I think I may be done

it's been since this past wednesday that i've posted and i find that i really don't have energy to keep putting them up... i may or i may not continue but, after all, i've been at this since early 2005... i've done it primarily for my own satisfaction but i'm finding that there's less and less of that to be had... things don't seem to be getting any better and i find myself being boringly repetitive on so many subjects that make my blood boil that it seems hardly worthwhile to keep doing it... i will undoubtedly keep close tabs on many of the same topics i've been following - civil liberties, the national security state, the surveillance society, the on-going shredding of the u.s. constitution, the insanity that passes for our foreign policy, assassination without a whisper of due process, etc., etc., and may occasionally put up a post or two, but it won't be with anywhere near the same frequency or diligence that i've worked so hard to maintain in the past... i know i have a few readers out there who have encouraged me to stay the course and i've greatly appreciated it, but times change and so do people... please know that i'll still be out here...

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The legality of execution by executive decree without due process

glenn...

The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights this morning filed a lawsuit in federal court against several Obama officials, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and CIA Director David Petraeus. The suit is brought on behalf of the survivors of three American citizens killed in Yemen by the U.S. Government — killed specifically by the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command — with no due process and far from any battlefield: Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan (killed together in a drone strike) and Awlaki’s teenaged son Abdulrahman (killed two weeks later).

The suit alleges that the killing of these Americans violates their Constitutional rights (including their Fifth Amendment right to due process) because “the United States was not engaged in an armed conflict with or within Yemen” and “these killings rely on vague legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never presented to the courts.”

by all means, go read the rest...

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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...

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Two NYT op-eds that point to a precipitous decline in U.S. moral authority that nobody seems to want to accept

as usual, glenn is all over it...

Two Op-Eds in The New York Times this morning both warn of the precipitous decline of American credibility on matters of human rights and peace ushered in by the Obama presidency.

the first op-ed glenn cites is on cyber-warfare written by misha glenny...

A Weapon We Can’t Control

THE decision by the United States and Israel to develop and then deploy the Stuxnet computer worm against an Iranian nuclear facility late in George W. Bush’s presidency marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet. Washington has begun to cross the Rubicon. If it continues, contemporary warfare will change fundamentally as we move into hazardous and uncharted territory.

This is one of the frightening dangers of an uncontrolled arms race in cyberspace; once released, virus developers generally lose control of their inventions, which will inevitably seek out and attack the networks of innocent parties. Moreover, all countries that possess an offensive cyber capability will be tempted to use it now that the first shot has been fired. . . .

the second is on extra-judicial assassination by former president jimmy carter...

A Cruel and Unusual Record

THE United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.

Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.

more glenn...

Many American pundits and foreign policy experts love to depict themselves as crusaders for human rights, but it almost always takes the form of condemning other governments, never their own. There’s no end to self-styled U.S. human rights moralizers who will oh-so-bravely (and inconsequentially) write one screed after the next about the oppressive acts of Syria, or Russia, or China, or Iran (the targets of their wrath are not just foreign governments, but usually ones serving the role as Current Enemy of the U.S. Government).

But when it comes to the human rights violations they can actually do something about — the ones committed (or enabled) by their own government: the government for which they vote and to which they pay taxes and over which they are supposed to act as adversarial watchdogs — they are largely silent.

the u.s. stand on human rights has been seriously compromised from the native american genocide that accompanied the founding and the growth of the country up through the more recent horrors unleashed by the school of the americas right up to the present day... i am of the opinion that our trampling of human rights hasn't necessarily gotten worse, merely more visible, and with visibility comes the opportunity to step out of our national denial and do something about it...

 

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Arthur Silber: The State is become death. Our target can be anyone we choose. Yes, this means you. No, there is nowhere to run.

it's been a long time since i've posted anything by arthur silber and, truth be told, i'd forgotten just how articulate and powerful a writer he is... my thanks to chris floyd and information clearing house for re-introducing me to arthur...

In a culture that was healthy to any significant degree, the recent NYT article about the Obama administration's institutionalized, systematic program of murder by secret decree would have resulted in a deafening, sustained, nationwide howl of outrage and denunciation. In a healthy country -- and here, I use "healthy" in the sense described in an essay from four years ago: "to designate those goals and motives that can generally be described as supportive of individual life and happiness" -- the government's announcement that it regularly murders innocent human beings, wherever they may be in the world, for any reason the government wishes, and that the murderers are proud of their murders and plan to continue them indefinitely, would have propelled millions of people into the streets.

[...]

It is one thing for the ruling class to target the general domestic population on economic matters, as it has by systematically squeezing every last bit of wealth and opportunity out of "ordinary" Americans and shoveling all of it into the drooling maw of the rulers (and for many Americans, these methods of brutalization are already catastrophic in the extreme). It is very different when the ruling class announces to the world that it considers every human being on Earth not favored by power and privilege to be fair game in a neverending campaign of slaughter.

Yet there are no crowds in the street. Forget howls of fury; you can listen with the greatest concentration of which you are capable, and you will detect barely a whimper. Life goes on precisely as before, as if nothing of great moment has happened.

[...]

These people are monsters. This is profoundly evil. All these people, all those who collaborate and assist in such a program, have placed themselves far beyond any limit of what can be designated as civilization.

it's stunning how far down the hole we've fallen...

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Tom Engelhardt: The last two presidents are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against

tom engelhardt comments on the recent nyt piece, Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will...

Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.  The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they -- and the vast national-security structure that continues to be built-up and institutionalized around the presidential self -- are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against.  They are one of the reasons those founders put significant war powers in the hands of Congress, which they knew would be a slow, recalcitrant, deliberative body.

[...]

It’s not, however, that American presidents have never had anything to do with or been in any way involved in assassination programs.  The state as assassin is hardly unknown in our history.  How could President John F. Kennedy, for example, not know about CIA-inspired or -backed assassination plots against Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, and South Vietnamese autocrat (and ostensible ally) Ngo Dinh Diem? (Lumumba and Diem were successfully murdered.)  Similarly, during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the CIA carried out a massive assassination campaign in Vietnam, Operation Phoenix.  It proved to be a staggeringly profligate program for killing tens of thousands of Vietnamese, both actual enemies and those simply swept up in the process.

and now...

Without the help of or any oversight from the American people or their elected representatives, [Barack Obama] alone is now responsible for regular killings thousands of miles away, including those of civilians and even children.  He is, in other words, if not a king, at least the king of American assassinations.

[...]

The founding fathers would surely have chosen republican democracy over safety.  They would never have believed that a man surrounded by advisors and lawyers, left to his own devices, could protect them from what truly mattered.  They tried to guard against it.  Now, we have a government and a presidency dedicated to it, no matter who is elected in November.

the good news is that this kind of imperial abomination is seeing the light of day and that there are at least a few people who are justifiably outraged and deeply worried about the path our country is on... the bad news is that there are just a few people who are justifiably outraged and deeply worried about the path our country is on...

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Glenn: The most extremist government interpretation of the Bill of Rights I’ve heard in my lifetime

in essence, the obama administration is saying that, if, in their infinite wisdom, they decided i was a threat to my country, they could deliberate in private about my fate and, without even giving me a chance to face my accusers or, even more egregiously, without informing me that the deliberation was taking place or even that i had been declared a threat, i could find myself walking down the street and suddenly be unceremoniously murdered in cold blood in broad daylight...

glenn greenwald...

Here we have the Obama administration asserting what I genuinely believe, without hyperbole, is the most extremist government interpretation of the Bill of Rights I’ve heard in my lifetime — that the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that the State cannot deprive you of your life without “due process of law” is fulfilled by completely secret, oversight-free “internal deliberations by the executive branch” — and it’s now barely something anyone (including me) even notices when The New York Times reports it (as the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer asked yesterday: “These Dems who think executive process is due process: Where were they when Bush‬ needed help with warrantless wiretapping?” — or his indefinite detention scheme?)

[...]

Every year that these assaults on core liberties are entrenched and expanded further — the Firth Amendment guarantee of due process “can be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch” – the more normalized they become, the more invulnerable to challenge they are, the more unlikely it is that they will ever be reversed. In 2006, Al Gore gave a speech on the Bush/Cheney assault on the Constitution and asked: “If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?” What prompted Gore’s denunciation was mere eavesdropping and detention without judicial review. That’s no longer controversial. Now we have this question: if the U.S. President can openly declare the power to order even the nation’s own citizens executed by the CIA in total secrecy, without charges or a whiff of transparency or oversight, what can’t he do?

an online acquaintance posted the following yesterday...

Reading this crap makes me want to leave the planet as soon as possible.

i totally understand what she's saying...

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John Brennan: American drone strikes are “ethical and just," "wise," and "surgically precise”

the exceptionalism of the united states...

tom engelhardt...

[C]onsider as Exhibit One a recent speech by the president’s counterterrorism “tsar,” John Brennan, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  According to his own account, he was dispatched to the center by President Obama to provide greater openness when it comes to the administration’s secret drone wars, to respond to critics of the drones and their legality, and undoubtedly to put a smiley face on drone operations generally.

Ever since the Puritan minister John Winthrop first used the phrase in a sermon on shipboard on the way to North America, “a city upon a hill” has caught something of at least one American-style dream -- a sense that this country’s fate was to be a blessed paragon for the rest of the world, an exception to every norm.  In the last century, it became “a shining city upon a hill” and was regularly cited in presidential addresses.

Whatever that “city,” that dream, was once imagined to be, it has undergone a largely unnoticed metamorphosis in the twenty-first century.  It has become -- even in our dreams -- an up-armored garrison encampment, just as Washington itself has become the heavily fortified bureaucratic heartland of a war state.  So when Brennan spoke, what he offered was a new version of American exceptionalism: the first “shining drone upon a hill” speech, which also qualifies as an instant classic of self-congratulation.

Never, according to him, has a country with such an advanced weapon system as the drone used it quite so judiciously, quite so -- if not peacefully -- at least with the sagacity and skill usually reserved for the gods.  American drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are “ethical and just," "wise," and "surgically precise” -- exactly what you’d expect from a country he refers to, quoting the president, as the preeminent “standard bearer in the conduct of war.”

Those drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are based on staggeringly “rigorous standards” involving the individual identification of human targets. Even when visited on American citizens outside declared war zones, they are invariably “within the bounds of the law,” as you would expect of the preeminent “nation of laws.”

The strikes are never motivated by vengeance, always target someone known to us as the worst of the worst, and almost invariably avoid anyone who is even the most mediocre of the mediocre.  (Forget the fact that, as Greg Miller of the Washington Post reported, the CIA has recently received permission from the president to launch drone strikes in Yemen based only on the observed “patterns of suspicious behavior” of groups of unidentified individuals, as was already true in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.)

Yes, in such circumstances innocents do unfortunately die, even if unbelievably rarely -- and for that we couldn’t be more regretful.  Such deaths, however, are in some sense salutary, since they lead to the most rigorous reviews and reassessments of, and so improvements in, our actions. “This too,” Brennan assured his audience, “is a reflection of our values as Americans.”

“I would note,” he added, “that these standards, for identifying a target and avoiding... the loss of lives of innocent civilians, exceed what is required as a matter of international law on a typical battlefield.  That’s another example of the high standards to which we hold ourselves.”

yes, we are truly exceptional as a nation, ever mindful of the highest principles of accountability, the rule of law and international humanitarian conventions... no other country can lay claim to such lofty moral standards...

but wait, there's more...

In truth, our leaders should be in mourning for whatever peaceful dreams we ever had.  But mention drones and they light up.  They’re having a love affair with those machines.  They just can’t get enough of them or imagine their world or ours without them.

What they can’t see in the haze of exceptional self-congratulation is this: they are transforming the promise of America into a promise of death. And death, visited from the skies, isn’t precise. It isn’t glorious. It isn’t judicious. It certainly isn’t a shining vision.  It’s hell.  And it’s a global future for which, someday, no one will thank us.

we should feel so very proud...

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Glenn: The War on Terror is the end in itself, and Terrorism is merely its pretext

as with so many other things i've posted about on this blog, i find myself endlessly posting about and repeating the same sad litany of abuses and outrages time after time...

glenn greenwald...

In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s summary execution one year ago, many predicted that the War on Terror would finally begin to recede. Here’s what has happened since then:

*With large bipartisan majorities, Congress renewed the once-controversial Patriot Act without a single reform, and it was signed into law by President Obama; Harry Reid accused those urging reforms of putting the country at risk of a Terrorist attack.
* For the first time, perhaps ever, a U.S. citizen was assassinated by the CIA, on orders from the President, without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield; two weeks later, his 16-year-old American son was also killed by his own government; the U.S. Attorney General then gave a speech claiming the President has the power to target U.S. citizens for death based on unproven, secret accusations of Terrorism.
* With large bipartisan majorities, Congress enacted, and the President signed, a new law codifying presidential powers of worldwide indefinite detention and an expanded statutory defintion of the War on Terror.
* Construction neared completion for a sprawling new site in Utah for the National Security Agency to enable massive domestic surveillance and to achieve “the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration.”
* President Obama authorized the use of “signature” drone strikes in Yemen, whereby the CIA can target people for death “even when the identity of those who could be killed is not known.”
* The U.S. formally expanded its drone attacks in Somalia, “reopening a base for the unmanned aircraft on the island nation of Seychelles.”
* A U.S. drone killed 16-year-old Pakistani Tariq Aziz, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed, three days after the older boy attended a meeting to protest civilian deaths from U.S. drones (another of Tariq’s cousins had been killed in 2010).
* NATO airstrikes continued to extinguish the lives of Afghan children; in just the last 24 hours, 5 more Afghan children were killed by the ongoing war.
* The FBI increased its aggressive attempts to recruit young Muslim-American males into Terror plots which the FBI concocts, funds, encourages, directs and enables, while prosecuting more and more Muslims in the U.S. for crimes grounded in their political views and speech.

Does it sound like the War on Terror and its accompanying civil liberties erosions are ending, or going in the opposite direction? The morning after the bin Laden killing, I wrote that the killing of bin Laden would likely re-ignite American excitement over militarism and would thus likely further fuel, rather than retard, the War and its various implications. As always: combatting Terrorism is not the end of the War on Terror; the War on Terror is the end in itself, and Terrorism is merely its pretext.

 as much as it pains me to say it (and it pains me every time i do say it), i believe the u.s. has quite deliberately and consciously fostered a strategy of endless war... there is so much money to be made from ceaselessly fighting yet another menacing enemy that our super-rich elites and all those who profit immensely from war and military action that they will never allow it to come to a halt, even if it means engaging in deliberately provocative acts carefully calculated to inflame conflict...

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Stephen Colbert on the CIA killing of American citizens

The Colbert Report
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The U.S. Government’s conduct of most affairs behind a wall of secrecy is ... cynical, manipulative and self-protective

glenn delivers an insightful analysis of the aclu lawsuit against various agencies of the obama administration — the justice and defense departments and the cia — over their refusal to disclose any information about the assassination of american citizens...

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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...?

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Terrorism is the most meaningless — and thus most manipulated — term of propaganda; it’s always what They do and never what We do

glenn on the assassination of iranian scientists...

Does anyone have any doubt whatsoever that if Iran were sending hit squads to kill Israeli scientists in Tel Aviv, or was murdering a series of American scientists at Los Alamos (while wounding several of their wives, including, in one instance, shooting them in front of their child’s kindergarten), that those acts would be universally denounced as Terrorism, and the only debate would be whether the retaliation should be nuclear, carpet-bombing, or invasion? As always, Terrorism is the most meaningless — and thus most manipulated — term of propaganda; it’s always what They do and never what We do.

* * * * *

Regarding the question of who is responsible for the spate of scientist murders and explosions in Iran, it is true that there is no dispositive evidence on that question; that’s one of the benefits of conducting most consequential governmental action behind a wall of secrecy: no public accountability. But as the links above demonstrate, there is strong circumstantial and even direct evidence that (a) Israel is involved and (b) the U.S. has engaged in substantial covert acts of war aimed not only at the Iranian nuclear program generally but at Iran’s nuclear scientists specifically.

That all of this is done with total secrecy and no oversight by design enables deniability, if one is eager to embrace that. Newsweek‘s neocon national security reporter, Eli Lake, even went so far yesterday as to suggest the “possibility” that Iran is behind these acts of violence: because, as is well known, countries love to murder their own nuclear scientists and blow up their own nuclear facilities (Lake, of course, is right that it’s a “possibility” that Iran is behind this; as I replied: “Another possibility: maybe Senegal, or Singapore, is killing Iran’s scientists – or maybe Martians don’t like their nuclear program”). But by far the most likely explanation is that Israel is responsible, and one would have to be deliberately gullible — to the point of extreme self-delusion — to believe that the U.S. not only has no knowledge of or complicity in a spate of assassinations by its closest client state in a nation in which it has exhibited an intense interest, but also has no ability to stop it if it chose to (at the very least, the U.S. frequently sanctions state sponsors of Terrorism; if it objected to Israel’s acts, wouldn’t it do that here?).

Whatever else might be true, Israel and the U.S. are certainly the leading suspects behind these killings. And that is what explains the vehement resistance against calling this Terrorism.

nobody can tell me that this spate of killings isn't deliberate, targeted assassination... who's behind it is questionable but it's hard to imagine that either israel or the u.s. - or both - don't have something to do with it...

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Ending the Bill of Rights in the U.S.

a message from anonymous...

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Be a good quiet peon and you have no reason to worry

from economonitor...

Historians will debate the exact date the Constitution no longer ruled America. When did it die in our hearts? When during the long slow decay did we pass from self-rule into oligarchy? When did we lose so many freedoms so that we were no longer a free people?

I believe that we passed that point this week. We need to think about our future. All paths from here lead into darkness of oligarchy; that seems unavoidable. Some of these paths may go up into the light again. Perhaps to a revived Second Republic, applying the paddles to shock Constitution back to life. Perhaps to a Third Republic.

[...]

The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution is its core. Without its protections the rest of document are little but pleasant sentiments.

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Congress has in effect repealed these words, allowing the Executive to declare guilt (in secret), and jail indefinitely or execute — using the military. Be a good quiet peon and you have no reason to worry.

so, where do we go from here...?

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The extremists on two sides of a conflict are almost always identical

i've said for years that there is a frightening similarity between extremists of all stripes... islamic religious extremists are a mirror image of christian religious extremists... there isn't even a sliver of daylight between republicans and democrats... the bigotry of some people in the black and hispanic communities can easily rival that of whites...

glenn, in his usual masterful and thorough way, makes the same case for those who ceaselessly push the war on terror and those who ceaseless wage the war of jihad...

The Enemy — which America’s warriors maintain and glorify with their endless we-are-at-War! fixation and in whose name Endless War is waged and civil liberties are destroyed — is, indeed, “on many counts the projection of the self.” There’s a good reason why Al Qaeda members and American would-be warriors are both equally desperate to maintain the we-are-at-War! mindset: it’s what gives them purpose and justifies everything they do.

i've only excerpted a small portion of glenn's post... it's well worth reading in its entirety as it sets forth a compelling perspective on these two events from thursday...

(1) the Democratic-led Senate rejuvenated and expanded the War on Terror by, among other things, passing a law authorizing military detention on U.S. soil and expanding the formal scope of the War; and (2) Obama lawyers, for the first time, publicly justified the President’s asserted (and seized) power to target U.S. citizens for assassination without any transparency or due process.

interesting times, eh...?

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Here we go - using the populist-fueled defeat of the collective bargaining law in Ohio as a way to co-opt OWS

our establishment folks can only see things in terms of elections, voting and candidates... using yesterday's rejection of the effort to revoke basic worker rights by ohio voters, cfa's robert borosage calls for a ramped-up effort to get progressive candidates running for offices at all levels across the country in 2012...

Two years ago, the Tea Party turned protest into political power, fielding right-wing challengers to office holders of both parties. Public dismay with the failed economy enabled Republicans to capture the House of Representatives, and state houses and legislatures across the country. They captured 675 state legislative seats, the largest sweep since 1938. Shock-doctrine conservatives then used the crisis to cut taxes on corporations while savaging public services. They moved to roll back worker rights to weaken unions, their most organized opposition. Realizing they represented a minority position, they passed a range of laws seeking to constrict voting rights, requiring photo IDs, limiting early voting, etc. Then they went after women's rights, environmental protections and the poor while doing most of what the business lobby asked of them.

Now from Madison to Wall Street and across the country, the new populist uprising is challenging the failed conservative ideas and corporate interests that have dominated our politics to devastating effect. The question now is whether that uprising will generate progressive challengers to conservative office holders in both parties. That will take not just inspiration but organization as well.

To supply that, Progressive Majority has joined with Moveon.org, US Action, the Center for Community Change, Rebuild the Dream, the New Organizing Institute and other partners in the emerging American Dream Movement to set the goal of recruiting and supporting 2,012 candidates in 2012.

the old saw has it that the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results... our electoral, two-party and campaign finance systems are so profoundly broken, i, for one, can no longer delude myself into thinking that "more and better progressives" (to paraphrase the daily kos mantra of "more and better democrats") will fix anything... it's the system that's broken, not individual office holders, and that's precisely what the occupy movement has forced us to look at...

i succumbed to my eternal and unrelenting desire to get my country back when i voted for obama, only to be rewarded with a president who has taken the national security state well beyond the excesses of george bush, who sanctions the remotely-controlled, targeted killing not only of foreign innocents but also of american civilians, who has populated the closest ranks of his advisers with wall street elites, and who is now taking a populist tack to try to win me back...

so, please don't try to crank up my enthusiasm and co-opt my energy and money for getting 2012 progressive candidates to run in 2012... ain't gonna happen...

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Constantly celebrating the people we kill

glenn comments on the celebratory atmosphere surrounding gadhafi's killing (and bin laden and al awlaki and al awlaki's son and al qaeda leaders and countless victims of drone attacks)...

Constantly celebrating the people we kill — dancing over their corpses — is now one of the most significant and common American rituals shaping our political culture. One of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that this mentality has become fully bipartisan. And it’s hard to see how this will change any time soon: once one goes down that road, it’s very difficult to turn around and go back. That’s true both individually and of a nation.

personally, i'd like to be celebrating a revival of a national devotion to the common good of all as so clearly described in the declaration of independence and the preamble to the constitution...

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The business of America used to be business, now it's death

glenn...

Every now and then it’s worth pausing to reflect on how often we talk about the killing of people by the U.S. Literally, the U.S. government is just continuously killing people in multiple countries around the world. Who else does that? Nobody — certainly nowhere near on this scale. The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, for death, including his own citizens; he does it in total secrecy and with no oversight; and this power is not just asserted but routinely exercised. The U.S., over and over, eradicates people’s lives by the dozens from the sky, with bombs, with checkpoint shootings, with night raids — in far more places and far more frequently than any other nation or group on the planet. Those are just facts.

i'd really like it if civil liberties and endless war were to rise higher on the radar of the occupy wall street movement... behind the curtain, the financial motu's are an intimate part of the corporate military industrial government complex, and have a great deal invested in ensuring that endless war and the national security state continue unimpeded...

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Killing al Awlaki "legal" only if it wasn't possible to take him alive

charlie savage in the nyt...

The Obama administration’s secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, found that it would be lawful only if it were not feasible to take him alive, according to people who have read the document.

[...]

The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis. The memo, however, was narrowly drawn to the specifics of Mr. Awlaki’s case and did not establish a broad new legal doctrine to permit the targeted killing of any Americans deemed to pose a terrorist threat.

The Obama administration has refused to acknowledge or discuss its role in the drone strike that killed Mr. Awlaki last month and that technically remains a covert operation. The government has also resisted growing calls that it provide a detailed public explanation of why officials deemed it lawful to kill an American citizen, setting a precedent that scholars, rights activists and others say has raised concerns about the rule of law and civil liberties.

But the document that laid out the administration’s justification — a roughly 50-page memorandum by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, completed around June 2010 — was described on the condition of anonymity by people who have read it.

The legal analysis, in essence, concluded that Mr. Awlaki could be legally killed, if it was not feasible to capture him, because intelligence agencies said he was taking part in the war between the United States and al Qaeda and posed a significant threat to Americans, as well as because Yemeni authorities were unable or unwilling to stop him.

The memorandum, which was written more than a year before Mr. Awlaki was killed, does not independently analyze the quality of the evidence against him.

The administration did not respond to requests for comment on this article.

of course, they don't want to comment... they'd be commenting on a crime...

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