by Bob Egelko, The San Francisco Chronicle, Dec 8, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO – The Obama administration has asked an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing former Bush administration attorney John Yoo of authorizing the torture of a terrorism suspect, saying federal law does not allow damage claims against lawyers who advise the president on national security issues.
![[John Yoo is accused of authorizing the torture of a terror suspect. (AP)]](https://i0.wp.com/www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/yoo_torture_0.jpg "yoo_torture.jpg")
Such lawsuits ask courts to second-guess presidential decisions and pose “the risk of deterring full and frank advice regarding the military’s detention and treatment of those determined to be enemies during an armed conflict,” Justice Department lawyers said Thursday in arguments to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
Other sanctions are available for government lawyers who commit misconduct, the department said. It noted that its Office of Professional Responsibility has been investigating Yoo’s advice to former President George W. Bush since 2004 and has the power to recommend professional discipline or even criminal prosecution.
The office has not made its conclusions public. However, The Chronicle and other media reported in May that the office will recommend that Yoo be referred to the bar association for possible discipline, but that he not be prosecuted.
Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor, worked for the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003. He was the author of a 2002 memo that said rough treatment of captives amounts to torture only if it causes the same level of pain as “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.” The memo also said the president may have the power to authorize torture of enemy combatants.
In the current lawsuit, Jose Padilla, now serving a 17-year sentence for conspiring to aid Islamic extremist groups, accuses Yoo of devising legal theories that justified what he claims was his illegal detention and abusive interrogation.
The Justice Department represented Yoo until June, when a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the suit could proceed. The department then bowed out, citing unspecified conflicts, and was replaced by a government-paid private lawyer.
Yoo’s new attorney, Miguel Estrada, argued for dismissal in a filing last month, saying the case interfered with presidential war-making authority and threatened to “open the floodgates to politically motivated lawsuits” against government officials. The Justice Department’s filing Thursday endorsed the request for dismissal but offered narrower arguments, noting its continuing investigation of Yoo.
Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and accused of plotting with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb.” He was held for three years and eight months in a Navy brig, where, according to his suit, he was subjected to sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and stress positions, kept for lengthy periods in darkness and blinding light, and threatened with death to himself and his family.
He was then removed from the brig, charged with and convicted of taking part in an unrelated conspiracy to provide money and supplies to extremist groups.
Padilla’s suit says Yoo approved his detention in the brig and provided the legal cover for his allegedly abusive treatment. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White refused to dismiss the case in June.
The Justice Department’s filing Thursday said Padilla is asking the courts to determine the legality of Yoo’s advice, Bush’s decision to detain Padilla, the conditions of his confinement and the methods of his interrogation – all “matters of war and national security” that are beyond judicial authority.
World Socialist Web Site editorial board,
wsws.org, Dec 2, 2009
Obama’s speech last night, which packaged the deployment of an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan as the prelude to withdrawal, was a cynical exercise in evasion, double-talk and falsification.
The new deployment is a major escalation of an unpopular war that will lead to the deaths of countless thousands of Afghanis and Pakistanis and a significant rise in US casualties. Indeed, many of the West Point cadets who were assembled to listen to the president’s speech will be sent to Afghanistan to fight in a war that the majority of Americans oppose.
Middle East Online, 2009-11-19
Consistently humiliated by Israel
Analysts: Obama has no real power over Israel despite his hard tone against Tel Aviv.
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is hardening its tone against Israel, but analysts warned Wednesday the tough talk was mere bluster hiding the lack of a viable plan to revive the Middle East peace process.
“You’ve had three ‘no’s’ to an American president in his first year,” said Aaron David Miller, who has served as advisor on Middle East peacemaking to previous US administrations
President Barack Obama is now “faced with the default position, which is words,” said Miller from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report, November 14, 2009
Blood on the floor and walls of a cell at Abu Ghraib. Defense Secretary Robert Gates invoked his new authority to block images like these from being released under the Freedom of Information Act. (Photo: Wikicommons)
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has blocked the release of photographs depicting US soldiers abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, using authority just granted to him by Congress to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to keep the images under wraps on national security grounds.
In a brief filed with the US Supreme Court late Friday, Department of Defense General Counsel Jeh Johnson, and Solicitor General Elena Kagan, said Gates “personally exercised his certification authority” on Friday to withhold the photos and “determined that public disclosure of these photographs would endanger citizens of the United States, members of the United States Armed Forces, or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States.”
Middle East Online, Nov. 3, 2009
Severely humiliated by hardline Netanyahu
Analysts: Obama needs fresh plan to restart Arab-Israeli peace talks after humiliating failure.
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration must devise a fresh plan to restart Arab-Israeli peace talks after losing face with a backtracking on its demands for a full Jewish settlement freeze, analysts said Monday.
President Barack Obama’s team has disappointed many Palestinians and other Arabs who long for it to fulfill both its initial tough stance on settlements and a broader pledge to improve ties with the Muslim world, they said.
During a Middle East tour, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sought Monday to reassure Arabs after angering them with her weekend praise of hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offer to restrict illegal settlements as “unprecedented.”
The chief US diplomat insisted her administration still opposed settlements as strongly as before.
Disputing her claim is Aaron David Miller, who served as adviser on Middle East peacemaking in previous US administrations.
“Netanyahu … outmaneuvered us,” Miller said.
The “paradox,” he argued, is that an administration which began with a tough policy toward the Israelis and a “sensitive” one toward the Palestinians has now shifted the onus to the Palestinians.
All Jewish settlements are illegal under international law because they are built on Arab land (mainly Palestinian), illegally occupied by Israel.
Around illegal 200,000 Jewish settlers are estimated to have moved into the dozen or so Israeli settlements in Palestinian East Jerusalem.
There are about 300,000 more illegal Jewish settlers currently living in settlements the Palestinian West Bank.
The settlers adhere to radical ideologies and are extremely violent to almost-defenceless Palestinians.
Unlike settlements, Miller said, borders, the status of the disputed holy city of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees and security for Israel are the core issues.
“They (the Obama team) need to do some fundamental rethinking about what their overall objective is and how they are going to achieve it,” Miller said.
Amjad Atallah, a former legal adviser to the Abbas-led Palestinian Authority, said the US shift on settlements has only weakened Abbas further and made him more reluctant than ever to enter peace talks with Israel.
“They (Palestinians) argue that if the United States was not prepared to back up what it said on settlements, why would it be prepared to back up what it might say on borders?” Atallah said.
The members of the US administration, believing in their powers of “moral persuasion,” were caught off guard, said the analyst with the New America Foundation.
“They thought once it got into permanent status negotiations, things would go relatively quickly. What they didn’t count on was the Israeli government’s intransigence,” he added.
Now that that has happened, “how do we go about re-establishing our street cred and what’s our strategy going forward?” he asked.
The administration now needs, Atallah said, to devise a diplomatic strategy that matches the “high-minded principled recognition” that the Arab-Israeli conflict is a central threat to US national security interests.
Instead, the United States is pursuing “a business-as-usual negotiating strategy” that can only ultimately lead to a worsening situation and even violence, he warned.
Obama, in failing to deliver on settlements, seems to have reinforced the Arab narrative that the “Americans are all in the pockets of the Zionists,” according to Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“It’s not going to be easy, but we need to find some way to change topic,” Clawson said when asked about how the US can revive talks.
Peace and Justice Post 
Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know
December 18, 2009Contrary to popular belief, the US actually has 189,000 personnel on the ground in Afghanistan right now—and that number is quickly rising.
By Jeremy Scahill, RebelReports, Dec 18, 2009
A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.
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