The Persecution of Lynne Stewart: Case in Point for America's Descent into Totalitarianism

Lawyer’s Jail Torment Marks US Totalitarian State

by Finian Cunningham - PTV

Half a century ago this month Martin Luther King wrote his famous prison protest against racial injustice, entitled ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’. An excerpt reads:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality... Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Fifty years on to this very month, King’s defiant cri de coeur could hardly be more apt to express the barbarous injustice being committed by the US government against one of that nation’s bravest defence lawyers - Lynne Stewart.

Ms Stewart (73) is dying in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, from cancer that has spread from her breast to the rest of her body. Her family has little doubt that her life-threatening illness has been induced by the vindictive conditions of her incarceration by the US authorities.

Ralph Poynter, her husband for the past 50 years, and more than 10,000 petition signatories from across the world are mobilising to face down the barbarity of the American regime. Her supporters are demanding Lynne’s immediate release from her prison cell on compassionate and legally entitled grounds.

Lynne Stewart’s story is not just one of personal harrowing torment. The US state’s cruel persecution of this woman epitomises the general destruction of human rights and the rise of draconian police powers across America in the aftermath of 9/11 and the fraudulent “war on terror”.

This climate of repression and xenophobia also became evident last week in the wake of the Boston marathon bombings, where one of America’s major cities was put under a state of virtual martial law for several days while the security apparatus hunted down two brothers, who were already known to these authorities.

Lynne Stewart came of age politically in the turbulent 1960s. Growing up in the poor New York working-class districts of Brooklyn and Harlem, she became a defence lawyer with the express purpose of upholding the rights of the oppressed, marginalised and downtrodden - many of whom were her friends and neighbours.

She witnessed how many of her friends from the African-American community were harassed and brutalised by American racist police forces. She saw how the courts denied justice to poor communities and how these communities were neglected and abandoned by elitist governments, to live in open-air prisons called inner-city ghettoes.

With irrepressible passion and wit, Lynne Stewart saw her duty to her fellow human beings as representing those who had been cast aside as untouchable and unwanted in an American society where all too often poverty and racial prejudice automatically impose a harsh life sentence of misery and suffering at birth. Without fear or favour, Lynne saw her vocation as, in her own colourful words, to not just defend those who couldn’t make it to the finish line, but to defend those who couldn’t even make it to the starting line.

Once, she stated publicly her purpose as a defence lawyer:

“Our quests are formidable. We have in Washington poisonous government that spreads its venom to the body politic in all corners of the globe. There is a consummate evil that unleashes its dogs of war on the helpless. Our enemy is motivated only by insatiable greed, with no thought of other consequences. In this enemy there is no love of the land or the creatures that live there, no compassion for the people, no thought of future generations. This enemy will destroy the air we breathe and the water we drink as long as the dollars keep filling up their money-boxes… We go out to stop police brutality; to rescue the imprisoned.”

Lynne’s words were not those of a bookish lawyer, but rather those of an impassioned human being who clearly saw injustice as an enemy of the people, as a political oppression that must be fought with all her body, heart, mind and spirit.

Her trenchant defence of the principle of presumed innocence saw her take on cases that many other attorneys shunned. These cases included members of the Black Panther movement and other radical social movements, such as Anti-Vietnam War, Weather Underground and Irish freedom fighters. She defended a great many other unknown ordinary citizens who were victims of daily American police brutality and racism. For Lynne Stewart, the courts were not a place to make a moneyed career in - they were battlegrounds to take up the plight of people who were victims of elite privilege and abusive state power.

During the 1990s, typically Lynne recognised the plight of American Muslims who were increasingly being harassed and demonised by America’s state security and police services. She took on the case of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as the “Blind Sheikh”.

Following the 1993 World Trade Center bombings in New York, the Egyptian-born cleric was accused in 1995 of “seditious conspiracy” in another plot to blow up various city landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge and the United Nations Building. Many observers denounced the prosecution as a set-up, pointing out that Sheikh Omar was poor, blind and disabled. Also, it was well known in the communities that FBI undercover agents had been for months going into mosques inveigling youths with these very same hare-brained terror schemes.

As with the recent Boston marathon bombings, there are many unanswered questions about the shadowy role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1993 New York blasts and the subsequent alleged landmarks bombing plot. There are strong suspicions that the FBI used “sting” tactics to entrap unwitting felons - in much the same that many people have questioned how the two Tsarnaev brothers in Boston were permitted to apparently evade known security concerns.

Lynne Stewart was not intimidated out of defending Sheikh Omar even though the increasingly unhinged American corporate media portrayed him as the “embodiment of Islamic terrorism”. By then, there was a growing pernicious climate of Islamophobia in the US - a disturbing trend that has since become a hate-filled crescendo in the decade following the 9/11 explosions in 2001.

Sheikh Omar was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment in 1995 along with nine other defendants. His prosecution was seen then as a travesty, owing to Lynne Stewart’s vigorous defence and evidence. For many observers, she proved in court not only the sheikh’s innocence, but also that the American government, the legal system and the law enforcement agencies were all implicated in insider-job terrorism and perverting justice. Recall that these revelations made by Lynne Stewart’s legal work were six years before 9/11 and the so-called “war on terror”.

True to her humanitarianism, Stewart maintained professional client relations with the incarcerated Sheikh Omar - who is currently serving out his sentence in a federal prison in North Carolina. The sheikh may have been behind bars, but Lynne Stewart continued working to clear his name and for his eventual acquittal.

This legal representation of an unfairly demonised man would lead to Lynne Stewart’s downfall in the following decade at the hands of the increasingly militant US authorities.

After 9/11, President George Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft instituted a raft of laws that would target defence lawyers and prevent their exercise of constitutional rights of free speech. Under these new stringent so-called anti-terror laws in the aftermath of 9/11, Stewart was accused of aiding terrorism because of her prison visits to Sheikh Omar and for allegedly passing written communications to his supporters on the outside. This latter accusation was based on a highly contaminated misrepresentation of a press release Lynne Stewart sent to the Reuters news agency concerning the case of her client. In the pre-9/11 era, such legal activities would have been considered normal confidential defence-client relations. Not any more; they are now seen as “collaborating with enemies of the state”. That is a measure of how extreme political and legal conditions in the US have deteriorated.

Lynne Stewart was arrested in 2002 and charged with “materially supporting terrorism”. Bizarrely - and indicating the witch-hunt climate that has gripped the US following 9/11 - the arrest was announced by Attorney General Ashcroft during an appearance on the David Letterman Late Show aired on the television channel CBS.

After a lengthy controversial legal battle, Lynne Stewart was herself sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment at the end of 2009 for aiding and abetting terrorists. She has now served more than three years of that sentence. Such is the sadistic nature of her incarceration, for some of the time she has been shackled with arm and leg irons to her prison bed, even while receiving medical treatment for her cancer.

The conclusion from this American state-sanctioned barbarity is clear. Lynne Stewart’s imprisonment is an attempt by the US regime to bury her alive behind bars. Of all people, Lynne Stewart knew best how the Washington shadow government of corrupt politicians and secret services were constructing the war-on-terror charade to demonise Muslims and create a climate of fear and paranoia in American society - a climate that would soon enable the shadow government to strip citizens of their human rights and constitutional protections. In a word, Lynne Stewart had to be silenced and got rid off. She knew too much and was too articulate about the vile inner-workings and scheming of the US secret state.

If voices like those of Lynne Stewart had remained free and active, it is probable that the US secret government would not be able to get away so easily with expanding its panoply of barbarities, such as the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, torture of detainees held without charge, the wholesale collapse of civil liberties, spying and surveillance on citizens, the illegal invasions and aggression towards other countries, and - perhaps the ultimate totalitarianism - the extrajudicial murder of foreign and American nationals with assassination drones by presidential order.

Owing to her life-long commitment to defending the rights of others and her rapidly deteriorating health, Lynne Stewart’s prison ordeal has won a growing public call for her immediate release, both within the US and across the world. Her case has also drawn widespread awareness and concern about the repressive trajectory of US society and the encroachment of a full-blown totalitarian police state.

Her cause has gained support from thousands of ordinary people who recognise Stewart’s towering defence of society’s weak and vulnerable members. Her supporters include human and social rights activists, UN special rapporteur on human rights Richard Falk, and many renowned thinkers and writers, such as Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, Ralph Schoenman, Alice Walker and Cornel West, as well as former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.

South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu has added his voice calling for Stewart’s immediate release, as has veteran American actor Ed Asner, who said: “Given the enormous good that Lynne Stewart has done for humanity throughout her life as a courageous lawyer for the poor, the oppressed and the unjustly accused, I am shocked by the cynical perversity of an American government that has pursued her savagely and vengefully.

Asner continued: “Lynne Stewart must be freed. The law requires her compassionate release and the medical care that can save her life. We must deny the US state a death sentence aimed at the freedom of us all. The state power that torments Lynne Stewart invades countries at will, murders hundreds of thousands with impunity and creates a climate of fear and repression to prevent the people of this country from calling those in power to account.”

Author and media commentator Ralph Schoenman said: 

“We must mobilize world opinion to stop the judicial and political murder of Lynne Stewart, an ominous measure of the mass repression in preparation for all working people and the oppressed. Few cases encapsulate so fundamentally the destruction of democratic rights in the United States as the persecution of Lynne Stewart.”

African-American comedian and political commentator Dick Gregory has vowed to continue a hunger strike until Stewart is freed. Nearly three weeks after refusing food, Gregory said: “The prosecution and persecution of Lynne Stewart is designed to intimidate the entire legal community so that few would dare to defend political clients whom the state demonizes and none would provide a vigorous defense. It also was designed to narrow the meaning of our cherished first amendment right to free speech, which the people of this country struggled to have added to the Constitution as the Bill of Rights.”

In sum, we may return to the words of the late Martin Luther King: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

It is high time for the US authorities to free Lynne Stewart from her unjust imprisonment.


NOTE: Those wishing to sign the petition for Stewart’s release can do so here.

Finian Cunningham, originally from Belfast, Ireland, was born in 1963. He is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For many years, he worked as an editor and writer in the mainstream news media, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. He is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring. He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme, Sunday at 3pm GMT on Bandung Radio

Getting a Tainted Industry Out of BC Waters and Securing Wild Salmon Economy

How Cohen Recommendations, Termination Clause and BCNDP Can End Risk to Wild Salmon Economy

by Kevin Logan - The Canadian.org

Independent salmon biologist Alexandra Morton has worked tirelessly and endlessly to raise awareness about the threat open net pen salmon farms presents to our coast.

For decades now, this frequently published scientist has worked to understand the impacts of this industry on wild salmon. She has also clearly demonstrated that the entirety of the wild salmon economy far and away exceeds the importance of this one industry alone.

The Wild Salmon economy dwarfs, by any measure, the economic benefit of fish farming and it makes no sense to continue putting the health of our wild salmon at risk as a result. This was covered in Damien Gillis' recent article in The Common Sense Canadian - which notes the staggering disparity between the sport fishing and salmon-dependent tourism economy and the paltry jobs and economic value provided by salmon farms.

The video below is from a recent screening of Salmon Confidential, a stunning documentary which has taken BC by storm, generating 115,000 views online and packed halls around the province since its release last month.

This short clip includes Green Party of Canada Leader Elizabeth May, Alexandra Morton and a Provincial Candidate for the BCNDP, Gary Holman. Highlighted in the video is the current position of the BCNDP.

For the past few months the NDP has claimed that the Provincial Government has no jurisdiction or capacity to move on the information Alexandra has provided on viruses affecting wild and farmed salmon and bring an end to the threat to the Wild Salmon economy and deeply entrenched coastal culture of this great province.

However, the NDP has committed to "adopting the Cohen Commission recommendations", which include a focus on applying the "Precautionary Principle" when dealing with the future of this industry and removing salmon farms from the Discovery Islands by 2020, unless DFO can prove they are having "less than minimal impact."

This is a very welcome development. It means the NDP has committed to exercising this important Precautionary Principle when establishing policy related to this industry.

With that knowledge, let's turn to the notion that BC has no jurisdiction as a result of a recent lawsuit which saw the Federal Government assume much of the oversight of the industry.

While this is essentially true, there is in fact a little known clause that exists in the agreements the Province holds with each and every fish farm.

It is an exit clause in their tenures which can be exercised within 60 days - with no compensation - that revokes the license for them to operate, if it is in the public interest. (See the full occupation license here)

Here is the exact text from Section 5, Subsection 8

8.1(g) (Termination) states that Marine Harvest agrees with the Province that "if we require the Land for our own use or, in our opinion, it is in the public interest to cancel this Agreement and we have given you 60 days' written notice of such requirement or opinion, this Agreement will, at our option and with or without entry, terminate your right to use and occupy the Land."

s. 8.3(a) goes further, and states, "You agree with us that (a) you will make no claim for compensation, in damages or otherwise, upon the lawful termination of this Agreement under section 8.1." (emphasis added)

Given the NDP has adopted the Cohen Commission recommendation of exercising the Precautionary Principle, and there is ample evidence that our wild salmon are at risk, it is time we encourage the NDP to focus on these licenses, and engage this industry in a proactive fashion in a bid to eliminate this unacceptable risk to the economy and long established culture that healthy wild salmon supports.

Let's all encourage those NDP candidates seeking your vote to honor their commitment to adopt the Precautionary Principle as recommended by the Cohen Commission.

And let's press each and every one of them to act on these license agreements, with a focus on resolving this clear and indisputable threat, by asking them to execute the termination clause for fish farms licensed to operate on wild salmon migration routes.

If the NDP wants to be seen as credible on their claim of adopting Cohen's recommendations and do whats right for the economy, then they must act now and follow though on their commitment while supporting the growth of the Wild Salmon economy - already more than ten times bigger than the salmon farming industry.

Kevin Logan

Kevin's career has been diverse, ranging from small business to NGOs through finance and government. Early on, he operated the research department for the Vancouver branch of international brokerage Richardson Greenshields. After leaving the finance industry he owned operated small businesses and eventually established a consulting company which contracts with both the private and public sectors. He served as a ministerial assistant to numerous ministers and a premier in the former BC NDP Administration. Kevin is also an independent researcher and writer who has administered many diverse and successful campaigns.

Mexico's Narco Gangs Silence Media

Mexican Journalists Threatened and Murdered Exposing Official Involvement with Narco Gangs

by TRNN

A report on how courageous Mexican journalists are threatened and assassinated while reporting on relationship between senior police and political figures and transnational narco gangs.

 

Since 2006 when Felipe Calderon assumed the presidency of Mexico until the end of his administration, 96 journalists have been murdered or disappeared.

Dredging the Impunity Hole: Barrick Answers Rape Charges in Papua

Barrick Seeks Immunity from Rape Victims 

by MiningWatch Canada

Barrick Gold has finally acknowledged that the security guards at its Porgera Joint Venture (PJV) mine in Papua New Guinea have been raping local indigenous women for years. Barrick’s shareholder meeting today is the first since the company has started to implement a long-overdue remedy program for hundreds of alleged rape victims. However, in return for individual benefit packages the women must provide Barrick legal immunity by signing an agreement never to sue the company for their rape.

Barrick’s Remedy Framework stipulates that; 

“the claimant agrees that she will not pursue or participate in any legal action against PJV, PRFA [Porgera Remediation Framework Association Inc.] or Barrick in or outside of PNG. PRFA and Barrick will be able to rely on the agreement as a bar to any legal proceedings which may be brought by the claimant in breach of the agreement.” 

Barrick has defended this requirement publicly on numerous occasions in recent months. However, in a recent release of April 16, Barrick says that a newer version of the remedy framework “contains much narrower terms” for the legal waiver. It is unclear what those terms are and Barrick has not provided the new version of the remedy framework.

Corporate remedy processes do not have any legal status, do not afford victims the safeguards and protections of a court of law – such as independent legal counsel – and are not required to provide remedy that would be commensurate with what victims may get through a legal process. Private agreements also fail to address any question of criminal culpability of the corporation.

MiningWatch Canada’s Catherine Coumans travelled to the remote Papua New Guinea mine in March to interview rape victims. 

“We have detailed our findings and concerns regarding Barrick’s remedy program in letters to the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights,” says Dr. Coumans.

“We are pleased that Barrick has started to adjust aspects of the remedy program in response,” she adds. “However, while the changes clearly indicate the program is a ‘work in progress,’ Barrick has still not discarded the legal waivers.”

Barrick’s Annual General Meeting is an opportunity for shareholders and the Board of Directors to find out what is really going on at the company’s mine sites around the world – if they cared to listen to the community leaders who travel to Canada to share their concerns. 

 

As early as 2008, Jethro Tulin, a local community leader from Porgera, addressed the directors: 

“As you know, your security guards have been shooting and killing our people and raping, even gang-raping, our women with impunity for years now.” 

 

While Barrick denied the allegations, the rapes continued unabated.

- 30 -

For more information contact: Catherine Coumans, 

MiningWatch Canada, e-mail;

catherine(at)miningwatch.ca

Related documents on MiningWatch Canada’s web site:

Barrick Gold's Framework of Remediation Initiatives in Response to Violence Against Women in the Porgera Valley, no date.

letters by MiningWatch Canada to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which detail concerns related to the remedy program for rape victims:

Initial letter to UNHCHR, March 19, 2013;

Response from Barrick Gold, March 22, 2013;

Follow-up letter from MiningWatch, April 2, 2013

Joint news release with Rights & Accountability in Development 

and EarthRights International: Rape Victims Must Sign Away Rights to Get Remedy from Barrick. January 30, 2013.

Background Brief - Concerns regarding the Remediation Framework for women victims of sexual violence by Porgera Joint Venture security guards. January 29, 2013.

OECD Complaint Against Barrick’s Porgera Operations, March 1, 2011.

Legal Brief before the Standing Committee on the Foreign Affairs and International Development (FAAE) of the House of Commons by the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law. November 16, 2009.

 

Horse Feathers: Marx Bros. w/out The Laughs

Like Fifth-Rate Marx Brothers, Without the Laughs

by Arthur Silber - Once Upon a Time

In the wake of the deliberate and purposeful exhibition of martial power in Massachusetts, it seems that most of those living in the Boston area, as well as many millions of Americans throughout the Land of the Free, rejoiced in this display of American strength and courage. It appears that Americans have never been braver; never before have they vanquished evil in so inspiring a manner. It is as if Americans' unmatched willingness to boldly confront the most terrifying dangers resulted in the simultaneous defeat of every monster who has ever existed throughout all of humankind's existence. Truly, we are a marvelous people. When the film is made of this glorious episode in our history (and surely there will be at least one; such wonderfully instructive events must be commemorated, and their educational value preserved), how will they title it? Perhaps, and I offer the suggestion with all suitable humility: Triumph of the American Will.

Now, now. Don't frown or react with sneering disapproval. When so many have worked so diligently to call up certain associations, we would be derelict in our duties as good citizens not to recognize the effort. And based on the evidence of the last week, many Americans will be thrilled by the cinematic spectacle and crowd the theaters to overflowing. Besides, most Americans will doubtless be unaware of the title's significance, just as they are unaware of the meaning of the events themselves. And while we might wish that Americans would take at least one or two lessons from history (I myself have been known to look to history for understanding, as for example here and here, in essays which are horrifyingly relevant to the instant matter), the attitude of most Americans is: "History? Whut?" As Americans, we are unique. We are so special and powerful that we recreate ourselves in every moment. History has no significance for us. We redefine what it means to be human. Why, you might even refer to us as the master---

Oh, dear. Those associations again. I'm sorry. I was carried away for a moment. Contemplation of our own blinding greatness is dangerously destabilizing.

Yet I have a confession. I realize this will only serve to confirm the depraved corruption of my soul, but I fear I lost that personal battle some time ago. When I think about these events, titles of a somewhat different kind occur to me. For example: Killer Klowns on Parade. Yes, I think that might do very nicely.

Many accounts note that it was only when the occupation of Watertown was momentarily relaxed, and residents were given permission to go outside once more -- breathe the freedom! -- that some ordinary schlemiel noticed something amiss on his boat, which in turn led to the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. But, speaking of breathing, how can it be that this schlemiel, who must be regarded as one of the many great American heroes in this great American pageant, went outside to smoke a cigarette? That simply cannot be. Rewrite! We're creating a legend! Details matter. Think of the future generations of children who will study this episode so as to learn how to be good citizens. I think Mr. Henneberry went outside to enjoy a few moments of solitude during which he could give thanks for the miraculous fact that he lives in America, where SWAT teams will descend on any (and every!) neighborhood at a moment's notice, to ensure the safety and security of all Americans. And to protect their freedom! Yes, that's a notable improvement.

And although it is also mentioned, much less emphasis is given to the fact that Mr. Henneberry's house, and his boat, were outside the perimeter within which the house-to-house searches were conducted. See here:

[Police commissioner] Davis is asked if it was a mistake to issue an all-clear – the final operation to ens[n]are Tsarnaev came minutes later.

We certainly did not give an all clear. We had no information that the suspect was holed up ... He managed to elude us by being slightly outside the area.

And here:

One of the law enforcement officials talks about Tsarnaev's course after the showdown with officers overnight. "We know he didn't go straight to the boat" from the shootout last night, the official said.

He says they found blood inside a house inside the perimeter.

"We thought we had the perimeter solid … but he was about one block away," the official says.

That one block might as well have been 100 miles. For all that time, as the paramilitary forces were directly terrorizing the residents of one house after another -- and indirectly terrorizing everyone who watched the unfolding spectacle -- they were looking in the wrong place. They had no idea whatsoever what the right place was. It took Mr. Henneberry, and his desire to smoke a filthy cigarette to privately contemplate American glory, to identify the right place.

Even if the depravity and corruption of your soul are but a pale reflection of the vile matter that makes up my inner being, some observations and questions will occur to you at this point. It is entirely unsatisfactory to argue that the perimeter -- the perimeter that these great brains with multiple lethal weapons thought was "solid" -- was close to being right. After all, Tsarnaev was only "about one block away." According to the account offered by the occupying authorities themselves, at that time they had no reason at all to search Henneberry's house and yard. It doesn't matter how far outside the perimeter Tsarnaev was: he was outside it. Tsarnaev might have been eventually discovered five blocks away, or five miles.

What if Tsarnaev had killed Henneberry? It certainly seems that he could have. (In that case, we would perhaps have a dead hero -- in which case, the cigarette stays in. The wages of sin, etc. There are lessons to be taught!) What if Henneberry hadn't gone to the backyard and/or hadn't noticed what he did. Would the perimeter have been enlarged? Changed altogether? Would house-to-house searches have been conducted in additional neighborhoods?

We might make some educated guesses as to the answers, but we will never know for certain what would have happened. It's entirely possible the authorities themselves don't know the answers. ("We are not in the business of answering hypotheticals of that kind," is the usual response in bureaucratese.) The point is that the authorities, after sifting through all the information they had, with the aid of however many "experts" of various kinds, established a perimeter -- and it was wrong. It wasn't the authorities, with the vast funds at their disposal, along with huge numbers of personnel (and with all their wonderful weapons!), who discovered Tsarnaev's location.

Along the same lines, we've learned that the FBI investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011. They did so at the request of the Russian government. We are told:

The FBI has defended itself, saying in a statement on Friday that it had run checks on the suspect but found no evidence of terrorist activity.

It said a request to Russia for further information to justify more rigorous checks went unanswered, and an interview by agents with Tsarnaev and his family also revealed nothing suspicious.

In a separate hearing on Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the FBI had been aware of Tamerlan Tsarnaev's trip to Russia, contradicting Senator Graham's allegation that the trip had been overlooked because his name had been misspelled in travel documents.

It was when I read this story and many similar ones that the Marx Brothers came to mind. The detail about Tsarnaev's name (possibly) being misspelled made me laugh out loud. Who knows whether Napolitano's version or Graham's is true. That Tsarnaev's trip to Russia "had been overlooked" because of a misspelling is entirely believable.

Consider how haphazard this business was. The FBI only investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the first instance because Russia asked them to. When Russia later failed to respond to a request "for further information to justify more rigorous checks," and after an interview (just one, apparently) "revealed nothing suspicious," they dropped it. Then, the U.S. government knew (or didn't know) about the trip to Russia. And then: Boston.

Feeling safer?

What I fervently wish at least a few more people understood and appreciated is that this is how "intelligence" is conducted generally. I've written numerous essays about the farcical charade that is "intelligence," and still almost everyone (including people who I know have read several of these articles at a minimum) talks endlessly about how crucial it is that "we get the intelligence right." The "intelligence" is almost never right.

Although I view it as hopeless to alter conventional wisdom on this issue, but because I am compelled to punish myself endlessly, I will repeat my brief summation of the argument:

I therefore repeat my major admonition, and give it special emphasis:

NEVER, EVER ARGUE IN TERMS OF INTELLIGENCE AT ALL. It is always irrelevant to major policy decisions, and such decisions are reached for different reasons altogether. This is true whether the intelligence is correct or not, and it is almost always wrong. On those very rare occasions when intelligence is accurate, it is likely to be disregarded in any case. It will certainly be disregarded if it runs counter to a course to which policymakers are already committed.

The intelligence does not matter. It is primarily used as propaganda, to provide alleged justification to a public that still remains disturbingly gullible and pliable -- and it is used after the fact, to justify decisions that have already been made.This was true in the case of Iraq; it is true -- and will continue to be true -- with regard to Iran; it was obviously true in connection with the Tsarnaevs (assuming they did what everyone now believes they did).

If you wish to join my campaign for masochistic enlightenment, I direct you to three articles in particular for many, many further details: "Played for Fools Yet Again," "Fools for Empire" (the last section of which analyzes how two nominally "antiwar" writers make the same grievous error), and "You, Too, Can and Should Be an 'Intelligence Analyst.'"

A closely related but separate issue demands attention here. That is: the idealization of authority. I've written extensively about how we are all taught as young children about the crucial importance of obedience to authority. The idealization of authority is a critical element of such training, but it is a subject requiring discussion on its own. The mechanism of idealization of authority will help to explain two issues of special relevance to the Boston horror show: why so many people tend to analyze authorities' actions in fundamentally the wrong way (the subject I indicated at the very end of the previous post), a subject which also requires explanation of why most people believe that the authorities' goals are what they publicly proclaim them to be (they're not); and why the majority of people erroneously attribute superior levels of competence to authority figures (whether they be individuals or institutions, including the police and the military).

On the last point, and as quick preview: given the evidence amassed in recent years, one would hardly think that anyone would believe that individuals become unusually competent because they join the government, or the military, or the police. Yet most people believe precisely that. In fact, the various individuals and institutions involved in the Boston horror-farce are no more or less competent than the average person you meet in the course of an average day. Given the powers and weapons at their disposal, they are certainly far more dangerous, but that is a very different matter. The Killer Klowns of Death who patrolled Boston and environs last week are exactly as competent as that young, doubtless "well-intentioned" guy who took your order at lunch -- and got it wrong.

Now that should scare the shit out of you. Next time.

Texter Beware: Telus Announces New Fees

Stop New Telecom Fees

by OpenMedia

It looks like we’re about to see new texting charges imposed on our telecom bills for no reason.

Telus has already sent a message to customers announcing an arbitrary new fee on text messages that cross the Canada-U.S. border.1 You can expect other providers to follow up with their own set of fees now.

It’s a cash grab and everyone knows it.

Big Telecom companies can only price-gouge us like this because Conservative Industry Minister Paradis refuses to enforce the government’s own rules – rules that are supposed to ensure we have access to affordable independent telecom options.2

In this moral vacuum, telecom giants like Rogers and Telus have started a process to take over Canada’s scarce wireless assets, including every major independent mobile provider.3

We know that if the party leaders hear your voice right now it could tip the balance and force the government into action. Please take a moment to send a message to all the party leaders (including Stephen Harper) now.

34,796 signatures (and counting). 

Subject: Please Stop New Telecom Fees

Attn: Prime Minister Stephen Harper
cc Liberal Party Leader Justin Trudeau
cc NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair
cc Green Party Leader Elizabeth May
cc Industry Minister Christian Paradis

I want the government to enforce the rules and to prevent new telecom fees on my monthly bill. Please stand up for telecom choice and affordability in Canada. Large incumbent telecom providers should not be allowed to block access to affordable mobile phone and Internet options.

 

Background & Outreach Resources

Footnotes:

[1] Here’s a picture of a message a Telus customer posted online.

[2] OpenMedia.ca joined experts and advocates to send a letter to our Industry Minister about Roger’s plan to break industry Canada rules by obtaining set-aside wireless assets. Find the full letter here [PDF]. While Paradis is feeling the pressure from Canadians and signaling discomfort with the Shaw-Rogers backroom deal, he still refuses to uphold the rules.

[3] Telus in talks to buy Mobilicity as wireless upstarts seek buyers. Source: The Globe and Mail.

Stealing Venezuela's Election: Who's jammin' Who?

Did Chavez’ Pick Steal the Election in Venezuela?

by Greg Palast for Vice Magazine - Leer el artículo en español aquí

The guy in the cheap brown windbreaker walking up the dirty tenement steps to my New York office looked like a bus driver.

Nicolas Maduro, elected President of Venezuela last Sunday, did indeed drive a bus, then led the drivers' union, then drove Chávez' laws through the National Assembly as Venezuela's National Assembly chief.

And this week, the US State Department is refusing to accept the result, suggesting Maduro hijacked the vote count.

But did he?

Maduro came to me that day in 2004 on a quiet mission, sent by President Hugo Chávez to give me information I needed for my investigation for Rolling Stone – and to get information from me that might save Chávez' life.

For one more week you can download Palast's short documentary, The Assassination of Hugo Chávez, originally filmed in Venezuela for BBC, without charge.

The central topic was the "Invisible Ring". Venezuelan intelligence had secretly taped US Embassy contractors in Caracas talking in spook-speak: "That which took shape here is a disguised kind of intelligence... which is annexed to the third security ring, which is the invisible ring."

("Invisible Ring"? Someone at the State Department has read too many Alan Furst novels.)

On the grainy film, they worried that "Mr Corey" (a code name we easily cracked) would blow his cover and begin barking, "I am from the CIA! I am from the CIA!"

"Mr Corey" was certainly not from the CIA, an agency holding on to one last fig-leaf of discretion. This crew was far more dangerous, from a spy-for-hire corporation, Wackenhut Inc. I'd been tracking Wackenhut for years, ever since their spies – more Austin Powers than James Bond – were arrested while on a black-bag job for British Petroleum. They'd attempted to illegally tape a US Congressman by running a toy truck with a microphone through the ceiling vents over the lawmaker's head.

But even clowns, when heavily armed, can be deadly. In 2002, Chávez was kidnapped with the blessing of the US Ambassador right out of the presidential palace and flown by helicopter over the Caribbean where, Chávez later told me, the President assumed he'd be invited for a swim from 2,000 feet. Instead, just 48 hours later, Chávez was back at his desk.

But Washington wouldn't quit the coup business. New documents revealed several interlocked methods ("rings") for overthrowing Venezuela's elected government.

First, US operatives would monkey with voter registrations – and if that didn't steal the election from Chávez' party, the next step was to provoke riots against Chávez' elections "theft". The riots would lead to deaths – the deaths would be the excuse for the US to back another coup d'etat to "restore order" and "democracy" in Venezuela – and restore Venezuela's oil to Exxon. (Chávez had seized majority control of the oil fields and Exxon was furious.)

Maduro had already figured the US operatives wanted to use, "The collection of [voters'] signatures... to [occur] amidst a climate of violence and uncertainty, national and international uncertainty...To cause deaths the day of the collection of signatures."

Would this be to justify another coup?

Maduro said, "Yes: The justification to tell the world Chávez is a murderer, Chávez is a dictator, Chávez is a terrorist and the OAS [Organisation of American States] should intervene and Chávez should be ousted."

This week, the warlords of the rings are back in Caracas as, per the original script, the US State Department is backing opposition claims that Maduro's win is in question. And per the old playbook, the losers are taking to the streets, seven voters are dead (mostly Chávistas, but not all) and Caracas waits for the coup's next boot to drop.

Is a manoeuvre to remove Maduro far-fetched? George W Bush promoted the botched kidnapping of 2002. But it was the progressive Barack Obama who, in 2009, newly elected President, blessed the overthrow of the elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya.

Still, it's fair to ask if Maduro and the Chávistas stole last week's presidential election?

Answer: They didn't have to. Even the Wall Street Journal accepts that, "for a majority of Venezuelans, Mr Chávez was a messiah," and Maduro, the successor Chávez chose from his deathbed, had too big a lead to lose.

Still, the election was nearly stolen – by the US-backed anti-Chávistas.

How? That's what Chávez wanted Maduro to find out from me: how could US operatives jerk with Venezuela's voter rolls? It wasn't a mere policy question: Maduro knew Chávez wouldn't be allowed to survive through another coup.

My answer: They could steal the vote the same way Bush did it in Florida – in fact, using the very same contractor. Take a look at these documents... from the pile I reviewed with Maduro:

According to the once-secret FBI memo above, ChoicePoint Corp – under a no-bid contract – had shoplifted Venezuela's voter rolls, as well as the voter rolls of Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Mexico and Honduras, all of whom were on the verge of electing presidents from the political left.

I did ask myself how our national security apparatchiks could say that filching these voter rolls made our nation more secure? What were they for?

I had little doubt. In November 2000, working for the Observer and BBC Newsnight, I discovered that a subsidiary of ChoicePoint had, for Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, obtained his state's voter rolls and "purged" more than 56,000 voters, the vast majority black and poor, illegally denying them their vote. And that was how Jeb's brother, George W, won the US presidency by just 537 ballots.

And now ChoicePoint had the data to allow Homeland Security to do a Florida on Venezuela – and Honduras and the others. (In 2006, the candidate of the left, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, won the election but lost the Mexican presidency through gross ballot-box finagling.)

Chávez himself read my findings on potential elections theft – to his nation on his TV show – and then he moved swiftly, establishing an election system that Jimmy Carter, who has headed vote observer teams in 92 nations, called, "an election process that is the best in the world".

Here's how it works: every Venezuelan voter gets TWO ballots. One is electronic, the second is a paper print-out of the touch-screen ballot, which the voter reviews, authorises, then places in a locked ballot-box. An astounding 54 percent of the boxes are chosen at random to open and check against the computer tally. It's as close to a bulletproof count as you can get.

Still, the guy who lost bitched and – his bluff called – was allowed to pick all the precincts he wanted – 12,000 – to add to the audit.

And that's why the US State Department then has to turn to the threat of bullets and "Third Ring" mayhem in the streets – to undermine the legitimacy of the new Maduro government and signal the US willingness to support a new coup.

It won't succeed this time, either. Populist socialist governments have now replaced the juntas and stooges that once gave the US control of the Organisation of American States. And Venezuelans themselves won't let it happen.

What impressed me about Maduro and his boss Chávez was their reaction to the Third Ring and the attempted Florida-tion of their election. Instead of ordering mass arrests, Chávez' and Maduro's response was to strengthen democracy with a no-tricks voting system.

I should note that ChoicePoint, once exposed, apologised to Mexico's government, agreed to destroy its ill-gotten voter rolls and, soon thereafter, sold itself to a credit-rating company. Wackenhut fired its goof-ball spooks and sold itself off in pieces. Both deny knowingly breaking laws of any nation. And in Bush's US State Department, all hell broke loose, as UN Ambassador John Negroponte, sources verified, fumed over what he deemed a renegade neo-con escapade endangering remaining US oil interests. (In fact, Chevron ended up paying what I call a "coup tax".)

The vote was still close, mainly because Maduro – a sincere, competent administrator – is no singing-dancing-camera-perfect Sinatra of politics like Chávez was.

Secretary of State Kerry's challenge to Maduro's 270,000-vote victory margin struck me as particularly poignant. Because in 2004, besides Chávez, I gave another presidential candidate evidence of the Bush gang's ballot banditry: Senator John Kerry. Kerry lost to Bush by a slim 119,000 ballots in Ohio, blatantly stolen, but Kerry refused to call for a recount. It took him two years to publicly acknowledge our findings – when he introduced, with Senator Ted Kennedy, legislation to fix America's corrupted voting system, then let the proposed law die of neglect.

Chávez knew, and Kerry will never learn, that democracy requires more than a complete count – it requires complete courage.

* * * * * * * *

Investigative reporter Greg Palast covered Venezuela for BBC Television Newsnight and Harper’s Magazine.

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!

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Muddying Murder: Parsing Terminology to Legitimize Drone Killings

Can a Drone Murder?

by David Swanson - War is a Crime

Tuesday's Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee hearing on drones was not your usual droning and yammering. Well, mostly it was, but not entirely. Of course, the White House refused to send any witnesses. Of course, most of the witnesses were your usual professorial fare.

But there was also a witness with something to say. Farea Al-Muslimi came from Yemen. His village had just been hit by a drone strike last week. He described the effects -- all bad for the people of the village, for the people of Yemen, and for the United States and its mission to eliminate all the bad people in the world without turning any of the good people against it.

The usual droning and yammering that preceded and followed this testimony seemed more offensive than usual. One witness summarized the general position of pointless witnesses who accept all common wisdom and have no information or insights to contribute:

If the drone strikes are part of war, that's fine, she said. But if they're not part of war, then they're murder. But since the memos that "legalize" the drone strikes are secret, we don't know whether they're perfectly fine or murder.

That's the common view of things. But to say it in front of someone who knows something about the killing from the perspective of the victims seems particularly tasteless.

The basic facts are barely in dispute. A single individual, President Barack Obama, is choosing to send missiles from drones into particular houses and buildings. Most of the people being killed are innocent and not targeted. Some of those targeted are not even identified. Most of the others are identified as run-of-the-mill resisters to hostile foreign occupations of their or neighboring countries. A handful are alleged to be imminent (meaning eventual theoretical) threats to the United States. Many could easily have been arrested and put on trial, but were instead killed along with whoever was too close to them.

If this is not part of a war, apparently, then it's murder.

But if it's part of a war, supposedly, it's fine.

It's funny that murder is the only crime war erases. Believers in civilized warfare maintain that, even in war, you cannot kidnap or rape or torture or steal or lie under oath or cheat on your taxes. But if you want to murder, that'll be just fine.

Believers in uncivilized war find this hard to grasp. If you can murder, which is the worst thing possible, then why in the world -- they ask -- can you not torture a little bit too?

What is the substantive difference between being at war and not being at war, such that in one case an action is honorable and in the other it's murder? By definition, there is nothing substantive about it. If a secret memo can legalize drone kills by explaining that they are part of a war, then the difference is not substantive or observable. We cannot see it here in the heart of the empire, and Al-Muslimi cannot see it in his drone-struck village in Yemen. The difference is something that can be contained in a secret memo.

This is apparently the case no matter whom a drone strike kills and no matter where it kills them. The world is the battlefield, and the enemies are Muslims. Young men in predominantly Muslim countries are posthumously declared enemies once a drone has killed them. They must be enemies. After all, they're dead.

I wonder how this sounds to a young Muslim man who's taken to heart the lesson that violence is righteous and that war is everywhere at all times.

Do people who blow up bombs at public sporting events think all together differently from people who blow up peaceful villages in Yemen?

Don't tell me we can't know because their memos are secret too. Those who engage in murder believe that murder is justified. The reasons they have (secret or known) are unacceptable. Murder is not made into something else by declaring it to be part of a war.

War is, rather, made criminal by our recognition of it as mass murder.

Boston Bombing: Holes in the Official Narrative

The Official Tsarnaev Story Makes No Sense

by Craig Murray

There are gaping holes in the official story of the Boston bombings.

We are asked to believe that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was identified by the Russian government as an extremist Dagestani or Chechen Islamist terrorist, and they were so concerned about it that in late 2010 they asked the US government to take action. At that time, the US and Russia did not normally have a security cooperation relationship over the Caucasus, particularly following the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. For the Russians to ask the Americans for assistance, Tsarnaev must have been high on their list of worries.

In early 2011 the FBI interview Tsarnaev and trawl his papers and computers but apparently – remarkably for somebody allegedly radicalised by internet – the habitually paranoid FBI find nothing of concern.

So far, so weird. But now this gets utterly incredible.

In 2012 Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who is of such concern to Russian security, is able to fly to Russia and pass through the airport security checks of the world’s most thoroughly and brutally efficient security services without being picked up. He is then able to proceed to Dagestan – right at the heart of the world’s heaviest military occupation and the world’s most far reaching secret police surveillance – again without being intercepted, and he is able there to go through some form of terror training or further Islamist indoctrination. He then flies out again without any intervention by the Russian security services.

That is the official story and I have no doubt it did not happen.

I know Russia and I know the Russian security services. Whatever else they may be, they are extremely well-equipped, experienced and efficient and embedded into a social fabric accustomed to cooperation with their mastery. This scenario is simply impossible in the real world.

We have, by the official account, the involvement of the two Tsarnaev brothers, the FBI and the Russian security services. The FBI have a massive recent record of running agent provocateur operations to entrap gullible Muslims into terrorism. The Russian security services have form on false flag Chechen bombings.

Where the truth lies may be difficult to dig out. But the above official version is not true.



Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.

Battlefield Earth: Dirty Wars, The Story of Our Times

Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield

by Jeremy Scahill 

Dirty Wars follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller Blackwater, into the heart of America’s covert wars, from Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond. With a strong cinematic style, the film unfolds through Scahill’s investigation and personal journey as he chases down the most important human rights story of our time.

Along the way we meet two parallel casts of characters. The CIA agents, shooters, military generals, and Special Forces operators who populate the dark side of American wars go on camera and on the record—many for the first time.

The human victims of this unaccountable violence are also heard.

 

Seeing and hearing directly from survivors of night raids and drone strikes and victims of torture in “black” detention sites shows the human lives caught in these wars. Tracing the rise of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the most secret and elite fighting force in U.S. history, Dirty Wars reveals covert operations unknown to the public and carried out across the globe by men who do not exist on paper and will never appear before Congress.

 In military jargon, JSOC teams “find, fix, and finish” their targets: anyone, without due process. No target is off limits for the “kill list,” including U.S. citizens. Dirty Wars takes viewers to remote corners of the globe to see first-hand wars fought in their name and offers a behind-the-scenes look at a high-stakes investigation. We are left with questions about freedom and war, justice and democracy.

Occupied Palestine in Photos and Stories: 'Gaza Against the Wall'

“Gaza: Against the Wall”

by Kevin Neish

Dear Media, with Mr. Harper's new "anti-terrorist" bill, the RCMP will be able to prevent Canadian citizens from traveling abroad if they are deemed to be taking part in "terrorist activities", so social justice activists like myself may soon be grounded. I have been invited to return to Gaza in June by a charity group, but it appears that I could be prevented from going if Mr. Harper's new bill passes. Canadians may now have an ideological "gatekeeper" keeping us in. Shades of 1950's McCarthyism. Below is the press release for my upcoming presentation on my last trip (and it may well be my last).
 Kevin Neish
 
 -----------------------------------------------------------------

Victoria human rights activist Kevin Neish presents a slide show and discussion of his recent 5 week tour of Gaza. Amidst the Israeli forces’ rockets, hijackings, kidnappings, shootings and blackouts, the Palestinian people of Gaza carry on with their lives.

 “Gaza: Against the Wall”
Public presentation and slide show
8 pm Friday April 26
 

Fernwood Community Association, 

1923 Fernwood Rd.
Admission by donation.

In Arabic they are called “sumud”, in English it's steadfast and unyielding. Mr. Neish volunteered as a human shield and human rights observer with farmers in their fields and with fishers at sea, along the Israeli border’s “shoot-to-kill buffer zone”.

He documented his trip with photographs and essays at www.kevinneish.ca

Since 1989, Mr. Neish has volunteered as a human shield and human rights observer in Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia and Palestine in the West Bank and now Gaza. He survived the Israeli assault on the Mavi Marmara in May 2010.

For immediate release

Contact: Kevin Neish
neish@victoria.tc.ca

Stripping Myanmar's Democratic Varnish

Darkness at Dawn: Tainting Democracy for Power and Profit

by Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque

Who would have thought that the brutal Burma junta had not really and truly reformed itself when it made its much-ballyhooed leap forward toward democracy by releasing dissident Aung San Suu Kyi and loosening restrictions on the officially recognised political opposition -- a move that brought the much-sought pat on the head (and easing of sanctions) from the American Imperium, and even a visit from Caesar himself?

Having witnessed this miracle, who would have believed that this same militarist junta -- which has retained all its power and maintained its repressive forces in place -- would now be using Suu Kyi and "democracy" to provide a PR fig leaf for a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing? Yet, strangely enough, that appears to be what is happening. The Burmese regime has overtly and covertly been assisting in the ongoing sectarian strife led by violent fundamentalist Buddhist monks against the small Muslim minority in the country -- particularly the Rohingya and Kaman Muslims, stateless people who have been forced into refugee camps by the junta and subjected to constant attacks by the Buddhist majority in Rakhine state and elsewhere around the country.

The outpouring of violence has shaken the moral authority of Suu Kyi, as she tries to maintain the momentum of democratization through negotiation and cooperation with the power structure. Many have found her statements on the violence to be remarkably muted. This too plays into the hands of the Burmese rulers: they get kudos for freeing dissidents and making gestures toward democracy, while at the same time they weaken the opposition by co-opting it.

(This dynamic might not be totally unfamiliar to observers of American politics, particularly in the relationship between the militarist-corporatist, drone-bombing, extrajudicially-murdering, indefinitely-detaining, force-feeding, whistleblower-quashing Obama administration and what is laughingly known as the 'left.' Although naturally our morally tough and savvy progressive pundits deliver themselves of fierce criticisms of this or that particular policy or political move of the Administration, their opposition is fatally compromised by their need to maintain their own much-sought pats on the head from the Imperium (don't want to be disinvited from the next Oval Office confab with progressive bloggers or -- gasp! -- dropped out of rotation on the Chris Hayes show!) and by their own fervent efforts to keep the militarist-corporatist, drone-bombing, etc. Administration in power last year.)

The Washington Post reports:

A leading international rights group on Monday accused authorities in Myanmar, including Buddhist monks, of fomenting an organized campaign of ethnic cleansing against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority that killed hundreds of people and forced 125,000 from their homes.

Human Rights Watch also described the bloody wave of violence and massacres in western Rakhine state last year as crimes against humanity, and slammed the government of President Thein Sein for failing to bring the perpetrators to justice months after mobs of Buddhists armed with machetes and homemade guns razed thousands of Muslim homes.

While state security forces sometimes intervened to protect fleeing Muslims, more often they fueled the unrest, the rights group said, either by standing by idle or directly participating in atrocities. One soldier reportedly told a Muslim man whose village was ablaze: “The only thing you can do is pray to save your lives.”

The allegations, detailed in a new report by the New York-based rights group, came the same day the European Union lifted all sanctions on Myanmar except an arms embargo to reward the Southeast Asian nation for its progress toward democratic rule. 

Burma seems to be playing out a scenario we have seen with grim regularity in the past several years, where the introduction of "democratic reforms" is eventually (or immediately) hijacked either by existing elites or new forces in league with elements of the power structure, or by satraps installed by outside powers via regime change. The new "democratic" governments are either woefully ineffective (e.g. Afghanistan, Egypt) or brutally repressive (Iraq, Libya) or a combination of the two (Russia, Ukraine). But in almost every case, the end result is that "democracy" becomes associated with collapse, corruption, economic ruin, sectarian violence, rampant crime. The very concept becomes tainted for those suffering under "democracy"; in many cases, the word itself becomes an insult, used as a bitter, cynical joke. (I saw this first-hand in Russia during the 1990s.)

People thus subjected to the ravages of "democracy" become much more amenable to authoritarian "solutions" to the problems their "freedom" has caused. This is, of course, because they have neither democracy or freedom but just another set of elites (or the same elites in new drag, like the suddenly "civilian" leaders of the Burmese military junta, or the KGB-connected cronies who have feasted on the Russian carcass for years) ruthlessly exploiting the fears and uncertainties of societies in upheaval.

None of this is likely to stop the accelerating American embrace of Burma's militarist regime. (After all, they're just killing Muslims!) But it is, yet again, a depressing coda to another bright story of a "democratic dawn."

***
(This is not the only route to authoritarianism, of course; we're seeing another model at work in the United States even as we speak. But that's another story, although you'll find good stuff on this theme here and here.)

ACTA Is Back: Canada's Made in the USA Intellectual Property Laws

The Return of ACTA: U.S. Dictating Canada’s Intellectual Property Laws

by Dana Gabriel - Be  Your Own Leader

In March, the Canadian government introduced a bill that would bring about sweeping changes to its copyright and trademark laws. This includes giving more power to customs and border protection agents without any judicial oversight. The move is intended to prevent counterfeit goods from entering the country, but has been criticized for being less about protecting Canadians and more about caving to American demands. With the U.S. dictating global intellectual property standards, the new legislation represents the return of ACTA and would pave the way for Canada to ratify the controversial international treaty.

Over the years, the U.S. has been critical of Canada's efforts in addressing trade in counterfeit goods and has been pressing for intellectual property reform. In the 2009 United States Trade Representative (USTR) Special 301 Report, Canada was placed on a priority watch list of countries that do not provide adequate intellectual property enforcement. As part of its 2013 Trade Policy Agenda, the USTR is now pushing Canada to comply with the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA). The multinational treaty is designed to standardize intellectual property laws around the world. Although it has been signed by a number of countries, including Canada, so far only Japan has ratified ACTA. It was the result of public pressure associated with risks internet privacy and online freedom of speech which lead to ACTA being rejected by the European Parliament in July of 2012. At the time, many assumed that ACTA was dead, but it still remains a top priority for the U.S. and they are attempting to revive the discredited agreement by trying to get the six necessary ratifications for it to come into force. In an effort to satisfy U.S concerns, Canada recently announced legislation which is aimed at bringing them in line with ACTA.

Last month, the Conservative government introduced Bill C-56, also known as the Combating Counterfeit Products Act. Academic researcher and law professor Michael Geist explained how the proposed legislation would, “ensure that Canada is positioned to ratify ACTA by addressing border measures provisions. The core elements of the bill include the increased criminalization of copyright and trademark law as well as the introduction of new powers for Canadian border guards to detain shipments and work actively with rights holders to seize and destroy goods without court oversight or involvement.” He emphasized that, “Customs officials are not copyright and trademark experts, yet they may now be forced to assess infringement cases including determining whether any copyright exceptions apply.” Mike Masnick of techdirt acknowledged that, “For many years, Canada has strongly resisted U.S.-style copyright laws, despite tremendous pressure to do so. Watching them cave on ACTA is certainly a disappointment.” He went on to say, “It shows a Canadian government who doesn't seem to care about what the public wants, but rather feels the need to kowtow to U.S. entertainment and pharmaceutical lobbying interests.”

The Council of Canadians have questioned whether the anti-counterfeiting bill, “is one of the conditions the U.S. government put on Canada joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade negotiations.” The group is urging that intellectual property rights be taken out of the TPP and the Canada-European Union (EU) Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) talks. There have already been attempts to use CETA negotiations to sneak in parts of ACTA. Stuart Trew, trade campaigner with the Council of Canadians wondered since, “The Harper government seems to have just collapsed in front of U.S. demands for border enforcement of Hollywood’s intellectual property rights despite the global controversy with ACTA. Can we expect Harper to bend this easily to European demands in CETA and U.S. demands in the TPP that will increase the price of drugs and undermine access to affordable medicines?” ACTA also favours Big Pharma with patent protections that would limit generic competition and would lead to higher drug costs.

On March 20, the USTR officially notified Congress of its intention to enter into negotiations with the EU on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement. In the letter, they also outlined specific goals in different areas such as intellectual property rights. As part of the transatlantic talks, the USTR, “Seek to obtain, consistent with U.S. priorities and objectives, appropriate commitments that reflect the shared U.S.-EU objective of high-level IPR protection and enforcement, and to sustain and enhance joint leadership on IPR issues.” A Civil Society Declaration signed by European and U.S. groups is insisting that the upcoming negotiations, “exclude any provisions related to patents, copyright, trademarks, data protection, geographical indications, or other forms of so-called intellectual property. Such provisions could impede our rights to health, culture, and free expression and otherwise affect our daily lives.” Some have warned that the TTIP could be used as a way to implement ACTA through the backdoor.

ACTA is part of the international agenda of patent, trademark and copyright lobbies. The agreement favours big businesses over individual innovators and creators. It was designed to protect the interests of multinational corporations at the expense of fundamental civil rights. ACTA is being used by the U.S. to pressure other countries into adopting a new global standard for intellectual property enforcement. The supranational treaty would impose draconian laws which threaten the sovereignty of member nations.


Dana Gabriel is an activist and independent researcher. He writes about trade, globalization, sovereignty, security, as well as other issues. Contact: beyourownleader@hotmail.com. Visit his blog at Be Your Own Leader

Dirty Wars: Scahill Back Filling the Empty Media Spaces

Filling the Empty Battlefield: Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter

by Tom Engelhardt - TomDispatch

Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 -- and just about no one noticed. Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.” In his prologue, the former consultant to the CIA and eminent scholar of both Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution and modern Japan labeled his Cold War self a “spear-carrier for empire.”

After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, he was surprised to discover that the essential global structure of that other Cold War colossus, the American superpower, with its vast panoply of military bases, remained obdurately in place as if nothing whatsoever had happened. Almost a decade later, when the Evil Empire was barely a memory, Johnson surveyed the planet and found “an informal American empire” of immense reach and power. He also became convinced that, in its global operations, Washington was laying the groundwork “all around the world... for future forms of blowback.”

Johnson noted “portents of a twenty-first century crisis” in the form of, among other things, “terrorist attacks on American installations and embassies.” In the first chapter of Blowback, he focused in particular on a “former protégé of the United States” by the name of Osama bin Laden and on the Afghan War against the Soviets from which he and an organization called al-Qaeda had emerged. It had been a war in which Washington backed to the hilt, and the CIA funded and armed, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists, paving the way years later for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan.

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Field of Nightmares

[Note for TomDispatch readers: This is part two of my series on how Washington helped create its enemies in the post-9/11 era. Part one was “The Enemy-Industrial Complex.” Also, I can't resist mentioning that I -- and so TomDispatch -- was named "Truthdigger of the week" at the invaluable website Truthdig.com. To read Alexander Kelly's piece on TD and me accompanying that honor, click here. Tom]

Filling the Empty Battlefield: 

Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter

by Tom Engelhardt

Talk about unintended consequences! The purpose of that war had been to give the Soviet Union a Vietnam-style bloody nose, which it more than did. All of this laid the foundation for... well, in 1999 when Johnson was writing, no one knew what. But he, at least, had an inkling, which on September 12, 2001, made his book look prophetic indeed. He emphasized one other phenomenon: Americans, he believed, had “freed ourselves of... any genuine consciousness of how we might look to others on this globe.”

With Blowback, he aimed to rectify that, to paint a portrait of how that informal empire and its historically unprecedented garrisoning of the world looked to others, and so explain why animosity and blowback were building globally. After September 11, 2001, his book leaped to the center of the 9/11 display tables in bookstores nationwide and became a bestseller, while “blowback” and that phrase “unintended consequences” made their way into our everyday language.

Chalmers Johnson was, you might say, our first blowback scholar. Now, more than a decade later, we have a book from our first blowback reporter. His name is Jeremy Scahill. In 2007, he, too, produced a surprise bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. It caught the mood of a moment in which the Bush administration, in service to its foreign wars, was working manically to “privatize” national security and the U.S. military by hiring rent-a-spies, rent-a-guns, and rent-a-corporations for its proliferating wars.

In the ensuing years, it was as if Scahill had taken Johnson’s observation to heart -- that we Americans can’t see our world as it is. And little wonder, since so much of the American way of war has plunged into the shadows. As two administrations in Washington arrogated ever greater war-making and national security powers, they began to develop a new, off-the-books, undeclared style of war-making. In the process, they transformed an increasingly militarized CIA, a hush-hush crew called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and a shiny new “perfect weapon” and high-tech fantasy object, the drone, into the president’s own privatized military.

In these years, war and the path to it were becoming the private business and property of the White House and the national security state -- and no one else. Little of this, of course, was a secret to those on the receiving end. It was only Americans who were not supposed to know much about what was being done in their name. As a result, there was a secret history of twenty-first-century American war crying out to be written. Now, we have it in the form of Scahill’s latest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.

Scahill has tracked, in particular, the rise of JSOC. In Iraq, it grew into a kind of Murder Inc., “an executive assassination wing,” as Seymour Hersh once put it, operating out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. It next turned its hunter/killer methods on Afghanistan and then on the planet, as the special operations forces themselves grew into an expansive secret military cocooned inside the U.S. military. In those years, Scahill started following the footsteps of special ops types into the field, while mainlining into sources in their community as well as other parts of the American military and intelligence world.

In his new book, he dramatically retraces the bureaucratic intel wars in Washington as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community muscled up, and secret presidential orders gave JSOC, in particular, unprecedented authority to turn the globe into a free-fire zone. Finally, as a reporter, he traveled to a series of danger spots -- Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan -- that Americans could care less about, where the U.S. military and the CIA (in conjunction with private security contractors) were experimenting with and developing new ways of waging Washington’s spreading secret wars.

As Scahill writes in his acknowledgements, thanking another reporter who traveled with him, “We were shot at together on rooftops in Mogadishu, slept on dingy floors in rural Afghanistan, and traveled together in the netherlands of Southern Yemen.” That catches something of the spirit behind a book produced by a dedicated, unembedded, independent reporter -- a thoroughly impressive, even awe-inspiring piece of work.

In the process, Scahill, who in these years broke a number of major stories as national security correspondent for the Nation magazine, fills us in on those American military death squads in Iraq, nightmarish special ops night raids in Afghanistan (that target all the wrong people), secret renditions of terror suspects to a CIA-funded jail in Somalia (after President Obama had forsworn “rendition”), the dispatching of drones and cruise missiles in disastrous strikes on civilians in Yemen, the hunting down and assassination of American citizens (aka terror suspects, although 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki certainly wasn’t one) also in Yemen on the orders of the president, the complex world of JSOC-CIA-Blackwater operations in Pakistan -- and so much more, including an indication that JSOC has even launched secret ground operations of some sort in Uzbekistan. (Who knew?)

Dirty Wars is also, in Johnson’s terms, a history of the future; that is, a history of potential blowback-to-come, a message in a bottle sent to us from the hidden front lines of America’s global battlefields -- and therein lies a tale of tales.

Preparing the Battlefield

A couple of years back, TomDispatch correspondent Ann Jones told me something I’ve never forgotten. Having spent time with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, she described their patrols in the countryside this way: yes, there were dangers, mainly IEDs (roadside bombs) and the odd potshot taken at them, but on the whole the areas they patrolled every day were eerily “empty.” In some sense, it almost seemed as if no one was there, as if they were fighting a ghost war on -- her term -- an empty battlefield.

As it happens, her observation has a planetary analogue that lies at the heart of Scahill’s remarkable book. As you may remember, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it took no time at all for Bush administration officials to think big. Notoriously, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began urging aides to build a case against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein only five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Within weeks administration figures were already talking with confidence about the need to “drain the swamp” of terrorists and enemies on a global scale. They were reportedly planning to target 60 to 80 countries, almost a third to close to one-half of the nations on this planet. In other words, when they quickly declared a Global War on Terror, they weren’t kidding. They meant it quite literally and, as Scahill reports, they promptly went to work building up the kinds of forces -- secret and at their command alone -- that could fight anywhere on the sly.

As these forces were dispatched globally to collect intelligence, train foreign forces (also often “special” and secret), and especially hunt and kill terrorists, a new tradecraft term came into play, a phrase as crucial to Scahill’s book as “blowback” was to Johnson’s. They were, it was claimed, going out to “prepare the battlefield” (or alternately, “the battlespace” or “the environment”). That process of preparation couldn’t have been more breathtakingly hubristic. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld summed up the situation this way: “Today, the entire world is the ‘battlespace.’”

Here’s the strange thing, though: when those secret forces went out to do their dirty work, that global battlefield was, using Jones’s term, remarkably, eerily empty. There was hardly anyone there. Perhaps hundreds or at most a few thousand jihadis scattered mainly in the backlands of the planet. If “preparing the battlefield” turned out to be the crucial term of the era, it wasn't exactly a descriptively accurate one. More on the mark might have been: “creating the battlefield” or “filling the empty battlefield.”

The pattern that Scahill traces brilliantly might have boiled down to a version of the tag line for the movie Field of Dreams: if you prepare it, they will come. The result was not so much a war on, as a war of, and for, terror. Washington would, at one and the same time, produce a killing machine and a terror-generating machine. Dirty Wars catches the way its top officials became convinced that the planet’s last superpower, with “the finest fighting force the world has ever known” (as American presidents now never grow tired of repeating), could simply kill its way to victory globally.

As Scahill also shows, they were often remarkably successful at eliminating the figures on their “kill list” of targeted enemies from Osama bin Laden on down: Bin Laden himself in Pakistan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, Aden Hashi Ayro in Somalia, Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, as well as various “lieutenants” of top al-Qaeda figures and allied groups. And yet, as those on the kill lists died, thanks to the CIA’s drones and JSOC’s raiders, so did others. Often enough, they were innocent civilians -- and in quantity. People who shouldn’t have ever had their doors kicked in, their sons arrested or their pregnant wives shot down, and who bitterly resented what they experienced. And so before Washington knew it, the kill list was growing larger, not smaller, and its wars were becoming more, not less, intense and spreading to other lands. The battlefield, copiously prepared, was filling with enemies.

A Perpetual Motion Machine for the Destabilization of the Planet

As Washington launched its post-9/11 adventures, the neoconservative allies of the Bush administration, believing the wind in their sails, eyed the vast area from North Africa to the Central Asian border of China (aka “the Greater Middle East”) that they liked to call the “arc of instability.” The job of the U.S., they imagined, was to bring stability to that “arc” by using America's overwhelming military power to create a Pax Americana in the region. They were, in other words, fundamentalists and the U.S. military was their born-again religion. They believed that its techno-power would trump every other form of power on the planet, hands down.

In the wake of the American withdrawal from Iraq and in light of the ongoing disastrous war in Afghanistan, if you look at the Greater Middle East today -- from Pakistan to Syria, Afghanistan to Mali -- you’ll know what instability is really all about. Twelve years later, much of the region has been destabilized to one degree or another, which might pass as the definition for Washington of short-term success and long-term failure.

In reality, they should have known better from the start. After all, behind the global war launched by the Bush administration and carried on by Obama was a twenty-first-century replay of a brutal flop of a strategy in Washington’s failed war in Vietnam. The phrase that went with it back then was “the crossover point,” the supposedly crucial moment in what was bluntly thought of as a “war of attrition.”

The idea was simple enough. The staggering firepower available to Washington would be brought to bear on the Vietnamese enemy with the obvious, expectable result: sooner or later, a moment would be reached in which the U.S. would be killing more of that enemy than could be replaced by recruitment in South Vietnam or the infiltration of reinforcements from the North. At that moment, Washington would “crossover” into victory. We know just where that led -- to the infamous body count (which the Bush administration tried desperately to avoid in Iraq and Afghanistan), to slaughter on a staggering scale, and to defeat when the prodigious number of enemies killed somehow never resulted in the U.S. crossing over.

And here’s the ironic thing. Like his father who, as the first Gulf War ended in 1991, spoke ecstatically of having “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” George W. Bush and his top officials had an overwhelming allergy to the memory of Vietnam. Yet they still managed to launch a global war of attrition against a range of groups they defined as “terrorists.” They were clearly planning to kill them, one by one if possible, or in “signature” groups if necessary, until some crossover point was reached, until the enemy was losing more members than could be replaced and victory came into sight. As in Vietnam, of course, that crossover point never arrived and it’s increasingly clear that it never will. Scahill’s reporting couldn’t be more incisive on the subject.

Dirty Wars is really the secret history of how Washington launched a series of undeclared wars in the backlands of the planet and killed its way to something that ever more closely resembled an actual global war, creating a world of enemies out of next to nothing. Think of it as a bizarre form of unconscious wish fulfillment and the results -- they came! -- as a field of nightmares.

What was created in the process now seems more like a perpetual motion machine for the destabilization of the planet. Just follow the spread of drone bases and of JSOC’s raiders, and you can actually watch the backlands of the globe destabilizing before your eyes, or read Scahill’s book and get a superb blow-by-blow account of just how it happened. The process is now well underway in Africa where destabilization seems to be heading south from Libya via Mali.

Reread Blowback 13 years later and it’s hard to believe that anyone was so ahead of his times, given the human predilection for being unable to foresee much of anything. Perhaps the saddest thing that can be said about Dirty Wars is that, the way things look, 13 years from now Scahill's book, too, may seem as fresh as last night’s news. He has laid out a style of off-the-books war-making that seems destined to be perpetuated, no matter what administration is in power.

Much remains unknown when it comes to our recent non-war wars. Thirteen years from now we may know far more about what JSOC, the CIA, and others were really doing in these years. None of that, however, is likely to change the pattern Scahill has set down for us.

So let’s not hesitate to say it: mission accomplished! The world may not have been a battlefield then. But they prepared the global battlespace so well that it’s heading in that direction now.

Almost unnoticed, imperial wars also have a way of coming home. Take the reaction to the Boston marathon bombings. The response was certainly the largest, most militarized manhunt in American history. In its own way, it was also an example of the empty battlefield. An 87-square mile metropolitan area was almost totally locked down. At least 9,000 heavily up-armored local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, hundreds of National Guard troops, SWAT teams, armored vehicles, helicopters, and who knows what else hit the streets of greater Boston’s neighborhoods in a search for two dangerous, deluded young men, one of whom ended up bloodied inside a boat in a backyard just outside the zone the police had cordoned off to search in Watertown. It was a spectacle that would have been unimaginable in pre-9/11 America.

The expense must have been staggering (especially if you add in business losses from the city’s shutdown). In the end, of course, one of the suspects was killed and the other captured -- and celebrations of that short-term success began immediately on the streets of Boston and in the media. But here, too, killing your way to success is unlikely to prove a winning strategy. After all, we’re already in Scahill’s blowback world in which, no matter the number of deaths, there is unlikely to be a crossover point.

After Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second Boston bombing suspect, was captured, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted a new phrase into the American lexicon. While calling for the 19-year-old to be held as an “enemy noncombatant” (à la Guantanamo), he wrote, "The homeland is the battlefield." That should send chills down the spine of any reader of Dirty Wars.

Above all else, there’s this: while the world burned and melted, Washington set itself one crucial global mission: to send its secret forces out onto that global battlefield to hunt random jihadis. It may be the worst case of imperial risk assessment since Nero fiddled and Rome burned.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: This essay focused on Jeremy Scahill’s new book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (Nation Books). In June, a film of the same title directed by Rick Rowley and based on the book will hit the theaters. I’ve seen it in preview. Its focus differs from the book’s. Scahill is its narrator. It's deeply personal and is powerfully humanizing of those whose doors we’ve kicked in during this last grim decade-plus. It could be the documentary of the year.]

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Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt