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Paul Merrell

Opinion recap: TV indecency policy awaits next round : SCOTUSblog - 0 views

  • The federal government’s battered policy against what it considers to be “indecent” programming on television has weathered two showdowns in the Supreme Court in the past three years.  But, on Thursday, the Court impliedly posed a question: whether that Federal Communications Commission policy — if left as is — would survive a third such encounter.  The signals were not promising for the FCC. The new ruling in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, et al. (10-1293), of course, did not strike down the policy.  It nullified specific orders by the FCC enforcing its policy, and avoided the First Amendment issue altogether.  FCC thus does retain the option of going right ahead to regulate broadcasts of single uses of four-letter words and momentary glimpses of provocative nudity, as if nothing had changed.   It also has the option of reconsidering, but anything new it writes will again be tested constitutionally, so either way, there will be a third round.
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    A decision today by the Supreme Court regarding the FCC's regulation of indecency in television  broadcasts is being widely misreported in mainstream media as authorizing nudity and profane language on television.  The decision actually struck down a pair of FCC decisions enforcing its regulation on grounds that the regulation as applied in those two cases was too vague to put broadcasters on notice that their particular broadcasts crossed any legally definable line. As discussed in the linked article, the decision does not prohibit the FCC from enforcing its regulation in differering situations. The FCC may continue to so or more likely will rewrite its regulation to be more explicit. The decision therefore sets the stage for a later case that might reach the First Amndement constitutional issues.  In other words, mainstream media gets it wrong again. 
Paul Merrell

Pentagon: 9/11 defense team linguist was CIA asset | The Miami Herald The Miami Herald - 0 views

  • The military confirmed Tuesday that a linguist tasked to serve on the death-penalty defense of an alleged Sept. 11 plotter had previously worked for the CIA but would not say whether he worked at a black site.The revelation Monday by alleged plot deputy Ramzi bin al Shibh, 42, brought this week’s resumption of the Sept. 11 hearings, the first in six months, to a screeching halt. All but one of the five alleged 9/11 conspirators said they independently recognized the stony-faced translator seated beside bin al Shibh at the war court from their years in the spy agency’s secret overseas prisons.The five men, led by alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, 49, are accused of orchestrating, financing and training the men who hijacked four aircraft and killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001.
  • Defense attorneys accuse the CIA of torturing their clients and then seeking to hide the evidence from their death-penalty trials. They also allege U.S. government and military interference is designed to disrupt their work with the accused.The five defendants return to court Wednesday to figure a way forward after the revelation, the latest snag in pretrial hearings for the case that has no trial date. The judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, gave lawyers Tuesday to conduct research, and trade classified court filings — starting with one by the prosecution Monday night that apparently described the controversial contract linguist’s intelligence background.Tuesday afternoon, a Pentagon spokesman, Army Lt. Col. Myles B. Caggins, said the linguist “has in the past made readily available to prospective supervisors his prior work experience with the United States government, including with the CIA.”
  • Caggins would not say whether the linguist worked at a CIA “black site,” an overseas prison where agents secretly interrogated prisoners and subjected them to brutal techniques — waterboarding, nudity, sleep deprivation, painful shackling and a quasi-medical procedure called rectal rehydration. He did, however, distance the case prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, from the disruption, saying his office “does not have any role in providing linguists to defense teams in military commissions.” He said defense lawyers get to vet their own linguists.“We vetted him. He denied it,” Bin al Shibh’s attorney, Jim Harrington, said Tuesday evening. Harrington said his team pointedly asked the linguist whether he had “participated in any interrogation, questioning or done any work with respect to detainees. Any place. His résumé denies it. It says he worked someplace else — Reston, Va., from 2002 to 2006.”Bin al Shibh was held in a series of secret overseas prison from his capture in Pakistan on Sept. 11, 2002until his arrival at Guantánamo four years later. Even then, according to the so-called Senate Torture Report, he remained in CIA custody.Defense lawyers want more information.
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  • “We will be filing motions for discovery regarding the former CIA interpreter utilized by Mr. Bin al Shibh’s defense team,” said attorney Cheryl Bormann, defending the alleged terror trainer Walid bin Attash, 36, who she said was shaken at seeing someone from a black site.Bormann also said she would be seeking a court order from Judge Pohl similar to the one Pohl styled after disclosure that FBI agents were investigating and questioning members of the 9/11 defense team: Instructing the defense team members to disclose if they worked for the CIA or a CIA contractor, absolving them of any Non Disclosure Order they signed with the CIA.“If people aren’t truthful about their background,” Bormann said, “there’s really no way for us to determine whether or not they are inappropriately assigned to our team.”
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    So, it sounds like the CIA was trying to sneak an agent who understands Arabic into the GITMO defendants' defense team. This, after the FBI was caught interrogating a defense team member. Time to dismiss the charges and free the defendants, I think. These men can't get a fair trial. 
Paul Merrell

Gina Haspel CIA Torture Cables Declassified | National Security Archive - 0 views

  • Current CIA director Gina Haspel described graphic acts of deliberate physical torture including the waterboarding of a suspected Al-Qa’ida terrorist under her supervision when she was chief of base at a CIA black site in Thailand in 2002, according to declassified CIA cables – most of which she wrote or authorized – obtained by the National Security Archive through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and posted on the Web today. The Haspel cables detail conditions the public has only seen in the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs from Iraq of detainees hooded and shackled, forced nudity, wall slamming, and box confinement, as well as “enhanced techniques” never photographed such as the simulated drowning of suspects on the waterboard. Waterboarding is a war crime under both U.S. and international law, dating back to U.S. prosecution of Japanese solders for torturing U.S. POWs during World War II.[1]
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