STU PITT BLOG

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Want to Sue the FBI for Spying on Your Mosque? Sorry, That's Secret. | Mother Jones

Obama, once a critic of the state secrets doctrine, has invoked it repeatedly. But critics say his latest use of Bush's favorite get-out-of-court-free card is different.

—By Hamed Aleaziz

Mon Aug. 8, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

The state secrets privilege—perhaps the most powerful weapon in the government's legal arsenal—has a complicated history. For years, Democrats, including then-Sen. Barack Obama, accused the Bush administration of overusing of the privilege, which allows the government to quash cases that involve national security before a court even hears evidence. Then, after Obama took office, his Justice Department used this get-out-of-court-free card repeatedly.

Last week, the DOJ invoked the state secrets privilege yet again. But this case, civil liberties groups say, is different.

Most of the post-9/11 cases that the government has killed with the state secrets privilege have either involved foreign-born terrorist suspects or the government's actions abroad. The case the Obama administration tried to quash last week doesn't explicitly involve either. The case in question, which was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), focuses squarely on domestic intelligence-gathering targeting Americans—namely the FBI's allegedly widespread use of informants and surveillance against Muslim Americans.

The FBI's involvement in the case—and the fact that it involves Americans—makes it stand out among the other state secrets cases, says Ameena Qazi, CAIR's deputy executive director. "We're surprised at the government's shocking move in invoking the state secrets doctrine in this case of all cases," Qazi says. Since this case "involves domestic intelligence-gathering on US soil against Americans," she explains, "it's an unprecedented move to our knowledge."

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This Is What Happens When You Ban Heroin by Anthony Gregory

How appropriate that California is home to the newest ban on caffeinated beer. This haven of busy-body progressivism has long been a national leader in the war against liberty and property. Talk-radio conservatives are mocking Governor Jerry Brown’s crusade against the dread alcohol-caffeine combo, lamenting the implications for our dwindling personal responsibility, freedom and common sense. This is classic California, they seem to agree.

But they do not appear to realize the origin of these terrible anti-liberty attacks, even when the answer is most obvious. Indeed it was in California that the war on drugs began. The 1875 Opium Dens Ordinance, mostly targeting Chinese immigrants, forever marked San Francisco as a pioneer among prohibitionist municipalities. A state-level law in 1891 mandated warning labels for opium. In 1907 California required prescriptions for opium sales and the drug and paraphernalia were banned statewide in 1909. The same year the U.S. sent Hamilton Wright to the Opium Commission in Shanghai to contemplate a global ban.

On a national level, the United States was a radically free country, as far as drugs were concerned, until the early 20^th century. A 1906 federal law involved small interventions into the drug market but it wasn’t until 1914, in the middle of the horrible Wilson administration, that the Harrison Narcotics Act was signed, signifying the beginning of the end for American drug freedom and so many other liberties that have fallen as collateral damage. For almost a century it’s been a nearly uninterrupted avalanche of prohibitionist nonsense and despotism.

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Neocon Dream Act: Obama Is Implementing Plans For War Throughout the Middle East

08-11-2011 • Washingtonsblog.com

The U.S. has dramatically ratcheted up the pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad, slapping new sanctions on key companies Wednesday as White House press secretary Jay Carney said the leader is guilty of “heinous actions” and the country would be better off without him. *** President Barack Obama and other administration officials have already said publicly that Assad has “lost legitimacy” and must begin the push toward democracy in Syria or step down. A few weeks ago, after months of protests on the streets of Syria and little progress from Assad without explicit U.S. calls for his resignation, administration officials began to consider calling for Assad to step down, CNN said. The new push from the White House, officials said, will make clear Assad is no longer a credible reformer and should give up his post. A Nato plan for a post-Gaddaffi Libya – carving up the country, and giving the richest spoils to the UAE – has been leaked. The U.S. is already at war in Somalia. As the New York Times noted last month: “U.S. Expands Its Drone War Into Somalia“. The U.S. is always trying to justify war against Iran (see this, for example) and Lebanon. What explains these widespread wars throughout the Middle East? As American reporter Gareth Porter reported in 2008: Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith’s recently published account of the Iraq war decisions. Feith’s account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country’s top military leaders. Feith’s book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing “new regimes” in a series of states…
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