The hawk fallacy - how "protecting" America could lead to its downfall

Glenn Greenwald is soon becoming one of my favorite civil libertarians. In today's Salon he does a fantastic job of summing up the malady affecting neoconservatives in our modern era - the stunning hypocrisy of purporting to be the unabashed saviors of democracy and freedom while in fact working against those ends in both domestic and international policy.

Using a Weekly Standard rant on the ACLU's well-known support of due process for U.S. prisoners he poses the question:

Between (a) an organization that works tirelessly for basic due process and Constitutional liberties for everyone and (b) a political movement which demands their rejection, does it really take any effort to see which side is vigorously defending core American principles and which side is waging war on them? And given how due-process-free imprisonment is one of the most potent recruiting tools for Islamic extremists (as reported by David Rohde, Johann Hari, Gen. McChyrstal, and even the Pentagon's own 2004 Task Force) -- to say nothing of the endless aggressive wars cheered on by The Weekly Standard's play-acting warriors -- does it take any effort to see who Al Qaeda's "useful idiots" and stalwart allies truly are?

Hawks on national defense who treat human rights loosely have proven time and time again that protecting the United States from "terrorism" in the name of "freedom" results mainly in the continued application of terror in our name against freedom, human rights and Constitutional government. Every time The United States proves itself willing to resort to illegal and inhumane practices, it weakens our nation and its laws in very real ways and leads to a perpetuation of external terrorism around the globe.

The recent conservative outrage against Obama's bow to the Japanese emperor - an action which does not demean the one bowing but shows respect - seems to remove any question: much of the modern Right sees U.S. courtesy and diplomacy as a weakness, somehow damaging in and of itself, while excusing blatant assaults against liberty under the guise of pragmatism. The pillars of modern hawkishness - illegal, indefinite detention of prisoners without charges, torture and inhumane treatment and frequent, half-justifiable action against foreign nations in these circles is seen as strength, while the rule of law, respect for human rights and diplomacy is seen almost as treason, actions taking to weaken the nation rather than bolster its image and shake the message of anti-American terrorists around the globe.

Rather than see "terrorists" as human beings recruited to a misguided, foolish cause, this type of policy sees them as a force of nature, one that cannot be reasoned with or made to see the benefits of freedom by its actual application. No, by treating insurgents (even ones who have perpetuated terror attacks) as less than human and unworthy of the treatment we give even our worst citizens, we reinforce our image around the globe as the enemy of Islam in the minds of those misguided enough to see this as a holy war. By waging endless wars without end we become what we purport to fight against, and the noble goals of our nation's founding serve no purpose unless they are actually lived up to.

No, a hawkish, violent and arrogant foreign policy appeals mainly to those without the subtlety to appreciate virtue, relish ideals and respect the founding U.S. principles of populism, human rights and liberty. As Greenwald states powerfully in his closing paragraph (which I won't summarize here because this powerful article is powerful reading), the very people who have championed themselves the saviors of America are, through their hubris, leading quite directly both to its moral and physical destruction.

Read the article

Al Franken reads the Fourth Amendment to Assistant Attorney General

Holding federal officials accountable to Constitutional language is apparently a strange thing to do, as Al Franken seems to have indicated earlier this week by reading from his senatorial copy of the Constitution:

he proceeded to read it to Kris, emphasizing this part: “no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

“That’s pretty explicit language,” noted Franken, asking Kris how the “roving wiretap” provision of the Patriot Act can meet that requirement if it doesn’t require the government to name its target.

Kris looked flustered and mumbled that “this is surreal,” apparently referring to having to respond to Franken’s question. “I would defer to the other branch of government,” he said, referring to the courts, prompting Franken to interject: “I know what that is.”

It's kind of sad that a commitment to civil liberties is so rare in elected officials - this is one of the single greatest instances of representation I've seen in months. Right-wingers who've been pretending to care so much lately about the Constitution will hate him regardless, though he's doing a remarkable job so far of being open and respectful to his constituents.

Absurd TSA disclaimer

In response to recent events (and a few older ones) I began a brief correspondence with a senior regional TSA agent at one of our nation's larger airports in an attempt to get the Administration's side of the story. I'm used both to reading and writing incendiary assaults on government organizations when an infringement on basic freedoms is suspected or agents misbehave in the performance of their duties, yet I realized that the TSA side of the argument was likely a little more sophisticated than the "Security Through Slavery" zealots many of us are used to imagining.

As I'd hoped I found the man's comments good-spirited and even informative, though most of my original concerns as a Bill of Rights/civil liberties nerd remain. But I can't discuss any of what we discussed due to a backward, ridiculous disclaimer at the bottom of each of his e-mail messages:

WARNING: The information in this email is confidential and may be legally privileged. Access to this email by anyone other than the intended addressee is unauthorized. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, any review, disclosure, copying, distribution, retention, or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient, please reply to or forward a copy of this message to the sender and delete the message, any attachments, and any copies thereof from your system.

So the part of his message that reveals him as a man concerned with security while remaining conscious of the problem of preserving individual liberty is "classified," while the ridiculous, restrictive disclaimer that ties my hands is fair game. I can't talk about what we discussed here, reproduce it or even show it to anybody without fearing some possible reprisal, but I can tell you that I can't.

I don't understand - the contents of his e-mail were transparent discussions of TSA policy, with nary a factoid that might jeopardize our nation's security - in fact, they served to humanize his organization significantly in my eyes. But they've decided that they have the authority to restrict each and every message they send, and I've never been one to create undue trouble for myself.

Too bad.

Artist detained for writecrime

In another reminder of why individual suspicions can never be used to justify detention or arrest, artist Mark Sable was detained last week at LAX for a script to a comic found in his luggage. That's right - not a weapon, not pepper spray or an incendiary device, but a script.

Considering our First Amendment protections the content of the script is immaterial, but it involved terrorism and a burgeoning government police state. Regardless of whether the uncreative minds of the TSA agents thought this an appropriate subject for a script, or even subversive is also immaterial - printed words represent no threat to a plane or my nation, while using personal suspicions and biases as an excuse for oppression and harassment does incalculable damage to any civilized nation and to its values.

If you in opposition to the Fourth Amendment allow mere "suspicion" to be a suitable cause for a search or detention, it will be used inappropriately and it will result in further First Amendment violations as the subjective judgments of sometimes-corrupt, sometimes-stupid agents become law and trump any semblance of due process.

Comics artist Mark Sable detained for Unthinkable acts (SFScope)

Just a little frightening. . .Obama to allow Gitmo executions without trials

From the New York Times:

The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial.

The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques. It could also allow the five detainees who have been charged with the Sept. 11 attacks to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom.

The proposal, in a draft of legislation that would be submitted to Congress, has not been publicly disclosed. It was circulated to officials under restrictions requiring secrecy. People who have read or been briefed on it said it had been presented to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates by an administration task force on detention.

Obama's already outlined his procedure of "indefinite preventative detention," a fascinating, scary way of saying "illegal imprisonment without trial or sufficient evidence." It's already too late for Obama to become the human rights President, and I suspect that our country is already on a path where a respect for the rule of law and the Bill of Rights is no longer considered an asset in political circles. Naturally, the terrorists won when we began to compromise our own ideals and values on a massive scale in the name of keeping America "safe." No good American should want this kind of "safety." It's largely imaginary in the first place and requires the destruction of nearly everything that makes our country great and unique.

The proposal would ease what has come to be recognized as the government’s difficult task of prosecuting men who have confessed to terrorism but whose cases present challenges. Much of the evidence against the men accused in the Sept. 11 case, as well as against other detainees, is believed to have come from confessions they gave during intense interrogations at secret C.I.A. prisons. In any proceeding, the reliability of those statements would be challenged, making trials difficult and drawing new political pressure over detainee treatment.

In a nutshell, President Obama wants to allow "evidence" obtained under illegal and unreliable torture methods to be considered statements of guilt worthy of execution (read note below), without any semblance of a lawful trial. Obama, having taken steps to begin closing Gitmo purely as a formality, has decided to turn it into an illegal execution factory.

NOTE: It seems that executions will not occur based solely on evidence obtained under torture, but a guilty plea on the part of the "defendant." This is still frightening as an inmate incarcerated for several months, often subject to inhumane or illegal torture and techniques for breaking them down, cannot be considered a reliable source for information. Allowing the government to execute based on a mere confession obtained through whatever methods they decide are legal is questionable at best, a prelude to totalitarianism at worst (and that's no exaggeration).

Obama explains the many exciting new ways we will violate human rights from here out

This abcnews article runs through Obama's plan to continue the sort of rationalizations and abuses that lead a President to violate national law and human rights in the name of keeping us "safe." This is nearly the same rationale used by Bush and ought to further disappoint anybody who expected the excesses of the Bush presidency to cease under Obama:

But apparently over-ruling his FBI director, President Obama today said that "where demanded by justice and national security, we will seek to transfer some detainees to the same type of facilities in which we hold all manner of dangerous and violent criminals within our borders; namely, highly secure prisons that ensure the public safety. As we make these decisions, bear in mind the following fact. Nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal super-max prisons which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists."

Detainees, he said, fall into five distinct categories. Those include those guilty of US criminal law who could be tried in US federal courts, those "who violate the laws of war and are, therefore, best tried through military commissions," 21 detainees ordered released by the courts, 50 detainees that his administration has judged suitable for transfer to other countries for "detention and rehabilitation."

Lastly, describing the "toughest single issue that we will face," the president described those who face indefinite detention, "people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases, because evidence may be tainted, but who, nonetheless, pose a threat to the security of the United States." [Emphasis added]

Sigh. . .

Cinematic Polemic

(DISCLAIMER: I'm going to be discussing two films in this post, neither of which I've seen. If you feel that I've judged either of these flicks incorrectly, I urge you to read this as yet another unasked-for criticism of our culture. Danke schein.)

A couple of highly-charged bits of filmmaking are being thrown into wide release today: Religulous, a Bill Maher/Larry Charles screed on religion, and An American Carol, a shallow assault on progressive "anti-Americanism" that takes aim at traditional right-wing boogeymen (Michael Moore, Islamic fundamentalists, liberal college professors) and evokes ready comparisons to Uwe Boll's Postal.

Both these films seem to make their points earnestly while trying for a few jokes, and both do a hearty job of indicating the problems at work in America - and not in the way they expect.

Religulous, starring Bill Maher and directed by Seinfeld pioneer Larry Charles, is probably the funnier of the two, and fairly transparent. Anybody who knows anything about it already knows nearly everything about it - it's a documentary about religion (more specifically Christianity), and Bill Maher and Larry David are involved. I would expect the "cynical smirk to fair questions ratio" to hover around 5:1 for this one.

And it seems for all the world to be a typical attack documentary; Maher trots the globe, picking the sorriest, most pathetic religious believers and pointing out that they are, in fact, silly goons. It's the film equivalent of Jay Leno asking people on street corners how many sides you'd find on a triangle ("Four! No, wait - is it an odd number?"). When you consider that a good 88% of human beings identify themselves as believers in God, it's no significant surprise that an earnest agnostic-faced atheist managed to find a few stupid jackasses among them to ridicule. I even know a few myself! It's been awhile since the fact that some people believe in God for wrong or even ignorant reasons made headlines, so kudos to Lions Gate for bringing it back to our attention. It's Borat for the Scientific American set! I'm sure the film is profoundly unfair, but if you already love/hate Bill Maher the way most of us do you'll know what to expect.

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And if there's ever been a film designed by its very premise to repel me, it's David Zucker's An American Carol, wherein a left-wing nutjob (Michael Moore, played by a guy who looks a bit like Michael Moore) is visited by a bunch of right-wing nutjobs (y'know - Kelsey Grammar, Leslie Nielsen and Jon Voight, playing a bunch of ex-presidents who have posthumously converted to neoconservatism), who teach him that America is, y'know, really great and he should just shut his mouth. I never liked Zucker's films (Airplane and assorted spoofs that are essentially live-action versions of Mad Magazine fare), but this might be the first one that's actually dangerous.

I don't have a problem necessarily with reminding us of great, if clichéd, moments in America's past (the Revolutionary War, a general commitment to freedom and rule of law), but of the film's self-righteous militaristic patriotism, a philosophy adopted only recently by the neocon right wing who has done more to destabilize our freedom and civil rights - all while pointing toward brown people as the real enemies - than any flag-burner could ever desire or manage. Doesn't this film miss the point that criticism of a country's flaws, when appropriate, is one of the surest indicators that you love said country and want to improve it, and nationalistic, reactionist regressivism is one of the surest indicators of a slide toward self-righteous depravity and self-assured exceptionalism (one of the few things that could really destroy this country)? For those of you who managed to parse that gramatically-questionable sentence, it was a rhetorical question.

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Does anybody else worry that the real conservative movement is over, and all we have left is the kind of Reaganesque neoconservative garbage and progressive hogwash that produces films like these? Why can't we get a real conservative picture to theaters, one that champions freedom and small government without legitimizing stingy treatment toward the poor, attacks the spiraling American Military Industrial Complex while understanding the need for a basic national defense, or champions the rights to free expression and privacy from government surveillance and interference without politicizing such an important, basic assault on our liberties? I'd like to see a picture that understands the Constitution and the Bill of Rights pragmatically, as necessary tools for freedom that we follow to the letter simply because they're the only anchors protecting us from misguided or even scheming politicians, without holding up the Constitution as an end in itself.

In other words, why can't we get a picture with some principles worth defending (defined, you'll notice, as those principles which happen to be mine)?

American's Immigration Process Explained

If I had a nickel for every time that an immigration opponent struggling to appear openminded told me that they have "no problem" with immigration as long as it's done legally, I'd have died by now of some kind of copper-nickle alloy poisoning. It's an old trope but I'm sure that the people who say it really believe it.

Never mind the fact that neocons who don't really get too worked up about lawbreaking suddenly find this border dispute terribly important, the one law that must never, ever be broken, under penalty of deportation. Those who don't feel that illegal immigrants should be deported at least want to make their life a living hell for a long, long time; even McCain's waffling on the issue, pretending to worry about brown people to keep his base comfortable. Remember, it's okay to burden the lives of Americans, as long as you do it while speaking English. If we celebrate "legal" immigration while keeping it a very, very difficult and time-intensive activity, all while throwing out illegals, we get the benefits of looking open-minded while keeping People Who Are Different far, far away from our homes. And what's more All-American than a little good, old-fashioned doubletalk?

All while our leaders are attempting to implement the most socialist, authoritarian, freedom-hating thing that has ever been done in my country. I had a casual respect for the Republicans back when they were all about cruel economic efficiency, but totalitarianism just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But never mind that (actually, mind that very much, but let's move on for now).

Jumping back to the immigration issue, this nice flowchart from Reason.com gives you a good look at just how easy and humane our immigration process really is. Take a look at the amply-titled What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand? and maybe shed a little light on the issue in future debates. Remember, a lie repeated enough times becomes truth and eventually common knowledge. . . unless you reject it.

Flowchart: What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand? (reason.com via BoingBoing)

Electronic Frontier Foundation Sues Government For Participation in Illegal Wiretapping

This image is about as subtle as a political cartoon.

One of the main reasons lately to back away from AT&T has been their complicity with the government for participation in illegal wiretapping. I realize that the neoconservatives have never been about small government, but they certainly pretend to bring it up quite often. Let's see how they'll react when their precious "private sector" steps in to enforce the Bill of Rights for them:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies today on behalf of AT&T customers to stop the illegal, unconstitutional, and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records. The five individual plaintiffs are also suing President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, former Attorney General and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and other individuals who ordered or participated in the warrantless domestic surveillance.

The lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, is aimed at ending the NSA's dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans and holding accountable the government officials who illegally authorized it. Evidence in the case includes undisputed documents provided by former AT&T telecommunications technician Mark Klein showing AT&T has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA.

The Fourth Amendment, for the record (thus the term illegal wiretapping):

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

(BoingBoing quoting the EFF press release)