For Whom the Tears Don't Fall

Obama's Tears

by John Chuckman

January 7, 2015

“Even those tears, I me mine

“I me mine, I me mine” – the Beatles

Had I seen the image of Obama, weeping over American gun deaths, seven years ago, I know I would have been deeply moved. It would have reinforced my view of him then as an empathetic, bright, and progressive politician. And I did then, and do now, find America’s violence – all of it, not just the small fraction of it seen in street killings – an appalling assault on the human spirit.

But the image comes seven years later, following a period of Obama’s proving himself an utterly cold and dry-eyed killer.

Actually, apart from seven years packed with regular killing and support of others doing killing in at least half a dozen lands, he is reliably reported to have once said at a high-level meeting, without tears or the least change in demeanor, “I’m pretty good at killing.”

I don’t know whether the recent tears were artificially induced, as by an irritant placed on a fingertip to be touched to his face at the right moment of his performance, or squeezed out from heretofore unknown political acting talent. Perhaps they just reflect a kind of strangely compartmentalized brain.

This last possibility would make him more bizarre than I had come to regard him. I had come pretty much to accept him as just one more of the garden-variety psychopaths who have held the American Presidency for decades. There were even rumors, stemming from gaps in his resume, that he was CIA, an organization that employs a lot of psychopaths and has now deeply penetrated America’s elected government, having itself produced several presidents – George Bush père for sure – and other high office holders. The practice is equivalent to the Mafia’s having a “made man” on the bench of a high court.

After seven years of mass murder, dirty tricks destroying countless lives and destabilizing many peaceful lands, thousands of extrajudicial killings conducted by young thugs from basement computer-games rooms at CIA, and unblinking acceptance of such brutal savageries as we’ve seen from Israel or Saudi Arabia or Turkey, his tears truly mean nothing, except perhaps somewhere in the back of his own dark and terrible mind.

Only a few days before my writing this, I read of Israel spraying a huge swath of land inside the boundary of Gaza with a deadly herbicide. So these miserable people – these people who cannot even import cement to repair Israel’s savage destruction of homes and schools and public sanitation in 2014 – are now also to live with reduced arable land plus the virtual certainty of heavy future birth defects, much as the Vietnamese still experience from America’s hellish saturation of their land with Agent Orange about half a century ago.

That Nazi-like behavior solicited no teary scenes from Obama, just as Israel’s slaughter of more than 500 children and 1,700 adults in 2014 solicited not a tear from Obama, not so much as an awkward throat-clearing.

I don’t know what caused him to cry in his little performance about guns in America, but if you tell me it was because a decent human was overwhelmed momentarily by America’s hideously murderous society, I will not even bother to answer.

As remarkably few in other lands appear to grasp, America is a massively brutal society. This is true both at home and abroad, and I should know because I grew up there. I also know it will not change within the lifetimes of any readers, the overwhelming size and nature of the situation being beyond what many outside observers can imagine.

Certainly the insipid measures Obama has taken will not make a dent in the toll. Strangers to American society simply cannot imagine how many guns are floating around there. A recent Small Arms Survey estimated 270 million small arms, but there are a remarkable number of military-grade weapons in private hands as a result of exposure to a vast armed services with its galaxy of local military bases, major national guard organizations and facilities in every state, and the past heavy arming of police and numerous agencies such as the TSA. The kind of police who beat up drug suspects and take their money are also the kind of police who illicitly trade in guns, and America has large numbers of them amongst its rag-tag collection of a million or so.

America swims in guns, and there is a vast market just in private sales and stolen guns. There will always be a market under such conditions no matter what regulations Washington may impose. And increasingly, the individual states have permitted what was in my day in Chicago a serious felony, the concealed carrying of guns. Some also allow citizens to carry them openly in holsters.

Remember, there is not just the matter of thousands of murders and countless maimings each year. There are, as was revealed by The Guardian for the first time ever, 1,134 people killed by their own police in 2015. It all charges the atmosphere of the United States with a kind of regular, low-grade terror. And America’s prisons have an international reputation for brutality. They include such barbaric innovations as super-max prisons (in which prisoners live out entire lives in total isolation), private profit-motivated prisons, and a prison population whose total size dwarfs that of all other advanced countries.

I read in British newspapers, discussing Obama’s efforts, expressions from readers such as “it’s about time” or “those awful Republicans,” and I know they reflect views of people who just really do not understand America.

America is a country which has killed at least 6 million people over the last half century abroad, virtually all the killing to no purpose other than America’s trying to have its own way in places as distant as Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and still others. If you think violence officially sanctioned on such a scale has no effect on the country responsible for it, you are extremely naïve.

Much of the killing was savage beyond description, employing fire bombs, napalm, white phosphorus, Agent Orange, carpet bombing, and that truly hideous invention, cluster bombs.

America also remains the only country ever to use nuclear weapons, twice, on civilian targets of no military significance, and this after Japan had made strong feelers for its surrender. No, for America only unconditional surrender was acceptable. And a series of 12 atomic bombs for 12 cities was scheduled. Some sensible minds questioned the lunacy, considering that Japan had been almost flattened by a ferocious campaign of fire-bombing, so that not one primary or even secondary military target was left standing.

The fact that only two atomic bombs were used had nothing to do with America’s humanity. In later years, detailed plans for massive atomic attacks on Russia and China were drawn up, the last of which so far as I am aware was in 1961, being earnestly advocated to President Kennedy by the insane men then running the Pentagon. Nuclear weapons also were seriously discussed as options during the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War.

America is, far and away, the world’s largest arms dealer, literally dwarfing the trade in death machines of any other country, and it sells its arms to tyrants and madmen across the planet enabling players like Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, or Egypt to hugely expand the total number of deaths for which America is responsible.

America also spends as much on its military as all the world’s militaries combined. It is an obscene amount of money dedicated to killing and oppression.

American advisors are in the business of advising kings and tyrants how they can control people and efficiently kill them if needed. America had an outfit called The Army School of the Americas which became infamous for its teaching military personnel sent from Latin America in the fine points of killing and torture. Today it’s been reborn as the bland-sounding Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

In a county like contemporary America, with its often poor employment prospects for young adults, the military is a major employer. It has an elaborate enticement system to attract young people. General military training anywhere consists of just two central matters: how to be doggedly obedient and how to kill people. So every year in America, many thousands of such young people are dumped back into the general population. Many of them then go on to become police because military service is a favorite entry qualification. Many of them remain unemployed. Some even homeless.

There are not just the regular armed forces involved in saturating the country with military values and attitudes, there are also the huge national guards and reserves and high school and college ROTCs. It is a massive effort, blanketing a supposedly democratic society with undemocratic and violent ideas. You might view it as kind of a national immunization program, immunization against democratic and human values, conducted year-in, year-out. So the young generation of Americans is constantly immersed in the concepts of blind obedience and killing. And all this is further reinforced by the vast numbers of Americans dependent upon work at its many regional military bases and other facilities.

Just a portion of this avalanche of annual spending on murder might have created countless new opportunities in America with new and better schools, better medical facilities, improved housing, and intervention into troubled families. No, instead, everything is just allowed to rip, and on the streets of Chicago and other cities, week-in and week-out, the toll of young blacks resembles minor battle scenes with as many as twenty-five shot (not all killed) on a single week-end.

That brings us to yet another aspect of American violence and passion for guns. America remains in many respects just as divided a society on racial lines as it was a century ago. The unspoken reason for many Americans keeping guns is the same one that caused Southern plantation owners to sleep each night with a knife and a pistol under the pillow. It rarely is openly discussed, but it is there like a great unnerving presence in a thousand dark places.

There is yet one more dimension to American violence. About half a dozen years ago, a study, led by a Harvard Medical School researcher, found evidence of mental problems in 26.4 % of people in the United States, versus, for example, 8.2% of people in Italy. The researchers were concerned with matters such as lack of access to treatment and under-treatment, but for those concerned about a safe and decent world, I think the salient finding is simply America’s high percentage. The world is being led by a nation where more than one-quarter of the people have genuine mental problems.

I’m afraid America’s movie industry has created sugary fantasies about America which still influence the views of many abroad. There really are no Jimmy Stewart types, with tears in the eyes and benign expressions, running America.

And in case you missed it, even in as sugary a confection as “It’s a Wonderful Life,” sobbed over by millions every Christmas season, some raw truth creeps in. Jimmy Stewart’s run-in with Bert the cop ends with Stewart running madly away in the snow and good old Bert pulling out his pistol and firing several times, trying to hit Stewart in the back and putting at risk pedestrians up and down the charming street. That’s the truest scene in the film.

And that is America. Fine-tuning and tears are about as fitting for the state of America as they would be on the Russian Front in World War II, the most horrendous conflict in all of human history in which 27 million Soviets and millions of Germans perished.

How to Save a Beached Whale

Baby Gray Whale Rescue

by Sam Morrison

The Caligula Games: Republicans Go Roman

America Revisits the Dark Side: Candidates Compete to Promise the Most Torture and Slaughter

by Rebecca Gordon - TomDispatch

January 7, 2016

They’re back!

From the look of the presidential campaign, war crimes are back on the American agenda. We really shouldn’t be surprised, because American officials got away with it last time -- and in the case of the drone wars continue to get away with it today.

Still, there’s nothing like the heady combination of a “populist” Republican race for the presidency and a national hysteria over terrorism to make Americans want to reach for those “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

That, as critics have long argued, is what usually happens if war crimes aren’t prosecuted.

In August 2014, when President Obama finally admitted that “we tortured some folks,” he added a warning. The recent history of U.S. torture, he said, “needs to be understood and accepted. We have to as a country take responsibility for that so hopefully we don’t do it again in the future.”

By pinning the responsibility for torture on all of us “as a country,” Obama avoided holding any of the actual perpetrators to account. 

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, American War Crimes, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

What a scam! Noam Scheiber and Patricia Cohen described it this way in a front-page New York Times report on how a small group of incredibly wealthy Americans funded their way into another tax universe: “Operating largely out of public view -- in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service -- the wealthy have used their influence to steadily whittle away at the government’s ability to tax them. The effect has been to create a kind of private tax system, catering to only several thousand Americans.”

Yes, you read that correctly: tiny numbers of Americans live on a different tax planet from the rest of us. They’ve paid for the privilege, of course, and increasingly for the political class that oversees how our country runs. They've insulated themselves in a largely tax-free zone that ensures their “equality” before the law (such as it is) and your deepening inequality before the same -- and before them. Their actions have garnered them the ultimate in impunity. In this election season in a country of more than 300 million people, for instance, a mere 158 families (and the companies they control) are putting their (largely tax-free) dollars where our mouths once were. By October, they had provided almost half the money thus far raised by presidential candidates in a move meant to ensure that American democracy becomes their system, their creature. (“Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.”)

My dictionary defines “impunity” simply enough as “exemption from punishment, penalty, or harm.” That’s a striking trait for those who lord it over us. In the most incarcerated nation on Earth, with close to 25% of the globe’s prison population, there are seemingly no bars strong enough to hold our economic elites or, for that matter, their national security brethren.

The U.S. national security state, like the billionaire class, has grown ever richer and become ever more entrenched in these years, while similarly extracting itself from what was once the American political and legal system. Its officials now exist in a world of secrecy in which, in the name of our “safety,” ever fewer of their acts are open to our scrutiny. They inhabit what can only be thought of as a crime-free zone. No act they commit, no matter how extralegal or illegal, will evidently ever land them in a court of law. They have, in essence, total impunity. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the CIA’s massive, extralegal operation to kidnap “terror suspects” (often enough, as it turned out, innocent civilians) and deliver them to the torture chambers of brutal allies or to a system of “black sites” off the coast of normal justice. Lying to Congress, hacking congressional computers, and assassinating American citizens have all been green-lighted. No one was ever punished. When necessary, in the secret corridors of power, officials of the national security state simply mobilize lawyers to reinterpret the law of the land to their taste.

When it comes to impunity, their record has been the equal of anything the billionaire class has done. And none of it was more impressive, in its own way, than the use of obviously illegal methods of torture, euphemistically termed “enhanced interrogation techniques,” against helpless prisoners in a secret global prison system, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon reminds us today. You want war crimes? Post-9/11, Washington could have sported the logo: War Crimes "R" Us. If you want to understand what this sort of impunity means in terms of the politics of 2016, then read on. Tom 

America Revisits the Dark Side: Candidates Compete to Promise the Most Torture and Slaughter

by Rebecca Gordon

Unfortunately, “hope” alone will not stymie a serial war criminal -- and the president did not even heed his own warning. For seven years his administration has done everything except help the country “take responsibility” for torture and other war crimes. It looked the other way when it comes to holding accountable those who set up and ran the CIA’s large-scale torture operations at its “black sites” around the world. It never brought charges against those who ordered torture at Guantánamo. It prosecuted no one, above all not the top officials of the Bush administration.

Now, in the endless run-up to the 2016 presidential elections, we’ve been treated to some pretty strange gladiatorial extravaganzas, with more to come in 2016. In these peculiarly American spectacles, Republican candidates hurl themselves at one another in a frenzied effort to be seen as the candidate most likely to ignore the president’s wan hope and instead “do it again in the future.” As a result, they are promising to commit a whole range of crimes, from torture to the slaughter of civilians, for which the leaders of some nations would find themselves hauled into international court as war criminals. But “war criminal” is a label reserved purely for people we loathe, not for us. To paraphrase former President Richard Nixon, if the United States does it, it’s not a crime.

In the wake of the brutal attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, the promises being openly made to commit future crimes have only grown more forthright. A few examples from the presidential campaign trail should suffice to make the point:

* Ted Cruz guarantees that “we” will “utterly destroy ISIS.” How will we do it? “We will carpet bomb them into oblivion” -- that is, “we” will saturate an area with munitions in such a way that everything and everyone on the ground is obliterated. Of such a bombing campaign against the Islamic State, he told a cheering crowd at the Rising Tide Summit, “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.” (It’s hard not to take this as a reference to the use of nuclear weapons, though in the bravado atmosphere of the present Republican campaign a lot of detailed thought is undoubtedly not going into any such proposals.)

* Kindly retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson evidently has similar thoughts. When pressed by CNN co-moderator Hugh Hewitt in the most recent Republican debate on whether he was “tough” enough to be “okay with the deaths of thousands of innocent children and civilian[s],” Carson replied, “You got it. You got it.” He even presented a future campaign against the Islamic State in which “thousands” of children might die as an example of the same kind of tough love a surgeon sometimes exhibits when facing a difficult case. It’s like telling a child, he assured Hewitt, that “we’re going to have to open your head up and take out this tumor. They’re not happy about it, believe me. And they don’t like me very much at that point. But later on, they love me.” So, presumably, will those “dead innocent children” in Syria -- once they get over the shock of being dead.

* Jeb Bush’s approach brought what, in Republican circles, passes for nuance to the discussion of future war crimes policy. What Washington needs, he argued, is “a strategy” and what stands in the way of the Obama administration developing one is an excessive concern with the niceties of international law. As he put it, “We need to get the lawyers off the back of the warfighters. Right now under President Obama, we’ve created... this standard that is so high that it’s impossible to be successful in fighting ISIS.” Meanwhile, Jeb has surrounded himself with a familiar clique of neocon “advisers” -- people like George W. Bush’s former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and his former Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, who planned for and advocated the illegal U.S. war against Iraq, which touched off a regional war with devastating human consequences.

* And then there is Donald Trump. Where to start? As a simple baseline for his future commander-in-chiefdom, he stated without a blink that he would bring back torture. “Would I approve waterboarding?” he told a cheering crowd at a November rally in Columbus, Ohio. “You bet your ass I would -- in a heartbeat.” And for Trump, that would only be the beginning. He assured his listeners vaguely but emphatically that he “would approve more than that,” leaving to their imaginations whether he was thinking of excruciating “stress positions,” relentless exposure to loud noise, sleep deprivation, the straightforward killing of prisoners, or what the CIA used to delicately refer to as “rectal rehydration.” Meanwhile, he just hammers on when it comes to torture. “Don't kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn't work.”

Only a stupid person -- like, perhaps, one of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who carefully studied the CIA’s grim torture documents for years, despite the Agency’s foot-dragging, opposition, and outright interference (including computer hacking) -- would say that. But why even bother to argue about whether torture works? The point, Trump claimed, was that the very existence of the Islamic State means that someone needs to be tortured. “If it doesn’t work,” he told that Ohio crowd, “they deserve it anyway.”

Only a few days later, he triumphantly sallied even further into war criminal territory. He declared himself ready to truly hit the Islamic State where it hurts. “The other thing with the terrorists,” he told Fox News, “is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. When they say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families.” Because it’s a well-known fact -- in Trumpland at least -- that nothing makes people less likely to behave violently than murdering their parents and children. And it certainly doesn’t matter, when Trump advocates it, that murder is a crime.

The Problem with Impunity

Not that you’d know it in this country, but the common thread in all of these proposed responses to the Islamic State isn’t just the usual Republican hawkishness. Each one represents a serious violation of U.S. laws, international laws of war, and/or treaties and conventions that the United States has signed and ratified under Republican as well as Democratic presidents. Most campaign trail discussions of plans -- both Republican and Democratic -- to defeat ISIS have focused only on instrumental questions: Would carpet bombing, torture, or making sand glow in the dark work?

Candidates and reporters alike have ignored the obvious larger point -- if, that is, we weren’t living in a country that had given itself a blanket pass on the issue of war crimes. Carpet-bombing cities, torturing prisoners, and rendering lands uninhabitable are all against the law. They are, in fact, grave crimes. That even critics of these comments will not identify such potential acts as war crimes can undoubtedly be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that no one -- other than a few low-level military personnel and a CIA whistleblower who spoke publicly about the Agency’s torture agenda -- has been prosecuted in the U.S. for the startling array of crimes already committed in the so-called War on Terror.

President Obama set the stage for this failure as early as January 2009, just before his first inauguration. He told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that, when it came to the possible prosecution of CIA officials for U.S. torture policies, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” He didn’t, he assured Stephanopoulos, want the “extraordinarily talented people” at the Agency “who are working very hard to keep Americans safe… to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering up.” As it turned out, lawyering up was never a problem. In the end, Attorney General Eric Holder declined to charge any CIA personnel, closing the only two cases the Justice Department had even opened. Nor did any of the top officials responsible for the “enhanced interrogation” program, including President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, or CIA Director George Tenet, need to waste a cent on a lawyer. Instead, they’re now happily publishing their memoirs. Or, in the cases of Jay Bybee and John Yoo, the Justice Department authors of some of the more infamous “torture memos,” serving as a federal judge or occupying an endowed chair at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, respectively.

On December 1, 2015, perhaps driven to frustration by the Obama administration’s ultimate failure to act, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a 153-page report titled “No More Excuses.” In it, the organization detailed the specific crimes relating to that CIA torture program for which a dozen high-level officials of the Bush administration could have been brought to trial and called for their prosecution. HRW pointed out that such prosecutions are not, in fact, a matter of choice. They are required by international law (even if the alleged criminals have run the planet’s last superpower). For example, the United Nations Convention against Torture, a key treaty that the United States signed in 1988 (under President Ronald Reagan) and finally ratified in 1994 (under President Bill Clinton), specifically requires our nation to take “effective legislative, administrative, judicial, or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.”

It doesn’t matter if there’s a war on, or if there’s internal unrest. The Convention says, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Whenever torture is used, it’s a violation of that treaty, and that makes it a crime. When it’s used against prisoners of war, it’s also a violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and therefore a war crime. No exceptions.

But when Obama acknowledged that “we tortured some folks,” he claimed an exception for American torture. He cautioned us against overreacting. “It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had,” he said, referring to the CIA’s corps of torturers. He pointed to American fear -- of the very sort we’re seeing again over San Bernardino -- as an exculpatory factor, reminding us of just how frightened all of us, including CIA operatives, were in the days after 9/11.

As it happens, whatever the former constitutional law professor in the White House or hotel-builder Donald Trump may believe, torture remains illegal. It makes no difference how frightened people may be of potential terrorists. After all, it’s partly because people do wicked things when they are afraid that we make laws in the first place -- so that, when fear clouds our minds, we can be reminded of what we decided was right in less frightening times. That’s why the Convention against Torture says “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever” excuse such acts.

But the U.N. Convention is just a treaty, right? It’s not really a law. In fact, when the United States ratifies a treaty, it becomes part of American law under Article VI of our Constitution, which states that the Constitution itself and

“… all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”

So even if torture did work, it would still be illegal.

War Crimes for the New Year

What about the other proposals we’ve heard from Republican candidates? Some of them are certainly war crimes. “Carpet bombing,” a metaphor that describes an all-too-real air-power nightmare (as many Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians learned during our wars in Indochina), means the saturation of an entire area with enough bombs to destroy everything standing without regard for the lives of anyone who might be on the ground. It is illegal under the laws of war, because it makes no distinction between civilians and combatants.

Because aerial bombardment hadn’t even been invented in 1907 when the Hague Conventions were signed, they don’t name carpet bombing specifically in a list of prohibited “means of injuring the enemy, sieges, and bombardments.” Nevertheless, at the center of the Hague Conventions, as with all the laws and customs of war, lies the crucial distinction between combatants and civilians. To destroy an entire populated area in order to eliminate a handful of fighters violates the long-held and internationally recognized principle of proportionality.

The Hague Conventions also put into the written international legal code long-held beliefs about the importance of distinguishing between civilians and combatants in war. Ben Carson’s willingness to allow the deaths of thousands of civilians and children in the pursuit of ISIS fundamentally violates exactly that principle.

In another shameful exception, the United States has never ratified a 1977 addition to the Geneva Conventions that specifically outlaws carpet bombing. Additional Protocol 1 specifically addresses the protection of civilians during warfare. Apart from such U.S. allies as Israel and Turkey, 174 countries have signed Protocol 1, explicitly making carpet bombing a war crime.

If the United States has not ratified Protocol 1, does that mean it is free to violate its provisions? Not necessarily. When the vast majority of nations agree to such an accord, it can take on the power of “ international customary law” -- a set of principles that have the force of law, whether or not they are written down and ratified. The International Committee of the Red Cross maintains a list of these rules of law. One section of these explicitly states that “indiscriminate attacks,” including “area bombardment,” are indeed illegal under customary law.

Senator Cruz’s promise to discover whether or not sand glows in the dark, presumably through the use of nuclear weapons, would violate the 1907 Hague Convention’s prohibitions on employing “poison or poisoned weapons” and on the use of “arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering.” It no more matters that the United States ratified this convention over a century ago than that the Constitution is more than 200 years old. Jeb Bush’s suggestion that we get the lawyers “off the back of the warfighters” notwithstanding, both remain the law of the land.

That they don’t appear to have the force of law in the United States, that the description of possible future war crimes can rouse crowds to a cheering frenzy in this political season, represents a remarkable failure of political will; in particular, the willingness of the Obama administration to call a crime a crime and act accordingly. Globally, it is a failure of power rather than of the law. Prosecuting a former African autocrat or Serbian leader for war crimes is obviously a very different and far less daunting matter than bringing to justice top officials of the planet’s only superpower. That is made all the more difficult because, under George W. Bush, the United States informed the world that it would never ratify the accords that set up the International Criminal Court.

In the Glare of San Bernardino

Human Rights Watch released its report on December 1st. The next day, a married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, attacked a holiday party at San Bernardino’s Department of Public Health, where Farook worked. They killed 14 people before dying in a police shootout. It was a horrific crime and it appears that the two were, at least in part, inspired by the social media presence of the Islamic State (even if they were not in any way directed by that group). Not surprisingly, the HRW report sank like a stone from public view. With it went their key recommendations: that a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate and bring to trial those responsible for CIA torture practices and that U.S. torture victims be guaranteed redress in American courts, something both the Bush and Obama administrations have fought fiercely, even though it is a key requirement of the U.N. Convention against Torture.

As last year ended, the fear machine had cranked up once again, and Americans were being reminded by those who aspire to lead us that no price is too high to pay for our security -- as long as it’s paid by somebody else. Expect more of the same in 2016.

And yet it is precisely now, when we are most afraid, that our leaders -- present and future -- should not be stoking our fears. They should instead be reminding us that there is something more valuable -- and more achievable -- than perfect security. They should be encouraging us not to seek a cowardly exception from the laws of war, but to be brave and abide by them. So here’s the challenge: Will we find the courage to resist the fear machine this time? Will we find the will to prosecute the war crimes of the past and prevent the ones our candidates are screaming for? Or will we allow our nation to remain what it has become: a terrible and terrifying exception to the international rule of law?

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and the forthcoming American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2016 Rebecca Gordon

Peace Valley Insurrection: Treaty 8 Stewards of the Land Draw the Line Against Site C Megadam

First Nations Prepare for Arrest to Stop Site C Dam - Treaty 8 Stewards of the Land call on Trudeau to stop Megadam in B.C.’s Peace Valley

by Treaty 8 Stewards of the Land

January 7, 2016

ROCKY MOUNTAIN FORT CAMP - First Nations members camped out at an historic fort site slated for  destruction by the Site C dam say they are prepared to face arrest to protect their traditional territory. Joined by local landowners, Treaty 8 Stewards of the Land say they will not permit BC Hydro to proceed with plans to clear-cut forests around the Rocky Mountain Fort site on the west side of the Moberly River.

The site, selected by explorer Alexander Mackenzie, was the first trading post in mainland B.C. and is situated in the traditional territory of Treaty 8 First Nations. The $9 billion Site C dam would flood 107-kilometres of the scenic Peace River and its tributaries, including the traditional hunting and fishing grounds of Treaty 8 First Nations.

In late December, despite three on-going First Nations court cases against the dam, BC Hydro built a bridge across the mouth of the Moberly River in preparation for logging in the proposed reservoir area.

In addition to its legal, economic, political and archaeological significance to indigenous and non-indigenous people, the camp is the gateway to the rest of the threatened Peace Valley. BC Hydro has served notice that the camp must be dismantled.

“Logging and flooding this part of the Peace Valley will irreversibly harm our ability to hunt, fish, trap and exercise other constitutionally-protected Treaty Rights, especially since much of the rest of Treaty 8 Territory has been devastated by other hydro-electric, oil and gas and industrial developments,” said Art Napoleon.

“To have any meaning, these treaty rights require a land base and waterways where there are wildlife and fish, and which is capable of supporting a diversity of plant life.

“Treaty rights also include management level decision-making to protect moose calving grounds, medicine harvesting and berry picking, and spiritual practices – all of which will be obliterated by Site C.”

A delegation of First Nations chiefs told Prime Minister Trudeau’s key Cabinet members in December that suspending federal approval of the Site C dam is a critical litmus test of his government’s promised new relationship with Indigenous Peoples.

“The Prime Minister says that Canada’s most important relationship is with its Indigenous Peoples and that he promises to uphold and respect Treaty Rights”, said Helen Knott. 

“This is what we are trying to do at a grassroots level. I speak as Great Great Granddaughter of Chief Bigfoot, the last to sign Treaty 8 in 1911, and I am trying to honour my Grandfather’s original intent and uphold those rights he meant to protect. I ask Prime Minister Trudeau to also honour that original intent.”
 

“We applaud the court cases being brought by West Moberly, Prophet River and others, but they take time to wind their way through the courts. Meanwhile, before the court cases are even heard, BC Hydro is  destroying the very valley that these court cases are intended to protect. The way I see it, they are stealing from future generations, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. We are not here just for us but for the ones that will come after us,” Knott added. 

“As individual Treaty 8 First Nation members, we cannot stand by. Do I want to be arrested? No, I am here peacefully doing what I believe is right and needed but this land is a part of who I am and I will take a stand for it. Prime Minister Trudeau can stop BC Hydro from destroying the Peace Valley. Until he does, we will”.

– 30 –

NEWS RELEASE

Media Contacts:

Helen Knott, Prophet River First Nation member and Treaty 8 Steward of the Land

Art Napoleon, Saulteau First Nations member and Treaty 8 Steward of the Land

Peering Through Ukraine's Looking Glass

Reality Peeks Through in Ukraine

by Robert Parry - Consortium News

January 6, 2016

Nearly two years since U.S. officials helped foment a coup in Ukraine – partly justified by corruption allegations – the country continues to wallow in graft and cronyism as the living standards for average Ukrainians plummet, according to economic data and polls of public attitudes.

Even the neocon-oriented Wall Street Journal took note of the worsening corruption in a Jan. 1, 2016 article observing that “most Ukrainians say the revolution’s promise to replace rule by thieves with the rule of law has fallen short and the government acknowledges that there is still much to be done.”

Ukraine’s Prime Minister,
Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
(Photo credit: Ybilyk)

Actually, the numbers suggest something even worse. More and more Ukrainians rate corruption as a major problem facing the nation, including a majority of 53 percent last September, up from 48 percent last June and 28 percent in September 2014, according to polls by International Foundation for Electoral Systems.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s GDP has fallen in every quarter since the Feb. 22, 2014 putsch that overthrew elected President Viktor Yanukovych. Since then, the average Ukrainian also has faced economic “reforms” to slash pensions, energy subsidies and other social programs, as demanded by the International Monetary Fund.

In other words, the hard lives of most Ukrainians have gotten significantly harder while the elites continue to skim off whatever cream is left, including access to billions of dollars in the West’s foreign assistance that is keeping the economy afloat.

Part of the problem appears to be that people supposedly responsible for the corruption fight are themselves dogged by allegations of corruption. The Journal cited Ukrainian lawmaker Volodymyr Parasyuk who claimed to be so outraged by graft that he expressed his fury “by kicking in the face an official he says owns luxury properties worth much more than a state salary could provide.”

However, the Journal also noted that “parliament is the site of frequent mass brawls [and] it is hard to untangle all the overlapping corruption allegations and squabbling over who is to blame. Mr. Parasyuk himself was named this week as receiving money from an organized crime suspect, a claim he denies.”

Then, there is the case of Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, who is regarded by top American columnists as the face of Ukraine’s reform. Indeed, a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month by Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, hailed Jaresko as “a tough reformer” whose painful plans include imposing a 20 percent “flat tax” on Ukrainians (a favorite nostrum of the American Right which despises a progressive tax structure that charges the rich at a higher rate).

Sestanovich noted that hedge-fund billionaire George Soros, who has made a fortune by speculating in foreign currencies, has endorsed Jaresko’s plan but that it is opposed by some key parliamentarians who favor a “populist” alternative that Sestanovich says “will cut rates, explode the deficit, and kiss IMF money good-bye.”

Yet, Jaresko is hardly a paragon of reform. Prior to getting instant Ukrainian citizenship and becoming Finance Minister in December 2014, she was a former U.S. diplomat who had been entrusted to run a $150 million U.S.-taxpayer-funded program to help jump-start an investment economy in Ukraine and Moldova.

Jaresko’s compensation was capped at $150,000 a year, a salary that many Americans would envy, but it was not enough for her. So, she engaged in a variety of maneuvers to evade the cap and enrich herself by claiming millions of dollars in bonuses and fees.

Ukrainian Finance Minister,

 Natalie Jaresko.

Ultimately, Jaresko was collecting more than $2 million a year after she shifted management of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF) to her own private company, Horizon Capital, and arranged to get lucrative bonuses when selling off investments, even as the overall WNISEF fund was losing money, according to official records.

For instance, Jaresko collected $1.77 million in bonuses in 2013, according to WNISEF’s latest available filing with the Internal Revenue Service. In her financial disclosure forms with the Ukrainian government, she reported earning $2.66 million in 2013 and $2.05 million in 2014, thus amassing a sizeable personal fortune while investing U.S. taxpayers’ money supposedly to benefit the Ukrainian people.

It didn’t matter that WNISEF continued to hemorrhage money, shrinking from its original $150 million to $89.8 million in the 2013 tax year, according to the IRS filing. WNISEF reported that the bonuses to Jaresko and other corporate officers were based on “successful” exits from some investments even if the overall fund was losing money. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How Ukraine’s Finance Minister Got Rich.”]

Though Jaresko’s enrichment schemes are documented by IRS and other official filings, the mainstream U.S. media has turned a blind eye to this history, all the better to pretend that Ukraine’s “reform” process is in good hands. (It also turns out that Jaresko did not comply with Ukrainian law that permits only single citizenship; she has kept her U.S. passport exploiting a loophole that gives her two years to show that she has renounced her U.S. citizenship.)

Propaganda over Reality

Yet, as good as propaganda can be – especially when the U.S. government and mainstream media are moving in lockstep – reality is not always easily managed. Ukraine’s continuing – and some say worsening – corruption prompted last month’s trip to Ukraine by Vice President Joe Biden who gave a combination lecture and pep talk to Ukraine’s parliament.

Of course, Biden has his own Ukraine cronyism problem because – three months after the U.S.-backed overthrow of the Yanukovych government – Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, Burisma Holdings, appointed his son, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors.

Burisma – a shadowy Cyprus-based company – also lined up well-connected lobbyists, some with ties to Secretary of State John Kerry, including Kerry’s former Senate chief of staff David Leiter, according to lobbying disclosures.

As Time magazine reported, “Leiter’s involvement in the firm rounds out a power-packed team of politically-connected Americans that also includes a second new board member, Devon Archer, a Democratic bundler and former adviser to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Both Archer and Hunter Biden have worked as business partners with Kerry’s son-in-law, Christopher Heinz, the founding partner of Rosemont Capital, a private-equity company.”

According to investigative journalism inside Ukraine, the ownership of Burisma has been traced to Privat Bank, which is controlled by the thuggish billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, who was appointed by the U.S.-backed “reform” regime to be governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a south-central province of Ukraine (though Kolomoisky was eventually ousted from that post in a power struggle over control of UkrTransNafta, Ukraine’s state-owned oil pipeline operator).


In his December speech, Biden lauded the sacrifice of the 100 or so protesters who died during the Maidan clashes in February 2014, referring to them by their laudatory name “The Heavenly Hundred.”

But Biden made no heavenly references to the estimated 10,000 people, mostly ethnic Russians, who have been slaughtered in the U.S.-encouraged “Anti-Terror Operation” waged by the coup regime against eastern Ukrainians who objected to the violent ouster of President Yanukovych, who had won large majorities in those areas.

Vice President Joe Biden 


Apparently, heaven is not as eager to welcome ethnic Russian victims of U.S.-inspired political violence. Nor did Biden take note that some of the Heavenly Hundred were street fighters for neo-Nazi and other far-right nationalist organizations.

But – after making his sugary references to The Heavenly Hundred – Biden delivered his bitter medicine, an appeal for the parliament to continue implementing IMF “reforms,” including demands that old people work longer into their old age.

Biden said, “For Ukraine to continue to make progress and to keep the support of the international community you have to do more, as well. The big part of moving forward with your IMF program — it requires difficult reforms. And they are difficult.

“Let me say parenthetically here, all the experts from our State Department and all the think tanks, and they come and tell you, that you know what you should do is you should deal with pensions. You should deal with — as if it’s easy to do. Hell, we’re having trouble in America dealing with it. We’re having trouble. To vote to raise the pension age is to write your political obituary in many places.

“Don’t misunderstand that those of us who serve in other democratic institutions don’t understand how hard the conditions are, how difficult it is to cast some of the votes to meet the obligations committed to under the IMF. It requires sacrifices that might not be politically expedient or popular. But they’re critical to putting Ukraine on the path to a future that is economically secure. And I urge you to stay the course as hard as it is. Ukraine needs a budget that’s consistent with your IMF commitments.”

Eroding Support

But more and more Ukrainians appear to see through the charade in Kiev, as the poll numbers on the corruption crisis soar. Meanwhile, European officials seem to be growing impatient with the Ukraine crisis which has added to the drag on the Continent’s economies because the Obama administration strong-armed the E.U. into painful economic sanctions against Russia, which had come to the defense of the embattled ethnic Russians in the east.

“Many E.U. officials are fed up with Ukraine,” said one Western official quoted by the Journal, which added that “accusations of graft by anticorruption activists, journalists and diplomats have followed to the new government.”

The Journal said those implicated include some early U.S. favorites, such as Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, “whose ratings have plummeted to single digits amid allegations in the media and among anticorruption activists of his associates’ corrupt dealings. Mr. Yatsenyuk has denied any involvement in corruption and his associates, one of whom resigned from parliament over the controversy this month, deny wrongdoing.”

The controversy over Yatsenyuk’s alleged cronyism led to an embarrassing moment in December 2015 when an anti-Yatsenyuk lawmaker approached the podium with a bouquet of roses, which the slightly built Yatsenyuk accepted only to have the lawmaker lift him up and try to carry him from the podium.

In many ways, the Ukraine crisis represents just another failure of neocon-driven “regime change,” which has also spread chaos across the Middle East and northern Africa. But the neocons appear to have even a bigger target in their sites, another “regime change” in Moscow, with Ukraine just a preliminary move. Of course, that scheme could put in play nuclear war.

Taking Aim

The Ukraine “regime change” took shape in 2013 after Russian President Putin and President Barack Obama collaborated to tamp down crises in Syria and Iran, two other prime targets for neocon “regime changes.” American neocons were furious that those hopes were dashed. Ukraine became Putin’s payback.

In fall 2013, the neocons took aim at Ukraine, recognizing its extreme sensitivity to Russia which had seen previous invasions, including by the Nazis in World War II, pass through the plains of Ukraine and into Russia. Carl Gershman, neocon president of the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, cited Ukraine as the “biggest prize” and a key step toward unseating Putin in Moscow. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What the Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”]

Initially, the hope was that Yanukovych would lead Ukraine into an economic collaboration with Europe while cutting ties to Russia. But Yanukovych received a warming from top Ukrainian economists that a hasty split with neighboring Russia would cost the country a staggering $160 billion in lost income.

So, Yanukovych sought to slow down the process, prompting angry protests especially from western Ukrainians who descended on Maidan square. Though initially peaceful, neo-Nazi and other nationalist militias soon infiltrated the protests and began ratcheting up the violence, including burning police with Molotov cocktails.

Meanwhile, U.S.-funded non-governmental organizations, such as the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (which receives money from USAID and hedge-fund billionaire George Soros’s Open Society), hammered away at alleged corruption in the Yanukovych government.

In December 2013, Nuland reminded Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations,” and – in an intercepted phone call in early February 2014 – she discussed with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who Ukraine’s new leaders would be.

“Yats is the guy,” Nuland said of Arseniy Yatsenyuk, as she also disparaged a less aggressive approach by the European Union with the pithy phrase: “Fuck the E.U.” (Nuland, a former aide to ex-Vice President Dick Cheney, is the wife of arch-neoconservative ideologue Robert Kagan.)

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, speaking to Ukrainian and other business leaders at the National Press Club in Washington on Dec. 13, 2013, at a meeting sponsored by Chevron.

Sen. John McCain also urged on the protests, telling one group of right-wing Ukrainian nationalists that they had America’s backing. And, the West’s mainstream media fell in love with the Maidan protesters as innocent white hats and thus blamed the worsening violence on Yanukovych. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine.”]

Urging Restraint

In Biden’s December 2015 speech to the parliament, he confirmed that he personally pressed on President Yanukovych the need to avoid violence. “I was literally on the phone with your former President urging restraint,” Biden said.

However, on Feb. 20, 2014, mysterious snipers – apparently from buildings controlled by the far right – fired on and killed policemen as well as some protesters. The bloodshed sparked other violent clashes as armed rioters battled with retreating police.

Although the dead included some dozen police officers, the violence was blamed on Yanukovych, who insisted that he had ordered the police not to use lethal force in line with Biden’s appeal. But the State Department and the West’s mainstream media made Yanukovych the black-hatted villain.

The next day, Feb. 21, Yanukovych signed an accord – negotiated and guaranteed by three European nations – to accept reduced powers and early elections so he could be voted out of office if that was the public’s will. However, as police withdrew from the Maidan, the rioters, led by neo-Nazi militias called sotins, stormed government buildings on Feb. 22, forcing Yanukovych and other officials to flee for their lives.

In the West’s mainstream media, these developments were widely hailed as a noble “revolution” and – with lumps in their throats – many journalists averted their misty eyes from the key role played by unsavory neo-Nazis, so as not to dampen the happy narrative (although BBC was among the few MSM outlets that touched on this inconvenient reality).

Ever since, the major U.S. news media has stayed fully on board, ignoring evidence that what happened was a U.S.-sponsored coup. The MSM simply explains all the trouble as a case of naked “Russian aggression.

There were kudos, too, when “reformer” Natalie Jaresko was made Finance Minister along with other foreign “technocrats.” There was no attention paid to evidence about the dark underside of the Ukrainian “revolution of dignity,” as Biden called it.

Though the neo-Nazis – sometimes even teamed up with Islamic jihadists – were the tip of the spear slashing through eastern Ukraine, their existence was either buried deep inside stories or dismissed as “Russian propaganda.”

That was, in effect, American propaganda and, as clever as it was, it could only control reality for so long.

Even though the fuller truth about Ukraine has never reached the American people, there comes a point when even the best propagandists have to start modifying their rosy depictions. Ukraine appears to have reached that moment.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

Pennsylvania Penal's de Facto Death Panels: Systemic Denial of Prisoner Medical Treatment "Barbaric"

Pennsylvania’s Barbaric Protocol for Non-Treatment of Prisoners with Hep-C: Prisoners' lives don't matter, at least in this state

by Dave Lindorff  - This Can't Be Happening

January 5, 2016

Scranton - One of the most astonishing things to come out of a three-day hearing in federal court in this gritty played-out coal town, where noted prisoner-for-life Mumia Abu-Jamal was last month seeking an injunction to force the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to provide him with medication to treat his raging Hepatitis-C infection was the discovery that the state has been withholding that life-saving treatment not just from him but from almost all of the 6-7000 inmates in state prisons who have active Hep-C cases, and that the state’s doing this not just for medical reasons, but as punishment for prisoners found guilty of “misconduct” or suffering from any “addiction.”

Word of this medieval and sadistic approach to medical care for prisoners in a state that as a colony and later as a young state in the new nation of the United States of America had pioneered humane punishment came late in the hearing when the attorney for the DOC, Laura Neal, admitted that she had at her desk in the courtroom a copy of a “protocol” for treatment of Hep-C.

At first, Neal was not even going to admit that there was such a protocol. In fact, under cross-examination by Abu-Jamal’s attorneys, a DOC witness testified that the state had until 22 months earlier been at least offering some infected inmates treatment with the then best medical option -- interferon -- but that even this had been halted because of medical studies concluding that it wasn’t very effective and that the side-effects could be worse than the cure.

This was, it turned out, only half the story, though. The actual national medical guidelines in question had said to stop using interferon all right, but the other part of those new guidelines said the reason for dropping interferon treatments was precisely because by 2013 there were several new medications available that have few side effects and that offer cure rates for Hep-C as high as 95% of those treated.

The Pennsylvania DOC, however, simply stopped treating prisoners at all, and didn’t offer the new medicines.

Once she had conceded that she had in her possession a new November 2015 DOC protocol for treating Hep-C, Atty. Neal told Federal District Judge Robert Mariani she didn’t want to have it placed into evidence, except if it were sealed from public view. She said she was only planning to use it in questioning the state’s expert witness, and didn’t intend it to be entered into evidence in the case.

Pressed further about her reason for wanting to keep the protocol secret, Neal admitted she didn’t want it “getting into the hands” of a legal team that has filed a class-action suit in western Pennsylvania seeking to compel the DOC to provide the new medication to all infected prisoners in its facilities, where, as in the US prison system nationwide, there now is a raging Hep-C epidemic.

The judge was not sympathetic to this argument and ordered her to provide the protocol to the court, unsealed.

Section of the Pennsylvania DOC's treatment protocol detailing

administrative reasons for denying Hep-C medical treatment to prisoners

A copy was obtained by ThisCantBeHappening! courtesy of Bret Grote, legal director of the Abolitionist Law Center and one of Abu-Jamal’s attorneys in this case.

The document is stunning in its callousness and sadistic punitiveness, which belies any notion that the state’s prison system has anything to do with redemption or “correction.” It is in fact, positively medieval in its heartless language and punitive philosophy.

Under the protocol, as I wrote earlier [1], a prisoner with Hep-C is considered ineligible for treatment with anti-Hepatitis drugs unless found to have advanced cirrhosis of the liver. Cirrhosis, a deadly and irreversible scarring and functional destruction of the liver, is a sign of advanced Hepatitis infection, not an early sign of the disease.

Nonetheless, once found to have a sufficiently serious case of cirrhosis, the ailing prisoner must still cross a second medical hurdle in order to obtain treatment: He or she must undergo an endoscopy of the esophagus, where doctors must find present a condition called esophageal varices.

The Mayo Clinic defines esophageal varices as:

...abnormal, enlarged veins in the lower part of the esophagus — the tube that connects the throat and stomach. Esophageal varices occur most often in people with serious liver diseases. Esophageal varices develop when normal blood flow to the liver is obstructed by scar tissue in the liver or a clot. Seeking a way around the blockages, blood flows into smaller blood vessels that are not designed to carry large volumes of blood. The vessels may leak blood or even rupture, causing life-threatening bleeding.

In other words, a person doesn’t even have a shot at getting the new medicine that cures the Hep-C infection unless he or she is near death from cirrhosis and at risk of any moment suffering deadly internal bleeding.

But then, if varices are found in the esophagus, there’s yet one more thing in the way. A “death panel” of DOC executives and top medical personnel from the for-profit contracting firm that provides what passes for medical care at the DOC next looks into the case to see whether the inmate in question has any record of “misconduct" involving obtaining a tattoo, whether the person may have shown evidence over the prior 12 months of any “addiction” problem, or whether the person has a history of failing to follow medical procedures.

Now remember, most of the prisoners crowding Pennsylvania’s prisons are not hardened mob or gang killers. They are, for the most part, just folks who have committed felonies of one kind or another, many of which are relatively minor, may have been non-violent in nature, like fraud, check kiting, drunk driving, or maybe burglary, and who are serving sentences of five years or less, yet here the DOC is effectively sentencing them to death from complications of untreated Hep-C. And it’s handing down this capital sentence not even for any serious reason -- simply for someone having taking the health risk of getting tattooed, or having an addiction problem.

Gov. Tom Wolf, to his credit, has put a moratorium on executions in Pennsylvania, and yet here he is allowing the state’s prison system, in effect, to condemn to death inmates who have active Hepatitis-C cases by denying them available medicines that could cure their disease -- a disease which they may well have actually contracted while in prison.
  

There is only one word for what is happening here: barbaric. 

Links:
[1] http://thiscantbehappening.net/www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2976

Trouble in the Colony: Malheur Squabble Amongst the Occupiers

The Malheur Wildlife Refuge Occupation: a Skirmish Among Colonizers

by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume  - CounterPunch

January 6, 2016

On January 2nd, a group of armed “militia men” broke into and took over the headquarters and visitors’ center of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon. As of this writing, no law enforcement action has been taken against them, though the County Sheriff has said that “a collective effort from multiple agencies is currently working on a solution” which includes the FBI.

Photo: Friends of Malheur Wildlife Refuge

The stated reason for the take-over was to protest the imminent imprisonment of two local ranchers – Dwight Hammond, Jr., and his son, Steven – for committing arson on public lands in 2001 and 2006. The Hammonds did not solicit the attention of the militia men, who all are reportedly from out of state.

Two of the militia men are Ryan and Ammon Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy, the rancher who, in 2014, famously prevented the Bureau of Land Management from removing his cattle that were illegally grazing on public lands. In an interview with the Oregonian, Ryan said: “The best possible outcome is that the ranchers that have been kicked out of the area… will come back and reclaim their land, and the wildlife refuge will be shut down forever and the federal government will relinquish such control.”

Ammon Bundy characterized the building as “the tool to do all the tyranny that has been placed upon the Hammonds” and the refuge as “destructive to the people of the county and to the people of the area.”

The Bundys have stated that they are prepared to occupy the building “for years” if necessary, and that they “would not rule out violence if law enforcement tries to remove them.”

This is a provocative action and inflammatory language, especially coming from people with guns.

Some have asked: would the corporate media be treating this story differently if the armed men were black? Would the word, “terrorists” be unhesitatingly applied if they were Muslim? Undoubtedly.

Is there big money behind the media that is responsible for biased coverage of militia actions and their issues of “sovereignty” in general? Undeniably. Did the local paper, the Oregonian, paint the Hammonds’ case in transparently sympathetic terms just one day before the Malheur occupation? Yep, right here.

Are the actions of the militia legally definable as “sedition” under federal law? Charles P. Pierce at Esquire Magazine argues that case (using some rather purple prose to do it).

And is it true, as the Audobon Society of Portland has declared, that “the occupation of Malheur by armed, out of state militia groups puts one of America’s most important wildlife refuges at risk”? Absolutely.

Social media has been abuzz with these and other points, and has roundly mocked the militia men, anointing them with names such as “Y’all Quaeda” and “Vanilla ISIS.” Yet for all the noise that’s been made from many different quarters, most of the voices have had one thing in common: they are all speaking from the point of view of the Colonizers of this continent, and doing so unknowingly. Nearly every one of them takes for granted that this is an issue between the militia and the government, and no more.

Fortunately, we can count on the Indian Country Today Media Network to provide us with a broader perspective:

“Some of the same armed ‘militia’ involved in the Cliven Bundy affair in Nevada have occupied federal land in Oregon formerly reserved for the Northern Paiute. Ironically, the ‘legal’ basis for starting a fight with the federal government is that sovereignty ‘really’ belongs to Oregon rather than the Paiutes, who have seen their federal trust land shrink from over one and a half million acres to a tiny remnant of 760 acres in Burns, Oregon, where this current armed standoff began.”

Adding to this point, Amanda Girard penned an article for U.S. Uncut, “Don’t Call Them Patriots. They’re Terrorists Occupying Sacred Native American Land,” in which she writes:

“The Bundy militia occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge should seriously reconsider their use of the word ‘tyranny,’ and how the land they’re claiming as theirs rightfully belongs to the indigenous tribes that armed white men illegally stole.”

Therein lies the rub. The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was carved out of stolen land. Who was the land stolen by? Armed white men, often self-organized as independent militias. That is how this continent was colonized, and the colonization never ended. Colonization is the system that sustains the nation to this day, with its cities, agriculture, laws, social mores and art. At a deeper cultural level, then, those on one side – who urge a government crack-down on the militia – and those on the other side – who support the militia – are on the same side: the side of the Colonizers against the Indigenous.

It is not common to use the word, “Colonizers,” to describe the non-Indigenous inhabitants of this continent, but it is accurate to do so. Nor is the adjective, “Colonial,” usually conferred on the institutions of these inhabitants, but it also fits. If we apply these terms to some of the points being made about the Malheur situation, we can see how narrow the discussion really is.

To revisit and rephrase: The Colonial government, at all its levels, treats Colonizers differently based on their skin color and religion (i.e., “Black,” “Muslim”). The Colonial news media is biased in favor of the Colonial ruling class and will enthusiastically make a cause célèbre out of anyone from the Colonial lower class if it will serve this bias (Fox News loves the Bundys). Colonial law defines certain illegal actions with particular labels (“sedition”).

These things are all true, but none of them questions the legitimacy of the Colonial arrangement or acknowledges the history of genocide that was essential to its origins, invasive spread and current sustenance.

Even the Audobon Society of Portland, which at least has sincere concern for non-human creatures, is not immune from the Colonial mindset. In their press release on the topic of Malheur, they note that the refuge “was established in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt.” Referencing this history lends an air of legitimacy – since, in Colonial terms, 1908 was a long time ago, especially here on the Empire’s western edge – but Roosevelt himself was ardently anti-Indigenous. Said he:

“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

The ethos of Roosevelt and the early “Conservationists” entailed depopulating land that was set aside as National Parks and other reserves. Many Indigenous people were forced from their ancestral homes as the Colonialists pursued their pseudo-intellectual ideal. From these barely post-Victorian progenitors sprang the notion, still in common currency, that “wilderness” must be kept free of human activity in order to be healthy. Never mind that the lands as the Europeans discovered them were the product of an active and age-long collaboration between Indigenous people and their ecosystems. Of course, to the Colonizers, who believed that the earth had been given “dominion over the earth” such a lifestyle was beyond their imagination, as it still is today.

In “Bundy Militia Musters Again Over Paiute Land,” the Indian Country Today Media Network shares some relevant history about the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge:

“If anything is clear-cut about Indians in the Constitution, it is that relations with Indian nations are a federal responsibility. Carrying out that responsibility in Oregon, President U.S. Grant established the Malheur Indian Reservation for the Northern Paiute in 1872. It is no coincidence that the historical reservation shares a name with the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, site of the current armed standoff. White settlement nibbled at the Malheur Indian Reservation until the Bannock War in 1878, which ended with surrendered Paiutes and Bannocks on the reservation being removed, officially to the Yakama Reservation in Washington Territory. Unofficially, Paiutes had scattered all over the Western States that comprised their aboriginal lands. The Burns Paiute Reservation is the remains of the Malheur Reservation and the Malheur Wildlife Refuge is an alternative use for the federal land, for those who believe the federal government exists.”

Some people might question the relevancy of this history. Why does it matter? It all happened so long ago. There’s many reasons why it’s relevant, and here are two:

1) The “Indian Wars” never ended. Indigenous people within the Colonial borders of the USA have the poorest health, lowest life expectancy and highest rate of poverty of any other group of people. Their tiny reservations, often hundreds or thousands of miles from their original homes, are under assault from Colonial resource extraction corporations seeking uranium, fossil fuels and water. Treaty obligations are still disrespected and broken. The Indigenous fight for survival is anything but over. To view the Malheur occupation solely in terms of militia vs. government at this one location in Oregon is to perpetuate the Colonial mindset in oneself and hence deny the ongoing Colonial policies against the Indigenous peoples.

2) The Colonial arrangement has made a mess of things, to say the least. Pillaging the earth for its resources has turned out to be a very bad idea, as witnessed by environmental degradation, species extinction and Climate Change. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The Indigenous example shows that people can participate in nature’s dynamic equilibrium in a healthy way, rather than throwing it off-balance. Human nature, as illustrated by the old ways, is nurturing; it is Colonial nature that is destructive. As long as Colonialism reigns supreme in thought and in action, the society cannot learn from the examples of Indigenous living that still survive, and will not attempt a collective return.

In the context of the Malheur occupation, the ranchers certainly signify some of the worst that the Colonial system has to offer: destruction of native habitat, private profiteering, short-term thinking, all wrapped up with a Biblical bow on top. For all their talk of attacking the system, these armed men are not a threat to Colonialism in the slightest, nor would they want to be. In the end, they merely represent one flavor of Colonialism, if a particularly rancid one. I will certainly be happy when they are removed from the refuge, which they surely will be, sooner or later. In my estimation, ranchers are among the most despicable people in this whole despicable culture and it will be a great day when there is no more ranching. But that doesn’t mean I’ll be cheering for their Colonialist opposition.

In the Esquire article cited above, Pierce writes:

“There is a constituency for armed rebellion in this country that is larger than any of our respectable political and social institutions want to admit. It is fueled by reckless, ambitious people who engage in reckless, ambitious rhetoric.”

“Reckless” and “ambitious” describes to a T the Colonial system that Pierce finds “respectable.” That system in turns produces Colonial citizens who spout “reckless, ambitious rhetoric,” which is mostly what we are hearing from “both sides” of the Malheur debate. No matter who loses that argument, Colonialism wins.

Kollibri terre Sonnenblume is a writer living on the West Coast of the U.S.A. More of Kollibri’s writing and photos can be found at Macska Moksha Press.

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Israel's Chemical Attack on Gaza's Farmers

'Catastrophe took place here:' Gaza farmers speak to RT after 'IDF destroys' 400 acres of crops

by RT

5 Jan, 2016

More than 400 acres of crops have been destroyed by the IDF near the fence surrounding Gaza, in a lethal no-go zone maintained unilaterally by Israel on the Palestinian side of the border. They say they sprayed pesticides to enable a security operation.

The no-go area is volatile and many explosives are found in it. The IDF told RT this was such a case, as it continues to patrol the area for improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and signs of border infiltrations. Israel’s ground forces have also been regularly entering the Gaza Strip to clear obstructions and for other purposes.

The IDF added the spraying of the pesticides did not harm the environment, but Palestinian farmers say hundreds of acres have been laid to waste, and showed evidence of this.

“A catastrophe took place here. A farmer works to make a living for his family. The IDF sprayed the crops. I wonder who will take responsibility for these actions. No one thinks of us. The proof is here. Come and take a look. All of our crops are damaged. They are no good for humans, or even animals,” Azam Said Abo Abed said.

“We had prepared to take crops to the market. But we were told to destroy them.”

Another, Salam Muhana, said he worries the IDF will spray the crops again, if they are replanted.

The farmers told RT they had received just one visit from the former minister of agriculture after the war. “We don’t even know the name of the current minister…”

The farmers are now picking what little crops have not been damaged.

Asked whether they believe the IDF is employing some sort of tactic here, the farmers said they didn’t know, and some choose to blame the Ministry of Agriculture, which had not kept in touch or asked them about the damage. By contrast, they say, the Red Cross showed up to repair the area the last time.

The IDF’s actions didn’t come as a surprise to the Gaza farmers. Saleh al Najar, one of the farmers, said the spraying also took place on December 19, 20 and 21, at a place called Bawabet Surej.

“The spray they used damaged all the crops, such as vegetables and wheat, and it’s known that it’s an agricultural area that provides the Gaza Strip with these crops.”

They are now appealing to the government, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Red Cross – particularly the latter, who last time sent specialists to take samples of the crops and survey the farms.

The IDF has maintained a no-go buffer zone around the Gaza border for years. Many have been killed and wounded there, as Israel attempts to defend the area near the fence from angry demonstrators.

However, farmers and scrap collectors also end up being targets.