Category Archives: Civil Rights

Caption Contest!

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Be careful what you say — anybody might be wiretapped. Seems to me this vintage World War I poster would lend itself to a wiretap-related caption. Whoever comes up with the best zinger wins a cafepress T-shirt or poster with the updated Miss Liberty graphic!

Of course, the Bushies are goin’ way beyond phone wiretaps. Mo Dowd writes today (courtesy of True Blue Liberal) that she doesn’t appreciate “Dick Cheney ogling my Googling.”

Because what I’m Googling, of course, is Dick Cheney. I have to constantly monitor how Vice Voyeur is pushing the federal government to constantly monitor millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls, e-mail notes and Internet searches.

If you want to know why the Grim Peeper is willing to turn this country into a police state to take his version of democracy to other countries, just do a Google search under “antiterrorism,” “government snooping,” “overreaching” and “fruitcake.”

I tried “fruitcake” and got, well, fruitcake, but “government snooping” brings up some real interesting hits.

Responsibility

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A few days ago, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, President Bush talked about responsible debate. “The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it,” he said.

So what did Mr. Responsibility’s spokesman do today? He attempted to deflect criticism of his policies with smears and lies. Yeah, real responsible.

Alleged journalist for the Associated Press Nedra Pickler wrote today,

The White House accused former Vice President Al Gore of hypocrisy Tuesday for his assertion that President Bush broke the law by eavesdropping on Americans without court approval. …

… [White House Press Secretary Scott] McClellan said the Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in warrantless physical searches, and he cited an FBI search of the home of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames without permission from a judge. He said Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, had testified before Congress that the president had the inherent authority to engage in physical searches without warrants.

“I think his hypocrisy knows no bounds,” McClellan said of Gore.

Pickler, uncharacteristically, did some fact-checking.

But at the time that of the Ames search in 1993 and when Gorelick testified a year later, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required warrants for electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes, but did not cover physical searches. The law was changed to cover physical searches in 1995 under legislation that Clinton supported and signed.

In December I wrote about this new variation on the righties’ favorite excuse — “Clinton did it too!” — and linked to a report on the Ames investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that says the FBI had obtained the required search warrants and was in compliance with the FISA law in effect at the time. What the righties have done is take part of Jamie Gorelick’s (admittedly confusing) testimony out of context as “proof” of warrantless wiretapping, in spite of other documentation that shows the Clinton administration acted within the law. See also Jack at Ruminate This.

Alberto Gonzales also repeated the lie on last night’s Larry King Live; Think Progress provides a smackdown. See also Steve Soto.

You know righties; once they got some excuse for bad Bush behavior in their heads, no amount of debunking will flush it out. But usually the White House has surrogates spread these little stories, to create some distance between the lie and the President. It seems they’re getting reckless.

In other smear news, E.J. Dionne admits that he “underestimated the viciousness of the right wing.”

Last November, Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat and a decorated Marine combat veteran, came out for a rapid American withdrawal from Iraq. At the time, I wrote: “It will be difficult for Bush’s acolytes to cast Murtha, who has regularly stood up for the military policies of Republican presidents during his 31 years in Congress, as some kind of extreme partisan or hippie protester.”

No, the conservative hit squad didn’t accuse Murtha of being a hippie. But a crowd that regularly defends President Bush for serving in the Texas Air National Guard instead of going to Vietnam has continued its war on actual Vietnam veterans. An outfit called the Cybercast News Service last week questioned the circumstances surrounding the awarding of two Purple Hearts to Murtha because of wounds he suffered in the Vietnam War.

The only surprise, of course, is why a smart guy like E.J. is surprised. Here’s the essential part:

What’s maddening here is the unblushing hypocrisy of the right wing and the way it circulates — usually through Web sites or talk radio — personal vilification to abort honest political debate. Murtha’s views on withdrawing troops from Iraq are certainly the object of legitimate contention. Many in Murtha’s party disagree with him. But Murtha’s right-wing critics can’t content themselves with going after his ideas. They have to try to discredit his service.

Like duh, E.J. Those of us out here in the leftie blog trenches spend most of our time countering rightie smear and disinformation campaigns. Not that it does any good. But it’s a damn shame that, with all the serious problems we face, we can’t have civilized debates based on facts.

And you know what’s funny? Right now I’m listening to Chris Matthews chrip away on Hardball. And he’s asking if Hillary Clinton should apologize for a speech she made yesterday. It’s OK to smear and lie to undermine the Constitution and deceive the American people, but you don’t dare insult the gawdallmighty Republican Party.

Update: Tweety dedicated his entire bleeping program today to Hillary Clinton’s speech, just because she used the word “plantation” to describe Congress. The day after the former vice president of the United States accused the president of breaking the law; and after the White House, through the press secretary and the attorney general, issued lies to smear that former vice president — Tweety spends an hour talking about Hillary Clinton and the “P” word. Bleeping unreal.

Update update: Nice quote by Thomas Frank in the February 2006 Harper’s (not online):

Get a conservative talking about the importance of character” and before long the word “strength” will come up. This is a quality treasured by the right, both on the battlefield and in the risk-taking world of business, and yet the distinguishing stylistic feature of the anti-liberal genre is precisely the opposite: irritability, a keen sensitivity to every last little insult. … Not only is conservatism the ideology of the powerful but conservatives are in command of all three branches of government. And yet the offense taking persists. Outrage is the melodramatic resolution to which all the action inevitably leads, the canned emotional response that every anecdote generates. …

… A convenient rhetorical benefit of this emphasis on electronic speech is that it solves the difficult problems of real-world power – by which I mean a problem that is difficult for conservatives populists who like to depict themselves as society’s victims. If offensive speech is the raw material of politics, then things like ownership or wealth distribution are not worthy of consideration. Nor can the threat posed by liberals be minimized or made to mean less dire by pointing out those liberals’ inability to win elections: as long as liberals exist, getting their ten seconds on TV or posting their liberalisms on the Internet, the danger to America is clear and present.

Staggering Incompetence

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Today’s New York Times story by Lowell Bergman, Eric Lichtblau, Scott Shane and Don van Natta Jr. — “Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends,” is not the first to question whether the once-secret NSA wiretapping program was effective. On January 4 Mark Hosenball posted a Newsweek web exclusive that asked the same question — illegal or not, did it work?

Hosenball writes,

Did the National Security Agency’s controversial eavesdropping program really help to detect terrorists or avert their plots? Administration officials have suggested to media outlets like The New York Times–which broke the story–that the spying played a role in at least two well-publicized investigations, one in the United Kingdom and one involving a plan to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge.

But before the NSA’s warrantless spying program became public, government spokesmen had previously cited other intelligence and legal tactics as having led to major progress in the same investigations. In the Brooklyn Bridge case, officials indicated that the questioning of a captured Al Qaeda leader had led to investigative breakthroughs in Ohio. In the British case, Justice Department officials told NEWSWEEK a year ago that investigators had made progress by using a controversial provision of the Patriot Act which allows authorities to monitor potentially suspicious activities in public libraries.

In other words, if next week we learn the White House has been getting intelligence from a Ouija board, expect the Bushies to claim the Ouija board helped save the Brooklyn Bridge.

NEWSWEEK reported extensively on these cases when government investigations were coming to fruition. In both instances, officials originally indicated that key investigative developments came from sources other than NSA electronic eavesdropping–then still a closely guarded secret.

And if we’d had that Ouija board before 9/11 — the WTC towers would be standing today.

In the New York Times story linked above, Bergman et al. report that the FBI found the NSA “intelligence” to be a nuisance — “tips” that required a lot of legwork to check out but led to dead ends.

F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained that they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs said intelligence officials turning over the tips “would always say that we had information whose source we can’t share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Qaeda operative.” He said, “I would always wonder, what does ‘suspected’ mean?”

“The information was so thin,” he said, “and the connections were so remote, that they never led to anything, and I never heard any follow-up.”

More critically, Bergman et al. reveal that the NSA did too snoop on communications that were entirely within the United States.

Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called. …

… in bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more “calls to Pizza Hut,” one official, who supervised field agents, said.

I’m assuming nobody was ordering pizza from Pakistan.

The New York Times article raises several more questions. One, was the NSA program in fact counterproductive because it wasted FBI time and resources playing Trivial Pursuit?

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators.

And, of course, we are still arguing over the legality of warrantless snooping on American citizens. One argument from the Right is that the nature of data mining makes warrants too cumbersome. On last night’s Hardball someone with expertise in FISA regulations (transcript not yet available) said that it has always been understood that warrants are not necessary for keyword searches, because they don’t involve people. But once the keyword search identifies a “U.S. person,” then law clearly requires a warrant. Seems to me that the process of applying for a warrant, as time consuming as that might be, would have forced the NSA to distinguish dead ends from genuine risks, thereby saving the FBI considerable time. Sort of the old “measure twice, cut once” principle.

Further, it is obvious the NSA program was not limited, or controlled, as the White House claims. We’re being lied to again. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you …

Lessons of History

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Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, attorney general during the LBJ administration, writes in today’s Los Angeles Times about the perils of unchecked power. Specifically, he writes about J. Edgar Hoover’s crusade to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King.

These days Hoover has become almost a comic figure; the tough guy in ladies’ underdrawers. But for a time he was so powerful even presidents were afraid to go after him. “Some of that support was based on admiration,” writes Katzenbach, “some on fear that he had damaging personal information in his files.” Although on paper he reported to the attorney general, in fact he operated outside anyone’s control. In the eyes of the nation Hoover was a hero who had fought organized crime and Communists. But by the 1960s, Katzenbach writes, Hoover was getting old.

He believed the world was questioning and rejecting the values he held out as fundamental — patriotism, respect for law and order, sexual mores grounded in marriage and family, the work ethic. He detested what he saw as a growing culture of permissiveness, and, as a conservative Southerner, he seriously questioned the idea of racial equality.

Hoover convinced himself that MLK was working for Communists. Lack of evidence thereof would not dissuade him. In 1963, Hoover went to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy for approval for a wiretap on Dr. King’s phones. Bobby Kennedy feared that Hoover’s accusations would destroy the Civil Rights movement.

When Hoover asked for the wiretaps, Bobby consulted me (I was then his deputy) and Burke Marshall, head of the Civil Rights Division. Both of us agreed to the tap because we believed a refusal would lend credence to the allegation of communist influence, while permitting the tap, we hoped, would demonstrate the contrary. I think the decision was the right one, under the circumstances. But that doesn’t mean that the tap was right. King was suspected of no crime, but the government invaded his privacy until I removed the tap two years later when I became attorney general. It also invaded the privacy of every person he talked to on that phone, not just Levinson.

But what we didn’t know during this period was that Hoover was doing a lot more than tapping King’s phones. As King’s criticism of the FBI continued, and as Hoover became more and more convinced there must be communist influence even though no evidence ever materialized, he determined to discredit and destroy King. He went further, putting bugs in King’s hotel bedrooms across the country. (He claimed that Atty. Gen. Herbert Brownell had authorized him to use such listening devices in cases involving “national security” back in the 1950s, and that he did not require further permission from the current attorney general, who in any case had no idea that the FBI was doing it.)

The FBI recorded MLK having extramarital affairs, which it used to try to destroy him. The FBI played the tapes for journalists and other influential people. At one point tapes were mailed to MLK with the suggestion he commit suicide.

This is appalling, to be sure, but Katzenbach makes an essential point — Hoover believed he was doing the right thing . He believed his acts were justified to protect the United States. “Perhaps because of age accompanied by virtually unchecked power, he lost any sense of proportion in law enforcement, using his authority in what he thought was a righteous cause.”

And here’s the conclusion:

Today we are again engaged in a debate over wiretapping for reasons of national security — the same kind of justification Hoover offered when he wanted to spy on King. The problem, then as now, is not the invasion of privacy, although that can be a difficulty. But it fades in significance to the claim of unfettered authority in the name of “national security.” There may be good and sufficient reasons for invasions of privacy. But those reasons cannot and should not be kept secret by those charged with enforcing the law. No one should have such power, and in our constitutional system of checks and balances, no one legitimately does.

Forcing the executive to explain its reasons for intrusive law enforcement is essential to maintaining not just privacy but freedom itself. A congressional committee must exercise oversight. So too must an independent court because Congress is also subject to possible political pressure.

Our freedom is too precious, and too much blood has been shed to preserve it, to entrust it to a single person, however sincere and however well intentioned.

At Newsweek, Jonathan Alter describes the peril we face now:

Any rational person wants the president to be able to hunt for Qaeda suspects wherever they lurk. The “momentous” issue (Alito’s words) is whether this president, or any other, has the right to tell Congress to shove it. And even if one concedes that wartime offers the president extra powers to limit liberty, what happens if the terrorist threat looks permanent? We may be scrapping our checks and balances not just for a few years (as during the Civil War), but for good.

And, once again, in the Civil War Lincoln made emergency use of a power given to Congress (to suspend habeas corpus) to deal with riots and unchecked lawlessness in some of the border states while Congress was not in session. When Congress came back into session, Lincoln went to Congress, acknowledged this power rightfully belonged to Congress, and asked for their retroactive approval even while the Civil War was still heating up. He didn’t just declare he could do whatever he thought necessary because there was a war on.

Alter continues,

The NSA story is an acid test of whether one is a traditional Barry Goldwater conservative, who believes in limited government, or a modern Richard Nixon conservative, who believes in authority. Alito is in the latter category. His judicial opinions suggest a deference to executive power, and he once pioneered presidential “signing statements” that are meant to help judges come down on the president’s side. Just recently, Bush attached such a statement to John McCain’s bill banning torture in which the president reserved the right to ignore the law if he wants to.

Alito embodies the inherent contradiction of the conservative movement. The nominee is an “originalist,” which means, as he said last week, that “we should look to the meaning that someone would have taken from the text of the Constitution at the time of its adoption.” But at that time, the 18th century, the Founders could not have been clearer about the role of Congress in wartime. As James Madison put it, “In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislative and not to the executive branch.”

No honest reading of the writings of the Founding Fathers, in or out of the Constitution, justifies Bush’s wartime ‘inherent authority” theory. The fact that so many “conservatives” accept this theory even as they babble about “strict construction” of the Constitution is proof that they’ve gone off the deep end, the charts, the scale, and any other measure of rational thought. The Right has become a virtual mob.

As John McGowan wrote here, “To pay the law heed is to accept that one’s own virtue is doubtful.” The ideologue who has no doubts he is right also has no qualms about setting the law aside when it gets in his way. But the person who would do such a thing is the same one whose judgment is too skewed to be trusted to do it — like J. Edgar Hoover.

Update: See Glenn Greenwald, “Bush followers are not conservatives.”

Distant Thunder

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Unfortunately, in this editorial the Washington Post is more right than wrong about the Alito hearings:

Democratic senators often seemed more interested in attacking the nominee — sometimes scurrilously — than in probing what sort of a justice he would be. Even when they tried, their questioning was often so ineffectual as to elicit little useful information. Republican senators, meanwhile, acted more as fatuous counsels for the defense than as sober evaluators of a nominee to serve on the Supreme Court. On both sides, pious, meandering speeches outnumbered thoughtful questions. And the nominee himself was careful, as most nominees are, not to give much away. The result is that Americans don’t know all that much more about Judge Alito than they did before.

There were some exceptions among the Dems — Senator Schumer comes to mind — but unless you were curled up in front of the TV for gavel-to-gavel coverage, you didn’t see Senator Schumer. More casual news consumers saw the clip of intra-senatorial snarking between senators Kennedy and Specter (although clear explanations of what the snarking was about were hard to come by). They saw Mrs. Alito bolt from the chamber in apparent distress. They saw Senator Biden wearing a Princeton cap. That’s about it.

Although I don’t agree with the editorial that the Vanguard and Concerned Alumni of Princeton issues were frivolous, I’m afraid they came across to most news consumers as frivolous. The Senate Dems rumbled away like distant thunder while Judge Alito sat, unperturbed, in the shelter of a Republican majority.

E.J. Dionne writes,

It turns out that, especially when their party controls the process, Supreme Court nominees can avoid answering any question they don’t want to answer. Senators make the process worse with meandering soliloquies. But when the questioning gets pointed, the opposition is immediately accused of scurrilous smears. The result: an exchange of tens of thousands of words signifying, in so many cases, nothing — as long as the nominee has the discipline to say nothing, over and over and over.

Alito, an ardent baseball fan, established himself as the Babe Ruth of evasion.

What news consumers did not hear is that Alito is a guy who doesn’t understand why the strip-search of a ten-year-old girl is a big deal (disagreeing even with Michael Chertoff, for pity’s sake). They didn’t hear that he thinks police were correct to kill an unarmed 15-year-old boy by shooting him in the back of the head. The boy, after all, had not obeyed an order.

By now, only the brain dead don’t realize that Alito is itching to overturn Roe v. Wade at the first opportunity. But it seems hardly anyone outside the Left Blogosphere gives a damn about Alito’s alarming — and un-American — theories about presidential power.

I realize that these issues were probably brought up by some Dem or another during the hearings, but they’ve been left out of the “story about the hearings” as told by news media. So the public isn’t hearing about them.

Paul Brownfield writes in the Los Angeles Times,

The hearings are monumental enough to be carried live on cable news, home of the video sound bite and the whir of instant dissection, but entirely ill-suited to the constant churn of a 24-hour news network.

Inside the Hart Senate hearing room, we watched two competing shows — the Republicans making like Regis Philbin, plugging Judge Alito’s latest vehicle (“So tell me about this Supreme Court nomination … “), the Democrats conducting an episode of CBS’ missing persons drama “Without a Trace,” poking at Alito’s past decisions and his membership in the conservative Concerned Alumni of Princeton but unable to place him, in the present.

Alito’s membership, and the fact that his wife Martha broke down in tears over the controversy Wednesday, gave the networks something to chew on, which is to say a way out of penetrating the gamesmanship of the hearings — senators preambling their way to question the discursively elusive witness.

Martha’s running mascara was the perfect diversion. Even if it wasn’t staged, something like it will be next time there’s a hearing on something the GOP doesn’t want you to know about.

Brownfield continues,

To watch the hearings at any length has value, but only if you watch them at any length — the straight stuff on C-SPAN, preferably, if you can stomach it. Because then you can see the chasm that exists between the dense thicket of speechifying and stonewalling in the hearing room, and the way it’s squeezed down and sized to fit our many-screened lives, above the crawl that tells you the “gay cowboy movie” “Brokeback Mountain” took home the Critics’ Choice Award or that Lindsay Lohan, distancing herself from her own sort of controversial membership, denied statements attributed to her in Vanity Fair about battles with bulimia.

Fact is, the Republicans do the sound-bite, made-for-TV-camera-moments thing extremely well, and the Dems can barely do it at all. That’s why, John Dickerson writes at Slate, the White House wants hearings on Bush’s NSA warrentless wiretapping. Bush wants hearings not because he wants to explain and defend his policy. Rather, Dickerson writes, “He’s inviting Democrats to another round of self-immolation.”

In 2002, the Republican Party used the debate over the Department of Homeland Security to attack Democrats in the off-year election by arguing the party was soft on terror. The president and his aides hope the NSA hearings will offer the same opportunity in 2006. …

… Bush and his aides are eager to talk about the National Security Agency’s activities because they think the issue benefits them politically. While Democrats are often confusing, with too many leaders and no clear message to push back against the commander in chief, the president is passionate when he talks about fighting terrorists, and a majority of voters still approve of his handling of the issue. And because the spying program was initiated soon after 9/11, it offers Bush an opportunity to discuss his more popular days as a take-charge executive after the 2001 attacks. “We’re very comfortable discussing the issue for as long as they want,” says Counselor to the President Dan Bartlett.

I can see it already. The GOP will be prepared in advance to smear and discredit anyone who testifies the program is illegal. Anyone tuning in to Meet the Press or The Situation Room or Hardball (and don’t even think about Faux Nooz) will see the usual conservative shills expounding long-discredited nonfacts and junk legalosity to argue the accusations of illegality have no merit. And Tim, Wolf, and Tweety will nod, politely, and frame their questions in a way that legitimizes GOP talking points, however frivolous.

“Democrats will be frustrated and antagonized,” writes Dickerson. “The president hopes they will get red-faced and obstinate.” The Dems will rumble away like distant thunder, and White House representatives will sit, unperturbed, in the shelter of a Republican majority.

And if, by accident, someone on the Dem side actually lands a blow, expect Condi to spring a leak and dash for the door.

Update: See also Steve Soto, “Democrats Punt Another One Away On Alito.”

Spy Links

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I haven’t had time to post as much as I wanted to today, but here are some links to articles and commentary on Bush Regime spying and abuse of power, in no particular order:

Daniel Klaidman, Newsweek, “Because We Can”

Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, “Did It Work?”

Noah Feldman, The New York Times, “Our Presidential Era: Who Can Check the President?”

Katherine Shrader, Associated Press, “Poll: Most Say U.S. Needs Warrant to Snoop”

Christopher Dickey, Newsweek, “Power Versus Justice”

Stirling Newberry, BOP News, “Reactionaries Now Use the ‘Hussien Defense’ for Bush”

Frank Rich, The New York Times (via True Blue Liberal), “The Wiretappers That Couldn’t Shoot Straight”

Jim Hoagland, The Washington Post, “Time to Ask: Who Are We?”

Editorial, Los Angeles Times, “While Congress Slept”

Michael Hammerschlag, Op Ed News, “Unpatriotic Spying: The Struggle for America’s Soul”

Enjoy.

Somewhere There’s a Hero

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Michelle Malkin gleefully notes that whoever leaked information about Bush’s illegal NSA activities likely committed a felony and is subject to prosecution.

And, as Auguste at Malkin(s)Watch notes, so was Daniel Ellsberg. The law may not care what the leaker’s motives were, but history surely will.

We are a nation of laws. But a corrupt and despotic government can always use the law to hide its illegal activities. In that case, it is an act of high patriotism to place oneself in jeopardy to expose the truth.

As Henry David Thoreau said, “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then?” Most men serve the state with their bodies, or with their heads, Thoreau continued.

Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others-as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as the rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil without intending it, as God. A very few-as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men-serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

I’m not encouraging citizens to break laws whenever they feel like it. I’m saying there are rare times in which the patriot must choose between his country and his government; between his duty as a patriot and the letter of the law. And in these cases the “perp” is not guaranteed a walk, because much evil is done by misguided individuals who believe they are right. Such people are subject to judgment by their peers.

But if our republic has any chance of remaining a nation that values liberty — instead of just paying it lip service — it will be because of courageous people who stand in the way of tyranny.

We may never know who it is, but somewhere, there’s a hero. Maybe more than one.

Freedom’s Just Another Word

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Last October Atlanta Journal-Constitution political cartoonist Mike Luckovich drew the word Why? made up of the names of 2,000 troops killed in Iraq. In response, a 17-year-old named Danielle Ansley used the names of the dead to render the word Freedom.

Naturally, righties find Danielle’s illustration inspirational and clever, while Lukovich is dismissed as a “moonbat.” So good with words, those righties.

I don’t want to be too hard on a 17-year-old, but I do hope eventually the child learns to think, and not just regurjitate. Not to sound like Tom Cruise, but freedom is too glib. The word has been just about stripped of all meaning and has become little more than a tribal totem, waved about by the likes of Michelle Malkin, an apologist for racially motivated imprisonment. Yeah, that’s freedom for you.

First off, the idea that any American should die deposing a dictator who was no threat to the U.S. is problematic of itself. There were no WMDs; there was no collaboration between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Our soldiers were sent to Iraq thinking they were defending America, and they were not. They were sent to fulfill some cockamamie political theory dreamed up by a pack of over-educated twits at the Project for a New American Century.

Second, whether the people of Iraq, right now, really are more free than they were before the invasion is debatable. Some Iraqis, certainly, are more free. There is more freedom to openly practice Shiia Islam, for example, which is fine. But this Christmas Iraqi Christians were afraid to go to church.

In spite of token rhetoric about women’s rights in the provisional constitution, women are less free than they were when Saddam Hussein was in power. They are less free to walk the streets without a veil. They are less free to marry as they choose. They are less free even to leave their homes. President Bush likes to brag that the invasion closed Saddam Hussein rape rooms; he doesn’t add that the lack of security leaves women more vulnerable to rape and kidnap than they were before. But I guess it doesn’t count if women aren’t raped in “rape rooms,” and the perpetrators are not agents of the state, but just thugs.

In any event, perhaps Danielle Ansley would like to explore the deeper meaning of the word freedom by living as a woman in Iraq (outside the Green Zone) for a while. If she survives, she might learn something about the gap between rhetoric and reality.

As Riverbend wrote,

We’re so free, we often find ourselves prisoners of our homes, with roads cut off indefinitely and complete areas made inaccessible. We are so free to assemble that people now fear having gatherings because a large number of friends or family members may attract too much attention and provoke a raid by American or Iraqi forces.

The bald, hard, bare-assed fact is that the deaths of 2,178 American soldiers (as of today) haven’t brought any measurable amount of freedom to anyone on the planet, except perhaps for the small cadre of men who are getting wealthy from wholesale corruption and war profiteering. In this country, the Bush Administration hides behind the “war on terror” to chip away at the civil liberties preserved in the Bill of Rights. In Iraq, it seems to me that one jackboot is replacing another. I don’t blame American soldiers for this, since most of the oppression right now seems to be Iraqi against Iraqi. One can, however, blame the flaming fools in Washington who sent U.S. soldiers to invade Iraq with next to no plans for post-invasion security.

But what about democracy? What about elections? The fact of the matter is that democracy and freedom are not the same thing. A country can be democratic and still oppress its people; the United States before the Civil War, when millions were enslaved, comes to mind. For that matter, the United States after the Civil War also comes to mind. A majoritarian republic allows the majority to oppress minorities any way it likes. The independent and sovereign Iraq now struggling to be born might technically be a “free” country, but if women must hide behind drapes and veils to avoid being murdered without compunction, then by no definition of the word are they free. Freedom takes more than democratic government; it takes a nation and society committed to the civil liberties of all.

It may be that in the fullness of time Iraq will become a truly free country. And it may have been that in the same fullness of time Iraq would have achieved that happy status without our “help.” We’ll never know what might have been.

But what we can see unfold before our eyes is the appropriation of the word freedom to mean “policies of the Bush Administration.” Perhaps the next word Danielle Ansley should learn is Orwellian.

Update: See also Kathy at Liberty Street.