Separation of Powers

On Thursday, the US Senate voted to bar Guantanamo Bay prisoners from challenging their detentions in American courts. The Senate vote was in spite of a 2004 US Supreme Court ruling which said that the Guantanamo prisoners could file petitions for writs of habeas corpus in the US courts.

Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC) introduced the provision, which was added to a defence policy bill. He told the Senate:

For 200 years, ladies and gentlemen, in the law of armed conflict, no nation has given an enemy combatant, a terrorist, an al-Qaeda member the ability to go into every federal court in this United States and sue the people that are fighting the war for us.

And he was right.

In Johnson v Eisentrager (1950), the US Supreme Court decided that US courts had no jurisdiction over German war criminals that had been captured in China and were being held in a US-administered prison in Germany and had at no time been present in “any territory over which the United States is sovereign.”

However, the 2004 Supreme Court decision in the joined cases, Rasul v Bush and Al Odah v United States, considered whether or not US courts have jurisdiction to hear “challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities, and incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.”

From the 2004 ruling:

The question now before us is whether the habeas statute confers a right to judicial review of the legality of Executive detention of aliens in a territory over which the United States exercises plenary and exclusive jurisdiction, but not “ultimate sovereignty.”

The 2004 Court distinguished Eisentrager:

Petitioners in these cases differ from the Eisentrager detainees in important respects: They are not nationals of countries at war with the United States, and they deny that they have engaged in or plotted acts of aggression against the United States; they have never been afforded access to any tribunal, much less charged with and convicted of wrongdoing; and for more than two years they have been imprisoned in territory over which the United States exercises exclusive jurisdiction and control.

The ruling goes on to explain historical applications of habeas corpus:

Application of the habeas statute to persons contained at the base is consistent with the historical reach of the writ of habeas corpus. … As Lord Mansfield wrote in 1759, even if a territory was “no part of the realm,” there was “no doubt” as to the court’s power to issue writs of habeas corpus if the territory was “under the subjection of the Crown.” (R v Cowle)

The Court therefore concluded that the District Court has “jurisdiction to hear petitioners’ habeas corpus challenges to the legality of their detention at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.”

I am curious about the conflict between the Supreme Court ruling and the Senate vote.

In United States v Klein (1871), a case that further defined the Constitutional separation of powers, the Supreme Court decided that it was not within the powers of Congress to invade “the province of the judicial branch by prescribing the rule of decision in a particular cause.”

It would seem to me that what the Senate is doing with Thursday’s provision is invading the province of the Supreme Court in violation of United States v Klein by attempting to create a statute which directly contradicts a Supreme Court ruling.

Reason on the rise again?

The town of Dover, Pennsylvania proved yesterday that reason has not completely abandoned the people of the United States.

The Dover school district had been the first one in the US to introduce “Intelligent Design” (i.e. neo-creationism) into their science curriculum as an alternative to Darwin’s widely accepted Theory of Evolution. The people of Dover rebelled at the ballot box on Tuesday, voting out every one of the eight members of the school board that had supported the teaching of “Intelligent Design”. Each of the newly-elected members of the school board ran on the Dover Cares slate, which had come together specifically to oppose the curriculum change.

It is reassuring to see that some people still care about what their children are being taught in school.

„V USA psali, že celá Paříž hoří“

“In the USA they have written that all of Paris is burning”
- Czech daily Lidové noviny

…nervozita mezi cizinci už je cítit. „Dneska se mě dokonce jeden manželský pár Američanů zeptal, jestli je bezpečné jít se podívat k Eiffelovce. Že prý v amerických novinách četli, že celá Paříž hoří, a když jim chvíli nejelo metro, měli strach, že to je kvůli těm střetům,“ dodává číšník Džamel v kavárně Le Petit Pont ve čtvrti Saint Michel.

“…you can already feel the nervousness amongst foreigners. ‘Today an American couple actually asked me if it was safe to go and look at the Eiffel Tower. It seems that in the American papers they had read, it said that all of Paris was burning, and when the metro didn’t come for a while, they were afraid that it was because of the clashes,’ said Jamel, a waiter in Le Petit Pont café in the Saint Michel quarter.”

I hope it’s not true, that the American papers are not really reporting that all of Paris is burning, but it brings to mind a problem that seems to exist everywhere, basically that the media presents exaggerated impressions of whatever is actually going on. Not to make light of what is happening in Paris, which is very serious indeed, but it is obvious that the line between fact and fantasy has been blurred.

When I lived in Israel during the first intifada, much of the foreign media made it appear as if there was general chaos all over the country, while in actuality the violence was confined at the time to the West Bank and Gaza. A few years ago, the threat of SARS was blown out of proportion by the media, much the same as the threat of avian flu is being blown out of proportion now. The threat of terrorism has been exaggerated as well.

Media is a commercial industry and sensationalism sells. Threats (e.g. avian flu and terrorism) do exist, and the riots in Paris are real, but the media cannot be trusted to paint a picture that stands up to reality.

Magpies

This morning I was standing at the window and a magpie flew into view and alighted on the roof of the church opposite. “Bad luck,” I thought, knowing that seeing one magpie is a bad omen while seeing two is good. The magpie took off again and flew out of view; a few seconds later another magpie flew into view from a different direction and also landed on the church roof. I was puzzled by this. Two magpies are good luck, but does it count if you don’t see them together? Should I count my sightings as a good sign, or are they in fact double bad luck (which would better suit my mood right now anyway)?

I looked for magpie lore on Wikipedia, and this is what I found there:

The magpie is a common component of European folklore.

In the British Isles a widespread traditional rhyme records the myth that seeing magpies predicts the future, depending on how many are seen. There are many regional variations on the rhyme.

Wikipedia offers three versions of the rhyme; this is the one with which I am most familiar:

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
And four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.

Wikipedia also included a practical quote from Terry Pratchett:

There are many rhymes about magpies, but none of them are very reliable, because they are not the ones the magpies know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Magpie

US Hegemony in the Americas

The Monroe Doctrine

The Monroe Doctrine was mentioned in a book I was recently reading. I knew the Monroe Doctrine had some significance because I had given an oral report on it in the 8th grade, but I could not remember anything about the Doctrine or my presentation - except that I had taken on the persona of a Russian woman, including what could only have been a comedy accent.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 stated that the Americas were to be closed to any future European colonisation and that any European interference in the affairs of sovereign American countries would be considered acts of hostility towards the United States.

The Roosevelt Corollary was added to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904 – it ‘gave’ the US the right to intervene in Latin American affairs. The Clark Memorandum of 1930 reversed the Roosevelt Corollary, in theory at least, saying that the US had no right to intervene in Latin America unless there was a threat from European powers.

However in reality, it would seem that there have consistently been ‘threats’ from Europe. Today I have looked into CIA covert operations in Guatemala, Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua.

Guatemala – Operation PBSuccess 1952-1954

Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was elected President of Guatemala in 1951 in a democratic fashion. His administration introduced some policies of which the US did not approve because they were too communist and indicated probable Soviet influence. Enter the CIA. The CIA operation used diplomatic, economic, propaganda and paramilitary means to overthrow President Guzmán. There is obviously more to the story than that – for a fairly comprehensive summary, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_PBSUCCESS

Cuba – The Cuban Project aka Operation Mongoose 1961-1962

Lifted from The National Security Archive:

In his exposé of the National Security Agency entitled Body of Secrets, author James Bamford highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by the Joint Chiefs of Staff codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS. This document, titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals - part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose - included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),” faking a Cuban air force attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.”

The project ultimately failed.

Chile – 1963-1973

Because Salvador Allende was a Marxist, the United States was determined that he not take power. The CIA spent $3 million to influence the outcome of the 1964 presidential election; Allende lost. In 1970 when Allende won the election, the CIA in Chile received orders to orchestrate a coup, preferably before 24th October, when Allende would take office. There was no coup that year.

Allende was finally overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet in a military coup in 1973. The CIA claims that it “played no direct role” in the coup, but it does admit that it was notified two days prior to the staging of the coup. There is no evidence currently publicly available to prove whether the CIA did or did not have a part in the coup.

Nicaragua – 1980s

In November of 1981, Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 17, which gave the CIA authority to recruit and support the Contras with $19 million in military aid. The Contras were freedom fighters or terrorists, depending on your point of view, who opposed the socialist Sandinista government.

In 1984 Nicaragua filed a suit against the US in the International Court of Justice and in 1986 the Court issued a guilty verdict, stating that the US was “in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to use force against another state”. The US was ordered to pay reparations, but refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the Court.

And then there was the Iran-Contra Affair of 1986-1987, which is a story for another day.

Are men smarter than women?

The clear answer is ‘no’. I am not going to claim that women are smarter than men, but only that studies have generally shown that there are no differences in IQ levels between men and women.

Dr Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn conducted a meta-analysis of the IQs of men and women, meaning that they took dozens of previously conducted studies and carried out an intense statistical analysis on them. Their findings indicated that men increasingly outnumber women as IQs get higher. For example, they claimed that twice as many men as women have IQs of 125, while 5.5 times more men than women have IQs of 155.

Irwing and Lynn’s study was published last week in the British Journal of Psychology, but in an unconventional move, they had announced their findings to journalists two months before the publication of their paper and without making their findings available to other academics. That move got them numerous invitations to appear on radio and television.

But in this week’s issue of Nature (a highly respected international science journal), Dr Steve Blinkhorn has denounced their work, claiming that it is “deeply flawed” and calling it “simple, utter hogwash.” The first flaw in Irwing and Lynn’s methodology was that they carefully selected studies which would support their findings while excluding those that would contradict them, thereby skewing their results. Blinkhorn has also accused the researchers of employing a number of statistical manoeuvres which he describes as being “flawed and suspect”.

It may also be useful here to note that Professor Lynn has previously claimed that white people are inherently more clever than black people.

There is a vast body of work on the subject of gender and IQ that has found no differences between men and women. Blinkhorn has summarised the situation thus: “Sex differences in average IQ, if they exist at all, are too small to be interesting.”

CIA "Black Sites"

The story was broken by the Washington Post when it reported on Wednesday that the CIA was running an international network of secret prisons and that the locations included facilities in Eastern Europe.

The European Commission has been taking the allegations very seriously because the existence of any such site, especially if the practice of any degree of torture is involved, would be in breach of both European Community law and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Yesterday, the group Human Rights Watch announced that it had identified two sites in Europe: Szymany Airport in Poland and Mihail Kogalniceanu military airfield in Romania. Not surprisingly, the Poles and the Romanians are denying all suggestions that the CIA could possibly have set up secret prisons within their territories. Of course it is feasible that those individuals issuing the denials simply have no knowledge of the existence of secret prisons because they are just that – secret.

Meanwhile, Czech Interior Minister František Bublan has said that the Czech Republic and 10 other countries (which he did not name) had rejected requests from the US to accept prisoners that were being held at Guantanamo Bay.

Today it was also alleged that the CIA has transported prisoners through the airport in Budapest, Hungary.

Dopey Dutch

Monkey brought this news to my attention earlier today.

The government of the Netherlands has just announced a scheme to bar foreigners from drug-selling coffee shops, with an aim to end “drug tourism”. The Dutch government has been under pressure from, in particular, Germany and France to tighten its cannabis laws. Coffee shops will still be able to operate, but as 'members only' venues, and memberships will be available only to Dutch residents.

The coffee shop owners are, of course, not happy about the proposed measures. They are licensed by local authorities and pay huge taxes. “It’s totally ridiculous. The minister is stupid. If this system comes in, all the tourists will buy from criminals in the street,” said Arjan Roskam of the Union of Cannabis Retailers.

And of course drug tourists are not happy about it either. “We are devastated,” said Alan Buffry of the Legalise Cannabis Alliance (UK). “It’s always been a refuge where you can smoke and relax without having to look over your shoulder. It was like a holiday from the police.”

Just another example of a government moving in the wrong direction.

Brownie: "fashion god"

I am happy to admit that I send a lot of bullshit e-mails while I am at work. Some of you have been happy to receive them. I am also happy to admit that my job is not very important and aside from a handful of up-tight lawyers and a few legal publishers, no one ever depends on me for anything at all.

Michael Brown, on the other hand, used to have what should have been a very important job, one that he should have taken very seriously.

In the news today… In the midst of Hurricane Katrina, around the time that Condoleezza Rice was shopping for shoes on Fifth Avenue, the then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was e-mailing his cronies about his wardrobe.

“If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god.”

What a dick.

The 7.1 Billion Dollar Panic

“President” Bush yesterday outlined a plan that will protect Americans from bird flu. Thank you, George, you’re my fucking hero.

Meanwhile, “Defense” Secretary Rumsfeld has declined to sell his shares in Gilead Sciences, which owns the patent for the drug Tamiflu, saying instead that he won’t participate in government while it is dealing with issues connected with bird flu. Well, it is easy to understand his decision because he has already made about $1 million and stands to make quite a bit more while the American population panics over an imaginary pandemic. And we have known for a long time already that Rumsfeld has no sense of ministerial responsibility.

A major mutation of a flu strain occurs about once every 10 years. It’s bloody normal. A pandemic occurs every 30 to 40 years. Over 500,000 Americans died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919. So far about 60 people have died of bird flu, none of them in the Americas.

Apparently, if the current H5N1 strain of bird flu mutates so that it can be passed from human to human, no existing vaccine will protect us. Tamiflu is but a treatment for normal human flu, not bird flu, and it if has any effect on bird flu at all, it will be minimal.

So take your vitamins, wash your hands before you eat, don’t play with fucking chickens, and don’t listen to W because he has no idea what he is talking about.