Wednesday Mashup Part 2 (11/10/09)

(Part One is over here.)

The New York Times informs us here that the infamous Second Circuit Court of Appeals under Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs (pictured) has done it again…

Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture. The Italian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong.

In Italy, a judge ruled that a station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency and 22 other Americans broke the law in the 2003 abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim cleric who ended up in Egypt, where he said he was tortured.

Two days earlier, a federal appeals court in Manhattan brushed off a lawsuit by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was seized in an American airport by federal agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials. He was held incommunicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was tortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians let him go.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided that none of that entitled Mr. Arar to a day in court.

…

Written by (Jacobs), the 59-page majority opinion held that no civil damages remedy exists for the horrors visited on Mr. Arar. To “decide how to implement extraordinary rendition,” he wrote, is “for the elected members of Congress — and not for us as judges.” Allowing suits against policy makers for rendition and torture would “affect diplomacy, foreign policy and the security of the nation,” Judge Jacobs said.

…

One of the dissenters, Judge Guido Calabresi, said that “when the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay.”

The damage to Mr. Arar, America’s reputation and the rule of law is already quite plain. The Supreme Court should reverse this ruling.

Given, though, that we’re talking about the High Court of Hangin’ Judge JR, I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope for that either (and this tells us how the Second Circuit upheld a ruling in 2006 dismissing a claim against Saudi Arabia, a Saudi charity, four princes and a Saudi banker of providing material support to al Qaeda before the September 11 attacks).

The prior post also tells us that the Jacobs court was guilty of “a bad reading of federal law” when they let gun manufacturers off the hook in response to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s lawsuit, and they also let former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman “skate” as well, ruling that she could not be held liable for assuring residents near Ground Zero that the air was safe to breathe (overturning a verdict against Whitman issued by U.S. District Judge Deborah A. Batts, who stated that Whitman’s actions “shocked the conscience”).

Oh, and did I point out that Jacobs also ruled that Medicaid funds could be denied to disabled people?

As noted here, though, Jacobs actually did have good words to say on behalf of Judge Sonia Sotomayor prior to her Supreme Court confirmation.

Would that he showed a speck of the generosity or understanding towards those seeking a hearing before him that he shows to his peers.

Update 11/13/09: Sadly, the beat goes on - another judicial miscarriage.

Also, former Laura Bush employee Andrew Malcolm recently opined as follows (here)…

A new CNN/Opinion Research Poll of 1,018 adult Americans finds those who are very or somewhat confident about the Democrat administration's plans waning, while those lacking confidence are increasing in numbers.

Nice one, Malcolm, you scumbag (the "ic" always matters).

Continuing...

…steady delays in manufacturing the (H1N1) vaccine and the federal government's distribution have continued. Deliveries of millions of doses have gone way beyond the original schedule. So late are deliveries that some medical experts say an epidemic will be well underway or over before all the doses become available in late December.

GOP Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, never a fan of big new government programs, has called this year's H1N1 swine flu preparations a "total failure." His belief seems to be spreading like a virus as well, with several polls showing a majority of Americans now have no intention of getting the doses, even if and when they become available.

Now, the new CNN Poll, taken Oct. 30-Nov. 1 with a margin of error of +/-3 points, finds those Americans who are very confident that the Obama White House can prevent a pandemic has fallen from a meager 15% around Labor Day to a worse 11% now. Those feeling "somewhat confident" has dropped from 44% to 40%.

Meanwhile, the percentage of those lacking any confidence has jumped from 40% to 49%.

I must tell you that I’ve just about had it with Ron Paul.

And I don’t care if he’s a doctor or not. In the final analysis, he’s a bought-and-paid-for Repug who has been screaming about “socialized medzin’” just as loudly as anyone else in his party for just as long (here).

And he claimed on that Alex Jones show (I'll let you find the link) that Obama is supposedly keeping his daughters from getting the H1N1 vaccine (uh, really?).

Actually, I already pointed out here that the issues with vaccine preparation in this country aren't Obama’s fault; as noted in the third item above (in an unusually lucid moment for Dana Milbank of the WaPo), the present shortage is “the result of years of failure to build adequate vaccine-manufacturing capacity in the United States. Too little work on new vaccine technologies means producers of flu shots still rely on the ancient method of making inoculations with chicken eggs.”

But beyond that, I want to add the following that I didn’t add last time (here)…

At a time of heightened national anxieties following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and other targets, US authorities raised the spectre of biological attack using the smallpox virus (though there was no evidence that such an attack was imminent, or even feasible). Bush announced a programme to vaccinate 10 million ‘frontline’ public service workers, including police and health staff, with the smallpox vaccine (which had not been used since smallpox had been declared extinct 30 years earlier). But few believed that smallpox was a real threat and, though the politicians succeeded in bullying the public health authorities into endorsing the programme, fewer than 40,000 of the eligible staff came forward to have the vaccine and within a year the whole campaign sputtered out.

According to journalist Arthur Allen in his authoritative study of vaccination and anti-vaccination campaigns in the US, in the smallpox scare ‘the Bush administration had seemingly distorted the truth and manipulated public fears to achieve its goals’ (4). As an advocate of the benefits of immunisation, Allen regretted the effect of the smallpox bioterrorism vaccine programme in undermining public trust for health authorities and in damaging the reputation of vaccination. He noted that this episode contributed to a shift in popular attitudes towards immunisation from the prevailing enthusiasm of the postwar years (resulting from the success of vaccination against polio, smallpox and other diseases) to the more ambivalent climate that now prevails (as a result of the vaccine/autism and other scares).

So if people are hesitant about getting their vaccinations (and there’s no reason for that, by the way; some school districts mandate up-to-date vaccinations), we can thank the husband of Malcolm’s benefactor for inflicting some unnecessary panic.

And finally, aside from Veterans Day, this day marks another remembrance for anyone living in the Philadelphia area in particular; fifteen years ago, Eddie Polec, all of 16 years old, was beaten to death on the steps of St. Cecilia’s Roman Catholic Church.

It’s hard for me to find the words to properly communicate what this act did to this city in particular. I guess phrases like “shocks the conscience,” “riveting,” “setting off torrents of rage” all seem to fit. After the emotions subsided, though (and it took a long time for that to happen), I suppose all that was left was almost unfathomable sadness.

As this New York Times report tells us…

…the police say, as many as two dozen Abington (Pa) youths armed with baseball bats piled into cars, drove into the Fox Chase neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia and confronted a group of teen-agers who ran off.

The Abington youths then cornered (Polec) in front of the church where he had once been an altar boy. He fell or was knocked to the pavement. Then, while some of the attackers pulled him to his feet, others clubbed him to death with a bat, fracturing his skull seven times.

The Philadelphia police arrested three suspects on Tuesday, and said they expected to make at least two more arrests soon. Thomas Crook, 18, Bou Khathavong, 17, and Nicholas Pinero, 17, were charged with murder and are being held without bail.

The police said the attack appeared to have been provoked by an accusation by a young woman from Abington who said she had argued with some teen-agers at a McDonald's in Fox Chase and was then raped. The police said that the young woman had not been raped, but the young men from Abington nonetheless planned revenge for days before they drove to the same McDonald's the night of Nov. 11.

Mr. Polec, whom the police said was not involved in the earlier incident, was standing in the parking lot with some friends when the Abington teen-agers pulled up and chased them to the front of St. Cecilia's Roman Catholic Church. Several of Mr. Polec's friends were injured in the melee.

And as noted here in a post about police and emergency personnel acting with the haste and pre-emption that, tragically, were missing in the Polec case, “(The Polec story) pained a family, neighborhood, city and nation in 1994. It prompted an overhaul of the Philadelphia 911 system – including removing civilian dispatchers and replacing them with trained officers.”

Another memory of this terrible event was the aftermath and the trial of the three defendants, in which the Polec family (led by father John) showed a measure of calm and reserve that seemed to be incomprehensible at the time (I can particularly recall some questioning by the father of the criminals responsible for the death of his son, which I believe took place in court…despite much Googling, I’ve only been able to obtain some sketchy information on all of this, so I can’t confirm that).

I also have a bit of a personal remembrance I’d like to share on this. John Polec worked as a computer programmer at The Vanguard Group for years, a place where I toiled as well, and I ended up working on a development team with a member of the family, as skilled a programmer in her own right and as nice of a person as you could imagine. A co-worker at that time brought up the family connection, and after I said to him that he must be mistaken, he pointed out to me a tattoo on her ankle with Eddie’s name and the year of his birth and death. I never asked her about it because I didn’t know what I could possibly say that wouldn’t reopen a wound; my guess is that most people lose themselves in their jobs to forget about bad stuff in general. So I kept my mouth shut and discussed other stuff.

I suppose the point of mentioning this at all is to say that Eddie Polec’s memory and that of his courageous family has not been forgotten. For anyone living in the Philadelphia area at the time of his death, I’m sure the attack remains as incomprehensible an act now as it was then, a tragic reminder of what happens when conscience-less young men with hormones raging imagine indestructibility, looking for any excuse to set themselves upon another human being like savage animals.

May God bless and keep the Polec family now and always.