Super 'Dela

sustainableprosperity:

Obama’s One-Way Mirror

Monday, 17 June 2013 11:56By Shayana Kadidal, Truthout | Op-Ed

There is something very wrong with this picture: Today I am in a federal court arguing that the press and public have a right to have access to daily transcripts and court documents in the trial of whistleblower Bradley Manning; meanwhile, Verizon is under government orders to turn over people’s calling records on a daily basis.

Similarly, next month, my colleague will argue in federal court that the government can’t simply place American citizens on secret “kill lists” without due process; meanwhile, the National Security Agency can go to hand-picked FISA judges to get direct access to the servers of Apple, Google, Facebook, Skype and others. 

We’re on the wrong side of a one-way mirror: The government can see us through it, but from our side we can’t see much of what it does in our name and with our tax dollars. Seven years into the self-styled “most transparent administration in history,” our lives - and the news media’s phone records - are as transparent as ever to the NSA, while the government is more opaque than ever.

We have become a nation in which massive surveillance of millions of citizens is deemed necessary to safeguard our democracy, while whistleblowers who uncover government wrongdoing are prosecuted as traitors. In this Orwellian world, the government has the right to know everything we are doing, but we do not have a right to know much of anything about what the government is doing.

This problem of one-way transparency is exemplified by how the government is dealing with the most important criminal trial involving leaks of classified information since the Pentagon Papers: the court-martial of Bradley Manning.

The government has refused to provide daily transcripts or audio tapes of the proceedings and media access to the briefs and court orders, making it nearly impossible for journalists to cover the trial accurately. In the pre-trial proceedings, the military judge went so far as to read her decisions out for hours at a time rather than provide transcripts. The situation is so bad that internet activists have raised almost $60,000 to pay for their own stenographer in the media room - and that will only pay for half the trial.

In ordinary criminal trials in federal courts, the media have access to daily transcripts against which they can check their notes of what happened in court; they have access to the parties’ briefs so they can read them beforehand and make sense of what is being said; and the judges publish their orders so people can read and understand their legal decisions. In Manning’s case, none of those things were made available by the government until, in a desperate attempt to fend off our lawsuit, they released several thousand pages of papers a week into the trial (so arbitrarily redacted that the judge’s name was blacked out of all of her own orders).

The reason for these efforts to suppress the ability to cover the trial is simple: The administration wants to make an example out of Manning, and if the process were open, as our Constitution requires, his example would be an inspiring one and not the deterrent one the government wants.

As the Supreme Court has said repeatedly, openness enhances the accuracy and fairness of judicial proceedings. It is essential for the proper functioning of a democratic government and society. If our current lawsuit fails, Manning’s trial will continue under conditions where journalists and the public will be unable as a practical matter to follow what is going on in the courtroom.

Having the public watching means that judges and prosecutors will carry out their duties diligently and fairly; but it also means that witnesses will be less likely to perjure themselves knowing that the whole world is watching, and in fact, that new witnesses may come out of the woodwork. In effect, the public serves as a fact-check on what is transpiring in the court. That can’t happen if dozens of prosecution witnesses testify in secret, as is planned, or if the pretrial filings are only released with massive, arbitrary redactions - all of which is happening in Manning’s case. This is precisely the kind of dangerous government secrecy that convinces people that leaks are essential for the preservation of our democracy.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

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SHAYANA KADIDAL

Shayana Kadidal is senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo project at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he has been employed since 2001. He works on the center’s case against the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program, CCR v. Obama, and represents journalists Amy Goodman, Jeremy Scahill, Kevin Gosztola, Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange and Chase Mada in a lawsuit challenging government secrecy in Bradley Manning’s court-martial.

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vicemag:

It’s not a problem of a few bad apples, as some people suggest, but instead a matter of irresponsible leadership, a pathological law enforcement culture, and a public ready and willing to sacrifice notions of justice, fairness and humanity for … what exactly?

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anarcho-queer:

Why Police Lie Under Oath

By MICHELLE ALEXANDER

THOUSANDS of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury’s believing their word over a police officer’s are slim to none. As a juror, whom are you likely to believe: the alleged criminal in an orange jumpsuit or two well-groomed police officers in uniforms who just swore to God they’re telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? As one of my colleagues recently put it, “Everyone knows you have to be crazy to accuse the police of lying.”

But are police officers necessarily more trustworthy than alleged criminals? I think not. Not just because the police have a special inclination toward confabulation, but because, disturbingly, they have an incentive to lie. In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn’t be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so.

That may sound harsh, but numerous law enforcement officials have put the matter more bluntly. Peter Keane, a former San Francisco Police commissioner, wrote an article in The San Francisco Chronicle decrying a police culture that treats lying as the norm: “Police officer perjury in court to justify illegal dope searches is commonplace. One of the dirty little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system is undercover narcotics officers intentionally lying under oath. It is a perversion of the American justice system that strikes directly at the rule of law. Yet it is the routine way of doing business in courtrooms everywhere in America.”

The New York City Police Department is not exempt from this critique. In 2011, hundreds of drug cases were dismissed after several police officers were accused of mishandling evidence. That year, Justice Gustin L. Reichbach of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn condemned a widespread culture of lying and corruption in the department’s drug enforcement units. “I thought I was not naïve,” he said when announcing a guilty verdict involving a police detective who had planted crack cocaine on a pair of suspects. “But even this court was shocked, not only by the seeming pervasive scope of misconduct but even more distressingly by the seeming casualness by which such conduct is employed.”

Remarkably, New York City officers have been found to engage in patterns of deceit in cases involving charges as minor as trespass. In September it was reported that the Bronx district attorney’s office was so alarmed by police lying that it decided to stop prosecuting people who were stopped and arrested for trespassing at public housing projects, unless prosecutors first interviewed the arresting officer to ensure the arrest was actually warranted. Jeannette Rucker, the chief of arraignments for the Bronx district attorney, explained in a letter that it had become apparent that the police were arresting people even when there was convincing evidence that they were innocent. To justify the arrests, Ms. Rucker claimed, police officers provided false written statements, and in depositions, the arresting officers gave false testimony.

Mr. Keane, in his Chronicle article, offered two major reasons the police lie so much. First, because they can. Police officers “know that in a swearing match between a drug defendant and a police officer, the judge always rules in favor of the officer.” At worst, the case will be dismissed, but the officer is free to continue business as usual. Second, criminal defendants are typically poor and uneducated, often belong to a racial minority, and often have a criminal record.  “Police know that no one cares about these people,” Mr. Keane explained.

All true, but there is more to the story than that.

Police departments have been rewarded in recent years for the sheer numbers of stops, searches and arrests. In the war on drugs, federal grant programs like the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program have encouraged state and local law enforcement agencies to boost drug arrests in order to compete for millions of dollars in funding. Agencies receive cash rewards for arresting high numbers of people for drug offenses, no matter how minor the offenses or how weak the evidence. Law enforcement has increasingly become a numbers game. And as it has, police officers’ tendency to regard procedural rules as optional and to lie and distort the facts has grown as well. Numerous scandals involving police officers lying or planting drugs — in Tulia, Tex. and Oakland, Calif., for example — have been linked to federally funded drug task forces eager to keep the cash rolling in.

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