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john ashcroft
In Historic Ruling, Bush Officials Can Be Sued for Post-9/11 Roundups
'[W]e simply cannot conclude at this stage that concern for the safety of our nation justified the violation of the constitutional rights on which this nation was built,' federal appeals court rules
Jun 18, 2015
Victims of post-9/11 racial profiling, illegal detention, and abuse in the U.S. may have the chance to sue high-level Bush administration officials, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft, a U.S. federal court ruled on Wednesday in what the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) called an "exceedingly rare" decision.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday found that Ashcroft, former FBI director Robert Mueller, and former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner James Ziglar, who are all defendants in the case of Turkmen v. Ashcroft, "exceeded the bounds of the [U.S.] Constitution in the wake of 9/11" by profiling, detaining, abusing, and deporting numerous Arab, Muslim, and South Asian men based on nothing more than their race or religion.
"[T]here is no legitimate governmental purpose in holding someone as if he were a terrorist simply because he happens to be, or appears to be, Arab or Muslim," the three-judge panel wrote in its decision (pdf). "[W]e simply cannot conclude at this stage that concern for the safety of our nation justified the violation of the constitutional rights on which this nation was built."
"The suffering endured by those who were imprisoned merely because they were caught up in the hysteria of the days immediately following 9/11 is not without a remedy."
--U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals
CCR, which brought the case in 2002, said the ruling was historic and served as a reminder that "the rule of law and the rights of human beings, whether citizens or not, must not be sacrificed in the face of national security hysteria."
The eight plaintiffs, along with hundreds of other men who were arrested following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, were held as "suspected terrorists" and placed in solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn for months on end, despite their only charges being civil immigration violations such as overstaying a visa or working without authorization. While in custody, the men were abused by guards, including through sleep deprivation, beatings, denial of religious rights, and by having "their faces smashed into a wall where guards had pinned a t-shirt with a picture of an American flag and the words, 'These colors don't run.'" They were then deported.
"Holding individuals in solitary confinement 23 hours a day with regular strip searches because their perceived faith or race placed them in the group targeted for recruitment by Al Qaeda violated the detainees' constitutional rights," Judges Rosemary S. Pooler and Richard C. Wesley wrote in their decision.
Following the ruling, CCR senior staff attorney Rachel Meeropol said, "Punishing low-level perpetrators is necessary, but hardly sufficient to prevent future abuse. Orders came from officials at the highest levels of government. Now we have the chance to ensure that they are held accountable and not treated as if they are above the law."
Pooler and Wesley concluded their 109-page decision with what CCR called an "unusual" section named "Final Thoughts." The section reads:
If there is one guiding principle to our nation it is the rule of law. It protects the unpopular view, it restrains fear-based responses in times of trouble, and it sanctifies individual liberty regardless of wealth, faith, or color. The Constitution defines the limits of the Defendants' authority; detaining individuals as if they were terrorists, in the most restrictive conditions of confinement available, simply because these individuals were, or appeared to be, Arab or Muslim exceeds those limits. It might well be that national security concerns motivated the Defendants to take action, but that is of little solace to those who felt the brunt of that decision. The suffering endured by those who were imprisoned merely because they were caught up in the hysteria of the days immediately following 9/11 is not without a remedy.
One of the plaintiffs, Benamar Benatta, said he was "very delighted" by Wednesday's ruling.
"It has been a long and stressful process that has taken a tremendous toll on my life, however, it is this kind of bold decision that restores my faith in the U.S. judicial system and gives me hope that justice will be served at the end," Benatta continued. "It is time for those officials at the highest levels of government to stop hiding behind excuses and answer for their arbitrary and discriminatory decisions that affected, and in some cases ruined, innocent people's lives."
The Justice Department said it was reviewing the court's decision. As CCR pointed out on Wednesday, it is rare for claims against high-level government officials to proceed.
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Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder Leaves Office (Good Riddance)
Going, going, gone, but let’s not forget him
Sep 25, 2014
Good riddance!
Eric Holder has announced that he is leaving his post of Attorney General, which he has sullied and degraded for six years.
A corporate lawyer with the Wall Street law firm Covington & Burling, Holder will be remembered for his timid defense of civil rights; his overseeing and even encouragement of the massive militarization of the nation's police forces; his anti-First Amendment efforts to pursue not just whistleblowers but the journalists who use them; threatening both with jail and in fact jailing a number of them (particularly in the case of whistleblower extraordinaire Edward Snowden, and WikiLeaks journalist Julian Assange, both of whom reportedly face U.S. treason charges); and his weak enforcement of environmental protection laws.
But Holder, who came into his position as the nation's top law enforcement officer in early 2009 at the start of the Obama administration and at the height of the financial crisis, will be best remembered for his overt announcement that there would be no attempt to prosecute the criminals at the top of the nation's top banks, whose brazen crimes of theft, deceit, fraud and perjury during the Bush/Cheney years and beyond sank not just the U.S. but the global economy into a crisis which is still with us.
Holder not only did not make any effort to put Wall Street's banking titans behind bars for their epic crimes, he did not even make them step down from their exalted and absurdly highly compensated executive positions when his office reached negotiated settlements with the banks in civil cases involving those crimes--civil cases that almost always allowed the banks to settle without even having to admit their guilt. (His ludicrous excuse: punishing these criminal executive might jeopardize the banks' stocks and hurt "innocent" shareholders!)
Nor was this legal benevalence limited to purely financial crimes. Banks like Citicorp and HSBC, which were found to have knowingly laundered millions--even billions--of dollars in drug money for drug cartels, were also allowed by Holder to escape with petty fines, and no prosecution of a single bank executive.
It is being suggested that Holder may opt to go back to his old post as a partner at Covington & Burling, which would be the final, though hardly surprising, insult to the American people, providing a particularly galling example of Washington's revolving door between government regulators and enforcers and the industries that they were supposed to be regulating or keeping honest.
God, how far we have fallen from the days when Ramsey Clark was Attorney General, and left to become a leading critic of Washington's imperial government at home and abroad!
At this point the Obama administration is little more than a place holder until the next presidential election in 2016. President Obama, who campaigned as a fire-breathing liberal who would restore constitutional government, end the Bush/Cheney wars, re-open the government so that transparency instead of secrecy would be the default position, and take decisive action against climate change, has abandoned all those false promises.
The illegal and unconstitutional wars continue in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are now being expanded into Africa and Syria and, at least by proxy, but most dangerously, to Ukraine. Civil liberties are under attack at least as severely as they were back in the McCarthy period, with whistleblowers being jailed, the president asserting the unfettered right to order the killing without trial of American citizens, and a spying system in place run by the National Security Agency that is monitoring and storing, by its own admission, virtually all electronic communications of the American people. The government is also as closed and secret in its operation as it has been since 1974, when it was broadened following the Watergate and Cointelpro scandals, and is certainly less transparent and open than it was even under Bush/Cheney. The Obama administration has also done little to nothing about tackling carbon emissions despite the president's lies to the contrary in his address to the UN.
In all of this extraordinary list of treachery and cowardice, Holder has played his sycophantic role as a defender of corporate America, of white privilege, and of Washington power. He has been both the John Ashcroft and the Alberto Gonzalez of the Obama administration. (Actually, that comparison is unfair to John Ashcroft, who at least was a man of conviction--repellent as some of those convictions may have been. In Holder's case, we have a man not of principle, but who is simply a corporate lawyer, ready to do his clients' bidding, however sordid and corrupt.)
Given the depths of unpopularity to which President Obama has sunk after six years of selling out his own electoral base and catering to the interests of the rich and powerful, the military establishment and neo-con right-wing of the Washington policy elite, it is safe to say that Holder's replacement, still unknown, will be no better--though given Holder's tenure it's also hard to imagine his successor being much worse either.
So good riddance to Holder. But it will be worthwhile, and indeed important, to watch carefully this departing Obama official's behavior back in the private sector, from under which rock he emerged to be Attorney General six years ago.
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Why the War on Women?
Remember when John Ashcroft put a drape over the bared breast of the "Spirit of Justice" statue at the Justice Department? The Republicans are now busy trying to cover their own political private parts after flashing a core part of their agenda - their war on women -- at an inopportune time.
Mar 11, 2012
Remember when John Ashcroft put a drape over the bared breast of the "Spirit of Justice" statue at the Justice Department? The Republicans are now busy trying to cover their own political private parts after flashing a core part of their agenda - their war on women -- at an inopportune time.
It's a motley conservative crew that makes up the Misogynistic Army of the Right. There are those who both fear women and believe them inferior to men. Pining for patriarchy, they seek to subdue and oppress women. There are others carrying water for a health insurance industry eager to save money wherever it can. And others just play for any advantage over Democrats.
Birth control gives women more power over their bodies and their lives, making it harder to keep them in their place. Equal health care costs money. Insurance reimbursement rates (in both private and public sector plans) are intended to drive down utilization. Women are generally more responsible about their health than men, so there's pressure to reimburse physicians less for treating women than men. Then there's the anti-Washington, anti-Obama faction that simply condemns anything Democrats are for.
Conservatives have had great success at tuning their racist dog whistles. They've learned how to use code to appeal to racial bigots ("welfare Cadillacs," "Willie Horton," "Derek Bell," "voter I.D."). The conservative chorus is often out of tune when it comes to singing about the subjugation of women.
Regrettably, Democrats have failed to take advantage of the dissonance. Roe v. Wade marked a moment similar to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Oddly, after securing those victories, Democrats began running away from them. In their pursuit of the so-called "swing voters," Democrats tried to avoid "polarizing" issues, that is, the important ones.
Republicans have been able to hide their antagonism toward women behind the abortion issue, an issue that scares many Democrats and their consultants. I'm not certain why. In Texas, for instance, one hears constantly that pro-choice candidates won't do well with Catholic Hispanic voters, but I've never seen the issue have any influence on election outcomes.
Last year, a Republican state representative in Texas, Wayne Christian, confessed that he was engaged in a war on birth control. My colleagues and I clipped the interview and posted it to YouTube, where it has received a good number of hits at one source or another.
I tried to convince many Democratic insiders that Republicans were more vulnerable than ever on the issues of women's health. I didn't get very far. Of course, I was making the argument at a time when the economy dominated voters' attention.
Still, state and national polls over the months show that women voters are increasingly uneasy with Republicans. Many women who voted Republican in 2010 seem to be moving back to Democrats.
If Democrats are to take advantage of this momentum, they are going to have to keep talking - shouting - about the issues surrounding women's health care. Typically, we think that our arguments are so powerful that if we just make them once or twice the reasoning world will accept our views automatically. We can move on to other things.
It doesn't work that way. The Right is going to keep up its attack on women. There are many Republicans who wish they wouldn't. They can see they are losing the argument with women voters. But their right wing won't stop. And if Democrats don't overwhelm them with progressive voices, sooner or later the right wing arguments will so dominate the media sphere that their views will begin to seem like common sense.
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