Justice Dept. ignores opposition, pushes ahead snitch program

Compiled by Eamon Martin

July 24 (AGR)-- The US Justice Department is forging ahead with establishing a network of domestic spies -- despite being dealt what could have been a fatal blow to the plan: Chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX), inserted last week a ban on the program in the proposed bill to form a new Homeland Security Department.

But “the administration is continuing to pursue Operation TIPS. We’re continuing with that course of action,” Barbara Comstock, spokeswoman for Attorney General John Ashcroft, said in an interview Friday. “We believe the program represents an important resource.”

Operation TIPS, short for Terrorism Information and Prevention System, is one part of President George W. Bush’s “volunteerism” initiatives, with 1 million proposed informants -- or nearly 4 percent of Americans -- initially participating in the program beginning in August. It aims to recruit millions of US workers to be alert to “suspicious” activities they encounter in their workday routines -- and report them to a toll-free federal hotline. The government is looking for “truck drivers, bus drivers, train conductors, mail carriers, utility meter readers, ship captains and port personnel,” according to the program’s website.

Armey’s impetus for banning Operation TIPS? “To ensure that no operation of the department can be construed to promote citizens spying on one another,” he wrote in his summary of the bill. Armey insisted that the controversial Operation TIPS program and a national ID card not be included in the legislation establishing a new cabinet-level Homeland Security Department.

The American Civil Liberties Union declared last Monday that the program could turn utility workers into “government-sanctioned peeping Toms.” Then on Wednesday conservative think tanks, the Cato Institute and the Rutherford Institute weighed in.

“What this means for the average citizen is that whatever you read, eat or do -- in the privacy of your home or out in public -- will now be suspect in the eyes of your cable repairman, postal carrier, meter man or others who, by way of the services they provide, will have access to your home,” said John W. Whitehead, founder and president of the Virginia-based Rutherford Institute.

But the plan has plenty of takers already. Labor unions that represent the nation’s truck drivers and port workers stepped up to volunteer their “eyes and ears” to the surveillance effort.

James P. Hoffa, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, stood in the White House driveway June 21 after a meeting with Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge to pledge his support.

“On behalf of the Teamsters, I offered the fact that we have 500,000 truck drivers on the road at any one time, and these people can be the eyes and ears of the Homeland Security office,” Hoffa said.

“I’m less worried about interstate truckers as UPS delivery people who go to people’s homes,” said ACLU legislative counsel Rachel King. “Americans still feel like their home is a sacred place, where they should be free from unreasonable government surveillance.” King believes overzealous volunteers might consider as suspicious items they spot in a home -- such as gun magazines, a Quran or letters written in Arabic.

In a shift from its position 24 hours earlier, the US Postal Service said Thursday it had decided to meet with the Justice Department to discuss Operation TIPS. USPS officials initially said on Wednesday that their 800,000 employees would not participate in the proposed program.

Likening the new program to Soviet-style repression, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), said: “I find it kind of scary. We used to laugh at the old Soviet Union idea where everybody reported everybody else…We don’t need to have it happen here.”

But Leahy said he finds the plan implausible.

“The idea that they’re going to have some huge data bank where everybody — from a next door neighbor who may have a gripe toward you because of your dog barking, to the person who fixes the cable in your house and doesn’t like some of the books you’re reading — that they’re going to report this into some data bank in Attorney General Ashcroft’s office really doesn’t make me feel more secure,” Leahy said.

What remains unclear is whether the program has been put in place, or whether it must be approved by Congress. Approval or not, Operation TIPS is already being enthusiastically promoted on a government website, as an arm of President Bush’s Freedom Corps program.

Bush has already been given wide latitude to further strengthen a more powerful, authoritarian, federal government specifically by shepherding the Patriot Act through Congress last fall, which granted law enforcement additional surveillance and detention powers, superceding provisions in the US Bill of Rights. Since then, many US citizens have been rounded up and held indefinitely without being charged.

“It’s going to be overused and abused, especially with people so nervous as it is,” said George Freeman, 45, who hauls produce in his truck cross-country. “You’re going to have people running every which way looking for terrorists and their 15 minutes of glory.”

“What can you say is suspicious? I can’t tell the government; next they’re going to say I had something to do with it,” said James Washington, a driver for United Parcel Service. “They’re just searching.”

Right now, a network of intelligence “reporting centers” is already being set up for the scheme. Officials are currently on their way to ten target cities to set up training centers. Recruits will be given lectures on what to look for and how to report suspicious persons, activities and objects.

Opponents have calculated that Operation TIPS will create one “spy” for every 24 citizens.

“I think the critics are making a big mistake. I would be happy to do some spying. I would love to do something to help America,” said Wilma Silva, a postwoman.

A few blocks down the street from Silva, Douglas Hannah was delivering Coca-Cola to a local grocery store, a job that for 10 years has taken him in and out of the sort of corner stores often owned by the immigrants targeted in the anti-Islamic backlash that followed the Twin Towers attack.

“Yes, I sure would join this operation,” he said. “I would be very happy to keep an eye on suspicious activities and suspicious people, and I would not feel uncomfortable about it at all.”

Sources: Associated Press, Brattleboro Reformer, CNN, Newsday, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Telegraph (UK)

Anti-choice group rallies in Dallas

By Andi Shively

Dallas, Texas, July 23 (AGR)— Operation Save America (OSA), the anti-choice group formerly known as Operation Rescue, held their annual week-long protest against abortion in Dallas on July 13-21. This year both the event and the turnout were significantly different from the week-long “Summer of Mercy” held in Wichita in July 2001.

Under the leadership of Flip Benham, OSA unveiled new policies in opposition to Islam and in support of the state of Israel. With large signs proclaiming that “Islam is a Lie!” members of the organization stood outside of a Dallas mosque every morning, providing literature to passersby and encouraging worshippers to convert. According to one OSA protester, the lie embodied by Islam is the idea that Muslims worship the same God as do Christians and Jews.

When asked why Islam was the particular religion chosen to target, OSA members cited the recent, steady growth of Muslims in the United States and worldwide.

“We are approaching them with love, as brothers” said another OSA protester. They claimed that morning traffic was being approached as an “educational” endeavor.

“They are deliberately exploiting a climate of discrimination and prejudice against Muslims, Arabs, and anyone perceived to be Muslim or Arab,” said Linsey, a pro-choice activist who traveled to Dallas to film the events. “There’s no way it’s a coincidence that they suddenly came up with this plan after Sept. 11 and the two had nothing to do with each other. It’s irresponsible and racist.”

The literature handed to passersby includes explicit mention of the events of Sept. 11.

While the mission of the organization has expanded, abortion remains the central issue. Teams of approximately thirty protesters were dispatched to two or three locations where abortion procedures are performed every morning. Once there, the group would hold large, graphic photographs of fetuses, try to talk women out of going into the building, yell at women who did go in, preach, sing, and pray. Traditional reproductive health clinics as well as private physician practices were targeted.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Adam, another pro-choice activist who came to film. “They just harassed this woman into not going in to get shots. All of these people are here for a typical doctor’s appointment.”

At one point, the owner of the liquor store two doors down from the physician’s office in the shopping center came out to yell at the OSA protesters.

“Get out of here, already,” he yelled. “You’ve been out here for three days. I’m getting no business; people are calling complaining.”

While there were small pockets of activity throughout Dallas, including a rally in support of the state of Israel and pickets outside a number of churches, the overall turnout was significantly reduced from the turnout seen last year in Wichita, which topped 1,000 on some days. In Dallas, estimates place OSA attendance at around 150 people.

“Last year was a big year, because it was in Wichita and [because of] what happened in 1991, but we weren’t expecting so many people this year.”

In 1991 Operation Save America’s predecessor, Operation Rescue, shut down Dr. George Tiller’s clinic for six weeks with sit-ins and blockades, resulting in over 2,500 arrests.

This year’s numbers were equally dulled in terms of pro-choice response. The only visible opposition to the mobilization was a “celebration of choice” rally held on July 20 by the Dallas chapter of the National Organization of Women. The city’s clinics and the Greater Dallas Coalition for Reproductive Choice advocated ignoring OSA’s presence.

Congressional votes to test Bush on Cuba

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, July 15 (IPS)— President George W. Bush faces an embarrassing series of defeats in Congress this week that will show his hard-line policies toward Cuba enjoy little and declining popular support, according to his opponents.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is likely to approve, as early as Tuesday, several amendments to next year’s Treasury-Postal Service Appropriations bill which, if enacted into law, would substantially ease the 42-year-old US trade embargo against the Caribbean island.

Supporters of the amendments predict that a substantial majority of lawmakers will vote to lift the ban on travel by US citizens to Cuba, permit Havana to buy US food exports on credit, and possibly end limits on remittances that Cuban-Americans can send to their families back home.

They say they even believe an amendment tabled by New York Rep. Charles Rangel that would ban the government from using any funds to enforce the trade embargo might narrowly pass this year. Last year, the same amendment was defeated by only 17 votes in the 435-seat chamber.

The administration, which tightened the embargo two months ago in the wake of former President Jimmy Carter’s visit to Cuba — the first by any former president since the 1959 Revolution — is holding fast.

Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and Secretary of State Colin Powell are expected to circulate a letter before the votes opposing the amendments and warning that they will urge Bush to veto them if they pass both houses.

With the unstinting support of the House’s far-right Republican leadership, which refused to hold hearings on any of the amendments, the administration is confident it can waylay the objectionable amendments even before they reach Bush’s desk.

“These will be dropped in the conference [committee] with the Senate, even though the Senate probably opposes the embargo more than the House,” said Geoff Thale, a Cuba specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a think tank and lobby group. “The problem is that people on the other side feel much more passionately about this.”

That is particularly true this year when Bush’s brother, Jeb, runs for re-election as governor of Florida, the state with the largest Cuban-American population by far. Republicans are going all-out to ensure that anti-Castro hard-liners, who are key political donors, remain squarely in the Bush camp.

“This administration is determined to pander to the right-wing exiles in Florida,” said Wayne Smith, who served as Washington’s top diplomat in Havana in the early 1980s. Smith, now with the Washington-based Center for International Policy (CIP), has long argued that the long-term US interests in Cuba are served better by a policy of engagement rather than isolation and embargo.

With the public increasingly concerned about the health of the US economy and the plunging US stock market, CIP released a new study Monday that showed that lifting the ban on US nationals traveling to Cuba could boost the economy by as much as $1.6 billion a year and create up to 23,000 new jobs, primarily in the troubled commercial airline industry.

“The economic embargo against Cuba is not only a failed policy, but it has also cost the American economy profits and jobs,” said Thomas Cooper, president of Gulfstream International Airlines and a CIP board member. “Congress should legalize travel to Cuba, recapture the dignity of our foreign policy, and provide a real boost to the American economy, and especially the airlines and tourism industries.”

The CIP report, produced by the Brattle Group consulting firm, echoed conclusions reached by another study released last month by the Cuba Policy Foundation (CPF) and the House Cuba Working Group, a bipartisan coalition of 44 lawmakers whose aim is to lift the embargo. It found that a total lifting of the embargo would produce, in the US travel sector alone, some $555 million and 3,800 jobs after one year and $1.9 billion and 11,000 jobs by the fifth year.

“The ban on travel to Cuba is hurting the US economy,” said Ambassador Sally Grooms Cowal, CPF’s president. “Americans wants to travel to Cuba, and a growing bipartisan coalition in Congress supports them. It is time US policy reflects the sentiment in Congress and the will of the American people.”

Last year, the House voted 240-186 to deny funding to the Treasury Department for purposes of enforcing the travel ban, but the effort was sabotaged by the House Republican leadership, despite the passage of a similar bill in the Senate.

Nonetheless, Bush during the past year has tightened travel restrictions on Cuba. In the year 2000, the Clinton administration imposed fines on 188 travelers for violating the ban, but last year the Bush administration quadrupled the number of fines, according to Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan.

In 2000, the fines averaged $3,000 each; last year, Bush’s first in office, they averaged $7,500.

The strict enforcement is consistent with Bush’s hard line toward Cuba. After Carter, during a weeklong visit to Cuba, called for normalizing trade relations and boosting exchanges, Bush traveled to Miami May 19 to rule out any easing of the embargo until Cuba transforms its political system and economy.

“It’s important to understand, without political reform, without economic reform, trade with Cuba will merely enrich Fidel Castro and his cronies,” Bush declared.

That well-worn refrain is now being pressed again in advance of this week’s votes. The Weekly Standard, an influential right-wing magazine that speaks for administration hawks in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, wrote last week that “Cuba is now in deeper trouble, both economically and politically, than at any time in the 43 years of Castro’s rule.”

“With the pressure on, now is not the time to bail out Castro and his failed regime,” it went on. “Yet that’s precisely what a growing group of business leaders, agricultural lobbyists and members of Congress want the United States to do.”

“We’ve heard this all before, I don’t know how many times,” noted WOLA’s Thale. “It’s clear these people and the administration will do everything they can to preserve an outmoded policy that may play well with voters in South Florida, but doesn’t make foreign policy sense to anyone.”

US court finds anti-gay job discrimination unconstitutional

Spokane, Washington, July 18– A Washington state appeals court today unanimously ruled that firing public employees because they are gay violates the US Constitution, which the American Civil Liberties Union said is the first ruling of its kind from any appeals court in the country.

The ACLU initially filed its state lawsuit against Pullman Memorial Hospital in 1996 on behalf of Mary Jo Davis, a sonographer who was subjected to severe and ongoing anti-gay harassment, then fired. A lower court dismissed the case, effectively saying that the US Constitution offers no refuge for lesbians and gay men who face discrimination by government agencies. Today, the Washington Court of Appeals disagreed in an 11-page decision.

“[A] state actor violates a homosexual employee’s right of equal protection when it treats that person differently than it treats heterosexual employees, based solely upon the employee’s sexual orientation,” the court ruled.

“This is a historic ruling,” said Matt Coles, Director of the ACLU Lesbian & Gay Rights Project. “For the first time, an appeals court is saying that it’s just plain unconstitutional for a government agency to fire someone for being gay.”

Today’s ruling sets a “powerful precedent,” Coles said, and will now send Davis’ case back to trial. She will be able to sue both the hospital and Dr. Charles Guess, the chief radiologist, who harassed her routinely. Guess constantly referred to Davis as a “f–king dyke” and “f–king faggot,” and told another doctor, “I don’t think that f–king faggot should be doing vaginal exams, and I’m not working with her.” When Davis complained, Guess told hospital administrators that he didn’t “agree with Mary Jo Davis’ lesbian lifestyle.” Rather than discipline Guess, the hospital punished Davis — reducing her work hours to three-quarters time so Guess wouldn’t have to work with her. Finally, in 1994, Davis was fired.

At the appeals court, Guess claimed that even if it were unconstitutional to fire Davis for being a lesbian, he couldn’t be expected to know that and therefore should be immune from legal responsibility. The court disagreed strongly: “The law is well established that intentional and invidious discrimination against an individual because he or she is a member of an identifiable class, violates that person’s right to equal protection. That proposition was as evident in 1994 as it is today.”

According to the ACLU, today’s ruling will help lesbians and gay men nationwide. “Mary Jo Davis was a good employee. She was subjected to a hellish work environment, then finally fired, because she is a lesbian,” said Ken Choe, the ACLU Lesbian & Gay Rights Project attorney handling the case. “All over this country, people face discrimination because of their sexual orientation. It’s particularly wrong when it’s the government that does it — and this decision is now one of our most powerful weapons in fighting it.”

Source: ACLU

NATION BRIEFS

Bush knew firm’s plight before stock sale
As a businessman in 1990, George W. Bush was deluged with confidential information about the financial plight of a Texas oil company before he sold the majority of his holdings and triggered a federal investigation, according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) records.

President Bush has refused to authorize the SEC to open the full file on his investigation, but selected documents have been released under the Freedom of Information Act. The president’s business dealings have come under more scrutiny as he tries to restore confidence in markets hurt by business scandals. Nearly half of 1,004 respondents in a Newsweek poll released yesterday said they thought Bush took advantage of the system for personal gain with the 1990 stock sale.

The documents show that four months before Bush sold most of his stake in Harken Energy Corp., he and other board members received a letter from management calling the previous year’s profits disappointing and warning that the company would “continue to be severely limited in our activities due to cash constraints.”

The SEC’s investigation of Bush was closed after officials determined he did not have enough insider information before his stock sale to warrant a case. (Washington Post)

New law lets army get info on
high school students
US military recruiters have the authority to demand that education officials turn over the names, addresses and phone numbers of high-school students under a new federal law.

President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” law orders school bosses from New York City and across the country to comply with the new edict -- or risk losing federal funds.

At the beginning of the school year, parents will be given an opportunity to call school officials to “opt out” of disclosing their child’s personal information.

The Selective Service had complained that until recently, it was difficult to get city officials to make recruiters welcome in their schools. (New York Post)

Protesters occupy mayor’s
office in Seattle
Seattle police officers arrested 23 protesters for trespassing July 17 after they occupied the mayor’s office for five hours and did not leave when City Hall closed. The protesters stormed into the 12th-floor lobby of the Municipal Building demanding to talk with Mayor Greg Nickels and calling on him to follow through with City Council plans to study allegations of racial profiling by police. The mayor was not in, according to a spokeswoman.

The protesters demanded that the mayor talk to them, in person or over the phone, and promise that he would sign the anti-racial profiling resolution already passed by Seattle City Council, which calls for data collection on all traffic stops and video cameras in police cars, and commit to pushing for a strong, effective, independent civilian review board in the upcoming negotiations with the Seattle Police Guild.

The event was organized by the People’s Coalition for Justice (PCJ). The PCJ, a multiracial group, has demonstrated against police shootings and for public access to city meetings. The group canvassed Seattle neighborhoods earlier this month, polling 2,000 people about their feelings toward police. The group said 87 percent of those contacted said they had no confidence that the Seattle police serve and protect people equally. (Oread Daily)