Here's why we're so concerned about civil liberties

How many times have you heard it from administration apologists? "I'm not a terrorist, I'm not talking to Osama bin Laden on the phone, so I don't care if they listen to my conversations. I've got nothing to hide. I'm innocent."

Well, here's a good example. You remember the lawyer from Oregon the feds scooped up and threw in jail a couple of years ago? Sure you do, they had him dead to rights. They even found his fingerprint on a supermarket bag full of detonator caps at the scene of the train bombings in Madrid. Plus, he represented a terrorist in a custody case. Definitely a bad guy, no questions asked. Naturally, our so-called allies in Europe were cautious, said to go slow, they weren't so sure. You knew they were soft on terrorism, didn't you?

Here's what they did to him: Using expanded surveillance powers under the USA Patriot Act, the government wiretapped his conversations, conducted secret searches of his home and his law office and jailed him for two weeks as a material witness in the case before a judge threw out the case against him.

“The horrific pain, torture and humiliation that this has caused myself and my family is hard to put into words,” said Mr. Mayfield, an American-born convert to Islam and a former lieutenant in the Army.

“The days, weeks and months following my arrest,” he said, “were some of the darkest we have had to endure. I personally was subject to lockdown, strip searches, sleep deprivation, unsanitary living conditions, shackles and chains, threats, physical pain and humiliation.”



Oops. It turns out they made a mistake. They didn't have the right guy. Had nothing to do with it, so they eventually just let him go.

So he did what comes natural to a lawyer: he sued them, and this week he settled the case for two million dollars. That's right, two mill to him from the federal government--I mean, two mill from our tax dollars because of what our employees, the feds, did to him.

And that's not all. They had to apologize to him. That never happens. Almost literally never. I've been suing the government and private parties--bad actors, like slumlords and people like that--for more than twenty years, and I don't think I've ever gotten an apology as part of a settlement, but they apologized in this case. “The United States of America apologizes to Mr. Brandon Mayfield and his family for the suffering caused” by his mistaken arrest, the government’s apology began.

And that's still not all. In addition to the apology, and the two million, he gets to keep the part of his case in which he was challenging the constitutionality of the so-called Patriot Act going. He didn't have to give up the legal challenge to the law to force the settlement out of the government. He'll get to continue with that case, and, hopefully, get a judgment invalidating the statute.

This is really important, but not just because of what the individual plaintiff got. One of the things we civil libertarians are saying all the time is that we have to protect the rights of everyone, even the guilty, because if we don't then the rights of the innocent are worthless. This is a guy who was innocent. Totally innocent. Not in the "innocent until proven guilty", presumption of innocence sense. He had absolutely nothing to do with it, and he was spied on, locked up, strip searched, and terrorized by our government. You're goddam right they owed him an apology.

And you also have to ask: who's the next innocent person they will do this to, and will there be anyone to stand up for that person?

Last Throes Update

Hey, remember this?

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The insurgency in Iraq is "in the last throes," Vice President Dick Cheney says, and he predicts that the fighting will end before the Bush administration leaves office.

In a wide-ranging interview Monday on CNN's "Larry King Live," Cheney cited the recent push by Iraqi forces to crack down on insurgent activity in Baghdad and reports that the most-wanted terrorist leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had been wounded.

The vice president said he expected the war would end during President Bush's second term, which ends in 2009.

Well, this week there's more news on how well things are going. Not just the fact that Iraqis are killing each other at a record pace, but also that the insurgents, dead-enders, or whatever you want to call them, now have enough income to keep fighting indefinitely:

BAGHDAD, Nov. 25 — The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, corrupt charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

“In fact, if recent revenue and expense estimates are correct, terrorist and insurgent groups in Iraq may have surplus funds with which to support other terrorist organizations outside of Iraq.”


More evidence that invading Iraq has actually made the world more dangerous for the United States, as well as failing to do anything for people in Iraq.

At least the news shows us that one wing of the MSM is seeing reality.

Democracy, Republican Style

We're all pretty happy about the election results across the river in New Hampshire, but it's not that long ago that the Republicans in New Hampshire, with help from the RNC, were deep into election fraud by jamming the Democrats' GOTV effort with thousands of robo-calls. You'll recall that it was so bad that James Tobin of the national Republican Party was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison for the scheme.

Now the Democrats are suing the Republican Party for damages, arguing that the Republican phone-jamming effort trespassed on their personal property and deprived them of its value. There's only one thing: the two parties have different views of the value of the damages the Dems suffered. The Republicans claim that their efforts only cost the D's a few thousand dollars, about what it cost them to rent the phone service for the day. The D's, on the other hand, say, "He, the whole point of all the money we spend on setting up our GOTV campaign is so that we can make GOTV calls on Election Day. If we can't do that, we've wasted all of our investment in setting up the GOTV system. That'll be four mill, please."

It's too soon to tell what will happen, but we'll be following the story. Meanwhil, here's the link to the story in the Times Argus.

Meanwhile, down in the sunny South, remember Katherine Harris?

Yes, that's her, the Bush hatchet woman with the scary makeup who made a fool of herself in her Senate run.

Well, when she ran for Senate her House seat was open, and in a hotly contested race the Republican who was running to replace, Vern Buchanan, her won by 369 votes.

But wait, it is Florida, and Katherine Harris's home district, so it couldn't be as easy as that, could it? No, indeed. In Sarasota County, which the Democratic candidate Christine Jennings carried, there was an undervote of over 18,000 votes. Missing voting machines, people being told their votes didn't register, the whole litany of things that can go wrong with touch screen voting.

The recount's over, Buchanan is demanding that Jenings back off, but it ain't over yet, folks.

If this is what they call democracy here at home, what do the R's think qualifies as democracy in Iraq?

Chafee has second thoughts

From today's Projo:

PROVIDENCE — In his first interview since losing the Republican U.S. Senate seat that has been in his family for three decades, Lincoln D. Chafee yesterday said a lot of people had been coming up to him “and saying, ‘We’re sorry you lost, but glad the Congress switched’ ” from GOP to Democratic Party control.

Asked if deep down, despite his personal disappointment about the outcome of Tuesday’s election, he felt the same way, Chafee looked into the TV cameras and said: “To be honest, yes.”

Random thoughts on the election

We obviously have a lot to celebrate this year, both in Vermont and nationally, and we should. We should also take this opportunity to learn from what happened, and to try to figure out what to do next time. I have several thoughts about this and I'm sure I'll have more. Still, here's a start:

1. The Fifty State Strategy worked. It was just a few months ago that I was asking whether the Fifty State Strategy was nuts, and now here we are, winning Senate and House seats all across the country. It certainly appears that Howard Dean was right in arguing that we should be building the Party and contesting elections all over the country.

But . . .

2. The Fifty State Strategy worked. Look around at the winners, and we can just take the last two who were declared, Jon Tester and Jim Webb as examples, and we see that a lot of the new Democratic Senators and Representatives are not the kind of Democrats that we here identify with. The D's will organize both houses of Congress, and get all the committee chairs, but liberal Democrats won't necessarily be happy with everything they do. Among other things, this will mean we need to keep the pressure on them. It also means, of course, that the wingers who keep claiming that the Democratic Party has been completely taken over by bomb-throwers whose politics run from Howard Dean to Fidel Castro have always been either lying or self-deluded.

3. Rove isn't as smart as everyone claims. Sure, the wingers were all over the place in the last few weeks before the election, proclaiming their confidence that the R's were going to hold the House and the Senate. That was clearly just spin, and there is no way that they actually believed it. On the other hand, they didn't fire Rummy until the day after the election. This seems like pretty good evidence to me that they either thought they were going to win, or they thought they had a good shot at it. If they thought they were going to lose they would have had to figure that firing Rumsfeld might help, and yet they didn't do it.

4. John Odum was right about what it would take to defeat Douglas. The problem was partly that the Parker campaign didn't do it, but partly that there was't enough time. Douglas has held statewide office all but two years since 1980, which means he had many years to give people the impression that he was a reasonable, moderate guy. Maybe that used to be the truth, but the new Douglas, Douglas 2.0--gubernatorial model, is entirely different. He is not either moderate or well-intentioned, and his competence appears limited to campaigning. If you talk to almost anyone who works in state government, at any level, they can tell you how his appointments have weakened the administrative agencies and have often been at odds with the mission of the agencies themselves. We have two years to get the truth out, but it's not going to happen if we wait until 2008.

5. Moveon.org is great, and needs to get even better. Moveon members made literally millions of calls across the country to mobilize support for Democratic candidates. This is a tremendous grass roots resource, and we need to strengthen ties between the Democratic Party and Moveon.org. They clearly had the message that we've always needed that you can't stop campaigning until it's over: on Tuesday night, probably after midnight, I logged on and they were having me call Alaska to get supporters. I thought this was just great.

On the other hand, they seemed to be a bit lacking in the LOS research. Even on Tuesday the scripts I was getting for calls were persuasive scripts, whereas here in Vermont we were doing purely GOTV calls to known supporters. It's hard to believe we were going to change anyone's mind on their way out the door to vote, so the last day push should have been all GOTV. Maybe that's one of the next steps.

6. Racism still works. If you ever have trouble remembering how low the Republicans can go, remember what they did to Harold Ford.Iknow that Hillary Clinton's people are terrified of Barack Obama because they think the South will stop the bleeding on Super Tuesday if she loses Iowa and New Hampshire, but the continued willingness of the Republican Party to make vicious racist attacks when it suits their purposes should be a cautionary note against overconfidence.

I'm sure there's more, but that's what's right at the top of my head.

Good work, everybody!

We obviously have a lot to celebrate this year, both in Vermont and nationally, and we should. We should also take this opportunity to learn from what happened, and to try to figure out what to do next time. I have several thoughts about this and I'm sure I'll have more. Still, here's a start:

1. The Fifty State Strategy worked. It was just a few months ago that I was http://rationalresis... whether the Fifty State Strategy was nuts, and now here we are, winning Senate and House seats all across the country. It certainly appears that Howard Dean was right in arguing that we should be building the Party and contesting elections all over the country.

But . . .

2. The Fifty State Strategy worked. Look around at the winners, and we can just take the last two who were declared, Jon Tester and Jim Webb as examples, and we see that a lot of the new Democratic Senators and Representatives are not the kind of Democrats that we here identify with. The D's will organize both houses of Congress, and get all the committee chairs, but liberal Democrats won't necessarily be happy with everything they do. Among other things, this will mean we need to keep the pressure on them. It also means, of course, that the wingers who keep claiming that the Democratic Party has been completely taken over by bomb-throwers whose politics run from Howard Dean to Fidel Castro have always been either lying or self-deluded.

3. Rove isn't as smart as everyone claims. Sure, the wingers were all over the place in the last few weeks before the election, proclaiming their confidence that the R's were going to hold the House and the Senate. That was clearly just spin, and there is no way that they actually believed it. On the other hand, they didn't fire Rummy until the day after the election. This seems like pretty good evidence to me that they either thought they were going to win, or they thought they had a good shot at it. If they thought they were going to lose they would have had to figure that firing Rumsfeld might help, and yet they didn't do it.

4. http://www.greenmoun... Odum was right about what it would take to defeat Douglas. The problem was partly that the Parker campaign didn't do it, but partly that there was't enough time. Douglas has held statewide office all but two years since 1980, which means he had many years to give people the impression that he was a reasonable, moderate guy. Maybe that used to be the truth, but the new Douglas, Douglas 2.0--gubernatorial model, is entirely different. He is not either moderate or well-intentioned, and his competence appears limited to campaigning. If you talk to almost anyone who works in state government, at any level, they can tell you how his appointments have weakened the administrative agencies and have often been at odds with the mission of the agencies themselves. We have two years to get the truth out, but it's not going to happen if we wait until 2008.

5. Moveon.org is great, and needs to get even better. Moveon members made literally millions of calls across the country to mobilize support for Democratic candidates. This is a tremendous grass roots resource, and we need to strengthen ties between the Democratic Party and Moveon.org. They clearly had the message that we've always needed that you can't stop campaigning until it's over: on Tuesday night, probably after midnight, I logged on and they were having me call Alaska to get supporters. I thought this was just great.

On the other hand, they seemed to be a bit lacking in the LOS research. Even on Tuesday the scripts I was getting for calls were persuasive scripts, whereas here in Vermont we were doing purely GOTV calls to known supporters. It's hard to believe we were going to change anyone's mind on their way out the door to vote, so the last day push should have been all GOTV. Maybe that's one of the next steps.

I'm sure there's more, but that's what's right at the top of my head.

Good work, everybody!

ARMY TIMES: ‘Rumsfeld must go’

What more does it take?

Editorial comes days after Bush affirms defense secretary’s job security
Image: Donald H. Rumsfeld
Rob Carr / AP file
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, seen on Oct. 18, is criticized in an editorial to be published Monday in publications catering to the major branches of the U.S. military.


Just days after President Bush publicly affirmed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's job security through the end of his term, a family of publications catering to the military will publish an editorial calling for the defense secretary's removal.

The editorial, released to NBC News on Friday ahead of its Monday publication date, stated, "It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads."

Revealed: U.S. Soldier Killed Herself After Objecting to Interrogation Techniques

There is no end to the tragedy of Iraq. Every night when I see the names and picures of the latest American victims on the news I can't stop thinking about these strong, dedicated young people, and the fact that they are dying for nothing.

Here is one of the worst stories I've heard yet. Follow the link to read the whole thing.

Revealed: U.S. Soldier Killed Herself After Objecting to Interrogation Techniques
The true stories of how American troops, killed in Iraq, actually died keep spilling out this week. Now we learn, thanks to a reporter's FOIA request, that one of the first women to die in Iraq shot and killed herself after objecting to harsh "interrogation techniques."

By Greg Mitchell

(November 01, 2006) -- The true stories of how American troops, killed in Iraq, actually died keep spilling out this week. On Tuesday, we explored the case of Kenny Stanton Jr., murdered last month by our allies, the Iraqi police, though the military didn’t make that known at the time. Now we learn that one of the first female soldiers killed in Iraq died by her own hand after objecting to interrogation techniques used on prisoners.

She was Army specialist Alyssa Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff, Ariz., native serving with C Company, 311th Military Intelligence BN, 101st Airborne. Peterson was an Arabic-speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at our air base in troubled Tal-Afar in northwestern Iraq. According to official records, she died on Sept. 15, 2003, from a “non-hostile weapons discharge.”