Legal & Open Thread Posted by christian h., 17 Aug 2007 05:10 pm

Open Thread (#17)

Yesterday, Jose Padilla was convicted of charges of conspiracy to “murder, kidnap and maim” people overseas. He faces life in prison. He did not actually commit any acts of terrorism at all, and the contention that he - a poor, uneducated man who grew up on the South Side of Chicago - provided “material support” to terrorism is laughable. Before he was even granted a trial, he was held incommunicado for three years as “enemy combatant”; during this time, he was likely tortured, psychologically and physically.

There are minor annoyances here: the way the media describe the verdict as “a victory for the Bush administration”, when it in fact demolishes their claim that (alleged) terrorists can’t be tried in civilian courts; the regurgitation of the dirty bomb accusation that was always absurd. But the main issue is this: a man, a US citizen in fact, was destroyed by the state, and precious few people were outraged by it. Why would they be? He was only a gang member, a convert to Islam, a nobody.

Padilla may well have been guilty under the incredibly lax standards needed to prove conspiracy charges (in itself, this legal construct undermines the constitution, in my opinion). But don’t we have a right to trial by a jury of our peers precisely so the law can be tempered by the people’s sense of justice? Why did not a single juror stand up and refuse to convict after a trial so obviously unjust?

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Responses to “Open Thread (#17)”

  1. on 17 Aug 2007 at 6:18 pm 1. Oaktown Girl said …

    Thanks for this, christian.

    It’s been Clusterf**k Friday at work, and I’m too exhausted to say much about this at the moment. But one thing I will say is that even though he officially had a “trial”, the man was and remains so psychologically damaged from the abuse he received while he was in our custody, that he was rendered completely unable to testify competently on his own behalf, or to assist his lawyers in presenting a case for his defense. How is that a “fair” trial? (Maybe me or someone else here can find some more information on that later and posts the links here).

    People in this country need to understand that everyone not only deserves but needs an honest, fair day in court. Not for the sake of the person who stands accused, but for all our sakes. Of course, the corporate media in its reporting of this sad event (what little “reporting” actually gets done, that is), will do nothing to help build and support that bridge of basic Constitutional understanding.

    Not to make this whole weekend’s Open Thread a total downer, but check out this movie review of Flanders. I found it a fascinating read. As JP says…Open away!

  2. on 17 Aug 2007 at 7:24 pm 2. JP Stormcrow said …

    This is my new favorite song, Ah Mary by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. (I prefer the studio version, but could not find one online.) I originally thought of posting it on the “Firestorms” thread.

    Ah Mary
    She’ll bake you cookies then she’ll burn your town
    Ah Mary
    Ashes Ashes but she won’t fall down

    She’s the beat of my heart
    She’s the shot of a gun
    She’ll be the end of me and maybe everyone, ohh Mary

    or the greedy bastards one:

    She’s skilled at the art of deception and she knows it
    She’s got dirty money that she plays with all the time

    but this Open Thread will do just fine:

    Ah mary, mary, mary, America.
    Ah mary, mary, mary, America.
    Ah mary, America.

  3. on 17 Aug 2007 at 7:34 pm 3. JP Stormcrow said …

    Supplanting my previous (but still quite topical) favorite from Tracey Grammer:

  4. on 17 Aug 2007 at 8:10 pm 4. christian h. said …

    Well, amazingly, the Cubs are back in first place - even though they’ve lost 10 of their last 15. It’s like some backwards race in the NL Central…

  5. on 17 Aug 2007 at 8:29 pm 5. JP Stormcrow said …

    Oh right. Sports, we kinda forgot about them around here. Actually, I’ve tuned it out, assuming that Detroit will edge out the Indians and then the Yankees will beat them for the Wild Card as well (and Seattle too) on the last day of the season when a steroid and adrenochrome-crazed Roger Clemens goes beserk on the mound at Camden Yard and gnaws his glove hand off at the wrist after a questionable pitch call. Unperturbed, the Yanks trounce the flustered Orioles as Kei Igawa pitches 7 innings of perfect relief.

    …no, better to just not get involved.

  6. on 17 Aug 2007 at 8:35 pm 6. Oaktown Girl said …

    when a steroid and adrenochrome-crazed Roger Clemens goes beserk on the mound at Camden Yard and gnaws his glove hand off at the wrist after a questionable pitch call.

    Close, but wrong. This is Clemens you’re talking about. He’d gnaw somebody else’s hand off at the wrist.

    And on a beautiful evening for a home game here in Oakland, the A’s are down 6-1 in the 5th.

  7. on 17 Aug 2007 at 8:55 pm 7. JP Stormcrow said …

    He’d gnaw somebody else’s hand off at the wrist.

    That would be his intention. He would rush the plate, and in the ensuing scrum get confused and end up performing the rare auto-amputation usually reserved for apocryphal <insert maligned ethnic group or Texas A&M> coyotes.

    And speaking of Clemens and everyone’s relaxing and fun days at work. This book might appeal to some. The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. My strategy is to be proactively assholish, you’d be surprised how many potential a’holes I’ve brought under control by this stratagem, it’s been like just about everyone I’ve ever worked with.

  8. on 18 Aug 2007 at 5:42 pm 8. JP Stormcrow said …

    The whole Padilla saga deserves to go down as one of the sorriest spectacles in history of this country. (I here presume that we will spared greater and more widespread horrors.) The picture above shows him in his “sensory deprivation” gear - which Ann Althouse defended as potentially being necessary because it kept him from communicating (presumably some super-secret Terrorism plans) via blinking. I came slow to the Padilla story after being prodded by a friend. Everything that I have learned since has been a horrorshow.

    I am too tired and appalled to go into all the details, but the governement case was so incredibly, incredibly weak and the charges so vague that I was right there with Firedoglake poster Siun when she heard that the jury had returned a verdict quickly:

    The Padilla jury began deliberations yesterday – and they are already back with a verdict which has just been read. The speed of this decision is stunning – and hopefully a sign that the jury saw through this Kafkaesque case.

    Alas, it was not to be. I do hate to second guess a jury, so I will just leave it at that.

    But of course those paragons of fair and impartial justice at the White House and DOJ were right there with praise and support for the verdict. (Because they are like super-respectful of the Rule of Law and all that, well except for Scooter of course, but then he was such a nice man.)

    “We commend the jury for its work in this trial and thank it for upholding a core American principle of impartial justice for all,” said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House. “Jose Padilla received a fair trial and a just verdict.”

    Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called the verdict “a significant victory in our efforts to fight the threat posed by terrorists and their supporters.”

    Per the Tracey Grammer song above, maybe the Merchant Kings of War and Woe can turn their hands to producing a Jose Padilla sensory-deprivation action figure to complement George Bush “naval aviator”.

  9. on 18 Aug 2007 at 5:46 pm 9. JP Stormcrow said …

    You know, it really is all going to end in tears.

  10. on 18 Aug 2007 at 8:06 pm 10. christian h. said …

    You know, it really is all going to end in tears.

    Indeed. I almost did cry when I heard of the verdict.

    You need something funny? Try the New York Times editing. Here some quotes from an article in the Movies section of the Sunday paper, on Thor Halvorssen, a guy who produces and supports documentaries:

    He’s a champion of the downtrodden:

    Mr. Halvorssen, a half-Norwegian Venezuelan, is a conservative operating in fields more often associated with liberals, a scion of wealth and privilege who champions the underdog and the powerless,

    and the way he champions them is by… supporting pro-business films…

    Since 2005, having already founded two nonprofit organizations focused on free speech and human-rights issues, Mr. Halvorssen has made the movie business part of his portfolio of controversy-stirring efforts. Established with a small amount of his money, his nonprofit Moving Picture Institute has raised about $1.5 million in donations to date to pay for, promote and seek distribution for documentary films.

    At a time when the most successful documentaries on political or social issues all seem to be anti-corporate, anti-Bush, pro-environmentalist and left-leaning, the Moving Picture Institute has backed pro-business, anti-Communist and even anti-environmentalist ones

    In his latest, he bravely and heretically takes on all-powerful… leftist academics

    The latest, “Indoctrinate U,” follows the first-time filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney as he turns Michael Moore’s guerrilla interview tactics on their head to address what he sees as political correctness on campus

    He uncovers real scandals - the lack of “men’s studies programs” (and, I suppose, “European American Studies”, too…), for example:

    In one scene, Mr. Maloney strolls into the women’s studies centers on several campuses and, playing innocent, asks directions to the men’s studies center. He is met with genuine bafflement, derisive laughs or icy hostility.

    It goes on and on like that. Target rich environment. Seriously, though, don’t they have editors at the Times? One wonders…

  11. on 18 Aug 2007 at 8:32 pm 11. James Killus said …

    It has been my contention for a long time that many people use television to drive themselves insane.

    You can do this with drugs, also, and I’ve watched it happen. But more people have access to television, and, for some reason, fewer people seem capable of handling it than most drugs.

    On a related note, I just had a little set-to with a fellow on Economist’s View blog, and managed to drive the poor fellow insane:

    Killus:

    You sound like some 20 something student who has no knowledge of history, especially of the environmental movement.

    The topic was global warming, and it is a subject where it’s easy to drive people insane, apparently, but something did occur to me as a result of the discussion, which was about how “realistic” it is to try to impliment policies that would eliminate the problem.

    Everyone seems to have a set belief in what sorts of policies are “realistic” approaches to certain problems. But what happens if “everything is on the table,” like the phoney tough, macho authoritarian right likes to say when talking about foreign policy. What if everything were on the table for global warming policy? What if the head of Exxon could be waterboarded? How about if Haliburton’s assets could be seized, just as if they were an Islamic charity “giving support to terrorists?” What if corperations were held to be organizations, and not “persons” with 14th Amendment rights (one of the most amazing examples of “judicial activism” in American history)? What if it were then illegal for those corporations to propagandize and lie about scientific issues? What if it were as legal to seize the guns of racist “Minutemen” taking potshots along the Mexican border as it was seize the guns of citizens in the wake of Katrina?

    Of course, I don’t believe that all of these things should be done, but maybe they should be “on the table.” And maybe if they were, the discussion would not always be assuming that the philosophical right has already won the debate.

  12. on 19 Aug 2007 at 11:12 am 12. JP Stormcrow said …

    Everyone seems to have a set belief in what sorts of policies are “realistic” approaches to certain problems

    Yes, and I think you’re example of the personhood of corporations is a good one. I really do like the way the faux originalists like Scalia are so uniformly on the side of business in how they rule on issues theat involve corporate rights. There really does need to be an amendment(s) that specifically treats corporate rights and responsibilities - no knock on the Founders, corporations are simply societal institutions that have morphed into something quite new and unimagined back in the day. But then God help us, what manner of monstrosity would we come up with as an amendment in today’s world. We’d probably get:

    Section 1. All corporations registered or operating in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are Citizens Inc. of the United States and of any State wherein they have interests. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges, immunities or profits of Citizens Inc. of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any Citizen Inc. of revenue or property, without massive over-restitution from the Public Treasury; nor deny to any Citizen Inc. within its jurisdiction protection from the frivolous so-called claims of ordinary citizens.

    Text adapted from the 14th amendment, which I learned is subject to a low-grade but ongoing controversy as to its legitimacy.

    To me the whole issue of corporate personhood can be summed up in the catchphrase “It’s only business”. When humans band together to form an association predicated on that operating principle they are purposefully leaving out a lot of their humanity. Who would grant the issue of such a limited partnership a full seat at the table of human affairs?

    And the reality is that in many regards they have an unequal seat. A lawyer I know does a lot of healthcare cases and it is continually infuriating to him that corporations are gvien immediate respect and consideration for mundane items such as dates, continuations etc. while his clients are accorded no such goodwill. The “going in” presumption is that corporation’s requests are substantive and considered, while those of individual’s are capricious and questionable.

  13. on 19 Aug 2007 at 11:25 am 13. JP Stormcrow said …

    A couple of other ideas that are “outside the pale”:

    Ownership of land should be called and treated as stewardship, recognizing both the finitude of the human lifespan and the interconnectedness of the land. (This is one where the words seem to matter to people, even when I advance this with absolutely no implied change in rights or responsibilites, but rather just using the new word and the connotations it brings, I generally get branded as Fidel-tse Stalin or somesuch.

    Provisions of greenmail or poison pills in corporate charters should be outlawed under relevant blackmail and extortion charters. Really, what are these but admissions that many corporate bigwigs are in fact unethical criminally-minded greedheads who can not be counted on to fulfill their conditions of employment. Imagine if regular employees who had access to some manner of internal power to fuck up a company (auditors, accountants, IT admins, environmental coordiantors for instance) got paid bonuses to specifically not use that power to act against the interests of the company.

  14. on 19 Aug 2007 at 12:18 pm 14. christian h. said …

    JP, for some idea how such an amendment might sound like, look no further than the formerly proposed “European constitution” - now more correctly called a treaty. What a monstrosity.

  15. on 19 Aug 2007 at 12:45 pm 15. JP Stormcrow said …

    They do seem to get right into the economic objectives don’t they.

    In objective #2
    …an internal market where competition is free and undistorted. Who gets to define “undistorted” in a world of existing funhouse mirrors?

    And somehow, I never thought that soemthing like “price stability” would make it up to #3 in the objectives.

  16. on 19 Aug 2007 at 1:35 pm 16. JP Stormcrow said …

    Via Crooked Timber, this book: Myths America Lives By looks to be pertinent to what could possibly cause a nation like the United States to find itself party to something like the Padilla travesty.

    Myths America Lives By identifies five key myths that lie at the heart of the American experience—the myths of the Chosen Nation, of Nature’s Nation, of the Christian Nation, of the Millennial Nation, and of the Innocent Nation.Drawing on a range of dissenting voices, Hughes shows that by canonizing these seemingly harmless myths of national identity as absolute truths, America risks undermining the sweepingly egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence.

    Hughes locates the roots of each myth in a different period of America’s development, and from each of these periods he finds stirring critiques offered by marginalized commentators–especially African Americans and Native Americans–who question the predominant myth of their age

  17. on 19 Aug 2007 at 4:26 pm 17. christian h. said …

    More outrages - this is from an article on the Oklahoma Utah mine disaster in the Times:

    Kirsti Loveland said her husband and other miners who escaped alive on Thursday night were angry and frustrated by the conditions of the rescue effort. She said that her husband, who works at another mine owned by Murray Energy, was told he had to work on the rescue effort although he felt it was too dangerous, and that he has been earning less than he does during his shifts at the mine where he normally works.

    “He is angry and very emotional,” Ms. Loveland said of her husband, whom she would not identify because she feared he would lose his job.

    Murray Energy’s general counsel, Mike McKown, denied that miners were obligated to work on the rescue effort. “They are all volunteers,” Mr. McKown said. “They are happy to help, They are a brotherhood of miners.” He also said there was no disparity in wages between rescue and mining jobs.

    I know who I’d believe here.

  18. on 19 Aug 2007 at 5:34 pm 18. James Killus said …

    The “personhood” of corporations had nothing to do with the founders, to whom “persons” meant slaves, as it did to the authors of the 14th amendment. It was the Supreme Court in the latter 19th century that came up with the novel idea of the “corporate person.” There’s some interesting reading on in Brad DeLong’s blog a little while back about the court decisions and politics of the time. The short version is that a combination of late 19th century ideology, plus the usual bribery and malfeasance, gave us the corporation as a “super-organization” with all the rights of citizens, but with many privileges (the most important being limited liabilitry) that ordinary citizens do not possess. This produced a “heads I win, tails you lose” sort of environment for those who control corporations.

    The other seriously privileged organizations in the U.S. are churches and newspapers. If you want to amass serious power, those are the organizations to use as tools.

  19. on 19 Aug 2007 at 6:10 pm 19. JP Stormcrow said …

    The “personhood” of corporations had nothing to do with the founders

    Clearly I have not made myself clear. (As I see for myself as I attempt to reread what I wrote.) In this instance I was merely trying to:

    1) Highlight the hypocrisy of the current crop of Supreme court originalists who generally all get to the same pro-business stance, when the entities that modern day corporations have become were not even dreamt of in the Constitution.
    and
    2) Point out that it is not a knock on the Founders that they did not anticipate them. As you point out newspapers and religions (two powerful societal institutions back in the day) did get special mention.

    Business corporations are in fact a fascinating and recent phenomena (yes, there were a lot of precursors - but they really are mostly a creature of the post-Civil War era). They look to still be on the rise, and to me the question is how far do they get down the The Snow Crash trajectory? Do they top sovereign governments, or stop just short? Probably some unholy mix of government and corporations will arise - and some have argued that early 20th century fascism is best understood as a an early attempt to create just that. (And some industrialists like Ford, Watson and Prescott Bush were clearly intrigued if not downright supportive.)