Friday Video: Habeas Corpus (what??)

8 Responses to "Friday Video: Habeas Corpus (what??)"

• Comment by: Karen

  1 11/3/06 5:22 PM | Comment Link |

  Great stuff! :-) Keith is quickly becoming a hero of mine. He’s written some fantastic columns about religion and politics, as well.

• Comment by: Eliza

  2 11/3/06 10:50 PM | Comment Link |

  I hadn’t heard of him before running into this video – have now seen a bit more of what he’s up to, & like it. (Did you know he has spent a fair chunk of his career as a sports newcaster? Seems like a pretty different focus, to me!). He reminds me alot of Jon Stewart, but I found this clip more informative than stuff from The Daily Show.

• Comment by: Eliza

  3 11/3/06 10:51 PM | Comment Link |

  He’s written some fantastic columns about religion and politics, as well.

  Karen, any specific columns of his you’d recommend? (And are they on the website for this show, or have you seen them somewhere else?)

• Comment by: David H

  4 11/4/06 7:29 AM | Comment Link |

  IMDB has a quick bio on Keith. I became a fan during his Sportscenter days. The IMDB bio seems to suggest he left ESPN because he thought himself to big for that network at the time. Interestingly, the Sept. 11 attacks brought him back to doing newsy current events stuff and also sparked a public apology to ESPN and all the people he left there.

  Here is an article at MSNBC on Habeas Corpus that is pretty well written.

  The whole thing with Habeas Corpus is that most Americans don’t have much idea what it is (if they have even heard of it), but it is a crucial foundational concept behind the U.S. idea of freedom and representative government. Its potential abridgement by the Bush administration shows either a serious lack of judgment or a nearly complete ignorance of its meaning and importance. It should be noted that this law seems likely to come before the U.S. Supreme Court in the not too distant future (see articles below).

  Other stuff on Military Commission Act:
  http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2006/11/military-commissions-act-argued.php

  http://thesouthend.typepad.com/tsenews/2006/10/military_commis.html

  http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2006/october25/human-102506.html

  http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061017-1.html

• Comment by: Karen

  5 11/4/06 12:39 PM | Comment Link |

  Yeah, I always knew him as a sportscaster. So it took quite a while to get it to stick in my mind that he’s now a political commentator. I watch his show, Countdown, once in a while.

  Here’s a column he did in January, in response to being called out personally by Focus on the Family during the SpongeBob controversy. I liked it so well I kept it:

  BLOGGERMANN
  Keith Olbermann
  Saturday, January 29

  DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR AT “FOCUS ON THE FAMILY”

  NEW YORK – Mother used to insist that there were two things you should never talk about in public: politics and religion.

  Now, of course, that’s all we talk about. But the moral guidance still rings
  loudly all these years later, and it always makes me a reluctant conversant,
  even if I apologize to Mom in advance.

  However, the Three-Card Monte Players at Dr. James Dobson’s “Focus On The Family” have reopened the can of worms that is SpongeBobGate, and have focused not on the family but on me, and in so doing embarrassed themselves and undermined the validity of their own concerns.

  Dobson, you will recall, joined the singularly inoffensive animated
  character “SpongeBob SquarePants” to his conspiracy theories of a
  “pro-homosexual” agenda, in order to get headlines. When he got those
  headlines, he promptly complained about getting them. Dobson, like many
  other exploiters of Amoral Values, ran immediately to the easiest way out of a stupid fix of his own creation: he blamed the big old ugly media.

  His website asked readers to send emails of protest to me and four other
  reporters who had covered this foofery – it even provided them with an
  email-generator with which to do so. But because I responded to nearly all
  of those missives with something other than “I’m sorry, please don’t send me to hell,” Dobson has determined I need more exposure.

  This time it is in the form of a delightful piece of fiction crafted by
  somebody called “Gary Schneeberger, editor,” of “Family News In Focus.” It is charmingly titled “Influencing Olbermann” and I’m vastly tickled by the
  compliment, and more over, by the cascade of factual errors that follows.

  Schneeberger observes that I’ve “devoted six pages on (my) Web site – over two days – to savaging the men and women who sent more than 30,000 e-mails through our CitizenLink Action Center.” We’ll skip the incongruity of pages in a blog and focus on that 30,000 number. Schneeberger does not state this (it would be inconvenient) but that number is clearly a total of emails generated to me and the four other reporters targeted. That would be an average of about 6,000 apiece, and now I feel left out, because the actual number received here is less than 2,000, and that includes 10%-20% blanks and 5-10% letters supporting our coverage and denouncing “Focus On The Family” as, in the words of one correspondent, “the American Taliban.”

  Still, let’s give ‘em that 6,000 figure they claim. That’s embarrassingly
  small for an email generating device, especially over the course of five
  days. Most of my blog entries induce about 1,000 hand-crafted emails, and
  during the post-election period the responses ran closer to 5,000 per day.
  If you’re setting up a spam campaign and providing people with everything up to and including cut-and-pastes to stick inside the message generator, and you can’t do better than 1,200 a day, you should give up and open a 7-11 somewhere.

  I might add before I’m accused of trying to answer philosophy with addition,
  that Mr. Schneeberger’s piece claims the spam campaign was a success because of the “1,674 words he’s spent addressing the subject on his Web site this week.” If we’re going to calculate and reward who’s bigger, sir, you’re going to lose.

  Having failed math, Mr. Schneeberger now tries extra-sensory perception.
  “…When it comes to lobbying liberal journalists like Olbermann, the sad
  reality is that getting them to acknowledge – let alone to respond
  respectfully – to our point of view is the longest of long shots. Theirs is
  a 24/7 secular world – in most newsrooms, especially those in big cities,
  about the only time you hear the word ‘God’ is as the first part of
  somebody’s second-favorite swearword.”

  Wow. Talk about creating your own reality.

  My newsroom is in Secaucus, New Jersey – population 15,931.

  “Focus On Family” headquarters is in Colorado Springs, Colorado – population 360,890.

  And not to let the facts get in the way of FOF’s prejudice, but I happen to
  be a religious man. I believe in God, I pray daily, and if I’ve ever gotten
  any direct instructions from my maker, they were that I’ll be judged by
  whether I tried to help other people, or hurt them. Also, that true belief
  should not be worn like a policeman’s club, nor used like one. And, finally,
  that I’m in big trouble for helping to introduce funny catchphrases into
  sportscasting.

  The producer of Countdown – Mr. Kordick, you’ve met him here, the guy who goes on vacation and celebrities die – is not only a religious man of the finest kind, but actually sings at Church-related events out in the
  community. And there are many others on the staff who are similarly
  spiritual, although, admittedly, none of us is pushy nor self-congratulatory
  about it.

  I might also say that I feel a little disappointed in my workplace. Mr.
  Schneeberger, who claims to have spent a dozen years in “secular newsrooms,” writes of all of these “God Damns” flying around the ones he knows so well. I honestly think I’ve heard that phrase used at MSNBC once or twice in the last year. I feel short-changed. Where did Schneeberger work, The Sodom and Gomorroh Picayne?

  Ultimately, Schneeberger’s piece claims that I have not presented a “cogent defense” of our coverage of Dobson’s faux pas. Well, I have mentioned that we played the entire video at the center of the controversy, and read the three references in the accompanying teacher’s materials to what to do if a child asked about same-sex families (the only references to any of that in, or with the tape), in an effort to let the viewer decide if Dobson’s complaint was legitimate or laughable.

  And, before we went on the air that night, we contacted Dobson’s office for
  a statement that might disconnect SpongeBob from the contretemps, and
  outlined how we intended to cover the story. We got no “that’s not right,”
  no “you’re demeaning Dr. Dobson,” and especially no “you’re taking Dr.
  Dobson’s words out of context.”

  All that came after Dr. Dobson realized how much damage he’d done to his cause.

  I suspect, long-term, that this is how Dr. Dobson’s followers are going to
  react in the next few months and years as the world around them gets
  increasingly tolerant and less reactionary. Several of his spammers warned of the coming Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriages (which the President many of them also claimed they personally elected used so efficiently in the campaign, but has already dropped with that “whaddya gonna do” shoulder shrug of his).

  More importantly, at some point, some of these people are going to wake up to find that the great secular assault they see on their children was, in
  fact, a bogeyman created to hide their own bad parenting. If they can’t
  convince their own kids of the appropriateness of their religion and values,
  then the religion, the values, or the convincing, must not have been very
  good. Ask my folks if I was an easy sell – yet most of my tenets turn out to
  have been their tenets – not my teachers’, not television’s, not the secular
  world’s.

  It goes back to the core of the Dobsonian point of view here: the fear of
  the “pro-Homosexual” agenda. That may be the way he delicately phrases it, but it is not shared by most of his followers who emailed me. They were
  clearly angry that there was no anti-homosexual agenda. And one of the most fascinating things about the studies of homosexuality in this country is
  that while there is still debate between the creationists and the
  environmentalists, I’ve never heard anything suggesting that a child is more
  or less likely to be gay, depending on whether he’s taught not to hate nor
  be intolerant, of gays.

  Schneeberger finishes his piece with the hope that I’ll experience the same
  kind of epiphany he claims to have in 1997. “Let’s pray, if he ever does,
  that he comes up with the right answer – and not because it may lead to
  fairer reporting. But because it may lead to a redeemed life.”

  Hey, guys, worry about yourselves. You’re spewing hate, while assuming that for some reason, God has chosen you and you alone in all of history to
  understand the mysteries of existence, when mankind’s existence is filled
  with ample evidence that nobody yet has been smart enough to discern an
  answer.

  You might try keeping it simpler: did you help others, or hurt them?

  I’ll be happy to be judged on the answer to that question, and if it’s a
  group session, I don’t expect I’ll find many members of “Focus On Family” in the “done ok” line.

• Comment by: DonnaV

  6 11/6/06 9:01 AM | Comment Link |

  Interesting timing…I was in Baltimore last week and have been mulling around in my brain some of the history from that area that was new to me…the thing that has stuck with me was learning that Pres. Lincoln has suspended Habeas Corpus ….yes, suspended it & had most of Marylands legislature arrested…placed cannons and a military unit overlooking the city of Baltimore after Virgina seceded from the Union seems he was fearful that Maryland would follow suit & the capitol would be surrounded…..
  I can’t help but wonder if a president today could get away with such a bold move….

• Comment by: Eliza

  7 11/6/06 9:45 AM | Comment Link |

  Well, I didn’t get to the event last night; we had family visiting, & it’s just been too busy. The additional information DonnaV added, & David H linked to, is really interesting (the MSNBC article by Olbermann has a different focus than the video, additional history). Interesting that habeas corpus seems like such an obvious right to suspend (for some groups, or for all) in times of unrest or threat, yet it’s such a basic foundation for our Constitution & the rights we hold so dear as Americans.

• Comment by: David H

  8 11/6/06 3:49 PM | Comment Link |

  Habeus Corpus has been suspended in US history, but never essentially eliminated for anyone deemed an illegal enemy combatant. And while President Lincoln and many others may have deemed his effort necessary, historians almost universally agree that Pres. F.D. Roosevelt’s suspension effort — which led to the incarceration of more than 100,000 Japanese in the U.S. (some of whom were born in this country) — was a terrible act of unreasoning fear and blind prejudice.

  The most cogent point made by Olbermann and the single reason every American should be concerned about Bush’s effort to eliminate Habeus Corpus for certain groups of people is that once Habeus Corpus is gone no person, once arrested, will be able to prove that they come from the favored citizenry rather than the threatening enemy. It isn’t just his opinion either. Here are a few legal scholars on the topic:

  Yale University professor of law Bruce Ackerman agrees that the Act:
  “authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights”.[20]

  Jonathan Turley, professor of constitutional law at George Washington University, called the Act:
  “a huge sea change for our democracy. The framers created a system where we did not have to rely on the good graces or good mood of the president. In fact, Madison said that he created a system essentially to be run by devils, where they could not do harm, because we didn’t rely on their good motivations. Now we must.”

  A number of legal scholars and Congressional members – including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) – have said that the habeas provision of the Act violates a clause of the Constitution that says the right to challenge detention “shall not be suspended” except in cases of “rebellion or invasion.”

  Right now the U.S. runs several immigrant detention facilities in this country. My newspaper and others have written extensively about people arrested on little pretext and confined to such prisons. Some have been held for two years awaiting disposition of their cases. In NJ, where my newspaper is based, the detention center guards beat, coerced and tortured people being detained, even though the only crime committed by many detainees was not having the proper paperwork for being in the U.S.

  And as one of the people notes in the first link below, the INS frequently moves the people inside the detention system to make sure they have little or no access to counsel.

  While the Military Commissions Act seems designed to help deal with terrorists and other highly dangerous “outsiders,” it could be used against American citizens because once you are arrested under the act, you won’t have access to a lawyer or a judge or family members. There is not requirement for the government to tell anyone that they have you, much less the charges under which you are being held.

  Perhaps more important, there is no stated sunset on this law. It wasn’t written to take affect until the war in Iraq or war on terror is concluded. As far as its framers are concerned this is a permanent change to how the U.S. hands out justice.

  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/04/147201

  http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10041.html