The Conscience of Abe’s Turn freedom of speech, defense, and life

I just got finished watching The U.S. vs. John Lennon, an inspiring and provocative film about John Lennon’s peace advocacy, and how the government attacked him for it. This documentary follows Lennon’s life after the Beatles, until his death in 1980, includes interviews with Yoko Ono and many others, and touches on freedom of speech, drug freedom, peace and military warfare, and the politics of power.

As I watched it, several themes impressed me. But nothing impressed me more than that so little has changed since then. In a very real sense, we are replaying, repeating, reliving history. This film makes real that the abuses and perversions of justice that we see today occurred decades ago, and in essentially the same form: public beatings of peaceful protesters, restriction of speech around high-profile political events, abuse of government power for personal and political gain, censorship, political appeals to “patriotism,” fear-mongering against immigrants and “aliens,” all in order to support direct government attacks on the First, Fourth, and Fifth amendments. Have we made that little progress?

Some quotes from the film:  read more »

This is a great link with which to kick off new posts, after a long hiatus. Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, recently responded to smears— er, I mean, accusations that he fosters Nazi sympathies.

The basis of these smear— accusations? That he collects World War II memorabilia. Marc Garlasco explains:  read more »

Via Fox News, the TSA in Missouri detained, harassed, and almost arrested Steve Bierfeldt, because he was carrying some cash from merchandise sales for a political organization:

Even though I’m not a lawyer, here are a couple thoughts, off the top of my head, based on my research:  read more »

Nine secret, Bush-era documents that the Obama administration released this week demonstrate the hubris of a powerful government and the danger posed by it.

Some of these documents are among the dozens of memos that the ACLU has been suing the Department of Justice to release. To echo Glenn Greenwald from last year: “Yet again, the ACLU has performed the function which Congress and the media are intended to perform but do not.”

One of the legal opinions, written in October 2001 by John Yoo, a lawyer with the Office of Legal Counsel, one who needs a Conscience, argued that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to military activities inside the United States. That is, the federal government thought it could get away with illegal searches and seizures and spying on innocent U.S. citizens, all without a warrant, as long as it could make it look like part of a military operation.

Yoo also advised that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war,” without saying specifically how that might play out, adding that the fight against “terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”  read more »

Fortunately, this item is to be filed under the category of incompetence, and not under malice. Unfortunately, in the end, the result is the same either way. Under a new law, which just went into effect, boxes upon boxes full of classic children’s books have been and are being thrown in the dumpster, literally, because that’s now federal law. When you elect idiots to Congress— But I repeat myself.

Since 1985, it’s been illegal to manufacture children’s books using lead paint. Before then, it was common to use lead in some pigments used to color illustrations. But now, in Congress’s immutable wisdom, the new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) makes it illegal to resell old children’s books from that time period.

Why is this stupid? Because even these old books pose no observable risk to children. Walter Olson explains on the City Journal website:  read more »

While the Obama-administration DOJ’s right hand is investigating whether Bush torture-memo authors should be disciplined, its left hand is still upholding the very same torture policies.

The impression I get is what I expected to see: even though the administration has changed, the government is still being filled with the same paranoid babble that characterized the Bush administration, and the doofuses are afraid to dismiss it too quickly. Or rather, in a word: politics.

• A federal appeals court ordered the continued imprisonment of 17 Chinese ethnic Uighurs, who have been detained without charge for over seven years at Guantánamo Bay, despite the fact that the U.S. government no longer considers them “enemy combatants” and even admitted that it does not have the authority to detain them.

• The government is still wrestling with the case of Ali al-Marri, a U.S. citizen who has been detained indefinitely without trial.

• The Pentagon concluded that “the Guantánamo Bay prison complies with the humanitarian requirements of the Geneva conventions.” (They must be looking at a different version than the one I’m familiar with, which specifically disallows “violence to life and person, in particular… cruel treatment and torture; … outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment; the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”)

• Obama’s new DOJ continue to regurgitate the Bush-era claims of “state secrets” in the Jeppesen case of 5 men who were kidnapped and tortured by the CIA.

• And the DOJ is still trying to gum up the ACLU’s effort to help Mohammed Jawad, a Guantánamo prisoner who has been unlawfully held by U.S. government since he was a teenager. (See also this post on Mohammed Jawad’s case.)

Yes, President Obama ordered that military commission proceedings be stopped, but the government is still pursuing a last-minute effort by the Bush administration to deny Jawad his right to challenge his imprisonment in a court of law.  read more »

The Marijuana Policy Project reports on a study examining what happens when we over-inflate the risks of using drugs. The study, recently published in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, notes that when the kids finally learn the truth, “intentions to engage in threatened behavior may be amplified.”

Of course, this is old news, or at least it should be. Telling someone not to do something just makes them want to do it more, and then lying to them about the dangers just encourages them to ignore you. No kidding? Maybe next we can commission a study to prove that water is wet.  read more »

A selection of news stories from the previous week. (Follow the links embedded in the following summaries to read more detailed news stories about each case.)

Lost: Thanks to Radley Balko’s dogged investigations, we now have the video evidence that shows Steven Hayne and Michael West falsifying evidence in Jimmie Duncan’s case, video that prosecutors originally refused to turn over to Duncan’s lawyers, video that the trial judge had inexplicably ruled contained “no exculpatory evidence favorable to the defendant.” There’s no telling how many innocent people have been harmed by Hayne and West, because even though the Missippi government has downgraded their trust in the alleged perjurers, officials still refuse to acknowledge there may have been a serious problem and refuse to review the many cases the duo worked on. Hayne in fact is still giving testimony in Missippi courts. (See also Rogier van Bakel’s post on the case and Radley Balko’s update.)  read more »

Via AntiPolygraph.org News: Just before the dawn of President-elect Obama’s reign, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury has issued a late legal opinion contradicting an anti-polygraph memorandum from President Lyndon B. Johnson. Yes, you read that right: LBJ.  read more »

The Orwellian term is “Child Protective Services,” or something similar. After all, who could possibly be against protecting children? Or “service”? But as it frequently is with government agencies, maybe a different term would be more accurate. Maybe: “Child Paternalism Services.”

Stephen. C. Smith describes what happens after the Maine DHHS serves you with a “substantiation” notice:  read more »