Alternative proposal

Thoreau has a more economical option regarding the release of Uighars:

According to Greenwald, we’ll be paying $200 million to the Island nation of Palau to accept 17 Gitmo detainees who were long ago cleared of any wrongdoing but can’t find host countries.

$200 million?  Once upon a time that was real money, but now it’s less than 0.2 milli-bailouts.  Still, belt-tightening is important, so I humbly propose to buy 17 homes in California, each for approximately $500,000 and also pay for some English classes and vocational training for the guys.  The price tag should come to less than $12 million.  I’ll have to add a mark-up, of course, but all in all I could probably settle the guys for less than $20 million, plus a $1 million commission for myself.

There’s an entrepreneurial recession-beating idea if I’ve ever seen one.

Obama’s Torture/GTMO Speech

I can’t figure out how to get MSNBC embedded… so here it is over at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ place.

Perils of a PATRIOT, revisited

The PATRIOT Act was not a factor in arrest (I linked to the story here). Wired has the scoop:

The claim that the boy is a victim of USA PATRIOT, though, appears to have been cut from whole cloth. While there’s plenty to criticize in that post-9/11 law, it doesn’t contain any provision that abrogates a defendant’s right to a trial. It’s also not responsible for making it illegal to phone in a bomb threat. That’s been a federal crime since 1939.

(Danke: Sully, again)

Perils of a PATRIOT

"Is Someone Reading Over Your Shoulder" by M.J.S.

When legislation is passed with fear as the motivator:

The family was at a church function that night, his mother, Annette Lundeby, said.

“Undoubtedly, they were given false information, or they would not have had 12 agents in my house with a widow and two children and three cats,” Lundeby said.

Around 10 p.m. on March 5, Lundeby said, armed FBI agents along with three local law enforcement officers stormed her home looking for her son. They handcuffed him and presented her with a search warrant. [...]

Lundeby told the officers that someone had hacked into her son’s IP address and was using it to make crank calls connected through the Internet, making it look like the calls had originated from her home when they did not. [...]

“There were no bomb-making materials, not even a blasting cap, not even a wire,” Lundeby said.

Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do.

Lundeby said the USA Patriot Act stripped her son of his due process rights.

(Danke: Sullivan)

SCOTUS needs a woman

"US Supreme Court" by dbking

Ezra Klein:

Few would publicly argue that the Court has a duty to be liberal or conservative (or stacked with young appointees who have very low cholesterol), the institution does have to be considered legitimate. It is responsible for a country that’s 51 percent female and whose law graduates are 48 percent female. Its highest profile cases revolve exclusively around things that happen in a woman’s body. If we were aware of those facts and were stocking the Court from scratch, there is no doubt that we would strive for more gender balance.

Viewed from that perspective, the situation clarifies considerably. The reason white men are disadvantaged in this nomination process is pretty simple: They are not, right now, what the Court needs. They are not the best candidates for the job.

Outcomes vs. values

"my Grandparents wedding" by mircea tudorache

Ezra Klein on young folks picking career over marriage:

This is one of those issues where you could imagine a pretty fertile compromise between traditionalists and liberals. Both would presumably want similar policies, albeit with different expected outcomes. But so far as I know, there’s fairly little intersection between the two camps. The traditionalists seem more interested in scolding women than in changing outcomes. Liberals are correctly allergic to the judgmental take of traditionalists. But liberals, at the end of the day, are the ones with the toolkit for addressing the problem, not to mention the political power to do so. Which gets to a question for the traditionalists: Is this about changing outcomes or changing values? If you believe this is about getting people to make an appropriate moral choice, then exempting them from that choice obviously doesn’t solve anything. But if you believe it’s about easing the path for families, then that calls for a rather different approach.

(My emphasis.) This is crux of a lot of social issues. My thinking is that conservatives are more concerned about the changing values… which, unfortunately for them, is an losing battle. They can only protest and whine and stomp their feet, which slow down the new value change; but ultimately, culture evolves.

If it’s about outcomes (such as reducing the number of abortions), then there are very real policy changes that can be made. But these policy changes, as Ezra notes, are usually in the liberals’ toolkit.

I don’t think conservatives are willing to dip into that Pandora’s box, lest the full potential of liberal social-engineering be unleashed.

The significance of the DOJ memos

Glenn Greenwald breaks it down:

Let’s just look at one of those documents (.pdf) – entitled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the U.S.”  It was sent to (and requested by) Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes and authored by Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and DOJ Special Counsel Robert Delahunty.  But it’s not a “Yoo memo.”  Rather, it was the official and formal position of the U.S. Government — at least of the omnipotent Executive Branch — from the time it was issued until just several before George Bush left office (January 15, 2009), when OLC Chief Stephen Bradbury abruptly issued a memo withdrawing, denouncing and repudiating both its reasoning and conclusions.

The essence of this document was to declare that George Bush had the authority (a) to deploy the U.S. military inside the U.S., (b) directed at foreign nationals and U.S. citizens alike; (c) unconstrained by any Constitutional limits, including those of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.  It was nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens.  And it wasn’t only a decree that existed in theory; this secret proclamation that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable to what the document calls “domestic military operations” was, among other things, the basis on which Bush ordered the NSA, an arm of the U.S. military, to turn inwards and begin spying — in secret and with no oversight — on the electronic communications (telephone calls and emails) of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

That the U.S. Government had suspended the Fourth Amendment itself isn’t exactly news.  A fleeting reference to that event (largely ignored by the media) was made in a footnote to one of Yoo’s previously released torture memos (release of which was also compelled not by the U.S. Congress or the media, but by the ACLU).  But reading the document that actually effectuated (in secret) that suspension — released only yesterday — is genuinely breathtaking.

First, the document states its general conclusion regarding the President’s authority to use military force inside the U.S.:

The President not only possesses these powers, but can wield them — including within the U.S. — independent of anything Congress or the courts do:

Long-standing laws that were enacted precisely to limit the use of the U.S. military inside the U.S. and against U.S. citizens — such as the Posse Comitatus Act — have no application:

No limits — not even those in the Bill of Rights, such as those imposed by the Fourth Amendment — are applicable to the President’s use of the U.S. military inside the U.S.   Thus, the President can order the U.S. military to search or invade our homes or eavesdrop on our communications (as he did) all without warrants or any Constitutional constraints of any kind:

The President’s power to use military force domestically in violation of the Bill of Rights applies equally even if the actions are ordered against American citizens on U.S. soil:

The President, when using military force against American citizens on U.S. soil, is ”free from the constraints” not only of the Fourth Amendment, but also of other core guarantees of the Bill of Rights — including First Amendment liberties, Due Process rights, and the takings clause:

If this isn’t the unadorned face of warped authoritarian extremism, what is?  And that’s just one of the numerous documents that were released yesterday.  Others vested the President with the power to imprison American citizens on U.S. soil indefinitely without charges of any kind.

Let’s underscore:  these weren’t just abstract theories.  They served as the basis for many U.S. government actions.  Military actions were, in fact, directed at American citizens on U.S. soil (that’s what the NSA program was, as but one example).  Both legal residents and American citizens captured on U.S. soil were put in cages for years with no trial or charges of any kind.  And, of course, the U.S. instituted a systematic torture regime that led to the brutalization and even deaths of many detainees in our custody.

Or to sum up:

The most vital point is that all of the documents released yesterday by the Obama DOJ comprise nothing less than a regime of secret laws under which we were governed.  Nothing was redacted when those documents yesterday were released because they don’t contain any national security secrets.  They’re nothing more than legal decrees, written by lawyers.  They’re just laws that were implemented with no acts of Congress, unilaterally by the Executive branch.  Yet even the very laws that governed us were kept secret for eight years.

This is factually true, with no hyperbole:  Over the last eight years, we had a system in place where we pretended that our “laws” were the things enacted out in the open by our Congress and that were set forth by the Constitution.  The reality, though, was that our Government secretly vested itself with the power to ignore those public laws, to declare them invalid, and instead, create a whole regimen of secret laws that vested tyrannical, monarchical power in the President.  Nobody knew what those secret laws were because even Congress, despite a few lame and meek requests, was denied access to them.  What kind of country lives under secret laws?

Student rights case makes it to Supreme Court, continued

John Cole weighs in:

While James and the Supreme Court are focusing on worthwhile Constitutional issues, this seems to me to be missing the point, and akin to trying to cure heart disease by making better defibrillators. We need to look at what got us to this point that school officials would even CONSIDERperforming a strip search for over the counter medication. This is a manifestation of decades of drug war mania and the ensuing zero tolerance idiocy.

Student rights case makes it to Supreme Court

Mike LaBossiere reacts:

On one hand, this does have some appeal. After all, children are not adults and this can (and has) been used to justify a difference between the rights possessed by children and those enjoyed by adults. Further, the school setting is also a different setting than the outside world and this often requires a difference in such matters. For example, consider the matter of hall passes. Outside of school, 18 year old students are free to go about as adults. Inside school, their movements are restricted by a system of permissions and passes. This is considered an acceptable practice because of the need to restrict student movement within school hours. Like wise, the school setting would justify violating the normal rules governing searches.

On the other hand, this sort of justification can be seen as defective. First, if it is a reasonable principle, then it would justify doing away with probable cause requirements across the board. After all, a case can almost always be made that a search was needed to protect someone from something. However, the requirements for probable cause are in place for excellent reasons. Hence, this principle seems to be unacceptable. Second, while the school setting can be seen as justifying differences in certain matters, the setting does not seem to justify such an extreme violation of a basic principle of law. Obviously schools do need to maintain a safe and orderly environment. But, this should not be taken to justify such things as strip searches. Rights do not simply end at the school door and the proper rule of law must apply even within the walls of schools.