I watched All the President's Men last night, for the first time in 20 years. What struck me was not just the less-obeisant Washington press, or a still-cute Dustin Hoffman: it was how relatively innocent the Nixon's administration's abuses seemed. to me -- even its abuse of counter-intelligence, when compared to how deeply these guys are working to embed such practices into the "normal" range of executive power. And while Marvin Kalb's Financial Times piece What Watergate Can Teach the White House (via Talk Left) points to the danger of perjury charges in the WHIG scanda, he doesn't acknowledge that to these guys, when the law goes against them it's time to change the law.
Even "cover-up" has to go by a new name. In a New York courtroom, a judge is finally hearing Maher Arar's suit against the INS and Justice Department . The judge is scratching his head at the government's invocation of the "state secrets" privilege, rarely used before this administration's Etch-a-Sketch approach to the Constitution.
In addition to claiming that valuable state secrets would have to be spilled in discovery -- precluding any discussion of whether Maher Arar should have been abducted and shipped to Syria, where he was tortured -- this privilege has been invoked in a range of cases.. Inter-Press Service reports: Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, told IPS, "Once rarely invoked, the state secrets privilege is now increasingly used by the government as a 'get out of jail free' card to block unwanted litigation."
Including employment discrimination:
Jeffrey Sterling, an operations officer with the CIA in its Near East and South Asia Division from 1993-2001, claimed he was told he was "too big and black" to receive certain CIA assignments, and that CIA management placed expectations on him "far above those required of non-African-American Operations Officers." He also contended he was retaliated against for using the CIA's internal equal employment opportunity process.
However, the court noted, "There is no way for Sterling to prove employment discrimination without exposing at least some classified details of the covert employment that gives context to his claim."
The IPS story (no link yet, sorry) also notes the use of this strategy in the cases of Sibel Edmonds and Wen Ho Lee.
Though anyway, of course, the government justifies its actions by denying Rasul....
The New York Times reported that the government lawyers also argued that "foreign citizens who change planes at airports in the United States can legally be seized, detained without charges, deprived of access to a lawyer or the courts, and even denied basic necessities like food ..."
When challenged by US District Judge David Trager if such treatment of a prisoner (Arar says he was "deprived of sleep and food and was coercively interrogated for days at the airport and at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn") would not violate the US Constitution and "clearly estabished case law", Mason said it did not.
Legally, she said, anyone who presents a foreign passport at an American airport, even to make a connecting flight to another country, is seeking admission to the United States. If the government decides that the passenger is an 'inadmissible alien,' he remains legally outside the United States - and outside the reach of the Constitution - even if he is being held in a Brooklyn jail. Even if they are wrongly or illegally designated inadmissible, the government's papers say, such aliens have at most a right against 'gross physical abuse.'
...and by throwing hissy fits rather than reveal information about acts that have already enraged the Arab world on the grounds they will cause "riots." I refer, of course, to the Abu Ghraib video scandal -- and direct you to the elegant discussion of same by hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, which ends:
As I wrote earlier, I do not for a moment discount the possibility that the release of these photos and videos could endanger people's lives. And if someone gets killed, it won't be one of the people responsible either for the interrogation policies that allowed this or for the abuses themselves, but some 19 or 20 year old who had nothing to do with it. But I can't see how we can interpret the law to allow policy-makers to allow appalling abuses in the knowledge that the very outrageousness of what they allow will prevent its disclosure. And, as I also said earlier, there were ways for those in charge to avoid this damage while protecting the rights of citizens to hold their leaders accountable. They could have either not allowed these abuses in the first place, or released the photos and videos as part of the trial of those responsible, both the soldiers who committed the crimes and their leaders who enabled them. They did neither, and now, as usual, soldiers on the ground will end up paying the price for their decisions.
As will the rest of us -- perhaps in a subway bomb, perhaps in our grief at having felt helpless to prevent these crimes. I just dug out a 1980's-era button of mine that reads, "Silence is the voice of complicity."
While I've been busy working to acquire some tricks of the trade, I do also want to send you to Rachel -- who has a terrific roundup of some of it - the growing scandal of the Brazilian man shot by traumatized/racist/lazy/terrified British police, and a plea re the Neanderthal who plowed under 500 crosses and 40 American flags at Camp Casey: "The penalty for defacing 40 flags? Senator DeLay?
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