Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Civil Liberties Page 7 of 8

Helping “Terrorists” Engage In Anything Non-Terroristic Can Get You Locked up for 15 Years

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On June 21, 2010

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You can’t make up bad decisions like this.  Note that this is a 6-3 decision, not a close one:

The law barring material support was first adopted in 1996 and strengthened by the USA Patriot Act adopted by Congress right after the September 11 attacks. It was amended again in 2004.

The law bars knowingly providing any service, training, expert advice or assistance to any foreign organization designated by the U.S. State Department as terrorist.

The law, which carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison, does not require any proof the defendant intended to further any act of terrorism or violence by the foreign group.

Nor does it require any proof that the organization is a terrorist organization, since a State Department declaration is an administrative act.

The Humanitarian Law Project in Los Angeles had previously provided human rights advocacy training to the Kurdistan Workers Party, known as the PKK, and the main Kurdish political party in Turkey.

The Humanitarian Law group and others sued in an effort to renew support for what they described as lawful, nonviolent activities overseas.

“The Supreme Court has ruled that human rights advocates, providing training and assistance in the nonviolent resolution of disputes, can be prosecuted as terrorists,” said Georgetown University law professor David Cole, who argued the case.

“In the name of fighting terrorism, the court has said that the First Amendment permits Congress to make it a crime to work for peace and human rights. That is wrong,” Cole said.

Got that?  Trying to help an organization do non violent things will get you locked up.

More to the point, as noted earlier, this is clearly a violation of the right of association and the right for free speech.  You get locked up based on who you associate with, not what you’ve actually done, and the decision who you can associate with is a purely administrative act at the sole discretion of the President of the United States.  Any organization the State Department declares a terrorist organization you cannot associate with, period.

This is of a piece with other policies which allow the President to assassinate an American citizen without a trial, to lock people up indefinitely without a trial and so on.  When they President does deign to allow a trial evidence obtained from torture is admissable, and the if the President doesn’t want the accused to know who their accuser is or to see the evidence against them, so be it.

This is, I should emphasize, just a continuation of a trend, a punctuation mark by the Supreme Court in a long line of decisions which have gutted the first amendment, the right to face one’s accuser, the right to due process and so on.  If I were to point to a very bad law that many folks supported who shouldn’t have it would be the RICO statutes, which likewise made simple association a crime.  Since it was “bad people” doing the association (the Mafia) folks didn’t care.

Since it’s bad people, “terrorists”, this time, too many people won’t care.

But if the rights of those you despise aren’t protected, than neither are yours.

Making videoing cops illegal doesn’t make the US a police state, honest

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On June 4, 2010

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Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up:

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

Evidence of police brutality?  Show it, and we’ll arrest you, too.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?

Why, Virginia, Would You Think the President Isn’t Willing to See Abortion Rights Slip Away?

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On April 14, 2010

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If only the king will save us:

While anti-choice zealots may have the necessary votes to uphold the 20-week ban regardless of John Paul Stevens’ replacement, this is why the Court matters so much. The right has used judicial appointments in a blatantly political fashion, and unless the President is willing to see basic rights stripped away, he must act boldly.

Now, odds are that the new nominee will be pro-abortion rights.  But anyone who thinks Obama isn’t willing to sell abortion rights down the river in exchange for things he values more (like giving money to corporations) wasn’t paying attention during the health care reform fight, were they?

If pro-choice organizations want to make sure their rights aren’t sold down the river any further, they need to make clear that if they are, Obama will pay a price. Obama doesn’t respond to left-wingers asking nicely, he doesn’t pre-emptively make concessions to left wingers.  He only does those things for right wingers, as with giving away off-shore drilling without getting anything in return.

Given pro-choice organizations impotence during the HCR, I think we’d best just pray that whoever Obama wants on the court is pro-choice by happenstance.

Paul Craig Roberts Speaks For Me

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On February 10, 2010

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When he notes the US is a police state:

Siddiqui has never been charged with any terrorism-related offense. A British journalist, hearing her piercing screams as she was being tortured, disclosed her presence. An embarrassed U.S. government responded to the disclosure by sending Siddiqui to the U.S. for trial on the trumped-up charge that while a captive, she grabbed a U.S. soldier’s rifle and fired two shots attempting to shoot him. The charge apparently originated as a U.S. soldier’s excuse for shooting Dr. Siddiqui twice in the stomach, resulting in her near death.

On Feb. 4, Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York jury for attempted murder. The only evidence presented against her was the charge itself and an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken a pistol-firing course at an American firing range. No evidence was presented of her fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken 100-pound woman had allegedly seized from an American soldier. No evidence was presented that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell casings, no bullet holes. Just an accusation.

Wikipedia has this to say about the trial: “The trial took an unusual turn when an FBI official asserted that the fingerprints taken from the rifle, which was purportedly used by Aafia to shoot at the U.S. interrogators, did not match hers.”

An ignorant and bigoted American jury convicted her for being a Muslim. This is the kind of “justice” that always results when the state hypes fear and demonizes a group.

Siddiqui was an American citizen, by the way.  Seized and held in a secret prison, tortured and raped.  This is your America.

Your America.

Anyone can be next. Indeed, on Feb. 3 Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that it was now “defined policy” that the U.S. government can murder its own citizens on the sole basis of someone in the government’s judgment that an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no conviction, just execution on suspicion of being a threat.

This shows how far the police state has advanced. A presidential appointee in the Obama administration tells an important committee of Congress that the executive branch has decided that it can murder American citizens abroad if it thinks they are a threat….

In no previous death of a U.S. citizen by the hands of the U.S. government has the government claimed the right to kill Americans without arrest, trial, and conviction of a capital crime.

Go read the whole thing.

And, if there is a God, may Barack Obama and Dennis Blair face him along with George Bush, because no, the difference isn’t enough to matter.

Certainly not to Siddiqui.

As Jesus said “as you do to these, the least of my children, you do to me”. I wonder how Jesus is taking being raped, bombed and tortured so regularly by Obama and Bush.

As for me, I won’t pretend that I don’t despise Obama almost as much as I despised Bush.  Maybe more, since there’s evidence that George Bush is a brain damaged psyhcopath (he is known to have tortured animals as a child, one of the cardinal signs and recordings of him speaking in the early 90s show fluent speech without “Bushisms”).

Obama should know better, but if he does, he doesn’t care enough to do anything about it, to the contrary, he keeps making it worse.

The Unvarnished Truth About the US

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On January 22, 2010

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I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time and in light of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited corporate money into the political system, I think it’s time.

Yesterday’s decision makes the US a soft fascist state.  Roosevelt’s definition of fascism was control of government by corporate interests.  Unlimited money means that private interests can dump billions into elections if they choose.  Given that the government can, will, and has rewarded them with trillions, as in the bailouts, or is thinking about doing so in HCR, by forcing millions of Americans to buy their products the return on investment is so good that I would argue that corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to buy out government – after all if you pay a million to get a billion, or a billion to get a trillion, that’s far far better returns than are avaiable anywhere else.

And no politician, no political party, can reasonably expect to win when billions are arrayed against it.

The one faint hope is that politicians in the Senate will panic, know they have 10 months to do something and ram something through.  Of course, that will only be a stopgap measure, until the Supremes overthrow it, but in the meantime, maybe Dems will get serious about the Supreme Court and not rubber-stamp radical right-wingers like Alito and Roberts.

That is, however, a faint hope.

Add to this the US’s complete inability to manage its economic affairs, and its refusal to fix its profound structural problems, whether in the financial system, the education system, the military, concrete infrastructure, technology or anything else and I cannot see a likely scenario where the US turns things around.  The US’s problems in almost every area amount to “monied interests are making a killing on business as usual, and ologopolistic markets and will do anything they can to make sure the problem isn’t fixed”.

Even before they had the ability to dump unlimited money into the political system, they virtually controlled Washington.  This will put their influence on steroids.  Any congressperson who goes against their interests can be threatened by what amounts to unlimited money.  And any one who does their bidding can be rewarded with so much money their reelection is virtually secure.

This decision makes the US’s recovery from its decline even more unlikely than before—and before it was still very unlikely.  Absolute catastrophe will have to occur before people are angry enough and corporations weak enough for there to even be a chance.

So, my advice to my readers is this.

If you can leave the US, do.  Most of the world is going to suffer over the next decades, but there are places which will suffer less than the US: places that have not settled for soft fascism and a refusal to fix their economic problems.  Fighting to the very end is very romantic, and all, but when you’re outnumbered, outgunned, and your odds of winning are miniscule, sometimes the smartest thing to do is book out.  Those who came to America understood this, they left countries which were less free or had less economic hope than America, and they came to a place where freedom and opportunity reigned.

That place, that time, is coming to an end.  For your own sake, and especially for the sake of your children, I tell you now—it is time to get out.

I am not the only person thinking this.  Even before the decisions, two of my savviest American friends, people with impeccable records at predicting the US meltdown, told me that within the next few years they would be leaving.

There’s always hope, and those who choose to stay might stop this terminal decline.

But you need to ask yourself, seriously, if you are willing to pay the price of failure: if you are willing to have your children pay the price of failure.  Because it will be very, very steep.

The Deeply Broken American Police System

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On January 11, 2010

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I remember, years ago, when the news of torture in Iraq first came out, I wrote an article entitled US Finally Treats Iraqis Just Like Americans. The point was that abuse and rape is so rife in US prisons and jails, that waterboarding and stress positions are really only embellishments. To an outsider it is evident that the US police and prison system is out of control.

So when I read that police in St. Paul pepper sprayed a jailed woman over her entire body, then refused to let her wash it off—I’m not surprised. When I read that a number of prisoners were on a hunger strike to convince guards to get medical care to an anemic women who had passed out, I’m not surprised.

‘Cause here’s the truth. Shoving people around can be a lot of fun. And being a cop or prison guard lets you do it almost as much as you want to. As a practical matter, brutality and abuse of power almost never leads even to a slap on the wrist, let alone being fired or criminal charges. Don’t piss off the really important people (of whom there are fewer and fewer every year) and you can be a petty tyrant to anyone else you please.

A lot of cops are good folks, but a lot of people who join the police or become prison guards do so because they want authority, because they want to be “the man”. Once inside, they join a society which has a strong undercurrent of hostility and contempt for civilians, who are seen, in many cases literally, as either sheep or criminals. In part this is natural, police interact with people when they’re at their worst or weakest—either with people who have committed crimes, or people who have suffered crimes. Neither group comes across well—the first are scum, the second are often shattered and seem weak. That’s the police life, day in, day out. So many police come to see civilians through that lens, because that’s most of what they see of civilians.
Add to this contempt the attitude of those who direct the police in operations like this, such as the Bush Secret Service, who have been corrupted by Bush into his Praetorian guard whose main job is less security than making sure no one can ever show dissent anywhere Bush could possibly see it, and you have a real problem. Most people are very malleable, they do what people in authority tell them to. People who stand up to authority are very rare. Police, by the very nature of the job, don’t actually tend to be mavericks, movie stereotypes aside. They tend towards authoritarian personality types. They like to give orders and they like to take orders. Sure, there are exceptions, but they are definitely not the rule.

Combine the fact that cops see civilians as an out-group (not like us) with official encouragement and fear mongering (terrorist anarchists) along with the personality profile of many folks attracted to the job and you have a group which is primed and ready to be brutal towards people they believe “deserve it”. Add to that the fact that police being disciplined for brutality and for violating people’s rights is actually quite rare, add in dollops of new police powers given by Congress, the executive branch and the Supremes over the last few years, and it’s practically a guarantee of police abuse of power, the destruction of the right to assembly and the end of real free speech. (The joke about free speech zones, of course, is “wasn’t the entire country a free speech zone?”)

Police are probably necessary in society. I do say probably, because large and complex societies often had  far far fewer people performing police functions than modern societies and most modern societies have even fewer than the US does. But as with standing armies, they’re profoundly dangerous not just for all the reasons listed above, but because large paramilitary forces (and US police are paramilitary, they have been systematically militarized, first by the war on drugs then by the war on terror, over the last 30 years) inevitably not only have to justify themselves by doing something (and what they’re best at is violence against civilians), but also provide a temptation to those in power. Why listen to people, why fix problems, when those who complain about the problems can just be intimidated or beaten into silence?

So a society which is really concerned about liberty and freedom has to watch its cops very carefully. They can’t be allowed to get out of control, to forget that they exist to serve civilians, not to shove civilians around. In the US the evidence is that the line has been crossed. This happens so regularly now that it’s just expected. It’s hardly commented on in the press, despite being the exact same behavior that has the press so excited and outraged when it happens in other countries like China. No major politician can be bothered to call it out as inappropriate. It’s just the new normal.

And so it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that if the US isn’t exactly a police state, it’s certainly not a free state. And with more people locked away than any other country in the world, it’s also impossible not to conclude that it’s also a prison state. Violence and the threat of violence is so endemic in the US that most Americans don’t even notice any more that they live in a an incredibly violent society which is kept on track by intimidation, and when necessary, actual violence. They don’t notice that their cops are out of control, ill-disciplined and essentially above the law.

Instead it falls mostly to those of us from outside, or Americans who have lived elsewhere to say “there’s something wrong here. Something deeply pathological.”

More on this in some later pieces. For now, though, look at the US, at the RNC, at your prisons, as if you weren’t American, and see what you see. Because I can tell you now, no other western first world nation is like the US in this regard. And it’s not one of those things Americans should be proud of.

Originally posted at FDL on Sept 3, 2008.

George Bush’s 3rd Term

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On December 8, 2009

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Well, well, well:

The openly-gay head of the federal Office of Personnel Management, John Berry, said this weekend that he cannot follow a court order directing him to provide health benefits to the lesbian wife of a federal employee. Why? Because he says that he doesn’t have the legal authority to do so.

Neat trick. We should all try that one next time a court orders us to do something. “Sorry, your honor. Rather than appealing your decision, I’m simply going to state publicly that I don’t believe I have the legal authority to obey your order.”

It’s keen that not giving benefits to gays is so important to Obama that he’s willing to tell the courts to go take a long leap off a short pier.  Wish I could say I was glad to see him take a stand on something.

I’m so glad we got so much “Change”.  Same basic economic policy, same basic financial policy, lots of warmaking.  Oh, and the current suggestion on the “public” option?  Make it run by private companies with no public funding.   Meanwhile, women are being thrown under the bus on abortion and Obama doesn’t care.

Homophobic and sexist.  Maybe not personally (I don’t believe Bush was a homophobe personally) but when it comes to public figures judging by policy is perfectly fair.

Plus ca change.

Meet the “Good Americans” Who Made America Synonymous With Torture

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On November 2, 2009

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When I read the details which have come out of the Hamdan and Padilla trials about how these two men were treated when in US custody, I don’t think “America did this”. America did this is far too bloodless. Specific men and a few women did this. Although the stain spreads over everyone who calls themselves American and those of your allies who often cooperated, everything that was done was done by specific people. They were not done by George Bush, they were not done by Cheney, they were done by American men and women.

So, when I read that, for example:

Hamdan’s defense team later revealed that Banks testified that Hamdan, apparently under such threat, had begged interrogators not to rape his wife or kill his family

I don’t think that America did it, though America did. I think that specific men did that. I read of, say Special Forces psychologist Col. Morgan Banks, and how he went to Afghanistan to use his SERE training, meant to help special forces resist terror, instead to set up interrogation. Instead to break men. I wonder how that happened, how a man who probably became a psychologist because he wanted to help people, became a monster. Oh, please, don’t argue otherwise. I’m sure he’s nice to his family. I’m sure he doesn’t kick dogs. I’m sure he loves America. I’m sure he wanted to avenge 9/11. Nonetheless if he did what we have every reason to believe he did (of course, his testimony is secret), he’s a monster.

Same thing with all the other interrogators, with the lone exception of the FBI interrogators, who were forbidden by John Ashcroft from engaging in torture. Ashcroft disgraced himself with Padilla, but even so, Ashcroft showed there were lines he wouldn’t cross. And so, until he was replaced, one organization in the US didn’t torture.

For 3 years, in other words, Ashcroft stopped the FBI from torturing. Think on that for a moment.

And then we’re back at the trial. And there is a judge who agreed to work under these military tribunal rules. I am sure, at night, he tells himself that he had to, because if it was not done by him it would be done by someone worse than him. Maybe he’s right, certainly the human rights observers have had little but good things to say about him. Still, he is a judge presiding at a trial where evidence obtained through torture is used; at a trial where the accused cannot face his accusers; the judge at a trial where hearsay evidence is allowed—the judge at a trial where even if Hamdan had been acquitted he would not be released. He’s a show trial judge, in other words, presiding over what everyone knows is a travesty of justice. He has loaned his name, Keith Allred, to this. He treated it seriously, as if it was worthy of his respect. He did not refuse to participate. And perhaps he’s right. Perhaps good men must participate in evil that it might be slightly less evil, and perhaps he is that good man, that good American, who makes a mockery of justice less harsh than it might be by participating.

This is the argument that some of the generals leading Vietnam made, that many will make about Iraq. “I knew it was wrong, a mistake, and immoral to boot. But if evil be done, better it be done by me that I might try and limit the damage, then that it be done by those foolish or fallen enough to believe it was actually the right thing to do.” Perhaps they are right, perhaps damning themselves is what they had to do. But I do not think that they can be other than damned, that their sacrifice is anything but their honor. They have not just looked into the Abyss, they have walked into it. And the price is, can only be, a piece of their soul. For us to respect their decision, indeed, requires that we see the evil they have done.

The same is true of the prosecutors. The same is true of “square jawed, calm and with a dry sense of humor” Robert McFadden, a special investigator with the Navy.

I find myself with some sympathy for these men. Still I find that I cannot but think that they have failed their first duty, which is not to their superiors, not to the President, but to the US constitution and what it stands for. I find that they have failed their basic duty to humanity.

I find that they are complicit in torture, in indefinite detention. I find that they have deliberately aided the destruction of justice, have aided the Bush administration in rolling back legal rights a full millenium, or more.

The “I was just following orders” was not acceptable to us in Nuremburg. It cannot be acceptable now. Yes, there are consequences to not following orders. But it’s the choices we make that define us. If following orders is more important to you than not being involved in torture, indefinite detention, the right of the accused to see the evidence against them—then you have made a statement about who you are.

And cooperation is needed by men like George Bush. It can be active cooperation, like that of the torturers, judge and prosecutors. It can be passive cooperation, as when “impeachment is off the table”, but cooperation is needed.

Still, one person can sometimes make a difference. John Ashcroft, immensely flawed as he is, made a difference. Comey made a difference. Fitzgerald made a difference.

Many men, there in Guantanamo, make Cheney and Bush’s policies possible through their cooperation. They do not resign, do not protest, do not refuse, at least, to actively cooperate. They are the men who made Bush’s America possible. Without men like them, he could have done nothing.

And so I really do wonder what the price of honor, integrity and morality is?

And I hope they were paid that price. A man who sells his soul should get his reward.

One and all, whether they were those who broke Hamdan by threatening to rape his wife and kill his family, they are complicit in that. One and all, whether they tortured anyone, they are complicit in torture.

They are the men who made George Bush’s America.

(Yet another reprint.  I am, in fits and spurts, moving articles which I feel have some lasting value, over to this site).

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