Political MoJo

The board that governs the Boy Scouts of America plans to vote on Thursday on a proposal to lift the ban on gay members.

But while the organization may soon welcome gay scouts, they are apparently not so welcoming of treehuggers. The Center for Investigative Reporting posted a story this week on the Scouts booting out Kim Kuska, a naturalist and former biology teacher who been affiliated with the Scouts for 50 years, over his "obsession" with protecting the rare Dudley's lousewort:

Since the 1970s, the Eagle Scout and adult Scout leader-turned-whistle-blower has worked to protect the plant from extinction at Camp Pico Blanco, a Boy Scout camp nestled in the mountains along the Little Sur River south of Monterey, Calif. The camp is home to nearly 50 percent of all known specimens of Dudley’s lousewort, a flowering fern-like plant found in only three places in the world.

But over the past four decades, Scout officials and camp staff have threatened its existence repeatedly by harvesting old-growth trees it needs to survive, crushing some of the few remaining plants and introducing potentially competitive species. Under state law, it is illegal to harm a plant that is classified as rare.

The camp also cut down several trees in the old-growth forest in 2011 without a permit, a Scout official acknowledged.

Kuska's whistleblowing reportedly got him drummed out of the Scouts earlier this month. Read the whole story here.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

On Tuesday, judges on the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an Arizona law that would have banned abortions at 20 weeks. The judges called the law "unconstitutional under an unbroken stream of Supreme Court authority." This is the first 20-week ban to be struck down in court. (Correction: Idaho's ban was also found unconstitutional in March.)

The judges wrote that Arizona "may not deprive a woman of the choice to terminate her pregnancy at any point prior to viability," echoing the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade 40 years ago that abortion should be legal up to the point that a fetus is can survive outside of the womb, which is usually construed as 24 weeks.

Anti-abortion state legislatures have passed a number of laws in recent years shortening the period in which abortion is legal. Arizona's 20-week ban was not the first in the US, but it was the first one that national reproductive rights groups challenged in court. It was, at the time, the strictest in the country, as it dated the 20 weeks from a woman's most recent menstruation rather than from the date of conception. (Taking basic biology and math into account, the bill actually banned abortion 18 weeks after the woman became pregnant). But after the Arizona law was passed in April 2012, other states passed even stricter rules; Arkansas banned abortions at 12 weeks in March 2013, and North Dakota banned them at 6 weeks a few weeks later.

Meanwhile, an anti-abortion lawmaker from Arizona has been trying to export the law. Republican Congressman Trent Franks introduced a bill last week that would impose a 20-week ban in Washington, DC as well.

Reproductive rights groups hope that Tuesday's ruling sends a warning to other states that might consider similar restrictions. "Today's decision is a huge victory in the fight to protect women's fundamental reproductive rights, and it should send a clear message to anti-choice politicians that their attempts to deprive pregnant women of critical health care are clearly unconstitutional and will not hold up in court," said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which joined with the ACLU to challenge the Arizona law.

The Center for Reproductive Rights also filed suit against another anti-abortion law in North Dakota earlier this month, and is expected to challenge the state's 6-week ban as well. CRR and the ACLU also won a preliminary injunction last week blocking Arkansas' 12-week ban from taking effect.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

On Monday, Guatemala's Constitutional Court overturned the conviction of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, an army general who ruled as de facto president from 1982 to 1983. On May 10, Ríos Montt, 86, was found guilty by a three-panel tribunal on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to 80 years in the slammer; he is the first former head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. But less than two weeks later, Guatemala's highest court threw out all proceedings in the case dating back to April 19, in part thanks to an aggressive lobbying effort by the nation's most influential business federation. Due to the court's 3-2 decision, the way forward—for Ríos Montt's opponents, for his supporters—has been thrown into question. After Monday's ruling, Ríos Montt was sent back to house arrest, where he had been since the case started in January 2012.

Here's a quick reminder of who Efraín Ríos Montt is, and what he did.

1. During his 17-month stint as military dictator, he oversaw the genocide by his armed forces of at least 1,771 members of the indigenous Maya Ixil population. Roughly 100 survivors testified during the course of his trial.

This Guatemala City newspaper reads, "Ríos Montt charged with 11 massacres." Via Granito: How to Nail a Dictator/Facebook

2. Along with the mass murder, his military regime carried out a policy of forced displacement, forced assimilation, torture, systematic rape and sexual assault, starvation, and arbitrary execution against those labeled as political opponents.

3. Due to his staunchly anti-communist attitudes during the Guatemalan Civil War, the general received plenty of financial, military, and political support from President Ronald Reagan's administration and friends in the United States. (Ríos Montt is an alumnus of the School of the Americas, a Department of Defense-owned institute and notorious tyrant-mill at Fort Benning, Georgia that taught torture, blackmail, death-squad tactics, and counter-insurgency to numerous Latin American strongmen and human rights abusers.)

Here's Reagan speaking to reporters following his meeting with Ríos Montt in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on December 4, 1982:

Well, ladies and gentlemen, President Ríos Montt and I have just had a useful exchange of ideas on the problems of the region and on our bilateral relations...I know that President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment. His country is confronting a brutal challenge from guerrillas armed and supported by others outside Guatemala. I have assured the president that the United States is committed to support his efforts to restore democracy and to address the root causes of this violent insurgency. I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice. My administration will do all it can to support his progressive efforts.

For all the accusations of obscene human rights violations, Reagan maintained that Ríos Montt was simply getting a "bum rap" from naïve activists.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

On Friday, I wrote a piece for Mother Jones speculating that government spying on press communications may not be "unprecedented," as Associated Press head Gary Pruitt put it, but simply rarely disclosed. The rules requiring disclosure of such surveillance, after all, only appear to apply to "subpoenas" for "telephone toll records"; they do not cover other secret tools deployed by federal law enforcement, such as National Security Letters. Even outside the shadowy world of intelligence, as federal magistrate judge Stephen Smith has observed, court orders granting government access to electronic communication records routinely remain secret indefinitely. I suggested that there could be quite a few other cases like the AP story that we've never learned about, even if the Justice Department has been scrupulously following its own rules, because such cases might not involve grand jury subpoenas for phone logs.

It is rare for someone who writes about the intelligence community to have speculation of this sort confirmed almost instantly, but a report in the Washington Post Monday has shined a spotlight on another hitherto unreported leak investigation in which the Justice Department obtained a warrant to read the email of Fox News reporter James Rosen. The warrant in that case was sealed for over a year; it appears to have remained publicly unnoticed until today—nearly three years after the search of Rosen's email was authorized. Should anyone believe this is the only such instance of the government snooping into a reporter's email that hasn't yet come to light?

The Rosen case is especially unsettling because the warrant affidavit suggests that Rosen himself could be subject to prosecution under the Espionage Act, on the grounds that his alleged encouragement to a source to provide classified information amounted to "conspiracy." The attempt to redefine a routine and necessary part of national security reporting as crime is unprecedented.

Whether Rosen is prosecuted or not, the Justice Department targeting a reporter as a possible "co-conspirator" is troubling. The case against National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake—who revealed massive waste in the agency's deals with intelligence contractors—ultimately collapsed. The information he'd revealed was embarrassing to the government, not dangerous to national security. But Drake's life was shattered, and a clear message sent to others who might seek to embarrass the government. A similar dynamic is at play in this case. Reporters are already feeling the chilling effects of the AP leak investigation. The government may or may not succeed in jailing leakers (or, perhaps at some point, reporters), but the point is to ensure that government sources are too scared to talk to press without approval.

That might sound like a fine idea if at risk were only vital national security secrets whose publication would endanger the United States. But as even top intelligence officials have acknowledged, overclassification is rampant in government. Much basic information, without which effective national security reporting would be impossible, is reflexively classified, whether or not it poses any realistic security risks, and reporters routinely discuss such information with sources. In practice, that means the government can pick and choose which leakers to go after—and which ones to wink at, because they're serving the administration's interests. No doubt, the government does have an interest in—and an obligation—to protect legitimate secrets, but an aggressive campaign that targets reporters and subjects them to broad and secret intrusions (and maybe prosecutions as well) will undermine a necessary check on government power and prevent the public from learning crucial information about what is done in its name.

A version of this post was first published on Cato at Liberty.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet