I have a big day going on and will link to McJoan and Greg Sargent for commentary on Obama and the FISA bill rather than write commentary myself. We’re all disappointed.
Republicans, of course, have an entirely different view on FISA, because they want an America in which security is paramount. I bet I know where they’ve been looking for inspiration.
Sorry I’ve been scarce. I had to focus on the other site for a while.
Glenn Greenwald is the go-to guy on matters of telecom immunity and wiretapping. I’ve got no explanation for the House Dems’ behavior other than they must all be corrupt up to their eyeballs.
Today the Supreme Court ruled that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have the constitutional right to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts. See Hilzoy for details.
I ran into this pro-Burma rally in Manhattan yesterday. Photo taken on 77th Street between 5th and Madison:
Funnily enough, I later ran into an anti-Scientology rally in front of the Scientology Center on 82nd Street. Yesterday was a good day for rallying, I suppose. (The weather was nice, anyway.) Both were small, very tightly controlled, mostly polite rallies behind those blue police barriers.
And thanks for playing nice this weekend. I didn’t have to work too hard after all.
Tim Weiner writes in tomorrow’s New York Times,
A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.
Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.
The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.
“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said. …
… Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons.
There is no evidence suggesting that President Truman approved any part of this proposal.
Reaction from the Power Tools was predictable: “Hoover was too quick to judge people disloyal–it would be interesting to get a look at the list of 12,000–but some may feel nostalgic for a time when disloyalty was at least acknowledged to be a bad thing.”
I feel nostalgic for a time when shredding the Bill of Rights was at least acknowledged to be a bad thing.
Regarding the 12,000 — from 1950 to 1953 J. Edgar Hoover leaked copious amounts of information and names to Sen. Joe McCarthy, who then “investigated” and held “hearings” in which he bullied and smeared his targets. McCarthy’s sidekick, the infamous Roy Cohn, also had contacts in the bureau, who gave him access to confidential FBI reports.
Much of what [McCarthy] got came directly from the FBI, which had a habit of leaking information to favored politicians. Not only was Joe friendly with J. Edgar Hoover, but several of his aides had either worked for the Bureau or built up good contacts there. Roy Cohn, for example, was very close with Lou Nichols, the assistant director. One source said that Cohn knew
… all about FBI lists of supect Communists and has a fantastic memory for the names and backgrounds of practically all the important ex-Communists in the country. My friend has frequently been with Cohn when he picks up the phone, calls the FBI and demands to know the whereabouts of some ex-Communist or suspect Communist. Within a half hour or so the Bureau will call him back and give him the name of the special agent who is riding herd on the particular individual and Cohn will shortly thereafter get a call from the agent.
Despite his repeated denials, Cohn also had access to confidential FBI reports. One agent revealed that his colleagues “put in long hours poring over Bureau security files, abstracting them for Roy Cohn.” And Ruth Watt, chief clerk of the Government Operations Committee [chaired by McCarthy], recalled that “we had a lot of FBI reports because we could get them, you see.” Watt added that “Roy and J. Edgar Hoover knew each other pretty well, so it was not too difficult to get these things.” [David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy [Free Press, 1983], p. 257]
One suspects that if J. Edgar Hoover were seriously concerned about these 12,000 people, then information on at least some of them ended up with McCarthy and Cohn. And McCarthy and Cohn held investigations and hearings pretty much nonstop until the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. But not one of McCarthy’s investigations resulted in a conviction of espionage. And none of the many charges McCarthy brought against individuals were ever proved, even by the release of the Venona files. So it’s a good bet that the bulk of those 12,000 people that Hoover wanted to detain permanently were innocent.
Senator Chris Dodd plans to begin a filibuster today. He will try to stop the Senate from granting retroactive immunity to telecoms that violated their customers’ privacy rights by sending billions of private domestic internet and telephone communications to the NSA. The vote on the bill that would grant immunity is scheduled for today. You can help out by contacting your senators to let them know what you think.
See also: Taylor Marsh, Jane Hamsher, Glenn Greenwald, Nicole Belle, the Anonymous Liberal.
Meanwhile, righties are hollering about fascism because a senior fellow emeritus at the Policy Studies Institute believes carbon rationing must be imposed to save the planet. Wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment by Big Government and Big Corporation, however, is no big deal.
Eugene Robinson, “Drive Time for the ‘Jena 6‘”
Amina Luqman, “Jim Crow Comes for Our Kids”
Los Angeles Times, “Soul Searching in Jena”
Ed Pilkington, “Enough is enough: racial protest brings thousands to Southern town”
Marian Wright Edelman, “Free the Jena 6”
Jeff Douglas, “Rally Brings Change”
Trey Ellis, “The Jena 6 Case Is History Written in Lightning”
Matt Martinez, “Raise Your Voice”
Update:
Gary Younge, “Jena: the next step“
Pam Spalding is right — we haven’t paid enough attention to the Jena 6, and I’m as guilty as anyone. My only excuse is that there are a number of other issues in the news lately I haven’t written about as well, like Blackwater, although I keep meaning to.
This is heartbreaking. I don’t believe anyone sells Atkins Elegant Desserts hereabouts, but I’d boycott anyone who did.
“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Samuel Johnson said. Maybe ’twas true then, but we’ve stooped a bit lower since. When all else fails, blame incompetence.
At least, that’s what the Wall Street Journal is doing. Check out this editorial about the FBI’s improper use of national security letters:
Just when President Bush seemed to have beaten back the Congressional defeatists on Iraq, along comes his own Justice Department to undermine some hard-won antiterror policy gains. The incompetence at Justice is getting to be expensive for Presidential power.
Remember, WSJ still believes President Bush has a glorious strategy for victory in Iraq. So for them to have gone from denial to excuses in such a short time is something of a miracle.
It’s true that the Justice Department’s internal investigation on the national security letter issue blamed human error and shoddy record keeping for most of the unauthorized wiretapping. But this tells me that the people at the top — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller — have been winking at nodding at gross violations of citizens’ 4th Amendment rights. If these two had made it clear that all surveillance would be conducted lawfully, you can bet there’d have been a whole lot less human error and shoddy record keeping.
Dem Senator Chuck Schumer has called on Alberto Gonzales to resign. Republican Senator Lindsay Graham accused Schumer of interjecting “a little politics here.” I guess some righties are still in denial. I also infer that it’s unseemly for a Senator to speak up on a serious lapse if the lapser is a member of the other party. But if Republicans would take responsibility for their problem children, the Dems wouldn’t have to speak up. But Republicans, in effect, let the kids run all over the restaurant screaming and tripping the waiters and stealing food off plates, and when, finally, some adult says stop that, you little brat, the GOP gets all indignant about it.
(On a related note, see the Carpetbagger — “It’s become a fairly common refrain, hasn’t it? The right does something offensive, the left gets mad when there are no consequences, time elapses, and the right, annoyed by lingering resentment, tells the left to ‘get over it.’”)
Meanwhile, the U.S. attorney purge continues to get attention. What we know so far is that some of the U.S. attorneys were fired after Republican officials in their districts complained to Karl Rove– the bleeping White House political director — about the attorneys’ performance.
Sources told Newsweek that the list of prosecutors to be fired was drawn up by Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, “with input from the White House.” And Allen Weh, the chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party, told McClatchy News that he twice sought Karl Rove’s help — the first time via a liaison, the second time in person — in getting David Iglesias, the state’s U.S. attorney, fired for failing to indict Democrats. “He’s gone,” he claims Mr. Rove said.
After that story hit the wires, Mr. Weh claimed that his conversation with Mr. Rove took place after the decision to fire Mr. Iglesias had already been taken. Even if that’s true, Mr. Rove should have told Mr. Weh that political interference in matters of justice is out of bounds; Mr. Weh’s account of what he said sounds instead like the swaggering of a two-bit thug.
As Digby writes,
The minute I read that the Arkansas replacement was one of Rove’s little minions and that Iglesias had been pressured before the election to indict a Democrat, it was clear that this was Rove deal all around.
The Dems want to question Rove ao I suspect we are going to see some executive privilege claims start flying. Rove seems to have developed a bad case of SMS (Scooter Memory Syndrome) in which he can’t remember a damned thing whenever it becomes clear that he was playing politics in the lowest most obvious way possible. In his case, once the investigations start, the disease will render him braindead so he probably won’t be much use to anyone from this point forward.
And have I mentioned in the last few hours that we are paying this asshat’s salary?
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