Tom Hayden : Is Obama Really in Control?

This plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced to land in Vienna despite Obama's earlier comment that he "wouldn't scramble jets against a 29 year old hacker." Photo by Andres Gutierrez / AP.

Refs being 'worked'?
Does Obama control the State?

The executive branch has aided in the unaccountable growth of a Frankenstein-like Leviathan which now is beyond the control of its own makers, operating outside the levers of democratic oversight and control

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / July 18, 2013

It seemed weird, off-handed, President Obama's comment that he "wouldn't scramble jets against a 29 year old hacker," just two days before the U.S. forced down a Bolivian plane carrying Evo Morales on the suspicion that Edward Snowden was smuggled aboard. Diplomatic hell broke loose, with Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and others all accusing the U.S. of violating their sovereignty.

With all the talk of Big Data, it's hard to believe that Snowden couldn't be detected enroute from the Moscow transit lounge to the departure gate for a Bolivian airliner. That aside, one wonders what if any was the connection between Obama's remark and the forcedown which subsequently happened.

Obama presumably was trying to squelch rumblings coming from within the national security state. After all, if some of the U.S. hardliners want Julian Assange, Snowden, and their ilk executed, or tried for treason before being executed, the same types might contemplate a Special Operation to render Snowden off a foreign airliner.

As for Evo Morales, I was told by a U.S. ambassador during the Clinton administration that he was a "very bad guy" who had tried to kill American diplomats, a good example of our intelligence demented..

The problem revealed by the incident is not a new one, and not for this president alone. Can we be confident that the president controls the permanent executive branch, especially the "intelligence" apparatus? Or is it not possible that key elements of the apparatus have been fabricating intelligence, pulling strings, "working the refs," boxing in the White House, asking forgiveness rather than permission, whatever one calls it, and running a foreign policy of their own?

If anyone is shocked by this, it's all happened before. Several presidents were threatened with blackmail by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who ran what one U.S. senator called a "Gestapo-operation." John and Robert Kennedy had to go around their own generals and conspire with the Soviets to cool down the Cuban missile crisis when it was at the brink.

JFK circumvented the generals and CIA by fudging an agreement in Laos. Richard Nixon and the China Lobby foiled Lyndon Johnson's election-year plan for peace talks by getting the Saigon generals to hold out until after the election. Jimmy Carter was forced to keep diplomacy with Cuba secret from his own State Department negotiators in the late Seventies. Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars documents how generals Petraeus and McChrystal tried to trap the president into a "forever war."

And before all of them, President Eisenhower warned that, "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." [1961]

And now this: starting with the Bush era, the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court [FISA] has morphed into a de facto parallel Supreme Court writing and implementing a virtual constitution for the War on Terrorism era. This secret court, appointed in its entirety by the right-wing Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, has approved 1,800 surveillance orders during the past year alone, while rejecting none.

There is no adversary proceeding in this new equivalent of a Star Chamber. There are virtually no public findings. The FISA court has ruled, in secret proceedings, that the vacuuming up of "meta data" on many millions of citizens is a "special needs" exception to the Fourth Amendment ban on state searches and seizures without a warrant.

Some of the secret court's opinions are said to be nearly 100 pages in length, issued without adversarial proceedings and virtually beyond appeal. Just because Obama is a constitutional lawyer doesn't mean that he's devoted detailed attention to this runaway construction of a new constitution -- until something like the Snowden revelations force his attention.

"It has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court," according to Eric Lichtblau in The New York Times [July 7], providing a veritable new constitutional framework for every agency engaged in activities under the umbrella of "national security." A similar extra-constitutional project has been underway for decades to rewrite the rules of private marketplace governance in the era of corporate globalization.

Both thrusts, toward privatization and intelligence wars, represent a gradual movement towards a new legal framework for Empire which minimizes or circumvents democratic processes. The NSA plus the WTO are the "new world order" that George Bush I mused about.

Obama, who is responsible for this mushroom cloud of secrecy, seems occasionally to cry for help at his recognition that it's spiralling out of control. Since 2012, Obama has officially "welcomed" public conversation, debate, and Congressional drafting of a "new legal architecture" in order to "rein in" his growing imperial presidency and those which are likely to follow.

His inability to implement meaningful change, however, is a remarkable illustration of the limits of the presidency. There is no sign either of Congressional willingness to re-draft the 1973 War Powers Act to cover drones, secret wars like Libya, or the growth of executive-branch cyberwar. The federal courts are complicit in the private rewriting of the Fourth Amendment and the democratic guarantees of the Constitution.

It is not only the shadow of secrecy over democracy, but the apparent grip of secret forces in the executive branch over public policy. Last week the U.S. supported a military coup in Egypt in express violation of Congressional funding restrictions, and without public hearings. Last month, the President reiterated his five-year old pledge to close Guantanamo, get detainees off life-threatening hunger strikes, and repatriate many who already are cleared for release.

As of now, those straightforward orders have not been carried out. Someone is blocking them.

A secret coup hasn't fully happened yet, and may not, given the nature of American pluralism. But the executive branch has aided in the unaccountable growth of a Frankenstein-like Leviathan which now is beyond the control of its own makers, operating outside the levers of democratic oversight and control.

Obama's occasional comments welcoming a "conversation" may be seen as muted alarms. If he cannot "rein in" the new Imperial Presidency, a populist protest could be slowly building toward either an insurgency presidential campaign, an uprising, or both.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Tom Hayden : Pentagon Calls Civilian Drone Casualties 'Bug Splat'

Splat from NuUniform.
Drone policy attacked in top think tank report

Bug splat! That's what the Pentagon calls civilian casualties in drone attacks.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / January 17, 2013

The Council on Foreign Relations issued a report last week calling for fundamental reforms in U.S. drone policies, surfacing sharp differences in official circles in response to widespread questioning and protest.

Micah Zenko writes in the Council Special Report that the Pentagon and CIA use the term “bug splat” in referring to their civilian collateral damage methodology. The acronym MALE is employed to describe “medium altitude long-endurance” drone technologies of the future.

More substantively, the CFR report recommends:

• That the Obama administration’s targeted-killings policy be limited to individuals with a “direct operational” role in terrorist plots against the U.S.;
• Ending the so-called “signature strikes” against individuals or groups who the White House says, “bear the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run,” and which define all military-age males in a strike zone as "combatants;”
• Far greater transparency and accountability in the definitions of civilian casualties, including aggressive congressional oversight.

The report concludes that of 3,000 killed in drone attacks so far, “the vast majority were neither al Qaeda nor Taliban leaders,” a major difference from the low-to-zero civilian casualty estimates by the Obama administration, including newly-recommended CIA chief John Brennan.

Congress comes in for sharp criticism for its failure over the past 10 years to hold a single public hearing on any aspect of the so-called non-battlefield targeted killings. Staffs of the foreign affairs committees “have little understanding of how drone strikes are conducted within the countries for which they are responsible for exercising oversight.”

Judiciary committees are “repeatedly denied access to the June 2010 Office of Legal Counsel memorandum that presented the analysis of the legal basis” for the drone killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in September 2011.

A citizen call for congressional hearings could trigger a response as the new legislative session gets underway in Washington next month. President Obama himself, in an October interview with Jon Stewart, called on Congress to offer “new legal architecture” in order to “rein in” the growing powers of the executive branch in the drone age. The CFR report is likely to shape the terms of the debate ahead.

The report credits protests by human rights and peace advocates and journalists for causing a “major risk” of operational restrictions on drones, and draws parallels with the widespread questioning that undermined the Bush-era torture policies and warrantless wiretapping.

“The current trajectory of U.S. drone strike policies is unsustainable,” the report flatly concludes. Public pressure combined with international condemnation will cause the decline of the program unless there are both reform and confidence-building measures.

The report warns that U.S. policies are setting off a dangerous drone arms race. “Without reform from within, drones risk becoming an unregulated, unaccountable vehicle for states to deploy lethal force with impunity.”

Public opinion surveys show a declining support for the drone policy from 83 percent to 62 percent just between February and June 2012, the period when President Obama initiated his “conversation” about the policy. Local protests have risen against drones as the Afghanistan war has been “winding down.” A colorful, large-scale protest against drones is expected to occur during the Obama inauguration.

The peace protesters have an institutional ally in the absence of support from Congress -- the powerful lobby for counterinsurgency, which opposes drone strikes as counterproductive without advisers and troops on the ground to win over “hearts and mind.” One member of the advisory committee on the CFR report was Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who embodied the counterinsurgency program in Afghanistan until forced into retirement.

In an interview last week, McChrystal cautioned that drones create widespread hatred on “a visceral level.” The Long War Journal representing the counter-insurgency advocates, and the New American Foundation, representing national security “centrists,” have been in the forefront of questioning the efficacy of the administration’s policies for this reason.

As 2013 begins, the return of an Imperial Presidency is a definite specter over the Obama administration. Not only is the drones policy under challenge, but the rules of Special-Ops killings and detention, the launching of cyber-war, and the return of the CIA to the business of running cover armies are examples of militarism without checks and balances.

The CFR report says, but cannot confirm, for example, that the CIA directs a paramilitary force of 3,000 Pashtun mercenaries on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Congressional oversight is failing, according to the report, and the War Powers Act of 1973 is simply obsolete for the era of modern warfare with its waning emphasis on ground troops.

As even the president has acknowledged, “I think creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons is going to be a challenge for me and for my successors for some time to come.” (Bowden, Mark. The Finish) Coupled with his comment to Stewart, that is as close as possible to an admission by a president that his government is operating outside the constitutional structure.

It is hard to expect serious reform from the same administrative elites who have depended on the War on Terror’s enabling framework for a decade. Obama may lead us towards a “conversation” but solutions will have to come from Congress at the insistence of the public and media. That is how the War Powers Act became law in 1973, at the insistence of Congress, the media and the peace movement.

No president, from Nixon to Obama, has ever accepted its constitutionality, though sometimes abiding by its requirements -- because they believe the law infringes on the power of the presidential office to make war. That is why the public and Congress will be required to reform the current policies, or the future will become far more secret than the past.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Obama Continues Immoral Bush Policies

Four more years. Image from NewsOne.
Obama embraces five
immoral Bush policies

“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period... was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / January 14, 2013

Looking back over the last four years, it has become clear that President Barack Obama has enthusiastically continued (and expanded in at least one case) five troubling policies of George W. Bush: foreign interventionism, the use of armed drones, extraordinary rendition, torture, and incarcerating alleged terrorists in Guantanamo.

Foreign adventurism encompasses the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the continued and expanded use of armed drones to kill people President Obama and his staff (including especially Obama’s new nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan) believe should die for their actions. Reportedly, Brennan maintains a “kill list” approved by President Obama. These drone killings occur throughout the Middle East, but particularly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

Killing in a war zone is relatively easier to justify under international legal principles to which the United States subscribes, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, than are killings elsewhere. But under Bush’s view, which relies on the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by the Congress seven days after 9/11, the “international war on terror” justifies killing anyone who the President and his agents believe is a terrorist, wherever they may be. Obama has accepted that view.

Under the International Covenant, lethal force by our military against enemy fighters in an armed conflict is permitted if done for military necessity, and if impact on civilian lives and property will not be disproportionate to the military objective. Currently, that limits such actions to Afghanistan, which we attacked because of its relationship to al Queda, the group responsible for the terrorist attack on 9/11.

Self-defense is also permitted by the International Covenant against another state that is responsible for an attack against the U.S. Drone attacks other than in Afghanistan appear to violate the International Covenant, no matter what the Congress may have authorized in 2001.

CNN reports that 4,400 people have been killed in U.S. drone attacks since 2002, most in Pakistan. Obama has ordered six times more drone attacks than Bush ordered. Of those 4,400 deaths, about 25% have been civilians, including over 200 children. Because the CIA is responsible for most of these attacks, confirming these data through the government is impossible.

John Brennan has denied that there have been any civilian deaths. According to his reasoning, any male of combat age is a terrorist, yet drone attacks have killed those attending funerals and weddings, as well as 16-year-old Tariq Aziz and his 12-year-old cousin who had been learning how to take video of drones that constantly circled their village in Pakistan, and at least two American citizens in Yemen who were not in a war zone.

In 2011, Anwar al-Awlaki, described as an al Qaeda propagandist, was killed in a drone attack in Yemen. Two weeks later, his 16-year-old son was killed in a separate drone attack.

Esquire's Tom Junod described the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki this way:

He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him.

He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.

Before the drone attacks began and before 9/11, during the Clinton administration, the U.S. government began the practice, in a limited way, of extraordinary rendition, which has been described as “the apprehension and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another.” After 9/11, the practice increased dramatically as a way to engage in torture away from the eyes of Americans and the media.

The CIA, along with other U.S. government agencies, has attempted to gather intelligence from foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism by taking them to countries where U.S. and international legal safeguards do not apply, at least so far as the CIA is concerned.

These suspects are detained and interrogated by U.S. personnel at U.S.-run detention facilities outside U.S. territory or are handed over to foreign agents for interrogation. Such people are subjected to torture as that is defined by U.S. and international law.

While President Obama promised to end such practices, what his administration has done is put lipstick on the proverbial pig. Obama now assures us that the U.S. will not render a person to another country for detention and interrogation unless that country promises not to torture the suspect. While his administration has ceased using the worst practitioners of torture used by Bush (Syria, Egypt, and Libya), it has instead engaged the services of other countries to directly take such suspects into custody so that the U.S. will not be tainted by how the suspects are treated.

In spite of the evidence we now have of the wrongness of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, those Americans who spoke out from the beginning, as well as those who quickly realized the sham of the Iraq war, continue to be ridiculed. The most recent public example of the latter group is former senator Chuck Hagel, who has been named to become Obama’s next Secretary of Defense.

The interventionism recognized and opposed by Hagel and others is not evidence of an exceptional nation, but of one that has long ago forgotten the vision of its founders that we would not have a standing army, nor would we intervene in the affairs of other nations.

Finally, the interventions we have engaged in since 9/11 have led to the creation of a special prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, at the southeastern end of Cuba, which has been widely condemned around the world, by both allies and enemies.

The deathly and desolate place known simply as Guantanamo should sicken every American of good will and normal sensibilities. Many of the people incarcerated and tortured there were turned over to the U.S. in return for the payment of bounties, and many were not involved with terrorism. Right now, the Obama administration has determined that 86 men incarcerated at Guantanamo are guilty of nothing and should be repatriated to their home countries. But actions of the administration and Congress have worked together to ensure that the 86 will remain incarcerated indefinitely.

Four years ago, President Obama pledged to close the prison. Yet, he recently signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for 2013, which will prevent any of the 166 men now incarcerated at Guantanamo from leaving for at least another year, including 56 men the government has listed as having been “cleared for transfer,” a process that requires the approval of many U.S. agencies and foreign governments. No one knows when these wrongfully incarcerated men will be allowed to return to their homes.

One of the most egregious human rights violations involving Guantanamo occurred to Al Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj, who was taken into custody at the Pakistani border after unknown individuals were paid a bounty by the U.S. for anyone they claimed to be a terrorist, but he was guilty of nothing related to terrorism.

The credentials of Sami al-Hajj as a journalist could not have been clearer when he was taken into custody. Amy Goodman, the primary host of Democracy Now!, recently summarized what Sami al-Hajj, now the head of Al Jazeera’s human rights and public liberties desk, endured at Guantanamo for six years:

The Al Jazeera cameraman was arrested in Pakistan in December of 2001 while traveling to Afghanistan on a work assignment. Held for six years without charge, al-Hajj was repeatedly tortured, hooded, attacked by dogs and hung from a ceiling. Interrogators questioned him over 100 times about whether Al Jazeera was a front for al-Qaeda. In January 2007, he began a hunger strike that lasted 438 days until his release in May 2008.

Recently, one innocent prisoner from Yemen -- Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif -- died in Guantanamo after nearly 11 years in captivity, leaving a wife and 14-year old son to mourn. He should never have been sent to America’s special prison, but someone was paid a $5,000 bounty to turn him in. He, too, was guilty of nothing related to terrorism. Mystery surrounds the circumstances of his death. U.S. authorities have told different stories about how he died, which should remind us all of the absolute truth of journalist I. F. Stone’s admonition that “All governments lie!”

When it comes to foreign adventurism, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, the U.S. is well-positioned to take military action from its wide-spread collection of cruisers, submarines, dock landing ships, amphibious transport docks, amphibious assault ships, and aircraft carriers, which together number around 135, with others under construction.

In addition and of equal importance, the U.S. maintains over 1,000 overseas military bases according to David Vine, an assistant professor of anthropology at American University, in Washington, DC, who has published one book on such facilities and nearly completed another on the subject.

While the Iraq war is over for the U.S. military, around 15,000 military contractors reportedly still operate there on behalf of U.S. interests, and perhaps as many as 300 troops train Iraqi security forces. Plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan include provisions to leave several thousand troops to continue training, provide support for the Afghan military, and perform counterinsurgency tasks.

Right now over 117,000 military contractors are in Afghanistan. No one outside of the government knows how many will be left in place once most U.S. troops have left, nor do we know how many CIA operatives will remain engaged there.

Mentioning the CIA inevitably brings up the question of torture. The evidence of torture by agents of the United States should be well-known by anyone who has read the newspapers since 9/11. That evidence spreads from Abu Ghraib, to extraordinary rendition sites, to Guantanamo, to our own military prisons in the U.S., where Bradley Manning was held for over a year in conditions and under treatments that violate the standards of decency which we claim to uphold.

Thomas Jefferson School of Law professor Marjorie Cohn wrote recently:

Torture is illegal in all circumstances. The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty the United States ratified which makes it part of U.S. law, states unequivocally: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

The prohibition of torture is absolute and unequivocal. Torture is never lawful. ... Yet despite copious evidence of widespread torture and abuse during the Bush administration, and the Constitution’s mandate that the President enforce the laws, Obama refuses to hold the Bush officials and lawyers accountable for their law breaking.

For nearly 60 years, at least since President Eisenhower authorized a coup in 1953 that brought the Shah of Iran (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) into power in place of the democratically-elected Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, the role the United States has played in the Middle East has been a tragedy.

What Martin Luther King, Jr. said about another tragedy is equally appropriate about our role not only in the Middle East, but in most of the world, where we have tried to control events and people with the armaments of war: “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period... was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

Deadly drones, foreign interventionism, extraordinary rendition, torture, and the legacy of Guantanamo require that more Americans speak out against the policies and practices of our government, hold officials accountable for their misdeeds, and find new ways to live in the only world we know. To do otherwise would allow both the bad people and the silent good people together to squander the promise of our great nation.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Richard Raznikov : Battlefield America

"Dissent is terrorism." Art by Anthony Freda / Activist Post.
Battlefield America:
'We had to make some sacrifices...'

There are no more legal barriers to arrest without warrants, prison without lawyers, condemnation and even execution without trial.

By Richard Raznikov / The Rag Blog / March 8, 2012

There was a declaration in the Congress during the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, to the effect that in the "war on terror" the United States was a part of the field of battle.

This statement was made by Senator Lindsey Graham, among others. It was consequent to the continuing fantasy that we now live in a "post-9-11 world" which, presumptively, means that the laws which have protected Americans from their government for 200 years no longer apply.

Sorry about your freedom, but we had to make some sacrifices to keep you free.

Because of 9-11, we were told, we needed the grotesquely-named "Patriot Act" which took large pieces out of the Bill of Rights. In order to be safe from the "enemy" we had to give up the Constitution. The Patriot Act was passed as emergency legislation with no debate. The senators and representatives who voted for it did not read it. For that alone, they deserve impeachment and removal from office.

But betraying the country is no longer a crime when it’s done by the government.

It seemed at the time like an odd construction, the insistence that America’s own turf was now a part of the battlefield, but that’s what Graham and others insisted.

There were reasons for this.

For one thing, as the NDAA legislation makes clear, the protection afforded Americans from the use of the army against us, the so-called Posse Comitatus Act, has effectively been nullified. Last month, the army conducted "exercises" with Homeland Security operatives and the L.A. police force in a section of downtown Los Angeles.

For another, by calling the United States part of the battlefield, the president, any president, can direct the army to arrest and detain without trial any citizen "suspected" of actions in "support" of an "enemy." The person imprisoned with no rights, in violation of the most fundamental clauses of the Constitution, can’t get judicial review and may never be released because the "war" against "terror" is a war which will by definition never end.

Pretty neat trick, huh?

Last time I looked, only fascist countries and totalitarian regimes did these sort of things. I must’ve been mistaken.

A week ago, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Steven G. Bradbury, former acting assistant Attorney General, principal deputy for the Office of Legal Counsel, and one of the authors of the infamous Bush "torture memos," told Senators that an amendment to the NDAA which would exempt American citizens from indefinite detention without charge or trial would be a mistake.

...the evident purpose of the legislation is to prevent the President from detaining as an enemy combatant under the laws of war, without criminal charge, any American citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States who is apprehended in this country, even if the person is captured while acting as part of a foreign enemy force engaged in acts of war against the United States, such as a U.S.-based terrorist recruit of al Qaeda acting to carry out an armed attack within our borders...

Bradbury believes such a limit would hamper the President in waging the war against terror. America’s a battlefield, he believes, echoing the words of Graham and Chuck Grassley, the senator who brought him in to testify, and that means that anyone on the side of the "enemy" should not be able to count on the protection of the Bill of Rights.

According to an article on the hearing by Kevin Gosztola in Firedoglake, Graham, who was present, "contended the 'homeland' was part of the battlefield and reading Miranda rights is not the best way to collect intelligence. He firmly asserted that homegrown terrorism could be a problem and he wanted the legal system to recognize 'the difference between fighting a crime and fighting a war.'"

No, reading a suspect ‘Miranda rights’ was never the best way to get a confession, either. A rubber hose or simple, repetitive beatings, or simulated drownings, for that matter, could get people to confess to anything just to make it stop. The use of torture, which Obama claimed to oppose but which his administration continues to authorize, is good only for the purpose of satisfying the perverse, sadistic interests of the torturers; nobody in law enforcement thinks it extracts much truth.

Bradbury testified that since President Obama believes he has the authority to order the killing of American citizens in other countries -- such as the victims of U.S. targeted drones in Yemen -- it doesn’t make sense that such a target could become entitled to constitutional rights simply by “making it to the homeland.”

See where this is going?

If the "war" against "terror" is fought everywhere on earth, and if Americans can be legally killed by order of the President on foreign soil, then the President can order the killing of American citizens anywhere, including the United States.

Attorney General Eric Holder. Image from MSNBC.
That was the point of Lindsey Graham’s continued harping on the "battlefield" terms; that was the point of the NDAA and its lightning-swift passage through a somnolent and hopelessly corrupt Congress which barely raised any questions. If America is part of the battlefield, whatever may be legally done on a battlefield may be done here, right here, maybe in L.A. or Oakland, or wherever you live.

True, the use of drone attacks might have to be minimized; too much political fallout from killing a bunch of neighbors along with the "enemy" suspect.

A year ago, the idea that the President had initiated use of death lists, lists of people who were to be killed by the CIA, was considered fanciful or paranoid. Such a claim in the New Yorker by Pulitzer Prize winner Sy Hersh, drew little public response and no Congressional outcry. Now, it’s a conceded fact. And still very few object.

Now, Attorney General Holder, obviously speaking for Obama, tells Congress that the President has the right to order the assassination of whomever he wants. And if America’s now in a permanent state of war, and if that war is taking place right here, in the Fatherland, then there is nothing to prevent Obama -- or any future president -- from killing people, or simply letting the army do it.

That is the situation. It’s not exaggerated. Right now, the U.S. uses death lists. Right now, people are targeted for assassination not because of what anyone’s proven them to do but because of what they are said to have done, or even are said to be thinking of doing.

Obama and Holder are telling us that in plain English. Right now, with the Patriot Act and NDAA, the U.S. is considered part of the "battlefield," which means that the army may do to anyone suspected of wrongful behavior, or of planning such behavior, whatever it wishes. That gives the formerly proscribed act known as prior restraint a whole new meaning.

There are no more legal barriers to arrest without warrants, prison without lawyers, condemnation and even execution without trial. It is a situation so antithetical to what America has by law always been that it is beyond belief. Yet it is so.

Here’s Holder again:

Now, let me be clear. An operation using lethal force in a foreign country targeted against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaeda or associated forces and who is actively engaged in planning to kill Americans would be lawful at least in the following circumstances: first, the U.S. government has determined after a thorough and careful review that the individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; second, capture is not feasible; and third, the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.

The government “has determined.” “Careful review.” “Capture is not feasible.”

And this:

Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaeda or associated forces. This is simply not accurate. Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process. It does not guarantee judicial process.

If due process under the American system, under the Bill of Rights, does not consist of judicial process, of what does it consist? For Holder and Obama, it consists of their own judgment. Don’t worry. Your government will not mistreat you.

Holder:

Some have called such operations "assassinations." They are not. And the use of that loaded term is misplaced. Assassinations are unlawful killings. Here, for the reasons that I have given, the U.S. government’s use of lethal force in self-defense against a leader of al-Qaeda or an associated force who presents an imminent threat of violent attack would not be unlawful, and therefore would not violate the executive order banning assassination or criminal statutes.

“Self-defense” against someone who has yet done nothing but who “presents an imminent threat” as determined by, well, by the government.

And Barack Obama, on the heels of drone attacks which have specifically targeted not only individuals, such as the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki, but funeral processions and first responders, such as medical teams, had this to say:

I want to make sure that people understand, actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part, they have been very precise precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates. And we are very careful in terms of how it’s been applied.

So, I think that there’s this perception somehow that we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly. This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases, and so on. It is important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash.

People who have not attacked America but who “are trying to go in and harm Americans” based on the secret information that we have. The President wants people to understand.

I understand, all right. Here’s Hina Shamsi, an ACLU lawyer, on Democracy Now!:

President Obama has used more targeted killings than the Bush administration ever did. And we do not have the memos, the Office of Legal Counsel memos, that justify the targeted killing policy. And so, very disappointingly, we see the administration claiming a broad and dangerous authority without adequate public transparency, disclosure, and refusing to defend its authority in the courts.

We do not get to see the memos, the memos that "justify" murdering, that is using "lethal force" against Americans, drafted by a government agency. Thanks for the transparency, Mr. President, that you promised. But don’t worry, we trust you. You would never lie to us. You would never violate the constitution. You want to make sure that people understand.

I understand, all right, and so do plenty of other people. This Constitution means something to us, brother, and we're not giving it up just yet.

[Rag Blog contributor Richard Raznikov is an attorney practicing in San Rafael, California. He blogs at News from a Parallel World. Find more articles by Richard Raznikov on The Rag Blog.]

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Mike Davis : The Embers of September

Embers. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
The Embers of September

By Mike Davis / The Rag Blog / September 8, 2011

Ten years ago, Lower Manhattan became the Sarajevo of the War on Terrorism. Although conscience recoils against making an equation between the assassination of a single Archduke and his wife (28 June 1914) and the slaughter of almost 3,000 New Yorkers, the analogy otherwise is eerily apt.

In both cases, a small network of peripheral but well-connected conspirators, ennobled in their own eyes by the bitter grievances of their region, attacked a major symbol of the responsible empire. The outrages were deliberately aimed to detonate larger, cataclysmic conflicts, and in this respect, were successful beyond the all imagining.

However the magnitudes of the resulting explosions were not simple functions of the events that detonated them. For example, in Europe between 1890 and 1940, more than two dozen heads of state were assassinated, including the kings of Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, an empress of Austria, two presidents of France, two Spanish prime ministers, and so on. Apart from the murder of Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo none of these events instigated a war.

Likewise, a single suicide bomber in a truck killed 241 U.S. marines and sailors at their barracks at the Beirut Airport in 1983. (Fifty eight French paratroopers were killed by another bomb the same day.) A Democratic president might have been pressured to go to war against the Shiite and Druze militias, but President Reagan distracted the public with an invasion of tiny Grenada, and then quietly withdrew the rest of his Marines.

If Sarajevo and the World Trade Center, by contrast, unleashed global carnage and chaos, it was because of the de facto collusion between the attackers and the attacked.

I’m not referring to mythical British plots in Balkans or CIA agents blowing up the Twin Towers, but simply to the well-known facts that the Imperial German General Staff had already decided in 1912 to exploit the first opportunity to make war, and that powerful neoliberals in Bush’s White House were lobbying for the overthrow of the regimes in Baghdad and Tehran even before the last hanging chad had been counted in Florida.

Both regimes were in search of a casus belli that would legitimate military intervention and silence domestic opposition. Prussian militarism, of course, was punctually accommodated by the Black Hand (an anarcho-nationalist group secretly supported by the Serbian Army), while Al Qaeda ‘s sublime horror show in lower Manhattan consecrated the divine right of the White House to torture, secretly imprison, or kill by remote control.

At the time, it seemed almost as if the Republicans had staged a coup d’etat against the Constitution. Yet the Bush administration could point to a whole catalogue of precedents. To put it bluntly, every single chapter in the history of U.S. global power has opened with the same sentence: “innocent Americans were treacherously attacked...”

Remember the Maine? Or the Lusitania (1198 dead)? Or the Panay, Pearl Harbor, the crossing of the Yalu, and the Gulf of Tonkin? The besieged legation in Peking, Aguilnaldo’s alleged attack on U.S. sentries outside Manila; Al Raisuli’s brazen kidnappings; Pancho Villa’s raid on sleepy Columbus, New Mexico; the rapine of National City Bank in Port-au-Prince; the storming of the Pueblo and the Mayaquez, the humiliated hostages in Tehran; the imperiled students in Grenada...

This list barely scratches the surface: the synchronization of outrage and intervention in U.S. history is relentless.

In the name of "innocent Americans," the USA annexed Hawaii and Puerto Rico; colonized the Philippines; punished nationalism in North Africa and China; invaded Mexico (twice), sent a generation to the killing fields of France (and imprisoned dissent at home); massacred patriots in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua; annihilated Japanese cities; committed genocide in Korea and Indochina; buttressed military dictatorship in Latin America; and became Israel’s partner in the mass murder of Arab civilians.

Someday -- perhaps sooner than we think -- a new Edward Gibbon in China or India will surely sit down to write The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire. (Hopefully it will be but one volume in a larger, more progressive oeuvre -- The Renaissance of the Asia, perhaps -- and not an obituary for a human future sucked into America’s sinking void.)

I think she’ll probably catalogue self-righteous American "innocence" as a particularly toxic tributary of national decline, with President Obama as its highest incarnation.

Indeed, from the perspective of the future what will be deemed the greater crime: to have created the Guantanamo nightmare in the first place, or to have preserved it in contempt of global popular opinion and one’s own campaign promises?

Obama, who was elected to bring the troops home, close the gulags, and restore the Bill of Rights, has in fact become the chief curator of the Bush legacy: a born-again convert to special ops, killer drones, immense intelligence budgets, Orwellian surveillance technology, secret jails, and the super-hero cult of General Petraeus

Our "anti-war" president, in fact, may be taking U.S. power deeper into the darkness than any of us dare to imagine. And the more fervently Obama embraces his role as commander in chief of the Delta Force and Navy Seals, the less likely it becomes that future Democrats will dare to reform the Patriot Act or challenge the presidential prerogative to murder and incarcerate America’s enemies in secret.

Enmired in wars with phantoms, Washington has been blindsided by every major trend of the last decade. It has completely misread the real yearnings of the Arab street and the significance of mainstream Islamic populism, ignored the emergence of Turkey and Brazil as independent powers, forgotten Africa, and lost much of its leverage with Germany as well as with Israel’s increasingly arrogant reactionaries. Most important, Washington has failed to develop any coherent policy framework for its relationship to the PRC, its main creditor and most important rival.

From a Chinese standpoint (assumedly the perspective of our future Gibbon), the United States is showing incipient symptoms of being a failed state. When Xinhua scolds the U.S. Congress for being "dangerously irresponsible" in debt negotiations, or when senior leaders openly worry about the stability of American political and economic institutions, the shoe is truly on the other foot. Especially when standing in the wings, bibles in hand, are the mad spawn of 9/11 -- the Republican presidential candidates.

[Mike Davis is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. An urban theorist, historian, and social activist, Davis is the author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles and In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire. Read more articles by Mike Davis on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Tarq : 9/11's in U.S. and Chile 28 Years Apart

After 9/11: The War-on-Terror Machine. Political cartoon by David Baldinger / dbaldinger.com.
U.S. and Chile:
Two 9/11's have similar impact

In both countries the 9/11 event was followed by violence, threats to democracy, and economic shifts from the vast majority of the population to the wealthy and political/military elites.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2011

9/11 in Chile

On the bright and sunny morning of September 11, 1973, aircraft bombed targets in Valparaiso, Chile, and moved on to the capital, Santiago. Following a well-orchestrated plan, tanks rolled into the capital city, occupied the central square, and fired on the Presidential palace. Inside that building, President Salvador Allende broadcast a final address to his people and fatally shot himself as soldiers entered his quarters.

Thousands of Allende supporters were rounded up and held in the city’s soccer stadium and many, including renowned folk singer Victor Jara, were tortured and killed. For the next 15 years, Chilean workers were stripped of their right to form unions, political parties and elections were eliminated, and the junta led by General Augusto Pinochet ruled with an iron fist all but ignored outside the country until Chileans began to mobilize to protest his scheme to become president-for-life.


9/11 in the United States

Of course, 9/11/01 was different. The United States was attacked by foreign terrorists, approximately 3,000 citizens and residents were killed at the World Trade Center, over a rural area in Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon. People all over the world expressed their sorrow and sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks as the American people experienced shock and dismay.

But then everything began to change. Within days of the terrorist attacks, members of President Bush’s cabinet began to advocate a military assault on Iraq, a longstanding target of the Washington militarists of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Now is the time, they said, to take out Saddam Hussein, seize control of Iraqi oil fields, and reestablish United States control over the largest share of the oil fields of the Persian Gulf region.

Cooler heads prevailed for a time, however. We cannot attack Iraq, critics said, because Iraq had nothing to do with the crimes in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

So it was decided that a war would be waged on Afghanistan, because the headquarters of the shadowy organization Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, was said to be in that country. On October 6, 2001, that war was initiated and still goes on although Bin Laden has been killed.

Shortly after launching the war on Afghanistan, the neocons in the Bush administration began a campaign to convince the American people that we needed to make war on Iraq. Lies were articulated that the Iraqi dictator was really behind the global terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. He had weapons of mass destruction. He was part of a global Islamic fundamentalist cabal.

At last, despite evidence to the contrary, the mobilization of millions of Americans against war, and growing global resentment against the Bush Doctrine justifying preemptive wars, the United States attacked Iraq in March, 2003. That war too still goes on.

Over the last decade, U.S. military budgets have tripled, thousands of U.S. soldiers have died or sustained irreparable injuries, and an estimated one million Afghan and Iraqi people, mostly civilians, have died.

Meanwhile the United States has maintained over 700 military installations around the world, declared the great land and sea area around the globe at the equator the “arc of instability,” and engaged in direct violence or encouraged others to do so, from Colombia to Honduras in the Western Hemisphere, to Ethiopia and Somalia in the Horn of Africa, to Israel, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Libya in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, to Pakistan, and Afghanistan in East Asia.

Presidents Bush and Obama have declared that United States military overreach to be in the national interest of the country and to serve the humanitarian interest of the world. Now the U.S. program includes the use of computer-operated aircraft, drones, that can target and kill anywhere based on decisions from command headquarters half way around the globe.

Meanwhile at home, the Patriot Act has extended the prerogatives of government to launch a program claiming to be essential to protect the people from domestic terrorists: spying on Americans; incarcerating people from virtually anywhere deemed to be a security threat; and establishing a political climate that intimidates critics of United States foreign policy.

Domestically, the decade since 9/11 has been characterized by sustained assaults on the basic living standards of the bottom 90 percent of the population in terms of wealth and income. Unemployment has risen dramatically. Job growth has ground to a halt. Health care benefits have declined while costs skyrocket.

Virtually every public institution in America, except the military, is being threatened by budget cuts: education, libraries, public health facilities, highways and bridges, fire and police protection, environmental quality.

Support for war overseas and at home is stoked by a so-called “war on terrorism” and an anti-government ideology, made popular earlier by the Reagan administration, that lionizes Adam Smith’s claims that only the market can satisfy human needs. Following 9/11, the “beast” -- government -- has been starved even more, resulting in increased demand on workers and institutions with reduced resources, offering “proof” that government never works.

Not all have had to sacrifice during this 10-year “war on terror” and its attendant domestic programs. The rich have gotten richer while the income and wealth of 90 percent of the population have experienced economic stagnation or decline.

Media monopolization has facilitated the rise of a strata of pundits who simplify and distort the meaning of events since 9/11 by claiming that war is necessary; the terrorist threat is a growing global threat; as a nation and individually we need to arm ourselves; and subliminally it is people of color who constitute the threat to security and well-being.


Where do we go from here?

So the United States' 9/11 event was not the first. The Chilean 9/11 preceded the U.S. one by 28 years. Its people experienced a brutal military coup. And in the United States mass murder was committed by 19 terrorists. But in both cases the 9/11 event was followed by violence, threats to democracy, and economic shifts from the vast majority of the population to the wealthy and political/military elites. In both cases, draconian economic policies and constraints of civil and political rights were defined as required by threats to the “homeland.”

As the 10-year anniversary of the U.S. 9/11 is remembered, it is critical to reflect upon how the murder of 3,000 citizens and residents was defined as an opening salvo in a perpetual “war on terrorism”: how this war trumps traditional civil liberties afforded by the constitution; how this war must be waged at whatever cost to the lives and economic resources of the country; and, as with the Cold War, military spending must take priority over every other activity for which the government has a role.

9/11/73 caused the Chilean people pain and suffering that they are still working to overcome 28 years later. Unless the American people mobilize to challenge the policies, foreign and domestic, that were justified by the tragedy of 9/11, the United States will continue to move down a similar path the Chilean people traveled after their 9/11.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Tom Hayden : On Bin Laden and Searching for Monsters

Seeking monsters to destroy. Image from Slog.
Searching for monsters:
Bin Laden is dead, but will
the 'Long War' on terror live on?

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / May 3, 2011

John Quincy Adams long ago urged that American foreign policy should be based on the principle that "she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy."

The killing of Osama bin Laden is a triumphant moment for President Obama and the CIA, allowing a symbolic claim to victory in the War on Terror, bringing an understandable feeling of closure for the victims of 9/11, and it will almost certainly assure the President’s re-election in 2012.

But as I wrote in The Nation in October 2009, however, the death of bin Laden is not likely to end the Long War on Terror, now spreading from Iraq to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and a dozen other theaters of counterterrorism.

If bin Laden is gone, and his network heavily damaged, what is left of the terrorist threat to our national security that justifies so many trillions of dollars and costs in thousands of lives?

Because of a fabricated fear of bin Laden, we invaded Iraq. The invasion of Afghanistan was to deny sanctuaries to bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In response, Al Qaeda moved into Pakistan, where bin Laden was killed on May 2.

So why are the Taliban in Afghanistan a threat to the security of the United States with bin Laden gone? Surely there are terrorist cells with lethal capacity scattered around the world, surely there might be revenge attacks, but there is hardly a centralized conspiratorial threat that justifies the deployment of hundreds of thousands of American troops.

Now we shall learn whether there is another agenda that keeps 150,000 American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

John Quincy Adams long ago urged that American foreign policy should be based on the principle that “she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

As history turned out, however, our governments have identified and defined many monsters, from Crazy Horse and Geronimo on to the present. The underlying theory has been that demonic conspirators provoke, lead, and manipulate insurgent movements, and that silencing them will end the threat.

The example of Che Guevara is instructive. Detected, hunted, captured, and killed by Bolivians accompanied by the CIA in October 1967, Che was transformed in death into a global symbol of rebellion. His spirit continues to be alive today all over Latin America, and indeed the world. It can be argued that Che’s impact became greater in martyrdom than during his guerrilla campaigns in Africa and Bolivia.

So it could be with the myth of Osama bin Laden. It may depend on whether the U.S. moves away from the War on Terrorism model to more active support of the youthful social revolution sweeping the Arab world today, which has already surpassed Al Qaeda in its scope and momentum.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties.This article was also posted at The Nation and was distributed by Progressive America Rising. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog]

Also see:

• With Afghanistan, a moment of opportunity for Obama by Tom Hayden / Los Angeles Times / May 5, 2011.

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Marc Estrin : GWOT Love

Dedication ceremony for the Vermont Global War on Terror Memorial on Veterans Day, 2010, at the Vermont Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Randolph Center, Vt. Photo by Alison Redlich / AP.
GWOT LOVE

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / November 14, 2010

BURLINGTON, Vermont -- I hear on the news this Veterans Day that our thankfully exiting governor -- cynically known as Governor Scissorhands for all his ribbon cutting -- will be dedicating a new memorial to our Vermont dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The "Vermont Global War on Terror Memorial," planned and funded by the families of "Vermont's 36 Fallen Global War on Terror Heroes” to the tune of $350,000, is aimed at “marking both the sacrifice of those who served and the heartbreak of the loved ones left behind.”

A memorial to oneself?

The sculptor of the Memorial describes it thus:

In front of the field memorial stands a low sarcophagus etched with the names and representing the body of Vermont’s Fallen Patriots.

Surrounding the field memorial and sarcophagus are three semi-circular bench walls.

In the center of each bench wall stands a monolith. The monolith on the left is dedicated to all those from Vermont who have served in the Global War on Terror. It has a hand tooled War on Terror Service Medal. The monolith on the right is dedicated to the families of the fallen and the great sacrifices they have made. It has a hand tooled Vermont Patriot’s Medal. The monolith in the back has a bronze dedication plaque and expresses the pride and sorrow of the citizens of Vermont.

Together the three monoliths -- their family, their comrades and their fellow citizens stand as sentinels ready to guard the sacred honor of the fallen...

The Cemetery Advisory Board of the Vermont Veterans Memorial Cemetery has provided what they call “a reverent location at the entrance to the cemetery.”

The GWOT Memorial will be a lasting tribute to our Fallen Heroes who have made the "ultimate sacrifice" protecting our country and defending our freedom. They will not be forgotten.

It is hard to know where to begin reacting to all this. I cringe at the language -- bathetic, maudlin, soupy, cloying, schmaltzy, large-P Patriotic -- but the sentiments inscribed in this language are more problematical still.

A guy stopped by at our peace vigil last night and said, “My nephew got back from Iraq and blew his brains out. He couldn't deal with the stuff he had done -- killing civilians and all that.”

This, it seems to me, is a more accurate description of reality.

Our president, of course, made a typical Veterans Day pledge: “As long as I am Commander-in-Chief, I am going to do right by them [our veterans]. America will not let you down. We will take care of our own,” he said.

On the other hand, yesterday's release of the draft report from the President's Fiscal Deficit Commission has recommended establishing Veterans Administration health co-pays. From the report:

This option would increase out-of-pocket costs for veterans in Priority Group 5 -- those who do not have service-connected disabilities and whose income is below a VA-defined threshold. Currently, those patients pay no fees for inpatient or outpatient medical care. This option requires copayments for medical care provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs to these enrollees, saving 0.7 billion in 2014.

This, it seems to me, is a more accurate description of reality.

And today, Obama exhorted Congress to stop shooting down the deficit proposals before they have been studied.

If people are in fact, concerned about spending, debt, deficits and the future of our country, then they're going to need to be armed with the information about the kinds of choices that are going to be involved, and we can't just engage in political rhetoric.

A new rhetorical War on Political Rhetoric?

The question of supporting troops is a vexed one. It is true they have suffered -- but they have also caused much suffering. Which of the two do we support? Only the first while ignoring the second? The families too have suffered. But is part of their pain related to their own responsibility in sending their children off to kill and be killed in the interests of a governing elite? Do we support such sending off?

In any case, the language of the Vermont Global War On Terror Memorial is tired, empty, and ever less to any point. It perpetuates a sentimental, obscuring cloud-of-unknowing over the realities we currently face and must radically change.

[Marc Estrin is a writer, activist, and cellist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Imprisonment Without Trial : The American Way?

Image from the ACLU.
When we fail our own ideals:
The unconstitutional practice
Of indefinite detention

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / March 21, 2010

When our forefathers created this great nation, one of the ills they desperately wanted to correct was to insure that government could no longer put people in prison and keep them there for extended periods of time without a trial.

This was a tactic many governments had used to stifle free speech and punish people who they didn't like. Because this is anathema in a free country, the writers of the Constitution included safeguards like habeas corpus to rein in those kind of governmental powers.

Sometimes in our history, we have not lived up to that ideal of justice. For instance, almost everyone now believes it was wrong for the U.S. government to imprison American citizens of Japanese descent during the Second World War. These people had committed no crime and posed no real danger to this country. Their incarceration was due to a racist and irrational fear.

We are now doing it again. We have been holding and torturing people (although I hope the torture has now been stopped) in Guantanamo Bay for many years without giving them a trial. This started under the administration of George Bush, when he decided he could imprison Muslims without reason or trial just by labeling them enemy combatants or terrorists, and keep them in prison for as long as he wanted.

To his shame, President Obama has continued this unconstitutional practice. He is now considering moving these prisoners out of Guantanamo Bay and into either another prison in Bagram in Afghanistan or a facility here in the United States. He is trying to do this to keep his promise to close the facility in Guantanamo Bay. Personally, I think this looks far more like a shell game than an effort to keep a promise.

What difference does it make whether these people are imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, or the United States? They are still being imprisoned with no charges and no trial, and are not allowed to present a defense or make a plea to be released. This is exactly the kind of thing our forefathers tried their best to prevent.

Now I know some will say these are prisoners of war and should be held until the war ends. The fact that not all of them were soldiers captured by our own troops belies this. Not to mention the fact that many have been released already. Others say they are terrorists and we will put ourselves in danger by releasing them. But a nation governed by the rule of law does not put people in prison because they may be scary people.

If scaring people was all it took to put people behind bars without a trial and deny them the right to defend themselves, then thousands of scary Americans should be behind bars right now. Frankly, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachmann, the KKK, the John Birch Society, the teabaggers, and anti-choice people who believe murder is a legal political act scare me far more than any so-called terrorist.

But I'll just have to wait until these people, vile though they may be, actually break a law. Because that's the way things are done in a country governed by the rule of law. We only arrest lawbreakers and then we give them a fair trial. And that's exactly what should happen to those that have been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.

Every prisoner in Guantanamo Bay should be given a constitutionally-fair trial if there is evidence that they have broken a law. If there is no evidence (or the evidence was gained through torture), then they should be released. Justice should always outweigh politics, and no person should be kept in prison for purely political reasons.

It comes down to something as simple as doing the right and just thing.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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Supremes : 'Suspected Enemy Combatant' no Longer a 'Person'

Portrait of a non-person. Image from girloftomorrow.
Dred Scott redux:
Enemy combatants denied legal standing

...once again, 144 years after the Civil War, we have established as the law of the land and the policy of the United States government that whole classes of people can be declared 'non-persons' and have their liberty stripped away...

By Chris Floyd / December 19, 2009

While we were all out doing our Christmas shopping, the highest court in the land quietly put the kibosh on a few more of the remaining shards of human liberty.

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here's how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a "person."

They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever -- save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

This extraordinary ruling occasioned none of those deep-delving "process stories" that glut the pages of the New York Times, where the minutiae of policy-making or political gaming is examined in highly-spun, microscopic detail doled out by self-interested insiders. Obviously, giving government the power to render whole classes of people "unpersons" was not an interesting subject for our media arbiters. It was news that wasn't fit to print. Likewise, the ruling provoked no thundering editorials in the Washington Post, no savvy analysis from the high commentariat -- and needless to say, no outrage whatsoever from all our fierce defenders of individual liberty on the Right.

But William Fisher noticed, and gave this report at Antiwar.com:

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that "torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use."
[....]
Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By agreeing, the court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court, which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act -- a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" -- did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants."

The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of "national emergency." And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.

And yet this is what Barack Obama -- who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer -- has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution. They can't even be sued for, in the specific case under review, subjecting uncharged, indefinitely detained captives to "beatings, sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, extreme hot and cold temperatures, death threats, interrogations at gunpoint, and threatened with unmuzzled dogs."

Again, let's be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand -- in court -- that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities. Nothing to answer for, nothing meriting punishment or even civil penalties. What's more, in championing the lower court ruling, Barack Obama is now on record as believing -- insisting -- that torture is an ordinary, "foreseeable consequence" of military detention of all those who are arbitrarily declared "suspected enemy combatants."

And still further: Barack Obama has now declared, openly, of his own free will, that he does not consider these captives to be "persons." They are, literally, sub-humans. And what makes them sub-humans? The fact that someone in the U.S. government has declared them to be "suspected enemy combatants." (And note: even the mere suspicion of being an "enemy combatant" can strip you of your personhood.)

This is what President Barack Obama believes -- believes so strongly that he has put the full weight of the government behind a relentless series of court actions to preserve, protect and defend these arbitrary powers. (For a glimpse at just a sliver of such cases, go here.)

One co-counsel on the case, Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, zeroed in on the noxious quintessence of the position taken by the Court, and by our first African-American president: its chilling resemblance to the notorious Dred Scott ruling of 1857, which upheld the principle of slavery. As Fisher notes:

"Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not ‘persons’ within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act -- an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow," he added.

The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants — whether or not they were slaves — were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.

And now, once again, 144 years after the Civil War, we have established as the law of the land and the policy of the United States government that whole classes of people can be declared "non-persons" and have their liberty stripped away -- and their torturers and tormentors protected and coddled by authority -- at a moment's notice, with no charges, no defense, no redress, on nothing more than the suspicion that they might be an "enemy combatant," according to the arbitrary definition of the state.

Barack Obama has had the audacity to declare himself the heir and embodiment of the lifework of Martin Luther King. Can this declaration of a whole new principle of universal slavery really be what King was dreaming of? Is this the vision he saw on the other side of the mountain? Or is not the nightmarish inversion of the ideal of a better, more just, more humane world that so many have died for, in so many places, down through the centuries?

Source / Empire Burlesque

Thanks to S.M. Willhelm / The Rag Blog

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John Ross : Days of Dementia in Obamalandia

The Zhu Zhu virtual hamster: Dementia in Obamalandia. Photo by Rex Larsen / The Grand Rapids Press.
On the loose in Obamalandia:
Days of Dementia ('Is the war over yet?')

Yes, Baracko, the economy is booming again for Chinese-made mechanical hamsters but homelessness is the real growth industry.

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / December 7, 2009

TRINIDAD, CA. -- Each Friday afternoon since Bush's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, my old friend Janine V. has been standing with Women In Black here near the 101 off-ramp as a silent reminder of the on-going Bush-Obama genocide in the Middle East.

In the early days of this heroic now-nearly eight year-old vigil, patriotic motorists, often on their way to the local Tsuri Indian Casino to swill at the Firewater Lounge, would hurl invectives and sometimes loaded beer cans at the women. But as the war settled into a daily grind and the U.S. body count climbed incrementally towards 5000, the insults and the beer cans diminished and a few locals now even honk their horns in support.

In the seven years that Trinidad Women In Black have held their ground by the off-ramp, the participants, never spring chickens to begin with, have grown older and one now suffers from dementia. Now when the women stand, she turns to Janine and often asks if the war is over yet?

Barack Obama's nationally televised December 1 declaration of renewed jihad against Al Qaeda's estimated 100 Afghan warriors that will elevate U.S. troop deployment to nearly a quarter of a million in Afghanistan and Iraq (plus another quarter million mercenary contractors) will keep Trinidad Women In Black in business for at least another decade.

The President's goal of "disrupting, dismantling, and destroying" the Taliban-Qaeda Axis of Evil is calculated to tickle America's terrorist nerve. As his grip on the wheel of state grows slack, Obama's presidency increasingly depends on harpooning "America's white whale" as Robert Wright recently dubbed Bin Laden in a New York Times op-ed piece. Al Qaeda's spiritual leader, a Frankenstein fabricated by Reagan's CIA, probably died years ago dragging his dialysis machine over the Khyber Pass.

Robert Fisk notes that Obama-man's West Point kowtow to the generals parallels a similar Soviet troop build-up way back in 1980 that was designed to train Afghan security forces to confront the CIA-financed Muhajadeen. We all know how successfully that plan backfired.

With Blackwater loading up the drones in Pakistan, it's only a matter of months before General McCrystal marches into Pakistan to wipe out the Taliban's safe havens and the Commander-in-Chief puts another 50,000 boots on the ground to secure that nuclear-empowered nation against "international terrorism."

Factoring in another 120,000 "crusaders" bogged down in Iraq, Gates & Company is talking about a bigger army -- actually U.S. economic calamity has translated into box office business for Army and Marine recruiters who are filling out their quotas for the first time since the 9/11 rush to vengeance thanks to the American "downturn."

Predictably, the chickens keep coming home to roost. Major Nidal Hasan's November 5 homicidal rampage at Fort Hood, the most dastardly act of "Islamic terrorism" on U.S. turf since 9/11 as the Glenn Becks vomit, is indeed an ominous sign. Driven by years of hearing out the horror stories of returning soldiers, the Major, a military psychiatrist and a devout Muslim who recoiled at the thought of deploying to Afghanistan to kill other Muslims, created his own horror story. Fort Hood is home to such time bombs. In the month since Major Hasan opened fire with a weapon bought a few yards off base, at least two other Fort Hood soldiers have been killed in soldier-to-soldier violence.

In the first nine months of 2009, 10 soldiers have commited suicide on base -- 76 in all at Fort Hood since Bush and his cronies declared war on Iraq. Soldier suicides in 2009 will again set a record (over 140) as they have every year for the past four. Another 1000 members of the U.S. Army are thought to have attempted suicide -- numbers are not available for other branches of the armed forces.

Meanwhile, domestic violence is pandemic on military bases. During a visit to Fort Bragg North Carolina, the home of the Center for Special Forces and the much-redeployed 81st Airborne a couple of years ago, I was told of soldiers who returned home at noon and by nightfall had massacred their entire family -- local newspapers no longer ran the stories. Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, and Fort Campbell Kentucky have the highest redeployment rates in the military.

The havoc that the Bush-Obama wars continue to wreck upon military families is of course a mere drop in the bucket of blood that these criminal aggressions have poured upon the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, a million of whose citizens have been slaughtered and maimed and exiled since 9/11. Despite the deadly outfall and the palpable suffering now so evident on the streets of America, Congress continues to allocate hundreds of billions of increasingly worthless greenback dollar bills to sustain this ghastly genocide.

I have been on my annual Day of the Dead pilgrimage to the land where my father croaked. I huddle in the kitchen hard by the carcass of this year's dead bird and try to divine the future from its picked-over bones. The task is not a thankful one. A full year after Obama's geyser of hope drenched North America from sea to stinking sea, the forecast is as bleak as a Cormac McCarthy novel. It's not just the venomous particulate drizzling from those few pulp mills and coal-burning plants that are still operating that batters the physical contours of our befouled lives.

Official unemployment is running 12.5% in California and 15% in Michigan but the real numbers are probably twice that if those who have given up looking for work or whose checks have run out or who are working part-time for less pay are counted into the mix. Despite Obama's scripted optimism that the "economy is growing again," there are currently six applicants for every job available and those in the know anticipate double-digit unemployment through 2012 -- the end of the world on the Mayan calendar.

A million more workers will soon have no income whatsoever when Congress, in an interlude of maximum callousness, fails to get around to extending their unemployment benefits while it debates the pros and cons of spending billions more that could nourish social lifelines to kill civilians on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. No dear, the wars are not over yet.

Thanksgiving 2009 was a particularly cruel season for the homeland. Fifteen percent of your fellow citizens -- one in every seven families -- are struggling to put food on the table if the mal gobierno's indicators are to be believed. According to the numbers, 17.5 million Americanos suffer "food insecurity," that is they have been forced to reduce their daily caloric intake at some point in the past year.

Such belt tightening has not much slimmed down the poor. The physique of poverty is now corpulence -- 34% of those living under the poverty line are considered obese and Precious is the new Miss America. And as with every set of stats cranked out by Obama's bean counters, those of darker hue suffer the brunt of deprivation -- 70% of those families who go to bed hungry every night are brown or black. Meanwhile, Wall Street, a gated community where white skin privilege is rewarded, is making a killing again.

The turkey bones yield apocalyptic visions of melting icebergs and Palin/Dobbs in the White House. The portents for this dynamic duo are particularly favorable. As the self-styled "rogue of the right" zooms to the top of the airport best-seller list, Lou Dobbs gloats that times are so tough for "illegal aliens" (read Mexicans) that they will soon be driven from the country -- impoverished families back in hardscrabble Michoacan and Oaxaca are now sending relatives stranded at the bottom of the Yanqui Depression money from home. Remittances from Mexican workers in El Norte, the lifeblood of the Mexican rural economy (10,000,000 Mexicans are dependent on them), dipped 35% this October.

To spice up this end-of-the-world scenario (2012 is boffo at the Multiplex), plague stalks the republic. The Center for Disease Control reports 6,000,000 case of H1N1 in 48 out of 50 states. The swine flu is spread exponentially by infected workers obligated to punch in and send their kids to school every day because they have no paid sick leave -- 40% of all U.S. workers suffer this affliction. Even those ostensibly covered do not stay home for fear that they will lose their jobs. The New York Times reports on one Wal-Mart worker sent home after he turned pale on the job and who fell gravely ill with the swine flu but failed to visit a doctor because he couldn't afford the co-pays on the mega-corps' health care plan.

Nonetheless, this worker's forced furlough may well have saved his life this past Black Friday when hordes of berserk consumers are wont to break down Wal-Mart doors and trample the help underfoot in their eagerness to spend money they do not possess. This year's toy to die for is a Chinese-made mechanical hamster at $17 a crack (one to a customer), a no-nuisance substitute for the real thing.

Yes, Baracko, the economy is booming again for Chinese-made mechanical hamsters but homelessness is the real growth industry. 2010 is expected to be a peak year for foreclosures -- business is percolating for the Flint, Michigan, sign maker in Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story who has landed a contract from local banks to churn out "Foreclosure" signs.

As evictions soar, the homeless overrun the shelters. Perhaps the cruelest twist of the holiday season was the 90-day jail sentence meted to an elderly rancher in San Luis, Obispo, California, for housing a score of homeless clean-and-sober vagrants on his property.

The mood of the country as the Yuletide season heaves into view is decked with dark resentment. One AP story reports that food stamp eligibility workers in Detroit fear for their safety. Irritated applicants herded into long lines that snake into the street throw chunks of concrete through the windows. The cops are called to control unruly clients.

The rule of thumb posits that hard times drive the underclass together. Class distinctions become viscerally clear and solidarity flows. But given American exceptionalism, this is not a likely trend in Obamalandia.

This is a nation where the Great Unwashed have been coerced by vulture consumerism that puts them at each other's throats over mechanical hamsters. American workers have become independent contractors battling with their neighbors over scraps. Most of us do not even know who lives on the other side of the sheetrock. Racism has raised the walls even more precipitously in this post-racialist year. Hate crimes are on a roll -- how about the thug who butchered a Florida Greek Orthodox priest because he thought he was a Muslim? President Obama is said to have spiked at nearly 400 death threats a day.

Recent revelations by those who purportedly speak for the Left have not been helpful. Moore's Capitalism seriously soft soaps criminal capitalism. The 1950s and '60s were hardly the working class paradise the filmmaker portrays -- strikers were beaten, workers were red-baited and blacklisted, black people dangled from poplar trees, fieldworkers were poisoned by the Agribiz kings. The bosses may have seemed like so many benevolent Scrooge McDucks to Moore when he was a lad growing up in a Catholic Caucasian industrial elite household but he is indeed spreading a white lie.

Michael Moore's egregious absolution of Barack Obama for his complicity in beefing up the fat cats while the rest of us grovel for carfare is Capitalism's most painful flaw. MM affirms that the Obamanator's candidacy so discombobulated the rulers that they threw gobs of money at him out of fear of what he represented and abracadabra he became the first Afro-American president of these United States.

We see Obama surrounded by jubilant throngs. We do not see the money. We see nothing about how the first Afro-American president feathered the nests of the Wall Street vultures. Nothing about the sleazy White House backroom deals with pharmaceutical industry creep Billy Tauzin to greenlight the steepest rise in prescription drug prices in 20 years as a prelude to Obamacare. Nothing about dishing up the whole enchilada to the insurance vampires so they can more commodiously gouge the aged and infirm.

Since I was diagnosed with liver cancer eight months ago (now in remission), I have accumulated a foot-high stack of bills and am dunned daily to pay off California-Pacific Medical Center to the tune of $34,000, nearly five times my yearly social security checks -- from which Medicare deducts a hundred bucks a month to allegedly cover my health needs.

Obama's health care pogram has never been about reforming a deformed system to treat the medically indigent. Obamacare was conceived to insure reelection and the health of the Democratic Party and the insurance tycoons. Let’s face it. We're all on the Jack Kevorkian health plan.

Another apostle of the Left I bumped into during my recent foray in Obamalandia was Amiri Baraka who as Leroi Jones I sometimes ran with back in the Village during the bebop '50s. Performing before a packed house in an auditorium named for a notorious San Francisco sweatshop at the main branch of the SF Public Library, Baraka read a love letter to Obama written soon after the election of the first Afro-American President and reviled those on the Left who continue to take to the streets to protest his tainted policies, as "infantile anarchists" and closet racists.

The former Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Stalinist poet laureate of New Jersey (a dubious distinction of which Amiri was stripped after claiming that 1400 "Hymies" employed at the World Trade Center stayed home on 9/11 day) raised eyebrows by hailing Obama's appointment of Rahm Emanuel, a member of the Israeli Defense Forces, as his chief of staff, a clever trick on the Zionists Baraka called it.

He urged his audiences to continue to vote vote vote for fork-tongued Democratic candidates. We have to grow the unlikely coalition that elected these charlatans! Other evasions and foolishness followed. Baraka was not much alarmed by his president's firing of Van Jones, the first Afro-American green jobs czar.

I was one of the first to take the mic for q's and a's. For 22 days prior to Obama's stirring inauguration on the Capitol mall, I pointed out, the Israelis had rained death down on Gaza, slaughtering 1400 civilians -- 360 more have died since -- and then the Zionists judiciously paused for Barack's historic oath-taking. Throughout this grotesque bloodletting, Obama (and Emanuel) remained stonily silent. All they had to say were three little words: Stop the Killing! Why had they not responded?

Barraka was irritated by my question and waved me away from the mic. Then poet Michael McClure pointed out that Amiri had not once mentioned the other elephant in the room, Afghanistan. "He's trying to get us out of there," the poet blathered. Sure, by sending in another 30,000 dead soldiers, we yodeled back.

"Is the war over yet?"

With Barack Obama calling the shots, and lefties like Michael Moore and Amiri Baraka defending him, the Trinidad Women In Black will all be slipping into dementia before the war is over.

["On The Loose In Obamalandia" is the first dispatch from the North American underbelly as John Ross embarks on a monster 2010 book tour presenting his latest cult classic El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption In Mexico City from sea to stinking sea. The author continues to seek midwest, southern, and east coast venues for late March and April. Any bright ideas? Write johnross@igc.org.]

The Rag Blog

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