Obama tells critics of his FISA support that freedom is just not very important. I presume electing a “change” President is just so much more important than any actual change in Bush abuses.
And Obama supporter Tom Hayden raises the alarm over Obama’s Iraq policy.
Add comment July 5th, 2008
Periodically there are rumors that the Bush administration is about to close Guantanamo. ABC News is reporting the latest version, based on the fact that the Government’s evidence-free claims that prisoners are “enemy combatants” won’t hold wen the prisoners get access to the courts :
Bush to Close Guantanamo?
By Jan Crawford Greenburg
July 02, 2008 7:06 PM
President Bush will soon decide whether to close Guantanamo Bay as a prison for al-Qaeda suspects, sources tell ABC News. High-level discussions among top advisers have escalated in the past week, with the most senior administration officials in continuous talks about the future of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay–and how it will be dramatically changed and/or closed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that gave detainees there access to federal courts.
Sources have confirmed that President Bush is expected to be briefed on these pressing GTMO issues–and may reach a decision on the future of the naval base as a prison for al Qaeda suspects–before he leaves for the G8 on Saturday. An announcement, however, is not expected before he leaves the country.
High-level administration officials say the Court’s decision dramatically changes the legal landscape–and raises questions about whether the government has solid evidence to present to federal judges to justify ongoing detentions.
That evidence, much of it classified and obtained by military and CIA personnel on the battlefield, is not the standard kind of proof judges are accustomed to seeing in regular criminal cases here, administration officials say. The documents do not contain the kind of detail-or include sources of that information-that’s typical in criminal cases, sources say.
Late last month for example, a federal appeals court in Washington said the government failed to prove its case with one detainee from China. The administration fears that’s a sign of things to come-in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling giving other detainees even broader habeas corpus rights to challenge their detentions in court, sources tell ABC News.
Of course, there is generally wide agreement–from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and even Bush himself–that GTMO should eventually be closed. But the Court ruling could well hasten that move, since it undercuts the main reason to keep the detainees there. A key reason for imprisoning the detainees at GTMO in the first place was the belief that they would not have access to the courts, since they were not on U.S. soil.
The recent discussions—which have involved numerous meetings with the most senior advisers to the President–the Principals–are about how to handle the some 260 detainees still imprisoned at GTMO. Should they be brought to the United States, and where, of course, to put them if they are to be imprisoned in this country?
Bush has not decided whether he will announce that GTMO should be closed, sources say. But at the very least, sources say, he will soon announce a host of these legal and policy changes that will force Congress to come up with a solution–including where to imprison those detainees if GTMO does, in fact, shut its doors.
Add comment July 3rd, 2008
The so-called “Democrats” who control Congress showed what they’re made of yesterday when they voted away fundamental civil liberties that took hundreds of years to win. The House passed the “Abolish Free Communication Act,” allowing virtually unlimited wiretapping, on the grounds of “national security.”. And they guaranteed that Presidents and corporations who break the law on a really grand scale will get total immunity.
As the New York Times describes the bill:
The proposal — particularly the immunity provision — represents a major victory for the White House after months of dispute. “I think the White House got a better deal than they even they had hoped to get,” said Senator Christopher Bond, the Missouri Republican who led the negotiations.
The funniest thing about the new bill were the statements of its Democratic enablers of their grand victory for the rule of law. They wrote in the bill that the President must obey the law. Of course, that principle has been around since the Constitution. Yet this bill gives a President who has flagrantly broken the law for years complete immunity for having done so. So the effect is to tell future Presidents that, if they break the law, they should do so on a truly grand scale, literally millions of times. Then they will get immunity instead of impeachment and life in prison. And their illegal acts will in turn be legalized by their enablers.
Barak Obama also showed his priorities by announcing he’ll reluctantly vote for this shredding of the Constitution, though he is oh so disappointed about it. After all, it’s a “compromise” that just happens to give Bush everything he wanted, and more. But that’s bipartisanship for you.
Jack Balkin at Balkinization explains why Obama supports the bill:
Barrack Obama plans to be the next President of the United States. Once he becomes President, he will be in the same position as George W. Bush: he wants all the power he needs to protect the country. Moreover, he will be the beneficiary of a Democratic-controlled Congress, and he wants to get some important legislation passed in his first two years in office.
Given these facts, why in the world would Obama oppose the current FISA compromise bill? If it’s done on Bush’s watch, he doesn’t have to worry about wasting political capital on it in the next year. Perhaps it gives a bit too much power to the executive. But he plans to be the executive, and he can institute internal checks within the Executive Branch that can keep it from violating civil liberties as he understands them. And not to put too fine a point on it, once he becomes president, he will likely see civil liberties issues from a different perspective anyway.
So, in short, from Obama’s perspective, what’s not to like?…
So, let’s sum up: Congress gives the President new powers that Obama can use. Great. (This is change we can believe in). Obama doesn’t have to expend any political capital to get these new powers. Also great. Finally, Obama can score points with his base by criticizing the retroactive immunity provisions, which is less important to him going forward than the new powers. Just dandy.
It should now be clear why the Obama campaign has taken the position it has taken. And given what I have just said, Obama’s supporters should be pressing him less on the immunity provisions and more on the first part of the bill which completely rewrites FISA. Because, if he becomes president, he’ll be the one applying and enforcing its provisions.
There is a lesson here that preserving rights never depends upon politicians, be they boring Congressman or Knights in Shining Armour. They know only money an political expediency. And expediency means serving the powerful. Rights can only be protected by a public willing and able to fight for them, to wrest them from the powerful. Until we have such a mobilized and empowered public we will have few rights we can be assured of preserving.
For details on what Congress did, read Glenn Greenwald’s latest in Salon: George Bush’s latest powers, courtesy of the Democratic Congress:
That’s the “compromise” Steny Hoyer negotiated and which he is now — according to very credible reports — pressuring every member of the Democratic caucus to support. It’s full-scale, unconditional amnesty with no inquiry into whether anyone broke the law. In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we’ll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it — the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected….
I’d like to underscore the fact that in 2006, when the Congress was controlled by Bill Frist and Denny Hastert, the administration tried to get a bill passed legalizing warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty, but was unable. They had to wait until the Congress was controlled by Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to accomplish that.
And isn’t it so odd how this “compromise” — just like the Military Commissions Act, the Protect America Act and all the other great “compromises” from the Bush era which precede this one — is producing extreme indignation only from those who believe in civil liberties and the rule of law, while GOP Bush followers seem perfectly content and happy with it? I wonder if that suggests that what the Democratic leadership is supporting isn’t really a “compromise” at all.
To call this bill a capitulation is to give it greater credit than it deserves. See the anti-Steny Hoyer ad Greenwald and colleagues have prepared.
Add comment June 21st, 2008
Thanks to Dori Smith of Talk Nation Radio, our May 3 forum — Torture and the American Psyche: Blurring the Boundaries Between Healers and Interrogators — was audio-recorded. Dori has edited the material for two hald hour shows on Talk Nation Radio. That material is now available. [NOTE: The forum was also video recorded. These videos should be available soon, on YouTube or a similar site. Stay tuned.]
For those who don’t read this blof regularly, here’s the description of the speakers:
SPEAKERS:
Eric Fair currently a divinity student at Princeton will speak from his experience as a civilian contract interrogator in Baghdad, Fallujah, and Abu Ghraib in early 2004. He will lend his first person account to our conversation.
Leonard Rubenstein, J.D. President of Physicians for Human Rights, a Nobel Prize winning organization, is an attorney and veteran of many human rights struggles. He will speak of the role of torture in our contemporary political culture.
David Sloan-Rossiter, Ph.D. will bring his long standing interest in using a psych oana¬lytic perspective to aid communities to the role of moderator of the program. He is co-chair of the Curriculum Committee at Boston Institute for Psychotherapy and Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis.
Stephen Soldz, Ph.D. a local psychoanalyst, social activist and Professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, is one of the nation’s leaders in opposing psycholo¬gist participation in torture and abuse. He will speak to the history of that struggle in the context of the broader struggle for human rights.
Talk Nation Radio
TNR Show I contains material from the Introduction by David Sloan-Rossiter and an interspersing of material from the talks by Leonard Rubenstein (President of Physicians for Human Rights) and myself. [See Dori's description here and download mp3 here.]
TNR Show II contains the conclusion from my talk, the talk by former Iraq interrogator Eric Fair, and some discussion, including comments by Stephen Behnke, the Ethics Director of the American Psychological Association. [See Dori's description here and download mp3 here.]
Complete Talks, unedited
The Talk Nation Radio versions are selected and cleaned up. For those who would like to listen to the complete talks, Dori has kindly made available the raw recordings.
David Sloan-Rossiter Introduction and Stephen Soldz talk here.
Leonard Rubenstein talk here.
Eric Fair talk here.
The Question & Answer session is available here.
1 comment June 2nd, 2008
The Global War on Freedom has struck the UK front again. A graduate student at Nottingham University, Rizwaan Sabir, was arrested and held for six days because he downloaded an Al Qaeda manual from a US government web site for his research on Al Qaeda tactics. HJis friend, university staff member Hisham Yezza, whom Sabir had asked to print the 1,500 page manual to save costs, is scheduled to be deported to Algeria. If deported, Yezza is in danger of being detained and, possibly, tortured.
Here is a Guardian article. Below the article is a Press Release from concerned Nottingham students and faculty:
Student researching al-Qaida tactics held for six days
By Polly Curtis and Martin Hodgson
A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the “psychological torture” he endured in custody.
Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.
The case highlights what lecturers are claiming is a direct assault on academic freedom led by the government which, in its attempt to establish a “prevent agenda” against terrorist activity, is putting pressure on academics to become police informers.
Sabir was arrested on May 14 after the document was found by a university staff member on an administrator’s computer. The administrator, Hisham Yezza, an acquaintance of Sabir, had been asked by the student to print the 1,500-page document because Sabir could not afford the printing fees. The pair were arrested under the Terrorism Act, Sabir’s family home was searched and their computer and mobile phones seized. They were released uncharged six days later but Yezza, who is Algerian, was immediately rearrested on unrelated immigration charges and now faces deportation.
Dr Alf Nilsen, a research fellow at the university’s school of politics and international relations, said that Yezza is being held at Colnbrook immigration removal centre, due to be deported on Tuesday.
“If he is taken to Algeria, he may be subjected to severe human rights violations after his involvement in this case. He has been in the UK for 13 years. His work is here, his friends are here, his life is here.”
Of his detention, Sabir said: “I was absolutely broken. I didn’t sleep. I’d close my eyes then hear the keys clanking and I would be up again. As I realised the severity I thought I’d end up in Belmarsh with the nutcases. It was psychological torture.
“On Tuesday they read me a statement confirming it was an illegal document which shouldn’t be used for research purposes. To this day no one has ever clarified that point. They released me. I was shaking violently, I fell against the wall, then on the floor and I just cried.”
Bettina Rentz, a lecturer in international security and Sabir’s personal tutor, said: “He’s a serious student, who works very hard and wants a career in academia. This is a great concern for our academic freedom but also for the climate on campus.”
Students have begun a petition calling on the university to acknowledge the “disproportionate nature of [its] response to the possession of legitimate research materials”.
A spokesman for Nottingham University said it had a duty to inform police of “material of this nature”. The spokesman said it was “not legitimate research material”, but later amended that view, saying: “If you’re an academic or a registered student then you have very good cause to access whatever material your scholarship requires. But there is an expectation that you will act sensibly within current UK law and wouldn’t send it on to any Tom, Dick or Harry.”
At its annual conference next week the University and College Union will debate a motion on “assaults on academic freedom by the DIUS [Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills]“. Sally Hunt, general secretary of the UCU, said: “If we really want to tackle problems like extremism and terrorism, then we need to be safe to explore the issues and get a better understanding. The last thing we need is people too frightened to discuss an issue or research a subject because they fear being arrested or reported.”
The higher education minister, Bill Rammell, said: “The government does not want to or has never asked for staff or students to spy on their colleagues or friends. We want universities to work with staff and students on campus to isolate and challenge the very small minority who promote violent extremism.”
Sabir’s solicitor, Tayab Ali, said: “This could have been dealt with sensibly if the university had discussed the issue with Rizwaan and his tutors. This is the worrying aspect of the extension of detention [under the Terrorism Act]. They can use hugely powerful arrest powers before investigating.”
Press Release:
Contact: Sam Walton, 07948590262
From: a group of concerned students and academics at the University of
Nottingham.For immediate use, 24/05/08 SATURDAY
Notts Uni detainee innocent but still facing deportation
Hicham Yezza, a popular, respected and valued former PhD student and
current employee of the University of Nottingham faces deportation to
Algeria on Sunday 1st June. This follows his unjust arrest under the
Terrorism Act 2000 on Wednesday 14th May alongside Rizwaan Sabir and
their release without charge six days later.On his release Hicham was re-arrested under immigration legislation and,
due to confusion over his visa documentation, charged with offences
relating to his immigration status. He sought legal advice and
representation over these matters whilst in custody. On Friday 23rd May,
he was suddenly served with a deportation notice and moved to an
immigration detention centre. The deportation is being urgently
appealed.Hicham has been resident in the U.K. for 13 years, during which time he
has studied for both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in
Nottingham. He is an active member of debating societies, a prominent
member of an arts and theatre group, and has been writing editorials for
the Student Peace Movement magazine for the last five years. He is well
known and popular on campus amongst the university community and has
established himself as a voracious reader and an authority on literature
and music. An application for British citizenship was underway, and he
had been planning to make his yearly trip to Wales for the Hay Festival
when he was suddenly arrested.Alf Nilsen, a research fellow at in the school of Politics and
International Relations says “This is a clear case of the police trying
to cover up their completely unjustified targeting of these two innocent
men by making Hicham look guilty by deporting him. Hicham is entirely
innocent and the rushed and heavy-handed way in which the authorities
are dealing with this matter is outrageous.”[ENDS]
Contact: Sam Walton 07814683906, samdreddude@hotmail.com; or Musab
Younis: 078901018073, musabz@gmail.com***************************
We’re focussing our campaigning on the following areas:
1) Lobbying the Home Office We have been made aware that a call from
an MP to the Home Office, in particular Liam Byrne, the relevant
minister, has the possibility to stop the deportation in its tracks. One
of our
major focuses is trying to get particular MPs to make this
representation. If the MPs we have close contact with are unsuccessful
in the immediate short term, we will be encouraging more and more people
to contact their MPs to make representations.Direct representations to the Home Office are presumably relevant as
well, as are representations to other parts of government (up to and
including Jacqui Smith, Gordon Brown etc.), which we will be pursuing if
our initial efforts are not successful.
-
please keep us informed of any such contact as we will be trying to keep
track of which MPs have been ‘lobbied’ and whether this has been
successful.2) Legal challenge The main legal avenue is to seek an injunction,
which would basically grant a stay of deportation. Whilst the cost of
this is minimal we are seeking to build up a legal fund as we anticipate
that future legal costs may mount. If an initial stay of deportation is
received it seems likely that there would be much more legal work to be
done to ensure Hicham’s release. Our understanding is that if Hicham’s
immediate deportation was stopped he would then have to face the
immigration charges.We are looking to get the best possible legal advice and would
appreciate any recommendations for relevant specialist solicitors that
may be available. That said we are receiving recommendations all the
time and have many avenues to explore through the experience of some of
our members in anti-deportation campaigns in relation to asylum.3) Media We are working to mount a coherent and sustained media campaign
and we’re already off to a flying start. We are seeking first to work
through known reliable journalists so that we get the right message out
first, before moving on to sending out press releases en masse. We would
very much appreciate contact details for journalists which people can
vouch for.We would appreciate help from yourselves in any way you feel possible.
However here are a few things we have thought of:First of all money to cover legal costs is a huge concern of us at the
moment. We would appreciate any contributions either from the Party
itself or personal donations and if you were able to spread this message
throughout the party we would be very grateful. We are in a situation
where even small amounts would make a real difference with the added
benefit that it is a clear demonstration of solidarity which will
inevitably boost moral and make a reality our aim of having the broadest
possible base of support.Also if sitting MEPs or councillors were able to use their positions in
any way to either make formal representations, or simply to raise the
profile of the campaign we would be very grateful. We are already
working on model motions and resolutions for unions and similar
organisations, which could also be used in councils or parliaments.Please send us any thoughts you have on these ideas and please pass on
this email address (staffandstudents@gmail.com) and our phone number
(07948 590262)
Add comment May 25th, 2008
The sign of an authoritarian state:
Lawyers for Guantánamo Inmates Accuse U.S. of Eavesdropping
By William Glaberson
One lawyer for Guantánamo detainees said he replaced his office telephone in Washington because of sounds that convinced him it had been bugged. Another lawyer who represents detainees said he sometimes had other lawyers call his corporate clients to foil any government eavesdroppers.
In interviews and a court filing Tuesday, lawyers for detainees at Guantánamo said they believed government agents had monitored their conversations. The assertions are the most specific to date by Guantánamo lawyers that officials may be violating legal principles that have generally kept government agents from eavesdropping on lawyers.
“I think they are listening to my telephone calls all the time,” said John A. Chandler, a prominent lawyer in Atlanta and Army veteran who represents six Guantánamo detainees.
Several of the lawyers, including partners at large corporate law firms, said the concerns had changed the way they went about their work apart from Guantánamo cases. A lawyer in Chicago, H. Candace Gorman, said in an affidavit that she was no longer accepting new clients of any type because she could not assure them of confidentiality.
The new filing, by the Center for Constitutional Rights, came in a 2007 lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act in which Guantánamo lawyers are seeking records to determine whether they have been targets of surveillance.
The Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday. But in a legal response in March, its lawyers said they could neither confirm nor deny that detainees’ lawyers had been targets of such surveillance “because doing so would compromise the United States Intelligence Communities sources and methods.”
Justice Department officials have said in the past that they had not used their terrorist surveillance powers to single out lawyers but that telephone “calls involving such persons would not be categorically excluded.”
Since 2001, lawyers representing terrorism suspects not being held at Guantánamo have said they suspected government eavesdropping. Justice Department officials have said they intercepted such lawyers’ conversations rarely and inadvertently.
But some detainees’ lawyers say they believe there may be a comprehensive effort to monitor their communications at Guantánamo and elsewhere.
In the Tuesday filing in United States District Court in Manhattan, Thomas B. Wilner, a partner at Shearman & Sterling, said government officials insisting on anonymity had told him twice that he “should be careful in my electronic communications.”
In addition to being a leading Guantánamo lawyer, Mr. Wilner is an international trade law specialist. “You need to be very careful in what you say on the telephone,” he said in an interview.
Ms. Gorman’s court filing said that during a visit to the Guantánamo naval base in Cuba, her military escort “referred in conversation to personal information about my family that I had not disclosed to him,” leaving her to wonder how that information had been obtained.
Several of the lawyers said a program of surveillance would be consistent with obstacles they had encountered in representing detainees. In 2004, officials proposed “real-time monitoring” of lawyers’ interviews with Guantánamo detainees.
A federal judge barred that, saying that listening to lawyers’ meetings failed to recognize “the exceptional place in the legal system of the United States” for attorney-client communications.
Guantánamo officials say they monitor attorney-client meetings for the safety of lawyers with video cameras but that meeting areas are not wired for sound.
But several lawyers said their clients had told them that shortly after detainees met with lawyers, interrogators had asked the detainees about topics that had been discussed.
The Guantánamo spokeswoman, Cmdr. Pauline A. Storum, said interrogators were trained not to inquire about attorney-client meetings.
Shayana Kadidal, the lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights handling the freedom of information case, said there were many practical consequences of surveillance concerns. For example, he said, lawyers challenging the Bush administration’s detention policies must travel worldwide for meetings with witnesses to avoid potential telephone or e-mail monitoring.
Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University represents two brothers from Qatar, Jarallah al-Marri, who is held at Guantánamo, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who is held at the navy brig in Charleston, S.C., the only person on the American mainland known to be held as an enemy combatant.
After 16 months during which Ali al-Marri was held incommunicado, Mr. Hafetz was permitted to discuss the case with him. In 2006, Mr. Hafetz said, a guard commander told Mr. Marri that he had to speak in English during a conversation with his lawyer.
Mr. Hafetz wrote government officials asking whether the English-only requirement indicated that his conversations with his client were being monitored.
Mr. Hafetz said the commander of the brig later said there was no military surveillance. Mr. Hafetz said he never received a response about whether other agencies had listened to their conversations.
These attorneys, who take the rule of law seriously enough to risk everything in its pursuit, are among the heroes of our times.
Add comment May 7th, 2008
Crooks and Liars tell us that today is the 83rd anniversary of John Scopes’ arrest for the crime of teaching evolution. In memory, here’s a selection from Inherit the Wind:
Add comment May 5th, 2008
In an LA Times op-ed, Julian Sanchez points out what is really at stake in the unbridled wiretapping power of the state that the President is trying to create, the ability to blackmail or destroy political opponents. We’ve seen this power used this week to bring down Elliott Spitzer. How many other victims haven’t we heard about, perhaps because they decide to go quietly? And how many victims are incarcerated? Many, we should assume. Ad many more will be if these powers remain unchecked:
Wiretapping’s true danger
History says we should worry less about privacy and more about political spying.
By Julian Sanchez
As the battle over reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act rages in Congress, civil libertarians warn that legislation sought by the White House could enable spying on “ordinary Americans.” Others, like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), counter that only those with an “irrational fear of government” believe that “our country’s intelligence analysts are more concerned with random innocent Americans than foreign terrorists overseas.”
But focusing on the privacy of the average Joe in this way obscures the deeper threat that warrantless wiretaps poses to a democratic society. Without meaningful oversight, presidents and intelligence agencies can — and repeatedly have — abused their surveillance authority to spy on political enemies and dissenters.
The original FISA law was passed in 1978 after a thorough congressional investigation headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) revealed that for decades, intelligence analysts — and the presidents they served — had spied on the letters and phone conversations of union chiefs, civil rights leaders, journalists, antiwar activists, lobbyists, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices — even Eleanor Roosevelt and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Church Committee reports painstakingly documented how the information obtained was often “collected and disseminated in order to serve the purely political interests of an intelligence agency or the administration, and to influence social policy and political action.”
Political abuse of electronic surveillance goes back at least as far as the Teapot Dome scandal that roiled the Warren G. Harding administration in the early 1920s. When Atty. Gen. Harry Daugherty stood accused of shielding corrupt Cabinet officials, his friend FBI Director William Burns went after Sen. Burton Wheeler, the fiery Montana progressive who helped spearhead the investigation of the scandal. FBI agents tapped Wheeler’s phone, read his mail and broke into his office. Wheeler was indicted on trumped-up charges by a Montana grand jury, and though he was ultimately cleared, the FBI became more adept in later years at exploiting private information to blackmail or ruin troublesome public figures. (As New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer can attest, a single wiretap is all it takes to torpedo a political career.)
In 1945, Harry Truman had the FBI wiretap Thomas Corcoran, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “brain trust” whom Truman despised and whose influence he resented. Following the death of Chief Justice Harlan Stone the next year, the taps picked up Corcoran’s conversations about succession with Justice William O. Douglas. Six weeks later, having reviewed the FBI’s transcripts, Truman passed over Douglas and the other sitting justices to select Secretary of the Treasury (and poker buddy) Fred Vinson for the court’s top spot.
“Foreign intelligence” was often used as a pretext for gathering political intelligence. John F. Kennedy’s attorney general, brother Bobby, authorized wiretaps on lobbyists, Agriculture Department officials and even a congressman’s secretary in hopes of discovering whether the Dominican Republic was paying bribes to influence U.S. sugar policy. The nine-week investigation didn’t turn up evidence of money changing hands, but it did turn up plenty of useful information about the wrangling over the sugar quota in Congress — information that an FBI memo concluded “contributed heavily to the administration’s success” in passing its own preferred legislation.
In the FISA debate, Bush administration officials oppose any explicit rules against “reverse targeting” Americans in conversations with noncitizens, though they say they’d never do it.
But Lyndon Johnson found the tactic useful when he wanted to know what promises then-candidate Richard Nixon might be making to our allies in South Vietnam through confidant Anna Chenault. FBI officials worried that directly tapping Chenault would put the bureau “in a most untenable and embarrassing position,” so they recorded her conversations with her Vietnamese contacts.
Johnson famously heard recordings of King’s conversations and personal liaisons with various women. Less well known is that he received wiretap reports on King’s strategy conferences with other civil rights leaders, hoping to use the information to block their efforts to seat several Mississippi delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Johnson even complained that it was taking him “hours each night” to read the reports.
Few presidents were quite as brazen as Nixon, whom the Church Committee found had “authorized a program of wiretaps which produced for the White House purely political or personal information unrelated to national security.” They didn’t need to be, perhaps. Through programs such as the National Security Agency’s Operation Shamrock (1947 to 1975), which swept up international telegrams en masse, the government already had a vast store of data, and presidents could easily run “name checks” on opponents using these existing databases.
It’s probably true that ordinary citizens uninvolved in political activism have little reason to fear being spied on, just as most Americans seldom need to invoke their 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech. But we understand that the 1st Amendment serves a dual role: It protects the private right to speak your mind, but it serves an even more important structural function, ensuring open debate about matters of public importance. You might not care about that first function if you don’t plan to say anything controversial. But anyone who lives in a democracy, who is subject to its laws and affected by its policies, ought to care about the second.
Harvard University legal scholar William Stuntz has argued that the framers of the Constitution viewed the 4th Amendment as a mechanism for protecting political dissent. In England, agents of the crown had ransacked the homes of pamphleteers critical of the king — something the founders resolved that the American system would not countenance.
In that light, the security-versus-privacy framing of the contemporary FISA debate seems oddly incomplete. Your personal phone calls and e-mails may be of limited interest to the spymasters of Langley and Ft. Meade. But if you think an executive branch unchecked by courts won’t turn its “national security” surveillance powers to political ends — well, it would be a first.
Julian Sanchez is a Washington writer who studies privacy and surveillance.
Add comment March 16th, 2008
Glenn Greenwald uses the example of the current wiretapping debate to show how far toward the radical authoritarian right our political discourse has gone. When the FISA court was proposed, it:
“was considered to be one of the great threats to civil liberties, the very antithesis of how an open, democratic system of government ought to function. The FISA court was long the symbol of how severe are the incursions we’ve allowed into basic civil liberties and open government.
The FISC is a classically Kafka-esque court that operates in total secrecy. Only the Government, and nobody else, is permitted to attend, participate, and make arguments. Only the Government is permitted to access or know about the decisions issued by that court. Rather than the judges being assigned randomly and therefore fairly, they are hand-picked by the Chief Justice (who has been a GOP-appointee since FISA was enacted) and are uniformly the types of judges who evince great deference to the Government. As a result, the FISA court has been notorious for decades for mindlessly rubber-stamping every single Government request to eavesdrop on whomever they want.”
Now, of course:
“embracing this secret, one-sided, slavishly pro-government court defines the outermost liberal or “pro-civil-liberty” view permitted in our public discourse. And indeed, as reports of imminent (and entirely predictable) House Democratic capitulation on the FISA bill emerge, the FISA court is now actually deemed by the establishment to be too far to the Left — too much of a restraint on our increasingly omnipotent surveillance state. Anyone who believes that we should at the very least have those extremely minimal — really just symbolic — limitations on our Government’s ability to spy on us in secret is now a far Leftist.”
Read Greenwald’s article and see how far we have gone down the road toward the total surveillance state.
Add comment March 3rd, 2008
The LA Times reports that a broad range of civil liberties groups are asking the court to void its order shutting down the Wikileaks.org web site:
Judge is asked to rescind shutdown of website
Media and public interest organizations tell the jurist that his order violates constitutional provisions against prior restraint of free speech.
A coalition of media and public interest organizations went to federal court in San Francisco on Tuesday urging a judge to reconsider his order to shut down a muckraking website that publishes leaked documents from businesses and government agencies worldwide.
Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen and several news organizations, told U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White that two orders he issued last week against wikileaks.org were prior restraints that violated the 1st Amendment.
Laura Handman, a Washington, D.C., attorney for the news organizations, said White’s order was so expansive that the only way to describe it was as if a judge had shut down a newspaper because of controversy over one article.
“I can’t think of another injunction that was so broad,” said Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group that focuses on digital issues.
White acted in response to a lawsuit filed Feb. 6 by Julius Baer & Co., a Zurich-based bank, alleging that a disgruntled former employee had posted internal documents alleging money-laundering and tax evasion schemes at its Cayman Islands branch.
Wikileaks.org specifically urges readers to post leaked documents in an effort to discourage “unethical behavior” by corporations and government agencies. Among the 1.2 million documents that Wikileaks says it has posted over the last several years is an operations manual for the controversial U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Julius Baer, represented by the Century City firm Lavely & Singer, past lawyers for several celebrities in battles with news organizations, alleged that the postings violated privacy and bank secrecy laws of Switzerland and the Cayman Islands and posed a serious threat of identity theft.
Judge White issued a temporary restraining order, barring Wikileaks from posting the bank documents on the Internet. White has scheduled a Friday hearing on whether to make the injunction permanent.
White also issued a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot of San Mateo, Wikileak’s domain name registrar, to disable the website’s domain name.
That blocks access to the site through its principal entrance, although the content remains available on mirror sites and through its numerical address.
Dynadot did not contest the judge’s actions. “The only agreement by Dynadot was to comply with the court’s . . . order to preserve evidence,” said the company’s attorney, Garrett D. Murai.
Zimmerman, whose organization filed a motion seeking to intervene in the case, said he was disappointed in Dynadot’s action. He said that a specific provision of the Communications Decency Act providing immunity for an “interactive computer service” protects the company against the bank’s claims.
On a broader level, attorney Thomas Burke and colleagues Handman and Kelli Sager, representing 12 media groups that filed a friend-of-the-court brief, cited the 1971 Supreme Court decision in the Pentagon Papers dispute as authority for their position.
In that case, the Supreme Court rejected the Nixon administration’s bid to bar publication of a secret government history of the Vietnam War.
“The 1st Amendment prohibits prior restraints in nearly every circumstance, even where national security may be at risk and even when the source unlawfully obtained the documents,” said the attorneys, whose clients include the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, The Times, Gannett Co. and Hearst.
Public Citizen and the California First Amendment Coalition filed a separate brief contending that the case did not come under U.S. jurisdiction because the parties include subjects of foreign states — the Swiss bank and Wikileaks, many of whose members are abroad.
“In shutting down this website through an unlawful prior restraint, the court has muzzled a very important voice in the fight against corporate and government misdeeds,” said Paul Levy, an attorney with Public Citizen.
Peter Lurie, deputy director of Public Citizen’s health policy wing, filed a declaration saying that the organization frequently uses leaked government documents to bring attention to important public issues, such as the Food and Drug Administration’s consideration of “a drug company plan to conduct research on its new drug in Latin America using a design that the agency acknowledged would be unacceptable in the United States.” After the plan was exposed, the company redesigned its study, Lurie said.
“If Wikileaks is shut down,” Lurie said, “the ability of Public Citizen and its members to access” information from whistle-blowers “will be significantly impaired.”
Attorney William Briggs, who represents Julius Baer, said his firm was preparing a response to the briefs lodged Tuesday. “This is a case that presents a conflict between an individual’s right of privacy versus the press’ ability to publish private information about private individuals,” he said.
“I think the individual privacy rights outweigh the right of the press to report that information because of reasons of identity theft. If financial industry customers do not think their information is protected, those institutions could go out of business.”
Add comment February 27th, 2008
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Oct | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
