- In a prior brief, I covered the first known acknowledgment
of secret law by US courts: In a challenge to the legality of warrantless
searches of passengers at airports, the courts agreed with the government
that the law was a secret and should remain so -that the public has no
right to see the law even though that law directly contradicts a constitutionally
protected civil right. If that were not outrageous enough, the proposed
legislation to "Fix FISA" is a fraud and involves more secret
law. It is also a lie in the sense that our government already surveils
all electronic communications and does so without a warrant. There is no
law, not even FISA, that authorizes this. They do it because they can hide
behind the veil of National Security. In order to give the appearance of
legitimacy, they select a few telltale conversations that present "probable
cause" evidence and take those before the FISA court to secure a warrant.
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- The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is there
primarily to establish a system that appears to give legitimacy to the
process-not because they actually abide by it or need it. All communications
are tracked and subjected to computer analysis, without a warrant. Secret
law (that is, law that is never published to the public), is attached to
public laws so that government officials can present something to the court
(in secret) if they ever get caught. Naturally, the courts play along by
sealing all court records from the public.
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- That said, it is interesting to note the degree of deception
and secrecy they maintain even as they attempt to mold the FISA law to
give the appearance of abiding by warrants. Why go to all this trouble
if they already do what they want, behind the veil of secrecy? They must
do so because most people in the justice department are not knowing conspirators
in the surveillance process, and need to be kept in the dark about the
deeper violations, and/or diverted away from searching deeper. The huge
public controversies about the smaller illegalities mask the larger crimes.
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- Marty Lederman reveals how this first layer of deception
works: "Seventeen years ago, the very first Bush (41) Administration
was considering whether to ask Congress for an amendment to FISA very similar
to the one the current Administration is now seeking. Mary Lawton, the
FISA guru within DOJ at the time (she tragically died shortly thereafter),
wrote a memo to Daniel Levin in the Deputy's Office discussing why such
a proposal might not be such a good idea. That memo has recently been released
under FOIA....
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- "The most important sentence in the memo, I think,
is: 'It should also be noted that the proposed amendment to FISA to resolve
the NSA problem . . . is certain to be written in such enigmatic terms
that only those who have been briefed in executive session will understand
them.' Truer words were never written. And that's why it is, indeed, almost
impossible to have a serious, informed legislative and public debate about
the current Bush Administration's proposed FISA amendments -- because the
public (and most legislators) can never be let in on what the amended statute
would actually do: it's secret law.
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- "Joe Klein dutifully published [Time] the talking
points he was being tendered by Republican strategists -- that the House
Democratic version of the legislation 'would require the surveillance of
every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court'
and 'would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans' --
that was manifestly not the case, as Klein could have learned in a few
minutes had he bothered to read the bill, or to contact folks on the outside
who had bothered to do so. (That's the Republican strategy: Make sure their
own bill is 'written in such enigmatic terms' that few in Congress or the
public can understand exactly what is authorized, and then feed writers
such as Joe Klein the line that the Democratic alternative treats terrorists
and U.S. persons the same, trusting that he'll parrot their line.)
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- "In any event, Mary Lawton's memo reminds me of
her testimony several months earlier in 1990 before the Senate Intelligence
Committee. Senator Specter was asking her about the prospect of regulating
physical searches under the existing FISA regime. Lawton balked. She explained
that DOJ would not want the FISA regime to be the exclusive means of conducting
physical searches, and it would be difficult to build loopholes into any
definition of 'physical surveillance' comparable to those in the existing,
complex FISA definition of 'electronic surveillance.' This led to the following
revealing colloquy:
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- LAWTON: The FISA statute, as you know, is crafted in
such a way that by definition a number of items falloutside its mandate.
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- SENATOR SPECTER: Would you enumerate those, please?
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- LAWTON: I can't in open session, Senator.
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- SPECTER: But the statute is public.
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- LAWTON: The statute is public. But . . . in the definitions
of the statute, certain things are included and those are public. What
those definitions leave out --
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- SPECTER: Is not public? Can't [I] figure it out from
what is in the definitional section?
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- LAWTON: Not without a considerable body of knowledge,
no.
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- SPECTER: Well, I question that. But for that very reason,
Congress ought to understand exactly what it is authorizing -- and should
be very careful to protect the interests of those U.S. persons who cannot
possibly know the extent to which their privacy interests are implicated."
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- Of course Specter himself is playing a role--that of
defender of the constitution. He is no such thing, and always compromises
with the administration in the end. But, these types of exchanges keep
conservatives believing that Specter, who played a key role in the cover-up
of the JFK assassination, is one of them.
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- MORE JACK-BOOTED POLICE WORK
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- This is the story of a valiant doctor Catherine Wilkerson,
M.D. who tried to intervene to keep an overly aggressive policeman from
nearly killing an innocent protestor. Alexander Cockburn relates the ordeal
she is going through after challenging the almighty state.
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- "Welcome to the jackboot state, not to mention the
jackboot campus, anno domini 2007. A doctor gives verbal advice to protect
the life of an unconscious man and she duly gets hit with attempted felonies
by vindictive campus cops, with the connivance of the University of Michigan...
This case began with an on-campus talk about Iran last November 30 by Raymond
Tanter, a [Neo-conservative] former Reagan administration foreign policy
advisor and cofounder of the Committee on the Present Danger. More recently
he's co-founder of the Iran Policy Committee. Tanter has said publicly
on more than one occasion that nuking Iran wouldn't be a bad idea. The
audience at the November 30 event was lively and contentious. On the campus
that Columbia's Lee Bollinger once ran there's an elaborate policy about
free speech, but those precepts were promptly flouted. As is now the fashion
at many universities, the U of M campus guards are gun-toting goons who
decided to wade in aggressively at the behest of the event's organizers.
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- "Here's how Wilkerson described what happened next,
on this site on March 13 of this year. 'I heard a commotion in the hall
and stepped out of the room. In the hall I saw the same huge cop on top
of the second protester who'd come to the first victim's aid. The cop had
the man, a relatively small guy in his forties, pinned down, arms pulled
behind his back, getting handcuffed. The cop used PPCT [Pressure Point
Control Tactics to the neck and back] against this person also, not once
but twice. The man writhed and cried out in pain. The cop used his far-greater
strength and body weight, along with the force of his knee on his victim's
back to press his chest against the floor. It would be impossible for a
person to inflate his lungs pressed against the floor with his hands cuffed
behind his back like that. Asphyxiation being a well-known cause of death
of people in custody, when the man started calling out that he couldn't
breathe, I approached, identified myself as a doctor, and instructed the
cop to turn him over immediately.
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- "'The victim went limp. The cop turned him onto
his back. I saw that the victim had a wound on his forehead and blood in
his nostrils. He was unconscious. Reiterating numerous times that I was
a doctor, I tried to move to where I could assess the victim for breathing
and a pulse. The cop shoved me, until finally, after my imploring him to
allow me to render medical care to the victim, he allowed me to determine
that the victim was alive. But he refused to remove the cuffs despite my
requests. A person lying with hands cuffed beneath his body risks nerve
damage to the extremities and, moreover, cannot be resuscitated. I continually
re-assessed the man, who had now become my patient, and who remained unconscious.
Eventually an ambulance arrived, along with the fire department and a contingent
of Ann Arbor police officers.
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- "'While the paramedics went about their business,
the first thing being to have the cop un-cuff the patient, I tried to fulfill
my obligation to my patient. I tried to oversee what the paramedics were
doing, which, contrary to protocol and the normal relationship between
physician and paramedic, was all that I was allowed to do. I was forced
to stay away. What I witnessed in the course of their treatment appalled
me. When the patient didn't respond to a sternal rub, one of the paramedics
popped an ammonia inhalant and thrust it beneath the patient's nostrils.
If you're interested in what's wrong with that, read Dr. Bryan Bledsoe,
foremost authority on paramedicine, and read his article condemning this
dangerous practice. That it's 'just bad medicine' is sufficient to make
the paramedic's actions unacceptable, but what happened next made my blood
curdle. He popped a second inhalant and a third, then cupped his hands
over the patient's nostrils to heighten the noxious effect. 'You don't
like that, do you?' he said. At that point I issued a direct medical order
for him to stop, but he ignored me. 'What you're doing is punitive,' I
said, 'and has no efficacy.' Then as the patient retched, rather than rolling
him onto his side to avoid the chance of his choking on his own vomit,
a firefighter held his feet down and yelled, 'don't spit.'
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- "'In thirty years of doctoring, I have never witnessed
such egregious maltreatment of a patient. Again I spoke up, 'this is punitive'
I hoped to shame the paramedical into stopping his unethical behavior.'
Please note that at no point did Wilkerson do anything other than offer
verbal advice. The police--by now not just campus but also city cops were
on the scene --ordered her to leave. As she was doing so, a city cop seized
her and put her under arrest. His superiors soon determined there were
no grounds for arrest and she was released without having been handcuffed
or requested to produce ID. Wilkerson ... takes the U.S. Constitution seriously
and filed a complaint about the incident alleging police misconduct. It
took seven weeks for the cops to answer the charges, which they did by
the expedient of filing a report plump with mendacity about Wilkerson's
conduct the night of the arrests.
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- "The Washtenaw County Prosecutor, Brian Mackie,
at the apparent request of the UM police, charged her with two attempted
felonies based on 'attempted interference' with the police officer who
had seized her. Her attorney, civil rights lawyer Buck Davis, tells me
that county judge Elizabeth Pollard Hines recently threw out two subsequent
charges, claiming that Wilkerson had tried to interfere with the campus
police as well as the police officer. This coming week Wilkerson faces
jury trial at the 15th District Court in Ann Arbor." ---Signs of the
times in the "freest country on earth".
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- World Affairs Brief. Commentary and Insights on a Troubled
World.
-
- Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution
permitted.
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- Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief
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- http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com
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