There are some things I want to blog about before we all die at midnight

The National Lawyers Guild has rebuked Justice Antonin Scalia for remarks he made in an interview with the BBC in which he excused torture as acceptable and perhaps even Constitutional in some instances.

[Get this -the Constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment does not apply when torture is used as an interrogation technique, because that isn't technically punishment. Seriously. This is why people hate lawyers.]

They have called on him to recuse himself from any and all cases that might come before the court involving interrogation techniques and the application of torture to extract intelligence information. “The Guild is appalled that a sitting Justice of the United States Supreme Court has ventured in a public forum his belief that it is justifiable to attempt to extract information from persons in custody by the use of torture. A justice of the highest court in the land, sworn to uphold the Constitution, whose views so undermine the fundamental right of security of the person guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, is unfit to sit on that Court,” said Marjorie Cohn, President of the Guild.

[Way to go Marjorie, and the rest of the NLG! This is why most people are like me - I get really damned defensive and ready to come to blows when someone says anything negative about my lawyer, who happens to be a pillar of virtue and integrity and a veritable scion of Adams.]

Hows that Surge™ workin' out for ya? Coalition -allied civilian guards announced Saturday that they were abandoning their posts in a volatile area south of Baghdad to protest the killing of at least 12 civilians over the last month by American airstrikes. The proverbial straw that broke the camels back came Friday when three members of the Sons of Iraq were gunned down by American forces who appeared to target them. The Sons of Iraq are largely credited with the reduction in violence throughout the country, especially in area that lack adequate police forces. Members receive about ten dollars a day in compensation and are given vests to make them readily identifiable to coalition forces. A tribal leader who has worked with the American forces said that the helicopter landed, the soldiers debarked, and deliberately fired on the Iraqi guards. "When we signed the contract with the U.S. forces, it was dependent on working jointly with them," the tribal leader said. "If they want us to come back, we will, but we need to make another contract that will guarantee our rights and prevent a repeat of such mistakes." By Saturday night 2000 had stood down and abandoned their checkpoints in the area where the shootings took place.

Oopsie! The FBI is blaming an "apparent miscommunication" with an as-yet-unnamed internet service provider that, instead of delivering the emails of a single individual named in a FISA warrant; delivered all of the emails that were sent to or from a small domain name. This is akin to a resident of your apartment complex being named in a warrant and the rental office turning over the keys to all 100 units. Marcia Hofmann, an attorney for the Electronic Freedom Foundation said it raised troubling questions about what happens when technology collides with civil liberties. “How do we know what the F.B.I. does with all these documents when a problem like this comes up?” Ms. Hofmann asked.

Tonight I nod respectfully to all those who served in the Balkans, especially Kosovo. The declaration of independence and the resulting celebrations are providing a few people around me with a feeling of quiet gratification tonight. Well done, Soldiers. Well done, Airmen. You saw your mission through, you halted a genocide, and you brought your men and women home alive, each and every one. Enjoy watching the payoff on cable over the next couple of days as the Kosovar Albanians you saved from genocide revel in the independence you made possible.

Well, that's a wrap - it's midnight-thirty in DC, and I'm still alive in KC. No one in my house has spontaneously succumbed to terrorism, at least not at this point.

If my luck holds out, I'll see you in the morning. If I wander into something interesting in the meantime, I'll update. Now, consider this an open thread and a communications hub. We're all in peril, you know, so let us know you're okay in comments, lest we fear the worst...

Members of the Bar call for investigations into Bush/Cheney

We are lawyers in the United States of America. As such, we have all taken an oath obligating us to defend the Constitution and the rule of law…. We believe the Bush administration has committed numerous offenses against the Constitution and may have violated federal laws…. Moreover, the administration has blatantly defied congressional subpoenas, obstructing constitutional oversight …. Thus, we call on House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy to launch hearings into the possibility that crimes have been committed by this administration in violation of the Constitution…. We call for the investigations to go where they must, including into the offices of the President and the Vice President. -- American Lawyers Defending the Constitution

Over a thousand American attorneys have affixed their signatures to the above statement, calling for far-ranging investigations into unconstitutional and possibly criminal activity by the current presidential administration. The statement has been signed by former Governor Mario Cuomo, and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein.

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights said in a conference call with reporters in December that

"The majority of lawyers in this country understand that the Bush administration has really gone off the page of constitutional rights and off the page of fundamental rights, and is willing to push the Congress to restore those rights." Ratner said he was "dismayed" that a Democratic majority has failed "to push on key illegalities… the torture program, and now the destruction of the tapes involving the torture program; the warrantless wiretapping, the denial of habeas corpus, the secret sites/rendition program, special trials, and of course what we now know is the firing of US Attorneys scandal…. The minimal that absolutely is needed to get us back on the page of law is to have serious investigative hearings that go up the chain of command and figure out who is responsible for what."

He noted that in spite of Justice Department investigations, and where Congressional committees held White House advisers Harriet Miers, Karl Rove and Josh Bolton in contempt, the leadership has failed to enforce their own actions by holding a vote on the resolutions. It does no good for congressional committees to get all puffed up and announce investigations and that subpoenas will be issued - if they are not going to follow through and make good the threat! (How did these people raise teenagers???)

"Congress has a constitutional duty to oversee the activities of the executive branch and our entire system of government is threatened when Congress simply folds before an obstinate executive," said Ratner. "Issuing contempt citations against Bolten, Miers, and Rove should be Congress's first order of business in 2008."

Another attorney on the conference call, Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild, pointed out that the when the Bush administration enshrined torture as national policy, that action violated three ratified treaties, as well as the US statute outlawing torture. The illegal war of aggression in Iraq, and the ongoing occupation of that country violates the US ratified UN charter.

Also speaking with reporters was Jesselyn Raddack, a former Justice Department ethics lawyer who served as an advisor during the interrogation of John Walker Lindh (the "American Taliban"). Raddack said, "My e-mails documented my advice against interrogating Lindh without a lawyer, and concluded that the FBI committed an ethics violation when it did so anyway. Both the CIA videotapes and my e-mails were destroyed, in part, because officials were concerned that they documented controversial interrogation methods that could put agency officials in legal jeopardy…. " Raddack pointed to the Department of Justice's investigations of Enron and Arthur Anderson for obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence, and the need for the same aggressive oversight and legal proceedings in these scandals.

By affixing their signatures to the document, those in our society who are charged with defending the Constitution took a solid and steady first step toward demanding the Congress follow their lead and stand up. The actions of this administration has put this country on the path to illegality, and that the United States has abandoned the moral high ground by abandoning our long-standing commitment to human rights.

Without accountability for the illegality of this administration, we face a harrowing future.

I am grateful that the guardians of the Social Contract are standing up.

I choose to stand with them.