March 2011

Gov. Scott Walker's aggressive tactics to crush collective bargaining in Wisconsin include a dark underbelly TPM's Josh Marshall writes.

Marshall highlights a situation involving University of Wisconsin professor William Cronon who wrote a blog post at Scholar as Citizen examining the "sudden and impressively well-organized wave of legislation being introduced into state legislatures that all seem to be pursuing parallel goals only tangentially related to current fiscal challenges - ending collective bargaining rights for public employees, requiring photo IDs at the ballot box, rolling back environmental protections, privileging property rights over civil right ...."

Cronon also authored a piece for The New York Times in which he compared Gov. Walker's (pictured) efforts to push an anti-workers' rights measure through the state legislature to the infamous work of former U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy.

Professor Cronon's criticism, Marshall writes, triggered a harsh reaction from the Wisconsin Republican Party. It lodged "a state open records request to gain access to Cronon's personal emails to get a look at what communications or discussions or sources or anything else" that went into Cronon's work.

Marshall writes:

Now, 'personal' is up for some reasonable debate here. This is his university email. And he's a Professor at the University of Wisconsin, the state university. So he's a state employee. Still, he's not an elected official or someone doing public business in the sense you'd ordinarily understand the term. Nor are they looking at anything tied to the administration of the University, which is legitimately a public matter. In the ordinary sense we tend to understand the word it's his personal email. And the range of requested documents leave no doubt about what they're after.

Cronon has responded to the Republican Party's move, noting its use of the state open records request is a "perversion" of the law, Marshall noted.

In his New York Times column, Cronon said Gov. Walker's conduct, which has spurred enormous protests at the state capitol, "has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War. Many citizens are furious at their governor and his party, not only because of profound policy differences, but because these particular Republicans have exercised power in abusively nontransparent ways that represent such a radical break from the state's tradition of open government."

In a guest post for ACSblog, former Wis. Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager lauds state Judge Maryann Sumi for temporarily halting Gov. Walker's bill to strip collective bargaining rights from workers, saying it was a blatant violation of the state's open meetings law.

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By Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, past president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Cohn edited The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse, a collection of essays.

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Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is facing court-martial for leaking military reports and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, is being held in solitary confinement in Quantico brig in Virginia. Each night, he is forced to strip naked and sleep in a gown made of coarse material. He has been made to stand naked in the morning as other inmates walked by and looked. As journalist Lance Tapley documents in his chapter on torture in the supermax prisons in The United States and Torture, solitary confinement can lead to hallucinations and suicide; it is considered to be torture. Manning's forced nudity amounts to humiliating and degrading treatment, in violation of U.S. and international law.

Nevertheless, President Barack Obama defended Manning's treatment, saying, "I've actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures . . . are appropriate. They assured me they are." Obama's deference is reminiscent of President George W. Bush, who asked "the most senior legal officers in the U.S. government" to review the interrogation techniques. "They assured me they did not constitute torture," Bush said.

The order for Manning's nudity apparently followed what he described as a sarcastic comment he made to guards after their repeated harassment of him regarding how he was to salute them. Manning said that if he were intent on strangling himself, he could use his underwear or flip-flops.

"In my 40 years of hospital psychiatric practice, I've never heard of something like this," said Dr. Steven Sharfstein, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association. "In some very unusual circumstances, when people are intensely suicidal, you might put them in a hospital gown. ... But it's very, very unusual to be in that kind of suicide watch for this long a period of time."