alternative hippopotamus

Continued mostly dark tonight turning to widely scattered light in the morning. So said a funny man once, something like 30 years ago. While, it’s a great line for any occasion, it captures the mood of the present progressive landscape succinctly. It does indeed seem dark currently, but we’re hoping for some scattered lightness any day now.

When the Democratic nominee comes out in support of a FISA bill that rewrites the history of illegality, legalizing activity today that was illegal yesterday, you sort of wonder what his next trick is going to be: retroactively pardoning the Watergate burglars?

My basic objection is this: a democratic society can’t recognize a separate and special class of people for which the gravity of laws are bent. It’s even more fundamental than ripping up our constitution. That would nullify one manifestation of western civilization. Creating a legally privileged class nullifies a fundamental concept of justice over the last several hundred years. That with respect to laws: all men are indeed created equal.

So, this FISA thing really has me pissed.

This is just painful enough, that I’m glad there’s a DC primary today to distract me: (TPM)

Let there be no doubt: a majority of senators, and a large number of Democrats, think the telecoms should not suffer the hazard of accountability for cooperating with the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) took to the floor last night to give a speech asking, “This is our defining question, the question that confronts every generation: The rule of law, or the rule of men?” The resounding answer: the rule of men.

I tend to believe that if you gave Pelosi and Reid truth serum and asked them what they really thought of the voters they’d tell you either a.) that we’re misbehaved children that need to be told what to do by Mommy and Daddy, or b.) they don’t really care what the voters think. We’re the society of the high-minded, superior creations, they’d tell you from the vantage point of pentathol, and we look after each other.

One of the reasons that the fascist piglets at places like NRO hate Hollywood so much is that it has the power to look at… what do you call them? Ideas.

And Rendition, the movie, is enough of a blockbuster (bookbluster?) to raise some visibility to the notion of extraordinary rendition by allegedly democratic republics. Which may raise questions like: is this something we can be proud of?

I lived through the Cold War. What I took from that era is that we would never condone things like secretly taking people off the streets and sending them to invisible prisons to torture them. That’s what made us the good guys and the folks who ran the Kremlin the bad guys.

I like the way Atrios puts it:

As Glenn Greenwald keeps saying over and over again, the Washington conventional wisdom is that spying on Americans without warrants and locking them up indefinitely without charges are the Very Serious Positions. This is a deeply sick political culture in a deeply corrupt and deeply sick city, composed of people who have turned their backs on everything most of us grew imagining this country stood for, and it’s important to support and be inspired by those who “dare” to stand up for what we all thought were American values.

I’ll add that in a WaPo Opinion piece Daniel Benjamin debunks the 5 Myths About Renditions. Kinda sorta, but not really: (emphasis mine)

4. Rendition is just a euphemism for outsourcing torture.

Well, not historically. The guidelines for Clinton-era renditions required that subjects could be sent only to countries where they were not likely to be tortured — countries that gave assurances to that effect and whose compliance was monitored by the State Department and the intelligence community. It’s impossible to be certain that those standards were upheld every time, but serious efforts were made to see that they were. At a minimum, countries with indisputably lousy human rights records (say, Syria) were off-limits. Another key difference: Renditions before Bush were carried out to disrupt terrorist activity, not to gather intelligence or interrogate individuals.

Now, though, the Bush team seems to have dramatically eroded such safeguards. The administration has apparently sent someone to Syria, and Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, was evidently boosted in Macedonia and interrogated in Afghanistan in a manner that sure sounds like torture. In light of this and other revelations, the criticism that the administration has “defined down” torture looks pretty persuasive. It’s probably a good bet that Congress or the next administration will reform the program, or abolish it outright.

In case Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid happen to come across this blog, I’d like to give them my feedback on their weekend FISA debacle. I’d like to, but I try to avoid using language like that on this site.

Yes, I’ve read that Pelosi wants to fix the bill before the six month expiration time. Predictably, any language that gives the Executive branch less than carte blanche will either be filibustered by Republicans in the Senate (while the Washington Post identifies this as Democratic obstructionism) or will be flipped the big cheney by the White House, who will then say that the Democrat Party loves terrorists and wants to marry them.

In six months Bushie will claim that if the law expires that means no restrictions exist on his ability to spy on political opponents (Yes, I know he says it’s to spy on terrorists. Personally, I don’t believe him. Just as Nixon justified using the CIA and FBI to spy on domestic critics in the name of national security, so will Bushie). Pelosi and Reid will explain that if they don’t cave like a spelunker on this one they’ll look weak on national security issues.

Isn’t this what’s all really about? The Democratic Party leaders are afraid of looking weak on issues of national security. They don’t care if the perception is correct. They don’t care that it’s at the price of weakening the basic rights of citizens.

Meanwhile, Bin Laden is in a cave somewhere on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan laughing his kidneys off.

Sometimes I wonder if the reporters for Pravda on the Potomac have any critical faculties whatsoever. Consider this bit for instance, concerning the terrorist plot in the UK:

Much of the televised discussion yesterday concerned the investigative tools available in Britain that U.S. officials credit with allowing authorities to get ahead of the plot before it proved catastrophic. Chertoff said the ability to monitor monetary transactions and communications and to arrest suspects for a period of 28 days on an emergency basis made a significant difference in the case.

Although Chertoff did not suggest any specific changes in U.S. law to allow such flexibility, he alluded to the controversial Bush administration programs of secretly wiretapping suspects and of monitoring financial records.

He said on ABC’s “This Week” that “we cannot afford to leave those weapons on the table.” On “Fox News Sunday,” he said, “The ability to be as nimble as possible with our surveillance is very important.”

While it’s true that this is followed by a statement of the form but Democrats disagree… the original statement is pure spin, and doesn’t deserve the he said/she said treatment.

As Glenn Greenwald discusses here, surveillance in the UK requires a warrant. The fundamental issue with the NSA surveillance was that no warrants were obtained, violating the FISA law.

This isn’t some technical violation. Without some check on the president’s authority, the motivation for surveillance will revert to what it was in the Nixon administration: a means to spy on political enemies.

It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with Specter. I certainly did, when I read this assessment of Bush’s influence, as well his judgement:

“There’s a real opposition to the president today which you see everywhere, and it manifests itself here. . . . There’s an attitude that if the president’s in favor of it, there must be something wrong with it.”

Seems like a good rule of thumb to me. There is a bigger picture, which concerns what things may well look like post-November. Getting progressive legislation passed is going to be difficult. But, blocking Bush-backed legislation may be a little easier than it is right now. Have no doubt, Bush will go for the radical right’s trifecta: God, Guns, and Gays. Plus a few sops to the CEO’s and favored plutocrats. Plus drilling pretty much everything and everywhere.

Folks on the right will undoubtedly use the old saw about Democrats just wanting to obstruct, not having any positive alternatives, etc., etc. To which I’d say: pretend for a second you’re on a runaway train. And you figure out a way of stopping the train without anyone getting hurt. No one is going to complain that you’re just obstructing the train without having a positive alternative. Stopping the train is the positive alternative.

Bush-backed legislation, run-away train… I think you see where I’m going.

When I first saw this WaPo article, indicating that “Wild Bullet” Spector had put together a bill offering amnesty to NSA wiretap participants I ignored it. I didn’t think it got Spector’s proposal wrong, I just figured this was part of the posturing and playing possum that happens when someone is trying to negotiate a controversial bill in Washington.

The “amnesty provision” (quotes here indicate that there might not have ever been an amnesty provision) is not the lede of the article. But, it’s a controversial part. Here’s the money quote:

Another part of the Specter bill would grant blanket amnesty to anyone who authorized warrantless surveillance under presidential authority, a provision that seems to ensure that no one would be held criminally liable if the current program is found illegal under present law.

Clearly, this doesn’t square with what Spector said today on CNN (Crooks and Liars).

Glenn Greenwald argues that the “amnesty” part of the Pincus article is just plain wrong, there is no supporting text in Spector’s bill. He also points out that at the time when he posted (which was after the Pincus article appeared) there was no reliable text that described Spector’s bill. This suggests to me that Pincus’ article was based on a leaked version, or at least one that was not generally available at the time.

Glenn Greenwald concludes that the WaPo is just not reliable, at least not as a single source. I’ll have to say I’m not there. I just can’t believe that Pincus would publish that controversial a statement without corroboration.

Yet, this is an odd story, and I can’t explain away the concerns. Was the Post was being used to float an early version of the bill to see if it would fly, or was this never part of Spector’s intent?

To answer your question in advance, yes, I saw the article in the Post-It-Note that said folks, by a considerable margin (63-35), had no problem with NSA having access to their phone records.

My first reaction to this is really? You mean that less than 24 hours after the story breaks, the average American understands the nature of this program? And that same 24 hours has been enough to not only grasp the technical implications, but also to digest the ethical ramifications? And, to conclude in the balance, that the current administration has their best interests at heart, and can without political jaundice competently execute such a program?

If the answer to all this is yes, then surely Bush, in the person of one of his lackies, can get approval under FISA. Because, surely, if the American people believe that this program wouldn’t be used for, say, spying on political enemies, then it should be legal.

Right?

I’ll add that I looked through some of the Who’s Blogging links on the article, and was shocked to see what some of my fellow Americans were writing:

• Pennraker: “Isn’t it amazing that Democrats would rather watch Americans die than breach some theoretical line about privacy?

  The culture of death.”

• Iowa Voice: “This NSA program isn’t something that should bother anyone except the tinfoil hat crowd and those that are actively working to destroy the United States.”

What could possibly cause someone to think someone like that, much less openly publish it on the internet? Is this the right’s version of Bush Derangement Syndrome?

Hopefully, the Post-It-Note will follow up by writing a piece on the paranoid delusions of the rightie blogosphere. (I’ll sit by the computer, waiting for it to come out)

In comments Jimmie D asks a very interesting question:

Why do you “AltHippo” think the president authorized the NSA spying program?
What do you think President Bush’s goal was?

George Lakoff’s answer would be that Konservatives* tend to look favorably towards strong authority figures. If someone wanted to unfairly paraphrase Lakoff, you might say that Konservatives have a Daddy Fetish. The tendency towards authority has resulted in the current situation where Bush, Rove, Cheney et al have been trying to increase the power of the Executive at the expense of the Legislative and Judicial branches.

Does the Legislative branch have the ability to make laws that regulate the Executive branch? The Unitary Executive theory says no. Instead, this theory says that each branch of the government has the right and obligation to interpret the law. Since the Executive branch isn’t going to interpret its own actions as violations of the law, the effect is that Congress does not have the power to regulate the Executive.

The answer to Why? therefore has two components: 1.) domestic espionage gives more power to the Executive which on its own is a good thing. 2.) Why not? Meaning, since Congress and the courts have no check on the President, why shouldn’t he do damned well as he pleases?

This LA Times story brings up an additional element. We learn that the FBI has been spying on violent terrorist groups. Like the Quakers:

Denver-area activists said that since the surveillance documents became public, there had been a subtle chill, with some people avoiding protests for fear of ending up in an FBI file. Some activists think the FBI has been watching their groups to intimidate them.

“We’ve kind of gathered up our skirts and pulled in,” said Sarah Bardwell, who works for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group. Along with some activist roommates, she has also volunteered for Food Not Bombs.

Why would the DOJ authorize domestic groups to be spied on? For a number of reasons, among which I would include control by fear and intimidation. If the consequences of attending a protest or meeting (for instance, not being able to get a job for the rest of your life) far outweigh any potential benefits (for instance, higher wages), then people are going to stay home and try as hard as possible not to be seen.

I’ll also note that this question came up recently on a WaPo chat with Noam Chomsky. Here’s what he had to say: (WaPo)

Wellfleet, Mass.: Mr. Chomsky:

Many fear the country is moving towards a “police state” where the Executive acts according to its desires, without constraint. What possibilities do you see, if any, for the trend towards consolidation of power in the Executive to be thwarted?

Noam Chomsky: The concerns are justified. Thus in this morning’s press it was reported that after signing the new version of the Patriot Act with grandiose flourishes, President Bush quietly issued a “signing statement” that exempted him from its requirement to notify Congress of FBI actions that go beyond court authorizaton. That is yet another brazen affirmation of executive power. There are many others. There is little doubt that this administration is at an extreme in seeking to establish a powerful state executive, free from interference by Congress or public awareness of its actions. The justification is the “war on terror,” but that can hardly be taken seriously. Terror is doubtless a very serious threat, but it is all to easy to demonstrate that it does not rank high in administration priorities.

* annoying spelling due to a lack of the right word. Use of the word “conservative” in this context is inexact. I don’t really believe that the folks that are running the country right now can be defined as conservative in its historical sense.