News results for Guantanamo suicides and the IPCC glacier mistake

There's some extremely disturbing evidence that the three simultaneous "suicides" at Guantanamo actually died during a torture session and were subject to an ongoing coverup. Google News returns 367 hits for this subject. Nothing in the New York Times; Washington Post carried the AP news report.

A single paragraph in the 3,000 page International Panel on Climate Change report has been shown to be wrong, correctly stating that the Himalayan glaciers are melting but incorrectly stating that they will be gone by 2035. This claim was never highlighted or given much importance by the IPCC. Google News returns 1,789 hits on this mistake. Feel free to draw your own conclusions about the comparison of news report numbers.

Regarding the IPCC mistake, Tim Lambert, John Nielsen-Gannon, and William Connolley have written the most interesting stuff. I think Tim shows this was an unusual mistake that was almost caught in the draft review process - I find that somewhat reassuring as just a screwup instead of an accepted procedure. From William's comments though, the section of the IPCC dealing with impacts needs to improve its game.

My unsupported speculation is that the mistake is tied into some internal, office-politics conflict among Indian climate scientists, and that has something to do with the sloppy work in this particular instance.

Impeach Bybee (and why you hear more about Yoo)

Berkeley lawprof John Yoo has earned a lot of notoriety for his role in the memos authorizing torture of detainees, but only recently has his superior, Jay Bybee, emerged from "forgotten man" status and become the target of potential (very unlikely) impeachment.

There are some obvious reasons for attending to Yoo, particularly his prominent public position that contrasts to Bybee's keeping his head low. Here's another reason though - the people leading the charge against this misuse of the law are themselves lawyers, and it's not an easy thing for a lawyer to publicly say a powerful appellate court judge could be a war criminal. There's both the chance that you'll someday be in front of that judge, and that other judges do not want to hear that kind of language coming from officers of the court.

Bybee should be impeached because he is incompetent and/or disloyal to the public and to the bar, and quite possibly a war criminal that should be jailed.

I write this as a lawyer who hasn't litigated in nearly six years and has no current plans to return to trials, but even so it feels like a scary thing to say, however true and necessary. The lawyers who are fighting torture are much closer to judges than I am. Impeachment is a tough thing; I'm glad people are finally bringing it up and I respect the people leading the charge. Just the stigma applies some tiny level of accountability.


UPDATE: Here's an online petition to the California Democratic Party calling for impeaching Bybee, and another to the House Judiciary Committee. Also edited the above for clarity.

UPDATE 2: An interesting article in the Washington Post suggests Bybee "regrets" the memos. If he wants to accept some responsibility then he should resign the judicial post, allowing him to publicly renounce the memos, explain his actions and apologize for his level of responsibility, all of which could help somewhat to fix a problem that he created. Accepting responsibility without consequences doesn't help that much.

Investigating Bush and the political valence of retribution

One of my few shifts to the political right in recent years came from accepting retribution as an appropriate purpose for criminal punishment. I don't accept it as a way of achieving justice, but as a way of making the victims of crime feel better, whether the victims are specific individuals or society as a whole.

So the political valence of investigating Bush Administration members for crimes is interesting when it comes to retribution. Conservatives would normally think retribution is a fine reason to go after someone, while liberals might not. Now though, conservatives shrink at the idea that people would want revenge for the crimes committed in our name and with our tax dollars. They might want to think about how strongly retribution should influence punishment in all crimes then, not just for rich people drunk on political power. I suppose liberals might consider the same question for other crimes, too.

Finally, conservatives might argue that no retribution is needed, because the crimes weren't "wrong." That would be the most shameful reasoning, I think.

(A side note - if it's true that the Bushies ordered the forgery of evidence of WMDs and Al Qaeda in Iraq to keep the war going, we can likely add another war crime, a war of aggression, to Bush's list. Forging evidence seems to me to be a different category from simply withholding evidence that cuts against their argument for continuing the war.)

Who Bush pardons next month, and whether Obama can (and will) reverse the pardons

An interesting dustup from Bush's latest pardon attempts - after it was publicly revealed that one recipient's father gave almost $30,000 to the Republican party, Bush is trying to take the pardon back, and one 140-year-old case suggests he might be able to do it. If the pardon has been issued but not delivered and accepted, then it remains revocable.

I've been wondering whether Bush will try and push the envelope of the pardon power next month, issuing a blanket pardon without names attached to anyone involved in any capacity with extraordinary rendition and authorized interrogation techniques. I've thought he'd do it without naming names not just to exempt as many underlings as possible, but also in order to pardon himself and Cheney without doing so expressly. The problem comes with the old case at the link above, that "A pardon is a deed, to the validity of which delivery is essential, and delivery is not complete without acceptance, and a pardon by an outgoing President may be revoked by his successor before delivery."

I'm not sure if the concepts of delivery and acceptance still operate today, or how they worked for Carter's blanket pardon of draft evaders. To the extent they still work though and allow Bush to revoke his pardon, Obama could do the same thing.

Something Obama may have to think about.

UPDATE: See the comments, and also here for whether Bush really can revoke the pardon. I think that insofar as the legal question is open, Bush would have estoppel problems if he claimed that Obama couldn't revoke pardons that Bush himself gave but had not "delivered." I also think Obama would likely duck the issue, though.

I've just updated Nancy Pelosi's wiki article

I've added a section on enhanced interrogation/torture here, to reflect her record of secret briefing and non-objection to waterboarding. Just trying to do my little part for justice and accountability. We'll see how long that section survives.

I find her excuses flimsy and vague (see the preceding link) - not saying when she first protested the techniques, and saying she concurred with Harman's objection is meaningless if she didn't express the concurrence at the time. Kind of hard to express that with the concision the wiki article requires, though.

UPDATE: Took all of 20 minutes for someone to add the "she concurred with objections raised by a Democratic colleague in a letter to the C.I.A. in early 2003" blather. Without stating when she concurred, and whether she only concurred in her mind as opposed to telling anyone, the phrase adds nothing. I guess I'll just leave it though.

I expect this Bush Administration leak is meant to stop the Dems from pushing for a special counsel to investigate the destruction of the CIA videotapes. I hope it has the opposite effect - if they stop pushing, we'll know why.

It's like destroying all the movies of the D-Day Invasion

That's what destroying the videotaped "interrogations" of Al-Qaeda members amounted to, if you accept at face value the Bush Administration claim that the interrogation methods were ethical and produced valuable information. The tapes were perfect training materials - actual "interrogators" getting actual information from actually resisting enemies. To say they were destroyed to protect interrogator identities is ridiculous - the interrogators' faces and voices could have been easily obscured.

So either it was criminally incompetent to destroy something so valuable if the Bush/Republican approach is justified, or it was criminal obstruction of justice to destroy evidence of governmental interrogators committing crimes authorized high up the chain of command.

Kevin Drum has more on the uselessness of these particular results.

The Italian trials are Bush's future

I predict that after Bush leaves office, neither he nor Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft or Gonzalez will visit Western Europe except if sent there as part of a diplomatic mission. The trials being conducted in Italy right now over the CIA kidnappings there a sign of the future on the international level. I might be wrong about this for the first few years, but after a while, they'll remember what happened to Pinochet and stay away.

It's small recompense to the rest of us, but the number of countries these people can't visit will grow over time. And Bush is younger than most of them - 30 years from now, he'll still be around. I wouldn't rule out America being a place where he ultimately gets tried at that point, just as it happened to Pinochet in Chile itself. That'll be worth waiting around for.