Supreme Court to hear administration lawyers defend the indefensible

From Amnesty International USA:

 

U.S. Supreme Court hears opening arguments on habeas corpus

Today, the Supreme Court will hear administration lawyers defend the indefensible: that the President can ignore the writ of habeas corpus and hold people indefinitely, without charge and without question.

The hearing challenges the administration’s attacks on our system of justice and the assertion that fear, not freedom, guides our country. The outcome could mark a significant shift back to our founding values of truth, justice and liberty.

As four Supreme Court Justices put it, “[I]if this Nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny.”

With so much at stake, your support for our work has never been so important. Thank you for standing with us.

» See our ad in today's New York Times
» Help tear down a piece of Guantánamo Bay

~ Link ~

more excuses for avoiding impeachment

Conyers' hard choice: An expert on impeachment says not this time

by Jack Lessenberry

5 Dec 2007

"My best friends are my biggest problem," he told me, out of the blue, as we leaned up against a wine bar at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn Saturday night. He wanted to talk about the possibility of impeaching the president.

Impeachment is something a lot of people talk about, but this guy's a little different. For one thing, he knows a lot more about it than anyone on the planet.

For another, he has the power, if anyone does, to do it. Nor can anyone launch a legal effort to impeach George W. Bush or Richard Cheney without his say-so. I was talking, of course, to Congressman John Conyers.

Make that, U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Conyers, now one of the most powerful men in Washington. He knows, more than most people, how deeply lawless President Bush is. He knows he deserves impeachment, and knows that Cheney does, probably even more so.

As a man who loves the Constitution, Conyers deeply loathes both these men, who have violated civil liberties and waged unjust war and sanctioned torture. He would be very happy, pleased and satisfied to see them gone.

Yet he knows that trying to impeach Smirky and Snarly now would be a very bad idea. It would be an effort doomed to failure, and one he knows he needs to resist, for a number of compelling reasons.

"There aren't the votes there, period," said Conyers, who was in Dearborn for the American Civil Liberties Union's annual dinner. "You need 218 in the House to impeach and 67 in the Senate to convict, and 218 and 67 just aren't there," he said, peering over his glasses.

"But beyond that — do you know what a boost that would give Bush if we tried and failed to convict him? He would have an outpouring of sympathy for him, we'd be discredited, and it might help elect one of his clones.

"Nothing is more important than stopping that from happening."

I was impressed by his reasoning and the vast knowledge behind it. This is something he clearly thinks about — a lot. Incidentally, from time to time rumors surface that the 78-year-old Conyers isn't completely there.

Frankly, there are times when he does give that impression, whether deliberately or otherwise. But what I can tell you is that the man I talked with Saturday night was shrewd, savvy and fully engaged.

Conyers knows how the system works, and he knows exactly what he's talking about. He knows where the bodies were buried, how they died, and who the usual suspects are and whether they were in fact involved. Half a century ago, he worked on the line at an auto factory.

Today, he knows how the power lines flow in Washington. And he knows better than anyone ever has, when, how and under what circumstances you can get impeachment done. John Conyers is the only man in history to have served on two subcommittees that looked into — and recommended — impeaching two presidents, Richard Nixon (Conyers voted yes) and Bill Clinton (he voted no).

Then in January, Conyers at last became the big enchilada — chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, one of Congress's most powerful.

Now, he had something like real power, 42 years after he arrived in Washington for the first time, in an era when a black congressman was a novelty and segregation was far from completely gone.

The world clearly changed when Democrats took Congress back a year ago, but not as much as some wished. "My best friends are my biggest problem," Conyers told me again. "They say, 'John, you got to go for it,'" showing how they'd grab him by the lapels. "'John, you got to impeach him!'"

I wondered if he was thinking of his wife, Monica Conyers, now a Detroit city councilwoman. She sponsored a resolution last May that passed the council unanimously, calling for the impeachment of both Bush and Cheney.

Just imagine — the man Monica lives with is the one man who can make that happen, and he isn't going for it. (That must have made for some interesting dinner table conversation.) He told me he's had to patiently explain to some of his oldest friends why he just can't push impeachment. For one reason, "there isn't enough time." Impeachment and conviction would take well over a year if they had the votes, which they don't. Bush is gone in barely over a year.

But beyond that, he noted that, "Nobody [in Congress] would be able to do anything else while they were doing impeachment," he told me.

Nobody would be able to work on stopping the war, or any of the dozens of other matters that need immediate attention. What's more, nobody would be paying attention to the issues the presidential candidates are trying to raise.

Sometimes they urge him to just impeach Cheney. "Yeah, and so what would happen if we succeeded?" Bush might appoint Rudy Giuliani vice president and give him a big edge for the election. Do you want that?

"Listen." he told me. "The most important thing is that we don't elect another Republican. That is the most important issue. I am supporting Obama, but any of the Democrats would be better than any Republican.

"Because if they elect another one of them, the Constitution is just going to be in tatters. Think of what that will mean for civil liberties. Think of wiretapping and the Supreme Court. Think of everything that would mean."

Yes, he's crazy like a fox, all right. What was it they used to say back during the darkest days of the civil rights movement? Keep your eyes on the prize. Conyers, who led the fight to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a federal holiday, knows about patience and keeping your eyes on the prize.

So is it worth it, being chairman of the House Judiciary Committee? His eyes lit up with amusement and mild amazement at the question.

"Are you kidding? To have the power to set the agenda and call hearings, to have the power to protect the Constitution? Forty-two years. I have been waiting and preparing for this for 42 years." He didn't say it, but I could tell part of him thought: African-Americans have been waiting since 1865.

Yes, he said with a very sly grin. Yes. "It's worth it, Lessenberry." As perilous a time as it may be, as awful the rogues are who currently occupy the castle, Chairman John Conyers is having the time of his life.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/11402

'War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal'

Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday November 20, 2003
The Guardian

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.

French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein".

Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.

"They're just not interested in international law, are they?" said Linda Hugl, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which launched a high court challenge to the war's legality last year. "It's only when the law suits them that they want to use it."

Mr Perle's remarks bear little resemblance to official justifications for war, according to Rabinder Singh QC, who represented CND and also participated in Tuesday's event.

Certainly the British government, he said, "has never advanced the suggestion that it is entitled to act, or right to act, contrary to international law in relation to Iraq".

The Pentagon adviser's views, he added, underlined "a divergence of view between the British govern ment 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.

The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has questioned that justification, arguing that the security council would have to rule on whether the US and its allies were under imminent threat.

Coalition officials countered that the security council had already approved the use of force in resolution 1441, passed a year ago, warning of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to give a complete ac counting of its weapons programmes.

Other council members disagreed, but American and British lawyers argued that the threat of force had been implicit since the first Gulf war, which was ended only by a ceasefire.

"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.

~ link ~

'Guns Beat Green: The Market Has Spoken'

The Nation, issue of 17 Dec 2007

Naomi Klein

" ... Anyone tired of lousy news from the markets should talk to Douglas Lloyd, director of Venture Business Research, a company that tracks trends in venture capitalism. "I expect investment activity in this sector to remain buoyant," he said recently. His bouncy mood was inspired by the money gushing into private security and defense companies. He added, "I also see this as a more attractive sector, as many do, than clean energy."

Got that? If you are looking for a sure bet in a new growth market, sell solar, buy surveillance; forget wind, buy weapons. ... "

~ Read on... ~

 

Joseph Schumpeter Revisited

" ... if Keynes was the most important economist of the 20th century, then Schumpeter may well be the most important of the 21st ... "

" ... In a later book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter wrote that the traditional view of competition must be abandoned. "Economists," he said, "are at long last emerging from the stage in which price competition was all they saw. ... However, it is still competition within a rigid pattern of invariant conditions, methods of production and forms of industrial organization ... that ... monopolizes attention. But in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization — competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives."

Entrepreneurs innovate new ways of manipulating nature, and new ways of assembling and coordinating people. It is important to stress that a Schumpeterian entrepreneur is not an inventor, but an innovator. The innovator shows that a product, a process, or a mode of organization can be efficient and profitable, and that elevates the entire economy. But it also destroys those organizations and people who suddenly find their technologies and routines outmoded and unprofitable. There is, Schumpeter was certain, no way of avoiding this: Capitalism cannot progress without creating short-term losers alongside its short- and long-term winners: "Without innovations, no entrepreneurs; without entrepreneurial achievement, no capitalist ... propulsion. The atmosphere of industrial revolutions ... is the only one in which capitalism can survive."

Schumpeter's ideas lay waste to economists' smooth graphs of long-run growth trends and economic evolution. Growth produces progress and wealth, but in unforeseeable ways and in discrete lumps that create many small winners (for example, the people who can now buy their shirts at Wal-Mart for $8.99 as opposed to $12.99 at its less-efficient competitors), a few huge winners (for example, the Walton family of Bentonville, Ark.), and notable substantial losers (the Main Street merchants of the Mississippi Valley, the Great Plains, and the Sun Belt).

Schumpeter, like his contemporary Karl Polanyi, feared for the long-term survival of capitalism. Bureaucrats and ideologues threatened by creative destruction would resist it. The challenge for the government in managing the market thus becomes not just the Adam Smithian task of securing property rights, enforcing contracts, and providing civil order, but also the tremendously difficult job of managing the creative destruction so that capitalism does not undermine and destroy itself for essentially political reasons. Schumpeter did not think the beast could be managed, because democracy is hostile to great inequalities, and socialism even more so.

Capitalism, however, inevitably generates these mammoth inequalities through creative destruction. The combinations of market economies and political democracies that we see today in the richest countries in the world were, Schumpeter thought, unlikely to be stable. No country that wanted to see rapid economic growth could afford to remain a political democracy for long.

He did not think governments could maintain enough social insurance to counter the destructive part of capitalism without strangling the sources of rapid growth. But why Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy places so much blame on "democracy" is unclear to me: Oligarchs fear change at least as much as democratic electorates do. ... "

By J. BRADFORD DELONG

http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i15/15b00801.htm

the 8th continent

"..Located in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii and measuring in at roughly twice the size of Texas, this elusive mass is home to hundreds of species of marine life and is constantly expanding. It has tripled in size since the middle of the 1990s and could grow tenfold in the next decade.

Although no official title has been given to the mass yet, a popular label thus far has been "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch."

As suggested by the name, the island is almost entirely comprises human-made trash. It currently weighs approximately 3.5 million tons with a concentration of 3.34 million pieces of garbage per square kilometer, 80 per cent of which is plastic.

Due to the Patch's location in the North Pacific Gyre, its growth is guaranteed to continue as this Africa-sized section of ocean spins in a vortex that effectively traps flotsam..."

 

http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/11/21/PacificGarbagePatch/

 

levitation within reach

: ... Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists.

In earlier work the same team of theoretical physicists showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible.

Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created an 'incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.

Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person. ... "

~ Read more... ~

 

'Yabba Dabble Doo: How Aleister Crowley Introduced the Iconic Gray Alien'

" ... Then, there is the interdimensional theory. Although this theory is rather another obvious deduction, and has been around in generic forms for a while, in his brilliant and epic book, Supernatural, Graham Hancock makes an almost inarguable case that the traditional, psychedelic plant-induced shamanic visions and experiences, fairy lore, and now modern abduction/alien scenarios stem from and share the same root, a kind of trance-induced, other channel of reality, in which these same gray-beings have won the starring roles.

What is even more intriguing is that within the story of what could be the very first modern, recorded appearance of this same entity, he is clearly described as an interdimensional being, with no pretenses of alien origins. In this story, there are other ideas that fit within Hancock's theory, such as the use of a meditative trance, drug induced, for purposeful contact (as in shamanism) with the otherworld.

In 1917-1919, the occultist Aleister Crowley was living on the Central Park West area in New York City, with what would be one of his many female companions, Roddie Minor. During a hashish and opium induced trance, Ms. Minor described to Crowley her rich visions. It is important to note here, that many of the narratives and articles which tell of the ensuing experiences, referred to as The Amalantrah Workings, are somewhat quick to dismiss Ms. Minor's visions. ... "

" ... with all this rich symbology within Minor's visions, it isn't surprising that Aleister Crowley took it seriously. He was quite experienced and actively engaged in exploring alternate and astral realms, and considered them, as do all the ancient shamanic cultures and many modern enthusiasts and researchers, to be "real." It is said he also recognized components of earlier "workings" (magickal practices) within her reports, so decided to conduct more formalized, regular sessions with her, culminating in what is known as The Amalantrah Working.

Amalantrah was a character within Minor's original visions, which became somewhat of an oracle channeled rather conversationally directly between Minor (and sometimes, others) and Crowley. Questions were asked and answers received, and much symbolic information gathered. From these sessions, Crowley drew a portrait of an entity which tangibly appeared, finally called "LAM."

Although there is a wealth of precise occult information concerning all the information gathered in the Amalantrah Working, the mythology and general narratives describing it generally follow the thought that Crowley opened up a magickal portal that allowed this entity LAM, others like him and their representational consciousness into the modern world.

It is also usually reported within such narratives that although Crowley made certain to close that opened portal, the rather bumbling occultists L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons (the founders of Scientology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, respectively) perhaps accidentally reopened it by the introduction of their own magickal endeavors, called the Babylon Working (much to Crowley's disgust.)

That the Babylon Working took place in 1946-just one year before the modern UFO era would be ushered in with Kenneth Arnold's famous saucer sightings, and the Roswell announcement adds to its idea of opened portals and alien entities. ... "

http://www.ufodigest.com/news/1107/dabbledoo.html