Monthly Archives: August 2006

Moving On

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Frank Rich writes,

The results are in for the White House’s latest effort to exploit terrorism for political gain: the era of Americans’ fearing fear itself is over.

In each poll released since the foiling of the trans-Atlantic terror plot — Gallup, Newsweek, CBS, Zogby, Pew — George W. Bush’s approval rating remains stuck in the 30’s, just as it has been with little letup in the year since Katrina stripped the last remaining fig leaf of credibility from his presidency. While the new Middle East promised by Condi Rice remains a delusion, the death rattle of the domestic political order we’ve lived with since 9/11 can be found everywhere: in Americans’ unhysterical reaction to the terror plot, in politicians’ and pundits’ hysterical overreaction to Joe Lieberman’s defeat in Connecticut, even in the ho-hum box-office reaction to Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center.”

I admit I’m surprised by the tepid box office for “World Trade Center,” especially since the reviews have been good. I’d be tempted to see it myself except that I’m afraid it would be a little too intense to watch in theaters. Someday I’ll watch it on television. Rich says that the film is doing better in the Northeast than the rest of the country, which surprised me, also. I guess all those Heartlanders who snapped up T-shirts picturing weepy eagles and flaming towers, and the country music fans who made “Have You Forgotten?” a big hit as we prepared to invade Iraq — have moved on.

If, indeed, they were ever there. I’ve believed all along that 9/11 represented something very different to many who watched on television than to those who were eyewitnesses and survivors. George Lakoff speaks to that a little bit in the Talking Dog interview:

There is a difference between imagery of someone who watches from afar, and the reality of someone who was actually there. The way the picture was shown, the buildings were hit, like a person being hit. The image would permit one to identify with the building– as if it were you. This has to do with mirror neurons: in our brains, there is a system of neurons that fire when you are either doing something physically or seeing another do the same thing. Seeing the plane hit the tower over and over on tv is as if you were seeing someone in shot, over and over again.

Lakoff elaborated in a paper he wrote just a week after September 11.

Buildings are metaphorically people. We see features—eyes, nose, and mouth—in their windows. I now realize that the image of the plane going into South Tower was for me an image of a bullet going through someone’s head, the flame pouring from the other side blood spurting out. It was an assassination. The tower falling was a body falling. The bodies falling were me, relatives, friends. Strangers who had smiled as they had passed me on the street screamed as they fell past me. The image afterward was hell: ash, smoke, and steam rising, the building skeleton, darkness, suffering, death.

It was different for me, because when I think of that day I remember watching through a window as the towers burned and collapsed. And they weren’t metaphorical buildings to me. I had walked through the mall levels where the shops and restaurants were many times. The towers were part of my ordinary workday landscape. I didn’t see the planes hit the buildings that morning, and seeing that imagery on television later didn’t hit me as hard as the collapse of the towers did.

As the Talking Dog says of the destruction of the towers, “people who DID NOT experience it personally actually have a harder time dealing with it than people who did.” I’ve heard other New Yorkers say the same thing. I believe that is true. That may be because, for New Yorkers, our whole environment changed. For days, weeks, months after, the city all around us was coping with September 11. For us, it wasn’t something that happened inside a little box in our living rooms. I think because of that direct and personal experience we had to face what had happened and deal with it in a direct and personal way. Television viewers could indulge in feeling outraged and victimized; survivors and eyewitnesses, on the whole, were overwhelmed with other emotions.

Lakoff continues,

The administration’s framings and reframings and its search for metaphors should be noted. The initial framing was as a “crime” with “victims” and “perpetrators” to be “brought to justice” and “punished.” The crime frame entails law, courts, lawyers, trials, sentencing, appeals, and so on. It was hours before “crime” changed to “war” with “casualties,” “enemies,” “military action,” “war powers,” and so on.

Lakoff wrote this just a week after September 11, remember. He caught on to what the Bushies were up to a lot faster than I did.

John Homans describes in the August 21 issue of New York magazine how the Bush Administration appropriated the grief of September 11:

Bush and his administration quickly swooped down to scoop up the largest part of the 9/11 legacy. The justified fear and rage and woundedness and sense of victimhood infantilized our political culture. The daddy state was born, with attendant sky-high approval ratings. And for many, the scale of the provocation seemed to demand similarly spectacular responses—a specious tactical argument, based as it was on the emotional power of 9/11, rather than any rearrangement of strategic realities.

Of course, the marriage of the ultimate baby-down-a-well media spectacle with good old American foreign-policy adventurism was brokered by Karl Rove, who decreed that George Bush would become a war president, indefinitely.

The final military takeover of Manhattan was the Republican convention in August of 2004, with nary an unscripted moment. In the convention’s terms, New York was less a place than a stage set for a sort of 9/11 puppet show.

Both Lakoff and Homans say that the nation became infantilized by September 11. Homans writes:

The memory of 9/11 continues to stoke a weepy sense of American victimhood, and victimhood, as used by both left and right, is a powerful political force. As the dog whisperer can tell you, strength and woundedness together are a dangerous combination. Now, 9/11 has allowed American victim politics to be writ larger than ever, across the globe. When someone from Tulsa, for example, says, “It’s important to remember 9/11 every day,” what he means is, “We were attacked, we are the aggrieved victims, we are justified.” But if we were victims then, we are less so now. This distorted sense of American weakness is weirdly mirrored in the woundedness and shame that motivate our adversaries. In our current tragicomedy of Daddy-knows-best, it’s a national neurosis, a perpetual childhood. (With its 9/11 truth-conspiracy theories, the far left has its own infantile daddy complex, except in that version, the daddies are the source of all evil.) No doubt, there are real enemies, Islamist and otherwise, more than ever (although the cure—the Iraq war—has inarguably made the disease worse). But the spectacular scope of 9/11, its psychic power, continues to distort America’s relationships. It will take years for the country to again understand its place in the world.

But if Frank Rich is right, maybe the psychic power is wearing off. This is good news, but to me it’s also a little sad. It was an extraordinary event, and it deserves to be remembered. They’re still finding bone fragments of the victims, for pete’s sake. And I worry that Americans are moving on not because the memory has faded, but because they’ve come to associate September 11 with the Bush Administration and all its shams and lies and deceits. And maybe people who over-indulged in victimhood don’t want to think about September 11 now, like someone overstuffed on Thanksgiving dinner who doesn’t want to even hear about roast turkey for several days.

Homans writes that for New Yorkers, September 11 is “a bond, a secret society, a thought world entered if not exactly happily, then without fear.” However, “The country, perhaps inevitably, has made a mess of our grieving.” I know how he feels. But this to me is a reflection on the hideous caricature of “leadership” provided by the White House. For five years the Bushies have worked mightily to bring out the worst in America. And they’ve done a heck of a job.

Just a week after September 11, Lakoff foresaw how the Right would react:

The use of the word “evil” in the administration’s discourse works in the following way. In conservative, strict father morality (see Moral Politics, Chapter 5) evil is a palpable thing, a force in the world. To stand up to evil you have to be morally strong. If you’re weak, you let evil triumph, so that weakness is a form of evil in itself, as is promoting weakness. Evil is inherent, an essential trait, that determines how you will act in the world. Evil people do evil things. No further explanation is necessary. There can be no social causes of evil, no religious rationale for evil, no reasons or arguments for evil.

Rightie refusal even to consider what caused Osama bin Laden and his followers to attack America is, IMO, pathological. As I explained here and here, to understand is not to justify. There is no virtue or advantage to remaining ignorant of our enemy’s motivations. But try explaining that to a rightie.

I agree with Lakoff also about how righties understand evil; I said about the same thing here. Righties judge whether an act is evil by who does it, not by the act itself.

Lakoff continues,

The enemy of evil is good. If our enemy is evil, we are inherently good. Good is our essential nature and what we do in the battle against evil is good. Good and evil are locked in a battle, which is conceptualized metaphorically as a physical fight in which the stronger wins. Only superior strength can defeat evil, and only a show of strength can keep evil at bay. Not to show overwhelming strength is immoral, since it will induce evildoers to perform more evil deeds because they’ll think they can get away with it. To oppose a show of superior strength is therefore immoral. Nothing is more important than the battle of good against evil, and if some innocent noncombatants get in the way and get hurt, it is a shame, but it is to be expected and nothing can be done about it. Indeed, performing lesser evils in the name of good is justified—”lesser” evils like curtailing individual liberties, sanctioning political assassinations, overthrowing governments, torture, hiring criminals, and “collateral damage.”

Of course, there’s also the cowardice factor. This past week (see Tbogg for details) rightie bloggers actually worked themselves into a lather over a couple of ladies with suspicious substances — which turned out to be Vaseline and facial scrub — on airplanes. It was way pathetic.

But Frank Rich says that, for most Americans, the thrill is gone.

The administration’s constant refrain that Iraq is the “central front” in the war on terror is not only false but has now also backfired politically: only 9 percent in the CBS poll felt that our involvement in Iraq was helping decrease terrorism. As its fifth anniversary arrives, 9/11 itself has been dwarfed by the mayhem in Iraq, where more civilians are now killed per month than died in the attack on America. The box-office returns of “World Trade Center” are a cultural sign of just how much America has moved on. For all the debate about whether it was “too soon” for such a Hollywood movie, it did better in the Northeast, where such concerns were most prevalent, than in the rest of the country, where, like “United 93,” it may have arrived too late. Despite wild acclaim from conservatives and an accompanying e-mail campaign, “World Trade Center” couldn’t outdraw “Step Up,” a teen romance starring a former Abercrombie & Fitch model and playing on 500 fewer screens.

Come to think of it, I’d rather watch a dancing Abercrombie & Fitch model than Nicolas Cage in fireman’s clothes, too.

Minority Majority

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Whenever I hear someone advocate racial profiling as part of national security — singling out people who look Middle Eastern for special attention — I think of the 1987 film “Born in East L.A.”

In this film Cheech Marin (who was also the writer and director) plays Rudy, a native-born east Angeleno who got caught in an INS raid without his wallet (and ID) and deported to Mexico. Denied re-entry to the U.S., Rudy spends most of the film scheming to get himself smuggled across the border, and getting mixed up with some con artists, hustlers, and the inevitable pretty girl along the way. If you’ve never seen it, rent it sometime; it’s a hoot.

Anyway, in one particularly brilliant segment Rudy is given the task of teaching English to a group of men planning to enter the U.S. illegally. The men turn out to be Chinese. Instead of English, Rudy teaches them how to pass for Latinos — how to walk, dress, watch girls, etc. And the funny thing is that it works; the Chinese fugitives are transformed into completely believable Latinos.

Years ago a Chicano friend (whose grandmother was Huichol) complained he often was mistaken for an east Indian by east Indians. And a Filipino co-worker once showed me a photograph of himself costumed in a Mongol-style helmet and chain mail. You would have sworn he was Genghis Khan.

Remember Jean Charles de Menezes? He was the Brazilian shot and killed on July 7 last year because London police mistook him for a Middle Eastern terrorist.

I bring this up because today the righties are cheering the mostly British passengers of Monarch Airlines Flight ZB 613 — departing Malaga, Spain, and flying to Manchester, UK — who mutinied because two (presumed) Arabic men were boarding. Passengers walked off the plane or refused to board entirely. Police eventually removed the two men so that the flight could take off (three hours late) without them. A security sweep of the plane found nothing amiss, and the two men eventually were cleared by security and flown to Manchester in another plane.

Captain Ed:

The incident shows that citizens will start imposing their own solutions to flight safety in the absence of demonstrably intelligent security while attempts at attacks continue … the unwillingness of the governments in both the UK and the US to provide systems of screening that instill confidence in the flying public has led to these incidents. They will continue and increase while screening systems insist on playing political correctness games instead of focusing on real threats as the Israelis have done for decades.

Other righties point out that the passengers were alarmed by the two men’s behavior, not their race, which was the same thing the London police said last year about Jean Charles de Menezes. This odd behavior was that they were speaking a foreign language (presumed Arabic, but the Daily Mail doesn’t say for sure) and wearing leather jackets in summer (London police also claimed Jean Charles de Menezes was wearing an “unseasonably thick jacket,” like the one I wish I had when I was riding around London on the top deck of a sightseeing bus last August; I was freezing). And the two guys were checking their watches. Like no law-abiding citizen ever checks his watch while waiting to board a plane.

So to those passengers who claim they were judging the men entirely by their behavior, I say: Sure you were.

A few days ago I wrote some posts about James Fallows’s new article about U.S. security in the current issue of Atlantic Online, in which he wrote:

“The patriotism of the American Muslim community has been grossly underreported,” says Marc Sageman, who has studied the process by which people decide to join or leave terrorist networks. According to Daniel Benjamin, a former official on the National Security Council and coauthor of The Next Attack, Muslims in America “have been our first line of defense.” Even though many have been “unnerved by a law-enforcement approach that might have been inevitable but was still disturbing,” the community has been “pretty much immune to the jihadist virus.”

Something about the Arab and Muslim immigrants who have come to America, or about their absorption here, has made them basically similar to other well-assimilated American ethnic groups–and basically different from the estranged Muslim underclass of much of Europe. … most measures of Muslim disaffection or upheaval in Europe–arrests, riots, violence based on religion–show it to be ten to fifty times worse than here.

See also this article in the National Catholic Reporter of January 14, 2005, that says American Muslims are remarkably law-abiding and are not providing a base of support for jihadists.

Muslims in Europe are another matter. Back to James Fallows:

The difference between the European and American assimilation of Muslims becomes most apparent in the second generation, when American Muslims are culturally and economically Americanized and many European Muslims often develop a sharper sense of alienation. “If you ask a second-generation American Muslim,” says Robert Leiken, author of Bearers of Global Jihad: Immigration and National Security After 9/11, “he will say, ‘I’m an American and a Muslim.” A second-generation Turk in Germany is a Turk, and a French Moroccan doesn’t know what he is.”

Alex Massie writes for The New Republic online:

The challenge of assimilation in Great Britain is daunting. A recent opinion survey of Muslims carried out by Channel 4 News concluded that just 44 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds feel Britain is their country, and 51 percent of them believe September 11 was the result of an American-Israeli conspiracy. Furthermore, 30 percent of British Muslims would like to live under sharia law, and 28 percent would like Great Britain to become an Islamic state. These findings, alas, cannot be considered the result of a rogue poll. A Pew Research Center survey this year found that 81 percent of British Muslims consider themselves Muslim first and British second. As Timothy Garton Ash noted in a prescient piece in Thursday’s Guardian, “This is a higher proportion than in Jordan, Egypt or Turkey, and exceeded only by that in Pakistan (87%).” No wonder the Channel 4 pollsters concluded that nearly one in ten British Muslims “can be classified as ‘Hardcore Islamists’ who are unconcerned by trifles like freedom of speech.”

What’s baffling about the alienation of British Muslims is that the British government has done more than most European governments to help Muslims assimilate. Further, British Muslims enjoy greater economic and educational opportunity than in some other European countries. Yet, as noted in the Guardian article, not only are British Muslims alienated, young British Muslims born in Britain seem more alienated than their immigrant parents.

The writer of the Guardian article, Timothy Garton Ash, speculates that, maybe, it has something to do with the fact that most British Muslims trace their origins to Pakistan. Maybe it’s Tony Blair’s support for George Bush. Maybe it’s the libidinous nature of British society (more so than the rest of Europe?). Maybe it’s all of those factors.

What Ash doesn’t say, but which the killing of Mr. de Menezes and the mutiny on Flight 613 reveal, is that British Muslims may be swimming against a strong but unacknowledged current of bigotry. Go here for more examples. The Brits may have entered into an unfortunate spiral in which terrorist acts of a small minority of Muslims incite bigoted reactions from “native” Brits, which in turn causes British Muslim youth to feel more alienated and more likely to be radicalized.

I say that if we listen to the hysterics and hate-mongering from the Right, we could find ourselves traveling down that same spiral.

One hears calls for “Israeli-style profiling.” I’m no expert, but it’s my understanding that Israeli-style profiling is more psychological profiling than ethnic profiling. According to this guy:

El Al’s passenger screening system, established in the early 1970s, relies on psychological profiling techniques backed up with high-technology equipment. This system has been highly effective: the last successful hijacking of an El Al jet was in 1968, when Palestinian terrorists diverted a flight from Rome to Algiers.34 Whereas the United States gives priority to screening baggage rather than people, Israel’s security model aims at ferreting out individuals with terrorist intentions. This profiling process relies on access to intelligence and careful observation of would-be passengers.

Note that these observations are made by people trained to catch revealing behaviors; not by bigoted passengers who panic when a man speaks Arabic (maybe) and checks his watch. And it would be pretty futile to single out ethnic Middle Easterners when you’re in the Middle East, I suspect.

I also agree with this blogger:

Israeli profiling is the very last line of defense. The first line of defense is a well-run intelligence service that has been penetrating Palestinian militant groups for years. Second is a series of checkpoints, roadblocks, and a wall. Finally, there’s a broad set of people trained to look for suicide bombers.

The blogger is not confident that U.S. airport personnel would be competent to carry out psychological profiling, and profiling done by improperly trained people is nothing but “security theater.” There are a great many other things we should be doing to improve airport security, he says, before we start profiling.

Every now and then some rightie will wonder why New York subway security doesn’t single out Middle Eastern persons for backpack searches. I always want to take the rightie by the hand and gently lead him to, say, some high-traffic spot in the Union Square subway station, and tell him to point out all the subway passengers who might be Middle Eastern. Eventually it should dawn even on the densest of righties that a majority of the thousands of people he sees might be Middle Eastern. It would be a lot easier to single out those passengers who definitely are not Middle Eastern, and even then he most likely would make some mistakes.

And if your purpose is to identify Muslims, don’t forget there are African Muslims and Asian Muslims, and the occasional person of European ancestry who converts to Islam.

If airport and other security were to put people wearing Muslim dress through special security, it wouldn’t take long for the enterprising terrorist to figure out how to dress and act so as not to arouse suspicion that he is Muslim. He might even rent “Born in East L.A.” and get tips on passing as Latino. If Chinese can do it, becoming Latinized should be a snap for a Pakistani.

Update: See Glenn Greenwald.

The blame lies not with those who entertain such fears, but with those who allow those fears to govern their conduct, and more so, those who purposely stoke and exaggerate those fears due either to their own fears and/or because doing so is to their advantage.

Update update: See also Scott Lemieux.

Shorter various blogospheric wingnuts: the government’s appalling lack of racism gives people no recourse but to take racism into their own hands.

Also also: Dave Johnson.

Losin’ It

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Yesterday President Bush went through the motions of doing his job and met with his economic advisers at Camp David. Afterward he made a statement and took questions from reporters.

MSNBC has a video. I normally wouldn’t ask you to look at a Bush video, except to call your attention to the way the president’s speech utterly lost cohesion when he was talking about Thursday’s wiretap ruling by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor.

If you want to skip the statement part (executive summary: bullshit) and go right to the questions, start the video at 6:10. The first questions are about Lebanon, and Bush’s answers — again, the usual bullshit — were spoken well enough. But it seemed to me that when the questions turned to the wiretap ruling (11:44) he went downhill — stammering, hesitating, changing thought in mid-sentence. He managed to dredge up some stock phrases and speak them forcefully — “this country of ours is at war”; “if al Qaeda is calling into the United States we want to know why they’re calling” — the latter being a non sequitur, and of course no one called Bush on it. But especially after about 13:15 I wondered if he was going to survive to the next clause.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I think the boy’s nervous.

The most-quoted line from Bush’s talk is this: “I would say that those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live.” I have nothing to add to Tristero’s take on the quote. For more commentary on Bush’s defiance of the law, see TChris at TalkLeft.

As for Bush’s claims about our glorious economy, I call your attention this this article by Ashley Seager in today’s Guardian.

The recent flow of news from around the world suggests that the balance of world economic power may finally be swinging away from the United States – the powerhouse of the past decade or more – towards Japan and Europe, which have lagged behind for many years.

The world economy has put in its fastest growth spurt for decades over the past three years, and is still bowling along at a healthy clip this year, despite a tripling of oil prices since early 2004. China and India continue to grow at breakneck speed but many economists are fearful that the interest rate rises by the world’s central banks this year, led by the US Federal Reserve, could put a swift brake on the world economy next year.

Indeed, the US economy has already slowed, expanding at an annual pace of only 2.5% in the second quarter. With news this week that the 12-member eurozone expanded at an annualised rate of 3.6% in the April to June period, Europe is suddenly growing faster than the US. Britain, too, has recovered from last year’s slowdown and expanded at an annualised 3.2% in the second quarter.

Back to Constitutional issues: Today, The People Who Understand This Stuff Better Than I Do are discussing the reasoning behind Judge Taylor’s decision. This article by Adam Liptak in the New York Times quotes a number of people who say the opinion is not as strongly grounded in legal opinion as it could have been. These people are not necessarily saying the decision was wrong, however. For example:

Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, predicted that the plaintiffs would win the case on appeal, but not for the reasons Judge Taylor gave.

“The chances that the Bush program will be upheld are not none, but slim,” Professor Sunstein said. “The chances that this judge’s analysis will be adopted are also slim.”

Today’s discussion seems to focus on whether the flaws in Judge Taylor’s arguments for her decision matter, since the decision can be supported solidly using other arguments. Professor Sunstein and others seem to believe the appeals court could take a fresh look at the case and side against the government even if they disallow Taylor’s opinion.

Glenn Greenwald argues that those picking apart Judge Taylor’s rhetoric and reasoning are losing sight of the Big Picture.

In the scheme of the profound issues our country faces, obsessing about the inartfulness of this judicial opinion is not unlike those who use a laughably grave tone to write articles about fights between Daily Kos diarists or the latest blogger “scandal” while ignoring our national media’s grotesque failure to scrutinize meaningfully our government’s conduct and claims — particularly on matters of war and peace or threats to constitutional liberties.

Scott Lemieux ain’t so sure:

… having read the opinion carefully I have to say that I side with Publius over Glenn on this one; while I strongly believe that the outcome of the case (at least insofar as the conclusions that the NSA program violates FISA and the 4th Amendment are concerned) was correct, the shoddiness of this opinion really does matter. First of all , this goes beyond mere inarftfulness; Publius is right that it’s ridiculous to claim that there is no dispute over the First and Fourth Amendment claims being made here (indeed, I don’t even agree with the former claim.) And second, if this was the Supreme Court the argument would be merely normative. But since it’s a District Court, the quality of the legal reasoning matters in a pragmatic way as well: this decision is certain to be overturned by 6CA. For lower courts, the quality of the legal reasoning most certainly does matter, and even a court sympathetic to the outcome will have no choice but to overturn this one. The NSA program is unconstitutional–but this argument needs to be made in an opinion that has some chance of holding up on appeal.

In the comments to Scott’s post, Ann Bartow and Glenn G. argue that Taylor’s opinion amounts to a summary judgment and wasn’t meant to be the final word. I take it the fact that the government’s “evidence” is secret, meaning Judge Taylor couldn’t discuss it specifically in her opinion, is a factor here. See also J.B. at Balkinization, who thinks Judge Taylor had tactical reasons for approaching the case as she did.

Betrayed

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If you are out and about this weekend, find a bookstore or newsstand and buy a copy of the September issue of Harper’s. The cover art is a modernist (modernist may be the wrong word; I’m not keeping up with trends in contemporary art) painting of a teacher and students posed for a class picture.

There are a number of good articles in this issue, but the one I most particularly want to call to your attention is “American Gulag: Prisoners’ Tales from the War on Terror” by Eliza Griswold. Griswold interviewed several former prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, and talked to family members and lawyers of prisoners still being held. The lawyers, working pro bono, are among 500 lawyers organized by the Center for Constitutional Rights to represent prisoners at Guantanamo. (The article probably will be posted on the web eventually, but not for two or three months.)

If even half of what Griswold writes is true, Guantanamo could be the blackest mark yet on our country’s history.

Highlights:

â–ºThere is no indication that the Hamdan decision will make a dime’s worth of difference to the “450 prisoners held at Guantanamo, let alone the 13,000 people currently ‘detained’ in Iraq, the 500 or so in Afghanistan, and the unknown number (estimated to be about 100) at secret CIA ‘black sites’ around the world,” Griswold writes. President Bush has made up his mind that the Court in Hamdan ruled in his favor, so he sees no reason to change.

â–ºTo date, “98 detainees have died (34 of those deaths are being investigated as homicides) and more than 600 U.S. personnel have been implicated in some form of abuse.”

â–ºSince even the Red Cross is given extremely limited and restricted access to the prisons (and, of course, no access at all to the “black sites,” shipboard brigs, or “forward operating sites” where most abuses occur), essentially this means there is no way to find out what’s really going on.

â–ºOnly about 5 percent of the prisoners at Guantanamo were arrested by Americans. The rest were captured by other Arabs Muslims/Middle Easterners and turned over or sold for a bounty. For example, Abdullah al Noaimi of Bahrain was captured by Pashtun tribesmen and sold to Pakistani security forces in 2001. At the time, Griswold writes, “there seemed to be a bounty on every Arab’s head, and fliers promising ‘wealth and power beyond your dreams’ were dropping, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, ‘like snowflakes in December in Chicago.'” After several weeks of detention by the Pakistanis, al Noaimi was turned over to Americans at Kandahar. Al Noaimi had visited the U.S. and for a time was a student at Old Dominion University in Virginia. He figured he’d tell the Americans his arrest was a mistake, and he could go home.

Abdullah al Noaimi was kept in Guantanamo for four years. He only recently returned home. The U.S. military decided al Noaimi was an enemy combatant, although the evidence supporting this claim remains secret.

â–º”Despite everything that is hidden about the practices in Guantanamo Bay,” Griswold says, “it is still the most transparent piece of the large mosaic of U.S. detention. And so the U.S. has begun to employ a sort of shell game to hide the more embarrassingly innocent detainees from public scrutiny: we simply send them home to be imprisoned by their own governments.”

â–ºA prominent Yemeni businessman, Abdulsalam al Hila, was in Egypt on business in September 2002 when he disappeared. His family had no idea where he was until, two years later, they received a letter smuggled out of a U.S. prison in Afghanistan.

â–ºIn 2004 an Afghani man was taken prisoner with his 12-year-old son. Both the father and son had a bag over their heads for eighteen days.

â–ºMen released from Bagram describe frequent beatings and days without food. The lawyers of the Center for Constitutional Rights say there is nothing they can do for prisoners there. They cannot even prove that U.S. law applies in Bagram.

Someday, whatever is going on in those prisons will see the light of day. And then there will be global outrage, and Americans will be shocked and say they had no idea any such thing was going on.

Elsewhere in this issue of Harper’s –a young man describes his internship with the Lincoln Group in Iraq. Lincoln Group is a pack of amateurs who got multi-million dollar contracts form the Pentagon to plant pro-U.S. stories in Middle Eastern newspapers. It’s a jaw-dropping story. See also Lewis Lapham’s “tribute” to Halliburton.

Many Thanks

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Not many bloggers noticed it, but yesterday Dan Froomkin revealed what it will take for President Bush to decide the Iraq mission is fulfilled so that our troops can leave.

He is waiting for Iraq to thank him.

Froomkin:

Alarmed at a brief dribble of actual un-spun news from inside the White House, spokesman Tony Snow yesterday tried his darndest to discredit it.

The dribble emerged courtesy of four scholars invited to talk with President Bush about Iraq on Monday. None of them substantively disagreed with Bush’s policies — see my column yesterday, Bush Bubble Alive and Well — but they did talk to New York Times reporters afterwards about where the president seemed to be coming from.

As a result, Thom Shanker and Mark Mazzetti wrote in the Times yesterday: “President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government — and the Iraqi people — had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday. . . .

“[T]he president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd.”

Froomkin goes on to describe Tony Snow’s denial of the President’s frustration. The President is not frustrated, says Snow. He is determined. And that’s the official White House position.

But Froomkin found more evidence of presidential frustration.

As columnist Sidney Blumenthal points out in Salon today: “Bush’s demand for expressions of gratitude from the Iraqis is not a new one. In his memoir, L. Paul Bremer III, head of the ill-fated Coalition Provisional Authority, records that above all other issues Bush stressed the need for an Iraqi government to declare its thanks.”

Peter W. Galbraith has more in his article on Bremer’s book for the New York Review of Books: Bremer “had lunch with the President before leaving for Baghdad — a meeting joined by the Vice President and the national security team — but no decision seems to have been made on any of the major issues concerning Iraq’s future. Instead, Bremer got a blanket grant of authority that he clearly enjoyed exercising. The President’s directions seem to have been limited to such slogans as ‘we’re not going to fail’ and ‘pace yourself, Jerry.’ In Bremer’s account, the President was seriously interested in one issue: whether the leaders of the government that followed the CPA would publicly thank the United States. . . .

“Bush had only one demand: ‘It’s important to have someone who’s willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq.’ According to Bremer, he came back to this single point three times in the same meeting. Similarly, Ghazi al-Yawar, an obscure Sunni Arab businessman, became Bush’s candidate for president of Iraq’s interim government because, as Bremer reports, Bush had ‘been favorably impressed with his open thanks to the Coalition.’ “

If that’s what he’s waiting for, Iraq, by all means thank the man. Send him flowers and a fruit basket. Bake him the biggest bleeping cake you can fit into an oven and write Thank you President Bush on top. And add a picture of Bush surrounded by bald eagles (white and dark chocolate feathers!). If you can’t mail the cake, send him some of the chocolate feathers with a photo of the cake and tell him it was delicious.

And, Iraq, if mailing a thank you card is inconvenient — or dangerous — here is a selection of free email thank you cards. Customize one and send it to [email protected].

If it’s not too much trouble, stage a parade in his honor. I know you can’t have a real parade without inviting mass slaughter, but maybe you could build a secured soundstage and fake it. Have marchers walk past one of those blue screens and add street scenes later. Or maybe some Bollywood producer would make it for you, in India. The President won’t know the difference. Trust me on this.

Tell him you’re commissioning Iraq’s best sculptor to create a statue of President Bush the Victorious to be erected where the statue of Saddam Hussein used to stand. Send him sketches showing three or four versions of what the statue might look like, and tell him he can pick the one he likes best. Promise to invite him to a big ceremony when the statue is unveiled. Don’t forget to make up some excuse to explain why it’s going to take a really long time to get the statue finished. Like, you’re all out of bronze.

And don’t forget to tell the President that because of his determined and resolute guidance Iraq is all grown up now and can manage on its own. Say you’ll miss us, but now you’re standing up, and you want all those coalition soldiers so dear to your hearts to stand down. Maybe promise the President a nice going away present — something really special you’ll send him just as soon as all the Americans and Brits are gone.

You don’t have to mean it.

Righties: The Constitution Supports Terrorism!

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Sarah Karash, Associated Press:

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government’s warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency’s program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy as well as the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.

“Plaintiffs have prevailed, and the public interest is clear, in this matter. It is the upholding of our Constitution,” Taylor wrote in her 43-page opinion. …

… The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of journalists, scholars and lawyers who say the program has made it difficult for them to do their jobs.


Glenn Greenwald discusses the opinion, so see Glenn for intelligent analysis and background (scroll down to updates). Glenn also predicts news media will spend more time on JonBenet Ramsey’s alleged killer.

This is great news, but I wonder if and how it will be implemented. The Bush Administration is likely to ignore the decision and secretly continue the program. If Congress can’t constraint the Bushies, I don’t know why they’d obey a court.

Anyway, as Dave Johnson points out,

Keep in mind that all this means is they have to start getting warrants — follow the law and Constitution just like how we have always done it in this country.

Dave links to rightie blog Ace of Spades; the comments are priceless.

Not only is she a Carter appointee, she is Black. Want to bet she was admitted to Yale on a Minority set a side? Maybe she’s related to Conners, the other Black nut from Mo Town.

I liked this one, too:

I think all of us should send this judge thank you cards. She may have just handed the GOP a 2006 sweep in both houses. She should be the Willie Horton of 2006.

Second, as we have all discussed with the ‘tards over NSA and other WoT issues, the Supreme Court (albeit in dicta) has indicated that foreign survellance is completely within the president’s power as commander in chief, so this ruling has no real chance. In fact, I wonder if Roberts will scoop up the appeal to make this a principal a firmly decided principal.

Right, but foreign surveillance of non-US persons is not what the suit was about. (This crew is brilliant, aren’t they?) The concern is that the Administration is not limiting itself to non-U.S. persons, and with no meaningful oversight, who can know what they’re up to? And of course there’s the picky little matter of following the law. Here’s an explanation of what the law says, courtesy of Media Matters.

FISA contains provisions that limit … warrantless surveillance to communications “exclusively between foreign powers.” Those provisions do not apply to Bush’s conduct, as he authorized domestic surveillance of communications between persons inside the United States and parties outside the country. FISA specifically states that the president may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order only if there is “no substantial likelihood” that the communications of “a United States person” will be acquired.

FISA also allows the president and the attorney general to conduct surveillance without a court order for the purpose of gathering “foreign intelligence information” for no more than 15 days “following a declaration of war by the Congress.” This provision does not permit Bush’s conduct either, as he acknowledged reauthorizing the program more than 30 times since 2001….

…The FISA (Title 50, Chapter 36 of the United States Code) provision (Title 50, Section 1802 — or “50 USC 1802”) … allows the president to authorize surveillance without a court order if the attorney general certifies that the surveillance is “solely directed” at “the acquisition of the contents of communications transmitted by means of communications used exclusively between or among foreign powers;” or, “the acquisition of technical intelligence, other than the spoken communications of individuals, from property or premises under the open and exclusive control of a foreign power.” The law also states that warrantless surveillance is permissible only if the attorney general certifies that “there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party.”

A second section within FISA, titled “Authorization during time of war” (50 USC 1811), states that the president may authorize warrantless surveillance for a period of no more than 15 days after Congress declares war.

Same commenter, continued:

Third, isn’t it time judicial review got smacked down? Can’t we get congress to pull a Justice Marshall over the Supreme Court and declare that Congress has the power to overrule supreme court decisions? Oh wait, no, Congress was deballed when DeLay left.

Let’s get this straight: A federal judge rules that the executive branch is violating a law passed by Congress, and this guy wants Congress to overrule the judge so that the president can continue to ignore Congress.

Brilliant, I say. You can’t make this shit up.

As Scott Lemieux says, the Right thinks that upholding the Constitution makes one pro-terrorist.

Kagro X at The Next Hurrah:

Taylor rejects the assertion that the defendants cannot carry on their case without the exposure of state secrets. Why? This part, in my opinion, is the gem we’ve all been waiting for:

    The Bush administration has repeatedly told the general public that there is a valid basis in law for the TSP. Further, Defendants have contended that the President has the authority under the AUMF and the Constitution to authorize the continued use of the TSP. Defendants have supported these arguments without revealing or relying on any classified information. Indeed, the court has reviewed the classified information and is of the opinion that this information is not necessary to any viable defense of the TSP. Defendants have presented support for the argument that “it … is well-established that the President may exercise his statutory and constitutional authority to gather intelligence information about foreign enemies.” [Footnotes omitted.]

In other words, Taylor says that all the claims about what sensitive information may or may not be revealed in a trial is quite beside the point of whether or not the program is legal and constitutional. The government has never once made the argument that the argument for the program’s legality is itself a matter of national security. Far from it. They have claimed that it was an open and shut case.

Taylor says: Fine. Make the case.

Here’s another good bit:

One other gem worth highlighting, though, was Taylor’s address of the Fourth Amendment’s applicability:

    In enacting FISA, Congress made numerous concessions to stated executive needs. They include delaying the applications for warrants until after surveillance has begun for several types of exigencies, reducing the probably cause requirement to a less stringent standard, provision of a single court of judicial experts, and extension of the duration of approved wiretaps from thirty days (under Title III) to a ninety day term.

    All of the above Congressional concessions to Executive need and to the exegencies of our present situation as a people, however, have been futile. The wiretapping program here in litigation has undisputedly been continued for at least five years, it has undisputedly been implemented without regard to FISA and of course the more stringent standards of Title III, and obviously in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

    The President of the United States is himself created by that same Constitution.

Ouch.

Ouch, indeed. Well, let’s hope the decision stands …

Can Dems Find Their Mojo?

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There were a couple of articles in Tuesday’s newspapers that underscored, for me, how far the Dems have fallen. One was a Washington Post column by E.J. Dionne:

While Republicans believe in their party and in the cause of building its organization from bottom to top, Democratic sympathizers tend to focus on favorite causes and favorite candidates, notably in presidential years. …

… a political party needs to see itself — and be seen by those who support it — as a long-term operation, not simply as a label of convenience at election time.

The other article was a New York Times story by Robin Toner, “Fathers Defeated, Democratic Sons Strike Back.”

In the history of the Democratic Party, the election of 1980 looms large: the year the party lost the White House, the Senate, a generation of Midwestern liberals and, in some ways, its confidence that it was the natural, even inevitable, majority party.

Now, that election has a sequel.

Call it the return of the sons: Chet Culver, the Iowa secretary of state and the son of former Senator John C. Culver, is running for governor of Iowa. Senator Evan Bayh, son of former Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, is organizing and testing the waters for a possible presidential bid in 2008. And Jack Carter, the son of former President Jimmy Carter, has decided at the age of 59 to run an uphill race for the Senate in Nevada, his first foray into electoral politics.

All of them had their political sensibilities shaped, to some extent, by the election that defeated their fathers and began a generation of conservative dominance.

OK so far. But the article goes on to describe the sons as “careful” centrists who run away from the dreaded “L” word — Liberal. For example:

While Birch Bayh was known as a classic “Great Society liberal,” as Evan Bayh has put it, and as a champion of causes like the equal rights amendment, the son has long been a careful centrist, a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council and a founder of the Third Way, a centrist research group.

Visiting 22 states over the past year, he has argued that the way for Democrats to win is to reach out to the middle class, demonstrate credibility on national security and show respect for faith and values issues.

Conclusion: Evan Bayh is a eunuch.

The past couple of posts focused on how the Democratic Party lost itself. This post discusses how the Right, through a long campaign of “hysterical charges and bald-faced lies,” undermined the Democrats’ credibility on foreign policy. The last post looks at how white middle- and working-class voters bolted to the Right when Democrats took a stand in favor of racial equality. Further, the old New Deal coalition was fatally undermined by the New Left. But the New Left did not create a new coalition to take the place of the old one. Instead, for almost forty years American liberals and progressives have been caught up in discrete issues — civil rights, reproductive rights, gay rights, the environment, etc. — that compete with each other for money and attention.

Meanwhile, the Right built an infrastructure of think tanks and media that by the 1980s dominated the nation’s political discourse and agenda.

This is a complex history, and I’ve only touched on a few main points. I’ve left out Ken Starr and the Clinton impeachment, for example, and the pernicious influence of the Christian Right. And then there is the problem of fundraising. With no broad-based coalition to support them, the Dems came to depend on a small pool of wealthy donors for campaign money. Now, E.J. Dionne notes, Dems argue whether they should wage a 50-state campaign or strategically focus on 20 or so “blue” states, conceding the remainder to the Right.

The result: In recent years Republicans have ruled national politics like lords, while the Dems cringed about like court eunuchs being careful not to offend. While the Republicans pushed for broad and radical change in domestic and foreign policy, Democrats attempted little more than minor, incremental tweaks. And when George W. Bush became president, and as we leftie bloggers and other liberals screamed our virtual heads off at the Dem Party to get a spine and stand up to the Right, at first Washington Dems either ignored us or ran away from us.

Dems in Washington are so insular they barely know what to make of demands from the grassroots. At first they seemed to think that if they ignored us, we would go away. Now some of them are catching on that we’re not going away, and they’re becoming more responsive. But conventional wisdom tells the Dems to stick with the Clinton triangulation approach, because we liberal activists have burned the party before, in the 1960s and 1970s.

There’s a lot of distrust and estrangement here. We liberals of the base don’t trust the party to work for our issues, but the party doesn’t trust us, either.

Some progressives argue in favor of a third party. The Dems, they say, are hopeless. Why work to elect them when they’re going to let us down, as they have in the past? This argument suffers from two fatal flaws. First, since the emergence of the first “third” party in the early nineteenth century, in national campaigns third parties at best have been spoilers. This has to do with the way we run elections in the U.S. and is not going to change no matter how sincere and earnest we are.

But the other flaw is even more fatal: Until we heal our toxic political culture, and until we liberals and progressives pull together to create a unified coalition with infrastructure to rival the Right’s — any third party we create will end up being just like the Dems.

The national Democratic Party came to be the way it is in response to the nation’s political environment, which has been so fouled by the Right that real political debate and discourse are damn near impossible. And it came to be the way it is because no coalition of citizens and interest groups support it and defend it, the way the New Deal coalition supported the Democrats from the 1930s until the 1960s. Instead, our myriad single-issue advocacy groups hang back until an election is looming, then issue endorsements. Like anyone cares. And the rest of us tend to focus on favorite issues and candidates, as Dionne says.

I cannot emphasize enough that the Democrats in Washington won’t change until we change. That’s the whole point of the netroots uprising, and I believe we’re having an effect.

Those who advocate abandoning the Dems for a third party are thinking too small. They are looking for the Magic Candidate who will get elected and go to Washington and make it all better. But this ignores how Congress works and how agendas are set in Washington; in fact, individual politicians are only as strong as their parties. Going the third-party route, IMO, would make progressives even more marginalized than we already are.

This is a feeble analogy, but let’s say you have a big aquarium, but your fish are sick and dying because there is something wrong with the aquarium environment. There’s not much point in replacing dead fish with new ones if you don’t fix what’s wrong with the aquarium.

Healing the political environment is not going to be easy. Media reform, which I’ve ranted about in the past, is critical. But I’ve got a couple of other ideas.

First, we absolutely must re-build a strong and broad coalition that will work together to support the Democratic Party and liberal/progressive politicians and issues all the time; not just when elections are looming. This coalition will not necessarily look like the New Deal coalition. It would include unions and minorities, but it should strive to include small business owners, who have been pretty much shafted by the Bush Administration, and workers, and not just workers who belong to unions. Everyone who lives on a paycheck and hopes to retire with a pension or 401K is being hurt by Republican policies these days. Retirees, also, should be our natural partners.

The single-issue advocates should think hard about whether it’s in the best interests of their causes to put all their effort into maintaining big nonprofit organizations that can’t actually do much but make noise, or instead work together through the Democratic Party. I say that if the advocates — for the environment, reproductive rights, civil rights, health care, etc. — could pull together and focus their efforts on strengthening and influencing a single political party, eventually they could have the power to effect real policy changes instead of settling for tweaks. Or, as in recent years, just trying to blunt the damage being done by Republicans.

As commenter JHB pointed out, 1970s-era changes in campaign finance law, which were supposed to make campaigns more democratic, had the effect of empowering pro-big corporation PACs and gave rise to single-issue groups pretending to be bipartisan, but who demagogue on one or two inflammatory issues to help Republicans get elected. It seems every time campaign finance gets “reformed,” new sets of problems arise. And, oddly enough, those problems tend to help the Republicans and hurt the Dems. I am more and more convinced that public finance of campaigns is the way to go. But if we can’t get public financing, we must fight any “reform” that would hinder our efforts at coalition building.

In short, liberals and progressives must completely re-think our way of doing political business. All the time. Not just the way we run election campaigns.

My advice for the Washington Democrats is to figure out who they are in their own right, and stop allowing themselves to be defined by the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Dems are so cowed they’ve come to believe rightie revisionist history — that the Democratic Party destroyed itself by their mushiness on foreign policy and association with 1960s hippies and radicals. And that the only way they can prove themselves to be worthy is to be like Republicans. Bleep that. I spent the last two posts explaining why the GOP version of Democratic Party history is bogus. Further, I sincerely believe a majority of voters are sick to death of the Republicans’ act and would respond well to something else.

In the last post I said Dems should “reconnect to the best of the core principles that made the party strong in the past and reaffirm those principles in the present.” Take, for example, this passage from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address:

For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

    Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
    Jobs for those who can work.
    Security for those who need it.
    The ending of special privilege for the few.
    The preservation of civil liberties for all.
    The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.

Whenever the Republicans go off on tangents about saving endangered stem cells or starting more wars in lieu of an actual foreign policy, Dems should be saying, look, here are the basic things government should be doing, along with national defense and homeland security, and government controlled by Republicans isn’t doing any of them. Instead, we’ve been distracted by fringe issues, most of which amount to government interfering with matters that people could better decide for themselves. Republicans believe in fairy tales — such as starting wars in the Middle East will spread democracy, or cutting taxes increases government revenue, or unregulated business and markets will improve everyone’s standard of living. None of these fairy tales have come true in the past, and they aren’t coming true now, yet Republicans still believe in them. If you’re tired of fairy tales and want government that works, government that does the job government is supposed to do, vote for Democrats.

Is that so hard?