NSA Wiretapping

President Obama: Don't Lecture China on Censorship

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

By Dave Lindorff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that censorship? Of course it is.

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

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

More ignorant in fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No censorship in America?

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

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

Harman Hemming on Harm She's Done

davidswanson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:58:23 -0400

In this video (full length 1:13:15) scroll ahead to 53:55 to hear veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern question Congresswoman Jane Harman on her vote for the Authorization to Use Military Force. McGovern also asks her about her rather dramatic shift two years ago to a position of opposing warrantless spying and civil liberties abuses, and whether that shift should be credited to the primary challenge made by Marcy Winograd, which Winograd is renewing next year.

At about 1:01 Harman responds. She claims not to have altered her views whatsoever, which is of course demonstrably false. As McGovern points out, her initial response to the publication of a report on warrantless spying was that it should have been kept secret. On the Authorization to Use Military Force, Harman claims great gullibility and ignorance. She points out that only Congresswoman Barbara Lee voted against it, and claims no one could possibly have known what horrors it would be used for. This is the same law President Obama claims gives him the power to imprison people without charge.

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

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

By Dave Lindorff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your tax dollars at work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Afghanistan War has to be ended now.

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

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

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

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

By Dave Lindorff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's Kill Big Brother

Bob Fertik — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:01:50 -0400

5 Ways to help
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4 ways to help
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It's time to repeal telecom immunity for illegal spying, restore privacy protection to library and bookstore records, and roll back the worst abuses of the PATRIOT ACT.

Repeal telecom immunity and roll back PATRIOT ACT abuses

The House and the Senate are holding hearings on the reauthorization of three key provisions of the USA PATRIOT ACT which are set to expire on December 31.

Senators Feingold and Durbin are using this reauthorization process to reverse Bush era laws that take away our constitutionally guaranteed rights. To this end, they have introduced the JUSTICE Act to bring an end to telecom immunity and roll back some of the worst abuses of the PATRIOT ACT.

One or both of your senators has not yet co-sponsored the JUSTICE Act. Sign our petition and help us restore civil liberties stolen by the Bush administration in the wake of September 11.

The JUSTICE Act would completely repeal the provision of the FISA Amendments Act intended to legally immunize big telecoms that illegally assisted in the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program. It would restore protections for the privacy of library and bookstore records. It would also add strong checks and balances to PATRIOT ACT provisions governing FISA orders, wiretaps, and national security letters.

Finally, the champions of constitutional rights in the Senate are taking steps to undo the worst of the damage. Please join us in supporting the JUSTICE Act. Click here to sign your name.

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

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

By Dave Lindorff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We may need to start sending that stronger message.
___________________

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

Six Months of Immunity

davidswanson — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:49:25 -0400

By David Swanson

Drafted in preparation for panel discussion at Veterans for Peace national convention August 7, 2009, on topic of "Holding the Architects of Illegal Wars and War Crimes Accountable."

Seven years to the day after the Downing Street Minutes meeting at which top British officials famously discussed U.S. President George W. Bush's intent to launch a war against Iraq whether or not any means could be found to legalize it, on July 23rd, the United Nations hosted a discussion of ways in which wars of aggression are given pseudo-legal cover. Included were remarks by Jean Bricmont and Noam Chomsky. It is not hard to imagine how different such discussions would be were the architects of the Iraq War ever held accountable for it in any way.

The Iraq War set a new low for the blatant openness of the lies used to justify it, and those lies included a secret memo signed by Jay Bybee, head of the Office of Legal Counsel, that purports to legalize any illegal wars launched by a U.S. president. If that memo and the OLC memos purporting to legalize specific war crimes like torture are left unchallenged, or if an attempt is made to prosecute those who exceeded the crimes "legalized" by the memos, the United States will henceforth be understood to openly treat as legal anything a president instructs a lawyer to "legalize" including the supreme international crime banned by the UN Charter, except when that crime is committed by nations other than the United States or Israel. Vice President Joe Biden recently remarked that Israel had the right to attack Iran if it chose to, a remark that would legitimize the worst crime there is, and yet a remark that Biden clearly made in an attempt to avoid any scandal or controversy by articulating what he and those he spends his time with understood to be universally accepted.

The crime of aggressive war against Iraq could be prosecuted in a foreign court, potentially in the International Criminal Court, theoretically in U.S. federal court, or -- using an argument made by Vincent Bugliosi -- through a local or state court in the United States where Bush could be tried for the murder of U.S. soldiers. The U.S. Department of Justice could also prosecute Bush for misspending funds on a war that had not yet been authorized in any way -- funds appropriated only for other purposes, or for the crime of lying to Congress, or for using false propaganda domestically, for imprisoning children, employing assassination squads, using the U.S. military domestically, spying without warrant, exposing an undercover agent, obstructing justice, or various other crimes. And an attorney general who would do all of that (or even most attorneys general who wouldn't) would also overturn the prosecutions of political prisoners like Don Siegelman, Paul Minor, and so many others, and hold accountable those who used the Justice Department to target state and local elected officials, 85 percent of those prosecuted being Democrats and the other 15 percent consisting largely of moderate Republicans. Many of the crimes above could also be prosecuted in foreign courts. A foreign or international court could conceivably even prosecute the crime of continuing the occupation into 2009, since the UN fig leaf for the occupation expired in December 2008 and has been replaced only by a treaty drawn up between an occupier and a puppet government of the occupied, a treaty now openly violated by both parties and never properly ratified by either nation. Many of the crimes could be, and several are, the subjects of civil suits as well. Bybee, who is now a federal appeals judge, could be impeached by Congress. He and other lawyers can also be disbarred.

If the architects of the Iraq War were being held accountable in any way for launching it and, in some cases, profiting from it financially, it is likely that U.S. troops would now be withdrawing from Iraq. As it is, no withdrawal is underway, a war in Afghanistan is being expanded, the possibility of launching a war against Iran is being kept open, and illegal strikes are being launched fairly routinely into Pakistan. We have seen in the past six months not just a period of immunity, but the clear results of that immunity, the clear evidence of why "looking backwards" has an enormous impact on what you see when you look forward. Sadly, much of the peace movement has not only stopped pressing for peace and lost the funding with which to do so, but it has also failed to at long last take up the cause of deterring future war crimes by prosecuting past ones. The positive news is that human rights and civil rights groups have taken up the cause of prosecuting torture. The drawback is that they never mention aggressive war, and it is hard to imagine an aggressive war occurring without torture even if torture has been punished.

For each of the other crimes that Bush and Cheney have been granted immunity for, a similar story can be told. The crimes are not in the past, because they are being continued in the present. In the case of indefinite detention, President Obama has fought in court and made a speech in front of the U.S. Constitution at the National Archives asserting the power to do exactly what candidate Obama said was unconstitutional. Obama is imprisoning people outside of any rule of law in Bagram and Guantanamo, and proposing to keep some of them in prison indefinitely without ever bringing them to trial. He is proposing to formalize such a system and dress it up in "due process" reviews. He asserts the power to render prisoners to other nations, as well. Having promised not to render prisoners for the purpose of having them tortured, Obama now claims the power to render prisoners while promising not to use it for torture, yet failing -- in the view of many human rights advocates -- to justify the practice. It is a safe assumption that Obama's behavior would be different, that he would not be proposing to formalize preventive detention, were Bush being criminally prosecuted or impeached or held liable in civil court cases for it.

On August 4th Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta published a column essentially advocating immunity for all past criminals who held important positions in the federal government. Panetta excused the CIA as having obeyed Bush, failing to recognize that being asked to disobey laws by one's employer does not create legal protection. At the same time, Panetta urged immunity for Bush as well. And Panetta claimed that the United States no longer tortures. One problem with this is that, even if it were true, it would also be true that the United States offers no deterrent against torture by its government employees or future top officials. A deeper problem is found in statements Panetta has made claiming the power to, in fact, torture. Back in May, blogger Josh Marshall was mystified, writing:

"One of the weirdest moments in Vice President Cheney's speech was when he claimed that 'President Obama has reserved unto himself the right to order the use of enhanced interrogation should he deem it appropriate.'"

But when you take a crime like torture and turn it into a policy question, and you choose the policy of not torturing, you maintain the power to switch to the policy of torturing without any criminal penalty -- unless someone else manages to transform torture back into a crime again. Here's Leon Panetta at his confirmation hearing, as reported by the Guardian:

"Pressed by Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon about a 'human ticking time-bomb' scenario, in which a terrorist knows of an imminent attack on the U.S., Panetta said he believed torture would not be necessary to extract information. 'I'm of the view that when you look at the FBI and the US military, that they have been able to show that it is possible to get the information that's needed to protect our nation's security,' he said. However, he added: 'If we had the ticking bomb situation and I felt that whatever we were using wasn't sufficient, I would not hesitate to go to the president and request any additional authority that we would need.'"

Following Cheney's statement and Marshall's bewilderment, MSNBC asked presidential advisor David Axelrod about it. Axelrod repeatedly refused to deny that Obama believed himself to possess the power to legally torture. Predictably enough, there have been numerous reports of ongoing torture and inhuman and degrading treatment committed by the United States as well as by the government of Iraq. Were torturers being prosecuted, fewer prison guards would still be torturing.

It's the same story with warrantless spying. It's not being prosecuted, and it's also -- predictably enough -- not ending. And it's the same story with a wide variety of abuses of power that Bush engaged in to a greater extent than did those who preceded him: the abuses are being cemented in place by Obama. Rather than throwing out signing statements that altered laws, Obama has begun writing his own. Rather than throwing out executive orders that create laws, Obama has begun issuing his own. Rather than opening up records and accepting court challenges that had been blocked by claims of "state secrets," Obama is repeating and enlarging those claims. Rather than delivering subpoenaed witnesses like Karl Rove to Congress, Obama's White House Counsel is interfering in the work of the Justice Department to negotiate very partial compliance on behalf of Rove, an old friend of his. Rather than declassifying information unnecessarily made secret, Obama is making materials secret that Bush did not. Rather than rewarding whistleblowers who had been punished for their good deeds, Obama has signing statemented away constraints on his power to retaliate against whistleblowers by firing them. Were Congress holding Bush accountable for any of these abuses, Obama would be less likely to engage in them. Once Bush and Obama engage in them without protest, it may become more difficult for Congress to change course and deny the same powers to Obama's successor.

So, what can we do? There is, at http://prosecutebushcheney.org a long list of steps we can take to pressure and encourage those who need it, and to create systemic reforms that make future crimes and abuses somewhat less likely. But ultimately, we are going to need to resist through nonviolent mass action, and the sooner we realize and organize that the better. It will not be easy. It will be a lot harder than what we have done thus far. But I have seen a lot of people make great sacrifices these past few years, and their examples have the potential to inspire others. Members of Veterans for Peace have done more than anyone else. And let me give you and example from this week from a friend of ours named Cynthia Papermaster. Here's a woman with a fixed income and no health insurance who has taken a large chunk of her retirement savings out of the bank and used it to purchase air time during the most worthwhile television shows there are for advertisements demanding that Attorney General Eric Holder enforce our laws against torture. I can't advise others to make the same sort of sacrifice, but I can point out that if others did it would radically change our situation, and that by removing money from the largest banks and from health insurance companies (which by and large will not actually cover you if you become seriously ill) it is possible to do more than one sort of good deed at the same time.

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

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

By Dave Lindorff

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waking from Madison's Nightmare

davidswanson — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:56:24 -0400

By David Swanson

The book I just read is in the running, in my estimation, for second-best text on how to undo the imperial presidency. (Can't be first, of course.) It's called "Madison's Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy," by Peter M. Shane, and it's much more about what the problem is than how to solve it, but the two things are not really separable, and the analysis of the problem here is invaluable.

This is a detailed and extensively researched look at the interactions among the three branches of our federal government, and the checks and balances employed - or the lack thereof. Shane takes a long view and sees 1981 and the Reagan presidency as the most radical break with the past, albeit the creation of a new era dramatically advanced by George W. Bush, following lesser advances by his father and Bill Clinton. Shane looks at domestic governance as much as foreign policy, and examines the relationships that departments and agencies have with the White House and with Congress:

"Up until at least 1981, if a federal administrative lawyer were asked to describe the relationship between the President and the administrative bureaucracy of the United States, the lawyer would probably say something like this: The President has powerful influence over the federal bureaucracy. He appoints the heads of all agencies (albeit with Senate advice and consent). Under the administrative laws enacted by Congress, the President can also fire most agency heads at will -- and he can discharge any of them for good cause, such as lawbreaking. An agency's failure to attend respectfully to the President's concerns may elicit punishment in the preparation of the agency's future budget. And, of course, the President is the President. By virtue of his office and his personal influence, what he says always carries great weight.

"But that lawyer would have added a crucial final point: the President cannot actually order administrative agencies to issue precise rules and regulations he wants. Agencies can issue rules and regulations that bind the public insofar as they have legislative authority from Congress to do so. That authority may leave the agency with substantial room for exercising its own judgment in how to develop the very best regulation. In exercising discretion, no sensible agency will be oblivious to the President's policy agenda. But the decision of how best to exercise agency judgment remains with the head of the agency, not the President. That means the president may fire an agency head if he is disappointed too often, but he cannot insist beforehand that the agency head follow the President's policy preferences."

If you've been paying attention to how things work in Washington, this should sound like something from another planet. It is now routine for the White House to send cabinet secretaries to swing electoral districts for political purposes. No department head sneezes without the president's permission. And the entire federal government is thought of as part of the executive branch -- with the exception of Congress, which is left to constitute the legislative branch all on its own. But look at how the Constitution viewed things. It devoted Article I and over half the length of the entire Constitution to Congress, which it gave virtually every power conceived of, touching on many of the current departments of the federal government, and then explicitly stipulating that Congress should have any other necessary powers as well. Congress, according to the Constitution, has the power . . .

"To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States or in any Department or Officer thereof."

Stubby little Article II gives very few powers to the president, nowhere suggesting that he or she should have ownership or command over the various agencies of government, and in fact not mentioning any other than the military, except to say that the president can make appointments, and to say this:

"He may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices."

This does refer to the departments as "executive departments," and Article II does begin by giving "the executive power" to the president. But it's worth pausing and stepping outside our own era for just long enough to wonder what "executive" means. Article II also says what the president is required to do, namely:

"He shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

Congress, until relatively recently, was understood to be central to our government. Only Congress is given the power to borrow money, to regulate commerce with foreign nations, to handle immigration and bankruptcies and the creation of money, transportation, the post office, the punishment of crimes, establishment of courts, defining and punishing crimes by other nations, declaring war, ending war, raising and spending money, creating and maintaining and overseeing the military, repelling invasions, and so on. These days, the White House is considered central to everything. Laws are made by "executive order" (an "executive order" is something like a faithful betrayal, a self-contradiction), by "signing statement" (a "signing statement" is a statement that one is NOT signing a bill as written) and by drafting legislation in the White House and insisting that Congress pass it out of loyalty to the president.

Imagine the absurdity today of suggesting that a president has the right to ask department heads to report on what they are doing. They are doing what he has told them to do. What Shane suggests is not that the EPA or the Department of Labor should be moved from the executive branch to the legislative, but that there are appropriate roles for both Congress and the president, not just the latter.

I cannot touch here on all of the rich and informed discussions in "Madison's Nightmare," which include perceptive condemnations of the secretive and unaccountable decision-making processes that led to wars in Vietnam and Iraq. I would fault Shane here only with too much generosity in assuming that the presidents in these cases were trying to learn anything that they failed to learn. But Shane is right that Congress must not only have the power to declare war or refuse to; it must also have the power to make public the deliberations that precede that decision. Shane is wrong, however, in my opinion -- and this seems to follow from his analysis -- in omitting from his recommendations at the end of the book any sort of accountability, prosecution, impeachment, or punishment. He does propose that the lawyers who facilitated torture be fired. However, they are -- with a couple of key exceptions -- already out of office. And why would someone as smart as Shane believe that lawyers should be dismissed for writing what they were asked to, but propose no penalty whatsoever for the president or vice president who did the asking? Indeed, how does Shane not notice that (had his book come out earlier) it would have been the torturer in chief who would have had to dismiss his own obliging lawyers?

Shane's recommendations at the end of the book are generally excellent. Many of them overlap with the ever-evolving list I've been maintaining, but the following were new ideas that I added to that list after reading this book:

Legislate a ban on presidents firing US attorneys at will. Give them four-year terms and allow their dismissal only for good cause.

Establish regular questioning of presidents by Congress members in Congress, as seen in the British Parliament.

Make government transparent on the internet, including the actions of agencies and the actions of Congress members.

Amend the Freedom of Information Act to allow less secrecy.

Ban the placing of secret holds on bills by senators.

Require that nonprofits always reveal their corporate sponsors when lobbying.

Demand that the Supreme Court do these three things:
-- ban the alteration of laws via signing statements,
-- establish the policy that the benefit of doubt given to departmental interpretations of law is not given to White House interpretations imposed on departments, and
-- reject partisan and bi-partisan gerrymandering.

Holder Refuses to Call Warrantless Spying Illegal

davidswanson — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:20:44 -0400

By David Swanson

In probably the most disturbing testimony to hit Capitol Hill since Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Judiciary Committee in May and refused to rule out lawless detention or to agree that government officials can sometimes be prosecuted for their crimes, on Wednesday Holder appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and, among much else, refused five times to agree that warrantless spying is illegal and unconstitutional. I spoke to Holder in April, and he assured me that I would be proud of my country. When?

Over the months that have passed since Holder last testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearings, it has become clear that most, if not all, of the major criminal activities of the Bush Administration will be covered up and protected, and in fact continued, by the Obama Administration -- yes, including torture. Most recently in the media, including in Wednesday's New York Times, are accounts of ongoing warrantless spying. At Wednesday's hearing, liveblogged here, illegal spying was the subject of a dramatic exchange.

Chairman Patrick Leahy was the first to raise the topic and to complain that he had to learn about the executive branch's crimes from the New York Times. I'm not sure who he would prefer or expect to hear such things from. Holder, in response, claimed not to know anything about it, because he hadn't "reviewed in any detail" the New York Times article. Senators Tom Coburn and Diane Feinstein both claimed that the New York Times article was not accurate.

But whether that article is accurate or not misses the broader question that was then raised by Senator Russ Feingold. He pointed out that executive "opinions" asserting the legality of torture have been overturned, but that those asserting the legality of warrantless wiretapping have not been. Senator Feinstein asked whether the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) "opinion" announcing that the 4th Amendment did not apply in the "war on terror" had been withdrawn. Holder said he did not know. Feingold pointed to past statements by Barack Obama and Eric Holder denouncing the warrantless wiretapping. And he asked Holder directly whether the warrantless wiretapping programs set up during Bush's presidency were illegal. Holder replied that they were "unwise". So Feingold asked again, and a third, fourth, and fifth time. Holder would go so far as to say "inconsistent with FISA" and yet explicitly refused to say "illegal." Holder said he hoped to someday release secret "opinions" on spying. But releasing something is not the same as overturning or "withdrawing" it. After five unsuccessful attempts to get Holder to call illegal spying illegal (even though Holder would, later in the same hearing, indicate his reliance on legislation that provided immunity for the crime), Feingold gave up and moved to another topic.

Feingold asked Holder about abuse of the "state secrets" privilege. Since February, Feingold said, he has sought a classified briefing from the executive branch to explain three cases in which Holder's department has used the "state secrets" excuse to try to block court cases. Feingold asked Holder to get him that briefing. Holder refused twice, but did claim that within "a matter of days" he would make some proposals public. The Senate Judiciary Committee plans on Thursday to mark up the State Secrets Protection Act, a bill to restrain executive abuse. Holder told the committee on Wednesday that the executive branch would release its position on the matter within days, and that then no legislation should be needed. Leahy appeared to agree to that outrageous assertion of power, saying that unless the position was released, his committee would mark up the bill.

Senator Dick Durbin asked Holder about the endlessly delayed report from the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), within the Department of Justice, on Jay Bybee's, John Yoo's, and Steven Bradbury's complicity in torture. Durbin pointed out that it has been six weeks since the comment period for the subjects closed (that is to say, Yoo and Bybee and Bradbury concluded their unprecedented and outrageous opportunity to submit edits to a report on their own wrongdoing). Holder told Durbin that changes are being made to the report as a result of those responses. He said that part of the report might be released in "a matter of weeks", but that other parts will be classified. Holder added that he believed the unclassified portion alone would give wrong impressions. He said that he would want to get more of the report declassified, but that doing so would take more time.

It's worth noting that leaders in both houses of Congress, including Leahy and his House counterpart Chairman John Conyers, have long since made clear that they will not seek to hold anyone accountable for torture until the OPR report is released. Presumably they mean the full report. And that could apparently be months or never. No doubt the assurances that all action will wait for the report is strong motivation to delay the report.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse ran through the chronology of delays and stalling tactics thus far. He said that on February 18, 2008, he had been told the OPR report was underway, that a draft report had been delivered in December 2008, that on May 4, 2009, the comment period from the torture lawyers had ended, and that the CIA was given an opportunity for substantive comment and classification review. Whitehouse asked whether the CIA was the current logjam. Holder said No. He said that the OPR is still working on the report in light of the responses it received from the torturers six weeks ago. Whitehouse focused on the CIA and asked Holder (a number of times) if he had any assurances from the CIA that those giving input to the report were not themselves involved in the torture. Holder made clear that the answer was no. He has no such assurances and isn't interested in them.

Wednesday's hearing also featured an amicable exchange in which Holder and Senator Lindsey Graham discussed the creation of a "review" procedure that might amount to "due process" for prisoners who would be held forever without trial. Graham also asked for an assurance from Holder that the President would decree torture photos to be classified before (or after) the next court order to release them. On that point, Holder refused to make such a commitment. But then, he's not the president.

Holder did say something encouraging about the nature of OLC opinions. Senator John Cornyn, who is concerned to prevent the residents of Washington D.C. from having voting representation in Congress, said that an OLC opinion that a proposal for DC voting rights was unconstitutional had not been released. Pressed repeatedly, Holder ended up saying that OLC opinions are just recommendations that he has the power to ignore. Of course, this should be true, but then Ashcroft, Gonzales, and Mukasey, not to mention Bush, had the same power and responsibility to reject absurd "opinions" that torture and warrantless spying and wars of aggression were legal.