ETHICS
No Confidence
Today, the Senate will hold a very rare
no confidence vote. The nonbinding resolution introduced
by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) would express the "sense
of the Senate" that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales "no longer
holds the confidence of the American people." The White
House and its conservative
allies have written off the vote, with White House Press Secretary
Tony Snow stating that it will have "no
effect" on President Bush's confidence in Gonzales. "[T]here's an
attempt to pull this thing like a piece of taffy, seeing if there's any
political advantage in it," said Snow on Fox News Sunday. "There's
not." Snow's comments undermine the seriousness of the no confidence
vote and the bipartisan
dissatisfaction with Gonzales. As Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA)
recently noted, this vote is a "historical
black mark."
BUSH'S 'CONSIGLIERE': Since
Bush swore
him in on Feb. 3, 2005, Gonzales has steadily
politicized the Justice Department. His involvement in the
prosecutor purge demonstrates his willingness to abuse his position and
exploit the agency, whose mission is to "ensure fair and impartial
administration of justice for all Americans." Yesterday, Snow tried
to claim, "Nobody
found anything untoward." But throughout his tenure serving Bush,
Gonzales has not only fired qualified U.S. attorneys, but driven
away respected civil rights officials and replaced them with
political appointees, pushed
laws that discriminate against minorities, and overseen
the erosion of Americans' civil liberties. As the New York Times
recently wrote, Gonzales "has never stopped being consigliere to
Mr. Bush's imperial presidency." "Whether it was the torture memo,
whether it's Guantanamo, whether it's Geneva Convention, whether it's
U.S. Attorneys, whether it's 'I don't
know, I can't recall,' a department as major as this, I don't think
the American people are well served," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein
(D-CA). "I'm hopeful this can be worked out. But there comes a time
when you have to say what you think, and this is what I think."
According to a recent poll, 63
percent of the American public don't believe Gonzales is telling
the truth about the U.S. attorney dismissals, and a majority believe
Gonzales should resign.
RIGHT-WING HYPOCRISY: "The
bottom line is the only person who thinks the attorney general should
remain attorney general is the president," notes Schumer. "He's gotten
virtually no support from even Republicans in the Senate, just a
handful have supported him, six
have called for him to step down, a dozen more have said very
negative things about him." But unfortunately, many of these Senate
conservatives who have used criticism of Gonzales as a public relations
stunt are now unwilling to oppose the President and support the
no confidence vote. On April 19, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) told Gonzales
that "the
best way to put this behind us is your resignation." But he has now
said that he will oppose today's no confidence vote and will instead
introduce an unrelated pet amendment, "expressing
'no confidence' in Congress' ability to cut wasteful spending or
balance the budget." The five other conservative senators are still "unwilling
to tip their hands about how they will vote," despite previously
publicly calling on Gonzales to resign.
ERODING CIVIL RIGHTS: This vote
of no confidence comes "after
five months of investigation and the disclosure of thousands of
pages of internal Justice Department documents" that contradict Gonzales's
explanations for why the U.S. attorneys were dismissed and what
role the White House played in the process. But even before the
prosecutor purge, Gonzales steadily politicized the Justice
Department. The Washington Post reports today that at "least one-third
of the immigration judges appointed by the Justice Department since
2004 have had
Republican connections or have been administration insiders, and
half lacked experience in immigration law." As the Justice Department
spokesman admits, "immigration judges are considered civil service
employees who may not be chosen based on political factors." In the
Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, just 42
percent of the lawyers hired since 2003 have strong civil rights
backgrounds, compared to 77 percent in 2001-2002. These political
appointees have aggressively gone after so-called voter fraud, which
is, as the New York Times noted, the Bush administration's "code for suppressing
the votes of minorities and poor people." In 2004, high-ranking
Justice political appointees overruled the Department's attorneys and
analysts who "recommended rejecting"
Georgia's voter ID law "because it was likely to discriminate
against black voters." More recently, the Bush adminstration has
attempted to cover-up the partisan firings by accusing several of the
ousted U.S. attorneys of failing
to aggressively pursue charges of voter fraud, even though there
has been very
little evidence of any such fraud.
TWISTING CIVIL LIBERTIES: Last
month's dramatic
testimony by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey described
the shocking lengths that the White House went to in order to gain
legal
sanction for its warrantless wiretapping program. He revealed that Bush
called then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's wife to seek permission for former chief of staff Andrew Card and
then-White
House counsel Alberto Gonzales to visit a debilitated and hospitalized
Ashcroft at his bedside. Testifying before Congress in Jan. 2006,
Gonzales claimed, "There has not been any serious
disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed."
But Comey said that he and several other top Justice officials
threatened a mass resignation over the program in 2004. Last week,
Gonzales again contradicted himself, stating that he and
Comey were referring to the same program.
"Comey's testimony related to a highly classified program which the
president confirmed to the American people sometime ago," he said. If Gonzales is now
telling the truth, that can only mean that he lied under oath in
2006.
CRAFTING TORTURE: In 2005,
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote that "Gonzales
is supposed to be a singular American success story." In
reality, as he noted, Gonzales's elevation has had unfortunate
"Orwellian" consequences for America's human rights record, paving the
way for abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. As White House counsel
in 2002, Gonzales prepared a memo for Bush that detainees captured in
Afghanistan were not
eligible for Geneva Convention protections: "In my judgment, this
new paradigm renders
obsolete Geneva's strict
limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint
some
of its provisions." He also "argued that dropping Geneva would allow
the president to 'preserve his flexibility' in the war on terror."
CIVIL LIBERTIES -- POWELL URGES
CLOSURE OF GUANTANAMO: Yesterday on NBC's Meet the Press, Gen.
Colin Powell
strongly condemned the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, calling it "a
major problem for America's perception" abroad. He said, "If
it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo -- not tomorrow, this
afternoon."
He also called for an end to the military commission system the Bush
administration has created to try Guantanamo detainees. "I would simply
move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal
system," Powell said. He scoffed at criticism that the detainees would
have access to lawyers and the writ of habeas corpus: "So
what? Let them. Isn't that what our system's all about?"
"[E]very morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some
person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds,"
Powell said. "[W]e have shaken the belief that the world had in
America's justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open... We
don't need it, and it's causing us far more damage than any good we get
for it." Despite such vocal criticisms from Powell, members of both houses of
Congress, and the President's own promises to
close the prison,
the administration has "transferred three suspected terrorists to the
Guantanamo Bay prison since March." "The three detainees are the first
to arrive in Guantanamo Bay since 2004,
with the exception of those who were abruptly transferred last fall
when Bush closed secret CIA prisons in Europe after their existence
became known." Human Rights Watch noted that such new arrivals and a
significant drop in the number of detainees released this year suggests
that "Guantanamo is getting its second wind, and becoming a permanent
option" for the administration. A lawyer from the Brennan Center for
Justice added, "It shows that the administration still believes Guantanamo is a viable way to hold
people indefinitely without due process."
HUMAN RIGHTS -- DESPITE CONDEMNING
GENOCIDE, U.S. WORKING WITH SUDANESE SPIES IN IRAQ WAR: Despite
President Bush's recent condemnation of the genocide in Darfur and
his issuance of economic
sanctions on the Sudanese government, the LA Times reports today
that "Sudan has secretly
worked with the CIA to spy on the insurgency in Iraq."
Claiming Sudan's spies have often been in a "better position than
the
CIA" to muster information on al Qaeda and insurgent groups, the
Bush administration considers Sudan a "valuable" resource in Iraq
"because the Sunni Arab nation is a crossroads for Islamic militants
making their way to Iraq and Pakistan." "Sudanese can go places we
don't go. They're Arabs. They can wander around," said a source
familiar with the CIA's program. The cooperation in the Iraq war
underlies a dichotomous U.S. foreign policy. Despite listing Sudan
as a "state sponsor of
terror,' the U.S. also considers Sudan "a strong
partner in the War on Terror." Additionally, "[t]he U.S.-Sudan
relationship goes beyond Iraq. Sudan has helped the United States
track the turmoil in Somalia, working to cultivate contacts with the
Islamic Courts Union and other militias in an effort to locate al Qaeda
suspects hiding there. Sudan also has provided extensive cooperation in
counter-terrorism operations, acting on U.S. requests to detain
suspects as they pass through Khartoum." Last month, a bipartisan group
of Senators wrote a letter to National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell questioning the close
association with Sudan. As Bush's recent sanctions were weak
on enforcement, "critics accuse the Bush administration of being soft
on Sudan for fear of jeopardizing the counter-terrorism
cooperation."
IMMIGRATION -- JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
EMPHASIZED POLITICAL TIES OVER EXPERIENCE FOR IMMIGRATION JUDGES: During her testimony to Congress last month, former Justice Department
liaison to the White House Monica Goodling admitted that she "considered
party affiliation in screening applicants to become immigration judges."
Goodling's revelation led to the expansion of an internal Justice
Department investigation "into whether aides to Attorney General
Alberto R. Gonzales improperly took into account political
considerations in hiring employees." The probe had not previously
included an inquiry into the hiring of immigration judges. Today, an
analysis by the Washington Post demonstrates just how much "the
Bush administration increasingly
emphasized partisan political ties over expertise in recent years in selecting the judges who decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of
immigrants," despite laws that preclude such considerations. As
the
New York Times noted last month, "unlike
federal judges, immigration judges are civil service employees, to
be appointed by the attorney general based on professional
qualifications, not their politics." "At least one-third of the
immigration judges appointed by the Justice Department since 2004 have
had Republican
connections or have been administration insiders, and half lacked
experience in immigration law, Justice Department, immigration
court and other records show." Among the recently appointed,
politically-connected judges are "a New Jersey election law specialist
who represented GOP candidates, a former treasurer of the Louisiana
Republican Party, a White House domestic policy adviser and a
conservative crusader against pornography." "Immigration law is very
complex," said Denise Slavin, an immigration judge since 1995 in Miami.
"So generally speaking, it's very good to have someone coming into this
area with [an] immigration background. It's very difficult, for those
who don't, to catch up."
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American commanders are turning to a strategy “that they
acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have
been their allies in the past.” Critics say the plan “could
amount to the
Americans’ arming both sides in a future civil war.”
“The Taliban carried out an apparent attempt to
assassinate Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday, firing
rockets that missed him by several hundred yards as he spoke to a
group of elders. No one was injured.”
“In what may be a sign of things to come, the lawyers for I.
Lewis
Libby Jr. last month invoked the rarely used courtroom tactic: the ‘bloggers
can be mean’ defense.” Libby’s lawyers urged
the judge not to publicly release letters written in support of their client, given “the real possibility
that
these letters, once released, would be published on the Internet and
their authors discussed, even
mocked, by bloggers.”
“Acting under pressure from Congress, the CIA has
decided to trim its contractor staffing by 10 percent. It is
the agency’s first effort since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to
curb what critics have decried as the
growing privatization of U.S. intelligence work, a circumstance
that has sharply boosted some personnel costs.”
“A tribal coalition formed to oppose the extremist
group al-Qaeda in Iraq, a development that U.S. officials say
has reduced violence in Iraq’s troubled Anbar province, is
beginning to splinter, according to an Anbar tribal leader and a
U.S. military official familiar with tribal politics.”
“Senate Democrats opened the door to reviving the
stalled immigration measure on Sunday, calling on Republicans
to resolve their internal divisions and produce an agreement on how
to move the legislation forward.”
And finally: HHS Secretary requests meeting with dead Senator. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt called Sen. Craig
Thomas’s (R-WY) office Thursday afternoon to request a meeting
with the
late senator. Thomas passed away on Monday after a seven month battle
with leukemia. The Washington Post writes, “Needless to say, grief-stricken
Thomas staffers were stunned.” |
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The
anti-poverty campaign of U2 frontman Bono -- dubbed ONE Vote '08 -- "is promoting a
$30 million
effort to pressure Republican and Democratic presidential candidates to
make the oft-forgotten
issue a priority."
UTAH:
African-American activists work to persuade state politicians to
recognize "Juneteenth," commemorating the end of slavery.
COLORADO:
Representatives fight federal government's efforts to expand
drilling in the state.
ECONOMY:
Tens of states are seeing higher than expected budget surpluses.
THINK
PROGRESS: The Assault On Reason, Paris Hilton Edition.
THINK
PROGRESS: Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: "You can safely bet" that
the list of fired attorneys came from the White House.
TECH
INSIDER: Office of Special Counsel report on General Services
Administration chief Lurita Doan's violations delivered to
President Bush.
BOB
GEIGER: Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) offers no confidence in Congress
amendment
to accompany no confidence vote on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
"Those disagreements [between
former Deputy Attorney General James Comey and the White House] did not
— were not about the particular
activities that the president has publicly described, that we have
termed the Terrorist Surveillance Program."
-- Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury, 6/7/07
VERSUS
"Mr. Comey’s testimony
related to a highly classified program which the president confirmed to
the American people sometime ago."
-- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, 6/5/07
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