Special to the Locust Fork Journal

No Comment
by Scott Horton
Edited by Glynn Wilson

Teacher, legislator Sue Schmitz

Editor’s Note: If you know Sue Schmitz, we would love to hear your stories about her and learn how people who know her feel about this story. Please feel free to make comments in the end, anonymous or otherwise.

February 1 – The morning calm in the small Alabama town of Toney, near Huntsville, was broken at 6:15 Thursday morning when a team of five FBI agents, accompanied by a prison matron, pounded on the door. When the man of the house answered, he was forced into the yard, shirtless in the early morning cold.

They came for his wife, Sue Schmitz, a diminutive, 63-year-old retired social studies and civics teacher who has lived in the town for 38 years. She was dragged out of her bathroom, where she was taking a shower, and handcuffed – breaking her flesh and scraping her wrists as she was hustled off to prison.

Who was this threat to society? Sue Schmitz is a well-respected state legislator who is loved in her community and by her students and is truly legendary for her passion for civics and outreach to the disadvantaged. The dream of her life was to let the fire of civic spirit catch on in communities and among families on the margin of society, where the danger of drug abuse and criminality are the highest. She dedicated her life to it.

She launched a program called “We the People,” designed to build civic spirit and interest in participatory democracy among school children. And Ms. Schmitz’s advocacy of civic engagement led directly to her conflict with U.S. Attorney Alice Martin, who considers it to be a criminal act.

You see, an idea has taken hold in Alabama since George Bush took over the White House and Bob Riley took over the statehouse, that there is something wrong with being an educator and a legislator too. In fact the Riley administration, led to some extent by the Newhouse monopoly press in the state, declared war on having community college employees serve in the legislature and even passed a law banning the practice, never mind the constitutionality of the question.

The Alabama Republican Party is busy revving up its plans for the fall elections, and this incident provides a unique opportunity to see its various limbs moving in perfect concert.

The party’s objective is to take control of the legislature. The party’s leader, Governor Riley, announced that if he can raise $7 million, the party can take control of all three branches of government – by 2010. They already control the state judiciary, including the Supreme Court.

Riley is busy mustering every tool at his disposal to accomplish that goal. That, of course, is all politics as usual – the sort of thing that goes on in states in every corner of the country. But there’s something exceedingly rotten in Alabama. And it’s revealed when we take careful stock of how Governor Riley and his party go about implementing their plans.

First, where do we read about this? On the editorial page of one of the three Newhouse newspapers that have a lock on the state’s print media market, and which operate as the press service of the Republican Party. The Mobile Press-Register, which otherwise publishes fawning pieces about Governor Riley’s cowboy boots and describes Karl Rove as a persecuted genius, now tells us that the G.O.P.’s plan to “take control of the legislature” (their words) is a wonderful idea.

Indeed, it gets the official seal of approval of the paper. You can read this on line at the Press-Register’s website, but why not read it at the website of the Alabama G.O.P.? After all, they are all part of the same operation. Why bother maintaining the pretense of independence?

Here’s the core of their story:

Most Republicans are advocates of reform, perhaps because they’ve been on the outside looking in at a deeply entrenched system. The Democratic Party has controlled the Legislature for more than a century. That kind of political dominance breeds complacency, cynicism and corruption.

Got that? Republicans = reform. Democrats = corrupt. No need to deal with individuals and their record of service. No need in fact to actually explore any political issues, like education or taxation. That would just confuse your poor, tired mind. The labels are all you need to know.

Let’s keep in mind that the state government is in the hands of the G.O.P., and the legislature in theory provides oversight. What happens to the process of oversight when the executive and legislature are in the hands of the same party? I think we all know the answer to that: corruption.

Voters often exercise just the kind of wisdom that the Founding Fathers envisioned by providing for opposing parties to live in an uncomfortable cohabitation. Uncomfortable for the politicians, that is. For those concerned about the hoggishness at the public trough that inevitably accompanies one-party crony rule, it can be the best solution. So when the Press-Register writes about “corruption” and “reform,” just remember that they mean those terms in the Orwellian sense.

The last several years have seen an explosion of no-bid state contracts in Alabama in which cronies of Governor Bob Riley are involved. What happens when newspaper reporters in Montgomery submit stories about these scandals to the three Newhouse newspapers? Alas, I’ve tracked that process, too. The stories don’t run and the reporters get chided.

The Press-Register is absolutely right. There is a culture of “deeply entrenched” corruption in Alabama, and they’re a significant part of it. But for the Press-Register the seat of corruption lies not there, but in the Alabama Education Association, the organization that represents school teachers.

Why? Because the AEA has crusaded for improvements to the state’s secondary education system, and has backed the Democrats, who generally support spending more money on education. You’d think a newspaper would favor reducing the state’s illiteracy rate, but you’d be wrong. After all, this is Alabama.

So the G.O.P.-loyal newspapers lead the charge into the campaign, calling for voter contributions to G.O.P. coffers to fund taking over the legislature. And they also crank out political propaganda for the G.O.P. in the form of stories that pass for news coverage.

At the core of this is the work of the Riley Administration’s court chronicler, Brett Blackledge at the Birmingham News. Blackledge has earned his stripes with a crusade looking into Alabama’s two-year college system, where he is fearlessly rooting out corruption. Funny how everything he writes is perfectly choreographed with Governor Riley’s themes of the week and seems seamlessly joined with criminal investigations conducted by the United States Attorney, about which Blackledge is impeccably well informed. And strange that his investigation of the two-year college system neglects to mention that Governor Riley ran it.

Still all of this pales in comparison with the single most wondrous fact about the Blackledge reportage – only Democrats ever figure in the crosshairs.

Mind you, there’s probably no shortage of corruption in this college system, feather bedding and the like. No shortage of allegations have come to me, Blackledge and the U.S. Attorney’s office concerning corruption. A great many of them involve figures connected to Governor Riley and the G.O.P. But, alas, there doesn’t seem to be enough ink or newsprint to allow Blackledge to write about those cases. Or perhaps there’s another reason. It would be what my politico friends call “off message.”

And today we see the typical pincer movement involving the Alabama Republican Party’s election campaign’s third arm, the U.S. Attorney’s office. Specifically, Alice Martin, the sometime U.S. Attorney, sometime G.O.P. candidate for elective office.

Martin fully understands the benefit to the party and its election efforts of criminal prosecutions being commenced that target elected Democrats, are geared carefully to the election cycle, and are hyped extensively to the party media apparatus. And yesterday, as Sue Schmitz was dramatically dragged from her home in Toney, Alice Martin went before the press with an announcement which will feature prominently in Republican campaign literature for the coming years. She announced an indictment that Blackledge signaled, with his usual perfect clairvoyance in all things prosecutorial, was in the works months back.

Sue Schmitz’s day was dramatically interrupted by her arrest. She had never before had a conflict with the law in any way. And yesterday morning, she had just been preparing to take a group of school kids from underprivileged backgrounds on a tour of the state capital, Montgomery. Here’s how the AP reports the story:

“We charge that Representative Schmitz’s only substantial ‘work’ was to work her official position in the Legislature to land a job through the postsecondary system,” U.S. Attorney Alice Martin said in a statement.

Schmitz was employed from January 2006 until October 2006 by the CITY Skills Training Consortium, an arm of Alabama’s troubled two-year college system. The federally funded program operated at 10 sites statewide to help at-risk youth referred by juvenile courts develop academic, behavioral and social skills. The indictment claims Schmitz made as much as $53,403 annually as a program coordinator despite rarely showing up and doing virtually nothing for the money.

Let’s just pause and look at what’s going on here. A massive federal case has been launched, at a likely taxpayer cost in excess of $2 million, against a social studies teacher, who it is alleged (on the basis of sharply disputed evidence) was not putting in as many hours as she should have in teaching her classes. This has to count as one of the more absurd (if not malicious) cases I’ve seen in recent years.

And remember, this is a Justice Department that can’t spare an FBI agent to look into, or a prosecutor to handle, a gang rape case involving Jamie Leigh Jones, or any of the dozens of other cases involving rape, assault and homicide in Iraq. They’re not “priorities.” On the other hand, bringing charges against Democratic office holders has been a very high priority from the day Bush took office, and it continues to be so today.

More than this, note how party connections flavor the U.S. Attorney’s interest in cases of feather bedding.

Recall that a Missouri criminal attorney conducted a detailed investigation into the service of Mark Everett Fuller as District Attorney in Coffee and Pike Counties. His study, presented in a sworn affidavit and backed up with documentation, showed that Fuller was an absentee district attorney. He drew his salary for the job, but he spent his time out of state, largely in Colorado, attending to the business that he owns and operated and which continues to provide most of his income–Doss Aviation. The affidavit was submitted to the U.S. Attorney and the Justice Department. No investigation of its allegations occurred.

The allegations of “feather bedding” in the case involving this Republican official were many times greater than the one charged against Schmitz. But what happened? Nothing. The U.S. attorney was not interested. As a prosecutor told Time’s Adam Zagorin, different rules apply with respect to the “home team.” Fuller went on to be the judge designated to handle the highest profile political prosecution in the country, involving former Governor Siegelman. Now we’re seeing more evidence of the two distinct flavors of justice dispensed by Republican prosecutors in Alabama: one marked with a “D” and the other with a “R.”

U.S. Attorney Martin seems to have a problem with the truth. She’s currently under investigation for giving perjured testimony in connection with an employment litigation. I lay out the details of the accusations against her, which are quite compelling, here. However, Martin serves at the pleasure of the president, and, as comedian Jon Stewart would say, it clearly pleasures him for her to continue to serve. And it pleasures Karl Rove and the G.O.P. state organizers even more.

“My client is a wonderful, dedicated educator. It’s been her life’s work. These charges are garbage,” said her attorney Buck Watson.

He also noted that he had advised the U.S. Attorney that if they decided to indict his client, she would come in on her own, and he would handle it–an offer spurned in favor of the heavy-handed arrest squad.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. “It’s bizarre.”

I spoke with several of Schmitz’s colleagues, who were shocked by the charges. And it’s spreading a message of cold fear in the community. Others with whom I communicated were afraid to have their names appear in print.

“This is a political vendetta. Anyone who objects to what they’re doing will become a target,” one teacher told me.

So why would a federal prosecutor put such tremendous resources into arresting and prosecuting a retired social studies teacher? Schmitz is an irresistible target. She’s a Democratic member of the state legislature. Note how Alice Martin’s loudly trumpeted indictment works in a perfect trifecta:

* The battle plan rolled out to retake the legislature, announcing “corrupt Democrats” as the target.

* The Newhouse papers run the call to arms and funds, and print a sequence of stories designed to make it all credible.

* The U.S. attorney’s office in Birmingham announces the indictment of a “corrupt Democrat” retired school teacher..

And today, as expected we see stories in the Newhouse papers announcing the indictment, with predictably tendentious commentary. All of this is geared at helping smooth the way for a successful prosecution, and more to the point, a successful Republican takeover of the state legislature. It is a pattern that Alabama has witnessed over and again in the past six years.

The charges against Schmitz will of course have to be proved in a court. And whether they are meritorious or not, Schmitz will be put to hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal expense and is having her reputation tarnished, all courtesy of the taxpayers. Whether the charges stand or fall, all of this activity has one clear-cut beneficiary: the Alabama G.O.P. and its plans “to take control of” the state legislature.

Funny, but the ballot box doesn’t figure very prominently in that effort.

Scott Horton is a New York lawyer who writes a blog column at Harpers.org. A slightly different version of this article ran first today on that Website. It is printed here with permission.

Editor’s Note: If you know Sue Schmitz, we would love to hear your stories about her and learn how people who know her feel about this story. Please feel free to make comments below, anonymous or otherwise…

After all the back room offers and counteroffers and fear-mongering and delay, the Senate has finally struck a deal on the surveillance bill and telecom immunity. Voting is scheduled to begin next Monday.

Apparently everyone has agreed to the bill, including Sens. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), so no filibustering is expected this time around, according to the TPMMuckraker.

The Dodd/Feingold amendment, which would strip retroactive immunity for the telecoms from the bill, will apparently need only 51 votes to pass, as opposed to the 60 votes pushed for by the Republican leadership. This is also the agreement on the related Specter/Whitehouse amendment, which would replace the federal government as the defendant in all the lawsuits instead of offering immunity to the telecom giants.

We’re not exactly sure where this puts us in terms of who we are going to sue, and so far, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has not sent out an update on where that important group stands on it.

Other amendments will come into play as well, one that will be introduced by Sen. Feingold that would require a warrant when the target of the surveillance is a U.S. citizen or resident.

This prevents the government from sneakily avoiding the trouble of obtaining a warrant by claiming that the focus is a foreign person, or so-called “reverse targeting.” Feingold’s amendment would theoretically prevent that by requiring a FISA court warrant for surveillance of a foreign person where the “significant purpose” of the collection is to target a citizen in the U.S.

The Republicans will offer up their own amendments, which could loosen the bill’s scope. Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) will offer one that “would change definitions in the law to allow surveillance without a warrant in cases that involve the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

“It will be a much different kind of debate than last time around,” the TPMMuckraker reporter in Washington says. As expected, President Bush signed the bill extending the Protect America Act for 15 days, “so Monday’s vote will not have the same time pressures. It will be a vote on retroactive immunity without the administration’s squeeze play.”

If so, why does the Bush administration want to trample our rights?

by Benjamin H. Friedman

As the new research fellow for Defense and Homeland Security at the Cato Institute, and someone who’s written extensively on how the terror threat to the United States is hardly an “existential” one, I was glad to see this headline on the cover of the latest Rolling Stone magazine (right behind the left ear of Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke): “The Fake Domestic Terror Threat: How the FBI Became a Factory of Fear.” (We would provide the link, but it’s not free online).

Even if it’s a bit hyperbolic, the author, Guy Lawson, does not tell readers much that they could not have gathered from the Washington Post or the New York Review of Books. But he repeats something that bears repeating: Six plus years of fevered searching for terrorists on American soil has turned up precious little of the real thing.

The hunt, led by the FBI, has found several wanna-be jihadis willing to sign up for phony terror plots often organized by FBI informants, various illegal immigrants with shady overseas connections, a number of people gathering funds for foreign terrorist organizations, and only a handful of true terrorists (and not particularly formidable ones).

That means we have found no terrorist sleeper cells in the United States since September 11, 2001, as the FBI admitted.

Time and again, federal officials held press conferences to announce the break-up of a terrorist plot and vaguely described the disaster prevented. The evening news and the headlines repeated their lurid claims. Months later, the inside pages of the papers would report that the plot was not what we were told – and TV (news) doesn’t even bother (to follow-up).

The plans have turned out to be unfeasible or preliminary.

On other occasions, it turned out the plotters visited a terrorist camp but did little plotting. Some charges have been dismissed. Some have been completely bogus.

Experts, like an FBI agent Lawson quotes, say that just because you haven’t found something, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. That’s indisputable. But when several federal agencies, local police, alarmed citizens and ambitious federal prosecutors search for terrorists for years and find almost none, you have good evidence that there just aren’t many to find.

Some might say the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. But that expression is illogical. If you spend two hours searching your car for your lost wallet, it is good evidence that it’s not there, though it’s not proof.

Make no mistake. The domestic terror threat is not altogether false. Most of those the government has prosecuted in the name of counter-terrorism should have gone to prison or been deported, and the FBI should not quit looking. The point is simply that the threat is greatly exaggerated.

Without that exaggeration it would be harder, obviously, to justify illegal wiretapping and other brazen assertions of unconstitutional executive power.

Lawson mentions another consequence of overreaction to domestic terrorism; one that is mostly ignored: fewer resources devoted to fighting good old-fashioned crime. He quotes a Northern Illinois police officer frustrated by the funds the FBI devotes to chasing terrorists when there is plenty of real federal crime going unsolved and wonders if this is the best use of our tax dollars. He could have gone further.

The FBI has shifted about 2,400 agents from crime to counter-terrorism in recent years, despite the doubling of its topline budget – now $6.4 billion. The result is likely more fraud, more racketeering, more mafia.

In a 2005 report, Justice Department inspector general Glenn Fine notes that the FBI opened 45 percent fewer criminal investigations in 2004 than 2001 and referred 27 percent fewer cases to a U.S. Attorney for prosecution. Cases opened on violent crime dropped 47 percent, financial crimes 40 percent, public corruption 42 percent and American criminal enterprises – often the mafia – 50 percent.

Even readers skeptical about the merits of federal policing ought to agree that it is wiser for the feds to chase real criminals than imaginary terrorists. As Jim Harper recently reported, terrorists usually impose large costs only by inducing the unwitting help of their victims.

By encouraging the FBI to ignore its traditional responsibilities, we magnify the costs of terrorism. A recalibration of priorities is in order.

American politics being what it is, however, it might take a few hundred more articles like Lawson’s.

Reprinted with permission. Originally filed under Defense and National Security and Civil Liberties in the Cato Institute’s Liberty Blog.