Rusk Reads - Border "Kidnappings," Signalgate, & Tattoo Pretext
Welcome to Rusk Reads. Every Sunday I will highlight three long-form article recommendations. These pieces will be meaningful, relevant, and thought-provoking.
If there was a Mt. Rushmore of press freedom Supreme Court decisions most folks would point to NYT v Sullivan first. Often forgotten among the general public but almost equally important is the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1971 case New York Times Co. v. United States. That summer the NYT and Washington Post published excerpts from the largely classified and leaked Pentagon Papers. These documents delved into the history, justification, and even efficacy of the Vietnam War in the prior Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Nixon sought to stop the embarrassing publication of the papers and seek punitive vengeance. The Supreme Court did not bite and reaffirmed the incredibly high bar the United States government has to reach to impose prior restraint on a news outlet. To this day this decision protects us from any administration, regardless of party, from using vague national security appeals to stop the presses. This week our theme of Rusk Reads concerns those same vague appeals to national security by looking at the Trump Administration’s actions to deprive alleged “criminal” undocumented immigrants of due process and the government’s top intelligence officials accidentally leaking a US-Yemeni military operation to the press.
I’m the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped.
By Jasmine Mooney | The Guardian
Mooney details in a first person story the seemingly arbitrary and Kafka-style horrors she experienced in the maze of US immigration bureaucracy. Mooney, and even us as readers, cannot help compare her path to those who will be indefinitely detained.
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
By Jeffrey Goldberg | The Atlantic
Signalgate is one of the most astounding security breaches in the history of the United States. The CIA Director, Secretary of Defense, the Director of the National Intelligence Service, the National Security Advisor, and the Secretary of State created an encrypted chat group on the app Signal to discuss a military operation in Yemen. The details are still scarce but the National Security Advisor somehow accidentally added the editor & chief of The Atlantic magazine to the chat. Chaos follows. Reading the original story will be part of the canon of government leaks for decades to come. I will note, because of the First Amendment and caselaw like the NYT Co v the US, the Trump administration would probably not have been able to block the later release of some of these messages using national security as a pretext. Even Goldberg admitted that some of the information he saw could have compromised US security personnel and assets. Clearly the government has taken the other scandal-minimizing path claiming the messages are innocuous and not classified information. This clearly is a farce as no one has asked the question yet: If Goldberg had released these messages 15 minutes prior to the operation instead of weeks later would a. the operation been at risk and b. would the Trump administration have objected? Clearly the answer to both is yes. The Atlantic called the government’s bluff and disclosed the messages in full within days. We will see if the US government remains consistent as they consider future national security matters with the presss. I will hold my breath.
The men disappeared to El Salvador because of their tattoos.
By Isabela Dias | Mother Jones
A soccer team, a humming bird, and an Autism awareness ribbon. All tattoos inked on migrants in the United States and then used as pretext to connect them to international and violent gangs. The outcome was deportation from the United States without due process and being imprisoned in a highly criticized El Salvadorian prison. This piece by Isabela Dias begins a long battle on what legal grounds the United States has to remove individuals for foreign policy and national security reasons and the processes that are being ignored or abused to do so. Some of the human tragedies are documented here with many more untold stories to come.