Adam Serwer

Reporter

Adam Serwer is a reporter at Mother Jones. Formerly a staff writer at the American Prospect, his writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Root, the Village Voice, and the New York Daily News.

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Newt's National Security Demagoguery

—By Adam Serwer

| Tue Feb. 21, 2012 8:27 AM PST

2012 GOP Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich. Flickr/Gage Skidmore

How dangerous is President Obama? According to Newt Gingrich, the president who ordered the raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan is "incapable of defending the United States," later offering as an example the fact that the authorities "barely got a guy on Saturday who's tried to blow up the US Capitol.”

Authorities "barely" foiled the plot only if, by "barely," Gingrich means they controlled the entire thing from beginning to end. Last Friday, an undocumented Moroccan immigrant named Amine El Khalifi was arrested in an alleged plot to suicide bomb the US Capitol—a plot that, according to the criminal complaint, was being monitored by the FBI for the past thirteen months and was planned only after Khalifi made contact with an undercover agent. When Khalifi finally showed up to carry the operation out, according to the complaint, it was with equipment he had been given by the FBI: A bomb that wouldn't detonate and a gun that wouldn't fire. This kind of sting operation, where the plot itself is never really in danger of actually coming to fruition, and which critics say amount to entrapment, has been a prevailing trend in domestic counterterrorism for the past few years. You could almost say Gingrich has a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how these things work.

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Could the Blunt Amendment Allow Employers to Block HIV Screening?

—By Adam Serwer

| Fri Feb. 17, 2012 8:48 AM PST

The Weekly Standard's John McCormack insists that my piece a few days ago on Sen. Roy Blunt's (R-Mo.) amendment, which would expand "conscience" exemptions in the Affordable Care Act, is inaccurate. He maintains that it would not allow health care providers or employers to deny certain services or treatments:

Can Democrats cite real examples of Christian businessmen denying AIDS treatment or screenings prior to Obamacare's passage? No, they can't. Because that never happened. (Though you can find countless examples of Christians setting up ministries specifically devoted to providing care to AIDS patients.) Furthermore, the conscience bill would not let employers decide by themselves to ban coverage of specific services. If an employer wanted to target AIDS victims who work for him, he would have to find an insurance company that specifically denied treatment for AIDS. Does such an insurance company exist in the United States of America?

McCormack writes that "the conscience bill would not let employers decide by themselves to ban coverage of specific services." Except, that's exactly what the bill says it would do. It states that "a health plan shall not be considered to have failed to provide [Essential Health Benefits or Preventive Services]" if it fails to cover the service or benefit because "providing coverage...of such specific items or services is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the sponsor, issuer, or other entity offering the plan." Moreover, employers frequently set up their own insurance plans and then pay insurance companies to administer them—more than half of workers were covered by such plans, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. So employers wouldn't have to find an insurance company that denied treatment for services or benefits mandated under the Affordable Care Act. They could design their own.

McCormack further expresses utter disbelief that an employer or an insurance company would deny treatment to someone who has HIV or AIDS. There is actually a long history of employment discrimination cases involving employers either using this pretense to fire employees whose health care costs are expected to skyrocket on the basis of having HIV/AIDS or insurance companies denying benefits, and they're hardly just a thing of the past. On the one hand, it's a sign of progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS that McCormack finds the idea of this unconscionable; on the other hand, there was an Academy Award winning film starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington on the subject, so it's the kind of history he should be aware of.

Undie Bomber Gets Life

—By Adam Serwer

| Thu Feb. 16, 2012 12:46 PM PST

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab Wikimedia

Judging by its lethality, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to blow up a plane en route to Detroit on Christmas 2009, using a bomb hidden in his underpants, was a spectacular failure. The would-be terrorist burned himself horribly and was subdued by nearby passengers.

Abdulmutallab received multiple life sentences for his crimes Thursday afternoon. When discussing terrorism however, there are ways to measure the success of an attack other than its deadliness—such as whether or not the attack is successful in, well, terrorizing people. In that sense, it's difficult to view Abdulmutallab's botched bombing as anything but an unqualified victory. Shortly after the attack, Republicans proclaimed the attack a "success" as part of a campaign to make the president look weak on national security. Some demanded that he be subjected to co-called enhanced interrogation techniques and placed in military detention. They insisted that by allowing federal agents rather than military officials to interrogate him, that America had made itself vulnerable to another attack—Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) likened an FBI interrogation of Abdulmutallab to an interview with CNN's Larry King.

The Abdulmutallab incident was just one of several that came during a spike of homegrown terrorist incidents in 2009, a trend that has subsided but also involved numbers so small that any decrease or increase was bound to look dramatic. Nevertheless, Abdulmutallab's impact has been substantial. While Republicans failed to overturn Obama's executive order banning torture, his arrest lead to a bipartisan effort in Congress to force federal agents to ask permission from the military to investigate terrorism cases where the suspect is believed to be a member of Al Qaeda. While the administration managed to force changes to last year's National Defense Authorization Act that make its provisions "mandating" the military detention of noncitizen terror suspects apprehended on US soil almost meaningless, there is now a presumption in the law that the military has a domestic role in counterterrorism.

You'd think that someone who couldn't even blow himself up right would be a joke, a punchline. Instead, in accidentally setting himself on fire, Abdulmutallab managed to inspire a panic that culminated in the Congress altering the law. Imagine what could have happened if he had actually killed someone.

DOJ Memo: We're Not Biased Against Conservatives

—By Adam Serwer

| Tue Feb. 14, 2012 3:35 AM PST

Attorney General Eric Holder. James Berglie/ZUMA Press

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the chairman of the House judiciary committee, has accused the civil rights division of the Obama Justice Department of being biased against hiring conservatives. Now, in a letter obtained by Mother Jones, the DOJ has responded to the charges. (You can read the full letter below.)

In a September letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Smith argued that the DOJ's civil rights division is biased toward liberals because many of the new hires in the division have experience working for civil rights organizations. You read that right: Hiring people with experience in civil rights to work in the civil rights division reflects "bias."

Smith's argument is that attorneys with experience in civil rights law are disproportionately liberal, and therefore the division's "neutral" hiring requirements are biased against conservatives. The idea that neutral employment qualifications can be a vehicle for bias is a cornerstone of civil rights law, and one that conservatives frequently oppose. It's the argument behind traditional affirmative action: that weighing two people's qualifications equally when one is from a historically disfavoured group, like black Americans, could be biased against the person from the historically disfavoured group. Smith has embraced this concept, but only as it applies to conservatives, who are not typically seen as a historically disfavored group deserving of special treatment. It's almost as if Smith is objecting to the idea that the Justice Department shouldn't consider political affiliation—instead, he seems to think conservatives are entitled to some strange form of affirmative action.

The Justice Department's response to Smith's charges, which was sent in December and recently provided to Mother Jones, gives the congressman a detailed explanation of the DOJ hiring process and how it currently works. According to the letter, which was signed by Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich, career attorneys at the head of each section, rather than political appointees, now make hiring recommendations. The new head of the civil rights division, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, can only overrule those recommendations with a written statement explaining why—something Perez has yet to do. Even Internet searches of prospective employees are prohibited, lest those attorneys doing the hiring allow the perception of what an applicant's political beliefs might be influence their evaluation.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

The GOP Plan to Give Your Boss "Moral" Control Over Your Health Insurance

Republicans now want to give CEOs the power to do away with any medical benefits they dislike.

—By Adam Serwer

| Tue Feb. 14, 2012 3:00 AM PST

In their latest move in the battle over contraception coverage, top Republicans in Congress are going for broke: They're now pushing a bill that would allow employers and insurance companies to pick and choose which health benefits to provide based simply on executives' personal moral beliefs. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the top GOPer in the Senate, has already endorsed the proposal, and it could come to a vote this week. The measure would make the religious exemptions to President Barack Obama's health care bill so large they'd swallow it whole.

"This is about gutting the Affordable Care Act and the protections it was meant to establish," says Leila Abolfazli, a lawyer focusing at the National Women's Law Center who focuses on health and reproductive rights.

Obama's Affordable Care Act requires all health care plans to offer certain services and benefits, including birth control. Last week, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) offered a "conscience amendment," to the law, pitching it as a way to allay religious employers' qualms about providing birth control to their employees.

But Blunt's proposal doesn't just apply to religious employers and birth control. Instead, it would allow any insurer or employer, religiously affiliated or otherwise, to opt out of providing any health care services required by federal law—everything from maternity care to screening for diabetes. Employers wouldn't have to cite religious reasons for their decision; they could just say the treatment goes against their moral convictions. That exception could include almost anything—an employer could theoretically claim a "moral objection" to the cost of providing a given benefit. The bill would also allow employers to sue if state or federal regulators try to make them comply with the law.

If Republican leaders get their way and Blunt's bill becomes law, a boss who regarded overweight people and smokers with moral disgust could exclude coverage of obesity and tobacco screening from his employees' health plans. A Scientologist employer could deny its employees depression screening because Scientologists believe psychiatry is morally objectionable. A management team that thought HIV victims brought the disease upon themselves could excise HIV screening from its employees' insurance coverage. Your boss' personal prejudices, not science or medical expertise, would determine which procedures your insurance would cover for you and your kids.

[Read the full article]

The Closest Thing We've Got to an Awlaki Indictment

—By Adam Serwer

| Mon Feb. 13, 2012 7:00 AM PST

Anwar al-Awlaki Wikimedia

Last week prosecutors filed their sentencing memorandum in the case of admitted underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a flight to Detroit in 2009 but ended up setting himself on fire and being subdued by nearby passengers. The memo includes a document that purports to show how Abdulmutallab ended up on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 with a bomb in his pants. The document provides the first real public evidence that extremist American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone strike in September, had an "operational" role in Al Qaeda.

Though Obama administration officials frequently insisted to reporters that Awlaki was not simply a pro-Al-Qaeda propagandist, but someone with a functional role in Al Qaeda's franchise in Yemen, actual evidence to that effect was scarce. According to the Abdulmutallab memo, in which prosecutors recommend a life sentence, Awlaki:

Helped facilitate Abdulmutallab's travel to Yemen, and allowed Abdulmutallab to stay at his home.
Evaluated Abdulmutallab's "suitability for jihad," and then helped him get training.
Gave "final approval" to the attempted plane bombing.
Helped Abdulmutallab film his "martyrdom video."

This information likely forms at least part of the justification for the decision to target Awlaki, who, according to the New York Times, was placed on the US's covert "kill list" following Abdulmutallab's failed attempt to kill more than two hundred people. Since Awlaki is dead and the government remains tight-lipped both about the legal justification for targeting him and the evidence regarding his role in Al Qaeda, it's impossible to objectively evaluate how reliable this information actually is.

H/T Marcy Wheeler.

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White House Seeking "Compromise" On Birth Control

—By Adam Serwer

| Fri Feb. 10, 2012 6:05 AM PST

Flickr/starbooze

The White House is looking to "compromise" on broadening the religious exemption to its mandate that employers must offer insurance plans that include contraception coverage, following a week of harsh criticism from Republicans and religious organizations.

ABC News' Jake Tapper reports that the White House's compromise could be premised on Hawaii's law, which mandates contraception coverage but contains a mechanism for ensuring that employees are covered while not making religious employers directly pay for that coverage. Here's how it works, according to a report from the Guttmacher Institute:

The Hawaii law specifies that when an employer is exempted from the contraceptive coverage requirement on religious grounds, its employees are entitled to purchase coverage directly from the plan. The cost to the employee must be no more than the price the employee would have paid had the employer not been exempted. The law requires an exempted employer to notify its employees of this option.

Here's the thing: The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has already said that this is unacceptable to them, because according to the National Catholic Register, this would still mean that religious employers "must directly send women to drugs and devices that are morally wrong and can do harm to them." (Millions of women use contraception, including the vast, vast majority of Catholic women, many of them for health reasons rather than preventing pregnancy.) It's also not clear the Hawaii plan is workeable at the federal level, as one administration source told CNN that "the federal government cannot compel insurers to provide a side-contraception plan."

The unacknowledged background to this fight is that, as my colleague Nick Baumann reported earlier this week, federal law has required employers to offer health insurance for more than a decade—which is why DePaul University, the largest Catholic university in America, already offers birth control coverage to its employees. Far from being an unprecedented "assault on religious freedom," the narrow religious exception here has ample legal precedent. As Michelle Goldberg has written, contraception mandates are in effect in 28 states in various forms, and the courts have ruled against challenges brought to those state laws. And in a 1990 opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia found that laws "neutral toward religion and generally applicable" don't hamper inviduals' constitutional rights, so the administration seems to be on firm legal ground.

Firm legal ground however, isn't the same as being politically popular, and despite the pre-decision polls showing that mandating contraception coverage would be broadly accepted, there's probably a reason the White House is looking for middle ground now. But that's the same reason that their critics seems unlikely to meet them in the middle on this issue: Republicans think that they have a winning political issue here, too. There's a political angle for the White House here too of course: In offering a compromise, they may not be hoping for reconcilation as much as an opportunity to make their critics look unreasonable.

House Dems Blast Gitmo "Reengagement" Report

—By Adam Serwer

| Thu Feb. 9, 2012 10:00 AM PST

Service members go jogging at Guantanamo Bay in 2010. Flickr/US Army

House Democrats blasted their Republican colleagues on the armed services committee Wednesday, following the release of a report criticizing the Obama and Bush administrations over their transfer of detainees out of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

"Rarely in the history of the House Armed Services Committee has so much time and money been spent with so little result," said Rep. Jim Cooper, a conservative Tennessee Democrat in a statement. Cooper said the quality of the report was a direct result of Republicans on the committee attempting to exploit fears of terrorism for political gain in November. "Reports on terrorism should not further the terrorists’ goal of spreading fear."

None of the Democrats on the committee signed onto the report, which was the result of an 11-month investigation by the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee that began last March. Instead, they released an eight page dissent.

The chief point of contention is the report's conclusion that 27 percent of the about 600 former Gitmo detainees who have been transferred "were confirmed or suspected to be presently or previously reengaged in terrorist activities." The report pegs the "reengagement" rate under the Obama administration at 7.5 percent, but like the 27 percent figure, this combines detainees who are "confirmed or suspected" of "reengaging." This is problematic measurement since it not only assumes the detainees were guilty in the first place, but it assumes that those who are merely "suspected" of "reengaging" have actually done so. Of the five detainees released under Obama who are on the "confirmed or suspected list," two were ordered released by the courts. The Democrats argue that the actual "reengagement rate" under Obama is three percent, not 7.5 percent. A Defense Intelligence Agency report published by McClatchy last year identified the rate for detainees transferred or released during the Bush administration at almost 15 percent. The report asks the administration to produce its own report on "rengagement" and calls for restrictions on transfers of detainees out of Gitmo to remain in place.

While the administration took on a comprehensive evaluation of all the remaining detainees at Gitmo when Obama took office, the Republican majority is critical of the task force that reviewed their cases on the basis that they were predisposed towards the president's goal of closing the facility. Despite the lesser "reengagement rate" under Obama, however, the report concludes that "the threat of reengagement may not be lessened in the long term" by more robust review procedures adopted during the Obama administration.

Human rights and civil liberties groups are also critical of the report, which ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Zachary Katznelson called a "rehash of old allegations, long on accusations, short on facts."

The number of former detainees who have committed terrorist acts post-release or transfer has been a point of controversy since Obama took office, having promised to close the Gitmo detention facility within a year. But Congress balked, and beginning in Decemeber 2010, Congress has maintained restrictions on transferring detainees out of Gitmo that, according to the Pentagon, are nearly impossible to satisfy. Public opinion has shifted markedly, with seventy percent of Americans in favor of keeping Gitmo open, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll. In 2009, a majority of Americans wanted Gitmo closed. So the report is unlikely to make the effort to close Gitmo any deader than it already is, or lessen the already abysmal chances that the dozens of detainees who have been cleared for transfer or release will taste freedom anytime soon.

Second White Nationalist Appearing At CPAC

—By Adam Serwer

| Thu Feb. 9, 2012 8:25 AM PST

Though gay conservatives aren't welcome at the Conservative Political Action Confrence this year, at least two white nationalists are appearing at the yearly conservative confab.

One is Peter Brimelow *, founder of the nativist site VDARE which publishes the works of white nationalists like Jared Taylor, and the other is Robert Vandervoort, who runs a group called ProEnglish and according to the Institute for Research on Education and Human Rights, "was also the organizer of the white nationalist group, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance," which is affiliated with Taylor.

They'll be appearing on a panel titled "The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity" alongside National Review's John Derbyshire, who believes "that racial disparities in education and employment have their origin in biological differences between the human races," differences that are "facts in the natural world, like the orbits of the planets." I'm not sure whether there's really any daylight between Derbyshire, who is a long-time writer at American conservatism's flagship magazine, and the two other men he's appearing with.

*An earlier version of this post wrongly identified "Peter Brimelow" as "Jay Brimelow."

Poll: Americans Approve Of Targeted Killing Of American Terror Suspects

—By Adam Serwer

| Wed Feb. 8, 2012 6:59 AM PST

An MQ-9 Reaper drone in Afghanistan in 2007. Flickr/james_gordon_los_angeles

Buried in the recently released Washington Post/ABC poll noting improving numbers for President Barack Obama are numbers showing that Americans are favorably disposed towards the use of targeted killing in counterterrorism operations, even if the targets are Americans.

Here are the poll results: Overall 83 percent of Americans approve of the use of "unmanned, 'drone' aircraft against terrorist suspects overseas," 59 percent strongly and 26 percent "somewhat." Of those who approve, 79 percent think the use of targeted killing against American citizens abroad who are suspected of terrorism is justified. The Washington Post's Greg Sargent, who takes a closer look at the internal numbers, finds that "Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American citizens by 58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35." Whether as a result of partisan identification with the president or an artifact of the United States shifting to the right on counterterrorism policy in general, it doesn't seem likely that Obama will pay a high political price with his base for either the escalation of drone strikes since taking office or the use of drones to kill Americans abroad suspected of terrorism.

The administration has faced increasing criticism from civil liberties and human rights groups over the nature and secrecy of its targeted killing program, including its efforts to block attempts to force disclosure of the legal rationale for targeting Americans without charge or trial, even as administration officials comment publicly on the program's success. Recently, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta revealed that, when it comes to the targeted killing of Americans suspected of terrorism, the final decision is made by the president himself. In an online forum, President Obama insisted that drones were being used with restraint, saying it was on a "very tight leash," with extreme care being taken to minimize civilian casualties. Not everyone agrees with that assessment: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism says that since Obama took office close to 400 of the casualties from drone strikes in Pakistan have been civilians, with close to 200 of them children.

Republicans have criticized Obama for his use of targeted killing and special operations forces—mostly on the grounds that more dead terror suspects means fewer of them to interrogate. But the poll numbers suggest widespread approval of Obama's approach to counterterrorism: Limited, covert, and with the collateral damage borne by individuals who remain far beyond the thoughts of most Americans.