Sun Tzu and Opposition Research Strategy: Part II

See Part I.

Why is Sun Tzu relevant to opposition research? In the military classic, On War, Clausewitz taught that war is politics carried on by other means. But he was only half-right. Sun Tzu treated that idea with greater sophistication millennia before in his now-famous Taoist musings.

Master Sun understood that war is not politics by "other" means, it's simply politics in its rawest form - the resort to blunt force, which is routinely exercised on a continuum throughout political life. Police exercise of force, particularly in minority communities, today is often a highly politicized matter.

The most extreme uses and abuses of police power often occur in political contexts - the 1968 Mexico City student massacre, for example, Chinese repression in Tiananmen Square, or the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.

The death penalty represents the ultimate ritualized, and politicized, use of force. How many societies since the Aztecs indulged in ritual human sacrifice on the scale of Texas' criminal justice system, which deliberately kills a symbolic but notable number of its citizens each year, including women? Until the US Supreme Court stopped the Lone Star state, children and retarded people were fair game.

Whether or not one agrees with the death penalty, though, it's part of the continuum of force available to society's political class to solve perceived problems, like high crime rates, or in past decades and centuries, unpatriotic dissent. War is only the most extreme type of political violence, the most destructive and the least beneficial. All this Sun Tzu well understood.

For a 21st century opposition researcher, what's underdeveloped in the mix is what Antonio Gramsci called society's "superstructure," and what conservative theorists in the 1960s and 1970s referred to as "the war of ideas." That's what links wars permanently to politics. In the era of mass communications, some battles are won and lost in the arena of public opinion instead of on the battlefield. The struggle to attain what Sun Tzu would have called "The Way," or a comity of ideology and interests between the people and their leaders, carries as much weight as superior weaponry or a leader's personal attributes.

Opposition researchers identify those areas of comity, the opponent's particular weaknesses, and generate information that supports a certain type of comparison message - one that highlights attributes that will endear your candidate to the public, while contrasting sharply with a specific negative aspect of the same issue. It can be as simple as, "Candidate X wants to work with businesses to create new jobs in our district, but our opponent Candidate Y is pushing stricter environmental laws that, if passed, would drive our last manufacturing jobs to China or Mexico." If you're in a district where the economy is staggering from trade related job loss, that pitch may sway enough voters to win.

Master Sun's universal value stems from his recognition that war does not mitigate other politics, particularly domestic politics. Instead, war turns politics into extremist caricature, illuminating society's core interests, values and choices in stark relief. That's why his commentaries, derived from personal experiences in those extreme moments, contain specific advice regarding strategies and tactics, attack and defense, which, viewed narrowly as political advice, have direct or indirect peacetime equivalents. That's especially true for the opposition researcher, who specializes in attack and defense.

When Sun Tzu wrote of the "martial artist," he did not refer to men with skills like Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris. He meant a general or civilian leader whose martial engagements possessed artistry, who wove together the webs of reality not just to win on the battlefield, but to win the peace thereafter, to consolidate power, and to ensure, above all, that the nation benefited, and was not harmed, through military engagement. An opposition researcher's goals are identical - attacks may be necessary, but they must be part of a larger political strategy, not utilized in a cookie cutter fashion.

Each campaign is different. Campaigns demonstrate martial artistry by identifying their core interests, what the campaign needs to win, and applying the appropriate set of tactics to the situation, much the same way a composer chooses various instruments for different parts of the symphony. Like a composer, campaign planners in hotly contested races hope to create a particular rhythm that maintains voters' interest and builds to a crescendo in time for the election. Every catchy song has a chorus - that's the campaign's overarching message - but each verse should build toward a memorable finale at the end of the race, on Election Day. This is one song that does not repeat and fade at the end.

See Part III

Sun Tzu and Opposition Research Strategy: Part I

See also Sun Tzu and the Art of Opposition Research, Parts Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six.

Criminal justice reform represents my political activism and my passion, but for the last 12 years I've also worked as a professional political consultant, performing opposition research in more than five dozen electoral political campaigns, all in Texas.

Opposition research is one of the least understood aspects of political campaigning. In recent years, I've worked fewer campaigns (just two in last November's election cycle), finding myself promoting issues more often than just candidates' ambition. Still, I've got a great deal of experience, at this point, "digging dirt," as the ill-fitting euphemism would have it. Oppostion research is a great deal more than that: It provides the meat to a campaign's message and rapid response in heated debate. Done right (and early) it provides, along with polling, the critical information campaign planners need to decide on all message and strategy.

I've got quite a bit of prose on my computer written as drafts of a possible how-to manual or book on the subject of performing opposition research that I began last summer, but got busy as election season and the Legislature approached and never finished it. I've decided to polish up that material and roll it out on the blog a little at a time as a special Grits series on opposition research.

The first few installments won't go into methods and sources, though I'll get there soon enough, but instead use Sun Tzu's The Art of War to show how oppo research is used as part of a campaign's strategy. Here's Part One of the series:

"So it is said that if you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a thousand battles."

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

With those words, thousands of years before the advent of electoral democracy, much less television, the ancient Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu described precisely the twin, Socratic needs filled by an opposition researcher in 21st century democratic politics! Know thyself. Know your opponent.

A Texas Democratic political consultant named Mark Yznaga, an avid player of the table game "Go," turned me on to The Art of War during my first-ever political campaign. Mark taught me to relish the artistry of the attack, even those by which our own candidates were occasionally victimized, and that defensive research mattered just much to the outcome of the campaign as oppo work. He also taught me that reading and understanding Sun Tzu's philosophy isn't hard at all - maintaining the personal and organizational discipline to follow his precepts at crunch time is the difficult part. But Mark was always better at that than I.

Sun Tzu clearly understood the role oppo research plays in human conflict. With the words italicized above he summed up the sole reason loathed creatures like campaign researchers can find regular work: To win. The leadership of political campaigns in that regard differ little from the leaders of armies, corporations, or any other participants in large-scale conflicts between competing interests. They must understand their opponents' strengths and weaknesses, their objectives, resources, strategies, and likely tactics, while at the same time, and much less comfortably, honestly and accurately assessing their own strengths, weaknesses, and relative position in the world

When charged with planning a new campaign, whether for an issue or for a candidate, I often literally re-read The Art of War in its entirety, taking notes as I go regarding how it relates to the specific task. I use it as a launching point for brainstorming about what messages and strategies his philosophy implies in a particular case. Heaven knows I can't always muster the discipline to follow them, but more often than not, these pragmatic Taoist strategies and tactics serve campaigns well. Their application transforms the role of oppo research from the application of easily learned dirt-digging skills into a more subtle and intricate art of political communications.

Like going to war, going negative in a political campaign involves potentially heavy costs, both in treasure and in less-easily-replaced public esteem. A wise commander mixes in less costly tactics, much the way poker players bluff occasionally to keep their opponents off-guard. That's in part because a real, full-blown negative campaign, where both sides spend money on paid negative communications, represents the most expensive, most difficult worst-case scenario, the equivalent of all-out war, which Sun Tzu taught to avoid. Particularly difficult for opposition researchers, who after all fancy ourselves as attack specialists, is resigning oneself to the idea that winning without fighting, or without going negative, should sometimes be preferred as an outcome.

"Those who win every battle are not really skillful," Master Sun sagely opined - instead, "those who render others' armies helpless without fighting are the best of all." "Therefore one who is good at martial arts overcomes others' forces without battle, conquers others' cities without siege, destroys others' nations without taking a long time." By that standard, the most skillful political tacticians are not working for the most heated campaigns. Instead, perhaps they hail from the legion of politicians who run unopposed in both the primary and general election cycles.

See Part II.

Site update: WTF? Suggestions?

Okay, Nate's right, Blogger's headed south on me, and I need to switch to a more reasonable hosting service. Until I do, though, this simpler template seems not to screw up my raggedy-ass HTML in the sidebar, so we'll run with it for now. It's perhaps time to ditch Blogger, though.

What do folks suggest? Moveable Type, Typepad, Wordpress, what's best? I've heard gripes and praise for each. I'm a writer, not a webmaster, at heart, so I don't really want to spend a LOT of time managing the thing.

Which is what makes Blogger such an amazing free service, huh? I mean, how many folks, myself included, first started a blog because it's literally just 1-2-3 easy? I sometimes see disdainful comments about Blogger's functionality compared to commonly used pay-per services, but I'm not bitter. I'm grateful for the chance to take the "new media" out for a spin to see how it handles, while maintaining ridiculously low overhead. It's part of what let me do this much writing as a side project -- it may not pay, but it doesn't cost me much. Still, given my level of use, I obviously need some better tools around here.

Odds and ends

Here's a few recent items worth linking:

• First, whatever you do, don't save anyone from drowning in San Marcos. Apparently, police would prefer this outcome.

• Drylabbing and more: A new, damning report (pdf) criticizing the infamous Houston crime lab was released last week, and BlogHouston is all over it. See HPDlabinvestigation.org for more.

• Troopers hit in head too often: After a cadet died in the boxing ring taking part in a routine Texas Department of Public Safety training regimen, the Associated Press revealed that 2.3% of all DPS cadets suffered brain concussions while participating in the same program.

• I've not been writing about the border wars around Nuevo Laredo between feuding drug cartels, mostly because I don't know enough to add anything original, but bottom line, all hell's breaking loose. Until recently, the feds have ignored the problem. While American police focus on busting low-level drug users and other little fish, their counterparts south of the border are being eaten alive by sharks. Said a Mexican political commentator, "If the United States is not going to legalize drugs, then Mexico has to come to terms with the narcos ... There were agreements in the past to let 80 percent of the drugs through, to allow some seizures for the Americans and for the media, and there was a lot less violence."

• High speed chases by police often involve people who are young and stupid, not hardened criminals, and they end tragically waaaaay too often. See various news stories about recent Texas police chases, including one that crashed, one who died, and one that got away. Plus, Catonya has two more examples from Oklahoma. In one instance, officers backed off when it became too dangerous. The other chase resulted in death. Most police departments' pursuit policies leave too much discretion to chase in officers' hands, allowing chases even for low-level misdemeanors and traffic violations. Sometimes excessive speeds, red light running, firing a weapon at a moving vehicle and other chase tactics create more problems than they resolve. In about a third of instances where police high-speed chases result in death, an innocent bystander is killed. The rest of the deaths all involve suspects or police officers. See Pursuitwatch for more.
  

• The Houston Chronicle's Harvey Rice reports that the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans doesn't seem to understand the "Supreme" part regarding US Supreme Court rulings -- they think they get to ignore the "Wise Nine" and do whatever the hell they want.

• Finally, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo needs a little help to reach a million hits by his blog birthday next week: Don't think about it, just click over and give some love. Happy birthday, Skippy.
  

GO KIDS

Friends and close readers know I was the court-appointed guardian of a child of an incarcerated parent (her father was deceased) from age 12-19. Before that experience, I never understood the variety of special problems -- economic, logistical, psychological -- facing children with a parent in prison and those who love them.

Family-oriented holidays like July 4 were especially hard. Even though Mom is a jerk, you've only got one, you know? Nobody loves you like your mother, and vice versa, and even when that relationship is destructive, it cannot be severed without causing significant harm.

In the last few years, a lot of new research has come out confirming my personal experience, some of which is referenced at the web page for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's GO-KIDS program, or Giving Offenders Kids Incentive and Direction to Succeed. E.g., research shows that without intervention, children of incarcerated parents are 6-8 times more likely than other kids to adopt a criminal lifestyle. That's sure true of my daughter. By age 12, when she came to us full-time (she'd lived in the neighborhood and been very close to my family since she was five), she was deeply troubled by her isolation and strangely but profoundly guilty regarding her mother's imprisonment. Those emotions were at the root of most of her at-times-substantial misbehavior.

Nothing me, Kathy, nor any court-ordered therapist could do ever changed that, actually. Her depression was profound and moreover stemmed from something real -- the death of one parent and the incarceration of another. That kind of pain can't be overcome with drugs or therapy, though maybe time and maturity might help, down the line. It can't be wished away.

We didn't take her to visit her Mom as much as we should have, but the times we did were highly significant to her -- landmarks in time by which she measured the duration of her mother's absence. I didn't understand until late in the game how important it was. I now think it should be the state's responsibility to ensure that children get to visit their incarcerated parents if they want to do so. (Many kids never see their parents while they're inside.) Our daughter desperately needed to be able to visit her mother, maintaining (out of dire need) an unrealistic but unshakeably romanticized portrait of her loving family's relationships in the past. As a teenager, when her mother's misbehavior's on release generated new crises, those delusions proved to be extremely damaging, but they were also deep-rooted and inevitable, not something that could be argued away. My wife and I did everything within the means of a devoted middle class couple to help her and I can honestly say it was often more than we could manage. Folks with fewer resources to devote or less savvy about working the system would be completely at sea.

So if the government decides incarcerating an individual is so important they're willing to spend $16,000 per year for their upkeep, fine. But then it's only fair the state should pay for all related externalities, like travel for visitation, special tutoring, healthcare and other extra support services for that person's kids. I can assure you, that's not happening now.

Hell, we'd have benefited as parents from some counseling -- for damn sure nobody ever explained to me the basics about what to expect, what my goddaughter was going through, what we could do, or where we could turn for help. Even something as minimalist as the web links below weren't available.

Children of incarcerated parents fall broadly into two categories: those staying with a second parent, or those staying with someone else, be it a grandparent, foster parent, or, some other formal or informal arrangement. Ninety percent of Texas kids with incarcerated fathers live with their mothers, according to TDCJ, while just 28% of kids with incarcerated mothers live with their fathers. Those other kids instead reside with various relatives, friends, as wards of the state, or even alone as runaways.

Yesterday I mentioned that dyslexics made up 30% of Texas prisoners, compared to 10% among the free population. That's a big number. To learn, though, that children of incarcerated parents are 6-8 times more likely to commit crimes boggles the mind. If I'd not lived through the experiences I have, I'm not sure I'd believe it. But the psychological damage my daughter endured was systemic, not personal. Every child similarly positioned would endure the same stress. God knows I'm not sure how I'd have handled it -- given how traumatic my own mother's death was for me just five years ago, not well, I'd guess.

Certainly there are some things government cannot do. Mostly my daughter needed unconditional love and lots of personal attention and Lord knows the government can't give her that. But there are specific, targeted state expenditures that could really make a difference in these kids lives. What if the state committed to targeting two narrow groups of kids -- dyslexics and children whose mothers are incarcerated -- to receive special services as part of a long-term anti-crime solution? The needs are obvious: for dyslexics, more testing and training for more teachers, for prisoners' kids, regular visitation, personal tutoring, counseling, mentor programs, etc. Those are goals of significant but definable scope that, if achieved, would improve the lives of many troubled young Texans and substantially reduce crime.

Budgets represent values. What we spend our money on reflects choices we make based on decisions about what's important. If Texas is serious about increasing public safety and reducing crime -- not just racking up ever-higher arrest numbers -- we need to make more of these types of expenditures on the front end. Spending $16K per year on the back end to incarcerate dyslexics and troubled kids just isn't a fair or workable long-term solution.

Here are some resources from TDCJ that might be of help for folks with prisoners' children in their lives. I've added the GO KIDS logo and link permanently in the sidebar if you're looking for this information in the future:

Resources for Chidren of Offenders in
Prison, on Probation or Parole:

• Institutional Programs for Incarcerated Offenders and Their Children
• Community Programs and Services for Probationers and Their Children
  
• Community Programs and Services for Parolees and Their Children
• State Agencies, Non-Profits and Other Organizations Providing Services for Children
• National Agencies, Non-Profits and Other Organizations Providing Services for Children

See also the Texas Inmate Family Association website at www.tifa.org.

West Texas drug task force may close

Another Texas drug task force may shut down rather than comply with Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) rules and supervision. The West Texas Narcotics Task Force will close up shop after September if Ector County pulls out as the lead agency, the latest in a long series of drug task force closures recently, reported the Midland Reporter-Telegram last week.

The news comes in the wake of the Texas Legislature's passage of HB 1239. That bill gave DPS new tools for exercising command and control over Texas' scandal-plagued Byrne-grant-funded drug task forces, which have earned an ignominious reputation statewide starting with the infamous Tulia case. Activists had wanted the rogue entities abolished, but the Legislature instead gave them more regulation. Still, local law enforcement interests are portraying the increased oversight as motivated by malicious legislative intent:

Midland County Sheriff Gary Painter said he sees the increased regulations as an effort on the part of legislators to eliminate drug task forces from the state.

"I think the state legislature has done their best to destroy multi-jurisdictional drug task forces throughout the state and I think with legislation placing it under the Department of Public Safety that they have succeeded," Painter said.

Texas Speaker of the House Tom Craddick told the Reporter Telegram Wednesday he supports Texas task forces, but only as supervised by the DPS.

Not everyone in law enforcement thinks the new law is untenable. The Trans-Pecos task force operated by Reeves County, which covers 8 counties adjacent to the West Texas Task Force, will not dissolve, the Midland paper reported, but instead will accept greater DPS oversight in order to continue to receive grant funds.

Even so, if the West Texas task force closes that means the two most populous counties in the area -- Midland and Ector (Odessa is the county seat) -- won't get their fair share of federal Byrne grant money anymore. It doesn't have to be that way. Ector and Midland officials should take this opportunity to request federal block grant money for other things their counties need.

Counties can apply to the Governor's Criminal Justice Division for the same federal money to pay for drug courts, drug treatment, intensive probation services, even special programs targeting crimes by juveniles or against the elderly -- none of which bring the same liability risk drug task forces do. (See a list of other programs for which local governments may request Byrne grant money on page 5 of this report [pdf].)

Right now, most Texans don't live in a jurisdiction that benefits from the federal Byrne grant funding for drug task forces. A majority of counties -- 140 out of 254 -- have already decided not to participate in Tulia-style task forces. Only about 25 task forces exist in Texas today, down from 46 just three years ago. Still, the Governor spends 86% of the state's Byrne grant funding to pay for drug task forces. As more counties leave the system, Governor Perry should shift that money to drug courts and other needed programs so it may be distributed with greater geographic equity.

People in those 140 counties pay federal taxes, too, after all. They should get their share of federal grant money.

Failure to treat dyslexia increases crime

Crime is neither random nor inevitable. It always occurs in a context, in particular the context of the individual who engages in it. While some bad people will choose to commit crimes no matter what, for others, changing the context of their lives early on could prevent them from ever entering the system.

That's the implication of a recent study that found the incidence of dyslexia in Texas prisons is triple the rate on the outside. Dyslexia is a reading disorder that causes a person to read letters on the page as though they're out of order, in a jumble. The Comptroller's Fiscal Notes publication says dyslexia directly contributes to hopelessness for many Texas youth and, ultimately, to their overincarceration.

[Dyslexia Research Foundation of Texas Chairman Bill] Hilgers said the incidence level is 10 percent or higher in Texas schools and about 30 percent or higher in prisons. The students either fall behind or get put in special education classes, Hilgers said.

"They drop out or get into other problems," he said. "Some end up in the criminal justice system. It creates a psychological problem. They feel stupid because they can't read. It's psychologically deadening--children and parents are very affected by that."

McCreary said it's better if dyslexia is diagnosed early, though some students with the disorder aren't identified until after third grade.

"Sometimes it takes a long time to find out a student is struggling to read if he or she is smart enough to find ways to compensate for the disability," she said.

The ones who don't learn to read because they are "smart enough" to "compensate for their disability" perhaps consitute the greatest tragedy of all -- that's the state's talent pool falling through the cracks. Think about it: One in ten Texans, but three out of ten Texas prisoners are dyslexic?! Horrifying. That's a direct result of the failure of our schools. This is obviously an area where greater investment in education would directly lead to lower incarceration rates and improved public safety. The folks diverted from prison would be people who otherwise would only have turned to crime out of frustration and a lack of opportunities because of a learning disorder that's not their fault.

As usual, though, the issue is mainly about money, or, rather, the values behind decisions to spend it: Texas just isn't investing enough to help these kids. Reports the Comptroller:

Hilgers said students need a lot of one-on-one training to overcome dyslexia. Students need to spend an extra hour a day for two years concentrating on reading skills to offset the disability, he said. ...

"The problem with dyslexics is that kids aren't able to sound out words or decode the sounds in words effectively," [Scottish Rites Children's Hospital medical director Dr. Jeffrey] Black said. "The intensive phonics system overrides that in many cases."

"We have a really good handle on what the condition is, how to identify it and intervene," he said. "The challenge now is scaling up, preparing more teachers and identifying more children so that fewer fall through the cracks." ...

Hilgers said the problem is that many school districts don't have the funding to implement comprehensive dyslexia programs.

"Schools just don't have the funding to do that, and teachers aren't trained to teach it," he said. "We need at least 10,000 to 15,000 more teachers trained, and nobody has seen fit to provide them."

Training 10,000 teachers would take big bucks, but not nearly so much as would be saved by diverting so many otherwise non-criminally inclined dyslexics away from prison. Legislators have an opportunity to do just that. They're in a special session right now on the subject of schools, and they could easily decide to pass the needed legislation under the Governor's current "charge." Somebody needs to step up.

See Dyslexia Texas for more.

What happened to Muslim detainees from Texas after 9/11?

As America prepares to celebrate Independence Day on July 4th, it's worth recalling for a moment that personal freedoms are still the basis for our democratic system's ultimate legitimacy, and that the US Bill of Rights still needs protecting in the age of the War on Terror.

Few documents provide a more vivid reminder of those truths than a new report by national ACLU and Human Rights Watch, which details the stories of scores of muslim or middle eastern individuals who were detained as so-called "material witnesses" by the federal government in the period immediately following 9/11. You may recall that after 9/11, hundreds of people were rounded up in a nationwide dragnet and held as material witnesses without being charged with a crime. We never had a lot of information about those Texas material witness cases, so I culled Texas-related excerpts from the report below:

Dr. Albader al-Hazmi

On September 12, 2001, Dr. Albader al-Hazmi, who was living with his wife and young children, woke up in his house to five FBI agents with guns drawn. A medical doctor doing his residency in San Antonio, Texas, al-Hazmi had no previous criminal record or interaction with the FBI. The government based its arrest of al-Hazmi on the fact that he shared the last name of one of the hijackers and had been in phone contact with someone at the Saudi Arabian Embassy with the last name “bin Laden” (which is a common Arabic name). ... He was detained for two weeks in jails in Texas and New York before being released. He never testified before a grand jury or court.

Anwar al-Mirabi

Federal authorities arrested Anwar al-Mirabi on September 13, 2001 in his Arlington, Texas apartment complex after his neighbors called the FBI to report that he seemed “suspicious.” The government first held al-Mirabi for overstaying his visa. On November 13, 2001, it arrested him on a material witness warrant. Neither al-Mirabi nor his lawyer, Gerald Kleinschmidt, was permitted to see the affidavit supporting the warrant.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Dallas initially denied the government’s request to seal the proceedings and records. The judge put the case on the docket and held that the government could not continue to detain al-Mirabi, because he was not a flight risk. In what may have been an effort to avoid complying with the court’s order, the Justice Department moved the proceedings, the records, and al-Mirabi to Chicago, outside the jurisdiction of the Dallas court. Although al-Mirabi remained on the public docket in Texas, all the records from Texas were transferred to Chicago. But there is no trace of al-Mirabi in the federal courts in the northern district of Illinois—no records, no appearance in any dockets, no notice of any public hearings. Gerald Kleinschmidt told a newspaper reporter that al-Mirabi’s material witness records were “all closed to the public, closed to the press, closed to his family. I guess these people have no rights at all.”

The Department of Justice refused to give Kleinschmidt any information about why it believed al-Mirabi had material information to a criminal proceeding. “Nobody can tell me, and I’m supposed to represent him … I had no idea what crime he was supposed to testify for, or if there was even a grand jury investigation when he was arrested.” The government held al-Mirabi for six months without having him testify. Kleinschmidt, who had worked for seven years as a federal prosecutor, told HRW/ACLU: I’ve never seen a case like this. It’s the emotional issue of terrorism—if they were somehow involved in hatching the plan, the government has to have some information to show the judge by [probable cause] that they participated in it. There is no longer a line in the court between being involved in a conspiracy or being a witness.

After being jailed nine months, al-Mirabi applied for and was granted voluntary departure and returned to Saudi Arabia with his wife and children. He was never charged with a crime.

Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Azmath

On September 12, 2001, the FBI arrested Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Azmath at the Amtrak railroad station in San Antonio, Texas. The two friends from India had just lost their old jobs working together as managers of a newsstand in New Jersey’s Newark Penn Station and were relocating to Texas for new work. They had begun their trip to Texas on a plane that was scheduled to fly from Newark, New Jersey to San Antonio, Texas on September 11, 2001. Because of the attacks that day, their plane was grounded in St. Louis, Missouri. Azmath and Khan completed their journey to San Antonio by train, like many other passengers. Shortly before the train reached San Antonio, federal agents approached Azmath and Khan on the train based on a “suspicious tip” from other passengers.

The government arrested Azmath and Khan after they discovered they possessed around $5000 cash, box-cutters, and “a prayer rug and other religious paraphernalia.” In other words, the FBI detained the two men because they had some money, had an instrument commonly used by people who work in newsstands among other occupations, and were Muslim non-citizens. Surely, but for the last attribute, they would never have been detained.

The FBI first held Khan as a visa violator but later obtained a material witness warrant for his arrest. Both he and Azmath, who was arrested on an immigration charge, were held in solitary confinement in the high security Special Housing Unit of MDC Brooklyn for almost a year.

The government never charged them with any terrorist-related offenses. Instead, the government eventually charged them with credit card fraud, based in part on statements Khan and Azmath made without the presence of counsel. During a court hearing in April 2002, Khan’s attorney argued against his continued detention:

"Why is this defendant being held in such close custody, when there is no terrorism case against him and it has not been shown in any credible, palpable way that this defendant was involved in an attempt to hijack an airliner to crash into the World Trade Center? … Yes, he’s a Muslim, he’s from India. His family lives in Hyderabad. The defendant has no criminal record, no pilot training, none of the indicators that would suggest that the defendant is involved in planning some kind of heinous act against buildings or airliners, none of that in this case.

Khan’s mother took his case to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which ruled that the United States had violated international prohibitions against arbitrary detention by holding Khan and Azmath without a sufficient basis. After almost a year in detention, Khan was convicted of credit card fraud and given time served. At his sentencing hearing, he contested his arrest:

"Your honor, I must say, my arrest was executed without probable cause based upon entirely bare suspicion and racial profiling. Single me out, a Muslim, as a terrorist. Your Honor, I am not a terrorist."

Khan and Azmath were deported in January 2003.

More on web campaigning

Via Burnt Orange Report, excerpts from Austin state Rep. Mark Strama's recent buzz-generating talk on the use of the Internet in electoral campaigns to the Democracy Fest Bloggers Caucus are now online. Check them out here. He goes into the mechanics of how the Strama campaign integrated the web and email into his field organizing.

This ground-level account makes a nice companion, I thought, to the big-picture strategic advice offered at the Campaigns and Elections seminar on blogging and campaigns recounted in this recent Grits post. I also discussed some of these e-campaigning topics in a Texas Observer book review last fall of Howard-Dean-campaign manager Joe Trippi's autobiography.

Site update: Slouching toward summertime

For those who care, a few updates about the Grits site:

First, the new look. No, it's not the result of some long-anticipated re-design conceived by high-level marketing consultants. Instead, I'd finally, utterly corrupted the HTML in the old format until the template simply came up last Friday completely blank. Shifting to a new blogger template turned out to be the shortest distance between two points to clean up the mess, so here we are.

Also, I've taken the opportunity to re-organize the links a bit and to add a few names to the blogroll that are long overdue. I'll be fiddling a little more with them as summer goes on and I get back into the habit of reading more widely. The legislative session, regular readers know well, took up a great deal of my focus.

Traffic has declined some since session ended, from a high average of more than 600 per day in April and May to around 400 unique visitors, give or take, these days. Not bad for a state-level, issue-specific blog, but Atrios I ain't. I still find that a lot of people who should be interested in Grits' content just don't read it because they're not used to reading blogs, don't trust them yet, etc. There's nothing but word of mouth and time to overcome that. So tell all your friends to start reading, and maybe one of these days I'll have enough traffic to justify accepting advertising.

Grits has received several nice references recently from other bloggers, especially folks complimenting my notes and comments from the Campaigns and Elections seminar on campaign blogs, and pointing to my adumbrations of Gov. Perry's vetoes. I appreciate a lot everybody who has linked to my stuff, especially Kuff, Libby, Pink Dome, Doc Berman, Catonya, and Mike Cable, all of whom have been especially generous highlighting Grits' fare. In addition, in an article featuring Nate from the blog Common Sense, Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith gave Grits a nice shout out in the July issue, announcing himself a reader and calling Grits "A protein-laden dose of big thinking on criminal justice reform." That one-liner may get stuck permanently in the sidebar, before it's done.

As much or more than the links and praise, I appreciate the bloggers I read regularly, the folks who keep me informed about lots of stuff I'd otherwise miss, and who collectively help create, for me, the sense of possibility the blogosphere embodies -- the grassroots media who make me think, and who on their best days make me think there's hope. In addition to those mentioned above, at the risk of leaving out tons of folks, I've especially appreciated writing by bloggers at CrimProf blog, Injustice Anywhere, GregsOpinion, Burnt Orange Report (welcome to the new crew!), A Capitol Blog, Rick Perry vs. The World, Drug War Rant, and of course Governing Magazine cover girl, Eileen at In The Pink Texas, on whom I've got a bit of a bloggerly crush. (Don't tell Kathy; she doesn't read my blog, so that last bit's just between us ...)

A lot of folks at the capitol became regular readers during the session, and several staffers emailed afterward to express sympathy about Governor Perry's ignominious vetoes. It means a lot to me that folks working day-to-day on Texas legislation considered this blog a reliable information source this spring. Thanks to them, and to all Grits' readers for stopping by.

Keep coming back. I ain't done yet.

Illegal drugs 14% of world ag exports

I was an economics major in college (never graduated) so ever since I began thinking about criminal justice issues, I've been fascinated by how blind the system can be to the economics of the behaviors our government chooses to criminalize. Via CrimProf blog, we discover news of a new United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimate that illicit drugs consititute 0.9% of world Gross Domestic Product, greater than the total GDP of 163 countries, or 88% of the countries in the world!

Obviously, those countries aren't the ones driving the drug market. Illicit drugs enjoyed a robust $322 billion in retail sales in 2003, the U.N. reported, with 44% of that market, or about $142 billion, in North America, mostly the United States. That's an awful lot of lost tax revenue. This is the first time the U.N. has estimated the economic scope of the international drug trade.

Most astonishing: Illegal drugs constitute 14% of total world agricultural exports. That means, practically speaking, if the pipe dream of stopping the drug trade ever actually succeeded, much of the world economy from Bolivia to Afghanistan to Northern California would collapse into global depression. Reported Xinhuanet news:

The largest market is cannabis herb, valued at 113 billion dollars, followed by cocaine, the opiates and cannabis resin, valued at 71 billion dollar, 65 billion and 29 billion dollars respectively on retail level.

The amphetamine-type stimulant markets together amounted to 44 billion dollars, according to the report.

Given the US share of the world retail market, claims of successes stopping the flow of drugs into America seem like fools' hubris.

Related Update: The Moroccan government last month said 96,000 families, 2/3 of the rural population (clarification: in the "Rif" region of that country) are "dependent on cannabis cultivation" for a living.

Cops profiting from traffic stops

Asset forfeiture opportunities offer some perverse incentives for law enforcement. In Weatherford, defrocked Parker County Sheriff Jay Brown this week was convicted of stealing money forfeited during drug investigations. He spent the money to purchase vehicles for county use, but later traded them for lesser-valued cars, pocketing the difference without reporting it. Sheriff Brown received a probated sentence.

Meanwhile, two cops in the South Texas town of San Benito used seized drugs from traffic stops to open up their own retail business on the side. The first of the officers was convicted this week and sentenced to eight years in federal prison, while their civilian partner received a three year sentence last fall. The second officer, Edgar Heberto Lopez, is still a fugitive.

Judge: Perry probation veto risks public safety

Judges fear the worst, says the June 26th Beaumont Enterprise, after Governor Rick Perry vetoed HB 2193 which would have strengthened Texas' probation system. One jurist painted an especially stark scenario, the paper reported:

In the late 1980s, Texas prisons were overcrowded at a population of about 35,000 inmates.

The situation was so dire, local criminal justice authorities say, that prisoners were being released after serving 10 percent of their sentences.

[Senior District Judge Larry] Gist shuddered when he recalls what happened next.

"There's this ridiculous picture of a one-rock drug possession coming in and a murderer going out, and nobody wants that to happen," he said.

He doesn't think it could happen again but can't really see what will prevent it.

"Perry started off this session saying, 'absolutely no new prisons,' and then he vetoed the very thing that could help that occur," he said

Gist said he is dismayed by the defeat of HB 2193 after six years of work.

I know the feeling. He's right to worry about the effects of overincarceration on public safety. Harris County will likely feel the worst impact. The Legislature's passage of HB 2193 would have protected the public by prioritizing incarceration resources for the most dangerous, avoiding the scenario of releasing murderers to incarcerate for drug possession or other minor crimes. That's a smarter approach than Perry's do-nothing alternative. As HB 2193 co-author state Rep. Ray Allen (R-Grand Prairie) has said, we should reserve incarceration for those whom we fear, not for those at whom we're only angry.

Where can you be surveilled? Pretty much everywhere, it seems

Here's one to watch: In Conroe, TX, prosecutors are seeking an indictment against a dry cleaner for positioning a hidden surveillance camera to view the toilet area in the employee restroom, according to the June 23rd Houston Chronicle.

"Police must prove Blackwelder taped the employees without their consent and knowledge and must also show that he did it with intent to arouse and gratify," reported the Chronicle. Judging from the facts relayed in the article, intent will be hard to prove. If the store owner claims he made the video to prevent employee theft, for example, and the prosecution can't prove otherwise, what he did may not have been illegal. So far, the store owner has not been arrested. (Via the Open Society Paradox)

The ambiguity regarding video voyeurism is a byproduct of the reduction of Americans' "reasonable expectation of privacy" by the courts in deference to law enforcement. In May, a man in Houston was caught taking an upskirt photo of a child in a mall; his camera was seized, but he could not be arrested. You see, the child had no "reasonable expectation of privacy" to prevent people from using technology to view any area visible from someplace they have a legal right to be, like bending down pretending to tie their shoe next to the check out counter in the mall. Those precedents were all set in cases where the Supreme Court was defining the limits of police surveillance, but applied generally, they obviously create a world of concern for anyone who respects even a minimalist zone of personal privacy in public spaces.

The whole idea that being "tough on crime" means it's wise to give police unfettered surveillance power is starting to have some unintended consequences, don't you think? Redefining the "reasonable expectation of privacy" to create more personal space in public is an area ripe for state legislation. The legal precedents were recently confirmed, and may take decades for the federal courts to get around to changing.

La mordida in Fort Bend County

Sam Jimmy Mann, formerly police chief of a small hamlet called Kendleton in Fort Bend County, Texas, was convicted last week of extorting more than $390,000 from motorists from 1997 - 2001 in illegal on-the-spot fines. He was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay restitution. Kudos to the Fort Bend DA for pursuing the case.

In Mexico this practice is called "la mordida," which translates as a small bribe but literally means "a little bite." There, the unofficially tolerated practice often supplements ridiculously low police salaries. Looks like the concept migrated north of the border.

Dying on our dime

Doc Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy refers us to bellwether stories from California and Arizona about how long prison sentences are boosting the cost of medical care for treating elderly prisoners. To blame in California: the infamous "three strikes" law that forbids parole for repeat offenders.

Texas, which operates a separate facility housing elderly offenders called the Estelle unit, has been dealing with this growing cost driver for years. See this Criminal Justice Policy Council report (pdf) on the subject from 1999, which presages many issues raised in these articles.

Texas judge and DA had affair during capital murder trial?!

This is one of those stories that helps explain why so many of those statues of Lady Justice with the blindfold and scales always seem to show a little tittie.

Photo via TalkLeft

Thanks to Injustice Anywhere for pointing me to this Salon story about Charles Dean Hood, the next Texan scheduled to be executed in 2005. The judge in his case at the time of the trial in 1989 was having an extramarital affair with the prosecuting attorney:

Hood, who was sentenced to death for a 1989 double murder, is scheduled to be executed by the state of Texas on June 30. Unfortunately for Hood, in the 15 years since he arrived on death row, the issue of the strange and not-so-secret relationship of State District Court Judge Verla Sue Holland and Collin County District Attorney Tom O'Connell has never been raised in a single state or federal court.

Unreal. IA declares she's confronted the same scenario in the courtroom in three different, lesser cases, which itself seems a scandal. But to think a judge and DA would countenance that conflict of interest in a death penalty case just boggles the mind. Read the whole story.

Hood's is the first of three Texas executions scheduled this summer.

UPDATE: The Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the execution the day before it was to have taken place.

Wired: 5.5 million personal records lost or stolen this spring

Millions of Americans had their personal identity information stolen or lost in the last few months from a handful of government and corporate sources, demonstrating anew the danger of aggregating personal data into huge, central databases.

According to Kevin Poulsen in Wired magazine's July issue (p. 32, not presently online), this year an astonishing 5.5 million records of Americans' personal information including social security numbers and credit reports, were stolen or went missing. About 80% of those losses stemmed from just eight entities that lost information between February 25 and May 2, only one of which, LexisNexis, is a major information aggregator. More than 2 million missing records stemmed from confirmed invasions by hackers or thieves bent on facilitating identity theft. The rest were the result of carelessness, lost backup tapes, etc., where the information may or may not have wound up in the wrong hands.

The eight institutions from whom data was stolen or went missing include corporate and academic icons:

• Ameritrade, 200,000
• AOL Time Warner, 600,000
• Bank of America, 1,200,000
• UC Berkeley, 98,000
• DSW Shoe Warehouse, 1,500,000
• LexisNexis, 310,000
• Polo Ralph Lauren, 180,000
• San Jose Medical Group, 185,000

But the Texas Department of Public Safety will never lose Texans' biometric information, right?

US House: Bipartisan support for de-funding drug task forces

Somehow I'd missed when the U.S. House earlier this month approved a 44% cut to the federal Byrne grant program that finances Texas' system of regional narcotics task forces. As the state of Texas prepares to implement just-passed legislation reining in those rogue agencies, Congress approved dramatically slashing their budget in a bipartisan vote. The failed amendment to reinstate the funds would have paid for the increase in funding by enacting an across-the-board cut in all other discretionary spending by .448%.

Twenty of Texas' 32 Congressional representatives supported cutting the program. In all, 137 Republicans, 114 Democrats and one Independent backed the measure, coming on the heels of a 24% cut enacted last year. Groups across the political spectrum support the reductions. According to the Bowling Green Daily News:

A federal grant program that gave about $7 million to Kentucky law enforcement during the 2005 fiscal year is not dead, as President Bush suggested in his February budget proposal, but it is limping.

Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Grants – a major source of funding for local drug task force agencies – will be cut to about 56 percent of the $634 million allotted in fiscal year 2005, unless the U.S. Senate decides to restore funding to the previous level.

A proposed amendment along those lines was voted down 175-252 on Tuesday (June 14) in the U.S. House of Representatives, but if the Senate disagrees with the decision, Byrne funding will get another look in a House and Senate conference committee later this year.

That's big news since the House had been the barrier to cutting the Byrne program in the past. In 2003, the US Senate voted on more or less partisan lines to end the Byrne program entirely, but the House didn't concur and the money was added back later in conference committee. Both Texas Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison backed that 2003 measure. This time, the legislation headed to the Senate already contains dramatic cuts, so if he can keep his votes who have already gone on record, President Bush's expanded GOP majority in the Senate should ensure the measure's passage.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat who voted for the 44% Byrne cut, has also proposed legislation to require states using Byrne money for drug task forces to require corroboration for undercover testimony.

Harris revokes probation most among big Texas counties

Governor Rick Perry apparently thinks Texas' overincarceration crisis will go away if he ignores it, but local officials must still manage the state's broken probation system in the wake of the Governor's ill-conceived veto of HB 2193.

The Houston Chronicle's Andrew Tilghman reports this morning that Harris County is struggling to improve supervision of probationers and lower its probation revocation rate, despite Governor Perry's veto of legislation to strengthen the probation system. Their goal of reducing revocations is welcome, but it'd be a lot easier to accomplish if Gov. Perry had not vetoed new tools to better supervise probationers.

Just as the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee found in last year's interim report, Harris County's high revocation rate leads the state and is a major driver of Texas' overincarceration crisis:

Roughly one of every seven Harris County probationers was put behind bars last year for failing to comply with court-ordered conditions, the highest revocation rate of any major Texas metropolitan area, state data show.

Once viewed as a respectable sign of a tough criminal justice system, a high revocation rate is increasingly considered a liability that fills costly jail space with low-level offenders and drains tax dollars.

That shift in perception puts mounting pressure on judges and probation officials at a time when the county probation department, formally known as the Community Supervision and Corrections Department, is ailing. ...

Last year, Harris County judges sent 15.8 percent of the county's felony probationers to jail for violating court-imposed rules or committing new crimes. The statewide average is 9.8 percent.

If the debate over strengthening Texas' probation system did nothing else, at least it has busted a hole in the argument that weak probation benefits society or reduces crime. This "shift in perception" largely stems from the big-picture reality that right now Texas' probation system isn't adequately supervising anyone, much less those most likely to commit new crimes. Revocation and imprisonment represents an expensive failure of the system, not a "tough" outcome. Among big Texas counties, here are the 2004 revocation rates:

REVOCATION RATES

Probationers from Harris County end up behind bars at a higher rate than those from other Texas cities. Listed are counties and the percentage of felony probationers sent to jail after revocation in 2004:

Harris: 15.8 percent

Tarrant: 15 percent

Dallas: 11.9 percent

Travis: 9.3 percent

Bexar: 8 percent

El Paso: 6 percent

Texas Department of Criminal Justice

That's a pretty impressive range. To me, it shows that probation can supervise people more successfully than they're doing it in Houston. After all, El Paso's not revoking one in seven probationers. Sen. John Whitmire, who chairs the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee, blamed Harris County judges for the high probation revocation rates, but Tilghman reported those jurists may yet want to change their stripes:

Others, however, say it is the judges, who impose probation conditions and ultimately decide whether to revoke, who drive Harris County's high rates.

"The (county) bench is made up of very conservative people, most of them former prosecutors," said state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston. "Elements of the judiciary are applying their own theories and philosophies, contrary to what a lot of experts and advisers would suggest works."

State District Judge Belinda Hill disagrees.

"I can't imagine that (Harris County judges) are any more rigorous than any other place," said Hill, who heads the judges' subcommittee on probation matters.

Hill said the county's 22 felony judges, who oversee the probation department and hire its director, are working to reduce the revocation rate. They are discussing plans to create a system of "progressive sanctions" that will give low-risk probationers more opportunity to stay out of jail, she said.

That's welcome news. Governor Perry's veto of HB 2193 was a grave disservice to public safety and to the taxpayers, but the issues raised by the bill haven't gone away. Tilghman's article shows that now local governments must wrestle with this looming state crisis, which the Governor knew existed but refused to provide leadership to resolve.