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In Congress, Dem and GOPer Working Together to Change the NDAA | Mother Jones

"Smith and Amash's effort comes amid a bipartisan backlash against indefinite detention that has already produced legislation on the state level. Republican-dominated legislatures in Arizona, Maine, and Virginia have passed anti-NDAA legislation. Proponents of indefinite detention argue that Congress' 2001 authorization of the use of military force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban permits the indefinite detention without trial of American citizens, even those apprehended in the United States. But the Supreme Court has not definitively ruled on the issue. Opponents counter that indefinite detention of American citizens in the United States is unconstitutional."

Review & Outlook: The Tea Party's Inner ACLU - WSJ.com

The Wall Street Journal has a conniption fit about conservative opposition to the NDAA: "The ACLU tea partiers may be well-intentioned but they are woefully uninformed about the war on the terror. Their efforts would undermine executive war-fighting authority and the legitimacy of a terrorist detention and military tribunal system that has been established over many Congresses, endorsed by two Presidents and confirmed by the Supreme Court. They should stick to shrinking the entitlement state."

Arizona Joins Virginia in the NDAA Exodus. Is Nullification the Next New Thing? (Cutting the Gordian Knot)

"In less than a week’s time a second state has put a foot down making it clear that it will not cooperate with Federal Law which is blatantly unconstitutional. Yesterday Arizona became the second state to pass a nullification of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)."

How Obama Became a Civil Libertarian's Nightmare | | AlterNet

“The major defining feature of the Obama administration on this issue is the eagerness with which it embraced the stunning evisceration of civil rights and liberties that was a hallmark of the Bush administration, and then deepened those outrageous programs,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, who is an attorney representing many Occupy protesters swept up in last fall’s mass arrests. “He has successfully counted on the acquiescent silence of the liberals.”

‘I withdraw’: A talk with climate defeatist Paul Kingsnorth (Stephenson, Grist)

I don’t think any “climate movement” is going to reverse the tide of history, for one reason: We are all climate change. It is not the evil “1%” destroying the planet. We are all of us part of that destruction. This is the great, conflicted, complex situation we find ourselves in. I am climate change. You are climate change. Our culture is climate change. And climate change itself is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, if you’ll pardon the terrible but appropriate pun. If we were to wake up tomorrow to the news that climate change were a hoax or a huge mistake, we would still be living in a world in which extinction rates were between 100 and 1000 times natural levels and in which we have managed to destroy 25 percent of the world’s wildlife in the last four decades alone.

Chris Hedges: Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

“You are unable to say that [such a book] consisting of political speech could not be captured under [NDAA section] 1021?” the judge asked. “We can’t say that,” Torrance answered. “Are you telling me that no U.S. citizen can be detained under 1021?” Forest asked. “That’s not a reasonable fear,” the government lawyer said. Advertisement “Say it’s reasonable to fear you will be unlucky [and face] detention, trial. What does ‘directly supported’ mean?” she asked. “We have not said anything about that …” Torrance answered. “What do you think it means?” the judge asked. “Give me an example that distinguishes between direct and indirect support. Give me a single example.” “We have not come to a position on that,” he said. “So assume you are a U.S. citizen trying not to run afoul of this law. What does it [the phrase] mean to you?” the judge said. “I couldn’t offer any specific language,” Torrance answered. “I don’t have a specific example.”

America brings the ‘war on terror’ home (Wolf, Daily Star)

"(Judge) Forrest also repeatedly asked for assurances – at least five times – that the NDAA would not sweep up people like the plaintiffs: journalists engaged in journalism and citizens engaged in peaceful protest. Again, every time, the lawyers for Obama and Panetta said that they could not give her such assurances. [...] We now have it from the U.S. government lawyers’ own mouths: This law may put journalists at risk, or at least the lawyers explicitly refused to rule out that option for their client – and, as Forrest put it, they have “one very big client.”"

Obama’s evolution: Behind the failed ‘grand bargain’ on the debt (Wallsten/Montgomery/Wilson, WaPo)

"That night, Obama prepared his party’s congressional leaders. He warned Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that he might return to the position under discussion the previous Sunday — that is, cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in exchange for just $800 billion in tax increases. [...] White House officials said this week that the offer is still on the table."

Not All Labor Leaders Happy With AFL-CIO’s Obama Endorsement (Elk, In These Times)

“There's not a lot of choice here, that’s the sad part of this,” says Matt McKinnon, political and legislative director of the Machinists union (IAM), which is affiliated with AFL-CIO and endorsed the president earlier this year. “He’s been a disappointment in several areas, but he came through with some decent appointees.” The expected endorsement represents the reality that organized labor leaders still feel trapped in a two-party system, with a not-always labor-friendly Democratic Party on one side and a downright hostile Republican Party on the other.

Elections: What Are They Good For? (Swanson, War Is A Crime.org)

Voting isn't everything. "I think Emma Goldman had a point in saying that if voting changed anything they would ban it. I think Howard Zinn had a point in saying that it doesn't matter who is sitting in the White House so much as who is doing the sitting in. The relentless ubiquitous question of how you can change the world if you refuse to engage in electoral politics strikes me as crazy. Women didn't vote themselves the right to vote. Workers didn't elect the eight hour day. India didn't vote the British out."

Part II Infiltration of Political Movements is the Norm, Not the Exception in the United States (Zeese, Occupy Washington, DC)

"When the long history of political infiltration is reviewed, the Occupy Movement should be surprised if it is not infiltrated. Almost every movement in modern history has been infiltrated by police and others using many of the same tactics we are now seeing in Occupy. "

Critiques Of Libertarianism: A Non-Libertarian FAQ (Huben)

"The purpose of this FAQ is not to attack libertarianism, but some of the more fallacious arguments within it. That done, libertarians can then reformulate or reject these arguments. This is also needed to help people place libertarianism and its arguments in context. It is very hard to find any literature about libertarianism that was NOT written by its advocates. This isolation from normal political discourse makes it difficult to evaluate libertarian claims without much more research or analysis than most of us have time for. Compare this to (for example) the extensive literature of socialism and communism written by ideologues, scholars, pundits, etc. on all sides. Libertarianism is scantily analyzed outside its own movement. Let's fix that."

UPDATED: Limbaugh's Misogynistic Attack On Georgetown Law Student Continues With Increased Vitriol (Media Matters for America)

Always good to have a reference, this is it. "Rush Limbaugh is not backing down after widespread condemnation over his misogynistic attack on Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University Law School student who testified before Congress recently about the problems caused when women lack access to contraception. " Multiple clips for future show and tells.

America's Death Squads (Davies, PDA Community/ZCommunications)

"Barack Obama has halted the macabre parade of hooded, shackled suspects in orange jumpsuits stumbling off American planes into the tropical sunshine at Guantanamo, but he has not done so by restoring the rule of law. Instead, to a great extent, he has replaced Bush’s policy with a global campaign to simply kill a wide range of people in cold blood: terrorism suspects, resistance fighters, and anyone else added to secret lists for secret reasons. From a uniquely American “exceptionalist” point of view, killing suspects instead of capturing them is a convenient way to avoid the embarrassment of sweeping up hundreds of mostly innocent people in an indiscriminate global dragnet and then not knowing what to do with them. The dead tell no tales. Public outrage is contained within the faraway countries where the killings take place and does not cause domestic political problems."

Corruption in Iraq: 'Your son is being tortured. He will die if you don't pay' (Abdul-Ahad, Guardian)

Iraq ten years after: instead of one Saddam, many little ones. "Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison. "We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else.""

Activists report suspicious government activity: the Nov. 6 FBI raids forum

Posted by Thomas Nephew on November 13th, 2010

As advertised here and elsewhere, activists convened at the Washington Friends Meeting House last Saturday afternoon for education and brainstorming about the recent troubling FBI raids and grand jury subpoenas of peace and solidarity activists in Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan. Search warrants indicated the FBI was looking for evidence of “material support” for foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) in Colombia, Palestine, and elsewhere — but as forum-goers were to learn, the idea of ‘material support’ has been stretched past the breaking point. A diverse and engaged crowd of some forty people attended the forum, and peppered each of three speaker panels with questions before brainstorming together about the next directions they could take.

The FBI Raids: Activists Respond to Government Intrusion (part 1)
Relevant links

A video of the first panel is shown to the right. This video and two more like it are displayed on an “11/6 forum videos” page together with links to news items, analyses, and documents referred to by panelists.

The first panel, “What’s Going On and What Are the Legal Rules in Place?,” was led off by Sue Udry, of the Defending Dissent Foundation, who spoke about the raids themselves, the shifting legal predicaments the activists involved are in, and the background of ever more intrusive, expanding uses of surveillance to address ‘terror threats’ allegedly emanating from nonviolent peace, animal rights, and environmental groups, to name a few. Using the Inspector General report on the FBI, and revelations from Pennsylvania, Iowa, and elsewhere, Ms. Udry made clear that the FBI raids are not isolated incidents, but an escalation of an already deteriorating situation.

Ms. Udry was followed by ACLU legislative counsel Michelle Richardson. Like Ms. Udry, Ms. Richardson noted how the expanding surveillance undermined both the Constitution and real counterterrorism efforts by “dumping more hay” on the haystack, instead of focusing on searching for needles. She described the United States as a surveillance society “collecting 1.7 billion records and communications a day. … When you get to 1.7 billion, that’s not about the government going to a judge and saying “I have a suspected terrorist, I’d like to read his emails,” that’s about our government turning its extraordinary computer powers loose on the American people.“ Charity and Security Network executive director Kay Guinane focused on the recent Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project ruling, which she and others believe probably green-lighted the raids on the peace activists. John Hardenbergh of the National Lawyers Guild discussed the grand jury process, acknowledging the old saw that prosecutors could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich — though he got a laugh with the observation “it depends what the ham sandwich is accused of doing.”

Seen on the way home from the forum.

Mr. Hardenbergh opened a second panel, “What Are Our Rights?,” with the sobering statement, “If you come away with anything from this training… one: cops lie and the second lesson I’d like people to come away with is keep your mouth shut.” For instance, a law enforcement officer can commit a misdemeanor like smoking a marijuana joint — and then arrest someone who emulates him. When an audience member observed that the scenario was much more likely for a black or Hispanic citizen than a white one, Hardenbergh agreed: “…there’s a huge gulf between knowing your rights and having them respected. [...] in our society, rights are granted on a scale, and that’s based on the [social] hierarchies.”

Camera and video use during protests were discussed as well. The rules and regulations can vary from state to state and are often murky — by design. One woman recounted a story of being questioned for taking pictures of federal Katrina-related activity in 2005. When she later inquired of the Homeland Security Department what things she wasn’t allowed to photograph, she was told that security reasons prevented them from sharing that information with her!

In a final panel, “How Should the Movement Respond?,” Nadine Bloch discussed the 2008 Maryland State Police spy scandal (discussed several times on this blog), while Raed Jarrar discussed several instances of entrapments of Muslim Americans such as Yassin Aref and the recent alleged Metro bomb plotter Farooq Ahmed into crimes fabricated by the FBI.

Audience members then brainstormed a number of ideas about how to push back against surveillance and for civil liberties. Among the ideas discussed:

developing a protocol for rapid response to incidents like the 9/24 FBI raids
preparing to push back against possible Metro initiatives to search bags
pushing the Bill of Rights Defense Committee’s Local Civil Rights Restoration Act (LCRRA)
supporting local political prisoner Dr. Sami Al-Arian (under house arrest)
pushing back against organized Islamophobia…

…and others. If you’re in the DC area and want to help with these alternatives or learn about others, contact Ms. Sue Udry at sue.udry@defendingdissent.org.

I got the feeling these were people who didn’t just absorb information but were interested in doing something about it. So I’m hopeful we’ll be making real progress over the coming weeks and months.

=====
EDIT, 11/15: Very long opening sentence split into two sentences; “Search warrants indicated the FBI was seeking evidence of” rather than “Activists were accused of”; “but as forum-goers were to learn” phrase added.

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