Category Archives: Essays

It’s funny watching the trailer of In the Name of the Father, almost 20 years after it came out on video, especially at a time when it appears that, as Glenn Greenwald describes, with each new terrorist attempt — ironically, each one less sophisticated than the last — the popular response is to find new ways to strip away the rights of the people:

What’s most amazing about all of this is that even 9 years after the 9/11 attacks and even after the radical reduction of basic rights during the Bush/Cheney years, the reaction is still exactly the same to every Terrorist attack, whether a success or failure, large- or small-scale.  Apparently, 8 years of the Bush assault on basic liberties was insufficient; there are still many remaining rights in need of severe abridgment.  Even now, every new attempted attack causes the Government to devise a new proposal for increasing its own powers still further and reducing rights even more, while the media cheer it on.  It never goes in the other direction.  Apparently, as “extremist” as the Bush administration was, there are still new rights to erode each time the word Terrorism is uttered.  Each new incident, no matter how minor, prompts new, exotic proposals which the “Constitution-shredding” Bush/Cheney team neglected to pursue:  an assassination program aimed at U.S. citizens, formal codification of Miranda dilutions, citizenship-stripping laws, a statute to deny all legal rights to Americans arrested on U.S. soil.

The U.S. already has one of the most pro-government criminal justice systems in the world.  That (along with our indescribably insane drug laws) is why we have the world’s largest prison population and the highest percentage of our citizenry incarcerated of any country in the Western world.  It is hard to imagine a worse fate than being a defendant in the American justice system accused of Terrorism-related crimes.  Conviction and a very long prison sentence are virtual certainties.  Particularly in the wake of 9/11 and the Patriot Act era, the rules have been repeatedly rewritten to provide the Government with every conceivable advantage.  The very idea that the Government is hamstrung in its ability to prosecute and imprison Terrorists is absurd on its face.  Decades of pro-government laws in general, and post-9/11 changes in particular, have created a justice system that strangles the rights of those accused of Terrorism.  Despite that, every new incident becomes a pretext for a fresh wave of fear-mongering and still new ways to erode core Constitutional protections even further.

It really is the case that every new Terrorist incident reflexively produces a single-minded focus on one question:  which rights should we take away now/which new powers should we give the Government?  We never reach the point where we decide that we have already retracted enough rights.  Further restrictions on rights seems to be the only reaction of which our political and media class is capable in the face of a new attack.  The premise seems to be that if we keep limiting rights further and further, we’ll eventually reach the magical point of Absolute Safety where there will be no more Terrorism.  For so many reasons, that is an obvious myth, one that ensures that we’ll reduce rights infinitely and with no discernible benefit.  We’re not the target of Terrorist attacks because we have too many rights; we’re the target because of our own actions, ones that we never reconsider in light of new attacks because we’re too busy figuring out which rights to erode next.

The reality of the world today is that our safety is always at risk, especially in public places, both by the terrorist loonies (even more foreseeable when the CIA is drone attacking other countries) and by the run of the mill All American Shooting Spree lunatics. The only difference being that the All American Shooting Spree is much more frequent and is always followed, not by a call for limiting rights, but by cries to reinforce the rights of gun owners. And won’t that be an interesting case of Right Wing cognitive dissonance when the first terrorist gets his hand on a gun purchased at a gun show?

Regulate individuals and leave the corporations alone.

This post will likely be followed with others discussing the same topic in greater detail, but I wanted to briefly express this one point: I often find it hard to comprehend, from a strictly ideological point of view, how those who believe in the supremacy of the free market and capitalism while distrusting government intervention and regulation would, at the same time, be in favor of strict immigration regulation and enforcement. Furthermore, it seems to me that the exact same arguments that Republicans, for example, would have against environmental regulation would also apply to the regulation of immigrants.

The way I reconcile the ideological discrepancy is by accepting their hypocrisy and lack of intellectual rigor.

Could anyone with a straight face imagine a hypothetical cartoon depicting Jesus molesting a child – as political satire of the recent Church scandals – without controversy and Christians going postal? Well, according to Katherine Parker at the Washington Post, Americans love their freedom of speech – unlike Muslims – and have a tradition of lampooning their own beliefs? Say what? I seem to recall that the U.S. has a long history of religious conservatives trying to block speech, organizing book burnings and bans, and people just generally freaking out.

And on Monday in the New York Times, Ross Douthat went even further saying that Radical Islam enjoys a unique position of privilege in American society – the culprit being political correctness — protecting it from scrutiny in popular culture. All this because South Park isn’t parodying the Muslim prophet Muhammad on television. Continue reading →

It is hard to imagine going on vacation to the Iraq-Iran border, but personally, I would like to give the three Americans now awaiting trial in an Iranian jail the benefit of the doubt. Obviously, Iran – a country that we consistently threaten with obliteration – thinks differently. But according to the Associated Press, the two American detainees are not fairing so well in prison. Both are sick and have only now received their first visitors since October. We, as readers, are supposed to look down on the tyrannical, human rights abusing Iranians because they have incarcerated — pending trial no less — these wandering Americans (because Iran wants to have weapons like the U.S. and Israelis do). Of course, I am not a fan of Iran either, but as I have written before, such a stance is extraordinarily hypocritical coming from a nation that has held and continues to hold countless detainees without trial in Guantanamo, Bagram and who knows where else.

In the same spirit of hypocrisy, the Nobel Prize winning Obama not only continues to promote the Bush Administration policy that the U.S. president has the unchecked power to detain indefinitely anyone it wants without trial, yet — as Glenn Greenwald described yesterday — the White House is now criticizing Pakistan for doing that exact same thing. Ironically, Pakistan’s defense is that “their courts are not up to the task of handling such a large volume of complex terrorism cases.” Does that sound familiar to any Republicans out there who have no faith in our justice system either?

Of this hypocrisy Greenwald writes:

Let’s teach those Pakistanis that we’re not going to tolerate their lawless and tyrannical detention of people without charges and trials.  We won’t put up with it.  Especially not when it’s “justified” with the Orwellian claim that their real civilian courts can’t handle the prosecutions and they’re “afraid” that Dangerous Terrorists might be released if they give them due process because they’re unprosecutable.  Kudos to the Obama administration for teaching them that countries that live under the Rule of Law simply don’t deny people trials based on such excuses.  It’d be one thing if they were assassinating these people without any charges or trials — that, of course, would be understandable — but not detaining them.  We’re the Leader of the Free World and we simply can’t be seen associating with or supporting regimes that would do such a thing.  Besides, unlike the U.S., it’s not like Pakistan really faces an Existential Threat from Islamic radicals or anything, so (unlike us) they really have no acceptable excuse for doing these things.

Meanwhile, a bomb goes off in Northern Ireland, yet Christianity and Christians remains free from ill repute.

If there were any doubts left whatsoever as to whether a liberal mainstream press actually existed in the United States, the Washington Post’s op-ed page once again proved itself to be overwhelmingly neo-conservative with four out of six articles, including articles by the blood thirsty, macho, war-wongering neocons Krauthammer and Kristol. Then there are the Bushdom nostalgists, Michael Gerson and Michael B. Mukasey, who want us to believe that neither U.S. sovereignty nor the U.S. legal system are strong enough to prosecute and incarcerate terrorists.  Maybe the two should put their articles together and then they’d come to the conclusion that after you fail to afford criminal and even military suspects their rights, then the evidence you have obtained against them is no longer admissible in either civilian or criminal courts. That leaves you with the only option left of operating a prison like Guatanamo, hidden from the Rule of Law, where suspects are held without ever being charged or tried with a crime. Then when Iran holds a trial against a U.S. citizen, Kristol and Krauthammer cry “human rights violation” and plead for a healthy dose of air strikes; what Hillary diplomatically calls obliteration.

Forget the fact that Miranda requires all suspects who are in custody and being interrogated to be read their rights. Forget that Robert Reid was Mirandized and tried in civil court under Bush/Cheney. Forget the fact that the Constitution’s Bill of Rights applies to people, not just citizens (even though Mukasey appears to believe that Miranda does not always apply citizens). Forget that these Constitutional rights — under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments — do not come with “except during wartime” exceptions (or that Congress has not declared war). Forget all of the domestic and foreign terrorists tried and convicted in federal civilian court over the past decade, and forget about the ones that could not be convicted by military tribunals under Bush/Cheney. Forget all your facts and your law. Sarah Palin — a politician to take seriously according to senior Washington Post pundit Broder — says she’s a Constitutionalist and, along with the neocon Post, believes that the Constitution just shouldn’t apply to the law anymore.

More than a political post, this is a post about our politics. From the recent article by Glenn Greenwald:

The Lynch Mob mentality
If I had the power to have one statement of fact be universally recognized in our political discussions, it would be this one:

The fact that the Government labels Person X a “Terrorist” is not proof that Person X is, in fact, a Terrorist.

That proposition should be intrinsically understood by any American who completed sixth grade civics and was thus taught that a central prong of our political system is that government officials often abuse their power and/or err and therefore must prove accusations to be true (with tested evidence) before they’re assumed to be true and the person punished accordingly.  In particular, the fact that the U.S. Government, over and over, has falsely accused numerous people of being Terrorists — only for it to turn out that they did nothing wrong — by itself should compel a recognition of this truth.  But it doesn’t.

All throughout the Bush years, no matter what one objected to — illegal eavesdropping, torture, rendition, indefinite detention, denial of civilian trials — the response from Bush followers was the same:  “But these are Terrorists, and Terrorists have no rights, so who cares what is done to them?”  What they actually meant was:  “the Government has claimed they are Terrorists,” but in their minds, that was the same thing as:  “they are Terrorists.”  They recognized no distinction between “a government accusation” and “unchallengeable truth”; in the authoritarian’s mind, by definition, those are synonymous.  The whole point of the Bush-era controversies was that — away from an actual battlefield and where the Constitution applies (on U.S. soil and/or towards American citizens wherever they are) — the Government should have to demonstrate someone’s guilt before it’s assumed (e.g., they should have to show probable cause to a court and obtain warrants before eavesdropping; they should have to offer evidence that a person engaged in Terrorism before locking them in a cage, etc.).  But to someone who equates unproven government accusations with proof, those processes are entirely unnecessary.  Even in the absence of those processes, they already know that these persons are Terrorists.  How do they know that?  Because the Government said so.  Even when it comes to their fellow citizens, that’s all the “proof” that is needed.

That authoritarian mentality is stronger than ever now.  Why?  Because unlike during the Bush years, when it was primarily Republicans willing to blindly trust Government accusations, many Democrats are now willing to do so as well.  Just look at the reaction to the Government’s recent attempts to assassinate the U.S.-born American citizen and Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.  Up until last November, virtually no Americans had ever even heard of al-Awlaki.  But in the past few months, beginning with the Fort Hood shootings, government officials have repeatedly claimed that he’s a Terrorist:  usually anonymously, with virtually no evidence, and in the face of al-Awlaki’s vehement denials but without any opportunity for him to defend himself (because he’s in hiding out of fear of being killed by his own Government).  The Government can literally just flash someone’s face on the TV screen with the word Terrorist over it (as was done with al-Awlaki), and provided the face is nefarious and Muslim-looking enough (basically the same thing), nothing else need be offered.

That’s enough for many people — including many Democrats — to march forward overnight and mindlessly proclaim that al-Awlaki is “a declared enemy of the United States working to kill Americans” (if you can stomach it, read some of these comments — from Obama defenders at a liberal blog — with several sounding exactly like Dick Cheney, screeching:  “Of course al-Awlaki should be killed without charges; he’s a Terrorist who is trying to kill Americans!!!”).  Even now, beyond government assertions about his associations, the public knows virtually nothing about al-Awlaki other than the fact that he’s a Muslim cleric with a Muslim name dressed in Muslim garb, sitting in a Bad Arab Country expressing anger towards the actions of the U.S. and Israel.  But no matter.  That’s more than enough.  They’re willing not only to mindlessly embrace the Government’s unproven accusation that their fellow citizen is a TERRORIST (“a declared enemy of the United States working to kill Americans”), but even beyond that, to cheer for his due-process-free execution like drunken fans at a football game.  And the same people declare:  no civilian trials are necessary for Terrorists (meaning:  people accused by the Government of being Terrorists).  Even more amazingly, the identities of the other Americans on the hit list aren’t even known, but that’s OK:  they’re Terrorists, because the Government said so.

A very long time ago, I would be baffled when I’d read about things like the Salem witch hunts.  How could so many people be collectively worked up into that level of irrational frenzy, where they cheered for people’s torturous death as “witches” without any real due process or meaningful evidence?  But all one has to do is look at our current Terrorism debates and it’s easy to see how things like that happen.  It’s just pure mob mentality:  an authority figure appears and affixes a demonizing Other label to someone’s forehead, and the adoring crowd — frothing-at-the-mouth and feeding on each other’s hatred, fears and desire to be lead — demands “justice.”  I imagine that if one could travel back in time to the Salem era in order to speak with some of those gathered outside an accused witch’s home, screaming for her to be burned, the conversation would go something like this:

Mob Participant:  Burn the Witch!!!  Kill her!!!

Far Left Civil Liberties Extremist-Purist (“FLCLE-P”):  How do you know she’s a witch?

Mob Participant:  Didn’t you just hear the government official say so?

FLCLE-P:  But don’t you want to see real evidence before you assume that’s true and call for her death?

Mob Participant:  You just heard the evidence!  The magistrate said she’s a witch!

FLCLE-P:  But shouldn’t there be a real trial first, with tangible evidence and due process protections, to see if the accusation is actually true?

Mob Participant:  A “real” trial?  She’s a witch!  She’s trying to curse us and kill us all.  She got more than what she deserved.  Witches don’t have rights!!!

Return to Question 1.

That’s essentially how I hear our debates over Terrorism, and how I’ve heard them for quite some time.  And it’s how I hear them more loudly now than ever before.  And with those deeply confused premises now locked into place on a bipartisan basis (“no trials are needed to determine if someone is a Terrorist because Terrorists don’t have rights”), imagine how much louder that will get if there is another successful terrorist attack in the U.S.  But in fairness to the 17th Century Puritans, at least the Salem witches received pretenses of due process and even trials (albeit with coerced confessions and speculative hearsay).  Even when it comes to our fellow citizens, we don’t even bother with those.  For us, the mere accusation by our leaders is sufficient:  Kill that American Terrorist with a drone!