Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

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The Voter Suppression Wiki has launched (via) and it looks like it might be a good way to track efforts at vote suppression. It deserves lots of exposure and I hope it’s effective. The Web 2.0 (buzzword alert!) group participation/social networking model makes sense for a project like this. Because it seems like there will be no shortage of incidents to document.

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Colleen Kollar-Kotelly: Not so fast, scumbag. With any luck we might just learn something.

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Nick Juliano reviews the fall line of Unreasonable Search and Seizure from the prestigious house of DHS:

The Department of Homeland Security quietly expanded its authorization to examine, copy and archive an array of documents and electronic files from citizens and visitors crossing US borders, according to reams of internal documents released Tuesday. The changes implemented last year reverse a two-decade-old policy requiring border agents to have reasonable suspicion of a crime before reading documents someone is bringing into the country; probable cause was required before documents could be copied…Civil liberties advocates say the new standards raise troubling questions about protecting citizens’ First Amendment rights and could lead to customs agents serving as and end-run around the Fourth Amendment by conducting searches that would be prohibited from other agencies. “For more than 20 years, the government implicitly recognized that reading and copying the letters, diaries, and personal papers of travelers without reason would chill Americans’ rights to free speech and free expression,” said Shirin Sinnar, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus. “But now customs officials can probe into the thoughts and lives of ordinary travelers without any suspicion at all.”

Fabulous!

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Barton Gellman was on NPR’s “Fresh Air” a little over a week ago (I forgot to post the link last time) about “Angler.” Prairie Weather has the transcript. There is a certain trendy blogger phrase that I promised myself I would never use (hint: its initials are “RTWT”) so let me just say I hope the following excerpt piques your interest enough to make you want to peruse the entire transcript:

Dick Armey was the House Majority Leader, old Republican friend of Cheney’s from his House days, and I would say that he was more than wavering on the war….The White House worked him over pretty good! They put a lot of pressure on him. They invited him to Camp David for special briefings. None of it was working. So Armey became Cheney’s project. He invited Armey to a little House hideaway that he had in the Capitol building. Cheney laid out maps, documents, photographs. What Armey tells me — and I lay this story out at some length in the book — is that Cheney told him two things that Armey now believes Cheney knew to be untrue….So you put together direct close ties to terrorists and a manned portable nuclear weapon and that simply turned Armey around. He said, “I can’t say, in the fact of so much certainty on Cheney’s part about so grave a threat, that there’s nothing there. ” Armey tells me he assumed that Cheney was giving him good intel and he’s learned since that that wasn’t correct.

Having done brief transcriptions for my “Unpacking Jane” segments (see below) I can appreciate how much work is involved in typing out even short exchanges. At the moment books, video and audio are all outside of the searchable Internet and that makes them unavailable to what I consider the most important territory for political debate. Even limited availability on the Internet can largely silence voices. I have no way of proving this, but New York Times columnists seemed to become much more central to online discourse when people could easily copy/paste excerpts and link to them freely. PW’s work at The Scribe makes material that otherwise would float away in the offline ether a part of the record. I’m sure the work involved often feels like plodding drudgery on the order of medieval monks copying manuscripts, but its contribution to the diffusion of knowledge makes it a genuine successor to their work as well.

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Looks like some folks in the military are strenuously resisting the administration’s attempts to lash them together in trying to whitewash and rationalize the torture and cruelty at Guantánamo (via):

A military prosecutor [Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld] involved in war crimes cases here has quit his position, citing ethical concerns about his office’s failure to turn over exculpatory material to attorneys for an Afghan detainee scheduled to go to trial in December….”My ethical qualms about continuing to serve as a prosecutor relate primarily to the procedures for affording defense counsel discovery,” wrote Vandeveld in his filing. “I am highly concerned, to the point that I believe I can no longer serve as a prosecutor at the Commissions, about the slipshod, uncertain ‘procedure’ for affording defense counsel discovery.”

Incidents like this strike me as incredibly important. Military officers are uniquely constrained in their abilities to protest what they might consider wrongdoing. The need for discipline requires a great deal of “swallow your reservations and go with the program” attitude. Armed forces can’t function effectively otherwise. We don’t have any kind of whistle blower provision (that I know of). An officer could resign and forfeit a career’s worth of good will, accumulated pension and connections for future employment. That is, to put it mildly, a heavy price to pay. It would be nice to think at least some would be willing to pay it. Of course, it would be nice to think I would be willing to pay it in those same circumstances, but who knows? And even if an officer did that, or even just arranged a quick retirement, there would be an immediate chorus of “malcontent/disgruntled ex-employee” that has become so familiar against those who go public with criticism. In short, it is unusually difficult for those in the military to effectively resist the excesses of the administration. Actions like those of Lt. Col. Vandeveld strike me as extremely significant as a result. It comes across as a distant distress signal, an attempt to get the word out to the rest of us while working within the system and remaining in good standing. It is a minor looking action that is in fact a fervent protest. Good on him.

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Bush: I’ll see you at the bill signing. We are going to get a package passed. Swaggering confidence has been prelude to failure before. Let’s make it so again, citizens!

Potentially interesting side note: The continuing resolution passed last night “goes a long way in lessening the closely-watched possibility of a lame duck congressional session after the November elections.” A little less than two years ago Ohio got a great big middle finger from departing Ohio governor Bob Taft and his cronies at the statehouse. If we somehow manage to avoid a massive transfer of wealth to the rich in the next day or so the whole thing might get kicked down the road for a bit. But it couldn’t plausibly get squeezed in to an extra session ostensibly for some other purpose. Proponents of the Great Lobbyist Payback must be very confident of success; keeping the continuing resolution as an ace in the hole may have been good strategy. But what the hell do I know.

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UNPACKING JANE: On page 117 ex-FBI agent discusses the utility of torture. He characterizes Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, perhaps America’s best informant on Al-Qaida, as a “lovable rogue” - someone who provides great information but is always getting into mischief (womanizing and such). A generally high maintenance individual.

Coleman learned from it that “people don’t do anything unless they’re rewarded.” He said that if the FBI had beaten a confession out of al-Fadl with what he called “all that alpha-male shit,” it would never be able to talk to him again and again. Brutality may yield a timely scrap of information, he conceded. But in the longer fight against terrorism, such an approach is “completely inefficient,” he said. You need to talk to people for weeks. Years.

And for the record, have any timely scraps defused any ticking time bombs? We haven’t seen a single one yet. The brutality has not prevented a single instance of the danger its proponents claim to be so worried about, but it has crippled our larger effort to learn about and compromise al-Qaida. Heck of a job, guys.