Privacy/Surveillance

Oh yeah...Remembering the War and Other National and Global Crises

dlindorff — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:25:56 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

The ongoing and deepening global economic crisis, to which Barack
Obama owes his presidential election victory, is no small thing, to be
sure. It also presents us on the left with a lot of openings to press
for progressive change.

We saw how the Republican attempt to derail Obama by labeling him a
“socialist” actually backfired—especially when people were reminded
that a fundamental premise of socialism is “income redistribution,” in
which some of the wealth of the rich is taken away through taxation,
and transferred through federal programs to those who are less wealthy.
Joe the Plumber was outraged, but when most Americans who were having
trouble paying for gas or making their next mortgage payment, or who
were worried that their jobs might be about to vanish, thought about
that for longer than a sound-bite, it turns out that, not surprisingly,
they decided socialism and redistribution didn’t sound like a bad or
scary idea at all.

The same can be said of labor unions. In good times, many Americans
have bought the argument that unions are just out to grab dues payments
from their paychecks. But as job security vanishes and wages languish,
people are waking up to the idea that they are simply expendable
“inputs” to employers, and that a union can help them stand up to
abusive, uncaring management. Republican propaganda about the sanctity
of “secret ballot” union elections—ironic given the GOP’s simultaneous
assault all over the country on the right to vote—fell on deaf ears.

Government itself, long a dirty word thanks to years of
conservative propaganda, aped and spread through the corporate media,
is coming back into favor, now that people see that they cannot count
on either themselves or their employers to pull them through hard
times. The idea that government can step in with things like extended
unemployment insurance benefits, food stamps, and even renegotiated
mortgages, makes people who once mocked “big government” view things a
little differently.

But this unprecedented economic crisis also poses dangers.

Because we are so obsessed with the ongoing collapse of the economy
and the gathering storm of debt, unemployment and loss of retirement
savings that it entails, it’s easy for all of us to lose sight of other
crises that demand our urgent attention and action.

Chief among these are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growing threat of climate change.

The wars are not going away on their own. The Iraq puppet
government of Nouri al Maliki is close to approving a deadline for the
removal of US troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. That is more than
three years from now—nearly as long as the US was involved in World War
II! It’s longer, even, than the absurd 16 months that Obama said it
would take for him to end the US war and occupation of Iraq during his
campaign, which was bad enough. (In the case of Afghanistan, it
represents a decade of war—as long as the Vietnam War!) The danger is
that Obama will allow that status of troops agreement with Iraq to
become his timetable for withdrawal. We have to say “No!” The Iraq War
must be ended immediately.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, is in a meltdown, and every day that US
forces operate there, the opposition to US occupation grows, simply
strengthening the Taliban. Similarly, the more the US tries to attack
Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in neighboring Pakistan, the more
opposition grows to the US in Pakistan. If we opponents of the war
allow Obama to go ahead with his plans for a larger US military force
in Afghanistan, we will end up with an even bigger and wider war in the
Middle East and Asia, with more terrorist recruits, and with whatever
remains of US funds for important domestic initiatives swallowed up by
the Pentagon and the secret intelligence budget.

Let me put this simply: Nothing progressive that has been proposed
by the Obama campaign can be achieved while the US is engaged in these
two criminal wars. No health care reform, no increase in education
loans, no early childhood education, no public works jobs programs,
Nothing.

And then there is climate change. The Obama campaign promised to
finally end eight years of a new Dark Ages, when government simply
denied science or actively attacked science, and to start taking
serious action to reduce America’s role in spewing out carbon into the
atmosphere. But you don’t hear much about that anymore. That’s because
reducing America’s carbon footprint costs serious money—money for
research into non-carbon energy sources, money for a power transmission
system to serve wind generation farms, money to develop a new
generation of non-polluting vehicles and to rebuild light rail and
inter-city rail systems. And once again, with the economy in a crisis,
and with the two wars sucking up all available tax revenues that aren’t
being given away to banks and Wall Street financial firms and insurance
companies, none of that is going to happen either, unless we demand it.

Meanwhile, while the progressive folks who put their all into the
Obama campaign are reveling in his and their Election Night success,
and are now taking a breather, the forces of darkness that control the
Democratic Party (think Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Rahm
Emanuel and the whole Democratic Leadership Council), are grabbing
control of the new administration, filling the incoming Obama cabinet
with carryover hacks from the Clinton administration, even including
the Clintons themselves, and, in some cases, the outgoing Bush
administration).

This is, in other words, no time to sit back and relax, reveling in
the admittedly hard-to-believe prospect of an African-American moving
into the White House. It is a time for action and then more action.

When Barack Obama makes that dramatic walk from his Inauguration
Day speech at the Capitol building to the White House, the streets need
to be lined with protestors holding up signs calling for an immediate
end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When the new Congress tries to vote for a $50 –billion or
$150-billion bail-out of the US auto industry, we need to be packing
the halls shouting it down. That money should be going only into
development of zero-emission automobiles, and it should be in the form
of voting-share equity in those companies.

Here, for what it’s worth, are my top 10 demands for action by the new Democratic government iin Washington:

1. US forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Immediately! Shift the
funds saved to reconstruction aid for those two countries and to
veterans benefits, with any extra savings going to help fund education
in poor school districts in the US.

2. Slash military spending by closing most or all overseas military
bases, by dramatically reducing nuclear forces to near zero, by
reducing the number of men and women in uniform, and by closing bases
in the US. Savings should go to shoring up the Social Security and
Medicare Trust Fund.

3. Open up the secret intelligence budget, currently running at over
$40 billion a year, and cut it, for starters, by half. Savings should
also go to the Social Security and Medicare Trust Fund. (Along the way,
ban all spying on Americans, and revive the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act in full as originally written.)

4. Break up the banking and automobile industry, as well as any
other industry in which any player is so large it is able to extort
money out of the government by threatening that its failure would cause
a national economic crisis. “Too big to fail” needs to mean “too big to
be permitted to exist.”

5. Join the Kyoto Treaty, and pledge to immediately begin a campaign
to reduce US carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 or better, 2030.
Establish a crash national research program to develop carbon-free
energy sources, and provide funding for households to convert to
passive geo-thermal heating and cooling systems. Funds can come from
the unused $350-billion portion of the Paulson/Bernacke Wall Street
bailout fund. (Talk about a job-creation program, not to mention a big
whack at imported oil!)

6. Pass the Employer Free Choice Act, requiring employers to
recognize a labor union wherever a majority of the workers have signed
cards saying they want a union, and requiring those employers to
negotiate and reach an initial contract agreement within 90 days, or
under mandatory mediation.

7. Reassert the Constitutionally mandated authority of Congress by
rescinding all Bush/Cheney-era signing statements and executive orders
and declaring them, by Presidental declaration and by Joint Resolution
of the Congress, to have been invalid and unconstitutional.

8. Order the US Justice Department to investigate the actions of the
prior administration and, where crimes are discovered, to prosecute
offenders, up to and including the former president, to the full extent
of the law. This would include obstruction of justice, abuse of power,
commission of war crimes, conspiracy, fraud, bribery, war profiteering
and criminal negligence.

9. Appoint Ralph Nader as new chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission, with a powerful mandate take the necessary steps to restore
competition and fairness to the nation’s media. (My pet proposal:
Establish a government loan fund to allow workers at failing newspapers
to buy their publications from the owners and to operate them as
employee-owned enterprises, on a tax-free basis.)

10. Enact a national health care program that provides health
insurance for every person in America. My choice here would be a
single-payer system—essentially an expansion of Medicare to cover
everyone, funded by progressive taxation. Failing that, a system in
which the government has an insurance program operating in competition
with the private sector, should eventually lead to a single-payer plan.
One idea: dispatch a public-citizen commission to Canada to study the
Canadian health system and report back to Congress and the White House
in 90 days.
_____________
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

Why I'm Voting for Barack Obama on November 4

dlindorff — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:04:31 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Okay, I was going to vote for Ralph Nader this November 4.

It was an easy decision. I live in Pennsylvania, which is now,
according to all the polls, reliably in the Obama column, with the
Democratic candidate holding an insurmountable lead in the polls of 14
percent over Republican John McCain—enough to overcome even the most
devious Republican vote suppression techniques and voting machine
chicanery.

I was going to vote for Nader because I find Obama to be a
seriously flawed candidate. He ran early on an anti-Iraq War platform,
saying not that invading Iraq was wrong legally and morally, but that
it was “the wrong war.” Since then, he has backed away even from saying
he wanted the war ended, opting for a 16-month withdrawal timetable
that would have the killing and dying in that sad land going on longer
than most wars this nation has fought. He has also called for an
escalation of the war in Afghanistan, despite clear evidence that more
troops just will make the situation there worse, and has called for an
expansion of the US military budget, to increase the size of the Army
and Marines, which will only encourage more warmongering, more killing
and more waste of precious resources.

Obama also sold us all out by going along with a bill sought by
President Bush granting immunity to telecom companies that aided and
abetted the illegal and unconstitutional spying on Americans by the
National Security Agency—spying that we now know is massive almost
beyond our imagination, even including the monitoring of private family
conversations of American service personnel in Iraq, of journalists,
and almost certainly of Bush administration political “enemies.” By
backing that obscene bill, Obama has made it almost impossible for
victims of this police-state surveillance campaign to sue and find out
what the Bush/Cheney administration has been up to all these years.

In so many ways, Obama has tacked to the middle or even the right, while spouting soaring but empty rhetoric about “change.”

Meanwhile, everything Ralph Nader says makes perfect sense. He has
consistently called the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the crimes that they
are. He has consistently called for a nationalized health care system,
which every other modern nation has long since proven to be a more
cost-effective and health-effective way to run a medical system than
the failed free-market approach advocated by Obama and the rest of the
Establishment political system. He has correctly denounced the economic
bailout as welfare for the rich and for the corporate criminals who
have been sucking the life out of the US economy for years.

And yet, I think I have to vote of Obama this year.

The reason is partly because I know I would vote for Obama if I
lived in Ohio or Indiana, where the race between McCain and Obama is
too close to call, and so, to vote for Nader when it is simply safe to
do so here in Pennsylvania is really a cop-out.

But even more important, when I see the hate-filled racists and
right-wing yahoos braying at McCain and Palin rallies, when I hear
people calling for Obama to be killed or lynched, and when I see the
rabid hate mail circulating in email inboxes falsely labeling him as a
secret Muslim, a terrorist, a Marxist and a black nationalist, I want
to see the man resoundingly win this election.

But it’s more than that. I also, perhaps against all logic and
experience, admit that I expect something good of an Obama presidency.

Call me naïve, but based upon my own life experience, I keep
thinking that a guy who has worked as a community organizer, a Harvard
Law School grad (and even law journal editor!) who could have named his
price at a Wall Street law firm, but who chose instead to be a
political and community activist, a guy who has relatives who live in
humble surroundings in Kenya, and who spent some of his childhood
actually living in a Third World Asian nation, not to mention a guy who
has surely felt the sting of being called a nigger, has to bring
something new to the White House. Certainly no other president in the
history of the country has come to the office with such a background.

Sure Obama is no leftist candidate. But if he were, he wouldn’t be
heading for an election victory. He wouldn’t even be the Democratic
nominee. He’d be, at best, where Dennis Kucinich is—holding a seat in
Congress where his every progressive effort would be stymied or mocked
by the House leadership.

The unfortunate reality is that the true left in the US is a joke
(many of its purists even mock successful left candidates political
figures like Kucinich, for god’s sake!). Fractured and fractious small
groupings have little or no link to the organized labor
movement—traditionally the bedrock of any successful left political
power. And the labor movement itself is as weak as it has ever been and
keeps growing weaker. The left in the US, such as it is, has even less
connection with the broad mass of the American public, thanks to years
of successful propaganda linking it to Stalin, Mao and Soviet Communism.

I have no illusions about the progressivity of the Democratic
Party. Certainly it has its progressive elected officials who have made
it into office—people like Kucinich, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Russ
Feingold, Rep. Maxine Waters and the like. But clearly, the Democratic
Party has shown itself to be in thrall to the moneyed interests on Wall
Street and in the corporate suites.

That said, there are important things that could happen—and I
stress the word could, not would—if this election were to be won by
Obama and by Democrats in the Congress. One of these things is that
there will be new Supreme Court justices named over the next four
years. Some will inevitably replace some of the aging “liberals” on the
bench (some of whom have not always been so liberal on economic
issues). Some could also replace current conservative justices
(Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both obese men, don’t
look terribly healthy to me, Justice Kennedy is getting on in years,
and even Chief Justice Roberts, while looking hale, has a problem with
epilepsy or some other ailment that has caused him to collapse in a
frothing fit of unconscious on occasion).

Also important is legislation to make it less of an obstacle course
for workers to win union representation and labor contracts on the job.
A major reason that unions have shrunk from over 30 percent of the
workforce in the 1950s to just 9 percent of the private workforce (and
13 percent of all workplaces, public and private) today, is that labor
law has been whittled away and turned to management’s advantage to such
an extent that it is almost impossible now to win a union election.
Employers who break labor laws suffer no penalty even when found
guilty, and workers who are unfairly fired for union activity can hope,
at best, if they are lucky, to win reinstatement and back pay after
fighting for years. Most just give up.

If a Democratic Congress passed new labor legislation and a
President Obama signed them into law, as he has promised to do, and if
new pro-labor officials were appointed to the national, regional and
local labor relations boards that adjudicate labor issues, we could see
a genuine revival of the labor movement in America with consequences
for workers’ lives, and for the political system that would be far
reaching and profound—and that could even pave the way for a resurgence
of a left/labor political movement.

Finally, with respect to war and militarism, I tend not to take
Obama’s warmongering seriously. Given the man’s background, I am
confident that he is not a militarist by nature. It may be politically
opportunistic for him to try during this campaign to out-tough McCain
on Afghanistan while calling for a wind-down of the war in Iraq, but it
would be a disaster for him to pursue a wider war in Afghanistan after
taking office, ensuring that his presidency, like Bush’s, Lyndon
Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s before him, would be dragged down by an
endless bloody conflict.

A President Obama will have his hands full trying to deal with an
unprecedented financial fiasco, and will want the wars off his plate as
quickly as possible. Maybe I’m being a Pollyanna, but I simply can’t
see a smart guy—and Obama is a smart guy—getting dragged into another
quagmire.

Besides, I have a darker vision, which is that the crisis of global
warming, so long denied by the Bush administration, is going to make
itself felt soon in ways that will be impossible to ignore, and which
will demand a crisis response. Obama, I believe, will be the right
person at the right time, to lead that response.

And that brings me to the final reason I am voting for Obama. As
crazy as John McCain clearly is, with his default setting on war as a
solution for all problems, this sickly and possibly terminally ill old
man has chosen to have a certifiable right-wing, closed-minded, bigoted
and stunningly ignorant religious zealot as his back-up. Sarah Palin,
as vice president, would in all probability end up becoming president
during a McCain first term.

This country and the world simply cannot risk having as the leader
of America an end-of-times believer at this critical moment. It’s not
just the polar bears and the wolves in Alaska who would suffer under a
Palin presidency. It would be all life on earth.
_____________

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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Does Justin Rood Hate Bloggers?

davidswanson — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:59:11 -0400

By David Swanson

I think that's a fair question. When Rood worked for TPMMuckraker he complained to CBS News about the life of a blogger.

When he got hired by the Disney Corporation (ABC News) he begin tackling such tasks as burying a story of war lies and war crimes in order to blog about phone sex.

Now he's added a followup to the original story that still fails to note that I blogged the full story over a year ago, and still fails to tell most of the story.

ABC Is Lying About NSA

davidswanson — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:26:07 -0400

By David Swanson

On Thursday, ABC News reported a big new break in the story of illegal and unconstitutional spying that our government has engaged in for years now, except that there was nothing new in the story and the important parts were left out.

The ABC News announcer began the video report thus:

"This is the first time any of the actual intercept operators, the people who listen in and record phone calls on behalf of U.S. intelligence agencies, the first time any of them has come forward."

But this would have been revealed as blatant nonsense by simply googling the names of the two operators, Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk. I reported Kinne's story on July 1, 2007, on a website that is read by hundreds of thousands of people every month, including quite a few Congressional staffers. The very popular radio show, Democracy Now!, reported on one aspect of Kinne's story on May 13, 2008.

I first reported Faulk's story on May 19, 2008. He contacted me because he had read the story I'd written about Kinne. That point is of interest because the report posted online by ABC News on October 9, 2008, reads:

"The accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other's allegations, provide the first inside look at the day to day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance program."

This is absolute nonsense, since Faulk learned of Kinne's story by reading it on my website in May.

Not only has ABC News announced as an "Exclusive!" a story that is over a year old, but dozens of major corporate media outlets have now parroted ABC News on this, cited ABC News as their source, and failed to so much as google the names of the people involved or to admit what they found when they did so.

Now, ABC News credits as its source the author James Bamford, whose new book I have not yet seen. Bamford tells me he left the phone-sex angle out of it. He probably included in it some of the more important information that ABC News excluded in favor of phone-sex titillation. But Bamford must also have contributed to the pretense that there was something new here that had not been reported before.

When I reported on Kinne over a year ago, I reported that Senator Patrick Leahy was ignoring her requests. Now, in response to ABC News picking up the story, Leahy is pretending to be interested in the matter.

Kinne, like Leahy, lives in Vermont. She had, even before I spoke with her, traveled all over Vermont giving speeches, though not focused on the revelations I reported. She was taking part in a tour promoting the impeachment of the president. Kinne is an active member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. I learned of her story when I heard her speak at a public event as part of the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta, Ga., after which I interviewed her. None of that background would ever be suitable information for the Disney Corporation (ABC News), but I think it played a big role in Kinne's decision to become a whistleblower, in her awareness that she had something to blow a whistle on, in her confidence to speak out. And her speaking out was a major factor in Faulk's decision to speak out. When Kinne spoke to me, she was not yet at the point where she would have been willing to go on ABC News if asked. But they didn't ask, and neither did any other corporate media outlet, and when ABC finally reported this story, it buried and distorted any account of how these two people had found the courage to speak up, thus reducing the benefit of the story for encouraging other whistleblowers.

But even a year and a half ago, Kinne was eager to speak to Congress, and Congress wanted nothing to do with her. Leahy and gang only became interested in putting on a show of being interested when ABC News reported the story. I'm glad they did. And I'm glad that Bamford persuaded them to. But they left most of the story out. It's a story of war lies and war crimes. It's not primarily a story about privacy, much less sex. Here are my original reports:

New NSA Whistleblower Speaks
July 1, 2007
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/24183
By David Swanson

A former member of U.S. military intelligence has decided to reveal what she knows about warrantless spying on Americans and about the fixing of intelligence in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Adrienne Kinne describes an incident just prior to the invasion of Iraq in which a fax came into her office at Fort Gordon in Georgia that purported to provide information on the location of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The fax came from the Iraqi National Congress, a group opposed to Saddam Hussein and favoring an invasion. The fax contained types of information that required that it be translated and transmitted to President Bush within 15 minutes. But Kinne had been eavesdropping on two nongovernmental aid workers driving in Iraq who were panicked and trying to find safety before the bombs dropped. She focused on trying to protect them, and was reprimanded for the delay in translating the fax. She then challenged her officer in charge, Warrant Officer John Berry, on the credibility of the fax, and he told her that it was not her place or his to challenge such things. None of the other 20 or so people in the unit questioned anything, Kinne said.

Kinne dates this incident to the period just before the official invasion of Iraq or possibly just after. She says that because the US engaged in so much bombing prior to the official invasion, she cannot recall for sure.

Prior to September 11, 2001, Kinne says, it was unacceptable to listen in on or collect information on Americans. The practice was barred by United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18. Kinne recalls an incident in 1997 in which an American's name was mentioned, and she and her colleagues deleted every related record because they took very seriously the ban on collecting information on Americans. Kinne was serving from 1994-1998 on active duty as an Arabic linguist for military intelligence at Fort Gordon in Georgia, sending reports to and collaborating with the NSA. She served at the same station after 9-11 when she was activated as a reservist.

Kinne says that post-9-11 she and others routinely collected information on people even after identifying them as aid workers for non-governmental organizations. A common rationale was that the phones of such organizations could conceivably be seized by terrorists. She recalled one case in which she was listening to an American talk to his British colleague in an international aid organization. The Brit expressed concern about the American military eavesdropping, and the American replied that they couldn't possibly be doing that because of USSID 18. Kinne recalls that her colleagues got quite excited and behaved as if the American had divulged secrets by mentioning that directive. They continued eavesdropping on the man although they were unclear at that point whether they were permitted to spy on Americans.

Shortly after this incident, however, in mid-2002, they were given a waiver to spy on Americans. This waiver was communicated to Kinne and her colleagues orally, and she assumed that it had come from the President or someone very high up. The waiver, she says, also permitted spying on Canadian, French, German, Australian, and British citizens without probable cause.

Many of the people, including Americans, whom Kinne spied on were journalists. These included journalists staying at a hotel in Baghdad that later showed up on a list of targets. Again, Kinne says, she expressed concerns to her officer in charge, letting him know that the military should be informed or the journalists should be warned to move to another location. Kinne says Berry brushed her off. He was, she says, "completely behind the invasion of Iraq. He told us repeatedly that we needed to bomb those barbarians back to kingdom come."

Berry was promoted to Chief Warrant Officer. Kinne left, went back to school, and took a job at the Veterans Administration helping some of the victims of the fixing of intelligence that she had witnessed. And early this year she joined a tour of Vermont with activists Cindy Sheehan, John Nichols, Dan DeWalt, and veterans of the war, a tour promoting the passage of impeachment resolutions in Vermont towns, a tour that helped effect the passage of those resolutions in over 40 towns up and down the state. Kinne found the experience "life-changing", and she's now decided to tell everything she knows, and to encourage others still in the government to speak out and release documentation.

"I wish that I had said something back then, but I don't think people would have listened," Kinne said.

Kinne, who now works for the VA at White River Junction, Vermont, said that she has written to Senator Patrick Leahy, who has not replied to her. Kinne has become active in Iraq Veterans Against the War. She said that the news of the current escalation of the war also helped move her to act. "That's the only reason why I am choosing to break whatever rules I may have just broken by telling you about it," Kinne said. "Because I think that this all needs to stop, and it needs to stop now. And the only way it's going to stop is if people start speaking out."

***

New NSA Whistleblower Tells of Faulty WMD Evidence
May 19, 2008
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/33525
By David Swanson

David Murfee Faulk was a translator in the Navy, working in Arabic and Iraqi dialect. In April 2004 he began working for the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Gordon outside Augusta, Georgia. (He now writes, under the name Murfee Faulk, for the Metro Spirit newspaper in Augusta, but he has never written about what he did for the NSA.)

Faulk says that in May 2004 he found an extremely large text file containing grid coordinates for alleged chemical weapons sites in Iraq. Faulk showed it to his supervisor, who was surprised. But he was not surprised that the file existed, only that it had not been deleted. The supervisor said he had believed all such files had been deleted, and that there had been a great many of them. In fact, according to this supervisor, U.S. Special Forces had gone to the locations and found nothing.

That's what usually happens, Faulk's supervisor told him, when you get something from the Israelis. "Four out of five times it's complete and total bullshit."

I asked veteran Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst Ray McGovern what he made of this, and he said that there is "no such thing as a 'friendly' intelligence service. Reporting from liaison services always needs to be taken with utmost reserve. That goes in spades for what comes from the Israelis, the more so since they have unique, yes unique, access to the White House and Pentagon, and are thus able to circumvent the intelligence bureaucracy set up to vet and evaluate raw intelligence and prevent unverified and/or tendentious 'intelligence' from reaching senior officials, lest they be misled."

With regard to other pieces of Israeli "intelligence" on Iraq's mythical weapons of "mass destruction," McGovern said: "Yes, most of the Israeli 'intelligence' on things like chemical weapons in Iraq was of little or no value. Worse still, data like coordinates for suspected chemical weapons-related sites could not be dispassionately evaluated by objective intelligence analysts because the key function of imagery analysis was ceded by the CIA to the Pentagon in 1996. What sergeant was going to tell Rumsfeld that Israeli sources and the 'intelligence' from the Israelis or the likes of [Ahmed] Chalabi were certainly not worth what Rumsfeld was paying for. At the same time, if truth was not the objective, but rather reports alleging this or that WMD-related sites, well, the Israelis were performing a useful service for the likes of Doug Feith, who would bundle them up and give them to the 'Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal' for passing to the president. Woof! Proof!"

McGovern seemed to find it perfectly possible that "evidence" of the sort that Faulk stumbled upon was voluminous: "The neuralgic search for WMD pointed up the problem. US chief WMD-searcher, David Kay, has told lurid stories of being awakened in Iraq at all hours by people working in the office of the Vice President: 'Hey we got new coordinates; check them out!'"

McGovern recalled one instance of someone speaking openly about the quality of Israeli "intelligence." When John Negroponte was Director of National Intelligence, National Public Radio’s Robert Siegel asked him to explain why the Israelis have suggested a much shorter timeline for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. "I think that sometimes what the Israelis will do [is] give you the worst-case assessment," Negroponte said.

Faulk is not the first former NSA employee from Fort Gordon to speak about things he saw there. In fact, Faulk contacted me after reading an article I wrote last July ( http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/24183 ) when Adrienne Kinne decided that she would stay silent no longer. (She also told her story on "Democracy Now" this month: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/13/fmr_military_intelligence_officer ). Kinne described the priority that was given to less than credible WMD claims that came in from Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. She also described how the NSA's policies with regard to spying on Americans changed completely on September 11, 2001. Prior to that date, she said, it was unacceptable to listen in on or collect information on Americans. The practice was barred by United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18. Kinne recalled an incident in 1997 in which an American's name was mentioned, and she and her colleagues deleted every related record because they took very seriously the ban on collecting information on Americans. After September 2001, she said, it was acceptable to spy on Americans even after identifying them as aid workers for non-governmental organizations. Faulk confirmed that this was the policy when he worked there as well.

It's a shame that we have to learn what our government is up to, after the fact, from former employees daring to speak out, but if more of them would do so the risk to them would be lessened, our knowledge increased, and our government's worst abuses reined in.

The News Cycle of the Blogosphere

davidswanson — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:43:38 -0400

By David Swanson

Here's a typical example of how the news cycle works now that the blogosphere interacts (or doesn't) with independent and corporate media:

July 1, 2007, AfterDowningStreet.org Breaks Story of NSA Whistleblower Adrienne Kinne
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/24183

May 13, 2008, Democracy Now picks up the story of Kinne
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/13/fmr_military_intelligence_officer_...

May 19, 2008, AfterDowningStreet.org Breaks Story of NSA Whistleblower David Murfee Faulk
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/33525

October 9, 2008, ABC News picks up both stories with a focus on phone sex
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=5987804&page=1

October 10, 2008
Congress notices, yawns, scratches its ass, goes back to what it had been doing. Talk shows make jokes about the phone sex.

America and China: Joined at the Hip

dlindorff — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:12:30 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

With the government now having spent over $800 billion in less than
a year shoring up tottering financial companies that had become little
more than casinos (and rigged ones at that), America is looking
increasingly like China, a country where the state has been gradually
getting out of the business of directly owning companies.

At this point, with the US government owning 80 percent of the
world’s largest insurance company, AIG, and essentially owning mortgage
firms Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as well as bankrupt Lehman Brothers,
and with the nation’s two largest automakers in line asking for $25
billion in government loans, one would be hard-pressed to spot the
difference between the two systems.

The essential point of commonality is that big
enterprises—especially banking enterprises—are being allowed to operate
as fail-proof yet operationally opaque adjuncts of the state. Their
business decisions—whom to lend to, what risks to take, etc.—are made
with the goal of enriching the key managers and shareholders, and
probably also key government officials and bureaucrats—with no thought
to the impact on the larger economy or the larger population of the
respective countries.

I saw this system in operation in China once when, as a reporter
for Business Week magazine based in Hong Kong, I visited the
neo-capitalist boomtown of Shenzhen, just across the LoWu creek from
Hong Kong. There I met a friend who introduced me to a former Nanjing
Law School classmate who was now a top officer in the Armed Police, an
800,000-man paramilitary unit used for putting down strikes,
demonstrations and “unrest” that essentially runs Shenzhen like a mob
family. The guy took us to a downtown skyscraper that housed a private
real estate company that, it turned out, was owned by the Armed Police
(all the company vehicles in the parking lot had the characters “Wu
Jing,” or “Armed Police” on their plates). In the lobby was a model of
a huge housing development planned and under construction, that would
become a bedroom community for Hong Kong office workers who would
commute to Hong Kong from Shenzhen. At the time, Chinese Finance Czar
Zhu Rongji had ordered a clampdown on lending to tamp down a Chinese
economy that was in danger of overheating. I asked this
soldier-entrepreneur how his company was planning on borrowing the
money it needed for this mega project, and he just laughed, saying, “We
can borrow all the money we need.” Later, my friend, wise in the ways
of the Chinese system, whispered, “When he goes into the bank to ask
for a loan, he’ll of course wear his army uniform, and what banker
would turn him down?”

How different is this, in the end, from the system that is evolving
here, where GM or Ford executives walk into the Federal Reserve, or the
Treasury Department, and demand $25 billion in loan guarantees, saying,
“Give us the money or we go under.” In China, an executive implicitly
puts a gun to the head of his government banker. In the US the
executive expressly puts an economic gun to the government banker’s
head.

So much for the free market, which now only applies to small
businesses. In America, as in China, individuals are left to sink or
swim, and private property is only private as long as the government,
or some well-connected developer, doesn’t want it. In China, if the
state decides it wants some land for a mega commercial development, it
just ejects the current residents, offers them a token sum for
resettlement, and moves in with the bulldozers. In the US, the
government does the same thing. Just ask the residents of New London,
ousted from their riverfront property on orders of the US Supreme Court
to make way for the “higher use” of a luxury hotel and commercial
development. As for that so-called “American Dream,” the family home,
as foreclosures rise to Depression Era levels, the government stands
idly by, but leaps to the aid of giant corporations that, having made
wildly risky gambles and lost, are about to go under. (In a
particularly ugly slap at the battered homeowner, the McCain campaign
in economically depressed Michigan has been gathering lists of
foreclosed properties to run against voter lists, intending to
challenge on Election Day the right to vote of anyone who offers an
address that is in foreclosure. Lose your home, in other words, and the
McCain will also try to make sure you lose your right to vote, too.)

The convergence of Chinese and US political-economic systems is
going on in other ways too. Both governments are using massive computer
systems (made in America) to monitor the Internet, with China making
use of equipment and techniques developed for them by US companies like
Google, Yahoo and Cisco Systems, and with the National Security Agency
then drawing on those techniques for use back here in America.

As we saw at the two national party conventions last month, the US
is also learning and applying the crowd-control techniques of the
Chinese government to the US where the default tactic wherever public
protest is planned is now to have police adopt a paramilitary approach
that features aggressive use of tear gas, concussion bombs, assault
rifles, house raids and preventive detention.

Another point of convergence is the concentration of power in a
secretive executive body. China, of course, has a national congress. It
meets once a year and passes carefully vetted resolutions. In recent
years, its members have occasionally raised a controversial issue, like
concerns about the environmental and human consequences of the Three
Gorges Dam, or about the role of shoddy construction in the deaths of
so many school children in the last earthquake. But it has no power and
plays no role in controlling the decisions of the true leaders of the
country.

Likewise in the US, there is a Congress, but over the last eight
years, it has ceded virtually all oversight power to the executive
branch, which treats any effort by its members to investigate or to
constrain its action with utter contempt.

Both countries promote widespread, worshipful display of the
national flag, and ritual oath-taking, as well as unquestioning
patriotism and worship of militarism.

In media too there is convergence. China has since 1949 had a
state-run media model, where all media organizations—newspapers, radio
and TV stations—are owned by the state, and function as propaganda
arms. In the US, while nearly all media organizations are privately
owned, by controlling the licensing of all electronic media, and thus
having the final say on any and all acquisition strategies, the
government has over the last 20 years or so, degraded the media to the
status of compliant servant. It is getting difficult to discern the
difference between the two models. In fact, Chinese citizens may
actually be better informed, having lived for decades under a
propaganda model, since they know that they are being lied to by their
newsmedia, whereas few Americans realize the extent to which their own
media are controlled and acting as government mouthpieces.

Fascism has perhaps been best defined as a system in which the
government and corporations merge, and in which militarism becomes a
dominant value. I have long argued that this is an apt description of
modern China. It is increasingly also an apt description of modern
America.
_____________
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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digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n With the government now having spent over $800 billion in less than a year shoring up tottering financial companies that had become little more than casinos (and rigged ones at that), America is looking increasingly like China, a country where the state has been gradually getting out of the business of directly owning companies.\r\n\r\n At this point, with the US government owning 80 percent of the world’s largest insurance company, AIG, and essentially owning mortgage firms Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as well as bankrupt Lehman Brothers, and with the nation’s two largest automakers in line asking for $25 billion in government loans, one would be hard-pressed to spot the difference between the two systems.\r\n\r";
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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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digg_title = "The Land of the Silent and the Home of the Fearful";
digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n 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.\r\n\r\n 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?”\r\n\r";
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Friday's House Judiciary Hearing on Impeachment: A Victory and a Challenge

dlindorff — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:34:40 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The dramatic hearing on presidential crimes and abuses of power
held on Friday by the House Judiciary Committee was both a staged
farce, and at the same time, a powerful demonstration of the power of a
grassroots movement in defense of the Constitution. It was at once both
testimony to the cowardice and self-inflicted impotence of Congress and
of the Democratic Party that technically controls that body, and to the
enormity of the damage that has been wrought to the nation’s democracy
by two aspiring tyrants in the White House.

As Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the committee, made clear
more than once during the six-hour session, this was “not an
impeachment hearing, however much many in the audience might wish it to
be” He might well have added that he himself was not the fierce
defender of the Constitution and of the authority of Congress that he
once was before gaining control of the Judiciary Committee, however
much his constituents, his wife, and Americans across the country might
wish him to be.

At the same time, while the hearing was strictly limited to the
most superficial airing of Bush administration crimes and misdemeanors,
the fact that the session—technically an argument in defense of 36
articles of impeachment filed in the House over the past several months
by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)--was nonetheless a major victory for the
impeachment movement. It happened because earlier in the month, House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has sworn since taking control of the
House in November 2006, that impeachment would be “off the table”
during the 110th Congress, called a hasty meeting with Majority Leader
Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Rep. Conyers, and Rep. Kucinich, and called
for such a limited hearing.

It was no coincidence that shortly before Pelosi’s backdown, peace
activist and Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan announced that her campaign
had collected well over the 10,000 signatures necessary to qualify for
listing on the ballot as an independent candidate for Congress against
Pelosi in the Speaker’s home district in San Francisco. Sheehan has
been an outspoken advocate of impeaching both Bush and Cheney. “Pelosi
is trying to throw a bone to her constituents by allowing a hearing on
impeachment,” said Sheehan, who came to Washington, DC to attend. “It’s
just like her finally stating publicly that Bush’s presidency is a
failure—something it has taken her two years to come to, but which
we’ve been saying for years.”

So determined were Pelosi and Conyers to limit the scope and
intensity of the hearing that they acceded to a call for Republicans on
the Judiciary Committee to adhere to Thomas Jefferson’s Rules of the
House, which prohibit any derogatory comments about the President,
which was interpreted by Chairman Conyers as meaning no one, including
witnesses or members of the committee, could suggest that Bush had lied
or deceived anyone. Since a number of Rep. Kucinich’s proposed articles
of impeachment specifically charge the president with lying to Congress
and the American People, this made for some comic moments, with witness
Bruce Fein, a former assistant attorney general under former President
Ronald Reagan, to say he would reference his listing of crimes to the
“resident” of the White House.

In the end, the rule imposing a gag on calling the president a
criminal fell by the wayside, with witness Vincent Bugliosi. A former
Los Angeles deputy district attorney, accusing Bush of being guilty of
the murder of over 4000 American soldiers and of hundreds of thousands
of innocent Iraqi civilians because he had “lied” the country into an
illegal and unnecessary war, and with committee member Shiela Jackson
Lee (D-TX) suggesting that the president may have committed treason in
invading Iraq, and that he appeared to be preparing to do it again with
an unprovoked invasion of Iran.

Conyers also acquiesced in a Republican effort to minimize public
monitoring and involvement in the hearing, allowing the minority party
to fill most of the available seats in the hearing room with office
staffers who showed little interest in the proceedings. Only a few
dozen of the hundreds of pro-impeachment activists who had come to the
Rayburn Office Building at 7 am in order to get seats in the Judiciary
Committee hearing room were allowed in, with the rest having to remain
in the hall or go to two remote “overflow” rooms to watch the
proceedings on a TV hookup. Conyers also went along with a call by
Republican members of the committee to have some of those who did make
it into the hearing ejected simply for wearing buttons on their shirts
calling for impeachment (the Republican members referred to these as
“signs”), though such small personal tokens are routinely allowed in
congressional hearing rooms.

It was clear that this was to be a tightly controlled and strictly limited hearing.

It was also clear that it was intended to go nowhere.

At one point, after hearing witnesses like Fein, Bugliosi, former
representative and Nixon impeachment committee member Elizabeth
Holtzman, former Salt Lake City mayor and impeachment activist Rocky
Anderson, former House Clinton impeachment manager Bob Barr, former
Watergate Committee counsel and current senior counsel of the Brennan
Center for Justice Frederick A.O. Schwartz, and Elliott Adams,
president of the board of Veterans for Peace, lay out the
administration’s crimes and abuses of power—which included charges of
usurping the legislative powers of Congress, violating international
treaties, war crimes, lying to Congress, an illegal war, felony
violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth
Amendment, defying Congressional subpoenas, obstruction of justice and
more, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), chair of the Constitution
subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, appeared convinced that the
abuses were real and serious.

But Nadler, who for two years has been a major obstacle on the
Judiciary Committee to any efforts to move impeachment to a formal
hearing, said, “No president has been removed from office through
impeachment.” He asked the witnesses, “How would you approach
impeachment today so it would be a viable option?”

Former Rep. Holtzman responded, “The real remedy to a president who
believes he is above the law is impeachment. There is no running away
from that.” She said, “An impeachment inquiry, handled fairly, could
work. Maybe I’m a cockeyed optimist, but I believe it could work.”

The basic point, made by Holtzman, by Fein and by many others,
including this writer, is that worrying about the political opposition
to impeachment, both in the House, and in the Senate, not to mention
among the broader public, is completely wrongheaded. Even when
impeachment articles were first filed against Nixon, the public and the
bulk of the Congress were against the idea. It was during the hearings
that the tide turned, as evidence of malfeasance, criminality and abuse
of power became evident through hearing testimony. The same would
happen in the case of President Bush and/or Vice President Cheney. Most
Americans don’t even know that the president made up evidence to
justify the war against Iraq out of whole cloth. They don’t know what
the Geneva Conventions are with regard to torture. They don’t know why
Congress passed the FISA act, which Bush has been feloniously violating
to spy on them (it was passed because Nixon was using the National
Security Agency to spy on Americans without judicial warrants!). They
don’t know the Bush has been refusing to enact laws passed by the
Congress. Public hearings by an impeachment panel would make all these
high crimes and misdemeanors clear on national TV to all sentient
Americans. Moreover, as Holtzman pointed out, the president would not
be able to use the claim of “executive privilege” to withhold testimony
from aides in an impeachment inquiry, the way he has done when they
have been subpoenaed by other House and Senate committees. Impeachment
would be about violations of the very executive actions he would be
claiming privilege on. As well, an impeachment committee, unlike any
other committee of the Congress, is specifically sanctioned and
empowered in the Constitution, meaning that even strict
“constructionist” Federalists on the bench would have a hard time
backing presidential obstruction.

As Holtzman noted, “There is no executive privilege in impeachment,
because refusing to testify is itself an impeachable offense.”

Committee Republicans, aided by two law professors they had brought
in to testify, Stephen Presser of Northwestern University School of Law
and Jeremy Rabkin of George Mason University School of Law, tried to
argue that impeachment was only meant for crimes in which the official,
or the president, was seeking personal gain. This nonsense was knocked
down by most of the speakers, who quoted numerous founders who made it
clear that what high crimes referred to were actions—even taken with
the noblest of intentions—that undermined the Constitution or abused
the powers of the office. As Rep. Nadler said, “Impeachment has nothing
to do with intentions or with good faith. Impeachment has to do with
abuse of power which weakens the balance of power.”

In the end, the hearing petered out, taking no action of any
kind—exactly the result that Pelosi, Hoyer and Conyers cynically
intended.

Now it is up to the public and the impeachment movement to call
their bluff and take impeachment to the next level. Noting that even
Rep. Conyers ended the hearing by saying, “We are not done yet, and we
do not intend to go away until we achieve the accountability that
Congress is entitled to and that the American people deserve,” Rep.
Kucinich and five other co-sponsors of his articles of impeachment
(Robert Wexler, Tammy Baldwin, Keith Ellison, Maurice Hinchey, Sheila
Jackson-Lee, and Hank Johnson) are calling on all Americans to contact
their representatives (202-224-3121) and urge them to join in
co-sponsoring those articles and in calling for a formal impeachment
hearing.

They are also calling on everyone to contact their local and
national media, nearly all of whom have blacked out news of
impeachment. Incredibly, the New York Times, for example, has not even
reported on Friday’s hearing, even as a news “brief.” Those news
organizations, like the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer,
that did report on the hearings did so only in short, inside articles.
Though the hearing was aired in full on C-Span (and is still available for download), many Americans don’t even know it happened.

Time is short, but even at this late date, it would be a simple
matter to impeach the president on some issues. As several of Friday’s
witnesses pointed out, President Bush has essentially dared Congress to
act, admitting that he openly violated the FISA law—a felony, and
openly admitting that he has refused to enact laws passed by the
Congress, claiming a power—unitary executive authority—not even
mentioned in the Constitution. He has openly admitted to having known
about, and approved, “enhanced interrogation techniques” devised by his
subordinates—techniques like waterboarding which clearly violate the
Geneva Conventions and US law. No hearings would be required to
establish these high crimes and misdemeanors. They could simply be
voted on by an Impeachment Committee and sent to the full House for a
vote.

Even if there were no time for a Senate trial, the simple act of
impeaching the president for one or more abuses of power would serve
notice on future presidents that future such abuses would not be
tolerated. Failure to do so, and allowing this administration to leave
office unimpeached, would send the opposite message: that Congress is
no longer a co-equal branch of government, but is merely a consultative
body, at best, and that a president is in effect a dictator.

That Pelosi buckled and permitted a hearing on impeachable crimes
by the Bush/Cheney administration is a major victory for the
impeachment movement, but it must not be the end of the line.
Impeachment activists need to now redouble their efforts to make
Congress do its Constitutional duty, and initiate a formal impeachment
proceeding.

As former Republican representative Bob Barr, now the Libertarian
candidate for president, told Friday’s hearing, “We had a nuclear clock
during the Cold War. In the ‘90s we had a debt clock. Now we have a
Constitution Clock.”

That clock is getting close to midnight, and it is ticking.
_____________
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 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

Impeachment Hearings: A Win is a Win

dlindorff — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:13:57 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

There are two ways to view the news that the House Judiciary
Committee will be holding a hearing on impeachable crimes by President
George W. Bush.

One view would be that this is all a charade and that after all, it
will not be a real impeachment hearing, but rather, simply a hearing
into the impeachable crimes of the Bush administration. As committee
Chair Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) put it, “We’re not doing impeachment,
but he [Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who introduced 36 articles of impeachment]
can talk about it.” Viewed that way, this is not such a big deal. Rep.
Kucinich gets to make his case that the president is committing high
crimes and misdemeanors and abuses of power and war crimes, but then
Congressional Democrats will continue to ignore all the crimes as it
has done since taking control of Congress in November 2006.

But a second way to view this is as a significant victory over the
quisling Congressional leadership, which has been ducking its
responsibility to defend the Constitution and to stand up for the rule
of law not just since November 2006, but since the inception of the
Bush/Cheney presidency.

I go for the second interpretation of events. It is clear, as was
beautifully laid out in an article published by Glenn Greenwald in
Salon magazine on July 15, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and
the rest of the Democratic Party leadership both in Congress and in the
party organization, have been blocking any action on impeachment for
fear of having their own complicity in Bush's and Cheney's crimes
revealed. As Greenwald notes, the Washington Post has
reported that Pelosi, along with Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Rep.
Jane Harman (D-CA) were briefed on the administration's use of torture
and not only didn't object, but actively encouraged it. Rockefeller and
Harman, who at the time were minority leaders of the Senate and House
Intelligence Committees at the time, were also briefed about Bush's
order to the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless spying on
Americans. They didn't object or publicly expose this blatant violation
of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment.
And of course, many, if not most of the House and Senate Democratic
leadership as well as many of the rank-and-file members of the party in
both houses backed Bush's illegal war on Iraq, and his USA PATRIOT Act.

No wonder Pelosi, even before winning control of Congress and being
elected Speaker, made it clear that under her "leadership" (if it can
be called that), impeachment of either Bush or Cheney would be "off the
table."

Looked at in this light, the fact that the House just voted 251-166
to send Kucinich's 36 articles of impeachment to the Judiciary
Committee for a hearing, that Pelosi has had to buckle, and that
Conyers has agreed to hold even an "informational" hearing on
impeachment, at which Kucinich, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL), and other
impeachment advocates in the House will be able to present their case
about the president's crimes and abuses of power, constitutes a major
victory of principle over cowardice, of integrity over complicity, of
the Constitution over creeping fascism. (24 Republicans joined in
voting to send the articles to the committee.)

The fact is that public demands to hold this criminal administration
accountable for its crimes against the Constitution, the American
people and the global community, have been mounting and have reached a
point that the Democratic leadership, as terrified as it is of
impeachment and of the accompanying airing of its own complicity in
those crimes, has been forced to allow an airing of those crimes.

Now I don't expect Rep. Kucinich to bite the hand that feeds him. He
will not present the impeachment case in a way that criticizes those
leaders. Indeed, he has publicly thanked both Pelosi and Conyers for
allowing a hearing on impeachment. But it would be surprising if
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee didn't make those points.
And that's good. Even if real impeachment hearings never actually come
to pass, we will be treated, finally, to a public airing of not just
the president's and vice president's crimes, but of the Democratic
Party leadership's participation in them.

The challenge now will be for the American people and for the
wide-spread and decentralized impeachment movement, and all
progressive, anti-war and civil liberties organizations, to press
Conyers and the Judiciary Committee to take it to the next level. If
Kucinich, Wexler and others do their job, and if we all demand that the
corporate media report on the hearings, Americans will finally know the
extent of this administration's crimes against the Constitution, and
the nature of the threat it poses to democracy and freedom in America.
At that point it will be time to demand that the Judiciary Committee
move to constitute itself as a formal Impeachment Committee, with full
power to subpoena and demand the appearance of witnesses in a real
impeachment hearing.

The hour is getting late, but there is still time to bring this criminal administration to justice.

American voters may forgive leaders like Pelosi, Harman, Rockefeller
and others for failing to stand up to Bush and Cheney if their names
get dragged through the mud of an impeachment hearing, but the American
people will never forgive them or the rest of the Congress if it allows
these two men to leave office next January without tar and feathers on
their backs and a federal grand jury on their cases.

Call your representative today and every day (at 202-224-3121) and demand that he or she co-sponsor some or all of Rep. Kucinich's 36 bills of impeachment, and join the call for real impeachment hearings. Send them an email. And sign the petition calling for impeachment hearings.

We are witnessing a backdown by the House leadership. It's time to push harder. Impeachment hearings, and impeachment itself, can happen!
____________
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). His work is available at ThisCantBeHappening.net

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