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Monthly Archives: January 2006
Hamdi Ho
Our national debate on the President’s surveillance powers has reached an impasse. We’re at the “Am not!” “Am too!” stage, which can only be resolved through the intervention of a parent.
Our side of the argument is laid out pretty well in an editorial in today’s Washington Post.
Especially without knowing the parameters of the surveillance, we hesitate to second-guess the president’s argument that FISA’s limits are unduly constraining. The surveillance may be critical for national security, and a law written in a different technological age may well need to be refurbished. But the proper way to handle that — which the administration rejected — would have been to seek changes in the law, not to do a stealthy end run around the legislative process. In such an amorphous, long-running conflict as the war against terrorism, it’s critical to ensure that limits are in place to prevent the executive branch from overreaching.
The White House has yet to explain why, if FISA regulations were cumbersome, it did not ask Congress for changes. After 9/11 Congress was tripping all over itself to give President Bush every tool he could possibly ask for to fight terrorism. The Patriot Act did, in fact, make changes in FISA (see Title II: Enhanced Surveillance Procedures). Clearly, the White House simply didn’t bother to follow legal procedure. They didn’t think they had to.
And now that they’ve been caught, they’ve gone on the defensive to make critics out to be dupes of terrorists. Instead of discussing the real issue (why the White House bypassed constitutional procedures) they’re trying to make the issue about why the Democrats are soft on terrorism, leading to the “Am not!” “Am too!” impasse. Now we need Mom to step in to make Georgie explain his extraconstitutional shenanigans and send him to his room until he promises to stop. And no computer or video games for you tonight, young man!
Today President Bush said the Supreme Court had approved warrantless wiretapping, which might come as a surprise to the justices. He’s referring to the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld decision, decided in 2004. If you don’t want to slog through the entire decision, there’s a brief abstract here.
Yaser Hamdi, an American citizen, was arrested in the fall of 2001 in Afghanistan by U.S. military. He was declared an “enemy combatant” and transferred to a military prison. A defense attorney filed a writ of certiorari in federal district court. Perhaps a reader with a law degree can explain this, but I take it this was a petition for the court to review Hamdi’s case. Anyway, the attorney, Frank Dunham, Jr., argued that the government had violated Hamdi’s 5th Amendment right to due process “by holding him indefinitely and not giving him access to an attorney or a trial,” says the abstract. “The government countered that the Executive Branch had the right, during wartime, to declare people who fight against the United States ‘enemy combatants’ and thus restrict their access to the court system.”
So how did the case turn out? The abstract continues,
In an opinion backed by a four-justice plurality and partly joined by two additional justices, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that although Congress authorized Hamdi’s detention, Fifth Amendment due process guarantees give a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant the right to contest that detention before a neutral decisionmaker. The plurality rejected the government’s argument that the separation-of-powers prevents the judiciary from hearing Hamdi’s challenge.
If you’re not seeing authorization for warrantless wiretapping in there, don’t worry. You aren’t the only one. A whole lot of real smart legal scholars got together to write this in the February 9 issue of the New York Review of Books:
Finally, the DOJ’s reliance upon Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004), to support its reading of the AUMF, see DOJ Letter at 3, is misplaced. A plurality of the Court in Hamdi held that the AUMF authorized military detention of enemy combatants captured on the battlefield abroad as a “fundamental incident of waging war.” Id. at 519. The plurality expressly limited this holding to individuals who were “part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners in Afghanistan and who engaged in an armed conflict against the United States there.” Id. at 516 (emphasis added). It is one thing, however, to say that foreign battlefield capture of enemy combatants is an incident of waging war that Congress intended to authorize. It is another matter entirely to treat unchecked warrantless domestic spying as included in that authorization, especially where an existing statute specifies that other laws are the “exclusive means” by which electronic surveillance may be conducted and provides that even a declaration of war authorizes such spying only for a fifteen-day emergency period.
The AUMF is an act of Congress, the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against al-Qaeda, Pub. L. No. 107-40, 115 Stat. 224 (2001). The White House argues that Congress implicitly authorized the NSA domestic spying program by means of the AUMF. The Department of Justice argues that
The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the AUMF in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004), confirms that Congress in the AUMF gave its express approval to the military conflict against al Qaeda and its allies and thereby to the President’s use of all traditional and accepted incidents of force in this current military conflict—including warrantless electronic surveillance to intercept enemy communications both at home and abroad. [emphasis added]
Oh, so did Justice O’Connor write in the majority decision that the AUMF authorizes the President to engage in warrantless wiretapping? Um, well, Justice O’Connor didn’t write about wiretapping or surveillance at all in the Hamdi decision. She does address warrantless arrests of American citizens, and she took a dim view of them. But not a peep about surveillance.
To understand where the Right is seeing this authorization for warrantless wiretapping in Hamdi, I turned to Paul of PowerLine, who wrote,
Specifcally, the Court ruled that AUMF grants the president implied authority to detain U.S. citizens in the U.S. because detention to prevent a combatant from returning to the battlefield is a fundamental incident of waging war. In the same way, AUMF can be read as authorizing the president to conduct communication surveillance targeted at the enemy on the ground that it too is a fundamental incident of waging war. If so, then the intercept program does not violate FISA because that statute contains an exception for surveillance authorized by statute.
Yes, O’Connor’s decision does say that combatants can be detained: “The capture and detention of lawful combatants and the capture, detention, and trial of unlawful combatants, by ‘universal agreement and practice,’ are ‘important incident[s] of war.’ … The purpose of detention is to prevent captured individuals from returning to the field of battle and taking up arms once again. … There is no bar to this Nation’s holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant. … In light of these principles, it is of no moment that the AUMF does not use specific language of detention.”
My reading of O’Connor’s decision is not that the AUMF authorized detention, but that detention is indisputably something that soldiers in war can do to someone fighting them. If we extrapolate Paul of PL’s reasoning, we’d have to say that warrantless wiretapping of American citizens is indisputably something that the White House can do. That’s not workin’ for me.
And the Court ruled against the Bush Administration in the Hamdi case, remember. The Court said that the executive branch cannot arbitrarily declare that an American citizen may be stripped of his due process rights, even if that citizen is caught fighting against the U.S. in a foreign country. Justice O’Connor wrote,
Striking the proper constitutional balance here is of great importance to the Nation during this period of ongoing combat. But it is equally vital that our calculus not give short shrift to the values that this country holds dear or to the privilege that is American citizenship. It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our Nation’s commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad. See Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U. S. 144, 164-165 (1963) (“The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit government action”); see also United States v. Robel, 389 U. S. 258, 264 (1967) (“It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties … which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile”). …
… We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens. [emphasis added]
This, folks, is the legal decision that Bush claims supports his warrantless wiretapping program. This, folks, is called “blowin’ smoke” where I come from. There are a great many more colorful things one might call it.
The legal eagles in the New York Review of Books say that the Hamdi decision is limited to to people engaging in armed conflict against the United States in Afghanistan. Further, Congress cannot have implied authorization of the NSA program, because “Congress has expressly and specifically addressed that precise question in FISA and limited any such warrantless surveillance to the first fifteen days of war.”
I will admit right now that I am no lawyer. Paul of PowerLine is a lawyer, or so he says. Someone on the Right might — no, will — say that he must understand this legal stuff better than I do. And maybe he does. But what he claims about Hamdi is pure fantasy. I may not be a lawyer, but I can read, and I can think. And I know bullshit when I see it.
Abortion and Slavery
If you’ve spent much time in Civil War discussion groups you’ve probably run into the argument that slavery would have ended in the South without the Civil War; therefore, the War hadn’t needed to be fought. Indeed, occasionally some southern apologist will insist that the South was well on the way toward giving up slavery and would have done so freely had the statist, Big Gubmint damnyankees not pushed the issue prematurely.
Well, certainly, by now slavery would have ended, although probably not by the free will of the slave states. It more likely would have ended by constitutional amendment once enough “free soil” states had entered the Union to form a majority.
In fact, that is what the plantation owners feared. And in 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected on a platform of keeping slavery out of the territories, which would ensure that new states entering the Union would be free soil states. Thus the election of Lincoln touched off the secession crisis, which in turn took the nation to war.
The southern plantation class, which controlled the South economically, politically and socially, was certain that the abolition of slavery would ruin them. They were prepared to fight to the death (or compel non-slave-owning whites to fight to the death in their place) to preserve slavery. The Declaration of Causes documents adopted by the states of Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas make it clear that secession was all about preserving slavery.
And may I suggest that a people determined to fight to the death to preserve something are not on the brink of giving that something up?
Anyway, the South started the war when South Carolina fired on the federal military reservation of Fort Sumter, and ever after they have blamed Lincoln for making them start it (that’s why it’s called the “War of Northern Aggression,” see; the damnyankees fought back). And after the war the former secessionists blamed Reconstruction for making them engage in race riots, lynchings, and other violence perpetrated upon the freed African Americans (even though much Reconstruction policy was enacted in reaction to the race riots, lynchings, etc.). Had the white plantation class been allowed more time to change their minds about slavery and end it on their own, which they would have done someday, then white southerners wouldn’t have been left with all those hard feelings that made them so violent. And then there wouldn’t have been a Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow or any of that stuff.
But after the war those damnyankee carpetbaggers conspired to temporarily disenfranchise southern white men just because they had engaged in armed rebellion against the government and thereby forced through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. And then the poor downtrodden southern white people just had no choice but to form the Klan and enact Jim Crow laws, because they hadn’t been given enough time to adjust.
Those of you who are much younger than I am and/or did not grow up in hollerin’ distance of Dixie might not have been exposed to this line of reasoning much, but believe me, it was common. Still is, in some circles.
Fast forward to today’s anti-abortion rights movement. Fetus People like to see themselves as the heirs of the abolitionists, and they compare the struggle to protect fetii with the stuggle to end slavery. And they like to evoke the Dred Scott decision, which declared that a black man could not be a citizen and could have no standing to bring suit against a white man. The “antis” want fetii to be given full citizenship status; those who would deny them that status are bad people, just like the justices who ruled against Dred Scott.
But in truth, the anti-choicers more and more remind me of the old white supremacists and Klansmen, not the abolitionists.
First, the line of reasoning that blames the abortion wars on Roe v. Wade (see previous post on abortion) and not on a faction of fanatics who will try to stop abortions by any means is just too much like saying the 13th Amendment was responsible for the formation of the Klan. Let’s pretend that tomorrow Roe is reversed. Does anyone seriously believe that states which allowed abortion to remain legal would not be descended upon by Randall Terry and the screaming culture of death hoardes? Puh-leeze …
The Right argues that the Roe v. Wade decision amounted to judicial activism and judges “ruling from the bench,” which is exactly the same thing they said about Brown v. Board of Education. Many on the Right insist they don’t really want to impose a ban on abortion; they just want the question to be decided by elected state legislatures according to the democratic process. Does anyone really think that if Roe were overturned tomorrow, and abortion given a full and fair debate in every statehouse, and the 50 states separately wrote abortion law that reflected majority opinion in each state, that the Fetus People would accept any state’s decision to keep abortion legal?
Hah.
The Fetus People simply do not accept any position on abortion but theirs, and they will not give up until their will is law. For the past 33 years these people have engaged in systematic intimidation and terrorism to impose their will. Let me repeat this passage from Eyal Press’s “My Father’s Abortion Wars” …
The flip side of the desire to rid the world of evil in accordance with your spiritual beliefs is the impulse among some of those convinced of their righteousness to demonize, and in extreme cases to want to eliminate, anyone who does not subscribe to them, something that, as I saw up close in Buffalo, is not a mind-set unique to Islamic fundamentalists. When the police removed protesters from a clinic in Buffalo one time, a spokeswoman for the local branch of Operation Rescue likened them to Nazi storm troopers. When a group of local religious leaders sympathetic to abortion rights held a meeting on another occasion, a protester assailed them as “ministers of Satan.” Driving past my father’s office while still in high school, I saw the signs emblazoned with his name. “Murderer!” “Baby-Killer!” On several Jewish holidays, including Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, a group called Project House Call organized demonstrations in front of doctors’ homes, choosing as their targets two local physicians who happened to be Jewish: my father and Slepian. Later, during the Spring of Life, radio ads blared, announcing: “Some doctors deliver babies. Some doctors kill babies!” My father and several other physicians were singled out by name. On the corner of Maple and Exeter Roads, a quarter-mile or so from my parents’ home, a six-foot red banner reading “Press Kills Children” was unfurled. In case anyone missed the banner, leaflets were distributed throughout the neighborhood.
These are not people who give a bleep about debate or the democratic process. And they are the cause of the abortion wars, which would be waged Roe v. Wade or no.
Some might argue that the pro-privacy Left is just as adamant to have its way, but when has anyone on the pro-privacy Left committed arsons and bombings, butyric acid attacks, and murders to get their way? In the 90 or so years in which abortion was illegal in most states — abortion didn’t become illegal until the late 19th century — I do not believe activists for abortion rights killed anyone, bombed anyone, or issued fatwas against the opposition. Instead, they worked within the system, which includes court challenges.
Let us revisit the old plantation slaveowners and ask another hypothetical question. Let’s say they’d been allowed more time to decide to give up slavery. Surely another generation, probably two, maybe more, of human beings would have lived their lives enslaved. And even if the slave states had been given more time, there is no guarantee that all slaveowners would have given up without a fight, or that slavery would not have left a residue of white supremacy no matter where or how it ended.
Today some on the Left argue that giving up Roe v. Wade would be smart strategy. Republicans have hidden behind Roe v. Wade long enough, they say. Without it, they’d be forced to deliver on their promises to ban abortion, thereby alienating the majority of voters. Or, they’d be forced to disappoint the Fetus People and forfeit their votes. Yet this would not end the abortion wars, and many women would suffer. And where abortion becomes illegal, the Fetus People will press for more — banning birth control and sex education, for example. The war will continue as long as the Fetus People choose to wage it. They will not be appeased.
So let’s stop kidding ourselves that there is anything that can be done to end the abortion wars. Like extremist Islamic terrorists, the Fetus People believe in their own absolute righteousness and will not stop fighting — to the death — to get their way. Like the slaveowners of earlier times, there is nothing else to be done but oppose them.
See also: Fetus People Follies.
Way to Go, Molly!
Blog for Choice Sunday
Eyal Press’s “My Father’s Abortion War” in today’s New York Times magazine is a sometimes sobering, sometimes frustrating reflection on Press’s father, an ob-gyn who devotes part of his practice to performing abortions, and the larger struggle over choice.
Eyal Press provides keen insight into opposition to abortion — the sobering part — but blames Roe v. Wade for the ongoing abortion wars — the frustrating part.
Dr. Press’s medical practice is in Buffalo, New York. Until 1998 he and Dr. Barnett Slepian often covered for each other on weekends at a Buffalo abortion clinic. Then Dr. Slepian was murdered — shot in the back by an anti-choice fanatic — and Eyal Press feared his father was next. Both Dr. Slepian and Dr. Press had been “subjected to abrasive treatment – protests in front of their offices and homes, harassment of their patients, death threats,” writes Eyal Press. “I had witnessed some of this firsthand while growing up.”
After Dr. Slepian’s murder, Eyal Press tried to persuade his father to retire.
There was silence. He cupped his chin in his hands and sighed. Then, looking over in my direction, with weariness but no hint of acquiescence in his eyes, he started telling me about his upbringing in Israel, how he got used to living in a world full of danger and not allowing it to deter him from doing what he felt was right.
“It’s wrong, wrong,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“To give in to fanatics, to terrorists.”
The very next morning, around 10, as I was talking to my mother, the phone rang. She picked it up.
“Death threat?” she said. “Death threat?. . .Excuse me, you’ll have to speak with my son.”
Her hand shook as she passed me the phone. It was a detective from the Police Department. He was calling to inform us that a newspaper in Hamilton, Ontario, which days earlier received a package containing a photograph of Slepian with an X drawn through his face, had just received an anonymous threat that my father was “next on the list.”
After interviewing a soft-spoken woman who has dedicated her life to abortion clinic protests — Eyal Press doesn’t say if he told her his father was an abortion provider — Press praised her religious sincerity, and added,
Yet as the scholar Jessica Stern notes, there are two sides to religion – “one that is spiritual and universalist, and the other particularist and sectarian.” The flip side of the desire to rid the world of evil in accordance with your spiritual beliefs is the impulse among some of those convinced of their righteousness to demonize, and in extreme cases to want to eliminate, anyone who does not subscribe to them, something that, as I saw up close in Buffalo, is not a mind-set unique to Islamic fundamentalists. When the police removed protesters from a clinic in Buffalo one time, a spokeswoman for the local branch of Operation Rescue likened them to Nazi storm troopers. When a group of local religious leaders sympathetic to abortion rights held a meeting on another occasion, a protester assailed them as “ministers of Satan.” Driving past my father’s office while still in high school, I saw the signs emblazoned with his name. “Murderer!” “Baby-Killer!” On several Jewish holidays, including Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, a group called Project House Call organized demonstrations in front of doctors’ homes, choosing as their targets two local physicians who happened to be Jewish: my father and Slepian. Later, during the Spring of Life, radio ads blared, announcing: “Some doctors deliver babies. Some doctors kill babies!” My father and several other physicians were singled out by name. On the corner of Maple and Exeter Roads, a quarter-mile or so from my parents’ home, a six-foot red banner reading “Press Kills Children” was unfurled. In case anyone missed the banner, leaflets were distributed throughout the neighborhood.
I call Eyal Press’s work frustrating because it is too much written through the prism of his experiences in Buffalo, New York, a city with a large Catholic population that is far, far away from the Bible Belt. In Eyal Press’s version of anti-choice history, abortion didn’t become a hot-button issue until after Roe v. Wade, and the anti-choice movment didn’t get organized until well into the 1980s. “During the 1970’s, when the opposition to abortion indeed came almost exclusively from Catholics – the Catholic Physicians Guild, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo – the right-to-life movement wasn’t terribly radical,” he writes. But the mid-1980s saw the “political reawakening of evangelicals” who began “filtering into the movement.”
Had Eyal Press grown up closer to the Bible Belt, he would have seen a very different history. The way I remember it is that before Roe v. Wade the Missouri state legislature was engaged in a Second Civil War over whether to legalize abortion. The state capitol at Jefferson City was besieged with pros and antis, and it seemed little else was on the legislative agenda. In 1972, when I was a journalism student at the University of Missouri, contingents from various evangelical student organizations regularly marched into the newsroom of the Columbia Missourian (the J School publishes a community daily newspaper to provide students with real-world experience) demanding that their anti-abortion press release du jour be given space on page 1, unedited. (Fortunately the “professors,” who were mostly former newspaper reporters, were a thick-skinned crew who didn’t like being told what to publish.)
Eyal Press of Buffalo, New York, thinks that Roe v. Wade began the abortion wars, but in Missouri and other midwestern states the announcement of the Roe decision in 1973 brought about a temporary cease-fire. State legislatures were allowed to turn their attention to other matters, and anti-choice groups withdrew to consider new strategies.
Abortion clinic arsons began three years later, in 1976. Bombings began in 1978.
Other nations are not tearing themselves apart over abortion, writes Press.
“No other nation obsesses about abortion the way we do,” the columnist Michael Kinsley noted recently. Not Italy, home to the Vatican; not France, England or Germany. Only in America is a medical procedure that was legalized more than three decades ago at risk of once again being criminalized. Only here have doctors routinely taken to wearing bulletproof vests and hiring armed guards for protection.
He blames Roe v. Wade for this. “By short-circuiting a debate that was only beginning (not unlike the issue of gay marriage today), Roe would escalate the very conflict it was designed to quell.”
Many argue that if only the SCOTUS hadn’t handed down Roe v. Wade, by now most state legislatures would have at least partly legalized abortion, and the American people would have reached something like a consensus. Some even argue that most states were well on the way to legalizing abortion, and the Roe decision had the effect of making anti-choice opinion more entrenched. To which I say … hooey. In a large part of the country the abortion wars were hot and heavy before Roe v. Wade was decided, and I believe that in most of the South and Midwest abortion would never have been legalized.
The argument is that most citizens, even in the South and Midwest, support keeping abortion legal; therefore, state legislatures would have bowed to the will of the majority and legalized it. Maybe; maybe not. A pro-choice majority nationwide doesn’t seem to stop the U.S. Congress from passing anti-choice legislation. And geographic proximity does not make state legislatures more sensitive to the public will; if anything, most citizens know less about what their state legislature is up to than they do about what goes on in Washington. As long as social reactionaries are able to swing close elections (or convince politicians that they can), politicians will cater to them.
Press writes that, in Europe, nations “decriminalizing abortion on the grounds of health rather than rights” and left open the possibility that abortion could be re-criminalized through regular legislative channels. Hence, anti-abortion terrorism didn’t catch on there. But according to Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns and Money,
What’s interesting about this is that Canada’s abortion policy–there are no legislative restrictions on abortion at all–was created by the judiciary, which struck down a national abortion law. While many people assert that judicial policy-making is much more “divisive” than when issues are resolved by legislatures, the court’s intervention is so popular 15 years after the fact that proposing even modest abortion legislation is electoral suicide. The lesson of this is obvious: people evaluate judicial policy-making the same way they evaluate other forms of policy-making. The idea that prior to Roe v. Wade American abortion policy was represented by a stable consensus is absurd, but a convenient myth for people who oppose abortion, because the legislative status quo was heavily slanted against the pro-choice majority. Abortion policy in the U.S. is divisive because it’s divisive; it doesn’t matter whether it’s courts or legislatures that do the policy-making.
I agree with Scott. I believe hysteria over abortion reflects something in American culture; the same something that keeps us fighting over evolution and other aspects of modernity long accepted in the rest of the civilized world. And later today or tomorrow I want to blog about the parallel between the abortion controversy and the abolition of slavery — and it’s not the parallel the Right sees, believe me.
See also: Other recent Mahablog posts on abortion; Blog for Choice.
Way to Go, John!
Caption Contest!
Be careful what you say — anybody might be wiretapped. Seems to me this vintage World War I poster would lend itself to a wiretap-related caption. Whoever comes up with the best zinger wins a cafepress T-shirt or poster with the updated Miss Liberty graphic!
Of course, the Bushies are goin’ way beyond phone wiretaps. Mo Dowd writes today (courtesy of True Blue Liberal) that she doesn’t appreciate “Dick Cheney ogling my Googling.”
Because what I’m Googling, of course, is Dick Cheney. I have to constantly monitor how Vice Voyeur is pushing the federal government to constantly monitor millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls, e-mail notes and Internet searches.
If you want to know why the Grim Peeper is willing to turn this country into a police state to take his version of democracy to other countries, just do a Google search under “antiterrorism,” “government snooping,” “overreaching” and “fruitcake.”
I tried “fruitcake” and got, well, fruitcake, but “government snooping” brings up some real interesting hits.
Stop Chris Matthews
In the past few months I’ve taken up watching Hardball again after more than four years of avoiding it. I swore off in 2001 because host Chris Matthews was just too obviouly shilling for the VRWC.
More recently he had settled down a bit. Matthews still has shit for brains, but sometimes he has good guests. His interview style is based on the ten thousand monkeys principle — you know, if you leave ten thousand monkeys in a warehouse full of typewriters, eventually — it may take centuries, but eventually — random monkey typing will produce an actual sentence. In Matthews’s case, the technique is to spew out as many words as he can in the course of a program, and randomly some of the words come together to make points. Or not. But, like I said, recently he’s had some good guests.
But this week Tweety the VRWC shill is back in all his glory. I swear he spent his entire Tuesday and Wednesday programs wanking over Hillary Clinton and the “plantation” speech. I believe the only thing that kept him from going at it again for a third full night was the Osama bin Laden tape.
And the monkey mouth spake, thus: Bin Laden “sounds like an over the top Michael Moore here, if not a Michael Moore.”
I admit I heard this and let it wash past me like the noise that it is, but today Peter Daou writes that we should demand an apology. And he’s right.
One reason the Right gets catered to the mass media is that it throws a screaming fit over every little slight, real or imagined, of their inviolable world view. Today, for example, the Right Blogosphere is on the rampage over the caption of this Associated Press photo: “Exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden is seen in this April 1998 file photo in Afghanistan.”
The problem? Michelle Malkin: “Got that? Osama isn’t a mass-murdering terrorist mastermind. He’s just a poor, exiled dissident who disagrees with civilization.”
They’re on a rampage over this caption, I tell you. Check out the links at Memeorandum.
Now, I think bin Laden is a mass-murdering terrorist mastermind, but by journalism 101 rules he’s an alleged mass-murdering terrorist mastermind until found guilty in court. There are certain principles and practices that professional journalists are supposed to adhere to, and one of them is maintaining a dispassionate distance from one’s subjects. ObL is an exiled Saudi dissident, among other things, so it’s a factually objective caption.
But as Peter Daou says, “last I checked, Michael Moore didn’t massacre thousands of innocent Americans.” Matthews’s comment was not professional. It was not dispassionate or objective. It was shilling for the Right by slandering a well-known personality of the Left. Daou quotes John Kerry:
You’d think the only focus tonight would be on destroying Osama Bin Laden, not comparing him to an American who opposes the war whether you like him or not. You want a real debate that America needs? Here goes: If the administration had done the job right in Tora Bora we might not be having discussions on Hardball about a new Bin Laden tape. How dare Scott McClellan tell America that this Administration puts terrorists out of business when had they put Osama Bin Laden out of business in Afghanistan when our troops wanted to, we wouldn’t have to hear this barbarian’s voice on tape. That’s what we should be talking about in America.
So today I join many others and demand that Chris Matthews publicly apologize to Michael Moore. If you want to join in, you can email Hardball — [email protected] — and MSNBC TV — [email protected]. The phone number for the Secaucus studio from which Hardball originates is 201-583-5000, and the fax is 201-583-5453. Contacting your local MSNBC affiliates that carry Hardball might be even more effective, though.
Update: What James Wolcott says:
Michael Moore didn’t bring down the towers, Howard Dean isn’t responsible for Bin Laden remaining at large, and, unlike the fisking blogger, the overwhelming majority of liberal Manhattanites didn’t lose their nerve and flee the city after 9/11. They, we, stayed put. It’s the cowardly lions who curled up into a fetal ball and remain there today, talking tough and fooling no one but themselves.
Stop Alito
Truce, Shmoose
If it weren’t for the fact it was released on al Jazeera, I’d wonder if the new bin Laden tape hadn’t been fabricated in the White House basement. The last time we heard from him, I believe, was on the eve of the 2004 elections. And here he is again, just when Georgie needs a diversion from this little Fourth Amendment problem.
On the tape, bin Laden suggests a truce in Iraq. To which I say, whoop-di-doo. Only 7 percent of the people we’re fighting in Iraq are affiliated with al Qaeda, according to authoritative sources, and we don’t know how many of the 7 percent actually take orders from bin Laden. Osama’s talkin’ out of his butt, says I.
Our little altercation in Afghanistan may have started out as a conflict between al Qaeda and supporters versus Afghan freedom fighters with western military support. And the scuffle in Iraq may have been conceived as one between BushCo and anti-western Islamic terrorism. But it seems to me that the violence in both countries is spinning out of control and is in the hands of more conflicting factions than you can shake a kufie at. It’s way past the point where two sides can shake hands and make a deal, even if they both wanted to. We’re not in control over there, but neither is Osama bin Laden.
I’m not sayin’ that’s the way I want it. That’s just the way it is.
Osama says he is preparing new attacks on the U.S., which isn’t exactly a big surprise, either.
ObL wanted to talk to Americans because increasing numbers of Americans want to pull out of Iraq. Naturally this touched off fury among the die hards of the Right who believe ObL is the real mastermind behind Moveon.org. For an example of crushing non-logic, check out this post. Osama says most Americans would be willing to leave Iraq. Moveon.org says most Americans would be willing to leave Iraq. The blogger lets this astonishing coincidence stand on its own, as if it self-evidently proved something.
I got news for you, toots; a majority of Americans think invading Iraq was a mistake and think we ought to be working real hard at getting out. That’s what polls say. Facts is facts.
If both Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush remark that the sky is blue, what does that tell us? (a) ObL and GWB are secretly in cahoots, or (b) the sky is blue.
Work on it, son.
Whether today’s message has any real significance, or whether it’ll prove to be something the Right will wank over for a while and then forget … well, your guess is as good as mine. Is there anything we should be doing differently because of this tape? Possibly beefing up security in major cities, but given the general waste of space the Department of Homeland Security seems to be, the cities are on their own. There’s no meaningful hope for a truce, unfortunately.