When bad news breaks it has become almost routine for those at the top to disavow all knowledge and let the hammer come down on those well down in the hierarchy. The pattern showed up again twice this week, and is now so common as to be almost standardized.

For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.

Judge Richard Berman rewrote verdicts, applied enhancements and came up with 86 years, and after insisting that the defendant was sane, remanded her to Carswell Federal Prison for the Criminally Insane. For her part, Aafia Siddiqui told her supporters not to be angry but to forgive.

Thursday Morning at 8:45, at 500 Pearl St. in Manhattan, in Room 21D, Judge Berman’s Court, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui will be sentenced. She is facing 30 years to life. People that are there might show up to pay their respects, there is no way justice will have been served.

In the movie Witness, there is a scene where a little Amish boy, who has witnessed a murder, takes the gun of the detective who is there to protect him from a chest of drawers. He is caught by his grandfather who sits him down for a talk. The grandfather asks if the boy would use this gun to kill. The boy says that he would only kill a bad man. The grandfather asks “How will you know who is the bad man?” This is the central point of our system of justice, we don’t just assume that someone is a bad man before punishing them, we have an elaborate process designed to require proof of actions before we punish.

Unfortunately our trauma with terrorism has eroded this system. Today, as you read this, there is a list of people around the world who are targeted for death. They are suspected of being involved with terror plots, and some of them are your fellow citizens. If they are found anywhere in the world by our forces they will be killed. Not captured and brought to trial, not attempted to be captured, but killed out right.

The Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed suit challenging the legality of this policy. There is an Islamic cleric named Anwar Al-Aulaqi who has been implicated in both the Fort Hood shootings and the Fruit of the Boom bomber plots. He has made many anti-American statements including the active encouragement of terrorism.

An opinion piece from a former Attorney General shows just how inconvenient one of the bedrock treaties of international relations has become for Guantánamo supporters.

For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.

As pressure to end the war builds in Washington, supporters of the war in Afghanistan will invariably return to their strongest argument: the threat of Al-Qa’eda. However, a reasonable understanding of the terrorist organization shows that even Al-Qa’eda is not enough to justify a bloody and expensive occupation.

On Monday, Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) announced she would not support foreign aid for Afghanistan until she was assured that the Afghan government had put an end to corruption.

There are a lot of reasons to be frothing at the mouth angry at the criminal Bush administration. One of the biggest is the way that they not only managed to overturn a half century of certainty about what torture is and the use of it, in doing so they have also extended the immunity of those committing torture in the name of national security. The use of the State Secrets privilege to quash cases brought by torture victims was the standard operating procedure in the Bush administration.

It has sadly continued in the Obama administration. Without letting our current Executive Branch off the hook at all, it is easy to understand how that happens. How many of us have ever been willing to give up privileges we have, even if we are fairly sure it is not a good idea for anyone to have them? Since no one, not even the former V.P. Dick Cheney is the villain in the movie of their life, everyone thinks they will use these powers only for good.

This is why we need groups like the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights to fight against the expansion of governmental power and accountability for any illegal acts the government might commit.

The CCR is filing for certiorari with the Supreme Court in the case of Saleh et al v. Titan et al. This case is a civil suit brought by 250 Iraqis and their widows against two U.S. contractors. The case revolves around the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in the early days of the occupation. The Iraqis are brought suit claiming that they were tortured by employees of Titan Corporation (which is now called L-3 Services, ever notice the worst offenders keep changing their names?) and a company called CACI International.

These two companies were hired by the U.S. Military to provide interpretation and interrogation services. The Iraqis claim all manner of abuse at the hands of the defendants including rape, beatings which resulted in the death of the detainees and having to watch family members suspended from a ceiling and beaten. The man who was hung from the ceiling and beaten died from this treatment.

As a citizen, I’m ultimately responsible for the conduct of my government. As we talk about health care and financial services, I think it’s particularly useful to remember the core assault on the rule of law – our inability to prosecute the crimes of the past decade.

If you were mad at all about Bush’s violations of civil liberties when he was president, this will get you fuming:

In a rare legal action against a government employee accused of leaking secrets, a grand jury has indicted a former senior National Security Agency official on charges of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter in hundreds of e-mail messages in 2006 and 2007.

The official, Thomas A. Drake, 52, was also accused of obstructing justice by shredding documents, deleting computer records and lying to investigators who were looking into the reporter’s sources.

“Our national security demands that the sort of conduct alleged here — violating the government’s trust by illegally retaining and disclosing classified information — be prosecuted and prosecuted vigorously,” Lanny A. Breuer, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a statement.

This is not just a single instance of outrage. It is a microcosm of the Obama presidency, the political success of corporate America, and the failure of its opposition.