What's Past is Prologue: the Case of COINTELPRO (Video)

In "Notes on Civil Liberties" this morning, Kevin highlighted the Bill of Rights Defense Committee's (BORDC) campaign, "Shine a Light on the FBI." I thought I'd add a bit to that discussion.

BORDC, along with 40 other organizations, including Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Torture Accountability, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Defending Dissent Foundation and the National Lawyers Guild, among others, wrote a letter [PDF] on July 12 to members of Congress, "request[ing] that you vote against the White House proposal to extend the term of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, III. The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved legislation to implement the proposal, but did so without adequate process and without meaningfully addressing any of the numerous outstanding oversight issues and constitutional abuses for which the Bureau continues to evade accountability."

As part of their campaign, BORDC has produced a great short video, "The unPATRIOTic Act & COINTELPRO 2.0," in which a number of former FBI and U.S. military figures, along with human rights activists, explain how the Patriot Act and government surveillance of and attacks on current activists, including Quakers and antiwar groups, are redolent of the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO program of the 1950s-1970s. The video is definitely worth viewing.



On the earlier COINTELPRO program, see this 1976 report by the U.S. Senate's Church committee, or this webpage dedicated to the subject at Political Research Associates, which includes links to many of the released COINTELPRO documents.

Despite the fact the FBI used agents provocateurs, forged documents, and various nefarious activities, including trying to drive Martin Luther King, Jr. to suicide, no U.S. officials were ever prosecuted for these activities.

BORDC reminds us that those interested can sign on to their letter to Congress.

Originally posted at The Dissenter/FDL

Congress Says Government Can Seize Your Personal & Business Records, and Then Gag Your Ability to Talk About It

The People's Blog for the Constitution (blog of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee) recently discussed the implications of the new reauthorization of the post-9/11 Patriot Act. This legislation has amounted to a direct assault on U.S. civil liberties, and Congress has been totally and abjectly complicit in reauthorizing these laws over and over again, since first proposed by the Bush Administration in 2002.

Four more years of the PATRIOT Act will worsen government secrecy

On May 26, 2011, Congress voted to reauthorize three provisions of the USA PATRIOT ACT that were set to expire. The most contentious of these provisions is Section 215, which allows the government to more easily gain access to various personal records without clear evidence that the individual in question poses a threat to national security. This provision also places a gag order on anyone whose records have been seized so they can’t talk about what happened.

If the thought of the government accessing your business or medical records, telephone calls, books, diaries, and even your genetic information (go to page 87) isn’t scary enough, the most frightening aspect of this provision is that we don’t know how the government actually interprets and applies it. In part, this is because the Justice Department has refused to reveal the government’s interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

Prior to Congress’s vote on the reauthorization of the PATRIOT ACT, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall proposed an amendment that would require the US Attorney General to publicly reveal the government’s official interpretation of the PATRIOT ACT. Wyden claims,

“[T]he government is relying on secret interpretations of what the law says without telling the public what those interpretations are… and the reliance on secret interpretations of the law is growing.”

Unfortunately, the proposed amendment failed and the law was reauthorized until 2015.
The government’s refusal to explain, much less meaningfully reform, this provision of the PATRIOT Act is hardly the first time that this piece of legislation has been used to infringe on the rights of people in the United States. The increasing use of national security letters (NSLs) to demand personal records without court approval has resulted in an estimated 6,400 intelligence violations. Some of these violations took the form of exigent letters, which do not exist anywhere in the law, but according to the Inspector General’s investigation, “contained inaccurate statements, circumvented the requirements of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act NSL statute, and violated Attorney General Guidelines and internal FBI policy.”

Despite widespread and well-documented abuses, Congress reauthorized the PATRIOT Act for another four years without any protections for civil liberties. Congress has failed to check and balance the Executive Branch on civil liberties issues, allowing executive secrecy to become entrenched—and this failure has implications far beyond surveillance.  With the Obama administration prosecuting more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined (including some who risked prosecution by exposing important facts about surveillance), Congress’s abandonment of its oversight responsibilities on the PATRIOT Act bodes poorly for the future.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has already stated that it will ask the courts to disclose information that Congress wouldn’t. On May 31, the ACLU filed a  Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding that the government reveal its interpretation of Section 215. Keep checking this blog and the ACLU for updates on that case and other news about the PATRIOT Act and civil liberties.

Short Shots in Anti-Torture Wars

With little time to post for the next few days, I wanted to give my readers a few juicy morsels to chew over.

There's Emptywheel's analysis at Firedoglake of the new Department of Justice brief, re the withdrawal of the “Enemy Combatant” definition for Guantanamo "detainees". Most are lauding it as some great victory. But it's yet another Obama cosmetic miracle: looks like progress on the outside, but is plain old ugly Bush on the inside. From EW's article:

The President has the authority to detain persons that the President determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and persons who harbored those responsible for those attacks. The President also has the authority to detain persons who were part of, or substantially supported, Taliban or al-Qaida forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act, or has directly supported hostilities, in aid of such enemy armed forces. [my emphasis]

The President has the authority ... the President determines ... the President has the authority.

You see, it's still the same unitary power, stripped of the baggage of Bush's vocabulary. And even as they abandon Bush's vocabulary, they progressively expand the reach of that authority to include just about all those whom Bush already determined were enemy combatants, no matter how nebulous that person's ties to al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is doing its best to derail the lawsuit by Rasul et al. against Donald Rumsfeld and former Bush administration officials for "torture; prolonged arbitrary detention; cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; cruel and unusual punishment; denial of liberties without due process, and preventing the exercise and expression of their religious beliefs." None of these victims were ever charged with a crime.

Daphne Eviatar at The Washington Independent reports (H/T to Stephen Soldz):

Dismissed at the urging of the Bush administration, the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In December, the case was sent back to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington for reconsideration, because the Supreme Court had ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detentions. It wasn’t clear what effect that ruling might have on the Rasul case.

Although some civil rights lawyers had hoped the Obama administration would change the government’s position — or at least try to settle this case, which is at the very least an embarrassment to the United States – the former prisoners had no such luck. Today, the Justice Department filed a brief arguing, as it did in Padilla’s case against Yoo, that government officials are not liable for torture, abuse, denial of due process or religious rights, because the right of Guantanamo prisoners not to suffer those abuses at the hands of the U.S. government was not clearly established at the time.

That would seem to contradict previous statements by President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder that torture (including waterboarding) and other abuses are clearly illegal, now and always, and that the president can’t simply override that prohibition.

And meanwhile, on the homefront, you'd never know it because the silence is so deafening, but the ACLU released a major study on the effects of the Patriot Act. Their press release states:

“Reclaiming Patriotism” reveals that in the years since its passage, the Patriot Act has paved the way for the expansion of government-sponsored surveillance including the gutting of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and a recent revamping of the Attorney General Guidelines to allow law enforcement to conduct physical surveillance without suspicion. Indeed, over the last eight years, numerous expansions of executive authority have worked in tandem to infringe upon our rights. Only by understanding the larger picture of the combined effects of Patriot Act, the amendments to FISA, the guidelines for physical surveillance and other expansions of power can Congress make an informed, consistent and principled decision about whether and how to amend all of these very powerful surveillance tools.

You can go read the report at this link.

Finally, the other day I reported on the attempt by former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray's to speak before a hearing of the UK Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights on the subject of the UK government's policy on intelligence cooperation with torture abroad. JCHR shunted aside the request more than once. I'm still not sure he actually spoke, but his website posted today this article, Trying Again to Stop Torture: My Formal Statement for the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Here's the conclusion from Murray, fighting the fight against state-sanctioned torture from Great Britain:

Conclusions

1. All CIA intelligence is received by the UK. MI6 has seen the fruits of every CIA waterboarding session and rendition torture. Very many will have been passed on to ministers and senior officials.

2. Ministers decided the principle of the universality of the UK/US intelligence sharing agreement was more important than any aversion to torture. We could not refuse this material from the CIA without compromising the basic agreement.

3. Ministers did know they were receiving intelligence from torture. There was a definite, internally promulgated and legally cleared policy to receive intelligence from torture, directed in person by Jack Straw.

4. The format of intelligence reports contains a deliberate double blind; by excluding the name of the detainee from the final report, Ministers can state they have never knowingly seen intelligence from torture.

5. The government’s public lines that we do not condone, endorse, encourage or instigate torture, even that we condemn it and work against it, do not answer the key question:

“Are we prepared on a regular basis to receive intelligence from torture?”

That question is capable of a one word answer. The true answer is yes. The government refuses to give a straight answer.