Kline gave the GOP response to President Obama’s weekly address, reaching a bit for Labor Day relevance by tying fears about health care reform to fears about job losses. (Gov. Pawlenty had his turn delivering the Republican message last April before another holiday — Tax Day.)

It’s a new role for Kline, a strong, silent type whose conservative credentials helped him leapfrog more senior Republicans in June to become the ranking member on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee.

Now he’s the GOP’s official point man attacking Democrats’ efforts to reform health care — though he’s outdone almost daily by his colleague in Minnesota’s Congressional delegation: Michele Bachmann.

She held a townhall on the topic; he won’t. But the man who once carried the suitcase containing the presidential Denny’s-style menu for nuclear war told a telephone townhall meeting that Senate Democrats passing health care reform by simple majority would be “the nuclear option, because it would cause the Senate to explode.”

The video of Kline’s Republican address is below. Here are the main themes:

Be very afraid

American families are worried … If you think that’s frightening, I’m sorry to say it could get even worse … No wonder Americans are scared … They also fear, and rightly so …

Au revoir, doc

What will happen to my coverage, and my choice of doctors? … the comfort of a familiar physician … Democrats’ plans may cost patients the right to see their family doctor …

Did I mention the re-set button?

It’s time to press the ‘reset’ button … It’s not too late to start over … honor American workers by hitting the ‘reset’ button on health care reform …

Elko noted a then-staggering number of RNC-related tweets: 17,000. Last week, one estimate pegged the number of tweets related to Iran’s election and the subsequent protests at nearly a billion.

A MnIndy sampling of RNC tweets showed that St. Paul’s protests had some of the same confusion and enthusiasm, if not the gravitas, seen in recent demostrations in Tehran:

Police: “You must go to the left.” Protester: “Your left or ours?” 6:31 PM Sep 4th from web

Overheard at May Day cafe: “Dude, I totally got tear gassed. It was fucking awesome.” 11:57 AM Sep 3rd from web

Overheard from excited Mpls policeman, “So I shot him with impact round a[nd] he just fucking dropped!” 6:51 PM Sep 1st from web

Here’s one area in which St. Paul exceeds Tehran, for now. The roster of arrested journalists in Iran is as yet not quite half as long as those arrested during the RNC — though with much more serious implications for the people detained.

Protestors demonstrate the use of water boarding on volunteer/actor Maboud Ebrahim Zadeh in Washington. (WDCpix)

The Minnesota Independent contacted four outspoken critics of America’s torture policies and practices for reaction to revelations about Bush-era treatment of prisoners. None of them said, “I told you so.” But the truth is … they told us so.

Steven Miles

On Monday, just as the nation’s interest in the torture issue was resurging, Miles’ 2006 book “Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors” came out in paperback. The new, updated edition reworks the original subtitle (”Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror”), delves into whether psychologists used interrogations to perform coercive experiments and provides a handy guide for book groups.

Miles, a physician and University of Minnesota professor of bioethics, lauds the Obama administration for releasing four “torture memos” last week, but says that move alone is far from sufficient:

The decision [to release the memos] is another step to restoring international law and the United States’ role as a leader for civil society. However, the task is not done. We need a Truth Commission and an independent prosecutor.

The American Bar Association and state physician and psychologist licensing boards must investigate and sanction health professionals for misconduct. Such sanctions are necessary for us to criticize the health [professionals] of other nations that cooperate with torture and to resume our role in supporting those groups who dare to challenge torturing regimes.

Miles tells the Independent he’s currently focused on researching all the doctors from around the world who have been punished for assisting torture.

Douglas Johnson

Douglas Johnson, executive director at the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT), issued a statement Thursday (pdf) applauding President Obama’s stated openness to “investigations of those policymakers and lawyers who authorized torture.”

The Center issued an e-mail alert asking members to urge lawmakers to launch investigations, which includes this message:

It is clear to the world that the U.S. committed torture. It is equally clear that authorizing, ordering or perpetrating torture is illegal. At this point, we urgently need an investigation to determine who authorized and ordered torture. We do not need to strengthen our laws. We need to enforce them; in fact, we are required to as a matter of law. … Whether this is a politically convenient time is not part of the equation.

“Prosecutions tend to strengthen democratic regimes,” Johnson told MnIndy  Wednesday. But he said the center’s clients tend to be mixed on the issue, with some strongly in favor of prosecutions and others who say an apology is what’s needed.

Attitudes toward prosecutions can change during treatment, Johnson said, as victims’ sense of safety slowly returns. CVT’s clients, he said, are “filled with fear”:

The predominate purpose of torture is to create a climate of fear and a culture of fear. … It produces a sense of panic, a brittleness, that makes it difficult to accurately judge what political space is available [in which] to work.

The politics of torture in America is based on warped views. “I don’t think either the media or the people have a very good handle on it,” Johnson said.

We’re hearing a lot from Bush’s people’s perspective. … The question is not “Does torture work?” but “Work for what?” … The focus is on the interrogation chamber instead of the costs we’ve paid as a country.

Johnson offers three ways torture costs America, saying it endangers American personnel in the future, it gives enemies incentive to fight to the death, and it contributes to a drop in approval of the United States by our allies.

America’s turn to torture, in Johnson’s estimation, was the work of “amateurs and a lack of respect for the rule of law.” Referencing World War II, he noted that though the post-9/11 world is scary, “We’re not fighting two wars in Europe and Asia. We did that without resorting to torture.”

Kirk Anderson

That’s a point picked up by Kirk Anderson, a St. Paul-based political cartoonist.

“The Nuremburg trials helped to carve in stone some basic premises about the rule of law, like you don’t get to ignore it when things get rilly rilly bad, even in a national emergency, even if there’s a national emergency with NAZIS, fer krine out loud,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We have apparently forgotten those lessons, and even now spout the Germans’ legal and moral rationalizations. They were only following orders! Somebody higher up said it was okay!”

Late last year Anderson published “Banana Republic,” a book compiling the weekly cartoons he drew for the Star Tribune for more than two years from 2005 to 2007. In the strip, Anderson relentlessly excoriated the Bush administration for treating prisoners as poorly as does the stereotypically repressive regime that controls his fictional Latin American country of Amnesia.

Is Obama’s move “courageous,” as some have said? Anderson responded by e-mail:

I suppose it is. Pretty sad that when your country commits war crimes, it’s “courageous” not to sweep it under the rug. … I am a very cynical, pessimistic guy. But the last eight years, I’m repeatedly astounded that my cynicism is no match for the day-to-day morality of Washington movers and shakers. Just when I think all the scales have fallen from my eyes, I read the morning paper, and realize that more scales are falling into my cereal. …

Anderson isn’t shy about wishing for prosecutions up and down the chain of command:

Of course, the higher-ups must be tried, but we need not gloss over lower level torture bureaucrats. This isn’t a difficult case, the former president and vice president admitted they were accomplices to torture on national TV … . We don’t need a “truth commission” or a “fact-finding commission,” many or most of the facts are already known. We need perpetrators rotting in jail, so this doesn’t happen again. At least not for a good ten years or so. …

But also, we should not let ourselves off the hook. We are all complicit, we all had a pretty good idea of what was going on. Congress, the Democrats, the media, us citizens, we let it happen, and often facilitated it. Part of the reason any accountability is unlikely is that Democrats are complicit, so they’re not real anxious for any hearings either. …

Coleen Rowley

Photo: Jill Brady (The Vigil)

That sense of broader national complicity is on Rowley’s mind as well. She told MnIndy: “Torture cannot be ended by being swept under the rug. And we, the American people, have already been seen as complicit.”

The former FBI agent, one-time DFL congressional candidate and now peace and government-openness activist, has been all over the mediascape, from the New York Times to the Huffington Post, since the torture memos’ release.

Torture is wrong, illegal and it doesn’t work. … The FBI agents should be speaking out right now bc the FBI all along was not a part of it. They knew it was wrong from the start. They started a “war crimes” file. … but all that time they were keeping quiet.

So Rowley said she was encouraged to see an op-ed titled “My tortured decision” in Thursday’s New York Times by Ali Soufan — the former FBI agent who Rowley called on more than a year ago to tell the truth about CIA torture.

“That’s a big deal,” Rowley said. “He specifically counters the things Cheney is lying about in terms of [torture's] effectiveness.”

To Rowley’s way of thinking, Obama is confusing the issue by rejecting “retribution.”

“Retribution” is pejorative term for the penalty phase of the criminal justice system. … He’s jumping over the fact finding phase. The little people, some of them didn’t like this. They didn’t want to do it. There’s a mixture of reasons why lower-end people went along with it. Obama should not be skipping over that.

On the other hand, Rowley said, “I don’t think there’s a lot of excuses for Cheney.”

Rowley recommends what she calls a “two-tiered approach” — congressional committee hearings combined with a special prosecutor’s investigation.

She cites the 1970s congressional committee led by the late Sen. Frank Church as the last to effectively investigate the country’s intelligence agencies and recalls that former Vice President Walter Mondale was a member.

“There have been 11 commissions since the Bush Administration started on intelligence failures. No one cares about these stupid commissions,” Rowley said.

Still, she figures it’s worth a try: “It’s such a historical moment. I think you could get the stellar people who are beyond reproach.” Mondale and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor are two she has in mind.

A Congressional committee should have purview only over non-criminal matters, Rowley said. Leave that to a special prosecutor, who in her view must be named by Attorney General Eric Holder, not Obama.

The president is not supposed to be doing it. Appoint [a special prosecutor] and do not even tell people who it is [for a while]. … If we had a good prosecutor, it couldn’t be reckless. It would take a long, long time.

You [the CIA] would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us [the Department of Justice] that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him. You would, however, place a harmless insect in the box. You have orally informed us that you would in fact place a harmless insect such as a caterpillar in the box with him.

It’s almost as if “1984″ was on top of the reading pile for someone at the DOJ or CIA. Simply compare that paragraph with the penultimate chapter of Orwell’s novel, in which the hero, Winston Smith, prepares to meets his “worst thing in the world” — rats — in dystopic leader Big Brother’s all-purpose torture chamber, Room 101.

Here’s the scene as performed by John Hurt and Richard Burton in the 1984 film version, followed by excerpts from Orwell’s novel. (Note that the parallel stands up even to U.S. government claims that no one actually put a bug in Zubaydah’s “confinement box.” Big Brother didn’t have to actually release the rats on Smith either to achieve the desired result of breaking his prisoner.)

Excerpts from Part 3, Chapter 5 of Orwell’s “1984″:

For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and O’Brien came in.

‘You asked me once,’ said O’Brien, ‘what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.’ …

‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’ …

‘In your case,’ said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.’

A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.

‘You can’t do that!’ he cried out in a high cracked voice. ‘You couldn’t, you couldn’t! It’s impossible.’ …

‘By itself,’ (O’Brien) said, ‘pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable — something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.’

‘But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don’t know what it is?’ …

But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment — one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.

‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!’ …

There was still the cold touch of wire against his cheek. But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and not open.

The video, taken by Twin Cities Indymedia, documents tour stops with cops-on-bikes in tow, a luncheon at a Minneapolis church with a parking lot full of police vehicles, and a musical (but “awkward”) petition-presentation to Ramsey County District Attorney Susan Gaertner with someone the TC Indymedia identifies as a plainclothes officer making his own video recording.

The events were in support of the RNC8, the eight individuals who face felony terrorism conspiracy charges from arrests made at pre-emptive raids before the RNC took place. Friends of the RNC8 are asking Gaertner to drop the charges.

In the video, famed FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley presents Gaertner with an appeal from famed Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, among others. Don Olson, a member of the Minnesota 8, a group who vandalized a Vietnam War-era draft office, told Gaertner, “We actually did something, but they didn’t do anything.”

TC Indymedia said 50 riders (not “rioters,” as it sounds like on the video) took part in the Tour de Fletcher, named for Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher, the man behind much of the law enforcement at the RNC.

After estimating the post-luncheon contingent at seven or eight remaining bicycles, a St. Paul police officer is shown issuing a radio message: “They’re not very forthcoming on information so I guess they don’t want to be safe on their bicycle ride.”

Police made one arrest for disorderly conduct, according to the video.

In a letter to Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan, bike-tour participant Nigel Parry wrote:

You are making the Cities a scary place to live. We should be able to go about our Constitutionally-guaranteed business, our political associations, and our vegan potlucks without this kind of—frankly—pervasive and fascist intervention.

The MPD’s internal review will mostly remain confidential, although the department is prepared to release a version of it to the public after St. Paul’s study goes public today. According to MPD spokesman Sgt. William J. Palmer:

We have completed an After Action Report, which is an internal document that reviews our methods and actions during the RNC. That is a non-public document because it will be used to plan future events and release would compromise tactical operations. There is a summary of the after action report which will be public. That document will be released once we receive a copy of the St. Paul reports. Because we participated in the St. Paul process as our agencies’ planning and operations were intertwined, we will use the relevant sections of that report to address the items of joint concern. Our report will also address those items relevant specifically to Minneapolis. We do not yet have a date that the summary will be available.

The Oberlin College project involves seven first- and second-year students (two from the Twin Cities) who will spend two weeks here this month interviewing as many as 20 people from a variety of backgrounds who were involved in, as researcher Samantha Link puts it, “the RNC scandal”:

We’ll be videotaping interviews (hopefully to compile into a mini-documentary at the end) with activists/protest organizers, journalists who got caught up in police actions, ACLU lawyers and official RNC organizers and police, if they will talk to us. Surveying the information available on the issue, it seems most of “the facts” are out there, but the people we are talking to still seem to have a story to tell. We want to focus on the human impact of the RNC conflict and any changes it created in citizens’ relationships to their government and their civil rights.

An Edina native, Link says the RNC shook her impression of home as a “generally tolerant place adhering to a live-and-let-live, ‘Minnesota Nice’ state of mind.”

A very different group from out of state is conducting another study based on interviews here this month. The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) describes itself as “a national membership organization of progressive police executives from the largest city, county and state law enforcement agencies … dedicated to improving policing and advancing professionalism through research and involvement in public policy debate.”

PERF’s topic of inquiry is more narrowly focused on communications and media relations during what are known as National Special Security Events (NSSEs) — huge gatherings like the RNC, the presidential inauguration, and even certain Super Bowls at which the U.S. Secret Service takes charge of all law enforcement.

I was among the media workers interviewed last week by PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler and Homeland Security Development Director Gerard Murphy, in a high-ceilinged meeting room in the office suite of MPD Chief Tim Dolan, who Murphy said had invited PERF to do the study. Wexler and Murphy asked about how journalists identified themselves to police and plans made by media and police before the RNC. Wexler asked whether I would be willing to wear special vests that would mark me as media. Their interest in what happened during the RNC and what could be done to make future NSSEs better seemed genuine.

Look for updates on these three studies as they are completed or I learn more about them.

I’d met Rowley in 2006, at her campaign fundraiser at my parents’ house. At the time, she seemed fierce and friendly, with a somewhat prim persona akin to her plaid-skirted appearance on the cover of TIME four years before. Now, a comfortably rumpled Rowley sidled into a courtroom seat with the more relaxed bearing of a street-level activist and occasional blogger. She had a stack of “Defend the RNC8!” postcards to pass out, and a lot to say.

Rowley recently submitted data requests about law enforcement during the 2008 Republican National Convention to the FBI (via the Freedom of Information Act) and to the Ramsey County Sheriff’s and St. Paul Police departments (through the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act). She expects to learn whether the surveillance and policing of 60 to 70 political organizations in St. Paul last September to protest the Republican National Convention (RNC)– as well as the surveillance of another 80 or so legal aids, independent media and artistic performance groups — was overly broad.

If it wasn’t, Rowley said that news will come as a relief to people like those she knows in CODEPINK who say they were pulled over repeatedly around the time of the RNC. But if the wide net she’s cast does snare examples of extra-constitutional overreaching, they’ll go into a book she’s working on with author William John Cox.

Rowley regaled me and Minnesota Public Radio’s Laura Yuen, who sat nearby, with stories about her early days as an FBI agent in the early 1980s. Hoover had died almost a decade (and several reform efforts) earlier, but his ghost still hovered over the Bureau. It was Rowley’s job to respond to the very sort of data requests she now has pending about the RNC. As we watched the defense attorneys from the National Lawyers Guild kibitz at the front of the courtroom, Rowley recalled that as an FBI agent she sat among stacks of files on the Guild’s members — a throwback to Hoover’s conviction that the Guild was a communist organization.

Back then, every new lead meant a new file, Rowley said. If folksinger Burl Ives threw a party, the next day everyone in attendance had an FBI file. She suspects that won’t be the case with the 150 groups about whom she’s requested records.

Rowley said she was always proud that the FBI fought public corruption as its top priority (it’s now the agency’s fourth priority, according to an FBI spokesman I talked to separately). I asked her about reports that the FBI is looking into allegations that businessman Nasser Kazeminy funneled money to U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman through a business he controls in Texas and Coleman’s wife’s employer in Minnesota. Does the FBI really open different levels of cases with some (like the Coleman cash question, reportedly) termed mere inquiries while others are full-fledged investigations? Rowley, who retired in 2004, said that in her day two levels of investigations did exist but the lesser was rarely used, and in any case the difference between them was nominal at best — you either had a case worth pursuing or you didn’t.

Rowley spoke in an elevated whisper — this being a courtroom, although the judge never appeared — that later put me in mind of the lower, hoarser whisper that actor Hal Holbrooke used in the “All the President’s Men” film to portray of Mark “Deep Throat” Felt, who had been Hoover’s second-in-command at the FBI. Felt died Thursday, having revealed himself as Deep Throat but taking with him any key to the internal contradictions of a man who helped engineer both the illegal surveillance on dissidents and the downfall of a president who put such dirty tricks to his own political ends. Next time I see her, I’ll ask how Rowley — who put her own livelihood at risk to root out wrongdoing within the FBI — how she felt about Felt.

The postcard Rowley was handing out this week.

Details after the jump, including the names of those whose trials start this week.

CRASS tells the Minnesota Independent that trials start this week for Vernon Rodrigues (felony); Shannon Alsup, Ashley Majer, Lisa Mirkovich, Loren Yglecias (gross misdemeanors); and Jared Collins, Leif Johnson, Thomas Kamen and Andrew Wilson (misdemeanors).

The protest against Coleman is set for 4:30 p.m. today at Mancini’s Steak House, 531 W. Seventh St., St. Paul.

The call-in to Gaertner’s office is set for  9 a.m.–5 p.m. Tuesday and 8 a.m.–1 p.m. Wednesday. That effort leads up to the next court date for the eight people arrested before the convention began who are known as the RNC8: Luce Guillen Givins, Max Specktor, Nathanael Secor, Eryn Trimmer, Monica Bicking, Erik Oseland, Robert Czernik and Garrett Fitzgerald.

CRASS describes itself as “non-hierarchical coalition of RNC arrestees and community allies” that includes Coldsnap Legal Collective, Friends of the RNC 8, the National Lawyers Guild – Minnesota, Communities United Against Police Brutality, Anti-War Committee, Twin Cities Indymedia, and Veterans for Peace.

On Friday, Joe Robinson received the first RNC protester felony sentence – a $100 fine and 100 hours of community service — from Ramsey County District Court Judge Salvador Rosas, who is assigned to hear the RNC8 case on Wednesday.

Larry Craig Photo: WDCpix

U.S. Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) cannot withdraw his guilty plea in the infamous 2007 Minneapolis-St. Paul airport bathroom sex case, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled today in an “unpublished” opinion. That means Craig is stuck with having copped in District Court to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct for allegedly signaling an interest in engaging in sex via foot taps from one restroom stall to another in which an undercover police officer was staked out.

The decision’s “unpublished” status means the court doesn’t want its ruling used as precedent in future cases — interesting, in view of charges that Craig sought special treatment or was being singled out for preferential or especially harsh treatment because of his status as a U.S. senator. Craig issued this statement:

I am extremely disappointed by the action of the Minnesota Court of Appeals. I disagree with their conclusion and remain steadfast in my belief that nothing criminal or improper occurred at the Minneapolis airport. I maintain my innocence, and currently my attorneys and I are reviewing the decision and looking into the possibility of appealing. I would like to thank all of those who have continued to support me and my family throughout this difficult time.

Whether the 28-year Senate veteran who is retiring this year plans an appeal isn’t known; Craig’s office has not yet returned a phone call to the Minnesota Independent. One recorded message said the staff was busy boxing up his files.

The case hinged on Craig’s plea, as cited in today’s ruling:

I am pleading guilty to the charge of Disorderly Conduct as alleged because on June 11, 2007, within the property or jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Airports Commission, Hennepin County, specifically in the restroom of the North Star Crossing in the Lindbergh Terminal, I did the following: Engaged in conduct which I knew or should have known tended to arouse alarm or resentment or [sic] others, which conduct was physical (versus verbal) in nature.

And the offense that’s at the root of all this? As cited in today’s opinion:

The complaint stated that appellant “peered” into the restroom stall occupied by the officer for as long as two minutes and that the officer “observed the Defendant tap his foot several more times and move his foot closer to the stall occupied by [the officer.  The officer] moved his own foot up and down slowly.  [The officer] observed the Defendant move his right foot so that it touched [the officer‟s] left foot, at which point the Defendant‟s foot was within the stall area of the stall occupied by [the officer].”

Hudson, Toussaint and Kalitowski

A three-judge panel consisting of Judge Natalie E. Hudson, Chief Judge Edward Toussaint, Jr., and Judge Thomas J. Kalitowski issued the decision. The opinion has two parts. First, the panel denied Craig’s arguments that his plea wasn’t specific about what action he was pleading to, and that there wasn’t an adequate judicial record of the hearing where his written plea was entered. (There is a record, the judges said; Craig simply didn’t provide them with a transcript.) It was Craig’s fault, the judges wrote, that he didn’t ask for a second hearing to establish what had occurred at the first — but at the time, Craig was still hoping to keep the case hush-hush.

The court didn’t buy Craig’s insistence that no “others” were bothered by his conduct (besides the officer in the next stall) as the charge requires. The judges said they took “others” to mean people who were also in the restroom at the time, and anyway the presence of “others” beyond one other person can be theoretical.

Craig’s late-in-coming entrapment defense also didn’t move the judges, who found that, for one thing, the senator initiated the bathroom dialog, and for another, failing to assert entrapment isn’t grounds to take back a guilty plea.

In the second part of the opinion, the Court of Appeals panel found that the law under which Craig was charged does not inhibit free speech to an overly broad extent. The senator knew that his foot-tapping might “arouse ‘alarm, anger or resentment’” as required under the law, and also that it was an invasion of privacy.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota (ACLU-MN) filed an amicus brief in the appeal at the request of Craig’s attorneys, ACLU-MN Executive Director Chuck Samuelson told MnIndy in an interview today. Samuelson conceded that the Court of Appeals “didn’t like our arguments,” which focused on the free-speech aspects of the case. But he contends, “Their reasoning is wrong.”

They talked about the language ‘to arouse’ … that inciting language. They say [Craig] was doing it. But they ignored that the guy who started it [the airport police sergeant] was not Craig [the official charge quoted above notwithstanding].

Frankly the court is really conflicted on this one. My gut tells me they just wanted this case to go away. The ACLU’s position in these sorts of laws have been used against gay men for a long, long time. If the police were concerned about public sex in the bathroom, then they should have followed best practices of police departments — put a sign on door, send cops through … the activity will probably disappear from that restroom and move someplace else. …

This really is entrapment, in our opinion. There is a line there that we think this sergeant crossed. By [the court's] reasoning the police officer is more guilty than Craig.

This a classic first amendment case of government suppression of unpopular speech. If this is inappropriate, what’s the status in heterosexual pickup bars? They [Craig and the officer] weren’t engaging in or planning on having sex in the bathroom. They were planning it [for somewhere else].

There is a double standard. Speech is speech. This never got more than speech. You can’t regulate this speech and then not regulate the speech of heterosexual people. … We don’t have police officers posing as [sexually available] women or whatever. …  The antidote to bad speech is more speech — the sign on the door [prohibiting bathroom sex].

With this ruling, Craig regains his rightful place as Minnesota’s most prominent issue of public-sex-in-a-bathroom-stall — eclipsing the more recent occurrence at the Metrodome during a University of Minnesota football game, where a sex act actually took place in a bathroom stall.

“The conduct at the football game,” Samuelson says, “now that was conduct.”

In a nine-page FOIA request (pdf), the ACLU states that CCMRF’s new role — “the first time an active military unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command” — “raises important questions about the longstanding separation between civilian and military government within the United States.” It cites the Posse Comitatus Act and states “the deployment raises concerns about the possibliity that the program may be used to facilitate domestic surveillance by the Defense Department.”

The FOIA request asks for records pertaining to the decision to deploy the unit within the U.S., including documents about the legal justification for doing so and discussions about possible uses of such units.