I didn’t respond to @paulkrugman's original tweet because I assumed it was just a bad tweet and that he’d figure that out on his own. But now I'm realizing that a lot of the events that defined the past 19 years for people like me didn’t even register with him. THREAD
The problem with the argument he makes here is that it doesn’t recognize that most of the "anti-Muslim sentiment and violence" was *officially sanctioned*. Focusing narrowly on hate crimes stats has the effect of moving all of that out of the picture.
For example, hundreds of Muslim men were rounded up in New York and New Jersey in the weeks after 9/11. They were imprisoned without charge and often subject to abuse in custody because of their religion. None of this would register in any hate crimes database.
The NYPD spent years infiltrating American Muslim organizations, surveilling mosques, extorting vulnerable people to turn against their communities—a strategy that was based on prejudice and turned up no terrorists. @adamgoldmanNYT & @mattapuzzo wrote a book about it.
Border agents harassed, intimidated, and interrogated American Muslims returning from abroad, and foreign Muslims visiting the US, often asking them to justify their religious beliefs and practices. That’s not in the hate crimes databases either.
Anyone who thinks the torture of prisoners in US military custody (at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere) had nothing to do with religion doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Here’s an email an FBI agent wrote about what he saw at Guantanamo. aclu.org/sites/default/…
Interrogators routinely exploited Muslim prisoners’ religious beliefs in order to pressure them to share information. Here’s one example: nytimes.com/2005/01/28/us/…
If you’re under the impression that the war in Iraq had nothing to do with prejudice, you’ve forgotten about stuff like this:
I could go on. The US has been in a paroxysm of "anti-Muslim sentiment and violence" for going on twenty years. That this doesn't seem to have registered with Krugman is really amazing to me, and pretty disturbing.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I don’t think Americans understand the extent to which the “foreign-intelligence exception” has hollowed out the Fourth Amendment. Most reporting about the current legislative debate is technical and incremental, and misses the forest for the trees. 1/
Here’s what's crucial: What was once an extremely narrow exception to ordinary constitutional principles has become, over time, a justification for warrantless surveillance on a staggering scale—not just of foreigners’ communications but of Americans’ communications too. 2/
With respect to Americans’ international communications, the Fourth Amendment has been made essentially a dead letter. 3/
Here’s something quite amazing. The OLC wrote a powerful memo explaining why the Attorney General's independence is vital to our constitutional system. It reads as if it had been drafted this morning, in response to today’s political landscape, but …. /1 knightcolumbia.org/documents/jwhw…
It was written 40 years ago. Ted Olson, then the head of the OLC, wrote it in Feb 1982 for the then-AG, William French Smith, to describe the “responsibilities of the AG to the Constitution.” /2
The memo is one of more than five hundred OLC opinions that @knightcolumbia has obtained over the past months as a result of a settlement with the Justice Department. All of the opinions are here. /3 knightcolumbia.org/reading-room/o…
Over the past months, @knightcolumbia has obtained hundreds of previously secret Office of Legal Counsel opinions on issues ranging from civil rights to national security. Yesterday we published a long-withheld set of opinions about the War Powers Act. /1 nytimes.com/2022/09/16/us/…
We were able to obtain these opinions by taking advantage of a 2016 law that limits the government’s ability to rely on the “deliberative process” privilege to withhold documents that are more than 25 years old. /2
The result has been an incredible wave of disclosure about an office that has been as secretive as it has been powerful. There is absolutely no precedent for the disclosure of OLC opinions on this scale. /3
This is actually a really hard set of questions. The government can't constitutionally coerce private publishers to censor speech. (There's a Supreme Court case about that.) But what should count as coercion is a really difficult question to answer.
For example, should the First Amendment be understood to prohibit a Senator from grilling a platform representative about the platform's editorial decisions? (@HawleyMO appears to think not.)
The Espionage Act is a much-abused law that casts a long shadow over press freedom in this country, and that impoverishes and distorts public debate about national security, foreign policy, and war. But is the EA being abused here, in Trump’s case? /1
I don’t think so. Even a narrower EA—an EA that accounted for the First Amendment interests of whistleblowers, news organizations, and the public—would apply to the facts here, if the facts are as they’re asserted to be. /2
Trump isn’t a would-be whistleblower or publisher who decided to disclose classified information to inform the public about grave government misconduct. There’s no plausible First Amendment defense of his (alleged) actions. /3