Author Archives: Lisa

Judge Rules Guantanamo Trials Unlawful

They’re calling this decision a setback for Bush’s policy.
It’s definitely a plus for democracy.

Judge Says Detainees’ Trials Are Unlawful
By Carol D. Leonnig and John Mintz for The Washington Post.

The special trials established to determine the guilt or innocence of prisoners at the U.S. military prison in Cuba are unlawful and cannot continue in their current form, a federal judge ruled yesterday.
In a setback for the Bush administration, U.S. District Judge James Robertson found that detainees at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may be prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions and therefore entitled to the protections of international and military law — which the government has declined to grant them.
The decision came in a lawsuit filed by the first alleged al Qaeda member facing trial before what the government calls “military commissions.” The decision upends — for now — the administration’s strategy for prosecuting hundreds of alleged al Qaeda and Taliban detainees accused of terrorist crimes.
Human rights advocates, foreign governments and the detainees’ attorneys have contended that the rules governing military commissions are unfairly stacked against the defendants. But Robertson’s ruling is the first by a federal judge to assert that the commissions, which took nearly two years to get underway, are invalid.
The Bush administration denounced the ruling as wrongly giving special rights to terrorists and announced that it will ask a higher court for an emergency stay and reversal of Robertson’s decision. Military officers at Guantanamo immediately halted commission proceedings in light of the ruling.
“We vigorously disagree. . . . The judge has put terrorism on the same legal footing as legitimate methods of waging war,” said Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo. “The Constitution entrusts to the president the responsibility to safeguard the nation’s security. The Department of Justice will continue to defend the president’s ability and authority under the Constitution to fulfill that duty.”
Robertson ruled that the military commissions, which Bush authorized the Pentagon to revive after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are neither lawful nor proper. Under commission rules, the government could, for example, exclude people accused of terrorist acts from some commission sessions and deny them access to evidence, which the judge said would violate basic military law.
Robertson said the government should have held special hearings for detainees to determine whether they qualified for prisoner-of-war protections when they were captured, as required by the Geneva Conventions. Instead, the administration declared the captives “enemy combatants” and decided to afford them some of the protections spelled out by the Geneva accords.
Robertson ordered that until the government provides the hearing, it can prosecute the detainees only in courts-martial, under long-established military law.
Robertson issued his decision in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a detainee captured in Afghanistan in late 2001 and accused of being a member of al Qaeda. Robertson’s opinion is expected to set the standard for treatment of other detainees before military commissions. So far, four Guantanamo Bay detainees have been ordered to stand trial…
Kevin Barry, a retired Coast Guard judge who is critical of the Pentagon’s legal justifications for the Guantanamo Bay detentions, called Robertson’s ruling a “remarkable” decision that “will give heart to all who think the rule of law should apply in the Afghanistan conflict.” Barry said the war on terrorism is the first U.S. war since the Geneva Conventions’ adoption in 1949 in which the government has not accorded POW status to enemy fighters.
“Even the Viet Cong, who were farmers by day and fighters at night, were accorded that status,” he said. “The judge got these issues right.”

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NY Times Editorial: New Standards For Elections


New Standards for Elections
By The New York Times.

1. A holiday for voting. It’s wrong for working people to be forced to choose between standing in a long line to vote and being on time for work. Election Day should be a holiday, to underscore the significance of the event, to give all voters time to cast ballots and to free up more qualified people to serve as poll workers.
2. Early voting. In states that permit it, early voting encourages people to turn out by letting them vote at times that are convenient for them. And it gives election officials and outside groups more time to react to voting problems ranging from faulty voting machines to voter intimidation.
3. Improved electronic voting. For voters to trust electronic voting, there must be a voter-verified paper record of every vote cast, and mandatory recounts of a reasonable percentage of the votes. The computer code should be provided to election officials, and made public so it can be widely reviewed. There should be spot-checks of the software being used on Election Day, as there are of slot machines in Nevada, to ensure that the software in use matches what is on file with election officials.
4. Shorter lines at the polls. Forcing voters to wait five hours, as some did this year, is unreasonable, and it disenfranchises those who cannot afford the wait. There should be standards for the number of voting machines and poll workers per 100 voters, to ensure that waiting times are reasonable and uniform from precinct to precinct.
5. Impartial election administrators. Partisan secretaries of state routinely issued rulings this year that favored their parties and themselves. Decisions about who can vote and how votes will be counted should be made by officials who are not running for higher office or supporting any candidates. Voting machine manufacturers and their employees, and companies that handle ballots, should not endorse or contribute to political candidates.
6. Uniform and inclusive voter registration standards. Registration forms should be simplified, so no one is again disenfranchised for failing to check a superfluous box, as occurred this year in Florida, or for not using heavy enough paper, as occurred in Ohio. The rules should be geared to getting as many qualified voters as possible on the rolls.
7. Accurate and transparent voting roll purges. This year, Florida once again conducted a flawed and apparently partisan purge of its rolls, and went to court to try to keep it secret. There should be clear standards for how purges are done that are made public in advance. Names that are due to be removed should be published, and posted online, well in advance of Election Day.
8. Uniform and voter-friendly standards for counting provisional ballots. A large number of provisional ballots cast by registered voters were thrown out this year because they were handed in at the wrong precinct. There should be a uniform national rule that such ballots count.
9. Upgraded voting machines and improved ballot design. Incredibly, more than 70 percent of the Ohio vote was cast on the infamous punch card ballots, which produce chads and have a high error rate. States should shift to better machines, ideally optical scans, which combine the efficiency of computers and the reliability of a voter-verified paper record. Election officials should get professional help to design ballots that are intuitive and clear, and minimize voter error.
10. Fair and uniform voter ID rules. No voter should lose his right to vote because he is required to produce identification he does not have. ID requirements should allow for an expansive array of acceptable identification. The rules should be posted at every polling place, and poll workers should be carefully trained so no one is turned away, as happened repeatedly this year, for not having ID that was not legally required.
11. An end to minority vote suppression. Protections need to be put in place to prevent Election Day challengers from turning away qualified minority voters or slowing down voting in minority precincts. More must be done to stop the sort of dirty tricks that are aimed at minority voters every year, like fliers distributed in poor neighborhoods warning that people with outstanding traffic tickets are ineligible to vote. Laws barring former felons from voting, which disproportionately disenfranchise minorities, should be rescinded.
12. Improved absentee ballot procedures. Voters outside of their states, including military voters, have a right to receive absentee ballots in a timely fashion, which did not always happen this year. Absentee ballots should be widely available for downloading over the Internet. Voters should not be asked, as military voters were this year, to send their ballots by fax lines or e-mail, denying them a secret ballot.

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Daily Show Compendium Of Reactions To The Election – Tony Blair, Anti-Bush Demonstrators, and The Shrub “Reaching Out”

This is from the November 4, 2004 program.

Reactions to the Election (13 MB)
This one includes Tony Blair’s latest press conference brown-nose, the Shrub reaching out to people who already share his goals, and the Shrub enforcing the one-question rule while looking forward to spending his new found “political capital.”
It also has footage of the Shrub being misinformed about Arafat being dead and his reaction to the news. (A fact which was clarified with a one sentence press conference.)

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Soldier Drops Case Against Army In Exchange For Honorable Discharge – Sued The Army On the Basis that the Back Door Draft Violates Constitutional Rights Against “Involuntary Servitude”


Honorable Discharge in Iraq Deployment Case
By for The LA Times
This is great news. However, I’m also totally confused by this, because this post explains how soldiers can’t sue the military because of a Supreme Court decision from the 1950s.
I am not confused about the results though. It would appear that this guy sued the Army and won (even if only because they “settled” by letting him resign like he wanted in the first place.)
If this guy was able to get an honorable discharge from at least attempting to sue the government, all of these soldiers who are having their tours extended against their will should maybe do the same. (Maybe a class action even.)
If it needs to go all the way up to the Supreme Court, let it go. The more cases the better..
From the article:


“The Army had not acted on his resignation request until he sued the government.
Ferriola’s suit had charged that the Army’s deployment order, dated Oct. 8, violated his constitutional rights against “involuntary servitude ” and breached his military contract…”
Capt. Jay Ferriola drops his lawsuit against the Army for assigning him to active duty after his contract had expired and he had resigned.
NEW YORK – The Army has agreed to honorably discharge a captain who challenged his assignment to Iraq in court, saying he had properly resigned…
Ferriola, a New Yorker who had served in South Korea and Bosnia, said he brought his lawsuit two weeks ago because he was assigned to Iraq even though he had told the Army in June that he was resigning because his eight-year term was finished.

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The Communists Weigh-in On The Election

Update 9:52 pm: In re-reading this, a thought occurs to me: Can anyone help me out with some data supporting the numbers in the second paragraph? Thx! – lisa
Someone emailed this to me, and I thought it was interesting.
It was written by Carl Dix, the National Spokesperson of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, and a cofounder of the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality.
It reads like it was written before or during the election, rather than afterwards.
We disagree on the point that I do believe that voting Bush out of office is a postivie step in the right direction. Or would have been…or will be…or, well, you get the picture.

Another Stolen Election? — Time For Serious Resistance!
by Carl Dix
Black people have had to fight fiercely for every gain. From slave revolts down thru people being killed just for trying to register to vote, every step of the way has been marked by struggle to force the authorities to grant basic rights. Now today the right to vote is being snatched back from many Black and Latino people.
Am I exaggerating? Not one bit. Earlier this year, Florida’s Secretary of State issued a list of 47,000 “felons” who would be ineligible to vote. Most of them were Black. Florida was forced to make the list public, and it was found to contain thousands of errors, including having hundreds of people who were listed as being convicted in the future. This is on top of the 94,000 people, again mostly Black, who were stricken from the voting rolls by a similarly error filled list in 2000, most of whom have not still not been put back on the voting lists!
Ohio is using an old state law about the kind of paper voter registrations must be on to invalidate newly registered Black voters. The Republican Party has lined up thousands of “poll watchers,” who are really political thugs, to challenge Latinos and Blacks to present proof that they are citizens or that they live in the precinct they’re voting in on election day. This is another rerun of 2000 when some “poll watchers” wore shirts that falsely implied they were federal police to intimidate people from even trying to vote. Additionally, corporations tied to the Republicans have made electronic voting machines that leave no way to check the accuracy of their count that will be used in states across the country.
All this is on top of the way the criminal injustice system works to criminalize Black and Latino people. Youth of color are routinely jacked up by the cops, beaten down and arrested for nothing more than being the wrong color or having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is part of the reason why half of the two million people in jail in the US are Black.
Bush and company are out to disenfranchise millions of Black and other minority voters. THIS POINTS TO THE PROSPECT OF A STOLEN ELECTION IN 2004.
This is what the Republicans did in 2000, and the Democrats let them get away with it. They didn’t build a fight to stop it and stood in the way of others who wanted to fight it. Things must be different this time. There must be massive resistance to any and all attempts by Bush and company to steal the presidency again!

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Nader Requests A Recount In New Hampshire

Even though I personally feel that Nader should have dropped out of the election the day before, at least he has the guts to ask for a recount.
No word yet on any response from the GAO to the letter sent on Friday by three Democratic congressmen requesting a formal investigation.
The complete letter is included below (underneath the quote that goes with this story).

Nader requests N.H. vote recount
By Kevin Landrigan for the Telegraph Online.

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader requested a hand recount of ballots in New Hampshire after getting seven-tenths of 1 percent of the vote.

Video Of 60 Minutes II Interview With National Guardsman Who Got Brain Damage While Posing As A Prisoner During Guantanamo “Drill”

This is from the November 3, 2004 program of 60 Minutes II. This post goes with this one.
Here’s the story on Sean Baker from the 60 Minutes II website.
This Administration doesn’t give a damn about anybody.
Here’s how the Administration treats the most patriotic of its soldiers.
(Sorry for the sound quality. My 60 minutes broadcasts are almost always distorted on my cable system now. Not sure what I can do about it…)

Interview with Sean Baker – Part 1 of 2 (17 MB)

Interview with Sean Baker – Part 2 of 2 (16 MB)
Baker makes the point that if a real detainee was trying to explain himself to the interrogators in a foreign language, he would undoubtedly have no chance at all:
“What does he think would have happened if he had been a real detainee? “I think they would have busted him up,” says Baker. “I’ve seen detainees come outta there with blood on ’em.

Bev Harris and Aviel Rubin Interview On Democracy NOW!

This is from the November 8, 2004 program.

Amy Goodman’s Interview With Bev Harris from blackboxvoting.org and Aviel Rubin from Johns Hopkins University (Real Stream) (Ogg (50 MB), MP3 28MB)
Bev Harris is the creator of blackboxvoting.org and the one spearheading a huge Freedom Of Information Act request for election information.
Aviel Rubin of John Hopkins University is the one who wrote the highly respected and virtually unchallenged white paper,
Analysis of an Electronic Voting System, which detailed the insecurities of electronic voting machines.
(Thanks, Joel!)

This Isn’t What The Supreme Court Had In Mind: Hasty Military Tribunals For Guantanamo Prisoners

A makeshift double-wide trailer is the “court,” and three anonymous military officers constitute the “judge and jury.”
Prisoners are not allowed proper representation by attorneys.
Translators seem to be provided, but they are not doing an adequate job. Prisoners who refuse to attend their tribunal hearing are sentenced in absentia.
But no one’s listening to what the prisoners have to say anyway. They are not allowed to know the names of anyone on the panel or see any of the “evidence” against them, because it’s classified.
The U.S. used to set the bar for humanitarian treatment of P.O.W.’s, now it’s setting the standard for modern day fascism.
This is not what the Supreme Court meant when it declared that “a state of war is not a blank check for the president,” and said that “enemy combatants” must be allowed to challenge their detention before a “judge” or “other neutral decision maker.” (Does anyone have the link to the decision itself?)
The Shrub Administration is arguing that the Supreme Court should reject the numerous petitions filed on behalf of Guantanamo prisoners because these military tribunals satisfy the Supreme Court’s requirements. But this quote from Guantanamo’s Captain Jamison proves beyond a reasonable doubt that these “administrative procedures” do not qualify as criminal courts:

Captain Jamison said the tribunals were administrative procedures and thus did not have to meet standards of regular criminal proceedings.

These are the kinds of conditions you used to hear about happening in third world countries — to Americans. These are the situations that the Geneva Convention was created to address. This is a travesty of Justice, to say the least.

Guant