ETHICS: No Confidence

CIVIL LIBERTIES — POWELL URGES CLOSURE OF GUANTANAMO: Yesterday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Gen. Colin Powell strongly condemned the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, calling it “a major problem for America’s perception” abroad. He said, “If it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo — not tomorrow, this afternoon.” He also called for an end to the military commission system the Bush administration has created to try Guantanamo detainees. “I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system,” Powell said. He scoffed at criticism that the detainees would have access to lawyers and the writ of habeas corpus: “So what? Let them. Isn’t that what our system’s all about?” “[E]very morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds,” Powell said. “[W]e have shaken the belief that the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open… We don’t need it, and it’s causing us far more damage than any good we get for it.” Despite such vocal criticisms from Powell, members of both houses of Congress, and the President’s own promises to close the prison, the administration has “transferred three suspected terrorists to the Guantanamo Bay prison since March.” “The three detainees are the first to arrive in Guantanamo Bay since 2004, with the exception of those who were abruptly transferred last fall when Bush closed secret CIA prisons in Europe after their existence became known.” Human Rights Watch noted that such new arrivals and a significant drop in the number of detainees released this year suggests that “Guantanamo is getting its second wind, and becoming a permanent option” for the administration. A lawyer from the Brennan Center for Justice added, “It shows that the administration still believes Guantanamo is a viable way to hold people indefinitely without due process.”

HUMAN RIGHTS — DESPITE CONDEMNING GENOCIDE, U.S. WORKING WITH SUDANESE SPIES IN IRAQ WAR: Despite President Bush’s recent condemnation of the genocide in Darfur and his issuance of economic sanctions on the Sudanese government, the LA Times reports today that “Sudan has secretly worked with the CIA to spy on the insurgency in Iraq.” Claiming Sudan’s spies have often been in a “better position than the CIA” to muster information on al Qaeda and insurgent groups, the Bush administration considers Sudan a “valuable” resource in Iraq “because the Sunni Arab nation is a crossroads for Islamic militants making their way to Iraq and Pakistan.” “Sudanese can go places we don’t go. They’re Arabs. They can wander around,” said a source familiar with the CIA’s program. The cooperation in the Iraq war underlies a dichotomous U.S. foreign policy. Despite listing Sudan as a “state sponsor of terror,’ the U.S. also considers Sudan “a strong partner in the War on Terror.” Additionally, “[t]he U.S.-Sudan relationship goes beyond Iraq. Sudan has helped the United States track the turmoil in Somalia, working to cultivate contacts with the Islamic Courts Union and other militias in an effort to locate al Qaeda suspects hiding there. Sudan also has provided extensive cooperation in counter-terrorism operations, acting on U.S. requests to detain suspects as they pass through Khartoum.” Last month, a bipartisan group of Senators wrote a letter to National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell questioning the close association with Sudan. As Bush’s recent sanctions were weak on enforcement, “critics accuse the Bush administration of being soft on Sudan for fear of jeopardizing the counter-terrorism cooperation.”

IMMIGRATION — JUSTICE DEPARTMENT EMPHASIZED POLITICAL TIES OVER EXPERIENCE FOR IMMIGRATION JUDGES: During her testimony to Congress last month, former Justice Department liaison to the White House Monica Goodling admitted that she “considered party affiliation in screening applicants to become immigration judges.” Goodling’s revelation led to the expansion of an internal Justice Department investigation “into whether aides to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales improperly took into account political considerations in hiring employees.” The probe had not previously included an inquiry into the hiring of immigration judges. Today, an analysis by the Washington Post demonstrates just how much “the Bush administration increasingly emphasized partisan political ties over expertise in recent years in selecting the judges who decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants,” despite laws that preclude such considerations. As the New York Times noted last month, “unlike federal judges, immigration judges are civil service employees, to be appointed by the attorney general based on professional qualifications, not their politics.” “At least one-third of the immigration judges appointed by the Justice Department since 2004 have had Republican connections or have been administration insiders, and half lacked experience in immigration law, Justice Department, immigration court and other records show.” Among the recently appointed, politically-connected judges are “a New Jersey election law specialist who represented GOP candidates, a former treasurer of the Louisiana Republican Party, a White House domestic policy adviser and a conservative crusader against pornography.” “Immigration law is very complex,” said Denise Slavin, an immigration judge since 1995 in Miami. “So generally speaking, it’s very good to have someone coming into this area with [an] immigration background. It’s very difficult, for those who don’t, to catch up.”

American commanders are turning to a strategy “that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.” Critics say the plan “could amount to the Americans’ arming both sides in a future civil war.”

“The Taliban carried out an apparent attempt to assassinate Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday, firing rockets that missed him by several hundred yards as he spoke to a group of elders. No one was injured.”

“In what may be a sign of things to come, the lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr. last month invoked the rarely used courtroom tactic: the ‘bloggers can be mean’ defense.” Libby’s lawyers urged the judge not to publicly release letters written in support of their client, given “the real possibility that these letters, once released, would be published on the Internet and their authors discussed, even mocked, by bloggers.” 

“Acting under pressure from Congress, the CIA has decided to trim its contractor staffing by 10 percent. It is the agency’s first effort since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to curb what critics have decried as the growing privatization of U.S. intelligence work, a circumstance that has sharply boosted some personnel costs.”

“A tribal coalition formed to oppose the extremist group al-Qaeda in Iraq, a development that U.S. officials say has reduced violence in Iraq’s troubled Anbar province, is beginning to splinter, according to an Anbar tribal leader and a U.S. military official familiar with tribal politics.”

“Senate Democrats opened the door to reviving the stalled immigration measure on Sunday, calling on Republicans to resolve their internal divisions and produce an agreement on how to move the legislation forward.”

And finally: HHS Secretary requests meeting with dead Senator. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt called Sen. Craig Thomas’s (R-WY) office Thursday afternoon to request a meeting with the late senator. Thomas passed away on Monday after a seven month battle with leukemia. The Washington Post writes, “Needless to say, grief-stricken Thomas staffers were stunned.”