Rights and Liberties

Protecting your rights, habeas corpus, torture, death penalty, eavesdropping, spying, no-fly lists. Comprehensive Rights & Liberties coverage available here.

More Spying, Fewer Results
Posted by Mustang Bobby, Shakesville on May 13, 2008 at 4:46 AM.

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, spying is up in the United States. But what have we got to show for it? Not much.

The number of Americans being secretly wiretapped or having their financial and other records reviewed by the government has continued to increase as officials aggressively use powers approved after the Sept. 11 attacks. But the number of terrorism prosecutions ending up in court -- one measure of the effectiveness of such sleuthing -- has continued to decline, in some cases precipitously.

The trends, visible in new government data and a private analysis of Justice Department records, are worrisome to civil liberties groups and some legal scholars. They say it is further evidence that the government has compromised the privacy rights of ordinary citizens without much to show for it.

Not to worry, says the Bush administration. Just because we've got nothing to show for it doesn't mean that spies -- real or imagined -- aren't being caught and aren't being dealt with.

Law enforcement officials say the additional surveillance powers have been critically important in ways the public does not always see. Threats can be mitigated, they say, by deporting suspicious people or letting them know that authorities are watching them.

"The fact that the prosecutions are down doesn't mean that the utility of these investigations is down. It suggests that these investigations may be leading to other forms of prevention and protection," said Thomas Newcomb, a former Bush White House national security aide. He said there were half a dozen actions outside of the criminal courts that the government could take to snuff out potential threats, including using diplomatic or military channels.

[...]

The emphasis on spy programs also is starting to give pause to some members of Congress who fear the government is investing too much in anti-terrorism programs at the expense of traditional crime-fighting. Other lawmakers are raising questions about how well the FBI is performing its counter-terrorism mission.

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The Horror of "Honor Killings"
Posted by PZ Myers, Pharyngula on May 12, 2008 at 1:03 PM.

I have a daughter myself, who I want to grow up to be independent and free and sensible and interesting, so I can't even imagine what it would take to bring a parent to this:

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. 'If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,' he said with no trace of remorse.

Yikes. What did she do? Become a mass murderer, a terrorist, a destroyer of entire cultures by acts of destruction?

No, nothing quite so horrific. She was guilty of puppy love.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city's Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Abdel-Qader Ali is a coward and a monster, the warped product of a bestial 'civilization' that treats half its members as chattel and the other half as little better than junkyard dogs, brutes who will maintain the savage order by denying love and individuality and murdering anyone who does not precisely fit their mandated roles.

Abdel-Qader Ali is not an aberration, not some random psychopath who committed an evil and then, all alone and despised, tries to justify it. No, he's part of a whole culture that favors this violence.

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Top Pentagon Legal Adviser Disqualified From Gitmo Trial
Posted by Bernard Hibbitts, Jurist Legal News and Research on May 12, 2008 at 8:34 AM.

A U.S. military judge has ruled that U.S. Air Force Reserve Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, a top Pentagon legal adviser on the Guantanamo military commission trials, is ineligible to participate in the first military commission trial of a detainee because he is too closely associated with the prosecution, the New York Times reported Saturday. The Times said it had a copy of the decision by Navy Capt. Keith Allred, although it had not been publicly released. The paper quoted Allred as concluding that "National attention focused on this dispute has seriously called into question the legal adviser's ability to continue to perform his duties in a neutral and objective manner". Hartmann is legal adviser to Susan J. Crawford, the Convening Authority for the military commissions. The New York Times has more.

Earlier this year former Guantanamo prosecutor Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis made headlines when he said in the wake of his resignation that Hartmann had questioned the need for open trials at Guantanamo and was upset with the slow pace of the proceedings begun by Davis. In a subsequent Los Angeles Times op-ed, Hartman said that the slow progress that frustrated Davis was an unavoidable part of a careful judicial process and rejected Davis' allegations that aspects of the military commissions were being intentionally hidden from the public. Last month, Davis testified at a pre-trial hearing for Guantanamo detainee Salim Hamdan that Hartmann had pressured him to move forward with military commissions quickly "before the election" or else "this thing's going to implode."

Missouri Amendment Would Require Proof of Citizenship to Vote
Posted by Attaturk , Firedoglake on May 12, 2008 at 6:58 AM.

Here's to you Milliard Fillmore, the nation's Lou Dobbs viewers turn their bitter eyes to you!

Now that the Supreme Court has issued its execrable decision allowing more strict voter identification at the polls, though no evidence of widespread voter fraud has ever been produced, the nativist still do not think it is enough. Now, it is about disenfranchisement of groups that vote against conservative agendas and nothing less.

The battle over voting rights will expand this week as lawmakers in Missouri are expected to support a proposed constitutional amendment to enable election officials to require proof of citizenship from anyone registering to vote.

The measure would allow far more rigorous demands than the voter ID requirement recently upheld by the Supreme Court, in which voters had to prove their identity with a government-issued card.

How bad is Missouri's plan, pretty damn bad:

The Missouri secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, a Democrat who opposes the measure, estimated that it could disenfranchise up to 240,000 registered voters who would be unable to prove their citizenship.

In most of the states that require identification, voters can use utility bills, paychecks, driver’s licenses or student or military ID cards to prove their identity. In the Democratic primary election last week in Indiana, several nuns were denied ballots because they lacked the required photo IDs.

Measures requiring proof of citizenship raise the bar higher because they offer fewer options for documentation. In most cases, aspiring voters would have to produce an original birth certificate, naturalization papers or a passport.

So how many of you walk around with your birth certificate, how many of you actually have a passport, how many of you carry it around with you?

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NY: Out of State Same-Sex Marraiges Are Legal
Posted by Pam Spaulding, Pam's House Blend on May 12, 2008 at 6:05 AM.

This victory nearly slipped under the radar. New York's highest court decided not to review a ruling in February that same-sex marriages performed elsewhere (Massachusetts and Canada, for instance, where Kate and I married), must be recognized by the state.

In a cryptically worded one-sentence order issued on May 6, the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest, declined, for the time being at least, to review a February 1 appellate court ruling out of Rochester that a lesbian couple, Patricia Martinez and Lisa Ann Golden, who married in Canada in 2004 are entitled to legal recognition of that marriage by Monroe Community College, Martinez's employer.

Since the Rochester ruling is the only New York appellate court ruling - coming from the Appellate Division's 4th Department - on the marriage recognition question issued to date, the decision stands as legal precedent statewide unless contradicted by one of the other appellate departments or reversed by the Court of Appeals.

The Empire State Pride Agenda, New York's statewide LGBT lobby group, taking note of that precedent, was quick to claim victory from the high court demurring on the issue.

"Today's action by New York's highest court means that the state of the law remains the same," said Alan Van Capelle, ESPA's executive director, in a written statement. "Same-sex couples who have gone to places like Canada to get married, or have moved to New York from places like Massachusetts, will continue to be treated as the married couples they are here in New York."

Legislation that would officially legalize marriage equality within the state is still pending, and the key is to ensure there is a pro-marriage majority in the state Senate, and that means turning that body over to Democratic control in the fall.

"Until a law is passed by the New York State Legislature, there will always be the possibility that another court decision could undo Martinez v. County of Monroe and strip away from otherwise legally married same-sex couples all of the 1,324 state-based rights and responsibilities that come with a marriage license in New York," Van Capelle said in his written statement. "Besides, no loving, committed couple should ever have to leave their home state to make sure that their family has the protection and stability of marriage."

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Intelligence Contractor Wasn't Pleased When We Showed up at its Shareholder's Meet
Posted by Tonya Hennessey, CorpWatch on May 10, 2008 at 9:24 AM.

A funny thing happened on the way to exercising my presumed right, as a shareholder, to attend yesterday's annual shareholder meeting of private military contractor L-3 Communications, held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manhattan's financial district.

I was one of a group including a translator, Marwan Mawiri, who worked for a year and 1⁄2 for Titan, now an L-3 subsidiary, in Iraq. Marwan has witnessed first-hand numerous problems with the way interrogation and translation contracting is being handled in Iraq - a practice that may be putting at substantial risk the national security and lives of the Iraqi people, of U.S. and multinational troops, officials and contractors, and of the United States itself.

The problem is clear: inadequate and downright bad vetting and hiring practices for analysts, interrogators and linguists. Indeed, the U.S. military has recently canceled Titan's translation contract due to poor practices along with waste, fraud and abuse.

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The Drug War: Still Racist After All These Years
Posted by Bean , Lawyers, Guns and Money on May 9, 2008 at 7:54 PM.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The New York Times reported today on two new reports (one from the Sentencing Project and one from Human Rights Watch) that confirm what any study of prison demographics could tell you: the war on drugs is still being waged only on some people and on some drugs. In other words, it's still a racist crock.

Drug related arrests are up and more than 4 of 5 drug arrests are for possession (as opposed to sale or manufacture). And Black men are 12 times as likely to be incarcerated for a drug crime than are white men. Also, 1/3 of drug arrestees were black, despite the fact that only 12.8% of the population is Black.

The statistics would be bad enough. But the absolute worst part of the Times article is that the author cites a Manhattan Institute staffer as an "expert" on incarceration issues. What does she blame drug war disparities on? The "fact" that Black and Latino men are more likely to be involved in the distribution of heroin and cocaine.

Ms. MacDonald [of the Manhattan Institute] said it made sense for the police to focus more on fighting visible drug dealing in the inner city, largely involving minorities, than on hidden use in suburban homes, more often by whites, because the urban street trade is more associated with violence and other crimes and impairs the quality of life.

“The disparities reflect policing decisions to use drug laws to try and reduce violence and to respond to the demand by law-abiding residents in poor neighborhoods to clean up the drug trade,” she said.

Riiiiiight. The policy makes Ooooooh so much sense. When racism and "personal responsibility" are your starting points.

Not surprisingly, the Human Rights Watch study's author gets it right:

“The race question is so entangled in the way the drug war was conceived,” said Jamie Fellner, a senior counsel at Human Rights Watch and the author of the group’s report.

“If the drug issue is still seen as primarily a problem of the black inner city, then we’ll continue to see this enormously disparate impact,” she said.

Mildred Loving Passes Away
Posted by Pam Spaulding, Pam's House Blend on May 6, 2008 at 5:36 AM.

Those of us eagerly waiting for the day when same-sex marriage is finally legalized across the land owe a debt of gratitude to Mildred Loving, whose 1967 case (Loving v. Virginia) resulted in a landmark Supreme Court decision that broke down a major social and legal barrier - interracial marriage.

Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

...Richard Loving died in 1975 in a car accident that also injured his wife.

In a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, Loving said she wasn't trying to change history - she was just a girl who once fell in love with a boy.

"It wasn't my doing," Loving said. "It was God's work."

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NC Robo-Call Investigation Broadens - NAACP Files Complaint
Posted by Pam Spaulding, Pam's House Blend on May 5, 2008 at 11:32 AM.

As I said last Tuesday, "Stop messing with my primary!" and "All I know is that this better not be connected to the Clinton campaign." That was a desperate wish for it to be some right-wing scheme to suppress votes. You just don't want to deal with an internal problem of this nature.

I posted the above statements before it was revealed by Facing South's investigation that the source of the misleading and illegal robo-calls in NC was the progressive DC non-profit Women's Voices Women Vote. It's still not clear what on earth really went on, but WVWV has been on a swift offensive to dispel any suggestion that there was purposeful deception.

Be that as it may, the NC attorney general is investigating, and over the weekend, Sue Sturgis of Facing South reported that the NC NAACP filed a complaint against WVWV.

The North Carolina NAACP has filed a formal complaint of possible voter suppression against Women's Voices Women Vote, the D.C. nonprofit that as we revealed earlier this week was behind the deceptive and illegal robo-calls made to state residents. The N.C. NAACP hand-delivered its complaint today to state Attorney General Roy Cooper and State Board of Elections Executive Director Gary Bartlett. It's also alerted the U.S. Department of Justice that it's collecting more information from its national network and is contemplating filing a formal complaint with that agency.

N.C. NAACP President Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (center in photo) announced the filing of the complaint at a press conference held this afternoon outside the N.C. Department of Justice. He was joined by his group's attorney, Al McSurely (left), and Bob Hall (right) of Democracy North Carolina. The state Attorney General's office is already investigating Women's Voices, but the N.C. NAACP and Democracy North Carolina want to be parties to that investigation.

"When you mess with the right to vote, you're messing with everything that is fundamental in our democracy," Barber said.

Here is the full text of the very detailed complaint, which recounts the facts at hand. Another serious aspect of this topic is below the fold.

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The Future of the Court
Posted by Sara Whitman, The Bilerico Project on May 2, 2008 at 7:10 AM.

As we wonder about whether or not Obama's charisma is running out, or if Clinton can in fact win regardless of how much ground she is making up right now, I want to remind everyone of something bigger than Obama or Clinton.

The Supreme Court.

If McCain wins this election? The Supreme Court will be stacked with Roberts and Alito clones and we will lose the court for the rest of my lifetime.

I plan on living a long life, too.

When I think about that, I'm not sure I need to be right anymore, about Senator Clinton. When I think about that, I get really frightened for my children.

John Paul Stevens is 88 years old. Ruth Ginsburg 75 and already a one time cancer survivor. How much longer can they hang on?

The war in Iraq needs to end. The economy needs to be sent for emergency surgery. Health care, public education, jobs- the list goes on and on. We are in such a mess after 8 years of Bush, it's hard to know where to begin.

I honestly don't care about Reverend Wright and what he said. I think Clinton's gas tax relief is a lame attempt to garner votes.

The bitter campaign has to stop. The Obamatrons and the Clintonistas have to give it a rest, and yes, I am including myself in that.

Because in the not so distant future? The next president of the United States will be appointing at least one, if not several, new justices to the supreme court.

We should all be afraid, very afraid, of McCain's probable appointments.

Scalia's Tortured Logic
Posted by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review on May 1, 2008 at 9:00 AM.

The meaning of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution could not be clearer:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

And yet, beginning in 2002, the most senior members of the Bush administration, including Dick Cheney, Sec. of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft and others, met dozens of times to draft a set of torture guidelines for use by CIA interrogators. It’s no wonder that Jonathan Turley, a strong advocate of impeaching Pres. Clinton, called their actions a war crime and compared their sessions to a meeting of gangster Tony Soprano’s Bada Bing Club.

On “60 Minutes” Last Sunday, Supreme Court Justice Antonin “Nino” Scalia offered a new and, well, tortured rationale for the legality of what Bush has euphemistically called “advanced interrogation techniques”:

STAHL: If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized, by a law enforcement person — if you listen to the expression “cruel and unusual punishment,” doesn’t that apply?

SCALIA: No. To the contrary. You think — Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.

STAHL: Well I think if you’re in custody, and you have a policeman who’s taken you into custody–

SCALIA: And you say he’s punishing you? What’s he punishing you for? … When he’s hurting you in order to get information from you, you wouldn’t say he’s punishing you. What is he punishing you for?

As often happens, Keith Olbermann speaks for every sane American:

The second most senior associate justice on Mr. Bush‘s Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, on TV now repeating in essence what he said earlier, that torture is not really as the Constitution prohibits, cruel and unusual punishment…

So you can torture the innocent or not yet proved guilty but you can‘t punish the guilty with torture? You don‘t see any logical inconsistency in that idea? The concept of punishment being in and of itself, torture or vice versa, that isn’t very pretty obvious to you? You, still there, Justice buddy? OK. Not only do I want to see your diploma, now, I want to see your grade point average.

Media types and conservatives still deride Bill Clinton for saying in a deposition in a civil lawsuit a decade ago, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” And yet, here we have a Supreme Court justice playing semantics over the definition of torture — and the media has barely taken notice.

Legislators Say Sean Bell Shooting Case not Closed
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, Majikthise on April 27, 2008 at 5:04 AM.

A coalition of New York legislators vows to seek redress for Sean Bell at the federal level, according to a statement released by Rep. Gregory Meeks on Saturday:

"We do not accept that this is the end of this case.  We have joined with the families and their attorneys in filing a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice requesting an investigation of violations of the civil rights of Sean Bell, Joseph Guzman, and Trent Benefield.  Indeed, this afternoon the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it's Civil Rights Division, the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's New York Field Division will conduct an independent review of the facts and circumstances surrounding the Nov. 25, 2006, shooting of Sean Bell and two of his friends.

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Cops Acquitted in 50-Bullet Killing of Unarmed Black Man on His Wedding Day
Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet on April 25, 2008 at 1:45 PM.

This morning in New York, three police detectives were found "not guilty" in the murder of Sean Bell, a 23-year old African-American man who was shot to death on his wedding day, November 25, 2006. His death sparked outrage in a city that is no stranger to police brutality; the list of police killings of unarmed black men over the years is long and familiar.

But the details in this case were grotesque. Fifty shots were fired at Bell and his friends, who were celebrating his bachelor party at a Queens strip club; one of the plainclothes officers -- himself responsible for 31 shots -- stopped to re-load.

Bell died after being hit four times in the neck and torso. But not before being handcuffed.

"Mr. Bell, mortally wounded and not speaking, and Joseph Guzman, despite wounds from his head to his feet, were put in handcuffs after the gunfire ceased," the New York Times reported. The case was shocking enough to elicit a strong response from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who called the shooting "inexplicable" and "unacceptable."

Of the five police officers involved in the shooting, three would be indicted by a grand jury. When it came to the trial, the defense opted for a judge rather than a jury, after attempting, unsuccessfully, to get the venue moved out of Queens. "Eighty-three percent of black potential jurors think the shooting was unjustified," defense attorneys argued. "Many have already decided that there is nothing more to consider and that the police are necessarily guilty of some crime."

As CNN aired images of the scene following the verdict this morning, it was not hard to see why. The anger and the pain on the faces of those gathered outside the courtroom spoke to years of seeing sons, brothers, and husbands brutalized by law enforcement officers apparently programmed to see black bodies as dispensable.

"There's no evidence that race had anything to do with it," Mayor Bloomberg concluded in November 2006. Really? Did race also have nothing to do with the case of Khiel Coppin? Timothy Stansbury? Amadou Diallo?

As much as people like to treat police shootings as "tragic" isolated incidents, the reality is that police officers inflict violence on black communities on a regular basis. And they get away with it -- again and again and again.

Reporters this morning took pains to remind viewers that for the police officers involved, their lives were forever changed. "With this case there's no winners, there's no losers," said the president of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association. Spare us. Bell had two young daughters with his fiancée, Nicole, who took his name to honor her would-be husband's memory. This morning, she fled the courtroom immediately after the verdict was read.

"I think it's not right, because they shot him 50 times," said one young man named Kamau, who came to the courthouse with his dad. "They knew he was hurt, and they kept shooting him. He didn't even have a gun."