New Quaker Notebook

It just keeps hitting the fan. Fourteen constitutional law scholars and former government officials, including such luminaries as Ronald Dworkin and William S. Sessions, have penned a letter to Congress advising them that the Bushevik's domestic spying program is incontrovertibly illegal:

"We write in our individual capacities as citizens concerned by the Bush administration's National Security Agency domestic spying program, as reported in The New York Times, and in particular to respond to the Justice Department's December 22, 2005, letter to the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees setting forth the administration's defense of the program. Although the program's secrecy prevents us from being privy to all of its details, the Justice Department's defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly the program appears on its face to violate existing law."¹

They go on to give a tightly reasoned argument why the Bush administration's actions are unlawful. And if that's not enough, now there are fresh allegations that Mr Bush okayed the NSA's covert domestic surveillance program BEFORE 9/11, in fact shortly after taking office in January 2001!² And then, not unlike Nixon before him, he went on to sanction the NSA's surveillance of antiwar activists, including those with connections to Quaker peace efforts.³

Not for nothing, then, does Sen Harry Reid say: "Our nation's capital has been overrun by organized crime."⁴

1. "On NSA Spying: A Letter to Congress," New York Review of Books, vol 53, no 2, February 9, 2006. By Beth Nolan, Curtis Bradley, David Cole, Geoffrey Stone, Harold Hongju Koh, Kathleen M. Sullivan, Laurence H. Tribe, Martin Lederman, Philip B. Heymann, Richard Epstein, Ronald Dworkin, Walter Dellinger, William S. Sessions, and William Van Alstyne.
2. See "Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Before 9/11," Truthout, January 13, 2006.
3. This was ugly, I think. In an article for Raw Story last Tuesday, Kevin Zeese reported that the NSA had mounted an extensive domestic spying operation against the peace group Pledge of Resistance - Baltimore during a "Keep Space for Peace Week" antiwar protest. He also produced documents to prove it, including the actual NSA action plan. That extensive operation included support from the NSA Weapons of Mass Destruction Rapid Response Team. The Baltimore Pledge of Resistance is part of a national movement called the Iraq Pledge of Resistance, which was founded in September of 2002 as "a nationwide network of activists and organizations committed to ending the war in Iraq through nonviolent, Gandhian and Kingian resistance." In the nine months leading up to the US invasion of Iraq, the American Friends Service Committee supported and helped coordinate the group's beginnings, believing that this was a "movement we understood to follow in the Quaker tradition of using nonviolent civil disobedience to protest and prevent war." That is why the Pledge of Resistance group is said to have a "Quaker connection." The Baltimore Pledge of Resistance has apparently had a long-standing feud with the NSA, which arrested its members on June 18, 2004, and before that on October 4, 2003, during protests at the NSA campus. For more information, see this July 4, 2004, Global Network report. Yesterday the Baltimore Sun reported on how the NSA used the Baltimore Police Department to track the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance as members prepared for protests outside the NSA's sprawling Fort Meade facility. The news story is archived at Common Dreams News Center.
4. Editorial, Houston Chronicle, January 12, 2006. Now admittedly I'm lumping the Busheviks with Congress' Republican malefactors, in a way that Sen Reid may not have intended.

Equivocation happens. Two years ago, in my blog about the strange logical connection between Gary Bauer and the late Ernest van den Haag, I complained about how easy it is to support an issue by using scientific data that are really about something else—just equivocate. Well, the New York Times is doing it today with a long piece about diabetes, and with pretty scary stats:

"An estimated 800,000 adult New Yorkers—more than one in every eight—now have diabetes, and city health officials describe the problem as a bona fide epidemic. Diabetes is the only major disease in the city that is growing, both in the number of new cases and the number of people it kills. And it is growing quickly, even as other scourges like heart disease and cancers are stable or in decline."¹

But read a little further into the article and you find that the story ("the focus of this series") is really about adult-onset Type II diabetes:

"There are two predominant types of diabetes. In Type 1, the immune system destroys the cells in the pancreas that make insulin. In Type 2, which accounts for an estimated 90 percent to 95 percent of all cases, the body's cells are not sufficiently receptive to insulin, or the pancreas makes too little of it, or both."

Type I diabetes is incurable, fatal, and rare. Type II is a product of Western civilization, a life-style affliction precipitated largely by our dietary choices; it's preventable, controllable through diet and exercise, and probably curable.² So what's really an epidemic isn't "diabetes" but rather Type II diabetes.

1. "Diabetes and Its Awful Toll Quietly Emerge as a Crisis,"New York Times, January 9, 2005.
2. See, for example, the CBS News Early Show, November 5, 2005, which had a story on "Type 2 Diabetes: Surprising Cure."

Justice for all on Sunday. At 7 PM tonight the third "Justice Sunday" rally is going to be taking place at the Greater Exodus Baptist Church, an African-American megachurch in Philadelphia. Organized and sponsored by Tony Perkins' Family Research Council, the rally is focused—as in the previous two rallies—on apparent judicial threats to religious freedom in the US, but may also address "Ten Commandments monuments as civic displays, prayer in tax-payer-funded schools, tight restrictions on abortion, the preservation of marriage as a lifelong relationship between one man and one woman, and government funding for faith-based social service programs."¹ "Justice Sunday III: Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land" will include such speakers as James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Sen Rick Santorum (R-PA), and Rev Jerry Falwell. The event was originally scheduled for December 4, but was moved to coincide with tomorrow's opening hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito.²

More information about the event is available at the Justice Sunday website. There are going to be two broadcast streams, the first (at 7-8:30 PM ET and again at 9-10:30 PM ET) on the Sky Angel Nationwide Satellite Television System, to be streamed into a vast network of Christian churches throughout the US, and the second on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) at 10-11:30 PM PST.³

Meanwhile, over at Faithful America, a program of the National Council of Churches USA, there is a petition formed to balance the effect of this third Justice Sunday. Says the group:

Millions of Americans of faith are about to be misrepresented in Washington. Because of a well funded and heavily promoted effort by right-wing religious fundamentalists, Congress is about to be flooded with calls and letters saying people of faith want ultra-conservative judges on the bench. They're calling it "Justice Sunday III"—the third in a series of not-so-subtle attempts by politically-aligned fundamentalists to pressure Congress to load the courts with ultra-conservative judges.

We believe it should be called "Just-Us" Sunday because it aims at a narrowly defined vision of justice—an unprecedented judicial climate of exclusion that would deny or overturn basic rights to many of our fellow citizens.

Concerned individuals can sign the petition and have it sent to their elected representatives by going to this link.

1. Christian Post, January 8, 2006.
2. DefCon Blog, Monday, November 21, 2005.
3. TBN has a working Internet stream you can access at this link.