Charlie Rose interviews Guardian editors Alan Rusbridger & Janine Gibson

The methodology pursued by the mainstream American press on the matter of the NSA's global data mining operations has been to question the nature, psychology, and patriotism of  Edward Snowden, the leaker. Understandably, rather than discussing an abstract, unconstitutional and criminal operation that has Orwellian dynamics, those who manufacture consent would much rather the public consider irrelevant personal trivia. Similarly, reports in the American press about Julian Assange/WikiLeaks and Pvt. Bradley Manning typically have misidentified the actual topic at hand; that being deliberate government lies and state criminality conducted against their own citizens and foreigners.  So instead of zeroing in on the copious deceptions of the state, we are left with banal inquiries into the legitimacy of the data breaches.

The interview above with the Guardian's Alan Rusbridger and Janine Gibson is an example of this infuriating process.  While I think Charlie Rose has produced some wonderful and thoughtful interviews on many subjects, his line of inquiry into the motivation of Mr. Snowden belies deference to state propaganda.  The Guardian editors clearly articulate that there has been no evidence by either the US government or any other sources that these leaks have been harmful to anyone or the US government.

Is it really too much to have television journalists ask questions like:

• Why has this program been running, when the public clearly said it was unacceptable back in the middle of the decade of the zeroes?
• Why are members of the US Congress so woefully ignorant of the scope of these programs?
• What penalties shall be administered upon those members of the military and government, who have been lying to the public about these programs?
• Under what authority does the US government have in stealing all the private and personnel data of non-citizens not located within the United States? 
• Why does the US government continually prevent these programs from being adjudicated and subject to constitutional review, if they deem them truly legal?
• Why doesn't the press call those in government who lie to the public and engage in illegal behavior traitors?
• Why are private corporations used to such an extent in gathering and processing clandestine information?
• Why does the current US government engage in prosecuting and penalizing whistleblowers to the extent that they do?

As others have said on this matter, the only reason a universal monitoring program is in place is that the state believes its true enemy is its own citizens.

America's strange obsession with criminalizing abortion

A rather strange event has occurred in Indiana.  A severely unstable and pregnant woman attempted to commit suicide.  She survived, but her child died because of her actions.  Neither suicide nor abortion is illegal in the state of Indiana or in the USA; however, shortly after the incident, a state prosecutor charged the woman with murdering her fetus and attempted feticide.

The Guardian UK newspaper elaborates:

On 23 December 2010 Shuai became so depressed after she had been abandoned by her boyfriend – a married Chinese man who broke his promise to set up a family with her – that she decided to end her life. She consumed rat poison, and after confessing to friends was rushed to the Methodist hospital.

Doctors took steps to save her, but on 31 December there were signs that the baby, then at 33 weeks gestation, was in distress and a Caesarian was performed. On the second day of Angel's life the baby was found to have a massive brain hemorrhage and on 2 January was taken off life support.

Many countries in the world criminalize abortion.  Most Latin American countries routinely prosecute and incarcerate women who undergo treatment and doctors who perform abortions.  The moral argument is that a fetus is a person and subject to the same rights as an actual person.  However, by that same logic there is always two people involved in the gestation process: the mother and the child.  In the above case, we have a mentally unstable women who attempts to commit suicide and a child who was born prematurely but dies soon afterwards, because of the mother's actions.  The fetus was 32-weeks old when Shuai attempted suicide.

The Houston Chronicle reports that the woman's lawyers unsuccessfully attempted to have the charges overturned on the following basis.

Defense attorneys argued in court documents filed March 9 that prosecuting a woman based on the outcome of her pregnancy violates constitutional rights to due process and equal treatment and is cruel and unusual punishment.

Women's rights and legal groups have intervened in the case:

Several medical and women's rights groups, including the National Organization for Women and the National Alliance for Mental Illness, have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of Shuai, claiming that prosecuting Shuai could set a precedent under which pregnant women could be prosecuted for smoking or other behavior that might deemed a danger to their fetus. They said that could discourage women from seeking prenatal care.

The prosecution claims that they are only following the law and the three-judge appeals court stated that "Shuai had not proven that common-law immunity exists for pregnant women who harm their own fetuses".  So what does this really mean?

In America's southern and conservative states there has been an outbreak of prosecutions against mothers.  Rennie Gibbs of Mississippi was accused of murdering her unborn child.

Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby's death – they charged her with the "depraved-heart murder" of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.

In Alabama, Amanda Kimbrough a mother of three was was arrested at her home and charged with "chemical endangerment" of her unborn child.  Just prior she gave birth to a child that lived for nineteen minutes.  The basis of the prosecution was that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy; a claim she has denied.

"That shocked me, it really did," Kimbrough said. "I had lost a child, that was enough."
She now awaits an appeal ruling from the higher courts in Alabama, which if she loses will see her begin a 10-year sentence behind bars.

This bizarre infatuation of the religious and conservative right with women's reproductive organs and their individual liberties is appalling.  In Latin America, despite abortion's illegality, the abortion rate is higher than in either Western Europe or the United States.

In a region where there is little sex education and social taboos keep unmarried women from seeking contraception, criminalizing abortion has not made it rare, only dangerous. Rich women can go to private doctors. The rest rely on quacks or amateurs or do it themselves. Up to 5,000 women die each year from abortions in Latin America, and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized.

If the objective of these prosecutoral zealots is to increase the welfare of newborns or reduce abortions, their mission will fail.  In the first case, anyone who thinks they may be subject to prosecution  just will simply get a legal abortion.  In the second case, as the evidence above shows, by creating legal barriers to abortion all you end up doing is forcing women into back alley clinics where their lives are jeopardized and where ultimately more deaths will occur due to a lack of proper medical supervision.

G-20 Police excoriated in report

About two years ago, the city of Toronto was host of a G-20 summit meeting of international leaders.  Police were tasked with protecting the glitterati of the global elite from protesters, malcontents, and violent anarchists bent on confrontation.  As far as most Canadians were concerned the entire event was a fiasco.  More than a billion dollars was spent on law enforcement, the entire city was shutdown at the beginning of the tourist season, hundreds of ordinary citizens, protesters, and journalists were harassed, brutally attacked by law enforcement, and subsequently jailed.

Numerous stories of police malfeasance and unconstitutional actions by the state against lawful citizens were reported in the media.

Over the past month a series of reports on police conduct during the G-20 meeting have been released.  The first report issued by the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP (CPC) found that it saw no indication that the RCMP acted "inappropriately" or as "agents provocateurs."  This report however, was only concerned with actions associated directly with the RCMP, Canada's national police force, and not with the nebulous complaints and behavior of the entire security apparatus on display that week.  The report did fault the RCMP in participating in the inappropriate "kettling" of protesters and ordinary citizens.  The process of "kettling" is a means in which police eliminate all egress routes for persons, as is portrayed in the picture above, and then extract detainees on a singular basis.  The sophistication of the mass arrests was also subject to ridicule in a specific instance where the RCMP arrested five persons, "two of whom turned out to be undercover Toronto police officers".

The second report that came out shortly after, by the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD), was scathing in its denunciation of police misconduct. The report found that the planning for the event was poorly conceptualized and concluded that:

many of the arrests of peaceful demonstrators were illegal — without proper warrants or reasonable grounds — and that the conditions and treatment of prisoners inside a makeshift detention centre were "improper and unnecessary"

The report expounds the fact the some officers deliberately ignored the Charter rights of citizens, used excessive force, and took “unreasonable, unnecessary and unlawful” actions against the same people they took an oath to protect and serve.

During the period of June 25 and June 27, police stop-and-search exercises in downtown Toronto increased exponentially.  The report determined that the police had overstepped their authority.  In an example of the latter, a metro Toronto transit worker was assaulted as he was on his way to work, arrested, and detained for 29 hours.  Mr. Elroy Yau is currently seeking "over $3 million, claiming his charter rights were violated during the G20 summit."

In another incident, which I discussed in my original blog on this topic, two Toronto police sergeants face disciplinary hearings after they were found to have illegally arrested journalists during the G-20 summit and engaged in a homophobic tirade.

In the case of [Ryan] Mitchell, the review found that the officers used excessive force in his arrest. But it couldn't substantiate Mitchell's allegation that during his arrest, an officer said: "I'm going to love shoving this baton up your ass."

The Toronto Star newspaper elaborates on the incident.

It also found [Sgt. Douglas] Rose and another officer, Sgt. Michael Ferry, unlawfully arrested [Lisa] Walter and her colleague, Ryan Mitchell, on the afternoon of the final day of the G20 summit. And that both officers used “unnecessary force” when arresting Mitchell, who said he was tackled to the ground and put into a headlock, his right arm twisted behind his back.

Video footage shot by bystanders contradicts the police officer's statements, where they claim that they arrested Mitchell for breach of the peace and that Mitchell was "struggling quite violently".

In the case of the second journalist, Lisa Walter, the review said there was insufficient evidence to substantiate that excessive force was used against her.  However, it did conclude that arresting officer Sgt. Rose was involved in "discreditable conduct" for using "profane, abusive or insulting language" regarding her sexuality.

---
Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair was initially chastised in the editorial pages of Canadian newspapers for failing to accept the results of the OIPRD report.  The Globe and Mail stated that:

Police Chief Bill Blair has not apologized for his own failings and those of the officers under his command... Mr. Blair’s response, a grudging concession that things could have been handled better, is a surprising miscalculation. He needed to show he is in command. His attempt to soft-pedal the findings will not succeed in dampening criticism of police actions, or the calls for heads to roll. On the contrary, it will raise pressure on Mr. Blair and the Toronto Police Service, because it suggests they have learned little over the past two years.

In response to public outrage to the report's findings, Chief Blair took the "unusual step of appointing retired judges and former Crown attorneys to run the hearings, which are usually adjudicated by a fellow officer, to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest."

In the end, none of this had to happen if Prime Minster Harper hadn't prematurely decided to force upon Toronto this unnecessary, ill planned, and useless publicity stunt.  We the public are equally left bewildered towards Minster Tony Clement, who was found in an auditor general's report to be in clear breach of federal policies on accountability in the G-8/G-20 boondoggle.  Why is it that millions -and in this case over a billion dollars- can be found to be used for Ministerial photo-ops, but actual infrastructure spending on subways, new transit lines, highway repairs, and sewer upgrades, all of which the city needs, is disregarded and mocked by the Conservative "law and order" politicians we have today?

Dick Cheney unrepentant in having destroyed America

Richard Cheney, the 46th vice-president of the USA, is about to release his memoirs next week titled, "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir. 

According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted when Dick Cheney left office in January 2009 his approval ratings (13%) were less than that of George W. Bush's (22%).  At their departure both men received historic disapproval ratings and continue to be considered by the majority of Americans as having failed to improve America.  The Bush presidency is highlighted by some of the following:

• advancing the unconstitutional notion of a unitary presidency
• repeated and consistent withdrawal from international treaties and agreements
• pushing through the civil rights destroying PATRIOT act
• massive and illegal wiretapping and spying on American citizens
• using torture upon seized enemy combatants and prisoners of war
• the failure to prevent the 9-11 attack on New York City and the Pentagon
• failing to adequately neutralize Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda's terrorist network
• pursuing the Iraq war under bogus pretenses and then failing to contain the regional civil war
• the abandonment of New Orleans and its citizens after Hurricane Katrina
• allowing the housing bubble to expand and eventually cause the financial collapse of 2008
• promoting corporate-written legislation that bolstered special interest profits
• promoting a laissez-faire regulatory framework that allowed corporate crime to exponentially grow throughout his two terms
• advancing the interests of oil and gas companies and rejecting sustainable and renewable forms of energy production
• denying climate change was occurring
• doubling the national public debt
• cut taxes for the richest Americans, while expanding the deficit
• cut national science and engineering budgets to pay for his wars and tax cuts
• limited scientific investigations on subjects deemed controversial for religious supporters, such as stem cell studies and environmental assessment studies
• preventing any international agreement that would prevent rises in global warming gases, which in the end may possibly be his greatest failure if even conservative predictions about climate change prove true

Cheney undoubtedly represented the very worst elements of the Bush administration.  Although Bush's approval didn't collapse until after Katrina, Cheney's approval amongst most Americans was in the gutter early into his first term.  His approval was constantly in the twenty-percent area and never improved.  He represented to his base an unapologetic statist who wanted to project American hegemony to its fullest level.  Cheney famously stated that "deficits don't matter!"  He was responsible for pursuing an energy policy that promoted America's addiction to foreign fossil fuels.  And as former Secretary of Defense, he was very familiar with the nature of the Pentagon machinery and sought to project America's military power domestically and across foreign shores.

To the rest of America, Cheney represented a Machiavellian operator.  With his over-the-top rhetoric, war making bravado, riddiculous claims that 3rd world nations with 2nd rate militaries were a threat to America, and his continuous scowl, the public turned on this crypto-fascist.

Reviews of Cheney's memoirs indicate a man who controlled both the president and policies of the Bush presidency in it early years. During the infamous 9-11 attack, Cheney states, despite clear lines of command set forth in the constitution, that it was him and neither Bush nor Rumsfeld who was in command of immediate operations.  At that moment in history, Cheney made it clear that the president of the United States had been unofficially deposed and that he had assumed all the controls of commander-in-chief.

The NY Times review of the book further highlights a man who is completely unrepentant of his actions.  The Times describes the book as being

often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues.

So it is clear that as Cheney's policy failures mounted, George W. Bush and others in the Bush administration became progressively unwilling to accept Cheney's worldview and provocations.  In the end, the rift was so great that Bush himself was unwilling to even grant full pardon to Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby for his acts of lying to prosecutors in order to protect Mr. Cheney.

What we know is Mr. Cheney is on his last legs and death is hunting him. This book is an attempt by a dying man to justify his evil by throwing sand in our collective faces. I'm sure Ozymandias would have done the same.

Obama, bagman for Bush's torture adventures

McClatchy Press has an excellent summary, through Wikileaks, of the Machiavellian maneuvers made by the Obama White House to undermine both international law and justice.

This blog has in the past described how the administration of Barack Obama over the past two years, has given "support and comfort" to the torturers and fiends of the Bush junta (here, here, and here). A number of prominent political and legal commentators have equally concluded that Obama, his AG, and members of his administration are now as culpable as their predecessors in concealing acts of torture, manipulating foreign governments to forsake investigations of American criminality, and failing to vigorously uphold constitutional prerogatives in prosecuting those who have violated domestic laws and international treaties, to which America is signature to.

In 2009, the Obama administration sent Republican Senator Mel Martinez to Spain to cajole the Spanish judiciary into abandoning investigations lead by Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzón into six Bush lawyers who laid, "the foundation for abuse of detainees in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." The Spanish investigations concerned Alberto Gonzales, who described parts of the Geneva conventions "quant" and "obsolete" after 9-11; Bush lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee; David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel; William "Jim" Haynes, Defense Department General Counsel; and Doug Feith, a Pentagon undersecretary who handled policy issues for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The Spaniards were not swayed and told Martinez and the American ambassador to Spain, that "The independence of the judiciary and the process must be respected.''  Michael Ratner, a civil rights attorney affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Rights, states that "The U.S. prides itself on our own independent judiciary... But here you have the hypocrisy of the U.S. government trying to influence an independent judicial system to bend its laws and own rules.''

The timeline of the above diplomatic maneuvers coincides with Obama's attempt to marginalize Bush's crimes:

But by the time Spain's Association for the Dignity of Prisoners filed the torture complaint that U.S. diplomatic circles found so troubling, the Obama White House was resisting calls to set up a Truth Commission or assign a special prosecutor to examine the legal framework that set up Guantánamo and permitted "enhanced interrogation techniques'' that included waterboarding high-value detainees.

"Generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards," Obama said on Feb. 9, 2009.

How Mr. Obama, a man who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, could become protector and defender of his predecessor's criminality, will be an issue that historians will grapple with for decades.  The emotional cheers of "change you can believe in" lie exposed as election based propaganda, told by the architects of Empire to confuse the guilible masses into believing that their opinion actually matters.

The continued ascent of the surveillance state

Recently Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post published another chapter into their ongoing investigation of America's secretive information gathering operations.  In the past series, they discussed the emerging nexus between corporate entities, clandestine information services, and the government.  A system so large that "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."  No single entity within the government is capable of understanding the totality or scope of the enterprise; not even the president's own top officials on the subject.

The most recent chapter to this story, involves the involvement of state and local police agencies.  Across the nation terrorism task forces have been created to capture information related to domestic threats that may arise in each jurisdiction in America.  The federal government has provided grants to this regional governments and police forces to purchase high-end military surveillance systems and communication networks to monitor and manage local populations.  In those cases where no terrorism related activities are identifiable, the new task forces are used to monitor criminal classes and/or any person or group the state deems of interest.

The most contentious aspect of the government surveillance lies in the collection of data on individuals who are completely innocent of any wrongdoing.  A Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, or SAR, has been established to collect data (personal, commercial, financial,...etc) upon any person the state determines suspicious.  Unlike the conventional system, where the state does not have the right to collect and horde every minuta of data about your life, the new terrorism laws and surveillance state network, casts a wide net.

As of December, there were 161,948 suspicious activity files in the classified Guardian database, mostly leads from FBI headquarters and state field offices. Two years ago, the bureau set up an unclassified section of the database so state and local agencies could send in suspicious incident reports and review those submitted by their counterparts in other states. Some 890 state and local agencies have sent in 7,197 reports so far.

The objective of the system is to amass as much information on each person within the United States as possible. The federal state has had a long and sordid history of monitoring, infiltrating, and undermining civilian populations engaged in nothing less than constitutionally sanctioned criticism of government practices. The following examples confirm the misuse of the current security state powers:

• In Virginia, the state's fusion center published a terrorism threat assessment in 2009 naming historically black colleges as potential hubs for terrorism.
• From 2005 to 2007, the Maryland State Police went even further, infiltrating and labeling as terrorists local groups devoted to human rights, antiwar causes and bike lanes.
• And in Pennsylvania this year, a local contractor hired to write intelligence bulletins filled them with information about lawful meetings as varied as Pennsylvania Tea Party Patriots Coalition gatherings, antiwar protests and an event at which environmental activists dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out coal-filled stockings

In America, the public has generally accepted the rise of the surveillance state. Trivialities such as civil liberties, the abuse of constitutional freedoms, the invasion of individual privacy, and the monitoring of lawful public assemblies, are glossed off by the mainstream media and the population as minor irritants that only affect those swarthy and obviously guilty dark-skinned persons with funny names. Glenn Greenwald expands on this asymmetric information relationship:

One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does. Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that "knowledge is power," this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling class omnipotent and citizens powerless.

The cabal of corporate fascists has extended its tentacles into every aspect and function of every person in the nation. Big brother is not just a metaphor, he is the state.

Dubya is Threatened with Arrest if He Visits London, UK!

From Scott Horton's blog over at Harper's comes this exquisite piece of news, from the city of London's conservative Mayor.  I usually do not repost entire posts of others, but this succinct and insightful post is too valuable to not be shared in its totality. Bold print has been added by me.

London’s Tory mayor, Boris Johnson, has some strong words of caution for former president George W. Bush: if you come to Europe to promote your book, pack heavily and be prepared for a long stay. In fact, you may “never see Texas again.” As he sees it, Bush’s book and statements he has made in efforts to market it constitute admissions of serious crimes.

Initial reports about Bush’s autobiography did not go over well in Europe, and Britain’s new Conservative government was particularly eager to push back against suggestions that their conservatism had any resemblance to the Bush variety. Bush insisted this his decision to use waterboarding and other torture techniques kept Britain safe. But British Conservatives are having none of it:

In the case of the three men waterboarded on Bush’s orders, British ministers are not aware of any valuable information they gave about plots against Heathrow, Canary Wharf or anywhere else. All the policy has achieved is to degrade America in the eyes of the world, and to allow America’s enemies to utter great whoops of vindication. It is not good enough for Dubya now to claim that what he did was OK, because “the lawyers said it was legal”.

As Johnson sees it, the torture debate is ultimately about America’s claim to leadership in the world and the Bush team’s sullying of the nation’s reputation:

How could America complain to the Burmese generals about the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, when a president authorised torture? How can we talk about human rights in Beijing, when our number one ally and friend seems to be defending this kind of behaviour? I can’t think of any other American president, in my lifetime, who would have spoken in this way. Mr Bush should have remembered the words of the great Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who said in 1863 that “military necessity does not admit of cruelty”. Damn right.

***

I have been saying this for years.  In yesterday's blog on Republican corruption, I stated that it is only a matter of time before someone in the Bush junta is ensnared and eventually prosecuted for international legal problems arising from their years of legal misconduct.  Whilst America's media glosses over the fact that both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush have admitted to ordering torture, people around the world are looking carefully at the decider's words and movement and evaluating the possibility of bringing him or his henchmen in front of a magistrate to explain themselves in court.

What we have also seen is that Mr. Obama has made substantial efforts to collude with the former administration in shielding and protecting them from domestic and international prosecutions.  Andrew Sulivan states in his blog that the most recent WikiLeaks information dump, "reveal an extraordinary effort by the US embassy and the Bush and Obama administrations to cajole, pressure, redirect and try to rig legal cases that could reveal the war crimes of the previous administration."  Both administrations are bound by the pirate's ethic of evading responsibility and accountability for any action they or their Jolly-Roger-like counterparts may engage in.  The Obama administration is now culpable in the crimes of his predecessors, and needs to explain their actions, at the very least, to the voters who demanded change that they could believe in.

War Crime Allegations Threaten to Harm America's Image

Der Spiegel International has a good description and analysis of the Afghan war crimes incident, that I wrote about yesterday, in which American soldiers have been charged with murdering civilians and extracting trophy body parts during active duty.

The article outlines what is at stake:

It involves more than a court imposing a just penalty for brutal murders, and more than compliance with the military code of honor and the Geneva Conventions. At stake is the reputation of a country that, after eight years under the administration of former President George W. Bush, had set out to liberate itself from charges of moral failure. Indeed, the Seattle case raises the question of whether the United States has really turned its back on the days when it gambled away its reputation with images of naked Iraqis forced to form human pyramids in Abu Ghraib prison.

It discusses how this situation will make mockery of the entire narrative under the Obama administration that there has been a clean break from the sordid eight years under George W. Bush.

They allegedly fired at their victims with gusto, collecting trophies that included finger and toe bones, and even a tooth. The charges outline senseless, horrific acts reminiscent of a former America, an America of waterboarding, torture scandals and Guantanamo Bay. They also raise the question of what exactly has changed since the election campaign in which then-candidate Barack Obama promised so much, including a more responsible approach to warfare and the closing of the military prison in Cuba, an important symbol of America's moral failings under former President George W. Bush.

The article also reviews the fact that Soviet forces in their earlier conflict with the Afghan population, also engaged in horrendous criminality:

Feeling helpless in their inability to counter the resistance of the Afghans, Moscow's troops turned to drugs and alcohol. Having lost their inhibitions, they committed atrocities they would never forget. In September 1982, a group of Russian soldiers burned 105 villagers alive in an irrigation canal south of Kabul. Women were thrown naked from helicopters. In a particularly horrific incident, soldiers doused a boy in kerosene and set him on fire in front of his parents

Quote of the Day: Sullivan on Obama

Andrew Sullivan is one of the few persons who has constantly and unequivocally condemned Republicans and Democrats, under the Bush junta and the Obama administration, of condoning and actively participating in the torture and murder of war on terrorism detainees.  In a blog entry that addresses the Machiavellian undercurrent to American politics, he condemns Mr. Obama for his recent cowardliness in preventing those who have been wrongly "extraordinary renditioned" and tortured by American forces to seek redress in court.

Aggressively trying to prevent torture victims from having their day in court merely using unclassified evidence is active complicity in the war crimes of the past. And such complicity is itself a war crime. Either we live under the rule of law and the Geneva Conventions, or we don't. And when Obama says we don't - as he unmistakably is - the precedent he is setting all but ensures that torture will come again, that there will never be consequences for it, and that the national security state can cloak itself in such a way that the citizenry has no way of penetrating its power. Bush and Cheney remain the real culprits here; but watching Obama essentially surrendering to their trap is a betrayal of a core rationale for his candidacy.

Government Demands More Digitial Search Authority

Another effort is being pushed by the FBI to gain more information about the digital habits of Americans.  Specifically, the government -in this case the duplicitous and hypocritical Obama administration- has stated that it wants the FBI to obtain the capacity to request an individual's telecommunications history, including but not limited to internet search records, Internet history, and other quantitative data from their service provider without judicial oversight.

With the enormous expansion of the security state subsequent to 9-11, the FBI had already gained via National security letters (NSLs) the authority to obtain people's communication, financial and credit information. As the ACLU states

These requests are not approved by a court, and the FBI does not have to suspect you of actually being a terrorist, spy or criminal; the only thing they have to do to get your records is certify to themselves (not a court) that you are "relevant" to an investigation. To make matters worse, the FBI has the power to prohibit any Internet service provider, bank or credit company from which it demands sensitive customer records from ever disclosing anything about the record demand.

The Washington Post reports that contrary to government statements, NSLs have been aggressively used with repeated frequency.  For example,

The Justice Department issued 192,500 national security letters from 2003 to 2006, according to a 2008 inspector general report, which did not indicate how many were demands for Internet records. A 2007 IG report found numerous possible violations of FBI regulations, including the issuance of NSLs without having an approved investigation to justify the request. In two cases, the report found, agents used NSLs to request content information "not permitted by the [surveillance] statute."

Given that the government has always had the authority to request this information in the case of emergencies, why would they need to circumvent legal review and authorization? The answer is obvious. Various factions within the government don't want anyone to impede or limit their questionable antics, which as their own internal review process has confirmed is corrupt.  Fishing expeditions that pull in ever greater information about people, who do not pose a criminal threat, but a political threat is the new normal.  As discussed in an earlier blog, the various and competing intelligence agencies, in association with a massive quasi-corporate infrastructure, are obsessed with collecting ever more information about ordinary citizens and controling larger domains of state decision-making authority.  Collectively, the growing demands of these organizations are meant to institute state primacy over individuals, civil liberties, and democracy itself.

Nader Interviews Judge Andrew Napolitano

I encourage everyone to watch and understand the vast scope of criticisms leveled by conservative legal authority Judge Andrew Napolitano.  Despite his affiliation with Fox News and the less than lucid histrionics of his comrades at Fox, the above interview with Ralph Nader -conducted for CSPAN- consolidated the fact that there are issues that are beyond the false media symmetries of right and left or conservative and liberal.

The interview outlines a vast scope of criminality, violations of the constitution, and historically unprecedented actions committed by the Bush White House against American citizens and in many cases perpetuated by the Obama White House.

Napolitano declares that:

1. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should be indicted and prosecuted for torture, domestic spying, and the illegal arrest and confinement of both American citizens and non-American citizens.
2. Questions the legality and morality of the Obama Administration's use of extra-judicial killing of American citizens while outside American territory.
3. Discusses the failure of persons within the Bush WH, such as Jay Bybee, to provide sound legal advice relating to the use of torture.
4. Asks where is this generation's Thurgood Marshall, the venerated Supreme Court Justice who attacked Jim Crow laws as a civil rights litigator.  Despite there being more lawyers than ever in the history of the USA, there remains very few entities (outside the ACLU, CCR, and human rights organizations) or persons willing to challenge the egregious criminality of the American president.

That Strange Concept Called Accountability!

Something remarkable happened last month that the press seems to have thoroughly overlooked here in the Americas.  The newly formed Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition government in Britain told the country that they were going to reform civil liberties that had been badly diminished under Labour and equally, hold the previous government accountable their years of participating in the kidnapping, rendition, and torture of persons across the globe.

Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime-Minister, made a speech declaring that the coming changes would be the biggest shake-up in UK democracy since 1832.  He railed against a litany of previous Labour government policies that formed the basis of Britain's surveillance state:

• ID Card schemes
• national identity registers
• biometric passports
• the storing of Internet and email records
• DNA databases
• proliferating security cameras
• repressive restrictions on free speech and assembly rights

Mr. Clegg's party before the election didn't mince words.  The Liberal-Democrats stated in their party platform that, "The Government believes the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused fundamental human rights and historic civil liberties."  He further inveighed against the current criminal justice system which imprisons too many citizens without improving public safety, and "pledged radical reform to empower citizens" over entrenched and wealthy interests.

William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, announced that an independent judge will investigate whether the British government was complicit in the torture of terror suspects.  The Guardian summarizes:

The judicial inquiry announced by the foreign secretary into Britain's role in torture and rendition since September 2001 is poised to shed extraordinary light on one of the darkest episodes in the country's recent history.

It is expected to expose not only details of the activities of the security and intelligence officials alleged to have colluded in torture since 9/11, but also the identities of the senior figures in government who authorised those activities. . . . Those who have been most bitterly resisting an inquiry -- including a number of senior figures in the last government -- may have been dismayed to see the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition formed, as this maximised the chances of a judicial inquiry being established.

Glenn Greenwald describes the mindset of Barack Obama, who claimed during the 2008 election that it was his desire to hold the Bush junta to account for their crimes.  To date the Obama administration has held none of the fiends who lied and took America to war on bogus premises, engaged in wholesale torture across the globe, and violated the Geneva conventions.  George W. Bush has already admitted that he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details of the CIA's use of torture.  Earlier this month, he further admitted that "Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded by the US, and said he would do it again 'to save lives'." This is consistent with Dick Cheney's bold statement to the world, back in February,where he announced that he was a "big supporter of waterboarding."

Andrew Sullivan and Scott Horton have both said that president Obama and his AG are now obligated to prosecute both Messrs Bush and Cheney.

[T]he attorney general of the United States is legally obliged to prosecute someone who has openly admitted such a war crime or be in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on Torture. For Eric Holder to ignore this duty subjects him too to prosecution. If the US government fails to enforce the provision against torture, the UN or a foreign court can initiate an investigation and prosecution.... Cheney himself just set in motion a chain of events that the civilized world must see to its conclusion or cease to be the civilized world. For such a high official to escape the clear letter of these treaties and conventions, and to openly brag of it, renders such treaties and conventions meaningless.

How far down the rabbit hole have we all gone, where the Conservatives of Britain are willing to hold their people to account, while the Obama administration gives the worst government in the history of the American republic another "get-out of jail" card and the press doesn't bother talking about any of it?

Torture me Slowly: Bush's Medical Experimentation Program

With each turn and further examination of the Bush Administration's institutional program of torture, the history becomes more surreal and terrifying.  According to a report issued by Physicians for Human Rights, the Bush Administration engaged in human experimentation with detainees across the globe in order to empirically assess the degree to which they could inflict pain on their prisoners without killing them.

Health professionals engaged in research on detainees, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and other international and domestic prohibitions against human subject research and experimentation. This research included monitoring the effects of abusive treatment, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation, in order to assess how far "enhanced interrogation techniques" could go and still be within the legal parameters and to guide the future application of the techniques.

James Risen, who exposed the existence of the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program in 2006, has written another article in the NY Times outlining the findings of the PHR report.

The data collected by medical professionals from the interrogations of detainees allowed the C.I.A. to judge the emotional and physical impact of the techniques, helping the agency to “calibrate the level of pain experienced by detainees during interrogation, ostensibly to keep it from crossing the administration’s legal threshold of what it claimed constituted torture,” the report said. That meant that the medical professionals crossed the line from treating the detainees as patients to treating them as research subjects, the report asserted.

This is not a triviality.  Medical physicians and psychologists, as the report, the Times article, and numerous others have pointed out, are prohibited by national and international codes in conducting human experimentation without informed consent.  There are no persons undecided as to if the Nazi's, the Imperial Japanese, or the Khmer Rouge were not criminal when they engaged in these heinous actions.  However, these practices also remind us of America's own dark history of eugenics, experimentation on black citizens and prisoners throughout the 20th century, and military/CIA studies on large scale groups, which has all been well chronicled.  It is therefore no surprise when these sadists rear their ugly heads and perversely claim that torture (or "wink" something like it) is a necessity required to protect Americans from foreign enemies.  What has been done is inexcusible; it is a war crime.

The authors provide evidence about the government's meticulous studies:

The report cites agency guidelines for health professionals involved in interrogations requiring that they document each time a detainee was waterboarded, how long each waterboarding session lasted, how much water was applied, exactly how the water was applied and expelled, whether the detainees’ breathing passages were filled, and how each detainee looked between treatments.

Andrew Sullivan asks, "where was the experimentation taking place? How many doctors and psychologists were involved? Was there a separate facility, as at Bagram, for experimenting with torture? Did these experiments ever go wrong?"

Whereas, Glenn Greenwald asks what is President Obama doing to investigate, prosecute, and prevent this from occurring again?  The horrible answer is obvious; nothing.  Obama has decided that the country and more importantly the American Empire cannot afford to be hijacked by squabbles over petty matters like constitutional law or war crimes committed by the executive.  Rather, the nation must boldly ignore the slight inconveniences of the previous Bush administration and get on with the business of voting for the next American Idol.

FBI Repeatedly Broke Law In Phone Record Searches

The FBI, the federal government's central law enforcement agency, has been found to have been engaged in illegal telephone surveillance activities.  According to the Washington Post, the transgressions began shortly after the passage of the Patriot Act and occurred throughout 2002 to 2006.

The USA Patriot Act, an omnibus bill of police state "must haves" enacted literally weeks after the September 11th 2001 attacks, permitted law enforcement agencies to search a home or business without the owner’s or the occupant’s permission or knowledge; expanded access of law enforcement agencies to business records, including library and financial records; and expanded the use of National Security Letters, which allows the FBI to search telephone, e-mail, and financial records without a court order.  It is this latter attribute in which the government, even when receiving carte-blanc authority to monitor its citizens with virtual impunity, determined that existing restrictions on its actions was too much.  The historical record of civil rights abuses and criminality conducted by American law enforcement against innocent civilian groups is well established.   For example, in 1978 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was enacted in response to Watergate era civil rights violations and revelations that president Nixon and other administrations had authorized warrantless surveillance of political opponents and activists.

In the stated period, the FBI monitored over 2,000 US telephone conversations under the pretense of terrorism emergencies that did not exist.  The tactic was not limited to Americans with ethnic-sounding names, but used to survey a wide swath of persons that the government was interested in; such as the press.

The FBI’s spying on journalists without any link to known cases of terrorism suggests that the journalists were the victims of political intimidation and retaliation by the FBI for exposing illegal government programs. Ellen Nakashima has written extensively on domestic wiretapping and government intrusions into privacy, while Raymond Bonner’s articles include exposes on detainee abuse and illegal surveillance.

The Washington Post article outlines that the FBI violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act when it collected phone records without linking the investigations to “emergency terrorist threats.”  A Justice Department probe of the situation is anticipated to find that the bureau routinely violated the law.

FBI officials told The Post that their own review has found that about half of the 4,400 toll records collected in emergency situations or with after-the-fact approvals were done in technical violation of the law. The searches involved only records of calls and not the content of the calls. In some cases, agents broadened their searches to gather numbers two and three degrees of separation from the original request, documents show.

Over-and-over we are told that "innocent" mistakes on behalf of government police agencies resulted in these illegal searches.  However, it is obvious from the development of events, as described in the WaPo article, that these actions were not undertaken to protect the nation from terrorists, but to advance the statist objectives of the Bush junta, so that they could effectively control and extinguish political opposition to their increasingly criminal pursuits.

Will this scanner make my penis look bigger?

If you're in the military-industrial complex, terrorism is an integral part of your profit scheme.  The more than one trillion dollars already spent on the Iraq/ Afghan/ Pakistan/ 'Global War on Terror' boondoggles has been highly profitable for those companies producing military materiel and providing such useful services as preparing meals for servicemen in war-zones (i.e. Halliburton) to lethal mercenary armies (i.e. Blackwater).  Fear of the other motivated the American populace to abandon liberties, scorn opposition to the leader(s) who failed to originally protect them, and give the mad-militarists, who never saw a problem they couldn't bomb into oblivion, a blank check to wage unlimited war against the rest of the planet.

Since the failed Christmas day mission of the "underpants bomber" aboard a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, MI, the brain-trust of several governments have declared their intention to install new high-resolution body scanners across airports in America and internationally with connections to US cities.  BusinessWeek, in an article "Invasion of the Body Scanners," discusses the costs of installing these devices and the benefits, or lack thereof, of utilizing these high-end technologies against a determined, albeit in the latter case a fairly stupid, adversary.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration, which has 40 scanners in place at 19 airports so far, has spent $25 million on 150 additional scanners and plans to buy 300 more. The devices, which are placed at security checkpoints, use radio waves or low-level X-rays to produce detailed images of passengers' bodies—and weapons or explosives beneath their clothes.

Despite objections from civil libertarians and a few members of congress, who have described the process as a "virtual strip search," Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman, Joe Lieberman was asking, "Why isn’t whole-body-scanning technology that can detect explosives in wider use?"  Perhaps the answer lies in its life-cycle costs, overall utility, the fact that millions of people would be exposed to potentially cancer-causing ionizing radiation for no beneficial reason, or as in my personal case, wonder if my penis will look big enough for the security clerk glinting at my masculinity!  For example, in the image above of a female TSA employee undergoing a scan, the outline of her breasts, pelvis, and genitalia are clearly observable to any staff and government agency.  The TSA claims to be, "Addressing privacy fears [by] making sure scanners blur facial features and genitalia and deleting images after use."  However, given the government's penchant and demonstrable history of disinformation, dishonesty, and incompetence at managing confidential information, does anyone believe them?

In relation to the military-industrial complex, the BusinessWeek article outlines:

The biggest beneficiaries of a scanner boom will likely be L-3 Communications (LLL) of New York and Torrance (Calif.)-based Rapiscan Systems, part of OSI Systems. They're the only scanner makers approved so far by the TSA, which already has contracts with them that could top $100 million apiece. If the TSA decides to install the machines at all 2,100 security lanes in the U.S., that could produce total revenue of $300 million to $400 million. "The TSA is saying, 'Let's accelerate the process,' " says Richard Hoss, a senior research analyst with Roth Capital Partners. "It's likely to benefit these companies." The stocks of OSI and L-3 are up 29% and 2%, respectively, since Christmas Day.

The most obvious question, that few in government or in the commercial world seem keen on addressing, is whether any of this will improve passenger safety?  The American public has not been made aware of any cost-benefit analysis that asks whether similar funding should be given to bomb-sniffing dogs, improved terrorist database management, or better intelligence gathering procedures.  A four-year test of the efficacy and reliability of body scanners in detecting plastics, chemicals, or liquids upon passengers at London’s Heathrow airport, resulted in the decision to discontinue their use.  Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer at BT Group, explains that "If we use full body scans, [terrorists] are going to do something else. This is a stupid game, and it's time we stop playing it."  Unfortunately for us poor tax-paying serfs, our dear leaders, like those bloviating charlatans in congress, don't really seem to care if the technology will work as required, but rather if said technology will enhance the profits of their friends in the military-industrial complex.

You Betcha!

What US Generals used to think of Torture

Tom Ricks, over at Foreign Policy, posts a quote made by US Army Maj. Gen. George Davis, who in 1902 lambasted all who, at the time, believed water-boarding was not torture and that "enhanced interrogation techniques" were acceptable in the face of international obligations.

No modern state, which is a party to international law, can sanction, either expressly or by a silence which imports consent, a resort to torture with a view to obtain confessions, as an incident to its military operations. If it does, where is the line to be drawn? If the ‘water cure' is ineffective, what shall be the next step? Shall the victim be suspended, head down, over the smoke of a smouldering fire; she he be tightly bound and dropped from a distance of several feet; shall he be beaten with rods; shall his shins be rubbed with a broomstick until they bleed?

My Person of the Year: Neda Agha Soltan

Unlike TIME magazine and FT who respectively chose FED Chairman Ben Bernanke and Goldman Sachs' CEO Lloyd Blankfein as their "person of the year", the Times of London (UK) newspaper has chosen a very modest person, who gave her life not in the pursuit of capital or saving the financial behemoths of Wall Street from their own self-inflicted greed, but rather for simple measures that we in the West take for granted every day.

Neda Soltan was not political. She did not vote in the Iranian presidential election on June 12. The young student was appalled, however, by the way that the regime shamelessly rigged the result and reinstalled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ignoring the pleas of her family, she went with her music teacher eight days later to join a huge opposition demonstration in Tehran.

“Even if a bullet goes through my heart it’s not important,” she told Caspian Makan, her fiancé. “What we’re fighting for is more important. When it comes to taking our stolen rights back we should not hesitate. Everyone is responsible. Each person leaves a footprint in this world.”

In Iran Neda has become the face of the revolution against the aging, sclerotic, and corrupt Mullahs.  Vigils and shrines were established across the country to commemorate her murder by a Basij militiaman on a motorcycle as she protested and chanted, "Death to the dictator!"  The Times elaborates:

It was not hard to see why Ms Soltan so quickly became the face of the opposition, the Iranian equivalent of the young man who confronted China’s tanks during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations 20 years earlier. She was young and pretty, innocent, brave and modern. She wore make-up beneath her mandatory headscarf, jeans and trainers beneath her long, black coat, and liked to travel. She transcended the narrow confines of religion, nationality and ideology. She evoked almost universal empathy.

The cowardice of the Mullahs and their police apparatus reached new heights in the months that followed her death.  The regime banned public displays of mourning, intimidated and jailed witnesses who observed her death, harassed Neda's family to prevent them from talking in public, and blamed foreign journalists for her death.

The corporate yes-men who have bankrupted our states, the war-mongers intent on justifying torture and genocide, and the shifty immoral politicans who run our governments and collectively represent the very worst of humanity, deserve nothing but contempt.  We however, as individuals can look through the veil fashioned by the corporate media and find virtue and human decency even in the darkest corners of this world.  This is why I too, even though her life was short and her contribution an accident, feel that Neha Soltan deserves to be known by us all; because her struggles and the ideals of the Green Revolution are our struggles.

***

For more information on Neda and the international response to her death, PBS's Frontline has an excellent documentary that is viewable online and also has a set of links on the subject.

They know where you are: adventures in domestic spying

It was easy to put the black hat on the evil-doers of the Bush Imperium, with their full-throttle propaganda declaring the triumphalism of good over evil and the virtues of the military fighting for the freedom of Halliburton overseas, while the government was curtailing civil liberties domestically. With the ascent of Barack Obama, there was a short-lived belief that the worst transgressions against individual civil rights, as exemplified in the Patriot Act, would come to an end. They did not.


Part I- Background

Earlier this year reports were made public of continued violations of federal laws that constrained the domestic surveillance of American citizens by the NSA (National Security Agency); a secretive intelligence agency that operates out of a black cube-shaped building outside Baltimore, MD. The violations were an extension of the massive data sweeps initiated by the Bush Administration and executed in part by the telecommunications companies on behalf of the state. The reported violations involve data on tens of millions of domestic phone calls and emails, providing the agency with the ability to conduct “data-mining” operations that yield extensive intelligence on large numbers of Americans. The government furthermore, was forced to admit that the NSA had operational plans of spying on select congressmen who were visiting overseas.

The persisting conceit that America is this shinning beacon of freedom and liberty is a complete myth. The criminal excesses of the executive branch and intelligence community against its own citizens, members of the legislative branch, and the press throughout this past decade are in display for all to view. Last year the "FISA Amendment Act essentially provided congressional sanction for the secret and illegal warrantless wiretapping program initiated by the Bush administration in 2001." Then Senator Barack Obama, left the campaign trail to cast his vote in support of this unconstitutional legislation and provide "support and comfort" for the American police state and its henchmen.

The act, approved with the support of the entire Democratic leadership in the House and nearly half of the Democratic senators, overturned even the limited restraints on government spying that existed under the FISA law passed in 1978, in the wake of revelations of gross abuses of power by the White House and the intelligence agencies under the Nixon administration.

Mr. Obama's Justice Department, mimicking their predecessor's penchant for statist philosophy, made the claim to the courts adjudicating individual cases brought against the government on the matter of domestic wiretapping violations, that 'the government enjoys “sovereign immunity,” meaning that no citizen can sue the government.'

The Obama administration’s uncompromising defense of illegal domestic spying under the Bush White House is not only an attempt to prevent anyone from being held accountable for these crimes and to bar the American people from learning the extent of the surveillance conducted against them. It is also a defense of the continuation of these same essential practices today, hidden behind a wall of secrecy.

Part II- GPS Tracking

Scott Horton over at Harper's Magazine's blog has recently come across an even more invasive practice conducted by the NSA and the telecom companies. Apparently in one situation, Sprint Nextel has been providing law enforcement agencies in America with the GPS coordinates of its cell phone customers (some eight million times per year); without any of the customers providing consent or either knowing anything about it. Sprint Manager of Electronic Surveillance Paul Taylor revealed the government monitoring technology at an industry conference

We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy.

So, not only has the American police state decided they do not require warrants to read or listen to your personal communications, they can and will track you or any other person within American territory, just like an inmate released on day-parole, with the use of your own cell phone.

American Fascism brought to you by the letters 'W' and 'O'.