Good week in news
Posted on Friday, May 9, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/225173/
The Constitution of the United
States has had a pretty good week
if headlines are any indication. OK, so it was only a couple of headlines, but surely that’s enough to encourage other conscientious citizens to resist tyranny. If tyranny is too strong a word for you, let’s just call it governmental “overinvolvement.” That’s the term the U. S. Justice Department used back in the 1970 s when certain armed employees of the Little Rock Police Department overstepped their authority a few too many times to avoid Washington’s notice. Of course, in those post-Watergate days, Washington was trying to repair its image with the American public, not flex its muscles. These days, it’s often left up to citizens to sound the alarm when governmental entities go too far. That’s what happened in two instances that made the news earlier this week, one involving a local judge’s order and the other involving one of the Bush administration’s infamous national security letters, or NSLs.
First things first: I can’t quite put my finger on what made me think of my 1984 trip to what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics when I read the story headlined, “Her banishment order earns judge a scolding.” Possibly, it was the fact that on the same day it appeared in my morning paper, our Editorial page editor, Paul Greenberg, mentioned a 1983 visit he’d made to the U. S. S. R. in his column, “Flashback.”
Suffice to say, I had a flashback of my own in reading about what prompted the Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission to issue a letter of admonishment to Elizabeth Wise, a part-time district court judge in Perry County. For just a moment, I was back in the lobby of that hole-in-the-wall hotel in Frunze—now Bishkek—watching helplessly as my newfound friend wept.
We were a motley group—activists, preachers, retirees, lawyers, business people, housewives, me—brought together under the aegis of the Ground Zero anti-nuclear organization in the name of peace, but most of us were there primarily because of the adventure. I’m sure the group leader would disagree with that characterization, but it’s my impression that only a handful were card-carrying peaceniks, if that many. Most of us had never been behind the Iron Curtain and we were eager to see for ourselves how the people there lived and, yes, what they really thought about us. We were, in a word, curious.
All except for one, my aforementioned traveling companion. Oh, sure, she was interested and engaged every step of the way, but it went deeper than that. She was on a pilgrimage. Her beloved grandmother had been born in Siberia, if memory serves, and she very much wanted to see that place. Our tour didn’t include Siberia, but never having been there and positive that she was of an age and a circumstance never to be able to try to get there again, she’d decided to get as close as she could and then petition the government to let her do so.
Our Intourist guide Natasha tried to make that happen, tried very hard, I believe, but glasnost was a new concept and didn’t include freedom of movement for Westerners in its definition. If you didn’t have a visa, you couldn’t veer from your pre-approved itinerary. At every turn, the response was always the same: Nyet.
What’s the saying, so near and yet so far ? It was outrageous, ridiculous and incomprehensible that a government could tell anyone where he or she could go if he or she had the means to get there. Ah, well, that’s Russia for you, the lady’s sympathizers agreed. Thank God we’re going home to the good old U. S. of A.
The judge in Perry County was admonished for banishing a man from the county and instructing authorities to arrest him any time he entered even if there were no active warrants against him.
“We knew there were some legal issues with that,” the chief deputy of the sheriff’s office there said. “We had some reports of him being back in Perry County, but we didn’t ever pick him up.”
Good old U. S. of A.
The other headline that caught my eye was datelined San Francisco: “FBI foiled in try to get data on Net library user.” What happened was that the FBI withdrew its NSL seeking the name, address and online activity of a patron of the Internet Archive after the digital library filed a lawsuit to block the action.
As The Washington Post reported, this is one of only three known instances in which the FBI has backed off from such a demand. The operative word here is “known.” NSLs, search warrants not subject to judicial approval before being served, bar the recipient from disclosing the order’s existence. Apparently, the FBI blinked rather than risk a court ruling that this warrant, if not all such warrants, not to mention the insufferable USAPATRIOT Act, is unconstitutional. Good old U. S. of A.
—–––––•–––––—Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page.