Month: October 2010

Questions for Andrew Sullivan – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com: “Questions for Andrew Sullivan BY GLENN GREENWALD (updated below – Update II [Friday])

Andrew Sullivan quotes from an excellent column by Alex Massie in The Spectator.  Massie points to Obama’s assassination program and writes: ‘you can make an argument that Obama’s actions are worse than Bush’s since a) he wasn’t charged with cobbling together a security framework in the confused, panicked aftermath of 9/11 and b) he actually, you know, once campaigned against quite a lot of this stuff.’  Andrew, basically objecting to Massie’s claim, makes several points in response that merit attention and, at least for me, prompt various questions.  Andrew:

But a single American al Qaeda terrorist in a foreign country actively waging war against us seems to me to be a pretty isolated example.

First, Awlaki is most certainly not a singular case.  Obama’s ‘hit list’ has at least four Americans on it; Awlaki is the only one whose identity we know.  From The Washington Post’s Dana Priest in January:  ‘After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad . . . . The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. . . . . As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added.’

Second, could Andrew please explain how he knows that Awlaki is an ‘al Qaeda terrorist’?  Being an ‘al Qaeda terrorist’ is a crime with which many people have been charged and convicted.  But Awlaki never has been.  Are the untested, leaked accusations from government officials really enough for Andrew to conclude that an American citizen is a ‘terrorist’ and, accordingly, support the imposition of the death penalty?  Does Andrew not need or want to see any actual evidence — let alone have that evidence subjected to due process and checks and balances — before simply assuming and asserting that an accusation like that is true?  Does the lengthy record of error and/or abuse under both Bush and Obama — whereby countless people have been falsely accused of being Terrorists — not preclude a rational person from vesting blind faith in unchecked government accusations of this sort?

Third, the ‘just an isolated case’ defense was frequently invoked by Bush supporters.  There were ‘only two’ American citizens detained for years without charges by the Bush administration — Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi.  Did that make the assertion of that tyrannical power more acceptable to Andrew?  The claim at the time from those of us who vehemently opposed it was that if you endorse what is being done to those two individuals, then by necessity you’ve vested the President with the power to detain Americans without charges or due process — not just the current President but future ones as well.  Isn’t that same concern exactly applicable to Obama’s asserted assassination power, no matter how many individuals –at the moment — are targeted?  And can Andrew point to a single, similar awesome power seized by political leaders on the ground of ‘war’ that did not end up being severely abused when it was exercised in the dark?”

 

The Washington Monthly: “SHE REALLY SHOULD GET OUT MORE…. Did extremist Senate candidate Sharron Angle (R) really say Sharia law has ‘taken hold’ in some U.S. cities? Pretty much.

One of the last questioners asked about ‘Muslims taking over the U.S.,’ including a question about Angle’s stance on the proposed mosque near Ground Zero in New York.

‘We’re talking about a militant terrorist situation, which I believe isn’t a widespread thing, but it is enough that we need to address, and we have been addressing it,’ Angle said.

‘Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas are on American soil, and under Constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don’t know how that happened in the United States. It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States.’

I’m not entirely sure exactly what Angle’s even trying to say here. She said she doesn’t know ‘how that happened in the United States.’ How what happened?

The implication seems to be that a ‘foreign system of law’ has ‘taken hold’ in Dearborn and Frankford, which is completely insane. Those communities, like every other community in the country, follow American law. Does Angle believe cities where there are a lot of Muslim Americans necessarily fall under Sharia?

She’s already made clear that she rejects the principle of church-state separation, so perhaps in her twisted worldview, predominantly Muslim cities suddenly become little theocracies unto themselves — carve-out exceptions to the First Amendment.

I really don’t think she’s well.”

 

Internet regulators may face Swedish Waterloo – The National Newspaper: “Best known for pillaging Vikings and the pop supergroup Abba, Sweden is now hosting its own version of the internet – one without government controls. At a time when many of the world’s governments are demanding access to mobile phone records and Google is accused of openly collaborating with the CIA, Sweden is home to an unregulated version of the internet.

Protected by that country’s liberal laws, a legitimate Swedish political party, the Pirate Party, is attracting the growing support of Swedish citizens and is determined to provide an alternative to the highly regulated internet envisaged by governments such as the US and service providers such as Google. Iceland is also drafting legislation to protect freedom of information on the internet.”

 

About Fusion Centers | Operation Defuse: “A fusion center is a multi-jurisdictional law enforcement apparatus which seeks to merge the information gathering and intelligence sharing practices of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.  Initially sold to the public as a means of preventing and combating terrorism, fusion centers later took on an ‘all-crimes approach’ incorporating information and intelligence about a multitude of crimes from simple traffic tickets to large scale drug distribution networks.  Drifting even further from their original purpose, some fusion centers have begun collecting and analyzing private non-criminal information such as shopping purchases, driving habits, and even health records.

While many existed prior, fusion centers received their national legislative backing through the passage of the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act of 2007.  They were created to ‘bring down the barriers to information sharing’, a problem iterated by many in the intelligence community after September 11th 2001.  Fusion centers accomplish this goal by standardizing the computer language used by various law enforcement agencies and granting each other access to their partner agency’s information systems and criminal intelligence databases.”

 

Wikileaks Calls US Pentagon ‘Nazi Punks,’ Threatens New Leak | Death and Taxes: “Since 9/11 American attitudes have dictated that security—at least our best effort at security—is more important than transparency. It’s an idea that justified all kinds of exceptions to American transparency that we would have otherwise objected to—from the Patriot Act allowing us to spy on citizens to holding suspects at Guantanamo without charging them with anything.”

‘Feds radiating Americans’? Mobile X-ray vans hit US streets – Yahoo! News: “Atlanta – For many living in a terror-spooked country, it might seem like a great government innovation: Use vans equipped with mobile X-ray units to scan vehicles at major sporting events, or even randomly, for bombs or contraband. But news that the US is buying custom-made vans packed with something called backscatter X-ray capacity has riled privacy advocates and sparked internet worries about ‘feds radiating Americans.'”