Category: Old Dish

THE PRESIDENCY UNBOUND

You can say this for the president. The powers he seized after 9/11 have indeed apparently helped neuter al Qaeda as we once knew it. That’s a big deal and a big achievement. We haven’t been attacked since: another big deal, in my book. But the flip-side of unchecked executive power is also the chance of self-reinforcing error (WMD intelligence) and abuse of power (authorizing torture against domestic and international law). Here’s a nugget from the Risen book, as reported by Time, that gives a concrete example:

Risen devotes a chapter to Sawsan Alhaddad, an Iraqi American recruited by the CIA as part of a “Hail Mary” prewar effort to gain intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons program by tapping the relatives of Iraqi scientists. Alhaddad was one of at least 30 Iraqi expatriates who risked their lives to travel to Iraq to ask their relatives about Saddam’s arsenal. According to Risen, all of them reported that Iraq had abandoned its WMD program – but the CIA never informed the White House.

The founders divided government for a good reason. It may be time to tame the prince.

REMEMBER TIA? That was John Poindexter’s much-ridiculed 2002 proposal for “Total Information Awareness” – a domestic spying program that was hooted down as way over the line in the balance between security and liberty. Turns out, in the super-secret and illegal NSA program, we got something much more invasive than even Poindexter envisioned:

Adm. John Poindexter, TIA’s creator, believed in the potential intelligence benefits of data-mining broadband communications, but he was also well aware of the potential for excess. “We need a much more systematic approach” to data-mining and privacy protection, Poindexter said at a 2002 conference in Anaheim, Calif., sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Poindexter envisioned a “privacy appliance,” a device that would strip any identifiers from the information – such as names or addresses – so that government miners could see only patterns. Then if there was reason to believe that the information belonged to a group that was planning an attack, the government could seek a warrant and disable the privacy control for that specific data. TIA funded research on a privacy appliance at the Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox Corp. “The idea is that this device, cryptographically protected to prevent tampering, would ensure that no one could abuse private information without an immutable digital record of their misdeeds,” according to a 2003 government report to Congress about TIA. “The details of the operation of the appliance would be available to the public.”

No such protection exists for the NSA snooping program. Bush just decided that as a law-free commander-in-chief, he could spy on any American he wanted to. And no one laughed.

REPUBLICAN WIRE-TAPPING: More common than you’d think. Here’s a PDF report on deployment of domestic wiretapping in anti-trust enforcement by the Justice Department. The law authorizing such domestic taps was passed last year. Under the Republicans, government doesn’t just get bigger and bigger; it gets progressively more invasive. Yep: under the Republicans.

ANDERSON UNPLUGGED: He won’t dye his hair and he reads this blog. Respek.

THE NEA EXPOSED: A little glimpse into the political activities of the union dedicated to keeping American education mediocre.

– posted by Andrew.

PERPETUAL PEACE?

I see Cato is hosting (and streaming over the Web) an interesting looking event next week with Columbia’s Jack Snyder and U Penn’s Edward Mansfield about their new book Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War. I spoke briefly to Snyder, after reading a chunk of his previous book on this topic, about a year back while working on a short squib on the rather more radical ideas of Princeton political scientist Joanne Gowa, a skeptic of the democratic peace hypothesis. Without going so far as to endorse Gowa’s critique in all its particulars, she and Snyder are a useful antidote to the assumption that, from the point of view of promoting stability and security, “spreading democracy” (in the formal sense of popular elections) is some kind of silver bullet. What would likely be effective to that end is the spread of liberal democracy—which entails cultivating a whole complex of mores and institutions. It is, of course, much easier to focus on flashier, more photogenic milestones like lines of purple-fingered voters outside polling stations. But as Snyder and Mansfield make clear, it may also be dangerous.

—posted by Julian

REALISM AND THE NEOCONS

There’s a smackdown debate on conservative foreign policy in the correspondence section of Commentary. Check it out.

ALITO AND EXECUTIVE POWER: It’s why he was nominated, why Miers was nominated and why Roberts was nominated. They all believe in an executive branch on steroids – the kind of thing conservatives once worried about. Sandy Levinson elaborates here.

TORTURE IN BURMA: The Burmese regime is one of the most odious and nutty on the planet. Read this account of torture in Burmese prisons. Now remember that, according to the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto, Mark Levin, Rich Lowry, John Yoo, and many others, nothing detailed in this account qualifies as torture at all.

A FIRST AMENDMENT FOR BRITAIN? A good idea from what looks like a stimulating book, “The Retreat of Reason.”

TACKLING JESUS: Not an easy decision.

– posted by Andrew.

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

One of the risks associated with certain ongoing socioeconomic trends – the upper class getting richer, the middle class shrinking, the barriers to social mobility increasing as a college diploma becomes ever-more essential – is that the twenty-first century U.S. will end up looking more and more like class-bound Europe, or worse, Latin America. Let’s just hope that hunting isn’t a leading indicator: it’s long been a much more democratic and working-class pastime here than in Europe, but Christina Larson argues that it’s now often too pricey for many Americans to afford.

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS: For politicians, from N. Gregory Mankiw, and worth a read by left and right alike.

– posted by Ross

WHAT IF MENCKEN BLOGGED?

Jack Shafer wonders whether it’s true that H. L. Mencken actually produced 70 million words in his lifetime. He reckons it’s more in the 5 million range. But what if he’d been a blogger, as I suspect he would be if he were alive today? I just counted up the words typed into this blog over 2005. I say “typed” because a chunk of them are quotes or emails from readers and the like. Nevertheless, at 530,000 words a year, a blogger could match Mencken’s lifetime record in a decade. Six years and counting …

THE MEDIA VERSUS ISRAEL: A round-up of last year’s worse anti-Israel bias.

CONSERVATIVES AGAINST WIRE-TAPPING: Remember when conservatives believed in restraining government power, not allowing it to spend as if there were no tomorrow and to let it wiretap citizens without so much as the flimsiest of rubber-stamping court checks? It turns out there are still some conservatives willing to resist the imposition of an above-the-law executive. Digby cites several sources here. Glenn Greenwald surveys the scene here. Bill Safire is on board. Even one priest in the Bush-cult called Powerline has demurred. Cato has suggested that if the president can simply break the law when he feels like it in pursuing the war on terror, why bother with the Patriot Act at all? Or the McCain Amendment?

– posted by Andrew.

EMAIL OF THE DAY

“You’ve stated precisely the right question. It’s interesting that in his signing statement, Bush appeals to the “constitutional authority of the President” and the “constitutional limitations on the judicial power,” but nowhere mentions the constitutional authority of Congress, which includes the powers: “To declare War, grant Letters of Marqe and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water,” “To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces,” and, “To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations” (U.S. Constitution, Art. 1, Sec. 8). It seems that even a strict constructionist would have to concede that Title X falls well within these powers.”

We’re not talking strict constructionism here. We’re talking about a president who believes that he alone can determine any policy even vaguely related to a war that he has redefined as a permanent condition for the indefinite future. My best guess is that we’ve only begun to find out what powers he has secretly assigned to himself. I certainly don’t trust him not to authorize torture again in the future. The only recourse is the press and the Congress. The Courts are in the process of being stacked with men and women completely deferent to executive power. I’m beginning to believe that Democratic retaking of at least one half of the Congress this year is essential to resisting the potential dangers of our current situation. And I’d say the same if we had a Democratic president with Bush’s contempt for the rule of law, and if the Republicans were the party in opposition.

– posted by Andrew.

THOSE “SIGNING STATEMENTS”

This is a useful primer on how the Bush administration has tried to add executive interpretation to Congressional law as a way to affect its implementation and potential review by the Courts. No big news that Sam Alito was behind the push to extend executive power. The entire point of Bush’s Supreme Court nominations is to buttress executive power at the expense of the Courts. But this should clearly be a central issue in the Alito hearings. As the imperial presidency nudges toward the edge of an imperial monarchy, this issue needs airing. Badly.

– posted by Andrew.

A PRESIDENT ABOVE THE LAW

In my view, this could turn out to be the big question of the new year: Do we have a president who refuses, in any matter tangentially related to the war on terror, to obey the law? We know he broke the FISA law and lied about it. We know he broke U.S. law against torturing detainees, and lied about it. Now we find that he is declaring himself unbound by the McCain Amendment. Marty Lederman is on the case. Money quote from the president’s signing statment of the Amendment:

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

Translation: I will violate this law whenever I feel like it. I hoped we had put this issue behind us. It appears we haven’t.

– posted by Andrew.