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Thursday, May 18, 2006 |
Stan Goff: Murtha's Example. If you put Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha and I in a room together, we could probably identify with each other around our military experience, but we would agree on little else I'm afraid. If you accept the linear continuum model of political orientation (which I don't, but at least it's well known), then Murtha is center-right, and I am crimson-left. That's precisely why this accolade I am about to write to his integrity can be taken seriously.
He is taking a lot of heat -- again -- for telling truths about the American war of conquest in Iraq.
On November 19th last year, a convoy fo Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines drove through the village of Haditha -- a Euphrates River farming town in northwestern Anbar Province of Iraq -- where they were hit with an impovised explosive device, killing Lance Corporal Miguel (T.J.) Terrazas, 20, from El Paso, Texas. Fifteen Iraqi civilians were then killed by the Marines, who later claimed that the civilians were killed by the blast of the roadside bomb.
But in January 2006, Time Magazine went to the Pentagon with video footage of the scene and 28 eyewitness reports that suggested something else happened altogether. Those reports, photographs, and video made an extremely strong case that the Marines of Kilo Company went on a vengeance rampage, kicked in the doors of civilian homes, and slaughtered 15 people, including men, women, and small childen, two of adults being elderly grandparents.
The Time story went public in March 2006. Subsequent inquires, outside the military -- who insists it is still investigating -- have strongly supported the eyewitness reports.
There is some kind of unwritten protocol to give troops the benefit of the doubt beyond anything that would be reasonable for anyone else. Catharine MacKinnon writes, "Manners are often taken more seriously than politics. There's a poltics to that."
If anyone in the United States were a suspect in 15 homicides, it's a pretty good bet they'd be in custody. It's also a pretty good bet that these guys are not.
Murtha is telling the public that the Pentagon investigation will show that the US Marines massacred civilians in Haditha in November 2005.
That is why I am grateful to Representative John Murtha for not adhering to what is considered good manners. He is not only defying the spineless and oportunistic Nancy Pelosi's directive to avoid the issue of the Iraq war, when he says saying we need to get our troops out of there pronto; he is now being very explicit about why. The fact that he is a former Marine with scar tissue from Vietnam only makes his public statement, that the result of the investigation will confirm a massacre at Haditha, discomfit the war-boosters of the right and the Schumer-Pelosi sales managers of the center that much more.
They know Murtha has an inside line to the Pentagon. That's why he prefigured the rebellion of the Generals earlier this year with his declaration last year that the aggression in Iraq is a disaster that will only improve by ending it. Murtha knows what I know, and a lot of veterans who are willing to tell the truth know. Imperial occupations are by their very nature -- in the words of Daniel Ellsberg -- atrocity producing situations.
The war in Iraq is an atrocity itself -- and no Democrat who fails to oppose it deserves to ever hold public office again.
The antagonism between the Iraqi population -- over 85% of whom want the US out -- and those whose job description is to "control" that population by any means necessary, is inherent, and therefore inescapable.
Murtha is going to take some serious heat on this. Our political culture abhors a non-conformist, and saying in a straightforward way that we need to backhaul US troops out of Iraq -- even though that is now a majority position -- is about as non-conformist as you get over there these days. Pointing out that the military behaves in ways that don't conform to our chauvinistic ideals of them is even more out of the box. So let there be no doubt: Murtha is now a target.
That means it is our responsibility to get his back. We have to write and call his office to thank him for his integrity. We have to write op-eds and letters to the editor rebutting the inevitable and hateful demogogy that will be leveled at him. We have to blog our approval, speak publicly of our approval, call radio programs and C-Span with our approval, and tell our own Representatives that he is the example we want them to emulate.
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11:12:37 AM 
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Published on Tuesday, May 16, 2006 by the Boston Globe
Bush Stomps on Fourth Amendment
by Laurence H. Tribe
The escalating controversy over the National Security Agency's data mining program illustrates yet again how the Bush administration's intrusions on personal privacy based on a post-9/11 mantra of ''national security" directly threaten one of the enduring sources of that security: the Fourth Amendment ''right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
The Supreme Court held in 1967 that electronic eavesdropping is a ''search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, recognizing that our system of free expression precludes treating each use of a telephone as an invitation to Big Brother to listen in. By 2001, the court had come to see how new technology could arm the government with information previously obtainable only through old-fashioned spying and could thereby convert mere observation -- for example, the heat patterns on a house's exterior walls -- to a ''search" requiring a warrant. To read the Constitution otherwise, the court reasoned, would leave us ''at the mercy of advancing technology" and erode the ''privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted." This decision, emphasizing the privacy existing when the Bill of Rights was originally ratified in 1791, was no liberal holdover in conservative times. Its author was Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the dissent. This issue should not divide liberals from conservatives, Democrats from Republicans.
These two decisions greatly undermine the aberrant 1979 ruling on which defenders of the NSA program rely, in which a bare Supreme Court majority said it doubted that people have any ''expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial," since they ''must 'convey' [such] numbers to the telephone company," which in turn can share them with others for purposes like ''detecting fraud and preventing violations of law." Unconvincing then, those words surely ring hollow today, now that information technology has made feasible the NSA program whose cover was blown last week. That program profiles virtually every American's phone conversations, giving government instant access to detailed knowledge of the numbers, and thus indirectly the identities, of whomever we phone; when and for how long; and what other calls the person phoned has made or received. As Justice Stewart recognized in 1979, a list of all numbers called ''easily could reveal . . . the most intimate details of a person's life."
The Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unconstrained snooping by Big Brother -- made bigger by an onrush of information-trolling technology that few foresaw in 1979 -- is bipartisan. It is a guarantee that cannot tolerate the pretense that numbers called from a private phone, unlike the conversations themselves, are without ''content." That pretense is impossible to maintain now that the technology deployed by NSA enables the agency to build a web with those numbers that can ensnare individuals -- all individuals -- just as comprehensively and intimately as all-out eavesdropping.
Even if one trusts the president's promise not to connect all the dots to the degree the technology permits, the act of collecting all those dots in a form that permits their complete connection at his whim is a ''search." And doing it to all Americans, not just those chatting with Al Qaeda, and with no publicly reviewable safeguards to prevent abuse, is an ''unreasonable search" if those Fourth Amendment words have any meaning at all.
The legal landscape, too, has changed decisively since the court's majority opined that Americans have no expectation of privacy in the numbers they call. Rejecting the accuracy of that description even decades ago, Congress, which was more vigorous then in its protection of privacy, enacted statutes reassuring us that our phone records would not be shared willy-nilly with government inquisitors without court orders. So it can no longer be said, if it ever could have been, that our ''expectations of privacy" about whom we call are groundless or that we ''consent" to reconstruction of our telephone profiles by using one of the phone companies that, unbeknownst to us, have agreed to share such information (although, we're told, not the content of every call) with NSA on demand.
Privacy apart, this president's defiance of statutes by the dozens is constitutionally alarming. But the matter goes deeper still. Even if Congress were to repeal the laws securing telephone privacy, or if phone companies found loopholes to slip through when pressured by government, the Constitution's Fourth Amendment shield for ''the right of the people to be secure" from ''unreasonable searches" is a shield for all seasons, one that a lawless president, a spineless Congress, and a complacent majority of citizens -- who are conditioned to a government operating under a shroud of secrecy while individuals live out their lives in fishbowls -- cannot be permitted to destroy, for the rest of us and our children.
Laurence H. Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor.
© 2006 Globe Newspaper Company
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10:49:46 AM
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The 9/11 Story That Got Away. In 2001, an anonymous White House source leaked top-secret NSA intelligence to reporter Judith Miller that Al Qaida was planning a major attack on the United States. But the story never made it into the paper. [AlterNet.org]
9:24:57 AM
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Michael Smerconish: Schiavo: The Final Word. May 14, 2006
Dear Son:
Congratulations on receiving your First Holy Communion today. Your mother and I are extremely proud of this achievement. It brought a tear to my eye to stand with you as you accepted the Sacrament, and it was obvious to your mother and me that you have taken your religious education very seriously.
I saved you a copy of the church bulletin that was distributed at Mass today as a keepsake, and I am writing you this letter in the hope that you will keep it attached to the bulletin as a note of explanation. You see, my name appears in an insert to the church bulletin that was distributed throughout the Archdiocese on the very day you received First Holy Communion, and not in a favorable light.
The situation caught me by surprise and it was unsettling to sit in a pew at church as we prepared for your special moment, only to look at the flier and see my name under the banner of a group called Pro Life Union Inc. They mentioned me by name in the context of a story about a recent symposium that I moderated at the University of Pennsylvania. It is certainly true that at the invitation of the nation's foremost bio-ethicist, Arthur Caplan, I participated and posed questions to individuals with expertise on the subject of death and dying. Untrue was the assertion in the bulletin that I was at Penn to somehow "celebrate" the death of a woman named Terri Schiavo. I found that characterization to be deeply offensive, and while I refused to allow it to mar your day, it nevertheless warrants an explanation for your future reference.
Terri Schiavo was a woman who collapsed without warning in 1990, when she was 26. She never recovered. Her husband, Michael, discovered her at their home in the early morning hours after hearing a "thud". Terri was later diagnosed by doctors to be in something called a persistent vegetative state. Two years after the event, Michael successfully asserted a medical malpractice action against Terri's doctors for failing to diagnose an underlying eating and nutritional disorder which led to her cardiac arrest and caused irreversible brain damage. Interestingly, while the jury made financial awards in a number of areas (medical expenses, lost earnings, loss of consortium), they awarded nothing for Terri's pain and suffering. In other words, after hearing the evidence just two years after the tragedy, the jury concluded that Terri was then feeling no pain and was not suffering.
Soon afterwards, there arose an ugly battle between Michael and Terri's parents, the Schindlers. The presiding judge for this dispute concluded that it was a dispute about money from the malpractice action. This dispute soon morphed into a battle over Terri's end-of-life wishes, given that she could no longer speak for herself. On this important issue, there was a factual dispute between Michael and the Schindlers.
In this country we live by the rule of law, and in the case of Terri Schiavo, a court listened to evidence for five days and made a factual determination that Terri's wish was to discontinue her feeding tube. The appellate court process was tested repeatedly and upheld that view.
Things got very ugly. Many outsiders to the case attempted to affect the outcome. One of those interests was the pro life community, which embraced Terri's parents and voiced opposition to the view that her feeding tube be continued. My own position was one of support for the right of the individual in a catastrophic condition to have their own wishes fulfilled. I regarded Terri's case as one involving the right of a person to die on their own terms in the event of a tragedy of this magnitude. In that regard, I believed that the affected person should make the decision free of any outside involvement, including my own, and that of the government. In the Schiavo case, the judicial system determined that Terri's wish was to discontinue her feeding tube. That was unsatisfactory for some observers. Among the upset interests was the pro-life community. (Frankly, I never looked at Terri's case in the conventional pro-life vs. pro-choice terms. But now I began to wonder whether their agenda was to support "life" even in a situation where a person in a permanent vegetative condition would themselves want otherwise.)
Terri Schiavo left this earth in 2005. An autopsy showed beyond any question that she was in a permanent vegetative state, had been for many years, and that the cause of her death was brain damage due to anoxic brain injury. An inquiry by the Florida state attorney found a complete absence of any evidence that Terri's initial collapse was caused by anyone's criminal actions.
I wish my name -- your name -- did not appear in the church bulletin on the day of your First Holy Communion. I love our church and the fulfillment it has provided each member of our family in our relationship with Jesus Christ. But I am your father first, and I am not about to let this moment pass without providing you with some frame of reference for how your dad views the controversy, even though I recognize it will be inappropriate for you to read this for a number of years.
Let no one tell you that your father celebrated any death. Your old man is supportive of self determination. In the case of Terri Schiavo, I kept saying 'there but for the grace of God go I'. If that outcome should come my way, I certainly don't want some individual, or some group, be they pro-life or pro-choice, imposing their view of end of life issues upon me, or anyone else. The fact that one such group would proclaim, in a church bulletin on the day of your First Holy Communion, that I have celebrated death by my support of Terri Schiavo's right to determine her own fate, tells me all that I need to know about this group's lack of respect for individual rights in such cases. They wanted to call this shot for Terri. Well, please don't ever let them decide for me.
Love,
Dad
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9:20:44 AM
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Eric Boehlert: Chertoff Flip-Flops On Border Patrol, The Press Yawns. Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff thinks the idea of deploying National Guard troops to secure the U.S.-Mexican border would be "a horribly over-expensive and very difficult way to manage this problem," mostly because the Guard "is not trained for the mission." Chertoff insists that "Unless you would be prepared to leave those people in the National Guard day and night for month after month after month, you would eventually have to come to grips with the challenge in a more comprehensive way. I think there's a smarter way to do it."
At least that's what Chertoff told Fox News' Bill O'Reilly just six months ago on national television.
Since Bush floated the Guard idea during his primetime address on immigration reform this week, Chertoff has caved on the issue and gone before the cameras to back the plan for Guard troops patrolling the border. (i.e. "We have used the National Guard and the military in support of the Border Patrol for about two decades, so this is not new.") As for his previous, unequivocal statement about the whole thing being a "horribly over-expensive and very difficult way to manage this problem"? That's been flushed down the media memory hole. Chertoff, who has received mostly fawning Beltway press coverage ever since he helped over-excited reporters chase the Whitewater hoax during the 1990s, has nothing to fear from the press grilling him about his violent National Guard flip-flop because the press has a pathological desire to employ a double-standard for Democratic and Republican leaders. I detail the phenomenon throughout Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, but that doesn't mean it's not distressing to watch yet another example unfold in plain sight, with the MSM--across the board and without exception--refusing perform its most simple function of holding public officials accountable.
Chertoff's bold National Guard flip-flop was first tagged by CQ magazine, which posted an item late Monday night, and on Tuesday's Josh Marshall's TPMmuckraker.com picked up the story. So the information is clearly out there. To date though, the press continues to play dumb. It probably goes without saying that Fox News, where Chertoff first made his "horribly over-expensive" quip, refuses to revisit the issue. In fact, Tuesday night O'Reilly himself was attacking liberal newspaper editorial pages for not backing Bush's plan to use Guard troops along the border. The fact that the Homeland Security secretary late last year told O'Reilly the idea was a loser, well, that was politely ignored. It was also politely ignored by the timorous news crews over at CNN and MSNBC, where Chertoff was interviewed at length about the new plan for Guardsmen to shoo away Mexicans. The simple fact is that, according to TVeyes.com, Chertoff's "horribly over-expensive" quote has not been aired, or been recited, on any national television news outlet since the immigration issue went front-and-center this week. National Public Radio has also played dumb.
Chertoff's telling quote has also not been printed in the news hole of a single major newspaper, although lots of dailies, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have dutifully quoted Chertoff about what great work the National Guard will do along the border.
Journalists don't like being called Lapdogs for the Bush crowd. But in instances like this, can you think of a better description?
UPDATE: Media Matters for America has lots of details on the press' no-show performance regarding Chertoff and the Guard.
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9:17:12 AM
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Margaret Carlson: Who Knows Extent of Surveillance?. Honk if you don't think someone has their mitts on your phone calls. What else don't we know about the Bush Administration's extraordinary grab for personal information about ordinary Americans, given what's been uncovered so far? Will someone put it to Gen. Michael Hayden today, the guy who presided over the most expansive use of technology for domestic surveillance in history at his hearings to become head of the CIA?
On top of warrantless wiretaps and wholesale mining of phone records, last week came news that journalists' calls were being traced, an anytime, anywhere program allowed either under the Patriot Act or Justice Department guidelines, depending on who is commenting at the FBI. Who knew you could get a free peek at such calls, without notifying the target, for 90 days? If people weren't concerned for their own privacy, they are unlikely to get worked up on behalf of reporters, who rank somewhere between car dealers and grave robbers in public esteem.
Read the rest here.
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9:13:37 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Patricia Thurston.
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