Last night, Glenn Beck and guest Tim Phillips from Americans for Prosperity — one of the lead organizations behind the Tax Day Tea Party protests — kicked off the week by bashing the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) and attacking unions for wanting to represent undocumented workers. According to Beck and Phillips, unions don’t care about the American worker:

BECK: Anybody who says, hey the unions — they just love America–they do. They love America with all their little itty-bitty heart. And they love the American worker. And that’s all they’re trying to do — is help the American worker…Why would a union want to bring in illegals that are working below minimum wage, working in awful conditions? Why would they want to do that unless they were trying not to protect American jobs but just trying to get rich and have a whole bunch of new people signed up to be union members?

PHILLIPS: You hit it Glenn. They simply want more of the forced dues that come from new union members, regardless of their status — whether they’re here legally or not. They just want more money for their coffers to pursue their genuinely crazy liberal agenda.

BECK: …There’s nothing like starting your week just, ya know, going after the unions.

Watch it:

There are actually a lot of reasons why unions would want to organize immigrant workers who earn low wages working in miserable conditions — and they don’t include any sort of get-rich-quick scheme or “crazy liberal agenda.”

When immigrant workers are exploited, it drives down the wages, benefits, and working conditions of all workers in that industry. Cristina Jiménez, an immigration policy consultant at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy has pointed out that “consigning undocumented workers to a precarious existence undermines all who aspire to a middle-class standard of living.” By organizing both immigrant and native-born workers, unions are better able to negotiate contracts that improve the standard of living for all of their members across the board.

Undocumented workers are extremely difficult to organize and EFCA would in fact make that job easier by strengthening penalties against companies that illegally coerce or intimidate workers to prevent them from forming a union. Increased union membership would help establish a secure workforce and lead to increased output and a more productive economy. Union workers earn 30% higher wages than their non-union counterparts and pay 8% less in health care deductibles. 72% receive retirement pension benefits compared to the 15% of non-union workers. EFCA is essentially a profit-making endeavor for the U.S. economy as a whole.

The most important thing that Beck misses is that it’s not the unions, but rather the unscrupulous employers who profit from hiring and exploiting undocumented immigrants that hurt American workers. It is not the union’s responsibility to verify the immigration status of a company’s employees, but it is a union’s duty to represent the interests of all of its members.

Israel’s Haaretz reports that “former U.S. presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee plans to broadcast his weekend show on Fox News” from a settlement construction site in East Jerusalem:

New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind said Huckabee will air the talkshow during a solidarity visit to the site of the project, which is in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

Hikind, who is active in right-wing Jewish causes, told Haaretz that dozens of U.S. activists will participate in the mission, in order to express their support for the project and the man behind it, Irving Moskowitz.

Hikind is a former follower of Meir Kahane, a Jewish extremist who was assassinated in 1990. Two Kahanist organizations, Kach and Kahane Chai, are on the U.S. State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

Irving Moskowitz is a Florida-based gambling magnate who funds right-wing pro-Israel organizations in the United States and radical Israeli settler groups and settlement projects in the occupied territories, like the one in Sheikh Jarrah. Moskowitz is also a longtime funder of conservative think tanks like the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and the Center for Security Policy (CSP).

Huckabee has been an outspoken supporter of Israeli settlements — and opponent of a two-state solution. Last July, Huckabee told World Net Daily that “the two-state solution is no solution, but will cause only problems. … The Palestinians can create their homeland in many other places in the Middle East, outside Israel.”

Yesterday I wrote about the Israeli government’s plans to build a new settlement in the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem.

Today Israel’s Haaretz reports that “former U.S. presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee plans to broadcast his weekend show on Fox News” from the construction site:

New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind said Huckabee will air the talkshow during a solidarity visit to the site of the project, which is in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

Hikind, who is active in right-wing Jewish causes, told Haaretz that dozens of U.S. activists will participate in the mission, in order to express their support for the project and the man behind it, Irving Moskowitz.

Huckabee has been an outspoken supporter of Israeli settlements — and opponent of a two-state solution. Last July, Huckabee told World Net Daily that “The two-state solution is no solution, but will cause only problems”:

The Palestinians can create their homeland in many other places in the Middle East, outside Israel.

Hikind is a former follower of Meir Kahane, a Jewish extremist who was assassinated in 1990. Two Kahanist organizations, Kach and Kahane Chai, are on the U.S. State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

Irving Moskowitz is a Florida-based gambling magnate who funds right-wing pro-Israel organizations in the United States and radical Israeli settler groups and settlement projects in the occupied territories, like the one in Sheikh Jarrah. Moskowitz is also a longtime funder of conservative think tanks like the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and the Center for Security Policy (CSP).

Taking questions after his national security speech at the Heritage Foundation yesterday, Newt Gingrich was confronted by Frank Gaffney, who we last saw on the op-ed page of the Washington Times suggesting that President Obama “might still be a Muslim.” Gaffney praised Gingrich’s speech as “a tour-de-force,” but wanted to know why Gingrich “didn’t specifically address sharia.”

For a little background, Gaffney is maniacal on the issue of sharia, or Islamic religious law, which he maintains is a “mortal threat” to the United States. He has developed a baroque set of ideas about sharia and “authoritative Islam”, a term he uses to suggest a single, monolithic understanding of Islam and the application of religious law, which of course does not exist. In as much as Gaffney’s arguments cannot be disproved — if you disagree with his claims about sharia, either you don’t know the truth about Islam (something he’s said to actual Muslims who’ve tried to explain to him that his ideas are ridiculous) or you’re involved in “stealth jihad” — they essentially amount to a conspiracy theory.

Gingrich seemed a bit unsure at first how to deal with Gaffney’s question, but then noted that he drew “a sharp distinction between Muslims who are part of the modern world and Muslims who are committed to a worldview so fundamentally different that it is literally irreconcilable with modernity.” Gingrich continued:

And I think, that this is part of why I said a while ago if you look, whether you want to start in ’79 or ’83 or ’93 or 9/11, we have now been engaged in — if you go back to ’83 — the longest war in American history. And we still haven’t, we still don’t have the intellectual tools to discuss it honestly. [...]

But I think all you have to do is describe in a positive sense the world we hope to create and the folks who believe passionately in sharia are almost automatically in a mortal struggle with you because it is literally antithetical to their worldview. And I think this is at the heart of why we have had a hard time dealing with this because we keep underestimating how fundamental the problem is and so we keep bouncing off of it.

Watch it:

We’ve obviously spent a lot of time in the U.S. since 9/11 talking about the threat of Islamic extremism. And while I think there’s still a lot that’s wrong with what continues to be said and believed, I think we’ve come a long way from post-9/11 hysteria and the dark days when nonsense about “Islamofascism” generated by Gaffney and associated neocons was taken more seriously than it is now.

Which is why it’s a bit embarrassing to see Newt still peddling these sorts of ideas in 2009. Gingrich’s claim that “we still don’t have the intellectual tools” to discuss the threat of extremism is really just a smart-sounding way of complaining that conservative ideas about the nature of that threat have been discredited. We have, I think, in the years since 9/11, developed many tools to better and more accurately understand our enemies — their intentions, capabilities, and their political appeal to certain target populations — and thus better protect the U.S. against the threat as it actually exists. President Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world is evidence that he gets this, and we already have evidence that Islamic extremists perceive Obama’s approach as far more dangerous than George W. Bush’s clumsy crusaderism.

None of this seems to have penetrated Newt’s consciousness. When Newt wonders aloud whether “the longest war in American history” started either in “’79 or ’83 or ’93 or 9/11,” — referring to, respectively, the Iranian revolution and taking of American hostages in Tehran, the Hezbollah bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut, Al Qaeda’s first attack on the World Trade Center, and 9/11, combining Iran and Al Qaeda into a single enemy — he’s admitting that he hasn’t paid much attention to the debate that’s actually occurred. One of the key conclusions of this debate is that it’s highly preferable to disaggregate ones enemies whenever possible. While Iran and Al Qaeda may both represent a threat, it’s both wrong and counterproductive to behave as if they represent the same threat. In doing so, Newt pretty clearly shows that he’s allowed the debate to pass him by.

Transcript below. Read more

Seven years, two elections and about half-a-dozen Supreme Court decisions after President Bush started warehousing detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a key Obama Administration task force released a preliminary report yesterday which spells out much of how the Administration intends to prosecute these detainees.  In a clear break from the prior Administration, the report promises to apply a “presumption that, where feasible” detainees will prosecuted in criminal court, although an attachment lays out a complex test to determine when military commissions are appropriate.  Because the Administration anticipates the use of such tribunals, much of the report also lays out procedural safeguards to ensure that these military commissions reach fair and accurate results.

In addition to reiterating the Obama Administration’s support for five recently announced procedural rules–such as a ban on the use of statements obtained through “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment”–the meat of the report is a call for Congress to enshrine eight safeguards in the United States Code:

(1) codifying in law a prohibition on use of statements obtained through cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; (2) further regulating the use of hearsay, to bring the rule more in line with the rules in federal court or courts-martial . . . (3) adopting a “voluntariness” standard for the admission of statements of the accused, while taking into account the challenges and realities of the battlefield; (4) incorporating classified information procedures that are more similar to those applicable in federal court . . . (5) reforming the appellate process to give reviewing courts more authority . . . (6) adopting clear rules requiring the government to disclose exculpatory evidence to the accused; (7) ensuring that the offenses charged in military commissions are law of war offenses; and (8) including a sunset provision requiring Congress to reevaluate the legislation after a term of years.”

The common thread flowing throughout these eight safeguards is the need to ensure that military commissions reach reliable results.  Hearsay evidence isn’t restricted in court proceedings because of some need to coddle criminals, but because second-hand accounts of what a witness might have said aren’t particularly reliable.  Similarly, coerced confessions are excluded from criminal trials precisely because there is no way to know where a coerced defendant is actually telling the truth.  In other words, these rules reflect the Obama Administration’s commitment to actually figuring out who the terrorists are at Guantanamo, rather than simply locking up innocent and guilty alike.

Of course, the promise of legal safeguards is one thing; actual justice for the wrongfully detained is another.  Moreover,a full report on the future of detainee prosecutions was originally supposed to be released today, but that report has been delayed for six months.  Nevertheless, the procedures laid out in yesterday’s preliminary report will go a long way towards eliminating the Kafkaesque detention and sham tribunals of the prior Administration if they are actually implemented.  Hopefully, they will allow the present Administration to finally sort the actual terrorists at Guantanamo away from the many innocents still detained there.

Our guest blogger is Micah Zenko, a Fellow in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations.

On June 30th, the first phase of America’s withdrawal from Iraq began as U.S. combat forces left “all Iraqi cities, villages, and localities,” as required by the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed in November 2008 by the government of Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki and the George W. Bush administration.

As reported Saturday and yesterday in the Washington Post, Iraq’s interpretation of the SOFA has placed a number of onerous operational constraints on U.S. troops, including an order to “stop all joint patrols in Baghdad.” An Iraqi Defense Ministry official confirmed the constraints to the BBC yesterday, noting that no joint patrols have been conducted in any cities since June 13th. One Iraqi Major even made the incredible claim that any joint U.S.-Iraqi missions had to be personally approved by Prime Minister al-Maliki.

On the one hand, U.S. commanders should welcome the initiative of their Iraqi counterparts in taking ownership over the security and well-being of their citizens. On the other hand, these operational constraints effectively eliminate the primary military mission of the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq — training and advising Iraqi security forces to provide stability and counter the worsening insurgent threats.

Furthermore, additional constraints have restricted the ability of U.S. soldiers from collecting evidence or detaining insurgents who pose an imminent threat, as is allowed in Article IV of the SOFA. Read more