Yet Leon rejected the administration's argument that five Algerian nationals formerly resident in Bosnia are enemy combatants and ordered their release "forthwith".

The text of his ruling is here (PDF).

It's the first time that a federal court has investigated the merits of a Bush administration claim that it possesses sufficient evidence to continue detaining a prisoner as an enemy combatant. Thus there's great significance in the fact that the administration's evidence has finally been put to the test and, right off the bat, found to be lacking. In fact, the evidence upon which these prisoners were held for the last 7 years, and treated horrifically, was ridiculously weak. Just like the 'evidence' against so many of the remaining prisoners at Gitmo, it depends upon hearsay or unverified/unverifiable allegations of a vague nature from unnamed or shadowy figures.

“The decision by Judge Leon lays bare the scandalous basis on which Guantánamo has been based — slim evidence of dubious quality,” said Zachary Katznelson, legal director at Reprieve, a British legal group that represents many of the detainees.

Leon found the government's case to be extremely flimsy, based as it was upon one undocumented allegation by a single unnamed source.

Judge Leon said that the Justice Department and intelligence agencies had relied solely on a classified document from an unnamed source, which he found was not persuasive on the government’s claim that the five had planned to travel to Afghanistan to join in hostile actions against the United States and allied forces. That secret document, the judge said, was too “thin a reed” on which to base detention.

Their detention has been so outrageously without merit that, very unusually, the judge urged the Justice Department lawyers not to appeal his ruling. The prisoners had waited seven years "for our legal system to give them an answer", Leon argued, and it wouldn't be useful to prolong the injustice with a pointless appeal. He found that a sixth prisoner was being held on the basis of sufficient evidence, and Leon suggested that the DoJ had plenty of opportunity to contest the broader legal issues in the appeal of his continued detention without delaying the release of the other five prisoners any longer.

In June the Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling about these prisoners in Boumediene v. Bush, which upheld their right to challenge the basis for their detention in federal court. It was an unusually strong ruling against the Bush administration's policies of open-ended detention. What was most remarkable was the Supremes' intervention into the appellate process in order to expedite the habeas review it was ordering for the Guantanamo prisoners. The concurrence written by Justice Souter in particular argued that the prisoners had been held for far too long without habeas review to allow the government to continue to drag things out through the appeals court. The government's allegations against Boumediene and the other prisoners in that case were on the face of pretty ridiculous on their face, though no court had yet examined them. Hence Judge Leon's ruling today that the government has no credible basis for imprisoning these men was the predictable outcome of the SCOTUS ruling.

Let's not forget that these prisoners had already been arrested, investigated, and ordered freed by the Bosnian Supreme Court before the US, ignoring that finding, demanded custody of the Algerians. Like a number of other prisoners held at Tuzla air base in Bosnia after the September 11 attacks, they were tortured while in US custody. At a minimum, they were treated to the sensory deprivation that became a standard part of the "exploitation" of prisoners at Guantanamo, Bagram, and elsewhere. As the European Parliament report (PDF) by Dick Marty stated:

While still on Bosnian soil, the six men were kept shackled in painful positions. They were forced to wear goggles to prevent them from seeing, headphone-like covers over their ears to make it impossible for them to hear, and face masks making it impossible to be understood and very difficult to breathe. They were subsequently transported to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.

It should be stressed that Judge Leon's ruling frees the men and urges the US to arrange for their return to Bosnia, but does nothing to redress the torture inflicted on them during seven years of captivity.

A similar pair of rulings in June and October regarding the Uighur prisoners at Gitmo came to a similar result as the rulings on the Bosnians. In June the DC Court of Appeals rejected sarcastically the Bush administration's claims about the Uighur prisoners, mocking the government's reliance upon hearsay and unvetted evidence at Combatant Status Review Tribunals, as well as its claims of secrecy in withholding evidence. The administration has to actually prove in court that the evidence supports the allegations.

Well, they thought about the difficulty of proving the nonsensical charges they were leveling against the Uighurs and decided to drop them instead. So in October, at a habeas review for the Uighurs in DC District Court, judge Ricardo Urbina ordered their immediate release. The government managed to get a stay of that order, but that could be reversed before the month is out.

Four cases in six months, each of them devastating to the Bush administration's pretense that it holds prisoners at Guantanamo based on overwhelming evidence of terrorist activities.

• Guantanamo
• Bosnia
• Uighurs
• Richard-Leon

The insurers do not however support a flat rate for both healthy and sick applicants - without which their apparent concession really is just another ploy coming out of the industry's bottomless bag of tricks.

What they're aiming for is a health insurance 'reform' bill that will allow them to continue to turn away high-risk applicants (in the future by the simple device of making such premiums unaffordable), while milking the healthier population by means of a new line of legally mandated insurance. The latter probably would include a substantial amount of junk insurance designed to give the appearance of health coverage but carrying minimal benefits. Insurers already do a tidy business in selling junk health insurance, but with legal mandates their profits in this sector could soar.

So this cynical announcement is emblematic of what is most wrong with our current health care system enterprise.

Let's face it, we don't have anything like a system in the US for delivering health care. We have a crazy patchwork of overlapping devices, none of which properly functions in itself or on its own. Even worse, at the core of this enterprise is a for-profit insurance industry that by design works at odds with the goal of providing health care. It exists to extract the maximum of money in exchange for the minimum of health care. The problem is not that the machine needs to be fine-tuned. The real problem is that it's a Rube Goldberg contraption.

This mess has grown and thrived because, regrettably, in the US we don't like to call a spade a spade. Or rather, the more severe a problem the more the traditional media and the DC political establishment refuse to acknowledge it. The evidence of elite denial is all around us.

We've just finished a campaign in which the Republicans nominated an absurdly and frighteningly ignorant vice-presidential candidate. Many voters figured that out pretty darn quickly. But how often did you see the political or media elite acknowledge publicly that Sarah Palin was a ridiculous nominee before voters had rejected her? After Election Day, sure, some put their fingers to the wind and decided it was safe to state the obvious. But until then, the important thing was to pretend that the selection of a patently unqualified candidate presented no problem any significance. She was packaged as a serious candidate, therefore the only thing to do was pretend she be taken seriously.

The same has occurred with every major problem the country has faced in recent years. The invasion of Iraq? There was transparently no need for it once weapons inspectors were admitted into Iraq. Anyway the evidence presented by the Bush administration simply didn't stack up. But how many establishment types dared to say the obvious? Much better just to get along by going along with the fantasy of seriousness being peddled.

The mortgage mess? For more than a dozen years it was clear to anybody acquainted with the housing market that house prices in many areas were inflating at ridiculous and unsustainable rates, and that lenders had thrown caution to the winds in pushing money at virtually anybody who inquired about buying the overvalued property, no matter their credit-worthiness. It was also clear that ARMs and other bizarre mortgage plans lenders pushed, along with a flood of unnecessary home equity loans, were going to create high default rates. When we first started to look at buying a house a decade ago, I recoiled in horror at the mortgage practices I saw. How many establishment types addressed this looming catastrophe until the house of cards actually began folding?

The meltdown of Wall Street financial institutions? That has been in the works since the 1980s when Depression-era regulations were swept aside, replaced by the 1920s ethos of anything-goes. Anybody willing to look candidly at what modern financial securities actually were predicated on could see that Wall Street's apparent success was built on nothing more than a pyramid scheme. Even insiders acknowledge shock at the willingness of just about everybody to pretend that the inherent flaws didn't so much as exist.

How often does Congress address well-known problems forthrightly, before they become urgent? What do you expect more from the traditional media, candor or timidity? A cynic might conclude that showing you're perfectly able to ignore looming disaster is a prerequisite to acquiring a position of prominence in politics or the traditional media in the US.

In any case, we can expect that nobody of influence is ever going to want to admit that the American health care 'system' is a broken and ridiculous contraption, or that adding any number of further levers, tensioning devices, mirrors, and spring-loaded squirrel ramps won't ever fix what is wrong with it. That would be revolutionary admission, after all, requiring some discussion of how a genuine health care system ought to be designed.

The establishment in the US is unwilling to concede that we have a health care carnival rather than a free market. There's no way that they're prepared to acknowledge that a health care 'system' dependent upon private insurance can never work properly because it's not designed to work. There can be no discussion of the plain fact that it's designed to extract the maximum of money in exchange for the minimum of health care.

It's a carnival, and the health insurance industry spokesman is the carnival barker. His job is to maintain the illusion that what we rubes need and want is an ideal health insurance package, and that he'll help us find it somewhere along that arcade if we just take his advice.

What we really need of course isn't in that arcade. It's universal health care, without the middlemen, without the con-artists.

But what it looks like we'll get from Congress, instead, is mandated con-artistry at semi-regulated rates of flim-flammery. Universal health insurance is not reform. It's an inoculation against actual reform. If that's what the 'reform' movement interjects this time around, it could be yet another 60 years before Americans finally get the universal health care that the rest of the developed world has long enjoyed.

• health-care-reform
• universal-health-care
• health-insurance

Oh, yes, and someone who was Vice President for Public Policy at Monsanto Corporation.

Yes, indeed, who better? Better, of course, meaning that you want the world made safe for Monsanto products.

Of course this may explain why so many people in bed with Monsanto have their names in the running for USDA head and other key food protection posts? People like the infamous Pennsylvania Ag Secretary Dennis Wolff and Tom Vilsack.

As Tom Philpott at the Gristmill said:

I don't think I'm a jaded enough observer of Washington's ways to figure it out. But here's what I know.

* The transition named its "team members" looking at energy and natural resources agencies, which includes USDA. The list includes Michael R. Taylor, a man who spent his career bouncing between the employ of GMO-seed giant Monsanto and Bill Clinton's FDA and USDA. Taylor is widely credited with ushering Monsanto's recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) through the FDA regulatory process and into the milk supply. He was particularly useful in the effort to prevent abstaining dairies from advertising their milk as rBGH-free.

In his post at GWU, Michael Taylor teaches "PubH 209: Policymaking at the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Health Policy"

And, well, who better to know than the man who was part of the Monsanto-FDA revolving door that got rBST approved. And yes, there is also a Clinton connection. Not surprising, since, says, CNN: "More than half of the people named so far to Obama's transition or staff posts have ties to former President Bill Clinton's administration."

That Monsanto-FDA revolving door was part of the Clinton administration apparatus.

Here is how Michael Taylor looks on his GW website.

Michael Taylor began his career at the Food and Drug Administration in 1976, as a staff attorney, and, after a decade in private law practice, returned to the FDA in 1991 as Deputy Commissioner for Policy. Following his departure from the FDA in 1994, Professor Taylor served as Administrator of the Food Safety and Inspection Services at the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Vice President for Public Policy at Monsanto Corp.; and Senior Fellow at Resources for the Future, where he focused on food safety as a global health concern and the impact of U.S. agricultural, trade, and development policies on poverty and hunger reduction in Africa.

Since joining SPHHS in 2007, Professor Taylor has promoted efforts to strengthen the FDA, especially by enhancing the agency's authority, resources and management structure. "No federal agency touches as many lives as intimately as the FDA, or works on a wider range of challenging public health policy issues," says Mr. Taylor. "The goal of my research and teaching is to bring these issues to life and equip students with a framework for understanding and analyzing them."

In recent years, he has also directed his longstanding interest in food systems and problems of food security to agriculture-led economic growth in rural Africa. He remains a Senior Fellow with the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa, where he works with senior U.S. and African leaders to identify policies and programs to support the continent's own efforts to build sustainable solutions to its rural poverty and hunger challenges.

Education
Bachelor of Arts (Political science), Davidson College, 1971
Juris Doctor, University of Virginia, 1976

Teaching: PubH 209: Policymaking at the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Health Policy

Research
Professor Taylor's research focuses on the policy, resource, and institutional issues that affect the ability of public health agencies to carry out their missions, with a particular emphasis on the FDA, the CDC and the ways in which federal, state, and local public health agencies interact. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, he explores opportunities to improve the nation's food safety information infrastructure, strengthen state and local roles in food safety, and foster risk-based resource allocation to better prevent foodborne illness.

Community Service
Professor Taylor chairs the Steering Committee of the Food Safety Research Consortium, a collaboration among university and think tank partners to reduce the risk of foodborne illness in the United States. He is also a member of the National Academy of Science's Committee on Environmental Decision-Making Under Uncertainty and serves on the board of the Alliance to End Hunger. In 2002, Professor Taylor earned the FDA's Distinguished Alumni Award.

And then there is the Michael Taylor you find on Political Friendster, where the connections among Taylor, Monsanto, and the unseemly side of the Clintons run deep.

Here are some snippets from the Political Friendster Michael Taylor page.

Attorney for Monsanto who rewrote the "regulations" for Genetically Modified foods.

He practiced food and drug law and was a partner in the law firm of King & Spalding for ten years and VP for Public Policy at Monsanto Company.

He was Administrator of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service from 1994 to 1996, Deputy Commissioner for Policy at the Food and Drug Administration from 1991 to 1994.

Deputy Commissioner for Policy at the Food and Drug Administration from 1991 to 1994, and an FDA staff lawyer and Executive Assistant to the FDA Commissioner from 1976 to 1981.

Although Taylor gained employment with FDA under George H.W. Bush, Taylor's a bi-partisan He's the second cousin of Tipper Gore, our former VP's wife. Washington is a cozy town.

During his days at King and Spaulding, Taylor also authored more than a dozen articles critical of the Delaney Clause, a federal law passed in 1958 prohibiting the introduction of known carcinogens to processed foods. The Delaney Clause had long been opposed by Monsanto and other chemical and pesticide companies. When Taylor rejoined the federal government, he continued to argue that Delaney should be overturned. This was finally done when President Clinton signed the so-called Food Quality Protection Act on the eve of the 1996 elections.

One of Taylor's duties was to represent Monsanto's efforts to get its bovine growth hormone approved by the FDA. Taylor left King and Spaulding in 1991 to rejoin the FDA, this time as Deputy Commissioner for Policy. In that position Taylor was responsible for writing guidelines on the use and marketing of the controversial hormone that were favorable to the company.

And that, my dears, is how we have a Taylor who seems to be trying to sew up a deal to put a Wolff into the USDA henhouse.

Thanks to la vida locavore for the tip.

And OrangeClouds115 has a very nice rundown of issues for appoints at USA here.

• rbst,
• milk,
• farming,
• agriculture,
• Monsanto,
• Obama,
• USDA,
• food,
• food-security,

It gets better. Alberto Gonzales has been indicted along with Cheney. The indictment comes in regard to an investment group Cheney has bought into. The Vanguard Group holds interests in allegedly abusive private prison companies that are running federal penitentiaries in Texas.

A South Texas grand jury has indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County's federal detention centers.

[...]

[The indictment] accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees by working through the prison companies.

Gonzales is accused of using his position while in office to stop an investigation into abuses at the federal detention centers.

It's not The Hague, but it's a step in the right direction.

• Dick-Cheney
• Alberto-Gonzales
• Vanguard-Group

Historical writings are subject to similar forces. What turns out to be popular and widely accepted very often is nearly the flimsiest stuff around. If they're not actually counterfeit or hollow, popular histories may have the thinnest veneer of authentic learning applied over a core of semi-useless junk. The better histories, though hoarded by specialists, get undervalued and therefore pushed aside from public discourse. Undeterred by norms of accountability, myriad hackers churn out junk history at a phenomenal rate and thus pull the market standard down to their level.

So I wish good luck to Matthew Pinsker as he attempts to reverse the sudden devaluation of the histories of Abraham Lincoln's administration.

He points out what should have been obvious from even a passing acquaintance with Lincoln's presidency: It was a frickin mess. The federal government, already dysfunctional in the months before Lincoln assumed office, became nearly paralyzed in 1861 because of infighting and incompetence. For the first several years Lincoln was beside himself with disgust at both his military and civilian leaders. From our ample documentation, it's not hard to perceive the sources of his frustration during this period in which the Union nearly imploded. In particular, Lincoln had too little control over his fractious cabinet and by extension over his generals.

Pinsker makes the case for what I believe used to be the received wisdom among historians of the 19th century: That in trying to bring his political rivals into the cabinet at the start of his presidency, Lincoln unleashed all manner of problems for himself and the nation. Politicians don't easily set aside their personal ambitions, friendships and enmities just because they've been promoted to high office. Rather predictably, Lincoln's rivals disrupted his government until the president finally learned to control them.

All of this was elided or ignored in a recent popular history that has captured Barack Obama's fancy. Lightweight historian (and serial plagiarist) Doris Kearns Goodwin shoved this ugly record of political fractiousness right off a cliff, arguing instead that Lincoln showed "political genius" by bringing his rivals into his government at a time of crisis. As Pinsker points out, nobody benefits from peddling historical bunk:

Over the years, it has become easy to forget that hard edge and the once bad times that nearly destroyed a president. Lincoln's Cabinet was no team. His rivals proved to be uneven as subordinates. Some were capable despite their personal disloyalty, yet others were simply disastrous.

Lincoln was a political genius, but his model for Cabinet-building should stand more as a cautionary tale than as a leadership manual.

And let's face it. A real "team of rivals" in an Obama administration would mean a cabinet post for Alan Keyes. And I can think of nobody who could endorse that proposition, not with a straight face anyway.

• Abraham-Lincoln
• Barack-Obama
• Doris-Kearns-Goodwin
• team-of-rivals
• Alan-Keyes

Yesterday the New York Times report in Premier of Iraq Is Quietly Firing Fraud Monitors reported on events related to the testimony at that hearing.

The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is systematically dismissing Iraqi oversight officials, who were installed to fight corruption in Iraqi ministries by order of the American occupation administration, which had hoped to bring Western standards of accountability to the notoriously opaque and graft-ridden bureaucracy here.

The dismissals, which were confirmed by senior Iraqi and American government officials on Sunday and Monday, have come as estimates of official Iraqi corruption have soared. One Iraqi former chief investigator recently testified before Congress that $13 billion in reconstruction funds from the United States had been lost to fraud, embezzlement, theft and waste by Iraqi government officials.
. . .
How many of the ministries have received orders to dismiss their inspectors is a matter of disagreement among Iraqi governmental officials, but their estimates range from a handful to as many as 17. Several senior Iraqi and American officials agreed that seven to nine inspectors general had already been dismissed or forced into retirement. In one case, at the Education Ministry, the post became vacant when the inspector general died.

Senior Iraqi officials and four of the dismissed officials, many of whom asked not to be named for fear of government reprisals, said inspectors had already been removed in the Ministries of Water Resources, Culture, Trade, and Youth and Sport. In addition, inspectors have been removed from the cabinet-level Central Bank of Iraq, and from two religious offices, the Sunni Endowment and the Christian Endowment, whose leaders carry the rank of deputy minister.

The article discusses testimony by Salam Adhoob, one of the witnesses at that September hearing whose testimony was excerpted in that September unbossed report.

Here is what we reported then:

Salam Adhoob worked as the chief investigator in Baghdad for the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity (CPI) summed up his testimony thus:

American financial assistance meant to strengthen the Iraqi military and stabilize Iraq not only made it into the pockets of corrupt officials. These same funds actually helped finance Al-Qaeda terrorists who have been killing American soldiers and Iraqi citizens. CPI investigators uncovered the transfer of funds from these front companies, Al-Aian Al-Jareya and Safin, to terrorists. The CPI discovered that one of the owners of Al-Aian Al-Jareya, Nair Mohammed Ahmed Jummaily, the brother-in-law of the current Minister of Defense, diverted a portion of these funds to Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Informers have told me that Mr. Jummaily traveled to Amman, Jordan to deposit money into the accounts of Al-Qaeda operatives. On his way back from Jordan, he was given safe passage through the city of Ramadi, Iraq, which was controlled by Al-Qaeda at the time. Mr. Jummaily was a well-known Al-Qaeda supporter and he and his attorney also worked with the Minister of Defense to release imprisoned Al-Qaeda terrorists.

During my three years as an investigator at CPI, I investigated hundreds of cases of fraud and corruption. I am convinced -- beyond a shred of doubt -- that American soldiers died because of this corruption. Because of corruption, the Iraqi Army's tanks were not repaired by Wye Oak Technology. Because of corruption, Iraq never received the armored vehicles it ordered from AM General. Al-Qaeda had better weapons than the Iraqi Army because of this corruption. The Iraqi Army had to ask the United States for help because it did not have sufficient weapons, which resulted in even more American deaths.

Excerpts from other witness may also be found at that post - and within the post are additional links to their full testimony.

The October 30, 2008 Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) report includes the following findings related to contractors, corruption, and oversight:

SIGIR’s oversight teams produced seven audit reports and three inspection assessments this quarter, including:

* a congressionally mandated review identifying 310 contractors that have provided security services in Iraq, costing U.S. taxpayers about $6 billion (with most of that money going to 77 of the contractors)

* an audit requested by Ambassador Ryan Crocker that reviewed U.S. Embassy procedures for reporting progress on reconstruction projects to the Chief of Mission, finding systemic weaknesses that the Embassy is acting quickly to ameliorate

* a focused financial review of two large USAID capacity-building contracts, finding significant shortcomings in invoice review, outcome reporting, and agency contract oversight

* an audit of IRRF contract terminations, which found very few adverse actions taken against contractors terminated for default

* an inspection of the Falluja Waste Water Treatment System, finding that the project will cost three times original estimates, will be completed over three years late, and will serve just over a third of the number of homes originally contemplated

As we said a few weeks ago,

The story of contractor corruption in Iraq is a continuing shame ol’ shame ol’. The harm has been almost limitless. There is the harm to our soldiers - . . . to our financial security in the US as billions are funneled into the pockets of the corrupt while harming our budget . . . to Iraqi citizens . . . to their view of the US.

• Iraq,
• contractors,
• corruption,
• inspectors-general,
• al-Maliki

At the New Republic political scientist David W. Rohde (not the Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter at the NYT) would have us believe that John Kerry's defeat in 2004 was "the luckiest break" the Democrats have caught in more than 40 years. Had the Democrats not lost that election, Rohde claims, they would have been dragged under by the quagmire of the succeeding four years. It's as if Democrats have no real ability to chart a new course.

His counter-factual history has Kerry winning but falling afoul of many of the problems that Bush created for the country. It also requires that Kerry have no coat-tails, no ability to manage Bush's disasters better than Bush, no foresight to head off looming problems. More tellingly, in Rohde's world the Democrats have no positive agenda of their own that might have won popular support, while the public holds no grudge against the Republican agenda as its cynicism is exposed in the glare of investigation under a Democratic administration.

No investigations. No consequences. No contrast between competing agendas. No competence. It's a pretty lousy government he imagines, and tells us more about Rohde's imagination as a political scientist than it does about Democrats.

As for his historical chops, well, why is he re-running the 2004 election rather than the 2000 one? Who in their right mind would claim to know with certainty that Democrats would have been ruined if the Supreme Court had instead required Florida to conduct a full statewide recount, thus handing the presidency to Al Gore?

The defining characteristic of science is that knowledge emerges from experiments whose results may be verified by repetition. The only person who could have achieved quite these results from this counter-factual experiment is David Rohde.

I'll leave it to you to identify the correct term to describe what he's doing. But it is not 'science'.

Briefly, the background is this: James Gordon Meek reported that Democrats like the "anti-torture views" of John Brennan, Barack Obama's chief adviser on intelligence matters. Brennan was the deputy to former CIA director George Tenet at the time that Bush's torture regime was implemented. It does seem strange to describe Brennan as "anti-torture" just because he's renounced waterboarding in the last few years and allowed that "the dark side has its limits". Glenn Greenwald documents how Brennan has advocated or made excuses for extraordinary rendition specifically and Bush's detention and interrogation policies generally.

Meek and Greenwald then got into a back and forth over Brennan's anti-torture credentials. Meek argues faux-naively that extraordinary rendition per se can be dissociated from the torture that awaits prisoners handed over to countries that routinely practice torture. Meek says nothing about the spiderweb of America's own secret prisons where Bush administration prisoners have been flown to be tortured.

In any case, Greenwald responded to Meek's tendentious argument with a certain degree of confusion about what is what in Bush's torture regime:

The most incriminating aspect of Brennan's views, in my opinion, is his support for the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation techniques." Since he says he opposes waterboarding and isn't on record opposing anything else, one can reasonably assume that must include some combination of things like stress positions, forced nudity, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, exploitation of paranoias, extreme isolation, hanging by the wrists, threats, and other previously forbidden techniques authorized by the Bush administration.

This needs sorting out. Several of the things Greenwald lists are not, apparently, part of what the Bush administration terms "enhanced interrogation techniques".

To judge by published reports, these consisted of a discrete and detailed list of coercive techniques, including waterboarding, to be used only with high-level authorization against specific prisoners...those who are described typically as "hardened" or "high-value" al Qaeda suspects. The CIA has claimed that "enhanced interrogation techniques" have been used against only about 30 prisoners. The list of "enhanced techniques" originally was approved at a White House meeting (in 2002, it seems) of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Colin Powell, and John Ashcroft. During the next year or more, requests for authorization to use "enhanced" techniques against specific prisoners were, reportedly, discussed at several further meetings of the National Security Council Principals Committee.

But "enhanced interrogation techniques" are far from the only forms of abuse meted out to prisoners under Bush. They shouldn't be confused with the underlying programs of abusive treatment that were inflicted on many or all detainees abroad. For the latter, the Bush administration has used the term "exploitation". It was partly to clarify the distinction between the much-discussed "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the less understood but more widespread "exploitation" that I wrote this Abbreviated History of Exploitation Processes.

Abuse of prisoners in Bosnia and Afghanistan began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. By December 2001 at the latest, the Bush administration began to try to systematize that abuse by reverse-engineering techniques used in the military's SERE training schools. These existed to train US military personnel in techniques they'd need if captured by an authoritarian regime. The training included systematic psychological abuse of the kind practiced on American POWs during the Korean War. It was these "exploitative" practices in particular that the Bush administration decided in 2001 to adapt and apply against terrorism suspects. They became the baseline standard of abuse meted out to nearly all detainees held in secret prisons or transferred to Guantanamo. "Exploitation" focuses principally on prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation/overload, disorientation, stress, extremes of noise, light, and heat, forced nakedness, sexual humiliation, and generally creating psychological confusion and a state of infantile dependency. The result frequently is extreme mental degradation. Prisoners often become suicidal.

A few of these methods were later incorporated into the "enhanced interrogation techniques" so there was some overlap with baseline "exploitation". But it's absolutely vital to keep them distinct. Because the Bush administration and its apologists have tried to minimize the extent of their crimes by focusing all attention on the victims of "enhanced" techniques – who are few in number and can be depicted more easily as dangerous terrorists.

"Exploitation" is used to establish mental conditions favorable to manipulative interrogations. Many of the prisoners "exploited" were never in fact interrogated, or only in a very cursory way. Even after the US military and CIA lost interest in prisoners or concluded that they had no connection to terrorism, the prisoners often continued to be subject to "exploitation" for months or years on end. More to the point, "exploitation" has continued to be the standard for mistreating prisoners at Guantanamo down to this day. It's not the exception, it's the rule.

And since John Brennan has sought to justify extraordinary rendition flights, during which prisoners are "exploited" most repulsively, then it's very difficult to see how he has done anything other than align himself with the Bush administration's policy of torture.

• torture
• enhanced-interrogation-techniques
• exploitation-processes
• Guantanamo
• George-W.-Bush
• Barack-Obama
• John-Brennan

That's the message of much of the commentary on Gitmo churned out in the traditional media since the election, including this NYT report by William Glaberson. It has relied not so much on the staunchest critics of Bush's detention and torture policies – no surprise that - but instead on Washington establishment types with axes to grind or interests to protect. Their notion is that, while Obama remains most malleable, he needs to be gulled into thinking that the central issues concern political leadership and the need to protect America from dangerous terrorists.

They don't. The central issue is whether to restore the rule of law. Much to their regret, that's not a very complicated issue.

As a result, the 'serious' people (who generally did nothing under Bush to stop his illegal policies) are straining to find ways to complicate the question of what to do - now that Bush won't any longer be an impediment to change. The most intractable complication of any change in essential policy, we're told, is that restoring due process means - horribile dictu - that some prisoners might go free.

What if some detainees are acquitted or cannot be prosecuted at all?

In most constitutional states, that's considered a feature of due process rather than a bug: People whom the government cannot charge and convict of crimes should not be held in prison.

Apologists for Bush's Gitmo policies are worried principally about three things: (i) That the government has little evidence to charge most of the prisoners with crimes, and much of that is laughably weak or acquired by illegal means such as torture. (ii) The government's manipulation of evidence, of charges, and of the kangaroo courts it created would be exposed in real court proceedings. (iii) All the prisoners have been tortured through a system of "exploitation" crafted by the Bush administration.

Under those circumstances, few if any prisoners could be convicted of crimes. None could be charged without exposing government wrongdoing to public scrutiny in the US. In the civilized world, both those things would be welcomed: the release of prisoners long detained without adequate evidence, and the exposure of government crimes.

But Glaberson's cohort of experts is urging Obama to circumvent the imaginary 'problem' of due process by creating a new system of "preventive detention".

Benjamin Wittes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued in a book published in June that Americans needed to cross a “psychological Rubicon” and accept the idea that preventive detention was a necessary tool for fighting terrorism.

“I’m afraid of people getting released in the name of human rights and doing terrible things,” Mr. Wittes said in an interview.

That is to say, because of Mr. Wittes' fearfulness and his disdain for human (i.e. legal) rights, Obama is supposed to restore the rule of law by creating a parallel system of injustice to cover the people the president (or Mr. Wittes) doesn't wish to put into the justice system (or prisoner of war camps).

“You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone,” said one civil liberties lawyer, David D. Cole, a Georgetown law professor who has been a critic of the Bush administration.

Let me demonstrate that Mr. Cole is wrong: There is no circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone. I just said what he claimed could not be said.

Proponents of a president's 'right' (or 'duty' as some would have it) to incarcerate 'dangerous' people without trial 'preventively' point to our willingness to lock lunatics away in insane asylums. Just as in the Soviet Union, I guess, criminal charges are supposed to be likened to mental disorders. By this confusion of criminal charges with medical diagnoses, the presumption of innocence would no longer apply. That sort of argument might appeal to fools and Brookings fellows, but I won't waste further time on it.

The other main reason that Glaberson's cohorts favor a new law on 'preventive detention' is that they assume it will never be invoked against people like themselves. To the smart set, the presumption that presidents with monarchical power would lock up only 'truly dangerous people' makes the long-term damage to the very foundations of our legal system seem trivial. Indeed for them there's a considerable benefit if Obama cooperates in drawing a veil over the past by not exposing it to judicial discovery: the unpleasant business of prosecuting the worst crimes of the Bush administration can be pushed aside indefinitely.

It's generally an unspoken rule of the Washington establishment that very important people do not have to answer for their abuse of power. In particular, according to this viewpoint, each successive administration is supposed to give its predecessor a pass for any and all crimes it committed. That's considered the height of bi-partisanship. Prosecuting important criminals, by contrast, "could be perceived as vindictive". "It would not be beneficial to spend a lot of time calling people up to Congress or in front of grand juries," says former federal prosecutor Robert Litt – whose own law firm's clients specifically stand not to benefit by spending time in that fashion.

You see, for the Washington elite the benefits of upholding our legal tradition hinge upon whether or not the legal system is brought to bear upon oneself and one's friends and clients.

Interwoven into this shameless assault on accountability and the rule of law are several preposterous (and therefore unstated) assumptions. In particular we're supposed to accept that certain prisoners are indescribably dangerous...more dangerous than the attack on our legal tradition...and that the Bush administration has lots of reliable information that "someone is a threat" though it can't be proved in court. An essential corollary is the assumption that these somebodies are critical operatives in the machinery of terrorism. Their release, we're to suppose, would lead inevitably to further acts of terror, whereas their continued detention prevents terrorism.

Now, I don't accept the specious view that Common Law stops applying whenever an allegation of terrorism is made. Neither should anybody. It's authoritarianism presented in legal raiment, very much in the tradition of the infamous Sedition Act of 90 years ago.

The imperative of Panic does not trump all. But even if I did accept that cowardly notion, there are many good reasons for rejecting the assumption that prisoners at Gitmo are dangerous in ways that no other actual or potential criminal suspects can ever be. Because unless you accept that the rules, laws, or precedents set in this instance can never be applied to anybody other than the terrorism suspects already held at Gitmo or in George Bush's other secret prisons, then you're stuck with an extra-legal system of imprisonment ruled over by the president. Far from solving any problems, you've just created (or institutionalized) a big one.

In any event, a single reason for rejecting that assumption is sufficiently devastating that there's little point in dwelling upon any others. And that is this: The Bush administration has shown again and again that it does not truly believe the inflated allegations it directs against Gitmo prisoners.

For example, obscured in the 'debate' thus far concerning what to do about Guantanamo is the Seton Hall study delivered in August to the Senate Judiciary Committee. That's a huge omission. This meticulous study (PDF) documents how many former prisoners have been released to their home countries, and how little correlation there has been between the rate and speed of their release, on the one hand, and the gravity of the Bush administration's allegations against them on the other.

In his written testimony to the Committee, Professor Mark P. Denbeaux, director of Seton Hall Law’s Center for Policy and Research stated, “…the Center sought to determine how evidence gathered against any given detainee influenced the decision whether to release him. Center researchers expected to find that the detainees who presented the greatest threat would have been released last, or would still be held at Guantánamo.

“Center analysis shows that was not the case. The only significant correlation to one’s being released, the date of his release, and status upon release, is the nationality of the detainee. Those from Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia were more likely to be released, and more quickly.”

In other words, the allegations stop mattering once the Bush administration decides it wants to stop detaining a given prisoner. That makes perfect sense, of course, under the circumstances. Everybody involved knew that many of these prisoners had been purchased in the first place under a program so bizarre that the sales prices had to be euphemized as so-called "bounties". The allegations applied to the prisoners, once purchased, came straight off a menu of hyperbolic and simplistic tropes - as an earlier Seton Hall study (PDF) had shown conclusively.

Thus before the advocates for creating a new system of "preventive detention" ever get a hearing, they ought to be required to explain why we should give credence reflexively to allegations by a Bush administration that has a credibility gap. I really don't think they have an answer to that.

• Guantanamo
• Barack-Obama
• habeas-corpus
• Mark-Denbeaux
• Seton-Hall-Law

"Couldn’t be!" You say? Think again!!

Yes, PA Secretary of Agriculture Dennis Wolff - the Monsanto shill who approved a stealth milk labeling ban last year - says he is in talks with the Obama Administration for a post at the USDA. That news comes as part of a Friday night news dump - so Bush Administration.

For those who are new to this sordid phase in the career Dennis Wolff, you can find a compendium of past posts that lay out Wolff’s role in trying to take away the right of Pennsylvanians to know whether their milk was produced using rBST / rBGH (recombinant bovine somatrophin / recombinant bovine growth hormone) here.

Whether or not you care about ingesting genetically modified foods, you should care about not being able to choose whether to ingest them.

That is exactly what Wolff did last year about this time. He issued a stealth regulation that forbade labeling milk so people could choose to avoid milk produced with genetically engineered rBST / rBGH.

When the news of the regulation was made public Wolff showed his true colors by claiming that the decision had been made by a Food Label Advisory Committee (FLAC), supposedly made up of representatives of the public and industry.

The well-named FLAC, as it turned out, was stacked with lobbyists and underlings from the PA Department of Agriculture. The lobbyists had set up fake consumer organizations - a/k/a astroturf groups - to mask who they were. A phone call to the group’s phone number rang directly in the lobbyist’s office.

There were two consumer advocates. One real and the other so-called consumer representative makes it her life’s mission to sue grocery stores who charge tax on toilet paper.

And, as it turned out, the FLAC made no recommendations but did spend a meeting looking at an array of milk labels.

Further investigation into Wolff’s record showed that he has a long record of spewing bile at anyone who is interested in organic food and concerned about the impact of untested products in our food. He also has a love affair with Monsanto front groups, such as Voices for Choices.

Here is a transcript of Wolff's message (link opens video):

Hello, my name is Dennis Wolff, and I'm Secretary of Agriculture for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and also owner of Pen-Col Farms.

Today I wanted to talk to you about a new trend I find alarming. It's called "extra labeling" or some call it "fear marketing."

Non-artificial hormone, antibiotic free, and pesticide free are all labels we see on milk cartons today. And they confuse the consumers. It seems to create a good milk, bad milk scenario. And it puts the image of milk at risk.

Typical labels may include "no artifical growth hormone" in large print and a small disclaimer in the back saying there is no significance in the milk whether it is from cows treated or not treated with rBST.

Many cases will force producers to sign a statements saying they will not use rBST on their herd. They will at the same time charge a premium for this extra labeled product that may include 50 cents per gallon. That's $6 per hundredweight. In many cases, none of that $6 finds its way back to the farmer's milk check.

Advances in improved and new technology are very important for agriculture., very important for the dairy farmers, and very important for producing healthy food produces, and very important to the environment.

What will be next? Will it be – penicillin, ivermec, practices like artificial insemination or embryo transfer?

We don't know, but we're very concerned.

We applaud Voices for Choices and suggest that you get involved in this timely and important issue. Our dairy farmers need new technology. They need all the opportunities that they have available to them to run profitable operations today.

They are critical. They are important and they are the reason the next generation will come back to the farm - profitability.

So there is the open minded Ag Secretary on a fact-finding mission among milk producers, finding the facts he wanted to find. And he responded:

Today rbST—What's Next? A Monthly Column by Dennis Wolff, Secretary of Agriculture, PA Farm News November 1, 2006.

Recently, several dairy processors began labeling and marketing milk as produced on farms not using synthetic hormones, attempting to gain more of the market share of milk sales. These marketing techniques are guiding consumers to purchase this milk, and allowing processors and retailers to charge more per gallon than for unlabeled milk. If consumers have preferences about the way food is produced such as “grass-fed,” “organic,” or “natural,” that’s their choice. However, in this situation, consumers are not basing their decisions on sound science but rather on manipulative marketing.

Actually, as a news story about this same time explained, consumer demand was for labeling, not against labeling.

Wolff also has a long record of supporting Monsanto astroturf organizations.

And of belittling members of the public who just want to know what they and their families are ingesting. His record shows that he regards them as the enemy, to be fought, not members of the public he is sworn to protect.

So this is the man that the Obama administration would put at the head of this critically important agency? an agency that has suffered immensely under the Bush Administration?

You can read the news story here announcing Wolff's potential role in the new Obama administration here.

Pa. agriculture chief in talks about USDA job
11/14/2008, 5:21 p.m. ET
By MARC LEVY The Associated Press
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania's agriculture secretary said Friday that he
is talking with President-elect Barack Obama's transition team about the possibility of joining the administration.

Dennis Wolff said the talks have covered him perhaps heading the U.S. Department of Agriculture or serving as an undersecretary.

"For me, it's just a great honor to even be on the list of people being considered, so I'm thrilled to be on the list," Wolff said. "I don't think anyone knows how this will unfold or how the process works, but it will be an interesting month or two."

Perhaps we should show Wolff just how interesting the next couple months will be.

Wolff has a history that shows he is completely unfit for this job. You can find more on that unseemly past at this compendium of blog posts and the links therein.

UPDATE: I have included BobB's comment with contact information for the Obama transition team. It is a site that asks for suggestions and comments for the new administration.

Please, please contact the Obama transition team at http://www.change.gov/page/s/contact and tell them not to hire Wolff! [and why]

You could also include this link to an article in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/business/11feed.html?_r=2&ref=business

Mr. Wolff would be an embarrassment to the new administration. Wolff is the classic example of a bureaucrat who would defend special interests over the public interest.

• milk,
• dairy,
• rBST,
• rBGH,
• Posilac,
• Monsanto,
• democracy,
• food,
• food-safety,
• farmers,
• farming,
• agribusiness,
• Obama,
• Dennis-Wolff,
• agriculture,
• USDA