Will Glenn Greenwald Run For Congress Against Peter King?

Terrorist supporter Peter King and civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald

Long Island as a geographical entity includes all of 4 counties: from east to west, Suffolk, Nassau, Queens and Kings (Brooklyn). Long Island as a state of mind is Nassau and Suffolk. When someone in NYC says they're going to "the Island," no one thinks they mean Brooklyn or Queens. There are 3 Long Island congressional districts, NY-01, NY-02 and NY-03 (although NY-03, represented by Steve Israel has a significant slice of Queens in it now). Although NY-01 and NY-03 are represented by Democrats, Obama did best last year in NY-02, the "Republican district" represented by Peter King. Here's how Obama performed in the 3 districts last November:

• NY-01- Obama- 49.6- 49.1%
• NY-02- Obama- 51.6- 47.2%
• NY-03- Obama- 50.8- 48.2%

[Update: I left out the new 4th CD, represented by Democrat Carolyn McCarthy, which now takes many of the Democratic-leaning South Shore Nassau County towns formerly represented by King. Her new district went for Obama with 56.3%, easily the most Democratic of the 4 (not 3) Long Island districts.]

Point: NY-02 is hardly a district the DCCC should be leaving uncontested as a red stronghold. But they do, especially under Steve Israel, a longtime crony of Peter King's. The district's PVI is R+1. Democrats represent 15 districts that are R+1 or worse. They are winnable seats, as Democrats like Carol Shea-Porter (NH), Raul Ruiz (CA) and Joe Garcia (FL) showed last year when they beat Republican incumbents in R+1 districts. The trick to it, though, is that the Democrats need a viable candidate and need to wage a real campaign. This is not something Peter King has had to face. When King first ran in 1992, it was an empty Democratic seat that Congressman Bob Mrazek had left so he could run for the Senate). King won 49.56 to 46.46%. But he never had a serious challenge after that. Blue America backed Dave Mejias in 2006 and he came close with 44% but the DCCC stabbed him in the back, Mejas spending only $908,135 to King's $2,075,502. And its been worse since then with the DCCC discouraging anyone from running and undercutting those who tried. Last cycle Vivianne Falcone took 41% of the vote after spending $11,115 (against King's $1,201,207), Needless to say, the DCCC spent exactly zero trying to help her, wasting millions of dollars are far redder districts where their conservative candidates had no chance at all.

King, probably best known for supporting violent foreign terrorists in Ireland, for his intense bigotry against Muslim-Americans and for picking fights with Michael Jackson, is back in the news this week.

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) made waves yesterday on a Fox News interview in which he called for “legal action” to be taken against Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. The congressman’s comments were delivered in his usual stentorian style, with absolute certainty and conviction, even though they appear to lack any factual basis.

Abridging the whole situation, however, involves something of a brain-twister, but we’ll give it a try anyhow: Legal action should be taken against Greenwald, says King, not only because of the NSA intelligence leaks that he has already published but also because of information he has threatened to publish-- specifically the names of CIA agents. Even though he hasn’t threatened to publish any such thing.

Here’s how King articulated the matter to Fox News host Megyn Kelly:

Not only did he disclose this information, he has said that he has the names of CIA agents and assets around the world, and they’re threatening to disclose that. The last time that was done in this country, you saw a CIA station chief murdered in Greece. No right is absolute. And even the press has certain restrictions. I think it should be very targeted, very selective and certainly a very rare exception. But in this case, when you have someone who has disclosed secrets like this and threatens to release more, then to me, yes, there has to be-- legal action should be taken against him. This is a very unusual case with life-and-death implications for Americans.

That stuff about the CIA-- not true, wrote Greenwald on Twitter:

...Wherever he’s fetching his information, King’s comments reflect one of three disturbing possibilities:

1) He knows something about Greenwald that none of us does;

2) He’s spouting off to a large Fox News audience on topics with which he has little familiarity;

3) He’s willfully misquoting and misconstruing the many public comments made by both Greenwald and Snowden on this case.

...Peter King would make a poor journalist. May he never, ever complain about being quoted out of context.

His words yesterday don’t speak to his acumen as a public servant, either. As argued previously in this space, the recent explosion of leak news has highlighted the centrality of governmental self-restraint in preserving freedoms.

Blue America is trying to recruit Greenwald to run against King. A prominent constitutional lawyer and author, Glenn was born on Long Island and got his law degree from NYU. Although he'd love to see Peter King retired, he doesn't want to serve in Congress. I can't blame him-- but I'm still trying to persuade him... and I'm willing to pledge a maximum legal contribution personally and endeavor to raise as much money for his campaign as we have done for Alan Grayson and Donna Edwards, each over $100,000 from Blue America donors.

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Can Iceland Give NSA Whistle Blower Asylum Before The Gulag Swallows Him Up?

Predictably, uptight Military Industrial Complex shills like Peter King (R-NY) and Mike Rogers (R-MI), were on the Sunday TV gab fests howling for the blood of Edward Snowden, the 29 year old ex-NSA employee/technical engineer for defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden came forward and outed himself as the source of Glenn Greenwald's explosive exposé about NSA domestic spying in The Guardian last week. Eric Cantor chimed in this morning that the House investigation will be "very serious." Does that mean he won't give the investigation to GOP clown Darrell Issa? And does it mean the "very serious" investigation will be of the program itself, rather than of the whistleblower? Don't count on it. Watch Cantor dodge the few direct questions the corporate media talking heads asked him:



Snowden is in Hong Kong, and the U.S. has a bilateral extradition treaty with that... "country." Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald was on Morning Joe with the moron team. The video is up top and I strongly recommend you watch it. Glenn's point (in his TV appearances): the NSA leak doesn't jeopardize national security. "There’s not a single revelation that we’ve provided to the world that even remotely jeopardizes national security."

Greenwald warned that we haven't seen anything yet, compared to what The Guardian has coming. So will whistle-blower and patriot Edward Snowden wind up in some secretive star court and gulag the way Bradley Manning has? Probably-- and, sadly, with the blessing of most Americans. Or maybe Iceland will give him asylum.

When WikiLeaks burst onto the international stage in 2010, the small Nordic nation of Iceland offered it a safe haven. Now American whistleblower Edward Snowden may be seeking that country’s protection, and at least one member of its parliament says she’s ready to help. On Sunday evening Icelandic member of parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir and Smari McCarthy, executive director of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, issued a statement of support for Snowden, the Booz Allen Hamilton staffer who identified himself to The Guardian newspaper as the source of a series of top secret documents outlining the NSA’s massive surveillance of foreigners and Americans.

“Whereas IMMI is based in Iceland, and has worked on protections of privacy, furtherance of government transparency, and the protection of whistleblowers, we feel it is our duty to offer to assist and advise Mr. Snowden to the greatest of our ability,” their statement reads. “We are already working on detailing the legal protocols required to apply for asylum, and will over the course of the week be seeking a meeting with the newly appointed interior minister of Iceland, Mrs. Hanna Birna Kristjánsdóttir, to discuss whether an asylum request can be processed in a swift manner, should such an application be made.”

It’s not yet clear whether Snowden has officially applied for asylum in Iceland. A press contact for the Icelandic Ministry of Interior, which handles asylum requests, said that he hadn’t yet seen an application from Snowden and that the ministry couldn’t comment until one was received.

Snowden, who left his home in Hawaii in May and is taking refuge in a Hong Kong hotel, noted his interest in seeking asylum in Iceland in The Guardian’s interview, telling the newspaper that his ”predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values, The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland,” he said. “They stood up for people over internet freedom.”

The 29-year-old intelligence analyst may have been referring to the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a group founded by Jonsdottir and McCarthy that has sought to strengthen Iceland’s protections for media outlets and whistleblowers. That project, which successfully passed a new source protection law in 2011, was propelled in part by Jonsdottir and McCarthy’s participation in WikiLeaks; Both Icelanders helped to publish the leaked Apache helicopter video that revealed the killing of civilians and journalists in Baghdad in April 2010.

“Over the last few days we at the International Modern Media Institute have watched alongside the rest of the world as the US government’s enormous encroachments on privacy and information security have been exposed in the media,” Jonsdottir’s and McCarthy’s statement reads. “These exposures have verified our greatest fears about the state of global intelligence gathering, and yet again highlighted the need for strong privacy protections and government transparency.”

Fly in the ointment: the most recent election in Iceland turned power over to a conservative government not all that likely to be as sympathetic to Snowden as anyone hopes-- if he can even get there, which sounds like a longshot to me considering where he is now.

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Lindsey Graham, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Drones, Constitutional Guarantees

Lindsey Graham seems to think the U.S. Constitution begins and ends with a very crimped interpretation of the Second Amendment. In his view it mandates that anyone can, willy-nilly buy any weapon he wants without any kind of government regulation. Most people not in thrall to the NRA do not interpret the Second Amendment that way. And to Graham, the rest of the Constitution just doesn't seem all that important. Friday, for example, he let loose with the above tweet. If the authorities fail to read the suspect, no matter how heinous the crimes he's accused of, his Miranda Rights-- the right to remain silent until he can consult an attorney-- it violates the 5th and 6th Amendments, two apparently not in the same league as the 2nd-- and could jeopardize the whole case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Graham is an attorney and he should know better.

No sense in getting all flustered and working up into a tizzy and violating the constitutional rights of an American citizen, as Tsarnaev is, on American soil, even if it appears he is a criminal. Worse yet, Graham was commiserating with the Washington Post's sniveling right-wing hack Jennifer Rubin yesterday that there should be more drones spying on American citizens. “This is Exhibit A of why the homeland is the battlefield," he told Rubin on the phone... before launching into an attack on Rand Paul.

Recalling Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster, Graham noted that he took to the Senate floor specifically to object to Rand’s notion that “America is not the battlefield.” Graham said to me, “It’s a battlefield because the terrorists think it is.” Referring to Boston, he observed, “Here is what we’re up against,” and added, “It sure would be nice to have a drone up there [to track the suspect.]” He also slammed the president’s policy of “leading from behind and criminalizing war.”

Apparently, the Obama Administration decided to go with Graham's interpretation of the Constitution and the FBI did not read the kid his Miranda Rights, invoking a bogus, extra-Constitutional public safety exception that, according to the FBI website "permits law enforcement to engage in a limited and focused unwarned interrogation and allows the government to introduce the statement as direct evidence... Police officers confronting situations that create a danger to themselves or others may ask questions designed to neutralize the threat without first providing a warning of rights."

Last night, writing for Slate, Emily Bazelon explained why we should all be outraged Tsamaev wasn't read his Miranda rights. As she says, "When the law gets bent out of shape for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, it’s easier to bend out of shape for the rest of us."

Who gets to make this determination? The FBI, in consultation with DoJ, if possible. In other words, the police and the prosecutors, with no one to check their power.

The New York Times published the Justice Department’s memo in March 2011. The Supreme Court has yet to consider this hole the Obama administration has torn in Miranda. In fact, no court has, as far as I can tell.

And so the FBI will surely ask 19-year-old Tsarnaev anything it sees fit. Not just what law enforcement needs to know to prevent a terrorist threat and keep the public safe but anything else it deemed related to “valuable and timely intelligence.” Couldn’t that be just about anything about Tsarnaev’s life, or his family, given that his alleged accomplice was his older brother (killed in a shootout with police)? There won’t be a public uproar. Whatever the FBI learns will be secret: We won’t know how far the interrogation went. And besides, no one is crying over the rights of the young man who is accused of killing innocent people, helping his brother set off bombs that were loaded to maim, and terrorizing Boston Thursday night and Friday. But the next time you read about an abusive interrogation, or a wrongful conviction that resulted from a false confession, think about why we have Miranda in the first place. It’s to stop law enforcement authorities from committing abuses. Because when they can make their own rules, sometime, somewhere, they inevitably will.

This morning, while 3 Stooges Lindsey Graham, Kelly Ayotte and John McCain were loudly calling for Tsarnaev to not be afforded a trial, Glenn Greenwald asked much the same question at The Guardian that Bazelon had. And answered-- and castigated both Lindsey Graham and the Obama Administration for trampling on constitutional guarantees.

Graham's tweets quickly created a firestorm of outrage among various Democrats, progressives, liberals and the like. They insisted that such actions would be radical and menacing, a serious threat to core Constitutional protections. I certainly shared those sentiments: the general concept that long-standing rights should be eroded in the name of Terrorism is indeed odious, and the specific attempt to abridge core constitutional liberties on US soil under that banner is self-evidently dangerous.

...[T]he Obama administration has already rolled back Miranda rights for terrorism suspects captured on US soil. It did so two years ago with almost no controversy or even notice, including from many of those who so vocally condemned Graham's Miranda tweets yesterday. In May, 2010, the New York Times' Charlie Savage-- under the headline "Holder Backs a Miranda Limit for Terror Suspects"-- reported that "the Obama administration said Sunday it would seek a law allowing investigators to interrogate terrorism suspects without informing them of their rights." Instead of going to Congress, the Obama DOJ, in March 2011, simply adopted their own rules that vested themselves with this power.

...Democrats reacted with horror and outrage to Graham's suggestion that "the last thing we may want to do is read Boston suspect Miranda Rights telling him to 'remain silent.'" But that's already Obama DOJ policy, enacted with little controversy. And last night's announcement makes clear that the Obama DOJ intends, as Bazelon says, to question him about a wide range of topics far beyond matters of imminent threats to public safety without first Mirandizing him.

But there's another reason why I found Democratic outrage over Graham's statements to be confounding. The theory on which Graham's arguments are based is one that the Obama administration has vigorously embraced with the full-throated endorsement of most of its supporters: namely, that the US is "at war", and that anyone who takes up arms against the country or tries to kill Americans is not entitled to basic rights-- even if they're American citizens. As Graham told the Washington Post, his view that Tsarnaev is not entitled to these rights is grounded in his belief that the US is fighting a global war and those who fight in it against the US are "enemy combatants."

It is bizarre indeed to watch Democrats act as though Graham's theories are exotic or repellent. This is, after all, the same faction that insists that Obama has the power to target even US citizens for execution without charges, lawyers, or any due process, on the ground that anyone the president accuses of Terrorism forfeits those rights. The only way one can believe this is by embracing the same theory that Lindsey Graham is espousing: namely, that accused Terrorists are enemy combatants, not criminals, and thus entitled to no due process and other guarantees in the Bill of Rights. Once you adopt this "entire-globe-is-a-battlefield" war paradigm-- as supporters of Obama's assassination powers must do and have explicitly done-- then it's impossible to scorn Graham's views about what should be done with Tsarnaev. Indeed, one is necessarily endorsing the theory in which Graham's beliefs are grounded.

...[A]s extremist as Graham's tweets may have seemed to some, it was already done in the US with little backlash. That demonstrates how easily and insidiously extremist rights assaults become normalized if they are not vehemently resisted in the first instance, regardless of one's views of the individual target.

Haters need to hate-- Good morning, America!

And Constitutional slippery slopes don't just happen in Washington and they're not the sole domain of right-wing Republicans. Right-wing Democrats, like California freshman Assemblyman Steve Fox, can he just as dangerous to the Constitution as Lindsey Graham. Fox represents the Antelope Valley in Buck McKeon's congressional district. McKeon, who has worked harder than anyone in Congress to guarantee that tens of thousands of domestic spy drones would have access to American skies, has been working the federal angles. Fox is handling it from Sacramento.

Assemblyman Steve Fox (D-Palmdale) achieved a significant legislative victory with the passage in the state Assembly of AB737, which would take steps to designate California as a test site for unmanned aviation systems, or drones.

By a wide margin, members of the state Assembly voted this week to approve the bill that would require California to apply to the FAA for designation as a site for drone testing. Fox was the sponsor of the bill. The bill now goes to the state Senate for consideration.

According to the wording of the bill, the FAA has already announced the designation of six national drone test sites. Since California is home to much of the aerospace industry and defense industry, a federal test site would ensure the continued growth of the industry and its importance to the state economy.

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