Glenn Greenwald on Eric Holder

Posted by mcm

November 20, 2008

This piece is more detailed and thoughtful than the one I sent out earlier, from MAMA Radio.

MCM

Is Obama’s likely nominee for Attorney General an encouraging sign for advocates of the Constitution and the rule of law?
Glenn Greenwald
Nov. 19, 2008

Even before there has been a single Cabinet selection announced, I’m already weary from all the gossip and chatter about potential appointees, but, at least for me, the position of Attorney General is different. So much of the anti-constitutional abuses and radicalism of the last eight years emanated from the Justice Department, and few things will have more of an impact on what the Obama administration does about them than the views, integrity and independence of the new Attorney General, who looks to be Eric Holder, Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration and, very briefly, Acting Attorney General.

The bulk of what I’ve read about and from Holder suggests, with a couple of ultimately marginal exceptions, that this appointment would be a very positive step. Digby yesterday quoted at length from an impassioned speech Holder gave in June of this year in which he condemned Guantanamo as an “international embarrassment”; charged that “for the last 6 years the position of leader of the Free World has been largely vacant”; complained that “we authorized torture and we let fear take precedence over the rule of law”; and called for an absolute end both to rendition and warrantless eavesdropping. He proclaimed that “the next president must move immediately to reclaim America’s standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights.”

Comments

Comment by woody on November 20, 2008 @ 9:12 am

He proclaimed that “the next president must move immediately to reclaim America’s standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights.”

Yeah, the rhetoric’s wonderful.

Might wanna ask him how Chiquita Banana regards the individual freedoms and basic human rights of Colombians, though, too, hunh?

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The Longest Line

On Election Day, 2004, election fraud was epidemic in Ohio (and throughout the nation). Would-be Democratic voters were impeded or disabled by the thousands, especially (though not only) in the inner cities and in college towns.

Bush/Cheney's drive to block the vote was particularly flagrant in Gambier, Ohio, home of Kenyon College. While student voters at nearby religious schools had quite an easy time of it, Kenyon's students had to wait for hours and hours and hours. Those long lines sooned turned out to have been purposely created, through the deliberate under-supply of working e-voting machinery to the polling sites at Kenyon. (The same thing happened all throughout the state and nationwide.)

After the election, Kenyon students wrote up an account of what they went through on that day and very late into the night. It's called The Longest Line. As it did not receive its due attention--and as we're heading toward another presidential race--I offer it to you for download here.

MCM