Afghan Ambassador Calls for More U.S. Troops

From the stage of a synagogue, Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States last night called on the U.S. to supply more forces and a greater commitment to his nation, which has recently seen an abrupt by members of the Taliban movement. At a an event taking place at the 6th & I Synagogue, an historic Washington, D.C., venue, Ambassador Said T. Jawad and his wife, Shamim, answered questions from Steve Coll, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning book, Ghost Wars, which chronicles the CIA’s involvement in the Afghan civil war. Coll currently leads the New America Foundation.

“The NATO troops are not fighting as hard as they should,” said Jawad, who also bemoaned the current capacity of U.S. and international forces.

Though Jawad’s assessment of the situation in Afghanistan almost certainly stems from his first-hand experience of events in his country, his call for a greater U.S. commitment comes just days before Sen. Barack Obama, in the heat of the presidential campaign, is expected to arrive in Afghanistan on a Senate fact-finding mission. Obama contend that the war in Iraq diverted U.S. attention from where he believes it is most needed: Afghanistan.

Yesterday CNN reported, “Since May, the deaths of U.S. and allied troops have far outpaced the toll in Iraq. On Thursday, the toll in Afghanistan was 21, compared with six in Iraq.”

Asked by Coll if a larger footprint by U.S. troops would serve to breed resentment among the Afghan people, Jawad emphatically said no. “The real intruders in Afghanistan are the Taliban,” he said. “We are very pragmatic… the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is the most important hope. The concern in Afghanistan is not how long [is the U.S.] going to be here; it’s that [the U.S.] will leave before institutions are in place.”

Of those institutions, Jawad expressed particular concern about the police force, whose ineffectiveness ultimately serves to undermine the government in the eyes of the Afghan people. “They are not sure of our ability to protect them,” he said.

While the Taliban has become most famous in the U.S. for its activities in Southern Afghanistan, the of Pakistan is Taliban country, as well, with the fabled silk-road city of Peshawar currently in the throes of a power struggle between the Taliban and Pakistani government forces. Yet the peril of extremism in Pakistan finds only tangential expression in the U.S. presidential contest.

On both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, the dominant ethnic group is Pashtun, a people who don’t necessarily accept the line drawn on a map by an Englishman 50 years ago that divides tribal lands between the two countries. I asked Jawad why that area has lent itself to the Taliban and their sympathizers. It’s not that there’s a native Pashtun affinity with the Taliban, Jawad said; it’s that the extremists acquired resources that enabled them to elbow out traditional elders. “The true tribal leaders have been pushed aside,” he said.

In Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, of which Peshawar is the capital, the Army and the intelligence agencies, said Jawad, actively aid insurgents, who often cross the border to contact attacks inside Afghan territory. When an audience member questioned the rationale of the generals and the spymasters, Jawad suggested that they are still looking to India as their greatest threat, and see the extremists as their forward line in any potential subcontinental conflict. “Most of the intelligence agencies lack wisdom,” he said.

The event, “A Conversation with Mr. & Mrs. Jawad,” was designed to highlight an exhibit of Afghan treasures, rescued from the Taliban by Afghan curators and government workers, that is currently traveling the U.S. Questions to Mrs. Jawad addressed cultural matters and the situation of women and children in Afghanistan.

See more tagged with: 6th & I synagogue, Afghanistan, Barack Obama, National Gallery of Art, new america foundation, Peshawar, Said Jawad, Shamim Jawad, Steve Coll and Taliban

What Next For Guantánamo?

Now that detainees held by the U.S. at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have the right of habeas corpus, members of one congressional body are asking, how will that work?

While the Supreme Court, with its decision in Boumediene v. Bush, granted prisoners held as enemy combatants at Guantánamo the right to their day in court, many questions remain unanswered — including whether the Boumediene decision applies to “enemy combatant” prisoners held by the U.S. in facilities other than the famed prison camp in Cuba. The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, an entity of Congress also known as the Helsinki Commission, yesterday asked the guidance of three experts in a packed hearing room.

Both Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., who co-chair the commission, spoke of the damage done to the U.S. image among its European allies by virtue of the fact of the Guantánamo, a place where prisoners have been subject to indefinite detentions and interrogation methods classified as torture in international law. Other commissioners spoke of “getting an earful” about U.S. detention and interrogation policies when they travel abroad on commission business.

“[I]n light of the latest defeat for the administration’s detention policies at the hands of the Supreme Court…” said Cardin, “I think it is high time to stop tinkering with a failed system and re-open entirely the question of how we handle terrorism suspects.”

“The fact that Gitmo is still open is testament to the genuine challenges we face in relocating its residents…,” Hastings said, “but it also speaks to a lack of political leadership in fixing the problems there.”

The three witnesses who appeared before the commission concurred with Hastings’ conclusion that Guantánamo should be closed. The witness list need not have been so stacked, Hastings implied, noting that the commissioners invited representatives from the Departments of Justice, Defense and State. “…in light of the vital implications of this subject for our country,” he said, “I sorely regret the absence of administration witnesses.” The commission’s membership includes representatives from Defense and State, but neither attended the hearing.

Much of the argument against granting full rights under U.S. and international law to those detained as enemy combatants centers on the possibility of that prisoner’s “return to the battlefield” if he is released. While that’s an acknowledged risk, said Jeremy Shapiro, research director for the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe, there’s more to consider.

“The question of whether a returned detainee poses a danger needs to be weighed against the danger that the existence of Guantánamo is doing every day in creating recruits for terrorism,” said Shapiro. “It is not simply the case that you will release somebody into a static pool of terrorists. The problem of Guantánamo, the image of Guantánamo, is creating in Europe and the world is, I would argue, on a daily basis adding to our terrorism problem.”

Matthew Waxman, now a Columbia Law School professor, served as the Pentagon’s chief legal adviser on detainee issues, where he earned the ire of David Addington, the famed enforcer for Vice President Dick Cheney. Waxman’s transgression? Insisting that Pentagon guidelines on detainee treatment incorporate language from the Geneva Conventions prohibiting cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment. At yesterday’s hearing, he advised lawmakers not to seek an easy fix to a complicated problem.

“When I say that there’s no simple and ready alternative, what I’m really getting at is there’s no easy solution out there that’s gonna take care of the whole problem on its own….,” Waxman told the commission. “[R]ather than looking for a one-size-fits all solution, such as ’send them all to their home countries,’ ‘bring them all into the United States’, ‘prosecute them all,’ the solution to Guantanamo probably lies in a combination of all of those things.”

Then he added another option to add to the list, one he conceded was “controversial”: “new legislation that might create what’s sometimes called administrative detention or preventive detention authority — to hold somebody inside the United States.”

Hmmm…I’m no lawyer, but I’m not sure how that would jibe with the whole rationale for habeas.

Rounding out the panel was Gabor Rona, international legal director for Human Rights First, and former legal adviser for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo. (See Brian’s coverage of how Pentagon advisers and Guantánamo officials hoped to evade ICRC detection of cruel and inhumane practices used in prisoner interrogations there.)

Rona took on the very notion of the “enemy combatant” and the standards — which sounded unconstitutional to me — of what constitutes “hostile acts” against the U.S.

“The definition of enemy combatant encompasses a huge swath of activities, many of which that have nothing to do with the battlefield — associating with terrorists, for example,” Rona explained. “So when the United States releases [an individual] and declares that they are no longer an enemy combatant, that doesn’t mean that they had made the correct decision in the first place that this person had engaged in hostilities against the United States.” In one case, Rona said, a detainee was deemed to have engaged in hostilities against the U.S. for having published an op-ed critical of “U.S. policies and practices.”

Rona also contended that no new legal architecture is needed in the face of the Supreme Court’s decision. “If we continue to look for the perfect, we will never find a solution and it will continue to be the enemy of the good,” Rona said. “The good is the federal criminal justice system.”

By the end of the two-hour hearing, the once-full room was more than half-empty. Even the two women from the anti-war group, Code Pink — one sporting a spectacular, hot-pink hair ornament — had made their exit before the closing gavel.

See more tagged with: alcee hastings, ben cardin, guantanamo, habeas corpus and helsinki commission

Live From Main Street
The Housing Crisis: Not Just Subprime Anymore

Marking National Housing Crisis Investigation Week, The Media Consortium examines Miami as a case study at the leading edge of a market disaster. Tomorrow, the Consortium’s next in its series of Live From Main Street town hall programs will take place in Miami’s Lyric Theater: “Magic City, Hard Times: How is Miami Facing the Economic Crisis and Working Toward a Sustainable Future?”

If you had any doubt of a housing crisis in the U.S., listen to the word from the horse’s mouth. According to RealtyTrac, a California-based firm that monitors foreclosures for investors, the national foreclosure rate for June 2008 exceeded by more than 50 percent the rate for June of last year. A foreclosure notice was delivered last month to one in every 501 U.S. households, RealtyTrac reported.

Yet the crisis is deeper than those numbers suggest. While the burst of the housing-market bubble is nearly always pegged to the surge in risky subprime mortgages made to under-resourced borrowers over the course of the last decade, the bust is affecting people who never borrowed a dime.

Neither borrower nor lender — but huring

“[T]he misconception is that the [housing] crisis is just a crisis around people who took loans,” said Gihan Perera, executive director of the Miami Workers Center. “On one level, that is clearly…where the bomb directly hit, in that there are tons of people who are losing their homes through foreclosures…but the ripple effect of the entire credit crisis is actually much bigger than that.”

In Miami, for instance, the foreclosure epidemic encompasses not only single-family homes, Perera explained, but apartment buildings, as well. “So the banks then are either trying to get rid of those buildings, or hold on to them at the least cost until they can get rid of them,” leaving tenants in the lurch. And with a flood of people losing their homes now entering the rental market, said Perera, who will be featured as a panelist at Live From Main Street program, rents are climbing.

The RealtyTrac report released yesterday names Florida among the five states with the highest foreclosure rates.

The crisis is reaching well into the middle class. In Florida, it’s not just urban centers like Miami that are hard-hit, but recently-built, upper-middle class boom-built communities like Celebration in the Orlando area, according to an investigation by a local television news operation, 2 News of WESH-TV. In their Central Florida region, WESH reported, “the most homes in foreclosure are in zip codes that didn’t exist five years ago.” But, regardless of income, communities of color appear to be the hardest hit, especially by the high level of defaults on subprime loans, which charge higher rates of interest than do prime mortgages. Often the rate for the first year or two of the loan is low, but then hikes up substantially after that.

Communities of color feel the pain

“All the estimates are that blacks and Hispanics will be hurt much more by the decline in housing fairly significantly,” said Algernon Austin, Ph.D., director of the Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy program at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “United for a Fair Economy estimates that it will be, basically, one of the greatest losses of wealth for African-Americans and Latinos that we’ve seen in, you know, probably the last hundred years.”

For those who took the subprime loans, the crisis is particularly acute. The UFE report to which Austin refers asserts that “the subprime mortgage crisis will cause African-Americans to experience wealth losses of between $72 billion and $93 billion over its duration. For people of color in general, the racial bias of subprime mortgage lenders accounts for nearly double the wealth losses for people of color as for whites.”

The ten regions listed in the RealtyTrac report that show the highest levels of
foreclosures are in either California or Florida, states with large communities of color. In the 2000 census, Florida ranked number two among the fifty states for the size of its African-American population. At least 20 percent of its inhabitants describe themselves as Latino or Hispanic.

Women targeted by subprime lenders

Women are extremely hard-hit by the crisis, and discrimination may well be in play. In a 2006 study, the Consumer Federation of America looked at (PDF) who received high-interest subprime mortgages, finding that “women are more likely to receive subprime mortgages of all types regardless of income… For purchase mortgages, women earning double the median income are 46.4 percent more likely to receive subprime mortgages than men with similar incomes.”

Add race to gender, and you find that African-American women, who are more likely to head single-parent households than white women, are the suffering the worst of the mortgage meltdown — especially, perhaps, middle-class black women. According to the Consumer Federation study, “Upper-income African-American women are nearly five times more likely to receive subprime purchase mortgages than upper-income white men, and upper-income Latino women are nearly four times more likely to receive subprime loans than upper-income white men.”

Black women, as always, were the last people into the musical chair game,” said Perera, “and then the chair was swept [out from] under them.”

House of cards

Although the crisis now extends beyond subprime borrowers to people at all levels of investment in the housing market, it was the subprime frenzy that tipped the market, said Wilhemina Leigh, Ph.D., a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C. “Nobody was regulating the Wall Street investment banks” that bought up the the bad debt from the subprime mortgage brokers and packaged that debt in securities. “Consequently they bought whatever they felt like buying, whatever looked good. It was really like the wild, wild West…”

Add to that a lack of oversight of the subprime brokers themselves, and a crisis was born. “[J]ust given that there were large pockets of people of color who just didn’t understand how the process worked, they were a ready-made set of pawns to be used, and to be taken advantage of in many cases by brokers who moved into these areas that didn’t have banks or credit unions and set up their shops there. They were the only game in town, so if you wanted a mortgage and walked through their doors, no matter what type of credit score you might have had, even if you qualified for prime, you weren’t going to get that because the only thing these shops knew how to do was subprime mortgages.”

In areas like Miami, the proliferation of subprime mortgages helped fuel speculation and an unsupported real-estate boom.

Wall Street, developers get off easy

While Wall Street has taken a hit on the housing bust, it’s nothing compared to the price paid by Main Street “The way our laws are currently structured,” Leigh explained, “a person who buys a security that ’s backed by a pool of mortgages does not have any liability once the…underlying mortgages go belly-up.” Wall Street walks away, leaving Main Street holding the bag. Last November, in a report issued jointly by three nonprofits that advocate affordable housing, author Kevin Connor wrote, “The big five investment banks are projected to pay out $38 billion in bonuses this year (2007) — even more than last year.”

Even in the face of a full-blown housing disaster for working people in his city, said Perera of the Miami Workers Center, politicians are looking to keep developers in the black while cutting back on social services for everyday Miami-dwellers. He cites a $3 billion project handed to large developers to build a baseball stadium and a tunnel under the Port of Miami. “We couldn’t get a jobs program to dig ditches, and kind of help working-class people out, “said Perera. “We’re about to give $3 billion to developers to dig a tunnel.”

See more tagged with: housing discrimination and mortgage crisis

How to Save the Constitution, and a Few Other Things

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Often touted as presidential timber, Sen. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin last year abandoned the playing field of the presidential contest to continue his mission as one of the Senate’s most outspoken defenders of civil liberties. Yesterday, the Senate passed into law the Protect America Act, a bill that expands executive power to spy on Americans and grants retroactive immunity from lawsuits to telecom companies who provide customers’ private records to the government. On June 26, just as senators were preparing for final debates on the bill, which eliminates many of the civil liberties protections of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Feingold talked to Brian Beutler about civil liberties, John McCain, the worst thing President Bush has done — and what a President Obama should say in his inaugural address.

BRIAN BEUTLER: So starting on FISA (and the Protect America Act), a lot of people were impressed with the House Democrats’ performance back in February when they Senate bill (that extended the warrantless wiretapping program). In the interim, what happened? Where was the pressure coming from within the Democratic party to revisit this issue and not wait at least until there was a new administration in place?

SEN. RUSSELL FEINGOLD: This is just really amazing to me, because there’s always the pressure on this. There’s a very interesting thing that happens with these where people get fired up and people really have good instincts about civil liberties and would really prefer to be on this side. I think that’s what they really believe in. So you get kind of a head of steam, which I noticed happened with the blocking of the reauthorization of the Patriot Act for a while, until people caved. And it happened for a while even in the Senate on the PAA. But what was a surprise was what the House did. I mean that was really impressive that a group of people, including Steny Hoyer and others, stood up and said, “No, we’re not gonna do this.”

But the problem is that there’s this fear, that sort of grows over time, that somehow Democrats are gonna get hit over the head by claims that they’re soft on terrorism. And it always rears its head, especially when we’re heading into a recess period or an election period. What’s happening right now is that they claim that the problem is that the. We were able to make the argument early in the year that the orders were lasting for a year. So even if the law expired, the orders allowing the surveillance were still in place. Until August. Well, we’re coming up to August.

Now the truth is that we could simply extend the bill for a year, sunset it. We could extend the orders. But as you get closer to these deadlines, the administration uses these intimidation tactics, and far too many Democrats fall for it. They think that somehow the administration’s gonna win this argument. I don’t think that’s true. I think the Democrats did great the last few months when the House stood up to them. But there is this sort of inertia — if that’s the right word — that leads to ultimately the caving of very large numbers of Democrats, even voting for an awful piece of legislation like this. That’s the only way I know how to describe it. I don’t know, the day-to-day pressure — it’s like this constantly pulsating fear of being accused of being soft on terrorism.

BB: Following up on that, then. How, politically, does one change that mindset — that being tough on national security means that the Democratic party has to support wars and the erosion of civil liberties?

RF: I think you show people that those who stand firm on this do just fine politically. I like to think of myself as an example of that. There are many people like that. The truth is that if you properly articulate that you want to balance national security and make sure we protect civil liberties at the same time. And take the time to go through the arguments — which are very frankly easy to win — these are not hard arguments. When anybody really listens to it, they just kinda shake their head. Then you can prevail and show people that you don’t need to buckle at the knees on this. But it requires a little patience. It requires a little faith in peoples’ willingness to listen. And that’s how in the long run you prevail. And I’m hoping that a lot of people who run this time, unlike a lot of people who ran in 2006, are held accountable.

I’m sure many of our candidates are gonna say, you know, I was against immunity and I don’t like this bill. Well, they need to be held accountable when they get here. And that hasn’t really happened. We have a lot of Democrats, even some who voted to get us out of iraq, who aren’t voting properly on this, in a way that is, you know frankly, very damaging to our efforts to improve the bill.

BB: I understand. So you don’t think that (in the next administration) an Attorney General Feingold or a Director of National Intelligence Feingold would be crucial?

RF: I certainly don’t think it’s crucial, and I think that the place I am right now — where I sit on the intelligence committee, the foreign relations committee and the judiciary committee — gives me a really unique angle on this. I think I may be the only person that has that combination of committees that relates to all of these issues.

BB: That’s why I requested the interview.

RF: I think it gives me a rather unique opportunity to pursue these issues. In the Senate. So I think that might be the best place for it.

BB: Assuming this passes the Senate, what’s the fix? Is there one? And when?

RF: Hopefully, under President Obama he will acknowledge, as he has in the past, not only how outrageous this immunity is — although that’s gonna be very hard to deal with because the horse may already be out of the barn — but I think, even more importantly, he will have an opportunity to review these very expanded powers that are given to the government to surveil our international communications. And to say, look, we need legislation that has some sort of court review and mechanisms for control of this, because it’s completely lawless. Now, if he doesn’t do it it’ll be very sad. And, in fact, my feeling, of course, is: let’s not let this go through now. It’s much harder to pass something and change it after the fact. But you know, I’m hoping we’ll have both houses (of Congress) and I’m hoping Obama will understand how important this is. And that will be a golden opportunity for him to correct one of many things that needs to be corrected from this administration. So I’m hoping it starts as early as January 20th.

BB: ….If the (telecom) immunity provision (to the Protect America Act) does go through, the way I see it there are two possibilities for discovery of what exactly the Bush administration was doing with the Terrorist Surveillance Program (the administration’s name for its warrantless surveillance of Americans and others). One is with the inspector general reports that the bill authorizes. I know a lot of people make fun of the idea of the administration investigating itself. But Glenn Fine (inspector general for the Department of Justice) is an interesting character…

RF: Yeah, he’s been very independent and very credible. You can expect something very good from that in terms of credibility, I agree with that. There’s no question there, that you know that’s one small positive piece here.

BB: Can the Bush administration just ignore that or signing-statement it out of existence, and if the IG (inspector general) process doesn’t work, would you believe that a (President) Obama would reveal to the Congress or the country just what was happening back in the TSP days?

RF: I don’t know what he’d reveal. I do believe he’d take the IG provisions seriously if, for some reason, this administration does not. I do think he’d take any conclusions they’d come to seriously. So that’s the good news, is that I really do think that he would. And he would have no reason not to. It’s not his administration. He’s a person that has been very associated with the rule of law in his career. So a President Obama to me would be somebody who, if there is a failure to follow through on this, who may well help us have follow up on this.

BB: Would a McCain presidency mean the continuation of these sorts of–

RF: –You know, I think McCain would be better on this than the current administration, to be candid with you. There’ve been some remarks that he’s made about — even though he’s pulled back some on telecom immunity — he’s said that he would do no signing statements. I think he knows and his people know that this administration is just out of control and is just really, lawless. But the difference between Obama and McCain on the specifics would be significant. I think that Obama would be far more likely to insist on some court review and some protections against things like bulk collection of information, reverse targeting of Americans. There’s no question he would understand that and I would hope we’d have a much better shot at him trying to correct those problems than Senator McCain.

BB: And what about for the state of the broader national security state and civil liberties state? What would a McCain presidency mean beyond FISA? So, national security letters, torture, REAL ID –

RF: I think he’d be much better than the current administration, because he has sensitivity to issues like torture. He’s shown some sensitivity — not so much in his voting but in his comments — about some of the other issues. But again, Obama’s far more likely to take the viewpoint that I take across the board, which is that the range of these power grabs in this administration have to be pulled back. And I would urge him to make that very statement in the inaugural address.

I’ve written an op-ed that was published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this Sunday — this past Sunday — which says look, this new president, whoever it is, has to renounce these extreme powers, or its gonna start getting locked into our constitutional history. Right now the position of this administration is an outlier in the terms of our constitutional history. If this new president doesn’t renounce it and say, look we’ve gotta get this back in balance, then we will have altered the nature of our very Constitution. So this is a critical turning point in the constitutional history of America. All right. I’m running out of time.

BB: Do you have two more minutes?

RF: Okay.

BB: Okay…off the top of my head I counted several examples of the civil liberties and national securities state run amok. There was FISA, torture, national security letters, REAL ID, the border fence — it goes on and on.

RF: There’s a lot.

BB: There’s a lot. I mean obviously there’s a mindset in play here. But assuming that the mindset doesn’t change, what’s been the most egregious thing that’s occurred in the last seven years and what’s the most important to scale back.

RF: It would be, I think, the overall assertion that, under Article II of the Constitution, the president can look at a clear statute that’s been signed into law and ignore it because of his so-called commander-in-chief powers. Whether that means a justification for warrantless wiretapping, whether that means saying, look, I can do whatever I want on torture. That overall assertion is the thing that underlies many of the specifics, and that’s the one that needs to be pushed back to the Youngstown Steel case test articulated by Justice Jackson.

BB: Assuming that doesn’t happen, which is the most odious piece of legislation of the last seven years or the–

RF: –The legislation isn’t as much the problem as, for example, the warrantless wiretapping program…I would say the illegal warrantless wiretapping program (which was instituted by executive order).

BB: And the last question is a sort of procedural one. It’s about the filibuster (by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.) that you supported back in December. Why haven’t we seen more of that on certain issues, when controversial legislation has gotten to the floor…

RF: Actually I’ve been doing that consistently on issues for years and years, including this issue. I started working on this issue in December 2005. And I was out there trying to slow down the Patriot Act in the first place. I was the principle person using procedural techniques to prevent the reauthorization of the Patriot Act. I was equal partner with Sen. Dodd on the filibuster on this. I have tried to use it. Other senators are not as excited about it. But you know I have very strong views on these issues. And they do know that, at least with regard to my approach, they have to go through a fair amount of procedural stuff (such as being made to debate, as they did this week, the amendment Feingold offered with Dodd to the Protect America Act) if it’s something this bad. It should probably be done more, because, in the Senate, if you show that you’re gonna inflict a little pain in terms of time, sometimes you can, you know, get somewhere. Like we’re doing here. Well, this thing will still go through, but we’re making them realize that it’s not going to be easy, and that’s very important.

See more tagged with: feingold, FISA, senate judiciary committee, Terrorist Surveillance Program and warrantless wiretapping

Update: FISA Expansion Passes
Telecom Immunity Remedy Fails

Update: The Senate has passed, by a margin of 69-28, the Protect America Act, the bill that expands the reach of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to protect telephone and internet service providers from legal liability when they fork over to the government private information about who you’re calling or emailing outside of the U.S. The bill also expands the range of allowable data-mining by government spymasters.

Though the bill was termed a “bipartisan compromise,” my colleague Brian Beutler explained:

The word “bipartisan” is technically indisputable. The word “compromise”, by contrast, is a total farce.

Attempts in the Senate to retool the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act this week featured a two-day debate on an amendment sponsored by Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Russell Feingold, D-Wisc., that would have stripped legislation for the Protect America Act of immunity for telephone and internet providers who complied with government requests for information on consumers’ calls and e-mails in violation of privacy law. That amendment just failed, 32-66.

(My colleague, Brian Beutler, who usually covers intelligence matters, is on leave this week. Last week, he interviewed Feingold about FISA.)

In one of the last speeches before the vote, Dodd forcefully argued against the “false dichotomy” put forward by his amendment’s opponents between “security and civil liberties.” Dodd added, “It’s a false dichotomy. Previous generations have made it; we should not.”

Both Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton voted for the Dodd-Feingold amendment. (Obama, to much consternation, has indicated that he will vote for the Protect America Act even without the telecom immunity provisions, because of compromises made in other areas of the bill.)

Two senators who are often talked up as potential veep candidates on the Obama ticket — Jim Webb of Virginia and Claire McCaskill of Missouri — voted against the amendment. In other words, they voted to protect the telecoms. (Note: Webb yesterday seemed to take himself out of the contest for running-mate.)

Other Democrats voting against the amendment were Barbara Mikulski, Md.; Jay Rockefeller, W.V.; Blanche Lincoln, (Ark.); Mary Landrieu, La., and Dianne Feinstein, Calif.

Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican whom Republicans love to hate, after voting against Dodd-Feingold, offered his own, more narrowly drawn, amendment, which also failed, 37-61.

See more tagged with: dodd, feingold and FISA

“This Constantly Pulsating Fear”
Exclusive: Feingold Talks to Beutler

Click here to download audio of Beutler’s interview with Sen. Russell Feingold

Living up to predictions by Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisc., of “the caving of very large numbers of Democrats… [on] an awful piece of legislation,” the Senate remains poised to pass the Protect America Act in a form that will allow telephone companies and internet providers immunity from prosecution for forking over consumer information to government spymasters. The bill confers immunity that would be retroactive to the first days of a warrantless spying program originated by the Bush administration following the 9/11 attacks. In an interview with The Media Consortium’s Brian Beutler, Feingold attributed Democrats’ weakness to “this constantly pulsating fear of being accused of being soft on terrorism.”

Today’s debate on the Senate floor focuses on an amendment to the Protect America Act that would cancel telecom immunity from the current version of the legislation, which is being pushed by the administration as an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, known simply as FISA. Perhaps the most passionate advocate of the anti-immunity amendement to speak today was Feingold, whom Beutler interviewed last week about (among other things) why the Senate Democrats are likely to let the administration have its way with the spying legislation — including telecom immunity.

The immunity debate today saw a couple of strange-bedfellow pro and con tag teams arguing the anti-immunity amendment, which is offered by Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut. Arguing against the amendment were Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., and Kit Bond, R-Mo.

Supporting Dodd was the team of Feingold and Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican. Specter focused on last week’s decision by a federal judge who last week ruled that the Bush administration’s warrantless spying scheme, known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Passing the
administration’s wish-list surveillance bill, Specter said, will amount to circumvention of the legal system. Feingold, under questioning by Specter, pleaded a constitutional case.

Here’s a bit of Brian’s interview of Feingold:

BRIAN BEUTLER: So starting on FISA, a lot of people were
impressed with the House Democrats’ performance in February when they refused to advance the Senate bill. In the interim, what happened? Where was the pressure coming from within the Democratic party to revisit this issue and not wait at least until there was a new administration in place?
…

SEN. RUSSELL FEINGOLD: This is just really amazing to me, because
there’s always the pressure on this. There’s a very interesting thing
that happens with these where people get fired up and people really
have good instincts about civil liberties and would really prefer to
be on this side. I think that’s what they really believe in. So you
get kind of a head of steam, which I noticed happened with the blocking of the reauth of the Patriot Act for a while, until people caved. And it happened for a while even in the Senate on the PAA (Protect America Act, which is the name of the new FISA legislation). But what was a surprise was what the House did. I mean that was really impressive that a group of people, including Steny Hoyer and others, stood up and said, “No, we’re not gonna do this.”

But the problem is that there’s this fear, that sort of grows over time, that somehow Democrats are gonna get hit over the head by claims that they’re soft on terrorism. And it always rears its head, especially when we’re heading into a recess period or an election period. What’s happening right now is that they claim that the problem is that the. We were able to make the argument early in the year that the orders were lasting for a year. So even if the law expired, the orders allowing the surveillance were still in place. Until August. Well, we’re coming up to August.

Now, the truth is that we could simply extend the bill for a year, sunset it. We could extend the orders. But as you get closer to these deadlines, the administration uses these intimidation tactics, and far too many Democrats fall for it. They think that somehow the administration’s gonna win this argument. I don’t think that’s true. I think the Democrats did great the last few months when the House stood up to them. But there is this sort of inertia — if that’s the right word — that leads to ultimately the caving of very large numbers of Democrats, even voting for an awful piece of legislation like this. That’s the only way I know how to describe it. I don’t know, the day-to-day pressure; it’s like this constantly pulsating fear of being accused of being soft on terrorism.”

BB: Following up on that, then. How, politically, does one change that mindset — that being tough on national security means that the Democratic party has to support wars and the erosion of civil liberties?

RF: I think you show people that those who stand firm on this do just fine politically. I like to think of myself as an example of that. There are many people like that. The truth is that if you properly articulate that you want to balance national security and make sure we protect civil liberties at the same time. And take the time to go through the arguments — which are very frankly easy to win — these are not hard arguments. When anybody really listens to it, they just kinda shake their head. Then you can prevail and show people that you don’t need to buckle at the knees on this. But it requires a little patience. It requires a little faith in peoples’ willingness to listen. And that’s how in the long run you prevail. And I’m hoping that a lot of people who run this time, unlike a lot of people who ran in 2006, are held accountable.

I’m sure many of our candidates are gonna say, you know, I was against immunity and I don’t like this bill. Well, they need to be held accountable when they get here. And that hasn’t really happened. We have a lot of Democrats, even some who voted to get us out of iraq, who aren’t voting properly on this, in a way that is, you know frankly, very damaging to our efforts to improve the bill.

BB: I understand. So you don’t think that an Attorney General Feingold or a DNI (Director of National Intelligence) Feingold (in the next administration) would be crucial?

RF: I certainly don’t think it’s crucial, and I think that the place I am right now — where I sit on the intelligence committee, the foreign relations committee and the judiciary committee — gives me a really unique angle on this. I think I may be the only person that has that combination of committees that relates to all of these issues.

BB: That’s why I requested the interview.

RF: I think it gives me a rather unique opportunity to pursue these issues. In the Senate. So I think that might be the best place for it.

See more tagged with: feingold and FISA

Bullets Can’t Stop Beutler From Cracking Wise

Funny thing about being a journalist: your job is to write about people and mayhem and trauma, but let any of those touch you directly, and it becomes a different game. With that caveat, allow me to recount my brief visit today with my colleague, Brian Beutler, whose sign-off is a familiar one on this site, and has come to define the reporting of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.

I was just about to leave the house this morning to meet with Brian when I got word through a mutual colleague of ours that he had been shot in Washington, D.C., in an aborted mugging.

I found him at Washington Hospital Center, where his good friend, Matt Franklin, sat vigil through the night as Brian underwent major surgery. By the time I got there, Brian was in recovery, and Matt and I were shown to his bedside.

Perhaps foremost among the topics about which Brian writes in his coverage of national security and civil liberties issues is FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Bush administration’s circumvention of the original 1978 legislation, and subsequent legislative attempts to widen the powers of the executive branch to spy on U.S. citizens. The entity of choice for such spying by the Bush administration has been the National Security Agency.

This morning, Brian and I had planned to go over the story he had just delivered about efforts by Sen. Russell Feingold to stop the latest version of FISA legislation from getting through the Senate. As his editor, I had promised our members that we would deliver the piece today.

When I stepped up to Brian’s hospital bed, he smiled through the clear, plastic mask covering his mouth, and said in a quiet, hoarse voice, “Sorry. I left you high and dry.”

What could I do but laugh?

After some housekeeping conversation about his level of comfort (not great, as you might imagine), he piped up, “I have a theory about the shooting.” He smiled, impishly.

“Oh, yeah?” I said.

“It was the NSA,” he said, with a deadpan look.

(Actually, it was two teenage boys who thought they wanted Brian’s cell phone.)

Matt laughed.

The good word is that Brian is expected to make a full recovery. Please be patient as we await his return to his beat. Nobody covers FISA and the rest of his beat quite like Brian Beutler. I know that his passion for his work will bring him back to the Hill in good time.

–Adele M. Stan

See more tagged with: Brian Beutler, media consortium and syndicated reporting project

How to Think about Immunity

As has been widely reported, the House’s new FISA bill probably won’t be up for a vote in the Senate until after the July 4th holiday. But the bill continues to be subjected to a great deal of criticism on the left for its telecom immunity and surveillance provisions.

And for good reason! The bill allows for bulk collection of data on American citizens without warrants or oversight of almost any kind, and, for all intents and purposes, it requires civil lawsuits against the telecommunications companies that participated in President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program to be thrown out of court. This, many would like us to believe, is some sort of compromise.

But there’s still the matter of the Inspector General reviews. The bill, as it stands right now, requires the IGs of all agencies involved in the wiretapping program to conduct reviews of a number of important things including:

(A) all of the facts necessary to describe the establishment, implementation, product, and use of the product of the Program;

(B) access to legal reviews of the Program and access to information about the Program;

(C) communications with, and participation of, individuals and entities in the private sector related to the Program;

(D) interaction with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and transition to court orders related to the Program; and

(E) any other matters identified by any such Inspector General that would enable that Inspector General to complete a review of the Program, with respect to such Department or element.

The way the law is written, the inspectors general of all the relevant agencies will convene shortly after the law is signed and name a Senate-confirmed designee to head the review process. (Senate-confirmed inspectors general are, at least in theory, more independent than politically appointed inspectors.) Over the course of the next year, each individual inspector general will examine his own agency’s role in the warrantless wiretapping program. At the end that term, the reviews will be turned into a comprehensive report and submitted to the relevant congressional committees in both classified and unclassified forms. Though the law lists no penalties for non-compliance (and so it’s hard to say why the administration wouldn’t just ignore these provisions) it does require the administration to expedite the process, and refrain from obstructing it (by, for example, dragging their feet on providing investigators with security clearances) in its own ways.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that All Will Be Revealed to the public. But it’s not nothing, either. People often scoff at the notion of the administration investigating itself and tend to regard calls for inspector general reports as inherently corrupt… until, of course, some inspector general releases some damning report detailing yet more corruption in the White House. A number of those reports have been written by Glenn Fine–who heads the IG office at the Department of Justice–and, if the bill passes, he will be one of the officials looking into the wiretapping program, and perhaps be in the lead.

This isn’t to carry water for congressional Democrats. But it is useful to look at what this provision and the immunity provision, taken together, mean as the bill’s written right now. For instance:

• If the fight over immunity is important to you because you want the telecommunications companies to pay for their crimes, or because you worry about the precedent the government is setting by providing amnesty to corporate criminals, then you’re basically out of luck.
• If the fight over immunity is important to you because you want the ins and outs of the illegal wiretapping program to be revealed in as much detail as possible, though, then all is not lost.

Obviously, it would be foolish to assume that Bush administration officials plan to cooperate with the inspectors general full stop. (You may have already noticed, but they have this tendency is to lie and obfuscate and stall when confronted with any sort of oversight, even oversight from within.) But in this instance they’re up against a deadline–and therefore some unusual incentives. If the FISA bill passes, say, a week from now, the White House will have about six months left in office, after which all of these agencies will undergo huge staff changes–particularly huge if Obama wins: no more Michael Mukasey, no more Robert Gates.

And it’s precisely for this reason that Bush et al may want to be a bit less intransigent with the inspectors general than they’d normally be, and get the reports out of the way while they’re still in office. Because if they do what they normally do and stand athwart the investigation, then a new administration will come in and the whole game changes, potentially drastically. One can imagine John McCain taking a page from Gerald Ford and continuing the obfuscation. But if Barack Obama wins the presidency (obviously still a big if) one can imagine a pretty thoroughgoing investigation and report. So in that sense, the administration might be inclined to be more helpful to the inspectors general than it normally is.

Some Capitol Hill Democrats are a bit more optimistic still. They think that no matter what approach Bush takes with the IG requirements, the reviews will take so long that they’ll bleed into a new (hopefully Democratic) administration no matter what.

But many still worry about a white wash. Or that the administration will provide the IGs with juuust enough information that the report will be completed quickly, but with the bare-minimum of disclosure. Possible, and unfortunate. But they might be at least somewhat chastened by the introduction of a new amendment from Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) If it passes (yet another big, big “if”) it will delay the provision of immunity until 90 days after the IG reports are submitted to Congress.

There are a couple ideas here. The first is that by making telecom immunity contingent upon the submission of the IG reports, Bingaman’s basically offering a guarantee that the IG reviews will be complete, and (at least in some cases) reported with some measure of credibility. The comprehensive report might not be a white wash after all. And if it’s extremely damning, the (new, more Democratic) Congress could–but probably wouldn’t–act in the intervening 90 days to amend the law and strip it of its immunity provision. Likewise, if the IG report does turn out to be weak, Congress could press for more.

Clearly, there are ifs, built on top of ifs, built on top of top of maybes here. But consider an alternative. If both the IG provisions and the immunity provision were to be removed from the FISA legislation in the Senate, and the lawsuits allowed to proceed during the Bush administration, it would set a better legal precedent, but there’d remain the risk that a great deal of information about the illegal wiretapping program would never make it out of the court house. No great victory for those interested in the discovery process. If, on the other hand, the IG and immunity provisions remain, and the Bingaman amendment fails (the most likely scenario), it’s a loss for the rule of law, but there’s still some chance that at least some of the details of the wiretapping program will be unearthed and made public.

Obviously, the ideal bill would allow the lawsuits to proceed and would require an IG report and would respect the Constitution, but our representatives–both Republicans and Democrats–foreclosed on that option.

Several months ago, the immunity battle was both an important moral fight and an effective way to derail a different extremely bad bill–one that lacked an IG provision altogether. At this point, with a different bad bill on its way to passage, immunity is pretty clearly not the grounds on which this bill is going to be stopped–if those grounds exist at all. In other words it might be time to learn to stop worrying about immunity and start pressuring Congress not to settle for a bleached IG process. And then to start thinking about how to undo all the other odious aspects of this legislation down the line.

See more tagged with: FISA, immunity and telecoms

John Yoo’s Attempt to Discredit a Critic

Last week’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing, which featured special guests John Yoo and David Addington, drew a lot of attention for its rhetorical bombshells (Chairman Conyers: Could the president order a suspect buried alive?) and the tense back and forth between the witnesses and Democrats on the bench. But Addington and Yoo are both long-time lawyers–lawyers for politicians, no less–and as such their testimony revealed much, much less about the Bush administration’s torture regime than many hoped it would.

However, there was this peculiar exchange between Yoo and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), on the subject of author Philippe Sands’ new book, Torture Team which contains a number of startling revelations about the administration’s abandonment of the eighth amendment.

Yoo: Sir, I haven’t read the book. I did read Mr. Sands’ testimony before this committee, and I noticed in the testimony he said that he had interviewed me for the book. And I can say that he did not interview me for the book. He asked me for an interview and I declined. So I didn’t quite understand why he would tell the committee that he had actually interviewed me.

King: And with that answer, Professor Yoo then, I’m going to interpret that to mean that at least with regard to that statement that he had interviewed you, you find that to be a false statement, and that would perhaps reflect on the veracity of the balance of the book.

Yoo: I can’t tell what else is in the book, but I don’t understand why he would say that he interviewed me for the book. I can tell the committee that he contacted me once. He wanted to interview me for the book and I said I don’t want to talk to you. I wrote my own book, you can look at my own book. Everything I have to say is in my book. And then he told the committee that he’d interviewed me.

The idea, of course, is that someone who hates America so much that he’s willing to fabricate all sorts of untrue allegations about Yoo (and, perhaps, other administration veterans) is not to be believed. When I heard this interchange, though, I emailed Sands and asked him to clear the air. He was fairly unambiguous: “I never claimed to have interviewed him! As set out in my book: we debated. ” So who’s telling the truth?

Well, Yoo’s right about approximately one thing: Sands did testify before the very same House panel, on May 6 of this year. But that’s about the extent of it. In his prepared remarks, Sands submits that, “[o]ver hundreds of hours I conversed or debated with many of those most deeply involved. They included… the Deputy Assistant Attorney General at DoJ (Mr Yoo).” [Emphasis mine.]

You can read, as Yoo did, for yourself. Or you can watch, starting about 2 min 45 sec into the video.
And, indeed, Yoo and Sands did debate each other in October 2005. You can listen to that debate in full if you follow this link. One hesitates to throw the word perjury around (maybe Yoo… misread… Sands’ testimony). But it is safe to say that the goal here was to discredit a critic who’s brought to light a great deal of damning information about the Bush administration and its allies.

See more tagged with: john yoo, Rep. John Conyers and torture

The Torture Taint

Even as they worked out the details of how interrogation techniques widely regarded as torture would be used on detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Pentagon officials sought to keep the blood off Defense Department hands.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Before the Pentagon’s detainee interrogation policy was finalized in 2002, military officials — both supporters and opponents of the controversial techniques it condoned — concerned themselves primarily with protecting their organizations from scrutiny rather than with preventing the techniques from being instituted in the first place. One senior Pentagon official even recommended removing detainees from the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, so that techniques that appeared to violate the U.S. Code of Military Justice could not be attributed to his agency.

On November 4, 2002, Sam McCahon, chief legal adviser to the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigation Task Force, raised objections to a legal opinion authored by Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver of the Army’s Judge Advocate General Corps that greenlighted a number of controversial interrogation tactics. In a memo to CITF Commander Brittain Mallow, McCahon wrote: “Any policy decision to use [techniques that could violate the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment] will be contrary to my recommendation.”

McCahon was particularly concerned about the harshest techniques outlined in the Beaver memo, including waterboarding, cold weather or water exposure, “the use of non-injurious physical contact,” or “scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family”.

“Nonetheless,” McCahon went on, “if the application of the requested measures is approved, I recommend the following actions to mitigate the adverse impact on the CITF.”

McCahon suggested first that detainees subjected to harsh treatment be interrogated at a facility other than Guantanamo. In addition, though, he recommended that those selected for harsh interrogations “not be a (sic) considered for referral to the Military Commission” in order to “reduce the risk that the more aggressive techniques used against a few detainees [will] be revealed.” His last request was that “CITF personnel should not participate in aggressive techniques… [to] preserve the integrity of our investigations [and] insulate CITF personnel from potential administrative or criminal liability.”

The goal, in other words, was to keep blood off CITF’s hands.

McCahon wasn’t alone in this thinking. On October 2, 2002, just one month before he sent off his own memo, military and government attorneys — including Beaver — met in Cuba with the official purpose of discussing what they called “counter resistance strategy” with Guantanamo officials. In reality, though, they negotiated the implementation and legality of a series of controversial detainee interrogation tactics that would soon become the official policy of the Department of Defense.

“We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around,” Beaver told the group, according to minutes of the meeting. “It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques…. They will be in and out, scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave. This would draw a lot of negative attention.”

The ICRC refers to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors the conditions in which detainees at Guantanamo are kept.

Although Beaver, now retired from the military, was strongly of the opinion that the techniques under discussion were legally permissible, her advice echoed concern over the potential for a public relations disaster expressed by military and law enforcement officials who opposed the use of harsh interrogation techniques.

Bernard Barrett, spokesperson for the ICRC in Washington, DC, said leaders of his organization knew that the military was not providing the group access to all prisoners when they began meeting with detainees at Guantanamo Bay in January, 2002.

To maintain access to the detainees and a working relationship with the government, he said, the ICRC doesn’t divulge to reporters its findings or deliberations with officials. But, he added, “any attempt [on the part of the government] to mislead us is not conducive” to maintaining a cooperative relationship. He also said the ICRC is confident that the situation was rectified in September 2004 — almost two years after the harsh interrogation regime was first approved by the Pentagon.

Guantanamo officials weren’t the only ones hoping to distance themselves and their organizations from the so-called coercive techniques. A May 2008 Department of Justice inspector general audit found that senior officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation had raised concerns about detainee treatment as early as 2002, instructing FBI agents not to participate in questioning sessions alongside military or CIA interrogators using controversial techniques.

However, the FBI did not require agents to report incidents of abuse until the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004. The IG report showed “a failure of leadership on the part of senior FBI officials,” according to Jameel Jaffer, national security director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

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