Ann Colomb scoops a plastic cup of corn from a white pail in her backyard and pours it onto the sod at her feet. A few dozen scraggly chickens scatter as the corn hits the ground, then gather back into a flock to peck up the kernels.Link.
“Grocery chickens are so expensive,” the 57-year-old Colomb explains. “And they’re pumped up with all those hormones. So we raise and butcher them ourselves.” Inside, a less lucky bird stews with gravy and spices in a pot on Colomb’s stove. As she frequently does, Colomb is entertaining guests. She’ll ladle the chicken and gravy over rice for visiting family members, along with a selection of the peppery, butter-laden sides—a mix of Creole cuisine and soul food.
It’s early July in Church Point, Louisiana, and the summer’s bearing down. In front of the Colombs’ modest, two-bedroom bungalow, a large rattletrap fan blows sluggish swamp air across the porch. An unused freezer, an old toaster oven, and a rickety covered swing sit under the driveway carport. Colomb’s husband, James, sits on a lawn chair and dabs the humidity from his face with a handkerchief.
The Colombs live on a mostly black street in a mostly white section of this mostly segregated town of 4,700 in Acadia Parish—the heart of Cajun country. James Colomb spent the bulk of his career working in an oil field, then was injured. The family’s sole source of income now is his disability check. Ann Colomb—“Miss Ann” to those who know her—is a homemaker.
It was from this unlikely setting, the United States alleged, that Ann Colomb and three of her four sons ran one of the largest crack cocaine operations in Louisiana. Over the course of a decade, prosecutors said, the Colombs bought $15 million in illicit drugs with a street value of more than $70 million. Judging solely from the indictments, the government’s case seemed formidable: a trail of police reports throughout the 1990s accusing the Colomb boys of possessing or selling drugs; a 2001 raid on the Colomb home that turned up 72 grams of crack, a Titan .25-caliber pistol, and a rifle; and more than 30 prison informants who were prepared to testify that they had sold crack to one or more members of the Colomb family. In 2006 a jury in Lafayette, Louisiana, convicted the African-American family on federal drug conspiracy charges. Ann and her sons served almost four months in a federal prison while awaiting their sentences, which would likely have ranged from 10 years to life.
But in the ensuing months, the government’s case unraveled, exposing some unsettling truths about the way jailhouse informants are used in America’s courtrooms. In December 2006, all charges against the family were dismissed. The federal judge who presided over the trial was so upset about what happened in his courtroom that he has since taken the rare step of speaking out about it publicly.
The legal fiasco was partly attributable to familiar themes of racism and overly aggressive prosecution. But the Colomb story is mostly about the war on drugs. It shows how the absurd incentives created by the unaccountable use of shady drug informants by police and prosecutors can quickly make innocent people look very guilty.
The case loomed over the family for more than five years. It wrecked their finances. The Colombs’ son Danny was convicted shortly after learning that his wife Elizabeth was expecting their first child. He spiraled into severe depression while incarcerated. He and Elizabeth say they spent their entire savings on attorney’s fees. Ann Colomb had a serious diabetic attack in prison. She too spent her savings on her defense.
Still, the Colombs’ home on Broadway Street is a happier place now, bustling with visiting neighbors and relatives. Ann forges a path through the doddering chickens and makes her way to the front of the house. She sits down in a lawn chair next to her husband and lifts her 3-year-old granddaughter Mariah into her lap. “It’s good now,” she says as she strokes the little girl’s braids. “I’m finally getting to enjoy my grand babies.”
Ten Years, Four Incidents, One Conviction
Ann Colomb and three of her four sons were indicted, charged, and convicted on federal drug conspiracy charges. The conspiracy indictment allowed the government to piece together a series of disparate events going back more than a decade, only one of which had ever amounted to a conviction in state court.
The indictment lists four “overt acts” over 10 years that prosecutors say indicate a conspiracy. The cumulative amount of cocaine police said was involved in the four incidents amounts to less than a gram. All four incidents also involved deputies from the Acadia Parish Sheriff’s Department, whom the Colombs accuse of harboring a racially motivated grudge against the family, driven in part by the Colomb boys’ history of dating white women. (The Sheriff’s Department declined to comment for this story.)
The only act listed in the federal indictment that resulted in a conviction at the time came in 1993, when a sheriff’s deputy pulled over a car occupied by Ann Colomb’s son from a previous marriage, Sammie Davis Jr., who was 26 at the time; Ann and James Colomb’s son Edward Colomb, then 20; and two other men. A subsequent search found cocaine and marijuana on the other two men and some residue in the car but none on Davis or Colomb. Sammie and Edward were nevertheless arrested and charged with drug possession. Ann and James Colomb say their attorney told Sammie and Edward that if they fought the charges, they would almost certainly be convicted and sent to prison. The two pleaded no contest to a felony possession charge and were sentenced to probation.
“We didn’t know anything about how all of this worked,” Ann Colomb says. “We’d never been in a court before. I didn’t know the first thing about drugs or the law.” The repercussions of that plea would hang over the family for 15 years.
In the other three incidents federal prosecutors claimed were part of the drug conspiracy, state charges were dropped before getting to trial. In one, an undercover police officer alleged that in December 1999 he met Sammie Davis Jr. under the Colomb home’s carport to purchase cocaine. Years later, at the federal trial, the man who built the carport testified that it had not existed in December 1999. It wouldn’t be built for another year.
An assistant to Acadia Parish Sheriff Wayne Melancon referred inquiries to Jerry Stutes, a federal investigator who worked for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Louisiana in the federal case against the Colombs. (Stutes has also worked for the Acadia Parish Sheriff’s Department.) Stutes declined to comment, referring inquiries to the Public Information Office of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New Orleans field office. That office referred inquiries to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
A Divided Town
In 1981 Ann and James Colomb moved their family to Church Point from nearby Carencro, Louisiana.
The family included Sammie Davis Jr. (named for the Rat Pack crooner), now 40, and the four children the couple had together: Edward, now 34; Danny, 33; Randy, 32; and Jennifer, 27. Because Ann and her first husband didn’t finalize their divorce until years after their separation, the surnames of the children can be confusing: Although only Sammie was the product of Ann’s previous marriage, both he and Danny take the last name Davis, while Edward and Randy take the last name Colomb. Jennifer, now married, takes the last name of her husband, Timothy Price.
Church Point has a history of racial unrest. Even today, black residents say, much of the town is segregated, by custom and practice if not by law. There are two versions of Church Point’s annual Mardi Gras parade, one for whites and one for blacks. (Church Point Mayor Roger Boudreaux insists that “anyone is free to take part in either the white or black parade.”) There are separate white and black Catholic churches, cemeteries, and, for the most part, neighborhoods. Blacks in Church Point say they aren’t permitted at the town’s only swimming pool. Mayor Boudreaux says the only pool in town requires a private membership but couldn’t say if there were any black members.
In 1994 fighting broke out in the stands of a Church Point High School football game when Margeaux Coleman was announced as the school’s first black homecoming queen. Coleman at the time was dating Randy Colomb, Ann’s fourth son. Months later, former Ku Klux Klan leader and white supremacist David Duke took part in the town’s white Mardi Gras parade. Black Church Point residents say town officials invited Duke in direct response to the homecoming scandal. Boudreaux says Duke showed up on his own initiative.
Rodney and Lois Carrier grew up in Church Point but today live in Carencro. The Carriers, both white, say they not only witnessed Church Point’s racial bias over the years; they participated in it.
“It’s still a different time in Church Point,” Lois Carrier says. She’s sitting in front of her kitchen window, where, sitting on the sill, there is a collection of black minstrel figurines. “There are still a lot of people there who don’t accept blacks into their homes,” she says. “Black people and white people live in different parts of town. Walk on different sides of the street. We were like that too. I’m ashamed of it now. But yes, we were racist people.”
All of that changed in 1997, the Carriers say, when their daughter Elizabeth began dating a black man—Ann Colomb’s son, Danny. “We weren’t happy when we heard Elizabeth was dating a black guy,” Rodney says. “We didn’t even want to meet him.”
In fact, it took months for the Carriers to agree to meet Danny. “But once we did, we fell in love with him,” Lois says. Danny converted to Catholicism and began teaching Sunday school at the Carriers’ church. “Danny healed us from our prejudiced way of thinking,” Lois Carrier says. “We could finally see past his color, to his heart.” Rodney Carrier’s eyes well up when he speaks of Danny. “Today, I wouldn’t want anyone but Danny for Elizabeth,” he says.
What Danny and his family went through in court also changed the Carriers’ way of thinking. “We were raised to trust the authorities, to have a certain fear of them,” Lois says. “Now, it’s like we’ve lost a lot of that trust. It’s almost a scary feeling, not to be able to trust the people you’re supposed to. What that family went through.…And watching them do Danny the way they did.…”
Elizabeth Carrier says she regularly did battle with Acadia sheriff’s deputies in the late 1990s. “I was pulled over all the time,” she says. “Whenever I left Ann’s house, they’d ask ‘What are you doing with those Colomb boys?’ or ‘Why are you here?’ ” She says the police also would ask her whom she was dating and, when she told them, ask to search her car for drugs. Eventually, she says, she stopped going to the Colombs and instead asked Danny to visit her house.
Brandy Hanks, 30, is a white woman who dated Danny Davis during and shortly after high school. “I was pulled over just about every time I left Miss Ann’s house,” Hanks says. “They’d ask me, ‘Why are you hanging out with those niggers, those drug dealers?’ Or they’d ask, ‘What’s someone like you doing over at the Colomb house?’ And they’d always ask who I was dating.”
It wasn’t just law enforcement. Hanks says the Ku Klux Klan once left a card on her windshield with threats about interracial dating. “People don’t know what it was like—what we went through,” Ann Colomb says. “You don’t know what it’s like to get a phone call in the middle of the night from somebody, saying if my boy Edward don’t stop dating white girls, I’m going to find him hanging from a tree.”
Colomb wipes a tear into her cheek, then grows defiant. “I told him to leave a branch open for me, because if he killed my boy, I was going to string his white ass up right alongside,” she says. “Then I disconnected our phone.”
By the mid 1990s, the Colomb boys say they were regularly getting pulled over. “We couldn’t drive anywhere in town without getting stopped,” says Edward. “They would pull you over, ask to search your car, make a big deal out of it. Sometimes they’d let you go, sometimes they’d take you in and try to get you to plead to something you didn’t do.”
“I’ve battled depression for 15 years because of all this,” Danny says. “I couldn’t leave my house without getting harassed. I still take Lexapro and blood pressure medication. I don’t think I was paranoid when I thought they were going to kill me. I had police try to run me off the road. Other times, it was petty stuff, just to mess with you. One deputy pulled me over and took my license from me for no reason. He never gave it back.”
In February 1996, local authorities claim to have witnessed Danny Davis participate in a hand-to-hand drug deal in a Church Point parking lot. That evening, a police team clad in camouflage, black ski masks, and full SWAT attire stormed the home of Brandy Hanks’ parents, where Danny and Brandy were staying. The police broke the family’s door open with a battering ram just as Hanks’ partially paralyzed mother approached to open it. She was thrown over the back of her couch, triggering a cardiac event that put her in the hospital. The police roused Danny from sleep at gunpoint, handcuffed him, and marched him outside the house, where newspaper photographers and television crews waited with cameras to capture the fallen football star in shackles.
“They pointed their guns at a two-week-old baby,” Hanks says. “My little sister was so scared she peed herself.”
The police found no drugs, weapons, or anything incriminating in the raid. But Danny Davis says they still attempted to get him to plead to a drug charge for a transaction he says never happened. He refused and was never charged. Davis would be hauled into the police station two more times and pressured by local authorities to plead guilty. He refused both times, and both times the charges were dropped.
It was from these multiple run-ins with local authorities throughout the 1990s that the U.S. Attorney’s Office plucked the four incidents included in the federal conspiracy indictment against the family. These incidents—plus a questionable sting on Ann Colomb’s house in October 2001 that turned up two guns and 72 grams of crack—were the only evidence presented by Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Grayson that the Colomb family ever sold any illicit drugs. The rest of the testimony came from jailhouse informants accusing the Colombs only of buying cocaine, and lots of it.
“They took a bunch of unrelated police harassments of these people over 10 years, coupled it with a parade of jailhouse snitches, and called it a conspiracy,” says Rodney Baum, Sammie’s lawyer. “It was ridiculous.”
The Raid
On October 22, 2001, a local drug task force claimed to have conducted a “controlled buy” of crack cocaine from Ann Colomb. According to police reports, Stevie Charlot, a local crack addict who once toured the world as drummer for a zydeco band, was recruited to conduct the buy. Although police say Charlot wore a wire to record the transaction, they didn’t preserve any recording of it.
In the years between the alleged buy in 2001 and the Colomb trial in 2006, Charlot changed his story several times. In 2002 he told a private investigator hired by Colomb’s defense lawyers (in a recorded conversation) that the buy never happened at all, that he’d made the entire thing up to appease law enforcement officials. Charlot himself was facing a host of drug charges at the time. But Charlot soon was back to his original story, telling the grand jury that “everyone in Church Point dealt with the Colombs,” though he couldn’t provide authorities with the name of a single Colomb drug customer other than himself.
Minutes after Charlot’s alleged drug buy, the local drug task force raided the Colomb home in full SWAT attire, taking down the unlocked front door with a battering ram. They handcuffed Ann Colomb at gunpoint and rummaged through her belongings. James Colomb had to be taken to the hospital with a panic attack and heart palpitations. In a guest room dresser (not Ann Colomb’s panty drawer, where Charlot allegedly told police the drugs were stored), police found 72 grams of crack cocaine, not in rock form, as Charlot alleged, but in round, uncut “cookies,” along with a handgun. The amount of cocaine was significant; a typical “hit” of two to three rocks weighs only a fraction of a gram.
At the time, Ann and James Colomb’s daughter, Jennifer, was staying in the guest room with her then-boyfriend (now husband) Timothy Price. Price, now 26, immediately said the drugs and gun were his. He still does. “I was dealing crack on the side,” Price says. “It wasn’t anything major. And it was stupid. But that stuff was all mine. After we took Jennifer’s dad to the hospital, I heard that they had taken Miss Ann to jail. I can’t tell you how bad I felt. Miss Ann wouldn’t allow a single joint in that house. And because of me, they were trying to say she was some kind of drug dealer.”
Price drove to the police station to turn himself in. “I told them the dope and the gun was mine,” he says. “My mom is a police officer. The gun was hers.”
But Price says the sheriff’s deputies wanted nothing to do with him. “When I told them it was all mine, they put me in a holding cell for about 15 minutes,” he recalls. “Then they came and told me to go home. They said, ‘The dope’s not yours. Tell Edward to come get his momma.’ After that, I didn’t really know what to do.”
Several months later, Price says, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Grayson sent him a letter asking him to come in for questioning. By that time, police had traced the gun found with the cocaine to Price’s mother. Nevertheless, Price says, “Mr. Grayson was surprised when I told him the dope was mine.” Grayson and U.S. Attorney Donald Washington did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
Later, Price says, Grayson tried to convince him to say his girlfriend, Jennifer, had cajoled him into taking a fall for the drugs. When Grayson threatened Price with 10 to 15 years in prison if he continued to claim the cocaine as his own, Price says he decided to get an attorney. When later called before the grand jury, Price acknowledged the gun was his, but on the advice of his lawyer he pled the Fifth Amendment when asked about the drugs.
Today Price says the drugs definitely were his, just as he did immediately after the raid. “I lost a lot of friends and relatives over all of this,” he says. “People looked at me like I was a ghost.” Price was never charged for the cocaine. Five years later, Ann Colomb would take the hit for the cocaine in federal court. Although Price and Jennifer are now married, the Colomb family still hasn’t completely forgiven him. Normally warm, Ann Colomb cools at the mention of Price’s name. Her sons Edward and Sammie roll their eyes when asked about him. But all seem to hold back their disdain now that he’s family.
“He did what he had to do,” Edward says, referring to Price pleading the Fifth. “The drugs were his and he tried to take credit for them. I guess you can’t blame a guy for not wanting to go to jail.”
“He brought drugs into my home,” Ann says. “We can move on from that. Timmy’s going to have to live with what he done. That’s probably enough punishment for him.”
Although the raid was a local police operation, its results soon attracted the attention of Assistant U.S. Attorney Grayson. With the aid of more than 30 jailhouse informants, he would grow it into a major federal drug conspiracy case. The first federal indictment against the Colombs came down in May 2002. Subsequent indictments continued through 2004. The final indictment sought to seize Ann and James Colomb’s home.
One other charge resulted from the raid. When the police came in, they say they found Sammie Davis in a room where an unloaded shotgun was stored in a closet. A police officer at the scene says Davis immediately admitted to him that the gun belonged to him. Davis denies this, explaining that he didn’t even live in the house at the time. (All of Ann’s sons had moved out by then.) Although there was nothing illegal about the gun itself, Davis was a convicted felon, the result of his no-contest plea in the 1993 incident. He’d later be convicted in a separate trial of being a felon in possession of a firearm. The Colomb family’s lawyers believe that news of Sammie’s conviction spread through the federal prison system, inspiring a second wave of jailhouse informants to come to Grayson with new allegations of selling drugs to the Colomb family.
The Government Builds Its Case
Brett Grayson had made a name for himself by bringing down the drug empire of Houston kingpin John Timothy Cotton between 2000 and 2004. But after Cotton’s conviction, defense attorneys alleged that Grayson had relied on improper jailhouse snitch testimony, testimony they say ranged from inconsistent to provably false. One attorney alleged he had proof that a network of federal prison inmates called the “Hot Boyz” were trading and selling information about pending drug cases, including notes from the prosecutors, photos of the suspects, and even grand jury testimony.
But Grayson had collected boxes and boxes of other evidence against Cotton and his associates, so any problems with the snitch testimony, courts later ruled, were “harmless error”—not enough to overturn any convictions. Still, the testimony coming from the inmates at the federal penitentiary in Beaumont, Texas, known as Beaumont Low, troubled U.S. District Court Judge Tucker Melancon (no relation to the Acadia Parish sheriff), who would develop similar misgivings about the jailhouse witnesses Grayson called to the stand to testify against the Colomb family.
It is rare for a sitting federal judge to agree to an interview about one of his cases. Melancon says he can’t remember ever previously speaking with a journalist about the events in his courtroom. But this case bothered him. “I saw some of these [informants] in previous cases,” Melancon says. “It was like revolving-door inmate testimony. The allegation was that there was in the federal justice system a network of folks who were trying to get relief from long sentences by ginning up information on folks being tried in drug cases. I’d heard about it before. But it all culminated in the Colomb trial.”
By the end of 2002, Grayson had found 16 prison informants to testify against the Colombs. According to post-trial motions, Grayson says the informants came to him voluntarily, without solicitation. During the trial, Grayson argued that the informants were credible witnesses because it wasn’t necessarily in their interest to testify. Snitches, Grayson argued, aren’t treated well in prison.
But Grayson’s witnesses had clearly benefited from their testimony when he’d used them in the past, in the form of reduced sentences. One career criminal, Reginald Milstead, had testified for Grayson in a prior case in addition to the Colomb case and in exchange had his life sentence cut down to 10 years—of which he’d already served seven. Another of Grayson’s witnesses had a life sentence reduced to 15 years, according to defense briefs filed after the Colombs’ conviction.
Between June and September 2004, a second wave of inmates sent Grayson letters asking to testify against the Colombs. It began shortly after Sammie Davis was convicted on the gun charge. Grayson signed up an additional 16 witnesses. “Grayson’s home phone number must have been written all over the walls at Beaumont Low,” quips Steve Shapiro, Edward Colomb’s trial lawyer. “He had that whole prison jumping to tell him whatever he wanted to hear.”
Still bothered by what he’d seen at the Cotton trial, Judge Melancon initially attempted to bar Grayson from calling the additional 16 witnesses against Colomb, citing worries that in the years between the Colomb indictments and the trial bad information might have been “trickling” through the prison system and tainting the “search for the truth” that is supposed to be the objective of a criminal trial. But Grayson filed an interlocutory appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which vacated Melancon’s ruling. Melancon was able to exclude just one of the additional witnesses, leaving Grayson with 31 prison informants ready to testify against the Colombs.
The Shady World of Informants
The use of dubious informants is standard practice in drug policing. Narcotics officers routinely recruit drug addicts, rival dealers, and arrestees already facing their own drug charges to make controlled buys from suspected drug dealers or to point out places where drugs might be found. The system is fraught with problems, including a lack of oversight, little accountability, and twisted incentives that encourage shortcuts and corruption.
But even within the already tawdry informant system, jailhouse informants occupy a particularly pernicious niche. Mandatory minimum sentences contribute to the corruption of jailhouse informant testimony. Under federal law, the only way someone serving a mandatory minimum prison sentence can get out early is to provide information or testimony that is of “substantial assistance” to prosecutors. What constitutes “substantial assistance” is solely up to the judgment of prosecutors. Make the prosecutor happy, and you go home early. Tell him something that may well be true but doesn’t quite go far enough to win him an indictment or conviction, and you risk giving up a golden opportunity to cut your time. Critics say it’s a system that suborns outright lying.
“Some of these people would fry their own mother to get out of a 25-year drug sentence,” says Judge Melancon. “You’re going against human nature. And you’ve put in a system that lets human nature run amok, that lets information be passed from inmate to inmate, for pay or otherwise. This is something we need to take very, very seriously.”
The problem isn’t new. In 1990 jailhouse informant Leslie Vernon White, an admitted perjurer, showed a 60 Minutes reporter how, even while in prison, he was able to obtain confidential information about pending prosecutions, then fabricate an incriminating story about a suspect and offer it up to prosecutors in exchange for a reduction in his sentence. Despite doubts about his credibility dating back to the late 1970s, prosecutors continued to put White on the stand until the late 1980s. After much publicity, he was finally indicted for perjury in 1992. White had given a similar interview to Time in 1988, prompting the Los Angeles district attorney to conduct a review that turned
up more than 100 cases potentially tainted by informant testimony. The defense bar later came up with more than 200 more.
In a 2005 report on 111 death row exonerations between 1973 and 2004, the Northwestern University School of Law’s Center on Wrongful Convictions found that 51 involved false testimony from jailhouse informants looking to cut their time. But such studies are rare, in part because of a lack of information.
“We just don’t know,” says Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at the Loyola School of Law in Los Angeles and a leading expert on the use of informants. “The problem is that we don’t require the government to keep track of how informants are used. Where there have been thorough reviews by journalists—in Chicago, for example—we’ve seen common and persistent abuses. It’s bad enough at the federal level. But we really have no idea at all what goes on at the state and local level.”
Judge Melancon says informant abuse at the federal level was made even worse by amendments to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Broadly speaking, a convicted felon has one year from the date of his sentencing to remember everything he can—to tell the government everything he knows about other criminal activity in exchange for a reduction in his sentence. But amendments passed in 1991, 2002, and 2004 added several exceptions to that rule.
The most problematic of these allows a prisoner to get time off in exchange for information he relays to prosecutors well after the one-year cutoff, if prosecutors believe the prisoner wasn’t aware that the information would have been valuable to them before. Critics say the exception is too vague and too easily manipulated. Prison inmates can now spend the entirety of their sentences monitoring the news and rumor mills for drug prosecutions involving people or places with which they’re even vaguely familiar, then write to prosecutors to offer up information with just enough knowledge of a given town or suspect to appear believable.
“It’s wide open now,” Melancon says. “Everybody in the federal prisons knows what’s going on outside. You’ve got these people with extremely long drug sentences who hear about a drug case in a town they’re familiar with. Now they realize they can tell the government things that happened years ago—true or not—and get time off their sentences.”
Judge James Gray, a drug war critic who sits on the Superior Court of Orange County, California, and also has served as an assistant U.S. attorney, says courts need to give more scrutiny to snitch testimony, and prosecutors need to verify it. “This is a game,” Gray says. “You have lots of people sitting in prison who will do virtually anything to get out. They’ll sell you out in a minute to get out of there. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain. And every guy that guy gives up is going to get his own mandatory minimum sentence. And he then becomes another source of potentially bad information for prosecutors. You can quickly rack up a lot of convictions. But it shouldn’t be surprising if, in the process, you create some cottage industries.”
The Trial
Because there was no appeal, there are no transcripts of the Colomb trial. The account here has been culled from post-trial briefs and rulings as well as interviews with the Colombs, their attorneys, Judge Melancon, and others who sat through the proceedings.
The Colomb trial began on March 20, 2006, with a jury of 11 whites and one Latino woman. There was one black alternate juror. Once Grayson had laid out the four incidents from the 1990s and the details of the 2001 raid, he brought his prison informants into court, one after another, each claiming to have sold enormous quantities of crack and powder cocaine to the Colombs. Most said the transactions took place in public, yet Grayson had no surveillance video, audio recordings, or witnesses to these transactions other than the informants themselves.
Judging from the informant testimony, Edward and Danny Colomb would have been buying some $500,000 worth of wholesale crack cocaine a month in 1994, while both were still in high school. The government alleged that Danny and Edward alone bought more than $15 million in cocaine between 1993 and 1999. Grayson offered no witnesses who bought any of that cocaine, nor did he produce any drugs or money, other than the 72 grams seized in the October 2001 raid.
The Colombs’ lawyers called witnesses who testified to various hard-labor jobs the Colomb boys held during the entire period under question. From 1995 to 1999—the height of the alleged conspiracy—Danny and Edward both took full-time jobs right out of high school doing backbreaking work for a cement contractor in Kaplan, Louisiana. From 1999 through 2000, Danny woke at 3 a.m. and worked until noon five days a week collecting garbage. From 1998 to 2000, while working both these jobs, Danny was also taking night classes at Remington College, where he earned an associate degree in electronics. From 2000 to 2005, he worked full time repairing office machines.
Grayson argued at the trial that he didn’t need to show how or where the Colombs got the money to buy all of that cocaine, or what they did with the money after they’d sold it. During his questioning of witnesses and in his oral arguments, he countered defense evidence of the Colombs’ modest lifestyle by pointing out that drug dealers are frequently robbed of their cash and tend to be deft at hiding and laundering money.
The trial lasted just under two weeks. The jury deliberated for five hours, then came back with its verdict: Edward, Danny, Sammie, and Ann were all guilty of running a drug conspiracy. (Sammie was acquitted on two related charges.) The four were taken into custody, then to a holding prison to await sentencing.
Ann Colomb didn’t do well in prison. “I have diabetes,” she says. “And I couldn’t treat it right in prison. So when I had an attack, they took me to the hospital. Because I was a prisoner, they put me in this cage with these bars and wire. I couldn’t wait with regular people. They kept me waiting in there, like a dog, while I was getting sicker. I couldn’t do anything but sit there in that little cage and look at the walls and wait for the doctor. It took hours. I thought, ‘This is it. I’m going to die in here.’ ”
The prison stint also took a toll on Danny, who was incarcerated just after learning Elizabeth was pregnant. He slipped further into depression. On the hearth in their home, Elizabeth keeps the stack of pictures she and her parents sent Danny while he was in prison. Mixed between family photos, pictures of pets, and wishes from church members were photos Elizabeth took of her bare belly as it swelled with their baby. “The photos got me by,” Danny says. “But I was missing Elizabeth’s pregnancy. And thinking about my child growing up without me was hard to take.”
The Carriers say Elizabeth wasn’t handling it well either. “She lost interest in her pregnancy,” Elizabeth’s mother, Lois, says. “We were worried she was going to lose the baby.”
Grayson’s insistence that the Colomb family be imprisoned while they awaited sentencing surprised both Melancon and the Colomb family’s attorneys. “It seemed mean,” Shapiro, Edward Colomb’s lawyer, says. “He didn’t have to do that.” It also may have come back to bite him. The Colombs’ four months in federal prison introduced them to one brave inmate who came forward with information that would devastate Grayson’s case and set the family free.
The Government’s Case Comes Apart
On the day the Colomb trial began, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Mickel, who works in the same office as Brett Grayson, received an extraordinary letter from a federal inmate named Quinn Alex, whom Mickel had prosecuted in a drug case.
While serving time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Three Rivers, Texas, Alex shared a cell with another convicted felon named Charles Anderson. Alex was upset because he had arranged for his girlfriend to wire Anderson’s girlfriend $2,200 in exchange for a file that included information about and photographs of the Colomb family. Alex had heard about the Colomb case from other inmates and planned to use the information he’d bought from Anderson to testify against the Colombs in exchange for time off from his own drug sentence. But after receiving Alex’s money, Anderson was transferred, and he never delivered on his promise.
Alex didn’t write to Mickel to expose the fact that inmates at Three Rivers were illegally sharing information and perjuring themselves in drug prosecutions. He was asking Mickel to prosecute Anderson for stealing his money. But the implications of the letter were profound. It was more evidence in support of the allegations from the Cotton trial about a perjury-generating jailhouse snitch ring in the federal prison system.
Attorneys for the Colomb family would later discover that Alex’s letter implicated several of the witnesses Grayson intended to call at the Colomb trial. In fact, by the time Grayson presented the letter to Judge Melancon on March 24, 2006, three of those witnesses had already testified. Melancon ordered Alex transferred to a nearby facility where he could be questioned by defense attorneys. After consulting with an attorney, Alex took the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer any questions.
The Colombs’ lawyers immediately asked for a mistrial. Perhaps due in part to the fact that he’d already been rebuked by the Fifth Circuit on the issue of informant testimony, Melancon denied the request. The jury in the Colomb case never learned of Alex’s letter. It’s a decision Melancon now says he regrets. “The allegation that money exchanged hands is really troubling,” Melancon says. “Where there’s that much smoke, there must be some fire. I should have declared a mistrial. Had the jury known what I knew, I don’t think they would have returned a guilty verdict.”
Alex’s complaint was more than a mere allegation. Defense lawyers later produced Western Union records documenting the $2,200 transfer. Although he argued against revealing Alex’s letter to the jury, Grayson called just eight more witnesses, far short of the 31 he had originally slated.
More revelations followed. While in the holding facility, Danny Davis met inmate “John Doe” while running prison Bible study sessions, and the two became friends. John Doe served time at Beaumont Low at the same time as many of the witnesses who testified in the Colomb trial. He soon concluded that Davis and his family had been wrongfully convicted. “He told me, ‘I don’t think you’re no drug dealer. And I can’t believe your mama is either,’ ” Davis says. According to the affidavit Doe signed, between 2003 and 2004 he observed witnesses who would later testify in the Colomb case “reviewing documents, including photographs.” He added, “It was obvious to me that these persons and others were preparing to testify against people for something that they did not do.” John Doe’s allegations were specific, verifiable, and consistent with both the Alex letter and the allegations from the Cotton
trial.
Unlike Grayson’s witnesses, John Doe had nothing to gain from coming forward and in fact had quite a bit to lose. “I’m willing to testify in court about what I saw,” he wrote in his affidavit, “because what they did was just cold. However, I am concerned about the danger I am putting myself in, and request that the court protect me.” In May 2006, two more witnesses came forward with evidence that government witnesses lied in the Colomb case. These witnesses also corroborated and confirmed what was in Quinn Alex’s letter and John Doe’s affidavit.
Attorneys for the Colomb family immediately filed motions for a new trial. In a sharply worded ruling issued on August 31, 2006, Judge Melancon threw out all of the Colomb convictions. Moreover, he strongly urged the U.S. Attorney’s Office to conduct a thorough investigation into the allegations of information sharing and ruled that if the government wanted to retry its case, it would have to first present him with the results of that investigation.
“What Judge Melancon did was rather ingenious,” says William Goode, Danny Davis’ lawyer. “The government either had to conduct this big investigation, which almost certainly would have impacted other cases, or they had to drop the charges against the Colombs. There’s no way they were going to conduct that investigation.”
In December 2006, Grayson’s office dropped the charges against the Colombs. Melancon then dismissed them with prejudice, precluding the government from ever bringing them again. Grayson referred all media queries to his supervisor, U.S. Attorney Donald Washington, who then took one last jab at the family. Refusing to admit the Colombs were innocent, Washington told the Lafayette Advertiser, “Though we continue to believe that these defendants were, in fact, trafficking drugs, we have decided not to pursue the case because of witness issues.”
Aftermath
The Colombs are free now and no longer need to worry about the conspiracy case. Ann and James Colomb’s home is safe from the U.S. government’s attempts to seize it. They and their children also say the police harassment has stopped. But the long ordeal took a toll on the family, and Ann and James have no savings left.
Legal experts say the Colombs are unlikely to get any compensation for their wrongful conviction and imprisonment. Last December, they found an attorney to help them with a lawsuit, but it’s a long shot at best, mostly because there’s no one to sue. The prison snitches themselves have no money. Any action against the sheriff’s deputies is well past the deadline set by law and would be difficult to prove anyway.
The most likely target of such a suit would be Assistant U.S. Attorney Grayson and his employer, the U.S. government. But Grayson and the federal government enjoy near total immunity from such suits. Prosecutors are almost completely insulated from lawsuits in order to prevent them from factoring potential litigation into their decision whether to pursue a case. A complaint would have to show that a prosecutor willfully or maliciously pursued charges he knew to be false—both of which are extremely difficult to prove.
After dismissing the charges against the Colombs in December 2006, Judge Melancon strongly urged U.S. Attorney Donald Washington’s office to investigate the allegations of information sharing at the federal prison facilities named in the Cotton and Colomb cases. “The problem wasn’t just this case,” Melancon says. “We potentially have a huge problem with this network in the federal prison system.
The question is how deep and far it goes. It’s worthy of an investigation at the highest levels.” He asked that Washington’s office either conduct its own investigation or have either the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas (where the prisons are located) or another investigator from the U.S. Department of Justice conduct it.
As of press time, none of the Colomb lawyers, the Colomb family, or anyone else affiliated with the case were aware of any such investigation. Melancon says he’s confident it’s being done, although he’s heard nothing about the investigation since his December 2006 ruling. Phone calls to U.S. Attorney Washington, Assistant U.S. Attorney Grayson, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas inquiring about the status of the investigation were not returned.
None of the witnesses in the Colomb case has been indicted. In fact, the federal government plans to use some of them again. In May 2006, Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Clemons indicted seven men in another drug conspiracy case in Louisiana, also stemming from the prosecution of Houston kingpin John Timothy Cotton. According to Alfred Boustany, the attorney for one of the indicted seven, Clemons plans to call witnesses from the same prisons where the allegations of information sharing have lingered, including some of the witnesses from the Colomb case. There are already allegations of information sharing in the new case, including letters turned over by one inmate’s girlfriend in which a prison informant gives other inmates specific instructions on what to say to prosecutors.
Because Judge Melancon is scheduled to preside over that trial as well, he wouldn’t comment on it.
But sources close to the case say that in preliminary court proceedings, Melancon gave federal prosecutors a stern warning that he won’t allow uncorroborated snitch testimony and didn’t want to see a repeat of the Colomb fiasco in his courtroom.
“In my 30 years of criminal defense, the federal court system is the worst I’ve ever seen,” Boustany says. “Especially with drug cases. The government is prodding these people to lie. There’s no other way to look at it.”
Ann Colomb’s lawyer, Gerald Block, adds, “This case scared the hell out of me. These were clearly innocent people. And they nearly went to prison for a long time.”
Last July, Ann Colomb sifted through the half-dozen ratty briefcases cluttering her kitchen counter—cases spilling over with the court documents, arrest records, and statements from her boys and their friends she has collected over the years. She was putting together a short summary of what happened to her and her family to pitch to a Baton Rouge attorney she’d hoped might handle her lawsuit against the government. That attorney declined, as did many others, before she finally found someone to file the suit for her—just before the time limit set by the statute of limitations expired.
“What happened to us should never happen to anyone,” she says. “It breaks my heart that they’re trying to do it again.”
Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason.
ADDENDUM: On March 13th, after this article went to press but before it appeared in print, Judge Tucker Melancon issued an order stating that on March 10, 2008 he met with U.S. Attorney Donald Washington and several assistant U.S. attorneys (though not Brett Grayson). The subject of the meeting was his order that the allegations of information sharing and perjury among prison informants revealed in the Colomb and Cotton trials be investigated. As a result of that meeting, Melancon determined that his order for an investigation had "been complied with."
The results of that investigation, however, are sealed. A clerk for Melancon said the judge couldn't comment on what was in the report because some of it may pertain to cases that could appear before his court. While that's understandable, it's unfortunate for the Colomb family. Not only will they not get to learn exactly why they were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned, it's likely that the contents of that investigation could be relevant to their civil lawsuit against Grayson and the federal government.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
American Justice In The Post-Freedom Era
MacPorn!
Nay, na Scots having with th' sex... na that Macporn....
With the growth in popularity of the iPhone, there's a lot of questions about how suitable it is as a business tool. That question alone has raised the issue of how suitable Apple is in the Enterprise in general. Most IT departments are not deploying Macintosh systems in large numbers and those that are are deploying are usually in niche spaces such as graphic arts, multimedia and publishing. The truth is that Mac OS has changed quite a bit in the last few years and today's Apple systems offer a reasonable alternative for Windows systems for many mainstream uses OS X Leopard is rock solid UNIX at the core with Apple's elegant user interface on top. One of the big issues around business use centers on myths that still exist regarding the platform.Link.
The first myth is that Apple computers are expensive relative to their PC cousins. While Apple is certainly not a discount brand and will almost never be the cheapest computers that can be purchased, they are certainly price competitive with PCs. While users do pay some premium for both the Apple brand and the innovation that goes into Apple's often brilliant hardware design, the premium is not out of line with that users already pay for name brand systems from vendors such as Sony, HP or Lenovo. In many cases, comparable Apple systems are priced similarly or in some cases are even cheaper than their competition.
The second myth is that there is a lack of software available. While OS X does not offer the same sheer number of titles that Windows offers, there is an abundance of business software for Macintosh. In some markets, such as content creation, there is actually more software available for the Mac. In addition, Microsoft offers a complete and compatible version of Office for the Macintosh so knowledge workers can easily share documents and communicate with colleagues across platforms. Apple’s support of web based Internet standards mean that most Internet base applications will simply run without modification. While there might be a specific application lacking that can hold back some deployments, most organizations might never hit that wall.
The third myth is that Apple architectures are based on proprietary protocols. While that was certainly true in the past, it is not an accurate portrayal of Apple today. Today, Apple is one of the most standards driven operating systems you can purchase. From MPEG 4 support in Quicktime to full TCP/IP support for networking and WiFi protocols for wireless access. (Apple was actually the first OS vendor to bundle TCP/IP support into a commercial operating system).
Apple systems can be a seamless fit for many organizations. Time to get over the myths and take a closer look.
How Our Leaders Operate
Except for Iraq, government ineptitude works in the wingnuts' favor. They want government to look bad and failure does that best. And corruption does that and gets $$$ into supporters' pockets: win-win for Our Leaders and their supporters, lose-kose for everyone else.
I've marveled for years at the apparent corruption and incompetence in Bush's Department of Housing and Urban Development, but the Washington Post ran a disconcerting front-page item yesterday explaining that mismanagement and criminal investigations arguably weren't the most offensive part of Bush's HUD.Link.In late 2006, as economists warned of an imminent housing market collapse, housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson repeatedly insisted that the mounting wave of mortgage failures was a short-term "correction."Hmm, why does this sound so familiar? Bush puts an unqualified buddy in charge of a major federal agency, the Bush buddy ignores the concerns of qualified aides and experts, the buddy then sees a crisis emerge and chooses to intentionally not act, and when pressed for an explanation, the White House says Bush's buddy is doing a heckuva job.
He pushed for legislation that would make it easier for federally backed lenders to make mortgage loans to risky borrowers who put less money down. He issued a rule that was criticized by law enforcement authorities because it could increase the difficulty of detecting and proving mortgage fraud. [...]
[Critics] contend that Jackson ignored warnings from within his agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, whose inspector general told Congress that some of the secretary's efforts were "ill-advised policy" and likely to put more families at risk of losing their homes.
It seems to be a running theme with these guys.
And here's the kicker -- while foreclosures rose and default rates hit the roof, Bush's HUD secretary treated himself with "an emergency bid to obtain oil portraits of Jackson and four other HUD secretaries at a cost to taxpayers of $100,000."
If the housing crisis weren't so serious, this kind of ridiculousness might even be funny.
Bitter
I know the modern so-called pundit can't --either intellectually or "professionally" -- grasp the concept that people outside of the big urban centers actually may have something to be bitter about.
Are the 139% or so who think this nation is off the rails bitter?
More why this is, as if you haven't figured it out, a tempest in a teapot here.
Are the 139% or so who think this nation is off the rails bitter?
More why this is, as if you haven't figured it out, a tempest in a teapot here.
Simple Answers
Someone at War Room is perplexed:
At this point, Democrats everywhere are pretty familiar with the Senate caucus' "Lieberman Problem." Aside from his problematic votes and rhetoric, Joe Lieberman wants, apparently more than just about everything, to be the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. If Harry Reid denied him the gavel, Lieberman would leave the party, and create a 50-50 split in the chamber.Answer is: He wants to chair this committee in order to save his GOP wingnut BFFs, including the Saint, from embarrassment over all their idiocies, no?
***
But there's always been one thing I don't understand about Lieberman's motivations: why does he want that chairmanship so much in the first place?
In 2006, seeking re-election, Lieberman said this committee was his top priority, and he was desperate to return to the Senate so he could wield the gavel. And now that he has the authority he sought, he's decided not to conduct any real oversight at all.
He seems to have desperately sought a chairman's gavel just for the sake of having it -- Lieberman wanted power he had no intention of using. Instead of a Senate committee that functions as it should, Lieberman just treads water, using his gavel as a flotation device.
What's more, Lieberman's neglect is made all the more obvious by the performance of Rep. Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform -- Lieberman's House counterpart -- who uses the committee's oversight powers as a successful watchdog should.
Today's Viddie: What Iraq Costs Us
Everyone claims part of the problem is that none of us are sacrificing for Iraq like in WWII. Well, we didn't in 'Nam and no one's complaining about that, now or ever. And what about the dead, injured, crippled and those whose lives have been turned upside down? What about the tanked economy and national debt pumped up to pay for the folly?
Vid:
Vid:
Monday, April 14, 2008
Rightist Inanity
I mean, to people like these and Steve Keller, this kind of crap is somehow newsworthy.
More To Fear: Misogynist President McCain
"He's not who you think he is" is likely to serve as the Republican rap against Barack Obama, if and when the inspiring orator from Illinois secures his party's presidential nomination. Yet precisely the same complaint can and should be made against John McCain, who is neither as moderate nor as principled as his publicists in the press corps tell us.[more]
Nowhere is the gap between "straight talker" and pandering faker more obvious than on questions of reproductive freedom and sex education. Usually obscured by his image as a "maverick" Republican and (former) critic of the religious right, his actual record infuriates many women when they learn what he believes -- and how he has voted.
Late last month, the Democratic National Committee released a memo based on focus group interviews with undecided voters in Minnesota and West Virginia concerning McCain. The female voters in the groups were surprised, dismayed and angered to learn that the Arizona Republican not only favors overturning the Roe v. Wade decision and curtailing abortion rights but is also opposed to requiring contraceptive coverage by health plans and favors abstinence-only sex education.
Our Leaders' Success At Making America And The World Safer
See? They're on it.
Albeit after the fact.
Albeit after the fact.
Stolen and sensitive U.S. military equipment, including fighter jet parts wanted by Iran and nuclear biological protective gear, has been available to the highest bidder on popular Internet sales sites, according to congressional investigators.[more]
Using undercover identities, investigators purchased a dozen defense-related items on the auction site eBay and the online network Craigslist from January 2007 through last month and received the items "no questions asked."
More Good News!
The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority.Do you really want to know more??
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Rightist Dementia
What's conservative about a lack of respects for facts and truth?
Nothing.
Nothing.
The idea started on the outer precincts of the right. Thomas DiLorenzo, an economist who calls Ron Paul "the Jefferson of our time," wrote in September that the housing crisis is "the direct result of thirty years of government policy that has forced banks to make bad loans to un-creditworthy borrowers." The policy DiLorenzo decries is the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to lend throughout the communities they serve.Link.
The Blame-CRA theme bounced around the right-wing Freerepublic.com. In January it figured in a Washington Times column. In February, a Cato Institute affiliate named Stan Liebowitz picked up the critique in a New York Post op-ed headlined "The Real Scandal: How the Feds Invented the Mortgage Mess." On The National Review's blog, The Corner, John Derbyshire channeled Liebowitz: "The folk losing their homes? are victims not of 'predatory lenders,' but of government-sponsored -- in fact government-mandated -- political correctness."
Last week, a more careful expression of the idea hit The Washington Post, in an article on former Sen. Phil Gramm's influence over John McCain. While two progressive economists were quoted criticizing Gramm's insistent opposition to government regulation, the Brookings Institution's Robert Litan offered an opposing perspective. Litan suggested that the 1990s enhancement of CRA, which was achieved over Gramm's fierce opposition, may have contributed to the current crisis. "If the CRA had not been so aggressively pushed," Litan said, "it is conceivable things would not be quite as bad. People have to be honest about that."
This is classic rhetoric of conservative reaction. (For fans of welfare policy, it is Charles Murray meets the mortgage mess.) Most analysts see the sub-prime crisis as a market failure. Believing the bubble would never pop, lenders approved risky adjustable-rate mortgages, often without considering whether borrowers could afford them; families took on those loans; investors bought them in securitized form; and, all the while, regulators sat on their hands.
The revisionists say the problem wasn't too little regulation; but too much, via CRA. The law was enacted in response to both intentional redlining and structural barriers to credit for low-income communities. CRA applies only to banks and thrifts that are federally insured; it's conceived as a quid pro quo for that privilege, among others. This means the law doesn't apply to independent mortgage companies (or payday lenders, check-cashers, etc.)
The law imposes on the covered depositories an affirmative duty to lend throughout the areas from which they take deposits, including poor neighborhoods. The law has teeth because regulators' ratings of banks' CRA performance become public and inform important decisions, notably merger approvals. Studies by the Federal Reserve and Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, among others, have shown that CRA increased lending and homeownership in poor communities without undermining banks' profitability.
But CRA has always had critics, and they now suggest that the law went too far in encouraging banks to lend in struggling communities. Rhetoric aside, the argument turns on a simple question: In the current mortgage meltdown, did lenders approve bad loans to comply with CRA, or to make money?
The evidence strongly suggests the latter. First, consider timing. CRA was enacted in 1977. The sub-prime lending at the heart of the current crisis exploded a full quarter century later. In the mid-1990s, new CRA regulations and a wave of mergers led to a flurry of CRA activity, but, as noted by the New America Foundation's Ellen Seidman (and by Harvard's Joint Center), that activity "largely came to an end by 2001." In late 2004, the Bush administration announced plans to sharply weaken CRA regulations, pulling small and mid-sized banks out from under the law's toughest standards. Yet sub-prime lending continued, and even intensified -- at the very time when activity under CRA had slowed and the law had weakened.
Second, it is hard to blame CRA for the mortgage meltdown when CRA doesn't even apply to most of the loans that are behind it. As the University of Michigan's Michael Barr points out, half of sub-prime loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA. A further 25 to 30 percent came from bank subsidiaries and affiliates, which come under CRA to varying degrees but not as fully as banks themselves. (With affiliates, banks can choose whether to count the loans.) Perhaps one in four sub-prime loans were made by the institutions fully governed by CRA.
Most important, the lenders subject to CRA have engaged in less, not more, of the most dangerous lending. Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, offers the killer statistic: Independent mortgage companies, which are not covered by CRA, made high-priced loans at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts. With this in mind, Yellen specifically rejects the "tendency to conflate the current problems in the sub-prime market with CRA-motivated lending.? CRA, Yellen says, "has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households."
Yellen is hardly alone in concluding that the real problems came from the institutions beyond the reach of CRA. One of the only regulators who long ago saw the current crisis coming was the late Ned Gramlich, a former Fed governor. While Alan Greenspan was cheering the sub-prime boom, Gramlich warned of its risks and unsuccessfully pushed for greater supervision of bank affiliates. But Gramlich praised CRA, saying last year, "banks have made many low- and moderate-income mortgages to fulfill their CRA obligations, they have found default rates pleasantly low, and they generally charge low mortgages rates. Thirty years later, CRA has become very good business."
It's telling that, amid all the recent recriminations, even lenders have not fingered CRA. That's because CRA didn't bring about the reckless lending at the heart of the crisis. Just as sub-prime lending was exploding, CRA was losing force and relevance. And the worst offenders, the independent mortgage companies, were never subject to CRA -- or any federal regulator. Law didn't make them lend. The profit motive did.
And that is not political correctness. It is correctness.
The Triumph Of Global Pan-National Entertainment
One of the benefits of the liberation of Eastern Europe....
Why The Times Sucks, From A Named, Authorative Source
Bill Keller, the executive editor, strongly defended Liptak’s column, though he said it contained at least implicit opinion. The mandate of columnists in the news pages “is fundamentally analytical,” he said. “They may have a point of view on an issue, but they are not partisan or ideological. They don’t endorse candidates. They don’t prescribe outcomes. ... They are free to express opinions of a certain type that grow out of a particular expertise and a body of reporting.”Link.
Keller added: “I do think it is important that we maintain the impartiality of the news pages. We do that by rigorously policing the fairness and accuracy of news stories, by clearly labeling material that comes with a point of view, and by confining outright advocacy and partisanship to the opinion pages.”
This insight of the way the Times operates of course raises questions:
What's wrong with reliance on facts, impartiality?
Why not a simple story like "McCain Flip Flops Again"? Then, relying on facts, there'd be no need for a reporter to waste time and focus sticking his opinion into the matter.
And of course, usually a well-reported story can be understood without any gratuitous opinion.
And how does the Miller debacle jibe with Keller's position?
Really, if yellow/tabloid journalism is so many turds, the Pinch/Keller Times is merely a gold-plated turd.
The Obvious, Pointed Out
Our Leaders really have no idea what they're doing in Iraq; it's not just posturing or pandering to their base. They have no clue. Anyone who claims to the contrary is pandering and/or clueless themselves. (Being a fair person, I am open to contrary facts.)
History Repeats....
A lot of the 1929 stock crash, which was at the least a major factor in the Great Depression -- at the least, it didn't help things -- was a lot of purchases with little money down: buy with no money and when the stock assuredly rises, pay back on sale. The problem is obvious: a fallen stock.
Same thing happened with mortgages -- not just sub-prime -- but it's worse than 1929.
Same thing happened with mortgages -- not just sub-prime -- but it's worse than 1929.
The Vets Speak Truth
Only recently have we emerged from the effects of the heart- and gut-Link.
wrenching Winter Soldier hearings. Over four days, we witnessed 30 hours
of vetted statements from 72 veterans, active duty soldiers, experts, and
Iraqis who had the great courage to go public with their first-hand
experiences.1 In account after account, a common thread emerged of
soldiers who struggled with their mission as occupiers of a country in the
midst of a civil war, and Iraqi families being torn apart and terrified, terrified
by—not grateful for—the presence of American soldiers and private
mercenaries.
We need to comprehend the enormous scale of the so-called “collateral
damage” in Iraq. It is appalling to learn that over a million Iraqi civilians are
estimated to have died since the U.S. invasion. 2 The speakers told of
Iraqis, being without power and water, begging for food and fuel, and only
wanting foreign troops and war profiteers to leave so they can begin to
rebuild their devastated country. Like Clifton Hicks,3 who served in Iraq and
lost three close friends there, most voices trembled with soft emotion or
rose, filled with bitterness or anger; and so many faces and clenched fists
reflected the pain of those who had experienced too much death, too much
fear, and too much destruction.
The groundbreaking hearings, held by the national veterans organization,
Iraq Vets Against the War (IVAW) near Washington D.C. from March 13 to
16, were patterned after the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings held in Detroit by
the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which are now thought to be one of
the turning points of that conflict. The title for the hearings comes from
Thomas Paine who wrote in 1776, “These are the times that try men’s souls.
The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from
the service of [their] country; but he that stands [by] it now, deserves the
love and thanks of man and woman.” Unlike the “summer soldiers” who often
deserted their duties in Paine’s time, “winter soldiers” carry on courageously
through the darkness.
The accounts began to take on a similar tone, no matter if the narrator was
Army or Marine, black or white or Latino, stationed in Fallujah or Baghdad,
or some other city or town. The soldiers and veterans explained how trickle-
down abuse starts at the top ranks of the military hierarchy with
institutionalized racism, sexual harassment, and assault on the lower ranks.
They talked about their complete lack of training in Iraqi culture and
language. As we listened, a composite picture emerged, in which our
soldiers are conditioned before leaving U.S. soil to think of Iraqis as “less
than,” as “Hajis;” a term once reserved for pilgrims to Mecca, now turned
inside out to demean and dehumanize. “Haji” has become to the Iraq
occupation what “Gook” became to the Vietnam and Korean wars. When a
people is rendered less than, everyone soon loses some humanity. When a
population is dehumanized, it becomes easier to kill them.
The presenters at Winter Soldier went deeper than telling stories that once
again confirm what we all should know, war is hell. They addressed the
anguished question that naturally arises: How do you explain actions that
would be criminal even in a war zone? The soldiers and veterans repeatedly
described their honorable motives in joining the military and throughout their
service, no matter the difficulty and repeated sacrifices it demanded of
them; however, they came to believe the invasion and occupation were
unjust and not what they were led to believe. We could not listen to the four
days of accounts and imagine our country invaded Iraq to export the
American dream of freedom and democracy any more than we could
imagine, now that we have removed the impediment of Saddam Hussein, the
five Western oil companies that will have free access to Iraq’s resources are
more interested in exporting this same American dream instead of importing
a more flammable one. Even the ultraconservative former Federal Reserve
chairman, Alan Greenspan, declared that “the prime motive for the war in
Iraq was oil.”4 It didn’t take long for the soldiers and vets who spoke to
come to the same conclusion.
The nature of this occupation and the civil war it sparked are especially
brutal for everyone involved. Not so for those of us in the 99% of the
population who are not really touched by this war. Daniel Fanning, who
served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Wisconsin National Guard, described
the duty the Commander in Chief has tasked to us: “shopping with yellow
ribbons proudly displayed on our SUVs.” As in all wars, if you haven’t
experienced it, it’s hard to grasp the white-hot frustration, anger, and
vengeful wrath that results when our soldiers have no reliable way to discern
friend from foe and are under extreme duress at virtually all times in a near-
country-wide combat zone. As the disillusionment over the injustice and the
impossibility of the mission grows, so does the abuse of civilians. When
soldiers, deployed two, three, four, and even five times, experience more
and more casualties in their units—people with whom they share a bond that
can be even stronger than family—their rage understandably erupts and
they need to blame someone for their grief. Similar circumstances produced
similar results in the jungles of Vietnam.
The soldiers and vets described the shear mechanics of killing so many
people. In story after story, we heard how Rules of Engagement slowly
eroded to the point where it was too often left up to these young, very
frightened, soldiers to determine for themselves if they “felt” threatened.
Jason Lemieux, who served almost five years with the Marines, including the
invasion and three tours in Iraq, described the rules he received: “[M]y
commander told me that our mission was—and I quote—‘to kill those who
need to be killed and save those who need to be saved.’ And with those
words, he pretty much set the tone for the deployment.” Too often, the
Rules were reduced to “Shoot anything that moves.”5
Two Marines talked about trashing the country during the invasion. One of
them, Brian Casler, served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. As
part of the invasion force, he said he and others in their unit defecated and
urinated into the containers of food and water they threw at the welcoming
children they encountered. To relieve the boredom during his first
deployment, they demolished Babylonian ruins and “drove over the rubble
for fun.” After describing how they ransacked a public building, he said, “We
found out later that we had shredded all of the birth certificates for the City
of Fallujah.”6
Several speakers talked about the disrespect of the Iraqi dead. Michael
Leduc, for example, told us about “Rotten Randy” and “Tony the Torso,” the
nicknames his Marine unit gave to the corpses they used for rifle practice.
Soldiers and vets also explained the practice of “reconnaissance by fire,”
where they’d shoot first into a house or a neighborhood in order to draw
return fire. Then, instead of moving on the source of the return fire and
incurring more risk to the unit, they’d respond with overwhelming firepower
that devastated the entire building or area. Hart Vigas, a mortarman who
served with the Army’s 82nd Airborne for the invasion of Iraq, painted a
word picture of the indiscriminate, “ground-shaking” destruction from C-130
Specter gunships.7 The students have learned from their teachers. A
forward observer and drill instructor with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division,
Jessie Hamilton stated that the Iraqi forces “showed little or no restraint”
when they responded to the slightest attack with such indiscriminate firing
that the U.S. troops gave nicknames to their methods: ‘spray and pray’ and
‘death blossom.’ “Once the shooting started,” he said, “death would blossom
all around.”8
Clifton Hicks described an operation that resulted in an official estimate of
700 to 800 enemy dead. “Judging from what I saw on the ground,” he said,
“I'm willing to swear under oath in all honesty that while many enemy
combatants were in fact killed, the majority of those so-called KIAs were in
fact civilians attempting to flee the battlefield.9
We were transfixed by the presentation and pictures of Jon Michael Turner,
a shorter young man with a blonde beard who served in Iraq with the 8th
Marines. Like so many personal veteran stories we’ve heard, his was still
bleeding with its raw truthfulness. “A lot of the raids and patrols we did were
at night around three in the morning . . . . And what we would do is just kick
in the doors and terrorize the families.” After he described segregating the
women, the children, and the men, he said, “If the men of the household
were giving us problems, we’d go ahead and take care of them anyway we
felt necessary, whether it be choking them or slamming their head against
the walls. . . . On my wrist, there’s Arabic for ‘F you.’ I got that put on my
wrist just two weeks before we went to Iraq, because that was my choking
hand, and any time I felt the need to take out aggression, I would go ahead
and use it.”
He was one of the first to speak of these things but far from the last. Like so
many other speakers, he said this kind of situation was the norm for him and
for others, not the exception. As for so many later speakers, other speakers
on the panel nodded in agreement. With a forced smile that constrained his
quivering lips, he closed with an apology to the Iraqi people: “I just want to
say that I am sorry for the hate and destruction that I have inflicted on
innocent people. . . . until people hear about what is going on with this war, it
will continue to happen and people will continue to die. I am sorry for the
things that I did. I am no longer the monster that I once was.”10
Describing the heartache that results from not being able to identify your
enemy, Jason Washburn, a Marine who served four years and completed
three tours of duty in Iraq, said this: “If the town or the city that we were
approaching was a known threat, if the unit that went through the area
before we did took a high number of casualties, we were basically allowed to
shoot whatever we wanted. . . . I remember one woman was walking by,
carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading towards us. So
we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher. And
when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was only full of groceries.
And, I mean, she had been trying to bring us food, and we blew her to
pieces for it.” 11
We listened to Jason Hurd, a medic with ten years of Army service including
tours of duty in Iraq: “But as time went on and the absurdity of war set in,
they started taking things too far. Individuals from my unit indiscriminately
and unnecessarily opened fire on innocent civilians as they were driving
down the road on their own streets.”12 He asked us all to see the war
through the eyes of an Iraqi and consider how we might respond if a foreign
army invaded our communities and terrorized our families.
Soldiers and vets told how superior officers instructed them on the official
ways to torment and beat detainees. Andrew Duffy, a medic who served on
the trauma team at the Abu Ghraib military prison, put it this way, “You can’t
spell abuse without ‘Abu.’” They were told to use the term “detainee”
because, unlike “prisoner of war,” there are no laws protecting detainees.
While he rocked back and forth in his seat nervously, Mathew Childess, a
Marine infantryman who served two tours in Iraq, referred to beating
detainees and “breaking fingers.” When a particular detainee begged for
food and water, he took the man’s hat, wiped himself with it, and stuffed it
into the man’s mouth.
Like Turner, numerous soldiers and veterans stared into the cameras that
were recording the hearing for broadcast and pled for forgiveness from the
Iraqi people now that they were distanced from the madness in Iraq in an
apparent attempt to regain some of what had been lost. For many, their
hands trembled as they talked and, along with us witnesses, were moved to
tears. At other times, so many only revealed that thousand-yard stare we’ve
seen too many times on the faces of Vietnam vets who carry the scars of
that war.
We sat engulfed in the horror, sorrow, and grief of the soldiers’ experiences
and wondered how can we transform this to help our children and
grandchildren reach an understanding so that they can make wise decisions
when they have the opportunity to serve their community and country at the
local homeless shelter, the voting booth, the peace march, or the armed
forces.
It bears repeating: So many soldiers and veterans spoke of their noble
motives for joining the military—especially after 9/11—but then having to
face the ignoble inhumanity of this occupation that so compromised their
values. Then they returned to a country that anointed them as the heroes
they so wished to be. Is it any wonder they are conflicted and disillusioned
with the contradictions? Is it any wonder that government statistics report
that one in three returning soldiers has mental problems and that CBS News
recently described the suicide rate among today’s soldiers and vets as
“epidemic?”13 As we continue to see with Vietnam vets, post traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD) is a normal human response to the inhumanity of
war.
Kristofer Goldsmith was a good soldier, graduating at the top of his basic
training class and receiving a 94.6% average in his Warrior Leadership
Course. But after four deployments in Iraq and almost shooting a six-year-
old boy, he said he became a “broken soldier.” He was due to get out of the
service when he, like some 80,000 other soldiers, was “stop-lossed” and
ordered to redeploy to Iraq for a fifth time. The day before he was to leave,
he tried to kill himself with alcohol and prescription pills. He was finally
released, but his discharge papers state: Misconduct: Serious Offense. His
offense? A suicide attempt due to mental illness. He showed the audience a
picture of himself, in uniform as the proud soldier, then slammed it down on
the table saying “This boy is dead.”
Some vets like Jeff Lucey couldn’t speak, so his parents spoke in his stead.
His father said his grown Marine son came home so haunted by what he had
done and witnessed that he drank heavily to anesthetize his pain—a coping
strategy mentioned by many of the vets who spoke. His parents said
Veterans Affairs (VA) told them they couldn’t assess him for PTSD until he
was alcohol free. Although he wouldn’t talk about the trauma he
experienced, Jeff would ask his father to hold him on his lap and rock him so
he could feel safe. Jeff’s father said the last time he was able to hold his son
was when he cut his body down from the rafters at their home where Jeff
had hung himself with a hose.14
Those who sell the invasion and occupation as a “just war” will deny that
these first-hand accounts are part of the whole truth or they will simply
dismiss the speakers as liars and traitors, which is already happening. They
will continue to entice new advocates and a never-ending stream of recruits,
all made possible by a gutless Congress, a compliant media, an apathetic
public, and a bottomless military budget, including $4 billion annually for
recruiting.
Repeatedly, the speakers stated that they welcomed the opportunity to
testify as to the accuracy of their statements in a legal proceeding. Luis
Montalvan, a captain with 17 years of service in the Army, stated, “I would
like nothing better than to testify under oath to Congress.” He then quoted
President Theodore Roosevelt: “To announce that there must be no
criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or
wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the
American public.”
The establishment media has been promoting the notion that we can “win”
and that the winning part has now started with the success of the surge.
What the argument ignores is that the recent drop in casualties are more
attributable to the fact that over four million Iraqis are refugees now and for
those who stayed at home, most of the ethnic cleansing has been
accomplished. The Winter Soldier speakers knew not to be swayed by this
propaganda. They know it’s immoral to use violence to achieve imperial
ends. Nearly everyone who spoke (including two Iraq civilians) concluded by
saying, U.S. troops AND the 180,000 private contractors and mercenaries15
need to get out of Iraq now.
ENDNOTES
Video and some transcripts are available at the IVAW Web site (www.
ivaw.org) and at www.democracynow.
January 2008 - Update on Iraqi Casualty Data. Further survey work
undertaken by Opinion Research Business, in association with its
research partner IIACSS, confirms our earlier estimate that over
1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which
started in 2003. http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?
NewsId=88
The statement from Mr. Hicks can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-1/clifton-hicks-
steven-casey/video
London Times, 9/16/07
Mr. Lemieux’s statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-2/jason-
washburn/video
The other Marine, Matt Howard, served with the 1st Marines. His
statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/breakdown-military/matt-howard/video
Mr. Vigas’ statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-1/hart-viges/video
Mr. Hamilton’s statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-1/jesse-
hamilton/video
http://therealnews.com/web/index.php?
thisdataswitch=0&thisid=1138&thisview=item
Mr. Turner’s statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-2/jon-turner/video
Mr. Washburn’s statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-2/jason-
washburn/video
Mr. Hurd’s statement can be viewed at: http://ivaw.
org/wintersoldier/testimony/rules-engagement-part-1/jason-hurd/video
A 2007 CBS news investigation found that in 2005, veterans
between the ages of 20-24 were between 2 and 4 times as likely to
commit suicide as their civilian peers.
The statement of Kevin and Joyce Lucey can be read at: http://www.
democracynow.org/2008/3/19/half_a_decade_of_war_five
The statement by Jeremy Scahill, author of the book, Blackwater,
was particularly damning as regards the corporate profiteers, the
“Coalition of the Billing,” as he called it.
Yet More Mendacity And Hypocrisy From Our Leaders
Or read about here and see photos of the asshole "in action" (well, not action involving anything substantive, just recreational); and more here.
Life In Our Growing Police State
Question for the day: Why can't people perceive how Our Leaders are completely deliberately destroying this country?
The FBI is used to investigate why a partisan kangaroo trial failed:
Why it's creepy (to say the least):
More:
We'd be interested in hearing from readers with prosecutorial backgrounds on this one.
The FBI is used to investigate why a partisan kangaroo trial failed:
Two jurors said Thursday they were unnerved by FBI requests for home visits to explain why they deadlocked in the federal public corruption trial of former Allegheny County coroner Cyril H. Wecht.Link.
Experts said the practice of using FBI agents to contact and interview jurors in their homes after mistrials was unusual, but the U.S. Attorney's Office in Pittsburgh characterized it as "commonplace."
"I thought it was kind of intimidating," the jury foreman said about the FBI phone call.
Said another juror, "I found it kind of unusual."
Both men requested not to be identified.
The FBI agents simply set up appointments for federal prosecutors, said Margaret Philbin, spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan.
"It is commonplace for the prosecuting attorneys and the investigating agency, in this case the FBI, to participate in the post-verdict discussion with the jurors," Philbin said in a statement. "Often that occurs before the jury leaves the courthouse. In this case the jury was excused before the attorneys and agents had an opportunity to speak with the members."
Prosecutors today must tell a federal judge which of 41 counts of fraud and theft they intend to pursue in a second trial of Wecht, who was accused of misusing his public office for personal gain. Jurors deliberated for 10 days and told U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Schwab on the 11th day they were deadlocked.
Special Agent Bill Crowley, a spokesman for the FBI's Pittsburgh office, and representatives at the bureau's Washington headquarters and the U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment.
Wecht defense attorney Jerry McDevitt declined to say whether the defense team spoke to jurors, but said the FBI's contact with jurors troubled him.
"That's the problem with their heavy-handed approach to this. Why would they need to talk to them now? They've already decided to retry him," McDevitt said. "I think given the circumstances of this case, it's coercive. It appears that way with these jurors."
Westmoreland County defense attorney Tom Ceraso, who was not involved in the case, said in his decades of experience trying cases in federal court he has never heard of the FBI telephoning or interviewing jurors.
"If I'm a prospective juror in the second trial, and I'm hearing stories that if I don't agree with the government that I might get calls from the FBI, that could have a very, very deleterious impact," Ceraso said. "I would think that's very bothersome to have that happen."
Hung juries and mistrials are rare in the federal court system. Last year, there were only 59 trials that didn't end with a conviction or acquittal nationwide, according to the Administrative Office for U.S. Courts in Washington.
After declaring a mistrial on Tuesday, Schwab strongly urged the jurors to refrain from talking about Wecht's case with reporters or lawyers from either side and then ushered them into his chambers. Schwab released the jury before prosecutors or Wecht's lawyers could interview them.
Prosecutors immediately moved for a retrial, which Schwab scheduled for May 27.
A former federal prosecutor, Thomas Farrell, who was not involved in the case, said using FBI agents to contact jurors wasn't routine but in this case likely stems from prosecutors not getting a chance to talk with jurors on the day the trial ended.
"It is unusual, but in this case it might be the logistics," said Farrell. He said the U.S. Attorney's Office doesn't have a large support staff.
The jury foreman said he wished prosecutors had talked with jurors before deciding to retry Wecht.
"That puzzled me," said the foreman, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of Schwab's request. "I was surprised at how quickly the government wanted to retry him, because they didn't seem to realize where we were as a jury when the case ended. I thought they would've at least polled us to see how close the counts were.
"I would hope that the government would have our best interests at heart, but I'm concerned about the costs of another trial. For us, it was a split jury and the majority found him 'not guilty.' "
In interviews with the Tribune-Review, several jurors said they respected each other and the court, and took their duty to weigh Wecht's guilt or innocence seriously. None had served on a jury before. Some began to see the prosecution as "political," according to the foreman.
Wecht is a Democrat and Buchanan a Republican.
"When it started, I had an open mind. I didn't know Dr. Wecht other than reading the paper or watching the news. I thought, 'I'll let all the facts of the case play out.' But in the end, those thoughts crossed my mind a few times," the foreman said.
Why it's creepy (to say the least):
First, prosecutors didn't seek to poll or speak to jurors before making their determination as to whether to retry the case. If they had, the jurors would have said that most of them were ready to vote to acquit. "That seemed to us to be vindictive," Dick Thornburgh, the former attorney general under President George H.W. Bush and a lawyer for Wecht, told me. "It's how [the prosecutors] have behaved the whole case." The jury foreman has even said that the prosecution seemed "politically driven." (See our rundowns of the case here and here.)Link.
And second, using the FBI to contact jurors is far from commonplace (Jerry McDevitt, another of Wecht's attorneys, told me that the agent who'd contacted the jurors was not even the agent who had worked on the Wecht case). Thornburgh told me that it was "unprecedented" in his experience. A former federal prosecutor told the Tribune-Review that it was unusual. And a veteran defense attorney from the Pittsburgh area told the paper that he'd never heard of such a thing. And there's a reason:
"If I'm a prospective juror in the second trial, and I'm hearing stories that if I don't agree with the government that I might get calls from the FBI, that could have a very, very deleterious impact," [the attorney] said. "I would think that's very bothersome to have that happen."
More:
We'd be interested in hearing from readers with prosecutorial backgrounds on this one.
[T]here was a hung jury this week in the trial of former Pittsburgh-area coroner Cyril Wecht. Because of a number of peculiarities, the case has been one of those DOJ prosecutions suspected of being politically motivated.Link.
The government immediately declared it would retry the case, but in the meantime the FBI has been contacting jurors asking about their deliberations.
Now it's not unusual for prosecutors to try to meet with jurors after the fact. Indeed, sometimes those meetings help determine whether a retrial is viable. But dispatching the FBI to arrange these meetings?
I've never heard of such a thing, and former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, who is representing Wecht, tells TPMmuckraker that it's "unprecedented" in his experience.
So what about it? Is this standard operating procedure in U.S. Attorney offices?
Late Update: Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) issued the following statement this afternoon:I am deeply troubled by reports of FBI agents contacting former jurors who failed to convict Dr. Wecht. Whether reckless or intended, it is simply common sense that such contacts can have a chilling effect on future juries in this and other cases. When added to the troubling conduct of this prosecution, there is the appearance of a win at all costs mentality. The committee continues to investigate this matter.
Straight Talk!
Sen. McCain responds to "The Real McCain"
Once again, I am honored to have Sen. John McCain guestposting at Jesus' General. Please be kind in your comments. He said he'd shank me with a homemade shiv if anyone insulted him.
--The General
Thank you, General, for allowing me to use your electrical computing machine pamphlet again. I got a lot of positive feedback the last time I used it. I'm seriously considering selling the screw-type printing press I've been using. People just don't read the broadsheets I post at the tavern anymore.
Today, I want to write about all those rotten cocksuckers who are saying that I have a problem with rage. Problem? I don't see... What? Hold on. I have to talk to my electrical computing machine operator for a second.
God damn it Lieberman. I'll use the word, "cocksucker" if I want. I'm the god damned Republican nominee, you ass-licking toady. Now get your ass back on the electrical computing machine telegraph key thing and write everything I say. What? Yes, this too, you ignorant fuck. Want me to have Lindsey fucking Graham kick your whining little ass again? Do you want to be VP or not? Then write down everything I said and apologize to the General's readers.
[I'm very sorry! - Joe]
Ok, where was I? Oh yeah, I was saying that I don't see my rage as being a problem. Take that incident with my wife for instance--the one that fucking jerk, Cliff Schecter, describes in his book, The Real McCain:
Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt."
Completely justified. She twirled my hair and implied I'm going bald for god's sake. I've got a great head of hair dammit. If anything, it's too good. It's so long on one side, I have to comb it over the top so I don't look like a lop-sided fucking hippy.
More importantly, It shows I have the right temperament to be President. If I can talk to my wife that way, just imagine how I'll talk to Putin or that fucking Buddhist, Ahmadinejad. That's if I even talk to them at all. Hell, I may just nuke the bastards. It's a lot fucking kwicker. I won't miss a single Matlock rerun that way.
Posted by Sen. John McCain at 12:56 AM
How Our World Works, Or Doesn't
The Nation:
The Justice Department is investigating the lawyers whose memos gave the Bush Administration the legal support it needed for waterboarding and other brutal interrogation techniques. We are "examining whether the legal advice in these memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys," H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, wrote to two Democratic senators in February.
The torture memos from 2002 were mainly the work of Jay Bybee, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and now a federal appellate judge in San Francisco, and Bybee's deputy, John Yoo, who has since returned to teaching law at the University of California, Berkeley. This month the Pentagon released a long-rumored torture memo from 2003 written solely by Yoo, which is even more adamant in its embrace of unfettered presidential power.
The memos are an abysmal piece of work, but they had great value to the President. Dismissing the Geneva Conventions and other law, they used the veneer of serious legal scholarship (abundant footnotes, many citations, long dense paragraphs) to create an aura of legitimacy for near-death interrogation tactics and unrestrained executive power. The memos had high credibility because they came from the OLC, the legal brain trust for the executive branch and (until then) the gold standard for legal acumen.
The press tends to overlook the lawyers when scandal breaks, focusing instead on their clients. That's understandable, but in public and commercial life no serious move is possible (no corporate maneuver, no new financial instrument, no war, no severe interrogation tactic) without legal approval. Even if the advice proves wrong, the client, if sued or indicted, can claim reliance on counsel.
When lawyers in private practice mess up, they face serious jeopardy. They can be fired, sued for malpractice, disbarred or prosecuted. Yoo and Bybee face no such risks. The President won't protest. He got what he wanted. And while a state disciplinary body can investigate, that is unlikely without Justice Department help.
The Justice Department recognized the incompetence of the torture memorandums when Bybee's successor, Jack Goldsmith, retracted an August 2002 memo that had construed the Convention Against Torture and the federal statute forbidding torture to permit interrogation tactics just shy of homicide. And that memo was actually an improvement on the OLC's earlier work, which, in advising on "the effect of international treaties and federal laws on the treatment" of detainees from Afghanistan, entirely overlooked the torture convention and statute.
In his book The Terror Presidency, Goldsmith, now a Harvard law professor, writes that the torture memos had "o foundation" in any "source of law" and rested on "one-sided legal arguments." They were valuable to the Administration nonetheless, Goldsmith says, because the CIA saw one of them as a "golden shield" against criminal prosecution of agents who had used harsh interrogation techniques.
Well, anyone can make a mistake, right? And don't lawyers disagree all the time? Of course, but that's not the point. The present criticism cites the utter shoddiness of the work. Take another example. Although the OLC memos broadly construed presidential power in foreign affairs, they ignored the Supreme Court's landmark 1952 "steel seizure case," which greatly restricts that power and contradicts the OLC's expansive claims. It would be like advising a client on school desegregation law and ignoring Brown v. Board of Education. Yale law dean Harold Hongju Koh called this omission "a stunning failure of lawyerly craft" and "a stain upon our law and our national reputation."
How could two really smart guys authorize torture using "one-sided legal arguments" that have "o foundation" in law? How could they be guilty of a "stunning failure of lawyerly craft"? The sad answer seems to be that they knew what the President wanted and delivered: torture is OK if you call it something else. Detainees are outside the protection of due process and civilized law. The President's authority is close to absolute. Anyway, no court can review him. (On this last point, the Supreme Court disagreed.)
This incompetence is especially serious because of the conduct it enabled. If a private lawyer gave such a lopsided and wrongheaded analysis to a business client, he'd be history. Lawyers advising private clients about to make important decisions (a "bet the company" kind of decision) meticulously analyze all sides of a question so the clients can assess risk and choose wisely.
The client deserved better, and that raises another issue, the most troubling. Who was the client? The lawyers told the President what he wanted to hear, but the nation was their client, and its sole interest was in thorough and independent legal analysis. Neither the President's political agenda nor the authors' views of what the law should say can be allowed to slant the OLC's work. So maybe the best and brightest lawyers got it so wrong because they forgot whom they served. Maybe they acted politically, not professionally. If so, we are dealing with a perversion of law and legal duty, a betrayal of the client and professional norms, not mere incompetence, which would be bad enough. Whatever the reason, Jarrett should find that this work is not "consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys." Jarrett must hold the lawyers accountable if he means to restore OLC's reputation and vindicate the rule of law.
Next Beloved Leader Explains His Plans For Iraq
In all undeserved fairness, he doesn't mean fighting an insurgency but just being a controlling presence like in South Korea and, to a lesser degree, post-war Japan. The problem with that, though, it skips over what his solution is so that there's a unified, relatively stable country to occupy.
This Ad Got The Guy Elected, Just In Case There's Any Doubt What The Voters Want
The masses aren't always wrong... this time only partly; cut and run isn't an option, desirable as it is, but we have to make plans to repair the damage we did....
New Link
Got a new link up, for Kiva.
Very short version: our politics -- actually, global politics -- is more and more top-down -- that is, controlled from the top. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much the antithesis of democracy, then again, the American empire, as it were, is post-democracy.
On the other hand, creating a healthy democracy, or at least the foundation for one, is a matter of bottom-up politics, which is where microcredit and Kiva come in. One hopes and prays that microcredit does all the good it can. (It does a lot but dunno whether it does enough.)
Very short version: our politics -- actually, global politics -- is more and more top-down -- that is, controlled from the top. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much the antithesis of democracy, then again, the American empire, as it were, is post-democracy.
On the other hand, creating a healthy democracy, or at least the foundation for one, is a matter of bottom-up politics, which is where microcredit and Kiva come in. One hopes and prays that microcredit does all the good it can. (It does a lot but dunno whether it does enough.)
Life In These Whacko United States
Six U.S. cities have been found guilty of shortening the amber cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners. The local governments in question have ignored the safety benefit of increasing the yellow light time and decided to install red-light cameras, shorten the yellow light duration, and collect the profits instead.Link.
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