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Tracking evidence - though it can disappear

Thursday, September 4, 2008

IT'S AS GOOD THIS WEEK as it was last week for a journalist like me to be away from the party political jamboreeing. All the same, some genuine news has been generated this time, albeit from outside the Republican National Convention.

And I don't of course mean the much-feared impact of Hurricane Gustav - mercifully not as bad as as it could have been (but handily raising unwanted memories, and many media replays, of the Administration's uselessness after Hurricane Katrina ... and ratcheting back President George W Bush's involvement, to great relief among John McCain's image-makers, so it ended up as a mere 8-minute video "remote", in the TV world's sometimes very telling jargon).

 

Nor indeed do I mean the wildly off-kilter selection - rapturously received by the activist party base last night - of Alaska's Sarah Palin as the Veep nominee (above left). Here I'm more than willing to follow Barack Obama's injunction to "back off" the matter of the teenaged Palin daughter's pregnancy ... save perhaps to observe sociologically that the Christian Right's much-vaunted "family values" appear  to be built upon some shifting sands nowadays. And to laud professionally the Washington Post for obtaining and publishing Governor Palin's policy decision, illustrated so clearly by her handwritten strokes (above), to slash the budget for state aid and support to teenage mothers, using her line-item veto powers.

 

The Palin family's own private concerns and decisions I most definitely have no right to report on or discuss.

 

What has compellingly engaged me, though, is an under-reported story of inexcusable official action against the media in St Paul. Intriguingly enough for this stay-at-home New Yorker, the story is characterized by a through-line that runs directly to some now-notorious abuse of police powers in the Big Apple.

 

Local Twin Cities media have been abuzz with accounts of police raids mounted ahead of the Convention against some self-proclaimed anarchists (and notably a group calling itself with unamusing sarcasm the "RNC Welcoming Committee") but also against media workers.

 

The arrest in a street skirmish of Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio's and cable TV's  Democracy Now show, following that of two of her DN program producers, was well-documented on video shown at - where else? - YouTube.com.  Unsurprisingly, the arresting officers clad in riot-gear do not come off well.
 

 
                                   

Goodman can, we all know, take care of herself. Like the good polemicist she is, she pointedly broadcast the fact that only once before has she been arrested while doing her work ... in East Timor when the Indonesian regime was killing innocent Timorese and she was reporting the massacres.

   

 

BUT ANOTHER NEW YORK-BASED OUTFIT THAT'S LESS CELEBRATED also got caught up in a police action, well off the street - in one of those dubious “pre-emptive” raids, in fact. And I find what happened to that group rather more worrysome.

 

Members of I-Witness Video, a kind of "citizen's journalism" enterprise with a strong civil liberties commitment, whose most frequent spokesperson is Eileen Clancy, were staying in a St Paul house when it was surrounded by officers of the local County Ramsey's Sheriff's Department. The detachment carried not just riot-gear but also assault rifles and pump action shotguns. Clancy says she was threatened at gunpoint as the officers crashed in and arrested her and several others, handcuffing her for several hours, and seizing her team's video equipment and files.

 

Sheriff Bob Fletcher has been hosting briefings for local and visiting national media, stressing his "intelligence-gathering" amongst incomers to the Twin Cities area, that was made possible through a local so-called law-enforcement "fusion center" which drew in a team of FBI domestic terrorism specialists - yes, that's right, domestic terrorism. (The briefings also showed off some seized items that could constitute home-made weaponry ... including, it was claimed, buckets of urine allegedly intended - and this grabbed many reporters' attention - for throwing at police.)

 

Among the Sheriff's "intelligence", no doubt, was the very traceable background of Clancy and her team. They have the distinction of having video-taped the infamous arrest sweeps conducted by the New York Police Department in 2004 when the RNC was convening in Madison Square Garden.

 

In the years since then many of the charges resulting from those arrests have been dropped or thrown out. I-Witness Video's work  was instrumental to this wholesale discrediting of the police's case. Most notably Clancy herself proved with her own video record that a police tape entered in evidence against one man, Alexander Dunlop, who was accused of attacking some officers, had been edited to remove shots of his immediate pre-arrest behavior, which in fact had been totally peaceable.

 

Was this the dangerous history of subversion that led a mid-west sheriff's team, with FBI help, to Eileen Clancy in her temporary digs? To most of us it might seem more like a proud and practical piece of support for the US Constitution, gratifyingly conducted on Manhattan's streets.

 

  

 

**A RADIO DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY WEEK ON CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

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A FOOTNOTE TO THE CLANCY CASE in New York has made me ponder afresh the US Constitution's current poor state of health. The Bush Administration has repeatedly put up a smokescreen to claim that every proven abuse of citizen's (and non-citizen's) rights over the last seven years has been the responsibility purely of "a few bad apples" at low ranks of authority - some of whom have even been prosecuted.

 

The constant use of this excuse - while the chief abusers of the Bill of Rights, like Bush himself, Vice President Dick Cheney and his closest adviser David Addington remain untouched by the law (unlike, of course, Addington's predecessor, Lewis "Scooter" Libby) - at the least strains credulity.

 

Meanwhile a chain reaction of disrespect for the Constitution pervades the entire machinery of law enforcement and national security - and it is, mere common sense proclaims, no accident. The chimes and echoes right across the branches of government, low and high, in small cases and big ones (from a White House meeting room to a local sheriff's office, in fact) are so insistent.

 

It just happens that the City of New York is trying to get its hands on some of I-Witness Video's tapes. Why, you may well ask? The City claims, in a submission to a federal court (as part of its defense against claims for wrongful arrests arising out of the 2004 police action) that the District Attorney's office has "misplaced or lost many of these tapes".

   

 

I’M INEVITABLY REMINDED OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY managing to "lose", or in actual fact - as was later admitted - to physically destroy videotape that recorded its "waterboarding" interrogation of Al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah (highlighted in THE MEDIA BEAT in December 2007 and now the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation led by the veteran prosecutor from Boston, John Durham).

 

Further up the chain, of course, we've known since April this year (thanks to ABC News and the Associated Press) that such waterboarding was agreed to in the first place, as one of several "enhanced interrogation techniques", at a White House meeting attended by Cheney, plus the then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the then Secretary of State Colin Powell and the then Attorney General John Ashcroft.

 

How completely fitting it is, among this crew of constitution-wreckers, that the then White House Legal Counsel Alberto Gonzales (above right) - later the Attorney General, but inevitably so briefly -  should this week be exposed for having broken the law, but that he should also not be prosecuted.

 

What a sign of this Administration's all-pervasive contempt for the Constitution and its safeguards that the Justice Department's Inspector General Glenn Fine finds Gonzales to have "improperly handled" highly sensitive documents about both the Administration's warrantless surveillance program and its unconstitutional treatment of prisoners.

 

As oblivious to the responsibilities of his office as he was arrogant, the hapless Gonzales can stand as an epitome of the Bush crowd. 

 

I'm surprised he didn't just trash the documents, like the much lower-ranking Clandestine Service Director in the CIA who trashed the tapes.

 

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