By Darlene Storm, Computerworld Feb 23, 2011 2:03 pm
It's recently been revealed that the U.S. government contracted HBGary
Federal for the development of software which could create multiple fake
social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on
controversial issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as
surveillance to find public opinions with points of view the powers-that-be
didn't like. It could then potentially have their "fake" people run smear
campaigns against those "real" people. As disturbing as this is, it's not
really new for U.S. intelligence or private intelligence firms to do the
dirty work behind closed doors.
EFF previously warned that Big Brother wants to be your friend for social
media surveillance. While the FBI Intelligence Information Report Handbook
(PDF) mentioned using "covert accounts" to access protected information,
other government agencies endorsed using security exploits to access
protected information.
It's not a big surprise that the U.S. military also wants to use social
media to its benefit. Last year, Public Intelligence published the U.S. Air
Force social media guide which gave 10 tips for social media such as, "The
enemy is engaged in this battlespace and you must engage there as well."
Number three was "DON'T LIE. Credibility is critical, without it, no one
cares what you have to say...it's also punishable by the UCMJ to give a
false statement." The Air Force used the chart below to show how social
media influences public opinion.
The 6th Contracting Squadron at MacDill Air Force Base sought the
development of Persona Management Software which could be used for creating
and managing fake profiles on social media sites to distort the truth and
make it appear as if there was a generally accepted agreement on
controversial issues. "Personas must be able to appear to originate in
nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online
services and social media platforms." What happened to don't lie and the
Uniform Code of Military Justice?
Everything revealed after Anonymous leaked emails from private security
firm HBGary Federal is disturbing on many levels. However, the Daily Kos
said with the Persona Management Software it would take very few people to
create "an army of sockpuppets" which could distort the truth while
appearing to be "an entire Brooks Brothers riot online."
So again I ask, what happened to number three . . . the rule about not
lying that was also "punishable by the UCMJ to give a false statement"?
President and CEO of Plessas Experts Network, Inc, Kirby Plessas pointed
out some of the unethical and potentially illegal activities that Aaron
Barr's leaked emails suggested like "Chumming and baiting" which sounded
like "entrapment of some sort." There would be no warrant for the data
collected on individuals which could then be stored for how long? "THIS is
the entire reason Intelligence Oversight was created - to avoid this sort
of thing from ever happening again."
According to Redacted News, the leaked emails showed how names can be
cross-referenced across social media sites to collect information on people
and then used to gain access to those social ciricles. The emails also
talked of how Facebook could be used to spread government messages:
Even the most restrictive and security conscious of persons can be
exploited. Through the targeting and information reconnaissance phase, a
person's hometown and high school will be revealed. An adversary can create
a classmates.com account at the same high school and year and find out
people you went to high school with that do not have Facebook accounts,
then create the account and send a friend request.
Under the mutual friend decision, which is where most people can be
exploited, an adversary can look at a targets friend list if it is exposed
and find a targets most socially promiscuous friends, the ones that have
over 300-500 friends, friend them to develop mutual friends before sending
a friend request to the target. To that end friend's accounts can be
compromised and used to post malicious material to a targets wall. When
choosing to participate in social media an individual is only as protected
as his/her weakest friend.
Lots of people have multiple online aliases, Facebook or Twitter accounts
for both business and private life. What most bothers me is the lying and
seemingly unethical means to an end. Although the government says it
doesn't approve of censorship, etc, when its secrets come to light, it
seems to be Okay with recommending underhanded tactics.
Secretary Clinton delivered a speech called, "Internet Rights and Wrongs:
Choices and Challenges In A Networked World." To help promote and support
Internet freedom, the State Department intends to award $25 million in
grants. While that is great news, the EFF reported, "For every strong
statement about preserving liberty, freedom of expression, and privacy on
the global Internet, there exists a countervailing example of the United
States attempting to undermine those same values."
Secretary Clinton later told "This Week" anchor Christiane Amanpou that
most Americans "are in favor of human rights, freedom, democracy. We know
that ultimately the most progress that can be made on behalf of human
beings anywhere is when those individuals are empowered, when they have
governments that are responsive." Clinton added, "At the same time, we
recognize that this process can be hijacked. It can be hijacked by both
outside and inside elements within any country."
So while the U.S. government can talk a good talk, what it does and what it
says often doesn't seem to jive. Gasp, I know, it's not a big shocker but
sometimes I find that utterly frustrating. The President wanted an Internet
Kill Switch, the FBI keeps pushing for backdoors on all-things-Net. What
happened to a code of ethics? Does it disappear behind closed doors, dirty
deeds done in the dark and used against the American people who are
supposed to be free to express themselves?
Friday, February 25, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Canada, U.S. agree to use each other’s troops in civil emergencies
Canada and the U.S. have signed an agreement that paves the way for the militaries from either nation to send troops across each other’s borders during an emergency, but some are questioning why the Harper government has kept silent on the deal.
Neither the Canadian government nor the Canadian Forces announced the new agreement, which was signed Feb. 14 in Texas.
The U.S. military’s Northern Command, however, publicized the agreement with a statement outlining how its top officer, Gen. Gene Renuart, and Canadian Lt.-Gen. Marc Dumais, head of Canada Command, signed the plan, which allows the military from one nation to support the armed forces of the other nation during a civil emergency.
The new agreement has been greeted with suspicion by the left wing in Canada and the right wing in the U.S.
The left-leaning Council of Canadians, which is campaigning against what it calls the increasing integration of the U.S. and Canadian militaries, is raising concerns about the deal.
“It’s kind of a trend when it comes to issues of Canada-U.S. relations and contentious issues like military integration. We see that this government is reluctant to disclose information to Canadians that is readily available on American and Mexican websites,” said Stuart Trew, a researcher with the Council of Canadians.
Trew said there is potential for the agreement to militarize civilian responses to emergency incidents. He noted that work is also underway for the two nations to put in place a joint plan to protect common infrastructure such as roadways and oil pipelines.
“Are we going to see (U.S.) troops on our soil for minor potential threats to a pipeline or a road?” he asked.
Trew also noted the U.S. military does not allow its soldiers to operate under foreign command so there are questions about who controls American forces if they are requested for service in Canada. “We don’t know the answers because the government doesn’t want to even announce the plan,” he said.
But Canada Command spokesman Commander David Scanlon said it will be up to civilian authorities in both countries on whether military assistance is requested or even used.
He said the agreement is “benign” and simply sets the stage for military-to-military co-operation if the governments approve.
“But there’s no agreement to allow troops to come in,” he said. “It facilitates planning and co-ordination between the two militaries. The ‘allow’ piece is entirely up to the two governments.”
If U.S. forces were to come into Canada they would be under tactical control of the Canadian Forces but still under the command of the U.S. military, Scanlon added.
News of the deal, and the allegation it was kept secret in Canada, is already making the rounds on left-wing blogs and Internet sites as an example of the dangers of the growing integration between the two militaries.
On right-wing blogs in the U.S. it is being used as evidence of a plan for a “North American union” where foreign troops, not bound by U.S. laws, could be used by the American federal government to override local authorities.
“Co-operative militaries on Home Soil!” notes one website. “The next time your town has a ‘national emergency,’ don’t be surprised if Canadian soldiers respond. And remember — Canadian military aren’t bound by posse comitatus.”
Posse comitatus is a U.S. law that prohibits the use of federal troops from conducting law enforcement duties on domestic soil unless approved by Congress.
Scanlon said there was no intent to keep the agreement secret on the Canadian side of the border. He noted it will be reported on in the Canadian Forces newspaper next week and that publication will be put on the Internet.
Scanlon said the actual agreement hasn’t been released to the public as that requires approval from both nations. That decision has not yet been taken, he added.
Neither the Canadian government nor the Canadian Forces announced the new agreement, which was signed Feb. 14 in Texas.
The U.S. military’s Northern Command, however, publicized the agreement with a statement outlining how its top officer, Gen. Gene Renuart, and Canadian Lt.-Gen. Marc Dumais, head of Canada Command, signed the plan, which allows the military from one nation to support the armed forces of the other nation during a civil emergency.
The new agreement has been greeted with suspicion by the left wing in Canada and the right wing in the U.S.
The left-leaning Council of Canadians, which is campaigning against what it calls the increasing integration of the U.S. and Canadian militaries, is raising concerns about the deal.
“It’s kind of a trend when it comes to issues of Canada-U.S. relations and contentious issues like military integration. We see that this government is reluctant to disclose information to Canadians that is readily available on American and Mexican websites,” said Stuart Trew, a researcher with the Council of Canadians.
Trew said there is potential for the agreement to militarize civilian responses to emergency incidents. He noted that work is also underway for the two nations to put in place a joint plan to protect common infrastructure such as roadways and oil pipelines.
“Are we going to see (U.S.) troops on our soil for minor potential threats to a pipeline or a road?” he asked.
Trew also noted the U.S. military does not allow its soldiers to operate under foreign command so there are questions about who controls American forces if they are requested for service in Canada. “We don’t know the answers because the government doesn’t want to even announce the plan,” he said.
But Canada Command spokesman Commander David Scanlon said it will be up to civilian authorities in both countries on whether military assistance is requested or even used.
He said the agreement is “benign” and simply sets the stage for military-to-military co-operation if the governments approve.
“But there’s no agreement to allow troops to come in,” he said. “It facilitates planning and co-ordination between the two militaries. The ‘allow’ piece is entirely up to the two governments.”
If U.S. forces were to come into Canada they would be under tactical control of the Canadian Forces but still under the command of the U.S. military, Scanlon added.
News of the deal, and the allegation it was kept secret in Canada, is already making the rounds on left-wing blogs and Internet sites as an example of the dangers of the growing integration between the two militaries.
On right-wing blogs in the U.S. it is being used as evidence of a plan for a “North American union” where foreign troops, not bound by U.S. laws, could be used by the American federal government to override local authorities.
“Co-operative militaries on Home Soil!” notes one website. “The next time your town has a ‘national emergency,’ don’t be surprised if Canadian soldiers respond. And remember — Canadian military aren’t bound by posse comitatus.”
Posse comitatus is a U.S. law that prohibits the use of federal troops from conducting law enforcement duties on domestic soil unless approved by Congress.
Scanlon said there was no intent to keep the agreement secret on the Canadian side of the border. He noted it will be reported on in the Canadian Forces newspaper next week and that publication will be put on the Internet.
Scanlon said the actual agreement hasn’t been released to the public as that requires approval from both nations. That decision has not yet been taken, he added.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Indiana Official: "Use Live Ammunition" Against Wisconsin Protesters
By Adam Weinstein
On Saturday night, when Mother Jones staffers tweeted a report that riot police might soon sweep demonstrators out of the Wisconsin capitol building—something that didn't end up happening—one Twitter user sent out a chilling public response: "Use live ammunition."
From my own Twitter account, I confronted the user, JCCentCom. He tweeted back that the demonstrators were "political enemies" and "thugs" who were "physically threatening legally elected officials." In response to such behavior, he said, "You're damned right I advocate deadly force." He later called me a "typical leftist," adding, "liberals hate police."
Only later did we realize that JCCentCom was a deputy attorney general for the state of Indiana.
As one of 144 attorneys in that office, Jeff Cox has represented the people of his state for 10 years. And for much of that time, it turns out, he's vented similar feelings on Twitter and on his blog, Pro Cynic. In his nonpolitical tweets and blog posts, Cox displays a keen litigator's mind, writing sharply and often wittily on military history and professional basketball. But he evinces contempt for political opponents—from labeling President Obama an "incompetent and treasonous" enemy of the nation to comparing "enviro-Nazis" to Osama bin Laden, likening ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Service Employees International Union members to Nazi "brownshirts" on multiple occasions, and referring to an Indianapolis teen as "a black teenage thug who was (deservedly) beaten up" by local police. A "sensible policy for handling Afghanistan," he offered, could be summed up as: "KILL! KILL! ANNIHILATE!"
Early Sunday, Mother Jones sent an email to Cox's work address at the Indiana attorney general's office, asking if the Twitter and blog comments were his, and if he could provide context for some of them. He responded shortly after from a personal email address: "For 'context?' Or to silence me? All my comments on twitter & my blog are my own and no one else's. And I can defend them all.
"[Y]ou will probably try to demonize me," he wrote, "but that comes with the territory."
To be sure, in the current political climate, partisan rhetoric has run hot online—and the Constitution guarantees everyone's right to such rhetoric. Nonetheless, a spokesman for the Indiana attorney general's office, Bryan Corbin, told Mother Jones that Cox's statements were "inflammatory," and he promised "an immediate review" of the matter. "We do not condone any comments that would threaten or imply violence or intimidation toward anyone," Corbin added.
The incident seems all the more troubling now that the public-sector union fight playing out in Wisconsin is now headed to other states—including Indiana, where GOP senators Tuesday passed a bill that would abolish collective bargaining for state teachers. (Indiana's Republican governor walked back his support of the measure Tuesday after taking stock of the opposition.) Cox's public writings made it clear that he isn't a member of a public-service union, and he has no love for those who are.
"Individuals have the First Amendment right to post their own personal views in online forums on their own time," Corbin wrote to Mother Jones, "but as public servants, state employees also should strive to conduct themselves with professionalism and appropriate decorum in their interactions with the public." Cox had been contacted by the office, Corbin added: "We have reiterated to the employee the standards of professional conduct expected for all licensed attorneys and for employees of the Indiana Attorney General's Office. After all the relevant information is obtained, this agency then will determine whether there has been any violation of the personnel handbook."
In the meantime, we hoped to give Cox a chance to explain his thoughts in greater detail. In his initial email to Mother Jones, Cox had written, "Ask what questions you want & I will do my best to answer. Maybe you'll learn something. Maybe I'll learn something." So we emailed him a list of questions:
What did he mean when he tweeted: "Planned Parenthood could help themselves if the only abortions they performed were retroactive"?
In referring to President Obama, why did he use a George W. Bush line once directed at the Iraqi people: "Your enemy is not surrounding your country, your enemy is ruling your country"?
Were members of the SEIU really like Hitler's Sturmabteilung, and did he stand by his headline, "Putting the 'Reich' in Robert Reich"?
We never heard back.
Adam Weinstein is Mother Jones' copy editor.
On Saturday night, when Mother Jones staffers tweeted a report that riot police might soon sweep demonstrators out of the Wisconsin capitol building—something that didn't end up happening—one Twitter user sent out a chilling public response: "Use live ammunition."
From my own Twitter account, I confronted the user, JCCentCom. He tweeted back that the demonstrators were "political enemies" and "thugs" who were "physically threatening legally elected officials." In response to such behavior, he said, "You're damned right I advocate deadly force." He later called me a "typical leftist," adding, "liberals hate police."
Only later did we realize that JCCentCom was a deputy attorney general for the state of Indiana.
As one of 144 attorneys in that office, Jeff Cox has represented the people of his state for 10 years. And for much of that time, it turns out, he's vented similar feelings on Twitter and on his blog, Pro Cynic. In his nonpolitical tweets and blog posts, Cox displays a keen litigator's mind, writing sharply and often wittily on military history and professional basketball. But he evinces contempt for political opponents—from labeling President Obama an "incompetent and treasonous" enemy of the nation to comparing "enviro-Nazis" to Osama bin Laden, likening ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Service Employees International Union members to Nazi "brownshirts" on multiple occasions, and referring to an Indianapolis teen as "a black teenage thug who was (deservedly) beaten up" by local police. A "sensible policy for handling Afghanistan," he offered, could be summed up as: "KILL! KILL! ANNIHILATE!"
Early Sunday, Mother Jones sent an email to Cox's work address at the Indiana attorney general's office, asking if the Twitter and blog comments were his, and if he could provide context for some of them. He responded shortly after from a personal email address: "For 'context?' Or to silence me? All my comments on twitter & my blog are my own and no one else's. And I can defend them all.
"[Y]ou will probably try to demonize me," he wrote, "but that comes with the territory."
To be sure, in the current political climate, partisan rhetoric has run hot online—and the Constitution guarantees everyone's right to such rhetoric. Nonetheless, a spokesman for the Indiana attorney general's office, Bryan Corbin, told Mother Jones that Cox's statements were "inflammatory," and he promised "an immediate review" of the matter. "We do not condone any comments that would threaten or imply violence or intimidation toward anyone," Corbin added.
The incident seems all the more troubling now that the public-sector union fight playing out in Wisconsin is now headed to other states—including Indiana, where GOP senators Tuesday passed a bill that would abolish collective bargaining for state teachers. (Indiana's Republican governor walked back his support of the measure Tuesday after taking stock of the opposition.) Cox's public writings made it clear that he isn't a member of a public-service union, and he has no love for those who are.
"Individuals have the First Amendment right to post their own personal views in online forums on their own time," Corbin wrote to Mother Jones, "but as public servants, state employees also should strive to conduct themselves with professionalism and appropriate decorum in their interactions with the public." Cox had been contacted by the office, Corbin added: "We have reiterated to the employee the standards of professional conduct expected for all licensed attorneys and for employees of the Indiana Attorney General's Office. After all the relevant information is obtained, this agency then will determine whether there has been any violation of the personnel handbook."
In the meantime, we hoped to give Cox a chance to explain his thoughts in greater detail. In his initial email to Mother Jones, Cox had written, "Ask what questions you want & I will do my best to answer. Maybe you'll learn something. Maybe I'll learn something." So we emailed him a list of questions:
What did he mean when he tweeted: "Planned Parenthood could help themselves if the only abortions they performed were retroactive"?
In referring to President Obama, why did he use a George W. Bush line once directed at the Iraqi people: "Your enemy is not surrounding your country, your enemy is ruling your country"?
Were members of the SEIU really like Hitler's Sturmabteilung, and did he stand by his headline, "Putting the 'Reich' in Robert Reich"?
We never heard back.
Adam Weinstein is Mother Jones' copy editor.
Scott Walker Runs on Koch Money
by: Lisa Graves | PR Watch | Report
Madison, Wisconsin - A new investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy documents the big money funneled by one of the richest men in America and one of the richest corporations in the world to put controversial Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in office.
The Republican Governors Association and the Kochs' Investment in Scott Walker
Walker was elected just over three months ago on the heels of an exceptionally expensive gubernatorial race in the Badger State, fueled by groups funded by the Koch brothers, David and Charles. David Koch, the son of a radical founding member of the John Birch Society, which has long been obsessed with claims about socialism and advocated the repeal of civil rights laws, personally donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association (RGA) in June of last year. This was the most he had ever personally given to that group. (Fellow billionaire Rupert Murdoch matched Koch's donation to the RGA with a $1 million donation from his company News Corporation, parent company of FOX "News" Channel.)
The RGA in turn spent $5 million in the race, mostly on TV ads attacking Walker's political opponent, Democratic Mayor Tom Barrett. As this photo shows, the RGA described itself as a "key investor" in Walker's victory. In its congratulations, the RGA notes that it "ran a comprehensive campaign including TV and internet ads and direct mail. The series of ads were devastating to Tom Barrett ... All told, RGA ran 8 TV ads and sent 8 pieces of mail for absentee, early voting, and GOTV, totaling 2.9 million pieces."
The Center for Media and Democracy reported on some of the RGA's spin-filled ads last November, including the ads against Barrett, and filed a snapshot report this week. As the RGA takes credit, its multi-million dollar negative ad campaign probably did help make the difference between the 1.1 million votes cast for Walker against Barrett's 1 million votes. According to Open Secrets, Koch Industries was one of the top ten donors to the RGA in 2010, giving $1,050,450 to help with governors' races, like Walker's.
As Mother Jones has noted, the Koch Industries' political action committee, KochPAC, gave Walker's campaign $43,000 directly (according to the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board). It may seem like a small amount compared with the millions the Kochs are spending funding the RGA and other groups, but that donation was one of the larger individual donations to Walker not from an expressly-named partisan PAC. It is, however, a drop in the bucket compared with the impact of a million-dollar negative ad campaign, especially because the candidate promoted by the mud-slingers does not have to get his hands dirty.
The Kochs' Investment in Americans for Prosperity
The laundering of Koch dollars through the RGA dwarfs the Kochs' direct donations to Walker, and it also does not tell the whole story. As the Center for Media and Democracy has been documenting on its SourceWatch site for several years, David Koch was the founder and chairman of a front group called Citizens for a Sound Economy, which received at least $12 million from the Koch Family Foundations and which is the predecessor of the group Americans for Prosperity.
As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker, the Kochs do not deny funding Americans for Prosperity (the amount is not disclosed) but assert that they provide no funding "specifically to support the tea parties." "Specifically" is the key word in that sentence that does not deny what is known in the non-profit world as "general support," meaning general funding or endowments, for an organization's operations and overall mission. As Mayer noted, Peggy Venable -- who helps the Americans for Prosperity Foundation train Tea Party activists and "target elected officials" -- "said of the Kochs, 'They're certainly our people. David's the chairman of our board. I've certainly met with them, and I'm very appreciative of what they do.'"
Americans for Prosperity provided “Tea Party Talking Points” as the Tea Party was launched around tax day in 2009, and this weekend it is providing talking points to those coming to Madison for a pro-Walker protest it is helping to stage. Media watchers can expect to hear Americans for Prosperity protesters get equal time on the news, and more than equal time on FOX, using phrases to cloak union-busting as merely getting workers to accept "paying a fair share" through "modest but critical reforms" that end "strong-arming politicians for exorbitant benefits." The spin will also likely include a trumped up statistic claiming that private sector employees in Wisconsin earn 74 cents for every dollar paid to "overpaid" state union members--you know, teachers, firefighters, police, social workers, nurses, and other civil servants. An "unofficial" theme, a drumbeat of the Bircher baby propaganda efforts bankrolled by the Kochs, is calling opponents "socialists," a smear heard with increasing frequency as the Kochs' influence has expanded in the past two years.
Americans for Prosperity's Investment in Scott Walker
Notably, Americans for Prosperity bragged that it was going to spend nearly $50 million across the country in the November elections. As one of the groups exploiting the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision to allow unlimited spending by corporations to influence election outcomes, it does not disclose its donors and it does not report its expenditures on so-called "issue ads." It did run such ads in Wisconsin last fall.
Americans for Prosperity has actively supported and promoted Scott Walker in a variety of ways. It featured him at its tea party rally in Wisconsin in September 2009, when he was running for the Republican nomination for governor. Americans for Prosperity also ran millions of dollars in ads on a "spending crisis" (a crisis it did not run ads against when Republicans were spending the multi-billion dollar budget surplus into a multi-trillion dollar deficit), and it selected Wisconsin as one of the states for those ads in the months before the election. It also funded a "spending revolt" tour in Wisconsin last fall through its state "chapter."
Just how much money has Americans for Prosperity and its Wisconsin counterpart spent on issue ads or promoting Walker over the past two years is one of the questions for this weekend's orchestrated "Stand with Walker" event.
The Return on Investment?
Some things are known, though. Koch money helped get Scott Walker the governor's seat in Wisconsin. And now a major Koch-related group is spearheading the defense of Walker's radical plan to kill public employees' right to organize in Wisconsin. The question is whether an actual majority of Wisconsin citizens want two of the richest men in the world, who do not live here -- and who, as Lee Fang has pointed out, have eliminated jobs in this state -- to be playing such an influential role in the rights of working people here.
The Kochs assert that they do not "direct" the activities of Americans for Prosperity or the Tea Party. No, they just fuel them with their riches from the oil business they inherited from their daddy.
And they did not vote for Scott Walker in the traditional sense in a democracy. Rather, as the Republican Governors Association spells out, they "invested" in him.
What is the return desired for their investment? It looks like the first dividend Walker wants to pay, through the help of the Koch-subsidized cheerleaders from Americans for Prosperity, is a death knell for unions and the rights of workers to organize. But tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens have stood up this week to say this ROI will not be paid, that their rights will not be the price Walker exacts from them in return for the largess the Kochs have shown him as the anointed instrument of their agenda in this state.
Lisa Graves is Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, the publisher of PRWatch.org, SourceWatch.org, and BanksterUSA.org. She formerly served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice, as Chief Counsel for Nominations for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and as Deputy Chief of the Article III Judges Division of the U.S. Courts.
Madison, Wisconsin - A new investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy documents the big money funneled by one of the richest men in America and one of the richest corporations in the world to put controversial Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in office.
The Republican Governors Association and the Kochs' Investment in Scott Walker
Walker was elected just over three months ago on the heels of an exceptionally expensive gubernatorial race in the Badger State, fueled by groups funded by the Koch brothers, David and Charles. David Koch, the son of a radical founding member of the John Birch Society, which has long been obsessed with claims about socialism and advocated the repeal of civil rights laws, personally donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association (RGA) in June of last year. This was the most he had ever personally given to that group. (Fellow billionaire Rupert Murdoch matched Koch's donation to the RGA with a $1 million donation from his company News Corporation, parent company of FOX "News" Channel.)
The RGA in turn spent $5 million in the race, mostly on TV ads attacking Walker's political opponent, Democratic Mayor Tom Barrett. As this photo shows, the RGA described itself as a "key investor" in Walker's victory. In its congratulations, the RGA notes that it "ran a comprehensive campaign including TV and internet ads and direct mail. The series of ads were devastating to Tom Barrett ... All told, RGA ran 8 TV ads and sent 8 pieces of mail for absentee, early voting, and GOTV, totaling 2.9 million pieces."
The Center for Media and Democracy reported on some of the RGA's spin-filled ads last November, including the ads against Barrett, and filed a snapshot report this week. As the RGA takes credit, its multi-million dollar negative ad campaign probably did help make the difference between the 1.1 million votes cast for Walker against Barrett's 1 million votes. According to Open Secrets, Koch Industries was one of the top ten donors to the RGA in 2010, giving $1,050,450 to help with governors' races, like Walker's.
As Mother Jones has noted, the Koch Industries' political action committee, KochPAC, gave Walker's campaign $43,000 directly (according to the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board). It may seem like a small amount compared with the millions the Kochs are spending funding the RGA and other groups, but that donation was one of the larger individual donations to Walker not from an expressly-named partisan PAC. It is, however, a drop in the bucket compared with the impact of a million-dollar negative ad campaign, especially because the candidate promoted by the mud-slingers does not have to get his hands dirty.
The Kochs' Investment in Americans for Prosperity
The laundering of Koch dollars through the RGA dwarfs the Kochs' direct donations to Walker, and it also does not tell the whole story. As the Center for Media and Democracy has been documenting on its SourceWatch site for several years, David Koch was the founder and chairman of a front group called Citizens for a Sound Economy, which received at least $12 million from the Koch Family Foundations and which is the predecessor of the group Americans for Prosperity.
As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker, the Kochs do not deny funding Americans for Prosperity (the amount is not disclosed) but assert that they provide no funding "specifically to support the tea parties." "Specifically" is the key word in that sentence that does not deny what is known in the non-profit world as "general support," meaning general funding or endowments, for an organization's operations and overall mission. As Mayer noted, Peggy Venable -- who helps the Americans for Prosperity Foundation train Tea Party activists and "target elected officials" -- "said of the Kochs, 'They're certainly our people. David's the chairman of our board. I've certainly met with them, and I'm very appreciative of what they do.'"
Americans for Prosperity provided “Tea Party Talking Points” as the Tea Party was launched around tax day in 2009, and this weekend it is providing talking points to those coming to Madison for a pro-Walker protest it is helping to stage. Media watchers can expect to hear Americans for Prosperity protesters get equal time on the news, and more than equal time on FOX, using phrases to cloak union-busting as merely getting workers to accept "paying a fair share" through "modest but critical reforms" that end "strong-arming politicians for exorbitant benefits." The spin will also likely include a trumped up statistic claiming that private sector employees in Wisconsin earn 74 cents for every dollar paid to "overpaid" state union members--you know, teachers, firefighters, police, social workers, nurses, and other civil servants. An "unofficial" theme, a drumbeat of the Bircher baby propaganda efforts bankrolled by the Kochs, is calling opponents "socialists," a smear heard with increasing frequency as the Kochs' influence has expanded in the past two years.
Americans for Prosperity's Investment in Scott Walker
Notably, Americans for Prosperity bragged that it was going to spend nearly $50 million across the country in the November elections. As one of the groups exploiting the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision to allow unlimited spending by corporations to influence election outcomes, it does not disclose its donors and it does not report its expenditures on so-called "issue ads." It did run such ads in Wisconsin last fall.
Americans for Prosperity has actively supported and promoted Scott Walker in a variety of ways. It featured him at its tea party rally in Wisconsin in September 2009, when he was running for the Republican nomination for governor. Americans for Prosperity also ran millions of dollars in ads on a "spending crisis" (a crisis it did not run ads against when Republicans were spending the multi-billion dollar budget surplus into a multi-trillion dollar deficit), and it selected Wisconsin as one of the states for those ads in the months before the election. It also funded a "spending revolt" tour in Wisconsin last fall through its state "chapter."
Just how much money has Americans for Prosperity and its Wisconsin counterpart spent on issue ads or promoting Walker over the past two years is one of the questions for this weekend's orchestrated "Stand with Walker" event.
The Return on Investment?
Some things are known, though. Koch money helped get Scott Walker the governor's seat in Wisconsin. And now a major Koch-related group is spearheading the defense of Walker's radical plan to kill public employees' right to organize in Wisconsin. The question is whether an actual majority of Wisconsin citizens want two of the richest men in the world, who do not live here -- and who, as Lee Fang has pointed out, have eliminated jobs in this state -- to be playing such an influential role in the rights of working people here.
The Kochs assert that they do not "direct" the activities of Americans for Prosperity or the Tea Party. No, they just fuel them with their riches from the oil business they inherited from their daddy.
And they did not vote for Scott Walker in the traditional sense in a democracy. Rather, as the Republican Governors Association spells out, they "invested" in him.
What is the return desired for their investment? It looks like the first dividend Walker wants to pay, through the help of the Koch-subsidized cheerleaders from Americans for Prosperity, is a death knell for unions and the rights of workers to organize. But tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens have stood up this week to say this ROI will not be paid, that their rights will not be the price Walker exacts from them in return for the largess the Kochs have shown him as the anointed instrument of their agenda in this state.
Lisa Graves is Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, the publisher of PRWatch.org, SourceWatch.org, and BanksterUSA.org. She formerly served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice, as Chief Counsel for Nominations for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and as Deputy Chief of the Article III Judges Division of the U.S. Courts.
What Conservatives Really Want
by: George Lakoff, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
The central issue in our political life is not being discussed. At stake is the moral basis of American democracy.
The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women's rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal care, science, public broadcasting and on and on.
Budget deficits are a ruse, as we've seen in Wisconsin, where the Governor turned a surplus into a deficit by providing corporate tax breaks, and then used the deficit as a ploy to break the unions, not just in Wisconsin, but seeking to be the first domino in a nationwide conservative movement.
Deficits can be addressed by raising revenue, plugging tax loopholes, putting people to work and developing the economy long-term in all the ways the president has discussed. But deficits are not what really matter to conservatives.
Conservatives really want to change the basis of American life, to make America run according to the conservative moral worldview in all areas of life.
In the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama accurately described the basis of American democracy: empathy — citizens caring for each other, both social and personal responsibility — acting on that care, and an ethic of excellence. From these, our freedoms and our way of life follow, as does the role of government: to protect and empower everyone equally. Protection includes safety, health, the environment, pensions. Empowerment starts with education and infrastructure. No one can be free without these, and without a commitment to care and act on that care by one's fellow citizens.
The conservative worldview rejects all of that.
Conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don't think government should help its citizens. That is, they don't think citizens should help each other. The part of government they want to cut is not the military (we have 174 bases around the world), not government subsidies to corporations, not the aspect of government that fits their worldview. They want to cut the part that helps people. Why? Because that violates individual responsibility.
But where does that view of individual responsibility alone come from?
The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. And what of people who are not prosperous? They don't have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally.
The market itself is seen in this way. The slogan, "Let the market decide" assumes the market itself is The Decider. The market is seen as both natural (since it is assumed that people naturally seek their self-interest) and moral (if everyone seeks their own profit, the profit of all will be maximized by the invisible hand). As the ultimate moral authority, there should be no power higher than the market that might go against market values. Thus the government can spend money to protect the market and promote market values, but should not rule over it either through (1) regulation, (2) taxation, (3) unions and worker rights, (4) environmental protection or food safety laws, and (5) tort cases. Moreover, government should not do public service. The market has service industries for that.
Thus, it would be wrong for the government to provide health care, education, public broadcasting, public parks and so on. The very idea of these things is at odds with the conservative moral system. No one should be paying for anyone else. It is individual responsibility in all arenas. Taxation is thus seen as taking money away from those who have earned it and giving it to people who don't deserve it. Taxation cannot be seen as providing the necessities of life for a civilized society, and, as necessary, for business to prosper.
In conservative family life, the strict father rules. Fathers and husbands should have control over reproduction; hence, parental and spousal notification laws and opposition to abortion. In conservative religion, God is seen as the strict father, the Lord, who rewards and punishes according to individual responsibility in following his Biblical word.
Above all, the authority of conservatism itself must be maintained. The country should be ruled by conservative values, and progressive values are seen as evil. Science should have authority over the market, and so the science of global warming and evolution must not be denied. Facts that are inconsistent with the authority of conservatism must be ignored or denied or explained away. To protect and extend conservative values themselves, the devil's own means can be used against conservatism's immoral enemies, whether lies, intimidation, torture or even death, say, for women's doctors.
Freedom is defined as being your own strict father - with individual, not social, responsibility, and without any government authority telling you what you can and cannot do. To defend that freedom as an individual, you will, of course, need a gun.
This is the America that conservatives really want. Budget deficits are convenient ruses for destroying American democracy and replacing it with conservative rule in all areas of life.
What is saddest of all is to see Democrats helping them.
Democrats help radical conservatives by accepting the deficit frame and arguing about what to cut. Even arguing against specific "cuts" is working within the conservative frame. What is the alternative? Pointing out what conservatives really want. Point out that there is plenty of money in America, and in Wisconsin. It is at the top. The disparity in financial assets is un-American - the top one percent has more financial assets than the bottom 95 percent. Middle-class wages have been flat for 30 years, while the wealth has floated to the top. This fits the conservative way of life, but not the American way of life.
Democrats help conservatives by not shouting out loud, over and over, that it was conservative values that caused the global economic collapse: lack of regulation and a greed-is-good ethic.
Democrats also help conservatives by what a friend has called "Democratic Communication Disorder." Republican conservatives have constructed a vast and effective communication system, with think tanks, framing experts, training institutes, a system of trained speakers, vast holdings of media and booking agents. Eighty percent of the talking heads on TV are conservatives. Talk matters, because language heard over and over changes brains. Democrats have not built the communication system they need, and many are relatively clueless about how to frame their deepest values and complex truths.
And Democrats help conservatives when they function as policy wonks — talking policy without communicating the moral values behind the policies. They help conservatives when they neglect to remind us that pensions are deferred payments for work done. "Benefits" are pay for work, not a handout. Pensions and benefits are arranged by contract. If there is not enough money for them, it is because the contracted funds have been taken by conservative officials and given to wealthy people and corporations instead of to the people who have earned them.
Democrats help conservatives when they use conservative words like "entitlements" instead of "earnings" and speak of government as providing "services" instead of "necessities."
Is there hope?
I see it in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands citizens see through the conservative frames and are willing to flood the streets of their capital to stand up for their rights. They understand that democracy is about citizens uniting to take care of each other, about social responsibility as well as individual responsibility, and about work - not just for your own profit, but to help create a civilized society. They appreciate their teachers, nurses, firemen, police and other public servants. They are flooding the streets to demand real democracy - the democracy of caring, of social responsibility and of excellence, where prosperity is to be shared by those who work and those who serve.
The central issue in our political life is not being discussed. At stake is the moral basis of American democracy.
The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women's rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal care, science, public broadcasting and on and on.
Budget deficits are a ruse, as we've seen in Wisconsin, where the Governor turned a surplus into a deficit by providing corporate tax breaks, and then used the deficit as a ploy to break the unions, not just in Wisconsin, but seeking to be the first domino in a nationwide conservative movement.
Deficits can be addressed by raising revenue, plugging tax loopholes, putting people to work and developing the economy long-term in all the ways the president has discussed. But deficits are not what really matter to conservatives.
Conservatives really want to change the basis of American life, to make America run according to the conservative moral worldview in all areas of life.
In the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama accurately described the basis of American democracy: empathy — citizens caring for each other, both social and personal responsibility — acting on that care, and an ethic of excellence. From these, our freedoms and our way of life follow, as does the role of government: to protect and empower everyone equally. Protection includes safety, health, the environment, pensions. Empowerment starts with education and infrastructure. No one can be free without these, and without a commitment to care and act on that care by one's fellow citizens.
The conservative worldview rejects all of that.
Conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don't think government should help its citizens. That is, they don't think citizens should help each other. The part of government they want to cut is not the military (we have 174 bases around the world), not government subsidies to corporations, not the aspect of government that fits their worldview. They want to cut the part that helps people. Why? Because that violates individual responsibility.
But where does that view of individual responsibility alone come from?
The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. And what of people who are not prosperous? They don't have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally.
The market itself is seen in this way. The slogan, "Let the market decide" assumes the market itself is The Decider. The market is seen as both natural (since it is assumed that people naturally seek their self-interest) and moral (if everyone seeks their own profit, the profit of all will be maximized by the invisible hand). As the ultimate moral authority, there should be no power higher than the market that might go against market values. Thus the government can spend money to protect the market and promote market values, but should not rule over it either through (1) regulation, (2) taxation, (3) unions and worker rights, (4) environmental protection or food safety laws, and (5) tort cases. Moreover, government should not do public service. The market has service industries for that.
Thus, it would be wrong for the government to provide health care, education, public broadcasting, public parks and so on. The very idea of these things is at odds with the conservative moral system. No one should be paying for anyone else. It is individual responsibility in all arenas. Taxation is thus seen as taking money away from those who have earned it and giving it to people who don't deserve it. Taxation cannot be seen as providing the necessities of life for a civilized society, and, as necessary, for business to prosper.
In conservative family life, the strict father rules. Fathers and husbands should have control over reproduction; hence, parental and spousal notification laws and opposition to abortion. In conservative religion, God is seen as the strict father, the Lord, who rewards and punishes according to individual responsibility in following his Biblical word.
Above all, the authority of conservatism itself must be maintained. The country should be ruled by conservative values, and progressive values are seen as evil. Science should have authority over the market, and so the science of global warming and evolution must not be denied. Facts that are inconsistent with the authority of conservatism must be ignored or denied or explained away. To protect and extend conservative values themselves, the devil's own means can be used against conservatism's immoral enemies, whether lies, intimidation, torture or even death, say, for women's doctors.
Freedom is defined as being your own strict father - with individual, not social, responsibility, and without any government authority telling you what you can and cannot do. To defend that freedom as an individual, you will, of course, need a gun.
This is the America that conservatives really want. Budget deficits are convenient ruses for destroying American democracy and replacing it with conservative rule in all areas of life.
What is saddest of all is to see Democrats helping them.
Democrats help radical conservatives by accepting the deficit frame and arguing about what to cut. Even arguing against specific "cuts" is working within the conservative frame. What is the alternative? Pointing out what conservatives really want. Point out that there is plenty of money in America, and in Wisconsin. It is at the top. The disparity in financial assets is un-American - the top one percent has more financial assets than the bottom 95 percent. Middle-class wages have been flat for 30 years, while the wealth has floated to the top. This fits the conservative way of life, but not the American way of life.
Democrats help conservatives by not shouting out loud, over and over, that it was conservative values that caused the global economic collapse: lack of regulation and a greed-is-good ethic.
Democrats also help conservatives by what a friend has called "Democratic Communication Disorder." Republican conservatives have constructed a vast and effective communication system, with think tanks, framing experts, training institutes, a system of trained speakers, vast holdings of media and booking agents. Eighty percent of the talking heads on TV are conservatives. Talk matters, because language heard over and over changes brains. Democrats have not built the communication system they need, and many are relatively clueless about how to frame their deepest values and complex truths.
And Democrats help conservatives when they function as policy wonks — talking policy without communicating the moral values behind the policies. They help conservatives when they neglect to remind us that pensions are deferred payments for work done. "Benefits" are pay for work, not a handout. Pensions and benefits are arranged by contract. If there is not enough money for them, it is because the contracted funds have been taken by conservative officials and given to wealthy people and corporations instead of to the people who have earned them.
Democrats help conservatives when they use conservative words like "entitlements" instead of "earnings" and speak of government as providing "services" instead of "necessities."
Is there hope?
I see it in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands citizens see through the conservative frames and are willing to flood the streets of their capital to stand up for their rights. They understand that democracy is about citizens uniting to take care of each other, about social responsibility as well as individual responsibility, and about work - not just for your own profit, but to help create a civilized society. They appreciate their teachers, nurses, firemen, police and other public servants. They are flooding the streets to demand real democracy - the democracy of caring, of social responsibility and of excellence, where prosperity is to be shared by those who work and those who serve.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Madison Area AFL CIO Votes to Prepare For General Strike
By Mike Elk
This evening in a press release from IBEW Local 2304 President Dave Pokilinski, I received word that the 45,000 member Southern Central Federation of Labor, the local chapter of the AFL-CIO for the Madison and Southern Central Wisconsin area, has voted to make preparations for a general strike.
The press release reads as follows:
Around 10:50PM Wisconsin Time on February 21st the South Central Federation of Labor endorsed the following motions:
Motion 1: The SCFL endorses a general strike, possibly for the day Walker signs his “budget repair bill,” and requests the Education Committee immediately begin educating affiliates and members on the organization and function of a general strike.
Motion 2: The SCFL goes on record as opposing all provisions contained in Walker’s “budget repair bill,” including but not limited to, curtailed bargaining rights and reduced wages, benefits, pensions, funding for public education, changes to medical assistance programs, and politicization of state government agencies.
It’s important to note that this is just a threat and not actually going out on a general strike. Under the Taft-Hartley Act a general strike in support of other workers is illegal; therefore the key word is the phrase “begin educating affiliates and members on the organization and function of a general strike”. In addition, only individual unions, not the central labor federation has the ability to call a strike.
Many private sector unions would not go out on a general strike out of fear of being of sued by their employers. However, local labor observers say many public sector unions and some of the construction unions would go out on a strike. Threatening a general strike creates even more pressure for Scott Walker in the business community. The business community in Wisconsin already appears to bucking under the intense pressure of the mass labor mobilization.
This evening in a press release from IBEW Local 2304 President Dave Pokilinski, I received word that the 45,000 member Southern Central Federation of Labor, the local chapter of the AFL-CIO for the Madison and Southern Central Wisconsin area, has voted to make preparations for a general strike.
The press release reads as follows:
Around 10:50PM Wisconsin Time on February 21st the South Central Federation of Labor endorsed the following motions:
Motion 1: The SCFL endorses a general strike, possibly for the day Walker signs his “budget repair bill,” and requests the Education Committee immediately begin educating affiliates and members on the organization and function of a general strike.
Motion 2: The SCFL goes on record as opposing all provisions contained in Walker’s “budget repair bill,” including but not limited to, curtailed bargaining rights and reduced wages, benefits, pensions, funding for public education, changes to medical assistance programs, and politicization of state government agencies.
It’s important to note that this is just a threat and not actually going out on a general strike. Under the Taft-Hartley Act a general strike in support of other workers is illegal; therefore the key word is the phrase “begin educating affiliates and members on the organization and function of a general strike”. In addition, only individual unions, not the central labor federation has the ability to call a strike.
Many private sector unions would not go out on a general strike out of fear of being of sued by their employers. However, local labor observers say many public sector unions and some of the construction unions would go out on a strike. Threatening a general strike creates even more pressure for Scott Walker in the business community. The business community in Wisconsin already appears to bucking under the intense pressure of the mass labor mobilization.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Tea Party Leader Plans to Infiltrate Union "Goons"
By Adam Weinstein
Last year, Mark Williams was tossed out of the Tea Party Express for his racially insensitive NAACP parody. (Three weeks later, he took the helm of an upstart tea party group.) Now, he wants to sow mayhem among "the union goons in Wisconsin" and elsewhere. According to a post on his blog today, Williams is seeking volunteers to pose with him as members of the Service Employees International Union at a Sacramento, California, rally, to act like angry fools and get the union workers bad publicity from "lazy reporters":
we are going to target the many TV cameras and reporters looking for comments from the members there (5) we will approach the cameras to make good pictures… signs under our shirts that say things like “screw the taxpayer!” and “you OWE me!” to be pulled out for the camera (timing is important because the signs will be taken away from us) (6) we will echo those slogans in angry sounding tones to the cameras and the reporters.
Williams later updated the post to report that tea partiers in multiple states, including Iowa, Colorado, and Massachusetts, were calling in to plan "their own creative ruses" for embarrasing the union demonstrators. "Several have also reminded me that we have a distinct advantage in that the SEIU primarily represents non-English speaking illegal aliens so we will be the ones whose comments will make air!!!!" he wrote:
Our goal is to make the gathering look as greedy and goonish as we know that it is, ding their credibility with the media and exploit the lazy reporters who just want dramatic shots and outrageous quotes for headlines. Even if it becomes known that we are plants the quotes and pictures will linger as defacto truth.
Thus far, demonstrations and counterdemonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, have been peaceful, according to reporting by MJ's own Andy Kroll. Anti-union protesters, led by media mogul Andrew Breitbart, GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, and "Joe the Plumber," largely fizzled after a rally on Saturday. And the image of union workers that Williams seeks to portray seems to run uphill against the images of the employees' leaders seen thus far. But as labor disputes spread to other states, it remains to be seen whether tactics like those proposed by Williams will be effective in embarassing the public employees...or embarrasing the tea party "plants" themselves.
Last year, Mark Williams was tossed out of the Tea Party Express for his racially insensitive NAACP parody. (Three weeks later, he took the helm of an upstart tea party group.) Now, he wants to sow mayhem among "the union goons in Wisconsin" and elsewhere. According to a post on his blog today, Williams is seeking volunteers to pose with him as members of the Service Employees International Union at a Sacramento, California, rally, to act like angry fools and get the union workers bad publicity from "lazy reporters":
we are going to target the many TV cameras and reporters looking for comments from the members there (5) we will approach the cameras to make good pictures… signs under our shirts that say things like “screw the taxpayer!” and “you OWE me!” to be pulled out for the camera (timing is important because the signs will be taken away from us) (6) we will echo those slogans in angry sounding tones to the cameras and the reporters.
Williams later updated the post to report that tea partiers in multiple states, including Iowa, Colorado, and Massachusetts, were calling in to plan "their own creative ruses" for embarrasing the union demonstrators. "Several have also reminded me that we have a distinct advantage in that the SEIU primarily represents non-English speaking illegal aliens so we will be the ones whose comments will make air!!!!" he wrote:
Our goal is to make the gathering look as greedy and goonish as we know that it is, ding their credibility with the media and exploit the lazy reporters who just want dramatic shots and outrageous quotes for headlines. Even if it becomes known that we are plants the quotes and pictures will linger as defacto truth.
Thus far, demonstrations and counterdemonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, have been peaceful, according to reporting by MJ's own Andy Kroll. Anti-union protesters, led by media mogul Andrew Breitbart, GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, and "Joe the Plumber," largely fizzled after a rally on Saturday. And the image of union workers that Williams seeks to portray seems to run uphill against the images of the employees' leaders seen thus far. But as labor disputes spread to other states, it remains to be seen whether tactics like those proposed by Williams will be effective in embarassing the public employees...or embarrasing the tea party "plants" themselves.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
FBI Targeting Palestine Solidarity Activists in New England
On the early morning of February 10, Richard Hugus, a member of the New England Committee to Defend Palestine, received a knock on the door by a member of the FBI accompanied by a police detective.
Richard asserted his right not to speak to the agent, who left behind a card identifying himself as agent David George.
When Richard's lawyer called to find out why the FBI was trying to interrogate him, the agent replied that they were interested in discussing an article Richard had written in 2005/2006 and a letter to political prisoner Aafia Sidiqqui.
In light of the recent grand juries that have been convened targeting Palestine solidarity and anti-war activists across the country, this FBI activity in Boston should come as no surprise.
For the NECDP, FBI repression is also nothing new.
We have experienced repression from the FBI and ICE since our inception in 2002, when Amer Jubran was arrested by FBI and INS agents who showed up at his door the day after our first demonstration and demanded that he cooperate with their investigation or face disappearance and indefinite detention.
"Please the ears of this gentleman," said the INS agent gesturing to the FBI, "or we'll let you rot for 50 years."
But while the FBI harassment is nothing new, a few things are worth noting about this latest development:
--The FBI openly asserted that it wants to investigate Richard for an article he has written.
In the past, we have been used to the FBI and the rest of the Homeland Security apparatus manufacturing fake grounds for investigating (and later arresting) activists--for such things as alleged immigration violations.
Over the last few years, the charge of "material support for terrorism"has been increasingly used to include public advocacy.
At the same time, there has been a constant public discourse on "violent radicalization" and "homegrown terrorism," in which spreading information and expressing opinions on the internet have been identified as threats to "security."
The idea that the FBI would investigate someone for expressing an opinionin an article is now normal. --Richard Hugus is a solidarity activist.
Although the FBI is still primarily targeting Arabs and Muslims with its "terrorism" investigations and arrests--with the number of such casesrising dramatically since the beginning of the Holder/Obama regime--the past year has shown a significant new trend of targeting not just Palestinians, but Palestine solidarity activists.
This attention to solidarity activists comes at a moment when zionists areincreasingly on the defensive. In 2010, officials at the "Israeli" Foreign Ministry said that they were considering stopping lectures by official representatives around the world because these only provide targets for arapidly growing protest movement.
The Reut Institute--a prominent zionist think tank--suggested in the same year that unless a new strategy were developed against the Palestine solidarity movement (including "legal" intervention, e.g. repression), "Israel" might soon find itself in theposition of being an international pariah state.
A central strategic recommendation of the Reut report was to distinguish between critics of Israeli policy and those who are committed to "delegitimizing Israel."
They suggest that it's important to treat the "critics" as potential allies--and give them more room to express themselves--in order to isolate the "delegitimizers."
What we are witnessing across the country is an attempt to isolate and remove radical voices from the public discussion about Palestine in order to reduce their influence within a growing movement.
Anyone who stands up for the right of Palestinians to resist or who refuses to accept the right of "Israel" to exist is in the rifle sight.
Richard Hugus is under investigation because he has used his skills as an activist, film-maker and writer to stand up for these fundamental truths:
oppressed people have the right to fight their oppressors; colonized people have the right to take back the land that was stolen from them.
As members of the New England Committee to Defend Palestine we give full support to these positions:
--The people of Palestine have the right to resist and to reclaim all oftheir historic land from colonization.
--The peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan have the right to resist US invasionand occupation by any means necessary.
We will not be silenced and we will not speak to the FBI.
Richard asserted his right not to speak to the agent, who left behind a card identifying himself as agent David George.
When Richard's lawyer called to find out why the FBI was trying to interrogate him, the agent replied that they were interested in discussing an article Richard had written in 2005/2006 and a letter to political prisoner Aafia Sidiqqui.
In light of the recent grand juries that have been convened targeting Palestine solidarity and anti-war activists across the country, this FBI activity in Boston should come as no surprise.
For the NECDP, FBI repression is also nothing new.
We have experienced repression from the FBI and ICE since our inception in 2002, when Amer Jubran was arrested by FBI and INS agents who showed up at his door the day after our first demonstration and demanded that he cooperate with their investigation or face disappearance and indefinite detention.
"Please the ears of this gentleman," said the INS agent gesturing to the FBI, "or we'll let you rot for 50 years."
But while the FBI harassment is nothing new, a few things are worth noting about this latest development:
--The FBI openly asserted that it wants to investigate Richard for an article he has written.
In the past, we have been used to the FBI and the rest of the Homeland Security apparatus manufacturing fake grounds for investigating (and later arresting) activists--for such things as alleged immigration violations.
Over the last few years, the charge of "material support for terrorism"has been increasingly used to include public advocacy.
At the same time, there has been a constant public discourse on "violent radicalization" and "homegrown terrorism," in which spreading information and expressing opinions on the internet have been identified as threats to "security."
The idea that the FBI would investigate someone for expressing an opinionin an article is now normal. --Richard Hugus is a solidarity activist.
Although the FBI is still primarily targeting Arabs and Muslims with its "terrorism" investigations and arrests--with the number of such casesrising dramatically since the beginning of the Holder/Obama regime--the past year has shown a significant new trend of targeting not just Palestinians, but Palestine solidarity activists.
This attention to solidarity activists comes at a moment when zionists areincreasingly on the defensive. In 2010, officials at the "Israeli" Foreign Ministry said that they were considering stopping lectures by official representatives around the world because these only provide targets for arapidly growing protest movement.
The Reut Institute--a prominent zionist think tank--suggested in the same year that unless a new strategy were developed against the Palestine solidarity movement (including "legal" intervention, e.g. repression), "Israel" might soon find itself in theposition of being an international pariah state.
A central strategic recommendation of the Reut report was to distinguish between critics of Israeli policy and those who are committed to "delegitimizing Israel."
They suggest that it's important to treat the "critics" as potential allies--and give them more room to express themselves--in order to isolate the "delegitimizers."
What we are witnessing across the country is an attempt to isolate and remove radical voices from the public discussion about Palestine in order to reduce their influence within a growing movement.
Anyone who stands up for the right of Palestinians to resist or who refuses to accept the right of "Israel" to exist is in the rifle sight.
Richard Hugus is under investigation because he has used his skills as an activist, film-maker and writer to stand up for these fundamental truths:
oppressed people have the right to fight their oppressors; colonized people have the right to take back the land that was stolen from them.
As members of the New England Committee to Defend Palestine we give full support to these positions:
--The people of Palestine have the right to resist and to reclaim all oftheir historic land from colonization.
--The peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan have the right to resist US invasionand occupation by any means necessary.
We will not be silenced and we will not speak to the FBI.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Feds Approve Monsanto Herbicide-Resistant Crops
by: Mike Ludwig, t r u t h o u t | Report
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has approved plantings of three genetically engineered (GE) crops in as many weeks, including Monsanto Co.'s Roundup Ready sugar beets and alfalfa that are engineered to tolerate Roundup Ready weed-killing herbicide.
The USDA on February 11 also legalized, without restriction, the world's first GE corn crop meant for biofuel production. Biotech giant Syngenta's Event 3272 seed corn will simplify ethanol production and is not meant to feed animals or humans.
The approvals flew in the face of legal and regulatory challenges posed by GE crop opponents and members of the agricultural industry. Opponents fear the GE crop varieties could contaminate conventional food crops and promote the overuse of herbicides like the glyphosate-based Roundup and more toxic chemicals used to kill glyphosate-resistant weeds.
Monsanto won a victory on February 4 when the USDA partially deregulated Roundup Ready sugar beets. A federal court in August 2010 temporarily banned the beets and ordered the USDA to re-review the environmental impacts of the Roundup Ready sugar beets as the result of a lawsuit filed by farmers and environmental groups.
Plaintiff attorney Paul Achitoff from the environmental group Earthjustice said the USDA's decision to allow plantings of the sugar beets under "lax conditions" violates federal law. However, the USDA said the beets pose no "plant pest risk" and farmers can start planting them before a final Environmental Impact Statement is issued in 2012.
Roundup Ready alfalfa was legalized without any restrictions on January 27 after nearly five years of legal battles that pitted farmers and GE critics against the USDA and Monsanto.
The USDA disappointed GE critics again last week when it fully deregulated Swiss agribusiness giant Syngenta's Event 3272 GE corn. The corn is genetically engineered to produce an enzyme that converts starch to sugar, making it easier to process the corn and turn it into the biofuel ethanol.
The North American Millers Association (NAMA), a normally pro-biotech organization that represents 170 agricultural mills in 38 states, is concerned that Event 3271 kernels could accidentally mix with corn meant for food processing and damage the quality of food products like snacks and breakfast cereals.
"USDA has failed to provide the public with sufficient scientific data on the economic impacts of contamination on food production, or information on how USDA will ensure Syngenta's compliance with a stewardship plan," said NAMA President Mary Waters.
Fight the lies and misinformation; support truth! Please make a tax-deductible donation to Truthout today and keep real independent journalism strong.
The USDA is counting on a "closed loop system" created by Syngenta to prevent Event 3272 corn from contaminating the food supply and is encouraging dialogue between Syngenta and the food industry, according to a release. The USDA is aware that some millers and food processors are concerned about Event 3272 and is promoting participation in an industry advisory council sponsored by Syngenta to review the "closed loop system."
Bill Freese, GE critic and policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety (CFS), said that the USDA should to take a closer look at Syngenta's track record.
A 2004 investigation conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirmed that Syngenta had illegally distributed GE seed corn engineered to produce an unregistered pesticide on over 1,000 occasions to farmers in the US, South America and Europe.
The EPA fined Syngenta $1.5 million in 2006 for distributing the seed corn, which produced a then unregistered pesticide called Bt 10.
The USDA did not classify Event 3272 corn as a crop grown to produce an industrial compound during its review of Syngenta's petition to legalize the corn, and NAMA argues that the agency would have completed a more thorough scientific review of the product if it regulators classified it as industrial.
A USDA spokesperson told Truthout that Event 3272 is not considered an industrial product crop because its extra genetic traits turn starch into sugar, not ethanol itself.
Syngenta's own recently released data shows Event 3272 would have "adverse impacts" on food quality if it entered the conventional corn supply, according to NAMA.
NAMA spokesperson Terri Long said the millers' association is concerned about food product quality and not Syngenta's past violations.
Freese said that Event 3272 is supposed to be used for domestic ethanol production, but Syngenta has applied for import approvals for Event 3272 in nations where the US exports corn. Freese said Syngenta is trying to avoid liability in case Event 3272 does contaminate the domestic corn supply.
Freese and CFS helped represent plaintiffs in the lawsuits against the USDA that challenged initial approvals of Roundup Ready alfalfa and sugar beets.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has approved plantings of three genetically engineered (GE) crops in as many weeks, including Monsanto Co.'s Roundup Ready sugar beets and alfalfa that are engineered to tolerate Roundup Ready weed-killing herbicide.
The USDA on February 11 also legalized, without restriction, the world's first GE corn crop meant for biofuel production. Biotech giant Syngenta's Event 3272 seed corn will simplify ethanol production and is not meant to feed animals or humans.
The approvals flew in the face of legal and regulatory challenges posed by GE crop opponents and members of the agricultural industry. Opponents fear the GE crop varieties could contaminate conventional food crops and promote the overuse of herbicides like the glyphosate-based Roundup and more toxic chemicals used to kill glyphosate-resistant weeds.
Monsanto won a victory on February 4 when the USDA partially deregulated Roundup Ready sugar beets. A federal court in August 2010 temporarily banned the beets and ordered the USDA to re-review the environmental impacts of the Roundup Ready sugar beets as the result of a lawsuit filed by farmers and environmental groups.
Plaintiff attorney Paul Achitoff from the environmental group Earthjustice said the USDA's decision to allow plantings of the sugar beets under "lax conditions" violates federal law. However, the USDA said the beets pose no "plant pest risk" and farmers can start planting them before a final Environmental Impact Statement is issued in 2012.
Roundup Ready alfalfa was legalized without any restrictions on January 27 after nearly five years of legal battles that pitted farmers and GE critics against the USDA and Monsanto.
The USDA disappointed GE critics again last week when it fully deregulated Swiss agribusiness giant Syngenta's Event 3272 GE corn. The corn is genetically engineered to produce an enzyme that converts starch to sugar, making it easier to process the corn and turn it into the biofuel ethanol.
The North American Millers Association (NAMA), a normally pro-biotech organization that represents 170 agricultural mills in 38 states, is concerned that Event 3271 kernels could accidentally mix with corn meant for food processing and damage the quality of food products like snacks and breakfast cereals.
"USDA has failed to provide the public with sufficient scientific data on the economic impacts of contamination on food production, or information on how USDA will ensure Syngenta's compliance with a stewardship plan," said NAMA President Mary Waters.
Fight the lies and misinformation; support truth! Please make a tax-deductible donation to Truthout today and keep real independent journalism strong.
The USDA is counting on a "closed loop system" created by Syngenta to prevent Event 3272 corn from contaminating the food supply and is encouraging dialogue between Syngenta and the food industry, according to a release. The USDA is aware that some millers and food processors are concerned about Event 3272 and is promoting participation in an industry advisory council sponsored by Syngenta to review the "closed loop system."
Bill Freese, GE critic and policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety (CFS), said that the USDA should to take a closer look at Syngenta's track record.
A 2004 investigation conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirmed that Syngenta had illegally distributed GE seed corn engineered to produce an unregistered pesticide on over 1,000 occasions to farmers in the US, South America and Europe.
The EPA fined Syngenta $1.5 million in 2006 for distributing the seed corn, which produced a then unregistered pesticide called Bt 10.
The USDA did not classify Event 3272 corn as a crop grown to produce an industrial compound during its review of Syngenta's petition to legalize the corn, and NAMA argues that the agency would have completed a more thorough scientific review of the product if it regulators classified it as industrial.
A USDA spokesperson told Truthout that Event 3272 is not considered an industrial product crop because its extra genetic traits turn starch into sugar, not ethanol itself.
Syngenta's own recently released data shows Event 3272 would have "adverse impacts" on food quality if it entered the conventional corn supply, according to NAMA.
NAMA spokesperson Terri Long said the millers' association is concerned about food product quality and not Syngenta's past violations.
Freese said that Event 3272 is supposed to be used for domestic ethanol production, but Syngenta has applied for import approvals for Event 3272 in nations where the US exports corn. Freese said Syngenta is trying to avoid liability in case Event 3272 does contaminate the domestic corn supply.
Freese and CFS helped represent plaintiffs in the lawsuits against the USDA that challenged initial approvals of Roundup Ready alfalfa and sugar beets.
Common Cause Asks Court About Thomas Speech
Tuesday 15 February 2011
by: Eric Lichtblau, The New York Times News Service | Report
Justice Clarence Thomas attended a political retreat for wealthy conservatives three years ago that have prompted new questions about his recent vote on Citizens United.
Washington - Discrepancies in reports about an appearance by Justice Clarence Thomas at a political retreat for wealthy conservatives three years ago have prompted new questions to the Supreme Court from a group that advocates changing campaign finance laws.
When questions were first raised about the retreat last month, a court spokeswoman said Justice Thomas had made a “brief drop-by” at the event in Palm Springs, Calif., in January 2008 and had given a talk.
In his financial disclosure report for that year, however, Justice Thomas reported that the Federalist Society, a prominent conservative legal group, had reimbursed him an undisclosed amount for four days of “transportation, meals and accommodations” over the weekend of the retreat. The event is organized by Charles and David Koch, brothers who have used millions of dollars from the energy conglomerate they run in Wichita, Kan., to finance conservative causes.
Arn Pearson, a vice president at the advocacy group Common Cause, said the two statements appeared at odds. His group sent a letter to the Supreme Court on Monday asking for “further clarification” as to whether the justice spent four days at the retreat for the entire event or was there only briefly.
“I don’t think the explanation they’ve given is credible,” Mr. Pearson said in an interview. He said that if Justice Thomas’s visit was a “four-day, all-expenses paid trip in sunny Palm Springs,” it should have been reported as a gift under federal law.
The Supreme Court had no comment on the issue Monday. Nor did officials at the Federalist Society or at Koch Industries.
Common Cause maintains that Justice Thomas should have disqualified himself from last year’s landmark campaign finance ruling in the Citizens United case, partly because of his ties to the Koch brothers.
In a petition filed with the Justice Department last month, the advocacy group said past appearances at the Koch brothers’ retreat by Justice Thomas and Justice Antonin Scalia, along with the conservative political work of Justice Thomas’s wife, had created a possible perception of bias in hearing the case.
The Citizens United decision, with Justice Thomas’s support, freed corporations to engage in direct political spending with little public disclosure. The Koch brothers have been among the main beneficiaries, political analysts say.
This article "Common Cause Asks Court About Thomas Speech" originally appeared at The New York Times.
© 2011 The New York Times Company
by: Eric Lichtblau, The New York Times News Service | Report
Justice Clarence Thomas attended a political retreat for wealthy conservatives three years ago that have prompted new questions about his recent vote on Citizens United.
Washington - Discrepancies in reports about an appearance by Justice Clarence Thomas at a political retreat for wealthy conservatives three years ago have prompted new questions to the Supreme Court from a group that advocates changing campaign finance laws.
When questions were first raised about the retreat last month, a court spokeswoman said Justice Thomas had made a “brief drop-by” at the event in Palm Springs, Calif., in January 2008 and had given a talk.
In his financial disclosure report for that year, however, Justice Thomas reported that the Federalist Society, a prominent conservative legal group, had reimbursed him an undisclosed amount for four days of “transportation, meals and accommodations” over the weekend of the retreat. The event is organized by Charles and David Koch, brothers who have used millions of dollars from the energy conglomerate they run in Wichita, Kan., to finance conservative causes.
Arn Pearson, a vice president at the advocacy group Common Cause, said the two statements appeared at odds. His group sent a letter to the Supreme Court on Monday asking for “further clarification” as to whether the justice spent four days at the retreat for the entire event or was there only briefly.
“I don’t think the explanation they’ve given is credible,” Mr. Pearson said in an interview. He said that if Justice Thomas’s visit was a “four-day, all-expenses paid trip in sunny Palm Springs,” it should have been reported as a gift under federal law.
The Supreme Court had no comment on the issue Monday. Nor did officials at the Federalist Society or at Koch Industries.
Common Cause maintains that Justice Thomas should have disqualified himself from last year’s landmark campaign finance ruling in the Citizens United case, partly because of his ties to the Koch brothers.
In a petition filed with the Justice Department last month, the advocacy group said past appearances at the Koch brothers’ retreat by Justice Thomas and Justice Antonin Scalia, along with the conservative political work of Justice Thomas’s wife, had created a possible perception of bias in hearing the case.
The Citizens United decision, with Justice Thomas’s support, freed corporations to engage in direct political spending with little public disclosure. The Koch brothers have been among the main beneficiaries, political analysts say.
This article "Common Cause Asks Court About Thomas Speech" originally appeared at The New York Times.
© 2011 The New York Times Company
Sunday, February 13, 2011
FBI harasses Michigan anti-war activist
By Tom Burke
Kalamazoo, MI - FBI agents continue to harass anti-war and international solidarity activists, this time in Michigan. On Feb 3., longtime Michigan peace activist Dave Staiger received a phone call from the FBI. Special agent Karlie Wood asked to interview Dave in person. Staiger told the agent, “My policy is to contact a lawyer if the FBI or police want to talk to me.” The agent said, “Contacting a lawyer is not necessary,” and that Staiger was not in any trouble. Special Agent Wood then stated that she wanted to talk about matters relating to the Grand Jury subpoenas and FBI investigation in Minneapolis and Chicago.
On Sept. 24, 2010, the FBI raided seven homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, taking boxes of activists’ personal belongings, computers, cell phones and passports. The FBI delivered subpoenas to fourteen activists that month, including two people in Michigan. Then in December, under orders for U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s office in Chicago, nine more Palestine solidarity activists were subpoenaed for Jan. 25.
Sixty cities and campuses across the country and some overseas held protests Jan. 25. The original 14 and the new nine activists subpoenaed all refuse to speak at Fitzgerald’s Grand Jury. The Grand Jury is a secret court of inquisition, handpicked by Fitzgerald’s office, with no judge. Those called before a Grand Jury have no right to a lawyer in the room with them and no press is allowed to witness the proceedings.
Dave Staiger said he participated in the recent National Call-In Day to Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney General Holder and President Obama, asking them to stop the FBI raids and shut down Fitzgerald’s Grand Jury. This helped him in knowing what to say to the FBI and to not be intimidated.
Staiger states, “This is an attack on free speech and it is undemocratic. It is starting to remind me of the 1950s and the McCarthy era.”
Mick Kelly, of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, has urged everyone in the progressive community to exercise their legal right to not answer questions put to them by FBI agents. “This is a witch hunt against anyone who is standing up against war and injustice. Tell FBI agents you have nothing to say. Period.” says Kelly.
Kalamazoo, MI - FBI agents continue to harass anti-war and international solidarity activists, this time in Michigan. On Feb 3., longtime Michigan peace activist Dave Staiger received a phone call from the FBI. Special agent Karlie Wood asked to interview Dave in person. Staiger told the agent, “My policy is to contact a lawyer if the FBI or police want to talk to me.” The agent said, “Contacting a lawyer is not necessary,” and that Staiger was not in any trouble. Special Agent Wood then stated that she wanted to talk about matters relating to the Grand Jury subpoenas and FBI investigation in Minneapolis and Chicago.
On Sept. 24, 2010, the FBI raided seven homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, taking boxes of activists’ personal belongings, computers, cell phones and passports. The FBI delivered subpoenas to fourteen activists that month, including two people in Michigan. Then in December, under orders for U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s office in Chicago, nine more Palestine solidarity activists were subpoenaed for Jan. 25.
Sixty cities and campuses across the country and some overseas held protests Jan. 25. The original 14 and the new nine activists subpoenaed all refuse to speak at Fitzgerald’s Grand Jury. The Grand Jury is a secret court of inquisition, handpicked by Fitzgerald’s office, with no judge. Those called before a Grand Jury have no right to a lawyer in the room with them and no press is allowed to witness the proceedings.
Dave Staiger said he participated in the recent National Call-In Day to Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney General Holder and President Obama, asking them to stop the FBI raids and shut down Fitzgerald’s Grand Jury. This helped him in knowing what to say to the FBI and to not be intimidated.
Staiger states, “This is an attack on free speech and it is undemocratic. It is starting to remind me of the 1950s and the McCarthy era.”
Mick Kelly, of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, has urged everyone in the progressive community to exercise their legal right to not answer questions put to them by FBI agents. “This is a witch hunt against anyone who is standing up against war and injustice. Tell FBI agents you have nothing to say. Period.” says Kelly.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Why Bradley Manning Is a Patriot, Not a Criminal: An Opening Statement for the Defense of Private Manning
Thursday 10 February 2011
by: Chase Madar | TomDispatch | News Analysis
Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old from Crescent, Oklahoma, enlisted in the U.S. military in 2007 to give something back to his country and, he hoped, the world.
For the past seven months, Army Private First Class Manning has been held in solitary confinement in the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia. Twenty-five thousand other Americans are also in prolonged solitary confinement, but the conditions of Manning’s pre-trial detention have been sufficiently brutal for the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on Torture to announce an investigation.
Pfc. Manning is alleged to have obtained documents, both classified and unclassified, from the Department of Defense and the State Department via the Internet and provided them to WikiLeaks. (That “alleged” is important because the federal informant who fingered Manning, Adrian Lamo, is a felon convincted of computer-hacking crimes. He was also involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution in the month before he levelled his accusation. All of this makes him a less than reliable witness.) At any rate, the records allegedly downloaded by Manning revealed clear instances of war crimes committed by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, widespread torture committed by the Iraqi authorities with the full knowledge of the U.S. military, previously unknown estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians killed at U.S. military checkpoints, and the massive Iraqi civilian death toll caused by the American invasion.
For bringing to light this critical but long-suppressed information, Pfc. Manning has been treated not as a whistleblower, but as a criminal and a spy. He is charged with violating not only Army regulations but also the Espionage Act of 1917, making him the fifth American to be charged under the act for leaking classified documents to the media. A court-martial will likely be convened in the spring or summer.
Politicians have called for Manning’s head, sometimes literally. And yet a strong legal defense for Pfc. Manning is not difficult to envision. Despite many remaining questions of fact, a legal defense can already be sketched out. What follows is an “opening statement” for the defense. It does not attempt to argue individual points of law in any exhaustive way. Rather, like any opening statement, it is an overview of the vital legal (and political) issues at stake, intended for an audience of ordinary citizens, not Judge Advocate General lawyers.
After all, it is the court of public opinion that ultimately decides what a government can and cannot get away with, legally or otherwise.
Opening Statement for the Defense of Bradley Manning, Soldier and Patriot
U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning has done his duty. He has witnessed serious violations of the American military’s Uniform Code of Military Justice, violations of the rules in U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10, and violations of international law. He has brought these wrongdoings to light out of a profound sense of duty to his country, as a citizen and a soldier, and his patriotism has cost him dearly.
In 2005, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters: “It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member [in Iraq], if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to try to stop it.” This, in other words, was the obligation of every U.S. service member in Operation Iraqi Freedom; this remains the obligation of every U.S. service member in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. It is a duty that Pfc. Manning has fulfilled.
Who is Pfc. Bradley Manning? He is a 23-year-old Private First Class in the U.S. Army. He was raised in Crescent, Oklahoma (population 1,281, according to the last census count). He enlisted in 2007. “He was basically really into America,” says a hometown friend. “He was proud of our successes as a country. He valued our freedom, but probably our economic freedom the most. I think he saw the U.S. as a force for good in the world.”
When Bradley Manning deployed to Iraq in October 2009, he thought that he’d be helping the Iraqi people build a free society after the long nightmare of Saddam Hussein. What he witnessed firsthand was quite another matter.
He soon found himself helping the Iraqi authorities detain civilians for distributing “anti-Iraqi literature” -- which turned out to be an investigative report into financial corruption in their own government entitled “Where does the money go?” The penalty for this “crime” in Iraq was not a slap on the wrist. Imprisonment and torture, as well as systematic abuse of prisoners, are widespread in the new Iraq. From the military’s own Sigacts (Significant Actions) reports, we have a multitude of credible accounts of Iraqi police and soldiers shooting prisoners, beating them to death, pulling out fingernails or teeth, cutting off fingers, burning with acid, torturing with electric shocks or the use of suffocation, and various kinds of sexual abuse including sodomization with gun barrels and forcing prisoners to perform sexual acts on guards and each other.
Manning had more than adequate reason to be concerned about handing over Iraqi citizens for likely torture simply for producing pamphlets about corruption in a government notorious for its corruptness.
Like any good soldier, Manning immediately took these concerns up the chain of command. And how did his superiors respond? His commanding officer told him to “shut up” and get back to rounding up more prisoners for the Iraqi Federal Police to treat however they cared to.
Now, you have already heard what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to say about an American soldier’s duties when confronted with the torture and abuse of prisoners. Ever since our country signed and ratified the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture, it has been the law of our land that handing over prisoners to a body that will torture them is a war crime. Nevertheless, between early 2009 and August of last year, our military handed over thousands of prisoners to the Iraqi authorities, knowing full well what would happen to many of them.
The next time Pfc. Manning encountered evidence of war crimes, he took a different course of action.
On the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) shared by the Departments of Defense and State Manning soon found irrefutable evidence of possible war crimes, including a now-infamous “Collateral Murder” video in which a U.S. Apache helicopter mowed down some 18 civilians, including two Reuters journalists, on a street in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. The world has now seen and been shocked by this video which Reuters is alleged to have had in its possession but had not yet made public. Manning is alleged to have leaked it to the whistleblower site WikiLeaks in April 2010.
Manning also found a video and an official report on American air strikes on the village of Granai in Afghanistan’s Farah Province (also known as “the Granai massacre”). According to the Afghan government, 140 civilians, including women and a large number of children, died in those strikes. He is alleged to have released that video as part of a tranche of some 92,000 military documents relating to our escalating war in Afghanistan -- already the longest war our nation has ever fought -- and Pakistan, where the war is steadily spreading. Manning is also alleged to have released to WikiLeaks some 392,000 documents regarding the Iraq War, many of which relate to the torture of prisoners, as well as some 251,000 State Department cables.
Now, in your judgment of Bradley Manning, please know that the stakes are indeed high, but not in the feverish way our political and media elites have been telling you from nearly every newspaper, channel, and website in the land. We will want you, a true jury of Manning’s military peers, to ask a few questions about what’s really been going on in this trial -- and in this country. After all, when we reward lawyers in the Justice Department who created memos that made torture legal with federal judgeships and regular newspaper columns, while locking lock up a whistle-blowing private, you have to ask: What country are we now living in?
This trial couldn’t be more important or your judgment more crucial. The honor of our country is very much at stake in how you decide. When we let the aerial slaughter of civilian noncombatants pass without comment or review, when a reported 92 children die from an American air strike on an Afghan village and 18 civilians are shot dead on a Baghdad street without the slightest accountability, except when it comes to locking up the private who ensured that we would know about these acts -- let me repeat -- the honor of your country and mine is at stake and at risk. Not the security of your country, though the prosecution will claim otherwise, but the honor of our country, and especially the honor of our military.
Pfc. Bradley Manning is one soldier who has done his duty. He has complied with it to the letter. Now you must do your duty as members of this jury and as soldiers.
Our Whistleblower Laws Protect Pfc. Manning
The prosecution will surely tell you that none of our existing whistleblower protection laws, interpreted narrowly, apply to Bradley Manning.
I say otherwise, and so will the experts we will call to the stand. You will hear from legal expert Jesselyn Radack, an attorney and former whistleblower who was purged, punished, and then vindicated for her courageous acts of disclosing illegal wrongdoing inside the Bush administration’s Department of Justice. Ms. Radack will explain to you why and how Bradley Manning is well protected by our current laws. After all, the Whistleblower Protection Act is designed to protect a government employee who exposes fraud, waste, abuse, or illegality to anyone inside or outside a government agency, including a member of the news media. This is well supported by case law. (See Horton v. Dep’t of Navy, 66. F3d 279, 282 (Fed. Cir. 1995)]. Isn’t that exactly what Pfc. Bradley Manning has done?
As a fallback argument, the prosecution is sure to suggest that WikiLeaks is not a real media entity in the way that the New York Times is. Any one of you who has ever gotten the news and information from the Internet knows otherwise.
The prosecution will also be eager to inform you that the Military Whistleblower Protection Act (MWPA) does not apply here. We, however, will prove to you that the act applies with great and particular force to Pfc. Manning. For one thing, the MWPA not only allows an even wider array of government officials to make disclosures of classified information, it also broadens the scope of what kinds of disclosure a soldier can make. It expressly allows disclosures of classified information by members of the armed forces if they have a “reasonable belief” that what is being disclosed offers evidence of a “violation of the law,” “an abuse of authority,” or “a substantial danger to public safety.” In other words, the purpose of the Military Whistleblower Protection Act is to protect soldiers just like Pfc. Manning who report on improper -- or in this case, patently illegal -- activities by other military personnel.
Now, there is no strict precedent, the prosecution will claim, for any of our whistleblower protection laws to apply to Pfc. Manning. But as we will make clear, there is no contrary precedent either. That’s because we’ve never seen a whistleblower disclosure as massive, vivid, and horrific as this one. We are in uncharted territory. If the plain language of these whistleblower protection laws is unclear, legal convention dictates that we look at the laws’ intent. Clearly Congress meant, and legislative history supports this, for the whistleblower protection laws to protect whistleblowers, not -- as this administration seems to think -- to prosecute them.
The progress of our common law is prudent, it is incremental, it is slow. But our common law is not dead. It does progress. Whether the common law will take that small step forward in the case of Pfc. Manning is your duty to decide. And your decision will have repercussions.
For if you convict Bradley Manning, then you are also clearing the way to try and possibly convict Army Specialist Joseph Darby, the whistleblower who leaked the Abu Ghraib photos and thereby ended acts of torture and abuse that were shaming our military and our nation. Now, Specialist Darby did not leak the photos of this disgrace up the chain of command or to the Army Inspector General as our whistleblower law envisions. Instead, he leaked it straight to the Army Criminal Investigative Division, and this path is not strictly what our whistleblower laws allow. Was Spc. Joseph Darby doing his duty as an honorable soldier when he exposed the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib? Or was he just trying to damage the United States? Your verdict on Bradley Manning could reopen that question, and answer it anew.
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If you convict Bradley Manning, you will also potentially be convicting the father of Army Specialist Adam Winfield. In February 2010, Winfield informed his father, Christopher Winfield, a marine veteran, via Facebook, of a homicidal “Kill Team” at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, that was murdering civilians. Winfield’s father tried to sound the alarm via phone calls to the Army Inspector General’s 24-hour hotline, to Senator Bill Nelson, and even to members of his son’s command unit in Fort Lewis.
Both father and son went beyond the “proper” channels to stop the murder of innocent Afghan civilians. Spc. Winfield is now on trial for possible complicity in the “kill team” murders, but no charges have been filed against his father. Tell me, then: Is Winfield’s father guilty of damaging his country because he tried to warn the Army about a homicidal “kill team” in the ranks? Whether you like it or not, whether you care to or not, this is something you will decide when you render your judgment on Bradley Manning’s actions.
The Espionage Charges
The most outlandish entries on the overachieving charge sheet are those stemming from the Espionage Act of 1917. After all, Pfc. Manning is just the fifth American in 94 years to be charged under this archaic law with leaking government documents. (Of the five, only one has been convicted.)
The Espionage Act was never intended to be used in this way, as an extra punishment for citizens who disclose classified material, and that is why the government only carts it out when its case is exceptionally desperate.
In order for Espionage Act charges to stick, it is required that Pfc. Manning had the conscious intent -- take note of that crucial phrase -- to damage the United States or aid a foreign nation with his disclosures. Not surprisingly, given this, you are going to hear the prosecution spare no effort to portray the release of these cables as the gravest blow to America’s place in the world since Pearl Harbor.
I hope you’ll take this with more than a grain of salt. For where is the staggering fallout from all the supposed bombshells in these leaked documents? Months after the release of the State Department cables, not a single American ambassador has been recalled. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who commands far more budget and power than the Secretary of State, publicly insists that these leaks -- the Iraq War logs, the Afghan War Logs, and the diplomatic cables -- have not done any major harm. “Now I've heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer and so on,” said Gates. “I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought.” Significantly overwrought? "Every other government in the world knows the United States government leaks like a sieve,” he added, “and it has for a long time."
So what happened to the biggest blow to American prestige since the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam? And keep in mind that the Secretary of Defense is by no means the only official pooh-poohing the hype about the WikiLeaks apocalypse. One former head of policy planning at the State Department looked at the cables, shrugged, and said that the documents hold “little news,” and that they are “unlikely to do long-term damage.” A senior Pentagon spokesperson, Colonel David Lapan, confessed to reporters last September that there is zero evidence any of the Afghan informers named in the leaked documents have been injured by Taliban reprisals. Tell me, where is the Armageddon that this 23-year-old private has supposedly loosed on our American world?
Of course, there’s no denying that some members of our foreign policy elite have been mightily embarrassed by the State Department cables. Good. They deserve it.
Their fleeting embarrassment is nothing compared to the shame they have brought down on our country with their foolish deeds over the past decade, actions that range from the reckless and incompetent to the downright criminal. It’s no secret that America’s standing in the world has been severely damaged in these years, but ask yourself: Is this because of recent disclosures of civilian deaths and war crimes --most of which are surprising only to Americans -- along with diplomatic tittle-tattle?
I suggest to you that the damage to our nation, which couldn’t be more real, has come not from the disclosures of a young private, but from our foreign policy elite’s long pattern of foolish and destructive actions. After all, the invasion and occupation of Iraq have cost rivers of blood. The price tag for our current foreign wars has now officially soared above the trillion-dollar mark (and few doubt that, in the end, the real cost will run into the trillions of dollars). And don’t forget, the invasion of Iraq has inspired new waves of hatred and distrust of our country overseas, and has provided an adrenaline boost for Islamic terrorists.
Needless to say, our political, military, and media elites have not lined up to take responsibility for this series of self-inflicted wounds. Before they try to pin a nonexistent catastrophe on Pfc. Manning, they ought to take a long, hard look in the mirror and think about the real damage they’ve done to our nation, the world, and not least the overstretched, overstrained U.S. military.
Just imagine: if only someone like Bradley Manning had leaked conclusive documentation about Saddam Hussein’s supposedly deadly but nonexistent arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, the excuse for our invasion of Iraq. Such a disclosure would have profoundly embarrassed Washington’s foreign policy elite and in the atmosphere of early 2003, the media would undoubtedly have called for that whistleblower’s head, just as they’re doing now.
Such a leak, however, would have done a powerful load of good for our nation. Four thousand four hundred and thirty-six American soldiers would not be dead and thousands more would not be maimed, wounded, or suffering from PTSD. At the very least, more than 100,000, and probably hundreds of thousands, of Iraqi civilians would still be living. These are the consequences of policy-making by a secretive government that wants the American people to know nothing, and a media that is either unable or unwilling to do its job and report on facts, not government spin.
You all are old enough to have noticed that the health of our republic and the reputations of our ruling elites are not one and the same. In the best of times, they overlap. The past 10 years have not been the best of times. Those elites have led us into disaster after disaster, imperiling our already breached national security, straining our ruinous finances, and tearing to shreds our moral standing in the world. Don’t try to blame this state of affairs on Private Bradley Manning.
The Nuremberg Principles Mean Something in Our Courts
Our soldiers have a solemn duty not to obey illegal orders, and Pfc. Manning upheld this duty. General Peter Pace’s statement on a soldier’s overriding duty to stop the torture and abuse of prisoners, whatever his or her orders, is not just high-minded public relations; it’s the law of the land. More than 50 years ago, U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 incorporated the Nuremberg Principles, among them Principle IV: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to an order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” This remains the law of our land and of our armed forces, too.
I suspect the prosecution will have other ideas. They will tell you that the Nuremberg Principles are great stuff for commencement addresses, but don’t actually mean anything in practical terms. They will tell you that the Nuremberg Principles are of use only to the Lisa Simpsons of the human-rights industry.
But know this: some 400,000 of your fellow soldiers died in the Second World War for the establishment of those principles. For that reason alone, they are something that you in the military ought to treat with the utmost seriousness.
And if the judge or prosecutor should tell you that the Nuremberg Principles don’t mean a thing in our courts, they would be flat wrong. Courts have taken the Nuremberg Principles to heart before, and more and more have done so in the past few years. In 2005, for example, Judge Lieutenant Commander Robert Klant took note of the Nuremberg principles in a sentencing hearing for Pablo Paredes, a Navy Petty Officer Third Class who refused redeployment to Iraq, and whose punishment was subsequently minimized.
Similarly, at his court martial in 2009, Sergeant Matthis Chiroux justified his refusal to redeploy to a war that he believed violated both national and international law, and was backed up by expert testimony on the Nuremberg Principles. The court martial granted Sgt. Chiroux a general discharge.
A long line of Supreme Court cases, from Mitchell v. Harmony in 1851 all the way back to Little v. Barreme in 1804, established that soldiers have a duty not to follow illegal orders. In short, it is a matter of record and established precedent that these Nuremberg Principles have meant something in our courts. Yours will not be the first court martial to apply these principles, fought for and won with American blood, nor will it be the last.
Whistleblowers Are Patriots Who Sacrifice for Their Country
Whistleblowers who attempt to rectify the disastrous policies of their nation are not criminals. They are patriots, and eventually are recognized as such. Bradley Manning is by no means the first American to serve his country in such a way.
Today, Daniel Ellsberg is famous as the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, a secret internal history ordered up by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara himself that candidly recounted how a series of administrations systematically lied to the nation about the planning and prosecution of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg’s massive leak of these documents helped end that war and bring down a criminal administration. How criminal? Midway through Ellsberg’s trial in 1973, the Nixon administration offered the judge overseeing his treason trial the directorship of the FBI in an implicit quid pro quo, a maneuver of such brazen corruption as to shame any banana republic. The judge dismissed all the government’s charges with prejudice and now Daniel Ellsberg is a national hero.
Those born after a certain date may be forgiven for assuming that Ellsberg was some long-haired subversive of an “anti-American” stripe. In fact, he had been, like Bradley Manning, a model soldier.
At the Marine Corps Basic School in Quantico, Virginia, Ellsberg graduated first in a class of some 1,100 lieutenants. He served as a platoon leader and rifle company commander in the Marine 2nd Infantry Division for three years, and deferred his graduate studies so he could remain on active duty with his battalion during the Suez Crisis of 1956. (You will note that deferring graduate school in order to stay on active military duty is the exact opposite of what so many of our recent, and current, national leaders did in those decades.) After satisfying his Reserve Officer commitment, Ellsberg was discharged from the Corps as a first lieutenant, and leaving the military went on to a distinguished career in government.
Daniel Ellsberg was a model Marine, and later a model citizen. His courageous act of leaking classified information was only one more episode in a consistent record of patriotic service. When Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers he did so out of the profoundest sense of duty, knowing full well, just like Bradley Manning today, that he might spend the rest of his life in jail.
Ellsberg calls Pfc. Manning his hero and he is a tireless defender of the brave Army private our government has locked away in solitary.
Vandals trash things without a care in their hearts, but real patriots like former Lt. Ellsberg and Pfc. Manning do their duty knowing that the privilege of living in a free society does not always come cheap.
“Frankly and in the Public View”: The American Tradition of Diplomacy
Today, Ellsberg himself is lionized, even by the U.S. government, as a national hero. The State Department recently put together a traveling roadshow of American documentary films to screen abroad, and front and center among them is an admiring movie about Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. But then it is only appropriate that the government recognize Ellsberg and his once-controversial disclosures as part and parcel of the American tradition.
After all, demands for more open and transparent diplomacy are as American as baseball and Hank Williams. World War I-era President Woodrow Wilson himself insisted on the abolition of secret treaties as part of his 14 points for the League of Nations; in fact, it’s the very first point: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”
How can foreign policy be democratic if the most serious decisions and facts -- alliances, death tolls, assessments of the leaders and governments we are bankrolling with our tax dollars -- are all kept as official secrets? The “Bricker Amendment” was an attempt by congressional Republicans in the 1950s to require Senate approval of U.S. treaties, in large part to open up public debate about foreign affairs. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat who served as representative to the U.N. for Republican President Richard Nixon, was also a severe critic of government secrecy and the habitual over-classification of state documents. These American statesmen knew that if foreign policy is crafted in secret, without the oxygen and sunlight of vigorous public debate, disaster and dysfunction would result.
For the past 10 years, we have had exactly such disaster and dysfunction as our foreign policy. Our leaders have plunged us into a dark world of secrecy and lies. Tell me: Is this Private Bradley Manning’s fault?
Let me be clear as I bring this opening statement to a close: for all the complexities this case holds, your job will in the end prove a simple and basic one. It’s your task not to let our leaders, or the prosecution, pin the horrendous state of affairs into which this country has been thrown on Pfc. Manning. I am confident that you will see him for the patriot he is, a young man with a moral backbone whose goal was not self-aggrandizement or profit or even attention and glory. His urge was to shine a bright light on his own country’s wrongdoing and, in that way, bring it, bring us, back to our nobler national traditions.
It is Pfc. Manning, not our fearless national leaders, who has sacrificed much to restore the rule of law and a minimal level of public oversight to American foreign and military policy. “Frankly and in the public view”: this once would have been called a reasonable description of the American character, something that set us apart from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Otto von Bismarck’s Prussia, or Imperial Japan. Whether our government has any responsibility to conduct its affairs frankly and in the public view in 2011 and beyond -- this is something else you will decide in your judgment on Pfc. Manning.
As soldiers, you know well that most Americans have insulated themselves from the last decade’s foreign-policy disasters. Even as we spend a trillion dollars on foreign wars, our taxes are cut. If you’re making decent money, the odds are it’s not your kids, grandchildren, brothers, or sisters who are off fighting, killing, and dying in our foreign wars. Most Americans, thanks in part to the media, have little idea of what you and your peers have lived through, the weight you have shouldered.
This is not true of Pfc. Bradley Manning. He came face to face with this disaster. He saw, and participated in, the roundup of Iraqi civilians to be tortured by their own national police force. Tell me honestly: Was this what Operation Iraqi Freedom was supposed to accomplish? Is this why you, his jury of peers, enlisted in the military?
Pfc. Manning saw this misery and rampant illegality with his own two eyes, and then, online, he discovered more of the same -- much, much more -- and he did something about it, knowing full well the penalty. “I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me […] plastered all over the world press,” he confided to the informant who betrayed him. Manning knew the stakes and the risks when he leaked these documents, but still he loyally performed his duty, both to the United States Army and to his country.
As one of Manning’s childhood friends from Crescent, Oklahoma, has testified, “He wanted to serve his country.” It’s up to you to decide whether he did.
You have a duty as a fully informed jury of free citizens. You are not an assortment of rubber stamps pulled out of a judge’s desk drawer. You are as important a part of this court as the judge, prosecutor, and the accused himself.
Whichever way you decide in your verdict, you will not face the consequences Bradley Manning already endures, but your judgment will have great consequences, not just for him, but for the honor and future of the country you have taken an oath to serve.
Now, go and do your duty.
Chase Madar is an attorney in New York and a member of the National Lawyers Guild. He writes for TomDispatch, the American Conservative magazine, Le Monde Diplomatique, and the London Review of Books. (To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast video interview in which Chase Madar explores Manning’s case and his defense, click here, or download it to your iPod here.)
Copyright 2011 Chase Madar
by: Chase Madar | TomDispatch | News Analysis
Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old from Crescent, Oklahoma, enlisted in the U.S. military in 2007 to give something back to his country and, he hoped, the world.
For the past seven months, Army Private First Class Manning has been held in solitary confinement in the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia. Twenty-five thousand other Americans are also in prolonged solitary confinement, but the conditions of Manning’s pre-trial detention have been sufficiently brutal for the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on Torture to announce an investigation.
Pfc. Manning is alleged to have obtained documents, both classified and unclassified, from the Department of Defense and the State Department via the Internet and provided them to WikiLeaks. (That “alleged” is important because the federal informant who fingered Manning, Adrian Lamo, is a felon convincted of computer-hacking crimes. He was also involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution in the month before he levelled his accusation. All of this makes him a less than reliable witness.) At any rate, the records allegedly downloaded by Manning revealed clear instances of war crimes committed by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, widespread torture committed by the Iraqi authorities with the full knowledge of the U.S. military, previously unknown estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians killed at U.S. military checkpoints, and the massive Iraqi civilian death toll caused by the American invasion.
For bringing to light this critical but long-suppressed information, Pfc. Manning has been treated not as a whistleblower, but as a criminal and a spy. He is charged with violating not only Army regulations but also the Espionage Act of 1917, making him the fifth American to be charged under the act for leaking classified documents to the media. A court-martial will likely be convened in the spring or summer.
Politicians have called for Manning’s head, sometimes literally. And yet a strong legal defense for Pfc. Manning is not difficult to envision. Despite many remaining questions of fact, a legal defense can already be sketched out. What follows is an “opening statement” for the defense. It does not attempt to argue individual points of law in any exhaustive way. Rather, like any opening statement, it is an overview of the vital legal (and political) issues at stake, intended for an audience of ordinary citizens, not Judge Advocate General lawyers.
After all, it is the court of public opinion that ultimately decides what a government can and cannot get away with, legally or otherwise.
Opening Statement for the Defense of Bradley Manning, Soldier and Patriot
U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning has done his duty. He has witnessed serious violations of the American military’s Uniform Code of Military Justice, violations of the rules in U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10, and violations of international law. He has brought these wrongdoings to light out of a profound sense of duty to his country, as a citizen and a soldier, and his patriotism has cost him dearly.
In 2005, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters: “It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member [in Iraq], if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to try to stop it.” This, in other words, was the obligation of every U.S. service member in Operation Iraqi Freedom; this remains the obligation of every U.S. service member in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. It is a duty that Pfc. Manning has fulfilled.
Who is Pfc. Bradley Manning? He is a 23-year-old Private First Class in the U.S. Army. He was raised in Crescent, Oklahoma (population 1,281, according to the last census count). He enlisted in 2007. “He was basically really into America,” says a hometown friend. “He was proud of our successes as a country. He valued our freedom, but probably our economic freedom the most. I think he saw the U.S. as a force for good in the world.”
When Bradley Manning deployed to Iraq in October 2009, he thought that he’d be helping the Iraqi people build a free society after the long nightmare of Saddam Hussein. What he witnessed firsthand was quite another matter.
He soon found himself helping the Iraqi authorities detain civilians for distributing “anti-Iraqi literature” -- which turned out to be an investigative report into financial corruption in their own government entitled “Where does the money go?” The penalty for this “crime” in Iraq was not a slap on the wrist. Imprisonment and torture, as well as systematic abuse of prisoners, are widespread in the new Iraq. From the military’s own Sigacts (Significant Actions) reports, we have a multitude of credible accounts of Iraqi police and soldiers shooting prisoners, beating them to death, pulling out fingernails or teeth, cutting off fingers, burning with acid, torturing with electric shocks or the use of suffocation, and various kinds of sexual abuse including sodomization with gun barrels and forcing prisoners to perform sexual acts on guards and each other.
Manning had more than adequate reason to be concerned about handing over Iraqi citizens for likely torture simply for producing pamphlets about corruption in a government notorious for its corruptness.
Like any good soldier, Manning immediately took these concerns up the chain of command. And how did his superiors respond? His commanding officer told him to “shut up” and get back to rounding up more prisoners for the Iraqi Federal Police to treat however they cared to.
Now, you have already heard what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to say about an American soldier’s duties when confronted with the torture and abuse of prisoners. Ever since our country signed and ratified the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture, it has been the law of our land that handing over prisoners to a body that will torture them is a war crime. Nevertheless, between early 2009 and August of last year, our military handed over thousands of prisoners to the Iraqi authorities, knowing full well what would happen to many of them.
The next time Pfc. Manning encountered evidence of war crimes, he took a different course of action.
On the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) shared by the Departments of Defense and State Manning soon found irrefutable evidence of possible war crimes, including a now-infamous “Collateral Murder” video in which a U.S. Apache helicopter mowed down some 18 civilians, including two Reuters journalists, on a street in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. The world has now seen and been shocked by this video which Reuters is alleged to have had in its possession but had not yet made public. Manning is alleged to have leaked it to the whistleblower site WikiLeaks in April 2010.
Manning also found a video and an official report on American air strikes on the village of Granai in Afghanistan’s Farah Province (also known as “the Granai massacre”). According to the Afghan government, 140 civilians, including women and a large number of children, died in those strikes. He is alleged to have released that video as part of a tranche of some 92,000 military documents relating to our escalating war in Afghanistan -- already the longest war our nation has ever fought -- and Pakistan, where the war is steadily spreading. Manning is also alleged to have released to WikiLeaks some 392,000 documents regarding the Iraq War, many of which relate to the torture of prisoners, as well as some 251,000 State Department cables.
Now, in your judgment of Bradley Manning, please know that the stakes are indeed high, but not in the feverish way our political and media elites have been telling you from nearly every newspaper, channel, and website in the land. We will want you, a true jury of Manning’s military peers, to ask a few questions about what’s really been going on in this trial -- and in this country. After all, when we reward lawyers in the Justice Department who created memos that made torture legal with federal judgeships and regular newspaper columns, while locking lock up a whistle-blowing private, you have to ask: What country are we now living in?
This trial couldn’t be more important or your judgment more crucial. The honor of our country is very much at stake in how you decide. When we let the aerial slaughter of civilian noncombatants pass without comment or review, when a reported 92 children die from an American air strike on an Afghan village and 18 civilians are shot dead on a Baghdad street without the slightest accountability, except when it comes to locking up the private who ensured that we would know about these acts -- let me repeat -- the honor of your country and mine is at stake and at risk. Not the security of your country, though the prosecution will claim otherwise, but the honor of our country, and especially the honor of our military.
Pfc. Bradley Manning is one soldier who has done his duty. He has complied with it to the letter. Now you must do your duty as members of this jury and as soldiers.
Our Whistleblower Laws Protect Pfc. Manning
The prosecution will surely tell you that none of our existing whistleblower protection laws, interpreted narrowly, apply to Bradley Manning.
I say otherwise, and so will the experts we will call to the stand. You will hear from legal expert Jesselyn Radack, an attorney and former whistleblower who was purged, punished, and then vindicated for her courageous acts of disclosing illegal wrongdoing inside the Bush administration’s Department of Justice. Ms. Radack will explain to you why and how Bradley Manning is well protected by our current laws. After all, the Whistleblower Protection Act is designed to protect a government employee who exposes fraud, waste, abuse, or illegality to anyone inside or outside a government agency, including a member of the news media. This is well supported by case law. (See Horton v. Dep’t of Navy, 66. F3d 279, 282 (Fed. Cir. 1995)]. Isn’t that exactly what Pfc. Bradley Manning has done?
As a fallback argument, the prosecution is sure to suggest that WikiLeaks is not a real media entity in the way that the New York Times is. Any one of you who has ever gotten the news and information from the Internet knows otherwise.
The prosecution will also be eager to inform you that the Military Whistleblower Protection Act (MWPA) does not apply here. We, however, will prove to you that the act applies with great and particular force to Pfc. Manning. For one thing, the MWPA not only allows an even wider array of government officials to make disclosures of classified information, it also broadens the scope of what kinds of disclosure a soldier can make. It expressly allows disclosures of classified information by members of the armed forces if they have a “reasonable belief” that what is being disclosed offers evidence of a “violation of the law,” “an abuse of authority,” or “a substantial danger to public safety.” In other words, the purpose of the Military Whistleblower Protection Act is to protect soldiers just like Pfc. Manning who report on improper -- or in this case, patently illegal -- activities by other military personnel.
Now, there is no strict precedent, the prosecution will claim, for any of our whistleblower protection laws to apply to Pfc. Manning. But as we will make clear, there is no contrary precedent either. That’s because we’ve never seen a whistleblower disclosure as massive, vivid, and horrific as this one. We are in uncharted territory. If the plain language of these whistleblower protection laws is unclear, legal convention dictates that we look at the laws’ intent. Clearly Congress meant, and legislative history supports this, for the whistleblower protection laws to protect whistleblowers, not -- as this administration seems to think -- to prosecute them.
The progress of our common law is prudent, it is incremental, it is slow. But our common law is not dead. It does progress. Whether the common law will take that small step forward in the case of Pfc. Manning is your duty to decide. And your decision will have repercussions.
For if you convict Bradley Manning, then you are also clearing the way to try and possibly convict Army Specialist Joseph Darby, the whistleblower who leaked the Abu Ghraib photos and thereby ended acts of torture and abuse that were shaming our military and our nation. Now, Specialist Darby did not leak the photos of this disgrace up the chain of command or to the Army Inspector General as our whistleblower law envisions. Instead, he leaked it straight to the Army Criminal Investigative Division, and this path is not strictly what our whistleblower laws allow. Was Spc. Joseph Darby doing his duty as an honorable soldier when he exposed the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib? Or was he just trying to damage the United States? Your verdict on Bradley Manning could reopen that question, and answer it anew.
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If you convict Bradley Manning, you will also potentially be convicting the father of Army Specialist Adam Winfield. In February 2010, Winfield informed his father, Christopher Winfield, a marine veteran, via Facebook, of a homicidal “Kill Team” at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, that was murdering civilians. Winfield’s father tried to sound the alarm via phone calls to the Army Inspector General’s 24-hour hotline, to Senator Bill Nelson, and even to members of his son’s command unit in Fort Lewis.
Both father and son went beyond the “proper” channels to stop the murder of innocent Afghan civilians. Spc. Winfield is now on trial for possible complicity in the “kill team” murders, but no charges have been filed against his father. Tell me, then: Is Winfield’s father guilty of damaging his country because he tried to warn the Army about a homicidal “kill team” in the ranks? Whether you like it or not, whether you care to or not, this is something you will decide when you render your judgment on Bradley Manning’s actions.
The Espionage Charges
The most outlandish entries on the overachieving charge sheet are those stemming from the Espionage Act of 1917. After all, Pfc. Manning is just the fifth American in 94 years to be charged under this archaic law with leaking government documents. (Of the five, only one has been convicted.)
The Espionage Act was never intended to be used in this way, as an extra punishment for citizens who disclose classified material, and that is why the government only carts it out when its case is exceptionally desperate.
In order for Espionage Act charges to stick, it is required that Pfc. Manning had the conscious intent -- take note of that crucial phrase -- to damage the United States or aid a foreign nation with his disclosures. Not surprisingly, given this, you are going to hear the prosecution spare no effort to portray the release of these cables as the gravest blow to America’s place in the world since Pearl Harbor.
I hope you’ll take this with more than a grain of salt. For where is the staggering fallout from all the supposed bombshells in these leaked documents? Months after the release of the State Department cables, not a single American ambassador has been recalled. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who commands far more budget and power than the Secretary of State, publicly insists that these leaks -- the Iraq War logs, the Afghan War Logs, and the diplomatic cables -- have not done any major harm. “Now I've heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer and so on,” said Gates. “I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought.” Significantly overwrought? "Every other government in the world knows the United States government leaks like a sieve,” he added, “and it has for a long time."
So what happened to the biggest blow to American prestige since the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam? And keep in mind that the Secretary of Defense is by no means the only official pooh-poohing the hype about the WikiLeaks apocalypse. One former head of policy planning at the State Department looked at the cables, shrugged, and said that the documents hold “little news,” and that they are “unlikely to do long-term damage.” A senior Pentagon spokesperson, Colonel David Lapan, confessed to reporters last September that there is zero evidence any of the Afghan informers named in the leaked documents have been injured by Taliban reprisals. Tell me, where is the Armageddon that this 23-year-old private has supposedly loosed on our American world?
Of course, there’s no denying that some members of our foreign policy elite have been mightily embarrassed by the State Department cables. Good. They deserve it.
Their fleeting embarrassment is nothing compared to the shame they have brought down on our country with their foolish deeds over the past decade, actions that range from the reckless and incompetent to the downright criminal. It’s no secret that America’s standing in the world has been severely damaged in these years, but ask yourself: Is this because of recent disclosures of civilian deaths and war crimes --most of which are surprising only to Americans -- along with diplomatic tittle-tattle?
I suggest to you that the damage to our nation, which couldn’t be more real, has come not from the disclosures of a young private, but from our foreign policy elite’s long pattern of foolish and destructive actions. After all, the invasion and occupation of Iraq have cost rivers of blood. The price tag for our current foreign wars has now officially soared above the trillion-dollar mark (and few doubt that, in the end, the real cost will run into the trillions of dollars). And don’t forget, the invasion of Iraq has inspired new waves of hatred and distrust of our country overseas, and has provided an adrenaline boost for Islamic terrorists.
Needless to say, our political, military, and media elites have not lined up to take responsibility for this series of self-inflicted wounds. Before they try to pin a nonexistent catastrophe on Pfc. Manning, they ought to take a long, hard look in the mirror and think about the real damage they’ve done to our nation, the world, and not least the overstretched, overstrained U.S. military.
Just imagine: if only someone like Bradley Manning had leaked conclusive documentation about Saddam Hussein’s supposedly deadly but nonexistent arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, the excuse for our invasion of Iraq. Such a disclosure would have profoundly embarrassed Washington’s foreign policy elite and in the atmosphere of early 2003, the media would undoubtedly have called for that whistleblower’s head, just as they’re doing now.
Such a leak, however, would have done a powerful load of good for our nation. Four thousand four hundred and thirty-six American soldiers would not be dead and thousands more would not be maimed, wounded, or suffering from PTSD. At the very least, more than 100,000, and probably hundreds of thousands, of Iraqi civilians would still be living. These are the consequences of policy-making by a secretive government that wants the American people to know nothing, and a media that is either unable or unwilling to do its job and report on facts, not government spin.
You all are old enough to have noticed that the health of our republic and the reputations of our ruling elites are not one and the same. In the best of times, they overlap. The past 10 years have not been the best of times. Those elites have led us into disaster after disaster, imperiling our already breached national security, straining our ruinous finances, and tearing to shreds our moral standing in the world. Don’t try to blame this state of affairs on Private Bradley Manning.
The Nuremberg Principles Mean Something in Our Courts
Our soldiers have a solemn duty not to obey illegal orders, and Pfc. Manning upheld this duty. General Peter Pace’s statement on a soldier’s overriding duty to stop the torture and abuse of prisoners, whatever his or her orders, is not just high-minded public relations; it’s the law of the land. More than 50 years ago, U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 incorporated the Nuremberg Principles, among them Principle IV: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to an order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” This remains the law of our land and of our armed forces, too.
I suspect the prosecution will have other ideas. They will tell you that the Nuremberg Principles are great stuff for commencement addresses, but don’t actually mean anything in practical terms. They will tell you that the Nuremberg Principles are of use only to the Lisa Simpsons of the human-rights industry.
But know this: some 400,000 of your fellow soldiers died in the Second World War for the establishment of those principles. For that reason alone, they are something that you in the military ought to treat with the utmost seriousness.
And if the judge or prosecutor should tell you that the Nuremberg Principles don’t mean a thing in our courts, they would be flat wrong. Courts have taken the Nuremberg Principles to heart before, and more and more have done so in the past few years. In 2005, for example, Judge Lieutenant Commander Robert Klant took note of the Nuremberg principles in a sentencing hearing for Pablo Paredes, a Navy Petty Officer Third Class who refused redeployment to Iraq, and whose punishment was subsequently minimized.
Similarly, at his court martial in 2009, Sergeant Matthis Chiroux justified his refusal to redeploy to a war that he believed violated both national and international law, and was backed up by expert testimony on the Nuremberg Principles. The court martial granted Sgt. Chiroux a general discharge.
A long line of Supreme Court cases, from Mitchell v. Harmony in 1851 all the way back to Little v. Barreme in 1804, established that soldiers have a duty not to follow illegal orders. In short, it is a matter of record and established precedent that these Nuremberg Principles have meant something in our courts. Yours will not be the first court martial to apply these principles, fought for and won with American blood, nor will it be the last.
Whistleblowers Are Patriots Who Sacrifice for Their Country
Whistleblowers who attempt to rectify the disastrous policies of their nation are not criminals. They are patriots, and eventually are recognized as such. Bradley Manning is by no means the first American to serve his country in such a way.
Today, Daniel Ellsberg is famous as the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, a secret internal history ordered up by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara himself that candidly recounted how a series of administrations systematically lied to the nation about the planning and prosecution of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg’s massive leak of these documents helped end that war and bring down a criminal administration. How criminal? Midway through Ellsberg’s trial in 1973, the Nixon administration offered the judge overseeing his treason trial the directorship of the FBI in an implicit quid pro quo, a maneuver of such brazen corruption as to shame any banana republic. The judge dismissed all the government’s charges with prejudice and now Daniel Ellsberg is a national hero.
Those born after a certain date may be forgiven for assuming that Ellsberg was some long-haired subversive of an “anti-American” stripe. In fact, he had been, like Bradley Manning, a model soldier.
At the Marine Corps Basic School in Quantico, Virginia, Ellsberg graduated first in a class of some 1,100 lieutenants. He served as a platoon leader and rifle company commander in the Marine 2nd Infantry Division for three years, and deferred his graduate studies so he could remain on active duty with his battalion during the Suez Crisis of 1956. (You will note that deferring graduate school in order to stay on active military duty is the exact opposite of what so many of our recent, and current, national leaders did in those decades.) After satisfying his Reserve Officer commitment, Ellsberg was discharged from the Corps as a first lieutenant, and leaving the military went on to a distinguished career in government.
Daniel Ellsberg was a model Marine, and later a model citizen. His courageous act of leaking classified information was only one more episode in a consistent record of patriotic service. When Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers he did so out of the profoundest sense of duty, knowing full well, just like Bradley Manning today, that he might spend the rest of his life in jail.
Ellsberg calls Pfc. Manning his hero and he is a tireless defender of the brave Army private our government has locked away in solitary.
Vandals trash things without a care in their hearts, but real patriots like former Lt. Ellsberg and Pfc. Manning do their duty knowing that the privilege of living in a free society does not always come cheap.
“Frankly and in the Public View”: The American Tradition of Diplomacy
Today, Ellsberg himself is lionized, even by the U.S. government, as a national hero. The State Department recently put together a traveling roadshow of American documentary films to screen abroad, and front and center among them is an admiring movie about Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. But then it is only appropriate that the government recognize Ellsberg and his once-controversial disclosures as part and parcel of the American tradition.
After all, demands for more open and transparent diplomacy are as American as baseball and Hank Williams. World War I-era President Woodrow Wilson himself insisted on the abolition of secret treaties as part of his 14 points for the League of Nations; in fact, it’s the very first point: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”
How can foreign policy be democratic if the most serious decisions and facts -- alliances, death tolls, assessments of the leaders and governments we are bankrolling with our tax dollars -- are all kept as official secrets? The “Bricker Amendment” was an attempt by congressional Republicans in the 1950s to require Senate approval of U.S. treaties, in large part to open up public debate about foreign affairs. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat who served as representative to the U.N. for Republican President Richard Nixon, was also a severe critic of government secrecy and the habitual over-classification of state documents. These American statesmen knew that if foreign policy is crafted in secret, without the oxygen and sunlight of vigorous public debate, disaster and dysfunction would result.
For the past 10 years, we have had exactly such disaster and dysfunction as our foreign policy. Our leaders have plunged us into a dark world of secrecy and lies. Tell me: Is this Private Bradley Manning’s fault?
Let me be clear as I bring this opening statement to a close: for all the complexities this case holds, your job will in the end prove a simple and basic one. It’s your task not to let our leaders, or the prosecution, pin the horrendous state of affairs into which this country has been thrown on Pfc. Manning. I am confident that you will see him for the patriot he is, a young man with a moral backbone whose goal was not self-aggrandizement or profit or even attention and glory. His urge was to shine a bright light on his own country’s wrongdoing and, in that way, bring it, bring us, back to our nobler national traditions.
It is Pfc. Manning, not our fearless national leaders, who has sacrificed much to restore the rule of law and a minimal level of public oversight to American foreign and military policy. “Frankly and in the public view”: this once would have been called a reasonable description of the American character, something that set us apart from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Otto von Bismarck’s Prussia, or Imperial Japan. Whether our government has any responsibility to conduct its affairs frankly and in the public view in 2011 and beyond -- this is something else you will decide in your judgment on Pfc. Manning.
As soldiers, you know well that most Americans have insulated themselves from the last decade’s foreign-policy disasters. Even as we spend a trillion dollars on foreign wars, our taxes are cut. If you’re making decent money, the odds are it’s not your kids, grandchildren, brothers, or sisters who are off fighting, killing, and dying in our foreign wars. Most Americans, thanks in part to the media, have little idea of what you and your peers have lived through, the weight you have shouldered.
This is not true of Pfc. Bradley Manning. He came face to face with this disaster. He saw, and participated in, the roundup of Iraqi civilians to be tortured by their own national police force. Tell me honestly: Was this what Operation Iraqi Freedom was supposed to accomplish? Is this why you, his jury of peers, enlisted in the military?
Pfc. Manning saw this misery and rampant illegality with his own two eyes, and then, online, he discovered more of the same -- much, much more -- and he did something about it, knowing full well the penalty. “I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me […] plastered all over the world press,” he confided to the informant who betrayed him. Manning knew the stakes and the risks when he leaked these documents, but still he loyally performed his duty, both to the United States Army and to his country.
As one of Manning’s childhood friends from Crescent, Oklahoma, has testified, “He wanted to serve his country.” It’s up to you to decide whether he did.
You have a duty as a fully informed jury of free citizens. You are not an assortment of rubber stamps pulled out of a judge’s desk drawer. You are as important a part of this court as the judge, prosecutor, and the accused himself.
Whichever way you decide in your verdict, you will not face the consequences Bradley Manning already endures, but your judgment will have great consequences, not just for him, but for the honor and future of the country you have taken an oath to serve.
Now, go and do your duty.
Chase Madar is an attorney in New York and a member of the National Lawyers Guild. He writes for TomDispatch, the American Conservative magazine, Le Monde Diplomatique, and the London Review of Books. (To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast video interview in which Chase Madar explores Manning’s case and his defense, click here, or download it to your iPod here.)
Copyright 2011 Chase Madar
Thursday, February 10, 2011
A Rich Fantasy Life
Wednesday 09 February 2011
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
I know I should be immune to this by now, but I still find myself awestruck by the incredibly detailed, insulated fantasy world that the American conservative "movement" has created for themselves. No lie is too big to be told, no fact is too firm to be bent around ideology, no myth is too absurd to defend to the knife. The ability to spew deliberate nonsense into the credulous ears of Fox-watching right-bent voters - and to be utterly without shame while doing it - is the core of this "movement's" political muscle, and has been for a number of decades now.
Take, for example, this past weekend's festival of Reagan. The late president's 100th birthday opened the floodgates for an ocean of nonsense to be dumped on the American people. He was a great leader, the conservative's conservative, a small-government hero who deserves a place on Mt. Rushmore.
Rilly?
Ronald Reagan's "supply side" economic model was the gateway drug that led inexorably to the collapse of the American economy two years ago, and yet his conservative acolytes - as well as far too many Democrats who should know better - still cling to that economic model as if it were holy writ.
Ronald Reagan raised taxes massively, and grew the federal government enormously, while sending the country spiraling into a morass of debt we are nowhere near recovering from, and yet his worshippers continue to tout him as the perfect "small government" man.
Ronald Reagan and his people sold shiploads of weapons to Iran even as they supported Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in his war against the Islamic Republic. Ronald Reagan and his people basically created the Taliban, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan as a means of carrying on the Cold War fight against the Soviet Union, and yet today his conservative followers cling to a "War on Terror" as their sword and shield.
Didn't hear any of this during the weekend's Reaganapallooza, did you? No surprise. Why let facts - Reagan was a terrible president who bears a great deal of responsibility for today's national problems, a president who exploded the debt and the size of government, a president who supported known terrorists and rogue nations with money and materiel even as they were killing Americans - get in the way of a perfectly good story line.
That's the kind of comfort bubble these people live in, and it must be a nice place to be, because they refuse to be budged out of it one centimeter. The Reagan worship we just witnessed is merely this week's iteration of an ongoing phenomenon: the creation of a parallel story line - nay, a parallel universe - to satisfy the already-calcified opinions of the far-right GOP base.
Stay informed with free Truthout updates delivered straight to your email inbox. Click here to sign up.
A perfect example of this is the Tea Party "movement," which is nothing more or less than a creation of the "news" media. There is no Tea Party; the term is a re-branding of that same GOP base, and nothing more. By way of vast corporate cash infusions from entities like the Koch brothers, these Tea Party dupes were fooled into believing they are a force for the common man, for the worker, for truth and justice and the American way, and even managed to get some of their so-called representatives elected to Congress in 2010...but it didn't take long for the mythology to start unraveling.
"Earmarks are bad" was the 2010 campaign refrain, but the very breathing second these Tea Party House members hit their seats in Congress, earmarks suddenly became no big deal, and now they are hardly discussed outside of the cloak room. Job creation? Nah. The newly-minted GOP House majority instead went to work trying to redefine what rape is in order to attack abortion rights, before backing off amid a storm of outrage and protest. And, of course, there is the push to repeal the health care bill, which, like the attack on abortion, is about throwing red meat to the base instead of actually getting anything done.
Here in reality, the gulf between right-wing rhetoric and actual activity has not gone unnoticed:
The GOP majority is bringing only a handful of bills to the floor this week, and none would be characterized as major legislation. Four of the five measures will be considered under a procedure generally reserved for non-controversial legislation; the fifth is a resolution that merely instructs committees to review federal regulations for their impact on job growth.
Democratic leaders contend it doesn't amount to much.
"Members return Tuesday from a week and a half of recess for another light legislative agenda in the House of Representatives," Kristie Greco, spokeswoman for the assistant Democratic leader, Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.), wrote in a note to reporters over the weekend. "Perhaps if House Republicans had a jobs agenda, the schedule would be more robust."
Greco scoffed at the resolution on federal regulations, saying the GOP planned to spend 10 hours debating a bill that "instruct[s] oversight committees to conduct oversight."
Adding to the criticism, a group of 10 Democratic committee leaders on Monday sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) denouncing the resolution as superfluous and a waste of time.
"The floor schedule that the Republican majority has pursued and intends to pursue this week will create no jobs," the Democrats wrote. "Indeed, spending two days, and taxpayer dollars, on a resolution calling on our committees to perform oversight functions that they are already authorized to conduct distracts from our efforts to create jobs."
Not everyone on the right is in love with the fiction that permeates and props up the "movement." Dick Wadhams, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, decided recently to abandon his re-election bid to keep his post. Why? "I have tired," he wrote in a memo to party officials, "of those who are obsessed with seeing conspiracies around every corner and who have terribly misguided notions of what the role of the state party is while saying 'uniting conservatives' is all that is needed to win competitive races across the state." He was even more blunt with the Washington Post: "I have loved being chairman, but I'm tired of the nuts who have no grasp of what the state party's role is."
Unfortunately for the rest of us, people like Mr. Wadhams are the exception that proves the rule. The rich fantasy life enjoyed by the right - Reagan was great, the Tea Party is a "movement" for the little guy, and the new GOP House majority will be a force for good - continues unabated.
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
I know I should be immune to this by now, but I still find myself awestruck by the incredibly detailed, insulated fantasy world that the American conservative "movement" has created for themselves. No lie is too big to be told, no fact is too firm to be bent around ideology, no myth is too absurd to defend to the knife. The ability to spew deliberate nonsense into the credulous ears of Fox-watching right-bent voters - and to be utterly without shame while doing it - is the core of this "movement's" political muscle, and has been for a number of decades now.
Take, for example, this past weekend's festival of Reagan. The late president's 100th birthday opened the floodgates for an ocean of nonsense to be dumped on the American people. He was a great leader, the conservative's conservative, a small-government hero who deserves a place on Mt. Rushmore.
Rilly?
Ronald Reagan's "supply side" economic model was the gateway drug that led inexorably to the collapse of the American economy two years ago, and yet his conservative acolytes - as well as far too many Democrats who should know better - still cling to that economic model as if it were holy writ.
Ronald Reagan raised taxes massively, and grew the federal government enormously, while sending the country spiraling into a morass of debt we are nowhere near recovering from, and yet his worshippers continue to tout him as the perfect "small government" man.
Ronald Reagan and his people sold shiploads of weapons to Iran even as they supported Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in his war against the Islamic Republic. Ronald Reagan and his people basically created the Taliban, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan as a means of carrying on the Cold War fight against the Soviet Union, and yet today his conservative followers cling to a "War on Terror" as their sword and shield.
Didn't hear any of this during the weekend's Reaganapallooza, did you? No surprise. Why let facts - Reagan was a terrible president who bears a great deal of responsibility for today's national problems, a president who exploded the debt and the size of government, a president who supported known terrorists and rogue nations with money and materiel even as they were killing Americans - get in the way of a perfectly good story line.
That's the kind of comfort bubble these people live in, and it must be a nice place to be, because they refuse to be budged out of it one centimeter. The Reagan worship we just witnessed is merely this week's iteration of an ongoing phenomenon: the creation of a parallel story line - nay, a parallel universe - to satisfy the already-calcified opinions of the far-right GOP base.
Stay informed with free Truthout updates delivered straight to your email inbox. Click here to sign up.
A perfect example of this is the Tea Party "movement," which is nothing more or less than a creation of the "news" media. There is no Tea Party; the term is a re-branding of that same GOP base, and nothing more. By way of vast corporate cash infusions from entities like the Koch brothers, these Tea Party dupes were fooled into believing they are a force for the common man, for the worker, for truth and justice and the American way, and even managed to get some of their so-called representatives elected to Congress in 2010...but it didn't take long for the mythology to start unraveling.
"Earmarks are bad" was the 2010 campaign refrain, but the very breathing second these Tea Party House members hit their seats in Congress, earmarks suddenly became no big deal, and now they are hardly discussed outside of the cloak room. Job creation? Nah. The newly-minted GOP House majority instead went to work trying to redefine what rape is in order to attack abortion rights, before backing off amid a storm of outrage and protest. And, of course, there is the push to repeal the health care bill, which, like the attack on abortion, is about throwing red meat to the base instead of actually getting anything done.
Here in reality, the gulf between right-wing rhetoric and actual activity has not gone unnoticed:
The GOP majority is bringing only a handful of bills to the floor this week, and none would be characterized as major legislation. Four of the five measures will be considered under a procedure generally reserved for non-controversial legislation; the fifth is a resolution that merely instructs committees to review federal regulations for their impact on job growth.
Democratic leaders contend it doesn't amount to much.
"Members return Tuesday from a week and a half of recess for another light legislative agenda in the House of Representatives," Kristie Greco, spokeswoman for the assistant Democratic leader, Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.), wrote in a note to reporters over the weekend. "Perhaps if House Republicans had a jobs agenda, the schedule would be more robust."
Greco scoffed at the resolution on federal regulations, saying the GOP planned to spend 10 hours debating a bill that "instruct[s] oversight committees to conduct oversight."
Adding to the criticism, a group of 10 Democratic committee leaders on Monday sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) denouncing the resolution as superfluous and a waste of time.
"The floor schedule that the Republican majority has pursued and intends to pursue this week will create no jobs," the Democrats wrote. "Indeed, spending two days, and taxpayer dollars, on a resolution calling on our committees to perform oversight functions that they are already authorized to conduct distracts from our efforts to create jobs."
Not everyone on the right is in love with the fiction that permeates and props up the "movement." Dick Wadhams, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, decided recently to abandon his re-election bid to keep his post. Why? "I have tired," he wrote in a memo to party officials, "of those who are obsessed with seeing conspiracies around every corner and who have terribly misguided notions of what the role of the state party is while saying 'uniting conservatives' is all that is needed to win competitive races across the state." He was even more blunt with the Washington Post: "I have loved being chairman, but I'm tired of the nuts who have no grasp of what the state party's role is."
Unfortunately for the rest of us, people like Mr. Wadhams are the exception that proves the rule. The rich fantasy life enjoyed by the right - Reagan was great, the Tea Party is a "movement" for the little guy, and the new GOP House majority will be a force for good - continues unabated.
WikiLeaks Backers ‘Anonymous’ to Be Probed by U.S. Grand Jury
By Michael Riley
Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Evidence collected by the FBI about Anonymous, which attacked websites of four companies to punish them for blocking contributions to WikiLeaks, will be considered this week by a U.S. grand jury, according to court papers and an informal spokesman for the group of activist hackers.
The federal grand jury in San Jose, California, will begin reviewing evidence tomorrow that includes computers and mobile phones seized from suspected leaders as prosecutors probe the coordinated so-called denial-of-service attacks in December, according to a federal subpoena and the spokesman, Barrett Brown. Anonymous directed activists to target payment processors MasterCard Inc., Visa Inc., EBay Inc.’s PayPal, and U.K.-based Moneybookers.com in public chat rooms.
Among the evidence seized by the FBI during multistate raids on Jan. 27 was data taken from an individual who controls one of Anonymous’s primary servers, identified by the organization only by his cyber-handle ‘Owen,’ Brown said.
“The FBI is breaking down people’s doors with guns drawn,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a member of the board of the National Lawyers Guild, which has talked with Anonymous organizers about their legal defense. “A group of people are engaged in a modern day electronic sit-in, and the FBI wants to treat that like it’s terrorist activity.”
Anonymous responded on Feb. 6 by hacking a California-based security firm that it said was aiding the probe, hijacking 60,000 company e-mails and making them public on one of the organization’s servers. The e-mails included a proposal by the company to develop a malware tracking program for the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), among other confidential documents.
Drawn Guns
Jenny Shearer, a Federal Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman, said the agency couldn’t comment on the probe or its targets. She said “it’s not unusual” to have drawn guns during the execution of a search warrant until “the situation is secure.”
The subpoena shows federal investigators are trying to piece together the workings of an elusive group composed of hundreds of hackers and activists stretched across several countries. Brown said about a dozen members are able to influence the direction of Anonymous.
Agents served a grand jury subpoena on a California man who goes by the screen name ‘Trivette,’ ordering him to appear before the panel tomorrow. It demands all information he has on how the December attacks were organized, including instructions to activists on how to download software that can overwhelm websites by inundating them with thousands of service requests a second.
‘Names, Handles’
The subpoena requested information on the group’s hierarchy and structure, including “names, handles, e-mail accounts, or IP addresses,” according to a copy provided to Bloomberg News by the organization.
The FBI also raided the home of a 19-year-old Nevada woman, Brown said. Agents seized two computers, including one owned by her father, her iPhone, two flash drives and a router, Brown said.
Among other recent high-profile attacks, Anonymous has claimed in public statements responsibility for crashing government websites in Egypt and Tunisia to support political protests.
Brown said the group, whose activities have sparked an international investigation and five arrests in Britain, is dedicated to “the defense of liberty.” Its goal is “a perpetual revolution across the world that goes on until governments are basically overwhelmed and results in a freer system,” he said.
History of Retaliation
Several cyber-security experts declined to speak about the group or its activities on the record because of its history of retaliating against critics, such as the Feb. 6 attack on a cyber security firm HBGary Federal, which Anonymous accused of aiding the government’s investigation.
Shearer, the FBI spokeswoman, declined to comment on any cooperation between the agency and the security firm.
Aaron Barr, the head of security services for the Sacramento-based company, was quoted in the Financial Times on Feb. 4 saying that he had information on the identity of Anonymous leaders that he planned to release at a cyber conference this month.
The following day, the group hacked into the company’s network and took more than 60,000 internal e-mails and began releasing them last night, Brown said. It also hijacked the Twitter accounts of HBGary’s employees, using them to post personal information such as social security numbers and addresses, he said.
In one e-mail provided by Anonymous, HBGary Chief Executive Officer Greg Hoglund discussed a possible “60 Minutes” interview on Anonymous, as well as how the security firm could use it to their advantage.
Public ‘Hero’
“Position Aaron as a hero to the public,” Hoglund wrote to Barr and Karen Burke, the firm’s spokeswoman. “I think these guys are going to get arrested, it would be interesting to leave the soft impression that Aaron is the one that got them, and that without Aaron the Feds would have never been able to get out of their own way.”
Burke declined to comment on that communication or the other e-mails or whether the firm negotiated with Anonymous to retrieve the internal communications before they became public, as the group claimed.
Investigation Continuing
“The investigation into our breach is still ongoing so it would be premature to comment further at this time,” HBGary Federal President Penny Leavy said in a statement.
The exposure has the potential to be extremely damaging to the security company and its reputation, said Susan Freiwald, an expert on cyber security and law at the University of San Francisco.
“It’s a security firm,” Freiwald said. “It’s especially sensitive for them to be portrayed as insecure.”
The search warrants issued by the FBI in some cases referred to possible violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the main federal anti-hacking statute, Brown said.
The law can be used to prosecute denial-of-service attacks, according to a Justice Department manual relating to computer crime and intellectual property posted on the agency website. Prosecutors must prove an attack caused at least $5,000 in damage to a company or its operations, a threshold the December attacks probably meets, Freiwald said.
No One Arrested
No one has been arrested yet in the U.S. in connection with the probe, Brown said. The Lawyers Guild’s Verheyden-Hilliard said the attacks against PayPal or MasterCard should be viewed as a form of modern-day civil disobedience, the equivalent of blocking a company’s virtual storefront.
Those attacks may have slowed or disabled the companies’ websites temporarily without affecting their payment processing functions, the companies said.
“Civil disobedience is historically more effective when the state intervenes in a heavy-handed way,” said Ryan Calo, an expert in cyber crime at Stanford University in Stanford, California. “It is not just the act but also all the follow-up -- the subpoenas, arrests, a trial. That’s all part of the act of civil disobedience.”
--Editors: Fred Strasser, Patrick Oster.
Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Evidence collected by the FBI about Anonymous, which attacked websites of four companies to punish them for blocking contributions to WikiLeaks, will be considered this week by a U.S. grand jury, according to court papers and an informal spokesman for the group of activist hackers.
The federal grand jury in San Jose, California, will begin reviewing evidence tomorrow that includes computers and mobile phones seized from suspected leaders as prosecutors probe the coordinated so-called denial-of-service attacks in December, according to a federal subpoena and the spokesman, Barrett Brown. Anonymous directed activists to target payment processors MasterCard Inc., Visa Inc., EBay Inc.’s PayPal, and U.K.-based Moneybookers.com in public chat rooms.
Among the evidence seized by the FBI during multistate raids on Jan. 27 was data taken from an individual who controls one of Anonymous’s primary servers, identified by the organization only by his cyber-handle ‘Owen,’ Brown said.
“The FBI is breaking down people’s doors with guns drawn,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a member of the board of the National Lawyers Guild, which has talked with Anonymous organizers about their legal defense. “A group of people are engaged in a modern day electronic sit-in, and the FBI wants to treat that like it’s terrorist activity.”
Anonymous responded on Feb. 6 by hacking a California-based security firm that it said was aiding the probe, hijacking 60,000 company e-mails and making them public on one of the organization’s servers. The e-mails included a proposal by the company to develop a malware tracking program for the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), among other confidential documents.
Drawn Guns
Jenny Shearer, a Federal Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman, said the agency couldn’t comment on the probe or its targets. She said “it’s not unusual” to have drawn guns during the execution of a search warrant until “the situation is secure.”
The subpoena shows federal investigators are trying to piece together the workings of an elusive group composed of hundreds of hackers and activists stretched across several countries. Brown said about a dozen members are able to influence the direction of Anonymous.
Agents served a grand jury subpoena on a California man who goes by the screen name ‘Trivette,’ ordering him to appear before the panel tomorrow. It demands all information he has on how the December attacks were organized, including instructions to activists on how to download software that can overwhelm websites by inundating them with thousands of service requests a second.
‘Names, Handles’
The subpoena requested information on the group’s hierarchy and structure, including “names, handles, e-mail accounts, or IP addresses,” according to a copy provided to Bloomberg News by the organization.
The FBI also raided the home of a 19-year-old Nevada woman, Brown said. Agents seized two computers, including one owned by her father, her iPhone, two flash drives and a router, Brown said.
Among other recent high-profile attacks, Anonymous has claimed in public statements responsibility for crashing government websites in Egypt and Tunisia to support political protests.
Brown said the group, whose activities have sparked an international investigation and five arrests in Britain, is dedicated to “the defense of liberty.” Its goal is “a perpetual revolution across the world that goes on until governments are basically overwhelmed and results in a freer system,” he said.
History of Retaliation
Several cyber-security experts declined to speak about the group or its activities on the record because of its history of retaliating against critics, such as the Feb. 6 attack on a cyber security firm HBGary Federal, which Anonymous accused of aiding the government’s investigation.
Shearer, the FBI spokeswoman, declined to comment on any cooperation between the agency and the security firm.
Aaron Barr, the head of security services for the Sacramento-based company, was quoted in the Financial Times on Feb. 4 saying that he had information on the identity of Anonymous leaders that he planned to release at a cyber conference this month.
The following day, the group hacked into the company’s network and took more than 60,000 internal e-mails and began releasing them last night, Brown said. It also hijacked the Twitter accounts of HBGary’s employees, using them to post personal information such as social security numbers and addresses, he said.
In one e-mail provided by Anonymous, HBGary Chief Executive Officer Greg Hoglund discussed a possible “60 Minutes” interview on Anonymous, as well as how the security firm could use it to their advantage.
Public ‘Hero’
“Position Aaron as a hero to the public,” Hoglund wrote to Barr and Karen Burke, the firm’s spokeswoman. “I think these guys are going to get arrested, it would be interesting to leave the soft impression that Aaron is the one that got them, and that without Aaron the Feds would have never been able to get out of their own way.”
Burke declined to comment on that communication or the other e-mails or whether the firm negotiated with Anonymous to retrieve the internal communications before they became public, as the group claimed.
Investigation Continuing
“The investigation into our breach is still ongoing so it would be premature to comment further at this time,” HBGary Federal President Penny Leavy said in a statement.
The exposure has the potential to be extremely damaging to the security company and its reputation, said Susan Freiwald, an expert on cyber security and law at the University of San Francisco.
“It’s a security firm,” Freiwald said. “It’s especially sensitive for them to be portrayed as insecure.”
The search warrants issued by the FBI in some cases referred to possible violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the main federal anti-hacking statute, Brown said.
The law can be used to prosecute denial-of-service attacks, according to a Justice Department manual relating to computer crime and intellectual property posted on the agency website. Prosecutors must prove an attack caused at least $5,000 in damage to a company or its operations, a threshold the December attacks probably meets, Freiwald said.
No One Arrested
No one has been arrested yet in the U.S. in connection with the probe, Brown said. The Lawyers Guild’s Verheyden-Hilliard said the attacks against PayPal or MasterCard should be viewed as a form of modern-day civil disobedience, the equivalent of blocking a company’s virtual storefront.
Those attacks may have slowed or disabled the companies’ websites temporarily without affecting their payment processing functions, the companies said.
“Civil disobedience is historically more effective when the state intervenes in a heavy-handed way,” said Ryan Calo, an expert in cyber crime at Stanford University in Stanford, California. “It is not just the act but also all the follow-up -- the subpoenas, arrests, a trial. That’s all part of the act of civil disobedience.”
--Editors: Fred Strasser, Patrick Oster.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Torturing Democracy
by: Henry A. Giroux, Paradigm Press | Book Excerpt
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, we have lived through a historical period in which the United States relinquished its tenuous claim to democracy. The frames through which democracy apprehends others as human beings worthy of respect, dignity, and human rights were sacrificed to a mode of politics and culture that simply became an extension of war, both at home and abroad. At home, the punishing state increasingly replaced the welfare state, however ill conceived, as more and more individuals and groups were now treated as disposable populations, undeserving of those safety nets and basic protections that provide the conditions for living with a sense of security and dignity. Under such conditions, basic social supports were replaced by an accelerated production of prisons, the expansion of the criminal justice system into everyday life, and the further erosion of crucial civil liberties. Shared responsibilities gave way to shared fears, and the only distinction that seemed to resonate in the culture was between friends and patriots, on the one hand, and dissenters and enemies, on the other. State violence not only became acceptable, it was normalized as the government spied on its citizens, suspended the right of habeas corpus, sanctioned police brutality against those who questioned state power, relied on the state secrets privilege to hide its crimes, and increasingly reduced public spheres designed to protect children to containment centers and warehouses that modeled themselves after prisons. Fear both altered the landscape of democratic rights and values and dehumanized a population that was ever more willing to look the other way as large segments of the populace were either dehumanized, incarcerated, or simply treated as disposable. The dire consequences can be seen every day as the media report a stream of tragic stories about decent people losing their homes; more and more young people being incarcerated; and growing numbers of people living in their cars, on the streets, or in tent cities. The New York Times offers up a front-page story about young people leaving their recession-ridden families in order to live on the street, often surviving by selling their bodies for money. Reports surface in the dominant media about unspeakable horrors being inflicted on children tortured in the "death chambers" of Iraq, Cuba, and Afghanistan. And the American people barely blink.
The Bush administration further eroded a culture inspired by democratic values, replacing it with a culture of war and a culture of illegality that experimented with an extrajudicial detention system used to create torture chambers in Bagram, Kandahar, and Guantanamo Bay. After 2001, the language and ghostly shadow of war became all-embracing, not only eroding the distinction between war and peace but also putting into play a public pedagogy in which every aspect of the culture was shaped by militarized knowledge, values, and ideals. From video games and Hollywood films either supported or produced by the Department of Defense to the ongoing militarization of public and higher education, the notion of the common good was subordinated to a military metaphysics, warlike values, and the dictates of the national security state. War gained a new status under the Bush administration, moving from an option of last resort to a primary instrument of diplomacy in the war on terror. A dogmatic faith in war was supplemented by a persistent attempt to legitimate such a politics through another kind of war based on pedagogical struggle to create subjects, citizens, and institutions that would support such draconian policies. War was no longer the last resort of a state intent on defending its territory; it morphed into a new form of public pedagogy--a type of cultural war machine--designed to shape and lead the society. War became the foundation for a politics that employed military language, concepts, and policing relations to address problems far beyond the familiar terrains of battle. In some cases, war was so aestheticized by the dominant media that it resembled an advertisement for a tourist industry. The upshot is that it the meaning of war was rhetorically, visually, and materially expanded to name, legitimate, and wage battles against social problems involving drugs, poverty, and the nation's newfound enemy, the Mexican immigrant.
As war became normalized as the central function of power and politics, it became a regular and normative element of American society, legitimated by a state of exception and emergency that became permanent rather than temporary. As the production of violence reached beyond traditionally defined enemies and threats, the state now took aim at terrorism, shifting its register of power by waging war on a concept, broadening its pursuits, tactics, and strategies against no specific state, army, soldiers, or location. The enemy was omnipresent, all the more difficult to root out and all the more convenient for expanding the tactics of surveillance, the culture of fear, and the resources of violence. War was now a permanent and commonplace feature of American domestic and foreign policy, a battle that had no definitive end and demanded the constant use of violence. War had become more than a military strategy: it was now a pedagogy and a form of cultural politics designed to legitimate certain modes of governance, create identities supportive of militaristic values, and provide the formative culture that supported the organization and production of violence as a central feature of domestic and foreign policy.
It is difficult to imagine how any democracy can avoid being corrupted when war becomes the foundation of politics, if not culture itself. Any democracy that makes war and state violence the organizing principles of society cannot survive for long, at least as a democratic entity. The United States descended into a period in which society was increasingly organized through the production of both symbolic and material violence. A culture of cruelty emerged in the media, especially in the talk radio circuit, in which a sordid nationalism combined with a hypermilitarism and masculinity that scorned not merely reason but also all those who fit into the stereotype of other--which appeared to include everyone who was not white and Christian. Dialogue, reason, and thoughtfulness slowly disappeared from the public realm as every encounter was framed within circles of certainty, staged as a fight to the death. As the civic and moral center of the country disappeared under the Bush administration, the language of the marketplace provided the only referent for understanding the obligations of citizenship and global responsibility, undeterred by a growing war machine and culture that produced jobs and goods and furthered the war economy.
The war abroad entered a new phase with the release of the photos of detainees being tortured at Abu Ghraib prison. War as organized violence was stripped of its noble aims and delusional goal of promoting democracy, revealing state violence at its most degrading and dehumanizing moment. State power had become an instrument of torture, ripping into the flesh of human beings, raping women, and most abominably torturing children. Democracy had become something that defended the unthinkable and inflicted the most horrible mutilations on both adults and children deemed to be the enemies of democracy. But the mutilations were also inflicted against the body politic as politicians such as former vice president Dick Cheney defended torture while the media addressed the question of torture not as a violation of democratic principles or human rights but as a strategy that might or might not produce concrete information. The utilitarian arguments used to defend a market-driven economy that only recognized cost-benefit analyses and the priority of exchange values had now reached their logical end point as similar arguments were used to defend torture, even when it involved children. The pretense of democracy was stripped bare as it was revealed over and over again that the United States had become a torture state, aligning itself with infamous dictatorships such as those in Argentina and Chile during the 1970s. The U.S. government under the Bush administration had finally arrived at a point where the metaphysics of war, organized violence, and state terrorism prevented leaders in Washington from recognizing how much they were emulating the very acts of terrorism they claimed to be fighting. The circle had now been completed, as the warfare state had been transformed into a torture state. Everything became permissible both at home and abroad, just as the legal system along with the market system legitimated a punishing and ruthless mode of economic Darwinism that viewed morality, if not democracy itself, as a weakness to be either scorned or ignored. Markets not only drove politics, they also removed ethical considerations from any understanding of how markets worked or what effects they produced on the larger social order. Self-regulation trumped moral considerations and became the primary force driving the market, while narrowly defined individual interests set the parameters of what was possible. The public collapsed into the private, and social responsibility was reduced to the arbitrary desires of the hermetic, asocial self. Not surprisingly, the inhuman and degrading entered public discourse and shaped the debate about war, state violence, and human rights abuses; it also served to legitimate such practices. The United States unabashedly entered into a moral vacuum that enabled it to both justify torture and state violence and to mobilize successfully a war culture and public pedagogy in the larger culture that convinced, as a Pew Research Center poll indicated, 54 percent of the American people that "torture is at least sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists."[1] Torture was normalized and duly accepted by the majority of the American people while the promise of an aspiring democracy was irreparably damaged.
Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror examines how the United States under the Bush administration embarked on a war on terror that not only defended torture as a matter of official policy but also furthered the conditions for the emergence of a culture of cruelty that profoundly altered the political and moral landscape of the country. As torture became normalized under Bush, it corrupted American ideals and political culture, and the administration passed over to the dark side in sanctioning the unimaginable and unspeakable--the torture of children. Although the rise of the torture state has been a subject of intense controversy, too little has been said by intellectuals, academics, artists, writers, parents, and politicians about how state violence under the Bush administration set in motion a public pedagogy and political culture that legitimated the systemic torture of children and did so with the complicity of dominant media that either denied such practices or simply ignored them. The focus on children here is deliberate because young people provide a powerful referent for the long-term consequences of social policies, if not the future itself, and also because they offer a crucial index to measure the moral and democratic values of a nation. Children are the heartbeat and moral compass of politics because they speak to the best of its possibilities and promises, and yet they have, since the 1980s, become the vanishing point of moral debate, either deemed irrelevant because of their age, discounted because they are largely viewed as commodities, or scorned because they are considered a threat to adult society. I have written elsewhere that how a society educates its youth is connected to the collective future the people hope for. Actually, how youth were educated became meaningless as a moral issue under the Bush administration because youth were not only devalued and considered unworthy of a decent life and future (one reason they were denied adequate health care), they were also reduced to the status of the inhuman and depraved and were subjected to cruel acts of torture in sites that were as illegal as they were barbaric. In this instance, youth became the negation of politics and of the future itself.
But more is at stake here than making such crimes visible: there is also the moral and political imperative of raising serious questions about the challenges the Obama administration must address in light of this shameful period in American history, especially if it wants to reverse such policies and make a claim on restoring any vestige of American democracy. Of course, when a country makes torture legal and extends the disciplinary mechanisms of pain, humiliation, and suffering to children, it suggests that far too many people looked away while this was happening and in doing so allowed conditions to emerge that made the unspeakable act of justifying the torture of children a matter of state policy. It is time for Americans to face up to these crimes and engage in a national dialogue about the political, economic, educational, and social conditions that allowed such a dark period to emerge in American history and to hold to account those who were responsible for such acts. The Obama administration is under fire for its embrace of many of Bush's policies, but what is most disturbing is its willingness to make war, secrecy, and the suspension of civil liberties central features of its own policies. Obama, in his desire to look ahead and embrace a depoliticizing and morally empty notion of postpartisan politics, recycles a dangerous form of historical and social amnesia, while overlooking the political and civic pathology he inherited. Hopefully, this book will remind us that memory at its best is unsettling and sometimes even dangerous in its call for individuals to become moral and political witnesses; to take risks; and to embrace history not merely as a critique but also as a warning about how fragile democracy is and what will often happen when the principles, ideals, and elements of the culture that sustain it are allowed to slip away, overtaken by forces that embrace death rather than life, fear rather than hope, insularity rather than solidarity. Robert Hass, the American poet, has suggested that the job of education, its political job, "is to refresh the idea of justice going dead in us all the time."[2] Justice is slipping away, once again, under the Obama administration, but it is not just the government's job to keep it from "going dead": it is also the job of all Americans--as parents, citizens, individuals, and educators--not merely as a matter of social obligation or moral responsibility but as an act of politics, agency, and possibility.
This book is divided into six chapters. The first chapter analyzes the emergence of a set of predatory economic, social, and political conditions that were intensified, particularly under the administration of George W. Bush, setting the stage for the transformation of the welfare state into the warfare and torture state. As democratic values were increasingly subordinated to market values and as a culture of fear replaced a culture of compassion, restraints previously placed on the play of market and financial forces were removed. Public issues now collapsed into private concerns, and people became more vulnerable to those economic and political forces promoting uncertainty, instability, and insecurity. As any notion of the common good and the institutions that supported it were increasingly viewed with disdain, the culture became more self-absorbed, mean-spirited, competitive, and ruthless in its unwillingness to show compassion for the other, especially those who were most vulnerable to uncertain timesóthe young, the elderly, immigrants, poor minorities, and Muslims. As the culture of fear and competitiveness seemed to spin out of control, the punishing state replaced the social state, and politics was largely reduced to protecting the benefits of the rich and expanding those policing apparatuses that were used to contain and punish the poor. As more and more social problems were criminalized, the punishing state became the sole source of legitimation for a state weakened by the forces of a destructive globalization and the free-floating forces of capital and finance. As the laws of the market, an excessive individualism, and an unchecked notion of self-interest became the most important principles shaping society, democratic values, identities, and relations were subordinated to the interests of an economic formation that had freed itself from all constraints. The conditions were now developing in which matters of justice, human rights, and truth were sacrificed to the forces of political and economic expediency. In the second chapter of the book, I analyze how torture became state policy through a series of "illegal legalities" concocted by various members of the Bush administration and how the media, in collusion with the government, refused to acknowledge that torture was not something that simply emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 but had been practiced by the U.S. government for decades. In the third chapter, I analyze how the debate about torture seemed to free itself from human rights abuses committed by the United States historically and also how the Bush administration actively promoted new forms of torture in violation of every major international treaty dealing with torture as an illegal and criminal act. The fourth chapter details the government denial of state-legitimated torture and the gruesome acts of violence and abuse committed on numerous detainees in various U.S.-controlled sites and prisons. Chapter 5 provides ample evidence of how these various conditions along with numerous violations of human rights ultimately resulted in the unthinkable--the torture of children. This chapter is as detailed as it is shocking, invoking both testimony from third parties and testimony from children who were actually tortured. The final chapter of the book raises a series of questions about whether Obama will challenge the horrible legacy of the Bush administration by redefining American democracy or whether he will simply become another victim of the culture of cruelty and suffering that is the legacy of the Bush-Cheney years.
Footnotes:
[1] Heather Maher, "Majority of Americans Think Torture Sometimes Justified," CommonDreams.org (December 4, 2009).
[2] Hass cited in Sarah Pollock, "Robert Hass," Mother Jones (March-April 1992), p. 22.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. He has taught at Boston University, Miami University of Ohio, and Penn State University. His most recent books include: Youth in a Suspect Society (Palgrave, 2009); Politics After Hope: Obama and the Crisis of Youth, Race, and Democracy (Paradigm, 2010); Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror (Paradigm, 2010). Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, we have lived through a historical period in which the United States relinquished its tenuous claim to democracy. The frames through which democracy apprehends others as human beings worthy of respect, dignity, and human rights were sacrificed to a mode of politics and culture that simply became an extension of war, both at home and abroad. At home, the punishing state increasingly replaced the welfare state, however ill conceived, as more and more individuals and groups were now treated as disposable populations, undeserving of those safety nets and basic protections that provide the conditions for living with a sense of security and dignity. Under such conditions, basic social supports were replaced by an accelerated production of prisons, the expansion of the criminal justice system into everyday life, and the further erosion of crucial civil liberties. Shared responsibilities gave way to shared fears, and the only distinction that seemed to resonate in the culture was between friends and patriots, on the one hand, and dissenters and enemies, on the other. State violence not only became acceptable, it was normalized as the government spied on its citizens, suspended the right of habeas corpus, sanctioned police brutality against those who questioned state power, relied on the state secrets privilege to hide its crimes, and increasingly reduced public spheres designed to protect children to containment centers and warehouses that modeled themselves after prisons. Fear both altered the landscape of democratic rights and values and dehumanized a population that was ever more willing to look the other way as large segments of the populace were either dehumanized, incarcerated, or simply treated as disposable. The dire consequences can be seen every day as the media report a stream of tragic stories about decent people losing their homes; more and more young people being incarcerated; and growing numbers of people living in their cars, on the streets, or in tent cities. The New York Times offers up a front-page story about young people leaving their recession-ridden families in order to live on the street, often surviving by selling their bodies for money. Reports surface in the dominant media about unspeakable horrors being inflicted on children tortured in the "death chambers" of Iraq, Cuba, and Afghanistan. And the American people barely blink.
The Bush administration further eroded a culture inspired by democratic values, replacing it with a culture of war and a culture of illegality that experimented with an extrajudicial detention system used to create torture chambers in Bagram, Kandahar, and Guantanamo Bay. After 2001, the language and ghostly shadow of war became all-embracing, not only eroding the distinction between war and peace but also putting into play a public pedagogy in which every aspect of the culture was shaped by militarized knowledge, values, and ideals. From video games and Hollywood films either supported or produced by the Department of Defense to the ongoing militarization of public and higher education, the notion of the common good was subordinated to a military metaphysics, warlike values, and the dictates of the national security state. War gained a new status under the Bush administration, moving from an option of last resort to a primary instrument of diplomacy in the war on terror. A dogmatic faith in war was supplemented by a persistent attempt to legitimate such a politics through another kind of war based on pedagogical struggle to create subjects, citizens, and institutions that would support such draconian policies. War was no longer the last resort of a state intent on defending its territory; it morphed into a new form of public pedagogy--a type of cultural war machine--designed to shape and lead the society. War became the foundation for a politics that employed military language, concepts, and policing relations to address problems far beyond the familiar terrains of battle. In some cases, war was so aestheticized by the dominant media that it resembled an advertisement for a tourist industry. The upshot is that it the meaning of war was rhetorically, visually, and materially expanded to name, legitimate, and wage battles against social problems involving drugs, poverty, and the nation's newfound enemy, the Mexican immigrant.
As war became normalized as the central function of power and politics, it became a regular and normative element of American society, legitimated by a state of exception and emergency that became permanent rather than temporary. As the production of violence reached beyond traditionally defined enemies and threats, the state now took aim at terrorism, shifting its register of power by waging war on a concept, broadening its pursuits, tactics, and strategies against no specific state, army, soldiers, or location. The enemy was omnipresent, all the more difficult to root out and all the more convenient for expanding the tactics of surveillance, the culture of fear, and the resources of violence. War was now a permanent and commonplace feature of American domestic and foreign policy, a battle that had no definitive end and demanded the constant use of violence. War had become more than a military strategy: it was now a pedagogy and a form of cultural politics designed to legitimate certain modes of governance, create identities supportive of militaristic values, and provide the formative culture that supported the organization and production of violence as a central feature of domestic and foreign policy.
It is difficult to imagine how any democracy can avoid being corrupted when war becomes the foundation of politics, if not culture itself. Any democracy that makes war and state violence the organizing principles of society cannot survive for long, at least as a democratic entity. The United States descended into a period in which society was increasingly organized through the production of both symbolic and material violence. A culture of cruelty emerged in the media, especially in the talk radio circuit, in which a sordid nationalism combined with a hypermilitarism and masculinity that scorned not merely reason but also all those who fit into the stereotype of other--which appeared to include everyone who was not white and Christian. Dialogue, reason, and thoughtfulness slowly disappeared from the public realm as every encounter was framed within circles of certainty, staged as a fight to the death. As the civic and moral center of the country disappeared under the Bush administration, the language of the marketplace provided the only referent for understanding the obligations of citizenship and global responsibility, undeterred by a growing war machine and culture that produced jobs and goods and furthered the war economy.
The war abroad entered a new phase with the release of the photos of detainees being tortured at Abu Ghraib prison. War as organized violence was stripped of its noble aims and delusional goal of promoting democracy, revealing state violence at its most degrading and dehumanizing moment. State power had become an instrument of torture, ripping into the flesh of human beings, raping women, and most abominably torturing children. Democracy had become something that defended the unthinkable and inflicted the most horrible mutilations on both adults and children deemed to be the enemies of democracy. But the mutilations were also inflicted against the body politic as politicians such as former vice president Dick Cheney defended torture while the media addressed the question of torture not as a violation of democratic principles or human rights but as a strategy that might or might not produce concrete information. The utilitarian arguments used to defend a market-driven economy that only recognized cost-benefit analyses and the priority of exchange values had now reached their logical end point as similar arguments were used to defend torture, even when it involved children. The pretense of democracy was stripped bare as it was revealed over and over again that the United States had become a torture state, aligning itself with infamous dictatorships such as those in Argentina and Chile during the 1970s. The U.S. government under the Bush administration had finally arrived at a point where the metaphysics of war, organized violence, and state terrorism prevented leaders in Washington from recognizing how much they were emulating the very acts of terrorism they claimed to be fighting. The circle had now been completed, as the warfare state had been transformed into a torture state. Everything became permissible both at home and abroad, just as the legal system along with the market system legitimated a punishing and ruthless mode of economic Darwinism that viewed morality, if not democracy itself, as a weakness to be either scorned or ignored. Markets not only drove politics, they also removed ethical considerations from any understanding of how markets worked or what effects they produced on the larger social order. Self-regulation trumped moral considerations and became the primary force driving the market, while narrowly defined individual interests set the parameters of what was possible. The public collapsed into the private, and social responsibility was reduced to the arbitrary desires of the hermetic, asocial self. Not surprisingly, the inhuman and degrading entered public discourse and shaped the debate about war, state violence, and human rights abuses; it also served to legitimate such practices. The United States unabashedly entered into a moral vacuum that enabled it to both justify torture and state violence and to mobilize successfully a war culture and public pedagogy in the larger culture that convinced, as a Pew Research Center poll indicated, 54 percent of the American people that "torture is at least sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists."[1] Torture was normalized and duly accepted by the majority of the American people while the promise of an aspiring democracy was irreparably damaged.
Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror examines how the United States under the Bush administration embarked on a war on terror that not only defended torture as a matter of official policy but also furthered the conditions for the emergence of a culture of cruelty that profoundly altered the political and moral landscape of the country. As torture became normalized under Bush, it corrupted American ideals and political culture, and the administration passed over to the dark side in sanctioning the unimaginable and unspeakable--the torture of children. Although the rise of the torture state has been a subject of intense controversy, too little has been said by intellectuals, academics, artists, writers, parents, and politicians about how state violence under the Bush administration set in motion a public pedagogy and political culture that legitimated the systemic torture of children and did so with the complicity of dominant media that either denied such practices or simply ignored them. The focus on children here is deliberate because young people provide a powerful referent for the long-term consequences of social policies, if not the future itself, and also because they offer a crucial index to measure the moral and democratic values of a nation. Children are the heartbeat and moral compass of politics because they speak to the best of its possibilities and promises, and yet they have, since the 1980s, become the vanishing point of moral debate, either deemed irrelevant because of their age, discounted because they are largely viewed as commodities, or scorned because they are considered a threat to adult society. I have written elsewhere that how a society educates its youth is connected to the collective future the people hope for. Actually, how youth were educated became meaningless as a moral issue under the Bush administration because youth were not only devalued and considered unworthy of a decent life and future (one reason they were denied adequate health care), they were also reduced to the status of the inhuman and depraved and were subjected to cruel acts of torture in sites that were as illegal as they were barbaric. In this instance, youth became the negation of politics and of the future itself.
But more is at stake here than making such crimes visible: there is also the moral and political imperative of raising serious questions about the challenges the Obama administration must address in light of this shameful period in American history, especially if it wants to reverse such policies and make a claim on restoring any vestige of American democracy. Of course, when a country makes torture legal and extends the disciplinary mechanisms of pain, humiliation, and suffering to children, it suggests that far too many people looked away while this was happening and in doing so allowed conditions to emerge that made the unspeakable act of justifying the torture of children a matter of state policy. It is time for Americans to face up to these crimes and engage in a national dialogue about the political, economic, educational, and social conditions that allowed such a dark period to emerge in American history and to hold to account those who were responsible for such acts. The Obama administration is under fire for its embrace of many of Bush's policies, but what is most disturbing is its willingness to make war, secrecy, and the suspension of civil liberties central features of its own policies. Obama, in his desire to look ahead and embrace a depoliticizing and morally empty notion of postpartisan politics, recycles a dangerous form of historical and social amnesia, while overlooking the political and civic pathology he inherited. Hopefully, this book will remind us that memory at its best is unsettling and sometimes even dangerous in its call for individuals to become moral and political witnesses; to take risks; and to embrace history not merely as a critique but also as a warning about how fragile democracy is and what will often happen when the principles, ideals, and elements of the culture that sustain it are allowed to slip away, overtaken by forces that embrace death rather than life, fear rather than hope, insularity rather than solidarity. Robert Hass, the American poet, has suggested that the job of education, its political job, "is to refresh the idea of justice going dead in us all the time."[2] Justice is slipping away, once again, under the Obama administration, but it is not just the government's job to keep it from "going dead": it is also the job of all Americans--as parents, citizens, individuals, and educators--not merely as a matter of social obligation or moral responsibility but as an act of politics, agency, and possibility.
This book is divided into six chapters. The first chapter analyzes the emergence of a set of predatory economic, social, and political conditions that were intensified, particularly under the administration of George W. Bush, setting the stage for the transformation of the welfare state into the warfare and torture state. As democratic values were increasingly subordinated to market values and as a culture of fear replaced a culture of compassion, restraints previously placed on the play of market and financial forces were removed. Public issues now collapsed into private concerns, and people became more vulnerable to those economic and political forces promoting uncertainty, instability, and insecurity. As any notion of the common good and the institutions that supported it were increasingly viewed with disdain, the culture became more self-absorbed, mean-spirited, competitive, and ruthless in its unwillingness to show compassion for the other, especially those who were most vulnerable to uncertain timesóthe young, the elderly, immigrants, poor minorities, and Muslims. As the culture of fear and competitiveness seemed to spin out of control, the punishing state replaced the social state, and politics was largely reduced to protecting the benefits of the rich and expanding those policing apparatuses that were used to contain and punish the poor. As more and more social problems were criminalized, the punishing state became the sole source of legitimation for a state weakened by the forces of a destructive globalization and the free-floating forces of capital and finance. As the laws of the market, an excessive individualism, and an unchecked notion of self-interest became the most important principles shaping society, democratic values, identities, and relations were subordinated to the interests of an economic formation that had freed itself from all constraints. The conditions were now developing in which matters of justice, human rights, and truth were sacrificed to the forces of political and economic expediency. In the second chapter of the book, I analyze how torture became state policy through a series of "illegal legalities" concocted by various members of the Bush administration and how the media, in collusion with the government, refused to acknowledge that torture was not something that simply emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 but had been practiced by the U.S. government for decades. In the third chapter, I analyze how the debate about torture seemed to free itself from human rights abuses committed by the United States historically and also how the Bush administration actively promoted new forms of torture in violation of every major international treaty dealing with torture as an illegal and criminal act. The fourth chapter details the government denial of state-legitimated torture and the gruesome acts of violence and abuse committed on numerous detainees in various U.S.-controlled sites and prisons. Chapter 5 provides ample evidence of how these various conditions along with numerous violations of human rights ultimately resulted in the unthinkable--the torture of children. This chapter is as detailed as it is shocking, invoking both testimony from third parties and testimony from children who were actually tortured. The final chapter of the book raises a series of questions about whether Obama will challenge the horrible legacy of the Bush administration by redefining American democracy or whether he will simply become another victim of the culture of cruelty and suffering that is the legacy of the Bush-Cheney years.
Footnotes:
[1] Heather Maher, "Majority of Americans Think Torture Sometimes Justified," CommonDreams.org (December 4, 2009).
[2] Hass cited in Sarah Pollock, "Robert Hass," Mother Jones (March-April 1992), p. 22.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. He has taught at Boston University, Miami University of Ohio, and Penn State University. His most recent books include: Youth in a Suspect Society (Palgrave, 2009); Politics After Hope: Obama and the Crisis of Youth, Race, and Democracy (Paradigm, 2010); Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror (Paradigm, 2010). Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.
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