Religion of Peace Nearly Strikes Canada

From The Washington Post:

Canadian intelligence agents and police have arrested 17 people who had amassed a huge cache of explosives and were ready to bomb public targets, authorities said Saturday.

The 12 men and five juveniles were seized in raids Friday night in the suburbs of Toronto. Police said the suspects, most of whom were believed to be Canadian citizens, had assembled three tons of ammonium nitrate and fashioned a cellphone into a detonator.

The bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killed 168 people with two tons of the same chemical fertilizer packed in a truck.

Authorities declined to identify the group's planned targets, but a report in the Toronto Star said the sites included the Parliament buildings in Ottawa and the Toronto offices of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, near the famed CN Tower downtown.

The suspects appeared in a Toronto court Saturday to face charges under Canada's terrorism laws, passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. Authorities divulged few details about the men, who all had Arabic names and ranged in age from 19 to 43. Authorities said they would not discuss the juveniles.

Since the bombings of the London public transit system last summer, Canadian authorities have said they had no illusions that Canada was immune from attack. They warned of the hot anger in the radical fringes of the country's growing Muslim enclaves and said they believed the presence of Canadian troops in Afghanistan had fanned those passions. They have said they also knew of clandestine contacts between Canadian Muslims and extremists, including two American Muslims arrested this year in Georgia on terrorism charges.

"An attack on Canadian soil is now probable," Canada's spy agency warned Parliament last month. A top official of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service last week repeated the warning to senators, emphasizing the threat posed by terrorists born and bred in Canada.

Police said the suspects had trained together outside Toronto. Although an intelligence official, Luc Portelance, said the group members were "adherents of a virulent ideology inspired by al-Qaeda," police acknowledged they had no evidence of a direct link to the terrorist group.

Instead, most of the suspects were young students or workers who fed on the political debates swirling around Canada's mosques and immigrant Muslim neighborhoods, according to what could be learned about the men and their communities. They sharpened their radicalism over the Internet without traveling to the Middle East.

"They are Canadians. They came to Canada at an early age or were born here," Toronto's mayor, David Miller, said Saturday. He questioned "how people would get sucked into this act."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a statement that "these individuals were allegedly intent on committing acts of terrorism against their own country, and their own people. Canada is not immune to the threat of terrorism."

Intelligence and security agents have been aware of some the suspects for nearly two years, according to reports and statements by officials here. The suspects allegedly met at a "training camp," according to police near Toronto, and made videotapes of their training.

The seriousness of the threat became clearer to authorities when the two men from Georgia traveled to Toronto in March 2005 and met with other Muslims to discuss bombing targets, according to the FBI.

The two men, Syed Ahmed, 21, and Ehsanul Sadequee, 19, were arrested in March and April and face charges of giving material support to terrorism.

According to an FBI affidavit filed in a federal court in Atlanta at the time of the arrests, Ahmed and Sadequee discussed "strategic locations in the United States suitable for a terrorist strike. They also plotted how to disable the global positioning system in an effort to disrupt military and commercial communications and traffic."

Three of the Canadian men they met were already under official suspicion here, according to the affidavit. An FBI official in Washington, Special Agent Richard Kolko, confirmed Saturday that "some of the Canadian subjects may have had limited contact with the two people recently arrested from Georgia."

In announcing the raids, however, Mike McDonell, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said the group was "planning to commit a series of terrorist attacks against solely Canadian targets in southern Ontario," the province that includes Toronto.

McDonell indicated that the raids were undertaken as the group prepared to carry out an attack, but he said more specific information would have to emerge from court proceedings. He denied rumors that the targets included Toronto's subway system.

"This group posed a real and serious threat," he said. "They had the capacity and the intent to carry out these attacks."

Officials said they had dismantled the group but that further arrests were possible. They also warned that this was not the only group threatening Canada's security.

"Everybody is concerned about what we don't know," McDonell said. "We were able to stop this. It's what we don't know that's got us worried."

Portelance, of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said the agency would be "negligent if we said there were no other threats in Canada."

"For some time CSIS has been communicating to the public there is a real threat," he said at a news conference Saturday. "I don't want to be alarmist and have people think there are numerous other threats out there, but clearly law enforcement are investigating others here in Canada."

Prime Minister Harper, speaking to military recruits Saturday, said: "Their target, their alleged target, was Canada — Canada's institutions, Canada's economy, Canada's people.

"We are targeted because of who we are and the way we live," he said. "Because of our society, our diversity and our values."

Indonesia Slowly Caves To Radicals

From The LA Times:

After model Andhara Early posed for Indonesia's first Playboy edition and landed on its cover, police called her in for questioning.

Investigators asked her to explain what she was doing in each of the five photos in her eight-page spread. It made no difference that she didn't pose nude — or that the photos were no more revealing than a lingerie ad.

"Police asked me whether my picture was pornography or not," she recounted. "I said, 'It's not. It's art, definitely art.' "

Playboy's entry to the Indonesian market has fueled debate over what constitutes pornography and how women should behave in the world's most populous Muslim country.

Indonesia, more moderate than most Muslim nations, faces mounting pressure from a growing conservative Islamic movement to pass a law redefining the concept of pornography and outlawing behavior that clerics consider an affront to Islam.

A measure before parliament would ban "pornoaksi," or porno action, a newly created offense so broad that it could include wearing a miniskirt or baring a navel. Kissing in public would be punishable by up to five years in prison. Dancing erotically could bring seven years. Exposing body parts that could be deemed erotic would be punishable by as much as 10 years.

"If you wear something sensual or sexy, it will be considered pornography," said Gadis Arivia, a professor of human rights and Western philosophy at the University of Indonesia who has helped organize opposition to the bill. "It will criminalize a lot of women in Indonesia."

Opposition to the measure has been especially strong in Bali, the predominantly Hindu island that depends heavily on tourism. Some worry that restrictions on attire could ban traditional Balinese dress and scare off foreign tourists accustomed to wearing revealing clothing. At one point, the governor of Bali threatened to secede if the bill was passed.

The threat of having to cover up has stirred moderate and middle-class Indonesians to political action, something that has seldom occurred since President Suharto was ousted and democracy was ushered in eight years ago. Opponents have organized demonstrations, launched a petition drive and pressured members of parliament to reject the measure.

"It's frightening because we see Indonesia being slowly turned into a conservative country," said Arivia, who attended high school in the United States. "We are scared to death that Indonesia will become an Islamic state. The majority of people would not want that."

Although more than 85% of the population is Muslim, the country is officially secular. Conservative Islam has been gaining ground since Suharto's fall in 1998. A series of deadly bombings funded by Al Qaeda and carried out against Western targets by local terrorist cells has demonstrated the success of Islamic extremists in appealing to disaffected young Indonesians.

Authorities in Aceh province on Sumatra and the city of Tangerang on Java have adopted Sharia, or Islamic law, leading to harsher treatment of suspected gamblers and prostitutes. Other communities are considering following suit.

Advocates of the anti-pornography legislation contend that a new national law is needed because existing laws and penalties are not "repressive" enough. Under today's standards, people may become too accustomed to seeing sensual dress or behavior, said Fauzan Alanshari, spokesman for the militant Indonesia Mujahedin Council.

"People might say that breasts are not pornography because they get used to seeing breasts," he said. "People might lose their sensitivity. We need the bill so that it will be more specific and thus it will be more repressive."

Alanshari said the bill would protect children from the possibility of encountering women wearing erotic attire.

"I'll give you an example," he said. "There's a prostitute wearing a sexy dress. I can control myself by not looking at her. But what about my children? So, we have to have a regulation to protect the public's rights. The public's rights include my right to protect my children."

The bill's sponsors say it has strong support in parliament, which is roughly 90% male. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a former general, has not taken a public position on the issue. But he recently disclosed that he had stopped a singer from appearing at a presidential function because her belly button was showing.

"I was really disturbed," the president said. "I told the singer to go home even before she performed in front of me at the state palace."

Opponents of the bill point to the adoption of Sharia in Tangerang, a city of 2 million next to Jakarta, as reason to be concerned.

During a police sweep one evening in February, Tangerang authorities arrested Lilies Lindawati, a 35-year-old waitress, and 26 other women as suspected prostitutes. The pregnant mother of two had been on her way home after trying to collect her last paycheck from the restaurant where she had worked.

She was not allowed to contact her husband, a teacher, and was denied a defense lawyer for her trial the next day.

"Lots of government officials and residents were gathered there," she told reporters later. "They were laughing at us as if we were part of a show."

Despite her denial, she was found guilty of prostitution because she had lipstick and other makeup in her purse. She couldn't afford the $35 fine and spent three nights in jail. She filed a wrongful arrest suit last month against the mayor, seeking $57,000 in damages.

Although the first Indonesian edition of Playboy contained no nudity — disappointing many buyers — anti-pornography activists targeted the magazine because of its international reputation.

Soon after release of the first edition in April, Islamic militants demonstrated outside the magazine's Jakarta office. Some threw rocks at the building, breaking windows of the bank downstairs.

Cheap pornography is readily available in major cities, but Playboy Editor Erwin Arnada says the Indonesian edition is a "lifestyle" magazine. He says he wants people to buy it for the articles. The first edition carried pieces on politics and global warming and one of the last interviews with noted author and former political prisoner Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who died soon after.

"We have to change the content to fit Indonesian culture," he said. "We will never publish nude pictures."

After receiving complaints from Islamic activists, police called in Arnada, cover girl Early, and centerfold model Kartika Oktavini Gunawan, who had posed showing a bare midriff in one photo and a naked shoulder and bare thighs in another.

Arnada, 41, who runs several other magazines and has produced half a dozen horror films, said officers questioned him for more than five hours but could not uncover any violation of the law. Police asked him not to distribute Playboy at newsstands in Jakarta, the publication's biggest market, but it is unclear whether Playboy will honor the request.

The first edition sold all 100,000 copies and has become a collector's item, going on EBay for as much as $100. But the controversy has cost the magazine most of its advertisers, and the price of the next issue will more than double to $10.

Early, 26, a Muslim and the mother of a 9-month-old baby, said she was "proud" to be on the cover of the first Indonesian Playboy. Her sudden notoriety has resulted in a flood of job offers and interviews. But she is concerned that the proposed anti-pornography law would hinder the growth of democracy and impose a strict form of Islam on all Indonesians, whether Hindu, Christian or Muslim.

"I don't support pornography, but this bill is vague," the model said. "It's about freedom of speech. People should be able to say whatever they want."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – Ohio Election Stolen

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  writes in this months Rolling Stone magazine that the Republicans "epublicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House."

The full Rolling Stone article can be found here. 

A cached copy of the article can be found here, in my Furl archive. 

Noe Pleads Guilty

From The Toledo Blade:

More than two years after investigators began probing Tom Noe’s vaunted political fund-raising ability, he admitted yesterday that he used friends and colleagues to illegally pour thousands of dollars into the effort to re-elect President Bush.

Noe, whose fund-raising acumen earned him star status as a Bush “Pioneer” and helped him secure coveted federal and state political appointments, pleaded guilty to all three felony counts he faced.

Noe said he wanted to “spare my dear family and friends … further embarrassment.”

The 51-year-old is facing between 24 and 30 months in prison and a substantial fine according to federal sentencing guidelines, assistant U.S. Attorney John Pearson said. However, he said he would seek an even stiffer penalty because of the “potential loss of public faith” in the presidential election.

For more than a year, Republicans in Ohio and Washington have been subjected to continued revelations about a man who had constant access to Gov. Bob Taft’s office and who was a guest at the White House. The President won a second term on the strength of a narrow victory in Ohio.

With his guilty plea, Noe will go from a well-connected Republican who led the Bush effort in northwest Ohio to a convicted felon, adding a permanent stain to his political career.

His guilty plea also acknowledged implicitly that he illegally obtained the cachet typically bestowed upon the biggest political fund-raisers. Hundreds of the Bush “Pioneers” and “Rangers” — those who raised more than $100,000 and $200,000 respectively — were rewarded with coveted ambassadorships, favorable policy changes, and friendly legislation. Noe himself was appointed to a key committee of the U.S. Mint.

State Sen. Randy Gardner (R., Bowling Green) said most people are “shocked and angered and disappointed all at once as to the magnitude” of the accusations against Noe.

“It’s beyond anyone’s comprehension,” Mr. Gardner said.

U.S. District Judge David Katz accepted the guilty plea and said a sentencing date would be scheduled after the federal probation office can produce a presentencing report. Noe will begin providing information for that report tomorrow.

By accepting responsibility and avoiding a trial, Noe is eligible for a reduced prison sentence.

Noe still faces more than four dozen other felony counts in Lucas County Common Pleas Court on allegations that he stole millions of dollars from two rare-coin funds totaling $50 million he managed for the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation. An August trial has been set in that case.
24 alleged ‘conduits’

During the hearing yesterday, federal prosecutors painted a picture of a man who knew it was wrong to give $45,500 to 24 alleged “conduits” to boost his fund-raising totals at a fund-raiser in October, 2003.

Noe duped them and the presidential campaign he sought to help, assistant U.S. Attorney Seth Uram said.

Noe turned to deceit, Mr. Uram said, after his pledge to raise $50,000 for the Bush campaign foundered when friends claimed they couldn’t attend the $2,000-a-plate event or couldn’t afford it.

“It was then that the defendant [decided] that they could use his own funds to pay for their $2,000 tickets,” Mr. Uram said.

But Noe, who had already given the maximum contribution a few months earlier, should have known it was wrong. Mr. Uram said investigators obtained memos given to Noe about conduits. One memo, which would have been used in a trial, clearly said: “It is illegal to give money in the name of another.”

He was formally charged with conspiracy to violate federal campaign laws and with violating them. He was also charged with causing the Bush-Cheney campaign to file a false campaign finance report.

Donor cards signed

All of the conduits signed donor cards that acknowledged they were the source of their donations when all knew Noe was responsible, prosecutors said.

But for all of the details that were revealed, the hearing left many questions unanswered: Why did Noe agree to raise $50,000 for the Bush campaign? Did anyone pressure him to raise money? Did he hope to curry favor with the Bush White House? His plea leaves those questions open to speculation.

Noe rose to prominence in the Republican Party over the last 15 years as a willing fund-raiser and political confidant and planner.

He secured high-profile gubernatorial appointments to the Bowling Green State University Board of Trustees and the Ohio Board of Regents, and for a time was chairman of the regents — despite being a college dropout. He also was appointed to the Ohio Turnpike Commission, where he also was chairman.

Noe and his wife, Bernadette, both former chairmen of the Lucas County Republican Party, have given more than $200,000 to politicians over the last 16 years. Their giving increased substantially after the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation in 1998 gave him the first of two $25 million payments to invest in his rare-coin funds.

In May, 2003, he secured a federal appointment to an important committee of the U.S. Mint, a panel that advises the U.S. Treasury secretary on themes and designs for coins and congressional gold medals. He was named its chairman.

Before The Blade began reporting in April, 2005, about Noe’s coin deals with the state, he and his wife owned three waterfront homes, including two in Ohio. Since then they’ve sold their condo along the Maumee River in Maumee and their $1 million Catawba Island home on the shore of Lake Erie.

The former GOP power couple retreated to a palatial home in the Florida Keys, which has been used to secure more than $1 million in loans to pay his attorneys.

All of the 24 alleged conduits cooperated with the probe and were willing to testify, Mr. Uram said. Four acknowledged they knew it was illegal at the time. Because the alleged conduits were not charged, Mr. Uram said he was precluded from identifying them.

But court records show that many of them were some of the people closest to Noe: his brother-in-law Joe Restivo; local politicians Maggie Thurber, Betty Shultz, Sally Perz, and Donna Owens; two former aides to Governor Taft; and other political and social friends.

Ms. Thurber, Ms. Shultz, Ms. Perz, and Ms. Owens all face potential state ethics charges for failing to disclose the money from Noe. A special prosecutor appointed by Lucas County Prosecutor Julia Bates is considering charges.

Ms. Thurber and Ms. Shultz yesterday declined to comment about their roles in Noe’s contributions to President Bush’s campaign. Ms. Perz and Ms. Owens did not return phone calls.

Mr. Uram said prosecutors would have relied on memos, records from the Bush campaign, information gleaned from Noe’s trash, and the testimony of the alleged conduits.

Loans claimed

The alleged conduits told investigators that Noe told them to claim the money was a loan if anyone ever asked, and he gave varying amounts to them — only three got the same amount as they would later give the Bush campaign — “so that the payments would look less suspicious,” Mr. Uram said.

Then, in April, 2005, as word of the federal investigation filtered to Noe, he called some of the alleged conduits and asked for payment on the “loans.” Some did send checks and some told investigators the money was a loan. They later changed their stories.

At one point, well after the event, Noe even created a “loan folder” to further disguise his fund-raising, Mr. Uram said.

Throughout the 45-minute hearing, Noe was calm and responsive with Judge Katz, acknowledging questions with “yes, your honor,” and “no, your honor.”

Then, after hearing all of the evidence Mr. Uram outlined, Noe said he voluntarily agreed to change his plea “to accept responsibility to spare my dear family and friends the further embarrassment of any additional court proceeding. Therefore, I plead guilty.”

He was joined in the courtroom by his sister, Beth Noe June of Clark Lake, Mich., and her husband.

Noe remains free on $350,000 bond pending the sentencing hearing. He will undergo drug testing as part of the presentencing report and a complete background check will be done.

Both the federal prosecutors and Noe’s defense attorneys will be able to review and question the report before Judge Katz sentences Noe.

Mr. Pearson said he anticipates Noe’s attorneys will ask that any federal sentence be delayed until the state charges are resolved.

Mr. Pearson asked Judge Katz to treat Noe like any other defendant.

The judge said he would answer those requests later.

No one in state government has been harder hit by the Noe case than Governor Taft, whose administration and legacy have been ravaged by his association with Noe and the scandal that has enveloped Columbus. Yesterday, Mark Rickel, the governor’s press secretary, said “this is a serious offense in the hands of a capable judge and prosecutors.’’

At the time of Noe’s indictment, a senior Justice Department official said the Noe case represented the largest campaign money-laundering scheme prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department since new campaign-finance laws were enacted by Congress in 2002.

Bush Administration Invoking State Secrets More and More

From The NY Times:

Facing a wave of litigation challenging its eavesdropping at home and its handling of terror suspects abroad, the Bush administration is increasingly turning to a legal tactic that swiftly torpedoes most lawsuits: the state secrets privilege.

In recent weeks alone, officials have used the privilege to win the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a German man who was abducted and held in Afghanistan for five months and to ask the courts to throw out three legal challenges to the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program.

But civil liberties groups and some scholars say the privilege claim, in which the government says any discussion of a lawsuit's accusations would endanger national security, has short-circuited judicial scrutiny and public debate of some central controversies of the post-9/11 era.

The privilege has been asserted by the Justice Department more frequently under President Bush than under any of his predecessors — in 19 cases, the same number as during the entire eight-year presidency of Ronald Reagan, the previous record holder, according to a count by William G. Weaver, a political scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso.

While the privilege, defined by a 1953 Supreme Court ruling, was once used to shield sensitive documents or witnesses from disclosure, it is now often used to try to snuff out lawsuits at their inception, Mr. Weaver and other legal specialists say.

"This is a very powerful weapon for the executive branch," said Mr. Weaver, who has a law degree and is a co-author of one of the few scholarly articles examining the privilege. "Once it's asserted, in almost every instance it stops the case cold."

Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at Wake Forest University who is studying the recent use of the privilege, said the administration's legal strategy "raises profound legal and policy questions that will be the subject of intense debate for the foreseeable future."

Some members of Congress also have doubts about the way the privilege has been used. A bill approved by the House Government Reform Committee would limit its use in blocking whistle-blowers' lawsuits.

"If the very people you're suing are the ones who get to use the state secrets privilege, it's a stacked deck," said Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, who proposed the measure and has campaigned against excessive government secrecy.

Yet courts have almost always deferred to the secrecy claims; Mr. Weaver said he believed that the last unsuccessful assertion of the privilege was in 1993. Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said, "It's a sign of how potent the national security mantra has become."

Under Mr. Bush, the secrets privilege has been used to block a lawsuit by a translator at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sibel Edmonds, who was fired after accusing colleagues of security breaches; to stop a discrimination lawsuit filed by Jeffrey Sterling, a Farsi-speaking, African-American officer at the Central Intelligence Agency; and to derail a patent claim involving a coupler for fiber-optic cable, evidently to guard technical details of government eavesdropping.

Such cases can make for oddities. Mark S. Zaid, who has represented Ms. Edmonds, Mr. Sterling and other clients in privilege cases, said he had seen his legal briefs classified by the government and had been barred from contacting a client because his phone line was not secure.

"In most state secrets cases, the plaintiffs' lawyers don't know what the alleged secrets are," Mr. Zaid said.

More recently the privilege has been wielded against lawsuits challenging broader policies, including the three lawsuits attacking the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program — one against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco and two against the federal government by the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

In a filing in the New York case, John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, wrote that allowing the case to proceed would "cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States" because it "would enable adversaries of the United States to avoid detection." Mr. Negroponte said he was providing more detail in classified filings.

Those cases are still pending. Two lawsuits challenging the government's practice of rendition, in which terror suspects are seized and delivered to detention centers overseas, were dismissed after the government raised the secrets privilege.

One plaintiff, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained while changing planes in New York and was taken to Syria, where he has said he was held in a tiny cell and beaten with electrical cables. The other, Khaled el-Masri, a German of Kuwaiti origin, was seized in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan, where he has said he was beaten and injected with drugs before being released in Albania.

The United States never made public any evidence linking either man to terrorism, and both cases are widely viewed as mistakes. Mr. Arar's lawsuit was dismissed in February on separate but similar grounds from the secrets privilege, a decision he is appealing. A federal judge in Virginia dismissed Mr. Masri's lawsuit on May 18, accepting the government's secrets claim.

One frustration of the plaintiffs in such cases is that so much information about the ostensible state secrets is already public. Mr. Arar's case has been examined in months of public hearings by a Canadian government commission, and Mr. Masri's story has been confirmed by American and German officials and blamed on a mix-up of similar names. The N.S.A. program has been described and defended in numerous public statements by Mr. Bush and other top officials and in a 42-page Justice Department legal analysis.

In the A.C.L.U. lawsuit charging that the security agency's eavesdropping is illegal, Ann Beeson, the group's associate legal director, acknowledged that some facts might need to remain secret. "But you don't need those facts to hear this case," she said. "All the facts needed to try this case are already public."

Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said he could not discuss any specific case. But he said the state secrets privilege "is well-established in federal law and has been asserted many times in our nation's history to protect our nation's secrets."

Other defenders of the administration's increasing use of the privilege say it merely reflects proliferating lawsuits.

In all of the N.S.A. cases, for instance, "it's the same secret they're trying to protect," said H. Bryan Cunningham, a Denver lawyer who served as a legal adviser to the National Security Council under Mr. Bush. Mr. Cunningham said that under well-established precedent, judges must defer to the executive branch in deciding what secrets must be protected.

But critics of the use of the privilege point out that officials sometimes exaggerate the sensitivities at risk. In fact, documents from the 1953 case that defined the modern privilege, United States v. Reynolds, have been declassified in recent years and suggest that Air Force officials misled the court.

An accident report on a B-29 bomber crash in 1948 was withheld because the Air Force said it included technical details about sensitive intelligence equipment and missions, but it turned out to contain no such information, said Wilson M. Brown III, a lawyer in Philadelphia who represented survivors of those who died in the crash in recent litigation.

"The facts the Supreme Court was relying on in Reynolds were false," Mr. Brown said in an interview. "It shows that if the government is not truthful, plaintiffs will lose and there's very little chance to straighten it out."

ABA To Investigate Bush’s Signing Statements

From The Boston Globe:

The board of governors of the American Bar Association voted unanimously yesterday to investigate whether President Bush has exceeded his constitutional authority in reserving the right to ignore more than 750 laws that have been enacted since he took office.

Meeting in New Orleans, the board of governors for the world's largest association of legal professionals approved the creation of an all-star legal panel with a number of members from both political parties.

They include a former federal appeals court chief judge, a former FBI director, and several prominent scholars — to evaluate Bush's assertions that he has the power to ignore laws that conflict with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Bush has appended statements to new laws when he signs them, noting which provisions he believes interfere with his powers.

Among the laws Bush has challenged are the ban on torturing detainees, oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, and “whistle-blower" protections for federal employees.

The challenges also have included safeguards against political interference in taxpayer-funded research.

Bush has challenged more laws than all previous presidents combined.

The ABA's president, Michael Greco, said in an interview that he proposed the task force because he believes the scope and aggressiveness of Bush's signing statements may raise serious constitutional concerns. He said the ABA, which has more than 400,000 members, has a duty to speak out about such legal issues to the public, the courts, and Congress.

“The American Bar Association feels a very serious obligation to ensure that when there are legal issues that affect the American people, the ABA adopts a policy regarding such issues and then speaks out about it," Greco said. “In this instance, the president's practice of attaching signing statements to laws squarely presents a constitutional issue about the separation of powers among the three branches."

The signing statements task force, which was recruited by Greco, a longtime Boston lawyer who served on former Governor William F. Weld's Judicial Nominating Council, includes several Republicans. Among them are Mickey Edwards , a former Oklahoma representative from 1977 to 1993, and Bruce Fein , a Justice Department official under President Reagan.

In interviews, several of the panel members said they were going into the project with an open mind, but they expressed concerns about Bush's actions.

“I think one of the most critical issues in the country right now is the extent to which the White House has tried to expand its powers and basically tried to cut the legislative branch out of its own constitutionally equal role, and the signing statements are a particularly egregious example of that," Edwards said. “I've been doing a lot of speaking and writing about this, and when the ABA said they were looking to take a position on signing statements, I said that's serious because those people carry a lot of weight."

William Sessions , a retired federal judge who was the director of the FBI under both Reagan and President George H.W. Bush , said he agreed to participate because he believed that the signing statements raise a “serious problem" for the American constitutional system.

“I think it's very important for the people of the United States to have trust and reliance that the president is not going around the law," Sessions said. “The importance of it speaks for itself."

Another member, Patricia Wald, is a retired chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, appointed by President Carter.

She said she had monitored the use of signing statements by previous administrations, but “the accelerated use in recent years presents a real question about separation of powers and checks and balances."

Wald also said she was especially interested in studying how signing statements affect the federal bureaucracy. As a judge, Wald said, she dealt with many cases involving challenges to decisions made by administrative agencies. She said that courts are deferential to such decisions because they are supposed to be made by objective specialists in the agencies. But a heavy use of signing statements could call that assumption into question.

“If Congress passes a law telling the people in the bureaucracy that `this is what you should do,' and the president signs it but attaches a statement saying `I don't want you to do it,' how is that going to affect the motivation of the bureaucracy?" she said.

The task force also includes several prominent legal scholars, such as Harold Koh , dean of Yale Law School and a former official in the Reagan and Clinton administrations; Kathleen Sullivan , former dean of Stanford Law School; Charles Ogletree , a Harvard law professor; and Stephen Saltzburg , a professor at George Washington University Law School.

Saltzburg — who was a Justice Department official under Reagan and the first president Bush, as well as a prosecutor in the Iran-Contra scandal — said he did not believe that signing statements were unconstitutional.

But, he said, frequent use of them could create bad perceptions about whether the US government obeys the rule of law.

“The president can say anything he wants when he signs a bill," Saltzburg said. “[But] what does it say about respect for the Constitution and for the notion of checks and balances to have the president repeatedly claim the authority not to obey statutes, which he is signing into law?"

Rounding out the panel are Mark Agrast , a former legislative counsel for Representative William D. Delahunt , Democrat of Quincy, and Thomas Susman, who worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under both Presidents Johnson and Nixon , and was later counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Susman said he agreed to serve out of intellectual curiosity: “I think it's a fascinating subject," he said. The task force is chaired by Neal Sonnett , a former federal prosecutor. Earlier this year, Sonnett chaired a similar ABA panel of bipartisan specialists who studied the legality of Bush's warrantless spying program.

The earlier panel unanimously concluded that Bush should obey a law requiring warrants for such surveillance, or he should ask Congress to change the law, rather than simply ignoring it.

In February, the ABA House of Delegates voted overwhelmingly to endorse the surveillance task force's recommendations, enabling Greco to testify about the program before Congress.

Sonnett said he planned to run the task force in a similar fashion. The group will discuss the issues in telephone conference calls. They will also divide up issues to research for the report that will accompany any of their recommendations, circulating drafts until they reach a consensus.

The task force will make its recommendation this summer, Greco said, and the 550-member ABA House of Delegates will vote on whether to adopt its findings at a meeting in August.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, promised to hold a hearing on Bush's use of signing statements.

Specter pledged the action after an article in The Boston Globe described the scope and details of Bush's assertions concerning the laws in them.

Greco and Sonnett also said the Globe's coverage of signing statements had persuaded them to launch the task force