David Sirota's new column in In These Times addresses five congressional votes every voter should know about, but probably doesn't. They are small ones that no one hears about, and Sirota says they are hugely important. They cover Iraq, homeland security, corporate welfare, and Halliburton.

Today, the Center for Constitional Rights (CCR) filed suit against private contractors involved in the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.

In light of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and similar abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Baghram, it has become clear that the Bush administration has a wide spread and systematic disregard for human rights and the Geneva Conventions.
CCR is challenging this policy. CCR just filed suits and actions in the last two weeks:
* Challenging the conditions and the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay
* Demanding information from the government about its policies with regard to detentions, interrogations and deaths in custody
* CCR is also working with military lawyers to challenge the upcoming military tribunals.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is a non-profit legal and educational organization dedicated to protecting and advancing the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If you can spare some change, go help them out.

Update: The AP reports on the lawsuit, and repeats some of the ugliest accusations--and they are ugly.

Greg Ford, a California National Guardsman, makes some new Iraqi prisoner abuse allegations:

A California National Guardsman says three fellow soldiers brazenly abused detainees during interrogation sessions in an Iraqi police station, threatening them with guns, sticking lit cigarettes in their ears and choking them until they collapsed. Sgt. Greg Ford said he repeatedly had to revive prisoners who had passed out, and once saw a soldier stand on the back of a handcuffed detainee's neck and pull his arms until they popped out of their sockets.

"I had to intervene because they couldn't keep their hands off of them," said Ford, part of a four-member team from the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion that questioned detainees last year in Samarra, north of Baghdad. He said the abuse took place from April to June.

Ford's commanding officers deny the allegations, but an investigation is underway.

by TChris

The "get tough on crime" mentality of the last 25 years induced state legislatures to turn back the clock on hard-fought reforms in our juvenile justice system. Juvenile courts weren't tough enough, critics said, so legislatures began to indulge in the absurd fiction that children who commit "adult crimes" (whatever those might be) aren't really children at all, and should therefore be subjected to the harsh realities that attend adult convictions. Legislators who acknowledge that kids lack the maturity to drink, smoke, vote, or fornicate were persuaded that kids are nonetheless capable of making mature decisions about crime and should be judged as if they possessed an adult capacity to make grown-up judgments about criminal behavior.

So it is in Ephrata, Washington, where Jake Lee Eakin (age 12, IQ 83) was ordered to stand trial for homicide in adult court. But Jake doesn't possess that imaginary level of adult sophistication; in adult court, he doesn't have a clue.

"When the judge starts talking, I don't know what he's saying mostly," said Eakin last week at the Grant County juvenile-detention center, his 70-pound frame floating in a prison-issue jumpsuit.

Eakin's lawyers are trying to persuade a state appellate court that sending a child of that age into adult court "threatens the very foundational purposes" of Washington's separate adult and juvenile-justice systems. There isn't much doubt of that. Nor is there any doubt that it's time for state legislatures to rethink the absurdity of treating kids like kids for all purposes except the criminal justice system.

If Eakin has a hard time understanding, it's in part due to his age and the typical brain development of a child his age — factors that would influence his decision-making and judgment, said Steven Drizin, a juvenile-justice expert at Northwestern University's law school.

"Most of the research suggests there are serious questions about competency of 14-year-olds," he said. "Certainly 13 and younger function like mentally retarded adults in their level of functioning." As for 12-year-olds, Drizin said, they are "simply not as culpable as adults for their criminal behavior."

by TChris

In 1965, unable to handle military service any longer, Charles Jenkins crossed the border into North Korea, leaving his life behind. He eventually married Hitomi Soga, one of a dozen Japanese citizens who had been kidnapped and used to train North Korean spies in the Japanese language and culture. Only five of the kidnapped Japanese are still alive. North Korea admitted their existence in 2002 and agreed to let them return to Japan.

But Jenkins, now 64, stayed behind, fearing that Japan would be forced to turn him over to the United States to face charges of desertion. His daughters (ages 18 and 20) stayed with him. The family would like to be reunited in Japan, and Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, wants to make that happen. When he raised the issue with President Bush, however, he got a predictable response: the former Sergeant must be dealt with according to military rules. If he goes to Japan to be with his wife, the U.S. wants him back.

Bush has contended with his own "deserter" label because of his ambiguous National Guard service, and he isn't likely to give Jenkins a break during an election year, particularly when his opponent is a war hero. As long as the President is unwilling to forgive and forget an event that occurred four decades ago, Jenkins' only hope of sharing the rest of his life with his wife and daughters may depend upon finding a country that doesn't have a treaty requiring extradition of miltary offenders and that will agree to host his family.

Closing arguments continue in Terry Nichols' state murder trial. He has been convicted of 161 counts of murder. The jury will decide whether he should be sentenced to life or death.

Defense attorney Barbara Bergman said Nichols has made mistakes in his life, but his role in the bombing merits a life sentence instead of death. "You must now decide do you kill Terry Nichols," Bergman told the jury of six men and six women on Tuesday. "He is a person with a heart and a soul, and a person whose life is worth saving."

Bergman became emotional during her argument. She said a death penalty for Nichols would mean guards will someday "take him out of his cell, strap him to a gurney and put poison in his veins." Defense witnesses presented photographs during the sentencing trial that showed Nichols with his three children - Joshua, 21, Nicole, 10, and Christian, 8. Others said they correspond with him about the Bible and religious issues. "He is a person who values and is valued by other people," Bergman said.

The New York Times doesn't mince words in its editorial today on Iraq, Abu Ghraib and the secret torture memo:

Each new revelation makes it more clear that the inhumanity at Abu Ghraib grew out of a morally dubious culture of legal expediency and a disregard for normal behavior fostered at the top of this administration. It is part of the price the nation must pay for President Bush's decision to take the extraordinary mandate to fight terrorism that he was granted by a grieving nation after 9/11 and apply it without justification to Iraq.

...We do not know how high up in the chain of command the specific sanction for abusing prisoners was given, and we may never know, because the Army is investigating itself and the Pentagon is stonewalling the Senate Armed Services Committee. It may yet be necessary for Congress to form an investigative panel with subpoena powers to find the answers. What we have seen, topped by that legalistic treatise on torture, shows clearly that Mr. Bush set the tone for this dreadful situation by pasting a false "war on terrorism" label on the invasion of Iraq.

[comments got hijacked by two bickering commenters, we've closed them. Take your personal spats outside please]

Apparently, the Bush Administration wants to argue out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to the detainees at Guantanamo and torture.

In the secret draft memo (text here), the authors point out that the torture statute only applies to those being held outside the United States and argue that Guantanamo is inside the U.S. In the appeals briefs filed in the cases of the Guantanamo detainees, DOJ argues the opposite. Via the BeatBushBlog:

Title 18, section 2340A of the United States Code, the "Torture Statute," makes it a crime, punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment, for any United States national to torture anyone outside the United States. If the torture results in death, the torturer may be sentenced to death or life imprisonment (statute quoted below, in part; emphasis added):
Sec. 2340A. - Torture
(a) Offense. -
Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.

The Department of Justice, at page 7 of its recently released March 6, 2003 draft memorandum, "Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism: Assessment of Legal, Historical, Policy, and Operational Considerations," takes the position that detainees at Guantanamo are within the United States and, as such, may be tortured without violating the Torture Statute (emphasis added to below):

A big thanks is due law professor Michael Froomkin of Discourse.Net for tackling the 56 page secret torture memo (text here) and providing a thoughtful analysis. Bottom line:

If anyone in the higher levels of government acted in reliance on this advice, those persons should be impeached. If they authorized torture, it may be that they have committed, and should be tried for, war crimes. And, as we learned at Nuremberg, “I was just following orders” is NOT (and should not be) a defense.

A federal judge in Tennessee has ruled a local statute unconstitutional that required tarot card readers to issue a disclaimer to customers because it infringes on the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech:

A federal judge struck down a law requiring fortunetellers to post disclaimers on their shops and advertisements, calling the ordinance an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Echols, ruling in favor of former tarot card reader Beth Daly and the American Civil Liberties Union, rejected the city of Dickson's argument that its law was intended to protect citizens from fraud. Echols cited earlier rulings that determined "predictions are only fraudulent if the speaker knows of facts that will prevent a prediction from coming true."

Within a month of the shop's opening in July 2002, Daly was told city law banned her from telling fortunes for a fee. She shut down, but pressed ahead with the lawsuit filed by the ACLU. The city repealed its law in 2003, apparently deciding that defending its ban "was not in the cards," Echols noted in a recently filed memorandum. But it replaced the ordinance with a new one requiring fortunetellers to post a disclaimer stating Tennessee has no requirements governing "the education, training or ability of fortunetellers, clairvoyants, palmists, phrenologists or other person claiming to be mystics endowed with supernatural powers." Though the city argued the disclaimer would protect customers from fraud, Echols determined it was an overly broad restriction of freedom of speech.

If you're looking for a deck, this one is our personal favorite. It gives strong emphasis to both the Kabbalah and the astrological signs and planets. We still have our deck from 1971, that we got in Ann Arbor, wrapped in the same silk scarf we bought the same day. Just remember, it's the wise man who rules his stars, and the fool who obeys them.

In an unprecedented settlement, the city of Cleveland, Ohio has agreed to pay a wrongfully convicted man $1.6 million--and reopen more than 100 cases to see whether the forensic fraud that infected his trial also occurred in other cases.

"(Cleveland) agreed to pay (Michael) Green $1.6 million for the 13 years he spent in prison for a rape he didn't commit. The payment is only a fraction of the $10 million Green demanded in a lawsuit, but he accepted less because the city also agreed to reopen more than 100 cases that included testimony from the same forensics lab worker who falsely testified in Green's trial. "

"This is virtually unprecedented," said Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project in New York City, which used DNA evidence to free Green. "This is a model for the rest of the country, and to my knowledge this is the first time that public officials have voluntarily agreed to do this."

An interesting note - after Green was freed from prison, the Plain Dealer ran a series of articles about his ordeal. The real rapist was so overcome by guilt when he read the articles that he turned himself in and confessed to the crime.

by TChris

The CLEAR Act, proposed last year by Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-GA) and joined by 121 co-sponsors, would authorize all state and local law enforcement officers "to investigate, apprehend, or remove aliens" in the United States in violation of federal immigation laws. States that refuse to authorize their officers to do the job would be cut off from federal funding for prisons.

This is the kind of legislation favored by the "send them all back where they came from" crowd, but requiring local police to arrest everyone suspected of an immigration violation would flood a system that's already overtaxed while diverting officers from more important duties (as prioritized by the local residents who employ them, if not Rep. Norwood). What happened to the time when Republicans were in favor of states running their own governments?

Another unintended consequence: years of public education urging battered women to call the police will be nullified by the fear that a call to the police will result in deportation.

"This is really putting into danger the lives of immigrant women and children," said Claudia Medina, executive director of ENLACE Comunitario, a pro-immigrant organization that works with victims of domestic violence.

"If this law is approved, it will cause chaos in our community.... Victims aren't going to report abuse. This will give one more tool to abusers against their victims."

The Albuquerque City Council passed a resolution last night opposing the bill. More on the CLEAR Act here.