An Anger-Fueled Ruse

So, apparently Attorney General Eric Holder is back up on the Hill doing his usual CYA Dog and Pony show about Operation: Fast and Furious, the gun-walking (remember when it was gun running?) operation that led to U.S. DOJ officials losing track of the guns it sold to drug lords without apprehending anyone. I know I've discussed this before, but I get irritated every time I see Holder try to B.S. his way out of this by bringing up gun control.

The guns are a distraction: a massive, calculated, politically motivated distraction away from the actual problem--the Drug War. The Republicans are using F & F to embarrass Holder and, predictably, Holder is getting defensive and trying to turn the blame on the Republicans for creating the environment where guns may flow freely across the border. I've seen this show before.

Never mind that people don't tend to kill each other willy-nilly with a body count in the tens of thousands just because they have guns. Never mind that a lack of prohibition on guns is being scapegoated to cover up a failed prohibition that has gone on for a half century. Never mind that the drug prohibition has made drug trafficking so lucrative that kingpins can buy whatever they want: they have submarines now.

WE NEED BETTER SUBMARINE REGULATION!

So, as I write this, you have grown men and women engaging in heated, angry, blame-filled hearings, arguing over something completely tangential and plainly irrelevant to the actual cause of the violence and murder. This is your government on drugs.

Any questions?


bellum medicamenti delenda est

"Made in the U.S.A." Is Not the Problem

I was watching the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing today on the oversight of the Department of Justice. The sole witness was Attorney General Eric Holder, who would be called upon to answer for "Operation Fast and Furious," a failed DOJ/ Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) program that was meant to snare cartels in gun trafficking. I tweeted the first part of the hearing, but I wanted to discuss an op-ed by two state attorneys general that Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) had put in the Congressional Record (courtesy of Emptywheel's @bmaz):

Congress and the media have understandably focused on the missteps of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the “Fast and Furious” sting operation that allowed suspected “straw buyers” to purchase weapons and transport them to Mexico in order to build cases against drug cartels.

However, the covert operation was terminated abruptly after its possible connection to the tragic death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was revealed. Unfortunately, most of the recent criticism about the operation seems to be serving as a means to attack Attorney General Eric Holder and destroy the ATF, rather than to hold those behind Fast and Furious accountable.

The focus should be on the real public safety problem underlying this controversy: keeping arms from the Mexican drug cartels and protecting the security of the United States. However, many of the roadblocks faced by ATF and the Department of Justice are not being built by international criminals, but by Congress. (Emphasis mine)

The piece goes on to explain the prolific violence in Mexico and that 95% of the guns recovered from Mexican drug violence 'can be traced to the United States.' This sounds troubling, but it's really smoke and mirrors.

As I've detailed in the past, drug violence in Mexico is indeed rampant and unspeakably brutal. People are kidnapped, murdered, often tortured, strung up from overpasses, disemboweled, and/or beheaded. Does it really matter whether the murderers bought their ropes and machetes from stores in Tuscon or Tijuana?

It's the murderers, stupid.

If we could magically keep American guns out of the hands of the cartels, people would start being gunned down with a greater percentage of AK-47s sold in other countries than AR-10s made and sold in America, but they would still be gunned down. The cartels have planes, boats, and more than enough money to get whatever they want through their expansive networks. Making it marginally more difficult to acquire weapons may be good policy insofar as we want better, more sensible gun laws in this country, but it's hardly the "real public safety problem" facing our law enforcement agencies and the public at large.

The cartels make astronomical profits from selling the drugs banned by the United States' global prohibition policy. That money gets them access to the entire planet and all its terrible weapons that make their line of work so bloody. Ramped up interdiction efforts just make drug dealing more dangerous, but also more lucrative, and thus more enticing. So, when you think about it, the real public safety problem is the one that enables and incentivizes the cartels to commit heinous crimes in the first place: the Drug War itself.

Arguing about where the cartels bought their guns is like arguing the make of the bus that just hit you: it's trivial, at best, and probably a sign you have brain damage.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

UPDATE: This isn't meant to be a dismissal of the ineptitude that plagued Operation Fast and Furious. This was a post about the underlying problems, not the highly questionable tactics employed in that operation.

Taking Mukasey to Task

Here in Wonky World, op-eds are the bread and butter of our daily lives. We scan them every day to see what other wonk-types say, comment on them on our personal or institutional blogs, and every once in awhile we get our shot at the big-time -- getting published in a major U.S. newspaper or even showing up on TV.

But, more often than not, the op-eds themselves are pretty mediocre fare. Oh, sure, some research assistant got the author some juicy stats on crime figures or Ag subsidies, but most just fall into the recesses of your mind after you read them. Nothing against the authors, mind you. The nature of the game is just rigged for boredom: editors love stats in spite of the fact that normal people's eyes glaze-over when the letters "GDP" appear in print.

This L.A. Times piece by GW Law professor Jonathan Turley, on the other hand, stands out:

In his twisting of legal principles, the attorney general has succeeded in creating a perfect paradox. Under Mukasey's Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president -- and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.



Such a perfect paradox is no easy task. Most attempts fall apart because of some element of logical consistency. The closest example to Mukasey's Paradox is the Grandfather Paradox: If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he meets your grandmother, you would not be conceived and therefore you could not go back to kill your grandfather. That one can play real tricks with your head.

...

Now some have pointed to other paradoxes in Mukasey's tenure. There is, for instance, the "paradox" that his confirmation was saved by Democrats -- who thereby allowed the president to avoid a confrontation on torture. There is the "paradox" of Mukasey insisting that courts should not investigate the Justice Department's failure to preserve the CIA torture tapes because the Justice Department should be allowed to investigate its own failure to previously investigate.

Yet these are not real paradoxes -- they're merely political ironies. A paradox is a statement that seems true but yields a contradiction or a dual truth. When reduced to its purest form, Mukasey's Paradox is that government officials cannot violate the law -- but that because executive privilege is also a law, it's sometimes necessary to violate the law in order to uphold the law.

Honestly, the idea of trying to logically breakdown the actions of government is enough to make any sane person's head hurt. To do it so coherently and cleverly most certainly points to many nights staring at C-SPAN with a copious amount of mind-altering substances and a laptop -- and/or a very good working relationship with a grad student in the Philosophy Department.

In all seriousness, 'Mukasey's Paradox' is a troubling but all-too-real tactic to execute the Administration's end-runs around the law. The examples in Turley's article show that justice is being circumvented to protect potentially guilty people. However repugnant to our sensibilities that may be, it is demonstrably worse when it is used to punish potentially innocent people, as in the case with detainees of the "War on Terror."

The Justice Department's arguments in the habeas cases currently before the Supreme Court assert that the detainees, as foreign citizens, do not get Constitutional protection. This is not unusual in American jurisprudence. However, because they are not regular, uniformed combatants -- i.e., prisoners of war -- neither do they get Geneva Convention protection.

Basically, the detainees are foreign -- but not the right kind of foreign as to give them basic human or even procedural legal rights. This loophole essentially makes them non-entities as far as American law is concerned and the government is free to do with them as they please, according to DOJ logic.

Look, the visceral reaction to September 11, 2001 should have long passed. I want to be tough on terrorists too, and if they ever catch Osama bin Laden alive, I don't think too many people would weep if some awful thing happened to him in U.S. custody. That said, we are holding people, specifically in the Boumediene case, that have already been released from foreign prisons for lack of evidence. Ironically, the United States has become a place where other nations -- like the bulwark of freedom known as Bosnia -- send people when their own courts say it is unlawful to detain them. (It is a sad, sad day when Bosnian judges have a better concept of human rights than our Justice Department and Federal judges.)

Hopefully, Justice Anthony Kennedy will side with the liberals in the habeas cases and restore at least some semblance of legal accountability to this Justice Department run amok.

And Speaking of Interrogations

When I saw this yesterday, I noted to friends that this makes Watergate look like child's play:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubayda, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

And by "severe interrogation techniques" they mean torture.

Always feckless and preachy, but sometimes right, Dick Durbin, et al., are calling for investigations and hearings. I've been to too many Senate Judiciary Hearings to think that much, if anything, will come out of them (How many times did it take to get Gonzales gone?), but I'd like to see them anyway.

Schumer Chokes...But For Good Reason

God forbid I ever agree with Chuck Schumer on anything, but I have to back him on his confirmation of Judge Mukasey. Money quote:

Should we reject Judge Mukasey, President Bush has said he would install an acting, caretaker attorney general who could serve for the rest of his term without the advice and consent of the Senate.

We all thought it couldn't get worse than Ashcroft, and we were WRONG. Seriously, how bad do you have to be to make John Ashcroft appear to be a brave defender of the Constitution? Gonzales proved the adage that the devil you know is better than the one you don't.

The Dems were in a bad spot here. Either confirm someone imperfect but qualified or get force-fed another Bush lackey. I'll (reluctantly) take Mukasey.

Over at the Kos, of course, they want their cake and eat it too.

Day-after Update: Kos, STILL whining.

If War, Then No Constitution

In yet another hint that our president didn't pay attention in Civics class -- he apparently has never heard of the "lame duck":

“In a time of war, it is vital for the president to have a full national security team in place, and a key member of that team is the attorney general,” [the president] said. “Yet the Senate Judiciary Committee has been holding up his nomination.”

Yes. This is what the Decider-in-Chief said to try and coax the Judiciary Committee to move on his AG nominee, Judge Mukasey. I'll translate into language he'd have written instead of a speech writer:

"Torture is bad, 'see. But terrorists are bad. heh heh. So, when fighting bad, gotta use bad. Let 'im through. Don't let that pesky Constitution get in the way."

No, W, we need an AG that will stand-up to your foreign policy and legal teams -- somebody has to.