From the Law Office of H. Candace Gorman
The military's chief prosecutor in the Guantanamo military trials has taken the prosecutor who was advocating for the death penalty in the USS Cole bombing case off the case. Read more here.
Don't even ask how the Cole bombing which occured in October 2000 became part of the September 11th roundup....
Every year on this day I turn to my friend the talking dog... who had the misfortune to be in NYC on that day-- and very close to ground zero.
Several of the remaining prisoners have turned to creating art to pass the time. And the art work is quite good-- and quite telling. I guess that is why the powers do not want the art work to leave with the men.
More here.
Democracy US-style ... November elections where Big Lie candidates abound ... Key states in the grip of Trump-nominated electoral officials ... Hundreds of new state laws to reshape the vote ... GOP plan for permanent minority government, with assistance from the Supreme Court ... Trouble in wait for Republicans' Pravda ... Roger Fitch's reports from our Washington bureau
President Biden has had a legislative victory, despite Democrats struggling with a small house majority and not-quite-majority senate. The upper house, in nominal Democrat control, has been held hostage by Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
Republicans had come to rely on the two "Blue Dog" Democrats to obstruct Biden's legislative agenda, and were taken by surprise when the two voted for a reduced remnant of the key Democrat infrastructure bill, the optimistically-renamed Inflation Reduction Act.
There were liberal jokes that Manchin had shocked Republicans by revealing he's a Democrat, but the conservative Bulwark was all praise for Manchin's manoeuvres.
≈ ≈ ≈
The party pre-selections for this year's November elections are now largely complete in US states, and it's clear the paranoid fringe is becoming the party establishment in most Republican-controlled states, where Donald Trump's election-denying supporters have chosen the nuttiest, coup-supporting, election-liars among their party's appalling range of candidates - some of whom received covert Democrat assistance.
The Democrats' controversial gamble assumes that genuinely crazy "MAGA-loon" candidates will repel independent voters and be easier to defeat in November; Republicans meddle in Democrat primaries for opposite reasons, spending to defeat progressive opponents.
The tactic may be working for Democrats in deep-blue Maryland, where the craziest Republicans standing for governor and AG have won pre-selection, and it may work elsewhere, now that the contents of Donald Trump's safe have been revealed.
Already-tainted Republicans, like Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, perhaps the most detested US senator (after Ted Cruz) and an unashamed insurrectionist, could lose to a centre-left Democrat, Lt Governor Mandela Barnes, although Wisconsin remains emblematic of America's two-party decline.
There's a danger in newly-minted Republican cranks, e.g, in Pennsylvania, where the TV personality Dr Oz (Mehmet Oz) could win a senate seat.
Missouri's senate primary perplexed Trump cultists, as their hero couldn't decide which of two dreadful Erics to support: the disgraced former governor and wife-beater Eric Greitens, or the current AG, Eric Schmitt, who joined in frivolous and baseless lawsuits to overthrow the 2020 election - (Schmitt won).
A greater worry: the number of overtly partisan candidates for "secretaries of state", i.e, state election administrators. Big Lie candidates for such offices dominated this year's Republican primaries.
Using the "stolen elections" pretext, candidates for state election administrators obliquely promised to throw the November elections for Republicans, and many of these candidates won party pre-selection.
Alarmingly, Republicans in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania chose Big Lie candidates for offices that regulate or rule on elections, based on the hope they would conduct elections for the benefit of Republicans. These nominees will be well-placed to tamper with the presidential vote in 2024 if they win office this November.
READ THE REST HERE.
In today's news one of the detainees is seeking release- he has been cleared and the Judge is holding the government's feet to the fire to get him out of Guantanamo. The prisoner Majid Khan says that he is being held in solitary confinement and this is what the government said in response:
According to the Biden Justice Department, Majid Khan is not held in solitary confinement because he “socializes with F.B.I. agents, prison guards, military lawyers and top prison officials during ‘religious feasts, social meetings and meetings regarding detention-related issues,’ Colonel Jemmott said in an affidavit.”
oh man. The guy would probably prefer solitary confinement than to be "socializing" with those guys...
read the rest here.
Seems that one of the prisoners facing the death penalty reported that he was water boarded while being interrogated but that little detail was left out in official reports...Carol Rosenberg at the New York Times reports :
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A prisoner accused of plotting Al Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S.S. Cole warship in 2000 told federal interrogators years later that he was waterboarded by the C.I.A., an interpreter testified Thursday. But that detail was omitted from the official account of the interrogations that prosecutors want to use at his death-penalty trial as evidence that he confessed.
At issue in the hearings is whether the military judge will accept a 34-page memo written by agents who questioned the prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, at Guantánamo Bay for three days in early 2007. The account of the interrogation is considered critical trial evidence. Defense lawyers say it is tainted by torture and want it excluded.
“He talked about the waterboarding,” said John J. Elkaliouby, who worked for the F.B.I. as an Arabic linguist from 1994 to 2015. “He said, ‘I was waterboarded by the C.I.A.,’ and I reported that to the whole team.”
read the rest here.
and what could be better than Joni Mitchell -- after 20 years of no public singing...
The US Supreme Court has become a Republican law enforcement tribunal ... Abortions, guns, religion, environment ... Cherry-picked legal reasoning ... Historical inaccuracies ... Worse to come ... Same sex marriage in Texas ... Washington correspondent Roger Fitch files
"[I]n future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold [contraception], Lawrence [same-sex relationships], and Obergefell [gay marriage] ... Because any substantive due process decision is 'demonstrably erroneous' ... we have a duty to 'correct the error' established in those precedents".
Clarence Thomas, concurrence overruling Roe v Wade.
"The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law."
Dobbs dissent.
"They did it because they could. It was as simple as that."
Linda Greenhouse.
The supreme court's first full term with three Trumpistes ended with a week from hell.
No longer a court, it's become a revolutionary tribunal, a Comité de Salut Public of six instead of twelve.
Six radical justices, led by Alito and Thomas, achieved a trifecta: public funding for religious schools (the First Amendment separation of church and state notwithstanding), unlimited guns on the streets of "blue" states (despite long-standing regulations in those states) and then, the greatest prize of all for dutiful evangelicals and right-wing Catholics, the end of legal abortions in Republican-ruled states, whether regulated, medically-required or any other reason, including rape and incest.
READ THE REST HERE.
As we approach another grim milestone in Guantánamo’s history — 20 and a half years of its existence, on July 11 — there is, at least, some mildly positive news from the prison’s largely dysfunctional military commission trial system, where Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a “high-value detainee,” and one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, in April 2007, recently agreed to a plea deal that could see him leave the prison by 2024.
read the rest here.36 men remain. including my remaining client who was cleared for release earlier this year and is ready willing and able to go to his home country of Algeria. The only incentive is reducing the number of detainees and that apparently is not enough.
The afghani who is now home is home because there was a court order -- but even that didnt do the trick until his attorneys and the judge kept on the government by requiring them to come in and explain the progress- repeatedly.
Read about the latest release here.
h/o to Walt.
In my post about my client's 20 years at Guantanamo I mentioned his black feet and the "socks." Let me explain a little further. It seems one of the torture methods was to soak the socks in a chemical that burned my clients feet and of course caused excruciating pain. His feet were still blackened from that chemical the last time I saw him.
I also want to explain what I meant when I mentioned the court transcript from the "hearing." I said, "if he did not change that too." What I was suggesting was that the judge changed the official transcript from the hearing. I did not say that lightly or facetiously. The judge actually had the transcript changed - a couple of the more outrageous statements the judge made were taken out of the official transcript. I actually wrote down those quotes during the hearing and wanted to use them in one of my many many motions following the hearing. Both were missing. I filed a motion asking for the recording because the transcript had been altered but the judge said there was no recording. That too was false.
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