The release of diplomatic cables by WikiLaeaks has provoked a strong reaction from the United States, but perhaps the most interesting part about them is what they reveal about an ally.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
(It's not just WikiLeaks that's being targetted. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
The Department of Homeland Security recently shut down dozens of web sites. Their legal authority to do so was questionable, as was the court's, and it is part of a disturbing trend.
Last Friday, deep in the middle of a long holiday weekend, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seized dozens of web sites. The full list is here, and a common reaction might be "well obviously they were engaged in illegal activity, so they had it coming." This is an example of what Glenn Greenwald mocked as trial by Wikipedia: the idea that if you bring up a topic which everyone can agree is self-evident, action may be taken without jumping through a whole bunch of tedious legal hoops.
In Greenwald's case he is describing the hit put out for Anwar al-Awlaki by the president. Supporters of Obama's assassination program protest that al-Awlaki is clearly a bad man - look at his Wikipedia page! - so it should not be necessary for courts to weigh in on the matter. If enough people who matter ("everyone") simply recognizes this, due process may be disposed of. Similarly, look at the list of domains seized: who could possibly argue that dvdsetcollection.com is engaged in any kind of legally protected activity? Why, the very name should be enough to convict!
There are several problems with this, one of which Steven Musil points out in his CNET article: Less than two weeks ago Oregon Senator Ron Wyden effectively killed a bill - the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act - that would have authorized precisely the DHS seizures carried out. How exactly does the government begin enforcement of a bill that not only has not yet been signed into law, but that is in the process of being actively rejected?
The issue was discussed on CNET's Buzz Out Loud podcast, which provided several of the links used in this post. Host Molly Wood has a particularly good take on the issue starting around the 10:14 mark; since it is a longish excerpt I have put the transcription after the main body. In it she references this article questioning the legality of the seizure on several grounds.
For instance, the seizure was announced (via) at Walt Disney Studios. Does DHS worry at all about seeming a little too cozy with private industry? With the seemingly endless examples of government officials leaving their posts and cashing in with companies who benefited from their tenure (here is this week's), shouldn't there be at least a gesture in that direction?
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
Since 9/11 the rallying cry of conservatives has been the authoritarian's mantra: If you aren't doing anything wrong, you shouldn't worry about an intrusive government. Now that an agency has finally gone too far for some of them, they have changed their tune. Civil libertarians should do something about that, and quickly - before it changes back.
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
I've been blogging for just about three and a half years now, and in the last week or so I have finally seen some movement on the subject of my very first blog post: an appeal for principled conservatives to push back on the civil liberties overreach of the executive branch. The right has generally had phenomenal ideological cohesion, so anyone who breaks ranks is usually an outsider to begin with (Andrew Sullivan, Daniel Larison) or quickly becomes one (Bruce Bartlett).
For most conservatives, the politics are the principle; that allows them to take contradictory positions over relatively short periods of time without recrimination. As Bartlett unhappily discovered, Republicans can cheerfully discard the pieties they mouth if it will help ensure a majority. Criticizing an expanding governmental role in health care will get you ostracized in an era of GOP rule, but it makes you a member in good standing during a Democratic one.
So the recent concern about the invasive and ineffective TSA search procedures is not surprising. Now that a Democrat is president there is flourishing concern over what the big, bad government is doing to innocent citizens. But as Adam Serwer writes, "This comprehensive assault on individual freedom didn't occur in a vacuum; it occurred because conservatives were successful in frightening Americans into choosing security over liberty every time the choice was before them, and because America's elected officials take being blamed for a terrorist attack more seriously than their oath to protect the Constitution." John Cole has been impatiently pointing this out as well. On this and other issues, right wing leaders tell their base what to believe.
Two aspects of it are surprising, though. The first is the way it has split, more cleanly than any other issue for the last few years, along establishment vs. outsider lines. DC newspapers have rallied (via) to support the government (via). It has not gone unnoticed. Both liberal and conservative commentators inside the Beltway - see Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein on the left, for example, and Marc Thiessen and the National Review editorial board on the right. See also Thomas Sowell if you need some comic relief. The Weekly Standard, bless its heart, did not have a single TSA item on its front page as of Wednesday.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
I am not going to pretend that I live inside the head of President Obama and his advisors, and thus understand their rationale for this move. Maybe they are doing it because they think it will help Democratic electoral chances. Maybe they actually think it is good policy. Maybe it is some combination of both.
The rationale, however, does not matter. We are not engaged in a debate about what goes on inside the minds of the leading figures in the administration, including Obama himself. What does matter is that this move will cost jobs in the middle of an ongoing employment crisis. Not only will this add to widespread hardship in this country, but it will have negative effects on the Democratic electoral position exceeding whatever minimal media optics the Obama administration will receive from this move.
On one level this is perfectly correct. What really matters is not what politicians think or say, but what they do, and the results their actions produce. But on another level, it matters enormously that we have no idea why Obama says and does the things he does. After all, the basis of democracy is that people deliberate and decide on what they will do collectively in the way of self-government. Proper deliberation depends upon open presentation of all the facts and arguments available. When things are hidden, deliberation is hindered, at the very least, if not corrupted, and ultimately destroyed. Leaders who honestly explain their actions foster democracy, whether one agrees with their positions or not. Leaders hide or deceive their motives and reasoning undermine democracy, even if one agrees with their actions.
This was one of the most central problems with the Bush Administration. One could quibble endlessly, splitting hairs over whether Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq, for example. Did he know for certain that what he said was not true? But all that was beside the point, as Lakoff pointed out in arguing that the basic issue was betrayal of trust, and as former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega pointed out in arguing that Bush should be impeached for perpetrating fraud in taking us to war.
Outright lying is just one of many ways that a government can erode the foundations of democratic legitimacy, and restoring that legitimacy was one of the most powerful motivations there was for ending the Bush regime. It was one of the most fundamental mandates that was bestowed on Barack Obama with his election--and it is a mandate that he has fundamentally ignored. Indeed, it is a mandate that he has betrayed.
To take just one example--albeit a very large, very central, very ugly one--consider Glenn Greenwald's column from the same day, "A growing part of the Obama legacy", in which he wrote:
Let's be clear: Arizona's new anti-immigrant law is not just racist, and unconstitutional, it's also dangerous to the law-abiding residents of Arizona. Anything that makes people afraid to come forward and cooperate with the police investigating crimes makes it harder for law enforcement to do its job, and that makes it easier for criminals to do theirs.
At her press conference where she actually signed the law, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said:
This bill, the "Support Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act," strengthens the laws of our state. It protects all of us, every Arizona citizen and everyone here in our state lawfully. And it does so while ensuring the constitutional rights of all within Arizona remain solid, stable and steadfast.
That's just a pack of lies. And not just the part about constitutional rights. All of it is a pack of lies.
Since 1979, the Los Angeles Police Department has operated under Special Order 40, which prohibits police officers from "initiat(ing) police action with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person." It was initiated by Chief Daryl Gates, who died just this past week. Gates had been called many things in his life, but "liberal" was not one of them. On April 9, The LA Times explained in an editorial:
The order was adopted in the late 1970s by then-Chief Daryl F. Gates, hardly a soft-on-crime liberal, who knew that the LAPD would be more effective if undocumented witnesses and victims felt free to speak with officers without fearing deportation. The order prevents officers from questioning people solely to determine their immigration status or arresting them solely for violations of immigration law. It does nothing to stop officers from arresting a violent suspect or calling in federal agents to investigate a person they believe illegally reentered the U.S. after deportation. It was good policy then and remains so today.
Special Order 40 is sound, sensible, effective and efficient police policy. It was initiated by a hard-ass conservative police chief. And it has worked for over 30 years--despite wingnut attacks based on lies and distortions (more on this below the fold).
On top of everything else, the Arizona law is clearly criminally stupid. Exactly what you'd expect from racist wingnuts. It is guaranteed to make law enforcement less efficient and less effective in Arizona. It is a pro-crime law. Period.
But what are we to do about it? Wait for the terminally risk-averse Obama Administration to accidentally find its backbone?
I don't think so. I think we need a massive wave of civil disobedience to overwhelm the Arizona criminal justice system, and make it overwhelmingly obvious that this law is morally unacceptable and unenforceable in America today. The only thing that gives me pause is the principle that I should not call for others to do what I am not willing to do myself. Which puts me in sort of bind. I have been arrested on principle before. I made the sacrifice then, because it was one I could consciously and fullly take on. If it meant two years--or possibly more--in prison to protest the Vietnam War at that time, I was willing to do it. But that doesn't count for anything now. I can't in good conscience be the one to lead this call. But I can say it is morally necessary, and I will fully support anyone who is willing to commit themselves and call on others to do the same. Waiting on the government and politicians to do the right thing is not sufficient, not when liberty, justice and equality are so viciously attacked.
1. Fighting for Economic Justice and Security in the U.S. and Global Economies
To uphold the right to universal access to affordable, high quality health care for all.
To preserve guaranteed Social Security benefits for all Americans, protect private pensions, and require corporate accountability.
To invest in America and create new jobs in the U.S. by building more affordable housing, re-building America's schools and physical infrastructure, cleaning up our environment, and improving homeland security.
To export more American products and not more American jobs and demand fair trade.
To reaffirm freedom of association and enforce the right to organize.
To ensure working families can live above the poverty line and with dignity by raising and indexing the minimum wage.
2. Protecting and Preserving Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
To sunset expiring provisions of the Patriot Act and bring remaining provisions into line with the U. S. Constitution.
To protect the personal privacy of all Americans from unbridled police powers and unchecked government intrusion.
To extend the Voting Rights Act and reform our electoral processes.
To fight corporate consolidation of the media and ensure opportunity for all voices to be heard.
To ensure enforcement of all legal rights in the workplace.
To eliminate all forms of discrimination based upon color, race, religion, gender, creed, disability, or sexual orientation.
3. Electoral Reform
Eliminate or reform the Electoral College so that a handful of states cannot game the system to override the will of the electorate;
Introduce Instant Runoff Voting so that a wider variety of political parties may compete in elections;
Eliminate private money in elections by creating a national, mandatory, publicly-funded election pot from which all federal candidates must draw; and
Pass laws, up to and including further amendment(s) to the Constitution, protecting the right of every citizen over the age of eighteen to vote.
4. Promoting Global Peace and Security
To honor and help our overburdened international public servants - both military and civilian.
To bring U. S. troops home from Iraq as soon as possible.
To re-build U.S. alliances around the world, restore international respect for American power and influence, and reaffirm our nation's constructive engagement in the United Nations and other multilateral organizations.
To enhance international cooperation to reduce the threats posed by nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction.
To increase efforts to combat hunger and the scourge of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other infectious diseases.
To encourage debt relief for poor countries and support efforts to reach the UN's Millennium Goals for Developing Countries.
5. Environmental Protection & Energy Independence
To free ourselves and our economy from dependence upon imported oil and shift to growing reliance upon renewable energy supplies and technologies, thus creating at least three million new jobs, cleansing our environment, and enhancing our nation's security.
To free ourselves and our economy from dependence upon imported oil and shift to growing reliance upon renewable energy supplies and technologies, thus creating at least three million new jobs, cleansing our environment, and enhancing our nation's security.
To change incentives in federal tax, procurement, and appropriation policies to:
(A.) Speed commercialization of solar, biomass, and wind power generation, while encouraging state and local policy innovation to link clean energy and job creation;
(B.) Convert domestic assembly lines to manufacture highly efficient vehicles, enhance global competitiveness of U.S. auto industry, and expand consumer choice;
(C.) Increase investment in construction of "green buildings" and more energy-efficient homes and workplaces;
(D.) Link higher energy efficiency standards in appliances to consumer and manufacturing incentives that increase demand for new durable goods and increase investment in U.S. factories;
To eliminate environmental threat posed by global warming and ensuring that America does our part to advance an effective global problem-solving approach.
To expand energy-efficient transportation choices by increasing investment in synthesized networks, including bicycle, local bus and rail transit, regional high-speed rail and magnetic levitation rail projects.
To preserve prudent public interest regulations that encourage sustainable growth and investment, ensure energy diversity and system reliability, protect workers and the environment, reward consumer conservation, and support an expanding marketplace that rewards the commercialization of energy-efficient technologies.
To protect, preserve, restore, and where reasonably possible expand wild lands and animal and plant populations endangered by human activity, reasonably compensating businesses and homeowners for damages or losses incurred by such.
Pass legislation and encourage community leadership to, among other acts: Increase funding to child placement services (foster care agencies); increase funding for comprehensive sex education programs that are proven to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies; increase awareness of the protective benefits of proper use of contraceptives, and increase access to them; increase funding for educational programs to spread awareness of sexually transmitted pathogens including viruses and bacteria, and their effects upon the human body; increase funding for prenatal care for unwed and low-income mothers; and expand daycare and nanny services to assist low-income families and single parents who choose to keep their children after birth.
7. Gun Control and State Militias
Adopt reasonable gun control laws that keep guns out of the hands of criminals, while preserving the 2nd Amendment right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms.
Restore full control of the National Guard units to their respective states, maintaining both a federal standing military and the individual state-controlled and regulated Militias.
8. Legalizing Marijuana
Legalize marijuana, and regulate it like tobacco and alcohol.
Increase funds to existing education and rehabilitation programs; create new programs and expand existing ones where necessary, to reduce addiction; pass common sense drug laws that focus on rehabilitation for non-violent offenders; and engage parents and community leaders to educate their children on the dangers of drugs.
Factory food sickens humans, livestock and the environment
What we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the last 10,000. So asserts Robert Kenner's new film, FOOD, Inc., which opens nationwide June 19th. The vast bulk of food production is now controlled by just a few mega-corporations with one value: profit. Relying on genetic engineering, pesticides and antibiotics, factory food is cheap, requiring little land. But the external costs to our health, the environment and the natural food industry are enormous.
Director: Robert Kenner
Producers: Robert Kenner and Elise Pearlstein
Co-Producer: Eric Schlosser
Released by Magnolia Pictures, with Participant Media and River Road Entertainment
93 minutes
FOOD, Inc. is the single most important film of the decade. Transcending hype and industry muzzling, the film exposes some of the cruel and unnatural aspects of industrial farms and food processing. It links epidemic rates of US obesity and diabetes with our intake of genetically engineered food.
NPR called it this summer's "suspense thriller."
The film condemns how workers and animals are abused. Illegal immigrants, who cannot complain about working conditions, comprise most of the workers at industrial food plants. They are vulnerable to raids and deportation. No corporate executives are arrested.
Well researched and well scored, the film debunks the pastoral fantasy spin. Industrial food is not grown, raised or processed on a farm. The animals see no sunshine, are kept immobile in cages, and are genetically or chemically modified. Those that are somewhat mobile are bioengineered to plump their bodies faster than their bones and muscles can support. They flop helplessly to the floor when trying to move.
Obama's Military Tribunals
Another Friday, another bow to Bush's antiterror legacy.
President Obama's endorsements of Bush-Cheney antiterror policies are by now routine: for example, opposing the release of prisoner abuse photographs and support for indefinite detention for some detainees, and that's just this week. More remarkable is White House creativity in portraying these U-turns as epic change. Witness yesterday's announcement endorsing military commissions.
White House officials insist that their tribunals will be kinder and gentler, stressing additional due-process safeguards for terrorists on trial for war crimes. But the debate that has convulsed the political system since 9/11 isn't about procedural nuances. It has been over core principles, with Democrats decrying a "shadow justice system" and claiming that "Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists."
The latter quote is from a speech by Senator Obama in 2007 denouncing "a legal framework that does not work." He also referred to the civilian criminal justice system and courts martial that Democrats then claimed, and many still claim, are the right venues for antiterror prosecutions. After the Supreme Court's Boumediene decision gave terrorists habeas rights, Mr. Obama again laid into the Bush Administration's "legal black hole" and "dangerously flawed legal approach," which "undermines the very values we are fighting to defend."
....Mr. Obama deserves credit for accepting that the civilian courts are largely unsuited for the realities of the war on terror. He has now decided to preserve a tribunal process that will be identical in every material way to the one favored by Dick Cheney -- and which, contrary to the narrative that Democrats promulgated for years, will be the fairest and most open war-crimes trials in U.S. history. Meanwhile, friends should keep certain newspaper editors away from sharp objects. Their champion has repudiated them once again.
And why shouldn't the WSJ be pleased? Glenn Greenwald, who's been all over this for months now, offered this short list of what Obama has done just this week:
So a Supreme Court justice that hardly anyone noticed has announced his retirement and all of a sudden the lips of The Experts are all a-flutter with the word "Empathy".
President Obama reports he wants his nominee to have it; and Republicans are convinced that the word is a secret code for something that eventually ends in the death of free speech, massive roundups of guns by the Secret United Nations World Police, and the Internment Of All The White People In Reeducation Camps Run By Americorps And ACORN And Gay People Who Want To Marry And Are Funded By George Soros.
It is suggested that Evil Activist Judges will trample the Constitution as they create Law out of whole cloth; and that only those who interpret the Constitution just as it was written can bring the proper attitude to the Court.
It sounds like somebody needs to come along and provide a couple of cogent thoughts about this whole empathy thing...and lucky for you, Gentle Reader, we have before us today specific examples of how the quality of empathy can express itself in Court Doctrine.
Dangerous Things are happening in America these days, we are told, and the once-innocent citizens of Iowa and Vermont have already been exposed to the hazard...and now it looks as though the contagion might spread to States across New England.
But lucky for us, our friends on the Right are here again to save to save us from...(insert horror film music here)...
...The Gay.
The Gay, it turns out, want the opportunity to marry.
Among other complaints, our friends on the Right feel this will destroy religious tradition, which will ultimately destroy first Christianity, then the Nation. Therefore, religious tradition must be protected at all costs.
Well as it turns out, there are some people from our past who know a few things about religious traditions and how they distort reality-and today, we'll examine the lessons they have to teach us.
Longtime readers of the Intrepid Liberal Journal may recall my April 2006 posting entitled, "Brain Fingerprinting and Civil Liberties." One mistake I made at the time was conflating the acronym FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) with the term brain fingerprinting. Perhaps the most accurate generic term is brain mapping.
Security at US federal buildings breaking down as conservatives - acting out their ideological hatred of government - contract out security responsibilities to liability-adverse private companies that shrink from challenging suspicious people.
Note: I originally put this blog post together for a progressive Muslim blog, which is why the focus is on the politics of the matter and the effects on Muslims of such an attack. Of course the people who would potentially be harmed by such an attack are reason enough to advocate, but I write to the interests of the intended audience.
I'm posting this here to inspire advocacy up the political chain to be onguard against George Bush again dropping the country's guard as he did right when he came into office and allowed 9/11, which seems to be happening again.
Remember this picture from the deadliest terror attack in the history of the country before 9/11? A fire rescuer carries a victim of white extremist bomber Timothy McVeigh out of the rubble of the Alfred P Murrah federal building in Oklahoma. Obviously, there are many non-Muslim groups out there who would like to attack the US government, but if terrorists with the sophistication of the Mumbai attackers put their collective efforts to it, I would be very worried that current security might be insufficient to stop them, based on the report below.
What's alarming is that the report shows that America is again at risk of an attack which could provoke yet another unrestrained vengeful Bush-like response that will land on US Muslims as it undermines efforts of civil libertarians to roll back the damage inflicted on the constitution by the Bush administration. Sometimes I wonder if ideological conservatives let the country drop its guard on purpose to practice their own version of crisis capitalism and crisis government reform. The article below cites budget constraints as the reason for privatizing federal building security but I'm convinced that is just a pretense.
From Government Executive.com:
After the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building 13 years ago, things changed for federal employees, especially in Oklahoma City. On April 19, 1995, just after 9 a.m., a truck rented by Timothy McVeigh and packed with more than 6,200 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane and diesel fuel detonated on the north side of the Murrah building. The blast - which killed 168 people, including 15 children in the federal day care center, and left more than 800 injured - destroyed one-third of the nine-story federal building and shattered glass in 258 buildings in a 16-block radius. It was, at the time, the deadliest terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil.
Within two weeks of the attack, one building just four blocks away - occupied by the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and other agencies - installed X-ray machines, magnetometers and glass security walls, and posted security guards in the lobby. Every person entering the building was scanned and their credentials verified.
Tightened security soon became a familiar sight at federal buildings throughout the nation, with policies quickly implemented to prevent similar attacks. Facilities in major cities were ordered to immediately erect Jersey walls to restrict the proximity of vehicles, and construction standards for new federal buildings were changed to require car bomb-resistant barriers and setbacks from surrounding streets.
But what a difference a decade makes. That post-bombing ramp- up has been almost completely rolled back, says Lauri Goff, president of the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 45 and an employee in that Oklahoma City building. And security faded even more after the Federal Protective Service's post-Sept. 11 transition to the Homeland Security Department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, she says.
The 10-story, 400,000-square-foot building where Goff works houses hundreds of federal employees. Nonetheless, she says, it has almost no security. There are no guards in the lobby, no one patrols the vacant floors and the cameras work intermittently."People talk all the time about being uncomfortable with the security situation," Goff says. "I'm willing to concede the fact that the people in Oklahoma City who were here, such as me, during the Murrah building bombing might be a little antsier than others, but even those who weren't talk about it."Her concern is echoed by federal employees across the country, who have told Government Executive they do not feel safe, and by the Government Accountability Office, which has sounded the alarm on federal building security.
Today, the ACLU is calling attention to the Constitution and the need to protect it. Obviously now is a very important time to consider our civil liberties, since November will see the election of a new group of Congresscritters and of course a new President. Seeing what I saw in St. Paul, though, with an excessively militarized police arresting anyone who uttered dissent makes me think that 'protecting the Constitution' is not a useful phrase. Glenn Greenwald asks if the Constitution is a historic relic, and it's a reasonable question, considering the open torture and lawless surveillance going on at the highest level of government (and no doubt the privacy violations by our commercial friends).
Of course, the Constitution isn't a quaint representation of some wonderful time of yore, it is a living document that must be refreshed from time to time with our willingness to recreate rights against an oppressive conservative movement aided by the quislings who shout for civil liberties but are unwilling to pay any price or even consider challenging their favorite politicians to add richness to their words. It was the so called 'liberal' Oliver Wendell Holmes, for instance, who wrote the Supreme Court decision sending Eugene Debs to jail for speaking out against US involvement in World War I. Another way to look at it is that we've been in dire straights before and come back brighter than ever; the ACLU is one such reaction built as an institutional reaction to that great war.
So we have to restore our civil liberties, using, as we saw in St Paul, our own words, actions, and bodies if necessary. That's how every generation of Americans did it before us and it's how we'll do it again.
Our electoral process is a start. Letters to the editor and to Congress are a start. Blogging is a start. Ultimately, the massive forces arrayed against civil liberties, including the huge sums of money designed to suppress free speech and spy on all of us in the name of Bush's war on terror, will need to be confronted with creativity, innovation, and resolve.
WASHINGTON - A Justice Department plan would loosen restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to allow agents to open a national security or criminal investigation against someone without any clear basis for suspicion, Democratic lawmakers briefed on the details said Wednesday.
The right is like a shark--once it smells blood it does not stop. The Democratic Party seems to keep thinking that if they capitulate, or triangulate the Republicans was cease to salivate. Not true. Congress gave Bush the Patriot Act. Then Iraq. Then funding for Iraq. Then FISA. All the while they expected them to be satisfied and leave the Dems alone.
It won't happen. They must be stopped. More on the expanded powers below.
The draft of the Democratic party platform is out. Does the section entitled "Reclaiming Our Constitution and Our Liberties" go far enough? How does it compare with Get FISA Right's proposals?
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