Democrats' War on Due Process and Terrorist Fearmongering Long Predate Orlando

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

27 June 16

 

efore the bodies were removed from the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last week, Democrats began eagerly exploiting that atrocity to demand a new, secret “terrorist watchlist”: something that was once the domestic centerpiece of the Bush/Cheney war-on-terror mentality. Led by their propaganda outlet, Center for American Progress (CAP), Democrats now want to empower the Justice Department — without any judicial adjudication — to unilaterally bar citizens who have not been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime from purchasing guns.

Worse than the measure itself is the rancid rhetoric they are using. To justify this new list, Democrats, in unison, are actually arguing that the U.S. government must constrain people whom they are now calling “potential terrorists.” Just spend a moment pondering how creepy and Orwellian that phrase is in the context of government designations.

What is a “potential terrorist”? Isn’t everyone that? And who wants the U.S. government empowered to unilaterally restrict what citizens can do based on predictions or guesses about what they might become or do in the future? Does anyone have any doubt that this will fall disproportionately on certain groups and types of people?

The Democrats’ most extreme attack on due process comes, unsurprisingly, from that party’s supremely authoritarian Terror Warrior, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose bill would “give the attorney general the discretion to block a sale to a given individual suspected of involvement of some kind in terrorism.” In their effort to exploit Orlando and other recent mass shootings, Feinstein and the Democrats encountered a serious problem: Neither Omar Mateen, nor the racist Charleston killer Dylann Roof, nor numerous other mass shooters, were on any terrorist watchlist (Mateen was investigated by the FBI, which — rightly — closed its file on him in 2014 after it found no evidence of wrongdoing). So Feinstein wrote a special provision in her bill to obviate this objection, one empowering the attorney general to put anyone on the banned list “who has been investigated in the last five years for ‘conduct related to a Federal crime of terrorism’” — even if they were ultimately found to have done nothing wrong.

After Feinstein’s bill was rejected last night on a largely party-line vote by the Senate, the Democrats unleashed a fearmongering messaging campaign so exploitative and deceitful that it would have made Karl Rove blush with embarrassment, or at least seethe with envy.

So now, in the lexicon of the leading liberal lights of the Democratic Party, someone deemed by the U.S. government to be suspicious — placed in secret on a list, with no evidence presented and no court process — is the equivalent of “ISIS.” And to demand due process be accorded — says this Harvard Law Professor — is to arm ISIS.

To see how deep down the authoritarian hole Democrats reside, consider this 1987 New York Times editorial raging against Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese for arguing that criminal suspects don’t deserve Miranda warnings. Meese’s rationale: “You don’t have many suspects who are innocent of crime. That’s contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.” Said the NYT editors in response: “In other words, guilty until proven guilty.” That’s exactly what Elizabeth Warren and Chris Murphy believe: If the U.S. government views you as suspicious, that is proof of your guilt. Thus, a “suspect” is the same as “ISIS.”

Even worse was the messaging that came from an operative with CAP, who has become a little Twitter star among the Democratic faithful for his endless Cheneyite exploitation of terrorism fears to attack Republicans and justify gun watchlists. This is how he described Feinstein’s bill:

It’s hard to put into words how appalling that is. This CAP official is not only outright lying about Feinstein’s bill: pretending that it bars “terrorists” — rather than people placed on a suspicion watchlist — from buying guns. Worse than rank dishonesty, he is literally, explicitly equating people who will be deemed suspicious by the U.S. government — overwhelmingly Muslim, needless to say — with “terrorists.” As Sam Adler-Bell put it about this tweet, “Referring to all people on the DOJ’s watchlist as ‘terrorists’ is legally incorrect and ethically ugly.” In Volsky’s mind, or at least in his propaganda, anyone deemed by the government to be suspicious is now a “terrorist” — no evidence needed, no trial held, no due process accorded.

For eight years, this mentality was the driving force behind the worst Bush/Cheney war-on-terror abuses. No matter what the extremist policy was — indefinite detention, warrantless eavesdropping, torture, no-fly lists, Guantánamo, rendition, CIA black sites — Republicans would justify it by saying it was merely being done to “terrorists” and would accuse their due process-advocating critics of wanting to “protect terrorists.” What they actually meant was that all of this was being done to people accused by the U.S. government of involvement in terrorism. But in their mind, “government accusations of terrorism” were synonymous with “proof of guilt.”

That is exactly the warped, Orwellian formulation Democrats embrace: As is extremely obvious, the Democrats’ definition of “terrorist” is “anyone whom the U.S. government suspects of being a terrorist.” Just as was true of all those GOP abuses, what makes these Democratic proposals so dangerous is that they constitute a war on the most basic right of due process. As Vox’s Dara Lind explained, “If you give the government more power to ban terrorists from having guns, you’re reinforcing the power it has to define who counts as a terrorist.” That’s why the ACLU yesterday wrote to the Senate and denounced Feinstein’s bill:

It’s tempting for some Democratic faithful to believe that their party leaders do not really believe in this blatant attack on due process, but instead are just doing this as a political tactic, a form of trolling to place Republicans in an uncomfortable position on gun control. Though believing that might make Democrats feel better, it is pure fantasy, utterly unsustainable by looking at the naked reality of the Democratic Party.

That theory might have some viability if Democrats had spent the last eight years fighting against the Bush/Cheney no-fly list and other forms of due process-free “terrorism” punishments. But the opposite is true: They have aggressively defended and expanded those policies. As The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux reported in 2014 after they obtained (and published) the U.S. government’s 166-page secret watchlist guidelines, “The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system” — ushering in massive increases in both the number of people on those lists and the ease of placing them on it.

It’s not just that there are huge numbers of people on the watchlist who have done nothing wrong. It’s much worse than that: People who are acquitted of the charges against them can and do remain on the watchlist if the FBI wants them to. As an ACLU report this year documented:

So it’s not that the Democrats have tried but were thwarted by the Big, Bad Republicans to get rid of secret watchlists, and are now using that against the GOP as some sort of genius rhetorical move. Just like George Bush and Dick Cheney did, Democrats love secret, due process-free terror watchlists. They have aggressively expanded their usage — overwhelmingly against American Muslims — and are now seeking to create a whole new list for an entirely different purpose. They’re doing this because they believe in it, and because they do not believe in due process.

But none of this should be surprising. This is who the Democratic Party is. They have proven over and over that they believe that the definition of “terrorist” is “someone whom the U.S. government suggests, in secret, might be a terrorist.”

Thus they have cheered all sorts of attacks on due process in the name of fearmongering over terrorism. Obama presided over a significant increase in mass surveillance. He has gone around the world, in at least seven predominantly Muslim countries, killing people with bombs and missiles shot by drones, then justifying it on the ground that the people he wanted to kill were terrorists. Democrats even stood and cheered as the Obama administration asserted (and exercised) the right to target U.S. citizens for execution via drone, based on nothing more than suspicion and government accusations; they even went to court to deny a father the right to have his American son have his day in court before being killed by the U.S. government.

[It should go without saying that Republicans here are no better. They watched approvingly for years as Bush and Cheney implemented this due process-free system of watchlists and secret punishments for terror suspects because it was predominantly affecting Muslims, and only began caring this year when their system (predictably) expanded, now to include gun rights. As I discussed last night with the ACLU’s Hina Shamsi:

Indeed, this is the 2003 document that created these secret, due process-free watchlists that Democrats have embraced and are now seeking to expand:

Moreover, for years, fearmongering about terrorism and accusing due process-advocating liberals of loving al Qaeda were staples of the GOP’s rhetoric. And GOP leaders still have not lost their touch when it comes to exploiting terror fears; just this week, Mitch McConnell plans to introduce a bill to expand secret, warrantless domestic surveillance by invoking Orlando.]

The Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of “due process” is really not that complicated: It provides that “no person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This is not some ancillary luxury; it’s one of the few genuine safeguards against tyranny. If you want to ban someone from buying a gun because you believe they’re a Terrorist or otherwise a Bad Person, then go create a procedure where the government must go to an actual court, present evidence, the accused can respond, and then a judicial ruling is issued. What kind of a person opposes that?

Our Gun Debate Is Topsy-Turvy. Like Quitting Donuts to Stop Lung Cancer

By Rebecca Solnit, Guardian UK

27 June 16

 

magine a chainsmoker comes in to see you who has lung cancer. You tell him to stop smoking, and he starts bargaining. He’s willing to give up donuts. You say donuts don’t cause lung cancer, so he offers to stop watching Game of Thrones. What’s clear is that he doesn’t intend to stop smoking, and he doesn’t want to hear about any correlation to lung cancer. That’s about where this country is on gun violence.

It’s weird that the civil-rights gesture of a sit-in is now being used to support gun action that apparently includes the no-fly list. The list, as a brown friend pointed out to me, is a list of mostly brown people, who got on for various reasons, some of them dubious at best, or wildly unfair and have no path to clearing their name and getting off.

Sloppily enforced, the list apparently also targets people who have the same name as people on the watch list. Senator Ted Kennedy was treated as a no-fly suspect at one point; so have small children and lots of peaceable people. But we have mass shootings all the time, and they’re mostly by citizens who’ll never get anywhere near a list like that. So this terrorist-watch-list legislation is a bandaid nowhere near the wound that matters.

What we see over and over is that this society would like to imagine our epidemic of violence is by “them” – some kind of marginal category: terrorist, mentally ill, nonwhite. But when it comes to mass killings, mostly it’s an epidemic of “us” –mainstream men, mostly white, often young, usually miserable.

In the wake of the murder of 49 people in Orlando, people have addressed the strong correlation between domestic violence and mass shootings. According to Everytown for Gun Safety: “More than half of women murdered with guns in the U.S. in 2011 — at least 53% — were killed by intimate partners or family members ... This is also true for mass shootings: in 57% of the mass shootings between January 2009 and June 2014, the perpetrator killed an intimate partner or family member”.

With that in mind, we could just get serious about enforcing the 1996 Lauterberg Law that allows firearms to be taken away from those convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors and prohibits them from purchasing and owning guns. It’s rarely actually used to require convicted abusers to surrender their guns, but it could be.

Lack of background checks also allows people who should not be allowed to buy guns to buy them. Fully enforcing that law nationwide would take away a whole lot of guns from people who are not good at self-control and respect and who are, as I said in the Guardian just before the Orlando massacre, the significant terrorists at large in this country. You can tell they’re terrorists because there are a lot of people, mostly women and children, who live in terror because of them.

No-fly-list no-guns legislation would not have prohibited the Orlando shooter from buying guns. He wasn’t on it. But if we had adequate domestic violence services in this country, perhaps his first wife would have contacted the authorities, rather than just being whisked away by her family. And if he had been convicted of domestic violence, as he should have been, and we had enforced the existing federal Lautenberg law in every state, with background checks in place, then he would’ve been denied guns and employment as an armed guard.

It’s too late for that now, but not to enforce the law on the books that might prevent a lot more deaths down the road.

Beyond that, we could recognize that we have a unique kind of violence in the United States. The omnipresence of guns has something to do with it, and so does what people are now calling hypermasculinity or toxic masculinity. But there’s also some warped idea of individualism and self-expression at work in the lone-gunmen shooting sprees.

In most countries around the world, people either kill someone they’re personally furious at or kill for political and economic reasons. The people they kill are killed for reasons that are coherent even if they’re reprehensible.

Many of our mass shootings are something else altogether: some miserable guy who finds personal relationships hard and his own psyche a mystery and a torment goes out and kills a bunch of strangers in a movie theater or a school or a workplace as a form of creative self-expression, general punishment or a desire to go out in a blaze of glory.

If the casualties are high enough, he’ll have his week or two of celebrity, thanks to the eagerness of the media to show and tell us everything about him. These days shootings involving three or four or five victims are hardly news unless the circumstances are spectacular, though. That’s why there was so little news about the man who allegedly shot his wife and four daughters in New Mexico the day before the Orlando bloodbath; allegedly his wife had asked for a divorce. The desire to be free of abuse is often what triggers its fatal escalation.

Mental illness is a factor in some – the shooter who killed six people and gravely injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 was said to be a paranoid schizophrenic, though he was also a supporter of far-right ideologies and also seemed to hate women, especially women in power like Giffords.

In many cases, including his, mental illness seems more a factor in disinhibiting people than in directing them; the directions come from the outside culture. There’s plenty of mental illness around the world, and it doesn’t lead to mass murders the way it does here. (Mental illness was cited as a factor in the 2014 Isla Vista mass shooting, and it led to a California law that went into effect this year that allows temporary restraining orders preventing mentally ill people from buying and owning guns.) Some cases are apparently fueled by racism, like Dylan Roof’s Charleston church massacre a year ago appeared to be.

In the case in Orlando, homophobia seems like a more compelling motive than Islam, and we might want to remember that the conservative mainstream has been, of late, in a frenzy of demonizing gay and lesbian and trans people, treating them as threats and outsiders and enemies.

The lesson is that a lot of the United States’s mass killers are just angry men. It’s not foreign-born ideologues; it’s our very own armed and angry men. It’s not them; its us.

We know everything we need to about the epidemic of violence in this country, except how to overcome the opposition to diagnosing it accurately and treating it effectively. You don’t pretend it’s not lung cancer, unless you want to have a good excuse to not give up the cigarettes that are killing you. Donuts don’t cause lung cancer. They never have and they never will. We all know that – some of us just don’t want to admit it.