Guilty of flying while brown

Ten years ago, on this day, I wasn't caught up in the national fervor for revenge on 9/11. I didn't feel solidarity in outrage with the 90% of America that wanted to kick some Arab ass in retaliation. I felt a profound sadness, because I "knew" this horrible attack would end up with this result. Ten years later, and this is what happens if you're flying while brown:

Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.

The cops brought us to a parked squad car next to the plane, had us spread our legs and arms. Mine asked me if I was wearing any explosives. “No,” I said, holding my tongue to not let out a snarky response. I wasn’t sure what I could and could not say, and all that came out was “What’s going on?”

No one would answer me. They put me in the back of the car. It’s a plastic seat, for all you out there who have never been tossed into the back of a police car. It’s hard, it’s hot, and it’s humiliating. The Indian man who had sat next to me on the plane was already in the backseat. I turned to him, shocked, and asked him if he knew what was going on. I asked him if he knew the other man that had been in our row, and he said he had just met him. I said, it’s because of what we look like. They’re doing this because of what we look like. And I couldn’t believe that I was being arrested and taken away.

Read the whole horrific account. Apparently some passenger(s) were scared of seeing brown people on the plane and reported "suspicious" activity. The FBI agent told her there were over 50 other such shakedowns in airports around the country on this 9/11.

It's true when they say 9/11 changed everything. Me, I knew from the very first one, it wasn't going to be a change for the better.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

America's most wanted

I honestly didn't think I would live to see this happen. The end of a legendary manhunt.

Fugitive South Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, wanted for 19 murders, was captured last night in Southern California, the result of a tip from FBI television spots that began airing this week. His capture ended a 16-year manhunt that spanned the globe.

Maybe you have to be from New England to appreciate Whitey's legend. He was so colorful a character, rainbows paled in comparison. He was always in the news before he went on the lam. Putting aside that he did some terrible things, I have to admit I'm a little sad they finally got him. It feels sort of like getting to the last page of a book you really loved and don't want to end.

Anyway, the only thing that could top this would be finally finding Jimmy Hoffa.

Go forth and read

By Libby

It's almost halfway through the month and I already have a lot of links saved that I'm never going to get around to blogging but are worth reading and should at least at be archived. It's Sunday night. What better time to catch up on your reading?

With all the focus on the primaries, Iraq hasn't been leading the news cycle but it's good to remember that it's still a mess over there. No matter what the White House tells you, the surge really didn't work. In fact, 2007 was the deadliest year for US troops since the invasion and as Dahr Jamail points out with a long list of 'benchmarks,' it wasn't so great for the Iraqis either.

Sibel Edmunds revelations on 9/11 is the most underreported, yet most explosive story in years. Our high ranking government officials gave nuclear technology to our enemies. You won't see it in the MSM. Only Chris Floyd has done it justice.

In better news, thread by thread, the veil of secrecy around the Bush administration is being shredded.

Of course, they won't have as many secrets to keep anyway. In a delicious irony, the telecoms have shut down wiretaps because the FBI failed to pay their bills.

If you're already worried about money, you probably don't want to read about the slow mo collapse of our house of cards economy. But better to be armed with knowledge, than be unpleasantly ambushed when it falls altogether.

On a lighter note, here's a defense of open wifi networks at home from a surprising source.

And here's some good news.I don't know about you, but one of my greatest fears is developing Alzheimers in my golden years. I'm thrilled to discover they may have found a cure.

Meanwhile, we've never been number one in health care outcomes, but in the last four years we've sank to rock bottom. The politicans are lying when they tell you we already have the best health care in the world. We don't and it costs too much for lousy coverage.

And finally, this one is old but I loved this quote by Eugene Robinson.

The word “change” has had great resonance in the Iowa campaign. In part, the yearning for change arises because George W. Bush has led the nation down so many dead-end paths. But from the conversations I had with Iowans, it seemed clear to me that change is also shorthand for the disconnect between the Washington state of mind and the widespread expectation, hardly unreasonable, that this city ought to actually get something done every once in a while.

Really and we don't care how it gets done as long as it answers to the will of the people instead of the whims of the corporations.

[h/t to Avedon and Radley]

NSLs should be abolished

Nothing really surprising here. Just another doc for the growing pile of evidence that the FBI regularly lies to obtain secret surveillance warrants. This latest revelation has allegedly resulted in tightened controls on obtaining the warrants but considering that's what they told us when they allowed the program to go forward in the first place, I'm not betting the farm that much will change. It is what it is, and I certainly won't ever approve of secret domestic surveillance no matter how many rules they make to "safeguard" our privacy.

But this does provide an opportunity to revisit a related piece that I didn't get to while I was working last week, that being an op-ed by someone who has received a NSL from the FBI. It starts like this.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

He fought the NSL in court and never released the information. The FBI eventually decided it didn't really need it after all and dropped the request but not the gag order which still remains in effect.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

The author goes on to point out that with the gag orders, citizens like himself who had legitimate misgivings about the abuse of the NSLs were prevented from communicating their concerns to those who had an ability to prevent the abuse, for instance his Congressmen at the time the Patriot Act was being reauthorized. As the FBI's breaches of proper protocol continue to be revealed, one would have to agree.

Today's article in the WaPo references expert agreement that "Congress, the courts and the Justice Department share the blame for not conducting more aggressive oversight of FBI agents." One wonders how they were expected to exercise such oversight when the whole program has, and continues to operate under such unwarranted secrecy. As the op-ed author notes, "At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy."

In fact, isn't compelling a private citizen, under the threat of penalty, to lie to even his own family about the government's conduct a defining aspect of a police state? I remind you again. Fascism doesn't arrive overnight. It creeps in by degrees. The secret warrants clearly need better controls but the NSL program takes us one giant step closer to a totalitarian government and should be shut down completely - before it's too late to save democracy as we know it.

No proof that NSLs work

I know it's just the editorial page and not the news side of the Wall St. Journal. And I'm aware that the editorial staff at the WSJ has a long tradition of blindly supporting GOP administrations but you would think a brainy bunch like that could do at least do better than make vague and unsupported pronouncements like this.

The worst outcome would be if Congress limited the administrative subpoena power in order to punish the FBI. By all accounts, these "national security letters" have proven to be useful in tracking potential terror threats. In particular, the Bush Administration shouldn't now give in to any such demands merely to appease Congress or save the jobs of Messrs. Mueller or Gonzales.

I mean, by whose accounts other than the White House have they proved useful? Name me one terror prosecution in which evidence collected by these NSLs have been instrumental. Hell, name me one prosecution in which they've even been tangentially useful. And more importantly tell me what they did with the hundreds of thousands of records they collected under the NSLs in the absence of any indictments for terrorism.

Gonzales certainly needs to go and he should take the NSLs with him. As has been pointed by others before me, if you institute a program with such potential for abuse, it's foolish to expect that any safeguards will prevent the abuse from occurring. Our judicial system was rightfully designed to operate in transparency and there's no need for NSLs to cloud the process when court authorized surveillance would work just as well.

Did Bush order the FBI to break the law?

It's hardly shocking to learn that even under the wide latititude given them under the Patriot Act, the FBI is violating the law in issuing National Security Letters to secretly obtain private information on innocent Americans. Their legal obligations are not at all onerous yet the FBI has failed to meet their very low threshold for compliance.

[The investigator] Fine found that FBI agents used national security letters without citing an authorized investigation, claimed "exigent" circumstances that did not exist in demanding information and did not have adequate documentation to justify the issuance of letters.

Fine claims the violations are not deliberate but that ignores an important point that Glenn Greenwald notes in his post. When the Patriot Act was reauthorized -- against my strenuous objections which only nine senators including Russ Feingold supported -- Bush issued one of his infamous signing statements announcing that he had no obligation to honor the oversight safeguards which formed the basis of the Senate's approval of the bill. As I recall there was a much debate and when the legislation passed the Senate assured us with great fanfare that they passed it specifically because these safeguards were going to "protect" Americans' privacy. So much for that.

The FBI has issued on the order of 47,000 of these NSLs. The auditor's review of only 293 of them found "22 possible breaches of internal FBI and Justice Department regulations -- some of which were potential violations of law --" and "the FBI identified 26 potential violations in other cases." Do the math for yourself folks. How many breaches would that be if the review were extended to all 47,000? Glenn sums up the greater implications.

The story here is not merely that the FBI is breaking the law and abusing these powers. That has long been predicted and, to some degree, even documented. The story is that the FBI is ignoring the very legal obligations which George Bush vowed were not obligations at all, but mere suggestions to be accepted only if he willed it. It is yet another vivid example proving that the President's ideology of lawlessness exists not merely in theory, but as the governing doctrine under which the executive branch has acted, time and again and as deliberately as possible, in violation of whatever laws it deems inconvenient.

One has to wonder just what are they doing with these databases of improperly obtained information? Somehow, I feel certain they're not deleting any of it.