DebateGate

WIll this stand?

Court Told It Lacks Power in Detainee Cases

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 20, 2006; A18

Moving quickly to implement the bill signed by President Bush this week that authorizes military trials of enemy combatants, the administration has formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has jurisdiction to consider hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed by inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

In a notice dated Wednesday, the Justice Department listed 196 pending habeas cases, some of which cover groups of detainees. The new Military Commissions Act (MCA), it said, provides that "no court, justice, or judge" can consider those petitions or other actions related to treatment or imprisonment filed by anyone designated as an enemy combatant, now or in the future.

Beyond those already imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere, the law applies to all non-U.S. citizens, including permanent U.S. residents.

The new law already has been challenged as unconstitutional by lawyers representing the petitioners. The issue of detainee rights is likely to reach the Supreme Court for a third time.

Habeas corpus, a Latin term meaning "you have the body," is one of the oldest principles of English and American law. It requires the government to show a legal basis for holding a prisoner. A series of unresolved federal court cases brought against the administration over the last several years by lawyers representing the detainees had left the question in limbo.

Two years ago, in Rasul v. Bush, which gave Guantanamo detainees the right to challenge their detention before a U.S. court, and in this year's Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , the Supreme Court appeared to settle the issue in favor of the detainees. But the new legislation approved by Congress last month, which gives Bush the authority to try detainees before military commissions, included a provision removing judicial review for all habeas claims.

Immediately after Bush signed the act into law Tuesday, the Justice Department sent a letter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit asserting the new authorities and informing the court that it no longer had jurisdiction over a combined habeas case that had been under consideration since 2004. The U.S. District Court cases, which had been stayed pending the appeals court decision, were similarly invalid, the administration informed that court on Wednesday.

A number of legal scholars and members of Congress, including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), have said that the habeas provision of the new law violates a clause of the Constitution that says the right to challenge detention "shall not be suspended" except in cases of "rebellion or invasion." Historically, the Constitution has been interpreted to apply equally to citizens and noncitizens under U.S. jurisdiction.

The administration's persistence on the issue "demonstrates how difficult it is for the courts to enforce [the clause] in the face of a resolute executive branch that is bound and determined to resist it," said Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law professor involved in the detainee cases.

On Tuesday, the appeals court granted a petition by lawyers for the detainees to argue against the new law. Vincent Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many of the detainees, said yesterday that he expected the administration to file a motion for dismissal of all the cases before the defense challenge is heard.

"We and other habeas counsel are going to vigorously oppose dismissal of these cases," Warren said. "We are going to challenge that law as violating the Constitution on several grounds." Whichever side loses in the upcoming court battles, he said, will then appeal to the Supreme Court.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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This year’s antagonists also include some new critics, including Mr. Gingrich’s one-time lieutenant, Dick Armey, the former House Republican majority leader.

In recent weeks, Mr. Armey has stepped up a public campaign against the influence of Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and an influential voice among evangelical protestants. In an interview published last month in “The Elephant in the Room,” a book by Ryan Sager about splits among conservatives, Mr. Armey accused Congressional Republicans of “blatant pandering to James Dobson” and “his gang of thugs,” whom Mr. Armey called “real nasty bullies” — arguments he reprised on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and in an open letter on the Web site organization FreedomWorks.

In an interview this week, Mr. Armey said catering to Dr. Dobson and his allies had led the party to abandon budget-cutting. And he said Christian conservatives could cost Republicans seats around the country, especially in Ohio.

“The Republicans are talking about things like gay marriage and so forth, and the Democrats are talking about the things people care about, like how do I pay my bills?” he said.

Mr. Armey also pinned some of the blame on Tom DeLay, the former Republican House majority leader, who “was always more comfortable with the social conservatives, the evangelical wing of the party, than he was with the business wing.”

Mr. Armey, who identifies himself as an evangelical, said he was tired of Christian conservative leaders threatening that their supporters would stay away from the ballot box unless they got what they wanted.
[.............]
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/20/us/politics/20conserve.html?_r=5&ei=5094&en=b1b937b467b8fa0b&hp=&ex=1161316800&oref=login&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

Vancouver soldier killed after unexpected call-up
Vancouver soldier killed after unexpected call-up
    Story Published: Oct 18, 2006 at 2:17 PM PST

Story Updated: Oct 19, 2006 at 10:42 AM PST


VANCOUVER, Wash. (AP) - A Vancouver soldier is one of ten killed this week by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

Ron Paulsen spent 14 years in the Army and then another 13 years as an inactive reservist.  At 52 years old, he was called up for active duty.

When Paulsen finished his service in 1992, soldiers were given a choice - take a lump sum of $30,000 and be done, or take an annual payment of $7,000 with a catch.

He said he went for the annual, but that meant he had to stay in the inactive reserve to get it, which is why he ended up getting called back in to service.

Paulsen said that roadside bombs were his biggest concern.  His family confirmed his death Wednesday.

(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
http://www.katu.com/news/local/4429767.html

A Question Bush Can't Answer

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, October 18, 2006; 12:16 PM

There are a lot of questions -- about a lot of things -- that President Bush can't seem to answer.

But Fox News's Bill O'Reilly, of all people, asked Bush one of the most important ones in an interview aired last night.

This one was about torture.

Here's the transcript ; here's the video .

O'Reilly raised the issue of waterboarding, a particularly appalling technique that CIA interrogators reportedly used on terror suspects.

O'Reilly: "Is waterboarding torture?"

Bush: "I don't want to talk about techniques. But I do assure the American people that we were within the law and we don't torture. I have said all along to the American people we won't torture. But we need to be in a position where we can interrogate these people."

Then came the question I've been waiting for someone to ask.

O'Reilly: " But if the public doesn't know what torture is or is not, as defined by the Bush Administration, how can the public make a decision on whether your policy is right or wrong? " [My emphasis.]

Bush's ducking of such an important question, it seems to me, is highly newsworthy. Here's the president's response, in its entirety:

Bush: "Well, one thing is that you can rest assured we are not going to talk about the techniques we use in a public forum, no matter how hard you try, because I don't want the enemy to be able to adjust their tactics if we capture them on the battlefield.

"But what the American people need to know is we have a program in place that is able to get intelligence from these people and we have used it to stop attacks. The intelligence community believes strongly that the information we got from the detainee questioning program yielded information that made America safer, that we stopped attacks.

"Secondly, the courts. Yeah, I believe it is necessary to have military tribunals because I ultimately want these people to be tried. And it took a while to get these tribunals in place. The Supreme Court ruled that the president didn't have the authority to set up these courts on his own, that he needed to work with Congress to do so, and we did.

"What's interesting about these votes that took place in the Congress is the number of Democrats that opposed questioning people we picked up on the battlefield. And I think that's an issue that they will have to explain to the American people."

So apparently that's his answer to O'Reilly's excellent and important question: Democrats are pro-terrorist.

(And let's not even get into the fact that he misrepresented the views of Democrats, all of whom to the best of my knowledge favor questioning suspects -- just not necessarily torturing them.)
[]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/10/18/BL2006101800799_pf.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061018/ts_nm/iraq_dc_1

[]
The U.S. military announced on Wednesday the deaths of 10 U.S. troops in
Iraq on Tuesday, an unusually bloody day for American soldiers battling sectarian violence and a Sunni Arab insurgency.
[]

At least 68 U.S. troops have been killed in October -- a pace, that if continues, would make it the deadliest month for U.S. forces since January 2005. At least 2,777 have died since the invasion in 2003.
[]

Cheney said yesterday we're doing "remarkably well" in Iraq.

Cheney: ‘General Overall Situation’ In Iraq Is Going ‘Remarkably Well’

Rush Limbaugh interviewed Vice President Cheney on his show today. At one point, Limbaugh asked Cheney to respond to growing frustration over U.S. efforts in Iraq.

Cheney acknowledged there is a “natural level of concern out there” because fighting didn’t end “instantaneously.” (Next month, the war will have lasted longer than U.S. fighting in World War II.) Cheney then pointed to various news items to paint a positive picture of conditions in Iraq and concluded, “If you look at the general overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.”


Full transcript:

  http://thinkprogress.org/2006/10/17/cheney-rush/

The current Congress has shown no inclination to investigate the Bush administration. Last year The Boston Globe offered an illuminating comparison: when Bill Clinton was president, the House took 140 hours of sworn testimony into whether Mr. Clinton had used the White House Christmas list to identify possible Democratic donors. But in 2004 and 2005, a House committee took only 12 hours of testimony on the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_10_15_atrios_archive.html#116101656816512784

http://www.buckeyestateblog.com/jesus_the_precinct_captain

Displease a Lobbyist, Get Fired
E-mails show Jack Abramoff's ability to influence White House staffing decisions through his highly placed friends.
By Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writer
October 15, 2006

WASHINGTON — For five years, Allen Stayman wondered who ordered his removal from a State Department job negotiating agreements with tiny Pacific island nations — even when his own bosses wanted him to stay.

Now he knows.

Newly disclosed e-mails suggest that the ax fell after intervention by one of the highest officials at the White House: Ken Mehlman, on behalf of one of the most influential lobbyists in town, Jack Abramoff.

The e-mails show that Abramoff, whose client list included the Northern Mariana Islands, had long opposed Stayman's work advocating labor changes in that U.S. commonwealth, and considered what his lobbying team called the "Stayman project" a high priority.

"Mehlman said he would get him fired," an Abramoff associate wrote after meeting with Mehlman, who was then White House political director.

The exchange illustrates how, more than two years after the corruption scandal surrounding the now-disgraced Abramoff came to light, people are still learning the extent of the lobbyist's ability to pull the levers of power in Washington. The latest revelations provide more detail than the Bush administration has acknowledged about how Abramoff and his team reached into high levels of the White House, not just Capitol Hill, which has been the main focus of the influence-peddling investigation.

The e-mails, disclosed as part of a report by the House Government Reform Committee, show how Abramoff manipulated the system through officials such as Mehlman, now the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Doing so, Abramoff directed government appointments, influenced policy decisions and won White House endorsements for political candidates — all in the service of his clients.

The report found more than 400 lobbying contacts between Abramoff's team and the White House.

Besides the Stayman matter, the e-mails reveal Mehlman's role in helping an Abramoff client, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, secure $16.3 million for a new jail that government analysts concluded was not necessary. Mehlman also helped Abramoff obtain a White House endorsement in 2002 of the Republican gubernatorial ticket in the U.S. territory of Guam.

Abramoff pleaded guilty in January to federal charges in a congressional bribery investigation that continues to loom over Capitol Hill and the GOP. A Senate subcommittee concluded that Abramoff fleeced Indian tribes out of millions of dollars in fees that he split with one of his associates.

The scandal has touched just one West Wing staffer, Susan Ralston, a onetime Abramoff aide who resigned this month as executive assistant to strategist Karl Rove after congressional investigators documented frequent contact with the lobbyist's team.

Mehlman said he did not recall the details of his contacts with the Abramoff team, including discussions about Stayman, the former State Department official. But he said such interactions were part of his job as White House political director.

"I was a gateway," Mehlman said in an interview. "It was my job to talk to political supporters, to hear their requests, and hand them on to policymakers."

Mehlman said he had known Abramoff since the mid-1990s and would listen to his requests along with those of other influential Republicans.

"I know Jack," Mehlman said. "I certainly recall that if he and others wanted to meet I would have met with them, as I would have met with lots of people."

Mehlman, a Baltimore native and graduate of Harvard Law School, has remained a GOP power player since stepping down as political director in 2003. He built the party's grass-roots get-out-the-vote strategy, managing President Bush's 2004 reelection campaign before taking over the RNC last year.

Democrats charge that Mehlman may have acted unethically during his time at the White House, lobbying for government actions at Abramoff's behest, even when policy experts disagreed with the decision.

The senior Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, Rep. Henry A. Waxman of Los Angeles, points to e-mails suggesting that in June 2001, amid negotiations over whether to fire Stayman, Mehlman requested and might have been given two U2 concert tickets in Abramoff's suite at what was then the MCI Center (now the Verizon Center).

Ethics rules prohibit officials from accepting gifts worth more than $20 from a person doing business with the government, although there are exceptions. Ethics officials typically consider such suite tickets to be worth the same as the event's most expensive tickets, which in this case was $133 apiece, according to Waxman's office.

"Please tell me we can fit two more in for Friday," lobbyist and Kevin Ring wrote to Abramoff, his partner. "Ken Mehlman of the White House apparently wants to go." On the day before the concert, Ring wrote to Abramoff that a resume for a Stayman replacement had been "sent to our conduit."

Referring in the same e-mail to an unrelated Labor Department appointment, Ring said he "will talk to Mehlman at the concert tomorrow night."

A former Abramoff associate remembers Mehlman attending the concert. Mehlman said he did not recall it. "I've been to several U2 concerts, but I don't know whether I went to that one," he said. "But I can tell you that as political director I was always very careful to make sure everything I did was above board and consistent with the rules."

Waxman said the e-mails suggested Mehlman may have "violated fundamental ethics regulations and the law."

"There are serious questions that Mr. Mehlman needs to address with candor and that Congress should investigate thoroughly," Waxman said.

The e-mails disclosed in the House report showed that Mehlman was involved in a variety of matters of interest to Abramoff, one of which bore fruit for the lobbyist after he discussed delivering campaign contributions to GOP causes.

Tony Rudy, a onetime aide to former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), referred to Mehlman on Nov. 9, 2001, as a "rock star" after Mehlman agreed to "take care of" the Choctaws' jail, despite a Justice Department finding that the tribe's existing jail was adequate.

Several days after that meeting, on Nov. 13, Rudy recommended a $15,000 contribution to the Republican National Committee. "Let's give the check to Ken Mehlman at the White House," wrote Rudy, who later pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in the broader investigation.

On Nov. 15, campaign finance records show, the tribe gave $10,000 to the RNC. Overall, the tribe gave $120,000 in the 2002 election cycle to Republican committees and $95,000 to Democratic committees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Two weeks after the RNC received its check, Susan Butler, chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Charles W. "Chip" Pickering, a Mississippi Republican whose district includes the Choctaws, e-mailed Rudy to say that she had discussed the issue with Mehlman and others and that "they were very positive and promised to work with us on it."

When Justice Department officials relented and released the money for the jail, giddy Abramoff associates planned to host agency officials in a suite at a Dave Matthews concert.

"I have the suite filling up with DOJ staffers who just got our client $16 million," one wrote. Another replied that the agency officials deserve any reward they want, "opening day tickets, Skins v. Giants, oriental massages, hookers, whatever."

Mehlman, meanwhile, also helped Abramoff with another client, Guam, the e-mails show.

On Oct. 9, 2002, Abramoff asked Mehlman to secure a White House endorsement for the island's GOP gubernatorial ticket.

Three weeks later, Abramoff received a note from Ralston, then Rove's assistant, saying that Mehlman had gotten a quote from the White House for "your Guam candidates." She also asked Abramoff to send his requests in the future to "Ken only."

For Stayman, learning more about how Abramoff used White House connections helped him understand why, five years ago, he found himself looking at a career change.

His job was up for renewal, but his State Department supervisors wanted to keep him on to finish a project that was expected to take more time.

"With only about a year left on my appointment, I didn't think it would trigger any interest from the White House," Stayman said. "I assumed that Abramoff was behind it, but I didn't know the details, who called whom and how much effort it took."

Unbeknownst to Stayman, though, within weeks of Bush taking office, the "Stayman project" was in full swing.

State Department officials resisted the dismissal, and negotiations dragged on for months. In May 2001, one of Mehlman's deputies assured Abramoff's team that, "Obviously, this guy cannot stay."

That July 9, Ralston e-mailed Abramoff with news of a deal on Stayman: "He'll be out in four months."

And he was.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-mehlman15oct15,0,6427529,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines