The government is really on trial in Padilla case

Word from San Francisco that the Obama administration is pressing for the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by an infamous terror suspect should come as no surprise to anyone. As everyone has seen in the past 12 months, last year's historic change at the top of the U.S. government did not mean that everything would be completely different from that point on. The government is involved in so many things, it is not possible -- nor desirable -- for all of them to change immediately. When it comes to lawsuits already in process, like the one filed by the family of Jose Padilla against University of California Professor John Yoo, the government cannot reverse positions without considerable legal maneuvering. Anyway, even if the government wanted to change course, it could, and maybe should, simply rely on the legal process to force that change. Even given that, it is not always clear what the government's best interest is. Take the Padilla case. You remember Padilla, right? He is the U.S. citizen accused of plotting with al-Qaida to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb in the United States in 2002. Padilla was declared an "enemy combatant" by the Bush administration and isolated in a U.S. Navy brig in South Carolina for more than three years. His and, his family's lawsuit alleges, was subjected to the kind of corporal mistreatment that Yoo, then a U.S. Justice Department lawyer, contended was not torture in a now infamous memorandum in 2002, according to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. According to allegations in the lawsuit, Yoo was subjected to sleep and sensory deprivation, kept for long periods of time in total darkness and blinding light, and threatened with the deaths of himself and his family if he didn't talk to U.S. interrogators. This is the kind of mistreatment the United States and scores of other nations agreed to eliminate in treaties signed after World War II. But Yoo's 2002 memo theorized how the Bush administration could possibly justify mistreatment of detainees while maintaining that the United States adhered to international treaties pledging that it would not engage in such conduct. The Padilla family lawsuit sought token damages against Yoo, contending that he had personally authorized the mistreatment, the Chronicle said. But the United States -- then the Bush administration, now the Obama administration -- contends that there is no legal right to sue lawyers who give advice to the president on issues of national security. That is not an insignificant point, and is probably correct. It will be interesting to see if the federal courts can resolve the question without deeply limiting access to the court system that citizens authorize and pay for. Yet the legal machinations are obscuring what is the fundamental issue here -- the United States mistreated detainees in violation of its own laws and its international obligations. The Obama administration is fighting the claim because that's what lawyers do when sued -- fight until and unless an honorable settlement becomes clear. And what about Padilla himself? The government withdrew the dirty bomb charges and put him on trial for an unrelated conspiracy, for which he was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison, even though he likely has gone insane while incarcerated -- if he wasn't insane already. So, whether Padilla's family can sue or not, all the legal arguments in the world cannot change that the U.S. government's reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks went beyond the bounds of civilized conduct. The people have already spoken and replaced the Bush administration -- it's time for the legal system to stop obfuscating and start putting the responsible officials on trial.

Effects of G.M bankruptcy still roiling San Francisco Bay

Did the State of California get the raw end of the deal along with thousands of autoworkers when the Toyota-General Motors joint venture in Fremont shut down last month? That's what a state panel that gave New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. a $2 million training grant in February is investigating, now that the automobile facility is scheduled to close early next year. The acting chairman of the Employment Training Panel, the little-known state agency that awarded the grant, has asked NUMMI to withdraw its request for the money in light of Toyota's announcement in August that the facility would be closing, according to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. "We would never have approved this if they had told us they were closing this factory in a year," said the acting chairman, Barry Broad, a labor union attorney. But NUMMI and the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, which helped train the workers, said the facility deserved the money because the training had been ongoing for months before the decision to close the plant was made. "We were hopeful that (Employment Training Panel) funding, along with other state and local programs, would enable Nummi to continue production at its Fremont facility," CMTA President Jack Stewart said, according to the Chronicle. "We expect that contractual obligations regarding completed employee training will be met." In fact, panel rules permit the agency to recover training funds when the company that gets money closes down or leaves the state. But a panel official said the $2 million was an indirect contract with CMTA, not NUMMI, so the recapture provision did not apply, the newspaper said. NUMMI received more than $18 million in training funds prior to the dispute. A spokesman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told the Chronicle that the governor's office requested the investigation.

Bush-era wiretapping goes on trial in San Francisco

Today's start of a court hearing on the federal government's post-9/11 wiretapping could herald a major step in undoing the years of constitutional mayhem of the Bush administration. A federal judge in San Francisco could decide that a now-defunct Islamic charity declared a terrorist organization in 2004 can proceed with its damage suit against the government for listening in on phone conversations with its attorneys without a warrant, according to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. The Bush and Obama administrations have tried, and failed, to get the case dismissed on national security grounds. U.S. Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has already ruled in the case that public statements by the government indicated that the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation had probably been wiretapped, the Chronicle said. The case is only the second in the country to challenge the Bush-era wiretapping program, instituted in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. In the first case, a federal judge declared the program unconstitutional but was overruled on appeal because the plaintiffs could not prove they had personally been wiretapped. But the Al-Haramain case is different in that the government already released documents apparently showing the charity had been wiretapped. The Bush administration said the documents had been improperly released, requested their return and declared them confidential. The foundation's attorney, Jon Eisenberg, argued before Walker that the president did not have the power to override a 1978 law requiring a special national security court to approve wiretapping of suspected terrorists, the Chronicle said. "May the president of the United States break the law in the name of national security? ... We're asking this court to say, 'no,'" Eisenberg argued at the hearing. Eisenberg also quoted now-President Barack Obama's statement while a candidate in 2007 that "warrantless surveillance of American citizens in defiance of (the 1978 law) is unlawful and unconstitutional." Walker told a government lawyer that the foundation had presented strong evidence that it had been wiretapped, the Chronicle said. The New York Times revealed the existence of the program in 2005 and Bush confirmed it. But Justice Department attorney Anthony Coppolino contended Al-Haramain's case had to be dismissed because the program, and everything connected to it, were protected secrets. Any ruling to the contrary would be "simply inappropriate," he argued, because it could reveal confidential information about "intelligence sources and methods," the Chronicle said.