Matt Yglesias

Right-Wing Rediscovering Civil Liberties Concerns

Last might, Josh Marshall wrote:

Reading through our email — or, okay, in this case, it’s more the hate mail — it’s clear that a growing number of base conservatives believe that the Obama White House is collecting their anti-health care reform emails and compiling them in a master White House database to surveil these people, keep tabs on them and so forth.

One: That’s dumb.

Two: It used to be that in this country we actually had formal legal constraints that would make it impossible for a president to behave in this manner. Then came George W. Bush, illegal surveillance, massive conservative mobilization in favor of the principle that illegal surveillance must go unpunished, eventual “centrist” accommodation to the view that illegal surveillance must go unpunished, and then the administration of Barack Obama. And now the right-wing is spreading scare stories about illegitimate surveillance.

It’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, but I would have been a lot happier if we’d just stuck with the rule of law in the first place.

The Trouble With Burqa Bans

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Michelle Goldberg had a very good column in TAP Online the other day about the debate in France over banning burqas:

Ultimately, though, there’s no evidence that most burqa-clad French women regard themselves as oppressed. “There are women who wear burqas who are not being forced by anyone, who think that form of modesty is appropriate for who they want to be in the world,” says Scott. “It’s hard to distinguish between them and those who are being forced.” And so in the end, a ban putatively passed to further women’s rights could instead impinge on their freedom, and take from them something they value. Even worse, it could lead to those in the most fundamentalist of households being trapped inside their homes altogether. It would be cruel to limit these women’s options in the name of liberation, even if their clothes are a rebuke to the secularism that the French rightly hold sacred.

Putting her points on this together in a slightly different way, this sort of ban seems extremely unlikely to actually help anyone who’s genuinely in need of help. A woman whose husband and/or other male relations have enough power over her to force her into a burqa against her will is only going to be forced by those same men further underground by this sort of rule. The only kind of person who would be genuinely unveiled by this kind of legal measure would be someone with enough autonomy to be in a position to choose compliance with the law over compliance with tradition. The French have a strong tradition not just of secularism, but of a kind of illiberal egalitarianism that holds that everyone should really be the same, and I think it tends to push them toward measures like this that don’t ultimately help anyone.

Uighur Detainees Headed for Palau

Mark Landler reports that the long-suffering Uighur detainees at Guantanamo Bay—guys who’ve been locked up for years even though everyone agrees they’re innocent—are going to be headed not for the United States (thanks Congress!) but instead the Pacific island nation of Palau.

Until 1994, Palau was administered by the United States under a UN trusteeship, after previous eras of colonial rule by Japan, Germany, and Spain. With a population of only 20,000 it’s a very small country. What’s more, rising CO2 loads in the atmosphere and the attendant rising temperatures and sea levels are threatening to wipe the island out unless countries like the United States step up and do something. Since Congress doesn’t necessarily seem to be in “do the right thing” mode with regard to climate, the Uighurs may find themselves needing to move again.

Civil Liberties in the New Regime

I think you have to admit that the Obama administration legal justification for why they can’t be forced to release innocent Uighur detainees currently held in Guantanamo Bay is pretty clever:

Petitioners’ continued presence at Guantanamo Bay is not unlawful detention, but rather the consequence of their lawful exclusion from the United States, under the constitutional exercise of authority by the political Branches, coupled with the unavailability of another country willing to accept them. Because the bar to petitioners’ entry into the United States is constitutionally valid, their resulting harborage at Guantanamo Bay is constitutional as well.

For all I know, this is even right as a matter of law. But as Hilzoy says, it clearly fails the “just do the right thing” test. I know some people who are “disappointed” with the Obama administration’s record on civil liberties. I’m not, frankly, because I don’t think it really makes sense to expect any administration to unilaterally divest itself of the powers that have been amassed by its predecessors.

Civil liberties have to be guarded by the courts and—especially—by Congress. Part of why it’s so problematic for congressional Republicans to be so busy attacking the Obama administration as too hesitant to torture people and so forth is that the natural order of checks and balances is totally turned on its head when the opposition is urging the executive to seize more power and become less transparent. Nobody’s going to wage a tough political battle to give up power.

The Shifting Balance of Power in the Media

I was knocking Bill Simmons’ knocks on Dwight Howard earlier, but I think this recent Simmons column was very shrewd and quite politically relevant. Simmons writes about how, in the past, athletes really needed to rely on the press to get their image out to the public. Consequently, reporters were able to demand quite a lot of access from athletes in order to cover them in-depth. But “things changed once cable, talk radio and fantasy took off and sports became a 24/7 industry.” The balance of power started to shift. Soon, athletes could communicate in a more-or-less disintermediated way with the public. Which, ideally, would mean that fans get a more “real” perspective but in reality means that fans tend to see a pristine self-presentation uninterrupted by any ugly reality.

This is important, I think, mostly because the same is true in politics. When we shifted from a world in which there were three network national newscasts during primetime to one in which we have 24 hours of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox and to some extent CNBC, Fox Business, and Bloomberg we shifted from a world in which the scarce commodity was space on the newscast to one in which the scarce commodity was content that’s cheap to produce. Consequently, journalism has become much more dependent on politicians and much more willing to just broadcast what important people say. Because politics is adversarial [edit sports is adversarial too, of course, but sports media isn't] , this doesn’t quite play out the same way as it does in sports. But it results in the fact that unless something is a “political controversy” then it doesn’t get coverage. Conservatives want to attack Obama from the right on civil liberties issues, so that debate gets covered. The more important critique—that Obama isn’t offering enough change from Bush—goes nowhere.

Obama’s Pronunciations

I don’t have a problem with the fact that Barack Obama says “Pah-kee-stahn” when referring to the country to the west of India. Nor do I have a problem with the fact that Obama says “Afghanistan” in the customary American manner. But given that the two countries are adjacent to one another and often come up in the same speech, it’s really infuriating to see him offer the two pronunciations in tandem. If you’re going to say “Pah-kee-stahn” you should say “Af-gah-nee-stahn” and if you’re going to say “Afghanistan” you should say “Pakistan.”

That’s just how I feel.

Pronunciation aside, good speech. Full text (as prepared) below the fold:

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On the Photos

I don’t have a great deal to say about this business of Obama refusing to release photos of detainee abuse. I briefly had myself convinced that this is a complicated issue, but it really isn’t. There ought to be an overwhelming presumption that the American people have the right to see the facts about what our government is doing in our name, with our money. There has to be some secrecy in the name of national security—it’s good that we don’t publish our nuclear codes or the details of the presidential security detail—but the notion that vague invocations of national interest or policy expediency should be permitted to sweep things under the rug is repugnant.

Of course if you want to think about why this is happening, ask yourself when’s the last time a politician lost an election because he was too deferential to the attitudes and institutional prerogatives of the national security apparatus of the United States. I don’t think it’s happened since the early 1970s. And it’s a not a coincidence that back then we got FISA and the Church Committee and so forth. But until it happens again, things will get worse and worse and worse in general even if there are spots of improvement.

New Developments in Harman Wiretap Case

The fact that Jane Harman wound up on a wiretap was always a bit, shall we say, odd and disturbing. And Laura Rozen paints a picture wherein it definitely looks abusive—Porter Goss screwing around perhaps in order to protect his corrupt subordinates.

Whatever the case may ultimately prove to be, I think this demonstrates what should long have been obvious, namely that broad surveillance powers are incredibly likely to be used for abusive domestic political purposes. Obviously, there are potential tactical national security gains to be made by letting the NSA and FBI just do whatever they want. But in a strategic sense, what happens when you allow secret unrestrained surveillance power is that harmful abuses wind up swamping legitimate uses of the authority. Unfortunately, back when debates where taking place about illegal surveillance, it was only the hippie bloggers making this point. All Republicans and all “responsible” Democrats like Jane Harman understood that anyone worrying about abuse needs to put a tinfoil hat on.

Now that it looks like Harman has been the target of abuse, I’m hoping she’ll lead a campaign for the sort of broad reforms that can help ensure this doesn’t happen again. But I fear she’ll lead a narrow campaign aimed at simply sending the message “don’t f**k with Jane Harman.”