City Is First In The Nation To Do So

At the close of a Thursday evening session which lasted a mere ninety or so minutes, members of City Council cast the expected 4 to 1 vote in favor of a resolution to remove Portland police officers from the Joint Terrorism Task Force rather than let them continue to operate without proper oversight.

By way of starting off the public testimony, City Hall fixture Irwin Mandel expressed some gratitude that Commissioner Dan Saltzman had expressed his "advanced explanation" for his imminent vote against the resolution in the pages of The Oreognian, because it allowed Mandel to speak to Saltzman's opinion rather than having to wait until the end of the session to hear it.

In the main, Mandel, savaged Saltzman's op-ed piece in much the same ways we did earlier today, including taking the Commissioner to task for trying to invoke the spirit of 9/11 as some sort of trump card against demands for proper local oversight of the City's police officers.

Lilly Mandel, in turn, savaged today's Oregonian editorial, wondering how the paper could even know that in the weeks since the original March hearing "there has been no flood of civil rights abuses involving the JTTF". She quipped that if there has been, those abuses would just have been Top Secret anyway.

But mainly, she questioned why the City should have to wait until after a "flood" of abuses before it acted to ensure proper oversight of its police officers. And in response to the paper's bizarre assertion that withdrawal was tantamount to "giving up a large amount of oversight and ability to hold the JTTF accountable", Mandel asked, "How can you give up something you never had?"

She also challenged those critics who assert that the withdrawal is wrong because the Federal government might punish the City by refusing to provide funds for combatting terrorism -- critics she dubbed those "who are willing to sell our precious civil rights".

Beyond that, we're going to move quickly through the other public testimony, hitting somehighlights, so we can go on to the statements of the Council members prioer to the actual vote. Much of what was said during public testimony was essentially as expected, with little new. But there are a few items worth noting.

Andrea Meyer of the ACLU of Oregon revealed an additional tidbit about the nine clients on whom the FBI has said there are documents which are "responsive" to the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act request regarding possibly-improper monitoring of local organizations and individuals: The responsive files related to one of those clients apparently are "missing" somewhere in the local FBI office.

Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch said that the resolution amoutned to "pretty much what we've been asking for all along" but urged that there be an annual public review which included the number of times the Federal government requested the cooperation of the Portland Police Bureau on the "case-by-case" basis allowed under the new protocol.

He also wondered about the FBI's assertions about elected officials not serving on the JTTF Executive Committee, since it's possible that some elected sherrifs might be allowed to sit on that body. In addition, Handelman argued that it was important to do everything possible to prevent potential abuses of civil liberties now, rather than have to offer "reparations and apologies forty years done the line".

Cliff Goldman, one of the very few people to testify against the resolution, stated that while he has never really felt a fear of terrorism, "with this coming up I began to think of my own personal safety". He also conjured the old chestnut in response to protecting our civil liberties that the victims of terrorism lose all of that and more.

(The unstated and dangerous premise in that argument is that we therefore have some sort of responsibility to give up our civil liberties in their name.)

Robert King, head of the local police union, argued that the concerns with oversight "have caused us to lose out sight on this important matter altogether". He also raised the spectre not only of the victims of 9/11 but of all of the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bonnie Tinker said to Commissioner Erik Sten: "I'm glad you have now got good leadersiph to follow." In the past, Sten has frustrated local civil liberties activists by expressing deep concerns and reserations about the JTTF but nonetheless voting to remain a participant. And to Saltzman, she said in response to his op-ed piece that it was not enough to have "concern" about matters such as the USA PATRIOT Act, but that there needed to be action as well. "I believe it is not possible to protect civil liberties," she said, "without insisting upon civilian oversight".

In the end, it came down to the much-postponed vote itself, and the closing comments on the issue by each member of City Council.

"This is a very serious issue, and one that I've spent a lot of tiem researching," said Commissioner Sam Adams, adding that he was convinced "that we can prevent terrorism" under the terms of the resolution. "And I think that we will and we can while protecting the basic rights of all people." He reiterated the litany of controversial provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act which he listed during the March hearing.

Saying that his view of his responsibility as an elected official is to not ignore such concerns, Adams said that "the additional very common sense accountability required by the Mayor and by the Commissioner I think is very reasonable".

Commissioner Randy Leonard placed his support for the resolution in the context of a demand for accountability in City government, which he said he's pressed consistently since first running for his office. "I think its unreasonable," he said, "to ask the Commissioner-in-Charge not to have full access and accountability of all the employees under that Commissioner's responsibility."

He called the proper civilian oversight of law enforcement officials a "timetested principles of governance" and a "cornerstone of our form of government" -- and one for which men and women have fought and died.

Leonard also reminded people that it was he who cast a vote against a resolution opposing the war in Iraq, largely on the basis of believing the government's stated rationales for that war. "As it turned out," he said, "my trust in what I was told was betrayed." As a result, he said he had adopted another guiding principle: "Trust, but verify."

And then came the moment for which some of us were waiting so eagerly: Saltzman's public defense of his solitary vote against the resolution.

"I respect very much the work of the Mayor, the FBI, and the U.S. Attorney over the last three weeks," he said, "and I am disappointed that those talks did not succeed." He said that his ideal outcome would have been for the talks to continue (convenient, since endless talks would simply mean continued participation without oversight), and therefore he would not support the resolution.

"With all due respect to the Mayor and my colleagues on the City Council," Saltzman said, "I think the resolution is a step backwards." He argued that restricting Portland's participation to "imminent" threats "does not equal prevention".

(Again, Saltzman conveniently leaves out facts which are inconvenient to his position. In this case, the fact that Portland's cooperation is not limited only to "imminent" threats, but can also move forward on a "case-by-case" basis. It's one thing when ones newspaper of record omits critical facts in order to distort public impression of an issue, but it's really rather ugly when an elected official does it as well.)

He then re-raised his argument from last month, which is all of the bad publicity this will bring as it puts Portland in the national spotlight.

"Terrorism is real," Saltzman said, insinuating by even uttering the sentence that proponents of proper local oversight over Portland officers have somehow forgotten this fact. "We live in a place that is a haven for hatecrimes," he added. "We ought to recognize that."

Saltzman reminded everyone that it was he who sponsored the Council resolution expressing concerns over provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. But: "We can't juxapose our concerns over the PATRIOT Act on this debate here and now."

(See our earlier item on JTTF coverage in The Oregonian for how dishonest and deceptive that statement is in terms of whether or not it actually reflects what's been going on.)

In response to the several people (including, we suspect, ourselves) who chastized him for trying, in his op-ed piece, to call upon 9/11 for his own purposes, he said this: "I wont pretend to speak for all New Yotkers". He then, nonetheless, said: "We would be letting New Yorkers down."

"To somehow discount that and to say we are using cheap political theater to invoke the spirit of 9/11," he chided, "I totally object to that."

Sten tried to place the evening's vote -- and his own vote in favor of the resolution -- in the context of the longer history of the JTTF issues as its come before Council in the past. "It is a completely false argument running through the other side of this argument that Portland is unilaterally withdrawing from this Task Force," he said.

He explained that the first time the issue came before him on the Council, he had felt like the FBI was presenting the City with a "false choice", simply between participating or not participating, entirely on the grounds the FBI presented and none other. "I did not like that choice," Sten said, but he went along with it in part because in the near-immediate aftermath of 9/11 "we erred on the side of getting on the Task Force" at a moment "where we were all trying to figure out what is the best response to this situation".

Sten said that the resolution before Coucil was an "entirely different approach that the false choice" offered by the FBI over the years. "This is a totally different choice, and it's the right one."

Over the years, Sten insisted, the Feds had taken no real steps to try to solve "these pressing problems" of local oversight. "Portland did not pull out, we waited three years," he said. "There is a completely false notion that Portland is just pullingout of this," Sten said. "Portland has worked very, very hard to remain in this."

"It's been an interesting few weeks," said Potter. During that time, he said, he listened to the public, the police, lawyers, and "to my heart".

"in this country," he said, "there's an old-fashioned principle that the police or the military have to be answerable to civilian oversight." He argued that looking back on history, it's clear that some people, when blindly given power, "sometimes that power is misused".

He stressed that such abuses have happened "within our lifetimes" and that "we're not talking ancient history, we're tlaking about recent history". He also made clear that the resolution impugns neither Portland's police officers nor the Federal government.

"I don't thjink Portland is a strange city," Potter said. "I think, though, that we are concerned about ensuring that we have a proper balance between protecting people physical security, the property they own, and balancing that against their rights."

"This is going to be in the best interests of our community in the long run," he said. "We will see that this will work for us to ensure the safety of our people".

And so, after much delay, many votes over the years in the other direction, and a seemingly limitless supply of distortion of the issues by the other side, the City Council of Portland, Oregon, voted 4 to 1 in favor of a resolution which will withdraw local police officers from the Joint Terrorism Task Force within ninety days.

In doing so, on April 28, 2005, Portland becames the first city in the nation to withdraw from a JTTF.

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