Another socialist blog

The whole point of terrorism is to make you afraid.  Constantly, intolerably afraid, and therefore willing to accept any change that will make the terror go away, such as giving in to whatever political demands the terrorist is making.

Certainly there are defense measures that will help reduce the chance of a successful terrorist attack, but there’s no way to stop every attack.  The only real defense against terrorism is refusing to be terrified.  They want you to live in constant fear, so you conspicuously demonstrate that you aren’t afraid, and deny them their objective.

So what are we to make of this story?  In 2005, an 18 year old Kentucky high school student writes a futuristic, violent short story about a gang taking over a high school.  He shows it to a teacher for feedback on his writing.  The teacher tells him the story could get him in trouble, so he takes his writings home.  His grandparents find the stuff he took home, and report him to the police.  He is arrested and charged with making terrorist threats, a felony.  A grand jury indicts him on attempt to commit terroristic threatening, a misdemeanor—which is at least better than a felony, but how do you attempt to threaten someone, anyway?  The judge wondered that too, when he eventually dismissed the charges:

[Judge} Brown agreed with Poole’s attorney, Brian Barker, who claimed the grand jury’s indictment failed to state a criminal offense. Barker argued criminal attempt would require an overt act on Poole’s part, something he says prosecutors failed to demonstrate.

Even Assistant County Attorney John Keeton was forced to concede the point. He told Brown there is no documented record of a conviction anywhere in Kentucky on a charge of attempt to commit terroristic threatening.

In other words, this guy went through the legal wringer, was charged with a felony, and now has a permanent record, because he…well, because he did nothing at all.  He didn’t even scare people.  He went to jail because they scared themselves, scared themselves silly by the look of things.

Real terrorists take note:  you can skip Kentucky.  They are already terrorized.  You win.

We’ve been told that all the invasions of our privacy since 2001, in particular data mining schemes like Total Information Awareness, are worth it because they’ll keep us safe from terrorists. Turns out that data mining to detect terrorists just doesn’t work, according to a new government report. Yes, the same government that spies on us without warrants.

If you’re disappointed that you won’t be on a list of terrorists because of your email and credit card records, however, fear not: the cops can just put you on a terrorist watch list because of your politics.

Former Maryland state police superintendent Thomas E. Hutchins authorized the infiltration of several anti-war and anti-death-penalty nonviolent protest groups, then added their members to the national terrorism database and the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database. In all, 53 citizens were thus included that we know of — it’d be naive to think that Maryland is the only state where the police abuse their powers). The police admit that there was “no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime” by those classified as terrorists.

One hopes that none of them have so far gotten their doors kicked down and their dogs shot.

You may want to rethink that.

• Here’s the story of a guy who got dragged out of Yankee Stadium by the police, for the crime of attempting to use the rest room during the singing of God Bless America.  The Yankees are certainly free to lead fands in a nationalistic religious song, but when the police enforce mandatory nationalistic/religious song time, something’s gone badly wrong with the whole liberty thing.
• An Oregon man had his camera seized and was given a ticket for photographing police officers who were on the job.
• Here’s a woman who was ordered by the Sheboygan, WI city attorney to remove from her Web site a link to the city’s police department, and launched a criminal investigation into her because of the link.  Apparently even publicizing the URL of a city department is more daylight than they can stand.  Here’s the criminal link.
• Government tracking of your movements, already the norm in the U.K., may soon be a reality in the U.S.  The leading vendor of traffic enforcement cameras proposes to use the existing cameras to create a national vehicle tracking system to see where you’ve been.  Don’t bother asking if they’ve got a warrant.

Another in what will become a continuing series of posts about police who don’t make me feel safe or secure.

The first is hilarious:  a traffic enforcement camera snaps a picture of an allegedly speeding car, and after a careful review of the evidence a summons is issued.  If you look carefully you can see that the speeding car was being towed.

The second is not at all funny:  someone mailed some pot to the mayor of DC suburb Berwyn Heights.  So a SWAT team broke down his door, shot the family’s two dogs, and interrogated his family as the dogs bled to death.  The unopened package of marijuana was still outside, waiting perhaps for its real recipient.  The cops didn’t have a no-knock warrant.  Had they knocked, the dogs would be alive.  [Update 9/11/2008:  he was innocent.]

The Senate still hasn’t approved the FISA bill legalizing warrantless spying.  You can still make a difference before the vote, and there will be several votes that will all matter.

And check out this hilarious cartoon starring Snuggly, the Security Bear.  “It’s not scary, it’s snuggly and secure!”

Think Barack Obama is the anti-Bush? Check out how well he agrees with George W on warrentless spying. In response to widespread outrage among his liberal supporters, Obama has issued a statement to explain his support for the FISA reauthorization bill that legalizes warrentless eavesdropping already done by the Bush administration, and gives immunity to telecom companies who colluded with the White House to break the law.

Liberals were doomed to be disappointed, for two reasons:  first, because Obama thinks he can get away with moving to the right, second, because Obama took money from telecom companies.  And disappointed they are:  Obama tarnishes his image as honest and sincere by dancing around the spying issue.  He claims the bill is a “compromise,” as if that made it OK to reduce your right to communicate privately.  But there’s no compromise, it’s a full surrender to the White House, and Obama is a liar.

The Human Rights Tribune is reporting that the United States has apparently quit the Human Rights Council, an international body within the United Nations System whose purpose is to address human rights violations.  The U.S. had only observer status to begin with, by its own choice, but now has apparently withdrawn completely as a gesture of opposition to the policy of the Council.

This is a departure even for the Bush administration, which usually offers lip service to human rights while ignoring them in practice.  Perhaps they didn’t want any embarrassing questions about human rights violations at Guantanamo?  More likely, they don’t want to do anything to legitimize U.N. involvement in the enforcement of human rights, at a time when the pro-torture policy of the administration will be getting increasing public scrutiny.

Charter Communications has announced that it will soon begin wiretapping its customers.

Well. They don’t call it wiretapping of course, they call it…”enhanced user experience.” By which they mean they will be looking at your web browser activity in detail, and inserting their own targeted ads based on whatever you happened to be doing at the time. Which, you might have imagined, was your own business.

I hardly know where to begin. Far from a paragon of virtue to start with, Charter proposes to invade the privacy of your private communications. Trust them, they promise they aren’t stealing credit card numbers or checking to see who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. Come on, if you can’t trust a big corporation who can you trust?

Surely they’ve got a good reason to demand you give up your rights, not to mention your peace of mind. Be assured, they do. But it’s not to protect you from terrorism, nor to protect your children from pedophiles, nor to stop spam or viruses from getting to your computer. They want to do it so you can enjoy more ads. That is, after all what you use the Internet for, right? Looking at commercials?

Among the excuses for going to war against both Afghanistan and Iraq was the perennial claim that we were bringing them freedom from tyranny. This many years since the wars began, it’s fair to look at the state of freedom there, don’t you think?

In Afghanistan, the parliament brought to power by the U.S. occupation is poised to pass a new law that will censor the press. In the name of “respect for Islamic values,” politicians will be able to silence those who would, among other things, poke fun at them.

Meanwhile, U.S. occupation forces in Iraq are building a wall creating a Sunni ghetto in Baghdad, over the loud objections of the people who we have freed from tyranny other than our own. Typically, U.S. forces began construction under cover of darkness, apparently hoping that a wall twelve feet high and three miles long would not be noticed.

The religious right is flexing its muscles of late, trying for no less than the destruction of the independent judiciary branch of government. The LA Times has obtained an audio tape of a two prominent right-wing religious leaders, James Dobson and Tony Perkins, discussing their plans to get Congressional Republicans to directly interfere in the federal court system. They, and House Speaker Tom DeLay, propose stripping funding from federal courts that make decisions conservatives disagree with.

Conservatives don’t like activist judges. They believe the law is objective and disinterested, not (as leftists would argue) a tool of the powerful to control the less powerful. They like “judicial restrant,” or at least they say they do. They do fall off the judicial restraint wagon now and then, as they did in Bush v. Gore.

It’s worth a look back at Bush v. Gore because today’s power struggle over judges illustrates the same bedrock hypocrisy that was in evidence then. In Deconstructing the Election, Win McCormack showed how the Republicans shredded their own doctrine of objectivity as they clawed to win Florida in 2000.

If the objectivity and disinterestedness of the law…are bedrock conservative doctrine, then James Baker, and his associates and conservative columnist sympathizers like William Safire, once again challenged and compromised that doctrine in the Florida presidential election imbroglio. The idea that law is (on the whole) neutral, objective and disinterested necessarily implies that the judges who interpret it are (on the whole) neutral, objective and disinterested; there is no conceivable syllogism whose conclusion is that our legal system is (more or less) objective and fair that can have as a premise that our judges are not and are not capable of being so. Yet this was the blatant premise of Republican commentary as an assortment of legal cases relating to the election wound their way through the Florida court system. Just as Republican operatives and commentators trashed the integrity of the county canvassing boards simply because they were under Democratic control, they also used the fact of their being Democratic appointees to attempt to discredit–often in advance–the decisions of various Florida judges, from the circuit level up to the state’s Supreme Court. The clear implication was that Democratic judges would necessarily, either reflexively or by calculation, rule in favor of the Democratic candidate. They could not be trusted to be disinterested and objective.

In addition to being a monumental betrayal of the conservative movement’s stated intellectual principles, this line of argument creates another problem for its Republican promoters: It tends to discredit in advance the decisions of Republican as well as Democratic judges. For if Democratic judges cannot be trusted to be evenhanded and judicious, what logic can be called forth to argue that Republican judges can be? They are also human. They are also partisan. They also owe something to the people who selected them. The theory unavoidably predicts that judges appointed by Republicans will rule, in a biased and partisan manner, against Democratic candidates and causes when occasions to do so arise.

It is doubly ironic, therefore–and doubly troublesome, one would think, for the integrity of the conservative cause–that this is exactly what happened when the case called Bush v. Gore reached the highest court in the land.

Just in time for any war crimes trials coming out of the Iraq war.