From AP: The White House continues to be detainee-centric:
The Obama administration plans to place federal employees in the largest immigration detention facilities in the country to monitor detainee treatment.
This oversight role is currently handled by private contractors. But under the new plan, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials would be placed at the largest jails to directly supervise how the detention centers are managed, according to people briefed on the government's plan.
The government has been criticized for its treatment of immigration detainees, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has made detention policies a top priority for her department.
Separately, DHS is forcing Sheriff Joe in Arizona (and perhaps other similarly situated law enforcement officials) to make a difficult choice under new 278(g) enforcement and detention policies:
Valley residents are getting used to the fanfare and bitter debate that accompany Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's "crime suppression operations," like the one in Chandler nearly two weeks ago. It has been 18 months since Arpaio launched the first raid in central Phoenix, but do they work?
Arpaio says "yes": The operations clear warrants, nab illegal immigrants and reinforce the message that illegal immigrants aren't welcome in the county...
It's those undocumented immigrants accused of committing crimes that the federal government now wants local law-enforcement to target. The Department of Homeland Security clarified its policy last month to reiterate that local agencies participating in the 287(g) program should only target "criminal aliens," those who have committed a crime other than illegal border crossing.
Arpaio has less than 90 days to weigh the two strategies as he considers his continued participation in the federal program.
If he accepts the new policy, he can still conduct sweeps, but his deputies will have to release illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes. If that policy had been in effect during the past 18 months, the Sheriff's Office would have had to release 150 of the sweeps detainees. If Arpaio doesn't agree to the terms, he won't be able to continue the identification program in the jails.
U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. is poised to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA abuses committed during the interrogation of terrorism suspects, current and former U.S. government officials said.
A senior Justice Department official said that Holder envisioned an inquiry that would be narrow in scope, focusing on "whether people went beyond the techniques that were authorized" in Bush administration memos that liberally interpreted anti-torture laws.
Current and former CIA and Justice Department officials who have firsthand knowledge of the interrogation files contend that criminal convictions will be difficult to obtain because the quality of evidence is poor and the legal underpinnings have never been tested.
Regardless of the finer points of federal statutes that might make for a riveting discussion in a law school classroom, let's remember one thing. As a practical matter the problem for investigation zealots is that no one outside of the Beltway media echo chamber and the "detainee lobby" cares about this. And in terms of safeguarding America, what purpose will be served (other than self-serving rhetoric) in the course of this investigation by publicly revealing sensitive intelligence techniques or hauling counter-terrorism officials in front of show trials?
According to the Washington Times, the U.S. is editing the bureaucratic lexicon again but seemingly keeping the same policies in place:
It's official. The United States is no longer engaged in a "war on terrorism." Neither is it fighting "jihadists" nor locked in a "global war."
President Obama's top homeland security and counterterrorism official on Thursday declared as unacceptable the terms crafted by the George W. Bush administration.
It is now solely a "war with al Qaeda" and its violent extremist allies, said John Brennan, head of the White House homeland security office, during a speech Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
The semantic shift is intended to bring precision to the way the president and his aides talk about the nation's efforts to defeat al Qaeda, though Bush administration officials say the policies that are being put to use have not changed dramatically
...Critics on the left and the right have pointed out that the Obama administration has continued such Bush-era policies as extraordinary rendition and drone attacks in Pakistan. There remains an international and domestic surveillance program that is cloaked in mystery, and the war in Afghanistan, where Mr. Obama has increased the number of U.S. troops and the military continues to house enemy combatants at Bagram Air Base. In addition, the White House is still considering the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects
As reported by ABC, Brennan also threw some cold water (so to speak) on the notion of closing the Gitmo jail by the deadline set forth in the executive order:
White House Homeland Security Czar John Brennan Thursday indicated the Obama administration might not make President Obama’s January 22, 2010 deadline to close the Detainee Center at Guantanamo Bay.
"I don’t have a crystal ball,” Brennan said. “At this point it is unknowable exactly how many people will be transferred next week, month, several months and what the conditions on the ground will be on 1 January and 21 January…Everybody is doing everything possible in the administration to realize the President's goal.”
And congratulations to Justice Sotomayor who yesterday received Senate approval of her nomination. Click here for a review of a page-turning book written by one of her new colleagues.
Remember when the Bush administration was routinely blasted for assaulting civil liberties and shredding the Constitution? Those were the good old days. The criticism usually arose in connection with counter-terrorism initiatives, of course, not domestic political dissent. Yet on Monday, the Obama administration put out a call for anyone who encounters any "fishy" information (i.e., information that runs counter to a government-run healthcare system) to forward that information to a designated White House email address. The Washington Examiner and other news outlets and websites wonder how this squares with freedom of speech and personal privacy:
The White House request that members of the public report anyone who is spreading "disinformation" about the proposed national health care makeover could lead to a White House database of political opponents that will be both secret and permanent, according to Republican lawyers on the Senate Judiciary Committee who are examining the plan's possible implementation...
In a letter to Obama Tuesday, Republican Sen. John Cornyn wrote that, given [White House director of new media Macon] Phillips' request, "it is inevitable that the names, email address, IP addresses, and private speech of U.S. citizens will be reported to the White House." Cornyn warned the president that "these actions taken by your White House staff raise the specter of a data collection program."
"I can only imagine the level of justifiable outrage had your predecessor asked Americans to forward emails critical of his policies to the White House," Cornyn continued. "I urge you to cease this program immediately."
Up until November 4, 2008, being a community organizer was a fantastic vocation. In fact, it was that role--unlike say military or law enforcement experience, business experience, or executive experience of any kind--that qualified someone to become the U.S. president. Now, when average, non-ideological citizens themselves engage in participatory democracy, they've somehow morphed into a "mob" rather than a community organization. Yesterday, ordinary citizens met with Congressman Chris Murphy in Simsbury, CT about healthcare. Murphy did not exactly cover himself in glory: Swing-district solons like Murphy will have to make a fundamental decision, perhaps one that will directly determine their political career going forward: vote the way the party machine tells them to or represent their constituents. And whose more out of touch: the politicians themselves or the reporters/editors that cover them? In this video, an outspoken, grassroots concerned citizen interacts with two seemingly clueless reporters from the local paper, the Hartford Courant.Here's the bottom line: while the free enterprise system can sometimes be unfair if not corrupt, and healthcare insurance reform is needed, the average American does not want socialism
Under "ObamaCare," Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Spector, a cancer survivor, and former PA Democrat Gov. Bob Casey (PA Sen. Bob Casey, Jr.'s father) would both have been goners long ago, according to the New York Post:
The controversial core of ObamaCare is a so-called "public option" that critics insist would eventually wipe out the ability of average Americans to get the kind of care Specter and the senior Casey received. This already is being set up, with the establishment in the Obama stimulus bill (passed with votes from both Sens. Casey and Specter) of the ominous-sounding "Federal Coordinating Council for Effectiveness Research."
Modeled after European equivalents such as the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the council is supposed to assign a monetary value to your life. This is done through a "QALY" -- a "Quality-Adjusted Life-Year." In Britain, The Wall Street Journal reports, NICE refuses to pay more than $22,000 "to extend a life by six months."
In other words, had Obama's plan been in effect in 1993, given the QALY of the 63-year-old Arlen Specter and the 61-year-old Bob Casey Sr., and had they been private citizens on the Obama public-insurance plan, both might, literally, have been allowed to die...
Pennsylvanians are well aware that the Specter and Casey families have benefited directly from high-profile medical treatment that the Obama plan would deny to average folks. So the question for Sens. Specter and Casey is: Would they be willing to enroll themselves and their families in the public plan the president is pushing?
Would they give up the quality health care that extended the senior Casey's life by seven years and quite literally saved Specter from death -- not once but three times?
On ABC News, Michelle Malkin aptly noted that ObamaCare is the "redistribution of health."
The latest trial balloon released into the media: We're not in Kansas anymore--or are we?
The Obama administration is looking at creating a courtroom-within-a-prison complex in the U.S. to house suspected terrorists, combining military and civilian detention facilities at a single maximum-security prison.
Several senior U.S. officials said the administration is eyeing a soon-to-be-shuttered state maximum security prison in Michigan and the 134-year-old military penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., as possible locations for a heavily guarded site to hold the 229 suspected al-Qaida, Taliban and foreign fighters now jailed at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.
The officials outlined the plans — the latest effort to comply with President Barack Obama's order to close the prison camp by Jan. 22, 2010, and satisfy congressional and public fears about incarcerating terror suspects on American soil — on condition of anonymity because the options are under review.
Other than for the sake of empty political rhetoric, remind us again why we are closing Gitmo?
While we're on the subject of the press, The Daily News, usually part and parcel of Obama-complaint media and the "civil liberties" chorus, did show some unusual editorial independence in assailing the legal advocacy in support of incarcerated terrorists at Gitmo and elsewhere:
Regular old U.S. criminals should be so lucky as to enjoy the devoted legal representation that has rallied to the sides of Islamist terrorists convicted of plotting the mass murder of Americans.
Self-styled human rights champions who made the Guantanamo Bay detention center a false symbol of barbarism have turned to easing the ultra-secure domestic imprisonments of fanatic jihadists.
They say that the likes of shoe-bomber Richard Reid, serving life in the Super Max prison in Florence, Colo., and American Taliban John Walker Lindh, held in tough confinement in Indiana, have a constitutional right to pray with fellow Muslim inmates.
Those include Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui and Wadih el-Hage, one-time aide to Osama Bin Laden, who was convicted of an embassy bombing that killed 247 people in 1998. You can imagine the kinds of things that might come up in such an Arabic-speaking prayer group.
Absolute isolation is necessary and neither cruel nor unusual for a class of inmates who will wreak mayhem wherever then can, inside prison or out. Lest you doubt, recall what happened in 2006 when three of the Trade Center bombers had mail privileges: They sent 90 cheerleading letters to terror networks that were printed in Arabic newspapers and used as recruiting flyers.
The perversity of wielding the First Amendment to claim that radical crazies have a constitutional right to exercise their religion together, not separately, is beyond breathtaking. And yet, in this day and age, it is not simply being laughed right out of court.
