The Post on the Patriot Act

Today's editorial in the Washington Post contained the following statements:

There is little evidence at this stage that any of the provisions [of the USA Patriot Act] have given rise to abuses. But some provisions, including some of the most valuable of the new powers, could be dangerous in the wrong hands or in the absence of rigorous oversight.

One reasonable response to the Post editorial is: WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN? At least, if you hadn't been paying attention and had just read the latest piece by Brian Cloughley over at Counterpunch. Cloughley's piece is helpful, in part, because it's an international's perspective on the abuses of the Patriot Act (among other things).

You have to remember that most of us foreigners used to think that if somebody went in front of a US court they would get, by and large, a pretty fair deal. Lots of foreigners, especially in countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, Russia, most of South America, Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran, and the entire African continent used to think that the American legal system was as fault-free as could be expected in this imperfect world. In their own countries the chances of a fair trial are uncertain, and in some places non-existent, and they regarded American legal procedures as being decidedly better than their own. No more.

Cloughley doesn't address any particular provisions in the Patriot Act, and his attitude towards pre-Bush administrations strikes me as a bit glowing. But he does express the disappointment of one who saw some good things in our country prior to Bush, and he conveys something of the cruelty that is sometimes obscured by more technical discussions of civil liberties and the defense thereof. Below are excerpts touching on each of these themes.

Most of the peoples of the world (and many governments) now look with bewilderment and despair at the extraordinary embrace of autocratic, underhand and sinister control measures by the administration of a country that formerly practised and reveled in an open system of governance. After all, the basic American sense of decency, probity and honor actually forced the resignation of a president who betrayed the trust of the American people, an event that shook and impressed the world at large. Even the viciously partisan pursuit of Clinton for deceit about his grubby peccadilloes showed, albeit it in a mean-spirited party-political fashion, that presidents could not get away with telling lies.

But now the world's democracies look at America and regard with horror the establishment's ferocious protection of a president who not only tells lies but wages war on his own people by denying them freedoms supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution.

And, for recent specific examples,...

In America there has been an explosion of unbelievably Alice-in-Wonderland, government-initiated, capricious prosecutions, relentlessly pursued by dedicated morons in the teeth of all evidence that their grounds for federal charges were deficient, imperfect and derisory. The victims, such as Professor Steven Kurtz of Buffalo, Captain James Yee of the Guantanamo Bay prison, and the lawyer Mr Brandon Mayfield (to name the high-profile cases), have gone through hell. Their lives have been destroyed by the Government of the United States. Rejoice, ye tyrants everywhere, because the Bush administration is providing you with precedent, aid and comfort in repression of your citizens.

Professor Kurtz (admittedly an eccentric of some magnitude; but what's the matter with that?) is suffering a campaign of desperation to find the tiniest thing legally wrong about his actions. There is no possibility that he can be found guilty of any offence of substance, but Ashcroft and the FBI are still trying. No doubt they will get him on something or other, because, these days, under the Patriot Act, you can be clapped in jail for almost anything, providing those who charge you can state, without evidence being produced, that you are in some way possibly associated with terrorism.

The treason charges against Captain Yee collapsed ignominiously, but when it was realized that the court would throw them out he was unnecessarily and intentionally humiliated in front of his family by production of evidence of dalliance with a female colleague. His wife and small daughter were brought into the courtroom specifically to hear details of the affair. The people who did this are by any standards the scum of the earth. The sort of a person who arranges for a man to be discredited, degraded and shamed in front of his little daughter is fairly typical of the Bush administration zealots. If someone is even a minor threat to their credibility they must destroy him. And if they can't destroy him, well, they make sure he suffers unto the next generation. Good Christian stuff, all this.

The macabre little piece of malevolent titillation about adultery (which is not indulged in by any God-fearing judge, bureaucrat or politician, of course) had nothing, nothing whatever, to do with the charges against Captain Yee that fell apart because they could not be supported in any way.

Production in court of the evidence of the woman with whom he had had an affair was designed specifically to crush and mortify Captain Yee and to destroy his family and make his daughter forever, throughout her whole life, ashamed of her father, courtesy of the Bush administration's obsession with persecuting people who don't conform to their ideology. This disgusting and deliberate act of vindictiveness on the part of individuals representing the US government had no bearing on the charges of treason against Captain Yee, which were, of course, laughed out of court.

Sobering times.