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

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 »

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 »

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 »

A new year. A new U.S. president.

An editorial by Aziz Huq on The Nation website offers a prescription for “Dismantling the Imperial Presidency”, with a warning reminiscent of Lord Acton’s famous quote:

Radical change is needed to re-establish legitimate bounds to executive power. We must again place beyond the pale Nixon’s famous aphorism that “when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” But radical change—as early appointments and policy signals from the Obama transition team suggest—comes easier as campaign slogan than governing practice…

No matter how decent, any new president is tempted by the tools and trappings of executive authority. However tainted the Oval Office is now, Obama’s perspective will change dramatically on entering the White House…

(Click here to read the whole article.)

He goes on to offer measure Obama can take in three important areas: torture, the law that the executive follows, and accountability.

Always watching!
-TimK

As you may know, The Conscience of Abe’s Turn was inspired not by George W. Bush, but by civil-rights abuses during Bill Clinton’s administration, some as portrayed in James Bovard’s book Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years. In a thoughtful article at the Future of Freedom Foundation website, James Bovard looks back at the last Democratic president’s record on Fourth-Amendment civil rights.

The Clinton administration consistently championed the right of government employees to stick their noses almost anywhere — into people’s email, car, house, or personal effects. Clintonites set off one false alarm after another to justify extending government’s right to intrude. The administration consistently sought to exploit technological development in order to maximize government’s control over the citizenry…

The prohibition against unreasonable searches is the key to the Fourth Amendment.

As law professor Jeffrey Standen observed in an article he wrote for Legal Times, each extension of government power makes further extensions “reasonable” — since “reasonable” is defined on a sliding scale by however much intrusion people will tolerate from the government. The Clinton administration often sounded as if the only searches that were unreasonable were the ones that government officials did not care to do.

(Click here to read the whole article.)

The article gets specific on many of the ways the Clinton administration fomented fear and fought to redefine the Fourth Amendment to give government enforcers more power over citizens. True, George W. Bush presided over some of the worst civil-rights abuses today’s citizens have ever seen. But we shouldn’t just assume that Bush’s Democratic successor will be a civil-rights proponent, because Obama—as Clinton before him, as any president, being in charge of the enforcement branch of the federal government—has a vested interest in promoting government power over systematic protections of our civil rights. Be aware.

Always watching!
-TimK

P.S. Thanks to libertarian policy analyst Doug Bandow for the pointer.

Brian Wilson on his radio show at WSPD yesterday talked with Jim Bovard about a recent Washington Post article about sending U.S. troops to the U.S. “The U.S. military,” according to the Post, “expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe.”

Domestic emergency deployment may be “just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority,” or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU’s National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of “a creeping militarization” of homeland security.  read more »

Chris Anders of the ACLU, reporting on the Guantánamo hearings of Ibrahim al-Qosi and Mohammad Hashim a couple weeks ago, noted that there is death in the air there… the death of Guantánamo itself:

[E]veryone notices that attendance is way down. A couple of military personnel shut off the power in empty tents here in “Camp Justice.” As the only representative of a human rights group this week, my bed is the only one occupied in my six-bed tent. And the media pool is now down to just one reporter. It seems that all that is left to be done is for the new president to pull the plug on the whole operation on January 20.

“But,” explained Suzanne Ito in another post, “we’re not tossing out the orange ribbons just yet. Our work is not done. We need to keep up the momentum on this issue, and show President-elect Obama that he has our support to shut Guantánamo down on Day One. With an executive order, he can close Gitmo and shutter the military commissions system.”

Then CNN reported that a federal judge ordered that 5 prisoners at Guantánamo be released, because they were not “enemy combatants,” or at least the government could not demonstrate that they were.

The smell of death in the air, and this day, it’s a sweet, refreshing aroma.

-TimK

Jacob Hornberger writes about the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who has been locked up in South Carolina, in the same facility in which Jose Padilla (the American) was incarcerated and tortured.

Here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, we have long argued against the assumption and exercise of the “enemy combatant” power, even with the right of habeas corpus. We have pointed out that those who were arguing that President Bush could be trusted with such power were misguided and short-sighted. We have said that such dictatorial power is irreconcilable with the principles of a free society. We have emphasized that the issue wasn’t whether Bush should be trusted with such power but rather whether one’s worst enemy should be trusted with such power.

But conservatives never thought the day would arrive when they would lose power to a Democratic president…

Then, conservatives’ worst fear materialized — the election of a Democrat and, even worse from their perspective, one, they said, whose middle name was Hussein, whose father was a Muslim, who had ties to terrorists, and who associated with an extremist Christian preacher. He’s the man who now wields the omnipotent powers that, thanks to conservatives, were traded to the president and the military for the aura of “safety” from “the terrorists.”

(Click here to read the whole article.)

-TimK

P.S. He also continues on that theme in this post.

I’ve been pondering this question ever since before the election, and I have not been hopeful.

During the campaign, Obama’s “civil rights” plank had more to do with removing rights than restoring them. Quoting from that page, he wants to:  read more »