Obama's DoJ: "Standing Firm for Injustice"

That's the gist derived by the ubiquitous Scott Horton, on the Harper's NoComent blog today from reports circulating in DC lately of the Obamistas fealty to Bushevik legal tactics to protect individuals form accountability for high crimes and misdemeanors, the worst of which was protecting the associate of the Executive from prosecution for deeds done to protect the Executive:

The Obama Justice Department yesterday again embraced a position of the Bush Administration that Senator Obama appeared to have criticized on the campaign trail. Daphne Eviatar reports in the Washington Independent that:

the department filed a brief renewing the government’s motion to dismiss the case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld. The case is very similar to the lawsuit filed by U.S. citizen and former enemy combatant Jose Padilla against former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, which I’ve been following. The plaintiffs in Rasul v. Rumsfeld allege that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior Bush officials are responsible for their torture; prolonged arbitrary detention; cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; cruel and unusual punishment; denial of liberties without due process, and preventing the exercise and expression of their religious beliefs.

According to their legal complaint, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed claim they traveled to Afghanistan in October 2001 to offer humanitarian relief to civilians. In late November, they were kidnapped by Rashid Dostum, the Uzbeki warlord and leader of the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance. He turned them over to U.S. custody—apparently for bounty money that American officials were paying for suspected terrorists. In December, without any independent evidence that the men had engaged in hostilities against the United States, U.S. officials sent them to Guantanamo Bay. Over the next two years, they claim — as does a fourth British man — that they were imprisoned in cages, tortured and humiliated, forced to shave their beards and watch their Korans desecrated, until they were returned to Britain in 2004. None were ever charged with a crime.

Their case was previously dismissed on the grounds that Guantánamo detainees (which these individuals are not, they have been released) have no due process rights. Of course, the Supreme Court rejected that view in Boumediene v. Bush, in which it concluded that Guantánamo detainees at least have some rights to challenge their detentions. The matter was sent back to the Court of Appeals for reconsideration.

The Obama Justice Department has adopted the arguments and positions of the Bush team, however. It continues, even in the face of Boumediene, to argue that the detainees have no due process rights; it also argues extensively that Donald Rumsfeld has complete immunity from claims that he was the engineer of torture and mistreatment of the prisoners.

I'll skip now to the money graf:

Robert H. Jackson, America’s greatest attorney general, called the use of immunity notions to block accountability for the mistreatment of prisoners in wartime a uncivilized practice and committed that it could not stand. He went one step beyond this. America, he committed in his most famous oration, would “press this chalice to its own lips”–namely would agree to hold its own officials accountable by the same standards and rules it advocated at the end of World War II. The Obama Justice Department is working hard to make Attorney General Jackson into a liar. It is also destroying the credibility of President Obama’s commitment to abide by international law.

I shan't impose any further on "Fair usage than this provocative excerpt. But let me encourage you to get thee hither and peruse the whole argument.



("Just because I am not surprised does not mean I am not outraged.")