BY Basil Tilmon, Account Manager GalleryWatch Inc.
This Week – Thursday afternoon, October 25
The week featured an interesting cyclical pattern – after a turbulent week of an attempted veto over-ride and floor ranting, this week was relatively conciliatory. Veto threats however loom over much of what Congress is doing, however. (Note: when you see the word veto…the link will take you to the appropriate veto statement.)
The following are some recent letters, memoranda and other correspondence in regard to the contractor, Blackwater:
Letter to Blackwater CEO Erik Prince from House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman (PDF 360 KB)
Letter Requests Further Information on Blackwater’s No-Bid Contracts, Additional Incidents Involving Their Personnel in Iraq, and Payments Made to the Families of Iraqis Killed by Blackwater
CALL FOR PAPERS
Special Issue: Global Warming, Governance, and the Law
Fiona Haines, Nancy Reichman, and Colin Scott, as editors of Law & Policy, are bringing together a series of papers on the legal and policy issues around global warming. We are interested in papers in all areas of law and policy related to climate change from any relevant academic discipline including:
Best Practices in Information Retrieval and Records Management: Analysis and Recommendations from the 2007 Sedona Conference
By Steven Essig
The Sedona Conference Journal, Volume 8, Fall 2007, includes much relevant commentary on possible best practices and other important concerns on effective information retrieval of legal documents. Issues raised range from effective precision and recall searching, appropriate sorts of indexing strategies, word choice, email retention policies for courts and other legal organizations among other major concerns. Of particular interest to librarians should be the section of the issue entitled “ESI Symposium”, which contains a report from “The Sedona Conference ® Working Group on Best Practices for Document Retention and Production (WG1), Search & Retrieval Sciences Special Project Team” (the August 2007 Public Comment Version).
“…Selfhelpsupport.org is an award winning membership site that serves as a Network for Practitioners of Self-Help Programs as well as an online Clearinghouse of information relating to self-representation.”
“…Members include courts, legal aid programs, bar associations, educational institutions, researchers, and other governmental and non-profit programs working to increase access to justice. Usage of the site and of materials accessed is for non-commercial purposes only.”
You can go directly to Selfhelpsupport at http://www.selfhelpsupport.org/
The following is a list of new and forthcoming hardbound books and e-books with a publication date range from 2007 – 2009. This subject search was run on Bowker Books in Print Professional on October 22, 2007:
Arkansas and Missouri DWI Defense: The Law and Practice
Author: Abele, Jon R. et al. Publisher: Lawyers & Judges Publishing Company, Incorporated ISBN or UPC: 1-933264-19-5(Active Record)
A Report of the Innocence Project. Benjamin Cordozo Law School of Yeshiva University, October 18, 2007:
“New York State Not Doing Enough to Prevent Wrongful Convictions, Report Says …exonerated through DNA evidence. The report…director of the Innocence Project, a legal clinic…frequently used for DNA analysis. But in…evidence stored in DNA and fingerprint…not comment on the Innocence Project report until it…” New York Times October 18, 2007
Annual Report to Congress on the Information Sharing Environment (PDF 588 KB)
Report Submitted by the Department of Homeland Security’s Information Sharing Environment
Source: FindLaw Legal News and Commentary.
By JOANNE MARINER, Terrorism and Counterrorism Director at Human Rights Watch.
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Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007
Last week, the New York Times published a front-page article describing two legal memoranda issued secretly by the Bush Administration in 2005 that purported to provide guidance regarding the legality of CIA interrogation methods. What the memos said, specifically, was that certain CIA practices did not violate the law.
I emphasize the “purported” purpose of the memos because I think their true purpose was quite different. Rather than giving objective guidance that would assist CIA officials in conforming their conduct to legal standards, the memos were actually meant to provide legal cover for conduct that violated fundamental legal norms.
The real purpose of the memos was, in short, to immunize US officials from prosecution for abusive conduct. They were meant to facilitate abuses, not to prevent them.
These two memos are part of a larger picture that includes earlier legal memos, a classified presidential directive, and last year’s Military Commissions Act. Taken together, they’re a paper trail for torture.
The OLC Paper Trail
According to the New York Times, a still-secret legal opinion issued by the Department of Justice in early 2005 provided explicit authorization to the CIA to subject detained terrorist suspects to a combination of abusive interrogation methods, including simulated drowning (known as “waterboarding”), head-slapping, and frigid temperatures. A subsequent legal opinion, issued just before congressional legislation was passed barring the cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees, reportedly declared that none of the interrogation methods used by the CIA violated that standard.
The two newly-revealed memos were reportedly drafted by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the office charged with providing authoritative legal guidance to other executive branch officials. They were said to have been approved by then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
A previous opinion issued by the OLC in 2002, when John Ashcroft was Attorney General, concluded that the president was not bound by federal laws prohibiting torture, and that the Department of Justice lacked authority to enforce anti-torture laws against officials who acted with the president’s authorization. It also provided a narrow and inaccurate interpretation of what techniques constitute torture under U.S. and international law.
Although the memos did not mention this fact, “waterboarding,” one of the interrogation methods they reportedly defended, has been prosecuted as torture by U.S. military courts since the Spanish-American War. Indeed, after World War II, U.S. military commissions prosecuted and severely punished enemy soldiers for having subjected American prisoners to waterboarding, as well as other techniques used by the CIA in recent years such as sleep deprivation, forced standing, and removal of clothing.
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