Yesterday I kicked off an action item, asking people to call and write the members of the House Judiciary Committee or their California members of Congress, informing them that the largest state Democratic Party in the country has voted to support a Congressional inquiry into Jay Bybee and other lawyers for their actions justifying torture, and that they ought to carry this through. Many people have already contacted their members of Congress and you should do the same. One thing that would help is to get them on the record. If you receive any constituent correspondence from your Congressperson about this issue, please forward it to me at david-dot-dayen-at-gmail-dot-com. We need to build a list of who supports accountability and who does not, of who in the California delegation agrees with their own party and who does not. We're starting to get some on-the-record statements, like this nonsense from Illinois Republican Donald Manzullo, who admits that waterboarding doesn't work, who calls it "more torture than not," as if there's a torture continuum of some sort (the fact that CIA interrogators had to add a tracheotomy kit to the proceedings should tell you what they were up to with waterboarding), but who then says that "no laws were broken" (which is patently false), and that, even if there were, nobody should be prosecuted because the whole thing would get "messy."
MANZULLO: Because then you are going to have to go back and you're going to have to go through every single interrogation and every single memo and the whole purpose of this is to relive again the fact that somebody made the decision to allow this.
We need on-the-record statements like this for every California Democrat, preferably in writing or on tape.
In other news, John Conyers and Jerrold Nadler announced their support to Attorney General Eric Holder for a special counsel to investigate and prosecute anyone involved in the decision-making process in the Bush Administration that led to illegal torture of detainees. That letter is here.
Finally, I will be on Angie Coiro's show on Green960 AM in San Francisco in the 7:00 hour tonight to talk about the CDP resolution, the need for an inquiry and impeachment of Jay Bybee, and the fight to restore the rule of law with respect to torture. Tune in if you can.
Thanks again to all of you who signed petitions and made phone calls and helped push the resolution to open a Congressional inquiry into Torture Judge Jay Bybee, which the California Democratic Party adopted at its convention yesterday. I have been told by the authors of the resolution that the pressure from the outside really aided their efforts.
The passage of the resolution was a beginning, not an ending. On the flip, come and join us in the next step.
UPDATE: Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post has the full story of the passage of the resolution at the convention.
Several weeks of hard work have paid off, and the California Democratic Party is poised to provide a major tool in the fight for justice and accountability for the Bush torture regime. The Resolutions Committee included on their consent calendar the resolution to begin a Congressional inquiry into Judge Jay Bybee and other lawyers who wrote opinions justifying and providing the fig leaf of a rationale for torture, with all punishments allowable under the law, including impeachment.
Without the release of the OLC memo from August 1, 2002, showing Bybee admitting that waterboarding gives the impression of imminent death and allowing it anyway, showing Bybee allowing the CIA to put detainees in a small box with bugs in a Room 101-style exploitation of phobias, I'm not sure this resolution would have passed. But the release massed a groundswell of support from the grassroots. My petition to urge the CDP to support the resolution gathered 4,827 signatures in about a week. Courage Campaign hopped aboard as well and got 9,000 or so sigs on their petition. Activists called the CDP offices and pushed for passage. And the party got the message.
Resolutions can go flat if they aren't picked up and used as a tool. Today, when it passes the full party on the convention floor in a few hours, we can celebrate. Tomorrow, we put this to work. Thanks to everyone who put in the time and effort to get this done.
UPDATE: Here's the full text of the resolution, on the flip:
At a press avail following her speech at the California Democratic Party convention, I asked Sen. Boxer about the Resolutions Committee passing support for a Congressional inquiry into the actions of torture judge Jay Bybee and the imposition of all possible penalties including impeachment. She said "I'm very open to that.... there is an ongoing investigation at the Justice Department into his work (at the Office of Professional Responsibility -ed), and we'll see how that goes. But I'm very open to that. And I'll remind everyone that I didn't vote for him when his nomination came up. I was one of 19 to do so."
Needless to say, the support from Sen. Boxer will be a great help in the Resolutions Committee, when they prioritize the top ten resolutions to send to the floor of the convention tomorrow.
The other interesting tidbit from the presser was that Sen. Boxer offered no indication of her endorsement on the ballot measures for the special election on May 19. She says she and Sen. Feinstein haven't studied the measures yet, and that they will get together in Washington and offer a joint statement once they make their decision. "I'll let you know when I go public. But let me say this - the budget process in California is dysfunctional, because of the super-majority needed to pass a budget and tax increases. And until we get to the root causes of changing that, it's very difficult to do anything." This pretty much tracks with what we've been saying for a long time. Until you pass #1, it won't matter if you pass #2-#10.
Other topics covered included torture investigations (Boxer supports the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Sen. Leahy recommended), the fate of cram-down provisions in the Senate ("Sen. Durbin is doing a heroic job... the banks are still a major lobbying group."), potential opponents in her 2010 re-election (I hope nobody runs against me!"), and the news of a budget reconciliation deal on health care in the Senate (she didn't have much to say on that other than that reconciliation should always be on the table, as it was during the Reagan years, and that the situation is "in flux.") Boxer was at her most eloquent answering a question about the rule of law and the impression that those at the highest levels of power, be it the banksters or the torture regime, were above it. "The law must prevail... the people should feel that something's wrong, if nothing is done on torture. If we don't like a law, we repeal it, we don't ignore it."
The very, VERY good news is that the resolution to impeach Jay Bybee from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals passed the Resolutions Committee with only small changes to the language. Any impeachment process must begin with a Congressional inquiry that gets remanded to the House Judiciary Committee. That's exactly the language we got, a resolution supporting a Congressional inquiry into Bybee and the other lawyers who justified torture. To everyone that signed petitions, you helped make this happen. We're not done yet, however. In order to get to the floor, the resolution must get ranked among the top ten at a "prioritizing" meeting today. Many more than ten resolutions passed in committee, so it will be a fight to get the Bybee resolution on the floor. I will be testifying in the committee today and lobbying for passage, armed with the thousands of signatures and personal testimonials gathered over the past week.
This could be as consequential as anything done in this convention, despite it happening off the floor and relatively outside of scrutiny. A resolution of support from the full CDP would be powerful. I'll keep you updated.
UPDATE by Brian: Just wanted to remind everybody about two useful mobile tools for following our coverage of the CDP Convention. First there is the Calitics mobile site at http://wap.calitics.com. That allows you to read all front-paged diaries and comment in a mobile phone friendly website.
Headed out the door for a nice, leisurely six-hour drive through the Central Valley to Sacramento for another California Democratic Party Convention. Calitics will have full coverage, of course - many of our writers will be on hand, both as delegates and as plain old media. There's a lot to cover, from party elections to endorsements on the May 19 election to the resolution to impeach Jay Bybee from the 9th Circuit to the unofficial opening of the 2010 election.
The early pre-convention news is that Antonio Villaraigosa won't be making the trip with me (although there's still room in the car, so you never know). It's a confusing development, considering all the high-profile events other gubernatorial hopefuls Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown are holding (Jerry's got a kegger at the old Governor's Mansion, while Gavin is part of an outdoor block party featuring Wyclef Jean). But that may be the reason, as Villaraigosa wasn't able to compete.
Villaraigosa's press office sent out a release announcing: "Mayor Villaraigosa today announced that he will convene emergency weekend meetings with union leaders to tackle the city's budget crisis.
"Talks will focus on ways to close a $530 million budget deficit through shared sacrifice and shared responsibility. The Mayor will begin meetings in City Hall with labor leaders on Friday evening and will continue through the weekend." [...]
Calbuzz asked Tony V spokesman Sean Clegg if the emergency budget session was "just a lame, bullshit excuse" to skip the convention. "It's exactly the opposite of that," Clegg said. "The city of Los Angeles and most cities across California are facing an unprecedented economic crisis and jobs come first."
Clegg said Villaraigosa is putting the needs of his city before his personal political fortunes by trying to pull together an agreement that would require labor unions to give back some hard-earned gains in order to save jobs and services in Los Angeles.
"This is a leadership moment. Antonio Villaraigosa is not going to Twitter while Rome burns," Clegg said -- a clear shot at the other mayor who would be governor: San Francisco's Gavin Newsom.
At the same time, a Tulchin Research/Acosta|Salazar pre-convention poll (which is three weeks out, but released on convention eve) shows Villaraigosa slipping. The poll had Garamendi in the race at the time.
Obviously, that top-line support is soft, with 1 in 5 undecided. But I'm frankly surprised how quickly this is turning into a two-horse race, which could actually open the door for a progressive movement candidate, if one existed. But alas...
Anyway, those are just a couple of the issues we'll see unfold. Stay with us throughout the weekend.
(I've teed up a few posts while I'm on the ride, but it'll be a light post day until late afternoon)
I'll do a fuller convention preview post in the morning, but just a final mention - I have a petition to tell the CDP to support the resolution to impeach federal Judge Jay Bybee, who sits on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals despite having been one of the architects of the flawed legal justification for torture committed in our name. There are musings about independent commissions and special prosecutors in Washington, but I believe we must press on all fronts, and the impeachment of Bybee, who sits on the 9th Circuit in San Francisco, is particularly acute here in this state. Currently I have 4,435 signatures - please sign by midnight tonight and I will present yours and everyone else's name at the Resolutions Committee tomorrow at 3pm. If we get this resolution passed, we will have a powerful tool to force California members of Congress to initiate hearings in the House Judiciary Committee to impeach Bybee. I think it's absolutely possible that we make this happen over the weekend - but the leadership of the CDP needs to know that there's a large and powerful constituency behind this effort.
Please sign the petition if you haven't already. And the Courage Campaign has their own petition, with around 8,500 signatures at last count. 13,000 people arguing for impeachment is a powerful number - let's go for more.
I am the Public Policy Director for the Courage Campaign
When I read the torture memos that President Obama released, I was shocked, but I can't say I was too surprised. Nevertheless, the details are horrifying. Waterboarding a detainee 83 times in a month, cramped confinement, putting "stinging insects" into a box with a detainee, and "walling" - throwing someone's head into a wall - these are the things that Jay Bybee's August 2002 memo approved. In 2003, Bybee was nominated and confirmed to a seat on the all-important 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
Last Friday David Dayen asked the Courage Campaign to join the grassroots effort to impeach Jay Bybee by helping pass this resolution. And we were happy to participate. Today we emailed our members asking them to sign up as supporters of the CDP impeach Bybee resolution.
The email we sent references the powerful NYT editorial calling for Bybee's impeachment. Since then Congressman Jerry Nadler, who chairs the House Subcomittee on Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and is a ranking Dem on the House Judiciary Committee, has announced his support of the impeachment of Jay Bybee:
"He ought to be impeached," Nadler said in an interview with the Huffington Post. "It was not an honest legal memo. It was an instruction manual on how to break the law."...
"Any special prosecutor on torture would have to look at the authors of those torture memos," said Nadler. "And certainly you have real grounds to impeach him once the special prosecutor took a good look at that. I think there ought to be an impeachment inquiry looked at in any event. Which should happen first, I'm not sure."...
"[Bybee] should be a target. Yoo should be a target. There are a number of targets," said Nadler, referring to for Bush administration counsel John Yoo, who also authorized torture and is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Bybee, noted Nadler, "is the only one who's a federal court judge now."
As we read with growing horror the most recent torture memos released by the Obama Administration, knowing that there are more revelations to come, I think a lot of us are asking the question that mcjoan asked yesterday. "Now what?" How can we address this moral rot that continues to eat away at our legitimacy? What can be done? Mcjoan offers a couple suggestions.
The process by which our government came not only to torture, but through torturous logic try to convince themselves that it was legal is not just the product of evil. It's the product of excessive, unchecked power that has proven far too easy to seize, to hold, and to exercise.
And we can't allow that to happen again.
That's why, at the very least, there must be investigations. Whether through the special prosecutor that the ACLU has called for, or Senator Leahy's proposal for a commission of inquiry, America has to know how this happened, gruesome step by gruesome step. There is no other way to prevent it from happening again.
Mcjoan is right that our corroded, accountability-free zone in Washington will require an incredible amount of effort just to bring us to these steps. We need to counter the establishment pressure to move away from this evil with our own pressure, to support the rule of law, to recognize that justice delayed is justice denied, and that a failure to hold accountable these acts will result in them returning, in spades, in the future. Without this accounting, in a very real sense our democracy dies.
And there is an actual mechanism, a way to leverage grassroots anger and push the elected officials who can make these decisions, at least in one case. We can prove the desire for accountability in the country and take a systematic approach to restore democracy and the rule of law. And it starts with Jay Bybee.
(We're going to be hearing a lot about this. I wanted to make sure that the resolution was in order, but apparently so. It is a moral outrage to have this man sitting in judgment of anyone right now. - promoted by David Dayen)
The torture memos released yesterday are a call to action. President Obama has done all he needs to do to enable us to rise up and demand accountability from those who directed and enabled torture. It's time.
Tuesday night at the monthly meeting of the largest county Democratic Party in the nation, Los Angeles, the vote was unanimous on a resolution calling for the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee, author of the famous "torture memo" -- aka "the Bybee memo."
Unanimous. LACDP spoke with one loud, clear voice on this. Next week, we'll be working this resolution at the California Democratic Party Convention in Sacramento. And I hope Democrats (and Republicans, too) will join together in crafting resolutions calling for accountability. It's time to dismantle the Bush Administration's torture policy, and bring its facilitators to account.
The resolution urges impeachment for the man who signed the memo advising the CIA that torture is sometimes allowable under U.S. law, Jay Bybee. Thanks to yesterday's document release, more people than ever are learning who Jay Bybee really is. He's the guy who first signed off on CIA torture.
Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Patrick Leahy's call for a truth commission to investigate the crimes of the Bush Administration. Obviously the events of the past couple days, with the release of OLC memos that really transformed the concept of democracy in the Bush era, is revitalizing this debate.
Justice Department officials said they might soon release additional opinions on those subjects. But the disclosure of the nine formerly secret documents fueled calls by lawmakers for an independent commission to investigate and make public what the Bush administration did in the global campaign against terrorism.
The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, said the revelations, together with the release of new information about the Central Intelligence Agency's destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes, had underscored the need for a commission that would have the power to subpoena documents and testimony.
The OLC memos are still extraordinary, so horrifying in the picture they paint of executive power that the head of the OLC, Steven Bradbury, felt the need to disavow them near the end of the Bush regime. It's likely that he did so to take the heat off of himself. But there ought to be no get-out-of-jail-free card for the actions taken as the result of these memos. Glenn Greenwald looks at one of the documents.
The essence of this document was to declare that George Bush had the authority (a) to deploy the U.S. military inside the U.S., (b) directed at foreign nationals and U.S. citizens alike; (c) unconstrained by any Constitutional limits, including those of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments. It was nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens. And it wasn't only a decree that existed in theory; this secret proclamation that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable to what the document calls "domestic military operations" was, among other things, the basis on which Bush ordered the NSA, an arm of the U.S. military, to turn inwards and begin spying -- in secret and with no oversight -- on the electronic communications (telephone calls and emails) of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
As Harper's Scott Horton says, "We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship." More on the memos from Jack Balkin and Anonymous Liberal.
Yoo, who is hiding out in Orange County at Chapman University, admitted in an interview to the OC Register only that his memos "lacked a certain polish," in a profile more concerned with how he's enjoying the beaches and Vietnamese food of Southern California rather than the "hippies, protesters and left-wing activists" of Berkeley. Somehow, he's still teaching law. Jay Bybee, the other major player in the composition of these memos, is a 9th Circuit Appeals Judge in San Francisco. Bruce Ackerman recommends impeachment.
Despite the calls of apologists to the contrary, we have to have a reckoning on this. The previous President, aided by his allies, asserted broad executive powers far outside Constitutional strictures, and the results were illegal wiretapping, torture, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, and a series of other crimes against the state and violations practically every amendment in the Bill of Rights as well as international law.
But one member of the Judiciary Committee wasn't at the truth commission hearing yesterday - Dianne Feinstein. Through a spokesman, she sidestepped whether or not she supports a commission, saying she "hasn't seen a proposal." But she is instituting a competing investigation, from her perch at the Senate Intelligence Committee, that is bound to be a whitewash:
The inquiry is aimed at uncovering new information on the origins of the programs as well as scrutinizing how they were executed -- including the conditions at clandestine CIA prison sites and the interrogation regimens used to break Al Qaeda suspects, according to Senate aides familiar with the investigation plans.
Officials said the inquiry was not designed to determine whether CIA officials broke laws. "The purpose here is to do fact-finding in order to learn lessons from the programs and see if there are recommendations to be made for detention and interrogations in the future," said a senior Senate aide, who like others described the plan on condition of anonymity because it had not been made public [...]
The senior aide said that the committee had no short-term plans to hold public hearings, and that it was not clear whether the panel would release its final report to the public [...]
Senate aides declined to say whether the committee would seek new testimony from former CIA Director George J. Tenet or other former top officials who were involved in the creation and management of the programs.
The Senate investigation will examine whether the detention and interrogation operations were carried out in ways that were consistent with the authorities and instructions issued in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said.
The panel will also look at whether lawmakers were kept fully informed. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the committee, and others have said that the Bush administration improperly withheld information from Congress on the CIA's operations.
This is basically a turf war. Feinstein wants control of the investigation process in her committee, over Patrick Leahy. And she wants the hearings to be private as well as the final report. Emptywheel writes:
Pat Leahy will have an investigation regardless of what DiFi says--and he's going to start it now. So DiFi issues a vaguely formulated leak saying that she's going to cover the CIA's role in torture. And, voila! Now the CIA and DiFi can say try to circumscribe Leahy's investigation. And of course, by doing an investigation that starts with the premise that it is "not designed to determine whether CIA officials broke laws," even while admitting that CIA officers may have gone beyond the "instructions issued in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks," it ensures no accountability even for those who went beyond Cheney's torture regime. And, finally, absolutely no current plans to make public the results, either through public hearings or by releaing a report.
Call DiFi at (202) 224-3841. Thank her for recognizing the importance of understanding the mistakes we made in the past. Remind her that even Pat Roberts' investigation into CIA Iraq intelligence was released publicly. Demand that she meet at least the level of transparency adopted by her Republican predecessors as SSCI Chair.
Agreed. This is too important for it to be done in the secret bowels of official Washington as a "fact-finding mission" yielding a white paper that will wind up collecting dust on a shelf. Feinstein is trying to let criminals off the hook, plain and simple. History tells us that the inevitable return of criminals like this will only be emboldened to go further as a result.
This is a major, if tentative, victory for criminal justice reform advocates.
California's three-strikes sentencing law suffered a blow Tuesday when a federal appeals court struck down as unconstitutional a 28-years-to-life sentence for a sex offender who failed to register with local police at the correct time of year.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case of Cecilio Gonzalez back to federal district court in Los Angeles for resentencing after finding his 2001 penalty constituted cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the 8th Amendment.
Gonzalez's harsh sentence was grossly disproportionate to his "entirely passive, harmless and technical violation of the registration law," the appeals court said.
This case represented the unintended consequence of three-strikes carried out to its most ridiculous extreme. 28 to life for registering, but not at the right time of year? Nuts. This isn't a crime in 11 states, and the maximum sentence allowed by customary law in California is three years.
In case the "tough on crime" absolutists start shieking about "activist liberal judges" overturning the will of the people, consider who wrote this opinion: Jay Bybee. Nominated by George W. Bush Jay Bybee. Writer of the fucking torture memo Jay Bybee. Even a guy who justified the torture of prisoners considers this cruel and unusual punishment. There is no indication whether or not Jerry Brown would carry this to an appeal, but considering the opinion of this very conservative jurist, I would imagine the US Supreme Court would at least potentially rule the same way, although they struck down a similar challenge to three strikes in 2003 on a 5-4 vote. Put it this way, I don't see Bybee as more conservative than Anthony Kennedy.
This does not invalidate three strikes entirely, but it certainly gives a ray of hope to those locked up for a minor third crime to challenge their sentencing. And it provides a framework to show how unjust and counter-productive these stringent mandatory sentences are. Three strikes is more of a symptom than the entire problem - the legislature has approved over 1,000 higher sentences in the past 30 years. But this is an important start, to end the tyranny of "tough on crime" absolutism that has contributed to busting the state budget and making this the worst state in the union when it comes to the corrections system.
