America’s Security State Is Apparently Trying to Hassle Its Critics Into Silence

[DeSwiss]

NY Magazine
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells


[font size=1]MIAMI, FL - OCTOBER 04: A TSA agent waits for passengers to use the TSA PreCheck lane being implemented by the Transportation Security Administration at Miami International Airport on October 4, 2011 in Miami, Florida. The pilot program launched today for fliers to use the expedited security screening in Miami, Atlanta, Detroit and Dallas/Fort Worth.The lane has a metal detector rather than a full-body imaging machine and passengers will no longer no need to remove shoes, belts, light outerwear, and bags of liquids that are compliant with TSA restrictions. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)[/font]

This Tuesday, Florida Congressman Alan Grayson had planned to hold an ad hoc hearing on Capitol Hill to help evaluate the political and ethical consequences of the drone strikes our military has been conducting with great frequency in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. Grayson is a pugnacious, showboating progressive, but this hearing (like the libertarian Senator Rand Paul's thirteen-hour March filibuster over drone deployment) shows exactly why a little bit of political grandstanding can sometimes be useful in Washington: Rather than simply questioning military and intelligence officials about the efficacy and wisdom of drone strikes, Grayson had invited some of the victims.

And so chief among the scheduled witnesses had been a Pakistani man named Rafiq ur Rehman, a schoolteacher who lives in a rural village called Trappi in north Waziristan. Mr. Rehman's 67-year-old mother was killed by a U.S. drone strike last October while tending her cows in a field with some of her nine grandchildren, who were helping her after school. (One of the grandchildren, Rafiq Rehman's son, had to be taken to a hospital in the capital, Islamabad, to have shrapnel removed from his leg.) Representative Grayson had found Mr. Rehman through a prominent Pakistani human rights lawyer named Shahzad Akbar, who represents more than 125 victims of drone strikes. The only problem is that Mr. Akbar, who was scheduled to accompany his clients to Washington, now finds that he can't get a visa.

Before November 2010, when the lawyer started working with drone strike victims, he never had any trouble getting visas to the United States — they came through in a matter of days and permitted him multiple entries. Mr. Akbar's human rights credentials are impeccable; he is the Pakistan representative for a large British human rights group, Reprieve, and at an earlier point in his career, he had worked as a consultant for the USAID. But Mr. Akbar has spent the last three years filing lawsuits against the Pakistani and American governments on behalf of drone victims. (One of these lawsuits turned up the astonishing detail that in the Pakistani tribal areas of North and South Waziristan, 1,400 people have been killed by drone strikes, according to local officials.) And in some of these lawsuits, he has named as defendants the CIA's Pakistani station chief and the agency's legal counsel. The first time Mr. Akbar applied for a U.S. visa after he began his drone work, the process took more than a year, rather than the usual few days. This time, Mr Akbar told me on Saturday from Islamabad, he was taken into a back room at the U.S. consulate, and told by the head of the visa section that the diplomatic corps had nothing against him, but that his application had been blocked by officials in Washington, "because of your history with the U.S."

This kind of thing has been happening with a disturbing frequency in the last few weeks — people taking part in the political debate over national security and surveillance have found themselves prevented from traveling to do so, or harassed when they tried. Most famously, David Miranda, who was working on the Edward Snowden revelations with his partner, journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained by British authorities for nine hours during a changeover at Heathrow Airport, ostensibly because of the suspicion he might be carrying digital copies of U.S. secrets stolen by Snowden, and interrogated about his political activities. Earlier last week, a man named Baraa Shibani, who is the Yemen representative for Reprieve — and also a member of the National Dialogue in Yemen, a kind of constitutional convention backed by the West to try to build the structures of a more democratic state there — was detained in a back room at Gatwick Airport. When Shibani asked why, he was told that it was because of Reprieve's work "investigating and criticizing the effectiveness of U.S. drone strikes in my country."

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[center]"Every nation gets the government it deserves." ~Joseph de Maistre - 1811[/center]

[AnotherMcIntosh]

1. How I miss Harry Truman.

[blkmusclmachine]

2. .

.

[bemildred]

3. They think they are the most important people in the world, they do.

Mountains must be moved, rivers diverted if necessary, to protect their simple-minded butts from public scrutiny. Otherwise Al Qaeda will destroy America.

[rhett o rick]

4. I believe we have passed the tipping point. The Powers To Be will never let us clean this up.

They are becoming more bold about their transgressions on our Constitution because they realize there really isnt anything we can do. Dont you wonder why Pres Obama appointed the strong conservative authoritarians Gen Clapper and Gen Alexander? He didnt have a choice.

[DeSwiss]

5. ''He didnt have a choice.''

- Precisely. None of them do. And it's been this way since 1963 when they replaced one recalcitrant President who wouldn't listen and heed the warnings, with one more to their liking.

[rhett o rick]

6. It should be obvious. When Georgie Porgie was president we know he didnt have a clue

as to what was going on. The intelligence programs were put in place. When Obama became president he didnt change those programs because if he did, any disaster would be blamed on his changes. He kept Clapper, Mueller, Comey, and Alexander because if he didnt, he would be responsible for all disasters.