Keeping the Country Secure

This has been a week of tortuous arguments in public, and on This Week there was an interesting juxtaposition of the one person totally agreeing with ex-Darth, Liz ex-Darth, and Katrina VanDen Heuvel, a really outspoken clear thinker. Beginning their discussion, host George Stephanopolous questioned the panel about President Obama's decision not to release the torture photos.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... How significant are these shifts and are they the right moves?

GEORGE WILL, COLUMNIST: Well, they come after he essentially affirmed warrantless wiretapping and escalated in Afghanistan. So you can see why a certain faction of the Democratic Party is unhappy.

On the other hand, he has changed his mind on the photographs, but he’s changed his mind by keeping a promise. The promise he made during the campaign was I will always consult with my commanders. He consulted with the commanders who said among other things, the 10 days after the Abu Ghraib photos were released, there was a spike of violence in Iraq. They strongly urged him not to release these and he won’t.

Now there is a court involved in this and the court has so far said that under the Freedom of Information Act, they have to be released. He can appeal that, he can lose, and he can then say I did my best and the photos come out.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That good enough?

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL, “THE NATION”: Obama was elected in part to correct the illegal shameful policies of these last eight years. I’m interested in the military commission’s decision. Because he sided ...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you support him on the photos?

VANDEN HEUVEL: I don’t.
(snip)
STEPHANOPOULOS: But I want to press one thing there, because there was a report -- no, but you (LIZ CHENEY) explained one part of it. I just want to ask you to explain another part of it. The report, though, that the vice president’s office did ask specifically to have information about Iraq-Al Qaida connections presented to this detainee, do you deny that?

CHENEY: I think that it’s important for us to have all the facts out. And the first and more important fact is that the vice president has been absolutely clear that he supported this program, this was an important program, it saved American lives.

Now, the way this policy worked internally was once the policy was determined and decided, the CIA, you know, made the judgments about how each individual detainee would be treated. And the vice president would not substitute his own judgment for the professionals...

STEPHANOPOULOS: No one in his office either?

CHENEY: ... at the CIA. So I think it’s very important for us to look at exactly what the facts are. And the facts are that three people were waterboarded. The people that, you know, claimed to have been waterboarded in these articles are not any of those people. And I think, frankly, you’ve also got to look at the source of some of these allegations, and one of the big sources is Colonel Wilkerson. Now, Colonel Wilkerson gets coverage because of his associations with General Powell.

STEPHANOPOULOS: His former chief of staff.

CHENEY: And has made a cottage industry of out, you know, fantasies about the vice president...

The issue of torture being wrong has been kept pretty sidelined during all the discussions, but Wilkerson obviously has struck a raw nerve in insisting that the obsession with torture was part and parcel with the politicizing of the basic functions of government. What the former vice president insists was keeping it secure has reduced our security. Reducing government's function in the past maladministration to blasting away at our principles is increasingly evident as a major cause of our insecurity, growing disaffection on the major part of the Middle East.

From John Dean whose testimony helped save the country from the Nixon criminality comes an analysis that VenDen Heuvel should be familiar with.

From generals and admirals at the Pentagon to Foreign Service officers in Foggy Bottom, along with untold thousands of the nameless and unknown career civil servants who soldier on to protect our national security, there is anger and resentment. Most of these people are not political in the partisan sense; rather, they work in and for our government to keep the nation safe, and take pride in their work.

For the past eight years, the Bush Administration has marginalized them, manipulated them, and beaten them down. Dick Cheney, in particular, worked to keep the national security professionals submissive, and to ignore their good advice. In a move that was unheard of for a Vice President, Cheney created his own National Security Council...Cheney cost the nation blood and treasure with his preemptive Iraq war. He embarrassed the United States the world over by demanding (and continuing to demand) that we use torture.
(snip)
Rather than risk alienation, Obama has given in to them, at the expense of his natural constituency, the political progressives who find it appalling that the Bush/Cheney torture is not being fully exposed (and prosecuted) to prevent it from happening again -- and sooner, rather than later.

I would encourage those who are demanding exposure and prosecution to keep pounding their drums. Clearly, they are on the right side of this issue, and Obama knows it. While he is going to placate the national security bureaucrats from time to time in order to lead them effectively, hopefully the pressure for him to deal with the atrocious behavior of Bush and Cheney is only just getting started.

The president has a bumpy ride before him, and its purpose is to get the country functional again. So much destruction went into making the mess, it's going to take a long time to get the chaff sorted out from the good.

The president's talent in community organization will be sorely needed, in a community that has been so violated as this government. Reining in the abuses has been accomplished by defeat of the criminal element. Bringing the executive branch back into compliance with the law will take a concerted effort on all of our parts.

Through The Looking Glass, Again

The 'Lewis Carroll' pleadings showed the Department of Justice arguing that its findings were true because it repeated them three times. In the future, this same discredited Justice Department wants to keep any other pleadings off the table. As long as no argument is presented against its pleadings, it can finally prove something. Saying something three times isn't enough for the mad hatter department, it now has to have everyone else just shut up.

In a brief filed late yesterday with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Bush administration asked that any review of the new warrantless surveillance law be kept secret and that the court refuse to accept legal briefs from anyone other than the Justice Department itself. The government is responding to a motion the American Civil Liberties Union filed earlier this month asking the FISC to ensure that any proceedings relating to the scope, meaning or constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) be open to the public to the extent possible.

The following can be attributed to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project:

“The government is proposing that the intelligence court should consider the constitutionality of the new surveillance law in proceedings that will be entirely secret. If the government’s request is granted, the court won’t hear arguments from anyone except the government and those arguments will be presented to the court in secret briefs. At the end of the process, the court will issue a ruling that is also secret. The process the government is proposing is completely unacceptable. Especially because the new surveillance law departs so significantly from the standards that have applied to government surveillance for the last 30 years, any proceedings relating to the new law’s constitutionality should be adversarial and as informed and transparent as possible.”

In a separate legal challenge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the ACLU seeks a court ruling declaring that the FAA is unconstitutional and ordering its immediate and permanent halt. Plaintiffs in the case include Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, the Nation and PEN American Center. (Emphasis added.)

This politicized group of second- and third-rate attorneys is certainly trying to cut the country off from any prospects of achieving the Justice this department was named for - back in the day. Its disreputable agents should be ordered out of the court, and a replacement with some degree of actual ability to represent its real client, the U.S. public, retained. The Republican National Committee should be ordered to pay the costs.

The Justice Department was set up to protect the Rule of Law, but the worst administration ever has much to fear from the law. Its power has been misused, and the effort made to keep the war criminals from justice. This has to be stopped, and the ACLU has never been needed so badly.

Real ID Needs To Be Real Gone

Among the various stupid laws (and there are a whole bunch of them)passed in response to 9/11, the Real ID law which mandates a nationally uniform driver's license is one that states are finally beginning to resist. The primary reason for the state rejection is that Congress required the states to provide the new licenses with all the 'security' bells and whistles without providing any funding for them. From today's NY Times:

Maine legislators started off the rebellion late last month by passing a nonbinding resolution that rejected the law, called the Real ID Act, which Congress passed in 2005. They said that it would cost the state $185 million to put into place and that instead of making Maine’s residents more secure, it would leave them more vulnerable to identity theft.

Since then, legislatures in five states — Georgia, Montana, New Mexico, Washington and Wyoming — have voted in committee or on the floor of one chamber to move similar legislation ahead. The bill adopted in a 99-to-1 vote by the Montana House of Representatives would go furthest, ordering state officials there to ignore the federal law.

More than cost should be considered, however. The new licenses will contain a great deal of data about the holders, in effect making them national identification cards. Without the cards, Americans have no effective and nationally recognized means to prove their identity. A bonus to all of this is that the cards may very well make identity theft even easier than it is right now.

...Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union said the states were raising legitimate issues. The law sets a national standard for machine-readability, most likely using bar-code-like strips where information about the owner can be scanned. This may tempt merchants to collect the data and use it for marketing purposes, Mr. Steinhardt said. The linked national database of all licensing information will also be a target for identity theft, he said.

The 110th Congress needs to pay attention to the states' complaints and undo the 2005 law completely. We don't need 'papers' controlling where we can and cannot go. This was a bad idea to begin with, and it's only getting worse.

The Good Guys Win a Round

Last Thursday, I posted on the government's attempt to subvert the Grand Jury process in order to hide some evidence that might prove embarrassing to the government ("Chillin'"). Today's NY Times provides the outcome of the skirmish.

Federal prosecutors in New York yesterday withdrew a subpoena to the American Civil Liberties Union that had sought to retrieve all copies of a classified document.

In an opaque and defensive four-page letter to the judge in the case, the prosecutors said they were acting “in light of changed circumstances” and their determination that “the grand jury can obtain the evidence necessary to its investigation from other sources.”

Another factor may have played a role. A transcript of a closed hearing in the case that was unsealed yesterday suggested the government was going to lose.

The government should have lost that battle. They didn't just want the document, they wanted all copies of the document so that the 'evidence' would no longer exist outside of the government secrecy vault. As I said last Thursday, [o]f course there is no investigative purpose. The purpose is to hide the evidence.

And the document in question?

The document itself, declassified Friday and released by the A.C.L.U. yesterday, was not obviously confidential. An “information paper” dated Dec. 20, 2005, it was marked “secret” at the top and bottom of each of its four pages. The A.C.L.U. said it received the document in an unsolicited e-mail message in October.

The document collected a number of policies concerning photographs of enemy prisoners of war. Journalists, the document said, “are generally permitted, and to some extent even encouraged, to photograph” prisoners “from point-of-capture throughout the entire detainment process,” though they are discouraged from showing recognizable faces.

...“If you read between the lines,” said the lawyer, Charles S. Sims, a First Amendment specialist at Proskauer Rose, “what it really says is that we want to exploit group photos of detainees.” The implicit instruction in the document, he said, was this: “If pictures of detainees can help sell the war, go for it.” [Emphasis added]

That such a document was classified in the first place is an indication of just how the current administration operates, and also serves as a clue as to just why the government wanted all copies as well as the original. The Bush White House would stop at nothing to promote and justify an illegal war, but it didn't want the American public to know to what extent it was willing to go to further that aim.

I think this whole sorry incident should be added to the list of items to be investigated in the 110th Congress.