DictatorshipIsEasier.us

America is Simply Losing It Folks

dlindorff — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:45:49 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Reading the latest AP report
on how American citizens are being snatched up, detained and deported
(sic) by the Immigration and Naturalization Service has reminded me
just what a screwed up place this country has become.

Ever since September 11, 2001, the country has simply lost it.

` Remember back then, no sooner had the dust settled over Lower
Manhattan, than the INS and other police agencies began rounding up
thousands of people with Muslam sounding names, or even with non-Muslim
sounding names but Muslim-looking faces, and locking them away in
federal and county detention centers, with no access to lawyers. People
who were here on grants of asylum because of political persecution in
their home countries were being shipped home to likely torture and
death, without any hearings.

Most Americans seemed okay about this.

There has been a “nativist” (sic) resurgence, with people who
consider themselves “real” Americans getting hysterical about all the
non-white immigrants and descendants of non-white immigrants in this
country. (Of course the whole idea of calling such idiocy “nativist” is
itself nonsense, since the real natives are the people that we
systematically exterminated in the 19th and early 20th century, and
that we try to keep confined on reservations.) So it shouldn’t be
surprising that besides plenty of immigrants who are here on legitimate
grounds being caught up in the government deportation machine, there
turn out to be many actual American citizens who are being snatched up
and sent to god knows where.

Not that any of this is new.

La Migra, as the agency is known among Latinos, and by people who
live south of the border, has never been particularly careful about
whom it deports when it comes to those with Hispanic surnames. I
remember back in the late 1970s, when I was part of a collective
running a spunky little alternative weekly newspaper, the LA Vanguard,
in Los Angeles, we had a had a cartoonist, Joseph Billie, who did a
comic strip for us called “Taco Rabbit.” Despite his name and surname,
neither of which was Hispanic in the least, Joseph was at least half
Latino, and looked the part.

Still a teenager, he on at least three separate occasions within
only one year’s time, found himself, despite his being a native-born US
citizen with only minimal Spanish language skills, snatched off the
street by agents of La Migra, who with no hearing would whisk him off
to the border at Tijuana and dump him in Mexico. Once there, he would
call his father, who would drive down and pick him up. Once Joseph had
to call us from Mexico to say he’d be late delivering his strip,
because he had been snatched by La Migra.

Joseph’s problem was that he didn’t drive, and so he didn’t carry
any ID. That was enough for the INS, which didn’t bother with any legal
niceties, like granting the arrestee a phone call—which would have
saved Joseph’s dad a long drive down to the border. Joseph, as it
turned out, didn’t mind being deported that much. He liked Tijuana, and
it was a free ride down, even if the INS guys could get a little rough
putting him on the bus.

But that was then. Now things are much worse. Lawyers who have
tried to defend some of the victims of INS roundups report that many
detainees are subjected to what can only be termed torture—things like
having themselves slammed into walls or pushed down stairs while arms
and legs are manacled, having their teeth smashed out, being left
outside in cold rain or blazing sun, kept from sleeping for days at a
time. Sound like Guantanamo or Bagram? In fact, there is little
difference.

But I really cannot think of anything much worse than being a US
citizen, or a legitimate Green Card holder, and being snatched away
from family and friends and job and, after being held incommunicado in
some stinking cell, shipped off to some country to which I did not
belong, and where I might not even be able to communicate.

The AP report quotes immigrant rights groups as saying that the
erroneous arrest, detention and deportation of US citizens has been
soaring, with one group saying that documented cases have gone from 129
in 2006 to 322 in 2007. But the numbers are going to really soar,
because in addition to the INS, increasingly local police agencies are
getting into the act. Last year over 950 law enforcement officers from
23 states attended brief training sessions run by the INS to learn
about picking up and detaining alleged illegal aliens.

Not so surprisingly, an appalling one in 10 Hispanic Americans
reported in 2007 that they had been stopped by law enforcement and
asked to prove that they were citizens or were in this country legally.

Ahem. Those kinds of numbers are the description of a police state, folks.

There is a simple solution to this problem. It’s in the
Constitution, actually. It is the Bill of Rights protection against
“unreasonable searches and seizures (Fourth Amendment), and against
arrest “without due process of law” (the Fifth Amendment), as well as
the right to “a speedy and public trial” and to “assisstance of
counsel” (The Sixth Amendment).

People really flipped out after 9-11, and many still think it’s
okay to treat “furriners” differently than we treat our own citizens,
but aside from the fact that the US Constitution doesn’t distinguish
between citizen and tourist or illegal resident, the growing number of
arrests, detentions and even deportations of American citizens by the
IRS shows what can happen when we start saying that some people don’t
deserve the protections afforded by that document.

In the end, any one of us could end up in an INS hellhole with no access to a phone.

_____________________
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

The Authoritarian Voice

Bob Fertik — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 10:17:32 -0400

The ex-Dictator speaks the truth at last, referring to his memoirs:

"I'm going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there's an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened," Bush said.

Spencer Ackerman adds:

All previous books about the Bush administration will be burned.

Department of Homeland Lunacy

dlindorff — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:33:10 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

I am not a terrorist.

How can I prove this in these paranoid times? Easy. The New York
Department of Motor Vehicles took my $30 payment over the phone to
clear what they said was a record of my NY drivers license having once
been withdrawn, and informed the National Driver Register in Washington
that I’m a good guy deserving of a renewal of my Pennsylvania drivers
license.

Let me explain.

After 9-11, Congress and the Bush Department of Homeland Security
went into overdrive passing things like the USA PATRIOT Act, the
establishment of the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) to
monitor air passengers and to develop lists of people to harass at air
terminals, a network of black sites to detain and torture suspected
terrorists, and more recently the National Driver Register, a federal
data bank designed to link all drivers licenses and car registrations
to a central computer system, and thus ferret out would be terrorists
trying to create false identities courtesy of the state DMVs.

I, like uncounted tens of thousands of innocent Americans, ran
afoul of this latest catch-a-terrorist system as my Pennsylvania
drivers license, which I first obtained in 1997 when I moved from New
York to Pennsylvania, came up for a third renewal. Several months ahead
of my renewal date, I got a coldly worded and ominous letter from the
Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles saying my license could not
be renewed because the new federal data base was reporting that my New
York license had been “withdrawn” by the NY DMV.

When I called the Pennsylvania DMV to explain that my New York
license had never been withdrawn or suspended (it had to have been in
good order for me to have used it under the state’s reciprocity
agreement with neighboring New York to obtain my new Pennsylvania
license), and to ask what the problem might be, I was told that they
couldn’t tell me, because the federal report doesn’t say what the
problem is. Nor is there any way to contact or appeal to Washington.

My only recourse was to deal with the New York State DMV—probably one of the blackest of bureaucratic black holes known to man.

I called the number that the Pennsylvania DMV provided, and found
myself connected to a maddening automated system which had no options
that could respond to my problem, and that offered no way to reach a
human being. Finally, by calling the media relations office of the
Pennsylvania DMV and using my reporting credentials, I was able to get
someone who could at least check enough into the case with New York to
establish that the problem was that when I moved to Pennsylvania,
transferring my car registration from New York to Pennsylvania, New
York kept my car’s registration active in that state. (I don’t know
what I would have done had I not been a journalist.) Then, since I had
stopped paying for New York car insurance when I switched over to
Pennsylvania plates and Pennsylvania insurance, my New York insurer had
sent in word to the New York DMV saying my car no longer had insurance.

Never mind that my car was by then in Pennsylvania and properly
insured for months before the date that New York showed my car to have
become uninsured. Pennsylvania couldn’t do anything about it because
the federal law says they may not issue me a license as long as there
is a problem with my license in another state. There is no statute of
limitations on any of this, and no method of appeal of the federal
listing.

I called a number that was kindly provided by the media officer in
Pennsylvania, and got through to an actual person in the New York DMV.
She told me that the problem came up because when I moved to
Pennsylvania and shifted my plates over to my new state of residence, I
didn’t send my old license plate to New York. Never mind that there’s
no way I would have known I had to send that plate in. And never mind
that I did obtain a new title for the car in Pennsylvania, and that the
record of that title transfer is in the national computer system. Any
cop with a computer could find that out. Never mind. Eleven years after
the fact, New York still needed the plates.

Of course, I’d long since sold that car for junk and didn’t have
the plates. I didn’t even remember what the license number was.

The DMV woman in New York told me I could clear the whole thing up
for a $30 charge, which she could take care of with a credit card over
the phone.

Note that she had absolutely no way of identifying me, to know that
I wasn’t a terrorist just paying her $30 so I could get a dreaded
Pennsylvania drivers license to use as an ID for whatever nefarious
purposes I might have in mind. She just took down the credit card
number and bingo, I’m cleared to go. The New York DMV, happy with its
little act of extortion, is now notifying the National Driver Register
computer that I’m clear, and next week, Pennsylvania’s DMV will find my
record on the National Driver Register clean and will be ready to renew
my license.

This is the DMV and Homeland Security automotive equivalent of the
TSA rules that have now every flier taking off her or his shoes (even
baby’s’ booties!), and surrendering tubes of toothpaste and mouthwash
at airport security checkpoints.

A fundamental rule about rules should be that if there are records
being kept, and if actions are being taken on the basis of those
records, then there has to be a way for errors to be corrected by the
agency that is maintaining and disseminating those records and
by any agency that is acting on the basis of those records. But in the
case of America’s terrorism fetish, this rule is being violated
routinely.

The “no-fly” and the “let-fly-but-first-harass” lists maintained by
the TSA, which both reportedly now contain tens of thousands of names,
are used by the TSA at airport checkpoints, but developed not by the
TSA, but by the dozens of police and intelligence agencies of the
federal government—the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, the ATF, the State
Department, the FBI, etc., etc. If your name turns up on the TSA list,
and you end up getting strip searched every time you try to fly, the
TSA will tell you you’re on the list, but they won’t tell you who put
you there, and they won’t take you off either. That has to be done by
the agency that reported your name—the one they won’t identify to you.
It’s straight out of Kafka.

The National Driver Register is the same kind of thing. It collects
information about license “problems” from all of the state DMVs, and
disseminates that information widely to all the other states, but it
doesn’t provide any details about what your “problem” might be. It
could be anything from conviction of vehicular homicide or DWI to a
15-year old case of being late with a car insurance payment. In fact,
DMV officials in both PA and NY, before they had the details,
repeatedly referred to my case as a “crime” when no crime had ever been
committed. And although, once I had discovered the nature of my
particular “transgression,” even though the Pennsylvania DMV people
agreed that it was a silly reason to withhold my licence renewal, and
that in fact I had done nothing wrong and was already fully switched
over to a Pennsylvania licence and car registration by the time the New
York license was “withheld,” they said they were “powerless” to renew
my license because of the federal law.

Kafka again.

We are at the mercy of lunatics
____________________

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

The Land of the Silent and the Home of the Fearful

dlindorff — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:08:14 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I was a speaker last night at an anti-war event sponsored by the
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Monmouth County, Progressive
Democrats of America and Democrats For America in Lincroft, NJ, near
the shore. It was a great group of activist Americans who want to see
this country end the Iraq War, turn away from war as a primary
instrument of policy, and start dealing with the pressing human needs
of the country and the world.

Yet even in this group of committed people, one woman stood up
during the question-and-answer session and said, “I want to get
involved in writing emails to members of Congress urging them to cut
off funding for the war and other things, but if I do that won’t I end
up getting put on a `watch list’” or something?”

I told her the short answer was yes, she probably would. In George
Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s America, no one is safe from such spying, and
even from harassment, as witness Tom Feeley, the man behind the website
Information Clearing House, who had armed men invade his house at night and threaten his wife complaining about his First Amendment-protected effort to publicize important stories on the Internet.

But I also told her that it didn’t matter. She should defend her
freedom of speech and her right to petition for redress of grievances,
just as she was defending her freedom of assembly by attending last
night’s event.

The only demonstrably true statement George Bush has made in his
sorry eight years in office is that the Constitution is “just a
goddamned piece of paper.” While it wasn’t the point he was making,
when he reportedly shouted this at a couple of Republican members of
Congress who were questioning the constitutionality of some of his
actions, he was right that the nation’s founding document is only worth
the parchment and ink it’s composed of, unless people use it and defend
it.

There is a remarkable and palpable fear abroad in this land—not a
fear of terrorism, but a fear of speaking up, a fear of being labeled
as “different” or as a “troublemaker.”
People will lean over and whisper their opinions, if they think they
are anti-Establishment, as though someone might be listening. People
write me after some of my columns run, praising me for my “courage,”
though why it should be perceived as requiring courage to merely write
something in America is beyond me.

The worst thing is that every time someone says she or he is
afraid, or acts afraid to speak or write what she or he is thinking,
five more acquaintances become equally scared and silenced.

The corollary, though, is that each time someone forgets or ignores
or rejects that fear, five people gain courage the do the same thing.

Now I’m not saying that there aren’t people monitoring, and
reporting on, what we say. I know our government is busy doing that. I
assume that my Internet activities are being monitored by the National
Security Agency. I assume my phones are tapped. I assume there was some
agent or informant among the fine people at the church last night. But
these Stasi wannabes have no power if we don’t let them frighten us
into silence and inaction.

What I find discouraging is the widespread acceptance, even on the
left, of this effort to intimidate us, and the pervasive attitude of
fear that has grown up around us. I spent a year and a half living in a
truly fascistic society in China, where there are real, concrete
threats to life and liberty faced by those who stand up and say what
they are thinking, and yet sometimes I think that ordinary people I met
in China were braver about stating their minds than many, or even most
Americans are. I’m not talking here about saying things like that you
think the Post Office is dysfunctional, or that you think federal
bureaucrats are corrupt or that taxes are too high. I’m talking about
questioning the system, or challenging the war, or protesting military
spending. Chinese people would tell me all the time that the Chinese
Communist Party was a corrupt gang of thugs or that you could not get
justice in a Chinese court. Chinese people are closing down factories
that short them on their pay. They have rallied in the thousands and
burned down police stations when corrupt police have raped, killed and
then covered up the death of a young girl. They have marched in massive
impromptu protests at the theft of their homes through eminent domain.

If you want to see where we’re headed here in America, check out
the workplace. There, we Americans have, through years of collective
cowardice and unwillingness to stand together in organized labor
unions, allowed our constitutional freedoms to be almost completely
erased. Today, an American workplace is more akin to a police state
than to a democratic society. Say what you’re thinking on the job, and
you’re liable to lose it. Wear a shirt that says something the boss
disagrees with, and you either remove that shirt or you are unemployed.
Even that final refuge of free speech, the bumper sticker, can get
workers in trouble if the wrong one shows up in the company parking
lot. That loss of will and of freedom has in no small way contributed
to the loss of jobs and the decline in living standards of American
workers.

It’s time for all of us to put a stop to this creeping usurpation of our liberties.

The anxious woman who asked her question came up to me after the
meeting and said proudly that she would not be afraid, and would start
signing on to protest letter-writing and emailing campaigns.

We need lots more like her.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Remembering When the Government Was at Least Approachable

dlindorff — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:26:59 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

We’ve come a long way towards imperial government in the US—towards
a view of the relationship between the federal government, and
especially the administration, and the citizenry that has more of a
ruler-subjects than a democratic feel to it.

Now I know it is easy to gloss over the way things were, and since I
spent a few days in federal prison for protesting the Indochina War at
the Pentagon in 1967, after being beaten by federal marshals for doing
nothing more than exercising my constitional right to protest on public
ground, I am well aware that 40 years ago we were also often treated
like serfs. But that said, there was something different back then—a
sense that you could deal with powerful officials as an equal.

Back in the summer of 1968, I spent one of several summers on the
road (something more young people should do today). I had hitch-hiked
across the country from Connecticut to Washington state with Allen
Baker, a college buddy, and then, towards the end of that summer break,
had bought an old pick-up truck for $100, which we were driving home
via the West Coast and the central route. Not having much cash, we were
stopping at cities along the way, where I would play guitar for gas
money.

This was the late ‘60s, and there was a major and sometimes violent
culture war underway between the long-hairs like me and the clean-cut
American “Silent Majority,” and my travel companion, Allen, and I were
concerned that it would be tough scaring up much cash in the vast
Republican stretches of desert, mountains and prairie that lay between
Nevada and Missouri. So when we passed through Yosemite National Park,
we decided to spend a day in the valley’s main parking lot, raising
donations from tourists.

While Allen dozed in the back of the truck, I opened my guitar case
and put up the “Gas Money” sign, and then, sitting on the running board
of the old Dodge, started to play.

The money poured in—over a hundred dollars in a fairly short amount
of time. It was really astounding. People walking by really enjoyed the
music and wanted to help us out.

Then a park ranger, an older fellow with a friendly smile, drove up.
“I’m sorry,” he said apologetically, “but I have been told to arrest
you.”

“What for?” I asked, genuinely shocked.

“There’s no panhandling allowed in the park,” he responded.

“What’s panhandling?” I asked him, genuinely unaware of the meaning
of the term, which I, an Easterner, thought must have to do with
cooking with a skittle on an open fire.

“It’s what you’re doing right now,” the ranger said.

By that point, Allen had woken up and sat up in the truck bed, rubbing his eyes.

“You’ll have to come in too,” the ranger told him.

We followed him back to the ranger station, where he proceeded to
write up our tickets. I noticed that there were two actual jail cells
in the station. Thankfully, at least we weren’t going to be locked up.
Then there was a loud bang outside. Suddenly, a younger ranger, looking
like a recent Marine veteran, muscled and crewcut, ran in. “Where’s the
first aid kit,” he yelled. “ I was just bringing in a kid on a
marijuana charge and he tried to run. I shot him in the leg.”

Whoa! I thought. This is Dodge City!

The older ranger told his partner where to get the kit, and then
turned his attention back to us. “Here are your tickets,” he said. “And
don’t skip out on them. This is a federal offense, and the FBI will
come after you if you don’t pay it.”

We left the building, and only then did I look at my ticket closely.
The fine: $500! It was a fortune back then. Even today it is a big
whopper—especially as a penalty for being poor.

I was pretty upset. That was about how much I had earned towards college that whole summer.

Well, the $100 I’d earned panhandling in the park got us back across the country, at least.

When I got home to Connecticut, though, my fine was rankling. Angry
at the injustice of it all, I typed up a letter to the Secretary of the
Interior, who at the time was Stewart Udall. I wrote about the shooting
incident, saying that I thought it was an outrage that an unarmed young
man arrested on a minor charge like marijuana possession would be shot
in a national park, and I also wrote that it was unfair to fine someone
$500 for simply playing music in a park parking lot. “I wasn’t
bothering people,” I wrote. “In fact, they were coming up to me to hear
the music, and the $100 they tossed into my guitar case is testimony to
the fact that they liked what I was doing. That isn’t panhandling, and
in any case, it’s pretty nasty to fine someone $500 when he’s doing
something because he needs money.”

About two weeks later, I got my letter back from the Department of
Interior. On it, in red ink, Udall himself had written, “I agree.
Forget your ticket. It’s been taken care of. Stewart Udall.”

I have tried to imagine that same situation happening today. First
of all, the unfortunate hippie who got shot that time long ago would
probably have been killed, because the ranger would have been carrying
a more high-powered weapon, and wouldn’t have even been aiming to
disable. Second, Allen and I would probably have been put on some
database at the Pentagon, the FBI and the Transportation Security
Administration, and would have been barred from flying or entering any
national parks. More importantly, though, I tried to imagine the
response I would have gotten writing to current Interior Secretary Dirk
Kempthorne to complain about an arrest for panhandling. Or to his
predecessor, Gale Norton. This is, after all, a department that has
instructed its rangers at the Grand Canyon and other parks not to talk
about evolution, and those at the Everglades National Park not to talk
about global warming and the inevitability that rising ocean levels
will swallow that sea-level park in this generation. Under both
secretaries, the Interior Department has played a key role in the Bush
administration’s efforts to alter and to selectively censor government
scientific reports on evidence of climate change.

I’m not saying it was all sweetness and light back in the ‘60s, or
even that Stu Udall was representative of all government officials in
the Johnson years, but there clearly was a different sense back then
that ordinary citizens had a right to communicate directly with their
leaders and to expect some kind of response.

Nixon began the end of all that, with his Imperial Presidency. It
wasn’t just his penchant for secrecy, though that was legendary. It was
his desire to make the government something more remote and feared,
something imposing and awesome, rather than down-to- earth and
accessible. President Carter, to his credit, went a long way towards
reversing that trend, but over the years it has continued, with Bush
and Cheney taking it to an extreme. Today the White House is a bunker.
Federal police carry assault weapons. Snipers man the roof of the White
House. People who write letters of complaint to minor federal officials
can end up being strip-searched and arrested.

And from the looks of things, it may not be much better even if
Obama takes over the White House. The first day of the Democratic
Convention in Denver saw anti-war protesters penned into the same kinds
of “free-speech zones” that the Bush/Cheney administration has made
into standard features of any “public” appearance they put in, while
AT&T, the company that brought us the convention, kept even
credentialed reporters away from a private party the company threw for
those Democrats in Congress who obligingly passed immunity legislation
to protect the company from lawsuits by those whose communications were
spied on by Bush’s National Security Agency. (Obama supported the
immunity legislation.)

So even as we are all being reduced to a nation of panhandlers, it
may be a long time before we can expect a handwritten letter from the
secretary of the Interior Department or of federal department, or for
help in getting off an unfair ticket.
___________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Huffing and Puffing at the Pentagon

dlindorff — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:02:26 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

American Secretary of War Robert Gates knows a real leader when he sees one. “Clearly, as far as I’m concerned,” he said, Vladimir Putin, and not President Dmitry Medvedev, "has the upper hand right now."

Well hell, Gates should know. After all, he deals on a daily basis with the same peculiar situation here in the US, where the president also is a figurehead and the real power lies in the hands of Vice President Dick Cheney.

But Gates doesn’t speak with such clarity and directness in other matters. "I think that there is a real concern that Russia has turned the corner here and is headed back toward its past rather than toward its future, and my hope is that we will see actions in the weeks and months to come that provide us some reassurance," he said, speaking on ABC and CNN, claiming that the country was returning to the authoritarianism of the old Soviet era.

Ahem.

It might also be noted that the US is heading increasingly towards an authoritarian future, no? Certainly over the course of the last seven years we have seen the executive branch in the US claim that it no longer needs to enact or adhere to laws passed by Congress or to terms of international treaties approved by the Senate. We have also seen this administration refuse to respond to Congressional subpoenas for information and testimony from White House officials, effectively establishing the presidency as a dictatorship, have we not?

As for Gates’ condemnation of Russia for resorting to force in Georgia, one need not defend Russia’s actions there to note that such tactics have long been deemed fully appropriate in the US. Only recently America used force to depose an elected government in Haiti, hustling its elected president off into exile. The US has also been working assiduously through covert means to overthrow the elected government of Venezuela, even supporting (and probably helping to organize) a temporarily successful military coup there. Then of course there is the decades-long effort by the US to overthrow the government of Cuba, which has included everything from invasions and embargos to multiple assassination attempts against Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Russia is clearly moving in an authoritarian direction at home, and is reasserting its influence and control over some—though hardly all—of the states that were formerly part of the USSR. But in all of this it is merely aping the behavior of the US government, which is becoming more authoritarian also, and which has always been a bully in its local neighborhood.

If Gates has anything legitimate to complain about it is that the American military disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its preoccupation with drumming up conflict with Iran, have rendered the Pentagon almost impotent when it comes to threatening Russia.

All that is left for Gates to do is huff and puff about Russia backsliding to the bad old days when it was able to stand up to the US as an equal.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Ducking Impeachment in Congress and the Newsroom

dlindorff — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:35:01 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

On Monday last week, something important happened in Washington.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic representative from Cleveland, OH,
who early in the primary season won some of the biggest applause lines
in the Democratic presidential candidate debates, introduced 35
articles calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush for
high crimes and misdemeanors.

You'd be excused if you didn't know this happened. There was almost
no reporting on the event that day or the next, which took several
hours to accomplish, along with several hours Tuesday for to be read
into the Congressional Record. Kucinich's address to the House was
broadcast live on C-Span. But it was not announced in advance or
highlighted on the C-Span website, and there were not many news reports
on the historically significant fact that articles of impeachment had
been filed against the president during subsequent days.

A week later, it has still not been reported in the New York Times,
the nation’s self-described “newspaper of record,” even though the
Times had just days before Rep. Kucinich’s action, editorialized about
the enormity of the president’s lies in tricking the country into
invading Iraq—one of the crimes leading Rep. Kucinich’s long list.

A number of papers did editorialize against impeachment, including
the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Florida Sun Sentinel—but it says
something that these publications thought it more important to attack
Rep. Kucinich’s action than to actually report on it as a news item.

Even the Washington Post’s news report was an example more of the
sclerotic state of American journalism than of genuine reporting. It
began:

“Having failed in efforts to impeach Vice President Cheney, Rep.
Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) escalated his battle against the
administration this week by introducing 35 articles of impeachment
against President Bush, using a parliamentary maneuver that will
probably force a vote today.”

Any journalism student who wrote a lede like Post staff writer Ben
Pershing’s in a classroom exercise would have gotten a “D” or an “F”
for it. Talk about backing into a story! First of all, Kucinich hasn’t
“failed” in his effort to impeach Cheney. Congress has failed to
impeach our criminal vice president and regent. Technically, Kucinich’s
Cheney impeachment bill is still lodged in the House Judiciary
Committee, where it is now joined in political limbo by the Ohio
congressman’s new Bush impeachment measure.

The unwillingness of the nation’s news media to seriously consider
the need for Congress to respond to and challenge the president’s clear
abuses of power—even as they themselves condemn of those abuses of
power—is a blot on the journalistic profession perhaps worse, and of
more lasting consequence, than their failure to act as watchdogs and
critics during the run-up to the Iraq War, when they acted more as
patriotic cheerleaders than as news organizations.

As impeachment advocates, including Rep. Kucinich, have pointed out,
unless this president and vice president are impeached by the current
Congress, any—and probably every—future president will feel empowered
by unchallenged precedent to ignore laws passed by the Congress, to go
to war without Congressional approval, to spy on Americans in violation
of the law, to ignore court orders, to abrogate international treaties,
and to lie to Congress and the American people. Unless Congress asserts
its rights under Article I, it will no longer even be a co-equal branch
of government, but instead will have been reduced to nothing more than
a debating society.

Editorialists, while refusing to honestly report on this
Constitutional crisis, have been parroting the claim of gutless and
calculating Democratic Party leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in
saying that with the nation at war and with a critical election
approaching, there are “more pressing” matters to consider than
impeachment, and that impeachment would be a “diversion.”

This is nonsense. As hundreds of American troops continue to die
each quarter in a war that never should have happened, and that was
launched five years ago and continued for half a decade thanks to
administration lies and deception, there is nothing more important
facing this nation than restoring Constitutional government and
Constitutional checks and balances—something that can only be done
through the Constitutional process of impeachment.

The American people instinctively know this. In polls, fully half or
more of the public consistently continue to say, even at this late
date, that they want the president impeached. Considering the media
blackout on the issue, this is truly astonishing and even heartening.
But it will take more than polls to get impeachment rolling. The public
needs to start demanding that its representatives take action, on pain
of being voted out of office.

I was at an anti-war forum in New Jersey last Friday evening
sponsored by a group of peace activists calling themselves the Iraq
Forum Organizing Team. When forum panelist Rep. Rob Andrews was asked
by an audience member whether he favored impeachment and supported Rep.
Kucinich’s articles of impeachment, Andrews fudged. He claimed,
ingenuously, that the articles had been sent to the House Judiciary
Committee for hearings, and said that he personally thought that Bush
had committed an impeachable “high crime” by outing the identity of a
covert agent of the CIA, Valerie Plame, and added that if the Judiciary
Committee “develops a bunch of evidence” to support that charge, he
would vote to impeach.

As I pointed out to the congressman, he certainly knows that that is
a cheap dodge. I said that he was well aware that the way legislation
moves forward in Congress is that members like himself sign on as
co-sponsors of legislation they favor, and that then, and only then,
those measures get hearings. Without co-sponsors, bills go to committee
to be killed by inaction, which is the intention of sending Kucinich’s
articles of impeachment to the committee. I said if Rep. Andrews were
honestly to believe that the president might have committed any high
crimes, he should either file articles of impeachment himself, or
co-sign the excellent set of articles already filed by Rep. Kucinich.
Instead, Andrews, like the rest of the Democrats and Republicans in the
House, with the notable exception of Rep. Wexler and California Reps.
Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey, have avoided Kucinich’s articles like the
plague.

The audience loudly applauded this condemnation of Rep. Andrews.

We are at a critical point on impeachment. The elected leadership is
afraid to challenge even this unprecedentedly unpopular president, who
continues to defy Senate and House subpoenas, continues to promote war
and to violate laws and treaties, and who is now conspiring with his
vice president to launch yet another, bigger, war against the nation of
Iran.

At the end of the day, if we get to January 19 without any
impeachment hearings, we may see Bush and Cheney depart Washington, we
may even see a Democratic president and a Congress with a significant
Democratic majority in both houses, but it will be a hollow victory.

The nation’s democracy will at that point have been left a smoking ruin.
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Time for Congress to Stand Up in Its Own Defense: Impeach Bush and Cheney N

dlindorff — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:24:50 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The last couple of weeks have brought confirmation—as if it were needed—even in the corporate media, that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the gang of thugs and sycophants around them in the White House, engaged in a massive conspiracy to lie the country into a war in Iraq.

The release of a confessional book by former White House press spokesman Scott McClellan and the subsequent release of a long blocked report by the Senate Intelligence Committee make it clear that Bush, Cheney & Company deliberately lied to Congress and the American public back in 2002 and early 2003 about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein (there was none). McClellan also states that Bush and Cheney conspired to “out” CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson, as part of a compaign to prevent her husband from exposing a major part of that campaign of lies: the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking to build nuclear weapons.

It would be hard to overstate the extent of or the damage caused by these crimes that are now exposed to the light of day.

Beginning in 2001, making the most cynical use of the tragic killing of nearly 3000 Americans in the 9-11 attacks, Bush and Cheney moved to aggrandize as much power as possible in the executive, and then, to consolidate that power grab, engineered a full-scale war against Iraq, enabling them to claim that any opponent of their dictatorial usurpation of power was a traitor to the nation.

It was all a lie.

Saddam Hussein had no links to Al Qaeda, and he had no nuclear program. He had no weapons of mass destruction. His country was broken, thanks to years of international sanctions and war.

As a result of these lies, we have a country that no longer even remotely resembles what the Founders had intended. The Congress has been shorn of its once exclusive authority to legislate, and even its Constitutional power to investigate the executive branch has been successfully defied. It is now an atrophied relic. The federal judiciary, right up to the Supreme Court, has been packed with administration sycophants and Federalist Society advocates of unfettered executive power.

We also have been saddled with an unwinnable war in the Middle East that has claimed the lives of 4500 Americans, destroyed the lives of another 30,000—or perhaps several hundred thousand, if we add in all those suffering psychological damage, or genetic damage from exposure to depleted uranium weapons. That war has also killed over 1 million innocent Iraqis, including countless chiildren, destroyed their country, bankrupted this nation, and made the US a pariah and a rogue state in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Most Americans long since came to the conclusion that the Bush administration was a gang of idiots. Just watching their handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster unfold was enough to make that clear. But the new reports from McClellan and from the Senate Intelligence Committee should make it clear that this was not just stupidity. The disasters that have befallen this nation, or that it has brought on the rest of the world, over the past eight years have been the result of deliberate lying and deceit and of the conspiratorial policies of a cabal of leaders whose goal from day one was undoing the Constitution and establishing the presidency as a kind of dictatorship.

Most of the corporate media have been unable to bring themselves to state this clearly. They edge around the issue by talking about the White House having been “misleading” or “untruthful.” And little is said about the lasting damage that has been done to the Republic and the Constitution, or about what is to be done about a still bloody war that never should have been fought in the first place.

The answer is clear. Impeachment proceedings should be initiated against both Bush and Cheney. These two arch criminals must not be permitted to leave office with their titles intact. They need to be tossed out in disgrace, and then indicted for war crimes and for crimes like perjury, conspiracy and perhaps treason.

We are already seeing the long-term damage that has been wrought. John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee for president, is saying that the president’s use of the National Security Agency to spy, without any court order, on tens or hundreds of thousants, or perhaps millions of Americans, is legal, and would continue under a McCain administration. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has said that he would continue Bush’s use of “signing statements” to ignore Congressional legislation that he felt impaired his Constitutional powers as president.

The nation is at a dangerous crossroad. Either Congress reasserts its authority now, via impeachment, drawing a Constitutional line in the stand in defense of Article I of the Constitution—the article that defines the power of Congress as absolute in terms of passing legisation—or it forever surrenders that role, leaving us with what can only be called a dictatorship.

We clearly cannot count on the next president, whoever that may be, to surrender powers usurped by the current one. What leader in history has willingly and voluntarily surrendered authority, after all?

Such power must be wrested back by Congress, and the only way for that to happen is impeachment—a course laid out clearly by the authors of the Constitution for just such a crisis.
____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Protect your right to Biological privacy! Oppose DNA Database Act!

mappw — Mon, 19 May 2008 14:02:11 -0400

Protect your right to Biological privacy! Oppose DNA Database Act! Dear Friends, Please respond to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) bulletin below. Then forward it to all who you know, as quickly and broadly as possible. We need to add our comments against a Federal DNA database in order to put a stop to it. We only have until today, Monday, to add our comments, to protect our biological right to privacy. Click the link below for more information - http://www.ccrjustice.org/get-involved/action/oppose-sweeping-new-federa... Click the link below to take action by adding your own objections - http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail... ____________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _________ ____ center for constitutional rights Friends, Under a new plan, the government could take your DNA and keep it on file permanently if you are arrested at a demonstration on federal property. Take action today to stop the government from giving itself sweeping new powers to create DNA databases. Please read this alert for background on the plan and immediately go here and click on the yellow "Add Comments" balloon to file public comments with the government to oppose the plan. The government is only accepting comments until this Monday, May 19, so take action today! At the end of 2005, a little-noticed provision was slipped into the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) reauthorization bill that provided the federal government with the power to collect and permanently keep DNA samples from anyone arrested for any crime whether or not they are convicted, any non-U.S. citizen merely detained by federal authorities for any reason, and everyone in federal prison. Now the government is trying to put the DNA Fingerprint Act into practice. Federal agencies would be required to take DNA samples from: Individuals arrested for the most minor of crimes, such as peaceful protestors who are demonstrating on federal property. Countless numbers of visitors from other countries who are pulled aside in airports by the Transportation Security Administration. Lawful immigrants seeking admission to this country, whether at the land border or in passport control at the airport. Go here for more information on the law. This is a dangerous invasion of privacy. Our DNA is not a fingerprint - it contains vast amounts of sensitive medical information about us. And Congress held no hearings on this dangerous legislation, even though it: threatens the privacy of millions of Americans; would disproportionately affect people of color; and turns the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" on its head. The Justice Department recently issued proposed regulations on the implementation of the law and is seeking public comments. Go here and voice your opposition to the federal government collecting and permanently storing our DNA. (See the end of this email for suggested talking points.) CCR will also be submitting extensive comments and notifying the press of this important story so the government can't slip their plan by without the public knowing. Congress failed to oppose this dangerous new law - it's up to us to let them know that the we oppose the government collecting people's DNA, and that we care about our privacy. Please take action today. Sincerely, Vincent Warren CCR Executive Director ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here are some reasons to oppose this plan, which you can use in your comments: Innocent people do not belong in a criminal DNA database. The underlying statute that permits this is wrong and goes against basic principles of our justice system. The regulations interpret the statute as broadly as possible, giving the FBI and other federal agencies the authority to take DNA in far too wide a range of cases. DNA is not a fingerprint - it contains vast amounts of sensitive medical information about us. The Justice Department's decision not to require destruction of the biological samples once the DNA profile is uploaded to its database exacerbates the potential for our genetic privacy to be violated and opens the door to the potential of familial searching. The regulations will add a disproportionate number of people of color to the database, potentially making those communities an increased target for law enforcement and further aggravating the already existing racial disparities in the criminal justice system. The regulations estimate that potentially more than one million new samples will be added to the database a year, yet the FBI's laboratory is currently receiving for processing only 75,000 offender samples each year. The requirement to collect, profile and upload such a massive number of DNA samples will flood the system and create huge backlogs, which may ultimately hinder criminal investigations, rather than help them. The regulations contemplate federal agencies contracting with third parties to collect and store DNA samples. Outsourcing the handling of this most sensitive information to multiple collection and storage sites will almost certainly lead to abuse, the creation of "shadow databases," and error, potentially undermining public trust in DNA as an effective investigational tool. Take Action: http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail... Center for Constitutional Rights ll 666 Broadway 7th floor NY, NY 10012 ll 212-614-6464 ll www.ccrjustice. org

The Bush Family's Bad Latin Real Estate Investment

dlindorff — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:43:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Back in late 2006, it was widely reported in the Latin American media that President Bush, or perhaps his old man, had bought a 100,000-acre farm in a remote area of Paraguay.

What struck people at the time was the choice of country. Paraguay, of course, has gained a certain Club Med status among the world's villains and criminal elements as the place to go when the law's on your tail. The country, ruled for six decades by the dictatorial and fascist Colorado Party of Gen. Alfredo Stroesser, an almost cartoon charicature of a Latin American dictator, has no extradition treaty with any nation.

That's why it has long harbored aging Nazis, bank robbers, and a string of ousted or retired Latin American dictators and their assistants over the years.

Given that President Bush, once he leaves office on January 20, 2009, will no longer have the diplomatic immunity conferred upon heads of state, or the Constitutional protection against indictment by domestic prosecutors, it makes sense that he would be looking for a safe haven from the long arm of the law.

After all, they guy is guilty of a huge laundry list of international crimes, from the Crime Against Peace and Conspiracy against Peace in the UN Charter, to Geneva Convention violations like approval of torture of prisoners, collective punishment of civilians, the killing of children and child soldiers, the failure to protect occupied citizens, the use of banned weapons, etc., etc., and also of domestic crimes, ranging from political use of government employees, conspiracy, treason, lying to federal officials, defrauding Congress, etc.

No wonder he wants to do what Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann did, and hole up in Paraguay.

Only trouble is, Paraguay may not be such a safe haven for long.

Last month, a former Roman Catholic Bishop with leftist, populist tendencies, Fernando Lugo, surprised almost everyone in Paraguay, and no doubt President Bush, by winning the national presidential election, ousting the Colorado Party for the first time in 61 years. There is talk that among other things, Lugo is thinking of returning Paraguay to the community of nations, by signing some of those extradition agreements.

If he does that Bush may be stuck having to hide behind his rump squad of Secret Service agents down at the Crawford Ranch, hoping they can keep the process servers from Brattleboro and Marlboro, VT, with their war crimes arrest warrants, at bay.
__________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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