America is a big and diverse country so any generalization that treats its people as a single entity with one set of qualities is going to be wrong. But having said that, I do want to make some fairly broad statements about one particular group, that of white, middle class, middle-aged and elderly Americans. Understanding the state of mind of this particular group is important because although it represents only one segment of opinion and class interests, it is vocal, votes disproportionately, and the shallow and sensationalistic media focuses on it and is sympathetic to its interests. Furthermore, as Kevin Drum notes, how responsive politicians are to your concerns is directly related to how much your income is. The sad truth is that the fundamental premise of democracy of ‘one person, one vote’ has effectively become ‘one dollar, one vote’.

My comments about the psyche of this group are based on those events that have received considerable attention in the news recently and the results of recent primary elections running up to the mid-term congressional elections.

The one thing that strikes me is that this group seems to be in the grip of irrational fear and despair, almost to the point of paranoia. One symptom of this is that they look back on the past as a wonderful time, a golden age of peace and prosperity and wholesome living, and the current times as fraught with a vague and inchoate sense of danger. They tend to take real but small current incidents, inflate their significance beyond all reason and evidence to gigantic proportions, and then quake in fear of the monster that they themselves have conjured up.

These people seem to think that the country is under existential threat from enemies internal and external. Externally, they think that al Qaeda or some Islamic equivalent is plotting to launch another attack on targets in the US. This is actually very likely to be true (after all, those groups explicitly keep saying they want to attack the US and its interests) but why does it cause such fear? Even the US government says that there exist less than a hundred such militants in Afghanistan, with the rest (still a small number) in the remoter areas of Pakistan. While such a small but determined group can create some death and destruction, even the remote possibility of one on the scale of another 9/11, it would still be a tiny pin prick for a country like America and not by any means an existential threat. Does anyone really think that Osama bin Laden’s forces will defeat the US military and that he will become the ruler of the US? Any mature country and mature people should be able to shrug off the threats of groups like al Qaeda as merely irritants and go about their normal business unconcerned. And yet these people are acting like elephants terrified by mice.

Related to this is the fear that Muslims are infiltrating the country, Christianity is under threat in the US and Islam taking over, and that Sharia law will soon be imposed on everyone. It is true that the number of Muslims is growing more rapidly than the general population because Muslims, like ultra-orthodox Jews and Catholics and Mormons, tend to favor large families, but they are still a tiny minority. The proposition that Christianity will be replaced with Islam in the US is laughable on its face but that has not stopped people from taking it seriously. The fuss over the Islamic community center in New York and the attacks on Muslims and mosques in various parts of the country are symptoms of this irrational fear.

Another fear is that the country is going to be overrun by Mexicans and other people from south of the border and this has resulted in increased anti-Hispanic sentiment, rooted in concerns about illegal immigration. Again, the symptom of the irrationality lies in these people taking the 14th Amendment guarantees that almost all babies born in the US are automatically US citizens and elevating this into fear of a colossal scheme for Mexicans to come to the US purely to deliver their babies here as part of a long term plan to overwhelm the US demographically. A variant of this crazy fear is that Muslims are also coming here to deliver babies so that, in a couple of decades, they can create home-grown terrorist cells.

These trends are disturbing to say the least. When enough people develop paranoid fears, they do stupid things.

Next: How these fears are inflamed.

Ok, this is my last word on this silly Koran burning business.

People have every right to burn the Koran if they want to, just as they have the right to build community centers wherever they want provided they comply with zoning laws. But instead of ignoring such a small issue, we have the absurd spectacle of even President Obama and General Petraeus getting into the act and calling for the priest to desist because of Muslim sensitivities. Don’t they realize that you can never placate hypersensitive people? If not this, it will be something else that inflames those who are quick to anger at any perceived affront, whatever their religion.

What is the matter with Obama that he feels he has to insert himself into these trivial issues, like he did before with the Henry Louis Gates affair? Doesn’t he have real work to do like deal with unemployment? By speaking on this he is simply begging for some other publicity seeker to think up some new scheme to grab the headlines.

Update: The burning has been canceled.

I don’t usually write much about many of the political events that dominate the news. Most of the time, our national discourse is dominated by the trivial and to even comment on it is to give undue importance to it and feed the flames. But another reason I don’t comment is because there is usually enough commentary and analysis elsewhere and by the time I think that I have a perspective on it that may add something new to the discussion, the issue has usually faded away because it was never one of major significance to begin with.
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As a result of all the shameful things the US government is doing in the name of fighting terrorism, it now has little credibility when it comes to claiming any moral superiority over other nations. It can no longer credibly condemn arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, denial of habeas corpus, torture, and summary executions by the governments of other countries. Of course, the government still does so within the US, knowing that the compliant US media will never point out the hypocrisy. This self-delusion is so complete that Americans are often shocked, just shocked, when people in other countries point out well-established facts that show the US in a bad light.

The recent bizarre case of the Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri shows this lack of credibility. Amiri claimed that the US kidnapped him and brought him to the US and tortured him, hoping to get him to implicate the Iranian government in a nuclear weapons program. He sought refuge in the Pakistani embassy before returning to Iran. The US government denied Amiri’s charges of kidnapping, saying that he had come to the US voluntarily and then changed his mind: “Last month, the U.S. State Department spokesman, P.J. Crowley denied that Amiri had been abducted, saying that “we are not in the habit if (sic) going round the world kidnapping people.””

Really, P. J. Crowley? We are not in the habit of going round the world kidnapping people? Where have you been the last decade? There was once a time when the official statement of a high US government official would be believed over that of an unknown foreigner. But there is only one location where that is true anymore and that is in the presence of the establishment media. It says a lot about the complicity of the US press corps that it did not immediately get convulsed with derisive laughter when Crwoley said this. Justin Raimondo over at the libertarian Antiwar.com provides the proper response:

Given the numerous instances of “extraordinary rendition” in which our government has been engaged, and no doubt continues to be engaged, one wonders how Senor Crowley can say that with a straight face. But then again, being an official spokesman for the US Department of State no doubt requires some sort of facial surgery – or, perhaps, an industrial-strength shot of Botox – to achieve the desired results.
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Let no one berate us libertarians for describing the US government as a criminal enterprise: it isn’t disloyalty to the country, or even a penchant for overstatement, that drives us to such rhetorical excesses. It’s the story of what happened to Shahram Amiri: it’s the lies, the thuggery and hubris of a ruling elite that believes it can get away with anything. Such is their contempt for the American people – and the peoples of the world – that they think we’ll swallow any tall tale, no matter how crudely fabricated, because we’re just not as smart as their cunning selves.

However, it looks like they’re not cunning enough by half, having blown the Shahram operation and exposed their embarrassingly inept tradecraft.

For further evidence of how low the government has sunk from the noble ideals expressed in the constitution and declaration of independence, read this email from an FBI agent (released by the ACLU) that details what he saw on a visit to Guantanamo.

(For more torture documents, see here.)

I came across these torture memos (thanks to the Progressive Review) just after reading The Translator, a memoir by Daoud Hari who lived through the horrible carnage in Darfur and then worked as an interpreter for western media, in the process getting captured and tortured by the various rebel groups and the government of Sudan. The similarities of what he experienced with the torture practices of the US government were chilling. When are Americans going to realize that they have allowed their government to adopt the practices of some of the worst dictatorships in the world?

Those who voted for Obama thought that he would undo the excesses of Bush-Cheney and restore some moral backbone. The fact that he has expanded and extended those abuses shows clearly that when it comes to civil liberties, Obama and his Democratic Party supporters are hypocrites.

Recent newspaper reports have said that Obama is worried about losing liberal support. Really? What a surprise! But he needn’t worry. As long as people are locked into the mindset that they must support their party at all costs, he is somewhat safe. As David Sirota documents, there are many who call themselves “the left” but really are just Democratic Party apparatchiks, willing to overlook and even support actions by Obama and the Democrats that they would have vociferously condemned if done by a Republican. The ACLU says that Obama has made Bush/Cheney the ‘new normal’. This website accurately sums up the situation:

Considered historically, it will become clear that the job of Republican governments is to invent novel, ad hoc expansions of state power, while the job of Democratic governments is to consolidate and systematize them. Far from repudiating supposed Bush-era “excesses,” the Obama regime has sought–usually successfully–to entrench and to codify them.

These appalling practices are justified on the basis that they are necessary to protect us from terrorism. But there is a great danger in sacrificing the law and principles in pursuit of evil. This scene from the play A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt (which was made into a great film in 1966) nicely captures what is at stake:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of the law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast. Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake!

As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

POST SCRIPT: al Jazeera on the Sharam Amiri story

The real test of your commitment to fundamental rights comes when the exercise of those rights arouses strong antagonistic feelings in you. Are you willing to defend the free speech rights of people who say things you find hateful? Are you willing to defend due process rights for those whom you despise? Why I support organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is precisely because of their commitment to defend those rights for all people without exception.

Take the case of the US-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, now supposedly hiding in Yemen. He has been accused of inciting violence against US targets and recruiting people to carry out those actions, such as Major Nidal Hassan and the Christmas Day bomber. Obama has, without any formal charges or trial but simply by unilaterally asserting the existence of extraordinary powers, passed a death sentence on him. In other words, any agency of the US government can kill Awlaki anywhere at any time using any means, no questions asked. His family in the US is naturally alarmed at this development. Glenn Greenwald describes what happened when they sought legal help.

Early last month, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights were retained by Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of Obama assassination target (and U.S. citizen) Anwar al-Awlaki, to seek a federal court order restraining the Obama administration from killing his son without due process of law. But then, a significant and extraordinary problem arose: regulations promulgated several years ago by the Treasury Department prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in any transactions with individuals labeled by the Government as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” and those regulations specifically bar lawyers from providing legal services to such individuals without a special “license” from the Treasury Department specifically allowing such representation.

On July 16 — roughly two weeks after Awlaki’s father retained the ACLU and CCR to file suit — the Treasury Department slapped that label on Awlaki. That action would have made it a criminal offense for those organizations to file suit on behalf of Awlaki or otherwise provide legal representation to him without express permission from the U.S. Government.
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It’s rather amazing that the Federal Government asserts the right to require U.S. citizens and American lawyers to obtain government permission before entering into an attorney-client relationship — all because these officials decided on their own, with no process, to call the citizen a “Global Terrorist.” It’s difficult to imagine a more blatantly unconstitutional power than that. What kind of an American would think the Government has the power to decide whether citizens may or may not be represented by lawyers?

Given the lack of outrage, apparently most Americans think that the right to a lawyer is a negotiable one. The ACLU and CCR filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of requiring a license from the Treasury department to represent a client and, perhaps fearing a defeat, the government issued a license making that lawsuit concerning licensing moot. So the case against the right of Obama to claim for himself the right to pass death sentences can proceed. But the bizarre nature of this case does not end there.

The Awlaki lawsuit… will likely face serious obstacles, beginning with the same warped tactic which both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly invoked to shield illegal surveillance and torture from judicial scrutiny: first, refuse to confirm whether such a program exists (notwithstanding public admissions that it does) on the ground such matters are “state secrets,” and then, with Kafkaesque perfection, insist that the lawsuit must be dismissed because (thanks to the Government’s refusal to acknowledge it) there is no evidence that Awlaki is subject to such an assassination program and thus lacks “standing” to sue.

Shades of Catch-22!

Bill Quigley, a professor of law at Loyola University and legal director of CCR explains why they sued to represent Awlaki.

What this case is really about is not Aulaqi but about our government disregarding the rule of law.

There are many reasons we can argue that premeditated killing by the government off the battlefield is illegal. The rule of law guaranteed by the US constitution binds even the President of the US and the military. Our constitutional system of checks and balances does not allow the executive branch of government to just decide in secret that they are going to kill people. The government certainly could not just execute him if he was in the US. The US would not allow other governments to come here and assassinate someone they opposed. And the US would never just fire drone strikes into the UK, China, Russia or Australia to kill someone. Yemen is over a thousand miles away from the battlefield of Afghanistan or Iraq. So why would anyone think it is legal to assassinate a US citizen in Yemen?

Despite these questions, Aulaqi has been the target of several unsuccessful drone strikes as the US military and CIA are actively trying to kill him.

These are all issues that should be decided in a court of law. That is why we are filing this suit.

His father, Nasser, said it best. If the government has proof his son violated the law, then they should charge him in public and let the law take its course.

If the government can find him to assassinate him, they can find him to bring him to justice.

The right to go to court to challenge the government is a core US value. It is important that we win the right to represent him no matter how controversial he is. Otherwise the government can deprive citizens of their right to a lawyer at the exact same time as they are trying to kill them. The courts should make these decisions and people deserve the right to have lawyers try to challenge the government. (my emphasis)

This case and the one concerning Yahya Wehelie reveal an emerging pattern. The government first claims for itself extraordinary powers. When those at the receiving end of its abusive treatment are able to muster the resources and expertise to strongly mount a legal challenge to the constitutionality of those claims and it looks like the government will lose in the courts, it quietly drops its opposition in that particular case without abandoning the policy itself. This makes the legal case moot and not subject to judicial review, thus avoiding the risk of a judge ruling that the action is unconstitutional.

The problem is that there are many people who are suffering at the hands of the government who do not have the means to mount this kind of challenge and so they languish. This is why although legal challenges are a partial solution, the only effective counterweight to government abuse is widespread public anger. As Judge Learned Hand once said, “I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

POST SCRIPT: Those awful activist judges

As an example of the disdain that the Obama administration has for the rights of even US citizens, take the case of Yahya Wehelie, a 26-year old US-born citizen. His case, though not involving torture, illustrates how government power can be abused when we allow it to operate in secrecy. While Wehelie was traveling abroad, he was placed on a no-fly list for no stated reason (though it may be because he went to Yemen to study) and as a result he was now stuck in Cairo for months and unable to return to the US, even though he offered to travel handcuffed and accompanied by US marshals. The ban was lifted without any reason given after the ACLU filed suit challenging the constitutionality of the no-fly list, and he is now home in Virginia.

But there are worse cases. Obama is also breaking new ground such as trying child soldiers for war crimes. This is the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian national captured outside Kabul in 2002 when he was just 15. As Chase Madar writes, “no nation has tried a child soldier for war crimes since World War II, and the decision to prosecute Khadr has drawn protests from UNICEF, headed by a former U.S. national security adviser, as well as every major human-rights group.” And yet, the government is prosecuting him in a military tribunal, a system that has few of the legal protections of a normal court of law. The judge has already ruled that Khadr’s confessions can be used against him although they may have been obtained under duress and torture.

As Glenn Greenwald says in discussing this case, the abuses by the government in this case involve far more than torturing a child into confessing and then using those confessions.

As I’ve written before about the Khadr case (as well as the very similar case of child soldier Mohamed Jawad), what is most striking to me about this case is this: how can it possibly be that the U.S. invades a foreign country, and then when people in that country — such as Khadr — fight back against the invading army, by attacking purely military targets via a purely military act (throwing a grenade at a solider (sic), who was part of a unit ironically using an abandoned Soviet runway as its outpost), they become “war criminals,” or even Terrorists, who must be shipped halfway around the world, systematically abused, repeatedly declared to be one of “the worst of the worst,” and then held in a cage for almost a full decade (one third of his life and counting)? It’s hard to imagine anything which more compellingly underscores the completely elastic and manipulated “meaning” of “Terrorist” than this case: in essence, the U.S. is free to do whatever it wants, and anyone who fights back, even against our invading armies and soldiers (rather than civilians), is a war criminal and a Terrorist.

Once again, role-reversal reveals that hypocrisy. If a foreign army were to occupy the US, would we view a 15-year old boy who takes up arms to attack those troops as a terrorist or a hero?

In fact, the Obama regime seems to take a positive delight in demanding for the right to indefinitely incarcerate people even if they know they are innocent. This is consistent with Obama pretending to want to close down Guantanamo while backing off from doing anything about it.

Tomorrow: Yet more violations of due process

POST SCRIPT: Our corrupt government

Readers will recall my many posts about how the fix was in from the start so that the health care ‘reform’ bill would serve the interests of the very organizations that make health care in this country so bad, primarily the health insurance companies. Glenn Greenwald has a must-read item about the revolving door between government and the health insurance companies that guaranteed this outcome. In fact, Obama has put a person from one of the worst of these companies (WellPoint) in charge of running the new program.

This five-minute clip of Bill Moyers, made just before the health care ‘reform’ bill passed, shows how the public option was sabotaged despite wide support for it, how Congress bought off, and highlights the ever-revolving door that guarantees that the companies win and the people’s voice will never be heard.

As readers of this blog know, after supporting Barack Obama against John McCain in the presidential election, I have been a harsh critic of his actions once in power. This should not come as a surprise as I said before the election that I would hold him to the same standards I applied to Bush-Cheney and that given the nature of US politics that he would be a loyal servant of the oligarchy that rules the US. But I have (I hope) been careful to distinguish between criticizing him for policies I disagree with and being much harsher with him for lying to us about his intentions.

As examples of policy differences, it should have been clear to any careful observer long before his election that Obama was very friendly with the big Wall Street financial interests and would eagerly do their bidding. (I wrote about this in February 2008.) If people had any doubts about this, his eagerness to support the bailouts of the big investment banks in the two months prior to his election should have settled them. Similarly, he clearly announced that he was going to expand the war in Afghanistan and he has done so. I think it is a terrible policy but he is simply doing what he said he would do.

Where I think Obama has been terrible is when it comes to civil liberties and the rule of law. After promising to restore the rule of law and due process, Obama has not only embraced the worst aspects of the Bush-Cheney encroachments but has expanded them even more, making the Obama administration one of the most lawless in recent history.

Starting with the government dragging its feet on the closure of Guantanamo and other black prisons and continuing the practices of torture, denial of habeas corpus and the right to lawyers, etc., it has steadily expanded its reach so that Obama now claims that he has the right to order the murder of anyone, anywhere, at any time. And what is incredible is that people are not outraged. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, to his credit, has actually introduced a bill to ban the extrajudicial killing of at least US citizens by the US government, undoubtedly to draw attention to the bizarre world that we now take as normal. Of course his party’s leadership will make sure that his legislation never sees the light of day. Party loyalty always trumps principle.

As one example of Obama’s disgraceful actions take the case of Hassan Odaini, who was picked up in Pakistan when he was 18 and has been detained for eight years even though the government knows he is innocent. As Glenn Greenwald says, “the Obama administration is knowingly imprisoning a completely innocent human being who has been kept in a cage in an island prison, thousands of miles from his home, for the last 8 years, since he’s 18 years old, despite having done absolutely nothing wrong.”

As Andy Worthington writes in Obama’s Moral Bankruptcy Regarding Torture:

As I explained in an article following the judge’s May 26 ruling, it had been publicly known since November 2007 that the government had conceded in June 2005 that Odaini, a student, had been seized by mistake after staying the night with friends in a university guest house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on the night that the house was raided by Pakistani and U.S. operatives, and that he had been officially approved for release on June 26, 2006 (ironically, on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture).

Nevertheless, the Justice Department refused to abandon the case against him, and took its feeble allegations all the way to the District Court, where they were savagely dismissed by Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. When the judge’s unclassified opinion was subsequently released, an even grimmer truth emerged: that shortly after Odaini’s arrival at Guantánamo in June 2002, an interrogator recommended his repatriation (after he had been exploited for information about his fellow prisoners), and that, in April 2004, “an employee of the Criminal Investigative Task Force (‘CITF’) of the Department of Defense reviewed five interrogations of Odaini and wrote that ‘[t]here is no information that indicates [he] has clear ties to mid or high level Taliban or that he is a member of al-Qaeda.'”

Odaini was not subjected to specific torture techniques, but there are many people — myself included — who are happy to point out to the Obama administration that subjecting an innocent man to eight years of essentially arbitrary detention in an experimental prison camp devoted to the coercive interrogations of prisoners who were deliberately excluded from the protections of the Geneva Conventions is itself a form of torture, especially as, unlike the worst convicted criminals on the U.S. mainland, no Guantánamo prisoner has ever been allowed a family visit, and many have never even spoken to their families by phone.

Moreover, the fact that the administration proceeded with his habeas case, despite knowing that he was innocent, and then refused to release him as soon as the judge delivered his ruling, confirms that, when it comes to lawlessness and cruelty, the Obama administration is closer in spirit to the Bush administration than it cares to admit.

Judge Kennedy has also ordered the release of another Guantanamo prisoner held for nearly nine years because “the administration failed to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the Yemeni man was part of al-Qaida or an associated force.”

But there are even worse examples of Obama’s post-election disdain for civil liberties, as I will discuss tomorrow.

POST SCRIPT: Australian elections

A short debate on Australian TV between the Sex Party and the Family First party, two ‘minor’ parties competing in upcoming Australian elections. (Thanks to Pharyngula.) Just from the names I can tell which party I like because you just know that a party that calls itself the Family Party is going to consist of intolerant twits, and the debate reveals it.

Some of this blog’s readers may be old enough to recall what used to happen in brutal Latin American dictatorships in the second half of the 20th century, when opponents of the government were picked up by the secret police and never heard from again, except when their mutilated dead bodies occasionally turned up. A whole network of state-sponsored secret prisons, systematic torture, and murder was put into place and paramilitary groups and so-called ‘death squads’, operating under the auspices and protection of the governments and usually consisting of security forces in plain clothes, used to carry out all manner of atrocities, leaving the public in a state of permanent fear.
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The previous post on this topic resulted in such interesting discussions that I want to expand on this topic in a new post.

I actually agree with some of the criticisms that were made about a camera-based system to enforce traffic laws on speeding and running red lights. But my point is that while the police-based system is fundamentally flawed and cannot be made fair and consistent and widespread because of the enormous costs that would need be incurred, the camera-based system as currently implemented is only technically flawed. It should be easy to improve it by purely technical fixes that can also be easily monitored to ensure that the devices work accurately and provide reasonable opportunities for compliance.
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