The T-Word

At his press conference last night President Obama responded to a question about Bush Administration interrogation policies and whether those policies sanctioned torture. Obama said:

"What I've said – and I will repeat – is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. I don't think that's just my opinion; that's the opinion of many who've examined the topic.... I believe that waterboarding was torture."

This seems like an important development. As we now know from Justice Department memos, the Bush administration sanctioned waterboarding. If the Obama administration believes that waterboarding is torture, that would seem to obligate – not allow but obligate – the administration to investigate and prosecute. As this post by Glenn Greenwald explains, the Convention on Torture is American domestic law, and it requires state parties like the United States to investigate and prosecute torture that occurs within their borders.

Of course it's the Attorney General, not the President, that decides whether to bring charges for violations of federal law. But unless Eric Holder disagrees with the President about waterboarding being torture, it would seem that – whatever Obama's personal predictions about "moving forward" and not "looking back" – Holder doesn't really have much of a choice. He can investigate and prosecute or he can himself become a criminal. And when I say that, that's not a political statement, that's the law.

Surely Obama knows this. It makes me wonder whether he really wants this issue to go away. If he did, he would probably have avoided using the t-word – because that word has all sorts of legal implications.

Coming Out

It was nice when Obama mentioned us in his inaugural along with Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus. We're here and we're nonbelievers. Get used to it.

More than ever, America’s atheists are linking up and speaking out.... They are connecting on the Internet, holding meet-ups in bars, advertising on billboards and buses, volunteering at food pantries and picking up roadside trash, earning atheist groups recognition on adopt-a-highway signs. They liken their strategy to that of the gay-rights movement, which lifted off when closeted members of a scorned minority decided to go public....

Polls show that the ranks of atheists are growing. The American Religious Identification Survey, a major study released last month, found that those who claimed “no religion” were the only demographic group that grew in all 50 states in the last 18 years. Nationally, the “nones” in the population nearly doubled, to 15 percent in 2008 from 8 percent in 1990.

Legal and Illegal Killing

One abolitionist's testimonial:

(h/t Capital Defense Weekly)

Borrowed Time

One week left for Chrysler to work out a deal to avoid bankruptcy. If Chrysler does seek bankruptcy protection, it'll be interesting to see how the market, the media and the Washington political class responds to the demise of one of the "Big Three" American automakers.

The Truth Will Out?

It feels like the release of the torture memos may have created a new interest in exploring the war crimes that were committed in our name.

Over at Hullabaloo, dday says:

I don't think you can debate whether or not to have an investigation on the Bush torture regime anymore, because the investigation is happening.

The press, finally, seems to be digging in. The Washington Post reports:

Condoleezza Rice, John D. Ashcroft and at least 10 other top Bush officials reviewed and approved as early as the summer of 2002 the CIA's use of harsh interrogation methods on detainees at secret prisons, including waterboarding that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has described as illegal torture, according to a detailed timeline furnished by Holder to the Senate Intelligence Committee....

Rice gave a key early approval, when, as Bush's national security adviser, she met on July 17, 2002, with the CIA's then-director, George J. Tenet, and "advised that the CIA could proceed with its proposed interrogation of Abu Zubaydah," subject to approval by the Justice Department, according to the timeline. Rice and four other White House officials had been briefed two months earlier on "alternative interrogation methods, including waterboarding," it states. Waterboarding is a technique that simulates drowning.

Note that this occurred prior to the Bybee memo which gave legal cover to the torture.

Dday concludes:

It's clear the President doesn't want the responsibility for future investigations. He apparently quashed the idea of a Presidential-level Torture Commission. But he cannot stop the wheels now in motion. Congress will have their crack at an investigation, and the media will return to the issue. The Attorney General will have to make his own independent judgment. And the truth may yet out.

I hope so.

Shrinkage

This strikes me as an interesting idea. Obviously it's not a policy that a city should adopt lightly – it will involve substantial displacement – but for cities like Flint that have undergone massive population declines over a period of decades, demolishing neighborhoods and condensing the population may actually be the least miserable option. Higher density will make the city easier and cheaper to manage, and the negative externalities of derelict spaces will be eliminated.

Dozens of proposals have been floated over the years to slow this city’s endless decline. Now another idea is gaining support: speed it up. Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval. “Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life,” said Dan Kildee, the Genesee County treasurer and chief spokesman for the movement to shrink Flint. “We need to control it instead of letting it control us.”...

“A lot of people remember the past, when we were a successful city that others looked to as a model, and they hope. But you can’t base government policy on hope,” said Jim Ananich, president of the Flint City Council. “We have to do something drastic.”...

Nothing will happen immediately, but Flint has begun updating its master plan, a complicated task last done in 1965. Then it was a prosperous city of 200,000 looking to grow to 350,000. It now has 110,000 people, about a third of whom live in poverty....

But what about the people who do live here and might want their sidewalk fixed rather than removed? “Not everyone’s going to win,” he said. “But now, everyone’s losing.”

On many streets, the weekly garbage pickup finds only one bag of trash. If those stops could be eliminated, Mr. Kildee said, the city could save $100,000 a year — one of many savings that shrinkage could bring....

“If it’s going to look abandoned, let it be clean and green,” he said. “Create the new Flint forest — something people will choose to live near, rather than something that symbolizes failure.”

Last Words

A man named Jimmy Lee Dill was executed last week by the state of Alabama for the 1988 murder of Leon Shaw during a cocaine-related robbery. According to the A.P., his last words were:

"I just hope that God's will be done and everybody find the peace that they need. I'm good."

(h/t CapitalDefenseWeekly)

Veterans for Peace

Courtesy of Sentencing Law and Policy Blog, the former president of Columbia – a veteran of the so-called War on Drugs – urges the U.S. to decriminalize:

[E]nforcements efforts are important, but when it comes to diluting the demand for drugs, the U.S. is missing the point, says the former President of Colombia, César Gaviria, in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast. A central player in the 1990s drug wars, Gaviria was the leader of a country that supplied the bulk of the planet’s cocaine. Now, he believes the best way to break the world’s thirst for drugs is to decriminalize them — not just the “soft” ones, but all of them....

Gaviria has lived the drug war first-hand, and says fighting it was “a very frustrating experience.” He believes “it is a failure because there are hundreds of thousands of people jailed, while consumption remains basically unchanged in the U.S. and is growing significantly in Europe.” He also points out that it has been “a source of indiscriminate violence and corruption in Latin America, and is weakening our democratic institutions.”

For the 62-year-old Gaviria, the former Secretary General of the Organization of American States, to call for such a radical change as decriminalization is groundbreaking. As president of Colombia from 1990 to 1994, he battled the cartels during some of that country’s most violent years. He led the crackdown that would ultimately bring down the powerful Medellín Cartel and its infamous leader, Pablo Escobar. “The fight against the drug cartels is unavoidable,” Gaviria says. “If you don’t do it, they become too powerful and may even pose a military threat, as we saw in Colombia. But that does not mean that such efforts reduce the flow of drugs.”

By Any Other Name

It's hard to describe just how badly the New York Times has failed our nation during the past eight years. Not to put too fine a point on it, but today, even after the release of Justice Department memos recounting, in excruciating detail, interrogation techniques okayed by the most senior members of the Bush Administration, the Times still refuses to use the word "torture" to describe those techniques. In the headline, torture is reduced to "harsh tactics." The article does slightly better, describing those techniques as "brutal."

The U.S. government has, in the past, prosecuted and convicted soldiers who engaged in waterboarding for torture. That technique has been understood to be torture for centuries. Why does the Times so carefully refuse to use that word in its reporting on the subject? The high level approval of torture will go down as one of the most ugly episodes in our nation's history and yet the nation's paper of record continues to euphimize it.

Supreme Law of the Land

As Spain moves forward with an investigation of torture by Bush officials, Glenn Greenwald reminds: prosecuting former Bush officials for torture is not just something the Obama administration should do, it's something the administration must do as a matter of law.

The Convention on Torture is a treaty that requires state parties to investigate and prosecute those who commit torture within their jurisdiction. The U.S. ratified this treaty. The U.S. Constitution's Supremacy Clause specifies that the Constitution, laws and treaties are the supreme law of the land. So the Convention on Torture is not solely an international agreement, it is also American domestic law.

While Villagers in DC view this as a matter of politics, it is also a legal obligation.

Another Gitmo

The Times gets it right on Obama and habeas corpus at Bagram:

The Obama administration is basking in praise for its welcome commitment to shut down the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay. But it is acting far less nobly when it comes to prisoners held at a larger, more secretive military detention facility at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan....

In February, the new administration disappointingly followed the example of the Bush White House in opposing judicial review for prisoners who have been indefinitely detained at Bagram without any charges or access to lawyers. The administration has now added to that disappointment by appealing a new federal court ruling extending the right of habeas corpus to some Bagram detainees.

The ruling was issued by Judge John Bates of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Narrowly crafted, the ruling essentially grants all non-Afghan Bagram detainees captured outside Afghanistan and held over six years without due process the same right to federal court review that the Supreme Court gave last year to similarly situated prisoners at Guantánamo....

The theater of war excuse for denying judicial review, the judge found, is unpersuasive when the government imports detainees from elsewhere. “It is one thing to detain those captured on the surrounding battlefield at a place like Bagram,” Judge Bates wrote. “It is quite another thing to apprehend people in foreign countries — far from any Afghan battlefield — and then bring them to a theater of war, where the Constitution arguably may not reach.”

What Digby Said

Until the US cleans its own dirty laundry, it's hardly in a position to go around telling other people how to behave. That's why it is so vital that President Obama fix this mess and quickly. Until he does it, his foreign policy will be hamstrung and eventually will be seen to be hypocritical and dishonest. His recent trip showed that the world wants to give him a chance and see him as a positive change from George W. Bush. But I'm not sure that's going to last long if his government has to soft-peddle human rights and international law...

This has been another edition of What Digby Said.

The Geography of Baseball

Quote of the Day

"The words 'not guilty' are verbal heroin."
– Sam Roberts, defense attorney

More Like This Please

I can't help but imagine how much fairer the criminal justice system would be if judges regularly responded to Brady violations like this judge:

A furious federal judge on Tuesday took the extraordinary step of ordering that the prosecutors who bungled the case of former Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska be investigated for possible criminal wrongdoing...

Judge Sullivan spoke disdainfully of the prosecutors’ repeated assertions that any mistakes during the trial were inadvertent and made in good faith. He said he had witnessed “shocking and serious” violations of the principle that prosecutors are obligated to turn over all relevant material to the defense.

The judge appointed the attorney Henry Schuelke as special prosecutor to investigate possible criminal contempt charges against the prosecution team.

Prosecutors commit Brady violations all the time. Even "serious" Brady violations are downright common. (Indeed, all violations of a defendant's constitutional rights ought be seen as "serious.") And yet there are almost never any repercussions. A little deterrence would go a long way.

You've Already Lost

A happy day in Vermont as the legislature overrode Gov. Jim Douglas' (R) veto and enacted a same sex marriage law. Just last week, the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously held that a state law preventing same-sex couples from marrying violated the equal protection clause of the state constitution. This brings to four the numbers of states that allow same-sex couples to marry: MA, CT, IA and VT.

I hope these two events represent a turning point. For awhile conservatives have used the "judicial activism" bogeyman to attack gay marriage rulings (as though it isn't one of the core purposes of courts to protect the rights of disfavored minorities); the legislative victory in VT demonstrates that popular majorities (even super-majorities) favor marriage equality, at least in some parts of the country. Similarly, conservatives have dismissed gay marriage as a product of East (and West) Coast cultural degeneracy; the IA victory neutralizes that.

In the long run, the bigots are gonna lose on this issue. They're on the wrong side of history. The younger generation just doesn't see loving relationships as a problem merely because the participants happen to be gay. As, Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal points out, demographically speaking, the bigots have already lost.

Big Tankers

As we on the left try to understand the possibilities and limitations of the Obama presidency, this may provide some useful insight into his theory of governance:

“Moving the ship of state is a slow process,” Mr. Obama said. “States are like big tankers. They’re not like speedboats.”

A Nation of Laws, Not Men

Perhaps the United States could learn a thing or two from Peru about how to respond when its leaders commit human rights violations:

Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was convicted of human rights crimes on Tuesday, the first time a democratically elected Latin American president was found guilty in his own country of rights abuses.

A three-judge panel convicted him for ordering a military death squad to carry out two massacres that killed 25 people during his 1990-2000 rule, when he was battling guerrillas. Nearly 70,000 people died in two decades of conflict in the Andean country.

Once lauded as a hero, Fujimori, 70, could spend the rest of his life in prison if he receives a lengthy sentence.

Update: Fujimori sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Market Failure

According to the Times, scores of CEOs made more than $10 million in 2008. A handful made more than $50 million. The list is here.

Vikram Pandit of Citigroup made $38.2 million. Part of me wants to point out that Citigroup's stock was down 77% during that time period. But that would suggest that under some circumstances a CEO's labor would actually be worth $38.2 million.

I believe it takes a certain skill to be a CEO. It may even be a rare skill. It may even be a rare skill that also has the ability to produce significant financial gain to shareholders (although obviously not in this case). But really? $38.2 million? Are these skills really that rare? Might a better explanation be that corporate boards aren't bargaining hard enough for CEO labor?