http://www.subtlebraininjury.com/blog Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:47:30 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 http://www.subtlebraininjury.com/blog/2009/02/holder-expected-to-review-change-bush-policies.html http://www.subtlebraininjury.com/blog/2009/02/holder-expected-to-review-change-bush-policies.html#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:53:00 +0000 gjohnson http://www.subtlebraininjury.com/blog/2009/02/holder-expected-to-review-change-bush-policies.html
By LARRY MARGASAK
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Eric Holder has won confirmation as the first black attorney general, but he’ll have little time to consider his role in history as he decides which Bush administration counterterrorism policies to reverse.

Holder was confirmed 75-21 Monday, with all the opposition coming from Republicans. He will be sworn in Tuesday by Vice President Joe Biden.

For starters, the new attorney general will learn the secrets of the Office of Legal Counsel, whose lawyers justified the use of controversial interrogation tactics and even declined to provide Bush administration documents to internal Justice Department investigators.

Holder will inherit a Justice Department wracked by Bush administration scandals over politically inspired hirings and firings. He has pledged to restore its reputation.

Holder also will play a major role in the future of terrorism detainees.

President Barack Obama, in a major policy shift, signed an executive order to close the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. He also created a special task force to review detainee policy; Holder and Defense Secretary Robert Gates will serve as co-chairs.

That panel will look at options for apprehension, detention, trial, transfer or release of detainees and report to the president within 180 days.

Holder promised senators he would review why career prosecutors in Washington decided not to prosecute the former head of the department’s Civil Rights Division. An inspector general’s report last month found that Bradley Schlozman, the former head of the division, misled lawmakers about whether he politicized hiring decisions.

Another key question facing Holder is whether to reverse former President George W. Bush’s order that three of his former top aides — Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten — should not testify before Congress about firings of U.S. attorneys. Rove and Miers were former aides when Bush gave his order.

If Obama reverses Bush’s policy, it would create a new legal issue: whether a former president’s order against testifying would still be valid.

The Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program is certain to come under Holder’s scrutiny.

After a lengthy and heated debate that pitted privacy and civil liberties concerns against the desire to prevent terrorist attacks, Congress last year eased the rules under which the government could wiretap American phone and computer lines to listen for terrorists and spies.

Holder promised one senator that he would re-examine a ruling by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey that immigrants facing deportation do not have a right to government-provided lawyers. Holder said he understands the desire to expedite immigration court proceedings, but added that the Constitution also requires that proceedings be fair.

There also could be changes in conducting warrantless surveillance.

Holder’s chief supporter, Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said the confirmation was a fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream that everyone would be judged by the content of their character.

“Come on the right side of history,” said Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.]]> http://www.subtlebraininjury.com/blog/2009/02/holder-expected-to-review-change-bush-policies.html/feed 0 http://www.subtlebraininjury.com/blog/2009/01/gop-elects-first-black-national-party-chairman.html http://www.subtlebraininjury.com/blog/2009/01/gop-elects-first-black-national-party-chairman.html#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:42:00 +0000 gjohnson http://www.subtlebraininjury.com/blog/2009/01/gop-elects-first-black-national-party-chairman.html
By LIZ SIDOTI
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Republican Party chose the first black national chairman in its history Friday, just shy of three months after the nation elected a Democrat as the first African-American president. The choice marked no less than “the dawn of a new party,” declared the new GOP chairman, former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele.

Republicans chose Steele over four other candidates, including former President George W. Bush’s hand-picked GOP chief, who bowed out declaring, “Obviously the winds of change are blowing.”

Steele takes the helm of a beleaguered Republican Party that is trying to recover after crushing defeats in November’s national elections that gave Democrats control of Congress put Barack Obama in the White House.

GOP delegates erupted in cheers and applause when his victory was announced, but it took six ballots to get there. He’ll serve a two-year term.

Steele, an attorney, is a conservative, but he was considered the most moderate of the five candidates running.

He was also considered an outsider because he’s not a member of the Republican National Committee. But the 168-member RNC clearly signaled it wanted a change after eight years of Bush largely dictating its every move as the party’s standard-bearer.

Steele became the first black candidate elected to statewide office in Maryland in 2002, and he made an unsuccessful Senate run in 2006. The former chairman of the Maryland Republican Party currently serves as chairman of GOPAC, an organization that recruits and trains Republican political candidates, and in that role he has been a frequent presence on the talk show circuit.

He vowed to expand the reach of the party by competing for every group, everywhere.

“We’re going to say to friend and foe alike: ‘We want you to be a part of us, we want you to with be with us.’ And for those who wish to obstruct, get ready to get knocked over,” Steele said.

“There is not one inch of ground that we’re going to cede to anybody,” he added.

“This is the dawn of a new party moving in a new direction with strength and conviction.”

His job is to spark a revival for the GOP as it takes on an empowered Democratic Party under the country’s first black president in the next midterm elections and beyond.

He replaces Mike Duncan, who abandoned his re-election bid in the face of dwindling support midway through Friday’s voting.

Two others who trailed farther back in the voting eventually followed suit, former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and Michigan GOP chairman Saul Anuzis.

In the sixth and final round of voting, Steele went head-to-head with his only remaining opponent, South Carolina GOP chief Katon Dawson. Steele clinched the election with 91 votes; a majority of 85 committee members was needed.

Just eight years after Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress, the GOP finds itself out of power, without a standard-bearer and trying to figure out how to rebound while its foe seems to grow ever stronger.

The Democratic Party boasts a broadened coalition of voters — including Hispanics and young people — who swung behind Obama’s call for change. At the same time, the slice of voters who call themselves Republican has narrowed. The GOP also has watched as Democrats have dominated both coasts while making inroads into the West and South, leaving Republicans with a shrunken base.

Despite the run of GOP losses, Duncan had argued that he should be re-elected because of his experience; his five challengers called for change and said they represented it.

As he left the race, Duncan thanked Bush and said of his two-year tenure: “It truly has been the highlight of my life.”

Another candidate, former Tennessee GOP Chairman Chip Saltsman, withdrew from the race on the eve of voting and with no explanation, saying only in a letter to RNC members, “I have decided to withdraw my candidacy.”

Saltsman, who ran former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s failed presidential campaign last year, saw his bid falter in December after he drew controversy for mailing to committee members a CD that included a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” by conservative comedian Paul Shanklin and sung to the music of “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”

___

On the Net:

Republican National Committee: http://www.rnc.org

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By WILL WEISSERT
Associated Press Writer

HAVANA (AP) — William Potts calls himself the “Homesick Hijacker.” U.S. authorities have another name for him: fugitive harbored by an enemy government — one of dozens of Americans hiding in communist Cuba.

Almost 25 years ago, he smuggled a pistol onto a commercial flight, diverted the plane to Havana, and spent 13 1/2 years in a Cuban prison for air piracy.

Now the Mount Vernon, New York, native has written to President-elect Barack Obama seeking a pardon and hoping U.S.-Cuba relations will improve and he’ll be able to come home.

Others among the more than 70 American fugitives in Cuba fear the opposite — that a thaw in the nearly 50-year-old freeze between neighbors will put them within the reach of U.S. law.

“It’s not a good time to raise my name up there,” said Charlie Hill, who was accused in the slaying of a New Mexico state trooper and hijacked a plane to Cuba in 1971. “Things are going good. I don’t want to be in the limelight.”

Neither government would comment on the subject because these are sensitive times — a change of U.S. administrations, and indications that both Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro are ready to make tentative moves toward detente.

Among other issues, U.S. officials are hoping Cuba will cooperate in apprehending a ring of Cuban-Americans who fled here from Florida in a Medicare scam. And Cuba continues to insist that the U.S. return five Cuban agents it says were wrongly convicted of spying in Miami.

But a former U.S. diplomat says better relations could give the FBI more freedom to go after the fugitives.

“In my time, we always got more of those kinds of people back from them when things were going a little better,” said Brookings Institution scholar Vicki Huddleston, who headed the U.S. Interests Section in Havana from 1999 to 2002.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, there were dozens of American hijackings to Cuba — so many that they became fodder for standup comedians. As a way of discouraging them, both sides signed a 1971 agreement under which each government agreed to prosecute hijackers or return them to the other country.

Still, periodic tensions with Washington often pushed Cuba to suspend the deal, and many fugitives reaching Cuba got asylum — bank robbery suspects, Puerto Rican independence fighters, Black Panthers leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver. They were treated as political refugees — a key reason why the U.S. still labels Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The remaining fugitives enjoy the same free housing, health care and other subsidies as Cubans.

The U.S. has no extradition treaty with this country, and in some ways, they have become wanted Americans whom no one is after. Washington can’t even provide updated information on who is believed to be in Cuba, referring The Associated Press to an outdated FBI list of 78 U.S. fugitives — at least four of whom are known to be dead.

Cuba stopped giving new arrivals sanctuary in 2006, so far returning four wanted Americans who recently had fled to avoid prosecution.

But some famous ones are thought to remain, such as Victor Gerena, a Puerto Rican separatist. He is still on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” fugitive list for a 1983 armed robbery of an armored car company in Connecticut.

Another is Assata Shakur, aunt of slain rapper Tupac Shakur. A black separatist, she was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1973 killing of a New Jersey police officer and had ties to former Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers, who became a campaign issue for Obama because he and Ayers served on the same Chicago community board.

Shakur escaped from prison and made it to Cuba. Though she remains underground, Potts says he ran into her at a Havana book fair last year. Gerena and Shakur still have $1 million bounties for their arrest. As recently as 2005, Fidel Castro said U.S. racism made Shakur a “true political prisoner.”

But Potts, who got to Cuba a year after Shakur, was not celebrated — instead, he ended up in the fearsome Combinado del Este prison just outside Havana. Now 52, he argues he has paid his debt — and that prison time-served here should allow him to head back to America a free man.

“I am no terrorist. Not even at the height of my sophomoric idealism could I ever condone terrorism of any kind,” he wrote in his pardon request, which he plans to send to the White House through his sister in Georgia.

He still faces an indictment for air piracy in Florida federal district court that could carry a 20-year prison sentence. Alicia Valle, special counsel to the U.S. Attorney for the district, refused to say whether prison time in Cuba could mean a reduced U.S. sentence.

In March 1984, on a Miami-bound Piedmont Airlines flight that originated in Newark, New Jersey, Potts pushed his call button and gave the flight attendant a note saying he had two accomplices aboard with explosives. He now says he told the lie to “avoid confrontations.”

He claimed to be Lt. Spartacus, a soldier in the Black Liberation Army. But now he says he was never actually a formal member of the violent Marxist group, and that he knew the hijacking would be nonviolent.

He was so infatuated with Cuba’s communist way of life that he was willing to hijack a plane, even though he spoke no Spanish, knew no one on the island and expected to go to prison.

Potts has married twice since being released from prison, but is now going through his second divorce. His wife took his Cuban-born daughters, ages 7 and 4, and nearly all the furniture in their scruffy Havana apartment, leaving him only a bed, pile of books and CDs, Muslim prayer rug and a small table on which is a single bowl and chopsticks.

Until recently, he ran an illegal Internet cafe on his aging home computer, netting about $110 a month after expenses, but now he is planning to move out of Havana, hoping to put the divorce behind him.

Potts says if pardoned he will go to the U.S. to help care for his elderly parents, but return to live in Cuba.

His U.S. relatives have visited him twice in recent years as part of family-visit programs designed for Cuban-Americans, and he took them with him to the U.S. Interests Section, Washington’s Havana mission, seeking visas for his daughters.

On the walls were wanted posters for Shakur and other Americans, but not for Potts.

When he met the officials there, “I asked them, ‘Look, are we going to have some trouble in here?’” he recalled. “And they said, ‘No. We could subdue you if we wanted to.’”

They didn’t, but his visa requests were denied.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.]]> http://www.subtlebraininjury.com/blog/2009/01/cuba-thaw-good-or-bad-us-fugitives-unsure.html/feed 0 http://www.subtlebraininjury.com/blog/2008/12/blagojevich-lawyer-to-submit-obama-report-to-panel.html http://www.subtlebraininjury.com/blog/2008/12/blagojevich-lawyer-to-submit-obama-report-to-panel.html#comments Mon, 29 Dec 2008 12:08:00 +0000 gjohnson http://www.subtlebraininjury.com/blog/2008/12/blagojevich-lawyer-to-submit-obama-report-to-panel.html
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — The lead attorney for Gov. Rod Blagojevich said he plans to submit President-elect Barack Obama’s internal report on contacts with the scandal-plagued governor to the Illinois House committee weighing impeachment.

Attorney Ed Genson told the Chicago Sun-Times on Sunday the report would support Blagojevich’s claims that he hasn’t done anything wrong in his handling of Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat.

Earlier in the week, Obama released the internal report supporting his insistence that there had been no inappropriate contact with the governor’s office by Obama or his staff.

State Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie, chairwoman of the committee, said Sunday that Genson’s request to submit the report would probably be approved. But she expressed skepticism that the report would prove the governor’s innocence.

“Maybe in this particular instance someone didn’t run a stop sign, but it doesn’t say they didn’t run a different stop sign,” she said.

The House panel is scheduled to meet Monday.

Genson’s move comes after the committee rejected his request to subpoena incoming Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, whose testimony he said would also bolster Blagojevich’s claims of innocence.

“Since I can’t subpoena anyone, this is the next best thing,” Genson said.

The panel rejected his subpoena request after U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said testimony from Emanuel and others would interfere with his investigation.

Currie said Fitzgerald has not yet responded to the committee’s request to access wiretap recordings used to build the case against Blagojevich.

“They understand this is urgent,” Currie said of the U.S. attorney’s office, “so I suspect we’ll hear from them very soon.”

Blagojevich was arrested Dec. 9 on charges accusing him of scheming to swap Obama’s vacant Senate seat for profit, shaking down a hospital executive for campaign donations and other wrongdoing. The two-term Democratic governor has declared his innocence and says he will fight the charges.

While Blagojevich has ignored repeated calls for his resignation, Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn said Sunday he expects Blagojevich to be impeached and removed from office by the Illinois Legislature by Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial birthday celebration on Feb. 12.

___

Information from: Chicago Sun-Times, http://www.suntimes.com/index

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By ROCHELLE HINES
Associated Press Writer

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) _ Retired U.S. Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who developed and executed the Iraq invasion plan, said President-elect Obama will “do the right thing” when it comes to the war.

Franks, who spoke with reporters before being inducted into the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame, said that as a senator, Obama had limited access to those who conducted day-to-day military operations. As president, Franks said, Obama will gain a different perspective.

“I give him a lot of credit for being a very, very bright man,” Franks said Tuesday. “Nobody will have to give him instructions. He’ll figure it out all by himself. And at the end of the day, he’ll do the right thing.”

Obama pledged during the campaign to bring all combat troops home within 16 months of his inauguration Jan. 20.

Franks was commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command when the United States began military action in Afghanistan in 2001 and invaded Iraq in 2003. He retired in August 2003.

The Oklahoma-born, Texas-bred four-star general said the United States has 230 years of experience in changing administrations. “Sen. Barack Obama is going to be the next president of the United States and I’m going to support him.”

Franks said he would have to “wait and see” what a Democratic-controlled House and Senate would do to funding for the military, but hoped there wouldn’t be a decrease in money to upgrade equipment for the troops.

“What we need to do with our military is spend as necessary to get the right size force with the right kind of equipment,” he said.

“It seems to me it would be a little disingenuous for the Democrats on the one hand to complain that not all American soldiers have the very best body armor or the very best Humvees … and then all of a sudden decide they need even less than they have now.”

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