There has been a lot of reporting lately on Obama’s executive orders calling for closing Gitmo and secret detention centers, and classifying waterboarding as torture. These are important, but also expected since he promised to do so during the campaign. Another major victory that has made a lot less news is his executive order to make government more transparent through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)

I’ve mentioned here that William Lederer long ago (1960) predicted that the US would be more successful in the Cold War if we were more open, not less open, and noted that much “secret” government information is classified only to save officials and politicians from embarassment. The trend in the last eight years has been terrible, most notably with Bush’s executive order telling government agencies not to expend resources to answer Freedom of Information Act requests. Finally, 49 years after Lederer’s book, we have a president who has directed all government agencies that they should have a “presumption of openness” rather than one of secrecy. In other words, instead of a citizen needing to prove that a document should be public, the agency has to prove that a document should be secret.

This is huge and, I should add, a non-partisan issue. In general, liberals who believe in transparency in government and conservatives who believe government should be small and responsive have long complained about the expense, the inefficiency and the lack of transparency the policy of secrecy causes. Meanwhile, government officials who believe in strong government and strong executive power (that is, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) have been in favor of a presumption of secrecy. So this is good news for true liberals and true conservatives, for civil libertarians and plain old libertarians.

See the Washington Post story, New Obama Orders on Transparency, FOIA Requests

Popularity: 15% [?]

I know that the Obama administration has made some important strides in civil liberties, but already the ACLU is seeing troubling signs. This from their newsletter:

Yesterday, ACLU lawyers encountered a recurring — and troubling — obstacle in our lawsuit seeking justice for torture victims caught up in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. But this time, the objections were not coming from the Bush administration.

To our surprise and disappointment, the new Justice Department urged a federal appeals court to dismiss our lawsuit charging a Boeing subsidiary with providing critical support for the CIA’s rendition program based on the same “state secrets” claim that the Bush administration had repeatedly invoked to avoid any judicial scrutiny of its actions. During the course of the argument, one judge asked twice if the change in administration had any bearing on the Justice Department’s position. The attorney for the government said that its position remained the same.

See also Justice Department Stands Behind Bush Secrecy In Extraordinary Rendition Case.

ACLU is asking that folks send a message to Senators Kennedy, Leahy, Specter and Representative Nadler

Popularity: 15% [?]

I’m a fan of the US Constitution and particularly the Bill of Rights. More than the environmental catastrophes and foreign policy catastrophes and disaster relief catastrophes of the Bush administration, it has always been the erosion of the Constitution that has worried me the most. I suppose if you read this blog you know why. It has also infuriated me when I hear, as I have on talk radio (and I’m talking about NPR not Rush Limbaugh), when I hear people excuse the harsh interrogation and illegitimate detention of terror suspects, saying “These are bad people.” No. These are people, who if US citizens would have the right to be considered innocent (not the luxury or privilege, but the right). They are terror suspects, not terrorists. Big difference.

I should also say that I have no particular animosity towards the police. All but two of my experiences with the police have been positive and those were not that bad (though in both cases the cops abused their power and I wish I had gotten their badge numbers. Both should have been subject to formal reprimand, though not fired). That said, here’s a great lecture from a law professor and a police officer on why you should never talk to the police, even if you are innocent.

Popularity: 16% [?]

I do not need a politician to stand up for civil rights, the rule of law, international treaties signed by the US and the US Constitution when it’s popular. I need them to stand up for those things when it’s difficult.
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Popularity: 16% [?]

“An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation. We must take steps to insure our domestic security and protect our Homeland.”

This quote, according to hundreds of pages on the web, is by Adolf Hitler from a 1933 (or 1932 or 1922 on some pages) announcement of the creation of the Gestapo. These pages all have two things in common:

1. They all compare Bush to Hitler
2. They never cite their source

As a geeky historian, I find the second more troubling than the first. In fact, the creation of the Gestapo (note the presence of uncited quotes in this article), which began piecemeal around Germany, culminated in the so-called Reichstag Fire Decree, which among other things

placed severe limitations on personal freedom, the right of free expression, the freedom of the press, and the freedom of assembly; it permitted the authorities to spy on people’s private communications through the post, telegraph, and telephone; it allowed the police to conduct search and seizure operations in private homes; andit enabled the police to arrest people and put them in protective custody without charging them with a specific offense[1]

It is, indeed, hard to avoid seeing the parallels with our government’s behavior since September 11. We have allowed our government to eavesdrop on phone conversations. We have permitted our elected officials to pass laws permitting the government to demand our purchasing records from bookstores (illegal search and seizure), which was largely solved by the bookstores refusing to make the information available, but the parallel is significant. We have also arrested people without charging them with a specific offense and we have allowed them to be tortured even if not guilty of a specific offense, because they might spill the beans about other threats to public security. So it is not amiss to compare the Gestapo to measures by the Bush administration. Obviously, one should not belabor the comparison: Bush is no Hitler. Bad as he is, Bush is nevertheless closer to Roosevelt than he is to Hitler. However, the utility of the comparison is not to paint Bush as a modern Hitler, which is ridiculous, but to point out how willing his is as a president and we are as a people to go down the same road that the Germans went down in return for a little security. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so it behooves us to make sure that the first step is in the direction of freedom, not totalitarianism. It is most certainly useful to see how dictators have taken control in the past so we can guard against it in the present, and in that light, Bush should make us afraid.

But what about the quote? It isn’t so far from the text of the special law of 26 April 1933 for the creation of the Secret State Police Office (Gestapa) that said it was necessary to create such a police force “In order to assure the effective struggle against all the efforts directed against the existence and security of the state.”[2] That gets at the essence of the quote, but it comes up short of being a parallel with the supposed Bush quote.

It may well be that the quote that is all over the net is accurate, but I would like to see one citation. Just one. At this point, most people object to my historian geekiness and say that the special law is “close enough” to the version on the net. But when we let the accuracy of our facts slide, we are also taking one step in the wrong direction. That journey of 1000 miles also ends in totalitarianism. The most important bulwarks we have against tyrants is that we do not let them control history. Stalin tried by airbrushing cosmonauts in and out of photos. The Roman Inquisition tried it by burning books. Open discourse based on verifiable facts is the bane of tyrants. Ultimately, it is more important than force of arms, because if you can twist history so that the people believe the Big Lie, you have no need of arms, but when the illusion of the Big Lie is broken on a broad enough scale, no amount of arms can restore the illusion.

When we parrot quotes that are parroted on the web by authors who are parroting others who can never cite their actual source, we go down that slope where we leave the realm of facts and enter the realm of myth, and the realm of myth is the favorite homeland of tyrants and demagogues everywhere. The land of myth is the one where we have a virtual paradise on earth if we could just get rid of the Jews. The land of myth is the one where Chinese peasants under Mao were living in a workers’ paradise and, as Jung Chang talks about in her wonderful memoir Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China, ended with Chinese children saving their pennies to send to the poor starving children in capitalist countries. The realm of fact is the one where at that very time, Mao was letting over one hundred million peasants starve to death in the name of an ideology. That’s why it matters whether your facts are checked or accepted on faith, whether your history is accurate and documented, or just “close enough”.

Sources

1. Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror : The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans, p. 87. This is more or less a paraphrase of the decree itself, the text of which and translation is on the Wikipedia.
2.Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (Clarendon Paperbacks), p. 29

Popularity: 34% [?]

According to the principles established by the Nuremberg trials, you and I are probably in the clear with respect to charges of crimes against humanity or war crimes, but perhaps our political leaders are not. Could those principles be extended to all taxpayers who fund war criminals? It might sound obvious or absurd depending on how you view the issues, but it’s not an easy question.

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I sent the following letter to my representative asking him to look into the Charles Swift situation. Swift, a military lawyer, mounted a serious defense of an accused prisoner and may have been the target of retribution for having done so. (more…)

Popularity: 30% [?]

President Bush, addressing the United Nations, said that American forces and interrogators were being hampered by the vague language of the Ten Commandments and added that he did not wish US forces to be bound by them. Democratic leader Harry Reid accused the president of trying to “reinterpret” the Decalogue.
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Popularity: 35% [?]

The Bush administration responded forcefully today to critics of “aggressive interrogation”, known euphemistically as “torture lite.” Critics, including the FBI, have alleged that torture is ineffective and does not elicit quality information from suspects. The Bush administration has pointed out, however, that these techniques have been extremely effective in the past. Notably, press secretary Tony Snow said, torture saved Europe from witches in the past and can save us from terrorism today. (more…)

Popularity: 28% [?]

Once again the United States leads the world in prisoners per capita. After an encouraging decline in recent years, the US prison population rose 2.6% last year, meaning that 1 out of every 136 Americans are currently in prison. This means that 4.7% of AfricanAmerican males are now in prison. More striking, 11.9 percent of black males aged 25-29 are in prison! By far, the south leads the way (10 of the 14 states with the highest incarceration rates), with Louisiana leading the way at over one percent incarceration (1138 per 100,000). That said, the state with the highest rate of black incarceration was… in South Dakota. The greatest differential between black and white incarceration rates was in Iowa.

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Popularity: 16% [?]