The Altera Centauri collection has been brought up to date by Darsnan. It comprises every decent scenario he's been able to find anywhere on the web, going back over 20 years.
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Call To Power 2 Cradle 3+ mod in progress: https://apolyton.net/forum/other-games/call-to-power-2/ctp2-creation/9437883-making-cradle-3-fully-compatible-with-the-apolyton-edition
You know if it goes beyond three paragraphs with lots of white space it won't get read. Summary?
-=Vel=-
The list of published books grows. If you're curious to see what sort of stories I weave out, head to Amazon.com and do an author search for "Christopher Hartpence." Help support Candle'Bre, a game created by gamers FOR gamers. All proceeds from my published works go directly to the project.
Well maybe not Bush III (just yet), but can anyone here seriously try to ethically justify purportedly ending torture with one hand while the other hand's forcefully defending it in court? I'm genuinely curious. (Ramo, I'm looking in your direction...)
I don't know why you would be. I like civil liberties, and rule of law. If torture victims are not able to seek redress, that's a very bad thing. But redress is obviously less important than stopping the practice itself.
Barack Obama is not Russ Feingold or John Conyers. I don't know why everyone is so surprised when he does **** like this. He's said over and over again that he really doesn't want to prosecute various civil liberties and human rights violations from the Bush Admin (forward, not backward, etc.). He voted for telecom amnesty. Frankly, his record so far has been less objectionable than his campaign record indicated (for example, in the campaign he supported the NSA warrentless wiretapping, but Blair said that's ending).
But if you want a "justification," this is the most plausible one that I've read:
Why They Kept Secret
The State Secret Privilege is perhaps the most powerful executive tool available for any president to use, and thus the Obama administration's decision to preserve its invocation, in Mohamed v. Jeppesen, was immediately interpreted by the vocal civil libertarian community as a betrayal of its basic principles. During the campaign, Obama had criticized its use to preemptively dismiss civil lawsuits against the government. Adding to the current agitation, Obama aides have been silent about its reasoning and the process.
But based on interviews with current administration officials involved in the case, with Bush administration officials, as well as with national security law experts, a clearer explanation emerges.
Officials decided that it would be imprudent to reverse course so abruptly because they realized they didn't yet have a full picture of the intelligence methods and secrets that underlay the privilege's assertions, because the privilege might correctly protect a state secret, and because the domino effect of retracting it could harm legitimate cases, both civil and criminal, that are already in progress.
"If you decide today precipitously to waive this privilege, you can't get it back,
an administration official said. "If you decide to assert it, you can always retract it in the future."
Though Justice Department prosecutors tended to the case during the presidential transition, senior Obama administration officials at the department were involved in a brief but detailed review of the case; they included Eric Holder, the attorney general, who has been on the job for less than a week. The director of the CIA hasn't been confirmed yet; at the time of his hearing last week, nominee Leon Panetta had been briefed about some ongoing issues, but was not yet read in to most of the agency's classified activities.
Speculation about the underlying intelligence abounds. Some critics say that the administration agreed to keep the privilege assertion in place because it wants to participate in whatever illicit activities the privilege is meant to cover up. But many of those same critics argue that so much about the case is already in the public domain.
The officials who spoke would not discuss the particulars of the case. They did agree to discuss the various cross-pressures that the administration finds itself facing.
One is that many Obama administration legal experts believe that the privilege was recklessly abused during the past six years in particular, and that its application became political or punitive. To that end, Holder directed his staff to review all current assertions of privilege -- a review that won't be completed for several more weeks. It may very well be noted that foreign policy concerns aren't state secrets, and it shouldn't matter in a U.S. court of law whether Jordan's King would be politically inconvenienced, or whether, even the United States should have the ability to decide what constitutes a state secret in a case where people were tortured.
The state secrets privilege has been bureaucratically calcified to an extent that worries many experts, with the Department of Justice making the decision about what's harmful more and more often, and the CIA and other intelligence agencies having less of a say. There is evidence that the privilege has always been used in this way, but that the Bush Administration's invocations were subject to more (legitimate) watchdogging from the press and outside interests. Some Obama administration officials believe that the privilege's assertion is legitimate, but that the Supreme Court, in the case which gave rise to the privilege, was much too deferential to the government.
One problem: the glut of cases courts are dealing with force the administration's hand. "Courts are not going to allow them to have as much time to think through the policies," said Robert Chesney, a University of Texas authority on national security law.
Retracting the privilege in this case might subject the government to a host of claims that it cannot fight; it makes sense that the administration wants to manage how it handles the issue of accountability.
Then there are the secrets themselves.
Public documents in the case cite the cooperation with the U.S. of Pakistan and Morocco, but the government has hinted that a trial would necessitate the release of information that bears on many other countries as well, countries which may have signed classified security arrangements with the United States, and countries who don't torture but would retract their intelligence cooperation if its nature was to be publicly disclosed.
Similarly, though the Obama administration has promised to stop rendering prisoners to countries that torture, Obama might well wish to keep up intelligence cooperation on other matters; if a country like Jordan, which is known to have taken rendered prisoners and known to have cooperated on a secret basis with the U.S. on many other activities, decides that their internal political risk is too great, they may withdraw cooperation altogether. A new administration needs to be very careful about the signals it sends.
"These new officials at DOJ, because of their own past arguments, deserve the benefit of the doubt," said Ken Gude, a national security law specialist at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "I can't imagine that the magic wand has risen over them in the two weeks they've been office, so that they'll say, 'we were wrong, and the Bush Administration was right.'"
"I completely agree with the decision," said William Weaver, a professor at the Unviersity of Texas at El Paso and a long-time critic of the privilege. "You can't unring the bell. Once this stuff is out and it's been released, then it's over."
The senior administration official said that the decision should not be interpreted as a definitive administration statement on accountability for the Bush Administration, or even for the five Mohamed detainees who were tortured.
"We all recognize that it's a very complex and sensitive dynamic, but whatever the answer, discovery in a piece of private litigation is not it. It might be the [Sen. Pat Leahy] truth commission idea, a DOJ truth commission, or even investigations run by the Justice Department. There will be a national clearing of the air," the official said.
"Whether people like it or not, it is going to take us some time to figure us out." a senior administration official said.
A Justice spokesman declined to comment; a spokesperson for Leahy, who came out in favor of a truth and reconcilliation commission yesterday, said that her boss would have no comment on the Jeppesen case.
The Atlantic covers news, politics, culture, technology, health, and more, through its articles, podcasts, videos, and flagship magazine.
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way. "
-Bokonon
Wait, so is this administration merely trying to protect people who have "rendered" in the past, or is it actively seeking the legal right to continue the practice? Or are they taking an ambiguous stand? I can't wade through all that crud.
If it were me, I'd just throw the SOBs to the UN, or some other international body that doesn't have more important things to do. Shut up the radical left without wasting our own resources and distracting everyone's attention too much from other measures. But then, I suppose the "nope, it didn't happen and we won't let you prove it" approach has its appeal too.
February 10, 2009
Reporting from Washington -- Accused in a 2002 grenade blast that wounded two U.S. soldiers near an Afghan market, Mohammed Jawad was sent as a youth to Guantanamo Bay. Now, under orders by President Obama, he could one day be among detainees whose fate is finally decided by a U.S. court.
But in a potential problem, Pentagon officials note that most of the evidence against Jawad comes from his own admissions. And neither he nor any other detainee at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was ever told about their rights against self-incrimination under U.S. law.
The Miranda warning, a fixture of American jurisprudence and staple of television cop shows, may also be one of a series of constructional hurdles standing between Obama's order to close the island prison and court trials on the mainland.
A procession of similar challenges -- secret evidence, information from foreign spy services and coerced statements -- also could spell trouble for prosecutors.
All of these problems illustrate the larger difficulty that lies ahead as the nation moves from the "law of war" orientation used by the Bush administration in dealing with detainees to the civilian legal approach preferred by Obama.
“As a lifelong member of the Columbia Business School community, I adhere to the principles of truth, integrity, and respect. I will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.”
"Capitalism ho!"
I like civil liberties, and rule of law. If torture victims are not able to seek redress, that's a very bad thing. But redress is obviously less important than stopping the practice itself.
Barack Obama is not Russ Feingold or John Conyers. I don't know why everyone is so surprised when he does **** like this. He's said over and over again that he really doesn't want to prosecute various civil liberties and human rights violations from the Bush Admin (forward, not backward, etc.). He voted for telecom amnesty.
I'm so happy about this. Even the administration of a liberal constitutional law professor doesn't believe that enemy combatants have constitutional rights.
Wait, so is this administration merely trying to protect people who have "rendered" in the past, or is it actively seeking the legal right to continue the practice? Or are they taking an ambiguous stand? I can't wade through all that crud.
The basis of the decision is that, if the activities of the CIA are litigated, then other nations, terrorist, etc., would learn their methodologies. Because the plaintiffs were suing the defendant company for aiding the CIA's activities, the case cannot go forward because the plaintiffs would have to introduce testimony as to how the CIA operates.
Obama administration tries to kill Bush e-mail case
By PETE YOST – 2 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails.
Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush's eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama's Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration's bid to get the lawsuits dismissed.
During its first term, the Bush White House failed to install electronic record-keeping for e-mail when it switched to a new system, resulting in millions of messages that could not be found.
The Bush White House discovered the problem in 2005 and rejected a proposed solution.
Recently, the Bush White House said it had located 14 million e-mails that were misplaced and that the White House had restored hundreds of thousands of other e-mails from computer backup tapes.
The steps the White House took are inadequate, one of the two groups, the National Security Archive, told a federal judge in court papers filed Friday.
"We do not know how many more e-mails could be restored but have not been, because defendants have not looked," the National Security Archive said in the court papers.
"The new administration seems no more eager than the last" to deal with the issue, said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that sued the EOP.
The Executive Office of the President includes the president's immediate staff and many White House offices and agencies.
Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government.
The Justice Department "apparently never got the message" from Obama, Blanton said.
The department defends the government when it is sued.
The basis of the decision is that, if the activities of the CIA are litigated, then other nations, terrorist, etc., would learn their methodologies. Because the plaintiffs were suing the defendant company for aiding the CIA's activities, the case cannot go forward because the plaintiffs would have to introduce testimony as to how the CIA operates.
I suppose it would be unacceptable to keep the trial under wraps somehow, assuming that's even possible? Oh well.
I suppose it would be unacceptable to keep the trial under wraps somehow, assuming that's even possible? Oh well.
Yeah, I don't get that at all. FISA courts and DC Cir. detainee courts have closed proceedings all the time, even though there's always a slim chance of some Daniel Ellsberg wannabe risking jailtime by releasing what's disclosed in those proceedings, so why not do the same for tort cases like this as well? There's probably no statutory authority for closed-door proceedings and sealed evidence in this context, but since the admin could rectify that lacking promptly and effortlessly absent a filibuster, it's fair to conclude that Obama just doesn't have much of a hard-on for transparency. Not a big shock there.
The Obama Administration this week released its predecessor's post-9/11 legal memoranda in the name of "transparency," producing another round of feel-good Bush criticism. Anyone interested in President Obama's actual executive-power policies, however, should look at his position on warrantless wiretapping. Dick Cheney must be smiling.
In a federal lawsuit, the Obama legal team is arguing that judges lack the authority to enforce their own rulings in classified matters of national security. The standoff concerns the Oregon chapter of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi Arabian charity that was shut down in 2004 on evidence that it was financing al Qaeda. Al-Haramain sued the Bush Administration in 2005, claiming it had been illegally wiretapped.
At the heart of Al-Haramain's case is a classified document that it says proves that the alleged eavesdropping was not authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. That record was inadvertently disclosed after Al-Haramain was designated as a terrorist organization; the Bush Administration declared such documents state secrets after their existence became known.
In July, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the President's right to do so, which should have ended the matter. But the San Francisco panel also returned the case to the presiding district court judge, Vaughn Walker, ordering him to decide if FISA pre-empts the state secrets privilege. If he does, Al-Haramain would be allowed to use the document to establish the standing to litigate.
The Obama Justice Department has adopted a legal stance identical to, if not more aggressive than, the Bush version. It argues that the court-forced disclosure of the surveillance programs would cause "exceptional harm to national security" by exposing intelligence sources and methods. Last Friday the Ninth Circuit denied the latest emergency motion to dismiss, again kicking matters back to Judge Walker.
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