HUMAN RIGHTS
Restoring The Constitution

In a landmark decision last week, the Supreme Court ruled that habeas corpus protections -- a time-honored principle entitling all who are imprisoned to challenge the basis for their confinement in a court of law -- apply to detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. "We hold these petitioners do have the habeas corpus privilege," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy. The Guantanamo "review process is, on its face, an inadequate substitute for habeas corpus," he added. The decision in Boumediene v. Bush "is a stinging rebuke of the Bush administration's flawed detention policies," Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) stated. President Bush, unsurprisingly, disagreed with the decision. "We'll abide by the court's decision. That doesn't mean I have to agree with it," he said. On Sunday, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol hinted that Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) would introduce legislation undermining the decision by setting up a "national security court." Rejecting such calls to reopen debate on the issue, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) remarked, "Follow the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court says these people have right to know why they're being held and what the charges are. That's so basic and fundamental."

STRIKING DOWN POOR LAWS: "The Court repudiated the efforts of Congress and the Bush administration to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions on behalf of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and to substitute constitutionally-defective procedures in their place," noted Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Mark Agrast. The decision found that the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, mandated by Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, do not constitute an adequate substitute for habeas, resulting in a "considerable risk of error" in the tribunal's decisions. The Court declared unconstitutional Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006, legislation that allowed Bush to imprison indefinitely any "unlawful combatant" and suspend the habeas writ for detainees. The MCA abolished habeas "despite the fact that the Constitution permits suspension of that writ only 'in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion,'" the Court noted. The decision does not address, however, whether the Bush administration had been "holding a single person illegally" at Guantanamo. "[O]ur opinion does not address the content of the law that governs petitioners' detention," Kennedy wrote. "That is a matter yet to be determined."

TAMING THE EXECUTIVE: The decision is the fourth blow to the administration's detainee policies, each of which rein in Bush's sweeping claims of executive power. In June 2004, the Court issued two opinions on detainee issues. The Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case "ruled that a U.S. citizen seized on the Afghanistan battlefield and detained in a U.S. military brig can challenge his detention in U.S. courts."s In Rasul v. Bush, the Court "held that foreign-born detainees can challenge their detention in U.S. courts." In 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Court held that the military commissions system established by a 2001 order from Bush violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. "[T]he Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote. Last week's decision also restrains Bush's power grab. Chief Justice John Roberts "unwittingly provides a fitting epitaph for the president's disastrous legal adventures," Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at CAP,  noted. "One cannot help but think...that this decision is not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants," Roberts remarked.

CONSERVATIVE FEARMONGERING: Several conservatives have responded to the decision with inflammatory rhetoric. In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia devoted an entire section to "a description of the disastrous consequences of what the Court has done today." "The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed," Scalia wrote. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich remarked, "This court decision is a disaster, which could cost us a city." Graham called it "dangerous and irresponsible." In contrast, Graham wrote a letter to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 stating, "A serious process must be established in the very near term either to formally treat and process the detainees as war criminals or to return them to their countries for appropriate judicial action." As Graham seemed to realize then, granting habeas rights to detainees is unlikely to result in threats to public safety. The Court's decision, in fact, will not result in the release of a single dangerous person.

Under the Radar

ETHICS -- DOCUMENTS SHOW MILITARY HID DETAINEES FROM THE RED CROSS: Documents released yesterday by the Senate Armed Services Committee show that the U.S. military "hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)," which is mandated under international law to record the abuse of prisoners. "When the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees," the documents say, "the [Department of Defense] has 'moved' them away from the attention of the ICRC." It is "unclear whether the Pentagon moved the detainees from one place to another or merely told the ICRC they were no longer present at a facility." Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, a now retired military lawyer, reportedly said at a 2002 meeting at the GuantanamoBay prison that "we may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques." ICRC’s Washington spokesman Bernard Barrett said, "we knew that we did not always have full access to all detainees. It was a fairly serious issue." Last year, the New York Times reported that a confidential 2003 manual for operating Guantanamo revealed that "military officials had a policy of denying detainees access to independent monitors" from the ICRC.

HUMAN RIGHTS -- WARS IN IRAQ/AFGHANISTAN CONTRIBUTING TO ESCALATING NUMBER OF GLOBAL REFUGEES: A report issued yesterday from Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, shows refugee numbers are at the highest levels in history rising from 9.9 million to 11.4 million by the end of 2007, while 26 million others are displaced by internal conflict or persecution. Guterres expressed concerned that, "after a five-year decline in the number of refugees between 2001 and 2005, we have now seen two years of increases." Nearly half of the world's refugees are fleeing from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with 3.1 million Afghan nationals seeking protection in 72 countries and 2.3 million Iraqis displaced. While the U.S. State Department has committed to resettling 12,000 "of the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees by September 30, 2008," the program has accepted a mere 4,742 people as of May 31. President Bush's Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program to resettle Iraqi and Afghani interpreters working for the U.S. military and State Department has come under fire for being too restrictive, overly complicated and for being granted to only 616 Iraqis as of April.  Soaring food prices and the effects of global warming threaten to drive more people from their homes and exacerbate problems faced by current refugees, the UN agency also warned.

ETHICS -- PENTAGON REPORT REVEALS MASSIVE OVERCHARGING BY CONTRACTOR KBR: Yesterday, the Pentagon Inspector General (IG) released an audit finding that KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton, "overcharged the U.S. Navy for providing meals to workers and service personnel in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina." The audit found that the Navy "paid approximately $4.1 million for meals and services we calculate should have cost $1.7 million, more than a $2.3 million difference." The audit also found that KBR's repairs of "hurricane-damaged Navy facilities" were "shoddy and substandard." "[O]ne technical advisor alleged that the federal govenrment 'certainly paid twice' for many KBR projects because of 'design and workmanship deficiencies.'" The IG "recommended that the Navy try to recoup about $8.4 million in 'excessive' equipment lease payments and material profits, and another $1.4 million for more than 110,000 meals that were paid for and thrown away over a 34-day period." Yesterday, an Army official who managed KBR's Pentagon contract for work in Iraq said he was fired "when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR." KBR "had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn't justify," the official, Charles Smith, said.

Think Fast

Having "spent several months experimenting with the limits of physical and psychological pressure," military officers at Guantanamo Bay turned to the CIA in late 2002 "to find ways to get terrorism suspects to talk." CIA lawyer Jonathan M. Fredman "explained that the definition of illegal torture was ‘written vaguely’" and "subject to perception." "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong," Fredman said.

The Senate ethics committee has begun a preliminary investigation into special treatment afforded to Sens. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), who received lower interest rates on their loans from Countrywide Financial. "I don't know that we did anything wrong. I negotiated a mortgage at a prevailing rate, a competitive rate," said Dodd.

Yesterday, President Bush signed into law the Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act, which provides tax relief for military families and "shut[s] a loophole that defense contractors had been using to avoid paying millions of dollars in payroll taxes." The new law will now require these companies "to pay the taxes that finance Social Security and Medicare programs."

Almost two weeks after conservatives began pushing the false claim that China is drilling off the coast of Cuba, Republican leaders are finally backing away from the story. "We're not using the China talking point anymore," Michael Steel, spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), told Roll Call.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) warns that the "government does not have adequate privacy protections for the personal information it collects, shares and stores as part of the effort to fight terrorism." The GAO report suggests updating the Privacy Act to protect against the government's "massive, massive data collections."

"A federal appeals court yesterday ordered a new trial for a former White House aide convicted of obstructing justice and lying." David Safavian was convicted in 2006 for lying about his connections to criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

"Criminal prosecutions of immigrants by federal authorities surged to a record high in March," according to a new report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The 9,350 new immigration prosecutions "accounted for the majority -- 57 percent -- of all new federal criminal cases brought nationwide that month."

A Reuters/Zogby poll found that 58 percent of Americans plan to drive less in response to rising fuel prices, and nearly 39 percent are considering changing or canceling their summer vacations. "About 10 percent said they were pondering moving nearer to work, while roughly the same percentage said they were thinking about finding a job closer to home."

And finally: Sen. Ted Stevens's (R-AK) office is decorated with figurines representing his various nicknames, including "a small collection" of green Hulks. Behind his desk he also has a stuffed Tasmanian Devil, a gift from former senator Trent Lott. "He called me 'Taz,'" Stevens said. "Everybody has a nickname around here. Hollings called me 'Avalanche' and I called him ‘Tidewater,'" he said of former senator Ernest Hollings. "We all have strange names for each other."

Good News

"Responding to reports that some lenders have stopped offering federal loans at community and other colleges, two Democratic senators introduced legislation Tuesday to prohibit lenders from picking and choosing among institutions."

State Watch

FLORIDA: "115,232 Florida felons had regained their voting rights since new rules took effect last April."

IOWA: "Iowa's two senators said Tuesday they plan to seek the same kind of federal help for flooded Iowans that was given to the victims of Hurricane Katrina."

OREGON: State is "seeing mass resignations from elected office and public boards" as a stringent ethics reform law takes effect.

Blog Watch

THINK PROGRESS: CNN's Glenn Beck: "It is approaching treason" to elect a progressive Congress.

WONK ROOM: The Bush administration goes the distance by making it harder for kids to get to school.

PERRSPECTIVES: Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) politicizes the death of NBC's Tim Russert.

DAILY KOS: Disgraced "reporter" Jeff Gannon is blogging for the National Press Club.

Daily Grill

Governor, are you dropping your opposition to drilling for oil off of Florida's coast? 
CRIST: I am not. ... No. 1, I don't like it."
 -- Gov. Charlie Crist (R-FL), last week

VERSUS

"What we ought to be willing to do is study it."
-- Crist, 6/17/08