I put up one pissy blog post about how there is no hope for liberty in the American political arena, and next thing you know I see this:
A group of libertarian-minded Republicans in Congress is blocking President Bush’s effort to strengthen domestic counterterrorism laws and reauthorize the USA Patriot Act, which the president has made one of his top domestic priorities this year.
Kind of a good news/bad news thing. Good that there is some opposition to the Patriot Act, which is odious in a number of ways, bad that Bush has made extending it his top domestic priority this year. Legislation is apparently gaining ground that would rein in some of the worst bits of the Patriot Act, although apparently Bush has threatened to veto anything of the sort. I should note that the lead paragraph above is a little misleading; Democrats are carrying more than their fair share of the load on this front.
Bush, who has not vetoed a single bill in his entire Presidency (a record, I believe), would single out a bill protecting civil liberties for veto. I happen to think that, from a broad strategic perspective, the Bush administration has gotten a lot right in the current war. However, they seem to be doing everything they can on the domestic front to encourage me to stay home in November.
Just how bad a President Mr Bush has caught some people by surprise.
By “some people” I mean me. True I am British, but I thought I knew something about American poltics and I expected Mr Bush to be O.K. – I did not expect him to achieve very much, but I did not expect a President who acts as if he has never seen a government spending program or regulation that he did not like.
I have no excuse, I had heard that Milton Friedman had refused to have anything to do with Mr Bush – but I thought “ah, it is the stroke – Friedman is allowing his experience of the father to influence his attitude to the son”.
It seems that the man with a poor mental capacity was not Milton Friedman (or other American free market folk), the man with the poor mental capacity was me.
I hate to say it but I have reached my breaking point with the Bush administration. I think the Republicans made a major mistake not putting forward a viable alternative to him in the primaries. True the war on terror has not turned out as bad as its critics would have us believe but I am forced to conclude that it has stalled considerably in regards to the reconstruction of both Afghanistan and in Iraq. I fear that this combined with the utter poison of the prisoner abuse scandal has put this administration to bed regarding the war on terror. New blood is needed to get the thing jumpstarted again. Since there is no viable Republican candidate which would be the ideal, I don’t think I have any choice but to vote for *choke* Kerry in November. He will not pull troops from Iraq and I believe that he would have no choice politically but to stay in Iraq until the job is done. It may be possible to control him somewhat through popular pressure while at the same time we could have a badly needed fresh start with the Arabs esp the Iraqis. It may also be possible to hold the line socially as well as long as a Republican majority is maintained in Congress. Kerry would thus find it very hard to push a hard left agenda either with his appointments or with legislation. I hate to say it but this scenario is sounding more reasonable to me with every passing day.
Peggy, the problem with Kerry is that he would turn over the Iraqis and the Afghanis to the UN, which is worse than the current situation. Sure, he might leave our troops there, but our boys defending the establishment of a new UN satrapy in Iraq is the worst possible outcome – US blood, UN corruption, and Iraqi suffering.
We don’t need a fresh start with the Arabs – they need a fresh start with us. We hold the whip hand, not them, not to mention the moral, economic, and political high ground. Kerry would go to them hat in hand, thus setting us up, as Carter did, for another generation of oppression, corruption, and exported violence. If the Arabs aren’t happy with the US, maybe they need to ask themselves “why we hate them.”
Kerry’s appointments would sail through the Senate, which is under the effective control of the Democrats. Under no circumstances would spending go down or taxes be cut under a Kerry administration. Kerry’s record in Congress is that of a rock-solid left authoritarian – tax, spend, and regulate.
Domestically and on foreign policy, I just don’t see how Kerry is better in any way than Bush.
No, President Bush is not the dream-come-true of the liberty minded, but I think everybody on this thread is forgetting the exigencies of American politics.
The sad fact is that there is not a mandate for liberty. Democrats will demagogue against privatization of Social Security and tax cuts, and about anything else you basic Samizdata reader would like.
Call me names, but I will pull the W lever pretty happily Next November. The tax cuts are as good as anybody could have gotten, his war performance has been imperfect but preferable to the UN.
Democracy means never getting exactly what you want. The whole concept is compromise with your fellow citizens.
It is therefore foolhardy to reject GW Bush just because he is imperfect. Yes he imposed steel and lumber tariffs, but the steel tariffs were short-lived. And he was able to push through fast-track trade agreement authority.
Spending has been excessive, but not more so than we could expect from Democrats. Remember, the Clinton spending cuts were all in Defense, and that was not all good.
And the Bush tax cuts were a surprising and significant plus.
Yes, the Patriot Act has some dangerous excesses, but we are in a war on terror and we had to do something to reverse the excesses of prior restraints, such as the wall between international and domestic intelligence.
The war in Iraq is not going badly at all. It is only the left-wing media desire to see Bush “lose” in Iraq that makes things sound so doubious. All war is hell. Why would this one be an exception? Compared with Allied fire-bombing in WWII, psychological torture of war prisoners is trivial. (And everything is relative.)
The worst thing that the American public could do now would be to vote for Kerry. Kerry is certain to retreat into a humiliating failure in Iraq, attributing that failure to Bush. He is also certain to tax and spend more than Bush.
I’m pretty ambivalent about USAPATRIOT myself (except for the name, which is godawful).
What parts of it am I supposed to be incensed about, again? And which civil-liberties-preserving laws are actually in the pipeline, for Bush to supposedly veto? (I’ll believe a veto when I see it, like I’ll believe support for the !@#! Assault Weapons Ban when I see a signature. It’s all posturing until there’s action or precedent, and I don’t see either yet in either case. Pathetic, but that’s politics.)
And I don’t mean those questions rhetorically, either. I want rational people (not, say, the ALA) to tell me what provisions in the actual legislation (ie, not using PATRIOT ACT as a synonym for “anything Bush does I dislike”, as far too many people do) are threatening which civil liberties, particularly, and which bills are actually in process to reform those ills (and what they would do, exactly).
As various places have noted, there’s so much hyperventilating and hyperbole about PATRIOT that I find it worthless to discuss the issue with people who can’t point to any specific problem, on the grounds that if they can’t find anything specific, they certainly don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.
(No, I’m not accusing Mr. Dean of that! Just explaining my stance on the issue; I have the sneaking suspicion that the vast majority of Patriot-Protesting is merely another facet of “anything that hurts Bush” posturing, which is a shame, if PATRIOT really is a significant danger. I have higher hopes for Samizdata, and I’d really like to see the hard-Libertarian case against PATRIOT in detail.)
Thanks Revolutionary Blogger. You provide yet another reason to vote for Bush. The demagogic anti-Bush propaganda is so pathetic as to require repudiation at the ballot box.
Sigivald,
very well. Let’s talk about the PATRIOT Act, then.
You may want to keep the original text handy as we go on.
The USA PATRIOT Act, an act passed very hurriedly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks (so hurriedly that many Congressment admitted they had not had time to read it), creates a new crime: “domestic terrorism”, a term so broad and generic that it could potentially include everything. That much should be obvious to anybody that has his or her eyes open and takes the value of personal liberty at heart.
But the Act doesn’t simply set up the stage for the erosion of such liberties. It also populates the stage with characters, and raises the curtain. Before you know it, you’re locked inside the theater watching the play unfold — and it’s not a reharsal. The legislation proceeds in fact to destroy, one by one, the civil liberty safeguards contained in the US Bill of Rights. Indeed since the passing of the PATRIOT Act, the Bill of Rights is already history, at least technically.
We are now living the first days of a new, crucial time; a time we have long feared would come — one in which the citizens are forced to take a primary role in defending their liberties, and bring new meaning to the ideal of a “Land of the Free”. The recent legislation aimed at blocking the PATRIOT Act in part or entirety, and preventing the passing of PATRIOT Act II, is now the only hope of bringing the safeguards back to the law books.
Under the Act, federal agents in the US can wiretap your phone, read your email, break into your home or office when you’re away, survey any kind of records about you — all without telling you, and with the power of prohibit anyone (gag order) from telling you. And all they need to do to be able to do this is claim that you might be a “domestic terrorist”, the powerful two-word magical formula I mentioned above.
Should you be arrested following such suspicion, you will be tried in a secret tribunal, behind closed doors. While detained, all conversations between you and your attorney can be tapped without the need for a judge’s permission. In this way, you can be made to be a witness against yourself. If you are termed an “enemy combatant” (a label which has already been put on some American citizens), you won’t even have an attorney, indeed you won’t be able to communicate with anyone on the outside.
Meanwhile, anything you read at the library can be legally examined, with of course the same automatic gag order mentioned above, lest your librarian be able to warn you that the FBI is interested in your reading list. This applies to anybody else that might have your information on file (banks, internet service providers, etc.). Upon request by the feds, they have to provide the data and keep silent about it.
The anti-COINTELPRO provisions that are there to prevent (or, more realistically, slow down) the government from covert surveillance, harassment and intimidation of dissenting individuals or groups are history, too. You or I may not be peaceniks, but I still find very educational to study the history of the COINTELPRO prgram and how it was used on dissenters in the 50s, 60s and 70s. You know how it goes: “First they came for the Jews…”
Finally (i.e. to conclude this post, but there’s more — as I said, read the law), the Act also sets up a policy of refusal in regards to requests of unclassified information on how the practices it implements are being used. There is now no way for you to get the government to release any records of what it’s doing; not that it was easy before, but now it’s impossible.
In an earlier post, David Carr quoted H.L. Mencken as saying: ‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary‘. A shame that more people do not realize that this is exactly what’s going on. A tragedy that so many of us should be more concerned with democracy in faraway countries than with the democracy of our own homeland.
Regards,
PG
Peter Gridley —
In a word: Nonsense.
P.S. I had a different word in mind but woried that you might not understand.
PG,
What are the actual passages in the law, and legal decisons in actual cases that lead to your claims? The link you provided didn’t work.
DSpears,
Sorry about that. Apparently, my HTML didn’t work.
I’ll try again, by spelling out the links.
Text of the US PATRIOT Act (H.R. 3162) from the Library of Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:h.r.03162:
Names of two cases of US Citizens treated as “enemy combatants”:
– Jose Padilla
– Yaser Esam Hamdi
Link to a CNN.com article describing a court decision ruling in favor of the “enemy combatant” argument:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/01/08/enemy.combatants/
Some sections of the law containing the legislation to which my claims above refer (click on Text of Legislation at the above Library of Congress link and find each section by looking for its number):
Definition of domestic terrorism – section 802
Access to records and other items – section 215
Secret searches without notice to owner – section 213
Section 411, “Definitions Relating to Terrorism”, allows for detention and deportation of individuals who provide lawful assistance to groups that are not designated as terrorist organizations.
Section 206 extends roving wiretap authority to “intelligence” wiretaps authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. These wiretaps are authorized in secret and without the need to show probable cause.
More secret searches and wiretaps without probable cause – section 218
I could go on, but I don’t want to steal all the work away from you.
Reading The Law is good for you — and for your freedom.
Regards,
PG
Talking of handing over Iraq and Afghanistan to the stewardship of the U.N.
Has the U.N. ever, successfully managed to run, stabilize, or otherwise have a beneficial effect on any of the countries with which it has been involved?
The very first country to suffer their inteference was, of course, Israel – in it’s formation and ever since. The next country was Korea, – still a sorry mess, and a world ‘flash-point’. The Balkans, Africa, North, West and East, everywhere they push their messy little fingers, ends up a mess. Did I hear the word ‘amateurs’ – more like totally inept, corrupt fools, just how anyone can defend their very existence, is beyond me.
Uncle Bill
If Peter’s words truly are, as you assert, nonsense, would you mind backing your assertion up? I’m not tempted to believe you unless you can offer me at least a shred of an argument.
Make sure it isn’t fallacious, while you’re at it.
Peter Gridley: Names of two cases of US Citizens treated as “enemy combatants”:
– Jose Padilla
– Yaser Esam Hamdi
It is sad, isn’t it? That these unlawful combatants are still in custody rather than in an unmarked grave. They should each have been despatched with a bullet in the head – that would have saved a lot of government money on legal expenses.
Peter Gridley: Under the Act, federal agents in the US can wiretap your phone, read your email, break into your home or office when you’re away, survey any kind of records about you — all without telling you, and with the power of prohibit anyone (gag order) from telling you.
The government had those powers before the Patriot Act in cases that were being built against drug traffickers and mobsters. The key difference is that potential terrorists may now be monitored as well, before they are implicated in terrorist acts. Investigators will still need to get a warrant from a judge, who is sheltered from political pressure by the fact that the Constitution provides for lifetime tenure for Federal judges.
A. regarding “US” enemy combatants.
– Yaser Esam Hamdi is NOT AN AMERICAN CITIZEN.
http://fileus.com/dept/citizenship/hamdi/hamdi-complaint.html
AND HAS NEVER CLAIMED TO BE UNTIL IN GITMO.
B. IDAHO has a huge terrorism problem. I really have faith that the reps from midwestern states know anything about the patriot act unless it applies russet to fingerlings. give me a break. fathead Chappaquiddick
kennedy? who asked his cousin to LIE and say it was he who killed Mary Jo Kopechne? I feel safer already.
A. regarding “US” enemy combatants.
– Yaser Esam Hamdi is NOT AN AMERICAN CITIZEN.
http://fileus.com/dept/citizenship/hamdi/hamdi-complaint.html
AND HAS NEVER CLAIMED TO BE UNTIL IN GITMO.
B. IDAHO has a huge terrorism problem. I really have faith that the reps from midwestern states know anything about the patriot act unless it applies russet to fingerlings. give me a break. fathead Chappaquiddick
kennedy? who asked his cousin to LIE and say it was he who killed Mary Jo Kopechne? I feel safer already.
http://www.ytedk.com/intro.htm
Hamdi was captured on the field of battle in open arms against the US, so citizen or not he’s lucky he didn’t end up shot, and is almost certainly a valid POW or ‘unlawful combatant’, depending on who’s handbook you’re using.
Jose Padilla was arrested on US soil, originally on a Grand Jury Indictment, and before arrainment was transferred to military custody. If he did indeed commit the acts of which he stands accused, he is almost certainly guilty of Treason, and should properly be hanged (ok, lethal injection or life without
parole) after trial.
Relevant bits from The Federalist on why Treason was defined as a crime in the Constitution:
From “The Federalist #43”: http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa43.htm
As treason may be committed against the United States, the authority of the United States ought to be enabled to punish it. But as new-fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for conviction of it, and restraining the Congress, even in punishing it, from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.
From “The Federalist #84” http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa84.htm
It may well be a question, whether these are not, upon the whole, of equal importance with any which are to be found in the constitution of this State. The establishment of the writ of habeas corpus, the prohibition of ex post facto laws, and of TITLES OF NOBILITY, to which we have no corresponding provision in our Constitution, are perhaps greater securities to liberty and republicanism than any it contains. The creation of crimes after the commission of the fact, or, in other words, the subjecting of men to punishment for things which, when they were done, were breaches of no law, and the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny. The observations of the judicious Blackstone,1 in reference to the latter, are well worthy of recital: “To bereave a man of life, [says he] or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.” And as a remedy for this fatal evil he is everywhere peculiarly emphatical in his encomiums on the habeas corpus act, which in one place he calls “the BULWARK of the British Constitution.”2
Excellent, Peter (once the link was fixed, and pity there’s no place with the text online with links to individual sections).
Though, looking at, for example, section 802, I don’t see that the definition of “domestic terrorism” is any more vague or shadowy and likely to be abused than any number of existing laws; more importantly, I’m not sure it’s possible to make a definition of the term which is less vague. As someone who thinks that such described activities ought to be illegal, I’m not sure why this should be thought to be a horrible thing.
Suffice it to say, I’ve gone over the text before; before my question was posted. What I’ve seen in return is not what I asked for, a summary of exactly what’s wrong with it, but a claim that I should be upset by what you say about it, with a nice dose of loaded rhetoric and what reads for all the world like hyperbole attached to it.
If PATRIOT is really so bad, couldn’t an argument against it be made without recorse to either “look it up” (I have, and don’t see the problem) or such rhetoric, most of it without citation?
(Also, Sec. 411. A 1 F, modifying iv IV cc indicates to me that there’s an explicit exception for people not “reasonably knowing” that their support was for a terrorist organisation, which seems directly contrary to what you claimed. Unless you mean A 1 G, which includes in “Terrorist organisations” ones that are not designated as such, but which do commit terrorist acts. If that’s the extent of the Crushing of Civil Liberties, well… sorry, no sale. Deporting aliens for materially supporting a terrorist organisation that has not been previously designated as such does not, to my mind, read as a giant civil liberties issue.)
It’s fine to make the point that US domestic anti-terror laws are an unwarranted assault on our civil liberties. But if you want to be fair, you ought to mention that statutes that prevented intelligence sharing, inability to obtain roving wiretaps on terror suspects and an FBI that was conditioned not to act aggressively contributed in large part to 9/11. I’d argue that it was the proximate cause.
I suspect that many people who frequent this blog are of the mind that we have (or ought to have) been in a war since 9/11. In wartime we have to do things that 20 or so years from now we won’t be particularly proud of, but the fact is they often need to be done. “Good” wars don’t change this. The Western allies annihalated hunderds of thousands of Japanese and German civilians in a matter of days. While no sane Brit or American can be proud of this, the fact remains that both Germany and Japan went from aggressive fascist states to benign, more or less capitalist states that manufacture great cars. No, I wasn’t charged with storming Omaha beach or required to drop incindiaries over Tokyo, but 60 years after the fact I’m relieved that when that stuff had to be done, that generation stepped up to the plate.
Right now we have locked up in Guantanamo Bay and other detention centers, people who would otherwise qualify as animals if it were not for their human appearance. All you have to do is look at the Nick Berg or Danny Pearl video to know exactly what we are up against. Frankly, and especially for the high level detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, I believe it would be irresponsible if US interrogators did not do everything possible to get these guys to talk. Again, 20 years from now university professors will rant and rave about how awful it all was.
If given the chance our enemies would not hesitate for a second to kill every single one of us. Either you simply accept this as a fact of life and do nothing, or suggest some grown-up alternatives to prevent a band of nutjobs from exploding a nuclear device in one of our cities.
Zhang Fei and David Mercer mention the nefarious characters of the two people detained under rather dubious legal means. This is irrelevant to anything other than the particular fate one would like to see dispensed to them. A law (or interpretation or action based on it) ought to be judged by its inherent soundness, its likely consequences, and its respect for or infringement of people’s rights, not on the character of the first people it is applied to.
Only a moron of the utmost ignorance and incompetence would take centuries of legal principle, learnt through practical experience, hard-won by the blood, sweat, and tears of liberty lovers, and throw it all away in order to secure the conviction of two people who, assuming they are indeed guilty as charged, could easily be convicted as such by practically any jury on the face of the planet.
“Right now we have locked up in Guantanamo Bay and other detention centers, people who would otherwise qualify as animals if it were not for their human appearance.”
You also had locked up for 2 years, people who turned out to be innocent of any terrorist-related crime at all. Because they were denied any legal representation, and could not even have a trial representing themselves, their innocence could not be established.
“If given the chance our enemies would not hesitate for a second to kill every single one of us. Either you simply accept this as a fact of life and do nothing, or suggest some grown-up alternatives to prevent a band of nutjobs from exploding a nuclear device in one of our cities.”
Alternatives have been suggested clearly and on multiple occasions. Being unaware of them simply demonstrates laziness and quite frankly pure ignorance, given how often they have been proposed. We are talking about very basic safeguards here – legal representation, the right to a trial before a court of law, enforcement of habeus corpus. All this does is allow someone to put their case via a legal challenge to the government’s accusations, and inform society that someone has been detained, rather than just disappeared without trace.
If you really want to eliminate the current terrorist problem, there are some very simple solutions – nuke every Islamic country, and commit genocide on all people of Islamic descent or belief. Or we could simply ban anyone from travelling outside their own home without a government security permit, for which they would have to apply and pass a background security check (all arabs and muslims would of course be denied, and kept under house arrest for life). Presumably you do not agree with such actions, due to their heinous consequences on innocent people. Equally, one can ensure that no terrorist suspects are a danger by locking them all up for the rest of their lives, without any legal representation, trial, or charge. Do you not think this will have heinous consequences for those detainees who are in fact not terrorists?
This may come as news to you, but not all people who are arrested as suspects are guilty. And arbitray detention is very much a danger when the government has no checks on its powers. Thus, it behooves us to make sure there are systems in place to assess the truth or falsity of government accusations justifying detention, and to release people when it turns out that the government’s initial assessment of them was inaccurate. Your approach is to simply not care about them, to throw them for life into a gulag along with the other human trash. That is the action of a horrible tyrant, not a civilised society.
“Equally, one can ensure that no terrorist suspects are a danger by locking them all up for the rest of their lives, without any legal representation, trial, or charge. Do you not think this will have heinous consequences for those detainees who are in fact not terrorists?”
Another reason why we don’t lock up terrorist suspects for the rest of their lives is because of the heinous consequences for those detainees who are in fact terrorists. In liberal societies, people are punished for what they have done, not for what they might do.
Cydonia
It would be nice to think that Bushbaby’s 100% record of not vetoing bills is due to diffidence about his own democratic legitimacy, hanging by a chad.
Somehow I doubt it, though.
We should be flattered that “Uncle Bill” thinks he has refuted criticism of the USA PATRIOT Act with a two-syllable word such as “Nonsense”. It’s a step up from the usual Freeperish comments such as “Ping”.