“‘We concluded that many of the problems we identified constituted serious misuse of the FBI’s national security letter authorities,’ Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said in the report.” A Justice Department audit finds the FBI has been systematically misusing NSA letters to procure personal information without a court order, prompting a mea culpa from director Robert Mueller and the prospect of possible hearings into the matter. “‘It appears that the administration has used these powers without even the most basic regard for privacy of innocent Americans,’ [Sen. Dick] Durbin said in a statement.“
Category: Civil Liberties
Jack Lint, Everyman?
“Gilliam came nearest to inventing his own country with Brazil (1985), one of the key political films of the late 20th century. Brazil is one of the great political films, an extraordinary mixture of Fellini and Kafka, with a complex force of synthesized images, which belongs to Gilliam alone.” In Slate, critic Clive James assesses Brazil‘s take on torture, and what Michael Palin’s Jack Lint does and doesn’t tell us about the men usually holding the implements.
Don Young’s Lincoln Lies.
“Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.” In vaguely-related news, conservative congressman Rep. Don Young trots out an obviously-fake Lincoln quote to bash Dems on Iraq. [ThinkProgress has the video.] ”’Now that he’s been informed these are not the actual words of Lincoln, he will discontinue attributing the words to Lincoln. However, he continues to totally agree with the message of the statement,’ [spokeswoman] Kenny said.” (For the record, and despite his suspension of habeas corpus, President Lincoln was a lenient sort, and assuredly not a believer in the reforming potential of public hangings.)
Power Mad.
“In some sense, the president is now as much a prisoner of Guantanamo as the detainees…The endgame in the war on terror isn’t holding the line against terrorists. It’s holding the line on hard-fought claims to absolutely limitless presidential authority.” Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick discerns the method in Dubya’s madness on the civil liberties front: “expanding executive power, for its own sake.“
The Postman Always Reads Twice.
“‘The administration is playing games about warrants,’ Martin said. ‘If they are not claiming new powers, then why did they need to issue a signing statement?‘” New year, more of the same. Channeling Albert Sidney Burleson, Dubya creates consternation among civil liberties advocates with another recent signing statement reinvoking the right to read anyone’s mail. Let me know if y’all figure out what the best student loan consolidation plan is.
A Bad Year.
“Whenever the courts push back against the administration’s unsupportable constitutional ideas…the Bush response is to repeat the same chorus louder: Every detainee is the worst of the worst; every action taken is legal, necessary, and secret. No mistakes, no apologies. No nuance, no regrets. This legal and intellectual intractability can create the illusion that we are standing on the same constitutional ground we stood upon in 2001, even as that ground is sliding away under our feet.” Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick surveys the top ten most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006.
You People are Crazy!
“It’s something that’s been bothering me for quite some time, the direction in which the party has been going more and more toward big government and disregard toward privacy and civil liberties.” Staunch conservative, defender of civil liberties, and Borat cameo Bob Barr leaves the Republican Party (for the Libertarians.) Now if only Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe would follow his example…
They Have the Bodies.
Wasting no time after signing the godawful terrorism bill into law, Dubya tells the US District Court that it has lost jurisdiction over habeas corpus petitions filed by Gitmo detainees. “What’s being blocked and what the government is opposing tooth and nail is the most simple thing of all: a hearing before a district court judge,’ said Jonathan Hafetz, who handles many detainee cases for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. ‘The government will do anything to prevent Guantanamo detainees from being able to present evidence in court.‘”
Terry le Heros.
As longtime readers might know (or might’ve adduced from some of the site banners above), I’ve always been a big Terry Gilliam fan, and will pony up for films considerably worse than The Brothers Grimm to repay the man for making Time Bandits, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and one my all-time favorite movies, Brazil. (In fact, “Ghost in the Machine” is the name of this site partly for the Brazil reference.) So it was a real treat yesterday when I and a friend from high school got to see Terry Gilliam live in the flesh last night at the IFC Center on 4th St. After making the rounds in front of The Daily Show yesterday afternoon, Gilliam showed up as part of IFC’s Movie Night series, in which a director of some repute screens one of his favorite films. (In fact, he showed up with the sign he’d been lugging around outside all day: “STUDIOLESS DIRECTOR — FAMILY TO SUPPORT — WILL DIRECT FOR FOOD”) Apparently, Gilliam had wanted to show One-Eyed Jacks, the 1961 western directed by Marlon Brando, but the Brando estate wouldn’t deliver a print or somesuch.
So, the film we got instead was Jaco von Dormael’s Toto le Heros (Toto the Hero), a bizarre Belgian concoction of 1991 that’s part Prince and the Pauper, part Singing Detective, part Citizen Kane and very Gilliamesque. A movie that’s hard-to-explain but that’s definitely worth renting, Toto follows the story of one Thomas van Haserbroeck (Don’t call him van Chickensoup), an imaginative young boy unsettlingly in love with his sister, a lonely man contemplating an affair with a mystery woman, and a deeply depressed senior citizen looking to exact revenge for a life-long grievance. Y’see, Thomas (or Toto, as he’s called in his dream life, where he’s a film noir gumshoe) insists he remembers being switched with another baby — his wealthy next-door neighbor, Albert Kant — during a fire at the hospital, and therein, in his mind, lies the source of most of his troubles. As the story switches back and forth in time, Toto and Albert’s lives keep butting against each other in strange doppelganger fashion, while old-Thomas enacts a plan to reclaim his stolen life…
After the movie, Gilliam returned to the front for a wide-ranging Q&A session, which involved questions both probing (“Did you borrow from Toto in 12 Monkeys?” [No, don’t think so.]) and peculiar (“Where’d you buy your shoes? Where’s the worst place you ever spent the night?” [Birkenstocks, some backwater hut in India]) Along the way, Gilliam told tales of first meeting the Python guys, photographing Frank Zappa in 1967, choosing his various directors of photography, and, the battle of Brazil notwithstanding, generally enjoying the constraints of studio heads and limited budgets. (They focus him.) Speaking of which, he also said Good Omens still seems to be moving forward, and Quixote may still happen someday. (He also mentioned The Defective Detective briefly, but it seemed in the past tense.) And these days he’s digging the new Dylan album, as well The Arcade Fire’s Funeral and The Flaming Lips’ At War with the Mystics.
At one point, he also said he was considering suing Bush, Cheney, et al for making an unauthorized remake of Brazil. With that in mind, I asked him whether his views on Brazil had changed at all now that we’re kinda living it. (I mean, what with Cheney playing Mr. Helpmann, Canadian citizens getting Buttled, and the Dubya team now fully sanctioning Jack Lints, what’s a good Sam Lowry to do, other than await his turn in the chair or on the waterboard?) He noted that, obviously, Brazil-type stuff was going on around the world at the time (in the Soviet bloc, Argentina, etc.) but that he watched the film the other day (to check out the new Criterion HD-DVD version) and was amazed at both how prescient and topical it was.
Throughout, Gilliam was amazingly friendly and personable, and came across a remarkably humble and down-to-earth guy. He kept taking questions well after the IFC-suit tried to close down the affair, and hung around the nearby cafe afterwards to sign various items. I ended up being the second guy in line, and got him to sign the Brazil still above (one of five I have framed in my hallway.) When he asked me my name for the signature, he lit up, “Kevin! Time Bandits Kevin!” I told him I was right around that age when I first saw Time Bandits, and he’s definitely got a lot to answer for.
The United States of Torture.
“We don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they’ll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration. They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.” Abu Ghraib becomes standard operating procedure as Dubya’s terror bill — horrifying as it is — passes the House 253-168 (roll call) and the Senate 65-34 (roll call.) Twelve Senate Dems (well, eleven Senate Dems and Lieberman) voted for the bill: Carper, Johnson, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Menendez, Nelson, Nelson, Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar, Stabenow. Chafee was the only Republican to vote against it, Snowe abstained.
Shameful, pitiful, demoralizing, pathetic. What else is there to say? As Rebecca Blood sums it up (via Medley): “We have lost the war on torture. It’s devastating.“