CIA Scandals

President Obama: Don't Lecture China on Censorship

dlindorff — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:22:53 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with
Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the
value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of
non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of
strength.”

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president
himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US
troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk
about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian
style control over information.

Let’s just take the issue of depleted uranium weapons, over 1000
tons of which have been expended in the US invasion of Iraq, most of it
in populated areas where millions remain exposed to the radioactive
dust of the burned material. There is almost no reporting on this topic
in the US media. The Pentagon has for years lied about and hidden the
effects of this deadly substance, used in shells, bombs and bullets
because of its unique ability to penetrate hard steel armor and
concrete bunker walls. It has refused to disclose where the weapons
were fired, and has denied US troops the tests that would show if they
have been contaminated. It has even resorted to having paid Pentagon
hacks surreptitiously libel, slander and otherwise undermine those
military sources and journalists who have tried to expose this scourge
(this reporter has been the target of such disinformation attacks).

But censorship in the US goes beyond these crude efforts at
government-directed control of information. In America, some of the
most potent censorship is done by the privately owned media—supposedly
a bastion of freedom of expression.

There is no reason why the US media cannot report on depleted
uranium and its deadly legacy in places where it has been used, such as
Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Kosovo, or on and around American
military bases from Maryland to Hawaii. And yet it does not. Just
recently, stories have appeared both on Britain’s SkyTV and in the Guardian newspaper,
reporting on an alarming rise in unusual birth defects and infant
cancers in Fallujah as well as in other Iraqi cities like Basra, Najaf,
Baghdad and Samara—all urban areas where there were major assaults by
US forces both in the initial invasion, when most of the DU weapons
were used, and later during fights against holed-up insurgent groups.

In Fallujah, the Guardian reports that birth defects are up by a
staggering 15 times normal—an increase of 1400%! While the article
doesn’t mention depleted uranium specifically, and says that doctors in
Fallujah have been "reluctant to attribute" the astonishing number of
birth defects to the massive assault on that city by US forces in late
2004, they do say those doctors cite “radiation and chemicals” which
were dumped on the city.

There is no such report about this in the US media.

Is that censorship? Of course it is.

The American government doesn’t tell CBS News or CNN not to report
this story, which amounts to a US war crime. It does not (at least
generally), contact the editors at the New York Times or the Washington
Post and say, “Don’t report on the infant mortality crisis in Iraq, or
on the possible connection to US weaponry” (Though the government did
ask and successfully get the Times to hold a story about the National
Security Agency's massive electronic spying program for a year, and
managed to pressure the Times' editors to kill a Times reporter's story
about President Bush's likely use of a hidden cueing device during the
2004 presidential debates). The editors of those news organizations
themselves most of the time simply decide that either the story is of
no importance to readers or they worry that they may be criticized
either by the government or by other media organizations for being
unpatriotic, or biased.

The end result of such a process of self-censorship, however, is
that the American public is as ignorant about certain things as someone
in China.

More ignorant in fact.

One thing I learned from living and working as a journalist and
journalism teacher in China back in the 1990s is that the Chinese
people, with their long experience of living in a totalitarian
dictatorship in which all media are owned and tightly controlled by the
state and the ruling Communist Party, are acutely aware that they are
being lied to and that the truth is being hidden from them.
Accordingly, they have learned to read between the lines, to pick up
subtle hints in news articles which honest journalists have learned how
to slip into their carefully controlled reports. They have also
developed a sophisticated private system of person-to-person reporting
called xiaodao xiaoxi or, literally, “back-alley news.” This
system used to be word-of-mouth between neighbors and friends. As
telephones became ubiquitous, it was done by phone, allowing
transmission over long distances quickly. Now there is the internet,
which, while it is systematically controlled via what has become known
as China’s “Great Firewall”—effectively all of China is like a vast
corporate “intranet” which blocks access to outside websites—still
allows the flow of email. This is nearly impossible to monitor,
particularly when the messages are not bulk mailed to large numbers of
addressees.

So in China, reports of corruption, of local rebellions or strikes,
of internal struggles within the government or party, or of important
news about the outside world that the government wants to keep at bay,
manage to circulate widely inside China despite a huge state censorship
apparatus.

This alternative highly-personal news network works because the
Chinese people know they are being lied to and kept in the dark, and
they want to break through that official shroud of secrecy and control.

In the US, in contrast, we have a public that for the most part is
blissfully unaware of the extent to which our news is being censored,
filtered and controlled. Like the President (who knows better), we
boast of our “free press,” and our open society, and indeed, as a
journalist, I am free to write what I want to write.

But given that most people get their news either from corporately
owned newspapers or from corporate radio and TV stations, it doesn’t
really matter what I or other journalists critical of the Establishment
write because it won’t appear in the corporate media. Since most
Americans, unlike most Chinese people, assume that they live in a
society with a free press and no censorship or control of information,
they don’t even bother to look beyond the information that is spoon-fed
to them by corporate media sources.

The result is that in my experience I have found peasants in rural
Jiangsu or Anhwei Province to in many cases be better informed about
their own country and the world than are typical American suburbanites.
Certainly if an American wants to be informed, all the information she
or he could want is available, but one has to be first of all aware
that one isn't getting certain information via the obvious sources, and
then one has to want to get it, and make the effort to find it. For
most Americans, all three of these elements are missing.

The list of censored stories and issues in the US, about which the
American public knows almost nothing is staggering, going well beyond
just the use of nasty weapons.

Do Americans know, for instance, that all the other modern western
Democracies in the world have some form of national health care—either
a state-run system like that in the UK or a single-payer model like
that in Canada, or some hybrid like they have in France or
Switzerland—and that in all those countries, the systems are so popular
that they have survived decades of conservative governments? No. Our
corporate media instead report on the crank critics of those systems
and allow us to believe they are hated by their citizens.

Do Americans know that the US no longer boasts the best standard of
living in the world—or even close? No. Because the American media
continue to portray the US as “number one.”

Do Americans know that Al Qaeda was actually a creation of the CIA?
No. This important bit of information doesn’t get mentioned in the US
media, which always starts the organization’s history at 1988, when it
got its name, when actually, its early origins date to the arming of
the mujahadeen by the CIA and the CIA-linked Pakistani intelligence
service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, when the US wanted to create and support resistance to the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

And of course, we rarely get to see the slaughter of women and
children that our beloved soldier “heroes” are conducting in Iraq and
Afghanistan in our name.

No censorship in America?

Mr. President, please. You may fool us, but at least don’t insult the intelligence of your Chinese audience.
____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He spent seven
years in China and Hong Kong and Taiwan as a Fulbright journalism
professor and a correspondent for Businessweek magazine. He is author,
most recently, of "The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006)
and is the winner of a Project Censored award. His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Country Joe, Kenny Rogers and Obama

dlindorff — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:26:02 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Country Joe McDonald
said it best in his iconic "Fixin' to Die" Rag: "Oh, it's one, two,
three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn." In
fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that
started out because the US didn't want the Commies to win a battle in
the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of
the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been
struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become
the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious--we had no
business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.

Afghanistan is the same thing all over again. We "got in"
surreptitiously for the same reason. Russia had helped organize a coup
to take over what passed for a "central government" and had found
itself mired in a brutal war of occuptation, and the US had begun, back
in the '70s, organizing and providing arms to the forces fighting the
Russians, not because Afghanistan--a country even more remote and
meaningless in terms of US interests or security than Vietnam--had any
importance but because it was a way to "stick it to" the Russians in
the waning days of the Cold War. But things have a way of coming back
to bite you, and the folks we armed turned out not to like us very much
either. So when we helped set up the foreign fighters--mostly Arab
volunteers--in Afghanistan, we set up a force of people who saw us, in
their home countries, as the oppressor and backer of vile and corrupt
regimes back home. It was only a matter of time before they began
turning their attentions to us. When 9-11 happened, we went after these
people in Afghanistan, and the government of the Taliban, which we had
formerly helped to power. In short order, what we managed to do was
substitute ourselves for the Russians.

What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? Don't ask me. I don't give
a damn. And neither do most Americans. For a while, Afghanistan was the
"good war" in many Americans' minds, because they bought the lie that
conquering Afghanistan was necessary to defend the US from terrorism.
Of course that was silly. Terrorists don't need countries. They are as
mobile as a nuclear submarine or a flu virus. But once you put large
numbers of troops in a foreign country and have them storming around
shooting up the place, and once you start bombing the crap out of
villages and killing people indiscriminately, you create a new
situation where you become the occupier. So here we are, fighting
another war that makes no sense, has no purpose, and has no end. Good
war? Necessary war? What a joke!

What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? Don't ask us. We don't
give a damn. And yet President Obama is now on track to add more
troops--maybe 20,000, maybe 40,000. Hell his general on the ground,
Gen. Stanley McCrystal, is asking for as much as 80,000, which would
put the total up to what it is in Iraq, where we're still bogged down
in an occupation quagmire.

That's where Kenny Rogers song "The Gambler" comes in. "You've got
to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk
away, know when to run."

We had a chance to walk away from Afghanistan back in 2001. The Al
Qaeda forces had been routed, the Taliban government had collapsed, and
people in much of the country of Afghanistan, who had been largely
spared any violence during the American attacks, were largely grateful
at having the yoke of fundamentalism lifted off their backs. But the US
didn't leave. A low-level war continued. More and more innocent people
were killed, or arrested and stuffed into a concentration camp and
torture hell-hole at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul, or shipped off to
the other hell-holes in Guantanamo Bay or other CIA secret sites. And
the Taliban were able to regroup and reposition themselves as saviors
of the nation. Now the US is cast as the occupier. We can't just "walk
away" anymore. We have to "fold 'em" and "run."

Will Obama have the sense of a gambler with a bad hand? So far the
signs are not good that he will. We are now in the position of having
70,000 US troops, soon to be closer to 100,000 troops, fighting,
killing and dying in a country run by a corrupt, vote-stealing leader
whose brother has long been known to be a leading profiteer in the
global opium/heroin trade, in which Afghanistan has become the world
leader (80-90 percent of the market) and, according to the New York Times,
for eight years and counting a paid CIA asset in charge of a
nation-wide death squad that is working on contract for The Agency.
Polls show that most Afghanis, understandably, want the US out of their
country. Wouldn't you?

A hand doesn't get much worse than that.

It's time to fold and run.

If we don't get the hell out of Afghanistan, then we'll all be
singing Country Joe's song, but with modified lyrics (which I just
premiered at a solo performance at a fund-raising dinner last week in
Philadelphia for the local chapter of Veterans for Peace):

Come on all you young women and men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He's got himself into a terrible jam,
Way off yonder in Afghanistan.
You ain't got a job, so pick up a gun!
We're gonna have a whole lotta fun!

All you folks in the National Guard,
You won't be protecting your back yard.
We may have floods and hurricanes here,
But you'll be dodging bullets in the desert there.
But if that's not what you signed up for,
We'll send you there a few times more!

General McCrystal, jump right in!
Your big chance has come again.
The VC whupped us back in '74,
But now you can show some Muslims what-for,
And maybe even earn you a medal or three,
Sittin' at your desk in DC.

Chorus:
Oh it's one, two, three what are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn.
Next stop's Afghanistan.
And it's five, six, seven, open up the Pearly Gates.
Ain't no time to wonder why.
Whoopee! We're all bound to die!

Come on mothers, here's the plan,
Send your son off to Afghanistan.
Come on fathers, it's all cool,
Send a daughter off to Ka-Bool.
And if they die, they come home free,
And nobody has to see.

chorus

Okay Wall Street, here's the deal:
Middle East oil is yours to steal.
Afghani blood, American too, is being shed now
Just for you!
And you can charge whatever you dare,
Cuz Washington don't care.

chorus

Bush and Obama, you've done your best,
You've made the Middle East into one sweet mess!
But that's okay, there's still a plan:
To divert attention just bomb Iran!
And if that seems a bit unwise,
Well hell, you've got the Nobel Prize!

Chorus:
And it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop's...
Pakistan?

_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and folksinger.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

America's Drug Crisis: Brought to You by the CIA

dlindorff — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:49:14 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of
your nearest city, or read about someone who died of a heroin overdose,
just imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or her saying: “Your
Federal Tax Dollars at Work.”

Kudos to the New York Times, and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, for their lead article
today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s
stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the
world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the
CIA payroll.

Okay, the article was lacking much historical perspective (more on
that later), and the dead hand of top editors was evident in the overly
cautious tone (I loved the third paragraph, which stated that “The
financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence
agency and Mr. Karzai raises significant questions about America’s war
strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.” Well,
duh! It should be raising questions about why we are even in
Afghanistan, about who should be going to jail at the CIA, and about
how can the government explain this to the over 1000 soldiers and
Marines who have died supposedly helping to build a new Afghanistan).
But that said, the newspaper that helped cheerlead us into the
pointless and criminal Iraq invasion in 2003, and that prevented
journalist Risen from running his exposé of the Bush/Cheney
administration’s massive warrantless National Security Agency
electronic spying operation until after the 2004 presidential election,
this time gave a critically important story full timely play, and even,
appropriately, included a teaser in the same front-page story about
October being the most deadly month yet for the US in Afghanistan.

What the article didn’t mention at all is that there is a clear
historical pattern here. During the Vietnam War, the CIA, and its Air
America airline front-company, were neck deep in the Southeast Asian
heroin trade. At the time, it was Southeast Asia, not Afghanistan, that
was the leading producer and exporter of opium, mostly to the US, where
there was a resulting heroin epidemic.

A decade later, in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, as
the late investigative journalist Gary Webb so brilliantly documented
first in a series titled “Dark Alliance” in the San Jose Mercury
newspaper, and later in a book by that same name, the CIA was deeply
involved in the development of and smuggling of cocaine into the US,
which was soon engulfed in a crack cocaine epidemic—one that continues
to destroy African American and other poor communities across the
country. (The Times' role here was sordid—it and other leading papers, including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times—did
despicable hit pieces on Webb shamelessly trashing his work and his
career, and ultimately driving him to suicide, though his facts have
held up.) In this case, Webb showed that the Agency was actually using
the drugs as a way to fund arms, which it could use its own planes to
ferry down to the Contra forces it was backing to subvert the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua at a time Congress had barred the US
from supporting the Contras.

And now we have Afghanistan, once a sleepy backwater of the world
with little connection to drugs (the Taliban, before their overthrow by
US forces in 20001, had, according to the UN, virtually eliminated
opium production there), but now responsible for as much as 80 percent
of the world’s opium production—this at a time that the US effectively
finances and runs the place, with an occupying army that, together with
Afghan government forces that it controls, outnumbers the Taliban 12-1
according to a recent AP story.

The real story here is that where the US goes, the drug trade soon
follows, and the leading role in developing and nurturing that trade
appears to be played by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Your tax dollars at work.

The issue at this point should not be how many troops the US should
add to its total in Afghanistan. It shouldn’t even be over whether the
US should up the ante or scale back to a more limited goal of hunting
terrorists. It should be about how quickly the US can extricate its
forces from Afghanistan, how soon the Congress can start hearings into
corruption and drug pushing by the CIA, and how soon the Attorney
General's office will begin a grand jury probe into the CIA's drug
dealing.

Americans, who for years have supported a stupid, blundering and
ineffective “War on Drugs” in this country, and who mindlessly back
“zero-tolerance” policies towards drugs in schools and on the job,
should demand a “zero-tolerance” policy toward drugs and dealing with
drug pushers in government and foreign policy, including the CIA.

For years we have been fed the story that the Taliban are being
financed by their taxes on opium farmers. That may be partly true, but
recently we’ve been learning that it’s not the real story. Taliban
forces in Afghanistan, it turns out, have been heavily subsidized by
protection money paid to them by civilian aid organizations, including
even American government-funded aid programs, and even, reportedly, by
the military forces of some of America’s NATO allies (there is
currently a scandal in Italy concerning such payments by Italian
forces). But beyond that, the opium industry, far from being controlled
by the Taliban, has been, to a great extent, controlled by the very
warlords with which the US has allied itself, and, as the Times now reports, by Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s own brother.

Karzai, we are also told by Filkins, Mazzetti and Risen, was a key
player in producing hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots for his
brother’s election theft earlier this year. Left unsaid is whether the
CIA might have played a role in that scam too. In a country where
finding printing presses is sure to be difficult, and where
transporting bales of counterfeit ballots is risky, you have to wonder
whether an agency like the CIA, which has ready access to printers and
to helicopters, might have had a hand in keeping its assets in control
in Kabul.

Sure that’s idle speculation on my part, but when you learn that
America’s spook agency has been keeping not just Karzai, but lots of
other unsavory Afghani warlords, on its payroll, such speculation is
only logical.

The real attitude of the CIA here was best illustrated by an
anonymous quote in the Filkins, Mazzetti and Risen piece, where a
“former CIA officer with experience in Afghanistan,” explaining the
agency’s backing of Karzai, said, “Virtually every significant Afghan
figure has had brushes with the drug trade. If you are looking for
Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in Afghanistan.”

“The end justifies the means” is America’s foreign policy and military motto, clearly.

The Times article exposing the CIA link to Afghanistan’s
drug-kingpin presidential brother should be the last straw for
Americans. President Obama’s “necessary” war in Afghanistan is nothing
but a sick joke.

The opium, and resulting heroin, that is flooding into Europe and
America thanks to the CIA’s active support of the industry and its
owners in Afghanistan are doing far more grave damage to our societies
than any turbaned terrorists armed with suicide bomb vests could hope
to inflict.

The Afghanistan War has to be ended now.

Let the prosecution of America’s government drug pushers begin.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative reporter.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

WTF? Obama Gets the Nobel Peace Prize?

dlindorff — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:13:53 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It’s not as much of a travesty as when Henry Kissinger, a war criminal of the first order who was an architect of the latter stages of the Indochina War, and was personally responsible for the slaughter of well over a million innocent people, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, while that war was still raging, but the awarding of the latest Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is travesty enough.

We’re talking about a man whose practically first act upon taking office early this year was to escalate the ugly and pointless war in Afghanistan with the addition of some 20,000 troops, and who, even as the Nobel committee was discussing his award, was meeting with his military and political advisors to consider expanding that war even further, both in Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan.

The Nobel Committee claimed that during Obama’s short period as president, the US “is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened."

Well, certainly when compared to the prior presidency of George W. Bush, that statement is correct, but that’s not saying much. After all, under President Obama, Guantanamo’s terrorist prison is still in operation and is holding people whom even the government admits are guilty of nothing. Under President Obama, the US has also blocked the Goldstone Report which condemns Israel of war crimes in its recent assault on Gaza. And under Obama, the US military in Afghanistan has continued to slaughter disproportionate numbers of civilians through its wanton use of aerial bombardment, pilotless Predator drones, and antipersonnel weaponry.

President Obama may have, as the Nobel Committee states, put forward a vision of nuclear disarmament, but his administration at the same time continues to refuse to sign the international anti-landmine treaty (putting America in the wretched company of just Russia, India and China). And under Obama, the US continues its role as not only the leading producer and exporter of arms, but also as the major initiator of wars in the world. Under Obama the US continues to outspend the rest of the world’s nations combined on its military. And don’t forget, Obama, like President Bush before him, continues to threaten to attack Iran, over that nation’s alleged nuclear weapons program—a program the very existence of which remains highly debatable.

As for climate change policy, President Obama in practice has taken a largely hands-off approach to getting Congress to act, not using his considerable political clout to force action on climate change legislation. It is now conceded that the US will go to the international climate conference in December with no bill passed to limit or reduce the nation’s CO2 emissions. Nor is the Obama administration likely to push for any significant program of CO2 reductions in the future.

Nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize closed on Feb. 1, less than two weeks after Obama took the oath of office as President, but the Nobel Committee in Norway had a good nine months since then to observe this president’s actions—and his lack of actions—on the key issues weighing on the decision. In the end, committee members were bamboozled by this president’s rhetoric of hope just as were the American people during the election campaign. As the committee wrote in announcing its decision: "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future."

If Nobel Peace prizes are being awarded to people who are simply giving the world hope, surely the judges could have found any number of worthy speechifiers. Hell, even the dictatorial leaders of China and North Korea can make flowery speeches about peace and human dignity. More to the point, the committee had under consideration at least two far more deserving nominees for the award who were actually acting at great personal risk to further peace and human rights: Chinese freedom-fighter Hu Jia and Afghani women’s rights advocate Simi Samar. It is an insult to the memory of former award winners like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jody Williams, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, and others who put their lives and careers on the line to struggle for peace and human dignity to give this award to a man who has accomplished so little, and who, in fact, in his short time in office, has managed to expand one war, to block the international condemnation of the brutality of another, and who has done nothing to reverse his own country’s leading role as a promoter of war and international violence.

Henry Kissinger hung his blood-drenched Nobel Peace Award on his office wall on Wall Street and continued to make obscene sums of money off human suffering in his dotage. One can only hope (ah, that intoxicating word!) that President Obama will take his award seriously, and will use his new status as official man of peace to halt America’s campaign of violence in Afghanistan, calling a regional peace conference to settle that conflict instead of simply expanding the war, that he will announce a major cut in American military spending and a halt to arms exports, that he will sign the landmine treaty and voluntarily end the production and use of antipersonnel weapons of all kinds, and that he will finally have the US join the International Criminal Court of Justice.

Right. Now that’s the audacity of hope.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Our Neighbors' Keeper: Local Cop Chiefs Want to Create a Nation of Snoops

dlindorff — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:54:04 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and other big city cops
are calling for a new system of “citizen watch” programs, allegedly to
help them spot hidden terrorists. I view this new call for a nation of
private spies with a deep suspicion born of experience with the LAPD
and its historic penchant for spying on law-abiding residents of that
city.

Back in the late 1970s, together with a band of other doughty
journalists, including Tommy Thompson, Ron Ridenour, Ben Pleasants, I
co-founded and ran a spunky little news weekly called the LA Vanguard.
In the course of just one year, we broke stories about secret “security
offices” run by local phone companies (Pacific Telephone and GTE) which
provided unlisted numbers and credit information to police and other
government agencies without requiring a warrant, about the killing of
unarmed citizens by police, about the LAPD’s “shoot to kill” gun use
policy, about judges in landlord-tenant cases who were slumlords
themselves, and many other stories that were being ignored by the LA
Times and the rest of the local establishment media.

For our efforts, we found out years later, we were targeted by the
LAPD’s “red squad,” known at the time as the Public Disorder
Intelligence Division (PDID), for an intensive program of spying that
including planting a young cop, Connie Milazzo, as a member of our
editorial collective. We only learned of Milazzo’s real identity years
later when she admitted disclosed it herself to a judge in a public
hearing (she wanted to avoid being sent to the county lockup along with
a group of activists she had “joined” undercover who had all been
arrested during a protest and who were refusing to provide their
identities to the court).

A subsequent lawsuit filed with the help of the ACLU of Southern
California, eventually settled for a payment of $1.8 million by the
City of Los Angeles, disclosed that the PDID had for years been using
as many as 20 undercover cops to infiltrate and spy on over 200 legal
political and activist organizations in the Los Angeles area, gathering
rooms full of files on everyone from members of the National
Organization for Women to the staffs of certain members of the city
council. We also learned that the LAPD was providing those files to a
shadowy private outfit in San Francisco called Western Goals, which had
links to the ultra-right John Birch Society. Western Goals was
apparently seeking to serve as a private repository of dossiers on
leftists and political activists collected by local police all around
the country in a kind of end run around the restrictions on domestic
spying by the FBI that had been imposed after the post-Watergate
revelations about the abuses of the COINTELPRO era.

This is why Bratton’s idea stinks. Local police, because they are
local, are even more prone to rogue activities that will never be
exposed or monitored than are federal police.

As accommodating of police-state tactics as Congress has been,
especially since 9-11, at least some members of that body have raised
concerns and demanded investigations of some of those abuses by
organizations like the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency. But
city councils have been notoriously uninterested in monitoring the
unconstitutional activities of their local police around the country,
who have extremely powerful political connections and the support of
local media establishments.

Any attempt to organize a citizen’s watch program to look for
suspicious activity is bound to devolve into a police program of spying
on those who are outside of the “norm”: minorities, leftists,
activists, loners, people with alternative life-styles, artists, etc.

Let’s be honest. America faces no existential threat from
terrorism. It does face such threats from rampaging climate change,
political corruption, corporate power, economic collapse, and many
other things, but it is hardly threatened by terrorism, which has
killed far fewer people even in 2001 than have auto defects,
contaminated food, and insurance company denials of care.

Back in 2001, the Bush/Cheney administration stoked an irrational
fear of terrorism in order to win passage of the Patriot Act and
acceptance of other actions, such as creation of a program by the
National Security Agency to use supercomputers to monitor millions of
Americans’ electronic communications. Many of those threats to freedom
remain in place today. Now Chief Bratton and his compatriots in police
departments around the country are trying to stoke that same irrational
fear of terrorism to move the country even further towards a
police-state mentality.

The last thing we need in this era of corporate-media-induced
conformity and citizen passivity is a bunch of self-appointed citizen
snoops calling in to the cops with reports on every neighbor who looks
or acts a little bit different.
______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama's Narrowing Window of Opportunity

dlindorff — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:23:38 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The way I see it, President Obama has a couple of months to turn his failing administration around.

The war in Afghanistan is going south, and within a couple of weeks,
his General William Westmoreland, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, will be
coming to him asking for more troops. Things are getting hairier in
Iraq too.

His signature health care initiative is foundering, with Republicans working in lockstep to see to it that it fails.

Pressure is mounting for an honest probe into the criminality of the
prior administration in its authorization and promotion of torture
against captives--most of them innocent--in the Bush/Cheney "war" on
terror.

The stock market, which by climbing back 50% from its collapse and
the bottom it hit on March 9, gave the president a breather, is showing
signs of exhaustion, and is likely to start sinking again, as investors
realize that there is no end in sight for the recession in the real
economy.

If all this continues into December, which is after all only a
couple of months away, Congress will go into recess, and when it
returns, it will be an election year, with all House seats up for
grabs, and a third of the Senate also facing re-election. Republicans
will be in an all-out campaign to reduce the Democratic majorities in
both houses, with history on their side (in almost every off-year
election, the party of new presidents lose support both houses of
Congress).

So, what's the president got to do?

First, he needs to announce a bold peace initiative in Afghanistan.
He should reject the call for more troops, and instead call for a
regional peace conference--one that would include all the neighborhing
countries around Afghanistan, and most significantly, the Taliban. At
such a conference, he should arrange for a new government of national
unity that includes the Taliban, and then get the hell out of the
country. Obama can declare victory if he wants, but the main thing is
to get out. Ditto for Iraq, where the US is still viewed as an occupier
and is going to be forced out eventually. There is no reason to stay
another day.

Second, he should declare the disfunctional and industry-polluted
health reform plans in Congress dead and simply announce that by
executive order, he is lowering the age for Medicare to 55, and is
switching all Medicaid patients in the country over to Medicare (with
the intention of lowering that age by five years ever year until all
are covered), and shutting down the Medicaid program. He should then
submit a bill to Congress establishing a government-owned insurance
company, open to all, with no restrictions on its ability to set
pricing and reimbursement rates or to negotiate discounts from
hospitals, doctors and pharmacy companies. Or alternatively, the bill
could enable anyone to simply buy into Medicare. He should tell
Democrats and Republicans alike that any member of Congress who votes
against that bill will not see any bill with her or his name on it get
his signature in his remaining years in office. The government company
would be phased out once Medicare covered everyone.

Finally, the president needs to announce that he is sickened by the
information he has received about the prior administration's torture
program, and that he is encouraging his attorney general to fully
investigate it, and to prosecute to the full extent of the law anyone,
no matter how high up in the military or in government, who authorized
torture or who covered it up.

Congress could be expected to howl at the use of an executive order
to expand Medicare, but the president could declare a national health
emergency as justification, saying the recession had thrown too many
people off of health insurance, and that as well, states were in dire
fiscal shape and laying off workers because of the increased Medicaid
burden.

Removing older workers from employers' health insurance plans would
be a huge shot in the arm for struggling companies, as they are the
biggest users of health care. Lifting the $400 billion cost of Medicare
from state governments would free up money to prevent the layoff of
state and local employees, which is threatening to stifle economic
recovery.

Republicans can be expected to denounce the president for going
after the Bush/Cheney administration on torture, but most Americans at
this point are becoming aware of the damage that the policy has caused
to the country's international reputation, and to the soldiers in the
field.

Many people would also howl about bringing the troops home from
Afghanistan, and Iraq, but the truth is that the vast majority of
Americans are sick of both wars and would welcome an end to them.

The key to all these moves, however, is that Obama needs to explain
them not in terms of saving money, but as being the right thing to do.
Health care reform has to be presented as a moral imperative, not as a
money saver (even though covering everyone with Medicare would be a
huge net savings for everyone in the country). Ending America's foreign
wars would be a huge savings, but the real reason to do it is that the
US has no business being a global cop and imperialist occupier. And
prosecuting torture is essential if the US is to be a nation of laws.
You wouldn't know it to listen to the jaded pundits in the corporate
media, but in my experience, most Americans are basically decent
people, and would like to be citizens of a country that did decent
things, not just things that could be justified as making "economic
sense."

I'm not expecting any of this to happen, of course. This president
has shown repeatedly and convincingly that he is a creature of the
Establishment, not given to any bold initiatives or to challenges to
the status quo. I'm just saying that these are steps that could salvage
his presidency--a presidency that is seeming increasingly doomed. The
corollary is that if he doesn't do these things, he will find himself
with a diminished majority in November, 2010, a reinvigorated
Republican opposition, a tanked economy, an angry electorate (including
a lot of pissed off former supporters), and, basically, nothing to show
for his whole presidency come 2012.

And to top it off, for failing to prosecute Bush/Cheney torture, he
could well find himself subject to arrest abroad should he decide to
travel a bit once he is ousted from office in January 2013.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book
is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Is America a Sick Country or What?

dlindorff — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:19:32 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

You see, here's the thing. When you hear about the sick, twisted
things that America's torturers have been doing, courtesy of President
George W. Bush and Vice President Darth Cheney, you have to remember
that the US military and the CIA were not really all that reliable when
it came to picking up the real terrorists. In fact, their batting
average was pretty lousy.

According to even the Pentagon's own reckoning, for example,
probably 85% of the captives being held at Guantanamo over the past
eight years were not terrorists at all, and a fair number--probably the
majority--weren't even fighting anyone when they were captured. I'm
sure that the averages at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or at the
secret prison in Iraq are no better. The military was offering bounties
in Iraq and Afghanistan for alleged terrorists, you see, and probably
still is, but in both of those lawless, tribal countries, many people
have used the offer to settle old feuds, turning in people they wanted
to punish or dispose of, and many others just turned in random people
to get the reward money.

Remember this when you hear about torture tactics that we are
learning were used by our side--things that make waterboarding sound
like a walk in the park. We're now getting confirmation of things that
we journalists were hearing rumors of earlier: faked executions using
blanks, faked executions in neighboring rooms, followed by threats of
the same to a person who had just heard the screams and a shot in the
cell next to him, threats with an electric drill, and now perhaps the
worst yet--the threat to kill a captive's children. And of course there
is the already disclosed case of a captive who had his genitals cut
with a razor, and generous use of tasers in places on the body designed
to cause maximum pain. That, and of course there are a lot raped
captives (including young boys), and a lot of bodies yet to be dug up
of captives who were simply killed during torture.

We've got a litany of horror and abuse here that sounds like the
worst kind of stories that used to come out of Saddam Hussein's Iraq,
or the Argentine Junta or Idi Amin's Uganda. About the only thing
missing is word that the military and CIA torturers were eating their
victims, or feeding them their own genitals, but who knows? Maybe we'll
get there yet. It's hard at this point to rule anything out.

What has become of the US? We started out the victims
of an attack in 2001, with the whole world rallying to our side, and
within a matter of weeks, our government, acting in our name, had
secretly embarked on a wholly unnecessary and totally criminal descent
into the barbarity of Middle Ages.

And now? The new administration has claimed to have put a stop to
the atrocities, but it remains adamant that it is not going to root out
the evil that was already done to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.

President Barack Obama says he does not want to look back at any
crimes that were committed. He wants to go "forward." This is not the
voice of justice, though. This is the voice of political gutlessness
and of big power exceptionalism. The same America that demands the
prosecution of war criminals in little countries like Cambodia or
Serbia or Sudan, considers itself exempt from criminal liability for
its own crimes.

Attorney General Eric Holder says he may be ready to appoint a
prosecutor to investigate cases where CIA or private contract torturers
"overstepped" the rules set by the White House and Justice Department,
but he has said he will not allow the investigation to go beyond that
to pursue the people who enabled those acts of torture--people like
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who personally instructed
torturers in Afghanistan to "take the gloves off" in one case, or
Assistant Attorney Generals John Yoo and Jay Baybee (now a federal
judge), who ruled that anything short of the destruction of bodily
organs or of a pain level equivalent to death was okay. Nor will he
allow any investigation to look at acts of torture that were
authorized, like waterboarding, if they had the sanction of the
Bush/Cheney White House.

This position taken by the new administration should sicken us all.
Worse, it should be broadly condemned, because if the descent into
barbarity which occurred with the highest White House sanction is not
investigated thoroughly, and punished fully, there is no way we can say
it will not happen again. In fact, it's safe to say that it will happen again,
the next time another charlatan gets into office and uses fear to blind
the American people to all that is right and decent, and to the
importance of maintaining the rule of law.

I know there are terrible things happening right now which demand
our attention and action--an escalating, endless war in Afghanistan
that increasingly resembles Vietnam in 1966 or 1967, a presidential
cave-on on health care reform, a sell-out on real action against
climate change, and on and on--but this particular crime--the crime of
failing to act to punish violations of the Geneva Conventions on
treatment of prisoners of war, which is being committed today by the
Obama administration--is so obscene, so directly in our faces, and is
such a stain on the whole nation, that it demands action.

We will probably never know how many innocent lives have been
destroyed by America's eight years of officially sanctioned torture,
but we can at least see to it that the people who sanctioned it, and
not just those who engaged in it (and that goes right up through the
chain of command to the Commander in Chief and to the real power behind
the throne, Dick Cheney), are put in the dock like the criminals at
Nuremberg, to face the charge of war crimes. and crimes against
humanity.

As the citizens of what we call a democracy, we can demand nothing less.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadeelphia-area journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Clinton and Obama: The Worst and Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

dlindorff — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:20:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because
he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and
compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that
progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the
irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate interests and the wealthy.

On the issue of war and peace, he has sided with the
military-industrial complex, with a policy of permanent occupation of
Iraq and endless war in Afghanistan, as well as continued funding of
the country’s colossal armory of death, from strategic missiles and
submarines to aircraft-carrier-group armadas to high-tech fighter
squadrons and space weaponry.

On civil liberties, he has sided with the police state, supporting
continuation of the Bush/Cheney administration’s insidious National
Security Agency spying program, defended military spying within the US,
and refused to prosecute obvious abuses by the prior administration.

On torture, the Obama administration is continuing the imprisonment
and torture of captives in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world
at Bagram Air Base and, probably, at other secret sites, and instead of
closing Guantanamo as promised, is looking into transferring that
hellhole of torture and abuse to one or several sites in the mainland
US.

Health care reform has become a sad joke, with the emerging
“reform” bill looking for all the world like the Rube Goldberg creation
of the Clinton era that properly went down in flames. Instead of taking
on the insurance industry, the hospital companies and the
pharmaceutical industry and other parts of the profit-making
medical-industrial complex, Obama cut deals with all of them behind
closed doors, assuring that their profits would be left untouched, and
that they could essentially write their own “reform” bill through the
offices of bought-and-paid members of Congress like Senator Max Baucus.
Obama and his congressional allies carefully kept any discussion of the
single-payer idea—essentially Medicare for all, and the approach that
even Obama himself admits would be cheaper and more universal—out of
sight and off the table.

Climate change action, too, has been sold out, with Obama adopting
the approach favored by the energy industry—“cap and trade.” That
concept is a gold mine for Wall Street trading firms, which will be
doing trades next in pollution credits instead of subprime mortgages,
and for energy companies which will get free credits to sell, courtesy
of the taxpayer. And because it’s a system so easy to game, it will do
nothing or next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Finally, there’s economy and banking reform. Here Obama didn’t even
make a pretense of taking a progressive approach. There is a stimulus
program, but half of it was in the form of tax cuts—token for the poor
and middle class and significant for the rich and for businesses, and
half in the form of federal grants, often for unneeded projects like
roads and road repair which go to some of the higher paid members of
the working class, leaving the poor and the ununionized with no job
help. Meanwhile, bankers were the recipients of trillions of dollars in
bailout assistance, while nothing was done to break up the huge
mega-bank holding companies that brought on the financial and economic
crisis in the first place. Instead of picking economic advisers and
bank regulators from the many talented system critics like Nobelists
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Obama picked veterans of the
Bush/Cheney administration, and Wall Street shills like Larry Summers
and Timothy Geithner.

Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not
because we thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his
background—community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience
living in a third world country (Indonesia), multi-racial—would lead
him to make at least some right decisions. We, or certainly I, hoped
too that the energized young and working class electorate that came out
for him in the fall would continue to press him aggressively to do the
right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the economy.

I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist
through and through on all the major issues that matter. And I was
wrong on the second. Most of the left in the US, from the labor
movement to the environmentalist movement to the anti-war movement, has
to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them out on each of
their key issues.

But here is the silver lining: The sell-out this time is so much
more blatant, and so much more serious, than it was with Clinton, and
for all the talk about Obama’s ability to string words together, he is
so much less of a charismatic figure than the gregarious Bill Clinton,
that he is unlikely to hang on to the ardent support that propelled him
to his victory last November. The disappointment and sense of betrayal
among progressives this time is palpable, especially because, while
Clinton, by 1994, had the excuse that he was working with a Republican,
or partially Republican Congress, Obama has solid control of both
houses, but refuses to use it. If, as I expect, the recession continues
to deepen, with more and more people losing jobs and homes, if, as I
predict, health care continues to be unaffordable and inaccessible, if,
as I know will happen, evidence of deadly climate change continues to
pile up, and if, as I am equally certain, Iraq explodes and the war in
Afghanistan continue to worsen, the left is going to see Obama and the
Democrats in Congress as the failures and corrupt frauds they are, and
will abandon them.

That leaves the question of what to do, and where those frustrated progressives will turn.

I don’t claim to have the answer to that. Clearly the labor movement
needs to recognize that hitching its fortunes to the Democratic Party
has been and will continue to be a dismal failure. It needs to pull all
its political money back and only support those who are 100% allies in
the struggle for the rights of workers. No money for the party as a
whole. It should also go back to the pioneering work of people like the
late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil and Chemical and Atomic Workers Union,
who before his death was tirelessly working to establish an American
labor party.

Other third parties on the left need to drop their individual
agendas and work towards unity, especially with the labor movement, in
order to create a broad-based left party that doesn’t have litmus tests
for inclusion—just broad principles like steeply progressive taxation,
an end to NAFTA and the WTO, democratization of the Federal Reserve
Bank, national health care, a wholesale slashing of the military
budget, by perhaps two-thirds or more, free education through four
years of college for all, and a crisis plan to attack climate change.

If the ever fractious US left, and the somnolent labor movement,
cannot come together as one, there is little hope of political change
in America. At that point the alternative would be an increasing
militancy over these critical issues, outside of the electoral
arena—something that has to happen anyhow, regardless of whether a real
third party force can be put together. We know that simply organizing
occasional polite marches in Washington, or in key cities, accomplishes
nothing. We have learned that email campaigns to deluge members of
Congress with canned opinions don’t work. What has worked, and will
always work, is massive campaigns of civil disobedience, tent cities in
Washington, organized disruption of war preparations, and door-to-door
organizing. The corrupt hacks who inhabit the halls of Congress and the
White House will not do the right thing just because it is the right
thing, or because we ask them nicely. They may, if we make them fear
that they will actually lose our votes in the next election. For the
most part, incumbent Democrats know that the people who peacefully
march down Connecticut Avenue are still likely to vote for them come
the next election. They’re not going to be so sure about people who are
being hit by tear gas and water cannons and who are being hauled off en
masse to jail at protests.

We may need to start sending that stronger message.
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net www.thiscantbehappening.net

Saving Private Bergdahl

dlindorff — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:49:47 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Let me say from the outset that I have the greatest sympathy for
23-year-old Bowe R. Bergdahl, the US soldier in Afghanistan who was
captured and is being held by Taliban forces, and for his family, who
must be going through a living hell worrying about what is going to
happen to him.

But I’m willing to bet you that all of them are wishing, right now,
that the US had not decided back in 2001 to begin a campaign of torture
and murder against the Taliban fighters that it was capturing in
Afghanistan, and against others that it has rounded up in the so-called
War on Terror.

I sure know that if my son were ever so unfortunate as to be
suckered into joining the US military and was then dispatched to fight
and kill people in some far-off land where the US had no reason to be
in the first place, and if he were to be captured, I would want to know
that my own country had been living up to the letter of the law in
respecting every clause of the Geneva Convention regarding the
treatment of captives.

The sad truth, however, is that neither the Bush/Cheney
administration, which simply tossed out the Geneva Conventions in 2001
and said its provisions, despite being signed into law by the US, did
not apply to the war in Afghanistan, which was the first assault in
what they conceived as a borderless and endless War on Terror, nor the
Obama administration, which has refused to grant full Geneva Convention
rights to the captives it holds in places like Afghanistan’s Bagram Air
Base, or at Guantanamo Bay, or to prosecute those who tortured and
ordered torture in the prior administration, has followed the law...

For the rest of this article, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net
________________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

CIA’s Lies About Secret Program Should Have Congress In Open Revolt

dlindorff — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:04:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

If this were the democracy that the Founding Fathers thought they
were creating, word from CIA Director Leon Panetta that his agency had
lied to Congress and specifically that it had lied repeatedly from
9-11-2001 through the end of 2008 concerning an as-yet undisclosed
secret program, would have virtually every member of Congress in a
state of rebellion, demanding answers.

After all, the CIA is required by law to report to at least the
majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees and to the majority and minority leaders of both houses of
Congress about such things.

But not only did the spy agency not report on what it was up to; it lied about what it was up to.

Now, given what we do know about the Bush/Cheney
administration—that it initiated a massive campaign of spying on
Americans by the Defense Department, the FBI, and the National Security
Agency, as well as other intelligence agencies, that it initiated a
campaign of torture of captives, including American citizens, while
asserting that the President didn’t even need to notify the courts or
the public about the arrest, detention, torture or even execution of an
American citizen if he, acting on his own, deemed that person to be an
“enemy combatant,” and given that we also know that Bush and Cheney
lied repeatedly about the justification for their invasion of Iraq, and
refused to be put under oath in their “interviews” by the 9-11
Commission, you would think the members of Congress, which was
railroaded into supporting everything from the USA PATRIOT Act to the
Iraq War invasion based on all these lies and deceptions, would be
demanding answers regarding this mysterious program.

For the rest of this story, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net