Adam Serwer

Reporter

Adam Serwer is a reporter at Mother Jones. Formerly a staff writer at the American Prospect, he has written for the Washington Post, the Root, the Village Voice, and the New York Daily News.

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Former Bush Officials Slam Mandatory Military Detention Bill

—By Adam Serwer

| Tue Dec. 6, 2011 10:04 AM PST

Former State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger

It's official: Just about the only people who think the mandatory military detention provisions in the defense spending bill are a good idea are the congressional legislators trying to show everyone how tough on terror they are.

Former Bush-era State Department legal adviser John Bellinger and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs Matthew Waxman have joined Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and FBI Director Robert Mueller in warning Congress that mandating military detention for non-citizen terror suspects apprehended in the US will harm national security.

The detainee provisions are apparently intended by their drafters to provide tough counterterrorism powers, but in practice they could have a detrimental impact on U.S. counterterrorism operations. Indeed, while originally drafted by Senate Republicans, these legislative encroachments on the president's authorities would likely have been as strongly opposed by the Bush administration as by the Obama administration. Any president—Democrat or Republican—would object to legislation that interferes this way with his flexibility in conducting the war against al-Qaeda.

[...]

Mandating military detention for categories of suspected terrorists could also jeopardize the ability of the United States to seek extradition of al-Qaeda suspects from other countries and hamper vital intelligence-sharing and law-enforcement cooperation by U.S. allies, who would be concerned that information they shared might be used to place individuals into military detention. Likewise, extending the legislative restrictions related to Guantanamo detainees would limit the president's ability to transfer detainees to other countries in appropriate cases, as the Bush administration did with respect to more than five-hundred individuals. It is important that the United States develop a sustainable terrorist detention policy, and these restrictions could undermine diplomatic efforts critical to that effort and impede sound decision-making with regard to future captures in this ongoing war.

This isn't the first time former Bush officials have spoken out. Waxman told me in October that the provisions "curtail [the] necessary flexibility" the executive branch needs to respond to terrorist threats. His successor at DoD Charles Stimson, without referring directly to the defense bill, wrote in defense of trying underwear bomber and Nigerian citizen Umar Abdulmutallab in civilian court saying that the president "must have the flexibility to use the most appropriate tool at any given time." It may be for very different reasons, but try to remember the last time former Bush administration officials, Obama national security officials, and the American Civil Liberties Union were on the same side of an issue. The next time this happens, the world is likely to implode.

Republicans have invested so much rhetoric in convincing their base that FBI interrogations involve propping up a few pillows and hand feeding grapes to terror suspects in their custody that they may not be able to change course without causing a backlash. Thus far, the Republicans and Democrats who joined together to add the mandatory military detention provisions to the defense bill have also ignored the combined expertise of the entire Obama administration national security team. Perhaps they'll listen more carefully to former officials from a Republican administration whose responsibility it was to actually handle such matters—and perhaps it'll stiffen the spine of the Obama administration if and when it comes time to follow through on that veto threat.

UPDATE: I missed the latest from Stimson, who is now a Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. In a policy memo on Heritage's website, he criticizes the mandatory military defense provisions directly, saying that "[t]o win this long war against terrorists, the President must have the maximum flexibility to use all tools of national power. "

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NAACP Decries "James Crow Esq."

—By Adam Serwer

| Tue Dec. 6, 2011 9:16 AM PST

NAACP President Ben Jealous

State-level voting restrictions are an attempt to suppress the minority vote and prevent them from exercising political influence, according to a report released by the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Monday.

"Jim Crow is poll taxes, James Crow Esquire it's having to pay for an ID,” said NAACP Sr. Vice President for Policy and Advocacy Hilary Shelton on a conference call with reporters Monday. NAACP officials referred to the voting restrictions as "James Crow, Esq.," so as to distinguish them from the violent tactics associated with enforcing Jim Crow segregation. "The intent seems to [be to] disenfranchise people of color disproportionately," said NAACP President Benjamin Jealous.

The report exhaustively details how 25 states have passed laws restricting voting rights, either by requiring photo identification or proof of citizenship at the polls, limiting early voting, passing stricter absentee ballot requirements, curbing third-party voter registration drives and venues for registration, implementing stricter felony disenfranchisement laws, and imposing residency requirements that make it harder for people to register to vote after they've moved. The Brennan Center has estimated that stricter voting requirements could make it harder for five million eligible voters to cast ballots. While Republicans have argued such rules are necessary to combat "voter fraud," examples of the kind of in-person voter fraud that might be curbed by such requirements are miniscule.

All of these new restrictions disproportionately impact the poor and minorities, the NAACP report states, and that's by design. While the report does not blame Republicans directly, it describes the restrictions as a "backlash" against an empowered minority vote in 2008 when the participation gap between eligible black and white voters was nearly eliminated. Echoing Ari Berman's* reporting for Rolling Stone, NAACP officials on the call singled out the American Legislative Exchange Council as the source of legislation implementing restrictions on voting.

"We are experiencing an assault on voting rights this year, that is disturbing in its scope and intensity," said NAACP LDF Director of Political Participation Ryan Haygood. "It's not a mistake that the very channels through which many voters of color showed up at the polls at 2008 are" the ones being blocked, he added. In fairness, the laws are likely also the result of a 2008 Supreme Court decision upholding a strict voter ID law in Indiana despite evidence that it would disproportionately disenfranchise minorities.

Some statistics from the report: 25 percent of blacks and 15 percent of Latinos don't have photo IDs, compared to eight percent of whites. In 2010, 14 percent of Latino voters and 12 percent of blacks registered through private voter registration drives, compared to six percent of whites. Blacks and Latinos are also far more likely to have moved recently. Forty-eight percent of Latinos and 43 percent of blacks moved within the last five years, compared to 27 percent of whites, making them far more likely to be impacted by, for instance, residency requirements in Wisconsin that only allow voters to register after having lived in the state for twenty-eight days. The disparate impact of felony disenfranchisement laws hits African-Americans particularly hard—38 percent of the more than 5 million Americans affected by felony disenfranchisement laws are black.

The NAACP and NAACP LDF aren't the first to draw comparisons between Jim Crow-era voter restrictions and today's vote fraud push by conservatives. Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz caused a firestorm last June when she said that Republicans were trying to "literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws" with stricter voting requirements.

"The interest is not [what's in] their heart, it's their policy," said Rev. William Barber, President of the NAACP North Carolina State Conference. "If they implement these policies, and they know who these policies are going to impact, it is disparate racial treatment.”

Shelton was more blunt. "It's more sophisticated, but it really is the same old strategy being played out yet again.”

*A previous version of this piece referred to the author of the Rolling Stone piece as Ari Melber; it was Ari Berman.

The American Heritage Dictionary's "Anchor Baby" Fail

—By Adam Serwer

| Mon Dec. 5, 2011 2:47 PM PST

Houghton Mifflin's latest version of the American Heritage Dictionary includes the derogatory term "anchor baby" as one of its newest words. That's not really the problem. The problem is that it regarded (at least initially) the term as value-neutral, rather than as a slur used to dehumanize the children of undocumented immigrants as little more than a strategy for getting a green card.

The term "anchor baby" was defined as "a child born to a non-citizen mother in a country that grants automatic citizenship to children born on its soil; especially such a child born to parents seeking to secure eventual citizenship for themselves, and often other members of their family." As Colorlines' Jorge Rivas pointed out, the dictionary's editor, Steve Kleinedler, went on NPR two weeks ago and said that this was an example of the American Heritage Dictionary defining a term "objectively without taking sides and just presenting what it is." This would be like defining "broad" as "a member of the female sex." Unsurprisingly, however, the American Heritage Dictionary shuns "objectivity" on this point and appropriately refers to the use of the term "broad" in this fashion as "offensive slang."

"Anchor baby" is used almost exclusively to delegitimize the claims of citizenship granted to the children of undocumented immigrants under the Constitution. The "anchor baby" slur relies on two particular myths, the idea that having an American citizen child is an automatic shield against deportation and the notion that people come here just to have children. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 91 percent of unauthorized immigrants in the US who had children in 2009-2010 came her before 2007. Having a child who is a citizen is hardly a certain path to citizenship either—the parent would have to wait till the child was 21 to sponsor them.

To Kleinedler's credit, following a post by the Immigration Policy Center's Mary Giovagnioli explaining the origins of "anchor baby," he said that "we will be adding a label to the term, either derogatory or offensive, which I acknowledge should have been done in the first place." Now maybe the American Heritage Dictionary can get started on "waterboarding." In a move reminiscent of the New York Times, which ceased to describe waterboarding as torture after the US started employing it as an interrogation method, the dictionary refers to this practice as being "widely considered a form of torture." And you thought false objectivity that blurs more than it clarifies was just a mainstream media thing.

Republicans Go After...Obama's Ambassador to Belgium?

—By Adam Serwer

| Mon Dec. 5, 2011 9:15 AM PST

US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman.

GOP presidential candidates are demanding President Obama fire his ambassador to Belgium over remarks suggesting that Muslim anti-Semitism is related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ambassador Howard Gutman argued in a speech delivered last week at a meeting of the European Jewish Union in Brussels that there is a distinction between "classic" anti-Semitism, that is general hatred of Jews, and "hatred and indeed sometimes and all too growing intimidation and violence directed at Jews generally as a result of the continuing tensions between Israel and the Palestinian territories and other Arab neighbors in the Middle East." Gutman also said that "every new settlement announced in Israel, every rocket shot over a border or suicide bomber on a bus, and every retaliatory military strike exacerbates the problem and provides a setback here in Europe for those fighting hatred and bigotry here in Europe."

The Romney campaign Sunday, sent out a statement demanding that Obama fire Gutman "for rationalizing and downplaying anti-Semitism and linking it to Israeli policy toward the Palestinians," while rival Newt Gingrich tweeted to his roughly 1.3. million Twitter followers that "Pres Obama should fire his ambassador to Brussels for being so wrong about anti-semitism." Conservative media pounced on Gutman's remarks (frequently and conveniently failing to mention that Gutman himself is a Jew and the son of a Holocaust survivor), while seeking to link his comments to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's Friday speech urging Israel to end its "isolation from its traditional security partners in the region" and to renew efforts to reach a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

Gutman's remarks were clumsy—it's true that the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process inflames anti-Semitism; it's also true that anti-Semitism frequently borrows concepts from what Gutman calls "classic" anti-Semitism. It's one thing to protest Israeli government policies, such as settlement expansion in the West Bank and military incursions that kill civilians, it's another to react to them by collectively blaming Jews. That said, Gutman's suggestion that anti-Semitism would subside if a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be reached isn't the same as saying Israelis or Jews are "responsible" for anti-Semitism.

The conservative reaction has two purposes: The first is to bolster a narrative that Obama has thrown Israel "under the bus," as Romney likes to say, a view not shared either by a majority of Israelis or the Israeli national security establishment. The other is to enable the self-destructive trajectory of Israel's current right-wing government, which has abandoned sincere efforts at reconciliation, by conflating any criticism of Israeli government policy with anti-Semitism.

The irony is that the Obama administration has been so on the defensive when it comes to Israel that it has failed to pressure the Israeli government into taking the necessary steps to reach a two-state solution, which given demographic realities in the region is the only way to ensure Israel's future.

White House: We're Serious About Vetoing The Defense Bill Over Detention

—By Adam Serwer

| Fri Dec. 2, 2011 1:48 PM PST

The White House reiterated its threat Friday to veto a defense spending bill that would mandate military detention for non-citizen terror suspects apprehended on American soil.

During Friday's press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney accused the Senate of engaging in "political micromanagement at the expense of sensible national security policy," adding that "our position has not changed, any bill that challenges or constrains the president's critical authorities to collect intelligence, incapacitate dangerous terrorists and protect the nation would prompt his senior advisers to recommend a veto."

Thursday evening, the Senate agreed on a compromise amendment to the defense bill to avoid deciding whether current law authorizes the indefinite military detention of Americans suspected of terrorism who are apprehended on US soil. That compromise however, did nothing to alleviate the concerns expressed by top national security officials within the administration, who say the provisions mandating military detention for non-citizen terror suspects could interfere with terrorism investigations and jeopardize national security. Later that evening, the overall bill passed the Senate by a 93-7 vote.

The White House is now in a full fledged standoff with the Senate. If the bill arrives at the president's desk unchanged, and the president does not veto after saying publicly that the detention provisions would put American lives in danger, the administration risks not only ensuring their objections will never again be taken seriously by Congress, but the accusation that they, rather than Congress, is playing politics with national security.