This Is What Accountability Looks Like

Yesterday the former President of Peru was sentenced to 6 years in prison by the Peruvian Supreme Court. The reason?

He ordered an illegal search.

Supreme Court Judge Pedro Guillermo Urbina ruled that Fujimori had abused his power in 2000 when he ordered a military aide to search the apartment of the wife of Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori's former security chief, who was then embroiled in a money-laundering scandal. Fujimori did not deny ordering the search but had said it was part of a nationwide manhunt for Montesinos. Prosecutors argued that he ordered the search in an effort to seize evidence that might have directly implicated him in Montesinos's crimes.

There were no riots in the streets. Peru isn't horribly broken and needs to be healed (mainly because Peru isn't a PERSON, a common mistake of the punditocracy, ascribing their own beliefs onto the nation at large). There is not some unmanageable breakdown of trust between the people and their government. All of the horrors that High Broderists in this country continually say would be unleashed by any accountability have not materialized.

This was a simple case of a chief executive who overstepped his power and authority, and the system of government set up to check these abuses acted in the most proper manner, and justice was actually served. Wht a concept.

Fujimori is actually on trial for additional human rights abuses during his Presidency. And that will be adjudicated in the same manner.

This is a completely foreign concept in America today. When our President engages in an illegal search, the Congress moves to legalize that behavior. When our President abuses human rights, nobody in a position of power stands up to him. When torture is undertaken by this government, members of Congress find out about it and stand silent. Heck, the US Congress has done a better job holding other countries accountable than we have our own.

US lawmakers have voted to stop Burma's rubies and high-quality jade from entering the United States.

The measure, passed by the House of Representatives, tightens sanctions against the junta by attempting to stop gem dealers from laundering their goods in third countries before they enter the US.

The bill, which must be approved by the Senate and president, also tries to stop Burmese leaders using US banks to launder money in third countries.

Democratic Rep Tom Lantos said in a statement: "Burma's generals fund this repression of their own people by selling off the country's natural resources, especially oil and gems, leaving the Burmese people in poverty."

He added that tightened sanctions would "ensure that the United States stands up to these thugs".

What about the lawbreakers inside the White House?

We have mechanisms in this country to achieve accountability. We have a nation of laws that, when properly enacted, can produce incredible results.

It was the nation's first ever electoral vote on Blackwater and it was a massive people-powered grassroots victory over the mercenaries. Every "stop Blackwater" candidate won by at least 63% (results here). It was an an enormous statement to Blackwater: stay out, you are not the kind of neighbors we want in our community. It is also a blistering statement by a very conservative town to reject the Bush world view. Our nation is not better served by having a privatized Army. There is nothing pro-troop about supporting Blackwater.

The United States Congress has a lot to learn from the 500-odd citizens of Potrero. Instead we get free passes from the Democrats. We get pleas that it's time to "move on," that the nation shouldn't have to go through such a wrenching circumstance.

There is a great decay in this country, a nagging feeling that things are simply not right, and it comes right down to accountability. Its absence has us as frustrated and despondent as a nation as I've seen in a long time. The fact is that we have a lot to learn from countries like Peru. And the elites, the chattering class, is trying to whisk right by this and move on to 2008.

The only thing that will put a salve on a large section of this nation is accountability.

BREAKING: Patrick Leahy Is, Well, SOMETHING Of A Gangster

I'm blown away at how it went down in the Senate Judiciary Committee today. Greg Sargent picks it up.

Sources say Senator Russ Feingold offered an amendment that would have stripped telecom immunity from the bill, but it was defeated. Then Senator Arlen Specter, the ranking GOPer on the committee, offered a "compromise" amendment saying that in these lawsuits the Federal government, and not the telecoms, would be the defendants.

But because of a procedural difficulty Specter's amendment wasn't voted on -- and Senator Patrick Leahy, the chair of the committee, essentially went around Specter's amendment and moved to have a vote to report the bill out of committee without any telecom immunity in it. That passed along strictly party lines. And that's where we are.

I think there was a back-channel deal between Leahy and Reid. There is likely to be a floor fight over this, so telecom immunity is not dead. But Reid is apparently committed to filing a motion to proceed on the bill without telecom amnesty. This is not a slam dunk, as Glenn Greenwald notes.

Even under the best-case scenario -- namely, Reid introduces a bill which does not contain amnesty -- anyone can (and certainly will) offer an amendment to include amnesty in the bill, and no matter what happens, it will be necessary to find 41 Senators willing to support Dodd's filibuster to keep amnesty out of the bill. As indicated, today is a good result in that it's preferable for the bill to have left the Committee today without amnesty in it (especially given the 3 Democratic members' support for amnesty) -- and that's not nothing -- but there is no grand "victory" in the sense that there is now some huge hurdle to having the Senate's bill include amnesty.

It's easier to whip people over stopping an amendment than filibustering the whole bill, that's the improvement. Reid has every ability to limit amendments, by the way, he could also do that. I was inclined to give Leahy a lot of credit for procedural ju-jitsu (by putting through a Title I version of the bill, keeping telecom amnesty in Title II, and then only allowing Title I out of the committee), but I guess there's always an out. This is still anybody's ballgame, but civil liberties forces are in a better position today than yesterday.

UPDATE: The House passed their version of the bill, without immunity. And it's actually a half-decent bill. In addition, the House passed needed mortgage industry reform legislation with a veto-proof majority, and EVERY SINGLE DEMOCRAT voted for it.

Today, I like our Congress. It changes from day to day.

Awful Sorry About That Lost Fourth Amendment

The Democrats are now sorry, so sorry, about the FISA bill.

At issue now is the temporary update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) passed earlier this month, just before Congress fled Capitol Hill for its summer break. This update was made necessary when the secretive judicial body that oversees the wiretapping, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, banned eavesdropping on foreigners whose communications were being routed through the United States.

The legal update, which expires in six months, allows the NSA to resume siphoning such communications. In one of its key changes, US intelligence no longer needs to know that at least one of the parties to a communication is abroad prior to eavesdropping. It needs only to "reasonably believe" that one person is off US soil.

In the weeks since this bill's passage some Democrats have begun to regret the manner in which it was approved. They feel the vote was held in haste, with summer break looming. And they've started to worry that by changing just a few words in a massive piece of law they've opened the door to practices they did not intend.

It's completely sad that it takes things like New York Times articles for legislators to recognize the enormity of what they've done. Don't they have staffers? Doesn't anyone in the office read the law?

This is such a depressingly familiar pattern. They pass a law in haste, get slammed for it by the base, then leak out that they regret doing things like allowing the Bush Administration to do physical searches on American soil and commandeer business records (which the new FISA bill does authorize, 'tis true). It's a treadmill this country simply must get off. And as for the Democrats smacking their heads and saying, "I shoulda had a V-8," it's too darn late for all that. The White House is emboldened by this willing giveaway of civil liberties. They're allowing local authorities to use spy satellites in data collection, fercryinoutloud. This genie will be very hard to get back in the bottle. Jonathan Alter knows it:

I hate to sound melodramatic about it, but while everyone was at the beach or "The Simpsons Movie" on the first weekend in August, the U.S. government shredded the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the one requiring court-approved "probable cause" before Americans can be searched or spied upon. This is not the feverish imagination of left-wing bloggers and the ACLU. It's the plain truth of where we've come as a country, at the behest of a president who has betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution and with the acquiescence of Democratic congressional leaders who know better. Historians will likely see this episode as a classic case of fear—both physical and political—trumping principle amid the ancient tension between personal freedom and national security.

(Nice dig at bloggers there, while at the same time validating what we've been saying for years. I guess we've committed the sin of being too right too soon.)

Quit talking about regrets and do something about it. Your approval ratings are in the toilet because of this constant enabling of Bush Administration policies that the country abhors. Wake the fuck up before we're knee-deep in an attack on Iran.

FISA Update

So we're beginning to learn the full story behind the shameful Democratic cave on the FISA bill. Apparently a new judge was rotated into the FISA court, and he or she objected to the wiretapping of calls that are international but go through a US switcher. Everyone's hair burst into flames at the White House, and they initially wanted to dissolve the court altogether. And essentially, that's what they did, giving oversight of the wiretapping program to the people who conduct it, letting the hens run their own henhouse, really. As Anonymous Liberal points out, the final bill is an abomination.

The bill has two basic components. First, it creates a carve-out that exempts nearly all international communications (even when one party is in the U.S.) from FISA’s regular provisions (which require individualized warrants, minimization, judicial review, etc.). The second half of the bill then grants the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence the power to authorize warrantless surveillance of the category of communications carved out by the first half of the bill [...]

Most of the debate in Congress and coverage of the bill in the media has focused on whether these procedures and oversight requirements are sufficiently rigorous to protect Americans’ civil liberties. They’re not. But that’s more or less beside the point because–and this is what I think many people do not yet appreciate–given the way FISA is structured, the President is under no obligation to follow even these watered-down oversight requirements. They are merely optional.

This is because the bill changed the definition of "electronic surveillance" to something so narrow that all other intelligence-gathering activities exist outside of it, and therefore outside the scrutiny of the FISA court.

It is imperative that members of Congress and the media be made aware of the full scope of this bill. It is not as advertised. By carving out a large category of surveillance activities from the definition of “electronic surveillance,” the bill effectively exempts such surveillance from FISA altogether. And while the bill purports to establish conditions and procedures for conducting warrantless surveillance, these requirements are effectively optional and, in any case, there is no penalty in the statute for disobeying them. Those lawmakers who voted for this bill need to be confronted with these facts and shamed into doing something to correct the situation.

I know lawmakers don't read the bills, but seriously, how could they have allowed this and gotten rolled so easily? The fact remains that any contact with a "foreign intelligence" target, in other words anyone foreign, is now legally susceptible to spying. Which means American citizens will be caught up in that net. And this doesn't seem to bother anyone because it's "only temporary." Yeah, I'd like to see the strategy for that fight in 180 days. I'm sure it'll be just as sterling.

The Bush Administration sought an amendment of FISA to overcome roadblocks that the FISA court threw in its way. It put its case to Congress in secret and sent its national intelligence czar to negotiate a deal. When he concluded an agreement, Bush rejected it. The White House replied with threats, essentially stating that as soon as another terrorist attack occurs, we will pin the blame on Democrats in Congress because of their failure to amend FISA to give us what we want.

As usual, the White House was not really interested in compromise. In fact, their conduct demonstrated that they would have much preferred not getting their way; they were in search of a political issue. News of such a ploy might even be enough, with a full-court press from the heretofore pliant media, to reverse our current political doldrums and make people take notice.

But Congress looked Bush’s insatiable quest for power squarely in the eye, unlocked the chicken coop, and said to the fox “here–take anything you want.” The changes that were made were subtle, but arguably they gave the Bush Administration even more than it asked for. And from this point forward, any conversation any American has with a foreigner or a person overseas may be snooped upon, no warrants necessary.

Meanwhile, the government wasted no time in using their expanded data collection powers by punishing the official alleged to have revealed the illegal spying program in the first place.

During the very time Congress was debating codifying President Bush's lawbreaking by revising the FISA law many of his allies had been afraid to publicly challenge as unconstitutional, Alberto Gonzales' DOJ was raiding the home of a former Justice official to identify the person who first brought the illicit program to light [...]

The agents seized (Thomas) Tamm's desktop computer, two of his children's laptops and a cache of personal files. Tamm and his lawyer, Paul Kemp, declined any comment. So did the FBI. But two legal sources who asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case told NEWSWEEK the raid was related to a Justice criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media. The raid appears to be the first significant development in the probe since The New York Times reported in December 2005 that Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents without court warrants.

The next thing that the Bush Administration will want is immunity. They know that they've expressly broken the law for five years, and while they have sanction for it now, after 2009 a real Attorney General may prosecute. So their next move is clearly to ensure that nobody, particularly not the telecom companies who have given over their infrastructure to the NSA so they can vacuum up millions of communications, is legally liable.

But the Center for Constitutional Rights is trying to head them off by seeking an injunction to declare the FISA bill unconstitutional.

Yesterday, lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees asked a federal judge in San Francisco to invalidate the recently-passed FISA law that lets the Bush administration conduct warrantless surveillance on suspected terrorists without first getting court-approved warrants.

“We are asking your honor, as swiftly as possible, to declare this statute unconstitutional,” said Michael Avery, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights. … “Neither Congress nor the president has the power to repeal the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirements,” Avery said.

In CCR v. Bush, the Center is arguing that the government’s surveillance jeopardizes its ability to represent Gitmo clients. CCR reports that it has engaged in thousands of telephone calls and e-mails with people outside the United States in the course of its representation.

This whole episode reveals that fearmongering still works and that the Constitution really is just a piece of paper to those who swear an oath to defend it.

Fourth Amendment For Me But Not For Thee

Are you poor? Black? Hispanic? Congratulations! The city of San Diego wants to look at everything you own without a warrant! All of this is in the context of ensuring that there are no "cheaters" and that money distributed to the poor by the state is being done legitimately. This is actually a Constitutional question that was upheld in 1971. Oddly enough, and sit down for this one because it's shocking, it's only ever applied to the poor and not the literally millions of other entities, whether corporate or agricultural, who receive the same type of largesse.

If waiving one's Fourth Amendment rights based on the receipt of government funds were applied outside of the impoverished, most people would instantly see the problem. Given the number of people who benefit from some kinds of government subsidy, the government could simply abrogate the Bill or Rights through its spending power. This can't be right. And whether or not it's unconstitutional, certainly these kinds of searches without cause are bad policy, for the same reasons. As soon as executives at Archer Daniels Midland agree to waive their Fourth Amendment rights, we can start talking about welfare recipients.

I know that the Fourth Amendment is no longer operative, so this may be something of a moot point. But it's so clear that those quick to jump on the indigent for "ripping off the taxpayer" has no similar fervor for those in corporate America. I was astonished when I heard Bill Richardson use the phrase "corporate welfare" at the Yearly Kos Presidential Forum. Maybe some of our more progressive cities might want to start barging in to some corporate offices just to make sure their books are the same as they claim. Who knows, maybe we can end welfare as we know it again.