NBC News yesterday confirmed that former U.S. attorney Eric Holder has accepted the offer of the Attorney Generalship in Barak Obama's forthcoming administration. The appointment would need the support of the Senate in order to confirm Holder but early indications are that there would be no particular problems in that regard.

Holder was formerly Deputy Attorney General in Bill Clinton's administration and his appointment to the No.1 job in the justice department would make him America's first black Attorney General. Holder is also a former judge, is widely respected by the legal profession, and is seen as a good choice in being able to restore the reputation of the Justice Department after the severe bashing it has received under the Bush administration. A key supporter of Obama, Holder seems to be generally accepted as a good pick for the job.

Labels: Attorney General, Eric Holder, Justice Department, Obama

There is no doubt that Guantanamo Bay has proved to be a very black mark against the perceived sense of America's fairness and justice. Even Bush has been trying to find ways of the closing it down but has been unable to resolve the complications involved in doing so. The problems with dealing with terrorists, or at least suspected terrorists, who have been captured in battle are many. The Republicans don't want to see them set foot on U.S. soil because under the rights protected under the Constitution they argue that evidence would have to be presented in open court obtained through informers and clandestine operations, both of which would end up being compromised.

On the other hand the military hearings under Bush have been fatally flawed because of evidence procedures and secrecy, and several expert military prosecutors resigning because of it. There is also the problem of presenting evidence that has been gained under torture. No court, except maybe the very worse of the 'kangaroo' kind would accept such evidence. Some are arguing for a new hybrid system of military and civilian commissions but this has already met with opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union who see nothing wrong with the legal system America already has.

Although many of the detainees could probably be released without trial another problem is that their home countries refuse to take them back. Yemen is a case in point. It boils down to the status of the detainees when they are released - they are either guilty or they are innocent. The Yemenis argue that they should either be tried in the U.S. courts or set free, and so negotiations have gotten nowhere. The whole situation is one big mess. I think that few would disagree that 'Gitmo' has to close, but Obama has been left with very few options when it comes to how to achieve it. Ultimately, if America is to regain her credibility in the world, she must live by the rule of law as set out in the Constitution. If America is seen to take the low road in dealing with terrorist suspects then the terrorists truly have won.

Labels: American Civil Liberties Union, courts, Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay, military, terrorists

America has decided - Barak Obama will be the next President of the United states of America - whether you like it or not. For those McCain supporters hoping to see some of the more liberal justices replaced with judges more sympathetic to causes such as the overturning of Roe v Wade are going to be disappointed. However, even if he is an 'expert prosecutor' when it comes to winning elections, Obama is unlikely to be able to replace any of the conservative judges currently sitting on the Supreme Court during his term, or terms of office.

At the moment the bench is split pretty evenly with 4 conservative judges and 4 more liberal judges. Ironically, it is the liberal judges that are more likely to come up for replacement in an Obama term because of their age. For example, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is 75, and Justice John Paul Stevens is 88! In contrast, most of the conservative judges are relatively young and are unlikely to come up for retirement within the lifetime of an Obama Presidency anyway.

Certianly, Barak Obama has made it quite clear that he would like to see more judges appointed who have the empathy of experience when it comes to the modern day problems of teenage moms, people who are disabled, or in poverty, or gay or African-American, and he also wants to see more justices with a view on constitutional limits on presidential power that are more traditional than has been the case under the Bush presidency. However, Obama is likley to be replacing like with like and therefore maintaining the statas quo in Supreme Court rather than making any significant change.

Ironically, McCain would have had a better chance of re-defining the Supreme Court in the conservative mold than Obama will a liberal one. If there are conservatives out there who now fear that an Obama-influenced Supreme Court will lead to wider access to abortions, gay marriages in every state, and the business community stifled with liability lawsuits they can, perhaps, relax a little. That said, Constitutional matters, after the ravages of the last eight years, will need some serious addressing if American democracy is to be protected from future incursions.

Labels: justices, Obama, Presidency, Supreme Court

The reprieve of Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis on Friday, the third time that courts have stayed his execution in little more than a year, has served again to highlight the arguments over the use of the death penalty in America. Now, coming from Britain where we no longer have a death penalty, quite rightly in my opinion, there are some notorious cases, where the evidence is incontrovertible, where one can't help but sympathise with the passion behind the argument for a death penalty. The problem, historically, is that far too many have been put to death only to find later that they were innocent. And this looks to be one of the reasons the courts are holding off on the Davis execution.

Davis was originally convicted in 1991 of the murder of a police officer. However, since then 7 of the 9 eyewitnesses called by the prosecution at his trial have since changed or recanted their testimonies. Davis' lawyers further argues that since no murder weapon was found, nor any physical evidence that linked Davis to the crime, that it left far too much doubt about the conviction to warrant an execution. However, despite granting a previous stay of execution in August, the Supreme Court later declined to take up his appeal. Now here we are again with the third stay of execution, this time by the Federal Appeals Court. The case has received international attention with appeals for clemency coming from some notable people including Pope Benedict XVI and former President Jimmy Carter. We'll have to see what the courts decide to do next.

Faulty eyewitness testimony has apparently been cited in over 75% of wrongful conviction cases, over 200 cases being exonerated by DNA testing. The question that comes to my mind is whether it is worse to let someone live, albeit locked away for life for a heinous crime, or is it worse to execute someone for something they didn't do. I know a lot of people will argue about the cost of keeping someone in prison, but according to an LA Times report in 2006, it has cost the California tax payer $250 million for each - each! - of the states executions. A 2003 Kansas Performance Audit Report showed that the costs of death penalty cases are 70% more expensive than non-capital cases. It can certainly be a highly charged and passionate debate. A Gallup Poll taken in May 2006 shows a very even split in public opinion with 48% for life without parole and 47% for the death penalty. I like the system here whereby individual states get to decide for themselves. A good source for facts about the death penalty in the U.S. is http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/

It would be interesting hear some of your views on the subject.

Labels: Death Penalty, eyewitness testimony, Georgia, Troy Davis

Coming from Britain where voter fraud and voter suppression are virtually unheard of, I was shocked to find out yesterday that despite all the legal wranglings over the 2000 and 2004 elections, you still have in place a system in which the rules and the voter registration roles are maintained by partisan local officials. Have you forgotten already the situation in Florida whereby Republican Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, called the election for Bush in 2000? Now in 2008, the accusations and evidence of localised voter disenfranchisement are already beginning to surface.

It seemed to start with McCain's accusations over the ACORN voter registration situation. Of course, ACORN being a liberal-supporting community organisation, McCain saw it as an 'undermining of the public's faith in democracy', when it actually turned out to be nothing more than a couple of lazy workers filling in "Mickey Mouse" names rather than having to go out and sign people up. No-one expects Mickey to actually turn up to cast a vote or anything!

Far more insidious is the mounting evidence of attempts to disenfranchise large, and mainly black, sections of the voting population within key battleground states by the Republicans - again! In a Supreme Court ruling on Friday, a Republican lawsuit challenging as much as one third of all new voter registrations in Ohio, numbering over 600,000, was blocked. Other attempts include the case in Michigan where voters were told they couldn't vote if they had lost their homes to foreclosure; Students in South Carolina, Virginia and Colorado were wrongfully told by voting officials "that they could lose their scholarships and their parents would no longer be able to claim them on their income taxes if they registered to vote in their college towns; the Princeton University report finding some 10,000 voting machines in the state are vulnerable to being hacked, and so on and so on.

In an article for AFP, the Director of the American Civil Liberties Union voting rights project was quoted as saying, "There's more (attempts at voter suppression) that's been going on in the lead-up to this election than any I can remember. The fact remains the people who have the power to make the rules are all too often willing to do so in ways that serve their partisan interests." [http://afp.google.com/article/
ALeqM5jI0Dz8WL2qWnD8ZjAqTkCFsT9weg]

I have to say as someone who is used to the British electoral system, I wonder at the sheer apathy of American voters. Your electoral system is fast descending to the level of a third rate banana republic and yet few seem to care. If the election is not stolen by McCain in November, I suggest that some sort of centralised, uniform, non-partisan voting organisation is introduced, perhaps under the Department of Justice, before the next election, lest you wake up one morning and find you now live under an electoral system like that 'enjoyed' by the Russians!

Labels: Civil Liberties, Election, Republican, Supreme Court, Voters

It doesn't matter how many times Sarah Palin says that she did nothing illegal or unethical in her dealings over the firing of Walt Monegan, the Alaska commissioner who refused to fire Palin's ex brother-in-law, the report clearly and unequivocally states that "Palin's efforts to get Wooten fired broke a state ethics law that bars public officials from pursuing personal interest through official action."
[see CNN for full overview of the case -
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/13/palin.investigation/].

Ultimately, this is not something she will get impeached for, the most that she can expect is that the Alaska Personnel Board might impose a fine of up to $5000. But, surely, it is not the infringement of the ethics codes themselves that is important here, it is the implications for the kind of mind set that Palin would bring to the Vice Presidency. In a piece by Michelle Goldberg for UK's The Guardian newspaper entitled "VP for vendetta - The Troopergate report suggests how Sarah Palin would govern the US: by abusing her power to settle personal grudges," [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/oct/14/sarah-palin-troopergate-election], the author highlights that it is the "pettiness of troopergate that makes it so troubling."

"We're used to politicians who do favours for campaign contributors, who are too cozy with lobbyists and who resort to underhanded tactics against political foes. What we are not used to are politicians who use their offices to intervene in family quarrels and punish their relatives' personal enemies. For the last eight years, we've suffered under an administration that sees no difference between politics and governing. Palin is something arguably worse, a person who sees no difference between her private life and her public duties. Even Dick Cheney, after all, hasn't used his office to torment disfavoured former in-laws."

To my mind, this should be sounding very loud warning bells to any right-thinking American voters. If you start to add up all the little instances - the mob mentality at McCain rallies; the warm-up-man Sherriff in Florida who evoked Obama's middle name, blatantly canvassing politically while in uniform and on duty - supposedly illegal under the Hatch Act, though it looks like no action is going to be taken against him, and so on, it all starts to give you a sense of what American would be like under a McCain - and possibly Palin - presidency; An America that in Dan Benbow's detailed and well argued opinion -
[http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Guest_Editorial_Nasty_Brutish_
and_Short_John_McCain_s_America_6176.html], would, to use that famous epithet of prehistory, be "Nasty, Brutish and Short." In such cases the spirit of the law becomes just as an important as the letter of the law.

Labels: Alaska, Ethics, McCain, Palin, Troopergate, Vice President

Anyone who saw the film 'Eagle Eye' recently may well be considering throwing their cell phones into the nearest trash bin. And who could blame them. Little do most cinema goers realise how close to the truth that film is. I hope that it was more than just the Progressives in this country who were appalled at the revelation by a former AT & T employee, detailing a secret room (Room 641A pictured above), where all phone and internet data from both their own customers, and other company's who used the AT & T system, were being fed straight to the government. Talk about "Your World Delivered". Yeah - straight to the NSA! My suggestion, apart from writing to your Congressman, is to switch to Qwest - a company that refused to cooperate with the government's eavesdropping program. I don't think people here yet realise just how much power they have over these big corporations, by simply refusing to buy their products until they mend their ways. I still do not understand why the Democrats passed the bill giving amnesty to the phone companies over this. It has to be one of the most flagrant 'Big Brother' acts this government has perpetrated against the American people.

However, a new report out by the National Research Council has, according to an article today in the ScienceDaily -
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081007155102.htm - concludes that "All U.S. agencies with counterterrorism programs that collect or "mine" personal data -- such as phone, medical, and travel records or Web sites visited -- should be required to systematically evaluate the programs' effectiveness, lawfulness, and impacts on privacy." Co-chair William Perry, who wrote the report, recognises that there are legitimate concerns over terrorist attacks in the U.S. but "the threat does not justify government activities that violate the law, or fundamental changes in the level of privacy protection to which Americans are entitled". At last someone is looking into this!

The idea behind such surveillance programs is that through a variety of data mining methods and pattern-seeking analyses, suspicious activity that may be part of a terrorist conspiracy may be revealed. However, the report brings into question whether these methods are actually capable of revealing anything useful. One real possibility is that such analyses may "result in some "false positives" where innocent people are flagged as possible threats." Please don't make the mistake of thinking that if you were targeted by mistake that you would have recourse to prove your innocence - those rights are long gone. You would be whisked off to Guantanamo, or one of the secret government prisons in Europe, and that would be the last anyone would hear of you. You would be classed as an 'enemy combatant', tortured, and confined indefinately without legal recourse. Such is the current state of American Democracy - you know, the one we are so keen to bring to others?

The potential for abuse for this kind of program is manifest. Combined with the erosion of Constitutional rights & civil liberties by Bush's government, this kind of surveillance program, as well as the upsurge in private security firms like Blackwater, I don't think the American people realise just how close they are to a 'Big Brother' totalitarian regime. It is vitally important that, with the election so close, that the American people realise what is being done to them so that they can do something about it before it is too late. Certainly the legality of such programs needs to be closely scrutinised - no government should be able to demand private data from a private company without some sort of court order. At least Qwest was man enough to say no. No-one wants to see another 9/11, but if this is the price we have to pay to prevent it then the terrorists have truly won. I urge you read the whole article and take action to defend your democracy.

Copies of Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Program Assessment are available from the National Academies Press; tel. 202-334-3313 or 1-800-624-6242 or on the Internet at http://www.nap.edu.

Labels: counterterrorism, eavesdropping, government, legality, National Research Council, surveillance