The Scars of 9/11

 

By David K. Shipler 

                About a dozen years after September 11, 2001, I asked a class of college undergraduates what they remembered about the attacks. They had been kids, and those who answered remembered most vividly their parents’ reactions, not their own. It was a fascinating illustration of one dynamic of trauma: the response of those around you figures into how you carry the injury forward. So it has been with the country’s behavior in the last twenty years.

                Chaya Roth, a Holocaust survivor whose mother and sister were repeatedly sheltered and saved by non-Jews as they fled across Europe, eventually recognized the healing effect of the courageous generosity—a post-traumatic syndrome of another kind. “That is why I never lost faith or hope in people,” she told me. “If one goes through difficult times, but comes out of these alive, it is because in the last analysis there was someone who provided help.”

                What has happened among Americans? Yes, at first we rallied in an uplifting sense of kinship. Three days after 9/11, as I drove to Kent State in Ohio for a colloquium on race, every American flag hanging from an overpass brought a rush of mournful pride, almost tears. At the university, during a small reception, a professor who was surely a star in her church choir suddenly began singing “America the Beautiful.” Some wept openly, others wept within, both in sorrow and in celebration of the bonds of harmony.

 And then? The administration of President George W. Bush, combined with local police departments across the country, proceeded to inflict damage on civil liberties that no subsequent president or Congress has been brave enough to repair. The FBI was instructed to investigate every citizen’s tip, no matter how ludicrous or obviously based on personal vendetta. One FBI agent told me that some of his colleagues shared his distaste for the strategy, worrying that innocents would be targeted.

As indeed they were. Muslims were surveilled, hounded, and jailed on the slimmest of pretexts, and held for months during slow-paced background checks that uncovered no terrorists but might naturally have sown the seeds of antipathy toward the United States. The consequences for those illegally in the country were so severe that abused wives feared calling the police, and some undocumented Pakistani residents fled from the US to Canada seeking asylum. When Canadian authorities couldn’t process them fast enough, they crammed into churches and homes in northern Vermont or took refuge in their own vehicles in the deep of winter.

The Next Trump

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Whether Donald Trump runs again in 2024 or fades from politics, his enigmatic hold on tens of millions of Americans will be a lesson to the next demagogue. Much will be learned from Trump’s successes in manipulating huge swaths of the public, and also from his failures to translate his autocratic desires into practical power.

                Just the fact that 72 percent of Republicans tell pollsters that they believe Trump’s discredited claim that he won the 2020 election is a mark of his perverse success in selling the Big Lie. His outsized personality, his ridiculous assertions, his coarse and insulting talent for channeling resentments felt by masses of alienated citizens placed him so far above reproach in so many minds that his obvious corruption and damage to the country’s reputation and national security made no impact on the committed. After four years of falsehoods, incompetence, and immorality, he won eleven million more votes than in 2016 (up from 63 to 74 million).

                He has deftly played the dual role of tough guy and victim, of swaggering bully and persecuted prey. This is a skillful embodiment of the wishes and fears of the millions, mostly white working class, who feel marginalized and dishonored while yearning for the wealth and strength that Trump appears to possess. He has given them the dignity that many feel they have been denied by the liberal, urban, multiethnic society that their country is becoming.

Despite his serial fabrications, his lack of moral boundaries made him seem authentic and unscripted. He was a paradox: an outsider but a pampered part of the corporate elite, a non-politician whose every move was politically calculated for his own benefit, a drainer of the “swamp” who wallowed in corrupt self-dealing. He was right when he said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters.  

But because Trump did not understand government and antagonized authoritative agencies, he was often stymied as he tried to rule dictatorially, above the law. He crudely attacked the intelligence agencies, the military, the FBI, and other power centers, precisely those that an autocrat would need to muster under his control. His impatience and incompetence stymied many of his efforts to shortcut the due process built into the regulatory system.

Protecting Public Health and Civil Liberties

By David K. Shipler

                The novel coronavirus is giving rise to novel surveillance tools. They can help contain the sweep of COVID-19, which is an urgent need, but the monitoring and categorization of citizens could also survive the pandemic with undue invasions of privacy. Legal safeguards are necessary to make sure that doesn’t happen.

                Innovative hardware and software, some rushed into production by profiteers, are aimed at recording and storing peoples’ physiological functions, locations, and immunity levels. As in any new technology, error rates are high, and the consequences of mistakes will be magnified if used to require quarantine or exclude non-immune people from jobs, housing, courthouses, and public transportation. Furthermore, unless information is automatically erased or sequestered, medical records could be combined in databases of extensive personal files accessible to law enforcement and immigration authorities.

The virtue of monitoring is self-evident during the crisis; less obvious are the longer term dangers of doing so. With no treatment or vaccine, self-quarantine and social distance are primary means of curtailing the spread. If people don’t know they’re sick—and neither do their fellow workers, diners, shoppers, passengers, theatergoers, sunbathers, gym users, and the like—the disease cannot be contained as public spaces reopen.

This is a matter of security, and as seen after 9/11, public acceptance of extraordinary measures soars in the moment, then persists long after the need abates. The Patriot Act, which Congress passed hastily in 2001, created exceptions to legal protections that had been enacted in the 1970s. Government agencies had been violating the Fourth Amendment by spying on antiwar campaigners, civil rights leaders, and other political activists. But it’s been nearly two decades since the 9/11 attacks, and Congress has applied only minor patches to the holes the Patriot Act tore in the fabric of civil liberties.

The same thing could happen now.

America Enters a Fourth World

By David K. Shipler

            Beginning at noon Friday, when Donald Trump becomes the most childish, reckless, and truthless president in modern American history, the United States takes the first step into a new category of nations: those once mighty and noble that are falling into frailty and disrepute. Unless our institutions and traditions turn out to be stronger than our people—which is entirely possible—we will become the charter member of what can be called the Fourth World.

            It is a place of undoing. It is a place where moral values of the common good are picked apart, strand by strand, until only the shreds of caring and justice remain. It is where progress is dismantled: progress—albeit fitful and incomplete—in mobilizing the society through government to protect the impoverished from utter ruin, the innocent from false imprisonment, minorities from tyranny, children from hunger, families from dangerous foods and medicines and polluted air and water, and the earth from the end-stage of catastrophic global warming.

            There is nothing divinely ordained about America’s greatness. Once Trump and the radicals who will populate most of his cabinet finish their efforts to destroy what has been painstakingly constructed over decades, it will take a generation to recover. That is the actual time when it will be appropriate to plead, “Make America Great Again!”

            The Fourth World will come after the Third World, a term coined in 1952 by Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer, to mean poor, undeveloped countries “ignored, exploited, scorned, like the Third Estate,” he wrote in L’Observateur. His reference to the Third Estate dated back to the gathering storm of the French Revolution, when Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes used it to refer to the common people, as opposed to the clergy (First Estate) and the nobility (Second Estate).

Let History Judge

By David K. Shipler

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.

                                    --James Madison

            In the Revolution of 2016, alienated Americans have set the stage for a hard lesson in how democracy can be used to disable democracy. It would not happen at once, but as gradually as if the constitutional body were afflicted by an autoimmune disease. The curing power of the people’s voice would be turned against itself. The strong hand at the top, so fervently desired by the forgotten and ignored, would evolve into a counter-revolution of authoritarian demagoguery, which even a tradition of pluralism could not withstand. This is the gloomiest scenario.

            There is another scenario, however. It envisions a successful test of the ingenious American system, imagined and created to separate, check, and limit the power to reign and abuse. The Constitution restrains and holds. The president’s autocratic impulses are shackled to the rule of law.

            Nothing in Donald Trump’s pronouncements, policies, and behavior so far suggests that he grasps or accepts the constraints of the Framers’ inspired concepts. He fired up masses of aggrieved citizens by promising them decrees, not proposals. He talked as if he could do whatever suited him, as if no legislative branch existed, no courts stood to thwart his whims. He has recognized no principle of protecting minority interests. He has nurtured a cult of personality more suitable to a dictatorship than a democracy.

            Therefore, it is reasonable to expect in him a president who will push far past the boundaries of his constitutional prerogatives by trying to politicize law enforcement and the judiciary until they are mere shadows of justice. It is logical to expect a president who will insult and dismiss citizens along racial, gender, and religious lines, as he did during his campaign, and continue to give license to the hate-mongers among us. It is likely that he will use the bully pulpit of the presidency to divide and diminish this once-great nation, and even to bring dissidents to subservience.

The Immortality of Presidents

By David K. Shipler

            History is supposed to have an unerring eye for ultimate accuracy. From the distance of time, historians are expected to act as the final judges, to cut ruthlessly through to the truth. It is fitting to reflect on this now, during a week of renewed mourning for President John F. Kennedy, who was felled in Dallas by an assassin half a century ago.

He and Jackie were dazzling. They tapped Americans’ vestigial yearning for royalty, the excitement of stylish celebrity, and the deep need for optimistic commitment to high purpose. Yet as popular as Kennedy was—his Gallup approval rating averaged 70.1 percent—he was never so widely admired as he became after his death. Indeed, Gallup’s graph of his rating shows a gradual, yearlong downward slope to 58 percent the week before he was killed—still higher than President Obama has enjoyed since the first six months of taking office, but a significant decline nonetheless. It followed a sharp bump up 13 months earlier after JFK faced down the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis. (Presidents’ percentages typically rise after a national security crisis, as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s did after Pearl Harbor and George W. Bush’s following 9/11.)

One is tempted to wonder what course the line on that graph would have taken had JFK lived and had been able to win a second term.

The Navy Yard and the NSA

By David K. Shipler

            With Congress locked in an ideological impasse, the U.S. government may look weak and bumbling, but it has never been more powerful in collecting personal information about Americans and foreigners—the guilty and the innocent alike. So how was it that the Navy knew less about Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis than the press was able to learn in a few hours? How come Alexis kept his Secret clearance despite police reports that he twice fired a gun, claimed to be hearing voices, and thought his brain was being manipulated by extra-low frequency radiation?

How did the Boston Marathon attackers escape detection, when one of them had been called to the FBI’s attention? And the would-be Christmas Day “underwear” bomber after his father warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria? And—given the global reach of the National Security Agency—the al-Shabab squad in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall? The answers are specific to each case, but among them is this: A dozen years after the 9/11 attacks, the government has still not learned the central lesson of that failure, which is not about amassing information but, rather, how to connect the dots among disparate points of data that have been filtered and focused. The lesson has remained unlearned partly because the indiscriminate collection accumulates unprocessed information so rapidly in such volume as to be practically useless.

The "Expectation of Privacy" and Surveillance in the 21st Century

As published at thenation.com June 17, 2013

By David K. Shipler

In 1928, the Supreme Court ruled that no warrants were needed for police to listen in on phone conversations, because voices were transmitted outdoors, beyond the private property that was protected by the Fourth Amendment. “The language of the amendment cannot be extended and expanded to include telephone wires reaching to the whole world from the defendant’s house or office,” the majority wrote in Olmstead v. United States. “The intervening wires are not part of his house or office, any more than are the highways along which they are stretched.”

If this sounds absurd, we can hope that today’s arguments on the forfeiture of privacy in a digital age will someday sound equally ridiculous. The telephone was still a relatively new technology in 1928, as cellphones and the Internet are today, and the law had not yet adjusted to its use. It took thirty-nine years for the Supreme Court to catch up with the times and reverse Olmstead. In Katz v. United States, the Court devised a new test to determine the Fourth Amendment’s jurisdiction—“first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable,’” as Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote in a concurring opinion. Thereafter, wiretaps required warrants.

DNA: The Tilted Supreme Court

By David K. Shipler

             Four years ago, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that people who proclaim their innocence have no constitutional right after their convictions to demand that DNA tests be done on the evidence in their cases, although plenty of guilty verdicts for rape and murder have been thrown out because mismatches have later been discovered. Yesterday, the Court ruled 5-4 that people arrested for “serious” crimes have no constitutional right to withhold their DNA from the police, even though the DNA is used for fishing expeditions into unsolved crimes unrelated to the reasons for the arrests.

Together, the two rulings create a tilted playing field in the criminal justice system: The individual is compelled, but the state is not. Anyone taken into custody (and presumed innocent) is compelled to give up his DNA at the outset but after conviction cannot compel prosecutors to give up the DNA found in the semen, blood, or other tissue from the crime scene.

The prosecutors’ obligations to test evidence for DNA rest in a variety of state laws, the Court decided in 2009, not in the Constitution’s guarantee of due process or the defendant’s right to summon “witnesses in his favor,” as the Sixth Amendment provides. The state laws are a mixed bag, and not always much protection; some deny convicts’ right to DNA if they confessed, although about one-quarter of the convictions reversed on the basis of DNA evidence involve false confessions, the Innocence Project reports.

The odd result is that the Court finds DNA the quintessential identifier in one ruling and a dispensable piece of evidence in the other. It is critical when it serves the state and merely optional when it serves the individual. This hypocrisy is mirrored by many prosecutors across the country who hail the precision of genetic coding to discover the criminal, yet resist its use to exonerate the wrongly convicted.

The inconsistency, the failure to bolster the system’s truth-seeking purpose, is reflected by the most colorful Justice, Antonin Scalia, who has been on both sides of the question. He joined the majority in the 2009 decision denying convicts the right to test crime-scene evidence, but in the latest case, Maryland v. King, he blustered sardonically in an entertaining dissent against the majority’s decision to uphold the Maryland law—which had been struck down by the state’s Supreme Court—requiring DNA to be taken without a warrant after an arrest. He warned of sweeping consequences, and he may be right.

Courts usually proceed incrementally, each decision building on precedent, and with DNA collection now approved for those arrested and presumed innocent, it will be a smaller step to wider use, as Scalia noted. DNA is a tool of infallible identification, after all. Why not require it for a driver’s license, for passing through airport security, for enrolling in public school? If lab techniques improve to speed up processing and reduce cost, a national database containing everyone’s DNA will someday be conceivable, and probably less constitutionally dubious than before this ruling. 

That cuts a chunk out of the Fourth Amendment’s provision for “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Taking a swab from inside a person’s cheek is a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, both sides agreed, and the majority found it reasonable. The trouble is, under judicial precedent a search normally requires individualized suspicion to a degree that depends on the circumstances—to search your home, for example, requires probable cause and a warrant signed by a judge; to frisk you without a warrant as you walk down the street requires a police officer’s “reasonable suspicion” that you are armed.

The Fourth Amendment has been chipped away as more and more suspicionless searches have been allowed by the Court, often with Scalia’s acquiescence: He voted for random drug tests of children in school choirs and other extra-curricular activities, for instance. The erosion has been helped along by the supposedly liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, who puzzled some commentators by joining with the majority on taking DNA after arrests. But nobody should be confused. Breyer has never been a big defender of the Fourth Amendment. He also endorsed suspicionless drug testing of schoolchildren, which prompted the plaintiff who lost, Lindsay Earls, to challenge him politely several years later. When Breyer visited Dartmouth, where she was then a junior, she asked whether justices ever recognized that they’d made a mistake. Yes, Breyer answered, “but not in your case.”

The Fourth Amendment was written as a bulwark, but it has proved a fragile restraint in an age of easy digital surveillance, biometric advances, and sweeping concerns about crime and terrorism. “I don’t think that there’s much left of the Fourth Amendment in criminal law,” Federal District Judge Paul L. Friedman told me several years ago—a startling statement from a respected judge who presides over drug and gun trials.

So behind this fading shield, DNA is a double-edged sword, useful to prosecutors and defendants alike—provided they can both wield it equally. In the small fraction of crimes where DNA is available, it is a marvelous tool for getting to the truth and reducing errors, for identifying the rapist and murderer, and for freeing the innocent.

But that won’t work if the DNA database contains evidence from only unsolved crimes. If we’re going to check all arrestees’ DNA, we also need a database of evidence from crimes we think we’ve solved, so that erroneous convictions can be uncovered. The law enforcement officials celebrating yesterday’s ruling would earn some integrity by pledging to establish such a resource. 

Obama's Search For the Next Era

By David K. Shipler

            Perhaps the most salient element in President Obama’s speech on national security last week was his attempt to begin weaning the United States from its post-9/11 mindset. If he pursues the effort and revises policy accordingly, he might help the country move away from fear and back toward the constitutional principles that have been sacrificed unnecessarily. This would end an era that is begging to be left behind.

            But his record has not been encouraging, and the environment he faces is not helpful. The problem is a mixture of reality and beliefs. Fear has to abate, but it won’t when real terrorism maims and kills at a Boston Marathon, or when the word “terrorism” is applied too broadly, as Republicans and some conservative pundits demand. Hardly anyone is comforted to learn, as Obama explained, that the threats now come from atomized al-Qaeda offshoots and radicalized individuals, rather than by centralized direction.

Yes, as he noted, that looks more like the baseline of terrorism the world has endured since long before 9/11. But it is not enough for Obama to say so. As he may have learned from earlier attempts to change emotional dynamics through speechmaking, actions speak louder than words. His well-crafted 2009 Cairo speech extending an open hand to the Muslim world was not followed by intensive, inventive policy. Four years later, on the other hand, his recent address in Jerusalem on Israeli-Palestinian peace is being followed by Secretary of State John Kerry’s shuttle diplomacy—a good effort whose outcome is not yet clear.

So let’s see if Obama follows his words on national security. He might consider how his administration’s behavior contributes to the problem of belief—namely, the public’s belief that we are still in the war whose end he now wishes to declare.

Human Rights: Wiping Away the Smirk

By David K. Shipler

            It used to be sadly comical when Russia took a holier-than-thou posture on human rights. But the United States has fallen so far that Americans don’t get to smirk much anymore. In the recent tit-for-tat over rights abusers who are being declared unwelcome in each other’s countries, at least three of the former top U.S. officials fingered by the Russians are, in fact, true violators of basic liberties. They have been branded legitimately. In the aftermath of today’s bombings at the Boston Marathon, it is worth remembering how easy it is, in the face of such tragedy, to deviate from the rule of law.

            The three are David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, who evaded the law and the Constitution to engineer torture and illegal surveillance; John Yoo, who wrote infamous memos for Bush’s Justice Department defining torture so narrowly as to give the CIA practically a free hand; and Geoffrey D. Miller, who as an army major general commanded both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons, where suspects were abused and humiliated, generating iconic photographs.

            They are among the eighteen Americans listed by Russia.

Will Obama the Constitutional Lawyer Please Stand Up?

By David K. Shipler
     Published in The Nation, issue of Feb. 11, 2013
There’s something about Barack Obama that induces

Americans to imagine what they cannot see. The right

envisions a vile socialist, while many on the left picture

an inspired liberal, politically restrained in his first term

but now free to pursue his true beliefs.

No hard evidence exists to sustain either view. Obama

behaves like a centrist who leans tentatively left on certain

social programs but boldly right on military force and civil

liberties. His supporters, who have watched him duplicate and

codify some of the Bush administration’s most damaging civil

liberties violations, are now reduced to wishful thinking that an

authentic Obama will soon step forward and return the country

to the constitutional footing that was abandoned after 9/11.

Civil Liberties: Liberals Give Obama a Pass

By David K. Shipler

Published at Salon.com Nov. 3, 2012

Let us stipulate, as lawyers like to say, that President Obama has a deplorable record on civil liberties, one that threatens long-term damage to the country’s constitutional culture.

Why, then, has his base of support not been eroded decisively? Why have so many on the left fallen silent, after railing against George W. Bush’s rights violations, as Obama has prolonged and codified most of the same practices? And why have so few on the right, riding a groundswell of resentment toward big government, failed to resent the biggest governmental intrusions into personal privacy since the FBI’s domestic spying during the Cold War?

Legalizing Drugs Would Bolster Constitutional Rights

By David K. Shipler

If Secret Service agents hadn’t infatuated the American press last weekend by cavorting with prostitutes in Colombia, there might have been space and time for newspapers and broadcasters to dwell on a more significant event that took place, also behind closed doors, at the Latin American summit. It was the discussion about partially legalizing narcotics to undermine the lethal drug cartels that have turned parts of the hemisphere into war zones.

This is not about to happen, obviously. As a politician in an election year, President Obama naturally rejected the idea. But the leaders—pushed by President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, President Felipe Calderon of Mexico, and President Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala—did order up a study by the Organization of American States. Desperation about drug violence has driven the decriminalization proposal to the highest levels of certain governments.

The arguments for and against legalization are familiar, but there is one in favor that has rarely been made: The war on drugs has also been a war on the U.S. Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Long after 9/11: Plato’s Shadows

By David K. Shipler

I recently asked a class of undergraduate journalism students what they remembered about September 11, 2001, since most of them were only eight or nine at the time.

Nobody chose to answer except one young woman, who said that she remembered her parents’ reactions. She did not elaborate, but it seemed that what stayed with her, more than the scenes from lower Manhattan, were the faces and voices of her mother and father.

Inevitably, as generation supersedes generation, that clear and terrible morning will be interpreted through the country’s reactions.

The Secret Service As Thought Police

By David K. Shipler

A case of security vs. speech, before the Supreme Court for oral argument today, may set important standards for law enforcement agents who make misjudgments in the heat of the moment. As usual on matters of civil liberties, the Obama Administration is on the wrong side.

Under President Obama’s predecessor, the Secret Service was mobilized to suppress political speech. To create glowing television portrayals of President George W. Bush wherever he spoke, White House staffers screened out people wearing anti-Bush T-shirts, had the Secret Service expel them from public presidential events, and even cruised parking lots looking for hostile bumper stickers so the cars’ occupants could be turned away once they reached the door. The Secret Service, which is supposed to protect the president from physical harm, protected him from political dissent as well, by instructing local police to restrict demonstrators to distant “free speech zones,” usually out of sight of both the president and the cameras.

The Permanent Emergency

By David K. Shipler

When President George W. Bush went outside existing law to fight terrorism, his unilateral, ad hoc measures were so lacking in authority as to be vulnerable to political pushback and constitutional challenge. They had a transitory quality, cobbled together hastily to address sudden danger. When he ordered the National Security Agency to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and secretly monitor communications without warrants, when he declared prisoners enemy combatants who could be held indefinitely without lawyers or trials, and when he avoided Congress and established military tribunals on his own, he faced an uproar from both the left and the libertarian right, and the prospect of reversal in the courts.

But now, more than a decade after 9/11, most of the policies that once seemed so extraordinary have been codified in law and practice, and recently portrayed by Attorney General Eric Holder as permanent, justifiable features of the legal landscape. This sea change in the constitutional culture will be difficult to undo, and it may lead eventually to a harsh judgment by history.

Church, State, and Santorum

By David K. Shipler

Given the history of religious persecution in colonial America, not to mention elsewhere in today’s world, it’s hard to think why Rick Santorum and his acolytes would so zealously wish to undermine what President Thomas Jefferson in 1802 called the Constitution’s “wall of separation between Church & State.” Jefferson coined the famous, controversial phrase in answer to a worried letter from leaders of the Baptist minority in Connecticut, where religious freedom was not an inherent right but merely a privilege granted by the legislature—one that could be withdrawn.

It had also been Baptists, in Virginia, who had inspired the First Amendment. Baptist preachers there had been jailed at the behest of the Anglican Church, and the growing Baptist voting bloc feared oppression by the fledgling federal government. Their leaders pressed a certain congressional candidate in 1788—James Madison—to abandon his ambivalence about amending the new Constitution. Madison hadn’t seen the need for amendments spelling out specific rights, but he did see a need for votes in a tough election. We know the result: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

‘I Confess!’ Why Do People Admit to Things They Haven’t Done?

By David K. Shipler
(Published in the New York Times Sunday Review of Feb. 26, 2012, online Feb. 23)

Several months after Antonio Ramirez was shot seven times in Oakland, Calif., the police picked up a frightened 16-year-old named Felix, isolated him in an interrogation room late at night without a lawyer, rejected his pleas to see his mother, and harangued him until he began to tell them what he thought they wanted to hear.

They wanted a diagram of the crime scene, he later told his court-appointed lawyer, Richard Foxall, but whatever he drew was so inaccurate that the police never produced it. When he described escaping in one direction after the killing, they corrected him, because they knew from witnesses that the shooter had gone the opposite way. When he didn’t mention an alley nearby, they told him about it, and he incorporated it into his statement. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said one officer, as Felix recalled to his lawyer.

Obama Toys With the Constitution

By David K. Shipler

President Obama has adopted one of George W. Bush’s most troubling tactics, roundly denounced by liberals when a conservative Republican used it, but now generally excused by liberals when employed by a Democrat in the White House. It is the “signing statement,” a litany of reservations and reinterpretations of a bill, issued by a president as he signs it into law.

Obama did this on the last day of 2011 to soften the immediate effect of the military detention powers he had just been awarded by Congress. He said he would “not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens,” as the new law allows—but he signed a bill empowering any president to do so anyway. He rejected the statute’s requirement that foreign suspects be held by the military, saying he would use his option under the law to waive the mandate broadly, both for individuals and for “appropriate categories of cases.” Nevertheless, he signed a bill that would impose no such restraint on any president.