No Comment
Public Events at Harvard and Duke
Tomorrow, Thursday, March 24, at 5:00 p.m., I will have a public conversation with Daniel Ellsberg entitled “Wikileaks and the Pentagon Papers: Government Secrets and the Public’s Right to Know” at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We will be exploring the similarities and differences between the Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks controversies, including the remarkable parallels between the U.S. government’s public campaigns of vilification against Daniel Ellsberg then and Bradley Manning now. The discussion will be followed by a showing of Oscar-nominated documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.” It is open to the public. More details here.Friday, March 25, at 7:30 p.m., I will be participating in a panel discussion on “The Nature of U.S.-Sponsored Torture” at a conference at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina; the opening session convenes the the First Presbyterian Church in Durham. My talk will focus on the Arab Revolution of 2011, the role that U.S. torture practices played in shaping this revolution, and its ramifications for America’s posture in the Arab world. The conference, “Toward a Moral Consensus Against Torture,” is co-sponsored by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and is open to the public. More information about the events is here.
Two New OLC Opinions on Warrantless Surveillance
Under cover of the quasi-war against Libya and the Japanese nuclear crisis, the Justice Department released two significant and long-outstanding Bush-era legal memoranda on Friday evening. Both deal with an intelligence community program so secret that even its name has to be redacted. Referred to by Bush Administration lawyers as simply “the program,” it apparently granted the Defense Department (and particularly its National Security Agency) authority to sweep through millions of communications—on telephone, by fax, in emails, through Internet visits, at home and abroad, involving U.S. citizens and foreigners. Josh Gerstein provides more context at Politico.The program seems to have been given an initial greenlight by Berkeley law professor John Yoo, then a deputy assistant attorney general at the Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo’s 21-page memorandum, shards of which can be examined here (PDF), apparently concluded that Congress never intended to restrict the president’s power to engage in “warrantless searches that protect the national security” when it enacted a law that made it a felony for officers of the executive branch to engage in domestic intelligence surveillance without first securing the approval of a special intelligence surveillance court. The second memorandum (PDF), dated May 6, 2004 and issued by Yoo’s successor, Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, survived the redaction process with considerably more flesh on the bone. In his book The Terror Presidency, Goldsmith criticized “Yoo’s unusually expansive and self-confident conception of presidential power.” But Goldsmith’s own memorandum seems remarkably redolent of Yoo’s outré notions of a president outfitted with dictatorial wartime powers.
In this memorandum, Goldsmith fashions two major arguments: first, that Congress, in passing the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) implicitly gave the president a pass on the stringent approval requirements for intelligence surveillance; second, that if it did not and were construed, as applied to “the program,” to require approval, that would be an unconstitutional infringement on the commander-in-chief powers. Goldsmith cautions would-be critics against going at him too unkindly without knowing the totality of the memo, and it’s true that it’s hard to take a whack at an object that has been so methodically obscured. Nevertheless, both arguments are exceptionally weak. The idea that Congress intended in passing AUMF to grant an exception to a highly particularized criminal statute designed to restrict specific kinds of domestic surveillance is a non-starter. If the Bush Administration felt it needed such clearance, it should have asked for this. It didn’t. The second prong puts forward the notion that the president can override a criminal statute based on an aggressive construction of his own commander-in-chief powers, a proposition that lacks support in judicial precedent and rests on an eccentric view of presidential war powers–one linked, moreover, to Jack Goldsmith and John Yoo.
In Goldsmith’s rehabilitation campaign, in Newsweek, The New Yorker, and other publications, he is presented as a noble counterpoint to Yoo and Addington. Yoo’s approval of the NSA program was uncovered by Goldsmith soon after he moved in at OLC and quickly judged legally untenable. Goldsmith tells us that he was prepared to resign over the matter. After the dramatic 2004 effort by Alberto Gonzales to secure Attorney General Ashcroft’s approval at a bedside visit at a Washington hospital, Goldsmith says that he thought a crisis would tear the government apart, but instead President Bush relented and agreed to changes in the program that enabled Goldsmith to write the second memo. There is much speculation about those changes, but we still don’t know what they are. Without that information it is very difficult to assess the space between Goldsmith’s and Yoo’s views of the law, which on the basis of these memos doesn’t appear to be much.
Both memos are heavily redacted, and it seems clear that the redactions reach heavily into legal reasoning rather than technical or scientific aspects of the surveillance program. The redactions may be designed to protect the Justice Department from embarrassment, by concealing legal arguments that are far below minimum professional standards. Goldsmith himself reinforces this impression. “They blew through [FISA] in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations,” he writes, suggesting that the secrecy assertions were directly connected to the poverty of the legal arguments. Three federal courts have in fact reached the fairly obvious conclusion that the NSA program, as carried out, is criminal.
The Justice Department’s Prison Rape Problem
The abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the mistreatment of Private Bradley Manning: cases like these grab headlines around the world. But comparable crimes that occur in civilian prisons in the United States tend to get overlooked and even taken for granted. In an engaging review-essay in the New York Review of Books, David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow address the issue of sexual abuse in prisons and the shocking failure of the U.S. government to discipline prison guards who mistreat inmates. Consider the plight of a small-time embezzler named Jan Lastocy:Back in 1998, Jan Lastocy was serving time for attempted embezzlement in a Michigan prison. Her job was working at a warehouse for a nearby men’s prison. She got along well with two of the corrections officers who supervised her, but she thought the third was creepy. “He was always talking about how much power he had,” she said, “how he liked being able to write someone a ticket just for looking at him funny.” Then, one day, he raped her.The total number of incidents of sexual abuse involving prisoners in the United States is more in the order of 216,000 per year: that’s the number that the BJS estimated for 2008. “Overall,” report Kaiser and Stannow, “most victims were abused not by other inmates but, like Jan, by corrections staff.” A congressional commission, acting under a statutory mandate with bipartisan support, delivered its findings and recommendations on the problem to Attorney General Eric Holder in June 2009. Holder was supposed to implement them within a year. He failed to do so. With a handful of exceptions, the attitude adopted by the Justice Department toward the commission has to be called hostile; it seems determined to dilute the recommendations. The Department’s principal argument against much of the reform agenda is budgetary—special monitoring and reporting functions would cost too much, it claims. It appears from this that the Department attributes little value to the right of prisoners not to be raped by federal employees.
Jan wanted to tell someone, but the warden had made it clear that she would always believe an officer’s word over an inmate’s, and didn’t like “troublemakers.” If Jan had gone to the officers she trusted, they would have had to repeat her story to the same warden. Jan was only a few months away from release to a halfway house. She was desperate to get out of prison, to return to her husband and children. So she kept quiet—and the officer raped her again, and again. There were plenty of secluded places in the huge warehouse, behind piles of crates or in the freezer. Three or four times a week he would assault her, from June all the way through December, and the whole time she was too terrified to report the attacks. Later, she would be tormented by guilt for not speaking out, because the same officer went on to rape other women at the prison…
For all these reasons, a large majority of inmates who have been sexually abused by staff or by other inmates never report it. And corrections officials, with some brave exceptions, have historically taken advantage of this reluctance to downplay or even deny the problem. According to a recent report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), a branch of the Department of Justice, there were only 7,444 official allegations of sexual abuse in detention in 2008, and of those, only 931 were substantiated. These are absurdly low figures. But perhaps more shocking is that even when authorities confirmed that corrections staff had sexually abused inmates in their care, only 42 percent of those officers had their cases referred to prosecution; only 23 percent were arrested, and only 3 percent charged, indicted, or convicted. Fifteen percent were actually allowed to keep their jobs.
There is another approach that might resolve these problems. The attorney general and his senior deputies who exercise control over the Bureau of Prisons could be held personally accountable for the scandalous extent of rape at federal prisons. They’ve been on notice for some time of the problem and they demonstrate no enthusiasm in addressing it. Their conduct therefore makes the well-defined pattern of abuse possible. The doctrine of per se ministerial liability, already applied with respect to prisons under the laws of war, seems to cover this situation perfectly. It provides that the ministerial authorities with responsibility for a prison are charged with personal liability for serious crimes committed against prisoners there if they fail systematically to establish appropriate rules, enforce them, and punish prison guards who mistreat prisoners. Its application might quickly change the Justice Department’s attitude to prison rape.
