Homeland Security

When 1st and 2nd Amendment Conflict: Protests, Guns and Double Standards

dlindorff — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:25:17 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Let me state from the get-go that I'm no opponent of gun ownership
(got my first rifle at the age of 12 and am still a crack shot). But
something weird is going on when you have guys wandering around a
political rally or protest site with pistols strapped to their thighs,
or semi-automatic assault rifles strapped brazenly to their backs, as
has been happening outside of venues where President Obama is speaking.

Before we get to the legal issues here, I just want to paint you a mental picture:

Take yourself back to the time when George W. Bush was president and
Dick Cheney was Vice President. Both men were barnstorming around the
country in those years, either ginning up support for their pointless
war in Iraq or campaigning for Republicans in Congressional races, or
for their own re-election. The response of police in charge of crowd
control at these events--always the same--was dependent upon who was
lining the streets. If there were people sporting signs that backed the
administration, they were left alone. If, however, it was someone
wearing something like an "Impeach Bush" T-shirt, or carrying a sign
saying "US Out of Iraq" or some other critical statement, he or she was
given a choice: move to a fenced in "Free Speech Zone" out of sight of
the presidential or vice-presidential entourage, or face arrest.

I investigated and wrote about what was happening
back then, and learned that the order to clear protesters away from
wherever the president or vice president would be was being made by the
Secret Service and the White House advance team. As I was told at the
time by Paul Wolf, a deputy police chief for Allegheny County, PA,
where Bush had come in 2003, the decision to pen in Bush critics at
that event originated with the Secret Service. "Generally, we don't put
protesters inside enclosures," Wolf said. "The only time I remember us
doing that was a Ku Klux Klan rally, where there was an opposing rally,
and we had to put up a fence to separate them."

Of the September, 2003 Bush event, he said, "What the Secret
Service does is they come in and do a site survey, and say, `Here's a
place where the people can be, and we'd like to have any protesters be
put in a place that is able to be secured.' Someone, say our police
chief, may have suggested the place, but the request to fence them in
comes from the Secret Service. They run the show."

Now I don't have to tell you that if those protesters who were
being moved away from a political rally or motorcade back then had been
visibly armed, much less armed with loaded assault rifles, they would
not have simply been herded into a "Free Speech" pen. They'd have been
arrested, probably tased into the bargain, their guns would have been
confiscated, and they might well have found themselves on a flight to
Guantanamo Bay.

What's different now?

For one thing, we aren't seeing the "Free Speech Zones" at Obama
events. Clearly the Secret Service is not being instructed by White
House operatives to have local police cart away protesters. That's a
good thing. The Bush/Cheney tactic against protest was a gross
violation of the First Amendment right of free speech and free
association. For another, it seems like the Secret Service is letting
local police make the decisions about who poses a threat to the
president--and in some states, like upstate New York, Colorado and
Arizona, for example--those local police seem perfectly comfortable
with having armed citizens in the crowds.

Let me just state for the record that this is sheer madness.

I've been to a lot of demonstrations in my life, and one thing that
has been pretty standard is that police have banned the use of wooden
sticks for holding up signs. The reason is obvious: They are afraid
that sticks might end up being used as weapons in any confrontation,
whether with them, or perhaps with angry opponents of whatever is being
protested. So protesters use cardboard tubes instead.

How is it that sticks or baseball bats can be banned at rallies and protests, but not guns?

I'm not talking here about the right to bear arms. People have the
right under the Constitution to own guns, and various states like
Virginia, for example, have passed laws even allowing them to be worn
into public places like restaurants. But police also have a duty to
protect the public, and the right to carry guns is not universal. They
cannot, for instance, be carried near schools in any jurisdiction I
know of. Does that violate the Constitution? Apparently not, according
to the Supreme Court.

Why aren't people allowed to carry guns near or in schools? You
tell me. Clearly it's because there have been some nasty incidents
involving people with guns blowing away kids at schools. It's not that
people haven't killed kids in other settings, but there's an emotional,
visceral response to seeing an armed person near a playground, so we
outlaw it. It would scare parents, scare kids and scare teachers, and
that's not an environment we want for our kids.

So what about political events? Don't we want political events to
be free from intimidation? The essence of a free society is the right
to go to a public political event and express one's support for or to
protest against some political figure or political policy. That can
involve having to confront people with an opposite perspective, which
can get tense and nasty, but the conflict is verbal, not physical, and
of course if it gets physical, the police intervene, as they
should--hopefully with even-handedness.

Guns at such events introduce a different factor. If police--and
the Secret Service--allow guns at political events, then members of the
public have to fear for their safety and their very lives. No amount of
police scrutiny can prevent a gun-holder, whether based upon a plan of
action or in the heat of the moment, from suddenly firing into a crowd.
That reality is certain to deter some people from speaking their mind,
and others from even showing up.

Furthermore, just as we've had plenty of gun violence at schools,
which has led to state and local bans everywhere on gun-toting near
schools, we've also had our share of political assassinations and
assassination attempts, usually by people who brought guns to political
events.

Should someone at some point make an assassination attempt against
the country's 44th president, I can see all the conspiracy theories
already, looking at how the Secret Service did nothing to keep guns
away from the president's appearances, and how local cops stood idly by
while armed gunmen milled around motorcades and outside the venues
where the president was speaking. Sure it would probably be someone who
came with a concealed weapon, not someone publicly carrying one, but
when you have people carrying them openly, it is bound to divert police
and Secret Service attention from the person or people in the crowd who
are up to something more sinister.

Am I crazy, or is this all just nuts? Does the Secret Service
really want another dead president on its hands? Do local police really
want to have people killed, or a president shot, on their watch?

We've established that this is the United States of Gun Owners, so
if you want a gun, go out and buy yourself one. Heck, buy a hundred if
you like. But nobody should be allowed to carry a gun at a political
event.

If we are going to keep our First Amendment, or what's left of it,
we have to make sure that freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are
not intimidated by wackos with weapons. If we can keep rallies free of
sticks and bats, we can and must keep them free of guns too.

___________________

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

Foolish Employment, Health Policies Leave US Wide Open for Pandemic

dlindorff — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:58:17 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The outbreak of a new swine flu in Mexico, and the potential threat
of a new global pandemic, shines a bright light on a major weakness in
the United States—an employment system where most workers are not paid
or even face getting let go if they get sick and have to stay home from
work, combined with a broken healthcare system where roughly one in six
people have no ready access to a doctor.

What the American failure to mandate employer-paid sick-days means
is that most Americans who don’t feel well go to work anyway, in part
for fear of losing their jobs, and in part because they are already
living so close to the margin that they cannot afford to miss a few
days’ pay.

The result of this is that offices, buses, subway cars and
elevators in coming weeks will be full of highly infectious people who
really should be home trying to recuperate. So even if your employer
does offer you sick leave, you will be placed at risk by other
employers who do not offer that benefit to their workers, or even by
lower-status workers at your own company who don’t get the same
sick-pay benefits you do. (At Temple University where my wife works, it
was only recently, after a long struggle backed by student activists,
that contractor-service guards on the campus received sick pay. Before
that, they had to come to work, sick or not, putting students and
faculty at risk of infection.)

Add to this the fact that nearly 50 million Americans earn too much
to qualify for Medicaid, yet work for employers who don’t provide them
with any health insurance. For such people, going to a doctor is a
serious problem. They probably don’t have the $50-$100 in cash to pay
for an office visit—much less the $200-400 it would cost to bring all
four members of a family—and going to an emergency room at a local
hospital and asking for charity care for something like flu symptoms
could mean a half day in a waiting room (with a lot of other sick
people!). Not to mention that many hospitals cheat on their free care
provision mandate and then dun patients for $2000 for seeing a
nurse-practitioner and getting the advice to take two aspirins and
drink a lot of fluid. And then of course, there’s coming up with the
money to buy a costly drug like Tamiflu.

Who’s likely to do any that without health insurance?

And so, as this latest round of flu starts to spread inexorably
northward from Mexico, we can expect to see it sweep through our
workplaces, and on into our schools, causing misery and no doubt a
large number of deaths that never should have happened.

The joke here, though it is hardly funny, is that businesses will
end up suffering as their workforces are sidelined for weeks, and as
the larger economy, already in a deep recession, suffers a further
blow. Sick workers don’t earn money, and thus have less to spend, and
besides, when whole families are laid up and feeling miserable, they
are not likely to go out on shopping sprees even if they do have money
in their pockets.

It doesn’t have to be like this. An enlightened country would
mandate that all employers offer their employees a minimum of one
week’s paid sick leave per year, so that people could stay home if they
came down with something. This benefit could be made cumulative, so
that a worker would be incentivized not to abuse the benefit, and could
use it in the event of a longer illness or injury.

An enlightened country would also see the self-interest for all in
having a health system that provided care for all. It’s not just a
matter of human decency, though one would hope that would be enough.
It’s also in our own interest that the person who sits next to us in
the office or on the bus have health insurance and ready access to a
doctor when needed.

At a bare minimum, the federal government should set up free
neighborhood clinics able to provide primary health care in every
community where it is determined that there is a lack off access to
physicians.

While we’re at it, school systems should also not be penalized if
students miss days at school because of illness. At present, having
students stay home for medical reasons reduces a school’s federal
funding, as grants are based upon a formula that counts student days
per year. This formulaic approach may lead school administrators to
avoid calling for school cancellations at a time of a possible epidemic.

Hopefully this outbreak of swine flu will turn out to be nothing
serious. But it should nonetheless serve as a wake-up call to the
American public. The next crisis could be a serious outbreak of
human-to-human bird flu, or a dramatic increase in drug-resistant
Tuberculosis or who knows what other communicable disease.

And when it comes to communicable diseases, we had better accept
that we have to be our brothers’ keepers or we will become their
vectors instead.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). He is
also author of “Marketplace Medicine” (Bantam, 1992). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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

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

Obama's First Big Mistake on the Job: Rescuing Sen. Joe Lieberman

dlindorff — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 08:08:44 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

The word is that Barack Obama, in keeping with his promise of a new
post-Bush/Cheney era of “civility in government,” is telling Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid not to eject the treacherous Sen. Joe
Lieberman (I-CT) from the Democratic caucus.

This is a terrible mistake. Joe Lieberman is a wretched example of
a man without principle—a back-stabbing slimeball of a politician whose
only allegience, apparently, besides to himself, is to Israel.

Now I don’t want anyone to think I’m some rabid anti-semite. My
wife and kids are Jewish, we have good friends who are Israeli, and no,
I don’t think the Jews run the media or the country. I do, however,
think that Joe Lieberman thinks more about what, in his warped and
shriveled worldview, is good for Israel, than about what is good for
America.

This senator from my childhood state of Connecticut, who back in
2000 ran as a standard-bearer of the Democratic Party as Al Gore’s
running mate, since 9-11 has been a warmonger of the first order, even
joining the right-wing Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) in trying to pass a
resolution in the senate last year which, had it made it through as he
originally worded it, would have effectively enabled—even
invited--George Bush to attack Iran at will as a part of Bush’s
megalomaniacal global “War” on Terror.

It is Lieberman’s obsession with having the US obliterate first
Iraq and now Iran, with nukes if need be, that led him to abandon his
party and become a leading supporter and apoligist for George W. Bush
and Dick Cheney, and later to become a key endorser of Sen. John
“Bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran” McCain.

Lieberman also signed on enthusiastically to the worst excesses of
Bush’s and Cheney’s eight-year-long assault on the Constitution, the
Bill of Rights and International Law. As head of the Senate Homeland
Security Committee, Lieberman became the leading advocate of fascist
policies in the Senate, rivaled only by such ranting Republican
proto-fascists as Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) and Rep. Michelle
Bachmann (R-MN). It was Lieberman who at least initially
enthusiastically backed Attorney General John Ashcroft’s mad proposal
(thankfully never implemented) to establish an Operation TIPS (for
Terrorist Information and Prevention Service) program that would have
recruited millions of Americans to spy on their neighbors and
co-workers, replicating the dreaded Stasi of Communist East Germany.
Only after libertarian-minded Republicans like former House Majority
Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) came out strongly against the scheme did
Lieberman have second thoughts, Initially, in fact, Lieberman had
personally, in his role as chair, blocked efforts by Sen. Patrick Leahy
(D-VT) to delete funding for Operation TIPS from a Homeland Security
Department funding bill before his committee.

The Democrats, who already are assured of 56 solid seats in their
caucus in the next Senate, with a chance at a couple more when all the
2004 Election races are settled and runoffs completed, don’t need a
weasel like Lieberman mucking up their ranks. If they need four more
votes to kill some Republican filibusters, they have Republicans they
can turn to, or cajole. If Barack Obama is smart (and he certainly is
that), he can also add a few—perhaps even four—Democrats to Senate
ranks by naming as many Republican senators as he needs to replace to
cabinet posts. As long as he names people like Sens. Susan Collins or
Olympia Snowe of Maine, or Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who represent
states with Democratic governors, those governors will be able to
appoint, as replacements, Democratic senators.

The other reason to shun Lieberman, and to cast him into the
legislative purgatory he so richly deserves, is that it would be an
object lesson to other potential Iagos in the party’s legislative ranks
that such treachery will not be tolerated. What, after all, is the
point of having a party at all, if its members can be as back-stabbing
as Lieberman and get away with it?

It would be a good lesson to the Democrats of the state of
Connecticut, too, who voted in a Democratic primary two years ago to
oust Lieberman as their candidate for re-election, but who then turned
around and joined Republicans in re-electing him when he ran as an
independent against a Republican challenger and against Ned Lamont, the
Democrat who had bested him in the primary. This was treachery by a
class of Democrats in the state of Connecticut that should also not go
unpunished. Connecticut voters should no longer have the benefit of a
powerful senator with seniority when that senator has so betrayed his
party.

Let Lieberman go over to the Republicans hat in hand. Let him
squirm as the Christian fundamentalists among them talk in tongues and
as others of them mutter their anti-semitic obscenities behind his
back. Let this one-time self-described advocate of civil rights blush
in shame as his new colleagues crack their racist jokes about the new
president in the lilly-white Republican caucus room.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in redemption as much as the next
atheist. I’d be perfectly happy to see Joey Lieberman back in the
Democratic caucus, but first he should be made to make a full public
apology both to Obama and to the millions of Democrats who elected the
nation’s first black president, as well as to the Democrats of his home
state of Connecticut, whose resounding 61-38% vote for Obama was the
biggest repudiation of Lieberman of all. That 38 percent tally is the
one he should have gotten when he ran for re-election last time. It’s
probably higher than he’d get if he ran today in Connecticut against
Lamont or any other Democrat.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF, a Connecticut native, is now 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

This Country is Nuts!

dlindorff — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:45:20 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Okay, I have to vent here. We all get a little crazy sitting alone
at our keyboards in this business, and it's finally gotten to me.

I know there are serious signs of a complete mental breakdown in the
US, with polls reporting that millions of people are actually excited
at having a low-rent religious fanatic who consistently mispronounces
pundit as "pundint" (shades of Dubya!), pilfers state funds for her
family's personal use, lies about her alleged opposition to Washington
pork, claims the bloody war in Iraq is "God's will," forces her
17-year-old daughter to make a momentary mistake into a lifetime one by
marrying the kid who got her pregnant, and refers to blacks as "sambo"
and to Alaska's indigenous people as "arctic arabs," running for vice
president on the ticket with a man who is a walking medical disaster
waiting to happen.

These are probably the same people who still give the worst
president in the history of the Union a 30 percent approval rating, who
keep watching reality TV shows (perhaps thinking they're real), and who
still think having 180,000 US troops indiscriminately slaughtering
Iraqis, Afghanis and Pakistanis is making the US "safe."

But right now I want to talk about Homeland Security and the US Postal Service, two small examples of domestic insanity.

I tried to mail a book to my father last Saturday for his 86th
birthday. In order to make sure it would get there by Tuesday, I sent
it in one of those flat-rate Priority Mail envelopes--the ones that
promise two-day delivery. It cost me $4.80 (five 90-cent stamps, one
24-cent stamp and two 3-cent stamps). I drop the little package off
after hours into the mail slot in the lobby of my local post office.

Yesterday, my envelope was in my mailbox, though, with a blue
sticker attached headed: "Important Customer Information: We regret
that your mail was not collected or is being returned to you due to
heightened security requirements. All mail that bears postage stamps
and weighs more than 13 ounces MUST be taken by the customer to a
retail service associate at a Post Office."

Okay, so dad won't get his present on his birthday.

I called the local PO to ask what was going on, and was told that
any package over 13 ounces with stamps has to be handed in person to a
counter employee.

"With stamps?" I asked. "What if I had worked at a company and had a
metered stamp put on it and then dropped it in a mailbox or mail slot?"

"Then it would go," I was told. "Because we'd have a meter number to trace who mailed it."

Let's see. The meter would trace the package to whatever big company
I might have worked at, but I don't see how that would help them trace
it to the actual mailer.

Now, what about if I brought my package to the counter? Would it be
opened and checked? No, I was told. I would simply be asked by the
counter clerk whether the package contained any banned substances, like
bodily fluids, liquids or bombs. If I said no, it would be accepted for
mailing. ("I know this sounds silly," the postal worker on the phone
told me, "but I don't make the rules. It's Homeland Security.")

Wow. The Post Office and the Department of Homeland Security are
sure keeping our mail trucks and our airlines safe with this clever
policy.

I mean, we can be sure that those stoopid Ayrabs wouldn't think to
put a metered stamp on the bomb they send through the mails. And that
asking at the counter thing, that would sure catch anyone trying to
slip some deadly substance into the mail stream. The clerks are
probably trained to look for certain kinds of markers of suspicious
behavior--a tic, a shifty look, or some reticence in the answer given.

Right.

So this is what it has come to in America. We're ready to put an
refugee from the "Jerry Springer" show a missed heartbeat away from the
White House, and we keep our mail and our aircraft industry safe from
terrorists by returning (through the mail, mind you!!) packages that
are left in a mailbox if they have postage stamps on them.

Dad, if you're reading this, I'm sorry your present is going to
arrive late. Take it up with Mike Chertoff, the guy who made sure
everyone got out of New Orleans alive when that city was hit by
Hurricane Katrina.

Is this a great country or what?
_____________________

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

I Was a Victim of the Government’s Absurd and Over-Hyped War on Terror

dlindorff — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:37:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I was injured thanks to the government’s ridiculous airport
security program last week on a US Air flight from Chicago to
Philadelphia. I also saw how pointless the whole thing is, if the
supposed goal is really to prevent airline hijackings.

First, my injury. Because of a silly fear that I might blow up a
plane with explosives tucked into my running shoes, I, along with
everyone else in the security checkpoint line at O’Hare, including
two-month-old babies wearing little booties, had to doff my footwear.
Clad in just socks, I tried to maneuver my way around a metal counter
that held those plastic trays carrying my laptop, my shoes, my belt and
change and keys, and my carry-on bag, and in the process my unprotected
big toe hit a sharp piece of metal protruding from the table.

The metal sliced right under my toenail, making a painful and
bloody cut into the soft tissue under the nail. Cursing and bleeding, I
made my way through the metal detector, and collected my goods.

Now, inside my bag, unbeknownst to the Transportation Security
Administration inspectors, was a bottle of mouthwash. It was larger
than the approved 2-oz size, and it was not in an approved sealed
plastic bag. But TSA inspectors looking into their video screens at the
X-Ray machine didn’t see it, because I made sure that it was vertical
as it passed through. All they saw was a little circle of plastic.
Likewise, on an earlier flight, I had made my way aboard with a Swiss
Army knife. By standing it in my carry-on bag so that it would be
vertical for the X-Ray, I was able to slip it through and onto the
plane.

Now clearly I’m not a terrorist (though for a time, thanks to my
anti-Bush, anti-war journalism, and an expose about the TSA’s “no-fly”
list abuses, I was on the watch list, and would get a circled “S”
written on my boarding passes that ensured that I would be pulled aside
to have my carry-on luggage hand searched). But if I were a terrorist,
I sure wouldn’t try to commandeer a plane with a jackknife. I’d want
something bigger. But that would be simple. One could easily carry on a
10-inch blade the same way. If one were nervous about doing that, it
could be a ceramic or better, a Plexiglas blade—plenty dangerous, but
invisible to X-rays and metal detectors.

For that matter, if I were into suicide bombing and wanted to
manufacture a liquid explosive, why on earth would I try to do it by
smuggling on two large jars of ingredients, when I could just put them
in plastic baggies and carry them aboard in my pockets? Unless you
happen to be singled out for special handling, nobody at the security
checkpoints pats you down. They just have you walk through the metal
detectors while TSA inspectors are busy patting down randomly selected
elderly nuns and racially profiled people, like unfortunate Sikh men
wearing turbans.

Any dedicated terrorist hijacker could figure out numerous ways to
get explosives and weapons onto a plane past these security
arrangements.

And that’s not even counting having the weapons smuggled into an
airport gate area along with all the goods that are offered for sale
there, where they could be picked up after a hijacker had already
cleared security. There is no way that all the newspapers, magazines,
clothing, trinkets, bottles of booze and personal hygiene products,
etc., are screened adequately as they are brought in each day to fill
the concession stands for the day’s business. First of all, one would
have to open and check every bottle and box offered for sale.

If you were genuinely worried about protecting against hijackers,
you would have those inspections at the entrance to each plane, not at
the entrance to the terminal, and you wouldn’t have all that commerce
inside the security zone. Ah! But what a roar of outrage we’d hear from
the business community if that lucrative business venue were eliminated!

Which brings me to the real question: Why do we have all this
pointless and easily breached security, not to mention a list that
contains an astonishing one million names of suspected “terrorists”?

Clearly, the security program is not about protecting the flying
public, or the nation’s tall buildings. That could be done much more
cheaply by putting air marshals on all flights, the way they do at El
Al, the Israeli airline that has never had a successful hijacking.

No, this is all about heightening the fear level of the American people, to routinize us to living in a police state.

The truth is, nobody is really interested in trying to hijack
planes anymore. First of all, the “crash into buildings” tactic is
dead. Pilots are now flying armed in armored cockpits that cannot be
easily entered, and would not accede to a terrorist’s demands any
longer, knowing what happened last time. And passengers would not sit
passively in a cabin takeover attempt, either. As a result, we don’t
have to worry about such things any longer.

The ease with which security could be breached, and the fact that
it hasn’t happened now for seven years, is evidence enough that nobody
is even trying to do it.

So let’s do away with all this time-consuming, costly, and politically motivated nonsense before I injure my other big toe.
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and
columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s
Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

A Manchurian Candidate in the White House?

dlindorff — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:34:28 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

With a viral campaign underway via email, right-wing radio, and on the street suggesting that Barack Obama is a black “Manchurian Candidate,” secretly trained as a Muslim fanatic who will insinuate himself into the White House, thence to undermine all that we hold dear, perhaps it is time to look at the Manchurian Candidate we already have in the White House, who, together with his handler over in Blair House, has pretty much done all the damage already.

George Bush came to office in 2001 promising a new era of integrity, civility and “compassionate conservatism,” an era of humble American foreign policy, and a bi-partisan approach to government.

What did we actually get?

Once in office, this chameleon president almost immediately set out to embroil the country in a major war in the Middle East against the nation of Iraq. The game plan was laid out at the president’s first National Security Council meeting, attended by Vice President Dick Cheney (the man holding Bush’s controller), Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neal (who later spilled the beans about the session).

Bush also famously ignored all warnings about the imminent attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. How much he and the rest of the administration knew about that attack in advance, or whether elements within the administration may have even helped it along, remains the subject of considerable interest and investigation and may never be answered, but it is clear that there were ample warnings about it, and he did nothing—even rudely blowing off a briefer who tried to alert him to the danger. Moreover, it is known that Israeli Mossad agents (who we know have close ties to both the US intelligence apparatus and to the Neocons who infest the Bush White House) did indeed have advance knowledge, and were set up across New York Harbor with a video camera to tape the attack on the Twin Towers (they were subsequently arrested by New Jersey police, only to be later released and sent back to Israel, through intercession by the US government). As well, we know that unidentified people made a killing by placing negative bets, called “puts,” on the stocks, several days before 9-11, of the two airlines that were hijacked, American and United, and of two investment banks that would be seriously hurt by the building collapses, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. (The puts were placed through an investment bank, Alex Brown, which until a year earlier had been headed by a man who moved over to become the number three person in the CIA.) It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Bush/Cheney administration, at a minimum, wanted an attack on American soil, and a national disaster that would put the country on a war footing.

Certainly instead of rallying the public and defending the nation’s democratic traditions and its Constitution, Bush and his handlers after 9-11 immediately set in motion a concerted scare campaign to undermine both. While urging the public to buy sheets of plastic and duct tape to construct “safe rooms” in their homes, they rammed through Congress a deceitfully named measure, the so-called Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act), which effectively undermined most of the articles of the Bill of Rights (and which appeared, suspiciously, fully drawn up in bill form, only days after the attacks).

At the same time, the president, only one week after the attacks, obtained an Authorization for Use of Military Force for a military attack on the Taliban government in Afghanistan and on Al Qaeda forces in that country, which he subsequently interpreted broadly as an authorization for a global “war” on terror which he then claimed made him effectively a dictator with absolute power both at home and abroad (the so-called “unitary executive” theory). Under this claim of absolute power as commander in chief in time of war, Bush went on to order the use of torture against captives, foreign and domestic, including US citizens, to strip even US citizens of the right of habeas corpus—that is, the right to have their arrest and detention brought before a federal court—and to establish secret torture centers around the globe and on military installations in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba.

As well, even before the 9-11 attacks, the president began a sweeping program of electronic spying, run through the super-secret National Security Agency, on Americans’ telephone and internet activities. It was and remains a program that deliberately avoids seeking warrants and court approval even by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court—a body that has only rejected some five requests for warrants out of hundreds of thousands sought since its establishment in 1978.

Finally, in a perhaps fatal undermining of the Constitution, the president after 9-11 began a practice of simply refusing to enact or obey laws passed by the Congress, effectively rendering the legislative branch an impotent debating club.

Not content to simply explode or dismantle the legal foundations of the American government and rule of law, Bush and his handlers also went about systematically destroying the country’s basic institutions and even its economy.

The education system was fatally ensnared in a test-driven system called “No Child Left Behind,” which has in short order dumbed down public education to an extent shocking even to this already anti-intellectual society, with many schools simply giving up the teaching of art, literature or history, in order to focus desperately on math and reading in order that their students would do well enough on standardized tests to keep the schools from losing their funding.

The dollar has been cast adrift to become the new Lira as the government has gone on an unprecedented borrowing spree to fund endless war and ever-larger military budgets, while erasing the taxes on the wealthy, the super-rich, and corporations. Banks were given free rein to enter into all manner of risky ventures, leading to the current collapse in credit. Corporations were encouraged to ship their production and jobs overseas. Homeowners were encouraged to spend, spend, spend and to mortgage their homes to the hilt and then some. Towns, cities and pension funds were encouraged to invest in fantastic “structured” products that were actually towering card houses. Domestic car manufacturers were encouraged to build every larger, ever more voraciously gas-guzzling vehicles, pumping out ever larger quantities of carbon into the already overstressed atmosphere.

The nation’s infrastructure—its roads, dams, bridges, levies, airports, veterans hospitals etc.--were left to decay, with predictable results, the most dramatic of which was the loss of an entire city, New Orleans, to a routine Category 3 hurricane (after which, the president did nothing to rescue the survivors or fund a recovery).

Surveying at the appalling wreckage left after eight years of the Bush administration, it is hard to recognize the country that he started out with in 2001. A once proud nation—one that only a few years ago was admired around the world and that now is viewed as a pariah and a rogue state—today trembles before a handful of turbaned fanatics holed up in caves in the Hindu Kush, its trillion-dollar high-tech military colossus fought to a standstill in Iraq and Afghanistan by a few thousand brave men and women armed with RPGs, antique AK-47s and home-made roadside bombs. A nation that once was the envy of the world for its free society now has scientists afraid to report their findings, university professors afraid to support outspoken colleagues, members of Congress afraid to defend their Constitution, citizens afraid of their neighbors, journalists afraid of government criticism, lawyers afraid to defend clients...

Hey, this place starts to look and feel an awful lot like the China I lived in back in 1991!

Forget all the nonsense about Barack Obama being a closet Muslim. We already have our Manchurian Candidate in the White House, and he has largely accomplished what he was programmed to do: destroy the country.

The truth is this: If at the end of their second term, Bush and Cheney were to hop on a plane and fly off to a hideout in the mountains on the Afghan-Pakistan border, leaving a "Nya-nya!" note on the White House dining room table, few people would really be very surprised.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and columnist. His most recent 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

Bush's Protect America Bill Bull

dlindorff — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:01:54 -0500

By Dave Lindorff,

President Bush has turned to the cheapest lies in an effort to protect himself from being exposed as a criminal in the ongoing campaign to have the National Security Agency spy at will on Americans.

Claiming—without a scintilla of evidence to back him up—that there are people planning a “much worse attack” than 9-11 on America, he says he must not only have free rein to unleash the NSA
spymasters on American telephone and internet communications, but also a grant of complete immunity from prosecution for such spying for the telecom industry.

The Senate, of course, with solid backing from Republicans and critical backing too from a significant number of treacherous Democrats (some of whom, like Intelligence Committee head Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) have gotten significant donations from the telecom industry), has already given the president the bill he wants. It now is before the House, where some Democrats and a few Republicans who still remember there’s supposed to be a Bill of Rights, are resisting passage of the cynically named Protect America bill.

The obvious lie that the president is spreading is made evident by the fact that there is no heightened alert status—not at airports, not at the border, not at city police and fire departments.

But furthermore, if nothing were passed, it would have no impact at all on the NSA’s current spying and monitoring activities. If there really were evidence of some kind of attack in preparation, the NSA would already be monitoring it under existing authority, and would be able to continue that activity without a warrant at least until next September! And even if the authority to monitor without a warrant were not granted at that point, the administration has from now until then to obtain a warrant, which it could do anytime it wants to by going to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

So the president’s false drama of staying home from his trip to Africa is just a sham. There is no urgency to this at all.

Then there’s the whole insistence on retroactive telecom immunity. The White House claims that if immunity for past, current and future warrantless spying by the telecom industry on behalf of the NSA is not granted, it would deter the industry from cooperating with the NSA in the future.

That is yet another fraud. If the White House or NSA were to obtain a warrant for its spying, no telecom executive would or even could refuse to comply. It’s the warrantless spying that one or two phone companies, notably Quest, had objected to in the past. The answer is easy: the NSA should seek warrants for its spying. The only explanation for the administration’s refusal to seek warrants from a court that since 1978 has only rejected a handful of requests out of hundreds of thousands submitted to it, is that it knows its request would be rejected—and that should tell us all we need to know about what he is up to.

What is really clear is that the administration has done some things that it really does not want the public to know about. That is the reason it’s seeking retroactive immunity. What it fears is that class action lawsuits, some of which have already been filed, against the phone companies, will lead to discovery which would reveal who it was actually spying on over the last eight years (and this illegal spying program, we now know, began in early 2001, shortly after Bush and Cheney took office, and well before the 9-11 attacks).

The claim that such discovery could lead to release of information that could alert terrorists to the fact that they are being monitored is laughable. No federal judge would allow such a thing to happen. The federal government would only have to assert such a threat, and any judge in the federal court system would agree to review the evidence before releasing it in open court.

So what is it that the White House and the NSA have been up to all these years that Bush and Cheney are so frightened to have outed?

The answer seems painfully clear, especially given that we know the program began before Sept. 11, 2001—a period when Bush and Cheney were famously uninterested in investigating terrorism.

They had to have been spying on us—-most likely on the groups that had protested Bush’s election fraud, the Democratic opposition, possible leakers in his own administration, and then, in the wake of 9-11, the questioners of the official story of that tragic event, the growing anti-war movement, the impeachment movement, critical journalists, etc.—-in short, the same kinds of people that President Nixon, back in the 1970s, unleashed the NSA on, and which led to passage of the FISA law and the FISA court in the first place.

There is a growing shrillness to the president’s lies and to the administration’s efforts to get this protective legislation passed. With a Democratic blowout possible this November, he has to worry that all this nefarious activity could come pouring out next year, leaving both him and Vice President Cheney, by then out of office and without protection from prosecution, open to attack from both criminal prosecutors and citizen lawsuits for damages.

The House, which has been a shameless lapdog of the administration for the past year since the Democrats took control of that body, has a chance here to show it still has at least one vertebra left in its severely decalcified spine, It should refuse to pass any extension of NSA warrantless spying authority, and should refuse immunity for the telecom industry.

Let the president dangle in the wind on this one. Call your representative (202-225-3121) and let her or him know you want them to really protect America, by not passing the so-called Protect America bill!

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative reporter 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

As if the US needs any more economic problems…

Heather Wokusch — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 07:36:00 -0500

There’s a time bomb ticking over here in Europe, and it’s completely off the radar where it will hit the hardest: the US.

The Bush administration is pushing for radical new regulations on airline travel including:

- Armed guards on all US-airline flights from Europe to the US
- More personal data on all air passengers FLYING OVER (not even landing in) the US
- Europeans will need new permits and a lengthier permission-application process before even booking a ticket to the US
- "Washington is also asking European airlines to provide personal data on non-travellers - for example family members - who are allowed beyond departure barriers to help elderly, young or ill passengers to board aircraft flying to America, a demand the airlines reject as ‘absurd’".

Under the radar, but an important developing story. Why? The tourism industry is incredibly important to the US and this paranoid development doesn’t help. Doesn’t win the hearts and minds of our allies abroad either.

Bureaucrats in Brussels are debating all of this right now and, as usual, will probably cave on many points. But big conventions, the tourism industry etc. are already going ballistic, diverting future plans away from the US.

Ominous development…

Read more about it here in The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/11/usa.theairlineindustry