What Race-Baiting?

The editorial board of the Tribune-Review, yet again, is hoping that its loyal readers simply trust what they say and won't bother checking the details from yet another editorial.

From Scaife's braintrust this weekend:

"Race-baiting” is “the act of using racially derisive language, actions or other forms of communication in order to anger or intimidate or coerce a person or group of people.”

And then:

Speaking last week to delegates at the NAACP convention in Houston, Mr. Holder likened voter ID laws to “a poll tax” that takes America back to its Jim Crow days.

Never mind that free identification will be provided to any voter who doesn’t have and/or can’t afford it — and never mind that those still without IDs can cast provisional ballots — Holder says the Obama administration “will not allow political pretexts to disenfranchise American citizens of their most precious rights.”

Yet it is Holder who uses the political pretext of race-baiting to undermine the very franchise he’s sworn to protect.

Um...so where's the race bating?  Perhaps it's somewhere else in his speech.

Did you know that the phrase "poll tax" doesn't actually occur in Holder's speech?  Even though the Trib used quotation marks when describing what Holder said?  Did you know that the phrase "Jim Crow" doesn't occur in the speech at all?  The braintrust is projecting those things onto Holder's speech - all without telling you.  And finally did you know that in the speech Holder was specifically referring to just one Voter ID law?  The one in Texas, which not-coincidentally is where he was speaking?

Yet again, the Tribune-Review is counting on its readership to skip the invaluable step of checking the Tribune-Review's facts (or better yet "facts").

This is actually what the Attorney General said about SB14:

At a fundamental level, this is the same commitment that has driven us to expand access to, and prevent discrimination in, America’s elections systems. And in jurisdictions across the country, it has compelled the Civil Right’s Division’s Voting Section to take meaningful steps to ensure integrity, independence, and transparency in our enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – a law that the NAACP was instrumental in advancing. Especially in recent months, Texas has – in many ways – been at the center of our national debate about voting rights issues. And I know many of you have been on the front lines of this fight. Here – as in a number of jurisdictions across the country – the Justice Department has initiated careful, thorough, and independent reviews of proposed voting changes – including redistricting plans, early voting procedures, photo identification requirements, and changes affecting third party registration organizations – in order to guard against disenfranchisement, and to help ensure that none of these proposals would have a discriminatory purpose or effect.

And, as many of you know, yesterday was the first day of trial in a case that th e State of Texas filed against the Justice Department, under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, seeking approval of its proposed voter ID law. After close review, the Department found that this law would be harmful to minority voters – and we rejected its implementation.

Under the proposed law, concealed handgun licenses would be acceptable forms of photo ID – but student IDs would not. Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them – and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them. Since the passage of this law, the NAACP and other leading civil rights organizations have been spearheading critical efforts to protect the rights of minority voters in this and other states. And a growing number of you are working to raise awareness about the potential impact of this and other similar laws – and the fact that – according to some recent studies – nationally, only 8% of white voting age citizens, while 25% of African-American voting age citizens, lack a government-issued photo ID. In our efforts to protect voting rights and to prevent voting fraud, we will be vigilant and strong. But let me be clear: we will not allow political pretexts to disenfranchise American citizens of their most precious right.

Now, I can’t predict the future. And I don’t know what will happen as this case moves forward. But I can assure you that the Justice Department’s efforts to uphold and enforce voting rights will remain aggressive. And I have every expectation that we’ll continue to be effective. The arc of American history has always moved toward expanding the electorate. It is what has made this nation exceptional. We will simply not allow this era to be the beginning of the reversal of that historic progress.

So where, again, is the race-baiting?

In the meantime, how bad is the "voter fraud" problem in the Great State of Texas?

Turns out, it's nearly non-existent:

While the State of Texas invests time and money into defending its voter ID law in federal court this week, KHOU 11 News has found the problem isn’t as extensive as portrayed. KHOU 11 News asked Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott to sum up the defense of the state’s law.

“There are two main things that we want to prove in this case. One that voter fraud is a serious problem in the state of Texas,” he said.

So KHOU 11 News requested a list of voter fraud cases in Texas to see the extent of the problem.

The total number of cases on the AG’s own list was 62 since 2002.

62.

Torture News - Good, Bad and Ugly

From last Thursday:

The Justice Department inquiry into CIA interrogations of terrorist detainees has led to a full criminal investigation into the deaths of two people while they were in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Thursday.

The attorney general said that he accepted the recommendation of a federal prosecutor, John Durham, who since August 2009 has conducted an inquiry into CIA interrogation practices during the Bush administration. Holder said Durham looked at the treatment of 101 detainees in U.S. custody since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and concluded that only these two deaths warranted criminal investigation. Holder said Durham found some of the 101 had never been held by the CIA.

And more from the Washington Post:

The Justice Department did not say which cases are being investigated, but U.S. officials said they are the death of an Afghan, Gul Rahman, in 2002 at a prison known as the Salt Pit in Afghanistan, and that of an Iraqi, Manadel al-Jamadi, who was questioned by three CIA officers at Abu Ghraib in 2003.

In the case involving the Salt Pit, known as a “black site” because the U.S. government did not officially acknowledge its existence, a CIA officer allegedly ordered Afghan guards in November 2002 to strip Rahman and chain him to the concrete floor of his cell. Temperatures plunged overnight, and Rahman froze to death. Hypothermia was listed as the cause of death and Rahman was buried in an unmarked grave.

Jamadi, the Iraqi, was captured on Nov. 4, 2003, by a Navy SEAL team hunting a terrorist cell thought to be responsible for a bombing in Baghdad. After initial interrogation efforts, he was transferred into CIA custody and was taken to Abu Ghraib. There he was hooded, placed in an orange jumpsuit and shackled to window bars in a shower room, where he died.

Jamadi’s body was put on ice to preserve it for autopsy. U.S. soldiers posed for photographs with the body — including some in which they gave the thumbs-up sign — provoking international outrage when news organizations showed the images.

The "Good" is that there are now criminal investigations into the torture related deaths that occurred during, at with the OK of, the Bush Administration.

The "Bad" is that this narrowing of an investigation leaves out a whole mess o' torture:

“It is difficult to understand the prosecutor’s conclusion that only those two deaths warrant further investigation,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “For a period of several years, and with the approval of the Bush administration’s most senior officials, the CIA operated an interrogation program that subjected prisoners to unimaginable cruelty and violated both international and domestic law. The narrow investigation that Attorney General Holder announced today is not proportionate to the scale and scope of the wrongdoing.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA created a network of secret prisons around the world to confine “high-value” al-Qaeda operatives. The detainees were subjected to what the agency called “enhanced interrogation techniques” — escalating forms of duress that began with slaps to the face and ended, in three cases, with prolonged bouts of waterboarding, which simulates drowning.

Among those held by the CIA were leading al-Qaeda figures, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who was waterboarded 183 times after his capture in March 2003.

Let's all say it together, children: Torture is illegal. Approving the use of torture is illegal. Both happened during the Bush Administration, though he tried to cover his tracks by having his office of legal counsel declare it not-torture.

The Good, Bad and Ugly can be summed up in this from the Post:

The Obama administration closed the CIA prisons and barred the use of the enhanced techniques. The Justice Department said it would not prosecute any CIA personnel who acted in good faith and followed the guidance of the Office of Legal Counsel.

As I pointed out in this recent Jack Kelly blog post, none of that actually flies. None of it gets the Bush Administration off the hook - and none of that gets the Obama Administration off the hook either.

From the Conventions Against Torture (signed into US Law in 1996), Article 1:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

And Article 2:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

And:

An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

So which is worse? Committing a war crime (as the Bush Administration obviously did) or letting the war criminals get away with their crimes (as the Obama Administration is obviously doing)?

As a patriotic American, the day after celebrating our nation's independence, I hang my head in a quiet itching disgust.

Facts Don't Count At The Trib

Another moment of illogic today from The Trib editorial board:

Talk about petty. The Obama administration excluded Republican Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum from Tuesday's meeting with state attorneys general from states "immediately" affected by the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill. That, of course, includes Florida. Mr. McCollum is one of several state AGs challenging ObamaCare in court. Hmmmm, think that might just be the reason?

Let's look at the facts. From the AP:

Attorney General Eric Holder plans to visit the Gulf Coast to see areas affected by the oil spill and meet with state attorneys general and U.S. prosecutors.

The Justice Department says Holder will visit the region Tuesday. He is scheduled to receive a Coast Guard tour, then meet with the attorneys general of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi and several U.S. attorneys.

More facts from the AP:

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum is taking the lead and is joined by attorneys general from South Carolina, Nebraska, Texas, Michigan, Utah, Pennsylvania, Alabama, South Dakota, Idaho, Washington, Colorado and Louisiana. All are Republicans except James "Buddy" Caldwell of Louisiana, who is a Democrat.

And then this from Reuters:

Five more U.S. states are joining a Florida-led group of states in a lawsuit challenging President Barack Obama's overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system, Florida's attorney general said on Wednesday.

Wait, wait. You guessed what comes next:

"We welcome the partnership of Indiana, North Dakota, Mississippi, Nevada and Arizona as we continue fighting to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens and the sovereignty of our states," Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum said.

So tell me again how because his involvement with a legal challenge to so-called "ObamaCare" McCollum was excluded from the meeting when the three AGs Holder met with are all involved in that same legal challenge.

Talk about petty. Talk about stupid.

More Lousy "Research" At The Tribune-Review

From today's Midweek Briefing, we see, yet again, that Richard Mellon Scaife's editorial board doesn't really care about the truth. Take a look:

Human Events reminds that Attorney General Eric Holder, who wants to afford the Christmas Day jetliner bomber all the rights and privileges of an American citizen in our civilian courts, once thought such terrorists -- enemy combatants -- should enjoy no such consideration. Mr. "Holder puts political convenience above common sense, military tradition and concern for the safety of American citizens," the newspaper notes in an editorial. So much for Eric Holder sticking to his principles.

And from the Human Events editorial they reference:

The American people overwhelmingly think that the Christmas Day airplane bomber, not to mention 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, should be treated as enemy combatants, not common criminals or Prisoners of War afforded protections under the Geneva Conventions.

Interestingly enough, Attorney General Eric Holder agrees -- at least, he did back in 2002. Here’s what he said when discussing the 9/11 terrorists: “One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located.…It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves,…that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohamed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not.”

B-u-u-u-u-u-t when you go find the entire quotation, it turns out that both Human Events and by extension Scaife's brain trust have it, well, wrong. And they should have known this because this smear was debunked almost a year ago at mediamatters.

You'd think they'd find some new smear to use. Here's the reality. Holder was being interviewed by Paula Zahn. And she asks:

The president will be meeting with his National Security team this morning to talk about, well, the apparent discord here. Give us a preview of what this discussion might entail. When you have Secretary of State Powell saying, "Let's abide by the Geneva Convention," and then folks on the other side, we are told, saying "Wait a minute. If we hold them to that kind of status, then all they'll be required to give us is their name, rank and file number."

So she's looking for Holder to map out both sides of a discussion. Right after the part quoted by Human Events, he answers:

And yet, I understand what Secretary Powell is concerned about, and that is we're going to be fighting this war with people who are special forces, not people who are generally in uniform. And if unfortunately they somehow become detained, we would want them to be treated in an appropriate way consistent with the Geneva Convention.[emphasis added]

And when he's asked how he would resolve the issue, Holder ultimately says:

I can understand the tensions that exist, but I think the way to resolve it is, in fact, the way Secretary Powell has proposed, which is to say these are not people who are prisoners of war as that has been defined, but who are entitled to, in our own interests, entitled to be treated in a very humane way and almost consistent with all of the dictates of the Geneva Convention. [emphasis added]

So what about a "flip-flop"?

I think this would constitute a lie. By Human Events and by the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. They should know better. It took me all of 10 minutes to find the truth. It should not have taken them any longer.

Looks like they're the ones putting political considerations above common sense (and reality).

Jack Kelly Sunday

In this week's column (a column my friend Ed Heath calls "silly") Jack Kelly both attacks and defends the CIA.

And en passant he spins torture into a clumsy euphemism. Take a look:

Attorney General Eric Holder -- who before his confirmation hearings told senators he wouldn't -- has appointed a special prosecutor to pursue CIA interrogators who discomforted al-Qaida bigwigs to get them to talk.

Discomforted? Is that even a word? First off, let's rid ourselves of the clumsy. It was torture. Take a look at this is from January of this year:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

But even what Crawford calls torture won't be prosecuted (as the current investigation will only focus on the torture that wasn't authorized):

Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani's health led to her conclusion. "The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge" to call it torture, she said. [emphasis added.]

So what was that which "discomforted" those bigwigs? From the LATimes:

Reporting from Washington - The CIA staged a mock execution and brandished weapons, including a gun and a power drill, during interrogation sessions with detainees, according to a long-secret internal CIA report expected to be released Monday.

The episodes are part of a catalog of alleged abuses -- a 2004 report by the CIA's inspector general -- that has prompted Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. to consider appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate cases in which the CIA strayed beyond its authorities.

Do we really need to look at the law again? Yea, I guess we do. Here's the US Code on Torture.

In it "torture" is defined as:

...means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;

And includes:

(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality;

So, yea, I am guessing that showing a detainee a mock execution or brandishing a running power drill (leaving him to believe he'll be subject a similar fate if he doesn't cooperate) constitutes torture. And it's against the law.

That's what Jack calls "discomfort." If it's for a good cause, Room 101 is sometimes necessary, I guess.

But let's look at the rest of the column. He says of the CIA:

Most of the intelligence we collect is gathered by the National Security Agency (electronic intercepts) or by the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency (spy satellites). The CIA's role has pretty much been restricted to human intelligence and analyzing intel gathered by others.

It's done a poor job of both. The most frighteningly funny book I've read in a long time is "The Human Factor," the memoir of "Ishmael Jones" of his career as a non-official cover officer (NOC) of the CIA.[emphasis added.]

Ishmael Jones may be in a bit of a pickle, however. Take a look at this from the Congressional Quarterly, July 2008:

A 25-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service has written a scathing — and unauthorized — account of the spy agency’s management, setting up an unprecedented legal test of former employees’ rights to pen tell-all books.

Writing under the pseudonym “Ishmael Jones,” the author says he wrote “The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture” in order to “improve the system and help it defend ourselves and our allies.”

The CQ article compares Jones to another ex-CIA writer, Frank Snepp, who got in trouble with the CIA for, among other things, by-passing the CIA censors. CQ continues:

Jones did something far more dangerous, Snepp thinks, by submitting his manuscript for clearance then “thumbing his nose” at CIA censors because he didn’t like their censorship decisions. “God knows what the hell could happen to him,” Snepp said.

“I did the best I could,” Jones told me. “I sent it to them more than a year ago, and I said, ‘Please tell me what you want taken out of this, or re-written,’ repeatedly. But they disapproved all of it, with the exception of a few sentences. They approved maybe one percent of the book.”

So he went ahead without their clearance, he said.

So it was sent to the CIA sometime in 2007 and he published anyway?? And Jack condones this?

All that aside, I have to ask (rhetorically, for I already know the answer), who was President in 2007? Jack never quite gets around to saying. Though he does, of course, lay out some serious blame on the current AG.

Nor does Jack include this in the chronology:

The CIA has also misled Congress on its spending, he maintains, diverting billions of dollars that were supposed to bolster its spying operations overseas into a dramatic expansion of offices inside the United States.

“It’s been a constant promise to Congress since I joined in the 1980s that we’re going to get out of the embassies. It didn’t mean into the United States,” Jones said. “The billions given to the agency after 9/11 to get case officers out of the embassies were intended to put them overseas,” he said. “And what they’re doing is hiring a lot of people, putting them in training for a very long time, and then they’re stacking them up in U.S. offices.”

“We probably had more case officers in California than we did in Iraq,” he writes.

Tell me again who was President post-9/11 and pre-Eric Holder?

Jack doesn't.

Oh, any by the way: Torture is illegal. Always illegal.

Well, It's Something

From the LA Times:

U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. is poised to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA abuses committed during the interrogation of terrorism suspects, current and former U.S. government officials said.

A senior Justice Department official said that Holder envisioned an inquiry that would be narrow in scope, focusing on "whether people went beyond the techniques that were authorized" in Bush administration memos that liberally interpreted anti-torture laws.

A start, but not enough. They can't (or shouldn't be allowed to) hide behind "we were just following orders."

Torture is a crime. Investigate and prosecute the crime.

Something's Happening...

Amid the delicate waltz of policy and politics and the law, there's this from Newsweek:

[Attorney General Eric] Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter.

Whatever happens there was torture and torture is against the law and the law demands an investigation. Let's see if something comes of this.

The Inhumane Pain's On The Dock In Spain

From the Huffington Post:

A Spanish judge opened a probe into the Bush administration over alleged torture of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, pressing ahead Wednesday with a drive that Spain's own attorney general has said should be waged in the United States, if at all.

Judge Baltasar Garzon, Spain's most prominent investigative magistrate, said he is acting under this country's observance of the principle of universal justice, which allows crimes allegedly committed in other countries to be prosecuted in Spain.

He said documents declassified by the new U.S. government suggest the practice was systematic and ordered at high levels of the US government.

And look at this:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking with reporters in Berlin before the investigation was announced, did not rule out cooperating with such an investigation.

"Obviously, we would look at any request that would come from a court in any country and see how and whether we should comply with it," Holder said.

"This is an administration that is determined to conduct itself by the rule of law and to the extent that we receive lawful requests from an appropriately-created court, we would obviously respond to it," he said.

Asked if that meant the U.S. would cooperate with a foreign court prosecuting Bush administration officials, Holder said he was talking about evidentiary requests, and would review any such request to see if the United States would comply.

I'll bet there'll be some back-peddling on this last part.

Torture Update

From the NYTimes:

Pressure mounted on President Obama on Monday for more thorough investigation into harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects under the Bush administration, even as he tried to reassure the Central Intelligence Agency that it would not be blamed for following legal advice.

The pressure?

...human rights activists, Congressional Democrats and international officials pressed for a fuller accounting of what happened. Senator Diane Feinstein, a California Democrat and chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, wrote Mr. Obama asking him not to rule out prosecutions until her panel completed an investigation over the next six to eight months.

And:

The Senate Armed Services Committee plans to release its own report after two years of looking at the military’s use of harsh interrogation methods. And the Democratic chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees are pushing for a commission to look into the matter. At the same time, the administration faces pressure from abroad. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations’ chief official on torture, told an Austrian newspaper that as a party to the international Convention against Torture, the United States was required to investigate credible accusations of torture.

Then there's:

Others pushing for more investigation included Philip D. Zelikow, the former State Department counselor in the Bush administration. On his blog for Foreign Policy magazine and in an interview, Mr. Zelikow said it was not up to a president to rule out an inquiry into possible criminal activity. “If a Republican president tried to do this, people would be apoplectic,” he said.

Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., who was chief counsel to the Church Committee, the Senate panel that investigated C.I.A. abuses in the 1970s, said Mr. Obama was “courageous” to rule out prosecutions for those who followed legal advice. But he said “it’s absolutely necessary” to investigate further, “not for the purpose of setting blame but to understand how it happened.”

Here's something else from Zelikow:

I am not eager to see any government officials prosecuted for crimes because of their zeal to protect their country. But crimes committed for worthy motives are still crimes, and we have institutions to sort this out.

So has anyone beside me found it troubling that President Obama is making announcements on who should be prosecuted for possible crimes? Whatever one's view of the matter, didn't the administration ardently announce its dedication to depoliticizing the Department of Justice? So why is it proper for the president to tell Attorney General Eric Holder what he should conclude?

He then posits 5 possibilities:

1. No unlawful conduct
2. Unlawful conduct but with a credible defense
3. Unlawful conduct with an inadequate defense
4. Unlawful conduct, no defense, but Obama pardons
5. No pardon, but Obama tells AG Holder what legal options he has.

His conclusion:

Can you imagine what folks would say if a Republican president exercised option #5? I wish President Obama would just play this straight. He also does no favor to suspects if he politicizes the question of their innocence.

Investigate. Prosecute. Do it publicly and fairly. It's the American way. It's also the law.

From Tony, The Norman

In today's P-G:

Perhaps I spoke too soon last week when I described U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's approach to starting a national discussion about race as "ham-fisted." You'll recall that Mr. Holder called us a "nation of cowards" for maintaining social segregation long after the battles for integration had been won.

While I agreed with his overall point, his didactic tone bothered me. It lacked the subtlety needed to get past the defenses of people in denial. There was also something hypocritical about accusing Americans of ducking honest dialogue about race when his own boss made a point of de-emphasizing it during the presidential campaign. We would prefer that Mr. Holder indict Dick Cheney for crimes against the U.S. Constitution, not point fingers at us.

That was last week. This week I'm feeling a lot more sympathetic toward the attorney general's position.

Tony then goes on to illustrate what changed his mind: the mayor in Orange County who had "no idea that there was a racial stereotype about black people having an insatiable lust for watermelons" after e-mailing an image of the White House with a watermelon filled lawn and the drunken kids of Madison County, Arkansas waving the Rebel flag and shouting racial epithets at the black electrical workers who were there to rebuild the area's power grid after a recent ice storm.

Tony ends with:

It isn't that Attorney General Holder went too far in his comments last week. He didn't go far enough.

Bring On The Special Prosecutor

From Talkingpointsmemo:

Washington has been dominated for weeks by the debate over forming an independent "truth and reconciliation commission" to uncover details about human rights and civil liberties abuses committed during the Bush administration. Prominent Democrats from Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT) to Rep. John Conyers (MI) to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA) have indicated their support for the concept.

But one day after Barack Obama's Pentagon was lambasted by human rights groups for reporting that conditions are humane, a coalition of liberal advocacy groups is done with taking it slow. In a statement released this morning, the 20-plus groups ask Attorney General Eric Holder to directly appoint a special prosecutor to probe former Bush administration officials.

And from Afterdowningstreet, here's the text:

We urge Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a non-partisan independent Special Counsel to immediately commence a prosecutorial investigation into the most serious alleged crimes of former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Richard B. Cheney, the attorneys formerly employed by the Department of Justice whose memos sought to justify torture, and other former top officials of the Bush Administration.

Our laws, and treaties that under Article VI of our Constitution are the supreme law of the land, require the prosecution of crimes that strong evidence suggests these individuals have committed. Both the former president and the former vice president have confessed to authorizing a torture procedure that is illegal under our law and treaty obligations. The former president has confessed to violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

We see no need for these prosecutions to be extraordinarily lengthy or costly, and no need to wait for the recommendations of a panel or “truth” commission when substantial evidence of the crimes is already in the public domain. We believe the most effective investigation can be conducted by a prosecutor, and we believe such an investigation should begin immediately.

Immediately. This is important (not as important as Presidential lying about a marital infidelity, obviously, but important nonetheless).