NPR and the Pragmatic Police State

This morning NPR features "an exclusive first look at a legal proposal....a detailed plan for holding terrorism suspects without trial, and it comes from two experts outside of the government." Inspite of the two "experts" mentioned by David Greene, Ari Shapiro only interviews one of them, Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution.

According to Shapiro "Wittes occupies a relatively unique position in national security. He has studied and written books on pragmatic approaches to fighting terrorism." [Actually he has written only one book on terrorism - Law and the Long War.]

I don't have any problem with NPR interviewing Wittes. Unfortunately, he is an important fish in circles of state power in Washington, DC, though - not surprisingly - his ideas are not particularly fresh or inspiring, and he heartily supports for projections of US military and foreign policy hegemony. Consider the Publisher's Weekly and Booklist reviews of his book:

• PW: "Both a defense and critique of the Bush administration, the book argues in favor of many of the measures taken by the executive branch while condemning its failure to secure congressional cooperation and the necessary legal architecture to back policies that were bound to be unpopular."
• Booklist: "Wittes remains highly sympathetic to the administration’s aims, giving them the benefit of the doubt on matters that other critics of the administration have not. Ultimately, his hope is that innovative legal structures will be forthcoming and seen as legitimate in a way that current efforts are not."

As Wittes himself states in an article on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, "we have no choice but to continue the war on terror in some form."

My problem with NPR's coverage of Wittes is that it is an endorsement of Wittes' viewpoint. In spite of his utter lack of credentials in the area of human rights, international, or Constitutional law and his rather conventional apologist approach to torture, he is a "expert" with "pragmatic approaches." As Glenn Greewald notes, Wittes can't even get the most basic Constitutional points correct when he argues for "legal" dictatorial powers for the President.

And what is the thinking behind Wittes' expert, pragmatic approaches? Consider this excerpt of the report:

(Shapiro) "So why push for indefinite detention at all? Well, Wittes says we already have it. People have been at Guantanamo for years. There are thousands more in Afghanistan...." (Wittes) "And so there's no question that we're detaining people outside of the criminal justice system. The question is what the rules are for those detentions and who makes those rules."

Look closely at the logic of this.

So why push to codify and legalize practice __________?
Because __________ is already being done!

All you have to do is put any debased government abuse of power in the blank - torture, rape, murder, rendition, illegal surveillance, etc. to see where this can lead. In Wittes' world (and NPR's by extension) the problem is not with the practice itself and a craven and complicit Congress that refuses its constitutional role of holding the executive office perpetrators accountable. Instead, the problem is that Congress has been slow to enact legislation to codify the practices. And according to Wittes, this reluctance to legislate away basic Constitutional values - and this is where he becomes a hero of the Weekly Standard security state devotees - opens up the possibilty of serious judicial oversight -OMG!

As Grumpy Demo points out on his blog - this is the kind of logic would please anyone who is hoping that our three branches of government would get "pragmatic" and realize that what we really need in the "war on terror" is a Unitary Benevolent Authoritarian Strong Man in the mold of Pinochet, Peron, or Castro.

A Lot of Awful Work Has Been Done

...or "an awful lot of work has to be done" to shut down Guantanamo - so says former Air Force lawyer and current Duke professor, Scott Silliman. It is telling that on the day after the release of a report on the "shattered lives" of released Guantanamo detainees, NPR and Jackie Northam are doing the awful work of convincing listeners that closing the prison camp will be a lot more complicated than they might have thought "during the heady days of the presidential campaign...[when as Northam reminds us] Obama spoke with easy assurance about his plans for Guantanamo Bay and the handling of terror suspects...."

Listen in vain to NPR's report for anyone mentioning torture, war crimes, violations of international law at Guantanamo. Conveniently, with such acts unmentioned, the issue of accountability and restitution never comes up. For Northam the only important issue is the difficulties that closing Guantanamo will present for the US government, "specifically what to do with the roughly 250 prisoners still held at Guantanamo."

To articulate the quandries of the poor, befuddled US government, who better to turn to than US government/military insiders such as Scott Silliman (see above), Commander Glen Sulmasy (of the Coast Guard Academy), and Matthew Waxman (of the Pentagon, State Department and Hoover Institution). One outsider, Vincent Warren with the Center for Constitutional Rights is mentioned for a very brief comment on favorable international attitudes to the new Obama administration. Here's how the cast performed:

• Silliman (who can't decide whether torture is effective) is on to argue for courts martial type proceedings as opposed to normal court proceedings that can be too "long and complicated."
• Sumasy, who is gung-ho for a more focused "war on terror" (in spite of what Juan Cole and Tony Karon think), is featured in this report for his advocacy of "hybrid courts or national security courts."
• Waxman (who to his credit fought against torture from his Pentagon posting) is on to emphasize that the only problem with sending the detainees somewhere like Bagram Air Base (Bagram!) is that it would not address the fundamental issue of what legal process detainees are "entitled" to. You have to ask why NPR wasn't covering Waxman back in October of 2007 when it mattered.

Listening to this NPR story I wondered when we will hear from about Gitmo from someone at Amnesty International, or the ACLU, or the Center for Constitutional Rights (to actually talk about their work). Maybe it will be tomorrow...or the day after that...or...

You Might Think We Would Know...But We Don't

I'll try to keep this brief. This morning Ari Shapiro reports on the case against our Constitution, our liberties, and the rule of law Ali al-Marri. This piece really disturbed me and it took me awhile to figure out why. After all, Shapiro includes various viewpoints of the "enemy combatant" designation and its concurrent endless detention.

But as I listened to the report though I was struck by how it was framed and the utter lack of context regarding the case (e.g. the barbarous treatment meted out to al-Marri and what the loss of Habeas Corpus can mean for a democratic society). You might have thought Shapiro was reporting on the fees for a driver's license not on the gutting of the Constitution.

Here's how Shapiro opens his piece:

"You might think this long after 9/11 we would know whether the President can legally hold someone like Ali al-Marri indefinitely without charging him - but we don't. "

Well guess what Shapiro? I do know. I know it's blatantly illegal and always will be, because if someone is held indefinitely (i.e. forever) without charges it means there is NO FRICKING rule of law left - and the courts are then a travesty. See Ari, that's how police states work; they keep it all very "legal."

Notice how he could have said something like:

"You'd think more than four years after a legal resident of the United States was placed incommunicado under brutal confinement, the courts could decide on whether the 4th Amendment guarantee against unreasonable seizure will be upheld and the Writ of Habeas Corpus enshrined in Article 1, sec. 9 of the Constitution will be respected."

I have to scratch my head and wonder how far the arbitrary-imprisonment-and-torture advocates in the federal government would have to go, before an NPR report would offer a peep of informative dissent.

BTW, I notice that NPR has not given a lick of coverage to the horrid conditions of al-Marri's imprisonment.