For legal reasons, Texas Department of State Health Services officials could not comment on the specific situation. However, press officer Carrie Williams said, “We are well aware of the allegations made by Operation Rescue and can assure the public we investigate each and every complaint thoroughly. Abortion facilities are one of the most highly regulated centers in the state and receive very few complaints overall. We inspect these facilities every year to ensure they are held to high standards.”

OR held a news conference at the state Capitol on the same day House lawmakers were debating legislation mandating sonograms before abortions. The House eventually decided to delay a vote until Thursday.

AG communications director Jerry Strickland said, “We have received information from the group. However, on an initial review of the report, it appeared that the Office of the Attorney General lacks jurisdiction over many of the issues in the report.”

Strickland said the AG would forward materials to the appropriate entities — to whom exactly will be determined as part of the review.

“If those entities substantiate violations, then we as lawyers for the state would accept referral for action pursuant to state law,” he said.

In addition to the AG and health officials, OR said it is filing complaints with the Texas Medical Board and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The group also sent each state legislator a copy of the report.

During a news conference today, OR president Troy Newman challenged the report targets and naysayers of the findings to pursue litigation against them immediately.

“If someone thinks that our allegations are not factual and believes they have evidence to disapprove us, let’s go to court,” Newman said. “Let’s put all the facts in front of a judge and jury. I look forward to any challenge.”

“Come and sue us,” Newman urged abortion providers in an interview following the conference. “I double-dog dare you.”

One of the centers in the report, Whole Women’s Health, has already disputed the claims presented by OR, who are accusing a dozen of the state’s abortion providers of breaking state and national law. The report, compiled from December 2010 to February 2011, lists the names of abortion doctors investigated alongside their alleged abuses and where they work.

Targets include five Whole Women’s Health Centers, a Planned Parenthood center in San Antonio and women’s clinics in Dallas and El Paso. Allegations include the illegal disposal of biomedical waste, illegal disposal of controlled substances, carelessness with patients’ confidential medical information, abuse of Texas’ ‘informed consent’ laws, and ‘a pattern of willingness to help minors evade parental consent laws and ignore the mandatory reporting of child sex abuse,’” according to the report, which can also be found on the group’s website, www.operationrescue.org. (Website contains graphic images.)

Group representatives said they will release more audio and multimedia evidence of the allegations soon.

During the investigation, OR sent a team of about 10-15 women undercover to abortion providers. Two of them, ages 22 and 19, spoke about the four weeks spent covertly soliciting the assistance of abortion facilities in four Texas cities -– Austin, San Antonio, Dallas and Fort Worth. Under false pretenses, changing information such as age, name and aesthetics such as hair color, the girls said they were “treated like sales” and “exploited to the fullest extent.” Many of the females were a part of Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, a California-based anti-abortion rights group of college and high school women born after Roe v. Wade, said Ashley Colantuone, a member and undercover participant.

When asked if the group had any ethical qualms, both Newman and Colantuone voiced confidence in the clandestine process they took to reveal what they consider “shocking abuses.”

Newman’s stated legislative priority is to “end all abortion,” and referenced the organization’s efforts in teaming up with Americans United for Life in support of legislation in the Iowa House and Senate that would stop telemedicine abortion procedures by Planned Parenthood, as also reported by our sister site the Iowa Independent.

AUL is also the group behind efforts to enact ‘justifiable homicide’ statutes that could encourage violence against abortion providers, according to Mother Jones. (The Iowa Independent reported on related legislation in Iowa.)

Calling Texas’ proposed pre-abortion sonogram bill, “necessary legislation,” OR legal counsel Brian Chavez said the bill does not go far enough, taking issue with its lack of enforcement.

(Image by: Matt Mahurin)

[Richard Cordray, the Attorney General for the state of Ohio] has filed a lawsuit in Lucas County (Toledo) Common Pleas Court against GMAC Mortgage and their parent company Ally Financial, in a suit which names Jeffrey Stephan, the infamous “robo-signer” who signed off on up to 10,000 foreclosures a month across the country with affidavits, without verifying the information in the foreclosure documents. The lawsuit alleges fraud on the part of GMAC, along with violations of the Ohio Consumer Sales Practices Act, in filing false affidavits to mislead the courts in what they describe as “hundreds” of Ohio foreclosure cases. And, the Attorney General is treating every single false affidavit filed in an Ohio court as a separate violation, with a fine of up to $25,000, plus additional restitution for the homeowner of an unspecified amount.

This is a major lawsuit, and as Cordray told reporters, “We’re at the beginning of this, not the middle or end, and we’ll see where it leads us.” For context, approximately 450,000 foreclosures have been filed in Ohio since 2005, and potentially all of them used this robo-signing process. At the outer edge of this, if every one of those foreclosure processes is seen as a single case of fraud, the fines for the entire lending industry would add up to $11.25 BILLION dollars, just in the state of Ohio, not including the extra restitution for homeowners.

And political pressure is growing from all levels of government — local, state and federal, from attorneys to senators — for all banks to halt all evictions until the paperwork fiasco is sorted out. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), for instance, sent out this advisory this afternoon, calling for a halt to evictions in Michigan:

Thus far, only three lenders — [Ally], Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase — have ceased post-foreclosure enforcement actions in 23 states that have court-controlled foreclosure proceedings: Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin. Even those lenders appear to have only ceased evictions, while they continue to engage in foreclosures, which take title from homeowners.

At this point Michigan and 26 other states are not on the moratorium list for these lenders, purportedly because they have a non-judicial foreclosure process. However, without judicial oversight, the possibility of abuse can be even greater in these states. As a result, elected state officials in non-judicial foreclosure states such as California, Colorado, Texas, Massachusetts, and Maryland have recently asked lenders to suspend their foreclosures.

And Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) is calling for Treasury and Housing and Urban Development officials to name a special investigator into the fraud crisis and to halt foreclosures in the meantime. In a letter, he writes:

According to credible reports … Ally Financial did not exercise proper professional standards as decisions were made about the fate of families struggling to maintain their homes. These reports are even more disturbing because the U. S. Government is a majority stakeholder in Ally Financial. The recent freeze in foreclosures announced by J.P. Morgan Chase, GMAC Mortgage, and Bank of America while internal investigations take place suggests that this problem may be widespread and not limited to poor management at a single company.

Accordingly, I request that the full resources of your departments, and of other relevant agencies of the U. S. Government, be brought to bear on this situation. Specifically, I urge you to jointly appoint an independent investigator to examine the foreclosure actions at the major loan servicers. I believe that foreclosures initiated by Ally Financial and other servicers with established problems should not be allowed to move forward until it can be ascertained that all proper steps were followed for any affected homeowner.

Cuccinelli has been criticized for using his post to promote his own political agenda. He established a political action committee March 23, the same day Obama’s health care reform bill became law — and the same day Cuccinelli filed a suit against it. His website, titled “Stop the Mandate,” links to a petition against enacting the health care reform law in Virginia and solicits donations for future campaigns. Cuccinelli jumped into the national immigration debate Friday, when he wrote an opinion allowing police officers in the state to check immigration status of anyone stopped or arrested in the state.

He told MSNBC he simply is being realistic about the need for money to defend himself against opponents:

The day after the election, I immediately start running the next election. I’m not a fool, I’m becoming a target, and I know I’m becoming a bigger target. We are attempting to defend ourselves.

The petition is an attempt to generate public support, and I will tell you that I have never seen in 20 years of my political activity citizens so willing to study the substance of the issue before them…and we’re trying to take full advantage of that to educate Virginians about how these first principles affect policies in the real world.

Asked what the next election would be, Cuccinelli confirmed he plans for reelection for attorney general in 2013, but was silent on further aspirations. “We’ll start under the presumption that I’m running for reelection, we’ll see where that ends up,” he told MSNBC.

What do the three men have in common? They’re all Republicans running for governor.

Corbett is the only attorney general in the mix who already clinched the Republican nomination in his state. He’s set to face Democrat Dan Onorato in November and has polled well among Pennsylvanians who support SB 1070 — which is popular in the state. Cox is running against four other candidates for the GOP nomination, and is using his tough immigration stance to differentiate himself from the other candidates before the Aug. 3 primary. McCollum will face his primary opponent, Rick Scott, on Aug. 24 after defending himself against claims of flip-flopping on immigration. Expect the amicus brief shows of support to be a talking point.

Casting himself as a lowly functionary in the administration with less access to the president than an intern, Yoo — now a Berkeley professor who frequently faces protests from students who say he’s responsible for the Bush administration’s torture policies — says he was just following orders.

Of those torture papers, he says: “I had to write them. It was my job. As a lawyer, I had a client. The client needed a legal question answered.”

His parents, he tells Solomon when she asks about his childhood, were both psychiatrists. Not that he’s in denial or anything.

“Attorney General Holder testified here not long ago about his decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other terrorsts to New York for civilian trials, which is an action that makes your mission more difficult,” Sessions said to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who is slated to testify.

“Bringing foreign nationals into the United States allows them to take advantage of certain immigration laws and assert special rights,” he continued. “At the last oversight hearing the attorney general seemed unaware of the consequences,” including that it “has the potential of resulting in their being released into the United States.”

Sessions didn’t mention that Holder also testified at that hearing that even if KSM and his alleged co-conspirators are acquitted at trial, the U.S. government would continue to hold them indefinitely under the laws of war as “unprivileged enemy belligerents.”

The rally, shown in the video below the jump, was held across the street from the courthouse where Holder wants to try self-described 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others, and less than a mile from the former World Trade Center, where the attacks occurred. It ended with both speakers and the crowd calling for Holder’s resignation.

A variety of conservative groups, Tea Party activists, retired policemen and other New Yorkers who remember the attacks vividly turned out to protest Holder’s decision to “give terrorists the same rights as U.S. citizens.” Many held signs calling for the impeachment of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, at times calling them “the real terrorists.”

Robert Dann, the son of a firefighter from Merrick, N.Y., called Holder’s decision a “moral disgrace.”

“I do not want them here spewing their hate against America,” he said. Like many others at the rally, Dann was also protesting other administration policies, such as “the outrageous spending going on by this government” which he called “pro-socialism.”

Speakers at the rally focused on the 9/11 trials, and called on the audience to protest Holder’s decision and to urge their Congressional representatives to interfere.

“Are you angry?” asked Edie Lutnick, executive director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, which provides aid to victims of terrorism, disasters or other emergencies. “Are you going to do what you need to do to change this?”

Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and National Review contributing editor, told the cheering crowd: “We’re back here, because he thinks it’s a crime, and we know it’s a war,” referring to Holder. “Sixteen years ago, when they declared war with us, we answered with subpoenas,” McCarthy said, referencing the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. “They attacked, and we indicted.”

“There are people here who after 9/11 were fighting terrorists, while the people who are running this government were at Guantanamo Bay representing terrorists,” he continued, apparently referring to lawyers currently in the administration who earlier worked to help Guantanamo detainees secure the right to challenge their detentions in court. (Neal Katyal, now the department’s deputy solicitor general, represented Salim Hamdan in his habeas corpus case, and some lawyers from Holder’s former law firm represented Guantanamo detainees as well.) “We are here because we want justice, we want the rule of law,” said McCarthy.

Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, asked “How are we going to find a jury that can be safe and secure, with Khalid the Schmuck Mohammed?”

Actor Brian Dennehy read a statement from Judea and Ruth Pearl, the parents of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whom Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claims to have beheaded in Pakistan in 2002. From the statement:

We, who witnessed the darkest side of hell, and have since spent every moment of our lives studying the anatomy of terror, we refuse to accept the strategy of normalization that Holder’s decision represents. Terror is a crime against society, and should not be tried in the same court as crimes against individuals or against a particular country.

Toward the close of the rally, the crowd heard from David Beamer, the father of Todd Beamer, the passenger on Flight 93 who led an attack on the hijackers, and uttered the famous last words, “let’s roll.”

“Mr. President, do not convey constitutional rights to the enemy,” he said. “Right this wrong, stop this attack.” Beamer called for Holder’s resignation, and the crowd replied with the chant: “Holder must go!”

This post was updated at 7:02 p.m. to include the statement of Judea and Ruth Pearl.

Eventually, the Justice Department did step away from Yoo’s defense — although Yoo’s personal lawyer, former GOP judicial nominee Miguel Estrada, is still being paid by U.S. taxpayers.

Now, despite having already filed briefs on Yoo’s behalf in the district court arguing that as a former DOJ lawyer he should not be held liable for the consequences of his legal advice sanctioning torture, the Justice Department has filed yet another brief in the case, making essentially the same argument, this time on the government’s own behalf.

In an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief filed to the appeals court yesterday (the lower court had refused to dismiss the case), the Justice Department argues that the court should not allow a lawsuit against a government lawyer providing advice to the executive branch where the case implicates national security and war powers. Such liability “could deter frank and full discussions within the Executive Branch regarding such matters.”

Of course, if the executive branch had actually had a “frank and full discussion” about the legality of torture with more than just a couple of hand-picked lawyers who believed in absolute executive power in the first place, John Yoo and the rest of the country wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. But set that aside for a moment.

Footnote 1 of the brief implicitly acknowledges the weird conflict involved in the DOJ’s even filing this brief, though without explicitly noting that the DOJ already made these same arguments on Yoo’s behalf earlier.

The first footnote essentially says that the Justice Department is going to repeat only some of its earlier arguments this time but not others. Specifically, it’s not going to make the argument now that Yoo didn’t do anything wrong because the right not to be tortured wasn’t clear at the time he approved it. That’s because since filing that first brief making just that argument, the department realized that, whoops, Yoo is under an internal ethics investigation, so maybe we should just stay out of this.

Dave Hoffman at Concurring Opinions interprets the footnote this way: “We’d like to join and expand on Yoo’s arguments about his good faith behavior. But other parts of us are still holding onto a report which may call into question the accuracy of that claim. Coincidentally and luckily, that report continues to be delayed, making it unnecessary for us to commit to a position that would be internally incoherent.  Do us a favor and resolve this on constitutional grounds, would ya?”

To be sure, that hasn’t stopped the Justice Department from making the argument elsewhere that torture wasn’t clearly illegal when Yoo sanctioned it. In the case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld, for example, that’s precisely the argument the Obama administration is still making. In fact, as I noted recently, the administration is going even further than that. In a brief recently filed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Obama Justice Department argued that under its own interpretation of the law, there is no constitutional right not to be tortured by U.S. authorities in U.S.-run prisons abroad.

Attorney General Eric Holder (WDCpix)

When Attorney General Eric Holder announced earlier this month that the suspected plotters of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks would be tried in civilian court, he also promised to seek the death penalty for all of them. But the heated debate that followed over the supposed dangers of trying “the worst of the worst” in a New York federal court has largely eclipsed the question of whether the death penalty is actually the best punishment for convicted terrorists.

[Law1]Some of the men have not only proudly claimed responsibility for the attacks, but also said that they want to be executed and martyred. Setting aside any moral concerns about the ultimate punishment, it’s not clear in this case whether the death penalty would act as a deterrence or an incitement to other potential terrorists. When it comes to jihadists who willingly risk or relinquish their own lives for their cause, is the death penalty really such a good idea?

“It is in the strategic interests of the United States to deny these most heinous Al Qaeda terrorists what they want most: martyrdom,” wrote Ken Gude, associate director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress, in a report released earlier this month. “Al Qaeda will exploit an execution by the U.S. government as a significant propaganda victory, no matter how fair and legitimate the trial,” he added in an article in The Guardian.

Even former Attorney General Michael Mukasey said last year that he hoped that these men would not be executed. Asked by students at the London School of Economics in 2008 whether he thought the Sept. 11 defendants, who were then facing military commission trials, should get the death penalty, he said: “I kind of hope they don’t get it. Because many of them want to be martyrs and it’s kind of like the conversation, you know, between the sadist and the masochist. The masochist says ‘Hit me’ and the sadist says ‘No.’ So I am kind of hoping they don’t get it.”

Other legal experts agree, but for different reasons. “I think the fact that the defendants want to be executed shouldn’t count either way,” said Michael Dorf, a law professor at Cornell University, who advocated against the death penalty for these suspects when they faced military commission trials last year. “However, I do think it is legitimate for the government to worry about the possible counter-productivity of the death penalty here. That is, if the government had concluded that executing [Khalid Shaikh Mohammed], et al were likely to substantially aid Al Qaeda in recruiting, a decision not to seek the death penalty could be based in part on that worry.” According to Dorf, executing the men not only wouldn’t deter other terrorists from committing similar crimes, but could even encourage them.

This debate comes at a difficult time for President Obama and his attorney general. The president has promised to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center by Jan. 22, but faces huge challenges. Those range from where to try the suspected terrorists housed there to where to send those that have been cleared for release but can’t be sent home due to potential persecution or political instability. Republicans, citing the dangers to the United States of trying terrorists on our soil and claiming the terrorists don’t deserve the rights accorded to criminal defendants in federal court, have pushed to try most terror suspects in military commissions. Many Democrats, prominent legal experts and former military leaders, on the other hand, have argued that civilian federal courts are better-equipped to handle such cases and would confer a legitimacy on the trials that is critical to restoring the United States’ reputation around the world. In deciding to try the Sept. 11 suspects in federal court, then, the Obama administration is eager to look like it’s still being tough on terrorism and its perpetrators. That may be influencing the decision to seek the death penalty.

Other countries have faced similar debates in the face of repeated terrorist attacks, and ultimately decided that executing terrorists was counterproductive. Although the death penalty is now outlawed in all European Union countries, when the U.K. House of Commons debated whether to repeal the death penalty in Northern Ireland in 1973, there was widespread agreement that executing terrorists, who often wanted to martyr themselves, would only lead to increased violence and terrorism.

The question raises a classic conundrum for criminal law theorists. Punishment in the American justice system is supposed to punish the criminal in a way that seems proportionate to the crime and also deter others from committing similar acts. But if suicide bombers are blowing themselves up for the cause, how much of a deterrent is the death penalty to these sorts of terrorists?

“It doesn’t make sense as a deterrent,” said Columbia Law Professor Jeffrey Fagan in an email. “Deterrence assumes a rational actor who perceives that the punishment costs exceed the benefits of the crime, and who will not act against his or her own self-interest. in this case, the punishment is no match for either the rewards of striking a significant blow at ‘The Great Satan’ or the rewards of martyrdom.”

Richard Dieter, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, agrees. “Terrorists expect to die or want to die,” he said. “There’s a chance that the death penalty feeds into that.” After the federal death penalty in the U.S. was expanded in 1994 to include terrorism, Dieter notes, “the very next year Timothy McVeigh blows up the Oklahoma federal building. So I don’t think anybody believes it’s much of a deterrent. It might even be an attractor.”

Of course, another purpose of criminal punishment is retribution. Under that theory, the criminal is supposed to get his just desserts –– an eye for an eye, in biblical terms. “For retribution, it doesn’t matter what his preferences are,” says Claire Finkelstein, professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

“Simply put, these monsters who specifically target civilians have no right to live,” wrote Rabbi Stuart Weiss, director of the Jewish Outreach Center of Ra’anana,in a recent op-ed in the Jerusalem Post, arguing that Israel, which has abolished the death penalty for almost all crimes, should reinstate it for terrorists. “They have forfeited the most basic human privilege by virtue of their crimes; any punishment save death is too good for them and is an obscene insult to the grieving victims of terror.”

It’s the classic notion of retribution. “The idea is that you return to the defendant what he has inflicted on the victim,” said Finkelstein. She herself doesn’t really think that’s possible, though. “There is no way to kill this man nearly 3,000 times, or force him to experience what his victims suffered as they tried to escape the twin towers,” she said.
Still, logical and even strategic considerations are often not what guides such decisions.

“There’s a lot of politics involved,” says Dieter. The Obama administration’s latest decisions on closing Guantanamo and trying terror suspects in federal court has opened it up to a rash of criticism from conservatives . “Maybe it’s part of this total picture that we’re closing this prison down there but that doesn’t mean we’re going to be soft on them,” said Dieter. “Once you open up the whole political world, the calculations are different.”