Why doesn’t the FBI doesn’t record interrogations?

Harvey Silverglate has an interesting OpEd in the Boston Globe about how the FBI goes about conducting interrogations.  Basically, it has a policy against electronically recording teh questioning of suspects.  Instead, it relies on one FBI agent to taking notes while another asks the questions.

Of course, if the FBI were an unscrupulous law enforcement agency, this could be seen as a convenient arrangement by which the FBI can fabricate select details if not an entire interview.  Then, to top it off, if the recorded version of the interrogation is contradicted by the facts, the subject of the interrogation can be charged with making false statements punishable by up to eight years in prison.

In 2006 the FBI defended its no-electronic-recording policy in an internal memorandum, which The New York Times later made public. The memo in part attempts to defend the policy as logistically necessary, but given that virtually every cellphone today has sound recording capabilities, any “inconvenience” or “non-availability” excuse for not recording seems laughably weak. The more honest — and more terrifying — justification for non-recording given in the memo reads as follows: “. . . perfectly lawful and acceptable interviewing techniques do not always come across in recorded fashion to lay persons as proper means of obtaining information from defendants. Initial resistance may be interpreted as involuntariness and misleading a defendant as to the quality of the evidence against him may appear to be unfair deceit.” Translated from bureaucratese: When viewed in the light of day, recorded witness statements could appear to a reasonable jury of laypersons to have been coercively or misleadingly obtained.

In short, a jury might not come to the government-preferred conclusions if they are presented with an actual recording of the interrogation instead of the government interpretation.  As in all cases of police conduct, a recording vastly curtails their ability to take liberties in describing what happened or what was said at trial time.  This is just one more means by which the government stacks the cards in its favor when it comes to criminal prosecution.

Recording has now become so easy and cheap, that law enforcement should be required to record, not just interrogations, but every encounter with any citizen during the course of an investigation.  If they can gather trillions of electronic communications (not to mention surveillance video), then surely it is within their technical reach to record exchanges with people they are investigating when such exchanges could be used to destroy someone’s life.

Lack of consequences leads the federal government to routinely violate the constitution

We are hearing a story that the federal government has secretly been collecting communications records of journalists at the Associated Press for months.  The government provided no reason for the surveillance, but there is some speculation that this is part of the Obama administration’s war on whistle blowers and other leakers of classified information.  As  government operations become increasingly more classified, almost any unauthorized leak to the press can be prosecuted.

When questioned about the legality of the surveillance, a spokesman for the Justice Department said that they follow “all applicable laws, federal regulations and Department of Justice policies when issuing subpoenas for phone records of media organizations.”  Of course, the Justice Department has a long history of abusing it’s surveillance powers which effectively makes such pronouncements laughable.  They have routinely targeted people for political reasons going back at least to the Kennedy administration with leaders of the anti-war and civil rights movements being subjected to such abuses.

Recent cases of abuse of power include the Clinton administration’s unauthorized use of hundreds of FBI security clearance files and the NSA’s massive warrantless wiretap program ordered under Bush after 9/11.  Even more recently is the case of the IRS targeting right-leaning political organizations.  The bottom line in every one of these cases is that no one ever suffered any repercussions from these abuses of power and that will continue to be the pattern going forward.  Just as President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for his criminal abuse of power, Congress granted immunity to the telecom companies that were complicit in the NSA wiretapping scandal.  Regardless of which party is in power, government always protects its own if there is a way to do so.  After every abuse of power (or at least those that are discovered), government officials either deny that there was abuse or they apologize and declare that it won’t happen again.  But, they always have their fingers crossed.

[UPDATE]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation weighs in on the AP wiretaps:

The widespread collection of information, as well as the apparent delay in notifying AP, both appear to be yet another violation the government’s own regulations, 28 C.F.R. sec. 50.10. In 2010, the DOJ Inspector General reported on three other violation, involving the Washington Post and New York Times. The regulations require that, “wherever possible” subpoenas of records of the news media should be “directed at material information regarding a limited subject matter, should cover a reasonably limited period of time and should avoid requiring production of a large volume of unpublished material.”

If the federal government doesn’t follow its own rules with regard to wiretaps, how could anyone with a brain think they will follow their own rules with regard to targeted killinng?   I keep asking myself why the public enthusiastically trusts the government when the government is so often caught lying to them.  The answer is that the each of the two parties tend to trust their own guy and are mostly blind to abuses of power by the guy they help elect.  So, any president can usually count on roughly half of the electorate to support whatever he does.

Glen Greenwald writes::

The ACLU last night condemned the DOJ’s acts as “press intimidation” and said it constitutes “an unacceptable abuse of power”. The Electronic Frontier Foundation denounced it as “a terrible blow against the freedom of the press and the ability of reporters to investigate and report the news”. The New York Times’ Editorial Page Editor Andy Rosenthal called the DOJ’s actions “outrageous” while Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said they were “shocking” and “disturbing”.

 

50 New York muder cases to be reopened

Retired NYPD detective Louis Scarcella, now 61, is accused of fabricating false confessions, coaching witnesses, and rewarding witnesses for testimony in cases going back at least 20 years.   One witness, drug addict Teresa Gomez, was used as a witness in several different murder trials.  She was the only witness in when Alvena Jennette, 49, was convicted.

“How is it possible a detective could use a witness in that many murder trials without any red flags being raised?” Jennette asked.

Derrick Hamilton, who was paroled in 2011 after the Daily News reported Scarcella’s only witness had recanted her claim that Hamilton killed her boyfriend.

When Scarcella arrested him, the detective made a shocking admission, according to Hamilton.

“He told me, ‘I know you didn’t commit this murder, but I don’t care,’ ” he said.

Of course, this kind of thing doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  Cops and prosecutors are rarely unaware of the corrupt behavior of their associates, but they are rarely held accountable.  Law enforcement has a culture of secrecy that permeates the profession.  Finding the truth and ensuring that justice is done takes a back seat to cranking out arrests, getting convictions, and supplying the prison industrial complex with fresh warm bodies.  Even judges are part of the problem.

Lawyer Ron Kuby is representing another man Scarcella helped put away, Shakaba Shakur, 48, who is 26 years into a 40-years-to-life murder sentence.

Scarcella somehow managed to get admissions — which were not witnessed, recorded or written.

“You’d think after two or three or five of these magical confessions, some judge somewhere would say, ‘Hmm . . . ’ ” Kuby said.

 

 

Cops demand video of them beating a man to death. You know, so they can safeguard the evidence. *wink wink*

A Bakersfield woman and her boyfriend were just leaving the Kern Medical Center last Tuesday night when they claim to have witnessed eight cops attacking a man and beating him with nightsticks until he was dead.

According to the Bakersfield Californian, both the woman, Sulina Quair, 34, and her boyfriend recorded the beating on their cell phones and told the 911 operator she was “sending it to the news”.  Nothing stirs cops into action quite like a threat of having their behavior recorded for the whole world to see.  Video  makes it extremely difficult for them to fabricate a story.  By early the next morning, they were at the woman’s house demanding that video.

“We had stopped by Taco Bell to get something to eat, and we were eating and at about 3 a.m. two detectives showed up, barged in without my permission and demanded to see my boyfriend for his phone,” Melissa said.

In that video, Melissa said Friday, it is very clear that the deputies were beating Silva. At one point, she recalled,  the deputies had Silva hogtied and they lifted him and dropped him twice and asked if he was still with them.

She said she and her boyfriend were essentially kept captive inside their own home until they released their phones.

Quair and her boyfriend apparently already guessed the implications of turning the video over to the very people (or their associates) likely to be incriminated by the video.  Kern County is no stranger to police corruption and misconduct.  The attorney for the family of the beating victim, David Sal Silva, is doing his best to keep public attention focused directly on the Kern County sheriff’s department.  Without that attention that video would probably mysteriously disappear.  Even with the attention, there are no guaranties that it will ever see the light of day.  And when cops lose evidence that incriminates them, they very rarely face any repercussions, so they have very little incentive to safeguard that video and every reason to make it magically disappear.

To witness a crime committed by a gang of cops and then being forced to turn over the only evidence of that crime to the cops themselves has to be frustrating.

“I have been crying a lot and his voice just plays over and over in my head,” Quair said Friday. “I sit there and I can still hear him choking in his own blood, trying to gasp for air.”

Eventually people are going to realize that they need to post the video on Youtube before they tell the cops they have video of police misconduct.  The safest way is to record the video and immediately send it to someone else so the video can’t be destroyed when the cops confiscate the phone.  In fact, cell phone apps are becoming available to help bystanders record cops and automatically send the recording to a third party.  The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) offers one such app.

A single vote against the Authorization to Use Military Force

Mere days after 9/11, Congress passed the Authorization to Use military Force (AUMF).  Now, 12 years later, we’re still at war bombing multiple countries and some Senators, Dick Durban for one, are complaining that military force has gone way past the scope of the AUMF.  They are saying, no one could possibly have known this would happen.  But, it’s pretty clear at least one member of Congress knew exactly would could happen and was the only person to vote against AUMF cautioning Congress a mere three days after 9/11:

“[W]e must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target. We cannot repeat past mistakes.

“In 1964, Congress gave President Lyndon Johnson the power to ‘take all necessary measures’ to repel attacks and prevent further aggression. In so doing, this House abandoned its own constitutional responsibilities and launched our country into years of undeclared war in Vietnam.

“At this time, Senator Wayne Morse, one of the two lonely votes against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, declared, ‘I believe that history will record that we have made a grave mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States. I believe that with the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake.’

“Senator Morse was correct, and I fear we make the same mistake today.”

And what was the reaction to her stand against the AUMF?  Greenwald explains:

To say that Lee was vilified for her warnings is a serious understatement. She was deluged with so many death threats that she was given around-the-clock police protection.

For Congress to suggest that no one could have known the risk posed by the AUMF is ludicrous.  They only need look at their own history to realize the predictability of their behavior in time of crisis and the disastrous results that follow.  Of course, Congress rarely acknowledges it’s mistakes, especially when those mistakes result in thousands of dead bodies.  And the media does nothing to take up the slack.  Last night, Stephen Colbert was fondly remembering the great LBJ who is responsible for about 30,000 dead U.S. bodies.  Oopsy.  Just a mistake.  Who could have known?

Greenwald sums it up nicely:

Barbara Lee’s lone vote against the 2001 AUMF – three days after the 9/11 attack – was an act of incredible and rare courage that is worth commemorating in its own right. But it was also prescient and wise, using America’s past bad acts to warn of the dangers likely to be unleashed by enacting it. If Dick Durbin wants to acknowledge his gross error in voting in favor of such a blank check for presidential war-making – one that led to 12 years of war in numerous nations with no end in sight – he should do so honestly. Instead of pretending that nobody could possibly have known this would happen as a deceitful means of excusing his bad acts, he should instead acknowledge that there were people who did know and tried to warn the nation about it, but those weren’t the types of voices to which he paid any attention because they weren’t emanating from the Pentagon, the Brookings Institution and the columns of Tom Friedman. That is the mistake he should acknowledge and learn to rectify.

Congress doesn’t attract the kind of people with the integrity to acknowledge their own culpability for what government does.  It’s always someone else’s fault.

There are no bad people in Congress, just people with a great capacity to rationalize.

Another review of “The Central Park Five”

Scott McConnell at The American Conservative reviews the Ken Burns documentary of the 1989 rape and assault of a Central Park jogger.  I wrote about the PBS documentary here.

The “Central Park Five” leaves one important question unanswered, says McConnell:

If Burns’s film has a failing, it is its failure to explore the real thoughts of the detectives, or subsequently, the two prosecutors, Elizabeth Lederer and Linda Fairstein, who put their game faces on and successfully prosecuted young people most in the city thought deserved to rot in jail. We now want to know whether the two suspected at the time their case was bogus. They must have, it seems to me. They had authority, and expertise, and they misused it. On the other hand, they had  ambitions, and a city which needed arrests and convictions. Some unseen voice—expressing the general will of crime-fearing New York—must have overridden their professional judgment.

Did these two prosecutors knowingly prosecute five innocent kids for purposes of expediency and career-building kudos?  I think the answer is very probably yes, but maybe not.  I have a saying:

There are no bad people, just people who have a great capacity to rationalize.

They could have convinced themselves that they were really doing the right thing.  In an interview in Think Progress, Ken and Sarah Burns speculate that Elizabeth Leder had “grave doubts” about the case, but has never openly discussed it.  Should Lederer and Fairstein have realized they were perverting justice?  Of course.   But I also think they, especially Fairstein, refuse to face that fact.  To believe they carried out their responsibilities in good faith requires a delusional perspective.  But, for them there is nothing to be gained by admitting that they, at worst, knowingly crucified innocent people or, at best, didn’t care.  They suffered no significant repercussions for their role in the perversion of justice during the Central Park Jogging case.  Their strategy is what the Central Park Five should have done from the beginning: deny, deny, deny.  Or, at least keep their mouths shut.

All your emails and phone calls are recorded

With the Boston bombings having become a perpetual fixture in all network news reporting, media outlets have been interviewing anyone and everyone who can claim to be an expert in crime or terrorism investigations.  One such expert is former counter terrorism agent, Tim Clemente who recently came right out and said that everything you say on the phone is recorded so it can be accessed later.

The discussion on CNN’s Out Front was about whether Katherine Russell, wife of Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, might have had prior knowledge of the bombings.  And how might they be able to ascertain that?  By reviewing past phone conversations between the two.  Calls made before the bombings and before they were under investigation. When Out Front anchor, Erin Burnett challenged Clemente on that claim, Clemente responded:

“All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”

Welcome to “the land of the free” where the government does is becoming increasingly secretive about what it does at the same time as it is increasing surveillance over  everything us citizens say and do.

Greenwald’s whole article is here.

Guantánamo vs. drone strikes

Obama is seen as being a great humanitarian with his rhetoric about closing the Guantánamo prison camp.  Is that really true?  An suggests that, rather than contradict his public stand on Guantánamo by sending more accused enemy combatants there, he is instead just opting to kill them with drone strikes.

Obama’s apparent concerns about civil liberties don’t seem that sincere considering that the total number of detainees taken to Guantánamo is a mere 780 compared to the 2000-3000 people killed in U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan alone, many of them women and children.  Prisoners can be released.  Death is permanent.

It’s not hard to imagine that democrats would have their panties in a wad if a republican president were conducting that many drone attacks, but their voices get strangely quiet when it’s their guy doing it.  Such stunningly transparent hypocrisy is one reason why I could never be a republican or democrat even if I agreed with them.

 

Search and Destroy

The guy who was initially suspected of sending ricin laced letters through the mail says his house is uninhabitable and wants the government to fix it.  A letter from his lawyer to U.S. Attorney Felicia Adams explains:

“To be specific, Mr. Curtis’ home is uninhabitable. I have seen a lot of post search residences but this one is quite disturbing. The agents removed art from the walls, broke the frames and tore the artwork. Mr. Curtis offered his keys but agents chose to break the lock. Mr. Curtis’ garbage was scheduled to be picked up Thursday, the day after he was snatched from his life. A week later, the garbage remains in his home, along with millions of insects it attracted,” the letter says.

Good luck with that Mr. Curtis.

Ice. New unlimited source of natural gas?

Over at The Atlantic, Charles Mann tells the story of Japan’s 18-year old project to mine natural gas from the ice at the bottom of the Philippine Sea.  While not a certainty, Japan has come far enough to launch a test that will determine if gas trapped in ice can be mined in sufficient quantities to be useful.  If so, undersea natural gas could impact how the world gets energy the way that the switch from coal to oil impacted it back in the early 20th century.  How big a deal is that?  Well, how big a deal would it be if suddenly the world was no longer vying over Mideastern oil reserves?

Mann concisely describes the ascendance of oil over coal and its affect on geopolitics. There is a lot of skepticism about whether ice-trapped gas can ever be effectively harvested but, as Mann points out, the same kind of skepticism surrounded the mining of shale gas through the controversial practice of fracking.  As a result of gas production from fracking, the price and of gas has dropped  and the U.S. actually stands a chance of becoming energy self-sufficient on net which was a pipe dream only a few years ago.  If viable, gas from undersea ice could transform the energy control landscape making dependent countries independent from foreign energy suppliers.

To add even more context, Mann goes through a history of the antagonism between those who predict petroleum energy will soon run dry and those who preach that we have enough for the foreseeable future.  Despite the fact that history favors the latter, political fighting continues.

The title of Mann’s article is “What if we never run out of oil?”  Seemingly great news if you’re not worried about environmental issues.  If fossil fuel energy continues to be cheap, the incentive to switch to renewable energy sources is threatened.  While renewable sources are getting cheaper, they cannot compete with fossil fuels.