Why are Americans such Assholes? Part-III

Some Americans have a rather an unusual definition of liberty and freedom: you are free to do what you are told.

Say you decide to visit the sunshine state of Florida, like so many Canadians every year.  In fact, it is approximated that as many as 3.1-million Canadians visit the state every year.  According to news sources:

Canada is Florida’s single largest international tourism market, accounting for three per cent of visitors. Americans make up 88 per cent, while other international visitors contribute nine per cent. Tourists spend more than $60 billion in the state each year.

So you would think that the locals would be very keen on making as receptive a welcome to persons from outside the state as possible.  Of course, if you think this, you've never been anywhere in the American south.  Consider the following news bulletin posted about a rather unstable but not unusual character assaulting a set of Canadian tourists.

Floridian sicks police on "terrorist"

"What's that, some kind of foreign licence plate? Yeah, that guy's definitely a terrorist."

That's what Joseph Tarochione thought when he spotted a set of white-and-blue Ontario plates on a car in Florida, apparently.

On January 31, the 73-year-old Homosassa, Florida man dialed police, said he was with the Department of Defense and asked them to inspect a vehicle belonging to a Canadian tourist for bombs, reports News 13.

Tarochione had used his own vehicle to force the Ontario car off the road and into the parking lot of a strip club, where he held the, um, suspects until officers arrived.

Problem is, Tarochione is not actually with the Department of Defense. And the tourists were not terrorists. Just Canadians. No bombs.

That doesn't mean firepower wasn't involved. When police searched Tarochione's car, they found a .22 Magnum handgun, a .22 long rifle revolver, a 16-gauge shotgun and ammunition.

Good thing he didn't try to use any of them during his "arrest." No one was harmed during the incident.

Tarochione was later arrested and jailed for impersonating a law enforcement officer.

This is what a decade of bogus furore and incendiary political machinations aimed at those who happen not to pray to ole' glory and pontificate on a daily basis the virtues of the American hedgemon produces. Given that only one third of Americans even own a passport, it isn't surprising that the nation is filled with xenophobes.  What I find appalling about these assholes, is their use of violence against anyone they consider remotely different than themselves.

Again, it's just another example of how Americans view themselves and rest of the world.

Chomsky on the Wall St. protesters, Bin Laden, & Israel

In this interview with Russia Today (RT) television Noam Chomsky discusses three main topics:

1. The current protests occurring in New York across from Wall Street and spreading throughout the world
2. The legal framework and international norms associated with kidnapping, torture, and murder
3. The current international versus American-Israeli perspective on the emergence of a Palestinian state.

For the most part I think what Chomsky has to say is true.

Criticisms leveled by Chomsky regarding economic matters and the control of the legislative process by corporations has been shown by this recent depression to have been wholly correct. America's political system is so badly broken that not even the greedy politicians can claim that the system works for anyone other than Goldman Sachs.

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What I found disappointing about this interview is Chomsky's rather weak argument that America is a lawless country because it assassinated Osama Bin Laden, invaded the sovereign nation of Pakistan, then dumped Bin Laden's body at sea. Unlike a great number of person on the left, Chomsky has never claimed that there were grand conspiracies at work during the 9-11 attack. What he does do is make the rather odd legalistic argument that everyone under American jurisprudence is entitled to the claim of being "innocence" until found guilty. That statement is true, but misleading. Bin Laden was never after 9-11 a conventional criminal. Rather, Bin Laden was the leader of an international organization whose purpose was to engage in terrorism that indiscriminately killed as many people as possible to draw America into a wider conflict in the Middle East. Bin Laden freely admitted and repeatedly boasted of his multiple attacks on American assets abroad and on 9-11. If we are talking about US law, under public law 107-40, the US Congress authorized the president of the United States “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Equally, under international law the UN charter provides nation states the right to use lethal force in individual and collective self-defense.

Second, Chomsky makes the error of claiming that the assassination has inflamed Pakistan's civilian population and enraged the quasi-military rulers of the state, thus exacerbating US-Muslim tensions and further destabilizing the Middle East. What Pakistan or its illiterate masses thinks about American killing of Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders on their territory is irrelevant. Pakistan exists because the United States for decades has been propping up this little Islamic wasteland run by kleptocrats and military dunces. The country is a failed state that exists as the central exporter of international terrorism across the world. What has become completely evident after the assassination is that individuals within Pakistan and its government have been hiding and protecting Bin Laden for years. Given the overall lawlessness and criminal actions of the Pakistani state, there is little reason anyone should consider anything that this country wants as legitimate.

Chomsky further states that Obama has become even more reckless than Bush in using drone attacks on targets. The problem with this statement is that is exactly what Obama didn't do when he sent military personnel to kill Bin Laden. Today Bin Laden's family members that were hiding with him in Pakistan are alive and not dead.  Something that Bin Laden's victims cannot claim.

I for one am in complete agreement with UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon, who said

“The death of Osama bin Laden … is a watershed moment in our common global fight against terrorism…Personally, I am very much relieved by the news that justice has been done.”

For all his faults, President Obama did the right thing and all civilized people should applaud his actions, instead of trying to score cheap rhetorical points in defending the indefensible.

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.

Quote of the day: Gabrielle Giffords on language

"They really need to realize that the rhetoric and firing people up, and, you know, even things for example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, you gotta realize there's consequences to that action."

- Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D, AZ), March 2010 in response to Sarah Palin's crosshairs graphic.

Sarah Palin, accomplice in mass murder!

Is this a reasonable graphic?  Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in an induced coma, didn't think so when asked about the above graphic issued by Palin, which implores Republican supporters to "reload" and keep pursuing their Democratic Party opponents.  In fact, the local Arizonan Republican candidate to oust Ms. Giffords did far more than Caribou Barbie.  He actually had a gun rally, where they said "Remove Gabrielle Giffords from office, shoot a fully automatic M-16." (ref. below)

Again, this type of inflammatory rhetoric isn't coming from fringe elements and outliers, this is coming from Party leaders, and no less than a former Vice-Presidential candidate of the USA herself.

If the above isn't sufficient to validate the depravity of these so-called Christians, consider what another Republican candidate and Tea party-backed congresswoman Michele Bachmann had to say on the subject:

Controversial Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said this weekend that she wants residents of her state "armed and dangerous" over President Barack Obama's plan to reduce global warming "because we need to fight back."

Whether these politicians believe what they are saying or are merely ginning up the facile minded dunces of the gun-totting "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" crowd is irrelevant to me.  They are inciting political violence to achieve political aims.  That and that alone is what the last decade has been all about: the war and struggle against violent extremism and terrorism!

Neither their words nor actions have been misconstrued by anyone to be merely metaphorical.   They themselves clearly defend their stance as a violent defense against Washingtonian corruption and capitulation to liberalism.  The only question left, is when is the Department of Justice going to start applying the laws uniformly and start sending Republicans to enjoy the warm sunshine and if Dick Cheney can be believed, excellent health care, in Guantanamo, Cuba?

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.

Penalizing Competence in the US Military

Tom Ricks has posted a couple of articles on Lt. Col Michael Mori.  According to Mori, the Pentagon was unhappy with his defense of an Australian enemy combatant at Guantanamo in 2003 and thus delayed his promotion for three years.

During the trial period, Mori said that the tribunal system was fundamentally flawed and that the government did not want to give his client a fair trial.  Marine Corps Times quotes Mori as stating to an interviewer, “I think his case has become political and … the first military commissions can’t be acquittals. They couldn’t afford that.” 

Today, he is now suing the Navy for what he claims is capricious treatment toward him for zealously executing his duty.

A followup commentary by a former JAG in Ricks' blog underlies the absolute nonsense that the military is the best setting for evaluating the criminality of foreign combatants.

I don't know anything about Mori's case, but I do know that if you want a long and successful career as an Army lawyer, you'd better remember "you are an Army officer first, and a defense counsel second." In other words, don't rock the boat. In fact, I would never advise a JAG to accept a defense counsel post if they hoped for a long career. Too much institutional bias against the necessary work that they are forced to do on behalf of their accused.

Fuelling the Clash of the Civilizations Meme!

Despite the fact that few persons on either side of the so-called Clash of the Civilizations divide actually want a "clash", there are those zealots who feel that wholesale planetary warfare is a positive course of action for the species. 

I've already discussed the rationals, why Bin Laden and his Islamist cohorts felt compelled to engage in their terrorist actions in previous posts (here and here).  The nature of the Islamist mind frame, generally speaking, is that of a victim seeking vengeance to mollify either actual or perceived attacks upon him and his metaphysical being.  To further the socio-political aims of its leaders, it requires a population, or at least a subset, to use the process of psychological transference, where their existing angst, anger, and inadequacies can be directly attributed to an externality that can be understood as the "other." In this case, the other is America or more generally Western civilization. For example, in an attempt to create a focus point in which they can blame the nation's inherent failings upon, the Mullahs inveigh against the "Great Satan". By transferring their own failures to America, they draw distinctions for their loyal followers of the high mindedness and virtue of their cause.  As the Green Revolution of 2009 has shown however, the majority of educated Iranians and youth, which form the majority of the population, find this decades old form of propaganda tiresome and repressive.

One has to remember, that across most of the Islamic world, their rulers are little more than quisling satraps whose existence is dictated by their utility to American hegemony. With the end of the cold war and advent of a more multipolar world, these nations offer America either oil reserves or strategic geopolitical use.  Equally, the governments of these nations are intimately aware of their own dependency on America's military, financial, and technical resources to exist. Weak failed states like Iraq -which has now been occupied by American forces for 19-years- and Afghanistan -occupied by NATO and Western forces for nine years- would most certainly degenerate into further civil war or complete disintegration without a firm military presence in the region; American or otherwise. Thus, while the specter of American hegemony may rankle the masses in many Islamic countries, those in control understand that if left to the demented illogic of absolute religious divinity over regional politics as espoused by factional leaders, these nations would combust into fratricidal violence and destabilize whole swaths of world.  For a thousand years, these people have been ruled and governed by others, and for good reason.

On the other hand, America's religious buffoons are hopped up on pushing humanity towards Armageddon and driving a war with the Kings of the East to validate Biblical prophecies.  For example, Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida has proposed that on the 9th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist assault on America, that his flock will burn Qu'rans (aka. the Koran).  The moral equivalence argument has been made that Muslims are attacking American Christianity through the construction of the Cordoba Cultural Center in New York.  The response by this lot, to this perceived slight, is to engage in a classic book burning exercise.  America's Republican party through their coy electoral race-baiting strategies have unleashed the most bigoted and unstable element of its confederacy of dunces.  General Petraeus, the Pentagon, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Obama, and numerous religious and national leaders across the world, including even PM Stephen Harper of Canada, have denounced the racism and brutal stupidity of this action, which they insist will further marginalize those who support American objectives in the Middle East and across the world. 

While the military-industrial complex and the mandarins of war need and demand that this segment of idiots ferment a rational for the Pentagon's exorbitant budgets, the rest of the world needs to contain, quarantine, and sterilize these maladroits before we are further dragged into their dystopian and self-destructive fantasies.

The First Ground Zero Mosque - The Original World Trade Towers!

An article in Slate illustrates the profound conceptual disconnect most people have between what the actual World Trade Towers were and its relation to Bin Laden and the 9-11 attacks.  Given the ignominious and bigoted diatribe offered by both the right and left on the subject of the Cordoba House Project in New York City near ground zero (discussed here, here, and here), this is a welcome anodyne.

The original towers were designed by Minoru Yamasaki, a Japanese American, who gained popularity with the House of Saud (The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) in the early 1950's.  Many of his designs, including the entire World Trade Tower complex as constructed in the 1970's, used Islamic themes and architectural conceits.  The article outlines a few of these elements in the overall WTC design:

• At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches—derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam—as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above.
• Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.
• The dense filigree of complex geometries alludes to a higher spiritual reality in Islam, and the shimmering quality of Islamic patterning relates to the veil that wraps the Qa'ba at Mecca.

The author of the Slate article infers that the Bin Laden family's construction company were intimately associated with many of the projects that occurred in Saudi Arabia and Osama Bin Laden, himself, would have been well aware of Yamaski's utilization of Islamic themes.  She then postulates that one of the rationals, although not necessarily the primary reason, for Bin Laden to attack the WTC towers, was that the buildings represented an intermixing of the Islam, modernity, and international capitalism. 

To Bin Laden, the World Trade Center was probably not only an international landmark but also a false idol.

It should also be understood, that the attack on 9-11, contrary to the facile arguments posited by the MSM and the Bush Administration, were not merely an attack on America.  Michael Scheuer, former CIA counter-terrorism expert on Bin Laden, explained in his book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, that the attacks were meant to provoke the US to expand their presence in the Middle East and engage in a clash of the civilizations battle with Islam that would destabilize apostate and pro-American regimes, eventually forcing the Americans and their lackeys into permanent retreat; like that of the Soviet Union during their Afghan conflict.  Bin Laden, in 2007, stated that if people wanted to understand the conflict, that they should, "read the book of Michael Scheuer in this regard."

Nick Clegg, The Iraq Invasion was illegal!

During question period in the British House of Commons this week, Nick Clegg, the current Deputy Prime Minister of the UK coalition government, attacked the morally bankrupt and perennially dishonest Labour Party for its role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  He lashed out at Jack Straw by proclaiming, "We may have to wait for his memoirs, but perhaps one day he will account for his role in the most disastrous decision of all: the illegal invasion of Iraq."

No one outside the coterie of miserable propagandists who sold the lies advocating for the invasion of Iraq consider the facts in dispute.  Kofi Annan, as Secretary-General of the United Nations, told the BBC in 2004 that the US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN charter.  The egregious falsehoods, exaggerations, and manufactured evidence posited by Tony Blair's Labour Party, Bush's bipartisan fraud-fest, and the usual suspects in the media and military-industrial complex now lie tattered and recognized for what it actually was.  The new UK coalition government, unlike the cowards in the Obama administration, have created an Iraq War inquiry to understand the details surrounding the decision to go to war.  Already, some startling details have been exposed.  For example, former MI-5 intel chief Baroness Manningham-Buller stated that "we regarded the threat, the direct threat from Iraq as low."

Tom Ricks summarizes on his Foreign Policy blog,

As for al Qaeda and Iraq, she said, "there was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection and that was the judgment, I might say, of the CIA. It was not a judgment that found favour with some parts of the American machine, as you have also heard evidence on, which is why Donald Rumsfeld started an intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment."

Furthermore, Baroness Manningham-Buller elaborated that the invasion of Iraq, instead of diminishing the overall risk and likelihood of terrorism on British soil, in fact exacerbated the threat from indigenous Muslim radicals.  The blowback of the 7/7 London transit system was not unexpected.  Most damning of all was her stated opinion that the intelligence on Iraq's threat was not "substantial enough" to justify the action.  Of course, much of this is old news.  Opponents and skeptics of the institutional claims have long been aware of Blair's dodgy dossier consisting of "sexed-up" warnings and memos disclosed by whistle-blowers describing how Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush had predetermined the outcome of invasion.

However, the above revelations were not what caught the attention of the press.  Rather, as the Guardian newspaper outlines, was that others considered Clegg's statement in parliament to be a 'gaffe' with the potential that Britain may face charges in some future International court.  The government, more interested in covering their collective asses, distanced themselves by saying that Clegg was expressing his "long-held view" about the Iraq conflict as leader of the Liberal-Democrats.  Downing Street further stated that the government would await the findings of the Chilcot inquiry prior to reaching a view on the war.  It's an odd statement, since Tony Blair's own attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, prior to the war explicitly said, "I remain of the view that the correct legal interpretation of [UN security council] resolution 1441 is that it does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the security council."

CIA Agents Sought by Spanish Prosecutors

Scott Horton at Harper's Magazine is stating that, "Prosecutors attached to the Audiencia Nacional in Madrid are reportedly requesting that Judge Ismael Moreno issue an order for the arrest of thirteen CIA agents involved in an extraordinary rendition operation from 2004."

The agency has come under substantial investigation over the past few years for their gross incompetence and servitude to the Bush junta's policies of extrajudicial kidnapping, torture, and murder.  For example, only last year 23 American intelligence officers were found guilty, in absentia, of the kidnapping and extraordinary rendition of an Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar, who the CIA agents seized off the streets of Milan, took to Egypt, and then subsequently tortured.

Similarly, in 2004 another individual named,

Khaled El-Masri, a greengrocer from Neu-Ulm, Germany, [was] seized by the United States as a result of mistaken identity while he was on vacation in the former Yugoslavia. El-Masri was placed on a CIA-chartered jet that arrived in Macedonia from Palma de Majorca in January 2004, en route ultimately to Afghanistan. It appears that Majorca was used regularly as a refueling and temporary sheltering point for the CIA, with the knowledge of the prior conservative government. While held in the notorious CIA prison known as the Salt Pit, El-Masri was apparently tortured during extensive interrogations before intelligence officers realized that they had seized the wrong man. The Washington Post reported that CIA agents, fearing the consequences of releasing him, argued for his continued detention and in fact held him for at least several weeks after his release had been ordered. Condoleezza Rice, then national security advisor to President Bush, intervened and directed his release. El-Masri’s CIA abductors entered Spanish territory using forged British passports, according to the prosecutors.

Criminal proceedings are also underway in Germany on similar charges of kidnapping and torture.

The Torture Debate: Making comparisons

NY Times Editorial column comes down hard on the cowardice that has become the legal system in America when it comes to addressing the high crimes of the Bush junta. It makes the comparison between the Maher Arar case that was recently dismissed in American courts versus the verdict issued last week against CIA operatives in Italy regarding the extraordinary rendition of an Islamic cleric. Again and again as the editorial elaborates, the US judiciary dismisses these cases of gross institutional criminality on the basis of fatuous "state secrets" claims or punts the claimant's to higher courts.

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NYT: A National Disgrace

Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture. The Italian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong.

In Italy, a judge ruled that a station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency and 22 other Americans broke the law in the 2003 abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim cleric who ended up in Egypt, where he said he was tortured.

Two days earlier, a federal appeals court in Manhattan brushed off a lawsuit by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was seized in an American airport by federal agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials. He was held incommunicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was tortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians let him go.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided that none of that entitled Mr. Arar to a day in court.

In Mr. Nasr’s case, authorities said that they had reason to suspect he was involved in recruiting militants to go to Iraq. It has long been established that Mr. Arar was not guilty of anything. Canada admitted that it had supplied false information to American authorities, and in 2007, it apologized and offered Mr. Arar $10 million in damages. Neither the Bush nor Obama administrations followed suit, leaving Mr. Arar to pursue litigation.

In June 2008, a three-judge panel of the same court dismissed Mr. Arar’s civil rights suit on flimsy grounds. The court then took a rare step, scheduling a rehearing before all of the court’s active members before an appeal was filed. Sadly, the full court’s decision is even more insensitive to the violation of his rights and the courts’ duty to hold government accountable for breaches of the law.

Written by Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs, the 59-page majority opinion held that no civil damages remedy exists for the horrors visited on Mr. Arar. To “decide how to implement extraordinary rendition,” he wrote, is “for the elected members of Congress — and not for us as judges.” Allowing suits against policy makers for rendition and torture would “affect diplomacy, foreign policy and the security of the nation,” Judge Jacobs said.

The ruling distorts precedent and the Constitutional separation of powers to deny justice to Mr. Arar and give officials a pass for egregious misconduct. The overt disregard for the central role of judges in policing executive branch excesses has frightening implications for safeguarding civil liberties, as four judges suggested in dissenting opinions.

It is painful to recall that this is the same federal circuit court that declared in 1980 that even foreigners accused of torture in foreign countries can be called to account in American courts.

The torturer is the “enemy of all mankind,” the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declared back then. One of the dissenters, Judge Guido Calabresi, said that “when the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay.”

The damage to Mr. Arar, America’s reputation and the rule of law is already quite plain. The Supreme Court should reverse this ruling.

Taxi Drivers to the Dark Side Convicted

In common law, rendition "is a transfer of persons from one jurisdiction to another, and the act of handing over, both after legal proceedings and according to law." Whereas, extraordinary rendition is a rendition, which is illegal and exists outside the bounds of international law. Although the practice has existed for some time, according to the ACLU, it was refined during the Clinton administration by CIA officials in the mid-1990s who were trying to track down and dismantle militant Islamic organizations throughout the Middle East. What came next under the watchful eye of the Bush junta and its own clandestine services, has come to exemplify the reckless cowboy-like swagger and irresponsibility of both the policies and people tasked to execute those orders.

Canadians are well versed in the tawdry details involved with the Mahar Arar extraordinary rendition case. As summarized in Wikipedia:

Arar, a Syrian-born dual Syrian and Canadian citizen, was detained at Kennedy International Airport on 26 September 2002, by US Immigration and Naturalization Service officials. He was heading home to Canada after a family holiday in Tunisia. After almost two weeks, enduring hours of interrogation chained, he was sent, shackled and bound, in a private jet to Jordan and then Syria, instead of being extradited to Canada. There, he was interrogated and tortured by Syrian intelligence. Maher Arar was eventually released a year later. He told the BBC that he was repeatedly tortured during 10 months' detention in Syria — often whipped on the palms of his hands with metal cables. Syrian intelligence officers forced him to sign a confession linking him to Al Qaeda. He was finally released following intervention by the Canadian government.

These illegal embarrassments, when revealed, have been completely ignored by the American judiciary and investigations into criminal activities committed by the Executive under George W. Bush have been scuttled by the Obama administration. However, not all countries consider the principles of justice to be malleable and subordinate to governmental abuse. After years legal blockage, an Italian judge has sentenced 23 Americans in absentia to up to eight years in prison on Wednesday for the abduction and extraordinary rendition of a Muslim cleric.

The case surrounds the actions of CIA agents, who were tasked with "the secret kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan in early 2003, his transport via US airbases in Italy and Germany to Egypt, and there, evidently with the CIA station chief for Italy riding shotgun, directly into the hands of Egyptian torturers." The problem with the whole affair was that their actions were anything but secret. Believing they were immune from all prosecution and international law, the agents were observed by Italian police publicly talking on their cell phones, running up huge expenses at luxury hotels, and were caught in their rental cars by local traffic cameras "as they drove illegally through pedestrian walkways." Obviously not being able to watch the Bourne Ultimatum in cinema, they were completely unaware of how clandestine operations were to be conducted.

According to the NY Times,

The heaviest sentence -- eight years in prison -- was handed down to the former head of the CIA's Milan station, Robert Seldon Lady, while 21 other former agents got five years each. U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Romano was also sentenced to five years, despite a request from the Pentagon that the case should be tried by U.S. courts. [Judge] Magi dropped the case against three Americans, including a former CIA Rome station chief, because of diplomatic immunity. Charges were also dropped against five Italians, including the former head of the Sismi military intelligence service, Nicolo Pollari, because evidence against them violated state secrecy rules. However, the judge sentenced two more junior Sismi agents to three years in prison as accomplices, indicating Italian authorities were aware of the abduction.

Instead of having foreign governments with an independent judiciary prosecute the criminal activities of the CIA and members of the Bush administration, the Democratic led Congress and Presidency should be reaffirming constitutional law and prosecuting those persons, agencies, and officials who violated America's treaty obligations and casually prescribed kidnapping, murder, and torture as America's new modus operandi in fighting terrorism. Then again, that would entail caring about anything other than just being elected.

FLQ Terrorists of Quebec: Osama's Brethren

'Have you ever seen a bus full of the English blow up?'

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When examples of terrorist threats from Canada are considered, there are a number of obvious examples. The first being the millennium bomber, Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian recruited by Al-Qaeda to infiltrate and destroy Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on the eve of the 2000 new year. Through his ineptitude and the good work on the part of US custom agents, Ressam was caught. The second example is the case of the Toronto-18, a group of delinquent youth with lofty ambitions, who conspired to blow up federal buildings in Toronto and Ottawa and behead Prime Minister Stephen Harper. While these pack-mules for Islamic duncery have been given plenty of press, they fail to reach the levels of criminality and wishful mayhem that Canada's first home grown terrorists, the FLQ, achieved.

The FLQ (Front de Libération du Quebec) was a left-wing nationalist and socialist revolutionary group in Quebec, with at least two terrorist cells. It was responsible for more than 200 bombings, including the bombing of the Montreal Stock Exchange in 1969 and the deaths of at least five people. These attacks culminated in 1970 with what is known as the October Crisis, in which British Trade Commissioner James Cross was kidnapped and Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte was murdered.

In today's Montreal Gazette is a reminder that while the faces and exact threats to civilized society may change, the intent and desire by small groups driven by ideological fervor and murderous contempt of their fellow citizens remains constant. The author provides a chilling recount of their anarchist mind frame, which is nearly verbatim to the bogus self-serving victimology and ethno-religious superiority espoused by the above Islamists. Consider the FLQ's language, "We do not terrorize our people; on the contrary, the Front de Libération du Quebec is a vast front of love and fraternity."

Then examine their "loving" declarations:

In a little while the English, the federalists, the exploiters, the toadies of the occupiers, the lackeys of imperialism - all those who betray the workers and the Quebec nation - will fear for their lives and they will be right. For the FLQ will kill ... Our present cells will look like amateurs when our elite groups go into action.

Have you ever seen a bus full of the English blow up?
Have you ever seen an English library burning?
Have you ever seen the president of a Yankee corporation under fire?
Have you ever seen a pellet micro-bomb?
Have you ever seen a miniature incendiary bomb?
Have you ever seen a can explode on the shelf of a supermarket in the British quarter?
Have you ever seen a Protestant church burning?
Have you ever seen Westmount without telephones or electricity and with its water supply poisoned?
Have you ever seen sharp-shooters ambushed on roofs, shooting down traitors?
Be sure you soon will!!!

Despite the continuous failures of these domestic terrorists to achieve their ends, whether it is in the context of killing school children in Beslan Russia, murdering pre-schoolers at the Oklahoma federal building bombing, the incinerating of civilians in London, Madrid, or Bali attacks; it is also quite apparent that there will always remain an entrenched and obscene element of our society who affiliate themselves with these murderous entities. Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Quebec separatist party, the Bloc Quebecois, recently defended plans to read aloud the 1970 FLQ manifesto (a lengthy left-wing screed against the ills of capitalism) during a cultural festival in Quebec City, telling reporters it is history and those who object are condoning "censorship." When the manifesto was read to a public gathering at the outdoor festival, cheers of "Bravo" and the FLQ's battle-cry for revolution and social mayhem, “Nous vaincrons” (we will overcome) could be heard from sympathizers.

It is no doubt then why Ressam found himself such a welcomed guest within the province of Quebec, prior to his deluded mission.