The Pentagon and All Its Suckers (That Would Be Us)

Gargantua's mouth:
The Pentagon and the suckers

By Saul Landau and Nelson P. Valdes / February 27, 2010

The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionally degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors. The transition from this disposition to that of considering them masters, is neither remote nor difficult; but it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions, to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power." -- Alexander Hamilton

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." - Dwight Eisenhower, January 17, 1961, Farewell Address.

During pre-game Super Bowl ceremonies Queen Latifah sang America the Beautiful. Following her, American Idol winner Carrie Underwood began warbling the Star Spangled Banner. Four jet fighters swished over the stadium. Did any of the cheering crowd or the tens of millions watching on TV ask how much it cost to have the thrill of two screaming jets offer the public supersonic foreplay before extra large men smashed and bashed through the thin membrane (the line) to reach the tantalizing quarterback?

In his farewell address, Eisenhower would not have dreamed of adding military sports/entertainment complex to his now fabled military industrial, military scientific and academic complexes. Rather, he called for "statesmanship" by which he meant molding, balancing, and integrating "these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."

Empty rhetoric? Now, 44 cents of every taxpayer's dollar feeds the military budget at a time when no nation has a military capable of challenging us. Maybe Obama should call for a national holiday just to appreciate the failure of Presidents and Congresses to take Ike's warning seriously.

The Orwellian name change from War Department to Defense Department should have sparked national skepticism. Since 1947, DoD holds the world record for spending, but has yet to defend the United States. Under the pretext of defense, Truman sent troops to Korea (Eisenhower stopped U.S. involvement in that war). Subsequently, U.S. troops have attacked and occupied more than a dozen countries, none of which threatened U.S. territory (Korea, Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan).

The DoD, however, cannot claim victory in its four major wars: Korea (1950-3), Vietnam (1964-75), Afghanistan (2001-?), and Iraq (2003-?). Before each invasion, war advocates shook the impending "domino" effect. Now it's the spread of terrorism. During the Cold War, all Asia would somehow fall under red rule if the Chinese or Vietnamese Communists won in Korea or Vietnam. The Communist Party still rules in China and Vietnam, both major U.S. trade partners. U.S. forces triumphed in Grenada and Panama where they met no major and ongoing resistance, and during Gulf War I, when Iraqi troops retreated and got "turkey shot.")

Last December, despite the DoD's no-win record when the enemy fights back and without any sign that a rival nation plans an attack against us or any of our vulnerable allies, Congress passed without debate the highest "defense" budget in human history.

Since 1988, as the Soviet Union neared collapse and no major power threatened, the military has ingested some $5.1 trillion. From 1999 to 2010, the DoD budget increased 153%. After 2001, when 19 suicidal men armed with box cutters hijacked and crashed planes into buildings, the Pentagon spent more than it did in Cold War years.

Every two years since 2001, the military budget has grown approximately $100 billion. Did this reasoning presume more military prowess would defeat civilian suicide bombers? Add to the Pentagon budget, $17 billion in military-related items from the Department of Energy, plus $70 billion for Homeland Security (isn't that redundant with Defense Department?), $38 billion from the Military Retirement Funds found within the Department of the Treasury, and military-related aid within the Department of State: the present budget exceeds $1 trillion.

By 2008, total weapons acquisition "cost growth" had reached nearly $300 billion over initial estimates. In other words, cost overruns of weapons alone surpassed the total 2000 defense budget! Why did the United States government invest more, and at an increased rate, than when it faced all the Soviet divisions and 20,000 nuclear weapons?

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, "the USA is responsible for 41.5 per cent of the world's total defense spending, distantly followed by China (5.8% of world share), France (4.5%), the UK (4.5%), and Russia (4%)."

In 2005, the total value of DoD assets was estimated at $1.3 trillion, with $1.9 trillion in liabilities. The Department has a workforce of over 2.9 million of military and civilian personnel, much larger than any other organization worldwide.

Wal-Mart, the largest corporate employer, has 1.8 million on payroll. The Pentagon's workforce is twice as large. The net income of the top 10 global Fortune 500s (including Exxon, Wal-Mart, BP, and Chevron) does not reach even 50% of DoD's budget.

Last year, the Pentagon had 539,000 facilities (buildings, structures, and linear structures), and 5,570 military sites; it also occupies 29 million acres of land, almost half the size of the United Kingdom.

The United States also has 837 overseas military bases, not including undisclosed secret bases. The Pentagon has 716 bases in 150 of the 192 countries in the world; others in U.S. territories abroad. The DoD does not count facilities with value of less than $10 million or those occupying less than 10 acres. The Pentagon itself claims the record for biggest building in human history (6.5 million square feet), 37 times larger than the Capitol.

Business scams promise high rates of return at little risk to investors. The Pentagon, however, pledges only to keep the nation well defended from all outside threats. Since no military threats have existed for almost two decades, DoD officials and their neo-con cousins invent them. And the suckers -- U.S. taxpayers -- invest.

[Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow whose A Bush and a Botox World was published by Counterpunch. Nelson P. Valdés is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico.]

Source / CounterPunch

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Health Care Reform : A Bad Proposal or a Worse One?

Senator Alexander, sitting next to Senator McCain, provided the Republicans' opening statement at the Health Care Forum at Blair House, and he challenged President Obama and the Democrats "to renounce jamming it through in a partisan way." Photo: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times.
Corporate Restructuring of Healthcare
Fails the American People

By Billy Wharton / The Rag Blog / February 26, 2010

At the President’s Healthcare Summit today, the American people witnessed a debate between the bad proposal for healthcare reform and the even worse one. The Democrats' House and Senate bills fail to address the growing problems of for-profit healthcare. Instead, by mandating the purchase of healthcare, their plan will create a profitable market for private health insurance companies to exploit.

The Republicans' counter-proposal, which seeks to allow consumers to buy insurance plans across state lines, would reverse decades of necessary reforms carried out at the state level. This would give mega-healthcare corporations a free-hand to expand their already abusive practices.

While the two parties squabble about how to carry out the corporate restructuring of healthcare, the American people continue to suffer under a for-profit healthcare system. 50 million people are uninsured, another 20 million underinsured and nearly 50,000 people die each year from preventable illnesses. In response, millions of Americans have begun to avoid healthcare -- a recent survey indicates that six out of 10 have either deferred or delayed necessary care in the last year.

A fundamental political shift in the healthcare debate is necessary. Instead of a discussion of how markets should operate or how to build the proper risk pool to insure profits, we should be examining how to recognize healthcare as a basic human right.

Simply put, healthcare should not be treated as a commodity. Private health insurers provide no medical benefit to the people they cover. They merely extract profits from the doctor-patient relationship. Instead, we should create a comprehensive medical system that guarantees no-charge access and the provision of all medically necessary care.

Near the end of today’s summit, President Barack Obama asked “Can America, the wealthiest nation on earth, do what every industrialized country in the world does?” As a socialist, my answer is yes, but it will not come from the Democratic or Republican proposals. Instead, a single-payer National Healthcare Program would provide universal access for all people in America. Such a program would pave the way for the creation of a fully-socialized medical system that would ensure healthcare as a human right.

The time for high-level summits and backroom wrangling among politicians who have received large-scale contributions from private insurers and pharmaceutical companies has ended. It is now time for the creation of a mass social movement that expresses the desires of everyday Americans for a medical system organized around the values of solidarity, compassion, and justice. Rejecting both the Democratic and Republican proposals will be a key part of this process.

[Billy Wharton is the co-chair of the Socialist Party USA and the editor of The Socialist and the Socialist WebZine.]

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Juan Cole on the U.S. Defense Budget

Gates Wants Europe to Beggar Itself on War Expenditures the Way the U.S. Has

By Juan Cole / February 25, 2010

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates decries Europe for general anti-war sentiment, unwillingness to beggar itself with expenditures on war.

But as far as I can tell, Europe is the world's largest economy and got there without any recent substantial wars except those the U.S. dragged it into. Moreover, the fastest-growing economy for the past nearly 30 years has been China, which spends a fraction on their military of what the US spends on its, and, aside from a skirmish with Vietnam in the early 1980s, has been at peace. Apparently massive war expenditures are unrelated to economic growth or prosperity.

In contrast, the U.S. has been at war for 19 of the last 47 years (not counting U.S.-backed insurgencies such as 1980s Afghanistan, on which we spent billions) but has not grown faster than the other two economically.

Moreover, the increasingly unwieldy U.S. national debt, deriving from the U.S. government spending more than it took in in recent decades, would not exist if the U.S. military budget had been the same as that of the European Union since 1980. The U.S. overspent on its military because Washington mistakenly thought the Soviet economy was twice as big as it actually was, and vastly over-estimated Soviet military capabilities.

The bloated military budgets continue now, apparently because of a couple thousand al-Qaeda operatives hiding out in caves in the Hadhramawt and Waziristan.

Some statistics to ponder:

U.S. Military Budget 2009: $711 billion
European Union Military Budget 2009: $289 billion
China Military Budget 2009: $122 billion.

U.S. GDP 2009: $14.4 trillion
European Union GDP 2009: $16.5 trillion (PPP)
China GDP 2009: $8.8 trillion (PPP)

U.S. economic growth 2009: 0.2%
European Union economic growth 2009: -4%
China economic growth 2009: 8.7 %

The real military-related expenditures of the U.S. are closer to $1 trillion. If the US cut those back to the level of the European Union and spent the money on promoting solar energy and making it inexpensive, America would have a chance of remaining a great power in the 21st century. If it goes on rampaging around the world bankrupting itself by invading and occupying other countries, the Chinese will laugh at us all the way to world dominance.

Source / Informed Comment

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Spying on Americans : Reagan and the PROMIS Conspiracy

It's a national tradition:
Spying on Americans

• Part II: Reagan administration acquires PROMIS software

By James Retherford and Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / February 2, 2010

[This is the second installment in a series about the U.S. government's extensive and inglorious history of spying on its own people.]

After Watergate and other revelations of illegal government intrusions led to Congress-mandated clamping down on intelligence operations in the mid-1970s, Ronald Reagan immediately set out to roll back the reforms. With former CIA director George H. W. Bush as his running mate, Reagan received considerable assistance from the intelligence community in the election of 1980. This may have included a secret trip to Paris -- as has been widely asserted -- to make a deal with Iranians guaranteeing that Jimmy Carter would not be able to retrieve the 42 American hostages before the November election, the so-called "October Surprise."

Reagan approved hiring the many private intelligence firms founded by former agents who had been ousted in the 1970s. He also brought psy-op people from the agency to the White House and State Department, using them in “public diplomacy programs” to mold public opinion. Vice President George H.W. Bush oversaw efforts to harass and spy on dissidents.

The coup de grace: the Reagan Justice Department “commandeered” (i.e., stole) a remarkable computer database program called Prosecutor's Management Information System or PROMIS which would serve as the basis for domestic and global surveillance operations for decades to come.

The story of PROMIS has become a Hollywood-style thriller replete with drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, rogue agents and alleged contract murderers, high-tech looting and international espionage, drug cartels, the Mafia, and the Yakuza, allegations of mass murder and massive cover-up, and near war with Japan... all fingers pointing to massive government corruption by Ronald Reagan’s coterie of friends in the Ed Meese Department of Justice.

This is compelling stuff for any legit investigative reporter, and indeed many — such as Joel Bleifuss, Barron’s, and Richard L. Fricker in the inaugural issue of Wired — have taken a shot at connecting the dots. But the scent of blood has also lured the conspiracy sleuths and rightwing demagogues ranging from Alex Jones to Lyndon LaRouche and the Moonies.

Here is what we make of the story.

Reagan rolled back reforms initiated after the Watergate break in.

The PROMIS... and more

Funded by grant money from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), PROMIS software had been developed in the 1970s by the INSLAW Corporation, a small software development company owned by William and Nancy Hamilton, for integrating criminal justice records.

“But the real power of PROMIS,” Fricker writes in Wired,

“is that with a staggering 570,000 lines of computer code, PROMIS can integrate innumerable databases without requiring any reprogramming. In essence, PROMIS can turn blind data into information. And anyone in government will tell you that information, when wielded with finesse, begets power. Converted to use by intelligence agencies, as has been alleged in interviews by ex-CIA and Israeli Mossad agents, PROMIS can be a powerful tracking device capable of monitoring intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.”

As it was being pitched to the Justice Department, government officials quickly recognized that its capability potential was for more advanced than any data integration system previously developed. PROMIS could be programmed to do everything from tracking all kinds of financial transactions to mapping troop movements in all parts of the world to monitoring intelligence operations, agents, and targets. It could used to acquire and integrate data in various foreign languages. Through an artificial intelligence component codenamed “Brainstorm,” PROMIS extended personality profiling into the realm of predicting an individual’s thoughts and future actions.

The Justice Department first signed a $10 million contract to lease the software and then simply seized it and drove INSLAW into bankruptcy, trying to force liquidation to a rival firm, Hadron, inc., controlled by a key Reagan crony named Dr. Earl Brian.

Brian had already ridden the coattails of Reagan and Attorney General Ed Meese from the former California governor’s state cabinet to a number of lucrative business holdings, including United Press International and Financial News Network (FNN), and allegedly was a key player in the so-called October Surprise, in which Reagan operatives, including vice presidential candidate Bush, have been alleged to have met with Iranian diplomats in Paris and arranged a deal to short circuit Jimmy Carter’s hostage release negotiations until after the 1980 election.

Ignoring the licensing agreement, the DoJ soon passed PROMIS along to other government agencies, including the CIA, though the U.S. government consistently denied this. There followed a long battle through the courts in which INSLAW unsuccessfully tried to obtain redress for the government’s theft of its intellectual property. Those who still believe in the integrity of our judicial system should research the case. For a time INSLAW was represented by Elliott Richardson, who argued compellingly that the matter called for a special investigator.

The CIA was not the only place where illegal versions of PROMIS showed up. According to former Israeli spy Ari Ben-Menashe, the U.S. sold the program to Israel. Ben-Menashe claims that Mossad counterterrorism expert Rafael Eitan first thought of the idea of bugging PROMIS and then selling it to Israel’s enemies in order to snoop on their security and intelligence activities undetected; Israel’s “trapdoor” was reportedly designed by an Israeli American living in Chatsworth, CA.

In turn, the Israelis sold the software to a number of national intelligence services, including Jordan and Iraq, as well as financial institutions, most notably the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) which used PROMIS to track money flow on behalf of U.S. and British intelligence agencies before imploding into a spectacular bank failure in 1991. Though Degem, a software company owned by British media mogul (and secret Israeli agent) Robert Maxwell, PROMIS was sold to the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries.

The software also slipped into Dr. Brian’s hands, allegedly as a payoff towards favors owed for Brian’s help during the October Surprise. From there Brian engaged the services of rogue computer expert Michael Riconoscuito to create a U.S. version with a secret backdoor allowing undetected U.S. intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on PROMIS users’ activities.

These modifications were done at a facility located on the Cabazon Indian reservation in Indio, CA, owned by Wackenhut, a Florida-based security company with FBI and CIA connections (and an alleged weapons fencing operation for Oliver North’s Iran-Contra dealings).

Wackenhut was founded by retired FBI and CIA executives and is often called the “FBI’s FBI.” Biological weapons and explosives were also developed at its Cabezon facility, located on tribal land officially administered by a self-professed former CIA operative, John Philip Nichols, who later would be convicted of murder solicitation in the death of a tribal official who allegedly had information linking Nichols to misappropriated money involving Wackenhut, illegal arms deals, gaming, and the mob.

Through Hadron, Brian sold the bugged PROMIS to Britain, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Iraq, and Canada. The illegal sale to Canada was discovered by accident when a Canadian government agency telephoned INSLAW requesting a French-language version of the software.

Perhaps the murkiest allegations about the distribution of the Trojan Horse-version of PROMIS came from Debra von Trapp, a technical expert who was hired by the Bush I administration and claims to have worked on a number of clandestine operations, including the bugging and installation of spyware in the White House as Bill Clinton prepared to move in. Von Trapp also claims to have been involved in a CIA project, staged out of a Xerox plant in Germany, to install spyware-enhanced PROMIS on hard drives being sold to Eastern Bloc intelligence agencies, including the KGB.

During the senior Bush’s term, von Trapp was a member of a team developing software to mine all sorts of information about people’s personal lives, allegedly run out of Oliver North’s office at the Department of Justice.

At the same time Riconoscuito was developing a spyware backdoor, another consultant, Barry Kumnick, whose father Frank was an Aryan Nation ideologue living next door to Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, ID, was creating an artificial intelligent component called Brainstorm which could allow technicians to predict an individual’s thinking and future action. Kumnick’s early work later morphed into the Total Information Awareness program under the second Bush. It is said that work on the program was stopped when Bush Senior was not reelected, but the work just as likely continued under the radar.

Investigative reporter Danny Casolaro's was "suicided" and his notes and tape recorder were missing.

Like any good spy story, the Islaw-PROMIS saga is marked by its trail of dead, disappeared, and discredited, with claims of as many as 50 murdered. The most remembered casualty was investigative reporter Danny Casolaro, whose naked body was found in a blood-filled bathtub in a Martinsburg, WV, hotel room with multiple slash wounds on his arms and wrists.

Missing was his ever-present briefcase, tape recorder, and notes and outline of his proposed book about the web of intrigue surrounding Iran-Contra, the savings and loan meltdown, BCCI, Contra-connected Wackenhut, Wackenhut-connected INSLAW, the INSLAW-connected October Surprise, and possibly including a secret group of well-connected work-for-hire former spooks running drugs for the Contras.

Casolaro called this high-level conspiracy “The Octopus” and had shown friends his research findings only days before his death. He was in Martinsburg to interview a source who, he told friends, would help him nail down a last piece of evidence in the INSLAW software theft case.

Bleifuss, reporting on the Casolaro death in In These Times, talked to a close friend who said Casolaro began receiving death threats eight or nine months before his demise. The last one, according to Casolaro’s brother, came five days before his trip to West Virginia. Casolaro reportedly told his brother that “if anything happens to me, don’t believe it is an accident.”

Casolaro’s body was found on a Saturday and was embalmed the following Monday -- before family members could be notified -- without a careful autopsy or forensic investigation; the death scene was quickly sanitized by a “cleaning contractor.” Four days later authorities ruled the young journalist’s death was a likely suicide.

Two years later attorney and corruption investigator Paul Wilcher, representing jailed former CIA operative Gunther Russbacher while also looking into the Inslaw case and its possible connections of other high-level conspiracies and cover-ups, was found dead in his bathroom with no apparent cause of death.

Days earlier Wilcher told a friend, now deceased White House correspondent (and Tyler, TX, native) Sarah McClendon, that his investigation had taken him deeper into the conspiracy than Casolaro’s had and that he had become a “danger signal” to powerful interests.

Wilcher’s personal records, documents, computer files, and other information also disappeared, and his body was cremated without positive identification, fingerprinting, or complete forensic examination to determine cause of death. Wilcher was 40 years old and, according to friends, in good health.

Russbacher claims that, as a aviator attached to the Office of Naval Intelligence, he piloted George Bush to Paris in 1980 to rendezvous with Iranian revolutionaries and hammer out details for the hostage release delay. He also claims that $40 million was handled over to the Iranians in Paris to seal the deal. Furthermore, Russbacher said that he had cockpit tape showing the former CIA director in the back seat of the SR71 spy plane used in the return flight.

Russbacher convinced Milcher that his intimate knowledge of the October Surprise as well as other agency “dirty tricks” was the real reason he had been imprisoned, charged, he said, with violating parole in fictional criminal cases originally fabricated by the government to provide cover in his clandestine work.

Riconoscuito also is in the slammer, convicted of illegal drug manufacture. He says he was framed as punishment for going public with his dealings with Brian, the development of PROMIS’s backdoor, and Wackenhut weapons manufacturing and Contra connections.

The developer of the Brainstorm AI component, Barry Kumnick, disappeared amidst the PROMIS scandal fallout. Before disappearing, Kumnick told his sister in Idaho that his new program would be extremely dangerous if it got into the wrong hands. Kumnick has recently resurfaced but has had little to say about INSLAW or his disappearance.


The Inslaw case is indeed an octopus with tentacles reaching into many dark places, and this telling barely scratches the surface of the layers of deception and intrigue.

For instance, we have omitted Debra von Tripp’s story of how the U.S. came perilously close to war with Japan over CIA intrusions into confidential Japanese business dealings and Japanese bugging of the White House; her allegations connect the Saran gas attack in Tokyo, the mid-air explosion of a Lear jet carrying the assistant secretary of the Army, and the Oklahoma bombing, planned and carried out, she said, by rogue U.S. intelligence agents working for the Japanese government.

Von Tripp states that the FBI-CIA dual-assignment agent behind these plots, Robert Goetzman, also murdered Vincent Foster because he “got greedy” and started selling NSA code to the Israelis. She states that one of Goetzman’s covers was as an executive for MCA/Universal, a Japanese-owned multinational entertainment conglomerate with ties to both the Yakuza and American organized crime... and also to Ronald Reagan -- who was represented by the MCA talent management company during his Hollywood career. That is her story, and she is still alive and free and apparently sticking to it, though few are listening.

In 2001, the Unification Church-owned Washington Times and Fox News each quoted federal law enforcement officials familiar with debriefing former FBI agent Robert Hanssen as claiming that the convicted spy had stolen copies of a PROMIS-derivative for his Soviet KGB handlers.

These reports further stated that Osama bin Laden later bought copies of the same PROMIS-derivative on the Russian black market for $2 million and used the software to penetrate database systems in order to move funds throughout the banking system and evade detection by U.S. law enforcement.

In 2006, former Polish-CIA double-agent and now international journalist David Dastych alleged that Chinese military intelligence (PLA-2) devised their own double backdoor through which they penetrated the PROMIS database systems in the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in order “to steal U.S. nuclear secrets."

Despite first a federal bankruptcy judge’s blistering ruling that “through trickery, deceit, and fraud,” the U.S. Department of Justice “took, converted, and stole” software belonging to INSLAW, and then an equally damning investigation by the House Judicial Committee, chaired by Texas congressman Jack Brooks, which also called for a full investigation of Danny Casolaro’s death, the Department of Justice and the CIA have managed to divert or outright quash every serious investigation into the PROMIS affair and the web of shadowy subplots surrounding the story.

INSLAW has not received an additional penny for the massive theft and widespread sale of its intellectual property. Faced with closing its doors due to bankruptcy, the company was rescued by a substantial cash investment by IBM and is still in business, though perhaps just barely judging from its modest presence on the World Wide Web.

The possible moral: Crime pays... if you are the Department of Justice.

Please see:

• Part I of this series: U.S. Government : Six Decades of Spying on its Citizens: LBJ and Nixon / by Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / January 5, 2010

Also see:

• James Retherford's 2009 Rag Blog series, Who Watches the Watchman? COINTELPRO and the Federal Government’s Clandestine Attack on the U.S. Constitution,
• And for more background on the domestic surveillance of dissidents in Austin and Texas, read The Spies of Texas by Thorne Dreyer / The Texas Observer / Nov. 17, 2006.

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Who Owns Congress? (Hint : Wall Street)

And where's the outrage?
Wall Street owns Congress

By Sid Eschenbach / The Rag Blog / October 11, 2009

See 'On the government's owners' by Glenn Greenwald, Below.

A few years ago, Bill Bennett wrote a book entitled The Death of Outrage based loosely, between self-serving rants, on the assertion that the nation should be outraged by Bill Clinton's character flaws...

The issue covered in Glenn Greenwald's article below is so far more important, far more lethal and far more pressing than any part of Bennett's book that it beggars the mind... but still no outrage. The inchoate sentiments displayed by the Tea-Baggers are as close as any group has come, albeit in their case from a particularly strange and disjointed line of reasoning, to grasping and acting on the fact that there has in fact been a financial coup d'etat in the U.S.

The political party that is able to articulate and frame this debate will own it... although for the very reason that there has been a coup, no major national leaders are making it.

No time like the present.

On the government's owners

By Glenn Greenwald / October 10, 2009

The most revealing political quote of the last year came, in my view, from the second-highest ranking Democratic Senator, Dick Durbin, who told a local radio station in April: "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."

The best Congressional floor speech of the last year on the financial crisis was this extraordinarily piercing five-minute revelation from Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio on the Wall Street bailout and how the Congress is subservient to their dictates.

And the single most insightful article on the financial crisis was written by former IMF Chief Economist and current MIT Professor Simon Johnson in the May 2009 issue of The Atlantic, when he argued that "the finance industry has effectively captured our government" and detailed how the U.S. has become very similar to failed emerging-market nations in both its political and economic culture.

All of that came together last night on Bill Moyers' Journal program, as Johnson and Kaptur together discussed the stranglehold which the financial industry exerts over the federal government and how that has produced a jobless recovery in which the only apparent beneficiaries are the bankers and other financial elites who caused the financial crisis in the first place.

The discussion began with reference to this Associated Press article from last week, which examined Timothy Geithner's calenders, obtained through a FOIA request. Those documents show that Geithner spends an amazing amount of time on the telephone with the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Citibank and JP Morgan: "Goldman, Citi and JPMorgan can get Geithner on the phone several times a day if necessary, giving them an unmatched opportunity to influence policy."

Other than the President, virtually everyone else -- including leading members of Congress -- are forced to leave messages. Kaptur and Johnson begin by discussing what that signifies in terms of the ongoing financial crisis and how government works.

I'll excerpt a few representative passages, but the entire segment is very worth watching:

[Moyers plays an excerpt from Capitalism: A Love Story:

MICHAEL MOORE: Do you think it's too harsh to call what has happened here a coup d'état? A financial coup d'état?

REP. MARCY KAPTUR: That's, no. Because I think that's what's happened. Um, a financial coup d'état?

MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah.

MARCY KAPTUR: I could agree with that. I could agree with that. Because the people here (pointing to the Capitol) really aren't in charge. Wall Street is in charge"...]

SIMON JOHNSON: Well, I think it really tells you how the system works. The system is based on access and is based on what on Wall Street shaping Washington's view of what's important.

It's the people who are very close to Mr. Geithner before when he was the head of the New York Fed. Before he became Treasury Secretary. These people have unparalleled access. And in a crisis, when everything is up for grabs, you don't know what's going on, the people who will take your phone calls, right, in government and people who are going to be standing in the oval office, making the key decisions. That's the heart of the system. That's the heart of how you get your agenda through, by changing their worldview. . . .

And Rahm Emanuel, the President's Chief of Staff has a saying. He's widely known for saying, 'Never let a good crisis go to waste'. Well, the crisis is over, Bill. The crisis in the financial sector, not for people who own homes, but the crisis for the big banks is substantially over. And it was completely wasted. The Administration refused to break the power of the big banks, when they had the opportunity, earlier this year. And the regulatory reforms they are now pursuing will turn out to be, in my opinion, and I do follow this day to day, you know. These reforms will turn out to be essentially meaningless. . . .

BILL MOYERS: Let me show you an excerpt from the speech President Obama made on Wall Street last month, September. Here is the challenge he laid down to the bankers.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses. Those on Wall Street cannot resume taking risks without regard for consequences, and expect that next time, American taxpayers will be there to break their fall.

BILL MOYERS: A reality check. Not one CEO of a Wall Street bank was there to hear the President. What do you make of that?

SIMON JOHNSON: Arrogance. Because they have no fear for the government anymore. They have no respect for the President, which I find absolutely extraordinary and shocking. All right? And I think they have no not an ounce of gratitude to the American people, who saved them, their jobs, and the way they run the world.

BILL MOYERS: In the scheme of things, it is the Congress, and the government that's supposed to stand up to the powerful, organized interests, for the people in Toledo, who can't come to Washington. Who are working or trying to keep their homes or trying to pay their health bills. What's happened to our government?

MARCY KAPTUR: Congress has really shut down. I'm disappointed in both chambers, because wouldn't you think, with the largest financial crisis in American history, in the largest transfer of wealth from the American people to the biggest banks in this country, that every committee of Congress would be involved in hearings, that this would be on the news, that people would be engaged in this. . . .

I've been one of the Members of Congress trying to increase by ten times the agents to get at the justice issues for the American people. For companies that have been hurt. For shareholders that have been hurt. Our government isn't doing it. That it's very easy to look at the budget of the F.B.I. in mortgage fraud and securities fraud and say, 'How serious is the government?' And until those numbers increase, we will not begin to get justice. . . .

BILL MOYERS: Well, and this is what we were talking about earlier, the system. I mean, President Clinton's Secretary of Treasury, Robert Rubin helps eliminate Glass-Steagall. And then leaves the government and goes to work for? Citicorp?

SIMON JOHNSON: Well Rubin's a fascinating character. He ran Goldman Sachs, he went into the Clinton White House, then he became Secretary of the Treasury, and it was on his watch that, first of all, Glass-Steagall began to really seriously crumble, and then it was completely swept away- replaced, abolished, really. And then, of course, Rubin goes on after he leaves Treasury, to be the senior guru type figure at Citigroup. And Citigroup is absolutely epicenter of everything that's gone wrong with our financial system.

BILL MOYERS: And wasn't it Robert Rubin the mentor, the guru to both Tim Geithner and Larry Summers?

SIMON JOHNSON: Absolutely. Both Geithner and Summers advanced to senior positions in the Treasury under Rubin was instrumental in bringing Larry Summers to be President of Harvard, after the Clinton Administration. And according to published new report, he was absolutely key person in making sure that Tim Geithner first went to a senior job at the IMF, and then became President of the New York Fed. And there are unconfirmed reports that Robert Rubin was an essential adviser to then candidate Obama in fall of last year, with regard to who he should bring on board as the leadership team on the economic side.

MARCY KAPTUR: And you know, looking at it from the heartland, when I look at Wall Street and all their connections into Washington, and I've been at it a while now, it's very disheartening to me, because I know they don't care about us out there. We're flyover country for them. And they're just out to make money. . . .

BILL MOYERS: So, Simon, what happens now? If we're going to avert a depression and the next calamity, what needs to be done?

SIMON JOHNSON: Well, I think you have to keep at it, Bill. I mean, that's the lesson from previous generations of Americans, who have really confronted entrenched power like this. You have to keep at it. And you mustn't be satisfied. When the Administration says, 'Okay, we fixed it. Don't worry. We did some technical tweaking on capital requirements, for example, in the banks.' You have to say, 'No, that's not true. Let's look at what's happening, let's follow it through.' . . . .

BILL MOYERS: Does President Obama get it?

MARCY KAPTUR: I don't think President Obama has the right people around him. The poor man inherited a total mess, globally and domestically. I think some of the people that he trusted haven't delivered. I urge him to get new generals. It's time.

SIMON JOHNSON: Louis the Fourteenth of France, a very powerful monarch, was famous for having many bad things, you know, happen under his rule. And people would always say, 'If only Louis the Fourteenth knew. I'm sure he doesn't know. If we could just tell him, he'd sort it out.' You know. I'm skeptical.

Neil Barofsky, the independent watchdog of the TARP program, recently said that while the Wall Street bailout did avert full-scale financial collapse, it plainly failed in its principal stated goal of increasing lending (because banks used the money to buy other institutions, create capital cushions, pay out bonsues, etc.). He detailed how the Treasury Department actually tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to coach the banks into refusing to provide Barofsky with information about how they used the TARP money they received. Worse, he said that the U.S. economy is more dependent than ever on these same "too-big-to-fail" financial institutions, which have grown in size, and the U.S. economy is thus more vulnerable than it was even a year ago to an actual collapse. Meanwhile, even the extremely modest Wall Street reforms Obama is advocating are meeting heavy resistance from those who Dick Durbin called the Owners of Congress.

As Kaptur said, given the size and scope of "the largest transfer of wealth from the American people to the biggest banks in this country," one would expect there to be massive public interest in what happened and why, and, more so, whether any of this is being fixed (it plainly isn't). One would particularly expect the Democratic Party -- which has long branded itself as being the populist party against Wall Street -- would be leading that charge, for political benefit if not for substantive reasons. But that's clearly not happening, and the primary reason why is because both political parties, as institutions, are dependent on and thus controlled by the very industry that is at the heart of it.

Among the two parties, there's no outlet for the populist anger that Kaptur understands and is voicing because each party is eager to serve the interests of those who fund them. And that's why Democrats have largely ceded the populist anger over Wall Street to GOP operatives who are exploiting the "tea party" movement as the only real organized citizen activism over these issues. See this article from last week: "Wall Street money rains on Chuck Schumer":

While the industry has scaled back its political spending in the wake of last year’s economic collapse, data from the Center for Responsive Politics show that it’s still investing heavily in the Senate, where it’s likely to have its best shot at stopping — or at least shaping — the crackdown on Wall Street that President Barack Obama has proposed.

And it’s clearly looking to Democrats to do it.

Of the $10.6 million the industry has given to sitting senators this year, more than $7.7 million has gone to Democrats.

This is hardly unique to the banking industry. This is how the political system works generally. Earnest, substantive debates over this or that policy are so often purely illusory, as the only factor that really drives that outcomes is the question of who owns and thus controls the political system. That central fact subsumes just about everything else.

Source / salon.com

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US Military: A Little Too Big for Its Britches

National Guard (murderers) at Kent State in May 1970.
The Military Is Not the Police
July 29, 2009

It was disturbing to learn the other day just how close the last administration came to violating laws barring the military from engaging in law enforcement when President George W. Bush considered sending troops into a Buffalo suburb in 2002 to arrest terrorism suspects. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily a problem of the past. More needs to be done to ensure that the military is not illegally deployed in this country.

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from law enforcement activities within the United States. If armed officers are going to knock on Americans’ doors, or arrest them in the streets, they should answer to civilian authorities.

Despite this bedrock principle, The Times’s Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston reported last week, top Bush administration officials, including (no surprise) Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that the president had the authority to use the military to round up a suspected terrorist cell known as the Lackawanna Six.

Mr. Cheney and others cited a legal memorandum co-written by John C. Yoo (author of the infamous torture memo), which made the baseless claim that the military can go after accused Al Qaeda terrorists on United States soil because it would be a matter of national security, not law enforcement.

The Lackawanna Six controversy is history, but there are troubling signs the military may be injecting itself today into law enforcement. The American Civil Liberties Union has been sounding the alarm about the proliferation of “fusion centers,” in which federal, state and local law enforcement cooperate on anti-terrorism work. According to the A.C.L.U., the lines have blurred, and the centers have involved military personnel in domestic law enforcement. Congress should investigate.

Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said Wednesday that fusion centers were not intended to have a military presence, and that she was not aware of ones that did. She promised greater transparency about what role, if any, the active military was playing.

Civil libertarians are also raising questions about a program known as the Chemical, Biological, Radiological/Nuclear and High-Yield Explosives Consequence Management Response Force. The Army says its aim is to have active-duty troops ready to back up local law enforcement in catastrophic situations, like an attack with a nuclear weapon. That could be legal, but the workings of these units are murky. Again, Congress should ensure that the military is not moving into prohibited areas.

Some of the military’s line-crossing seems ad hoc. Earlier this year, when a man in a small town in Alabama went on a shooting spree, Army troops reportedly went out on the streets to participate in the law enforcement effort. It is still unclear precisely what role they played. It is important that the military be thoroughly trained on what the law does and does not permit.

After the lack of respect for posse comitatus at the highest ranks of the previous administration, the Obama White House and Congress must ensure that the lines between military and law enforcement have been restored, clearly, and that they are respected.

Source / New York Times

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Another Terrorist Attack May Put the Military in Charge

The Joint Chiefs of Staff photographed in the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gold Room, more commonly known as The Tank, in the Pentagon on December 14, 2001. DoD photo by Mamie Burke.
Power Shifts in Plan for Capital Calamity
By Eric Lichtblau and James Risen / July 27, 2009

WASHINGTON — A shift in authority has given military officials at the White House a bigger operational role in creating a backup government if the nation’s capital were “decapitated” by a terrorist attack or other calamity, according to current and former officials involved in the decision.

The move, which was made in the closing weeks of the administration of President George W. Bush, came after months of heated internal debate about the balance of power and the role of the military in a time of crisis, participants said. Officials said the Obama administration had left the plan essentially intact.

Under the revamped structure, the White House Military Office, which reports to the office of the White House chief of staff, has assumed a more central role in setting up a temporary “shadow government” in a crisis.

And the office, a 2,300-person outfit best known for flying Air Force One, has taken on added responsibilities as the lead agent in shepherding government leaders to a secure site at Mount Weather in rural Virginia, keeping classified lists of successors and maintaining computer systems, among other operational duties. Many of these types of tasks were previously handled by civilians at other agencies, led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Supporters of the plan inside the Bush White House, including Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, saw the erratic response to the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as a mandate for streamlining an emergency response process they considered clunky because it involved too many agencies.

Yet during the debate, officials at other agencies that have traditionally played critical roles expressed concern that the new structure placed too much power in the hands of too few people inside the White House. They also saw the move as part of the Bush administration’s broader efforts to enhance the power of the White House.

Though the office reports to the White House, many of its employees are uniformed soldiers, and it has sometimes been led by a military officer. So concerns about the perception of growing military influence in the emergency process set off an internal struggle, and the White House decided not to move ahead with a more ambitious proposal to give the power of the purse to the military arm, rather than FEMA, for budgeting the emergency operations, one official said.

While Obama administration officials would not discuss details of their continuity plan, they said the current policy was “settled,” and they drew no distance between their own policies and those left behind by the Bush administration.

Obama transition officials were told of the changes during a joint emergency exercise held in January, one of several dry runs using the new structure, officials said.

Officials in the Obama White House appeared unaware of the tensions the plan had set off. They rejected as “flat-out wrong” the idea that military officials in the White House had assumed any “decision-making authority” in a crisis but declined to discuss their logistical responsibilities.

“Many components of government, within civilian and defense establishments, play an important support role to ensure that our constitutional form of government, and its civilian leadership, prevails even under the most catastrophic circumstances,” said Nick Shapiro, a White House spokesman.

A Pentagon spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said senior Defense Department officials believed the changes represented “minor tweaking” in the system, not a major overhaul.

Former Representative Tom Davis, the top Republican on the House Committee on Government Reform when the debate started, said his committee had never been informed of the changes. Mr. Davis said he believed it should have been told, though he said he did not disagree with the changes.

A directive by President Bush signed in May 2007 set in motion a classified review at the White House that led to the changes put in place at the very end of his administration.

Before, some 200 people governmentwide were assigned to Mount Weather in a catastrophe to set up a working government under the direction of FEMA. The number of officials from outside the White House has significantly shrunk , and the new team is made up mostly of White House civilian and military personnel, the officials said.

The new pecking order for emergency operations order was made clear when non-White House officials central to the old command structure arrived at Mount Weather for a training exercise last year. They found their meeting space gutted to make way for a new office planned for the White House team.

Bush administration officials saw FEMA as ill-equipped to handle a governmentwide emergency, and they cited problems with the agency’s execution of a classified training exercise in May 2008 as evidence.

But the White House Military Office has recently had its own problems.

President Obama’s civilian director of the office, Louis Caldera, authorized what turned out to be an alarming photo shoot of a low-flying Air Force One speeding by the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline. Mr. Caldera resigned in May.

Source / New York Times

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The Navajo Nation and Uranium Mining: Not a Happy Combination

Fred and Clara Slowman near their newly rebuilt home near Teec Nos Pos, Ariz. Many homes were contaminated with uranium. Photo: Kevin Moloney for The New York Times.
Uranium Contamination Haunts Navajo Country
By Dan Frosch / July 26, 2009

TEEC NOS POS, Ariz. — It was one year ago that the environmental scientist showed up at Fred Slowman’s door, deep in the heart of Navajo country, and warned that it was unsafe for him to stay there.

The Slowman home, the same one-level cinderblock structure his family had lived in for nearly a half-century, was contaminated with potentially dangerous levels of uranium from the days of the cold war, when hundreds of uranium mines dotted the vast tribal land known as the Navajo Nation. The scientist advised Mr. Slowman, his wife and their two sons to move out until their home could be rebuilt.

“I was angry,” Mr. Slowman said. “I guess it was here all this time, and we never knew.”

The legacy wrought from decades of uranium mining is long and painful here on the expansive reservation. Over the years, Navajo miners extracted some four million tons of uranium ore from the ground, much of it used by the United States government to make weapons.

Many miners died from radiation-related illnesses; some, unaware of harmful health effects, hauled contaminated rocks and tailings from local mines and mills to build homes for their families.

Now, those homes are being demolished and rebuilt under a new government program that seeks to identify what are very likely dozens of uranium-contaminated structures still standing on Navajo land and to temporarily relocate people living in them until the homes can be torn down and rebuilt.

Stephen B. Etsitty, executive director of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency, and other tribal officials have been grappling for years with the environmental fallout from uranium mining.

“There were a lot of things people weren’t told about the plight of Navajos and uranium mining,” Mr. Etsitty said. “These legacy issues are impacting generations. At some point people are saying, ‘It’s got to end.’ ”

After a Congressional hearing in 2007, a cross-section of federal agencies committed to addressing the environmental and health impacts of uranium mining on the reservation. As part of that commitment, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Navajo Nation began working together to assess uranium levels in 500 structures through a five-year plan set to end in 2012.

Using old lists of potentially contaminated structures, federal and Navajo scientists have fanned out to rural reaches of the 27,000 square mile reservation — which includes swaths of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah — to measure levels of radium, a decay product of uranium that can cause lung cancer. Of 113 structures assessed so far, 27 contained radiation levels that were above normal.

“In these situations, you have contamination in somebody’s yard or in their house,” said Harry Allen, the E.P.A.’s section chief for emergency response in San Francisco who is helping lead the government’s efforts. “To us, that is somewhat urgent.”

Many structures that showed high levels of radiation were vacant; some families had already moved out after hearing stories of contamination in their homes. But eight homes still had people living in them, and the E.P.A. and Navajo officials have worked to convince residents that it would be unsafe to stay.

“There were a lot of things people weren’t told about the plight of Navajos and uranium mining,” Stephen B. Etsitty said. Photo: Kevin Moloney for The New York Times.

“People had been told they were living in contaminated structures, but nobody ever did anything about it,” said Will Duncan, an environmental scientist who has been the E.P.A.’s main representative on the reservation. “They would tell us, ‘We don’t believe you are going to follow through.’ ”

But with a budget of nearly $8 million, the E.P.A. has demolished all 27 contaminated structures and has begun building ones to replace those that had been occupied. Typically, the agency pays a Navajo contracting company to construct a log cabin or a traditional hogan in the structure’s stead, depending on the wishes of the occupants. Mr. Allen said the cost, including temporarily relocating residents, ran approximately $260,000 per dwelling and took about eight months.

The agency also offers $50,000 to those who choose not to have an old home rebuilt.

Lillie Lane, a public information officer with the Navajo Nation E.P.A. who has acted as a liaison between the federal government and tribal members, said the program held practical and symbolic importance given the history of uranium mining here.

Ms. Lane described the difficulty of watching families, particularly elders, leaving homes they had lived in for years. She told of coming upon two old miners who died before their contaminated homes could be rebuilt. “In Navajo, a home is considered sacred,” she said. “But if the foundation or the rocks are not safe, we have to do this work.”

Some families, Ms. Lane said, complained that their children were suffering from health problems and had wondered if radiation were to blame.

The E.P.A. has started sifting through records and interviewing family members to figure out whether mining companies that once operated on the reservation are liable for any damages, Mr. Allen said.

On a recent summer day, Fred and Clara Slowman proudly surveyed their new home, a one-level log cabin that sits in the quiet shadows of Black Rock Point, miles away from the bustle of Farmington, N.M., where the family has been living in a hotel.

Mr. Slowman said he suspected that waste materials from a nearby abandoned mine seeped into his house. The family plans on having a traditional Navajo medicine man bless their dwelling before they move in.

“In our traditional way, a house is like your mom,” he said. “It’s where you eat, sleep, where you’re taken care of. And when you come back from the city, you come back to your mom. It makes you feel real good.”

Source / New York Times

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The Iqbal Decision and the Common Man

In Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s view, the court “messed up the federal rules.”
9/11 Case Could Bring Broad Shift on Civil Suits
By Adam Liptak / July 20, 2009

The most consequential decision of the Supreme Court’s last term got only a little attention when it landed in May. And what attention it got was for the wrong reason.

But the lower courts have certainly understood the significance of the decision, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which makes it much easier for judges to dismiss civil lawsuits right after they are filed. They have cited it more than 500 times in just the last two months.

“Iqbal is the most significant Supreme Court decision in a decade for day-to-day litigation in the federal courts,” said Thomas C. Goldstein, an appellate lawyer with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington.

On its face, the Iqbal decision concerned the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The court ruled that a Muslim man swept up on immigration charges could not sue two Bush administration officials for what he said was the terrible abuse he suffered in detention.

But something much deeper and broader was going on in the decision, something that may unsettle how civil litigation is conducted in the United States. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dissented from the decision, told a group of federal judges last month that the ruling was both important and dangerous. “In my view,” Justice Ginsburg said, “the court’s majority messed up the federal rules” governing civil litigation.

For more than half a century, it has been clear that all a plaintiff had to do to start a lawsuit was to file what the rules call “a short and plain statement of the claim” in a document called a complaint. Having filed such a bare-bones complaint, plaintiffs were entitled to force defendants to open their files and submit to questioning under oath.

This approach, particularly when coupled with the American requirement that each side pay its own lawyers no matter who wins, gave plaintiffs settlement leverage. Just by filing a lawsuit, a plaintiff could subject a defendant to great cost and inconvenience in the pre-trial fact-finding process called discovery.

Mark Herrmann, a corporate defense lawyer with Jones Day in Chicago, said the Iqbal decision will allow for the dismissal of cases that would otherwise have subjected defendants to millions of dollars in discovery costs. On the other hand, information about wrongdoing is often secret. Plaintiffs claiming they were the victims of employment discrimination, a defective product, an antitrust conspiracy or a policy of harsh treatment in detention may not know exactly who harmed them and how before filing suit. But plaintiffs can learn valuable information during discovery.

The Iqbal decision now requires plaintiffs to come forward with concrete facts at the outset, and it instructs lower court judges to dismiss lawsuits that strike them as implausible.

“Determining whether a complaint states a plausible claim for relief,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the five-justice majority, “requires the reviewing court to draw on its judicial experience and common sense.”

Note those words: Plausible. Common sense.

The old world was mechanical. A lawsuit that mouthed the required words was off and running. As the Supreme Court said in 1957 in Conley v. Gibson, a lawsuit should be allowed to go forward “unless it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief.” Things started to change two years ago, when the Supreme Court found a complaint in an antitrust suit implausible.

In the new world, after Iqbal, a lawsuit has to satisfy a skeptical judicial gatekeeper.

“It obviously licenses highly subjective judgments,” said Stephen B. Burbank, an authority on civil procedure at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “This is a blank check for federal judges to get rid of cases they disfavor.”

Courts applying Iqbal have been busy. A federal judge in Connecticut dismissed a disability discrimination suit this month, saying that Iqbal required her to treat the plaintiff’s assertions as implausible. A few days later, the federal appeals court in New York dismissed a breach of contract and securities fraud suit after concluding that its account of the defendants’ asserted wrongdoing was too speculative.

The judge hearing the claims of the falsely accused Duke lacrosse players has asked for briefing on whether their lawsuit against Durham, N.C., can pass muster under Iqbal. But the judge considering a case against John C. Yoo, the former Bush administration lawyer, said it could move forward despite Iqbal because the suit contained specific allegations about Mr. Yoo’s conduct in justifying the use of harsh interrogation methods.

In the Iqbal case itself, Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani Muslim who was working as a cable television installer on Long Island, said he was subjected to intrusive searches and vicious beatings after being arrested on identity fraud charges two months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Justice Kennedy said Mr. Iqbal’s suit against two officials had not cleared the plausibility bar. All Mr. Iqbal’s complaint plausibly suggested, Justice Kennedy wrote, “is that the nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available.”

Justice David H. Souter, said the majority had adopted a crabbed view of plausibility and had in the process upended the civil litigation system.

In his dissent in Iqbal, Justice Souter wrote that judges should accept the accusations in a complaint as true “no matter how skeptical the court may be.”

“The sole exception to this rule,” Justice Souter continued, “lies with allegations that are sufficiently fantastic to defy reality as we know it: claims about little green men, or the plaintiff’s recent trip to Pluto, or experiences in time travel.”

But that is no longer the law. Under the Iqbal decision, federal judges will now decide at the very start of a litigation whether the plaintiff’s accusations ring true, and they will close the courthouse door if they do not.

Source / New York Times

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Another Good Reason to Ban War: Troops' Children Suffer

Mental Health Problems Growing for Troops' Kids
July 7, 2009

Children of U.S. military troops sought outpatient mental health care 2 million times last year, double the number at the start of the Iraq war, and there was also an alarming spike in the number of military kids actually hospitalized for mental health reasons.

Internal Pentagon documents show the increases, which come as the services struggle with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a shortage of therapists.

From 2007 to 2008, some 20 percent more children of active duty troops were hospitalized for mental health services, the documents show. Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, inpatient visits among military children have increased 50 percent.

The total number of outpatient mental health visits for children of men and women on active duty doubled from 1 million in 2003 to 2 million in 2008. During the same period, the yearly bed days for military children 14 and under increased from 35,000 to 55,000, the documents show.

Overall, the number of children and spouses of active duty personnel and Guard and Reserve troops seeking mental health care has been steadily increasing as the military struggles with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last year's increase in child hospitalizations coincided with the ''surge'' of tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops into Iraq to stabilize the country.

However, reasons for the treatment increases are not clear from the documents. Besides the impact of service members' repeated tours in overseas war zones -- and the severe economic recession that has affected all American families -- the military has been encouraging troops' family members to seek mental health help when needed.

The military plans additional research.

Still, the statistics seem to reinforce the concerns of military leaders and private family organizations about the strains of the wars. Along with issues of separation, some families must deal with injuries or the deaths of loved ones.

Military families move, on average, nearly every three years, which adds additional stress.

''Army families are stretched, and they are stressed,'' Sheila Casey, wife of Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the U.S. Army chief of staff, told a congressional panel last month. ''And I have often referred to them as the most brittle part of the force.''

Evidence of domestic violence and child neglect among military families, as well as an increase in suicide, alcohol abuse and cases of post-traumatic stress, are all troubling signs, Mrs. Casey told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee. She and other military spouses testified that gaining access to mental health care is a problem.

At summer camps organized by the National Military Family Association for about 10,000 children, most of them kids of deployed soldiers, there have been more anecdotal reports this year of young people taking medication, and showing signs of severe homesickness, anxiety, or depression, said Patricia Barron, who runs the association's youth initiatives.

Barron, a military spouse, said her organization is participating in a study on deployments and families. She said much is still unknown about the effects.

''If it continues to happen, you have to wonder how this is affecting them,'' Barron said. ''In the long run, you have to wonder if there isn't going to be detrimental effects that might hang on for a long period of time.''

The shortage of mental health professionals isn't just isolated to the military. But the problem is more pronounced because of the increase in demand, both on the home front and in the war zones.

About 20 percent to 30 percent of service members returning from war report some form of psychological distress.

There are efforts under way to encourage the military, the Department of Veterans Affairs and state and local agencies to share mental health resources. Also, there have been incentives offered to encourage military spouses to enter easily transferrable fields such as health care.

In recent years, there's been an increase in funding in areas such as education, housing and child care devoted to improving the quality of life for military families. First lady Michelle Obama has said helping military families is a priority.

* * * * *
On the Net:

National Military Family Association: www.nmfa.org

Military Home Front: www.militaryhomefront.dod.mil

Source / AP / New York Times

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Ansel Herz: A Report of a March on T. Don Hutto

Click the arrow button in the bottom right-hand corner for a better view. (Sorry about the wind noise, folks!)
Podcast with pictures: Texans march against Hutto detention center on World Refugee Day
By Ansel Herz / June 22, 2009

This was my second time traveling out to Hutto. Transcript and more information below.

[Chanting]

“I’ve known about this place, this is just my first time coming here. When I first got here, I actually felt like crying because I felt so angry that they would do this to people. Everybody talks about peace in the world and stuff, but this has nothing to do with it…”

18-year-old Yvette Garza joined about a hundred people from around Texas on Saturday afternoon in Taylor, a forty-minute drive from Austin. For the third year in a row, activists marked World Refugee Day with a march across town to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, an immigrant detention center holding undocumented families, including at least 100 women and young children. Jose Orta, a Taylor resident, said the corporate-run facility should be shut down.

“They are incarcerated. And those children have done nothing, nothing wrong. They are non-criminals. Yet they are in a medium-security prison. No matter what you call it – you can call it a detention facility or a residential facility, whatever. It is a medium-security prison, and T. Don Hutto’s got to go!”

[Marching]

“People started making profits for people wanting to make money off of people’s misery.”

Conrado Acevedo, an activist with the indigenous coalition ‘Defense of Our Mother,’ traveled from Houston.

“They used to let ‘em go and then they would show up in court, which was the more humane way. But now when you put people in jail, especially a mother with kids, I mean that’s totally uncomprehensible in a supposedly democratic society. So we’ve been coming here for two years…”

[Sound]

The march eventually spilled onto an field alongside the facility. Marchers raised their voices, hoping the kids inside would hear them.

The group rallied for another few hours with music and speeches in the blazing sun across from the detention center. They vowed to continue protesting until the facility is closed and the families are released.

It’s June 22, 2009, this has been a Mediahacker.org podcast, and I’m Ansel Herz.

Cross-posted to YouTube and to HIMC. Learn more:

* T. Don Hutto blog
* America’s Family prison short film by Matt Gossage
* “The Least of These” film
* More pictures at Houston Indymedia

Source / Media Hacker

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A Summary of Internet Surveillance Legislation

Internet surveillance laws in Canada and around the world
June 19, 2009

The Canadian government has been trying to modernize its surveillance and wiretapping laws for years now, to take into account the growth of cellphone and internet communications. Canada's current telephone wiretap laws are more than 30 years old. Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan said in June 2009 that the current legal framework was designed "in the era of the rotary telephone."

In November 2005, the Liberal government at the time introduced legislation to that end. The Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act would have required internet companies to give the police confidential information on their subscribers, including name, address and phone numbers. The bill would also have required cellphone and internet companies to add surveillance hardware and software to their networks.

That bill was introduced about a week before a vote of no confidence and the dissolution of Parliament, and it died when the Liberals lost the election in January 2006.

In 2007, a document obtained by CBC News suggested that government agencies were seeking consultation on how law enforcement and national security agencies could gain lawful access to customers' information without a court order. Days later, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said that warrants would be required to gain customer information under any new surveillance law.

"We have not and we will not be proposing legislation to grant police the power to get information from internet companies without a warrant. That's never been a proposal," Day said.

Another law — the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Document Act, or PIPEDA — was passed in 2004 and intended to protect the private information that consumers give to companies in the course of doing business. PIPEDA already allows for internet service providers and other private companies to disclose personal information to law enforcement officials to comply with subpoenas or warrants, or in emergency situations where an individual's life, health or security is potentially threatened.

In June 2009, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan announced the latest bills intended to modernize the Criminal Code.

"We must ensure that law enforcement has the necessary tools to catch up to the bad guys and ultimately bring them to justice. Twenty-first century technology calls for 21st-century tools," Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said when the bills were announced.

In a reversal from Day's position in 2007, one of the new bills would require internet service providers and cellphone companies to provide police with "timely access" to personal information about subscribers — including names, address and internet addresses — without the need for a warrant.

The government news release announcing these bills said, "Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Sweden, already have similar legislation in place." Here's the legal situation in those countries.

United Kingdom

The Regulation of Investigatory Power Act of 2000, also called RIPA, is a comprehensive surveillance law that covers everything from the use of closed-circuit TV cameras to the use of moles in criminal investigations. RIPA includes provisions that require ISPs to install systems to aid investigators in tracking electronic communications.

United States

The USA Patriot Act, enacted following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made several changes to U.S. law intended to combat terrorism. It expanded the ability of law enforcement agencies to search communications, medical and financial records. It also extended the use of wiretaps to include internet connections.

Also, the Bush administration authorized the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless domestic wiretaps in 2001, possibly earlier. This was first revealed in the media in The New York Times in December 2005.

Two subsequent laws, the Protect America Act of 2007 and FISA Amendments Act of 2008, extended the NSA's authority on domestic wiretaps.

In February 2009, a federal Appeals Court in San Francisco rejected the Obama administration's request to stop a lawsuit challenging the government's warrantless wiretapping program on the grounds that it is a potential threat to national security.

Australia

The Surveillance Devices Bill of 2004 allows Australian Federal Police to obtain warrants for the use of data, optical, listening and tracking surveillance devices. The Intelligence Services Act of 2001 covers the use of surveillance devices by the country's security agencies.

New Zealand

The Search and Surveillance Powers Bill was introduced in September 2008 to update the surveillance powers and procedures New Zealand's law enforcement agencies.

Germany

In 2006, the western German state of North-Rhine Westphalia adopted a law that gave intelligence agencies broad powers to spy on and hack into the computers of terror suspects, including infecting them with spyware viruses. Germany's highest court overturned that law in 2008, saying: "The law violates the right to privacy and is null and void."

However, the Constitutional Court also ruled that the government is allowed to conduct surveillance on internet communications in cases where it could prevent loss of life or an attack on the country. The court said agencies must get permission from a judge before they can secretly upload spyware to a suspect's computer.

Sweden

Sweden's parliament approved new laws in June 2008 to allow the country's intelligence bureau to track sensitive words in international phone calls, faxes and emails without a court order. The law took effect in January 2009. Opposition critics and civil liberties organizations have called the law the most far-reaching electronic surveillance law in Europe.

Source / CBC News

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Vigil at T. Don Hutto Center on June 20th

As ICE cynically says on their Web site, "The facility provides an effective and humane alternative to maintain the unity of alien families as they await the outcome of their immigration hearings or the return to their home countries."
Family Friendly Lockups?
By Diana Claitor / The Rag Blog / June 12, 2009

Central Texas is one of two places in the entire U.S. where the federal immigration people are experimenting with family detention. The other is Pennsylvania.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think we Austinites need to take every chance to show the feds and the world that we don’t approve, that we are not okay with refugee mamas and their babies and kids being incarcerated in a prison camp while their cases are decided.

The T. Don Hutto Center is not actually in Austin, but on the railroad tracks on the edge of nearby Taylor (about 30 miles east of Austin) and it is run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a for-profit adult corrections company.

On Saturday, June 20th, organizations from across Texas will be joined by Amnesty International and National LULAC in a vigil honoring World Refugee Day in front of the T. Don Hutto family detention center in Taylor, Texas.

A caravan will leave Austin from 2604 E. Caesar Chavez at 11:30 am. The vigil will begin with a 1pm walk from Heritage Park in Taylor. Protestors will gather for a vigil at the T. Don Hutto detention center at 1001 Welch from 2-4pm.

Warning: Get a map online beforehand, because it’s off the beaten track.

There will be speakers, music, art and a lot of that big red sun, so I will not do the walk but instead will go straight to the vigil at 2 p.m. and wear a hat. It would be good to see a strong Austin contingent there in light of the national visitors. Maybe some of us ex-Rag, ex-Sun and early Chron people want to say “Ya basta!” to this whole idea for detaining children.

Family detention is not a simple subject—check out the New Yorker article and see the two exceptional documentaries on Hutto—but one basic truth applies: it’s just not right. More humane and less-costly alternatives exist that keep families together and out of prison-like detention centers. A study by the Vera Institute found that more than 90% of immigrants on a supervised release program attended their immigration hearings. The average cost of a supervision program is $12 a day compared to reportedly over $200 a day to detain a person at Hutto.

And listen to the nine-year-old kid from Canada when he says, "I don't like to stay in this jail .... this place is not good for me."

Check out tdonhutto.blogspot.com for more information. Or call Bob Libal of Grassroots Leadership at (512) 971-0487 or Diana Claitor of Texas Jail Project at (512) 597-8746.

Source /

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