Judge denies Obama administration attempt to dismiss challenge to “no-fly” list

World Socialist Web Site
Eric London

A federal district court judge in California last week denied a motion by Obama administration lawyers to dismiss a legal challenge to the “no-fly” list brought by a young Malaysian woman, Rahinah Ibrahim.

Ibrahim, at the time a Stanford University Ph.D. candidate, was detained at San Francisco International Airport on January 2, 2005 when she and her daughter attempted to board a flight to her home country. She was intending to fly home to present her doctoral research at a conference sponsored by Stanford. Ibrahim was subjected to harsh treatment by airport security officials. Although she was in a wheelchair due to complications from a recent hysterectomy operation, officials handcuffed her and held her in a jail cell for two hours.

Officials eventually allowed Ibrahim to depart from the United States, but refused to allow her to re-enter the country. The government revoked her visa and denied her application for another visa in 2009, citing possible terrorist activity. No evidence has ever been presented by the government to support allegations of links to terrorist organizations.

Ibrahim originally filed the suit in 2006. It will now proceed to discovery, during which court proceedings may force the Obama administration to relinquish state records pertaining to Ibrahim’s case. Ibrahim is seeking to return to the United States and be removed from the “no-fly” list.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has heard the Ibrahim case on two previous occasions. Both times, as in the present case in US District Court, the Obama administration refused to release any evidence regarding Ibrahim’s alleged terrorist connections, claiming that such information involved sensitive security matters that neither the public, nor even the courts, were privileged to view.

The administration maintains that it has the right to block individuals from flying on commercial flights or entering the country without presenting any evidence either to the targeted person or a court of law.

US District Court Judge William Alsup issued the order denying the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss. In it, he lambasted the administration for the anti-democratic maneuvers it has used in its repeated attempts to quash the case.

“Here the government seeks to affirmatively use allegedly privileged information to dispose of the case entirely without ever revealing to the other side what its secret evidence might be,” wrote Alsup. “Here, the government has not justified its sweeping proposal. It has gone so far as even to redact from its table of authorities some of the reported case law on which it relies! This is too hard to swallow.

“The government’s latest motion based on lack of standing, being a complete mystery, is denied.”
The Obama administration’s attempt to keep Ibrahim in a legal limbo is part of its wider policy of continuing and expanding the domestic surveillance network and police state infrastructure established by the Bush administration.

The “no-fly” list, created in 2001 ostensibly in reaction to the September 11 attacks, today reportedly includes over 20,000 names. This is more than double the number in 2011. The Obama administration has placed more names on the “no-fly” list in the last 12 months than George W. Bush did during his eight years in office.

The “no-fly” list is merely one of many such lists compiled by the US government’s Terrorist Screening Center. The enormity of the government’s surveillance network is exemplified by the larger “terrorist watch list,” which includes the names of about 400,000 people.

There is no public oversight of the process by which the government determines whom to place on the “no-fly” or “terrorist watch” lists. Individual students, professors and workers have likely been placed on the list on account of their opposition to US foreign policy as expressed in phone, email, or social media communications. An unknown number of innocent individuals have been placed on the list merely because of their race, nationality or religion. Since the government is not required to make public the reasons for an individual’s placement on the list, or even inform an individual that he or she has been put on the list, there is no way to hold the government accountable.

Ibrahim, who was allowed to complete her Ph.D. in absentia, is still unable to return to the United States.

America’s Descent into Deception and Tyranny: Agenda Prevails Over Truth

In the Western world truth no longer has any meaning. It its place stands agenda. 
Agenda is all important, because it is the way Washington achieves hegemony over the world and the American people. 9/11 was the “new Pearl Harbor” that the neoconservatives declared to be necessary for their planned wars against Muslim countries. For the neoconservatives to go forward with their agenda, it was necessary for Americans to be connected to the agenda.

President George W. Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neil, said that prior to 9/11 the first cabinet meeting was about the need to invade Iraq.

9/11 was initially blamed on Afghanistan, and the blame was later shifted to Iraq. Washington’s mobilization against Afghanistan was in place prior to 9/11. The George W. Bush regime’s invasion of Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) occurred on October 7, 2001, less than a month after 9/11. Every military person knows that it is not possible to have mobilization for invading a country half way around the world ready in three weeks.

The Orwellian “PATRIOT Act” is another example of planning prior to the event.  This vast police state measure could not possibly have been written in the short time between 9/11 and its introduction in Congress. The bill was already written, sitting on the shelf waiting its opportunity. Why? Who wrote it? Why has there been no media investigation of the advanced preparation of this police state legislation?

Evidence that responses to an event were planned prior to what the government said was a surprise event does suggest that the event was engineered to drive an agenda that was already on the books.
Many on the left-wing are immune to evidence that is contrary to the official 9/11 story, because for them 9/11 is refreshing blowback from the oppressed. That the oppressed struck back is more important to the left-wing than the facts.

The right-wing can’t let go of the fantasy either. America in all its purity and wonderfulness was attacked because evil Muslims cannot stand our goodness. “They hate us for our freedom and democracy.” The right-wing vision of a great and good America wronged is essential to the right-wing’s sustaining ideology, an ideology that is prepared to commit violence in order to prove its righteousness.

Implausible stories can be useful to other agendas and thus be sustained by their use in other arguments. For example, the Obama regime’s story of the killing of Osama bin Laden is central to Charles Pierson’s story in the November 16-30, 2012, CounterPunch in which Pierson writes about the growing strains on the US-Pakistan alliance. Pierson writes that bin Laden resided next to Pakistan’s largest military academy and that bin Laden “did go next door every Wednesday to use the pool. If the Pakistani government was unaware of bin Laden’s presence this would mark an intelligence failure of heroic proportions.”

Scandal Alert: Congress Is Quietly Abandoning the 5th Amendment

The Atlantic
Conor Friedersdorf

Meet the prominent legislators who think it's okay to throw Americans in jail forever without charges or trial.

Reuters

What everyone must understand is that American politics doesn't work the way you'd think it would. Most people presume that government officials would never willfully withhold penicillin from men with syphilis just to see what would happen if the disease went untreated. It seems unlikely that officers would coerce enlisted men into exposing themselves to debilitating nerve gas. Few expected that President Obama would preside over the persecution of an NSA whistle-blower, or presume the guilt of all military-aged males killed by U.S. drone strikes. But it all happened.

Really thinking about all that may make it easier to believe what I'm about to tell you.

It may seem like imprisoning an American citizen without charges or trial transgresses against the United States Constitution and basic norms of Western justice dating back to the Magna Carta.

It may seem like reiterating the right to due process contained in the 5th Amendment would be uncontroversial.

It may seem like a United States senator would be widely ridiculed for suggesting that American citizens can be imprisoned indefinitely without chargers or trial, and that if numerous U.S. senators took that position, the press would treat the issue with at least as much urgency as "the fiscal cliff" or the possibility of a new assault weapons bill or likely nominees for Cabinet posts.

It may seem like the American citizens who vocally fret about the importance of adhering to the text of the Constitution would object as loudly as anyone to the prospect of indefinite detention.

But it isn't so.

The casual news consumer cannot rely on those seemingly reasonable heuristics to signal that very old norms are giving way, that important protections are being undermined, perhaps decisively.

We've lost the courage of our convictions -- we're that scared of terrorism (or of seeming soft on it).

News junkies likely know that I'm alluding to a specific law that has passed both the Senate and the House, and is presently in a conference committee, where lawmakers reconcile the two versions. Observers once worried that the law would permit the indefinite detention of American citizens, or at least force them to rely on uncertain court challenges if unjustly imprisoned. In response, Senator Dianne Feinstein tried to allay these concerns with an amendment:

An authorization to use military force, a declaration of war, or any similar authority shall not authorize the detention without charge or trial of a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States apprehended in the United States, unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such detention.

You'd think the part about American citizens being protected from indefinite detention would be uncontroversial. It wasn't. But the amendment did manage to pass in the United States Senate.

Afterward everyone forgot about it pretty quickly. But not Charlie Savage. He's a journalist at The New York Times. If every journalist were more like him the United States government would be far less able to radically expand the president's unchecked authority without many people noticing.

Here is his scoop:

Lawmakers charged with merging the House and Senate versions of the National Defense Authorization Act decided on Tuesday to drop a provision that would have explicitly barred the military from holding American citizens and permanent residents in indefinite detention without trial as terrorism suspects, according to Congressional staff members familiar with the negotiations.  

Says Adam Serwer, another journalist who treats these issues with the urgency that they deserve:

Of the four main negotiators on the defense bill, only one of the Democrats, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), opposes domestic indefinite detention of Americans. The Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.), believes detaining Americans without charge or trial is constitutional, and only voted for the Feinstein amendment because he and some of his Republican colleagues in the Senate convinced themselves through a convoluted legal rationale that Feinstein's proposal didn't actually ban the practice. Both of the main Republican negotiators, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard "Buck" McKeon (R-Calif) and Senator John McCain (R-Ariz) believe it's constitutional to lock up American citizens suspected of terrorism without ever proving they're guilty.

There is a complication, as he notes: Civil liberties groups "aren't shedding any tears over the demise of the Feinstein-Lee amendment," because they objected to the fact that it protected only U.S. citizens and permanent residents, rather than all persons present in the United States. While I respect that principled stand, the more important thing is that this outcome puts us all at greater risk of having a core liberty violated, and that Senators McCain, Levin, and many other legislators suffer no consequences for failing to protect and defend the United States Constitution.
   
As Serwer puts it, "The demise of the Feinstein-Lee proposal doesn't necessarily mean that Americans suspected of terrorism in the US can be locked up forever without a trial. But it ensures that the next time a president tries to lock up an American citizen without trial -- as President George W. Bush previously tried -- it will be left up to the courts to decide whether or not it's legal."

Don't let the dearth of attention fool you -- this is a scandal. Congress has turned its back on safeguarding a core Constitutional protection and a centuries old requirement of Western justice.

Rage, rage against the dying of the 5th.

Report finds harsh CIA interrogations ineffective

Washington Post
Greg Miller

After a contentious closed-door vote, the Senate intelligence committee approved a long-awaited report Thursday concluding that harsh interrogation measures used by the CIA did not produce significant intelligence breakthroughs, officials said.

The 6,000-page document, which was not released to the public, was adopted by Democrats over the objections of most of the committee’s Republicans. The outcome reflects the level of partisan friction that continues to surround the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other severe interrogation techniques four years after they were banned.

The report is the most detailed independent examination to date of the agency’s efforts to “break” dozens of detainees through physical and psychological duress, a period of CIA history that has become a source of renewed controversy because of torture scenes in a forthcoming Hollywood film, “Zero Dark Thirty.”

Officials familiar with the report said it makes a detailed case that subjecting prisoners to ­“enhanced” interrogation techniques did not help the CIA find Osama bin Laden and often were counterproductive in the broader campaign against al-Qaeda.

The committee chairman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein ­(D-Calif.), declined to discuss specific findings but released a written statement describing decisions to allow the CIA to build a network of secret prisons and employ harsh interrogation measures as “terrible mistakes.”

“I also believe this report will settle the debate once and for all over whether our nation should ever employ coercive interrogation techniques,” Feinstein said.

That conclusion has been disputed by high-ranking officials from the George W. Bush administration, including former vice president Richard B. Cheney and former CIA director Michael V. Hayden. Both of them argued that the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other measures provided critical clues that helped track down bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who was killed in a U.S. raid in Pakistan in May 2011.

Largely because of those political battle lines, Republicans on the Senate intelligence committee refused to participate in the panel’s three-year investigation of the CIA interrogation program, and most opposed Thursday’s decision.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the committee’s ranking Republican, said in a statement that the report “contains a number of significant errors and omissions about the history and utility of CIA’s detention program.” He also noted that the review was done “without interviewing any of the people involved.”

The 9 to 6 vote indicates that at least one Republican backed the report, although committee officials declined to provide a breakdown.

Other GOP lawmakers voiced support for the report’s conclusions. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, issued a statement saying that the committee’s work shows that “cruel” treatment of prisoners “is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience, but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence.”

It could be months, if not years, before the public gets even a partial glimpse of the report or its 20 findings and conclusions. Feinstein said the committee will turn the voluminous document over to the Obama administration and the CIA to provide a chance for them to comment.

When that is completed, the committee will need to vote again on whether to release even a portion of the report, a move likely to face opposition from the CIA, which has fought to keep details of the interrogation program classified.

Even if it were released, the report would probably have little impact beyond providing new ammunition for a largely dormant interrogation debate.

The agency abandoned its harshest interrogation methods years before President Obama was elected, and the Justice Department began backing away from memos it had issued that had served as the legal basis for the program.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department closed investigations of alleged abuses, eliminating the prospect that CIA operatives who had gone beyond the approved methods would face criminal charges.

Civil liberties groups praised the report.

Electronic Voting Machines Designed to “Steal Elections”

Global Research
Harvey Wasserman

CICJ Books has just released “Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement’s Rise and Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People’s Vote, 2000-2008″ by Marta Steele.

Marta Steele has done yeoman work for the election integrity movement. She has plowed through more websites and blogs than one can even imagine. She set out with the nearly impossible task of writing the definitive historical narrative of the folly of electronic voting in the United States between 1988 and 2008. More shockingly, she accomplished that task.

Electronic voting machines are perfectly designed to steal elections. That’s their principle purpose. Ireland has just gotten rid of them altogether. Germany, Japan, Canada, Switzerland all use paper ballots. Why? Because you can actually count them in public, and then count them again.

But here in the US, elections are corporate-owned and operated. Anyone who experienced pushing the e-spot for John Kerry and having the name George W. Bush light up—as happened so often in Ohio 2004—knows all too well that what Marta Steele documents in this remarkable book has become the defining reality in American election theft.

What she has done by way of documentation is truly impressive. Never again will those who question the validity of electronic voting be called “conspiracy theorists.” Through sheer tenacity, the author has scoured the vast morass of cyberspace and brought back all the essential data and assembled it in an understandable and analytical fashion. Readers can only draw one conclusion from her work – those who deny the death of democracy are foolish “coincidence theorists.”

She accumulated mountains of incidences that show the so-called “red shift” in favor of the Republican Party is not an anomaly or computer “glitch,” but evidence that there is systematic tampering of computerized voting machines by private companies connected to the Republican Party. Although our newspaper, the Columbus Free Press, and our website freepress.org published plenty on the flaws of electronic voting and election irregularities, we were nonetheless overwhelmed by the research documented in this volume. Those who read this book will no longer fall for the easy propaganda lines and talking points put forth by Karl Rove and his cohorts in explaining away impossible election results.

This book is important because its research is so detailed, its history so clear, and its analysis so convincing. The book destroys the mythology that “it can’t happen here” – that our system is an old and infallible democracy that can’t be corrupted. This powerful work will force all who read it to take a side, but more importantly, to take action, perhaps even direct action.

A key breakthrough that the book allows is to shatter the absurd notion that the empire of the United States may very well meddle in and steal elections abroad, but would never use these tactics at home. The fact that the Bush family, with their patriarch George Herbert Walker Bush being the CIA director, is so inextricably linked to the rise of electronic voting and improbably election results, should be no surprise. That’s why it is no coincidence that she starts her history of election voting irregularities in the year that George H.W. Bush wins the New Hampshire and becomes president.

The Bush family ascendancy corresponds to black box, nontransparent voting in America. The more we’ve privatized our software and hardware and called it “trade secrets,” the better the Bush family candidates have done, against all odds. Their presidential victories, with the official exit polls falling well outside the margin of errors and predicting victories for their opponents, would easily be denounced by election observers in a Third World country.

Small wonder that when push came to shove, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell refused to allow United Nations observers into the Buckeye State polling places to check the veracity of the 2004 balloting.

We believe this book does more than any other to expose the evils of electronic voting. The endnotes alone amount to a giant step forward in revealing the crimes of privatized e-voting in our nation.

As Al Gore and John Kerry refused to do, we must now face the reality that as long as our balloting process is dominated by electronic machines, the outcome of any election can be flipped by a governor or secretary of state with a few late-night key strokes. Considering the hundreds of millions the rich and super-rich are willing to spend to control the government, would you ever doubt they would hesitate to buy an election?

What Marta Steele has done is to confirm far beyond any reasonable doubt that as long as electronic machines are at the core of our vote count, there is no such thing as democracy in the USA. What we have instead is an electronic corporatocracy….proprietary, secretive, anti-democratic and for sale (or lease) to the highest bidder. The real question is: now that Marta had made this all perfectly clear, what are we going to do about it?

~ with Harvey Wasserman

Blood is Their Argument: The Real Campaign Trail

Empire Burlesque
Chris Floyd

Drone victim in North Waziristan

"...for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument?" -- Shakespeare, Henry V

Even as the presidential candidates meet in ersatz agon to spew their self-serving lies and scripted zingers in a "debate" on foreign policy, the real campaign -- the campaign of blood and bone, of death and terror, being waged in Pakistan by the American government -- goes on it all its horror.

This week, the Mail on Sunday -- one of Britain's most conservative newspapers -- published a story outlining, in horrific detail, the true nature of the drone killing campaign begun by George W. Bush and vastly expanded by Barack Obama. Coming on the heels of a recent report ("Living Under Drones") by teams at Stanford and New York universities on this ongoing war crime, the Mail on Sunday story brings the humanity of the victims -- and the inhumanity of perpetrators -- to the fore. The story concerns legal action being taken in Pakistan on behalf of families of drone-murder victims by Pakistani lawyer and activist Shahzad Akbar and the UK-based human rights group, Reprieve. As the MoS reports, two court cases have been filed that could "trigger a formal murder investigation into the roles of two US officials said to have ordered the strikes."

The MoS quotes the Living With Drones report to set the context:

…Between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed since the strikes in Pakistan began in 2004. The report said of those, up to 881 were civilians, including 176 children. Only 41 people who had died had been confirmed as ‘high-value’ terrorist targets.

As the paper notes, full figures on the killings are hard to come by, due to the convenient fact that "the tribal regions along the frontier are closed to journalists." The true death count of civilians is almost certainly far higher.

So who are the thousands of people being slain by brave American warriors sitting at computer consoles on a military bases on the other side of the world? From the MoS:

The plaintiff in the Islamabad case is Karim Khan, 45, a journalist and translator with two masters’ degrees, whose family comes from the village of Machi Khel in the tribal region of North Waziristan. His eldest son, Zahinullah, 18, and his brother, Asif Iqbal, 35, were killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone that struck the family’s guest dining room at about 9.30pm on New Year’s Eve, 2009.

Mr Khan said: ‘We are an educated family. My uncle is a hospital doctor in Islamabad, and we all work in professions such as teaching. We have never had anything to do with militants or terrorists, and for that reason I always assumed we would be safe. Zahinullah, who had been studying in Islamabad, had returned to the village to work his way through college, taking a part-time job as a school caretaker. ‘He was a quiet boy and studious – always in the top group of his class.’ Zahinullah also liked football, cricket and hunting partridges. Asif, he added, was an English teacher and had spent several years taking further courses to improve his qualifications while already in work. Asif had changed his surname because he loved to recite Iqbal, Pakistan's national poet.

Well, that's what they claim, right? No doubt the button-pushing drone "pilot" parked safely in his cushy padded chair back in Nevada could ascertain through the computer screen that the quiet student and the poetry-loving teacher were actually "active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm America," to quote the Nobel Peace Laureate in the White House, in his only public acknowledgement of the drone campaign. Such miscreants, said the Laureate, are the only people ever killed by this "targeted, focused effort."

Mr Khan, who had been working in Islamabad at the time, hurried back to the village when he got the news. This is what he found:

He got home soon after dawn and describes his return ‘like entering a village of the dead – it was so quiet. There was a crowd gathered outside the compound but nowhere for them to sit because the guest rooms had been destroyed’.

Zahinullah, Mr Khan discovered, had been killed instantly, but despite his horrific injuries, Asif had survived long enough to be taken to a nearby hospital. However, he died during the night.

‘We always bury people quickly in our culture. The funeral was at three o’clock that afternoon, and more than 1,000 people came,’ Mr Khan said. ‘Zahinullah had a wound on the side of his face and his body was crushed and charred. I am told the people who push the buttons to fire the missiles call these strikes “bug-splats”.

‘It is beyond my imagination how they can lack all mercy and compassion, and carry on doing this for years. They are not human beings.’

In this, however, Mr Khan is wrong, and therein lies the tragedy: the people who killed his brother and thousands of other innocents, and have carried on doing it for years, are indeed human beings -- all too human. The lack of mercy and compassion they exhibit is one of our endemic human traits -- and one that has been assiduously, relentlessly, deliberately -- and profitably -- cultivated for years by our bipartisan elites, who sow fear and hatred and dehumanization to advance their agenda of domination, playing upon -- and rewarding -- what is worst in our common human nature, while mocking, denigrating and punishing what is best.

One of the officials targeted in the lawsuit is former CIA general counsel John Rizzo. As the paper notes:

Mr Rizzo is named because of an interview he gave to a US reporter after he retired as CIA General Counsel last year. In it, he boasted that he had personally authorised every drone strike in which America’s enemies were ‘hunted down and blown to bits’.

He added: ‘It’s basically a hit-list. The Predator is the weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head.’

That's nice, isn't it? Noble, worthy, honorable, isn't it? Again, these are the mafia thug values being embraced, lauded, supported and reinforced at every turn by the most respectable figures throughout American politics and media, including of course the popular media, where TV shows and movies abound with tough guys "doing whatever it takes" to kill the dehumanized "enemy" and "keep us safe."

'Just trust us' - NSA to privacy advocates in court

Russia Today

The US National Security Agency isn’t outright rejecting claims that they’ve been conducting surveillance on everyone in the country, but they want Americans to at least give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their intensions.

The NSA was in court again this week to challenge a potential class action lawsuit that aims to end the governmental agency’s electronic surveillance program begun by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; but while the plaintiffs in the case want to abolish the warrantless wiretapping and spying on innocent civilians started under that administration’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, the government’s argument is now one that requires Americans to accept the agency’s insistence they’re really not up to anything worth worrying about, Courthouse News reports.

In Federal Court this week, the NSA said that the public should simply trust the government when they say they aren’t abusing any powers legally or illegally in place to engage in clandestine surveillance of each and every citizen.

A San Francisco courthouse was the venue for the latest episode in the matter of Jewel v. NSA, a 4-year-old case that charges the spy agency with once and still operating an "illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet communications surveillance.”Lead plaintiff Carolyn Jewel brought on the suit back in 2008 with the assistance of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and on behalf of current and former customers of AT&T who say they were affected when the telecom giant allowed the NSA unfettered access to their systems to spy on the communications of any customers they wish.
The plaintiffs say that the NSA ordered the attachment of surveillance devices to AT&T’s master network in order to have the ability to divert any communication routed through their service to secure facilities to allow for "an unprecedented suspicionless general search." When former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake condemned the agency’s overly broad and costly surveillance of innocent Americans in 2007, the government attempted to silence him by filing an indictment under the Espionage Act of 1917.

When Jewel v NSA ended up in federal court in 2010, US District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker originally dismissed the case, only for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals deciding to reinstate it last year.

"Since September 11 and now, through two administrations, the executive has engaged in unprecedented assertions of power without regard to the constitutional and statutory limits of its authority,” attorney Richard Wiebe wrote in the case’s initial filings. “It has correspondingly sought to exclude the judiciary from adjudicating whether these exercises of executive power have stayed within the limits set by the Constitution and by Congress."

Currently, the government alleges that they do not have to respond to charges of unwarranted eavesdropping because they have immunity in instances where disclosure could disrupt national security. As Courthouse News previously reported, the federal government “claims to have invoked state secrets privileges that protects it from any litigation consequentially stemming from supposed violations of those acts.”

Plaintiffs, however, say that the government waived its right to sovereign immunity when it put itself in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as well as the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment that protects Americans from unlawful searches and seizures.

Rewarding Impunity

Why is President Obama's attorney general handing out prizes for sweeping torture under the rug?

Foreign Policy
David Cole

On Oct. 17, Eric Holder handed out the Justice Department's annual awards for distinguished service to a slew of department employees. Featured at the top of the awards announcement were the men and women who successfully prosecuted 10 New Orleans police officers for killing innocent civilians in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and a U.S. marshal who risked his life to protect a victim from a violent fugitive during the fugitive's capture. But buried at the bottom of the list -- the 13th of 14 "distinguished service awards" -- was a more unusual awardee: Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham. Durham and his team received the award not for bringing anyone to justice, but for declining to hold accountable anyone in the CIA for its brutal interrogations of detainees at secret prisons, or "black sites," in connection with President George W. Bush's "war on terror."

"In order to conduct the investigations," the citation reads, "the team had to review significant amounts of information, much of which was classified, and conduct many interviews in the United States and at overseas locations."

There's no question that Durham worked hard for a long time, and that the investigation was complex and substantial. After all, more than 100 men were "disappeared" into the CIA's black sites for extended incommunicado detention and interrogation. Because the CIA prisons were a secret, everything that happened there is classified, complicating investigation still further. And because the investigation itself is secret, we can't know precisely what evidence Durham considered, what roadblocks he faced, what judgment calls he made.

But here's what we do know. Many of those "disappeared" into the CIA's black sites were tortured and/or illegally subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, were waterboarded 83 and 183 times, respectively. They and other detainees were stripped naked, doused with water, beaten about the face and stomach, slammed into walls, deprived of sleep for days on end, forced into painful stress positions, and confined in small dark boxes for hours at a time. And these were just the "authorized" torture tactics, given a green light by a secret memo written in August 2002 by John Yoo and Jay Bybee from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and specifically okayed by President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, among others.

We also know, thanks to the CIA's own Inspector General, that CIA interrogators in the black sites went beyond even the illegal brutality authorized by high-level officials. One detainee was threatened with a handgun and a power drill. A mock execution was staged next to a detainee's cell. Interrogators threatened to kill the children of another detainee if he didn't tell them what they wanted to know.

We also know that in 2005, CIA higher-up Jose Rodriguez ordered the destruction of videotapes of two of those interrogations, shortly after the Washington Post revealed the existence of the CIA secret prisons where the interrogations took place, and while the tapes were under request from several courts and a Senate committee looking into charges of abuse.

Durham cleared everyone in the CIA of accusations of wrongdoing. Does he deserves a medal for that? Maybe so, but then there are a few other recipients the attorney general left out. Surely John Yoo and Jay Bybee deserve medals for making the interrogations possible in the first place, by issuing a memo that Jack Goldsmith, director of the Office of Legal Counsel after Bybee, has called a "get out of jail free card." Goldsmith himself, along with his successors as OLC heads under Bush -- Daniel Levin and Steven Bradbury -- also deserve medals for secretly allowing the torture tactics to continue even after the administration rescinded the initial memo when the Post published it. Tellingly, the Bush administration could not publicly defend, even for a moment, what everyone had signed off on in secret; but Goldsmith, Levin, and Bradbury ensured, in subsequent secret memos and authorizations, that the CIA's illegal program could go on.

The Neocons’ Project for the New American Century: “American World Leadership” – Syria next to Pay the Price?

Global Research
Felicity Arbuthnot

“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter, who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people.” (Eugene Debs, 1855-1926, speech Canton, Ohio, 16th June 1918.)

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), unleashed in June 1997, has largely disappeared from the political radar, yet the mire, murder and general mayhem the US, UK and dwindling “boots on the ground” allies find themselves in, are seemingly rooted in its aims, which march relentlessly on.

PNAC was founded under the Chairmanship of William Kristol, former Chief of Staff to Vice President Dan Quale during the Presidency of George Bush Snr. Kristol’s father, Irving Kristol has been described as the “Godfather of Neoconservatism.”

The organization was: “ ... dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: That American leadership is good for America and the world.” Projects were devised: “ ... to explain what American world leadership entails.” (i)

Consulting “the world” about the mind-numbing concept of a US planetary take-over was not a consideration.

Little time was wasted in advancing this new world order. On 29th May 1998 PNAC sent a letter (ii) to the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich and to Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott. It referred to a letter sent to President Clinton four months earlier: “expressing our concern” that U.S policy of “containment of Saddam Hussein was failing.” Thus: “the vital interests of the United States and its allies in the Middle East would soon be facing a threat as severe as any we had known since the end of the Cold War.”

Therefore a strategy should be implemented to: “... protect the United States and its allies from the threat of weapons of mass destruction (and) put in place policies” that would topple the Iraqi leadership.

Without a glance towards international law, the letter continued: “.U.S. policy should have as its specific goal removing Saddam Hussein’s regime ... Only the U.S. can (demonstrate) that his rule is not legitimate. To accomplish (this) the following political and military measures should be undertaken ...” The first “measure to be taken” was what has now become the blueprint for each planned overthrow of a sovereign government:

“We should help establish and support (with economic, political and military means) a provisional, representative and free government of Iraq in areas of Iraq not under Saddam’s control.”

That Iraq’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity” was guaranteed in law and by the United Nations was not an issue for consideration. Signatories, a veritable “Whose Who” of neo-cons, included John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, James Wolsey, Zalmay Khalizad and PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan.

Robert Kagan is currently on Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy Advisory Committee, his wife is Victoria Nuland, spokeswoman for the Clinton headed  U.S. State Department. Kagan’s loftily entitled book “The World America Made”, was publicly endorsed by Barack Obama.Its theme was referenced in his 2012 State of the Union address.

Nor has William Kristol gone away. In March 2011 he wrote an editorial in the Weekly Standard arguing that US Military “interventions” in Muslim countries (including the decimations of the 1991 Gulf War, the Balkans, and destructions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq) should not be classified as “invasions” but as “liberations.” Needless to say, he backed US “intervention” in Libya, urging Conservative support.

A more recent piece of war mongering was on Fox News (7th August 2012) when he opined:

“I went back and looked at the speech President Obama gave in March 2011 when he announced the very mild intervention in Libya, which did help to get rid of Qaddafi. Every reason he gave for intervening in Libya is there squared, in triplicate, for intervening in Syria, including the strategic importance of getting rid of Assad and weakening Iran, and we’re sitting there talking about ‘we really hope there won’t be sectarian violence later on’, and, gee, this is kind of unfortunate.”

US court calls CIA emperor without clothes

Press TV

A US appeals court in Washington has denounced President Barack Obama’s CIA-run policy of assassination drone strikes, calling the CIA an emperor without clothes. 


On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to court over Pentagon’s controversial drone policy after the US government refused to release documents related to the drone attacks, also known as the “targeted killing” program.

Judge Merrick Garland told government lawyer Stuart Delery, "If the CIA is the emperor, aren't you asking us to say that the emperor has clothes even when the emperor's bosses say it doesn't?"

The ACLU has tried to file Freedom of Information Act requests to get information on the CIA's drone program.

However, the US spy agency has refused to respond to the requests, saying that it cannot confirm the existence of the program.

The assassination drone program is cloaked in secrecy, even as officials up to President Obama admit it exists.

On January 31, 2012, Obama confirmed that the United States uses the pilotless aircraft in Pakistan and other countries.

In 2009, former director of the CIA, Leon Panetta said, "Because these are covert and secret operations, I can't go into particulars. I think it does suffice to say that these operations have been very effective."

“The notion that the CIA’s targeted killing program is a secret nothing short of absurd,” ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said on Tuesday.

The US regularly uses the unmanned aircraft for attacks on Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan, claiming the airstrikes target Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, but locals say civilians are the main victims of the assaults.

The aerial attacks were initiated by former US President George W. Bush but have been escalated under Obama.

False Flags and Imperial Mobilization: The Middle East Explodes on 9/11 Anniversary

Global Research
Larry Chin

Every year, people commemorate 9/11 without having a clear understanding of the original event or the elite agenda that made it possible. This lack of comprehension persists, even as the world explodes in series of orchestrated “new 9/11s” on the eleventh anniversary of the original crime.

* * *

What was still is

The attacks of 9/11/01 was a false flag operation of the Bush/Cheney administration and CIA-affiliated military-intelligence assets (Al-Qaeda, etc.). The resulting “war on terrorism” of the Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations is built on false flag terrorism and propaganda. The “terrorists” are military-intelligence assets, acting on behalf of Anglo-American leaders and their allies.

9/11 is not history. It is now.

The overriding elite military and intelligence agenda remains the conquest of oil and gas resources. 9/11/01 was the first act of desperation among elites to control all significant energy-related geography on the planet, while preventing rival powers from doing the same.

Under the “war on terror”, the world has suffered eleven continuous years of false flag terror. Bombings. Destabilizations. Assassinations. Coups and counter-coups. Controlled and co-opted popular revolts and “mob violence”. Regime changes. Criminality beyond redemption.

As of this writing, new false flag terror attacks in various nations have been carried out by “terrorists” directly and indirectly connected to the CIA and Washington.

They have taken place simultaneous with mob action and grass roots street protests, likely stoked and guided by military-intelligence assets of the CIA and its affiliates.

The manner of the Benghazi attack suggests military-style coordination (also see here), and that the attack was allowed to happen.

The timing was politically convenient. The anti-Muslim film (allegedly by an American right-wing Christian zealot) that sparked riots, and its translated broadcast in Egypt, demand further inquiry. Popular unrest also appears to be guided and/or co-opted.

While the situation remains fluid, what is beyond question is that in the wake of this violence, there has been no attempt to negotiate peace. Instead, support is being drummed up for retaliation: new military attacks and aggressive US war policies, for either the “restoration of order” (Libya,), or new and long-planned regime changes (Syria, Iran, Pakistan, etc.) In the famous words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, such attacks would spur the masses to support “imperial mobilization”.

This is not simply sudden chaos or reaction. Ignoring the multiple red herrings, the central war agenda has not changed in eleven years. It is simply being taken to a new level.

Military-intelligence assets behind every act

The Libyan violence, including the assassination of Ambassador Christopher Stevens was carried out by the Al-Qaeda “freedom fighters” that helped the US overthrow the regime of Muammar Qaddafi. These assets are closely linked to American neoconservatives, including a large contingent of figures behind the Bush/Cheney apparatus. At the forefront is the bloodthirsty Senator John McCain, who is all over the American media screaming for vengeance. Other “leading suspects”, such as the Ansar al-Shariah group, are also Al-Qaeda linked.

Libyan president Mohammed el-Megarif has stated clearly that the attack was “planned by foreigners, by people who entered the country a few months ago”.

Al-Qaeda, a CIA front for decades, plays multiple roles, boogeymen as well as “freedom fighters”, on behalf of US policy.

In Afghanistan, the pattern repeats. The murder of four members of the NATO coalition force by terrorists impersonating Afghan police officers has been blamed on the Taliban. The Taliban is another Islamic front connected to the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, which is a virtual branch of the CIA that came to power with Washington support. There is no mention of these connections in mainstream reporting.

Syria has been targeted for regime change, and a “humanitarian” war. It is in the process of being destabilized, as are Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The same forces are involved in each region. The Haqqani network in Pakistan was recently named as a major new threat. Not mentioned is the fact that the ISI, as already noted, is connected to the CIA.

Iran has been the target of CIA covert operations and black ops for years. Like the other nations, it has been infiltrated and is brimming with spies and “terrorists”.

This combination—calculated, criminal military-intelligence programs by world leaders, competing and/or “out of control” intelligence assets, intelligence blowback, parallel with legitimate protests and popular backlash—is a recipe for global catastrophe, threatening the future of humanity.

Following the attack in Benghazi, the next step has already been taken, and it is not towards peace or order. Now that it has the luxury of another pretext, the Obama administration has sent even more CIA and FBI spies to the region (not mentioning the fact that the region is already brimming with intelligence assets working for Anglo-American interests), more drones, and Marines, including forces to the Syrian border.

This is the Obama administration’s “diplomacy”. The administration has plans to attack both Syria and Iran. His political “rivals” embrace the same plans, and more.

Cover-up and spin

As of this writing, US officials and the US State Department are involved in a propaganda dance with competing factions, all playing political football with this “new 9/11”. CIA-connected media outlets are unleashing waves of competing spin.

Speaking on behalf of the Obama administration, UN Ambassador Susan Rice claims that there was no “actionable intelligence” that could have prevented the attacks by Al-Qaeda, blaming the violence on “spontaneous” mob reaction. This, even while strong evidence suggests that Washington had clear warnings. This, directly counter to the claim by Libyan president Mohammed el-Megarif that the attack was “planned by foreigners, by people who entered the country a few months ago”. Many suspicious aspects abound, as noted by former US congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.

And as it was eleven years ago, hot propaganda debate swirls deceptively around the ability of the supposedly “stretched thin” CIA, its intelligence successes or “failure” to “protect Americans”. We hear the endless assertions that the CIA and its many foreign branches, with their unlimited budgets, resources, technology and global stranglehold “lack the resources”. The criminal agency responsible for the bulk of the world’s terrorism is depicted as the heroic outfit that will “go after” the terrorists on behalf of America.

The parallels with the original 9/11 attack and propaganda cover-up are unmistakable.

Presidential election charade

While the world burns under the fires lit by military-intelligence, yet another sham of a presidential election is underway, with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney (and the poison-spitting vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan)—each of them war mongering corporatist candidates—falling over themselves to proclaim who is the more effective “terrorist killer”, and who will do a better job when it comes time to destroy Iran and Syria.

The outbreak of anti-Americanism abroad conveniently steers election debate away from a US economy that will not be revived, the endless looting of US tax dollars, and the destruction of social programs (and the fact that all of that taxpayer money goes to war and the CIA). It focuses American anger once again on “crazy Arabs”. The US population was false flagged and “dog wagged” on 9/11/01. It is being deceived again.

Towards oblivion

Thanks to successful mass conditioning, the annual 9/11 “remembrance” has become a yearly international holiday for the Big Lie.

Both the Republican neocons and the Democrats and the Obama administration benefit from this propaganda. Obama and Romney know that the US economy will not be repaired, and that there really is nothing to talk about.

But war is forever. Popular hysteria and hatred remain the keys to controlling the “hearts and minds” of the emotional and the uninformed, who do not bother to study history and facts, even though they are widely available.

It will not matter which war mongering US presidential candidate “wins” (granted the next seat by the consensus of elites, and given the fraudulent electronic vote totals).

The inability and refusal by the masses to recognize and resist this horror ensures that the atrocities to continue, towards even greater criminality and destruction.

The pandora’s box opened on 9/11/01 remains wide open, and set ablaze, on 9/11/12.

Romney, Obama Plot Shredding of Social Safety Net; Fight Back with Wall Street Sales Tax to Make Zombie Bankers Pay for Their Depression

Webster Tarpley

War crimes: Why should Bush, Blair and Obama be exempt?

FirstPost
R. Jagannathan

Should Bush and Blair face trial?

By any normal definition, they would fit the definition of terrorists. They can decide to attack whoever they choose and cause untold human suffering. They can bomb and bury hundreds of unnamed enemies that would be called genocide in any saner world. And they can even order assassinations of specific people, including their own countrymen.

But we are not talking al-Qaeda or LTTE or any such group that everyone considers beyond the pale. They are, in fact, the leaders of the free world – America and Britain.

Thus far, nobody beyond fringe Left groups has had the gumption to tell it like it is. Now, a widely-respected Nobel Peace Prize winner has done what no one else has: call George W Bush and Tony Blair to account for the sufferings of the people of Iraq and other countries they launched a war against.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa recently pulled out of a leadership summit in Johannesburg when he heard that Tony Blair would be addressing the meeting. His reason: Both Bush and Blair went to war in Iraq on the basis of a lie – that they had detected weapons of mass destruction in that country, which turned out to be false – and must thus answer for their crimes (Read what he wrote in The Observer here).

Tutu, a leading light of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle and a key member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, appointed to investigate human rights abuses during the White racist regime, believes that there is a good case for trying both George Bush and Tony Blair before the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

If African despots and Eastern European ethnic cleansers can be hauled up before the international court, why not Blair and Bush?

Wrote Tutu: “On what grounds do we decide that Robert Mugabe should go to the International Criminal Court, Tony Blair should join the international speakers’ circuit, bin Laden should be assassinated, but Iraq should be invaded, not because it possesses weapons of mass destruction, as Mr Bush’s chief supporter, Mr Blair, confessed last week, but in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein?”

To be sure, the US can’t hauled up before The Hague because it is a superpower and hence makes it own rules. Moreover, the US has decided not to allow its nationals to be tried by any court outside the US for international crimes.

But Tutu is not one to pull his punches. Pointing out that over 110,000 Iraqis have been killed since Bush went to war in 2003, Tutu says that “on these grounds alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in The Hague.”

To which, Blair could only manage the usual arguments – that the decision to invade Iraq was based on information they had of weapons of mass destruction at that time, and which later turned out to be false.

The Guardian quotes him as saying that Tutu is “completely wrong” on Iraq. “I have a great respect for Archbishop Tutu’s fight against apartheid – where we were on the same side of the argument – but to repeat the old canard that we lied about the intelligence is completely wrong as every single independent analysis of the evidence has shown. And to say that the fact that Saddam massacred hundreds of thousands of his citizens is irrelevant to the morality of removing him is bizarre.”

But Blair was being disingenuous in pretending that Tutu was ignoring Saddam Hussein’s murderous side. What Tutu pointed out was that “the cost of the decision to rid Iraq of its by-all-accounts despotic and murderous leader has been staggering,”

The more important issue is this: can the powerful sit in judgment on the less powerful, when they will not play by the same rules they impose on others?

To date, the French and the Brits have paid no price for the depredations of their colonial enterprise, including many countries in Africa and Asia.

Even today, the US continues to believe it can order any assassination, and use any weapon, to strike at anyone it decides is a threat to the US.

Tutu is, in fact, being circumspect in singling out only Blair and Bush, when President Obama continues to tread the same path of unilateral killings in the name of tackling terror.

Apart from the well-known assassination of Osama bin Laden inside Pakistan, the US has over the last eight years killed possibly upto 3,000 people in Afghanistan through drone attacks on suspected militants, and as many as 15 percent of these killings may not even be terrorists or militants. That means 450 murders of possibly blameless people (read here)– collateral damage in this war on terror.

If Bush and Obama are not accountable for these wrongful deaths, who is?

The US also maintains a list of people who can be assassinated on the same ground – as a potential terror threats – and the list can include American citizens too.

The Washington Post reported in 2010 that the CIA had put Anwar al-Awlaki, an American al-Qaeda militant who is alleged to have attempted to bomb a Detroit-bound airline, on a “kill or capture” list.

Little wonder, al-Awlaki was assassinated in October 2011. Killing American citizens needs sanction directly from the US President, and Obama apparently sanctioned his killing.

When Obama gave the go-ahead a year earlier, the Post quoted CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano without irony: “This agency conducts its counter-terrorism operations in strict accord with the law.”

Anthony Gregory, writing for the Center for Research on Globalisation portal, quotes a Reuters report confirming the existence of a secret group that authorises such assassinations.

“American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials. There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.”

If there is no law establishing this assassination committee, one wonders why the CIA thinks it is operating within the four corners of the law. The only purpose of the group apparently is to generate the kill list, and the only safeguard is Obama’s signature, if the killing of an American citizen is involved. Killings of non-Americans can apparently be done by the committee, at will.

Archbishop Tutu’s comments may have jarred sensibilities in the US and Britain, where the powerful are used to sitting in judgment rather than being judged themselves, but it is clear that his call for trying Bush and Blair does not go far enough.

President Obama’s actions and assassination panels cannot be exempt from the world’s scrutiny and may not be some day.

Nothing, of course, is going to happen now. But Tutu’s truth cannot remain buried forever in the shifting sands of international power equations.

THE REPUBLICANS CROSS THE RUBICON

Paul Craig Roberts

Does anyone remember when National Public Radio was an independent voice?

During the 1980s NPR was continually on the case of the Reagan administration. NPR certainly had a Democratic slant, and a lot of its reporting about the Reagan administration was one-sided. Yet, NPR was an independent voice, and it sometimes got things correct.

In the 21st century that voice has disappeared, which was the intention of the George W. Bush regime. Bush put a Republican woman in charge who made it clear to NPR producers and show hosts that the federal part of their funding was at risk.

Money often over-rules principle, and when corporations added their really big money NPR collapsed. Today the local stations still pretend to be funded by listeners, but if you have noticed, as I have, there are now a large number of corporate advertisements, disguised in the traditional terms “with support from . . .” If you are not listening to classical music, you are listening to corporate advertisements.

Today the entire “mainstream media” is closed to truth-tellers. The US media is Washington’s propaganda ministry. The US media has only one function–to lie for Washington.

What reminded me of NPR’s surrender was NPR’s August 31 report with its two regular talking voice political pundits discussing the Republican Convention and Romney’s speech. After witnessing the Republicans at their nominating convention at Tampa violate all their own rules and ride roughshod over the Ron Paul delegates, one expected some discussion of the Republican Party’s refusal to allow Ron Paul to be placed in nomination or his delegate account to be announced.

The operative question was obvious: How can the American people trust the Republicans with the awesome power of the executive branch when the Republican Party just finished demonstrating for all to see its Stalinist qualities by crushing the anti-war, anti-police state wing of its party?

The authoritarianism was gratuitous. Romney had a sufficient number of delegates to be nominated. It would have cost Romney nothing to follow the rules and allow Ron Paul to be placed in nomination and his delegate numbers to be reported. Instead, Romney wrote off the liberty contingent of the Republican Party. The Brownshirts demonstrated their power.

The last Republican who wrote off a chunk of his own party was Barry Goldwater, and he went down to crushing defeat. Makes one wonder if the Republicans are relying on those electronic voting machines programed with proprietary Republican software that leave no paper trail. The Democrats have acquiesced to Republican election theft. There have been numerous cases where exit polls indicate that voters chose a different candidate than the one chosen by the Republican programmed voting machines.

One would have thought that NPR and its pundits would have found the parallel with Goldwater worth comment, but the suppression of the Ron Paul delegates was already down the memory hole.

One would also have thought that NPR and its pundits would have found Clint Eastwood’s speech a fascinating topic of discussion. Eastwood had a Republican National Committee approved speech, but discarded it. Instead, Eastwood stood beside an empty chair and pretended to be talking to Obama, but it could just as well have been Romney in the chair. By pretending to be talking to Obama, Eastwood made his points without eliciting boos from the Republican audience.

Not many in the Republican audience caught on, but there were some stony faces when Eastwood said “I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there are 23 million unemployed people in this country.” More stony Republican faces when Eastwood showed his opposition to the Iraq and Afghan wars and asks the chair, “why don’t you just bring them [the troops] home tomorrow morning?” Those who thought he was digging at Obama cheered; those who realized he was criticizing hardline Republican positions were displeased.

But NPR and the US media in general are uncomfortable with such real news as a political party being told off by one of its heroes and a political party sufficiently stupid to repeat Barry Goldwater’s mistake. The establishment might complain. The money might dry up or employees be fired for permitting such a story to be aired. The Democrats lost their independent financing when jobs offshoring destroyed the unions. There are no longer countervailing powers to Wall Street and the corporations, which have been endowed by the Republican US Supreme Court with First Amendment rights to purchase US elections, and placed in charge of the US Treasury, the regulatory agencies and the Federal Reserve.

In Tampa the Republicans wrote off the Ron Paul vote, because they are enamored of power and its gratuitous demonstration. Can people so desirous of power and the thrill of its use be trusted to let go of power when they lose the next election? There are enough presidential executive orders and national security orders, even some signed by the Democrat Obama, that any president can assert them and refuse to face election.

Once Rome accepted Julius Caesar’s coup, the Roman Republic was gone. Those who tried to save the Roman Republic by assassinating Caesar failed, because the majority of the legions had gone over to the dictatorship, which promised them more money than the Republic had. Caesar’s name became the title for Rome’s dictators.

In the US, even your friendly local police have gone over to dictatorship. And they are armed with its tools. A friend, a competitive shooter for accuracy, told me that as he left his gun club on August 27, a local sheriff department entered in a military armored vehicle, something one would expect to see on a battlefield, followed by a large sheriff’s department truck full of military equipment. He says that the gun club allows local police to use the club’s facilities so that club members are not stopped and harassed about their firearms as they go to and from the club. He reports that the police will line up 30 abreast, with automatic weapons, not allowed to club members, and fire at one target, with 30 police emptying 30-round magazines at the same target.

He once asked our protectors if they were practicing for some competition. The answer was, “No, we are preparing to control the outcome when there is trouble.”

Control is the operative word. We have seen for a number of years now that the Republican Party is power-addicted. Remember when the Bush administration fired the US Attorneys who refused the order to indict only Democrats? Remember the Republican Party’s transparent frame-up of popular Alabama Democratic governor Don Siegelman? Evidence indicates that the Republican operative Karl Rove took advantage of a Republican federal judge, vulnerable according to news reports to corruption charges, and a compliant Republican US attorney in Alabama to railroad Governor Siegelman. The message to Democrats was: if you get elected in our Southern Territory, we will get you.

But never fear, we have “freedom and democracy.” George W. Bush told us so himself.

The weak, chicken-hearted Obama administration has not commuted Siegelman’s outrageous sentence. The inability of the Democrats to stand up for their own members and their own principles is the best indication we have that Republican tyranny will prevail.

It didn’t take Caesar George W. Bush 10 minutes to wipe out the prison sentence of vice president Dick Cheney’s chief aid for revealing the identity of a CIA operative, a felony under US law. But the Obama Justice (sic) Department supports Karl Rove’s destruction of one of its most popular governors.

It was the German left-wing’s weak opposition to the National Socialists that gave the world Hitler.

The Republican Party has become the Party of Hate. Decades of frustration have made Republicans mean. They object to everything that has happened since the Great Depression in the 1930s to make the US a more just and humane society.

The Republican Party wants power so that it can smash all vestiges of regulation and welfare and all those of whom Republicans disapprove: the poor, the minorities, liberals, the imagined “foreign enemies,” war protestors and others who challenge authority, those American weaklings who have compassion for the unfortunate, the US Constitution, that pinko-liberal-commie document that coddles criminals, illegal aliens, and terrorists, and all dissenters from the policy of enriching the one percent at the expense of the 99 percent.

Above all else, the Republicans want to turn Social Security and Medicare into profit centers for private corporations.

Would the world be surprised if Republicans donned brown shirts? America has declared itself to be “the indispensable nation,” justifying its hegemony over the world. Any country that does not submit to Washington is “a foe.” The neoconservative propaganda that America is the indispensable nation with a right to world hegemony sounds a lot like “Deutschland uber alles.”