police surveillance of death penalty opponents & peace activists

wow! here's a scary post from karl keys at capital defense weekly. i'll just paste the whole thing:

As most probably know, cops in Maryland have been targeting people opposed to the ultimate use of state power. I’m too cheesed off to even pretend I can talk rationally about this as everyone I know who supports ending the dp in Maryland is, well, ridiculously normal/mainstream. I’ll leave it to Dr. Michael Blankenship from the Justice Gambit:

Maryland State Police officers conducted surveillance on local peace activists and groups opposed to the death penalty, including some in Takoma Park, for more than a year during the administration of former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), documents released this morning show.

Read more…

No evidence of criminal behavior was reported during almost 300 hours of undercover surveillance. It was doubtful that the investigation originated because of any illegal activity. So? Being opposed to capital punishment has rarely been viewed in a positive light by the government. I speak from experience when local prosecutors and sheriff’s joined together to complain to the university about my research and testimony as an expert witness.

However, this is a new low. The use of public funds and resources that were supposed to be expended on crime control activities to conduct covert surveillance on a legal and peaceful group of people should make rational individuals afraid - very afraid. Will there be any accountability for this outrageous abuse of power and public resources?

The Maryland docs are here. The only positive thing I can say about all of this (and friends are listed in the docs) is that the officer(s) assigned determined that this was (B)ravo (S)ierra and asked the investigation be terminated.

this is worse than spending all those fbi resources to find all the iraq war protestors when we were signing our names & providing personal info on all those petitions.

truth is this is outrageous, but on the other hand maybe there'll be another good thing to come of this. (i'm making some assumptions here:) i guess we middle-class middle-aged white folks are discovering that the whole criminal justice thing really isn't all that fair and that law-abiding peaceful people are not immune. maybe if this hits home then we'll start to pay better attention to what's really happening in other neighborhoods. and maybe be more willing to believe similar claims by others.

iraq strategy

doesn't it seem like the "stay the course in iraq" contingent is using the logic of
the beatings will continue until morale improves . . . ?

i mean, aren't we finally admitting that we made a terrible mess for bad reasons, but we argue that we're going to keep doing what we're doing (which made the mess) because the only alternative we can see is to walk away? are our options really that limited?

i don't think we should just walk away. what about our responsibility to clean up the mess we made? (yes, saddam made some of it, but we destroyed the country and need to look at our own part.)

it's not the military's responsibility, nor is it within the military's expertise to rebuild a country, which is what iraq needs to be stable, and what we should do if we want any hope of a non-puppet ally there. we should rebuild infrastructure and support economic and political structures which benefit the iraqi people. even after all the iraqi people we've killed, we have a chance to leave the country better than we found it in at least some ways, and if we do, we may be able to regain some of that lost world opinion. (which matters)

this work will require some tools and skills that the military is not designed to possess, and that our current administration does not use, for whatever reason.

but the adage if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail can be expanded:

if you have lots of tools but only believe in the hammer . . .

or maybe

it's hard to build stuff with only a chainsaw

woke up thinking about . . .

whenever i am tempted to start with that line, the beginning of bruce cockburn's "get up jonah" jumps into my head:

woke up thinking about turkish drummers
didn't take long -- i don't know much about turkish drummers . . .

~~~

sorry i've been non-blogging for several days. on the trip to nyc, i met a law professor who'd just returned from rwanda, and the conversation got me waking up thinking about the genocide there, a subject which has fascinated me since i read philip gourevitch's we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families ten years ago. (rwanda is neighbor to the congo, where i lived for a few years as a child, so i think this is part of the pull for me.)

i've spent all my writing time this week wrestling with the importance of genocide in the debate about pacifism and peacemaking. one reason it is important is that genocide gives us a character in the story with whom we can easily identify (the neighbor), and i think this may offer some interesting perspectives.

the essay is way too long for a blog post, so i'll probably post random thoughts from it here this week.

thoughts on pacifism

last night, on the way home, i listened to a talk, in which the speaker made several points to which i wish i could have responded, so here are the responses i wish i'd made:

she recounted a conversation with a pacifist in which she asked whether he would call the police when threatened, he said no, she complimented him on his consistency and asked whether he understood that he benefited from the fact that his neighbors were willing to call the police, and he said yes and it disturbed him every day.

she evoked the "what about hitler?" question and said that quakers were not really against violence because the taking of life by God is ok, and therefore the question is only to whom we're willing to give the life-taking authority.

this seems so small to me.

to believe in God, i don't have to believe that we die because God takes our lives, and i don't in fact believe this. God is not puppet-master, controlling every detail, in my view. death is a natural end of life. the end of life by natural means is not an act of violence. Though it can be horrible, it's not killing, not murder. there are differences.

i can be a pacifist who believes in God, without contradiction. sorry.

the hitler question always comes up in pacifist discussions, and different people resolve it different ways, but i say it's unfair to demand that the framing of the question start where it does. this framing may be interesting, but it shouldn't be the central question, or we'll never learn the real lessons available here.

there are interesting parallels to the abortion question: given this situation (which likely could have been prevented, but let's not talk about that) what do we do?

in fact, i think i would respond to most of what she said with the argument for putting more of our energy into preventing the situations from occurring.

we have wars because we recognize no other tools for solving international problems, because we have leaders who stir up our fears, because we have invested in war-making rather than peace-making. we have put our faith in our military strength.

military response is not a quick, last-minute response, though it can seem so. the truth is that it takes long-term and expensive investment to be prepared to act in the moment. there is no quick peacemaker response either, but what do we invest in peacemaking? what would it look like to build a peacemaking force comparable to our military? to study effective peacemaking, invest in it, train for it, build public support for it, build its reputation internationally, etc.? that's worth a little thought, isn't it?

instead we ask the peacemakers to take this set of facts and declare what we would do. what if we turned that around and put the other side on equal footing: assume no military, no department of defense, no budget, no millions in annual r&d funding, etc. -- now here comes hitler, what do you do? with this set of facts, the military solution would be ineffective as well.

when the military succeeds, we say that's proof that the military is necessary and good.

when diplomacy succeeds, we generally don't see it.

when the military fails, we say, well, we need a bigger stronger military.

when diplomacy fails, we say diplomacy doesn't work.

does this make sense?