“Once Again Senators”: Obama Prosecutes Terrorist Suspect And The “Little Generals” Complain Again
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and an al Qaeda spokesperson, appeared in a New York courtroom this morning, and pleaded not guilty to plotting to kill Americans. It was his first court appearance after having been captured on Feb. 28 and flown to New York last week.
Of course, there apparently has to be a political angle to the proceedings, and as Adam Serwer noted, several congressional Republicans are “furious” at the Obama administration for “prosecuting an alleged terrorist.” And why might that be? Because the GOP officials disapprove of the use of the federal court system.
Several Senate Republicans are slamming the administration’s to move its latest terror suspect through the federal court system, bypassing the military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. […]
“Military detention for enemy combatants has been the rule, not the exception. By processing terrorists like [Ghaith] through civilian courts, the administration risks missing important opportunities to gather intelligence to prevent future attacks and save lives,” according to a joint statement by Sens. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Lindsey Graham (R.S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Do we really have to explain this to Congress again?
Look, we have a very capable system of federal courts, which have tried and convicted plenty of terrorists. We have also have a terrific system of federal penitentiaries, which have a record of never, ever allowing a convicted terrorist to escape.
On the other hand, we also have a system of military commissions, which tend to be an ineffective setting for trying suspected terrorists. It’s why every modern presidential administration has relied on civilian courts for these kinds of trials. It’s why the Pentagon, Justice Department, and intelligence agencies are unanimous in their support for trying accused terrorists in civilian courts. It’s why folks like David Petraeus and Colin Powell — retired generals McCain, Graham, and Ayotte tend to take seriously — agree with the Obama administration and endorse Article III trials.
So why must Republicans rely on stale, misleading talking points?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 8, 2013
“No Right Is Absolute”: Assault Weapons Are Weapons Of Mass Destruction And Should Be Banned
The tragedy in Connecticut forces America to confront a simple question: Why should we allow easy access to a weapon of mass destruction just because it could conceivably be referred to as a “gun”?
I count myself among the many Americans who at various points in their lives have owned and used long guns — hunting rifles and shotguns — for hunting and target shooting. No one I know in politics seriously proposes that ordinary Americans be denied the right to own those kinds of weapons.
But guns used for hunting have nothing in common with assault weapons like the ones that were used last week in the mass murder of 20 first-graders — except the fact that they are referred to “guns.”
Rapid-fire assault weapons with large clips of ammunition have only one purpose: the mass slaughter of large numbers of human beings. They were designed for use by the military to achieve that mission in combat — and that mission alone.
No one argues that other combat weapons like rocket-propelled grenades (RPG’s) or Stinger Missiles should be widely available to anyone at a local gun shop. Why in the world should we allow pretty much anyone to have easy access to assault weapons?
Every politician in America will tell you they will move heaven and earth to prevent weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists. Yet we have allowed the ban on this particular weapon of mass destruction to expire. As a result, a terrorist named Adam Lanza was able to have easy access to the assault weapons he used to kill scores of children in minutes.
Let’s be clear, Adam Lanza was a terrorist just as surely as he would have been if we were motivated by an extreme jihadist ideology. It makes no difference to those children or to their grieving families whether their loved ones were killed by someone who was mentally deranged or by someone who believed that by killing children he was helping to destroying the great Satan.
When an individual is willing — or perhaps eager — to die making a big “statement” by killing many of his fellow human beings, it doesn’t matter what their motivation is. It does matter whether they have easy access to the weapons that make mass murder possible.
And after last week, can anyone seriously question whether assault weapons are in fact weapons of mass destruction? If Lanza had conventional guns — or like a man in China who recently went berserk, he only had knives — he would not have been physically capable of killing so many people in a few short minutes.
Of course you hear people say — oh, a car or an airliner can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction — many things can become weapons of mass destruction. And there is no question after 9/11 that we know that this is true. But cars and airliners have to be converted from their primary use in order to become instruments of mass death. It takes an elaborate plot and many actors to take over an airliner and it isn’t easy to methodically kill 27 people with a car.
More important, assault weapons have no redeeming social value or alternative use whatsoever. The only reason to purchase an assault weapon, instead of a long gun used for target practice or hunting, is to kill and maim large numbers of human beings.
And it is not the case that if assault weapons were banned ordinary people would get them anyway. We certainly don’t take that attitude with nuclear weapons or dirty bombs. We make it very hard for a terrorist to get nuclear weapons or dirty bomb. It used to be hard to get assault weapons.
When the former President of Mexico visited the United States some time ago to discuss the drug-fueled violence on the Mexican border, he pointed out that the end of the assault weapons ban in the U.S. had resulted in an explosion of smuggling of assault weapons from the United States to Mexico. Weapons that were previously unavailable in large numbers, became plentiful. He begged the United States to re-impose the assault weapons ban.
Allowing easy access to assault weapons guarantees that terrorists, criminals and mentally unstable people will use them to commit future acts of mass murder — it’s that simple. There are seven billion people on the planet. Try as we may, we are not going to prevent some of those seven billion people from becoming terrorists, criminals or mentally unstable. Why make it easy for them to do harm to their fellow human beings by giving them easy access to a weapon of mass destruction?
Since this tragedy, there have been calls for greater restrictions and background checks on those who can buy guns — and there should be. But from all accounts, the weapons used in the Connecticut murders were purchased legally by the shooter’s mother — who herself appeared to be perfectly sane right up to the moment that Lanza used those same weapons to end her life.
The NRA will no doubt repeat its mantra about the “slippery slope.” “If we ban assault weapons, shotguns will be next,” they say. Really? By banning anyone from buying Stinger Missiles that are used to shoot down airplanes do we make it more likely that the government will one day prevent people from hunting ducks?
The simple fact is that no right is absolute because rights come into conflict with each other. Your free speech does not give you the right to cry “fire” in a crowded theater.
Is the NRA’s concern that banning assault weapons will put us on a “slippery slope” more important than the lives of those 20 first graders? Should it really take precedence over the fact that today in Newtown, Connecticut there are 20 families with holiday presents on a closet shelf, that were purchased for an excited six-year-old who will never open them?
Are the NRA’s fears more important than the terror faced by children in the Sandy Hook Elementary school last week?
Does the right to own an assault weapon take precedence over the right of those parents to see their children grow up, and graduate from college, and stand at the alter to be married, and have children of their own?
The bottom line is that there is no reason why weapons of mass destruction of any sort – chemical weapons, biological weapons, RPG’s, improvised explosive devices (IED’s), missiles, dirty bombs, nuclear devices, or assault weapons — should be easily accessible. For 10 years there was a ban on the production, ownership and use of assault weapons in the United States until Congress and the Bush Administration allowed it to lapse when it sunset and came up for reauthorization in 2004.
A serious response to the tragedy in Connecticut requires that Congress act to reinstate the assault weapons ban before the children of other families fall victim to the fantasies of some other mentally unbalanced individual — or the ideology of a terrorist who has been empowered by our failure to act.
By: Robert Creamer, February 18, 2013; Originally Posted in The Huffington Post Blog, December 16, 2012
“American Born Terrorists Are Not Excused”: The Alternatives To Drone Strikes Are Worse
America’s drone policy makes everyone uncomfortable. The alternatives are worse. Attacking enemy combatants from the air is part of warfare. Combatants who wear civilian clothing or who operate from sanctuaries are not excused from risk. Compare drone strikes to the feckless 1998 cruise missile attack on bin Laden. Drone strikes work; that is why our opponents object to them. If the host governments are cognizant and accepting (even if this is not public), if the laws of armed conflict limiting egregious attacks on civilians are observed, drone strikes are an acceptable use of force.
The more difficult issue involves targeting belligerents who also hold American citizenship. If you think about it, every confederate killed by U.S. forces in the Civil War was an American citizen. Germans with dual citizenship, both civilians and soldiers, were killed in combat or in aerial bombings during World War II. There were probably a few citizens among Chinese forces in Korea. Killing Americans participating in hostilities in an armed conflict against the United States, while disturbing, is not automatically precluded.
Arrest and trial is the preferred approach for dealing with Americans who threaten to kill their fellow citizens. What do we do if arrest is not an option? We could wait for a moment when they can be caught, but that runs the risk that while we wait, there will be another 9/11 or a successful airline bomber. The struggles against global jihad do not fit neatly with existing rules for conflict, and a pragmatic approach that puts public safety first faces difficult choices in balancing risk and rights.
The most difficult choice involves setting bounds for the use of lethal force against Americans. The administration has three rules: A senior U.S. official must determine there is an “imminent” threat of violent attack; capture is not possible; and attacks must be consistent with the laws of war (meaning an effort to avoid collateral damage and innocent causalities). The rules could be clearer in saying targets must be combatants engaged in armed struggle, and the administration uses an elastic definition of “imminent,” but these rules are sufficient for what should be a rare and infrequent event—if drone attacks on U.S. citizens are not rare and infrequent, something is dangerously wrong. It would be better if we did not have to do this and there will be a time when these rules can be abolished, but that time is not now.
By: James Lewis, U. S. News and World Report, February 6, 2013
“The Ignorant Inquisitors”: Capitol Hill’s Angry Little Men Keep Making Hillary Clinton Bigger
Anyone truly concerned about the safety of U.S. diplomatic personnel abroad – and that should include every American – has fresh reason for fury over last September’s disaster in Benghazi and its aftermath. But the target of public anger should not be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose conduct has been exemplary ever since the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three of his brave colleagues lost their lives last September. Far more deserving of scorn are the likes of Rand Paul (R-KY), Ron Johnson (R-WI), and all the other grandstanding, conspiracy-mongering, ill-informed politicians who questioned her Wednesday on Capitol Hill.
Four months after the tragedy occurred, Republicans on both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee still seem to be obsessed with the talking points provided to UN Ambassador Susan Rice before she appeared on television to discuss the incident. According to Republican folklore, unsupported by facts, the Obama White House engaged in a conspiracy to conceal the true nature of the terrorist attack by mischaracterizing it as a “demonstration.” The continuing focus on that trivial issue – long since explained by Rice herself, as well as retired General David Petraeus and others, under oath – understandably provoked an exasperated Clinton to scold Johnson, one of the dimmer idols of the Tea Party.
When the Wisconsin Republican began to harp on this topic yet again – interrupting her answer, after stupidly asserting that Clinton could have resolved any questions about the attack with “a very simple phone call” to the burned-out Benghazi compound – she responded sharply:
With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because there was a protest or was it because there were guys who went out for a walk one night who decided they would kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and to do everything we can to make sure it never happens again.
No doubt Clinton’s utterly sane retort will undergo dishonest editing, in the style of James O’Keefe, to make her sound cavalier or arrogant. But it is the Republicans in Congress whose attitude toward the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and his fallen comrades has seemed cynical and false, ever since they first sought to exploit the incident politically during the presidential campaign. Meanwhile, having historically supported reductions in federal spending on diplomatic security, they have done nothing useful so far to enhance the safety of Americans serving abroad. Worse still, their questions to Clinton indicate that very few of them, even at this late date, have bothered to learn the basic facts surrounding the Benghazi incident.
By contrast, Clinton has assumed responsibility in a meaningful way ever since September 11 – which is to say that she has taken action to ensure a serious response. As required by law, she empowered an independent investigation, which resulted in dozens of recommendations for improved security and held several high-ranking State Department officials to account for the lapses in Libya. It is worth noting that Thomas Pickering, the distinguished former diplomat who led the probe, fixed culpability for the security flaws at Benghazi at “the assistant secretary level,” rather than with Clinton herself. Nobody in Washington understands the workings of the U.S. foreign service better than Pickering, who served in top positions under both presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Certainly not Johnson or Paul, who rather comically asserted that “if [he] were president,” he would have fired Clinton. Always hard to imagine, a Paul presidency seemed even more remote when he quizzed her about obscure right-wing conspiracy theories involving Syria, Turkey, and Libya.
As Joan Walsh observed in Salon, those irate and ignorant inquisitors on Capitol Hill appeared small and peevish in their confrontation with Clinton, a woman whose serious, diligent, tireless approach to public service has armed her with an enduring popularity at least three times greater than her Republican adversaries in Congress. Their feeble attempts to cut her down, echoed by the usual loudmouths on radio and cable television, only make her bigger.
If they persist, she probably will be president someday.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, January 24, 2013
“The Problem, Folks, Is The Guns”: Wayne LaPierre Is A Perfect Example
In the aftermath of the massacre of first-graders at Sandy Hook elementary school, right-wing defenders of unregulated guns have gravitated to a common alibi: The problem isn’t guns; it’s mental illness. If only society kept better track of crazy people and kept weapons out of their hands, we could prevent more episodes of armed mayhem.
Senator elect Marco Rubio has spoken of the need to “keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill” and dozens of Tea Party Republicans have echoed the same talking point. The always predictable Charles Krauthammer wrote: “While law deters the rational, it has far less effect on the psychotic. The best we can do is to try to detain them, disarm them…. there’s no free lunch. Increasing public safety almost always means restricting liberties.” And the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, in additional to calling for an armed guard in every school, urged an “active national database of the mentally ill.”
Oh my, where to begin? Mental illness is just now starting to become less stigmatized. If we create an even more Orwellian society in which anyone who has ever sought treatment for emotional problems ended up in some national database, you can just imagine what that would do to people’s willingness to seek help. Surely it is better to end the easy purchase of combat weapons than it is to keep a record of everyone in America who might hypothetically go on a rampage.
Surveillance as a substitute for gun control is no idle threat. In the age of anti-terrorism, courts have already permitted the National Security Agency to troll among otherwise confidential records—everything from cell phone and computer-information trails to bank and insurance company records. The Fourth Amendment, which usually requires a warrant for invasion of privacy, has been simply waived. If the justification is preventing “terrorism”—and surely shooting up a classroom is a kind of terrorism—the NSA could create a database in which half of Americans are classified as potential mass killers.
Isn’t it better to just get rid of the guns?
For now, privacy protections such as The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPPA) make it illegal to disclose medical records, and mental-health treatment has an even higher standard of privacy protection. But it would be child’s play for the NSA to ignore these privacy protections, as it has others.
A second irony: The very right-wingers shedding crocodile tears over the need to focus on mental illness rather than gun control are the same people who have shredded public budgets that support treatment of the mentally ill. No area of public spending has been cut more deeply.
In Portland, Maine, a pioneering psychiatrist named William McFarlane has devised a strategy and outreach protocol for dramatically reducing the incidence of psychosis. The research of Dr. McFarlane and his colleagues demonstrated that it wasn’t the condition of schizophrenia per se so much as it was the devastating experience of a mental breakdown that disabled young adults and put them into the permanent status of the emotionally impaired.
Dr. McFarlane and his team devised an early outreach and prevention system called the Portland Identification and Early Referral program (PIER) that made use of community education. Teachers, counselors, clergy, youth workers and young people themselves were encouraged to be alert to patterns that might indicate future risks of psychosis. Dr. McFarlane’s main intervention was family education and early counseling, supplemented where necessary by medication.
Many teenagers who were loners or were haunted by delusional thoughts, seeing the educational materials “self-referred.” They would come into the PIER office saying, “that sounds like me.” In Portland, the predicted incidence of hospital admissions for psychotic breaks was reduced by between a third and a half.
McFarlane’s breakthrough was hailed as the most important insight about how to reduce the devastating effects of severe mental illness in decades. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the approach was expanded to several other cities and states. But in Portland, it has been shut down for lack of funding, thanks to that state’s right-wing governor. Reopening PIER in Portland would cost under $100,000 a year and would save many millions on hospital admissions and ruined lives spared.
What’s the connection to gun violence? “These kids who go on gun rampages,” says McFarlane, “tend to be pre-psychotic. Most people with mental illnesses are not dangerous, but these are. They still have enough functioning to methodically plot out their attacks. They have lost capacity for judgment but not for planning.”
“At our very first family meetings,” McFarlane adds, “one of the things we emphasize is safety. Families get it. If they own guns, they either get rid of them, or lock them up.”
It may be a coincidence, but there have been no gun massacres in the communities that have programs modeled on PIER. However, referrals to Dr. McFarlane’s program and others like them are voluntary. Nobody is put into a database.
At the very least, the right-wingers who hope to shift the focus from gun control to mental illness might have the decency to support more funding to treat the latter. According to Michael Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), some 60 percent of people with some form of mental illness receive no treatment whatsoever. More than half the counties in America, he adds, have no practicing psychologist, psychiatrist, or clinical social worker.
When press coverage of Adam Lanza first surfaced, there was conjecture that the 20-year-old shooter may have had Asberger’s Syndrome, a loose diagnostic category that is being dropped from the newest edition of the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders (DSM-V) in favor of the broader category of Autism.
All over America, parents of quirky kids are agonizing over whether their children might be “on the spectrum” or whether they simply hear “a different drummer,” as Thoreau so beautifully put it. Federal and state law gives parents the right to seek a full evaluation, and if a child is identified as having some version of even mild autism, the family can qualify for additional services. But there is the dreaded trade- off of services for stigma.
What if the risk of getting your child listed on some database as potential doers of violence were added to that equation? What parent would ever seek help? In fact, Asberger’s and Autism are seldom associated with violence.
The problem, folks, is the guns.
Absent the guns, the loners who have shot up schools and shopping malls might have gotten out of control, but they would not have been able to go on shooting sprees.
To the extent that the issue is mental illness, the problem is the gross underfunding of known treatments that work. Adding stigma and surveillance while not adding funds would only make an injustice that much worse. Can’t we at least keep that straight?
By: Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, December 21, 2012
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