Biometric Big Brother

by Fuzzyone

Documents recently released as part of  Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Center for Constitutional Rights  show that the the FBI is engaged in a massive effort to collect biometric data on essentially everyone.  This is part of The FBI's "Next Generation Identification" Program (NGI):

NGI is a massive database program that collects and stores personal identifying information such as fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans, scars, marks, tattoos, facial characteristics, and voice recognition. Data can be collected not only from arrested individuals, but also from latent prints (fingerprints left behind at a crime scene or anywhere else) or through handheld “FBI Mobile” biometric scanning devices. Worse than the FBI accessing all your personal data, when NGI becomes fully operational in 2014, other federal agencies will gain access to the bio-data without your knowledge or consent.

There is more of that here and its pretty scary.  There is really no limit to the amount of data that can be collected or how it can be shared.

What I find really disturbing is that there has been, as far as I could tell, no media attention to this information.  Perhaps in the post-Patriot-Act world this sort of thing is just no longer news. (I learned of it via the invaluable Talk Left.)  It should be news and we should all be concerned by the extent to which this kind of date is being collected with no regard for privacy or for the potential consequences.

Getting Away With Torture: The Ill Treatment Of Detainees

By Stephen Rohde, cross-posted from Truthout.

Should the U.S. government officials most responsible for setting interrogation and detention policies following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks be investigated, and if warranted prosecuted, under United States and international law?

In a new comprehensive 107-page report entitled "Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees," Human Rights Watch (HRW) concludes that "there is sufficient basis for the U.S. government to order a broad criminal investigation into alleged crimes committed in connection with the torture and ill-treatment of detainees, the CIA secret detention program, and the rendition of detainees to torture" focusing on alleged criminal conduct by "former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet."

HRW also recommends investigating former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales (counsel to the president and later attorney general), Jay Bybee (head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)), John Rizzo (acting CIA general counsel), David Addington (counsel to the vice president), William J. Haynes II (Department of Defense general counsel), and John Yoo (deputy assistant attorney general in the OLC).

HRW found that "there is enough strong evidence from the information made public over the past five years to not only suggest these officials authorized and oversaw widespread and serious violations of US and international law, but that they failed to act to stop mistreatment, or punish those responsible after they became aware of serious abuses."

Moreover, although Bush administration officials have claimed that detention and interrogation operations were only authorized after extensive discussion and legal review by Department of Justice attorneys, HRW concludes that "substantial evidence that civilian leaders requested that politically appointed government lawyers create legal justifications to support abusive interrogation techniques, in the face of opposition from career legal officers."

Although HRW expressed no opinion about the ultimate guilt or innocence of any officials under U.S. law, the report provides a narrative summarizing Bush administration policies and practices on detention and interrogation, and details the case for individual criminal responsibility of several key administration officials.

The report documents how the Bush administration authorized coercive interrogation practices by the CIA and the military that amounted to torture, and instituted an illegal secret CIA detention program in which detainees were held in undisclosed locations without notifying their families, allowing access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, or providing for oversight of their treatment. Detainees were also unlawfully transferred to countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, where they were likely to be tortured.

We now know that as a direct result of Bush administration decisions, detainees in U.S. custody were beaten, thrown into walls, forced into small boxes, and waterboarded, an ancient method of torture where victims are subjected to mock executions in which they endured the sensation of drowning. Two alleged senior al-Qaida prisoners, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were waterboarded 183 and 83 times respectively.

The report documents how detainees in U.S.-run facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay endured prolonged mistreatment, sometimes for weeks and even months, including "painful 'stress' positions; prolonged nudity; sleep, food, and water deprivation; exposure to extreme cold or heat; and total darkness with loud music blaring for weeks at a time." In Iraq, the abuses included "beatings, near suffocation, sexual abuse, and mock executions;" at Guantanamo Bay, "detainees were forced to sit in their own excrement, and some were sexually humiliated by female interrogators." In Afghanistan, "prisoners were chained to walls and shackled in a manner that made it impossible to lie down or sleep, with restraints that caused their hands and wrists to swell up or bruise."

The report makes clear that Bush administration officials "developed and expanded their initial decisions and authorizations on detainee operations even in the face of internal and external dissent, including warnings that many of their actions violated international and domestic law." And "when illegal interrogation techniques on detainees spread broadly beyond what had been explicitly authorized, these officials turned a blind eye, making no effort to stop the practices."

HRW also points out that the CIA's use of torture, enforced disappearance, and secret prisons was counterproductive and "tainted the U.S. government's reputation and standing in combating terrorism, negatively affected foreign intelligence cooperation, and sparked anger and resentment among Muslim communities, whose assistance is crucial to uncovering and preventing future global terrorist threats."

To date, President Barack Obama has failed to heed the call to initiate a full and fair investigation of these allegations. As a presidential candidate, Obama spoke of the need for a "thorough investigation" of detainee mistreatment. After his election, he said there should be prosecutions if "somebody has blatantly broken the law," but later backed off and said "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."

HRW points out that "without real accountability for these crimes, those who commit abuses in the name of counterterrorism will point to the U.S. mistreatment of detainees to deflect criticism of their own conduct" and that "when a government as dominant and influential as that of the United States openly defies laws prohibiting torture, a bedrock principle of human rights, it virtually invites others to do the same. The U.S. government's much-needed credibility as a proponent of human rights was damaged by the torture revelations and continues to be damaged by the complete impunity for the policymakers implicated in criminal offenses."

The report responds to the claim that any effort to address past abuses would be politically divisive, and might hinder the Obama administration's ability to achieve pressing policy objectives. "Any failure to carry out an investigation into torture will be understood globally as purposeful toleration of illegal activity, and as a way to leave the door open to future abuses. The U.S. cannot convincingly claim to have rejected these egregious human rights violations until they are treated as crimes rather than as 'policy options.'"

But the benefits of conducting a credible and impartial criminal investigation are numerous. The U.S. government "would send the clearest possible signal that it is committed to repudiating the use of torture," which "would boost U.S. moral authority on human rights in counterterrorism in a more concrete and persuasive way than any initiative to date; set a compelling example for governments that the U.S. has criticized for committing human rights abuses and for the populations that suffer from such abuses; and might reveal legal and institutional failings that led to the use of torture, pointing to ways to improve the government's effectiveness in fighting terrorism."

Today, substantial evidence has been placed on the public record regarding illegal detention policies and the torture and ill-treatment of detainees in US custody. FOIA lawsuits brought by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights have yielded over 100,000 pages of government documents. Extensive information was also uncovered in an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Department of Justice inspector general issued a report about FBI involvement in detention abuse in 2008, and the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility issued a report on the role of department lawyers in crafting legal memoranda which justified abusive interrogations.  A report by the International Committee of the Red Cross also describes the treatment of “high-value” detainees in CIA custody. In addition, former detainees and whistleblowers have come forward to tell their stories, and many of the principals have spoken about their roles.

Based on compelling evidence, HRW believes criminal investigations of the following individuals are warranted:

President George W. Bush "authorized the CIA renditions program, which he knew or should have known would result in torture," "has publicly admitted that he approved CIA use of torture, specifically the waterboarding of two detainees," and "never exerted his authority to stop the ill-treatment or punish those responsible."

Vice President Dick Cheney "chaired or attended numerous meetings at which specific CIA operations were discussed, beginning with the waterboarding of detainee Abu Zubaydah in 2002," "was a member of the National Security Council (NSC) 'Principals Committee,' which approved and later reauthorized the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture and ill-treatment in the CIA interrogation program" and "has publicly admitted that he was aware of the use of waterboarding."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "approved illegal interrogation methods that facilitated the use of torture and ill-treatment by US military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq," "closely followed the interrogation of Guantanamo detainee Mohamed al-Qahtani who was subjected to a six-week regime of coercive interrogation that cumulatively amounted to torture," "was a member of the NSC Principals Committee, which approved the use of torture for CIA detainees," and "never exerted his authority to stop the torture and ill-treatment of detainees even after he became aware of evidence of abuse over a three-year period beginning in early 2002."

CIA Director George Tenet "authorized and oversaw the CIA’s use of waterboarding, near suffocation, stress positions, light and noise bombardment, sleep deprivation, and other forms of torture and ill-treatment," "was a member of the NSC Principals Committee," and under his direction, "the CIA also 'disappeared' detainees by holding them in long-term incommunicado detention in secret locations, and rendered detainees to countries in which they were likely to be tortured and were tortured."

In addition, HRW concludes there should be criminal investigations of the government lawyers who wrote legal memoranda seeking to justify torture, which were the basis for authorizing the CIA secret detention program, including Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee, John Rizzo, David Addington, William J. Haynes II, and John Yoo.

Will President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder take the Human Rights Watch report seriously?  Will they fulfill U.S. obligations under the Convention Against Torture to investigate these documented allegations of torture? Or will they look the other way, becoming accomplices after-the-fact and risking the condemnation of history.

 Stephen Rohde, a constitutional lawyer and Chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, is author of  American Words of Freedom and Freedom of Assembly.

Just Put Your Lips Together And . . . Get Indicted

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.  We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.  -- President Barack Obama

Jane Mayer, in a devastating article in The New Yorker, recently highlighted the Obama Administration's unprecedented attack on whistleblowers.  She described the case against Thomas Drake, a computer specialist who leaked information to a reporter, motivated by the patriotic desire to expose government waste in the National Security Agency.  Although Drake is not a spy, he was indicted for violating the Espionage Act and was looking at a possible  35-year sentence.

As Mayer put it, "the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness."  Drake's case is one of five in which the government is using "the Espionage Act to press criminal charges" in alleged instances of national-security leaks, "more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined."  As reported in the Times, these five include one case each against defendants from the National Security Agency , the C.I.A, the F.B.I., the military and the State Department.

The case against Drake recently fell apart, and last week he pleaded guilty to a minor charge and is unlikely to serve any time.  But the other four cases remain, including the case of Steven Kim, an arms expert who is charged, as another recent Times article reports, "not by aiding some foreign adversary, but by revealing classified information to a Fox News reporter."

Last month, the Justice Department subpoenaed New York Times reporter James Risen, to force his disclosure of a source who gave him information.  Jane Mayer explains that the case "involves a book that Risen wrote, “State of War,” in which he described a failed effort by the C.I.A. to sabotage Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. Jeffrey Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer, is facing trial on ten felony charges relating to the leak of the information."

Shamai Leibowitz is a former linguist for the FBI who was sentenced for 20 months in prison for leaking classified documents to a blogger.  After being sentenced, Leibowitz said that "this was a one-time mistake that happened to me when I worked at the FBI and saw things that I considered a violation of the law.”   His 20 month sentence, according to Politico, was the largest sentence ever handed out to a government employee accused of passing national security secrets to a member of the media.
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And then, of course, there is Brandon Manning, who has been detained for over a year for allegedly leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.  In his case, substantial allegations of inhumane treatment have been raised not only by the human rights community and progressive-minded journalists, but by P.J. Crowley, the State Department's chief spokesperson, who was then forced to resign.

It is a deeply disturbing irony that an Administration that came into power vowing to maintain transparency has, as a conservative political scientist quoted in Mayer's New Yorker article stated, "presided over the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history—even more so than Nixon.”   What is going on here is what Yale law professor Jack Balkin contends is part of the dramatic shift since 9/11 towards the "normalization and legitimization of a national-surveilance state."  And so former Bush officials who authorized torture and illegal wiretapping go home to write their memoirs while government officials who attempt to expose waste and wrongdoing are prosecuted as spies and traitors.

Doubling Down On The War On Terror

Guantanamo remains open.  Military tribunals are used to try suspected terrorists.  Controversial provisions of the Patriot Act are renewed.  Government officials who leak information to the press are treated as spies and prosecuted with unprecedented aggression. The FBI eases restrictions on their agents' ability to use intrusive surveillance measures on individuals.  The FBI raids  peace activists.  This is not Bush's America.  This is Obama's America.

Originally posted at TomDispatch, Karen J. Greenberg, author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First One Hundred Days, explains that these are not aberrations and suggests five steps that could help to put the excesses of the never-ending War on Terror behind us.

Business As Usual On Steroids

By Karen J. Greenberg, originally posted on TomDispatch, June 19, 2011.

In the seven weeks since the killing of Osama bin Laden, pundits and experts of many stripes have concluded that his death represents a marker of genuine significance in the story of America’s encounter with terrorism.  Peter Bergen, a bin Laden expert, was typically blunt the day after the death when he wrote, "Killing bin Laden is the end of the war on terror. We can just sort of announce that right now."

Yet you wouldn’t know it in Washington where, if anything, the Obama administration and Congress have interpreted the killing of al-Qaeda’s leader as a virtual license to double down on every “front” in the war on terror.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was no less blunt than Bergen, but with quite a different endpoint in mind.  “Even as we mark this milestone,” she said on the day Bergen’s comments were published, “we should not forget that the battle to stop al-Qaeda and its syndicate of terror will not end with the death of bin Laden.  Indeed, we must take this opportunity to renew our resolve and redouble our efforts.”


National Security Adviser John Brennan concurred. “This is a strategic blow to al-Qaeda,” he commented in a White House press briefing. “It is a necessary but not necessarily sufficient blow to lead to its demise.  But we are determined to destroy it."  Similarly, at his confirmation hearings to become Secretary of Defense, CIA Director Leon Panetta called for Washington to expand its shadow wars.  "We’ve got to keep the pressure up,” he told the senators.

As if to underscore the policy implications of this commitment to “redoubling our efforts,” drone aircraft were dispatched on escalating post-bin-Laden assassination runs from Yemen (including a May 6th failed attempt on American al-Qaeda follower Anwar al-Awlaki) to Pakistan.  There, on May 23rd, a drone failed to take out Taliban leader Mullah Omar, while, on June 2nd, an attempt to kill Ilyas Kashmiri, a militant associated with the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, India, may (or may not) have failed.  And those were only the most publicized of escalating drone attacks, while reports of a major “intensification” of the drone campaign in Yemen are pouring in.

In the meantime, President Obama used the bin Laden moment to push through and sign into law a four-year renewal of the Patriot Act, despite bipartisan resistance in Congress and the reservations of civil liberties groups. They had stalled its passage earlier in the year, hoping to curtail some of its particularly onerous sections, including the “lone wolf” provision that allows surveillance of non-US citizens in America, even if they have no ties to foreign powers, and the notorious Section 215, which grants the FBI authority to obtain library and business records in the name of national security.

One thing could not be doubted.  The administration was visibly using the bin Laden moment to renew George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror (even if without that moniker).  And let’s not forget about the leaders of Congress, who promptly accelerated their efforts to ensure that the apparatus for the war that 9/11 started would never die. Congressman Howard McKeon (R-CA), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was typical.  On May 9th, he introduced legislation meant to embed in law the principle of indefinite detention without trial for suspected terrorists until “the end of hostilities.”  What this would mean, in reality, is the perpetuation ad infinitum of that Bush-era creation, our prison complex at Guantanamo (not to speak of our second Guantanamo at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan).

In other words, Washington now seems to be engaged in a wholesale post-bin Laden ratification of business as usual, but this time on steroids.

Perhaps after all these years the nation’s leadership was simply unprepared for bin Laden’s death and hasn’t been able to imagine switching directions readily, or perhaps the war on terror has simply become a way of life. Certainly, the Obama administration has a record of translating potentially propitious moments for change into strategic paralysis.

Remember, for instance, the president’s day-one-in-the-Oval-Office pledge to close Guantanamo within a year?  Six months later, the administration had doubled down on the idea of the indefinite detention of terror suspects and so effectively made Obama’s promise meaningless.  It’s a pattern that’s repeated itself when it comes to the Afghan War, the trial in New York City of 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and other crucial matters.

But think about it for a moment: Should the postmortem to bin Laden be just a continuation of the same-old-same-old?  Shouldn’t there be a national pause for reflection as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches?  Wouldn’t it make sense to stop and rethink policy in the light of his death and of a visibly tumultuous new moment in the Greater Middle East with its various uprisings and brewing civil wars?

Why has an administration that prides itself on thinking before doing pushed on without a moment’s reflection? Why shouldn’t the president establish a commission filled with at least a few new faces (and so a few new thoughts) to assess what a war on terror might even mean today?  And why not insist that, until the findings of such a commission come in, there will be no new expenditures, legislation, or policy decisions to continue -- let alone further expand -- that war, its detention policies, or for that matter the Patriot Act?

Were the President to establish such a commission, here are five symbolic steps it might recommend -- hardly the only ones, but a start -- that could help set the U.S. on another path and put the war on terror behind us:

1. Concede that there is no more tangible endpoint for the war on terror than the death of bin Laden: Rather than trying to banish the term “war on terror” (as the Obama administration did in 2009), let’s face it squarely.  Practically speaking, at the moment as for the past near-decade, it is little but a catch-all phrase for “endless war.”

Our commission would have to face a basic question: If we are not to commit to war without end, what could the “cessation of hostilities” possibly mean when it comes to American terror policy?  Any attempt at a definition would have to grapple with the real meaning of bin Laden’s death.  After all, it may be the only tangible victory we’ll ever have. What a moment, then, to announce that the war on terror has now passed out of its “war” phase and entered a phase of risk management.

At present, Congress is considering an expansion of the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) that it passed on September 14, 2001, and that allowed “the use of force against those nations, organizations, or persons [the President] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the attacks of 9/11.  The current version builds upon the previous open-ended war model and actually expands the number of possible targets for the use of force to those who “have engaged in hostilities or have directly supported hostilities in aid of a nation, organization or person” that is engaged in hostilities against the U.S. or its coalition partners.

Nor does it have an end date.  How long this overly broad, overly vague policy would remain in effect remains unknown.  It would be far better if current and pending revisions of the AUMF were more honest in acknowledging that the counterterrorism policy it promotes is slated to last indefinitely, much like the “wars” on drugs and organized crime.  This would, at least, put in front of lawmakers the appropriate question: Are you willing to authorize military force as your perpetual state of risk management against an ever-expanding list of enemies? Perhaps, in the context of an endless state of war (and the expenses that would go with it), Congress might prove more circumspect about granting such broad powers to the president.

2. Release John Walker Lindh: This would be a symbolic act of compassion, a way to turn our attention back to the first moments of the Bush administration’s disastrous Global War on Terror, and perhaps help along the process of heading Washington in new directions.  Lindh, you may remember, was the young man captured and turned over to U.S. forces by Afghan allies in the early weeks of the invasion of Afghanistan.
An American who had spent time with the Taliban and was ready to fight for them (but not against the United States), he was the first person against whom the Bush administration, in one of their favored phrases, “took off the gloves.”  He was mistreated and abused while wounded.  Later, faced with the prospect of never emerging from jail, he provided information to the authorities in exchange for a 20-year sentence in a plea deal.

Even George W. Bush described him as a “poor boy” who had been “misled,” an upper-middle-class American kid whose teenage identity issues sent him deep into the fundamentalist part of the Muslim world, though with no indication on his part of any interest in jihad, nor the slightest idea that the United States would invade Afghanistan and he would find himself on the other side of the lines from his own countrymen.

Lindh’s mistreatment in Afghanistan and subsequent sentencing here were essentially acts of symbolic revenge for the tragic death of CIA agent Mike Spann, the first official American casualty in what was already being called the Global War on Terror.  His sentence was also meant as a warning to others who might consider his path.

As it happened, the judge in charge of the case acknowledged that there was absolutely no evidence Lindh had been involved in Spann’s murder.  Bewilderingly enough, he nonetheless allowed the prosecutor to tie Lindh inexorably to Spann's murder through the emotional testimony of Spann's father at sentencing.
The U.S. government was sending a message.  If this country would punish one of its own in such a fashion without evidence of a crime or even of theoretical allegiance to the idea of jihad against the West, what wouldn’t it do to its foreign enemies?

In prison, Lindh has since committed himself to the quiet life of a scholar of Islam. Many who have followed this case think that, at age 30, he should be returned to his family.

Lindh’s release would be a signal that the United States was ready to return to an era of calm justice and that the war on terror, with all its excesses, was truly coming to an end.

3. Create a rehabilitation program for releasing Guantanamo detainees currently assigned to indefinite detention: In the same spirit, it’s time to signal that, along with the war on terror, the paroxysm of fears that led us to detain individuals who had not committed crimes, but were otherwise deemed harmful, has come to an end.  The Obama administration’s most recent directive on Guantanamo follows its long-hinted-at intention to hold approximately four-dozen Guantanamo detainees in indefinite detention for a variety of reasons.  Bottom line: although there is insufficient evidence to convict them, administration officials have determined that each of them could pose a danger to this country, if released.

Under U.S. law, detention without trial poses constitutional problems, which is why Guantanamo detainees were granted habeas corpus rights by the Supreme Court.  Similarly, under the laws of war, the detention of prisoners is only justified while hostilities are ongoing.  If there really is no "war" on terror, it is hard to justify holding detainees indefinitely without a fair adjudication of their rights in a court of law.

Why not, then, consider creating an American version of the de-radicalization or rehabilitation programs that flourish elsewhere in the world -- notably, for example in Indonesia -- as a prelude to release for those where the evidence for a trial is absent?  A rehabilitation program might steer individuals towards non-violent behavior, whatever their ideological leanings; it might re-educate them on the subject of Islam; it might introduce notions of rights and liberties. Religious leaders, psychologists, and counterterrorism officials could fashion such a program jointly as they do elsewhere in the world.  President Obama surprisingly inserted the word “rehabilitation” in his March 2011 directive on the future of Guantánamo (“Executive Order -- Periodic Review of Individuals Detained at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station Pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force”).  Why not use this milestone moment in the war on terror to follow up in a concrete fashion?

4. Revisit the issue of prosecuting those responsible for America’s offshore torture policies in the Bush years: The Obama administration made a decision not to investigate or prosecute the creators of the torture policy that defined the Bush administration’s interrogation tactics in its war on terror. They did so, its officials claimed, in an effort to focus on the overwhelming issues the new presidency had to confront. They were visibly eager to avoid stoking a bitter partisan battle that they feared might further divide the country.
They banked instead on the idea that the lawyers and politicians responsible for that torture policy and the “black sites” and “extraordinary renditions” that went with it would quietly fade into the woodwork.  This has obviously not been the case. On the contrary, in recent months former officials and members of the Bush administration have openly re-embraced those policies. In the aftermath of bin Laden’s death, as if on cue, they immediately flooded the newspapers and air waves with unsupportable claims that torture had led Washington to the al-Qaeda leader and should be a crucial part of the American arsenal in the future.
Forget for a moment that torture has still not been shown to have extracted valuable information (not otherwise available) from terror suspects.  We know, in fact, that on a number of occasions it led investigators down the wrong path. More importantly, it was a symptom of the war-on-terror frenzy that gripped this country and led it down the wrong path.

We now have all the proof we need that pretending torture never happened, legally speaking, only helps keep us embroiled in that “war” and the emotions it evokes.  If the war on terror is ever to end, then tolerance for the support of torture has to end as well. Nothing would accomplish this better than the actual prosecution of the American crimes of that era -- or at the very least, the investigation and official condemnation of those who sidestepped the constitution and diminished the moral standing of the country at home and abroad.

5. Restore permanently to the Department of Justice responsibility for trying terrorists from around the globe: Since the fall of 2001, the Justice Department has been largely deprived of its portfolio for trying terrorists captured outside the United States.  With the exception perhaps of cases involving terror attacks on military targets, there is no reason Justice should not prosecute such cases, as in the 1990s it successfully prosecuted the conspirators who first attacked the World Trade Center, as it did in the African embassy bombings cases, and as it has recently done in Chicago in the case of Tahawwur Hussain Rana, who was convicted of providing material support to the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba. (He was acquitted of conspiracy charges in the Mumbai bombing.) Since 9/11, the ability of judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys to understand terrorism cases and try them responsibly has, if anything, increased immeasurably, while the military commissions system instituted by the Bush administration at Guantanamo and kept in place by President Obama has crashed disastrously and repeatedly on the shoals of politics, misinformation, and faulty procedure.

Whatever a commission might do when it came to bringing the war on terror officially to an end, this is the moment -- with the death of bin Laden, the Arab uprisings, and the 10th anniversary of 9/11 -- to do it and to begin to seek ways to defend America even while guiding us back to our true self: a country with respect for the law, restraint when it comes to the use of force, and rights for all.

Karen J. Greenberg is the executive director of the New York University Center on Law and Security, author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First One Hundred Days, editor of The Torture Debate in America.  Tomdispatch.com’s mission is “to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.”  Tom Engelhardt and the other progressive writers do just that.   Tomdispatch.com is a project of The Nation Institute, a 501(c)(3) public charity.  By clicking on the Tomdispatch badge on the right panel of this blog you will be directed to a link where you can make a tax deductible donation.

Renewing The Patriot Act: Who Will Protect Us From Our Government

By John W. Whitehead, originally published on the Rutherford Institute's website on May 16, 2011

[John Whitehead is the founder and president of the Rutherford Institute.  The Rutherford Institute is notorious for backing Paula Jones' lawsuit against Bill Clinton and has roots in the Christian right.  It has been criticized for the selective nature of the civil liberties cases it litigates and for its underlying agenda.  That said, Whitehead is worth listening to when he passionately defends civil rights and civil liberties.  As the Patriot Act is expected to be extended this week, Whitehead's piece below is a good example.]

It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government. --Thomas Paine

Those who founded this country knew quite well that every citizen must remain vigilant or freedom would be lost. This is the true nature of a patriot--one who sounds the clarion call when the Constitution is under attack. If, on the other hand, the people become sheep-like, it will lead to a government of wolves. This is what we are faced with today as Congress marches in lockstep with the White House to renew the USA Patriot Act.

The Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, violating at least six of the ten original amendments--the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments--and possibly the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well. The Patriot Act also redefined terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations and civil disobedience were considered potential terrorist acts, thereby rendering anyone desiring to engage in protected First Amendment expressive activities as suspects of the surveillance state.

The Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens--no doubt an earnest impulse shared by small-town police and federal agents alike. According to Washington Post reporter Robert O'Harrow, Jr., this was a fantasy that had been brewing in the law enforcement world for a long time. And 9/11 provided the government with the perfect excuse for conducting far-reaching surveillance and collecting mountains of information on even the most law-abiding citizen.

Suddenly, for the first time in American history, federal agents and police officers were authorized to conduct black bag "sneak-and-peak" searches of homes and offices and confiscate your personal property without first notifying you of their intent or their presence. The law also granted the FBI the right to come to your place of employment, demand your personal records and question your supervisors and fellow employees, all without notifying you; allowed the government access to your medical records, school records and practically every personal record about you; and allowed the government to secretly demand to see records of books or magazines you've checked out in any public library and Internet sites you've visited (at least 545 libraries received such demands in the first year following passage of the Patriot Act).


In the name of fighting terrorism, government officials were permitted to monitor religious and political institutions with no suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they told anyone that the government had subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation; monitor conversations between attorneys and clients; search and seize Americans' papers and effects without showing probable cause; and jail Americans indefinitely without a trial, among other things. The federal government also made liberal use of its new powers, especially through the use (and abuse) of the nefarious national security letters, which allow the FBI to demand personal customer records from Internet Service Providers, financial institutions and credit companies at the mere say-so of the government agent in charge of a local FBI office and without prior court approval.

To their credit, some Americans began to protest the fact that the Patriot Act had given government agents carte blanche to investigate average Americans for what we used to call the right to free speech. Take the case of Derek Kjar who found himself under investigation after he mentioned that he did not intend to harm President Bush with anything more than a vote for John Kerry in the November 2004 presidential election. Agents from the Secret Service paid Kjar a visit, telling him that his neighbors had alerted them to a potentially threatening bumper sticker on his car. The sticker, found on a number of websites at the time, featured a black-and-white likeness of Bush with a crown tilted slightly on his head. Under the image are the words, "KING GEORGE--OFF WITH HIS HEAD" --a reference to the infamous King George of colonial days. Although the message is protected political speech, Kjar didn't know that. Kjar said the two agents visited him at his job at a dry cleaning service, where they asked him if he had any ties to terrorist groups or enjoyed reading historical accounts of assassinations. They also asked Kjar about his friends and family and wanted to know how he paid his monthly rent. The agents finally left after Kjar gave them the bumper sticker. Kjar said he feared the agents were going to "take me away."

Kjar is far from the only American to be subjected to a cross-examination over his personal views about the government. Even so, despite the fact that more than 400 local, county and state resolutions were passed in opposition to the Patriot Act, that spirit of resistance proved to be fleeting. Once again, Americans lapsed into a somnambulant trance and turned a blind eye as Congress, at the urging of the Bush Administration, renewed several of the Patriot Act's more controversial provisions, which were set to expire, or sunset, on December 31, 2005. The Patriot Reauthorization Act (PAREA) took government intrusion into the lives of average Americans to a whole new level. For example, one "administrative authority" provision within PAREA, which allows the FBI to write and approve its own search orders, represents a direct assault on the Fourth Amendment's prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure. By approving what critics termed "carte blanche for a fishing expedition," Congress empowered the FBI to conduct warrantless searches on people without having to show any evidence that they may be involved in criminal activities. This provision also lifted one of the last restrictions on special warrants for the FBI--namely, that the information be related to international terrorism or foreign intelligence.

Despite campaign promises to the contrary, Barack Obama has proven to be little better than George Bush in terms of civil liberties. For example, on February 27, 2010, just a little over a year after taking office, Obama quietly signed into law three controversial provisions of the Patriot Act that were set to expire. The "roving wiretaps" provision allows the FBI to wiretap phones in multiple homes without having to provide the target's name or even phone number--merely the possibility that a suspect "might" use the phone is enough to justify the wiretap. The "lone wolf" provision allows intelligence gathering of people not suspected of being part of a foreign government or known terrorist organization. And Section 215 allows court-approved seizure of records and property in antiterrorism operations.

Then, one year later, in February 2011, Congress approved a 90-day extension of those very same provisions, which Obama once again signed into law. Now, rather than expiring quietly, those provisions are once again up for reauthorization on May 28, thanks to the handiwork of Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, with backing from Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the chairmen of the Judiciary and Intelligence committees, respectively. Unfortunately, not only are Sensenbrenner and his cohorts pushing to extend the first two controversial provisions (allowing "roving wiretaps" of phones used by terror suspects and allowing federal investigators to compel production of business records) for six more years, they have also proposed making permanent the "lone wolf" provision, allowing the government to monitor individuals who they believe are terrorists even though they might not have ties to a specific group.

With or without the help of the Patriot Act, the American government, never a staunch advocate of civil liberties, has been writing its own orders for some time now. Indeed, not long after 9/11, I had an FBI agent say as much to me, suggesting that my efforts to oppose the Patriot Act were pointless. And, in fact, as the McCarthy era and the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. illustrated, the government's amassing of power, especially in relation to its ability to spy on Americans, predates the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001.

Yet what the Patriot Act and its subsequent incarnations did was legitimize what had previously been covert and frowned upon as a violation of Americans' long-cherished privacy rights. Thus, what began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in the fall of 2001 has snowballed into a massive assault on our constitutional freedoms, our system of government and our fundamental philosophies and way of life, as a report from attorney Emily Berman of the Brennan Center for Justice makes clear.

Pointing to guidelines implemented by Attorney General Michael Mukasey in December 2008 that loosened restrictions on the FBI's investigative powers, Berman notes that the changes granted "the FBI license to employ intrusive techniques to investigate Americans when there is no indication that any wrongdoing has taken place. This means that FBI agents can collect and retain vast amounts of information, much of it about the innocent activities of law-abiding Americans. And it can then retain that information indefinitely and share it with other government agencies."  Berman continues:

In the absence of meaningful limitations on the FBI's authority, agents or informants may attend religious services or political gatherings to ascertain what is being preached and who is attending. They may focus their attention on particular religious or ethnic communities. They may gather and store in their databases information about where individuals pray, what they read, and who they associate with. All with no reason to suspect criminal activity or a threat to national security. And then they may keep that information in their databases, regardless of whether it indicated any wrongdoing.

We also know that without sufficient limits and oversight, well-meaning efforts to keep the homeland safe--efforts which rely heavily on the collection and analysis of significant amounts of information about Americans--can adversely impact civil liberties. Indeed, history teaches that insufficiently checked domestic investigative powers frequently have been abused and that the burdens of this abuse most often fall upon disfavored communities and those with unpopular political views. Investigations triggered by race, ethnicity, religious belief, or political ideology may seem calibrated to address the threat we face, but instead they routinely target innocent people and groups. Beyond the harm done to individuals, such investigations invade privacy, chill religious belief, radicalize communities and, ultimately, build resistance to cooperation with law enforcement.

To those who have been paying attention, this should come as no real surprise. After all, the history of governments is that they inevitably overreach. Thus, enabled by a weak-kneed Congress, the president and other agencies of the federal government have repeatedly laid claim to a host of powers, among them the ability to use the military as a police force, spy on Americans and detain individuals without granting them access to an attorney or the courts. And as the government's powers have grown, unchecked, the sheep-like American people have gradually become used to these relentless intrusions into their lives.

In fact, since 9/11, we've been spied on by surveillance cameras, eavesdropped on by government agents, had our belongings searched, our phones tapped, our mail opened, our email monitored, our opinions questioned, our purchases scrutinized (under the USA Patriot Act, banks are required to analyze your transactions for any patterns that raise suspicion and to see if you are connected to any objectionable people), and our activities watched. We've also been subjected to invasive patdowns and whole-body scans of our persons and seizures of our electronic devices in the nation's airports (there were 6,600 such seizures in airports alone between October 2008 and July 2010). We can't even purchase certain cold medicines at the pharmacy anymore without it being reported to the government and our names being placed on a watch list. And it's only going to get worse.

Most Americans have been lulled into thinking that the pressing issues are voting in the next election or repealing health care. This is largely due to the media hoopla over the Tea Party, the 2012 presidential contenders, the energy crisis, and the assassination of Osama bin Laden, and the continuous noise from television news' talking heads. But the real issue is simply this--the freedoms in the Bill of Rights are being eviscerated, and if they are not restored and soon, freedom as we have known it in America will be lost. Thus, whether it's a short-term or long-term scenario, Congress should not renew the USA Patriot Act, nor should President Obama sign it into law. If he does so, he might just be hammering the final nail in our coffin.

Unfortunately, even many of those civil libertarians who took Bush to task and vocally criticized his civil liberties abuses have been virtually silent in face of President Obama's continuation of Bush programs that undermine the Bill of Rights. For example, The Public Record, a nonprofit news organization based in California, asked prominent civil and human rights leaders "to explain their relatively passive position on the renewal of the Patriot Act. Most did not respond. One who did requested that his name not be used because he is still hoping to energize some of the silent voices."  Here's what he had to say:

Many of my colleagues have just given up on the Patriot Act, either expressly or implicitly (in terms of the mindshare, energy, and resources dedicated to the issue). They don't seem to understand or recall just how foundational this supposedly "emergency" law was in setting the stage for the infringements that came later.

Sheer exhaustion plays a role, but the fact that it's been nearly a decade means that generational change is even starting to have an impact, as have all the other irons in the fire -- so many other traumatizing events have come up to distract and rightfully demand attention (torture, even broader surveillance, illegal war, assassinations), and a corrosive new so-called realism (cynicism, actually) about the politics of terrorism and the complicity of our fear-driven media and political class, combined of course with a reluctance to undermine our first black president and whatever incremental progressive achievements he can make.

So the situation's pretty bleak out there, and will only turn around, in my view, if there is much greater bottom-up, local, and peer-to-peer, community-to-community activism.

Patriots, wake up! It's time to protect our country and our rights against a government of wolves that grows more power-hungry with every passing day.

Bored To Death In Afghanistan (And Washington)

Mating Déjà Vu with a Mobius Strip in the Graveyard of Empire

By Tom Engelhardt, originally published at TomDispatch, May 19, 2011.

One day in October 2001, a pilot for Northwest Airlines refused to let Arshad Chowdhury, a 25-year-old American Muslim (“with a dark complexion”) who had once worked as an investment banker in the World Trade Center, board his plane at San Francisco National Airport.  According to Northwest’s gate agents, Chowdhury writes in the Washington Post, “he thought my name sounded suspicious” even though “airport security and the FBI verified that I posed no threat.”  He sued.

Now, skip nearly a decade.  It’s May 6, 2011, and two New York-based African-American imams, a father and son, attempting to take an American Airlines flight from New York to Charlotte to attend a conference on "prejudice against Muslims," were prevented from flying.  The same thing happened to two imams in Memphis “dressed in traditional long shirts and [with] beard,” heading for the same conference, when a pilot for Atlantic Southeast refused to fly with them aboard, even though they had been screened three times.

So how is the war in Afghanistan going almost 10 years later?  Or do you think that’s a non sequitur?

I don’t, and let me suggest two reasons why: first, boredom; second, the missing learning curve.
At home and abroad, whether judging by airline pilots or Washington’s war policy, Americans seem remarkably incapable of doing anything other than repeating the same self-defeating acts, as if they had never happened before.  Hence Afghanistan.  Almost 10 years after the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan and proclaimed victory, like imam-paralyzed airline pilots, we find ourselves in a state that might otherwise be achieved only if you mated déjà vu with a Mobius strip.

If you aren’t already bored to death, you should be.  Because, believe me, you’ve read it all before.  Take the last month of news from America’s second Afghan War.  If nobody told you otherwise, you could easily believe that almost every breaking Afghan story in the last four weeks came from some previous year of the war.


Headlines from the Dustbin of History (Afghan Department)

Let me explain with seven headlines ripped from the news, all of which sit atop Afghan War articles that couldn’t be newer -- or older.  Each represents news of our moment that was also news in previous moments; each should leave Americans wondering about Washington’s learning curve.

* “Pentagon reports 'tangible progress' in Afghanistan”: Here, the headline tells you everything you need to know.  Things are going remarkably swimmingly, according to a recent congressionally mandated Pentagon report (which cost a mere $344,259 to produce).  How many times in recent years has the military claimed “progress” in Afghanistan, with the usual carefully placed reservations about the fragility or reversibility of the situation?  (Oh, and how many times have U.S. intelligence reports been far gloomier on the same subject?)

* “Afghan violence rises amid troop surge -- Pentagon”: The information that led to this headline came, curiously enough, from that very same upbeat Pentagon report.  As the Reuters piece to which this headline was attached put it: “A surge of U.S. troops into Afghanistan has dealt a blow to the Taliban insurgency, but total violence has risen since last fall and is likely to keep climbing, the Pentagon said on Friday in a new assessment of the war as it approaches its 10-year mark.”  This spring, insurgent attacks have reportedly been up about 80% compared to the previous year, which might be more startling if the rise-in-violence piece weren’t a longtime staple of Afghan War reportage.

Are you bored to death yet?  No, then I’ll keep going.

* "Audit: Afghans don’t know how many police on rolls":  The news embedded in this headline is that a recent audit by the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan has found that some of the $10 billion a year being poured into training, building up, and supplying Afghanistan’s security forces is undoubtedly missing-in-action.  The IG reports that “the country's police rolls and payrolls cannot be verified because of poor record keeping,” which means that the numbers “for all practical purposes become somewhat fictitious.”  Put another way, the U.S. and its coalition partners are undoubtedly paying “ghost” policemen.

This story could be paired with a recent Reuters piece, “Pentagon’s rosy report of Afghanistan war raises questions,” which points out that, despite the billions of dollars and years of time invested in mentoring Afghanistan’s security forces, “there are currently no Afghan National Police units that are able to operate independently.”  In addition, even that recent “rosy” Pentagon report indicates that so many Afghan soldiers are deserting -- six out of every 10 new recruits -- as to imperil the goal of creating a massive army capable of taking over security duties in the next several years.  It has also been difficult to find enough trainers for the program, and given all of the above, experts suspect that the country will not have an effective army in place by 2014.

But here’s the thing: such reports about the massive training program for Afghan security forces, the inability of those forces to operate independently, the wholesale desertions continually suffered, and so on have appeared again and again and again over the last years.

* “With bin Laden dead, some escalate push for new Afghan strategy”: Here’s the only problem with that “new Afghan strategy” reportedly being debated in Washington -- it’s not new.  It’s drearily old.  In fact, it’s simply a replay on the downhill slide of bitter policy arguments in the fall of 2009 involving Washington policymakers and the U.S. military.  That was a moment when the Obama administration had set about reassessing Afghan strategy and trying to choose between counterinsurgency (“the surge”) and what was then called “counterterrorism plus” (more drones and more trainers, but less combat troops).

Then the debate was narrow indeed -- between more (an increase of 40,000 troops) and more (an increase of 20,000 troops).  There was never a real “less” option.  Today, with almost 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and despite reports of “war fatigue,” even among Congressional Republicans, as well as plummeting poll numbers among Americans generally, the new debate is similarly narrow, similarly focused, and deeply familiar, a kind of less-versus-less version of the more-versus-more duke-em-out of 2009.
Similar arguments, similar crew.  Then, Vice President Biden spearheaded the counterterrorism-plus option; today, it’s chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry, who quickly made the parameters of the “new” strategy debate clear: "I do not know of any serious policy person who believes that a unilateral precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan would somehow serve our interests or anybody’s interests. I do not believe that is a viable option.”

As in the fall of 2009, agreement among “serious policy people” that there should be a continuing American “footprint” in Afghanistan is set in stone.  It seems the only question on the table is how small and how slow the drawdown should be, with the debaters already evidently settling into an agreed upon endgame of 20,000 to 30,000 American troops, special operations forces, and trainers post-2014. Despite the president’s promise of significant troop reductions this year, early hints about war commander General David Petraeus’s recommendations indicate that as few as 10,000 may be withdrawn, with no combat troops among them (though pressure to increase those numbers is rising).

Not out of your mind with boredom yet?  Then I’ll keep at it.

* “Accusations of Corruption Rampant in Afghanistan”: Here’s the thing: you don’t even need to know the details of the story that lies behind that NPR headline.  Yes, Vermont representative Peter Welsh has called on Congress to investigate Afghan corruption, given the billions the U.S. is squandering there; yes, the Afghan deputy attorney general admitted that he had arrest warrants for various high officials on corruption charges but feared trying to bring them in; yes, headlines like “Afghan war progress at risk from corruption, training lags” are commonplace these days, as are stories about “reconstruction” corruption, protection payoffs to unsavory local warlords or the Taliban, and staggering levels of corruption in and around the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.  But here’s the thing: it’s been that way for years.  Corruption stories -- and stories about fighting corruption or the need to force the government of Hamid Karzai to do the same -- have been the essential bread and butter of Afghan war reporting for almost a decade.

* ”For Second Time in 3 Days, NATO Raid Kills Afghan Child”:  The New York Times piece under this headline reports on how “NATO” night raiders (usually U.S. special operations forces) killed a 15-year-old boy, the son of an Afghan National Army soldier, sleeping in his family fields with a shotgun beside him.  In the incident two days earlier the headline alludes to, another crew of night raiders killed a 12-year-old girl sleeping in her backyard, as well as her uncle, an Afghan police officer.  And who’s even mentioning the eight private security guards killed in an air strike as May began?

As it happens, however, from the moment that a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, using precision-guided weapons, destroyed a village wedding party in December 2001, killing 110 out of 112 revelers (only the first of numerous wedding parties to be blown away during these years), such civilian casualties have been the drumbeat behind the war.  The Afghan dead -- slaughtered by Taliban suicide bombers and IEDs as well -- have risen in a charnel heap high above those of September 11, 2001.

Accompanying such stories over the years have been passages like this one from the Times piece: “When morning came, an angry crowd gathered in Narra, the boy’s village, and more than 200 people marched with his body to the district center. Some of the men were armed and confronted the police, shouting anti-American slogans and throwing rocks at police vehicles and the... government center, according to the district governor and the [local school] headmaster. ”

This is the never-ending story of the war, the one whose only variations involve whether, faced with such deaths, U.S. military spokespeople will stonewall and deny, launch an “investigation” that goes nowhere, or offer a pro forma apology.  When it came to the death of that girl recently, an apology was indeed issued, but her father made the essential point: “They killed my 12-year-old daughter and my brother-in-law and then told me, ‘We are sorry.’  What does it mean?  What pain can be cured by this word ‘sorry’?”

Rogue War

When it comes to the Afghan War, there are other news stories of the present moment that were also the Afghan news of 2006, 2008, and 2010.  There’s even the newest hot set of rumors about U.S. attempts to open negotiations with the Taliban, whose last iteration ended when American officials discovered that the Taliban “senior commander” they had flown to Kabul was actually a clever impostor (who made off with a pile of money).  But let’s consider just one more story, the seventh headline of this moment, versions of which have headlined many other moments in these years, and ask whether there isn’t something -- anything at all -- new to be learned from it.

* “Afghan officer fires on NATO troops, kills 9”: This was breaking news when it happened.  On April 25th, a veteran Afghan air force pilot, armed with two weapons and in a specially guarded and secure area of Kabul airport, suddenly opened fire on a group of Americans evidently involved in a training program for Afghan pilots.  He gunned down eight U.S. Air Force personnel, including a lieutenant colonel, four majors, two captains, and a master sergeant, as well as a private contractor (himself a retired U.S. military officer) before being killed.  It was “the deadliest episode to date of an Afghan turning against his own coalition partners.”  But hardly the only one.  In a sense, this was no news at all.  It was already at least the fourth time in 2011 that someone dressed in an Afghan army or police uniform had turned a weapon on U.S. or NATO personnel.  Among such incidents was one just three weeks earlier in which a man wearing a border police uniform, reportedly “upset over the recent burning of the Quran at a Florida church,” killed two Americans, and another in February in which an Afghan soldier, reportedly “offended by his German partners,” killed three of them, wounding yet more.

By military count, since March 2009, 17 such incidents have been reported.  Since the mass killing at Kabul airport, there has already been an 18th in which, according to sketchy reports, a man in an Afghan police uniform opened fire on two NATO personnel at a “luncheon” in Helmand Province in the country’s embattled south.  In such incidents, at least 34 Americans have died. (Not counted in this total, evidently, is an incident in January 2010 in which a Taliban double or triple agent blew himself up amid a group of CIA employees on a forward operating base in Eastern Afghanistan, killing seven of them, including the station chief.)
Such incidents pile up repetitively, without adding up to anything of significance here.  Yes, the literal math has been done and it should be striking, even shocking, to Americans, and yet these news stories seldom get much attention and have already fallen into a he said/he said pattern in which the only crucial question becomes: Was the killer a Taliban plant or a “rogue” member of the Afghan security forces?   As soon as such an attack occurs, the Taliban -- which has made striking strides in entering the modern age of media spin -- promptly takes credit for it, claiming that whoever blew away a coalition soldier was one of its own and the incident a carefully planned operation.

It’s easy to understand why the Taliban would want to associate itself with such events.  Harder to grasp -- though no reporter seems to give it a second thought -- is the U.S./NATO response.  Their spokespeople regularly hustle out statements insisting that whoever attacked U.S. or coalition personnel was not connected to the Taliban, but simply having a truly bad day/life (experiencing, say, financial or psychological stress) and that, as a result, the incident was an “isolated” one, “not part of any organized pattern,” or as an American general summed it up to reporters, “rare.”  And yet the phenomenon turns out to be common enough that the military has a label for it: “green-on-blue” violence.

Consider this, though: Is the thought that the enemy is capable of repeatedly infiltrating American or NATO ranks really more devastating than the thought that, on a really bad day, “our” Afghans, the ones we are training or regularly working side-by-side with, have a deep-seated, repetitive urge to blow the foreigners away?  That seems to me the devastating message U.S. military officials are rushing to reinforce.
Can you, in fact, even come up with a comparable historical situation?  Admittedly, when weaponry is everywhere, war is the subject, and hair-trigger is the attitude, people can die in all sorts of ways, as “fragging” incidents in the U.S. military in the Vietnam era indicated.  (There was, in fact, one such incident at a military base in Kuwait as the invasion of Iraq began and, more recently of course, a disturbed Army psychiatrist, Major Nidal Hasan, went on a rampage, killing 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas.)
Still, where else is there such a record of police and military personnel blowing away their own trainers and ostensible allies so often?  Isn’t it possible that all those “rogues” are offering a collective message Americans simply don’t care to hear?

Despite the almost unbroken and certainly repetitive record of three decades of war and destruction, there are undoubtedly new stories to be found under the Afghan sun (as well as across the border in roiling Pakistan).  It’s just that you aren’t likely to find them in American war coverage, in part because you aren’t likely to find them in American strategic or tactical thinking.

Perhaps the real question is this: What does it tell us when neither a new policy thought nor a new story can come out of a disastrous war almost 10 years old?

What does it mean when a great power proves incapable of learning anything from its own past actions?

What does it mean when you can’t think creatively or reimagine the world in a land that has so often been referred to as “the graveyard of empire”?  Is it really so hard to guess?

And by the way, is anybody bored to death yet?  Then, what if, for the sake of having one new story to write, we decided to come home?

Second Amendment Remedies

Jared Loughner reportedly used a Glock 19 9 mm semi-automatic pistol that he bought legally at the Sportman's Warehouse in Tuscon.  The gun retails for $499.  It has a high capacity magazine that can hold up to 30 or more rounds. The federal assault weapons ban that would have prohibited the purchase of the gun and the high capacity magazine expired in 2004, after heavy lobbying by the NRA thwarted its reinstatement.

The Federal Assaults Weapon Ban was signed into law by President Clinton in 1994.  It prohibited the sale of certain semi-automatic weapons as well as "large capacity ammunition feeding devices," i.e., high-capacity magazines which hold more than 10 rounds.  According to Daniel Vice, senior attorney at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, if Loughner had been using a traditional magazine, "it would have drastically reduced the number of shots he got off before he had to pause, unload and reload -- and he could have been stopped."  Under the law, it was also illegal to manufacture these weapons and magazines except for export or for sale to law enforcement 

The assault weapons ban included a ten-year sunset provision.  The law expired in 2004, after an amendment to extend it for another ten years, introduced by Senator Feinstein, was voted down 90-8.  In 2007, a bill to reinstate and expand the ban on assault weapon was introduced in the House by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY).  McCarthy, whose husband was killed and son injured during a shooting rampage in 1993, is a fierce advocate for gun control.  Her bill had 60 co-sponsors but never passed.  Another bill was introduced by Republican Congressman Mark Kirk in 2008.  It remains in subcommittee.

Only ten states have their own laws regulating assault weapons, and Arizona, predictably, has some of the most lax guns laws in the country.  It is one of only three states that allow its residents to carry loaded, concealed guns without a special background check.  In September, Arizona passed a law that allows people with concealed-weapons permits to bring their guns into bars. 

In the wake of the tragic shooting, there has been remarkably little discussion in the mainstream media about gun control and there does not appear to be the will in Congress to enact stricter gun laws.  The only potential legislation appears to be a proposal to ban high capacity magazines, which Rep. McCarthy and Rep. Lautenberg (D-NJ) plan to introduce this week.  Even this relatively modest bill will encounter strong opposition thanks to the lobbying efforts of the NRA.

The National Rifle Association remains the most powerful lobby in Washington, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.  It spent more than $2 million on lobbying through September 2010, and has 23 lobbyists on staff.  As reported in USA Today, the NRA's political action committee is one of the most powerful in the country, ranking eighth in terms of receipts and expenditures.

So, there you have it.  A mentally ill young man was unable to enlist in the military, after failing a drug test, and was suspended from college pending a mental health evaluation.  He had five run-ins with the Pima Community College campus police, was arrested in 2007 for possessing drug paraphernalia and had two other minor infractions.  But, he could go into a sporting goods store, pass an FBI background check "without incident," and within minutes walk out with a new semi-automatic weapon and a magazine capable of shooting off more than 30 rounds without having to reload.

Regulations barring assault weapons and high capacity magazines, and laws requiring meaningful background checks and waiting periods to purchase guns will not impair the rights of legitimate gun owners.  This is not about the Second Amendment.  It is about whether Congress will continue to allow itself to be controlled by a powerful lobby at the risk of the country's health and safety.

[Related posts: Tragic and Inevitable]