Author Archives: Lisa

Pentagon Hawk Richard Perle Admits That Shrub War Was Illegal Under International Law

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Is illegal. Not was illegal. The damn thing isn’t over yet!

War Critics Astonished as U.S. Hawk Admits Invasion Was Illegal
By Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger for The Guardian UK.

International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.
In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: “I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.”
President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq – also the British government’s publicly stated view – or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.
But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that “international law … would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone”, and this would have been morally unacceptable…
The Pentagon adviser’s views, he added, underlined “a divergence of view between the British government and some senior voices in American public life [who] have expressed the view that, well, if it’s the case that international law doesn’t permit unilateral pre-emptive action without the authority of the UN, then the defect is in international law”.
Mr Perle’s view is not the official one put forward by the White House. Its main argument has been that the invasion was justified under the UN charter, which guarantees the right of each state to self-defence, including pre-emptive self-defence. On the night bombing began, in March, Mr Bush reiterated America’s “sovereign authority to use force” to defeat the threat from Baghdad…
“I think Perle’s statement has the virtue of honesty,” said Michael Dorf, a law professor at Columbia University who opposed the war, arguing that it was illegal.
“And, interestingly, I suspect a majority of the American public would have supported the invasion almost exactly to the same degree that they in fact did, had the administration said that all along.”
The controversy-prone Mr Perle resigned his chairmanship of the defence policy board earlier this year but remained a member of the advisory board.
Meanwhile, there was a hint that the US was trying to find a way to release the Britons held at Guantanamo Bay.
The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said Mr Bush was “very sensitive” to British sentiment. “We also expect to be resolving this in the near future,” he told the BBC.
That provides no comfort for Jennings

Remains Of Howard Dean’s Long Lost Brother Found In Vietnam?

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Talk about a surprising turn of events. The remains still have to undergo extensive testing, but he evidence recovered so far appears to be authentic.

Remains of Dean’s Long-Missing Brother Found
By Jodi Wilgoren and Michael Slackman for the New York Times.

The Pentagon will not try to make an official identification until after the remains are flown to a forensic laboratory in Hawaii next week, but personal items found with the bodies

Vice Chairman Of The U.S. Joint Chiefs Of Staff Says That Osama Bin Laden Is No Longer Target Of War On Terror

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From the “what the hell are you talking about?” file, this news is just in from the Shrub Administration: Bin Laden’s No Longer Enemy #1.
That means that this “War On Terror” now officially has nothing to do with 911 (as if it ever was).
All you have to do is “take yourself out of the picture,” and our Army will stop chasing you!
What a great deal!
U.S. General Says Bin Laden ‘Out of the Picture’
By Yousuf Azimy for Reuters.

A senior U.S. general said on Friday that al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden (news – web sites) had “taken himself out of the picture” and that his capture was not essential to winning the “war on terror.”
General Peter Pace, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at U.S. military headquarters just north of Kabul that the 11,500-strong U.S.-led force hunting al Qaeda and Taliban militants was not focusing on individuals.
“He (bin Laden) has taken himself out of the picture,” Pace told reporters after visiting U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan (news – web sites).
“It is not an individual that is as important as is the ongoing campaign of the coalition against terrorists,” he said.
America’s new ambassador to Kabul Zalmay Khalilzad said earlier this week that the U.S. military would “redouble” its efforts to find bin Laden and other al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.
While appearing to contradict this, Pace, added: “That is not to say that we would not be glad to capture Osama bin Laden today or tomorrow.”

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Guantanamo Bay Prisoners Continue To Be Denied Due Process

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Meanwhile 4,000 Miles Away in Guantanamo Bay, 660 Prisoners Have No Idea When They Will be Freed
By Andrew Buncombe for the Independnet Uk.

The Guantanamo Bay prison camp – established after the terror attacks of 11 September and the war in Afghanistan – was meant to be a temporary detention centre, somewhere to hold the “worst of the worst”.
Almost two years later, the camp has been transformed into a de facto permanent facility where 660 adults and three children are kept in a legal black hole, cut off from the outside world and with no idea whether they will ever be charged with a crime or released. Critics claim the prison, which operates with hardly any independent scrutiny, has become a live experiment in long-term interrogation where experts constantly seek to hone and improve their techniques.
“It’s like it has become a cold storage facility,” said Richard Bourke, a lawyer in Louisiana representing two Australian citizens who are among the prisoners. “You hear comments from the camp commander about how they are constantly improving their interrogation techniques. They are just experimenting in areas that interest them.”
Guantanamo Bay and the nine Britons held there have become the focus of increasing tension between Britain and the US and will be a subject of talks between George Bush and Tony Blair this week…
Few critics claim that prisoners at Camp Delta, as the incarceration unit is known, suffer physical torture, though in the first six months of its operation interrogators used techniques known as “stress and duress” to intimidate and soften up their subjects. Such techniques include sleep deprivation, exposing prisoners to hot or cold conditions and making them sit or stand in uncomfortable positions.
But lawyers and activists say the prisoners – to whom the Bush administration refuses to grant the protection of the Geneva Conventions – face a form of psychological torture by being refused information about their future or access to legal advice. There are regular reports of suicide attempts among the prisoners and recently Commander Louis Louk, the officer in charge of the prison’s hospital, revealed that one in five of the prisoners received medication for what he termed “clinical depression”.
Against this backdrop the Bush administration received unprecedented criticism last month from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the only non-state organisation permitted to visit the camp, which said its refusal to inform prisoners about their future was causing an intolerable situation. “The main concern for us is that the US authorities have effectively placed them beyond the law,” said Amanda Williamson, an ICRC spokes-woman. “After more than 18 months of captivity, the internees have no idea about their fate, no means of recourse through any legal mechanism. They have been placed in a legal vacuum, a legal black hole. This, for the ICRC, is unacceptable.”…
Campaigners received a boost last week when the Supreme Court announced that it would examine whether Guantanamo Bay fell within the jurisdiction of the US courts. Lower courts had supported the claim of the Bush administration that Guantanamo Bay, technically leased from Cuba, was outside the jurisdiction and prisoners were not eligible for the protection of the US constitution. If the Supreme Court places Guantanamo Bay within US legal jurisdiction there is likely to be a flood of lawsuits demanding the US to charge the prisoners or release them. Ms Patten said: “The question is can the government carve out a place in the world beyond the law, beyond the reach of the courts that review the legality of such actions.”

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Massachusetts Supreme Court Rules Gay Marriage Legal!

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SJC: Gay Marriage Legal in Mass.
By Kathleen Burge for The Boston Globe.

The Supreme Judicial Court today became the nation’s first state supreme court to rule that same-sex couples have the legal right to marry.
“We declare that barring an individual from the protections, benefits and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts constitution,” Chief Justice Margaret Marshall wrote in the 4-3 decision.
The ruling won’t take effect for 180 days in order to allow the Legislature “to take such action as it may deem appropriate in light of this opinion,” the court ruled in its 50-page decision. Since the SJC is the ultimate authority on the state constitution, however, the Legislature cannot overturn today’s decision — nor would the US Supreme Court agree to interpret a state’s constitution.
Opponents could fight for a constitutional amendment, but the soonest that could be placed on the ballot is 2006. The Legislature has already been considering several bills, including one that would allow gay marriage, that would grant benefits to same-sex couples.
The SJC ruling held that the Massachusetts constitution “forbids the creation of second-class citizens.” The state Attorney General’s office, which argued to the court that state law doesn’t allow gay couples to marry, “has failed to identify any constitutionally adequate reason for denying civil marraige to same-sex couples,” Marshall wrote.
The court rejected the claim of a lower court judge that the primary purpose of marriage was procreation.

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Interview With Craig Newmark

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I interviewed Craig Newmark for a project in one of my graduate classes.
Here’s an excerpt (complete transcription below):

A: Craigslist, as I think about it more and more. What I’ve done, not consciously, but just implemented what I could of the philosophy that I guess I’ve adopted, not consciously, and that seems to be happening by many people on the Net. The deal is that, in the early 90’s, a lot of people, including myself, somehow figured that eventually the Net would change the way we do everything. That includes business, it includes socializing — the way we connect to people, plus online and in real life, and it might also change the world in terms of the way we govern ourselves, the way we get help when a country’s in trouble. I even felt that a little bit when I saw the ArpaNet in the early 70’s when I was at CASE tech. And this was pretty good.
And nowadays, after the bubble is over, we now see that the Net has started to change everything. It’s changing the way we do business in a number of areas. It’s changing the way we socialize in a number of ways, particularly dating and so on. The ubiquity of digital cameras has also accelerated online dating, and we’re now seeing, or beginning to see, the Internet changing the way we govern ourselves, at least in the U.S. The Net has strongly influenced the way the Dean people are doing their thing… another way to look at it is, in the early 90’s we had this technology we think is going to change the world. We had this bubble, which distracted a lot of people with a lot of money and, on the down side, the bursting of that bubble lost a lot of people jobs and lost a lot of people their retirement money. On the positive side, this world-changing, democratizing technology got developed a lot faster than otherwise. It got deployed a lot faster than otherwise. A lot of people go trained in that technology throughout the world who are, in my fantasy at least, now going around the world changing it. That’s not bad.
Q: Do you purposefully use technology to change the world?
A: That wasn’t my vision originally. I just wanted to connect better with people. To let them know what’s going on. To hear about what’s going on, and that worked pretty well. Doing this has helped me realize that we don’t save the world with big deal social activism normally. We change the world through many, many little acts of good will, and I just provided a platform where people can in fact implement many thousands or millions acts of good will. We’re not the only ones, but, you know, we do a good job of it, and we’re growing.

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