Lannan awards for cultural freedom and diversity

Photo of Malcolm Margolin from the Yosemite Association when he is a member of the Boad of Trustees.

According to the December 4 East Bay Express,


Berkeley publisher Malcolm Margolin who founded Heyday Books in 1974, which focuses on California history and the environment, is one of five Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award winner

to recognize individuals working on behalf of communities struggling to uphold and defend their right to cultural freedom and diversity....Cultural Freedom is a basic human right dependent on political, economic, and environmental justice.

The other winners are:

• anti-pollution activist Bradley Angel, who worked as an advisor to the Colorado River Native Nations Alliance to prevent a nuke dump
  
• anti-domestic-violence activist Esther Chávez-Cano
• undocumented-immigrant-rights activist Isabel García, who works to change border polices; and
• lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, of Reprieve, who represents Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

Wendell Berry: Speech Against the State Government (and MTR)

Portrait of Wendell Berry by Robert Shetterly for his project, Americans Who Tell the Truth.

Poet and essayist Wendell Berry was the big draw for a breakfast this morning at the Society of Environmental Journalist's final day of conferencing at the Hotel Roanoke. He chose to read his "Speech Against the State Government" first delivered on February 14, 2008 at the "I Love Mountains" protest in Frankfort, Ky.

Mr. Berry said during the reading that it was okay to reprint it, so I give it to you here in full. Here, too, after you finish reading is Mark Engler's piece from Grist on the occasion of Mr. Berry's seventieth birthday, August 5, 2004.

*

Speech Against the State Government

In 1996, when Ellen Davis, a scholar of the Bible at Duke Divinity School, was taken to a mountaintop removal site in Kentucky, she remembered Jeremiah:

I have seen the mountains, and here, they are wavering, and all the hills palpitate. I have seen, and here, there is no human being, and all the birds of the heavens have fled. I have seen, and here, the garden-land is now the wasteland . . .

If you take seriously the knowledge that humans are capable of neighborliness and caretaking, are capable of caring well for the earth for the earth’s own sake and for the sake of their neighbors now and yet to come, and if you know that according to our greatest teachers this neighborliness is expected of us, then you will grieve in knowing that we humans are destroying the earth. You will be offended in knowing that we are doing so with governmental approval and with governmental encouragement. If you are at all a normal human, you will find that hard to swallow. You may find it, in fact, a putrid lump that will gag you somewhat before you can get it down.

And yet to Kentucky state government, a wholly owned subsidiary of the coal corporations and of any other corporations that bid high enough, earth destruction is a normal economic enterprise. Earth destruction by strip mining has been an officially accepted practice in the eastern Kentucky coal fields for nearly half a century. In the Knott County Court room on the night of July, 15, 1965, confronting, as he had and would, the already catastrophic damage of strip mining that was going to get worse, Harry Caudill spoke of “the gleeful yahoos who are destroying the world, and the mindless oafs who abet them.”

Forty-three years later, bad has come to worse, and worse has come to worst, the gleeful yahoos still reign supreme in the coal fields, and the mindless oafs who abet them still hold dominion in Frankfort. This is not because money talks, as Sen. Mitch McConnell seems to think. It is because money votes, and money buys people who vote. It is because might, with enough money, does not have to worry about right. It is because, in the magnetic field of money, the flags and crosses on certain political lapels turn into price tags.

I must hurry to say that I am not talking about all Kentucky politicians. There has always been in this capitol a “saving remnant” of women and men who are not for sale. It is because of those people that we, the powerless, have never yielded to despair, but have continued to come here with the hope that at last this government will see the truth and do its duty.

Over the last forty years, with other powerless people, I have been here many times. We have come, moneyless into the magnetic field of money, trying to stop the mindless destruction of the land and people of our state. We have made our protests and our arguments, presented our facts, appeared before committees, spoken to those willing to speak to us. And virtually always we have failed. The destruction has continued. Nothing has changed.

Newly reminded of our political nonentity, we have gone home to await another chance to try again. Meanwhile the destruction has gone on. When I return from one of these tours of the capitol, if the Kentucky River is raised and running, I can see the land of our mountain counties flowing past my house. And I know that that river, vital to the future of our state and its economy, is seriously impaired at its headwaters and degraded in all its length by pollutants, and that the most powerful among us simply do not care.

What are we to do? Well, to begin with, there is no “we” that I can confidently speak for. I have been speaking for myself so far, and I will continue to do so.

Human nature, which I fully share, tells me that in the face of great violence it is easy to think of retaliatory violence. I reject that entirely. I do not believe in violence as in any sense a solution to any problem. I am willing also to take the further step into Scripture and say that we should love our enemies – or at least act toward them as if we love them.

The next temptation is to do as our enemies do, to say, “If they do it, so must we.” And I have in fact spent some time on the argument, which can be logically made, that Kentucky conservationists ought to start a fund drive and apply for grants in order to buy our fair share of state government. I reject that also. Even a good cause cannot justify dirty politics.

But thinking of that argument, I convinced myself of a proposition that is more difficult: If current governmental practice affords no apparent recourse but to become as corrupt as your opponents, you have got to become more radical.

Kentucky conservationists are not the first people to have to confront their own helplessness before an alien government. Others have done so, and you know some of their names. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are two of them; there have been many others. Their solution to the problem of powerlessness is to make of powerlessness a power. The name of this solution is non-violent resistance or insistence, including civil disobedience. If your government will not rise to the level of common decency, if it will not deal fairly, if it will not protect the land and the people, if it will not fully and openly debate the issues, then you have to get in the government’s way. You have to forbid it to ignore you. You have to provide it with two new choices: either it must grant you the consideration that it rightfully owes you, or it must expose itself openly as a government not representative of the people but owned by the privileged few.

And here yet another temptation asserts itself. Why not wait until our cause becomes vivid and urgent enough, and our side numerous enough, to vote our opponents out of office? Why not be patient?

My own answer is that while we are being patient, more mountains, forests, and streams, more people’s homes and lives, will be destroyed in the Appalachian coal fields. Are 400,000 acres of devastated land, and 1,200 miles of obliterated streams not enough? This needs to be stopped. It does not need to be “regulated.” As both federal and state governments have amply shown, you cannot regulate an abomination. You have got to stop it.

Speaking for myself still, I will say that I don’t like the idea of resorting to non-violent obstruction, and I don’t feel very brave about it. It involves more time and trouble than I want to donate; the penalties can be unpleasant, and they can be much worse than that. Furthermore, as I am now out of patience with useless protesting and lobbying, I have no interest in useless civil disobedience. You are not going to catch me making a merely symbolic gesture. But I began my opposition to strip mining on that July night in the Knott County court room in 1965. I have been patient for forty-three years. And there are now enough of us who are concerned – there are enough of us here today – to require our government either to accept its responsibility or, publicly, and to its everlasting disgrace, refuse to do so. Surely the members of this government who represent coal corporations will be impressed by the tenfold increase in our numbers from February 14, 2007. Surely they will notice, more to their dismay, that many of this increase are young people.

If this General Assembly and this Administration give notice as usual that they are blind by policy to the ongoing destruction of the land and the people they are sworn to protect – and if you, my friends, all other recourse having failed, are ready to stand in the way of this destruction until it is stopped – then I too am ready.

New FBI Guidelines: More COINTELPRO?

Photograph via Glenn Greenwald of Monica Bicking (r.) and her friend Eryn Trimmer. Both were arrested at the Food Not Bombs communal house in St. Paul prior to the Republican convention's start, perhaps because they were volunteering at the RNC Welcoming Committee which had opened a convergence space for locals and visitors who wanted to protest at the RNC. Their preemptive arrests and others came as part of a joint operation between the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department, the Minneapolis Police Department, and the FBI. Afterwards, in a news conference, Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher told Minnesota Public Radio and others, in reference to the the ironically named Welcoming Committee

We had sources working inside this organization.

*

Citizen surveillance: To expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize?

The post-Watergate Church Committee documented citizen surveillance by the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Internal Revenue Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation. COINTELPRO, the FBI's domestic surveillance program, had agents infiltrating protest and civil rights groups, among others, "to expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize" them.

On April 30, 2001 , historian Howard Zinn (email) wrote attorney Dennis Cunningham (contact form) that based on his studies,

the FBI tactics, violating constitutional rights, described in the committee report,...[were] not confined to those years, [as] is clear from what...[the FBI] was doing before 1956 and after 1971.

More than seven years later, the FBI may continue to engage in its efforts "to expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize," abetted by the mindset of the Bush administration's war on terror after the events of September 11, 2001.

While no one wants a repeat of such events, there is a legitimate debate about the balance between safety and civil liberties. As Senator Pat Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said on July 9 in introducing Attorney General Michael Mukasey,

On issue after issue...this administration makes the Watergate era look like child’s play.

And yet, Mukasey testified statement, webcast in RAM) that he was looking at consolidating the guidelines to grant more leeway in domestic surveillance.

Even before Mukasey's proposed new guidelines, Bobby Scott (D-VA) had introduced H. Res. 1211 on 5/20/2008, express the sense of the House that the current guidelines

should be rescinded and replaced by the former Guidelines ('Levi guidelines') to protect Americans from domestic Federal Bureau of Investigation spying in the absence of suspected criminal activity.

Scott's measure had no co-sponsors and has gone nowhere other than to be referred on to subcommittee. It appears to be facing the same dead end as H. Res. 1026, Cynthia McKinney's (D-GA) 2006 call to reinstate the Church Committee.

When will they ever learn?

In "History lessons never learned,"Geoffrey R. Stone (email, webpage), Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote in the August 29, 2007 Chicago Tribune that Mukasey's predecessor, Alberto Gonzalez, might have profited from the example of Edward Levi, who, in the wake of the Church Committee revelations issued the first Attorney General Investigative Guidelines in 1976 which

reiterated and reaffirmed the rights of all Americans by clearly and carefully circumscribing the investigative authority of the FBI...[and] expressly prohibited the FBI from investigating, discrediting or disrupting any group or individual on the basis of protected 1st Amendment activity.

So, look Mukasey's proposed guidelines in context of

• his promotion of retroactive telecom immunity for warrantless surveillance, as enacted in the new FISA law
• the rule revision proposed July 31 to liberalize police intelligence-gathering by state and local police agencies; and
• the potential problems already spotlighted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center regarding state "fusion centers," which share surveillance information between the FBI, state and local agencies and others (for an example, see the Memorandum of Understanding between the FBI and Virginia State Police.)

All these factors, raise the question in my mind of whether Mukasey, too, has failed to learn the lessons of history.

It's not as if the current guidelines constrain citizen surveillance

John Ashcroft's Attorney General's Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering Enterprise and Terrorism Enterprise Investigations, which Scott wants rescinded, specify that

Mere speculation that force or violence might occur during the course of an otherwise peaceable demonstration is not sufficient grounds for initiation of an investigation...but where facts or circumstances reasonably indicate that a group or enterprise has engaged or aims to engage in activities involving force or violence or other criminal conduct...in a demonstration, an investigation may be initiated...(my emphasis added)

That's a lot of wiggle room. The FBI's "October Plan," described on September 17, 2004, by CBS Correspondent Jim Stewart used

aggressive - even obvious - surveillance" techniques...people suspected of being terrorist sympathizers, but who have not committed a crime. Other "persons of interest," including their family members, may also be brought in for questioning.

There's also a lot of wiggle room, if you believe the account "Moles Wanted," in the May 21, 2008 City Paper. Matt Snyders (contact form) writes that an U. of Minnesota policeman and an FBI agent attempted to recruit a student who had turned himself in for spray painting an elevator

to show up at “vegan potlucks” throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protesters, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal agencies and state and local law enforcement.

You can read about a sweep of several houses prior to the RNC in Glenn Greenwald's accounts or in more detail in a variety of articles, videos and photographs at The Minnesota Independent, a project of the non-profit Center for Independent Media. You can also read Monica Bicking's brother Ian's thoughtful take on the actual meaning of his sister's use of the term "anarchism." Also of interest is Pioneer Press reporter Mara H. Gottfried's (email) account of journalist Amy Goodman (email) questioning her arrest and that of other journalists at a news conference with St.Paul police chief John Harrington. And, after this was submitted to NewsTrust, I had a review from Jeanne Roberts, who wrote this essay. She's a journalist who lives in Minneapolis and emailed me to say that she knows a couple of those arrested through her sons.

It's a terrible thing.... The Twin Cities are... primarily [a] ... community of Scandinavian/German heritage, meaning the people are calm, reasonable and thoughtful. Our diversity, mostly toward the inner cities, is as great as New York's, though on a smaller scale. This kind of thing doesn't happen here. We adults expect that kids will cut up (protest, riot, complain, cut classes and get mixed up with a few unsavory types in the process), and we take it with a grain of salt. The police have overreacted, and we are not pleased...

What sticks out in my mind in reading all of these articles and also the local mainstream media coverage is the possible conflation of crime and dissent and the curtailment of free speech. The police entered private homes with guns drawn with warrants for items like paint, bottles, and rags--labeling them as "the ingredients for making Molotov cocktails,"-- supposed evidence of planned violence. Violence perhaps diametrically opposed the arrestees' beliefs. For instance, neighbors describe Monica Bicking as a committed, admirable activist, not a terrorist. (I will link, as soon as I can find the source again.)

As Bicking's attorney Bruce Nestor said,

If they have evidence of a criminal act, then they should charge them...And if they can charge [my client, Monica Bicking] with a complaint, then we will go defend that in court. But right now they are just holding them. You can’t just hold [Bicking] to prevent her from exercising her free speech.

Problems, of course, weren't limited to St. Paul. In Denver, complaints about police spying on the Quakers and other non-violent activists date back to at least 2002. Prior to the Democratic convention this year, the police asked first responders to report "stockpiling" of materials that could be used for violent protests including bicycles, maps and "FRS devices" (a type of walkie talkie.) At the convention, police drew the ACLU's attention for their August 27 arrest of ABC News producerAsa Eslocker, who was investigating the role of lobbyists and big donors at the convention, as well as for denying legal representation to protesters and bystanders arrested en masse on August 25. There was report of at least one pre-emptive arrest at the DNC as well.

And remember the NYT report from 2007 that teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations prior to the 2004 RNC?

The proposed Attorney General Investigative Guidelines

Lara Jakes Jordan (email) covers the Justice Department for Associated Press. For a July 2 story, she interviewed

[m]ore than a half-dozen senior FBI, Justice Department and other U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the new policy [who] agreed to discuss it only on condition of anonymity...

and reported that while

[c]urrently, FBI agents need specific reasons — like evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated — to investigate U.S. citizens and legal residents

the new guidelines would

let agents open preliminary terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, were deemed suspicious.

On August 13, Mukasey delivered remarks in Portland to the Oregon Anti-Terrorism Conference and Training saying he hoped to have his new guidelines for FBI's intelligence activities within the United States

implemented and made public within the next few weeks...to eliminate distinctions in the existing rules that make it, in practice, harder to gather information about threats to the national security than it is to conduct "ordinary" criminal investigations.

He gave examples such as eliminating limits on how agents use information from informants, conduct surveillance based on tips and search databases. But, as whistleblower Michael German, an FBI agent for 16 years now at the ACLU, told Marisa Taylor (email, story archive) McClatchy's reported covering the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security,

I'm concerned with the way the attorney general frames the problem. He talks about arbitrary or irrelevant differences" between criminal and national security investigations, but these were corrections originally designed to prevent the type of overreach the FBI engaged in for years.

Asked about the guidelines in light of the FBI seeking personal records of Americans by relying on national security letters, rather than seeking FISA court orders and the FBI secretly obtaining reporters' phone records through exigent letters without following proper procedures, German said Mukasey needed to strengthen the guidelines, not "water them down."

Nobody's complaining about the FBI collecting domestic intelligence when it's appropriate and authorized under the law....What the attorney general is doing is expanding the bureau's intelligence collection without addressing the mismanagement within the FBI. If you have an agency collecting more with less oversight, it's only going to get worse.

Congress reacts

On August 18, Leahy and Ranking Member Arlen Specter (R-PA) wrote Mukasey, asking that he postpone approval of his proposed guidelines.

On August 20, Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Richard Durbin (D-IL), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) also raised their concerns, writing the Attorney General, asking that he delay signing the still-secret guidelines until "members of Congress, experts in the relevant fields, and affected communities have had a full opportunity to provide detailed input to the Department of Justice." They note that the guidelines were made available to congressional staff for

only a few hours at a time over the course of a week and a half – during the August congressional recess when many staff and members are out of town – does not constitute the kind of meaningful and robust consultation that we believe is called for, and that might help improve the guidelines. (my emphasis added)

So, why are folks concerned about the guidelines? The Senators wrote that (again, my emphasis added):

• The guidelines permit the FBI to use a variety of intrusive investigative techniques to conduct “assessments” of possible criminal activity, national security threats or foreign intelligence collection – without any initial factual predication. We are concerned about the extent to which such authority might, for example, permit the FBI to conduct long-term physical surveillance of an innocent American citizen; interview such an individual’s neighbors and professional colleagues, including based on a “pretext” or misrepresentation; recruit human sources to provide information on that individual; or conduct commercial database searches on that individual – all without any basis for suspicion. Moreover, the mechanisms that the FBI intends to use for approval and oversight of these new investigative tools have not been shared with Congress and yet are critical to understanding how these tools could be employed....the draft guidelines might permit an innocent American to be subjected to such intrusive surveillance based in part on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or on protected First Amendment activities.
• The guidelines permit the collection of foreign intelligence information inside the United States, through both “assessments” and predicated “full investigations,” with little explicit protection for information gathered about United States persons. The definition of “foreign intelligence” is broad, and covers any information relating to the activities of a foreign government, organization or person. We are concerned about the extent to which the FBI may be permitted to gather or use information about Americans under the rubric of foreign intelligence gathering when there is no suspicion of a crime, threat to national security, or any other wrongdoing.
  
• The draft guidelines include broad information-sharing provisions with few constraints ...[regarding] U.S. persons who are under no suspicion of wrongdoing.
  

The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?

Privacy International's (PI) studies national policies on constitutional protection, privacy enforcement and other factors, then scores countries along a scale from "consistently upholds human right standards" to "endemic surveillance societies." In its 2007 report, PI ranked the United States with Russia and China as being among the worst.

In the absence of the publication of Mukasey's guidelines, it's hard for members of the public to evaluate the concerns raised by our Senators, but I find the further blurring of the lines between criminal actions and the First Amendment right to dissent chilling. As Glenn Greenwald wrote,

Those who are simply assuming that they probably got what they deserved -- and who are, more generally, defending the Police here simply because some actual criminals engaged in destructive behavior -- are no different than those who justify anything and everything the Government does because there are some Terrorists out there and they're really violent.

As Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, said in 2006 when hiring Michael German, its "a time when it’s hard to tell the difference between the morning paper and a George Orwell novel."

And as Reagan-era Justice Department official Bruce Fein told Congress that same year,

This is a defining moment in the constitutional history of the United States, and on this issue I think we're all republicans and we're all democrats, to borrow from Thomas Jefferson's inaugural, because the issues that we confront with regard to checks and balances are indispensable to the liberty of those living and those yet to be born.

At 9:30 a.m. on September 17, the Senate Judiciary Committee will be hearing from Robert S. Mueller, III, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the wake of complaints. I wait, wondering, what, if anything, will come out of this hearing--how much further will we erode our Constitution and how much further will we descend from our proclamation in our national anthem that we live in the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave."

New Yorker on Carbon Footprints

Photograph by Horacio Salinas illustrating the article "Big Foot" by Michael Specter.

I'm off to DC for a few days. Here's something to read while I'm gone, in case I don't get to post.: