Old FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

Dave Lister thinks we need to connect the dots, the apparently obvious dots, and rejoin the Joint Terrorism Task Force in the wake of the fake bomb plot the FBI itself helped conceive, plan, and execute.

[I]n weird Portland, our leadership can decide that we should be the only jurisdiction in the entire country to withdraw from the Joint Terrorism Task Force and be safer as a result.

At least that’s until a young Somali man selected Portland for his alleged plot to kill hundreds of innocent men, women and children because, in part, our tolerance and our weirdness would have us convinced it could never happen here.

…

[Commissioner] Leonard has also said that the outcome of the alleged bombing plot would have been no different were we in or out of the JTTF. I’m glad he’s convinced of that; I’m sure not.

I’m going to take that last part first, because Lister’s argument appears to be this: we need to rejoin the JTTF because law enforcement successfully thwarted a terrorist plot without us being in the JTTF.

Ignoring the lingering question of entrapment, if this case shows us anything it’s that Portland does not need to be in the JTTF in order for these sorts of plots to be foiled — precisely the opposite of the argument Lister tries to advance.

But moving on to the more important issue, Lister’s entire conception, of course, is nonsense.

After the city withdrew from the JTTF (again, here’s all my coverage), Portland police officers were still permitted to cooperate with Federal authorities on a case-by-case basis, precisely because the city very much understood that it could happen here. The withdrawal simply meant that the city’s police officers weren’t allowed to have standing, ongoing security clearances above those granted to their civilian bosses.

Lister goes on to rewrite the history of why Portland withdrew from the JTTF in the first place, suggesting that it was never more than Portland’s hatred of President George W. Bush.

That’s a convenient line of “reasoning” for the right wing to use, but it’s hogwash. As was repeatedly communicated both by the testifying public and by the commissioners themselves, the premise always was that we are meant to be a nation, and by extension a city, of laws not one of men. We’re not meant simply to trust that there are no abuses, we’re supposed to have legal safeguards in place to ensure that there are no abuses.

To refresh Listers’ memory, at stake during the JTTF debates of 2005 (and before) were two provisions of state law, specifically of ORS Chapter 181. ORS 181.575 designates specific information not to be collected or maintained by law enforcement agencies, while 181.850 places restrictions on state and local law enforcement from enforcing Federal immigration laws.

Even setting aside the creed of local, civilian control over our own police officers, the fact that the FBI doesn’t monitor its state or city law enforcement partners for compliance with Oregon law remains unchanged whether the President is George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

It’s true, as Lister writes, that Mayor Sam Adams’ plan the revisit the issue states that “the nation has elected a new president and changes in related federal policies have occurred” since the city withdrew from the JTTF. But, contrary to Lister’s assertion, that doesn’t mean our withdrawal from the JTTF was a personality conflict with George Bush.

It’s perfectly sensible when there is new political leadership — in fact, it’s arguably the right thing to do — to examine whether or not any policy changes have occurred which, for example, would allow our local, civilian officials to obtain the relevant security clearances, which in turn would allow the city to authorize the police officers which they oversee to return to the JTTF.

Contrary to Lister’s demagoguery on the issue, JTTF withdrawal was never about personality or some sort of petulant political snit fit against George Bush. It was about ensuring the compliance of the city’s police officers with state laws with which the FBI does not concern itself. It was about maintaining the city’s local, civilian control over those officers. At the same time, the withdrawal still allowed for case-by-case close cooperation with Federal law enforcement, precisely because the city continued to understand that, indeed, something could happen here.

None of that changes just because Dave Lister, Dan Saltzman, or anyone else hopes they can dupe everyone else into forgetting what really happened during the withdrawal debates of 2005.

Lister says he wants everyone to “set politics aside and do the right thing”. But it’s politics to revise the history of the JTTF debate, and it’s politics to ignore the central issues of that debate.

The city already did the right thing in 2005 in demanding that our local officials be able to ensure the compliance of local law enforcement with state law. If there are no new federal policies in place today which would allow that to happen within the context of participating in the JTTF, it’s nothing but politics to demand that we return to it.

On the floor of the United States Senate today, prior to a cloture vote to end debate on the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law prohibiting gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, Senator John McCain had some things to say on the matter.

Today is a very sad day. The Commandant of the United States Marine Corps says when your life hangs on the line, you don’t want anything distracting it. Mistakes or inattention or distraction cost Marines lives. I don’t want to permit that opportunity to happen and I’ll tell you why. You go up to Bethesda Naval Hospital. Marines are up there with no legs. None. You’ve got Marines at Walter Reed with no limbs.

The reference is to the recent remarks of General James F. Amos, Commandant of the Marine Corps, who has publicly opposed repeal.

“Mistakes and inattention or distractions cost Marines lives,” he said on Tuesday, explaining how he came to his decision. “That’s the currency of this fight.

“I don’t want to lose any Marines to the distraction. I don’t want to have any Marines that I’m visiting at Bethesda [National Naval Medical Center, in Maryland] with no legs be the result of any type of distraction.”

…

[W]ith so many Marines engaged in Afghanistan, he thought about what could happen to small units like those in Sangin, where fighting is the heaviest by many accounts. When a firefight breaks out, he said, lives depend on “intuitive behavior” free from distraction.

“I don’t want to permit that opportunity [for distraction] to happen,” he said.

It’s important to parse what General Amos and Senator McCain are saying, because quite clearly they themselves haven’t.

Amos and McCain, when talking about “distractions” and “intuitive behavior”, in essence are saying that the soldiers of the United States military are too stupid, immature, or outright homophobic to do their jobs properly if there are gays in their midst.

Their position, when parsed, is that if there are known gays around, we can’t trust what politicians and military leaders keep telling us is the best-trained fighting force in the history of the world to be intelligent and focused enough to do what we’ve spent billions of dollars training them to do when the bullets fly and the bombs fall.

James Amos, the head of the United States Marine Corps, and John McCain, a leading Senator and himself a veteran, argue that the soldiers for whom they claim to speak are simply too weak, or at least too weak-minded, and that the nation’s policies need to respect this failing.

Fortunately for the rest of us, today sixty-five of McCain’s fellow Senators disagreed with his and Amos’ assessment that U.S. soliders are too stupid, immature, or outright homophobic to live in the 21st century.

In the wake of the FBI successfully thwarting its own terrorist plot, Commissioner Dan Saltzman immediately and unsurprisingly rushed to urge the City of Portland to rejoin the Joint Terrorism Task Force from which, over his convoluted objections, it withdrew five years ago.

From the office of Mayor Sam Adams there now is a draft work plan to reexamine the question of JTTF membership, so I thought I’d present here some portions of my own coverage of the city’s decision to withdraw in April, 2005. Specifically, the comments of each member of City Council upon casting their vote.

In the end, it came down to the much-postponed vote itself, and the closing comments on the issue by each member of City Council.

“This is a very serious issue, and one that I’ve spent a lot of time researching,” said Commissioner Sam Adams, adding that he was convinced “that we can prevent terrorism” under the terms of the resolution. “And I think that we will and we can while protecting the basic rights of all people.” He reiterated the litany of controversial provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act which he listed during the March hearing.

Saying that his view of his responsibility as an elected official is to not ignore such concerns, Adams said that “the additional very common sense accountability required by the Mayor and by the Commissioner I think is very reasonable”.

Commissioner Randy Leonard placed his support for the resolution in the context of a demand for accountability in City government, which he said he’s pressed consistently since first running for his office. “I think its unreasonable,” he said, “to ask the Commissioner-in-Charge not to have full access and accountability of all the employees under that Commissioner’s responsibility.”

He called the proper civilian oversight of law enforcement officials a “time tested principles of governance” and a “cornerstone of our form of government” — and one for which men and women have fought and died.

Leonard also reminded people that it was he who cast a vote against a resolution opposing the war in Iraq, largely on the basis of believing the government’s stated rationales for that war. “As it turned out,” he said, “my trust in what I was told was betrayed.” As a result, he said he had adopted another guiding principle: “Trust, but verify.”

And then came the moment for which some of us were waiting so eagerly: Saltzman’s public defense of his solitary vote against the resolution.

“I respect very much the work of the Mayor, the FBI, and the U.S. Attorney over the last three weeks,” he said, “and I am disappointed that those talks did not succeed.” He said that his ideal outcome would have been for the talks to continue (convenient, since endless talks would simply mean continued participation without oversight), and therefore he would not support the resolution.

“With all due respect to the Mayor and my colleagues on the City Council,” Saltzman said, “I think the resolution is a step backwards.” He argued that restricting Portland’s participation to “imminent” threats “does not equal prevention”.

(Again, Saltzman conveniently leaves out facts which are inconvenient to his position. In this case, the fact that Portland’s cooperation is not limited only to “imminent” threats, but can also move forward on a “case-by-case” basis. It’s one thing when ones newspaper of record omits critical facts in order to distort public impression of an issue, but it’s really rather ugly when an elected official does it as well.)

He then re-raised his argument from last month, which is all of the bad publicity this will bring as it puts Portland in the national spotlight.

“Terrorism is real,” Saltzman said, insinuating by even uttering the sentence that proponents of proper local oversight over Portland officers have somehow forgotten this fact. “We live in a place that is a haven for hate crimes,” he added. “We ought to recognize that.”

Saltzman reminded everyone that it was he who sponsored the Council resolution expressing concerns over provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. But: “We can’t juxtapose our concerns over the PATRIOT Act on this debate here and now.”

…

In response to the several people (including, we suspect, ourselves) who chastised him for trying, in his op-ed piece, to call upon 9/11 for his own purposes, he said this: “I wont pretend to speak for all New Yorkers”. He then, nonetheless, said: “We would be letting New Yorkers down.”

“To somehow discount that and to say we are using cheap political theater to invoke the spirit of 9/11,” he chided, “I totally object to that.”

Sten tried to place the evening’s vote — and his own vote in favor of the resolution — in the context of the longer history of the JTTF issues as its come before Council in the past. “It is a completely false argument running through the other side of this argument that Portland is unilaterally withdrawing from this Task Force,” he said.

He explained that the first time the issue came before him on the Council, he had felt like the FBI was presenting the City with a “false choice”, simply between participating or not participating, entirely on the grounds the FBI presented and none other. “I did not like that choice,” Sten said, but he went along with it in part because in the near-immediate aftermath of 9/11 “we erred on the side of getting on the Task Force” at a moment “where we were all trying to figure out what is the best response to this situation”.

Sten said that the resolution before Council was an “entirely different approach that the false choice” offered by the FBI over the years. “This is a totally different choice, and it’s the right one.”

Over the years, Sten insisted, the Feds had taken no real steps to try to solve “these pressing problems” of local oversight. “Portland did not pull out, we waited three years,” he said. “There is a completely false notion that Portland is just pulling out of this,” Sten said. “Portland has worked very, very hard to remain in this.”

“It’s been an interesting few weeks,” said Potter. During that time, he said, he listened to the public, the police, lawyers, and “to my heart”.

“In this country,” he said, “there’s an old-fashioned principle that the police or the military have to be answerable to civilian oversight.” He argued that looking back on history, it’s clear that some people, when blindly given power, “sometimes that power is misused”.

He stressed that such abuses have happened “within our lifetimes” and that “we’re not talking ancient history, we’re talking about recent history”. He also made clear that the resolution impugns neither Portland’s police officers nor the Federal government.

“I don’t think Portland is a strange city,” Potter said. “I think, though, that we are concerned about ensuring that we have a proper balance between protecting people physical security, the property they own, and balancing that against their rights.”

“This is going to be in the best interests of our community in the long run,” he said. “We will see that this will work for us to ensure the safety of our people”.

And so, after much delay, many votes over the years in the other direction, and a seemingly limitless supply of distortion of the issues by the other side, the City Council of Portland, Oregon, voted 4 to 1 in favor of a resolution which will withdraw local police officers from the Joint Terrorism Task Force within ninety days.

With that vote, Portland became the first city in the nation to withdraw from a Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Faced with Commissioner Saltzman again demagoguing the issue and Mayor Adams revisiting the city’s potential membership, I invite you to browse all of my coverage of the debates from 2003 through 2005.