Scalia can fuck off right now

Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia referred to "30" former gitmo prisoners who had "returned to the battlefield" in his dissent in the 5-4 ruling that 900 years of Anglo-Saxon legal tradition and the plain letter of the Constitution both actually matter, and you can't just declare the right to protest your arbitrary imprisonment to a court void.

Obsidian Wings tracked down some of those "30" who had "returned to the battlefield." Included are two (2) who actually did return to a battlefield and were recaptured. Also included are three (3) who appeared in the film The Road to Guantanamo. One gave an interview to the New York Times. Another wrote an op-ed for the same paper (click to read). All of these were ruled "hostile acts" by the Pentagon.

The list has since been revised to 12, six of which are new, indicating that six of the original supposed 30 are still considered by the DoD to have "returned to the battlefield" in some sense. (One was arrested in Germany, in an apartment; two are alleged to be working for militant groups but there is no way to check the claim; I don't know about the sixth.)

More at Obsidian Wings.

FISA tactic: stall for time

Okay, so the plan to fight FISA is to try to run out the clock in the Senate before the summer break; getting the bill through in the short pre-election session will be difficult, tho' by no means impossible, and every delay is a win for our side.

Prolifigate backstabber Majority Leader Harry Reid has pretended to sign on to the effort to delay, but 1) he's full of shit, he's done everything he can to get all this passed, and 2) as Glenn Greenwald says, you can "rarely go wrong by assuming Reid's motives are something other than he claims them to be." And lo, emptywheel throws a convincing theory that it's actually about the foreclosure-relief bill that Mr. Bush has threatened to veto; basically it's a quid pro quo of "you sign off on this, we'll get you your immunity." I know that I don't trust Mr. Reid and you shouldn't either; I find his attempt to indicate that you should to be insulting and tiresome in the extreme.

Christy at Firedoglake points to a speech by Senator Dodd against the bill as a whole and in particular against immunity. This is part of the attempt to stall the bill out. But the speech is pretty good. While irrelevant, Ron Paul has issued a strong statement against the whole fiasco. And Russ Feingold has gotten quite forthright in attacking the Democratic party over this, as he should be. Also, you really should read Greenwald's discussion of the naked corruption of the entire process:

Beyond the FISA bill's evisceration of the rule of law, the Fourth Amendment and surveillance safeguards, what has always been so striking with this controversy has been how transparently sleazy and corrupt it reveals the Congress to be. Right out in the open, telecoms have just led Congressional supporters of telecom immunity around like little puppets. It's just amazing -- though extremely common -- that while negotiations over the bill occurred in total secrecy, with civil liberties groups and the public at large being completely excluded, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer "negotiated" directly with the telecoms over how the telecoms' amnesty bill should be written.

Telecoms broke our surveillance laws, and then our Democratic Congressional leaders ran to them to take instructions on how to write the special law to protect them, and they didn't even really bother to hide that...

Whatever else is true, if Democrats and Barack Obama vote this bill into law, they will be (a) legalizing warrantless spying on Americans and (b) embracing the core premise of Bush radicalism: that as long as the President says something is legal (as he told telecoms that warrantless spying was legal), then it ought to be treated as such.

So as Digby says,

So go ahead and make calls to your Senators, and they'll be tracked (by more people than you think), but we have a ruling class that has invaded your privacy more and more over the years. All for your protection, of course. The daddies in Washington want you to know they have an eye on the bad guys for you. Problem is, they think you are the bad guy.

Click here for the list of people to call. Also, contribute to the fund against retroactive immunity and to remove House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer from office. Contributions slowed quite a bit after hitting $300,000, but the goal is $500,000, and that's a long way off.

Feinstein (D-CA) on FISA and retraoctive immunity.

Quoting straight out of the Republican political playbook to support FISA revisions and retroactive telecom immunity, Senator Diane Feinstein said on the Senate floor this afternoon, "Taking no action [on FISA] means we will be opening our self [sic], in my view, to the possibly of a massive attack." (Source: Wired's Threat Level (27b/6))

Gut the 4^th Amendment, endorse the principle that the Chief Executive can violate the law at will and order others to do so without punishment, and retroactively legalise years of domestic spying, or The Terrorists will Kill You. Wretched. Look for this in fall campaign ads, one way or another.

hate

The FISA cloture vote - the vote to end debate - just passed 80-15; an overwhelming rout, and about in line with what I was expecting. (I was thinking 10ish; 15 is close.) For the record, that's not just a majority, but a veto-proof majority of Democrats alone (by percentage). If I heard the clerk correctly, and I think I did [but am told I could not have - see comments; a de facto yes on cloture, but not present rather than an active yes on cloture], Senator Obama voted for cloture, which is to say, against the filibuster, which is to say, functionally, both for retroactive immunity as well as the rest of the bill. Senator Obama's campaign promise to filibuster any bill containing retroactive immunity is accordingly broken, as expected.

Senator Reid is speaking in favour of FISA right now, but in a context of the housing/foreclosure bill, as part of an agenda to get all these things done etc. He's also promising to hold the Senate in session until various bills pass; FISA was not included in those parts of the agenda which could be allowed to slide until August.

ETA: Note that Senator Obama, if not present - tho' I thought I heard his name - is still failing to support a filibuster in any way, and still a violation of his campaign pledge.

ETA2: Senator Obama is confirmed not present - I did mishear the clerk - along with Senators Clinton, Kennedy, Byrd, and McCain. This is the first round of cloture vote; there will be either one or two more, I forget which. The votes against cloture (the good vote) were: Biden (D-DE), Boxer (D-CA), Brown (D-OH), Cantwell (D-WA), Dodd (D-CT), Durbin (D-IL), Feingold (D-WI), Harkin (D-IA), Kerry (D-MA), Lautenberg (D-NJ), Leahy (D-VT), Menendez (D-NJ), Sanders (I-VT), Schumer (D-NY), and Wyden (D-OR).

Washington State voters please note that Senator Patty Murray voted for this travesty.

ETA3: Doing the math:

(128 + 14) / (128 + 14 + 105 + 31) = 0.510791367

...means that while a majority of Democrats in Congress actually voting opposed this bill on votes when it counted, it was a very, very, very slim majority of 51.1%. Add in three of the four "not present" Democrats to the Senate, and you get 0.505338078, or 50.5%. (I exclude Kennedy since his absence is entirely involuntary.) Add in the three "not present" Democrats in the House, and you get 0.5, or 50.0% - a tie. Including Kennedy in the population of Democrats as a whole, the "good" voters were an outright minority of Congressional Democrats, at 49.8%.

purple, but not at the store

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