Signs of a Sick Society, Episode XXVII

Posted on April 6, 2008 by RagBlog


No Picnic: Man Charged with Screwing a Patio Table

Police in Ohio say that a married father of three has confessed to repeatedly having sex with his patio picnic table.

Art Price, Jr., 40, has been charged with four counts of public indecency after a neighbor videotaped him getting all nasty with the umbrella hole in the middle of his plastic picnic table. Apparently preferring the table’s legs in the air, Price reportedly flipped the table over before forcing himself inside of it.

Price admitted that his skeevy antics took place both inside and outside of his home, and police say he did his table humping in broad daylight, not far from a school.

In addition to public outrage, we imagine there’s considerable jealousy among Price’s other lawn furniture. While barbecues and lawn chairs don’t have many places for good loving (unless you’re big enough for that drink holder), we’re sure that plastic gnome hiding in the hedges is wondering why he wasn’t chosen. The garden hose, however, is probably pretty relieved.

Source, with video

UPDATE: Authorities have dropped the indecency charges against Price, after deciding the evidence didn’t support the case for a felony. (Maybe somebody got to the picnic table and it refused to testify.) Prosecutors say, however, that they may revisit the case later.

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Good News Dept.

Posted on April 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

The Old American Century.

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Giving Legal Guidance to Ignore the Constitution

Posted on April 6, 2008 by RagBlog


White House Query Led Lawyer to Write Memo Saying Bush Could Ignore Fourth Amendment
by Jason Leopold / April 5th, 2008

Eleven days after 9/11, John Yoo, a former deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, drafted a 20-page memorandum that offered up theories on how Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures would be applied if the U.S. military used “deadly force in a manner that endangered the lives of United States citizens.”

Yoo came up with a number of different scenarios. He suggested shooting down a jetliner hijacked by terrorists; setting up military checkpoints inside a U.S. city; implementing surveillance methods far more superior than those available to law enforcement; or using military forces “to raid or attack dwellings where terrorists were thought to be, despite risks that third parties could be killed or injured by exchanges of fire,” says a copy of the little known Sept. 21, 2001 memo.

Yoo, the author of an August 2002 legal opinion widely referred to as the “Torture Memo” that gave CIA interrogators the legal authority to use brutal methods against suspected terrorists to extract information, drafted the memo in response to a question posed by Timothy E. Flanigan, the former deputy White House counsel, who wanted to know “the legality of the use of military force to prevent or deter terrorist activity inside the United States,” according to a copy of Flanigan’s memo.

Yoo wrote that his ideas would likely be seen as violating the Fourth Amendment. But he said the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the prospect that future attacks would require the military to be deployed inside the U.S. meant President Bush would “be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties.”

“We think that the Fourth Amendment should be no more relevant than it would be in cases of invasion or insurrection,” Yoo’s memo stated.

Yoo also wrote in the Sept. 21, 2001 memo that domestic surveillance activities, such as monitoring telephone calls and without a court’s permission, might be proper notwithstanding the ban in the Fourth Amendment on unreasonable searches and seizures.

The Sept. 21, 2001 memo Yoo sent to Flanigan was referred to in a lengthy story published in the New York Times on October 24, 2004. The Times story said Yoo’s suggestions for suspending the Fourth Amendment was hypothetical at best.

But another legal opinion Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, drafted less than two years later says that the Bush administration accepted Yoo’s legal theory as policy for more than one year beginning in late October 2001.

Earlier this week, the Pentagon declassified an 81-page memorandum Yoo drafted in March 2003 that authorized military interrogators to use brutal techniques to obtain information about terrorist plans from prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The memo was publicly released as part of the American Civil Liberties Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Pentagon.

Buried deep within that legal document is a footnote that refers to an Oct. 23, 2001 legal memorandum written by Yoo.

“Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations,” the footnote states, referring to a 37-page document titled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.”

Yoo based his opinion on the 1990 drug case US v. Verdugo-Urquide in which the Supreme Court refused to hear a lawsuit brought against the United States by a Mexican citizen whose home was searched by federal agents without a search warrant. In rejecting the Fourth Amendment claim, the Court said aliens could not claim the benefit of the Constitution for conduct outside the United States—such aliens were not part of the “we the people” who benefited from the Fourth Amendment. Further, the Court found that allowing such claims would have significant and deleterious consequences for the United States in conducting activities beyond its boundaries, not just in drug cases… but in the use of armed forces abroad “for the protection of American citizens or national security.”

Yoo refers to the case in his 2006 book, War by Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror, where he argues in more than 23 separate pages about the various legal reasons local and federal law enforcement agencies, as well as a sitting U.S. president, could ignore the Fourth Amendment. Yoo’s legal theories revolve primarily around domestic surveillance activities.

“If Al-Qaeda organizes missions within the United States, our surveillance simply cannot be limited to law enforcement,” Yoo wrote in his book. “The Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement should not apply, because it is concerned with regulating searches, not with military attacks.”

Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, said Yoo helped President Bush break the law by giving the legal guidance to ignore the Constitution.

“The recent disclosures underscore the Bush administration’s extraordinarily sweeping conception of executive power,” Jaffer said. “The administration’s lawyers believe the president should be permitted to violate statutory law, to violate international treaties, and even to violate the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. They believe that the president should be above the law.”

Jaffer said the Bush administration has never argued publicly that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to military operations within the U.S.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Thursday the administration hasn’t relied on Yoo’s Oct. 23, 2001 memo for more than five years.

Still, Congress said it has spent a considerable amount of time trying to pry loose the memo from the Department of Justice.

On Thursday, John Conyers, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey saying he was rebuffed on two previous occasions—on February 12 and 20th–when he wrote the DOJ requesting the Oct. 23, 2001 memo be turned over to his committee

“Based on the title of the October 23, 2001 memorandum, and based on what has been disclosed and the contents of similar memoranda issued at roughly the same time, it is clear that a substantial portion of this memorandum provides a legal analysis and conclusions as to the nature and scope of the Presidential Commander in Chief power to accomplish specific acts within the United States,” Conyers wrote.

“The people of the United States are entitled to know the Justice Department’s interpretation of the President’s constitutional powers to wage war in the United States,” Conyers added. “There can be no actual basis in national security for keeping secret the remainder of a legal memorandum that addresses this issue of Constitutional interpretation The notion that the President can claim to operate under “secret” powers known only to the President and a select few subordinates is antithetical to the core principles of this democracy. We ask that you promptly release the October 23, 2001, memorandum.”

Jason Leopold is an investigative reporter and a two-time winner of the Project Censored award. He is the author of the National Bestseller, News Junkie, a memoir. Visit newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. Read other articles by Jason, or visit Jason’s website.

Source

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Democrats Query Mukasey About 9/11 Statement

Posted on April 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Top Democrats demand Attorney General explain remarks about pre-9/11 phone call

A letter has been sent by leaders of the House Judiciary Committee to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, demanding that he explain a recent public statement that federal authorities failed to intercept a call from suspected terrorists in Afghanistan prior to the 9/11 attacks, when doing so could have prevented the attacks from taking place.

Mukasey blamed that failure on a lack of the sort of warrantless wiretapping authority that the administration has now called on Congress to provide. However, there has never been any previous mention of such a call, and the Judiciary Committee letter — signed by Chairman John Conyers and two subcommittee chairs — points out that the law that existed at the time would have allowed the call to be intercepted immediately, with permission granted retroactively by the FISA court.

That letter has been noted by blogs, such as Talking Points Memo, but does not appear to have gained any attention from the mainstream media.

Blogger Glenn Greenwald, who has covered the Mukasey incident extensively, originally believed that “he just made this up out of whole cloth in order to mislead Americans into supporting the administration’s efforts to eliminate spying safeguards and basic constitutional liberties and to stifle the pending surveillance lawsuits against telecoms.”

However, Greenwald has now received an email from the Department of Justice’s Principal Deputy Director of Public Affairs, citing both a reference by a 2002 Congressional Joint Inquiry to an untraced call between one of the 9/11 hijackers and “a known overseas terrorist facility” and a Feb. 22, 2008 letter from Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell blaming the failure to intercept that call on FISA restrictions.

With that clue, Greenwald found a mention in the Congressional report of a call from one of the 9/11 hijackers which could have easily been intercepted, except that “consistent with its focus on communications abroad, NSA adopted a policy that avoided intercepting the communications between individuals in the United States and foreign countries … even though the collection of such communications is within its mission andit would have been possible for NSA to obtain FISA Court authorization for such collection.”

The report added that NSA believed the FBI should be responsible for monitoring domestic calls but had not actually developed a plan for it to do so.

“The administration has no interest in improving its intelligence-gathering capabilities, its counter-terrorism strategies, or its ability to identify valuable information,” Greenwald concludes. “Its only interest is to obtain greater and greater domestic spying powers with fewer and fewer oversights — based on the premise that as long as they know Everything, we’ll all be safe.”

The Judiciary Committee letter also includes a reiteration of an earlier demand that the text of the so-called Yoo Memorandum — a secret 2001 Office of Legal Counsel opinion suggesting that Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures do not apply in cases of terrorism — be provided to Congress.

The letter, signed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI), Subcommitee Chairmen Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Robert C. Scott (D-VA), appears below.

April 3, 2008

The Honorable Michael Mukasey
Attorney General of the United States
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20530

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

We are writing about two disturbing recent revelations concerning the actions and inactions by the Department of Justice and the federal government to combat terrorism. These include a public statement by you that appears to suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of the federal government’s existing surveillance authority to combat terrorism, as well as possible malfeasance by the government prior to 9/11, and the partial disclosure of the contents of a secret Department memorandum concerning Executive Branch authority to combat terrorism, whichhas been previously requested to be provided to Congress. We ask that you promptly provide that memorandum and that you clarify your public statement in accordance with the questions below.

First, according to press reports, in response to questions at a March 27 speech, you defended Administration wiretapping programs and proposals to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by referring to a pre-9/11 incident. Before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, you stated, “we knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went. You’ve got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn’t come home, to show for that.”1

This statement is very disturbing for several reasons. Initially, despite extensive inquiries after 9/11, I am aware of no previous reference, in the 9/11 Commission report or elsewhere, to a call from a known terrorist safe house in Afghanistan to the United States which, if it had been intercepted, could have helped prevent the 9/11 attacks. In addition, if the Administration had known of such communications from suspected terrorists, they could and should have been intercepted based on existing FISA law. For example, even assuming that a FISA warrant was required to intercept such calls, as of 9/11 FISA specifically authorized such surveillance on an emergency basis without a warrant for a 48 hour period.2 If such calls were known about and not intercepted, serious additional concerns would be raised about the government’s failure to take appropriate action before 9/11.

Accordingly, we ask that you promptly answer the following questions:

1. Were you referring to an actual pre-9/11 incident in the portion of your statement quoted above? If not, what were you referring to?

2. Do you believe that a FISA warrant would have been required to intercept a telephone call from a known terrorist safe house in Afghanistan to the United States in 2001? If so, please explain.

3. Even assuming that such a warrant would have been required, do you agree that even before 9/11, FISA authorized emergency interception without a warrant for a 48-hour period of phone calls from a known terrorist safe house in Afghanistan to the United States?

4. Assuming that you were referring to an actual pre-9/11 incident in your statement, please explain why such phone calls were not intercepted and appropriately utilized by federal government authorities in seeking to prevent terrorist attacks.

Second, in the March, 2003 Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memorandum publicly released on April 1, 2008, the contents of a secret October, 2001 OLC memorandum were partially disclosed. Specifically, the 2003 memorandum explains that in an October 23, 2001 memorandum, OLC “concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.”3 On two prior occasions in letters of February 12 and February 20, 2008, Chairman Conyers requested that the Administration publicly release the October 23,2001, memorandum.4 The memorandum has not been received despite these specific requests.

Based on the title of the October 23, 2001 memorandum, and based on what has been disclosed and the contents of similar memoranda issued at roughly the same time, it is clear that a substantial portion of this memorandum provides a legal analysis and conclusions as to the nature and scope of the Presidential Commander in Chief power to accomplish specific acts within the United States. The people of the United States are entitled to know the Justice Department’s interpretation of the President’s constitutional powers to wage war in the United States. There can be no actual basis in national security for keeping secret the remainder of a legal memorandum that addresses this issue of Constitutional interpretation. The notion that the President can claim to operate under “secret” powers known only to the President and a select few subordinates is antithetical to the core principles of this democracy. We ask that you promptly release the October 23, 2001, memorandum.

Please provide your responses and direct any questions to the Judiciary Committee office, 2138 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515 (tel:202-225-3951; fax: 202-225-7680). Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

John Conyers, Jr.
Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary
Jerrold Nadler
Chairman, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
Robert C. “Bobby” Scott
Chairman, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security

cc:
Hon. Lamar S. Smith
Hon. Trent Franks
Hon. Louie Gohmert
Hon. Brian
Benczkowski

Filed by Muriel Kane
Source. The Raw Story / April 3, 2008

Also see They’re Going to Pay the Price / Mukasey Knew About 9/11 Before It Happened / Keith Olbermann (with video.)

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Thiher — and The Rag Bloggers — on Obama, Heaven, Hell

Posted on April 5, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Updated April 6, 2008 by The Rag Blog

The following comes to us from Gary Thiher, our compadre from the sixties and seventies who now professes philosophy in Arkansas. His comments are in response to The Left and Barack Obama by David Hamilton and Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog. You are invited to add your comments.


After 40 years, our radical critique still applies.
By Gary Thiher / The Rag Blog / April 5, 2008

Duuuh! Have we forgotten our radical critique, which has proven so accurate over 40 years and more?

That Obama will bring the era of peace and freedom seems profoundly doubtful, let alone that he and Clinton would both do so. He has after all racked up slightly more Wall St. money than even Clinton (over $6 million), has endorsed no change in Israel-Palestine policy, advocates increasing not contracting the military, opts for a clearly inadequate health care policy, etc., etc. I myself would opt for Obama over Clinton only because it is slightly less clear that he would inevitably move to a moderate/conservative position, while it is virtually certain that she would.

If there is a reason to work for the Dem candidate, it is surely a fairly strong “lesser of 2 evils” argument – because the contemporary Republicans have become sooo evil. This is not merely a matter of their forthrightly and purely reactionary policies (reactionary in the literal sense – to take us back to a previous era, viz., the Gilded Age). As the current administration reveals, they have the souls of tyrants in the most literal sense. Even in the sixties, when we knew there existed contingency plans for mass incarcerations in concentration camps, I never felt the immanent, real possibility of outright dictatorship and tyranny the way I do with Bush and Co. Torture, attack on habeus corpus. On habeus corpus, for chrisake!, the oldest and purest guard against absolutism.

I know that seeking heaven is a more lovely motivator than is avoiding hell, but let’s don’t fall for the fantasy that so often leads radicals astray in one way or another, in defiance of what a cold-eyed analysis of the real historical conditions indicates.

Response from Alice Embree

I find a few more reasons to support Obama than Gary mentioned.

He has aroused a stunning grassroots level of support that holds some promise of being aroused post-election to hold him accountable to his agenda of hope. His own grassroots organizing resume holds some promise that he will listen to those who are mobilized.

The real problem is that no one ever seems to lay out a coherent strategy for post-electoral mobilization. If we believe that an independent peace movement is needed to end the war, then we have a responsibility to resurrect that peace movement to at least pre-war numbers. Otherwise, we will have a re-deployment of ground forces and a shift to air attacks. (Does that sound familiar? It is already happening.) If, we want universal, single payer health care, then we have a responsibility to mobilize numbers that can counter the corporate forces that so easily cratered the Hillary effort.

I have tasted the kool-aid, been moved by the speeches, and been amazed by the legions of supporters. I respond to the message of hope and the language of “we,” not the Hillary language of “I”. It has been a long time since we’ve had a president that can put two sentences together, much less speak eloquently of what is possible. We are like thirsty souls in the desert. But, as radicals we know that movements make changes and politicians respond. Our job description is to build and sustain a movement for peace and justice.

Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / April 5, 2008

And more: from author and former Austin activist Dick Reavis

Old Comrades:

I now live in North Carolina, which will conduct a Democratic
primary on May 6. I have contributed to the Obama campaign and am
helping a little, standing with a clipboard in my hand in front of
supermarkets on weekends, registering voters.

I am doing this because I believe that Obama’s presence in the
presidency would further debilitate racism. He doesn’t have to be a
good guy to achieve that end. In my view, even Powell and Rice
helped clear the nation’s mind in the same way.

I see signs in the campaign that perhaps others of you saw in
1964, or in the McCarthy campaign of 1968, or in 1972. Idealistic
young people have been drawn in. The campaign has in several ways
deprofessionalized politics.

The volunteers I encounter expect more justice from Obama’s
election that they are likely to see if he reaches the White House. It
is unclear to me how he will feel if they are disillusioned–but we
know how they will feel, and I think we need to be on the scene, if
only to empathize. Had Democratic supporters of our day empathized
with our disillusionment over Lyndon, our lives would have been much
easier.

The one thing that I am seeing clearly at the supermarkets is that
the people, “rich” and poor–I have worked both at Whole Foods and
Food Lion–white and black, are sick of Bush, sick of the war, sick of
the fat-cat ripoffs.

I don’t think that any of us can know what the outcome of that mood will be. The Obama campaign is built on hopes that may be dashed, I agree. But when, in the last 30-plus years, has it even been possible to entertain hopes of any kind?

Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / April 6, 2008

And this from Roger Baker

Support Obama?

I think there are two issues here that tend to get in the way of each other and confuse things.

Issue #1: is Obama the sort of guy who can inspire hope among the 80 per cent (or pick a number) who feel they are getting shafted by the system the worst; those who understand that and say in polls that indicate 80 per cent think the USA is on the wrong track but probably think the right politician could offer relief.

The answer to that is pretty clearly Yes. But about the same number seem to support Hillary for about the same reason. And yet apparently McCain narrowly leads in the polls because folks think he could turn around a country run by special interests and on the wrong track. Go figure.

The best reason to vote for Obama, IMO, is that he best represents hope for those on the bottom. And because in politics, appearance is reality. And because I really think he is a sincere reformer just as much as his mother was. I really like Obama, whereas I think Hillary is a power junkie.

Issue #2: Can Obama come out looking good as he tries to clean the Aegean stables of corporate domination? Could he get the country back on the right track like FDR got acclaim for doing during the great depression? Almost certainly not; that is what the facts seem to me to argue.

Here the answer is a lot more clear in my mind. We are in a global economic crisis (closely tied to fossil fuel energy). Under Bush and Clinton deregulation of corporate control, there are tens of trillions of dollars of worthless paper IOUs like “credit default swaps” permeating Wall Street. All that debt can never be repaid; its all based on cheap oil and exponential growth, so the global economy is going to REALLY crash at some point. The fed is in a desperate situation, caught in a liquidity trap, trying to inject enough liquidity to prevent a general panic, with further devaluation and serious inflation only a matter of time.

Economics is really the predictable face of politics; I think we can see that things are about to get worse, no matter who is elected, and this will leave the whole nation greatly disappointed.

A few guys like Richard Heinberg and William Howard Kunstler seem to me to tell the truth about how serious our problems are, and the likely social outcome. Here is Heinberg, who at least is somewhat optimistic:

Robert Heinberg: Resilient communities – paths for powering down.

No Democrat can tell such truths under such circumstances and hope to get much support. The Socialists and Greens are much better in their program than the Dems, but they offer false hopes too. (The Green Party platform is a long unprioritized list of individually good policies, but with an unaffordable price tag which means they cannot be implemented. I say that while being personally a fairly Naderish Green.)

I’ll likely vote for Obama, but my expectations are low. Even so, I certainly wish him the best of luck and hope he can pull off a miracle in navigating the white waters of a nation full of suffering, angry voters looking for scapegoats.

Meanwhile, I won’t stop fighting for a better world. I’m programmed that way, I think, and its hard to break old habits.

Roger Baker / April 6, 2008 / The Rag Blog


From Paul Spencer:

My daughter and her husband were talking with friends last Summer, one of whom had worked with Obama in Chicago in the ‘projects’. She told Pasha and David that Obama was enthusiastic and dedicated in his work there. This was at the time that the campaign was just beginning to take shape, so it was not a recruitment speech on her part. She added that she felt a strong affinity for Obama on the basis of her experience with his work and character.

I agree with those who are concerned with some of his policies. I agree with those who doubt that he can – or will try to – make systemic change. I agree that we are in for bad times, and Obama will not be able to solve the basic problems. But I completely agree with David (Hamilton) that: 1) he has the best program suggestions of the current candidates; 2) he is the only candidate who may turn ‘left’; and 3) his ‘rock star’ celebrity status has activated a large number of citizens who believe ‘left’ but feel disenfranchised.

Our task is to keep our programs in front of both the Obama campaign and these potential progressives. Our task is to create and maintain a presence in local party organizations – Democrat, Green, or similar. Our task is to be ready with program and organization when Naomi Klein’s “Shock”(s) destabilize our government.

That’s why David’s idea to promote a programmatic discussion of the Israel/Palestine crisis is vital. Of course, he had to pick the most intractable of the lot, but the template is there. (See The Rag Blog’s Israel-Palestine peace plan discussion.)

Paul Spencer / April 6, 2008 / The Rag Blog

And David Hamilton:

Obama as an agent for progressive change.

Obama has already done something very important to improve democracy in America. He has significantly democratized the process of presidential campaign financing. Howard Dean deserves some credit for pioneering the model, but I doubt he knew what would happen in advance when he started raising money over the internet in 2004. Obama has carried this approach to new heights.

The last figures I read in the NY Times, Obama has over 1.25 million contributors. That’s a record several times over. Through February, his campaign had raised over $193 million, already a historic record for an entire presidential campaign. Virtually all of it came from individuals and none of it from PAC’s. In March he raised another $40 million, doubling the amount Clinton has raised each month this year.

Corporations are barred from making direct contributions, so his top 10 contributors as of March 1, were individuals (limited to $2300 each) who work for the following institutions: (opensecrets.org)

Goldman Sachs $523,478
University of California $339,168
UBS AG $327,302
JPMorgan Chase & Co $317,142
Lehman Brothers $302,697
Citigroup Inc $301,146
National Amusements Inc $293,022
Sidley Austin LLP $271,857
Harvard University $268,491
Google Inc $259,010

Eliminating the two universities, that totals $2,595,520 from people who work for major corporations, mostly financial institutions. That’s a little over 1 per cent of his total contributions and what he is now raising every two days. I have heard that his median contribution is $109. Sally and I have given him more than that.

A very important part of our analysis over the last 40 years is that we have a system of legalized bribery of politicians in this country called “campaign contributions.” By this means more than any other, politicians became beholden to big donors who represented the corporate ruling class. Although we would prefer public financing of all political campaigns, to fundamentally change this system is no small accomplishment.

David Hamilton / March 16, 2008 / The Rag Blog

Go to The Left and Barack Obama, Thorne Dreyer and David Hamilton.
Also see Progressives for Obama by Hayden, Ehrenreich, Fletcher and Glover.

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The Iranians: Doing What Junior Can’t or Won’t

Posted on April 5, 2008 by RagBlog

The Terrorists Are In Fact Peacemakers
By Pepe Escobar

Iran is sufficiently powerful to broker a ceasefire deal

Source

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Facts About Iraq That Junior Doesn’t Know

Posted on April 5, 2008 by RagBlog

In Mosul, a member of the Kurdish security forces

A battle for land in northern Iraq
By Ned Parker, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 5, 2008

A struggle between Sunni Arabs and Kurds has torn apart the city of Mosul and could play a crucial role in drawing the region’s boundaries.

MOSUL, IRAQ — Far from the volatile Shiite rivalries that have shaken Baghdad and Basra, this city has been devastated by an epic struggle for land and power between Sunni Arabs and Kurds that has shattered the social fabric and could very well shape the future boundaries of northern Iraq.

Kurds say that they have been driven out of the city by Sunni Arab militants and criminal gangs, who have set off car bombs and kidnapped and killed members of their ethnic group. In turn, Kurdish forces have been accused of carrying out assassinations in Mosul and torturing Arab detainees elsewhere in the campaign to annex territory to the semiautonomous Kurdistan region.

The Iraqi government and U.S. military spokesmen blame the chaos on Al Qaeda in Iraq, a loosely organized Sunni Arab insurgent group, which desires to create a new base in the north. But the problems date to 2003, when the Kurds first sent fighters into Mosul, and the status of the city’s Arab elite was diminished.

“Mosul became a real battlefield between Sunni Arab insurgents and peshmerga [Kurdish fighters] before Al Qaeda in Iraq really became much of a factor up there,” said Wayne White, head of the U.S. State Department’s Iraq intelligence team from 2003 to 2005.

“The Sunni Arab population up there knows the Kurds have designs on areas well beyond their current area of control in Nineveh [province], and are doubtless determined to push back,” he said.

The Kurds believe Mosul’s northern and eastern suburbs were wrongfully appropriated by Saddam Hussein’s Sunni Arab regime. They also contend that they are the rightful owners of the Sinjar region in the western part of the province. The sought-after territories are believed to contain oil reserves.

Since late 2004, Kurdish security forces have seized de facto control of the disputed lands. The Kurdistan regional government’s flag, a tricolor with a yellow starburst, flutters across northern Nineveh, and soldiers from neighboring Kurdistan are posted at dozens of sentry posts on roads.

Arabs rarely venture into northern Nineveh these days, even if they have Kurdish friends who fled Mosul, the provincial capital.

“It’s easier for Arabs to go to Syria and Jordan,” said Juneid Fakhr, a retired archaeologist.

Read the rest of it here.

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Not a "Criminal?" What’s the Problem?

Posted on April 5, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Cameras on Harris County toll road.

Toll road cameras looking beyond scofflaw drivers.
Camera system upgraded to help catch criminals.
By Rosanna Ruiz / Houston Chronicle / April 4, 2008

Harris County Toll Road Authority cameras are now on the lookout for more than just those drivers who blow through EZ Tag lanes without paying. County authorities promise new, upgraded cameras can help catch murderers and other violent criminals.

The cameras have the capability to search their databases and issue alerts to county dispatchers when a wanted criminal crosses their lenses.

“We’re going to be catching a lot of bad guys,” said Assistant Chief Deputy Randy Johnson, of the Precinct 5 Constable’s Office, who also serves as the incident management administrator for the toll road authority.

Eleven cameras already are in place and another 24 will be installed by the end of the month.

The toll road authority plans to install cameras throughout the toll system by the end of the year. Five similar cameras are mounted on deputy constables’ patrol cars, Johnson said.

The system, which has been operating for about a month, has proved so promising that the Houston Police Department wants a piece of the action. Harris County leaders next week will consider an agreement that would include the HPD in the county system at no cost.

“This is a good law enforcement tool,” HPD spokesman John Cannon said. “It’s a technology we would be foolish to ignore.”

The license plate recognition cameras are perched on toll booth canopies. As a car passes, the cameras focus on its plates. That information is then checked against a database of chronic toll road violators, as well as more serious criminals. License plates of automobiles involved in child abductions or other missing persons’ cases also are on record.

If the system detects a match, a county dispatcher will be alerted and notify the nearest law enforcement officer.

“If that car is flagged, if it goes through a particular toll or EZ Tag lane, it would immediately be brought to the attention of county employees and constables who patrol the tollways,” Cannon said. “That gives us a better lead than if we did not have that type of technology.”

The county has been successful using cameras to track toll road violators, but the new cameras can do both. The system had been tested at one site on Texas 249 for about three years, Johnson said.

“It’s been a slow process, but we’re there now,” he said.

Red-light cameras installed at 50 Houston intersections will not be used in the same way as the tollway authority’s cameras, Cannon said.

“Red-light cameras are strictly used for traffic enforcement,” the HPD spokesman said. “That’s not what they were designed to do.”

Law enforcement agencies’ use of cameras has generated privacy concerns, as when the city rolled out its red-light camera program.

Some consider the use of the cameras as yet another imposition on privacy, said Adam Gershowitz, a South Texas College of Law criminal law professor. Privacy rights, however, are not owed to people in the middle of a public road, he said.

“The counter argument is: That’s the first step. What happens after that?” Gershowitz said.

Source.
Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

And, some online responses from Chronicle readers:

How could any liberty loving person be for this? So you are ok with the government putting a chip in your head so they can find you if you “Ever Become a Criminal”. Next you would be ok with the govrenment reading your thoughts (yes test are being done now to read brain waives).

After all if you have nothing to fear, why care? You are getting a divorce and the govrenments thought detectors read your mind when you cheated (not to mention listened to your phone calls and read your emails, and had credit card data for supporting evidence). It is not about catching the bad guys. Is about our freedoms, which are being taken away as we speak.

—HoustonPokerPro

A life under governmental surveillance is a far scarier thing to me than the actions of most criminals.It’s amazing to me what our society is increasingly willing to give up for a false sense of security.

—GetAClue

Step by step, inch by inch, the United States of American is becoming a police state. There are too many sheep and not enough free thinkers in this country to turn back the tide that will surely destroy us all. All it will take now is one more 9/11 type event and all hope will be lost.

—IHateTxDot

Read all the responses here.

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Beware the New New Thing AND The Already Thing

Posted on April 5, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Christian Northeast / NYT

New internet technologies could bring de facto censorship.
By Damian Kulash Jr. / April 5, 2008

Recently, the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust task force invited me to be the lead witness for its hearing on “net neutrality.” I’ve collaborated with the Future of Music Coalition, and my band, OK Go, has been among the first to find real success on the Internet — our songs and videos have been streamed and downloaded hundreds of millions of times (orders of magnitude above our CD sales) — so the committee thought I’d make a decent spokesman for up-and-coming musicians in this new era of digital pandemonium.

I’m flattered, of course, but it makes you wonder if Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner sit around arguing who was listening to Vampire Weekend first.

If you haven’t been following the debate on net neutrality, you’re not alone. The details of the issue can lead into realms where only tech geeks and policy wonks dare to tread, but at root there’s a pretty simple question: How much control should network operators be allowed to have over the information on their lines?

Most people assume that the Internet is a democratic free-for-all by nature — that it could be no other way. But the openness of the Internet as we know it is a byproduct of the fact that the network was started on phone lines. The phone system is subject to “common carriage” laws, which require phone companies to treat all calls and customers equally. They can’t offer tiered service in which higher-paying customers get their calls through faster or clearer, or calls originating on a competitor’s network are blocked or slowed.

These laws have been on the books for about as long as telephones have been ringing, and were meant to keep Bell from using its elephantine market share to squash everyone else. And because of common carriage, digital data running over the phone lines has essentially been off limits to the people who laid the lines. But in the last decade, the network providers have argued that since the Internet is no longer primarily run on phone lines, the laws of data equality no longer apply. They reason that they own the fiber optic and coaxial lines, so they should be able to do whatever they want with the information crossing them.

Under current law, they’re right. They can block certain files or Web sites for their subscribers, or slow or obstruct certain applications. And they do, albeit pretty rarely. Network providers have censored anti-Bush comments from an online Pearl Jam concert, refused to allow a text-messaging program from the pro-choice group Naral (saying it was “unsavory”), blocked access to the Internet phone service (and direct competitor) Vonage and selectively throttled online traffic that was using the BitTorrent protocol.

The Internet shouldn’t be harnessed for the profit of a few, rather than the good of the many; value should come from the quality of information, not the control of access to it.


When the network operators pull these stunts, there is generally widespread outrage. But outright censorship and obstruction of access are only one part of the issue, and they represent the lesser threat, in the long run. What we should worry about more is not what’s kept from us today, but what will be built (or not built) in the years to come.

We hate when things are taken from us (so we rage at censorship), but we also love to get new things. And the providers are chomping at the bit to offer them to us: new high-bandwidth treats like superfast high-definition video and quick movie downloads. They can make it sound great: newer, bigger, faster, better! But the new fast lanes they propose will be theirs to control and exploit and sell access to, without the level playing field that common carriage built into today’s network.

They won’t be blocking anything per se — we’ll never know what we’re not getting — they’ll just be leapfrogging today’s technology with a new, higher-bandwidth network where they get to be the gatekeepers and toll collectors. The superlative new video on offer will be available from (surprise, surprise) them, or companies who’ve paid them for the privilege of access to their customers. If this model sounds familiar, that’s because it is. It’s how cable TV operates.

We can’t allow a system of gatekeepers to get built into the network. The Internet shouldn’t be harnessed for the profit of a few, rather than the good of the many; value should come from the quality of information, not the control of access to it.

For some parallel examples: there are only two guitar companies who make most of the guitars sold in America, but they don’t control what we play on those guitars. Whether we use a Mac or a PC doesn’t govern what we can make with our computers. The telephone company doesn’t get to decide what we discuss over our phone lines. It would be absurd to let the handful of companies who connect us to the Internet determine what we can do online. Congress needs to establish basic ground rules for an open Internet, just as common carriage laws did for the phone system.

The Internet, for now, is the type of place where my band’s homemade videos find a wider audience than the industry’s million-dollar productions. A good idea is still more important than deep pockets. If network providers are allowed to build the next generation of the Net as a pay-to-play system, we will all pay the price.

Damian Kulash Jr. is the lead singer for OK Go.

Source. Op Ed, New York Times / The Rag Blog


The Already Big Thing on the Internet: Spying on Users
By Adam Cohen / April 5, 2008

In 1993, the dawn of the Internet age, the liberating anonymity of the online world was captured in a well-known New Yorker cartoon. One dog, sitting at a computer, tells another: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Fifteen years later, that anonymity is gone.

It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on you.

Technology companies have long used “cookies,” little bits of tracking software slipped onto your computer, and other means, to record the Web sites you visit, the ads you click on, even the words you enter in search engines — information that some hold onto forever. They’re not telling you they’re doing it, and they’re not asking permission. Internet service providers are now getting into the act. Because they control your connection, they can keep track of everything you do online, and there have been reports that I.S.P.’s may have started to sell the information they collect.

The driving force behind this prying is commerce. The big growth area in online advertising right now is “behavioral targeting.” Web sites can charge a premium if they are able to tell the maker of an expensive sports car that its ads will appear on Web pages clicked on by upper-income, middle-aged men.

The information, however, gets a lot more specific than age and gender — and more sensitive. Tech companies can keep track of when a particular Internet user looks up Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, visits adult Web sites, buys cancer drugs online or participates in anti-government discussion groups.

Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal. (“Hmm … I wonder why I always get those drug-rehab ads when I surf the Internet on Jane’s laptop?”)

The bigger issue is the digital dossiers that tech companies can compile. Some companies have promised to keep data confidential, or to obscure it so it cannot be traced back to individuals. But it’s hard to know what a particular company’s policy is, and there are too many to keep track of. And privacy policies can be changed at any time.

There is also no guarantee that the information will stay with the company that collected it. It can be sold to employers or insurance companies, which have financial motives for wanting to know if their workers and policyholders are alcoholics or have AIDS.

It could also end up with the government, which needs only to serve a subpoena to get it (and these days that formality might be ignored).

If George Orwell had lived in the Internet age, he could have painted a grim picture of how Web monitoring could be used to promote authoritarianism. There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens’ every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.

The public has been slow to express outrage — not, as tech companies like to claim, because they don’t care about privacy, but simply because few people know all that is going on. That is changing. “A lot of people are creeped-out by this,” says Ari Schwartz, a vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology. He says the government is under increasing pressure to act.

The Federal Trade Commission has proposed self-regulatory guidelines for companies that do behavioral targeting. Anything that highlights the problem is good, but self-regulation is not enough. One idea starting to gain traction in Congress is a do-not-track list, similar to the federal do-not-call list, which would allow Internet users to opt out of being spied on. That would be a clear improvement over the status quo, but the operating principle should be “opt in” — companies should not be allowed to track Internet activities unless they get the user’s expressed consent.

The founders wrote the Fourth Amendment — guaranteeing protection against illegal search and seizure — at a time when people were most concerned about protecting the privacy of their homes and bodies. The amendment, and more recent federal laws, have been extended to cover telephone communications. Now work has to be done to give Internet activities the same level of privacy protection.

Source. New York Times

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Hey, Kids – It’s Just a Joke

Posted on April 5, 2008 by RagBlog

We bet he won’t be laughing at his next election. The Rag

“PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has been caught on film saluting US president George W Bush – but he says the incident was just a joke.

Cameras caught the gesture as world leaders gathered in Bucharest for talks on NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan.

Mr Rudd is seen saluting the US president in acknowledgment, bringing to mind Mr Bush’s description of former prime minister John Howard as his “deputy sheriff”.

But asked about the moment later, Mr Rudd laughed out loud and said it was “a joke”.”

HeraldSun April 04, 2008

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Martin Luther King’s Voice Still Silenced by MSM

Posted on April 5, 2008 by RagBlog

40 Years Later, (The Late) Martin Luther King Still Silenced
by Jeff Cohen

Soon after Martin Luther King’s birthday became a federal holiday in 1986, I began prodding mainstream media to cover the dramatic story of King’s last year as he campaigned militantly against U.S. foreign and economic policy. Most of his last speeches were recorded. But year after year, corporate networks have refused to air the tapes.

Last night NBC Nightly anchor Brian Williams enthused over new color footage of King that adorned its coverage of the 40th anniversary of the assassination. The report focused on the last phase of King’s life. But the same old blinders were in place.

NBC showed young working class whites in Chicago taunting King. But there was no mention of how elite media had taunted King in his last year. In 1967 and ‘68, mainstream media saw Rev. King a bit like they now see Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Back then they denounced King’s critical comments; today they simply silence them.

While noting in passing that King spoke out against the Vietnam War, mainstream reports today rarely acknowledge that he went way beyond Vietnam to decry U.S. militarism in general: “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos,” said King in 1967 speeches on foreign policy, “without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

In response to these speeches, Newsweek said King was “over his head” and wanted a “race-conscious minority” to dictate U.S. foreign policy. Life magazine described the Nobel Peace Prize winner as a communist pawn who advocated “abject surrender in Vietnam.” The Washington Post couldn’t have been more patronizing: “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.”

When King’s moral voice moved beyond racial discrimination to international issues, the New York Times attacked his efforts to link the civil rights and antiwar movements.

King’s sermons on Vietnam could get as angry as those of Barack Obama’s ex-pastor: “God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war . . .We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world.”

In 1967, King was also criticizing the economic underpinnings of U.S. foreign policy, railing against “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.” Today, capitalists of the West reap huge profits from their domination of global media.

Thankfully, we now have the Internet and independent media outlets where King’s later speeches are available for the ages.

If King had survived to hear the war drums beating for the invasion and occupation of Iraq – amplified by TV networks and the New York Times front page and Washington Post editorial page — there’s little doubt where he’d stand. Or how loudly he’d be speaking out.

And there’s little doubt how big U.S. media would have reacted. On Fox News and talk radio, King would have been Dixie Chicked. . .or Rev. Wrighted. In corporate centrist outlets, he’d have been marginalized faster than you can say Noam Chomsky.

One suspects King would be marveling at the rise of Barack Obama and the multiracial movement behind him. But would he be happy with Obama and other Democratic leaders who heap boundless billions onto the biggest military budget in world history?

In 1967, King denounced a Democratic-controlled Congress for fattening the Pentagon budget while cutting anti-poverty programs, declaring: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College, and founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media. He founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986, and has written and lectured about King’s life and death for 35 years.

Source

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Seymour Hersh at Trinity College

Posted on April 4, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Reporter Seymour Hersh

Pulitzer winner discusses media, Bush, Iraq
By Steve Bennett / April 4, 2008

Last night my 82 year-old mom called (after attending Seymour Hersh’s speech), and she was blown away.

Mother added that Hersh spoke about the mental condition of the soldiers that are coming home. It is bad, and unlike my (Vietnam) generation’s mental illness, replete with heroin addiction and homelessness, this one is returning with uncontrolled and murderous rage. And for the most part it is not being treated, because of lack of funding. I’m paraphrasing my mother’s paraphrasing of Hersh, but the shit is about to hit the fan.

Fontaine Maverick / The Rag Blog

After his stories on Abu Ghraib were published in The New Yorker in 2004, Seymour Hersh got a call from an old friend in Tel Aviv — a retired Mossad officer, a man “who had spent 40 years hating Arabs.”

“You don’t know what you’ve done,” this “tough guy” growled. “I’ve done horrible things to Arabs, but you can’t sexually humiliate them. You can take out their eye. But you can’t sexually humiliate them.”

Hersh told the story during a scattershot speech Thursday night at Trinity University, the first in the Maury Maverick Jr. Lecture Series, to illustrate the depth of misunderstanding that most Americans have for Arab culture.

Hersh, called “America’s last muckraker” by writer Jan Jarboe Russell in her introduction, offered “a quick tour” of the Middle East, focusing on Iraq, the Bush administration and the news media.

“Let me just say, we let you down,” Hersh said of the media. “It was our job not to take Bush at face value.”

Hersh began with Bush and kept at him at a frenetic pace.

“This is the most radical president we’ve ever had,” Hersh charged. “We don’t know why he does what he does.”

But Hersh gave it a shot. With Vice President Dick Cheney and others, he said, “It might be oil.”
“With Bush, I really think he thinks democracy is it, that we can impose democracy on the Middle East.”

Hersh called Iraq “a corpse.”

“This is a country that is so broken,” he said.

“Just talking about getting out is not enough. We have to start talking about how we can fix it.”

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai massacre, Hersh believes Iraq is analogous to the Vietnam War because “we can’t see the enemy.”

“They attack, we respond by shooting around and it’s chaos,” he said.

And he drew parallels between the mindset of American soldiers, like those at Abu Ghraib, and those at My Lai.

“This came from the top,” he said of Abu Ghraib. “Soldiers did not think this up. They do not think up the way to humiliate an Arab man is to make him naked.”

Source / San Antonio Express-Times
Read Sy Hersh’s work for the New Yorker.

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