Category Archives: Commentary

All written commentary.

More Gitmo detainees slated for release, but stuck

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Another round of Guantanamo detainees cleared for release remains held by the U.S., even after deals were made with host countries to take them. In the past, the problem has been a lack of countries willing to resettle the released prisoners. I discussed that difficulty in depth when the last of the mistakenly captured Uighur detainees were freed at the end of 2013.

The U.S. will only release detainees to nations that can provide a safe place for them to live, so they often can’t be repatriated to their home countries (e.g. China or Saudi Arabia) due to hostile governments who want to punish them separately from the U.S. treatment. They also can’t be resettled in the U.S. because there is too much political opposition, even when their lawyers vouch for them being perfectly safe.

But the difficulties are usually overcome when the U.S. signs a deal to resettle the detainees somewhere safe in exchange for various goodies and benefits granted to the host country. That’s no longer the case, according to the new revelations, which indicated that Uruguay had completed a deal with the United States earlier this year to take more of the released prisoners, and then we didn’t let them go after all.

The reason for the delay – now, at least – seems to be the backlash from the Obama’s Administration’s unscheduled deal trading five Taliban detainees, who were not cleared for release, to Qatar, for the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. prisoner of war held by the Taliban. The action, which did not involve detainees deemed harmless, was taken without notifying Congress beforehand as expected.

This backlash has also complicated things further by the vengeful and shortsighted decision of House Republicans to insert a provision into a major military spending bill that would make everyone at Guantanamo Bay a permanent prisoner forever with no ability for the President to transfer any of them, anywhere, at any time. It remains to be seen if that provision will become law, although it seems unlikely. But it demonstrates an extreme misplacing of priorities to hold people indefinitely without charge, including those the government has decided should not have been detained to begin with.

Supreme Court says cell searches require warrants

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Finally a decent ruling on search & seizure from the Roberts Court: Police cannot search your phones during an arrest without a warrant anymore.

The justices ruled unanimously that police almost always need a warrant to go through the cellphone of someone they arrest. Because phones today hold such vast and personal stores of information, the court held, searching them without a warrant is different from going through, say, the glove compartment of an arrestee.

 
Reactions:

Civil libertarians hailed the Supreme Court decision on police searches of cellphones as a landmark for privacy in the digital age — but the cops themselves say it could tie their hands during investigations.

 
oh boohoo. no1curr

Unfortunately this is the tip of the iceberg from the crowd that believes everything is justified for “security,” no matter how proportional. That disturbing attitude was captured in a quote from Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, the country’s largest police union:

“There’s more at stake here than due process.”

 
I mean, I’m not sure why we’re even bothering with law enforcement, national defense, and democracy if we’ve reached a point where due process is a minor, irrelevant point or nothing more than an inconvenience. It’s kind of part of the point of the U.S. system.

So, put a screen lock on your phone with a strong PIN or password, because those enforcers with a less than consistent relationship to the rule of law might take liberties even after this ruling. Other than that, best of luck.

At least the Supreme Court is on your side on this one. Until you need to find a lawyer to back up your position on that, at which point you had better be wealthy enough to afford a good one, because the Supremes made the public defender system optional if states don’t feel like funding it enough to function.

Maliki appears to fully switch foreign alliances

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Maliki, having been dumped by the Americans, enthusiastically announced the purchase of military jets from Russia and welcomed airstrikes by the Assad regime in Syria on Iraqi border positions held by ISIS rebels.

It sound as if he has thrown himself in with the Russian and Syrian governments, who are already allied with Iran, his primary benefactor, in the Syrian civil war and on the nuclear issue.

US still labeling its longtime Kurd allies “terrorists”

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Turns out the United States is still refusing to de-list its closest and longest political allies in Iraq — the two major Kurdish parties — as “tier III” terrorists (see update at the bottom for the definition) even after expending huge amounts of resources explicitly to protect them with a no-fly zone from 1991-2003, during which time they formed a competitive representative democracy on their own.

Earlier this year, Iraqi Kurdish media outlet Rudaw commented on the problem as follows:

Listing the KDP and PUK as Tier III terrorist groups stems from the classic US perception that any non-state militant actor rebelling against the state, may be listed as a terrorist group regardless of the goal the group seeks to achieve.

But now since that era of rebellion against dictator Saddam Hussein is gone, Iraqi Kurdistan is expecting the US to delist its parties from the category of terrorist groups.

 
This de-listing problem — which the State Department continually claims is being fixed — was news to me, though not surprising given how long Nelson Mandela got stuck on the terrorist watch list from way back in the day (when we were still allied with the Apartheid regime in South Africa).

But of all countries, Turkey, their past mortal enemy, is treating them better than the United States has been recently. (Or at least is positively treating the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party, with whom the ruling AK Party of Turkey has formed a strategic partnership, as explored on our blog in depth recently. Remains to be seen if they would be as friendly if the opposition Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, slightly more sympathetic to Baghdad than the KDP is, were to win the next elections.)

Flag-of-Iraqi-Kurdistan

Update for clarity, October 20, 2014: Below is the explanation of the admittedly nebulous “tier III” status as described by the website of the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services.

These organizations are defined by law as “a group of two or more individuals, whether organized or not, which engages in, or has a subgroup which engages in,” terrorist activity. Tier III organizations are also called “undesignated terrorist organizations” because they qualify as terrorist organizations based on their activities alone without undergoing a formal designation process like Tier I and Tier II organizations.

Instead, the determination of whether a group can be considered a Tier III organization is made on a case-by-case basis, in connection with the review of an application for an immigration benefit. Tier III organizations arise and change over time.

So, the list fluctuates a lot more than the tier I list of “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” or the tier II list of false charities and other criminal enterprises supporting organized terrorism. Thus, a tier III listing is less severe than a tier I formal designation, but it is not by any means flattering, and Americans could potentially still get into trouble for supporting such an organization, including the major Kurdish political parties in Iraq. Likewise, party supporters could be blocked from entering or moving to the United States. It’s also more puzzling, given that it’s a more flexible list, that the Kurdish parties haven’t been removed previously. Unfortunately, tier III is a persistently confusingly applied category that regularly covers U.S. allies and U.S.-recognized political opposition parties, according to the Baltimore Law Review.

In pyrrhic victory for America, old Miss racist defeats young Miss racist

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The New York Times front page is blaring that U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran has won his Mississippi Republican primary on the strength of Black votes. Remains to be seen how accurate that claim is, given that the piece doesn’t actually cite exit polling proving that Black voters did or did not make the difference in this 50%-49% race. (I’d guess it’s very unlikely, since the vast majority of the voters on both sides were probably white, and these kind of election night news stories almost consistently breathlessly exaggerate the role of “crossover” voting, based on “narratives” rather than data.)

But it does say a hell of a lot about his hyper right-wing tea party opponent — born the year Cochran entered Congress — that he referred to all Black Mississippi voters (regardless of party!!!) as “ultraliberal” and said Cochran shouldn’t be trying to appeal to Black voters. (This is among the least horrid things from a man whose supporters pulled dirty tricks like photographing Cochran’s wife in a nursing home.)

Meanwhile, it must have been pretty tough to make a convincing pitch for Black voters to rally to the incumbent. Sen. Cochran was an active executor of the so-called “Southern Strategy” during the 1968 Nixon Campaign, when the Republican establishment made an active decision to seek out the votes of angry, white Southern Democrats who were upset about the Civil Rights legislation passed by the Johnson Administration a few years early. This strategy precipitated the en masse defection of both elected officials and base voters from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in several waves from the 1960s to the 1990s, until the Deep South became a solidly Republican stronghold.

Unlike many of his southern peers in Congress (even today), Sen. Cochran did not switch parties while in office. He has been a very conservative Republican (if you include lush pork barrel earmarking for Mississippi under that heading) for his whole Congressional career. But although he was first elected to Congress as a Republican U.S. Representative in 1972 and served as the state head of Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, Cochran had actually only been a Republican for a few years before that, after growing up as a Democrat. If you do the math, that means he switched parties about the time the Civil Rights Act passed. How charming.

So the seventy-six-year-old racist squeaked out a primary win over the 41-year-old racist challenger and will presumably go on to start a seventh term as the United States Senator for a state that still has a Confederate battle flag on its state flag.

Balloons-Falling-Colbert-Report

U.S. may now strike Iraq because it feels like it

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Meanwhile the murderous government in Egypt just got new U.S. military helicopters.

 
I noticed an alarming top story just now on my Google News search:
Screen Shot 2014-06-23 at 8.26.08 PM

So I read on, to get more details:

President Obama is lining up ISIS targets in Iraq and may launch an attack on the militant Islamic militia that is threatening Baghdad even if he does not get an agreement with the Iraqi regime, Secretary of State John Kerry said today.

Speaking in Baghdad after meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other political leaders, Kerry said Obama is “each day” gaining more certainty of the targets he would strike if the United States decided on its own to take military action.

“He has reserved the right to himself, as he should, to make a decision at any point in time if he deems it necessary strategically,” Kerry said.

Obama has said he would not provide Iraq more military support unless it forms a government more accepting of religious minorities, but Kerry stressed that Obama wouldn’t hesitate to have the U.S. conduct its own military operations if necessary.

“The president has moved the assets into place and has been gaining each day the assurances he needs with respect to potential targeting,” Kerry said.

 
While it’s true that the United States since 9/11 has conducted airstrikes without permission in other countries before (e.g. Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc.), the justification has been that the targeted individuals or organizations were at least trying to attack the U.S. homeland, U.S. troops in the area, or U.S. sites like embassies and such. I might not agree with that policy, but at least I can follow the reasoning.

That’s not the case here, because ISIS isn’t attacking those points. Nor has the argument been made that such strikes would be a “humanitarian intervention” to stop massacres (as was argued in the Balkans in the 1990s). Which makes it an odd and troubling development.

The summary phrase of greatest importance to that point, in the above, was: “may launch an attack … even if he does not get an agreement with the Iraqi regime”

Thus, the newest version of the Bipartisan Post-9/11 US Rules for Whole World: The United States President reserves right to attack anyone, anywhere, for any reason even if U.S. is not attacked (and even if there are no attacks on its sites, its people, or its interests).

Because ISIS isn’t doing any of that so far, nor does it look like it will be imminently. ISIS is probably about 3 layers away from being a threat to the U.S. in any way, including sites/interests/regional troops. So why the heck would we attack without Iraq’s request?

True, ISIS is allegedly massacring opponents in Iraq, but we haven’t invaded Syria to stop the regime or “our” rebels or ISIS from doing that next door.

We’re not doing it to protect the Iraqi government. Because they didn’t (and largely still don’t) want our help, and we left, and this didn’t happen immediately after we left. And we’re not getting their permission.

What can possibly be gained from this action? Who benefits from this at all? Probably not the Iraqis. Certainly not the United States.
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Tom Tancredo is baaaaaaack, y’all

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flag-of-coloradoThe New York Times has published a comprehensive State-of-The-Race report on former 5-term Congressman and 2008 presidential also-ran Tom Tancredo’s latest explosive bid for office, this time as a Republican candidate for Governor of Colorado, ahead of the primary tomorrow. [Update: Tancredo finished second.]

Tancredo last campaigned as the American Constitution Party nominee for the same office four years ago. The ACP is notable mostly as an openly theocratic, right-wing party, with close ties to George Wallace’s segregationist movement.

So far, this latest race can (as is always true with him) best be summarized as Tommy T on the mic dropping racist hot 16s once a minute. But don’t call him racist because he’ll sue your “ass from here to Omaha” (an actual quote from him in the article). [Side note: Can public figures sue average people for making assertions about them?]

Let’s wind back to his amazingly insightful, I mean wildly racist, 2006 comment about one of our country’s fine metropolises of lesser Anglo-ness.

“Look at what has happened to Miami. It has become a Third World country. You just pick it up and take it and move it someplace. You would never know you’re in the United States of America. You would certainly say you’re in a Third World country…”

 
So as you can see, he’s not a racist. He just never says anything but racist stuff and has only racist policies.

Fifteen years after he built a national reputation as an inflammatory foe of illegal immigration, Tom Tancredo, 68, is still campaigning, without apology, as Tom Tancredo. […] He says President Obama should be impeached, but notes that “you can’t criticize him because he’s black and if you do, you’re a racist.”

 
As with the 2010 cycle, Republicans are split very hard in the state right now between “We need more conservative candidates” and “Our candidates are unelectable loons.”

And Tommy T is King of Loon Lake. As the oft-embattled and semi-immortal former state Republican Party chair Dick Wadhams said of Tancredo to the Times: “He has said so many inflammatory things — the list is unbelievable.”

But in a hilarious turn of events, an organization literally calling itself “Republicans Who Want to Win” has been running ads saying that primary voters shouldn’t choose Tancredo because he’s unelectable. Whom should the voters choose instead to be more electable?

The Colorado-based group is supporting Bob Beauprez, a former congressman who lost his 2006 bid for governor by double digits.

 
Womp-womp.

In the GOP primary polling earlier this year and late last year, Tancredo was the top candidate but Bob Beauprez was giving him a run for his money. So we’ll see how this turns out tomorrow night. I’m hoping for a Tancredo nominee. He’s got virtually no chance of beating the reasonably popular and inoffensive Democratic incumbent governor, but he could blow up the chances of a lot of other Republicans on the ballot, for Senate especially, as well as for Congress. (Or at least add to the problems, if the nearly as horrid Ken Buck also ends up on the ballot for the U.S. House after dropping his 2014 Senate bid and losing a 2010 Senate bid spectacularly.)

And if Tancredo doesn’t win the primary? Something something we the people.