Contumacious

Glenn Greenwald with David Barsamian, March 08, 2011

2011-03-20T14:44:00.012-04:00

*Glenn's Lannan talk can be viewed or read here.

DB: Well, we’ve got lots of questions and about 30 minutes to get through some of them. Let me just start, if I can have that privilege. You mentioned Eisenhower’s farewell address. It was just marked in a few columns here and there, the fiftieth anniversary. You know, after he made that warning, in the very next paragraph, the warning about the military industrial complex, he did say that there was one thing that could put a break on it, and that was an informed and knowledgeable citizenry, which goes to the whole question of the role of the media in being a conduit for information or misinformation or propaganda.

GG: Right. Well, one of the interesting things that before I began writing about politics, and what that has enabled me to do is to focus full time on it in a way that you can’t do when you actually have a job. Before I began writing about politics, I thought that I was a fairly well informed consumer of news. I did things like dutifully read the NYT, and I would read magazines and watch high end news programs and the like. I assumed there were things I was getting that were not entirely accurate. I was a litigator, so I generally assumed that people were lying constantly. It’s just a risk of the profession. But, I thought that by and large I was getting the basic story right about what the US is and what it does in the world. One of the things that was really so eye-opening for me was, and again, there is a little bit of a naiveté to it, is that once I was actually able to start focusing on these things full time, and reading original documents for myself, and not having to rely on the mediation of the media, being able to pick and chose what I would focus on, rather than having editors decide for me what I needed to know about it and what I didn’t, was that essentially all the, not just individual facts but the broad narrative that I was getting was really radically flawed. I basically erased the part of my brain that had existed, that thought that it had stored accurate political information, and kind of rebuilt it from scratch. One of the things that today is still so remarkable to me, is that there are enormously consequential events that exist, for example, in the Muslim world, that are constantly displayed on their news programs and in their newspapers, that are literally unmentioned in the American media. That has created this extraordinarily huge gap in the perception in that part of the world, and this part of the world. We like to assume that the reason why that gap exists is that they’re these primitive fundamentalists who are propagandized and who aren’t told the truth by their media and by their government. There is some extent to which that is true, but there’s huge extent to which the opposite is true, which is the reason this perception gap exists is because we are propagandized. There’s so much that happens that we don’t know about that they do. They know every time an American airplane slaughters innocent civilians and we virtually never hear about it. They know that the American government spent years imprisoning Al Jazeera journalists without any due process of any kind in order to interrogate them about Al Jazeera, and they we attacked Al Jazeera with fighter jets. I guarantee you the percentage of Americans who knows any of that is infinitesimal. And, you go down the list, and this is the definition of propaganda, when the information that we get is designed to shape our perceptions favorably to the government and there’s so much of it that we have.

DB: A number of questions focus on WL and Bradley Manning. How can people support, financially or otherwise, WL and do so anonymously…that seems to be a concern, and Bradley Manning. I know there’s a demonstration coming up in Virginia on March 20.

GG: Right. As far as financial support to WL is concerned, there are difficult ways to do that, because all American financial services corporations like Bank of America and PayPal have terminated their services and VISA and MasterCard won’t process payments. It is difficult. There are ways to do it through bank wires. I don’t know if there’s a way to do it anonymously, and again, the fact that that concern has been raised reflects the climate that I talked about earlier. But if you go the WL website which isn’t easy to find these days, thanks to the cyber attacks and Amazon, but it’s at wikileaks dot ch. There are instructions for how one can donate to WL. Bradley Manning is a much more conservative donation to make, in the sense of nobody could ever suggest that there would ever be anything illegal about it. He has a defense fund, which fortunately has raised I think ninety five or ninety six percent of the money that they think they will need for his defense. There are still other things he needs in terms of publicity to help get his story out in the media. There may be other expenses associated with protests and legal actions brought over the treatment to which he’s being subjected. So, you could just google Bradley Manning Defense Fund and you’ll find it there, a very trust worthy organization, and you can donate as well. But, I think the more important thing that one can do for WL and Bradley Manning, rather than giving money, is what we’re doing now, which is, you know, a lot of times when I write things or speak at places, there are always question, well, what can be done about this, as though what we’re doing is nothing. One of the most important things you can do is get together with fellow citizens and inform them and talk with them and buildup the dissatisfaction and the anger over it, so that there is real dissatisfaction in the citizenry for these things. There is a protest on March 20th at the Quantico Base in Virginia, the brig where he’s being held, and whoever has the resources to go there, I think would be encouraged to do so. And there are similar protests being organized all around the country, at Marine or Army facilities or at members of congress over the torture to which this American citizen is being subjected on American soil. I think this would be immensely helpful in bringing more attention to his plight.

DB: Again, this is an amalgam of several questions. You talked in your presentation about this enormous consortium of government and corporate power and that faction is so powerful. In some ways, that’s very disenabling in terms of creating this tremendous force. How can people confront it?

GG: One of the interesting dynamics that I confronted from the very beginning of my working on political issues, writing about political issues full time, was this idea that if you, and it’s almost a paradox, but it’s almost like the more you document just how heinous things are, the more hopelessness you risk breeding, because, the more you demonstrate how these powerful factions are seemingly invulnerable, and how immunized they are from any forms of accountability, the more daunting the task seems to confront them. And, what I would always say, whenever people would say this seems so hopeless and everything seems pessimistic in terms of the prospects for change, I would say that any systems that have been constructed by human beings can be destroyed and replaced, or even modified by other human beings. History proves that. One of the things that I think is so vital about what’s happening in the Middle East is, I mean, “hopelessness”-if you were to look up that term in the dictionary, you would find essentially the pictures of the people who were living under the repression in those countries. I mean, these are dictatorships that have been in place for decades. The people are disempowered, not just financially and in terms of weaponry, but in terms of being kept illiterate and poor education. I mean, that’s not true in all the countries, but in many. When you have a country that is under that level of repression for so long, it breaks their spirit, it breaks their psychological belief that they can actually change things. And, so the fact that in that part of the world the most unlikely part of that world, people, ordinary people are rising up together and essentially putting great fear in these tyrants and in these monarchs who are propped up by the US and have been for decades; and are winning should prevent any person in this country with the resources and the relative domestic liberties that we have, from ever succumbing to resignation. That ought to be the model that prevents that from happening.

DB: It took the Egyptian people eighteen days to overthrow a 30 year autocracy.

GG: Yeah, exactly.

DB: [9:40] Quite an amazing accomplishment. What do you think is behind Obama’s decision to restore military tribunals in Guantanamo?

GG: Well. This is part and parcel of the entire preservation by Obama of the Bush-Cheney architecture for the war on terror generally and the detention regime specifically. There’s this idea, [I actually wrote about this today even though I was traveling, but it was irritating me so much that I found the time because I thought I was going to go crazy if I didn’t], that Obama wanted to close Guantanamo so very, very badly, but unfortunately he was thwarted by the Congress, because they denied him the funds to do so, and then enacted legislation barring the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo to the US, and that he is therefore forced, against all of his wishes, to preserve what’s taking place in Guantanamo. And this is actually a complete fiction, because if you go and look at what Obama actually said he wanted to do, and intended to do, prior to the time that Congress did anything, he, it is true, wanted to “close” Guantanamo, in the sense of taking all of the parts that compose it and moving it a couple thousand miles north to a maximum security facility, a super-max in Thompson, Illinois, where the detainees there would continue to be detained without any due process of any kind, without being charged, without any recourse beyond the say-so of the president and to continue their system of military tribunals as well that caused so much controversy during the Bush administration. I was pretty involved in the debates over the Guantanamo disputes, and my recollection is pretty clear that what made people so angry about Guantanamo, was not that it was located in Cuba rather than Illinois, so that if you move it to Illinois it’s all problem solved. I think what made people angry, was that it was sort of un-American and unjust to put people in prison for decades or for life without so much as charging them with a crime; or inventing new tribunals, [instead of allowing them access to our regular courts] that were essentially rigged in advance to ensure their conviction. So, this idea that Obama wanted to close Guantanamo, and isn’t that great and too bad he got thwarted is true only in the narrowest sense. The reality is he all along wanted to simply transfer this system that was Guantanamo to a different location on the premise that if he did that, I guess, it would fool enough people in the Muslim world, and in the US, to make everyone think that the nightmare of the Bush regime was over. That would never have fooled anyone, other than a few partisans in the US and probably the entire cast of cable news, but other than that, it would not have fooled anyone. It is true that Congress forced this system to continue in Cuba, but what Obama wanted to do wasn’t all that different.

DB: Talk about the social media and its impact; Face Book, Twitter, You Tube. I was just in Kashmir ten days ago. The kids there who are in revolt against the Indian occupation are taking their cell phones and photographing and then uploading those onto You Tube and they’re spreading all over.

GG: Right. To me, this new social media really is just he inevitable and logical progression from what I think the internet did several years ago in terms of making political discourse much more democratized. It really was the case not all that long ago, even just going back to 2002, 2003, when the only people who could really be heard loudly in political discourse in the US were people who either were entrenched political officials who had access to large media outlets or employees of large multinational conglomerates who essentially comprise all the people who call themselves journalists in the US. Every person you saw on television who delivered the news, who talked about the news, journalists who wrote for newspapers, the largest newspapers are all employees of huge corporate institutions. That meant that there was a very homogenized voice, set of voices that were shaping political discourse, which is why, if you go back and read political debates in 2002 and 2003 as I sometimes still do, you’ll be shocked. No matter how much you think you remember just how insane it all was, if you go back and read what happened on PBS or CNN as they talk about Saddam Hussein and all his scary weapons; or if you talk about, people who talk about in newspapers George Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld being brave and even sexually arousing warriors and how manly they were, all very common themes. You don’t have to look very hard for that, it’s all there, you will be shocked by just how rotted and degraded our political discourse was, even that recently. What the internet really did was it allowed people, such as myself and a lot of other people, to no longer have to go to large institutions and corporations in order to have the means for building a readership and building an audience and using the technology that can disseminate ideas to large numbers of people. It really diversified and democratized political discourse and brought in a lot of new voices and therefore a lot of new ideas, which is why I do think things have improved slightly in terms of how political debates are conducted. What Face Book and Twitter and what all that social media has done, is, it has brought it to parts of the world where it didn’t exist before and it has just democratized it further. So now, all you need is access to You Tube and a cell phone, and you can make major international news without the mediation of any corporate editors, in a way that was completely unthinkable even seven or eight years ago. It especially is effective at organizing like-minded people in a very quick way to create their own alliance of power that could compete with far more entrenched power. Again, I think we’re at the very insipient stages of this process, and that is why internet freedom is such a vital war to be attentive to, because people in power know how threatening it is, and that’s why they’re constantly devising ways to control it, to undermine it, to dilute it and to subvert it.

DB: It’s been said more than once that corporate media is a WMD-a weapon of mass distraction, and needs to be regulated to some extent. Now, talking about, you just mentioned political discourse. The question here is about the affect of the Citizen’s United [CU] case and what can be done to reverse the effect of corporate money in elections, and how that relates to the regime of secrecy.

GG: [16:41] Right. One of the things I think that CU did was…I personally don’t think that CU changed very much, because, CU dealt with a very narrow form of corporate spending, which is the ability of corporations to spend money specifically in a sixty day period prior to an election in order to elect a candidate. Prior to CU, corporations were completely free to spend as much money as they wanted to do things like run what were called “issue ads”, so they could run an issue the day before the election and spend as much money as they wanted saying Congressman Smith has supported this horrendous piece of legislation that’s the equivalent of the worst tyranny. Call Congressman Smith and tell him to stop it, which was just a poorly disguised way of saying vote against Congressman Smith. All CU did was allow corporations now to make their spending more overt so that they could now say vote against Congressman Smith, vote for this person. Prior to CU, in my opinion, corporate influence, the influence of corporate money in American politics was already far and away the most serious problem that we face. I think…because what it encompasses is everything I talked about earlier. It’s the ability of the nation’s wealthiest factions to control our political process in a way that was never intended. Until that problem is redressed, there isn’t very much within the democratic process, voting, referenda, petitions, calling members of congress, none of that really matters because the people to whom they’re answering are the people who are the oligarchs, the people who control all the financial wealth because they own the political process. I personally am more comfortable, a lot more comfortable, with leveling that playing field with a very robust form of public financing so that if corporation give ten million dollars to a particular candidate, there’s a public financing scheme that will give ten million dollars to their opponent, and will level out the playing field so that candidates don’t have to be beholden to moneyed interests. I think that that’s the only way to subvert that, combined with genuine full disclosure so that people like the Koch brothers and others can’t operate in the dark and act covertly. But, I think public financing can truly level the playing field in a way that will alleviate the need of politicians to serve who their masters are now which is to the people who pay into and buy the political system.

DB: You excoriate in very clear terms the Democrats and the Republicans. Is it time for a second political party?

GG: A third?...[laughs] Right. That took me a second. It’s interesting, but some of the critics of the American political process whom I respect most will say, no matter how critical they are of the Democratic Party, and how insistent they are that there’s very little difference between them, that it’s still important at the end of the day to vote against Republicans and vote for Democrats. That’s something that Noam Chomsky says all the time. I’m not for the moment saying that’s my opinion, so if you want to applaud him go ahead. That has always been persuasive to me, or at least it was for a long time, that…Chomsky’s argument is, and Howard Zinn’s would say the same thing, and others, too, that even though the differences are so minute, relatively speaking from a bird’s eye view, and even though the kinds of issues we talked about tonight, there are no differences, that when you’re talking about a structure as enormous as the US government, that even minor differences between the two parties in terms of how they allocate resources, which programs they fund, and which ones they defund, can have a very substantial impact on the lives of millions of people and it’s irresponsible to say that because the differences aren’t great enough, that I’m going to abstain, or that I’m going to become indifferent about which political party wins. Because it actually does matter in the lives of a lot of people whether Social Security is cut a lot or kind of a lot, and things like that. That’s that argument, and it’s an argument which I have found somewhat persuasive. Lately, I’ve become a lot more ambivalent about that argument. The reason is that, though it is true that if you look at short term political cycles there are some differences between Democrats and Republicans. It may very well be the case that had John McCain and Sara Palin won, that we would have instead of just a few wars we would have one more with Iran, which would be an extremely bad thing for countless millions of people. At the same time, it’s also the case that if you look a little bit broader at the political conflicts, at some point you have to say, I’m willing to sacrifice some short term political gain in order to find a way to make more meaningful improvements over the long term. Otherwise, we’re going to be having the same conversation in 2016 and 2020 and 2024 and our children will and our grandchildren will, and everyone’s going to be lamenting how terrible it is that we don’t have any choices and yet nothing will change because at the end of the day all the loyalists lineup behind the two parties on the ground that the other one is just slightly worse. Until that mind set is broken, and I don’t know what the answer is for breaking it because I acknowledge that there is real danger from abstaining from the political process, or in becoming indifferent about which of the two political parties wins, but what I know is as long as we continue doing what we’re doing the same dynamic will persist. That’s just logical. So, at some point, I think you need to start to say that the differences are minor enough that I’m willing to let this slightly worse party win a couple more seats than they otherwise might, maybe even win an election because I want the Democratic Party to know that if they continue doing what they’re doing on the grounds that they can just take for granted all of our support, at some point that assurance in their mind needs to be broken so that they become more attentive to the people they claim to represent.

DB: Two questions from a student from St. John’s College. First off: are there some things that should be secret? And the second one is: Where have reporters like Ed Murrow, Woodward and Bernstein gone?

GG: [23:30] I would certainly say clearly the answer to the question should some things be secret is “Yes”. If the government is investigating as part of a grand jury a potential criminal target, you don’t want that fact to be known; or what they discover to be known, because it may be that the person is innocent and their name will be besmirched by disclosure of grand jury secrecy. There are certain things that you probably wouldn’t want publicized on the front page of the NYT, like the location of nuclear war heads and the combination to launch them would probably be a thing that you’d want to keep secret, in my opinion. I think even the hardest core transparency advocates acknowledge that there is some degree of legitimate secrecy. The problem is that secrecy ought to be the very rare exception, and it’s become the rule. One of the things that’s so amazing to me, is that, over the last year WL has released close to a million pages of documents. While I said before, and it’s true, that this claim that there’s nothing new there is absurd, there are tons of things that are new, the vast majority of what has been released is actually quite banal. They are just very routine documents. To me, that in itself is a scandal, because what it shows is that the government reflexively stamps secret or classified on basically every single thing that it does. So, the more people keep saying that these WL documents show nothing, that they don’t reveal anything, the more to me that is an indictment of just the obsession with secrecy that the US government and the US military has. The presumption has been reversed. Everything is presumptively secret when it’s supposed to be presumptively disclosed. And that’s why, to me, when people raise concerns well isn’t WL going a little too far in disclosing some things that should be secret. We’re so far over towards the pole of excessive secrecy that I can’t even envision the day when I’m going to start worrying about excessive disclosure. I’d like to be in that position, but we’re so far from that day. So, yes, some things should be kept secret, but that is so far away from the problem that we have, that things that should be kept secret aren’t being kept secret, when everything is being kept secret, and that’s a real threat to democracy.

As far as where Bob Woodward went, he’s still around. Unfortunately, I don’t mean I wish that he weren’t alive. I mean that he’s still practicing journalism in a very harmful way, and I think that that transformation from the Bob Woodward of forty years ago when he worked very hard to expose serious wrong doing at the highest levels of government, [it’s not quite as pure and romanticized as that, but there’s been enough pessimism tonight, so we’ll let Bob Woodward have his legacy], but the transformation of Bob Woodward from whistle blowing adversarial journalist into what he’s become, which is basically royal court spokesman, very highly paid, royal court spokesperson, that’s how I see him, I think is illustrative of the media generally. It used to be that journalism was a marginalized, outsider profession. The people who practiced it were fairly poor, they weren’t very rewarded economically. They’ve now been incorporated almost fully into the circles of political power. They’re far closer to, they identify far more with culturally and socio economically with the people whom they’re covering, and the people whom they’re suppose to be adversarially watch dogging, than the people on whose behalf they’re doing that. It’s become completely morphed. That, I think, has really corrupted what they do. The great journalists David Halberstam said the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you probably are. I think that kind of underscores this fact that journalists have always supposed to have been, not hobnobbing with political power and getting access to it and being friendly with it, but being truly belligerent towards it, being excluded from it and being on the outside. The minute Bob Woodward started being aloud out into the pearly halls of power in Washington, and having his access dependent on going and writing what served their interest, is the minute that he became corrupted as a journalist, no longer was a journalist. I think that’s what’s happened with journalism generally…establishment journalism generally, it’s become corporatized, and it’s become integrated into the system of political power and therefore can’t possibly be adversarial to it any longer.

DB: If I may say to that student, forget Woodward. Read Dahr Jamail. Read Jeremy Scahill. Nir Rosen.

GG: Izzy Stone

DB: IF Stone, of course, classic journalist. There are a lot of alternatives out there. I’m sure I left off some names. Excuse the grammar, but within a week this event will be podcastable and downloadable both the audio and the video. Just go to the Lannan Foundation website and you’ll find it there. We’re running out of time. Let me give you a couple of loaded questions, here. Any more bombshells from WL? They reportedly have some major information about what’s happening in the financial system.

GG: Well, there was a story for a while that they had some very explosive documents about a major bank which everyone assumed correctly was Bank of America [BoA]. And that actually lead to a recent scandal where the BoA hired a law firm and some internet security firms to start trying to coordinate a response to WL, and to attack it. I’m not sure how significant those BoA documents are really going to be. Obviously, there’s lots of corruption and wrong doing at the highest levels of every major American Bank. The BoA is America’s largest bank. So, it isn’t that the corruption doesn’t exist I just don’t know if these document are going to be able to fulfill the original promise. What I do know is that WL’s problem right now is that they’re so overloaded with disclosures of documents that seem at face value to be extremely significant, that one of the reasons why they actually do need financial support is because it’s very expensive for them to go through the process of verifying and authenticating those documents. They’re well aware that the Pentagon wants to feed false documents to them, that their credibility would be instantly destroyed if they ever released in this major fanfare of a way documents that turned out to be fabricated. So, when they do get documents, they go to extreme lengths to ensure that they are authentic. That’s why it takes some time. So they are sitting on some documents that I know for a fact, if they’re real, will make as much headlines, if not more than the previous disclosures. It’s just a matter of getting those documents verified.

DB: Glenn, I have to ask you this question. I have an unreleased WL document right here in my hand reporting that you will sign books in the lobby in a few moments. Can you confirm or deny that?

GG: It is true. It is a major coup of WL. They have authenticated that.

DB: You heard it right here. Thanks very much for coming. Have a wonderful evening.

GG: Thank you very much. [31:05]

You can view the interview and read the transcript of Glenn's talk at the Lannan Foundation here.

http://podcast.lannan.org/2011/03/13/glenn-greenwald-with-david-barsamian-conversation-8-march-2011-video/

With much thanks again to longime poster extraordinaire, harpie for the transcription!

Glenn Greenwald Speech at the Lannan Foundation

2011-03-16T22:52:00.019-04:00

Thank you. Thanks very much and good evening to everybody, and thank you for coming and thank you very much for that warm reception as well. And thank you as well to the Lannan Foundation for inviting me to Santa Fe, which I’ve discovered over the last day and a half is a beautiful city. It’s my first time here. And I’m especially delighted to have been invited to kick off what certainly will be a very exciting and vibrant speaker series that the Lannan Foundation is sponsoring. So, I’m particularly pleased to be here for that, as well.

I’ve been speaking more at events like this and at various college campuses and the like over the last year. And one of the things that typically happens before the event, is that there’s a lot of time and mental energy spent on figuring out what the topic of the speech is going to be, and what the title is going to be. The speaker and the sponsors of the event go back and forth over what will be an interesting topic, what’s timely, what will be interesting to people. And then the title gets worked on and changed and edited. I have several speeches planned over the course of the next month, and there are all different topics and titles that were all worked out as part of this arduous process. What I found is that, as much time and energy that’s spent on that process, it actually ends up being completely irrelevant, because I find that no matter what the topic is, I keep speaking about the same set of issues, no matter what the title is.

The reason why that happens is not because I have some monomaniacal obsession with a handful of issues I can’t pull myself away from no matter what the topic is. That may be true, but that’s not actually the reason. The reason is because political controversies and political issues never take place in isolation. They’re always part of some broader framework, that drives political outcomes, and that determines how political power is exercised. And so it doesn’t really matter which specific topic, or which specific controversy of the day you want to discuss, the reality is, you can’t really meaningfully discuss any of them without examining all the forces that shape political culture, and that shape how political outcomes are determined. So, in order to talk about any issue, you end up speaking about these same, broad themes, that are shaping, and I think plaguing, the political discourse in the United States.

This is something that I first realized when I started writing about politics in late 2005. One of the very first topics on which I focused was the scandal about the Bush administrations eves dropping on American citizens without the warrants required by law. This was first exposed by the NYT in December of 2005, so it happened around six weeks after I began writing about politics. I had this, back then, very naïve idea that this was going to be very straight forward and simple political controversy. The reason I thought that in my naiveté, was because what the Bush administration got caught doing [eaves dropping on Americans without warrants from the FISA court] is as clear as could possibly be a felony under American law. You can actually look at the criminal law that existed since 1978, when FISA was enacted. It says that doing exactly what the Bush administration got caught doing, is a felony in the US, just like robbing a bank, or extortion or murder, and that it’s punishable by a prison term of five years or a ten thousand dollar fine for each offense. The report that the NYT published was that there were at least hundreds and probably thousands of instances where American citizens were eavesdropped on illegally and in violation of the law. So, I thought that this was going to be a fairly straight forward controversy, because I had this idea that if you get caught committing a felony, and the NYT writes and reports on that and everybody’s talking about that, that that’s actually going to be a really bad thing for the person who got caught doing that. I know it was really naïve. I’m actually embarrassed to admit that I thought that, but that really is was I thought at the time. I also thought that basically everybody would be in agreement that that was a really bad thing to do….that thing that the law said for thirty years was a felony and punishable by a prison term and a large fine. And, as it turned out, [and I realized this fairly quickly] none of that actually happened. It wasn’t a really bad thing for the people who got caught committing that felony.

And, not only did everyone not agree that that was a bad thing, very few people actually agreed that that was a very bad thing. So, what I thought I was going to be able to do was to take this issue and write very legalistically about it, and demonstrate that what the Bush administration had done was a crime, that it was a felony under the statute and that the legal defenses for it that they had raised were frivolous and baseless and that would be the end of the story. Crime committed, investigation commenced, punishment ensues. So what immediately happened, when I realized that none of that was really going on, of course then the question became why. Why was my expectation about what would happen so radically different than what in fact happened?

So, then I needed to delve into that dynamic, that I began by referencing that determines political outcomes. I had to examine the fact that we have a political faction inside the US [the American Right] that is drowning in concepts of nationalism, and exceptionalism, in tribalism that leads them to believe that whatever they and there leaders do is justifiable inherently because they do it, and in a complete lack of principle…this is the same faction that impeached a democratically elected President not more than 10 years earlier on the ground that the rule of law is paramount and we can’t allow our presidents to break the law. And, yet, here they were defending it.

And then I watched Democratic politicians, one after the next, go on talk shows to talk about this scandal, and they were all petrified of saying what the reality was, which was that what the Bush Administration got caught doing was a crime and it was illegal. They were all afraid to say that. What they were really eager for was for the scandal to go away, for them not to have to talk about it any longer. And so that made me write about the craveness of the Democratic Party, and the extent to which they are replicas of Republicans when it comes to national security issues, and the complete bipartisan consensus, where all of these kinds of issues are concerned, especially in the post 9-11 world.

And then I started realizing that there were journalists who were shaping the political discourse who were not only saying that they were fine with the fact that the Bush Administration had broken the law, but were attacking the very few Democrats who actually stood up and said “I think it’s problematic when the President does things that the Congress says is a criminal offence.” The journalist class, almost unanimously, was saying that the Democrats ought to avoid this for political reasons, and that on substantive grounds, Bush did the right thing because he had to protect us. Then I had to start writing about the media’s allegiance to political power and their belief in the omnipotence of the national security state, and its ability to act without restraints.

And then it turned out that it wasn’t just the government who was eavesdropping, but they were doing so in collaboration with the largest telecoms, the entire telecom industry, in essence, which was turning over all the phone records and e-mails of their customers secretly to the government, even though laws were in place specifically prohibiting private telecoms from handing over any information to the government without warrants because in the past, when the Church committee discovered the decades of abuses they found that ATT had been turning over records to the government, that Western Union was turning over all telegraphs. And so, Congress said not only the government is barred from eves dropping on Americans without warrants, but private telecoms-it shall be against the law for them to turn over data without warrants as well. Of course, they did exactly that. That led to my having to write about the consortium between government and corporate power and how the surveillance state and the national security state have essentially become merged; and that the real power lies with the private sector because so many of these government functions have been nationalized.

Then, of course, the entire quote-unquote scandal ended by all of the perpetrators being completely protected. The Bush Administration was given an immunity shield by the Obama Administration from any investigations to determine whether crimes were committed. And the private Telecom industry was given retroactive immunity by the Democratic led Congress in 2008 supported by Barak Obama.

In fact, the only person to suffer any legal repercussions from that NSA scandal was someone named Thomas Tam, who was the mid-level Justice Department whistle blower who found out that this was taking place and was horrified by it and called Eric Lichtblau at the NYT and exposed that it had happened. The person who was the only one to suffer repercussions was the person who exposed the criminality. The criminals were fully immunized.

So that led to my having to write about how the rule of law had been subverted, all the things David was just reading about. And, so, I realized that what I thought the scandal was about, what I thought the issue was about,…you know, nice abstract clinical little discussions about whether the law had been violated, and whether Article II theories were really viable, were actually relatively irrelevant. You could have that discussion, but it didn’t make much of a difference. What made the real difference were these broader themes.

[20:07] So, although the topic tonight is ostensibly Wikileaks and the controversies surrounding Wikileaks, if you look at what has happened in the Wikileaks scandal, it involves everyone of the ingredients that I just described. That’s why I can give a speech on the erosion of civil liberties in the US [which I’m going to do in a few days]…tonight I’m talking about Wikileaks, but what I’m always going to end up talking about are the fundamentals of how political power in the US is exercised and the way in which just outcomes are subverted because of these dynamic

One of the reasons why I find WL to be such a fascinating and critical topic is because I think it sheds unprecedented light on how these processes work and how they have come to develop and evolve in the US. I also think that there’s so much at stake in the war that has arisen over Wikileaks and internet freedom, and the ability to breach the secrecy regime behind which the government operates. For that reason, too, it’s such a critical topic.

There are a lot of different ways to talk about Wikileaks, and Wikileaks is a complex topic. But, one of the things I want to do is just to sort of walk through, a little bit, the chronology of my involvement in WL and to talk about some of the realizations that I’ve had that may have been somewhat known to me, but have really been cast into a very bright light as a result of what’s happened in the controversy surrounding WL.

[21:55] The first time that I ever wrote about WL, or ever really thought about WL was in January of 2010, a little bit more than a year ago, now. And this is a time when almost nobody had heard of WL, before they disclosed the first news-making leak, which was the video of the Apache helicopter shooting unarmed citizens and journalists in Baghdad. But, what had prompted me to pay attention to it and to write about it was that the Pentagon had prepared a report in 2008, a classified report, about WL that ironically though unsurprisingly was leaked to WL, which WL then published. What this report said, it talked about how the Pentagon considered WL to be an enemy of the state; a grave threat to US national security. It discussed a variety of ways to destroy WL: by fabricating documents to submit to them, in the hopes that they would publish forged documents, which would then destroy there credibility, like what happened with Dan Rather and CBS news and the Bush AWOL story; it talked about breaching the confidentiality between them and their sources so that their sources would get exposed and people would no longer feel confident in leaking to them. I didn’t have a really good sense for what WL had been doing, or what it was, but I figured that if there’s any grouping targeted that way by the Pentagon, that’s a group that merits a lot more examination and probably some admiration.

So I started looking a lot into WL and what they were doing, and at the time, although they hadn’t made much news in the US, they had actually exposed a great deal of wrong doing around the world. They had disclosed documents showing the involvement of government leaders in death squads in Kenya; they had shown the involvement of the Icelandic government in the financial collapse that destroyed that country’s financial security; there was an internet bill being discussed in Australia to shut down websites that were supposedly promoting child pornography, yet secretly on the list of targeted websites were a bunch of political site that had been critical of the Australian government; they had exposed corporate toxic waste dumping in West Africa; the involvement, or the negligence of local officials in Berlin with regard to a trampling at a night club that killed 23 people. So they had been quite active in a whole variety of different ways in exposing wrongdoing.

The one document they had exposed involving the US was a manual at Guantanamo for how prisoners ought to be treated. This manual was nothing very enlightening. We already knew that severe systematic abuse and torture were taking place at that site. But, the mere fact that WL had shown that they were able to start shedding light on some of the world’s most powerful factions, and exposing serious corruption, and had touched a little bit on America’s detention regime, with this one document, was enough for the Pentagon to take them very seriously. So, I wrote at that time about that report, and I had talked about all the potential for good that I thought WL could do. I had encouraged, in the context of my writing about it, [and I also interviewed Julian Assange at the time], I encouraged my readers to donate money to the group because there were indications that they were somewhat impeded in some of the disclosures they wanted to do because of the lack of resources. I said this would be a great organization to donate your money to. They need it. They look as though they could really achieve a lot of good. And after I wrote that, I received a lot of comments from people via e-mail, from people in person telling me at my attended events, from people in my comment section, American citizens who said the following: “I understand and agree with the idea that WL has a lot of potential to do good, but I’m actually afraid of donating money, because I’m afraid that I’m going to end up on some kind of a list somewhere; or that eventually I will be charged with aiding and abetting, or giving material support to a terrorist group”. This was not one or two people who tended toward the pole of paranoia saying these things. These were very rational people, and there were a lot of them. Some long term readers whom I knew to be quite sober in their thinking. The fear that they were expressing was somewhat pervasive. That, to me, was extraordinarily striking: that these were American citizens who were afraid to donate money to a group whose political aims they supported; who had never been charged with, let alone convicted of any crime who felt like they were going to end up on some kind of government list, or possibly be charged with aiding and abetting or giving material support to terrorism. Although I didn’t find those fears to be completely justifiable, in the sense that I thought those things would happen, I told people that I thought they ought to set those fears aside and donate money anyway, the fact that those fears existed; that that kind of climate of intimidation has been created in the US when it comes to the most basic rights of association and free speech, which are the rights which are implicated by donating money to a political organization that you support; that that climate of fear and intimidation had been so great that people were self censoring and relinquishing their own rights was something that perhaps in the abstract I had known about in the past, but really illustrated to me just how pervasive that had become.

Over the course of the next several months, because I was writing about WL more and more, especially as they began releasing the news making videos and documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and I began engaging in debates on behalf of WL and arguing with those who were claiming they were a force for evil and should be punished and prosecuted, I got to know the people who were involved in WL, either currently or in the past. Especially among the people who had once worked with WL, but then stopped, there was a common theme that they all sounded when you spoke to them about why they stopped working with WL, including some who had been very high up in the organization hierarchy and who were well resourced, and people who are citizens of European countries. What they said, almost to a person about why they stopped being involved in WL, and what a lot of people who still work with WL will tell you about why they are contemplating no longer working with WL is they will say: “I am extremely supportive of the organization’s aims and mission, I am proud to have been a part of the things they have done thus far, but I have a paralyzing fear that one day, my government is going to knock on my door and not charge me with a crime [that I can confront and am willing to deal with], but they’re going to knock on my door and tell me they are extraditing me to the US”.

In other words, the great fear of almost every person now or previously involved in WL is that they’re going to end up in the custody of the American Justice system, because of the black hole of due-process-free punishment that they’ve seen created and that is sustained for foreign nationals accused of crimes against US National security, because of the way in which people are disappeared without recourse to courts or any political protest.

It’s amazing that we have spent decades, probably since the end of WWII, lavishing praise on ourselves as the model of justice for the entire world, the leaders of the free world, lecturing everybody else about what their system of justice ought to be, and yet the fear that so many people around the world have, is that they will end up in the grip of American justice. That to me was extraordinarily telling, as well.

[30:05] Then, over the course of the next couple of months, when the controversy over WL was really escalated by the release of the diplomatic cables, I began doing a lot of public media debates over whether WL was a force for good or a force for evil, or whatever media morality narrative was, and how that was framed. I appeared on countless shows and television networks. The reason I was so ubiquitous doing that isn’t because CNN and MSNBC producers suddenly decided that they really liked me. It was because there were so few people to chose from who were actually defending WL, because the unanimity in the media was essentially that they were demonic and ought to be punished. So, it in order to have a debate where one person was arguing on behalf of WL and one was arguing against it, [it was very easy to find someone who was against it. You could more or less pick a journalist or a political figure out of a hat and that would be accomplished], what was harder was to find people who were willing to defend it. There were some but not many. So, I did a lot of these show, a lot more than I like to do, and is probably healthy for me to do. One of the things that I found, that was sort of striking was, I was usually on the show, the format of the show would be: there would be some journalist or a person who is on TV, an actor on TV playing the role of a journalist [laughter] along with some kind of government official, some like Washington functionary. So, I was on CNN and I debated Jessica Yellin who’s the CNN anchor, along with Fran Townsend, George Bush’s former national security advisor; and I did an NPR show once with Jamie Rubin, who was Madeline Albright’s deputy, and John Burns, the NYT reporter. That was usually the format. I did MSNBC with Jonathan Tapper who’s a journalist who writes for the Washington Post editorial page, and Susan Molinari, a former Republican congresswoman. Literally in every single case, the person who was designated as the journalist, and the person who was there to represent America’s political class thought and argued identically. I mean they were completely indistinguishable in terms of how they thought about WL. They were all in agreement that what WL was doing was awful; that our government had to put a stop to it. The only concern that they had was that the government wasn’t more careful in safeguarding secrets. So, you had people who were claiming to be journalists who were on television outraged that they were learning what the government was doing and furious at the government for not taking better steps to hide those things from them. And you had these debates that would take place and I would be listening to them and I literally couldn’t tell the journalist and the political official apart. And the reason that was so striking to me was because, if you think about it, if you put yourself in the mindset of what a journalist is supposed to be, not what an American journalist is, what an American journalist is supposed to be, what they’re supposed to be interested in, is exposing the secrets of the powerful, especially when the actions which are being undertaken in secret, are corrupt or illegal or deceitful.

What WL is doing is exactly that. It is shedding unprecedented light on what the world’s most powerful corporate and government factions are doing. Any journalist who ever had an inkling of the journalistic spirit, at one point in their life before that all got suffocated, you would think they would look at what WL was doing and reflexively celebrate it. Or at the very least, see the good in it. Yes, that what they are doing is what we are supposed to be doing, which is bringing to the citizens of the world the secrets that governments and corporations are trying to keep to conceal their improper actions. And yet there is almost none of that. I mean, it made sense to me that people in the political class were furious at WL because people in the political class inherently see their own prerogatives as being worth preserving, and they want to be able to operate in secret and think that they ought to be. But, the fact that journalists were not only on board with that, but were really leading the way was really remarkable to me as I did these interviews because there wasn’t even really a pretense of separation between how journalists think and how political functionaries think. I found that pretty striking as well.

[34:34] A few other aspects to the WL controversy that I think are commonalities in how our political discourse functions: One of the things you had was almost a full and complete bipartisan consensus that WL was satanic. I don’t think there has been a single democratic of republican politician of any national notoriety [other than I think Ron Paul and a couple of very liberal members of the house] who were willing to say that maybe WL isn’t all evil in a very cautious way. Other than that, you basically had a complete consensus as always happens when it comes to national security controversies. Almost nobody was willing to defend WL.

Then what you had was a faction on the American right, and some democrats as well, who very casually, almost like you would advocate a change in the capital gains tax, or some added safeguards for environmental protection, would go on television and start calling for Julian Assange’s death: like I think we need to send drone attacks, I think we need to treat him the way that Al Qaeda is treated. And maybe I was being a little unfair to Democrats and the debated between Republicans and Democrats were having at this time was should we kill Julian Assange or just throw him in prison for the rest of his life, even though he hasn’t actually committed any discernable crime? But the ease and the casualness with which our political culture entails calls for people’s death, you know we ought to kill this person even without any due process we ought to use drones, we ought to treat him the way we treat Al Qaeda, and the like I think is also reflective of how our political culture functions.

Couple other things that happened that I think are quite common which WL sheds light on: One of the things that started happening was that you have members of congress of both parties writing laws, now to vest the government with greater power to prosecute people for espionage, and for other serious felony offenses for leaking classified information. So this is very typical when a new demon arises and here we have Julian Assange and WL the villain of the month, immediately the government starts thinking about how they can opportunistically manipulate the hatred, the two minute hate sessions that arise out of this new villain to develop and seize more power for itself. And you very much see that.

And the last point that happens that is, I think, quite significant, is, and this is what David was talking about in his introduction, was the complete manipulation of law to advance the interest of the powerful. One of the things that I found to be striking about what’s happened with WL is, there’s this group, Anonymous is what they call themselves, and they’re essentially a group of mostly adolescent hackers who have quite advanced computer skills for doing things like shutting down websites or slowing them down. What they decided they were going to do was they were going to take a position in defense of WL. They said that they were going to target for cyber attacks and other kinds of cyber warfare any companies that in response to the government’s pressure terminated their services with WL. There were a whole variety of companies that obediently complied with the government’s request to cut off all services of WL: Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, Amazon, all of these companies made it impossible for WL to stay on line or for them to conduct financial transactions to receive donations. Anonymous began to target these websites. And the attacks were fairly primitive. They slowed those sites down for a few hours. Not very much damage. And yet, the Justice Department treated them like this Pearl Harbor on the internet. Eric Holder said “We are going to devote unlimited resources to getting to the bottom of Anonymous and who they are”. Turned out to be a couple of 16 year olds in The Netherlands and Belgium doing the clichéd operating from their mother’s basement type thing, but the fact that they had targeted corporate power on behalf of WL, an enemy of the US government, meant that the full force of the law was unleashed in order to punish them.

But, a couple of weeks before those Anonymous attacks, there was a far more sophisticated, and a far more serious and dangerous cyber attack that was launched at WL, that basically resulted in their being removed from the entire network of websites for the US, the entire website that hosts all internet websites for the US could no longer sustain those attacks that were being launched in a way that would safeguard their other customers. So they removed WL from the internet. That was when they had to search around and ultimately find a different url. Now that attack was really worthy of serious investigation because the complexity of the attack was really unlike anything that had really been seen before in terms of being right out in the open.

And yet, so far, for some really strange reason, even thought that attack was every bit as illegal as the attacks that Anonymous had launched that merited such scrutiny and investigation from the Justice Department, Eric Holder, the Justice Department, the Obama Administration has never once vowed to get to the bottom of who might be responsible for the attacks that knocked WL off line, even thought they’re much more dangerous.

And so, what this really reflects is that the law becomes a weapon for the US government for corporate power to use, to punish those who stand up to it he way anonymous did in a very mild and modest way. And yet, at the same time, the law shields those who are in power or who are operating on behalf of those in power of to advance their interests as illustrated by the fact that whoever was responsible for the attack on WL, whether a government organization or a corporate entity, or some combination of both, broke serious laws, committed serious cyber felonies, and, yet, will never be investigated, let alone prosecuted by the Justice Department.

And it’s all of these ingredients that I’ve just described that WL revealed, and that has shaped the outcome and driven the WL controversy are the same things I would talk about no matter what political controversy you asked me to talk about, whether it be Civil Liberties erosions; or what’s happening in Wisconsin, or anything else. And that’s why I say that the title, the topic, the individual episode that you chose to focus on, is valuable only as a window into how our political culture, how political factions all function.

The last point I want to make is why I think that WL is such a vital topic, not just in terms of the light that it shines on our political process, but in terms of what’s at stake.

I actually do believe that the battle over WL will easily be one of the most politically consequential conflicts of our generation, if not THE most politically consequential. I think that we’re just at the very insipient stages of this conflict, and that how it plays out is still very much still to be determined. I think what’s at stake is whether or not the secrecy regime that is the linchpin for how the American government functions, will continue to be invulnerable and impenetrable or whether it will start to be meaningfully breached. And I also think that internet freedom, the ability to use the internet for what has always been its ultimate promise, which is to have citizens band together in a way that no longer needs large corporate and institutional resources, to subvert and undermine the most powerful factions to provide a counter weight to them, whether that internet freedom will be preserved.

And this is why I think that: we have in general, when you talk about politics and you look at political discussions, what typically is focused on are these internecine day-to-day conflicts that are partisan in nature. What are Republicans and Democrats bickering about? What reason today is the left and the right at one another’s throat? What is it that’s dividing the citizenry and making the citizenry divisive and unable to band together to defend their common interest? These are the kinds of controversies that fill cable news shows; that occupy pundits and political chatterers, and all of that.

By and large, all of that is completely inconsequential. In fact, I shouldn’t say that. It actually is consequential. It has a purpose. The purpose is to distract all of us from what really matters in terms of how the government functions. What matters in terms of how the government functions has very little to do with whether Democrats or Republicans win the last election, or the next election. And it has very little to do with who sits in the White House, what individual occupies the oval office. I don’t mean to suggest those things are irrelevant, they’re not, they matter in marginal and sometimes more ways.

But what they don’t have anything to do with is the permanent power faction that runs the US and runs the governments with which the US is allied, this consortium of government and corporate power that I talked about earlier. What’s really interesting is, it used to be case that if you stood up in front of an audience and said that what really is running the government of the US is not the political parties that win elections, but this secret consortium of government and corporate power, a lot of people would look at you like you were some sort of fringe paranoid maniac, it would be a self marginalizing act to talk about that. But I don’t actually think that’s the case very much longer, and that’s because a lot of mainstream sources have confronted those realities, because it’s impossible to turn away from them.

I mean you could of course go back to the famous 1956 farewell speech of Dwight Eisenhower, who is hardly a fringe figure. He was a four star, a five star general, and a two term elected Republican president and he warned about exactly that. He called it the military industrial complex, of course. But he described how the merger of government and corporate power in the national security state context was threatening to subvert democracy because it would become vastly more powerful and unaccountable than anything that was actually still responsive to democratic forces. And yet, it’s odd that something that someone like Dwight Eisenhower warned about became for a long time taboo to talk about. I think in the post 9/11 world, this merger has become so overt, so conspicuous, so pervasive that its impossible to hide it any longer.

So earlier this year, or the end of last year, the Washington Post had a three part series that got very little attention because it covered this topic too well. People just didn’t know quite how to process it, especially people who go on television and talk about the news of the day. It was called Top Secret America. It was written by Dana Priest, who’s one of the widely hailed and highly decorated establishment reporters, along with William Arkin. What it describes is exactly what I just described, which is a vast apparatus of corporate and government power that is so unaccountable and so secret and so sprawling and so powerful that not even the people ostensibly running it know what it is composed of or what it does or what it entails. This is the faction that is truly exerting power in the US when it comes to most of the significant policies.

So, people become confused, and frustrated and angry and confounded and disheartened when they elect a Democratic president like Barack Obama who ran on a platform of change and delivered so little of it; and who continues to extend and bolster the very policies against which he railed while he was running.

There are lots of reasons why that is, and part of it is because politicians are inherently unprincipled, and get into office and want to preserve their own power. They think that the power that other people exercise which was a threat, in their hands is not only something that could be trusted but could be used as a force for good. All of those reasons are true. But, what is really true is that this powerful faction that exists, this enormous consortium of government and corporate power is at least as powerful and probably much more so, than any single politician, even the “most powerful man on earth” or whatever we call the president these days. So, even if he wanted to change these things, and I think he doesn’t, even if he wanted to he probably couldn’t.

What this faction relies upon more than anything else to preserve their power and to carry out the actions they undertake, is this wall of secrecy, this regime of secrecy. It is that secrecy that enables them to operate in the dark and therefore operate without any constraints, moral, ethical, legal, or any other kind. This is not a new concept. If you look at what political theorists have always talked about for centuries, if you look at what the founders talked about, the gravest threat to democracy and to a healthy government is excessive secrecy, because people are human beings, and human nature is such that if you operate in the dark, you will start to abuse your power.

That’s why, central to the whole design of our country, was that there would be these institutions that would prevent that from happening. They would be adversarial to political power. You would have the Congress that would investigate and exert oversight. We would have the media, the glorious Fourth Estate that would serve as a bulwark against abuse. We would have the Courts that would ultimately hold people accountable under the constraints of law at least, if nothing else worked. And each of these institutions have utterly failed, especially, though not only, especially in the post 9-11 world to bring about any meaningful transparency to what the national security and the surveillance state is doing. They operate fully without accountability, without constraint and with total compunction to do what they want.

[49:22] So, WL, is one of the very, very, very few entities that has proven itself capable of breaching that wall of secrecy. That is why it is one of the very few entities that has finally put some degree of meaningful fear in the heart of this national security state. For that reason and that reason alone is all I need. That is why I think a defense of WL has become so vital and so crucial and such an obligation on the part of anybody who believes that this regime of secrecy is so harmful.

Now if you look at the instances of serious government abuse over the past decade, and even longer, what you’ll find is that the lynchpin, the enabler for all of them is secrecy. So, if you look at the Bush Administration’s creation of a worldwide torture regime, or its spying on American citizens without the warrants required by law, or Dick Cheney meeting with energy executives early on to formulate the nation’s energy policies to benefit only that group, or how the government excluded any dissenting intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq war to make the case as though it was somehow airtight, or even going back to Viet Nam, when the government knew the war they were waging was unwinable, even as they were assuring the American public they were making progress and then Daniel Ellsberg released the secret documents showing that. It’s always secrecy that enables this level of abuse. It’s the same thing in all of the animal kingdom. Cockroaches at night scamper around in the kitchen and the minute you turn on the light, they run and hide. That is what transparency and light does to people.

One of the things about it is you can have whistleblowers, and we have had whistleblowers without WL, but there are a couple of features about WL that make it so unique and such a threat. One of the unique features is that it provides full anonymity. It doesn’t even know the identity of the people who are leaking to it, unlike say, the NYT, which always knows the identity of their sources and thus could be compelled at some point to disclose it to the government. And they have been compelled to do so. WL does not know the identity of who it is who’s leaking to them, and unless somebody goes around and boasts that they are the leaker it’s virtually impossible for the government, no matter how much force they bring to bear, to discover the identity

More importantly, WL is a stateless organization. Unlike the NYT or the Washington Post or The Guardian or Der Spiegel, or El Pais or any of the other newspapers around the world, WL does not physically exist in any state, and therefore can’t be subject to the laws of that state. It can’t, therefore, be dragged into court and compelled to disclose information about their sources, even if they had it. But, what’s more important still about this statelessness is that unlike American newspapers, which will acknowledge as Bill Keller, the executive editor of the NYT recently did, in an article he wrote about WL, they will acknowledge that even though they try to be objective, their allegiance is a patriotic and nationalistic one. They are loyal to the US government, and their editorial judgments are shaped by what advances or undermines American interests. They therefore don’t disclose things many times on the ground that disclosure will harm American policy, even though that policy is improper. So, the NYT learned that the Bush Administration was spying without warrants and they sat on that story for a year because Bush told them to, until Bush was safely reelected. Or, the Washington Post learned that the CIA was maintaining a network of CIA black sites throughout Eastern Europe, a violation of every precept of international law on American treaties. Although they finally wrote about it, they concealed the specific nations where those black sites were located because the CIA told them that if they disclosed the nations it would prevent them from continuing to operate those prisons. So they withheld the information that enabled that illegal policy to continue.

WL doesn’t do that. They have no allegiance to the US government. Their allegiance is to transparency and disclosure. So, sources know that if they disclose something to the NYT, it’s very likely that the NYT will conceal it, or will edit snippets of it and release only those in order to protect the interests and policies of the US government. WL will not have that allegiance. They have a true journalistic purpose which is to bring transparency to the world.

And then, finally what you see is the reform potential with WL. The amount of information which has been released over the past year is extraordinary. And although journalists have talked about how there’s quote nothing new in these documents was the claim made for a while to dismiss its importance. On one hand WL is a great threat to national security and compromising all that was good in the world. On the other hand nothing they were disclosing was remotely new and it was all everything we already knew. That conflict never got reconciled. It didn’t need to.

But, the reality is that the documents WL has disclosed has not only made huge headlines in the US, but in almost every country around the world. What’s really interesting is that Bill Keller, the afore mention NYT executive editor, although a hardcore critic of WL, in that article said, that some of the documents released by WL, allegedly disclosed to WL by Bradley Manning, exposed just how corrupt and opulent the royal family in Tunisia was, and that that helped fuel and accelerate the uprising in Tunisia, which was of course the catalyst for the rest of the uprisings in the middle east. So, if you look at the chat logs that have been disclosed, where Bradley Manning supposedly confessed that he was the source of these documents, what he says about why he did that was that he believed that only WL would provide the level of disclosure needed to bring about the kind of transparency that would make people, not just in the US, but in the world, realize the level and magnitude of corruption of the people in power. And that this could not help but trigger very serious uprisings and reforms: exactly what is happening is exactly what he said he hoped to achieve through this leak. That’s why what David said in his introduction sounds like it may be satirical or hyperbole, but I think it’s really true. I’ve said the same thing, as well, that if Julian Assange or Bradley Manning were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, it would certainly be a far more justifiable award than the one that was given in 2009 to the American president.

I have one more point that I just want to make, that I think underscores this whole controversy. And that is, as I said earlier, that I saw the WL controversy as a war over the regime of secrecy and whether it would be preserved or subverted and over internet freedom as well. The people who are most threatened by WL are well aware of the fact that you can not stop the technology that WL has developed. Even if you did send a drone to kill Julian Assange and everybody else associated with WL, the template already exists. It’s not all that difficult to replicate WL’s system for anonymity and for disclosure. In fact, there are other entities already popping up that will simply substitute for WL and replace what they’re doing. The Pentagon knows that. The National Security State knows that. They know that they can’t create secrecy practices that will protect them against these kinds of disclosures, as well. So, their strategy is to escalate the climate of intimidation and deterrence, so that would-be whistle blowers in the future think twice and a third time and a fourth time when they discover illegal and deceitful actions about exposing it to the world.

So you see, in response to WL, and a variety of other whistle blowers, the Obama administration waging what is clearly the most unprecedented aggressive war to prosecute whistle blowers, people who exposed waste and corruption and law breaking in the Bush era, have been prosecuted with extraordinary aggression by the Obama DoJ, even though Obama, when he ran for president, hailed whistle blowers as patriotic and courageous, and said that whistle blowing needs to be fostered and protected, he’s currently heading a war, the likes of which we have never seen, to put people who whistle blow, who expose the wrong doing of the powerful, into prison, and to expose who they are and detect them.

On top of that, you have a war being waged on WL. The Justice department is obsessed with the idea of prosecuting WL, even though they have done nothing that newspapers everyday also don’t do, which is expose government secrets that they receive from their source. And they’ve done things like subpoena the twitter accounts of anyone associated with WL including a sitting member of the Icelandic Parliament who was once associated with WL, causing a little mini diplomatic crises, at least as much of a crises as can be caused with Iceland.

You see as well what has happened to Bradley Manning, which David described and I’ve written endlessly about, and won’t repeat, but, what they want essentially to do, is to take that climate of fear that I began by talking about, that made so many people who read what I wrote petrified of donating money to WL, even though they have the absolute legal and constitutional right to do so. They want to take this climate of fear and drastically expand it. This is what the Bush torture and detention regime were about. Everybody knows that if you torture people you don’t get good information. It was never about that. Disappearing people and putting them into orange jumpsuits, and into legal black holes and water boarding them and freezing them and killing detainees was about signaling to the rest of world that you can not challenge or stand up to American power, because if you do, we will respond without constraints, and there is nothing anybody can or will do about it. It was about creating a climate of repression and fear to deter any would be dissenters or challengers to American power. And that is what this war on whistle blowing and this war on WL is about as well.

They don’t want, more than anything, for anybody to get the idea that they can start doing what WL is doing, to start exposing those in power who engage in wrong doing. That is their biggest fear, because they know that if that mechanism exists, they can no longer continue to do the things that they are doing. So, this war on WL, this war on whistle blowers, is about forever ending really the one avenue that we’ve had over the past decade for learning about what our government and their corporate partners do, which is the process of whistle blowing. If they succeed, that regime of secrecy will become much more intensified. That deterrent will endure for a long time. But if WL is successfully defended, if these efforts are warded off, then one of the most promising means of bringing accountability and transparency that we’ve seen in a very long time, will be preserved. And that’s why I talk about WL so much, why I write about it so much and why I think it’s so important.

So, thank you very much for listening. [1:01:45]

Please don't miss the follow-up discussion with Glenn and David Barsamian. It can be found here.

With much thanks to "harpie" for the transcript.

Tom Delay goes down for 3

2011-01-15T17:27:00.002-05:00

But who is the Capo di tutti capi?

Inquiring minds want to know.

This whole story reads like an article about a takedown of the Gambino family.

Delay is thug, a hood. But he is just a bag man.

Anyone think that the rot stops with Tom?

If it's wrong to take a bribe, then it's wrong to give one. When will they indict the lobbyists?

"Gun" Violence in Pakistan

2011-01-15T16:15:00.004-05:00

Obama is very very upset over the shooting victims in Arizona. Especially the kids. The speech was good.

Many dead kids in Pakistan due to Predator drone attacks. Very few alleged al Qaeda dead. This year Predator attacks will be stepped up to include militants.

What could go wrong?

http://jahanzebjz.tumblr.com/post/2753963879/victims-of-us-drone-attacks-
in-pakistan-drone

President Obama has already ordered twice as many unmanned drone attacks as his predecessor, George W. Bush. Few notice and even fewer care.

Guns don't kill people. Predator drone attacks kill people.

Shootout in Arizona

2011-01-15T15:51:00.001-05:00

November 1881 Ordinance No. 9

"To Provide against Carrying of Deadly Weapons" (effective April 19, 1881).

Section 1. "It is hereby declared to be unlawful for any person to carry deadly weapons, concealed or otherwise [except the same be carried openly in sight, and in the hand] within the limits of the City of Tombstone.

Section 2: This prohibition does not extend to persons immediately leaving or entering the city, who, with good faith, and within reasonable time are proceeding to deposit, or take from the place of deposit such deadly weapon.

Section 3: All fire-arms of every description, and bowie knives and dirks, are included within the prohibition of this ordinance."

Ordinance No. 7, Section 1:

"Any establishment, house of prostitution or other place open to the public and it shall be the duty of any officer to enter such place and at once arrest such persons as he may then find engaged in or causing such breach of the peace." (effective April 12, 1881).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfight_at_the_O.K._Corral

The gunfight at the O.K. Corral actually started because Cowboys (the Cowboys were a gang) were trying to come into Tombstone with guns. That was not allowed. That was the proximate cause of the fight, but the background is they hated each other for a variety of reasons.

It's 120 years later, and these asses are still arguing about guns.

Cutting Spines, the logical terminus of "Getting Tough"

2010-08-21T20:44:00.018-04:00

A Saudi judge is reported to have asked hospitals if it is possible to cut the spinal cord of the man, found guilty of paralysing another man in a fight -- BBC

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has passed legislation that reflects his "get tough" position on crime. Getting tough would imply that there is some ultimate standard that we are not applying, some perfect punitive goal that would constitute ultimate justice. So what is the logical consequence of getting tough? Stop me if you see anything on this list that Harper or Vic Toews would not approve of.

Death penalty for murder? Check.

Death penalty for 'rape'? Check.

Life sentences for serious crimes? Check.

3 times you're out? Check.

No parole? Check.

Harsh conditions in prison? Check.

Prison rape an acceptable part of the punishment Check.

Forced labour - check Corporal punishment? Check.

Bad food, starvation diet? Check.

No tv's. Check.

Severing someone's spine because he paralyzed a man in a fight? Check?

Severing spines, eye for an eye, = getting tough? Shocking yes, but how far off the mark is it from Harper's 'dream' system? I don't think that Harper would go so far as that, nor would most Canadians. But this is the logical consequence of path we are on. If Harper gets his American style justice system we might not be severing spines but we will be executing people.

The illustration used for this story is an official US government image of the gurney used to perform executions at Terre Haute Penitentiary by lethal injection. Lethal injection is a perfect example of the medicalization of punishment.
PD-USGOV.

Great infographic on the failed drug war

2010-07-14T21:41:00.005-04:00

The truth about the war on drugs is obvious. It's failed. In the process it has destroyed many people.

[Via: Medical Coding Certification]

See also: Glenn Greenwald, Cato report on the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal.

On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were "decriminalized," not "legalized." Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense. Glenn Greenwald

I just got buzzed or, Help! I am being followed!

2010-02-11T12:55:00.003-05:00

If Google went down tomorrow, I'd pretty much have to kill myself. I use Gmail for my business because it available to me anywhere, and my ability to organize and integrate it with my other data and apps is stunningly useful. And no spam.

I use Google Street View to check out businesses that might have a use for my rear projection digital signage business line, which is designed to be displayed in windows. I "go" down the street looking for businesses that have a suitable window and then I contact them. Saves hours of riding around, and it's free.

I have a lot of my business information and important documents stored on Google docs, which I also use to collaborate on projects. This blog is on Google. I use their calendar, their "to do" list. It just goes on and on.

Today I hooked up Google Buzz, it was easy, too easy, just like the rest of the Google happy dust. To my surprise (shock?) I am being "followed" by someone I don't know - but who once posted on this blog. And with several hundred other "contacts" I am sure that this is just the beginning.

What can he see? According to Google:

"Your Google Reader shared items, Picasa Web public albums, and Google Chat status messages will automatically appear as posts in Buzz. To edit your connected sites or change privacy settings, view connected sites."

Is even this too much? Sure I have public Picasa albums, I use Google reader (Feedly actually, but they are integrated into the matrix, sorry Google), but I don't know... this just feels invasive.

What really bothers me though, is that unlike our other shadowy masters, Steve and Bill, I know almost nothing about about Sergei and Larry, other than they are very smart and very very rich. Jesus, they might even be Republicans! Are you scared yet?

"Don't be evil", Google motto.

Larry and Sergei have information, lots of it. Absolute power and all that.

Google indexes every word on every web page in the world.

Google, or "The Google" as I like to call them - is a problem.

Every email I send, they store. Every email I get, they store. Their robots read my mail to serve me ads. You too. Is that all they do? Who knows? Google does!

Has Barack Obama ever visited bigtits.com, or made some intemperate remarks about white people in his emails? I have no idea, but Sergei and Larry do, and if he did, they could, if they so chose, blackmail him, with that one little data point, they would, in effect, own the President. You too of course, same for all the senators and members of the congress, one false step on line and the Google has got your number.

They have all the passwords. They know where you went and what you searched for. And it's not going away. Can Larry and Sergei resist using the 'ring of power' , the largest database of personal information ever assembled? Are they as good and Bilbo and Frodo?

If you don't believe me, just Google it.

Gil Scott Heron, extraordinary new recording

2010-02-09T11:00:00.002-05:00

I don't work for the record companies, so it's just from me when I say that this new album by Gil Scott Heron is something very special. Have a listen. Then have a Listen.

Happy New Year. Real men go to Sana´a

2010-01-08T17:32:00.002-05:00

It's a new year. A new decade. Still no agreement on climate change. Obama is still bombing, most lately in Yemen, the new front in the now official "war on al-Qaeda".

And it's been almost a decade since 911, and still no new investigation. Still though, there is hope.

Someone just sent me this, the latest "Hitler Rants..." video, which is well on it's way to being the most edited video clip in history.

For those of you how believe Obama will get rid of nukes or something... Onward to Mars!

2009-10-12T17:33:00.002-04:00

It's an absolutely hilarious idea. Obama is going to get rid of nukes! When? How?

Remember when someone told Bush that Mars was a planet, and that people could go there, and he said that sounded swell, and that America should go! This is like that. Bullshit.

A lofty sounding "goal" for the proles to chew on. Nothing more.

Of course the irony, the cosmic irony, is that contrary to popular belief, nuclear weapons actually do prevent war! Does anyone here doubt that WWIII would not have broken out over: Korea, Suez, Vietnam, Cuba, etc if it were not for the fact that had the central actors actually had gone at one another, we'd all be dead? Why has North Korea not been attacked? Nuclear weapons! Why did America not attack China? Yup. Why did America not attack Russia? Same reason!

WWII is pretty good proof that we did not need nukes to wipe out civilization. The most deaths caused by bombing were not at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the most deaths caused by bombing were at Dresden, and Tokyo. Today, we can kill much better than that, a global war, even without nuclear weapons would easily destroy billions of lives, not to mention our environment.

No, nuclear weapons have prevented, not once but many times the utter destruction of the Earth. Obama probably does not know this, but it doesn't matter because he is entirely insincere about eliminating nuclear weapons. It's impossible for a dozen good reasons, and that he does know.

If Obama actually is serious about getting rid of nuclear weapons, his idiocy will result in WWIII and be the death of us all. And for that he gets a Peace Prize?

reposted from Salon

Attack on Iran - Are "secret sites" the New Anthrax?

2009-09-28T00:33:00.007-04:00

I have been predicting it for years. As have many others, but the attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities hasn't happened. Why?

There is a debate over the attack, even in Israel. Even there, the serious military types worry that a strike, (actually weeks and weeks of strikes - see Kosovo) might be enough to trigger an Arab nations onslaught. And they worry about the hundreds of SRBM's that Iran could credibly place on Israeli targets. Never mind the certain disruption in oil supplies which would trigger a global economic catastrophe, which would be exponentially worse than the current one. And did I mention that Iran has dozens, if not hundreds, of hypersonic Russian and Chinese Sunburn, Mosquit and Silkworm ship killer missiles that could credibly destroy many of the American ships now operating in the Persian gulf?

It also now seems that even though Cheney supported an attack, Bush did not. That matters. Without US acquiescence at least, and support at best, any Israeli attack would fail. So America is critical. And to date, no green light has been given.

This does not mean that the fanatics, religious and otherwise, who occupy the Israeli government, won't make the calculation that if they attack, the United States MUST come in on their side to avoid, wait for it, ANOTHER HOLOCAUST.

Meh, I tend to depend on the good old MAD doctrine which worked so well with those "crazy", "ëvil" Russkies. All this talk about a "suicidal" leadership is just propaganda. As Sting said, even the Russians love their children too.

Is Ajad nuts enough to do it anyway? I don't think so, aside from the fact that he lacks the political power to order a strike, AND IS YEARS AWAY FROM HAVING A WEAPON! The real question is, Does Khameni want one? And the answer is that is that the Supreme Leader has declared atomic weapons "unislamic" .

Khamenhi knows that it would be the literal end of Iran, and even if the former mayor of Tehran wanted to nuke Israel, the military would never comply. The Ayatollahs would have to be mad to support such an adventure, and they are not, despite all the press to the contrary. They would be annihilated as Hilary said. In fact if Iran were to nuke Israel, even I would support glassing the entire country as a lesson to the next lot of maniacs.

The real danger will come from those "serious" journalists and politicians who will try to convince us that a "limited" strike is possible, just like the good old days at Osirak. Only those days are gone.

I think the real "fear" of an Iranian bomb is that the West and America in particular, will have to treat them as equals, and not "little people" who we can lord over and order around as we do with so many nuclear armless countries around the world.

So it's on again, off again. The name of the game is Maniacs/fundamentalists vs the Sane. Unfortunately for us all, there are many pushing for an attack, whatever the cost, it is up to we the people, to push back even harder, with facts and appeals to morality and common sense, thin as the latter are on the ground. I see no other way forward.

Sibel Edmonds on Mike Malloy, 911 bombshell, Bin Laden worked for the west

2009-08-29T23:18:00.004-04:00

Sibel Edmonds, former FBI translator, and some say the "most gagged woman in America" has just revealed on the Mike Malloy show, to guest host Brad Friedman, that Osama Bin Laden had "intimate relations" with the intelligence community right up to 911.

Lots wrong with that picture.

http://letsibeledmondsspeak.blogspot.com/2009/07/sibel-edmonds-on-mike-malloy.html

More at Blad blog: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7332

Actual interview here: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7406

Unobtrusive. Pervasive. Lethal

2009-06-18T01:54:00.005-04:00

MAV's micro air vehicles. AKA suicide bombers that can fly!

Remote controlled killing machines change everything! Going to war just got easy, and cheap! Does this mean more war? You bet!

http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/flight-international/2008/12/video-suicide-micro-air-vehicl.html

Most people think aircraft when they think of remotely operated battle bots, but soon land and sea bots they will be everywhere as well. If you think that remotely controlled killing machines are frightening, just wait till the autonomous killing machines come on line!

UPDATE: "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security launched another unmanned surveillance aircraft over the Canadian border on Monday, this time in the Great Lakes area, to try to stem the flow of drugs, migrants and terrorists into the country, U.S. officials told CBC News." http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2009/06/22/drone-great-lakes022.html

Robot tanks next? You betcha! The annexation of Canada just got easier! Good job Obama!

Fabled Enemies -- Really Excellent Video on the 911 Attacks

2009-02-21T14:18:00.004-05:00

From Jason Bermas, a co-producer of the legendary, if flawed, "Loose Change" series. Unlike others, Bermas focuses on evidence that the hijackers had training at American military bases, and high level assistance obtaining American visas.

Comprehensive, mesmerizing, and chock a block with evidence and interviews.

Full review here.

9/11 Truth, Lies @ Salon

2009-01-23T23:09:00.008-05:00

I often post over at Unclaimed Territory, Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon.com.

Oftentimes, the subject of 9/11 Truth comes up. Glenn is not too keen on this as it is disruptive and generally "off topic". And as he says it quickly degenerates into a shouting match between the two opposing camps.

So today I offered to let people who want to discuss this in a more appropriate venue come here to Contumacious to discuss and of course YELL!

It's all good. Let the chips fall where they may.

My position is pretty clear, I don't buy the official story. I have no clear idea how they did it, as I am not privy to all the facts or the evidence, but I am sure that any good theory has to explain the facts, and my reading is that the official story fails to do this in many many ways.

So if anyone from Salon, or anywhere else for that matter, has something to say. Please feel free to say it here.

UPDATE
Some interesting links:

Operation Northwoods, the first draft for the 911 attack? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

Pilots for 911 Truth: http://pilotsfor911truth.org/

Prof. David Ray Griffin video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8797525979024486145&hl=en

Architects for 911 Truth: http://www.ae911truth.org/

UPDATE 2

OPERATION

Operation Northwoods, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war." - James Bamford, Body of Secrets

A big objection to 911 being an "inside job" is the sheer size of the operation, and the ability of the conspirators to maintain secrecy after the fact. The truth is we don't know how many people had to be in on it, because we don't know exactly what happened. It is true that in the past we have things like the Manhattan Project that even Harry Truman knew nothing about until he became President.

Operation Northwoods is not a conspiracy theory, it happened but was rejected by President Kennedy. What this teaches us is that there were elements within the military, indeed the leadership of the military Admiral Leimnitzer was prepared to

1) Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio.
(2) Land friendly Cubans in uniform "over-the-fence" to stage attack on base.
(3) Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.
(4) Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans).
(5) Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires.
(6) Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage).
(7) Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. Some damage to installations.
(8) Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City.
(9) Capture militia group which storms the base.
(10) Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires -- napthalene.
(11) Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims (may be in lieu of (10)).
And this is just a partial list! If you want to read the whole story go here.

Did they think they could keep this a secret? Yes. Did they keep it a secret for almost 50 years? You bet.
The parallels between what happened and what was planned in America, by Americans, in 1962 are massive.javascript:void(0)

Update 2
Excellent video that documents the use of Thermate at the WTC.
H/T Frank!

Gaza

2009-01-10T15:21:00.003-05:00

Click to enlarge

Bush may be Indicted for Murder in Vermont

2008-10-29T22:45:00.004-04:00

Charlotte Dennett is running for state Attorney General in Vermont. If she wins she will appoint Vincent Bugliosi as a special prosecutor to prosecute George Walker Bush with multiple homicides. Bugliosi is best known for his successful prosecution of Charles Manson for murder. Since then he has successfully prosecuted 26 murders and has gotten convictions on a 105 out of 106 felonies. On Mike Malloy tonight he said that believes that he can win this case as well. Let's hope he's correct.

Click here to visit her site.

Zaynab Khadr Hunger Strike Enters 3rd week

2008-10-21T10:20:00.010-04:00

Zaynab Khadr has now been on a hunger strike for over 2 weeks, she is doing this in one of the most public places in Canada, yet, this story has received almost no press coverage -- beyond some hateful speech on a few conservative to right wing blogs. I find this mystifying, whatever ones politics -- this a newsworthy story. Under other circumstances, Omar's plight would be a Hollywood movie, and on the nightly news. But it's not.

This says a lot about Canada, our shift to the right, our fear of the other, our obliviousness to our duties under international law and our abject failure to live up to the principles of basic Canadian decency. It also a reflection of the extent that American conservative Republican party style politics has crept into Canada. Canada remains the only country not to demand that the Americans repatriate their nationals from Guantanamo. England did it, Australia did, and those people are now free to walk the streets -- there have been no problems.

Few people in Canada are aware or care about what we, under both Liberal and Conservative governments have done to Canadian citizens who happen to be Muslim in the name of the war or terrorism, or more cynically, in the name of kowtowing to American neocons. Omar Khadr is a young man, and even some of his jailers say that "Omar Khadr is "salvageable" and a "good kid," but a prolonged detention at Guantanamo Bay could turn the Canadian into a radical, say the U.S. soldiers who guard him.

His guards describe him as a "likable, funny and intelligent young man," according to documents from Foreign Affairs, which also state the 21-year-old hopes Canada will get him out of the U.S.-run detention centre in Cuba.

The reports, based on visits to Khadr by department officials in April and March, say American soldiers posted to the detention centre seem "to look out for him by stopping by to chat on occasion, convincing him to meet with his lawyers and encouraging him to 'keep his nose clean.'"

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/06/03/khadr.html

Unfortunately for Omar, Stephen Harper is in the process of "getting tough" on young offenders right here in Canada, he is even proposing life sentences in adult prisons for 14 year olds -- a policy which he has been probably been told by the professionals at Correctional Services Canada, is wrong headed and counter productive. Short of receiving a direct order from his boss, George Bush, there is no chance that Harper will do anything to ensure the release of a child soldier from Guantanamo. As far as he, and sadly, many Canadians are concerned, he should stay there till he dies.

Not all Canadians though, there is one very respected one who disagrees... Romeo Dallaire asks, Who are the real criminals in Omar Khadr's case?

Press Release
Entering her third week at the foot of Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the older sister of Toronto-born Omar Khadr remains on hunger strike in an attempt to solidify public support for her brother to receive a fair trial in Canada. Omar, who speaks five languages fluently, has been held in the American detainment camps in Guantanamo Bay since he was 15. He was captured in 2002 while serving as a translator for Arab militants, after a Special Forces operation left an American soldier critically wounded.

Since his imprisonment, his case has been plagued by allegations of torture, mistreatment and falsified military records doctored to make him appear guilty of the crimes of those adults around him. His older sister Zaynab has spent years campaigning for his return to Canada, but has met fierce opposition from both sides of the political spectrum.

The family, who voted for Stephen Harper, has been condemned by the left for comments suggesting they disapproved of Canada's lax drug laws and generous allowances towards homosexuals. Similarly, the right has condemned the family for their anti-war stance and rhetoric suggesting that Omar was justified in any actions he took after six hours of bombardment killed the adults around him. In her weblog detailing each day of her hunger strike, Zaynab detailed visiting the Museum of Civilization last week where she was attracted to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, stating that “if we followed it, we would truly be a great people”. Hosted at TheKhadrLegacy.com, a website built by the family to update both supporters and detractors on the updates in Omar’s case, the weblog also details her Tuesday visit to a Rideau doctor who suggested that fatigue and malnutrition were responsible for her decreased energy and stamina heading into her third week. Challenged by AM640’s John Oakley earlier this week about how far she was willing to take her hunger strike, Zaynab responded that she was willing to go to any length, just as she hoped any Canadian would for their own younger brother. "The split-second decision of a terrified child caught in unimaginable circumstance does not make him a terrorist", opines Zaynab, critical of the common sentiment that her younger brother is a hardened Jihadist. "I just want to be as normal as any normal unknown Canadian", wrote Omar from his prison cell in a letter to the CBC in June. Canada is now the only Western government to support the detainment camps, as even the United States has condemned its own "black hole" in which civil, international and military laws have not applied. Both presidential candidates in the American election this November have said that they intend to close down the Guantanamo camps. Prosecutors, attorneys and defendants have all announced they are boycotting the proceedings, or resigning rather than being forced to serve in a system that has been condemned internationally as a "kangaroo court". The Supreme Court ruled five months ago that Canadian government had acted illegally in the matter of Khadr, by being complicit in the torture of a Canadian citizen. The United Nations, Canadian Bar Assocation, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have all condemned the refusal to provide Khadr a fair trial in a Canadian court. He is the only prisoner to have cooperated fully with authorities, and has begged to be allowed to return to Canada.

The Khadrs’ mother reports feeling torn between her loyalty to her children, and her belief that Zaynab is needlessly risking harm to herself. “She could die and it would make no difference” she says, “Canada is just not going to let him come home”.

How in hell is it that Powell's endorsement means anything to anyone?

2008-10-19T16:30:00.006-04:00

Here's a guy who's been sticking his finger in the wind to find the source of power for decades and then blowing with it. He helped cover up the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and then was absolutely instrumental in lying America into a war that will go down in history as being even more stupid and pointless than Vietnam. People like Powell are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

This is the guy who was waving bottles of fake anthrax around at the UN - remember that? This is the guy who was showing the world pictures of Iraqi mobile bio-labs that we know now (and he knew then) were completely made up! http://www.noahshachtman.com/archives/002725.html

So he is endorsing Obama? In a rational sane America, that would be a bad thing. Who's next? Rumsfeld? Chtheny? Charlie Manson?

It's doublethink of the worst sort. Bush and his crime family are now rightly denigrated for the invasion of Iraq, but somehow Powell escapes the calumny if not blame and then goes on to be seen as some kind of elder statesman, whom you look to for leadership! I find this wrong.

Oh, I know, Powell is really a good man and just did those things because he had to, while he actually worked behind the scenes for good. Just as Obama is excused or even applauded for idiotic and counterproductive statements like saying he would bomb Pakistan, and wants to ramp up, what I guarantee you, is an ANOTHER unwinnable war in Afghanistan because we somehow think he actually has good intentions and is lying just so he can win and then turn into the messiah.

For those who think that an endorsement from that man is a good thing; go ahead and crow over the endorsement of a despicable lackey, serial liar, and war criminal if you like. I just hope you all really enjoy the escalation of the war in Afghanistan and the promised bombing of Pakistan.

For the record I support Obama, but only as the lesser evil.

"Caging" the Vote in Canada

2008-10-17T18:38:00.008-04:00

Due to a weak, essentially unilingual Liberal party leader, Stephane Dion, and a badly timed, poorly communicated "Green Shift" platform, the Conservative Party of Canada, led by Stephen Harper just won a minority government with significantly more seats than before. In fact they are now blathering and ulalating about having a "mandate" to implement their extremist agenda.

At least that is the mainstream view. What is not being discussed is the effect that new regulations had on Canadian would be voters, which required them to provide photo-identification at polling booths. This new regulation was NOT communicated to the public. The first I heard of it was on the day of the election! Even a passport was not sufficient in itself to prove identity! It would have been a simple matter to include this new information on the voting registration card that is sent to all voters, but it was not. Stupidity? Indifference? Incompetence? Not likely.

I have no idea how many Canadians were disenfranchised as a result of that policy, but CBC ran a story on election day where they talked to a number of people who were unable to vote since they were not able to produce their "papers". One disenfranchised voter is too many.

The number one piece of photo ID used in Canada is the drivers licence. So who is least like to have a drivers licence? Answer, poor people, minorities, urban people, and of course, immigrants. Who is least likely to vote for a heartless, love the rich and big business, government? Poor people, minorities, urbanites, and immigrants.

Good job Stephen! You should send those Republican campaign advisers a big bonus! Oh, what's that? You did? Never mind.

Omar Khadr's Sister, Zaynab Khadr, on Hunger Strike, Parliament Hill, Canada

2008-10-14T18:53:00.011-04:00

I spoke with Omar Khadr's older sister Zaynab, today on Parliament Hill. She is on the seventh day of a hunger strike until the Canadian government makes a formal request to the United States government to demand the repatriation of Omar Khadr
(عمر أحمد خضر) to his home in Canada. To it's shame, Canada is the only country in the world that has not asked to have it's nationals in Guantanamo Bay returned.

Even if Khadr is guilty, which is doubtful, he was 15 years old at the time of the alleged (he has never been convicted) offence. Under the Child Soldier Protocol, which both the United States and Canada have ratified, combatants under age 18 cannot be held criminally responsible. The Protocol requires governments to help child soldiers who must be helped to recover and reintegrate into society. It does not specifically bar prosecution of child soldiers but says they should not be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and that they cannot be subjected to life imprisonment without possibility of release. The United States government is seeking life imprisonment for Khadr in a trial which will take place this fall.

I asked her if she was in communication with her brother and she said they can send letters, but it takes a long time and that they are censored. She told me that she would remain on the hill, "as long as it takes".

We will be following this story as it develops so check back soon to read more.

Click here to visit the Khadr families blog and to read Zaynab's thoughts on her hunger strike.

Click here to read "The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr" in Rolling Stone magazine

Update: CBC television will be airing a documentary tonight (Oct. 16, 2008) on the upcoming trial of Omar Khadr.

Update 2: I visited Zaynab again today. She is in good spirits but a little tired and weak. She has not been spoken to by any official, although a few good Canadians took it upon themselves to suggest that she "go back where she came from", not knowing or caring that she, as she told me, was born in Ottawa, so is "as home as I will ever be". She did say that most people were friendly and kind. As we talked she was making simple black felt ribbons with the name "Omar" in white. Zaynab told that me she is afraid that Omar will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Is Civil War Coming to America?

2008-10-11T11:42:00.009-04:00

Obama is ahead in the polls, what happens when he wins? How will this crowd react? Look at face of the man in flag tie when he is asked a question? It is the face of pure hatred. Cons talk about Liberals the way they used to talk about Commies. And who knew that being labeled a "European Socialist" was an insult?

Are the people who support Sarah Palin any different? No, the crowd of Palin supporters in the video below represents the absolute worst of America, the bottom feeders, the creationists, haters, bigots, and maniacs. What struck me is the obvious lack of intellect of the people in the video. I wonder how many in that mob could actually define the word "terrorist" let alone "socialism"? There have always been idiots and yahoos in politics, what's new is the way the Palin/McCain ticket is pandering to them in an apparent attempt to create the conditions for social unrest in America. The title for this post is deliberately provocative, but it is a genuine possibility. Given the apparent seething, roiling hatred we see in this video, I cannot see Obama having any success in his presidency. It is obvious that from the day he takes office he will be under constant vicious attack from people that I can only describe as genuine enemies, not political foes, not opponents, but enemies. The only question is when will the real violence begin?

Update:

I didn't think it could much worse than the hatred and stupidity evinced in the videos above, but it gets worse... The only other question I have, is why do we have to hear about this stuff from Al Jazeera and not CNN?

John McCain's "serious but so far undisclosed ailments"

2008-09-20T10:36:00.009-04:00

According to the erstwhile journalist Eric Margolis, a close friend of McCain's has revealed that McCain has a serious undisclosed illness. Completely unsurprisingly, given the control the oligarchy has over the MSM, you will be hard pressed to find another reference to this report in the corporate media - this despite the fact that the health of a Presidential candidate, is an important issue. Now if his choice for VP was someone competent, serious and intelligent, the fact that he will probably die in office -- might not be so troubling. But as has been amply documented elsewhere, Foxy Palin is an intellectual lightweight, has no relevant experience and has extreme religious beliefs -- there is also very troubling evidence of corruption and a strong tendency toward authoritarianism.

Foxy's relative merits aside, it is bizarre in the extreme that roughly half of America is considering McCain as President. We live in an increasingly complex, technological world, yet McCain does not use a computer! I could not imagine running my business or even my personal life without a computer, yet McCain wants us to believe he can run the country/planet using quill pens, tom tom drums, and carrier pigeons!

McCain's gaffes about the "country"of Czechoslovakia et al, his history as a Viet Cong mouthpiece, (his VC nickname was "Songbird"), his health, his history as a member of the Keating five, and his untreated Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome are extremely troubling, in fact they should be giant red flags to any thinking American. And now we have this interview with Spanish television that shows a man not fit to run a hardware store.

Prosecute George Bush for Murder -- New Site Sends Bugliosi Book to Federal Prosecutors

2008-09-18T00:00:00.013-04:00

Vincent Bugliosi, the man who prosecuted Charlie Manson, says in his new book, "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder" that any Federal DA who has a soldier in his district who has been killed in Iraq, has a perfectly good case for murder given that buhs lied America into war. Unsurprisingly, no DA in America has had the decency, sense, or the gumption to do so. Fed up with this lack of action, Bob Alexander has set up a web site where you can buy a copy of Vinnie's book and have it sent to one of the 2700 federal prosecutors in America in the hope, (faint?) that one of them will get up on their hind legs and take a run at it. It's farking brilliant. We'll see what happens.

If you want to contribute -- please visit the site. Your $15 may be the $15 that finally brings a monster -- who is in the same league as Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein... to justice.

http://prosecutegeorgebush.com/

*UPDATE*
Sept. 20, 2008

Vermont Candidate Pledges to Prosecute Bush

By Greg Guma, Maverick Media, Toward Freedom

Charlotte Dennett, who entered the race for Vermont Attorney General this week, readily admits that it will be an uphill battle. But the Vermont Progressive Party’s candidate does have one thing going for her – an issue with the potential to mobilize voters upset about the Iraq War. At her first press conference, sitting next to renowned prosecutor and author Vincent Bugliosi, she pledged to prosecute George W. Bush for murder if elected and appoint Bugliosi as a special pros.ecutor to take on the job

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/36085

No Politics today, just Maniacs

2008-09-16T15:14:00.008-04:00

Have you ever wanted to say "screw it" and jump off a really high cliff into some whitewater - just to see if you live?

Maybe you've had the impulse to run across a freeway, blindfolded, at rush hour? These guys didn't just dream about it they did it.

They jumped into the darkness and they lived - even though they probably shouldn't have. Are they nuts? Are they stupid? Are they too young to know that they can die? You bet! But for a while they were more alive than most of us will ever be.

.

Mike Malloy's Anti-Obama Rant

2008-08-07T22:22:00.006-04:00

Paul Peete at HuffPo wrote the following about some comments that Mike Malloy made on his radio show...

"The first traitor to the Democratic Presidential nominee with a national microphone made his move to support McCain and urge others to do so. On his radio show , billed as "Speaking Truth to Power," Mike Malloy abandoned all progressive logic as he spent his entire show in a rant against Barack Obama to the amazement of listeners and those who have heard him push for Obama's election. Citing Obama's vote in favor of the FISA law and change of heart on allowing off-shore drilling, Malloy said that Obama would not be able to bring about the change that he has championed and that those who follow him through eight years of failure will allow the Republican fascism to point to that failure as evidence that the government the Republicans have put in place by the Bush/Cheney cannot be undone.

To satisfy his predominantly progressive audience's need to have him not completely go GOP, Malloy stated that he wants Americans to elect a Democratic Congress so that they can have a veto proof majority for, in his reasoning, the President does not pass laws and does not declare wars. So where has he been burying his head while Bush/Cheney set in motion all of the predicates for the current energy gouging and war on a nation that neither attacked us, nor had the capability of doing so.
I never heard of Paul Peete, but I know Mike Malloy, and he is no "traitor" to progressive or liberal causes. His comments about Obama are NOT being correctly interpreted by Peete -- I assume deliberately or as a consequence of his lack of mental acuity.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Malloy is simply taking the long view -- something that the justifiably disillusioned yet over-excited liberal dreamers seem incapable of doing. Obama will fail, and he will fail on many levels, this is his intended role in the great American political psycho-drama as written by the oligarchy.

When I say fail, I mean fail in the sense that he will NOT bring about change, there is no "hope", in fact, I have not heard him say anything that makes me think that there will be change -- nor has he said anything that would give me "hope" -- unless you consider his promises to support Israel unconditionally and to bomb Iran and Pakistan unless they bend to his will, hopeful.

Americans are being suckered again. Obama will change nothing, the depth, breadth and extent of the problems facing America, exceed his capacity to correct, even if we accept the dubious premise that he actually wants to.

Electing McSame with a Dem majority in the House and Senate -- as Mike Malloy suggests, is in fact the best way forward; it's the long view, it's the smart approach -- it is not "traitorous" Mr. Peete, have you even listened to single hour of Mike Malloy's show?

"Songs of Death"

2008-06-28T13:37:00.002-04:00

Anyone who is interested in clear-headed, rational, yet compassionate writing on the world, pre-apocolypse, should be reading this blog: http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/05/songs-of-death.html

Read this post! As each day passes, and the probability of his ascension to the emperor's cat bird seat increases, the mask drops a little more.

I had had "hope" for Obama, but there is little hope now. My utter loss of faith in this man began with his obsequies at AIPAC, less than 24 hours after his presumptive nomination, and it ended with his support for the neutering of the 4th Amendment via the FISA "compromise" bill that gives law breaking telecoms immunity from civil suit and Buhs everything he wants.

It is clear now, to anyone who is awake, that Gore Vidal is right, that there is only one party in America, and that is the party of the oligarchy, and Obama simply the latest slave to their hegemonic dreams. The Democrats and the Republicans exist simply to keep illusion of a Democratic Republic alive in the minds of the few Americans still paying any attention at all.

Ebooks and the Kindle

2008-06-08T19:59:00.008-04:00

Having advocated/wished for some form of an electronic book for over 20 years now, I was very excited to read about Amazon's new Kindle ebook. They got a lot of things right, it is always connected to the internet via the cell phone network, there 10s of thousands of books available and best of all it uses epaper -- which is much easier to read than an LCD screen, and uses no power until you change the page.

Unfortunately, titles cost $10 and you can't share them of course, DRM strikes again. But this post is not so much about the Kindle as it is about ebooks in general, and their impact on society.

Is the Kindle the future of books? Yes, and no, the Kindle is not a "true" ebook anymore than a model T was a self parking Lexus, or an MP3 player circa 1999 was an iPod. In time, someone will address all the concerns expressed here. For now, I will say that the Kindle is extremely ugly and I won't reiterate its many deficiencies. Despite the Kindle's problems, I will say that the day of dead tree data is over. Killing a tree, grinding it into a pulp with poisonous chemicals, then packaging it with yet more dead tree boxes, shipping it thousands of kilometers with giant polluting trucks, storing them in the huge museums that some people call libraries or book stores, until they are worn out, and then packing them up in more paper boxes and burning them or burying them somewhere is beyond stupid - it is criminal.

As far as paying $10 dollars for a book, this is theft, it is too much. The only true value of a book is in its IP. The ultimate goal is to cut profiteers like Amazon's Bezos right out of the loop. For those dinosaurs who still love the smell and feel of books -- you can always recreate the "experience" of reading and recycle by collecting some old newspaper and wrap your kindle in that. That way it will even dirty your fingers - just like a cheap romance novel.

The Kindle of the future will hold hundreds of thousands of books! And in no way will the paltry power requirements and this tiny bit of plastic be worse than all that trash. Besides it will be solar powered. Why do we still have newspapers? It is insane! Megatonnes of waste so some dino can get his sports scores! I do not think so.

Think about the possibilities for students who will be able to download the latest textbooks for cheap - assuming that we can get greedy billionaire thieves like Bezos out the loop. Impossible you say? They are already doing it in Korea, a country apparently not crippled by the turgid thinking of stuck in a rut bibliophiles and greedy lawyers.

A book is a terrible way to acquire data, you cannot look up a word, check a reference, resize the text, and you sure as shit can not read your email in between. In 20 years there will, thank god, be no books. Just like you cannot buy a ridiculous film camera anymore. (And good riddance to an outdated, polluting technology.) Oh, in the future there may still be specialty books such as coffee table books and the like for a while, but even those will be superseded by upcoming superiour storage and display technologies.

I do not love books -- I love the stories and the information. And I do not love the dry dead corpses of what were once living trees that breathed, shaded, and were homes for animals. Save a tree, save the environment, and buy an ebook, just not the Kindle, it is ugly and Bezos has enough money. Most of it stored electronically by the way, not on paper - yecch!

Bill Clinton's Crimes vs Bush's

2008-06-07T16:38:00.002-04:00

Absolutely -- on the monster scale, Clinton comes in as a piker. Unfortunately the comparison between the two should not be limited to an extramarital affair versus an illegal war, wiretapping et al.

What about the attack on the Al Shifa "chemical weapons" plant in the Sudan? We now know it was not a chemical weapons plant, it was in fact used primarily for the manufacture of anti-malaria medicines and veterinary products. Clinton should have known this, and probably did, (is US 'intelligence' really that bad?). Mind you that this attack took place two years after the Sudan expelled Osama Bin Laden.

This attack led to the "extra deaths" of thousands of innocent people, perhaps 10's of thousands, and to his great credit -- even Clinton now accepts this and has apologised.

Perhaps the decision to attack was merely a "policy dispute". I would call it a politically motivated war crime.

Did he get a free ride then? Yup. Does that free ride continue to today? Seems so.

Officials later acknowledged, however, "that the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed. Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980s."
Noam Chomsky has argued (in his book 9-11 and elsewhere) that the bombing of Al-Shifa was a piece of terrorism by the United States Government that probably resulted in the deaths of "several tens of thousands" of Sudanese people from diseases such as malaria and TB because they were deprived of the medicines manufactured at the plant.

Werner Daum (Germany's ambassador to Sudan 1996–2000), whose account was used by Chomsky as a source, wrote an article (in Summer 2001) in which he called "several tens of thousands of deaths" of Sudanese civilians caused by a medicine shortage a "reasonable guess". The regional director of the Near East Foundation, who had field experience in the Sudan, published in the Boston Globe another article with the same estimate.

- Wikipedia

Clinton was not alone in his crime, "...Al Gore, Sandy Berger, George Tenet, and Richard Clarke all stood by the decision to bomb al-Shifa." -- Wikipedia

On June 26, 1993, Clinton bombed Baghdad in retaliation for an alleged but unproven Iraq plot to assassinate former President George Bush. Eight Iraqi civilians, including the distinguished Iraqi artist Layla al-Attar were killed in the raid, and 12 more were wounded. This kind of unilateral action in response to an unproven charge is a violation of international law.

http://tinyurl.com/4js27

Clinton also ignored the obvious impending genocide in Rwanda, and we all know what happened there. He apologised for that a well. So I guess it's okay then.

UNICEF reports that in 1999 more than 1 million Iraqi children under 5 were suffering from chronic malnutrition, and some 4,000-5,000 children are dying per month beyond normal death rates from the combination of malnutrition and disease. Death from disease was greatly increased by the shortage of potable water and medicines, that has led to a 20-fold increase in malaria (among other ailments). This vicious sanctions system, causing a creeping extermination of a people, has already caused more than a million excess deaths, and it is claimed by John and Karl Mueller that Clinton's "sanctions of mass destruction" have caused "the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction [nuclear and chemical] throughout all history" (Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999).

I won't even go into the bombing of Kosovo, an action that was taken without UN authorization.

The complete list of Clinton's crimes is much longer than can be reasonably be posted here. What's interesting is how Clinton has been 'rehabilitated' and his long list of murders and war crimes is forgotten. In ten years will Bush suffer a similar fate? Bet on it.

Attack on Iran - Update

2008-05-01T01:17:00.002-04:00

More bad news I am afraid. The attack on Iran is still on.

Yes, we've been on about an attack on Iran for a year or more, but the clouds of war are gathering again- this time darker and thicker than before. Gates has just ordered another carrier group to the Persian Gulf. What's different is that in the past they always said it was a normal rotation, but this time, this time, Gates is quite explicit, it is a warning to Iran to back off. Which would be fine if there was anything for Iran to back off from. There isn't of course, so no matter what they do, they can't win. "Later this week Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is expected to confront the Iranians with evidence of their meddling and demand a halt. If that doesn't produce results, the State Department has begun drafting an ultimatum that would tell the Iranians to knock it off - or else." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/29/eveningnews/main4056941.shtml

I keep asking myself why they are doing this? There are no easy answers. A lot of people would say Israel, but that is wrong. Israel/America is not worried about Iran. Iran is not, and can never be, an existential threat to Israel. Oh, Israel will benefit, but the real goal is oil, and the real loser will be China. The strategic thinkers know that China is the real enemy. China is breathing down America's neck, not militarily, but economically. Anyone with a calculator can see that America is sinking and China is rising quickly.

So what to do, what to do? The answer is simple really, control the oil. All of it. Forever. This is going to be shock and awe to the nth degree. The plan is to hit them and hit them so hard, that even the toughest fighters will be rocked back on their heels as they watch the slaughter.

I think that the plan is to destroy, then control, the whole middle east, take the oil, and crush the Muslims, as Admiral Fallon said, "like ants".

If you think this sounds bad, it gets worse. When the blow back comes and it will - you will be confronting an enraged, embittered and determined enemy, who will attack with a never before seen fervor. Bush will declare a national emergency, NSPD 51 will kick in, and that's the end of democracy in America.

America gets the oil, the people will be happy, Israel will have a free hand with the Palestinians, and China will be told they are back to being a branch plant. Oh, and Bush and Cheney get to avoid the war crimes trial.

The Pigman Goes too Far!

2008-04-25T19:39:00.008-04:00

Wow, Limbaugh has gone too far this time, he is "dreaming" of riots at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Limbaugh, aka The Pigman, is telling his listeners that if Hilary wins there should be riots. He wants riots.

The great Mike Malloy over at Nova m is asking his listeners to write, email, and phone the FCC to complain. We all know it probably won't don't any good because Limbaugh has a special pass from the bushies, but hey, we have to try.

Have a look and listen, this guy is going for a repeat of 68. This is how the Rwanda genocide started, this is how civil wars start. He has to be stopped.

Click here to listen the Malloy over at Nova M: http://www.novamradio.com/live/stream.php
9PM EST - Monday to Friday

Hilary is NOT Lying about Bosnia and Snipers

2008-04-18T17:40:00.002-04:00

I don't like Hilary. I see her as yet another corporatist candidate who will not only not end the war, but start new ones on behalf of the oligarchy for whom she toils. Obama is probably the same, don't expect much (like a quick end to the occupation of Iraq) and you will be happy with him.

I say that I don't like Hilary because I want to defend her. She was not lying when she "misspoke" about landing under fire in Bosnia. Hilary knows, very very well, that everything she says gets fact checked, so when she told that story it seems probable that she did not realize that that the "incident" never happened.

More likely she confabulated the memory. No doubt she was told repeatedly that the trip was dangerous and received lots of warnings about how she might come under sniper fire, etc. Over time these warnings, and her memories, melded into a false narrative -- this phenomenon is called confabulation. Confabulation is common, we all do it, most of us don't get caught.

Hilary subconsciously wanted to make herself the hero, and over time, in her own mind at least, she was. She confabulated. She did not lie.

John Dean got caught too. See the link...

http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/11/john_deans_memory_and_scooter.html

Iraq Occupation vs German Occupation of Poland

2008-03-22T17:15:00.002-04:00

Depending on who you talk to, Iraq has lost between 60,000 and 1.2 million killed.
A good comparison is Poland. The population prior to the war was roughly the same as Iraq, @ 34,849,000 compared to Iraq in 2003, which was according to the UN, 25,175,000. By the end of the occupation, which again is roughly about as long as America has been occupying Iraq, they had lost 5,600,000 people or 16.07% In contrast Iraq has lost 4.7 % of its population if one assumes 1.2 million extra deaths is correct.

The Germans killed 5 times as many people as the Americans. One could compare Iraq with occupied Norway, who lost "only" .042 of their population but then the Germans considered them fellow Aryans.

France lost 562,000 -- a "mere" 1.35% of their population, but then they, despite the fact that after the war, every second Frenchman claimed to have been a Maquis, did not resist to the extent that the Iraqis have.

If the low number is true, then, in historical terms, the Iraqi occupation has been kind indeed, even the higher number does not approach the Germans, forget the Mongols who tended to kill, well... everyone.
1.2 million dead Iraqis is still a stack of bodies approximately 189 miles high.
source data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Arguing With Americans

2008-03-20T03:03:00.007-04:00

I post a lot over at Salon, where Greenwald is amazing, as I have remarked here before. Salon is a liberal online magazine, with a very large audience.

They are on side on a lot of issues, but on one issue - Salon tows the line. 911 Truth is off limits there; Patrick Smith, of "Ask the Pilot" has done a hit piece, and Farhad Manjoo their tech writer has taken a whack at it too, here and here. Sadly, I have yet to see a single article at Salon that does not ridicule and sneer.
This is not the way to the truth. There are serious questions. They must be answered.Not everybody is a fan of Farhan's journalistic or intellectual prowess, as seen in the comment below. Neither am I - this is the guy who just tried to tell us that the recent errant KH series spy satellite was shot down by, wait for it, a cruise missile! It must have been one low and slow spy satellite. And he is supposed to be tech writer. His perspicacity on the 911 question is in serious doubt as well.

This story was assigned to the wrong reporter

This story should not have been assigned to Farhad Manjoo. Sifting through the various levels of truth, lies, myth and fantasy surrounding the events of 9/11 requires a journalist who can review evidence objectively, not a dittohead like Manjoo whose knee-jerk response to any criticism of the Bush administration and Republicans is to insist that they would never act with anything other than the purest and noblest of motives. It's time for Manjoo to move to Fox News and for Salon to hire a real political reporter.

-- Yossarian

I like Salon, but they should open up the filter, just a little.

Neocon Lies, Amazing Video

2008-03-20T02:29:00.003-04:00

I ask anyone who see this to pass it on to their friends, family, co-workers, hell print the url on your business cards. All the lies, well, not all the lies, who's got 132 hours to watch that? But it does have a LOT of them. There is footage here I have never seen before, and I have seen a lot of videos!

Lots Happening

2008-03-20T02:04:00.002-04:00

I have been away. Many things have happened. The clouds are gathering all over the world.

Obama is being hit and hit hard. The Iran Project is still on the table. Gas is a $110 a barrel. Trouble in South America. Gaza is under siege, water, food and medicine are scarce. And Gaza is now under threat of a shoa - another nakba. A threat made explicit by the Israelis, a threat so evocative that it shocked the Israeli people themselves.

It's been five long years since another, new, holocaust began, in the "hell that is now Iraq" - as Saddam called it from the gallows. Electricity in Baghdad is on for an hour a day at most. Baghdad, one of the oldest cities in the world, in one of its hottest places, in the dark, powerless. Powerless in so many ways.

And we have lost one of the great souls. Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died at 90, or as he said, "I have completed 90 orbits around the sun". I will miss him.

Ellsberg Says War With Iran Still on

2008-02-07T15:31:00.003-05:00

Russian Yakhonts hyper-sonic anti-ship missile

Below is an email I just sent to Mike Malloy, host of the Mike Malloy show which you can listen to at www.mikemalloy.com. If you haven't heard of Mike, please tune in after the news at 9PM EST. Mike is one of the leading progressive voices out there and was named by FOX news as being one of the top 20 most dangerous Liberals in America.

Hi Mike

I've been talking about the attack on Iran for so long now, I'm into the boy who cried wolf zone. But time will tell, and time, my friend, is running out. If there is to be an American or Israeli attack on Iran, it must be soon - within the year. We will know soon.

Today we have Daniel Ellsberg warning about an attack on Iran. He is very worried. Ellsberg says that, "The American public and media have not picked up on the urgency surrounding a pending war with Iran... no matter how much time is left, impeachment is one thing that must happen for the sake of preserving American democracy."

The war plans are not just on the table Mike, Sy Hersh says they are being "updated by the minute".

I won't even bother to add that so called "case" against Iran is a thin, wet, dirty, tissue of lies and propaganda, without any basis in reality whatsoever.

Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the country's most famous whistleblower, fears that before the Bush administration leaves office, it will try to attack Iran.

Indeed, Ellsberg's argument gained merit as George W. Bush increased his rhetoric against Iran when he delivered his final State of the Union Address. Bush accused Iran of training militia extremists in Iraq and emphasized the United States will confront its enemies.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/76241/?page=entire

So what happens if Bush does attack Iran Mike? Please see this link to a shocking, yet truly superb article on Iranian military capabilities. The Iranians have an arsenal of hypersonic and unstoppable ship killer missiles like the Russian SS-NX-26 Yakhonts missiles, (speed: Mach 2.9; range: 180 miles) deployed by the Iranians along the Gulf's northern shore.The US Navy has no defense against these missiles. None. If and when the attack on Iran occurs, within hours the world will change again as the Iranians will almost certainly sink USN Nuclear Carriers, tankers, and capital ships.

There are really only three things that are important right now Mike: stopping the war, not starting a new one, and 9/11 justice.

Personally I would like to hear a show devoted to asking questions about the attack on Iran.

Keep up the great work. We appreciate it.

2008-02-05T13:31:00.002-05:00

Super Tuesday. Super indeed. Tonight we will know who the nominee's are. Much is at stake tonight. I will be posting more later tonight as the results come in.

So the results are in, and they are... inconclusive. Unless you are Republican. The Democratic nomination could go either Hilary or Obama. I am not excited. Their policies are similar. I see little difference. I "like" Obama more, but right now, until I see some real promises on the table, I don't care who wins.

Update: Feb. 15

I changed my mind. I do care who wins. Obama is not going to make much of a dent in miles thick wall around the oligarchy, nor is he going to have much money to work worth given that the US has such massive deficits and debts. I have seen Obama and he is sincere I think, and unlike Hilary who is so indebted, so beholden and yes so corrupted by her ties to the oligarchy, at least Obama will try and he should be elected.

Hilary, Hilary, Hilary

2008-02-01T20:46:00.000-05:00

Sen. Hillary Clinton said this:

"I believe that it is abundantly clear that the case that was outlined on behalf of going to the resolution -- not going to war, but going to the resolution -- was a credible case. I was told personally by the White House that they would use the resolution to put the inspectors in ... Some people now think that this was a very clear open-and-shut case. We bombed them for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors."

Does Everything go Down the Memory Hole Now?

Hans Blix and other inspectors said many many times that Saddam was cooperating with the inspectors! I remember! Saddam was in fact, extremely cooperative.

Why would Saddam have not cooperated? HE DID NOT HAVE WMD! Even though the US sold him the precursor chemicals for nerve gas. So logically he had nothing to lose by cooperating. He knew the gun was pointed at his head.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/18_blix.shtml

All this was widely reported in what left of the free press at the time, and was certainly on the Internets.

And Hilary knew all that, and she knows the inspectors were not impeded when she voted for the war. This is not true, many of us knew that the WMD stories were lies, even at the time. If H. Clinton was not in possession of the facts then she is stupid and uninformed, if she actually accepted the story as told by Bush and Cheney - then she is dangerously naive. On the other hand if she knew the facts and voted to kill one million people, beggar the treasury, all the while making the United States the world's leading outlaw nation - then she is plain evil.

No one can hide something like a chemical weapons factory, not anymore. If Saddam had had anything the US would have the address, the telephone number, and the name of the guy running the plant.

Her husband, obviously with her assent, since she is so "strong", attacked and destroyed what he said was a chemical weapons plant in the Sudan 3 days before the Monica hearings. Some of us, "knew" that it was in fact a pharmaceutical factory even at the time. Since Sudan was under American led sanctions at the time, they were unable to produce enough medicines to treat their sick, and thousands, perhaps 10's of thousands of the vulnerable, mostly the old, and the young died as result.

Here is the official bullshit line as it was reported then. http://www.cnn.com/US/9808/20/us.strikes.01/

And here is the truth as we now know it. http://www.workers.org/ww/1998/sudan0910.php

Even Bill now admits it was a mistake, would that his wife had his balls. And I don't mean in a jar.

If you want more war, more death, more hatred toward America, plus a completely deadlocked congress and senate, compounded by a screaming, raging, right wing noise machine, by all means vote for Hilary.

At least Obomba has no blood on his hands - yet. But we can always hope that he will follow through on his callow, cowardly and near insane threats to bomb Waziristan, that's in Pakistan, a country with real WMD.

US Ends Torture! Replaces it With "EIT Units"

2008-01-31T17:48:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald over at Salon is posting today about the American Attorney General Michael Mukasey's recent testimony before Congress.

Greenwald, inter alia, is upset because even extraordinary testimony from Mukasey about torture is now "ordinary".

Mukasey explicitly embraces the most extreme theories of presidential omnipotence and lawlessness and displays as much Cheney-ite contempt for the notion of Congressional oversight as the Vice President himself. He repeatedly endorsed patently illegal behavior -- including torture...

He went on to say..
Mukasey repeatedly insisted that even his most lawlessness-endorsing views are within our political mainstream, and he's right about that. It's now been seven years that our country has functioned under the radical executive power theories of the Bush administration, which include the right of the President to break the law. Congress long ago decided it would do nothing about any of it, would acquiesce to it, and thus -- as was predictable and predicted -- it has all become normalized.

No more "torture"

It's so simple I wish I had thought of it, all that is required to end torture in America is to change the name! It's not "torture", that has such a negative, even authentic ring to it, no let's call it "enhanced interrogation techniques", no wait, let's reduce it to some acronym with no unpleasant connotations. EIT, yeah that's it, EIT! We had to use a little EIT on the detainee, then we had some tea.

The Senators and Mukasey spoke all day long about torture with such dispassion that one would have thought it was nothing more than the latest bureaucratic HUD program. They don't even use the euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques" any more. That phrase has been so normalized that they now all know and use an abbreviation for it -- "EIT."

Glenn has long been an eloquent, careful and relentless opponent of the regime occupying the White House. Nevertheless he has always held out the hope and belief that America was still a functioning democracy. Just last December he blogged approvingly and hopefully about Chris Dodd's attempt to block the new FISA bill that is before Congress, a bill that will legalize warrantless surveillance, and provides retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that aided and abetted warrantless, and therefore illegal spying on Americans. Unfortunately for that sense of optimism, the democratic leadership is now actively blocking Dodd, and it looks like the authoritarian FISA bill will now pass - just the way Bush wants it. So where is the "democracy"?

Glenn goes on to say,
Congress does that (enables illegal activities) because we live in a system of lawlessness -- we have decided that the President has the power to break the law without consequences...

I am with Glenn up to this point, but then he loses me in an outbreak of optimism...

The Bush administration will be gone in 11 months, but -- in the absence of some meaningful accountability -- all of this will remain.

"Probably" Bush's last State of the Union Speech

Even that notorious organ of the state, The Washington Post, has said recently that this is "probably" Bush's last State of the Union speech. Probably? Probably?

It is sad to see someone like Glenn Greenwald, an American in the best sense, essentially admit that democracy in America has ended, and even sadder to have to agree with him. Sad... and terrifying.

Here is my comment at Salon on Glenn's latest blog.

Glenn Deklares a Diktatorship

Glenn has been building up to this for some time, as he said in his book, "How Would a Patriot Act?", two years ago, "we are a country in which the president has said -- expressly and repeatedly -- that he has the power to act without restraints, including the power to break the law."

More recently he has used the term "oligarchy" not once but many times. Over the last few months and years he has meticulously detailed the abuses of, not a President - but a dictator.

Glenn's latest post amounts to a declaration that democracy in America has ended, and that it has ended in the sad spectacle of the craven, obsequious, and beaten members of the Congressional Boyar Duma reduced to begging the Tzar's top secret policeman for favors.

Up to this point I agree with everything that Glenn said.

He finishes however, by asserting that "Bush will be gone in 11 months", and wistfully hopes that the next boss will be better than the last boss. "It remains to be seen..." if the next putatively "democratic" President will prosecute any of this sanguinary regime's many crimes. This is where he loses me.

If Bush and his whole grisly gang are in fact planning on packing up and going on the lecture circuit, how to explain their apparent lack of any fear that those new and extraordinary powers of the "unitary executive" will not be used against them? After all the executive can now declare anyone an "enemy combatant", spirit them away to a secret prison and then administer all the EIT units that they care to apply.

But they are not worried. They keep committing crimes. The attack on Iran is still on, despite the latest NIE. They have no fear, no worries. Bush is a textbook extreme sociopath, and for people like him, consequences are an abstraction at best. But what about the rest of them - surely they must be worried? If they are, I see no evidence of that whatsoever.

Look for another attack on America. Wait for the deliberately unspecified "catastrophic emergency" that will trigger NSPD 51 - which gives Bush out-of-the-drawer dictatorial powers, with "legitimate" primacy over the Congress, the Senate and what's left of the Supreme court.

Glenn is right that Bush is now a functional dictator (a charge that has never before been seriously or credibly leveled at a sitting POTUS). Where he goes wrong is his sadly naive, but admirable, belief that there will be an election and perhaps... prosecutions.

There will be no election and if there is, it will be a Diebold affair. Either way it's more war, and no "freedoms", not in America anyway.

The only question is what are you going to do about it? There is only one answer, there must be impeachment, and it must be now.

Tragically, the quisling Pelosi, with the assistance of her erstwhile colleague and fellow sonderkommando, Reid, continue to keep impeachment "off the table".

Big Trouble in Gaza

2008-01-28T00:14:00.000-05:00

Bush has left the region. Gaza is still short of everything. Sir Tony Blair is missing in action. But at least Hamas and Egypt are cooperating in closing the border. This after the starving hoardes of the Palestinian emptied the entire border region of foodstuffs, so much so that the locals are wondering what they will eat.

Of course none of this addresses any of the root problems in the region. Israel is still occupying Palestinian land. Still practicing collective punishment on the people of Gaza. All of this is a flagrant violation of international law.

Romney Gets Some Help

2008-01-27T16:37:00.000-05:00

In the Jan 24th repub debate, Russert asks Romney the Robot if he would do what Ronald Reagan did for social security in 1983? It's a trick question - because to answer it of course you have to know what raygun did in 83. Just before the man in the magic underwear answers, you can clearly hear someone say, "he raised taxes, I'm not gonna".

Never mind it was not Ronald Reagan who raised taxes, it was congress - back in the day when there was a congress. Remember those days?

Obviously this was someone helping him using a wireless device.

For comparison here is a picture of the decider and his little transceiver that he wore the 2004 debates.

The analysis was done by one of the top NASA image specialists, and he concluded that shub was WIRED. More, proof as if we needed it, that Bush is a pawn, a "Mechanical Turk", only stupider.

Here is a little something from Raw Story about the 04 debate. Look at the transcript and tell me that Chimpsky wasn't hearing "the voices" again.

"In the second debate, Bush went off the rails, again in a way that suggests remote coaching. According to the rules, each candidate answers questions in turn. The one to whom the question is addressed gets two minutes to reply, and his opponent gets ninety seconds to rebut. At the moderator's discretion, there may be a one-minute extension, providing each candidate an additional thirty seconds on each question.

At one point, when Bush had taken a question, and Kerry had delivered a spirited rebuttal, moderator Charlie Gibson decided to extend the session. But he had trouble getting the words out, as Bush leapt up and leaned into his face, repeatedly demanding the very extension that Gibson was attempting, without success, to offer him.

Kerry: "We're gonna build alliances; we're not gonna go unilaterally [into war]; we're not gonna go alone, like this President did."

Gibson: "Mr. President, let's extend for one minute..."

Bush: "Lemme just one question; I, I gotta answer this."

Gibson: "Exactly, and with reservists being held on duty..."

Bush: "Let, let me just answer this, what he said about goin' alone."

Gibson: "Well, I wanted to get into the issue."

Bush: "You tell Tony Blair we're goin' alone. Tell Tony Blair we're goin' alone. Tell Servio Belisconi we're goin' alone..."

A fair reading of the scene would have Bush's remote coach urging him to respond at that moment, with enough vehemence to distract the President from what was happening right before his eyes. "You've got to respond to that - you can't let it go. He's insulting our allies," we can imagine the coach saying. And we can imagine Bush getting flustered to the point that he failed to grasp what the moderator was trying to tell him."

Of course there is a Rational explanation for the voices. It was Jesus.

All the News

2008-01-27T15:41:00.000-05:00

Lately I have been checking the "top stories" on FOX news. On a week when human beings with a heart and a mind are thinking about the Israeli tactics in Gaza and 300,000 people being forced from their homes to find food, medicine and to take their sick to hospital in Egypt; the fools who get their "news" from Fox were reading about a naked Sarah Michelle Gellar, whoever she is, and "humanoid" figures on Mars.

Not one, not a single "most popular" story, is remotely important to our society. It is sickening, truly sickening. Where is the outrage about Gaza? Where are the 935 lies of bush?

Maybe, just maybe, when the coming war is over, and the survivors emerge from the rubble - humanity will see the light. More likely, they will shrug, pick up a stick, and start beating their neighbor - just because he's a Jew, or an Arab... or an American.

I just hope that after we are gone, the dolphins will do a better job. I am sure that they will!

Top ten most viewed stories on FOX web site.

Libby is no Liddy

2006-04-07T02:17:00.000-04:00

Bush is implicated by Scooter Libby in the naming of CIA agent Valery Plame

A new low or the begining of the end? Will a war in Iran come to the rescue of the intrepid yet evil American President? Nothing surprises me about the Bush administration. If we can call a criminal enterprise like the Bush regime an "administration". Unless perhaps in the sense Marlowe meant it in this precesient passage from Heart of Darkness...

But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force -- nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind -- as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

The Long War

2006-02-09T21:30:00.000-05:00

Lots has happened since I last posted. The short blog is that it's not getting better, but worse. How? Bush has admitted the spies on Americans, which is illegal and unconstitutional, but he can do it because he is the King! (argument simplified so Republicans can understand it)

So why did Bush 43 choose this time to announce his illegal activities, and then declare them legal? Not because he was worried about getting in trouble. Those kind of thoughts never occur to him. No, he did it now because all the pieces are in place for a coup. Through threats, intimidation, bribery, and the West's seemingly inate fear of the Muslim menace (helped along by maniacal comments from Iranian politicians) Bush has a UN ready to declare Iran a menace to Israel, sorry I meant a menace to the world. He has his men in place at the Supreme Court, he has admitted spying, torture, and nothing happened. No one spoke out. John Kerry was recently asked on Air America Radio if the election was stolen. His reply? "I don't want to revisit the past...".

So he has his cowed terrified country, he has the legislative branch, he has the Supreme Court, and now he has the UN. Perhaps it is now time to make the tax cuts permanent so to speak by invading Iran and in the ensuing fear and confusion, making the announcement: "My fellow Americans, I wish to announce today that it is with great regret that I am suspending the constitution and postponing the election. The threat to America today is too great to risk changing horses in mid-stream. We have information that Islamo-fascist elements are in the United States and that they may be armed with with nuclear weapons, anthrax and chemical weapons."

You get my drift. It's very bad news I am afraid. It is pretty clear from their actions that the US has made a decision at a very deep level for world control; not of your parliament, but of your resources. Is their any hope? No. Not unless the American people rouse themselves from their long slumber and throw off the dictatorship of the Bush family. This will not happen, not as long as Bush is in control of the most powerful and effective mind control apparatus in the history of the world.

Pot Madness in Canada

2005-03-08T23:59:00.000-05:00

Four Mounties are dead, and one really mean crazed loner has checked out - in what The Guardian' s Canadian stringer, Anne McIlroy, called a "plantation" raid gone bad. Canada, it's politicians, and the corporate press; are currently roiling about in a frenzy of speculation and hysteria about the evil hairy bud, in the throes of American style Reefer Madness! In the last few days, I have even heard suggestions that we start preventative detentions for those the government deems dangerous. Scary stuff.

Marijuana makes you stupid...

It was the grow ops fault, claimed Canada's top cop - Anne Mcllelan, in a stupifyingly opportunistic and disgusting press conference. It was sickening and maddening to watch as she used this tragedy to promote her archaic and out-of-touch with the public agenda of cracking down on grow ops. This just the day after these poor devils lives were thrown away - all to catch a guy with some marijuana plants!

She even said marijuana is a gateway drug! This would be hilarious if it was not so serious. Is she that out of touch, that delusional? I wonder... does Ms. Mcllelan even believe in evolution? Is she a Scientologist? No one says marijuana is a gateway drug anymore except Americans! Unsusprisingly Mcllelan has used her confrere John Ashcrofts methods in attempt to bully, manipulate and terrorise the public with the old bugbear - organised crime. How can anyone with a functioning mind not see that it is prohibition that raises the price - which in turn attracts organised crime? Sure the Angels have their hand in; but a lot of the trade in Canada is actually small growers producing 10 - 30 lbs a year for themselves and a few customers - all this without any Harleys or assault weapons in sight. Anne must be made to admit that legal marijuana doesn't need to be booby-trapped or guarded with assault weapons, because legal marijuana is about as valuable as parsley.

I smell another call from Paul Celluci - the man former External Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy recently called - the "Governor of the Northern Territories." Ms. Mcllelan even went so far as to make anti-democratic remarks in a fascistic edict to our independent judiciary, "We are putting the onus on the courts -- the judiciary, in a sense -- to take this crime seriously," Ms. McLellan said at a Liberal policy convention in Ottawa. It's shocking that our Public Security Minister is slipping on the jackboots to issue diktats to our "independent" judiciary, and not a word from the corpporate media, or even Stephen Harper - the leader of the loyal opposition.

How many hectares was that "plantation" anyway?

The plantation was 20 plants according to Irwin Cotler, Canada's Justice Minister (and good friend of Alan "torture warrant" Dershowitz) - at least that's what he told the Liberals at their recent convention, "We can't start saying that if it's 50 plants it's a grow-op problem and if it's 20 plants it's not a grow-op problem."

And I say: if it's 50 idiots who think it is a gateway drug or 20 idiots, it's not a gateway problem, it's an idiot problem.

Any mans death diminishes us; senseless pointless deaths perhaps most of all - the spectacle of our government asking, nay insisting, that good men die - for nothing - must end now.

Change the law. Canadians know that it was madness, bad laws; and now we hear poor planning, that killed the Mounties, not marijuana.

Missile Defence in the Great White North

2005-02-27T23:21:00.001-05:00

Prime Minister Martin has just announced that Canada will not be participating in the American "missile defence" programme - and he only took 2 years to decide!

This is good news for Canada, to the extent that we are not supporting the creation of a powerful first strike weapon that will finally give America the edge it could never achieve with clumsy nuclear weapons. (That's right first strike - more later)

"But wait!", as Rex Murphy (Canada's "beloved national curmudgeon") said many times tonight on Cross Country Checkup, a national CBC radio call-in show; "What's wrong with defending against rogue missiles?" Ha ha, nothing Rex, the question is, and you'd know that if you had done any research prior to the show - instead of relying on your quick tongue, and ready quip - the question is, "What's wrong with American global hegemony?"; because that's what we'll have 15 seconds after Star Wars goes on-line. As soon as the night sky is filled with glittering lasers, energy weapons, and kinetic kill vehicles, Bush 43 will call the Chinese to tell them their missiles are not much good anymore, but that his American missiles work just fine, oh and by the way, Hu or Wen or whatever they call you over there, you work for me now. The world will lay prostrate under such an "umbrella" of death.

That's why Star Wars II is secretly planned as a space based first strike weapon - because whoever owns the new high ground - wins. Which is why it is so destabilizing. Just as Israel cannot "allow" the Iranians to acquire nuclear weapons, the Chinese, and even the Russians cannot allow the Americans to acquire first strike capability either.

Everything I just said about Star Wars is wrong because it can never work...

The only response to a putative missile defence is a good counter-measure. The problem for the neo-cons is that counter-measures are fairly easy - given the fact that missile defence is almost impossible anyway due to the extreme physics of the targeting solutions. The neo-cons are in total denial about this of course; either that or they don't care as it rakes in so much money and power for them and what used to be called the "military industrial complex", but is today called the Bush White House.

To read more about the physics, and the extraordinary difficulty involved in shooting hypersonic thermonuclear warheads with anti-missiles, energy weapons and the like, read Dr. Theodore Postol - who until he pointed out that the emperor had no clothes, was a top researcher in the field of missile defence and had done a lot of work for the Pentagon.

They could smuggle the bomb inside a bale of marijuana...

Postol essentially makes an airtight case why missile defence can never work. Not even in theory. Even if it did work - all a "enemy" or a "terrorist" would have to do - as the late Carl Sagan said, is to smuggle a bomb inside a bale of marijuana! I would add that any number of good Mexican "coyotes" - the people smugglers of Mexican border, could probably lend a hand too.

Which brings us back to American global dominance according to PNAC and the neo cons, who figure it's only right that America should run the show. They all know you can't defend against missiles, the Pentagon knows, Shrub knows, Cheney knows, that counter measures will always defeat any system. And lets forget the single rogue missile argument as being ridiculous - no one would commit national suicide that way. So if it won't work and shrub can't make that smirking call to Premier Hu, then what?

Space based weapons will give America the capacity to destroy, from space, any nation, any target - using all of the above weapons - only against ground and sea-based targets. A meter long depleted uranium rod shot from space at a ground based target, would arrive seconds from launch and have the kinetic energy to vaporise a battleship (or an abortion clinic).

No, Star Wars II won't give the Yanks auto-hegemony - but it will go a long way down that road. Of course the added benefit of a new arms race is that it will help slow the asian tiger and wound the ascending Russian bear - plus it's good for Haliburton, Boeing, and General Electric. After all, contrary to what most people believe about the senile Reagan "defeating" communism (a child's story) , the cold war was won simply by outspending the Russians. The Americans throughout the whole cold war, never spent more than 6% of their GDP on defence! Just to be a poor second to the American death machine, the Sovs were forced to spend up to 29% (by some estimates) of a much smaller GDP.

So Mr. Dithers (Paul Martin) made the correct decision - but probably only for the basest of political reasoning - his own survival. At least for now we won't be treated the spectacle of good Canadian soldiers serving on the Bush family Death Star anytime soon.

killer robots

2005-02-19T20:48:00.002-05:00

There was a war...

A few years from now. Nuclear war. The whole thing. All this … everything ... is gone. Just gone. There were survivors. Here. There. Nobody knew who started it. It was the machines… Defense network computer. New. Powerful. Hooked into everything. Trusted to run it all. They say it got smart...a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond...extermination."

–Kyle Reese to Sarah Connor
The Terminator

By now many of you will have heard of the new S.W.O.R.D.S robots - 18 of which are about to be deployed to Iraq.

A lot has been written on their capabilities and development history. The specs are indeed awesome. The SWORDS units are small remote controlled, tracked robots. Mounted on the robot are a number of fully automatic light machine guns servoed to a remote operator who uses a mil spec "laptop" to control the machine and operate the weapons. The machine can be equipped with any number of night vision cameras and other sensors - the data is acquired and transmitted in real time to it's human operator. All the operator has to do is pick his target, lock the weapons system in, and shoot. Actually "vaporise" is probably a better word than "shoot".

Of course many red blooded American boy have grown up killing pixelated enemies on Doom, so they will be good at it!

So far, the SWORDS are to be equipped with light machine guns for use against personnel, but as time and technology progress the weapons will improve as will the sensors. Even with the existing tech, target acquisition and destructive power has much improved over human capabilities. The problem with H.U.M.A.N.S, is that they must breath, have hearts that beat, they get tired and may even flinch in the face of the enemy. The S.W.O.R.D.S will never miss. And for the remote operators, "mercy" is not something you show to a collection of pixels on a screen. Now thanks to robot technology it will be even easier now to shoot, sorry "terminate" a comatose enemy wounded in a Mosque.

The real, the monumental, significance of these machines, has not been mentioned by most commentators, for this is truly something new in human history and the implications need to be discussed.

Imagine armor plated, titanium alloy Texas Rangers dropping death from the sky. Dream of robot "Marines" on the march killing "enemies" - coming soon to a terrorist state near you.

For the first time, we can kill "enemies" and "terrorists" on the ground, in their homes - even hunt them down in the rubble of their heathen towns - with no risk to ourselves. Even manned planes can be shot down, although given the total air superiority America enjoys over the world, it's not very likely anymore. But at least the risk, as tiny as it is, is there.

Imagine, in just a few years, American soldiers will be able to control, via satellite, 3rd generation S.W.O.R.D units from their bases in California, the Pentagon, anywhere! These new machines will be much more capable than the S.W.O.R.DS units; it's not hard to imagine a division of Main Battle Tanks - only with no one in them - the technology exists to do that now.

Soon, imperial planners at the Pentagon and in the White House will be able to plan military adventures without any regard for loss of life whatsoever. Americans have been brutalized by years of living in the worlds most violent dog eat dog society in the world and by their many many wars of aggression. As a result of this, and the atmospheric fear that they are saturated in daily, many Americans have little regard for human life - or at least "enemy" life - once convinced by Fox and the President that the dead, wounded and maimed, are inhuman monsters unworthy of life.

Come with me if you want to live.

The Pentagon has announced that it hopes to have autonomous war machines deployed by 2020. Like it or not, machines that kill humans, autonomously, or by remote control are on the way.

Take away the risk to ourselves and soon any kind of mad crusade becomes not just easy, but given our predilection for violence and our unquenchable thirst for oil - inevitable.

Why

2005-02-19T03:41:00.000-05:00

Welcome to my blog. This is my first attempt at blogging, and although I like to think of myself as somewhat out on the edge, I suppose I must be blogger number 6,589,888 by now... I suspect this is a low number.

Here in Ottawa it's another long cold winter, minus 20 tonight with little sign of global warming. Of course I believe in global warming just not tonight. As a result of an early winter storm, followed by rain, followed by sub zero temperatures, the side streets here have 18 inch thick banks of dirty solid ice on either side of the street. Traffic is reduced to one lane on many streets which resemble narrow country roads only made of dirty ice. At the moment Ottawa closely resembles the surface of Titan - only a little warmer.

So what's Contumacious about you ask? Well, I'm worried; I'm worried about the war, American killer robots, western culture and the decline thereof, our muzzled liberal media, and worse the unmuzzled yet controlled - right wing media And I am worried about the freaking environment (we just had terrible smog for 3 days - in January!), and lots more. I could go on of course, but I will leave that for later posts.

I won't always focus on the wars; but I will always focus on the contrary - which is often the truth.