Judiciary Issues - Two Counterpoints

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Stephen D. Poe" <sdpoe () acm org>
Organization: Nautilus Solutions
Reply-To: sdpoe () acm org
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 10:27:46 -0500
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: Judiciary Issues - Two Counterpoints

Dave - 

1. I was struck in particular by one line in Kobrin's email from the
Financial Times article:

"The very idea of secret arrests conjures up images of the police state;
democracies should only ever use them in the most extreme of cases."

Whereas I certainly agree wholeheartedly with this statement, I also
find it hard to imagine a case more extreme than 9/11 (and fervently
hope I'll have to keep a worse such case as an exercise for the
imagination). 

I suggest as a counterpoint this op/ed piece.

2. I also suggest it is a counterpoint to Kobrin's assertion "Unlikely
that this strong a stand would be taken in an American paper.". I
suggest the NY Times article Coulter lambastes and her below article,
taken together, are a clear demonstration of the First Amendment and how
strong a stand (on both sides) you can find in the US.


YOU DON'T SAY
Thu Jun 19, 8:02 PM ET
By Ann Coulter 

If you are one of the millions of Americans who recently canceled your
subscription to The New York Times, you may not know that we are in the
middle of a civil liberties emergency. Apparently, in the weeks
following the terrorist attack of 9-11, the FBI rounded up a lot of
Muslim men who were in this country illegally. Not only that, but some
were actually questioned.

These, my friends, were only some of the atrocities detailed in a "frank
and blistering" report plastered all over The New York Times a few weeks
ago. The report, released by the inspector general of the Department of
Justice, was showcased on the front page of the Times; it was excerpted
in the national section; and it was the subject of the lead editorial
that day, somberly titled "The Abusive Detentions of Sept. 11."

The laboriously assembled report includes such shocking revelations as
these:

"(T)he Sept. 11 attacks changed the way the department, particularly the
FBI and the INS, responded when encountering aliens who were in
violation of their immigration status."

"In other times, many of these aliens might not have been arrested or
detained for these violations."

And in the searing words of The New York Times: "Had it not been for the
attacks, 'most if not all' of the arrests would probably have never been
pursued." 

In other words, under Attorney General John Ashcroft, the FBI, the INS
and the Department of Justice are so out of control that they have
actually begun to enforce U.S. immigration laws.

Also according to the report, guards at a Brooklyn detention facility --
weeks after the attack and within sight of ground zero -- subjected
illegal immigrant Muslim detainees to "physical and verbal abuse." As
the Times described it, "Detainees reported being slammed against the
wall, or being subjected to such verbal taunts as 'You're going to die
here.'" To quote Tony Soprano: You don't say.

Does anyone at the Times even know any normal people?

The detainees are in this country illegally, their co-religionists had
just slaughtered thousands of Americans, and the Times is dismayed,
perplexed, angry and shocked that some of them may have been subjected
to the sort of manhandling that occurs in the hallways of middle schools
throughout the nation. Why, I'm subjected to physical and verbal abuse
every time I go through an airport security check, and I'm a citizen.

After a bit of overheated fulminating, the Times editorial unleashed
this whopper: "The inspector general's findings are particularly
powerful because they come not from politicians or advocacy groups, but
from a unit of the Bush administration itself." This is how The New York
Times always prefaces its outrageous statements: "it is widely
understood that ..."; "all learned men agree ..."; "all people of good
will believe ...." 

Not so fast. The report came from Inspector General Glenn Fine -- a
lingering, festering Clinton appointee.

As a rule of thumb, all career government bureaucrats are liberal
Democrats. (Children in Republican families do not grow up yearning to
work for the government someday.) Republican presidents come in, make a
handful of appointments to each department, and then the career
bureaucrats go about gleefully denouncing the Republicans while allowing
themselves to described in the New York Times as "internal"
whistleblowers. 

This leads to a somewhat inconsistent pattern of "internal" reports.
After Janet Reno gassed American citizens in Waco, Texas, leaving 80
dead, the Justice Department's internal report "found no mistakes by
anybody at the Justice Department or the FBI," in the words of Newsweek
magazine. Also, one searches Lexis-Nexis in vain for any mention of an
internal report on Janet Reno's commando raid against a small Cuban boy
in Miami whose mother died bringing him to freedom.

But when Clinton-appointee Fine discovered that, immediately after the
9-11 attack, Bush administration officials failed to inform the Muslim
detainees "in a timely manner about the process for filing complaints
about their treatment" -- he produces an indignant report. (The guards
should have told Fine that the illegal immigrants were liars, bimbos,
"stalkers" or just wanted a book deal.)

Accustomed to the high ethical standards of the Clinton administration,
one can certainly understand Fine's outrage upon learning that guards
overseeing Muslim illegal aliens after 9-11 imposed "restrictive and
inconsistent policies on telephone access for detainees." Indeed, there
are unconfirmed reports that several illegal detainees were prevented
from using the phone to cast their votes on "American Idol." So, it was
pretty much like a week in Uday and Qusay's torture rooms.

"Instead of taking a few days as anticipated," the report says, "the
clearance process took an average of 80 days, primarily because it was
understaffed and not given sufficient priority by the FBI." That is
pretty shocking when you consider how much time the FBI must have had on
their hands immediately after 9/11. Some detainees were held so long
that they had to drop out of U.S. flight schools altogether. FBI
officials' explanation was that they were engaged in some mysterious
project known only as "preventing the next terrorist attack on U.S.
soil." 

In a remark worthy of Inspector Clouseau, Fine's report says:
"Department officials acknowledged to the inspector general's office
that they realized soon after the roundups began 'that many in the group
of Sept. 11 detainees were not connected to the attacks or terrorism.'"
Indeed, the Clinton appointee's report repeatedly takes the FBI to task
for failing to "distinguish" between illegal immigrants and terrorists.
Wow. What a great idea. If the FBI would simply "distinguish" between
the terrorists and everyone else, then they could just arrest all the
terrorists! Why didn't anyone else think of that?

Remember this report by Clinton-appointee Glenn Fine the next time a
liberal tells you a Democrat president would have done as good a job as
Bush in fighting the war on terrorism.

-
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=108&ncid=759&e=2&u=/030620/5
1/4g3xf.html


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