QOTD: Craig Melvin
by digby
Last night guest hosting on All In with Chris Hayes, Craig Melvin had some final thoughts on Ferguson and they are well worth watching. He concluded with this powerful statement:
“They want to know what happened,what can we all do to try and prevent it from happening again…
to another young man …
who looks like me.”
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Thought for the day
by digby
A year ago everyone was agitating for the US to bomb Syria on behalf of the rebels in order to unseat the war criminal Bashar Assad who was committing atrocities on innocent civilians. Today the same people are agitating for the US to bomb Syria on behalf of Bashar Assad in order to push back the rebels who committing atrocities on innocent civilians.*
I don’t have an answer for the problem of ISIS but I think it’s a very good idea to take a breath and ask some questions before running around screaming like the Martians have invaded. This piece in the NY Times indicates there are some people who are taking a thoughtful, rational stance:
With the rapid advance of ISIS across northern Iraq, and the release this week of a video showing one of the group’s operatives beheading an American journalist, the language Obama administration officials are using to describe the danger the terrorist group poses to the United States has become steadily more pointed. But some American officials and terrorism experts said that the ominous words overstated the group’s ability to attack the United States and its interests abroad, and that ISIS could be undone by its own brutality and nihilism.
“They have a lot of attributes that should scare us: money, people, weapons and a huge swath of territory,” said Andrew Liepman, a senior fellow at the RAND Corporation and former deputy head of the National Counterterrorism Center. “But when we’re surprised by a group, as we have been in this case, we tend to overreact.”
These notes of caution from inside the government and from terrorism watchers come as the White House considers expanding military action against ISIS, including possibly striking across the border in Syria.
American intelligence agencies are working on a thorough assessment of the group’s strength, and they believe that its ability to gain and hold territory could make it a long-term menace in the Middle East. Intelligence officials said there were indications that ISIS’ battlefield successes had attracted defectors from Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Africa, who are eager to join a group with momentum.
But experts say ISIS differs from traditional terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and its affiliates, primarily because it prefers enlarging what it calls its caliphate over discrete acts of terrorism. It has captured dams and oil fields, and has seized spoils of war like armored personnel carriers and tanks.
“This is a full-blown insurgent group, and talking about it as a terrorist group is not particularly helpful,” said William McCants, a fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said the Defense Department did not believe that ISIS had “the capability right now to conduct a major attack on the U.S. homeland.”
If you watch Lindsay Graham flapping his hands like Butterfly McQueen all over Fox News you’d think ISIS was days away from a full-blown invasion. (Honestly, these war hawks are nothing more than hysterical panic artists.)
That horrific execution of James Foley proves that ISIS has a sophisticated grasp of how to stir the emotions of the Western powers. It’s impossible for us not to react with horror and anger at such barbaric acts. But it’s somewhat relevant to keep in mind that the act of beheading is actually not uncommon in the middle east. Just last week American ally Saudi Arabia carried out similar executions as official acts:
Saudi Arabia has beheaded at least 19 people since the beginning of August in a surge of executions, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said.
The deaths relate to the period from 4 to 20 August and are included in the 34 deaths ordered since the beginning of January.
According to HRW, international standards require that capital punishment should only be reserved for the “most serious crimes” in countries that still use it.
Offences that resulted in the Saudi Arabian death penalties in August ranged from drug smuggling and sorcery.
Four smugglers were executed on 18 August for smuggling a “large quantity of hashish” into the country amid an effort by King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and the government to tackle the social ill of narcotics and warned that anyone else doing the same would also be punished “according to Sharia”, the Saudi Press Agency said.
The men were all part of the same family and their deaths were condemned by Amnesty as being part of the “disturbing” surge in executions. Reuters reported that their confessions may have been obtained through torture.
Mohammed bin Bakr al-Alawi was beheaded on 5 August for allegedly practicing black magic sorcery, the Saudi Gazette reports, while according to Amnesty, a mentally ill man, Hajras al-Qurey, has been sentenced to death for drug trafficking “after an unfair trial” and will be killed on 25 August.
Al-Qurey’s son had reportedly confessed to drug smuggling and said that his father was unaware that the contraband was in the car.
The elder claims to have been beaten into confessing, despite repeatedly exclaiming that he was innocent and that he suffered a mental disability. He was held criminally liable despite an examination finding symptoms of mental illness including auditory hallucinations.
And this from Egypt last week:
Four beheaded corpses were found by residents of a town in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Wednesday, security sources said, blaming Islamist militants waging an insurgency against Cairo.
The security sources in Sinai and Cairo, said residents of Sheikh Zuwaid found the bodies two days after the men were abducted by gunmen while travelling in a car in the town, a few kilometres from the Gaza Strip.
Though the men were civilians, they may have been targeted for their perceived allegiance to the police and army, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. They gave no other indication of the identity of the men.
The militants have stepped up attacks on policemen and soldiers since then-army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi toppled President Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood in July 2013.
The government does not distinguish between the Sinai militants and the Brotherhood, which it has designated a terrorist group although the movement says it is peaceful and denies any links to the wave of militant attacks.
Today’s New York Times front page has a chilling picture of armed men dressed in black and wearing black masks alleged to be preparing to execute Palestinians who they suspected of spying for Israel. (The story itself is on A10!) They apparently shot them, which I guess passes for civilized behavior these days, but to me that picture was every bit as terrifying as the other pictures we saw this week.
That’s the context in which these horrors are unfolding.
It’s probable that the US as the world’s policeman (a situation that needs to be dealt with before anything else will change) will end up right in the middle of it again whether we like it or not. But it does no good to start charging around like a bull in a china shop bombing who we think the “bad guys” are this week. You can’t look at this situation as one between “good guys” and “bad guys.” The line between good and evil resides in every human being and right now, in the middle east, the evil side of a whole lot of people seems to be dominant. And here in the US we’ve seen some pretty awful examples of the same phenomenon. (Certainly, after our performance of the past decade in terms of unjustified invasions we are in no position to moralize. We have delivered plenty of brutality.)
A cool temperament and wise counsel are called for now. At the very least assume that anything the pearl-clutching Lindsay Graham says must be done should be tabled for at least a month.
This interview with former State Department official Matthew Hoh is worth reading. He makes the important (and obvious) point that there are simply no good recent examples of “intervention” actually helping anything. Not that it seems to matter. But it’s worth considering as we watch yet another seemingly unstoppable march to war in the middle east.
*h/t to SM
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Thanks
by digby
I wanted to extend my heartfelt thanks to Spocko, Batocchio and UndercoverBlue for their contributions to the blog this past week. I was thrilled to have them and from the retweets and emails I received so were a lot of people!
Gracias.
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GOP funding vigilantes?
by digby
That’s what the Heritage Foundation is calling for:
The organization is still recovering from a fiasco last year in which one of its senior policy analysts was found to have previously written a paper claiming Latinos in the US are and will likely remain less intelligent than “native whites.”
Now, they’re releasing what they call “practical, effective, fair and compassionate” solutions to the current immigration crisis—a plan that includes stepped up border enforcement by vigilante organizations and an explicit threat to deport anyone covered by a future executive order.
So what are some of the steps on their self-described “positive path”?
Give “accreditation” and state government funding to private citizens to “police border communities”
These private citizen groups, many of which have been designated hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, have stepped up their activity in recent weeks.
Armed with semi-automatic weapons and wearing camouflage—according to their recruitment photos—they have vowed to “fight, die and, if forced by any would-be oppressor, to kill in the defense of ourselves and the Constitution.”
In response to this escalation, the US Border Patrol said in a statement that it “does not endorse or support any private group or organization taking matters into their own hands, as it could have potentially disastrous personal public safety consequences.”
The problem isn’t new. The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that “vigilante militias have been capturing, pistol-whipping and very possibly shooting Latin American immigrants” along the border since the 1990s.
In 2012, the leader of the “US Border Guard” militia in Arizona killed five people including a toddler.
Terrific idea. because if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past couple of weeks it’s that we just don’t have enough para-military agencies in this country. We’re going to have to get the open-carry yahoos and the Oath-keepers and militiamen deputized to form posses at the border. What could go wrong?
The upside? Well, they hate the idea of any kind of government spending — except on cops and soldiers. So we can think of this as a jobs program.
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Otter therapy
by digby
At the end of this most horrible week you need this:
Have a drink and take a break. August is almost over. Thank God.
Oath Keeping Cop?
by digby
This is one of the cops shoving the media around in Ferguson:
He was appearing at an Oath Keepers meeting. They seem to like him.
Apparently he was suspended from duty today. I’m going to guess his attitudes aren’t exactly unique …
Here’s an article on the Oath Keepers from a few years back:
Founded last April by Yale-educated lawyer and ex-Ron Paul aide Stewart Rhodes, the group has established itself as a hub in the sprawling anti-Obama movement that includes Tea Partiers, Birthers, and 912ers. Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Pat Buchanan have all sung its praises, and in December, a grassroots summit it helped organize drew such prominent guests as representatives Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun, both Georgia Republicans.
There are scores of patriot groups, but what makes Oath Keepers unique is that its core membership consists of men and women in uniform, including soldiers, police, and veterans. At regular ceremonies in every state, members reaffirm their official oaths of service, pledging to protect the Constitution—but then they go a step further, vowing to disobey “unconstitutional” orders from what they view as an increasingly tyrannical government.
[…]
It was while volunteering for Ron Paul’s doomed presidential bid that Rhodes decided to abandon electoral politics in favor of grassroots organizing. As an undergrad, he had been fascinated by the notion that if German soldiers and police had refused to follow orders, Hitler could have been stopped. Then, in early 2008, SWAT received a letter from a retired colonel declaring that “the Constitution and our Bill of Rights are gravely endangered” and that service members, veterans, and police “is where they will be saved, if they are to be saved at all!”Rhodes responded with a breathless column starring a despotic president, “Hitlery” Clinton, in her “Chairman Mao signature pantsuit.” Would readers, he asked, obey orders from this “dominatrix-in-chief” to hold militia members as enemy combatants, disarm citizens, and shoot all resisters? If “a police state comes to America, it will ultimately be by your hands,” he warned. You had better “resolve to not let it happen on your watch.” He set up an Oath Keepers blog, asking soldiers and veterans to post testimonials. Word spread. Military officers offered assistance. A Marine Corps veteran invited Rhodes to speak at a local Tea Party event. Paul campaigners provided strategic advice. And by the time Rhodes arrived in Lexington to speak at a rally staged by a pro-militia group, a movement was afoot.
Rhodes stood on the common that day before a crowd of about 400 die-hard patriot types. He spoke their language. “You need to be alert and aware to the reality of how close we are to having our constitutional republic destroyed,” he said. “Every dictatorship in the history of mankind, whether it is fascist, communist, or whatever, has always set aside normal procedures of due process under times of emergency…We can’t let that happen here. We need to wake up!”
Here’s what Oath Keepers recommends the police should have done in Ferguson:
One retired Special Forces veteran in our group suggested that instead of grouping the police officers in large blocks (50 to 100 men), that you should break up these groups into rapid reaction teams of 20 to 25 officers and disperse them, staging them in places spread around Ferguson, with a focus on the looters, not the protesters.
Our intelligence and police veterans concurred, and added that you should also task some officers to go out in street clothes to blend in to the crowds and work as Scouts, identifying threats and looters. The plainclothes Scouts should be directing the rapid reaction teams to protect the businesses from the ongoing crime, and refocus the police assets away from unconstitutional activities like shooting CS gas at peaceful protesters and enforcing curfews, and get to the business of putting the real criminals behind bars.
If you think you need more minority officers for this role, you could easily find them in the St. Louis County Police Department, St. Charles County Sheriff Department, and other local municipal police departments. The plainclothes officers can identify and locate the trouble-makers and their caches and resources, such as gas cans and bottles for Molotov cocktails, bricks, etc., and they can also film the trouble-makers in support of later arrests and prosecutions.
Those plainclothes Scouts can also be directly backed up by small teams of five to seven additional plainclothes officers to take down identified looters in a manner that uses minimum force along with effective surprise applied only to the actual suspected looter. And those plainclothes small reaction teams can be further backed up by the uniformed rapid response teams, if needed, as they apprehend the looters and shooters. If possible, each officer should have a small, discrete camera – such as a badge camera – pinned to their clothing and running at all times, so that there is a recording of all that occurs…
With hundreds of criminals stealing the businesses of Ferguson blind and damaging private property, how many arrests of actual looters took place? The percentage is embarrassing (and arrests of otherwise peaceful protesters for “failure to disperse” or “failure to keep moving” don’t count). The Highway Patrol’s tactics did not work, and it is time to admit it. It was a mistake to remove St. Louis County from a command role. Instead, Governor, you should have directed them to use their considerable assets to go after the looters while respecting the right of the people to peaceably assemble.
I think they should have called in Batman, personally.
That’s part of a long and rambling letter that Rhodes sent to Governor Nixon. There’s a lot of agitation about looters in it. A lot. To their credit, they do say that cops shouldn’t roust protesters and media. But damn, those looters need to dealt with.
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Dr Keith Ablow is a moron
by digby
What an idiot. He condemns Michele Obama for trying to get kids to eat their vegetables and then goes on an on about how a bunch of thin woman all need to lose 5 pounds and should only eat half a cookie.
I guess all those cranky old white men who love Fox News enjoy that sort of misogynistic meanness.
But really, shouldn’t he be a little bit less critical of other people’s weight?
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If tasers aren’t for use in place of deadly force what are they for?
by digby
I’ve written a couple of things about tasers this week, one on Salon in which I questioned their use as torture devices for cops’ convenience and one here where I explained why I don’t think they should be banned. I explained that while they are often misused, if they were deployed only in situations where lethal force would be the only other option, they would be a very useful tool in the toolbox. I raised the Powell killing in St. Louis as an example of how they should be used.
Well, I think I’m changing my mind. From what I gather on the internet, a lot of police and other experts believe that tasers cannot be used in situations where a citizen is wielding a knife or other weapon other than a gun because there is no guarantee that a taser will stop them. Therefore, the protocol is to use deadly force in any situation where they feel threatened. The St. Louis police chief was quoted on CNN saying “Tasers aren’t 100%. That’s what guns are for.”
And that means the only use for tasers is to force compliance of unarmed citizens with the use of 50,000 volts of electricity — which is torture. Like this:
In police reports and in the document charging Hulett, the officers said they told Hulett he was under arrest on the bus before hitting him with the Taser. But in a video of the incident, no such statement can be heard.Schiano said he reviewed all the available evidence, including the bus video, but found nothing to corroborate the officers’ statements that they told Hulett before tasering him that he was under arrest.
“I listened closely and I didn’t hear it,” [District Attorney]Schiano said outside the courtroom. “I can’t speak for them. That’s for them to answer.”
Hulett was charged with disorderly conduct by intending to cause annoyance and alarm by obstructing vehicular traffic.
“He wasn’t obstructing any traffic,” Schiano said. “He was on the bus. As I see the video, he was just trying to go home or wherever he was trying to go.”
And if there was no disorderly conduct, there was no reason to arrest him, Schiano said. So the resisting arrest charge was also improper, he said.
The video, taken from a security camera above the driver’s seat, shows the officers lifting Hulett’s shirt then hitting him with the Taser after warning him that it’s coming.
Hulett then falls as the officers, Sgt. William Galvin Jr. and Officer William Coleman, move him off the bus. They drag Hulett away from the bus and one of the officers stands over him as Hulett lies on the pavement.
Hulett, who says a back condition makes it difficult to sit while riding a bus, suffered a broken hip in the incident, according to hospital records.
“You want it again?” the officer yells repeatedly at Hulett in the video.
Galvin then grabs Hulett’s right foot and drags him about 10 feet along the pavement.
Hulett, 35, suffered a broken left hip in the incident, according to medical records from Upstate Medical University.
In his news release today, Fitzpatrick said he was concerned about the timing of a use of force report filed by the police department. It was dated Aug. 1, three months after the incident and just hours after a story about the case was published in The Post-Standard and on Syracuse.com.
That report said the officers were justified in the force they used.
or this:
McFarland hurt himself June 30, 2009, in a fall at his Woodacre home. His wife called 911, but when paramedics arrived, McFarland refused to be taken to a hospital and signed forms declining medical assistance.
Sheriff’s Deputies Justin Zebb and Erin Mittenthal arrived at the home shortly thereafter “without consent and without a warrant,” said McFarland’s suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Deputies are automatically dispatched to most medical calls.
County officials said McFarland made a comment to the deputies about shooting himself. His attorneys have said an embarrassed McFarland was joking about his fall.
After McFarland ordered the deputies to “get out of (the) house,” Zebb pulled out his Taser and told McFarland to come with him to the hospital, the suit said.
When McFarland got up from his sofa, the deputy shocked him several times.
Marin County paid that man over a million dollars in damages. Most people, however, don’t have these altercations filmed and even if they do cops are usually found to be justified. This man had the means to get a good lawyer.
The only good reason for cops to have tasers is to use them in place of lethal force. If the only legitimate use for these weapons is to torture citizens into compliance then they need to be banned.
Update: For a thorough rundown of everything done wrong in the Powell shooting this piece gets to it all. Yes, they could have tasered him.
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What are they going to do now?
by digby
Some news on the Hobby Lobby front:
A “proposed rule” by the Department of Health and Human Services lets female employees of for-profit businesses, like Hobby Lobby, obtain birth control directly from their insurer, at no extra cost, if their boss opts out of covering the service in the company’s insurance plan for religious reasons.
[…]
In the same announcement, HHS will also unveil an interim rule tweaking the nonprofit accommodation, in an effort to put an end to a separate lawsuit against it. Instead of informing the insurer or third-party administrator directly, the new rule says, an objecting employer will have to notify the government, which will inform the insurer.The existing rule requires objecting employers to directly inform their insurer, at which point the insurer must pay for it. Some entities, like Wheaton College, sued and said that also violates their religious belief because it amounts to a “permission slip” for contraception. The theory is that under the new rule, it’ll be the government that triggers the provision of birth control, not the employer.
It is inane that they have to do this at all since these employers aren’t actually paying for birth control and it’s none of their goddamn business if their employees use it but there it is.
I wonder how they’re going to react now. Because we know that this isn’t really about them violating their conscience don’t we? It’s about preventing women from getting birth control. I’m sure they have something else up their sleeves …
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Making whistleblowers necessary
by digby
David Sirota at Salon reports on a number of developments in the government’s repression of the press and the public right to know:
As states move to hide details of government deals with Wall Street, and as politicians come up with new arguments to defend secrecy, a study released earlier this month revealed that many government information officers block specific journalists they don’t like from accessing information. The news comes as 47 federal inspectors general sent a letter to lawmakers criticizing “serious limitations on access to records” that they say have “impeded” their oversight work.
The data about public information officers was compiled over the past few years by Kennesaw State University professor Dr. Carolyn Carlson. Her surveys found that 4 in 10 public information officers say “there are specific reporters they will not allow their staff to talk to due to problems with their stories in the past.”
“That horrified us that so many would do that,” Carlson told the Columbia Journalism Review, which reported on her presentation at the July conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Carlson has conducted surveys of journalists and public information officers since 2012. In her most recent survey of 445 working journalists, four out of five reported that “their interviews must be approved” by government information officers, and “more than half of the reporters said they had actually been prohibited from interviewing [government] employees at least some of the time by public information officers.”
In recent years, there have been signs that the federal government is reducing the flow of public information. Reason Magazine has reported a 114 percent increase in Freedom of Information Act rejections by the Drug Enforcement Agency since President Obama took office. The National Security Agency has also issued blanket rejections of FOIA requests about its metadata program. And the Associated Press reported earlier this year that in 2013, “the government cited national security to withhold information a record 8,496 times — a 57 percent increase over a year earlier and more than double Obama’s first year.”
There’s more at the link. Obsessive government secrecy ends up making whistleblowing necessary way beyond the prosaic revelations of corruption and malfeasance. You simply can’t have a functioning democracy if the people doesn’t know what the government is doing. I get that they might think they are “protecting” us but that’s patronizing at best and just plain dishonest at worst.
Something’s gone wrong these past few years and it doesn’t seem as if either party has any real interest in transparency. And the Democrats are arguably worse because they pretend to care about it and then crack down with the same fervor as Bush and Cheney. If all this is being done to “protect” us we have a right to know specifically what it is we’re being protected from. They’re infantalizing us by keeping it from us. Unfortunately, it’s far more likely they are using the excuse of “protecting” us to expand their power as bureaucracies (and human beings) are wont to do when they have the chance. And that’s very dangerous.
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