The MSM: Dictating What You’re Allowed to Know

Posted on April 7, 2008 by RagBlog

The US Establishment Media in a Nutshell
by Glenn Greenwald / April 5, 2008

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

“Yoo and torture” – 102
“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73
“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16
“Obama and bowling” — 1,043
“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
“Obama and patriotism” – 1,607
“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. “The Clintons are Rich!!!!” will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.

“Media critic” Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post today devoted pages of his column to Obama’s bowling and eating habits and how that shows he’s not a regular guy but an Arrogant Elitist, compiling an endless string of similar chatter about this from Karl Rove, Maureen Dowd, Walter Shapiro and Ann Althouse. Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson devoted her whole column this week to arguing that, along with Wright, Obama’s bowling was his biggest mistake, a “real doozy.”

Obama’s bowling has provided almost a full week of programming on MSNBC. Gail Collins, in The New York Times, today observed that Obama went bowling “with disastrous consequences.” And, as always, they take their personality-based fixations from the Right, who have been promoting the Obama is an Arrogant, Exotic, Elitist Freak narrative for some time. In a typically cliched and slimy article, Time’s Joe Klein this week explored what the headline called Obama’s “Patriotism Problem,” where we learn that “this is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right.” He trotted it all out — the bowling, the lapel pin, Obama’s angry, America-hating wife, “his Islamic-sounding name.”

Read all of it here.

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A Wider Middle East War Is Still Very Likely

Posted on April 6, 2008 by RagBlog

Lightning over Northern Tehran

British fear US commander is beating the drum for Iran strikes
By Damien McElroy / The Telegraph / April 4, 2008

British officials gave warning yesterday that America’s commander in Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the US-backed Baghdad government.

A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran’s intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian military facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment. In closely watched testimony in Washington next week, Gen Petraeus will state that the Iranian threat has risen as Tehran has supplied and directed attacks by militia fighters against the Iraqi state and its US allies.

The outbreak of Iraq’s worst violence in 18 months last week with fighting in Basra and the daily bombardment of the Green Zone diplomatic enclave, demonstrated that although the Sunni Muslim insurgency is dramatically diminished, Shia forces remain in a strong position to destabilise the country.

“Petraeus is going to go very hard on Iran as the source of attacks on the American effort in Iraq,” a British official said. “Iran is waging a war in Iraq. The idea that America can’t fight a war on two fronts is wrong, there can be airstrikes and other moves,” he said.

“Petraeus has put emphasis on America having to fight the battle on behalf of Iraq. In his report he can frame it in terms of our soldiers killed and diplomats dead in attacks on the Green Zone.”

Tension between Washington and Tehran is already high over Iran’s covert nuclear programme. The Bush administration has not ruled out military strikes.

In remarks interpreted as signalling a change in his approach to Iran, Gen Petraeus last week hit out at the Iranian leadership. “The rockets that were launched at the Green Zone were Iranian-provided, Iranian-made rockets,” he said. “All of this in complete violation of promises made by President Ahmadinejad and the other most senior Iranian leaders to their Iraqi counterparts.”

The humiliation of the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki by the Iranian-backed cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in fighting in Basra last week triggered top-level warnings over Iran’s strength in Iraq.

Gen Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Baghdad, will answer questions from American political leaders at the US Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday before travelling to London to brief Gordon Brown.

The Wall Street Journal said last week that the US war effort in Iraq must have a double goal.

“The US must recognise that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq,” wrote the military analyst Kimberly Kagan.

There are signs that targeting Iran would unite American politicians across the bitter divide on Iraq. “Iran is the bull in the china shop,” said Ike Skelton, the Democrat chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the Shi’ite groups, whether they be political or military.”

Source

Petraeus Testimony Next Week Will Signal Iran Attack
By Paul Craig Roberts / April 5, 2008

Today the London Telegraph reported that “British officials gave warning yesterday that America’s commander in Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the US-backed Baghdad government. A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran’s intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian militiary facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment.”

The neocon lacky Petraeus has had his script written for him by Cheney, and Petraeus together with neocon warmonger Ryan Crocker, the US governor of the Green Zone in Baghdad, will present Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday with the lies, for which the road has been well paved by neocon propagandists such as Kimberly Kagan, that “the US must recognize that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq.”

Don’t expect Congress to do anything except to egg on the attack. On April 3 the International Herald Tribune reported that senators and representatives have made millions of dollars from their investments in defense companies totaling $196 million. Rep. Ike Skelton, the Democrat chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is already on board with the attack on Iran. The London Telegraph quotes Skelton: “Iran is the bull in the china shop. In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the Shi’ite groups, whether they be political or military.”

All Skelton knows is what the war criminal Bush regime tells him. If Iran really does have all these connections, then it behooves Washington to cease threatening Iran and to make nice with Iran in order to stabilize Iraq and extract the US from the nightmare.

Reporting from Tehran on April 4, Reuters quotes Mohsen Hakim, whose father, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, an ally of the Maliki US puppetgovernment in Iraq: “Tehran, by using its positive influence on the Iraqi nation, paved the way for the return of peace to Iraq and the new situation is the result of Iran’s efforts.”

Instead of thanking Iran and working with Iran diplomatically to restore stability to Iraq, the Bush regime intends to expand the nightmare with a military attack on Iran. Ryan Crocker was quick to dispute Hakim’s report that Iran had used its influence to end the fighting in Basra. Crocker alleged that Iran had started the fighting. The absurdity of Crocker’s claim is obvious as even the neocon US media reported that the fighting in Basra was started by the US and Maliki in an effort to clear out the Shi’ite al-Sadr militias. Most experts saw the attack on al-Sadr for what it was: an effort to remove a potential threat to the US supply line from Kuwait in the event of a US attack on Iran.

Crocker alleges that the rockets dropping on the Green Zone during the Basra fighting were made in 2007 in Iran. As should be obvious even to disengaged Americans, if Iran were to arm the Iraqi insurgency, the insurgents would have modern weapons to counter US helicopter gunships and heavy tanks. The insurgents have no such weapons. The neocon lie that Iran is the cause of the Iraqi insurgency is just another Bush regime lie like the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and connections to al Qaeda and the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan attacked the US.

The Bush regime will tell any lie and orchestrate any event in order to “finish the job” in the Middle East.

“Finishing the job” means to destroy the ability of Iraq, Iran, and Syria to provide support for the Palestinians and for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon against Israeli aggression. With Iraq and Iran in turmoil, Syria might simply give up and become another American client state. With Iraq and Iran in turmoil, Israel can steal the rest of the West Bank along with the water resources in southern Lebanon. That is what “the war on terror” is really about.

The entire world knows this. Consequently, the US and Israel are essentially isolated. The US can only count on the support that it can bribe and pay for.

At the NATO-Russian summit in Bucharest, Romania, on April 4, Russian President Putin said: “No one can seriously think that Iran would dare attack the U.S. Instead of pushing Iran into a corner, it would be far more sensible to think together how to help Iran become more predictable and transparent.”

Of course it would, but that is not what the warmonger Bush regime wants.

Perhaps the British government has derailed the plot to attack Iran by leaking in advance to the London Telegraph the disinformation Cheney has prepared for Petraeus and Crocker to deliver to the complicit US Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday. On the other hand, the US puppet media is likely to bury the real story and to trumpet Petraeus claims that Iran has, in effect, already declared war on the US by sending weapons to kill US troops in Iraq.

By next Thursday we will know from how the Petraeus-Crocker dog and pony show plays in the US Congress and media whether the Bush Regime will commit yet another war crime by attacking Iran.

Paul Craig Roberts a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, is forthcoming from Random House in March, 2008.

Source

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People Enjoy Killing Each Other?

Posted on April 6, 2008 by RagBlog
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Hot Shots and Classic Takes

Posted on April 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Too purty not to post.

Classic 1949 Chevy Pick-up Truck with the Lone Star Flag Plate. Photo by E. Joe Deering / Houston Chronicle.

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Understanding Iraq : Maybe This Will Help

Posted on April 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Suppose Texas was like Iraq
By Gwynne Dyer / April 6, 2008

London — Suppose the shoe were on the other foot. Suppose that the former United States had splintered into half a dozen fragments after the South won the Civil War 145 years ago.

Suppose all the Arabs lived in a single, powerful state, but had no oil. Suppose an Arab military force was currently bringing peace and freedom to the oil-rich, violence-torn country of Texas.

What would they be reading in the Arab newspapers five years after the occupation of Texas?

They’d be learning about the minute doctrinal differences and the irreconcilable rivalries between Catholic Hispanics and Protestant Anglos, and even between Southern Methodists and Southern Baptists. They’d all know about Texas’ long love affair with guns, as if that explained why Texans were killing Arab soldiers.

They’d constantly be reminded that the dominant minority in east Texas is African-American, while in west Texas it is Hispanic, as if that explained anything. Leader writers in Arab newspapers would be speculating about which of the many Texan militias could be persuaded to side with the Arab troops in the task of pacification.

Everybody in the Arab world would know far more about Texas than any sane non-Texan should ever want to know — without understanding anything at all. And then the Arab troops would go home sooner or later, and everybody in the Arab world would forget all those intricate details about Texas again.

Well, the shoe is not on the other foot. It’s American troops in Iraq, not Arab troops in Texas, so it’s the Western media that are filled with minutiae about the rivalries among Iraqi sects, parties and militias. We’ve just had a fairly intense week of it, with the Baghdad government that is dominated by two Shiite parties, Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, using the national army to attack the militia of a third Shiite faction, that led by Muqtada al-Sadr.

There are also the Kurds (aligned with the U.S. but divided among themselves) and the Sunni Arabs (who were fighting the Americans last year but are mostly allied with them at the moment, though that alliance may now be fraying). But the main event last week was between the Shiites.

For the record, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s attempt to shut down Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi army, has failed. Al-Maliki’s offensive against the Mahdi army in Basra stalled after four days, with three-quarters of the city still in the hands of the militia. Meanwhile heavy fighting spread to four other cities in the south and to Baghdad itself, and U.S. ground troops were drawn into the fighting to cover the Iraqi army’s failures.

Al-Maliki, who had been full of bluster at the start, declared himself surprised by the strength of the resistance (although nobody else was). He stopped the offensive and extended his deadline for disarming the militias by 10 days. Then, after frantic scurrying around behind the scenes, a deal emerged in which Muqtada al-Sadr gently let him off the hook.

Sadr declared March 30 he was ordering the Mahdi army to stop fighting and get off the streets, but demanded that the government stop “illegal and random raids” (that target his followers) and release all detainees (including hundreds of Mahdi army members) who have been arrested without formal charges.

And Sadr’s spokesman made it very clear that no weapons would be handed in.

Al-Maliki did not argue. The offensive has been called off, and the Mahdi army is still intact. As al-Maliki’s spokesman put it, “the government will . . . implement the law against those who do not obey the instructions of the government and of Sadr.”

The latter comes out of this confrontation stronger than ever, having faced down al-Maliki (with the full weight of the U.S. behind him), and then winning extra points for being the peacemaker.

But the saga of the past week is just more minutiae, of no great relevance to the future of Iraq, let alone of the U.S. No matter who ends up running Iraq, all the American troops will go home in the end. And whatever happens in Iraq after that, although of great importance to Iraqis, will be of little interest to Americans.

This does presume, of course, that post-occupation Iraq will not be run by bloodthirsty and intolerant fanatics whose only goal in life is to attack the U.S. But that was never remotely likely at any stage of the game. The notion that this is anybody’s primary motive in the Arab world, even that of the bloodthirsty and intolerant fanatics who run “al-Qaida in Mesopotamia,” is just a self-centered American fantasy.

Ten years from now, all that painfully acquired knowledge about the details of Iraq’s internal rivalries will be long gone from American minds. Even in Iraq, few people will remember what happened last month in Iraq or give a damn about it. And the main conclusion of the American public about the Iraq adventure, as it has long been about Vietnam, will be (as Talleyrand said about one of Napoleon’s stupider decisions) that “it was worse than a Crime; it was a Mistake.”

Gwynne Dyer’s new book, “After Iraq,” has just been published in London by Yale University Press.

Source. Japan Times
From Hunter Ellinger / The Rag Blog

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This Band Didn’t Start Off in Stadiums, You Know

Posted on April 6, 2008 by RagBlog


“When You Can’t Afford the Electricity, Baby, You Go Acoustic.”: The Stones Meet the Press
By Phyllis Pollack

New York, New York

The press conference with the Rolling Stones and Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese, held to promote the upcoming theatrical release of the documentary feature film, Shine A Light, took place on March 30 in New York City, on the fourth floor of the Palace Hotel. The room was filled to capacity, accommodating approximately two hundred members of the press that included myself.

The event followed a press lunch that was also held at the hotel. Members of the media were anxiously queued up, awaiting to hear what the Scorsese, who had directed films including Italianamerican, Taxi Driver, The Last Waltz, Raging Bull, The Color Of Money, The Last Temptation Of Christ, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, Kundun, Age Of Innocence and The Departed, and who had worked as an assistant director in the seminal film Woodstock, would have to say about working with the Stones. Needless to say, the members of the media, who were present, were looking forward to hearing the imminent statements that would soon be made by both the band and by the revered filmmaker.

The five icons, filmmaker Scorsese, Rolling Stones vocalist Mick Jagger, guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, and drummer Charlie Watts entered the room. The conference began with the introduction, “Ladies and gentlemen, Martin Scorsese and the Rolling Stones,” to which they were greeted with extended, enthusiastic applause.

The highly anticipated media event lasted approximately twenty-four minutes, as the press conference was cut shorter than expected. Therefore, a limited amount of questions were allowed, due to the time constraint.

What transpired at the press conference moved quickly, as the red carpet premiere would be held soon after, just a few blocks away, at Clearview’s Ziegfeld Theater on West 54th St.

Here are some of the highlights from the press conference.

Jagger: Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, New York.

Moderator: First question, right here.

Question: To all five of you here, would you explain why was it important for you to make this film in a small venue in your native Manhattan? Was this audience special, and if so, why?

Scorsese: The importance of making the film in a smaller venue for me, I contemplated it. We discussed doing it in a bigger arena, and I looked into that, and actually while I was doing it, I was trying to prepare for that. I began to realize I think I’m better suited to try to capture the group on stage on a smaller stage, more for the intimacy of the group and the way they play together, the way you see the band work together, and work each song. I found that to be interesting, more than interesting. It is a compulsion of mine. I love to be able to see that, and to be able to cut from one image to another, movement and that sort of thing. And really, about the intimacy of the group, and how they work together.

Jagger: Why, I can’t remember what you said now.

(Audience laughter.)

Jagger: But the audience was a good audience, because I think they really got into the spirit of making the movie, as well as enjoying being an audience for the band. They were a great audience for the band, but I think also, a great audience for the movie.

Wood: They were all cameramen.

(Audience breaks into laughter.)

Jagger: Really.

Scorsese: They enjoyed it. The cameramen liked it. Yeah.

Question: Keith, anything special about that night?

Richards: The Beacon Theater is special for some reason. It wraps its arms around you, especially if you can play there for more than one night. And you start to get, the room sort of wraps its arms around you. And every night gets warmer. It’s a great feeling room. And also, hey, this band, you know, didn’t start off in stadiums, you know. (Richards laughs)

Question: Charlie, Do you want to try that? A special night?

Watts: No.

(Audience breaks into laughter.)

Richards: I knew he’d say that.

Read the entire interview.

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End of the world as we know it

Posted on April 6, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

You might feel fine, but high oil cost, scarcity mean American Empire is about to come crashing down
By Guy R. McPherson / April 6, 2008

Peak oil spells the end of civilization. And, if it’s not already too late, perhaps it will prevent the extinction of our species.

M. King Hubbert, a petroleum geologist employed by Shell Oil Co., described peak oil in 1956. Production of crude oil, like the production of many non-renewable resources, follows a bell-shaped curve. The top of the curve is termed “peak oil,” or “Hubbert’s peak,” and it represents the halfway point for production.

The bell-shaped curve applies at all levels, from field to country to planet. After discovery, production ramps up relatively quickly.

But when the light, sweet crude on top of the field runs out, increased energy and expense are required to extract the underlying heavy, sour crude. At some point, the energy required to extract a barrel of oil exceeds the energy contained in barrel of oil, so the pumps shut down.

Most of the world’s oil pumps are about to shut down.

We have sufficient supply to keep the world running for 30 years or so, at the current level of demand. But that’s irrelevant because the days of inexpensive oil are behind us. And the American Empire absolutely demands cheap oil. Never mind the 3,000-mile Caesar salad to which we’ve become accustomed. Cheap oil forms the basis for the 12,000-mile supply chain underlying the “just-in-time” delivery of plastic toys from China.

There goes next year’s iPod.

In 1956, Hubbert predicted the continental United States would peak in 1970. He was correct, and the 1970s gave us a small, temporary taste of the sociopolitical and economic consequences of expensive oil.

We passed the world oil peak in 2005, and we’ve been easing down the other side by acquiring oil at the point of a gun – actually, guns are the smallest of the many weapons we’re using – paying more for oil and destroying one culture after another as the high price of crude oil forces supply disruptions and power outages in Third World countries.

The world peaked at 74.3 million barrels per day in May 2005. The two-year decline to 73.2 million barrels per day produced a doubling of the price of crude. Later this year, we fall off the oil-supply cliff, with global supply plummeting below 70 million barrels/day. Oil at merely $100 per barrel will seem like the good old days.

Within a decade, we’ll be staring down the barrel of a crisis: Oil at $400 per barrel brings down the American Empire, the project of globalization and water coming through the taps. Never mind happy motoring through the never-ending suburbs in the Valley of the Sun. In a decade, unemployment will be approaching 100 percent, inflation will be running at 1,000 percent and central heating will be a pipe dream.

In short, this country will be well on its way to the post-industrial Stone Age.

After all, no alternative energy sources scale up to the level of a few million people, much less the 6.5 billion who currently occupy Earth. Oil is necessary to extract and deliver coal and natural gas. Oil is needed to produce solar panels and wind turbines, and to maintain the electrical grid.

Ninety percent of the oil consumed in this country is burned by airplanes, ships, trains and automobiles. You can kiss goodbye groceries at the local big-box grocery store: Our entire system of food production and delivery depends on cheap oil.

If you’re alive in a decade, it will be because you’ve figured out how to forage locally.

The death and suffering will be unimaginable. We have come to depend on cheap oil for the delivery of food, water, shelter and medicine. Most of us are incapable of supplying these four key elements of personal survival, so trouble lies ahead when we are forced to develop means of acquiring them that don’t involve a quick trip to Wal-Mart.

On the other hand, the forthcoming cessation of economic growth is truly good news for the world’s species and cultures. In addition, the abrupt halt of fossil-fuel consumption may slow the warming of our planetary home, thereby preventing our extinction at our own hand.

Our individual survival, and our common future, depends on our ability to quickly make other arrangements. We can view this as a personal challenge, or we can take the Hemingway out. The choice is ours.

For individuals interested in making other arrangements, it’s time to start acquiring myriad requisite skills. It is far too late to save civilization for 300 million Americans, much less the rest of the planet’s citizens, but we can take joy in a purpose-filled, intimate life.

It’s time to push away from the shore, to let the winds of change catch the sails of our leaky boat.
It’s time to trust in ourselves, our neighbors and the Earth that sustains us all.

Painful though it might be, it’s time to abandon the cruise ship of empire in exchange for a lifeboat.

Guy R. McPherson is a professor of conservation biology at the University of Arizona.

Source. Arizona Republic

Thanks to Jim Baldauf / The Rag Blog
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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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