To this horrifying statement one can only agree with Paul Krugman, writing in A Willful Ignorance: “Two words: emperor, clothes.”

One of the reasons this is so bad is that they can not only “Wag the Dog” — they can swing the whole friggin’ puppy.

You don’t think it happens? Read this.

As noted in his own post, Nick Gillespie found that story here.

Since the fall of the Hussein government, the failure to find evidence of illegal weapons has been a major political embarrassment for the Bush administration. – “Officials Say Bush Seeks $600 Million to Hunt Iraq Arms,” New York Times, October 2, 2003.

This, as the article points out, is on top of the $300 million already spent in the unsuccessful hunt for these weapons. For goodness sake, man, we know you couldn’t immediately plant the weapons without looking suspicious. But couldn’t you just get it over with now?

On the other hand, think of the possibilities! Eventually, the Bush Administration could make the following announcement:

“Today, the Bush Administration announced that they have finally found weapons of mass destruction. Although many people suspect that these weapons of mass destruction were planted, the Administration says, “If we were going to plant weapons, we would have done it sooner. Why would we waste $900 million-plus tax dollars on a pretend search? Why would we have endured criticism for so long?”

There are, of course, two explanations for why this could happen, when it does happen:

1. It’s very difficult to plant weapons on a suspect while others may be watching. If a cop shoots an un-armed suspect in an alley and then plants a gun on the body, he does not do it while he thinks he’s being watched. There are some honest people in Iraq—American men and women included—who might reveal the trick; the Administration has to be very careful about this. [Note: I do not believe that cops routinely plant weapons on un-armed people they've shot in alleys. Please do not think I intend here to malign the police. We do know there have been cases where this happens and I'm simply pointing out that if/when it does, it's not something the perpetrator wants to do while being observed by honest people.]
2. Many people will believe the President when he tells us these weapons have finally been found specifically because of the money and time that has been expended. Just as my so-far-only-imagined speech above notes, they will say, when the time comes, “If he was going to plant those things, he wouldn’t have wasted all our money first and endured all that criticism.”

Consider this: Enduring the criticism will be less painful if the weapons are found closer to the election. If they are found right now, the impact on voters will be less significant in 2004; if they are found not long before the election, the Democrats will be caught off guard again and the election will likely be a rout.

As to the argument about wasted money, this administration doesn’t view spending our tax dollars on a war for Oil & Revenge to be waste. It is an investment. Halliburton, Bechtel and Worldcom will absolutely guarantee the President and his cronies that those no-bid contracts and $9000 dollar cell phones will be worth the few hundred billion of “somebody else’s money” which will eventually be spent.

I just wonder if this announcement will be made with the usual pouty-face reserved for when the President knows no thinking person could help but doubt his righteousness and integrity over what he is saying. (This is why we see it more and more these days.)

It’s hard to know if the President would actually be as brazen as I’ve outlined above. With some of the things that have been said and done so far, it does not seem to be “outside the pale.” Given the current refusal of the majority of voters to even ask questions, it may not be necessary.

At any rate, if this speech ever comes, remember: I tried to warn you.

Administration officials are expecting “anyone who might have done that, if they did, to come forward,” Mrs. Bush said…. “My husband wants the very highest ethics in the White House. So, I suspect whenever this washes out, we’ll see who did it, if anyone did.” - First Lady, Laura Bush, expressing the utmost confidence in the belief that sensitive information leaked itself. (CNN.com/Inside Politics, October 1, 2003; emphasis mine.)

The First Lady says her husband wants the highest ethics in the White House. However, she gave no indication as to when he would resign.

When you see a picture like this and read the words that go along with it, you realize what a masterful manipulator the President is.

I mean, seriously, how many times do we watch the cute little first- or second-grader encountering the real world and yet we never cease to be inwardly pleased at the picture it creates? How can we doubt the sincerity of such a child? And if the child is misguided, or lying, or wrong, how can we refuse to forgive when we see that sweet little pouty face?

“Leaks of classified information are bad things.” - President George Waaaaah Bush, responding to the slowly-awakening Press Dragon as it finally notices he is not above physically destroying those who oppose him.

Someone in the President’s small group of Protectors said of Joseph Wilson, “That b#st#rd criticized the President! He made him look like the liar he is a liar! Well, how about this! Let’s just see how he likes having his wife killed!”

And the denials—just as they did over reports that the President had lied about weapons of mass destruction; just as they did over repeated complaints that the President has exploited the now-infamous 9/11 attacks for his own gain; just as they did when the President was rewriting history by saying “we gave [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in”, but then those inspectors who weren’t in, had to be evacuated so we could start bombing; just as they did after the President and his men repeatedly (and falsely) argued that there was a connection between Iraq and Al Queda, only to backtrack on that later; just as they did over the disclosure of how nearly All The President’s Friends (Halliburton, Bechtel and Worldcom, to name a few) were enriched by being given the no-bid spoils of a country annexed just for them; just as they did over the lies about Iraq attempting to buy uranium from Africa which, when exposed by Wilson as lies, resulted in this attempted murder by someone within the administration—are flying thick and heavy.

We believe you, Mister President. When you put on that cute pouty face and remind us that “Leaks of classified information are bad things,” how could we doubt you? The mere fact that no one wears that face in real life—although we confess we often see it in sit-coms and on young children in grocery stores after something the little tykes dislike occurs—has us convinced you couldn’t possibly be lying. At least not this time.

I mean, after all, if the American people really believed you were not above having your critics killed, some of them might actually start to question some of the other lies you’ve told.

And then we’d all have to wear pouty faces.

This blog entry shines a little light on Aronson’s dark answer to the question…

As Aronson noted in his summary of the facts, the suspect’s truck had been legally seized by the police who were investigating the disappearance of his daughter; the suspect was…well, a suspect. When the vehicle was returned, unbeknownst to the suspect, it had been upgraded to include GPS technology which would allow the police to track him.

Aronson begins by trotting out the old tired comment that “there is no right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution.” Like so many others, he does not argue this point nor mention the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which states

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. - Bill of Rights, 10th Amendment.

If it is true that the words “right to privacy” do not appear in the Constitution, it is equally true that all the ways in which privacy rights may be abrogated will not be found there, either. This argument that “there is no right to privacy in the Constitution” cuts both ways. And given the reasons behind the Revolution and the subsequent writings regarding limitations to be placed on government including, but not limited to, the Bill of Rights, it cuts deeper against the government’s right to erase privacy rights with the mere flick of a judicial wrist. You’ll never hear this from those who argue “there is no right to privacy in the Constitution,” however. If they don’t continue the mantra that there is no such right, people might start to believe the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were limiting documents. And we couldn’t have that.

(Various Supreme Court Justices at least since the time of Brandeis in 1910, if not before, have argued a constitutional right does exist, however, in considering the question of privacy expectations of citizens. The Supreme Court itself has repeatedly seen a constitutional right to privacy. This was most clearly explicated in Griswold [381 U.S. 479], where it rested upon First, Ninth and Tenth Amendment grounds. More recently, in Lawrence v. Texas [123 S. Ct. 2472; decided June 2003], the court reaffirmed its recognition of the constitutional right to privacy, noting at p. 2475: “Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds,” i.e., we have rights to privacy not limited by where we are; the case, further, adds to the historical mix of amendments supporting a privacy right the Fourteenth, specifically the Due Process clause.)

Aronson himself does focus some attention on the enumerated powers outlined in the Sixth Amendment; he quickly determines that it was “reasonable” for the police to plant a GPS unit on a suspect’s car. He notes that

Most people are vaguely aware of GPS technology, but it’s probably fair to say Jackson, like almost all of the rest of us, has not pondered its uses in monitoring the movements of crime suspects.

He then attempts to dismiss the critically-important characterization of the inchoateness of this ordinary understanding by pointing out that

Search and seizure law has always accounted for technological innovations. If you “hide” your drug paraphernalia by putting it on your front door step at night, you could, conceivably, tell the judge that you reasonably expected privacy because, after all, it was dark and no one could see it. But if the police walk by and shine a flashlight on your stuff, the judge is likely to find they conducted no “search” at all.

But there’s a glaring problem with this: Flashlights are commonplace and frequently used to discover things made “invisible” by darkness. And the ability to create light after sundown is even more common. It would be difficult, indeed, to beam forth an argument that one had a reasonable expectation of privacy by “hiding” something in a public place using only a cover of darkness.

Such is not the case with GPS. It’s probably fair to say that there are more people in the United States who don’t have access to flashlights than there are people who do have access to GPS technology. It’s just not (yet) commonplace. Whereas only a fool could reasonably believe hiding drug paraphernalia on a darkened front door step would make it immune to discovery, it would take an exceptional person—not extremely exceptional perhaps, but nevertheless exceptional—to easily cognize a high probability they were being secretly tracked via GPS technology. The day may come when GPS technology is a commonplace—people are beginning to see such technology in everything from implants to find lost pets to implants to protect against child kidnapping to, yes, even new cars that provide maps and driving directions to drivers. But the realization of GPS technology as a “commonplace” or ubiquitous technology which might readily jump to the mind of that favorite of legal-fiction characters—the reasonable person—is not yet here.

Even when that day arrives, the question of utilizing GPS without a warrant remains to be answered.

A second argument Aronson makes is that everything the suspect did in this case was “public” and he therefore had no reasonable expectation of privacy. He notes that

there is no question, none at all, that the police can follow your movements in public. They can do so, moreover, while trying to conceal their identity, by driving in unmarked cars, not following too closely, and regularly switching vehicles. And they can certainly do it for a couple of weeks before you’d have any legal right to complain.

Aronson correctly points out that “[i]f the sheriff’s office had tracked William Jackson this way, his appeal would have merited a single paragraph from the courts of appeals rather than two lengthy opinions.” Yet the very problem here is that while the police could have done this, they did not! And, for that reason, the appeal merited more than a single paragraph.

Aronson’s argument seems to be this: “The police could have followed the suspect to obtain proof of his guilt. And placing a bug on him is ‘sort of’ like following him. It just makes it easier in cases where the suspect is unwilling to cooperate.” Another version of this argument might go like this: “The police could have proven their case against the suspect. And forcing a confession out of him is ‘sort of’ like proving the case. It just makes it easier in cases where the suspect is unwilling to cooperate.”

Where the police could have followed the suspect, they should have followed the suspect. This is, as Aronson noted, a time-honored method, accepted by the courts, for obtaining evidence. (Even here, however, it’s important to note that sometimes the law still requires a warrant, at least to retrieve evidence that might not be lying right out in the open.)

Jackson killed his daughter. That makes it easy for us to endorse what the police did in this instance. After all, he was guilty. But it’s important to remember that laws like those embodied or devolving from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written to protect all citizens against the intrusions of government. There was no codicil stating, “All the foregoing limitations are to apply unless the government thinks the suspect is really guilty.” There was no amendment indicating the law only applied in the absence of criminal suspicion. On the contrary, virtually all of these limitations concern themselves with the ways in which the government may pursue citizens suspected of wrongdoing.

If the only thing that mattered is that we actually got the bad guys, then when the government is uncertain who did what, they could just detain groups of people until they somehow found the right one. If all that mattered is that the guy actually was a criminal, we could just turn the police loose without any constitutional safeguards and then, if it turned out later that someone was wrongfully convicted, we could give them a little money and send them on their way. But that’s not what’s central to our criminal justice system. There is a saying that “It is better that 10 guilty people go free than that one innocent person is convicted.” (See, e.g., 4 William Blackstone, Commentaries ch. 27, at p. 358; United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. 338 at p. 361; Bunnell v. Sullivan, 947 F.2d 341 at p. 352.) Or, as the Supreme Court of the United States notes, it is “the ultimate objective that the guilty be convicted and the innocent go free.” (Bell v. Cone, 535 U.S. 685 at p. 716.)

Sometimes this makes it a little tougher on law enforcement officers, prosecutors and the courts. But if we do otherwise, it will take more than a flashlight to find our way out of the darkness.

Certainly, no one deserves that moniker more than George Bush, but the article attaches it to Osama Bin Laden, instead. If you read the article, though, you’ll soon come to understand that it’s a tie for first place…

The article is so well-written that I’m loathe to say much myself. I’d just as soon direct you to it. The core of the article, though (to give you a taste and in case it disappears, as Internet sources sometimes do), states:

[U]nder Bush, we started the methodical destruction of our wonderful freedoms in the name of self-protection.

We cringed, we cowered and, when the opportunity to do so arose, we bullied. And, when the chance came for George W. Bush to settle an old personal score with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, we thumbed our nose at the rest of the world and insulted it. “Old Europe,” our leaders said, disdainfully.

We invented “freedom fries” to show our contempt for the nation that made America possible in the 18th century.

We took a page from the despots of the world and started making people disappear. We rediscovered torture of prisoners to make them talk, either through surrogates (“The Saudis know how to deal with these kinds of problems”) or using modern, scientific, non-touching methods.

We pushed through the USA Patriot Act, an unreadable mess of legalistic mumbo jumbo, without a single senator or representative knowing exactly what was in it. It turned out to be such a bad piece of legislation that communities around the nation passed resolutions vowing to not cooperate with it. Even librarians united to defy its unwarranted snooping terms.

And now, as I reported yesterday, Bush wants to push through even stronger restrictions than those already present in the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. Now I realize that those of you who admire the ad hominem style, thinking that it completely eradicates the opposition, probably just look on me as some leftist wacko. (If you actually read my stuff, you’d see that I also attack leftists and that I only support Democrats because I find them to be the lesser of two evils. I do not find anything to endorse in them otherwise. I have frequently stated my position by saying, “When Republicans mess up, the whole country gets screwed; when Democrats mess up, only interns do.”)

But since when have librarians been seen as a hotbed of leftist-commie-pinko politicos? And what of the world perception of us? If you won’t follow the arguments, let’s attack this from another angle.

When I was young, my father taught me a great deal about logic. In denial of the subjunctive, he used to say things like

If robins carried shotguns, worms wouldn’t eat them.

And, more to the point here, when I would complain about people having “misperceptions” about my intentions on this, that, or the other thing, he would say

When one person “misperceives” you and thinks you’re a duck, you can pretty much shrug them off. When another calls you a duck, maybe you still can. When a third person calls you a duck, it should make you a little nervous. If a fourth calls you a duck? You better start checking yourself for feathers.

G-d only knows what he would say in a situation where practically the entire world has started quacking at us!

The truth of the matter here—as “The Luckiest Man in the World” points out—is that the terrorists “only” killed people. George Bush and his thugs have killed an entire constitutionally-founded nation.

The Declaration of Independence “proposed a republican government founded in the collective rights of the people, based on their authority alone, and beholden to them.” (Thomas Jefferson, “Account of a Declaration,” from the Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, found here.) Yet our own President and his staff work night and day to create and push through—sometimes sneaking them through by keeping Congress from reading them until just before a vote is called or scheduling votes for times when the opposition party is known to be unavailable—bills to allow the government to strip away the very liberties which this government for the people was founded upon.

And the President has not limited his use of the terrible specter of war to obtain the upper hand for government as relates to civil rights. He has also used it to strengthen the position of corporations—artificial, immortal, rich and powerful “persons”—against real persons. When seeking establishment of the oddly-named “Homeland Security Department,” he lobbied hard to exempt the federal government from the requirements of the labor laws. He has used it to award contracts to friends of himself and the Vice-President for telecommunications, oil and construction. He has done this without even allowing competitors of his friends a chance at the business; the contracts were “no-bid” contracts. He has used it to increase the level of secrecy surrounding his administration—what it’s up to now and what it plans to be doing in the future. He has weakened the Freedom of Information Act. This is in spite of the fact that Congress itself attempted to broaden the FOIA in 1996 because, among other things, “Freedom of Information Act has led to the disclosure of waste, fraud, abuse, and wrongdoing in the Federal Government” and “the identification of unsafe consumer products, harmful drugs, and serious health hazards.” And, of course, we no longer even talk about the real reason we went to war in the first place: OIL.

When you boil it all down

President Bush keeps using 9/11 as one of his leading arguments for a whole range of sweeping policy decisions, from tax cuts and a bill to start drilling in a protected wildlife area of northern Alaska to the war in Iraq. The Republican Convention, which is to serve as a springboard for Mr Bush’s re-election, has been deliberately slated for the end of next August, very close to the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks. - Radio Netherlands, “9/11, Mr. Bush’s albatross?,” 11 September 2002.

This comment is just as true today—if not more so—than it was when it was made in 2002.

I tell you all this because I keep thinking that if you—and the rest of American voters—only knew the facts, we would actually do something about this President and prevent him from accomplishing for bin Laden what bin Laden was not able to accomplish himself.

On the other hand, if robins carried shotguns, worms wouldn’t eat them.

The United States is spending about $3.9 billion a month on military operations in Iraq, not counting funds to rebuild the country. – “Lawmakers Now Question Bush’s Iraq Policy,” AP story on Findlaw.com, 2 September 2003.

Hei-ho, the dair-io, to bankruptcy we go!

P.S. Some of those lawmakers questioning Bush’s Iraq Policy are Republicans who have been supporters of the Bush Regime. Even Republicans are starting to realize that Halliburton, Bechtel, Bush and Cheney are getting rich, but most others (including Republicans) aren’t.