Pruning Shears

Tara McKelvey linked to a report in The Lancet describing how inmates at Guantánamo are literally going insane. She then points out that psychiatric personnel there have been, if anything, assisting interrogators in determining just how far the human mind can bend before it snaps. In other words, not attending to their mental health but pushing it as far as possible towards the breaking point without actually hitting it.

Mohammed Jawad was ordered released from Guantánamo, but “Justice Department officials said they were studying whether to file civilian criminal charges against Mr. Jawad. If they do, officials say, he could be transferred to the United States to face charges, instead of being sent to Afghanistan, where his lawyers say he would be released to his mother.” Yes, “studying.” The leisurely equanimity with which our justice system contemplates the eventual fate of actual human beings is abhorrent. Or as Lakhdar Boumediene said, “I give you two years, no problem. But not seven years.”

I think dday is flirting with me:

The President has no bill to go out and hawk because the Congress is deep into negotiations, so he’s selling nothing, a difficult task for anyone. You could say that Obama should have just stepped in and laid down the law, but not only has that proven to fail in the 1993-94 Clinton health care plan, but I don’t necessarily want executive dictates to trump Congressional process. I think there’s a lot of unnecessary bottlenecks in Congressional process, like the undemocratic filibuster and the seniority system for Committee chairs (particularly in the Senate) and the anti-majoritarian nature of the Senate itself. But in general, we don’t elect emperors, and checks and balances are by and large healthy, and I’m OK with Congress performing their task of coming up with legislation and the President performing his task of executing it. Obviously he has some input, but I don’t want an executive dominating the process.

In news you may have missed, “Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania admitted last February to having accepted 2.6 million dollars from private prisons in exchange for giving juveniles sentences that were disproportionate to their offenses.” Unsurprisingly, the victims want to pursue civil suits for damages. Surprisingly, the state Supreme Court ordered the destruction of the victims’ case files. Those files are the primary evidence in the case and the lawsuits would be crippled without them. Another test of secrecy vs. transparency. (Note also: the bribes came from private prisons. Given the recent keening and wailing over the proposed “government takeover” of health care this might not be the best example of how free enterprise can more effectively manage public services.)

David Corn reported that the contents of the infamous erased tape from Watergate may soon be reconstructed based on Bob Haldeman’s notes taken during the meeting. It seems that just like the tape several pages of notes went missing, but it now may be possible to read them from the impression the pen made on pages underneath the one he was writing on. It would be nice to see that happen. Knowing that things that appear to have disappeared may not be gone forever. That may not be helpful in the pursuit of justice, but is very helpful in writing history.

The Obama administration is threatening Britain just like the Bush administration did. Glenn Greenwald has more. It looks like the UK is not entirely cowed, however. If details on the CIA’s “ghost flights” come out some of our allies (Poland?) may not look very good.

Andrew Sullivan:

I fear that this is exactly how Washington operates. The governing class, which includes the Washington Post (an extended arm of the government in so many ways and filled with ‘journalists’ whose goal in life is becoming friends with those in power) has no interest in exposing that they went along with a policy of torture for years. The overwhelming concern of a man like Fred Hiatt is to protect his neocon friends who devised and implemented torture as a standard operating procedure. The last thing the Washington Post would want is any inquiry into those really responsible for turning the US into a torture-state. Because those people - Rumsfeld, Yoo, Cheney, Bush, Addington, Libby, Rice, Tenet, Ashcroft, Bybee - are part of the inner circle. They are the Washington over-class, the people Washington Post journalists and commentators have dinner and cocktails with. You can’t accuse them of war crimes. How rude! So find someone outside our circle, and prosecute them. It worked once with the Abu Ghraib scapegoats. Why not find some more?

Marcy also noted that while there has been a lot of talk about how the military never crossed the line of arresting and detaining Americans on American soil, it “already was deployed domestically against Americans. That’s what the domestic surveillance program was (and largely still is): the use of DOD’s NSA-related capabilities to detain and search American property—their email—and to hell with the collateral damage.”

This isn’t really my beat, but it seems General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt has exposed his company’s soft underbelly and invited more attacks on it. Apparently if you send him lots of emails, spring an ambush interview on him and disrupt a GE shareholder’s meeting you can get its subsidiaries to alter their behavior. I’m sure activists everywhere, not just media critics, will take note. Greenwald notes its importance, drags the tale of its news wing’s servile stance towards the government in the runup to the Iraq war a few steps back from the memory hole, and gives Richard Wolffe the business for good measure in this week’s best illustration of the term “comprehensive takedown.”

Memo to John Conyers: You are a member of Congress. You can do more than call for investigations. You can actually launch them.

Diane is dimming the lights on cab drollery for at least a month. In her announcement she wrote:

The biggest thanks, however, goes to Avedon Carol, the Cab’s Official Fairy Godmother, who not only linked to us when no one had any idea we existed, but continued to do so on a regular basis, even when she disagreed with what we had to say. I think that Avedon has done more for community building on-line and in meat-space than anyone I know.

UNPACKING JANE In last week’s excerpt I wrote about the “clear new legal order” Jack Goldsmith issued requiring humane treatment of Iraqi prisoners. It was precipitated by Alberto Gonzales’ demand for guidance on whether Iraqi detainees could be flown out of that country. What required such a clarification? Mayer writes on page 264:

The answer to Gonzales’s question would affect thousands of U.S. soldiers and CIA officers in Iraq who were unsure whether they were breaking the laws. When the issue erupted publicly later, various administration officials, including Yoo, insisted that they had always made it clear that all Iraqis were covered by international law. But on the ground, confusion was rampant. One soldier, Captain Ian Fishback, a West Point graduate with the 82nd Airborne Division, who served several tours of duty in both Afghanistan and Iraq, said that he tried for seventeen months to get clear legal guidance, while witnessing a wide variety of abuses that would ordinarily be illegal under military and international law. “Death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment” were commonplace in Iraq, he said. But because command authorities - beginning with President Bush - cast the fight in Iraq as part of the global war against terrorism, he said, no one knew which laws applied.