When the bullets fly
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Via a World O' Crap post at Sadly, No comes this item from the periphery of the conservative movement, proferred by a real piece of work named Paula Devlin, who adopts an interesting view of property rights -- one, it must be noted, that is not significantly different than that promoted by the Montana Freemen, the militia movement and other right-wing extremists -- in a piece titled "Serfdom, American Style":
- The globalists, via the UN, concocteed the scheme called Agenda 21 that purports to restore this nation to its pristine condition prior to the arrival of Columbus. Our politicians, since they have their nests feathered, think this is fine and go right along with it. Forget about the will of the people or Constitutionality. If that's what the globalists want, that's what will happen and the people will be conned into believing these schemes will provide them a benefit. They could not be more wrong.
If anyone thinks they own their own piece of real estate, think again. You are renting it from the local taxing authority who will repossess it if you miss a payment. You cannot do what you wish with it, especially if an imaginary endangered critter might have crossed it before the last ice age. You cannot defend yourself against intruders, rapists or robbers. (Invite them in, give them coffee and ask them nicely to wait until the sheriff arrives from the donut shop.) You get to pay through the nose for all the "services" of government, which boil down to them telling you what you can and cannot do with what you own.
It wasn't so long ago property owners could shoot trespassers. Now the trespassers have all the rights, especially illegal immigrants. They should not even have legal standing. Property owners who have illegals on their property should shoot them on sight and ask questions later.
As it just so happens, of course, this is precisely what the radicals at Ranch Rescue -- as well as other border "militias" -- have in mind as well.
Well, at least one rancher on the border seems to have taken the sentiments of Paula Devlin and her ilk to heart, at least to some extent. While he won't take pot-shots at illegal immigrants -- who he says are mostly harmless -- he has indeed taken to slinging a few rounds in the direction of the smugglers he says come rumbling through his property. And he's paid a price for it:
- Echoes of the Wild West in one man's border war
... Kozak said he does not blame the illegal entrants who frequently walk through the gullies around his cabin, leaving him alone on their journey north.
His concern is the trucks racing across his land, their loads covered in tarps and the tail lights disconnected to avoid the attention of federal agents.
First he put up gates to try to stop the smugglers. After three $200 gates and spending hundreds more for fences and posts, Kozak gave up because they were simply knocked over by the trespassers.
Kozak moved on to other barricades, made of wood and barbed wire with danger signs.
That's when the shots started. The shooting then was random, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents told him they were happening because he was trying to stop drug loads.
Kozak responded with his own warning shots.
But Wednesday, when a maroon truck drove across his property, something in Kozak snapped.
He opened fire on the truck with his rifle, placing three rounds in the hood.
The truck raced away.
Meanwhile, Kozak parked his own truck sideways on the road to block their return path and went inside to fix himself a pot of coffee.
That's when the shooting started.
The first bullet hit the wall, destroyed the kettle on the stove. The next bullet went into the water heater, followed by three more shots that ripped into the house. One bullet hit a photo album, passing through 20 pictures before stopping.
Kozak took cover, grabbed his rifle and went out the front door. The shooters were gone.
His travel trailer, set up sideways on the smuggler's route, was on fire. It's now a melted ruin of ash.
"That's the first time they ever unloaded that many rounds," he says. "They gave me a message and said, 'Don't shoot at us any more.'"
It would be easier to feel sympathy for this rancher if he were to cooperate more fully with the Border Patrol, but he may have his own reasons for being leery.
But also worth noting: The same rancher wants nothing to do with Ranch Rescue, either.
This story is a classic case of how the extremist right finds a way to thrive: It injects itself into situations in which the government is actually failing its citizens, and not coming up with any realistic solutions either. In that sense, the situation for border communities in the current decade is not unlike that facing farmers in Middle America in the 1990s: the genuine grievances are going unaddressed, and when that happens in a democracy, then extremists find fertile ground for recruitment.
[Thanks to reader James Wilson for the tip.]
10:30 PM
Clarke, Clinton and terrorism
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
It is almost astonishing -- but not really, when you think about it -- the extent to which the White House is attacking former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke for speaking out about the Bush administration's multiple failures in coming to grips with terrorism both before and after Sept. 11, 2001.
None of the attacks so far have attempted to counter even a single one of Clarke's facts. Indeed, on one key factual point -- Clarke's Sept. 12 encounter with Bush in the Situation Room, in which Bush pushed him to find Iraq culpable in the attacks -- the Bush people, astonishingly enough, are claiming that Bush "doesn't recall" that meeting. Of course, the fact that Clarke claims to have at least three other eyewitnesses to the meeting has perhaps prevented Bush from simply claiming that Clarke is lying.
No, all of the attacks so far have been about Clarke's character. They can't attack him on facts, so they impugn his motives -- a classic ad hominem response that reveals the depths of their desperation.
Among the most interesting of these arguments are those suggesting that both Clarke and, in the bigger picture, Bill Clinton are even more to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks than George Bush, because they had the previous eight years to do something about al Qaeda and didn't.
Nevermind, of course, the role of certain factions of the right in undermining the Clinton efforts to corral al Qaeda. But if we're going to look at the big picture, then Bush has to be part of that as well.
However, there's no doubt that there is blame to be shared by the Clinton administration, on at least a few important counts.
One of the very real proximate causes of 9/11 was the failure of American intelligence, particularly in its multiple handlings of al Qaeda in the years preceding 2001, and especially its ability to gather intel on the ground, from within al Qaeda. Nearly everyone inside the intelligence services recognizes that this had primarily occurred during the Reagan era, when the CIA was heavily bureaucratized and much of its intel-gathering capacity severely diminished. See, for example, this piece in the Atlantic Monthly by Reuel Marc Gerecht, published just before 9/11, about just this subject:
- The CIA's Counterterrorism Center, which now has hundreds of employees from numerous government agencies, was the creation of Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, an extraordinarily energetic bureaucrat-spook. In less than a year in the mid-1980s Clarridge converted a three-man operation confined to one room with one TV set broadcasting CNN into a staff that rivaled the clandestine service's Near East Division for primacy in counterterrorist operations. Yet the Counterterrorism Center didn't alter the CIA's methods overseas at all. "We didn't really think about the details of operations -- how we would penetrate this or that group," a former senior counterterrorist official says. "Victory for us meant that we stopped [Thomas] Twetten [the chief of the clandestine service's Near East Division] from walking all over us." In my years inside the CIA, I never once heard case officers overseas or back at headquarters discuss the ABCs of a recruitment operation against any Middle Eastern target that took a case officer far off the diplomatic and business-conference circuits. Long-term seeding operations simply didn't occur.
In this sense, Clinton inherited a serious problem -- and even when confronted with various terrorist attacks, did little to attack it. In some regards, he actually condoned and abetted it. Clinton certainly carries some of the weight of 9/11, and he would probably admit as much in a candid moment.
None of this, however, compares to Bush's pre-9/11 record, which -- as Clarke has revealed in brilliant detail -- was unremittingly a litany of failures to comprehend the real threat that terrorism posed to America, and to focus his energies and the public budget on frivolous diversion, most notably a missile-defense system. Bush's downgrading of the counterterrorism chief's role from a Cabinet-level spot to a subjuncture of the Justice Department is only the signal move of a wide range of missteps that Bush took to undermine the nation's counterterrorism efforts.
The point isn't so much that these efforts (or lack thereof) aided or abetted the 9/11 attackers. There's simply no guarantee that even if Bush had done everything right, he could have prevented the attacks (just as probably nothing Clinton could have done would have effectively prevented Oklahoma City).
The point is that Bush's actions beforehand indicated a very poor grasp of the nature of terrorism -- and his actions afterward have continued to demonstrate that serious lack of judgment.
What especially demonstrates this incapacity is Bush's insistence on an almost obsessively military orientation of the "war on terrorism," which has led us into the clearly diversionary Iraq war. This orientation, as I've discussed recently, has many side consequences, not the least of which is that while we can make real logistical inroads against groups like al Qaeda (and we have), at the same time we substantively contribute to the environment that breeds future terrorism.
Moreover, Bush has simultaneously de-emphasized efforts to confront domestic terrorism, which as OKC established is fully capable of inflicting serious harm as well, and which in a 9/11 environment is capable of even more egregious harm in the way that it piggybacks off of international terrorism (see, e.g., the anthrax attacks). That Bush has done so indicates the extent to which the "war on terrorism" waged by Bush is actually, as previously noted, a political public-relations campaign.
In this regard, perhaps the most amusing of the ad hominem attacks on Clarke are those that accuse him of publishing his book, and taking his criticism of Bush public, for "political" reasons: [Snivel snivel] "He's bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign!"
This reminds me of the way Bush supporters smeared the families of 9/11 victims by suggesting they were just playing "partisan politics."
You know, I think it's undeniable that all of these people are fairly up-front about their desire to see Bush lose re-election.
But then, it's also worth keeping in mind that Richard Clarke was a registered Republican in 2000, just as some of the 9/11 family members are former Republicans as well.
These people didn't reach the point that they have simply because of some kind of gamesmanship that treats politics as a football game with points scored and lost by competing sides. They came to their decisions to denounce the Bush administration because they had all seen, in very tangible ways, just how disastrous this presidency has been for the nation. They understand that replacing him is a fundamental step necessary for the country to win the war on terrorism.
It doesn't seem to cross the minds of the conservatives attacking Clarke and other Bush critics that yes, these people have been politicized -- but politicized for very good reasons. It is more than likely, incidentally, that there are a couple million jobless workers out there who have been politicized for similarly good reasons. They've all seen, in their lives and those of everyone around us, how the Bush administration has made life worse for all Americans.
If being united in the desire to see Bush defeated at the polls makes these people partisan politicos, then so be it.
But when it's someone like Richard Clarke, or the families of the terrorists' victims, who is saying so, then the rest of us are going to listen carefully to their reasons.
4:31 PM
Driving the wedge
This weekend in Seattle, methodist Church elders dealt a major setback to the right-wing campaign to divide the churches over the issue of allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the ministry:
- Gay pastor can continue ministry
A lesbian Methodist pastor will be allowed to continue her ministry after she was acquitted Saturday in a church trial over her sexual orientation.
After about 10 hours of deliberations, a jury of 13 pastors ruled in favor of the Rev. Karen Dammann, 47, who disclosed three years ago that she was in a homosexual relationship. Two pastors were undecided and the rest found her not guilty of practices "incompatible with Christian teaching."
It was an interesting ruling, because United Methodists (particularly those in the West), with a long history of progressivism, have been among the most tolerant in ministering to gays and lesbians. But the larger church -- particularly those congregations in the South -- have refused any changes in the church's national rules regarding allowing gays and lesbians into the ministry itself. It represented a real conflict between two competing impulses within the church:
- Church law prohibits the ordination of self-avowed, practicing homosexuals. But the church's social principles support gay rights and liberties.
"We, the trial court, reached our decisions after many hours of painful and prayerful deliberations, and listening for and to the word of God," the jury said in a statement released after the verdict. "We depended upon the prayers of the whole church, which undergirded our process. We depended on the leading of the Holy Spirit."
Of course, this is only the early stages of this particular fight. See the P-I's story the following day:
- United Methodists grapple with gay ban
... But the battle over homosexuality in the Methodist ministry is sure to be rejoined April 27 in Pittsburgh, when representatives of the 117 regional conferences around the world assemble in the General Conference, which meets every four years and determines church doctrine.
Homosexuality has been on the agenda every time since 1972, when the General Conference adopted a committee statement that "homosexuals not less than heterosexuals are persons of sacred worth. ..." -- but only after a floor vote added the phrase "... although we do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider the practice incompatible with Christian teaching."
That started what a church panel on homosexuality recently called "a long and painful struggle ... which continues down to the present time."
It should be clear what Methodist progressives are up against. Indeed, the response from church officials in other parts of the country was fairly ominous:
- From the other side of the struggle, the Rev. James Heidinger II of Lexington, Ky., said that decision amounted to "jury nullification" of church doctrine.
"It seemed to so many ... that this was an open-and-shut case," said Heidinger, who leads a conservative, traditionalist movement in the church. "There was never any question about what Karen Dammann was involved in. She admitted that.
"I am stunned by the decision of this trial jury. That is a group, clearly, in the annual conference out there in Washington state, where they're really not -- they don't personally, themselves, embrace the church's position on this issue."
And of course, the faction that has fomented this fight from the beginning -- notably, the Scaife-funded Institute for Religion and Democracy weighed in with its own harsh condemnation of the ruling:
- "The church trial for the Rev. Karen Dammann in Washington state was farcical," noted IRD United Methodist spokesman Mark Tooley. "Every United Methodist General Conference since 1972 has declared homosexual practice to be incompatible with Christian teaching. Yet a jury of 13 clergy decided the church in fact has no position on this topic."
What was especially striking about the IRD release was the way it sought to marginalize the Western churches, making all too plain just how it intends to use the issue as a wedge to weaken the larger church:
- The Western Jurisdiction of the 10 million member United Methodist Church (8.3 million in the U.S.) is the denomination's most liberal region and the most resistant to upholding church teachings about marriage and sex. It is also the fastest declining part of the church and now comprises only about four percent of the church's membership. The jurisdiction comprises the Pacific and Rocky Mountain states, which include some of the fastest growing areas of the U.S. population.
"Here is the irony," Tooley said. "Liberal church leaders, who emphasize tolerance and open doors, are largely unable to attract new converts to the faith. When they succumb to the surrounding secular culture, the secular culture does not embrace them, it merely responds with an indifferent shrug."
In this case, he may be right. The secular left needs to wake up and begin defending its Christian allies -- and too often, it is blind to their very existence.
3:31 PM
An excerpt of sorts
Monday, March 22, 2004
For your reading pleasure, may I direct readers to my just-finished three-part series at The American Street, titled "Hate on Fat Tuesday". It's a firsthand account of my experience at the 2001 Seattle Mardi Gras Riots:
Part 1: Blood on the Streets
Part 2: A Twice-Shaken City
Part 3: The Hole in the Law
Most of this text is taken from a chapter of Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America -- due on the shelves in June -- that we wound up excising altogether. (I've included in the third part of the series a capsule description of most of the events of the book, to lend it some context in this version.) It was a bit of an experiment, sort of a twist near the end of the book, which spends most of the preceding 250 or so pages examining the problem of hate crime with an emphasis on rural America, and it didn't work, so we pulled it. It's still a worthwhile piece of storytelling, though, so I've republished it here. Hope you enjoy.
9:06 PM
Bad for business
Just call it the magic of the marketplace:
- Some companies wary of moving to Utah, citing intolerance
Seems having a reputation for reactionary ultraconservatism is bad for business -- at least when it comes to attracting the best and the brightest to your state:
- The state's moral conservatism was in full display during a February debate when two Republicans argued for forcing women to carry to term any fetus conceived of rape.
That "disrespectful" debate and concerns that Utah is too backward for raising children prompted executives of two other companies to separately back off tentative plans to move some operations to Utah, says Democratic state Sen. Ron Allen.
Allen won't identify the companies, which fear product boycotts in Utah, but says they would have brought 2,000 jobs with a corporate headquarters for one and a technology and engineering center for the other.
"I'm not trying to make trouble for Utah. I'm saying we have an image problem. How can we ignore it?" Allen asked. "We need to brand ourselves, and part of that branding is all of us being on the same sheet of music and promoting Utah in a positive way."
It's not just Democrats making this point, either:
- Second-term U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett, a Republican, last week volunteered yet another example of a company that decided against moving to Utah. Without naming names, he said the chief executive of a New York publishing company told him that the company's mostly single employees balked at relocating to Utah.
Bennett calls the Utah Legislature "a very yeasty place for debate" and its majority Republicans "quite colorful." Asked whether the Legislature too often gets bogged down in ideological passions, he said he "was not going to venture further into that particular swamp" because "I got in enough trouble with the legislators" two years ago blasting GOP-crafted gerrymandering.
"When companies look at relocation, they look at a lot of factors," including state taxes and a region's quality of life, said Fraser Bullock, a venture capitalist and Olympic organizer who helped Utah squeeze a $100 million profit out of the 2002 Winter Games.
Bullock said the games projected a positive image of Utah, "a sense that we're not that different" from others. But he's worried those gains are being eroded by the Legislature's so-called moral message bills.
None of this is really news to anyone who grew up in the archconservative West, because we all know that the best and brightest young people who are from those places eventually flee for more tolerant and civil climates.
Actually, there are those who say that keeping people like us out is exactly the reason that these conservatives cultivate this reputation.
4:59 PM
Papers, please
It isn't just Freepers who are resorting to physical intimidation when confronting their political opponents. Now it's elected Republican officials, according to the Washington Post:
- A contentious General Assembly hearing on illegal immigration led to a scuffle and shouting match yesterday between two Republican lawmakers and advocates for immigrant rights.
Baltimore County Dels. Patrick L. McDonough and Richard K. Impallaria said they left the hearing to confront four advocates who they said had referred to them as "racists" during testimony on a bill to study the financial impact of illegal immigration.
Advocates from Casa de Maryland said Impallaria turned on one of their lobbyists in the hallway, questioning her immigration status.
"He called me an illegal and said, 'You are probably one of those who broke the law,' " said Natali Fani, 23, a Latina lobbyist for the Takoma Park-based advocacy group. "He was pointing his finger right in my face, and he was yelling. It was really ugly."
Jamie Kendrick, a union leader working with the group, said he intervened, only to have McDonough push him in the hallway of the Lowe House Office Building.
"He physically shoved me aside," said Kendrick, executive director of the Service Employees International Union Maryland-DC state council. "It was kind of surreal. I have been doing this for eight to 12 years and have never seen a delegate come out of a hearing loaded for bear like that, and certainly never saw a delegate physically accost a member of the public like that."
The intimidation tactics were accompanied by the usual Republican racial sensitivity, too:
- Kendrick said McDonough also asked to see Fani's "papers." Impallaria denied that anyone asked to see Fani's papers but said he asked whether she was an illegal immigrant. "I wanted to see how this legislation would affect her," he said.
Pretty soon, that will be the standard response to anyone questioning the conservative agenda: "Show us your papers, please."
4:42 PM
No AWOL takers
The unanswered questions about George W. Bush's military record continue to go unanswered -- which is becoming, in a way, a kind of answer in itself.
Some of you may recall that, a few weeks ago, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau put up a significant offer: He would pay $10,000 to any National Guard veteran who could step forward and prove that he had served with Bush in Alabama. If no one did, he'd donate that amount to the USO.
Well, the results are in: No one came forward, and so the money is going to the USO:
- Alas, none of the over 1600 entries we received qualified for the proferred $10,000.Three carefully and arbitrarily selected runner-ups were posted on the Straw Poll site, where DTH℘ readers passed judgement on them. Here are those submissions, and the prizes they have won -- followed by a generous and representative sampling of the entries that overflowed our in-box. We truly appreciate the efforts of all those who selflessly joined us in our efforts to take the Bush Guard story out of play.
This perhaps shouldn't surprise anyone. After all, a couple of veterans' groups have been offering a $1,000 cash reward for anyone to step forward and establish Bush's presence at the Alabama Guard base since 2000. No one ever has.
Bush's defenders keep pointing to the testimony of one "Bill" Calhoun, who claims he served with Bush in Alabama the summer and fall of 1972 -- even though records clearly show Bush wasn't there when Calhoun says he was. Interestingly, however, Calhoun has never come forward to collect any of these rewards -- perhaps because doing so would mean he'd be at risk of perjuring himself.
And there's a reason no one else has bothered to do so -- the numbers of people who could have served with Bush in Alabama are really quite small, and none of the rest of his fellow veterans can recall Bush arriving at the base at all. That was one of the points of the Memphis Flyer story that interviewed others who were in the Alabama Guard at that time, including two who were looking for Bush to show his face:
- Though some accounts reckon the total personnel component of the 187th as consisting of several hundred, the actual flying squadron -- that to which Bush was reassigned -- numbered only "25 to 30 pilots," Mintz said. "There's no doubt. I would have heard of him, seen him, whatever."
Even if Bush, who was trained on a slightly different aircraft than the F4 Phantom jets flown by the squadron, opted not to fly with the unit, he would have had to encounter the rest of the flying personnel at some point, in non-flying formations or drills. “And if he did any flying at all, on whatever kind of craft, that would have involved a great number of supportive personnel. It takes a lot of people to get a plane into the air. But nobody I can think of remembers him.
“I talked to one of my buddies the other day and asked if he could remember Bush at drill at any time, and he said, ‘Naw, ol’ George wasn’t there. And he wasn’t at the Pit, either.’”
The “Pit” was The Snake Pit, a nearby bistro where the squadron’s pilots would gather for frequent after-hours revelry. And the buddy was Bishop, then a lieutenant at Dannelly and now a pilot for Kalitta, a charter airline that in recent months has been flying war materiel into the Iraq Theater of Operations
“I never saw hide nor hair of Mr. Bush,” confirms Bishop. . "In fact," he quips, mindful of the current political frame of reference, "I saw more of Al Sharpton at the base than I did of George W. Bush."
These same veterans, who remember Calhoun as well, are clearly skeptical of Calhoun's story (which is putting it nicely):
- Bishop was even more explicit. “I’m glad he [Calhoun] remembered being with Lt. Bush and Lt. Bush’s eating sandwiches and looking at manuals. It seems a little strange that one man saw an individual, and all the rest of them did not. Because it was such a small organization. Usually, we all had lunch together.
“Maybe we’re all getting old and senile,” Bishop said with obvious sarcasm. “I don’t want to second-guess Mr. Calhoun’s memory and I would hate to impugn the integrity of a fellow officer, but I know the rest of us didn’t see Lt. Bush.” As Bishop (corroborated by Mintz) described the physical environment, the safety office where the meetings between Major Calhoun and Lt. Bush allegedly took place was on the second floor of the unit’s hangar, a relatively small structure itself... It was a very close-quarters situation “ It would have been “virtually impossible,” said Bishop, for an officer to go in and out of the safety office for eight hours a month several months in a row and be unseen by anybody except then Major Calhoun.
In the meantime, Doonesbury again tackled the subject in Sunday's strip -- rather pointedly, I might add.
7:45 AM
Ratcheting the violence
Sunday, March 21, 2004
The scene in Fresno this weekend may well have given us a preview of the shape of this summer's presidential campaign:
- Arrest mars Fresno anti-war rally: Organizer is accused of interfering with a police officer
What the headline doesn't explain -- nor does the story until you get down deep into it -- was that the rally was targeted by members of the Free Republic (whose role as far-right "transmitters" I have discussed previously), which is based in Fresno.
And cops, instead of properly dealing with the instigators, arrested the rally's organizer on the thinnest of pretexts.
At least one Freeper showed up early for the rally and began trying to provoke arguments with members of Peace Fresno, the organizers of the event. Ken Hudson, the group's secretary and a teacher at local elementary school, approached the Freeper and warned him he would call police if he tried disrupting the rally. The Freeper, evidently, persisted, and local sheriff's deputies were called.
Not that Peace Fresno is on any great terms with the sheriff's office. In fact, an undercover deputy infiltrated the group last year, creating quite a local row when this was revealed. The group has filed a civil-liberties claim against the office.
The Fresno Bee story describes Saturday's situation thus:
- Hudson called sheriff's deputies to the park and asked them to talk with the unidentified Free Republic representative.
Hudson said he twice asked deputies to move away from a Peace Fresno banner beside the rally stage to talk with the man because the rally was about to start. He denied a statement by deputies that he asked them to leave.
Sheriff's Sgt. Mark Bray said the unidentified man was accused by protesters of trying to incite them and that Hudson's actions kept them from talking with the man about his behavior. Deputy Eric Garringer ordered the arrest because of Hudson's alleged interference.
There are more details at the Peace Fresno Web site:
- Ken had this to say about his arrest earlier today: Ken says that he was at Courthouse Park preparing for the arrival of the marchers when he noticed a Freeper who goes by the name of "At Bay." At Bay was going up to event participants and engaging them in hostile conversations. Ken said that At Bay appeared to be attempting to provoke people and he (Ken) called the sheriff. Ken was concerned that At Bay was going to get into a violent confrontation with someone.
The Sheriff arrived and talked to Ken for about 10 minutes. During that time At Bay tried to intervene in the conversation several times. Each time he (At Bay) was told to back off by the sheriff's deputy. Deputy Garringer then went to talk with At Bay. They were standing in front of the Peace Fresno banner, just to the side of the main stage.
It was at this time that the anti-war marchers began to arrive for the rally. Ken says he went over to Deputy Garringer and At Bay and suggested they move from the stage area so the "permitted" rally could begin. Garringer told Ken to back off. Ken took several steps back. He held the permit in his hand and said again that Peace Fresno had a permit to hold a rally here today and asked them to move from in front of the stage area. That is when Ken was arrested.
Accompanying this account was an interesting photo, especially for those of us schooled in police body language:
As the account describes:
- This is a picture of At Bay talking with the deputy sheriffs about 15 minutes after the arrest. When they were done talking they shook hands and At Large returned to his work of disrupting the crowd. He told one peace activist that he was there to monitor and photograph the criminals and anti-American scum that attend these events.
At Bay himself later chimed in on the comments on this board, claiming he was just there participating in his First Amendment rights. His account -- since deleted -- conveniently omitted his apparent provocations and attempts at disruption.
But most noteworthy, in my view, was the Freeper sewage that came spilling over onto the comments of the board:
- Fuckin Leftist traitors break the law and think they should get away with it?! FUCK YOU YA GODDAMN LEFTIST PUKES AND DON'T EVEN THINK OF FUCKING WITH FREE REPUBLIC MOTHERFUCKERS!
WE WILL BEAT YOU DOWN IN THE STREETS NEXT FALL!!!!
The same commenter later promised:
- If I see you or any of your comrades from Dem Underground I will kick the living shit out of you you filthy faggotcunt traitor
DO NOT IDENTIFY YOURSELF AS LEFTIST OUT ON THE STREET YOU PIECE OF SHIT OR YOU WILL BE BEATEN UNCONSCIOUS YOU GODDAM ENEMY OF AMERICA!!!!!
These comments were later deleted from the board, along with several responding to the threats.
But I've preserved them here because they encapsulate the right-wing mentality that's floating about out there, stirred up by two years' worth of drum-beating about liberals being traitors and not real Americans, an "evil," as Sean Hannity describes it, on an equal footing with terrorism. The product is a growing eliminationism directed at liberals. The campaign I saw getting its test run in Montana is all primed and ready to go for this summer's presidential campaign.
Last year, in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, we saw an early version of this strategy: Not content merely to hold their own pro-war demonstrations, right-wing radio hosts began inviting their listeners to invade peace rallies, disrupt them, and shout them down. They succeeded in doing so on several occasions. At other times, they did not. Accompanying the campaign was a steady patter of eliminationism and death threats directed at war protesters.
So expect to see a lot more of these kinds of open provocations this coming year: Bush supporters invading and disrupting Kerry rallies; threats of violence directed at anyone supporting the "traitors" and "appeasers"; and eventually, the eruption of actual violence. It's hard to say which side will shoot first (the right-wingers are more likely, since they have the guns, but you never know how these things will play out), but it's looking increasingly like someone's going to get hurt.
Worst of all, it's also looking like law enforcement is going to be part of the problem.
[Thanks to Julius for the Peace Fresno link.]
11:27 AM
Republican family values
Friday, March 19, 2004
The next time some blowhard Republican tries to tell you that conservatives are all about moral values and that today's decadent teenagers are the product of liberalism, direct them to this story, out of Georgia:
- Another attack on Hispanic reported
Seems a claque of well-to-do white kids from Cherokee County decided earlier this year to prey on Guatemalan immigrant laborers because they typically carried cash and were unlikely to report the robberies. They'd pick them up at the usual day-laborer hangouts, take them out to the sticks, beat the crap out of them and threaten them with death.
Five youths, all of whom attended Cherokee High School in Canton, were charged in the Feb. 2-3 attacks on two day laborers, in which they robbed the men of paltry sums. These kids weren't white trash who needed the money in any event.
No, as an earlier story makes clear, these kids were from well-known and well-off local families -- so much so that two judges and the local prosecutor had to recuse themselves in the case:
- In 2003, Scott Cagle, an uncle of Ben Cagle's, made a $400 campaign contribution to Mills, according to campaign disclosure reports.
When District Attorney Garry Moss removed his office as prosecutor three weeks ago, he said it was because of his acquaintance with members of Ben Cagle's extended family. Ben Cagle's grandparents are founding members of Cherokee's Republican Party and remain active in civic and cultural affairs.
These kids did it not for money but seemingly for "kicks". In the South, though, such claims of mere frolicry have a history of covering for acts of racial terrorism -- otherwise known as hate crimes.
Indeed, that concern was raised locally:
- Hispanic community advocates want prosecutors to add hate-crime charges because of the way the boys characterized their actions. A hate-crime conviction can add up to five years to any sentence. The next grand jury announcement of indictments will be in April.
Wheeler told police he and the other boys targeted the Guatemalans because they knew Hispanics usually carried cash, the chief of detectives testified.
"It was easy money," Trifilo said, summarizing Wheeling's explanation.
It's worth noting that there are real problems with the prosecutor's rationale in not pursuing such charges.
Blaming these attacks on an economic motive is not very credible, considering the tiny sums obtained (the entire spree netted about $570) as well as the economic backgrounds of the perpetrators. In fact, there is a distinct lack of a serious economic motive in this case -- which is, in fact, one of the earmarks of a bias-motivated crime.
Another indicator -- in some states, it constitutes the very definition of a bias crime -- is the intentional selection of the victims by their race. That this occurred was unquestionable, and in fact at one point the kids apparently bragged about "robbing Mexicans."
Moreover, an economic motive doesn't in itself rule out a bias motivation as well. The question is whether investigators knew what to look for and how to get it, or whether it even crossed their radar.
In an event, regardless of any hate-crime element, it's always nice to see good Republican moral values being instilled in today's youths.
[Thanks to Rick in my comments.]
10:06 PM
Republican racial values
The next time some Republican blowhard wonders aloud why blacks vote so overwhelmingly Democratic, you can just point them to this story:
- NAACP flap resurfaces with Yow T-shirt
To hear Commissioner Billy Yow tell it, it's just a shirt.
In fact, he said, it's a shirt he's been hawking quietly for eight months now that just happens to feature a character urinating on the letters "NAACP," a reference to the national civil rights group.
But the shirt has created a buzz, thanks largely to prominent mention in a new local weekly tabloid affiliated with another county commissioner, and it could resurrect old feuds involving race, politics and the county's elected governing board.
"If someone labels me a racist, that's just their narrow-mindedness," Yow, who is white, told a group of reporters gathered in front of his house Wednesday afternoon.
The shirt uses the stars-and-bars design of the Confederate battle emblem, which has been labeled by some, including chapters of the NAACP, as a racist emblem. It is touted by others as a symbol of Southern pride and heritage.
Yow called the design "a symbol of freedom."
The shirt, Yow said, was an exercise of free speech originally prompted by his 2003 battle with local NAACP chapters that led to calls for his removal.
"I'm still not over it," Yow said of the fight. "God forgives; Billy Yow don't."
And what was the dispute about? It was about Yow openly discriminating against any NAACP member in a hiring matter. "NAACP member" being a euphemism for ... well, you know.
- The shirt's history is rooted in last year's search for a new county manager and Yow's assertion that Alston, who was then chairman of the board, wanted to find an NAACP member for the post. Yow was quoted in February 2003 as saying that he wouldn't vote to hire an NAACP member "unless he was very overly qualified."
That and other comments sparked protests from local chapters of the NAACP and a vote by the county commissioners that Yow interpreted as a censure. The board eventually rescinded that move after Yow filed a lawsuit.
Yow eventually dropped the suit, and the county hired Willie Best, who is black, as county manager.
Yow's racial bias couldn't be any clearer -- and his wink-and-nudge act isn't fooling anyone.
He is, of course, a GOP stalwart.
[ Thanks to a complete bunch of pants, via Frograbbitmonkey.]
9:29 PM
Lucky us
Thursday, March 18, 2004
I mentioned yesterday that there has been a recent uptick in right-wing domestic terrorism, ranging from the Texas cyanide bomb case to the Florida man who planned a bombing spree against abortion clinics and gay bars.
What's noteworthy is that, so far, we have been very fortunate in all these cases, which have been cracked by happenstance (especially in the Krar case) and watchful citizens -- not because of crack work by law enforcement, whose emphasis, as we have seen, has shifted away from domestic terrorism.
An older case of domestic terrorism -- dating from an incident and arrest that occurred in early 2002, but which went utterly unnoticed in the press -- is now coming to light, and the story underscores, again, just how lucky we've been.
According to this report in the Tennessean, a sharp-eyed citizen likely prevented a Buford Furrow wannabe from shooting up a Jewish children's school in Nashville back in January 2002:
- On this leafy street in Nashville's Richland neighborhood, Smith could study the Jewish school while traffic was forced to squeeze past him awkwardly on the right. One of those passing motorists saw the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle on Smith's lap, the barrel pointed toward the school.
The motorist in a white car watched as Smith gestured to him. Smith drove forward, made a U-turn and eventually pulled onto West End Avenue. By then, the driver had noted the Contour's license plate and flagged down a Metro police officer.
By midafternoon, Michael Smith was in custody, starting a legal case that ended yesterday with his sentencing in federal court.
Immediately after his capture on Jan. 4, 2002, local police and federal agents started peeling away the layers of the former paramedic's life. They found live hand grenades, pipe bombs, boxes and boxes of ammunition, right-wing hate literature and military manuals detailing sniper techniques.
Ah well. Just another "isolated incident", right?
Meanwhile, in Boston, a neo-Nazi's threat against black bus drivers threw a scare into the transit system:
- MBTA cops alerted area police last night to be on the lookout for a car carrying a white man who threatened to blow up every bus he saw with a black driver.
"This is a very serious incident to us, not only because of the threat to blow up a bus, but because of the racial overtone of the threat,'' MBTA police Lt. Robert Lenehan said.
... The man claimed to be a member of the Aryan Nation and used a racial slur as he threatened to blow up any bus with a black driver. Then he got back into the car, and it sped off.
Yeah, but, see, it can't be terrorism. These were Americans. Right?
10:46 PM
"Who cares what you think?"
Self-admitted regular schmoo Bill Hangley finally comes forward to talk about his brief encounter with George W. Bush, which produced probably the Bushism to end all Bushisms:
- A church picnic in Philadelphia, designed to help George W. Bush promote his faith-based policies. I was working at the time for a local nonprofit that had helped set it up, but I had some serious misgivings about the president's performance up to that point, and being a part of the whole operation had left me feeling a bit like a pseudo-person. So when I had the chance to shake Bush's hand, I said, "Mr. President, I'm very disappointed in your work so far. I hope you only serve four years."
His smiling response was swift: "Who cares what you think?"
I agree with Hangley that the quote ought to be appearing on T-shirts, preferably at Bush appearances. (Of course, anyone wearing one would be automatically sent to the "First Amendment zone.")
- And now, as November approaches, I have to thank the president for pointing me toward exactly the right question. The voters won't go to the polls thinking only of war or taxes or moral clarity. They'll be asking themselves, "Does Bush care what I think?"
The only appropriate answer to which, of course, would be a smirk.
10:08 PM
What I've been doing instead of blogging
I've been a bad boy, I know.
7:41 PM
A note
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
By the way, has anyone else observed the profoundly anti-democratic sentiment that underpins the neoconservative spin about the outcome of the Spanish election?
At the base of the contention that the defeat of Aznar constituted "appeasement" is the belief that the voters didn't know what they were doing. That "democracy" (as these thugs define it) is too important to be left in the hands of voters.
That, of course, along with the intimations that the Spanish elections should have been postponed. (For what? A good dose of spin?) Somehow I wonder if we'll be hearing that rationale again.
11:58 PM
Getting Serious About Terror
One of the realities highlighted by last week's terrorism attacks in Spain -- and largely overlooked by the press -- is the fact that domestic terrorism is largely indistinguishable from international terrorism in terms of the damage that it can inflict -- and that focusing on one at the expense of the other leaves a nation truly vulnerable to lethal violence.
This was driven home by the way the Spanish government immediately tried to blame the attacks on the separatist ETA -- a domestic group -- instead of al Qaeda, who now appear to be the real culprits:
- Beginning immediately after the blasts, Aznar and other officials telephoned journalists, stressing ETA's responsibility and dismissing speculation that Islamic extremists might be involved. Spanish diplomats pushed a hastily drafted resolution blaming ETA through the U.N. Security Council. At an afternoon news conference, when a reporter suggested the possibility of an al Qaeda connection, the interior minister, Angel Acebes, angrily denounced it as "a miserable attempt to disrupt information and confuse people."
"There is no doubt that ETA is responsible," Acebes said.
Within days, that assertion was in tatters, and with it the reputation and fortunes of the ruling party. Suspicion that the government manipulated information -- blaming ETA in order to divert any possible link between the bombings and Aznar's unpopular support for the war in Iraq -- helped fuel the upset victory of the Socialist Workers' Party in Sunday's elections. By then, Islamic extremists linked to al Qaeda had become the focus of the investigation.
With a seemingly bottomless capacity for callousness, right-wing pundits and warbloggers have been quick to blame the Spanish voters for supposedly capitulating to the terrorists by giving them their desired election result. The iterations of this noxious claim have been too numerous to list here, but are embodied by David Brooks' recent NYT column:
- The Spanish government was conducting policies in Afghanistan and Iraq that Al Qaeda found objectionable. A group linked to Al Qaeda murdered 200 Spaniards, claiming that the bombing was punishment for those policies. Some significant percentage of the Spanish electorate was mobilized after the massacre to shift the course of the campaign, throw out the old government and replace it with one whose policies are more to Al Qaeda's liking.
What is the Spanish word for appeasement?
As Retrogrouch points out, this kind of argument is not just outrageously thoughtless, it is simply wrong on the facts. The Times' own reportage gives a much clearer and more honest picture of what was on Spanish voters' minds:
- At the bus and train terminal at Plaza de la Castilla in northern Madrid, Alberto Martín, a 31-year-old nuclear physicist who voted Socialist, said, "If the government had said, `We don't know who did it,' nothing would have happened and Zapatero would not be there. Aznar was making decisions without any consideration for people's concerns. Look at the war in Iraq. Aznar thought he was God! There was no dialogue."
The election, Mr. Martín added, "is a victory for the people, not for terrorism. You see, I'm now going to take the train."
Of course, the right-wing smear of Spanish voters serves precisely one purpose only: To set the stage in America for the Bush re-election campaign's talking points attacking John Kerry for his supposed weakness on national security. It's meant to work in tandem with the equally noxious "terrorists want to see Kerry win" meme.
And as it happens, their inability to understand -- or to honestly characterize -- the real reasons for the Spanish election outcome points precisely to Republicans' substantial vulnerability on exactly the issue of national security.
Because, just like the Spanish government, Bush and the GOP have sold the electorate a bill of goods on a "war on terror" that has come up substantially short in making the "homeland" more secure -- and has, in fact, more substantially increased the likelihood of being vulnerable to a terrorist attack.
The Bush approach has been to treat terrorism as though it were a phenomenon mostly related to unrest in the Middle East, the product of brown-skinned fanatics for whom the only adequate response is the full force of American military might. This approach largely treats terrorism as though it exists only in conjunction with a handful of states -- the "Axis of Evil" -- that support it, and containing it means bombing and killing its supporters out of existence.
This was, in essence, the rationale for invading both Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of Afghanistan, certainly a military response is fully justified, since the state connection to terrorism is clear and unmistakable. In the case of Iraq, however, that connection remains far from clear; though at one time I thought evidence existed to suggest such a connection, it has become painfully clear since that any Iraqi sponsorship of terrorism, particularly al Qaeda, was thin at best.
More to the point, however, is the fact that by making the "War on Terror" primarily a military operation and only secondarily (at best) a matter for law enforcement and intelligence, the Bush administration is focusing on only a rather narrow part of the terrorism spectrum. (Even on those terms, as Matt Yglesias has ably demonstrated, Bush's execution of the "war on terror" has in fact largely consisted of smoke, mirrors, shock and awe.)
The reality: Terrorism is a global phenomenon. It takes the shape not of a singular or even related ideology, but the idiosyncratic form of whatever extremism gives it birth. It is amorphous, and highly corpuscular, sometimes effectively emanating from extremely small groups or even individuals. And it is every bit as alive and well in America as it is in the Middle East.
This has many ramifications, not the least of which is that emphasizing the military component to any effective assault on terrorism -- and there are instances, such as Afghanistan, when a military solution indeed is required -- has an extraordinarily negative effect, particularly if military operations are undertaken through fraudulent circumstances, as in the invasion of Iraq. As Robert Wright observes in Part 3 of his insightful series in Slate, "A Real War on Terrorism":
- We have to understand that terrorism is fundamentally a "meme" -- a kind of "virus of the mind," a set of beliefs and attitudes that spreads from person to person. One way to squelch terrorism is to kill or arrest the people whose brains are infected with the meme, and the Bush administration has done some of that effectively. But some forms of killing and arresting -- especially the kinds that get us bad publicity -- do so much to spread the meme that our enterprise suffers a net loss. ... The ultimate target is memes; killing or arresting people is useful only to the extent that it leads to a net reduction in terrorism memes.
Rephrased in these terms, the point I've been trying to drive home is that, for technological reasons, memes are getting faster and slipperier. The information age is doing for these "viruses of the mind" what dense urban living and interurban transport did for biological pathogens during the late Middle Ages. (The result of humankind's failure to reckon with this was the Black Death.) And few things drive terrorism memes farther and faster over their new electronic conduits than doing an ill-thought-out job of neutralizing people already "infected."
Any kind of serious War on Terror needs to have the flexibility to respond proportionately and nimbly to various terrorist threats as they manifest themselves, and in this respect a military emphasis is simply too musclebound to be effective. A comprehensive approach will emphasize intelligence and law enforcement -- especially global law enforcement, the very concept of which is anathema to the Bush administration -- while reserving its military options, fraught as they are with multiple collateral hazards, solely for the rare circumstances that warrant them.
This, as it happens, appears to be the smart approach to terrorism that is being advocated by none other than John Kerry, though of course it is being demagogued by the Bush campaign and its apologists as being solely about law enforcement.
Nearly all the smart folk on the left side of the blogosphere have been urging Kerry to take the debate on national security to Bush, to turn the assault on Kerry as weak on it head, and attack the administration for its very real miscalculations and missteps in this arena: Atrios, Josh Marshall, and Daily Kos are only among the foremost in the blogosphere making this point.
If Kerry is going to do this, one of the most effective ways he can make this point is to talk about domestic terrorism -- because the Bush administration's extraordinarily weak record on that front exposes in a concrete way that everyone can understand just how phony its "war on terror" (and accompanying rationale for the invasion of Iraq) really is.
It would not take much to drive this point home. The Kerry campaign could easily point to Bush's serious lapses in handling domestic terrorism as symptomatic of the real shortcomings of his approach to "homeland security":
- -- The fall 2001 anthrax attacks, for which no one has yet been apprehended.
-- The Texas cyanide bomb case.
-- The ricin attack on the Senate.
-- Various cases of right-wing domestic terrorism since Sept. 11, ranging from plots to attack abortion clinics and gay bars to the bombing of local racial-relations offices.
As I've discussed previously, the Bush record is such that it is becoming clear that Americans are more vulnerable than ever to domestic terrorism, particularly since it is likewise evident the extremist right intends to "piggyback" off attacks committed by international terrorists -- and yet federal law enforcement's emphasis remains almost entirely on international terrorism. Even when a disturbingly dangerous case like the Texas cyanide bombers emerges, it is relegated to insignificance -- and so poorly handled that FBI investigators fail to even contact their own offices where leads might appear.
Even conservative news organizations like UPI have noticed. A recent op-ed piece on the wire service titled "Outside View: Who is William Krar?" points up many of the same problems observed here as well:
- Even more astounding is the stony silence from the Ashcroft Justice Department, which found at least 2,295 occasions to toot its own horn that are apparently more newsworthy than the Krar arrest.
"We don't spend a lot of time thinking about how we announce our activities," a Justice Department spokesman told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Really? This is from a Justice Department that averages two news releases every day and has never been shy to march out every triumph over the arrest or conviction of anyone remotely connected to overseas terror.
No, this Justice Department is obsessed with thinking about how they announce their activities. And that is what is so intriguing about this arrest and the conspicuous lack of comment from Ashcroft.
It is, to quote another famous crime fighter, reminiscent of "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time," said Inspector Gregory. "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.
What throws the Bush administration's miserable handling of domestic terrorism into stark relief is those few cases in which the government has tooted the "domestic terrorism" horn in making arrests -- all of which have involved so-called "eco-terrorists," such as the recent arrest of "Tre Arrow" up in Victoria. Especially noteworthy in that recent AP story was this point:
- The FBI lists the ELF as its No. 1 domestic terrorism priority.
This is a crystalline example of the gross skewing of priorities for both law enforcement and intelligence in dealing with terrorism that has been a hallmark of the Bush regime.
While eco-terrorists are a serious problem, and deserve certainly serious prosecution under the law, the level of threat they represent is proportionally so much less than that from the far-right "Patriot" movement and white supremacists as to raise serious questions about the priorities of both the FBI and the Justice Department. Certainly it is worth observing, as does It's a Crock, that "eco-terrorist" Jeff Luers -- who torched three SUVs and took care to do so when it was unlikely anyone would be harmed -- is serving a 22-year prison sentence, while William Krar -- who built a cyanide bomb designed to kill perhaps a hundred people or more -- is facing a mere 15 years. When left-wing terrorists begin actually killing and maiming people and blowing up federal buildings with day cares inside them, or even plotting to do so, perhaps then they will deserve the kind of focus being accorded them under the Bush and Ashcroft style of governance.
Moreover, lest anyone think that the American far right is incapable of serious damage and not really in al Qaeda's class, it's probably useful to recall that before Sept. 11, the most lethal terrorist attack on American soil was committed by American right-wing extremists, with a toll similar to Spain's recent losses.
And contrary to those who argue that an emphasis on law enforcement is inadequate, the reality is that a one-two punch of intelligence and law enforcement is extraordinarily effective in stopping terrorism, at least domestically. One of the points that emerged from my in-depth work for MSNBC on domestic terrorism was that of the 40-plus cases of serious domestic terrorism we identified as arising in the 1995-2000 period, the vast majority had in fact been nipped in the bud by law enforcement before the would-be terrorists could act, largely through effective intelligence-gathering and aggressive arrests and prosecution. There is no reason this same approach would not be effective on a global scale -- unless, of course, one was allergic to cooperating with the very concept of international law enforcement.
In many ways, the American situation is a kind of reverse mirror image of Spain's: Were domestic terrorists to actually strike on U.S. soil, the government would be eager to blame the attack on international terrorists -- as was, in fact, the case with the anthrax terrorist. Just as with Spain's Aznar, Bush's handling of terrorism has instead revolved around invading Iraq -- a diversion, by nearly any standard, from a serious and comprehensive assault on terrorism.
But unlike in Spain, hardly anyone has bothered to point out the flaws in that approach to the voters. John Kerry would be smart to do so.
4:31 PM
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