George Mason University's
History News Network

Roundup: Media's Take


This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.

SOURCE: WaPo (3-20-13)

David Ignatius is a columnist for the Washington Post.

Ten years ago this week, I was covering the U.S. military as it began its assault on Iraq. As I read back now over my clips, I see a few useful warnings about the difficulties ahead. But I owe readers an apology for being wrong on the overriding question of whether the war made sense.

Invading Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein a decade ago was one of the biggest strategic errors in modern American history. We’ll never know whether the story might have been different if better planning had been done for “the day after,” or the Iraqi army hadn’t been disbanded, or several other “ifs.” But the abiding truth is that America shouldn’t have rolled the dice this way on a war of choice....


Wednesday, March 20, 2013 - 17:50

SOURCE: WSJ (3-17-13)

Mary O'Grady is a member of the editorial board at The Wall Street Journal and writes editorial columns on Latin America, trade and international economics. She is also editor of "The Americas," a weekly column that appears every Monday and deals with politics, economics and business in Latin America and Canada.

Argentines celebrated last week when one of their own was chosen as the new pope. But they also suffered a loss of sorts. Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a tireless advocate of the poor and outspoken critic of corruption, will no longer be on hand locally to push back against the malfeasance of the government of President Cristina Kirchner.

Argentines not aligned with the regime hope that the arrival of Francis on the world stage at least will draw attention to this issue. Heaven knows the situation is growing dire.

One might have expected a swell of pride from Argentine officialdom when the news broke that the nation has produced a man so highly esteemed around the world. Instead the Kirchner government's pit bulls in journalism—men such as Horacio Verbitsky, a former member of the guerrilla group known as the Montoneros and now an editor at the pro-government newspaper Pagina 12—immediately began a campaign to smear the new pontiff's character and reputation at home and in the international news media....


Monday, March 18, 2013 - 14:56

SOURCE: Media Matters (3-18-13)

Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer for Salon, is the author of "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush."

Responding to a barrage of criticism he received for a factually inaccurate and flawed column he wrote this month about the sequestration battle, New York Times columnist Bill Keller wrote a follow-up blog post to detail how critics had hounded him online, especially via Twitter.

Denouncing the social media tool’s tendency to produce what he called mean and shallow commentary, Keller lamented Twitter’s suddenly pervasive power. “It is always on, and it gets inside your head,” he wrote, adding, “there is no escape.” Indeed, within days of writing his column, Keller felt compelled to pen a lengthy piece about his Twitter encounter.

The columnist painted an unpleasant picture of being hounded and “bull[ied]” on Twitter for merely expressing “an unpopular view.” But as the tenth anniversary of the United States-led invasion of Iraq approaches, I couldn’t help thinking back to when columnists like Keller, and newspapers like the New York Times, where Keller became executive editor in July 2003, helped cheer the nation to war. To date, that conflict has claimed the lives of nearly 8,000 U.S. service members and contractors and more than  130,000 Iraqi citizens, and is projected to cost the U.S. Treasury more than two trillion dollars. (The Times’public editor later called the paper’s prewar coverage “flawed journalism.”)

Thinking about the historic failure of the Times and others in the media a decade ago, I couldn’t help wish that Twitter had been around during the winter of 2002-2003 to provide a forum for critics to badger writers like Keller and the legion of Beltway media insiders who abdicated their role as journalists and fell in line behind the Bush White House’s march to war. I wouldn’t have cared that recipients might have been insulted by the Twitter critiques or seen them as mean and shallow, the way Keller does today. Sorry, but the stakes in 2003 were too high to worry about bruised feelings....


Monday, March 18, 2013 - 14:35

SOURCE: NYT (3-18-13)

Ten years ago, America invaded Iraq; somehow, our political class decided that we should respond to a terrorist attack by making war on a regime that, however vile, had nothing to do with that attack.

Some voices warned that we were making a terrible mistake — that the case for war was weak and possibly fraudulent, and that far from yielding the promised easy victory, the venture was all too likely to end in costly grief. And those warnings were, of course, right.

There were, it turned out, no weapons of mass destruction; it was obvious in retrospect that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. And the war — having cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of Iraqi lives, having imposed financial costs vastly higher than the war’s boosters predicted — left America weaker, not stronger, and ended up creating an Iraqi regime that is closer to Tehran than it is to Washington.

So did our political elite and our news media learn from this experience? It sure doesn’t look like it....


Monday, March 18, 2013 - 13:13

SOURCE: Salon (3-16-13)

Tracy Thompson is the author of "The New Mind of the South." This excerpt comes from a longer excerpt of her book posted at Salon.

In the course of our conversation, Yacine Kout mentioned something else—an incident that had happened the previous spring at Eastern Randolph High School just outside Asheboro. On Cinco de Mayo, the annual celebration of Mexico’s defeat of French forces at the Battle of Puebla in 1862, a lot of Hispanic students brought Mexican flags to school. The next day, Kout said, white students brought Confederate flags to school as a message: This is our heritage.

The Civil War is like a mountain range that guards all roads into the South: you can’t go there without encountering it. Specifically, you can’t go there without addressing a question that may seem as if it shouldn’t even be a question—to wit: what caused the war? One hundred and fifty years after the event, Americans—at least the vast majority who toil outside academia—still can’t agree. Evidence of this crops up all the time, often in the form of a legal dispute over a display of the Confederate flag. (As I write, there are two such cases pending—one in Oregon and the other in Florida, making this an average news week.) Another common forum is the classroom. But it’s not always about the Stars and Bars. In 2010, for instance, Texas school officials made the news by insisting that Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address be given equal prominence with Abraham Lincoln’s in that state’s social studies curriculum. The following year, Virginia school officials were chagrined to learn that one of their state-adopted textbooks was teaching fourth graders that thousands of loyal slaves took up arms for the confederacy.

At the bottom of all of these is one basic question: was the Civil War about slavery, or states’ rights?

Popular opinion favors the latter theory. In the spring of 2011, in recognition of the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, pollsters at the Pew Research Center asked: “What is your impression of the main cause of the Civil War?” Thirty-eight percent of the respondents said the main cause was the South’s defense of an economic system based on slavery, while nearly half—48 percent—said the nation sacrificed some 650,000 of its fathers, sons, and brothers over a difference of interpretation in constitutional law. White non-Southerners believed this in roughly the same proportion as white Southerners, which was interesting; even more fascinating was the fact that 39 percent of the black respondents, many of them presumably the descendants of slaves, did, too....


Sunday, March 17, 2013 - 09:00

SOURCE: Dissent Magazine (3-15-13)

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books). He can be reached via the website www.DemocracyUprising.com.

In November 2000, as Argentina’s economic crisis escalated, the country’s bishops, led by Buenos Aires Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio, emerged from a plenary conference with a statement that was hardly welcome news to proponents of economic neoliberalism. Arguing that the true debt of Argentina was not financial but “social,” it blasted the “growing gap between rich and poor,” the “negative aspects of globalization,” and “the tyranny of the markets.”

“We live in world in which the primacy of economics, without a base of reference in…the common good, impedes the resurgence of many nations,” the statement read. It further contended, “To accustom ourselves to living in a world of exclusion and inequality is a serious moral failure that erodes the dignity of mankind and compromises peace and social harmony.”

In a subsequent interview, Bergoglio charged “wildly economistic” ideas with manufacturing poverty.

Almost thirteen years later, Bergoglio has been selected as the new pontiff, Pope Francis I. Despite his statements about the global economy, Bergoglio is no radical. Indeed, figuring out what his selection represents for the Catholic Church, and what it portends for the future direction of the Vatican, involves reckoning with a number of contradictions....


Friday, March 15, 2013 - 14:37

SOURCE: National Review (3-14-13)

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security.

Perhaps because St. Patrick’s Day is coming up, I’ve found myself re-reading Edmund Burke and Conor Cruise O’Brien — and drinking Irish whiskey. I first became acquainted with these three sources of stimulation back in 1978. That was also my first brush with terrorism.

I was a young foreign correspondent sent to Northern Ireland to cover the “Troubles,” the conflict between Catholics and Protestants, Republicans (Irish nationalists) and Loyalists (those favoring solidarity with the United Kingdom) that broke out in the 1960s and dissipated just before the turn of the century.

I spent many hours in pubs, listening to those on both sides of the divide tell me what they believed, whom they despised, and what acts of violence they would countenance — and in some cases carry out — to achieve their objectives.

In Ireland I also developed a habit I’ve since kept of reading the important writers of every country I visit — as well as partaking of local libations. Burke, of course, was a great 18th-century Irish author, statesman, and political philosopher. An enthusiastic supporter of the American Revolution, he saw early on that the revolution in France was heading into darkness, including la Terreur — mass executions of “enemies of the revolution.”...


Thursday, March 14, 2013 - 16:18

SOURCE: The New Republic (3-5-13)

Francisco Toro is a Venezuelan journalist, political scientist and blogger. Born and raised in Caracas, he attended High School and College in the United States.

Hugo Chávez died today in Venezuela at the age of 58, but his battle with a never-specified form of cancer was waged largely in a Cuban hospital—a telling detail, as Cuba loomed just as large in his political imagination as his native country.

It's a point that my gringo friends up north always struggle with. The Cuban Revolution's immense influence on the region has been constantly underestimated and misunderstood from day one. It's only a slight exaggeration to suggest that everything of note that's happened south of the Rio Grande since 1959 has been an attempt either to emulate, prevent, or transcend the Cuban experience. Chávez will be remembered as the most successful of Fidel Castro's emulators, the man who breathed new life into the old revolutionary dream. 

Starting in the 1960s, guerrilla movements throughout the hemisphere tried to replicate the Sierra Maestra rebels' road to power, to no avail. In the '70s, Chile's Salvador Allende tried the electoral route, but he didn't have a clear majority. In the '80s, Nicaragua's Sandinistas had the majority and rode it to power, but took over a state too bankrupt to implement the social reforms they'd always championed....


Thursday, March 7, 2013 - 17:33

SOURCE: The New Republic (3-5-13)

Chuck Thompson is the author of BETTER OFF WITHOUT ’EM: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession.

In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court arguments over the Voting Rights Act, the geography of racism is once again a topic of debate. None other than Chief Justice John Roberts kicked things off when he asked the act’s defenders—that would be the U.S. government—a 20-word question that brilliantly framed the entire debate: “Is it the government’s submission that the citizens of the South are more racist than the citizens of the North?” Roberts asked, pinning a very ragged tail on a very ugly donkey.

Unlike most debates about this question, this one has real implications. The landmark act requires that areas of the country with a particularly virulent history of racial discrimination must receive federal approval before making changes in their voting laws. To no one’s surprise, the majority of the states covered by Section 5 are located in the South. If the answer is “yes,” then a reasonable case can be made for upholding the existing law....


Thursday, March 7, 2013 - 17:23

SOURCE: The Daily Beast (3-7-13)

A longtime correspondent for Newsweek, Mac Margolis has traveled extensively in Brazil and Latin America. He has contributed to The Economist, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor, and is the author of The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.

It was a farewell fit for a caudillo. Waving flags and wearing bright red berets, tens of thousands of Venezuelans poured into the streets of Caracas Wednesday, hoping to catch a glimpse of the flag-draped coffin bearing the remains of president Hugo Chávez, who died of cancer at age 58 on Tuesday.

More than a farewell, this “sea of red” in the streets was a dramatic display of how completely the leader of the so-called Bolívarian revolution for “21st-century Socialism” has kept Venezuela and much of Latin America in thrall for nearly a generation. As mourners wept and punched the air in grief, the heads of states of a dozen Latin nations flocked to the Venezuelan capital to pay tribute to the mercurial man of the people, whom Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff described as “a great leader, an inspiration, and a great friend.”

The public outpouring was a hint of the anguish still to come as this nation of 28 million comes to grips with the sudden absence of the outsize firebrand who put populism on steroids, made a sport of hectoring the superpowers, and now stands shoulder to shoulder with Latin icons like Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Argentina’s Juan Domingo Perón. “Chávez didn’t die. Chávez lives on in the people,” chanted the mourners in the funeral cortege, bringing downtown Caracas to a halt.

Beyond the commotion, uncertainty and apprehension loom. According to the Venezuelan Constitution—a document often quoted, but rarely followed—a new election must be called within 30 days. Already, pretenders to Chávez’s seat are jockeying for advantage. Pollsters tout the advantage of acting president Nicolás Maduro, who was Chávez’s handpicked heir and looks best placed to ride the wave of sympathy into the Palacio de Miraflores. The most likely challenger is Henrique Capriles Radonski, a 40-year-old governor who galvanized the fractured political opposition to run against Chávez in the October elections, falling a respectable 11 percentage points short of an upset....


Thursday, March 7, 2013 - 16:39

SOURCE: WSJ (3-6-13)

Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

At times even a chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court finds it useful, as the saying goes, to put the hay down where the goats can get it. And so it was last week in oral arguments over a big voting-rights case.

At issue in Shelby County v. Holder was whether some states in the American South, unlike many states in the North, must still submit any change in voting practices to the Justice Department for approval, as required by one section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted, the practical enforcement of this provision is mainly directed at Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

After listening to his liberal colleagues argue that Alabama's election practices, as interpreted by various legal formulas four decades after the law's passage, still discriminate against blacks, Chief Justice John Roberts put the hay down in front of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli....


Thursday, March 7, 2013 - 16:04

SOURCE: NYT (3-7-13)

Chester A. Crocker is professor of strategic studies at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and served as assistant secretary of state for African Affairs from 1981 to 1989. Ellen Laipson is president of the Stimson Center.

HISTORY has often shown that military victories do not automatically translate into political success. This is true in the recent military victory of French and government of Mali forces in their fight against radical Islamist insurgents who tried to seize power in the North African nation. The small victory in Mali is just the beginning of what will likely be a very long struggle for control of the Sahel — the trans-Saharan badlands that stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.

We all know now that President George W. Bush was premature when he said in 2003 that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” as he stood in front of a banner reading “Mission Accomplished.” It would be equally premature today to say that success in Mali signals the defeat of jihadist forces in the Sahel.

The Sahel divides the Sahara desert from the grasslands to the south. The unstable region stretches 3,400 miles west to east across parts of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Algeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan, South Sudan and Eritrea. Militias roam the region trafficking in drugs and arms, seizing hostages for ransom, and trading livestock....


Thursday, March 7, 2013 - 15:14

SOURCE: WaPo (3-6-13)

George F. Will is a columnist for the Washington Post.

“When I first met Richard Nixon,” Robert Bork says in the book he completed a few weeks before his death in December, “I could see in his expression the conviction that someone had blundered badly.” With the dry wit that, together with his mastery of the dry martini, made him delightful company, Bork says the president, who “almost visibly recoiled,” evidently considered his red beard emblematic of Ivy League left-wingery. Nixon probably thought the barbarians were within the gates.

They were. On Nixon’s staff.

Saving Justice: Watergate, the Saturday Night Massacre, and Other Adventures of a Solicitor General,” Bork’s recounting of events of 40 years ago, is an antidote to today’s tendency to think that things in Washington have never been worse. Bork became Nixon’s solicitor general in June 1973, 12 months after the Watergate burglary. Then Bork, fresh from Yale Law School’s faculty, met Nixon: “Apparently unsure if he was really dealing with a conservative Ivy League professor, he assured me his conservatism was something of a pose to keep others from moving too far left.” Conservatives knew this....


Thursday, March 7, 2013 - 14:36

SOURCE: TomDispatch (2-26-13)

Chase Madar (@ChMadar) is a civil rights attorney in New York City who has written about the proven alternatives to school security overkill. His latest book is The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower (Verso).

Outrage over the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre may or may not spur any meaningful gun control laws, but you can bet your Crayolas that it will lead to more seven-year-olds getting handcuffed and hauled away to local police precincts.

You read that right. Americans may disagree deeply about how easy it should be for a mentally ill convicted felon to purchase an AR-15, but when it comes to putting more law enforcement officers inside our schools, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and liberal Democrats like Senator Barbara Boxer are as one. And when police (or “school resource officers” as these sheriff’s deputies are often known) spend time in a school, they often deal with disorder like proper cops -- by slapping cuffs on the little perps and dragging them to the precinct.

Just ask the three nine-year-old girls and an eight-year-old boy who got into a fight at their Baltimore elementary school -- then got arrested by real police.  Or Salecia Johnson, age six, cuffed and arrested for throwing a tantrum at her elementary school in Milledgeville, Georgia. Or Wilson Reyes, a seven-year-old at a Bronx, New York, elementary school who last December 4 was cuffed, hauled away, and interrogated under suspicion of taking $5 from a classmate. (Another kid later confessed.)

The last of these incidents made the cover of the New York Post, but the New York City Police Department still doesn’t understand what they did wrong -- sure, the first-grader spent about four hours handcuffed in a detention room, but that’s “standard for juvenile arrest.”

Which is precisely the problem: standard juvenile misbehavior (a five-year-old pitching a fit, a 12-year-old doodling on a desk, a 13-year-old farting in class, a class clown running around the football field at halftime in a banana suit) is increasingly being treated like serious crime, resulting in handcuffs and arrest. If you can’t understand why such “consistency” is crazy, please desist from reading the rest of this article.

It seems grotesque that the horrific slaughter of those twenty children in Newtown, Connecticut, will result in more children getting traumatized, but that’s exactly where we’re headed -- with firm bipartisan support.

In his amazing post-Newtown speech last December, Wayne LaPierre, the CEO and executive vice president of the NRA, called for armed guards in all schools -- a demand widely hailed as jaw-droppingly nutty. A few weeks later, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) proposed $50 million in federal grants to install more metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and National Guard troops in schools, but made her pitch in the caring cadences of a Marin County Democrat. And when President Obama ordered more police in schools (point 18 in his 23-point Executive Order responding to the Sandy Hook tragedy), it was all over.

So here’s an American reality of 2013: we will soon have more police in our schools, and more seven-year-olds like Joseph Andersons of PS 153 in Maspeth, New York, getting arrested. (He got handcuffed after a meltdown when his Easter egg dye-job didn’t come out right.)

The School-to-Prison Pipeline

In fairness to the feds, similar kinds of local responses were already underway before the La Pierre-Boxer Axis of Tiny Handcuffs even arose. Across the country, from Florida and Connecticut to Tennessee, Indiana, and Arizona, despite tough budgetary times, municipal governments are now eagerly scrounging up the extra money for more metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and armed guards in schools. (The same thing happened after the Columbine shooting fourteen years ago.) No one keeps national statistics, but arrests of the ten-and-under set do seem to be on the rise since Sandy Hook. A typical recent case: in January, a seven-year-old at a Connecticut school was arrested by the police for “threatening” a teacher. Jitters are understandable after the trauma of Sandy Hook -- but arresting a seven-year-old?

Truth be told, we were already well on our way to turning schools into carceral fortresses before the Sandy Hook slaughter even happened. In fact, the great national infrastructure project of the past twenty years may be the “school-to-prison pipeline.” After all, we are the nation that arrested Isamar Gonzalez for being in her high school early to meet with a teacher, then arrested her principal, Mark Federman, when he tried to intervene.

The stats speak as loudly as the anecdotes: of the Chicago School District’s 4,600 arrests in 2011, 86 percent were for misdemeanors. That school system spends $51.4 million on security guards, but only $3.5 million for college and career coaches. And for every incident that makes the news, there are scores that don’t. Despite a growing body of damning research by civil libertarians of the left and the right, including Annette Fuentes’s excellent book Lockdown High, political opposition to the school-to-prison pipeline has proven feeble or nonexistent. Brooklyn State Senator Eric Adams, who represents one of the most liberal districts in the country, has staked out the civil libertarian outer limit by helpfully suggesting that Velcro handcuffs might be more suitable than metal ones for arresting young children.

The metal detector at the schoolhouse door is threatening to become as iconic an American symbol as baseball or type 2 diabetes. Not that metal detectors in place were capable of preventing the massacre at Red Lake High School in Minnesota in 2005: young Jeffrey Weise just barged right in and shot six people dead; nor could the metal detectors at George Washington High School in Manhattan or Paul Robeson High School in Brooklyn prevent teens from getting stabbed. Yet metal detectors and school police proliferate across the country. 

One state, however, truly leads the way. Self-satisfied Yankees have traditionally slandered the state of Mississippi as a jerkwater remnant of the past. As for me, I say Mississippi represents the American future.  A new report by advocacy groups shows how the Hospitality State is leading the nation in cruel and draconian school over-policing. Felony assault charges for throwing peanuts on the school bus! Dress codes enforced by handcuffing a child to a railing for hours for the crime of not wearing a belt! Cops escorting a five-year-old home for wearing the wrong color shoes! And constant arrests of kids for “disorderly conduct.”

Yes, the “Mississippi model” of non-union teachers plus “zero tolerance” discipline is the kind of schooling that some of the best and brightest among our education “reformers” have been touting -- and what they are increasingly getting. In fairness, Governor Rick Perry’s Texas is struggling with Mississippi for vanguard status, with cutting-edge surveillance of students and 300,000 misdemeanor arrests in 2010 for “crimes” like tossing a paper airplane. And Massachusetts is a strong contender for third place.

Safe Schools Without Police or Metal Detectors

The over-policing of our schools is particularly grotesque because it’s so unnecessary. All schools need order and all students need self-discipline (as do adults), but putting police and metal detectors in a school often just adds another layer of violent chaos to an already tough situation. In my own policy research on school security overkill in New York City, I’ve found plenty of high schools, and not in the fancy parts of town, that do just fine without police or scanners.

In fact, they do better than fine: one report I coauthored with advocates from the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform found that schools without police or metal detectors actually get significantly better educational results (higher graduation rates, lower truancy) than their heavily policed counterparts.

So why aren’t these low-impact schools being held up as models? Why don’t City Hall and the New York City Department of Education seem to want to know about these more effective -- not to mention cheaper -- models? Alas, despite a steady fifteen-year nationwide drop in crime, politicos continue to score points with voters by showing that they aren’t afraid to crack down on children, especially the working-class black and Latino youth who bear most of the brunt of these policies. The psycho-racial-political dynamics are pretty much the same throughout the country.

But there are proven, demonstrably better, ways to do school discipline. Ask Judge Steve Teske whose visionary common sense has brought down referrals to juvenile court by 70 percent in Clayton County, Georgia, by forcing schools to handle minor disciplinary infractions without handcuffs or police arrests. (In the same period in that county, serious weapons charges, like bringing guns and knives to school, have fallen by 80 percent -- further evidence that restraining a police presence actually makes schools safer.)

For another example of the right way to respond to school violence, look no further than Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, site of the 1999 massacre of twelve students and a teacher by two heavily armed students. In response, the school made the choice not to add a phalanx of armed guards. (Columbine actually had an armed school resource officer on duty the day of the killings, and he was unable to slow, let alone stop, the carnage.)

In fact, Columbine today remains an open campus with no metal detector at the front door. Instead, its administration has worked hard to improve communications with the student body, trying to build an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect. Columbine parents have supported this approach for a simple reason: they don’t want their children treated like criminals. Because Littleton, Colorado, is a largely affluent community with political muscle, they’ve been able to resist the avalanche of punitive measures that have been generated by every school massacre since the one that took place at theirs.

Other schools -- particularly urban ones with working-class African American and Latino students -- are not so lucky. When President Obama announced his pledge of more “resource officers” in schools, he was quick to qualify it with an “if they want them.” A laudable sentiment that doesn’t really reflect how things usually work on the ground.

One Brooklyn high school principal I interviewed told me of the constant pressure he experienced from higher up in the New York City Department of Education to put in a metal detector and more police personnel. Another school security success story I profiled back in 2008 has since had a metal detector rammed down its educational throat despite its immaculate disciplinary record. Now, its students are made to feel like potential criminals from the moment they arrive every morning. The logic is, in its way, all-American: crazy white kids go on shooting sprees, and then the screws tighten on black and Latino kids.

Resisting the Axis of Tiny Handcuffs

Is there any hope of preventing the rush to put more first graders in handcuffs? Yes, but don’t expect any help from the NRA, which is actively promoting a heavily armed vision of heaven on Earth in which armed guards will be everywhere, with all public space turned into an airport security line. As for Barbara Boxer, evidently she wasn’t as struck as I was by the t-shirts that Sacramento’s school security police made with the slogan “U Raise 'Em, We Cage 'Em” emblazoned on the image of a child behind bars. Or maybe she should talk to constituents like five-year-old arrestee Michael Davis or the seven-year-old in San Mateo whom a cop blasted in the face with pepper spray for climbing a bookshelf. It remains to be seen if the NRA and Boxer, united, can ever be defeated.

This response to the Newtown massacre is of a piece with a developing post-9/11 American national-security-lockdown mentality -- the belief that an armed response will solve most of our problems, domestic and foreign. It’s a habit of thought that leads not figuratively but quite literally to a police state. The over-policing of schools is just a part of the increasing militarization of the police nationwide, which in turn fuels the smoldering paranoia that drives civilians to stock up on AR-15s and the like.

Ending this cycle of armed fear and violence will require getting police out of the schools along with the whole battery of security state accessories. The only way to get there will be via the broadest possible civil libertarian coalition: Black community groups and Ron Paul types, immigrants' rights activists and teachers and principals unions that see the big picture, liberals and conservatives united against the nanny/thug state.

There could be no finer spokesperson for such an ecumenical gathering than the newly crowned Miss America, Alabama-raised Brooklyn-residing Mallory Hytes Hagan. After wowing the pageant judges with her terpsichorean prowess, she demonstrated the soundest policy judgment. Asked if she thought it was a good idea to bring armed guards into schools, Ms. Hagan’s response was clear. “No, I don’t think the proper way to fight violence is with violence.” According to the New York Daily News, she said it “firmly.” Let people of goodwill rally behind this model citizen to end all the grotesque violence in our schools.


Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - 12:50

SOURCE: Inside Story (AU) (2-25-13)

David Hayes was Deputy Editor of openDemocracy from 2003–12. He writes each month for Inside Story.

“Ni avec toi, ni sans toi.” If Britain’s long and often tortuous relationship with the European Union could be summed up in a single phrase, the epigraph of Francois Truffaut’s film La Femme d’à Côté is a good candidate. Across seven decades, the two sides have been enveloped in fluctuating tides – of politics and history, of interest and emotion, of loyalty and ideology, of reason and longing – without ever settling into a definitive resolution. “Neither with you, nor without you,” indeed.

If truth be told, though, they shared little of the passion of Truffaut’s doomed couple. Britain’s early encouragement of continental cooperation in the late 1940s; its protracted negotiations over the infant European Economic Community in the 1950s; its twice-vetoed applications to join in the 1960s, and the successful bid in the 1970s; wrangles over budgets, labour rights and exchange rates in the 1980–90s and tensions over the new European Union’s constitutional treaty in the 2000s; and the eurozone crisis in the 2010s – through all this, the story has been one in which rows have often given way to hard-won agreement, yet also in which divorce was no more feasible than real intimacy.

Now, in 2013, comes a new chapter that offers the possibility of a radical break. In a long-delayed and much-trailed speech on 23 January, prime minister David Cameron announced that four years hence he intends to hold a referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Union. Departure is not his preferred option. The speech delineates a series of principles for a reformed European Union (competitiveness, flexibility, devolution of power, democratic accountability, and fairness); if they can be codified to Britain’s advantage in negotiations with other member-states, they would allow Cameron to recommend that the British vote to stay in the union....


Monday, February 25, 2013 - 17:09

SOURCE: NYT (2-20-13)

Richard Parker writes for McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

...Democrats are champing at the bit to turn Texas blue. “People are now looking at Texas and saying: ‘That’s where we need to make our next investment. That’s where the next opportunity lies,’ ” one Democratic state senator told Politico. There’s even optimistic chatter of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s capturing the state in 2016 if she runs for president....

Texas was reliably Democratic for more than a century, from Reconstruction through the Lyndon B. Johnson years. Johnson ably — albeit cynically and sometimes illegally — harnessed the Hispanic vote to keep his more reactionary opponents off balance in primaries.

But the liberal 1960s drove white conservatives into what was once a minuscule Republican Party. With the help of Rust Belt migrants in the 1970s, Republican strength grew under John G. Tower, Bill Clements and the elder George Bush....

 


Friday, February 22, 2013 - 12:31

SOURCE: Salon (2-11-13)

Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter.

With the nation deep in the throes of Hollywood-induced Lincoln-philia, Washington Examiner editor Mark Tapscott asked Friday what the revered president might do about one of the thorniest political questions of 2013: “Would Lincoln have droned Robert E. Lee?” His answer — an imagined conversation between Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that has the 16th president remarking “OMG” and “sheesh” — is dumb, but the question and answer are more interesting that Tapscott gives them credit.

Lincoln is rightly held up as the paragon of the American presidency, so it makes sense that people would ask how he would handle a tough moral question like the use of unmanned killer drones, which has compelling arguments both for and against. WWLD? We consulted experts and the historical record to find out. The answer may surprise you.

First off, Lincoln was obsessed with military technology and innovation, so there’s little question that he would have been intrigued by drones, had they been invented in the 1860s. He often personally witnessed demonstrations of new inventions and pushed for their advancement and field testing through the War Department bureaucracy, in part by promoting officers who held a similar love of innovation. Under his tenure, the Union became one of the world’s first militaries to use repeating rifles (a vast improvement over the single-shot muzzle-loaders it replaced), rifled artillery, machine guns, rockets, armored “ironclad” warships, and torpedoes, and he made advanced strategic use of railroads and especially the telegraph....


Wednesday, February 13, 2013 - 13:57

SOURCE: Huffington Post (2-12-13)

Dr. Ellen J. Staurowsky is presently a professor in the Department of Sport Management in the Goodwin College of Professional Studies at Drexel University.

For over four decades, American Indian organizations, individuals, and their allies have sought to eliminate the use and abuse of American Indian imagery in the marketing and promotion of athletic teams in school and professional settings. Through consciousness raising, legal challenges, public protest, and reasoned discourse, American Indian plaintiffs have attempted to get relief from a constant barrage of images that undermine the ability of Native peoples to be seen as human beings rather than objects to be used in the entertainment of the masses. More than 100 organizations, including the National Congress of American Indians, National Indian Education Association, Native American Journalists Association, the Society of Indian Psychologists, and the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights, have supported the discontinuation of these images on the grounds that they encourage stereotyping that negatively impacts the health and well-being of American Indians in schools and workplaces by perpetuating false and misleading representations that form the basis for mistreatment and disrespect of American Indians in the past and in the present while guaranteeing a future of the same.

And progress has been made. According to Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Huldogee Mucogee), two-thirds of educational institutions have ceased the practice of using American Indian imagery as anchors for brand identity, community bonding, and team spirit. In 2005, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) took the position that while member institutions could not be barred from using American Indian imagery, NCAA championships would not be held on campuses where American Indian imagery was used in the marketing of sport teams and teams with American Indian imagery would be required to cover it up in order to compete in NCAA championships. Recognizing Indian sovereignty, the NCAA's policy on Native American mascots also allowed for schools to retain their American Indian imagery if a namesake tribe gave permission. In May of 2012, Oregon became the second state after Wisconsin to prohibit Native American mascots, nicknames, and imagery in public schools.

For all of the progress that has been made, there remains a stalemate between mascot supporters who believe these images honor American Indians and opponents who regard these images as racially offensive and insensitive. Last Friday, on the anniversary of the passage of the Dawes Act of 1887, an act that set in motion a U.S. government policy of assimilation designed to dismantle tribal governments and strip American Indians of identity, land, and culture, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights (MDCR) filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) challenging the use of American Indian mascots by 35 public high schools in that state. This complaint seeks to unlock this stalemate by taking the assessment of this imagery beyond the scope of public opinion and situating it in the realm of demonstrable harms done to American Indian children. The MDCR complaint is based on an emerging body of research documenting the impact that this imagery has on the students who encounter it in schools. As noted in the complaint:

A growing and unrebutted body of evidence now establishes that the use of American Indian imagery reinforces stereotypes in a way that negatively impacts the potential for achievement by students with American-Indian ancestry. The negative impact on this minority of students is NOT associated with malicious intent, or even benign negativism. In fact the impact of even "positive" stereotyping ... produces a similarly detrimental impact (MDCR complaint, 2013, p. 5).

Citing the work of Stephanie Fryberg, an assistant professor of social and cultural psychology at the University of Arizona, the complaint hinges on an understanding that American Indian children do not benefit from depictions of "braves," chiefs" and "Indians" in educational settings. To the contrary, often among the least represented and most at-risk groups in school systems, American Indian children experience a negative impact on their self-esteem, levels of confidence, achievement, and community worth. Non-Indian children, in turn, experience a boost in their levels of self-esteem after seeing these images. Educated within "mascot" cultures, non-Indian students foster expectations of how American Indians should behave, look, and act, not as a result of having dealt with American Indians before but as a result of stereotyping that rarely depicts American Indians in roles as bankers, doctors, educators, film-makers, journalists, lawyers, musicians, and politicians, but as representatives of a dying people depicted as fierce and fighting "warriors."

Through the creation of an unequal learning environment that deprives American Indian children access to an education free of impediments to success in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the MDCR has called upon the OCR to issue an order to end the use of American Indian mascots, names, terms, graphics, and/or other imagery to protect the welfare and safety of children entrusted to the care of educators in primary and secondary schools.

In contemplating what this complaint means, a consideration of the experiences of American Indian children affected by this imagery on a daily basis in schools offers insight as to the harms reported by Fryberg and other researchers. Consider those too fearful to even disclose that they are, in fact, American Indian because they do not wish to suffer the distress of fulfilling the script laid-out before them as a result of a stereotyped world-view of feathers and war whoops. Consider the peer-pressure American Indian children encounter to "fit" in and not rock the boat by challenging the traditions of face painting, feather wearing displays that distort and disfigure their culture, religion, and heritage. Consider the profound effects on an American Indian child's sense of confidence to be in hiding while being in plain view, seen and yet unseen. Consider the awkwardness an American Indian child feels walking into school and watching as other students wipe their muddy shoes on the head of a "chief," embedded as it is in a doormat. Consider a gifted American Indian athlete's dilemma when contemplating whether to try out for a team because of the offense that will have to be endured by being required to wear a uniform with an acknowledged racial slur on it.

Whether the imagery represents a violation of any particular civil rights law or more profoundly the laws of common decency, this complaint asks again, in another way, that educators (coaches, administrators, fans, marketers, parents, public policy makers, teachers) reflect on the dynamics around these images. The test of the notion that this imagery fosters an atmosphere of honoring American Indians is refuted by the troubling reality that less than 50 percent of American Indian children nationally graduate from high school. Recent statistics reveal that in some parts of the United States, suicide rates among American Indian youth is between 9 and 19 percent more frequent than those found among other youth groups.

At its most fundamental, the MDCR complaint raises the question of why there would be such energy devoted to protecting an American Indian image or a mascot rather than the welfare of American Indian children. There is a connection between the forces unleashed with the signing of the Dawes Act in undermining the fabric of American Indian communities and national identities and the harms done to the psyche of American Indian children through the misappropriation and misuse of American Indian imagery by schools and athletic teams. The OCR can take significant steps to address the unequal environment in which American Indian children grow up and learn by banning these images.


Tuesday, February 12, 2013 - 16:56

SOURCE: TomDispatch (2-7-13)

Todd Miller has researched and written about U.S.-Mexican border issues for more than 10 years. He has worked on both sides of the border for BorderLinks in Tucson, Arizona, and Witness for Peace in Oaxaca, Mexico. He now writes on border and immigration issues for NACLA Report on the Americas and its blog “Border Wars,” among other places. He is at work on his first book, Border Patrol Nation, for the Open Media Series of City Lights Books.


Originally posted on TomDispatch.com

Before September 11, 2001, more than half the border crossings between the United States and Canada were left unguarded at night, with only rubber cones separating the two countries. Since then, that 4,000 mile “point of pride,” as Toronto’s Globe and Mail once dubbed it, has increasingly been replaced by a U.S. homeland security lockdown, although it’s possible that, like Egyptian-American Abdallah Matthews, you haven’t noticed.

The first time he experiences this newly hardened U.S.-Canada border, it takes him by surprise. It’s a freezing late December day and Matthews, a lawyer (who asked me to change his name), is on the passenger side of a car as he and three friends cross the Blue Water Bridge from Sarnia, Ontario, to the old industrial town of Port Huron, Michigan. They are returning from the Reviving the Islamic Spirit conference in Toronto, chatting and happy to be almost home when the car pulls up to the booth, where a blue-uniformed U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent stands. The 60,000-strong CBP is the border enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security and includes both customs and U.S. Border Patrol agents. What is about to happen is the furthest thing from Matthews’s mind. He’s from Port Huron and has crossed this border “a million times before.”

After scanning their passports and looking at a computer screen in the booth, the agent says to the driver, as Matthews tells the story:

“Sir, turn off the vehicle, hand me the key, and step out of the car.”

He hears the snap of handcuffs going around his friend’s wrists. Disoriented, he turns around and sees uniformed men kneeling behind their car, firearms drawn.

“To my disbelief, situated behind us are agents, pointing their guns.”

The CBP officer asks Matthews and the remaining passengers to get out of the car and escorts them to a waiting room. Thirty minutes later, he, too, is handcuffed and in a cell. Forty-five minutes after that another homeland security agent brings him into a room with no chairs. The agent tells him that he can sit down, but all he sees is a countertop. “Can I just stand?” he asks.

And he does so for what seems like an eternity with the door wide open, attempting to smile at the agents who pass by. “I’m trying to be nice,” is how he put it.

Finally, in a third room, the interrogation begins. Although they question Matthews about his religious beliefs and various Islamic issues, the two agents are “nice.” They ask him: Where’d you go? What kind of law do you practice? He tells them that a former law professor was presenting a paper at the annual conference, whose purpose is to revive “Islamic traditions of education, tolerance, and introspection.” They ask if he’s received military training abroad. This, he tells me, “stood out as one of their more bizarre questions.” When the CBP lets him and his friends go, he still thinks it was a mistake.

However, Lena Masri of the Council of American Islamic Relations-Michigan (CAIR-MI) reports that Matthews’s experience is becoming “chillingly” commonplace for Michigan’s Arab and Muslim community at border crossings. In 2012, CAIR-MI was receiving five to seven complaints about similar stops per week. The detainees are all Arab, all male, all questioned at length. They are asked about religion, if they spend time at the mosque, and who their Imam is.

According to CAIR-MI accounts, CBP agents repeatedly handcuff these border-crossers, often brandish weapons, conduct invasive, often sexually humiliating body searches, and detain people for from two to 12 hours. Because of this, some of the detainees have lost job opportunities or jobs, or given up on educational opportunities in Canada.  Many are now afraid to cross the border to see their families who live in Canada. (CAIR-MI has filed a lawsuit against the CBP and other governmental agencies.)

Months later, thinking there is no way this can happen again, Matthews travels to Canada and crosses the border, this time alone, on the Blue Water Bridge to Port Huron. Matthews still hadn’t grasped the seismic changes in Washington’s attitude toward our northern border since 9/11.  Port Huron, his small hometown, where a protest group, Students for a Democratic Society, first famously declared themselves against racism and alienation in 1962, is now part of the “frontline” in defense of the “homeland.”  As a result, Matthews finds himself a casualty of a new war, one that its architects and proponents see as a permanent bulwark not only against non-citizens generally, but also people like Matthews from “undesirable” ethno-religious groups or communities in the United States.

While a militarized enforcement regime has long existed in the U.S-Mexico borderlands, its far more intense post-9/11 version is also proving geographically expansive. Now, the entire U.S. perimeter has become part of a Fortress USA mentality and a lockdown reality. Unlike on our southern border, there is still no wall to our north on what was once dubbed the “longest undefended border in the world.”  But don’t let that fool you.  The U.S.-Canadian border is increasingly a national security hotspot watched over by drones, surveillance towers, and agents of the Department of Homeland Security.

The Canadian Threat

Bert Tussing, U.S. Army War College Homeland Defense and Security Director, realizes that when people think of border security, what immediately comes to mind is the U.S.-Mexico border. After all, he is speaking in El Paso, Texas, where in the early 1990s the massive transformation and expansion of the border enforcement apparatus was born. Operation Blockade (later renamed Operation Hold-the-Line) became the Clinton administration’s blueprint for the walls, double-fencing, cameras, sensors, stadium-lighting, and concentration of Border Patrol agents now seen in urbanized areas -- and some rural ones as well -- from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego, California. Tussing believes that this sort of intense surveillance, which has literally deformed communities throughout the southwest, should be brought to the northern border as well.

A former Marine with close-cropped brown hair, Tussing has a Napoleonic stature and despises being stuck behind a podium. “I kind of like moving around,” he quips before starting “The Changing Role of the Military in Border Security Operations,”his talk at last October’s Border Management Conference and Technology Expo.

Perhaps Tussing realizes that his audience holds a new breed of border-security entrepreneur when his initial Army-Marine joke falls flat. Behind the small audience are booths from 74 companies selling their border-security wares. These nomadic malls of the surveillance state are popping up in ever more places each year.

Hanging from the high ceiling is a white surveillance aerostat made by an Israeli company. Latched onto the bottom of this billowing balloon are cameras that, even 150 feet away, can zoom in on the comments I’m scrawling in my notebook. Nearby sits a mannequin in a beige body suit, equipped with a gas mask. It’s all part of the equipment and technology that the developing industry has in mind for our southern border, and increasingly the northern one as well.

Tussing homes in on a 2010 statistic: 59,000 people (“illegals if you will”)  tried to enter the United States from countries “other than Mexico, the euphemistic OTMs.” Six hundred and sixty-three of these “OTMs” were from countries Tussing calls "special-interest nations" such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, and Somalia, and also from countries the U.S. has identified as state-sponsors of terrorism like Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria.

Next, he turns to the U.S-Canada divide, mentioning the 1999 case of Ahmed Ressam who would have become “the millennium bomber,” if not for an astute U.S. Customs agent in Washington state. Here, as Tussing sees it, is the crux of the problem: “We found over time that he was able to do what he was to do because of the comparatively liberal immigration and asylum laws that exist today in Canada, which allowed him a safe haven. Which allowed him a planning area. Which allowed him an opportunity to build bombs. Which allowed him an opportunity to arrange his logistics.” He pauses. “This is not to say that Canada’s laws are wrong, but they are different from ours.”

A Government Accountablity Office report, he adds, claims that “the risk of terrorist activity is high along the northern border.” Of that 4,000-mile border between the two countries, he adds, “only 32 of those miles are categorized as what we say are acceptable levels of control.”

As what Tussing calls the "coup de grâce" to his argument for reinforcements of every sort along that border, he quotes Alan Bersin, former director of Customs and Border Protection: “In terms of the terrorist threat, it’s more commonly accepted that the most significant threat comes from the north,” not the south.

A Constitution-Free Zone

In 2012, the U.S. government spent more on the Homeland Security agencies responsible for border security than all of its other principal federal law enforcement agencies combined. The $18 billion allocated to Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement significantly exceeds the $14.4 billion that makes up the combined budgets of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshal Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. In the years since 9/11, more than $100 billion has been spent on border security. Much of that went to the southern border, but now an ever larger chunk is heading north.

On that northern border, things have come a long way since North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan in 2001 held up an orange cone and said, “This is America’s security at our border crossing... America can’t effectively combat terrorism if it doesn’t control its borders.”

Now Predator B drones, sometimes in the air for twenty hours at a stretch, are doing surveillance work from Grand Forks, North Dakota, to Spokane, Washington. Expensive surveillance towers equipped with night-vision cameras and sophisticated radar have been erected along the St. Clair and Niagara Rivers in Michigan and western New York state. Homeland Security built a $30 million border security “war room” at Michigan’s Selfridge Air National Guard Base, which, with its “video wall,” is worthy of a Hollywood action flick. This “gold standard” for border protection, as the CBP dubs it, is now one of many places where agents continuously observe those rivers of the north. As at Selfridge, so many resources and so much money has been poured into the frontlines of “homeland security,” and just upstream from cash-starved, post-industrial Detroit, the poorest city of its size in the United States.

In addition, the CBP’s Office of Air and Marine -- essentially Homeland Security’s air force and navy -- has established eight U.S. bases along the border from Plattsburgh, New York, to Bellingham, Washington. While such bases are commonplace on the southern border, they are new on the Canadian frontier. In addition, new state-of-the art Border Patrol stations are popping up in places like Pembina, North Dakota (at the cost of $13 million), International Falls, Minnesota ($6.8 million), and other places. This advance of the homeland security state in the north, funded and supported by Congress, seems both uncontroversial and unstoppable.

Don’t think that the eternal bolstering of “border security” is just a matter of fortifying the boundary line, either. Last November, the CBP ordered an additional 14 unmanned aerial vehicles. (They are, however, still waiting for Congress to appropriate the funding for this five-year plan.) With this doubling of its fleet, there will undoubtedly be more surveillance drones flying over major U.S. urban areas like Detroit, Buffalo, Syracuse, Bangor, and Seattle, places the ACLU has classified as in a “Constitution-free zone.”

That zone -- up to 100 miles from any external U.S. border -- is the area that the Supreme Court has deemed a “reasonable distance” in which to engage in border security operations, including warrantless searches. As in the Southwest, expect more interior checkpoints where federal agents will ask people about their citizenship, as they did to Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy in 2008. In the zone, you have the developing blueprint for a country not only in perpetual lockdown, but also under increasing surveillance. According to the ACLU, if you were to include the southern border, the northern border, and coastal areas in this zone, it would contain 200 million people, a potential “border” jurisdiction encompassing two-thirds of the U.S. population.

It’s October 2007 when I get my first glimpse of this developing Constitution-free zone in action at a Greyhound bus station in Buffalo, New York. I’m with Miguel Angel Vasquez de la Rosa, a Mexican lawyer who is brown-skinned and speaks only Spanish. As we enter the station, we spot two beefy Border Patrol agents in their dark-green uniforms patrolling the waiting area.

I have to blink to make sure I’m not seeing things, to remember where I am. I’m originally from this area, but have lived for years along the U.S.-Mexican border where I’ve grown used to seeing the “men in green.” I can’t remember ever seeing them here.

Before 9/11, Border Patrol agents on the southern border used to joke that they went north to “go fishing.” Not anymore. The 2001 USA Patriot Act mandated a 300% increase in Border Patrol personnel on the northern border, as well as the emplacement of more surveillance technology there. Further legislation in 2004 required that 20% of the agency’s new recruits be stationed on the Canadian divide.

The number of U.S. Border Patrol agents on the northern border went from 340 in 2001 to 1,008 in 2005 to 2,263 in 2010. Now, the number is approaching 3,000. That’s still small compared to the almost 19,000 on the southern border, but significant once you add in the “force multipliers,” since Border Patrol works ever more closely with local police and other agencies. For example, according to immigration lawyer Jose Perez, New York State troopers call the Border Patrol from Interstate-90 outside of Syracuse about a suspected undocumented person about 10 times a day on average. “And we aren’t even in Arizona.”

On that day in Buffalo, the two agents made a beeline for Miguel to check his visa. A moment later, the hulking agents are standing over another brown-skinned man who is rifling through a blue duffle bag, desperately searching for his documents. Not long after, handcuffed, he is walked to the ticket counter with the agents on either side. Somehow, cuffed, the agents expect him to retrieve his ticket from the bag, now on the counter. There are so many people watching that it seems like a ritual of humiliation.

Since 2007, this sort of moment has become ever more usual across the northern border region in bus and train stations, as “homeland security” gains ever more traction and an ever wider definition. The Border Patrol are, for instance, staking out Latino community centers in Detroit, and working closely with the police on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state, leading to a much wider enforcement dragnet, which looks an awful lot like round-ups of the usual suspects.

After 9/11, the Border Patrol’s number one mission became stopping terrorists and weapons of mass destruction from coming into the country between the ports of entry. The Border Patrol, however, is “an agency that doesn’t have limitations,” says Joanne Macri, director of the Criminal Defense Immigration Project of the New York State Defender Association. “With police officers, people have more due process protection.” Since 9/11, she adds, they have become “the national security police.”

And from what we know of their arrest records, it’s possible to grasp their definition of national security.  Just in Rochester, New York, between 2005 and 2009, the CBP classified 2,776 arrests during what it terms “transportation raids” by skin complexion. The results: 71.2% of medium complexion and 12.9% black. Only 0.9% of their arrests were of “fair” complexion. And agents have had incentives to increase the numbers of people they sweep up, including Home Depot gift certificates, cash bonuses, and vacation time.

Macri tells me that it is now ever more common for armed national security police to pull people “who don’t belong” off buses and trains in the name of national security.  In 2011, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement director John Morton, there were more than 47,000 deportations of undocumented people along the northern border.

Too Close to Home

The next time Abdallah Matthews crosses the international border, a familiar face asks him the normal questions: Where did you go in Canada? What was the purpose of your trip? Matthews is already in the same CBP waiting area, has already been handcuffed, and can’t believe it’s happening again.

The CBP agent suddenly stops. “Do you remember me?”

Matthews peers at him, and finally says, “Yes, I played soccer with you.” They haven’t seen each other since high school.  They briefly reminisce, two men who grew up together along the St. Clair River before all those expensive surveillance towers with infrared cameras and radar went up. Although Matthews and the CBP agent were once friendly, although they lived in the same small town, there is now a boundary between them. Matthews struggles against this divide. He pleads: “You know who I am. I grew up here. I’ve been over this border a million times.”

This is, of course, only one of thousands of related stories happening along U.S. borders, north and south, in a universe in which, as anthropologist Josiah Heyman puts it, there are increasingly only two kinds of people: “the watchers and the watched.”  And keep in mind that, with only "32 miles" under operational control, this is just the beginning. The U.S. border enforcement apparatus is only starting its migration north.

Matthews’s former high-school acquaintance guides him to the now-familiar room with the counter where three interrogators are waiting for him. They tell him to spread his legs. Then they order him to take off his shoes. It’s hard to take them off, however, when your hands are cuffed behind your back. The two interrogators in front are already shouting questions at him.  (“What were you doing in Canada?”) The one behind him kicks his shoes. Hard. Then, after Matthews finally manages to get them off, the agent searches under his waistband.

When they are done, Matthews asks the agents what they would do if he were to circle around, reenter Canada, and cross the border again. The agents assure him that they would have to do the same exact thing -- handcuff, detain, and interrogate him as if his previous times had never happened.

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Friday, February 8, 2013 - 14:16

SOURCE: Guernica Magazine (2-8-13)

Barbara J. Miner is a Milwaukee-based journalist who has covered education for more than 20 years. She is author of the newly released book Lessons from the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City (New York: New Press).

...Before the mid-1990s, the term “failing schools” was all but nonexistent. It certainly, for instance, was not applied to Jim Crow-era segregated black schools in the South that could not even afford desks.

What’s more, the first use of vouchers was not by poor black parents but by whites hoping to escape desegregation. From 1959 until 1964, when federal courts intervened, officials closed all the public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia rather than comply with orders to desegregate. White parents took advantage of publicly funded vouchers to attend a newly created private, whites-only academy.

Such an association between vouchers and white supremacy is not useful to today’s voucher advocates. Instead, vouchers have been repackaged as a way to improve academic achievement and to expand parent “choice.” But after more than 20 years, one of the clearest lessons from Milwaukee is that vouchers, above all, are a way to funnel public tax dollars out of public schools and into private schools. Vouchers, at their core, are an abandonment of public education....


Friday, February 8, 2013 - 12:45