Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

/in /by

There are two key takeaways I get from this comprehensive WaPo piece on why Gitmo will never close.

First, after just one Congressman–VA’s Frank Wolf–bitched about the plan to bring innocent Uighurs to the US, the plan was shut down (apparently unilaterally, by Rahm).

With chief of staff Rahm Emanuel at the helm of the meeting, senior national security officials agreed that eight of the 17 Uighurs being held at the off-shore facility would be resettled in the United States, most in Virginia. The Chinese Muslims would be brought in two at a time; the first two to come were chosen, in part, because they could speak reasonably good English and were likely to make a good impression given the intense media attention they probably would draw.

[snip]

“They were going to show up here, and we were going to announce it,” said one senior official, describing the swift, secretive operation that was designed by the administration to preempt any political outcry that could prevent the transfer.

But before the plane could leave Cuba, word leaked to Rep. Frank R. Wolf that Guantanamo detainees were on their way to his district in Northern Virginia. Wolf, a Republican, had not been briefed on the matter by the White House, despite his history of defending the Uighur community in his district, and was infuriated by the move.

He faxed a letter to the Obama administration and released it to the news media, declaring that the “American people cannot afford to simply take your word that these detainees, who were captured training in terrorist camps, are not a threat if released into our communities.”

The outrage from a single congressman was enough to spook the Obama administration, which quickly shelved its Uighur plan. Craig as well as a current senior official and a former senior official said they don’t know who stopped the transfer.

“They did not reconvene the principals,” Craig said. “They did not have a meeting in the Oval Office to discuss this and change the direction. It just happened: ‘We’re not doing it.’ ”

In fact, the transfer was stopped by Emanuel, according to officials familiar with Emanuel’s thinking. [my emphasis]

Sort of makes you wonder who leaked the information to that scary big bad Wolf, huh? All the more interesting given that Wolf was the guy who first asked OPR to do an inquiry into John Yoo’s torture memos; you’d think you could leverage that detail.

Also, note the interesting timing: The Uighurs just lost their latest attempt of an appeal to SCOTUS. So now they’re stuck so it’s okay to leak this information to the WaPo for a score-settling article?

The more important news, though, is that back in April 2009, Obama learned that there was real evidence on just dozens of the Gitmo detainees.

In late April, Obama heard some jarring news during a Situation Room meeting with the interagency task force reviewing the case of every detainee at Guantanamo.

The president asked Matthew G. Olsen, the Justice Department lawyer heading the task force, approximately how many Guantanamo detainees could be prosecuted, according to administration officials.

Probably fewer than 20, Olsen said.

[snip]

White House officials were in such disbelief that they asked Justice Department participants to write up a memo explaining exactly why they couldn’t bring more of the men to trial. In many cases, the intelligence gathered on the men was not court-worthy evidence.

Now, you’d think a lawyer would conclude from the fact that there was no “court-worthy evidence” on the majority of men held in Gitmo that something was wrong with the selection process of those in Gitmo. You’d think that would provide an opportunity to pivot and level with the American people about what really went into the collection of a bunch of men turned over for bounty. You’d think that the President would have dealt with the underlying issue: that we had invented excuses to hold many of the men in Gitmo, or tortured excuses out of the others.

But instead, Obama decided to champion indefinite detention.

Indefinite detention of these men against whom we didn’t–and in most cases, still don’t–have court-worthy evidence.

Read the whole article. It describes how fear and Rahm’s bureaucratic maneuvering led the Administration to completely cave on one of their earliest promises.

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    • prostratedragon says:

      Gee I don’t know, that Peter Principle concerns incompetence unsullied by intention …

  2. frankiet1 says:

    “But instead, Obama decided to champion indefinite detention.”

    One seriously ought to wonder if the Bushies had something real bad on Obama. Or that Obama craves unfettered power so much that he decided to go the lawless way, just for the hell of asserting more executive power. How else can one explain his pig-headed insistence in re-enforcing Bush’s blunders instead of coming up clean with the American people?

    And to think that I thought I’d never get disappointed like I was with Carter…what was I thinking?

    • tjbs says:

      The bush crime family ,through rove Diebold machinery, was NOT going to allow the remote possibility that there would be any Presidential investigation into their Torture/ Murder/ Treason thus another actor like reagan, pretending to be President, was “elected’ from a nowhere, nothing background.

      This is the same bush MO as clarence the clown, acting like a Supreme Court judge, that they foisted on us before.

    • eCAHNomics says:

      My hypothesis on O is that he’s a sociopath, who both enjoys torturing, slaughtering (thinking of his vast expansion of civilian killing drone attacks), and also enjoys watching his voting public supporters twist & turn.

    • coloradoblue says:

      And the (Obama) administration immediately caved.

      Gee, usually there’s a bit of theatre before they cave.

      • DWBartoo says:

        Well, it IS a song and dance, coloradoblue

        “Leadership” and “gravitas” dominating the world and time … enough …

        The Big “O” and the Brightest and the Best, the Astutes, aka the PTB, happily brought to all good and polite little “consumers” by the MOTU for all our sentient pleasures.

        Ass toots, actually …

        DW

    • PJEvans says:

      Don’t forget he kept a lot of the DoD and DoJ people who were appointed by Cheney Bush. He’s been getting ‘advice’ from the same people who created the mess.

  3. bobschacht says:

    In many cases, the intelligence gathered on the men was not court-worthy evidence.

    Now, you’d think a lawyer would conclude from the fact that there was no “court-worthy evidence” on the majority of men held in Gitmo that something was wrong with the selection process of those in Gitmo.

    While I think you are right about a great number of the cases, a lawyer might also conclude that the evidence they have is not court-worthy because it was obtained either by torturing the detainee, or torturing someone else. Which is not at all the same thing. The evidence could be true and accurate, but inadmissible. And of course it could also be misleading and false, as well as inadmissible and incriminating.

    When one tries this kind of bargain with the Devil, there is a cumulative tendency that eventually results in unmanageability. Sooner or later, those awkward outcomes that you were trying to avoid generate consequences that become bigger and bigger, until finally the whole thing comes around and bites you on the ass. That will happen sooner or later to Obama; but how many people will suffer before the whole thing explodes?

    I’ve found that generally it is better to admit the mistake, and correct it, before it gets too big.

    Bob in AZ

    • emptywheel says:

      Hard to buy that, though.

      My point was, how did we collect these people? Most of them, still, were collected, and then later sent to Gitmo (the torture the guys in the field used was particularly bad, but it wasn’t much about collecting evidence, I don’t think). So, in other words, with the exception of a few people brought to Gitmo much later, we actually got them, then started collecting the evidence.

      Now, the evidence we eventually got MAY be true. But (again, for the most part) there’s absolutely no way of telling at this point, because the whole system is so corrupted.

      That said, I absolutely agree with your point about the errors snowballing. I think that’s what some of hte sources in this article believe, too.

      • rosalind says:

        “That said, I absolutely agree with your point about the errors snowballing.”

        last lines of the coen bros “burn after reading”:

        CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer?
        CIA Officer: I don’t know, sir.
        CIA Superior: I don’t fuckin’ know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.
        CIA Officer: Yes, sir.
        CIA Superior: I’m fucked if I know what we did.
        CIA Officer: Yes, sir, it’s, uh, hard to say
        CIA Superior: Jesus Fucking Christ.

        rinse. repeat.

      • bluewombat says:

        My point was, how did we collect these people?

        I assume that’s a rhetorical question; if not, Andy Worthington’s The Guantanamo Files answers it pretty well per workingclass’s post @ 36.

  4. powwow says:

    Also, note the interesting timing: The Uighurs just lost their latest attempt of an appeal to SCOTUS. So now they’re stuck so it’s okay to leak this information to the WaPo for a score-settling article?

    I read the first page of the Finn/Kornblut Post article, didn’t believe the account of how/why Attorney General Holder yanked the DOJ’s KSM indictment and excluded his national law-enforcement agency from further involvement in the case, and decided I didn’t need seven more pages of anonymous spin and speculation-as-reporting about Royal Court intrigues at this time.

    “At this time” being after Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Sotomayor wrote a letter to the file to try to excuse away their failure to act on the Uighur/Kiyemba III petition for cert. last Monday (which only needed their four votes to be heard). And also after I’d read the Uighur attorney’s subsequent recap and prediction of a bleak future to match the bleak past for all the remaining presidential inmates at Guantanamo Bay military prison, as a direct result of the failure of our highest court to act to enforce the separation of powers that’s central to our Constitutional system of government.

    Sabin Willett ought to know whereof he speaks, after the futile habeas corpus journey he’s made through our “independent” federal judiciary on behalf of his clients. These words register:

    Requiem for a Remedy

    On Monday I was thinking about the greatest enemy combatant of them all, whose last campaign, like ours, ended in April. […]

    […]

    Three years ago, Boumediene [authored by Kennedy] came down like a lion at the end of the term. Great, but short-lived, was the joy in our camp, for the D.C. Circuit soon outflanked its master. It out-hustled the High Court and picked its decision apart, skirmish by skirmish. […]

    […]

    Meanwhile, the government like an anxious privy counselor scurried to soothe the Nine, intoning, “The writ of habeas corpus is effective at Guantanamo Bay, the writ of habeas corpus is effective at Guantanamo Bay.” Maybe they believe it up there at the Supreme Court, but today the only thing actually effective at Guantanamo Bay is politics. Kiyemba decrees that when the courts finally declare a man a noncombatant, the Executive will dutifully carry out politics, domestic and international, including the politics it wanted to carry out in the first place. They can call this the Writ, but Posterity will not be fooled. The Writ cared not a whit for politics. It was stone to discretion, and it dragged the Executive kicking and screaming to compliance. That hasn’t happened. After Kiyemba it cannot happen. Judge Silberman was right about that, and the Department of Justice need no longer be coy about it.

    Not that too many — or should I say, any — men can hold a win in the D.C. Circuit these days. The narrow Article I idea of the precise military enemy identified in a war authorization has been broadened (in utterly unnecessary dictum) to the mythic (Bihani). Any combination of circumstances will be reshuffled to “condition” the probability (Adahi), candor compels at least one judge to admit that the real detention standard is, “He might be — you never know.” (Esmail). A district judge would be daft to essay what used to be her most sacred task — assessing witness credibility. She’ll either be trumped by a statistician (Adahi), or pronounced a gull for $4 bills (Esmail). In the rush to sweep the field of detainee cases, not even the honor of U.S. servicemen was safe. To kill off one case, the D.C. Circuit ruled that it is foreseeable that our troops will torture a prisoner (Rasul).

    (Call me a “Detainee lawyer” if you will, but I will denounce that last decision until the day I die.)

    In the end it wasn’t about enemies at all. For it was the Uighurs, of all people, upon whom the court house door at last was shut. […]

    I’m from Massachusetts. I’ve been a guest of the D.C. Circuit. As an outsider, it always seemed to me that the special culture of scholarship down there might also be the court’s Achilles’ heel. Every judge has a gold-plated resume, ran the law review and clerked for at least a middling deity. In such heady company, one might forget that judicial review is not about brilliant opinions. Remedy is the guts of the judicial power. The rest is book reports.

    […]

    No judge can order release in any place where his orders have effect. Whatever his view of the law of war, a reader of this blog must wince, a little, at the idea that the judicial power consists of being reassured by the jailer that the jailer will attend to his own unlawful act — at the idea that what controls a judicial remedy is not law, but the politics of Yemen, of Bermuda, of Obamacare, of the New Hampshire Primary.

    […]

    After Kiyemba, a man comes or goes by executive discretion, which is exactly where we were when this all began.

    […]

    The irony that governments understand is that as time passes, injustice grows more tolerable, not less. So why prosecute anyone now? Life imprisonment is available for the asking. […]

    Next month, [Uighurs] Hammad, Khalid, Sab’r, Abdulrazak, and apple-cheeked Abdulsabour will begin their tenth year as America’s prisoners: your prisoners, my prisoners. They were our prisoners for seven years because we were said to be looking for a Palau, and that was good enough then. They have been our prisoner for two more because they declined Palau, and that is good enough now.

    […]

    Four of our Uighur clients might have found freedom here in 2009 (and I rather think that if they had, once the shouting died down, the whole business of shuttering the prison would have become infinitely easier), but hysteria was whipped to a froth in the Old Dominion, and the President flinched. When they went to Bermuda, a zealot emailed to say that they and I would have blood on our hands. Two years later, their hands are only callused (they work construction). They buckle their helmets and ride their scooters on the South Road to Paget Parish. They send me texts. One lives with his wife and expects a child; the others dream of wives and children. Bermuda seems to have survived. Why aren’t we shamed by this?

    Their five old friends did not go to Camp Iguana to steal a march upon U.S. citizenship. We brought them. They asked not for asylum, but for freedom in the only place where the judicial power could grant it. Why that plea carried no urgency when there was no Palau, and why their choices should now be between prison and another deep blue sea has never been explained to their satisfaction, nor mine. I can parse the legal argument, but I’ve never understood the moral one.

    […]

    We Americans held U-boat drivers in York County, Virginia, Japanese sailors in Wisconsin. As for the Nazi officers at the Hearne Camp in Texas, when they were on work release harvesting cotton, they weren’t imprisoned at all. We held the enemy on our own soil in those days. In Texas, he worked the soil. Today, our soil fears men who never were our enemies at all.

    Can it really be that the frequenter-of-a-suspicious-guest-house is more fearsome than those POWs of yesterday, whom we held in camps all across America? That the Uighur is? What shall we say when the Guantanamo prisoner’s fifteenth year comes? His twenty-fifth? When a prisoner dies of old age, as Awal Gul did last February? […]

    While it was here, habeas might have helped us resolve these questions. Now that it is gone, only politics will. So I trudge the lane this gloomy April, of a melancholy disposition.

    […]

    How will Guantanamo end? Not with Eliot’s bang, nor even with his whimper. Our government seems determined that it shall not end at all.

    Sabin Willett

    April, 2011

  5. MadDog says:

    …Read the whole article. It describes how fear and Rahm’s bureaucratic maneuvering led the Administration to completely cave on one of their earliest promises.

    It also shows as clearly as ever that the only opinions that ever really matter within the Beltway are only those of the Beltway.

    Voters? The American public? We don’t matter.

    • MadDog says:

      And the article highlights:

      …Indeed, the failed effort to close Guantanamo was reflective of the aspects of Obama’s leadership style that continue to distress his liberal base — a willingness to allow room for compromise and a passivity that at times permits opponents to set the agenda…

      Passivity? Compromise? Or are those really instead Beltway words describing a spine with the flexibility of a wet noodle? A profile in cowardice?

      Change you can believe in almost imagine forget about.

  6. PeasantParty says:

    My imagination is reeling, which seems to be a constant since Bush, Jr. and Cheney entered office. Why do I keep thinking that the bulk of those people in Gitmo witnessed US War Crimes and that is the sole reason they are being imprisoned?

    Way back when Cindy Sheehan started her campaign to confront Bush I thought she was a little tilted to the wrong side of brainwaves. As time went on and I could see how the beltway and media treated her I started to see how brave she was and what truths were coming from her mouth. I have to tell you that if there is no Primary to Obama and this absurd Washington rule of our country, I will write in a Presidential candidate to go up against the man that ran on stopping these wars!

    It will be Cindy Sheehan! She had their number way back then and still to this day everything she said appears true! She is one of the many families that have paid the ultimate price for fake wars for oil and US global takeover.

    • coloradoblue says:

      I will write in a Presidential candidate to go up against the man that ran on stopping these wars!

      It will be Cindy Sheehan!

      Mine will be Bradley Manning.

      Can you imagine the MSM freakout if Manning got 100,000 votes?

  7. donbacon says:

    What a mess, but the U.S. has fixed it. There will be no new prisoners at Gitmo because the new policy is to take no prisoners. If you’re a suspect you’re dead, and the opposite is also true.

    KABUL, Afghanistan (March 18, 2011) – Afghan National Security and International Security Assistance Forces killed several suspected insurgents during a combined operation to detain a known insurgent leader in Nahr-e Saraj district, Helmand province, today.
    http://www.isaf.nato.int/article/isaf-releases/isaf-joint-command-evening-operational-update-march-18-2011-2.html

  8. donbacon says:

    AP News:
    They fed them well. The Pakistani tribesmen slaughtered a sheep in honor of their guests, Arabs and Chinese Muslims famished from fleeing US bombing in the Afghan mountains. But their hosts had ulterior motives: to sell them to the Americans, said the men who are now prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Bounties ranged from $3,000 to $25,000, the detainees testified during military tribunals, according to transcripts the US government gave The Associated Press to comply with a Freedom of Information lawsuit. A former CIA intelligence officer who helped lead the search for Osama bin Laden told AP the accounts sounded legitimate because US allies regularly got money to help catch Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. Gary Schroen said he took a suitcase of $3 million in cash into Afghanistan to help supply and win over warlords.

  10. Sharkbabe says:

    When I look at Obama anymore, I see literally nothing – air.

    U.S. Presidents are puppet shills of the MIC/bank thugocracy. Though I must say Obama’s so fucking lazy he’s barely even bothering to phone it in anymore.

  12. JaneaneTheAcerbicGoblin says:

    Rahm, the incompetence that keeps on giving. For a guy with a “tough guy” reputation, he folds like a chair on the Titanic every time some heat comes down from Republicans. Nothing but hot air and cowardice.

  13. scribe says:

    Cowardice and looking forward not back. And sticking a shiv into Rahm.

    That shiv’s a bow to the Real Democrats Barry and Rahm have spent the entire term bitchslapping: “See! It was the evil Rahm you rightly hate so much! All his fault! He’s gone, gone, gone. So, give us another term and we’ll let Obama be Obama and all will be sunshine and light in the world.”

    If, OTOH, Barry had gone about making his narrative by making clear the Cheney/Bush junta’s principals were, in fact, exposed to prosecution for their crimes, they could not have constructed their counternarrative. The immediate rejoinder would have been “they’re covering up for their own crimes, which we are investigating”. But the minute it became clear – when they let the statute run on the warrantless wiretapping in Feb.-March 09 – they would not be prosecuting the criminals, they gave them free rein. Indeed, the signs were present the week of the election, when Obama told Reid it was OK to let Lieberman keep his chairman’s seat despite Lieberman campaigning for McSame and joining in that campaign’s vile personal/racial attacks on Obama. But the wiretapping statute running made it clear to the Beltway and the announcment “looking forward not back” was merely something for the dense and stupid to her so they’d finally get it.

    Dipshits.

  14. hackworth1 says:

    From wiki:

    Tim’s father, Peter F. Geithner, was the director of the Asia program at the Ford Foundation in New York in the 1990s. During the early 1980s, Peter Geithner oversaw the Ford Foundation’s microfinance programs in Indonesia being developed by Ann Dunham Soetoro, President Barack Obama’s mother, and they met in person at least once. Geithner’s maternal grandfather, Charles F. Moore, was an adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and served as Vice President of Public Relations from 1952-1964 for Ford Motor Company.[11]

    Tim Geithner worked for Kissinger Associates in Washington for three years and then joined the International Affairs division of the U.S. Treasury Department in 1988.

    When did Barry O get his Kissinger chops? When was Barry Obama a Kissinger protege?

    • donbacon says:

      FF/CIA
      The former Binghamton University professor of sociology, James Petras, and other critics accuse the Foundation of being a front organization for the CIA. Petras names the exchange of high-ranking personnel between the CIA and the Foundation, Ford Foundation’s big donations to the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom, the former Foundation president Richard Bissell’s relationship with DCI Allen Dulles and involvement with the Marshall Plan during the 1950s, among other things. According to Petras, the Ford Foundation funds “anti-leftist human rights groups which focus on attacking human rights violations of U.S. adversaries”.

      USAID/CIA
      Prior to joining The Ford Foundation, Mr. Geithner served with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Washington, D.C.
      http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2009/02/tim-geithners-dad-barack-obamas-mom-and.html

      • earlofhuntingdon says:

        That would fit with Geithner’s MSFS from Georgetown. The CIA has considered Central Africa to be its territory ever since it and the Belgians took out Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. Gotta have them gold and minerals. Which makes for a cozy fit as Treasury ignores the “intelligence” and organized crime industries’ use of global finance to launder funds from their provenance and to use them for purposes at least as ugly as funding “revolutionaries” in Nicaragua.

    • donbacon says:

      from Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramwell:
      Ford Foundation archives reveal a raft of joint Foundation-CIA projects. The most prominent of these CIA fronts are the Eastern European Fund, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and International Rescue Committee (where William van den Heuvel, father of Nation editor and publisher Katrina van den Heuvel, was a long time board member). The Ford Foundation has also been the primary funder of two secret elite planning groups, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
      http://open.salon.com/blog/stuartbramhall/2011/04/13/the_ford_foundation_and_the_cia

  15. hackworth1 says:

    The USA gumbint is run by a den of incestuous and murderous thieves. There is no change that can be believed in.

  16. rmwarnick says:

    The Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy is matched only by the Obama administration’s secrecy. Obama’s job may be harder, since he’s hiding not only his own mistakes but Bush’s mistakes as well. They probably tell themselves it’s for the good of the country but we know it’s because they can’t stand criticism.

  17. EternalVigilance says:

    fear and Rahm’s bureaucratic maneuvering led the Administration to completely cave

    Do you have any evidence at all that would support your hope that Obama’s “promises” were ever anything more than a seducer’s empty lie?

  18. lysias says:

    Wolf represents a district in Northern Virginia with a lot of federal employees, including military folks and people in the CIA.

  19. workingclass says:

    Gitmo will close when the empire collapses which could be much sooner than we think. I never hear speculation about what post imperial America will look like. I guess Americans just cant imagine it.

    I’m guessing Gitmo will be abandoned and later returned to Cuba as part a new treaty.

    Cheney needed to imprison some brown men from Afghanistan so he could say he captured some terrorists. I don’t think there is much more to it.

    • bluewombat says:

      Cheney needed to imprison some brown men from Afghanistan so he could say he captured some terrorists. I don’t think there is much more to it.

      Hit the nail right on the head, yes we did.

    • coloradoblue says:

      I never hear speculation about what post imperial America will look like. I guess Americans just cant imagine it.

      There are some people who talk about what the post imperium US will look like. Many are on the far right, and, from what little I know about them their answer is ‘guns, god and gold’.

      But take a look at James Howard Kunstler (you’ll have to google, the link didn’t take).

      He’s a bit out there, even for a pessimist like me. But basically he is saying we will have to have a return to small and mid-sized self-sufficient societies.

      I even think we are seeing the beginnings of this now.

      • DWBartoo says:

        Most “long-range” views seem to imagine that things will just run out of steam, (perhaps in the containment “vessels”?) … that America will be permitted to retire to a quiet, rootin’, tootin’, shoot-’em-up ‘cuz Jaysus wants ya to be rich Galtian paradise where quick, hard wits and a quicker trigger-finger will win the day, fair maid and all … or else the techno view has us all jumpin’ on spacecraft to venture boldly forth … and so on.

        Before America reachs any idyllic state of sustainable, self-sufficient community, if we, the people of America, do not choose deliberately AND reasonably, to go “there” soon … we, us, you and I and everybody else in America might have to imagine rebuilding “society” from a bombed out ruination.

        The odds that the rest of the world’s people, remembering that such a “rest” amounts to billions of human beings, will long continue to put up with the destructive and selfish behavior of a few hundred million relatively comfortable “consumers” who BELIEVE that they are “different” from everybody else, even “exceptionally” so, to the extent of declaring “endless war” on a “battlefield” that is “everywhere” … is a wee bit of a “long-shot”; even if we use only “history”, as a guide … such “odds” are worth plugging in to the imagination “equation”, are they not?

        We, Americans, may well be our own worst enemy.

        However, if we cannot or will not STOP “doing what we’re doing”, then intuition cannot help but suggest that others, lots of others will, eventually, have to consider stopping us.

        Most “scenarios” rosey or otherwise seem premised on the belief or conclusion that NOTHING, even the destruction of the capacity of planet Earth to support human life, will alter America’s march to total world domination (just as tawdry, destructive and demeaning myths have long dominated the manifestations of such “humanity”, as to be found in “justice”, or “truth”, or “equality” as America’s “citizens” may claim as her dear sweet own …)

        Perhaps the most mind-numbing conceit of the American mindset is its sanquine assumption that NOTHING will change until America permits or allows it, coloradoblue.

        DW

      • workingclass says:

        Thanks. I forgot about Kunstler.

        http://www.kunstler.com/index.php

        The survivors of his “long emergency” emerge as agrarians. Heavy emphasis on peak oil and the end of cheap energy. Kunstler is a social critic and understands the economy better than most. He’s fun to read. I recommend him.

  20. bluewombat says:

    This reminds me of Obama’s nomination of Dawn Johnsen to OLC. He makes the flimsiest effort to do what his supporters expect, then as soon as someone says “Boo,” he says “Never mind.” Why, it’s almost enough to make you think he never intended to do it in the first place.

  22. JohnLopresti says:

    powwow has linked to a balkinization article concerning the denial of cert in re Kiyemba et al (10-775, April 18, 2011); the balkinization piece was written April 18, 2011 by Hafetz. Hafetz discusses the discoordination between Scotus and the court of appeals for DC (CADC), the venue congress vested as the sole arbitor of habeas cases from gtmo. Hafetz maintains that the conservatives on CADC deliberately are avoiding implementing the work Scotus did in the Boumediene case.

    Further, Grassley has announced opposition to an Obama administration nominee to CADC, Halligan based on her favoring tight laws on firearms.

    As a side note, Obama and company have forwarded a new nomination to CADC, Beckwith. I can picture the grilling she might endure in the senate judiciary committee from Republicans with regard to the Heller case; but I think that matter mostly a Republican red herring.

    Also in the Hafetz article at balkinization is the information Palau has withdrawn further asylum offers.

    powwow additionally has linked to the liberal bloc*s (minus [recused?] Kagan) 2 pp memo accompanying the denial of cert to Kiyemba this past week. The liberals assert the government continues to look for alternative homes in other nations for the handful of Uighurs at gtmo. One evasion or imprecision I see in the liberal bloc*s blurb is its citing of CADC*s Rogers* litany of instances of some Uighurs having rejected prior offers of asylum.

    But mostly I see the inaction on the gtmo issue as a political survival tactic, even though it is rooted in the Republican administration*s denaturing of the ethic of historic compliance with the Geneva accords on human rights. I still hear the echo of Rice*s good nations dont torture tour of Europe; her contribution to the Bush legacy. State dept will keep those speeches on the official website as an impartial record.

  23. Jeff Kaye says:

    Gitmo will close when the U.S. judiciary finally delivers sentence in the case of Ali Mohamed, or when an explanation is tendered as to why informer/plant Emad Salem was pulled and the original plan stopped by the FBI to place fake explosives in the bomb that first exploded at the World Trade Center in 1993 (see this NYT story on that latter fact)… that is, not while this government still holds power.

    They will not let the whole truth about Guantanamo come out, a truth that is only halfway known at this point. Perhaps the new Wikileaks release due out any day now (see this UK Telegraph story) will help us apprehend this truth, but I’ve already made the point numerous times. Guantanamo was a huge laboratory and recruiting station for the government. The studies were numerous, and the black ops they needed recruits for were and are numerous, too. Then, there is its propaganda value, which has been exploited by Cheney and the right to this very day.

    Just what were those injections for, as reported in the ICRC report on the black site prisons and torture? Were they the same as the ubiquitous reports of injections at Guantanamo? Why have so many said they were offered freedom and release from torture if only they would “cooperate,” or even more specifically, turn informer? For whom? For what plan?

    After Salem turned informant, when he got too humanitarian, he was called off. The next thing you know, the first World Trade Center bombing went off. So who is in charge? The same people who don’t want Guantanamo to close, ever… who want military commissions, unfettered domestic surveillance, fusion centers, etc. It’s not hard to guess who that is. Cui bono?