Stakes
by dday
In the heat of an election, amidst the media din, sometimes everyone forgets why they’re undertaking the fight. The contest becomes one of personalities and soundbites instead of issues and solutions. In this election, there is a definitive reason for that; the rot at the core of our government has a bipartisan patina and has been met by official silence across the political spectrum. There are serious assaults on our Constitution and our civil liberties that haven’t had so much as a 30 second glance in the traditional media. And yet they are very deep problems that will not go away with a new Administration in Washington.
As the Bush administration enters its final months with no apparent plan to close the Guantánamo Bay camp, an extensive review of the government’s military tribunal files suggests that dozens of the roughly 255 prisoners remaining in detention are said by military and intelligence agencies to have been captured with important terrorism suspects, to have connections to top leaders of Al Qaeda or to have other serious terrorism credentials.
Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have said they would close the detention camp, but the review of the government’s public files underscores the challenges of fulfilling that promise. The next president will have to contend with sobering intelligence claims against many of the remaining detainees.
“It would be very difficult for a new president to come in and say, ‘I don’t believe what the C.I.A. is saying about these guys,’ ” said Daniel Marcus, a Democrat who was general counsel of the 9/11 Commission and held senior positions in the Carter and Clinton administrations.
The strength of the evidence is difficult to assess, because the government has kept much of it secret and because of questions about whether some was gathered through torture.
If you hadn’t guessed, this is (to me, anyway) a signal that the CIA and the intelligence community is going to go to the greatest lengths possible to bury George Bush and Dick Cheney’s mistakes on a variety of fronts. The unspeakable tragedy of the Uighurs, innocent bystanders wrapped up in sweeps in Afghanistan, who have been dismissed of any charges and told by a federal judge that they should be released, but who today will be told that they are likely to spend the rest of their lives in prison, is but one example. The rule of law has taken a beating over the past eight years, as federal statutes and international conventions and war crimes resolutions have been totally ignored, and illusions of security took great precedence over liberty. I don’t remember this getting much mention at all over the past week:
WASHINGTON — An operation in 2004 meant to disrupt potential terrorist plots before and after that year’s presidential election focused on more than 2,000 immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries, but most were found to have done nothing wrong, according to newly disclosed government data.
The program, conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, received little public attention at the time. But details about the targets of the investigation have emerged from more than 10,000 pages of internal records obtained through a lawsuit by civil rights advocates. Parts of the documents were provided to The New York Times.
The documents show that more than 2,500 foreigners in the United States were sought as “priority leads” in the fall of 2004 because of suspicions that they could present threats to national security in the months before the presidential election and the inauguration. Some of those foreigners were detained and ultimately deported because they had overstayed their visas, but many were in this country legally, and the vast majority were not charged.
We’re talking about massive ethnic and racial profiling, enormous data mining schemes, a near-total ignoring of relevant statutes on privacy and civil liberties, all done in a systematic fashion and guarded zealously by elites throughout Washington. The courts can offer a bit of relief here, by asking for secret documents providing the legal basis for the illegal wiretapping program, for example, but considering that the Congress immunized telecoms who participated in the program, that relief is small indeed.
There are stakes to this election but they don’t end on November 4. I think Glenn Greenwald, as usual, put this best:
It certainly seems, by all appearances, that Barack Obama and Joe Biden will win on Tuesday (though anything can happen, don’t assume anything, etc. etc.). For reasons I’ve explained many times before, I consider that to be a good and important outcome (principally due to the need to excise the Right from power for as long as possible). But the virtually complete absence from the presidential campaign of any issues pertaining to the executive power abuses of the last eight years — illegal eavesdropping, torture, rendition, due-process-less detentions, the abolition of habeas corpus, extreme and unprecedented secrecy, general executive lawlessness — reflects how much further work and effort will be required to make progress on these issues no matter what happens on Tuesday.
Much of this is deeply embedded in the political culture. Very few people in the political and media establishment object to any of it; most either tacitly accept or actively believe in it. And the natural instinct of political officials — especially new arrivals determined to achieve all sorts of things — is to consolidate, not voluntarily relinquish, extant political power. It will help to have in the Oval Office someone who has, at least at times, evinced the right instincts on these matters (even though during other times he has acted contrary to them), and the better outcome on Tuesday (the defeat of John McCain) will likely ensure some very modest, marginal improvements in terms of the rule of law, executive power abuses and constitutional transgressions. But that outcome is merely necessary, not remotely sufficient; the election by itself will not produce fundamental changes in most of these areas. That’s going to take much more than a single election, standing alone, can or will accomplish.
That work will go on beyond 2008 and into 2010, as the progressive movement matures and seeks to hold accountable those who directed, engaged in, or tacitly accepted the worst of the abuses of the Bush Administration. Elections end with confetti drops but they really represent a beginning and not an end. As we seek together to change the country and not just the nameplate in the Oval Office, it’s going to get more difficult. But the importance of it, in the looks on the faces of those Uighur prisoners, in the eyes of the Muslim immigrants questioned for no good reason, from the lips of the innocent phone-callers whose communications have been captured and stored, is too vital to forget.
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