Justice Needs Our Effort!

AfternDowningStreet.org must have been reading my mind. I've been looking for some direction to continue the necessary work of redeeming at least two aspects of our American heretage and national imperative: respect for the rule of law and maintaining equality in the eyes of the law. At there site you will find lots of reports to inspire you and hopefully move you to action. Go to this link for specific Obama reports, including one about getting Robert Gates OUT of the administration (and into the docks at the Hague?): http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/obama

PEACE IN OUR TIME
There are major signs of real change and discouraging signs of the same old militarism emerging from the Obama transition team. We're tracking this news online:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/obama
United for Peace and Justice and other peace and justice groups will soon be urging local groups and coalitions and newly forming collections of citizens to schedule meetings between now and January to meet at length with our newly elected or reelected U.S. representatives and senators. Not only do we need to communicate the public demand to FULLY end the occupation [my bold] of Iraq AND the occupation of Afghanistan, but there is an opening right now for us to advocate a shift of resources from killing to living. Find out what your representative wants to fund, build a coalition with labor, environmental, and other domestic groups, and talk about how much money is going into wars and wasteful militarism. Ask your Senators to insist that Bush not negotiate a treaty in Iraq without the Constitutionally required approval of the U.S. Senate. Watch for details on this and other actions at:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/activism
IMPEACHMENT AND PROSECUTION
President Elect Obama has committed to abandoning the practice of rewriting laws with signing statements, to ending warrantless spying, to working with Congress to rewrite the PATRIOT Act, and to asking his Attorney General to investigate the crimes of Bush and Cheney. It will take everything we have to hold him to those commitments, but that will not be enough.
The coming year is our opening to begin shifting power back from the White House to where the Constitution put it: in the hands of our representatives in Congress. If we do not accomplish this under a relatively law-abiding president, we cannot expect to do so under the next outlaw. In this regard it is frightening to see committee chairs behaving as if no oversight will be required in the coming years, and as if all the outstanding subpoenas and contempt citations of the past two years were just campaign gimmicks. We must demand that Congress reissue all outstanding subpoenas in January or, better yet, enforce them itself. Work with us on this at:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/congress
We also need to build resistance in the country and in Congress to the possibility of Bush pardoning his subordinates for crimes he authorized. Impeachment is possible, and has been done before, during the final months in office, as well as after the offenders are out of office. And prosecution is now finally possible at the local, state, federal, foreign, and international levels. Improved policies are well worth celebrating and pushing forward, but if the penalty for Bush and Cheney's crimes is merely that Obama and Biden cease committing some of them, we will be guaranteeing ourselves another Bush and Cheney, or worse, down the road. This newly released book includes Congressman Dennis Kucinich's 35 articles of impeachment, a list from Elizabeth de la Vega of crimes committed, and an essay by David Swanson on how we can prosecute the crimes:
http://tinyurl.com/3kkwpy
Please get involved in the many aspects of the campaign for accountability at:
http://convictbushcheney.org
TAKE ACTION NOVEMBER 10th
The National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance (NCNR) is planning a protest at the U.S. Justice Department on November 10th. Its members are willing to risk going to jail to urge the indictment of Bush and Cheney for war crimes. Let's all of us contact the Justice Department urge Attorney General Mukasey to meet with NCNR.
In September organizers from NCNR sent a letter to Mukasey urging the indictment of Bush and Cheney and requesting a meeting to discuss the matter. Mukasey has not responded. Please sign this petition, which will send an email to Mukasey asking him to meet with NCNR.
Then mark November 10, 2008, on your calendar and plan to either phone the Department of Justice or join us at the protest there at noon. The phone numbers are 202-514-2000 and 202-353-1555. Stay involved in the campaign to convict Bush and Cheney.
SIGN THE PETITION
http://democrats.com/mukasey-indict-bush-cheney
CHANGE THE MEDIA: NO MORE CROOKS AND LIARS

On November 4, 2008, the American people demanded change in Washington DC. One of the most important changes must be removing criminals and proven liars from serious national policy debates, including our commercial airwaves and and opinion pages. Sign this petition:
http://democrats.com/change-the-media-no-more-crooks-and-liars

Mukasey's 9/11 Lies

Following up on Glenn Greenwald's request for readers to follow up and "generate the attention for this story that it requires", I hereby join Mr. Greenwald and call for an immediate investigation of Mukasey, Ashcroft, all of BushCo and their entire lying 9/11 scenario. These 4 posts from Glenn's blog on Salon.com should catch your interest.
Michael Mukasey's tearful lies
Michael Mukasey has conclusively proven himself to be an exact replica of Alberto Gonzales -- slavishly loyal to every presidential whim and unbound by even the most minimal constraints of truth while serving those whims.[...]
[...] These are multiple falsehoods here, and independently, this whole claim makes no sense. There is also a pretty startling new revelation here about the Bush administration's pre-9/11 failure that requires a good amount of attention.
[...] Independently, even if there had been a warrant requirement for that call -- and there unquestionably was not -- why didn't the Bush administration obtain a FISA warrantknew about but didn't intercept really amounts to one of the most potent indictments yet about the Bush administration's failure to detect the plot in action. Contrary to his false claims, FISA -- for multiple reasons -- did not prevent eavesdropping on that call.
[...] to listen in on 9/11-planning calls from this "safe house"? Independently, why didn't the administration invoke FISA's 72-hour emergency warrantless window to listen in on those calls? If what Muskasey said this week is true -- and that's a big "if" -- his revelation about this Afghan call that the administration Independently, even if there had been a warrant requirement for that call -- and there unquestionably was not -- why didn't the Bush administration obtain a FISA warrantknew about but didn't intercept really amounts to one of the most potent indictments yet about the Bush administration's failure to detect the plot in action. Contrary to his false claims, FISA -- for multiple reasons -- did not prevent eavesdropping on that call.
[...] to listen in on 9/11-planning calls from this "safe house"? Independently, why didn't the administration invoke FISA's 72-hour emergency warrantless window to listen in on those calls? If what Muskasey said this week is true -- and that's a big "if" -- his revelation about this Afghan call that the administration Michael Mukasey can cry all he wants about the 9/11 attacks. But neither he nor the rest of the Bush administration are the proprietors of those attacks. There were millions of New Yorkers in Manhattan on 9/11 other than Michael Mukasey, who lived and worked there for a long time. Neither Mike Mukasey nor his tearful pleas for unchecked government surveillance power and the erosion of the rule of law are representative of them.
To the contrary, the substantial majority of New Yorkers -- and huge majorities of Manhattanites -- vehemently reject the Bush/Cheney agenda of dismantling our constitutional framework and basic safeguards in the name of these sorts of fear-mongering and manipulative appeals. Unlike Mukasey and other Bush followers, most New Yorkers have ceased quivering in fear long ago -- if they ever did -- and have had their resolve to defend our basic constitutional liberties strengthened, not obliterated, as a result of the 9/11 attack and the subsequent, self-serving exploitation of it by Mukasey's White House bosses. And under no circumstances do Mukasey's tears provide license for this tidal wave of lies in defense of presidential lawlessness, from our nation's highest "law enforcement officer." [...]
Thursday April 3, 2008 07:04 EDT
Why doesn't the 9/11 Commission know about Mukasey's 9/11 story?
(Updated below with response from Philip Zelikow -
Update II – Last week, during a question-and-answer session following a speech he delivered in San Francisco, Attorney General Michael Mukasey revealed a startling and extremely newsworthy fact. As I wrote last Saturday, Mukasey claimed that, prior to 9/11, the Bush administration was aware of a telephone call being made by an Al Qaeda Terrorist from what he called a "safe house in Afghanistan" into the U.S., but failed to eavesdrop on that call. Some help is needed from readers here to generate the attention for this story that it requires.[...]
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the Mukasey speech and is asking some of the right questions:
Update III - With the help of readers, I was able to find and get in contact with Tom Kean's office, who asked that an email be sent to him requesting comment. The email I sent is here, along with the email I sent to the DOJ (at their request) asking for comment from Mukasey. [...]
Update IV -Chairman Conyers demands answers from Mukasey - House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, along with two Subcommittee Chairs, just sent a letter to Michael Mukasey demanding answers to all the right questions about his 9/11 claims as well as the bizarre (though unsurprising) reference in the Yoo Memorandum to the suspension of the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. That letter will need to be followed up with action, but it's a good start.
UPDATE V: The DOJ replies to my email referenced above, here.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/29/mukasey/index.htm

Mike & Eliot

The Attorneys General ... and then some.
Maybe the day will come when we'll know if or what went on between these two, other than criss-crossing the halls of New York [in]Justice but for now, let's just check out some visuals.
Mukasey in 3/4 left. I like the shadow over his left side.

Michael Mukasey — federal judge in New York; presided over 1993 WTC bombing case; active in 9-11 cases, including Larry Silverstein’s insurance claims; oversaw the detained material witnesses of 9-11, including five dancing Israeli Mossad agents apprehended by FBI; recently appointed by Bush to be the next Attorney General; radical Zionist of Russian Jewish parentage; “dual citizen” of US and Israel.
http://www.whodidit.org/cocon.html




Here's Spitzer in black and white. Flawed skin but set jaw. No wrinkles on this dude's face.

What does it mean? Time will tell. Or not.

The Many Sides of Eliot Spitzer

First, Scott Horton's post in today's The New Republic:
Spitz Out, by Scott Horton
Was the investigation of Eliot Spitzer politically motivated?
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
On Monday a friend gave me a copy of a memorandum (pdf) that Attorney General Michael Mukasey had circulated inside the Justice Department admonishing staff about how to deal with politically sensitive cases. "They must be about to bag another big-time Democrat," my friend said, jokingly. Perhaps it wasn't a joke. Within hours the wires were burning with reports that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had been linked to a prostitution ring.
[...] All of this makes for excellent copy, particularly for the cable news networks and other outlets that feed off just this sort of tale of personal fall. But there may well be a story-behind-the-story. How did the case against Spitzer get launched? Was he brought down by a politically motivated investigation?
The integrity of our criminal justice system rests on the notion that we investigate crimes, not people. As Robert Jackson, probably the greatest attorney general of the last century, put it:
If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.
[...] The story emerging around the fall of Eliot Spitzer suggests that the case did not start with the report of a crime. Rather it started with a decision to look into Spitzer and his financial dealings. In the course of an open-ended investigation, information about a prostitution circle surfaced. That looks abusive. An investigation like that provides no basis to acquit Spitzer. But it suggests that when his case is done, the public should be pressing some tough questions about why this investigation was launched and pushed forward.
[...] The Los Angeles Times reports that Spitzer asked that his name be taken off the money wires, which reportedly aroused suspicion. The bank submitted a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) to the IRS. The payments which totaled up to $80,000, looked suspicious, we are told, and were examined on the basis that they might be an effort to money-launder bribes. This was reported to the IRS in Hauppauge, Long Island, which in turn involved the Public Integrity Section in the Department of Justice.
[...] Spitzer is an extremely wealthy man, and his channeling of payments at the level suggested can hardly be viewed as something that raises legitimate suspicion. As money laundering goes, $40,000 to $80,000 is peanuts--not the sort of thing that would normally raise an eyebrow. Here it is not the sum involved that triggered suspicion; it is the person who made the payments.[...] Several reports about this case have suggested that it is somehow routine for prosecutors to go through the financial records of public officials to look for evidence of corruption. But in the absence of specific grounds justifying the investigation (for instance, an informant complaining about a bribe) prosecutors have no such authority. In this case, the basis for action is extraordinarily weak. Most importantly, the investigators do not appear to be looking into a crime, they appear to be investigating Spitzer in the hopes of finding something compromising.
Scott Horton teaches law at Columbia University and is a legal affairs contributor to Harper's.
http://tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=c5005f31-237e-4f9d-bca1-891c7aa2b7b2
So, are you interested enough to continue? Using the wayback machine, let's move to to a previous post from Sander Hicks about Spitzer’s love affair with Larry Silverstein and “relationship” with 9/11:
September 11, 2007, Sander Hicks Hits a Home Run!
9/11 Spitzer Scandal Scoop!
Spitzer's Real Scandal
“Eliot Spitzer is like the good-looking bouncer in a bar, who is secretly dealing drugs,” explained forensic microbiologist Mike Copass. We were in a San Diego bar this July, down near the water in Ocean Beach. Copass had acted as a facilitator of San Diego’s 9/11 Citizen’s Grand Jury, an extra-legal group which mounted a mock trial in April.
Copass has degrees from Stanford and Harvard, and an eager glint in his eye. Despite his preppy appearance, Copass makes some pretty radical allegations: that Eliot Spitzer acted as a firewall, preventing public disclosure of his friends’ roles in the anthrax attacks that occurred shortly after 9/11, in addition to facilitating his associates’ windfall from the bloated insurance pay-outs at the World Trade Center. He even accuses Spitzer of covering up the real perpetrators of the 9/11 attack itself.
http://nymegaphone.com/node/24

Inspirational Words or Rubbish?

I know I always look to Orwell when I want clarity of thought! There's nothing like "War is Peace" to snap me back to attention. But I
Law enforcement chief has Orwellian inspiration
By Randall Mikkelsen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top law enforcement official said on Friday he keeps in his office a portrait of George Orwell, whose book "1984" envisioned a futuristic technology security state overseen by a prying "Big Brother."
[...] Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in his first extensive meeting with reporters since taking office in November, said he selected two portraits for his office, the first being Robert Jackson, a former Supreme Court Justice, U.S. attorney general and Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor.
[...] Mukasey, a former federal judge, said he admired Jackson for his clarity of expression and thought.
"I said I had his picture hanging. His was one of two. The other was George Orwell, so put 'em together " Mukasey said without elaborating.
[...] Orwell wrote in his essay, "Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
Jackson also had memorable sayings. "The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish," he once wrote.
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN2536540620080125

An American Inquisition

Is That Legal?
November 12, 2007
If It Was Torture in Mississippi, Then It's Definitely Torture, Right?
[...]In 1926, the Mississippi Supreme Court called the water cure torture. No qualifiers. No hedging. Just plain, good ol' fashion torture . . . and therefore a forbidden means for securing a confession. These men were hardly a group I'd call *activist* or *liberal* and certainly not bent on subverting our country in the name of coddling criminals.
In a case called Fisher v. State, 110 So. 361, 362 (Miss. 1926), Mississippi's highest court ordered the retrial of a convicted murderer because his confession was secured by a local sheriff's use of the water cure.
http://www.isthatlegal.org/archives/2007/11/if_it_was_tortu.html
Here's the new AG. He seems pleasant enough, but he's confused about this centurys old approach. Write him a letter to help him figure out what justice means.
Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey
Michael Mukasey was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1941 and graduated from Columbia College and Yale Law School, where he was on the Board of Editors of the Yale Law Journal. Prior to becoming Attorney General, he had a lengthy career as an attorney, including service as an Assistant United States Attorney from 1972 to 1976 in New York. From 1975 to 1976 he also served as chief of his district's Official Corruption Unit. From 1976 to 1987 he was an associate, and then member, of the firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler

BagNews Photo Tells All

True Colors

The key to the image is not the congeniality of Senators Feinstein and Schumer just before the two helped greenlight A.G. candidate and waterboard protector Mukasey. The story of the pic is Feingold's expression. Like a mirror, that look reflects the day-in, day-out letdown as "our" Congressional majority (#1, #2) capitulates on terrorism, security, the war, etc. (Notice, too, Russ has no hand in the matter.)

"So Chuck, I noticed you wore your red tie today."
"Thanks Diane. I believe you've been showing your true colors lately, also."

We Know the Definition of Torture

Calling All Activists!

EMERGENCY DEMO on the Selection of

Michael Mukasey as Attorney General

We will leaflet and hold a silent vigil at the office of

NY Senator Charles Schumer

11 am - 1 pm, Monday November 5^th

757 Third Avenue (near 47th St)

WE SAY NO!

NO TO WATERBOARDING AND ALL FORMS OF TORTURE!
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding)
NO TO UNLIMITED PRESIDENTIAL POWER!
NO TO DETAINING PEOPLE WITHOUT CHARGE!

INFORM THE DEMOCRATIC SENATORS SCHUMER and FEINSTEIN (CA)

DO NOT PROMOTE TORTURE AS A US POLICY!