A threat to religious liberty on the ballot

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. And she is the author of a bestselling account of rightwing evangelical Christian religiosity, Jesus and John Wayne. (Link is to my review.)

Currently on her substack, Du Mez Connections, she tries to figure out how to talk to and with evangelical Christians who are attracted by Donald Trump's promises.

On multiple occasions (and included in the GOP platform), Trump has promised to set up a “new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias” that will focus on “investigating all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.”

Promising to “aggressively defend” religious liberty, this plan to go after those “persecuting” Christians will do no such thing.

Instead, the targets of such a task force will likely be Christians themselves.

... Drawing from my own experience, I’ll wager a guess that it will be fellow Christians.

That’s right. If Trump is promising to go after his political enemies, I can only imagine that his Christian nationalist allies will want to go after theirs. And Trump has told them he’ll have their back. At the National Religious Broadcasters convention, he promised his Christian supporters that if he got back to the White House, he’d give them power: “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before.”

What does this mean for Christians who aren’t Trump supporters? For Christians who don’t toe the Christian nationalist party line?

Having interacted with more than my share of Christian nationalist types over the past few years, I have a pretty clear sense of what this could look like.

The greatest threat to the Christian nationalist agenda are Christians themselves.

Christian nationalism thrives on an “us-vs-them” mentality in which God is allegedly on their side.

Christian nationalists are not in the majority, but their power depends on convincing ordinary Christians that any who oppose their religious and political agenda are opposing God—and if you oppose God, you are clearly on the side of the devil.

Fellow Christians who speak out against Christian nationalism get in the way of this false narrative, and that’s why Christian nationalists have spent so much time attacking fellow Christians. Those of us who impede their agenda are targeted as “wolves,” “false teachers,” and “Jezebels,” accused of allying with the devil, of destroying “the Bride of Christ.”

I can attest to the ruthlessness with which Christian nationalists treat fellow Christians who get in their way. We’re attacked with vicious lies, slander, attempts at character assassination, threats of spurious lawsuits, and, for those of us who work at Christian organizations, with attempts to get us fired for speaking truth to their power.

When you are deemed an enemy of “the Church,” of Christian America, of God, anything goes.

I know this well. “We can say what we want about her and do what whatever we want to her,” one of their ilk said about me recently. Such sentiments reveal the underlying Christian nationalist worldview, one that thrives on demonizing enemies, often quite literally.

The language of spiritual warfare gives them cover, but scholars of authoritarianism know that dehumanizing rhetoric is the first step toward political violence.

If you care about religious liberty, Trump’s own rhetoric, his campaign platform, and Project 2025 all should be cause for significant concern. So should the behavior of his Christian nationalist allies.

If you are a Christian who cares about religious liberty, not as a mask for Christian supremacy (and a very specific brand of Christianity at that), but as a fundamental right for all Americans and as a protection for authentic Christian faith, then you should be alarmed.

This time around, there is a genuine threat to religious liberty on the ballot. And the threat is aimed at Christians themselves.

Talk about folks who are hard to reach! This author is close enough to them to have more chance than most people I know. Of course, from their point of view, I know the wrong people.

The struggle for liberty is not finished, or even fully engaged

Carla Hall is an opinion writer for the Los Angeles Times: 

In America, liberty has never been part of a woman’s brief, and our personal autonomy has neither been spelled out nor assumed. It took suffragettes more than 70 years to win a federal right for women to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. Congress still won’t pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

... Now, instead, what is being spelled out in the law is what women can’t do with their bodies. In some states, they can’t terminate a pregnancy after 12 weeks of gestation, or six weeks — or ever, unless maybe they get so ill during a pregnancy that they will die without an abortion. Millions of child-bearing women live in states with no abortion rights or extremely restricted rights, putting them at risk of having to give birth against their will.

What kind of a country that believes in the pursuit of liberty and happiness does that? ...

 ... After the 1994 uprising in Chiapas, the Zapatistas enshrined women’s rights into the Women’s Revolutionary Law, which rules the way they live today. It reads in part: “Women have the right to decide how many children they will have and take care of.”

It shouldn’t take another American revolution for women in this country to simply have full autonomy over their bodies. We don’t need a new government. We just need the people who run this one to realize that without personal autonomy there is no liberty.

On this Independence Day, liberty still needs its ardent, determined friends.

The Patriot Act is 20 years old

On October 26, 2001, President George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act, into law. (That's the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism [USA PATRIOT] Act of 2001" if you want to get formal about it.)

(Ashleigh Nushawg/Flickr)

According to the ACLU:

Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet. While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.

In those fraught days after 9/11, American Muslims saw the new law as a gun aimed straight at their community. They weren't wrong; hostile surveillance and harassment have been a constant in American Muslim life over the last two decades. The law too often has been understood as a license for various law enforcement agencies to participate in putting these vulnerable Americans on notice that they are different and perhaps dangerous.

CAIR (the Council on American–Islamic Relations) has served as a leading umbrella civil rights organization for many embattled Muslim communities for the last two decades, as well as participated in broader human rights coalitions. For the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Patriot Act, the group polled American Muslims about whether they still felt under siege:

• 63% of American Muslims say they believe American media coverage of Muslims has not become more accurate since 9/11

• 69% said they experienced one or more incidents of anti-Muslim bigotry or discrimination since 9/11

• 34% said anti-Muslim rhetoric after 9/11 had an impact on their mental health

nevertheless

• 63% say their mosques have engaged in more interfaith dialogue since 9/11

• 95% say they always or sometimes speak up in response to anti-Muslim remarks

• 181 American Muslims ran for office in 2020

More here.

CAIR concludes:

Overturning these unconstitutional policies, such as the disastrous watchlist system, is within reach if we work together, inshallah.

Watchers

Not sure this is a disguised camera, but it might be.

I think about this when wandering about Walking San Francisco. Home surveillance cameras like Amazon's Ring are certainly picking up my perambulations around city neighborhoods. Who is that person with the camera (on the street I am often not accurately identified by gender) who goes by looking at houses intently? I take seriously the concerns of privacy advocates.

The cameras, they say, intrude on other people’s privacy by recording motion detected up to 30 feet away. The rights of passersby such as dog walkers, mail carriers, and children playing across the street are being violated without their consent, said Mike Katz-Lacabe, a member of Oakland Privacy, a coalition of people who are concerned about privacy and surveillance.

“Personally, I don’t want to live in a surveillance dystopia where my neighbors are essentially spying on me on behalf of my local law enforcement,” he said. ...

[Evan] Greer, [director of Fight for the Future,] said ... “I think it’s very Silicon Valley to assume we can either have a world with package theft, or we can live in a totalitarian surveillance state — but you can’t do both,” she said. “Given the choice, I’d rather live in a world with a little bit of package theft and a little less fascism.”

San Francisco Chronicle

Now I'm not bothering anyone or even approaching any doors. I might photograph your door as I walk by, if you've painted it in interesting colors or hung something novel off it. San Franciscans do the darndest things to express their individuality in their house exteriors, even in neighborhoods where the underlying architecture is mundane.

Other examinations of the proliferation of private-residence, cloud-enabled security cameras raise other concerns. Apparently Amazon's video cache of Ring observations has been hacked. And just having the cameras has trained their owners to be voyeurs.

The Washington Post surveyed more than 50 owners of in-home and outdoor camera systems across the United States about how the recording devices had reshaped their daily lives. Most of those who responded to online solicitations about their camera use said they had bought the cameras to check on package deliveries and their pets, and many talked glowingly about what they got in return: security, entertainment, peace of mind. Some said they worried about hackers, snoops or spies.

But in the unscientific survey, most people also replied that they were fine with intimate new levels of surveillance — as long as they were the ones who got to watch. ...

Matthew Guariglia, an analyst for the online-rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, [commented:] “Who hasn’t looked out and watched other people through their peephole? There’s a kind of morbid fascination to it,” he said. “The problem is when it’s not just you behind a peephole but a camera that’s on at all times, saving to a cloud you don’t control.”

We're losing privacy most everywhere and we don't usually even think of it. We all carry underlying, mostly unconscious, daily fears; we wish we were protected. And you just know that the downsides of all this surveillance will be felt most heavily where they always are, where people are least empowered to talk back to the watchers -- in poor communities and in communities of color.

Secret government terrorist watchlist is unconstitutional

The legal system is sl-o-o-w, as Congress' attempt to get testimony from Trumpites is demonstrating.

Hundreds of government intrusions on civil liberties deriving from the U.S. "war on terror" have been litigated for nearly two decades. Just yesterday a Federal judge issued a sweeping ruling which ought to knock down one of the pillars of the panicked post-9/11 surveillance state.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — The government's watchlist of more than 1 million people identified as "known or suspected terrorists" violates the constitutional rights of those placed on it, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga grants summary judgment to nearly two dozen Muslim U.S. citizens who had challenged the watchlist with the help of a Muslim civil-rights group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

... Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, called the ruling a victory. He said he will be asking the judge to severely curtail how the government compiles and uses its list.
"Innocent people should be beyond the reach of the watchlist system," Abbas said. "We think that's what the Constitution requires."

Abbas said that while there has been significant litigation over the no-fly list, which forced the government to improve the process for people seeking to clear their name from the list, he said Trenga's ruling is the first to broadly attack the government's use of the watchlist. Trenga also wrote in his 31-page ruling that the case "presents unsettled issues."

Ultimately, Trenga ruled that the travel difficulties faced by plaintiffs — who say they were handcuffed at border crossings and frequently subjected to invasive secondary searches at airports — are significant, and that they have a right to due process when their constitutional rights are infringed.

He also said the concerns about erroneous placement on the list are legitimate.

Associated Press

CAIR's executive director Nihad Awad claims the watchlist has become "effectively a Muslim registry..." In addition to over a million foreigners who may or may not exist, the government concedes that there were 4600 U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents who have not been charged with any crime, who had no recourse after being secretly included in the watchlist. The list has been shared throughout the government, with local law enforcement, and sometimes with private companies.

This decision should be the end of this -- but the government never gives up easily.

Arizona on my mind

Yesterday an update and fundraising appeal from the ACLU dropped in my email. By random chance I happened to open it (can't open 'em all.) As per usual, the ACLU is doing vital work.

In this case, the legal eagles are challenging an attempt by Arizona legislators to bar participation in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement "to end international support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law." The details are intricate as they often are, but according to the ACLU, this seems the crux:

Last year, an Arizona federal court blocked the state from enforcing its anti-boycott law, ruling that the law — which requires government contractors to certify that they are not participating in boycotts of Israel or Israeli settlements in the West Bank — violates the First Amendment.

Can't do that. BDS is a non-violent response to violent oppression, well within anyone in this country's free speech rights.

The case reminded me that Arizona has a history with boycotts -- boycotts of Arizona. The state was the target of a boycott when it legislated against the Martin Luther King day holiday; Phoenix lost a scheduled Super Bowl in 1993 over that one. Legislators learned that boycotts can hurt. Arizona attracted another high profile boycott in 2010 when it passed a law which directed local law enforcement to question people's immigration status, incentivizing racial profiling.

But the Arizona boycott law I remember vividly from personal experience was the state's attempt to outlaw the efforts of the United Farm Workers Union to organize in 1972. The UFW was profoundly dependent on support from urban liberals across the country for boycotts of grapes and lettuce in support of the people in the fields. (In fact it may have been far better at this tactic than at actually attracting and holding worker support.) Media suggested overzealous Arizona sheriffs were stopping and harassing motorists whose cars bore the then-ubiquitous bumpersticker "Boycott Grapes." Approaching the state while driving cross-country that spring with a carload of UFW vets, we wondered, should we remove our stickers? We didn't and had no problem. After all, we were all white.

These days, Arizona is yet another state where urbanization and demography are ever-so-slowly pulling the state away from its racist conservative past. Will the change be reflected in its politics, if not in 2020, perhaps in the next decade?

On freedom from unwarranted search and seizure while traveling

Back in the dim, distant days when I started this blog (2005!) I wrote a lot about the TSA and government watch lists. (After all, the E.P. and I were told we were on the no fly list for awhile, enough to offer a chance for the ACLU to try to find out what the government was up to.) This topic has been less a priority lately, but given everything else, it is not too surprising that it seems once again current.

We've all learned a lot since those days; there's an excellent, thorough, book on the history of the U.S. government using our desire to travel to constrain and control citizens they take to be troublemakers. (The picture is of Mrs. Ruth Shipley who did the dirty work for Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and FBI chief J.Edgar Hoover in the 1950s.)

Once again, the ACLU has taken up a "freedom to travel" case, this one of what seems a novel sort because it involves involuntary (short) detention of people who have not only passed through all the security theater that dominates our airports, but also have already completed their journey.

On February 22, 2017, Delta Airlines Flight 1583 departed San Francisco and headed for John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. As the plane was landing, passengers heard a strange announcement.

Speaking over the intercom, a flight attendant announced that everyone would have to show their documents in order to get off the plane. After passengers expressed their consternation, the flight attendant repeated her announcement, stating that officers would be meeting the plane and every passenger would have to show government-issued ID to deplane.

... the government does not have this authority. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires government agents to have individualized suspicion to conduct even a brief investigatory stop. Despite this, two Customs and Border Protection agents met Flight 1583 and stood immediately outside the aircraft door, blocking the exit into the jetway. The officers wore uniforms emblazoned with the words, “POLICE/CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION,” and carried guns visible in their holsters.

Passengers were naturally intimidated; some interactions with these apparent Homeland Security spooks seemed racially tinged to some passengers.

The ACLU's filing contains other notable details:

Despite the focus on the identification documents, DOE 1 and DOE 2 [officers] carried no clipboard, photograph, or list of names and did not appear to check the passengers’ identification against any list.

.... Plaintiffs did not consent to any search or seizure as they were attempting to deplane Flight 1583. Instead, they understood from the circumstances, as set forth above, that the stop and search was mandatory and that they were not free to deplane without submitting to the officers. The coercive circumstances included the announcements made by the flight crew at CBP’s direction, the presence of two large armed CBP officers obstructing the only means of egress from the plane, and the words and actions of those officers, as described above.

I recognize that last condition. When we were stopped at the San Francisco airport in 2002, we were surrounded by three urgently summoned police officers who told us that, "no" -- we might not go get a drink of water until they figured out what to do with us.

Liberty survives when people speak up against government infringements on our freedoms. It will likely be a long haul, but props to these plaintiffs for stepping up to the fight.

About the FBI, but not about James Comey

Easy to miss amidst the furor over the FBI director getting canned for investigating Trump's still unproved, but likely, Russian ties, was the release this week of the Council on American-Islamic Relations new report: The Empowerment of Hate: The Civil Rights Implications of Islamophobic Bias in the U.S. 2014-2016. The general picture is depressing, and reveals the country's underside:

Islamophobic bias continues its trend toward increasing violence. In 2016, CAIR recorded a 57 percent increase in anti-Muslim bias incidents over 2015. This was accompanied by a 44 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the same period.

From 2014 to 2016, anti-Muslim bias incidents jumped 65 percent. In that two-year period, CAIR finds that hate crimes targeting Muslims surged 584 percent.

The authors discuss many forms of bias, including in employment, in school, and harassment on the street. I found this chart particularly disturbing:

Of all federal agencies, the FBI -- our supposedly most professional national police -- was far and away the subject of the most bias concerns. The relative magnitude of these complaints seems off the scale.

Digging into the report, CAIR offers a carefully worded description of the community's relationship with the FBI.

Visits from the Federal Bureau of Investigation have become a regular feature of life for many American Muslims. The FBI regularly contacts individuals in order to question and interrogate them about their religious views and to surveil the Muslim community to gather general intelligence, rather than to acquire specific information regarding a credible crime or threat. However, the agency also investigates hate crimes and other criminal activity targeting Muslims and their places of worship, positive work for which many members of the community are grateful.

But last October and November, something seemed to escalate. Note, this was before Trump was elected, under Obama. Agents descended on Muslim enclaves, asking ten scripted questions. Some of these seem plausibly related to security concerns, though accusatory, such as "Do you know of anyone in the U.S. who raises money or provides support to Al-Qaeda or other extremist groups in Afghanistan or Pakistan?" But other seem just crackpot: "Are you aware of anyone with family or other connections to Afghanistan or Pakistan?" What do they think, that Muslims spring fully formed from the ground without parents or relatives?

CAIR's offers a very polite, measured pushback against this dragnet questioning.

CAIR’s concern is that headquarters instructed agents not to follow legitimate leads regarding any particular individual. Instead, it systematized an ineffective general sweep generated by the mindset that Muslims are a monolith and, in general, a threat to the nation. ... This mindset is in conflict with statements from two FBI Directors praising the Muslim community’s actions to report criminal activity. The questions themselves reflect an internal indecision on the part of FBI headquarters because they presume that Muslims would not come forward with information regarding criminal activity.

Concerned U.S. Muslim parents have in fact called in the authorities to report their own children who were "radicalizing."

Back in the early '00's, when the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were young and people in the United States were just as ignorant as we are today, we'd hear stories of GI's roughing up unlucky Afghan peasants while demanding to know whether the captives knew Osama bin Laden. One guy with a headdress is just like another guy with a head covering, right? That didn't get them very far. You'd think that we would have learned.

U.S. Muslims are understandably afraid with the Orange Tweeter unleashing the least professional, most bigoted elements in border control and law enforcement agencies. They long had to live with the unfounded suspicions of those among their neighbors for whom they are the Other.

Resist and protect much.

Chanukah 2016

Since the first night of Chanukah happens to coincide with Christmas Eve this year, we will be otherwise occupied and won't be able to join the friends with whom we usually mark the holiday of the lights. Fortunately, thanks to Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a communal celebration of the light of freedom and justice which does not fail was available in Union Square in San Francisco Wednesday evening.

Amid the Christmas shopping frenzy, scores of us came out in solidarity with all communities under threat in this time, most especially our Muslim friends and neighbors.

Zahra Billoo, Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-California), spoke of her anger at the ignorant hate being directed at her community. Most of us probably don't know the level of harassment this community was under before the election.

Did anyone else feel like they were hit by a speeding train this past November? For many American Muslims in the Bay Area, that’s exactly what it felt like.

... November was off to a rocky start from the very beginning, and the results of the elections had little to do with it. What wasn’t so open and obvious to very many people was that many American Muslims were paid a surprising visit by an unsolicited party.

In the days leading up to the elections, the FBI conducted a nationwide sweep, knocking on the doors and visiting the homes of law abiding American Muslims. The Bay Area community was part of a nationwide FBI sweep that specifically profiled and targeted American Muslims prior to elections about possible pre-election terrorism. Community members were asked appalling questions about whether they personally knew al-Qaeda leaders killed in U.S. military airstrikes the prior month or whether they knew of anyone who wished to cause harm to Americans at home or abroad. Nothing connected these individuals to each other or to any alleged threat. In fact, nothing connected them at all except the fact that they were Muslim and shared a similar ethnicity. ...

CAIR-SFBA Civil Rights Desk

These are the same sort of offensively ignorant questions our spooks asked Afghans under interrogation in 2001. Apparently they've learned nothing except that they suffer no penalty for abusing a community under bigoted suspicion.

It is heartening to know that some of us still know better.***Trump yesterday reaffirmed his intention of creating a registry of Muslim citizens and banning Muslim immigrants.

Our worst demons come out when we're scared

In this moment of exaggerated panic about vague foreign threats, while the Donald bleats for a registry of Muslims in the USA, we should recall we've been here before -- and we're mostly ashamed about it.

On February 19, 1942, two months after the U.S. was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order that permitted military authorities to declare areas from which "any or all persons may be excluded." General John L. DeWitt used this authority to force almost all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast into internment camps. Two thirds of the approximately110,000 persons sent to the camps were born in the United States and therefore were citizens; 30,000 were children; the rest were legal residents.

The military internment unleashed unabashed nativism and racism. Japanese ethnicity was rapidly made into a race in the classic white pattern. One of those military authorities, Major Karl Bendetsen, explained his plans:

"I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp."

This racializing of an ethnic group had broad consequences in the internment orders:

These edicts included persons of part-Japanese ancestry as well. Anyone with at least one-sixteenth (equivalent to having one great-great grandparent) Japanese ancestry was eligible. Korean-Americans and Taiwanese, classified as ethnically Japanese because both Korea and Taiwan were Japanese colonies, were also included.

And it is inadequate to think of the internment only as the mass imprisonment of families in hastily converted stables and remote tent camps; this was also about envious white neighbors seizing the property of the more prosperous Japanese-Americans. Many white residents of California and parts north had always resented their Japanese-American competitors. Austin E. Anson, managing secretary of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, spelled out his views to the Saturday Evening Post:

We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over... If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we'd never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we do not want them back when the war ends, either.

Internees lost their businesses, their savings, and their even their personal property.

In Hawaii, which had suffered an actual attack and sat in the midst of the Pacific battlefield, only 2000 of 157,000 residents of Japanese ancestry were placed in camps. The military there needed Japanese American labor in the fields and ship repair yards!

On the mainland, although by end of the war many Japanese Americans had been released and even recruited into the military,

... the exclusion order was not rescinded until January 2, 1945 (postponed until after the November 1944 election, so as not to impede Roosevelt's reelection campaign).

Most Japanese Americans never got their property back, but they campaigned long and hard for legal vindication and even reparations. In the late 1980s, Congress ordered payments of $20,000 to surviving detainees.

Hardship and mistreatment aren't good for anyone, but many Japanese Americans of the generation consigned to the camps became tenacious fighters for human freedom including Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, Minoru Yasui and Yuri Kochiyama. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) advocates for the civil and human rights of all people. They can be bold: JACL came out for legalizing same sex marriage in 1994 when most LGBT people had barely thought about this remote possibility. Today JACL is in the forefront of activities in support of the civil rights of Muslims and of calls for resettling Syrian escapees in the United States.

We should all be so generous.

The photo is a detail from a commemorative monument Japantown, San Francisco. I have used Wikipedia liberally here to check numbers and dates. The article on the internment is exceptionally good.

But how mighty is it?

Freedom of speech is a central creed. A portion of the citizenry may tolerate coerced confessions, warrantless searches, and inadequate spending on lawyers for the poor, but Americans tend to take personally their right to speak. Rights preserved or violated in the criminal justice system look remote to upstanding citizens who cannot identify with accused murderers, thieves and drug dealers. The right to speak, however, affects everyone who chooses to exercise it.

The people portrayed in these pages attest to the resilience of free speech used both to voice ideas and to try to suppress the ideas of others. ...

In Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist David K. Shipler offers a series of stories about contemporary free speech controversies in the U.S. The book continues the themes of his Rights of the People and Rights at Risk which explored how we have allowed our fear of terrorism and our fear of the (usually racially defined) Other to erode freedoms we think are embedded in our legal codes. In the first he seemed repulsed when describing how authorities had used the 9/11 atrocities as an excuse to extend lawless violation of civil liberties long the norm in communities of color to the rest of the population. In the second book, he seemed more habituated to ongoing abuses: ours has become a mindlessly fearful culture where principled resistance to authority has become exceptional.

This third book is an empathetic, intelligent, meticulous account of several contexts in which U.S. citizens have recently fought free speech fights. The flashes of indignation Shipler showed in the earlier volumes are largely absent. He calls himself "close to a First Amendment absolutist" but his object here is to understand more than to expose -- and certainly not to condemn broadly. Even where he seems to find restrictions on speech appalling, his touch is light.

On some of his topics I found the result enlightening. He carefully explores parental efforts to censor what books high schools may ask their children to read. Instead of portraying the protesting parents as narrow-minded bigots, he really allows them to explain what they are so afraid of. Their anguish turns out to be that their children are growing up in a too rapidly changing world, an understandable perception, even if not one that should control what young people may study.

Shipler's old indignation shows through in his chapters on the persecution of government whistleblowers and the national security state's attempts to intimidate and muzzle the reporters who tell their stories. We should grateful for journalists like James Risen who Shipler interviewed extensively for this chapter.

A section on "the cultural limits of bigotry" explores how changing rules of acceptable discourse -- no, it is NOT okay to say "ni__er" or "faggot" in public these days -- have left many citizens feeling silenced. Society at large sometimes punishes transgressors who break these mostly unwritten rules, like NBA team owner Donald Sterling who was forced to divest, though without losing his profit. But mostly, people who won't get with the program simply retreat to the welcoming silos of the right-wing subculture, bruised and angry. And since Shipler wrote, they have found Donald Trump to give voice to their fury.

Shipler seemed to me at his weakest in recounting how the Jewish Community Center in Washington DC let itself be bullied by conservative donors into booting out a much-celebrated little theater for mildly exploring some of the contradictions of Israel-Palestine. This is not a benign story; the inability on the part of much of the Jewish establishment to allow honest conversation about Israel is an active impediment to peaceful solutions, not some minor side-show. But Shipler doesn't go there.

Shipler is a thoughtful reporter; even a weak book from this author is worth reading. Presumably he has grouped the various topics in this volume together because he senses there's a connection under the general rubric of "free speech" from which we could learn. But he hasn't quite pulled out a connecting thread here. Since he seems committed to exploring the contemporary meaning of "civil liberties," maybe there will be a further volume in this series?

Mysterious exclusion unraveled: she's married!

In a couple of days, it will be eleven years since Stanford PhD and distinguished Malaysian affordable housing architect Rahinah Ibrahim was arrested at SFO, told she was on the TSA no-fly list, and then excluded from visiting the United States. Since 2008, she's won a court order for disclosure of why she's barred, experienced lengthy government stalling, been forced by her visa denial to testify from abroad on videotape, been the beneficiary of a secret ruling, finally been told that her listing came because an FBI agent checked the wrong box, and then, once more, denied a visa because of "terrorist activities.

The determined investigative journalist Raymond Bonner has tried to untangle the complete, shameful, saga for ProPublica. Bonner is the reporter who first uncovered the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador in 1982. He's used to getting to the bottom of cover-ups. For this article, he wrangled the first extensive interview with Ibrahim about her long case.

And it turns out, this story is also about the inability of U.S. authorities to separate the activities of an accomplished woman who follows her faith by wearing the hijab from their doubts about her husband!

[Judge William] Alsup provided a hint to the answer in three sentences, easy to overlook in his 38-page opinion, and carefully crafted so as not to reveal any classified information. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, there are nine grounds for denying a person a visa. “Some of them go beyond whether the applicant herself poses a national security threat,” Alsup wrote. The judge did not list the nine grounds. But the immigration law is a public document. Eight of the categories apply to the applicant. One does not. The ninth basis for turning down a visa application is if the person “is the spouse” of a foreigner who has engaged in any terrorist-related activity in the preceding five years.

Thus, the basis for Ibrahim’s place on the watch lists would appear to be something the law purportedly abhors — guilt by association, or in this case, by marriage.

The U.S. government's suspicions of Ibrahim's husband Mustafa Kamal seem flimsy indeed.

While his wife was at Stanford, Kamal undertook several humanitarian missions to Mindanao, the predominately Muslim province in the Philippines. A civil war had been simmering there for nearly two decades, waged by Muslims seeking independence from, or at least greater autonomy in, the overwhelmingly Catholic country. The war had created more than 200,000 refugees. When Kamal visited for five days in 2003, providing food for widows and orphans, building wells and schools, restoring mosques, the province had become a front in the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism; CIA and FBI agents were all over the place. ...

Former FBI and CIA agents who were working in that area at the time told me that Kamal, by his mere presence in Mindanao doing humanitarian work, would have come to the attention of American intelligence.

There may be another reason Ibrahim ended up on the no-fly list. “Maybe they got the wrong wife,” said an American official who has followed the case closely.

As allowed in Islam, Kamal has two additional wives. It is not something Ibrahim or her husband try to hide. He lists his wives, and posts photos of the families on Facebook. Altogether, Kamal has 13 children. They often gather at Ibrahim’s house on holidays. “We are one big family,” she told me.

Kamal’s third wife, Kurais Abdullah Karim, a Filipina, could also be a cause of Ibrahim’s problems. A lecturer at the International University of Malaysia, Karim, is from Mindanao and is, as Kamal put it, a “humanitarian activist.” In addition to having her own blog, about fashion, and posting regularly on Instagram, she is an unabashed supporter of the Muslim liberation movement in Mindanao. ... (In 2014, the Philippine Government and the secessionist Muslims signed a peace treaty ending more than four decades of civil war.)

Kamal said he has never had any involvement with Jemaah Islamiyah, or any other terrorist organization. Malaysian intelligence and security agencies keep close tabs on Malaysians who go to Mindanao, American and European intelligence officials told me, but they do not have a file on Kamal or Ibrahim. If they did, she would not be allowed to be a professor, let alone dean, at the government university, current and former Malaysian officials said, a conclusion shared by American officials who have worked in Malaysia.

... The State Department still considers her ineligible under the terrorism category, and she will have to apply again for a waiver should she seek to come to the United States.

I find Ibrahim's persistence in seeking truth and redress through all this quite inspiring. Perhaps that sort of grit is what it takes for a girl from a rural village to become an internationally recognized architect.

Guns and the no-fly list

On Sunday night the Prez suggested that

"Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun. What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon? This is a matter of national security."

I have to admit that I momentarily enjoyed the politics behind the suggestion. When Republicans are pissing in their pants at the idea of admitting desperate escapees from the Syrian war and ISIS, they refuse to vote to prevent people designated as dangerous from acquiring guns? That's low.

But hey, I was once told I was on the no fly list which was always a crock. Certainly I was never any danger to aviation or much of anything else. And much as the spooks like to tout their "success" at preventing terrorism, people who actually know something about security have long thought watch lists were mere "theater."

So I don't mind that that Jamelle Bouie has reminded anyone inclined to enjoy the Prez's thrust against gun lovers' hypocrisy that we're putting ourselves on the wrong side of rights we normally care about.

... civil libertarians—and liberals, at least during the Bush administration—think [the terrorist watch list] is constitutionally dubious. They’re right. “The list contains the names of people who the government thinks are a threat to civil aviation—terrorists,” writes University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner for Slate. “These people are denied passage. … Yet the government does not have proof that these people have committed crimes nor, since it can’t see into the future, that they will commit crimes.” If you’re on these lists, you’re presumed guilty until proven innocent, with no due process and little recourse.

The list is conceptually flawed, and using it to deny gun ownership is wrong on its face. Add racial and religious profiling to the mix—the people on the list, including Americans, are disproportionately Arab or from Muslim countries—and you have an anti-gun measure with deep disparate impact.

He's right; my politically convenient pleasure is wrong. Schadenfreude at Republican discomfiture is no excuse.

New York Times has amnesia

On Wednesday, the French authorities said they had carried out more than 414 raids across the country, arrested 64 people and placed another 118 under house arrest.

Under the emergency, the authorities are permitted to conduct raids and make arrests without first obtaining a warrant. But as soon as someone is arrested or property is seized, the regular legal system kicks in. Suspects in terrorism cases are already allowed to be held without charge for up to six days.

In the United States, even in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, raids on that scale would have created a storm of criticism, but the French, only 10 months after Islamist radicals attacked the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, have generally accepted the crackdown as necessary.

November 20, 2015

Actually, by November 2001, the Times was reporting that somewhere between 500 and 1000 miscellaneous Muslim males, of varying immigration statuses, had been picked and held, largely incommunicado, mostly without charges or lawyers.

Then as now, this wasn't law enforcement; it was a panic attack. Like the French, few in the U.S. objected to this blanket racial and religious profiling. None of those swept up in this dragnet were ever charged with terrorism. Perhaps the French can undercover some real perps? That doesn't seem to be what dragnets do.

Policing for profit

One of the less noted by-products of the country's misbegotten "War on Drugs" and post 9/11 security hysteria is that police departments are free to seize property from people not even charged with a crime. And they can keep it to fund their toys, as boasted above.

The Washington Post ran a significant expose last year. Private "police training" companies have thrived on teaching the game of asset seizure to cops.

One of those firms created a private intelligence network known as Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that enabled police nationwide to share detailed reports about American motorists — criminals and the innocent alike — including their Social Security numbers, addresses and identifying tattoos, as well as hunches about which drivers to stop.

Many of the reports have been funneled to federal agencies and fusion centers as part of the government’s burgeoning law enforcement intelligence systems — despite warnings from state and federal authorities that the information could violate privacy and constitutional protections.

A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.

If we didn't know before, we know since the Justice Department report on Ferguson which motorists and communities are most at risk from these piratical practices.

The Drug Policy Alliance is running a campaign against asset-seizure policing.

No Fly list sputters along

For awhile, because we'd been told we were on it, I wrote a lot about the U.S. government's No Fly list -- and the various other watch lists that popped up after 9/11. Last year I wrote up a good book on the history of terrorist watch lists. It seems governments instinctively restrict travel when they can get away with it.

These days, I fly unimpeded.

But lots of people -- mostly Muslim people it seems -- remain stuck in No Fly hell, not entirely predictably or rationally.

The latest case I've run across is that of Mourad Benchellali. Benchellali was released from Guantanamo in 2004. A French citizen, he was sold to the U.S. by Pakistanis after he escaped Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. invasion in 2001. By his own account, as related by the British human rights activist Andy Worthington, he was a dumb 19 year who blundered into a mess.

His father was a radical imam who had tried (and failed) to fight in Bosnia, his brother Menad had tried (and failed) to fight in Chechnya, and his brother, his father and even his mother had all spent time in French prisons, but he insisted that he went to Afghanistan for “an adventure” and as a way of enhancing his status, hoping that he would be “viewed differently” in his neighbourhood, and that his reputation might “match” that of his brother. He admitted that his sense of adventure was “misguided and mistimed,” and blamed his brother for encouraging him to go, and for arranging for him to attend a training camp. “For two months, I was there,” he wrote after his release, “trapped in the middle of the desert by fear and my own stupidity.”

The U.S released him to his home country in 2004, where he was tried, convicted of associating with terrorists, and given credit for time served in Guantanamo. A complex appeal process actually got the charges dropped, and re-raised, and dropped again. In 2008 Worthington reports that he explained further in an interview to McClatchy Newspapers:

It was June 2001, and I thought I’d take a vacation, be back in time for classes in September. Later, the papers would say I was a desperate outsider [in France], trapped looking in on an uncaring nation. But that’s not true. I was happy. I was getting an education. I had a job. I had a fiancee. I just thought I wanted a bit of adventure.

So what has he been doing since he returned to France beside writing a book alleging he was tortured by the U.S. in Kandahar and Guantanamo? He's been traveling about, using his own experience as an example to discourage young people tempted by the Islamic State's recruitment pitches. He's a counter-jihadi recruiter! He has flown in Europe with no trouble.

But when invited to speak at a conference on peace and radicalization in Montreal, he was prevented from attending by the U.S. No Fly list.

No, he wasn't coming to this country. But the U.S. makes any airline passing through U.S. airspace submit a passenger list. He was refused boarding in Lyon. At least he was told the U.S. list prevented him from keeping his appointment; too often people are just kept in the dark about what prevents them from flying.

I can't help wondering -- is Benchellali's continued inclusion on the list inefficiency on the part of list keepers who never remove anyone? Or do they really think this speaker against terrorist recruitment is a danger? Or is it because his story puts the U.S. in a bad light? We are not allowed to know, of course. National security theater in action ...

A little less hysteria, please

In 2004, then Senator and Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry told a reporter:

'We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance.''

I still think he was right. To me, this was Kerry's finest moment in a unfocused and sometimes craven campaign.

The people of this country used to be far more able to slough off occasional outbreaks of political violence without lapsing into hysterics. This is a big country. Unless terrorists obtain some real weapons, the damage they can do is limited, though obviously devastating for anyone unlucky enough to cross their path.

Does anyone reading here remember this?

... in New York, terrorists took advantage of peak holiday travel to explode a bomb, equivalent to twenty-five sticks of dynamite, that they had hidden in a coin locker -- collapsing the floor and ceiling, hurling shrapnel from the metal lockers that pierced through flesh and left body parts scattered through the main baggage claim area at La Guardia. Fourteen people were killed. No one ever claimed responsibility. No perpetrator was ever found.

Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge

That was in 1975. I certainly don't recall that particular horror. If it happened today, we would be exhorted to immerse ourselves in the story 24/7, hold commemorations, and take on the full trauma. There were 89 bombings that year in the United States attributed to terrorists. I don't remember us deforming our entire society in response. We may not have kept calm, but we simply carried on.

This week Gallup published a poll about our attitudes to the proper balance between civil liberties and intrusive government measures against the threat of terrorism.

Republicans and Democrats currently hold similar views of whether maintaining security or protecting civil liberties is more important in government anti-terror efforts. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 66% say civil liberties should be the higher priority and 29% say protecting citizens from terrorism should be. Meanwhile, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents prioritize civil liberties over security by 64% to 32%.

At the same time, most people (55%) think the sort of spying on citizens for which Edward Snowden provided evidence does not violate their civil liberties. But 41% do feel violated. Frankly, I'm surprised the latter number is that high. Our "civil liberties" are very abstract as they relate to government spying without felt consequences. For a lot of people, liberty means not being shot by a rampaging police officer, not some agency collecting your internet activity. Meanwhile we freely give away our "private" preferences and excitements on Facebook.

The question about whether we feel violated is a new one for Gallup. We won't know until they ask it repeatedly whether this is a perception that changes with the news. I think it might -- either way.

In general, this poll made me feel a little better about the good sense of my fellow citizens. Maybe we can stop responding foolishly to distant provocations. That would be hard with politicians fueling fear, but collectively we're not completely nuts.

H/t Digby for pointing to the poll.

Rights we don't use can erode

The law says we can photograph and film law enforcement officers while they are about the people's business. This often feels a bit risky. The ACLU in California is making it easier.

Their new iPhone app lets anyone shoot and automatically upload of interactions between cops and the rest of us. The app's best feature is that all it takes is one tap on the screen to send the recording off through the ether; unless police departments have the capacity to jam (do they?) the ACLU has it and there is no longer any reason for the cops to attack the phone. Maybe they'll even figure that out someday if enough of us wander around equipped to make instant reports?

I've installed the app. It seems simple to operate; there's a test feature and everything seems to work as described. If you allow the phone to geo-locate, it can even point you to locations where others using it are filming. There's a video tutorial here.
***I can imagine using this even though I'm just an old white lady who happens to live in a conflicted neighborhood. Twice in the last couple of months I've observed police-civilian interactions that might have been worth recording. Having this option will likely make me more inclined to film next time -- that's probably part of the point for the developers.

Best new candidate of 2014 gets an unlikely endorsement

Author Stephen King has a message for residents of Maine. If elected, Shenna Bellows could be trusted to be a Senator who understands and advocates for civil liberties. We have Elizabeth Warren standing up for the economic well-being of the 99 percent. We need an equivalent leader who stands strong for the rule of law.

"You don't have no freedom ..."

Bill de Blasio, the prohibitive favorite to be elected mayor of New York City next week, has promised to end this sort of thing. A court has ruled this kind of policing is unconstitutional. Let's hope that means there's a change coming.

In addition, de Blasio has promised New York Muslims that widespread, dragnet infiltration of their business and places of worship by the NYPD will stop when he is in office. He's pretty explicit:

“The efforts of surveillance have to be based on specifically specific information, and obviously you need to go through a careful vetting process,” de Blasio said during a rally at Columbus Park in Downtown Brooklyn.

Based on internal NYPD reports and interviews with officials involved in the programs, the NYPD has conducted wholesale surveillance of entire Muslim neighborhoods, chronicling daily life including where people eat, pray and get their hair cut, according to a series of reports by The Associated Press. Police also reportedly infiltrated dozens of mosques and Muslim student groups.

In addition, the NYPD secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorism organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing, according to the AP.

A de Blasio administration in New York will be something of a test whether a smart, civil liberties-oriented, executive can rein in one facet of our country's pervasive spook and surveillance infrastructure.

Many of us hoped Barack Obama could perform this feat at the national level, but the growth of the NSA/secret ops arena on his watch is a disappointment. Let's see what de Blasio does in our largest city.