Indefinite detentions overseas become Obama administration's dilemma

U.S. citizens who thought last year's change at the top meant a return to the days before al-Qaida and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington got another reality check Friday when a federal appeals court in Washington ruled that terror suspects captured overseas may not challenge their detentions in U.S. courts. The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel means that three detainees held for years without trial at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan did not have the same right of appeal that suspects being held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, won in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2008, according to the New York Times. The ruling reversed a trial judge's decision that the Bagram detainees -- in this case, two men from Yemen and one from Tunisia who claimed they were captured outside Afghanistan and brought to the U.S. base -- had the same rights as prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. Critics and supporters of the Bush administration's aggressive post-9/11 detention policies, which Obama criticized while campaigning but has defended in court, reacted to the ruling with expected vehemence. A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster of the New York-based International Justice Network, said the appeals court ruling would allow U.S. presidents to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without ever having to prove that they were guilty of anything, the Times said. “The thing that is most disappointing for those of us who have been in the fight for this long is all of the people who used to be opposed to the idea of unlimited executive power during the Bush administration but now seem to have embraced it during this administration,” she said. “We have to remember that Obama is not the last president of the United States.” But U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), a backer of the Bush-era detentions, told the Times that the ruling was a "big win" for the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. “Allowing a noncitizen enemy combatant detained in a combat zone access to American courts would have been a change of historic proportions,” he said. “There is a reason we have never allowed enemy prisoners detained overseas in an active war zone to sue in federal court for their release. It simply makes no sense and would be the ultimate act of turning the war into a crime.” A spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department, Dean Boyd, declined to comment on the decision, the Times said. The three prisoners say they are not terrorists and are being held by mistake.

High-profile federal investigation into gulf oil spill won't answer the big questions

At least U.S. President Barack Obama has decided to heed calls from lawmakers for an investigation into the potentially catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but even the authority of the White House won't be enough to resolve the problem unless
the young government is willing to ask the questions nobody wants to answer. An unnamed White House official said Monday that Obama will establish a commission to investigate the massive spill, which started in late April and now threatens to contaminate some of the nation's richest fishing areas and most beautiful beaches, according to Cable News Network (CNN). Eight senators had formally requested an investigation to determine whether oil giant BP, which used to go by British Petroleum, violated any laws leading up to the explosion that destroyed its Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico and started the oil leaking more than a mile under the surface. "The commission will take into account the investigations under way concerning the causes of the spill and explore a range of issues," the official told CNN, including industry practices, rig safety, federal governmental oversight and environmental review. That's fine in theory, and Obama has raised a lot of hopes with his harsh criticism of companies involved with the Deepwater Horizon and his pledge to break up the often incestuous relationship between the oil industry and government regulators. But solving the basic problem raised by the Gulf of Mexico spill, and the Exxon Valdez and hundreds or thousands of spills before that, will be a lot harder. If we're drilling for fossil fuels, spills are unavoidable. They don't have to be as bad as this one, but they're going to happen. The relationship that needs to change is the one between U.S. citizens and their automobiles, and that will require the government to raise prices by imposing new taxes, reducing petroleum imports through tariffs, stopping the construction of so many highways and starting to invest in the kinds of public transportation that will make automobiles less of a necessity.

Toyota makes it look easy -- automaker races back in the black

Well, maybe that's why it pays to hire a good accountant. Toyota Motor Corp. announced Monday that it is profitable again despite being accused of safety lapses, paying millions of dollars in fines and being forced to recall millions of cars around the world. Toyota, the world's largest automaker, reported a profit of $1.2 billion in the first quarter of 2010 after losing millions of dollars in 2008 and 2009. “After taking over amid a storm, I wanted to do anything to avoid a third straight year in the red,” said Akio Toyoda, Toyota's president, according to the New York Times. Toyoda said the automaker had made "tough and anguishing decisions" to return to profitability, including cost-cutting and layoffs in Japan and in other countries where Toyota cars and trucks are manufactured. The company said it expected to make more than $3 billion this year as its worldwide sales surged, particularly in the United States and China. The rebound surely is good news for slumping U.S. automakers General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, if it reflects worldwide trends. GM and Chrysler borrowed billions of dollars from the U.S. and Canada to stay afloat during the global recession. But Toyota's good news could not completely obscure problems looming in the near future for the automaker. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced this week that it was investigating the company's handling of a steering defect in its popular Tacoma truck after denying it for a year. “We’re still in a storm — there’s been no change on that front,” Toyoda said. “But from the storm, we’ve begun to see glimpses of sunny but faraway skies. I feel that we’re starting to approach safer waters.” Toyota still faces lawsuits from car buyers claiming injuries causes by acceleration problems and a series of shareholder suits. U.S. regulators also are considering imposing additional fines on the automaker, which paid a $16.4 million fine -- the largest permitted under U.S. law -- to the Transportation Department in April.

Obama administration resorts to Bush path on detainees

News from Washington that the Obama administration is proposing exempting terrorism suspects from constitutional protections guaranteed to U.S. citizens raises troubling questions about the president's commitment to undoing the worst abuses of the last administration. There is nothing in the Bill of Rights to suggest that it is negotiable, or that it only was intended to apply to some of the people some of the time. Yet that is undeniably the basis of Attorney General Eric Holder's proposal that terrorism suspects -- in this case, the Pakistani immigrant who stands accused of trying to set off a bomb in New York's Times Square on May 1 -- no longer be allowed the protection of the so-called Miranda rule, according to the New York Times. The Miranda rule, which bars authorities from questioning suspects until they are advised of their right against self-incrimination -- comes from a landmark 1966 U.S. Supreme Court decision interpreting the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from forcing citizens to testify against themselves, and the Supreme Court held in Miranda that police must advise suspects of this right before questioning begins to give full effect to its protection. But the Fifth Amendment is not the government's protection to give: it was made part of the basic law of the United States to prevent the government from accumulating too much power. As we well recall, Obama was elected in 2008 because the Bush administration developed the nasty habit of selectively enforcing rights that the United States previously knew to apply to everybody. Yet there was Holder on the NBC-TV show Meet the Press on Sunday, touting "big news" and recommending new limits on people's constitutional rights. “We’re now dealing with international terrorists,” Holder said, “and I think that we have to think about perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have and somehow coming up with something that is flexible and is more consistent with the threat that we now face.” Holder also indicated for the first time that the United States now believes that bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad, who was arrested as he boarded a plane to leave the United States, had been trained by the Pakistani Taliban. Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union told the Times that Congress did not have the authority to limit the Miranda ruling since it merely interprets the U.S. Constitution. “What’s troubling is that this is coming from the Obama administration,” Romero said. “The irony is that this administration supposedly stands for the rule of law and the restoration of America’s legal standing, and now they are trying to negotiate away fundamental Fifth Amendment rights that have been the cornerstone of our democracy.”

High court gets it wrong in church-state case

There was a time in this country when most people understood what the U.S. Constitution said, even on controversial and evolving legal situations like the separation of church and state. States and municipalities did whatever they wanted, pretty much, whether constitutional or not, like they still do sometimes, but the U.S. Supreme Court always had the last and most reasonable word. Of course it wasn't always so -- there have, as we all know, been some amazing doozies over the years. But that was then, before the likes of Byron White and William Rehnquist were on the court. Now, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas in four of the panel's nine seats, the high court can no longer be relied on for sound reasoning in the face of the kind of blatant partisanship that comes from highly paid advocates. Each yearly term of the current panel reveals further examples of this, from the utterly regrettable Bush v. Gore decision in 2000 (the constitutional way to determine who won a presidential election is to stop counting the votes!) to the shockingly unrealistic Citizens United decision (Congress is constitutionally barred from placing reasonable limits on campaign contributions!) earlier this year. So, it came as little more than rueful surprise to see the court rule 5-4 Wednesday that a Christian religious cross erected on national parkland as a war memorial in California's Mojave Desert did not violate the First Amendment, as the New York Times reported. It wasn't just that the cross itself was on public land, or that the government had tried to relieve itself of responsibility by selling the tiny bit of land under the Sunrise Rock cross to a veterans' group, but that U.S. officials refused to allow representatives of other religions to place their own memorials there! The First Amendment's prohibition on laws "respecting an establishment of religion" has come to bar the United States from favoring any religions over others. It is a tribute to the soundness of this reasoning that such disputes rarely reach the high court, even with the loud and often overbearing religious leaders that populate the country. Yet favoring is clearly what the government did at Sunrise Rock. "The Constitution does not oblige government to avoid any public acknowledgment of religion's role in society," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court majority. "Here one Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion. It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten." But in dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens, the only war veteran on the court, said "I certainly agree that the nation should memorialize the service of those who fought and died in World War I, but it cannot lawfully do so by continued endorsement of a starkly sectarian message." The case is entitled Salazar v. Buono, No. 08-472.

Democracy in the new Iraq -- loser could prevail in parliamentary elections

News from Baghdad that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has formed a coalition government to rule his U.S.-supported country for the next four years sounds like good news. For the continuation of Maliki's role as prime minister of Iraq, it could be. But since Maliki finished second in the March election to the secular and Sunni coalition led by Ayad Allawi, the prospect of four more years of a Shiite-dominated government despite the election results could be problematic for the fragile Iraqi society, according to the New York Times. An unpopular government also could complicate the planned withdrawal of 100,000 U.S. soldiers by the end of August, particularly if the current parliamentary standoff continues and is accompanied by an escalation of violence. But if Maliki's State of Law coalition holds and it results in Allawi's Iraqiya party being completely excluded from power in the next government, despite its narrow victory in the election, there is almost certain to be political resentment in addition to the simmering Shiite-Sunni religious friction that seems to almost always be present. Minority Sunnis held power in Iraq during the brutal reign of Saddam Hussein but the majority Shiites have been in power since the 2003 U.S. invasion. "No doubt this could lead to a resurgence in violence and provide a fodder for extremism," said Sheik Abdul-Rahman Munshid al-Assi, leader of a Sunni political council in the disputed region of Kirkuk, the Times said. "There must be participation in the government by any means. Otherwise, we will return to square one." There is only one Sunni politician in Maliki's coalition, the Times said. "The fear is this alliance will have a sectarian color," said Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni allied with Allawi. "That is how Iraqis and the world will see it, whether we like it or not. This development will be a tragic step backward." One hopeful sign -- the Shiite coalition invited Allawi's Iraqiya group to join a national unity government. But the details of such a government -- surely the most important factor -- have not been made clear, the Times said.

Someone's not telling the truth in U.S.-Iran nuclear dispute

Lingering mistrust over the imperial attitude of the United States during the last administration no doubt took at lot of the sting off Monday's trade of hyperbole between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the United Nations in New York. After Ahmadinejad delivered his expected tirade against the United States, which is trying to put together international economic sanctions to penalize Iran for trying to develop nuclear weapons, Clinton accused Tehran of ignoring its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and called for "a strong international response," according to Cable News Network. The two leaders spoke at the opening of a monthlong conference on nuclear nonproliferation, which has taken on additional urgency of late due to Iran's apparent progress toward developing nuclear weaponry and North Korea's detonations of two nuclear warheads since 2006. Diplomats from the United States, Britain and France walked out of Ahmadinejad's speech a few minutes after he began speaking, CNN said. But the diplomats no doubt heard Ahmadinejad denounce the United States for accusing Iran of nuclear activities without "even a single credible proof," and for permitting Israel to compile an arsenal of several hundred nuclear weapons. "Regrettably," Ahmadinejad told the conference, "the government of the United States has not only used nuclear weapons, but also continues to threaten to use such weapons against other countries, including Iran." Of course, Ahmadinejad speaks as if the world hadn't repeatedly heard him threaten Israel with annihilation. And, as if Israel hadn't already proved itself capable of maintaining a nuclear stockpile in a peaceful manner -- something no one wants to see unstable Iran try to do. Clinton, for her part, accused Iran of placing the future of the nonproliferation treaty in jeopardy with its actions and disingenuous remarks. Iran "will do whatever it can to divert attention from its own record and to attempt to evade accountability," she said. "I hope that we can reach agreement in the Security Council on tough new sanctions because I believe that is the only way to catch Iran's attention," Clinton told reporters after her speech. Ahmadinejad also called for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, a concept endorsed by the United States. Clinton said such a zone would be possible only after successful peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Clinton also called for creation of a $50 million Peaceful Uses Initiative by the International Atomic Energy Agency to bring the benefits of nuclear energy to more countries, no doubt a reaction to Ahmadinejad's oft-repeated complaint that the United States and Western nations were trying to monopolize nuclear technology.