Decline and Fall

Lots of links to this piece around the blogosphere, but abuses like this can't be publicized enough. This is happening in America. The "land of the free." Back when I was a kid, you only heard kind of behavior from the Soviets:

Last Sunday I and a few other girls began our trip to New York. We were going to shop and enjoy the Christmas spirit. We made ourselves comfortable on first class, drank white wine and looked forward to go shopping, eat good food and enjoy life. When we landed at JFK airport the traditional clearance process began.

We were screened and went on to passport control. As I waited for them to finish examining my passport I heard an official say that there was something which needed to be looked at more closely and I was directed to the work station of Homeland Security. There I was told that according to their records I had overstayed my visa by 3 weeks in 1995. For this reason I would not be admitted to the country and would be sent home on the next flight. I looked at the official in disbelief and told him that I had in fact visited New York after the trip in 1995 without encountering any difficulties. A detailed interrogation session ensued.

...

I was exhausted, tired and hungry. I didn't understand the officials' conduct, for they were treating me like a very dangerous criminal. Soon thereafter I was removed from the cubicle and two armed guards placed me up against a wall. A chain was fastened around my waist and I was handcuffed to the chain. Then my legs were placed in chains. I asked for permission to make a telephone call but they refused. So secured, I was taken from the airport terminal in full sight of everybody. I have seldom felt so bad, so humiliated and all because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law.

...

I was completely exhausted, tired and cold. Fourteen hours after I had landed I had something to eat and drink for the first time. I was given porridge and bread. But it did not help much. I was afraid and the attitude of all who handled me was abysmal to say the least. They did not speak to me as much as snap at me.

...

I was hugely relieved when, at last, I was told that I was to be taken to the airport, that is to say until I was again handcuffed and chained.Then I could take no more and broke down and cried. I begged them at least to leave out the leg chains but my request was ignored. When we arrived at the airport, another jail guard took pity on me and removed the leg chains. Even so I was led through a full airport terminal handcuffed and escorted by armed men. I felt terrible. On seeing this, people must think that there goes a very dangerous criminal. In this condition I was led up into the Icelandair waiting room, and was kept handcuffed until I entered the embarkation corridor.

These aren't the actions of one rogue asshole at INS or DHS. This is the procedure when a dire threat to national security like a young Icelandic woman tries to enter our country. This is the result of the politics of fear. I am ashamed to be an American.

Labels: GWOT, liberty

I might have predicted that now that a few people are actually reading my blog, posting on something as controversial as gay marriage would bring out the hataz. Here's the comment "anonymous" posted:

Just because someone you know has skills or qualities that you admire but who turns out to be a homosexual does not mean you should support or condone his homosexuality. What if your uncle was a talented writer who also saved a bus load of senior citizens from falling over a cliff... but you discovered that he also likes to get together on the weekends with a group of guys and circle jerk on his 21 year old daughter, with her permission. Are you supposed to support his love of shooting sperm on his daughter with his buddies? Of course not. It's disgusting and wrong and is detrimental to the fabric of society. (Your blog just went downhill fast.)

Wow. Thanks for the disturbing image. I'm glad such a paragon of decency deigned to comment so vividly on my humble blog. I'm sure my traffic will increase even more now that my blog can be reached by googling "circle jerk daughter."

This comment shows many of the problems that homophobes have when trying to actually think about homosexuality:

1) Their assessment is based completely on the fact that they think homosexual sex is disgusting. First, given the vividness of this commenter's hypothetical scenario (I'm betting he got a little turned-on just thinking it up), I'd wager that a tour through his hard drive would reveal plenty of evidence that he doesn't find anal sex disgusting per se, just when it's a guy getting penetrated. He's probably got a copy of "ANALyze This 14" or "Weapons of Ass Destruction" and a box of kleenex just waiting for him when he gets home from his Klan meeting. But that's OK, because it's, you know, chicks getting it.

2) They refuse to separate the activity from the orientation. Actually, they usually deny that being gay is an orientation at all, but rather a choice, as if people are just lining up to become the next Matthew Shepard. But notice that in my post I didn't mention the activity itself even once. I focused it on love, because that's what marriage, and brotherhood, is about. The thing that small-minded people like Anonymous don't get is that the love that one homosexual man feels for another homosexual man is indistinguishable from the love that us heteros feel for the special women in our lives. My personal transformation occurred when I realized that, and discovered that my pathetic dogmas were no match for my much stronger conviction that

3) They frequently invoke indefinable terms like "fabric of society" to support their arguments, but that's where their analysis ends. What is this "fabric" of which they speak? In a nation as multi-faceted as ours, that's not a question that lends itself to a short answer. The "fabric of society" line is just intellectual laziness. Guess what: even if there is a definable fabric in American society, it's much more likely to consist of things like liberty, individualism and the Golden Rule than discrimination, repression and pretending the world isn't as it actually is. If you insist on living somewhere where those are widely-shared values, Tehran is lovely this time of year.

4) They are always ready to impose their sense of "ewwww, that's disgusting!" on others with the full force of the State. This guy probably came here via a link to my Blackwater Air Force post. It's generated about 80% of the total traffic to my site, so that's a fairly safe bet. You would think he'd be all about keeping the terrifying power of the State at bay, but you'd be wrong. It's only within very well-defined parameters that he is willing to stand for freedom. He's just like Ashcroft or Gonzalez: infringing the rights of others is fine as long as he thinks it's justified. Civil libertarians such as myself, however, tend to be unwilling to grant the State that much authority, no matter what the circumstances. It's the old, "your freedom ends where my nose begins" line, but it applies to other people's noses as well.

5) They actually believe that the world will be better off if homosexuals continue to be relegated to pariah status and have avenues toward healthy, long-term commitment cut off from them. This guy's so worried about the damage to the "fabric of society" done by the acceptance of roughly 10% of the population that he completely misses the damage that is done by the ghettoization and oppression of that same 10%. I submit that normalizing and accepting people who are different from us will not only improve their lives, but ours as well. I submit that opening up the opportunity for that 10% of our people to live openly in fully committed, legally-binding relationships will only strengthen society.

Why are some people so unwilling to just let others be? What could my brother's or Andrew Sullivan's love possibly do to harm him? The answer, of course, is nothing. Nothing, that is, except force him to see that the world is full of people that aren't like him. And thank god for that.

Labels: homosexuality, liberty, personal

(Photo by Michael Stuetz)

Labels: homosexuality, liberty, personal

One feature that I neglected to address in my recent posts on Blackwater was brought up by some of the commenters to those posts, for instance this one:

The scariest thing about some entity like Blackwater turning America into a police state is the fact that they hire foriegn soldiers of fortune. These Hessians could one day be marching down our streets and commanding American citizens at the point of a gun barrel. Just like they are doing in Iraq. And you see the results there. A lot of dead people.

Although I am hesitant to declare the police state nearly here, I am mindful of the dangers of allowing the seeds for it to be planted while we all assure ourselves that it could never come to that.

As for those foreign soldiers of fortune, I see them all the time. The most visible to me are the guys guarding our mess halls. All of the ones at my local facility seem to be from Uganda, as far as I can tell (I've had brief conversations with some of them). To a man, they seem like nice people, but then again so did Eichmann. The fact of the matter, however, is that they are standing outside (and sometimes inside) our dining facilities with loaded weapons. I've never asked if they have rounds chambered, but the magazines are in their M-16s, which means they could be firing three-round bursts withing seconds if the situation called for it.

While I don't live in fear of them staging an armed takeover of the salad bar, I do wonder what kind of status they might be afforded if their employer, EOD Technology, were called upon to provide homeland security. Doubtless there would be cries of protestation from all corners of the political spectrum shoudl they ever arrive stateside (the Dems would cry "civil liberties" while the GOP would play the xenophobia card, I suspect) but I'm not at all convinced that our Unitary Executive would pay them any heed. The legal aspect of this is something I am utterly unqualified to expound upon, so I won't.

We need to understand this very clearly: the United States is arming private armies of foreign nationals to provide security for its own military on installations in Iraq. This isn't a "coalition of the willing" here, because they aren't operating under their nation's flag. They are employees of American companies, beholden primarily to those companies, and they're paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. And it's not like they're only guarding the mess halls. Foreign security contractors go outside the wire just like Americans.

This would be distressing even if the ones I referred to weren't from a country that is one of the biggest offenders in the horrific production of child soldiers in the world. Were some of the guys guarding me while I eat abducted at a tender age by the Lord's Resistance Army? Somehow, I doubt their employer keeps statistics on these things.

But the point is not that they are foreign, but that they are there at all, and largely unaccountable for their actions.

Labels: Iraq, liberty, mercenaries, military

Here's Jacob Sullum on the Bush Administration's politicization of information classification:

Whenever Bush administration officials have claimed that releasing information would harm national security, I always assumed they meant that the information would be useful to our enemies—that it would help terrorists plan attacks or avoid detection....

Evidently, that is not necessarily the argument. A recent interview with Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, suggests that the administration also feels duty-bound to withhold information when it might be useful to critics who oppose President Bush's anti-terrorism policies, since those policies are necessary to protect national security. But the very same information can—indeed, should—be released at a more opportune time, when it will help the president pursue his policies.

You see, The Decider by definition only acts to protect America. Dissention from His will only gives aid and comfort to America's enemies. Democracy and the rule of law are luxuries we can no longer afford now that the terrorists are trying to take away our liberty. Put your trust in Him. Balko hits the nail on the head:

Politicizing what information gets classified is pretty ugly. But doing so because you fervently believe that any information that might make people think less of the president is ipso facto a threat to national security is downright pathological.

Maybe now is the time to remember the Oath of Office that the President took while, apparently, crossing his fingers behind his back:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Notice what he's supposed to "preserve, protect and defend"? The Constitution. Not his office. Not his policies. Not the borders. Not even America's security. His charge is to protect the constitution. Given the range of opinion on what that actually means, there's actually a fair amount of leeway there. But there's no way in hell that keeping information about his Administration's activities from the American people when it might make him look bad and then releasing it when it might make him look good, all the while claiming that the relevant laws don't apply to him anyway, passes the test. How this isn't grounds for impeachment I have no idea.

Labels: Bush, liberty

Another whistleblower-getting-stomped-by-big-government-thugs story, this one from a while back. Actually, it turns out that the Sibel Edmonds story has been out for a while, so this isn't exactly a breaking story. But it's new to me and this is exactly the kind of story that needs to get out, so I'm blogging it.

Some of it is almost laughably absurd, for instance the part where "even information about her birthday and the schools she had attended became classified, a so-called matter of national security too dangerous to disclose."

But this part should send chills down your spine:

"My attorney stood up and argued the case about the state secret's privilege. Then the court asked [us] to step out of the court...while the government argued its side. Can they do this? This is the United States of America. The guards escorted us out and they locked the doors. We don't know what [the FBI attorneys] told the judges. My attorneys could never know what they argued. As far as we know, they could have made the most outrageous lies. There was no one there to challenge them. We assume that they did because a few weeks later the court upheld the lower court's ruling."

Just another day in the War on the Enemies of Freedom.

She's got a website, by the way, which you ought to check out. See also the Let Sibel Edmonds Speak blog for further information, including the recent airing of information regarding her case that was previously classified.

Meanwhile, Pardon My Paradox looked up Bunnatine Greenhouse, one of the whistleblowers mentioned in the article linked to below, and her story appears to check out. He also found that Donald Vance received this year's Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize (awarded annually to a whistleblower "for bringing a specific issue of social importance to the public’s attention").

Labels: GWOT, liberty

In Bush's brave new world, whistleblowers are repaid with jail time and interrogated at Camp Cropper:

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers - all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

''It was a Wal-Mart for guns,'' he says. ''It was all illegal and everyone knew it.''

So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn't know whom to trust in Iraq.

For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Also held was colleague Nathan Ertel, who helped Vance gather evidence documenting the sales, according to a federal lawsuit both have filed in Chicago, alleging they were illegally imprisoned and subjected to physical and mental interrogation tactics ''reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants.''

This is what happens when the supposed need for "security" is allowed to trump all rights, even for American citizens. This is what happens when you're "either with us or with the terrorists." Even when you are demonstrably not with the terrorists. Because the definitions of "patriot," "traitor" and "enemy combatant" are entirely subject to the arbitrary will of the king.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, Iraq, liberty

A fascinating interview with Josh Rushing, the former Marine Public Affairs Officer who was told to stop speaking to the press because he had committed the unpardonable sin of defending Al Jazeera. He now works for Al Jazeera International, where he has seen, over and over again, the mind-numbing absurdity of America's new distrust of the press. The interview is worth reading in its entirety, but this section in particular was astonishing for its sheer absurdity:

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that first story you went out on. Talk about going to North Dakota and what happened.

JOSH RUSHING: Yeah, you know, it seemed like a simple story. We were going to do a story about Small Town America, and there's actually a part -- and, you know, the country is obsessed with immigration, how many people are coming over the border. Well, there's part of North Dakota, this kind of western, northwestern North Dakota, where the towns are actually emptying out. All the kids are graduating, going away and not coming back, to the point there's actually small towns that will give you money to put your children in the school system there and land. They'll give you free land to build your house on, just trying to attract somebody to keep these communities alive. So I wanted to see what's the value in these communities. So it's a real nice, charming story, extolling the values of Small Town America.

Well, I go up, and it was kind of interesting, because a reporter came out on my first day there, a reporter from the local newspaper, and she said she was surprised at how I was dressed. And I thought, well, maybe I'm kind of casual to be on TV. I was in blue jeans. And she said, "No, I thought you'd be in robes and a head scarf." You've got to be kidding. Why would I be in robes and a head scarf? "Well, you're Al Jazeera, you know. And that's what we were looking for." So it was --

AMY GOODMAN: So she came out to do a story on you --

JOSH RUSHING: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: -- doing a story in her town.

JOSH RUSHING: Absolutely, right. And so, you know, I gave her a nice interview. She kind of got it. And a couple days later she called me, really terrified and upset. And she said a federal agent had been to her office, had asked her to step outside. She said, "Can I bring my reporter's notebook?" And he said, "No. I'll be the one asking questions," took her out and started asking her questions like, you know, "Who did you talk to? Did he seem like a citizen? Did he seem like an American? Did he have a camera? He didn't take pictures, did he?" "Of course, he took pictures. They're doing a story, you know? A news story."

And he said there were possible international implications to me being that close to the unsecured border. Let alone, I came from Washington, D.C., where my office is three blocks from the White House. Now I'm a danger in northwestern North Dakota. So it turns out he was from the Border Protection, Customs & Border Protection. He went around and did that to everyone I interviewed so that I couldn't go back and get another interview. We were going to go back and do the high school graduation, and we were unwelcome at that point, because people were worried. They were worried -- are there international implications they don't know about? Had they said something that would put the country at risk to me, or even worse, maybe put themselves at risk from their own country? At the time, it was the NSA wiretapping story that was in the news. And even this reporter worried about calling her mom, because was she now on the wiretap database, and would that put her mom on the list, as well? So I was going through this kind of weird time, where I'm being followed by federal agents. I'm just trying to do a story about the value of Small Town America.

It's hard to make up satire like this. The point Rushing has been making ever since he saw the way Arab news media were shunned by military commanders in Iraq is that if we aren't getting our message out to the Arab world, the mission of "building democratic institutions" over there, er, here, is utterly lost. Al Jazeera, contrary to what the right has asserted and the American "liberal media" has dutifully repeated, is actually one of the best signs that open societies might actually be on their way in that/this part of the world. Any news organization willing to rake enough muck to get themselves kicked out of a monarchy for offending the regime is good with me. As noted in this Washington Post op-ed,

Most people in this country have never watched al-Jazeera. But in so many minds, it has become synonymous with al-Qaeda. I'd guess that the only thing most people know about it is that it is always the first network to receive bin Laden's videotapes. What they don't know is that al-Jazeera started nearly 10 years ago as the first independent voice in the Middle East. With the courage to tell it like it is, it offended authoritarian regimes from Saudi Arabia to Jordan. Its reporters -- and at times the network itself -- have been routinely kicked out of countries for reporting the real news instead of acting like the sleeping pill known as state-run television news.

Al-Jazeera has even been labeled "Zionist" by the Arab street and its regimes. It is the only Arabic broadcaster to put Israeli officials on television and to report the Israeli side of stories. Israeli leaders such as Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres have been invited to appear on the network, although they ultimately did not. But Israel routinely sends Arabic-speaking officials to participate on various programs.

What many Americans also don't know is that, before Sept. 11, 2001, al-Jazeera was lauded and applauded by the Bush administration for this fearless attitude toward the dictatorships of the Middle East. High-ranking administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, made frequent appearances on the network.

My, how times have changed. But it's not surprising, really, when you consider that the U.S. is steadily declining on the worldwide press freedom scale. I can only hope that one of these days someone in our country's leadership will, perhaps out of benign curiosity, pick up the constitution and notice that it's actually pretty explicit about how important the press is in a free society.

Labels: GWOT, liberty, politics

Oops. It looks like the military has denied access to myspace and youtube. Can blogger be far behind? It looks like I'll have to post more surreptitiously.

On the other hand, this only makes my commitment to telling it like it is even more pressing. It seems to me that the only proper response to government encroachments on freedom of speech is to speak more freely. I hope I can do that.

Hat tip: Sully.

Labels: Iraq, liberty, military

This one's a few days old, but you shouldn't miss Belle Waring at Crooked Timber having a blast with a few responses to "various right-wing Morrisette-ironic talking points." I second Unqualified Offerings' endorsement of this rule of thumb:

if Solzhenitsyn recounts some practice as one employed in coercive interrogations at Lubyanka, it’s torture. So, false execution: definitely torture. Also torture: long-time standing; exposure to extremes of heat and cold; forcing prisoners to kneel or stand in painful positions; putting prisoners in cells so small they cannot stand or lie down; keeping them awake for days at a time. These practices were the meat and drink of the NKVD, who preferred them to fingernail extraction for the same reason certain American torture advocates do: they can be made to seem as if they are not torture, even though they are, in fact, actually torture.

And then there's this, which I am also only too happy to endorse:

“Liberals don’t condemn terrorist atrocities in Iraq, such as the latest chlorine bomb attacks, because they think Arabs are sub-human scum from whom nothing better can be expected.” Um, who thinks Arabs are scum now? Moving on, I have a strong sense that my condemning such attacks is pointless (still, obviously, I read about such attacks with surprise and horror and regard them as evil). Give me a lever long enough and I will…er, scratch my ass with it in a spasm of useless, self-righteous moral preening! By contrast, since I am a citizen of a democratic state, my efforts to change US policy by criticizing, say, Yoo’s depraved torture justifications may actually have some effect, however small. Additionally, it’s true that qua terrorists (rather than qua Arabs), I don’t expect much better from Sunni ultras. On the other hand, I am a US patriot. This means I have a lot invested in our city on the hill image and don’t want to see my nation’s honor dragged through the mud by a bunch of incompetent authoritarian dillholes.

You see, it's not that the left is more outraged by the awfulness of America than by the awfulness of more demonstrably awful countries, it's that the left is more outraged by the awfulness of America when America claims a certain moral high ground and then acts awfully. It pisses us off when we look at our own society and say, "gee, that doesn't look like a very nice place, does it"?

Labels: conservatism, GWOT, liberty, terrorism, torture

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
--Sinclair Lewis

Who can deny that the above quote sounds mysteriously prophetic in regards to the Bush Adminostration?

David Brooks has written a column that should be a wakeup call to everyone--liberal and conservative alike--who cares about the future of this country. I don't pay for the New York Times, so I'll rely on Glenn Greenwald's and Andrew Sullivan's fiskings to get to what may very well be the heart of Brooks' piece:

Normal, nonideological people are less concerned about the threat to their freedom from an overweening state than from the threats posed by these amorphous yet pervasive phenomena. The "liberty vs. power" paradigm is less germane. It's been replaced in the public consciousness with a "security leads to freedom" paradigm...

The "security leads to freedom" paradigm doesn't end debate between left and right, it just engages on different ground. It is oriented less toward negative liberty (How can I get the government off my back?) and more toward positive liberty (Can I choose how to lead my life?).

This is the voice of the new "conservatism" (also known as "neoconservatism"), the one that constantly trumpets the threat from without in order to consolidate power in what I can only describe as the threat from within. This is the voice of "conservatism" that advocates executive privilege, the Patriot Act, McCarthyite witch-hunts against enemies of the administration (the Attorney-firing scandal is a perfect example of this), and the destruction of habeas corpus rights that have for more than two centuries served as the bedrock of our republic. Goldwater and Reagan are rolling in their graves.

Don't believe me? Here's Ronald Reagan, stumping for Goldwater in 1964:

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

Whe Reagan spoke those words, he was referring to the welfare state, which sought to re-organize and re-define American society in the model bequeathed to America by people who positioned themselves as the "elite" who knew better how to preserve American society than those pesky founders. In that day and age, the threat to liberty came from the left. Today it comes from the right. But it's not the right that I once knew. Which is why I am one of Rob Knop's "RUB"s--Republicans Until Bush.

Labels: conservatism, liberty, politics