SCOTUS will hear the case of Ashcroft, et al., v. Iqbal

The high court announced this morning that it will hear the case brought against former AG John Ashcroft and current FBI director Robert Muller in the next term. The ruling will spell out when the cabinet officers can be sued for Constitutional violations carried out by their subordinates.

The Iqbal case grows out of a lawsuit that was filed against former AG Ashcroft, director Mueller and others in their command chain following the post-9-11 roundup of men of Arab descent or who had been identified as Muslims, in an apparent clear violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The suit does not challenge the actual roundup, but focuses instead on conditions in the federal prison facility in Brooklyn where many of the men were held.

We have been appalled by the roundup of individuals based on their ethnicity and/or faith since it happened and will be watching the next session for the ruling to be handed down.

~~BG

A cruel mocking land where decency knows no home

The wingnuts were right - 9/11 did change everything - but not the way they couch it. Because of the insanity that has set in after that heinous attack, we have become something worse than what we were determined to defeat in the Cold War on ideological grounds.

Anything goes for Americans, and all other comers are less than human, bereft of rights and not entitled to dignity, subjected to treatment that would set up howls from every quarter if any country dared to subject any exceptional American to such treatment.

The next president needs to dissolve the Department of Homeland Security and all of the agencies that fall under that umbrella and return to the 9/10/01 status quo ante that served us quite well and even warned against the impending terror attacks over a month before they happened, only to be dismissed with a smirking "okay, you've covered your ass now."

The Washington Post has a long and sickening article on deportations in which people are sedated with dangerous psychotropic drugs normally used to control episodes of extreme psychosis and violence.

In a Chicago holding cell early one evening in February 2006, five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador, according to a nurse's account in his deportation file. As they pinned him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his coveralls into his right buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted, "Nighty-night."

Such episodes are among more than 250 cases The Washington Post has identified in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003 -- the year the Bush administration handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland Security's new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.

Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees, unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international human rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places.

Federal officials have seldom acknowledged publicly that they sedate people for deportation. The few times officials have spoken of the practice, they have understated it, portraying sedation as rare and "an act of last resort." Neither is true, records and interviews indicate.

Records show that the government has routinely ignored its own rules, which allow deportees to be sedated only if they have a mental illness requiring the drugs, or if they are so aggressive that they imperil themselves or people around them.

Stung by lawsuits over two sedation cases, the agency changed its policy in June to require a court order before drugging any deportee for behavioral rather than psychiatric reasons. In at least one instance identified by The Post, the agency appears not to have followed those rules.

As a medical professional, this sickens and disgusts me, and any medical person who has carried out this immoral and possibly illegal protocol should be in front of a professional review board to determine the status of their license and perhaps refer for criminal charges of assault.

Let me give an example - if I am on duty in the lab and the police bring in a person they have arrested for driving under the influence for a blood test to back up the breathalyzer, I have to have that patient's consent before I perform a venipuncture under a very specific set of protocols for collection of forensic evidence. If that patient refused to give consent, and I perform the procedure anyway - I would be criminally liable for assaulting that patient and could see jail time as a result. And in that instance, evidence is being collected for presentation at trial - nothing is injected which carries inherent risk of injury or death via a physiological reaction.

There is simply no way that the sedation protocol passes muster, I don't care what those sadistic thugs Yoo and Addington (you just know that those feckless thugs wrote the legal opinions that allow this apostasy) say about it.

Citizens should be pissed of, sure - but every single medical professional in the country should be contacting their representatives and senators, and our professional organizations as well. I don't like being made complicit in crimes against humanity - and when medical escorts are prohibited from carrying out follow-up doses during layovers on foreign soil because it violates human rights laws, what the fuck else could a reasonable person call it?

I hang my head in shame.

But it is a big deal

I am still kinda in shock, trying to get my head around not just the glib dismissal of torture by this president in an interview on ABC last Friday. Torture was pre-authorized like a god-damned elective medical procedure, before the legal opinions were fixed to fit the policy.

"So?" doesn't shock me, not coming from this criminal gang. The collective yawn from the American people, on the other hand, breaks my fucking heart.

The Kansas City Star editorial board writes: "It's shameful that the United States has become, under the Bush administration, a country that tortures prisoners. This is a dark stain on our country's honor and ideals.

"And it was disturbing, although not surprising, to learn this week that top White House officials, from Vice President Dick Cheney on down, were deeply involved in shaping and approving a torture policy -- including giving assent to specific harsh techniques such as waterboarding, according to Associated Press. . . .

"ABC News, which broke the story Wednesday, reported that some of the principals understood the moral swamp into which they were wading.

"'Why are we talking about this in the White House?' Ashcroft is quoted as saying at one meeting. 'History will not judge this kindly.'

"Nor will history judge the American people kindly if we look the other way."

I agree with the Star's Editorial Board.

This is a big deal. This is a huge deal. It cuts to the heart of what defines America.

It was not so long ago that I lived every single day of my life on the front lines of the Cold War, frequently I lived atop hundreds of megatons of instant death and destruction, and sent my husband to work on those doomsday machines every singe day.

We won that one, and the reason we won was we had the more attractive guiding principles. We didn't torture. We didn't send people to gulags. We didn't rig elections. We didn't pledge fealty to authoritarianism in a quest to quiet our irrational fears.

In short, we were just flat out better people. Or at least we fancied ourselves as such, and we thought the white hats looked quite fetching.

I want to be proud again.

I want to be right again. Not me personally. I have been all along, and I have the archives to prove it.

I mean I want America to be right again, as in morally correct.

Impeach this sneaky bastard already!

On March 1, 1976, in the the wake of the abuses of COINTELPRO being made public after contentious congressional hearings over domestic spying and assassinations, President Ford created an intelligence oversight board of private citizens with top security clearances to rein in abuses and sniff out illegal spying activities. Ford created the Intelligence Oversight Board to serve as a watchdog over spying agencies by executive order to put off an angry congress enacting more sweeping legislation to curtail the activities of the intelligence communities against American citizens. At the time Ford issued the order he told the Congress "I believe [the changes] will eliminate abuses and questionable activities on the part of the foreign intelligence agencies while at the same time permitting them to get on with their vital work of gathering and assessing information."

Thirty two years later - practically to the day - the current occupant signed a super-double-secret executive order gutting the oversight panel and stripping it of authority.

"It's quite clear that the Bush administration officials who were around in the 1970s are settling old scores now. Here they are even preventing oversight within the executive branch. They have closed the books on the post-Watergate era," said Tim Sparapani, senior legislative counsel to the ACLU.

But Bush downsized the board's mandate to be an aggressive watchdog against such problems in an executive order issued on Feb. 29, the eve of the anniversary of the day Ford's order took effect. The White House said the timing of the new order was "purely coincidental.

"Under the old rules, whenever the oversight board learned of intelligence activity that it believed might be "unlawful or contrary to executive order," it had a duty to notify both the president and the attorney general. But Bush's order deleted the board's authority to refer matters to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation, and the new order said the board should notify the president only if other officials are not already "adequately" addressing the problem. (emphasis added)

Bush's order also terminated the board's authority to oversee each intelligence agency's general counsel and inspector general, and it erased a requirement that each inspector general file a report with the board every three months. Now only the agency directors will decide whether to report any potential lawbreaking to the panel, and they have no schedule for checking in.

Two attorneys who have served as deputy and general counsel to the CIA denounced the order, insisting that the board had been reduced to little more than paper-pushers, and that weakening it undermines the public trust. "An organization like this gives some level of comfort that there is an independent review capability. Changes like this appear to water down an organization that contributes to the public's confidence," said the former general counsel.

But gutting intelligence oversight was just the beginning. That executive order, EO 11905, banned assassinations. Yet Bush drew up a list of suspected al Qaeda operatives to be summarily executed.

It is abundantly clear that the people who are around now who were around during Nixon are all sociopaths. They weren't content to count their blessings, thank their lucky stars and slink away in shame to molest the American people no more. No, they weren't content to be thankful they didn't all go to prison. They came back with an agenda, to settle old scores.

It was a mistake to pardon Nixon - and we can't make the same mistake again. The Republic wouldn't survive a third try by these fascist bastards.

It is imperative that we impeach these bastards, before he takes out the pardon pen and blanket-pardons the whole lot of them.

Justice demands public accountability, not weary resignation.

What's not to get?