Tuesday Reads

Good Morning!!!

It’s the end of a long weekend that celebrates the life of an American with vision, purpose, and fortitude in the pursuit of principle.   The news at the moment is as glum as the weather.  I will try to end the morning reads on higher and lighter ground.  I promise.

With that, I start with Glenn Greenwald at Salon and ‘The U.S. role in Gulet Mohamed’s detention’.  Thought we were done torturing people and denying them due process?  Dream on!  This is the story of a young American held in extraordinary conditions in the extraordinary country of Kuwait that basically still owes us their oil fields and freedom from the occupation by Saddam Hussein.  Gulet’s been held in some horrible situations that beg the question of who is responsible?  Is it some Sultan or President Obama?  Yes, this is change you can believe in if you’re Dick Cheney. Gulet and his family were led to believe that he would be released and sent home.  Home is the U.S. because he is a US citizen.  He deserves a lawyer and due process.  Now, he’s on the no-fly list and you know what that means.

As an American citizen, Gulet has the absolute right to return to and re-enter his country.  But by secretly placing him on the no-fly list while he was halfway around the world — and providing no information about why he was so placed — the U.S. Government is denying him his right to return.  Worse, they know that this action is not only preventing him from returning, but is keeping the 19-year-old in a state of absolute legal limbo, where’s he imprisoned by a country that admits it has no cause for holding him and does not want to hold him, yet which cannot release him.  The U.S. government has the obligation to assist its citizens when they end up detained without cause; here, they are doing the opposite:  they’re deliberately ensuring it continues.

If there’s any evidence that he has has done anything wrong, he should be charged, indicted, and brought back to the U.S. for trial.  What the Obama administration is doing instead is accomplishing what they could not do if he were in the U.S.:  holding him without a shred of due process, interrogating him without a lawyer present, and — if his credible claims are to believed — using beatings and torture to get the information it wants (or false information:  Gulet told me he was very tempted to falsely confess to make the beatings stop).  This abuse of the no-fly list is a common tactic used by the U.S. Government to circumvent all legal and constitutional constraints when it comes to its own citizens; this case just happens to be extra viscerally repellent.

Let’s see what our Secretary of State can do about this.

Not too long ago, our intrepid frontpager BostonBoomer took us down memory lane in pursuit of the vast criminal background that fills the resume of our head Inquisitor, Darrell Issa.  Now, it appears The New Yorker does the same. Just remember, your read it here first.  Skip the first two pages, those read like some blah blah blah  American Fairy Tale.  When you hit the rest, look for the pattern of insurance scams, crime, and a fortune that appears to be based in car theft.  The justice system is likely the force behind young Issa going into the military.   The unraveling of the Fairy Tale begins in 1998–like so many do–with a political tall tale that reflects the spin and not the facts.  Some one fact checked Issa’s campaign material.

In May of 1998, Lance Williams, of the San Francisco Examiner, reported that Issa had not always received the “highest possible” ratings in the Army. In fact, at one point he “received unsatisfactory conduct and efficiency ratings and was transferred to a supply depot.” Williams also discovered that Issa didn’t provide security for Nixon at the 1971 World Series, because Nixon didn’t attend any of the games.

A member of Issa’s Army unit, Jay Bergey, told Williams that his most vivid recollection of the young Issa was that in December, 1971, Issa stole his car, a yellow Dodge Charger. “I confronted Issa,” Bergey said in 1998. “I got in his face and threatened to kill him, and magically my car reappeared the next day, abandoned on the turnpike.”

Bergey died of lung cancer in 2002, but his widow, Joyce, recently said to me that she remembered her husband telling the story of the stolen Dodge Charger. She laughed when she heard that Issa is now a prominent member of Congress. “Well, he probably figured he was borrowing it from a friend,” she said. “But now we’re discussing politicians, so we all know how honest they are. When I meet a good one, I’ll let you know.”

Issa was transferred to a supply depot in the military.  That explains a lot.  For example, how does a guy coming out of the army find the funds for a really expensive sports car?   Only in America can this sort’ve  fractured fairy tale occur and play out in success.  Issa is bad news.   This is the second time I’ve linked to BB’s expose and it will not be the last.  We can muckrake with the best of them here and we intend to keep it up.

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