I wanted to add something to what Glenn wrote in response to your question about why Dawn Johnson hasn't been confirmed yet.

Obama appointed a Harvard Law professor to act in the interim for her until she is confirmed. I don't recall his name at this time but her spot isn't vacant. I feel a lot of people think because she isn't in her job yet that this explains all of the crazy positions being taken by the DOJ and Obama. Or that when Dawn Johnson gets confirmed she will become the magic bullet that makes this all go away.

I personally don't expect to see any big change of direction with or without Dawn Johnson on the job even if she more than likely agrees with us.

Meanwhile, former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed is engaged in what The Guardian calls "an urgent legal attempt to prevent the US courts from destroying crucial evidence that he says proves he was abused while being held at the detention camp detainee." The photographs -- which show Mohamed after he had been severely beaten and which he claims was posted on the door to his cage "because he had been beaten so badly that it was difficult for the guards to identify him" -- is scheduled to be destroyed by the U.S. Government

The Guardian article seems to imply that Mohammed's lawyers have no photographic evidence of the abuse. But a New York Times article from Monday says:

In an affidavit filed in June with United States District Court, the former inmate, Binyam Mohamed, said that video and still cameras had documented his abuse, and that he had seen some of the images, which he said were in the possession of his lawyers.... ....Mr. Mohamed said that his lawyers were prohibited by the rules governing counsel for Guantánamo detainees from talking about the photographs, but that he was not.

One of his lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith, confirmed that he had a copy of at least one photo, and that he could not talk about it. He provided a copy of the affidavit by Mr. Mohamed, filed in connection to a pending legal action that began before his release.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/world/americas/07mohamed.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=binyam&st=cse

In other news, I read a very disturbing article in Mother Jones "A Thousand Little Gitmos", relating the story of Syed Mehmood Hashmi, a naturalized US citizen currently held under Guantanamo like conditions at the Special Housing Unit at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in NYC. The US is using secret evidence and Hashmi lives under unbelievably brutal and somewhat obviously illegal conditions in custody.

I couldn't find it electronically, but pick it up if you happen to spy the July/August edition of Mother Jones.

Power is the correct word. It isn't the right or legitimate authority that allows the current regime, the prior regime or any regime to hold aquitted persons indefinitely; it is power (they have a bigger gang than anyone else). Governments (all gangs)deal in force or threat of force. That is as far as their thinking takes them. Anytime force is an option to get or do what they want they will exercise it. Maybe it is just human nature, parent to child, in the school yard, on the battlefield.

Here are my questions:

Obama: Gutless, faux liberal and political coward, or committed fascist?

NPR: Cheerful, committed Pravda, or timid prisoner of its political masters?

Pre-Alzheimer sat in and keyboard dyslexia. How else do you explain 'there is one volition tere'?

Sorry.

For the moment some people will stay in jail. No, I don't know how long. I trust that they will not be tortured in the interim. You don't.

-- calamine

Do you also "trust" that each of the individuals of which you so flippantly say, "for the moment some people will stay in jail" that you have any insight or right to judge for them as to what constitutes torture to them?

Do you think it might be possible that an innocent person being detained for years, with an indefinite date, if any date, for their release, does not feel tortured? If so, Is there some difference between yourself and those people that you can point to that would convince anyone that you, under those same circumstances, would not find yourself feeling tortured?

Glenn wrote:

"Shepard actually thinks that 'torture' is determined by the motive with which the suffering is inflicted. The connection between the Government's ability to get away with these things and the media's warped view of its role really cannot be overstated."

It's not sunlight but intelligence that is the best disinfectant. And you are wiping her clean.

National Pandering Radio

Pardon me for interrupting this Obama bashfast out here in the Greenwald Fantasia (where the perfect "rule of law" sits, just over the horizon by the cotton trees), but this is utter bullshit:

All of this underscores what has clearly emerged as the core "principle" of Obama justice when it comes to accused Terrorists -- namely, "due process" is pure window dressing with only one goal: to ensure that anyone the President wants to keep imprisoned will remain in prison.

The troubling and complex decisions made by the Obama Administration are not made in a vacuum, Glenn.

There is no good decision to be made in cases tainted by Bush torture and illegal coercion of confessions.

As a lawyer, you've heard of Inheritances. For instance, if Michael Jackson dies owing 500 million dollars, this debt is not inherited by his children. They do not have to pay it back.

Yet if Michael Jackson dies with a 500 million dollar estate, that money does pass down to his children.

The law does not view "debt" as a continuation to be passed down automatically. There are allowances. To use a wingnutty term, the sins of the father do not pass down to the child.

Barack Obama has inherited a legal fiasco of which a significant amount of terrorists have had the legal cases against them so tainted by corruption and abuse, that they will likely be found "not guilty" due to simply to Bush incompetence.

In this scenario, no good choices remain.

"Due Process" is not granted to those innocents who lose their lives as the politely euphemistic "collateral damage" when we hunt down terrorists, yet you'd hardly find anyone in America who would argue that in pursuit of terrorists, some "collatoral damage" must occur.

We accept the death of innocents as part of the war on our enemies.

No one brings charges against the American military if 20 innocent people die in a bombing raid on an Al Qaeda hideout in an urban area of Pakistan. It is understood.

Yet those innocents who were killed clearly had their "due process" taken away, no?

This is a far murkier form of collatoral damage, self inflicted as it was by a corrupt previous administration.

But to divorce the tough choices Obama has to make from the non-linear nature of the election change marked on January 20th, 2009, is to live in fantasy land. Yes it would be nice if the "rule of law" applied equally and always to every scenario.

But this country has been applying the law unequally to women, black people, Native Americans, immigrants, poor people, etc. since its inception.

The arc bends towards justice, but it is a bumpy ride.

To claim Barack Obama is worse than Bush because he's attempting to extricate himself from a fiasco of Bush crime is to thunder down from the holier-than-thou cloud known as Sanctimonious Hypothetical America (or Brazil, as the case may be).

A legal line must be drawn between the cleanup of the Bush years and the reinstatement of law that begun on January 20th. It is imperfect, flawed and hypocritical. It violates the rule of law on every level.

It is also the only response to the lawlessness that preceded Obama and is now his inheritance.

We must appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate the law breaking under Bush. But to whine about Obama holding terrorists simply because the Bushies tarnished the legal case beyond repair is to call for a system of justice that has never existed in war time, never existed in America, and doesn't exist outside a first year law student playing hypothetical games while cramming for midterms.