Category Archives: Op-Eds

Op-Eds

CIA Torture Report: Where’s Our Next Heroic Whistleblower?

Leave a comment
Abu Ghraib 4
Inmate being tortured by US interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In December of 2014, The US Senate’s  Select Committee on Intelligence issued a report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s “inadequate and deeply flawed” interrogation techniques, concluding that those practices were “not effective” and that they were “far more brutal” than the public — or Congress — had been led to believe.

The document is commonly referred to as “the CIA torture report” for obvious reasons. Among other atrocities, it describes a detainee being chained naked to a concrete floor until he died of hypothermia, and other detainees being subject to “rectal feeding.”

Or, rather, it supposedly describes such things. The public has never seen the actual report, only summaries and excerpts.

In a rare act of legislative heroism, US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), whose record of being wrong on the issues comes close to perfection over her 25 years in the Senate, had the report distributed to various executive branch agencies so that it would eventually be revealed through the Freedom of Information Act.

But now the Trump administration is moving to prevent that. US Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), the Select Committee’s chair, has requested the return of all extant copies of the report to the Senate (which is exempt from FOIA) and the administration is complying with that request.

What do the CIA, the US Senate, and the White House have to hide? My guess is quite a bit.

Should they be allowed to hide those things from the taxpayers who pay the bills and whose lives are put at risk by the criminal acts of the US intelligence community? Absolutely not.

Will they get away with hiding it? Not forever. The days of governments being able to permanently bury secrets are over, thanks to heroes like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and the folks at WikiLeaks.

It’s a near certainty that several executive branch employees put copies of the report away for safe-keeping precisely to safeguard the public interest in a situation such as this.

In fact, we may now see the report sooner than we otherwise would have. A civil servant who was content to let the FOIA process run its course, if it was allowed to, may treat this development as a trigger event for showing us what our government is hiding from us.

Good. Trump, Burr and the CIA are cats covering up their output in the litter box.  Time for someone responsible to clean up — with, pun intended, a scoop.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION  HISTORY

Op-Eds

Stand With Ross Ulbricht. Shun His Tormentors.

Leave a comment
Prosecutor General Vyshinskiy (centre), readin...
Prosecutor General Vyshinskiy (centre), reading the indictment, in 1937 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On May 31, a panel of three judges on the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld the conviction and sentence of American political prisoner Ross Ulbricht.

It’s been two years since I last devoted a column to Ulbricht’s plight, so a refresher seems in order:

After a show trial so obviously fixed in advance that Stalin’s pet prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky would have blushed with embarrassment to participate in it, judge Katherine Forrest sentenced Ulbricht to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the crime of running a web site. Yes, really.

In theory, the issue was that the site, Silk Road, was used by buyers and sellers of illegal drugs. In fact, it was that someone calling himself “Dread Pirate Roberts” — whom the prosecution alleged was Ross Ulbricht — had created and operated an online marketplace in which business was conducted anonymously and beyond the reach of government regulators.

Forrest denied Ulbricht bail on the prosecution’s claim that he had conspired to commit murder — charges which were used to poison the jury pool and keep the defense from  reviewing the state’s evidence or vetting its witnesses until right before the trial began.

Forrest effectively forbade Ulbricht’s attorneys to present a defense.  The prosecution was allowed to present “evidence” while refusing to disclose how it gathered that evidence. The FBI’s technical claims were admitted; expert witnesses to dispute those claims were excluded. The defense was forbidden to suggest alternate theories of the identity of “Dread Pirate Roberts.” The prosecution withheld, until after the trial, the information that two of its own agents were on their way to prison for corrupt activities during, and bearing on, the investigation.

The polite language of procedural appeal in criminal cases is “reversible error” by the judge. But Katherine Forrest didn’t fumble around and screw things up. She intentionally fixed the trial at every opportunity, for the express purpose of seeing Ross Ulbricht convicted of, and giving him the maximum possible sentence for, “crimes” for which he deserved not a day in prison even if he had in fact done the things he was accused of.

In any sane universe, Ross Ulbricht would be a free man and Katherine Forrest would be removed from the bench, disbarred, and sued down to her last dime for damages.

Instead of correcting this massive injustice, federal appellate judges Jon O. Newman, Gerard E. Lynch, and Christopher F. Droney chose to ignore the plain facts, become Katherine Forrest’s co-conspirators, uphold her clearly criminal actions, and keep Ross Ulbricht caged.

Hopefully, the legal saga isn’t over and justice will eventually be served in higher courts or through presidential commutation of the unjust sentence.

Socially, these robed evil-doers deserve to be shunned by all good people. They shouldn’t be able to get tables at restaurants or drinks at bars. Their clergy of choice should withhold communion until they repent and make restitution. We probably can’t make their lives as miserable as they’ve made Ross Ulbricht’s. But we should try.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION  HISTORY

Op-Eds

Free Speech: Ted Wheeler is the Enemy He Invokes

Leave a comment
English: Occupy Portland participants in Pione...
English: Occupy Portland participants in Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Oregon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ted Wheeler, the mayor of Portland, Oregon, wants to control who can say — and hear — what.  He’s asked the federal government to cancel one permit and deny another, both for “alt-right” demonstrations at Portland’s Shrunk Plaza.

His excuse: Portland is “in mourning” and its “anger is real” over an incident in which an anti-Muslim bigot,  Jeremy Joseph Christian, allegedly harassed two women on a commuter train and then stabbed three men who came to their defense, two of them fatally.

Not a bad excuse as excuses go, I guess, but no excuse can be allowed to trump our rights of free speech and peaceable assembly. On this matter, Mayor Wheeler is objectively taking the same position as Christian: The position that it is acceptable to use force to suppress ideas one disagrees with.

There are two  metaphorical ways to describe a world in which various ideas compete for our attention and allegiance. Each of those metaphors has consequences.

Metaphor 1: A “marketplace of ideas” in which the best product wins out because it is sold with good arguments and people like it better. In this marketplace, any idea can be offered at any time by anyone who supports it. Hopefully the better ones get enough “market share” to be implemented; if an idea doesn’t work out, its supporters can move on to another.

Metaphor 2: A “war of ideas” in which things take a darker turn. The competing sides each conclude that their ideas cannot win out unless the alternatives are excluded not just from adoption, but from discussion and consideration. At some point, force inevitably becomes the instrument of that exclusion. The war ceases to be metaphorical. America is clearly at such a point now with the increasing frequency of riots and street fights over politics.

Even scarier than ad hoc riots and street fights, though, are calls by government officials for suppression of political speech through government permit schemes, police action to disperse demonstrators, etc.

The difference between Ted Wheeler and an “alt-right” agitator with a baseball bat is that Wheeler has a full-time police force, armed with lethal weaponry and effective legal immunity for its actions, at his beck and call.

We’ve seen societies in which the likes of Wheeler lay down a party line and the police break out their tear gas and truncheons to suppress all opposition to that line. For example, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany before, and eastern Europe after, World War Two.

I don’t want to live in such a society. Hopefully you don’t either. The events in question shouldn’t even require a permit — or the permission of Ted Wheeler. Freedom is our path away from the war and back to the marketplace.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION  HISTORY