Some Bush-hatin’

So, look, I’ve been good about this, right? I’ve gone several weeks without a rant. It’s been a while since I went off on how bad the Bush administration is. I haven’t quoted DeLong‘s Theory that “The Bush administration is not only worse than you imagine even after taking account of the fact that it is worse than you imagine, it is worse than you can conceivably imagine”. But this week is just too much–even though the constant and consistent Pure Evil has caused me to reach a new level of cynical burn out, the sheer volume of new stories this week has set me off again.

Let’s start with the big one: Bush has illegally allowed the NSA to spy on American citizens without warrants. This is kind of like Niemoller‘s revenge on all those crazy right-wingers who were OK with Bush removing any and all civil rights from anyone not an American citizen.

Note the pattern: assert that the civil rights are only available to American citizens, and only on American soil. Once the public gets used to that then you can claim the power to declare any citizen a functional non-person by claiming they were enemy combatants, or whatever. Once the public gets used to that then you can apparently claim the power to do warrantless searches on anyone, including citizens on native soil, who you suspect might be involved in terrorism… There aren’t many more ways this can get worse really.

Here’s a bit from the NYT report:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

(Note that the Times sat on this story FOR A YEAR because the administration waved the flag at them. Christ, what happened to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”.)

Got any doubts about whether or not Bush was breaking the law here?

Well, the Washington Post has this:

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the secret order may amount to the president authorizing criminal activity.

The law governing clandestine surveillance in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, prohibits conducting electronic surveillance not authorized by statute. A government agent can try to avoid prosecution if he can show he was “engaged in the course of his official duties and the electronic surveillance was authorized by and conducted pursuant to a search warrant or court order of a court of competent jurisdiction,” according to the law.

“This is as shocking a revelation as we have ever seen from the Bush administration,” said Martin, who has been sharply critical of the administration’s surveillance and detention policies. “It is, I believe, the first time a president has authorized government agencies to violate a specific criminal prohibition and eavesdrop on Americans.”

Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said she is “dismayed” by the report.

“It’s clear that the administration has been very willing to sacrifice civil liberties in its effort to exercise its authority on terrorism, to the extent that it authorizes criminal activity,” Fredrickson said.

Alternately, you could head over to Washington Monthly and read the Political Animal column on this. The feeling there is pretty clear:

This is against the law. I have put references to the relevant statute below the fold; the brief version is: the law forbids warrantless surveillance of US citizens, and it provides procedures to be followed in emergencies that do not leave enough time for federal agents to get a warrant. If the NY Times report is correct, the government did not follow these procedures. It therefore acted illegally.

Bush’s order is arguably unconstitutional as well: it seems to violate the fourth amendment, and it certainly violates the requirement (Article II, sec. 3) that the President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

That piece goes on to argue for impeachment. Man, I’d love to have the people rise up and say “OK, that’s it, this time you crossed the line”, but on the other hand, jwz points out the potential problems with an impeachment proceeding…

This is surely the most impeachable thing he’s done yet. But let me remind you why that is maybe not such a good strategy:

2. Vice President – Dick Cheney
3. Speaker of the House of Representatives – Dennis Hastert
4. President Pro Tempore of the Senate – Ted Stevens
   (See also “Who The Fuck Is Ted Stevens?”)
5. Secretary of State – Condoleeza Rice
6. Secretary of the Treasury – John W. Snow
7. Secretary of Defense – Donald Rumsfeld
8. Attorney General – Alberto “Torture Lawyer” Gonzalez

Man, that’s like the Evil Dick hit parade or something.

Perhaps the best writeup on why this is illegal comes from Perry E. Metzger, a crypto geek:

As you may all be aware, the New York Times has reported, and the administration has admitted, that President of the United States apparently ordered the NSA to conduct surveillance operations against US citizens without prior permission of the secret court known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (the “FISC”). This is in clear contravention of 50 USC 1801 – 50 USC 1811, a portion of the US code that provides for clear criminal penalties for violations. See:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode50/usc_sup_01_50_10_36_20_I.html

The President claims he has the prerogative to order such surveillance. The law unambiguously disagrees with him.

There are minor exceptions in the law, but they clearly do not apply in this case. They cover only the 15 days after a declaration of war by congress, a period of 72 hours prior to seeking court authorization (which was never sought), and similar exceptions that clearly are not germane.

There is no room for doubt or question about whether the President has the prerogative to order surveillance without asking the FISC — even if the FISC is a toothless organization that never turns down requests, it is a federal crime, punishable by up to five years imprisonment, to conduct electronic surveillance against US citizens without court authorization.

The FISC may be worthless at defending civil liberties, but in its arrogant disregard for even the fig leaf of the FISC, the administration has actually crossed the line into a crystal clear felony. The government could have legally conducted such wiretaps at any time, but the President chose not to do it legally.

Even setting aside the legal questions–and for the record, I have no doubt that Bush is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY over the line into illegal–there is the question of the philosophy of the system. Here, I’m tempted to just let Glenn Greenwald do the talking:

Underlying all of the excesses and abuses of executive power claimed by the Bush Administration is a theory of absolute, unchecked power vested in the Presidency which literally could not be any more at odds with the central, founding principles of this country.

Glenn goes on to quote Yoo’s document on why Bush has unlimited power, and then presents a nice counter-argument from both “founder’s intent” and common sense.

But that theory of the Executive unconstrained by law is completely repulsive to the founding principles of the country, as well as to the promises made by the Founders in order to extract consent from a monarchy-fearing public to the creation of executive power vested in a single individual. The notion that all of that can be just whimsically tossed aside whenever the nation experiences external threats is as contrary to the country’s founding principles as it is dangerous.

(Oh, you have seen Yoo’s document right? Like the part where it explicitly says no statute passed by Congress “can place any limits on the president’s determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing and nature of the response.” Hm. Apparently Bush is like the infallible Pope of America or something. Of course Yoo is the same guy who thinks it isn’t torture unless you are really trying to kill the subject…)

So, that’s a pretty good rant going already right? But that’s just ONE of the stories that broke this week.

We could stick with the “erosion of civil rights” angle, and talk about the apparent legalization of random search:

A federal judge ruled on Friday that police had a constitutional right to randomly search passengers’ bags on the New York City subway to deter terrorist attacks.

U.S. District Judge Richard Berman ruled the searches were an effective and appropriate means to fight terrorism, and constituted only a “minimal intrusion” of privacy.

What’s that Ben Franklin quote about people who will trade liberty for safety?

Actually, the irony here is that the judge is making security tradeoff decision that erode liberty without providing a serious potential increase in safety. Not that this is anything new…

OR, we could stick with the “government spying on Americans” angle

A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn’t know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

See also Scheier on this topic.

Personally, I am very worried about this increase in military activity inside our country. If anyone should be making sure protesters stay on the right side of the law, it’s the police…not the military.

And it could get worse.

Not that the military spying on peaceful groups inside the US is the only kind of internal surveillance going on. There’s also the creepy PATRIOT Act Big Brother stuff with lists of reading material that makes you a suspect–a story about which also broke this week:

A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.”

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a “watch list,” and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

“I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book,” Professor Pontbriand said. “Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that’s what triggered the visit, as I understand it.”

(Speaking of the PATRIOT Act, the one small good thing I’ve seen this week is that it apparently won’t be renewed. Of course, since we learned this week that the government doesn’t actually need its conduct to be legal…)

And, of course, we don’t need to be worried about all the unreviewed security stuff, since the government never makes mistakes. And they certainly would never accidentally kidnap and imprison the wrong person for months. And even if they did that, they would certainly never have such an accidentally imprisoned person “shackled, beaten, photographed nude and injected with drugs“. And even if all that did happen, it would surely only happen once.

Of course, since I’m just going off about recent stories I can’t really get into the torture scandals (any of which, incidentally, should have been enough to bring a government down). Unless, of course, there were new developments in those this week. Like, oh, I don’t know, a Human Rights Watch report that talks about the treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan:

The detainees said U.S. interrogators slapped or punched them during interrogations. They described being held in complete darkness for weeks on end, shackled to rings bolted into the walls of their cells, with loud music or other sounds played continuously. Some detainees said they were 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 detainees said they were deprived of food for days at a time, and given only filthy water to drink.

Yes, that makes me feel proud to be a part of modern civilization. It surely does.

Of course torture is part of the history of American foreign policy, whether the American people can admit it or not. That history also showed up on my screen this week:

It’s not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they blame abuses on “a few bad apples”–so too do many of torture’s most prominent opponents. Apparently forgetting everything they once knew about US cold war misadventures, a startling number have begun to subscribe to an antihistorical narrative in which the idea of torturing prisoners first occurred to US officials on September 11, 2001, at which point the interrogation methods used in Guantánamo apparently emerged, fully formed, from the sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney’s and Donald Rumsfeld’s brains. Up until that moment, we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its humanity intact.

What’s that Santayana quote about history again?

At least we can count on the fourth and fifth estates to keep us informed , right? Maybe they’ll sit on a story for a year, but eventually they’ll come clean right?

Don’t make me start quoting all the stories about journalists, columnists, and think tank writers who have admitted being bought off by the administration. Do a Google.

And it’s not just inside the U.S., it’s policy in Iraq and it’s formal warfare against… well, the rest of the world apparently:

A $300 million Pentagon psychological warfare operation includes plans for placing pro-American messages in foreign media outlets without disclosing the U.S. government as the source, one of the military officials in charge of the program says.

Dan Gilmour understands the truth about this:

This program poisons journalism. It means that every story relating to U.S. policies in every foreign outlet should be considered propaganda, bought and paid for by the U.S. taxpayers via their government, until someone proves that to be untrue.

The administration is undoubtedly proud of this initiative. The rest of us should be disgusted.

The techniques and technologies developed under this program to disseminate pro-administration propoganda around the world can be turned around and used to manufacture consent inside the U.S. But, naturally, no administration would resort to running internal propaganda, right?

The people’s government would never pervert the free media like that, though, right? If that’s what you’re thinking, you have some remedial reading to do. Start here.

Bush’s Media Agenda

The current administration is more inhospitable to truth and an informed citizenry than any before it. In fact, the administration seeks the opposite: a public that buys a carefully constructed myth over reality. This deception has manifest in seven lines of attack:

• Infiltrating public broadcasting with party loyalists
• Manufacturing fake news and propaganda
• Bribing journalists to flack for the administration
• Gutting the Freedom of Information Act
• Deceiving media (and the U.S. public) about Iraq
• Stifling dissent within mainstream media
• Consolidating media control into the hands of the elite

The media did a crap job of covering the Tookie Williams thing too. I’d rant about that too, but frankly nothing I could say would touch the insightful piece at Body and Soul. I’m glad I won’t have to explain capital punishment to my daughter, I’ll tell you that. I am also glad that I’m not in a position where Arnie gets to decide whether or not my repentence for somethin is sincere.

Well, I’m running out of steam, and I haven’t even got through the list of administration-related stories that outraged me this week. This was a heavy week, but I think I could do a post like this for every week since 2001 anyway. I really don’t understand how the American people haven’t risen up en masse… or rather, let us say that I am still enough of an optimist to reject the only explanations for this failure that make sense to me.

Of course, you can only blame the America people for electing an administration this bad if they actually elected them. (I can still blame you all for not rising up, though. )

And, that’s the end of my steam…