Month: June 2013

Border Security Theater?

Barro analyzes the compromise being worked out:

The basic outline of the deal is this: Democrats agreed to spend as much money on border security as Republicans wanted (some $30 billion over 10 years) so long as Republicans agreed that there wouldn’t be consequences if the security doesn’t work.

It’s not as dumb a deal as it sounds like.

This approach substitutes for one that many Senate Republicans had previously been demanding in exchange for supporting the immigration bill: A “hard trigger” that only activated the path to citizenship for previously-unauthorised immigrants once border security was apprehending 90% of people trying to cross the border illegally.

Brad Plumer adds:

It’s not clear what all this extra staff and technology will do for border security. There are also good questions about whether the Department of Homeland Security can even train that many guards, or whether there’s actually room for 700 miles of fence — Corker called the provisions “almost overkill.” But for Republicans looking to convince their base that they’re taking border security seriously, overkill might be exactly what they need.

Yglesias is skeptical that more border enforcement will do much good:

Visa overstayers are already a large share of the unauthorized population, and creating a guest-worker program is going to increase the possibility of visa overstaying. You could build the Berlin Wall all across the U.S.–Mexico border and you’re not going to solve anything. What you need to do is either increase the number of W Visas (my preference) or increase behind-the-border security or some combination of the two. Personally, I don’t really care that a border surge is going to be ineffective. But it can get corrosive in the long term if you promise the voters something your legislation can’t deliver. If this bill passes, the immigration-enforcement problem won’t be at the border.

Reihan agrees that focusing exclusively on the border is counterproductive:

Not surprisingly, my preference would be for much more stringent behind-the-border security and for the elimination of the guest-worker program, but my preferred policy option has many serious downsides, e.g., the enforcement measurements it would likely require would be expensive, draconian, and potentially intrusive. Canada, for example, imposes a one-year mandatory prison sentence on unauthorized immigrants, which seems impracticable in the U.S. context.

And Ed Krayewski argues that, if “the Border Patrol is underfunded (big if), it’s because they have to pursue drug cartels and human traffickers operating along the border”:

Real immigration reform would mean liberalizing immigration laws to make it easier to enter the United States legally. Appropriately implemented, immigration reform should cut down significantly on human trafficking at the border. Once it is easier to go the legal route than to hire a coyote, the human trafficking problem should largely take care of itself.

Though he would prefer to deal with the drug trafficking issue by ending the war on drugs, he goes on to note that, “if the Border Patrol is mandated to pursue narcotraffickers and terrorists along the border, easing the demand for illegal entry (by lowering the cost of legal entry) ought to allow the Border Patrol to focus on those narrower problems.”

“Killed In Front Of My Eyes”

On the 20th anniversary of her book, Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean describes how watching an execution compelled her to become an activist:

I knew when I came out of that execution. It was the middle of the night. I’d never watched a protocol like that — a human being had been strapped down and killed in front of my eyes. I had in front of me the horror of his crime and then the horror of watching the state kill him. I threw up. My first instinct was to run, and then I went and realized I’d been called to tell the story and get it out to the people.

She also seems to be a fan of the new Pope:

When Pope Francis got up and made one of his first speeches, he said the Church has been too self-referential. He said we have to do what Jesus did; we have to go to the margins of society. And he mentioned two things: hospitals and prisons. He said, you know, one of the most serious sins is spiritual worldliness. Jesus said that you’re not to lord over people; you’re to be the servant of each other. I interpret that as addressing the way the Church has been using its position to silence people and control them and threaten them with excommunication. Those are power moves.

Update from a reader:

I remember reading this article by Prejean back in 2005. It had a bigger negative impact on my opinion of Bush than any other single thing I read.

Memo To David Gregory

Some advice from David Carr about how journalists tackle the powerful, not just fellow journalists:

The one question all young reporters on Fleet Street are taught to keep foremost in their mind when interviewing public figures can be best paraphrased as, “Why is this jerk lying to me?”

My take on Gregory’s grilling of Greenwald and ignoring war crimes by public officials is here.

Should I Be Allowed To Vote?

Literally, me. New York is debating the issue:

The New York City Council is seriously considering a measure that would permit voting by legally resident noncitizens in municipal elections after six months’ residence. If the measure passes, it would surely energize similar initiatives in other major metropolitan areas.

Noncitizen voting was once the norm, even in federal elections. At the beginning of the 20th century, as many as 22 states and territories allowed noncitizens to vote not just for local but also for national elections. Noncitizens legally voted in every presidential election until 1924. The practice coincided with an immigrant surge approximating today’s.

The case for permanent resident voting:

Opponents of noncitizen voting ignore basic conceptions of self-governance. Noncitizens are directly affected by local government and pay local taxes. Accordingly, they should have the same say as their neighbors in how they are governed. It was on that theory that even undocumented immigrant parents were allowed to vote in New York City school-board elections until the elected board was abolished in 2002.

More than 35 percent of New Yorkers are foreign-born; many remain noncitizens and many are economically challenged. Denying the vote to so large a proportion of the community gives rise to a new kind of rotten borough.

Because of the HIV ban, I have lived in the US for 20 years with no right to vote, no citizen’s constitutional rights, no guarantee of social security, no access to any medical benefits by the state … and yet, I have been taxed at a rate of roughly 50 percent for the past decade or so. You’d think I’d be furious. I am maddened by the irrationality of the HIV ban – and the long decades of complacency since.

And yet I favor restricting votes to citizens. Voting is integral to a democratic society and although I have paid my taxation and had no representation, that merely makes me the same as every other US citizen in the District of Columbia. My view is that until all citizens are able to be represented in the Congress, no permanent residents should.

DC’s core rights must come first – or we will be giving non-citizens more democratic leverage than citizens.

The After-Life (And Suicide) Of An American Torturer

The country still won’t come to terms with the fact that the US perpetrated a global campaign of war crimes, torture, dehumanization and cruelty for seven years, and its impact is still being felt. It is felt not simply among all those dictators – from the master-torturer, the King of Jordan, to the Chinese and Russians, beaming broadly, knowing that the US has now no moral legs to stand on, especially since Obama’s decision to ignore binding Geneva Convention laws that require prosecution of the guilty.

But there is a human toll as well: not just among those still living with PTSD from the brutal torture sessions, but from the perpetrators as well. Many did so with qualms, under orders; others, given the signal from the commander-in-chief that torture was now an American value, took to it with relish and occasionally desperation. One reluctant participant soldier, just killed himself – yet another one – because he couldn’t live with what he had actually been ordered by his president to do. Part of his suicide note:

My body has become nothing but a cage, a source of pain and constant problems. The illness I have has caused me pain that not even the strongest medicines could dull, and there is no cure. All day, every day a screaming agony in every nerve ending in my body. It is nothing short of torture. My mind is a wasteland, filled with visions of incredible horror, unceasing depression, and crippling anxiety, even with all of the medications the doctors dare give. Simple things that everyone else takes for granted are nearly impossible for me. I can not laugh or cry. I can barely leave the house. I derive no pleasure from any activity. Everything simply comes down to passing time until I can sleep again. Now, to sleep forever seems to be the most merciful thing.

You must not blame yourself. The simple truth is this: During my first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to describe. War crimes, crimes against humanity. Though I did not participate willingly, and made what I thought was my best effort to stop these events, there are some things that a person simply can not come back from. I take some pride in that, actually, as to move on in life after being part of such a thing would be the mark of a sociopath in my mind. These things go far beyond what most are even aware of.

To force me to do these things and then participate in the ensuing coverup is more than any government has the right to demand. Then, the same government has turned around and abandoned me. They offer no help, and actively block the pursuit of gaining outside help via their corrupt agents at the DEA. Any blame rests with them.

“Crimes against humanity.” “Far beyond what most are even aware of.” “The ensuing cover-up.”

When will the American people finally see the Senate Intelligence Report on the Torture Program?

And when will Eric Holder finally initiate criminal prosecutions? Or are the powerful always above the law, even as soldiers kill themselves because of the memory of the inhumanity?

Gawker, which published this first, notes:

“Daniel Somers was a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was part of Task Force Lightning, an intelligence unit. In 2004-2005, he was mainly assigned to a Tactical Human-Intelligence Team (THT) in Baghdad, Iraq, where he ran more than 400 combat missions as a machine gunner in the turret of a Humvee, interviewed countless Iraqis ranging from concerned citizens to community leaders and and government officials, and interrogated dozens of insurgents and terrorist suspects. In 2006-2007, Daniel worked with Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) through his former unit in Mosul where he ran the Northern Iraq Intelligence Center. His official role was as a senior analyst for the Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and part of Turkey). Daniel suffered greatly from PTSD and had been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and several other war-related conditions. On June 10, 2013, Daniel wrote the following letter to his family before taking his life. Daniel was 30 years old.”

(Thumbnail Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

David Gregory Is What’s Wrong With Washington

There has been an understandable collective wince at David Gregory’s asking a fellow-journalist whether he should go to jail (I speak of Glenn Greenwald) for helping a whistle-blower. Now, as readers know, I’m somewhat skeptical about the large claims made by Glenn and Snowden as to PRISM but, equally, I emphatically do believe that these revelations were clearly released to further what Snowden felt in good faith was the public interest. In a piece that would be close to perfect if it had any acknowledgment of the other side of the equation – that plenty of fanatical Jihadist extremists are trying to kill us every day – Glenn explains:

In what conceivable sense are Snowden’s actions “espionage”? He could have – but chose not – sold the information he had to a foreign intelligence service for vast sums of money, or covertly passed it to one of America’s enemies, or worked at the direction of a foreign government. That is espionage. He did none of those things.

What he did instead was give up his life of career stability and economic prosperity, living with his long-time girlfriend in Hawaii, in order to inform his fellow citizens (both in America and around the world) of what the US government and its allies are doing to them and their privacy. He did that by very carefully selecting which documents he thought should be disclosed and concealed, then gave them to a newspaper with a team of editors and journalists and repeatedly insisted that journalistic judgments be exercised about which of those documents should be published in the public interest and which should be withheld.

That’s what every single whistleblower and source for investigative journalism, in every case, does – by definition.

More to the point, Glenn’s role in this was at first passive. Snowden contacted him, not the other way round. He then did what any non-co-opted journalist would do – and examined the data independently, with other independent journalists and published the truth. He’s a role model, not a target.

So why would a journalist like Gregory ask such a question?

Two theories:

first, underlying a lot of this, is the MSM’s fear and loathing and envy of the blogger journalist. Notice that Gregory calls Greenwald a “polemicist” – not a journalist. The difference, I presume, is that polemicists actually make people in power uncomfortable. Journalists simply do their best to get chummy with them in order to get exclusive tidbits that the powerful want you to know.

Second: ask yourself if David Gregory ever asked a similar question of people in government with real power, e.g. Dick Cheney et al. Did he ever ask them why they shouldn’t go to jail for committing documented war crimes under the Geneva Conventions? Nah. Here’s a question Gregory asked of Petraeus during the Obama administration:

Presumably, US forces and Pakistani officials are doing the interrogations, do you wish you had the interrogation methods that were available to you under the Bush administration to get intelligence from a figure like this?

Notice the refusal to use the word “torture”. Note the assumption of the premise that torture actually provides reliable intel. Note also Petraeus’ polite dismissal of the neocon question. Gregory has asked this question before:

Can you address my question? Did harsh interrogation help in the hunt for bin Laden?

Again, note the refusal to use the word torture. That would be awkward because Gregory is a social friend of Liz Cheney (Gregory’s wife worked with Cheney’s husband at the law firm Latham & Watkins). Who wants to call their social friend a war criminal? Notice also this classic Washington discussion by Gregory on torture. It’s entirely about process. There is no substantive position on something even as profound as war crimes. The toughest sentence: “This is a debate that’s going to continue.” Gregory is obviously pro-torture, hides behind neutrality, and beats up opponents with one-sided questions.

It just hasn’t occurred to him that the only place for Dick Cheney right now is jail.

But an actual journalist, Glenn Greenwald, not part of the Village, who has made more news this past fortnight than the entire coterie Gregory lives among and for? The gloves are off. I’m not going to attack Gregory for asking a sharp question of another journalist, however odd? I am merely going to note that he has been far tougher on this journalist for doing his job than on Dick Cheney for abdicating his.

At some point the entire career structure of Washington journalism – the kind of thing that makes David Gregory this prominent – needs to be scrapped and started over. And then you realize that it already has.

And the change is accelerating.

Rand Is Already Running, Ctd

Last week, Rich Lowry wrote that, while he is “far from a Rand Paul-ite,” anyone “underestimating him in 2016 does so at their peril”:

At least for some stretch of 2015, Rand Paul could well be the Republican front-runner, tapping into grass-roots enthusiasm on the model of Howard Dean in 2003. And it’s not inconceivable that he could go further than that famous representative of “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” although the field will presumably be very crowded on the right.

But Ramesh doubts that voters will warmly receive his economic platform:

Paul’s economic plan includes a 17 percent flat tax to replace the current income tax. The effect of such a policy would be a bigger bill for a lot of middle-class households. The median income for a family of four is $65,000, and under the current tax code — assuming the family takes the standard deduction — its federal income-tax bill would be about $2,700. Under the plan Paul sketches, it would be about $3,500.

A single mother of one making $35,000 a year would see her tax liability rise, too. If she uses the standard deduction, she pays about $1,500 today. She’d probably pay $2,100 if Paul had his way.

The very richest Americans, on the other hand, would see their taxes decrease a lot. The journalists buzzing about Paul have rarely discussed this. They want to talk to him about foreign policy or marijuana. I suspect that if he were a presidential nominee, however, voters would see a lot more Democratic ads about his views on taxes. And he wouldn’t come across as the candidate who wants to keep the government out of their wallets.

Francis Wilkinson focuses instead on “Paul’s ‘crunchy con’ persona”:

At a Reagan library event, he extolled the virtues of composting. This is anything but trivial. Conservatism in recent years has defined itself largely by what it hates: Obama, liberals, government. Environmentalism is high on that list, as a toxic stream of votes in the House of Representatives confirms. Paul’s embrace of composting is brilliant: It suggests a thoughtfulness about the environment (along with an absence of hatred) without in any way challenging Republican petro-donors.

Paul’s fiscal policy, including a flat tax and a grim reaper approach to federal departments and the federal budget, should be enough to keep him penned in on Congress’s end of Pennsylvania Avenue. But a Paul presidential run might begin to liberate his party from other orthodoxies.

Earlier Dish on Rand here.

Stigma Sticks

Researchers asked university students to evaluate three groups of people: “people who have been wrongfully convicted of a crime”; “people who have been convicted of a crime that they actually committed”; and “people in general”:

The students rated wrongfully convicted people in a similar way to offenders, including perceiving them as incompetence and cold, and having negative attitudes towards them. Although the students desired less social distance from the wrongly convicted compared with offenders, they preferred to have more distance from them than people in general. And while they expressed more pity for wrongly convicted people than offenders, this didn’t translate into greater support for giving them assistance such as job training or subsidised housing. In fact, the students were more in favour of giving monthly living expenses to people in general as opposed to the wrongly convicted.

Christian Jarrett notes that “it’s unsafe to generalise confidently from a student sample,” but offers anecdotal evidence:

Consider the case of the unfortunately named Kirk Bloodsworth. In 1993, after nearly nine years in prison, Bloodsworth was a free man thanks to DNA testing that showed he was not guilty of raping and killing a nine-year-old girl – the first time the scientific technique had been used in this way. Yet despite his release, Bloodsworth continued to be vilified, including having “child killer” scrawled in dirt on his truck.

Bloodsworth, a former Marine, talks about that incident and others in the above video.