Fun legal news

Court rejects domestic spying appeal
By The Associated Press
Tue Feb 19, 2008
SETBACK FOR PRIVACY ADVOCATES: The Supreme Court, without comment, turned down an appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union to let it pursue a lawsuit against the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

The Court ruled that defendants could not establish that they had, in fact, been victims of illegal wiretapping, hence did not have standing to bring suit.

The fairly obvious ties to Kafka & Catch-22 have been noted by others.

Today:
Justice At Guantanamo
By Kevin Drum, CBS News
Feb 20, 2008
A couple of months ago Col. Morris Davis, chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, wrote an op-ed in the LA Times explaining that he had resigned his post after he was placed in the chain of command under Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes. Today he sheds some further light on his decision in an interview with Ross Tuttle of The Nation:

When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes — the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. "[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals, we've got to have convictions.'"

Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions' chain of command. "Everyone has opinions," Davis says. "But when he was put above me, his opinions became orders."

Ah, yes... when the Soviet Union conducted similar proceedings in the 1930s, we were pleased to call them "show trials" - pure theater, no justice.

The common term is "kangaroo court".

... and let's not forget:

U.S. military will seek death penalty for 6 Guantánamo prisoners

That's right: we're seeking the death penalty in proceedings that seem to be plausibly described as "show trials"!!!

This'll do wonders for our standing in the international community... and those of you planning trips abroad may want to adjust your plans. If other countries start acting like the U.S., you could find yourself whisked away to a covert "black site", held incommunicado for years, subject to "enhanced interrogation" until you confess your "crimes", and then tried for undisclosed capital offenses!

Stop the madness!