Monday, February 09, 2009 - Posts
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So much for a perfect score. In a piece today, Judith Resnik and I came up with a top 10 list of Bush legal positions that Obama's Department of Justice should drop. No. 5 was the "state secrets" defense, as invoked by Bush lawyers to block a lawsuit by five men who say the U.S. tortured them abroad. The old DoJ argued that the "very subject" of the case—against the private contractor (Jeppesen Dataplan) that flew the men to their foreign destination—is a state secret, and so walled off from any investigation connected to the lawsuit. Today in court, Obama's new DoJ stuck with that line. “The change in administration has no bearing?” Judge Mary Schroeder of the 9th Circuit asked, with apparent surprise. "No, your honor," the lawyer answered.
At the Atlantic, Marc Ambinder shrugs. "Obama certainly never promised Americans that he'd declassify everything, or that the government had to renounce its right to assert a state secrets privilege forever," he reminds us. Well, no. But there's a weird disconnect here, since many of the relevant facts in this case are already known, thanks to reporting by The New Yorker's Jane Mayer and others. As ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner said, "the only place in the world where the facts of these claims can't be discussed is in this courtroom." More crucially, the state-secrets defense doesn't just mean that a judge decides what evidence to keep classified and out of public view. It means that based on the government's say so, no one even gets to open the lid of the box to find out what evidence is inside. Not even the judge. It's a blanket defense designed to halt potentially legitimate claims in their tracks. To add insult to injury, the Supreme Court fashioned it to preserve secrets in a 1953 case—about why an Air Force flight went down in the state of Georgia—in which the government's professed reason for secrecy turned out to be completely bogus.
As his department's lawyer held the Bush line in court today, Attorney General Eric Holder promised a review of all the government's uses of the state-secrets privilege, "to ensure that is being invoked only in legally appropriate situations." Maybe at some point down the line, that will seem reassuring. But at the moment, Holder's promise plus today's developments in court equals not much.
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Dahlia, I see the Angelina resemblance (morphed a bit with Janeane Garofolo). Both women have youth, beauty, and more notoriety than a sane person would ever dream of. But Nadya Suleman has 14 kids to support, no job, and no Brad Pitt. Possibly, the publicity machine will take her somewhere ("Tuesday a special Dateline: How are her other six children doing?"), but despite her chances for a cable reality show, I have a bad feeling her steely optimism will not be enough to carry her to a movie-star happy ending.
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Sen. Patrick Leahy, chair of the judiciary committee, is calling for a truth commission to investigate various unfortunate doings at the Bush Department of Justice. The commission would have subpoena power but witnesses wouldn't open themselves to criminal charges by testifying, except perjury. That probably means immunity—if not blanket immunity, then protection for anything a witness tells the committee. In other words, it's about finding out what happened, not punishment. There are other ways this could happen—various lawsuits could reveal more about DoJ's innerworkings, and the Obama DoJ could also just release internal documents on its own. The advantage a congressional commission offers are a few good interrogators (calling Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse), and the chance to frame the questions, and to write a big report with gravitas, 9/11-commission style. But Leahy's proposal isn't what the Obama administration has called for. Good for Leahy for putting this on the table so that the president and his new lawyers will have to respond.
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I can’t tear myself away from the story of Nadya Suleman, who recently added octuplets to her family of six small kids, without a job, home, or spouse. She lives with her mother in a three-bedroom home, although it looks like her rent free days are soon to be over. Yet in a series of interviews with NBC’s Ann Curry, the 33-year-old Nadya sounds like she’s got it all figured out: She’s just going to finish her degree and get a job and move her 14 children into a new house. Good thing the economy is booming.
Suleman told Curry—and Nancy Gibbs at Time seems to agree—that we are judging her differently from other parents of multiples (who get showered with Pampers and phone calls from the president) merely because she isn’t married. Are they right? Noreen, you posted about free-floating squeamishness about big families, but are we even nastier when there is no dad? Suleman is not on welfare (she is collecting workers compensation) and she really does appear to adore her kids. So is she really all that different from another famous baby-collector, Angelina Jolie, to whom she bears—by the way—a freakish resemblance?
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Last night, the heretofore squeaky clean heartthrob Chris Brown turned himself in to the L.A. police for allegedly making criminal threats against his girlfriend, the hugely successful pop singer Rihanna. He's now out on bail and is also under investigation for felony domestic violence. In lieu of any verifiable, definitely accurate information about what went down between the two, I don't feel particularly comfortable opining on the dispute, but I will say this: The gossip industry (blogs, tabloids, TV news magazines) is positively gleeful, albeit in the most concerned way possible, to be covering such a high-profile incident (TMZ has seven posts up about it since 8 p.m. ET yesterday).
In the absence of the radically unhinged celebrity behavior that was commonplace during the Brit-Paris-Lindsay era (and, wow, look around, we're finally out on the other side of that mind-deadening national obsession. Maybe there's one good thing about mortgage-backed securities after all), the gossip biz hasn't had a chance to stretch its rumor-mongering, banal-detail-finding wings in some time. Now it's got a chance to do what it does best (forget this "covering" politics thing) and, judging from this morning's saturation coverage, it's not going to let up anytime soon. Not so long ago, there would have been another sordid story in the pipeline, ready to snatch the news cycle away from Brown and Rihanna—now there's just the stimulus package. I'm not sure the gossip media is equipped to cover domestic assault admirably/responsibly/interestingly, but we're definitely going to get to watch them try.
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