Twenty years. That could well be the sentence handed down to Ahmed Ghailani after a New York City jury decided that the Al Qaeda member on trial for the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya should be acquitted on 284 of 285 counts.Umm, looks like not only FoxPAC’s Mike Baker’s history is weak, but I would say that he needs brushing up on his current events too.
The bombings, massive coordinated explosions that killed 224 people (including 12 Americans) and wounded over 4,000 were carried out by Al Qaeda because of U.S. involvement in the first Gulf War and continued involvement in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East.
President Obama, crack crimefighter Eric Holder and leading members of the fading Democratic party all crowed -- prior to the trial -- that Ghailani's case would serve to show the world that civilian trials are just the ticket for fighting terrorists. Seriously.
So what happened? First, it was decided by folks involved to take the death penalty out of consideration --so even if Ghailani had been found to be guilty of all 285 counts, including 224 counts of murder, he couldn't have received the death penalty. This was simply a nod to reality... no New York jury has had the guts to hand down a death penalty since Captain Hudson sailed up the river and decided Manhattan would be a perfect safe haven for liberals. -- My history's a little weak so don't quote me on that one. Point being, the chances of securing a death penalty verdict in Manhattan rest somewhere between nada and bupkus.
As emptywheel tells us here…
There will be a lot of incredulity about the fact that Ghailani was not found guilty of the other charges. In particular, people will suggest that had Hussein Abebe been permitted to testify that he had sold the explosive to Ghailani used in the attack, then he would have been found guilty on all charges.And as another fdl post from the same page tells us, Judge Kaplan said that the government couldn’t use Abebe as a witness in a military commission either.
But aside from second-guessing the trial result, there’s a problem with that: Judge Lewis Kaplan strongly suggested that he refused to let Abebe testify not just because prosecutors wouldn’t have found him if it weren’t for the torture-induced confession of Ghailani, but also because Abebe himself was coerced to give the testimony he did. Which means we couldn’t know whether his testimony had been shaded to reflect what those coercing him to testify wanted him to say.
Torture is not only morally reprehensible and utterly wrong, but it’s also a really stupid thing to do if what you’re trying to obtain is a criminal conviction in a court of law.
Likewise, I found the same thing when I visited the web site of Bucks County’s (Republican) Board of Elections here.
Looks like “mission accomplished.”
By the way, one of Congressman Patrick Murphy’s departing acts has been to contact the VA to make sure that Iraq war veterans serving as part of Operation New Dawn receive the full range of benefits to which they should be entitled and remain unaffected even though the name of the campaign has changed from Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Note to Mikey Fitzpatrick: I don’t think you realize just how big the shoes are that you have to now try and fill. I and many others will be watching. And you’d better not mess it up, or I personally will remind you of that as much as I possibly can.
This brings to mind the phrase “same as it ever was” (here…also, Jed L. had a good comeback on all of that nonsense here).
And NPR is full of “Nazis and propagandists” according to Roger Ailes here, huh? Gee Rog, don’t you think you’re being a little tough on Matthew Continetti?
One thing we’ll need to do before we leave this year is fund the government. Because Democrats didn’t pass a single appropriations bill this year.As noted here from about six years ago, the Repugs had only passed 4 of 13 spending bills and were getting ready to submit their own omnibus bill to cover remaining spending and fund the government for 2005.
So now they’ll try to mop up in the 11th hour with an Omnibus spending bill that covers all of it. This is one more sign they aren’t learning many lessons from the election.
If this election showed us anything, it’s that Americans don’t want Congress passing massive trillion dollars bills that have been thrown together behind closed doors.
They want us to do business differently.
So I won’t be supporting an Omnibus spending bill.
So, as it is with just about everything else, when it comes to passing omnibus appropriations bills to make up for the rest of the prior year, IOKIYAR.
The only discordant note (in the award ceremony)? This moment in President Obama’s remarks: "Now, I'm going to go off-script here for a second and just say I really like this guy."I think Kristol must wake up and see that we’re on standard time again and blame Obama for the darkness, or that the rooster crows too loud.
He should have stayed on script. Sgt. Giunta was being honored by the president, on behalf of the nation, for an act of extraordinary heroism. Who cares whether Barack Obama “really like[s] this guy” or not? Does the grace of being liked by Barack Obama add one iota to Sgt. Giunta’s luster? Obama seems incapable of understanding that, when he acts formally as president of the United States, it’s really not about him, and that intruding himself into a ceremony like this diminishes him. Fortunately, Obama’s graceless interjection could not diminish what Sgt. Giunta did.
Tell you what – if you don’t try to use Obama’s quote as an excuse to blame him when all he was doing was indicating friendship, then I won’t mention Obama’s predecessor’s preoccupation with idiotic nicknames, as noted here, OK?
(Actually, I don’t think they cared so much about the story as they did about showing the pic of Obama looking like he’d just eaten a plate of bad clams.)
Fortunately, HuffPo provides a bit more depth here…
WASHINGTON (RNS) President Obama signed an executive order Wednesday (Nov. 17) that reforms the White House's faith-based office in a bid to improve transparency and clarify rules for religious groups that receive federal grants.And that’s a shame, because the White House pledged to ban faith-based job discrimination here; to learn more about why that’s important, please read this Pandagon post about Alicia Pedreira, who had the misfortune of living a life as a lesbian in Kentucky while working at a home for vulnerable children, a job from which she was fired because she was photographed wearing a T-shirt saying “Isle of Lesbos,” which is an actual Greek island, for the geographically challenged of us.
The nine-page order reflects numerous recommendations made more than six months ago by a blue-ribbon advisory council charged with streamlining and reforming the office created under former President George W. Bush.
"The recommendations that they've put forth make really concrete and tangible improvements to the government's relationship with faith-based organizations," said Joshua DuBois, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
The executive order, however, does not address controversial questions of whether grant recipients can hire and fire based on religion. Administration officials have said those questions will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
I give the Obama Administration credit for metaphorically putting rouge and eyeliner along with lipstick on the proverbial pig here. However, when you’re done, it’s still going to walk on all fours and oink just as loud as if you’d never bothered to do anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment