Glenn and Bruce Ackerman on the extreme advance of executive power under Obama

overreaching executive power and the virtually complete negation of constitutionally protected liberties lie at the heart of the choices we are being presented in the 2012 presidential election which, upon even cursory reflection, are no choices at all...

glenn ...

[Consider] the years-long screeching over President Bush’s mere eavesdropping and detentions without any judicial review or transparency — he’s assaulting the Constitution and Our Values! – compared with the reaction to Obama’s more extremist assassinations without any judicial review or transparency. Or consider how a high-level aide to John Ashcroft marveled with envy over Obama’s ability to prosecute whistleblowers with such abandon, noting to The New York Times that the Ashcroft DOJ was deterred by the prospect of a political storm that Obama simply does not face:  ”We,” lamented the Ashcroft aide, “would have gotten hammered for it.”

This was the same dynamic that led former Bush OLC official and current Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith to explain quite presciently (and celebratorily) back in May, 2009, that Obama — by leading progressives and Democrats to support his embrace of Bush/Cheney Terrorism and civil liberties policies — was doing more to entrench those once-controversial policies as bipartisan consensus than Bush and Cheney themselves could ever have dreamt of doing:

The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric. . . .

[...]

. . . Obama — as he has proven — can get away with far more aggression and belligerence by all but eliminating the pervasive political conflict that arises when done under a Republican President.

an interview on presidential power conducted by lane greene of the economist with bruce ackerman, sterling professor of law and political science at yale...

so, what are we supposed to do in november when facing that election booth handle...? continue to delude ourselves into thinking that we're participating in government by and for the people...? continue to believe that we actually have a choice when voting for president...? whoever occupies the oval office is and will continue to be the bought-and-paid for property of our global ruling elites who have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are the ones in charge of the world's economic and governmental systems...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Obama's duplicitous foreign policy

yeah, no shit...

jeremy scahill via the nation...

On the campaign trail, Obama promised an end to torture, extraordinary rendition and secret prisons. But since taking office he has in fact doubled-down on some of the more insidious policies he inherited from the Bush administration. As Nation correspondent Jeremy Scahill explains, Obama has surrounded himself with war hawks, relied on targeted killing and acted unilaterally to defend US interests. Instead of drawing down the two major ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has shifted combat to special operations units, prolonging US engagement and fighting a "dirty" war.

and to think how much i railed against george bush...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Chomsky: If the Obama administration decides they don't like somebody, they murder them

from democracy now...

As the United States carries out another deadly drone strike in Yemen, Noam Chomsky compares the counterterrorism policies of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. "If the Bush administration didn't like somebody, they'd kidnap them and send them to torture chambers," Chomsky says. "If the Obama administration decides they don't like somebody, they murder them." Chomsky also praises the whistleblowing activities of WikiLeaks, as well as the ongoing Latin American shift away from Washington's long-running political and economic dominance.

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Glenn on Jose Rodriguez' new book

in case you need a memory jog, rodriguez is the cia officer who destroyed videotapes documenting the interrogation of two al qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody during congressional and legal scrutiny about the secret detention program and suffered zero consequences...

the title of rodriguez' book: “Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives”...

glenn...

Rodriguez thus joins a long line of Bush officials — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, et. al — who not only paid no price for the crimes they committed, but are free to run around boasting of those crimes for profit. That’s what happens when the most politically powerful officials are vested with immunity for their illegal acts. Both the criminals and their crimes become normalized. They feel free not only to admit their crimes openly but to justify and glorify them, because they know they will never be held accountable for them. Instead of having to explain himself as a criminal defendant, Rodriguez is instead permitted to wrap his conduct in the banner of heroism as a highly-paid Simon & Schuster author.

This will be one of the most enduring and consequential aspects of the Obama legacy: by working so hard, in so many ways, to shield Bush-era crimes from all forms of accountability, the Democratic President has ensured that they are not viewed as crimes at all, but at worst, run-of-the-mill political controversies. Given all this, why would any government officials tempted to commit these same crimes in the future possibly decide that they should not?

how pathetic... if you or i had done something similar, we would be locked away in a super-max facility for the rest of our lives...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Sandy Weill, an architect of the economic collapse, is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

conclusively proving that my country's values are firmly in the right place... < /snark>

from time to time on this blog, i have railed against individuals i consider to be high profile examples of what is wrong in this country and the world... karl rove, carl icahn, donald rumsfeld, george bush, lloyd blankfein, bill kristol and a number of others spring to mind... yesterday's post by robert scheer in truthdig added yet another name to my black list - sanford weill...

How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of U.S. homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

So much for the academy’s proclaimed “230-plus year history of recognizing some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, and civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders.” George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Albert Einstein must be rolling in their graves at the news that Weill, “philanthropist and retired Citigroup Chairman,” has joined their ranks.

Weill is the Wall Street hustler who led the successful lobbying to reverse the Glass-Steagall law, which long had been a barrier between investment and commercial banks. That 1999 reversal permitted the merger of Travelers and Citibank, thereby creating Citigroup as the largest of the “too big to fail” banks eventually bailed out by taxpayers. Weill was instrumental in getting then-President Bill Clinton to sign off on the Republican-sponsored legislation that upended the sensible restraints on finance capital that had worked splendidly since the Great Depression.

[...]

Although Weill has shown not the slightest remorse, Reed [John S. Reed, Citibank CEO when has had the honesty to acknowledge that the elimination of Glass-Steagall was a disaster: “I would compartmentalize the industry for the same reason you compartmentalize ships,” he told Bloomberg News. “If you have a leak, the leak doesn’t spread and sink the whole vessel. So generally speaking, you’d have consumer banking separate from trading bonds and equity.”

sandy weill... somebody we can all look up to...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

War crimes are war crimes no matter who commits them

from war criminals watch...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Glenn: The attempt to make targeted killing of American citizens seem normal should insult anyone with the most basic understanding of American law

first the aclu in response to attorney general holder's explanation yesterday for why the obama administration believes it has the authority to secretly target u.s. citizens for execution by the cia without even charging them with a crime, notifying them of the accusations, or affording them an opportunity to respond...

Few things are as dangerous to American liberty as the proposition that the government should be able to kill citizens anywhere in the world on the basis of legal standards and evidence that are never submitted to a court, either before or after the fact.

Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power.

glenn's summation...

Holder’s attempt to make this all seem normal and common should insult anyone with the most basic understanding of American law. As The New York Times put it when first confirming the assassination program in April, 2010: ” The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen. . . . It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said. A former senior legal official in the administration of George W. Bush said he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president.” To date, not a single such citizen has been identified.

As always, the most important point to note for this entire debate is how perverse and warped it is that we’re even having this “debate” at all. It should be self-negating — self-marginalizing — to assert that the President, acting with no checks or transparency, can order American citizens executed far from any battlefield and without any opportunity even to know about, let alone rebut, the accusations. That this policy is being implemented and defended by the very same political party that spent the last decade so vocally and opportunistically objecting to far less extreme powers makes it all the more repellent. That fact also makes it all the more dangerous, because — as one can see — the fact that it is a Democratic President doing it, and Democratic Party officials justifying it, means that it’s much easier to normalize: very few of the Party’s followers, especially in an election year, are willing to make much of a fuss about it at all.

And thus will presidential assassination powers be entrenched as bipartisan consensus for at least a generation. That will undoubtedly be one of the most significant aspects of the Obama legacy. Let no Democrat who is now supportive or even silent be heard to object when the next Republican President exercises this power in ways that they dislike.

a stunning disregard for due process, the rule of law and the united states constitution...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Lamenting the loss of our civil liberties on the day set aside to honor Martin Luther King

chris hayes interview with former guantánamo detainee lakhdar boumediene...

boumediene, explains in Arabic how his life was devastated by indefinite detention...

In October, 2001, six Algerian men were arrested in Bosnia and accused of plotting to blow up the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. They were later released due to insufficient evidence, but immediately handed off to U.S. military forces. In an exclusive interview Chris talks with Lakhdar Boumediene, one of the six men arrested who was then detained at Guantanamo for seven years - without charge or explanation.

With the help of a translator, Boumediene explains life as a Guantanamo prisoner, including the internal politics, ways in which he says U.S. military officials tortured him, and the struggles he faced after being released.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

in a similar vein, glenn reminds us of the tremendous attack on our civil liberties that continues unabated under barack obama... he cites jonathan turley's wapo op-ed...

In The Washington Post yesterday, Law Professor Jonathan Turley has an Op-Ed in which he identifies ten major, ongoing assaults on core civil liberties in the U.S. Many of these abuses were accelerated during the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11, but all have been vigorously continued and/or expanded by President Obama. Turley points out that these powers have long been deemed (by the U.S.) as the hallmark of tyranny, and argues that their seizure by the U.S. Government has seriously called into question America’s status as a free nation: “They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian.” All ten of these powers are ones very familiar to readers here:

Assassination of U.S. citizens; Indefinite detention; Arbitrary justice; Warrantless searches; Secret evidence; War crimes; Secret court; Immunity from judicial review; Continual monitoring of citizens; and Extraordinary renditions.

feel the hope...? feel the change...?

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

2012 election

no comment necessary...

mr. fish...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

The ACLU commemorates 9/11 and our new, improved National Security State

from "A Call to Courage: Reclaiming Our Liberties Ten Years After 9/11"...

Ten years ago, we could not have imagined our country would engage in systematic policies of torture and targeted killing, extraordinary rendition and warrantless wiretaps, military commissions and indefinite detention, political surveillance and religious discrimination. Not only were these policies completely at odds with our values, but by engaging in them, we strained relations with our allies, handed a propaganda tool to our enemies, undermined the trust of communities whose cooperation is essential in the fight against terrorism, and diverted scarce law enforcement resources. Some of these policies have been stopped. Torture and extraordinary rendition are no longer officially condoned. But most other policies—indefinite detention, targeted killing, trial by military commissions, warrantless surveillance, and racial profiling—remain core elements of our national security strategy today.

glenn...

[S]o entrenched is this institutional militarism, secrecy, surveillance and authoritarianism that even if there were greater public debate over it like there was during the Bush presidency, this system would hardly be affected, let alone threatened. Governments and other power factions -- especially ones threatened by the prospect of social unrest and upheaval -- do not relinquish this sort of authority unless compelled to do so.

and thus we have the REAL commemoration of 9/11...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Obama "needs to start doing business in a different way in a hurry"...? Puhl-e-e-eze...

there's a fundamental flaw to the reasoning here... think you can spot it...?

I keep thinking back lately to that candidate and team I watched in 2008. The candidate really had his finger on something. The team almost never made a serious mistake. When a mistake did happen, they did a respectable job of digging their way out of it. They had some fight in them. Well, I’ve learned something new from these folks: Up until now, I’ve thought that running a strong presidential campaign is a sign that one can probably govern fairly well too. But there appears to be little correlation between the two.

One wonders if there is concern now in the party’s higher echelons about the White House’s methods. Of course there must be. But what, for example, do seasoned Democratic senators say to one another when they chat in private? What about the party’s big money people? All of them must be dismayed. But which of them can reach Obama? Who can pierce the armor of his inner circle and tell him he needs to start doing business in a different way in a hurry?

there's an implied assumption that obama the candidate really had any intention of doing anything different than he has done since he took the oath of office...

speaking for myself, i was so unbelievably discouraged after the eight disastrous years of george w. bush that i completely neglected my due diligence on candidate obama, leaving myself to become enraptured instead with obama's eloquence and populist rhetoric, rather than looking seriously at his record... at least i can console myself with the fact that i was hardly the only one...

but, at this point, with the 32 months of obama's record as president staring us in the face, i don't see how anyone can think for a minute that 1) anybody can "pierce the armor" or that 2), even if the armor is "pierced," that the man has the slightest intention of "doing business in a different way"... he is what he is and god help us all...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Bush’s policy was to capture (and torture) suspects, while Obama simply assassinates them

chomsky at his usual best, writing in al akhbar...

While longstanding US policies remain stable, with tactical adjustments, under Obama there have been some significant changes. Military analyst Yochi Dreazen observes in the Atlantic that Bush’s policy was to capture (and torture) suspects, while Obama simply assassinates them, with a rapid increase in terror weapons (drones) and the use of Special Forces, many of them assassination teams. Special Forces are scheduled to operate in 120 countries. Now as large as Canada’s entire military, these forces are, in effect, a private army of the president, a matter discussed in detail by American investigative journalist Nick Turse on the website Tomdispatch. The team that Obama dispatched to assassinate Osama bin Laden had already carried out perhaps a dozen similar missions in Pakistan.

As these and many other developments illustrate, though America’s hegemony has declined, its ambition has not.

Another common theme, at least among those who are not willfully blind, is that American decline is in no small measure self-inflicted. The comic opera in Washington this summer, which disgusts the country (a large majority think that Congress should just be disbanded) and bewilders the world, has few analogues in the annals of parliamentary democracy. The spectacle is even coming to frighten the sponsors of the charade. Corporate power is now concerned that the extremists they helped put in office in Congress may choose to bring down the edifice on which their own wealth and privilege relies, the powerful nanny state that caters to their interests.

The eminent American philosopher John Dewey once described politics as “the shadow cast on society by big business,” warning that “attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.” Since the 1970s, the shadow has become a dark cloud enveloping society and the political system. Corporate power, by now largely financial capital, has reached the point that both political organizations, which now barely resemble traditional parties, are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate.

[...]

The deficit crisis is largely manufactured as a weapon to destroy hated social programs on which a large part of the population relies. Economics correspondent Martin Wolf of the London Financial Times writes that “it is not that tackling the US fiscal position is urgent…. The US is able to borrow on easy terms, with yields on 10-year bonds close to 3 percent, as the few non-hysterics predicted. The fiscal challenge is long term, not immediate.” Very significantly, he adds: “The astonishing feature of the federal fiscal position is that revenues are forecast to be a mere 14.4 percent of GDP in 2011, far below their postwar average of close to 18 percent. Individual income tax is forecast to be a mere 6.3 percent of GDP in 2011. This non-American cannot understand what the fuss is about: in 1988, at the end of Ronald Reagan’s term, receipts were 18.2 percent of GDP. Tax revenue has to rise substantially if the deficit is to close.” Astonishing indeed, but it is the demand of the financial institutions and the super-rich, and in a rapidly declining democracy, that’s what counts.

Though the deficit crisis is manufactured for reasons of savage class war, the long-term debt crisis is serious, and has been ever since Ronald Reagan’s fiscal irresponsibility turned the US from the world’s leading creditor to the world’s leading debtor, tripling national debt and raising threats to the economy that were rapidly escalated by George W. Bush. But for now, it is the crisis of unemployment that is the gravest concern.

[...]

In the past 30 years, the “masters of mankind,” as Smith called them, have abandoned any sentimental concern for the welfare of their own society, concentrating instead on short-term gain and huge bonuses, the country be damned – as long as the powerful nanny state remains intact to serve their interests.

yes, we have to turn to foreign media to see, hear and read chomsky...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

B.S. alert: "The most powerful man in the world seems strangely paralyzed"

here's yet another piece of bullshit about how "weak" obama is... ain't buyin' it...

spiegel...

A new financial crisis has gripped the US, Asia and Europe, but Barack Obama can only respond with catchphrases. The United States will remain a "triple-A country," the US president insisted Monday, as stock markets crashed. The most powerful man in the world seems strangely paralyzed.

America's president, as the political scientist Richard Neustadt once noted, may be the most powerful man in the world, but he has only one real power: the power of persuasion.

That's why US presidents are so keen to get in front of the TV cameras and address the nation from what Americans refer to as the "presidential pulpit." Barack Obama was back at the pulpit on Monday afternoon, as the world's stock exchanges plummeted. "No matter what some agency may say, we've always been and always will be a triple-A country," asserted the president. It had taken Obama three days to make a statement on Standard & Poor's decision to strip the United States of its top credit rating.

But Obama convinced no one. Even while the president was speaking, the Dow fell below 11,000 for the first time in nine months. This is certainly a problem for Obama, but more than that, it is a problem for America.

[...]

Weak leadership could cost Obama the next election. But it is not just a problem for the US president. Neither is it just a problem for America. Obama's weakness is a problem for the entire global economy.

obama is doing exactly and precisely what he has intended all along... the "weak" argument is solid-gold crap...

it's the same garbage that was foisted on us about the "incompetency" of the bush administration... was george w. a buffoon...? absolutely... was his administration incompetent...? shit, no... the bush handlers were doing exactly what they had planned to do and they used their front man, george, to stand out in front, look stupid and take the heat... is obama weak...? is obama stupid...? is obama a buffoon...? hell no to all three...

now, that doesn't rule out the possibility that obama's strings are being pulled by others and that he truly IS weak, but there isn't anything i'm seeing that says that... obama has a bully pulpit just like every other u.s. president and what's coming out of his mouth, even though it's dramatically more articulate and polished than his predecessor, is just as much b.s. as anything that ever came out of george's mouth... only in george's case, i don't think he had the slightest idea of what he was saying... in obama's case, i think he knows EXACTLY what he's saying and, even more importantly, DOING...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 1 comments

When Obama looks in the mirror in the morning, I don't think he sees a reflection

there's no reflection because there's nobody there...

glenn in the guardian...

Barack Obama is gutting the core principles of the Democratic party

[...]

[I]t is now beyond dispute that President Obama not only favours, but is the leading force in Washington pushing for, serious benefit cuts to both social security and Medicare.

This week, even as GOP leaders offered schemes to raise the debt ceiling with no cuts, the White House expressed support for the Senate's so-called "gang of six" plan that includes substantial cuts in those programmes.

The same Democratic president who supported the transfer of $700bn to bail out Wall Street banks, who earlier this year signed an extension of Bush's massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and who has escalated America's bankruptcy-inducing posture of Endless War, is now trying to reduce the debt by cutting benefits for America's most vulnerable – at the exact time that economic insecurity and income inequality are at all-time highs.

Where is the "epic shitstorm" from the left which Black predicted? With a few exceptions – the liberal blog FiredogLake has assembled 50,000 Obama supporters vowing to withhold re-election support if he follows through, and a few other groups have begun organising as well – it's nowhere to be found.

Therein lies one of the most enduring attributes of Obama's legacy: in many crucial areas, he has done more to subvert and weaken the left's political agenda than a GOP president could have dreamed of achieving. So potent, so overarching, are tribal loyalties in American politics that partisans will support, or at least tolerate, any and all policies their party's leader endorses – even if those policies are ones they long claimed to loathe.

This dynamic has repeatedly emerged in numerous contexts. Obama has continued Bush/Cheney terrorism policies – once viciously denounced by Democrats – of indefinite detention, renditions, secret prisons by proxy, and sweeping secrecy doctrines.

He has gone further than his predecessor by waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, seizing the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process far from any battlefield, massively escalating drone attacks in multiple nations, and asserting the authority to unilaterally prosecute a war (in Libya) even in defiance of a Congressional vote against authorising the war.

And now he is devoting all of his presidential power to cutting the entitlement programmes that have been the defining hallmark of the Democratic party since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. The silence from progressive partisans is deafening – and depressing, though sadly predictable.

The nature of American politics is that once a policy is removed from the partisan wars – once it is adopted by the leadership of both parties – it is removed from mainstream debate and fortified as bipartisan consensus. That is why false claims in the run-up to the Iraq war, endorsed by both parties, received so little mainstream journalistic scrutiny. And it's why the former Bush lawyer and right-wing ideologue Jack Goldsmith – back in May 2009 – celebrated in The New Republic the fact that Obama was doing more to strengthen Bush/Cheney terrorism policies than his former bosses could have ever achieved: by embracing the very terrorism approach he once denounced, Obama was converting it from rightwing radicalism into into the official dogma of both parties, and forcing his supporters to defend what were, until 2009, the symbols of rightwing evil.

Identically, Obama is now on the verge of injecting what until recently was the politically toxic and unattainable dream of Wall Street and the American right – attacks on the nation's social safety net – into the heart and soul of the Democratic party's platform. Those progressives who are guided more by party loyalty than actual belief will seamlessly transform from virulent opponents of such cuts into their primary defenders.

And thus will Obama succeed – yet again – in gutting not only core Democratic policies, but also the identity and power of the American Left.

it's really astounding to me how this whole thing works...

watching this phenomenon called barack obama blatantly demonstrating that there is literally NO daylight between the two parties in our so-called two-party system, not only doggedly upholding but vigorously extending the worst excesses of the nightmarish years under dubya, determinedly selling out every principle i believe in, and then seeing almost NOBODY pushing back, is reducing me to abject despair...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al., are still striding amongst us, carrying big sticks and with that same crazed look in their eyes

tom engelhardt...

Americans do seem to have turned the page on Bush and his cronies. (President Obama called it looking forward, not backward.) Still, glance over your shoulder and, if you’re being honest, you'll have to admit that one thing didn’t happen: they didn’t turn the page on us.

They may have disappeared from our lives, but the post-9/11 world they had such a mad hand in creating hasn’t. It’s not just the Department of Homeland Security or that un-American word “homeland,” both of which are undoubtedly embedded in our lives forever; or the Patriot Act, now as American as apple pie; or Guantanamo which, despite a presidential promise, may never close; or all the wild, overblown fears of terrorism and the new security world that goes with them, neither of which shows the slightest sign of abating; or the National Security Agency’s surveillance and spying on Americans which, as far as we can tell, is ongoing. No, it's scores of Bush policies and positions that will clearly be with us until hell freezes over. Among them all, consider the Obama administration’s updated version of that signature Bush invention, the Global War on Terror.

Yes, Obama’s national security officials threw that term to the dogs back in 2009, and now pursue a no-name global strategy that’s meant not to remind you of the Bush era. Recently, the White House released an unclassified summary of its 2011 “National Strategy for Counterterrorism,” a 19-page document in prose only a giant bureaucracy with a desire to be impenetrable could produce. (Don’t bother to read it. I read it for you.) If it makes a feeble attempt to put a little rhetorical space between Obama-style counterterrorism and what the Bush administration was doing, it still manages to send one overwhelming message: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al., are still striding amongst us, carrying big sticks and with that same crazed look in their eyes.

it doesn't matter who sits in the oval office... our country remains seriously out of control and, unless and until we the citizens step up and insist that the bastards step down, it will continue to run amok...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Hating on Chomsky for telling the truth

there's nothing in today's world more guaranteed to earn vitriol, hatred and death threats than telling the truth...

In a move likely to spark another annual round of healthy controversy, the veteran American linguist, social scientist and human rights campaigner Noam Chomsky was named 2011 winner of the Sydney Peace Prize last night.

Professor Chomsky said he was honoured by the award, whose previous recipients include the South African cleric Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi and the Australian journalist John Pilger.

In recent weeks the 82-year-old has been one of America's most-hated men, subjected to ''obscenities, intellectual hysteria and death threats'' over remarks following the shooting of Osama bin Laden.

The al-Qaeda leader's crimes, he wrote, were vastly exceeded by those of the former president George Bush. ''We might ask how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at his compound, assassinated him and dumped his body in the Atlantic.''

Professor Chomsky said the ill-considered American operation had pushed the world to the brink of war, possibly even nuclear war. ''The commandos who violated Pakistani sovereignty were given orders to fight their way out if necessary. They risked coming into confrontation with the Pakistani army."

as jack nicholson playing colonel nathan r. jessup so famously said, "you can't HANDLE the truth...!"

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Why is the U.S. so completely spastic about Wikileaks? [UPDATE & BUMPED]

[UPDATE & BUMPED]

i was sure glenn would have something to say about this development and, naturally, he didn't disappoint (see below)...

for a country that gives huge lip-service to transparency and freedom of the press, the u.s. is obsessed with killing both of them...

U.S. Tries to Build Case for Conspiracy by WikiLeaks

Federal prosecutors, seeking to build a case against the WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for his role in a huge dissemination of classified government documents, are looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information.

Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

and speaking of bradley manning, glenn is working to keep his unconscionable 7-month detention in solitary without charge visible...

The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months -- and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait -- under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning's detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

[...]

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs.

[...]

In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America's Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig's medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.

Just by itself, the type of prolonged solitary confinement to which Manning has been subjected for many months is widely viewed around the world as highly injurious, inhumane, punitive, and arguably even a form of torture. In his widely praised March, 2009 New Yorker article -- entitled "Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?" -- the surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande assembled expert opinion and personal anecdotes to demonstrate that, as he put it, "all human beings experience isolation as torture." By itself, prolonged solitary confinement routinely destroys a person’s mind and drives them into insanity. A March, 2010 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law explains that "solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture."

For that reason, many Western nations -- and even some non-Western nations notorious for human rights abuses -- refuse to employ prolonged solitary confinement except in the most extreme cases of prisoner violence. "It’s an awful thing, solitary," John McCain wrote of his experience in isolated confinement in Vietnam. “It crushes your spirit." As Gawande documented: "A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam . . . reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered."

does this seem to anybody but me like they're doing their damnedest to make a case whether one exists or not...? meanwhile, george bush and dick cheney, who have the blood of multi-thousands of people on their hands thanks to their deceptive and illegal war in iraq, run around scot-free...

[UPDATE]

glenn...

Getting to Assange through Manning

[...]

[C]laiming that WikiLeaks does not merely receive and publish classify information, but rather actively seeks it and helps the leakers, is the DOJ's attempt to distinguish it from "traditional" journalism. As Savage writes, this theory would mean "the government would not have to confront awkward questions about why it is not also prosecuting traditional news organizations or investigative journalists who also disclose information the government says should be kept secret — including The New York Times."

But this distinction is totally illusory. Very rarely do investigative journalists merely act as passive recipients of classified information; secret government programs aren't typically reported because leaks just suddenly show up one day in the email box of a passive reporter. Journalists virtually always take affirmative steps to encourage its dissemination. They try to cajole leakers to turn over documents to verify their claims and consent to their publication. They call other sources to obtain confirmation and elaboration in the form of further leaks and documents.

[...]

[There is no way to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks without criminalizing journalism because WikiLeaks is engaged in pure journalistic acts: uncovering and publicizing the secret conduct of the world's most powerful factions. It is that conduct -- and not any supposed crime -- which explains why the DOJ is so desperate to prosecute.

it seems to me that criminalizing investigative journalism and opening the door for criminalizing virtually any form of reporting on government activities may indeed be the goal behind the insane push to prosecute julian assange and wikileaks...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. Victory goes to the falsifiers.

dahlia lithwick on obama's eschewing of any accountability for our nation's criminal behavior...

President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would “turn the page” on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush Administration’s war on terror. What he didn’t seem to understand, what he still seems not to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons at which it occurred. Now more than ever, it’s feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it’s not illegal after all.

scott horton in harper's...

Since Barack Obama became president, the debate over torture in America has taken a morally corrupt turn. Defenders of the old regime continue to defend the use of torture as essential to the nation’s defense. Their claims are contradicted by the facts: torture was used to extract false confessions that fueled, among other things, the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses. The fact that America tortured is still a principal recruiting tool for radical Islamists. But Obama has kept silent in the face of all of this, not wishing to engage torture apologists in debate. More significantly, he has apparently encouraged his Justice Department to squelch any meaningful investigation of torture, in violation of the clear requirements of law. A policy that says “don’t look back” means the triumph of torture: while we may not be captives of our past, we are the captives of our perception of the past. When one side offers an airbrushed version of the past and the other is silent, then, in the binary world of Washington, victory goes to the falsifiers.

i've been posting about accountability - more specifically, the lack thereof - since i started this blog in 2005 (see google's 97 hits here) and we're still not seeing any...

(above courtesy of information clearing house...)

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Incentivizing bad bankster behavior

it's hard for me to accept that we're actually having a debate about holding crooks accountable... otoh, why should we hold the bankers accountable when our elected leaders flout the constitution with impunity...?

Failing to prosecute Wall Street’s high-flying crooks doesn’t only represent a great miscarriage of justice. Powerful voices within the economic establishment are now making the case that holding the bankers criminally culpable is necessary if we ever hope to stop our national economy from moving from one speculation-driven bubble to the next.

Nobel-prize winner Joe Stiglitz recently told AOL’s Daily Finance that major damage resulting from the financial disaster “has not really been taken on board, and that is confidence in our legal system, in our rule of law, in our system of justice.” His prescription? “I think we ought to go do what we did” in the wake of similar financial crises in the past, and “actually put many of these guys in prison.”

His argument is based not on the visceral satisfaction of seeing the high and mighty brought down a peg, but on cold economic grounds. At heart, economics is the study of incentives, and by refusing to hold the corporate criminals at the heart of the housing crisis accountable in any meaningful way, we’re creating powerful incentives for more malfeasance in the future.

As Stiglitz explained, “People have an incentive sometimes to behave badly, because they can make more money if they can cheat. If our economic system is going to work then we have to make sure that what they gain when they cheat is offset by a system of penalties.” With those penalties amounting to a small 5 percent or 10 percent tax on illegal profits, what’s to stop the crooks? “You're still sitting home pretty with your several hundred million dollars that you have left over after paying fines,” Stiglitz said.

why should the banksters be held accountable when our ex-president is going around bragging that he authorized torture...?

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

The Bush family and how it has held us by the short hairs for years

if the heavens continue to smile on me, i will never again see the smirking chimp's visage on tv... it's hard enough seeing it appear in all sorts of news articles trumpeting bush's new book...

Investigative journalist Russ Baker provides the stunning counter-story to what’s in George W. Bush’s new book.

russ baker's book: Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Past Fifty Years...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 1 comments