Privatizing national defense was never a good idea

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.
--NYT

As trifecta writes at Daily Kos:

The press was so bad in those two months following the massacre, that Blackwater had to act. They didn't reform, they hatched bribery plots, trying to find Iraqi officials who cared more about a nice cash payout than justice for the seventeen dead citizens that they were elected to represent.

The story is just crossing the wires. Let's just hope this doesn't get diverted to Joe Lieberman's Subcommittee and the truth shall come out. These folks need to go to prison, starting at the rotten head at the top.

--the BB

All roads lead to the White House

Though Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and others have stonewalled the investigations, the nearly 400-page inspector general's report released this week provides a far clearer sense of the White House's role in the U.S. Attorney purge of 2006.

Read more at TPM.
--the BB

"We can't have acquittals, we've got to have convictions."

Ross Tuttle at The Nation writes of "Rigged Trials at Gitmo":

Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the legal treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon's announcement on February 11 that it was charging six Guantánamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes--and seeking the death penalty for all of them.

Now, as the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration's military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials are rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo's military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees in an attempt to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.

Towards the end of the article we read:

"If someone was acquitted, then it would suggest we did the wrong thing in the first place. That can't happen," says Horton sardonically.

[Scott Horton teaches law at Columbia and "has written extensively about Haynes's conflicts with the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) corps, the judicial arm of the Armed Forces."]

Read the whole thing.

Do you find this acceptable?

h/t mcjoan for her post Show trials at Daily Kos. She notes:

[William] Haynes was a legal adviser to Rumsfeld and Gates. Bush nominated him to a federal bench position, but his nomination was actually blocked by Republican Lindsey Graham because of Haynes involvement in developing the Pentagon's torture policies. He was bad enough for Lindsay Graham to block him, and he's in charge of the Gitmo trials.

The Gitmo detainees have no hope of a fair trial, and even if they should be acquitted (against the apparent rules the administration has imposed) the government has already said they can be held indefinitely because they've already been deemed "enemy combatants." Those who survive the show trials will never breathe free air if the Bush administration has anything to say about it.

Anybody remember that quaint phrase "EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW"? They are inscribed over the main entrance to the Supreme Court building.
I wish this nation still believed in, and practiced, this.
--the BB