Footnote to the preceding

Or, the empire is struck back.

Just for the record, it doesn't always work out the way they wanted and arbitrary abuse of power does not always go unpunished. At least in the District of Columbia, from which all three of these examples come. This is old news, but I just learned about the cases yesterday, so it's new to me.

1) On April 15, 2000, the International Action Center staged a demonstration as part of a weekend of actions at a meeting of the IMF/World Bank. In response,

police illegally closed a whole downtown block in Washington and arrested 678 demonstrators, tourists, shoppers and passers-by in what has been described as the largest act of preventive detention in recent decades in the United States.

Most of the cases were later dismissed, but the DA pushed the case against the group's co-director, Brain Becker. That may have been a big mistake, as that September, Becker was acquitted by the judge, who found the government had failed to prove that the demonstrators had engaged in "unlawful assembly." With that as part of the record, the more recent news is less surprising than it might have been:

The District of Columbia has agreed to pay $13.7 million to settle a class action suit brought by protesters arrested during a demonstration in 2000, lawyers in the case announced at court today[, November 23, 2009].

Lawyers for the protesters said it would be the largest amount ever paid in the U.S. to compensate protesters who were wrongfully arrested. ...

[Mara] Verheyden-Hilliard[, of the Partnership for Civil Justice, which filed the suit in 2001,] said she believed that U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman’s decision to set a trial date had pushed the District to settle.

“Faced with the reality of trial and a potentially huge loss, the district was able to come to the table,” she said.

2) In 2002, police wrongfully arrested and interrogated eight individuals during a demonstration against the Iraq war. In November 2009, the city agreed to pay them $450,000 in compensation.

3) On September 27, 2002, a protest against the World Bank was taking place in Pershing Park. Police surrounded the gathering and prevented anyone from leaving. Then, without warning or providing a chance to "disperse," police arrested some 400 people.

[S]ome were hogtied and held for more than 24 hours before being released.

Officials seemed to realize almost immediately that this was, to put it mildly, a big mistake. The captain of the US Park Police said he told a DC police official that he wouldn't carry out the arrests. The District refused to prosecute a single case.

Within the next two years, the D.C. Council investigated Pershing Park and released their own scathing assessment. The Council concluded that then-Chief Charles Ramsey had lied, and police officials had engaged in a cover-up of the incident.

Eventually, the case became all about the cover up. A federal judge would slam the the Office of the Attorney General and the D.C. Police Department's general counsel for withholding thousands of pages of discovery documents. The police department's running resume, a moment-by-moment chronicling of police activity on Sept. 27, went missing. Radio dispatches turned over to plaintiffs contained mysterious gaps.

The upshot was that two months ago, on December 16, the city settled a class action suit, agreeing to a payout of $8.25 million and to a series of improvements related to record-keeping - about which officials are required to report every six months to the Partnership for Civil Justice, a nonprofit civil rights organization which represented to plaintiffs in all three cases.

Footnote: The Pershing Park saga is not over.

Four bystanders rounded up by police that day are represented by separate lawyers and are not part of the class-action suit.

One of their attorneys, Jonathan Turley, said he is scheduled to meet with [DC Attorney General Peter] Nickles for the first time Tuesday[, December 15,] to discuss a possible settlement. But he seems to be itching for a courtroom brawl.

"We are preparing for trial," Turley said.

Go get 'em, Jonathan.

I'll keep saying it

Last month, the Obama administration "fully embraced the Bush administration's shameful effort to immunize torturers and their enablers from any legal consequences for their actions," in the words of Ben Wizner, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project.

In April, a panel the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had reversed a District Court decision that threw out an ACLU-filed suit against a Boeing subsidiary for its role in Bushco's illegal "extraordinary rendition" program. The District Court acted after the Bush gang intervened to invoke the bogus "state secrets" privilege but the Appeals Court ruled that the privilege must be invoked about particular evidence, not the entire suit.

The Obama crowd has responded by filing for a rehearing before the full court, asking the panel's decision be overturned and the Bush cabal's position on "state secrets" be upheld.

This happened just about the same time that Obama promised to “use every legal and administrative remedy” to keep additional torture photographs hidden from the public.

Also last month, Congress passed a $106 billion war supplemental appropriation which also included some funds for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But that latter cash came with some restrictions, some good, some bad - the former assuming that anything done through those bastions of "the hell with the people, pay the banks first" thinking can be good.

Obama, in a statement made as he signed the bill, said that he would ignore the conditions.

They would "interfere with my constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations by directing the Executive to take certain positions in negotiations or discussions with international organizations and foreign governments, or by requiring consultation with the Congress prior to such negotiations or discussions," Obama said in the signing statement.

On Thursday, the House slapped him upside the head, voting 429-2 to deny funding for any agreement that doesn't meet the conditions set out in the supplemental.

But the point here is the signing statement itself. Signing statements were traditionally used by presidents to explain how they would interpret certain sections of a law. Sometimes it was as simple as laying out the administration's understanding of what would be a "reasonable" effort in some direction; sometimes it was more complex. But it was really only during the Shrub regime that it became commonplace for a president to simply declare that certain parts of a law did not apply to him and that he could, on his own authority and without recourse to the courts, declare himself free to ignore them. And here was Barack Obama doing exactly the same thing.

Well, it's another month, and the beat goes on.

The Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission.

Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department's chief lawyer, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that releasing a detainee who has been tried and found not guilty was a policy decision that officials would make based on their estimate of whether the prisoner posed a future threat.

Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration argues that the legal basis for indefinite detention of aliens it considers dangerous is separate from war-crimes prosecutions. Officials say that the laws of war allow indefinite detention to prevent aliens from committing warlike acts in future, while prosecution by military commission aims to punish them for war crimes committed in the past.

Which instead of justifying the policy actually illustrates just how extreme it is. "We can hold anyone we want forever and nobody can do squat about it - not because of what they've done, not because of what they were planning, not even because of what we think they were planning, but because of what we think they might plan in the future. We don't need proof, we don't even need evidence and we sure as hell don't have to show anybody any. Because we are all-seeing, we are all-knowing, and our judgments are not to be questioned by such trifles as laws or courts or constitutions."

Rep. Jerrold Nadler ... questioned the administration's plan to allot prisoners to federal courts, military commissions or indefinite detention.

"What bothers me is that they seem to be saying, 'Some people we have good enough evidence against, so we'll give them a fair trial. Some people the evidence is not so good, so we'll give them a less fair trial. We'll give them just enough due process to ensure a conviction because we know they're guilty. That's not a fair trial, that's a show trial," Mr. Nadler said.

Seems to me I just said that somewhere.

Also this week, the Obama crowd

threatened to veto the funding bill for US intelligence agencies because the House included a provision that would increase the number of members who receive briefings on highly secretive covert operations

from the so-called "Gang of 8" - the chairs and ranking minority members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, the Speaker and Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, and the majority and minority leaders of the Senate - to include all members of the Intelligence Committees. It would also allow Congress, not the president, to restrict the briefings in extraordinary circumstances.

The Obama administration, like all previous administrations of the modern era, believe that the president, and only the president, has the power to determine what constitutes national security information and, even more vitally, what safeguards ought to be in place to protect the information.

There's that key, recurring phrase: "only the president."

Finally, TPMMuckraker makes an interesting observation about Karl Rove's recent testimony to the House Judiciary Committee. He had been cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the committee on the grounds of "executive privilege," which the Shrub gang claimed applied not only to White House policy staff but to all White House staff, including former staff, and continued to apply even after the administration left office. That is, they claimed in essence that no one at the White House, no one at all, now or in the past, could be made to appear before Congress without the president's express permission. More bluntly, the executive branch was not subject to Congressional oversight except to the degree it chose to allow it.

A district court ruled against Rove, but the matter was on appeal when an agreement was reached among the committee, the White House, and Bush lawyers.

The [Bush] White House's foot-dragging may have inflicted some measure of political damage. But in terms of the legal repercussions, by coming to a deal while the case was still pending in an appeals court, the Bushies have largely succeeded in one of their goals: ensuring that no clear precedent has been established limiting the president's power to claim executive privilege in such cases. And the Obama White House's role in helping to secure the deal for Rove's testimony suggests that's an outcome they wanted too.

That is, the Obama gang wants to be able to make similar spurious claims of "executive privilege" whenever it wants to avoid facing Congress.

In each case, over and over again, regular as clockwork, the Obama administration has adopted and run with Bush administration policies that concentrate power in the president and give the office extreme, even dictatorial, powers to conceal information, ignore laws, arrest without proof, imprison without charge, and govern without oversight as soon as the magic words "foreign policy" or "national security" are invoked. And over and over again I have argued precisely that: that Obama was adopting Bush policies.

At what point are some people going to give it up? At what point are people going to stop saying "they haven't had time to re-evaluate" or "the case came up too fast" or "give them time?" At what point are people going to stop using the excuse of being "focused on health care" or "focused on the economy?" When are people give up the fantasy that this is either the result of a settling-in period or a hidden brilliant political strategy that we are just too inferior to comprehend?

Obama has his 20-percenters, just like Bush did: that certain portion that will believe and support him no matter what he does, as first became clear when what should have been a clear red flag - his craven flip-flop on FISA last year - provoked instead a flood of excuses. But for the rest, when are you going to face the fact that all this is not some kind of temporary aberration, not a pile of exceptions, that in the areas of presidential power and national security, this is Barack Obama? This is who he is, what he thinks, what he wants, what he intends?

Seriously, what more will it take?

Footnote: So Obama claims he has the authority to ignore a law if it "interferes" with his "constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations." So why does he also claim that he can't issue an order suspending enforcement of Don't Ask, Don't Tell on the grounds that the policy arises from an act of Congress - even though no one appears to dispute his "constitutional authority" as CIC to issue such an order?

Update to an earlier post, part two

An update to this post and this post from last week.

They fiddle... - Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai refused to meet with President Robert Mugabe on Monday because, it was said, he was furious that the government has refused to issue him a passport and provided emergency travel documents, good for just one trip, only the night before the scheduled meeting. His party called this an insult which could not be ignored.

On Tuesday, Tsvangirai hinted he might refuse to attend another regional summit scheduled for Monday, one aimed at saving the recent power-sharing accord, even though this one is to be held in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare. A representative of Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change said the party was trying to decide if it could "trust" Mugabe.

However, on Thursday Tsvangirai confirmed he would attend.

So is the Mugabe government trying to gratuitously insult Tsvangirai? Quite possibly. Consider that he apparently turned in the document some months ago so pages could be added to it. The government, however, has not returned it, using the preposterous argument that it had run out of passport paper - even though ordinary Zimbabweans who are prepared and able to pay a high fee can get a passport within 24 hours.

How much of this on both sides is maneuvering during political hardball and how much is just dumb ego is hard to tell, but my money is on a fair amount of the latter.

...while their nation burns - In addition to the total economic collapse suffered by the people of Zimbabwe, there is a new affliction: cholera.

Eleven more people have died in a new outbreak of cholera, an acutely infectious disease, in northern Zimbabwe, state media reported on Tuesday.

The daily Herald newspaper quoted the local civil protection unit in the run-down former agricultural town of Chinhoyi as saying that the deaths had occurred in the last three weeks, while 500 had been treated for the disease.

Earlier in October, health officials confirmed that 16 people had died in the dormitory town of Chitungwiza on Harare's outskirts. ...

"The widespread outbreaks of diarrhoeal diseases, including cholera, across Zimbabwe, resulting from the catastrophic breakdown of urban water supply and sanitation services will dramatically worsen with the rainy season which begins in less than a month," warned Gregory Powell, the chairperson of the Zimbabwe Child Protection Society, warned.

"A toxic combination of under-nutrition and diarrhoea is likely to result in the deaths of thousands of children, and many more into acute, severe malnutrition."

This undoubtedly is part of the reason that Jacob Zuma, the head of South Africa's ruling African National Congress Party called on Mugabe and Tsvangirai to consider the plight of the poor in their discussions.

"I think what we can do is just to remind our brothers and sisters that, look, Zimbabweans in the meantime are suffering. Their suffering could only be relieved by them, and it is their responsibility as the leaders to ensure that they instill confidence to the Zimbabweans, even to their own leadership," Zuma pointed out.

I wouldn't hold my breath, Mr. Zuma.

Footnote: The wolves are circling, the snakes are coiling and hissing, just waiting for the moment to strike.

As the global financial crisis unfolds and more questions are asked about excessive deregulation, the World Bank and others are preparing economic policy prescriptions that will throw open Zimbabwe’s economy to the whims of the world markets. ...

Zimbabwe’s current political woes started after the government adopted a structural adjustment programme backed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1990. The resulting socio-economic downturn culminated in large-scale job losses and a massive rise in the bread price, among others, which provoked social upheaval and, eventually, an electoral challenge to the ruling ZANU-PF.

It seems like déjà vu as various actors are gearing up with similar policies for the country’s "economic revival".

With the same sort of advice, specifically agreeing to "internationally accepted norms of sound macro-economic management," price and exchange rate "liberalization" (that is, no regulations, no price controls, no exchange rate controls), and respect for "property rights" (no land redistribution, no nationalizations, and, based on previous examples, slashed taxes and reduced public services) which includes "revisiting" a law that requires all businesses have at least 51% ownership by Zimbabweans - that is, open wide the doors to the same sorts of international investments that have drained other developing nations and thrust them into permanent debt.

Something about carnival sideshow barkers is running through my mind just now.