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Obama's Czars are another way the Executive branch is cir venting the separation of power. He is taking on traditionally legislative responsibilities and has gotten a free pass from his cohorts in the House/Senate.
Yeah, but the founding fathers carefully crafted a system of govt to prevent this sort of abuse of power, even predicting it would come. The only hope now to preserve what the created is for one of the other two branches of govt to intervene - in this case, the Supreme Court. But unfortunately, the SC seems to lean towards abuse of power for the president right now. At least when the president is someone they agree with. So maybe the 4 conservatives will vote this down while Obama is in office.
The problem with subverting the balance of power carefully laid out is that once it is subverted, once the groundwork has been laid for unchecked power, that means someone you DON'T agree with could have that power, too. People who supported Bush didn't seem to get that, nor do people who support Obama. Which is why we need impartial judges to NOT do like this, to protect our democracy from ourselves.
Obama's Czars are another way the Executive branch is cir venting the separation of power. He is taking on traditionally legislative responsibilities and has gotten a free pass from his cohorts in the House/Senate.
Biggest dissapointment by far. Whatever, them all. Gonna learn some Euro languages and go kick it with Slomo.
So did his predecessors. This Czar thing isn't the novelty you're making it out to be CC.
Is it just me or when I hear them talking about Obama's "Czars"...I think of Mother Russia (and Communism and Socialism, etc)? Is that a part of the smear campaign or does Obama really call his people Czars? If the latter, that's real ing dumb.
Czar=Kaiser=Caesar
It would be especially dumb since the only connection between the czars and communism is that it was the russian communists who got rid of the russian czars.Is it just me or when I hear them talking about Obama's "Czars"...I think of Mother Russia (and Communism and Socialism, etc)? Is that a part of the smear campaign or does Obama really call his people Czars? If the latter, that's real ing dumb.
No ? I forgot about the whole 1917 thing. I've been off my game lately. But yea, I still think czar has a negative connotation to it, I don't think most people think it's a warm word that we can put our trust in.
What an ignorant interpretation. Do I need to walk you thorough it?Republican administration's war crimes are being covered up and Republican Cobra says "See, this is bull !!"
Obama promised transparency in his administration.
We clearly see he is a liar.
Liberals believed he would open the tome of secrecy and be up front and open.
Obama has been as secretive, or more so than the last administration.
Therefore... I'm saying it should be crystal clear that Obama is a fake. A liar. Cannot be trusted.
one more thing.
I am not a republican.
Would you rather have lip service, or honesty?
Transparency?
The way he keeps getting owned at the few press conferences he gives he may never give another one...
tell us. how did he get owned?Transparency?
The way he keeps getting owned at the few press conferences he gives he may never give another one...
one small example from today
so, what does it say in the entire cms study, cowboy?
Unfortunately that vid actually ends as he really starts stuttering...he just spent all that time trying to convince them costs were going down and got confronted with the fact that they weren't...and that was mainstream news (ABC), not Fox....It was pure ownage.
can you be less specific?
Neither. I'd rather have someone who actually stopped these abuses. Whether one promises to keep them, or whether one promises to stop them but does not, makes no difference to me.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/09/hbc-90007607State Secrecy and Official Criminality
By Scott Horton
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals split down the middle in finding (PDF) that the Justice Department was en led to halt a civil lawsuit between private parties because of the threat that the suit would expose state secrets. By the margin of a single vote, it reversed the decision of a panel of the same court (PDF) holding that the doctrine could only be applied to individual pieces of evidence, not to entire lawsuits.
The case, Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, involved claims by an individual that he was seized and then tortured in a proxy arrangement directed by the CIA. Jeppesen Dataplan was directly involved, restraining and transporting the victims with knowledge that they would be tortured; that knowledge is exhibited, for example, in briefings to the company’s employees. These facts were established beyond any reasonable doubt without the need to turn to classified information.
Indeed, one of the most respected courts in the English-speaking world—the Court of Appeal in London–had already viewed the formidable evidence and demanded a criminal investigation, now pending. The British court concluded, just as the Ninth Circuit was legally obligated to do, that state-secrecy claims could not be used to block discovery of evidence of crimes. Under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which adopts the position that the U.S. Justice Department took in 1946, the crime of disappearance connected to torture is a crime against humanity, with no statute of limitations and no defense of superior orders applicable.
The Holder Justice Department would have us believe that it is protecting state secrets essential to our security. That posture is risible, and half of the court saw through it. The dilemma faced by the Justice Department was rather that evidence presented in the suit would likely be used in the future (not in the United States, obviously) to prosecute those who participated in the extraordinary renditions process.
Twenty-three U.S. agents have already been convicted for their role in a rendition in Milan. Prosecutors in Spain have issued arrest warrants for a further 13 U.S. agents involved in a botched rendition case that touched on Spanish soil. Prosecutors in Germany have opened a criminal investigation into the use of Ramstein AFB in connection with torture and illegal kidnappings. Prosecutors in Poland are pursuing a similar matter. And Prime Minister David Cameron was recently forced to brief President Obama on his decision to direct a formal inquiry which could lead to prosecutions tied directly to the subject matter of the Mohamed case. This is the remarkable background to the case decided by the Ninth Circuit, and remarkably not a single word about this appears anywhere in the opinion—or even in most of the press accounts about it.
Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have called the Department on its acts of cons utional treachery. From the West Coast:
The decision to short-circuit the trial process is more than a misreading of the law; it’s an egregious miscarriage of justice. That’s obvious from a perusal of the plaintiffs’ complaint. One said that while he was imprisoned in Egypt, electrodes were attached to his earlobes, nipples and genitals. A second, held in Morocco, said he was beaten, denied food and threatened with sexual torture and castration. A third claimed that his Moroccan captors broke his bones and cut him with a scalpel all over his body, and poured hot, stinging liquid into his open wounds.From New York:
The state secrets doctrine is so blinding and powerful that it should be invoked only when the most grave national security matters are at stake — nuclear weapons details, for example, or the iden y of covert agents. It should not be used to defend against allegations that if true, as the dissenting judges wrote, would be “gross violations of the norms of international law.” All too often in the past, the judges pointed out, secrecy privileges have been used to avoid embarrassing the government, not to protect real secrets. In this case, the embarrassment and the shame to America’s reputation are already too well known.The majority opinion is so thoroughly unconvincing that the court makes a pathetic plea to other branches of the government to do what is properly its function: fixing the claims of torture victims and awarding them damages.
By signing the Convention Against Torture, the United States made an unequivocal commitment to the international community to compensate those who are tortured by its agents. The Ninth Circuit has made a liar out of Uncle Sam and a mockery of its duty to uphold the law proscribing torture.
The DOJ is considering hiding targeted killings of Americans behind it too:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/wo...laki.html?_r=1Nevertheless, many in the administration are reluctant to air in court the case that Mr. Awlaki is waging war against the United States, in part because they do not want to concede that judicial review is appropriate for executive branch decisions on targeted killings.
Instead, they are seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed without discussing its merits. For example, officials say, the brief is virtually certain to argue that Mr. Awlaki’s father has no legal standing to file a lawsuit on behalf of his son.
To strengthen the case, they are considering at least two other potential arguments, each with a downside.
The first would involve asking the judge to dismiss the case because it could reveal classified information. Under the “state secrets doctrine,” the government can seek to withhold evidence or block lawsuits related to national security.
So, let's get this straight.
Obama claims the right to assassinate American citizens, rather than bring them to court. And when people DO try to bring it to court, he'll use "state secrets" to shut it down.
Are we still living in America? I mean, I'm not being hyperbolic here. This is some tyrannical/dictatorial here.
Definitely some "through the looking-glass" right thurr. In yesterday's article Greenwald compared Obama -- very appropriately I thought -- to the Queen of Hearts.
http://harpers.org/blog/2012/12/euro...es-as-torture/In a landmark decision, Europe’s highest court has concluded that techniques used routinely by the Bush-era CIA in connection with its extraordinary-renditions program cons ute torture. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, sitting in Strasbourg, awarded damages to a German greengrocer of Lebanese extraction, Khalid El-Masri. The Court also chided the governments involved for failing to pursue criminal accountability for those responsible for El-Masri’s abduction and torture. El-Masri had been mistaken for a similarly named terrorist operative while he was on a trip in December 2003 to Macedonia. He was seized by Macedonian authorities, acting in close coordination with the United States, and was turned over to the CIA. After being flown in a chartered “torture taxi” to Afghanistan, he was held in the CIA’s notorious “Salt Pit” prison north of Kabul. Even after the mistaken identification was confirmed, the CIA continued to hold El-Masri for six weeks, ignoring instructions from the White House to release him. After a further intervention from Condoleezza Rice, El-Masri was granted his release and abandoned on a hilltop in Albania, five months after he was detained.
The Court focused its attention on El-Masri’s treatment in the hands of a CIA extraction team:
[T]wo people violently pulled his arms back . . . he was beaten severely from all sides. His clothes were sliced from his body with scissors or a knife. His underwear was forcibly removed. He was thrown to the floor, his hands were pulled back and a boot was placed on his back. He then felt a firm object being forced into his anus . . . a suppository was forcibly administered. He was then pulled from the floor and dragged to a corner of the room, where his feet were tied together. His blindfold was removed. A flash went off and temporarily blinded him. When he recovered his sight, he saw seven or eight men dressed in black and wearing black ski masks. One of the men placed him in a nappy. He was then dressed in a dark blue short-sleeved tracksuit. A bag was placed over his head and a belt was put on him with chains attached to his wrists and ankles. The men put earmuffs and eye pads on him and blindfolded and hooded him. They bent him over, forcing his head down, and quickly marched him to a waiting aircraft, with the shackles cutting into his ankles. . . . He had difficulty breathing because of the bag that covered his head. Once inside the aircraft, he was thrown to the floor face down and his legs and arms were spread-eagled and secured to the sides of the aircraft.As the court noted, these procedures were part of a standard protocol used by the CIA at the time, described in numerous reports relating to the extraordinary-renditions process and covered by a secret CIA memorandum (PDF) dated December 30, 2004. The court found that El-Masri had been tortured and sodomized as a result of these procedures. Although the Obama Administration banned torture and ended the extraordinary-renditions program under an Executive Order issued the second day of Obama’s presidency, it remains unclear whether the extraction protocol is still in effect. In one rendition carried out by the Holder Justice Department in April 2009, similar procedures were used on a defendant in a petty corruption case, though no suppository was applied. The Justice Department vigorously defended the extraction protocol in that case and insisted that the procedures it authorized did not cons ute torture.
The El-Masri ruling is a watershed event principally because it reflects the first high-profile, binding judicial determination that the CIA used torture practices in connection with its renditions program. Thus far, litigation of the issue in the United States has failed as federal courts — deferring to the executive’s attempts to avoid scrutiny of well-do ented and severe human rights abuses by invoking secrecy — have generally refused to allow cases to proceed to trial. In the El-Masri case, the government mounted similar defenses based on national-security concerns and secrecy, but the Court refused to prioritize these over well-do ented claims of torture. El-Masri’s evidence had been corroborated by a German criminal investigation, and the Court also found that internal U.S. probes, as well as investigations conducted by human rights organizations, the European Parliament, and the Council of Europe provided him substantial support. The Court’s decision required careful cognizance of leaked classified U.S.-government do ents, and of U.S. diplomatic cables that affirmed American conniving aimed at blocking criminal probes into the El-Masri case.
Jim Goldston, a former U.S. federal prosecutor who represented El-Masri before the Court, told me that the decision should come as a “wake-up call to the Obama Administration and to the American courts, showing that it is possible to investigate torture and similar abuses connected with the war on terror even while it is underway.”
The ruling establishes that governments who collaborated with the CIA, even while they weren’t themselves directly participating in the rendition, are nevertheless liable for torture and attendant crimes. In this regard, it is likely to be studied closely in Poland, where a prosecution has been opened targeting Polish intelligence officials who supported the CIA’s black site there.
During a call from Condoleezza Rice to German chancellor Angela Merkel, the United States acknowledged its mistake in seizing El-Masri. However, it has never offered him an apology, insisting in response to his complaints that the torture inflicted on him was a state secret. Nor has the United States offered El-Masri compensation or access to rehabilitation, even though it is obligated to do so under the Convention Against Torture.
The decision also focuses attention on the fact that the perpetrators of El-Masri’s torture have not been held to account under criminal law. According to an investigation run by the Associated Press, CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky played a key role in El-Masri’s abusive treatment, ignoring his protests because her “gut told her” he was a terrorist. Bikowsky was quickly promoted following the El-Masri incident, and she now occupies a senior counterterrorism post, from which she exercises great influence on sensitive operations.
In view of Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement of official impunity for torture-related crimes involving CIA agents during the war on terror, the Court’s judgment boils down to this question: What nation will step up to the plate, conduct a proper investigation, and bring charges? It points a finger toward two loyal U.S. allies: Germany and Macedonia. Macedonia was complicit with the CIA, while Germany buckled to U.S. diplomatic pressure and stopped its criminal probe. The Court makes clear that criminal investigation and prosecution must now follow.
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