Heckuva job

The Bush administration Dept. of Justice -- the incompetent gift that keeps on giving.

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department said Wednesday it would drop corruption charges against former Sen. Ted Stevens because prosecutors withheld evidence from the senator's defense team during his trial.

The reversal is an embarrassment for the department, which won a conviction against the Alaska Republican in October and is now asking to overturn it.

The week after his conviction, Stevens lost his Senate seat in the November election. The patriarch of Alaska politics since before statehood, Stevens, 85, was also the longest serving Republican senator.

He has been awaiting sentencing.

Stevens was convicted of seven felony counts of lying on Senate financial disclosure forms to conceal hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts and home renovations from a wealthy oil contractor.

The trial was beset by government missteps, which continued even after the guilty verdict was read. The trial judge grew so infuriated he took the unusual step of holding the Justice Department in contempt.

In court filings, the Justice Department admitted it never turned over notes from an interview with the oil contractor, who estimated the value of the renovation work as far less than he testified at trial.

"I have determined that it is in the interest of justice to dismiss the indictment and not proceed with a new trial," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement released Wednesday. He said the department must ensure that all cases are "handled fairly and consistent with its commitment to justice."

The Justice Department is investigating the conduct of the prosecutors who tried the Stevens case.

I don't think anyone really wanted to see the Hulk in jail, anyway, just as long as he's out of the Senate.

A Christmas gift to al Qaeda?

The handling of post-9/11 terrorist suspects has, of course, been stupendously stupid. The Guantanamo Bay military prison has proved to be an embarrassing dumping gound often for people we don't know what to do with. And military tribunals have been a clumsy affront to our values and undermine our standing in the court of world opinion.

Now, it looks as though we are going to double down on our stupidity by giving these mother fuckers a gift: martydom.

Alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants have told a military judge at Guantanamo Bay they want to confess and plead guilty.

The judge at the pre-trial hearing, Col Stephen Henley, said he would question the men to ensure that was their wish.

Mr Mohammed had earlier said he wished to be executed and achieve martyrdom, but had still mounted a defence.

The five accused face the death penalty if convicted of a role in killing 2,973 people in the suicide plane attacks.

These guys should have been disposed of in the same way as Mohammed's nephew. Ramzi Yousef, the perpetrator of the WTC bombing in 1993 was convicted in a court of law and sentenced to life in prison. He's all but forgotten and will never achieve martyrdom.

Stacking the courts

Of course wingnuts published by the respected opinion pages of wsj.com are certain that an Obama presidency would result in a Constitutional right to welfare and forced abortion of gay marriages. The fact of the matter is -- as the Times brings us a reminder today -- that in addition to the wide swath of destruction left by the Bush administration, a possible Obama administration will likely be bulloxed by federal circuit courts. Bush has appointed one-third of all federal judges, for a total of 62% of federal judges appointed by Republican presidents.

WASHINGTON — After a group of doctors challenged a South Dakota law forcing them to inform women that abortions “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being” — using exactly that language — President Bush’s appointees to the federal appeals courts took control.

A federal trial judge, stating that whether a fetus is human life is a matter of debate, had blocked the state from enforcing the 2005 law as a likely violation of doctors’ First Amendment rights. And an appeals court panel had upheld the injunction.

But this past June, the full United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit voted 7 to 4 to overrule those decisions and allow the statute to take immediate effect. The majority argued that it is objectively true that human life begins at conception, and that the state can force doctors to say so.

Mr. Bush had appointed six of the seven judges in the conservative majority. His administration has transformed the nation’s federal appeals courts, advancing a conservative legal revolution that began nearly three decades ago under President Ronald Reagan.

On Oct. 6, Mr. Bush pointed with pride to his record at a conference sponsored by the Cincinnati chapter of the Federalist Society, the elite network for the conservative legal movement. He noted that he had appointed more than a third of the federal judiciary expected to be serving when he leaves office, a lifetime-tenured force that will influence society for decades and that represents one of his most enduring accomplishments. While a two-term president typically leaves his stamp on the appeals courts — Bill Clinton appointed 65 judges, Mr. Bush 61 — Mr. Bush’s judges were among the youngest ever nominated and are poised to have an unusually strong impact.

We can only hope that their incoherent views of the Constitution will lead to plenty of dissension within their ranks.

McCain's activism

Jeffrey Toobin listened to McCain's speech on appointing federal judges -- a speech he delivered in as obscured manner as he possibly could -- and hears the dog whistles for the conservative base.

The giveaway here was that McCain did not reveal the subject matter of this supposed judicial outrage. The case was Roper v. Simmons, in which a seventeen-year-old boy murdered a woman after breaking into her home, and was sentenced to death. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion overturned the sentence and held that the Constitution forbids the death penalty for juvenile offenders. McCain’s reference to the Court’s “discourse” on the law of “other nations” refers to Kennedy’s observation of the “stark reality that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty.” Likewise, Kennedy noted that the only other countries to execute juvenile offenders since 1990 have been China, Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. According to McCain, the United States apparently belongs on this dismal list.

Nor were his references to penumbras and emanations accidental. Those words come from Justice William O. Douglas’s 1965 opinion for the Court in Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the Justices recognized for the first time a constitutional right to privacy, and ruled that a state could not deny married couples access to birth control. The “meaning of life” was a specific reference, too. It comes from the Court’s 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed the central holding of Roe v. Wade, and forbade the states from banning abortion. In short, this one passage in McCain’s speech amounted to a dog whistle for the right—an implicit promise that he will appoint Justices who will eliminate the right to privacy, permit states to ban abortion, and allow the execution of teen-agers.

Toobin goes on to explain that, unlike most McCain positions these days (the Bush/McCain Iraqi debacle not included), McCain really means it.

Previously unimaginable

Headlines like this:

Bush Uses Veto on C.I.A. Tactics to Affirm Legacy

At least up until recently.

More DOJ fun

If this weren't such an affront to our constitutional form of government, it would be pretty comical.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1 — The Democratic governor of Puerto Rico says he has been improperly made a target of Justice Department prosecutors who began by looking into campaign contributions and have since broadened their efforts with a grand jury inquiry including subpoenas of his college transcripts and even questioning about whether he has had a hair transplant.

One little word

And the entire edifice could collapse.

The biggest problem for Mr. Mukasey remains his refusal to take a clear legal position on the interrogation technique. Fear of opening the door to criminal or civil liability for torture or abuse, whether in an American court or in courts overseas, appeared to loom large in Mr. Mukasey’s calculations as he parried questions from the committee this week. Some legal experts suggested that liability could go all the way to President Bush if he explicitly authorized waterboarding.

And who says the Bush/Cheney administration doesn't plan ahead...at least when it comes to shielding themselves from future prosecution.

Meanwhile, I think there are soon going to be a great number of job openings over at State.

During the meeting, one Foreign Service officer likened the Iraq order to a “potential death sentence,” The Associated Press reported. “It’s one thing if someone believes in what’s going on over there and volunteers, but it’s another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment,” said the officer, who identified himself as Jack Croddy and once worked as a political adviser with NATO forces, The Associated Press reported. “I’m sorry, but basically that’s a potential death sentence, and you know it.”

The comments were directed at Harry Thomas, the Foreign Service director general. Ms. Rice did not attend the meeting, but her Iraq deputy, David Satterfield, was there.

“I certainly understand very much that this is extremely difficult for people who have not contemplated this kind of service,” Mr. Satterfield said in an interview. But, he added, “this is an expeditionary world. For better or worse, it requires an expeditionary service.”

Many federal employees have refused repeated requests that they go to Iraq, while others have demanded that they be assigned only to Baghdad and not be sent outside its fortified Green Zone, which includes the American Embassy and Iraqi government ministries.

I wonder what other expeditions we can expect before sanity can be restored.

Excessive sentencing

In the eyes of the Deciders, I guess.