As I suspected, our “leaders” in the U.S. Congress aren’t inclined to require the Obama Administration to release the “targeted kill” memo authored by David Barron before confirming his judicial appointment today. And once again, the mainstream media got suckered by the White House’s PR machine to enable business as usual.
While I encourage all to read the entire post, here’s how bmaz, a lawyer and top-level blogger at Emptywheel blog, ends his post on the subject today:
<snip>
Barron cleared cloture late Wednesday and is scheduled for a floor vote for confirmation today, yet release of the “redacted memo” is nowhere remotely in sight. This framing on Barron’s nomination, irrespective of your ultimate position on his fitness, is a complete and utter fraud on the American citizenry in whose name it is being played. And that is just on the one Awlaki Memo that we already know the legal reasoning on from the self serving previous release of the “white paper” by the Administration. Discussion of the other six identified pertinent memos has dropped off the face of the earth. Booyah US Senate, way to do your job for the
citizens you represent! Or not.
Personally, there is more than sufficient information about David Barron’s situational legal, and moral, ethics in the white paper alone to deem him unfit for a lifetime Article III confirmed seat on a Circuit Court of Appeal.
But, even if you disagree and consider Barron fit, you should admit the American citizenry has been ripped off in this process by the Democratically led Senate, and an Obama Administration who has picked a dubious spot to finally get aggressive in support of one of their nominees.
If Goodwin Liu and Dawn Johnsen, two individuals who had proven their desire to protect the Constitution, had received this kind of support, this country, and the world, would be a better place. Instead, Mr. Obama
has reserved his all out push for a man who, instead, opted to apply situational ethics to gut the most basic Constitutional concept of Due Process. That’s unacceptable, but at a minimum we should have the
benefit of proper analysis of Barron’s work before it happens.
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FYI – Senator Leahy has unsuccessfully attempted to get this memo released for years as have 30 other Members of Congress. Any thoughts on what that says about the balance of power between the Executive and Legislative branches of goverment? And when legislators do have leverage – such as with this judicial appointment, do they choose to use it? It sure doesn’t seem that way to me!
If you have the stomach for it, while at the Emptywheel blog, take a look at Marcy’s dissection of the bills purportedly “reforming” the surveillance state.
Nothing to see here, move along, move along…
We're not evil enough to succeed
Come up with a twisted “legal” rationale for how the President can secretly kill Americans with flying robots, and become a federal judge!
The lack of morality on display is shaping the generations to come. The magical, disappearing Constitution seems to be the favorite parlor trick of our leaders today.
Also, Leahy’s proposed solutions to NSA spying have been gutted fully, so it is almost ready to pass. I’d like to see him pull his own support from his bill, as all the privacy rights organizations did yesterday. (The USA Freedom ACT now expands what the NSA can do!)
“..really good at killing people...”
Obama bragging to aides he is “really good a killing people” ….
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/03/obama-drones-double-down_n_4208815.html
Is Obama fit to be president, much less be fit to make critical lifetime appointments that impact us now and for generations?
An Appropriate Question
Is Obama fit to be President? He and his administration (czars)have done more damage to this country than any President prior, so I would say the answer to your question is a profound NO, not fit or qualified to be President of this once upon a time “land of the free”.
It's getting worse
Well said Alan, obstacles or not, this leader can’t lead or inspire anyone anymore, his past speeches have all come back to haunt him, anything said now, not creditable. The current hypocrisy, of many, is the inaction, his old campaign speeches where he rails on Bush over the horrible VA conditions. Well “many many” years later… It speaks for it’s self. He should stay on the golf course. With that said, due process, what’s that? This administration governs by Excutive order, doesn’t deal with any little Constitutional details!
http://youtu.be/Q-wmZING2pU
http://www.wnd.com/2014/05/obama-2008-va-will-become-a-leader-of-health-care-reform/
Say it ain't so, Bernie!
Yup, Senator Sanders joined Senator Leahy in voting for the confirmation of David Barron yesterday. Apparently, his office didn’t think that vote was newsworthy enough to include in their latest news report however:
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/newswatch/052314
BOO! HISS! I sure don’t feel well-represented by my US Senators today!
Kudos to Rep Peter Welch though for voting against the watered-down bill purportedly reining in NSA surveillance. Here’s what Senator Ron Wyden has to say about that bill.
Excerpt from Senator Wyden: “I am gravely concerned that the changes that have been made to the House version of this bill have watered it down so far that it fails to protect Americans from suspicionless mass surveillance. The new text of the bill states that the government must use a “selection term” to collect Americans’ records, but the bill’s definition of a “selection term” is so vague that it could be used to collect all of the phone records in a particular area code, or all of the credit card records from a particular state.
While this bill’s authors may not intend for it to be interpreted so broadly, the Executive Branch’s long track record of secretly interpreting surveillance laws in incredibly broad ways makes it clear that vague language is ineffective in restraining the Executive Branch. Given the Executive Branch’s record of consistently making inaccurate public statements about these laws in order to conceal ongoing dragnet surveillance of Americans, it would be naïve to trust the Executive Branch to apply new surveillance laws with restraint.
It is unfortunately clear that some of the same officials who were responsible for conducting this dragnet surveillance and misleading the public about it are now working to make sure that any attempt at reform legislation is as limited as possible.”
===============
As usual, Marcy Wheeler has carefully parsed the legislation and will stay on top of what happens in the Senate Judiciary Committee (chaired by Sen Leahy). For anyone interested in more details on the holes in the House bill, here is Marcy’s latest post on the subject.
She begins:
I fear, reading this Kevin Drum post, that my explanations of why USA Freedumber will not end what you and I think of as bulk collection have not been clear enough. So I’m going to try again.
It is now, with the bill in current form, a 4-part argument:
* The bill uses the intelligence community definition of bulk collection in its claim to end bulk collection, not the plain English language meaning of it
* The bill retains the “relevant to” language that got us into this problem
* The “selection terms” it uses to prevent bulk collection would permit the collection of vast swaths of innocent people’s records
* Such a reading would probably not rely on any new FISA Court opinion; existing opinions probably already authorize such collection
<snip>
============
Too many Too few
Too many American’s put these people there.
Too few of us can change things.
As the primitives say, “Say your prayers children.”
Updates - Surveillance, Democracy, & US Empire
Unfortunately, blogger Marcy Wheeler isn’t optimistic that the Senate Judiciary Committee will improve the surveillance bill (she dubs the bill “USA Freedumber” & reminds that in 2009, Russ Feingold (sigh) called the committee “the Prosecutors Committee” based on its oversight on these issues). After recounting the number of times the SJC has dropped the ball in the past (regardless of Senator Leahy’s position), she provides a whip count and concludes:
If my read here is right, the best case scenario — short of
convincing Sheldon Whitehouse some of what the government wants to do is
unconstitutional, which John Bates has already ruled that it is – is
relying on people like Ted Cruz (whose posturing on civil liberties is
often no more than that) and Jeff Flake (who was great on these issues
in the House but has been silent and absent throughout this entire
debate). And that’s all to reach a 9-9 tie in SJC.
Which shouldn’t be surprising. Had Leahy had the votes to move USA Freedom Act through SJC, he would have done so in October.
That was the entire point of starting in the House: because there was
such a large number of people (albeit, for the most part without
gavels) supporting real reform in the House. But because reformers
(starting with John Conyers and Jerry Nadler) uncritically accepted a
bad compromise and then let it be gutted, that leverage was squandered.
Right now, we’re looking at a bill that outsources an expanded phone
dragnet to the telecoms (with some advantages and some drawbacks), but
along the way resets other programs to what they were before the FISC
reined them in from 2009 to 2011. That’s the starting point. With a vote
count that leaves us susceptible to further corruption of the bill
along the way.
Edward Snowden risked his freedom to try to rein in the dragnet, and
instead, as of right now it looks like Congress will expand it.
==============
Marcy also posted “What If the Democratic Response to Snowden Is to Expand Surveillance?,” a thoughtful piece on the role that “explicit or implicit beliefs about the role of US hegemony” plays in the acceptance of many in the expansion of the surveillance state. She references an excellent Salon post by Andrew O’Hehir entitled “The empire strikes back: How Brandeis foreshadowed Snowden and Greenwald” that highlights Justice Louis Brandeis’ influential dissent in the 1928 wiretapping case Olmstead v. United States:
“Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher,” Brandeis
concluded. “For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its
example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it
breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto
himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of
the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the
Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a
private criminal — would bring terrible retribution.”
Marcy also responds to what she deems a “more problematic piece” in The Guardian by Eben Moglen entitled “Privacy under attack: the NSA files revealed new threats to democracy“.
All in all, a great conversation even if we shouldn’t get our hopes up about action in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Ellsberg responds plus
Daniel Ellsberg responds to Sec of State Kerry’s comments about Edward Snowden ‘manning up’ & returning to the US to ‘face the music’ in an op-ed in The Guardian. Ellsberg discusses how the use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers precludes a fair trial in the U.S., pointing to his own experience as well as those of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, and State Dept contractor Stephen Kim.
========
While here grumbling to myself about the impotence of the Congressional Judiciary Committees (one chaired by Senator Leahy), I can’t help but share a few other links that show the sad condition of the US judicial system.
Here’s good ol’ Marcy Wheeler spotlighting the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s most recent motion in an NSA lawsuit:
I’ve written about these accusations in the past. EFF got a
preservation order in its NSA lawsuits back in 2008. Only after the
government asked for permission to destroy phone dragnet data earlier
this year did they learn the government has been destroying data
relevant to their various suits for years.
But now they’ve written an aggressive motion asking for sanctions.
EW's latest assessment on Senate action on surveillance
Read it and weep:
Predictably, Saxby Chambliss Makes a Bid for USA Freedumbest
I’ve written several times
about how HR 3361 — what others call USA Freedom Act and I dubbed the
USA Freedumber Act when it was gutted in the House — is worse than the
status quo in a number of ways.
But I’m also aware that the Senate could make it worse. I’m still
waiting to see what kind of surprises Dianne Feinstein has in store for
Thursday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
So I am thoroughly unsurprised that Ranking Republican Saxby Chambliss wants to make Freedumber worse.
I actually think this is a calculated move to
add various transparency measures that Pat Leahy will respond to, but
open up the floodgates to a full Internet-and-smart-phone dragnet. It
will allow those who’ve gotten badly played in this negotiation an
opportunity to declare victory even as the dragnet gets even worse.
Add this to the evidence this is all a big play:
The Gang of Four is just working to get to Conference, where they already seem to have in mind what they’ll produce.
Before we’re done, we’re sure to see USA Freedumbest.
==============================
Cut their funding entirely
If the Senate doesn’t reign the NSA in, it will inevitably backfire on them. Taking away privacy and freedom never goes well, no matter what dictators think is necessary. The NSA is broken and clearly has no intention of fixing itself.
None of this massive, warrantless surveillance of my nieces, nephews, aunts, and uncles and YOU does anything but waste money and corrupt what we say we believe in as a country.
Hi, George Washington? I know you just spent a long time fighting the British and winning independence from their warrantless surveillance of the colonies, and have agreed to a Constitution that specifically forbids these sorts of intrusions on individuals, but… could you reconsider and let us intrude into every home and every pocket of Americans? Just in case, you know… we promise not to abuse this secret superpower.
BTW, I hear Google just bought the company that puts cameras in teddy bears for use as home monitoring surveillance for parents.
Barron's memo legally justifying killing of US citizen released.
…and of course, blogger Emptywheel is on the case with a link to the released document:
http://www.emptywheel.net/2014/08/15/7-pages-to-drone-kill-an-american-citizen/
In another post, Marcy notes something interesting about the legal justification:
http://www.emptywheel.net/2014/08/16/why-was-cia-assessing-whether-they-could-drone-kill-anwar-al-awlaki/
Please keep in mind that both Senators Leahy & Sanders voted to approve the Office of Legal Counsel lawyer and author David Barron to a lifetime judicial appointment without insisting on the release of this document prior.
I forget why – cuz we don’t have any other good candidates??? Because the issue isn’t relevant or important? Because it’s still time to look forward?