We’re going to try to get more deeply into this. But I at least wanted to touch on the story so word of this shocking incident gets wider attention. Walter F. Murphy is a legendary expert on constitutional theory and the Court. I actually took his class in college almost twenty years ago. Yesterday at the Balkanization blog, Mark Graber published a letter from Murphy in which he explains his experience finding himself on the Terrorist Watch List.
Now, we’ve all heard stories at this point about all sorts of different people ending up on this list who obviously have no credible connection to any terrorist organization. Often it’s a matter of a mispelled name or someone having the same name as someone else. And often the stories are treated as oddities or examples of how randomly names get added, as though the issue is the poor management of the list and disorganization of the process of compiling it. But that doesn’t appear to have been the case here.
Let’s pick up Murphy’s description of what happened …
“When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk. At this point, I should note that I am not only the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) but also a retired Marine colonel. I fought in the Korean War as a young lieutenant, was wounded, and decorated for heroism. I remained a professional soldier for more than five years and then accepted a commission as a reserve office, serving for an additional 19 years.”
“I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: “Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that.” I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. “That’ll do it,” the man said. ”
“After carefully examining my credentials, the clerk asked if he could take them to TSA officials. I agreed. He returned about ten minutes later and said I could have a boarding pass, but added: “I must warn you, they’re going to ransack your luggage.” On my return flight, I had no problem with obtaining a boarding pass, but my luggage was “lost.” Airlines do lose a lot of luggage and this “loss” could have been a mere coincidence. In light of previous events, however, I’m a tad skeptical.”
Given who Professor Murphy is, I have no doubt this is an accurate account of his particular experience. And it would seem that the people who actually work with the list on a daily basis treat it as a given that the most innocuous and obviously protected forms of criticism of the Bush administration routinely get you on the watch list. That pretty much confirms the truth of what most of us would probably have thought was a harebrained conspiracy theory. Doesn’t this deserve more scrutiny?
Late Update: This is apparently the lecture that may have landed Murphy on the list.
Even Later Update: At Wired’s Threat Level blog, Ryan Singel says he’s sure Murphy didn’t get put on any list because of any 1st Amendment protected speech.
At TPMCafe, Ken Baer says that whatever the ins and outs of Syria policy, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was wrong to travel to Damascus because it threatens to erode the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy. But I don’t think this is a rational concern. Ken draws the analogy to Jimmy Carter’s semi-freelance diplomacy during the 1994 North Korea crisis. But these two cases are not remotely comparable — Carter went to try to negotiate a deal in the midst of a tense diplomatic stand-off that risked slipping into war. To discuss these cases in the same breath makes no sense.
The simple fact is that senior members of Congress routinely go on trips abroad to meet heads of state and government. When they are sufficiently senior, their trips inevitably have diplomatic dimensions in addition to fact-finding ones. To make a distinction between fact-finding and diplomacy in a case like this is to misunderstand not only how congressional delegations do operate but how they should operate.
More generally, this sort of event itself is actually quite common in US history — trips by members of Congress take on more visibility when the president is extremely weak or discredited at home, both of which are the case today. President Bush’s self-immolation (and not just self-) on the domestic and international stages is his doing, not Pelosi’s. And there is no need for the Speaker to modulate her activity to take his invalid status into account.
There seems to be a real effort to salvage the Pelosi ‘story’ from its maculate conception as a Republican talking point. But I’m afraid it cannot be done. At the core it’s pure bamboozlement.
Since the U.S. attorney scandal implicates practically the whole of the Justice Department’s leadership, the reins have been passed to Paul Clement, the Solicitor General, who’s now in charge of how the department handles things.
So it was apparently his call to keep Monica Goodling on the payroll even after she’d pleaded the Fifth. That’s a good start.
State Department refusing to say whether Nancy Pelosi’s Syria trip constituted a violation of the Logan Act.
More like this: Richard Holbrooke tears the media a new one for its dismal coverage of fraudulent Pelosi Syria trip story.
Okay, I write a lot of media criticism about very important topics, botched stories which could change the fate of nations and all that. Now, admittedly this is a silly story, about which nothing really matters at all. But it’s such a monumentally botched headline I just couldn’t help writing a post about it.
Here I am with my wife trying to enjoy some rare hours in the evening when our four month old Sam is actually asleep. And I go to the CNN page to catch the latest news. And what do I see but this shocking headline: “Howard K. Stern hires lawyer in JonBenet case.”
So I’m thinking, holy crap, first he’s accused of killing Anna-Nicole’s son, then Anna-Nicole, now it turns out he killed JonBenet too? I mean, it’s like he’s a one-man serial killer on the payroll of Star magazine. So I click through the link not quite sure what I’m going to find.
But alas it’s rather more prosaic. Stern is hiring Lin Wood, who represented the Ramsey family in the JonBenet case to sue media companies he says are “falsely implicating him in the death of the former Playboy Playmate and her son, Daniel.”
So I guess that would be more like lawyer from the JonBenet case rather than in the JonBenet case. Ahhh, my kingdom for a preposition, or a brain.