Should GW abandon his scheme for detainees?

[David_Simmons]

In nearly every court case that detainees managed to bring to an impartial review the government has lost. The latest one is this one in which a military judges dismissed cases against two detainees. It seems to me that the ad hoc methods invented by the administration to avoid due process for detainees give both the civilian an military legal departments bad gas pains.

According to the story the ruling in these cases bring into question the legitimach of the detention of all of those held at Guantanamo Bay.

So wouldn’t it be reasonable to back up, take a fresh start and follow the usual procedure of examining each case on its own merits, bring them to court or dismiss them? After all, the cost in money an time really can’t be that significant in the over all cost of the war on terror. It would also be in accord with our usual standards of justice.

[Duckster]

@David Simmons

So wouldn’t it be reasonable to back up, take a fresh start and follow the usual procedure of examining each case on its own merits, bring them to court or dismiss them? After all, the cost in money an time really can’t be that significant in the over all cost of the war on terror. It would also be in accord with our usual standards of justice.

I think this is where your premise fails. Has the Bush Administration ever admitted, “Whoops! We blew that one. Let’s back up a bit, reanalyze and go down this path instead.” ??

[hotflungwok]

How fast are these being done? It seems that at this rate, it will be just another thing Bush can drop in the lap of the next pres.

[miss_elizabeth]

@David Simmons

So wouldn’t it be reasonable to back up, take a fresh start and follow the usual procedure of examining each case on its own merits, bring them to court or dismiss them? After all, the cost in money an time really can’t be that significant in the over all cost of the war on terror. It would also be in accord with our usual standards of justice.

It would be extremely reasonable. Unfortunately, we are dealing with the Bush administration, and they are not reasonable people. (If they were, we probably wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with)

[RTFirefly]

@hotflungwok

How fast are these being done? It seems that at this rate, it will be just another thing Bush can drop in the lap of the next pres.

It takes a while to clean up after the elephants, doesn’t it? Even back in 2004, I was saying that Kerry needed to win because we needed a Truth and Reconciliation Commission after four years of Bush and Cheney.

I’m all for closing down Gitmo, giving habeas rights back to those held there, and trying them individually under the same sorts of evidentiary rules that would have been applied six years ago. But Congress would have to pass veto-proof legislation to make it so, and most of the Pubbies are still sticking to Bush like pubic lice, so we can forget it for now.

[BrainGlutton]

The Bush Admin just might conceivably be capable of learning from a mistake, but it has repeatedly demonstrated that it is fundamentally incapable of admitting a mistake, and there is no way to change the detainee policy without doing the latter.

[David_Simmons]

@miss elizabeth

It would be extremely reasonable. Unfortunately, we are dealing with the Bush administration, and they are not reasonable people. (If they were, we probably wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with)

Further down in the story is this gem

The dismissed cases have no real effect on the prisoners’ freedom: The administration has said that even those never charged with specific crimes will be held for the duration of the war on terrorism, regardless of judicial procedures created to try them.

That just leaves me speechless.

Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, head of the war crimes tribunal defense team, said that Congress should take the opportunity to force the government to cease circumventing legitimate U.S. courts in its effort to prosecute Guantanamo prisoners.

With the military and civilian legal systems both saying that the current method is wrong on all counts, is there really nothing that can be done to force congress to act?

These actions by the US government are doing nothing but acting as a recruiting tool for more terrorists. Well, come to think of it they are doing another thing. The have ruined our standing in the world as a place of even-handed justice.

As was the case with the resolution to authorize force in Iraq and the USA Patriot Act, the congress at the time also bears the shame of this sort of thing.

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, Hamdan’s defense attorney, said the Military Commissions Act "demonstrates once again that if you put a statute together in three weeks and rush it through … you end up with a process that doesn’t work.

There were all stavish, Republican dominated congresses. I honestly don’t see how anyone can justify voting for a Republican until its party leaders have taken a course in our constitution and system of justice.

The excuse that “every thing changed on 9/11” is hogwash. Some things did need to be changes, such as tighter security in transportation and an awareness that we should be prepared for such attacks. However, the attacks did not threaten our national existence and, bad as they were, should not have resulted in blind panic which exists in places yet today.

[BrainGlutton]

I think most of those detainees will be either charged or released not long after January 2009 (unless Fred Thompson wins the presidency). They shouldn’t hope for either any sooner than that.

[John_Mace]

@hotflungwok

How fast are these being done? It seems that at this rate, it will be just another thing Bush can drop in the lap of the next pres.

I’ve been saying that for years, and it makes even more sense now. Whoever wins in '08 is going to have to clean up the whole mess.

[David_Simmons]

@John Mace

Whoever wins in '08 is going to have to clean up the whole mess.

And in '12, '16 and probably '20.

You guys have your work cut out for you. Electring someone capable doing that won’t be easy. In fact getting someone capable of doing it to even run will be damned hard.

[John_Mace]

@David Simmons

And in '12, '16 and probably '20.

For Iraq, definitely. I would hope that Guantanamo could be cleaned up in 4 years. My guess is that all but a handful should be just let free.

[David_Simmons]

@John Mace

For Iraq, definitely. I would hope that Guantanamo could be cleaned up in 4 years. My guess is that all but a handful should be just let free.

Cleaning up the mess will mean, in my opinion, somehow canceling the precedents that have been set by this operation at Guantanamo Bay. I see presidents citing them way into the future when it gets inconvenient to do legally whatever they want to do.

[BrainGlutton]

@David Simmons

Cleaning up the mess will mean, in my opinion, somehow canceling the precedents that have been set by this operation at Guantanamo Bay.

That’s Congress’ job, and I hope they get on it soon.

[Zoe]

Has Thompson had anything to say about the detainees at Gitmo? My contention is that he is not as conservative as he is making himself out to be. God, I hope he’s not! He was a popular Senator even with us Democrats. I know he has a good legal mind. He has used it to fight corruption against both Republicans and Democrats.

[tagos]

Bush’s hostile GW record is beyond argument as anyone who has paid even cursory attention to the issue already knows. Congress has been holding hearings.

Govt meddling claimed

Under its new Democratic chairman, Henry Waxman, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform took on the Bush administration’s handling of climate change science, and even the Republicans on the panel had little good to say about the administration’s actions.

Drew Shindell, a NASA scientist who said he was speaking as an individual, not for his agency, described research he and his colleagues did on ozone depletion and greenhouse gases over Antarctica.

Shindell said the findings helped explain recent cooling on the continent, a phenomenon cited by climate dissidents as challenging the mainstream view. And, he said, the findings suggested Antarctica might warm rapidly in the future, melting ice and dramatically raising sea levels. By the time the administration had signed off on the work, he said, its importance had been played down and references to “rapid warming” had been deleted.

Another witness, Rick Piltz, said he resigned in protest in 2005 from his job with the federal Climate Change Science Program when he became convinced that the administration’s goal was to “impede” the understanding of climate science among the public and even the Congress.

Part of his job, Piltz said, was to compile periodic assessments of government climate research for the Congress. “This report has essentially been made to vanish by the Bush administration,” he said.

The fourth witness was Francesca Grifo, who directs the scientific integrity program of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group that researches environmental, arms control and other issues.

Grifo’s testimony drew largely from a report, produced by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project, a private group that defends whistle-blowers. The report, made public on Tuesday, is based on a scientist union survey of federal climate scientists and interviews and document searches by the Government Accountability Project. It says it is common for scientists to be pressured to eliminate references to climate change, for their work to be changed to misrepresent their findings and for climate-related materials to disappear from Web sites.

Almost 60 percent of the scientists who responded to the survey said they had personally experienced such an incident in the last five years, the report says, and those who said their work was most closely related to climate change experienced the most interference.

Rewriting the Science

As a government scientist, James Hansen is taking a risk. He says there are things the White House doesn’t want you to hear but he’s going to say them anyway.

Hansen is arguably the world’s leading researcher on global warming. He’s the head of NASA’s top institute studying the climate. But as correspondent Scott Pelley first reported last spring, this imminent scientist says that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science.

“In my more than three decades in the government I’ve never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public,” says Hansen.

Restrictions like an e-mail Hansen’s institute received from NASA in 2004. “… there is a new review process … ,” the e-mail read. “The White House (is) now reviewing all climate related press releases,” it continued.

<snip>

Dozens of federal agencies report science but much of it is edited at the White House before it is sent to Congress and the public. It appears climate science is edited with a heavy hand. Drafts of climate reports were co-written by Rick Piltz for the federal Climate Change Science Program. But Piltz says his work was edited by the White House to make global warming seem less threatening.

“The strategy of people with a political agenda to avoid this issue is to say there is so much to study way upstream here that we can’t even being to discuss impacts and response strategies,” says Piltz. “There’s too much uncertainty. It’s not the climate scientists that are saying that, its lawyers and politicians.”

Piltz worked under the Clinton and Bush administrations. Each year, he helped write a report to Congress called “Our Changing Planet.”

Piltz says he is responsible for editing the report and sending a review draft to the White House.

Asked what happens, Piltz says: “It comes back with a large number of edits, handwritten on the hard copy by the chief-of-staff of the Council on Environmental Quality.”

Asked who the chief of staff is, Piltz says, “Phil Cooney.”

Piltz says Cooney is not a scientist. “He’s a lawyer. He was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, before going into the White House,” he says.

Bush Aidi softened report

A White House official who once led the oil industry’s fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase “significant and fundamental” before the word “uncertainties,” tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.

Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the “climate team leader” and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor’s degree in economics, he has no scientific training.

That a lobbyist from the Petroleum Institute was censoring science for the White House is, like I said, not news.

Bush: Global Warming is just hot air

When the New York Times quizzed Bush about why his scientists had shifted their positions on what caused global warming, he appeared entirely ignorant that they had. “I don’t think we did,” he said. When tipped off to the paper’s coverage of the report, he added: “Oh, OK, well, that’s got to be true.” Maybe he really doesn’t read the newspapers. His aides then assured reporters that, no, this report wouldn’t signal any change in his policies around climate change.

In other words, Bush will continue to delay regulatory action related to global warming, while pledging to invest in more study of the issue in the name of “sound science,” before doing anything about it.

“The Bush administration has been playing whack-a-mole trying to beat back its own scientists on global warming; every once in a while they miss one,” says Jeremy Symons, who worked at the Environmental Protection Agency in 2001, when the president reneged on his campaign promise to regulate global-warming pollution – a move, Symons says, done for “no reason other than to appease polluters.”

“The strength of the science is overwhelming and it’s reflected in this new report,” adds Symons, now climate change program manager for the National Wildlife Federation. “It doesn’t leave the administration anywhere to hide about the fact that it’s not doing anything. The science hasn’t changed, but when it comes to policy the Bush administration still has its head in the sand.”

It’s a repeat of a situation early in Bush’s presidency, when he asked the National Academy of Sciences to look into global warming and they found that it is happening and is likely caused by such human activities as burning fossil fuels. The response? The administration just continued to call for further study and even infamously censored mentions of the harmful impact of global warming from a federal environmental report.

The Bush administration has refused to allow climate experts to even participate in climate policy discussions, asserts Rosina Bierbaum, a former director of the White House science office. Rather than consult with its own scientific advisors when devising a strategy on climate change, the White House constructed a plan primarily from conversations with the National Economic Counsel.

“I wasn’t asked anything,” says Bierbaum, now dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment. “In fact, I was told to stop sending weekly science updates to the White House, as had been the tradition with the previous administration.”

When Bush does address climate change, he brags about his programs “Healthy Forests” and “Clear Skies,” chipper names that mask what they actually do. The programs allow companies to voluntarily reduce greenhouse gas intensity, not overall greenhouse gas emissions.

That means that as the economy grows, the ratio of greenhouse gas emissions to economic output should not grow as quickly. Yet that phenomenon is already happening on its own; as the economy becomes more service-oriented, it’s naturally becoming less CO2-intensive. According to the Government Accountability Office, emission intensity was already projected to drop 14 percent between 2002 and 2012.

“The core of the Bush policy was a voluntary goal of reducing emissions ‘intensity’ by 18 percent by 2012,” says Aimee Christensen, executive director of Environment 2004, a political action group. So what the policy really calls for – but does not require – is a mere 4 percent reduction in intensity. What’s lost in the discussion about “emissions intensity,” says Christensen, is that actual greenhouse gas emissions will increase 12 percent.

Has the White House interfered?

More than 120 scientists across seven federal agencies say they have been pressured to remove references to “climate change” and “global warming” from a range of documents, including press releases and communications with Congress. Roughly the same number say appointees altered the meaning of scientific findings on climate contained in communications related to their research.

These findings, part of a new report compiled by two watchdog groups, shed new light on complaints by a scattering of scientists over the past year who have publicly complained that Bush administration appointees have tried to mute or muzzle what researchers have to say about global warming.

“We are beyond the anecdotal,” says Francesca Grifo, director of the scientific integrity program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), one of the two groups, referring to press reports of a dozen instances of interference that have emerged over the past 12 months. “We now have evidence to support the view that this problem goes deeper than just these few high-profile cases.”

In all, 150 scientists reported a combined 435 instances of real or perceived “interference” related to global-warming research within the past five years. This has led to self-censorship, Mr. Maassarani says,

During Tuesday’s hearing, additional evidence came from Rick Piltz, who resigned from his position as senior associate with the administration’s Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) in 2005 over what he saw as repeated instances of interference in the program’s reporting process – often with pressure coming from two conservative think tanks that have spearheaded efforts to debunk global warming. One of their key contacts in the White House, he says, was the chief of staff of the president’s Council on Environmental Quality, Philip Cooney, who served as an attorney and lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute prior to joining the council.

Roger Pielke Jr., a science-policy specialist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, noted in testimony before the committee Tuesday that selecting which results to highlight with a press release is by nature a political act.

Yet even Dr. Pielke says that “the Bush admininstration has engaged in hypercontrolling strategies for controlling information” on global warming.

Adds Grifo, “It’s time for the public to stand up and be angry, too. It’s their knowledge, their scientists, just like Washington is their capital.”

This stuff is so well known I am at a loss to understand how anyone can hold the belief that the Bush regime has been anything but hostile to taking action on climate change. The only action the miserable little monkey has taken is to call for more ‘science’ to examine ‘uncertainties’ while interfering in the reporting of the science itself and smoke and mirror policies that don’t address the real issues.

That he has now been dragged, kicking and screaming, to the realisation that he has to pretend to be doing something is neither here nor there.

[tagos]

Wrong bloody thread! Sorry. Can a mod move this to the GW thread? :smack:

[BrainGlutton]

@BrainGlutton

That’s Congress’ job, and I hope they get on it soon.

Here’s a start, at least.

Wonder if W will dare to veto that?