Bloody Lawyers – Page 21

Throw back the little ones and pan-fry the big ones

Published on August 30, 2006

Is it hip to be a Steely Dan fan again yet? Whether it is or no I’ve always liked them and I’ve been relistening to Aja lately, which is why this odd little snippet of gossip in the Grauniad caught my eye:

Please, if anyone knows what Steely Dan duo Walter Becker and Donald Fagen are on or up to then let us know. As previously reported they recently wrote an open letter to actor Luke Wilson complaining that his actor brother Owen used their song Cousin Dupree as the basis for his character in You, Me and Dupree. Now they have posted an 1,800 word open letter to Wes Anderson, who directed the Wilsons in The Royal Tenenbaums and Bottle Rocket. “Surely,” they write, “we are not the first to tell you that your career is suffering from a malaise.” They then write suggested lyrics for Anderson’s next film and end up asking that a cheque for $400,000 (?210,000) be FedExed to them.

I sensed some backstory here, so I did a little google. Here’s the full text of the letter to Luke Wilson. nd here’s the letter to Wes Anderson. I love the language, very 1975.

It’s like a little window back in time. Pass the bowl man. The whole thing’d be kinda sweet, if it weren’t just so goddamned breadheaded.

The whole letter reads like a comedic screenplay. In my mind’s eye I see Donald Sutherland as Fagan and Kevin Spacey as Becker ( ymmv, obviously) but I’m really not quite sure about the director … the Coen brothers maybe, or the Farrelly’s or some other indy-type sibling duo. Perhaps that’s just a tad obvious. I know who – Kevin Smith! Dude! Whatever, it just has to have a crazed John Goodman in it somewhere. He’d be perfect as as the psychotic Russian hired muscle… I’m feeling the excitement here, this could be a real pitch. Major studios please note, I thought of it first.

See how it works? Little fleas have bigger fleas upon their backs to bite ’em and bigger fleas have bigger fleas and so ad infinitum. I await my royalty demand from Becker & Fagan with bated breath.

Read more: Music, Gossip, Steely Dan , Seventies Nostalgia

“Gagged But Not Dead.” Yet.

Published on December 16, 2005

Remember Sibel Edmonds? She’s the whistleblower who exposed Bush administration ineptitude and malfeasance inside the FBI –

When she was hired by the FBI as a translator after 9-11, Edmonds, a Turkish American born in Iran and fluent in Farsi and Turkish among other languages, discovered an odd network within the FBI where, among other things, relatives of foreign diplomats were working as interpreters. They were translating FBI wiretaps of foreign diplomats suspected of spying. As it turned out, these suspect family members were relatives of the translators–in other words moles working in the translation section.

Edmonds found her own initials forged on improper translations of documents–translations she had never seen before.

Edmonds was startled when what she considered ill-trained and incompetent interpreters were sent to Guantanamo Bay to translate detainee interviews. For example, one Turkish Kurd was dispatched to interpret Farsi, a language he did not speak.

Edmonds learned that a longtime reliable FBI asset who reported on Afghanistan, told FBI agents in April 2001 of al Qaeda?s plans to attack the U.S.

In the course of her work, Edmonds discovered Islamic terrorists might well have become entangled in ongoing international drug and money laundering. She suspects that this knowledge was one of the reasons the Justice Department classified everything in her case.

When Edmonds sought to protest these and other irregularities to her superiors in the FBI, she was called a ?whore? by her supervising agent, who told her he would next see her in jail. She was dismissed and escorted out of the FBI building. Edmonds never got a hearing before the 9-11 Commission, though she did have a chance to tell her story, sort of, on the side. A recent federal appeals court hearing on her case was made secret in the interest of national security. All in all, she was cast out as an enemy of the state. To fight back, she has launched a new organization to protect other government whistleblowers.

Copyright ? 2005 Village Voice Media, Inc.

The US government is pulling out all the stops to ensure Edmonds’ story is not made public.

In June 2002 the FBI itself acknowledged the truth of some of Edmonds’ allegations, and US Senators Grassley and Leahy wrote to the Justice Department Inspector General asking specific questions about Edmonds’ allegations – they say that the FBI has confirmed many of her allegations in unclassified briefings but that the letter stating this was later retroactively classified in May 2004. Members of congress have also published documents related to her case on their websites, only to be ordered to remove them on national security grounds.

I have often wondered why there seems to be a preponderance of women whistleblowers? Katherine Gun, Cynthia Cooper, Sherron Watkins, Colleen Rowley , Sarah Keays… it can’t be that women are more honest or fair minded than men. It’s only a personal theory, but it may be that as women tend to be kept outside the overwhelmingly male power structures within the average large organisation, they are already alienated, which might make coming forward less of a moral dilemma. Whatever the motivation, or gender, whistleblowers need support.

Edmonds has now gone online with her website, Just A Citizen. She has a petition to get rid of the gag order and requests that people link to her site to ensure the information stays out there. She is worried, and I can hardly blame her – these are not good people and they’ve shown few scruples so far. We owe it to principled whistleblowers to help, and we particularly owe it to women whistleblowers. They’re not just fighting organisational corruption alone, but as women, they have to fight doubly hard to be heard.

I urge you to link to the site and sign the petition. Let’s get the information out there. They can’t gag us all.

Defence lawyer at Guantanamo

Published on May 11, 2005

The Talking Dog has an interview with Joshua Dratel, defence lawyer for David Hicks, an Australian citizen held at Guantanamo Bay. The interview had some interesting nuggets in it:

Talking Dog: Any reason why Mr. Lindh was charged with a crime, whereas, for example, Yasir Hamdi, also a citizen, or Hicks, were denoted “enemy combatants” and not charged, while Zaccarias Moussaoui WAS charged? Has any of this ever been explained?

Joshua Dratel: It seems that the only “overt distinction” is that by original design, citizens are not eligible for the military commissions. Of course, they never made a distinction there in the case of Moussaoui– his case seemed to be the product of a debate betweeh the Departments of Justice and Defense as to which should prosecute him, and at that time, the criminal justice people prevailed. They have not, apparently, prevailed since.

In addition to Jose Padilla, as citizen unlawful combatants, a man named Al-Mari is still being detained in a brig in South Carolina; he’s represented by Larry Lusberg of the Gibbons firm in New Jersey. That case is completely off the radar.

[…]

Talking Dog: Can you briefly summarize what you in particular find unfair about the military commission process at Guantanimo?

Joshua Dratel: Basically, there are no rules. The Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs court-martials — that’s been thrown out. No standards at all. Total arbitrariness. No efforts at anything resembling fairness. Let’s start with evidence and proof. People don’t know this, of course. The government’s “proof” consists entirely of interrogators reading from reports of their interrogations– without any basis to challenge the underlying accounts of witnesses, such as the witnesses themselves (who have frequently been shipped out of Guantanamo) or their interpreters, or the conditions under which the statements were taken, which were frequently, to put it politely, “coercive.” Just statements from the detainees themselves– regardless of whether obtained from abuse, or coercion, even rising to torture. In the commissions, you simply can’t challenge them– you don’t have access to the witnesses.