Tag: civil liberties

Shoe, meet the other foot

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

Keith Olbermann stepped over a line last night in attempting to defend the president and the administration from criticism by Republicans.

Sens. John Cornyn and John McCain and U.S. Rep. Peter King attacked the decision to Mirandize the man charged in the failed New York truck bomb incident, reviving an argument that is just dangerously dismissive of the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

They are advancing the idea that reading Faisal Shahzad, the now-detained the Pakistani-born American, his rights cut off potential avenues of information, potentially endangering Americans. I don’t want to argue the Mirada issue here. It is pretty clear where I stand (read the above paragraph).

What is interesting is the way in which Olbermann flipped the argument, creating a strawman to knock down and then building up a new, equally questionable argument of his own. Read this exchange between the TV host and Major General Paul Eaton, retired U.S. Army general who was in charge of training the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004, and who is now a senior adviser at the National Security Network:

OLBERMANN: If you are the FBI agent and the police officers who spent 53 hours straight on the manhunt that was successful and as Mike Sheehan pointed out, you throw in the time of the flight that they had as a pad to Dubai, they didn‘t catch him at the last second before he left the country or would have gotten out of the grasp of this country. They got him about a day before and got him after about two days and a few hours‘ work.

What would it feel like to have done this job and have lawmakers back at home of any stripe criticizing you in the job that you just did?

EATON: Well, not good is the answer. Since January of 2009, we have seen a relentless attack on our FBI, on our armed services, on our policemen by the Republican Party. Any opportunity that they can find to see a seam to get in there and lay in an attack they have pursued. And, frankly, as a retired soldier and as a guy who supports my police, who supports my FBI, I want them to cut it out.

Olbermann offers a softball question and then gets the answer he was hoping for, one that casts the critical Congress members as anti-law enforcement and un-American. Cornyn, McCain and King are off-base and playing political games, but they are well within their rights to criticize the Obama administration, the FBI and/or the military. That’s the system we’ve erected here and one that Olbermann, himself, vociferously defended during the dark days of the Bush administration.

Olbermann is guilty of what many on the left have been guilty of since the election of Obama to the White House — a willingness to argue for things they were against, their intellectual U-turns tied to a political expediency that clouds their reason. Democrats now hate the filibuster, though they were prepared to defend it and demanded its use during the Bush years. Republicans have become so committed to it — after nearly eliminating it with the “nuclear option” — that they have stopped the Senate from functioning.

On issue after issue — torture, Guantanamo, rendition, oil drilling — liberal supporters of the president, or liberal commentators critical of the GOP, refuse to see that the arguments they have accepted just would not pass the flip test. If Bush were to have proposed the oil-drill compromise, would liberals have offered the kind of tame rebuke most offered? Would they have credited Bush with having an uncanny political mind and some kind of long-term strategy?

I think we know the answer.

As for Mr. Olbermann: I ask that he imagine the critics being Russ Feingold and John Kerry and the TV host being Bill O’Reilly. Would he have stood for O’Reilly’s blustering attack against the liberal senators? I think we know the answer to that one, as well.

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Take me out of the ballgame

So, let’s get this straight: The Yankees continue to play “God Bless America” during baseball games, a practice that began in 2001 after the 9/11 terror attacks. OK, fine. What’s odd, however, is that a fan says he was removed from the game because he attempted to go to the restroom during the musical interlude.

There is some discrepency over the policy at the stadium, The fan, Bradford Campeau-Laurion, told CBS TV that he was told that

theYankees had a rule restricting movement in the stands during the playing of God Bless America. The rule is enforced by ushers, stadium security and the NYPD.

The Yankees, however, say

there is no rule against moving or using a bathroom during a game but police say if a fan is disruptive to others they have the right to kick that fan out.

Police say the incident was alcohol related, but a witness has come forward to contradict the account.

To many, this might seem a silly tangent at a time when we are fighting two wars, the Russians have crossed into a neighbor’s territory, the economy is tanking and so on. But I would argue that these empty displays of patriotism set within these large eventws create a dangerous atmosphere that admittedly was much more stifling in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. But watching earlier coverage of this campaign, with its focus on flag pins and Michelle Obama’s remarks about pride in country, remembering as well the way the GOP turned war heroes like Sens. Max Clelland and John Kerry into caricatures, ,Dixie Chicks, Tim Robbins, Bill Maher, Linda Rondstadt — the list of public figures (and the anonymous horde) whose criticism of the war and the president resulted in ugly controversy and rebuke seems endless — it’s pretty clear that we still view dissent as dangerous. I’ve experienced this first hand, in letters and e-mails I’ve received when I’ve criticized the war, the president, John McCain, Fox News, conservatives, etc.

The dissent issue has faded, to some degree, but not completely — consider this story from The Progressive magazine:

Professor Robert Ovetz was driving through San Francisco on the morning of June 30 when he saw the lights of a police car behind him.

Ovetz pulled over.

“When the officer came up to my window, he asked the typical police requests: registration, drivers’ license, insurance card,” says Ovetz. “I asked him why he was pulling me over. And he said because of the bumper sticker on my back window.”

That sticker says, “No to Empire,” in large bold letters, and on the bottom in very small letters, “www.thenation.com,” Ovetz notes. It’s a bumper sticker from The Nation magazine.

Ovetz’s first reaction was to laugh, he says.

Then he recalls the following conversation:

“How could it be illegal for me to have a bumper sticker on my back windshield?”

“It’s obscuring your view.”

“You’re just trampling on my free speech rights.”

“No sir, I’m just doing my job.”

That’s the standard response in these situations. But it does appear to be a case of selective enforcement. And it is wholly consistent with the kind of infringements we have experienced since 9/11.

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Chilling charges

There is something less than democratic about the charges being issued in this story. There were about 3,500 students participating in this march, but New Brunswick police only charged three — two being march organizers? Could this have more to do with what the march was protesting than with the breaking of laws? Just asking.

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Science fiction comes to life

Does anyone else find this scary? The FBI wants to create what CNN is calling a “massive computer database of people’s physical characteristics” designed to help the bureau better track “criminals and terrorists.”

The program will include “palm prints, scars and tattoos, iris eye patterns, and facial shapes.”

The idea is to combine various pieces of biometric information to positively identify a potential suspect.

The problem, as the ACLU told CNN, is that the program is not likely to be limited to nefarious elements. The technology too easily can be used for other means, including employment background checks and the like.

“It’s the beginning of the surveillance society where you can be tracked anywhere, any time and all your movements, and eventually all your activities will be tracked and noted and correlated,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Liberty Project.

The Washington Post reports that the program is designed to bring together information from a variety of agencies, which law enforcement says will bring “together information from a wide variety of sources and making it available to multiple agencies increases the chances to catch criminals.”

This has the Electronic Privacy Information Center a bit concerned, Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Post.

“You’re giving the federal government access to an extraordinary amount of information linked to biometric identifiers that is becoming increasingly inaccurate,” he said.

And as Steinhardt told CNN, this will affect all of us.

“This had started out being a program to track or identify criminals,” he said. “Now we’re talking about large swaths of the population — workers, volunteers in youth programs. Eventually, it’s going to be everybody.”

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The Blog of South Brunswick

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Democrats caving on civil liberties

You’re kidding me, right?

The Democrats, elected to a majority as an antidote for six years of President Bush, are prepared to “expand the government’s authority to conduct electronic surveillance of overseas communications in search of terrorists,” according to The Washington Post.

The proposal, according to House and Senate Democrats, would permit a secret court to issue a single broad order approving eavesdropping of communications involving suspects overseas and other people, who may be in the United States. That order “need not be individualized,” according to a Democratic aide.

They are calling it a compromise, because it would keep the FISA courts involved unlike the administration’s plan, which would have granted the NSA “authority to intercept without a court order any international phone call or e-mail between a surveillance target outside the United States and any person in the United States.”

The administration’s proposal also would grant the attorney general sole authority to order the interception of communications for as long as one year, if he certified that the surveillance was directed at a person outside the United States.

Democrats are painting the move as protecting civil liberties — even Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont, who is as strong on civil liberties issues as anyone — but the compromise smacks of what the ACLU is calling “politics of fear.”

“The Democrats have pretty much gone along with what the administration has been pushing for, in terms of allowing them to change the program so dramatically as to allow quite a large amount of wiretapping of Americans without a warrant,” she said. (The Washington Post)

The Daily Kos offers a fairly pointed take on it, as well:

Even Rockefeller’s limited fixes, which keep all surveillance authority with the FISA court, gives too much to the administration. While the administration is “targeting” the people overseas and incidentally listening to the Americans on the other end, there is most likely nothing in the legislation to make them stop and get a warrant when Americans are involved. Rockefeller’s proposal again leaves it to administration guidelines to figure that out, in secrecy most likely, and we know what they do when no one is watching.

Hopefully the impasse over giving Gonzales control over the program will be enough to kill the entire proposal. FISA is and has been entirely adequate to answer the demands of legal surveillance. There is no need to give one inch to this administration on domestic wiretapping, of all things.

Stop this train before it wrecks completely.

I couldn’t agree more.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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