The new Star Chamber

At Harper's magazine, Scott Horton writes about how Bush is resurrecting the Star Chamber and he uses the Omar Khadr case as one of his examples.
The Star Chamber was a secret security court used by the Tudors and Stuarts, and its abuses were one of the main reasons why the Purtians created the United States 300 years ago. How quickly they forget!

The Bush Administration is slowly introducing the Court of Star Chamber to the process of American justice. We see its elements everywhere. In the farcical Combat Status Review Tribunals created in Guantánamo, now repeatedly denounced even by judges serving on them as a travesty. In the Military Commissions, crafted in conscious avoidance of the standards both of American military and civilian justice. And in the steady press to lower the standards of our federal courts to introduce practices that continually tip the scales of justice in favor of prosecutors. Reports have begun to circulate that the Administration has put together a group of scholars headed by a right-wing activist judge to craft legislation to introduce a new court of Star Chamber, perhaps to be floated in the coming year. . . . in the Bush view of justice, a failure to convict is unacceptable. And which is why the Bush view of justice is no justice at all.

Horton cites the Khadr case as an example of Star Chamber thinking:

Five news organizations, The AP, The New York Times Co., Dow Jones & Company Inc., The Hearst Corp. and The McClatchy Company have filed a complaint stating that they are being denied access to critical information that would allow them to report on the Guantánamo Military Commissions proceeding against Canadian Omar Khadr.

Various arguments in the case of Omar Khadr at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are apparently made via e-mail — a communications channel to which the public has no access — and issues apparently are being raised in closed sessions for which no transcripts or summaries are available, the news organizations, including The Associated Press, wrote in a filing. In addition, the filing stated, the public is not permitted access to motions and other documents submitted by the parties and “even the existence of a motion is not currently disclosed in any publicly accessible way.”

Khadr is now 21 years of age and has been in prison for five years, since he was 16. He is accused of having committed crimes as a minor. Radkhika Coomaraswamy, the UN Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, has registered strong complaints about the treatment of Khadr, as have other nations and human rights groups. “She raised her concerns about the creation of an international precedent where an individual is being tried for war crimes with regard to alleged acts committed when he was a child,” said a UN spokesman. There is a view in the international law community that the act of trying a minor as a war criminal is itself a war crime. Not that this would, of course, give the Bush Administration the slightest pause.
Specific charges against Khadr include having lobbed a grenade that killed an American medic in Afghanistan. The US strategy of closely guarding the proceedings and restricting media access to arguments and materials submitted is, however, highly selective. The Department of Defense leaked to CBS News’s “Sixty Minutes” program what prosecutors have long viewed as their “bombshell” evidence: film which they assert shows Khadr involved in insurgent activities in Afghanistan. The Government strategy is that the Government will exercise tight control over what the public learns about the trial and what transpires there. That, of course, was the very abuse against which “Freeborn” John Lilburne railed in his assault on the injustice of the Stuart courts, and the right to an open court is often cited in legal history books as having been established by him, in the middle of the seventeenth century. Which is why the Bush Administration is so much more at home with sixteenth century concept of judicial conduct. But the major issue that critics raise here is not Khadr’s guilt or innocence, but the procedural fairness and transparency of the process by which he is being tried.
As things stand now, whatever results from the trial of Omar Khadr, no serious observers are going to consider them to be fair. So what purpose is served by them? The answer to that question is fairly obvious: domestic political propaganda. This is a political trial, not an exercise in justice.

And successive Canadian governments have gone along with this travesty -- they have not fought for Khadr's rights any more than they originally fought for Mahar Arar.
Now Khadr, along with his family, have to be one of the least sympathetic defendants that Canadians have ever been asked to hold their noses and support.
But that, of course, is not the point
Its not about them, its about us -- are we the kind of people who will tolerate secret trials and endless imprisonment, or not?

Harper wins

And we lose.

Pictures that make you go Ahhh!

Knut, the polar bear cub from the Berlin Zoo

Why can't the left-wing be more like the right?

Bill from Portland Maine notes that Washington Post pundit David Broder thinks the left-wing should try to be more like the right -- I guess Broder thinks Imaginary Moderates find duplicity appealing, I don't know why.
So anyway, Bill helpfully provides this handy checklist:

>> Discriminate against minorities a little more
>> Be a little more skeptical about global warming, and give "global cooling" advocates a seat at the table
>> Think a little less about the poor
>> Slow down on trying to provide guaranteed health care for all Americans. The ones who don’t have insurance are probably fat, drunk, chain-smoking lazy asses, anyway.
>> Don’t be so quick to badmouth abstinence-only education, even though studies show it's not effective. We just need to give it more time. And money.
>> Practice putting profits above people---those who don’t earn much money have been blessed by God with conveniently-located Wal-Mart stores, so everybody wins!
>> Repeat after me: Every time the government takes away one of my civil liberties, I become a little safer
>> Dial down your curiosity and start trusting your leaders to know what's best for you
>> Be patient with Iraq. Give the surge more time. Six, nine, twelve months tops. And stop saying how bad the Iraq war is for the troops. They're doing what they were trained to do: be the de facto police force for a bickering, do-nothing sovereign government that's not our own.
>> Ladies: a little more time in the kitchen, if you please
>> Complain a little louder about sexual immorality, but don't deny yourself the pleasure of the occasional steamy affair or public bathroom hookup
>> At least admit that the planet might be six thousand years old, and that Adam might have ridden a triceratops to get his Pabst Blue Ribbon at the local 7-11
>> Stop fretting about how Republicans gutted the government over the past seven years. Look forward, not backward. Remember the famous quote: "Those who forget the past are taking the perfect combination of fine pharmaceutical products."
>> Be a little more hateful of illegal immigrants, especially now that we've just discovered over the past year that they exist. Come help build the wall---you can even carve your initials in it!
>> Ask yourself: how come there's not a single liberal judge who knows how to properly interpret the United States Constitution?
>> Be more skeptical of candidates for government positions who have the necessary skills and background to do their jobs well. Nobody likes a showoff.
>> Buy more guns---nothing builds confidence like the feel of a Glock tucked in your shorts
>> Be a little more "me me me" and a little less "we we we"

Well, I know I'm impressed.
Seriously, though, its sad, isn't it. Being a conservative used to be sorta honourable -- I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said if someone isn't a socialist at 20 they have no heart, and if they're not a conservative by 30 they have no head. I may not have ever been conservative myself but at least I could understand why someone would be and we could agree to disagree. But now the Conservative "brand" is sanctimonious, blustering, racist, sexist, homophobic, immoral, greedy, ignorant, and cheap -- Rush Limbaugh is their poster boy.

Kyoto Lite?

Delay, deny, obfuscate, mis-direct -- our Conservative government has the Bush administration formula down pat.
Now Canada is preventing a Commonwealth agreement on climate change purportedly because some of the world's big polluters are not involved.

"We would not support a binding target only for some emitters - especially if that excludes major emitters," Harper spokeswoman Sandra Buckler said in an e-mail.

Yeah. So what was it that Kyoto was attempting to do?
Of course, the right-wing climate-change-denial countries manufactured reasons not to join that one, either -- Kyoto, after all, was not perfect, and only an absolutely perfect plan would be good enough for them.
And of course the rest of us couldn't possibly do anything on our own to save the planet ... might cost us some money! Can't have that.

Great line of the day

About the Scott McClellan ain't-nobody-here-but-us-chickens denial, Josh Marshall writes:

Nuts
It would seem that, despite leaving the White House, Scott McClellan's testicles remain in protective custody.

Great line of the day

TRex writes about the Imaginary Moderates:

You know, all those salt-of-the-earth ordinary Americans who believe that George W. Bush should decide when we get out of Iraq, and that the government is way too tough on big business. These reasonable pragmatists understand that war is not something to be exited lightly, that huge corporate profits benefit everyone, er… somehow, and that regulating pollutants and toy safety and food additives just inhibits the course of human evolution. If we simply let natural selection do its thing, then eventually we’ll be immune to everything, just like cockroaches and Karl Rove, and who wouldn’t want that?

Grief

I saw this Reuters photo on the Iraq Today website -- a mother grieving over her child, who was one of the three children killed in Baqubah on Sunday by a roadside bomb.
UPDATE: Anne Applebaum writes an appallingly callous column in the Washington Post about how the tragedy of Iraq is that the US has lost so much international credibility they won't be able to make a new war on Iran.

Looking into the briefcase

Summarizing The Brian Mulroney defense:

Mila and the kids are to blame, really. I would never have grabbed Schreiber's $100,000 cash if they hadn't expected to live in the lap of luxury after struggling along for so many years on the mere $10,000+ a month paid to a prime minister in 1993.

and there's more:

The money? Why, it was a retainer, yeah, that's it, a retainer. For consulting, yeah, that's it, for consulting.

and finally, you'll love this one:

Why didn't I tell anybody before? Well, gosh darn it, nobody asked.

I think his spokesman should just shut up.

The stupid, it burns

Tom Friedman writes the stupidest NYTimes column ever - which is, I know, saying a lot -- and Glenn Greenwald calls him on it:

The drooling, bloodthirsty desire for war and vengeance which Friedman spewed forth in the months after 9/11 has been suppressed some as a result of the disaster in Iraq, but it is still lurking in him and the rest of our pundit class with all the vibrancy it had in 2002. And now that they are starting to convince themselves that they were Right After All about Iraq, they're starting to unveil it again, in completely unchanged form. They have learned absolutely nothing. They cannot, because they are convinced that they are the Guardians of Great Wisdom and cannot err. Even in Iraq, they did not err.
Almost five years after helping to unleash the greatest disaster in our country's history, Tom Friedman is still openly indulging his adolescent, weakness-based fantasies about ass-kicking and chest-beating Dr. Strangelove threats and the virtues of acting like a mafia thug such as Tony Soprano, "quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm." Friedman sits around watching TV shows and -- for reasons far more psychological than political -- identifies with amoral Tough Guy thugs and gets all excited by the vicarious sensations of strength and power and then disguises all of that as "foreign policy analysis."

This is exactly why the rest of the world no longer respects the United States -- call it whatever you like, we know thuggery when we see it.

Just for fun

Defining "progress" down

The New York Times describes how things are improving in Iraq since al-Sadr halted his attacks:

Since Mr. Sadr gave his order in mid-September, the numbers of unidentified bodies found on the streets of Baghdad daily have rarely exceeded a half dozen. When his militia was more active, there were often 30 or more unidentified bodies found daily.

When you do the math, it works out to about 360 unidentified murders in the last two months. Great news, eh?

Great line of the day

I found one of the most chilling parts of the Afghanistan prison story today to be the matter-of-fact, bureaucratic tone in the Corrections Canada memo:

On a Health and Safety level we will be walking through blood and fecal matter when either on patrol or in the prison and should not be wearing our personal footwear as it will track into our personal quarters.

In a comment to Pogge's post, Skdadl pinpoints why this was so disturbing:

I think we call this the banality of evil. I have to walk through blood and fecal material, so I need better boots. This is the road to Nuremberg, folks. And this is being done in our name.

United

Young, old, western, eastern, English-speaking, French-speaking, northerner, southerner, right-wing, left-wing -- we are all united in sorrow and shame about the tragic death of Robert Dziekanski.

Great line of the day

Dave at Galloping Beaver has a post up about the Amnesty International report on Afghan prisoners:

... DND and the Canadian Forces have an obligation, no matter where our forces are deployed, to observe Canadian law. We don't get to ignore the mistreatment of prisoners taken by our forces, even if that mistreatment is happening at the hands of others after being turned over.
The responsibility for the detention of prisoners falls to the Aghanistan authorities because we have agreed to that obviously flawed arrangement. As a belligerent involved in a war, we have every right to retain prisoners in Canadian custody.
It's about time prisoners taken by Canadian Forces were placed in Canadian custody until the objectives of the Canadian mission have been fully satisfied. And if the argument is that it is too costly to do so, we shouldn't be involved at all.

Emphasis mine.