Aletho News

Let’s Follow the Brits’ Lead in Restoring Civil Liberties

By Michael Tennant | 28 May 2010

Here in the United States, liberal Democrats claim to be defenders of civil liberties, yet since taking power in January 2009 they have done little to restore lost liberties and much to encroach further upon them.

In just the past couple of weeks, for example, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives has voted to pay state governments to collect the DNA of Americans arrested for, but not necessarily guilty of, crimes and to store that information in a centralized FBI database; and the Democrat-controlled Senate has voted to allow the federal government to collect detailed data on Americans’ every financial transaction.

Over in Great Britain, however, the leader of the Liberal Democrat party, Nick Clegg, not only campaigned on restoring Britons’ civil liberties but is actually making good on those promises just two weeks after assuming the office of Deputy Prime Minister in a coalition government with the Conservative Party. The government’s first initiative under Clegg and Prime Minister David Cameron is a bill to repeal a national ID card and database, reports the U.K. Guardian. (This was not a hard sell to Cameron, who is also opposed to national ID cards.)

Just as 9/11 was used as an excuse to clamp down on civil liberties here in the former British colonies, so it was in the mother country. The Guardian writes that “compulsory identity cards … were first floated by the then-home secretary David Blunkett in the aftermath of 9/11.” After numerous attempts to pass legislation enacting a national ID card, it finally passed in 2006. Then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown promised in 2009 that the cards would not be compulsory, though that was only true, as the Guardian reported, if one did not “want to leave the country or legally drive a car” since obtaining a passport or driver’s license would automatically register a person in the national database.

Approximately 15,000 people have obtained national ID cards in the past four years; under the new legislation those cards will also be invalidated. “The role of the identity commissioner, created in an effort to prevent data blunders and leaks, will be abolished,” says the Guardian. The government expects to save one billion pounds between this legislation and other legislation “to cancel the next generation of biometric fingerprint passports,” the Guardian reports.

According to the Guardian, Clegg’s comment on the upcoming legislation was: “The wasteful, bureaucratic and intrusive ID card system represents everything that has been wrong with government in recent years.” This is in keeping with his campaign rhetoric, as in this Associated Press report: “‘This government will end the culture of spying on its citizens,’ Clegg said during a speech in north London. ‘It is outrageous that decent, law-abiding people are regularly treated as if they have something to hide. It has to stop.’” Among the civil-liberties violations Clegg promised to end or restrict were, in addition to the national ID card and database, the use of closed-circuit TV cameras to monitor citizens’ activities and a national DNA database. The AP points out that British police “currently have the power to take DNA or fingerprints from anyone at the point of arrest, and can hold the information of those found innocent for years.” Sound familiar?

The British government, having heard from its fed-up citizens that it was intruding on their privacy, is actually taking steps to rein in the worst of its abuses. Meanwhile, in the alleged land of the free, our government is headed in the opposite direction. The House wants to expand the national DNA database to include innocent people’s biometric data. U.S. cities are installing TV cameras at an ever-increasing pace; the AP noted, for instance, that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited London in an effort to learn how the British government spies on its citizens with cameras so that he could do likewise in the Big Apple. The REAL ID Act, which would create a de facto national ID card, although officially opposed by at least half the states, is still scheduled to go into effect next year despite then-Senator Barack Obama’s “flatly opposing” it in his response to a CNET questionnaire of 2008 presidential candidates. It’s time our government heard from its fed-up citizens and started cutting back on its violations of our privacy, too. Let’s not keep our opinions on the subject private.

June 1, 2010 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Pure Kafka

By Glenn Greenwald| May 29, 2010

The first paragraph of today’s New York Times article by Charlie Savage:

The 48 Guantánamo Bay detainees whom the Obama administration has decided to keep holding without trial include several for whom there is no evidence of involvement in any specific terrorist plot, according to a report disclosed Friday.

The Report itself, in a matter-of-fact-tone, describes the individuals to be kept in a cage indefinitely without charges this way:

They can’t even be prosecuted in the due-process-abridging military commissions we invented out of whole cloth for those who can’t be convicted in a real court.  In other words:  of course we’ll provide a fair tribunal for proving your guilt — as long as we’re certain we can convict you — otherwise, we’ll just imprison you indefinitely without charges. All this even though 72% of Guantanamo detainees have been found to be wrongfully held since the Supreme Court compelled habeas hearings in 2008.  And then there are the numerous Yemeni prisoners who have been cleared for release but who will be kept in a cage anyway because we arbitrarily decreed that we’re not going to release even innocent prisoners back to Yemen.

Here’s one other passage from Savage’s article worth noting:

Of that group, the 48 whom the administration has designated for continued indefinite detention without trial have attracted the greatest controversy, in part because many Democrats sharply criticized that policy when the Bush administration created it after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Yes, I also vaguely recall the days when Democrats criticized the policy of imprisoning people indefinitely without charges.  Harper‘s Scott Horton has more on all of this:

The Obama Administration came to Washington promising to clean up the Bush-era detentions policy and make it conform to the clear requirements of law. Then it seems to have decided that the law wasn’t so convenient and that simply providing for unbridled executive authority à la Bush-Cheney wasn’t such a bad idea after all. In terms of Washington power politics, that decision seems to have taken the form of letting Robert Gates make the call on all these issues. The two figures in the Administration who took the most credible stance for implementing the Obama campaign-era promises on detentions policy — Greg Craig and Phil Carter — resigned within a few weeks of one another, offering no believable reasons for departing. Then press reports began to appear about secret prisons, operated by JSOC and DIA and applying rules different from those applied in the “normal” DOD prisons, including plenty of torture-lite techniques under Appendix M of the Army Field Manual (PDF).

This passage in the National Security Strategy makes clear that Barack Obama and his team have abandoned the promises they made to reform detentions policy in the 2008 campaign. Even the commitment to stop torture does not appear to have been fully implemented, given the unaccountable practices of JSOC and the DIA in Afghanistan. Barack Obama’s belief in the rule of law apparently takes the back seat to Barack Obama’s belief in his own ability to make the right call as executive. History will judge whether his confidence in his own abilities is warranted, but the distortion of the constitutional system presents a continuing challenge for those who believe in the older and more fundamental principle of accountability under the law.

Yes — being as sentimental as I am — I, too, harbor nostalgia for that “older principle of accountability under the law”:  you know, that idealized time when everyone was entitled to be charged with crimes before being imprisoned forever (rather than only those for whom prosecution was “feasible”) and when Presidents weren’t actually allowed to target American citizens for murder without at least some due process being granted.  Anyway, did Sarah Palin post something to her Facebook page today?  And isn’t that Glenn Beck crazy?

May 29, 2010 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Democrats and the McCarthyite attack on detainee lawyers

By Glenn Greenwald | May 27, 2010

Over at Balkinization, Law Professor Steve Vladeck has done a superb job highlighting a truly vile provision in the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2011, which directs the Pentagon’s Inspector General to “conduct an investigation of the conduct and practices of lawyers” who have represented Guantanamo detainees and then report back to Congress.  That provision is the brainchild of GOP Rep. Jeff Miller of Florida, who has labeled efforts to represent detainees (specifically as part of the John Adams Project) a “treacherous enterprise” and smeared those lawyers as “disloyal.”  Vladeck thoroughly documents how the lawyer conduct that is targeted by the mandated investigation is so broad that it could easily encompass every act of defending Guantanamo detainees, and thus, standing alone, could serve to intimidate and deter lawyers from vigorously representing those detainees in the future.

This is all an outgrowth of the incomparably repellent McCarthyite, “Al Qaeda 7” campaign by Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney to smear detainee lawyers as disloyal Terrorist lovers, and more broadly, of the endless fear-mongering over Terrorism that continues to grip the U.S. Government.  The Weekly Standard has long been targeting the John Adams lawyers for doing their job (i.e., seeking the identity of CIA interrogators who tortured their clients), and that magazine now claims that it’s the CIA that is demanding an investigation into these lawyers (Look Forward, Not Backward is, as we’ve seen repeatedly, only available for torturers and criminal eavesdroppers).  Reflecting this intensifying mood is the latest hysterical right-wing book, this one by anti-Islam obsessive (and media favorite) Andy McCarthy, who warns — in the title — that “Islam and the Left” are jointly engaged in a “Grand Jihad” to “Sabotage America” (the blurbs and summaries of his book are so inane and extreme that, despite how repulsive is this screed, it’s difficult to suppress one’s laughter when reading them; based on small book excerpts alone, Conor Friedersdorf documents how McCarthy’s book is suffused with lies).  This is the McCarthyite fever swamp that is the genesis of this lawyer-targeted provision.

Writing at Matt Yglesias’ Center for American Progress blog, CAP’s Satyam Khanna says this:

The DOD budget bill is a pretty huge document; so I would hope this was furtively slipped in by some GOP staffer, to be removed shortly.

Yes, it sure would be nice to believe that the Democrats who control Congress — and who control the House Armed Services Committee which passed the bill containing this provision — somehow had nothing to do with its inclusion.  Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), that’s simply not the case, as The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage explains:

Democrats on the committee agreed to Mr. Miller’s proposal after several modifications. One change added the requirement of “reasonable suspicion” of wrongdoing before a lawyer would be investigated by the inspector general. Another enabled Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to halt such an inquiry if it would interfere with a related criminal investigation.  Detainee lawyers argue that even with such modifications, Mr. Miller’s amendment is broad enough to give pause to all lawyers representing Guantánamo detainees — including the far larger numbers who have sought judicial hearings for prisoners who contend that they are not terrorists and are being held by mistake.

Those “modifications” are cosmetic at best, as Vladeck explains:

[T]he “reasonable suspicion” standard could itself force counsel to think twice before challenging extant DoD policies governing their interactions with their clients, thereby interfering with counsel’s ability zealously to represent their clients. The mere threat of investigation could easily force compliance with troubling policies limiting lawyer-client interaction that counsel might otherwise seek to challenge. Say what you will about the merits of these cases, but I had thought we’d long-since settled the appropriateness of allowing lawyers in these cases vigorously to represent their clients in court, consistent with the highest traditions of the profession.

This is yet another example of repellent, fear-based policies that could not be (or at least were not) enacted during the Bush years yet are finding new life under Democratic Party rule.  Recall that Bush Pentagon official Cully Stimson was actually forced to apologize for suggesting that lawyers who represented Guantanamo detainees were engaged in disloyal and improper acts.  Yet with the Democrats in control of Washington, a provision grounded in exactly that rotted premise has now been unanimously reported out of a major House Committee.  There are still barriers it has to overcome in order to become law — including a House floor vote, a mark-up in the Senate, and then, if it makes it that far, the President’s signature — so it’s still possible it can be stopped.  But for that to happen, Democrats are going to have to insist on its removal.  It remains to be seen if they are willing to do that.

May 28, 2010 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment