random musings on jury duty

At some indeterminate point in time I may have an indefinite number of observations to make about a specific civil or criminal matter that may or may not be proceeding somewhere in the city of St. Louis.

Until such time, there are a few random thoughts that can clear the censors.

1. Wow, there is either a lot of lawsuits, a prosector's office that is desperate for some extra convictions, or just the whim fancy of coincidence due to only having two data points for reference. Whatever the case, the Jury assembly room was absolutely packed. The last time I was called, I sat for two days in a room that was never more than half full. Yesterday morning, every seat was taken. They were yelling at folks for trying to sit or stand in the aisles.

2. If metal detectors and shoe-wearing is good enough for our court system, how the heck is the TSA's existence justified?

3. Why do they require you to be there by 8:00am on the first day? Nothing was going on.

4. Square this one for me. How does one exercise one's 'intellect and conscience' while also listening to instructions from judges to act without regard for what one believes the law ought to be?

5. Seriously, think about number 4.

6. Downtown is actually pretty nice on a sunny fall day.

7. Communicate end times for the day. Is it so hard to tell folks when they will leave and get them bus passes ahead of time so that if you have to, say, to pick a completely random example, get your car from the shop by 5:30 pm, you know that 1) you will be able to get there by then, or 2) you won't be able to get there by then and should make alternate plans now, long before 5:20pm.

8. Is Jury duty a 'duty' or a 'privilege'? Listening to how many folks aren't eligible is a hodge-podge of hierarchy, class, oppression, and what not. Active duty? Under 21? Felony conviction? I continue to be surprised I've only been called twice in the entire time I've been living in St. Louis.

will manning serve more jail time than libby?

There are some fascinating angles to this story at Wired. What is classified information? What should be classified? Who gets to determine what is classified? Is it ever okay to leak something? What should happen to whistleblowers? How does the public conduct oversight of classification?

And perhaps most interestingly, what is the military smoking to give a 22 year old the keys to the kingdom? Is this what our military has become? We're so far removed from dealing with actual national security matters that an army specialist deemed by our own government as barely competent to drink a beer has access to sensitive diplomatic cables that have nothing to do with his assignment in Iraq?

Or maybe, they do have something to do with Iraq, and they would be quite embarrassing for our political leadership. But of course, how can we know what they are when the government classifies them and prevents We the People from seeing them? This is particularly intriguing as it involves the Wikileaks video Collateral Murder to which my reaction is basically ho hum.

You see, unlike when, say, the Bush Administration destroyed an actual national security asset, and most ironically, one working on WMDs, stuff like this carries no military value. None. Zero. It's political, and there are no reasons to classify politics. In fact, secrecy is pretty much exactly how We the People get screwed.

But remember, no senior Bush official served jail time for revealing undercover agent Valerie Plame (Wilson). None. Zero. Wanna bet 22 year old Manning gets more than that?

oppressors get upset, hilarity ensues

Let me premise this by saying I'm not one of those people who thinks we live in an honest, full blown police state, but I do care a lot about Constitutional rights (I did grow up in a town called Liberty, after all) and probably follow related news more than the average bear.

Well, sometimes our surveillance society ends up being comical as much as anything else. Check out these two stories I saw together this evening.

First, the Pittsburgh G-20 Twitter-Terrorist (I have that copyrighted, CNN!) appears to actually be under real government investigation. It wasn't enough that the police spent 16 hours searching his home for...something (the warrant wasn't real clear on that). A federal Grand Jury indicted him on a separate line of inquiry about alleged violations of the Anti-Riot Act. Yes, the guy tweeting publicly available locations of police who shouldn't even have been deployed so that protestors could avoid them is accused of inciting a riot. That's just brilliant. Next thing you know, people who advocate nonviolence are going to be locked up in jail as dangerous criminals. Oh wait, we have a great history of doing that, from this guy to that one.

The second thing I ran across was this devious sex criminal. How do I know she's devious? She's a Philadelphia Phillies fan, of course. She posted an ad on Craigslist. The Philly police, naturally having nothing else to do, read through Craigslist, found her ad, and asked her to meet a guy in a bar. They talked for awhile until some sort of implied offer for World Series tickets involved, gasp, sex. Then presto, guy replying to ad about World Series tickets turns out to be a cop, girl wanting World Series tickets turns out to be a danger to society.

Thank you Pennsylvania for removing two hardened, dangerous, violent criminals off our streets!

the disgustingness continues

(P) This week, the ACLU put up another document that the government has belatedly released regarding the criminal (er, heroic, terrorist-stopping, manly, beer-drinking) acts of the senior officials of the Bush Administration.

As the document bureaucratically explains:

Note: This paper provides further background information and details on High Value Detainee (HVD) interrogation techniques to support documents CIA has previously provided the Department of Justice.

This paper focuses strictly on the topic of combined uses of interrogation techniques.

What I think is going to surprise a lot of people as more and more of the details trickle out is how cold and calculated everything is. One of the features of a large organization is that bureaucracy involves lots of decision-makers, and in order to disseminate information among the various groups, there is lots of information sent back and forth. The nature of this process thus can almost hilariously contrast with the particular subject matter at hand. Our nation's leaders discussed war crimes, treaty violations, and felonies as if they were discussing where to build a new highway interchange or quarterly projections for GDP growth.

This process is precisely why transparency, openness, 'sunshine', is a core element of good governance. Decision-makers have to know at the time of their decisions that their deliberations will become public, that there will be social and legal consequences for blatantly improper courses of action.

The PDF for this document from 2004 sent to the Office of Legal Counsel from the Central Intelligence Agency can be downloaded here. It's been clear for awhile that this is no group of 'bad apples' or 'rogue agents' or other nonsense. The dedicated staff at the CIA, NSA, DIA, INR, etc, etc, who are monitoring my blog, your email, your mom's phone conversations, your dad's credit history, your neighbor's political contributions, your kid's internet postings, your grandma's participation in peace groups, etc, etc, are not the people who designed these policies. And to a great extent, it's the bureaucracy itself, the countless professional civil servants, who are able to apply the brakes internally, to slow down inappropriate, counterproductive, illegal programs.

But that only stops so much. When a group of our leaders is committed to ignoring the law, there is only one group of people that can stand up to them, and that is us, We the People. Seven years after we first started this particular bit of horrific, counterproductive, illicit behavior, we have yet to stop it completely, let alone hold the architects accountable for their creation.

But hey, at least we've been able to arrest millions of other Americans over the past seven years for grave allegations like shoplifting, prostitution, and marijuana possession. It's good we've got our 'tough on crime' priorities in order.

unsanitizing torture

(P) I personally tend to be more discrete and diplomatic in my communication, but I wanted to highlight somebody being a little more direct in telling it like it is. The notion that our prison policies have been anything but immoral, illegal, and counterproductive is pretty funny.

Some articles have a way of just lettin' it all hang out, leaving little to the imagination. The graphic alone makes reading this story worth it.

I would normally give a warning that this is mature content, but this is what our government is doing in our name to real human beings. How can conduct be so horrific we should shelter our kids from it, but at the same time, not be worth investigating and prosecuting? That's a rhetorical question, of course. Of the millions of Americans who have been arrested in the last few years, few have committed crimes even remotely as disgusting or an as large a scale as the senior officials of the Bush Administration.

For your reading pleasure, Whores on Terror by Allan Uthman.

A snippet:

I don’t want to come off as minimizing the horror of controlled drowning. It’s just that there’s something about forcible anal rape that brings the torture issue into sharp focus. Just once, I’d like to hear one of these American Enterprise Institute psychos, the ones that always trot out to defend the Neocons’ freakish obsessions, have to defend shoving a flashlight up a guy’s ass. I want to hear Frank Gaffney or Jonah Goldberg tell me why I shouldn’t be fucking mortified that raping prisoners was considered within tolerable interrogation practices by my country. I want Glenn Beck to justify butt-raping a suspect.

who supports criminals?

Pop quiz time. Who said this about legislation designed to prevent powerful companies from being held accountable for criminal activities and to allow even further spying on Americans by unaccountable government leaders?

"It is not all that I would want," [____] said. "But given the legitimate threats that we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay."

A) President Bush
B) Vice President Cheney
C) Senate Minority Leader McConnell
D) Presumptive Republican nominee McCain
E) Presumptive Democratic nominee Obama

If you guessed Obama, you're right.

Wow, this is just unbelievable. Or at least, unbelievable if you think Obama is as progressive as he lets people believe he is. When push comes to shove, he seems quite willing to support corporations, even when they commit felonies. Some guy who smokes a joint will serve more jail time than these criminals! He seems quite willing to do what the Republican leadership demands, no matter how much the very people whose votes he's pursuing despise the policies of the GOP. He seems quite willing to use the same baseless scare tactics and the same hollow deceptions about 'safeguards' as the GOP leaders themselves.

This legislation doesn't even prevent outright spying on Americans. The Executive merely will have to tell the court that they are trying to 'minimize' the information collection on US citizens.

illicit markets are the coolest

Jodi and I are watching a show on PBS about illicit markets. Aside from the exaggeration of the uniqueness of now (as if black markets haven't always existed) it's pretty cool. I find illegal markets a lot more intellectually stimulating than legal ones. There's just so much going on, so much innovation, you always have to be a step ahead of the people chasing you. The power of people's individual choices to overwhelm the best laid plans of governments and corporations. The reminder that criminal is a label of one's relation to arbitrary laws (and the arbitrary enforcement of those laws), not a statement on one's abilities in sales, marketing, operations, strategy, entrepreneurship, interpersonal relations, or other valuable, marketable, productive skills.

And of course, the overwhelming economic, human, and national security case for ending crime as we know it by decriminalizing much of what we call crime. Consumers get inferior products when pushed into gray and black markets, taxpayers get screwed by the massive bills which don't do anything, and organized crime and terrorist organizations have access to massive revenue and transportation networks.

But hey, it's hard to compromise on good public policy when it comes to issues like this. After all, the GOP is all about big government, and they hate free markets.

how much evidence is enough

(P) One of the fundamental issues I am most passionate about deals with the process of voting. Now, it's not particularly exciting in and of itself; in fact, it's rather mundane and boring, when all goes well. But when all does not go well, it throws off the whole system. It's impossible to have representative government when the official tallies don't represent the will of the people. In fact, it's more sinister than that. It's impossible to have representative government when there is the impression that the official results are illegitimate, even if they do accurately reflect the results of an election.

There are a number of ways over the years that American democracy has been susceptable to manipulation, with perhaps the most famous cases being political bosses, or machines, in major cities, whose tactics were basically to persuade lots of people to vote a certain way through less than fair means. What's interesting about the voting issues of the past few years compared to prior periods is that the defining characteristic is no longer trying to manipulate people into voting. Rather, it's about trying to prevent certain groups of people from voting, or, if you can't stop them, prevent their votes from being counted accurately. It's also worth noting that men from New York to KC ended up being convicted and incarcerated for various crimes. Election fraud is a serious issue, and there is much precedent in our history for prosecuting it aggressively. Just like Al Capone, a common tactic was going after tax evasion if the evidence couldn't be collected for a conviction related to illegal election activity.

Now, none of the above will strike anybody as particularly controversial, as it's safely in the past and primarily dealt with urban Democratic bosses. It gets really interesting, however, when we raise questions about current GOP operatives. All of a sudden, it's treasonous, insane conspiracy theorizing to pose questions when something smells fishy (my favorite line from back in November of 2004 from the mainstream media is courtesy of the Washington Post: "spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists"). We all know how irrational accountants, engineers, and statisticians tend to be.

There are lots of places to read about specific problems in Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Nevada, and elsewhere. The unfolding story about White House political involvement in US Attorney selection certainly will shed additional light on GOP voter suppression tactics. Some people have already been convicted and/or forced to resign their positions in the following years. What's perhaps most suspicious, though, prompted this particular post.

Under state law and a specific court order, Ohio election officials were required to secure results from the 2004 election for further study. Guess what? The documents have been destroyed or are missing from over half the counties in Ohio.

Nothing to see here folks, move along.