US Politics: Obama and the Continuing Threat to Civil Liberties (Buttar)

The American Prospect interviews Shahid Buttar, civil-rights lawyer and executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee:

A lot of people on the left were hoping that Barack Obama would wipe away everything George W. Bush had done to restrict civil liberties. Obviously, that hasn't happened. But what would you say is the best thing the Obama administration has done in this area, and the most glaring omission in its policies?

I'd say the single best thing the president has done in this arena is to renounce extraordinary/coercive interrogation. Ending torture is a big deal, period.

Having said that, the failure to impose accountability has invited more torture in the future by eroding the international legal prohibition and effectively declaring that it's OK to consider and repeat as a policy matter. While I'm disturbed by the continuing, and expanding, surveillance regime, I think torture demonstrates the best -- and worst -- of the administration's performance so far.

Has the fact that there's a Democrat in the White House -- and one who has engaged in high-profile legislative battles over things like health care and financial reform -- taken threats to civil liberties off progressives' radar screens?

I hope not but fear that has indeed been the case. The debate over the PATRIOT Act here offers an illustrative example. When the president -- who campaigned against it in no uncertain terms -- caved to the intelligence agencies by supporting a "temporary" reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act over congressional objections last fall, it shifted the landscape and left members of Congress who do care about civil liberties on an isolated fringe.

How this is all playing out in the popular arena is unfortunately less clear to me. It does strike me that lots of people still care about civil liberties -- only increasingly that voice is coming from a conservative/libertarian perspective. The populist fury over continued government surveillance is still there but is being articulated more by the Tea Party and its supporters than the anti-war/progressive/green side of the spectrum, which was in the lead under the Bush administration.

You've been particularly critical of the FBI in recent months -- you've charged that it has in effect created a new version of the notorious COINTELPRO, in which it engaged in a concerted campaign to infiltrate and undermine left-leaning organizations through the 1950s and 1960s. What is the FBI doing now that most people are probably unaware of?

Undercover infiltration -- what the bureau calls "undisclosed participation" -- was a cornerstone of the COINTELPRO era and has come back again in full force. Like then, the FBI is subject to few, if any, checks and is operating in complete secrecy. Even members of Congress who have sought more transparency here have been denied. It's especially bizarre that the legal standard under which infiltrations are conducted remains secret. It makes sense for operational details to be non-public, but for the legal rules to be secret never makes sense and is an open invitation to abuse -- especially given the bureau's unfortunate recurring history in this area.

FBI Director [Robert] Mueller admitted in late July that the FBI currently pursues infiltration activities limited neither by evidence, which many of us had known, given its exploratory infiltrations of mosques around the country, nor even suspicion, which he'd previously been careful to insinuate as the limiting principle.

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Comments

[Dave]

"I’d say the single best thing the president has done in this arena is to renounce extraordinary/coercive interrogation. Ending torture is a big deal, period."

*******

What price are we paying for this? All Qaeda operatives are aware of the interrogation techniques used in the Army Field Manual, and they are trained to outsmart them. Renouncing the enhanced interrogation techniques will only confirm Bin Laden's belief that the United States is soft. Bin Laden described the Soviets as "brutal" and that is the posture we need to be in when dealing with terrorists -- a brutal one. Otherwise we will lose.

[Dave]

So, Buttar is a Muslim civil rights lawyer. I'll bet he never met a piece of anti-terror legislation he didn't like.