by TChris

Last month, TalkLeft reported that former Wisconsin district attorney (and unsuccessful Republican candidate for state attorney general) Joseph Paulus is being prosecuted for accepting bribes in drunk driving cases from a former prosecutor turned defense attorney. New information reveals that Paulus was the kind of prosecutor who, blinded by his own ambition and sense of righteousness, would do anything to secure a conviction, even if it meant sending the innocent to prison.

The prosecutor who replaced Paulus has asked the state's Department of Justice to review twenty cases in which Paulus withheld evidence from the defense. In one case, Paulus withheld DNA evidence that proved a rape suspect hadn't committed the crime. In a murder case, he withheld evidence that the victim's death may have been accidental. When his employees questioned his integrity, he fired them; when they tried to reveal his wrongdoing, he publicly attacked them.

Paulus apparently made records disappear that would reveal his wrongdoing.

[The new prosecutor] said his office also has asked the state to look into why numerous court, police and prosecutors' records in questionable cases are now missing. Among the lost records: Sheriff's department reports from the early 1990s in which Paulus was accused by his former wife of stalking her.

Questions about Paulus' integrity had surfaced repeatedly over the years, but nothing happened until he was caught accepting bribes. Yet the bribery caused far less harm than the pattern of disregarding rules and rights in order to secure convictions. The larger implications of this story shouldn't be ignored.

The allegations surrounding Paulus should prompt state policymakers to "seize the moment" to determine what additional checks and balances need to be placed on district attorneys in Wisconsin, said Walter Dickey, a UW-Madison law professor and former state corrections secretary. "The fact of the matter is," Dickey said, "we have too much power in the hands of the prosecutor."

One reform is obvious: prosecutors shouldn't be allowed to keep any scrap of information secret. Everything should be turned over to the defense, in every case.

Major General Geoffrey Miller is back as the new head of prisons in Iraq. Saturday, he defended his recommendation (made last summer during a visit to Abu Ghraib) that Iraqi prison guards be "actively engaged" in extracting information from Iraqi detainees. See also the transcript of his May 4 briefing conference here. Miller was sent to Iraq to replace Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski Miller who was relieved of her duty in March. Before then, Miller had been the Commander at Guantanamo:

Although the spotlight Friday was on Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld’s testimony before Congress, the focus of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal has started to shift onto Major General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Miller left Guantanamo and was put in charge of Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad, after Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski was quietly sacked at the end of March. Gen. Janis Karpinski has not been charged in connection with the investigation.

She has subtly implied that Miller encouraged questionable practices by introducing his "Gitmo" (Guantanamo) prison practices into Iraq. She is reported to have said that Miller "Gitmo-ized" the Iraq system....Miller’s recommendations for speeding up the interrogation process at Abu Ghraib were presented to the top commander in Iraq, Brigadier General Ricardo S. Sanchez. In part they stated, " … it is essential that the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees." The phrase, "setting conditions for interrogations" is a euphemism.

Miller denies using torture. We're skeptical of his claim, to say the least.

Anthony Lewis has a terrific column in the new Mother Jones, One Liberty At a Time, in which he argues:

From the cages at Gunatanamo to a jail cell in Brooklyn, the administration isn't just threatening the rights of a few detainees—it's undermining the very foundation of democracy.

It is not just for Guantanamo that the alarm bells of American liberty should be sounding. Civil liberties are more broadly in a perilous state.... In the name of fighting terrorism, President Bush and his administration have abruptly overridden rights protected by the Constitution and international law. Ideas foreign to American principles—detention without trial, denial of access to lawyers, years of interrogation in isolation—are now American practices.

The danger of what is happening is more profound than the denial of justice to some individuals. The Bush administration is really attacking a basic premise of the American system: that we have a government under law.

by TChris

After the government rested its case against former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, U.S. District Judge Martin Jenkins dismissed 23 of 42 charges against him. Lazarenko "is accused of defrauding and extorting hundreds of millions of dollars from his homeland and laundering more than $100 million through U.S. banks."

Jenkins ruled earlier in the trial that prosecutors would have to prove that the schemes Lazarenko was accused of using to defraud his former government were prohibited under Ukranian law and that the money he purportedly stole did not belong to him when it was transported out of the country.

On Friday, the judge said that prosecutors had failed to make their case on most of those points. "That Lazarenko's conduct may have violated some common law fiduciary duty in the United States would be insufficient to prove that he failed to provide honest services to the citizens of Ukraine," the judge wrote in an order issued on Friday.

Lazarenko still faces charges of wire fraud, money laundering and conspiring to steal money from a Ukrainian government-owned dairy business.

First Amnesty International, now the Red Cross:

The international Red Cross says the abuse it found in Iraq's US-run prisons was systematic and amounted to torture, adding that it first raised concerns with the United States more than a year ago. At a quickly-arranged news conference, the International Committee of the Red Cross' director of operations, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, said US authorities had broken international laws and their transgressions had been documented in an ICRC report. "The elements we found were tantamount to torture... There were clearly incidents of degrading and inhuman treatment," he told reporters.

Democracy of One writes that the Bush Administration's culture is responsible for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners:

It is the contempt for due process and civil liberties by Bush and other administration officials that has led to the culture of impunity under which these abuses have occurred. The culture of any organization starts at the top, and lower ranking members take the lead from those above them. In the administration’s bluster to protect America by suspending civil liberties, they unwittingly fostered an environment where gross violations of international law and human decency were tacitly, though not explicitly condoned. While direct orders from top military brass surely were never given to rape, murder and sexually humilate prisoners, these acts are the result of administration policies that lack transparency and accountability

The Taguba report is curious in its failure to discuss Major General Barbara Fast who was the chief intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib prison.

...except for one brief mention, the 55-page report contains nothing about the role of the top military intelligence officer in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast. As head of intelligence for the U.S. command in Baghdad, Fast was in charge of interrogators at Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were beaten, sodomized and photographed in sexually degrading positions.

Experts contacted by the St. Petersburg Times say strict adherence to military protocol - and a possible reluctance to delve too far into intelligence operations - have kept Fast out of the spotlight....That the investigation into prisoner abuse was conducted by a major general may be one reason why Fast, an officer of equal rank, apparently has undergone little scrutiny, one expert says.

There's more in this long Sunday New York Times article, In Abuse, a Picture of G.I.'s Ill Prepared and Overwhelmed. The article also contains statements from the individual guards.

Officials already seem to be backtracking on their arrest of Brandon Mayfield, the Portland, Oregon immigration and family law attorney (and former lieutenant in the U.S. army) arrested on a material witness warrant in connection with the March, 2004 Spain train bombings:

The law enforcement officials said they were afraid that Mr. Mayfield, who is originally from Kansas, might become a fugitive if he knew he was under suspicion. So monitoring that was just getting started was abruptly halted. Mr. Mayfield was arrested before investigators had fully examined his phone records, before they knew if he had ever met with any of the bombing suspects, before they knew if he had ever traveled to Spain or elsewhere overseas. His relatives said he had not been out of the United States for 10 years.

As to the purported fingerprint of Mayfield on a plastic bag in a van containing detonators, it turns out the F.B.I. isn't sure it's a match:

The New York Times says the father of Ivan Frederick, of one of the prison guards being investigated for abuse, fearful his son would be a scapegoat, contacted his brother-in law-, William Lawson, who contacted "retired Colonel and muckraker David Hackworth," who put the father in touch with the '60 Minutes II' producers.

Rumsfeld to Congress yesterday: "I wish I had been able to convey to them the gravity of this before we saw it in the media,"

The irony, Mr. Lawson said, is that the public spectacle might have been avoided if the military and the federal government had been responsive to his claims that his nephew was simply following orders. Mr. Lawson said he sent letters to 17 members of Congress about the case earlier this year, with virtually no response, and that he ultimately contacted Mr. Hackworth's Web site out of frustration, leading him to cooperate with a consultant for "60 Minutes II."

....He shared his frustration in his March 23 e-mail message to Mr. Hackworth's Web site, writing: "We have contacted the Red Cross, Congress both parties, Bill O'Reilly and many others. Nobody wants to touch this."

"The Army had the opportunity for this not to come out, not to be on 60 Minutes," he said. "But the Army decided to prosecute those six G.I.'s because they thought me and my family were a bunch of poor, dirt people who could not do anything about it. But unfortunately, that was not the case."

How did the photos get to Ivan Frederick's father?

This is just awful....in today's Guardian....showing the guards were taught how to commit the indecencies they perpetuated on Iraqi prisoners.

The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources. The techniques devised in the system, called R2I - resistance to interrogation - match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, said: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing." He said British and US military intelligence soldiers were trained in these techniques, which were taught at the joint services interrogation centre in Ashford, Kent, now transferred to the former US base at Chicksands. "There is a reservoir of knowledge about these interrogation techniques which is retained by former special forces soldiers who are being rehired as private contractors in Iraq. Contractors are bringing in their old friends".

Amnesty International has written this open letter to President George W. Bush on the question of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners. As to the Taguba report, the letter says:

The Taguba report emphasized that the findings were "amply" supported by confessions from suspected perpetrators, statements from detainees and witnesses, as well as "extremely graphic photographic evidence". The report found that there was a failure to establish clear training, procedures and oversight on interrogation and treatment of detainees, and "that very little instruction or training" was provided to military police personnel on the applicable rules of the Geneva Conventions.

....The Taguba report presents evidence that the abuse allegedly inflicted on the detainees in Iraq followed requests from military intelligence and other government interrogators that the military police (MP) guards in the prison "set physical and mental conditions for favourable interrogation of witnesses". Guards alleged that military intelligence personnel had given instructions including "loosen this guy up for us", "make sure he has a bad night"; "make sure he gets the treatment"; and "Good job, they're breaking down real fast. They answer every question. They're giving out good information, Finally, and Keep up the good work. Stuff like that."

Amnesty recounts the pattern of abuses it reported to the Administration over a long period of time.

The New York Times reports Saturday on the routine mistreatment of prisoners in America. After setting out numerous sickening examples, the article reverts back to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and we learn that the man who was responsible for directing the re-opening of the Abu Ghraib prison after the U.S. invaded Iraq, and for training the guards, was Lane McCotter of Utah, who was selected for the job by none other than Attorney General John Ashcroft.

[McCotter] resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.....McCotter later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system....In Utah, in addition to the death of the mentally ill inmate, Mr. McCotter also came under criticism for hiring a prison psychiatrist whose medical license was on probation and who was accused of Medicaid fraud and writing prescriptions for drug addicts.

Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further action was taken.

McCotter reports he left Abu Ghraib after training the guards and cutting the ribbon at the opening ceremony last September. As for Ashcroft, who picked McCotter,

When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including Mr. McCotter, he said, "Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights."

Then there's this quote, which turns out to be quite prescient:

Sabrina Harman is one of the U.S. soldiers who have been charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and who will face court martial proceedings. Harman was interviewed by e-mail from Iraq this week.

[She] said she was assigned to break down prisoners for interrogation. "They would bring in one to several prisoners at a time already hooded and cuffed," Harman said in interviews by e-mail this week from Baghdad. "The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk." She said her military police unit took direction from the military intelligence officers in charge of the facility and from civilian contractors there who conducted interrogations.

Harman's face is now famous as belonging to one of the soldiers who posed in a widely published photograph showing naked Iraqi detainees stacked in a pyramid....She also is charged with striking several detainees by jumping on a pile of detainees, writing "rapeist" on a prisoner's leg and with attaching wires to a prisoner's hands while he stood on a box with his head covered, according to Army charging documents. She is accused of then telling him if he fell off the box he would be electrocuted.