Spectacle Monopolized

STOP SOPA Michael Mozart

2012-01-19T02:33:00.000-05:00

Transparency

2011-03-26T23:30:00.001-04:00

Anonymous Anonymous

2011-02-27T19:25:00.003-05:00

By Guest Contributor Kilgore Trout and Tyler Bass

Anonymous is the go-to collective of hackers that want to drum up fear for Internet freedom. Anonymous' weapon of choice is a distributed denial of service attack, also known as a DDoS. A DDoS works by overloading a web server to the point where for a few hours it can no longer function. Nothing about it is necessarily very threatening in reality. Popular histronics aside, it's far more akin to a sit-in than a suicide bombing. For Anonymous, it hasn't yet come to anything like that scene from The Net when hackers break into a pharmacy and switch around Dennis Miller's prescriptions, which, who knows, they might have tried to do if as many preteens had broadband back in 2003.
Like twin babies, Anonymous members have their own internal language, AnonSpeak, which utilizes compound nouns in the spirit of Orwell's 1984. To some, this is understood as sardonic, as the forces which the so-callled “legion” attacks are often highly authoritarian. Unsurprisingly, Anonymous is blind to history, or we only hope so; one of their greatest icons, the Guy Fawkes mask, represents a papal dictatorship, that by edict of an invisible man living in the sky. Kind of like in North Korea, now that we think about it.
Anyway, the better-souled and -brained among Anonymous understand that imitating quintessential fascists, such as out of Orwell, is an intimidation ruse. But some people within Anonymous clearly do really lust for that kind of information command structure in their lives, such as out of cults, the military or even as enforced on civis by spooks and info-bureaucrats in places like Tunisia. Hence the boot the perhaps more influential members intended for, say, HBGary, the Church of Scientology or Visa instead comes right down on the necks of members of Anonymous, the “Anons.”
It is key to note that the same loss of identity demanded by Anonymous' powerbrokers is the same loss of volition that PayPal asks you to make when they insist that your money isn't possible to donate to the legal funds of political prisoners like Manning, as opposed presumably to those of suspect rapists and serial killers on trial in the United States. And while the DDoS attacks are more akin to the sit-in than the suicide bombing, that is aggrandizement as well because of the substantially lower chance of dodging the rap.
Information stratification systems, such as one the Air Force Materiel Command sought to impose on members' civilian family members, lionize the legion mentality, a trust in higher-ups to discern information for its worth to the collective. Yes, that particularly grisly order was somewhat checked, but the underlying message was sent: If you want promotion in the Air Force, that material is now off-limits, like printing out pages from Operation Clambake for perusal during your Scientology course session. In either case, that of Anonymous or the Air Force, young men act as drones, either by maintaining a willful ignorance of the evil their government does, or by playing the humble, user-friendly role of running, say, the Low Orbit Ion Cannon at strangers, the hacker-skill equivalent to running SETI@home. These DDoS attacks make it exactly 0 percent less likely that Amazon and PayPal will stop acting as shills for their nihilistic politico-corporate slavemasters.
Seeing as how they couldn't even keep their own system safe from Anonymous, we're can't put much faith in HBGary's list of supposed Anonymous head-honchos. It could very well be laughably wrong. This is as much to the credit of of HBGary's total incompetence as to Anonymous' much-touted ubiquity.
Regardless, like politicians asking us to “move beyond politics;” or religious people telling you that their one religion is not a religion, and by definition bad, at all; Anons will deny they are a member of anything. And that is just the base of the inside-out pyramid of contradictions that form the body of Anonymous ideology.
Anons, they say, are far above the lowly label of group. Anonymous prefers the self-gratifying label of “hyper-consciousness,” a tad more flattering than Internet lynch mob. In truth, most Anons are a collection of unconscious slaves, sucked in by ingenious propaganda.
Anonymous might be the latest development in botnet technology. A botnet is kind of like a large bank of computers that can be drawn upon for a DDoS attack. Hackers used to have to write computer viruses to create a bot net. Anonymous is like a botnet that is spread and maintained by viral ideology. As the privacy available on the Internet has accelerated, so has waned the stigma of celebrating that privacy.
Anonymous being a predictable result, the Air Force has for months now been looking for contractors to impersonate multiple groups of people online. While Anonymous will chase power in the svelte brutality of Wachowski brother films, the Air Force will chase it through its own hyper-real set of active-camo sheep clothing. Every side which abuses the personal information of bystanders will prove itself, at least for the moment, the wolf. And BoA, at least, has decided that it's decided to play both of them, call on the rule of law when it benefits their privacy, but buy it away when they can from fellow private citizens.
Anonymous is easy to get sucked into. We've become a bit obsessed ourselves. We don’t blame these kids for wanting to be activists. We understand that. Defiance is the appeal. Yet it doesn’t take a lot of insight to see that the true feature of an Anon is not activism or defiance. Again, its call for legions, taken unsardonically, are calls for submission.
Kilgore, for one, is an expert troll with over a decade of experience. In AnonSpeak, a troll is a highly honorable position of power. A troll disconnects himself from all preconceived notions and creates a narrative that is designed to outrage others.
The Westboro Baptist Church is a cult run by Fred Phelps that uses strategies similar to online trolling so that it can sustain itself. Like Anonymous, they imagine the rest of society to be too evil to understand their utter brilliance. This is the reason Anonymous rationalizes identity-less action. Infamously, the WBC go to funerals of soldiers – American military culture, mind you, being more homophobic than the rest of society in the first place – and call everyone there a bunch of “fag lovers” or “fag enablers.” Indeed, they do this to families of people who more easily say and/or admit they're homosexuals. And when the fists fly, they profit, either from civil settlements or from donations, their having made a loud-enough mating call to fellow knuckle draggers like themselves.
At AnonNews, Anonymous posted a press release promising DDoS attacks on the activists at Westboro Baptist. Westboro Baptist responded by posting their own press release on AnonNews. Invoking President George W. Bush's own incitement to violence against American soldiers, it said quite simply, “Bring it on.”
As obnoxious as nearly everyone considers the Westboro Baptists, the war against them will eventually discredit Anonymous' well-intentioned fight for a more honest world. And so its name, no matter how vehemently Anonymous insists that no crossing them will be forgotten, will be thus.

UPDATE: 2/28/2011 - So it appears that PayPal has reinstated Manning's account. But only after much "bawing."

Inquiry: From A Hilarious HHS-wide E-mail About WikiLeaks

2010-12-10T09:55:00.003-05:00

"[C]lassified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority."

So apparently the claim is "a secret is secret, even if it's not a secret."

It gets better: "This requirement does not restrict employee or contractor access to non-classified, publicly available news reports (and other non-classified material) that may in turn discuss classified material, as distinguished from access to underlying documents that themselves are marked classified (including if the underlying classified documents are available on public websites or otherwise in the public domain)."

So, just to make up a fictional piece of classified data. For the sake of the discussion, let's say that it's secret that the President of Ireland Mary McAleese is in fact a leprechaun. In the hypothetical classified material, there is a quote: "President McAleese is a leprechaun." I guess if it's verbatim, it's still the classified material. But how long does the excerpt have to be considered from the raw cable? A sentence? A paragraph?

Apparently, if I one merely restates and says, "Recent reports from the classified cables say that Irish President McAleese is a leprechaun," that's okay for an HHS employee to have read.

SM Repost: The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange

2010-12-05T10:10:00.000-05:00

via David Samuels at The Atlantic

Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents available on Wikileaks -- and, predictably, no one is grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.

Assange, the organizing brain of Wikileaks, enjoys a higher degree of freedom living as a hunted man in England under the close surveillance of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies -- but probably not for long. Not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan - "a vicious antiwar type," an enraged Nixon called him on the Watergate tapes -- has a working journalist and his source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats that have been directed at Assange and Manning by high-ranking members of the Obama Administration.

Published reports suggest that a joint Justice Department-Pentagon team of investigators is exploring the possibility of charging Assange under the Espionage Act, which could lead to decades in jail. "This is not saber-rattling," said Attorney General Eric Holder, commenting on the possibility that Assange will be prosecuted by the government. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the Wikileaks disclosures "an attack on the international community" that endangered innocent people. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs suggested in somewhat Orwellian fashion that "such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government."

It is dispiriting and upsetting for anyone who cares about the American tradition of a free press to see Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton and Robert Gibbs turn into H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichman and John Dean. We can only pray that we won't soon be hit with secret White House tapes of Obama drinking scotch and slurring his words while calling Assange bad names.The truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration sound like the ACLU.

Unwilling to let the Democrats adopt Nixon's anti-democratic, press-hating legacy as their own, Republican Congressman Peter King asserted that the publication of classified diplomatic cables is "worse even than a physical attack on Americans" and that Wikileaks should be officially designed as a terrorist organization. Mike Huckabee followed such blather to its logical conclusion by suggesting that Bradley Manning should be executed.

But the truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration sound like the ACLU. In a recent article in The New Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Coll sniffed that "the archives that WikiLeaks has published are much less significant than the Pentagon Papers were in their day" while depicting Assange as a "self-aggrandizing control-freak" whose website "lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media." Channeling Richard Nixon, Coll labeled Wikileaks' activities - formerly known as journalism - by his newly preferred terms of "vandalism" and "First Amendment-inspired subversion."

Coll's invective is hardly unique, In fact, it was only a pale echo of the language used earlier this year by a columnist at his former employer, The Washington Post. In a column titled "WikiLeaks Must Be Stopped," Mark Thiessen wrote that "WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise," and urged that the site should be shut down "and its leadership brought to justice." The dean of American foreign correspondents, John Burns of The New York Times, with two Pulitzer Prizes to his credit, contributed a profile of Assange which used terms like "nearly delusional grandeur" to describe Wikileaks' founder. The Times' normally mild-mannered David Brooks asserted in his column this week that "Assange seems to be an old-fashioned anarchist" and worried that Wikileaks will "damage the global conversation."

For his part, Assange has not been shy about expressing his contempt for the failure of traditional reporting to inform the public, and his belief in the utility of his own methods. "How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined?" he told The Sydney Morning Herald. "It's disgraceful."

Assange may or may not be grandiose, paranoid and delusional - terms that might be fairly applied at one time or another to most prominent investigative reporters of my acquaintance. But the fact that so many prominent old school journalists are attacking him with such unbridled force is a symptom of the failure of traditional reporting methods to penetrate a culture of official secrecy that has grown by leaps and bounds since 9/11, and threatens the functioning of a free press as a cornerstone of democracy.

The true importance of Wikileaks -- and the key to understanding the motivations and behavior of its founder -- lies not in the contents of the latest document dump but in the technology that made it possible, which has already shown itself to be a potent weapon to undermine official lies and defend human rights. Since 1997, Assange has devoted a great deal of his time to inventing encryption systems that make it possible for human rights workers and others to protect and upload sensitive data. The importance of Assange's efforts to human rights workers in the field were recognized last year by Amnesty International, which gave him its Media Award for the Wikileaks investigation The Cry of Blood - Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances, which documented the killing and disappearance of 500 young men in Kenya by the police, with the apparent connivance of the country's political leadership.

Yet the difficulties of documenting official murder in Kenya pale next to the task of penetrating the secret world that threatens to swallow up informed public discourse in this country about America's wars. The 250,000 cables that Wikileaks published this month represent only a drop in the bucket that holds the estimated 16 million documents that are classified top secret by the federal government every year. According to a three-part investigative series by Dana Priest and William Arkin published earlier this year in The Washington Post, an estimated 854,000 people now hold top secret clearance - more than 1.5 times the population of Washington, D.C. "The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive," the Post concluded, "that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."

The result of this classification mania is the division of the public into two distinct groups: those who are privy to the actual conduct of American policy, but are forbidden to write or talk about it, and the uninformed public, which becomes easy prey for the official lies exposed in the Wikileaks documents: The failure of American counterinsurgency programs in Afghanistan, the involvement of China and North Korea in the Iranian nuclear program, the likely failure of attempts to separate Syria from Iran, the involvement of Iran in destabilizing Iraq, the anti-Western orientation of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and other tenets of American foreign policy under both Bush and Obama.

It is a fact of the current media landscape that the chilling effect of threatened legal action routinely stops reporters and editors from pursuing stories that might serve the public interest - and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or lying. Every honest reporter and editor in America knows that the fact that most news organizations are broke, combined with the increasing threat of aggressive legal action by deep-pocketed entities, private and public, has made it much harder for good reporters to do their jobs, and ripped a hole in the delicate fabric that holds our democracy together.

The idea that Wikileaks is a threat to the traditional practice of reporting misses the point of what Assange and his co-workers have put together - a powerful tool that can help reporters circumvent the legal barriers that are making it hard for them to do their job. Even as he criticizes the evident failures of the mainstream press, Assange insists that Wikileaks should facilitate traditional reporting and analysis. "We're the step before the first person (investigates)," he explained, when accepting Amnesty International's award for exposing police killings in Kenya. "Then someone who is familiar with that material needs to step forward to investigate it and put it in political context. Once that is done, then it becomes of public interest."

Wikileaks is a powerful new way for reporters and human rights advocates to leverage global information technology systems to break the heavy veil of government and corporate secrecy that is slowly suffocating the American press. The likely arrest of Assange in Britain on dubious Swedish sex crimes charges has nothing to do with the importance of the system he has built, and which the US government seems intent on destroying with tactics more appropriate to the Communist Party of China -- pressuring Amazon to throw the site off their servers, and, one imagines by launching the powerful DDOS attacks that threatened to stop visitors from reading the pilfered cables.

In a memorandum entitled "Transparency and Open Government" addressed to the heads of Federal departments and agencies and posted on WhiteHouse.gov, President Obama instructed that "Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing." The Administration would be wise to heed his words -- and to remember how badly the vindictive prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg ended for the Nixon Administration. And American reporters, Pulitzer Prizes and all, should be ashamed for joining in the outraged chorus that defends a burgeoning secret world whose existence is a threat to democracy.

Pionen - Bahnhof's computer facility movie1

2010-12-05T02:33:00.000-05:00

Rap News vs News World Order (The war on journalism)

2010-10-29T18:39:00.000-04:00

Iraq War Logs Every Death Mapped - From Wikileaks and Guardian MIRROR

2010-10-25T20:03:00.000-04:00

What You Can't Say on Campus: Greg Lukianoff on Free Expression in Highe...

2010-10-21T18:45:00.000-04:00

Officer Bubbles - Weapons Display

2010-10-20T01:19:00.000-04:00

2_2 Escapee of North Korea's brutal prison camp tells his horrifying story

2010-09-25T07:42:00.000-04:00

Lockerbie CIA framing Libya 6/6

2010-09-14T00:59:00.000-04:00

BEAST calling: Ted Angle!

2010-09-08T09:30:00.000-04:00

Changing The World For The Better

2010-09-05T17:25:00.001-04:00

SM REPOST: 'Patriot' Paranoia: A Look at the Top Ten Conspiracy Theories

2010-08-12T11:46:00.002-04:00

(As posted by the Southern Poverty Law Center)
By Alexander Zaitchik

Conspiracy theorizing has flourished as a virtual art form in all nations and across all political persuasions. But the American radical right has to be considered a strong contender for the title of modern conspiracy champion. A vast body of academic literature exists exploring this history, of which Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" is the most famous. Hundreds of books and articles have chronicled the rise (and fall) of an unceasing march of disparate conspiracy-based movements that, at different points in American history, have trembled before and warned against imaginary threats posed by Catholics, Mormons, Jews, American Communists, Freemasons, bankers, and U.S. government officials and agencies.

Scholars continue to debate the psychological and sociological origins of conspiracy theories, but there is no arguing that these theories have seen a revival on the extreme right in recent years. Over the last two decades, a far-right conspiracy culture of self-proclaimed "Patriots" has emerged in which the United States government itself is viewed as a mortal threat to everything from constitutional democracy to the survival of the human race. This conspiracy revival — which has been accompanied by the explosive growth of Patriot groups over the last year and a half — kicked into overdrive with the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, who is seen by Patriots as a foreign-born Manchurian candidate sent by forces of the so-called "New World Order" to destroy American sovereignty and institute one-world socialist government.

Since Obama's election, the constituent theories within the overarching narrative of the New World Order have increasingly made inroads into the mainstream national discourse. Thanks to conservative cable news hosts like Glenn Beck (of Fox News) and Lou Dobbs (formerly of CNN), conspiratorial rants about FEMA concentration camps and the "North American Union" have been beamed directly into the living rooms of millions of Americans. Websites popular with Tea Party conservatives, meanwhile, have further stoked fears of a socialistic one-world government takeover by "un-American" forces. Joseph Farah's WorldNetDaily.com, for example, has grown its influence by peddling paranoia about the president's birth certificate and AmeriCorps' "domestic armies." Earlier this year, the John Birch Society, a group with a long history of hatching and promoting wild conspiracy theories (including the idea that President Eisenhower was a communist agent), co-sponsored the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual powwow of leading conservatives and Republican Party figures. Speakers at this year's conference included such mainstream names as Washington Post columnist George Will, former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner.
Here is a compilation of 10 of the most popular conspiracy theories currently circulating on the radical right and, increasingly, on points of the political spectrum much too close to the center for comfort.

1 Chemtrails

In the world of Patriot antigovernment paranoia, New World Order forces attempt to manipulate and control the unwitting population from every conceivable source and direction — from the images on your television screen to the very water that comes out of your kitchen tap. In recent years, the New World Order has been meddling most nefariously from above, high among the clouds.

Few Internet-age antigovernment conspiracies have spread as quickly or as widely as the idea of "chemtrails": the belief that air and water vapor contrails that form in the wake of high-altitude aircraft are really clouds of toxic soup being deliberately sprayed by hundreds, if not thousands, of secret government planes executing the designs of the New World Order. What is the insidious purpose of the chemtrails program? It depends which paranoid Patriot you ask. The most popular theories include population control, weather manipulation, and outright human extermination. If, as some cultural historians suggest, the UFO sightings of the 1940s and 50s were the skyward projection of early atomic-age fears, chemtrails are the climate-change-age corollary, with cultural panic over pollution and strange weather mixing with deeper traditions of Patriot antigovernment animus.

Hundreds of websites currently peddle chemtrails theories, along with books, DVDs and all manner of survivalist gear. They maintain that toxic clouds in the sky are easily distinguished from normal contrails by their longer duration and expansive dissipation patterns. Most of the spraying is believed to take place at night over the population centers of the NATO countries, especially the United States.
Who, exactly, is responsible for the program? There are conflicting schools of thought here as well. But among Patriot groups it is generally agreed that some alignment of New World Order lords — sometimes referred to as the Illuminati — is busy spraying cities and towns with pathogens. In the grimmest of the scenarios, the spraying represents the first of a two-stage depopulation program. Stage one involves spreading pathogens to weaken humanity's collective immune system; once general T-cell weakness is attained, goes the theory, we can expect aerial dispersal of smallpox or anthrax to finish us off.

Fear over chemtrails long ago spread beyond the Patriot fringe. Twenty years ago, the buzz surrounding chemtrails had grown to the extent that the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration felt compelled to issue a joint "Aircraft Contrails Factsheet." The six-page illustrated report patiently explained the science of contrails, such as the role humidity plays in the variance between how long contrails linger and spread, sometimes forming cirrus cloud cover, and pointed out that they have zero impact on human health.
But as these things go, official efforts to confront the conspiracy only fueled its growth. It is today bigger than ever, commanding adherents across the globe.

2 Martial Law

If Patriot groups fear anything more than the water vapor in the sky, it is the imminent imposition of martial law. A longstanding and central plank of the Patriot catechism is the belief that one day — very soon! — federal forces, in league with the states, will suspend constitutional government and institute a police state.
During the first few years after the 9/11 attacks, this fear was also discussed on the left. But what was a temporary concern there has long been an absolute certainty on the far right. Today, hundreds of Patriot groups around the country are actively preparing for the declaration of martial law, some of them by mapping wilderness areas, learning how to set booby traps, studying and practicing guerrilla warfare tactics, and setting up short-wave radio communications systems. The question is not if, but when, the New World Order will come crashing down.

Patriot groups believe the legal groundwork for the inevitable imposition of martial law is being laid in Washington, within the pages of a steady stream of classified National Security documents and directives. At the local level, meanwhile, they suspect town and city governments are also in on the plan, as evidenced by their passing of emergency powers ordinances.

Once the legal mechanisms are in place, all that's needed is a "crisis trigger," for which Patriots are constantly on the lookout. Whether this trigger is real or manufactured matters less than the fact that it will succeed in frightening the population into submission and be used to justify suspension of the Constitution. This crisis trigger could take any form. Common scenarios suggested on Patriot discussion boards include economic collapse, followed by massive social unrest; a global (and likely government-created) pandemic; multiple acts of mega-terrorism (again, featuring government collusion); or possibly a fraudulent presidential election, resulting in rioting in major cities around the country.

Patriot groups often refer to the unelected junta that will rule the coming police state as a "metropolitan government." This language, like the martial law scenario, has a long pedigree. As Patriot/survivalist Don Harkin explains in the Idaho Observer, a conspiracy rag popular among militia groups: "Metropolitan government was exposed in the late 1950s by Jo Hindman. … [Today] this unconstitutional form of government is being implemented all over the country — particularly in the nation's more densely populated areas such as Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle."

Once the "metropolitan government" is instituted, most Patriots are certain they will immediately be rounded up and sent to internment camps — which takes us to our next conspiracy.

3 FEMA Concentration Camps

Following the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Domestic Terrorism held hearings on the Patriot/militia subculture that bred and nurtured the bombers. Throughout the hearings, a running theme expressed by Patriots was a fear that "urban gangs," directed by Washington and possibly acting in concert with U.N. and foreign troops, would sweep in from the coasts, confiscate their guns, and round them up. This home-invasion force would hold down the streets during the imposition of martial law, then send the members of Patriot militias to internment camps run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which most Patriot groups consider to be "the executive arm of the coming police state."

This conspiracy has recently surged in popularity, especially after the Senate in March 2009 passed the Serve America Act, the meat of which was a multi-billion-dollar expansion of AmeriCorps, a federal program that employs many inner-city youths in community service jobs. For the Patriot fringe (and media enablers like Glenn Beck), the thought of billions of dollars going to employ inner-city youth evoked images of "domestic armies." Soon, the far-right media was full of warnings about "Obama's brown shirts" and "slavery."

The renewed chatter about "FEMA concentration camps" took many forms. Glenn Beck promised to "look into it." Films such as "Camp FEMA: American Lockdown," featuring conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, have been wildly popular on conspiracy-driven websites like martiallawsurvival.com, outselling all previous conspiracy-driven pseudo-documentaries. Aerial photographs, each supposedly showing secret government holding facilities, went viral on the Web.

Of course, the photos showed nothing of the sort. A careful review of some of the photographs carried out by Popular Mechanics editor James Meigs made clear that the visual "evidence" was bogus in every instance. For example, a photograph of an alleged secret prison was actually a North Korean work camp. Other photographs showed nothing more sinister than well-known National Guard training centers and Amtrak rail yards.

Just as the agencies responsible for air travel and air quality have tried to respond to the chemtrails conspiracy allegations, so, too, has FEMA gone on record reassuring Americans that it has no intention of abrogating the Constitution or rounding up citizens. An internal FEMA memo, however, made clear that agency brass understands the losing-battle nature of trying to quell the conspiracies. "Most people know us as the agency that responds to natural disasters," the memo read. "Others believe we have a somewhat sinister role. For the latter, it is not realistic to think that we can convince them otherwise and it is advisable not to enter into debate on the subject."

4 Foreign Troops on U.S. Soil

While "urban gangs" are considered a leading candidate to enforce a New World Order (NWO) lockdown, they are not the only threatening force clouding the Patriot mind. There is also a belief on the radical right that treasonous government officials are colluding with other governments to suppress Americans with the use of foreign troops. Patriots believe this foreign assistance will be necessary due to the patriotism of America's own troops. As explained on the Patriot website libertyforlife.com, many U.S. active military personnel and veterans would likely refuse orders to suppress the rights of their fellow citizens, and so "the US/NWO/UN government is importing foreign troops into the USA to do what US soldiers did to Iraq." Among the many Patriot groups dedicated to resisting this is the Oath Keepers, made up of veteran and active-duty U.S. military personnel.

Whose troops, exactly, would be deployed here? Those of whichever allies the U.S. is partnering with at any given moment. For example, Patriot sites were atwitter with news that, in July 2009, FEMA organized a terrorist-response exercise in conjunction with troops from 14 allied countries, including Australia, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

After the 2009 exercise, the Web burst with YouTube clips attempting to alert people to the sinister presence of foreign troops. Like other popular conspiracies to see a revival in recent years, this one is hardly new. In 1997, one Patriot blogger warned that Red Chinese troops would be allowed to take over America. The fevered language of this Clinton-era theorist nicely captures the frantic energy that has always defined Patriot conspiracy culture, as well as the racial dimension never far from the surface of so many conspiracies:

"During the 1950's, the elitists planning for world government made plans to use occupation forces in every country that did not submit to their greedy, arrogant ambitions. Their plan called for using Chinese troops in America. Now that American soldiers have been used in Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, a precedent has been set to bring the red Chinese troops here. The UN could justify such an action if the Black Muslims instigate a race war. I expect this scenario if the Democrats loose [sic] the White House and Congress in the 2000 elections. Comrade Clinton could not be slicker in making himself Commandant of Gulag America."

5 'Door-to-Door' Gun Confiscations

One of the defining features of Patriot/militia subculture is an obsession with firearms. Patriot groups stockpile them, train using them, and, perhaps most of all, worry about losing them. Any attempt to restrain their gun rights is viewed as the thin-edge-wedge of a New World Order crackdown. Patriots believe it inevitable that NWO forces in black masks and jackboots — and possibly UN blue helmets — will one day be sent door to door to take away their weapons by force. This fear is also stoked by mainstream figures within the conservative movement. Wayne LaPierre, the president of the National Rifle Association, a major player in the Republican Party coalition, is the author of a book entitled, The Global War on Your Guns: Inside the UN Plan To Destroy the Bill of Rights. In 2006, Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter attached an amendment to a domestic-security spending bill that prohibited the confiscation of legally owned guns during an emergency. The measure passed by a vote of 84-16.

Within Patriot subculture, the gun-confiscation fear sometimes dovetails with other conspiracies of an anti-Semitic flavor. Proponents of gun control in these instances are seen as representing a New World Order cabal run by Jews. At the website Real Zionist News, for example, a New York State gun control law aimed at protecting police officers was described as "the first step toward confiscation." According to the site, "The real agenda is to disarm law-abiding GENTILES, whom Zionist Jews fear will soon discover Jewry's anti-American, freedom-hating mission."

6 9/11 as Government Plot

The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., were seen by both the far left and far right as fitting the bill for an intentional "crisis trigger." In the weeks and months after the attacks, a subculture of "9/11 Truthism" emerged in which the attacks were seen as anything but a simple case of well-trained Al Qaeda operatives flying planes into landmark buildings. Instead, "truthers" argued that the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by controlled demolitions, that a missile brought down United Airlines 93, and that a missile — and not an airliner at all — struck the Pentagon. Who was responsible? The U.S. government, of course. On the far left, the reason seen for attacking the American people was to justify a perpetual state of war; on the far right, it provided an excuse for the government to, at long last, institute a police state.

On both extremes, a distinct current of anti-Semitism runs through 9/11 conspiracies. Especially in the right-wing variants associated with Patriot groups — and in a number of radical-right black separatist group as well — the central agents are often very pointedly described as either high officials of Jewish descent or outright Israeli agents. Another feature of anti-Semitic 9/11 conspiracies is the popular claim that 4,000 Israelis and Jews did not show up for work at the World Trade Center on the morning of the attacks. The origins of that conspiracy theory appear to have come from a statement by the Israeli Foreign Ministry that some "4,000 Israelis" were in the New York and Washington areas the day of the attacks. Here again, we see how a misread or misconstrued fact can be distorted through paranoia and multiplied by the power of the Internet, allowing totally unfounded rumors to travel the globe at warp speed.

For many Patriot groups dedicated to the fight against the New World Order — often referred to as "American Revolution II" — the American people have been denied the truth about the 2001 attacks by "the New World Order-controlled corporatist-Jewish media."

Of course, when this media does mention 9/11 truther claims, this, too, is seen as evidence of a conspiracy within a conspiracy. For example, when former White House official Van Jones was found to have signed a petition calling for an investigation into truther-related allegations, Patriots saw the subsequent media attention as a ruse. "Our patriot movements are totally being hijacked," said Jeffrey Grupp of the popular conspiracy website AntiMatterRadio.com, "not by infiltrators, but by a takeover of our patriot discussions."

That's typical of most conspiracies in the Patriot pantheon: When the mainstream media does not address the conspiracists' allegations, it is proof of their propaganda role. And when they do, it is a sign of an even more sophisticated and perfidious manipulation.

7 Population Control

For the conspiracy-minded, there is no such thing as an accidental tragedy or historical caprice. Each epidemic, mass industrial poisoning and medical advance (vaccinations, in particular) is just another highly suspicious example of the latest technologies being employed to further the agenda of hidden New World Order forces.

When the fluoridation of the U.S. water supply began in the middle of the last century, proto-Patriot groups screamed of a poisonous plot by communists in high places. A half century later, when the Food and Drug Administration approved aspartame as an ingredient in numerous food items, the descendents of the anti-fluoride conspiracists sounded yet another poison-ingredient alarm. But even aspartame paled in comparison to the threat supposedly posed by the avian flu virus, which many Patriots, from the late 1990s to the present, believe to be the result of research conducted at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Maryland's Fort Detrick.

In the Patriot mind, population control is often intimately linked to gun rights. After all, they say, it was gun control that led to large-scale slaughters in nations as diverse at Idi Amin's Uganda, Josef Stalin's Russia, Adolf Hitler's Germany and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's Turkey. American citizens, they believe, once deprived of their guns, will be next in line for a slaughter worthy of the history books.

What is the point of limiting — or even intentionally decimating — the U.S. population? One Patriot theory says the United Nations wants to create a "biosphere" out of most of the United States, and that eliminating the humans who put pressure on the environment will be a necessary first step.

Increasingly, devastating weather events are considered the result of government-engineered efforts to depopulate the country. In Patriot circles, Hurricane Katrina was not only seen as a pretext to begin confiscating guns, but is sometimes viewed as a man-made disaster orchestrated in secret government command centers where sophisticated high-altitude weapons control both the weather and the minds of men.
Chief among these weapons is one allegedly operating high above the earth, appropriately enough named after the instrument traditionally favored by mythological angels.

8 HAARP

This is the "Death Star" of the Patriot conspiracy galaxy, around which so many other conspiracies orbit and often intersect.

According to the U.S. government, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program is a joint scientific research project of the Air Force and Navy, based in Gakona, Ala., whose stated purpose is "studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes."

Few true-blue Patriots believe that — and they aren't alone in their skepticism. Earlier this year, former Minnesota governor and tele-conspiracist Jesse Ventura visited the HAARP site for his TV show in an attempt to probe the official claims and find out "what's really going on." For those enthralled to a Patriot view of the world, the government's description of HAARP only scratches the surface. To the conspiracy-minded, HAARP is a government program tasked with creating secret directed-energy weapons, instruments for weather and mind control, and even potent new methods to cause earthquakes. Predictably, after January's devastating earthquake in Haiti, some Patriot sites noted that the neighboring Dominican Republic was undamaged, leading them to speculate that the U.S. government was responsible and had targeted Haiti alone — ignoring the more relevant explanation that the Republic's capital and major population center, Santo Domingo, was 160 miles from the quake's epicenter.

Discussions of HAARP often overlap with the chemtrails conspiracy. Many Patriot sites argue that NATO aircraft are spraying the toxic soup as part of a top-secret HAARP-related weather-modification program, or are refining a new-generation of high-frequency atmospheric weapons developed at the HAARP research center. Any number of wild-eyed (and self-published) introductions to the subject of HAARP are circulating on the web; one example is HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy, by Jerry E. Smith.

9 The Federal Reserve Conspiracy

It wasn't long after its creation under Woodrow Wilson that the Federal Reserve System became a central fixture in the world of right-wing conspiracy. It was seen, rightly, as introducing European-style central banking into the United States. It was also seen, this time wrongly, as the latest form of spreading Jewish and banker control over every aspect of American life. No one did more to promote anti-Fed hysteria in the early years than automobile magnate Henry Ford, who in the 1920s penned a multi-volume, anti-Semitic conspiracy opus called The International Jew, in which the Fed plays a starring role.

Ford's modern-day ideological descendants in the Patriot movement continue to view the Fed — without question, an opaque institution to most — through a lens colored by deep suspicion, paranoia, and hatred. For many, it remains the ultimate symbol of New Word Order power, in both Jewish and non-Jewish variants. Nor is anti-Fed paranoia limited to the Patriot fringe. Both the Idaho-based neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations and the black separatist Nation of Islam have claimed significance for the fact that the Federal Reserve System and the Anti-Defamation League both were founded in 1913.

In May 2009, a group of leading radical rightists convened on the South Georgia key known as Jekyll Island, where 100 years earlier bankers and government officials first hashed out plans for what became the Federal Reserve System. This meeting played a key role in launching the current resurgence of militias. Less than five months into the Obama Administration, the Jekyll Island conclave warned of "increasing national instability," worried about the coming New World Order, denounced secret schemes to merge Canada, Mexico and the United States, and furiously attacked the President Barack Obama's "socialized" policies.
Which leads, appropriately, to our final top conspiracy.

10 The North American Union

Since the passage of NAFTA in 1993, fears of economic dislocation and loss of sovereignty have animated both sides of the political spectrum. On the left, these fears are centered on the growth of transnational corporate power at the expense of U.S. labor and national policy. In some circles on the right, the trade bill is seen as the beginning of the so-called "North American Union" (NAU), the goal of a secret plan to merge the United States with Mexico and Canada and, in the process, eliminate sovereign government for each country. It is also a dominant conspiracy theory animating the hard-line anti-immigration movement, which overlaps heavily with Patriot territory.

As proof of the NAU plot, left- and right-wing conspiracy theorists typically point to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a series of working groups between the countries of North America to study regulatory cooperation in transportation, energy, aviation, the environment and more. To many adherents, participants at these meetings plot how best to send millions of Mexico's citizens to the United States, erect international courts designed to overrule and undermine American law, and pass continental hate crime laws that will send anti-gay Christian preachers to prison, and more.

In recent years, the paranoia about the SPP process has become so intense that a proposed highway project linking Canada, Mexico and the United States — the NAFTA-inspired Canamex Corridor concept which has managed only 85% completion after 15 years of planning — is seen as part of an evil design that will end with the Mexican government seizing control of Kansas City's Missouri River port. Other conspiracy theorists fear that a new currency, the "Amero," will displace American dollars — though no U.S. official of even marginal influence has ever proposed such a thing. (This last fear is odd coming from Patriot circles that otherwise have no love for Federal Reserve-issued greenbacks.)

As with so many conspiracies, the NAU plot is often inflamed by real news items that are seen as vastly more significant than they really are. This is especially true when the news items involve traditional New World Order bogeymen. In 2005, for example, when the Council on Foreign Relations released a document entitled "Building a North American Community" — calling for exploring the idea of further integration of Canada, the United States and Mexico — Patriot sites responded as if the report were a New World Order directive, spelling the imminent end of national sovereignty.

Alexander Zaitchik is a former Intelligence Report staff writer and free-lance journalist based in New York. His first book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, has just been published by John Wiley & Sons Inc.

So What's Vilsack saying about Sherrod these days?

2010-08-05T09:10:00.001-04:00

Just got this mass-message by e-mail.

Dear Tyler Bass,

Thank you for contacting me regarding the events that transpired on the week of July 19, 2010. I have received many letters and emails expressing a wide range of thoughts and opinions. Some questioned the circumstances under which Mrs. Shirley Sherrod was initially asked to resign, others expressed a desire for further accountability for myself and others at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and still others were simply frustrated with the perception that the change they voted for in 2008 was not evident over the course of these events.

Admittedly, I reacted too quickly. As I stated in my news conference on Wednesday, July 21, 2010, I should have taken the time to gather all the facts before making what resulted in a hasty and incorrect decision. I also should have called Mrs. Sherrod to learn her version of the events that had transpired. As a result of my actions, a good woman was put through a very difficult event, and that is something I deeply regret.

I apologized to Mrs. Sherrod that Wednesday and told her I was sorry for the pain this must have caused her and her family. Thankfully, she graciously accepted my apology. While I cannot change what happened, I can try to make something out of this incident. I have offered Mrs. Sherrod a unique opportunity to continue her service at USDA, and I am hopeful that she accepts. USDA needs Mrs. Sherrod and people like her to continue the fight to overcome a history of failures in the area of civil rights.

I will continue to review the circumstances that brought us to this day and I am committed to learning from my mistake. I also remain deeply committed to ensuring progress in correcting USDA’s record on civil rights. In part, that commitment was what caused me to react with such haste when I read the incomplete text of Mrs. Sherrod’s speech. Since I began this job in January 2009, transforming the culture of USDA and resolving allegations of past discrimination quickly and fairly has been a top priority of mine. I am pleased that to date we have reviewed thousands of past complaints and begun to act to bring about justice for many individuals. However, we have much more work to do, and I will not stop until we are finished.

Again, thank you for taking the time to contact me and share your thoughts.

Sincerely,

Thomas J. Vilsack
Secretary

THEY RADIO RETURNS JULY 26, 8 P.M. EDT -- "Who Framed Yigar Amir?" With Barry Chamish

2010-07-25T17:05:00.006-04:00

Co-hosts Ashnfara Judy and Tyler Bass return to discuss with journalist Barry Chamish the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Barry Chamish has concluded that the official story of the assassination, in which the prime minister was gunned down by Yigal Amir, is utterly impossible, and that in fact Rabin's own bodyguards caused the undoing of the Israeli leader's life. In "Who Framed Yigal Amir?", They Radio will delve into the forensics, the motives and the covert murderers, Chamish says, had everything to gain at Rabin's ultimate loss.

Tune in Monday, July 26, 2010 8 p.m. EDT at blogtalkradio.com/they.

Naomi Klein to police: "Don't play public relations, do your goddamned j...

2010-07-24T17:19:00.000-04:00

CIA Black Operations in Iran

2010-07-18T18:24:00.000-04:00

SM REPOST: FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL SENTENCED TO LIFE IN PRISON FOR NEARLY 30-YEAR ESPIONAGE CONSPIRACY (AS RELEASED BY THE DOJ)

2010-07-16T14:17:00.002-04:00

Wife of Official Sentenced to Nearly Seven Years in Prison for Her Role

WASHINGTON -- Walter Kendall Myers, a former State Department official, and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, have been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and 81 months in prison, respectively, for their roles in a nearly 30-year conspiracy to provide highly-classified U.S. national defense information to the Republic of Cuba.

The sentences, handed down today by Judge Reggie B. Walton in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, were announced by David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security; Ronald C. Machen Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia; Shawn Henry, Assistant Director for the FBI’s Washington Field Office; and Ambassador Eric J. Boswell, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security.

On Nov. 20, 2009, defendant Kendall Myers, 73, aka “Agent 202,” pleaded guilty to a three-count criminal information charging him with conspiracy to commit espionage and two counts of wire fraud. His wife, Gwendolyn Myers, 72, aka “Agent 123,” and “Agent E-634,” pleaded guilty to a one-count criminal information charging her with conspiracy to gather and transmit national defense information. The defendants, both residents of Washington, D.C., were arrested on June 4, 2009, by FBI agents and have remained in custody ever since.

Both defendants have agreed to the entry of a monetary judgment against them in the amount of $1,735,054. The assets that will be forfeited to the government towards satisfaction of that judgment include the proceeds from the sale of the defendants’ apartment and vehicle, and various bank and investment accounts.

“For nearly 30 years, this couple proudly committed espionage on behalf of a long-standing foreign adversary. Today, they are being held accountable for their actions. Their sentences should serve as a clear warning to others who would willingly compromise our nation’s most sensitive classified information,” said David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security.

“Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers were brought to justice not because they were careless, but because of an extremely well-planned and executed counterintelligence investigation that required the unprecedented cooperation of multiple agencies of the U.S. government tasked with protecting our national security,” said Ronald C. Machen Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. “Others like the Myers who are presently betraying the trust that this country has placed in them should know that they are not safe from prosecution regardless of how careful they think they are being. As with Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers, they will be caught and brought to justice.”

Shawn Henry, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, said: “The Myers made a conscious decision to betray the United States and its citizens. The FBI, along with its partners in the U.S. Intelligence Community, will continue to aggressively pursue anyone who seeks to cause the same harm.”

“Walter Kendall Myers betrayed his country. By committing acts of espionage Myers grievously violated the confidence placed in him by the U.S. Department of State and the American people. Today, he has been rightfully sentenced for crimes against our nation,” said Assistant Secretary for State for Diplomatic Security Eric J. Boswell.

Background

According to the sentencing memorandum, plea agreements and other documents filed in court by the United States:

Kendall Myers began working at the State Department in 1977 as a contract instructor at the Department’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in Arlington, Va. After living briefly with Gwendolyn in South Dakota, he returned to Washington, D.C., and resumed employment as an instructor with FSI. From 1988 to 1999, in addition to his FSI duties, he performed work for the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). He later worked full-time in INR and, from July 2001 until his retirement in October 2007, was an intelligence analyst for Europe in INR where he specialized on European matters and had daily access to classified information through computer databases and otherwise. He received a “Top Secret” security clearance in 1985 and, in 1999, received access to “Sensitive Compartmental Information.”

Gwendolyn Myers moved to Washington, D.C., in 1980 and married Kendall Myers in May 1982. She later obtained employment with a local bank as an administrative analyst and later as a special assistant. Gwendolyn Myers was never granted a security clearance by the U.S. government.

Recruitment

In December 1978, while an employee of the State Department’s FSI, Kendall Myers traveled to Cuba after being invited by a Cuban government official who had made a presentation at FSI. That Cuban official was an intelligence officer for the Cuban Intelligence Service (CuIS). This trip provided CuIS with the opportunity to assess or develop Myers as a Cuban agent. Myers kept a diary of his two-week trip to Cuba in which he explicitly declared his affinity for Fidel Castro and the Cuban government. The diary was recovered by the FBI in the investigation.

In 1979, Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers were visited in South Dakota by the same Cuban intelligence officer who had invited Kendall Myers to Cuba. During the visit, the Cuban intelligence officer recruited both of them to be clandestine agents for Cuba, a role in which they served for the next 30 years. Their recruitment by CuIS as “paired” agents is consistent with CuIS’s past practice in the United States. Afterwards, CuIS directed Kendall Myers to pursue a job at the State Department or the CIA to gain access to classified information. Kendall Myers, accompanied by his wife, returned to Washington, D.C., where he pursued a position at the State Department.

During the time frame in which Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers were serving as clandestine agents for Cuba, the CuIS often communicated with its clandestine agents in the United States by broadcasting encrypted radio messages from Cuba on shortwave radio frequencies. Clandestine agents in the United States monitoring the frequency on shortwave radio could decode the messages using a decryption program provided by CuIS. Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers communicated with CuIS by this method. The shortwave radio they used to receive clandestine communications was purchased with money provided by CuIS. The shortwave radio was later recovered by the FBI.

Undercover Operation

According to the court documents, in April 2009, the FBI launched an undercover operation against the pair. Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers met four times with an undercover FBI source, on April 15th, 16th and 30th, and on June 4, 2009. The meetings were all video- and audio-taped.

During the meetings, Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers made a series of statements about their past activities on behalf of CuIS, including how they used code names and how they had transmitted information to their CuIS handlers through personal meetings, “dead drops,” “hand-to-hand” passes, and in at least one case, the exchange of shopping carts in a grocery store. The couple also stated that they had traveled to meet Cuban agents in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina and other locations.

When asked by the undercover FBI agent if he had ever transmitted information to CuIS that was classified higher than “Secret,” Kendall Myers replied, “oh yeah…oh yeah.” He said he typically removed information from the State Department by memory or by taking notes, although he did take some classified documents home. Gwendolyn Myers admitted she would process the classified documents at home for delivery to their CuIS handlers. In the final meeting with the FBI source, Kendall Myers disclosed “Top Secret” national defense information related to sources and methods of gathering intelligence. He also admitted that he had previously disclosed the information to CuIS.

Corroboration

The admissions by Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers were corroborated by other evidence collected in the investigation. The FBI seized a shortwave radio in their apartment and confirmed overseas trips by the couple that corresponded to statements they made. The FBI also identified encrypted shortwave radio messages between CuIS and a handler for the couple that were broadcast in 1996 and 1997.

Furthermore, an analysis of Kendall Myers’ State Department computer revealed that, from August 22, 2006, until his retirement on Oct. 31, 2007, he viewed more than 200 intelligence reports concerning the subject of Cuba. Of these reports concerning Cuba, the majority was classified and marked “Secret” or “Top Secret.” The FBI also located handwritten notes by Kendall Myers reflecting the gathering and retention of “Top Secret” information which he intended to provide the CuIS, but never did.

Finally, since at least 1983 and until 2007, Kendall Myers made repeated false statements to government investigators responsible for conducting background investigations which determined his continued suitability for a “Top Secret” security clearance. By not disclosing his and his wife’s clandestine activity on behalf of CuIS and by making false statements to the State Department about their status as clandestine Cuban agents, he defrauded the United States whenever he received his government salary. Based on these false representations and promises, Kendall Myers obtained at least $1,735,054 in salary from the U.S. government for the benefit of him and his wife.

This investigation was conducted jointly by the FBI’s Washington Field Office and the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. The prosecution was handled by Assistant U.S. Attorney G. Michael Harvey, from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, and Senior Trial Attorney Clifford I. Rones, from the Counterespionage Section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

Market Manipulation On Display

2010-07-05T21:13:00.000-04:00

Ayn Rand Returns From Dead, Speaks Slowly to Glenn Beck

2010-07-05T21:08:00.000-04:00

The Economic Crisis - What Would Karl "I Am Not A Marxist" Marx Do?

2010-07-05T21:07:00.000-04:00

U.S. Justice Department Alleges "Global Conspiracy" In LCD Price-fixing Scheme

2010-06-29T15:07:00.002-04:00

(AS RELEASED BY THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT)

TAIWAN LCD PRODUCER AGREES TO PLEAD GUILTY AND PAY $30 MILLION FINE

FOR PARTICIPATING IN LCD PRICE-FIXING CONSPIRACY

Fines Obtained in LCD Investigation Total More Than $890 Million

WASHINGTON – A Taiwan thin-film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) panel producer and seller has agreed to plead guilty and to pay a $30 million criminal fine for its role in a global conspiracy to fix the prices of TFT-LCD panels, the Department of Justice announced today.

According to a one-count felony charge filed today in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, HannStar Display Corporation, based in Taipei, Taiwan, participated in a conspiracy from Sept. 14, 2001, to Jan. 31, 2006, to fix the prices of TFT-LCD panels sold worldwide. According to the plea agreement, which is subject to court approval, HannStar has agreed to cooperate with the department’s ongoing TFT-LCD investigation.

TFT-LCD panels are used in computer monitors and notebooks, televisions, mobile phones and other electronic devices. By the end of the conspiracy period, the worldwide market for TFT-LCD panels was valued at $70 billion. Companies directly affected by the LCD price-fixing conspiracy are some of the largest computer and television manufacturers in the world, including Apple, Dell and Hewlett Packard.

“The Antitrust Division has thus far charged seven companies and 17 executives as a result of its investigation into the LCD industry, and we are committed to vigorously prosecuting corporations and individuals who engage in this type of price fixing scheme,” said Christine Varney, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.

According to the charge, HannStar carried out the conspiracy by agreeing during meetings, conversations and communications to charge prices of TFT-LCD panels at certain pre-determined levels and issuing price quotations in accordance with the agreements reached. As a part of the conspiracy, HannStar exchanged information on sales of TFT-LCD panels for the purpose of monitoring and enforcing adherence to the agreed-upon prices.

HannStar is charged with price fixing in violation of the Sherman Act, which carries a maximum fine of $100 million for corporations. The maximum fine may be increased to twice the gain derived from the crime or twice the loss suffered by the victims of the crime, if either of those amounts is greater than the statutory maximum fine.

Including today’s charge, as a result of this investigation, seven companies have pleaded guilty or have agreed to plead guilty and have been sentenced to pay or have agreed to pay criminal fines totaling more than $890 million. Additionally, 17 executives have been charged to date in the department’s ongoing investigation.

Today’s charge is the result of a joint investigation by the Department of Justice Antitrust Division’s San Francisco Field Office and the FBI in San Francisco.

Anyone with information concerning illegal conduct in the TFT-LCD industry is urged to call the Antitrust Division’s San Francisco Field Office at 415-436-6660 or visit www.justice.gov/atr/contact/newcase.htm.

Rumored Manhunt for Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange 4 of 4

2010-06-27T14:07:00.001-04:00

Rumored Manhunt for Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange 3 of 4

2010-06-27T14:07:00.000-04:00

Rumored Manhunt for Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange 2 of 4

2010-06-27T14:03:00.000-04:00

Rumored Manhunt for Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange 1 of 4

2010-06-27T11:00:00.000-04:00

G20 Toronto -- Charlie Veitch Arrested and Luke Rudkowski Denied Entry i...

2010-06-27T10:25:00.000-04:00

G20 Protests Heat Up: Video of police car fire in Toronto

2010-06-27T10:07:00.000-04:00

SM Repost: NO SECRETS Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency.

2010-06-26T23:09:00.000-04:00

by Raffi Khatchadourian
For The New Yorker
JUNE 7, 2010

The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic. The shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city, even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes and a mop of silver-white hair, arrived to rent the place. Assange was dressed in a gray full-body snowsuit, and he had with him a small entourage. “We are journalists,” he told the owner of the house. Eyjafjallajökull had recently begun erupting, and he said, “We’re here to write about the volcano.” After the owner left, Assange quickly closed the drapes, and he made sure that they stayed closed, day and night. The house, as far as he was concerned, would now serve as a war room; people called it the Bunker. Half a dozen computers were set up in a starkly decorated, white-walled living space. Icelandic activists arrived, and they began to work, more or less at Assange’s direction, around the clock. Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.
Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.
Iceland was a natural place to develop Project B. In the past year, Assange has collaborated with politicians and activists there to draft a free-speech law of unprecedented strength, and a number of these same people had agreed to help him work on the video in total secrecy. The video was a striking artifact—an unmediated representation of the ambiguities and cruelties of modern warfare—and he hoped that its release would touch off a worldwide debate about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was planning to unveil the footage before a group of reporters at the National Press Club, in Washington, on April 5th, the morning after Easter, presumably a slow news day. To accomplish this, he and the other members of the WikiLeaks community would have to analyze the raw video and edit it into a short film, build a stand-alone Web site to display it, launch a media campaign, and prepare documentation for the footage—all in less than a week’s time.
Assange also wanted to insure that, once the video was posted online, it would be impossible to remove. He told me that WikiLeaks maintains its content on more than twenty servers around the world and on hundreds of domain names. (Expenses are paid by donations, and a few independent well-wishers also run “mirror sites” in support.) Assange calls the site “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis,” and a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself. So far, even though the site has received more than a hundred legal threats, almost no one has filed suit. Lawyers working for the British bank Northern Rock threatened court action after the site published an embarrassing memo, but they were practically reduced to begging. A Kenyan politician also vowed to sue after Assange published a confidential report alleging that President Daniel arap Moi and his allies had siphoned billions of dollars out of the country. The site’s work in Kenya earned it an award from Amnesty International.
Assange typically tells would-be litigants to go to hell. In 2008, WikiLeaks posted secret Scientology manuals, and lawyers representing the church demanded that they be removed. Assange’s response was to publish more of the Scientologists’ internal material, and to announce, “WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon.”
In his writing online, especially on Twitter, Assange is quick to lash out at perceived enemies. By contrast, on television, where he has been appearing more frequently, he acts with uncanny sang-froid. Under the studio lights, he can seem—with his spectral white hair, pallid skin, cool eyes, and expansive forehead—like a rail-thin being who has rocketed to Earth to deliver humanity some hidden truth. This impression is magnified by his rigid demeanor and his baritone voice, which he deploys slowly, at low volume.
In private, however, Assange is often bemused and energetic. He can concentrate intensely, in binges, but he is also the kind of person who will forget to reserve a plane ticket, or reserve a plane ticket and forget to pay for it, or pay for the ticket and forget to go to the airport. People around him seem to want to care for him; they make sure that he is where he needs to be, and that he has not left all his clothes in the dryer before moving on. At such times, he can seem innocent of the considerable influence that he has acquired.
itting at a small wooden table in the Bunker, Assange looked exhausted. His lanky frame was arched over two computers—one of them online, and the other disconnected from the Internet, because it was full of classified military documents. (In the tradecraft of espionage, this is known as maintaining an “air gap.”) He has a cyber-security analyst’s concern about computer vulnerability, and habitually takes precautions to frustrate eavesdroppers. A low-grade fever of paranoia runs through the WikiLeaks community. Assange says that he has chased away strangers who have tried to take his picture for surveillance purposes. In March, he published a classified military report, created by the Army Counterintelligence Center in 2008, that argued that the site was a potential threat to the Army and briefly speculated on ways to deter government employees from leaking documents to it. Assange regarded the report as a declaration of war, and posted it with the title “U.S. Intelligence Planned to Destroy WikiLeaks.” During a trip to a conference before he came to the Bunker, he thought he was being followed, and his fear began to infect others. “I went to Sweden and stayed with a girl who is a foreign editor of a newspaper there, and she became so paranoid that the C.I.A. was trying to get me she left the house and abandoned me,” he said.
Assange was sitting opposite Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch activist, hacker, and businessman. Gonggrijp—thin and balding, with a soft voice—has known Assange well for several years. He had noticed Assange’s panicky communiqués about being watched and decided that his help was needed. “Julian can deal with incredibly little sleep, and a hell of a lot of chaos, but even he has his limits, and I could see that he was stretching himself,” Gonggrijp told me. “I decided to come out and make things sane again.” Gonggrijp became the unofficial manager and treasurer of Project B, advancing about ten thousand euros to WikiLeaks to finance it. He kept everyone on schedule, and made sure that the kitchen was stocked with food and that the Bunker was orderly.
At around three in the afternoon, an Icelandic parliamentarian named Birgitta Jonsdottir walked in. Jonsdottir, who is in her forties, with long brown hair and bangs, was wearing a short black skirt and a black T-shirt with skulls printed on it. She took a WikiLeaks T-shirt from her bag and tossed it at Assange.
“That’s for you,” she said. “You need to change.” He put the T-shirt on a chair next to him, and continued working.
Jonsdottir has been in parliament for about a year, but considers herself a poet, artist, writer, and activist. Her political views are mostly anarchist. “I was actually unemployed before I got this job,” she explained. “When we first got to parliament, the staff was so nervous: here are people who were protesting parliament, who were for revolution, and now we are inside. None of us had aspirations to be politicians. We have a checklist, and, once we’re done, we are out.”
As she unpacked her computer, she asked Assange how he was planning to delegate the work on Project B. More Icelandic activists were due to arrive; half a dozen ultimately contributed time to the video, and about as many WikiLeaks volunteers from other countries were participating. Assange suggested that someone make contact with Google to insure that YouTube would host the footage.
“To make sure it is not taken down under pressure?” she asked.
“They have a rule that mentions gratuitous violence,” Assange said. “The violence is not gratuitous in this case, but nonetheless they have taken things down. It is too important to be interfered with.”
“What can we ask M to do?” Jonsdottir asked. Assange, engrossed in what he was doing, didn’t reply.
His concerns about surveillance had not entirely receded. On March 26th, he had written a blast e-mail, titled “Something Is Rotten in the State of Iceland,” in which he described a teen-age Icelandic WikiLeaks volunteer’s story of being detained by local police for more than twenty hours. The volunteer was arrested for trying to break into the factory where his father worked—“the reasons he was trying to get in are not totally justified,” Assange told me—and said that while in custody he was interrogated about Project B. Assange claimed that the volunteer was “shown covert photos of me outside the Reykjavik restaurant Icelandic Fish & Chips,” where a WikiLeaks production meeting had taken place in a private back room.
The police were denying key parts of the volunteer’s story, and Assange was trying to learn more. He received a call, and after a few minutes hung up. “Our young friend talked to one of the cops,” he said. “I was about to get more details, but my battery died.” He smiled and looked suspiciously at his phone.
“We are all paranoid schizophrenics,” Jonsdottir said. She gestured at Assange, who was still wearing his snowsuit. “Just look at how he dresses.”
Gonggrijp got up, walked to the window, and parted the drapes to peer out.
“Someone?” Jonsdottir asked.
“Just the camera van,” he deadpanned. “The brain-manipulation van.”
t around six in the evening, Assange got up from his spot at the table. He was holding a hard drive containing Project B. The video—excerpts of running footage captured by a camera mounted on the Apache—depicts soldiers conducting an operation in eastern Baghdad, not long after the surge began. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Reuters has sought for three years to obtain the video from the Army, without success. Assange would not identify his source, saying only that the person was unhappy about the attack. The video was digitally encrypted, and it took WikiLeaks three months to crack. Assange, a cryptographer of exceptional skill, told me that unlocking the file was “moderately difficult.”
People gathered in front of a computer to watch. In grainy black-and-white, we join the crew of the Apache, from the Eighth Cavalry Regiment, as it hovers above Baghdad with another helicopter. A wide-angle shot frames a mosque’s dome in crosshairs. We see a jumble of buildings and palm trees and abandoned streets. We hear bursts of static, radio blips, and the clipped banter of tactical communication. Two soldiers are in mid-conversation; the first recorded words are “O.K., I got it.” Assange hit the pause button, and said, “In this video, you will see a number of people killed.” The footage, he explained, had three broad phases. “In the first phase, you will see an attack that is based upon a mistake, but certainly a very careless mistake. In the second part, the attack is clearly murder, according to the definition of the average man. And in the third part you will see the killing of innocent civilians in the course of soldiers going after a legitimate target.”
The first phase was chilling, in part because the banter of the soldiers was so far beyond the boundaries of civilian discourse. “Just fuckin’, once you get on ’em, just open ’em up,” one of them said. The crew members of the Apache came upon about a dozen men ambling down a street, a block or so from American troops, and reported that five or six of the men were armed with AK-47s; as the Apache maneuvered into position to fire at them, the crew saw one of the Reuters journalists, who were mixed in among the other men, and mistook a long-lensed camera for an RPG. The Apaches fired on the men for twenty-five seconds, killing nearly all of them instantly.
Phase two began shortly afterward. As the helicopter hovered over the carnage, the crew noticed a wounded survivor struggling on the ground. The man appeared to be unarmed. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon,” a soldier in the Apache said. Suddenly, a van drove into view, and three unarmed men rushed to help the wounded person. “We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly, uh, picking up bodies and weapons,” the Apache reported, even though the men were helping a survivor, and were not collecting weapons. The Apache fired, killing the men and the person they were trying to save, and wounding two young children in the van’s front seat.
In phase three, the helicopter crew radioed a commander to say that at least six armed men had entered a partially constructed building in a dense urban area. Some of the armed men may have walked over from a skirmish with American troops; it is unclear. The crew asked for permission to attack the structure, which they said appeared abandoned. “We can put a missile in it,” a soldier in the Apache suggested, and the go-ahead was quickly given. Moments later, two unarmed people entered the building. Though the soldiers acknowledged them, the attack proceeded: three Hellfire missiles destroyed the building. Passersby were engulfed by clouds of debris.
Assange saw these events in sharply delineated moral terms, yet the footage did not offer easy legal judgments. In the month before the video was shot, members of the battalion on the ground, from the Sixteenth Infantry Regiment, had suffered more than a hundred and fifty attacks and roadside bombings, nineteen injuries, and four deaths; early that morning, the unit had been attacked by small-arms fire. The soldiers in the Apache were matter-of-fact about killing and spoke callously about their victims, but the first attack could be judged as a tragic misunderstanding. The attack on the van was questionable—the use of force seemed neither thoughtful nor measured—but soldiers are permitted to shoot combatants, even when they are assisting the wounded, and one could argue that the Apache’s crew, in the heat of the moment, reasonably judged the men in the van to be assisting the enemy. Phase three may have been unlawful, perhaps negligent homicide or worse. Firing missiles into a building, in daytime, to kill six people who do not appear to be of strategic importance is an excessive use of force. This attack was conducted with scant deliberation, and it is unclear why the Army did not investigate it.
Assange had obtained internal Army records of the operation, which stated that everyone killed, except for the Reuters journalists, was an insurgent. And the day after the incident an Army spokesperson said, “There is no question that Coalition Forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force.” Assange was hoping that Project B would undermine the Army’s official narrative. “This video shows what modern warfare has become, and, I think, after seeing it, whenever people hear about a certain number of casualties that resulted during fighting with close air support, they will understand what is going on,” he said in the Bunker. “The video also makes clear that civilians are listed as insurgents automatically, unless they are children, and that bystanders who are killed are not even mentioned.”
ikiLeaks receives about thirty submissions a day, and typically posts the ones it deems credible in their raw, unedited state, with commentary alongside. Assange told me, “I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.” Because Assange publishes his source material, he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter how speculative. In the case of Project B, Assange wanted to edit the raw footage into a short film as a vehicle for commentary. For a while, he thought about calling the film “Permission to Engage,” but ultimately decided on something more forceful: “Collateral Murder.” He told Gonggrijp, “We want to knock out this ‘collateral damage’ euphemism, and so when anyone uses it they will think ‘collateral murder.’ ”
The video, in its original form, was a puzzle—a fragment of evidence divorced from context. Assange and the others in the Bunker spent much of their time trying to piece together details: the units involved, their command structure, the rules of engagement, the jargon soldiers used on the radio, and, most important, whether and how the Iraqis on the ground were armed.
“One of them has a weapon,” Assange said, peering at blurry footage of the men walking down the street. “See all those people standing out there.”
“And there is a guy with an RPG over his arm,” Gonggrijp said.
“I’m not sure.” Assange said. “It does look a little bit like an RPG.” He played the footage again. “I’ll tell you what is very strange,” he said. “If it is an RPG, then there is just one RPG. Where are all the other weapons? All those guys. It is pretty weird.”
The forensic work was made more difficult because Assange had declined to discuss the matter with military officials. “I thought it would be more harmful than helpful,” he told me. “I have approached them before, and, as soon as they hear it is WikiLeaks, they are not terribly coöperative.” Assange was running Project B as a surprise attack. He had encouraged a rumor that the video was shot in Afghanistan in 2009, in the hope that the Defense Department would be caught unprepared. Assange does not believe that the military acts in good faith with the media. He said to me, “What right does this institution have to know the story before the public?”
This adversarial mind-set permeated the Bunker. Late one night, an activist asked if Assange might be detained upon his arrival in the United States.
“If there is ever a time it was safe for me to go, it is now,” Assange assured him.
“They say that Gitmo is nice this time of year,” Gonggrijp said.
Assange was the sole decision-maker, and it was possible to leave the house at night and come back after sunrise and see him in the same place, working. (“I spent two months in one room in Paris once without leaving,” he said. “People were handing me food.”) He spoke to the team in shorthand—“I need the conversion stuff,” or “Make sure that credit-card donations are acceptable”—all the while resolving flareups with the overworked volunteers. To keep track of who was doing what, Gonggrijp and another activist maintained a workflow chart with yellow Post-Its on the kitchen cabinets. Elsewhere, people were translating the video’s subtitles into various languages, or making sure that servers wouldn’t crash from the traffic that was expected after the video was posted. Assange wanted the families of the Iraqis who had died in the attack to be contacted, to prepare them for the inevitable media attention, and to gather additional information. In conjunction with Iceland’s national broadcasting service, RUV, he sent two Icelandic journalists to Baghdad to find them.
By the end of the week, a frame-by-frame examination of the footage was nearly complete, revealing minute details—evidence of a body on the ground, for instance—that were not visible by casual viewing. (“I am about twelve thousand frames in,” the activist who reviewed it told me. “It’s been a morbid day, going through these people’s last moments.”) Assange had decided to exclude the Hellfire incident from the film; the attack lacked the obvious human dimension of the others, and he thought that viewers might be overloaded with information.
The edited film, which was eighteen minutes long, began with a quote from George Orwell that Assange and M had selected: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” It then presented information about the journalists who had been killed, and about the official response to the attack. For the audio of this section, one of the film’s Icelandic editors had layered in fragments of radio banter from the soldiers. As Assange reviewed the cut, an activist named Gudmundur Gudmundsson spoke up to say that the banter allowed viewers to “make an emotional bond” with the soldiers. Assange argued that it was mostly fragmentary and garbled, but Gudmundsson insisted: “It is just used all the time for triggering emotions.”
“At the same time, we are displaying them as monsters,” the editor said.
“But emotions always rule,” Gudmundsson said. “By the way, I worked on the sound recording for a film, ‘Children of Nature,’ that was nominated for an Oscar, so I am speaking from experience.”
“Well, what is your alternative?” Assange asked.
“Basically, bursts of sounds, interrupting the quiet,” he said.
The editor made the change, stripping the voices of the soldiers from the opening, but keeping blips and whirs of radio distortion. Assange gave the edit his final approval.
ate Saturday night, shortly before all the work had to be finished, the journalists who had gone to Baghdad sent Assange an e-mail: they had found the two children in the van. The children had lived a block from the location of the attack, and were being driven to school by their father that morning. “They remember the bombardment, felt great pain, they said, and lost consciousness,” one of the journalists wrote. The journalists also found the owner of the building that had been attacked by the Hellfires, who said that families had been living in the structure, and that seven residents had died. The owner, a retired English teacher, had lost his wife and daughter. An intense discussion arose about what to do with this news: Was it worth using at the National Press Club, or was it a better tactic to hold on to it? If the military justified the Hellfire attacks by claiming that there were no civilian casualties, WikiLeaks could respond by releasing the information, in a kind of ambush. Jonsdottir turned to Gonggrijp, whose eyes had welled up.
“Are you crying?” she asked.
“I am,” he said. “O.K., O.K., it is just the kids. It hurts.” Gonggrijp gathered himself. “Fuck!” he said. Resuming the conversation about ambushing the Army, he said, “Anyway, let them walk into this knife—”
“That is a wonderful thing to do,” one of the activists said.
“Let them walk into this, and they will,” Gonggrijp said. “It is a logical response.”
Jonsdottir was now in tears, too, and wiping her nose.
“Now I want to reëdit the thing,” Assange said. “I want to put in the missile attack. There were three families living in the bottom, so it wasn’t abandoned.” But it was impossible to reëdit the film. The activists were working at capacity, and in several hours it would be Easter.
At half past ten in the morning, Gonggrijp pulled open the drapes, and the Bunker was filled with sunlight. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and black pants, freshly washed and ironed, and he was struggling to keep everyone on schedule. Last-minute concerns—among them finding a criminal-defense lawyer in the United States—were being addressed. Assange was at a computer, his posture upright as he steadily typed.
“How are we on time?” he asked no one in particular.
“We have three hours,” Gonggrijp said.
Assange wrinkled his brow and turned his attention back to the screen. He was looking at a copy of classified rules of engagement in Iraq from 2006, one of several secret American military documents that he was planning to post with the video. WikiLeaks scrubs such documents to insure that no digital traces embedded in them can identify their source. Assange was purging these traces as fast as he could.
Reykjavik’s streets were empty, and the bells of a cathedral began to toll. “Remember, remember the fifth of November,” Assange said, repeating a line from the English folk poem celebrating Guy Fawkes. He smiled, as Gonggrijp dismantled the workflow chart, removing Post-Its from the cabinets and flushing them down the toilet. Shortly before noon, there was a desperate push to clear away the remaining vestiges of Project B and to get to the airport. Assange was unpacked and unshaven, and his hair was a mess. He was typing up a press release. Jonsdottir came by to help, and he asked her, “Can’t you cut my hair while I’m doing this?”
“No, I am not going to cut your hair while you are working,” she said.
Jonsdottir walked over to the sink and made tea. Assange kept on typing, and after a few minutes she reluctantly began to trim his hair. At one point, she stopped and asked, “If you get arrested, will you get in touch with me?” Assange nodded. Gonggrijp, meanwhile, shoved some of Assange’s things into a bag. He settled the bill with the owner. Dishes were washed. Furniture was put back in place. People piled into a small car, and in an instant the house was empty and still.
he name Assange is thought to derive from Ah Sang, or Mr. Sang, a Chinese émigré who settled on Thursday Island, off the coast of Australia, in the early eighteen-hundreds, and whose descendants later moved to the continent. Assange’s maternal ancestors came to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, from Scotland and Ireland, in search of farmland, and Assange suspects, only half in jest, that his proclivity for wandering is genetic. His phone numbers and e-mail address are ever-changing, and he can drive the people around him crazy with his elusiveness and his propensity to mask details about his life.
Assange was born in 1971, in the city of Townsville, on Australia’s northeastern coast, but it is probably more accurate to say that he was born into a blur of domestic locomotion. Shortly after his first birthday, his mother—I will call her Claire—married a theatre director, and the two collaborated on small productions. They moved often, living near Byron Bay, a beachfront community in New South Wales, and on Magnetic Island, a tiny pile of rock that Captain Cook believed had magnetic properties that distorted his compass readings. They were tough-minded nonconformists. (At seventeen, Claire had burned her schoolbooks and left home on a motorcycle.) Their house on Magnetic Island burned to the ground, and rifle cartridges that Claire had kept for shooting snakes exploded like fireworks. “Most of this period of my childhood was pretty Tom Sawyer,” Assange told me. “I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.”
Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. “I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,” he recalled. He absorbed a large vocabulary, but only later did he learn how to pronounce all the words that he learned.
When Assange was eight, Claire left her husband and began seeing a musician, with whom she had another child, a boy. The relationship was tempestuous; the musician became abusive, she says, and they separated. A fight ensued over the custody of Assange’s half brother, and Claire felt threatened, fearing that the musician would take away her son. Assange recalled her saying, “Now we need to disappear,” and he lived on the run with her from the age of eleven to sixteen. When I asked him about the experience, he told me that there was evidence that the man belonged to a powerful cult called the Family—its motto was “Unseen, Unknown, and Unheard.” Some members were doctors who persuaded mothers to give up their newborn children to the cult’s leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The cult had moles in government, Assange suspected, who provided the musician with leads on Claire’s whereabouts. In fact, Claire often told friends where she had gone, or hid in places where she had lived before.
While on the run, Claire rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange would go there to write programs on a Commodore 64, until Claire bought it for him, moving to a cheaper place to raise the money. He was soon able to crack into well-known programs, where he found hidden messages left by their creators. “The austerity of one’s interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me,” he said. “It is like chess—chess is very austere, in that you don’t have many rules, there is no randomness, and the problem is very hard.” Assange embraced life as an outsider. He later wrote of himself and a teen-age friend, “We were bright sensitive kids who didn’t fit into the dominant subculture and fiercely castigated those who did as irredeemable boneheads.”
When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet—this was 1987—but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teen-agers with the requisite technical savvy could traverse. Assange called himself Mendax—from Horace’s splendide mendax, or “nobly untruthful”—and he established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks. He joined with two hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives, and they broke into computer systems in Europe and North America, including networks belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense and to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a book called “Underground,” which he collaborated on with a writer named Suelette Dreyfus, he outlined the hacker subculture’s early Golden Rules: “Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.”
round this time, Assange fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, and he briefly moved out of his mother’s home to stay with her. “A couple of days later, police turned up, and they carted off all my computer stuff,” he recalled. The raid, he said, was carried out by the state police, and “it involved some dodgy character who was alleging that we had stolen five hundred thousand dollars from Citibank.” Assange wasn’t charged, and his equipment was returned. “At that point, I decided that it might be wise to be a bit more discreet,” he said. Assange and the girl joined a squatters’ union in Melbourne, until they learned she was pregnant, and moved to be near Claire. When Assange was eighteen, the two got married in an unofficial ceremony, and soon afterward they had a son.
Hacking remained a constant in his life, and the thrill of digital exploration was amplified by the growing knowledge, among the International Subversives, that the authorities were interested in their activities. The Australian Federal Police had set up an investigation into the group, called Operation Weather, which the hackers strove to monitor.
In September, 1991, when Assange was twenty, he hacked into the master terminal that Nortel, the Canadian telecom company, maintained in Melbourne, and began to poke around. The International Subversives had been visiting the master terminal frequently. Normally, Assange hacked into computer systems at night, when they were semi-dormant, but this time a Nortel administrator was signed on. Sensing that he might be caught, Assange approached him with humor. “I have taken control,” he wrote, without giving his name. “For years, I have been struggling in this grayness. But now I have finally seen the light.” The administrator did not reply, and Assange sent another message: “It’s been nice playing with your system. We didn’t do any damage and we even improved a few things. Please don’t call the Australian Federal Police.”
The International Subversives’ incursions into Nortel turned out to be a critical development for Operation Weather. Federal investigators tapped phone lines to see which ones the hackers were using. “Julian was the most knowledgeable and the most secretive of the lot,” Ken Day, the lead investigator, told me. “He had some altruistic motive. I think he acted on the belief that everyone should have access to everything.”
“Underground” describes Assange’s growing fear of arrest: “Mendax dreamed of police raids all the time. He dreamed of footsteps crunching on the driveway gravel, of shadows in the pre-dawn darkness, of a gun-toting police squad bursting through his backdoor at 5 am.” Assange could relax only when he hid his disks in an apiary that he kept. By October, he was in a terrible state. His wife had left him, taking with her their infant son. His home was a mess. He barely ate or slept. On the night the police came, the twenty-ninth, he wired his phone through his stereo and listened to the busy signal until eleven-thirty, when Ken Day knocked on his door, and told him, “I think you’ve been expecting me.”
Assange was charged with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes. While awaiting trial, he fell into a depression, and briefly checked himself into a hospital. He tried to stay with his mother, but after a few days he took to sleeping in nearby parks. He lived and hiked among dense eucalyptus forests in the Dandenong Ranges National Park, which were thick with mosquitoes whose bites scarred his face. “Your inner voice quiets down,” he told me. “Internal dialogue is stimulated by a preparatory desire to speak, but it is not actually useful if there are no other people around.” He added, “I don’t want to sound too Buddhist. But your vision of yourself disappears.”
It took more than three years for the authorities to bring the case against Assange and the other International Subversives to court. Day told me, “We had just formed the computer-crimes team, and the government said, ‘Your charter is to establish a deterrent.’ Well, to get a deterrent you have to prosecute people, and we achieved that with Julian and his group.” A computer-security team working for Nortel in Canada drafted an incident report alleging that the hacking had caused damage that would cost more than a hundred thousand dollars to repair. The chief prosecutor, describing Assange’s near-limitless access, told the court, “It was God Almighty walking around doing what you like.”
Assange, facing a potential sentence of ten years in prison, found the state’s reaction confounding. He bought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle,” a novel about scientists and technicians forced into the Gulag, and read it three times. (“How close the parallels to my own adventures!” he later wrote.) He was convinced that “look/see” hacking was a victimless crime, and intended to fight the charges. But the other members of the group decided to coöperate. “When a judge says, ‘The prisoner shall now rise,’ and no one else in the room stands—that is a test of character,” he told me. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges and six were dropped. But at his final sentencing the judge said, “There is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what’s the expression—surf through these various computers.” Assange’s only penalty was to pay the Australian state a small sum in damages.
As the criminal case was unfolding, Assange and his mother were also waging a campaign to gain full custody of Assange’s son—a legal fight that was, in many ways, far more wrenching than his criminal defense. They were convinced that the boy’s mother and her new boyfriend posed a danger to the child, and they sought to restrict her rights. The state’s child-protection agency, Health and Community Services, disagreed. The specifics of the allegations are unclear; family-court records in Australia are kept anonymous. But in 1995 a parliamentary committee found that the agency maintained an “underlying philosophy of deflecting as many cases away from itself as possible.” When the agency decided that a child was living in a safe household, there was no way to immediately appeal its decision.
The custody battle evolved into a bitter fight with the state. “What we saw was a great bureaucracy that was squashing people,” Claire told me. She and Assange, along with another activist, formed an organization called Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection. “We used full-on activist methods,” Claire recalled. In meetings with Health and Community Services, “we would go in and tape-record them secretly.” The organization used the Australian Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents from Health and Community Services, and they distributed flyers to child-protection workers, encouraging them to come forward with inside information, for a “central databank” that they were creating. “You may remain anonymous if you wish,” one flyer stated. One protection worker leaked to the group an important internal manual. Assange told me, “We had moles who were inside dissidents.”
In 1999, after nearly three dozen legal hearings and appeals, Assange worked out a custody agreement with his wife. Claire told me, “We had experienced very high levels of adrenaline, and I think that after it all finished I ended up with P.T.S.D. It was like coming back from a war. You just can’t interact with normal people to the same degree, and I am sure that Jules has some P.T.S.D. that is untreated.” Not long after the court cases, she said, Assange’s hair, which had been dark brown, became drained of all color.
ssange was burned out. He motorcycled across Vietnam. He held various jobs, and even earned money as a computer-security consultant, supporting his son to the extent that he was able. He studied physics at the University of Melbourne. He thought that trying to decrypt the secret laws governing the universe would provide the intellectual stimulation and rush of hacking. It did not. In 2006, on a blog he had started, he wrote about a conference organized by the Australian Institute of Physics, “with 900 career physicists, the body of which were sniveling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character.”
He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.
These ideas soon evolved into WikiLeaks. In 2006, Assange barricaded himself in a house near the university and began to work. In fits of creativity, he would write out flow diagrams for the system on the walls and doors, so as not to forget them. There was a bed in the kitchen, and he invited backpackers passing through campus to stay with him, in exchange for help building the site. “He wouldn’t sleep at all,” a person who was living in the house told me. “He wouldn’t eat.”
As it now functions, the Web site is primarily hosted on a Swedish Internet service provider called PRQ.se, which was created to withstand both legal pressure and cyber attacks, and which fiercely preserves the anonymity of its clients. Submissions are routed first through PRQ, then to a WikiLeaks server in Belgium, and then on to “another country that has some beneficial laws,” Assange told me, where they are removed at “end-point machines” and stored elsewhere. These machines are maintained by exceptionally secretive engineers, the high priesthood of WikiLeaks. One of them, who would speak only by encrypted chat, told me that Assange and the other public members of WikiLeaks “do not have access to certain parts of the system as a measure to protect them and us.” The entire pipeline, along with the submissions moving through it, is encrypted, and the traffic is kept anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network, which sends Internet traffic through “virtual tunnels” that are extremely private. Moreover, at any given time WikiLeaks computers are feeding hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents. Assange told me that there are still vulnerabilities, but “this is vastly more secure than any banking network.”
Before launching the site, Assange needed to show potential contributors that it was viable. One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”
In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first document: a “secret decision,” signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China. The document called for the execution of government officials by hiring “criminals” as hit men. Assange and the others were uncertain of its authenticity, but they thought that readers, using Wikipedia-like features of the site, would help analyze it. They published the decision with a lengthy commentary, which asked, “Is it a bold manifesto by a flamboyant Islamic militant with links to Bin Laden? Or is it a clever smear by US intelligence, designed to discredit the Union, fracture Somali alliances and manipulate China?”
The document’s authenticity was never determined, and news about WikiLeaks quickly superseded the leak itself. Several weeks later, Assange flew to Kenya for the World Social Forum, an anti-capitalist convention, to make a presentation about the Web site. “He packed in the funniest way I have ever seen,” the person who had been living in the house recalled. “Someone came to pick him up, and he was asked, ‘Where is your luggage?’ And he ran back into the house. He had a sailor’s sack, and he grabbed a whole bunch of stuff and threw it in there, mostly socks.”
Assange ended up staying in Kenya for several months. He would check in with friends by phone and through the Internet from time to time, but was never precise about his movements. One friend told me, “It would always be, ‘Where is Julian?’ It was always difficult to know where he was. It was almost like he was trying to hide.”
t took about an hour on Easter morning to get from the house on Grettisgata Street to Iceland’s international airport, which is situated on a lava field by the sea. Assange, in the terminal, carried a threadbare blue backpack that contained hard drives, phone cards, and multiple cell phones. Gonggrijp had agreed to go to Washington to help with the press conference. He checked in, and the ticketing agent turned to Assange.
“I am sorry,” she said to him. “I cannot find your name.”
“Interesting,” Assange said to Gonggrijp. “Have fun at the press conference.”
“No,” Gonggrijp told the attendant. “We have a booking I.D. number.”
“It’s been confirmed,” Assange insisted.
The attendant looked perplexed. “I know,” she said. “But my booking information has it ‘cancelled.’ ”
The two men exchanged a look: was a government agency tampering with their plans? Assange waited anxiously, but it turned out that he had bought the ticket and neglected to confirm the purchase. He quickly bought another ticket, and the two men flew to New York and then rushed to catch the Acela to Washington. It was nearly two in the morning when they arrived. They got into a taxi, and Assange, who didn’t want to reveal the location of his hotel, told the driver to go to a nearby cross street.
“Here we are in the lion’s den,” Gonggrijp said as the taxi raced down Massachusetts Avenue, passing rows of nondescript office buildings. Assange said, “Not looking too lionish.”
A few hours after sunrise, Assange was standing at a lectern inside the National Press Club, ready to present “Collateral Murder” to the forty or so journalists who had come. He was dressed in a brown blazer, a black shirt, and a red tie. He played the film for the audience, pausing it to discuss various details. After the film ended, he ran footage of the Hellfire attack—a woman in the audience gasped as the first missile hit the building—and read from the e-mail sent by the Icelandic journalists who had gone to Iraq. The leak, he told the reporters, “sends a message that some people within the military don’t like what is going on.”
The video, in both raw and edited forms, was released on the site that WikiLeaks had built for it, and also on YouTube and a number of other Web sites. Within minutes after the press conference, Assange was invited to Al Jazeera’s Washington headquarters, where he spent half the day giving interviews, and that evening MSNBC ran a long segment about the footage. The video was covered in the Times, in multiple stories, and in every other major paper. On YouTube alone, more than seven million viewers have watched “Collateral Murder.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates was asked about the footage, and said, clearly irritated, “These people can put anything out they want and are never held accountable for it.” The video was like looking at war “through a soda straw,” he said. “There is no before and there is no after.” Army spokespeople insisted that there was no violation of the rules of engagement. At first, the media’s response hewed to Assange’s interpretation, but, in the ensuing days, as more commentators weighed in and the military offered its view, Assange grew frustrated. Much of the coverage focussed not on the Hellfire attack or the van but on the killing of the journalists and on how a soldier might reasonably mistake a camera for an RPG. On Twitter, Assange accused Gates of being “a liar,” and beseeched members of the media to “stop spinning.”
In some respects, Assange appeared to be most annoyed by the journalistic process itself—“a craven sucking up to official sources to imbue the eventual story with some kind of official basis,” as he once put it. WikiLeaks has long maintained a complicated relationship with conventional journalism. When, in 2008, the site was sued after publishing confidential documents from a Swiss bank, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and ten other news organizations filed amicus briefs in support. (The bank later withdrew its suit.) But, in the Bunker one evening, Gonggrijp told me, “We are not the press.” He considers WikiLeaks an advocacy group for sources; within the framework of the Web site, he said, “the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document.”
Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events. In an invitation to potential collaborators in 2006, he wrote, “Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations.” He has argued that a “social movement” to expose secrets could “bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality—including the US administration.”
Assange does not recognize the limits that traditional publishers do. Recently, he posted military documents that included the Social Security numbers of soldiers, and in the Bunker I asked him if WikiLeaks’ mission would have been compromised if he had redacted these small bits. He said that some leaks risked harming innocent people—“collateral damage, if you will”—but that he could not weigh the importance of every detail in every document. Perhaps the Social Security numbers would one day be important to researchers investigating wrongdoing, he said; by releasing the information he would allow judgment to occur in the open.
A year and a half ago, WikiLeaks published the results of an Army test, conducted in 2004, of electromagnetic devices designed to prevent IEDs from being triggered. The document revealed key aspects of how the devices functioned and also showed that they interfered with communication systems used by soldiers—information that an insurgent could exploit. By the time WikiLeaks published the study, the Army had begun to deploy newer technology, but some soldiers were still using the devices. I asked Assange if he would refrain from releasing information that he knew might get someone killed. He said that he had instituted a “harm-minimization policy,” whereby people named in certain documents were contacted before publication, to warn them, but that there were also instances where the members of WikiLeaks might get “blood on our hands.”
One member told me that Assange’s editorial policy initially made her uncomfortable, but that she has come around to his position, because she believes that no one has been unjustly harmed. Of course, such harm is not always easy to measure. When Assange was looking for board members, he contacted Steven Aftergood, who runs an e-mail newsletter for the Federation of American Scientists, and who publishes sensitive documents. Aftergood declined to participate. “When a technical record is both sensitive and remote from a current subject of controversy, my editorial inclination is to err on the side of caution,” he said. “I miss that kind of questioning on their part.”
At the same time, Aftergood told me, the overclassification of information is a problem of increasing scale—one that harms not only citizens, who should be able to have access to government records, but the system of classification itself. When too many secrets are kept, it becomes difficult to know which ones are important. Had the military released the video from the Apache to Reuters under FOIA, it would probably not have become a film titled “Collateral Murder,” and a public-relations nightmare.
Lieutenant Colonel Lee Packnett, the spokesperson for intelligence matters for the Army, was deeply agitated when I called him. “We’re not going to give validity to WikiLeaks,” he said. “You’re not doing anything for the Army by putting us in a conversation about WikiLeaks. You can talk to someone else. It’s not an Army issue.” As he saw it, once “Collateral Murder” had passed through the news cycle, the broader counter-intelligence problem that WikiLeaks poses to the military had disappeared as well. “It went away,” he said.
ith the release of “Collateral Murder,” WikiLeaks received more than two hundred thousand dollars in donations, and on April 7th Assange wrote on Twitter, “New funding model for journalism: try doing it for a change.” Just this winter, he had put the site into a state of semi-dormancy because there was not enough money to run it, and because its technical engineering needed adjusting. Assange has far more material than he can process, and he is seeking specialists who can sift through the chaotic WikiLeaks library and assign documents to volunteers for analysis. The donations meant that WikiLeaks would now be able to pay some volunteers, and in late May its full archive went back online. Still, the site remains a project in early development. Assange has been searching for the right way not only to manage it but also to get readers interested in the more arcane material there.
In 2007, he published thousands of pages of secret military information detailing a vast number of Army procurements in Iraq and Afghanistan. He and a volunteer spent weeks building a searchable database, studying the Army’s purchasing codes, and adding up the cost of the procurements—billions of dollars in all. The database catalogued matériel that every unit had ordered: machine guns, Humvees, cash-counting machines, satellite phones. Assange hoped that journalists would pore through it, but barely any did. “I am so angry,” he said. “This was such a fucking fantastic leak: the Army’s force structure of Afghanistan and Iraq, down to the last chair, and nothing.”
WikiLeaks is a finalist for a Knight Foundation grant of more than half a million dollars. The intended project would set up a way for sources to pass documents to newspaper reporters securely; WikiLeaks would serve as a kind of numbered Swiss bank account, where information could be anonymously exchanged. (The system would allow the source to impose a deadline on the reporter, after which the document would automatically appear on WikiLeaks.) Assange has been experimenting with other ideas, too. On the principle that people won’t regard something as valuable unless they pay for it, he has tried selling documents at auction to news organizations; in 2008, he attempted this with seven thousand internal e-mails from the account of a former speechwriter for Hugo Chávez. The auction failed. He is thinking about setting up a subscription service, where high-paying members would have early access to leaks.
But experimenting with the site’s presentation and its technical operations will not answer a deeper question that WikiLeaks must address: What is it about? The Web site’s strengths—its near-total imperviousness to lawsuits and government harassment—make it an instrument for good in societies where the laws are unjust. But, unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect legitimate policy. In liberal societies, the site’s strengths are its weaknesses. Lawsuits, if they are fair, are a form of deterrence against abuse. Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.
After the press conference in Washington, I met Assange in New York, in Bryant Park. He had brought his luggage with him, because he was moving between the apartments of friends of friends. We sat near the fountain, and drank coffee. That week, Assange was scheduled to fly to Berkeley, and then to Italy, but back in Iceland the volcano was erupting again, and his flight to Europe was likely to change. He looked a bit shell-shocked. “It was surprising to me that we were seen as such an impartial arbiter of the truth, which may speak well to what we have done,” he told me. But he also said, “To be completely impartial is to be an idiot. This would mean that we would have to treat the dust in the street the same as the lives of people who have been killed.”
A number of commentators had wondered whether the video’s title was manipulative. “In hindsight, should we have called it ‘Permission to Engage’ rather than ‘Collateral Murder’?” he said. “I’m still not sure.” He was annoyed by Gates’s comment on the film: “He says, ‘There is no before and no after.’ Well, at least there is now a middle, which is a vast improvement.” Then Assange leaned forward and, in a whisper, began to talk about a leak, code-named Project G, that he is developing in another secret location. He promised that it would be news, and I saw in him the same mixture of seriousness and amusement, devilishness and intensity that he had displayed in the Bunker. “If it feels a little bit like we’re amateurs, it is because we are,” he said. “Everyone is an amateur in this business.” And then, his coffee finished, he made his way out of the park and into Times Square, disappearing among the masses of people moving this way and that.

Ha, and, silly me, I thought Washington owned slaves or something.

2010-06-26T20:30:00.000-04:00

Praising a Jamaican 'drug lord'

2010-06-26T16:19:00.000-04:00

Death of a Nation - East Timor

2010-06-18T20:29:00.000-04:00

Dying With Jim Jones

2010-06-15T10:29:00.001-04:00

BEAST: State Department's Conspiracy Theories Page May Downplay Depleted Uranium Hazards

2010-06-11T15:12:00.001-04:00

New Article here.

Interview with D.C.'s water fluoridation guru

2010-05-25T11:21:00.002-04:00

Just click right 'chere.

SM REPOST: Hedges on the Greeks

2010-05-25T09:49:00.000-04:00

The Greeks Get It
By Chris Hedges

Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.
The former right-wing government of Greece lied about the size of the country’s budget deficit. It was not 3.7 percent of gross domestic product but 13.6 percent. And it now looks like the economies of Spain, Ireland, Italy and Portugal are as bad as Greece’s, which is why the euro has lost 20 percent of its value in the last few months. The few hundred billion in bailouts for other faltering European states, like our own bailouts, have only forestalled disaster. This is why the U.S. stock exchange is in free fall and gold is rocketing upward. American banks do not have heavy exposure in Greece, but Greece, as most economists concede, is only the start. Wall Street is deeply invested in other European states, and when the unraveling begins the foundations of our own economy will rumble and crack as loudly as the collapse in Athens. The corporate overlords will demand that we too impose draconian controls and cuts or see credit evaporate. They have the money and the power to hurt us. There will be more unemployment, more personal and commercial bankruptcies, more foreclosures and more human misery. And the corporate state, despite this suffering, will continue to plunge us deeper into debt to make war. It will use fear to keep us passive. We are being consumed from the inside out. Our economy is as rotten as the economy in Greece. We too borrow billions a day to stay afloat. We too have staggering deficits, which can never be repaid. Heed the dire rhetoric of European leaders.
“The euro is in danger,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel
told lawmakers last week as she called on them to approve Germany’s portion of the bailout plan. “If we do not avert this danger, then the consequences for Europe are incalculable, and then the consequences beyond Europe are incalculable.”
Beyond Europe means us. The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis, which preceded the current government of George Papandreou, did what the Republicans did under George W. Bush. They looted taxpayer funds to enrich their corporate masters and bankrupt the country. They stole hundreds of millions of dollars from individual retirement and pension accounts slowly built up over years by citizens who had been honest and industrious. They used mass propaganda to make the population afraid of terrorists and surrender civil liberties, including habeas corpus. And while Bush and Karamanlis, along with the corporate criminal class they abetted, live in unparalleled luxury, ordinary working men and women are told they must endure even more pain and suffering to make amends. It is feudal rape. And there has to be a point when even the American public—which still believes the fairy tale that personal will power and positive thinking will lead to success—will realize it has been had.
We have seen these austerity measures before. Latin Americans, like the Russians, were forced by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to gut social services, end subsidies on basic goods and food, and decimate the income levels of the middle class—the foundation of democracy—in the name of fiscal responsibility. Small entrepreneurs, especially farmers, were wiped out. State industries were sold off by corrupt government officials to capitalists for a fraction of their value. Utilities and state services were privatized.
What is happening in Greece, what will happen in Spain and Portugal, what is starting to happen here in states such as California, is the work of a global, white-collar criminal class. No government, including our own, will defy them. It is up to us. Barack Obama is simply the latest face that masks the corporate state. His administration serves corporate interests, not ours. Obama, like Goldman Sachs or Citibank, does not want the public to see how the Federal Reserve Bank acts as a private account and ATM machine for Wall Street at our expense. He, too, has helped orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upward in American history. He serves our imperial wars, refuses to restore civil liberties, and has not tamed our crippling deficits. His administration gutted regulatory agencies that permitted BP to turn the Gulf of Mexico into a toxic swamp. The refusal of Obama to intervene in a meaningful way to save the gulf’s ecosystem and curtail the abuses of the natural gas and oil corporations is not an accident. He knows where power lies. BP and its employees handed more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

We are facing the collapse of the world’s financial system. It is the end of globalization. And in these final moments the rich are trying to get all they can while there is still time. The fusion of corporatism, militarism and internal and external intelligence agencies—much of their work done by private contractors—has given these corporations terrifying mechanisms of control. Think of it, as the Greeks do, as a species of foreign occupation. Think of the Greek riots as a struggle for liberation.
Dwight Macdonald laid out the consequences of a culture such as ours, where the waging of war was “the normal mode of existence.” The concept of perpetual war, which eluded the theorists behind the 19th and early 20th century reform and social movements, including Karl Marx, has left social reformers unable to deal with this effective mechanism of mass control. The old reformists had limited their focus to internal class struggle and, as Macdonald noted, never worked out “an adequate theory of the political significance of war.” Until that gap is filled, Macdonald warned, “modern socialism will continue to have a somewhat academic flavor.”
Macdonald detailed in his 1946 essay “The Root Is Man” the marriage between capitalism and permanent war. He despaired of an effective resistance until the permanent war economy, and the mentality that went with it, was defeated. Macdonald, who was an anarchist, saw that the Marxists and the liberal class in Western democracies had both mistakenly placed their faith for human progress in the goodness of the state. This faith, he noted, was a huge error. The state, whether in the capitalist United States or the communist Soviet Union, eventually devoured its children. And it did this by using the organs of mass propaganda to keep its populations afraid and in a state of endless war. It did this by insisting that human beings be sacrificed before the sacred idol of the market or the utopian worker’s paradise. The war state provides a constant stream of enemies, whether the German Hun, the Bolshevik, the Nazi, the Soviet agent or the Islamic terrorist. Fear and war, Macdonald understood, was the mechanism that let oligarchs pillage in the name of national security.
“Modern totalitarianism can integrate the masses so completely into the political structure, through terror and propaganda, that they become the architects of their own enslavement,” he wrote. “This does not make the slavery less, but on the contrary more— a paradox there is no space to unravel here. Bureaucratic collectivism, not capitalism, is the most dangerous future enemy of socialism.”
Macdonald argued that democratic states had to dismantle the permanent war economy and the propaganda that came with it. They had to act and govern according to the non-historical and more esoteric values of truth, justice, equality and empathy. Our liberal class, from the church and the university to the press and the Democratic Party, by paying homage to the practical dictates required by hollow statecraft and legislation, has lost its moral voice. Liberals serve false gods. The belief in progress through war, science, technology and consumption has been used to justify the trampling of these non-historical values. And the blind acceptance of the dictates of globalization, the tragic and false belief that globalization is a form of inevitable progress, is perhaps the quintessential illustration of Macdonald’s point. The choice is not between the needs of the market and human beings. There should be no choice. And until we break free from serving the fiction of human progress, whether that comes in the form of corporate capitalism or any other utopian vision, we will continue to emasculate ourselves and perpetuate needless human misery. As the crowds of strikers in Athens understand, it is not the banks that are important but the people who raise children, build communities and sustain life. And when a government forgets whom it serves and why it exists, it must be replaced.
“The Progressive makes History the center of his ideology,” Macdonald wrote in “The Root Is Man.” “The Radical puts Man there. The Progressive’s attitude is optimistic both about human nature (which he thinks is good, hence all that is needed is to change institutions so as to give this goodness a chance to work) and about the possibility of understanding history through scientific method. The Radical is, if not exactly pessimistic, at least more sensitive to the dual nature; he is skeptical about the ability of science to explain things beyond a certain point; he is aware of the tragic element in man’s fate not only today but in any collective terms (the interests of Society or the Working Class); the Radical stresses the individual conscience and sensibility. The Progressive starts off from what is actually happening; the Radical starts off from what he wants to happen. The former must have the feeling that History is ‘on his side.’ The latter goes along the road pointed out by his own individual conscience; if History is going his way, too, he is pleased; but he is quite stubborn about following ‘what ought to be’ rather than ‘what is.’ ”

My One-Question E-mail Interview With Apple CEO Steve Jobs About Flash

2010-05-20T10:30:00.003-04:00

I'll be the first to admit that I'm no electrical or software engineer. But some of your claims have just been truly strange regarding Flash. At one point, you were saying that cell phones for the most part can't plausibly run Flash. I have used Skyfire on a Nokia e71 and e71x, and it is quite usable. I mean, gosh, I know you've got to pay attention to your bottom line. But when you've got somebody not particularly technology savvy noticing these things, well, it's kind of difficult for you to expect people to take your claims seriously. Being generous with you, I suspect you believe that because Flash is somewhat inconsistent on these types of devices, it's not worth running it at all. But to claim that Flash doesn't work on this now three-year-old phone, e71, is just laughable.

It sounds like the real issue is bandwidth. And frankly I'm not very likely to totally blame you for this problem. In the name of preserving its bandwidth, AT&T has been banning applications on my e71x in the interest of controlling data flow. The real problem with this is its conceit ignores that of course on the iPhone and many other branded phones the restrictions also occur on privately-owned Wifi networks. It would have made AT&T look worse, but the restrictions that you have put on the iPhone and iPad are clearly about appeasing AT&T. Pretending that they are about Flash just seems disingenuous. I think you should negotiate with AT&T to just allow fuller access to flash and other high-bandwidth applications as long as the user is simply using Wifi.

As long as you want to market a device as being "perfect for video," you simply have to allow Flash at this time.

The flash you have run is flash-lite, which is not capable of running most flash websites. Adobe is just now showing full flash running on mobile devices, around 2 years later than promised.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Apple's iPhone does not run Flash Lite.

CORRECTION: While Apple's iPhone does now run Flash Lite, contrary to what I claimed earlier, I still feel I can rest my case about Apple's ulterior motives for not utilizing Flash. It escapes me why anyone would wish to adopt either the iPad or the iPod and enter a not-so-glamorous world of puritanical sensory deprivation.

Interview with New York Senate Green Party Candidate Sander Hicks.

2010-05-07T13:22:00.003-04:00

Over at Disinfo.com.

2010-05-06T13:34:00.000-04:00

BANKING IS SAFE WITH GOVERMENT CONTROL 1961 FEDERAL SAVINGS & LOAN

2010-05-05T00:19:00.000-04:00

2010-04-20T00:56:00.001-04:00

Defense Contractors Sponsor Sesame Street Programming Special

2010-04-14T14:33:00.005-04:00

(Image courtesy of the Elf Wax Times' James Galloway)

If you fill out and send in this form, you can remove you or your ward's name from a list of prospective American military recruits. Its completion moves a name into a "suppression file" in the Department of Defense's Joint Advertising and Marketing Research & Studies. This makes it much harder for military recruiters to reach out to a prospective recruit whose contact information they may have acquired in various ways. Federal law actually requires that they have as much access to high school students as any other prospective employer.

Sesame Street has become loved and reviled for its socially-conscious programming; in one famous example from 1983, after an actor on the show died, Sesame Street took the chance to impart to very young children the temporal nature of human existence by marking his character's death on the show. The forward-thinking episode invited some degree of opposition because even adults themselves continue to find death very uncomfortable or even impossible to psychologically confront.

Premiering tonight on PBS at 8 p.m. EDT is a program, "When Families Grieve," that features four families, two of which features fathers from the American military. (One of the soldiers killed himself. The other died in a helicopter crash in Iraq.) It's important to note that the publicly-subsidized program has made a point of representing the suffering of military-serving families under the umbrella of a discussion of, as a whole, grief, a topic universal to the human experience. The program -- sponsored by defense contractors BAE Systems, the Lockheed Martin Corporation, Oshkosh Defense -- explores the concept of loss from a entirely nationalistic perspective.

Tonight's special discusses military families' suffering through the prism of the death of famed puppet character Elmo's uncle. At a press conference at the Pentagon yesterday morning, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Admiral Michael Mullen greeted Jesse, the grieving daughter, along with her cousin Elmo.

Said Deputy Defense Secretary Lynn, "This [episode] deals with the even more difficult challenge [than a previous episode discussing servicemembers coming home injured] of confronting death and loss. It's an essential part of the human experience, but talking about death is a very difficult thing."

Said Gary Knell, president and CEO of Sesame Street Workshop, "This project, we hope, will help us to bridge the gaps that might exist between military kids, children within the general public. Regardless of the situation experienced, millions of kids have to endure the most emotionally challenging experience in their lives."

In front of a studio audience and broadcast on Pentagon Live, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the deputy Defense secretary shared a few tender moments with the two puppets.

Said a young puppet, Rosita, whose father apparently did not die fighting the unseen enemy, "You know what? We love military families, our friends and we want to show them how much we care about all of you. And you know what? We care a lot. And we want to help in any way we can."

Explained Elmo precociously, "Well, Elmo and Jesse are cousins. Elmo's daddy and Jesse's daddy were brothers."

"That's right. But my dad died last year."

Looking on with utmost affection, Admiral Mullen replies to her, "We know that, Jesse. And we also know that you're here to share that experience, and we very much appreciate you doing that. That will make a big difference for military children who have experienced that as well, as well as other children in America."

This nationalization of the death experience to children is truly the next step in military propaganda. If it was groundbreaking to simply feature one prominent character's death in an episode, this is even more revolutionary. Through the use of beautiful, talented celebrities (such as John Mayer and Queen Latifah), PBS will help prevent military families' grieving experiences from becoming in any way insulated from the (usually) natural death causes which other parents must face. Encouraging children to understand death as a distinctly American experience from their earliest conscious moments tacitly ensures that later on in life that they imagine that degree of suffering as a construct somehow remote from the foreigner's perspective. This is absolutely critical to meeting recruitment goals, and further normalizing the military lifestyle.

"When Families Grive" will ensure that sympathy for human beings suffering the loss of a loved one is focused as exclusively as possible on Americans. And Americans only.

From the man who brought you "Century of Self" . . .

2010-04-05T21:09:00.001-04:00

SM REPOST: Wikileaks coverage

2010-04-05T11:47:00.002-04:00

Some information round-up released by Wikileaks this morning. Reporting with at-desk James Galloway over at Elf Wax Times.

- Video and resources now viewable at http://collateralmurder.com/
- Download, various formats: http://collateralmurder.com/en/download.html
- English transcript: http://collateralmurder.com/en/transcript.html
- Rules of Engagement and other resources etc.
http://collateralmurder.com/en/resources.html

- Wikileaks short description: "The video, shot from an Apache
helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded
Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the
rescue were also seriously wounded."

- NYTimes article on original Baghdad attack in July 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html

- Reuters articles on the request for investigation
From 2007: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL0539996520080711
From 2008: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL05399965

- Wikileaks description:

The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and
stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S.
military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance
with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".

Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of
Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before,
during, and after the killings.

WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a
shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to
both versions from the radio transmissions.

WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a
number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to
verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have
analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source
material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly
involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives
gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the
people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs:
putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very
dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were
killed while doing their work.

SM REPOST: EDITORIAL:U.S. must stop spying on WikiLeaks

2010-03-26T12:42:00.000-04:00

Just spotted this over at the Wikileaks website.

Fri Mar 26 08:44:46 UTC 2010

Over the last few years, WikiLeaks has been the subject of hostile acts by security organizations. In the developing world, these range from the appalling assassination of two related human rights lawyers in Nairobi last March (an armed attack on my compound there in 2007 is still unattributed) to an unsuccessful mass attack by Chinese computers on our servers in Stockholm, after we published photos of murders in Tibet. In the West this has ranged from the overt, the head of Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, threatening to prosecute us unless we removed a report on CIA activity in Kosovo, to the covert, to an ambush by a "James Bond" character in a Luxembourg car park, an event that ended with a mere "we think it would be in your interest to...".

Developing world violence aside, we've become used to the level of security service interest in us and have established procedures to ignore that interest.

But the increase in surveillance activities this last month, in a time when we are barely publishing due to fundraising, are excessive. Some of the new interest is related to a film exposing a U.S. massacre we will release at the U.S. National Press Club on April 5.

The spying includes attempted covert following, photographng, filming and the overt detention & questioning of a WikiLeaks' volunteer in Iceland on Monday night.

I, and others were in Iceland to advise Icelandic parliamentarians on the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a new package of laws designed to protect investigative journalists and internet services from spying and censorship. As such, the spying has an extra poignancy.

The possible triggers:

* our ongoing work on a classified film revealing civilian casualties occurring under the command of the U.S, general, David Petraeus.
* our release of a classified 32 page US intelligence report on how to fatally marginalize WikiLeaks (expose our sources, destroy our reputation for integrity, hack us).
* our release of a classified cable from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik reporting on contact between the U.S. and the U.K. over billions of euros in claimed loan guarantees.
* pending releases related to the collapse of the Icelandic banks and Icelandic "oligarchs".

We have discovered half a dozen attempts at covert surveillance in Reykjavik both by native English speakers and Icelanders. On the occasions where these individuals were approached, they ran away. One had marked police equipment and the license plates for another suspicious vehicle track back to the Icelandic private VIP bodyguard firm Terr. What does that mean? We don't know. But as you will see, other events are clear.

U.S. sources told Icelandic state media's deputy head of news, that the State Department was aggressively investigating a leak from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik. I was seen at a private U.S Embassy party at the Ambassador's residence, late last year and it is known I had contact with Embassay staff, after.

On Thursday March 18, 2010, I took the 2.15 PM flight out of Reykjavik to Copenhagen--on the way to speak at the SKUP investigative journalism conference in Norway. After receiving a tip, we obtained airline records for the flght concerned. Two individuals, recorded as brandishing diplomatic credentials checked in for my flight at 12:03 and 12:06 under the name of "US State Department". The two are not recorded as having any luggage.

Iceland doesn't have a separate security service. It folds its intelligence function into its police forces, leading to an uneasy overlap of policing and intelligence functions and values.

On Monday 22, March, at approximately 8.30pm, a WikiLeaks volunteer, a minor, was detained by Icelandic police on a wholly insignificant matter. Police then took the opportunity to hold the youth over night, without charge--a highly unusual act in Iceland. The next day, during the course of interrogation, the volunteer was shown covert photos of me outside the Reykjavik restaurant "Icelandic Fish & Chips", where a WikiLeaks production meeting took place on Wednesday March 17--the day before individuals operating under the name of the U.S. State Department boarded my flight to Copenhagen.

Our production meeting used a discreet, closed, backroom, because we were working on the analysis of a classified U.S. military video showing civilian kills by U.S. pilots. During the interrogation, a specific reference was made by police to the video---which could not have been understood from that day's exterior surveillance alone. Another specific reference was made to "important", but unnamed Icelandic figures. References were also made to the names of two senior journalists at the production meeting.

Who are the Icelandic security services loyal to in their values? The new government of April 2009, the old pro-Iraq war government of the Independence party, or perhaps to their personal relationships with peers from another country who have them on a permanment intelligence information drip?

Only a few years ago, Icelandic airspace was used for CIA rendition flights. Why did the CIA think that this was acceptable? In a classified U.S. profile on the former Icelandic Ambassador to the United States, obtained by WikiLeaks, the Ambassador is praised for helping to quell publicity of the CIA's activities.

Often when a bold new government arises, bureaucratic institutions remain loyal to the old regime and it can take time to change the guard. Former regime loyalists must be discovered, dissuaded and removed. But for the security services, that first vital step, discovery, is awry. Congenitally scared of the light, such services hide their activities; if it is not known what security services are doing, then it is surely impossible to know who they are doing it for.

Our plans to release the video on April 5 proceed.

We have asked relevant authorities in the Unites States and Iceland to explain. If these countries are to be treated as legitmate states, they need to start obeying the rule of law. Now.

—Julian Assange (editor@wikileaks.org)

The Yes Men - Fix The World

2010-03-23T07:49:00.001-04:00

The Modern Anti-War Movement: A Photojournalism Essay

2010-03-21T15:41:00.011-04:00

I have listened to various activists describe the goals of Camp Out Now with various degrees of ambition. Only able to obtain permits the day before the event was to begin, they appear to hold in their tents limited supplies of food for the purposes of day living, but the legality of actually sleeping outside on The Mall remains at contention. Pictured at the foot of the Washington Monument are markers representative of some Iraqi and U.S. casualties of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Unknown protester sitting down in the “Postcard zone.”

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son, Casey, in Iraq in 2004, immediately following her arrest attributed her decision to lay down in the verboten “Postcard zone” as wishing to express solidarity with the also-arrested fellow military mom and anti-war protester Elaine Brower.

After the protesters start laying down in the “Postcard zone,” D.C. police approaching the White House back lawn from the east.

One particular group, We Are Change Pittsburgh, was upbraiding the direction of the rest of the protesters, cautioning them as to the likelihood of World Trade Center 7, for example, having been wrapped with nano-thermite. When I noticed that one of protesters in that group was sporting one of the “Ron Paul ReLOVEution” shirts, I asked him about why he would support Paul if the representative would say he didn’t think that the buildings’ falls were controlled demolitions. He replied to the effect that Paul knew those demolitions to be the truth, but simply had to deny such knowledge in the practical interest of keeping his congressional seat.

Some part of me wants to scoff at this, but the truth is that most Americans have come to consistently expect their candidates of choice to compromise on absolute facts and all-important truths easily as pertinent as who is in fact killing citizens by the thousands in the streets in broad daylight.

I guess in contrast to all of the self-described communists and socialists running around the protest, there were ”freeper”-flavored counterprotesters of sorts, but they never really got much argument because most of the people there didn’t arrive to discuss health-care legislation or ending the Federal Reserve.

Praying for her enemies, but apparently not hard enough to put down the Starbucks.

Considering the regularity at which NATO members are dying along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, I was a little amazed that the degree of passionate counterprotest seemed to be limited to the case of this heckler of Debra Sweet, an executive at World Can’t Wait, an organization pushing as hard as any for the prosecution of the George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The heckler seemed to semi-seriously believe that Sweet’s indictments of Bush were a celebration of feticide. Stepping in front of Sweet’s bullhorn, she complained that someone was bullhorning in her ear. Behind Sweet, she would attempt to dangle a crucifix in Sweet’s face as she spoke. What’s kind of startling about this counterprotester is her indignation at someone making it the priority to complain about the death of some foreigner’s wantedchild, as opposed to the death of an American fetus whose mother chose not to bring him or her to term.

I still can’t figure out what the implication was with the Ameri-clowns, one of whom is sporting dog tags. Again, I guess I could have asked. But what’s the purpose of going this far at a political rally if the average person can’t immediately get your point? With so much to see, I just wasn’t satisfied that these women would have a worthy-enough explanation for putting on white face and red wigs.

And, no, they’re not Obama-is-a-death-socialist counterprotesters. That one on the right has a socialist newspaper in her pocket.

A typically flamboyant Code Pink protester, who is on roller skates, sadly not in the frame. He whizzed by me, making the crashing and exploding noise of a Hellfire missile, said, “Sorry, here’s $2,000,” and then sped away in a giddy, albeit embittered fervor.

Juan Torres recently assisted in the production of a documentary about his son, whose superior officers, he has claimed for years, framed him for suicide in order to silence allegations of black-market inner-military opiate trading out of Afghanistan.

At the advent of the Iraq War, you might have recalled hearing former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld praise the humanity of surgical-strike smart bombs.

Former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader approached the podium, and asserted there to be no meaningful difference between the Obama and Bush II presidencies with regard to Iraq policy.

It’s hard to know for sure just how effective government mind control techniques have gotten, but, insofar as they have driven someone to put on a Klan hood, call the impression “rapist of humanity,” and obliquely Bible verses on bed sheets, there is clearly plenty of room for concern.

Here’s an illustration of the fear of domestically-staged psychological operations in the wake of both 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, the latter of which Senator Patrick Leahy (D-MD) has communicated he considers at least partly unsolved.

Former attorney general and Saddam Hussein counsel Ramsey Clark speaking to Al-Jazeera.

I pride myself on my understanding of conspiracy theories, why people start the likely and unlikely ones, and why people got mixed up in historical conspiracies. But this guy was a bit of a head scratcher, even for me. Asked his poster, “Who burned Pentagon & WTC on 911?” The not-even-a-U.S.-senator “Barrack” Obama and Marion Barry, it asserts. Cryptically, the artist added, “Cocaine, e.t.c. (sic).” Setting aside the remote possibility that he viewed the cocaine as having set Mayor Barry into some super strength-bestowing ego rage, we can presume that he takes Barry’s cocaine use as an indicator of some deeper mass-murdering instincts. We’ve all heard the conjecture about Mossad, but what’s up with Specter here? I wasn’t careful enough to take the time to ask this guy questions, but it looks like the now-junior Pennsylvania senator is still taking some blowback from the Magic Bullet theory.

In the interest of time, I’ll have to leave it to others to speculate on former Representative Benjamin Gilman’s role in 9/11. Or scripture’s for that matter.

On Saturday, anti-war protesters heeded the ANSWER Coalition’s call for public grievance regarding the continued U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. While not nearly as epic as the protests in, say, 2007 that attracted hundreds of thousands in the run-up to the surge, attendees represented a dedicated core, gathering in Lafayette Square just behind the White House. Disturbingly, one Iraq War veteran to whom I spoke, Geoff Millard, claimed that the main reason for the lower attendance is the substantially decreased economic means of most Americans relative to three years ago to even make a day trip to Washington, D.C.

Early in the day, members of Iraq Veterans Against The War (IVAW)would attempt to lay down a mud stencil in the so-called “Postcard Zone” in front of the White House, the area where everyone goes to get their picture taken.

Shantelle Bateman, a woman who was in Iraq for seven months starting in August 2004, was one of the people preparing to lay down a mud stencil with fellow members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Police spoke to the group’s police liaison. “They communicated to her,” said Ms. Bateman, “that what were about to do was illegal, citing something about a police – some D.C. case where a man was chalking on the sidewalk, and D.C. decided that it was legal (sic\illegal). Although, this is federal property. They didn’t discuss any of that at all. But, in any event, they told us that we had to cease and desist. We – but before that while our police liaison was talking to the police, usually what we do is we carry on with our action until the police liaison settles it. So we laid down the stencil, anyway, and we’re going to do what we‘re going to do. But then we decided to gather up, and decided to just stand there. And that’s when they called the – then decided to close the sidewalk.”

Although not initially citing a specific legal code, police limited access to a certain stretch of that sidewalk in front of the White House, but only to overt protesters, the people carrying signs. In view of the police and until that time from which the protesters had returned from a loop through downtown D.C., tourists were walking freely where the police would not allow protesters. Later in the day, White House police would cite D.C. Code 22-3312.01, a law against defacing public property whose spirit is in saving the district clean-up costs.

At around 11 a.m., people were making preparations assembling prop coffins draped with Iraqi, American and Afghan flags. This type of exercise is a reference to long years of body counts being hidden away either in photograph or downplayed just in word. Those coffins would play no bit part in the protest that would ensue over the next evening.

Ever since presidents have been able to send soldiers into battle for 90 days without necessarily having congressional approval, there’s been a curious shell game afoot. Essentially, if you’re trying to impress these protesters by being an anti-war candidate, you’re left in the bizarre position of having some question your base patriotism if you don’t fund military operations. (Of course, I’m talking about John Kerry here, but the rules still apply.) If you defund, the opponents accuse you of “not supporting the troops,” regardless of how the troops feel about the operation, anyway. In this way, self-described pro-war and anti-war politicians alike can successfully transfer policy responsibility off of themselves. The policy crisis is obvious. It’s one of the main reasons why Representative Patrick Kennedy has been shouting in agony on the floor of the House in recent weeks. Meanwhile, try to blame a soldier, and naturally he or she will point to the people issuing the marching orders. And why not?

In response to my stating this line of jaded reasoning, Ms. Bateman said, “I mean, personally, I have more loyalty to my ethics and my values than I do to any fucking party or movement or wing or whatever. And what brought me to this place to join IVAW was a look at what my personal role and my personal responsibility is and not just, like, the war that I participated in, but my world in general, and decided to do something about it and to do something different. And I think that individuals need to take that responsibility in the collective, you know. And I don’t think that we do that. It’s a big transfer of who did what to who and whose fault it is. We’re all responsible. Everyone is responsible. Congress is responsible. I am responsible. You are responsible. Anyone who will hear this is responsible. And until you identify and accept that and deal with it, that’s where – here’s where we’ll be.”

While the headlining causes were the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan and Iraq, Palestinian rights groups also figured heavily into the event, which had approximately 6,000 attendees at its peak.

Protesters, however, did not heavily emphasize in their signs or clothing the movement to secure reparations for the former slave colony of Haiti, which, while able to secure sovereignty through violent revolution, were stuck for decade after decade actually having to slowly buy their corporal autonomy from their ancestors’ kidnappers, the French, in the process acceding to picking off the natural resources that might have more easily sustained the island nation’s population.

And this is where the protest really lost a lot of the immediacy perhaps it could have claimed, since Haiti is one of the worst casualties of the brand of colonialism ANSWER’s biggest signs and themes alluded to in Iraq and Afghanistan. That sort of talk has set the stage for apologists talking about how relatively nice the use of drones is.

Near the end of the afternoon, some protesters began stacking the cardboard coffins against the White House fence, and then laying down next to the coffins. This is what would initiate eight arrests.

Blow The Man Down: The Reputational Suicide of Representative Eric Massa (D-NY)

2010-03-10T20:08:00.002-05:00

All while painting the pugnacious White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s lobbying efforts as bullying, over the past few days, Eric Massa made good on his promises to not leave his seat quietly, and conducted a series of mind-boggling media appearances. Mr. Massa, in explaining his resignation, cited a cancer diagnosis and political pressure to vote for health-care legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, along with aides’ harassment accusations.

There need not have been any “gotcha” questions. There need not have been any surprise witnesses or mere third parties to decimate the former representative’s reputation. Mr. Massa appeared to be making a desperate, transparent pitch at appearing definitely not homosexual.

In the audio clip from March 8 below, former Rep. Massa, while claiming that he was trying to make the radio show as family-oriented as possible, entered into anecdotes about his Navy days not so much as alarming, but striking for their total lack of necessity in safely contextualizing his resignation and aides’ accusations of physical and verbal abuse. Whatever one concludes about early ‘80s Navy hazing rituals, the truly bizarre implication is that, because these rituals were practiced among men living and working an environment of (ostensibly) enforced heterosexuality, somewhat similar practices are somehow less undesirable in the confines of Capitol offices, which the popular imagination holds are highly formal settings.

Over the last couple of days, media analysts have been pounding their heads trying to make heads or tails of his volunteering information about the hazing rituals, specifically running naked men through trash or having them stick their faces in the crotches of superiors. The representative would then disclose a tactless anecdote about having offered in jest to help one of his Naval bunkmates climax when Massa walked in on him masturbating.

Click To Play

Aides’ sexual harassment charges came at the heel of an incident wherein Mr. Massa admitted, as he did yesterday on Glenn Beck’s show, to having “groped” aides during a tickle fight that eventually resulted in a multi-man pile-on. Curiously, within three hours, appearing on “Larry King Live,” he would deny having “groped” whatsoever.

Not wishing to take on the label of hypocrisy – especially in the wake of accusations against former Republican Representative Mark Foley (R-FL) having made sexual advances toward male pages – House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) communicated to Rep. Massa that he had 48 hours to communicate his aides’ complaints to the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. (In 2006 that top House Republicans had been aware of “overfriendly” e-mail messages Mr. Foley, who represented Palm Beach, had sent to a 16-year-old page, and did not speak against Foley publicly until more explicit text messages were revealed.) It is apparent that to one degree or another Mr. Foley’s actions would damage the Republican Party’s standing in Congress in 2006. It is especially important to understand the most serious of the allegations against Mr. Massa in the context of the Foley scandal.

The point of these particularly egregious examples of providing what seems like too much information remains mysterious. Mr. Massa would repeatedly claim that his outing was politically motivated, as he supports a single-payer health insurance program quite distinct from the legislation now under consideration by congressional leadership through a legislative budgetary process called reconciliation. Reconciliation runs around the filibuster rule requiring a 60-vote majority. The former representative claims that while in the congressional shower room, Mr. Emanuel, himself naked, approached Mr. Massa, and proceeded to browbeat him and poke him in the chest. The White House denies that the incident took place.

Of Mr. Emanuel himself, Mr. Massa would subsequently say during a radio show, “Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil’s spawn,” adding, “He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive.”

On both King and Beck’s shows, Massa would repeat what was apparently a joke apology to Emanuel, saying that the chief of staff would merely be willing to tie Mr. Massa’s children to rail tracks, as opposed to his own.

On “Larry King Live,” Mr. Massa refused to answer whether he was gay.

2010-03-10T14:29:00.000-05:00

Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad?

2010-03-01T09:51:00.001-05:00

On Saturday, January 16, in the context of public discussion in the middle of the previous week and public talks by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern and a December suicide bombing that left eight CIA agents dead, a protest of roughly 70 people occurred on a strip of land outside of the CIA outside Dolly Madison Boulevard. Its number dwindled to approximately 20 before concluding at the nearby corner of the street where Dick Cheney now lives. Attempting to approach strangers and seriously discuss the war a block away from the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters was as frustrating as trying to initiate a meaningful conversation on chatroulette.com; every single discussion was tinged with the unknown. The governmental intelligence gathering and military arm’s past activities left a lingering possibility of being duped by a shill, a lunatic or a misinformed reactionary. What is the nature, though, of some of the biggest legitimate critics of the U.S. covert military apparatus?

At approximately 1 p.m. that day, I was making a miscalculated approach from the north through one of America’s wealthiest suburbs. A handful of men in black uniforms awaited my pulling up through the north gate at 38.956641,-77.145633, two of them with AR-system rifles pointed away from me. They asked if I was going to the protest, and I offered an affirmation, awkwardly and very conspicuously turning the vehicle around. The whole experience was pretty nerve-wracking because I kept imagining all of the very likely ways in which my trunk and car contents were being scanned. I don’t think I’ll feel more naked in front of the genital-splaying full body scanner at the airport.

The protest was, let’s just say, a big, big tent of interests.

Speaking of tents, the largest group of most obviously organized protesters appear in the orange jumpsuits, outfits which are a hybridization of the iconic Abu Ghraib prison image of the detainee standing on a box like some sort of bizarro Statute of Liberty, except with wires coming off of him – the black hoods are a reference to that specific image – and the orange jumpsuits of Guantanamo Bay. In actuality of course, the latter lucky individuals wear goggles, presumably so they don’t get that nasty itch which comes from wool. I’m pretty sure that, later in the day on the walk to Dick Cheney’s house, that figure giving the pro-Taliban protester the most flack was the one arguing to me for the careful maintenance of a relatively strict, smaller tent, if you will. Immediately, the irony of what he tried to maintain in his arguments to David and me was apparent in light of the CIA’s long-celebrated history of destabilizing protest.

If this protest can be said to have succeeded in any sense, it is only because Cheney’s opulently wealthy neighbors may have been forced to deal with on an – ahem, enhanced – basis possibly being ID’d as they attempt to approach their own dwellings. It’s simple, but it probably gave them at least a less vague idea of what it’s like to have to go through a military checkpoint in Iraq. But don’t get me wrong. The people who live in Dick Cheney’s neighborhood inhabit silk-lined crystal goblets. These are the kind of people who fly their dogs to each other on private planes.

Sheehan’s most impassioned accusation regarding Dick Cheney is that he is in fact directly and in no uncertain terms responsible for her son’s death. As has been widely reported for years, Cindy Sheehan lost her son Casey when his helicopter was shot down over Iraq while he had gone along on a mission that, his mother says, he had immediately protested. The myriad ways in which the role of the military is discussed in conversation, the blame for death in war behaves as a bullet striking a concrete surface and breaking apart, each piece destroying a part of different people’s reputations. Politicians, fawning for the soldiers, accept bold pronouncements of their culpability much as Harry Truman did with the sign he kept on his desk, “The buck stops here.” Meanwhile, conversations with actual soldiers inevitably reveal a lot of skepticism about the motives of their elected superiors and of course for good reason. However, the mindset of anyone in an organized warring setting is the displacement of personal responsibility for a killing by a discrete yet distinct virtue in serving one hierarchy’s orders and ostensibly, by extension, the multitude of one’s national group.

Famously, in the lobby of the CIA are inscribed words from the books of Psalms that say the truth will “set you free.” If one only barely extends CIA management’s skill in theology, the biblical verse can be understood in the context of lying to close family members “for their own good” and “trying to suppress that twitch.” Whether it was Nancy Pelosi and the CIA last year unable to match stories about whether they had informed her about waterboarding (e.g. – torture to anyone with nothing to personally gain by saying otherwise), or Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas this year getting the agency to back off claims that he’d sanctioned their destruction of assuredly brutal interrogation videos, the blood has been flowing down both sides of the aisle as freely as slime on Double Dare. The CIA is now like either Congress’ drop rifle, or the main instigator of Congress becoming the CIA’s.

The whole event was happening in the context of Ray McGovern’s having appeared at Café Gutenberg in the District of Columbia beside Cindy Sheehan. McGovern made a ton of headlines for his having cornered Donald Rumsfeld on having manipulated the information regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the run-up to the war. McGovern noted an interesting tidbit from history that he says surprises a lot of the students that he addresses, that in The Washington Post, there was an op-ed by Harry Truman a month following the assassination of JFK that decried the CIA’s role as having moved from an information-gathering conduit to an organization carrying out covert action. After having provided so many intelligence briefings to so many presidents since, he bitterly reminded the crowd at the café of how prophetic Truman’s words have proven.

It was at that same evening event in the auditorium of sorts of the café that Sheehan really began to flesh out what she meant by Peace of the Action, her brainchild for nonviolent resistance to the military operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. As spring approaches, she said, she was planning to set up a camp on The Mall, and from there enlist a larger coalition to stage sit-ins in the Senate and House Office buildings. She claimed in a TV interview with Russia Today that the whole thing begins early next month. Don’t expect her to go all William Thomas and literally set up tent as Thomas did outside of the White House for 26 years. I think that’s about as likely as the machine, grinding along like a slug with razor-sharp teeth on his belly, is to get enough.

As recently as late last year, Sheehan got herself arrested by handcuffing herself to the White House, adamant that Barack Obama’s work for peace is as negligible as Bush’s. Much in the same way that exaggeratedly hawkish voices skate by faster for their children’s military roles, there is a similar bubble around Sheehan. Her son’s decision to enlist, her own father’s work for Lockheed Martin, all of it hovers as a paradox around the woman. Cindy Sheehan has become iconic because that same spirit that leads people to say nothing at all about murders like those the drones are carrying out is that guilt, that guilt that says we’re suckers to judge anyone who pats their kids on their behinds on the way to the firing line and/or daresay, actually loses a child to war and then happens to ramp up her strident demands for rapid demilitarization. The truth is if you criticize these types, hawks or doves, you’re going to look like a real asshole to a number of people actually relatively disinterested in these peoples’ personal causes: ending or escalating the conflicts. And in self-obsessed, painfully monolingual, low-turnout America, that means just about everybody!

The moment I saw “David” (or so he called himself) was the moment I suspected that he might work for the CIA. A crowd of four or five was standing around him trying to block his posterboard sign which said “Victory to the Taliban.” Immediately, I tried to make him shift his frame of reference to catch him in a lie, requesting his defense of the Taliban’s destruction of some impossibly old statues of Buddha. Surprisingly, his answer was very zen, saying that he believed that the Buddha would have supported the destruction of the statues. It really seemed very sympathetic to Buddhist beliefs, namely Linji’s koan, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him.” Somehow, this didn’t awaken any cheerleading for the Taliban in me, but the nuance of the answer did satisfy my instincts asking me if I was simply dealing with a provocateur. After all, I thought, why would a guy rooting for the Taliban be willing to transfer blame off of Casey Sheehan for enlisting in the first place and then onto Dick Cheney? Still, still, I had to remind myself, this guy shared none of Sheehan’s apparent commitment to nonviolence. It was pretty obvious that the rest of the protesters had a great deal of trouble reconciling themselves with the Taliban’s social policies, too. But, blockers all around him, David would contend that since the Taliban were the only organized group expressing direct opposition to U.S. forces and that the others were foolish not to support them.

Watching while Debra Sweet went up to address the crowd, like one of those South American tree frogs, David just starting excreting the sort of distilled stupid that’s absolutely undoing everything good humans have ever accomplished. Her denouncement of any fundamentalist strain of any religion was approached by David with the claim that she was being racist. So frustrating is the way this runs: Criticize a belief, and it’s automatically like saying you don’t like the way someone looks or their entire lineage. You see, that made me think that maybe David was just an actor.

One of the speakers, Joshua Smith, was handing out DVDs containing technical materials and recent news write-ups about the capabilities of the drone attacks along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Smith attributed the biggest problems to the agency’s assumptions about how much it really knows about the people at whom it’s pointing the 100-pound, five-foot Hellfire missiles fired from out of sight from the Reaper and Predator-brand drones. He said, “The problem is they’re not doing their due diligence in their intelligence gathering. And when they strike a home, they always label ‘suspected militants’ who were killed. That encompasses civilians. Anybody in a dwelling of a high-value target they label a ‘suspected militant.’ And, as I’ve said, I think, onstage, if you go and Google ‘suspected militants, drones,” you’ll see page after page of drone attack reports, and the word or the term ‘suspected militant’ is used throughout. And ‘suspected’ is the key word, of course. That flies in the face of most all customary international law and in regards to the Geneva Convention(s) and the Additional Protocols (of 1977). There are many protocols stated to protect at the utmost civilian life. And that is not being followed at all.”

By saying “customary international law,” Smith was referencing his documentation, author Max Kantar’s citing the Additional Protocols of 1977 against the United States. Kantar says that, while these were not ratified by the United States, non-ratifiers have been held accountable. Last November, Kantar published a report called “International Law: The First Casualty of the Drone War,” which very seriously decimates conclusions such as the “31 percent to 33 percent” casualty ratio for the drone strikes forwarded by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann last year through The New Republic and the New America Foundation.

“Mechanisms for enforcing the protocols exist,” explains Kantar. “In the report I wrote, I cited the cases of Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and Sierra Leone, where several war criminals from those countries were prosecuted in the ICC. And I don't think there was very much opposition in the international community to do so. However, who gets prosecuted and who doesn't and who is held accountable and who isn't, is determined entirely by power. That is why there's a warrant out for the arrest of al-Bashir from Sudan but not for Ehud Olmert or George W. Bush. This isn't to say that al-Bashir shouldn't be indicted. He should. But George Bush is a much bigger criminal and he should be indicted too. There's the famous saying by Thucydides, which basically says that the powerful do what they can and the weak accept what they must. Unfortunately we live in a world ruled by force and this is also reflected in the UN.”

Smith indicated his belief that the war is most likely over natural gas. “And there is another theory that we are only there to destabilize Pakistan for the pipeline to not be able to be built. And that would be in the aspects regarding a proxy war on China so that China cannot have access to all of that natural gas.”

Although former congresswoman, Green Party presidential candidate and ardent Gaza activist Cynthia McKinney had said she would make it, Sheehan says that she had to step out of it due to her father’s health.

So I said to Smith, who has protested near the Gazan border, “Well, do you think that – to what extent do you – this is largely painted by people like Robert Gates. When, you know, this larger surge was announced, it was viewed in terms of Islamic extremism and fundamentalism.

Do you feel that – to what extent do you feel that really motivates the people who orchestrate and who actually make the decisions about doing these attacks? Are they really – or just by what their intent – you know, I’m talking about their intentions, you know. Do they really believe that this is about Islamic extremism? When they say that, are they really ‘we got to get that natural gas?’ I mean, I think that that’s a worthy question.”

He replied, “Well, I don’t believe the war or the global war on terror have anything to do with Islamic extremists. I think it is strictly imperialism, domination, profits for the military-industrial complex, and of course natural resources. I think the factor of Islamic extremists is the scapegoat for everything.

I said, “But – so the people being killed in essence were either – they’re standing in the way of the pipelines being built or they’re for the pipelines being built? I’m trying to understand the victims’ relationship to, you know, that larger economic goal.”

Smith said, “Well, victims in relation to Taliban and al Qaeda, and those victims being the innocent people, primarily, they are heavily against U.S. occupation, I believe. There are a lot of reports about that. But also the Taliban have come in with their initial laws, and attempted to help the people. Now, this is a common occurrence. However, it ends up actually being” – and here Smith trails off, confident that the politician-as-heartbreaker theme has been thoroughly articulated elsewhere. “This an occurrence we see here in America with promises of politicians. I saw it in Gaza where Hamas had taken over.”

“So we see it with America. We see it with – in Israel with the Palestinians and then within Gaza’s own, quote, unquote, ‘government,’ and we’re seeing that there in Pakistan and Afghanistan now.”

I asked, “So what extent does the trade of opiates and heroin reflect on motivating the war and the drug trade as a whole?”

Smith said, “Well, the motivation in regard to drugs, I would believe, is that the United States wants to protect the drug trade. They – the drug trade here in America is primarily used to somewhat infiltrate and undermine lower levels, as they would say, of, you know, society.”

“Poor people,” I suggested.

“Poor people. Yes. And, in urban areas, the CIA has been exposed as protecting quite a bit of the cocaine trafficking.”

I asked Smith, “What is the relationship between the CIA’s funding, apparent funding, of Ahmed Karzai and yet the pushing of these lower-level military people into trying to stop the drug trade? Why do they get them into that if they’re paying a drug dealer?”

“Well, I think what a lot of people need to understand is the drug trade is an entire economy unto itself, and, especially in countries such – when we were in Vietnam and just as we are now in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the drug trade being an economy is also somewhat a source of currency. Bundles of any drug from those regions are traded openly and around the regions, and that’s only my suspicion. My father was in Vietnam, and he told me all the facts of that. My father told me of the military escorting loads of drugs in U.S. helicopters.”

The nature of assassinations is that they constitute a weighed balance. Insofar as people rationalize killing those whose actions they cannot properly assess; and that is to say they concede the incalculability of collateral damage. Interchangeably, the most callous killer and most righteous actor inevitably and must take into the cost of this sort of action, if for no other reason than people may make associations whose outrageously dubious behavior may be unknown to them. At their most organized, acts of violence enter a realm in which regarding individuals’ actions must be set aside in order to accomplish some perceived greater goal.

The battles of Central Asia recall the words of the iconic Mohammed ibn Abdullah that oppression is worse than slaughter. The Americans, NATO and now even Japan are locked in combat with a variety of belligerents, Pakistani criminals and apparently others with no apparent affiliation with any of these groups. But as surely as the mission there rolls on and everyone who matters at House Armed Services Committee like Chair Ike Skelton (D-MO) and the White House continue to approve, the only apparent calculus, if their words are taken on their face, is that the deaths have much greater meaning. The Bush administration’s tactic of trying to curb the poppy trade by burning crops has been abandoned to take on a different strategy, the more public advocacy of simply paying the people who would otherwise be fighting NATO.

At least from my contact in Karachi, there seems to be a degree of uncertainty about the relationship between the assassination of Benazhir Bhutto and Baitelluh Mahsud, taken out by one of the CIA’s drones, not unlikely to have been operated from a center such as Kreech Air Force Base in Nevada. The Times was reported significantly higher civilian casualty rates than the U.S. military sources.

The cynics claim that NATO is making the big push into Central Asia for the purposes of holding onto Central Asian natural gas pipelines, that even the sparsely populated mountainous regions around the Khyber Pass. Is this just raw, albeit abashed imperialism? Will these movements in Central Asia really provide freer societies for the Pakistanis and the Afghans? The United States is cleaning up an old mess, having set up a bunch of particularly wealthy Saudi Wahhabists against the Soviet Union. By all accounts, the remnants of this organization have only a hundred or so members even in Afghanistan. From the very limited information available on official ongoing investigations into the organization, it’s not amazing that the struggle has become so demagogued. Just as the 9/11-spawned (and recently respawned!) USA PATRIOT Act has been mostly used against those uninvolved in terrorism per se, the self-definitional spirit of al Qaeda seems to be totally lost.

What happened that I had least expected were counterprotesters who were most certainly born and raised in Central Asia. One of them had difficulty understanding one of my questions due to the language barrier. They were slightly closer to the highway, more towards the traffic of luxury sedans and SUVs, as well as the Fairfax County Police. Their reactions to my questions are here. They seemed totally oblivious to the reports of the scale of civilian deaths that Kantar had managed to piece together from old CNN reports.

I showed this footage to a guy I know in Karachi, way to the south, and he thought it was amazing. “I am grateful to you that you shared this video to me because after watching this I amazed to know that someone (seems to be from) my land really supports drone attacks and termed them defensive measures. I am not sure about the identity of these guys but I can tell you that, even those people who [defend] or justify U.S. existence in Afghanistan and the policy of Pakistani government to give land and transportation to U.S., don’t support drone attacks. Who they guys are? Why they stand for drones’ favor? And before CIA center? These are questions which would be answered by you, but I don’t look something genuine-voiced in all of this. That’s I think so.”

One of the Pashtun gentlemen said that he would have respected the protest with Sweet, Sheehan and Smith had they first protested the atrocities of the Taliban before protesting the drone attacks. And while Sweet had gotten up to a microphone and denounced the Taliban, it’s true that the crux of the blame that day among the main organizers had gone first to the American and Pakistani authorities who were authorizing murder, insofar at least as the assassinations were outside of a court. I had remembered meeting a Pakistani man in Washingtob four months before the protest who had told me that he was very glad to hear that such a drone attack had killed Baitullah Mehsud, a man, many argued, had ordered the killing of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007. I didn’t ask them their names on camera, because I honestly thought they would refuse and I didn’t want to break the flow of natural conversation when approaching their most honest inclinations about the subject matter. Last names weren’t really something I would have pushed with anyone at the outdoor CIA state-sanctioned murder symposium.

Your Nervous System Does Not Belong To Rob Bell

2010-02-08T16:21:00.004-05:00

Under this crook's logic, if we allowed marijuana as a prescription drug, we might as well be selling it in schools to children. At that same time, where are his complaints about the prescriptions offered for the more dangerous, addictive Oxycontin in light of the risk that would end up in children's hands by default? Where are his complaints about the state's sale of alcohol? Of course, all that is really in effect coming out of his mouth is "I want cops to waste time" and "I want poor people randomly incarcerated."

Too often in life, if we take the easy route and refuse to do what's right, we become complicit in unconscionable wrongs. Late last month, some of Virginia's legislators failed once again to free their fellow citizens from the immoral bounds of a system of law that treats adults as if they are less-than-human animals unworthy of deciding their frame of psychological reference without the permission of the collective. Those who push for the continued criminalization of cannabis -- and I want to underline this next part -- while not standing upon disallowing the distribution of the obviously more harmful alcohol are intellectually bankrupt, dishonest and have thus made themselves more serious criminals than anyone trafficking marijuana per se. It is our civic duty to make their reprimand common and accessible to as many people as possible. I urge you to distribute the numbers in this message as far and as widely as possible, particularly to Virginians you may know.

The contents of the voice vote which killed Virginia House Bill 1134, which would have decriminalized the simple possession of marijuana, are not widely known because the mass media has refused to take seriously what a majority of Americans, including the Republican pharmacist who introduced the measure, now understand. Here's what we face.

Here are the names and numbers of the supporters so they can be thanked. This is a very important step.
Delegate H. Morgan Griffith (R) - House District 8
+18046981008
Delegate Vivian E. Watts (D) - House District 39
+18046981039
Delegate Charniele L. Herring (D) - House District 46
+18046981046

And here are the people whose numbers we should distribute for the carrying out of ardent, strongly-worded phone calls of disapproval.
Delegate David B. Albo (R) - House District 42
+18046981042
Delegate Benjamin L. Cline (R) - House District 24
+18046981024
Delegate Ward L. Armstrong (D) - House District 10
+18046981010
Delegate C. Todd Gilbert (R) - House District 15
+18046981015
And ESPECIALLY
Delegate Robert B. Bell (R) - House District 58
+18046981058

(Here, by the way, is my source, Virginia NORML.)

Albo, Cline, Armstrong, Gilbert and Bell must be strongly reminded of the treachery and shame which has accompanied the United States leading the industrialized world in incarceration rates. While our opponents would rather turn this matter into a big joke, there is nothing funny at all about putting people in prison for years of their life without their having caused some serious harm to other people. We must not let up despite this bill's having been tabled for a year.

I will spare no words in reminding each of you that we are up against cold, hardened evil racism here. While there are amazingly still a few who can honestly claim ignorance of the fact that alcohol is more harmful than marijuana, some of the deniers are blatantly dishonest people who simply want any excuse they can to incarcerate people who look a certain way. If we do nothing, we might as well travel back in time and help Governor Wallace block a doorway to keep a public school segregated. If we say nothing, even when the words in our heads are guiding us the right way, we might as well be turning on Bull Connor's fire hose. I seriously believe this policy's level of underlying violence is as serious because the sentencing statistics say it all.

Do the right thing. Distribute these telephone numbers and names. Power to the people.

Excerpt from The New Jim Crow

2010-01-08T09:53:00.000-05:00

Frankly, even those who ardent racists who feel that the innate ability case is not dead have to admit at least the underlying racist ulterior motives of many of those who keep drugs illegal. Frankly, most of the people who I've known as fervent supporters of drug criminalization were generally some of the people I've known least likely to want to live in a neighborhood with individuals darker-skinned than they. We can let them argue whether that is all incidental, but I for one do seriously believe that this dynamic is tantamount to conspiracy.

While the relative explicitness of racism has declined since the 1960s, it has become impossible to understand the rational benefit to society of criminalizing certain drugs while more harmful ones remain for sale by prescription or in the corner store. It's inescapable to conclude that the ulterior motive, indeed, is not isolation and destruction of ethnic minorities.

From the introduction to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow.

Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.

Cotton’s story illustrates, in many respects, the old adage “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals—goals shared by the Founding Fathers. Denying African Americans citizenship was deemed essential to the formation of the original union. Hundreds of years later, America is still not an egalitarian democracy. The arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the same. An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history. They are also subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were.

What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

***

I reached the conclusions presented in this book reluctantly. Ten years ago, I would have argued strenuously against the central claim made here—namely, that something akin to a racial caste system currently exists in the United States. Indeed, if Barack Obama had been elected president back then, I would have argued that his election marked the nation’s triumph over racial caste—the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow. My elation would have been tempered by the distance yet to be traveled to reach the promised land of racial justice in America, but my conviction that nothing remotely similar to Jim Crow exists in this country would have been steadfast.

Today my elation over Obama’s election is tempered by a far more sobering awareness. As an African American woman, with three young children who will never know a world in which a black man could not be president of the United States, I was beyond thrilled on election night. Yet when I walked out of the election night party, full of hope and enthusiasm, I was immediately reminded of the harsh realities of the New Jim Crow. A black man was on his knees in the gutter, hands cuffed behind his back, as several police officers stood around him talking, joking, and ignoring his human existence. People poured out of the building; many stared for a moment at the black man cowering in the street, and then averted their gaze. What did the election of Barack Obama mean for him?

Like many civil rights lawyers, I was inspired to attend law school by the civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s. Even in the face of growing social and political opposition to remedial policies such as affirmative action, I clung to the notion that the evils of Jim Crow are behind us and that, while we have a long way to go to fulfill the dream of an egalitarian, multiracial democracy, we have made real progress and are now struggling to hold on to the gains of the past. I thought my job as a civil rights lawyer was to join with the allies of racial progress to resist attacks on affirmative action and to eliminate the vestiges of Jim Crow segregation, including our still separate and unequal system of education. I understood the problems plaguing poor communities of color, including problems associated with crime and rising incarceration rates, to be a function of poverty and lack of access to quality education—the continuing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Never did I seriously consider the possibility that a new racial caste system was operating in this country. The new system had been developed and implemented swiftly, and it was largely invisible, even to people, like me, who spent most of their waking hours fighting for justice.

I first encountered the idea of a new racial caste system more than a decade ago, when a bright orange poster caught my eye. I was rushing to catch the bus, and I noticed a sign stapled to a telephone pole that screamed in large bold print: The Drug War Is the New Jim Crow. I paused for a moment and skimmed the text of the flyer. Some radical group was holding a community meeting about police brutality, the new three-strikes law in California, and the expansion of America’s prison system. The meeting was being held at a small community church a few blocks away; it had seating capacity for no more than fifty people. I sighed, and muttered to myself something like, “Yeah, the criminal justice system is racist in many ways, but it really doesn’t help to make such an absurd comparison. People will just think you’re crazy.” I then crossed the street and hopped on the bus. I was headed to my new job, director of the Racial Justice Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Northern California.

When I began my work at the ACLU, I assumed that the criminal justice system had problems of racial bias, much in the same way that all major institutions in our society are plagued with problems associated with conscious and unconscious bias. As a lawyer who had litigated numerous class-action employment-discrimination cases, I understood well the many ways in which racial stereotyping can permeate subjective decision-making processes at all levels of an organization, with devastating consequences. I was familiar with the challenges associated with reforming institutions in which racial stratification is thought to be normal—the natural consequence of differences in education, culture, motivation, and, some still believe, innate ability. While at the ACLU, I shifted my focus from employment discrimination to criminal justice reform and dedicated myself to the task of working with others to identify and eliminate racial bias whenever and wherever it reared its ugly head.

By the time I left the ACLU, I had come to suspect that I was wrong about the criminal justice system. It was not just another institution infected with racial bias but rather a different beast entirely. The activists who posted the sign on the telephone pole were not crazy; nor were the smattering of lawyers and advocates around the country who were beginning to connect the dots between our current system of mass incarceration and earlier forms of social control. Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.

In my experience, people who have been incarcerated rarely have difficulty identifying the parallels between these systems of social control. Once they are released, they are often denied the right to vote, excluded from juries, and relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated existence. Through a web of laws, regulations, and informal rules, all of which are powerfully reinforced by social stigma, they are confined to the margins of mainstream society and denied access to the mainstream economy. They are legally denied the ability to obtain employment, housing, and public benefits—much as African Americans were once forced into a segregated, second-class citizenship in the Jim Crow era.

Those of us who have viewed that world from a comfortable distance—yet sympathize with the plight of the so-called underclass—tend to interpret the experience of those caught up in the criminal justice system primarily through the lens of popularized social science, attributing the staggering increase in incarceration rates in communities of color to the predictable, though unfortunate, consequences of poverty, racial segregation, unequal educational opportunities, and the presumed realities of the drug market, including the mistaken belief that most drug dealers are black or brown. Occasionally, in the course of my work, someone would make a remark suggesting that perhaps the War on Drugs is a racist conspiracy to put blacks back in their place. This type of remark was invariably accompanied by nervous laughter, intended to convey the impression that although the idea had crossed their minds, it was not an idea a reasonable person would take seriously.

Most people assume the War on Drugs was launched in response to the crisis caused by crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods. This view holds that the racial disparities in drug convictions and sentences, as well as the rapid explosion of the prison population, reflect nothing more than the government’s zealous—but benign—efforts to address rampant drug crime in poor, minority neighborhoods. This view, while understandable, given the sensational media coverage of crack in the 1980s and 1990s, is simply wrong.

While it is true that the publicity surrounding crack cocaine led to a dramatic increase in funding for the drug war (as well as to sentencing policies that greatly exacerbated racial disparities in incarceration rates), there is no truth to the notion that the War on Drugs was launched in response to crack cocaine. President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods. A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country. The Reagan administration hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a strategic effort to build public and legislative support for the war. The media campaign was an extraordinary success. Almost overnight, the media was saturated with images of black “crack whores,” “crack dealers,” and “crack babies”—images that seemed to confirm the worst negative racial stereotypes about impoverished inner-city residents. The media bonanza surrounding the “new demon drug” helped to catapult the War on Drugs from an ambitious federal policy to an actual war.

The timing of the crack crisis helped to fuel conspiracy theories and general speculation in poor black communities that the War on Drugs was part of a genocidal plan by the government to destroy black people in the United States. From the outset, stories circulated on the street that crack and other drugs were being brought into black neighborhoods by the CIA. Eventually, even the Urban League came to take the claims of genocide seriously. In its 1990 report “The State of Black America,” it stated: “There is at least one concept that must be recognized if one is to see the pervasive and insidious nature of the drug problem for the African American community. Though difficult to accept, that is the concept of genocide.” While the conspiracy theories were initially dismissed as far-fetched, if not downright loony, the word on the street turned out to be right, at least to a point. The CIA admitted in 1998 that guerilla armies it actively supported in Nicaragua were smuggling illegal drugs into the United States—drugs that were making their way onto the streets of inner-city black neighborhoods in the form of crack cocaine. The CIA also admitted that, in the midst of the War on Drugs, it blocked law enforcement efforts to investigate illegal drug networks that were helping to fund its covert war in Nicaragua.

It bears emphasis that the CIA never admitted (nor has any evidence been revealed to support the claim) that it intentionally sought the destruction of the black community by allowing illegal drugs to be smuggled into the United States. Nonetheless, conspiracy theorists surely must be forgiven for their bold accusation of genocide, in light of the devastation wrought by crack cocaine and the drug war, and the odd coincidence that an illegal drug crisis suddenly appeared in the black community after—not before—a drug war had been declared. In fact, the War on Drugs began at a time when illegal drug use was on the decline. During this same time period, however, a war was declared, causing arrests and convictions for drug offenses to skyrocket, especially among people of color.

The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.

The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison. Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities across America.

These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates of drug crime. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color. That is not what one would guess, however, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, which are overflowing with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men. And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These young men are part of a growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society.

***

It may be surprising to some that drug crime was declining, not rising, when a drug war was declared. From a historical perspective, however, the lack of correlation between crime and punishment is nothing new. Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns. Michael Tonry explains in Thinking About Crime: “Governments decide how much punishment they want, and these decisions are in no simple way related to crime rates.” This fact, he points out, can be seen most clearly by putting crime and punishment in comparative perspective. Although crime rates in the United States have not been markedly higher than those of other Western countries, the rate of incarceration has soared in the United States while it has remained stable or declined in other countries. Between 1960 and 1990, for example, official crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were close to identical. Yet the U.S. incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate fell by 60 percent, and the German rate was stable in that period. Despite similar crime rates, each government chose to impose different levels of punishment.

Today, due to recent declines, U.S. crime rates have dipped below the international norm. Nevertheless, the United States now boasts an incarceration rate that is six to ten times greater than that of other industrialized nations—a development directly traceable to the drug war. The only country in the world that even comes close to the American rate of incarceration is Russia, and no other country in the world incarcerates such an astonishing percentage of its racial or ethnic minorities.

The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to actual crime trends, the American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world history. And while the size of the system alone might suggest that it would touch the lives of most Americans, the primary targets of its control can be defined largely by race. This is an astonishing development, especially given that as recently as the mid-1970s, the most well-respected criminologists were predicting that the prison system would soon fade away. Prison did not deter crime significantly, many experts concluded. Those who had meaningful economic and social opportunities were unlikely to commit crimes regardless of the penalty, while those who went to prison were far more likely to commit crimes again in the future. The growing consensus among experts was perhaps best reflected by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, which issued a recommendation in 1973 that “no new institutions for adults should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed.” This recommendation was based on their finding that “the prison, the reformatory and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it.”

These days, activists who advocate “a world without prisons” are often dismissed as quacks, but only a few decades ago, the notion that our society would be much better off without prisons—and that the end of prisons was more or less inevitable—not only dominated mainstream academic discourse in the field of criminology but also inspired a national campaign by reformers demanding a moratorium on prison construction. Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, notes that what is most remarkable about the moratorium campaign in retrospect is the context of imprisonment at the time. In 1972, fewer than 350,000 people were being held in prisons and jails nationwide, compared with more than 2 million people today. The rate of incarceration in 1972 was at a level so low that it no longer seems in the realm of possibility, but for moratorium supporters, that magnitude of imprisonment was egregiously high. “Supporters of the moratorium effort can be forgiven for being so naïve,” Mauer suggests, “since the prison expansion that was about to take place was unprecedented in human history.” No one imagined that the prison population would more than quintuple in their lifetime. It seemed far more likely that prisons would fade away.

***

Far from fading away, it appears that prisons are here to stay. And despite the unprecedented levels of incarceration in the African American community, the civil rights community is oddly quiet. One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system—in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole—yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis).

The attention of civil rights advocates has been largely devoted to other issues, such as affirmative action. During the past twenty years, virtually every progressive, national civil rights organization in the country has mobilized and rallied in defense of affirmative action. The struggle to preserve affirmative action in higher education, and thus maintain diversity in the nation’s most elite colleges and universities, has consumed much of the attention and resources of the civil rights community and dominated racial justice discourse in the mainstream media, leading the general public to believe that affirmative action is the main battlefront in U.S. race relations—even as our prisons fill with black and brown men.

My own experience reflects this dynamic. When I first joined the ACLU, no one imagined that the Racial Justice Project would focus its attention on criminal justice reform. The ACLU was engaged in important criminal justice reform work, but no one suspected that work would eventually become central to the agenda of the Racial Justice Project. The assumption was that the project would concentrate its efforts on defending affirmative action. Shortly after leaving the ACLU, I joined the board of directors of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. Although the organization included racial justice among its core priorities, reform of the criminal justice system was not (and still is not) a major part of its racial justice work. The Lawyers’ Committee is not alone.

In January 2008, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights—an organization composed of the leadership of more than 180 civil rights organizations—sent a letter to its allies and supporters informing them of a major initiative to document the voting record of members of Congress. The letter explained that its forthcoming report would show “how each representative and senator cast his or her vote on some of the most important civil rights issues of 2007, including voting rights, affirmative action, immigration, nominations, education, hate crimes, employment, health, housing, and poverty.” Criminal justice issues did not make the list. That same broad-based coalition organized a major conference in October 2007, entitled Why We Can’t Wait: Reversing the Retreat on Civil Rights, which included panels discussing school integration, employment discrimination, housing and lending discrimination, economic justice, environmental justice, disability rights, age discrimination, and immigrants’ rights. Not a single panel was devoted to criminal justice reform.

The elected leaders of the African American community have a much broader mandate than civil rights groups, but they, too, frequently overlook criminal justice. In January 2009, for example, the Congressional Black Caucus sent a letter to hundreds of community and organization leaders who have worked with the caucus over the years, soliciting general information about them and requesting that they identify their priorities. More than thirty-five topics were listed as areas of potential special interest, including taxes, defense, immigration, agriculture, housing, banking, higher education, multimedia, transportation and infrastructure, women, seniors, nutrition, faith initiatives, civil rights, census, economic security, and emerging leaders. No mention was made of criminal justice. “Re-entry” was listed, but a community leader who was interested in criminal justice reform had to check the box labeled “other.”

"Yes, I did, because I got hit with snowballs."

2009-12-21T19:00:00.001-05:00

Going Vogue: On Ideology

2009-12-15T01:11:00.004-05:00

Easily one of the strangest attributes of watching Congress is the sense that, whatever one’s perspective, the only way that meaningful change could ever truly come about would be a total lack of moderation. It is for this reason that the ad nauseum complaints about partisanship – and, indeed, the credit so many politicians intrinsically offer bipartisanship – even come about. The party system is the ultimate, most explicit act of surrendering independent thought, and it is an act that binds together virtually every successful politician in the United States.

At the same time, there is no sense to the claim that working outside the two major parties will necessarily lead to a better conclusion. However, what has come to be known affectionately as “sausage making” is unironically the very vehicle by which pork barrel spending takes it place in modern legislation. Vague notions of “realpolitik” and “pragmatism” and “realism” inevitably serve to distance legislation from the notions that inspired its original crafting and more toward serving private special interests. Individual party members often decry this process, but never so much that they would seek to go independent. The senatorial and congressional campaign committees for the two major parties reward candidates for their cohesion, and this fosters an atmosphere of going along to get along. This is the atmosphere in which it is easiest to mobilize mass murder.

No doubt, the 2008 Republican executive ticket would express agreement with much of the above, or at least pay lip service to it as maverickism. At the same time, they are observations worth honoring only up to the point where the candidates must seek party blessing. Despite the obviously superior rationality of many adolescents and children compared to a veritable plethora of voters 18 years of age and above, suffrage is not universal largely because of the assumption that children are tremendously impressionable and would simply vote in the manner prescribed to them by their parents. Of course, it is true that parents for good or for ill play a substantial role in communicating the biases, values and interests real or otherwise that spell out decisions at the ballot box.

Whatever one may believe about the prospect of extending the universality of suffrage to those of any age, it seems apparent that the refusal of the vote to children reflects a mass illusion that voting adults are any less embracing of conformity for its own sake than a child might be of the views of his or her doting parent. At the grandest rallies, though, at, say, the nomination of a major-party candidate for president, the acceptance speech is always rife with the vaguest of platitudes. In a moment of clarity, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has described the parties respectively as the “mommy party” and the “daddy party” in an act of extraordinary accuracy. Child voting is verboten because it would only serve to highlight the humiliating fact that adults unfortunately do not themselves wish to engage the world as free agents, but rather submit to the whims of the blithely consuming hordes.

Sure, candidates may allude to the pledges and promises of the campaign trail, but only vaguely so. The purpose of these rallies is for the candidates to advertise themselves as everything to everyone, as satisfying deeply-held subconscious emotional needs. The ritual of the major-party sales pitch reflects an almost Zoroastrian thirst for an epic struggle between competing forces and the essence of ideology, feigning that all of the possible movements of a society could be summed up into either moving “left” or “right.” But the truth is that the causes and interests actually driven by an individual’s quest on behalf of her or his own interests maintain no integrity when politicians mobilize people in this manner. In fact, when people accept this paradigm from their leaders, they are necessarily allowing the subversion of their own interests. The same could be said for pundits who outwardly shrug at accusations of party-based bias who are nonetheless assure their own compensation by marketing for their readers a sense of a consistent worldview.

In order to even engage people in acquiescence through the very act of voting itself, it is necessary that competing ideologies maintain a certain internal inconsistency. Politicians often tout bipartisanship as being a breakthrough, because it is to the collective advantage of members of both major parties that people believe that all rational or debatable viewpoints can fall within the spectrum of views inside the party platforms themselves. This notion lends itself to some bizarre results.

For example, in Barack Obama’s bestselling The Audacity of Hope, the author says, “I suspect that some readers may find my presentation of these issues to be insufficiently balanced. To this accusation, I stand guilty as charged. I am a Democrat, after all.” Even though the Democratic Party outdates the Republican Party and despite the constant trashing of Republican Party member activities by Democrats, tacit in the party’s very existence is its necessary dependence on another ideology, an ideology which in light of itself is considered at least partially wrong. Barack Obama’s intends for his claim to express a degree of laudable humility about his perspectives as a mortal. But as he goes on to cite the greater similarity of his viewpoints with the editorial pages of The New York Times than The Wall Street Journal, the implication of a supposed internal consistency within party ideology crosses a border into the surreal.

However, make no mistake: This type of claim pervades to every single major-party politician in office today without exception. It evinces the bland careerism of individuals unserious about permanently “going forward” or “restoring” any particular good condition to humans alive today. The interest is to instigate a dialectic battle against another ideology understood in a separate vacuum. The party system continues because the most fervent partisans and “moderates” enjoy the flavor of being right and having been right, and in a world full of enormously complex moral choices, the only way to totally acquire this feeling is to adopt a set of semantics disengaged and divorced from a complementary set.

AFP: Show Thrown at the Shoe Thrower

2009-12-01T23:01:00.001-05:00

And Now For A Few Quiet Moments With Felipe

2009-11-12T18:22:00.001-05:00

They Radio at 8:00 p.m. EST, Nov. 12 with The Man Without Fear; Guest Activist Andrew Carroll

2009-11-12T00:48:00.006-05:00

In a world where everyone thinks they own your mind, and infinitely more harmful substances than cannabis are legal, Andrew Carroll had the wherewithal and righteousness to stick it to The Man, and you can listen in as the hero tells his story of standing up for his own mind tonight at 8 p.m. EST. Despite having incarcerated more of their citizens than any other industrialized nation, half of Americans still beg and plead like pitiful, childish slaves for their government to keep them safe from their own volition, in effect maintaining a fascist, cruel status quo that considers cannabis users better off incarcerated than as "unproductive" as Carl Sagan, Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.

The medical evidence, however, tells the truth: Marijuana is much less harmful than tobacco and alcohol. (The latter, of course, the recipient of patrons brainwashed enough by the falsely dichotomous marketing slogan "drugs and alcohol" implying alcohol is not a drug.) The criminalization of cannabis is, indeed, an active, modern conspiracy, as it has relied on conscious efforts by pro-timber industrialists and racist social engineers to propagate a brutal mythology to exploit and enslave the masses, all the while defying the findings of physicians and even Drug Enforcement Agency officials who have tried to stand in their way.

In this episode, They Radio co-host Tyler Bass mulls it all over with New England Activist Andrew Carroll. Mr. Carroll is not particularly enthusiastic for smoking pot, but he is quite the buff for human liberties. To make a statement this past year, he committed an act of civil disobedience by merely holding a piece of marijuana flower and taking the shaft from crazy Johnny Law and his manipulative politician slavemasters.

They Radio, proving that not only does the emperor wear no clothes, but he has not been working out lately. Tune in tonight at blogtalkradio.com/they. Friend us on Facebook at "theyradio live" or on MySpace at myspace.com/they.

U.S. Congress Goes Full Emo

2009-11-08T17:36:00.001-05:00

Research Latency & Deeds

2009-11-04T04:16:00.004-05:00

Say what you will about either one of these candidates and the McDonnell Regent thesis, but if you’ve looked at this thing, you’ll have to admit that had it been widely circulated the first time that Creigh Deeds faced off against Bob McDonnell six years ago for state attorney general, you have to admit this paper would have made Deeds the surefire winner. Even a Regent graduate himself or herself would admit that had the document been released six years ago, it would have convinced enough McDonnell opponents to turn the tide for Deeds.

Over the election cycle’s 24 hours, all the major domestic political cable networks have been saying that Bob McDonnell won the race because Virginia is “contrarian” in its election vis-à-vis the national scene, e.g. – they intentionally will vote for Republican Governors if the presidency and/or Congress are Democratically controlled. All morning on Fox News' “America’s Newsroom,” anchors were suggesting the notion of contrarianism. Late in the day on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow would adopt a similar description. This whole contrarian argument can boast a streak as long as 1977, claimed Maddow.

Much ink has been spilled about the contents of the McDonnell Regent thesis’ decrying feminism, banning contraception and women in the workplace. A salient media interested in this sort of sociological fodder slammed him for it, and Deeds ran with it, attempting to widen the gender gap, all the while lining up McDonnell votes for limiting the sale of contraception (et feminist cetera). On the back of the thesis, he initiated a women’s mobilizing group and made ads featuring women majorly miffed about McDonnell’s academic work.

Take a look at Deeds’ campaign literature, the signs and the website if you have not already, and you can see that Gotham font used by the Obama campaign. This was an effort to ride coattails the same way that McDonnell did throughout his thesis, offering deference at all times to the architects of the Reagan Revolution, as well as the rise of Reagan himself.

With total exasperation, it seems, was the only way Deeds’ campaign went after McDonnell. McDonnell, on the other hand, defined the Deeds campaign, as by the end of the race the McDonnell campaign was smirking with catty, “myth-busting” press releases replying to accusations of having attended “Pat Robertson’s” university. His only real replies were simply restating the same institution with its newer name and without Robertson’s next to it. Deeds’ biggest cheerleader in the mainstream media overall was The Washington Post¸ and throughout the entire campaign season, they made a big deal out of the social policy issues in the McDonnell thesis, the whole while ignoring the fact that McDonnell’s current allegiance to the ideas was impossible to prove. As if the ideas were any less obnoxious if they were communicated in immaturity or haste or in thirst for a better grade.

What was truly strange about the way that The Washington Post examined Deeds’ thesis was with the credulity that editorial treated students actually engaging in serious intellectual criticism if they wish to get a good grade. It’s not surprising if McDonnell believes next to nothing from his old thesis. The question really is whether that’s a good thing at all.

The thesis really reads like something directly out of Adorno. High-levels of superstition, a view of the family as the center of society. Like most self-described conservative ideologues, McDonnell expresses aspirations toward smaller government, yet his thesis’ bent on removing pornography from society or apparent will to prosecute homosexual acts would require an enormous, substantially intervening bureaucracy trouncing any derided welfare office in potential waste, fraud and abuse.

From my initial reading, I was struck by the degree to which the document detailed his love of family and its positive role in his life. Indeed, his own wife's work as he served in the National Guard no doubt helped foster a greater (financial) environment for his edification, if indeed such a thing could be said about a university or a law degree issued by the media tycoon himself. "Please, put your hands on the TV, and pray with me." The whole document basically posits that people are becoming more selfish and individualistic. This struck me as weird because of the way that a lot of Republican leadership has latched onto that Randesque side of Reagan that barked "rugged individualism." Although individualism is somewhat decried relative to the general tone of Ronald Reagan after his reelection, McDonnell chooses to excerpt the contemporary president's remarks regarding the importance of family.

Then, it is as if McDonnell has entered a state of describing an ideal reality, absent so many facets key to understanding human nature. He becomes distinctly prescriptive, as opposed to the descriptive tone that had defined so much of the opening tone. His worldview reflects a view of the pre-1960's as more in line with the Judeo-Christian ethic. The ugly truth is that the "choice" to work, for women, was something fantastic, something to celebrate. Unfortunately, its arrival might have come at the cost of its becoming a "necessity" as much as a "choice" work really is to any degree of ambition.

Like Mr. Wilson lashing out at Dennis The Menace, the fatal flaw of Bob McDonnell's law thesis is its insistence that human are fewer, and, in addition, living shorter lives than in the 1960s.

By page six, the essay is crawling its way into exhaustion, discussing the youth as "victims" of pornography, e.g. - images. McDonnell seriously bucks some senses of personal autonomy throughout one's life insofar as a strict set of obligations are observed by all parties in a family involved, the children and the parents. In this sense, he sees rampant youth drug abuse as being signs of greater trouble, almost implying that drugs are necessarily even an adequate root for serious escapism, as opposed to, say, like going into the Dark Forest where Yoda indicates you're only going to battle yourself.

By page seven, McDonnell espouses the morality of corporal punishment, accurately; however, pointing to the influence that religious influence has had on these beliefs. The 30-something law student didn't see secularism as the absence of religion or a vacuum, but an ideology unto itself. His cynicism about the very "secular" and "humanist" ideologies of the public school system somehow doesn't stop him from placing credence in the SAT results' falling 10 percent, the SAT necessarily being a product of the same ideologies that govern the public schools in critique.

McDonnell apparently advocates state action against "the perverted notion of liberty that each individual should be able to live out his sexual life in any way he chooses without interference from the state." If this thesis were to be updated, among a great many things, it would require an expansion to take into the account of Lawrence v. Texas, that mid-‘90s cocaine sting turned sodomy bust that initiated the Defense of Marriage Act and the ensuing, ongoing gay marriage debate. This was a case where the state of Texas was trying to put two men in prison for anal-penile penetration. Preceding all of this expression at the beginning of this paragraph, the last on page 8, is a seeming non sequitor where certain court decisions represent embraces of "collectivist-statist ideology" being the view of the government toward the family; later, he remarks that the level of individualism has come to be selfish.

McDonnell goes on to attribute the mother's taking on a role outside of the house as having caused economic collapse, for want that women should have been staying at home and teaching their children Judeo-Christian values while the man worked. In this thesis, growing education funding has not resulted in greater increases in grades. Deeds would often criticize the governor for not mandating average plus pay for Virginia public school teachers.

In one sense, the thesis definitely decides that the government should serve as a heavier arbitrator on certain aspects of sex life, but its judgments are limited in a different way. McDonnell frames these paragraphs pointing out the foreshadowed "inconsistencies," but what they really represent is a different kind of intrusion. No doubt financially rewarding gender diversification in the workplace by tax credit would offend McDonnell today. But, to repeat the author's admitting the limits of his knowledge on "cause and effect" the relationship between women entering the workplace by tooth and nail, and women who were more conservative and entered begrudgingly. Presumably, they would play less part in his proposed resurgence of Republican values that will simultaneously "eliminate the need for a comprehensive and expensive federal bureaucracy" in addition to court officials, attorneys and clerks to manage people desperately trying to struggle their way through legal proceedings to prosecute the frivolous social “crimes” frowned upon by the thesis.

Bob McDonnell's concerned tone is that of a shepherd taking care of his flock, making sure that they don't stray from each state-ordained partner. All the while, he insults the government's intrusion at times when it is being bureaucratic. Ultimately, though, the regulation is the same, and the demand from the state is that people seek person affirmation from their partners as they do from their school, their nearest Social Security office. McDonnell's philosophy regarding parenting reflected in this essay is one in which state power is totally diverted from the relationship of the parent. These are the grounds on which, particularly in matters relating to parental consent for abortion, he asserts the duties of a parent to include procurement of state power in the interest of deterring or moderating abortion. Interviews with The Washington Post reveal an attitude of conciliation and single-minded dedication to mourning with the receivers of the operations. Looking back on the thesis in light of his more recent statements lends McDonnell the mien of a polemicist in making his arguments.

McDonnell's quotation of Thomas Jefferson's reference to "nature's God" in the Declaration of Independence is rather ironic, given how much stake the former attorney general places in the institution of the church to satisfy the needs of "of widows, orphans, and the poor and the disadvantaged." Seeing as how "widower" is left out, the essay continues its overall very patriarchal tone. In advocating "voluntary school prayer," the Reagan era necessarily allowed for the use of classroom time for things like "silent reflection" and similar things.

In his thesis, the new Virginia governor reflects on the party of individual liberty, but claims in the thesis (disastrously!) that the government must intervene, and that when the excise of liberty takes the shape of pornography, drug abuse, or homosexuality, the government must restrain, punish and deter." At the beginning of the thesis, McDonnell decries the bureaucratized state initiatives in their anti-poverty manifestations. Presumably, police and court bureaucracies (effectively, the religious police) are to arbitrate on sensitive intellectual grounds like the supposed harms or even the very definition of what constitutes "indecency" or "community standards." Moreover, the community – to wit, not even close blood relatives – is left in the place of deciding when any given individual has had enough morphine or heroin or cannabis. This is of course an assertion of the very statism that McDonnell decries. Arguably, it has a lot to do with why the U.S. military leadership claims a degree of success by stomping out or controlling the trade of opiates (eventually abused and otherwise) out of Afghanistan. The Reagan era's ultimate expression of this was the raising of the drinking age disastrously to 21, except to military members on base (except, eventually, in places like Qatar and Saudi Arabia). The inference in these policies of course is directly that the state owns one's body at least as much as it owns any Treasury bond or any parent's children.

Eventually, upon reading the paper, I came upon the state attorney general’s reference in a serious way to the Garden of Eden, and immediately it evoked the cartoonish image of a talking snake begging me to eat fruit. Closing my eyes, nodding my head, I closed the laptop in front of me, and reveled in my certainty that either McDonnell was silly enough to genuinely believe that mythology substantiated public policy debate or that he was self-conscious to know that the tactic was exactly what his professors desired. Anyone who’s ever gone to college knows that the best humanities grade is most certainly had by simply appearing independently-minded but offering total accord with your professor’s ideology, whatever that may be.

Back in early August, I caught up with Deeds supporters at a rally in McLean, one of America’s wealthiest suburbs to try to help discover what created enthusiasm for the candidate earlier on when he was still relatively neck-in-neck with McDonnell.

Hugh Elwood, Reston, Va.
TB: What do you feel like is the biggest policy difference between the candidates?
MR. ELWOOD: Well, I think it’s more of a general policy stance. I think that Creigh represents the new movement, the – of the progressive Democratic Party.
TB: Yeah.
MR. ELWOOD: And, McDonnell, he just represents the same tired, old policies, you know, whether it be at a statewide level or a national level that the Republican Party is espousing right now.
TB: Well, what policies are those?
MR. ELWOOD: Progressive programs for jobs and infrastructure, higher education.
TB: Yeah, I noticed on their websites when they talked about issues, they both made a general notion – they did have a general notion of creating jobs. And I was wondering, is there a way in which you see job creation with Creigh Deeds as being – why would it be more effective? I mean, I’m trying to – I’m trying to get you be as specific as possible. If there’s something he said or if there’s something the other candidate said that you just inherently disagree with, I mean.
MR. ELWOOD: Well, basically the Republican policies are saying that they will create new jobs by giving tax breaks to those who are more wealthy; and, therefore, the wealthy folks will create more jobs for us worker bees.
On the other hand, I think Creigh represents more of a policy where he would create jobs by giving people tax breaks, by supporting small-business men. And most of the jobs in the country now are being created by small-business men.
TB: Yeah.
MR. ELWOOD: So I think Creigh probably supports those folks more than McDonnell does.
TB: Right. Right. Well, do you feel that – do you feel that his support for the health-care policies that are – you know, the health-care reform that’s now going through Congress could actually add more to the burden that’s placed in – on, you know Medicare costs and medical costs in the state of Virginia? Do you feel that there’s a risk of that?
MR. ELWOOD: I don’t think there’s much risk of that. I think there’s more risk that people will not be covered by health care. I mean that we have huge numbers of people in the Commonwealth and in the nation that aren’t covered by any kind of health care. And Deeds’ support of Obama’s policies in this regard are key for me.
I mean, this is one of – one my sticking points is health care. I mean, that’s my favorite cause. And I think Creigh is probably the guy that would represent that for Virginians better than anybody.
TB: Do you feel that it’s important to have a gun in a bar?
MR. ELWOOD: (Laughs.) No. Alcohol and guns, what could go wrong, right? No.
TB: (Laughs.)
MR. ELWOOD: That’s ridiculous. Why would anybody want to carry a gun to a bar except for a bad reason?
TB: Right. Right. Okay. That’s interesting.
Yeah, I mean, you know the NRA has – you know that that is actually apparently Deeds’ policy, though?
MR. ELWOOD: That’s interesting.
TB: (Laughs.)
MR. ELWOOD: That’s one thing I would disagree with him on.
TB: Yeah, I was – I’m waiting to see if McDonnell will go after him on the gun issue. I think it would be – it would be a lot of fun to see if –
MR. ELWOOD: Yeah, that would be a reversal –
TB: – he could actually alienate his own right-wing base.
MR. ELWOOD: – of roles, right?
TB: Do you feel that – you know, Bob McDonnell talks a lot about values and family. And, you know, I’ve heard him talk about this for years, you know, even back to when he was speaking when he won his first election for attorney general, and he was speaking at a Kilgore rally. Actually, that’s the first time I saw him speak. I was wondering if you felt like his policies were more oriented towards family values, or if that was an empty gesture? I mean –
MR. ELWOOD: You know, I think, you know, we all have families –
TB: Yeah.
MR. ELWOOD: – or most of us, anyhow.
TB: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. ELWOOD: And for any one candidate to attack another on family values is – it’s just sort of – it’s just not valid because Creigh has a family, Bob McDonnell has a family, and we all value family. We all value American life, and I think it’s a non-issue.

Lori Alexander, Mount Vernon, Va.
TB: I was just checking out some emails from our good friend McDonnell. And I – just kidding – I mean, but I was looking at it, and he is apparently criticizing the candidate, Deeds, for having a different view regarding charter schools than President Obama.
An I noticed you were talking about education.
MS. ALEXANDER: Okay.
TB: And I was wondering what your own view on charter schools was and whether you would favor, you know, the positions taken more by teachers’ unions against, like, these – testing schools in order to give them funding, rather, I mean, what your ideas are about that?
MS. ALEXANDER: You’re asking the right person.
Well, for me, actually, I went to a charter school growing up. I grew up in a very poor area, and I am not known – sometimes, I think – I don’t want to say anything negative about the teacher’s union.
TB: Yeah.
MS. ALEXANDER: But I do want to say that I do in my heart back in Massachusetts that sometimes the unions think too much about money and resources and forget about the children.
As you know, that – we have a large teachers’ union in Massachusetts, where I grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts.
TB: Right.
MS. ALEXANDER: And the teachers were horrible, but they were not allowed to fire them because the union was behind them. So I had teachers that were abusive towards me as a child, that would say racist comments to the kids because I was –
TB: Sure.
MS. ALEXANDER: – whites were a minority in my school.
TB: Right.
MS. ALEXANDER: And I do think that teachers should be held accountable. I do think Virginia – this Virginia is not Massachusetts, though. I think Virginia has some wonderful teachers. Fairfax County has one of the best school systems in the area. However, my thinking is, is that I do think teachers need – kids need to know how to take standardized exams. And I’ll give you a good example.
I went to public schools my whole life. I took the MCAT exam. And I scored – I have a graduate degree. I scored a 2 in verbal reasoning because my schools were so poor; they never taught me how to take tests.
TB: Yeah.
MS. ALEXANDER: And I’m one of those kids that are from a low-income background so we don’t do well with test-taking because most of the people that I went to school with were – the teachers called ignorant. We were poor.
So I think it’s – I think it’s very important that teachers go back to basics, and – and – and I do think that teachers need to teach kids how to speak appropriately, how to write English appropriately and how to be able to not stay in that low-income façade. Does that make sense?
TB: Here’s a statement from Bob McDonnell today. He said, “I was disappointed to see the video yesterday of my opponent supporting the comments of the head of the Virginia Education Association when it comes to charter schools and performance pay. Just two weeks ago, she wrote in The Washington Post that” – she’s talking about the union head – “‘the charters do not make sense for Virginia.’
“While campaigning with Senator Deeds this week, she again made clear determination to work behind the scenes to apparently water down or impede the president’s efforts to expand the number of charter schools nationwide, and provide performance pay for teachers and principles. It is a baffling position considering that the president and the secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, recently announced their Race To The Top education reform plan to provide billions in federal education funding for the states that would aggressively expand charter schools and enact performance pay plans.”
I mean, do you think that – do you think that –
MS. ALEXANDER: I think Obama’s doing the right thing, and if Deeds agrees with charter schools and making teachers accountable, I am totally for that. I agree with that because there are many, many good teachers, but also what my experience is some that are not very good.
TB: Well, here’s the thing. He’s was standing with the head of the teacher’s union not two days ago, and when she said that – warned about charter schools and their role, he nodded his head. It was a visual cue, and that’s why the Republican Party of Virginia and Bob McDonnell have been attacking him for that.
MS. ALEXANDER: Well, it’s hard. I mean, the only thing I can say is I do – I support Deeds. And if I don’t support – I don’t support him –
TB: What’s the most important to you?
MS. ALEXANDER: To me, it’s actually the environment. So schools are important, but the environmental issues are important; also, health care.
TB: What makes you think Deeds is going to do better things for the environment?
MS. ALEXANDER: Well, because I’m a member of the League of Conservation Voters.
TB: Right.
MS. ALEXANDER: And Deeds has had over 80 percent to 100 percent ratings.
TB: Right.
MS. ALEXANDER: We – the League of Conservation Voters rate both Democrats and Republicans, and he is way off the chart. He’s against the coal plant, and I think all of those things are important.
TB: Which one?
MS. ALEXANDER: In Surry.
TB: Okay.
MS. ALEXANDER: The Surry coal plant.
So actually that’s – what I really like about Deeds is his environmental policies. But when it comes to schools, I probably am a little bit more moderate.
TB: Okay.
MS. ALEXANDER: I do believe that there’s some teachers that if they’re not cutting it, they need to go. They need to go.
And I do – I actually do agree with vouchers. I’m a voucher person. I’m sorry.
TB: The crowd swarms in for the kill!
MS. ALEXANDER: But you know what? Because – you know what, I should not have to have been put in the abusive school. I was beat up; I was threatened because these parents didn’t take care of their kids, and they were taking their anger out on me. And no kid should have to be put through that.
TB: Okay. And you feel the union impeded that –
MS. ALEXANDER: Oh, yeah! Of course they did.

Yvonne Surette, Herndon, Va.
TB: Well, then, I mean, you would disagree about the unions, though, right?
MS. SURETTE: I don’t think there’s enough data on charter schools.
TB: Okay.
MS. SURETTE: There’s conflicting data. There are studies that show they don’t do any better. There are some studies that show that they do better. And there’s so much conflicting information about SOLs about about No Child Left Behind. I think it’s almost impossible to tell. It’s too early to tell how charter schools are doing.
TB: Then why – then what is the issue that brings you the most here? As opposed to McDonnell, what issue do you see as being the biggest difference between them?
MS. SURETTE: Between the two of them?
TB: You’re not going to say guns. But what do you feel?
MS. SURETTE: I just cannot in good conscience vote for a Republican ever.
TB: But that’s not an issue.
MS. SURETTE: Nope. To me, it’s a broad range of issues. There’s not one particular issue. Virginia has got to remain a blue state. We’ve got to have both Democratic senators and a Democratic governor within a Democratic administration. It’s the only thing that’s going to save this country.
TB: But it’s not nominal. There must be some policy that makes you –
MS. SURETTE: You want me to say a policy?
TB: – when you think Republicans and you get frightened, what do you think?
MS. SURETTE: (Laughs.) Okay, let’s take health care.
TB: Okay.
MS. SURETTE: The Republican position on health care is ridiculous. It’s they want people to – if they’re poor, hell with you. It’s an unkind position.
It’s like not letting gay people marry. It’s just keeping people out of hospital room when they’re dying partner. They can’t go in because they’re not next of kin. It’s just the same kind of thing.
And I think we need to regard health care as the way we regard the police and the fire, you know? If you’re poor or rich, they’re going to come and rescue you. It’s doesn’t matter. Health care has to be exactly the same way. It has to be public. It has to be – you know, there has to be a single-payer system. Everybody. There’s 50 million people in this country without health care. And that would be issue today.
TB: Would you support single-payer health care –
MS. SURETTE: Absolutely.
TB: – if it made it so that Virginia had to take more of its own funds to pay for Medicare?
MS. SURETTE: Absolutely. And even if it means an increase in taxes. The good of the community is what matters.
I come also from Massachusetts where just like California years ago we had something called Proposition Two and a Half, I think it was, like Prop 13 in California. People vote against their own best interests. You know, they don’t see the future. They don’t see that. “Oh, I’ll get $100 chopped off of my tax bill!” But they’re going to close the schools. You’re not going to have a neurologist when you’re old. You’re an idiot if you don’t support education.
TB: And about single payer, is there a level – what level of income annually would you –
MS. SURETTE: Two hundred and fifty thousand (dollars). (Laughs.)
TB: Would – you would – okay. You got it. There you go.
MS. SURETTE: Yeah. (Laughs.) I think that’s the administrative position.

Delegate Charles Caputo
TB: I was wondering, one what issue do you see the biggest difference between Bob McDonnell and Deeds?
DEL. CAPUTO: You know, the biggest issue that defines Deeds is the ability to relate to the needs of the people and fulfill them.

Judy White, Springfield, Va.
TB: What do you see as the biggest – on what issue do you see the biggest difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds?
MS. WHITE: Transportation.
TB: Transportation. On what sense? In what way?
MS. WHITE: Because Bob McDonnell has a plan, but they say it won’t work.
TB: Who’s “they?” The?
MS. WHITE: Other members of –
TB: The House of Delegates? General Assembly?
MS. WHITE: Yeah.
TB: All right. What is Deeds’ plan? And why do you think it would be more likely to work?
MS. WHITE: He doesn’t really have a set plan that I know of yet.
TB: Right.
MS. WHITE: If he does, I haven’t read about it.
TB: Okay. But Bob McDonnell’s formulated but bad plan is what makes you say that’s the biggest difference, right?
MS. WHITE: Uhm, well, I think the biggest difference is one’s a Republican and one’s a Democrat.
TB: (Laughs.) Right. Right.
MS. WHITE: (Laughs.)
TB: But, I mean, it’s foggier than that. I mean, on the gun issue, I would say, you know, you wouldn’t say it’s so typical, you know?
MS. WHITE: Right.
TB: Right. I’m just throwing that out as an example. It’s not to really jog it.
Yeah, I mean, most of the people I hear from hear, you know, say just in general, “I’m a Democrat. I would vote for a Democrat.”
But, you know, I want to get the heart of the candidates. I mean, obviously, there’s some position he could take that would make you say, “I’m sitting out” or “I’m voting for a third party” or something like that.
MS. WHITE: Well, that’s why most of us are here because we don’t really know a whole lot about Deeds yet.

Frank Blechman, Fairfax
TB: What do you see as the biggest policy difference between the two candidates?
MR. BLECHMAN: Bob McDonell has built a career out of saying, “No.” And Deeds has built a career out of saying, “Yes.” I think it’s a character difference, not a policy difference.
TB: Okay. So you just see Bob McDonnell as being less moral?
MR. BLECHMAN: No, it’s not a question of moral. It’s a question of, do you really care about solving problems? Why are you running to be a leader of a government?
TB: Yeah.
MR. BLECHMAN: A government is about doing the things together that we can’t do alone. So if you want to get things done, then you figure out how to get things done.
TB: What has he – he said, “No” to? What do you – like, what –
MR. BLECHMAN: He said no to fixing the roads. He said no to expanding higher education. You got a no about expanding health care for children. I mean, you want me to go on? I’ll give a long list.
TB: Yeah, please.
MR. BLECHMAN: He said as part of the Republican leadership of the House no to making the tax structure more fair. I mean, those are just four. And I think possibly the one that here in Northern Virginia cuts quite a bit is he said no on the environment; we’re not going to spend any more money actually trying to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. Eventually, he got beaten into it. But it’s – his inclination is to say, “No, I don’t care about any of those things. I care about cutting taxes, making government smaller.”
That’s terrific. He should go run a corporation. He shouldn’t try to run government.
TB: Could you name a per anna figure of income at which you would say, “We can’t raise taxes on people who make this much per year?”
MR. BLECHMAN: Let me tell you. In Virginia, you hit the top income-tax bracket –
TB: Yeah.
MR. BLECHMAN: – at $17,500 of taxable income.
TB: Yeah.
MR. BLECHMAN: That level was set when the new top bracket was added in 1964. The original top bracket, which you hit at $7,500, was set in 1927. Those numbers have not moved, have never been adjusted. I think $17,500 as the top tax bracket is too low. We have a virtually flat tax – income-tax system. And our total income-tax system is quite regressive because we depended on fees and on sales taxes.
So, for me, I would raise the top income. I would either add a new top income-tax bracket –
TB: Right.
MR BLECHMAN: – or I would raise the level of tax on the top income-tax bracket, and raise the point at which it went into effect?
TB: Right. And to ask you a question that might seem obvious –
MR. BLECHMAN: I understand what you’re doing.
TB: – you’re talking. Yeah. You’re asking – you’re talking about 17,000 (dollars) per year?
MR. BLECHMAN: Taxable income, you hit the top income-tax bracket in Virginia.
TB: If you make $17,000 per year?
MR. BLECHMAN: Seventeen thousand five hundred, you hit the top income-tax bracket in Virginia.
TB: That’s not 70 (thousand dollars)? It’s –
MR. BLECHMAN: No, one seven comma five zero zero.
TB: Oh, wow.
MR BLECHMAN: So that’s a – that’s not a very progressive tax. I think you should raise the level at which that top tax applies, and increase the amount.
TB: Do you feel that you need a gun in a bar?
MR. BLECHMAN: I don’t. But I live in Northern Virginia.
TB: All right.
MR. BLECHMAN: I have to tell you, I was in a meeting a couple of years ago where neighborhood activists were sitting around.
TB: Yeah.
MR. BLECHMAN: And folks from Alexandria were talking about trying to get the city to help them with – control rats.
TB: Right.
MR. BLECHMAN: And folks from down in Abbingdon said, “What are you talking about? Take your gun and shoot ‘em!”
TB: (Laughs.)
MR. BLECHMAN: Why do you need the city to control rats?
Well, the folks from Alexandria tried to explain why firing a gun in a crowded neighborhood to try to hit rats is a dangerous thing to do. Folks down say just, “I don’t get it. Who need government to deal with rats?”
TB: (Laughs.)
MR. BLECHMAN: Well, living here in Northern Virginia, I don’t feel that I need a gun for my public safety.
TB: (Laughs.)
MR. BLECHMAN: I don’t feel safer carrying a gun. I don’t feel safer when I’m in places where I see people swaggering around with weapons on their hips. I don’t go to bars that much, but I sure don’t need a gun there. And I think it’s bad public policy.
TB: It seems like in a lot of the language I see coming out of nationwide congressional Republican leadership, there is a more of a demonization of government roles and of social programs. They would say, for example, like, you know, that a government takeover of health care was a bad thing; whereas, a Democratic politician would say, oh, well, it’s rather an action of the many, and they would say that, “Oh, well, it’s the people doing this for each other.”
You know, I was wondering if you feel like government has become a swear word to Republicans?
MR. BLECHMAN: Well, since 1976. This is not a new development.
TB: Right.
MR BLECHMAN: This is a generational development.
TB: Why ’76?
MR. BLECHMAN: Seventy-six is the year when Ronald Reagan begins his ascendency, and the whole group of pollsters and speechwriters that came with him that made liberal an evil word; made it not just an incidental part of their campaigns as Nixon had in ’68 and ’72, but a deliberate, central part of the campaign. And then that became the Reagan Revolution. “Government is the problem,” not the solution.
Now, in fairness, Democrats got so cowed and scared, very few Democrats would say government is the solution. And we’re not back to a point yet where we have usefully defined, what are the things that government can do better than private industry? And, until we do, we’re going to have a hard time winning votes on those issues.
. . .
MR. BLECHMAN: I believe that a single-payer system will save us in the first 10 years somewhere between 15 (percent) and 25 percent of what we’re now spending on health care. So I’m willing to take that gamble. But I understand it’s a gamble.
TB: I guess I was trying to focus on an issue. Is there any particular issue that’s most important to you about Deeds, that is the most serious reason for voting for him?
MR. BLECHMAN: Well, in Northern Virginia, on every poll, the number one issue is transportation. And as guy from Hampton Roads, which has huge transportation problems, McDonnell voted no to fund transportation. And as a guy from Bath Country that does not have huge transport needs, Deeds was willing to on the limb, and say we have to fund transportation; we have to do it statewide; we cannot do it with a Northern Virginia tax or a Hampton Road tax, and we have to do it on a statewide basis. That’s an issue of tremendous integrity. It’s an issue that won him the primary. And it’s going ot win him the general.

They Radio Live on November 5, 8:00 p.m. EST on Antisemitism; Guest: author and Jewish Defense Organization Activist A.J. Weberman

2009-11-04T01:30:00.004-05:00

There's an old Usenet rule called Godwin's Law that dictates that the longer a discussion goes on, the likelihood of someone comparing his opponent to Hitler approaches one. In a world still dealing with the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, emotions still run hot enough that politicians and activists manipulate the masses through the use of ethnic stereotypy. The relationship between lineage and faith in question, antisemitism has become cardinal to many conspiracy theories, from the forged (such as the Protocols of Zion) to the outlandish (David Icke's claims that antisemitism was being used against him by the shapeshifting reptilian elite and the Anti-Defamation League's equally bizarre on-camera insistence that just implying that some Jews were secretly lizards was antisemitic.)

From Adam Fogle at The Palmetto Scoop

Bamberg County GOP Chairman Edwin Merwin and Orangeburg County GOP Chairman James Ulmer penned a piece together responding to criticism by state Rep. Bakari Sellers over [South Carolina Senator Jim] DeMint’s opposition to Congressional earmarks.

The defense of DeMint, however, was anchored in an ethnic stereotype.

“There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves,” Ulmer and Merwin wrote. “By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.”

Even earlier, late September, the editor-in-chief of RedState.com accused now-conspicuous Florida Congressman Alan Grayson (D) of having revealed a certain callousness by supposedly accompanying his description of failed American health-care policy as a "holocaust" with claims that the Anti-Defamation League was a "crazy, racist institution." The truth was that the quote actually came from a Grayson policy adviser, Tom Stoller. Yet even more fascinatingly, Grayson's Wikipedia page describes him as Jewish.

Realities like these show that, whatever your views on the state of Israel and/or Judaism, accusations of antisemitism have become the centerpieces of vast conspiracy theories involving memes that are sometimes borrowed for the creation of other theories that have absolutely nothing to do with Judaism and/or the state of Israel. This is best embodied in the fact that the term "cabal," derived from the Jewish mystical scriptual interpretation Kabbalah, is now used to describe a potentially secular, ethnically ambiguous occult group acting in intrigue. Of course, many ethnic groups, insofar as their necessarily temporal descriptions will even allow, are the subjects of collective blame, but they will just have to wait for another night because we've got an awesome guest.

Thursday night, Ashnfara Judy and I will be joined by Jewish Defense Organization Activist A.J. Weberman, as we try to put our finger on the roots of these phenomena. Tune in at blogtalkradio.com/they Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 8 p.m. EST, and we'll even make some time for you to call in. Friend us on Facebook or at myspace.com/theyradio.

They Radio Returns Live October 22nd, 8:30 p.m. EDT with "Skulls of Salvation" author Lanaia Lee

2009-10-20T19:11:00.002-04:00

We learned how to control our minds using telekinesis for
protection and safety during battles. I think every human being
has the capacity to do this. Maybe in time, mortals may learn
how to harness this power. However, I fear that if mankind did
figure this out, many would be like Uric, using the power for
personal gain and treachery.
"The one true power of the Orions is illusion, the power of
the mind. Those that chose to go back to our home eventually
died. When the star exploded, it created a massive light in the
sky that lasted for several months. In reality, the star that
exploded was the historical Star of Bethlehem. I know this
because I lived it.

- From Lanaia Lee's Skulls of Salvation, Book 2 - Of Atlantis

This Thursday, Ashnfara Judy and I will be returning for another episode of They Radio. You can listen in at Blog Talk Radio or on our MySpace page, if you're into that sort of thing. Our episode on 2012 truly nailed the zeitgeist, as the release of Ms. Lee's book and the upcoming Hollywood blockbuster evidence. Sometime in the second half of the 90-minute program, we'll even let you call in at (347) 945-5210.

You don't have to live near the turn of a millennium to see some people getting excited about the upcoming end of the world. In this episode, we'll discuss the author's book, her views on 2012 prophecies, Mayan beliefs, the story of Atlantis and truths lost to time. Enough time with an open mind, a stomach for covert social dynamics and parapolitics and an eye for the truth behind lies will make you glad you tuned in!

And Now A Nice Quiet Afternoon With Idi Amin

2009-10-18T15:30:00.001-04:00

Stormtroopers' 9/11

2009-10-17T15:40:00.001-04:00

Just because someone believes in the Force doesn't mean they're going to go blow up the Death Star.

Live From City 17

2009-09-27T10:54:00.001-04:00

Confronted by LRAD Accoustic Weapons

2009-09-25T21:06:00.001-04:00

Now on the streets of the United States of America.

The Health Care Crisis, from The Pinky Show

2009-09-12T20:14:00.001-04:00

Well, this gets some of the general ideas together.

Bass: On "Reining In The Imperial Presidency," a report by House Judiciary's Democratic Majority

2009-07-11T12:42:00.001-04:00

Coming Your Way This Week, America

2009-06-22T09:39:00.001-04:00

2009-06-20T09:01:00.001-04:00

Got this on Facebook today. Probably Good Advice.

2009-06-18T09:05:00.001-04:00

Dear friend

On Friday 19th June, it will be Aung San Suu Kyi’s 64th birthday. She will spend her birthday detained in the notorious Insein Prison.

On May 18th Aung San Suu Kyi was put on trial, charged with breaching the terms of her house arrest after an American man, John Yettaw, swam to her house and refused to leave. The dictatorship are using the visit as an opportunity to extend her detention.

Her trial has now been adjourned until 26 June. Aung San Suu Kyi has already spent more than 13 years in detention and faces another 5 years in prison.

DEMONSTRATION
Please show your solidarity and join us outside the Burmese Embassy in London from 1-2pm on Friday 19th June.
19A Charles Street
London, W1J 5DX
Nearest tube: Green Park

Solidarity events will be held worldwide. To find out details of events taking place near you, visit: http://www.64forsuu.org/events.php

SEND HER A BIRTHDAY MESSAGE
You can leave a message of support at http://www.64forsuu.org

More than 9000 people have now left a message, video or tweet calling for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, and all of Burma’s political prisoners.

Celebrities from around the world have sent messages, including George Clooney, Yoko Ono, David Beckham, Julia Roberts, Daniel Craig, and Richard Branson. Stephen Fry, Eddie Izzard, Kevin Spacey and Sarah Brown have been “tweeting” about the campaign.

As well as celebrities, the website has received political support featuring video messages to Aung San Suu Kyi from heads of state including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Mohamed Nasheed, President of the Maldives and President Jose Ramos Horta, President of Timor-Leste.

Post your message now http://www.64forsuu.org

Thank you for your support

Johnny Chatterton
Campaigns Officer
Burma Campaign UK

PS. If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, we’re asking everyone to put Aung San Suu Kyi as their profile picture until her birthday. You can download the image here: http://www.facebook.com/aungsansuukyi

---
Support our work: Donate to the Burma Campaign UK and make a difference today. You can be sure your donation will make a difference. Supporting the Burma Campaign UK is one of the most effective ways of supporting the struggle to free Burma. Donate now: http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/donate.html

The Burma Campaign UK
Registered Company No. 3804730
Registered office address
28 Charles Square
London N1 6HT

They Radio Returns On The Torture Cover-Up - June 20, 7 p.m. MySpace.com/TheyRadio

2009-06-17T09:01:00.003-04:00

Listen out for the return of Tyler Bass and Ashnfara Judy this Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 7 p.m. EDT as we discuss the recent attempts in Congress to cover-up evidence of torture and detainee abuse. Special guests include ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) and Brigadier General Janis Karpinski (ret.). You'll be able to listen at myspace.com/theyradio or at blogtalkradio.com/they.

Supporters of Ahmadinejad in Tehran

2009-06-16T08:09:00.001-04:00

Auto-Tune the News #3: cuba. afghan friendship. 2-party woes.

2009-06-13T18:28:00.001-04:00

Longtime State Department Reporter Dies, 63, To Domestic Media Silence

2009-06-08T09:05:00.001-04:00

Photo Courtesy of Macedonian International News Agency

Lambros Papantoniou, correspondent for the Elettheros Typos, a Greek daily in Athens, dies the night of Wednesday, May 27, and the blogs were silent. Maybe there was something deeper about the way that Mr. Papantoniou, a man who had been asking questions in press briefings in the Department of State for a very long time, was not the talk of numerous political blogs that had so often mentioned his name. His remarks had inherently influenced the dynamic in some of the most regular discussions directing the tone of press comprehension of American foreign policy. What I'm really trying to say here is that the condition in any given press briefing, whether with Robert Wood or Ian Kelly, is a fairly hazardous. Ask an unusual question, and you may be seen, unfairly or not, as wasting other peoples' time. On a few occasions, unfairly or no, Mr. Papantoniou was viewed as wasting others' time by questioning whether there was really a solid link between HIV and AIDS.

To follow up, I contacted the president of the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society, David Crowe, based on information from this press release. In an interview by phone, I asked Mr. Crowe why Mr. Papantoniou was so hung up on this issue about the relationship between HIV and AIDS.

Mr. Crowe: "The best understanding that we can make is that HIV has never been purified. There are no claims that it has ever been purified. There are claims that it has been isolated, but when you look at what it means to isolate the virus, it doesn't mean that you've proven that any virus is present let alone a specific virus. So because of the purification in – in – in a sense that's comparable to what we normally think of as purification, which would be separating the virus from all other organic materials. And that's essentially what Lambros was asking: Where is the evidence that it's been purified? And, secondly, have you ever seen the purified virus -- (inaudible) -- from a human as opposed to from some artificial lab culture?

"So even if you could pull out a virus out of a culture that was derived from, human blood for example, there's so many other things that go into that culture, that's still not proof that the virus came from a person. But given that nobody's purified HIV even from a laboratory culture, that kind of a secondary question."

Crowe believes that SARS was an epidemic caused by a drug therapy based on a fear that there was a new pneumonia out there.

David Crowe describes Mr. Papantoniou as "a mystery wrapped up in an enigma." He told me that a close friend of Mr. Papantoniou, a Harvard-trained pathologist named Dr. Andrew Maniotis, had told Crowe that Papantoniou had been treated with AIDS drugs. He said, "I believe that, when he was in the hospital, they were treating him with AIDS drugs. But I also understand he had other health problems." But, as this was hearsay, he hesitated to tell me this because he didn't "want to report something that was inaccurate." He got me in touch with Dr. Maniotis.

Dr. Maniotis described Papatoniou as a close friend who had been "fighting for weeks" for his life. The impact of the loss weighed heavy on the tone of his voice. Dr. Maniotis described Papantoniou as "one of the most dynamic human beings that has ever, you know, pushed human rights and freedom in the world." The pathologist denied that he had told Crowe that Papantoniou had been treated with AIDS drugs or that the doctor was HIV positive.

"Nobody really knows why he's gone," said Dr. Maniotis, who said that Mr. Papantoniou was "like a brother" to him. "He had a very stressful time," he added. "Now he's dead." He continued to say that, as a pathologist by some training, it's easier to figure out why someone "just died, but it's rare to find why they did die." He said he wasn't certain if we'll really ever know why the reporter died.

He described him as a "humanitarian" that "the world will miss."

Think these guys will see as much time as Max Hardcore?

2009-06-07T19:50:00.001-04:00

2009-06-04T23:08:00.001-04:00