Judge in San Fran allows terrorist to sue Bush Administration. This is crazy on the surface and will be expensive.

Hoekstra, a Holland Republican, is referring to a ruling on Friday by Judge Jeffery White rejecting the government’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Jose Padilla against John Yoo, a former attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel and now a professor of law at Berkeley, the principal architect of the Bush administration’s legal defense of torture.

Padilla, an American citizen, was arrested and designated as an enemy combatant by the Bush administration in May, 2002. He spent nearly 4 years in a military prison without charges being filed, without access to an attorney or any of the other basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution. While there, he was routinely abused during interrogation. The Bush administration maintained that he had been plotting to set off a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States.

Attorneys filed a habeas corpus case in federal court on Padilla’s behalf, arguing that the government cannot hold an American citizen indefinitely without charging them or giving them the opportunity to defend themselves in court, as the Bill of Rights clearly says.

Yoo had written the legal opinions for the Bush administration asserting that the Bill of Rights did not apply here because those constitutional guarantees “give way before the Government’s compelling interest in responding to a direct, devastating attack on the United States, and in prosecuting a war successfully against international terrorists.”

After the Supreme Court had ruled in another case involving a U.S. citizen being detained indefinitely without charges, Hamdi v Rumsfeld, Padilla was transferred from the military prison to a civilian prison and charged with conspiracy. Despite the fact that there was no mention during that trial of any “dirty bomb” plot, any plots to kill anyone in the United States or even any links to Al Qaeda — the claims the government had made for years as justification for keeping him locked up without charges — Padilla was convicted by a jury and is currently serving a 17 year sentence. His appeal of that conviction is still pending in court.

In this lawsuit against Yoo, both the Bush and Obama administrations have argued, along with Yoo himself, that the case should be dismissed for various reasons. Judge White, who was appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush in 2002, rejected those arguments in Friday’s ruling (PDF).

The ruling relied primarily on a recent 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that rejected a broad interpretation of the state secrets privilege. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have argued that any case on any issue “must be dismissed regardless of its stage if it cannot be litigated further without risking disclosure of state secrets.”

The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit rejected that broad reading of the state secrets privilege a few weeks ago in a separate case involving a challenge to the Bush administration’s policy of “extraordinary rendition,” whereby detainees were transferred to another country where they were tortured during interrogations. The appeals court ruled that there are valid procedures in place to prevent the release of classified information during trials and that the government had to assert that privilege in regard to each piece of evidence requested rather than as a general means of dismissing any case that they claim involves classified information.

Judge White cited that appeals court ruling in his order rejecting the motion to dismiss in the Yoo case, noting that the extremely broad version of the state secrets privilege being asserted by the Bush and Obama administrations “has no logical limit – it would apply equally to suits by U.S. citizens, not just foreign nationals; and to secret conduct committed on U.S. soil, not just abroad. According to the government’s theory, the Judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law.”

It is likely that Yoo will appeal today’s ruling, but since the 9th Circuit has already rejected the broad reading of the state secrets privilege it seems unlikely that he will win that appeal. The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on this or any similar case but there are several cases where the government is making a virtually identical claim about the courts having to dismiss any case involving secret information, it is likely that one of them will eventually be heard by the high court.

From a 2005 debate between Bush administration torture advocate John Yoo and Notre Dame law professor Doug Cassell:

Cassel: If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

If the president thinks it’s important enough, he can crush the testicles of the child of a terror suspect. I don’t even have a joke for this. It’s beyond appalling.

Continued -

The Dead Parody Sketch

The apocryphal story, probably not true, is that musical satirist Tom Lehrer stopped recording and performing when Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize, saying, “satire is now dead.” It may be dead, but some insist on killing it again (and again, and again), as demonstrated by the fact that David Vitter and Larry Craig are co-sponsoring the Marriage Protection Amendment. This bill would amend the constitution to outlaw same-sex marriage, presumably to “protect the sanctity of marriage” or some such nonsense.

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. How do you possibly parody something like this? A married man who paid hookers to dress him up in diapers and treat him like an infant and another married man who tried to arrange gay sex in an airport men’s room are standing up for the “sanctity” of marriage. To quote the late great Molly Ivins, no matter how cynical I get I still can’t keep up.

From the “I’m embarrassed to share a planet and a species with these people” department

If you’re looking for quite possibly the single dumbest human being on the planet, I nominate Rickie Pitre of the Houma, Louisiana school board for his borderline insane reaction to a graduation speech at one of the high schools there. Here’s the background story from the local paper:

Cindy Vo, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, spoke of high-school memories, friends and the future. Then she recited a sentence in Vietnamese, dedicated to her parents as they looked on. “Co len minh khong bang ai, co suon khong ai bang minh,” she said into the microphone.

The 18-year-old graduate told classmates that the line, roughly translated, was a command to always be your own person.

It’s hard to imagine anyone would be bothered by that, but the school board is now forming a committee to “study” the graduations done at the four high schools and make recommendations for new rules. What new rules? Like requiring English only graduation speeches. Seriously:

“As board members, we get to observe the different ceremonies and there’s some inconsistencies I think the board or administration more importantly needs to address,” board member Rickie Pitre recently said in committee. “I don’t like them addressing in a foreign language. They should be in English.”

It was one line, for crying out loud, a gesture of love and thanks for her Vietnamese parents who don’t speak English very well. One line, you dolt. Stupidity on this level really should be physically painful. In a just world, this idiot would walk around in so much pain he would think he’s trying to pass a kidney stone the size of a bowling ball. But no, in this country we elect these people to school boards. Can the rapture just hurry up and get here so we can get these people off our planet? Please?

Turn off those irony meters for this one

Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition says that if Muslims are allowed to claim the same kinds of religious exemptions that Christians do, it will lead to Sharia law being implemented in the US. In a breathlessly ridiculous column on his organization’s website, he says that Muslims are secretly planning to institute Sharia law in the US by suing for religious exemptions from their employers.

All over the United States, radical Muslims are pushing companies to bow to Islamic law known as Sharia. They are doing this under the guise of religious freedom, but the political and cultural ideology of Islam recognizes only Allah as the supreme ruler over the world…

What Muslims are doing has been referred to as “creeping Sharia” – that is, getting companies, communities and states to change policies in order to force everyone to obey Sharia law, a totalitarian system of regulations that govern Islamic theocracies.

And he has several examples. Like this one:

In Minneapolis in 2006, a number of Somali cabdrivers refused to carry passengers with alcohol. The Muslim Brotherhood was behind this publicity stunt. The airport’s initial plan was to cave to Sharia law and create Sharia-compliant and Sharia non-compliant cabs. An Islamic “fatwa,” or order was issued by the Muslim American Society in June 2006 and sent to the Metropolitan Airports Commission. The fatwa stated that Islamic law prohibits Muslim cabdrivers from carrying passengers with alcohol “because it involves cooperating in sin according to Islam.”

Right. And that’s totally different than Christian pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control to customers because doing so would violate their religious beliefs, or Christian doctors refusing to provide fertility treatments to gay and lesbian patients. Totally different. For, uh, special, lucky, magic reasons. Let’s get this straight: when Christians ask employers to accommodate their religious beliefs and excuse them from duties they consider immoral, that’s standing up for religious freedom; when Muslims do the same thing, that’s preparing a theocratic takeover of the country. QED.

Fox News snags a Baldwin

Seeking to maintain their flawless record of remaining oblivious to their own absurdities, Fox News this week brought on a washed-up has-been who kinda sorta used to be an actor and is now an evangelist to comment on celebrity endorsements of candidate. And that quasi-celebrity was: Stephen Baldwin, who promptly declared an argument to be “the most stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” No, I’m not kidding. I’ve got video:

Seriously, imagine how inane you have to be to be considered the dumbest Baldwin brother. Don’t worry, Stephen. I hear there’s an opening in the Surreal Life house in season 8. You’ll be bunking with one of the Backstreet Boys and Tito Jackson.
]]> http://michiganmessenger.com/1517/bigots-buffoons-and-baldwins/feed 0