The Terrorists Are In Fact Peacemakers
By Pepe Escobar
Iran is sufficiently powerful to broker a ceasefire deal
Thorne Webb Dreyer, Editor
RECENT POSTS
The Iranians: Doing What Junior Can’t or Won’t
Facts About Iraq That Junior Doesn’t Know
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.
Not a "Criminal?" What’s the Problem?
Toll road cameras looking beyond scofflaw drivers.
Camera system upgraded to help catch criminals.
By Rosanna Ruiz / Houston Chronicle / April 4, 2008
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.
Beware the New New Thing AND The Already Thing
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
Hey, Kids – It’s Just a Joke
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
Martin Luther King’s Voice Still Silenced by MSM
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.
Seymour Hersh at Trinity College
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.
Defending the Indefensible: Billions in Subsidies
I don’t know about you, but I wanna throw up all over these smug, arrogant fuckers.
Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog
Lowe (Conoco Phillips) and Robert Malone (BP America) face congress April 1 2008.
BIG OIL – 4,000 Americans Died For Them
By Frank Gormlie / April 3, 2008
Top Oil Execs to Congress on Their Record $123 Billion Profits: ‘We feel your pain, but don’t blame us!’
Ten days after US military deaths in Iraq reached 4,000, the top executives of the five largest oil and gas companies appeared before Congress. It was Tuesday, April 1st – April Fools’ Day – and they were there to address the record profits their companies were bringing in and why the companies should continue to receive billions in government subsidies by way of tax breaks. The top honchos were from Exxon, Shell, BP America Inc., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips, and were appearing before the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. The execs told Congress that they know record fuel prices are hurting the American people, and claimed it’s not their fault and said their huge profits are in line with other industries.
Combined, the oil companies made $123 billion last year. This is at a time when US motorists are paying record prices at the pump – now averaging $3.29 a gallon amid talk of $4 a gallon this summer. The price of oil has settled at just over $100 a barrel on the New York exchange. And one out of 8 Americans are on food stamps. Then there’s the mortgage crisis, the housing crisis, … not to mention the Constitutional crisis. And recent economic experts have tied the huge costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to bringing down the American economy, and there’s even talk that we’re heading into not just a recession but a massive depression …. we could go on.
Record profits by the oil companies. Even Alan Greenspan had to admit that the reason we’re in Iraq is because of the oil.
4,000 US Deaths to Secure Iraq Oil Fields for Oil Companies
So, let me get this straight. Our economy is going down the toilet while the hike in gas prices drives all our consumer goods – like food – up. The Iraq war is taking away our financial resources while we’re in Iraq to secure the oil fields for the oil companies. And the oil companies are making record profits off of us. My god, no wonder we elected Bush twice! We’re dumber than a bag of hammers.
But wait – our countrywomen and men are dying to secure those oil fields! Our people! 4,000 and counting. They died for the oil executives who testified in front of our Congress and said, hey, we feel your pain, but don’t blame us, we’re just making money like everybody else. That’s what they said.
Oil Company Profits Higher Than Other Industries
The Associated Press reported that the execs said their earnings are typical and in line with the average of other major US industries. AP outlined the combined 2007 earnings and revenues of five top companies in some major industries:
The oil and gas industry earned $123.29 billion on revenue of $1,460.20 billion. Companies included are Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell, BP PLC, Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips.
The pharmaceutical industry earned $48.24 billion on revenue of $230.64 billion. Companies included are Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer Inc., GlaxoSmithKline PLC, Sanofi-Aventis SA and Novartis AG.
The defense industry earned $15.5 billion on revenue of $229.59 billion. Companies included are Boeing Co., United Technologies Corp., Lockheed Martin Co., Honeywell International Inc. and Northrop Grumman Corp.
Read all of it here.
A Case of Great Respect for Privacy Rights
Notice the lawyer’s name — could he be related to our own Red-Headed Stranger??
Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog
Search and Seizure: Vermont Supreme Court Throws Out Marijuana Conviction Based on Warrantless Aerial Surveillance
from Drug War Chronicle, Issue #530 / April 4, 2008
In a decision handed down last Friday, the Vermont Supreme Court threw out the felony marijuana cultivation conviction of a man caught growing marijuana following a warrantless flyover of his rural property by a military helicopter. Vermont residents have a broad privacy right “that ascends into the airspace above their homes and property,” the court held in State v. Bryant.
The case began in 2003, when Stephen Bryant, who owned a remote Addison County home, told a local official he didn’t want trespassers. That unnamed official “found defendant’s insistence on privacy to be ‘paranoid,'” the opinion noted, and suggested that a Vermont State Police team do a flyover to look for marijuana. Under the rules of the state’s Marijuana Eradication Team, which uses Vermont Army National Guard helicopters and pilots, flights are supposed to stay 500 feet above the ground. But an August 7, 2003 surveillance flight dipped down to 100 feet and hovered above Bryant’s property for half an hour.
Troopers in the chopper saw marijuana plants, then used that information to obtain a search warrant. Bryant was arrested and charged with marijuana possession and cultivation. At trial, he argued that he used marijuana for medicinal purposes to treat an old work injury. Jurors acquitted him of possession, but convicted him of cultivation. In June, 2005, he was sentenced to 45 days. His appeal followed.
The Vermont constitution protects the privacy rights of residents even if it means some pot plants may go unseized, the court held in an opinion written by Associate Justice Marilyn Skoglund for the 4-1 majority.
“We protect defendant’s marijuana plots against such surveillance so that law-abiding citizens may relax in their backyards, enjoying a sense of security that they are free from unreasonable surveillance. Vermonters expect — at least at a private, rural residence on posted land — that they will be free from intrusions that interrupt their use of their property, expose their intimate activities, or create undue noise, wind, or dust,” wrote Skoglund.
“With technological advances in surveillance techniques, the privacy-protection question is no longer whether police have physically invaded a constitutionally protected area. Rather, the inquiry is whether the surveillance invaded a constitutionally protected legitimate expectation of privacy,” she added.
“The decision is a boon to all Vermonters,” said Middlebury attorney William Nelson, who represented Bryant at the Supreme Court. “It protects our privacy when we are out of doors, on our own property, and in our own yards,” he told the Burlington Free Press after the decision.
The opinion serves as further evidence that the state constitution gives Vermonters greater privacy protection than federal laws do, Vermont law school professor Cheryl Hanna told the Free Press. “A lot of people feel the federal government doesn’t respect privacy rights after Sept. 11,” said Hanna. “Vermonters, at least at the state level, have that additional check on what the government can do.”
Never Did the Possibility of Disappointment Offer So Much Hope
Would you like change with that?
Super Tuesday II, as Fox dubbed it, took some steam out of the Obama bandwagon, but he’s still the likely Democratic nominee, and therefore the likely president-to-be. Which is remarkable, really—a nonparticipant can only stand slackjawed in awe of Obamamania. Previously rational people whom LBO admires, like Barbara Ehrenreich and Christopher Hayes, have fallen in love with the Senator’s brand of change we can believe in, a slogan that has to be one of the emptiest since Sandburg’s “The people, yes!,” that the New Party used in New York in the early 1990s. Obama has become the Tokio Hotel of politics.
On what is this mania based? Obama is inspiring the young, lifting the alienated off their couches, and catalyzing a new movement for…change, presumably one we can believe in. The content of this change is hard to specify. Some serious leftists we know and love point to Obama’s roots as a community organizer in Chicago, though many people in a position to know say he didn’t rock many boats in those days. He was embraced by foundation liberals, however, who greased his way into the Harvard Law School via a lakefront condo.
All of which doesn’t make Obama uniquely bad: he’s just another mainstream Democrat with a sleazy real estate guy in his past. Though he’s being touted as an early opponent of the Iraq war, he told the Chicago Tribune in 2004: “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position….” He voted to renew the PATRIOT Act, campaigned for happy warrior Joe Lieberman against Ned Lamont in 2006, and wants to increase the size of the U.S. military. He supports Israel’s continuing torture of the Palestinians penned into the Gaza Strip. A Congressional Quarterly study found his Senate voting record was virtually indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton’s; the only major difference in their votes is a surprising one: a move to limit class actions suits against corporations, which Clinton voted against, and Obama for. Obama’s vote was against the preferences of a Dem financial base, trial lawyers, but pleasing to the Fortune 500 and Wall Street.
In this binary world, when you criticize Obama, people immediately include you’re a Hillary Clinton fan. Uh, no. Her politics are bellicose and neoliberal. Her “experience” consists largely of having watched her husband be president for eight years, though it’s likely they were sleeping in separate bedrooms for much of the time. A plague on all their houses.
Agendas
Some more thoughtful victims of Obama Disease point to detailed position papers on the candidate’s website. These must always be taken with a grain of salt, especially during primary season. Candidate Bill Clinton promised to “invest in people” and ended up being the president of “a bunch of fucking bond traders,” as Hillary’s husband memorably put it. LBJ campaigned as the peace candidate in 1964, and ended up killing a million Indochinese.
Obamians also point to his rejection of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC); they put him on their list of rising stars, and he asked to be removed. Encouraging—except for the fact that his chief economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, the fellow who told the Canadians not to take the anti-NAFTA rhetoric seriously, is the DLC’s chief economist. Goolsbee has written gushingly about Milton Friedman and denounced the idea of a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures. That hire is more significant than asking to be struck from a list.
Big capital would have no problem with an Obama presidency. Top hedge fund honcho Paul Tudor Jones threw a fundraiser for him at his Greenwich house last spring, “The whole of Greenwich is backing Obama,” one source said of the posh headquarters of the hedge fund industry. They like him because they’re socially liberal, up to a point, and probably eager for a little less war, and think he’s the man to do their work. They’re also confident he wouldn’t undertake any renovations to the distribution of wealth. You could say the same about Clinton—but you know those hedge fund guys. They like a contrary bet. A share of Obama stock on the Iowa Electronic Market was 30 on May 19, 2007, the day of Jones’s Obama bash; it peaked at 86 on March 1, a gain of 187% (in a year where triple digits are rare). It’s since settled back into the low 70s, which is still quite a gain.
Read all of it here.
From Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog
On the Road with the Beats
On Display Through August at The University of Texas at Austin.
Now on display at The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin is Jack Kerouac’s scroll manuscript of On the Road, included for a limited time with the exhibition On the Road with the Beats. Travel with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and their friends across America and the globe in this exhibition. Manuscripts, books, photographs, and visual art from the Ransom Center’s collections tell the story of the Beat Generation and the literary and social revolution they inspired. The scroll will be on view through June 1, with the entire exhibition running through August 3. Located at 21st and Guadalupe Streets, the Ransom Center is free and open to the public. More information at http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/.
Look for more about this exhibit on The Rag Blog.
An Outrageous Miscarriage of Justice
Targeting Defense Lawyers: Lynne Stewart’s Long Struggle for Justice
By Stephan Lendman / April 3, 2008
On April 9, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft made a symbolic visit to “Ground Zero.” While in New York, he held a well-publicized press conference at the US Attorney’s Office and used the occasion for an indictment. Four individuals were named on charges of conspiracy and materially aiding a terrorist organization. One of them was long-time civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart. On the same day, FBI agents arrested her at her home and illegally seized documents there and from her office that are protected by attorney-client privilege.
In July 2003, Federal District Court Judge John Koeltl (a 1994 Clinton appointee) dismissed the original charges for being “unconstitutionally void for vagueness” and because they “revealed a lack of prosecutorial standards.” Nonetheless, Stewart was symbolically reindicted on November 22, 2003 (the 40th year anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination) on five counts of aiding and abetting a terrorist organization under the 1996 Antiterrorism Act. Specific charges included:
* “conspiring to defraud the United States;
* conspiring to provide and conceal material support to terrorist activity;
* providing and concealing material support to terrorist activity; and
* two counts of making false statements.”
Stewart was also accused of violating US Bureau of Prisons-imposed Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) that included a gag order on her client, Sheik Abdel Rahman. These measures are imposed on some prisoners to forbid discussion (even with an attorney) of topics DOJ claims are outside the scope of their “legal representation.” It’s all very vague, does more to harass and obstruct justice than protect state secrets, yet Stewart was forced to accept them to gain access to her client.
In her case, police state-type attorney-client monitored conversations provided the basis for her indictment. However, engaging in this practice stretches the limit of the law, gives DOJ sole authority to decide how far and for what purpose, and in this instance egregiously overstepped it by charging defense counsel with aiding and abetting terrorism for representing her client as required.
At former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s request, Stewart agreed to join him as a member of Rahman’s court-appointed defense team. He was convicted in his 1995 show trial and is now serving a life sentence for “seditious conspiracy” in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center Center bombing despite evidence proving his innocence.
However, in what’s now common practice, the government’s case related more to his affiliations and anti-western views than specific evidence presented. Rahman was connected to the Egyptian-based Al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group) – a 1997 State Department-designated “Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). Ironically in the 1980s, he was handled much differently as a “valuable (CIA) asset” for his influential role in recruiting Mujahadeen fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was no accident that he got a US visa, green card and State Department-CIA protection for as long as he was valued. When he wasn’t, he became a target along with Lynne Stewart who represented him at trial.
Stewart’s charges were trumped up, outrageous, and likely first time ever instance of a defense attorney in a terrorism case facing terrorism-related counts – for doing her job as the law requires and that renders attorney-client confidentiality sacrosanct under our criminal justice system. No matter, if convicted, she faced a possible 30 year sentence.
In America’s “war on terrorism,” her precedent-setting case is chilling, and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, explained it: Its “purpose….was to send a message to lawyers who represent alleged terrorists that it’s dangerous to do so.” It’s also an effort to exploit the current atmosphere, incite fear and suspicions, stifle dissent, and make it just as risky for anyone with openly critical views of government policies. In Police State America, we’re all Lynne Stewarts.
At the time of her indictment, her attorney, Michael Tigar, explained what was at stake:
“This case (still ongoing) is an attack on a gallant, charismatic and effective fighter for justice (and has) at least three fundamental faults: (it) attack(s) the First Amendment right of free speech, free press and petition; (it) attack(s)….the right to effective assistance of counsel ….chills the defense….(and) the ‘evidence’ in this case was gathered by wholesale invasion of private conversations, private attorney-client meetings, faxes, letters and e-mails. I have never seen such an abuse of government power.” In America’s “war on terrorism,” many other defense attorneys can cite similar instances of lawlessness and injustice today.
However, in targeting Stewart, DOJ may have gotten more than it bargained for. Whatever the outcome, her case shamed the government, gave her worldwide recognition, made her a powerful symbolic figure, and elevated her to iconic stature. For her honor, devotion to principles, and lifetime of service to society’s most abused, she deserves it and more.
Throughout her 30 year career, she never shunned controversy or her choice of or duty to clients. She represented the poor, the underprivileged and society’s underdogs and unwanted who never get due process unless they’re lucky enough to have an advocate like her. She knew the risks and understood the state uses every underhanded trick possible to convict these type defendants and overwhelm, outspend and/or discredit their counsel doing it.
Nonetheless, she did what the American Bar Association’s Model Rules state all lawyers are obligated to do: “devote professional time and resources and use civic influence to ensure equal access to our system of justice for all those who because of economic or social barriers cannot afford or secure adequate legal counsel.”
Read all of it here.
counterpunch / The Rag Blog
Lynne Stewart Sentencing Begins; Chaos Ensues
Chaos erupted on the twelfth floor of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse in lower Manhattan this morning when Lynne Stewart, the left-wing criminal-defense lawyer convicted of materially aiding terrorism last year, appeared for sentencing before U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl a bit after nine.
“Free Lynne! Free Lynne!” shouted at least 100 of her supporters massed outside the courtroom, some of them raising their fists in a Black Power salute, others singing from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” They had gathered earlier for a rally in Foley Square to support Stewart’s efforts to be spared prison, perhaps with a sentence of home confinement. She has undergone radiation therapy for breast cancer.
Read it here.
