Quote of the Day

[T]he fact that lives are at stake is not enough to justify giving up on democracy. And be clear: when you think that when you lose out in a political debate in which lives are at stake, that makes it OK to kill people to get your way, you have given up on democracy.

Hilzoy, taking on the anti-choice voices that claim killing doctors is justified because it saves [the] lives [of all the aborted foetuses].

Read the whole thing here.

"Our Most Effective Rhetoric And Actions"

That's what Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, is looking to preserve in the wake of the Tiller murder: the ability to "peacefully protest" abortion providers. Terry fears that, following Dr. Tiller's shooting in his Church yesterday that the authorities will seek to curtail anti-abortion protest efforts.

Hilzoy looks into those so-called peaceful protests. She found a chilling example in a Rolling Stone review of (also from Operation Rescue) Troy Newman's campaign against Dr. Tiller - which targeted not only the MD but his entire staff and any service enterprise even loosely associated with the clinic. This includes mass protests at homes, shopping and entertainment venues, mass mailings to entire neighborhoods, mailings and protests at spouses' places of employment, harassment of businesses that clinic staff frequented, and other reprehensible tactics.

From Rolling Stone:

Operation Rescue's smear campaign against [clinic administrative assistant Sara] Phares is part of a new strategy to shut down abortion clinics by systematically harassing their employees into quitting. Banned by law from blockading clinics as it did in its early days, Operation Rescue has taken its offensive to the front lawns and mailboxes of clinic workers. In Wichita, members of the group rummage through employees' garbage in search of incriminating information. They tail them around town as they run errands. They picket clinic staffers at restaurants while they're inside having dinner and castigate them while they're standing in line at Starbucks. Operation Rescue is also visiting companies that do business with the clinic and threatening them with a boycott if they don't sever their ties with the facility. This is America's new abortion war, and the objective, in military terms, is to cut off the supply lines to abortion clinics and demoralize their troops.

Troy Newman, the head of Operation Rescue, calls it the Year of Rebuke -- and if it works in Wichita, he plans to unleash the campaign of intimidation on abortion clinics all across the country. "I want these employees to realize that their lives have changed," he says. "As long as they're embedded in the abortion industry receiving blood money, they can't live a normal life. They just can't."

Hilzoy:

If you read the whole story, you can find out how Newman threatened the Tillers' dry cleaner and a cab company that sometimes took patients to and from the clinic:

Newman then tells him, in the most courteous tone imaginable, that he might see a few people outside the company holding signs. Just to let everybody know what he's participating in. "It's not personal," Newman says gently.

They also go through employees' trash, and offer rewards for incriminating information. They stop children on sidewalks and tell them their neighbors kill little babies.

The point made is very clear: organisations like Operation Rescue employ the sort of aggressive, intimidating tactics that their opponents are (to put it mildly) reluctant to use against them. Those methods are met with charges "religious discrimination," "harassment," "assault" and other inflammatory descriptors by the anti-choice league when used against them. Yet somehow they are "legitimate, peaceful protest" methods when used by the anti-choice groups to intimidate and harass anyone working for, or doing business with, an abortion provider.

If anyone thinks this is acceptable, imagine taking these tactics and applying them to the treatment of, say, a religious minority or ethnic group. Suddenly the offensiveness of these activities becomes more apparent. And once the offensiveness of the methods is made apparent, it becomes clear that there is no justification for them. The claims of the anti-choice groups that they are saving lives ring hollow when it becomes clear how many lives they are destroying in the process.

H/T Bark Bark Woof Woof.

Contractors: Not Just for the DoD Any More

Jeremy Scahill has a compelling article up on Alternet about how local law enforcement is embracing the contracting trend.

This privatization trend is hardly new, but it is accelerating. While events such as the Nisour Square massacre committed in September 2007 by Blackwater operatives in Baghdad show the lethal danger of unleashing mercenary forces on foreign soil, one area with the potential for extreme abuses resulting from this privatization is in domestic law enforcement in the U.S.

Many people may not be aware of this, but since the 1980s, private security guards have outnumbered police officers.

"The more than 1 million contract security officers, and an equal number of guards estimated to work directly for U.S. corporations, dwarf the nearly 700,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States," according to the Washington Post. Some estimate that private security operate inside the U.S. at a 5-to-1 ratio with police.

In New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of the city, private security poured in. Armed operatives from companies like Blackwater, Wackenhut, Intercon and DynCorp spread out in the city. Within two weeks of the hurricane, the number of private security companies registered in Louisiana jumped from 185 to 235.

...

Now it seems that some cities think it is a great idea to expand the use of these private forces using taxpayer funds.

The Wall Street Journal this week reported, "Facing pressure to crack down on crime amid a record budget deficit, Oakland is joining other U.S. cities that are turning over more law-enforcement duties to private armed guards. The City Council recently voted to hire International Services Inc., a private security agency, to patrol crime-plagued districts. While a few Oakland retail districts previously have pooled cash to pay for unarmed security services, using public funds to pay for private armed guards would mark a first for the city."

In a stunning development revealed late Wednesday night, Oakland dropped its plan to hire International Services Inc. after the firm's founder and two other executives were arrested on charges of defrauding the state of California out of more than $9 million in workers compensation.

...

Why do some Oakland officials want this? On the one hand, the belief that it will bring security, but also to save money:

Hiring private guards is less expensive than hiring new officers. Oakland -- facing a record $80 million budget shortfall -- spends about 65 percent of its budget for police and fire services, including about $250,000 annually, including benefits and salary, on each police officer.

In contrast, for about $200,000 a year, the city can contract to hire four private guards to patrol the troubled East Oakland district where four on-duty police officers were killed in March. And the company, not the city, is responsible for insurance for the guards.

As in many cities, this is a contentious issue in Oakland, which has struggled to deal with substantial violence on the one hand and police brutality on the other. According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

The areas where the armed guards were supposed to have been deployed have a disproportionate share of homicides, assaults with deadly weapons and robberies. … The crime rate in the area, according to a 2003 blight study, is between 225 and 150 percent higher than the city as a whole.

Scahill's point is well taken, since as we have seen elsewhere private contractors are bound neither by their oaths as public servants nor law nor treaty when it comes to fulfilling their mission objectives. The antics of Blackwater, Custer Battles et al on the streets of Baghdad, Jalalabad, Masar-e-Sharif or Khabul have been bad enough: transplanted to US cities employing private security as law enforcement, those tendencies will have tragic effects for those communities just as has been seen in Louisiana and California to date.

I can recall, from my years out West, the "patrol specials" that local businesses put on the streets. These were either off-duty or out-of-work police officers, whose backgrounds had been inspected, working in their own communities and funded by business and local organisations as a supplement to the SFPD presence. They were also a small minority, functioning as an adjunct rather than a functional replacement for the beat cops. The new trend looks nothing like the patrol special concept. The programmes Scahill outlines are far larger, with personnel brought in from outside the community (including as far away as Israel as he points out): these people will have little if any feeling for the communities they are tasked to serve. The results are tragically predictable.

It is understandable, particularly in the current crisis, for a municipality to seek to save resources, and contractors offer on the surface an immediate economy over their police department peers. However, the point that they will be less restrained, more aggressive, and far less interested in the rights of the residents of the communities where they are deployed is valid. Those tendencies will almost certainly lead to more litigation for abuse, harassment, and wrongful death, which regardless of the pains suffered by the communities affected will result in the economies of their employment vaporised by the resulting judgments. Since any municipality will have less invested in defending a contractor than a comparable law enforcement officer, sworn to public service and on the municipality's payroll, the likelihood that that municipality will pay some sort of damages increases, making the cost/benefit calculus untenable in the long term. Even if the cost in lost liberties and lives were acceptable, any community choosing to contract with private security for law enforcement faces the likelihood that the fiscal costs will become unacceptable even if that is not the case immediately.

Maintaining a police force is not an inexpensive proposition. But it is something any US citizen has a right to expect of his/her government. Handing off that responsibility may seem like an effective solution to the budget constraints of the present, but the costs in dollars, public trust and individual lives are nearly certain to eclipse any short term gain any city choosing to sidestep its responsibility to its citizens would see.

As Bad As They Are, Part Two

Andrew Sullivan has a pair of tales from World War Two, highlighting just how different the earlier - and highly successful - interrogation methods were, and why even the Nazis avoided the barbarity on display from the Bush years.

A Thought on the Torture Investigations

The problem with this entire discussion is that, rather than requiring that the subsequent President pursue the illegalities of his/her predecessor, the obligation actually rests on the concurrent Congress to review, investigate and prosecute any illegal behaviour on the part of the sitting President at that time. The 108th through 110th Congresses had ample opportunity, and substantial grounds, to undertake such an investigation. That they did not is far more indicative than any action the 44th President could take to investigate the administration of the 43rd.

Backroom Deals

There's a lot of noise today about this particular item.

I see two particular points of interest.

One, the investigation highlights just how much intelligence-gathering the NSA was doing within the US, and how much of it was truly targeted at US citizens. Had this merely been about foreign agents plotting harm to the US as the programme was originally presented, Rep. Harman would have gone essentially unnoticed. However, she was not, and only the intervention of (then) Attorney General Gonzalez prevented a full-blown and very embarrassing investigation. Of course, now that the deal that was struck has been exposed, the embarrassment is compounded, so any benefit Harman received was strictly temporary.

Two, it showcases how widespread foreign involvement in US policymaking could potentially be, and how diverse the prospective "foreign agents" would be by inference. If Harman, then a House Intelligence Committee member, was amenable to quid pro quo with foreign agents despite (or perhaps because of) her responsibilities, the AIPAC moment might be only one of many. Also, if AIPAC was the foreign agency snared by the wiretap, it certainly makes wiretapping to "catch foreign terrorists" harder to justify unless one is willing to label Israel a state sponsor of terrorism, which the Conservatists are loath to do and which even the US Left is hesitant to consider. And Gonzalez' intervention says much about what the Bush maladministration was prepared to overlook to achieve its aims.

Harmon's subsequent distancing from authority by House leadership is certainly appropriate. Unless charges are preferred, though, her continuing in office is best left between her and her constituents for the moment.

UPDATE: Re. Harman has issued an not-quite-rebuttal statement to the charges. It seems she's missing the larger point, though the point she does make is certainly troubling.

As Bad As They Are

Christopher Buckley wants us to remember that terrorists still don't have our morals.

It is, yes, good that the U.S.A. is not doing this anymore, but let’s not get too sanctimonious about how awful it was that we indulged in these techniques after watching nearly 3000 innocent Americans endure god-awful deaths at the hands of religious fanatics who would happily have detonated a nuclear bomb if they had gotten their mitts on one. And let us move on. There is pressing business...

The operative question becomes: What do we do now with captive bad guys who possess information that could prevent another 9/11? We may have moved on. They, assuredly, have not.

I'll leave issues as to his arithmetic aside for the moment.

Buckley's article speaks loudly of two double standards: that of calling terrorists out as monsters whilst employing their own methods against them, and that of the assumption that torture of detainees is productive for US intelligence services but indoctrinating and corrupting for US citizens subjected to the same treatment. His attempt at levity, first at dismissing the severity of the treatment meted out to detainees at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other sites, then by spotlighting Monty Python ("bring out - the Comfy Chair!") and Mel Brooks for their deliberately light-hearted discussion of the Inquisition (exceedingly dark subject matter) as somehow comparative, then by proposing new alternate "enhanced interrogation" techniques such as subjecting detainees to four-hour commute conditions, touch-tone telephone exercises with a rotary phoneset, and exercises with frustrating television programming, are eerily tone-deaf to the current situation.

The problem is not that the US tortured people. The problem is that the US tortured people while insisting it did not, fabricated legal justifications for actions clearly illegal on the US' own books as well as in violation of multiple international treaties and conventions, and continued to claim the high moral ground in world affairs just as its own morality was being systematically destroyed by those same claimants. Were the US willing to admit that some people just need to be waterboarded on principle, disavowed the conventions, habeus corpus, reasonable search and seizure, trial by jury, and the countless other conventions of US, Parliamentary and Napoleonic law on which its modern jurisprudence is based, the outcry against that particular programme would be much smaller; however, doing so would invalidate whole sections of the Constitution, reams of legal precedent and a plurality of the concepts on which the nation was built and to which it claims to continue to cling. Minimising the treatment of detainees does not serve a nation founded on the principles outlined in the formative documents the US has long used, and frequently cited, as reason for the way it deals with foreign powers based on their accpetance of those ideals.

Buckley's counter-assumption, that non-coercive interrogation does not yield actionable intelligence, has equally been found false, and prominent figures within the military and intelligence communities have already made statements to precisely that effect.

Somehow, though, Buckley continues to cling to the assumption that pursuit of international criminals without the ability to employ their methods is unproductive; that recognising that those methods, if used by US questioners, as immoral and illegal is a pointless exercise; and that interrogation, as a practice, needs to be somehow offensive to the senses taken out of the context of intelligence gathering. His question "What do we do now with captive bad guys who possess information that could prevent another 9/11?" is deliberately misleading in that it assumes a need to do something unpleasant to obtain their cooperation. Information coerced from a detainee may well be of value, but assuming there is no other way to obtain such, and that we must needs behave in borderline inhuman ways towards those we capture, is both contrary to the history of Western law and ethics and the founding principles as elucidated in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and countless other documents that have shaped the US.

UPDATE: Wolfrum has his own take here.

What You Get For Your Law Enforcement Tax Dollar

First, comes the story of an ISP raided by the FBI - with, so far, no indication given as to cause or consequence (outside shutting down the provider's datacenter for the time being).

Second, there's an interesting article on how Utah is funding a programme to help its officers sweat out their crystal meth habits.

Third is an item on how two drunk sheriffs here in Tampa Bay who were let go after what would have been a DUI traffic stop.

And last is the tale of a Texas police chief who tasered his wife.

I have the greatest respect for law enforcement in general. But I've had less than pleasant encounters with them in the past, most notably an assault I witnessed in California where the PD arrested the victim instead of the assailant. So while I'm willing to give them the benefit of at least some doubt, these stories taken together tell a tale of presumed privilege and police-state practices that make one shudder. And while these are taken from a variety of US national sources, their relative immediacy - all in the last six months, and three of them in the last week - is alarming.

H/T Wolfrum.

A Case Of SSAD*

I suppose it was only a matter of time before not liking being watched became some psychological condition.

Colin Gant, 41, of Lowestoft, who drives more than 500 miles a week in his job, was forced to take detours to avoid the detection devices.

He then approached Norfolk Safety Camera Partnership for help.

...

[Inspector Marcus] Rowe added: "It's recognised that if you drive past a fixed site camera the average person will probably check their speed to make sure they are doing the appropriate speed.

"Colin's reaction went beyond that and he felt anxiety and stress."

The surveillance society that the postindustrial West is fast becoming is affecting our daily lives more than any of us would like or would care to admit. David Kravets reviewed the situation not two months ago for Wired, and wasn't particularly impressed with what it found.

If you think you're being watched, you're probably right.

The American Civil Liberties Union posted a website Monday showing that government-financed surveillance cameras are running rampant across the United States.

The situation is such that even publications like Popular Mechanics, not especially attuned to civil liberties, has taken notice.

What bothers me is that, while the BBC story is the first article I have seen where the aversion to one's every action being monitored has been treated as a problem for the individual and not society, it likely not the last. As more cameras and surveillance equipment enter our public spaces, the likelihood that such "anxiety" will increase is substantial.

* SSAD, or "Surveillance Society Anxiety Disorder," is not a genuine psychological condition. However, it is a rational extrapolation of the mindset behind the writing in the BBC article, and an actual clinical diagnosis based on this premise (and likely given a very similar name) is only waiting to be applied.

What We Get For Our GWoT Dollar

The Washington Post has an illuminating item on the Maryland State Police's misguided efforts at antiterrorism.

Go read it here.

Crime And Punishment

Some of my professors, when covering the Middle Ages and the birth of Islam, applauded Muslim jurisprudence for its moderation. One key example was punishment for theives: under Sharia a convicted thief lost his/her right hand as punishment. In a time when Europe was hanging people for the same offense, on the surface this seems humane. However, one item that wasn't covered all that well is that in Islam the left hand is "unclean:" anything done with it is deemed evil, and eating with it poisons the soul. A faithful Muslim thief, without the support of family or charity (unlikely given the offense), would starve to death rather than risk damnation, and a thief who fed himself would be shunned by society as sinful and unrepentant.

In this context, the local flap over Nick Bollea's ability to drive has similar undertones. Bollea, son of wrestling star Terry "Hulk Hogan" Bollea, has a history of poor driving, including a spectacular crash in August 2007 that left his passenger John Graziano permanently disabled. Bollea entered a no contest plea and was sentenced to eight months in jail (he was released early for good behavior), five years of probation, 500 community service hours and suspension of his driving privileges. He's also facing civil action from Graziano's family.

In light of this, the hearing last month by the Bureau of Administrative Reviews to grant Bollea a hardship license is getting a lot of press here. DMV hearing officer Cindy Van Dunk was reluctantly persuaded to issue the license to Bollea after hearing his need for transportation for his new job. The decision is getting a lot of heat, at present from Bay News 9.

A "hardship license" in Florida allows someone who would ordinarily not qualify for driving privileges to get to work, school, church or medical services, but no more. There's also a strict work-only variant. It's not clear which version Bollea was granted.

Certainly Bollea is hardly a responsible driver from his prior actions. The job he cites as reason for the license - with a recording label - will likely put him on the streets at hours not unlike those where his prior accidents occurred. And Bollea has since then moved to California, which does not recognize the Florida document, rendering the decision effectively moot.

But consider this for a moment: regardless of all these things, depriving someone of driving privileges in a community with a bare skeleton of public transportation denies that person nearly all opportunities for employment. Transit in Tampa Bay is geared far more to getting residents to shopping than it is getting commuters to work. Many businesses are some distance from bus routes, and residential communities do not have ready links to commercial districts. Distances between bedroom communities and businesses make commute by foot or bicycle practically impossible. Unless one is content as cashier at a corner market or gas station, opportunity for those without cars is basically nonexistent.

I looked recently at commuting to work on the bus: staying within Tampa, and within the HARTLine service region, it would take me two hours at least, and two or three buses, to travel twelve miles across roads I could navigate on my own in twenty minutes. Much of that commute time would be spent waiting at the local mall for the bus traveling the next leg of the commute: a location five miles out of the way. It would also cost me $90 a month for a bus pass, versus at most half that in gas. Connections between Tampa and St. Petersburg are even worse: the only regular link is Greyhound, which runs only four times a day and requires a separate ticket, and HART and PSTA (Pinellas County's transit authority) do not accept each other's passes either.

Working in Southwest Florida virtually requires one to have personal transportation of some sort, and with the distances involved the automobile is the only practical solution. Denying anyone the right to drive essentially deprives that person of employment even as it makes the roads safer for the rest of us.

I'm hardly sympathetic to Nick Bollea. He is an irresponsible brat who deserved his punishment. However, his case highlights a problem here: public transit is not a viable option for anyone who has either a preference or a need for it, which makes suspension of driving privileges for any length of time effectively an inability to work. The suspended driver in this case is left little better off than the one-handed convicted thief in medieval Arabia.