National Security Letter Gag Orders Ruled Unconstitutional
by 2nd Circuit Court. It’s a small victory in what has been an all out assault on the constitution and civil liberties.
Amazing to me that both Dems and Republicans supported and enacted this tripe, but then I’m not really surprised by much anymore.
From Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Today, the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals gave another setback to the Bush Administration’s claims for sweeping new Executive powers. The court found the National Security Letter (NSL) statute’s gag provision unconstitutional in Doe v. Mukasey. The NSL law allows the government to seek your electronic communications transactional records from your ISP without obtaining a court order. The gag provisions required the recipient of a NSL to stay quiet as long as the government desired, with only a fig leaf of judicial review.
The fig leaf was not good enough to satisfy the First Amendment. The Second Circuit struck down the statute’s truncated judicial review provisions, which required the court to treat the FBI’s assertions as conclusive absent evidence of bad faith. In addition, the government was required to initiate judicial proceedings to enforce the gag, instead of the ISP who received the NSL. The Court also construed several controversial aspects of the NSL statute narrowly, substantially reducing the scope of the FBI’s gag power.
The Second Circuit allowed the FBI to continue to issue NSL to communications service providers, but only pursuant to the new narrower interpretation. The Court did not address the Fourth Amendment implications of NSLs, since the government had withdrawn the NSL at issue before the court ruled, leaving the gag order as the only live issue. District Court Judge Marrero’s prior decision is also worth reading.
We Are America: The Torture Nation
Bush, Cheney and Company are betting the farm, they are outright daring you, the American citizen to do anything about the fact that they committed war crimes and authorized torture.
The sad thing is, after the last 8 years, I have no reason to believe that “we the people” will do a thing to prove them wrong. Consider the embarrassment and shame brought about by the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II. If we still have a country recognizable as America in 10 to 20 years (which is in some doubt from my perspective), how much deeper our shame, our guilt, our humiliation?
We are the people who stand by and do nothing while torture, war, and war crimes are carried out in our name. We are the Germans who stood by and did nothing as Hitler and Nazi fascism turned their society upside down and exterminated “undesirables”.
We are America, the torture nation.
From the Los Angeles Times – “Cheney Was Key in Clearing CIA Interrogation Tactics:
Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he was directly involved in approving severe interrogation methods used by the CIA, and that the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should remain open indefinitely.
Cheney’s remarks on Guantanamo appear to put him at odds with President Bush, who has expressed a desire to close the prison, although the decision is expected to be left to the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.
Cheney’s comments also mark the first time that he has acknowledged playing a central role in clearing the CIA’s use of an array of controversial interrogation tactics, including a simulated drowning method known as waterboarding.
It’s also worth noting that Cheney is claiming the CIA came to him saying what they wanted to do, when history and evidence have made it very clear at this point that the policy came from the top-down.
AlphaInventions…
AlphaInventions.com is a new tool promising to drive traffic to your site. I’ve been doing political blogs for the better part of four years, and despite what I think is good content, solid analysis, etc. I’ve never really been able to drive the kind of traffic I would expect.
Quite a few people are reporting good results, so who I am I to not give it a try?
I’m succumbing to the pressure and trying this out.
Please stay tuned for your irregularly scheduled content…
4th Amendment and the NSA
What a “quaint” idea…
Maybe “the people” (the few who are paying attention) should give some extra weight to what a career professional like Thomas Tamm, the “NSA Whistle-Blower” has to say on the topic:
(h/t: Great Scat!)
They Couldn’t Care Less
Mr Bush, upon being reminded that his claim that Iraq was the central front in the war on terror, due to Al Qaeda being in Iraq wasn’t true until after the invasion of Iraq on the false allegations that Weapons of Mass Destruction would be found:
Yeah, that’s right. So what? The point is that al Qaeda said they’re going to take a stand. Well, first of all in the post-9/11 environment Saddam Hussein posed a threat. And then upon removal, al Qaeda decides to take a stand. And they’re becoming defeated and I think history will say, one, the world was better off without Saddam, two, along with the Iraqi troops we have denied al Qaeda a safe haven because a young democracy is beginning to grow, which will be an important sign for people in the Middle East.
His vice president Darth Cheney upon being reminded that 2/3 of Americans do not support the Iraq war:
Any one else noticing a pattern here?
Can’t Say I Blame Him…
Apparently invading a country for trumped up WMD, mismanaging it into a civil war, and causing the mass-exodus of millions of Iraqi’s pisses people off a bit.
Also torturing their people (Abu Ghraib anyone?) may have made the “war crimes” president a wee bit unpopular in the land he “liberated”.
Greenwald on Maddow Show Re: Closing Guantanamo
As I mentioned the other day, it’s the Dems that are trying to cover for Bush and want to leave in place the CIA director that implemented the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld torture policy.
Don’t take my word for it, Glenn Greenwald (who’s regular blogging is required reading for anyone interested in a non-partisan debunking of the BS being flung in Washington), appeared on Maddow to discuss the Bush attempts to clog the pathway of closing Guantanamo and the disgraceful stain it has been, and continues to be for our nation.
Why Does the Bush DoD Hate Our Troops?
DoD playing games with classification levels of “disability” most often experienced while deployed in theater. But wait, I thought that Bush and the Republicans always supported our troops. I thought it was only the liberals, and the dirty-hippy lefty bloggers that hated our troops, no?
Thousands of similar stories caused veterans advocates to protest that the military was manipulating disability ratings to save money, and Congress last year ordered the Pentagon to accept appeals from wounded and injured troops.
So far, officials have yet to examine a single case.
“Congress finally took action to give those troops a fair hearing, and now the Department of Defense is dragging its feet,” said Vanessa Williamson, the policy director at New York-based Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a veterans’ advocacy group. “Establishing the review board was clearly not the Department of Defense’s priority. And that’s a real shame.”
Senate Report Confirms Top-Down Detainee Abuse Policy
Says that this should not be blamed on guards and interrogators, but the policies of the Bush Administration. Wrong.
Last I checked, policies were abstract concepts, open to interpretation and debate. All people at all levels who took part in the abuse of detainees are culpable.
However, I will agree with one thing: The highest level of punishment and culpability should be placed at the very top of this administration, namely with Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney.
I advocate detaining them immediately, and using whatever means necessary to extract information about their programs of abuse from them. Perhaps stress positions, water-boarding, and (shudder) Cristina Aguilera?
WASHINGTON (AP) — A new Senate report says the physical and mental abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay Naval Base was the direct result of Bush administration policies and should not be blamed on guards and interrogators.
The report from the Senate Armed Services Committee is the result of a two-year investigation. It directly links President Bush’s policies after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, legal memos on torture and interrogation rule changes with the abuse that was photographed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq four years ago.
The report says administration officials publicly blamed the abuses on low-level soldiers but called that ”both unconscionable and false.”
via Panel Cites White House, Not Soldiers, for Abuse – NYTimes.com.
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