Tag: homeland security

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State Secrets

The government’s recent brief cited the leading Supreme Court decision on state secrets, United States v. Reynolds in 1953, but it said nothing about Judge Walker’s reading of it.

“Reynolds itself,” Judge Walker wrote, “leaves little room for defendants’ argument that the state secrets privilege is actually rooted in the Constitution.”

The Reynolds case concerned an Air Force accident report. The government refused to turn it over in an injury lawsuit, saying that disclosure of the report would endanger national security by revealing military secrets.

When the report was finally released in 1996, it contained no secrets, but it did show that the deaths of nine men in the crash a B-29 bomber had been caused by the Air Force’s negligence.

NyTimes, August 2, 2009

As seems inevitable… It is not surprising, of course, that the Bush Administration would have sought to establish Reynolds as a precedent– sparing the government having to defend itself against those annoying lawsuits. A more recent ruling by Judge Walker, against the Bush Administration, asserted that the Reynolds ruling established no such precedent. But once again, we have Obama’s Justice Department supporting Bush policy positions that Obama seemed to criticize on the campaign trail. What gives?

These policies are not abstractions: real individuals have been kidnapped and tortured as a result of Bush policies and their only recourse, the courts, have been denied them by rulings by other courts that are contrary to Walker. The government– the President!– reserves the right to tell the courts when a lawsuit might “endanger” national security, without, of course, ever being accountable for what that danger is. Civil libertarians are rightly aghast.

It is so, so perfect that the major precedent for this kind of judicial ruling is so, so discredited: the U.S. Air Force was trying to cover up it’s own negligence, exactly as the plaintiffs in Reynolds alleged. Does anyone even know or care?

It is nauseating to read conservatives complain bitterly about Obama’s health care plans because they don’t want the government telling them what to do. You idiots! The government is declaring that it has the right to seize and detain and even torture you , and spy on you, and obtain your library records, and tap your phones without any judicial oversight at all– and you are worried that you’re going to forced to have health insurance! You don’t like liberals because they want to infringe on your personal freedoms?! Oh, the rank hypocrisy!

I am waiting for conservatives to enunciate a clear-cut declaration that they no longer accept the idea of “innocent until proven guilty”. Perhaps the movies and television dramas like “24” have finally succeeded where generations of McCarthyites failed.

A director of Homeland Security explained that 60-year-old women in wheelchairs are routinely searched when flying because… “if Al Qaeda knew that we were letting 60-year-old women in wheelchairs through, do you think they would hesitate to plant a bomb on a 60-year-old woman in a wheelchair?”

By golly, he’s right. And if Al Qaeda knew that they couldn’t get bombs onto airplanes, they would start putting them on ships and trains.

Does Al Qaeda know that this dink is in charge of homeland security? Because, if they did, I think they would rest assured that a nation run by idiots cannot long prevail anyway.

The more you are afraid, the more powerful the government and police are. I suggest you laugh at your government at least once a day.

 

More bad news about Obama:  “Unfortunately, the House measure is opposed by the Obama administration, which still seems to operate on the principle that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America.”  Paul Krugman, NY Times.  Link to Story.

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Preemptive Injustice

Charles Krauthammer, in the Washington Post, is a little more transparent than most official government spokesmen when he declares that the U.S. would be foolish to wait for terrorists to actually commit any crimes before going after them.

It would be foolish to wait for a crime to be committed before punishing the offender.

The fact that he actually wrote such a statement is baffling to me, but it must be supposed that he knows or thinks he knows that such a statement would actually make sense to some people, if not the Bush Administration.

I note that he only offers two options: do nothing, or pre-emptive attacks. Among other things, it’s a dishonest statement. There is a large constituency out there for the idea of addressing the root causes of terrorism, like the disenfranchisement of entire ethnic groups, or economic oppression, or neo-colonialism. That would be a third option: address the root causes of terrorists. Krauthammer would probably scoff at such an idea. For one thing, it would require you to be empathetic to the needs of others. Real men don’t do that..

At the most obvious level, of course, the statement makes no sense at all. I feel silly doing this, but if Krauthammer is right that his statement will make sense to a lot of people, then I guess I need to convince myself as well, that I’m not crazy.

1. We don’t know who is going to actually commit a crime (a terrorist act) until the crime is committed. So if we decide that we will go out and arrest people who haven’t committed crimes yet because only a fool would wait until the crime was actually committed, we have indeed entered a brave new world of criminal justice. We are going to start busting people who we think might think about committing crimes in the future.

2. It does indeed sound foolish to wait until someone robs you or assaults you before you assault them. So go out and find the person who is going to do that awful thing to you and assault them first, to deter them. Does that make sense to you? If it does, the Bush administration may have a job for you in the State Department.

3. Okay, so that sounds absurd. What do we do? What we have always done. You try to ensure that people who commit crimes or acts of terrorism are punished. You try to root out the causes of crime and terrorism. Great Britain fought terrorism in Ireland with pretty well nothing but brute force for about 100 years. It was not until they made progress in negotiations with the IRA that the possibility of peace in Northern Ireland became a reality. They’re not there yet. It’s not smooth sailing. It’s hard work. You understand the temptation to just lock them all up. But brutality has been tried and it has failed to stop the terror. If the Catholics in Northern Ireland feel that they are exploited and oppressed by the Protestant majority, there will be two, maybe three replacements for every terrorist you lock up or kill.

You can never bring an end to terrorism with brute force alone, unless you are willing to countenance genocide. And even then, you’ll never get them all. The state of Israel is testimony to that.

4. You can’t possibly know for sure what anyone is going to do in the future, no matter what you think they are thinking or even planning today. For every murder committed, there must be hundreds of murders contemplated. For every member of Al Qaeda, there are dozens of young Moslems who decide that part of their passage into manhood is the experience of a few months at a military training camp in Afghanistan. Most of these men will never become terrorists, but we are now arresting and imprisoning young Moslem men who went to these camps before an act of Congress made them illegal. They are charged with being a member of a terrorist organization.

This is a hideous perversion of justice, but it is countenanced by most people today because of frenzied government warnings about imminent terrorist threats. We are frightened into acquiescence when most of us should know better.

5. This is a self-perpetuating contrivance to justify increasing government authoritarianism and militarism. By labeling Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil”, we strengthen the hand of the hard-line reactionaries within Iran and weaken the reform movement. We give credence to the mullahs’ belief that the West is out to get them, like we were in 1953 when we installed the Shah.

6. What is the difference between defending your country and terrorism? Who were the terrorists in Viet Nam? The Viet Cong, who were defending the results of the elections that brought socialists to power in the former French colony? Or the foreigners who entered their country with bombs and grenades and napalm and attempted to prop up a failing, corrupt government? Who were the terrorists in Nicaragua? The Sandinistas who eventually won the first free elections held after the fall of Somoza, or the Contras? Who had legitimacy? Who represented the will of the people?

7. Does Krauthammer sound familiar? A little like Henry Kissinger discussing the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile? Thousands were tortured or murdered because of the CIA’s pre-emptive support of pro-American forces in the Chilean military. Would Krauthammer be in favor of renewed interventionism in Latin America? Do we need some more dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina to preemptively suppress terrorist movements?

Or would we, perchance, be better off supporting democracies in those countries– and preemptively preventing the kind of oppression that gives rise to terrorist movements in the first place.

When you can’t catch the burglar, simply arrest the paper-boy, so at least you can tell people you’ve done something about crime.

“When dealing with undeterrables (sic) (like al Qaeda) or undetectables (sic) (like an Iraq or an Iran passing WMDs to terrorists) there is no such thing as containment. There is no deterrence, no address for the retaliation. There are two options: do nothing and wait for the next attack, or get them before they acquire the capacity to get you. That is called preemption.” Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post

I know the “sic” is rude, but I can’t help it if the Washington Post decides that their columnists can just make up new words nowadays.

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Homeland Insecurity: the Lashkar-i-Taiba

The Lashkar-i-Taiba is a militant Islamic group that has been fighting the occupation of the Kashmir by India.

I don’t really care about the Kashmir at this point. It’s another one of those names like Beirut and Northern Ireland and Jerusalem that evoke, for me, the long tired endurance of vindictive human folly.

The point is that until 9/11, the United States didn’t much care about them either. It was not illegal to belong to the Lashkar-i-Taiba, just as it is not illegal to belong to the Labour Party in Britain, the Green Party in Germany, or to be a personal friend of General Augusto Pinochet.

Just as it is not illegal to own guns, in the enlightened United States of America. The Republicans, in fact, just tried (and failed) to make it illegal to believe that gun companies should ever be liable for anything at all.

But the ever-vigilant Department of Homeland Insecurity found out about 11 Moslem men who like to play paintball. They were arrested. They were questioned. Astonishingly, they turned out to be Moslem! Astonishingly, they had belonged to Lashkar-i-Taiba. They had belonged to Lashkar-i-Taiba before the government decided it was illegal to belong to Lashkar-i-Taiba.

You would think that someone with common sense would say, it wasn’t illegal to belong to Lashkar-i-Taiba at the time they belong to it. Let’s give them a warning about the terrorist nature of this organization and let them go.

Not in your lifetime! And miss the opportunity to let the public know how you, the mighty Bush Administration, are stopping terrorists everywhere, dead in their tracks?

Somehow, one of them was “persuaded” to testify that the 11 were, in fact, thinking about something like something that might be construed as “anti-American” or something, and therefore should go to prison for the rest of their lives. The pattern for these trials is always the same: the only witness gets a much lighter sentence in exchange for his testimony against the others.

Would you tell the truth if you had a choice between being charged with very serious offenses that could result in sentences of up to 100 years, or being charged with less serious crimes that could result in just a few years in a jail? Tough choice.

To be specific, Yong Ki Kwon, 28, and Khwaja Mahmood Hasan, testified that they had wanted to fight for the Taliban against the U.S. Since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, where the Taliban was the government, that’s somewhat like taking a couple of German boys from New Jersey in 1944, and putting them on trial for thinking about going home to Germany to join the army. And then sending them to prison for 100 years. Meanwhile, the soldiers that actually did fight against Americans, in Germany, are all released within months of the end of hostilities.

Once again, we have “terrorists” convicted of being terrorists, without the government actually proving– or even claiming to want to prove– that they actually committed any crimes, other than the thought-crimes of being Islamic and foreign.

If Mr. Ashcroft is doing such a fabulous job of rooting out terrorists, how come he has yet to catch a single person actually planning a terrorist attack? Once again, he has nabbed a bunch of Moslems, labeled them “terrorists”, and locked them up, without being able to show that they were actually planning to commit a single crime. In fact, the government admits that it has no evidence that the men were planning any attacks at all in the U.S. Yet, they may well go to prison for 20 – 40 years?!

This is an outrage.

The Men:

Ahmed Abu-Ali (in Saudi Arabia, being sought).
Randall Todd Royer,
Donald Thomas Surratt,
Masoud Ahmad Khan,
Caliph Basha Ibn
Hammad Abdur-Raheem
Ibrahim Ahmed al-Hamdi Mohammed Aatique
Khwaja Mahmood Hasan
Sabri Benkhala

“…one of them, Masoud Ahmad Khan, had a photograph downloaded from the Internet of the FBI headquarters building in Washington.” Along with about 10 million tourists.

You know, the more you read about this case, the more bizarre it appears. The men are charged with training in combat tactics– like about 7 million militia members in the U.S. They heard lectures on the righteousness of “violent jihad” in Kashmir. I’ve probably heard lectures more filled with violent hatred from Christians in North America for Hollywood and liberals.

It is considered sinister that these men had guns. What? Like about 50 million other Americans?

There undoubtedly are real terrorists out there. We can’t catch them. We’re not that smart. We haven’t really succeeded in infiltrating their organizations. So let’s take the people we catch– like these poor 11 schmucks from Virginia– and pin something on them. That’s the truth.

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Homeland Security Pie

Ha ha! I hope those suckers looking for big contracts from Tom Ridge’s Homeland Insecurity office know how much money they’re wasting!

A lot of big corporations are looking at that $40 billion pork barrel just sitting on Tom Ridge’s desk waiting to be looted and thinking to themselves, gee, I’d like a piece of that.

So some of these foolish corporations went and hired Tom Ridge’s former legislative affairs director, and several other former staff, hoping that these people can use their personal relationships with Ridge to negotiate lucrative contracts.

Now you may think there is something fishy going on here. Don’t you dare. These employees have waited a whole year before tarting themselves up for the grueling task of lobbying their former colleagues for big, fat, government contracts. Just as the law requires.

Are they in for a shock!

What they didn’t know is that Mr. Ridge will not be influenced by his former staff persons at all. Nosiree! Mr. Ridge will decide who gets that money purely on the basis of the best interests of the American taxpayer! And these companies really do care about providing the best value for the taxpayers that they can. That’s why Walter B. Shirk, a lawyer at Powell, Goldstein, Frazer, and Murphy, another lobbying firm, wrote an article for a newsletter entitled “Opportunity and Risk: Securing Your Piece of the Homeland Security Pie”.

So those corporations are wasting a lot of money! Wow! Wait ’til they find out! I’ll bet all of those former staffers wish they’d never quit their jobs with Mr. Ridge, because once those corporations that hired them as lobbyists find out that they would have done just as well if they had sent a perfect stranger to make their presentations– well, they’ll probably let all those people go. Even if, like Ashley Davis, former special assistant to Mr. Ridge, they do see him quite often socially, and say they are very good friends with Mr. Ridge. I’m sure Mr. Ridge won’t hesitate to tell Ms. Davis’s clients they better offer the government a very, very good deal on whatever it is they’re selling, because that close friendship will play no part at all in the decision-making process.

And they’ll never get another job in government of course, because people like Tom Ridge wouldn’t want some former flunkies from these corporations hanging around his office, no way. Not after they deserted him just to make a lot more money.

Just as I’ll bet Halliburton never hires Dick Cheney back. Not after that piddly $80 billion he tossed their way for the reconstruction of Iraq.

My only question is this. Why do these companies even bother with lobbyists? All they have to do is pull their strings.