Mohamed Mohamud’s defense team has asked a federal judge to put a muzzle on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

The nation’s top prosecutor has commented publicly at least twice in recent weeks about the criminal case against Mohamud. The 19-year-old Somali-American is accused of plotting to bomb thousands of Christmas revelers at Portland’s Nov. 26 tree-lighting ceremony, a plot thwarted by an undercover FBI sting.

“Thwarted,” in this case, as Glenn Greenwald and others have ably pointed out, means “created,”  but the Oregonian glosses over this rather obvious fact.

Defense lawyers Stephen R. Sady and Steven T. Wax filed a motion on Monday asking U.S. District Judge Garr M. King to prohibit government prosecutors from making further comments about the case. They allege that Holder’s public statements violated federal regulations and their client’s constitutional right to due process.

Prosecutors have not yet filed a response to the motion.

I wait with bated breath.

Mohamud’s defense team wrote in their motion that the Mohamud case already involves high risks regarding pretrial prejudice. They alleged that Holder’s remarks went far beyond general comments about the charges against their client or a discussion of policy issues.

Jesus H. Christ, the whole frigging CASE depends for its “success” on little more than pretrial prejudice, as it was obviously designed to do, but as usual, The Oregonian doesn’t get this.  Instead, it editorialized that Mohamud’s nonexistent threat “proves” that Portland ought to get its jackboots on and join the Joint Terrorism Task Force in marching Little Beirut to the tune of the Police State drummer.  (Alone among America’s larger cities, Portland has resisted this step in the post 9/11 era, a niggling detail that sticks in the craw of the authoritarian elite…)  

“By opining on the merits of the case,” they wrote, “the government pollutes the jury pool with inappropriate opinions and prejudgments.”

Ya think?

The defense team noted that on Nov. 29, Holder told news media that the FBI had acted properly in making their case against Mohamud and rejected the notion that the bureau’s employees had made Mohamud the victim of illegal entrapment. On Dec. 10, the attorney general elaborated on those comments at a civil liberties gathering in San Francisco.

What the hell was Holder even doing at such a gathering, let alone addressing it?  Did Liz Cheney have a beauty appointment that day?

“Those who characterize the FBI’s activities in this case as ‘entrapment’ simply do not have their facts straight — or do not have a full understanding of the law,” Holder said to the group Muslim Advocates at its annual dinner.

On some level, you have to admire the chutzpah of Holder to appear before a Muslim group and presumably eat their food, too, and then spout such arrogant, errant, nonsense; it’s revealing that, at least socially, he quite evidently doesn’t share the fear of Muslims his underlings are constantly trying to incite in others. You see, the FBI glommed onto then 17-year old Mohamud, who had been fingered by his own father as a potential risk, put him on a no-fly list that precluded him working on a fishing boat in Alaska where Sarah Palin could have presumably kept an eye on him, got him an apartment, a van, a bomb, etc., and what do you know?  He morphed into the boy-band version of Osama Bin Laden, just in time for the War On Christmas.  Will the taxpayer-funded terrorist miracles never cease?

Evidently not.  Undaunted by their shameful, and costly, persecution of Brandon Mayfield, which only resulted in their wearing fascist egg on their idiotic faces (and a hefty settlement…), the increasingly desperate local branch of the FBI continues its demented, vicious, and wasteful efforts to create new terrorists out of whole cloth for the sole purpose of perpetuating their made-up “war,” of which the Mohamud “case” is only the latest example.  A similar costly and copycat case, involving another impressionable teenage nobody in Virginia, popped up about the same time, and appears just as meritless as this one, reflecting little more laudable behavior from the people who Protect Our Freedoms than you’d expect from any other shameless mercenaries in a grabby outfit trying to rack up year-end bonuses.  ”They” used to hate us for our freedom; if so, they must love us by now….

Clearly, the FBI shares America’s concern about unemployment.

Its own, anyway.

This morning, Glenn Greenwald had an excellent post about the despicable fear-mongering ad Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol had slapped together to smear not just the Obama DOJ, but basically the entire tradition of western jurisprudence, the evenhandedness of which seems to offend vermin like them.  Watching the ad and considering its source, I didn’t really give it much more thought; surely such spurious McCarthyite smears have long passed their due date, and surely no non-Fox journalist would ever take them seriously.  Well, no they haven’t, and yes they would, and stop calling the Los Angeles Times Shirley.

Behold:
Reporting from Washington – Nine top political appointees at the Justice Department previously worked as lawyers or advocates for “enemy combatants” confined at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prompting new questions from Congress and conservative critics about the integrity of the administration’s handling of detainees.

Ooh, sounds scary, and “new,” to boot.

The Justice Department insists that the officials have not involved themselves in matters dealing with enemy combatants. But the department has revealed the names of only two of the nine appointees, making it difficult to independently assess the claim. And one of the named officials — Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer in the national security division — sits on a task force weighing the future of Guantanamo prisoners. She is a former senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, which worked on behalf of ensuring constitutional rights for detainees during the George W. Bush presidency.

Since everybody knows that only people with a demonstrated desire to kill all Arabs indiscriminately should ever be allowed to work at the Justice (!) Department.

The other named official is Neal Katyal, the principal deputy solicitor general, who argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of Salim Ahmed Hamdan and won a 2006 ruling that Bush’s military tribunal system violated the rules of military justice and the Geneva Conventions. Hamdan, a former bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden, later was released and returned to Yemen.

According to congressional sources, one of the other seven appointees is Tony West, an assistant attorney general who heads the civil division. In 2002, he was part of the California-based legal team that represented John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban.

I have a list of names, said the drunken sociopath from Wisconsin….

These kinds of backgrounds and connections “raise serious questions about who is providing advice on detainee matters,” a group of Republican senators told Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. last week.

“Some say.”  Can you believe this?  Who?  Michelle Malkin?

One of the sharpest critics is a group called Keep America Safe, run in part by Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. It has derided the unidentified appointees as the “Al Qaeda 7,” and in a video on its website Tuesday asked, “Whose values do they share?”

Ah, finally a disinterested observer willing to go on the record.  It gets worse, though, when the pussies at DOJ, instead of calling such fascist propaganda what it was and giving this un-American cabal a little needed history lesson, this lame capitulation comes forth:

In a Feb. 18 letter to the senators, Ronald Welch, an assistant attorney general, said five Justice Department lawyers provided legal counsel to detainees and four filed friend-of-the-court legal papers on behalf of detainees or advocated on their behalf. He identified them only as working in Holder’s office, for the deputy attorney general and in other top positions at the department.

“To the best of our knowledge,” Welch wrote, “during their employment prior to joining the government, only five of the lawyers who serve as political appointees represented detainees, and four others either contributed to amicus briefs in detainee-related cases or were otherwise involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees.”

Others, he said, “came to the department from law firms where other lawyers represented detainees.”

In naming Katyal and Daskal, Welch said both appointees had been careful not to overstep rules governing professional conduct.

He said Katyal, after joining the Justice Department, had “participated in litigation involving detainees who continue to be detained” at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. He said Katyal also has participated in litigation involving Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who was arrested in Illinois and accused of being an Al Qaeda sleeper cell agent.

Welch said Daskal had “generally worked on policy issues related to detainees” but that “her detainee-related work has been fully consistent with advice she received from career department officials regarding her obligations.”

In referring to all of the political appointees, Welch said that none “would permit or has permitted any prior affiliation to interfere with the vital task of protecting national security, and any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely false.”

Wait a minute.  Did one or more shriveled but still rule of law supporting gonad actually threaten to descend?  Quick, bring in somebody else….

In addition, Tracy Schmaler, a department spokeswoman, said Tuesday that “department attorneys are subject to ethics and disclosure rules as required under both department guidelines and the administration’s own ethics rules, which are the strongest in history.” She added that “it should be clear that fighting terrorism and keeping the American people safe is our No. 1 priority.”

That’s more like it.  Naturally, the right-wing nutjobs who dreamed up this little putsch couldn’t have been more delighted, or more theatrically outraged, at a pathetically weak response as that, and went on, and on.

Nevertheless, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, said the Justice Department had not given a full accounting of who and how many top appointees might have conflicts.

Sessions said the issue was whether “the attorney general believes that treating terrorists like civilians enhances or damages our ability to gather crucial intelligence.” He said that issue could not be answered until the other seven names were released.

“It’s time for these policies to meet the light of day — and for the public to get the answers they deserve,” Sessions said.

Good job, LATimes.  And always give the last word to the scariest neoconfederate sore loser in the Senate, those types always have a lot to contribute to an informative discussion of human rights and such.  This genius article was typed by:

richard.serrano@ latimes.com

I think I ought to pour a little something and write to him.

UPDATE: (whatever unlikely replies will be eagerly appended….)

Dear Mr. Serrano,
Have you ever read the Constitution?  What about the Magna Carta?
Heck, did you ever watch Sesame Street?  Considering what you wrote
today about the flagrantly un-American attacks a discredited
neofascist like Liz Cheney made on not just the Obama DOJ, but the
entire idea of western jurisprudence, I can only conclude not.
I’ll type slowly for you…  We have, in those parts of the world that
are nominal democracies, what’s known as an adversarial system of
justice.  All alleged (do you know what that word means?) criminals
are entitled to legal representation, whether or not they are
citizens, and whether or not some chickenhawk nutjob has
extrajudicially pronounced them guilty.  This is kind of a big thing
and has been since 1215 or so, but  maybe you’ve been busy with other
things.
I know that those of you in the withered shell of our media are
desperately afraid of being called “liberal,” but when “liberal” means
not accepting medieval despotism, it would be sort of your duty as an
American to go ahead and risk the scarlet letter.  Who knows?  If such
a thing caught on, people might start reading newspapers again.
It’s worth a try, since the way you’re going about it is having the
opposite effect.
I only want to help.

Cocktailhag

Portland, Oregon

Reply

Serrano, Richard to me

show details 2:58 PM (3 minutes ago)

Cocktailhag,
You say you will type slowly for me. Why don’t you not type at all.

Regards
Rick.

Boy, did he show me, I tell you.  I’m so glad I get to call him Rick.

Welcome to America in what will surely be her last, and worst, century as a nominal democracy.  I don’t even have to tune into Rush Limbaugh or FOX to know that our righty bloviators will be out in force, doing their usual torture two-step: It wasn’t that bad, and they deserved it, anyway.  Moreover, these obscene atrocities, of course, “kept us safe.”  From what, pray tell?  Certainly not from becoming a brutal, despised, global pariah that can no longer even get an extradition approved from most of the free world.  The same people who cynically thundered ad nauseam about Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers evidently did so out of envy; his power drills were of inferior quality than those made in the good old USA.  The still heavily redacted five-year-old document seems unlikely to cause any outrage, except perhaps from those who would have suppressed it forever.  Same shit, different day.

It wasn’t always this way.  During WWII, Germans eagerly surrendered to American forces, secure in the knowledge that they would be treated humanely.  And we won that war, as I recall.  Now we are torturers, and we’re 0 for 2, and counting.  And despite the rhetoric comparing Saddam to Hitler, the Nazi war machine we defeated was formidable enough to conquer a whole continent, while Iraq’s ragtag resistance has hobbled us for nearly seven years.  In this case, it seems that nice guys don’t always finish last.

CIA Director Leon Panetta somberly vowed to “stand up for those officers who did what their country asked and who followed the legal guidelines they were given.”  When your country asks you to threaten a detainee with a power drill and your legal adviser says that’s a-ok, I would humbly suggest you need either a new country or a new lawyer, preferably both.  Further, John Yoo’s vile and plainly illegal memos have now somehow taken on the standing of a danged Supreme Court decision, and thus the rantings of an insane wingnut will serve as convenient exculpatory evidence that these good-hearted tool-wielders had every reason to believe what they were doing was both legal and worthwhile.  To borrow a phrase from Barney Frank, “on what planet?”

The vestigial capacity for horror at these disgusting abuses of power is probably not enough in today’s America for it ever to be politically expedient to prosecute these latter-day Inquisitors, and the Obama Administration’s querulous need to “look forward, not backward” has, perhaps inadvertently, joined the noisy Right in normalizing such despicable crimes to the point where nobody, particularly among the political and media elite, even get what all the fuss is about.  So we tortured some people and continue to do so, big deal.  Following the inevitable trajectory of every story of the crimes that have blighted our history since Bush was placed in office by a corrupt Supreme Court majority,  torture is just another “wild conspiracy theory” that has now magically become “old news.”

Change we can believe in, indeed.