Check It Out for Wednesday, May 20th
William Fisher at IPS News: on the Obama administration's extrajudicial "national security court" that is drawing broad criticism from human rights and legal experts
"The administration of President Barack Obama is considering the creation of a national security court to try cases in which there is enough reliable intelligence to hold a foreign terrorism suspect in preventive detention, but not enough to bring a case in federal court or even through military commissions.
"Human rights advocates and legal experts confirm that the new institution is among the options being considered by the Justice Department Task Force Obama created to determine how best to adjudicate the cases of suspected terrorists held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama has pledged to close that detention centre by January 2010.
"But the idea of establishing a National Security Court is attracting widespread criticism because it would mean keeping some terrorism suspects on U.S. soil indefinitely.
"Prof. Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois law school agrees. He told IPS, "The proposal to establish a ‘National Security Court’ here in the United States would constitute a U.S. Constitutional abomination."
" 'It would simply import the Gitmo kangaroo courts into the United States itself and purport to render these U.S. domestic kangaroo national security courts part of our longstanding constitutional system for the administration of justice going back to the foundation of our Republic,' he said.
"A similar view is expressed by Chip Pitts, president of the Board of Directors of the Bill of Rights Defence Committee. He told IPS,
" 'The basic problem with National Security Courts is similar to that with military commissions or other second-tier systems not offering the full panoply of basic human rights and civil liberties to defendants: they posit a category of people (suspected terrorists) purportedly not entitled to basic constitutional and human rights including a full and genuine presumption of innocence with the associated opportunities to fairly defend themselves.'
"He added, 'These have been the very concerns prompting the U.S. to routinely object when such courts are used by other countries.'
"He said, 'The bottom-line is that such courts – like military commissions applying outside of the usual circumstances (real-world war, with battlefields etc) – are neither needed nor a good idea. They would risk being broadened and subjected to mission creep, but even if they can be limited to the circumstances contemplated would be an alarming step along the road toward a very different country indeed from what our founders envisioned.' "
Brian Beutler at TPMdc backgrounds the Capitol Hill Dems blocking Gitmo closure funding.
"We reported earlier that the Senate voted overwhelmingly this afternoon to strip the funding for the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay from a supplemental war spending bill.
"The move has angered many. It comes a day after Senate Democrats announced they would withhold the money until the White House settles on a comprehensive plan for dealing with detainees--and critics on the left are charging that Democratic leaders have caved to Republican scare tactics.
"That's certainly part of the story--but a bigger problem, according to several sources, has been the White House's failure, for months, to co-ordinate strategy and messaging on the issue with Congress, where the bulk of opposition to the plan lies.
"On his first day in office, President Obama signed an executive order calling for the detention facility to be shuttered within a year. Four months later, strategists and Hill staffers say the White House didn't follow through. According to one strategist who advises Democrats on this issue, "things kind of got lost a little in the period between when the executive order was signed and today. There wasn't much direction from the White House to Capitol Hill. There was a breakdown between the White House and Congress."
"What happened next will come as no surprise to students of Washington politics. Republicans rushed to fill the ensuing leadership void, and high-jacked the issue entirely. They have insisted for months now that closing the Guantanamo prison is the first step in a process that will result in terrorists walking American streets, and Democrats have met those charges with silence. (A day after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ceded rhetorical ground to the GOP--"we will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States"--Senate Republicans released a memo headlined "Meet Your New Neighbor, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad?" Reid has since clarified his position, calling Obama's approach the right one.)
"Guantanamo isn't the only issue on which the White House and Senate leaders have been out of sync recently. Last week I reported that a similar leadership vacuum is responsible for the long wait Dawn Johnsen has had to endure as Democrats struggle to come up with the 60 votes they'll need to overcome a filibuster before they can confirm her to run the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel."
"Despite renewed vows to protect Appalachian waterways from the ravages of mountaintop coal mining, the Environmental Protection Agency has recently authorized a number of pending mountaintop permits that will bury dozens of streams in the nation’s oldest mountain range. The move has left mining supporters cheering the federal endorsement of a popular extraction method, environmentalists wondering if the Obama administration truly intends to prioritize water quality concerns above those of the powerful coal industry, and both sides unsure what to expect of mountaintop permitting in the future.
"After reviewing 48 pending Appalachian mining applications in recent weeks, the EPA has rejected just six over concerns that the projects would harm local water supplies. Most of the approved projects, EPA says, are surface mines, including some mountaintop removal projects. Combined, EPA concedes, the operations will fill scores of Appalachian valleys with mining waste — a process that will bury miles (some say hundreds of miles) of seasonal mountain streams with debris and sludge known to carry heavy metals and other toxins likely to wash to communities below. The news has caused many strip-mining opponents to worry that the agency has backtracked on earlier vows to put science and the health of ecosystems at the forefront of its permitting decisions.
“ 'A wave of new mountaintop removal coal mines would represent a leap in the wrong direction,' Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope said in a statement. 'With the bulldozers and explosives standing by in Appalachia, the Obama administration should take bold action to protect communities, streams and mountains before it’s too late.' "
"The neo-conservatives have all but been vanquished. But the Barack Obama administration in the United States is making a solitary exception in the case of Zalmay Khalilzad. He is back on the Washington circuit, repeating an amazing trapeze act which has few parallels in the chronicles of political opportunism.
"Now he is reportedly negotiating his way back to his old hunting ground in Kabul. The New York Times newspaper's ace Washington correspondent has broken the story quoting senior American and Afghan officials that Zal could assume a "powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government". Such a position, a senior US administration official has been quoted as saying, involves Zal serving as "a prime minister, except not prime minister because he wouldn't be responsible to a parliamentary system".
"That's one hell of a cute way of putting a complicated matter in real perspective. Cooper reveals that officials in the Obama administration wouldn't admit they are behind the seamless idea, but apparently Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Af-Pak representative Richard Holbrooke are all seized of it and have been plain decent about it, leaving it to President Hamid Karzai "to decide whether to proceed".
"The old Karzai is no more the current Karzai. Zal cannot ride roughshod over him and expect him to take it in his stride, as he used to. Today, Karzai truly believes he is the leader of the Afghan people. Therefore, Zal must undergo a veritable metamorphosis himself and evolve into an altogether new butterfly. Karzai would like to be certain that Zal doesn't begin to dictate once he is ensconced in power in Kabul.
"Obama, on his part, cannot hold out any assurance to Karzai in this regard, either. It has to be left to Karzai and Zal to work out between then, which they are reportedly doing at the moment in Kabul. Nor can Karzai depend on the Afghan constitution to ensure that Zal will scrupulously function under his supervision.
"For, the real catch is that Zal will be an extra-constitutional authority, not accountable to the Afghan constitution or parliament or people or, arguably, even to Karzai himself. Karzai would apprehend that ultimately, Zal is Zal and from the time he hit the ground, he would be sprinting and it would be impossible to match his stamina for outpacing his peer group.
"To be sure, Zal will report only to Washington. All the same, Clinton, too, needs to be watchful. To quote Cooper, "While he was working for the Bush administration, Khalilzad often brushed up against other officials, including secretary of state Condoleezza Rice." Now, that's formidable dexterity - to bypass Condi and deal directly with Bush.
"The million-dollar question, however, is what the Obama administration is hoping to achieve by inserting Zal into the extraordinary pack of hugely ambitious American high-fliers who are hovering around the Hindu Kush already. As things stand, Holbrooke by himself has a reputation as a "bulldozer".
"Then there is the legendary commander with the Roman name, Central Command chief General David Petraeus. At the field level, Petraeus has just put one of his favorites in as the new commander of US forces in Afghanistan so that he has a total grip on what is going on - General Stanley McChrystal. The American media estimate that apart from top-notch soldierly qualities, McChrystal has a knack for maintaining excellent chemistry with politicians.
"Taking all factors into account, Karzai cannot be faulted if he draws the right conclusion that the raison d'etre of Zal's insertion into the Kabul power structure is to incrementally eject him out of it. It is all a bit Kafkaesque - the Obama administration expects Karzai to cooperate to commit political suicide."
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