Today's Stories

May 7, 2009

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

May 7, 2009

Stain Removal

Impeaching the Torture Judge

By DAVE LINDORFF

In December 2001, an appellate judicial panel in the state of New York ruled that Yonkers City Court Judge Edmund G. Fitzgerald had to step down from his bench and leave his position following his disbarment for allegedly “misusing” $9000 in a client’s account prior to his election as a judge.  In 2007, the North Carolina courts faced something of a dilemma when state judge James Ethridge, who had been disbarred the prior October by the North Carolina State Bar for “swindling an older woman of her house and savings” as an attorney six years earlier, refused to quit his judicial position.  Under state law in North Carolina, judges are required to be licensed lawyers, so Judge Ethridge was barred from holding court or signing court orders, but he continued to collect his salary. Only the state’s Judicial Standards Commission, or the state legislature, through an impeachment, could remove him from his job.

Judge Bybee, who sits on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Nevada, could eventually present the federal judicial system with a similar dilemma. Bybee, prior to his short tenure as an Appellate Judge which began in 2003, was assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, where he wrote a lengthy memo for the White House justifying the use of torture techniques such as waterboarding,  sleep deprivation, body slamming and other measures on captives in the Bush/Cheney so-called “War” on Terror.

It is now being reported that the Justice Department is about to release a review the department’s ethics unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility, which will report on that memo, as well as other memos written by Bybee’s then colleagues in the Office of Legal Counsel, John Yoo, now a professor of law at Berkeley University’s law school, and Steven Bradbury, and that the report will recommend disbarment for the three men. That would put the matter in the hands of the states where each man is licensed to practice law—in Bybee’s case, the state of Nevada. According to the New York Times, the 220-page internal review of Bybee’s, Yoo’s and Bradbury’s actions as counsel to the White House amounted to “serious lapses of judgment” that could warrant reprimands or disbarment.

What sets Bybee apart from the other two men is that after his work in the Bush/Cheney administration, he went on to become a federal judge with a lifetime appointment.  Furthermore, unlike North Carolina, and many other states, there is no requirement that a federal judge have a law degree or be a lawyer , much less be a licensed one.  While every judge on the federal bench is, in fact, a lawyer in good standing with their state bar, technically they do not have to be.

Judges in many state courts can be removed from office by the judicial conduct committees operated by those states’ supreme courts,  but federal judges can only be “disciplined” by the federal judicial system’s office of judicial conduct, not removed from office. A disciplined judge might be prevented from hearing cases or from signing court orders, but removal  from office, under the Constitution, requires impeachment by a majority of the House of Representatives, and conviction by a two-thirds vote of the US Senate.

At the same time, it would likely be a huge embarrassment to the judicial system if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred for ethical lapses and for what the forthcoming Justice Department investigation is reportedly calling “serious lapses of judgment,”  and then continued to serve as a judge in one of the second highest courts in the land.

Prof. Deborah Rhode, director of the Center for the Legal Profession at the Stanford University School of Law, commented, “I would imaging that anything that would be enough to disbar you would be enough to remove you from the bench,” when asked what the impact of a disbarment of a judge would be in the federal courts.

Certainly, if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred by the Nevada court, there would be mounting calls for his impeachment by Congress. It is certainly possible too, that if Bybee didn’t simply resign at that point, the House, heavily Democratic, could initiate impeachment proceedings and that he would be impeached, since not only would he have been disbarred and criticized strongly by the Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility, but his actual memo, released by the Obama White House, has him offering legal cover for clear violations of the US Criminal Code and the Geneva Conventions, to which the US is a signatory. 

Whether House prosecutors could convince all Senate Democrats, plus independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and seven Republicans to reach the required 67 votes needed to convict (assuming  no abstentions), is an open question.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson Law School in San Diego, who is head of the National Lawyers Guild, notes that while the Constitution says judges may only be removed from office by the process of impeachment, it also says: “The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior.” 

Bybee in his 2002 memo (actually largely written by his subordinate at the time, John Yoo, but approved and signed by Bybee), tries to argue that what the Geneva Conventions and the US Criminal Code define as torture—namely “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,”—actually is only “torture” if it is “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” a patently absurd interpretation since it would be impossible to imaging “degrading treatment” rising to that level of pain. Bybee’s memo went on to say that even if US personnel did actually torture a captive, it would not be a violation of the law or the conventions if the torturer didn’t have a “specific intent” to cause pain. Going even further, he wrote that even if the torturer had a specific intent to cause pain, “a showing that an individual acted with a good faith belief that his conduct would not produce a result that the law prohibits negates specific intent.”

Judge Bybee himself, in an opinion written in 2006, mercilessly mocked this kind of legal sophism, saying: “The only thing we have to enforce our judgments is the power of our words. When these words lose their ordinary meaning—when they become so elastic that they may mean the opposite of what they appear to mean—we cede our own right to be taken seriously.” (Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1309 v. Laidlaw Transit Services, Inc.)

It seems clear that acting as a “mob attorney” for the White House, artfully misinterpreting a criminal statute (Sections 2340-2340A of title 18 of the United States Code implements the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, making them an integral part of US law) outlawing any form of torture in order to provide legal cover for criminal behavior by American forces and the CIA towards captives in the “War” on Terror would meet the definition “Bad Behavior,” warranting impeachment.

Whether Democrats in Congress, who in recent years have demonstrated an astonishing lack of courage and respect for the Constitution, will rise to the occasion is another matter, especially with a new Democratic president who has made it clear he is loath to hold the prior administration to account for any of its crimes or clearly unconstitutional behavior.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com

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