National Public Radio often has "news judgment" that coincides with the agenda of liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union. So it's not surprising that they greeted Thanksgiving by highlighting that President Obama is nicer to turkeys than to human lawbreakers on Wednesday night's All Things Considered:
MARY LOUISE KELLY, substitute anchor: Now, presidents have been pardoning humans for much longer than they've been pardoning turkeys. But as White House correspondent Ari Shapiro reports, with this president, the turkeys are winning so far.
ARI SHAPIRO: As of today, President Obama's tally of pardons is as follows: turkeys, four; humans, zero.
The last two presidents have each been very slow to use the pardon power, despite a pile of requests before the pardon attorney at the Department of Justice. But pardons have become politically controversial in recent times. The ACLU is still complaining:
SHAPIRO: One reason could be the controversy surrounding some recent grants clemency. President Clinton was excoriated for pardoning fugitive financier Mark Rich his last day in office. President Bush was criticized for commuting the sentence of former White House aide Louis Scooter Libby. But those cases are the exception. Political scientist Ruckman says over 90 percent of pardons are granted to people who have already served their time. Clemency just clears their record and lets them vote, serve on a jury, or own a gun.
P.S. RUCKMAN, Rock Valley College: Their rights are simply being restored, so the idea that pardons require some kind of grand political capital to be spent is actually very ludicrous.
SHAPIRO: One woman whose petition is before President Obama is a 42-year-old mother and grandmother named Hamida Hassan. She is 16 years into a 27 year prison sentence for a first time nonviolent crack offense. The Nebraska judge who heard her case said he didnt want to give such a harsh sentence, but he saw no way to give a shorter term under federal sentencing guidelines at the time. Under the sentencing guidelines now in place, Hassan would have already served her time. Jay Rorty of the ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project is leading a campaign on behalf of Hassan.
JAY RORTY: I have worked with prisoners for a long time and I've never seen the volume of letters and support from prison officials themselves in support of commutation.
SHAPIRO: But so far there's no word from the White House on this pardon or any other. In recent decades, half of all human pardons have been granted in the month of December, so Hamida Hassan and all the rest might have better luck next month.
The ACLU were also featured in another Wednesday night story (just before the turkey pardon), on the increasing momentum for keeping terrorist suspects in detention at Guantanamo. NPR's Dina Temple-Raston mildly suggested that Barack Obama is weighing keeping Guantanamo open, without reminding the listener that candidate Obama pledged to close it and President Obama signed an executive order two days into his presidency pledging to close it within a year.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Back in August, Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina quietly introduced a bill that would codify indefinite detention. He wanted to answer questions like what kind of enemy combatant could be locked up without trial; how much evidence would the government need? Now, holding people indefinitely happens already. What would be new here are clear rules to govern that. It's possible President Obama, rather than close Guantanamo, might end up backing a law that holds detainees indefinitely. Zarate says the Ghailani case shows the administration needs to define detention better than it has.
JUAN ZARATE, former Bush official: The decision may be crystallizing in certain ways, especially in the postelection environment. They may speak about it more publicly or more directly. But I think in many ways, they've already made this decision.
LAURA MURPHY (ACLU, Washington): It's un-American to hold people forever without charge or trial.
TEMPLE-RASTON: That's Laura Murphy of the ACLU's Washington office. She worries that codifying indefinite detention will end up of legitimizing it. And she says it raises a number of questions. What if the detainees suspected of terrorism are actually innocent? What kind of system would there be to determine that? Would there be any kind of judicial review? Benjamin Wittes of Brookings says in definite detention without rules, which happens now, should concern people more.
WITTES: If your concern is not legitimizing it, lying about it is a very strange way to do that. And right now, what we are doing as a society is lying to ourselves about the detention that we engage in.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Incoming House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith of Texas is working on a companion bill to Senator Graham's effort. Administration officials told NPR they didn't want to discuss the legislation before they see what's in it.
It's not surprising for Temple-Raston to feature the ACLU -- she was hired in 2007 as she was finishing up a book co-authored with ACLU executive director Anthony Romero on "the dangerous erosion of the Bill of Rights in the age of terror" under Bush. So much for nonpartisanship in public radio. Howard Kurtz reported then: "She says NPR editors came up with 'common sense' guidelines that do not allow her to quote Romero or profile the ACLU, but that still allow her to use the organization as a source." That would explain why Laura Murphy was quoted instead of her book-writing pal.
