ted rall, tunisia, egypt, wisconsin and revolution

I've been meaning to post this interview with cartoonist and activist Ted Rall ever since Allan said, "You must read this - he sounds exactly like us."

Rall's new book is The Anti-American Manifesto; this interview is in the CUNY [City University of New York] Graduate School Advocate.

Reluctant Revolutionary: An Interview With Ted Rall

Advo­cate: . . . In your new book you explic­itly advo­cate the use of rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence. It’s hard to get any more rad­i­cal than that and I can’t imag­ine the deci­sion to write such a book was an easy one to make. Indeed, in con­ver­sa­tions with friends about the book I’ve found that even the men­tion of rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence is almost uni­ver­sally greeted with dis­dain, shock, or dis­be­lief. I am really inter­ested in how you came to this deci­sion to write the book, the events or ideas that led you to this argu­ment, and why you felt com­pelled to write this book now?

Ted Rall: Well, it was a very dif­fi­cult deci­sion, from a career stand­point as well as from the stand­point of being a sim­ple Amer­i­can cit­i­zen. As a stu­dent of his­tory I am well aware of the fact that rev­o­lu­tion is dan­ger­ous and vio­lent and bru­tal and can make things worse before they make things bet­ter, so it’s not a deci­sion to be taken lightly. I want to be very clear that even though the book is a call to arms and a call to get rid of the cur­rent gov­ern­ment, and it does def­i­nitely defend the use of vio­lence (I would say that there is no such thing as non-violent rev­o­lu­tion; no rad­i­cal change has ever taken place with­out vio­lence or the cred­i­ble threat of vio­lence), but I think there is a ten­dency to sen­sa­tion­al­ize the vio­lent aspect of the book. Most rev­o­lu­tion­ary activ­ity is inher­ently non-violent actu­ally. It’s just that vio­lence is part of the revolutionist’s tool­box; it has to be, oth­er­wise there is no way to cred­i­bly remove the state. The rich and the pow­er­ful don’t give up wealth and power vol­un­tar­ily so you can’t fight it non­vi­o­lently with­out effec­tively tying one hand behind your back.

In terms of the deci­sion to write the book I kind of fol­lowed a sim­ple, log­i­cal process, which is to ask myself and many other peo­ple whether there was any pos­si­bil­ity that this sys­tem, the Democ­rats and the Repub­li­cans and the cor­po­ratist cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem that they sup­port, could or would address any of the really seri­ous press­ing prob­lems that are faced by the Unites States today  —  whether those are income inequal­ity or the envi­ron­ment and cli­mate change, or sky­rock­et­ing deficits, or war and mil­i­tarism, or health­care  —  and I don’t think so.

. . . When Obama refused to be the new FDR I knew that, Obama being about the best most pro­gres­sive, smartest pres­i­dent we were gonna get out of this sys­tem, I knew that the time had arrived to call for rev­o­lu­tion. Now I wish that other peo­ple were doing it, I wish that I could join some­one else’s move­ment. I don’t want to stick my neck out; it’s not fun to attract all of this heat, but no one else is doing it. There’s no Left what­so­ever in the United States. All there is is wimpy lib­er­als. So, I wrote this book in order to start a con­ver­sa­tion. This is not rev­o­lu­tion for dum­mies, this is not a how-to guide, this is not the anar­chists’ cook­book. If you are pick­ing this up look­ing for how to over­throw the US gov­ern­ment buy another book; this is not that book. This is a book that cre­ates the space to have a dis­cus­sion that is just not even part of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. Amer­i­can pol­i­tics occurs strictly between the Ds and the Rs. We don’t even talk about the Greens and the Lib­er­tar­i­ans, much less the pos­si­bil­ity of get­ting rid of the sys­tem entirely.

Advo­cate: Along those same lines, how has your life changed since the pub­li­ca­tion of the book? What’s the last month been like for Ted Rall? What have you learned about Amer­ica, par­tic­u­larly con­cern­ing the sub­ject of this book?

TR: I guess many things did not come as a sur­prise. The fact that the media and the polit­i­cal sys­tem are so deeply entrenched and unwill­ing to con­sider actual change came as no sur­prise. The fact that there are many very reac­tionary, hate­ful peo­ple who defend the sta­tus quo no mat­ter what came as no sur­prise either. But what did come as a sur­prise were the huge crowds that came out to my book sign­ings, which indi­cated to me that there is a thirst for talk­ing about these sorts of options. Many, many peo­ple have been over the sys­tem for a long time, but that con­ver­sa­tion doesn’t take place, so I pro­vided a forum for that kind of dia­logue to hap­pen. What I’ve learned, and it’s kind of what I sus­pected, is that there are a lot of peo­ple out there like me. I wouldn’t have writ­ten the book if I thought I was alone. I don’t think I’m such a unique thinker. A lot of peo­ple can look at the same set of cir­cum­stances and draw sim­i­lar con­clu­sions, and they have. So in terms of how my life has changed, I mean, it hasn’t really, except for being very, very busy doing inter­views, but that’s about it.

I've always said that, despite the persistent, ignorant and usually imaginary fear of socialism and communism that runs through US history, the real danger to US democracy has always been from forces on the right. I've blathered about this ad nauseum on wmtc, no need to flog the "fascist shift" theme here. Now, events in the Middle East, the successful leftist movements transforming South America, and the sudden spark of progressive engagement emanating from Wisconsin and rippling through other states, are combining to give me new hope. These events are reminders that none of us can predict the future.

No people's movement, no matter how successful, has ever known the outcome of their struggle in advance. All we can do is keep on keepin' on.

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the uterus police: georgia politican wants every pregnancy loss investigated by law enforcement

[allan guest post]

There are far too many US politicians - on both sides of the aisle - who despise equality, hate women, and have no shame in pushing legislation that would sound right at home in any of the world's worst dictatorships. Here are what two of them are doing.

Georgia Representative Bobby Franklin wants abortion classified as murder (of course), but he also wants to force the police to investigate all "miscarriages" (the antiquated term for a spontaneous abortion) to make sure that they were indeed spontaneous. From Daily Kos:

Franklin wants to create a Uterus Police to investigate miscarriages, and requires that any time a miscarriage occurs, whether in a hospital or without medical assistance, it must be reported and a fetal death certificate issued. If the cause of death is unknown, it must be investigated. If the woman can't tell how it happened, than those Uterus Police can ask family members and friends how it happened. Hospitals are required to keep records of anyone who has a spontaneous abortion and report it. ... Needless to say, there are no exceptions allowed. Not for rape victims. Not for incest victims. Not to save the life and health of the mother ...

(I first saw this at Care2.)

Two weeks ago, it was reported that Franklin has filed a bill that would remove the term "victim" from rape, stalking, and domestic violence cases and replace it with "accuser". A post at Creative Loafing notes that Franklin once actually

conjured the phrase "My body, My choice" while discussing a piece of legislation he introduced that would prevent the government from making vaccinations compulsory in the event of a pandemic. Irony at its worst.

Franklin is also not keen on having homosexuals in the military:

The Bible says it's a capital offense. You want someone with unrepentant criminal behavior? And it's not just that, neither should adulterers, neither should thieves, neither should a lot of things.

Well, I actually agree with this. Let's have the US military conduct a rigorous weeding out of its troops by strictly applying the 10 Commandments.

Have you ever said "goddamn it"? Out! Have you ever worked on Sunday? Out! Did you ever disobey your parents? Out! Have you ever stolen anything, ever? Out! Have you ever looked at anyone else in the world who was not your wife/husband and had a sexual thought? Out! Have you ever wished you had the same cool gadget as that guy over there? Out! And even if you somehow passed the test and were sent off to fight in a war, as soon as you killed one person ... Out!

Get 'er done, Congress!

Mother Jones reports that the South Dakota GOP-dominated House of Representatives will soon vote on House Bill 1171, which is sponsored by Representative Phil Jensen. The bill would

expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus - a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. ...

[The bill seeks to alter] the state's legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person "while resisting an attempt to harm" that person's unborn child or the unborn child of that person's spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman's father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion - even if she wanted one.

The bill has already passed out of committee on a 9-3 party-line vote.

Sara Rosenbaum, a law professor at George Washington University: "It takes my breath away. Constitutionally, a state cannot make it a crime to perform a constitutionally lawful act."

The magazine continues:

South Dakota already has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, and one of the lowest abortion rates. Since 1994, there have been no providers in the state. Planned Parenthood flies a doctor in from out-of-state once a week to see patients at a Sioux Falls clinic. Women from the more remote parts of the large, rural state drive up to six hours to reach this lone clinic. And under state law women are then required to receive counseling and wait 24 hours before undergoing the procedure. [There are ongoing attempts to increase this to 72 hours. - ed.]

Before performing an abortion, a South Dakota doctor must offer the woman the opportunity to view a sonogram. And under a law passed in 2005, doctors are required to read a script meant to discourage women from proceeding with the abortion: "The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being." Until recently, doctors also had to tell a woman seeking an abortion that she had "an existing relationship with that unborn human being" that was protected under the Constitution and state law and that abortion poses a "known medical risk" and "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide." In August 2009, a US District Court Judge threw out those portions of the script, finding them "untruthful and misleading." The state has appealed the decision.

But, remember: the procedure is still legal -- even though the state has not had anyone able to perform the procedure practicing in the state in almost 20 years. (Also, see this Common Dreams article from 2005.)

An update to the story states that Jensen is considering adding specific protections for abortion providers to the bill. "There's no way in the world that I or any other representatives wish to see abortion doctors murdered," Jensen told the Washington Post.

Oh, my goodness gracious, no.

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resistance is not futile: resistance is everything

I think a lot about resistance: about what it means when ordinary people refuse to yield to powers much stronger than themselves. I've been thinking of the many forms acts of resistance can take, why people resist, what it means.

Last summer in Toronto, groups of people walked the streets of their city to show that they could, to defy the sudden existence of martial law that claimed they couldn't.

All over the UK, students are in the streets and occupying buildings, resisting massive cuts to education funding. The situation in the UK and throughout Europe is very dire - but the people whose system caused the pain are not suffering. A friend who lives in London and I were emailing recently, and she summed it up this way:

...they are closing libraries, cutting everything, raising university tuition fees by 200% and sales tax is now 20%! Bankers are getting huge bonuses still. We work with quite a few financial services firms and it's like they are living in a different universe. Although of course they are taking the opportunity to lay off as many as they can as well even though they are continuing to make huge profits. Barclays doesn't serve tea anymore at meetings to 'cut back'.

Some of my friend's British compatriots are employing a brilliantly creative strategy of resistance to library closures. (Many thanks to Deang for sending this story.)

A town has emptied its library in a bid to fight plans to close it down.

People in Stony Stratford, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, have spent the week withdrawing their maximum allowance of books in protest against council plans to close it as part of budget cuts.

And today they said the plan had been a success, with all 16,000 books withdrawn from the library.

Today, as they celebrated the empty shelves, Emily Malleson from Friends of Stony Stratford Library (FOSSL) said they were amazed at how everyone in the town had pulled together.

She said it was calculated that books were being checked out at a rate of around 378 per hour - smashing the usual rates.

"A local resident mentioned the idea, maybe as a bit of a joke, but we thought it was a great idea so we put it to FOSSL," she said.

"I went home, put it on Facebook and emailed everyone I could think of and it's just gone absolutely mad."

They planned to start the campaign on Wednesday, but keen supporters of the library started taking books out the week before.

And in just over a week, the shelves were emptied, with the final books withdrawn yesterday.

"People were going in last night to get books and there weren't any left, "she said.

"I think it's a very simple but clever idea and it's given something that people can act on and make their voice heard.

I love this for so many reasons: how this town values and protects its library, how people united can fight back, how a few organizers with a good idea can spark rebellion. I also love the story because it's about reading as resistance.

Reading has been used as act of political resistance through the ages. Countless books and movies depicting ordinary people struggling against totalitarianism will bring you to hidden books, an echo of children secretly reading books forbidden by their authoritarian schoolmasters, now with potentially fatal consequences.

I recently saw this connection in two differnt novels. (Still in the works: a winter-break "what i'm reading" post.) In The Chosen One, an excellent young-adult novel by Carol Lynch Williams, a young person's resistance to her parents' oppressive religion - and a forced marriage to a man four times her age - begins with reading. Her rebellion begins in the library, until the library becomes - literally - her means of escape.

In Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, after a man risks his life to save a Jewish boy, they read together, working their way through the man's vast library, the education of that boy becoming an ongoing act of resistance.

Reading as resistance isn't about beating the enemy: it's about maintaining some human dignity, stubbornly clinging to a shred of one's own humanity. That has been the case for all the subjugated peoples of the world who have refused to speak the language of their oppressors. At least in private, and often at great cost, people the world over will insist on speaking the language of their own people. It's a way of saying: we still exist.

Also in Fugitive Pieces, a shopkeeper in the Nazi-occupied Greek village hides oranges, saving the scarce fruit - and their desperately-needed nutrition - for the neediest families. The shopkeeper could be killed on the spot: hiding an orange as an act of courageous resistance.

Food can become an instrument of resistance. The movie "Hunger" depicts the refusal of food as the ultimate resistance: the 1981 IRA hunger strike, led by Bobby Sands in 66 days of self-inflicted torture. First we see an earlier form of protest, as the political prisoners in Northern Ireland refuse to wash or change their clothes, covering the walls of their cells in their own excrement, making their captors' jobs as disgusting and difficult as possible.

When the guards haul off the men for forced bathing - heavy accent on forced - the prisoners lash out with feet and fists and teeth, individual naked men fighting back against a small army decked out in face shields and batons. It's a stunning scene. I thought: this is what resistance means. Never going quietly. Never being docile. Fighting every inch of the way. Resistance means: we will not go quietly.

Michael Fassbender's harrowing, incredible performance as Sands causes you to question the very nature of human survival and sacrifice. Watching the effects of starvation on the human body and brain, you wonder, how could a human being choose this? Where do they find the strength? Inevitably, even a believer like me may be led to ask, what good does this do?

Then in the postscript you learn that 10 more men made the same choice - that the prison ultimately met all their demands - that during the hunger strike, Bobby Sands was elected to Parliament, opening the door for political recognition of Sinn Fein.

And suddenly the movie's title isn't about the needs of the body: it's about the human hunger for freedom.

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airport sexual assault, cadets for christ and the bleating heart of the usa

The only thing that scares me more than the fascist shift are all the sheeple who willingly march to the bleat.

In December, Claire Hirschkind, a 56-year-old rape survivor who has a type of pacemaker implant, was arrested and banned from an airport for refusing to submit to having her breasts handled by a stranger. Emphasis mine.

Hirschkind said because of the device in her body, she was led to a female TSA employee and three Austin police officers. She says she was told she was going to be patted down.

"I turned to the police officer and said, 'I have given no due cause to give up my constitutional rights. You can wand me,'" and they said, 'No, you have to do this,'" she said.

Hirschkind agreed to the pat down, but on one condition.

"I told them, 'No, I'm not going to have my breasts felt,' and she said, 'Yes, you are,'" said Hirschkind.

When Hirschkind refused, she says that "the police actually pushed me to the floor, (and) handcuffed me. I was crying by then. They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security."

An ABIA spokesman says it is TSA policy that anyone activating a security alarm has two options. One is to opt out and not fly, and the other option is to subject themselves to an enhanced pat down. Hirschkind refused both and was arrested.

Other travelers KVUE talked to say they empathize with Hirschkind, but the law is the law.

"I understand her side of it, and their side as well, but it is for our protection so I have no problems with it," said Gwen Washington, who lives in Killeen.

"It's unfortunate that that happened and she didn't get to fly home, but it makes me feel a little safer," said Emily Protine.

Claire Hirschkind being sexually assaulted is "for our own protection" and "makes me feel a little safer". I keep reading and re-reading these words, marveling at how thoroughly brainwashed USians are, how perfectly their government has instilled fear in their hearts, how weak, compliant and complicit in their own oppression they have become.

Speaking of sheep, have you heard about this? A Christian cult called Cadets For Christ is operating within the United States Air Force. Cadets for Christ is part of the "shepherding" movement, which teaches that females are sheep, males are shepherds, and you do the math. Go read Ed Brayton, with links to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and HuffPo.

I was a bit suspicious when I read the family name of the people who have gone public about their daughter's brainwashing: they are Peter and Jean Baas. But this has been documented for at least a year. It is not a hoax.

Thanks to James for sending. I couldn't resist the juxtaposition of these various ruminants.

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greenwald: what wikileaks revealed to the world in 2010

The incomparable Glenn Greenwald, December 24, 2010.

Throughout this year I've devoted substantial attention to WikiLeaks, particularly in the last four weeks as calls for its destruction intensified. To understand why I've done so, and to see what motivates the increasing devotion of the U.S. Government and those influenced by it to destroying that organization, it's well worth reviewing exactly what WikiLeaks exposed to the world just in the last year: the breadth of the corruption, deceit, brutality and criminality on the part of the world's most powerful factions.

As revealing as the disclosures themselves are, the reactions to them have been equally revealing. The vast bulk of the outrage has been devoted not to the crimes that have been exposed but rather to those who exposed them: WikiLeaks and (allegedly) Bradley Manning. A consensus quickly emerged in the political and media class that they are Evil Villains who must be severely punished, while those responsible for the acts they revealed are guilty of nothing. That reaction has not been weakened at all even by the Pentagon's own admission that, in stark contrast to its own actions, there is no evidence -- zero -- that any of WikiLeaks' actions has caused even a single death. Meanwhile, the American establishment media -- even in the face of all these revelations -- continues to insist on the contradictory, Orwellian platitudes that (a) there is Nothing New™ in anything disclosed by WikiLeaks and (b) WikiLeaks has done Grave Harm to American National Security™ through its disclosures.

It's unsurprising that political leaders would want to convince people that the true criminals are those who expose acts of high-level political corruption and criminality, rather than those who perpetrate them. Every political leader would love for that self-serving piety to take hold. But what's startling is how many citizens and, especially, "journalists" now vehemently believe that as well. In light of what WikiLeaks has revealed to the world about numerous governments, just fathom the authoritarian mindset that would lead a citizen -- and especially a "journalist" -- to react with anger that these things have been revealed; to insist that these facts should have been kept concealed and it'd be better if we didn't know; and, most of all, to demand that those who made us aware of it all be punished (the True Criminals) while those who did these things (The Good Authorities) be shielded.

See the column for headlines and screenshots.

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on truth, skepticism and the u.s. propaganda machine: "sicko" was never banned in cuba

Michael Moore: ¡Viva WikiLeaks! SiCKO Was Not Banned in Cuba. Read and enjoy.

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bradley manning: 7 months (and counting) in solitary confinement for showing the world the truth

Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking the Collateral Murder video that brought WikiLeaks to the spotlight, is now enduring his seventh month of solitary confinement. He is being held in deplorable conditions. His health is deteriorating. His supporters are being threatened and harassed.

We must never forget Bradley Manning. We must do everything we can to help him know he is not alone, although physically he is very much alone.

From The Guardian:

As Julian Assange emerged from his nine-day imprisonment, there were renewed concerns about the physical and psychological health of Bradley Manning, the former US intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the diplomatic cables at the centre of the storm.

Manning, who was arrested seven months ago, is being held at a military base in Virginia and faces a court martial and up to 52 years in prison for his alleged role in copying the cables.

His friends and supporters also claim they have been the target of extra-judicial harassment, intimidation and outright bribery by US government agents.

According to David House, a computer researcher from Boston who visits Manning twice a month, he is starting to deteriorate. "Over the last few weeks I have noticed a steady decline in his mental and physical wellbeing," he said. "His prolonged confinement in a solitary holding cell is unquestionably taking its toll on his intellect; his inability to exercise due to [prison] regulations has affected his physical appearance in a manner that suggests physical weakness."

Manning, House added, was no longer the characteristically brilliant man he had been, despite efforts to keep him intellectually engaged. He also disputed the authorities' claims that Manning was being kept in solitary for his own good.

"I initially believed that his time in solitary confinement was a decision made in the interests of his safety," he said. "As time passed and his suicide watch was lifted, to no effect, it became clear that his time in solitary – and his lack of a pillow, sheets, the freedom to exercise, or the ability to view televised current events – were enacted as a means of punishment rather than a means of safety."

House said many people were reluctant to talk about Manning's condition because of government harassment, including surveillance, warrantless computer seizures, and even bribes. "This has had such an intimidating effect that many are afraid to speak out on his behalf," House said.

Some friends report being followed extensively. Another computer expert said the army offered him cash to – in his words – "infiltrate" the WikiLeaks website. He said: "I turned them down. I don't want anything to do with this cloak and dagger stuff."

When the Washington Post tried to investigate the claim, an army criminal investigation division spokesman refused to comment. "We've got an ongoing investigation," he said. "We don't discuss our techniques and tactics."

On 3 November, House, 23, said he found customs agents waiting for him when he and his girlfriend returned to the US after a short holiday in Mexico. His bags were searched and two men identifying themselves as Homeland Security officials said they were being detained for questioning and would miss their connecting flight. The men seized all his electronic items and he was told to hand over all passwords and encryption keys – which he refused. The items have yet to be returned, said House. He added: "If Manning is convicted, it will be because his individual dedication to human ethics far surpasses that of the US government."

House, who met Manning through friends but came to know him only after his detention, said he was committed to his cause. "Like many computer scientists, I identify with the open government issues at the core of this case."

Bradley Manning Support Network: please do what you can. You can write to Bradley care of Courage To Resist:
Bradley Manning
c/o Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave #41
Oakland CA 94610
USA

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daniel ellsberg calls for boycott of amazon over wikileaks

Daniel Ellsberg:

Open letter to Amazon.com Customer Service:

December 2, 2010

I’m disgusted by Amazon’s cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.

For the last several years, I’ve been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That’s over. I ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.

I understand that many other regular customers feel as I do and are responding the same way. Good: the broader and more immediate the boycott, the better. I hope that these others encourage their contact lists to do likewise and to let Amazon know exactly why they’re shifting their business. I’ve asked friends today to suggest alternatives, and I’ll be exploring service from Powell’s Books, Half-Price Books, Biblio and others.

So far Amazon has spared itself the further embarrassment of trying to explain its action openly. This would be a good time for Amazon insiders who know and perhaps can document the political pressures that were brought to bear – and the details of the hasty kowtowing by their bosses – to leak that information. They can send it to Wikileaks (now on servers outside the US), to mainstream journalists or bloggers, or perhaps to sites like antiwar.com that have now appropriately ended their book-purchasing association with Amazon.

Yours (no longer),
Daniel Ellsberg

Powell's, by the way, is an excellent bookseller. The company supports progressive causes and their employees are unionized.

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omar khadr's so-called confession: "somewhere in hell, joseph stalin is smiling"

Tony Keller, writing in the National Post, says what I've been thinking all along. Yes, the Post. This shouldn't be an issue of left and right. Don't conservatives believe in basic concepts of justice and fairness?*

In the 1930s, that great legal innovator Joseph Stalin introduced the show trial. The accused would stand up in court and willingly, even eagerly, confess to the most fantastical crimes. At the first great show trial, in 1936, Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and other former senior Communist party members admitted to being members of a terrorist organization. They said they had plotted to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders. In the following years, as Stalin's purges picked up steam, show trials featured increasingly incredible stories, usually involving the accused admitting to being agents of Western imperialism.

What made men confess to things that were unlikely, sometimes impossible and usually unsupported by other evidence? Torture. Sleep deprivation, beatings, and threats against their wives and children. To stop the pain, you had to confess to whatever it was that the interrogators wanted to hear. And then you had to get up in court and willingly confess to it all over again.

The trial of Omar Khadr has been called a travesty of justice, a violation of the rule of law, a kangaroo court and lots of other things beside. But what it really was, was a show trial.

* We know the current Conservatives don't, but many conservatives must. Small-c conservatives, it's time to take back your party.

Read it here.

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a view from new york city on 9.11

You may have seen some coverage of the vigil held in lower Manhattan on Friday night, in support of peace and religious tolerance. I thought you might like to read a first-hand report from a friend of mine who was there. NN writes:

I attended with M, her 70+ year-old neighbor (a veteran of many civil rights protests), and L. The crowd number between 1000-2000, depending on reports, and filled a penned-in area about two blocks long. The tone of the speeches was a little too religious for my tastes, but I was happy that among those present were a rabbi, an imam, an Episcopal minister and a few other clergy. Keith Ellison, a U.S. Rep (the first Muslim) from Minnesota spoke, and a few local elected officials were present as well or sent messages. Bloomberg’s support was cited, although I’m sure he had few friends in the crowd.

The entire event was completely peaceful. I saw no counter-protesters and the police seemed relatively low key with this group of mostly white, middle-class (looking) crowd. On returning home I checked the local news for coverage; surprisingly, Fox had it on as their first story and said nothing denigrating. Of course, they didn’t show the man who stood opposite the penned-in crowd, who quietly held a sign that said. “Don’t let Fox make you afraid.”

On a personal note, I thought the organizers left too much time for the event, 2+ hours, as numbers dwindled significantly as the evening went on and the weather grew cool and windy. A few forced feeling sing-alongs were part of the evening’s agenda-- also not my cup of protest. I was glad to be in the company of like-minded people, but as M summed it up, there should have been 10,000 people there instead of our one or two.

Organizing a protest is no easy job, and perhaps a turnout of 2,000 can be deemed a success. Then again, in a city of 8 million - and so many of them with personal experience of bigotry and intolerance - maybe not.

Here are two more views on September 11th and US Islamophobia, from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

First, in "The Healers of 9/11," Kristof writes about Susan Retik and Patti Quigley, two women who lost husbands in the September 11th attacks. Both women were pregnant at the time. Now they are working together to combat hunger and illiteracy among women and girls in Afghanistan. Their organization is called Beyond the 11th.

Naturally I disagree with Kristof's characterization of Afghanistan as "the very country that had incubated a plot that had pulverized" these women's husbands, but that's less important than his very good column on this worthwhile organization. Perhaps most importantly, Retik's and Quigley's work highlights a simple truth: anger and hatred are not inevitable. They are choices. We can choose peace.

In "Is this America?", Kristof calls out Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, a once-progressive, now ultra-right-wing rag, for his blatant and shameful Islamophobia. Kristof gathers some evidence to show Peretz has plenty of company.

For a glimpse of how venomous and debased the discourse about Islam has become, consider a blog post in The New Republic this month. Written by Martin Peretz, the magazine’s editor in chief, it asserted: “Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.”

Mr. Peretz added: “I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”

Thus a prominent American commentator, in a magazine long associated with tolerance, ponders whether Muslims should be afforded constitutional freedoms. Is it possible to imagine the same kind of casual slur tossed off about blacks or Jews? How do America’s nearly seven million American Muslims feel when their faith is denounced as barbaric?

This is one of those times that test our values, a bit like the shameful interning of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the disgraceful refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe.

It would have been natural for this test to have come right after 9/11, but it was forestalled because President George W. Bush pushed back at his conservative ranks and repeatedly warned Americans not to confuse Al Qaeda with Islam.

Now that Mr. Bush is no longer in the White House, nativists are back on the warpath. Some opponents of President Obama are circulating bald-faced lies about him that are also scurrilous attacks on Islam itself. One e-mail bouncing around falsely accuses Mr. Obama of lying and adds, “His Muslim faith says it’s okay to lie.”

Or there’s the e-mail I received the other day from a relative, declaring: “President Obama has directed the United States Postal Service to remember and honor the Eid Muslim holiday season with a new commemorative 44 cent first class holiday postage stamp.” In fact, it was President Bush’s administration that first issued the Eid stamp in 2001 and that issued new versions after that.

Astonishingly, a Newsweek poll finds that 52 percent of Republicans believe that it is “definitely true” or “probably true” that “Barack Obama sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.” So a majority of Republicans think that our president wants to impose Islamic law worldwide.

That kind of extremism undermines our democracy, risks violence and empowers jihadis.

Newsweek quoted a Taliban operative, Zabihullah, about opposition to the mosque near ground zero: “By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor. It’s providing us with more recruits, donations and popular support.” Mr. Zabihullah added, “The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get.”

In America, bigoted comments about Islam often seem to come from people who have never visited a mosque and know few if any Muslims. In their ignorance, they mirror the anti-Semitism that I hear in Muslim countries from people who have never met a Jew.

One American university professor wrote to me that “every Muslim in the world” believes that the proposed Manhattan Islamic center would symbolize triumph over America. That reminded me of Pakistanis who used to tell me that “every Jew” knew of 9/11 in advance, so that none died in the World Trade Center.

It is perfectly reasonable for critics to point to the shortcomings of Islam or any other religion. There should be more outrage, for example, about the mistreatment of women in many Islamic countries, or the oppression of religious minorities like Christians and Ahmadis in Pakistan.

Europe is alarmed that Muslim immigrants have not assimilated well, resulting in tolerance of intolerance, and pockets of wife-beating, forced marriage, homophobia and female genital mutilation. Those are legitimate concerns, but sweeping denunciations of any religious group constitute dangerous bigotry.

If this is a testing time, then some have passed with flying colors. Hats off to a rabbinical student in Massachusetts, Rachel Barenblat, who raised money to replace prayer rugs that a drunken intruder had urinated on at a mosque. She told me that she quickly raised more than $1,100 from Jews and Christians alike.

Above all, bravo to those Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders who jointly denounced what they called “the anti-Muslim frenzy.”

“We know what it is like when people have attacked us physically, have attacked us verbally, and others have remained silent,” said Rabbi David Saperstein. “It cannot happen here in America in 2010.”

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick put it this way: “This is not America. America was not built on hate.”

“Shame on you,” the Rev. Richard Cizik, a leading evangelical Christian, said to those castigating Islam. “You bring dishonor to the name of Jesus Christ. You directly disobey his commandment to love your neighbor.”

Amen.

Excuse me, Cardinal McCarrick. You might want to check your history books. I believe you'll find that's exactly what America was built on.

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the u.s. border is 161 kms wide

Some friends of us were recently driving near New York State's Thousand Islands, and were caught in a sudden traffic jam. They were horrified to learn that the cause was not an accident or construction, but US border patrols. Guards were stopping cars, requesting ID and questioning people about their reasons for being in the US. Our friends - who are Canadian - were offended and repulsed. Can you imagine such a thing occuring in Canada, nowhere near the border?

We already know that the US border is a Constitution-free zone, where laws prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure do not apply. (Of course, for millions of US citizens, the entire US is a Constitution-free zone.) But many people are unaware that, since 2001, the "border" has become an elastic area up to 100 miles (161 kilometres) wide.

While several people sent me a recent New York Times story on transportation checks, this story appeared two years earlier in USA Today.

Border Patrol agents are stepping up surprise inspections on domestic trains, buses and ferries, nabbing illegal immigrants far from the border.

In Vermont, Washington, Louisiana, New York and elsewhere, the agents, who have the authority to search any mode of transportation within 100 miles of the border, are working routes that don't cross into Canada or Mexico. Most checks are at bus and train stations and ferry terminals.

"The first line of defense is on the immediate border," says Joe Giuliano, deputy chief in the patrol's Blaine, Wash., sector, which includes Alaska and Oregon. "We have to have a second line of defense."

In February, agents began checking passengers taking the ferry between Washington's San Juan Islands and the terminal in Anacortes, Wash. So far, Giuliano says, they have caught 59 illegal immigrants, two with criminal records, and eight U.S. citizens, most on drug violations.

The patrol started ferry checks after hiring more agents, he says. "To be honest, it's something we should have done for a long time," he says. "We were so short on resources."

Immigrant and civil liberties advocates argue that the agents focus more on certain passengers based on skin color and accent.

"They will see a white person and ask, 'Where were you born?' Then they will see a person of color and ask, 'Do you have ID?' " says Caroline Kim with the Detainment Task Force in Syracuse, which provides bail for some detained immigrants and helps them through the legal process.

The Border Patrol says it does not engage in racial profiling. . . .

This story in Wired also followed up on an incident in 2008.

Government agents should not have the right to stop and question Americans anywhere without suspicion within 100 miles of the border, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday, pointing attention to the little known power of the federal government to set up immigration checkpoints far from the nation’s border lines.

The government has long been able to search people entering and exiting the country without need to say why, which is known as the border search exception of the Fourth Amendment.

After 9/11, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security the right to use some of its powers deeper within the country, and now DHS has set up at least 33 internal checkpoints where they stop people, question them and ask them to prove citizenship, according to the ACLU.

"It is a classic example of law enforcement powers expanding far beyond their proper boundaries – in this case, literally,” said Caroline Fredrickson, who heads the ACLU’s Washington, D.C., Legislative Office.

The ACLU says it has scores of complaints from citizens and wants Congress to investigate and roll back the buffer zone. According to a map the rights group released Wednesday, some 190 million citizens live within what the ACLU dubs the "Constitution-free Zone."

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islamophobia in the u.s. is an "increasingly vehement, nationwide movement"

Our comments in this post morphed - predictably, I think - into a conversation about the insanity taking place in the US against the planned Muslim cultural centre in lower Manhattan. In a recent column, Haroon Siddiqui pointed out that:

This theme has emerged in opposition to mosque projects in California, Connecticut, Kentucky, Michigan, New York state, Texas and Tennessee.

but concludes:

These groups are noisy but marginal. This is the opposite of Europe, where Islamophobia has gone mainstream. In North America, it is still held in disdain.

From what I gather, Islamophobia is much deadlier and more virulent in Europe, but I think Siddiqui is misreading the situation in the US, perhaps confusing it with the more mild forms of Islamophobia we see in Canada. (I'm using "mild" as a relative term here, not to excuse or explain away.)

Islamophobia is indeed held in disdain by many good people in the US, but in a country founded and built on racism, any bigoted movement can quickly gain traction - especially when the actions of the government do nothing but reinforce the hatred. This is, after all, a country where more than half the national budget is spent on wars against Muslim countries.

Glenn Greenwald:

One of the most under-reported political stories is the increasingly vehement, nationwide movement -- far from Ground Zero -- to oppose new mosques and Islamic community centers. These ugly campaigns are found across the country, in every region, and extend far beyond the warped extremists who are doing things such as sponsoring "Burn a Quran Day." And now, from CBS News last night, we have this:

Fire at Tenn. Mosque Building Site Ruled Arson

Federal officials are investigating a fire that started overnight at the site of a new Islamic center in a Nashville suburb.

Ben Goodwin of the Rutherford County Sheriff's Department confirmed to CBS Affiliate WTVF that the fire, which burned construction equipment at the future site of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, is being ruled as arson. . . .

The chair of the center's planning committee, Essim Fathy, said he drove to the site at around 5:30 a.m. Saturday morning after he was contacted by the sheriff's department.

"Our people and community are so worried of what else can happen," said Fathy. "They are so scared" . . .

Opponents of a new Islamic center say they believe the mosque will be more than a place of prayer; they are afraid the 15-acre site that was once farmland will be turned into a terrorist training ground for Muslim militants bent on overthrowing the U.S. government.

"They are not a religion. They are a political, militaristic group," Bob Shelton, a 76-year-old retiree who lives in the area, told The Associated Press.

Shelton was among several hundred demonstrators who recently wore "Vote for Jesus" T-shirts and carried signs that said "No Sharia law for USA!," referring to the Islamic code of law.

Others took their opposition further, spray painting a sign announcing the "Future site of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro" and tearing it up.

Earlier this summer opponents criticized the planned mosque at hearings held by the Rutherford County Commission, as supporters held prayer vigils.

At one such prayer vigil, WTVF reported opponents speaking out against construction.

"No mosque in Murfreesboro. I don't want it. I don't want them here," Evy Summers said to WTVF. "Go start their own country overseas somewhere. This is a Christian country. It was based on Christianity."

The arsonists undoubtedly will be happy to tell you how much they hate Terrorism. And how there's a War on Christianity underway in the U.S. The harm from these actions are not merely the physical damage they cause, but also the well-grounded fear it imposes on a minority of the American population. If you launch a nationwide, anti-Islamic campaign in Lower Manhattan based on the toxic premise that Muslims generally are responsible for 9/11 -- and spend a decade expanding American wars on one Muslim country after the next -- this is the inevitable, and obviously dangerous, outcome.

Why should non-Muslim Americans care about this? Besides the same reasons white Americans needed to care about civil rights, non-gay Americans need to care about same-sex marriage, and men need to care about feminism, because what kind of world do we want to live in? Besides that. This growing hatred against an imagined internal enemy is one of the requirements of the fascist shift. How much clearer can the parallels be?

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the u.s. police state at home and abroad

I found three items in my inbox, seemingly unrelated, but in reality, inextricably connected. Think of their implications, on the people of the US and on the world.

First we have The Real News' Paul Jay speaking with author Eric Margolis. The former head of the MI5, the British equivalent of the FBI or the RCMP, admits that the Iraq War was based on lies and deception - but consumers of mainstream US news never hear this.

Next we have Glenn Greenwald musing on the The Washington Post's revelations of a secret US government, spying on nearly everyone - certainly including its own citizens. Jeremy Scahill, writing in The Nation, points out that this has all been known and reported on before, but a major corporate media report should at least raise an eyebrow. But no one makes a peep. Greenwald:

This all "amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight." We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.

Anyone who thinks that's hyperbole should just read some of what Priest and Arkin chronicle. Consider this: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." To call that an out-of-control, privacy-destroying Surveillance State is to understate the case. Equally understated is the observation that we have become a militarized nation living under an omnipotent, self-perpetuating, bankrupting National Security State.

I find reading Greenwald on the WaPo expose more edifying than the Top Secret America project itself, for the context and commentary he brings.

And then one more piece, this by Ed Brayton, who tirelessly chronicles (among other things) the epidemic of police abuse of power in North America. This one is particularly brutal. Brayton quotes Alison Kilkenny, who some of you know as the partner of comic Jamie Kilstein.

Late one night in October, a 17-year-old on a bike was chased by a police officer in a cruiser. When the boy refused to stop, the officer aimed his Taser out the driver's window and fired. The boy fell off the bike and the cruiser ran over him, killing him.

Another report on the same incident:

At about 12:45 a.m., said Moultrie, Victor left on a borrowed bike. From there to where the chase started was about four and a half miles. But it was about 1:45 a.m. that Officer Jerald Ard spotted Victor. Where Victor went after leaving Moultrie's house is unclear.

Ard would later say that he tried to stop Victor because he had seen him at a construction site and thought he may have stolen something. But witness Victor Stallworth said he saw Victor ride his bicycle past the construction site without stopping. Months later, Ard gave investigators a different reason for stopping Victor: He didn't have a light on his bike -- only two reflectors.

A video camera on the dashboard of Ard's squad car recorded the brief chase:

Ard spotted Victor and did a fast U-turn to stop him. When Victor didn't stop, Ard veered to the wrong side of the street and up on the sidewalk behind the teenager.

The officer revved the motor, his tires screeching, as he followed Victor into the side yard of an apartment building. With his flashers and PA system on, Ard yelled at Victor to "stop the bike."

It is unclear why Victor disobeyed the order to stop, but the teenager continued pedaling, trying to escape. Ard followed his every move, driving in and out of the wrong lane of traffic and up onto the sidewalk again. One minute and seven seconds into the chase Ard fired his Taser at Victor, who turned into a parking lot. About two seconds later, Victor fell to the ground and Ard ran over him.

And if that isn't enough to make your blood boil, this certainly should:

A video, taken from the dashboard of another officer's car, recorded what happened in the minutes before the discovery:

Three officers squatted next to Ard's car, looking under it at Victor. Ard unlocked the passenger side of his car and got something out. The object is light-colored and floppy, but isn't clearly visible. Ard, holding the object, crawled under the car next to Victor's body and stayed there for 40 seconds. Two minutes later, paramedics found a 9mm silver and black semi-automatic in Victor's pocket.

Lab tests showed the gun had been wiped clean. No fingerprints were on it -- not Victor's, not anyone's. Victor's family, as well as his pastors and friends, were aghast. Victor was scared of guns, they said. He would not have carried a gun around.

None of this is particularly unusual. The officers in the Atlanta PD drug squad who turned state's evidence against their colleagues testified that virtually every officer in the department kept bags full of drugs in the trunks of their squad cars to plant on people.

And guess what? A judge decided that the officer had not done anything wrong by firing a taser at a kid on a bike on the false basis that he might have stolen something that had never been reported stolen.

If this incident shocks you, consider that Brayton blogs about this kind of thing all the time.

So we see a police state on the macro level, as the US attempts to monitor and control nearly the entire world, and a police state on the local level, as police officers operate as uniformed organized crime units. And we see a public largely ignorant of either condition.

To the usual protestations that the US is not a police state, because the person speaking is free to come and go as she chooses, I retort that in every police state, some people remain free and some live under siege. Historically, in any former or current authoritarian society - be it East Germany, Argentina, South Africa or elsewhere - some portion of the population lived well and undisturbed, and some lived in fear and degradation.

Apartheid-era South Africa was a lovely, comfortable society for well-off white people. So can it be said that South Africa was a free society? Whether the distinction is based on class, colour, ethnic origin, or anything else, how can we say a society is free, if a large percentage of its population is harassed, spied on, preyed on, even murdered, with no access to justice and zero consequences to the perpetrators? I explored this theme in this previous post, which documents the millions of law-abiding New Yorkers who live in a police state today.

And if we must look at everything from a purely selfish level, does this map include you? If Winston Smith believed himself to be free, did that make him free?

Around the globe, the US makes war against anyone who challenges its global empire, or happens to live in the way of resources it claims as its own. At home, it makes war against the poor, the ranks of which are growing exponentially.

And the vast majority of its citizens continues to believe they live in a democracy and a free society, because no one tells them otherwise. If anyone does try to raise an alarm, most people have no context in which to place the information; it sounds completely bizarre, and they automatically reject it. Or, increasingly, the bell is a false alarm, ringing backwards, sounded by the people who foment and profit from fascism.

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a few notes on how crazy my country of origin has become

My classes don't start until September 13, but next week my mother is here, so my time is suddenly very limited. As my last days of relative freedom tick away, I'm combing through some very old email in my inbox, to see what I can read, post and/or dispose of. I found a neat juxtaposition between two links sent by two of my main link-senders.

First, Kevin Drum, writing in Mother Jones, makes a dead-on assessment of the Obama administration. Thanks to James.

Here's the good news: this record of progressive accomplishment officially makes Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. And here's the bad news: this shoddy collection of centrist, watered down, corporatist sellout legislation was all it took to make Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. Take your pick.

Widening the lens, Glenn Greenwald dissects the greatest hoax perpetrated in my lifetime: "The Liberal Media". This one is longer, but like all of Greenwald's columns, very much worth your time. Sent by my Greenwald correspondent, redsock.

First, consider which viewpoints cause someone to be fired from The Liberal Media. Last month, Helen Thomas' 60-year career as a journalist ended when she expressed the exact view about Jews which numerous public figures have expressed (with no consequence or even controversy) about Palestinians. Just weeks ago, The Washington Post accepted the "resignation" of Dave Weigel because of scorn he heaped on right-wing figures such as Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh. CNN's Chief News Executive, Eason Jordan, was previously forced to resign after he provoked a right-wing fit of fury over comments he made about the numerous -- and obviously disturbing -- incidents where the U.S. military had injured or killed journalists in war zones. NBC fired Peter Arnett for criticizing the U.S. war plan on Iraqi television, which prompted accusations of Treason from the Right. MSNBC demoted and then fired its rising star Ashleigh Banfield after she criticized American media war coverage for adhering to the Fox model of glorifying U.S. wars; the same network fired its top-rated host, Phil Donahue, due to its fear of being perceived as anti-war; and its former reporter, Jessica Yellin, confessed that journalists were "under enormous pressure from corporate executives" to present the news in a pro-war and pro-Bush manner.

What each of these firing offenses have in common is that they angered and offended the neocon Right. Isn't that a strange dynamic for the supposedly Liberal Media: the only viewpoint-based firings of journalists are ones where the journalist breaches neoconservative orthodoxy? Have there ever been any viewpoint-based firings of establishment journalists by The Liberal Media because of comments which offended liberals? None that I can recall. I foolishly thought that when George Bush's own Press Secretary mocked the American media for being "too deferential" to the Bush administration, that would at least put a dent in that most fictitious American myth: The Liberal Media. But it didn't; nothing does, not even the endless spate of journalist firings for deviating from right-wing dogma.

. . . .

Then there's the Nasr case itself. Look at how our discourse is completely distorted and dumbed-down by the same stunted, cartoonish neocon orthodoxies that have also destroyed our foreign policy. In our standard political discussions, the simplistic and false notion -- obviously accepted by CNN -- drives the discussion: Fadlallah is an Evil Hezbollah Terrorist!!, and Nasr probably is as well given the "respect" she expressed for him during his death. Thus: CNN got caught employing an Israel-hating Terrorist-lover, and once she revealed herself, she had to be fired immediately!!!! That really is the primitive level of agitprop churned out by neocon polemicists and then dutifully ingested and embraced by CNN.

The reality, though, is completely different. [More here, with copious links.]

I tune out a good deal of US news and distraction, but inevitably, someone solicits my opinion. When people ask me what I think about the "mosque at ground zero" controversy, and I can't even begin to stutter an answer. You mean, the Muslim cultural centre in lower Manhattan? Why are we allowing bigots and jingoists to define our speech? It's not ground zero, some mythical mirage of the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of ever. It's a real place with a real name: lower Manhattan. It's not a mosque, and if it were? Why should Muslim prayer be prohibited there? Imagine if churches couldn't be built near the former sites of any US-led or -funded terrorism exploits. Christians would have to colonize the Moon.

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question: when is the end of a war not the end of a war?

Answer: When it is not the end of the war.

I am absolutely, utterly, totally and completely floored to learn that otherwise intelligent people actually believe that the US occupation of Iraq is over.

The US has been lying about this war since a year before the invasion. They have been lying, deceiving, bullshitting, spinning, inventing, embellishing, covering-up - what else you got? go get a thesaurus - from day one. Why would they suddenly start telling the truth now?

After this so-called withdrawal, more than 50,000 US troops will remain in Iraq, and that number again in private mercenaries, funded by US taxpayers, will be there, too.

People, you can't seriously believe this constitutes the end of the war, can you?

And why would the US pull out? Has an unlimited cache of oil just been found on the moon?

"We have always been at war with Eastasia."

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the definition of a police state depends on where you live - what country, and what postal code

Some people get upset when progressive activists use words like "police state" and "fascism" to describe law enforcement overkill in North American society. I understand the argument. We don't want to exaggerate conditions in our own society and thus minimize the conditions of people who live under extreme conditions, as the Palestinians, Iraqis, and others in occupied or highly repressive regimes.

But I often find these and similar words appropriate for several reason.

First, fascism, like democracy, is a process. Neither is an on-off, all-or-nothing state. I often borrow Naomi Wolf's concept of the "fascist shift," which describes a process of change through which a democratic state becomes an undemocratic state. There are many historical precedents.

Second, I think many people subscribe to an overly narrow definition of these words, leading them to minimize some very grave dangers. If the word "fascism" conjures images only of Nazis - if we decide this is the litmus test of fascism - then we may miss a whole lot of fascist tendencies that don't pass this narrow test. I'm sure you've seen this poster? As a commenter on my Flickr page put it, by the time you're at that point, it's too late.

There's a third and very important consideration: not everyone who lives within the same geographic boundaries lives in the same state. Israel is said to be a democracy. Apartheid-era South Africa was said to be a democracy, too. It was, for some. As Israel is, for some. Canada has a great health care system and excellent quality-of-life statistics - unless you're Native. The US is a land of opportunity - except for all the people who don't have any. And so on.

Right now, in my hometown of New York City, millions of people live in what I will unapologetically term a police state. Columnist Bob Herbert calls it "Jim Crow policing".

You might think Jim Crow was about whites-only water fountains and other public facilities, but it was much worse than that. Jim Crow was a reign of terror, not perpetrated by the state but enabled by it. This morning I interviewed a South African activist and historian for an upcoming post (one I'm really looking forward to). He said Jim Crow in the US South was worse than South African apartheid.

So what is "Jim Crow policing", also known as "stop-and-frisk"? It is when police stop people of colour on the streets in their own community, interrogate them, force them to submit to body checks and searches, and collect their personal information, to be stored in a giant police database. There is no warrant. There is no probable cause for arrest. There are no charges. There is only skin colour and zip code.

Millions of New Yorkers have been subjected to stop-and-frisk. The New York Civil Liberties Union conducted a multiyear study of police practices. Here's what they found.

An analysis by the NYCLU revealed that more than 2 million innocent New Yorkers were subjected to police stops and street interrogations from 2004 through 2010, and that black and Latino communities continue to be the overwhelming target of these tactics. Nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent, according to the NYPD’s own reports:
* In 2004, 315,483 New Yorkers were stopped by the police. [See numbers here.]

From the NYCLU's Stop and Frisk Fact Sheet:

NYPD’s Over-reliance on Stop and Frisk

* The NYPD stopped, questioned and/or frisked over 508,540 people in 2006, an increase from just 97,296 in 2002.

* Even using "the most liberal assumptions" about the national average when it comes to the rate of the public's contact with police officers, the Rand Corporation’s study notes, New York should have had "roughly 250,000 to 330,000 stops rather than the 500,000 stops actually recorded."

* Only 10 percent of stops led to summonses or arrests. The overwhelming majority of New Yorkers questioned and frisked by the NYPD were engaged in no criminal wrongdoing.

* As compared to a 1999 study by then Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, which reported that police stopped nine people for each arrest they made, twice as many people now are being stopped for each arrest.

Disproportionate Stops of People of Color

* 89 percent of those stopped in 2006 were people of color. 55 percent of the stops were of black people – more than double their percentage of the population – and 30 percent were of Latinos.

* Stops of whites, who number about 3.6 million according to recent census estimates, amounted to only 2.6 percent of the white population. By contrast, stops of blacks, who number about 2.2 million people, represented 21.1 percent of the entire black population.

* Residents of Brownsville's 73rd Precinct and Harlem's 28th Precinct had a 30 to 36 percent chance of being stopped and questioned by police in 2006. Citywide, the average was about 6 percent.

* A total of 2,756 cops filed 54 percent, or approximately 274,000, of all stop-and-frisk reports in 2006. Of that group, 15 percent, or about 413 officers, stopped no whites.

Disproportionate Outcomes of Stops for People of Color

* In 2006, 21.5 blacks were stopped for each arrest of a black person as opposed to only 18.2 whites stopped for each white arrest.

* Cops found guns, drugs, or stolen property on whites about twice as often as they did on black suspects.

* Whites were stopped on suspicion of possessing a weapon at a rate lower than their weapon-possession arrest rate. Blacks were stopped on suspicion of possessing a weapon at a rate greater than their weapon-possession arrest rate. These findings indicate that cops were more often unjustified in stopping black people on suspicion of having weapons.

Disproportionate Use of Force on People of Color

* Police used force – i.e. handcuffing, frisking, drawing weapon, restraining – about 50 percent more often on blacks than on whites in 2006.

* 45 percent of blacks and Latinos who were stopped were also frisked, compared with only 29 percent of whites.

In addition to these class- and colour-based indignities, the NYPD has been storing all the personal information they collected indefinitely in a giant database. In other words, the NYPD turned more than 1 million innocent African American and Latino New Yorkers into criminal suspects, even though they had not even been legally accused of wrong-doing!

The New York State legislature recently passed a bill, signed by Governor David Paterson, preventing the NYPD from storing this data. It passed over the heated opposition of both New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. (New York Post: "Mayor Bloomberg, cops fume as gov purges frisk list".)

However, the law only speaks to data collection and storage practices. To my knowledge, it does nothing to curtail the stop-and-frisk practice itself.

Why can police stop and search citizens without a warrant, without evidence or suspicion of wrong-doing? Doesn't the US Constitution forbid that?

If you were among the millions of people subjected to this practice, would you feel you lived in a police state?

An Op-Ed in the New York Times by Heather Mac Donald defended the practice of using stop-and-frisk in low-income neighbourhoods because "that's where the crime is," and decried the "predictable chorus of criticism from civil rights groups" against the stop-and-frisk database. Here are five articulate soloists from that chorus.

The best crime-stopping policies actually deal with criminals. Yet Heather Mac Donald wants the New York Police Department to continue a stop-and-frisk policy with a 90 percent failure rate. Nearly nine out of every 10 people stopped and interrogated on our streets are let go without a citation or summons — and certainly without an arrest.

Last year, N.Y.P.D. officers stopped New Yorkers 575,000 times. A gun — the ostensible reason for the stop-and-frisk regime — was found in slightly more than 0.1 percent of those stops. That is an unbelievably poor yield rate for such an intrusive, wasteful and humiliating police action.

I agree with Ms. Mac Donald that vulnerable communities need better police protection — but a policy that is both ineffective and hurts the long-term relationship between the police and the community is not the way to provide that protection.

Donna Lieberman
Executive Director
New York Civil Liberties Union
New York, June 28, 2010

•

Heather Mac Donald misses two key points. Critics of the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics do not accuse individual officers of racial bias, but question the practice itself because of how it focuses almost entirely on minority neighborhoods.

Also, Ms. Mac Donald writes as if stop-and-frisk methods were the only effective response to unlawful acts in high-crime areas. Other police departments in the nation, like those in San Diego and Boston, have engaged in community policing strategies that have been successful in reducing crime in designated areas.

And by contrast, those approaches have helped build positive relationships between the community and the police, rather than create the kind of antagonistic and hostile attitudes in local residents that stop-and-frisk has often fostered.

It is time to cease defending the racially biased stop-and-frisk practices of the city’s Police Department and to consider other proven crime-fighting approaches.

Robert Gangi
Executive Director
Correctional Association of New York
New York, June 28, 2010

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Apart from the Fourth Amendment protection against warrantless searches and seizures, the alarming 575,000 “pedestrian stops” chalked up last year by New York’s Finest are flagrantly contrary to law.

Section 140.50(1) of the state’s Criminal Procedure Law provides that “a police officer may stop a person in a public place ... when he reasonably suspects that such person is committing, has committed or is about to commit” a crime.

Absent the Constitution’s prerequisite of “probable cause” and the statutory requirement of reasonable suspicion, each of these arbitrary stops flouts the law, makes a travesty of the right to privacy and breeds contempt for law enforcement.

Eighty years ago, Justice Louis Brandeis observed: “The makers of our Constitution . . . conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”

Roger Brandwein
Scarsdale, N.Y., June 26, 2010

The writer is a lawyer.

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Heather Mac Donald’s ringing endorsement of Compstat policing and the more than half a million New York Police Department stop-and-frisk street encounters in just one year brushes aside the consequences that so many adverse interactions have on the relationship the police enjoy with the community.

For too many minority New Yorkers, the sight of a passing police car brings a sense of dread and angst, the terrible feeling that they do not yet enjoy the full liberties the Constitution promises or the rights of redress that many New Yorkers take as a given. It ignores, too, the fact that many street cops bristle at the constant pressure to produce higher year-on-year “numbers,” pressure that coarsens a profession that is overwhelmingly rooted in service.

The N.Y.P.D. should be proud that it takes crime and disorder seriously — something that sadly cannot be said for many big city police departments — but people of good conscience should beseech the deservedly much-respected Commissioner Raymond Kelly to look again at whether this level of adversarial interaction is really required.

Eugene O’Donnell
Chicago, June 26, 2010

The writer, a lecturer in the department of law and police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is a former N.Y.P.D. officer and New York City prosecutor.

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Heather Mac Donald argues that the racial disparities with respect to the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practices are justified because of higher crime rates in black and Latino communities. While she cites many statistics regarding violent crime, she minimizes the fact that of the 575,000 stops in 2009, only 12 percent led to arrest or summons, and completely ignores that guns and other weapons were recovered in slightly more than 1 percent of the stops.

To Ms. Mac Donald, and perhaps many New Yorkers, the police’s singling out of “suspicious-looking” people for questioning because they live in “high crime” neighborhoods may seem like a low-cost, intuitively compelling approach to crime prevention. To the hundreds of thousands of innocent people stopped walking to school or work, running an errand for their families or simply visiting friends, these practices have the effect of undermining communities, damaging self-esteem and corroding trust.

Practices that yield so little and cause such harm demand critical examination.

Leonard E. Noisette
Director, Criminal Justice Fund
Open Society Institute, U.S. Programs
New York, June 28, 2010

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