October 2006 Archives

In the US, the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the military from acting in a police fashion against U.S. Citizens, except in times of emergency, insurrection, and so on. It's considered one of the cornerstone laws that prevents the US from descending into a complete police state.

Well, the recent Military Authorization Act of 2007 has removed some of the restrictions on the president and made it more possible for him to use the military, even against the objections of the local power structure.

On October 17th, the President signed the so-called "Torture Bill", or more officially, the Military Commissions Act, he also signed the Military Authorization Act of 2007, which contained at Section 1076 a provision which would change the Insurrection Act to allow the President to deploy the military under the auspices of quelling insurrection, for just about any cause. Don't believe me?

Here are the words of the actual bill:

The President may employ the armed forces, including the
National Guard in Federal service, to--
``(A) restore public order and enforce the laws of the United
States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or
other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or
incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the
United States, the President determines that--
``(i) domestic violence has occurred to such an extent
that the constituted authorities of the State or possession
are incapable of maintaining public order; and
``(ii) such violence results in a condition described in
paragraph (2); or
``(B) suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic
violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy if such insurrec-
tion, violation, combination, or conspiracy results in a condition
described in paragraph (2).
``(2) A condition described in this paragraph is a condition
that-- ``(A) so hinders the execution of the laws of a State or
possession, as applicable, and of the United States within that
State or possession, that any part or class of its people is
deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named
in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted
authorities of that State or possession are unable, fail, or refuse
to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that
protection; or
``(B) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the
United States or impedes the course of justice under those
laws.
``(3) In any situation covered by paragraph (1)(B), the State
shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the
laws secured by the Constitution

It also adds "or those obstructing the enforcement of the laws" to the list of people who can be arrested by the military and detained. Interesting that the law that suspended habeas corpus and force people held by the military to have to go before military tribunals the same day that the bill that would expand the ability of said police to arrest people under the discretion of the President.

Let's extract a sentence out of the law above and write it out a little more clearly:
"The President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service, to restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of [an] other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy if such insurrection, violation, combination, or conspiracy opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws"

Reading that, I see a condition where if people oppose the actions of the government, the President can seize upon that as an "insurrection" and order the military into an area and declare martial law. This could include arresting people for protesting the actions of the government. What determines a conspiracy? What determines "opposing the execution of the laws of the United States"? By writing this, am I committing an act by which I am exposed to arrest by military officers and being held in some brig for an indeterminate amount of of time?

I face a dilemma with this story. I don't want to sound like a raving lunatic, but I also don't want to ignore the consequences of what was passed. It seems clear to me that the president's been given the ability to declare martial law for just about nothing and lock up whomever. This is without considering the implications of the Military Commissions Act, which adds an entirely different aspect to the issue. Luckily for me, I'm not the only one who's reading this bill this way:
Toward Freedom
Media Monitors

Or, you can read the words of Senator Patrick Leahy, the only politician who has thus far spoken out against the bill:

...[the bill] adopts some incredible changes to the Insurrection Act, which would give the President more authority to declare martial law. Let me repeat: The National Guard Empowerment Act, which is designed to make it more likely for the National Guard to remain in State control, is dropped from this conference report in favor of provisions making it easier to usurp the Governors control and making it more likely that the President will take control of the Guard and the active military operating in the States.

The changes to the Insurrection Act will allow the President to use the military, including the National Guard, to carry out law enforcement activities without the consent of a governor. When the Insurrection Act is invoked posse comitatus does not apply. Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy, and it is for that reason that the Insurrection Act has only been invoked on three — three — in recent history. The implications of changing the Act are enormous, but this change was just slipped in the defense bill as a rider with little study. Other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.

To recap, we've got a president that, since 9/11, has illegally wiretapped many more Americans than necessary, has illegally detained American citizens without granting them access to lawyers or even charging them with a crime, involved us in a war in a country under false pretenses while ignoring the real and present dangers in the countries truly responsible for our bloody nose, tortured people or had them rendered illegally to countries that then tortured for us or for sport, tried to shroud his administration in secrecy, and attacked everyone who did not agree with him completely as enemies of the state. All the while, he let his political friends and allies get away with the most egregious of acts, like letting New Orleans sink into the sea, accepting bribes from Indian casinos, redrawing voting districts so that politicians were picking their voters rather than voters picking their politicians, earmarking billions of dollars for the most outrageously fatty pork projects, and try to seduce young men.

And now Congress, our elected representatives are content to give him the ability to declare martial law at will AND detain and torture detainees at will.

It's at this point that I'm left speechless and have nothing more to say, but perhaps, these two thoughts: In democracy, one should always imagine the very worst person ever that could hold office, and circumscribe the powers of that office such. As Thomas Jefferson said: "Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question."

Clearly we have not.

There’s a lot of talk around the world about the upcoming defeat of the Republicans on Election Day, and what it means. Words are being bandied about like “precriminations”, or “Speaker Nancy”. You can almost smell the nervous anticipatory sweat wafting off the pages of Daily Kos.

Most pundits and analysts have zeroed in on the Iraq boondoggle or the economy, specifically gas prices. There’s also been plenty of talk about Mark Foley, Jack Abrahmoff, Tom DeLay, etc, etc. These are all valid reasons for why people might be seeking to toss some people from office. However, few commentators outside the internet have spent any time examining what truly matters to me these days: the state and safety of our personal liberties. We live in a time, as Keith Olbermann has noted, of “exaggerated crisis”. Days from the election Republican talking heads spin desperately daring people to vote for the GOP claiming that people who vote for the Democrats or 3rd Parties are doing so under the influence of insurgents in Iraq, bin Laden, Hugo Chavez, and probably the Grinch, sitting smugly in his undisclosed location above Whoville.

Even worse, people in the US still overly fear these bogeymen, believing as some article of faith that any minute now we’re all going to die in a fireball or chemical attack. I believe as an article of faith that if anything, the fireball most likely to kill you will erupt from your grill one summer night as you attempt the perfect sear on a steak like you saw on the Food Network.

The Democrats know that people still fear these bogeymen. They know that Americans worry about these things. They’re savvy enough to know these things this year, and because they know these things, they also know their hold on power will be tenuous. They know that if they come into leadership it’s not by some landslide of electoral support, sudden voter enlightenment, or righteous moral outrage fueled by Americans sick and tired of being misled (in all senses that word can mean), but instead because in Washington they’re the “other guys”; the ones not overly smeared by all scandals or failures of leadership. They stand to gain power because they’re not quite tainted yet.

The leadership of the Democratic Party knows the slippery transient nature of the power they’re being given so they’re not going to do anything that might make them appear weak or foolish; anything that might lead to them being swept from office in a few years. Sure, they may seek to push through social and economic issues that are important to them, like minimum wage increases, changes in Medicare and Medicaid, or rolling back tax cuts. Sure they may speak of checking the power of the President, but when it comes down to the brass tacks, on matter of terrorism, and more importantly civil liberties, they’re going to quietly toe the line drawn by the Republican Party. Hell, they may even become more hawkish and reactionary than the Republicans. Why?

They’ll do this because they know that if they stray beyond that clearly-defined line, and something should happen in the US the Party is dead in the water. They will be figuratively, if not literally, radioactive, and utterly unelectable. Then the American people will elect into office a far-right Republican administration that will rule with an iron fist and leaden intolerance for all things not socially conservative.

So for me, thinking that the NSA wiretapping, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the PATRIOT Act, and others are the most pressing matters of our times, I’m gaining nothing by a change in power. I’ve accepted the fact that we’re only trading in one set of nearly the same shitheads for another.

Well, it’s not entirely true. There’s one other possibility that I can see coming from all this that might make me happy: gridlock. It’s possible that neither power will have a firm grip on power, so that things in Washington will grind to a halt. Nothing will get done at all as the partisans spend more time sniping at each other across the aisle. Now, that might not be such a bad thing after all.

It goes without saying this year: The Redskins Lost. So why am I saying it? I don't know, I have to bitch to someone, and my wife's a Giant's fan so she just laughs at me.

I will say, however, that I credit the Redskins for putting out some passing numbers today. The last few games have been the same fargin cycle: run, run, pass because you're 3rd and long, kick, and repeat, ad nauseum. I know Gibbs likes to play a physical run-style football, but it's been stupid since game 3.

I blame Tom Cruise. Dan Snyder picked up his production company and everything's falling apart. Tom's probably in the locker room now yelling at them like he's Jerry Maguire and about their thetans and n-grams.

Cory Doctrow has written on BoingBoing about fabric that you can buy that comes with a license agreement. The license agreement states that anything made from the material cannot be sold commercially. It's silly, and it will only end up hurting the company in question, because crafters will not want to use the material in their products, or...crafters will just shrug and ignore the agreement, at which point, what as the company gained, except apparently some future grounds for a lawsuit, which will make them look silly if they actually do sue.

This is unfortunately nothing new. I know several crafters, and there have been different kinds of fabric that are "prohibited" from being used in commercial applications.

I understand that the fabric company is attempting to protect the pattern that is on the fabric, and somehow save their "intellectual property" but I believe they're taking it too far. As Cory points out, are we going to come to a point where you need to get a license agreement from your butcher when you buy a cut of meat because he has a special way of cutting the rib-eye that he wants to protect? Is your neighborhood plumber going to make you sign an NDA before he works on your house which prohibits you from examining his fix or from letting someone else touch it?

How far are we going to extend this notion of "property" to non-tangible items before we end up binding ourselves (literally and figuratively) in such a way that we can't make any forward progress as a culture?

I installed the MeeBo tool. MeeBo is tool that sits in the browser and lets you, the reader, chat with me, the author. It's like IM, but in the browser. If you see that I'm online, feel free to use it to chat with me.

We all knew it was only a matter of time before the Republican pundits would start down this path (a path beaten by FoxNews misrepresenting Foley as a Democrat): Are Gay Republicans Closeted Democrats?

Obviously the Republicans can't fathom that Mark Foley could act the way he did and be a Republican, so they needed a way to pin it on Democrats. So they're trying to spin a conspiracy of secret democrats infiltrating the Republican Party and seducing pages to discredit the Republicans.

It would be funny if so many people didn't probably already believe that in the Republican party.

I know I'm late to the party, but I figure it's important that I too link to the Keith Olbermann piece on "Habeas Corpus". As he highlights in his piece, without the ability of someone to show up in court and demand to know why they're being held, most other rights fly straight out the window.

Why is this important? Because the Military Commission Act of 2006 that was recently sent to the president removes the right of habeas corpus from detainees. So what does that mean for you? Well it grants the president uncheckable power to throw whomever in jail for whatever reasons he sees fit. All he has to do is declare someone an enemy combatant.

And what does Bush need to do to declare someone an enemy combatant? There is no legal standard for that declaration. It's entirely up to the president's will at this point.

For more in depth analysis of the Military Commission Act of 2006, read Amnesty International's brief here.

I have a couple questions I keep asking myself, and I figure that I'll just post them here and hope someone smarter than me will answer them:

1. If the Shia in Iraq don't trust the mostly Sunni military and the Sunni don't trust the mostly Shia police forces, why not make them work together in a joint task force so there are both Shia and Sunni together, and each group can make sure the other isn't acting as a death squad?
2. The world thinks that the Afghani poppy crop is a problem that requires massive amounts of intervention and money and the destruction of the plants to prevent the production of heroin. Rather than spend money to destroy the crop and time to convince the farmers they shouldn't grow the only thing that's remotly profitable, why not get them to start converting it into biodiesel? The produce so much poppy seed there that they should be able to yield some significant amount of biodiesel, hopefully enough to respark their economy and help the farmers live free from the influence of the warlords who finance themselves via heroin? Imagine, they could potentially become one of the larger suppliers of diesel to China. Let's do some math quick. This site says that opium poppies yield 124 US gallons/acre and the NY Times reports that there were 321,235 acres of poppy planted in Afghanistan in 2004. That's 39,833,264 US gallons of biodiesel on a conservative estimate. While that's only 10% of the total daily US consumption of oil, it's a significant amount of money for the company, More than $101,000,000 at current US prices for a gallon of diesel. Again, it's just a thought.

I hope the Eagles clean T.O.'s clock. Seriously, I hope that T.O. eats so much turf at the Linc that he shits blades of grass for two weeks. I had to hear so much about the whole T.O. saga while I lived in Philly that I have so much hate for that man. There were weeks where every story on the news was T.O. this, T.O. that...it was disgusting.

As I and a lot of the blogosphere has posted, FoxNews mislabelled Rep. Foley as a Democrat, several times, and then just silently removed the references rather than publically admitting their mistake. Seeing as FoxNews gets high ratings, and the viewers of the channel believe strongly in its infallibility, it's important that FoxNews publically admit their mistake.

To that length, my friend and fellow blogger Richard Harlos wrote the following letter. I encourage all of my friends to send it as well.

Unfortunately, FoxNews still does not have an ombudsman, but you can send the letter to comments@foxnews.com and newswatch@foxnews.com. Also, good to send to oreilly@foxnews.com and hannity@foxnews.com as well.

My wife and I were talking the other day:

Me: "What would you want to do if Bush somehow got to remain in office at the end of his term?"
Her: "What do you mean?"
Me: "Say there's another terrorist attack, or the war in Afghanistan or Iraq's going worse and the Congress votes some measure to keep him in office a little longer to 'get us through this rough patch'"
Her: "You mean like he faked a terrorist attack?"
Me: "I don't care if he did or Al-Qaeda legitimately did one"

- A long silence -

Her: "I'd want to move to Canada."
Me: "I was thinking that too, but what if the Canadians shut down the border and refused Americans entrance to their country? I bet a lot of Americans would head north."
Her: "I guess we'll see in the next two years what happens."

Canada's only 8 hours from here by highway, but honestly, I think if we expatriated, we'd do better to hit a place like New Zealand. I'd even consider a place like Singapore or Malaysia. It makes me sick to my stomach to even consider any of this, but I have to. Given how much Bush has changed the answer to every question asked of him to one of "national security" and "protecting Americans at all costs", which seems to include torturing people, or having them sent to other nations which will torture them, detaining American citizens forever without charge, spying on all Americans regardless of cause, and seeking extraordinary powers to circumvent Congress and the Judiciary, I can only imagine what crimes against liberty would be perpetrated by a President Bush in a period of time beyond his normal term limits where he's not beholden at all to voters. It scares the hell out of me.

Nevermind all of the other shit swirling around about Mark Foley (I'll get to it later) but I thought this deserved notice today: Fox News has decided that Mark Foley is a Democrat! Not just once, BUT TWICE! I love that they ran the line "Did Dems Ignore Foley E-Mails To Preserve Seat?".

Wow. So a Republican does something like this and his party affiliation is automagically switched. That's fabulous. So if Fox News was around in the 1960's and Kennedy was stumping for getting rid of the IRS would they have identified him as the Republican Candidate?

Again, wow.

Dear Shithead,
Thank you for contacting me recently regarding your concerns for the health of myself and my children. I appreciate your desire to help me, and trust that I know your admonitions about my intelligence, upbringing, financial well-being, weight, and...uhm...skankness come from the heart.

I hope, however, that you, as clearly someone who works in the mental health industry assisting other sad sacks as myself, will understand when I must correct you on a few points. I pray you do not take umbrage.

Please note, I see from your IP address that you live in Toronto, Canada, and as such, I will try to frame my responses in such a manner as to be easier for you to understand.

First of all, if you must know, I live here, which is 1,120 miles away from here. I'd heard good things about the Canadian education system, but praytell, may I suggest you hit the geography books a little more. Please, I do not mean to offend, only to educate.

Also, I would have converted that 1,120 miles into whatever wacky measurement system you're using these days (I think it's beaver pelts), but I can't find anything that converts miles to Canadian standard beaver pelts online. But I'm sure you can do the math.

Also, I can assure you that I have showered recently, as recently as this morning in fact, so I am not filthy. I'm not sure if you know this, but it's not snowing or icy yet here in the United States, so we still have running water! The pipes haven't frozen here yet! Most Americans regularly bath, sometimes twice a day.

Don't worry for yourself though, I'm sure some fisherman will cut a whole in the ice covering Lake Scugog up north of you and you'll be able to bath for the winter. I'm sure that it's almost as good as a hot shower with soap.

And finally, I must commend you on knowing what a salad is, living in Canada. As far as I'd heard, the only things green in Canada are the pine trees and the US dollars you crazy Canuncks crave so badly. I didn't think you'd know what a green leafy vegetable is, but I commend you sir or madam, for your obviously extensive worldly knowledge.

If you must really know, my son and daughter both eat their vegetables, including salads, and enjoy them, and neither of them suffer from the same weight problems I or you or your mother does. Please also be assured that I am exercising and have lost 30 lbs in the last 3 months, and plan to continue the weight loss, especially with your inspiring words of encouragement ringing in my ears.

Thanks again for contacting me, and for going a whole sentence with using the words 'hooser' and 'eh', and take care.

Sincerely,
Maurice Reeves