Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Civil Liberties Page 7 of 8

America cannot be America at perpetual war

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On July 4, 2010

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On this, the 4th of July, I, a Canadian, want to talk to Americans about their values.  Perhaps that’s presumptuous.  Perhaps I should just shut it and say “it’s none of my business.”

I could argue that it’s my business on purely pragmatic grounds: where goes the US, Canada often follows.  We are a US subject state in all but name, and your failure to fix your problems makes it much harder and sometimes impossible to fix our problems.

But forget that.  I don’t primarily care about the US because of Canadian interests, I care about the US because I care about the American dream.

I sometimes think that many of us who aren’t Americans believe in American ideals more than American citizens do.  We imbibe, in other countries, a particularly pure form of the American civil religion.  We hear about doing the right thing, about always giving the accused a day in court, about freedom of speech, about division of power and about rights that are rights not because they are given by government to its subjects, but because they are inalienable human rights.

Oh, as time goes by, you realize that America has always had problems with its virtues.  You learn of the red scares, the Japanese internments, the genocide against the Indians, slavery and Jim Crow.

And yet… and yet, both people and countries are defined not just by their failures, but by the ideals they strive towards.  America’s ideals, and its striving towards them, were what gripped the world and gave others hope.  If the American experiment in freedom, in rights, could succeed, then perhaps it could succeed in other places.

But what we see today is the American Dream dying.  Not just the dream of every generation being better off than the one before, though that’s dying, but the dream of a country where the citizens actually had rights, where they actually were free.

There are a number of reasons, but I think Jefferson’s prescient phase sums it up best:

I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies

I’m not so sure that banks are more dangerous than standing armies, but certainly the two of them together have brought the US to where it is.

The problem with standing armies is simple enough: if you’ve got one, politicians are always tempted to use it.  When it’s a professional standing army, so the majority of the population is not effected by its use, that temptation increases.  When the army is the most powerful (though not the most effective) in the world, well, that temptation increases even further.

War is an executive function.  A war cannot be run by a legislature.  As a result, during war the power of the executive grows.  In the US the executive can now hold people without charge indefinitely, meaning President has the ability to lock people up without a trial.  If he does bother to grant a trial, the accused does not have the right to face their accusers or to see the evidence against them and evidence obtained through torture can be used.

The President can spy on any American he wants, and you have essentially no recourse, since it is illegal to let you know that you’re being spied on.  The President can declare American citizens combatants and have them assassinated, which is capital punishment without a trial.

Meanwhile, instead of the whole country being a free speech zone, free speech is only allowed in small areas if anyone important is nearby.  Lord save the important people from having to actually see the people whom their policies are impoverishing and whose rights they are destroying.

The right of association has been severely crippled, since the executive can now declare any organization a terrorist organization without any trial and without any appeal.  Any American who works with “terrorists” is a criminal.  Even if they are, say, like Jimmy Carter, helping Hezbollah participate in fair elections.

To sum up, the President can do all of the following, in most cases without meaningful appeal or a trial: execute Americans, imprison people indefinitely, spy on anyone he wants, forbid people from flying, torture people, kidnap people, forbid people from associating with whoever they want, and deny them the right to speak freely anywhere except in small cordoned off zones.

This is America?

This is what the American dream has come to?

Your founders warned you about this.  Warned you that standing armies and unrestrained banks would cost you your freedom.

And the sad thing is that most Americans are ok with it.

Are Americans who don’t believe that everyone is endowed with inalienable rights still Americans worth the name?

That is my question to you on July 4th.

Happy Independence Day.

What Actually Happened at the G20 Protests

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On June 28, 2010

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There’s been a lot of crying about “thugs and anarchists” in Toronto.  I live about 4 blocks from where some of the vandalism occurred, though I wasn’t there at the time.

As best I can tell, what happened is that for about an hour, the Black Bloc protesters clearly and visibly prepared for action, with both the police and other, non-violent protesters able to see they were doing so. The number of Black Bloc vandals seems to have been between 50 to 100, certainly not more than 200.  (The police had 20,000 men.)

The police actually withdrew, leaving behind police cars for the Black Block to torch.  Which they then did.   The Black Bloc then proceeded up Yonge street (the main north/south street in downtown Toronto), vandalizing as they went, and eventually many headed over to Queen’s Park, the Provincial capital.  Two hours after the first violence, the police finally take action, ensuring that there are plenty of videos of police cars burning and vandalism that would not have occurred if they had taken action earlier.

According to the police, rather than confront a maximum of 200 protesters, they withdrew behind the barrier around the G20 meetings and let them vandalize downtown Toronto for 2 hours.

At the end of the day the people who matter never even saw any protests and the 1 billion dollar police presence and suspension of civil liberties was “justified” by vandalism and burning police cars.

Simply put, the police decided that they couldn’t spare say 2,000 out of their 20,000 men to stop 200 vandals.  This was a deliberate decision to allow downtown to be vandalized.

I leave it as an exercise for readers to decide if this was a matter of incompetence, or if it was a deliberate strategy.  And if it was deliberate strategy, just what they were trying to accomplish with their strategy.

Of course, along the way Canadian Civil Liberties observers were arrested as well, and protesters were not allowed to see lawyers.

I am ashamed to be Canadian today, and I am ashamed of my governments, at all levels.

(A video of a clearly peaceful protest nonetheless attacked, after the jump)

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Helping “Terrorists” Engage In Anything Non-Terroristic Can Get You Locked up for 15 Years

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On June 21, 2010

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You can’t make up bad decisions like this.  Note that this is a 6-3 decision, not a close one:

The law barring material support was first adopted in 1996 and strengthened by the USA Patriot Act adopted by Congress right after the September 11 attacks. It was amended again in 2004.

The law bars knowingly providing any service, training, expert advice or assistance to any foreign organization designated by the U.S. State Department as terrorist.

The law, which carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison, does not require any proof the defendant intended to further any act of terrorism or violence by the foreign group.

Nor does it require any proof that the organization is a terrorist organization, since a State Department declaration is an administrative act.

The Humanitarian Law Project in Los Angeles had previously provided human rights advocacy training to the Kurdistan Workers Party, known as the PKK, and the main Kurdish political party in Turkey.

The Humanitarian Law group and others sued in an effort to renew support for what they described as lawful, nonviolent activities overseas.

“The Supreme Court has ruled that human rights advocates, providing training and assistance in the nonviolent resolution of disputes, can be prosecuted as terrorists,” said Georgetown University law professor David Cole, who argued the case.

“In the name of fighting terrorism, the court has said that the First Amendment permits Congress to make it a crime to work for peace and human rights. That is wrong,” Cole said.

Got that?  Trying to help an organization do non violent things will get you locked up.

More to the point, as noted earlier, this is clearly a violation of the right of association and the right for free speech.  You get locked up based on who you associate with, not what you’ve actually done, and the decision who you can associate with is a purely administrative act at the sole discretion of the President of the United States.  Any organization the State Department declares a terrorist organization you cannot associate with, period.

This is of a piece with other policies which allow the President to assassinate an American citizen without a trial, to lock people up indefinitely without a trial and so on.  When they President does deign to allow a trial evidence obtained from torture is admissable, and the if the President doesn’t want the accused to know who their accuser is or to see the evidence against them, so be it.

This is, I should emphasize, just a continuation of a trend, a punctuation mark by the Supreme Court in a long line of decisions which have gutted the first amendment, the right to face one’s accuser, the right to due process and so on.  If I were to point to a very bad law that many folks supported who shouldn’t have it would be the RICO statutes, which likewise made simple association a crime.  Since it was “bad people” doing the association (the Mafia) folks didn’t care.

Since it’s bad people, “terrorists”, this time, too many people won’t care.

But if the rights of those you despise aren’t protected, than neither are yours.

Making videoing cops illegal doesn’t make the US a police state, honest

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On June 4, 2010

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Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up:

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

Evidence of police brutality?  Show it, and we’ll arrest you, too.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?

Why, Virginia, Would You Think the President Isn’t Willing to See Abortion Rights Slip Away?

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On April 14, 2010

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If only the king will save us:

While anti-choice zealots may have the necessary votes to uphold the 20-week ban regardless of John Paul Stevens’ replacement, this is why the Court matters so much. The right has used judicial appointments in a blatantly political fashion, and unless the President is willing to see basic rights stripped away, he must act boldly.

Now, odds are that the new nominee will be pro-abortion rights.  But anyone who thinks Obama isn’t willing to sell abortion rights down the river in exchange for things he values more (like giving money to corporations) wasn’t paying attention during the health care reform fight, were they?

If pro-choice organizations want to make sure their rights aren’t sold down the river any further, they need to make clear that if they are, Obama will pay a price. Obama doesn’t respond to left-wingers asking nicely, he doesn’t pre-emptively make concessions to left wingers.  He only does those things for right wingers, as with giving away off-shore drilling without getting anything in return.

Given pro-choice organizations impotence during the HCR, I think we’d best just pray that whoever Obama wants on the court is pro-choice by happenstance.

Paul Craig Roberts Speaks For Me

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On February 10, 2010

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When he notes the US is a police state:

Siddiqui has never been charged with any terrorism-related offense. A British journalist, hearing her piercing screams as she was being tortured, disclosed her presence. An embarrassed U.S. government responded to the disclosure by sending Siddiqui to the U.S. for trial on the trumped-up charge that while a captive, she grabbed a U.S. soldier’s rifle and fired two shots attempting to shoot him. The charge apparently originated as a U.S. soldier’s excuse for shooting Dr. Siddiqui twice in the stomach, resulting in her near death.

On Feb. 4, Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York jury for attempted murder. The only evidence presented against her was the charge itself and an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken a pistol-firing course at an American firing range. No evidence was presented of her fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken 100-pound woman had allegedly seized from an American soldier. No evidence was presented that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell casings, no bullet holes. Just an accusation.

Wikipedia has this to say about the trial: “The trial took an unusual turn when an FBI official asserted that the fingerprints taken from the rifle, which was purportedly used by Aafia to shoot at the U.S. interrogators, did not match hers.”

An ignorant and bigoted American jury convicted her for being a Muslim. This is the kind of “justice” that always results when the state hypes fear and demonizes a group.

Siddiqui was an American citizen, by the way.  Seized and held in a secret prison, tortured and raped.  This is your America.

Your America.

Anyone can be next. Indeed, on Feb. 3 Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that it was now “defined policy” that the U.S. government can murder its own citizens on the sole basis of someone in the government’s judgment that an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no conviction, just execution on suspicion of being a threat.

This shows how far the police state has advanced. A presidential appointee in the Obama administration tells an important committee of Congress that the executive branch has decided that it can murder American citizens abroad if it thinks they are a threat….

In no previous death of a U.S. citizen by the hands of the U.S. government has the government claimed the right to kill Americans without arrest, trial, and conviction of a capital crime.

Go read the whole thing.

And, if there is a God, may Barack Obama and Dennis Blair face him along with George Bush, because no, the difference isn’t enough to matter.

Certainly not to Siddiqui.

As Jesus said “as you do to these, the least of my children, you do to me”. I wonder how Jesus is taking being raped, bombed and tortured so regularly by Obama and Bush.

As for me, I won’t pretend that I don’t despise Obama almost as much as I despised Bush.  Maybe more, since there’s evidence that George Bush is a brain damaged psyhcopath (he is known to have tortured animals as a child, one of the cardinal signs and recordings of him speaking in the early 90s show fluent speech without “Bushisms”).

Obama should know better, but if he does, he doesn’t care enough to do anything about it, to the contrary, he keeps making it worse.

The Unvarnished Truth About the US

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On January 22, 2010

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I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time and in light of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited corporate money into the political system, I think it’s time.

Yesterday’s decision makes the US a soft fascist state.  Roosevelt’s definition of fascism was control of government by corporate interests.  Unlimited money means that private interests can dump billions into elections if they choose.  Given that the government can, will, and has rewarded them with trillions, as in the bailouts, or is thinking about doing so in HCR, by forcing millions of Americans to buy their products the return on investment is so good that I would argue that corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to buy out government – after all if you pay a million to get a billion, or a billion to get a trillion, that’s far far better returns than are avaiable anywhere else.

And no politician, no political party, can reasonably expect to win when billions are arrayed against it.

The one faint hope is that politicians in the Senate will panic, know they have 10 months to do something and ram something through.  Of course, that will only be a stopgap measure, until the Supremes overthrow it, but in the meantime, maybe Dems will get serious about the Supreme Court and not rubber-stamp radical right-wingers like Alito and Roberts.

That is, however, a faint hope.

Add to this the US’s complete inability to manage its economic affairs, and its refusal to fix its profound structural problems, whether in the financial system, the education system, the military, concrete infrastructure, technology or anything else and I cannot see a likely scenario where the US turns things around.  The US’s problems in almost every area amount to “monied interests are making a killing on business as usual, and ologopolistic markets and will do anything they can to make sure the problem isn’t fixed”.

Even before they had the ability to dump unlimited money into the political system, they virtually controlled Washington.  This will put their influence on steroids.  Any congressperson who goes against their interests can be threatened by what amounts to unlimited money.  And any one who does their bidding can be rewarded with so much money their reelection is virtually secure.

This decision makes the US’s recovery from its decline even more unlikely than before—and before it was still very unlikely.  Absolute catastrophe will have to occur before people are angry enough and corporations weak enough for there to even be a chance.

So, my advice to my readers is this.

If you can leave the US, do.  Most of the world is going to suffer over the next decades, but there are places which will suffer less than the US: places that have not settled for soft fascism and a refusal to fix their economic problems.  Fighting to the very end is very romantic, and all, but when you’re outnumbered, outgunned, and your odds of winning are miniscule, sometimes the smartest thing to do is book out.  Those who came to America understood this, they left countries which were less free or had less economic hope than America, and they came to a place where freedom and opportunity reigned.

That place, that time, is coming to an end.  For your own sake, and especially for the sake of your children, I tell you now—it is time to get out.

I am not the only person thinking this.  Even before the decisions, two of my savviest American friends, people with impeccable records at predicting the US meltdown, told me that within the next few years they would be leaving.

There’s always hope, and those who choose to stay might stop this terminal decline.

But you need to ask yourself, seriously, if you are willing to pay the price of failure: if you are willing to have your children pay the price of failure.  Because it will be very, very steep.

The Deeply Broken American Police System

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On January 11, 2010

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I remember, years ago, when the news of torture in Iraq first came out, I wrote an article entitled US Finally Treats Iraqis Just Like Americans. The point was that abuse and rape is so rife in US prisons and jails, that waterboarding and stress positions are really only embellishments. To an outsider it is evident that the US police and prison system is out of control.

So when I read that police in St. Paul pepper sprayed a jailed woman over her entire body, then refused to let her wash it off—I’m not surprised. When I read that a number of prisoners were on a hunger strike to convince guards to get medical care to an anemic women who had passed out, I’m not surprised.

‘Cause here’s the truth. Shoving people around can be a lot of fun. And being a cop or prison guard lets you do it almost as much as you want to. As a practical matter, brutality and abuse of power almost never leads even to a slap on the wrist, let alone being fired or criminal charges. Don’t piss off the really important people (of whom there are fewer and fewer every year) and you can be a petty tyrant to anyone else you please.

A lot of cops are good folks, but a lot of people who join the police or become prison guards do so because they want authority, because they want to be “the man”. Once inside, they join a society which has a strong undercurrent of hostility and contempt for civilians, who are seen, in many cases literally, as either sheep or criminals. In part this is natural, police interact with people when they’re at their worst or weakest—either with people who have committed crimes, or people who have suffered crimes. Neither group comes across well—the first are scum, the second are often shattered and seem weak. That’s the police life, day in, day out. So many police come to see civilians through that lens, because that’s most of what they see of civilians.
Add to this contempt the attitude of those who direct the police in operations like this, such as the Bush Secret Service, who have been corrupted by Bush into his Praetorian guard whose main job is less security than making sure no one can ever show dissent anywhere Bush could possibly see it, and you have a real problem. Most people are very malleable, they do what people in authority tell them to. People who stand up to authority are very rare. Police, by the very nature of the job, don’t actually tend to be mavericks, movie stereotypes aside. They tend towards authoritarian personality types. They like to give orders and they like to take orders. Sure, there are exceptions, but they are definitely not the rule.

Combine the fact that cops see civilians as an out-group (not like us) with official encouragement and fear mongering (terrorist anarchists) along with the personality profile of many folks attracted to the job and you have a group which is primed and ready to be brutal towards people they believe “deserve it”. Add to that the fact that police being disciplined for brutality and for violating people’s rights is actually quite rare, add in dollops of new police powers given by Congress, the executive branch and the Supremes over the last few years, and it’s practically a guarantee of police abuse of power, the destruction of the right to assembly and the end of real free speech. (The joke about free speech zones, of course, is “wasn’t the entire country a free speech zone?”)

Police are probably necessary in society. I do say probably, because large and complex societies often had  far far fewer people performing police functions than modern societies and most modern societies have even fewer than the US does. But as with standing armies, they’re profoundly dangerous not just for all the reasons listed above, but because large paramilitary forces (and US police are paramilitary, they have been systematically militarized, first by the war on drugs then by the war on terror, over the last 30 years) inevitably not only have to justify themselves by doing something (and what they’re best at is violence against civilians), but also provide a temptation to those in power. Why listen to people, why fix problems, when those who complain about the problems can just be intimidated or beaten into silence?

So a society which is really concerned about liberty and freedom has to watch its cops very carefully. They can’t be allowed to get out of control, to forget that they exist to serve civilians, not to shove civilians around. In the US the evidence is that the line has been crossed. This happens so regularly now that it’s just expected. It’s hardly commented on in the press, despite being the exact same behavior that has the press so excited and outraged when it happens in other countries like China. No major politician can be bothered to call it out as inappropriate. It’s just the new normal.

And so it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that if the US isn’t exactly a police state, it’s certainly not a free state. And with more people locked away than any other country in the world, it’s also impossible not to conclude that it’s also a prison state. Violence and the threat of violence is so endemic in the US that most Americans don’t even notice any more that they live in a an incredibly violent society which is kept on track by intimidation, and when necessary, actual violence. They don’t notice that their cops are out of control, ill-disciplined and essentially above the law.

Instead it falls mostly to those of us from outside, or Americans who have lived elsewhere to say “there’s something wrong here. Something deeply pathological.”

More on this in some later pieces. For now, though, look at the US, at the RNC, at your prisons, as if you weren’t American, and see what you see. Because I can tell you now, no other western first world nation is like the US in this regard. And it’s not one of those things Americans should be proud of.

Originally posted at FDL on Sept 3, 2008.

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