An Arizona local news station (KPHO) is reporting that the state Senator behind Arizona’s new immigration law, Russell Pearce (R), does not intend on stopping at SB-1070. In e-mails obtained by CBS 5, Pearce said he intends to push for an “anchor baby” bill that would essentially overturn the 14th amendment by no longer granting citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants born on U.S. soil. “Anchor babies” is a derogatory and “politically charged” term used to refer to the U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents.

Pearce is confident his new proposal is constitutional. “It’s common sense,” Pearce said. “Again – you can’t break into someone’s country and then expect to be rewarded for that. You can’t do it.”

However, the Constitution doesn’t grant citizenship to those born in the U.S. as an “award,” but rather, as a right. In an article released by the Center for American Progress (CAP), its authors argue “Eleven years and a bloody Civil War later, when the framers of the 14th Amendment composed its text, they explicitly rejected the notion that America is a country club.” Under the 14th Amendment, “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The U.S. Supreme Court explicitly confirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that anyone born in the United States would be a citizen regardless of their parents’ nationality. “This is why the hard right’s assault on birthright citizenship — claiming that the Constitution does not in fact grant citizenship to the children of immigrants to the United States — does not survive contact with the text of the Constitution itself,” writes CAP.

Pearce isn’t the first lawmaker to go after the children of immigrants. Since taking office, Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA) has tried and failed to pass seven pieces of legislation that would either repeal or reinterpret the 14th Amendment’s definition of citizenship. Most recently, Bilbray took his anti-14th Amendment crusade to the state-level, backing the Taxpayer Revolution’s “Anchor Baby” reform initiative which sought to limit the rights and benefits of the U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants by redefining the 14th Amendment’s jurisdiction. Bilbray has also praised and defended Arizona’s new immigration law, indicating that police officers will be able to identify undocumented immigrants by employing criteria such as the shoes they wear.

KPHO obtained a troubling email from one of Pearce’s constituents who is encouraging him to pursue the “anchor baby” legislation. “If we are going to have an effect on the anchor baby racket, we need to target the mother,” wrote the constituent. “Call it sexist, but that’s the way nature made it. Men don’t drop anchor babies, illegal alien mothers do.” In response to the email, Pearce said he “didn’t find anything wrong with the language.” “It’s somebody’s opinion…What they’re trying to say is it’s wrong. And I agree with them. It’s wrong,” Pearce told KPHO.

I first became aware of Malcolm Nance back in 2007, when he staged an intervention into the waterboarding/torture debate with an item at Small Wars Journal entitled “Waterboarding is Torture…Period“:

With regards to the waterboard, I want to set the record straight so the apologists can finally embrace the fact that they condone and encourage torture. […]

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration — usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threatened with its use again and again.

Coming from a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE), Nance’s views on the subject carried enormous weight. Responding to the nonsensical “waterboarding isn’t torture because we use it on our own trainees!” argument (which is still a favorite of torture advocates like Liz Cheney and Marc Thiessen, of whom Nance has written “has no sense of honor and no moral compass“), Nance noted that “SERE was designed to show how an evil totalitarian enemy would use torture at the slightest whim. If this is the case, then waterboarding is unquestionably being used as torture technique.” In other words, U.S. trainees are subjected to waterboarding in order to prepare them for torture if they are ever captured.

Nance, who now works as a counter-terrorism and terrorism intelligence consultant for the U.S. government’s Special Operations, Homeland Security and Intelligence agencies, has just published a new book with the purposeful title An End to Al Qaeda. “The American strategic communications effort since 9/11 has been an unmitigated failure at every level,” Nance writes. The Bush administration’s “lack of knowledge about Al Qaeda and their religious-based ideological strategy led President Bush to declare the ‘War on Terrorism’ a new Crusade,” effectively affirming Osama bin Laden’s own claims about the nature of the conflict between Islam and the West.

As to why American strategic communications efforts were so poor, Nance writes that, rather than directing its messaging toward Al Qaeda’s own target audience among Muslim populations, “the Bush strategic communications policy was focused like a laser on the American public”:

But getting the American people to understand terror was not the goal. The push behind the policies to influence the nation’s message was designed to target changing American laws to benefit the conservative agenda in America, not counter the ideology of bin Laden. By choosing the spend billions on influence operations to change the internal dynamics of American life with the objective of what presidential political adviser Karl Rove called working toward “a permanent Republican majority,” the Bush administration effectively surrendered the war of influence in the Muslim world to bin Laden.

I’ve similarly noted on several occasions that conservatives’ obsession with being “at war” with Al Qaeda is a transparent attempt to keep the national security debate on grounds more favorable to conservatives, nevermind that this both misunderstands the actual nature and scope of the threat, and plays right into Al Qaeda’s own propaganda.

Though the Obama administration has made progress in degrading the capabilities of Al Qaeda and affiliated groups, Nance insists that it is essential to continue to challenge Al Qaeda over the basis of its murderous ideology, and better highlight the fact that the vast majority of Al Qaeda’s victims have been innocent Muslims, including hundreds of children. Noting a number of influential Islamic scholars who have condemned Al Qaeda, Nance writes that “the greatest weakness of Al Qaeda’s religious militant ideology is vulnerability to any deep analytical dissection of their religious motives.” While Western governments getting into fine-grained discussions over Islamic precepts will probably do little to convince those Al Qaeda is targeting with their pitch, much more can be done to facilitate and publicize internal Muslim critics of Al Qaeda, who have far more credibility in calling out Al Qaeda’s attempted hijacking of Islam. “In the war of ideas,” writes Nance, “Al Qaeda and their viral messengers need to be shouted down.”

This Sunday at 5 p.m. (ET) I’ll be hosting a discussion of An End to Al Qaeda with Mr. Nance at Firedoglake.

Last night, the Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute (CHLI) honored House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-IN) with a leadership achievement award for his contributions to the Hispanic community. However, Roll Call reports that “nobody — including Pence — can seem to figure out why.”

According to CHLI executive director Octavio Hinojosa, Pence is being recognized for his “collective leadership,” “willingness to work on comprehensive immigration reform,” and for talking with Republican lawmakers “about the need to engage folks on the other side of the aisle” on issues that are important to Latinos. However, a look at Pence’s record raises more questions than it answers about CHLI’s decision to honor Pence:

In 2006, while Pence was introducing a “no amnesty immigration reform” plan in the House, CHLI was hosting a congressional briefing that “united” pro-immigration reform advocates in support of a moderate Senate bill containing a path to legalization.

Pence told Roll Call yesterday that he has not been reaching out to Democrats to craft a bipartisan immigration reform plan in 2010 and still does not support creating a pathway to legalization for undocumented immigrants. CHLI Chairman Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL), meanwhile, has said he believes “that any legislation Congress considers should be comprehensive in nature” and stressed the need to “create a system to ensure that foreign workers seeking employment in the U.S. are appropriately authorized to work.”

In recent weeks, Diaz-Balart has been an outspoken critic of Arizona’s new immigration law, SB-1070. Pence, meanwhile, has defended Arizona’s actions, stating “we can’t blame Arizonans for trying to reaffirm the rule of law.” Sixty-seven percent of Latinos oppose SB-1070.

While 74 percent of Latino registered voters were “very supportive” of including a public option in health care reform, Pence told Hispanics that they can “expect that Republicans will be united in opposition to a government takeover of healthcare.”

Pence told Roll Call that CHLI might be honoring him because he helped provide the first-ever Spanish-language GOP response to the State of the Union. Ironically, in 2007, Pence felt the need to co-sponsor legislation declaring English as the official language of the U.S.

In a November 2009 interview with Newt Gingrich’s online publication, “The Americano,” Pence stated that “Republicans didn’t work hard enough in the past to reach out to Hispanic Americans.” According to Pence, “that’s changing.”