Saturday, December 15, 2007
Reconquista!
-- by Dave
"Mexicans!! Tonight we dine in ... SAN DIEGO!!!!"
Now that's funny.
[Hat tip to the l'il bro. For more on "Reconquista!" see here.]
Friday, December 14, 2007
Huckabee's 120 days
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20180228050948im_/http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_BLlJwLdIRpk/R2LRW1qJTVI/AAAAAAAAAbg/lbS7MBUsgKI/s400/ICE+raids.jpg)
-- by Dave
I've been trying to envision what Mike Huckabee's immigration plan -- the one calling for the deportation of 10 to 12 million "illegal immigrants" within a 120-day period -- would look like.
After all, we're talking about truly enormous numbers. The logistics alone would be daunting: we're talking about rounding up and shipping out 100,000 people a day. These are numbers that make the notorious Palmer Raids of the 1920s look like a drop in the bucket.
Just to get a rough idea what we're talking about, let's review what recent raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have looked like.
In Idaho:
- One family with members who are U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents said they were terrified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who came to their home in the predawn hours accompanied by Blaine County sheriff's deputies. No one in their home was arrested.
"They pounded on my door so hard that my walls shook," Dana Ayala, a Wood River Valley resident and U.S. citizen, told the Idaho Community Action Network. "My 19-year-old son opened the door to see what was happening, and six agents armed with guns, Tasers and flashlights pushed their way into my home."
... "It is clear that ICE agents terrorized the community, including U.S. citizen children who were sleeping when the raid occurred," said Leo Morales, a community organizer for ICAN. "In several homes, children were left crying as ICE agents interrogated parents and hauled them away.
Testimonies gathered on Tuesday also indicated that in several instances ICE agents walked into the home looking for individuals not living there, then arrested the people in the home with no proof of immigration status.
In some instances, federal agents rushed into the house when a child opened the door."
Arlington Heights, Ill.:
- On the morning of Feb. 27, ICE agents swept into the Cano Packaging Corporation in Arlington Heights, Ill., a mostly middle class, white suburb 25 miles from Chicago. The agents arrested the undocumented immigrants who had been hired by a temporary staffing agency to work at Cano. The nine men and eight women were then bused to a jail, which also serves as a regional immigration detention facility.
Maria de Carmen Santana says she was invasively strip-searched, and told the process was a search for hidden drugs. She was handcuffed so tightly that it left marks on her wrists, she says, and she was unable to get pain medication for severe tendonitis in her ankle.
“It was disgusting how we were treated,” Santana, 46, says in Spanish. “We aren’t murderers. We aren’t drug addicts. Our only crime is being here to work without papers.”
One woman alleges she was denied medical help while vomiting, and another when suffering an intense migraine. An ailing diabetic man was forced to do exercises as punishment for not making his bed. Detainees say the facility’s meal portions left them extremely hungry, and a guard threw out fruit that detainee Leonel Trujillo had stashed in his cell.
Arkadelphia, Ark.:
- On Tuesday, July 26, between 30 and 35 children, some as young as three months old, were left stranded when federal agents arrested 119 immigrant workers at the Petit Jean Poultry plant in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. No provisions were made for these children as their parents were carted 70 miles away to a detention center to await deportation.
Many of these families, now forcibly torn apart, had lived and worked at the company for years. Of those detained, 115 were from Mexico, two were from Honduras and the other two were from El Salvador and Guatemala.
This surprise raid caught the town’s mayor, the Clark County sheriff, and the plant manager by surprise, and no provisions were made to care for the children or to alert relatives. The federal agents failed to even contact the Department of Human Services, the agency that is usually responsible for abandoned children.
“A lot of those families had kids in day care in different places, and they didn’t know why Mommy and Daddy didn’t come pick them up,” Arkadelphia Mayor Charles Hollingshead told the Associated Press.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman claimed Friday that every one of the immigrants had lied to the agents, telling them they had no children. He later changed his story, admitting that the detainees did tell the agents that they had children left behind. Still, the agents did not allow the detainees to contact their families to make arrangements for their children.
Jose Luis Vidal told the Associated Press that his sister and brother-in-law left behind children aged ten, five and one when they were deported to Laredo, Mexico.
New Bedford, Mass.:
- The heads of three state agencies appeared before the Joint Committee on Children, Families and Persons with Disabilities to discuss the impact of the March 6raid on New Bedford's children. ...
The raid on Michael Bianco Inc., in which 361 immigrants were arrested, had a huge ripple effect across the immigrant community, according to state officials. Eighty-four children in New Bedford were directly affected by the raid, losing one or both of their parents. Children were left in the care of aunts, uncles, baby-sitters and even landlords. One baby was hospitalized for dehydration after being separated from its nursing mother.
Gov. Deval Patrick has called the raid's impact on families a "humanitarian crisis."
And the trauma is continuing, according to Dennis Gauthier, head of the DSS office in New Bedford.
His agency discovered two days ago that a 16-year-old girl, "living in fear," had been cared for by a landlord for the past two weeks.
DSS has also placed three teenagers who were swept up in the raid in foster care, he said, because ICE would not allow them to be released to parents who are illegal immigrants.
DSS is still pressing ICE to release 10 parents to care for children, including the mother of a 4-year old boy who is not eating and is severely underweight.
"This child needs his mother back," said Mr. Spence, noting that the child is living with his father. "This child is not safe. This child is at risk. Release the mother with a monitoring bracelet, that's what we've asked."
Marshalltown, Iowa:
- Like the March 6 raid on the Michael Bianco Inc. leather goods factory in New Bedford, in which more than 300 workers were arrested, the Swift operation left some children stranded for hours, and many others in the care of friends and relatives. ICE flew many detainees to an out-of-state federal detention facility before immigrants' advocates had a chance to speak with them about their children. Some detainees were not initially honest with ICE investigators about whether they had children, fearing they, too, would be taken into custody even though some of those children were US citizens.
And like the New Bedford raid, the Swift raids drew harsh criticism from the governor, who criticized ICE's limited cooperation with state officials, including its refusal to release information in a timely fashion on who was detained and where.
Immigration raids nationwide have increased in recent months. Scenes similar to those in New Bedford and Marshalltown have played out in cities like Worthington, Minn., and Stillmore, Ga., where a poultry plant was raided last Labor Day. In Santa Fe, 30 undocumented workers were arrested in a raid in February, and Mayor David Coss said he was outraged that "families are being torn apart, literally."
Richmond, Calif.:
- In and around Richmond, Calif., 119 people were arrested in January in a series of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Richmond Mayor Gail McLaughlin said that although authorities characterized those arrested as "criminals and gang bangers," only 18 had criminal convictions.
"I was shocked and disgusted," she said. "The overwhelming majority of their sweeps arrested hard-working men, mothers and school children."
Demographers say about half of working-age illegal immigrants in the United States have children, most of whom are U.S.-born and therefore citizens. Non-profit groups are helping these families prepare for the worst.
Immigrant parents are signing forms designating who should get custody of their children if they're detained or deported. Often, that means a relative with legal status.
This is just a sampling, of course. Now try to imagine, if you will, these kinds of nightmares being amplified by a factor of a half-million or more.
... I know it's hard to imagine such a thing. Because we all know that as the push to search out all 12 million intensifies, so will the ugliness of the raids.
And let's not forget that rounding people up is only the beginning: There is, fortunately, such a thing as due process in America, even for non-citizens, which means that each one of these 10 to 12 million people will have to have their cases reviewed. In the meantime, they'll have to be placed in detention centers.
When you're talking about 100,000 people a day, you're talking numbers well beyond the capacity of any current holding facility or detention center operating in America. And because the need will be ostensibly short-term, that means we'll almost certainly once again be building temporary mass detention centers -- otherwise known as concentration camps.
Of course, this country already has some experience with that. And sure enough, in response simply to the increased demand under Bush's relatively modest push for illegal-immigrant roundups, we're building them again.
Just what kind of America is it that Mike Huckabee envisions? Has anyone thought about what this country will look like -- not just ethnically and racially, but ethically and morally -- after he has his 120 days?
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Please explain
-- by Dave
Head-scratcher of the day:
Mike Huckabee, in an interview with Cap'n Ed, regarding the clemency he offered to Wayne Dumond:
It's pretty hard to comprehend how caving in to frothing Clinton-conspiracy mongers, and in the process releasing a violent rapist who raped and killed again, is anything other than one of the lamest definitions of "integrity" ever concocted.
Nevermind the bizarre logic. (Um, so, Mike: You're saying if you'd known then that you were going to run for president someday, you'd never have operated with integrity? Oh, forget it.) Still ... exactly what kind of defense is that?
Fact is, Huckabee's behavior in the whole Dumond episode was typically Republican: running with the howling pack because that's how you get ahead politically. But in the Bizarro Universe that is the GOP, I guess that's what they call integrity.
Head-scratcher of the day:
Mike Huckabee, in an interview with Cap'n Ed, regarding the clemency he offered to Wayne Dumond:
- "If I'd have known then that I was going to run for president, and I was more interested in my political future than taking my job seriously and being responsible and operating with integrity, I wouldn't have ever -- I would never have done a clemency."
It's pretty hard to comprehend how caving in to frothing Clinton-conspiracy mongers, and in the process releasing a violent rapist who raped and killed again, is anything other than one of the lamest definitions of "integrity" ever concocted.
Nevermind the bizarre logic. (Um, so, Mike: You're saying if you'd known then that you were going to run for president someday, you'd never have operated with integrity? Oh, forget it.) Still ... exactly what kind of defense is that?
Fact is, Huckabee's behavior in the whole Dumond episode was typically Republican: running with the howling pack because that's how you get ahead politically. But in the Bizarro Universe that is the GOP, I guess that's what they call integrity.
Freedom vs. terror
-- by Dave
Be sure to check out my weekly Firedoglake post, "Civil Liberties and Terrorism", a discussion of Jane Harman's current anti-domestic-terrorism legislation:
Unfortunately, it's eaten up all my blogging time today. Hope you find it worthy.
Be sure to check out my weekly Firedoglake post, "Civil Liberties and Terrorism", a discussion of Jane Harman's current anti-domestic-terrorism legislation:
- As a journalist who has spent some time reporting on -- and in the process, studying -- domestic terrorism, I've been long dismayed by the Bush administration's political-marketing approach to terrorism, emphasizing the threat of foreign terrorists in the wake of 9/11 while displaying a distinct blindness to the ongoing threat from the domestic side.
So when I first heard about Rep. Jane Harman's "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007" -- which looseheadprop has already discussed a bit -- I was intrigued. After all, a cursory glance at it indicated that it represented a reprioritization of our anti-terrorism policies to a more comprehensive strategy, one that's been lacking since George W. Bush's presidential tenure began.
But a closer look at the bill -- particularly the context in which it's arising, the elements pushing it forward, and the significant incursion on civil liberties for which it potentially opens the floodgates -- makes clear that, instead of offering effective tools to defeat terrorists, it's likely if anything to make matters worse. Certainly, it's nothing that serious progressives should support; the sooner it is shot down, the better.
I first heard about it a few weeks ago when I received an e-mail from Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise, who was in the process of writing a story about it, inquiring if I'd heard of the legislation. At the time, I hadn't; and my initial response, based on a cursory examination, was that it looked, at least on the surface, like a potentially effective measure that would reorient our priorities on fighting terrorism.
Still, there were nagging issues, not the least of which was that the "national commission" that it would create would be exempt under the Federal Advisory Commission Act, which is designed to ensure transparency and openness to the public for its activities. Indeed, the more I looked, the more it became apparent the entity it would create would have little if any public accountability at all -- and would actually resemble some of the witch-hunt commissions that have haunted past episodes of American history.
But in-depth policy analysis is not my bailiwick, so I consulted people in the civil-rights business what their opinions were, and what I heard back was more than enough to raise real doubts in my mind about the legislation.
Unfortunately, it's eaten up all my blogging time today. Hope you find it worthy.
Civil Liberties and Terrorism
[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]
As a journalist who has spent some time reporting on — and in the
process, studying — domestic terrorism, I’ve been long dismayed by the Bush administration’s political-marketing approach
to terrorism, emphasizing the threat of foreign terrorists in the wake
of 9/11 while displaying a distinct blindness to the ongoing threat from
the domestic side.
So when I first heard about Rep. Jane Harman’s "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007" — which looseheadprop has already discussed a bit — I was intrigued. After all, a cursory glance indicated that it represented a reprioritization of our anti-terrorism policies to a more comprehensive strategy, one that’s been lacking since George W. Bush’s presidential tenure began.
But a closer look at the bill — particularly the context in which it’s arising, the elements pushing it forward, and the significant incursion on civil liberties for which it potentially opens the floodgates — makes clear that, instead of offering effective tools to defeat terrorists, it’s likely if anything to make matters worse. Certainly, it’s nothing that serious progressives should support; the sooner it is shot down, the better.
I first heard about it a few weeks ago when I received an e-mail from Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise, who was in the process of writing a story about it, inquiring if I’d heard of the legislation. At the time, I hadn’t; and my initial response, based on a cursory examination, was that it looked, at least on the surface, like a potentially effective measure that would reorient our priorities on fighting terrorism.
Still, there were nagging issues, not the least of which was that the "national commission" that it would create would be exempt under the Federal Advisory Commission Act, which is designed to ensure transparency and openness to the public for its activities. Indeed, the more I looked, the more it became apparent the entity it would create would have little if any public accountability at all — and would actually resemble some of the witch-hunt commissions that have haunted past episodes of American history.
But in-depth policy analysis is not my bailiwick, so I consulted people in the civil-rights business what their opinions were, and what I heard back was more than enough to raise real doubts in my mind about the legislation.
Lindsay’s In These Times piece directly touched on these issues. Notably, she obtained assessments from people who are invovled in both researching and organizing against domestic terrorists, particularly the far-right variety, many of whom I consider research colleagues. And the response was uniformly negative.
Mike German:
As Beyerstein observes:
It became publicly obvious, though, that the administration’s antiterrorism strategy was nigh-useless with the FBI’s insistence that the most dangerous domestic-terrorist threat to Americans is actually the Earth Liberation Front. As I noted at the time:
It’s a profoundly counter-productive approach, because defeating terrorism — really defeating it, which ultimately means preventing it — requires not the brute and violent excision of terrorists but the removal of the conditions (typically unaddressed grievances) that inspires people to such lengths in the first place. And the American system of government, predicated on a Constitution dedicated to the political empowerment of ordinary citizens, is in the end one of the most powerful tools for defusing this threat.
As German, in his excellent book Thinking Like a Terrorist: Insights of a Former FBI Undercover Agent, puts it:
We’ll never defeat them by taking away their civil rights. What will work, in fact, is emphasizing our liberties and ensuring that they are protected from abuse both by the government and by their fellow citizens.
In that respect, passing a federal bias-crimes law will do more to protect Americans from acts of terrorism than creating an unaccountable national commission ever will, since it would seriously enhance the law-enforcement tools we already have. Jane Harman and the rest of the Democratic leadership recently had their chance to do something about that — and, well, we all know how that turned out, don’t we?
So when I first heard about Rep. Jane Harman’s "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007" — which looseheadprop has already discussed a bit — I was intrigued. After all, a cursory glance indicated that it represented a reprioritization of our anti-terrorism policies to a more comprehensive strategy, one that’s been lacking since George W. Bush’s presidential tenure began.
But a closer look at the bill — particularly the context in which it’s arising, the elements pushing it forward, and the significant incursion on civil liberties for which it potentially opens the floodgates — makes clear that, instead of offering effective tools to defeat terrorists, it’s likely if anything to make matters worse. Certainly, it’s nothing that serious progressives should support; the sooner it is shot down, the better.
I first heard about it a few weeks ago when I received an e-mail from Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise, who was in the process of writing a story about it, inquiring if I’d heard of the legislation. At the time, I hadn’t; and my initial response, based on a cursory examination, was that it looked, at least on the surface, like a potentially effective measure that would reorient our priorities on fighting terrorism.
Still, there were nagging issues, not the least of which was that the "national commission" that it would create would be exempt under the Federal Advisory Commission Act, which is designed to ensure transparency and openness to the public for its activities. Indeed, the more I looked, the more it became apparent the entity it would create would have little if any public accountability at all — and would actually resemble some of the witch-hunt commissions that have haunted past episodes of American history.
But in-depth policy analysis is not my bailiwick, so I consulted people in the civil-rights business what their opinions were, and what I heard back was more than enough to raise real doubts in my mind about the legislation.
Lindsay’s In These Times piece directly touched on these issues. Notably, she obtained assessments from people who are invovled in both researching and organizing against domestic terrorists, particularly the far-right variety, many of whom I consider research colleagues. And the response was uniformly negative.
Mike German:
Chip Berlet:“A chief problem is radical forms of Islam, but we’re not only studying radical Islam,” Harman says. “We’re studying the phenomenon of people with radical beliefs who turn into people who would use violence.”
That worries Mike German, policy counsel for the ACLU, who calls the legislation “wrongheaded” because it focuses on ideology, rather than criminal activity. The bill calls for heightened scrutiny of people who believe, or might come to believe, in a violent ideology. German wants the government to focus on people who are actually committing crimes, rather than those who are merely entertaining violent ideas, something perfectly legal.
Devin Burghart:“The bill replicates what already exists without peer review and safeguards,” says Chip Berlet, a senior policy analyst for Political Research Associates, an independent non-profit research organization that studies political violence, authoritarianism, and homegrown terrorism.
Let’s be clear: The problems that America faces regarding domestic terrorism have little if anything to do with the lack of tools for dealing with it. The tools exist already. The problems we have with domestic terrorism are all about the failure to use, or the misuse, of the tools we do have. The lack of adequate funding and staffing to deal with the issue reflects the larger skewing of national priorities by our governmental leaders — and that remains the problem.The broad wording of the bill leaves open many questions. If homegrown terrorism is defined to include “intimidation” of the United States government or any segment of its population—could the Commission or the Center of Excellence task itself with investigating groups advocating boycotts, general strikes, or other forms of non-violent “intimidation”?
“While we wholeheartedly support efforts to curtail terrorism, primarily coming from white supremacists, we would also like to see legislation that more vigorously defends civil rights,” says Devin Burghart, an expert on domestic terrorism at the Center for New Communities, a national civil and human rights organization based in Chicago.
As Beyerstein observes:
German, who I first encountered when he was an undercover FBI agent, has a substantial track record of blowing the whistle on the FBI’s misbegotten handling of domestic terrorism under Bush. And as he points out, we quickly lost sight of the reality that terrorism is an asymmetrical threat, in spite of the fact that right on the heels of 9/11, the nation was gripped by the very real threat of an anthrax attack — which in the weeks, months and years since has been clearly shown to be an act of domestic terrorism. That incident made all too clear that these terrorists are prone to "piggybacking" off other domestic terrorists in hopes of creating a cresting tide of terror.The FBI already has a domestic terrorism unit. The U.S. intelligence community also monitors the homegrown terrorists and overseas networks that might be reaching out to US residents. The July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate included a section headed, “The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland.” But Harman argues that a national commission on homegrown terrorism could benefit the country in much the same way as the 9/11 Commission, the Silberman/Robb Commission or other high-profile national security inquiries.
Whatever the merits of a commission, they seem to be separate from the arguments for a center for excellence. After all, Congress can request testimony from the experts of its choice. There are other ways to fund research into domestic terrorism, including research grants awarded by peer review. One of the amendments to the bill emphasized the importance of international cooperation between U.S. authorities and experts in countries that have already contended with homegrown Islamic terrorist plots, but there is nothing stopping Congress from consulting with those experts now.
Berlet questions why the country needs the Secretary of Homeland Security to channel resources through a handpicked “center of excellence” when there are already so many scholars organizations studying political violence in America. He cited the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center as long-established, institutional sources of expertise on homegrown terrorism. Their efforts are complimented by independent scholars and writers across the country.
“Congress could just read their books,” he says.
It became publicly obvious, though, that the administration’s antiterrorism strategy was nigh-useless with the FBI’s insistence that the most dangerous domestic-terrorist threat to Americans is actually the Earth Liberation Front. As I noted at the time:
Not only is the Bush administration allergic to international law enforcement, the officials in charge of its subsequent "war on terror" seem to break out in hives at the very concept of Americans’ civil liberties, since the majority of initiatives it’s undertaken since — data mining, wiretapping, and placing "enemy combatants" not under the purview of normal law enforcement but new "military tribunals" — have been all about destroying constitutional and legislative protections of those rights.This is a crystalline example of the gross skewing of priorities for both law enforcement and intelligence in dealing with terrorism that has been a hallmark of the Bush regime.
While eco-terrorists are a serious problem, and deserve certainly serious prosecution under the law, the level of threat they represent is proportionally so much less than that from the far-right "Patriot" movement and white supremacists as to raise serious questions about the priorities of both the FBI and the Justice Department. Certainly it is worth observing, as does It’s a Crock, that "eco-terrorist" Jeff Luers — who torched three SUVs and took care to do so when it was unlikely anyone would be harmed — is serving a 22-year prison sentence, while William Krar — who built a cyanide bomb designed to kill perhaps a hundred people or more — is facing a mere 15 years. When left-wing terrorists begin actually killing and maiming people and blowing up federal buildings with day cares inside them, or even plotting to do so, perhaps then they will deserve the kind of focus being accorded them under the Bush and Ashcroft style of governance.
Moreover, lest anyone think that the American far right is incapable of serious damage and not really in al Qaeda’s class, it’s probably useful to recall that before Sept. 11, the most lethal terrorist attack on American soil was committed by American right-wing extremists, with a toll similar to Spain’s recent losses.
And contrary to those who argue that an emphasis on law enforcement is inadequate, the reality is that a one-two punch of intelligence and law enforcement is extraordinarily effective in stopping terrorism, at least domestically. One of the points that emerged from my in-depth work for MSNBC on domestic terrorism was that of the 40-plus cases of serious domestic terrorism we identified as arising in the 1995-2000 period, the vast majority had in fact been nipped in the bud by law enforcement before the would-be terrorists could act, largely through effective intelligence-gathering and aggressive arrests and prosecution. There is no reason this same approach would not be effective on a global scale — unless, of course, one were allergic to cooperating with the very concept of international law enforcement.
It’s a profoundly counter-productive approach, because defeating terrorism — really defeating it, which ultimately means preventing it — requires not the brute and violent excision of terrorists but the removal of the conditions (typically unaddressed grievances) that inspires people to such lengths in the first place. And the American system of government, predicated on a Constitution dedicated to the political empowerment of ordinary citizens, is in the end one of the most powerful tools for defusing this threat.
As German, in his excellent book Thinking Like a Terrorist: Insights of a Former FBI Undercover Agent, puts it:
German cites the values expressed by Jefferson in his inaugural address:Luckily enough, the United States has the most practical counter-terrorism strategy ever written, and its record of effectiveness has lasted over 200 years. All we have to do now is take it off the shelf where it has been languishing since 9/11 and implement it. The counterterrorism strategy I’m referring to is called the Constitution of the United States.
The Constitution is a workable counterterrorism strategy because its authors were themselves terrorists — or freedom fighters, if you prefer — fresh from a successful asymmetrical war of attrition waged against the superpower of their day. The colonists knew what compelled them to fight and what enabled them to succeed. When they sat down to create their new government, they wanted to inoculate it against the abuses of power that drove their just rebellion. …
As German says:Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people — a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected.
People involved in the work of monitoring domestic terrorists, hate groups, and other far-right extremists are motivated primarily by concern for the fundamental civil rights of our fellow citizens. After all, what these groups are about primarily is the extra-governmental denial of the civil rights of minorities and other target groups.A nation guided by these principles could not produce a legitimately motivated terrorist group, especially the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments guaranteed these rights to all men and women. And while extremist terrorist groups can rise from time to time to threaten the peace, the efficient enforcement of the law through the strict observance of constitutional rights ensures these groups will not grow into a movement that can threaten national security.
Unfortunately, the decision makers who set U.S. counterterrorism policies somehow got the idea the Constitution was an impediment to counterterrorism operations rather than an effective strategy to fight terrorism. They said the Bill of Rights unnecessarily handcuffed our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and they could only effectively counter terrorism if they were freed from constitutional restraints. Further, the al Qaeda threat was so new and so grave it was beyond the capacity of traditional legal solutions. They even rendered the Geneva Conventions "quaint" in this new type of war.
They told the American people and their allies we needed to go on the "dark side" if we wanted to fight this threat and win. Even worse, since the Global War on Terrorism began they have led us to believe our own rights threaten our survival. They have lured us into the false belief that we can only ensure our security by sacrificing our civil liberties.
These reactions are not unusual in times of crisis, as we’ve seen, nor is the United States alone in making the mistake of believing security can be maintained only by restraining liberty. It seems every generation faces threats it then uses to justify extraordinary actions. …
Over 200 years later the Constitution still protects us, and ours is still the strongest government on earth. Liberty is now a weakness, it is our strength. …
As we learned from reading the various terrorists’ strategies, they use tactics specifically designed to provoke an inefficient response. Terrorists want the victimized government to blame an entire community for the acts of a few and punish the innocent as well as the guilty. An effective counterterrorism strategy, then, requires efficiency, both in using allocated resources wisely and in focusing the counterterrorism strategy squarely on the terrorists. The Constitution is the perfect counterterrorism strategy because it is designed to compel efficiency in the way government power is exercised.
We’ll never defeat them by taking away their civil rights. What will work, in fact, is emphasizing our liberties and ensuring that they are protected from abuse both by the government and by their fellow citizens.
In that respect, passing a federal bias-crimes law will do more to protect Americans from acts of terrorism than creating an unaccountable national commission ever will, since it would seriously enhance the law-enforcement tools we already have. Jane Harman and the rest of the Democratic leadership recently had their chance to do something about that — and, well, we all know how that turned out, don’t we?
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
The Huckster
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20180228050948im_/http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_BLlJwLdIRpk/R2BJoJJxIuI/AAAAAAAAAbI/COVZ8bEigP4/s400/08huckabee-sc533.jpg)
[New York Times photo]
-- by Dave
It's kind of funny how, in the world of Republican wingnuttia, being taken seriously can turn you into a real nutcase.
Take Mike Huckabee. Back before he started climbing in the GOP presidential polls, he was inclined to say reasonable things about immigration, things that were almost kind of human-sounding, such as: "Unfortunately, instead of being angry at the federal government for totally failing us [on immigration policy], [people] sometimes get angry at [immigrants] themselves." It was enough that the nativist wing of the party decided to declare him a "disaster" on the issue.
So to head them off at the pass, as it were, as he gained in the polls, pretty soon he was joining the rest of the Republican field in immigrant-bashing, even going so far as to issue an immigration plan calling for the deportation of all 12 million illegal immigrants within 120 days. That and his altered rhetoric were enough to win him the support of Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist -- who is a special kind of right-wing nutcase himself, most recently promoting conspiracy theories about a looming "North American Union".
Of course, if this were a Democrat engaged in such a wholesale "repositioning," the term "flip-flop" would be on all the cable-network tongues. Ah, but the Village idiots Heart Huckabee, building up his image as a likeable fellow while ignoring a host of questions about his record as Arkansas governor.
And what that record suggests, of course, is that this rightward shift on immigration was inevitable for Huckabee, given his own pedigree in xenophobic wingnuttia. As Bloggernista notes, he's been especially toxic in his dealings with Teh Gay:
- In a 1992 senate race Huckabee when asked about allowing openly gay Americans to serve in the military said:
- I believe to try to legitimize that which is inherently illegitimate would be a disgraceful act of government. I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.
Wow Mike! Tell us how much you really hate The Gays.
This revelation comes on the heels of Huckabee defending his statement about quarantining people living with HIV, Huckabee saying homosexuality is a sin and saying that gay marriage is a threat to civilization.
Huckabee's animus toward gays is of course a product of his fundamentalist religiosity, which has played a major role in his climb in the GOP polls. When he was in Seattle recently, he sought and won the endorsements of a group of fundamentalist pastors here:
- Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, was endorsed by Joseph Fuiten, pastor of Cedar Park Church in Bothell, and 29 other evangelical-faith community leaders from the area.
"The governor represents our values," Fuiten said after a small fundraising luncheon at the Harbor Club in Bellevue. "I like that he believes, and I like what he believes. His Christianity is organic; he has been this way all his life."
You may remember Pastor Fuiten. He was the fellow who, a few months back, announced that under Christian rule, non-Christians would be considered "illegal aliens."
More to the point, he's also one of the leading regional figures in anti-gay politics, culminating in his leadership role with the virulently (and violently) antigay organization Watchmen on the Walls. At their recent gathering in Lynnwood, he opened the proceedings by making a speech that mostly blamed the media for publicizing the group's background. But Fuiten at the same time indicated that he subscribes to the revisionist theory that gays were secretly behind the Holocaust (a popular item among the Watchmen).
This is the electoral ground that Mike Huckabee is now staking out. And the more successful he becomes, the farther right he seems to be heading. By the time he manages to ascend to the nomination (should he make it that far), we might start hearing more about that proposal to quarantine gays. It would fit in with his plan to eliminate 12 million immigrants from our shores.
But, you know, if he says it with a grin and a strum of the guitar, I'm sure the Village will be buying. It wouldn't have been the first time they've been suckers for right-wing opportunists with a Southern twang.
Reconquista reconsidered
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20180228050948im_/http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/Sierra%20Madre-723467.jpg)
[The nativist nightmare: "Borders? We don't need no steenking borders!"]
-- by Dave
We've had a little fun here in the past making fun of the wingnuts (like Michelle Malkin) who have ardently adopted the "Reconquista!" conspiracy theory.
But Alisa Valdez-Rodriguez has a thought-provoking post up about the continuing currency of the theory, and makes an important point:
- 45 million Mexicans live in extreme poverty in Mexico. According to Duke University professor David Brady, at least 46 million Americans now live in extreme poverty. We are technically the richest country in the world, yet we have the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation, and by far the most poor people. Our poverty rate is double that of Canada and the UK and triple that of the rest of Europe. It's like the caller on the Randi Rhodes show said, "You have seven unemployed guys in a bar, Bill Gates walks in, and on average, everyone's a billionaire."
Yep. It’s a fact. When it comes to income distribution and poverty, we’re being Mexicanized. But it’s not because of the Mexicans. It’s because of the neocons, their disgusting monopolies, corporate greed and political corruption.
I wouldn't characterize this as a product of the "neocons" per se, except to the extent that they are part of the larger conservative movement, which encompasses the nativists who are the chief progenitors of the wedge politics that enable this paradigm.
Nonetheless, her larger point is an important one -- namely, that Republican and generally pro-corporatist policies throughout government have had the long-term effect of creating what my late mentor, Sen. Frank Church, used to call the "Latin Americanization of America":
- One comment in particular, however, stands out in my mind these days. We were talking about America's future, and where the conservative cadre that was then taking over the Republican Party intended to take us. His expression darkened, and it was clear that he had a good deal of foreboding in this regard. "What I fear most," he said, "is the Latin Americanization of America."
He wasn't concerned, of course, with the arrival of Latinos on American soil (or what Pat Buchanan calls "Meximerica") except insofar as that could be manipulated to achieve this end. What he feared was that corporatist conservatives, if given free rein, would turn our standard of living into what you find in Latin America. That working Americans would one day be reduced to the level of near-serfdom that is the common way of life for millions of Latinos.
Indeed, this is the underlying dynamic driving much of the current immigration debate. Nativists so far have had a field day whipping up hysteria about invading Latinos, which lets conservatives evade the hard issues about the role of immigration in a growing economy.
By making Latinos into scapegoats, the American right has managed to obscure the culpability of the "magic of the marketplace" in creating the demand for illegal labor -- and obscures the reality that keeping them illegal ensures the corporations who benefit a captive labor force. Of course, creating a path to citizenship for these immigrants would immediately undercut, if not demolish, this dynamic -- so it's important to keep whipping up fears about white privilege as a way of preventing from even considering such a route.
In the process, of course, the all-important discussion we need to be having -- one in which we start emphasizing American values and what it means to be American, which really is the essence of our nation's great immigration tradition -- is lost altogether.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Character will out
-- by Dave
We've known for a long time that the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) -- a favorite "think tank" for right-wing nativists, who find their endless churn of often dubious statistics grist for their own anti-immigrant mills (Lou Dobbs in particular has a penchant for citing them) -- has a background that is, to put it kindly, a bit sketchy.
It is, after all, a leading component in the organizational network of "academic" nativists cobbled together by the white eugenicist John Tanton, exposed five years ago by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Despite its pedigree, it's always managed to avoid being designated a bona-fide "hate group," in large part because such a designation typically goes to groups that devote their energies to the xenophobic denigration of target groups. FAIR, with its focus on "statistical studies" (such as they are), has typically managed to eschew such rhetoric -- though the frequently inflammatory twist it gave to its studies meant that often danced at the edge.
Today the SPLC announced that it was finally designating FAIR a "hate group", due to a recent ratcheting rightward of its rhetoric and its activities, far enough that it was clear the mask was coming off:
- At the center of the Tanton web is the nonprofit Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the most important organization fueling the backlash against immigration. Founded by Tanton in 1979, FAIR has long been marked by anti-Latino and anti-Catholic attitudes. It has mixed this bigotry with a fondness for eugenics, the idea of breeding better humans discredited by its Nazi associations. It has accepted $1.2 million from an infamous, racist eugenics foundation. It has employed officials in key positions who are also members of white supremacist groups. Recently, it has promoted racist conspiracy theories about Mexico's secret designs on the American Southwest and an alternative theory alleging secret plans to merge the United States, Mexico and Canada. Just last February, FAIR President Dan Stein sought "advice" from the leaders of a racist Belgian political party.
As Mark Potok explained it at the Hatewatch blog:
- Much of this has been known for years. But last February, underlining the way that FAIR does business, its leaders met with the leaders of Vlaams Belang — a hastily renamed Belgian party that under a prior appellation, Vlaams Blok, was officially banned by the Belgian Supreme Court as a racist and xenophobic group. It was, for some, a final straw — the Rubicon of hate, as it were. When FAIR officials met with Vlaams Belang leaders to seek their “advice” on immigration, we decided to take another look at FAIR. When our work was done, it was obvious that FAIR qualified as a hate group. Early next year, when the Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual hate group list is published, FAIR will be on the list.
The contacts with Vlaams Belang reflect part of a larger trend of the internationalization of white nationalism, including recent electoral gains for white supremacist factions in Germany, and the export of far-right gay-bashing radicals from Eastern Europe to America in the form of the Watchmen on the Walls. You may also recall Vlaams Belang as the recent implosion in the wingnutosphere over the group's American outreach efforts -- reported in some glorious detail on the pages of another SPLC-designated hate group, VDare.
Funny how that works.
Feeling the thuggery
-- by Dave
David Love at In These Times has a followup to the recent SPLC report on "noose incidents" as an indicator of a growing white backlash against minorities, and concludes:
The manifestation of this backlash, however, goes well beyond simply the noose incidents, and the targets are broader than merely minorities. As a product of the right's ongoing "culture war," the animus is being more generally directed toward those who are blamed for threatening white privilege: liberals, mulitculturalists, antiwar peace advocates, gays and lesbians, and what Bill O'Reilly calls "secular progressives," in addition to the obvious and usual targets -- blacks and other racial minorities, as well as such religious/ethnic minorities as Jews and Muslims.
I've been documenting this growing eliminationism for some time now, observing that for the most part it has been confined to poisonous rhetoric.
But I've also observed that this kind of rhetoric has a history in America and elsewhere of being an important predicate of actual eliminationist violence, serving as a form of social permission that actually encourages such acts.
You can see this danger clearly in such incidents as that reported recently by Pam Spaulding:
Pam goes on to then detail some of the hateful comments that have come pouring in to Mark's site, including the following warning:
This kind of generalized hatefulness is not merely confined to neo-Nazis and fringe thugs; rather, but it's being expressed so broadly and at so many levels -- from major right-wing media figures to Republican presidential candidates to the far reaches of the right-wing assholosphere -- that of course, it's also being internalized, and indeed normalized, by the general populace.
That this is occurring on a broad scale is indicated by the fact that it's even turning up among impressionable high-schoolers, such as the students in Maryland who advocated banning a course in "peace studies" because it was too "liberal." A couple of weeks ago, Crooks and Liars pointed out a story out of Florida in which such liberal activism actually produced an outpouring of thuggish intimidation from right-wing students waving the banner of the Confederate flag. It started out with the standard organization of an anti-war "peace" group among a small cluster of students:
That was when the Dixie flags began showing up, along with the "love it or leave it" talk:
As Newhoggers points out, the most disturbing element has been the school's response -- which has de facto condoned the thuggery:
There's something truly rotten in the Denmark of the right. Every day, it seems, it comes floating up to the surface in some form. But we're reaching a dangerous pass when local civic authorities start to give it their tacit support.
David Love at In These Times has a followup to the recent SPLC report on "noose incidents" as an indicator of a growing white backlash against minorities, and concludes:
- But why are these racially motivated crimes on the rise at this point in time? Potok suggests that the recent noose incidents reflect not a fringe phenomenon, but a major social problem. "We're looking at an upsurge in racial nationalism," says Potok. "What's going on is a serious backlash against globalization. You have a certain level of economic rage that provides fertile ground for these groups." He says that with more people of color immigrating to the country, "whites are angry and uneasy."
According to Potok, these whites who are scapegoating think, "Our country is being stolen from us. The country my white Christian forefathers built is being taken away." But on Democracy Now!, Malik Shabazz, a member of Black Lawyers for Justice, said: "The hanging of nooses is a sign that there [could] be real bodies under those nooses very soon."
The manifestation of this backlash, however, goes well beyond simply the noose incidents, and the targets are broader than merely minorities. As a product of the right's ongoing "culture war," the animus is being more generally directed toward those who are blamed for threatening white privilege: liberals, mulitculturalists, antiwar peace advocates, gays and lesbians, and what Bill O'Reilly calls "secular progressives," in addition to the obvious and usual targets -- blacks and other racial minorities, as well as such religious/ethnic minorities as Jews and Muslims.
I've been documenting this growing eliminationism for some time now, observing that for the most part it has been confined to poisonous rhetoric.
But I've also observed that this kind of rhetoric has a history in America and elsewhere of being an important predicate of actual eliminationist violence, serving as a form of social permission that actually encourages such acts.
You can see this danger clearly in such incidents as that reported recently by Pam Spaulding:
- Openly gay Chapel Hill (NC) Town Councilman Mark Kleinschmidt (who I recently met up with at the G&L; Leadership Conference last weekend) is the target of a bunch of online neo-Nazi thugs who have compiled a list of out gay elected officials, or as one put it, "List of Open and Unapologetic Faggot Politicians." Mark:
- Over the last 3 days I've seen at least three sites re-post the same list of gay officials from around the country. The post is a reprint of a list of openly gay elected officials maintained by Actwin, an lgbt activist who monitored the voting records of gay elected officials.
The most disturbing element? This repeated statement:Because the information is perishable, local activists are best advised to use this information first as a precursor for additional investigation before taking "direct action".
- Over the last 3 days I've seen at least three sites re-post the same list of gay officials from around the country. The post is a reprint of a list of openly gay elected officials maintained by Actwin, an lgbt activist who monitored the voting records of gay elected officials.
Pam goes on to then detail some of the hateful comments that have come pouring in to Mark's site, including the following warning:
- White America is waking up.
Attention sub-humans: Something wicked this way comes.
This kind of generalized hatefulness is not merely confined to neo-Nazis and fringe thugs; rather, but it's being expressed so broadly and at so many levels -- from major right-wing media figures to Republican presidential candidates to the far reaches of the right-wing assholosphere -- that of course, it's also being internalized, and indeed normalized, by the general populace.
That this is occurring on a broad scale is indicated by the fact that it's even turning up among impressionable high-schoolers, such as the students in Maryland who advocated banning a course in "peace studies" because it was too "liberal." A couple of weeks ago, Crooks and Liars pointed out a story out of Florida in which such liberal activism actually produced an outpouring of thuggish intimidation from right-wing students waving the banner of the Confederate flag. It started out with the standard organization of an anti-war "peace" group among a small cluster of students:
- But what started out as a light-hearted gesture soon started to be taken out of context.
Students started approaching the group members, yelling obscene things at them, said Lauren.
"People just turned on us like that," she said. "At least 10 boys stood up and yelled things at me at once, and we couldn't even walk through the halls without a harsh comment being made."
The heckling began early in the school year, according to group members. They said they were putting small posters promoting peace on friends' lockers with their permission.
They thought it was OK, because the cheerleaders and football players had signs on theirs. Eventually, though, group members said they were told by the school's administration they could no longer hang up the posters.
"People tore them down and drew swastikas and 'white power' stuff on them," Lauren said.
Skylar had similar things written on her posters.
"Someone taped an 'I Love Bush' sign over my 'Wage Peace' sign," she said. "So I tore it down, threw it away, and the whole commons starting booing. I walk by later and find that someone has completely tore my sign down and placed an 'I Love America, Because America Loves War' sign up."
That was when the Dixie flags began showing up, along with the "love it or leave it" talk:
- Soon, a second group started to wear Confederate flag shirts to oppose the peace group, Skylar said. She saw shirts with sayings such as "This is America, get used to it," and "If peace is the answer; it must be a stupid question."
"Now there are even 'support our troops' kids who don't like us because I guess they think you can't say peace and support the troops at the same time," Lauren said.
Skylar later passed out yellow ribbons for her group to wear to show they support the troops as well as peace.
However, Cocoa Beach Jr./Sr. High sophomores Lydia Pace and Joseph Marianetti said the Confederate shirts they wear express support for the troops in Iraq, and nothing more. Joseph said the shirts have nothing to do with racism.
"Someone took something that stood for peace and twisted it" in regards to the swastikas (drawn by a third group) and the Confederate flag, he said.
As Newhoggers points out, the most disturbing element has been the school's response -- which has de facto condoned the thuggery:
- The school responded by punishing the peace kids for causing trouble and denied them the right to have a peace club even though they submitted a written proposal and had a sponsor as required. Now all they have left is a My Space page where their detractors continue to leave threatening comments.
There's something truly rotten in the Denmark of the right. Every day, it seems, it comes floating up to the surface in some form. But we're reaching a dangerous pass when local civic authorities start to give it their tacit support.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Enough with the baby drowning
-- by Dave
My latest post at The Big Con is up. It's a discussion of the effort to end the Bush administration's corporate scam on public lands, the "RAT tax", it's titled "The Phonies in the Woods":
Hope you enjoy. Will have a regular post up later today here.
My latest post at The Big Con is up. It's a discussion of the effort to end the Bush administration's corporate scam on public lands, the "RAT tax", it's titled "The Phonies in the Woods":
- It's a sure indicator that all-out rot has begun to sink into conservatism as a governing philosophy when even people in the red states that normally constitute the right's electoral base begin to figure that there's something wrong here.
The point no doubt came home for many of them the past three years when they decided to go fishing or camping somewhere and found that they were being expected to fork over even more money at the trailhead -- with the money actually going toward the private development of business on those lands.
Last week, Sens. Max Baucus, D-Montana, and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, introduced legislation that would bring an end to the Bush administration's scheme to make the public pay twice for using public lands, all to the benefit of the resource-extraction industry.
Hope you enjoy. Will have a regular post up later today here.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Did someone say ... Satan?
-- by Dave
I had just finished reading Tom Tomorrow's thorough takedown of Bill O'Reilly when I came across this:
- On Fox News yesterday, Bill O’Reilly let loose on “far-left websites” like DailyKos, stating, “If you read these far-left websites, you’re a devil worshipper. You are.” O’Reilly’s ombudsman responded, “As a journalist, you know better than that.” O’Reilly shot back: “Satan is running the DailyKos. Yes, he is!”
Satire is now not just dead -- its corpse is being danced about on a stick.
I'm sure someone should tell O'Reilly to get a grip, but I'm not sure we'd want to see how he might choose to act on that.
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