Seizing control of the politburo

New Supreme Court term … Political gold rush flows from Citizens United … Tea Party nutters … Government plan to assassinate US citizen goes to court … Torture case against Boeing subsidiary overturned ... Roger Fitch files from Washington

A new term has begun for a Supreme Court described as the most conservative in decades. It started with a "Long Conference" on September 27, where the court winnowed down thousands of petitions for certiorari to a few dozen. 

Leading the cert pack was the civil damages case, Saleh v Titan Corporation, arising out of the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq. Scotusblog has more.

Justice Kagan won't be participating in many decisions. 

Legislation allowing retired Supreme Court Justices to sit when needed (as now occurs in Courts of Appeal) is pending.

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In last term's Citizens United decision, High Court Republicans strived to help needy party colleagues raise campaign cash, and it's paying off big time in the 2010 election cycle. 

A political gold rush ($5 billion) has broken out and only a constitutional amendment seems likely to stem it. 

Mother Jones has more, including a handy corporate seating chart for Congress.

Murdoch: $2 mill of shareholders' money to RepublicansFollowing Citizens, money sources have been secret, and thanks to renegade Democrats who helped Republicans defeat the DISCLOSE Act, will remain so.  

Some donors don't mind the publicity. Rupert Murdoch has given $1 million each to the Republican Party and its front, the Chamber of Commerce.

So much for the 2010 elections, due on Melbourne Cup Day.

The 2012 race is just around the corner, and already, Murdoch's Fox Network has on its books four of the Republican presidential wannabes, just about every one of them who isn't a serving official. 

As Paul Krugman observed:

"Nobody ... paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine."

But, as a (sacked) party operative put it, "the Ministry of Propaganda has ... seized control of the Politburo". 

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As the election approaches, the LA Times is profiling some of the nutty candidates being fielded by Tea Party Republicans, including a congressional candidate who likes to dress up in SS uniforms.

Lt Col West: unrepentant torturerThere are worse things. One of the consequences of the Pentagon's failure to punish torture and other war crimes is the career possibilities opening up for those acquitted or merely disgraced.

In North Carolina and Florida, Republicans are fielding congressional candidates previously charged with grave offences against prisoners in Iraq.

The UK Independent's Johann Hari reported on Lt Col Allen West the last time he ran for Congress.

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The ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights have sued to block Obama's leaked plan to assassinate the American born Anwar Al-Awlaki by drone. The complaint is here. 

The government moved dismissal, with this legal memorandum. The Times has more.

While Bush's lawyers always argued against "second-guessing" or "micromanaging" the executive, Obama baldly claims:

"The judiciary is simply not equipped to manage the President and his national security advisors in their discharge of these most critical and sensitive executive functions."

In due course, the government cried "state secrets", but only after it had claimed, inter alia, the unreviewable right to kill. 

Glenn Greenwald and Emptywheel were appalled, but The New York Times seemed comfortable with Obama's killings, provided there were "guidelines."

Al-Awlaki: Obama ordered his death by droneAdding insult to aerial injury, a new IT case revolves around the inaccurate, untested and (it turns out) bootlegged software the CIA is using to target victims.

Responding to charges that it was using the Red Queen approach to cases - execution before trial - the Obama administration is now considering indicting Al-Awlaki prior to killing him.

The only problem: "material support for terrorism" carries a 15-year penalty and people might wonder at the discrepancy between the executive punishment - summary execution - and the actual legal penalty.

Emptywheel comments.

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USA Today has a new study investigating the bipartisan collapse of ethics at the Justice Department. 

The newspaper identified 201 cases of prosecutorial misconduct, starting with a Guantánamo habeas case.

Yet prosecutorial misconduct is rarely punished in the US, if a new study of California courts is any guide.
 
The DoJ mess has now claimed its first death, with the suicide of a Justice lawyer under investigation.  

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On September 8, The New York Times reported the dismissal of a torture case brought against a CIA contractor. 

The article related how an enbanc  9th Circuit had overturned a unanimous three-judge decision that foreign victims of US rendition policies could sue Jeppesen Dataplan, a Boeing subsidiary that arranged their transport to torture centres.

The full bench ruled, 6-5, that the simple assertion of "state secrets" by the government - not even a party to the suit - foreclosed any recovery for the torture victims.

The majority cynically suggested the plaintiffs apply instead to Congress for act of grace payments.

Scotusblog has more.

Jane Mayer: kick-started the rendition caseReaction was swift. Scott Horton noted that the British courts had already rejected the state secrets defence in the very same case, i.e. that of the freed Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed. 

At The New Yorker, Jane Mayer, whose interview with a whistleblower kick-started the Jeppesen case, suggested state crimes, not state secrets, were at issue. 

The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan was particularly eloquent in his outrage.

Even The Washington Post and The New York Times were shocked.

On the very next day, however, newspapers reported that the US was extracting $400 million from the present Iraqi government for the crimes, including torture of Americans, committed by the Saddam regime.

Glenn Greenwald noted this beyond-irony hypocrisy.

Scott Horton, for one, thinks compensating for torture should be a two-way street, but it isn't happening.

A new study by a justice think tank looks at the official stonewalling that is blocking judicial redress for victims of US torture. 

Happily, the DoJ's new Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section has announced a campaign to ferret out war criminals, even including Americans. 

USA Today has more. 

The new unit should soon be flooded with addresses, mostly in California: Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Jim Haynes and Condi. On the East Coast, there's Steven Bradbury, David Addington, John Rizzo, Rummy and Cheney.