torture and mendicants and war enablers

During the Iraq, some on the anti-war left blamed human rights organizations for paving the way to war with criticisms of the regime's human rights abuses. But without those norms, you wouldn't have had people in the U.S. government fighting back against torture policies.

America’s Shame: What’s in the Senate Torture Report? by John Cassidy

Rooseveltian Resolve

Four Questions about Fiscal Policy by JW Mason

The Nearly Forgotten Dearly Beloved 1920-21 Depression Yet Again; Or, Never Reason from a Quantity Change by David Glasner

‘Battle of the beards’: Paul Krugman vs. Ben Bernanke by Robert J. Samuelson (May 6, 2012)

Ben Bernanke (1999): "Rooseveltian Resolve" by DeLong  (March 02, 2013)

Japanese Monetary Policy: A Case of Self-Induced Paralysis? by Ben Bernanke (December 1999)

Earth to Ben Bernanke: Chairman Bernanke Should Listen to Professor Bernanke by Krugman (April 24, 2012)

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Federal Appeals Court sides with C.I.A. over its rendition program and torture charges, which means it sided with Holder and the Obama Justice department over the "state secrets doctrine." The court was divided 6-5 and the Supreme Court may hear the case.

The lead plaintiff is Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and legal resident of Britain who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. He claimed he was turned over to the C.I.A., which flew him to Morocco and handed him off to its security service.

Moroccan interrogators, he said, held him for 18 months and subjected him to an array of tortures, including cutting his penis with a scalpel and then pouring a hot, stinging liquid on the open wounds.

Mr. Mohamed was later transferred back to the C.I.A., which he said flew him to its secret prison in Afghanistan. There, he said, he was held in continuous darkness, fed sparsely and subjected to loud noise -- like the recorded screams of women and children -- 24 hours a day.

He was later transferred again to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was held for an additional five years. He was released and returned to Britain in early 2009 and is now free.

There were signs in the court’s ruling that the majority felt conflicted. In a highly unusual move, the court ordered the government to pay the plaintiffs’ legal costs, even though they lost the case and had not requested such payment.

Judge Fisher, who was a senior Justice Department official before President Bill Clinton appointed him to the bench in 1999, also urged the executive branch and Congress to grant reparations to victims of C.I.A. "misjudgments or mistakes" that violated their human rights if government records confirmed their accusations, even though the courthouse was closed to them.
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He cited as precedent payments made to Latin Americans* of Japanese descent who were forcibly sent to United States internment camps during World War II. But the five dissenting judges criticized the realism of that idea, noting that those reparations took five decades.

"Permitting the executive to police its own errors and determine the remedy dispensed would not only deprive the judiciary of its role, but also deprive plaintiffs of a fair assessment of their claims by a neutral arbiter," Judge Michael Daly Hawkins wrote.

After the A.C.L.U. filed the case in 2007, the Bush administration asked a district judge to dismiss it, submitting public and classified declarations by the C.I.A. director at the time, Michael Hayden, arguing that litigating the matter would jeopardize national security.

The case could lead to prosecutions of George Tenet, Bush, Cheney and/or their lieutenants. My view is that Obama and Holder want to "turn the page" as Obama said recently about Iraq. It's analogous to when fascist or Communist dictatorships give way to democratic governments who in turn go out of their away not to provoke previous regimes lest the military re-enter politics. See Chile or Spain for example.

NYTimes editorial

Glenn Greenwald

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* huh?

He who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process becomes a monster himself. And if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare right back at you.

----- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

John Burns on the end of the Iraq War.

In Korea, a Model for Iraq by Paul Wolfowitz.

Ever since 9/11 and the toppling of Saddam Hussein I have really lost a lot of respect for the so-called "anti-war" left. Their arguments are almost always disingenuous and self-righteous. Very few will face up to how bad Saddam Hussein actually was. It's all about pointing fingers at America and how wrong Republicans are.

I've never had much respect for conservatives as it was, but after 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq they really let the mask slip. Cheney, Bush, David Addington, George Tenet, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Rumsfeld, etc. decided to "take the gloves off" and make America into a lawless torture-state, not unlike Saddam's Baathist police state. Now I have even less respect for conservatives.

The Dark Side
New York Times editorial on terrorist suspects and torture.

In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo prisoners could challenge their detention as enemy combatants in federal court, under the constitutional right of habeas corpus. Since then, the government has lost 37 of the 53 habeas cases that have been decided, largely because it could not prove the prisoners were terrorists.

In the 15 cases where prisoners have alleged coercive interrogations, according to the ProPublica report, judges have sided with the prisoners eight times. (There are probably more cases than these, but the judges’ opinions have been too heavily redacted by the government to tell.) Only three detainees in habeas cases have actually been let go.

In one compelling example, Judge Gladys Kessler of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in November threw out the case against Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, captured in Pakistan in 2001. The government described Mr. Mohammed as a fighter for Al Qaeda, and Judge Kessler acknowledged there was some evidence he had associated with terrorists.

But the main evidence that he was an active terrorist was supplied by another prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, who Judge Kessler said was repeatedly tortured for two years while being held in Pakistan and Morocco at the behest of the United States. His genitals were mutilated; he was deprived of sleep and food; he was held in stress positions and forced to listen to piercingly loud music.

Because the government did not dispute Binyam Mohamed’s torture -- and could not otherwise prove that Farhi Mohammed was actively engaged in fighting for Al Qaeda or the Taliban -- she ordered him released. The government is appealing.

At least 50 other Guantánamo prisoners have filed habeas lawsuits. Torture could also affect the trial, if there is one, of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who planned the 9/11 attack.

...

The decisions speak well of the federal judges who are adhering to civilized legal standards even when the decision to release prisoners is difficult. We hope this demonstrated respect for due process will help repair this country’s battered reputation. Had Bush-era interrogators held to similar standards, there would be fewer dubious detention cases at Guantánamo, and the government would have a much stronger case against those prisoners who are there legitimately.