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Justice after Bush:

By Scott Horton.

I. The Crimes

Americans may wish to avoid what is necessary. We may believe that concerns about presidential lawbreaking are naive. That all presidents commit crimes. We may pretend that George W. Bush and his senior officers could not have committed crimes significantly worse than those of their predecessors. We may fear what it would mean to acknowledge such crimes, much less to punish them. But avoiding this task, simply “moving on,” is not possible.

This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protesters, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted “signing statements” that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.

No prior administration has been so systematically or so brazenly lawless. Yet it is no simple matter to prosecute a former president or his senior officers. There is no precedent for such a prosecution, and even if there was, the very breadth and audacity of the administration’s activities would make the process so complex as to defy systems of justice far less fragmented than our own. But that only means choices must be made. Indeed, in weighing the enormity of the administration’s transgressions against the realistic prospect of justice, it is possible to determine not only the crime that calls most clearly for prosecution but also the crime that is most likely to be successfully prosecuted. In both cases, that crime is torture.

There can be no doubt that torture is illegal. There is no wartime exception for torture, nor is there an exception for prisoners or “enemy combatants,” nor is there an exception for “enhanced” methods. The authors of the Constitution forbade “cruel and unusual punishment,” the details of that prohibition were made explicit in the Geneva Conventions (“No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever”), and that definition has in turn become subject to U.S. enforcement through the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the U.S. Criminal Code, and several acts of Congress.¹1. In addition to being illegal, torture is profoundly un-American. The central premise of the American experiment is the belief, informed by Enlightenment principles, that the dignity and worth of the individual is at least as important as that of the state. This belief weighed heavily on the minds of the Founders. The new American military was to be a force of yeoman soldiers, citizens in peacetime who were to be regarded as no less than citizens in wartime. Enemy soldiers likewise were to be treated with respect. George Washington, in the winter of 1776, sent a written order to officers overseeing prisoners: “Treat them with humanity.” And in 1863, at another time of crisis, Abraham Lincoln included the prohibition of torture in the first American codification of the laws of war, which he also issued as a direct order to his field commanders. By way of such American leadership, the prohibition on torture was gradually absorbed into international law.

Nor can there be any doubt that this administration conspired to commit torture: Waterboarding. Hypothermia. Psychotropic drugs. Sexual humiliation. Secretly transporting prisoners to other countries that use even more brutal techniques. The administration has carefully documented these actions and, in many cases, proudly proclaimed them. The written guidelines for interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, for instance, describe several techniques for degrading and physically debilitating prisoners, including the “forceful removal of detainees’ clothing” and the use of “stress positions.” And in a 2006 radio interview, Dick Cheney said simply that the use of waterboarding to obtain intelligence was a “no-brainer.”²2. Cheney at the time declined to refer to this practice as torture, preferring instead to describe it as “robust interrogation,” and that reluctance has been echoed in the press. I myself was twice warned by PBS producers, in advance of appearances on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, that I could use the word “torture” in the abstract but that I was to refrain from applying it to the administration’s policies. And after an interview with CNN in which I spoke of the administration’s torture policy, I was told by the producer, “That’s okay for CNN International, but we can’t use it on the domestic feed.” More recently, however, the consensus appears to be that “torture” is a perfectly adequate description of administration policy. In the vice-presidential debates, Joe Biden said that Cheney has “done more harm than any other single elected official in memory in terms of shredding the Constitution. You know—condoning torture.” In the first presidential debate, John McCain said we must ensure “that we have people who are trained interrogators so that we don’t ever torture a prisoner ever again.” And Barack Obama, though vague, seemed to accept this formulation. “I give Senator McCain great credit on the torture issue,” he said, “for having identified that as something that undermines our long-term security.”

Finally, there can be no doubt that the administration was aware of the potential criminality of these acts. In January 2002, White House lawyers began generating a series of memos outlining the administration’s motivation for torturing. They claimed that “the war against terrorism is a new kind of war” requiring an enhanced “ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists” and that “this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.” The legal term for such contemplation is mens rea, or “guilty mind,” and it is an important consideration in criminal trials. Which is perhaps the reason that John Ashcroft—when he, Dick Che ney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and George Tenet gathered at the White House in 2002 to formally approve the application of specific torture methods—asked the assembled, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”³3. In an interview with Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, a former senior CIA official with knowledge of the administration’s torture program summarized its attitude more bluntly: “Laws? Like who the fuck cares?”

II. The Consequences of Inaction

The accuracy of Ashcroft’s prediction remains to be determined. The United States does, in fact, have a long history of prosecuting torturers, but the punishments have varied considerably. In 1902, U.S. Army Captain Edwin Glenn confessed to and was court- martialed for using “the water cure” on Filipinos as part of the U.S. prosecution of the Spanish-American War. He was required to pay a fifty-dollar fine. And in 1926, when the Mississippi Supreme Court declared waterboarding to be torture and overturned the conviction of a man who had confessed to another crime under its application, the police who had elicited the confession went entirely unpunished. In other circumstances, though, the consequences have been more significant. In 1983, an east Texas sheriff named James Parker was convicted of waterboarding six men in order to coerce confessions. He was sentenced to ten years in federal prison. And when American prosecutors convicted Japanese officials at the end of World War II of war crimes that included waterboarding, the sentence sought, and obtained in some of the cases, was death. Which is not to say that administration officials will or should face similarly dire sanction. But such consequences are a measure of the gravity of the crime.

Waterboarding is far from the worst that detainees have suffered under U.S. supervision. Its use is especially worthy of note, however, because it is universally understood that 1) the administration authorized waterboarding, and 2) waterboarding is a serious crime.⁴4. This last point is not even slightly controversial. Richard Armitage, a Republican former Navy officer who served as deputy secretary of state from 2001 to 2005, is likely the highest-ranking administration official to personally have experienced this form of torture. In the late Sixties, he was waterboarded as part of a training program— Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE—designed to prepare military personnel to resist enemy interrogators. His conclusion was straightforward. “Of course waterboarding is torture,” he told the BBC in 2007. “I can’t believe we’re even debating it.” Military lawyers agree. In a 2007 letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, four retired judge advocates general hammered the point again and again. “Waterboarding is inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal,” they wrote, adding that “it is not, and never has been, a complex issue, and even to suggest otherwise does a terrible disservice to this nation.” Even Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, himself a onetime reserve military judge and sometime supporter of administration detainee policy, admits that waterboarding is illegal. “I don’t think you have to have a lot of knowledge about the law,” he said in 2007, “to understand this technique violates Geneva Convention Common Article Three, the War Crimes statutes, and many other statutes that are in place.”

Open criminality is a cancer on democracy. It implicates all who know of the conduct and fail to act. Such compliance presents a practical crisis, in that a government that is allowed to torture will inevitably transgress other legal limits. But it also presents an existential political crisis. Many democracies have simply collapsed as the people permitted their leaders to abandon the rule of law in the face of alleged external threats. The turn to torture was rapid, for instance, in Argentina at the time of the Dirty War and in Chile after the American-directed coup against Salvador Allende. In both cases, that turn had little to do with a perceived benefit from the use of torture in interrogation. To the contrary, the very criminality of the act had a talismanic significance. It asserted the primacy of the will of the torturer. It made the claim, for all to accept or reject, that the ruler was the law. Such a claim is, of course, intolerable to democracy, which presupposes, as Thomas Paine wrote, that “the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

Reasserting the rule of law is no simple matter. A new administration may—or may not—bring an end to open torture in the United States, but it will not bring an end to our knowledge and acceptance of what has already taken place. If the people wish to maintain sovereignty, they must also reclaim responsibility for the actions taken in their name. As of yet, they have not. Pursuing the Bush Administration for crimes long known to the public may amount to a kind of hypocrisy, but it is a necessary hypocrisy. The alternative, simply doing nothing, not only ratifies torture; it ratifies the failure of the people to control the actions of their government.⁵5. It is not without justification that Bush was able to claim in 2005, “We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections.” Such taunts recall the (likely apocryphal) moment when William Tweed, the corrupt head of New York’s Tammany Hall, was confronted with indisputable evidence of graft. “Well,” he said, “what are you going to do about it?”

III. Possible Methods of Sanction

Torture is a war crime, and war crimes present an unusual legal challenge. They can be prosecuted domestically, like any other crime. But because they are war crimes, they also are subject to enforcement by all nations, under a well-established principle of universal jurisdiction. Making matters more complex, such crimes can be prosecuted not only in standing courts here or abroad but also in domestic or international ad hoc courts—like those convened for the Nuremberg trials—designed to deal with specific political concerns. Various combinations are suited to different situations:

International Criminal Tribunal

In recent years, nations have joined together on an ad hoc basis, often with U.S. support or under the auspices of the United Nations, to prosecute military and political figures from Cambodia, Rwanda, West Africa, and the former Yugoslavia. Many of these tribunals are still in progress and thus far have achieved mixed results. But they have by and large followed a predictable pattern. Rather than attempting to prosecute all potential war criminals, they have instead focused on those in positions of authority whose action or inaction had broad consequences. And they have shown a particular concern for offenses committed systematically against persons outside of combat, who in many cases have been disarmed and taken prisoner.

The precedent for all of these tribunals was the Nuremberg trials, convened at the end of World War II. Under U.S. leadership, the Allies prosecuted not only leaders of the Nazi Party but also industrialists, doctors, and prison commandants. The Americans and Soviets also wanted to prosecute the people who had created the legal framework for the Nazi regime, but British and French leaders objected. Consequently, the United States, acting on its own, convened a separate Nuremberg tribunal to try lawyers, judges, and legal policymakers. In doing so, it established the principle that policymakers who overrode the mandatory prohibitions of international law against harming prisoners in wartime could be prosecuted as war criminals, no matter how many internal memos they had written to the contrary.

The International Criminal Court, headquartered in the Netherlands, was created in 1998 to provide a permanent version of such a tribunal. The ICC bears many traces of U.S. authorship, and indeed its establishment, in one form or another, was urged by presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Bill Clinton. But American conservatives, opposing what they saw as a limitation on American sovereignty, have blocked the U.S. from joining the 108 other nations that have signed the Court’s foundational treaty. And even the institution’s strongest advocates agree that, although the ICC is suited to prosecuting political leaders in minor states, it was never intended as a check on the great powers. In fact, the ICC’s success depends upon its gaining the support of those great powers.

As things stand it would be legally very difficult and politically impossible for the ICC to indict American policymakers for war crimes, and even more difficult for an ad hoc group of nations to do so. Moreover, any such effort would probably provoke a public-opinion backlash within the United States.

Foreign Courts

Most crimes are subject to sanction on the basis of territoriality—that is, the crime is viewed as having occurred on the soil of one particular state, and that state has the right to enforce its criminal law by prosecuting the crime or not. War crimes, however, are not subject to this territorial limitation. Any nation that has a reasonable relationship to the crime can prosecute the alleged criminal—the state where the offense occurred, any of the warring states, or a state whose nationals were harmed or mistreated. Consequently, many other nations have standing, under international law, to pursue war-crimes prosecutions against U.S. citizens.

The example of Augusto Pinochet shows how such an approach might unfold. In 1998, the onetime dictator of Chile, then eighty-two, was seized in Britain on a Spanish arrest warrant. He was charged with several crimes stemming from his seventeen years in power—including torture, illegal detention, and forced disappearances—and placed under house arrest in a Surrey mansion while diplomats from all three countries debated the next steps. After several months of complex legal proceedings, the British determined that Pinochet was medically unfit to stand trial and returned him to Chile, thus maintaining their claim to jurisdiction without actually pursuing a prosecution. Even this attenuated process would be difficult to replicate with an American political figure, however. Most nations that have a record of prosecuting war crimes are close allies of the United States and would be justifiably concerned about the practicalities of maintaining positive defense relations with the world’s preeminent power. Moreover, the United States—like Chile— almost certainly would not extradite a former official for such purposes.

At present, however, one criminal prosecution is already pending. It arises from the abduction in Italy, under the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, of an Egyptian cleric named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. Twenty-six Americans—including diplomats, intelligence officers, and a military attaché—face criminal charges in absentia in the case. For the Americans the abduction was a sensitive national- security operation. But for the Italian criminal-justice authorities it was simply the armed assault and kidnapping of a resident alien. Even if, as widely expected, the case produces convictions, the American operatives will not be extradited to Italy. They will, however, have difficulties traveling outside the United States.

Even this mild form of sanction, however, fails to address the domestic political problem. True justice cannot be compelled from without. If the United States wishes to demonstrate to the world, and to itself, that its abdication of human-rights principles was an anomaly, it will have to do so under its own auspices.

Domestic Courts

Most violations of the laws of war are punished through a military court system. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which provides the tools for enforcement of the laws of war in the United States, civilians as well as uniformed service members may be prosecuted, though such prosecutions are rare and raise significant constitutional issues. Moreover, such systems are fine for punishing errant soldiers, but they seldom function properly when the culpable person is far up the chain of command. This is largely because military justice is not concerned exclusively with justice; it is also concerned with upholding command authority. There is little likelihood, therefore, that policymakers would be prosecuted before a court-martial.

Torture is forbidden by federal law as well.⁶6. 18 U.S.C. § 2340 makes it a crime for any “person acting under the color of law” to “inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.” The penalty for this crime—as Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel carefully noted in a 2003 memo on the subject—is up to twenty years in federal prison. Could a federal prosecutor take it upon himself to enforce that law? Alberto Gonzales expressed concern in a 2002 memo that a prosecutor might display sufficient independence to do just that. But thus far none has. The scandal surrounding the dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006 helps explain why: the Bush Administration has maintained an unprecedentedly tight rein on its prosecutors, acting harshly when they depart from the prescribed political path. Indeed, so many high-level figures at Justice were involved in creating the legal mechanism for torture that the Justice Department has effectively disqualified itself as an investigative vehicle, even under a new administration.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE:

Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an outlaw administration—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine)

Against the Militarized Academy

Thursday 20 November 2008

by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has announced an effort to increase the militarization of higher education. (Photo: FilmMaker Magazine)
While there is an ongoing discussion about what shape the military-industrial complex will take under an Obama presidency, what is often left out of this analysis is the intrusion of the military into higher education. One example of the increasingly intensified and expansive symbiosis between the military-industrial complex and academia was on full display when Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, announced the creation of what he calls a new “Minerva Consortium,” ironically named after the goddess of wisdom, whose purpose is to fund various universities to “carry out social-sciences research relevant to national security.”(1) Gates’s desire to turn universities into militarized knowledge factories producing knowledge, research and personnel in the interest of the Homeland (In)Security State should be of special concern for intellectuals, artists, academics and others who believe that the university should oppose such interests and alignments. At the very least, the emergence of the Minerva Consortium raises a larger set of concerns about the ongoing militarization of higher education in the United States.

In a post-9/11 world, with its all-embracing war on terror and a culture of fear, the increasing spread of the discourse and values of militarization throughout the social order is intensifying the shift from the promise of a liberal democracy to the reality of a militarized society. Militarization suggests more than simply a militaristic ideal – with its celebration of war as the truest measure of the health of the nation and the soldier-warrior as the most noble expression of the merging of masculinity and unquestioning patriotism – but an intensification and expansion of the underlying values, practices, ideologies, social relations and cultural representations associated with military culture. What appears new about the amplified militarization of the post-9/11 world is that it has become normalized, serving as a powerful educational force that shapes our lives, memories and daily experiences. As an educational force, military power produces identities, goods, institutions, knowledge, modes of communication and affective investments – in short, it now bears down on all aspects of social life and the social order. As Michael Geyer points out, what is distinctive about the militarization of the social order is that civil society not only “organizes itself for the production of violence,”(2) but increasingly spurs a gradual erosion of civil liberties. Military power and policies are expanded to address not only matters of defense and security, but also problems associated with the entire health and social life of the nation, which are now measured by military spending, discipline and loyalty, as well as hierarchical modes of authority.

As citizens increasingly assume the roles of informer, soldier and consumer willing to enlist in or be conscripted by the totalizing war on terror, we see the very idea of the university as a site of critical thinking, public service and socially responsible research being usurped by a manic jingoism and a market-driven fundamentalism that enshrine the entrepreneurial spirit and military aggression as means to dominate and control society. This should not surprise us, since, as William G. Martin, a professor of sociology at Binghamton University, indicates, “universities, colleges and schools have been targeted precisely because they are charged with both socializing youth and producing knowledge of peoples and cultures beyond the borders of Anglo-America.”(3) But rather than be lulled into complacency by the insidious spread of corporate and military power, we need to be prepared to reclaim institutions such as the university that have historically served as vital democratic spheres protecting and serving the interests of social justice and equality. What I want to suggest is that such a struggle is not only political, but also pedagogical in nature.

Over 17 million students pass through the hallowed halls of academe, and it is crucial that they be educated in ways that enable them to recognize creeping militarization and its effects throughout American society, particularly in terms of how these effects threaten “democratic government at home just as they menace the independence and sovereignty of other countries.”(4) But students must also recognize how such anti-democratic forces work in attempting to dismantle the university itself as a place to learn how to think critically and participate in public debate and civic engagement.(5) In part, this means giving them the tools to fight for the demilitarization of knowledge on college campuses – to resist complicity with the production of knowledge, information and technologies in classrooms and research labs that contribute to militarized goals and violence.

Even so, there is more at stake than simply educating students to be alert to the dangers of militarization and the way in which it is redefining the very mission of higher education. Chalmers Johnson, in his continuing critique of the threat that the politics of empire presents to democracy at home and abroad, argues that if the United States is not to degenerate into a military dictatorship, in spite of Obama’s election, a grass-roots movement will have to occupy center stage in opposing militarization, government secrecy and imperial power, while reclaiming the basic principles of democracy.(6) Such a task may seem daunting, but there is a crucial need for faculty, students, administrators and concerned citizens to develop alliances for long-term organizations and social movements to resist the growing ties among higher education, on the one hand, and the armed forces, intelligence agencies and war industries on the other – ties that play a crucial role in reproducing mili tarized knowledge.

Opposing militarization as part of a broader pedagogical strategy in and out of the classroom also raises the question of what kinds of competencies, skills and knowledge might be crucial to such a task. One possibility is to develop critical educational theories and practices that define the space of learning not only through the critical consumption of knowledge but also through its production for peaceful and socially just ends. In the fight against militarization and “armed intellectuals,” educators need a language of critique, but they also need a language that embraces a sense of hope and collective struggle. This means elaborating the meaning of politics through a concerted effort to expand the space of politics by reclaiming “the public character of spaces, relations, and institutions regarded as private” on the other.(7) We live at a time when matters of life and death are central to political governance. While registering the shift in power toward the large-scale pr oduction of death, disposability and exclusion, a new understanding of the meaning and purpose of higher education must also point to notions of agency, power and responsibility that operate in the service of life, democratic struggles and the expansion of human rights.

Finally, if higher education is to come to grips with the multilayered pathologies produced by militarization, it will have to rethink not merely the space of the university as a democratic public sphere, but also the global space in which intellectuals, educators, students, artists, labor unions and other social actors and movements can form transnational alliances to oppose the death-dealing ideology of militarization and its effects on the world – including violence, pollution, massive poverty, racism, the arms trade, growth of privatized armies, civil conflict, child slavery and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the Bush regime comes to an end, it is time for educators and students to take a stand and develop global organizations that can be mobilized in the effort to supplant a culture of war with a culture of peace, whose elemental principles must be grounded in relations of economic, political, cultural and social democracy and the desire to sustain human life.

(1). Brainard, Jeffrey. (April 16, 2008) “U.S. Defense Secretary Asks Universities for New Cooperation,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, online at http://chronicle.com/news/article/4316/us-defense-secretary-asks-universities-for-new-cooperation.

(2). Michael Geyer, “The Militarization of Europe, 1914-1945,” in The Militarization of the Western World, ed. John Gillis (Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 79.

(3). William G. Martin, “Manufacturing the Homeland Security Campus and Cadre,” ACAS Bulletin 70 (Spring 2005), p. 1.

(4). Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). p. 291.

(5). See Cary Nelson, “The National Security State,” Cultural Studies 4:3 (2004), pp. 357-361.

(6). Chalmers Johnson, “Empire v. Democracy,” TomDispatch.com (January 31, 2007), available online at http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views07/0131-27.htm

(7). Jacques Rancière, “Democracy, Republic, Representation,” Constellations 13:3 (2006), p. 299.

»

t r u t h o u t | Against the Militarized Academy

Reboot the FCC

Lessig: It’s Time to Demolish the FCC | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com

Ecuador says CIA infiltrated its military.

Agence France-Presse.
Published: Friday October 31, 2008.

QUITO (AFP) – The US Central Intelligence Agency had “full knowledge” of the deadly Colombian raid March 1 on a FARC rebel camp inside Ecuador that led to a rupture in ties between Bogota and Quito, Ecuador’s Defense Minister Javier Ponce said.

The CIA “had full knowledge of what was happening in Angostura,” the border area in Ecuador where the attack took place, Ponce said while presenting the results of an official investigation into the suspected infiltration of Ecuador’s armed forces by US intelligence agents.

Investigators “even detected a call by the CIA on the morning of March 1 announcing the attack in Angostura,” the minister added.

Authorities suspected that the incursion — decried by the Organization of American States as a Colombian “premeditated violation” of Ecuadoran sovereignty — relied on support from a US aircraft assigned to joint US-Ecuador anti-drug missions from a US Former Operating Location (FOL) in Manta, Ecuador, he said.

“The main doubt is about the activities of a US intelligence aircraft which surprisingly arrived at FOL Manta one week before the attack…. The arrival of this plane marked the beginning of night flights that had not been normally undertaken from the FOL,” Ponce said.

The same aircraft “permanently withdrew from the base” four days after the raid, he added.

In April, Ecuador’s leftist President Rafael Correa sacked his defense minister and police chief after alleging the CIA had infiltrated his country’s security apparatus to help US ally Colombia.

The raid on the camp of the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) killed more than 20 people, including FARC’s number-two guerrilla Raul Reyes, four Mexicans and an Ecuadoran.

A diplomatic stand-off quickly ensued, with Quito expelling Bogota’s ambassador on March 3 and both sides ordering thousands of troops to their common border.

While military tensions have eased, diplomatic relations between the neighbors have yet to be normalized.

The FARC is Latin America’s oldest and most powerful insurgency, and has been trying to topple the Bogota government since the 1960s.

Source: The Raw Story | Ecuador says CIA infiltrated its military

Schwarzenegger: I Would Like To Be President!

Schwarzenegger’s Green Challenge , California Governor Says He’ll Stick To Environmental Plans, Despite Economic Crisis – CBS News

Rep. Nadler (D-NY) Introduces H.R. 1531 | 911blogger.com

By Thomas Frank USA TODAY.

WASHINGTON — Fewer than 1% of airline passengers singled out at airports for suspicious behavior are arrested, Transportation Security Administration figures show, raising complaints that too many innocent people are stopped.

A TSA program launched in early 2006 that looks for terrorists using a controversial surveillance method has led to more than 160,000 people in airports receiving scrutiny, such as a pat-down search or a brief interview. That has resulted in 1,266 arrests, often on charges of carrying drugs or fake IDs, the TSA said.

The TSA program trains screeners to become “behavior detection officers” who patrol terminals and checkpoints looking for travelers who act oddly or appear to answer questions suspiciously.

Critics say the number of arrests is small and indicates the program is flawed.

“That’s an awful lot of people being pulled aside and inconvenienced,” said Carnegie Mellon scientist Stephen Fienberg, who studied the TSA program and other counterterrorism efforts. “I think it’s a sham. We have no evidence it works.”

TSA spokeswoman Ellen Howe said the program has been “incredibly effective” at catching criminals at airports. “It definitely gets at things that other layers of security might miss,” Howe said.

In many cases, the extra scrutiny is a casual conversation with a TSA behavior officer that shows someone is innocent, Howe said. Studies are underway that analyze the program’s effectiveness, she added.

The program has grown from 43 major airports last year to more than 150 airports, including some with just 20 flights a day. The number of behavior officers will jump from 2,470 to 3,400 by October.

The TSA has not publicly said whether it has caught a terrorist through the program. The agency says that some who are arrested, particularly on fake ID charges, may be scouting for a possible attack.

Some scientists say the TSA effort is just as likely to flag a nervous traveler as a terrorist.

“The use of these technologies for the purpose that the TSA is interested in moves into an area where we don’t have proven science,” said Robert Levenson, a psychologist at the University of California-Berkeley.

Although observers can perceive whether someone appears anxious or is acting deceptively, they can’t tell whether that person is planning an attack or something such as an extramarital affair, Levenson said.

Levenson and Fienberg were part of a National Academy of Sciences team whose report last month said “behavioral surveillance” has “enormous potential for violating” privacy.

The report calls for more research and says surveillance should be used only as “preliminary screening” to find people who merit “follow-up investigation.” That is how the TSA uses the program, Howe said.

Paul Ekman, a San Francisco psychologist who helped design the TSA program, said it can be effective, but it needs more study.

“The shortcoming is, we don’t know how many people are showing suspicious behaviors and aren’t being noticed,” Ekman said.

USATODAY.com

Video: Seeing Without Sight Times Health Guide: Blindness.

BLINDSIGHT A patient whose visual lobes in the brain were destroyed was able to navigate an obstacle course and recognize fearful faces subconsciously.

Blind, Yet Seeing – The Brain’s Subconscious Visual Sense – NYTimes.com

Gotcha!

Radley Balko | December 6, 2008, 1:28pm

Hit & Run > Gotcha! – Reason Magazine

Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash: Non-Profit Demands Full Federal Investigation.

www.rovecybergate.com

Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash: Non-Profit Demands Full Federal Investigation – MarketWatch

See also:

• OUT THE RABBIT HOLE: Rove Cybergate Campaign – Thursday, September 4th, 2008 – Robert Larson interviews Cliff Arnebeck who is the lead attorney in a RICO lawsuit designed to shine light on the conspiracy to subvert our elections, our constitution and our justice department to create an unchallengeable “unitary executive” corporatocracy.  Arnebeck.mp3 (MP3 audio)
• The Raw Story | Ohio TV station: Was Connell crash an accident or murder?
• Mike Connell was warned not to fly before plane crash

Swat Team conducts food raid in rural Ohio.

On Monday, December 1, a SWAT team with semi-automatic rifles entered the private home of the Stowers family in LaGrange, Ohio, herded the family onto the couches in the living room, and kept guns trained on grandparents, their daughter-in-law (whose husband is currently serving as a U.S. Navy Seabee in Iraq), their children and grandchildren for four hours. The team was aggressive and belligerent. The children were quite traumatized. At some point, the “bad cop” SWAT team was relieved by another team, a “good cop” team that tried to befriend the family.

The Stowers family has run a very large, well-known food cooperative called Manna Storehouse on the western side of the greater Cleveland area for many years. [See video: The Stowers tell their story]

There were agents from the Department of Agriculture present, one of them identified as Bill Lesho. The search warrant is reportedly suspicious-looking. Agents began rifling through all of the family’s possessions, a task that lasted hours and resulted in a complete upheaval of every private area in the home. Many items were taken that were not listed on the search warrant. The family was not permitted a phone call, and they were not told what crime they were being charged with. They were not read their rights. Over ten thousand dollars worth of food was taken, including the family’s personal stock of food for the coming year. All of their computers, and all of their cell phones were taken, as well as phone and contact records. The food cooperative was virtually shut down. There was no rational explanation, nor justification, for this extreme violation of Constitutional rights.

Presumably Manna Storehouse might eventually be charged with running a retail establishment without a license. Why then the Gestapo-type interrogation for a 3rd degree misdemeanor charge? This incident has raised the ominous specter of a restrictive new era in State regulation and enforcement over the nation’s private food supply.

For verification see this court filing showing that government exceeding its authority

This same type of abusive search and seizure was reported by those innocents who fell victim to oppressive federal drug laws passed in the 1990s. The present circumstance raises the obvious question: is there some rabid new interpretation of an existing drug law that considers food a controlled substance worthy of a nasty SWAT operation? Or worse, is there a previously unrecognized provision(s) pertaining to food in the Homeland Security measures? Some have suggested that it was merely an out-of-control, hot-to-trot ODA [Ohio Department of Agriculture] agent, and, if so, this would be a best-case scenario. Anything else might spell the beginning of the end for the freedom to eat unregulated and unmonitored food.

One blogger familiar with the Ohio situation has reported that:

“Interestingly, I believe they [Manna Storehouse] said a month or so ago, an undercover ODA official came to their little store and claimed to have a sick father wanting to join the co-op. Both the owner and her daughter-in-law had a horrible feeling about the man, and decided not to allow him into the co-op and notified him by certified mail. He came back to the co-op demanding to be part of it. They refused and gave him names of other businesses and health food stores closer to his home. Not coincidentally, this man was there yesterday as part of the raid.”

The same blog also noted that the Ohio Department of Agriculture has been chastised by the courts in several previous instances for its aggression, including trying to entrap an Amish man in a raw milk “sale,” which backfired when it became known that the Amish believe in a literal interpretation of “give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away” (Matthew 5:42)

The issue appears to be the discovery of a bit of non-institutional beef in an Oberlin College food service freezer a year ago that was tracked down by a county sanitation official to Manna Storehouse. Oberlin College’s student food coop is widely known for its strident ideological stance about eating organic foods. It seems that the Oberlin student food cooperative had joined the Manna Storehouse food cooperative in order to buy organic foods in bulk from the national organic food distributor United, which services buying clubs across the nation. The sanitation official, James Boddy, evidently contacted the Ohio Department of Agriculture. After the first contact by state ODA officials, Manna Storehouse reportedly wrote them a letter requesting assistance and guidelines for complying with the law. This letter was never answered. Rather, the ODA agent tried several times to infiltrate the coop, as described above. When his attempts failed, the SWAT team showed up!

More details here…

Swat Team conducts food raid in rural Ohio

UPDATE:

Raid on Family’s Home and Organic Food Co-Op Challenged

posted December 17, 2008.

Columbus – The Buckeye Institute’s 1851 Center for Constitutional Law today took legal action against the Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA) and the Lorain County Health Department for violating the constitutional rights of John and Jacqueline Stowers of LaGrange, Ohio. The Stowers operate an organic food cooperative called Manna Storehouse. ODA and Lorain County Health Department agents forcefully raided their home and unlawfully seized the family’s personal food supply, cell phones and personal computers. The legal center seeks to halt future similar raids. The complaint was filed in Lorain County Court of Common Pleas.

“The use of these police state tactics on a peaceful family is simply unacceptable,” Buckeye Institute President David Hansen said.  “Officers rushed into the Stowers’ home with guns drawn and held the family – including ten young children – captive for six hours. This outrageous case of bureaucratic overreach must be addressed.”

The Buckeye Institute argues the right to buy food directly from local farmers; distribute locally-grown food to neighbors; and pool resources to purchase food in bulk are rights that do not require a license. In addition, the right of peaceful citizens to be free from paramilitary police raids, searches and seizures is guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and Section 14, Article 1 of the Ohio Constitution.

“The Stowers’ constitutional rights were violated over grass-fed cattle, pastured chickens and pesticide-free produce,” Buckeye Institute 1851 Center of Constitutional Law Director Maurice Thompson said. “Ohioans do not need a government permission slip to run a family farm and co-op, and should not be subjected to raids when they do not have one. This legal action will ensure the ODA understands and respects Ohioans’ rights.”

On the morning of December 1, 2008, law enforcement officers forcefully entered the Stowers’ residence, without first announcing they were police or stating the purpose of the visit. With guns drawn, officers swiftly and immediately moved to the upstairs of the home, finding ten children in the middle of a home-schooling lesson. Officers then moved Jacqueline Stowers and her children to their living room where they were held for more than six hours.

Such are raids are beyond the scope of the purely administrative authority delegated to ODA and county health departments. In enforcing licensure laws, these agencies are only permitted to contract for routine enforcement services. Forceful raids and sweeping searches and seizures are not routine, and exceed the authority granted to ODA and county health departments.

The Buckeye Institute seeks an injunction against similar future raids, and a declaration that such licensure laws are unconstitutional as applied the Stowers and individuals like them.

There has never been a complaint filed against Manna Storehouse or the Stowers related to the quality or healthfulness of the food distributed through the co-op.  The Buckeye Institute’s legal center will defend the Stowers from any criminal charges related to the raid.

A copy of the complaint is available at buckeye institute dot org slash stowers dot pdf.  A video of the Stowers describing the raid is available here.

The Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, together with its 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, is a nonpartisan research and educational institute devoted to individual liberty, economic freedom, personal responsibility and limited government in Ohio.

www.buckeyeinstitute.org/article/1284

Career Army Officer Sues Cheney, Rumsfeld For 9/11 Complicity

April Gallop files suit for failure to warn people inside Pentagon despite advance knowledge, as well as prior knowledge and complicity in terror attacks

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, December 18, 2008

A career Army officer who was injured in the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11 is suing Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for failing to issue a warning that American Airlines Flight 77 was about to hit the building despite receiving knowledge of its approach some 20 minutes in advance.

Retired Army officer April Gallop, a ranking specialist with top secret clearance who began working at the Pentagon in 2000, has also filed suit against US Air Force General Richard Myers, who was acting chairman of the joint chiefs on 9/11.

Gallop was knocked unconscious when the roof collapsed in her office her and her 2-month-old baby sustained a serious brain injury after suffering the consequences of what Gallop describes as “two explosions”. Gallop does not believe that a Boeing 757 struck the building on 9/11. The lawsuit charges that the attack was “engineered by other means, a planted bomb or bombs and/or a missile,” citing the lack of plane debris witnessed after the attack, along with evidence from the “black box” discovered at the scene, which indicated that the plane passed low over the building immediately before the fireball was observed, as well as the complete failure of ground and air defenses which protect the Pentagon.

The official 9/11 timeline confirms that NORAD and the FAA knew that Flight 77 had been hijacked and was likely headed towards Washington at 9:24 a.m, 19 minutes before the Pentagon was struck. The gap between the second plane hitting the World Trade Center and the incident at the Pentagon was a full 40 minutes.

“The ex-G.I. plaintiff alleges she has been denied government support since then, because she raised ‘painful questions’ about the inexplicable failure of military defenses at the Pentagon that day, and especially the failure of officials to warn and evacuate the occupants of the building when they knew the attack was imminent” said Gallop’s attorney William Veale in a press release.

The suit charges that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Myers conducted a conspiracy to facilitate the attacks and alleges that other unnamed individuals had foreknowledge. The preliminary statement of the lawsuit charges that the attacks were staged so as to “Generate a political atmosphere of acceptance in which the new Administration could enact and implement radical changes in the policy and practice of constitutional government in our country.”

The text of the lawsuit lists a mountain of evidence indicating that top members of the Bush cabinet had a hand in the attacks, focusing not just on the Pentagon, but prior knowledge of the attacks and the inconceivable response to all four hijacked airliners on 9/11.

The suit cites the Project For a New American Century strategy documents as proof that top Neo-Cons were yearning for “a new Pearl Harbor” in order to whip up support for a pre-planned geopolitical agenda.

Read more »

Tom Vilsack’s Kind of Agriculture.

Another Shill for Monsanto.

By RONNIE CUMMINS.

Yesterday’s announcement that former Iowa Governor, Tom Vilsack, has been selected as the new Secretary of Agriculture sent a chill through the sustainable food and farming community who have been lobbying for a champion in the new administration.

“Vilsack’s nomination sends the message that dangerous, untested, unlabeled genetically engineered crops will be the norm in the Obama Administration,” said Ronnie Cummins, Executive Director of Organic Consumers Association. “Our nation’s future depends on crafting a forward-thinking strategy to promote organic and sustainable food and farming, and address the related crises of climate change, diminishing energy supplies, deteriorating public health, and economic depression.”

The Department of Agriculture during the Bush Administration failed to promote a sustainable vision for food and farming and did not protect consumers from the chemical-intensive toxic practices inherent to industrial agriculture. While factory farms and junk food have been subsidized with billions of tax dollars, the US industrial farm system has released massive amounts of climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and increased our dependence on foreign oil.

The Secretary of Agriculture is responsible for directing the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its $97 billion annual budget, including the National Organic Program, food stamp and nutrition programs, agriculture subsidies, and the Forest Service.

While Vilsack has worked to restrain livestock monopolies, his overall record is one of aiding and abetting Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs, also known as factory farms). Vilsack’s support for unsustainable industrial ethanol production has already caused global corn and grain prices to skyrocket, literally taking food off the table for a billion people in the developing world.

Over the past month, Organic Consumers Association members have sent over 20,000 emails to President-Elect Obama’s Transition Team, calling for the appointment of a Secretary of Agriculture who would develop and implement a plan that promotes family-scale farming, a safe and nutritious food system, and a sustainable and organic vision for the future.

“Obama’s choice for Secretary of Agriculture points to the continuation of agribusiness as usual, the failed policies of chemical- and energy-intensive, genetically engineered industrial agriculture,” said Cummins. “Americans were promised ‘change,’ not just another shill for Monsanto and corporate agribusiness. Considering the challenges we collectively face as a nation, from climate change and rising energy costs to food insecurity, we need an administration that moves beyond ‘business as usual’ to fundamental change—before it’s too late,” concluded Cummins.

Vilsack’s business as usual positions have included the following:

·     Vilsack has been a strong supporter of genetically engineered pharmaceutical crops, especially pharmaceutical corn.

·     The biggest biotechnology industry group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, named Vilsack Governor of the Year. He is also the founder and former chair of the Governor’s Biotechnology Partnership.

·     When Vilsack created the Iowa Values Fund, his first poster child for economic development was Trans Ova and their pursuit of cloning dairy cows.

·     The undemocratic 2005 seed pre-emption bill was the Vilsack’s brainchild. The law strips local government’s right to regulate genetically engineered seed.

·     Vilsack is an ardent supporter of corn and soy based biofuels, which use as much or more energy to produce as they generate and drive up world food prices, literally starving the poor.

The OCA has launched an online petition campaign at www.stopvilsack.orgto mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to oppose Vilsack’s Senate confirmation.

Additionally, OCA’s nationwide network of 850,000 organic consumers are urging members of Congress to move beyond business as usual and implement a comprehensive strategy for organic food and farming in 2009 and beyond.

Ronnie Cummins is director of the Organic Consumers Alliance. He can be reached at: ronnie@organicconsumers.org.

Ronnie Cummins: Another Shill for Monsanto

Obama Slam-Duncans Education
By Greg Palast.

December 16, 2008 “Information Clearinghouse” — – Hey, you Liberal Democrats. You may have won the election, but you’re getting CREAMED in the transition.

Today, President-elect Barack Obama stuck it to you. He’s chosen Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.

Who? Duncan is most decidedly not an educator. He’s a lawyer. But Duncan has this extraordinary qualification: He’s Obama’s pick-up basketball buddy from Hyde Park.

I can’t make this up.

Not that Duncan hasn’t mucked about in the educational system. Chicago Boss Richie Daley put this guy in charge of the horror show called Chicago Public Schools where Duncan turned a bad system into a REALLY bad system.

And Obama knows it. Indeed, although he plays roundball with Duncan (who was captain of the Harvard basketball team), State Senator Obama was one of the only local Chicago officials who refused to send his kids to Duncan’s public schools. (The Obamas sent Sasha and Malia to the Laboratory School, where Duncan’s methods are derided as dangerously ludicrous.)

So, if The One won’t trust his kids to Duncan, why is he handing Duncan ours?

The answer: Duncan is supported by a coterie of teacher-union hating Republicans. The vocal cheerleader for the Duncan appointment was David Brooks, the New York Times columnist; the REPUBLICAN columnist.

Hey, didn’t those guys LOSE?

The problem with Duncan is not party affiliation. The problem is education philosophy. And Duncan is a Bush baby through and through, a card-carrying supporter of the program best called, “No Child’s Behind Left.”

At the heart of the program is testing. And more testing. Testing instead of teaching. When tests go badly, the solution is to push the low-test-score kids to drop out of school. If triage isn’t enough, then attack their teachers.

Here’s how Duncan operates this Bush program in Chicago at Collins High in the Lawndale ghetto. Teachers there work with kids from homeless shelters from an economically devastated neighborhood. Believe it or not, the kids don’t get high test scores. So Chicago fired the teachers, every one of them. Then they brought in new teachers and fired THEM too when, surprise!, test scores still didn’t rise.

The reward for a teacher volunteering for a tough neighborhood is to get harassed, blamed and fired. Now THAT’S a brilliant program, Mr. Duncan. But Duncan’s own failures have not gotten HIM fired. As long as his 20-foot jumpshot holds, he’s Mr. Secretary.

In no other cabinet department is the lack of expertise, lack of accomplishment, lack of a degree in the field found acceptable but in Education.

But what horrifies me more than Duncan’s lack of credentials is Obama’s kowtowing to the right-wing clique crusading against the teachers’ union and progressive education. The ill philosophy behind the Bush-brand education theories Duncan promotes, “Teach-to-the-Test,” forces teachers to limit classroom time to pounding in rote low-end skills, easily measured on standardized tests. The transparent purpose is to create a future class of worker-drones. Add in some computer training and – voila! – millions of lower-income kids are trained on the cheap to function, not think.

Analytical thinking skills, creative skills, questioning skills are left exclusively to privileged little Bushes at Phillips Andover Academy or privileged little Obamas at the Laboratory School.

For the rest of America’s children, instead of hope, we’ll have hoops.

Greg Palast is the father of school-aged twins and the author of, “Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal ‘08, No Child’s Behind Left” his New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse. Palast is a Nation Institute Puffin Foundation Fellow for investigative reporting.

© 2008 Greg Palast

Obama Slam-Duncans Education: Information Clearing House – ICH

What the data miners are digging up about you – New Scientist

by Amanda Gefter and Tom Simonite.

In today’s technological world we leave electronic traces wherever we go, whether shopping online or on the high street, at work or at play. That data is the raw material for a new industry of number crunchers trying to explain and influence human behaviour, as Stephen Baker explains in his new book The Numerati.

In the book, Baker meets the maths whizzes at the bleeding edge of this new way of doing business, politics, and even matchmaking.

You might be surprised at some of the things Baker’s “numerati” want to know and can already find out about you. Read on for some examples taken from the book, and click here to read our full review.

Mountains of facts

Databases know more about you than you realise. A Carnegie Mellon University study recently showed that simply by knowing gender, birth date and postal zip code, 87% of people in the United States could be pinpointed by name.

Websites can collect huge amounts of data from users. Retailers, for example, can track our every click, what we buy, how much we spend, which advertisements we see – even which ones we linger over with our mouse.

Sites can easily access your entire web browser history, enabling them to try and guess your gender and other demographic information.

Some of the links that data can reveal are surprising, and profitable. Ad targeting firm Tacoda discovered that the people most likely to click on car rental ads are those that have recently read an obituary online, apparently planning their trip to a funeral.

The second largest group are romantic movie fans – they are suckers for weekend rentals perhaps trying to emulate the lovey-dovey escapes common in romantic fiction.

The business of data

Data is big business for the numerati. US firm Acxiom keeps shopping and lifestyle data on some 200 million Americans.

Read more here:

What the data miners are digging up about you – tech – 28 November 2008 – New Scientist