Abuse of power in Trump's America ... The windback of environmental protections ... War with California ... "Natural law" replaces human rights ... Distortion of the US judiciary ... Guantánamo update ... Roger Fitch visits Washington's new spy museum
The commander-in-chief is rich and a thief, but he's very bad at tinkering: if anything, Donald Trump is a tailor of chaos, daily ripping and tearing the fabric of American society, reminding one historian of the brutish Roman emperor Commodus. Impeachment is not likely, however, with a loyalist senate and electoral removal stymied by the Republican opposition's legendary dirty tricks.
Even so, the Trump administration's pillaging and looting should lead to prosecutions when Democrats regain control of the politicised Justice Department, where there's presently a blanket refusal to enforce contempt citations of the Democrat congress, including against AG Bill Barr.
Happily, an appeals court decision has momentarily arrested Trump's ceaseless self-dealing, in a case about domestic emoluments; there's still the problem of foreign emoluments, but to be fair, the far-sighted Saudis bought the 45th floor of Trump Tower before Trump's election.
Corruption is often masked as deregulation, such as the 85 attempts to undo or subvert environmental safeguards, with no obvious beneficiary but deep-pocketed polluters and hydrocarbon bagmen.
Unravelling settlements for corporate misconduct is another feature of Trump's administration, with government fixers making life easier for banking malefactors, reducing or overruling penalties imposed by the previous administration.
There's a NYT report on the Trump administration's corrupt settlement of corporate penalties, but nothing can touch the record achieved the last time Republicans were in office: the reduction of a Big Tobacco penalty from $130 billion to $10 billion, an accomplishment so astounding that the government lawyer arranging it, Robert McCallum Jr, was rewarded with the sought-after position of US ambassador to Australia.
The Energy Department is meanwhile bringing back incandescent lights. Phasing them out was a Bush idea, but the regulations were Obama's and that's enough for America's (racist) president, along with his nutty belief that energy-saving globes make him look orange.
The EPA has announced it will revoke California's authority to enforce higher pollution standards that the auto manufacturers themselves have embraced. There's no discernible legal basis for the revocation, and to further punish a state that rejects everything Trumpian the DoJ is thuggishly threatening to prosecute the participating manufacturers for committing antitrust violations in cooperating with California.
It all springs from Trump's subservience to the perceived needs of the doomed but still dominant industry, Big Carbon, led by a new EPA administrator who's had horrible successes, former coal industry executive Andrew Wheeler. It's part of a rollback no one wants and progressive states are fighting.
Meanwhile, the Power Company Climate Coalition, an association of utility companies, also opposes Trump's new carbon emissions rule, which would replace Obama's Clean Power Plan.
Political sackings continue at Homeland Security, the department responsible for immigration. The latest: General Counsel John Mitnick. Departmental lawyers have struggled to provide independent legal advice and defend in court government actions that are often unlawful; the president's political adviser, Stephen Miller, is probably behind the sacking.
Current ICE outrages include rural seclusion (fewer lawyers), tent courts where journalists are excluded, and problematic payments for empty prisons.
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Fresh Orwellianisms continue to bubble-up from the cranks who inhabit Trump departments: "freedom gas" for methane and natural gas, and "natural law" for inserting religious dogma into human rights law.
The suspicious "natural law" distortion is part of a new "Commission on Inalienable Rights" inspired by rogue academics at sundry religious universities. It will provide "fresh thinking about human rights" and propose "reforms of human rights discourse where it has departed from ... natural law and natural rights" (read same-sex marriage and gay rights).
"Natural law" could gain traction with some of Trump's judges, including a supreme court about to review Trump-backed discriminatory employment practices already struck down by several appeals circuits and opposed by the EEOC.
There's more here on an employment policy perversely justified under claims of religious beliefs and likely to be joined at the court by another "religious right" to discriminate (in weddings), just upheld in a 4-3 Arizona supreme court decision.
The Washington Post has an important article on the Federalist Society's ambitious 30-year program, now approaching fruition, to distort the US judiciary, while US public TV's Frontline has a new documentary on the chief target, the supreme court.
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As everyone knows, the Guantánamo internment camp is a colossal waste of public money, at a cost of $13 million a year per prisoner. Sadly, the people who facilitated it remain unpunished. Seventeen years after the shocking Yoo-Bybee "torture memo", its authors are still enjoying comfortable positions as a tenured Berkeley law professor, and 9th circuit justice, respectively, while their partner in crime, Gina Haspel, has been made CIA director and sanitised by the Wall Street Journal, which often prints John Yoo op-eds.
The results of their gruesome handiwork continue to seep out: declassified CIA cables obtained by the Intercept cast new light on the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the lead defendant in the Pentagon's 9/11 commission. An FBI agent is testifying about CIA "black site" procedures in the related al Baluchi case.
The 9th circuit has meanwhile ruled in a case brought by Abu Zubaydah, a Guantánamo prisoner and the first person subjected to George Bush's "enhanced interrogation". The court held that Zubaydah's ordeal at the CIA's black site in Poland was not entitled to protection as a state secret, paving the way for his lawyers to question the men who designed the torture, i.e. James Mitchell (see below) and Bruce Jessen. Both men have settled civil damages claims in a law suit indemnified by the CIA.
The 9th circuit called Zubaydah's treatment "torture", but the Pentagon prefers other words for the "tendency to deviate from ethical standards under the pressure of circumstances and in the absence of external oversight".
In a new directive it's called "behavioural drift", unethical or abusive behaviour "commonly observed in detention and other settings in which individuals have control or power over others' activities of daily living or general functioning".
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Waterboard display at the International Spy Museum
Washington has a tasteless new Spy Museum, and two CIA ruffians, the contract "psychologist" James Mitchell and interrogation-tape destroyer José Rodriguez, have contributed audiovisuals for the museum's popular Guantánamo exhibit, to provide a "balanced" view of the CIA's at times controversial aggressive debriefings.
The museum's exhibits include demonstration water-boards and a mock-up of the house where Osama bin Laden met his extrajudicial end.
It's an upbeat American foil to Lithuania's grim "KGB museum", with its Soviet torture exhibit; Donald Rumsfeld made a solemn pilgrimage there in October 2005, as the CIA tormented Abu Zubaydah nearby.
Postscript: Donald Trump has nominated an actual torture proponent to lead US human rights policy.
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