SC Prog Blog

The FBI’s Right to Threaten Torture
by James Bovard

A federal appeals court has concluded that an FBI agent must go to trial on charges he coerced a false confession out of a prime suspect in the 9/11 attacks. But the FBI still insists that its agent did nothing wrong. And the feds swayed the court to suppress that portion of a recent decision detailing how the FBI agent used the threat of torture to break an innocent man.

Abdallah Higazy, a 30-year-old Egyptian student, arrived in New York City to study engineering at the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn on August 27, 2001. A U.S. foreign-aid program reserved and paid for his room at the Millennium Hilton Hotel, next to the World Trade Center. After the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, Higazy hot-footed it out of the hotel. After the terrorist attack, the hotel was sealed.

Three months later, guests were allowed to retrieve their belongings. When Higazy went to the hotel on December 17, he was arrested and accused of possessing an aviation radio. (A hotel security guard reported finding the radio in a safe in his room.) Higazy denied owning the radio. He was arrested as a material witness and locked up in solitary confinement.

Higazy wanted to clear his name so he agreed to take a polygraph test. FBI agent Michael Templeton wired him up for the test but then proceeded to browbeat him for three hours until he finally admitted to owning the radio. Higazy said the FBI agent warned him, “If you don’t cooperate with us, the FBI will… make sure Egyptian security gives your family hell.” The FBI refused to permit Higazy’s attorney, Robert Dunn, to be in the room while he was given the polygraph. After the interrogation, Higazy was “trembling and sobbing uncontrollably,” according to Dunn.

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Reading Suzanne Levine’s account of her years at Ms., brought back fond memories of my own about the magazine that changed my life. My sister had a subscription in high school, and I became an avid reader of Ms. in 7th grade. It educated and inspired me, and started me on the path of political activism.

In college, I spent a week in New York City in search of a summer internship. My first stop was at Ms. Although the magazine wasn’t hiring, then-editor Pat Carbine spent a couple of hours with me talking about my aspirations and calling editor friends in the city to see about other job options. Looking back, it moves me that such a powerful woman would take time out of her busy day to help a kid with big dreams and no plan.

I ended up spending my summer in New York at McCall’s magazine. But I will never forget the kindness of the good people at Ms. I congratulate them on helping grow the feminist movement not just here but around the world.

Becci Robbins

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Ms. Memories
By Suzanne Braun Levine
The Women’s Media Center

It is always stunning to me to realize that an event that still lives in my contemporary memory actually took place decades ago; so when I was invited to a 35th anniversary celebration for Ms. Magazine (yes, it lives! The current publishers are the Feminist Majority Foundation), it was as though my life was flashing before my eyes. I joined the magazine in the summer of 1972 for the very first monthly issue. When we put Wonder Woman on the cover, we felt empowered and protected by her magic bracelets. But I had no idea what a life-changing and world-changing adventure I had signed up for.

At the time I was an only half-awake feminist. But I did have one bond with the magazine. When the Preview Issue came out the previous winter it featured a list of celebrities who admitted that they had had illegal abortions; amended to the article was a coupon for other women to add their names. I filled out the coupon, glad to step forward on an issue that mattered a lot to me. By the time those coupons were being compiled, I was on the job and actually found and opened my envelope.

The women I worked with came from a range of backgrounds – the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and those like myself who were magazine types and somewhat less activist. I wore a pink silk blouse and matching cashmere skirt to my first day of work – only to discover that my “desk” was a pile of boxes in a small dusty room I shared with three others. It didn’t take long before I – along with many of the readers of Ms. – was becoming radicalized by the injustices toward women that we were encountering at every turn. I was also a little scandalized by some of the more way-out seeming discussions that I found myself editing. Back then, I found the idea of not shaving your legs, for example, almost unthinkable. And “Liberating Masturbation” … Well, you can imagine.

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Democracy for America is sending around an invitation to vote in its Pulse Poll for your favorite Democratic presidential candidate. If you had to vote today, who would you choose?

Add your two cents.

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DFA:

Our challenge to Al Gore: Jump In or Drop Out!

Something surprising is happening at Democracy for America; former Vice President Al Gore is leading the race for the DFA Presidential endorsement – as a write-in candidate.

Voting is still open until November 5 at midnight, and there is plenty of time for any candidate to win. All your candidate needs is your vote right now:

VOTE in DFA’s Pulse Poll

Despite the fact that Al Gore has not announced that he will run and wasn’t even included in the endorsement poll, DFA members have seized the power and written him in. With over 65,000 votes cast so far, the time has come for Vice President Gore to make a decision.

The clock is ticking. We are deep into the 11th hour. There are fewer than 90 days until the first votes are cast. And filing deadlines to be on the ballot start closing in just days.

You deserve to know. Is Al Gore in or out?

Fixing Cocaine Sentencing Laws
By Kara Gotsch

This month the Supreme Court heard a case which touched on a 20-year-old controversy involving justice and crack cocaine. The court will rule early next year in Kimbrough v. United States whether a federal district judge’s more lenient sentencing decision, based on his disagreement with policy that punishes crimes involving crack cocaine more harshly than those involving powder cocaine, is reasonable. The case will help judges determine their ability to sentence below an advisory guideline range. Unfortunately, the outcome will leave in place the excessive mandatory penalties that the Kimbrough judge found unjust.

The case of Derrick Kimbrough stems from his 2005 guilty plea in Virginia for possession with intent to distribute 56 grams of crack cocaine and possession of a firearm. Kimbrough, a Desert Storm veteran with no previous felony convictions, was prosecuted in federal court where penalties involving crack cocaine are harsher than in state systems. As a result, instead of receiving a sentence of about 10 years under Virginia law, he faced a federal sentencing guideline range between 19 and 22 years.

Federal District Judge Raymond A. Jackson, who presided over Kimbrough’s case, called the recommended guideline sentence “ridiculous” and instead sentenced Kimbrough to 15 years, the minimum required by mandatory sentencing laws.

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Clinton rakes in cash from the weapons industry
by Leonard Doyle
The Independent

The US arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican party. Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street’s favourite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favourite, Barack Obama.

Clinton’s wooing of the defence industry is all the more remarkable given the frosty relations between Bill Clinton and the military during his presidency. An analysis of campaign contributions shows senior defence industry employees are pouring money into her war chest in the belief that their generosity will be repaid many times over with future defence contracts.

Employees of the top five US arms manufacturers – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon – gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to the Republicans. “The contributions clearly suggest the arms industry has reached the conclusion that Democratic prospects for 2008 are very good indeed,” said Thomas Edsall, an academic at Columbia University in New York.

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The Real Estate of Women’s Health
By Ann Friedman

In the politics of providing reproductive health care to women, opponents are using three important things as weapons: location, location, location. Which is why health-care providers scored a major victory this month with the opening of a sparkling new $7.5 million clinic this week in Aurora, Illinois.

Abortion may be legal in America, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s available to all American women. For years, right-wing activists have used property law and building codes to make the provision of women’s reproductive care prohibitively burdensome. They’ve successfully passed laws in a number of states that target abortion providers, requiring expensive interior renovations to change air-circulation methods, heighten ceilings, and widen halls and doorways.

Some who oppose abortion have made a practice of buying up the property leased by women’s health clinics, then installing a so-called crisis pregnancy center – where right-wing activists try to guilt women out of having abortions – on the premises. These property grabs are typically made by a third party whose name is unfamiliar to clinic directors, as was famously done in Wichita, Kansas, by Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue. But when Planned Parenthood went to open its new Aurora clinic, opponents cried foul because the reproductive health-care provider built its facility and obtained building permits through a subsidiary, Gemini Office Development, LLC.

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America’s Anti-Militarist Tradition
by Sheldon Richman

The right wing went apoplectic at the skepticism that greeted Gen. David Petraeus’s recent testimony about the alleged success of the military escalation in Iraq. It was as though a member of the military was incapable of engaging in spin to support his commander in chief’s war policy. President Bush summed up this attitude revealingly when he said it was one thing to attack him, but quite another to question General Petraeus.

War, Clausewitz noted, is politics by other means. That makes high-ranking generals a species of politician. Not a few have harbored presidential thoughts, and some have made it. It is said that Petraeus would like to be another. These are the people the pro-war conservatives are willing to trust implicitly? (Anti-war members of the armed forces, on the other hand, are, in Rush Limbaugh’s words, “phony soldiers.”)

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