Secrets, Lies, War, and Whistleblowers: What Manning Has Done for America

How Dystopian Secrecy Contributes to Clueless Wars: Bradley Manning Has Done More for U.S. Security than SEAL Team 6

by Chase Madar  - TomDispatch

The prosecution of Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ source inside the U.S. Army, will be pulling out all the stops when it calls to the stand a member of Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that assassinated Osama bin Laden. The SEAL (in partial disguise, as his identity is secret) is expected to tell the military judge that classified documents leaked by Manning to WikiLeaks were found on bin Laden’s laptop. That will, in turn, be offered as proof not that bin Laden had internet access like two billion other earthlings, but that Manning has “aided the enemy,” a capital offense.

Think of it as courtroom cartoon theater: the heroic slayer of the jihadi super-villain testifying against the ultimate bad soldier, a five-foot-two-inch gay man facing 22 charges in military court and accused of the biggest security breach in U.S. history.

But let’s be clear on one thing: Manning, the young Army intelligence analyst who leaked thousands of public documents and passed them on to WikiLeaks, has done far more for U.S. national security than SEAL Team 6.

Tomgram: Chase Madar, Bradley Manning vs. SEAL Team 6

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: This website received an honor last week. In the Utne Reader’s 2013 media awards, TomDispatch won for “best political coverage” of the year. Here’s the description that went with the category: “Emerging in the early days of the War on Terror, TomDispatch’s fierce devotion to truth has proven essential to navigating our Orwellian post-9/11 planet. Combining some of the most insightful and courageous voices on the web, the site strikes at the very foundations of power and propaganda. As we face down a new decade of drone warfare, counterinsurgency, and climate chaos, Tom Dispatch’s forceful analysis and sharp investigative authority could scarcely be more vital.” Tom]

Okay, give them this much: their bloodlust stops just short of the execution chamber door. The military prosecutors of the case against Bradley Manning, assumedly with the support of the Obama administration, have brought the virulent charge of “aiding the enemy” against the Army private who leaked state secrets. Yet they claim to have magnanimously taken the death penalty off the table. All they want to do is lock Manning up and throw away the key because, so they claim, he did nothing short of personally lend a hand to archfiend Osama bin Laden. This echoes the charge repeatedly made by top U.S. officials that he and WikiLeaks have “blood on their hands” for releasing a trove of military and State Department documents.

We’re talking about the very officials who planned and oversaw Washington’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the backlands of the planet and who have searched their own hands in vain for any signs of blood. (None at all, they don’t hesitate to assure us.) Among them are those, military and civilian, who set up our torture prisons at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan, are ultimately responsible for the perversions of Abu Ghraib, and oversaw kidnappings off the streets of global cities. These are the folks whose Air Force blew away at least six wedding parties in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose drones have killed hundreds, if not thousands of civilians, and whose special operations forces recently seem to have been involved in the torture, murder, and secret burial of Afghan civilians. I could go on, but why bother since it was all done “legally,” which means they can retire to corporate boards of their choice, rake in money from speeches, and write their memoirs, while Manning, whose motive (to judge by the online conversations he had) was to end the bloodletting, reveal information about American crimes, and to shut down our wars will have no memoir to write, no life to live. It can’t get worse than that, can it?

Given what we now know about the U.S. military’s unwillingness to pursue prosecutions of rape in its own ranks, its eagerness to pursue Manning to the edge of the grave should be considered striking. We’re talking about a national security state that -- as recent revelations have made clear -- can imagine just about no boundaries when it comes to surveilling its own population and none whatsoever when it comes to protecting its own actions from the eyes of the public. In that sense, Manning truly crossed a red line. Rape? A mere nothing compared to his crime. After all, he was aiding the most dangerous enemy of all: not Osama bin Laden, but Americans who want to breach the ever-expanding secrecy of the National Security Complex.

As TomDispatch regular Chase Madar (covering the Manning trial as a blogger for the Nation) suggests today, right now there seem to be few crimes more dangerous than shining a light on the secret workings of the U.S. government and its military. Admittedly, President Obama entered the Oval Office promising on Day One to let the “sunshine” in on government operations. Manning fulfilled the president’s promise in the only way a 22-year-old who had seen terrible things in Iraq could imagine doing. Maybe it wasn’t elegant by the president’s high standards, but it was effective. He deserves something better than the worst the U.S. military and Washington can throw at him. He deserves a life, and if that life in the end proves as valuable as it’s been so far, a memoir. Tom

How Dystopian Secrecy Contributes to Clueless Wars: Bradley Manning Has Done More for U.S. Security than SEAL Team 6

by Chase Madar

The assassination of Osama bin Laden, the spiritual (but not operational) leader of al-Qaeda, was a fist-pumping moment of triumphalism for a lot of Americans, as the Saudi fanatic had come to incarnate not just al-Qaeda but all national security threats. This was true despite the fact that, since 9/11, al-Qaeda has been able to do remarkably little harm to the United States or to the West in general. (The deadliest attack in a Western nation since 9/11, the 2004 Atocha bombing in Madrid, was not committed by bin Laden’s organization, though white-shoe foreign policy magazines and think tanks routinely get this wrong, “al-Qaeda” being such a handy/sloppy metonym for all terrorism.)

Al-Qaeda remains a simmering menace, but as an organization hardly the greatest threat to the United States. In fact, if you measure national security in blood and money, as many of us still do, by far the greatest threat to the United States over the past dozen years has been our own clueless foreign policy.

The Wages of Cluelessness Is Death

Look at the numbers. The attacks of September 11, 2001, killed 3,000 people, a large-scale atrocity by any definition. Still, roughly double that number of American military personnel have been killed in Washington’s invasion and occupation of Iraq and its no-end-in-sight war in Afghanistan. Add in private military contractors who have died in both war zones, along with recently discharged veterans who have committed suicide, and the figure triples. The number of seriously wounded in both wars is cautiously estimated at 50,000. And if you dare to add in as well the number of Iraqis, Afghans, and foreign coalition personnel killed in both wars, the death toll reaches at least a hundred 9/11s and probably more.

Did these people die to make America safer? Don’t insult our intelligence. Virtually no one thinks the Iraq War has made the U.S. more secure, though many believe the war created new threats. After all, the Iraq we liberated is now in danger of collapsing into another bitter, bloody civil war, is a close ally of Iran, and sells the preponderance of its oil to China. Over the years, the drain on the U.S. treasury for all of this will be at least several trillion dollars. As for Afghanistan, after the disruption of al-Qaeda camps, accomplished 10 years ago, it is difficult to see how the ongoing pacification campaign there and the CIA drone war across the border in Pakistan’s tribal areas have enhanced the security of the U.S. in any significant way. Both wars of occupation were ghastly strategic choices that have killed hundreds of thousands, wounded many more, sent millions into exile, and destabilized what Washington, in good times, used to call “the arc of instability.”

Why have our strategic choices been so disastrous? In large part because they have been militantly clueless. Starved of important information, both the media and public opinion were putty in the hands the Bush administration and its neocon followers as they dreamt up and then put into action their geopolitical fantasies. It has since become fashion for politicians who supported the war to blame the Iraq debacle on “bad intelligence.” But as former CIA analyst Paul Pillar reminds us, the carefully cherry-picked “Intel” about Saddam Hussein’s WMD program was really never the issue. After all, the CIA’s classified intelligence estimate on Iraq argued that, even if that country’s ruler Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction (which he didn’t), he would never use them and was therefore not a threat.

Senator Bob Graham, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2003, was one of the few people with access to that CIA report who bothered to take the time to read it. Initially keen on the idea of invading Iraq, he changed his mind and voted against the invasion.

What if the entire nation had had access to that highly classified document? What if bloggers, veterans' groups, clergy, journalists, educators, and other opinion leaders had been able to see the full intelligence estimate, not just the morsels cherry-picked by Cheney and his mates? Even then, of course, there was enough information around to convince millions of people across the globe of the folly of such an invasion, but what if some insider had really laid out the whole truth, not just the cherry-picked pseudofacts in those months and the games being played by other insiders to fool Congress and the American people into a war of choice and design in the Middle East? As we now know, whatever potentially helpful information there was remained conveniently beyond our sight until a military and humanitarian disaster was unleashed.

Any private-sector employee who screwed up this badly would be fired on the spot, or at the very least put under full-scale supervision. And this was the gift of Bradley Manning: thanks to his trove of declassified documents our incompetent foreign policy elites finally have the supervision they manifestly need.

Not surprisingly, foreign policy elites don’t much enjoy being supervised. Like orthopedic surgeons, police departments, and every other professional group under the sun, the military brass and their junior partners in the diplomatic corps feel deeply that they should be exempt from public oversight. Every volley of revealed documents from WikiLeaks has stimulated the same outraged response from that crew: near-total secrecy is essential to the delicate arts of diplomacy and war.

Let us humor our foreign policy elites (who have feelings too), despite their abysmal 10-year resumé of charred rubble and mangled limbs. There may be a time and a place for secrecy, even duplicity, in statecraft. But history shows that a heavy blood-price is often attached to diplomats saying one thing in public and meaning something else in private. In the late 1940s, for instance, the United States publicly declared that the Korean peninsula was not viewed by Washington as a vital interest, emboldening the North to invade the South and begin the Korean War. Our government infamously escalated the Vietnam War behind a smokescreen of official secrecy, distortion, and lies. Saddam Hussein rolled into Kuwait after U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie told the Ba’athist strongman that he could do what he pleased on his southern border and still bask in the good graces of Washington. This is not a record of success.

So what’s wrong with diplomats doing more of their business in the daylight -- a very old idea not cooked up at Julian Assange’s kitchen table five years ago? Check out the mainstream political science literature on international relations and you’ll find rigorous, respectable, borderline-boring studies touting the virtues of relative transparency in statecraft -- as, for example, in making the post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe such a durable peace deal. On the other hand, when nation-states get coy about their commitments to other states or to their own citizenry, violent disaster is often in the offing.

Dystopian Secrecy

Foreign policy elites regularly swear that the WikiLeaks example, if allowed to stand, puts us on a perilous path towards “total transparency.” Wrong again. In fact, without the help of WikiLeaks and others, there is no question that the U.S. national security state, as the most recent phone and Internet revelations indicate, is moving towards something remarkably like total state secrecy. The classification of documents has gone through the roof. Washington classified a staggering 92 million public records in 2011, up from 77 million the year before and from 14 million in 2003. (By way of comparison, the various troves of documents Manning leaked add up to less than 1% of what Washington classifies annually -- not exactly the definition of “total transparency”.)

Meanwhile, the declassification of ancient secrets within the national security state moves at a near-geological tempo. The National Security Agency, for example, only finished declassifying documents from the Madison presidency (1809-1817) in 2011. No less indicative of Washington’s course, the prosecution of governmental whistleblowers in the Obama years has burned with a particularly vindictive fury, fueled by both political parties and Congress as well as the White House.

Our government secrecy fetishists invest their security clearances (held by an elite coterie of 4.8 million people) and the information security (InfoSec) regime they continue to elaborate with all sorts of protective powers over life and limb. But what gets people killed, no matter how much our pols and pundits strain to deny it, aren’t InfoSec breaches or media leaks, but foolish and clueless strategic choices. Putting the blame on leaks is a nice way to pass the buck, but at the risk of stating the obvious, what has killed 1,605 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan since 2009 is the war in Afghanistan -- not Bradley Manning or any of the other five leakers whom Obama has prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. Leaks and whistleblowers should not be made scapegoats for bad strategic choices, which would have been a whole lot less bad had they been informed by all the relevant facts.

Pardon my utopian extremism, but knowing what your government is doing really isn’t such a bad thing and it has to do with aiding the (American) public, not the enemy. Knowing what your government is doing is not some special privilege that the government generously bestows on us when we’re good and obedient citizens, it’s an obligation that goes to the heart of the matter in a free country. After all, it should be ordinary citizens like us who make the ultimate decision about whether war X is worth fighting or not, worth escalating or not, worth ending or not.

When such momentous public decisions are made and the public doesn’t have -- isn’t allowed to have -- a clue, you end up in a fantasy land of aggressive actions that, over the past dozen years, have gotten hundreds of thousands killed and left us in a far more dangerous world. These are the wages of dystopian government secrecy.

Despite endless panic and hysteria on the subject from both major parties, the White House, and Congress, leaks have been good for us. They’re how we came to learn much about the Vietnam War, much about the Watergate scandal, and most recently, far more about state surveillance of our phone calls and email. Bradley Manning’s leaks in particular have already yielded real, tangible benefits, most vividly their small but significant role in sparking the rebellion that ejected a dictator in Tunisia and the way they indirectly expedited our military exit from Iraq. Manning’s leaked reports of U.S. atrocities in Iraq, displayed in newspapers globally, made it politically impossible for the Iraqi authorities to perpetuate domestic legal immunity for America troops, Washington’s bedrock condition for a much-desired continuing presence there. If it weren’t for Manning’s leaks, the U.S. might still be in Iraq, killing and being killed for no legitimate reason, and that is the very opposite of national security.

Knowledge is Not Evil

Thanks to Bradley Manning, our disaster-prone elites have gotten a dose of the adult supervision they so clearly require. Instead of charging him with aiding the enemy, the Obama administration ought to send him a get-out-of-jail-free card and a basket of fruit. If we’re going to stop the self-inflicted wars that continue to hemorrhage blood and money, we need to get a clue, fast. Should we ever bother to learn from the uncensored truth of our foreign policy failures, which have destroyed so many more lives than the late bin Laden could ever have hoped, we at least stand a chance of not repeating them.

I am not trying to soft-peddle or sanitize Manning’s magnificent act of civil disobedience. The young private humiliated the U.S. Army by displaying for all to see their complete lack of real information security. Manning has revealed the diplomatic corps to be hard at work shilling for garment manufacturers in Haiti, for Big Pharma in Europe, and under signed orders from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to collect biometric data and credit card numbers from their foreign counterparts. Most important, Manning brought us face to face with two disastrous wars, forcing Americans to share a burden of knowledge previously shouldered only by our soldiers, whom we love to call heroes from a very safe distance.

Did Manning violate provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice? He certainly did, and a crushing sentence of possibly decades in military prison is surely on its way. Military law is marvelously elastic when it comes to rape and sexual assault and perfectly easygoing about the slaughter of foreign civilians, but it puts on a stern face for the unspeakable act of declassifying documents. But the young private’s act of civil defiance was in fact a first step in reversing the pathologies that have made our foreign policy a string of self-inflicted homicidal disasters. By letting us in on more than a half million “secrets,” Bradley Manning has done far more for American national security than SEAL Team 6 ever did.

Chase Madar is an attorney and the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the WikiLeaks Whistleblower. A TomDispatch regular, he writes for the London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, the American Conservative, and CounterPunch. He is covering the Manning trial daily for the Nation magazine.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Chase Madar

Shining Deceit Beneath the Ancient Sun: Israel's False Prophets of Peace

From the Trojan Horse to the Golden Calf—the Power of Deceit

by William A. Cook

Little in this world is new but the means to do it; our actions and our behaviors are but regurgitations of our heritage. Our Western world gorges on its past and glorifies in it. Our children memorize and are mesmerized by the deeds of heroic figures the likes of Achilles and Oedipus, glorified by the great chronicler Homer, deeds done with power and deceit. Our children and our adults flock even now in 2004 to witness the fall of Troy with Brad Pitt extolling the virtues of Achilles and Sean Bean acting the sly Odysseus. Our hearts and our desires throb to theirs; we faint and flutter at their heroics as we witness the carnage of their exploits and the splendor of their victories.

Our minds find the means to their ultimate success in the deception fabricated by Odysseus, the great Trojan Horse, a monstrous sculpted symbol of conceded victory offered by the Greeks to their vanquishers. Our minds marvel at the simplicity of the deception, a mixture of apparent kindness, of supplication, of forgiveness, of beauty, of hopefulness, but ultimately our minds recognize the power of the mental cruelty that creates out of such darkness the power to destroy, to massacre, to devastate, to cripple, to maim, to slaughter the lives of all who lived and loved and prayed behind the walls of Troy. We do not anticipate that Priam or Hector or the wives of Troy will be our guides through this mayhem, just those with the power, the will, the means to deceive; in that mixture rests success.

How appropriate the film appeared in 2004 as Ariel Sharon forced the world to conceptualize a 21st century power as it constructs a wall to incarcerate an indigenous people, walling them in as opposed to storming their wall to destroy them. Done we are told to defend the state of Israel, not to continue in this new civilized century the slow motion genocide of the Palestinians. How unfortunate that the Israeli military, with the fourth largest state of the art assemblage of weaponry on the planet, cannot defend itself against a people that have no military at all. How to convince the world that they are the victims not the Palestinians? To deceive or not to deceive is not the question; the question is what is the means of deception since one cannot put a sculptured horse inside the Bantustans that constitute the mythological state of Palestine.

Today, John Kerry, our new Secretary of State, flits around the mid–east by phone or jet to proffer a last stand “peace” talk initiative between Netanyahu and Abbas with the trump card held above their respective heads that the US will withdraw from its role as interlocutor leaving the two parties to solve their differences on their own, something a kin to Achilles hauling the dead Hector behind his chariot around his Father’s city to the delight of his mercenaries. Think of it: without the deception that America offered to the world, a pseudo-determined effort to control Israeli expansion further into Palestinian land and their ostensible state, Netanyahu can further corral the millions of Palestinians into tighter and tighter quarters as Settlers (read squatters) steal yet more of what’s left of Mandate Palestine. As long as Netanyahu can count on the US veto in the Security Council, he has nothing restraining his efforts to rid the land of Arabs as his Zionist predecessors so desired.

Kerry’s pitiful efforts reflect the reality of the fictitious peace talks that the US, the “objective broker” since 1967, has presented to the world. Here are the words of Dr. Jeff Halper in his article “The Problem with Israel” published in The Plight of the Palestinians, November 23, 2006.

Let’s be honest (for once): The problem in the Middle East is not the Palestinian people,
not Hamas, not the Arabs, not Hezbollah or the Iranians or the entire Muslim world. It’s
us, the Israelis. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the single greatest cause of instability,
extremism and violence in our region, is perhaps the simplest conflict in the world to
resolve. For almost 20 years, since the PLO’s recognition of Israel within the 1949
Armistice Lines (the “Green Line” separating Israel from the West Bank and Gaza),
every Palestinian leader, backed by large majorities of the Palestinian population, has
presented Israel with a most generous offer: A Jewish state on 78% of Israel/Palestine in
return for a Palestinian state on just 22% – the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. In
fact, this is a proposition supported by a large majority of both the Palestinian and Israeli
peoples. As reported in Ha’aretz(January 18, 2005):

Some 63 percent of the Palestinians support the proposal that after the establishment of the state of Palestine and a solution to all the outstanding issues - including the refugees and Jerusalem - a declaration will be issued recognizing the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and the Palestinian state as the state of the Palestinian people...On the Israeli side, 70 percent supported the proposal for mutual recognition.

Halper goes on to establish the deceit of the Zionist governments in Israel as they pretend to desire peace talks and a resolution to a two state solution when in fact the Israelis have prevented any attempts by the Palestinians to achieve peace in the 19 efforts he lists. A look at the map below will demonstrate this fact. Given what is termed the facts on the ground, parlance that replaces theft with the consequences of power, one can see that there is no way that a Palestinian state could be formed simply because the bits and pieces left are not themselves contiguous and do not include all of Palestine or the Palestinian people; Gaza is not included in this new initiative. Thus while Abbas must not state any preconditions, he must also accept the mandate of Israel and the United States that Gaza is no longer a part of Palestine nor are its people.

How strange that a people can be split asunder by those that determine it to be an enemy when in fact it is a legitimately elected government for the people of Gaza as it had been a major portion of the united Palestinian people before Israel and the US declared it to be a terrorist organization. Israel savages Lebanon in 2006, invades Gaza in a murderous rampage during the season of peace at Christmas in 2008-2009, attacks a fleet of peaceful protestors to Israel’s illegal control of international waters as they sailed to bring medical supplies to the besieged people of Gaza while they assassinated 8 Turkish citizens and an American Turkish teenager, and they are immune from prosecution because the US vetoes the justified efforts by the UN to bring them before the International courts. The Israeli state began as a terrorist organization against the British Mandate Government from the 1930s through to May of 1948 (see Introduction in The Plight of the Palestinians, Macmillan 2010); it has continued to use terrorism against the people of Palestine and the people of Lebanon and Iraq and Syria and Egypt and the United States ever since. Yet we, the United States of America, support, or more correctly our representatives support in our name, this terrorist organization that hides its reality by elections.

Since most of the people in the educated world understand the realities of the above paragraph, it has become necessary for Israel and the US to find yet another deception to continue the “cleansing” of Palestinians out of “Judea and Samaria” the names that replace in Israel the land of the Palestinians, the West Bank and the Palestinian portion of Jerusalem. They have turned to the Golden Calf.

Like the Trojan Horse, the Golden Calf is a sculpted image from another ancient text, the Bible, that deceived the followers of Moses to replace him as their leader since he had disappeared up the mountain and they felt insecure. Aaron fashioned all the gold trinkets the people could find and made the image of the calf or bull since it is not clear exactly what was fashioned. Scholars differ on what this image represents; bulls and calves were common in Near Eastern religions (Dr. Jeffrey Tigay, The JPS Torah Commentary). Interestingly, the Egyptian God Ptah is represented by a bull, a sacred animal that symbolizes his soul on earth who gave fertility and rebirth to the people.

Perhaps that is what the followers of Moses wanted to remember since they had just fled from Egypt and quite obviously the God Ptah is more of a uniting g-d than Yhwh who is, as the book of Exodus points out, a Merciless God.

“25 Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies. 26 So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me.” And all the Levites rallied to him.

27 Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’” 28 The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. 29 Then Moses said, “You have been set apart this day.”

30 The next day Moses said to the people, “You have committed a great sin. But now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.”

From the Golden Calf of Ptah to a god of destruction of his own people, the biblical myth sets two necessities for the followers of Moses, obedience to a merciless, unseen god and dependence on an intermediary to gain atonement. Such are the rights of those lashed to a mythical god.

But this is a mythical tale after all since current archeology and historical accuracy of the Bible has determined that the Exodus never happened. “The saga of Israel’s growing conflict with Egypt is neither historical truth nor literary fiction. It is a powerful expression of memory and hope born in a world in the midst of change” (Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 2001).

The story of the exodus served immediate political and military ends to rally the people with “a saga of a new beginning reminding them of their own difficulties and giving them hope for the future” (70). How important then to use this image to achieve political and military ends as the Zionists fear the split of “their” Palestine with the indigenous inhabitants, yea even to deceive your own people to assure power through fear.

How then gain sympathy for their plight? How make the world understand that this is yet another taking of Jewish land? How rally the world with their compassion, their generosity, their mercy for the downtrodden then to offer four billion in gold to the Palestinians that they might rise to new heights of civilization by building stores and apartments and industries and eateries and homes and Disney like entertainment parks on the land left to them, approximately 10-12% depending on whether or not one takes in the checkpoints and towers and the wall that sneaks in to capture hundreds of dunams beyond those established by Resolution 242, the green line.

Thus does the Golden Calf become the lure to enslave the people to the god of greed as the biblical story unfolds once again. So today the Zionists proffer their gold to the Palestinians to be the reason for their being seeking to touch the depths of their despair and humiliation by offerings that have led them to this pit of human degradation where the stuff of this world negates the values of the mind and soul and heart in favor of perfumes and satins and silks, and debauchery.

“6 So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.

7 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt,have become corrupt. 8 They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’”

But the Palestinians did not come out of the land of Egypt anymore than the Israelis did. They have lived in Palestine for millenniums’ and know the sacredness of the land that their fathers and mothers deeded to them with hearts filled with love and the keys to match, while the Israelis fled to other places or converted to the truths of Christianity or the faith of Allah. So what does Secretary Kerry’s four billion and his deadline mean to the Palestinians?

It’s obvious what it means to Netanyahu: it means freedom to do what he wants to do, delay, delay, delay till more and more land can be swallowed by Israel and the chance of a Palestinian state is a mirage of the past. It means total subjugation of the people to the rule of Israel, not as an equal state but as a neighboring territory that has no freedom of movement, no currency of its own, no independent economy, no government that can do more than police the people of Palestine on behalf of Israel, no judicial system that acts contrary to Israeli courts, no access to the sky except through the Israeli airport, no egress and ingress unless approved by the IDF, no access to the farms separated by the wall without IDF approval, no border on the east except that created by Israel to annex the best agricultural land in Palestine, a necessity to defend the state of Israel, no free movement between the Palestinian Bantustans and the Palestinian families, friends and neighbors in Gaza without Israeli control of the borders between their accepted Palestinian territories and that of a baptized terrorist state, no accepted government approved by Israel that will permit the people of Palestine to determine laws that apply to them, no access to the settler network of highways that lace the Palestinians’ land for fear of terrorist activity and hence necessary to defend the Israelis, in essence no freedoms, no rights, no state, no justice. This is what Israel will gain and what the Palestinians will get for their acceptance of four billion in gold that glitters in the noon-day sun but sheds not a ray of light on the soul.

This deception is not lost on the Arab world nor on the citizens of most of Europe, England, Australia, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy or the nations east of Europe. America stands alone with its arms around the most condemned state on the planet, the state of Israel that dances to its own tunes as it celebrates its impunity for crimes committed against citizens of many nations, its arrogance against the world body that it joined and effectively and defiantly mocks as irrelevant, and its sadistic action to force the world to accept the hypocritical London Declaration of Anti- Semitism that will silence all criticism of the state of Israel as renewed Anti-Semitism and punishable by law.

As it rampages through the decades defiantly destroying International Laws as established in concert with all peoples on the earth through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Accords, it moves now to force all to accept its dictates to determine what they will and what they cannot criticize or believe. This they call the London Declaration of Anti-Semitism, a global silencing of criticism of this rogue state; this they call democracy, freedom, and liberty. How evil the deception, how steeped in indifference to the human plight, how arrogant and loathsome, how humiliating to the individual soul, how in keeping with a mindset ruled by obedience to a system, a commanding agency, and determined by the few to minister to the many.

When we consider what might have been, we may weep for the innocents slaughtered in the fulfillment of the Zionist dream that took America to war against Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and Syria, and the ultimate goal of Israel, Iran, we will understand that our youth fought to save Israel’s soldiers from facing the death that awaited them on these battlefields while we watched the people of the world turn against the American values that gave us credibility throughout the world and lashed us to the mast of Zionist madness.

Caleb Behn and the Coming Resource Conflict on Indigenous Lands in BC

Caleb Behn on Indigenous Law, Resource Conflict in NorthEast BC

by Damien Gillis - The Canadian.org

Watch this presentation by Caleb Behn, a young, First Nations lawyer-in-the-making from Treaty 8 territory in northeast BC - one of the most heavily industrialized places on earth. The subject of the forthcoming documentary film Fractured Land, Behn discusses the blending of indigenous and colonial law to address the conflict arising from intense resource development, such and natural gas fracking, hydroelectric dams, logging, mining, and industrial roads that permeate his ancestral lands and threaten his family's traditional way of life. The one-hour presentation - shown here in three parts - was co-hosted at the Vancouver Public Library on February 28 by Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada, Amnesty International and the Hul'qumi'numTreaty Group. Behn, who is Dunne Za/Cree on his mother's side and Eh-Cho Dene on his father's, recently completed law school through UVic and is now pursuing his articles at Ratcliff & Company in Vancouver.
 

 

Part 1

Damien Gillis is a Vancouver-based documentary filmmaker with a focus on environmental and social justice issues - especially relating to water, energy, and saving Canada's wild salmon.

 

Edward Snowden and the Panopticon Realized

Edward Snowden and China

by Peter Lee - China Matters

First, why Hong Kong?

My answer: Because he’s a spook.

There has been no end of sniggering from the liberal Colonel Blimps that Snowden chose to reveal his identity in Hong Kong. As in (from the Twitter feed of a journalist who relentlessly works the "unfree China" side of the street):

“Seeking refuge in Hong Kong out of devotion to free speech is a bit like seeking refuge in Tibet out of devotion to Buddhism.”

Here’s what I think:

Snowden, in addition to his career as an IT grunt, had worked on the covert operations side in Geneva.

When he thinks about what happens to him, he assumes his identity is going to be revealed. He looks at the situations of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. Definitely doesn’t want to stay in the United States (Manning). Definitely doesn’t want to take up residence in a liberal democracy which happens to be a US security partner (Assange).

He wants to control the circumstances of his exposure and obtain maximum press exposure to shape international perceptions of him and rally support before the legal hammer comes down.

He doesn’t want to take the risk of getting quickly jacked up by a national legal system of a nation allied to the United States on any charge, trumped up, plausible, or genuine.

Iceland? Pretty, snowy, let-Internet-freedom-ring-a-ding-ding Iceland?

One more problem.

He doesn’t want the local authorities and local spooks working enthusiastically with the US authorities to make surveil him, harass him, help make a case against him, and button him up. He doesn’t want to get rendered. He would like not to get bumped off.

What countries would a CIA analyst believe to have the lowest level of cooperation with the CIA and the most pervasive counterintelligence capabilities? Russia maybe. China maybe.

So he looks at a jurisdiction that a) has a liberal legal systems with good protections and process and b) keeps its US spooks on a short leash.

In other words, Hong Kong.

Second, were his revelations timed to coincide with the Sunnylands summit?

I guess so, for maximum hypocrisy exposure (Snowden) and media heat (Greenwald). My personal feeling is that it is not going to affect US-China cyberbitchslapping too much. Both sides already have a pretty good idea of each other’s capabilities. In fact, I would think it would be better for Xi Jinping not to take the Snowden embarrassment as an excuse to take lightly President Obama’s demands. This is just the sort of
situation in which the United States drops the hammer in order to demonstrate that it’s still the biggest bully on the block.

Third, will the PRC arrange for Snowden to be extradited to the United States?

Probably, though I think their inclination will be to let the Hong Kong legal system grind ahead with all deliberate speed, perhaps with a few discrete shoves from behind the scenes, in order to preserve Hong Kong’s reputation for judicial independence. If President Obama can bring himself to ask really, really nicely, the PRC might resort to some sort of extraordinary intervention.

But I think Snowden knows he’s coming home, sooner or later.

Fourth, why are Snowden, Greenwald, and the Washington Post receiving anything other than the thanks of a grateful nation for revealing, not the details of individual covert operations, but information on US surveillance capabilities which are known or suspected by most insiders but unknown only to the public at large?

I have no answer for that.

It is a rather disturbing fact that the evolution of 21st century society is driving us into a deeper awareness and understanding of the work of that famous French philosopher, Michel Foucault.

I will outsource this observation to the excellent Bernard over at Moon of Alabama:

Edward Snowden points to a different danger of such secret data accumulation: [Snowden] said the [analysts and governments] labored under a false premise that “if a surveillance program produces information of value, it legitimizes it. . . . In one step, we’ve managed to justify the operation of the Panopticon.”

The Panopticon is a architectural concept for a prison where the guards can watch, unseen by the inmates, from a tower in the middle into all cells build in a circle around the tower. It leaves the inmates in a perceived state of permanent surveillance. The French philosopher Michel Foucault described the effect:

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.

The original Panopticon, like the digital version the NSA is building, takes away all feeling of privacy. Even when one is not watched, knowing that the possibility of being watched is always there, creates uncertainty and leads to self disciplining and self censorship. It is certainly a state the powers that be would like everyone, except themselves, to be in. 

Well, I'll add this. For those of you unfamiliar with concepts of penal architecture, the Panopticon was a proposal by the 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. No true Panopticons were ever constructed for reasons of technical difficulty. The nearest thing to a true Panopticon was built in Cuba in the 1920s:

Here is the requisite ironic postscript from Wikipedia:

[T]he essential elements of Bentham's design were not only that the custodians should be able to view the prisoners at all times (including times when they were in their cells), but also that the prisoners should be unable to see the custodians, and so could never be sure whether they were under surveillance or not.

This objective was extremely difficult to achieve within the constraints of the available technology, which is why Bentham spent so many years reworking his plans. Subsequent 19th-century prison designs enabled the custodians to keep the doors of cells and the outsides of buildings under observation, but not to see the prisoners in their cells. Something close to a realization of Bentham's vision only became possible through 20th-century technological developments – notably closed-circuit television (CCTV) – but these eliminated the need for a specific architectural framework.

After Nuclear, After Onofre

San Onofre Nuke Plant is Dead!

by Harvery Wasserman - CounterPunch

From his California beach house at San Clemente, Richard Nixon once watched three reactors rise at nearby San Onofre. As of June 7, 2013, all three are permanently shut.

It’s a monumental victory for grassroots activism. it marks an epic transition in how we get our energy.

In the thick of the 1970s Arab oil embargo, Nixon said there’d be 1000 such reactors in the US by the year 2000.

As of today, there are 100.

Four have shut here this year. Citizen activism has put the “nuclear renaissance” into full retreat.

Just two of 54 reactors now operate in Japan, where Fukushima has joined Chernobyl and Three Mile Island in permanently scarring us all.

Germany is shutting its entire fleet and switching to renewables. France, once the poster child for the global reactor industry, is following suit. South Korea has just shut three due to fraudulent safety procedures. Massive demonstrations rage against reactors being built in India. Only the Koreans, Chinese and Russians remain at all serious about pushing ahead with this tragic technology.

Cheap gas has undercut the short-term market for expensive electricity generated by obsolete coal and nuke burners. But the vision of Solartopia—a totally green-powered Earth—is now our tangible long-term reality.

With falling prices and soaring efficiency, every moving electron our species consumes will be generated by a solar panel, wind turbine, bio-fueled or geothermal generator, wave machine and their green siblings.

As of early this year, Southern California Edison’s path to a re-start at San Onofre seemed as clear as any to be expected by a traditional atomic tyrannosaur.

But with help from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Senator-to-be Ed Markey (D-MA), a powerful citizen uprising stopped it dead.

So did the terrifying incompetence and greed that has defined the nuclear industry from the days of Nixon and before.

San Onofre Unit One shut in the 1990s due largely to steam generator problems.

In the early 2000s, Units 2 & 3 needed new steam generators of their own. In the usual grasp for more profits, Edison chose untested, unlicensed new designs.

But they failed. And the whole world was watching. In the wake of Fukushima, two more leaky tsunami-zone reactors surrounded by earthquake faults were massively unwelcome.

So a well-organized non-violent core of local, state and national activists and organizations rose up to stop the madness.

At Vermont Yankee, Indian Point, Seabrook, Davis-Besse and dozens of other reactors around the US and world, parallel opposition is escalating.

Make no mistake—this double victory at San Onofre is a falling domino. Had the public not fought back, those reactors would have been “fixed” at public expense.

Today, they are dead.

Worldwide, there are some 400 to go. Each of them—including the 100 remaining in the US—could do apocalyptic damage. We still have our work cut out for us.

But a huge double-step has been taken up the road to Solartopia.

There will be no Fukushimas at San Onofre.

A green-powered Earth is that much closer.

And we have yet another proof that citizen action makes all the difference in our world.

So seize the day and celebrate!!!



Harvey Wasserman is author of SOLARTOPIA! (www.harveywasserman.com) and HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. He edits
www.nukefree.org. His GREEN POWER & WELLNESS SHOW is at www.prn.fm.www.nukefree.org. His GREEN POWER & WELLNESS SHOW is at www.prn.fm.

Taking Responsibility in Usual Form: Monsanto Points Wheat Contamination Finger Elsewhere

Monsanto Suggests Sabotage

by Betty Krawzcyk - Betty's First Edition

Can Monsanto escape responsibility for endangering the entire US wheat market by claiming as it is now doing that their unapproved GMO wheat found growing in a farmer’s field in Oregon is the result of sabotage? In other words, Monsanto is suggesting that a person or persons opposed to GMO food deliberately planted the wheat in the farmer’s field. Who would do such a thing? To what purpose? I have this horrible suspicion.

By suggesting sabotage, Monsanto could deflect any suspicions from themselves that they had found a way to push their genetically modified wheat on the world in spite of the world’s objections. Because if the entire global wheat growers’ fields have become contaminated with Monsanto’s GMO wheat as the result of an act of vengeance against them, then what is the world to do?

The world might just have to accept the GMO wheat if it wants wheat at all. Is this suspicion just too crazy? Maybe, except for one thing. A thing that seems so coincidental that it’s eerie.

On March 28, 2013 President Obama signed the “Monsanto Protection Act”. This act was tacked on to Bill H.R. 933, a continuing resolution spending bill and “grossly protects biotech corporations such as Missouri- based biotech corporations such as Monsanto company from litigation” (Breaking News 3/30/ 2013).

What this means is that even if the US courts should rule that a GMO food is unsafe, this legislation will overrule the court and Monsanto will be able to proceed no matter what the court says. But there is a time limit on this absolute protection for Monsanto. It was allowed only for six months and runs out on September 31.

This act, or rider, was written by Monsanto along with US Sen. Roy blunt (R-Missouri), (New York Daily News (5/3/2013). All out in the open. Apparently no need to hide the fact that Monsanto wrote their own bill to give themselves absolute legal protection no matter what damage they do. A class action suit is forming in the US by the wheat farmers and wheat growing states. These wheat farmers and wheat growing states are already being drastically affected by a partial or all out ban on their wheat from Asia and Europe who don’t want GMO wheat.

But what recourse would the farmers and wheat growing states actually have against Monsanto if the world’s wheat pools have already become significantly compromised? And when this Monsanto protection rider runs out, what next? Will Monsanto just write another one?

The fact that this bill came to be in effect just in time for the discovery of the Monsanto GMO wheat found growing in a farmer’s field in Oregon is very peculiar. I believe Monsanto already knew their experimental, but never approved GMO wheat, was already growing in Organ and perhaps elsewhere, having put it there themselves, or at least knew that it was there. Which explains the scramble to protect themselves legally.

If Monsanto deliberately planted the wheat themselves then they must figure that after the initial outcry and perhaps a boycott or two and jillions of dollars of propaganda explaining why GMO wheat is actually good for humans, then they will have certainly cornered the market once and for all. If the GMO wheat is already in the world’s wheat supply, then we will all be eating GMO bread and cakes and cookies.

Even if it was truly accidental the damage is still there. Monsanto has already taken the necessary steps to protect itself legally, and in the end GMO will certainly prosper in unthinkable ways…as controllers of the world’s supply of many of the world’s basic foodstuffs they can, more or less, rule the world along with the international banks.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope Monsanto didn’t do this deliberately. But intentional or accidental, we may have to rethink eating wheat altogether. I love bread. I really love bread. But I think I will begin to research how to make bread from beans or potatoes. Yes, potato bread would be good. I read where Prince Edward Island has had very poor potato markets lately because of the idea that potatoes are too heavy in carbs. But there are two good things about potatoes including sweet potatoes. First, they are delicious. And as yet, they are not genetically modified.


Betty K | Blog: http://bettysearlyedition.blogspot.com
Books: www.schiverrhodespublishing.com

Hezbollah Victory at al-Qusayr Rocks Syria Opponents

US and Israel Lobby Reels from Hezbollah al-Qusayr Victory

by Franklin Lamb - al Manar

Beirut - Although al-Qusayr may not be the decisive battle for Syria, it is irrefutably an important turning point in the crisis which has given the regime much sought military momentum. Plenty of adjectives and some clichés are being bandied about from Washington to Beirut to describe the al-Qusayr battle results and significance.  Among them are "game-changer," "mother of all battles," "altered balance of power," critical "turning point in the civil war," and so on.

It does appear that the victory of the Syrian government forces at al-Qusayr is a strategic achievement, if also a humanitarian disaster for the civilian population still waiting for the ICRC and SARCS, (Syrian Arab Red Crescent Society) emergency help. Al Qusayr is located in Homs province, an area central to the success of the Syrian government’s military strategy. It is situated just west of the shortest route from Damascus to the coast, at a juncture where regime forces have struggled to maintain control. Rebel control of al-Qusayr had disrupted the regime’s supply lines from the port of Tartus and was open for the cross-border movement of Gulf arms to rebels via Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.

Government control of al-Qusayr also provides a ground base for the Assad government to move to retake control of the north and east of Syria. This cross-roads city just 6 miles from the Lebanese border has many strategic ramifications: breaking the opposition's 18 month control of much of Homs province, facilitating government forces momentum generally across Syria, and psychological, by raising the morale of exhausted Syrian forces while energizing the Assad government and its allies to finish the conflict and focus on long-promised reforms and try to relieve Syria from the nearly 27 months of hell for its people.

Perhaps less appreciated here in Beirut are al-Qusayr’s effects on the Zionist occupiers of Palestine and their currently traumatized US lobby.

From conversations and emails with former colleagues at the Democratic National Committee (on which this observer served during the Carter administration) as well as with Congressional insiders, a picture emerges of nearly debilitating angst among those committed to propping up the apartheid state in the face of truly historic changes in this region that have only just begun to re-shape the region.

The reactions from various elements of the pro-Israel lobby range from the Arabphobic Daniel Pipes’ fantasy essay in the Washington Times this week entitled “Happy Israel” to Netanyahu’s increased threats issued from Tel Aviv about what Israel might do if his three cartoon “red lines” are breached, to more pressure on the White House by Israel’s agents in Congress who are demanding that Obama act immediately to undo “the major damage done at Qusayr”.

Several aspects of “the Qusayr rules and results” are being discussed at the HQ of the racist anti-Defamation League (ADL) which has summoned an emergency gathering of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to craft a solution to the problem. The tentative agenda reportedly includes for discussion and action the following:

The twin defeats at al-Qusayr and at Burgas, Bulgaria -- the latter should not be underestimated, according to one AIPAC activist who works on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, given that it substantially knocks out the props from the lobby’s project to get the European Union to list Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, thus interfering with the Islamic party’s fundraising. The lobby is reacting angrily to Austria’s Chancellor Werner Faymann and Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger’s statement about that country’s decision to withdraw its 380 peacekeeping troops, more than one-third of the 1000 United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, (UNDOF) contingent, from the Golan Heights.

The lobby is claiming that Austrian move constituents an existential threat to Israel because it opens the Quneitra crossing, the door to the Golan, for the Syrian civil war to spill over the border into Israel. At the same time it is being argued that al Qusayr lifts pressure off Hezbollah, Iran and Syria as well as the Palestinian resistance and gain all more fighters who sense victory for the current regime and major gains for all in the political dynamics of the region.

The Israel embassy in Washington has chimed in with a statement that the Austrian withdrawal threatened the role of the UN Security Council in any future negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, while at the same time encouraging Hezbollah to move into the Golan.

Israel stalwart, Eric Cantor (R-Va) told a "brown bag" lunch gathering in the House Rayburn Building cafeteria late this week that the “fall of al Qusayr, will facilitate the Assad regimes advance on areas north of Homs province and will likely return to Damascus control of important rebel-held areas in the north and the east. Cantor claims that the Assad regime victory effectively cuts off an important supply route to the rebels which will leave the armed opposition even more weakened and scattered. Israel is demanding an immediate US supported counter-offensive consistent with the demands made by US Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham.

The apartheid state also is demanding that the White House scrap Geneva II, claiming that Assad is now too strong for the US/Israel to benefit from such a dialogue. “If the international community is serious about seeking to enforce a negotiated settlement, they will first have to do something to decisively change the balance of power on the ground ahead of any serious negotiations,” he added.

When asked about giving US aid to Lebanon, Cantor reportedly sneered, as he expressed his shock that Hezbollah had so many troops and, without US boots on the ground, would be very difficult for Israel to defeat, he reportedly replied, “Forget about Lebanon, it never was a real country anyway, just call the whole place over there Hezbollah and let’s send in the marines to finish the job.”

One congressional staffer who attended the meeting winced at the thought of US marines again being sent to Lebanon given their previous experience there nearly 30 years ago.

The Lobby is also concerned about the fact that the Arab League and the Gulf countries might be softening in their ardor to confront Syria and Hezbollah, who they view as now being full partners in this crisis. A media source at the Saudi Embassy in Washington has complained that the six member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has spent more than a billion dollars on the opposition and have, to date, little to show for their “investment.” Nor does Israel have much to show to date for its deepening role in the crisis given that its air strikes are widely viewed in Washington and internationally as being counterproductive and helping to unite Muslims and Arabs in the face of their common global enemy.

The ADL reportedly wants the White House to act fast “to do something” in light of a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released on Wednesday, the day of the Syrian government’s victory at al Qusayr, showing that only 15% of Americans polled advocated taking military action, and only 11% supported providing the rebels with arms. A quarter of respondents, 24%, favored taking no action, similar to the White House current position.

Abe Foxman, ADL’s President for Life, and inveterate anti-Semite tracker, myopically sees anti-Semitism, and surely not Israel’s decades of crimes against humanity as the cause for other “anti-Semitic” polls released this week. Those included the recent one commissioned by the BBC which confirmed that Israel is not only ranked second from the bottom of 197 favorably viewed countries, including as a danger to world peace, and just about the world’s most negatively viewed country, but its support globally continues to evaporate. Views of Israel in Canada and in Australia remain very negative with 57 and 69 per cent of their citizens holding unfavorable views. In the EU countries surveyed, views of Israeli influence are all strongly negative with the UK topping the list with 72 per cent of the population viewing Israel negatively.

As Ali Abunimah noted this week, “The persistent association of Israel with the world’s most negatively viewed countries will come as a disappointment to Israeli government and other hasbara officials who have invested millions of dollars in recent years to greenwash and pinkwash Israel as an enlightened, democratic and technological 'Western' country."*

With Wednesday's National Lebanese Resistance (Hezbollah) victory at al-Qusayr, coming as it does 97 years to the month after the Triple Entente’s (UK, France & Russia) May 1916 secret Asia Minor Agreement, generally known as Sykes-Picot, the scheme to control the Middle East following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire has furthered crumbled. Its "Rosemary’s Baby" progeny, the colonial Zionist occupation of Palestine, is increasingly being condemned by history to an identical fate.

According to a growing number of US and European officials and Middle East analysts as well as public opinion polls, it is solely a matter of time until, like al-Qusayr, Palestine is returned to her rightful, indigenous inhabitants.

* "Israel one of world’s most unpopular countries and it’s getting worse: BBC survey," Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada, June 6, 2013

http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-one-worlds-most-unpopular-countries-and-its-getting-worse-bbc-survey

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Syria and Lebanon
and can be reached c/o fplamb@gmail.com

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Walter M. Brasch, Jon Elmer, Janine Bandcroft June 10, 2013

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Pacific Free Press

Christy Clark, the seatless premier, elevated by less than half of the less than half of eligible British Columbia's electorate casting votes in the recent election, announced her cabinet picks last week, and her party's "mandate" to transform the province for generations to come. The eggs of our future economic prosperity and environmental well-being are all to be placed in the single LNG "clean energy" basket.

While LNG, or Liquified Natural Gas, is the stuff of which Clark's pipeline dreams are made, British Columbians should know; it is neither clean energy, nor is it a wise economic bet. But, that hasn't deterred a single smile or photo opportunity for the ever-optimistic premier. As with most things, the United States is ahead of Canada on the development of LNG, and they are beginning too to feel the extreme effects of an industry gone wild.

Walter M. Brasch is an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor, syndicated columnist, broadcaster, educator, activist, and prolific author whose book titles include: 'Before the First Snow,' 'America's Unpatiriotic Acts,' 'Sex and the Single Beer Can,' 'Press and the State,' 'Social Foundations of Mass Media.' His latest book, 'Fracking Pennsylvania: Flirting with Disaster' is a detailed investigation of the fracking industry, and what that activity means for the people and landscape on the burgeoning areas it takes place.

Walter M. Brasch in the first half.

And; the stubborn resistance of Bashar al-Assad Syrian Army, and its continued support from the people, has thrown the plan of Western hegemony in the Middle East off schedule. It's a worrying sign for America and her allies, as the people of previously conquered Iraq and Libya are bejoining the great push back against their erstwhile saviours. More worrying still perhaps for club NATO is the mounting social unrest in member-state Turkey, whose leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan managed, seemingly without acknowledging the irony, to fan the flames of discontent at home while visiting Tunisia, birthplace of the Arab Spring. There Erdoğan slapped the collective face of protesters occupying Istanbul's Taksim Square, insisting development of a mosque and mall complex would go ahead in the city's central park, and accusing those protesting of being no better than beer-swilling apostates.

Jon Elmer is a freelance Canadian journalist and photo-journalist who has worked in numerous countries covering war, occupation, and social conflict. He has, over the last decade and more spent extensive periods living in and reporting from Occupied Palestine. Jon's articles and photographs are featured in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Le Monde diplomatique, The Progressive, Al Jazeera English among others. He is also a contributor, with Anthony Fenton to the book, 'Empire's Ally: Canada in Afghanistan.'

Jon Elmer and the over-arching swing of public discontent along the Arc of Instability in the second half.

And, Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV Radio broadcaster Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of what's good to do in and around our city in the coming week. But first, Walter M. Brasch and fracking's flirtation with disaster.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, M. Shahid Alam, Gilad Atzmon, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, Ramzy Baroud, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, William Bowles, Mordecai Briemberg, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Paul Cienfuegos, David Cromwell, Ezili Danto, Jon Elmer, Yves Engler, Laura Flanders, Amy Goodman, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Julia Butterfly Hill, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Diana Johnstone, Malalai Joya, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Frances Moore Lappe, Ingmar Lee, Dave Lindorff, Alexandra Morton, Loretta Napoleoni, Andrew Nikiforuk, Ken O'Keefe, Greg Palast, Michael Parenti, Robert Parry, John Pilger, Kevin Pina, Paul Craig Roberts, David Rovics, Danny Schechter, David Schindler, Vandana Shiva, Tim Shorrock, Norman Solomon, Jean Saint-Vil, Harvey Wasserman, Paul Watson, Bernard Weiner, Andy Worthington, Mickey Z., Howard Zinn and many others.

First the Sentence, Then the Trial (Maybe): The King's Justice in Modern America

Guilty Until Proven Innocent: How to Pre-Convict and Pre-Punish an American Muslim

by Victoria Brittain  - TomDispatch

 A four-month hunger strike, mass force-feedings, and widespread media coverage have at last brought Guantanamo, the notorious offshore prison set up by the Bush administration early in 2002, back into American consciousness. Prominent voices are finally calling on President Obama to close it down and send home scores of prisoners who, years ago, were cleared of wrongdoing.

Still unnoticed and out of the news, however, is a comparable situation in the U.S. itself, involving a pattern of controversial terrorism trials that result in devastating prison sentences involving the harshest forms of solitary confinement. This growing body of prisoners is made up of Muslim men, including some formerly well-known and respected American citizens.

At the heart of these cases is a statute from the time of the Clinton presidency making it a crime to provide “material support” to any foreign organization the government has designated as “terrorist.” This material support provision was broadened in the USA PATRIOT Act, passed by Congress just after the 9/11 attacks, and has been upheld by a 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. Today, almost any kind of support, including humanitarian aid, training, expert advice, “services” of all sorts, or “political advocacy” undertaken in “coordination” with any group on the State Department’s terrorist list, can lead to such a terror trial. The Court has never defined what “coordination” actually means.

In that Supreme Court ruling, Justice Stephen Breyer was joined in dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Breyer proposed a narrower interpretation of material support: individuals should not be subject to prosecution unless they knowingly provided a service they had reason to believe would be used to further violence. At the time, the position of the dissenting judges was backed by key editorials in major newspapers. In the three years since, however, more material support cases have resulted in long sentences with very little public notice or critical comment.

 

 

Tomgram: Victoria Brittain, Miscarriages of Justice

Sometimes, when you watch the strange, repetitive political dance that swirls around the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- the president announcing yet again that he plans to “close” it and the Republicans in Congress swearing that they won’t let him -- it’s hard not to wonder what alternative universe we live in. The initial round of this began on the day Barack Obama entered the Oval Office and circulated an executive order meant to close that prison within a year. The latest presidential “closing” announcement came just over two weeks ago. In a major speech at National Defense University, Obama also claimed that he would soon lift restrictions he had imposed in 2009 on sending Guantanamo prisoners long cleared of any criminal activities back to Yemen. Just last week, Congressional Republicans offered the usual reply. They proposed to keep the prison open, whatever the president wanted, “by barring the administration from transferring its terror suspects to the United States or a foreign country such as Yemen.”

By now everyone knows that Guantanamo can’t be closed, not by this administration or any other one imaginable. At present, it is the scene of an extraordinary protest movement, now almost three months old, by 103 prisoners using potential death by starvation to bring attention to the nightmare that has been their lives behind bars in Cuba.

More than 11 years after its founding, Guantanamo looks to Americans ever more like an offshore aberration, the last of the walking dead that just won’t go down. As it happens, though, that institution is anything but an aberration. It’s exactly what it was meant to be. The Bush administration situated it just off the coast of Florida in the first place because it wanted to avoid legality, justice, and the reach of U.S. courts. It’s true that George W. Bush's top officials made a fetish out of giving illegality -- including global kidnapping operations, torture interrogations, and a global string of “black sites” -- a feel-good veneer of legalism. That was why, for instance, the Department of Justice produced those infamous “torture memos” that, among other remarkable things, managed to put the legal definition of torture in the hands and mind of the torturer. But the goal of the president, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other key officials -- some of whom reportedly had torture techniques demonstrated for them in the White House -- had everything to do with leaving legality behind.

In 2001, they were eager above all to “take the gloves off.” They wanted to be able to do anything they cared to do on their self-proclaimed “global battlefield.” They wanted to lay hands -- not theirs, admittedly, but delegated ones -- as violently as possible on the prisoners swept up there: the worst of the worst, minor footsoldiers of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, people who simply had enemies who betrayed them, and the innocent who wandered into or were trapped in this hell. It didn’t matter. They weren’t into making distinctions or charging prisoners with crimes or anything so banal. What they wanted was control, total control, over the bodies of their enemies. It wasn’t a nice thing. It wasn’t a pretty thing. It wasn’t the sort of thing you said in polite company or (most of the time) in the media, which, in one of the small linguistic scandals of the era took to replacing the simple, easy to define word “torture” with the administration’s euphemistic phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

They wanted to revel in their power and their glory in the Greater Middle East, but also in the dark corners of those black sites and in that jewel-in-the-crown of offshore injustice, Guantanamo. They were proud of their Cuban prison. They meant it to be a way of life and now, of course, no one can get rid of it. It’s not possible. The Obama method of “closing” it means transferring to a supermax prison on U.S. soil up to 50 prisoners that top American officials believe to be guilty of something, but can’t bring to trial, largely because “confessions” were taken from them by the dirtiest possible methods that won’t hold up in any court of law. Even this, however, wouldn’t close Guantanamo. It would simply embed its methodology in the heart of the U.S. prison and judicial system (which is why such a plan has sarcastically been dubbed “Gitmo North”).

In fact, in certain ways, like so many ugly things that wars bring home, aspects of what might be called the Guantanamo Syndrome have already crept deep into our American world, whether Congress approves or not. As Victoria Brittain, author of Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror, makes clear in her latest TomDispatch post, pre-punishment and pre-conviction, Guantanamo-style, are increasingly everyday by-products of the war on terror at home. Tom

Pre-Trial Punishment
In the U.S. these days, the very word “terror,” no less the charge of material support for it, invariably shuts down rather than opens any conversation. Nonetheless, a decade of researching a number of serious alleged terrorism cases on both side of the Atlantic, working alongside some extraordinary human rights lawyers, and listening to Muslim women in Great Britain and the U.S. whose lives were transformed by the imprisonment of a husband, father, or brother has given me a different perspective on such cases.

Perhaps most illuminating in them is the repeated use of what’s called “special administrative measures” to create a particularly isolating and punitive atmosphere for many of those charged with such crimes, those convicted of them, and even for their relatives. While these efforts have come fully into their own in the post-9/11 era, they were drawn from a pre-9/11 paradigm. Between the material support statute and those special administrative measures, it has become possible for the government to pre-convict and in many cases pre-punish a small set of Muslim men.

Take the case of Ahmed Abu Ali, a young Palestinian-American who is now serving life in the Administrative Maximum Facility, a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, and is currently under special administrative measures that restrict his communications with the outside world. A university student in Saudi Arabia, he was arrested in 2003 by the Saudi government and held for 20 months without charges or access to a lawyer. The Washington Post reported that the U.S. government finally asked for his return just as his family filed a lawsuit in Washington.

At the time, it seemed like a victory for the family and the various human rights organizations that had supported them, but on arrival Ahmed was charged with material support for al-Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush. The evidence to convict him came from an anonymous alleged co-conspirator and from taped confessions he made, evidently after being tortured in Saudi Arabia, a common practice there. The evidence of his torture was contested at his trial. The case was described by a staff member of Amnesty International USA as “unusual in the annals of U.S. outsourcing of torture.” An appeal of Ahmed’s 30-year sentence actually resulted in the imposition of an even more severe sentence: life without parole.

In addition, special administrative measures have been applied to him. These were originally established in 1996 to stop communications from prison inmates who could “pose a substantial risk of death or serious risk of injury.” The targets then were gang leaders. Each special administrative measure was theoretically to be designed to fit the precise dangers posed by a specific prisoner. Since 9/11, however, numerous virtually identical measures have been applied to Muslim men, often like Ahmed Abu Ali with no history of violence.

A question to Ahmed’s sister about how her brother is doing is answered only with a quick look. She is not allowed to say anything because special measures also prohibit family members from disclosing their communications with prisoners. They similarly prevent defense lawyers from speaking about their clients. It was for a breach of these special measures in relation to her client, the imprisoned blind sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, that lawyer Lynne Stewart was tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison in the Bush years.

Although these measures have been contested in court, few have ever been modified, much less thrown out. Those court challenges and evidence provided to the European Court of Human Rights by American lawyers have, however, provided a window into what one of them described as a regime of “draconian and inhumane treatment.”

Under such special administrative measures at the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York City, a prisoner lives with little natural light, no time in communal areas, no radio or TV, and sometimes no books or newspapers either, while mail and phone calls are permitted only with family, and even then are often suspended for minor infractions. Family visits are always no-contact ones conducted through plexiglass.

“The conditions have quite simply wreaked havoc on Mr X’s physical and mental well-being,” one lawyer wrote for the European Court of Human Rights, describing a seven-month period in which a prisoner at the Metropolitan Correction Center was allowed no family phone calls. Another highlighted his client’s lost concentration, which made it impossible to work on his case effectively. “Their world shrinks dramatically,” was the way Joshua Dratel, a lawyer who has represented several men under these measures, described the situation.

In cases where special administrative measures are in place pre-trial, such as the well-documented ordeal of American post-graduate student Syed Fahad Hashmi, lawyers have often been obliged to prepare cases without actually sitting with their clients, or being able to show them all court materials. After three pre-trial years mainly in solitary confinement under special administrative measures at the Metropolitan Correction Center, Hashmi accepted a government plea bargain of one count of material support for terrorism and was given a 15-year sentence.

His crime? He allowed an acquaintance to stay at his student apartment in London, use his cell phone, and store a duffel bag there. The bag contained ponchos and waterproof socks that were later supposedly delivered to al-Qaeda, while the phone was used by that acquaintance to make calls to co-conspirators in Britain.

Silencing Palestinian-Americans

Just as the Bush administration found the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and ignored them, so the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” a part of Western civilization since Roman times, has all but disappeared for Muslims who face accusations of “material support” for terrorism.

Such cases have, at times, involved high-profile men and once received significant media attention. Civil rights activist and University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian, accused of being a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (a State Department-designated terrorist organization), was, for instance, treated like a man already being punished for his crime even before his trial. Previously, he had been a respected American-Muslim political leader with contacts in the White House and in Congress. Now, walking to pre-trial meetings with his lawyers, his arms were shackled behind him, so that, humiliatingly, he had to carry his legal papers on his back.

Amnesty International described Al-Arian's pre-trial detention in Coleman Federal Penitentiary as "gratuitously punitive." It cited his 23-hour lockdown in his cell, the strip searches, the use of chains and shackles, the lack of access to any religious services, and the insistence on denying him a watch or clock in a windowless cell. He was transferred to 14 different prison facilities in 6 states. He ended up spending three and a half years in solitary confinement without being convicted of anything. At his trial, the government called 80 witnesses, including 21 from Israel, while his counsel called no defense witnesses, only citing the U.S. Constitution. A Florida jury nonetheless acquitted him on half of the counts, and deadlocked on the other half. (Ten out of 12 jurors wanted to acquit him on all charges.) He later struck a plea deal on one minor charge.

Today, the Palestinian-American professor is still in legal limbo, under house arrest, awaiting a judge’s ruling on whether he has to testify in a separate case. An articulate U.S. Muslim political leader, who helped bring in the Muslim vote for George W. Bush after the candidate came out publicly against the use of secret evidence in trials, when the Gore campaign did not and so contributed to his Florida victory in the 2000 presidential campaign, has been silenced for his openly expressed pro-Palestinian opinions.

Successful and influential Palestinian-American Ghassan Elashi, a founder and the chairman of what was once America’s largest Muslim charity, the Holy Land Foundation, and Shukri Abu Baker, its president, were similarly silenced along with three other foundation officials. The two of them received prison sentences of 65 years for giving charity to orphanages and community organizations in Gaza (also supported by the European Union and the U.S. Agency for International Development). The Holy Land leaders were accused of giving “material support” to a foreign terrorist organization: Hamas, the elected government in Gaza. There were no accusations of inciting or being involved in acts of violence. This case, like Professor Al Arian’s, would never have been possible if Justice Breyer’s views had prevailed at the Supreme Court.

Even then, it took a second trial before a jury returned a guilty verdict against the Holy Land leaders. Nancy Hollander, counsel for one of the men, summed up the situation this way: “The thought that somebody gets sixty-five years for providing charity is really shameful, and I believe this case will go down in history, as have others, as a shameful day.” In 2012, the Supreme Court refused to rehear the case, and four of the five convicted men remain confined to the especially restrictive “communications management unit” at the U.S. penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, where Muslims make up two-thirds of the inmates.

There were also 246 unindicted co-conspirators named in the Holy Land Foundation case, including major Muslim organizations. The case and the particularly long sentences sent a shot of fear through Muslim communities in the U.S., as was surely intended.

The men’s daughters still speak out on their fathers’ case. Noor Elashi, for example, told me, “His is the poster case for 'material support.'” In the meantime, 15-minute weekly prison phone calls, monitored in real time from Washington, are the thinnest of threads to hold family relationships together, as are rare visits to distant prisons. Mariam Abu Ali once described to me her annual visit to her older brother Ahmed Abu Ali. The expense was difficult to absorb: two flights, a rental car, and a motel for a three-day visit of about four hours a day, for a family already shouldering heavy debts for legal fees.

The real ordeal, though, was emotional, not financial. “They bring him in shackled at the waist and legs,” she told me. “We see them take off the handcuffs as he puts his hands out through a gap in the door. It’s emotionally draining… he’s there but so far away behind the glass. Only one of us can hear him at a time as he speaks though a phone… I’ve tried to lip read when it isn’t my turn, but it really doesn’t work. I feel very exhausted and sometimes I fall asleep during the visit. I cry every time, especially when he leaves… It’s not like a death. You don’t grieve and then finish, because this is not in the past. In fact, it is not even in the back of my mind -- it is always there… This is chronic after nine years and it is not going to end.”

In itself, solitary confinement has devastating effects, as Dr. Atul Gawande has vividly pointed out, and is becoming ever more common in U.S. prisons in breach of internationally recognized norms on the humane treatment of prisoners. It tends to break the will of inmates, sometimes even robbing them of their sanity. However, in its most extreme use, combining those special administrative measures with the isolation imposed in prison communication management units, it is mainly applied to American Muslims.

The stories of what happens to Muslim men today in U.S. prisons and of the judicial cases that land them there under the harshest of conditions bear a startling resemblance to the cages at Guantanamo Bay and the charade of a legal system that is still in operation there.

Miscarriages of Justice

In addition to the examples of prominent, formerly successful Palestinian-Americans, there are a series of haunting cases of newer Muslim arrivals in the U.S., each of them an evident miscarriage of justice. These include the Fort Dix Five, originally from Albania, and that of Imam Yassin Aref, an Iraqi Kurd. Their entrapment cases, typically based on “sting” operations manufactured by FBI informants, sent men respected in their communities into solitary confinement for long years on what were probably trumped-up charges. In such cases, the only “plot” is often manufactured by the government itself.

This, then, is the state of so many cases of “terrorism” in the U.S. today in which disparate Muslim men have been swept up in a system in which guilt is assumed and people’s lives are quickly turned into waking nightmares in what used to be called the “justice system.” Some great miscarriages of justice do get overturned. Black Panther Robert King spent 31 years in prison, 29 in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit. His release in 2001 came about by chance when his persistent letter writing attracted the attention of a young lawyer and the founder of The Body Shop, Anita Roddick, who became his champion alongside a grassroots campaign for his release. Since then, King has himself campaigned at home and abroad for the release of his two colleagues in “the Angola Three,” who still remain in prison, and against the system that could have broken him as it has so many others.

Thanks to the special administrative measures applied in his case, Ahmed Abu Ali cannot do what Robert King did, or what the lawyer and a friend of WikiLeaks informant Private Bradley Manning did to get his prison conditions widely known, or what Mumia Abu Jamal has done throughout his 30 years in solitary confinement via his books and his talks on prison radio. Ahmed cannot contact the world outside in search of the support he and his family need, nor can his family members.

The painful impact of all this on the families is difficult to imagine. Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman once wrote that torture “presupposes the… abrogation of our capacity to imagine someone else’s suffering, to dehumanize him or her so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer… but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness.”

Perhaps such a state helps explain why people around the world are far more aware than most Americans of what happens to Muslim men in the post-9/11 “justice system.” The particular cruelty of the punishments they endure even before their unfair trials, will someday, like the abuses at Guantanamo, gain the attention they deserve.

 

Victoria Brittain, journalist and former editor at the Guardian, has authored or co-authored two plays and four books, including Enemy Combatant with Moazzam Begg. Her latest book, Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2013), has just been published. This is her second piece for TomDispatch.

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Copyright 2013 Victoria Brittain

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