Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Two Days > Eight Years?

I’m feeling pretty good right now.

Yesterday, on his first full day in office, President Obama issued three memoranda to executive departments reinforcing his commitment to open government and accountability. For one, he directed departments to comply with the Freedom of Information Act and err on the side of disclosing information rather than hiding it. In 2001, former Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered executive departments to comply with FOIA requests only after exhausting all avenues to prevent disclosure of information. He even emphasized that potential embarrassment or liability is not a good reason to withhold information requested under FOIA. That’s tremendous!

Obama’s memoranda also gives the National Archives the authority to declassify whatever presidential records it sees fit, a stark reversal from an administration that had fought tooth and nail to keep everything it did secret. The potential exists for massive declassification of Bush administration records that are being kept secret for no other reason that it might be embarrassing or might disclose political favors.

That’s really terrible, in case you were wondering. The Bush administration’s default position was secrecy over disclosure, which only served to emphasize Bush’s greater message: the U.S. government works for we the representatives first, then for you the people. Obama’s philosophy is exactly the opposite: he has said several times that he and the rest of our representatives are public servants first, and everything they do should be in that vein of serving the public.

It should go without saying that our government is accountable to us, but it’s been a long time since that’s been true. We have been told that we have no right to know what our representatives are doing, and in some cases, we have been told it is unpatriotic to question the things our government does. Thank you, Obama, for bringing us back to normal.

And then this morning, as promised, Obama signed an executive order calling for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay prison within a year. The fate of the 200-some prisoners left there has yet to be decided: prosecutions under the Military Commissions Act have been suspended for 120 days, pending a review of each prisoner’s case. Guantánamo is littered with people who did nothing more than be in the wrong place at the wrong time, including people who were minors when they were arrested in 2001.

But there’s more! Obama signed another order directing the C.I.A. to use only the interrogation techniques specified in the Army Field Manual, a policy that has been in the works for two years, but was ignored by the Bush administration in a signing statement.

Things are looking good for America. After eight long years, it’s refreshing to see accountability, transparency, and the due process of law finally take precedence over narrow political interest.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Who Are the Uighurs, and Why Should You Care?

In China, life is great if you’re a middle-class city-dweller. If you practice a particular religion, things aren’t so great. If you’re not ethnically Chinese, things aren’t so great. And if you’re a Uighur, things really aren’t that great.

The Uighurs live within the borders of present-day China, but like most of the people who live in western China, they aren’t ethnically Chinese; they’re a Turkic people who speak a Turkic language. Oh, and they’re Muslim. If it’s anything the Chinese love, it’s religion!

Seventeen specific Uighurs are being held by the U.S. government at the terrorist detention facility in Guantanamo Bay. Earlier this month, Judge Ricardo Urbina of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. ordered the seventeen Uighurs released and present in his courtroom at 10 A.M. His reasoning was that, since the administration no longer considers them “enemy combatants,” they must be released … to somewhere.

The Bush administration filed an emergency appeal with the D.C. Circuit Court which, predictably, put a halt to the Uighurs’ release. Part of the administration’s argument was that aliens, who may or may not want to engage in terrorism against the United States, should not be released into the country. The D.C. Circuit Court emphasized that it had issued a stay of Judge Urbina’s order only to give it more time to consider the Bush administration’s appeal, and that the stay should not be considered a ruling on the merits.

The Bush administration said it wanted the Supreme Court to hear the case. Interestingly, the government says that they were trained in Afghanistan to fight the Chinese government, not the American government. Furthermore, the administration says that the courts lack the authority to order aliens into the United States, since the determination of whom shall be allowed into the United States rests with Congress and the executive branch.

The issue remains with the D.C. Circuit Court — a traditionally conservative-friendly venue — which has not yet issued a ruling. The case of the Uighurs could be used as precedent when it comes to ruling on the legality of detentions in Guantanamo Bay, which is why the Bush administration is so eager to keep them out of the United States and away from the long arm of adjudication.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? ‘Voter Fraud’ Is a Fraud

2007 was a time of change. U.S. attorneys, for example, were changed in some states. Why? That’s a question that has resulted in lots of testimony, legal proceedings, investigations, and the resignation of former attorney general Alberto Gonzales. Once the dust cleared, it looked like David Iglesias of New Mexico, and others, were fired from their posts because they refused to prosecute Democrats close to election time and they refused to investigate “voter fraud.”

Voter fraud is when individual voters attempt to vote more than once, usually by falsifying registration information. Republicans claim that they are very concerned about this, and as a result, they had party operatives standing by at polls to challenge the legitimacy of some voters. They also went through state voter rolls and flagged suspicious entries. Of course, they only did this in swing states like Ohio, which indicates just how much they care. Voter fraud is, to use a metaphor from yesteryear, pure bromide. When pressed, Republicans have not been able to point to a single, actual, verifiable instance of voter fraud occurring anywhere in the country. It’s not that it doesn’t happen: it just happens on scales so small that it’s very difficult to catch. We’re not talking thousands and thousands of people all falsifyng voter information. It’s one guy here, one guy there.

What does happen, though, is large-scale voter suppression of the type we saw in Ohio in 2004. That, however, was managed by our public servants, the ones who are supposed to be protecting our voting rights. J. Kenneth Blackwell was simultaneously Secretary of State in Ohio — putting him in charge of voting in the state — and co-chairman of the Ohio committee to re-elect George W. Bush.

Third parties are, in most states, allowed to challenge the legitimacy of a person’s vote at a polling place. This was a favorite tactic of the Republican Party in 2004: party officials stood by at the polls, suggesting that particular people had questionable registrations. Poll workers issued the questionable voter a provisional ballot, meaning the vote would be counted only after the voter’s registration had been investigated.

Government officials also engaged in widespread “purging” of voter roles, often eliminating legitimate voters. Now, the Republican Party wants Ohio’s voter registration information so that it can determine for itself who should be purged. They took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which issued a one-page order today lifting a temporary restraining order that directed the Ohio secretary of state to provide the Ohio Republican Party with voter registraiton information.

This is not precedent-setting, nor is it a ruling on the merits of the case. Overruling an injunction merely means that the court didn’t think that the case had a high likelihood of winning based on the merits.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Never forget! Never remember!

“When the president does it that means that it is not illegal. [...] If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law.”

In an interview with David Frost in 1977, former president Richard Nixon attempted to justify his years of abusing government power with the argument that the government is always acting in the best interests of the people; therefore, it may need to break the law sometimes in order to help the people. For the argument to work, of course, the initial assumption must be beyond question: the government always acts in the best interest of the people.

This essay is about September 11. It is about how the government was allowed to break the law under the assumption that the government is right. It is about how September 11 allowed the government to break the law.

Fear is a powerful ally of tyrants. It allows them to rule with near-impunity, as every action made by a tyrant can be justified by the needs of security. The events of seven years ago created a tremendous amount of fear in the United States. A nation that is afraid will accept restrictions on its liberties, as long as those restrictions are made in the name of security. In the months following the September 11 attacks, our national slogan became, “If have nothing to hide, then what’s the problem?” Our Constitution is based on an explicit respect for privacy for its own sake. Privacy never has to be justified; privacy is, and it is up to the people who want to take it away to explain themselves. After September 11, the dynamic changed completely: the onus was now on us, the private citizens, to justify why we need privacy. If a person were to exercise his or her constitutional right to privacy, the assumption was immediately that such a person had something to hide.

After all, it’s entirely patriotic to acquiesce to authority. This is what we learned after September 11. The phrase “In a post-9/11 world …” became a ubiquitous, omnibus assertion that, somehow, the rules of law, order, and liberty had fundamentally changed that morning. Everyone was under suspicion, and anyone who appeared outside the norm was especially suspect.

And most of us didn’t question our leaders. The New York Times happily published Judith Miller’s stories of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even though her only sources were government officials … who later turned out to be lying. The Fourth Estate, whose job it usually is to criticize the government, accepted what the government said. Voices of dissent — like Phil Donahue’s — were silenced. Donahue’s 2003 MSNBC show was the network’s highest-rated program, but it was pulled, anyway. Donahue was extremely critical of a war in Iraq at a time when being critical of the government was passé. The Dixie Chicks were booed and assailed in 2003 for daring to criticize George W. Bush. And let’s not forget that every critic of the Iraq policy was lambasted for not being patriotic, or for wanting to help the terrorists, or both.

Remember that? That’s the 9/11 legacy.

Remember also that Our Government initially fought tooth and nail against a commission to investigate the causes of the September 11 attacks. Know also that the USA PATRIOT Act was not written and passed in a mere month. The legislation was already extant, just waiting for the right time to come out of the closet. Nothing gets written in under a month, especially not legislation as voluminous as the USA PATRIOT Act. Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig tells this story:

The Patriot Act is huge and I remember someone asking a Justice Department official how did they write such a large statute so quickly, and of course the answer was that it has been sitting in the drawers of the Justice Department for the last 20 years waiting for the event where they would pull it out.

Imagine that: someone, somewhere within the Justice Department had written a daringly authoritarian piece of legislation and was waiting eagerly for just the right time to pull it out. The public wouldn’t accept such a gross abuse of power and trampling of its rights during peacetime. But once a war started and the public was scared … ah! That’s just the time to start being authoritarian! Hitler used fear in the same way. His own people burned down the Reichstag, Hitler blamed the communists, then used the resultant fear to not only get himself elected chancellor, but be granted new powers.

George W. Bush’s Justice Department has repeatedly argued that the president has additional war-time powers not to be found in the Constitution. Alberto Gonzales even went so far as to suggest that federal judges should not have oversight over wiretapping, since “a judge will never be in the best position to know what is in the national security interests of our country.”

The troubling thing is, we’ve been here before. Our nation’s resolve is tested every time there is a crisis. It is then, and only then, when we will be fully able to see how well our Constitution holds up to stress, and whether or not all our talk about liberty means something. History shows that, by and large, we consider the Bill of Rights to be a bunch of empty platitudes. Every time this country has faced a crisis, we have limited the rights of our people, and those limitations have been wholeheartedly accepted. There was widespread censorship during World War I and World War II, and everyone was okay with that. Japanese internment? Let’s do it! COINTELPRO? CREEP? Why not!

September 11 put us once again face to face with a crisis. Either we could continue to exercise our liberty and approach the problem rationally, or we could, as a nation, freak out, get scared, and let our leaders do whatever they wanted in the name of protecting us from another attack.

Guess which one happened.

We let our constitution get torn to pieces. We let our government hold people — even U.S. citizens — indefinitely, without a trial. Those people had to go to court to fight for rights that they already had. We let our government torture people then say that it wasn’t torture. George W. Bush gave it a fuzzy name; he called it “enhanced interrogation techniques.” We let our leaders pretend that they cared a whit about the soldiers they sent to die in their war, but based on the extreme lengths this administration has gone to deny medical care to veterans, it doesn’t look like this administration cares. It wants disposable meat.

September 11 was the day that we surrendered control of our country to a bunch of used-car salesmen. On September 11, Rudolph Giuliani and Dick Cheney decided to violate the memories of those who died in the World Trade Center for their own selfish political purposes — sometimes together, sometimes separately — every night since then, always with smiles on their faces.

Never forget!

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Secrecy You Can Believe In

Think Progress reports today that Sarah Palin prefers to use a Yahoo! email account to conduct the business of the state of Alaska. This is a wonderful way to avoid the nuisance that dogs all government officials: accountability. With a personal email account, the government can conduct its business (1) in secrecy and (2) outside the realm of accountability. The George W. Bush administration — to which the McCain/Palin administration would bear no resemblance — loves the practice of using private email accounts for its business, since those emails are not subject to federal record retention policies. You’ll recall that one of the neat things we learned in the investigation of the fired U.S. attorneys was that White House staffers routinely use rnc.com (that stands for Republican National Committee) email addresses to conduct government business. Thankfully, the RNC doesn’t have as robust a data retention policy — if any at all — as the government, so emails containing incriminating information, such as suggesting that a U.S. attorney be fired for purely political reasons, can disappear into the aether.

I just hope George W. Bush doesn’t have a sordid affair with Sarah Palin, because that wouldn’t be good press.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Democrats and the ‘radicalization’ of civil liberties

What is “radical” anymore? In last week’s National Review, Stanley Kurtz made a big fuss about Barack Obama’s past as an organizer in Chicago. John McCain and others have attempted — poorly — to link Obama to the Weather Underground, even though Obama was a child during that group’s prominence. (Even Sarah Palin derided Obama’s “community organization” credentials, though she implied that his participation in such activities was irrelevant, not dangerous.)

And then there are the “terrorist fist jab” comments from Fox News that should have clued Fox’s few remaining viewers into the fact that they’re out of their minds.

But it appears that “radical” also means “willing to stand up and fight for constitutional rights.” The Democrats walk around like a paranoid city-dweller, eyes darting back and forth, Mace at the ready, just in case a Republican jumps out of the shadows and accuses them of being soft on terrorism. Let’s not mince words: Democrats are extremely, morbidly terrified of losing the seats they won in 2006. Their hold on the House is tenuous, and in the Senate, they are ahead only because Joe Lieberman hasn’t yet come out of the closet and declared himself a Republican. One of the only things that could cause Democrats to lose seats in November is the accusation that, somehow, Democrats are enabling terrorism. Even though the assertion is laughable, Democrats take it very seriously.

So seriously, in fact, that they have put their tails between their legs whenever President Bush has suggested that they’re wasting time, spending too much money, or not acquiescing to his self-pronounced “inherent powers” granted to him by the War on Terr’. When they came into office, it appeared that the Democrats meant business: we’re talking oversight, and end to the war in Iraq, impeachment, and a rollback of all the ridiculous powers the president has claimed for himself. Almost two years later, the Democrats have capitulated every time Bush has demanded they remove withdrawal promises from emergency funding for his war. In this way, Bush can still lay claim to the mantle of fiscal conservatism, since his budgets contain no bloat. The periodic emergency funding bills, though, are a different story.

Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean must have concluded that being a Democrat means … being a Republican! Democrats in Congress are apparently under the impression that the American people want more of the same politics that led Republicans to be ousted from Congress in 2006. The most blatant and gratuitous example of Democratic capitulation was the recently-passed FISA bill. After months of haranguing and what appeared to be actual standing-up, Democrats sat back down and voted to extend the president’s wiretapping powers and indemnify the telecommunications companies that illegally assisted with the illegal wiretapping from civil suits. The word “appeasement” comes to mind, but in its appropriate context.

Why did the Democrats allow the president to continue breaking the law? Why, in fact, did they go above and beyond the call of duty and take the extra step of protecting the phone companies from civil suits? Money is obviously one reason. Telecom companies donate a lot of money to both parties, and politicians are loathe to turn down free money. Salon.com contributor and former civil rights attorney Glenn Greenwald tried to crash a private party AT&T was holding at the DNC, but was told the media were not allowed in.

Protecting civil liberties is now, for some reason, a “radical” thing to do. Daring to suggest that the president is acting illegally is out of vogue now?