I have been covering the Fourth Congress Against the Death Penalty sponsored by the United Nations and the international abolition movement, which brought together anti-death penalty groups from all over the world, and featured talks and workshops with a number of people, several from the US, who had spent years and even decades on death rows before being found innocent of the crimes that had put them there.

In view of their agonies and torments, my own little injury seems rather pathetic, but it did give me a chance, as the debate over how to deal with America’s health care crisis drags on in Washington, to see in person the workings of a non-socialist model of health care–but one that controls prices and also mandates (that word that strikes terror into every Republican heart) that everyone buy insurance.

The answer is, it works pretty damned well!

When I got up from my sprawled position on the sidewalk and stood, there were gasps of horror from my companions as they looked at my gaping wound. Blood began pouring from it and refused to be stanched. I was walked back the block or so to the International Center where someone got out an emergency medical kit and cleaned me up a bit. Then an ambulance was called.

The three EMT guys in the ambulance competently and professionally checked me our for signs of a concussion, found none, and let me climb in back and sit. On the way to the hospital we discussed their work. The big difference between them and drivers in cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Philadelphia, where I’ve lived, is that they said they had almost never had to transport a gunshot victim. “We have a lot of knifings in the summer for some reason–usually drug related,” said one EMT. “But no gunshot wounds.”

But the big difference came when we got to the big public University of Geneva teaching hospital that they chose for my treatment.  Exiting the ambulance, the men led me without stopping right past the intake and billing office, into the emergency room, where they brought me to the doctor in charge. She checked me out and, determining that I was not a serious case, dispatched me to the waiting room adjacent to the ER. It was equipped with free internet service, so I was able to contact my family back in the US while I waited.

Having been triaged into a low priority category, I sat for about an hour in what proved to be a clean, well-appointed ER operation. Unlike urban ERs I’ve visited over the years in the US, which tend to be controlled chaos, this place was calm and smooth-running. Maybe it’s because there weren’t police rushing in every so often delivering serious injured arrestees or victims. (Traffic here seems more orderly than what I’m used to too, plus there is a paucity of over-weight “muscle cars” and SUVs, so there may be fewer crash victims coming into the ER also.)

In any case my turn for treatment came soon enough. The doctor and a nurse did a careful job of sewing me up, pulling the wound together with two layers of stitches. Then they sent me on my way, with a letter of instructions to my American doctor about what they’d done, and when he should plan on pulling out the stitches.

On the way out, I passed through the billing room, where the nurse introduced me to a billing office clerk.  My bill for the ER visit: $200.

Now that is probably between 400 percent and 900 percent less than what the same injury would have cost in an American hospital ER–and in an American ER, I might not have even been stitched up by a doctor. (A friend in Philadelphia from Puerto Rico who went to Temple University’s public teaching hospital emergency room with a nasty case of the flu was given some aspirin and sent home a few years ago with a bill for $2000).  Clearly the highly regulated private insurance plans that every Swiss person (including any non-citizen resident staying longer than three months) is mandated to buy (low-income people and the unemployed get subsidized), are keeping the hospital and doctor charges low.

One big difference between what is being offered up as insurance “reform” by House, Senate and President Obama, and what the Swiss have, is that every Swiss person buys a basic health insurance plan on which the Swiss insurance companies are barred from making a penny of profit. The insurance firms can offer highly profitable supplemental plans that cover amenities like private rooms, but they must also offer the basic plans at competitive rates. There is no “managed care”–the euphemistic term for the common American insurance plans that actually manage no care for enrollees. Patients can choose their own doctors and hospitals and don’t go through medical gatekeepers to get authorized for treatment. They do have co-pays for treatment, but the total deductible outlay per person ranges from 300-2500 Swiss Franks per year (about $275-$2300) depending upon the plan chosen by the enrollee.

“Our insurance is not cheap, and it keeps getting more expensive,” Evelyne Giordani, the coordinator of Lifespark, a Swiss-based anti-death penalty organization, told me. “But it is still a lot better than what you have to pay in the US.”

Well,  of course, many Americans have some of their insurance premium paid for by their employer–an arrangement which American businesses actually like and have lobbied to keep, knowing that they are just paying for it with money that they aren’t paying in higher wages. (Workers only think they are not paying when the premiums are covered as a benefit, all or in part, by the employer.) American employers actually like being the health insurance provider because where the Swiss, like their fellow Europeans with more socialist-style or single-payer style health systems, aren’t tethered to their jobs by the serf-like bonds of health insurance, most Americans have to worry that if they quit, get fired, or go out on strike, they and their families are then left at the mercy of the health care industry. That in fact is a major reason American workers are so much more docile and cowed by management than are their European counterparts.

So all in all, the Swiss have it pretty good. They’ve got excellent health care, available to all. They aren’t being held for ransom by employers. They have complete freedom of choice of physician, hospital and course of treatment. The have reasonable costs for their care. And they are still only collectively spending just over 10 percent of GDP per year on health care. That’s more than the next most costly country, Canada, which devotes 9 percent of GDP to health care with its single-payer Medicare-for-all type system. But it’s still a far cry from the staggering 17.5 percent of GDP that gets pumped into the medical industrial complex in the US, where nonetheless 40 million Americans remain left out of the system, with no ready access to medical care at all.

The one place where Swiss health care and American health care have something in common is ambulance service. While my care in the hospital was incredibly cheap, my bill for the ambulance ride was $730, which is about what I expect it would have cost me in the US (maybe a little less).  One difference though–most of that bill would be covered in Switzerland. I’m less confident about getting reimbursed by my Blue Cross plan, though. They’ll probably figure out some way to weasel out of paying for it.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Photo/Wikimedia

So much for the First Amendment.

Morris Davis, the retired Air Force Colonel who served as the Chief Prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo from September 2005 until his resignation in October 2007, has just lost his job at the Congressional Research Service (a branch of the Library of Congress) for writing, in his personal capacity, an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, in which he drew on his wealth of experience of the Commissions to criticize the Obama administration for its decision to prosecute some Guantánamo prisoners in federal courts, and others in Military Commissions.

Davis also wrote a letter to the Washington Post, in which he criticized former Attorney General Michael Mukasey for scaremongering about the administration’s decision to try Guantánamo prisoners in federal courts, and he was admonished for that too.

In a letter dated Nov. 20, Daniel P. Mulhollan, the director of CRS, told Col. Davis that he had not shown “awareness that your poor judgment could do serious harm to the trust and confidence Congress reposes in CRS,” and notified him that he would not be kept on after his one-year probationary period at CRS ends on Dec. 21.

The ACLU immediately stepped in, sending a letter on Friday to Dr. Jim Billington, the Librarian of Congress, arguing that “CRS violated the First Amendment when it fired Davis for speaking as a private citizen about matters having nothing to do with his job there, and that CRS must reinstate Davis to his position in order to avoid litigation.”

Aden Fine, staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group, said, “The First Amendment protects Col. Davis’s right to speak and write as a private citizen about issues on which he has personal knowledge. Col. Davis didn’t give up his right to express his opinions and first-hand knowledge about a matter of such public importance when he left the military commissions system and went to work at CRS.”

In correspondence over the weekend, Col. Davis reinforced the ACLU’s views, explaining:

I am the head of the Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division at the Congressional Research Service (one of five CRS research divisions) at the Library of Congress.  My division does not now nor has it ever had responsibility for providing Congress with advice on military commissions; that responsibility resides with the American Law Division … The Library of Congress has a regulation on outside activities for staff and it “encourages” outside writing and speaking on topics outside the staff member’s area of responsibility and the Congressional Research Service has a similar policy … In short, it was clear that I was prohibited from expressing my opinions publicly on matters within my area of responsibility, but I believe I retained the same right as all citizens to express opinions on matter outside the scope of my official duties.

He added:

The First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech and the Supreme Court has long recognized that public employment does not override that right (although regulation of speech is permissible when related to an employee’s official duty … and as noted, I have absolutely no official duty connected to military commissions). It is ironic that our offices are located in the James Madison Building, which is named for the “Father of the Constitution” and the primary architect of the Bill of Rights who led the effort to secure the right of free speech. I suspect Mr. Madison would be surprised to learn that the right he cherished is denied those working in the building that bears his name.

Morris Davis and the ACLU are right, of course, and I hope that Davis is reinstated. Even aside from the fact that he should be entitled to express his personal opinions under his First Amendment rights, it is difficult to see how his published comments could possibly be construed as demonstrating “poor judgment” that “could do serious harm to the trust and confidence Congress reposes in CRS.”

In his Wall Street Journal article on November 10, for example, Col. Davis stated only that the administration’s decision to try some prisoners in federal court and others in Military Commissions was “a mistake.” As he explained, “It will establish a dangerous legal double standard that gives some detainees superior rights and protections, and relegates others to the inferior rights and protections of military commissions. This will only perpetuate the perception that Guantánamo and justice are mutually exclusive.”

And in his letter to the Washington Post, he chided former AG Mukasey for claiming that the decision to try prisoners in federal courts “comes down to a choice between protecting the American people and showcasing American justice,” and also for implying that the Commissions were “essential to keep detainees from returning to terrorism.” As he added, “The Geneva Conventions permit detaining the enemy during armed conflicts to prevent them from causing future harm. Criminal trials punish past misconduct. Suggesting that the choice is either criminal prosecution or freedom is false.”

Ironically (given his subsequent treatment), Col. Davis’s comments about the Commissions were actually rather constructive, as he pointed out that the administration “could legitimately choose to prosecute detainees in either forum — federal courts or military commissions — and satisfy its legal obligations,” noting only that “The problem is trying to have it both ways.” He also explained, “It is not as if double-standard justice is required to keep suspected terrorists off our streets. Those detainees who cannot be prosecuted can still be detained under rules the administration approves — likely in the next several months — for the indefinite detention of those who pose a threat to us during this ongoing armed conflict.”

Jut as ironic is the fact that Davis’s dismissal follows nearly a year at CRS in which he has, in fact, been the soul of discretion regarding his former role as the Chief Prosecutor of the Commissions, the politicization that drove him to resign, and the comments he made in February 2008 that led to the immediate resignation of William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s Legal Counsel, even though countless journalists (myself included) would dearly love to talk to him about these matters.

Arguably, no one knew more — or, at least, felt more keenly — the politicization of the Commission process in 2007, after the system was revived by Congress in the fall of 2006 (following a Supreme Court ruling in June 2006, which found that it violated both the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice).

Detailed accounts of Davis’ resignation — and his subsequent explanations of his reasons for doing so, which strike at the heart of the Bush administration’s torture regime, and its attempts to prosecute the victims of torture over Davis’s objections — can be found, in particular, in my article, “The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials,” but to conclude this account with a concise explanation, it is worth noting the following passages taken from that article:

[I]n a blistering op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, two months after his resignation, Col. Davis stated, “I was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, until Oct. 4, the day I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system. I resigned on that day because I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively or responsibly.”

[Col. Davis] explained that the particular trigger for his decision was [a] memo … informing him that he had been placed in a chain of command under Haynes. Stating that he resigned “a few hours after” being informed of this, he mentioned that “Haynes was a controversial nominee for a lifetime appointment to the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, but his nomination died in January 2007, in part because of his role in authorizing the use of the aggressive interrogation techniques some call torture.” He added, “I had instructed the prosecutors in September 2005 [shortly after taking the job] that we would not offer any evidence derived by waterboarding, one of the aggressive interrogation techniques the administration has sanctioned.”

In February 2008, Col. Davis told Ross Tuttle of the Nation about a conversation he had with Haynes in August 2005:

“[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, which had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions.’”

This, I’m sure you’ll agree, is far more explosive than Col. Davis’s op-ed and letter regarding the Military Commissions, but even had he chosen to talk about these matters, he should have been free to do so. The fact that he has not is a loss for those of us who wish to see the Bush administration held accountable for its crimes (and who are keen to follow the chain of command from Haynes, via Susan Crawford, the Commissions’ Convening Authority, to Dick Cheney and David Addington), but it also provides another demonstration that, when it came to exercising his freedom of speech whilst employed by the CRS, Col. Davis had no intention of demonstrating “poor judgment” at all.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

That AUMF was the handiwork of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and it was rammed through House and Senate with almost no debate in the wake of the 9-11 attacks and then used to justify most of the subsequent assaults on the Constitution and Bill of Rights that are still haunting America and the world today.

While Congress saw the 2001 AUMF as an authorization to launch an attack on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan  (an attack that quickly toppled the Taliban government, but that famously failed to crush Al Qaeda, thanks to its being called off half a year later so troops could be shifted to a new war in the making against Iraq), Bush and Cheney interpreted it as a “declaration of war” in a “global war on terror,” which they claimed had no border, no end, and which they even tried to claim extended to within the boundaries of the US.

So anxious were Bush and Cheney to be permanent wartime generalissimos, unfettered by Constitutional constraints, that just minutes before the measure went to the Senate for a vote, according to then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, they sought to add the words “in the United States” after the phrase “appropriate force” in the language of the resolution. As Daschle, who wisely refused their request, notes, “This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas—where we all understood he wanted authority to act—but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens.”

The point though, is that the 2001 AUMF was in fact an authorization to use military force to go after terrorism.  It was not an authorization to conduct a full-scale war against another nation, or to become enmeshed in a civil war in another nation, which is what is going on in Afghanistan today. That, in fact, is why even Bush felt he needed a second AUMF to authorize his invasion of Iraq.

President Obama is trying to finesse this by falsely claiming, with a straight face, that Afghanistan is the “epicenter or terrorist activity” in the world. He is deliberately trying—and getting full support from the complicit corporate media—to conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda to justify his absurd claim, too, by also falsely claiming in his speech that several unnamed “terrorists” have been apprehended in the US who were sent here recently from some ill-defined terror central inside of Afghanistan.

The truth is that not one act of terrorism outside of Afghanistan has been attributed to the Taliban of Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban, while admittedly a brutal, reactionary, fundamentalist group of militant Islamists, are not global jihadis bent on wreaking havoc in the Western world or even in the rest of the Islamic world. They are a domestic Afghan military and political movement that is seeking to return to power in Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda, the organization that was the target of the Congressional AUMF resolution in 2001, has long since abandoned Afghanistan for safer, greener pastures.

This being the case, Obama’s war in Afghanistan, and especially his decision to intensify it dramatically, is being conducted illegally, without any actual authorization from Congress, as required by the Constitution.

If the president wants to mire the US further and more deeply in a civil war in Afghanistan at this point, aimed at defeating the Taliban in that country, he should at least be required to obtain a new resolution in Congress authorization that action.

As a constitutional lawyer, the president knows that he is acting illegally, which is why he was so careful in his speech to West Point cadets on Tuesday to make the bogus claim that Afghanistan remains the epicenter of terrorism. But governing by lies is no way to govern, and the American people will eventually realize that they have been lied to. Indeed, the fact that a majority of Americans, according to polls, want to see the Afghan War ended, shows that even given the biased pro-war media, most people understand this on some level.

The Bush/Cheney administration did much to undermine and wreck Constitutional government during their eight years in office. Many people had hoped that Obama was serious when he said during his campaign that he wanted to restore Constitutional governance if elected. But by his latest move, putting the US into a full-scale war in Afghanistan on the basis of a lie and without any genuine war resolution from Congress, he has joined his predecessor in further debasing both the Constitution and language itself.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

The vote follows a similar climbdown two week ago by the House of Representatives, which had recently allowed itself to be mesmerized by a paranoid motion proposed by Rep. Hal Rogers, (R-Ken.), and the bill will now be signed into law by President Obama.

However, Congress is still interfering to an unacceptable degree in the administration’s plans, insisting, as AFP described it, that the President provides lawmakers with “a detailed assessment of the possible security risk 45 days before” prisoners are brought to trial in the United States,” including “details of the dangers involved, steps to diminish the possible threat, the legal rationale for the transfer, and assurances to the governor of the receiving state that the individual poses little or no security risk.”

In addition, the bill as it was finally passed still allows lawmakers to meddle with plans to transfer prisoners to other countries, requiring as AFP put it, that prisoners “cannot be transferred to another country unless the president gives Congress the name of the detainee, the destination, a risk assessment, and the terms of a transfer.” As Lt. Col. David Frakt, the former military defense attorney for released prisoner Mohamed Jawad, explained to me recently, this is actually an example of Congress reinforcing the powers it granted itself in summer, when lawmakers insisted on being given two weeks’ notice before any prisoner — even those cleared by the courts after successful habeas corpus petitions — can be released.

In Lt. Col. Frakt’s words, what this meant was that Congress had decided that, for this two-week period, prisoners cleared by US courts can actually be held “in the status of ‘Congressional prisoner,’ a status for which there is no Constitutional authority,” and this unconstitutional power grab has not been removed in the final discussions regarding the bill.

Even so, the saddest part of the bill — which still casts the gloomiest of light on the lawmakers — is the lawmakers’ insistence that no prisoner can be released onto US soil, either on the mainland or on overseas territories like Guam or Puerto Rico. This has done nothing but alienate European countries, who are being asked to take cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture in their home countries, and, moreover, threatens to bring Congress into conflict with the Supreme Court.

Last Tuesday, as the Senate voted to allow prisoners to be brought to the US to face trial, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case of the Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), who remain in Guantánamo, even though a District Court judge ordered their release into the United States over a year ago, after the Bush administration conceded that they had no connection with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The judge, Ricardo Urbina, ruled that they be brought to the United States, because no other country had been found that would accept them, and because their continued detention in Guantánamo was unconstitutional.

As I explained in an article last week, the Justice Department, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, disagreed, as did the Court of Appeals, which ruled that issues involving the immigration of aliens were matters for the Executive and not the courts to decide, even though the men’s lawyers pointed out that this effectively gutted habeas corpus of all meaning.

President Obama, of course, failed to rise to this challenge by bringing these men to the United States, and, ever since, his administration has scrabbled around, in a generally undignified manner, trying to find new homes for them, sending four to Bermuda in June, and hoping that the rest would be relocated to the remote Pacific island of Palau.

However, as the Washington Post noted in a principled editorial last Wednesday, the stumbling block to this otherwise workable plan to pretend that the United States has no obligations towards men it wrongly imprisoned for nearly eight years is that Palau has refused to take one of the men, Arkin Mahmud, who “suffers from serious mental health issues because of his detention and lengthy periods of solitary confinement.” As a result, his brother, Bahtiyar Mahnut, has decided to turn down Palau’s offer of a new home for himself, in order to stay with his brother. As the Post noted, “Unless another country accepts the brothers, they could remain in custody indefinitely — a prospect that is unconscionable and that no doubt informed the justices’ decision to hear the matter.”

The Post proceeded to explain that the Supreme Court was faced with a tricky legal decision, because the justices will be considering whether, in defense of habeas corpus, and in reference to the unique position in which the Guantánamo prisoners are held, they are being asked to decide whether a judge has the power to order the release of prisoners into the US, when all the precedents, as the Court of Appeals made clear, establish that the admission of foreigners in to the US is a matter for the executive and legislative branches of government.

However, as the Post also noted:

[T]he moral and ethical imperatives are clear and compelling. The Uighurs find themselves subject to detention not because they tried to enter the country illegally but because they were snatched in Pakistan and Afghanistan after the United States’ 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and forcibly taken to Guantánamo. The United States has complete control over the fate of these men and should take full responsibility in righting the situation. That should include narrowly crafted legislation that would allow Mr. Mahmud and Mr. Mahnut into the United States, where they could remain together and Mr. Mahmud could get the medical help he needs.

This is a bold move for one of the nation’s leading newspapers to take, but I unreservedly commend the Post’s editors for it, as it addresses a seemingly insoluble quandary, which, it seems to me, cannot otherwise be resolved. Whilst it is probable that a number of the remaining Uighurs will soon start a new life in Palau, the administration may want to think long and hard about what to do with Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut, and to be grateful that only the Washington Post has chosen to shine a spotlight on the continued imprisonment of an innocent man whose detention has not only been regarded as unconstitutional for over a year, but who also “suffers from serious mental health issues because of his detention and lengthy periods of solitary confinement.”

This report was originally published at The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Presidential power has been on a pathway of expansion beyond what the Constitution outlined, and what a government of, by, and for the people requires, since George Washington was president. That expansion, which hit the highway after World War II, got a turbo boost during the co-presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Some of the new powers that those two stole from Congress, the courts, the states, and us the people are being abused less severely in this new age of Obama; others, more so; but far more crucially, in a pattern followed by recent presidencies, all are being maintained, if not expanded, and thus more firmly cemented into place for future presidents to use. Wherever you fall on the political spectrum, you are likely to strongly oppose some major decisions of some future presidents. So it shouldn’t be hard to envision some pretty undesirable consequences that might flow from presidential power that increasingly approaches the absolute.

Our television news and newspapers don’t seem terribly interested in this story, despite scraping its surface with reports on the many “czars” Obama has appointed or lectures on the importance of renewing, or only marginally amending, the PATRIOT Act. And Congress seems, if possible, even less interested. That’s not so surprising, given that we’ve replaced the three branches of government with the two parties, so that at any given time roughly half the members of Congress take as their leader a president who is theoretically supposed to execute the will of Congress. And the other half usually obey their party’s “leaders” in Congress, whose primary interest is in electing one of their own as the next president. Both parties continue to value presidential power itself either for its uses in the present, or for when their candidate is elected. Everyone wants to inherit the imperial presidency, not constrain it.

Under these circumstances, bills to create commissions investigating presidential abuses, to place a judicial check on claims of “state secrets,” limit the use of presidential signing statements, or to allow more than eight members of Congress to be given “security” briefings by the executive branch prove not to be priorities for either party.

These days, the old-fashioned idea of checking executive abuses of existing laws through the issuance of subpoenas or by impeachment is, in Washington, widely considered a scandalous proposition. Congress impeached a judge this year who had groped his employees, but Jay Bybee, who signed secret memos purporting to legalize aggressive war and torture, and who now holds a lifetime seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, is protected from such a step by his recent membership in the executive branch (and the displeasure Fox News would express toward his impeachment).

In April, Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked Bybee to testify, and the judge refused, just as many of his former colleagues in the Bush administration had in 2007 and 2008. Leahy may be unwilling to follow up by issuing a subpoena that even the new Department of Justice might refuse to enforce. The current department, for instance, allowed the White House Counsel to negotiate partial compliance with a House Judiciary Committee subpoena by former presidential advisor Karl Rove. And if Leahy is like most members of Congress, he will not even consider the option of using the Capitol Police to enforce a subpoena himself — something that no committee has done in 75 years.

All Power to the President

Any quick survey of the powers the presidency now claims would have to include the power to make laws, the power to make wars, the power to spend money, the power to make treaties, the power to grant immunity for crimes, the power to operate in secrecy, the power to spy without warrants, the power to detain without charge, and the power to torture.

Laws are still made by Congress, but they can be rewritten via signing statements; that is, statements announcing a president’s intention to violate particular sections of the very bill he is signing into law. Neither Congress nor President Obama has thrown out all of Bush’s extensive signing statements that did indeed alter laws. In fact, Obama has announced that his subordinates will review his predecessor’s signing statements only as the need arises.

This policy might please those imagining that the Obama administration will always make the right decision about whether to maintain or reject a Bush-made amendment to a law, but it does nothing to strip the presidency of the power to use the mechanism of the signing statement to re-make or amend or alter new laws. As it happens, Obama has already published his own law-making signing statements.

Presidents now also routinely determine national policy through executive orders and, in doing so, run the country out of the White House rather than through departments headed by officials approved by Congress. They also increasingly dictate a legislative agenda to Congress — and both members of Congress and members of the public generally accept without comment or opposition that inversion of our constitutional system. And then there are the secret memos.

In those secret memos, Bush’s lawyers in the Department of Justice dutifully “legalized” numerous illegal acts, including aggressive war and torture. Despite years of public back-and-forth between the White House and the Congress over the question of whether to ban torture, any act of complicity in torture was already a felony in the U.S. code under the Anti-Torture Act, which enforced the Convention Against Torture signed by President Ronald Reagan. However, the secret Justice Department memos were taken as the final word in legality, no matter what the law said.

Obama has directed the Justice Department not to prosecute those at the highest levels responsible for producing those memos, though he has permitted consideration — whether seriously intended or not — of the possibility of prosecuting a handful of low-ranking staffers who strayed beyond the illegal policies outlined in the memos. Not only does this bestow immunity on the most prominent criminals, reversing the approach — starting at the top — that the U.S. took at the Nuremburg war crimes trials after World War II, but it has the potential to create a terrifying precedent for the future. If a president can use his justice department to legalize a crime simply by asking a lawyer to write a memo, then who can doubt that a president has something approaching absolute power?

Presidents, not Congress, do indeed make wars now, whether or not they consult Jay Bybee’s memo on the subject. They make wars without congressional declarations of war, using instead vague bills to maintain a pretense of congressional involvement — and then they don’t even comply with the terms outlined in those authorizations. Illegal (as well as unconstitutional) as they may be, these wars can be expanded into apparently permanent occupations that include the construction of gigantic military bases from which additional wars may be launched. In the process, mercenaries often take the place of soldiers, and as “private contractors” they then operate even further from congressional oversight or the law.

To invade Iraq, President Bush spent money not appropriated for that purpose. He also gave himself the power to transfer money into “black budgets” beyond the purview of all but a few members of Congress, and so use it for secret tasks signed off on by his officials. Of course, massive secret budgets under the control of the president are nothing new, though they’ve grown through the years. Neither are they constitutional or sustainable.

On October 6th, the leaders of the two parties met with President Obama and, by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s account, let him know that he could end, decrease, maintain, or escalate the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan as he saw fit. The Senate had voted the previous week not to call on war commander Stanley McChrystal for public testimony about that ongoing war until after the president determines his war policy, which of course means a war policy for all of us. Two days later, in a surprising flicker of dissent, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey released a statement suggesting that, contrary to everything he’d said for years, he recognizes that Congress has the power to choose not to fund those wars and thereby to end them.

As his presidency was winding down, George W. Bush concluded an unofficial treaty (though it was called a Status of Forces Agreement) with the government of U.S.-occupied Iraq for three more years of war there without feeling the slightest need for it to be ratified by the Senate. Ever since, the U.S. military has actually violated the terms of that document, while its key commanders continued to publicly state their intention to remain in Iraq beyond the end of 2011, a clear violation of the agreement. In the meantime, this White House has used the treaty as cover for an ongoing illegal occupation of Iraq with, at this point, 120,000 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of private contractors.

Is Congress Broken?

When many feared that Bush might pardon his subordinates for crimes he had himself authorized, the consensus among members of Congress and scholars was that he could, in fact, do such a thing. In some ways what both Bush and Obama have actually done is worse. With a big assist from Congress in the form of bills like the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act, they have worked to grant immunity for crimes without even naming the criminals or revealing what they have done. Obama’s Department of Justice is now arguing, appealing, or re-appealing in various court cases to keep secret the abuses of government officials and corporations involved in torture and warrantless spying. Recently, the Justice Department even argued that, when it comes to denying information to a court or the public, telecommunication corporations must be considered a part of the executive branch of the federal government, and earlier this year the administration threatened the British government with an end to intelligence sharing if it revealed evidence of torture.

President Obama announced that he will only claim the right to hide information from a court on the grounds that important “state secrets” are involved after careful review by lawyers at the Department of Justice. This may be an improvement over the Bush years — not exactly a hard standard to reach — but notably this decision still cedes not an ounce of power to any branch other than the executive, even as Obama’s lawyers make radical “state secrets” claims in attempts to block entire court cases, rather than over particular pieces of information.

While this president is ceding modest amounts of territory claimed by the previous one, he is ceding nothing when it comes to presidential power itself. For example, the president said he would release White House visitor logs (as the Bush administration had not), just not those already recorded, including the ones that held records of the visits of deal-making health insurance executives, nor any future logs that he thinks would endanger “national security.” That offers change of a sort, however modest, but leaves it entirely in the president’s hands to decide which logs to release.

This administration has indeed released some of the secret memos that Bush’s Department of Justice used to justify torture and never shared with the public, but only when compelled by courts. The Justice Department has, in fact, fought fiercely against their release and has redacted significant sections of them before making them public.

Bush claimed for the presidency the power to detain people without charge or legal process — and then used it. Obama stood in front of the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives in Washington and asserted the same power, in violation of the right of habeas corpus found in that torn and tattered document. Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta and presidential advisor David Axelrod have similarly made clear that the president still claims the power to engage in “harsh interrogation techniques” but chooses not to use it. Torture in this way has been transformed from a crime into a policy choice, with the intended message apparently being that we can stop torture temporarily by choosing to elect Democrats. This is perilous territory.

Perhaps presidents simply cannot be expected to give back powers gained by the executive branch, but shouldn’t we expect Congress to work to take them back on our behalf? When Alberto Gonzales resigned as attorney general, he did so because a rapidly growing list of members of Congress signed onto a one-sentence bill directing the House Judiciary Committee to investigate possible grounds for his impeachment. Such an approach toward Judge Jay Bybee could begin to restore the power of Congress to assert itself in other areas as well, while pressuring the Justice Department to enforce the law, and potentially making public a great deal of information through the subpoenas involved in any impeachment hearing, which does not permit claims of “executive privilege.” Information subpoenaed in an impeachment hearing must be produced, or the failure to produce it can become another impeachable offense.

Many of us probably consider our current president a much nicer guy than our local congressional representative. That doesn’t change the fact that influencing a president, or even a senator, via grassroots pressure is infinitely more difficult than influencing a member of the House of Representatives.

This is not a new discovery. After all, isn’t this, in part, why the House was given the power of the purse and the power of impeachment? Being closer to the ground, that body is, by its nature, going to be more amenable to democratic pressure and direction. If we want once again to have a real hand in making our nation’s policies, our best shot — admittedly still a distinctly uphill course — is to focus on the person who represents us in the House.

Unfortunately, we have to compel each of them to do something they have come to collectively fear: taking back the power originally bestowed on them and not on behalf of their party, but of their branch of government, of the Constitution to which they’ve sworn an oath, and of the proper sovereigns of this nation: we the people. Otherwise the chief legacy of the Obama years will, like those of his immediate predecessors, be the slide from republic into empire and the continuing growth of an imperial presidency.

David Swanson served as press secretary for Kucinich for President in 2004, runs the AfterDowningStreet.org website, and is the creator of Impeachbybee.org. His new book is Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press). He is now touring the country for the book. You can find out when the tour will be in your town by clicking here.

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and other big city cops are calling for a new system of “citizen watch” programs, allegedly to help them spot hidden terrorists. I view this new call for a nation of private spies with a deep suspicion born of experience with the LAPD and its historic penchant for spying on law-abiding residents of that city.

Back in the late 1970s, together with a band of other doughty journalists, including Tommy Thompson, Ron Ridenour, Ben Pleasants, I co-founded and ran a spunky little news weekly called the LA Vanguard. In the course of just one year, we broke stories about secret “security offices” run by local phone companies (Pacific Telephone and GTE) which provided unlisted numbers and credit information to police and other government agencies without requiring a warrant, about the killing of unarmed citizens by police, about the LAPD’s “shoot to kill” gun use policy, about judges in landlord-tenant cases who were slumlords themselves, and many other stories that were being ignored by the LA Times and the rest of the local establishment media.

For our efforts, we found out years later, we were targeted by the LAPD’s “red squad,” known at the time as the Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID), for an intensive program of spying that including planting a young cop, Connie Milazzo, as a member of our editorial collective.  We only learned of Milazzo’s real identity years later when she admitted disclosed it herself to a judge in a public hearing (she wanted to avoid being sent to the county lockup along with a group of activists she had “joined” undercover who had all been arrested during a protest and who were refusing to provide their identities to the court).

A subsequent lawsuit filed with the help of the ACLU of Southern California, eventually settled for a payment of $1.8 million by the City of Los Angeles, disclosed that the PDID had for years been using as many as 20 undercover cops to infiltrate and spy on over 200 legal political and activist organizations in the Los Angeles area, gathering rooms full of files on everyone from members of the National Organization for Women to the staffs of certain members of the city council.

We also learned that the LAPD was providing those files to a shadowy private outfit in San Francisco called Western Goals, which had links to the ultra-right John Birch Society. Western Goals was apparently seeking to serve as a private repository of dossiers on leftists and political activists collected by local police all around the country in a kind of end run around the restrictions on domestic spying by the FBI that had been imposed after the post-Watergate revelations about the abuses of the COINTELPRO era.

This is why Bratton’s idea stinks. Local police, because they are local, are even more prone to rogue activities that will never be exposed or monitored than are federal police.

As accommodating of police-state tactics as Congress has been, especially since 9-11, at least some members of that body have raised concerns and demanded investigations of some of those abuses by organizations like the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency. But city councils have been notoriously uninterested in monitoring the unconstitutional activities of their local police around the country, who have extremely powerful political connections and the support of local media establishments.

Any attempt to organize a citizen’s watch program to look for suspicious activity is bound to devolve into a police program of spying on those who are outside of the “norm”: minorities, leftists, activists, loners, people with alternative life-styles, artists, etc.

Let’s be honest. America faces no existential threat from terrorism. It does face such threats from rampaging climate change, political corruption, corporate power, economic collapse, and many other things, but it is hardly threatened by terrorism, which has killed far fewer people even in 2001 than have auto defects, contaminated food, and insurance company denials of care.

Back in 2001, the Bush/Cheney administration stoked an irrational fear of terrorism in order to win passage of the Patriot Act and acceptance of other actions, such as creation of a program by the National Security Agency to use supercomputers to monitor millions of Americans’ electronic communications. Many of those threats to freedom remain in place today.  Now Chief Bratton and his compatriots in police departments around the country are trying to stoke that same irrational fear of terrorism to move the country even further towards a police-state mentality.

The last thing we need in this era of corporate-media-induced conformity and citizen passivity is a bunch of self-appointed citizen snoops calling in to the cops with reports on every neighbor who looks or acts a little bit different.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Just 163 Representatives voted against the motion, which, as JURIST described it, also supports “adding Guantánamo detainees to the federal ‘no fly’ list, and adopting Senate language forbidding the release of photos showing detainee abuse.”

Just in case there was any doubt about the motion, Rep. Rogers, in his inimitable style, explained that he was concerned with “protecting the American people from all threats … including the warped intentions of terrorists and radical extremists,” and proceeded to explain that “This motion strengthens the House bill’s current restrictions on Guantánamo Bay detainees by ensuring their names have been put on the No Fly list and by clearly prohibiting their transfer to the United States — for whatever reason.”

After lambasting the Obama administration for having “No plan” for how to close Guantánamo, Rep. Rogers explained that “this motion prohibits the granting of any immigration benefit for any reason. Without such a benefit, there is no legal way to bring these terrorists to American soil and in our constituents’ backyards. And, that means these terrorists cannot be granted the same constitutional rights as American citizens.”

He added, “After all, these detainees are enemy combatants, caught on the battlefield. They are NOT common criminals and they should not be granted legal standing in our criminal courts by bringing them onto US soil. From my point of view, we cannot waver on this issue, nor can we be weak. There is no reason these terrorists, who pose a serious and documented threat to our nation, cannot be brought to justice right where they are in Cuba. And, I certainly think that is where the American people stand on this issue — they don’t want these terrorists in their hometowns, inciting fellow prisoners, abusing our legal system, and terrorizing their communities.”

This, then, is the reason that I have lost my sense of humor. In May, members of the US Senate voted by 90-6 to approve an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009, eliminating $80 million from planned legislation intended to fund the closure of Guantánamo, and specifically prohibiting the use of any funding to “transfer, relocate, or incarcerate Guantánamo Bay detainees to or within the United States.” Defending the amendment, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), speaking for himself and his spineless colleagues who had bowed to a Republican fearmongering campaign, said, “This is neither the time nor the bill to deal with this. Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president. We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.”

In June, the House of Representatives followed up by passing a spending bill turning down the administration’s request for $60 million to close Guantánamo, which, as JURIST described it, “placed limits on the government’s ability to transfer detainees to the US and release detainees to foreign countries.” Approved by a vote of 259-157, the bill also prohibited funds from being used to release detainees from Guantánamo into the United States. In JURIST’s words, “The legislation [requires] the president to submit to Congress a detailed plan documenting the costs and risks of transferring a detainee to the US for trial or detention at least two months before the detainee is to be transferred. Additionally, the president [has] to notify the governor and legislature of the state to which the detainee is to be transferred at least 30 days before the transfer and must show that the detainee does not pose a security risk. The bill also requires that the president submit a report to Congress before releasing a detainee into his country of origin or last habitual residence unless that country is the US.

Last Thursday’s vote was for a non-binding motion to instruct conferees to follow Rep. Rogers’ motion (see an explanation here) rather than binding legislation, but, at the very least, it signals that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are determined to scupper Barack Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo by January 22, 2010, for two indefensible reasons.

The first is the NIMBY card (Not In My Back Yard), in which lawmakers wail, as Rep. Rogers put it, that “the American people … don’t want these terrorists in their hometowns, inciting fellow prisoners, abusing our legal system, and terrorizing their communities.” This requires everyone involved to conveniently forget that America’s Supermax prisons are the envy of prison-lovers the world over, that convicted mass-murdering criminals — including some convicted of terrorism — are safely locked away in these prisons, and that the rest of the world is looking on and laughing at the lawmakers’ feeble paranoia.

However, the second reason for my despair is rather more fundamental. To hear Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, use the word “terrorists” when referring to the Guantánamo prisoners, and to hear this same word repeated ad infinitum by Rep. Rogers, and by those many members of the Senate and the House who have persistently voted to prevent the closure of Guantánamo, is to step back into those dark months after the 9/11 attacks, when former Vice President Dick Cheney and his closest advisors were hatching their plans to hold anyone who ended up in US custody as an “enemy combatant” — in other words, neither as a criminal nor as a prisoner of war, but as a whole new category of non-being without rights.

It involves stepping back to a time when Cheney and his associates were hatching their plans to hand out bounty payments, averaging $5,000 a head, to the US military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, who seized at least 86 percent of the men who ended up in Guantánamo, the majority of whom were not “caught on the battlefield,” as Rep. Rogers cla.

It also involves stepping back to when these same men — and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld — were hatching their plans to prevent the military from conducting competent tribunals under Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions.

Pioneered by the US, and conducted during every war from Vietnam onwards, competent tribunals were designed to separate soldiers from civilians, in situations in which enemy soldiers did not wear uniforms, by holding tribunals close to the time and place of capture, in which these men could call witnesses to establish their credentials. In the first Gulf War, these tribunals led to nearly three-quarters of 1,200 men being released, but in Afghanistan the administration’s decision not to proceed with the tribunals (which was dictated from the highest levels of government) not only contributed to the filling of Guantánamo with people who were neither soldiers nor terrorists, but also led the administration to conclude that the humane standards of treatment required by the Geneva Conventions for all prisoners (whether uniformed personnel or not) did not apply to “enemy combatants.”

This was just the beginning. Voting to prevent the Obama administration from bringing Guantánamo prisoners to the US for any reason — even for federal court trials — endorses the notion that, having randomly rounded up hundreds of prisoners, and having refused to screen them, it was then justifiable to deprive them of the protections of the Geneva Conventions and to transport them to Guantánamo, where they continued to be held without rights, and where, if the lawmakers had their way, they would remain in that perpetual limbo.

What the nation’s lawmakers seem to be forgetting is that the legal black hole of Guantánamo’s early years was only maintained until June 2004, when no less a body than the US Supreme Court was required to intervene. The Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of granting the prisoners habeas corpus rights because, although some of them may well have been soldiers, who should have been held as prisoners of war, or terrorists, who should have been prosecuted as criminals, the Bush administration’s decision to hold them as “enemy combatants” without rights meant that those who claimed that they were innocent men seized by mistake — perhaps in connection with those bounty payments mentioned above — had no way whatsoever of challenging the basis of their detention. Without the intervention of the Supreme Court, they could have been held for the rest of their lives without ever having been screened adequately to determine whether they were, in fact, terrorists, soldiers or innocent men seized by mistake or sold for money.

Even then, this miserable story was far from over, as lawmakers should recall. In an attempt to ignore the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Bush administration introduced one-sided military tribunals to evaluate the prisoners’ cases, relying on supposed evidence that in fact consisted largely of “confessions” extracted from other prisoners, either through torture or coercion, or through bribery (the promise of better living conditions, or the false promise of freedom), and persuaded Congress (including many of the same cowardly propagandists responsible for the votes in May, June and last Thursday) to pass two hideously flawed pieces of legislation — the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — which purported to strip the prisoners of the habeas rights granted by the Supreme Court.

Last June, the Supreme Court rose up again, this time granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, and setting in motion a process of reviews that, to date, has led to District Court judges examining the government’s supposed evidence in 38 cases, and ruling that, in 30 of these cases (in other words, in 79 percent of the cases), the government failed to establish that the men in question were members of, or supported al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. If the lawmakers cared to read the rulings, they would discover that this was largely because the judges concluded that the government was relying on supposed evidence that in fact consisted largely of “confessions” extracted from other prisoners, either through torture or coercion, or through bribery (the promise of better living conditions, or the false promise of freedom).

Fortunately, the lawmakers are no longer able to prevent these cases from taking place — as no doubt, if they were able, they would yet again cast the remaining prisoners into a lawless abyss — but by making such sweeping generalizations about the “terrorists” in Guantánamo, and about preventing the government from transferring any of these “terrorists” to the US mainland to be imprisoned and to face trials, they are committing a number of grievous errors.

They are preventing justice from being delivered in the cases of the small number of prisoners actually accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks and other acts of international terrorism, and they are shamelessly, ridiculously, and unforgivably tarring everyone held at Guantánamo as a “terrorist,” even though the majority of the men have never been charged with any crime, even though the lack of screening and the bounty payments that I mentioned above have been assiduously chronicled by lawyers and writers — myself included — who have not succumbed to a witless parroting of Dick Cheney’s hollow propaganda, and even though judges in US courts continue to demonstrate that, behind the hype and hyperbole, the majority of these men are not “terrorists” at all.

My sense of humor will return (you don’t deal with Guantánamo day in and day out without having a sense of humor, however dark), but my despair at the spinelessness and stupidity of the majority of the nation’s lawmakers will only dissipate when these men and women can be bothered to examine the facts, rather than letting themselves remain infected by the lies and paranoia of the most disgraceful Vice President in American history.

This column was originally published at The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Senate Finance Committee's "Gang of Six." Clockwise from upper left: Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Kent Conrad, D-N.D., Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and Olympia Snowe R-Maine

Some years ago, my wife and I, together with our young daughter, took a circuitous summer train trip through France, Italy, Austria and Germany. The last leg was an overnight express from Berlin that deposited us at the Gare du Nord in Paris just at sunrise. Feeling washed out from the ride, we made our separate ways to the facilities.

I was standing at the urinal with a bunch of other men, relieving myself, when I heard this awful groaning coming from a stall. The groaning grew louder and more painful sounding. Some guy was obviously having a terrible time with his bowels.

The agony continued, to the point that we who were by now washing our hands at the sinks were looking at each other in puzzlement, wondering what was going on. I even wondered if someone should ask if the poor wretch if he needed help.

Finally there was this enormous, impossibly long fart of incredible volume and duration. This was followed by a long sigh of relief and an awful stench.

We men in the rest room all looked at each other, shrugging and stifling laughs. A few of us couldn’t contain ourselves and actually burst out laughing.

There was a shuffle in the stall, and the latch was turned. We couldn’t resist. Everyone turned to see who had just produced such a prodigious noise and odor, expecting to see some huge, ponderous guy lumber out. Instead, a shriveled little old man left the booth, nodded silently at the rest of us, and exited the room.

I’m reminded of this incident by the recent efforts in Congress to produce a health care reform bill—especially of the efforts in Sen. Max Baucus’s Senate Finance Committee, which yesterday, after weeks of allegedly painful negotiating among the so-called Gang of Six—three conservative Democrats and three Republicans—and several weeks more of discussions among members of the whole committee, produced a bill that essentially leaves us with the status quo, except with some rather smelly additions, such as a mandate that the uninsured and unemployed buy some crummy health insurance plan offered by the private health insurers or face a stiff fine by the IRS.

If the stench of corruption from the legal bribes of the insurance industry lobby were not so vile and pervasive, we would all be rolling in the aisles at the tiny fart produced by all that straining and pushing on the part of Sen. Baucus, D-Mont, and his Finance Committee colleagues.

Of course, it’s not over yet. Once both houses of Congress have voted to approve the bills that have emerged from committee in House and Senate, there will be another session on the pot—this time in a secret conference committee, where members of the leadership of both houses will negotiate to come up with a single bill to send back to their respective houses for an up-or-down vote.

It can be safely predicted that the final legislation will resemble much more the Senate version than the House version, because Senate Democrats long ago surrendered control of that body to the minority Republicans by accepting the so-called Rule of 60, whereby any Republican can simply threaten to filibuster a piece of legislation and the Democrats will immediately take it back and hack off any offending piece of it to ensure that either all Democrats will vote for it, or that one or two allegedly sane Republicans will join the majority of Democrats, thus making a filibuster impossible.

Not once since at least 2006, when Democrats took over the Senate, has the Senate Democratic leadership demanded that all Democrats in that body support a bill or face retaliation, in the form of lost committee assignments or sabotage of a bill important to local constituents—the kind of thing that Republicans have done with their members for years.

Indeed, Democrats seem to like the imaginary Rule of 60, as it gives them a ready excuse to never have to actually do anything progressive, as demanded by their electoral base.

And so, whether it’s health care reform, financial industry regulation and reform, climate change legislation, civil liberties, investigations into torture and war crimes, or ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,  Congress has come to resemble a French railway station lavatory, with committees grunting away in the stalls behind closed doors, while a little old lady in the corner collects change from the visitors who regularly come in to take a piss and monitor the proceedings.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Ambassador Daniel Fried was tapped by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to lead a team to carry out President Obama's commitment to close Guantanamo within one year.

In an exclusive interview with the BBC, Daniel Fried came across as an eminently reasonable man placed in a disturbingly unreasonable position by his bosses.

A senior diplomat, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs for four years, Fried was plucked from his job in March 2009 to become the Obama administration’s Special Envoy to Guantánamo, serving as a member of the interagency Task Force charged with reviewing the cases of the remaining Guantánamo prisoners, and responsible, primarily, for finding countries to accept dozens of prisoners who have been cleared for release, either by the Task Force, often based on decisions already taken by Bush-era military review boards, or by the courts, after successful habeas corpus petitions.

These are men who cannot be returned to their home countries because of fears that they will face torture, or further arbitrary imprisonment, on their return, although Fried is also responsible for trying to broker a deal with Yemen, whose nationals make up around 40 percent of the remaining 225 prisoners. Fried spoke mainly to the BBC about negotiations with Europe, but it is apparent that attempts to overcome the long-standing failure to secure a deal with the Yemeni government remains one of the most difficult tasks that he faces.

In an interview for Radio 4’s Today program, which was partly filmed and televised on BBC News, Fried gave Jon Manel a largely spin-free account of the problems he faces, some of which have been exacerbated by the US government’s unwillingness — or inability — to resettle some cleared prisoners in the United States.

To my mind, President Obama missed a golden opportunity to bring 17 prisoners to the US in his early days in office. These men, the Uighurs (Muslims who had fled oppression in China’s Xinjiang province, and who were sold to US forces after being betrayed by Pakistani villagers, following their flight from Afghanistan) had been cleared of any involvement with al-Qaeda, the Taliban or any form of international terrorism by the Bush administration and by the US courts, but the President wavered, allowing Guantánamo’s supporters in Congress (scaremongers inspired by the hateful and false rhetoric of former Vice President Dick Cheney) to gain the upper hand, eventually persuading Congress to pass legislation blocking the transfer of any cleared prisoners to the US mainland.

Fried began by explaining that his job was “miserable,” because he was “cleaning up a problem” inherited from the Bush administration, which had nothing to do with advancing any positive aspects of US policy. “It’s not like we’re advancing liberty or making peace,” he said. He added that working out what to do with the remaining prisoners is “a huge problem and a complicated one,” but according to Manel, although he said that he would “not criticize Congress,” he stated, unambiguously, “It is fair to say, as just an objective statement, that the US could resettle more detainees [worldwide], had we been willing to take in some.”

The interview was also notable for the following frank exchange about the perception of the remaining prisoners as “the worst of the worst,” which included, I believe, the first public admission, by a senior Obama administration official, that some of the prisoners were nothing more than low-level Taliban recruits, in an inter-Muslim civil war (with the Northern Alliance) that preceded the 9/11 attacks and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism, and that they should not have been in Guantánamo for the last seven years:

Daniel Fried: The detainees in Guantánamo run a spectrum. Some really are awful. Some qualify as “the worst of the worst,” and we’re going to put those on trial. Some, frankly, should not have been in Guantánamo for the past seven years.

Jon Manel: So they were innocent?

Daniel Fried: Innocent, guilt … I look at their files and some of them seem relatively benign, and I have in mind the Uighurs, in particular, but others …

Jon Manel: They’re the minority from China …

Daniel Fried: That’s right, the Uighur minority from China, but if I had to describe — if there’s such a thing as an average Guantánamo detainee, it’s someone who was a volunteer, a low-level trainee or a very low-level fighter in a very bad cause, but not a hardened terrorist, not an organizer. Now it is those people whom we’re asking Europeans to take a look at, and each government has to evaluate the background of each individual and make a decision.

Despite his criticism of the implications of the failure to accept any cleared prisoners into the United States, Fried did make the point that “parliamentarians in Europe” — as well as the US – “have raised questions about security, and we have to respect those opinions,” although he was also concerned to publicize the successful resettlement of four of the Uighurs in Bermuda (in June), even though it had apparently brought him into conflict with the British government, because, as the BBC described it, “Bermuda is a British overseas territory and Britain was not informed until the last minute.”

“The British government, it is fair to say, cannot be considered part of the deal. This was worked out between the Americans and the Bermudans,” Fried told Manel, adding, “I will say that I’ve been admonished by the British government in very clear terms.” He insisted, however, that the deal had been successful. “We are very grateful to the Bermudan government and the behavior of the four Uighurs has been exemplary, which really bolsters our contention that they were not any kind of threat,” he said, adding, “These are four people who are enjoying freedom who would otherwise be in Guantánamo.”

This was an important point to make, although I maintain that the Uighurs’ “exemplary” behavior, which “bolsters” the government’s “contention that they were not any kind of threat,” would have had a far more powerful impact if it had happened in Washington D.C., where American citizens would have been able to appreciate, first-hand, that the Uighurs are not, and have never been terrorists.

In conclusion, Fried told Manel that he was “confident” that the President’s January deadline for closing Guantánamo would be met, although he could not guarantee it. “President Obama’s timetable is what we’ve got,” he said, “we don’t have Plan Bs, we’re looking at that timetable. We’ve got a lot of work to do, we need help getting this done, and we’re going to be working hard at it. But you’re not going to have Guantánamo II. Whatever solution we come up with, it will be one based firmly on the rule of law and transparency.”

Fried’s interview coincided with an announcement that Hungary is preparing to take a cleared prisoner from Guantánamo, to add to those already accepted by the UK (Binyam Mohamed, a British resident, in February), France (Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian, in May), and Portugal (Mohammed al-Tumani and Moammar Dokhan, both Syrians, last month). Other countries who have agreed to take cleared prisoners are Belgium, Ireland, Italy (although with some disturbing conditions), and Spain, and discussions are apparently ongoing with both Lithuania and Switzerland.

A short video of the BBC interview (featuring the exchange reproduced above) is available here.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., D-Ill., debuts on a watchdog group's list of the 15 most corrupt members of Congress.

The government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released its annual “Most Corrupt Members of Congress” list, a detailed analysis of the unethical and sometimes illegal activities of 15 congressmen and women who have most egregiously betrayed the public’s trust.

CREW also has launched the report’s tandem website, www.CREWsMostCorrupt.org, which offers short summaries of each member’s transgressions as well as the full-length profiles and all accompanying exhibits.

New to this year’s list are Senators Roland Burris and John Ensign, and Representatives Nathan Deal, Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Pete Visclosky.

According to CREW, Jackson’s dealings with disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich cemented his inclusion on the list:

On December 9, 2008, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested by federal agents for what was described at the time as a “political corruption crime spree.” One of the central allegations against the governor was that he attempted to sell an appointment to the Senate seat vacated by then President-elect Obama.

In the affidavit supporting the arrest of Gov. Blagojevich, the governor is quoted stating he believed a particular candidate, later identified as Rep. Jackson, would “raise money” for him and that “he might get some [money] upfront.” The governor also claimed an “emissary” from Rep. Jackson came to him and offered to raise a total of $1.5 million for his campaign should Rep. Jackson indeed be appointed to the vacant Senate seat. In fact, the day before the governor’s arrest, Rep. Jackson met with him to discuss the vacancy.

The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) launched a “preliminary review of Rep. Jackson’s actions surrounding his bid for appointment to the Senate seat.” OCE asked Gov. Blagojevich’s former staffers and campaign aides to turn over correspondence between Rep. Jackson and the governor. Additionally, the Department of Justice has interviewed Rep. Jackson and subpoenaed individuals with knowledge of Rep. Jackson’s alleged effort to raise funds for Gov. Blagojevich. If Rep. Jackson offered then-Gov. Blagojevich anything of value, including campaign contributions, in exchange for an appointment to the vacant U.S. Senate seat, Rep. Jackson may have violated Illinois bribery law.

Rep. Jackson has denied any wrongdoing and says he is cooperating with both investigations. In the first half of 2009, his campaign committee paid $18,697 in legal fees in addition to $100,000 paid in December 2008.

Sen. Burris’ dealings with Blagojevich also lead to his inclusion on the corrupt lawmakers list. In the case of Sen. Ensign, CREW said:

On June 16, 2009, Senator John Ensign announced he had engaged in an extramarital affair with an unnamed former campaign staffer from December 2007 until August 2008. The staffer was later identified as Cynthia Hampton, whose husband Doug Hampton, was a close friend and top aide to the senator.

In a letter to FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly, Mr. Hampton stated that although the two families had been “lifelong friends,” Sen. Ensign pursued and engaged in a relationship with Mr. Hampton’s wife. He said Sen. Ensign’s “conduct and relentless pursuit of my wife led to our dismissal in April 2008.” Mr. Hampton further stated that because of Sen. Ensign’s conduct, Mr. Hampton’s family “lost significant income, suffered indescribable pain and emotional suffering. We find ourselves today with an overwhelming loss of relationships, career opportunities and hope for recovery.”

Cynthia Hampton was paid $1,885 a month, working for both Sen. Ensign’s campaign and his leadership political action committee, Battle Born PAC. In January 2008, a month after their affair began, Ms. Hampton’s salary doubled after she took on increased responsibilities with the re-election committee and took over as treasurer for the PAC. An individual close to Sen. Ensign’s family said that after the senator confessed the affair to his wife, reconciled with her and attended counseling, he fired Ms. Hampton, providing her with a severance payment paid from his own pocket.

Both Doug and Cynthia Hampton received payments from Sen. Ensign after leaving his employ. After his departure, Mr. Hampton received $6,000, an amount Sen. Ensign’s office claimed was “equal to 12 days of unused vacation,” and was not a severance package, an understanding confirmed by Mr. Hampton.

On July 8, 2009, Mr. Hampton said Sen. Ensign had personally paid Ms. Hampton over $25,000 in severance. Sen. Ensign’s attorney, Paul Coggins, quickly contradicted that claim, stating Sen. Ensign’s parents paid Ms. Hampton and her family $96,000 after they had learned of the affair. Mr. Coggins insisted the payments were not made from campaign or official funds, nor were they related to any campaign or official duties. Rather, he explained, the April 2008 payments were “gifts made out of concern for the well-being of long-time family friends during a difficult time.” Each of Sen. Ensign’s parents made out four checks in the amount of $12,000 to Cynthia Hampton, her husband and two of their children. Sen. Ensign’s office claimed the alleged $25,000 severance payment was part of his parents’ $96,000 “gift.”

Additionally, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which Sen. Ensign chaired, paid the Hamptons’ 19-year-old son $1,000 a month from March through August 2008 for his work as an intern.

Sen. Ensign originally indicated he went public because he was being extorted. He later admitted, however, that he went public because he had learned Mr. Hampton had written to FOX News with details of the affair, asking the network to investigate the matter and downgraded the alleged extortion to a legal demand.

If, as it appears, Mr. and Ms. Hampton were discharged directly because of Ms. Hampton’s affair with the senator, Sen. Ensign may have engaged in discrimination on the basis of sex in violation of Senate Rules. Additionally, the payments to the Hamptons may have been an unreported, illegal, excessive in-kind contribution to Ensign for Senate and Battle Born PAC in violation of campaign finance law.

After a two year absence, Rep. Maxine Waters has reappeared in the study for unethical activities unrelated to the conduct that landed her on the list in the past. A detailed list of those who have previously graced the report can be found on the website.

Of this year’s list of 15, at least 12 are under investigation: Reps. Ken Calvert, Jerry Lewis, Alan Mollohan, John Murtha, Pete Visclosky and Don Young are under Department of Justice (DOJ) investigations, while Sens. Roland Burris and John Ensign and Reps. Charles Rangel and Laura Richardson are under congressional ethics committee investigations. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. is under investigation by both the DOJ and the Office of Congressional Ethics and Rep. Vern Buchanan is being investigated by the Federal Election Commission.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said today, “With the economy in a free-fall, unemployment rates at record highs and health care solutions still nowhere in sight, members should be spending their time looking for answers to the nation’s problems, not finding new ways to enrich themselves.”

Sloan continued, “The members of Congress profiled in CREW’s Most Corrupt report have betrayed those who voted them into office. This report holds them accountable for their bad choices.”

The 15 most corrupt members of Congress are:
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL)
Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL)
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA)
Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA)
Sen. John Ensign (R-NV)
Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)
Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA)
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV)
Rep. John Murtha (D-PA)
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY)
Rep. Laura Richardson (D-CA)
Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-IN)
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)
Rep. Don Young (R-AK)

Click here to visit CREWsMostCorrupt.org.

Editor’s note: This story was previously headlined, “Democrats Dominate Watchdog Group’s Most Corrupt Members of Congress List.” TPR reader Woody pointed out in the comments that the use of  the word”dominate” was a bit strong considering that Democrats outnumber Republicans by just one. We agree with Woody and have changed our headline to simply reflect the fact that the list was released.