One Utah

At “Camp Justice” in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the U.S. military is currently conducting the first American war crimes trial since World War II — of Salim Hamdan, a citizen of Yemen and a former driver for Osama bin Laden.
To call this proceeding a kangaroo court would run the risk of insulting marsupials everywhere.
From Glenn [...]

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is an absurd, counter productive policy. At Pam’s House Blend, she’s got some fun video of Elaine Donnelly doing her whackadoodle best to argue in favor of the policy. Donnelly raises the “unit cohesion” argument again and again and Rep. Patrick Murphy smacks it down -asking in essence, “Are [...]

Everyone except a few bloggers has probably forgotten, if they ever knew, that last April Barack Obama made a half-hearted pledge to prosecute at least some of the crimes committed by the Bush administration. In response to a question from a DailyKos blogger, he answered carefully:
What I would want to [...]

Yesterday, the Fourth Circuit appellate court, in a 5-4 ruling (PDF), affirmed that the President has the power to arrest U.S. citizens and legal residents inside the U.S., and imprison them indefinitely in a military prison, without charging them with any crime, based solely on his assertion that the imprisoned individual is an “enemy combatant.”
The [...]

As predicted last February, the U.S. government terrorist watch list has passed the one million mark.

Barry Steinhardt point out the absurdity on HuffPo:

There cannot possibly be one million terrorists poised to attack us. If there were our cities would be ablaze. The president - if not this president, then the next one — needs to [...]

Via Glenn Greenwald, here’s a glimpse of the Joys of Washington Bipartisanship as President Bush rejoiced in yet another humiliation of the Democrats this afternoon in the Rose Garden.
This one is special, signing the bill keeps Bush from being prosecuted on multiple felony counts for at least 30 violations of the Foreign Intelligence [...]

The history of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is a sordid tale of bigotry, ignorance and fear-mongering. The Clinton Administration tried to do the right thing and got blown out of the water. Congress - stampeded by a bunch of raving homo-bigots - decided to set military policy. DADT was the result.
DADT has [...]

And there is nothing we can do about it, at least in the short run. A sad time for America.

Glenn Greenwald:
The votes in the Senate on various amendments to the FISA “compromise” bill and to the underlying bill itself were originally scheduled for today, but have been postponed until tomorrow (Wednesday, July 9) to [...]

Jesse Helms died at the age of 86. He served 30 years in the US Senate. He was a shrewd manipulator of Senate rules and a fearless champion of racism in its most honest form. Helms was also a rare breed - a truly honest bigot. He didn’t dress up his [...]

Barack Obama promised “change,” and he has delivered on that promise. We wanted Obama to change Washington, and instead he’s inexplicably changing his policy positions to accommodate the Bush administration and the far right. The most immediate problem: a proposal to make unconstitutional changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Senator [...]

According to the latest CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey, only 35 percent of Americans believe a terrorist attack somewhere in the United States is likely over the next several weeks. While this level of fear is still way out of proportion with the actual risk, it’s the lowest in a CNN poll since the 9/11 [...]

Only 15 senators voted to block the FISA bill: Biden (D-DE) - Boxer (D-CA) - Brown (D-OH) - Cantwell (D-WA) - Dodd (D-CT) - Durbin (D-IL) - Feingold (D-WI) - Harkin (D-IA) - Kerry (D-MA) - Lautenberg (D-NJ) - Leahy (D-VT) - Menendez (D-NJ) - Sanders (I-VT) - Schumer (D-NY) - Wyden (D-OR). Senators Clinton, [...]