How Democracies Die

By Mike Lofgren,
Courtesy Of "Truth-Out"

Picture a country at the height of its international power and prestige. It has military forces stationed around the globe. It is an intellectual leader. Its citizens are pleased to insist that the national idea, their country's way of life, is a beacon of enlightenment and human rights for the rest of the world. Indeed, they are wont to harp on the notion that the country embodies the very concept of Western Civilization.

But beneath the façade of greatness there is creeping rot. The rich (who are accustomed to getting their way in all things) corrupt the system and buy the people's representatives in this venerable democracy. The country lurches towards political polarization and, predictably, the machinery of orderly governance becomes gridlocked. The politicians of the right, who take every opportunity to bellow for increased spending on the military, refuse to raise the revenues to pay for it. Why?

Because the wealthy citizens who happen to own these representatives refuse to pay a single cent in additional income taxes. Their class solidarity as alleged "'job creators"' who are owed unconditional deference outweighs their loyalty to the nation at large. 

They successfully demand that even the crushing expense of a long war should be paid for by loans from abroad (the interest payments on which merely add to the expense) rather than by direct taxes from those citizens best able to afford them. Naturally, a growing share of the population develops a visceral sense that the system is rigged.

There is worse to come. There gradually coalesces a bitterly reactionary political alliance between the plutocratic rich; a retrograde religious Right seeking to roll back the secular state; hidebound militarists; and the species of glib, pseudo-intellectual malcontents who are drawn to political extremism like iron filings to a magnet. They all seek a purported restoration of a country that never existed: a pious, socially harmonious nation where everybody else knows their place. The political groupings of the center and left, on the other hand, are dithering, irresolute, and have not the courage of their own alleged convictions.

This uncomfortably familiar-sounding litany of social dysfunction actually refers to the French Third Republic (1870-1940). One of the most informative, and for English-speaking readers, popularly accessible accounts is still William L. Shirer's magisterial "The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940." Shirer, although a sentimental Francophile himself, delivered a damning indictment of the pathological tendencies of the Third Republic. The immediate cause of the stunning German breakthrough at Sedan in May 1940, and the subsequent French surrender, may simply have been defective military technique. To Shirer, however, the deeper cause was a depressed national morale fostered by political polarization, governmental gridlock and an upper class that had psychologically seceded from the country.

Shirer's account of the Republic's efforts to put its finances in order after the enormous expenditures of World War I bears an eerie resemblance to the current farce in Washington. There was a theoretical limit on what the Bank of France (a privately held entity like the Federal Reserve) could advance to the government that was much the same as the statutory debt limit in the United States. This was no problem for the conservative Poincaré government: the breech was committed, and went unremarked in the press. But when the moderately left-of-center Herriotgovernment breeched the same limit, a cacophony arose about fiscal irresponsibility. And when the Herriot ministry sought to redress this fiscal crisis with an overdue levy on France's wealthy, the cacophony became a firestorm in the plutocracy-owned media. Herriot's proposed solution also met with blackmail: the possessing class threatened to expatriate its capital in the manner of the present-day American tycoon who incorporates himself in the Cayman Islands or Singapore.

Several of the French overclass proceeded to attack the basis of parliamentary democracy itself. François Coty (of the perfume fortune) bought the mildly conservative Le Figaro and turned it into an extremist rag, while later pouring millions of francs into right-wing anti-parliamentary movements, some of them overtly fascist paramilitaries. When the moderately socialist government of Léon Blum was elected in 1936, the estrangement from France of much of its millionaire class and the right-wing groups they supported was such that they adopted the slogan "Better Hitler than Blum!" Their preference for a German dictator who had spoken and written for 15 years about his unshakable determination to militarily subjugate France to a government that had proposed a 40-hour work week requires no further analysis. When the German panzers broke through at the River Meuse and France fell, many of France's better sort were not unduly discomfited. The next year, the racing season at Longchamp carried on much as before, with Paris's high societyturning out in all its finery.

Consistent with its penchant for creating its own reality, the American Right is fond of fabricating quotes about the way the world works. A creative variant is when the Right attributes such quotes to famous historical figures to give the words an aura of timeless sagacity. One such chestnut is this: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largesse out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy." This quote has been variously "credited" to Benjamin Franklin and Alexis de Tocqueville, among others. Its actual origins appear to be no more exalted than the opinion page of the Daily Oklahoman of December 9, 1951. But it accurately distills the right-wing conceit about the cause of decadence in democracies.

A compelling counterexample to this "wisdom" about how the rabble with its boundless sense of entitlement supposedly destroys democracy is furnished by the French Third Republic. In that country, the native plutocracy, and the corrupt reactionary politicians who did its bidding, refused to act as citizens bound in patriotic duty to give as well as take. They meanly betrayed the majority of their countrymen and left the nation - once the world's inspiration as the cradle of the rights of man - a squalid dictatorship.

Clearing The Path For Future Tyranny

By Murtaza Hussain,
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

The right to indefinitely detain citizens without trial, classified kill-lists and "disposition matrices", a fast-expanding fleet of legally-unaccountable aerial drones, and the presumptive right to kill American citizens without due process - all these sweeping expansions of executive power are the legacy of four years of Barack Obama's presidency and of themselves represent a new era in the power of the American government over its citizenry.

Never before has an American president asserted their ability to act as judge, jury and executioner towards their own citizens, a power which Barack Obama claimed for the executive branch in killing the New Mexico-born fundamentalist preacher Anwar Al-Awlaki in a drone strike - followed by his 16 year-old son two weeks later.

The passage of the National Defense Authorisation Act (NDAA) provides the President with the ability to place Americans under indefinite military detention without trial or even the provision of evidence; a power which extends to citizens abroad as well as to those on US soil. Such concepts seem utterly otherworldly to most Americans, especially given their origination from a liberal president who had been elected in large part as a response to the perceived belligerence and militarism of George W Bush.

With Obama facing a tight re-election battle with Mitt Romney, even his supporters - who would normally express alarm at these actions - are reticent to criticise him for fear of damaging his chances and empowering his Republican challenger. However it is important to note that the unprecedented assertions of executive power over the life and death of American citizens during the past four years is an issue that goes far beyond partisan politics and which will have lasting repercussions for the United States after the upcoming election is a distant memory.

While most Americans may trust Barack Obama as an individual not to abuse the broad new legal rights he has enshrined for his office, the undeniable truth is that regardless of whether he serves another four years, he will not be president indefinitely - and the expansive powers he has claimed represent an indelible legacy which will not expire when he leaves office. Even if Mitt Romney is defeated this coming November, an outcome which by most expert accounts is reasonably likely, further years and decades down the line there is no guarantee as to what type of president will come to office and what attitude they will have towards their new powers to detain and execute citizens without reference to once-sacred American values such as habeas corpus and the overarching right to due process - all of which have been unceremoniously discarded by this administration.

While the primary target of rights abuses in recent years have been religious minority communities towards whomsignificant percentages of Americans feel fear and antipathy, the dragnet will inevitably expand in the long-term given changing political priorities, and is already being applied to individuals and groups today whose ethno-religious background has nothing to do with the post-9/11 "War on Terror".

Domestic Surveillance and Suppression

The FAA Reauthorisation Act signed into law by President Obama earlier this year means that unmanned drones will be moving from foreign military theatres into American skies at a rapidly accelerating pace - an estimated 30,000 by 2020. The first American to be arrested by a domestic police force with the assistance of Predator drone technology was an anti-government "sovereigntist" named Rodney Brossart who was detained on his property in South Dakota using what his attorney described as "guerilla-like police tactics".

Drones are already in use by police forces around the country and law enforcement officials in Texas have already stated that they are considering equipping their own department's Predator drones with rubber bullets and tear gas - weapons which have historically been suited for crowd suppression. Plans are being implemented for the use of drones for domestic surveillance from New York to California, the latter which held a large-scale exercise dubbed "Urban Shield" which heavily involved the use of unmanned drones for reconnaissance purposes.

Contrary to popular criticisms, drone technology is not inherently malign and in many ways domestic use of them as a tool of police forces is not dissimilar to the employment of helicopters and other aerial vehicles in the past. What makes the new and rapidly expanding domestic drone fleet a potential threat to American civil liberties is that it has come into existence without meaningful oversight or regulation of their activities. As such, no lines have been drawn to mitigate their effect upon public privacy nor upon their impending weaponisation. Just as the drone warfare campaign in Pakistan and Yemen has become an entirely extrajudicial exercise in targeted killing and assassination, domestic drone use is rapidly expanding without meaningful attempts at legal oversight.

In what has been perhaps a conscious decision, technology in the hands of government has been allowed to advance without requisite changes in legislation to bring protection to the fundamental rights of American citizens. A policy paper published last year by the ACLU regarding domestic drone usage stated that "all the pieces appear to be lining up for the eventual introduction of routine aerial surveillance in American life - a development that would profoundly change the character of public life in the United States".

Americans, especially those who identify with progressive values, must ask themselves what happens when this new, massively expanding and legally unaccountable fleet of unmanned drones comes into the hands of a president whom they do not view to be as personally scrupulous as Barack Obama - something which in the long-term is almost inevitable regardless of who holds office over the next four years.

A Separate Rule Of Law

As noted by New York Times Editor Andrew Rosenthal, in the post-9/11 period the United States has implemented what is effectively a "separate legal system for Muslim Americans"; one which is uniquely harsh, unyielding, and where the constitutional right to due process is applied unevenly if at all in the majority of cases.

In this environment, once unconscionable government powers - such as indefinite detention, blanket surveillance as well as state-sanctioned kidnapping and rendition - have been asserted and often codified, thus ensuring that they remain in effect into posterity. While it is America's relatively small Muslim population today which bears the brunt of these measures, there is no guarantee upon whom they will be employed in the future. Ironically, Obama himself noted this in his 2004 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention where he astutely pointed out that"if there's an Arab American family being rounded-up, without benefit of an attorney, or due process, that threatens my civil liberties".

Disappointingly however, Obama has presided over an unprecedented and institutionalised erosion of the civil liberties of Muslim Americans and Muslims in general which has left them subject to blanket surveillance, due process-freeindefinite detention, and, as noted earlier, in certain cases extrajudicial execution. The use of entrapment as a tool by law enforcement agencies to mastermind terror plots on their own and induce young, isolated and impressionable Muslims into joining them has effectively become standard operating procedure, with the tacit endorsement of the executive branch.

Following a time-tested historical pattern, these odious and broad government powers are already expanding from victimising minority communities to targeting the population at large, as was evidenced in FBI operations against the "Occupy" movement, which arose across several American cities earlier this year.

Japanese and African American communities have borne the brunt of government oppression in decades before, but the formalised and indefinite scope of powers granted during this administration provide the opportunity for any future president to rule with less regard to civil liberties than at any time in history, suspending fundamental rights by executive fiat and operating with less transparency than any administration which preceded it.

Again, while Americans may "trust" Barack Obama with such powers, there is no guarantee that an as-yet unknown president years later will not abuse the rights granted him through the erosion of constitutionally mandated checks on executive power and legal protections for the citizenry.

Paving The Way For Tyranny

Imagine for a moment it were George W Bush and not Barack Obama who had asserted the right of a president to kill American citizens without trial, subject them to permanent military detention and warrantless wiretapping, and who had authorised the creation of a legally unaccountable fleet of unmanned, perhaps armed, aerial robots to conduct surveillance over American cities.

The outcry among liberal Americans would almost assuredly be greater than the muted reaction which Barack Obama's imposition of these very measures has created, and domestic opposition would perhaps cause them to be prevented or at least equipped with safeguards and oversight to prevent broad erosion of domestic civil rights. Although Barack Obama is facing an electoral challenge from Mitt Romney, a politician who many progressives find unpalatable, it is worth reflecting that regardless of what happens in this election these powers will always remain with any future president.

In coming years there could very well be another president as - or more - militaristic and belligerent than Bush and they will now possess far greater powers of domestic coercion than he ever had at his disposal. Had Bush wanted to impose such sweeping measures towards the latter years of his term he likely could not have - domestic opposition to the excesses of his government was more vocal and would have imposed great political costs had he tried to implement the type of radical measures which Obama has seamlessly placed into the hands of the federal government.  

To be clear, Barack Obama is not a tyrant, and he is not as president going to undertake a broad-based campaign of oppression against the American people. But what his remarkably successful campaign against American civil liberties over the past four years has tangibly done is remove the legal structures which exist to prevent the empowerment of a potentially wanton and increasingly tyrannical government in the future.

The power to hold secret "kill-lists" of American citizens and a raft of other measures that would only recently have been thought unconscionable are now firmly in the hands of the executive branch. America's founders knew the dangers of unchecked power and built safeguards to avoid the possibility of a president trampling the rights of the citizenry. Now that these have been systematically eroded by the Obama administration, what can we say of the next president who will inherit these sweeping new powers?

A time will inevitably come when progressives will have to face a right-wing president evocative of their former bête noire, and they will undoubtedly do so in an atmosphere where the ability of a president to oppress and subjugate American citizens is at a level comparable to legitimately despotic countries.

In the haste to squelch criticism of him during election season, it is worth reflecting that regardless of what happens on November 4, Barack Obama will not be president of the United States ad infinitum. Despite this, the legacy of dangerously expanded executive powers he has left behind will live on and will take a path which cannot be safely predicted. Failing to challenge this president on his campaign against US civil liberties may one day be looked at as a failing far more significant than the results of this single election.

No Matter Who “Wins”, Humanity Loses

By Larry Chin,

On one side, the Obama administration, and the traditional brand of neoliberal imperialism and international consensus, and false domestic populism. On the other side with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, militant right-wing extremism, an apocalyptic war agenda and the politics of sadism at home.

The final choice will not be made by voters (who will be disenfranchised again, via electronic vote fraud and other manipulations), but by the criminal elements who seize final control of the apparatus over the final month of the “contest”.

The “children” are being allowed to fight it out amongst themselves. The side with ultimate command of the corporate media propaganda, the most effective back door deals, and the most effective dirty tricks and election night shenanigans, will prevail, the pre-determined result promptly encrypted into the software of controlled Diebold voting machines.

The Debate Charade
 

It is tempting but futile to dissect the theatrics of the debates, which are based on entirely on false premises to begin with. Not one exhaustively argued “talking point” addresses realities.

The carefully pre-selected issues assume a host of falsehoods, from the legitimacy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the destabilizations of Iran and Syria, to the need for fiscal austerity.

These are rhetorical dog-and-pony shows without real differences, beyond timing, style, and method, by which they will execute similar agendas.

Both sides largely agree on foreign policy. Both sides proudly trumpet how best to inflict crippling economic warfare on “nuclear Iran”, and topple Syria. The only argument is whether the sequential multinational stranglehold (“diplomacy”) led by the Obama administration continues apace, or, if Romney/Ryan and the right will get what they really want: an all-out war with Iran.

Both sides agree on the same falsehoods regarding the national debt (without mentioning that the world war that they enthusiastically wage is the main expenditure) and the US financial crisis (ignoring the fact that the financial “crisis” and “bailout” was a manipulation that centralized the power for Wall Street constituents, the big banks, who support both sides equally, at the expense of US taxpayers). In terms of social programs (that will be cut in any case in order to pay for more war), the Romney/Ryan contingent calls for an immediate destruction of the entire social structure of the US—a swift draconian end to social programs such as Medicare and Social Security—while the Obama administration takes a more gradual approach.

Essentially, the candidates have already admitted that they do not serve the interests of most of humanity.

The media “analysis” of the election has been stomach-turning— nothing more than insanity heaped atop insanity. The chattering of talking heads over infantile nonsense, such as “who looks presidential”, who got more “gotchas” and “zingers”. A dumbed-down spectacle for a dumbed-down, manipulated populace.

Which Way To The Abyss?

There have never been real elections in contemporary America, and there will be no “election” this time either. There will, as always, be no real choice: war-mongering, mass-murdering imperialist “A” or war-mongering mass-murdering imperialist “B”.

America and the world must pay attention to which brand of fascism will ultimately be chosen, if only to properly prepare for what is to come. The marginal differences in method and style have ramifications, domestically and globally.

The quelling of increasingly large swaths of humanity is more important to the elite than ever before. The next White House occupant will spearhead the likely UN and NATO regime changes for Syria and Iran, both of which have been systematically destabilized by the CIA and its affiliates, and the “reconstruction” of the American social net.

Will it be more of the fist inside the velvet glove, or the hammer directly to the skull?

No matter who “wins”, humanity loses.

Via: "Global Research"

Suppressing Protest

Human Rights Violations In The U.S. Response To Occupy Wall Street

A group of legal experts have published a report detailing "abusive and unlawful protest regulation and policing practices" by New York police in response to Occupy Wall Street protests.

The report, Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street, examines treatment of protestors and journalists by local, state, and federal authorities from September 2011 through July 2012.

The eight-month investigation – carried out by law clinics at NYU, Fordham, Harvard and Stanford – documents instances in which authorities acted in ways that "suppress and chill protest rights" and violate international obligations to respect free assembly and expression.

These include excessive or unnecessary use of force, massive and continuous over-policing, obstruction of press freedoms and legal monitoring, constant surveillance, accountability and transparency failures, unjustified restrictions on peaceful assembly and arbitrary rule enforcement.

The first appendix of the 132-page report lists 130 incidents of excessive or unnecessary physical force by police in New York City.

A few examples (with video links):

September 24, 2011: A protester was being surrounded and held by three officers... One of the officers then pushed him to the ground... officers then proceeded to handcuff and arrest the protester.

October 5: An officer took at least three two-handed overarm swings at protesters. Some of the protesters are holding cameras, and at least one protester had his hands in the air as if signaling the officer to stop.

November 17: An officer threw another protester to the ground who was standing between police and their target... The video then shows another officer appearing to strike the apprehended protester several times with downward jabbing motions of his baton.

January 1, 2012:  An officer lifted a metal barricade with both hands, causing it to move up in the direction of a protester’s face. The video appears to show that the protester was struck in the face by the top bar of the barricade.

March 17: An officer [at 4:11] grabbed a protester out of the arms of another officer... Approximately six other officers then surrounded the protester, grabbed at his head and arms, ripped the mask off his face and pushed him to the ground.

The authors call for the city to establish an inspector general to oversee the police department, a review of the city’s response to the protests and the creation of new guidelines for policing them, and the prosecution of officers found to have broken laws.

If the NYPD fails to respond to these suggestions, the group said, it will ask the Department of Justice to investigate their complaints.

Further detailed studies from the Protest and Assembly Rights Project will be published in the coming months about police response in Boston, Charlotte, Oakland, and San Francisco.

Via: "Business Insider"

The Report: "About The Protest and Assembly Rights Project"

First They Come For The Muslims

Chris Hedges writes,

Tarek Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced Thursday in Worcester, Mass., to 17½ years in prison. It was another of the tawdry show trials held against Muslim activists since 9/11 as a result of the government's criminalization of what people say and believe. These trials, where secrecy rules permit federal lawyers to prosecute people on "evidence" the defendants are not allowed to examine, are the harbinger of a corporate totalitarian state in which any form of dissent can be declared illegal. What the government did to Mehanna, and what it has done to hundreds of other innocent Muslims in this country over the last decade, it will eventually do to the rest of us.

Mehanna, a teacher at Alhuda Academy in Worcester, was convicted after an eight-week jury trial of conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq and providing material support to al-Qaida, as well as making false statements to officials investigating terrorism. His real "crime," however, seems to be viewing and translating jihadi videos online, speaking out against U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and refusing to become a government informant.

Stephen F. Downs, a lawyer in Albany, N.Y., a founder of Project Salam and the author of "Victims of America's Dirty War," a booklet posted on the website, has defended Muslim activists since 2006. He has methodically documented the mendacious charges used to incarcerate many Muslim activists as terrorists. Because of "terrorism enhancement" provisions, any sentence can be quadrupled—even minor charges can leave prisoners incarcerated for years.

"People who have committed no crime are taken into custody, isolated without adequate recourse to legal advice, railroaded with fake or contrived charges, and 'disappeared' into prisons designed to isolate them," Downs told me when we met last week at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

Downs calls the process of condemning people before they have committed a crime "pre-emptive prosecution." The concept of pre-emptive prosecution mocks domestic law as egregiously as pre-emptive war mocks the foundations of international law.

Downs' awakening to the corruption of the judicial system came in 2006 when Yassin Aref, a Kurdish refugee from Iraq who was an imam of a mosque in Albany, was entrapped in a government sting operation. Downs, who three years earlier had retired as chief attorney for the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct, became part of Aref's legal defense team. He met with Aref two or three times a week in the Rensselaer County jail over a six-month period.

"I was unprepared for the fact that the government would put together a case that was just one lie piled up on top of another lie," Downs said. "And when you pointed it out to them they didn't care. They didn't refute it. They knew that it was a lie. The facts of most of these pre-emptive cases don't support the charges. But the facts are irrelevant. The government has decided to target these people. It wants to take them down for ideological reasons."

"In the past, when the government wanted to do something illegal it simply went ahead and broke the law," he said. "They rounded up the Japanese during World War II and stuck them in concentration camps. They knew they were breaking the law when they decided to go after the activists with COINTELPRO in the 1960s but they rationalized that they were doing it for a higher purpose. This is different. The government is destroying the legal framework of our country. They are twisting it out of recognition to make it appear as though what they're doing is legal. I don't remember that kind of a situation in the past. The opinions of the court are now only lame excuses as to why the courts can't do justice."

"The government lawyers must know these pre-emptive cases are fake," he said. "They must know they're prosecuting people before a crime has been committed based on what they think the defendant might do in the future. They defend what they are doing by saying that they are protecting the nation from people who might want to do it harm. I'm sure they've been co-opted at least to believe that. But I think they also know that they are twisting the legal concepts, they are stretching them beyond what the framework of the law can tolerate. They have convinced themselves that it is OK to convict many innocent people as long as they prevent a few people from committing crimes in the future. They are creating an internal culture within the Justice Department where there is contempt for the law and for the foundational principle that it is better for one guilty person to go free than that one innocent person is convicted. They must know they do not do justice, and that they serve only ideological ends."

Downs pointed out that if the government was actually concerned about the rule of law it would prosecute politicians and other prominent Americans who have publicly spoken out in support of Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK or People's Holy Jihadis), an armed group on the State Department terrorism list that carries out terrorist attacks inside Iran. They include former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton, and Gen. James Jones, who was President Obama's first national security adviser. Some of them voiced their backing in speeches for which they were paid lavishly.

"Their support of MEK is far worse than any of the pre-emptive prosecution cases," Downs said. "They are literally engaged in material support for terrorism. But of course they're not being prosecuted. ... The whole thing is a game. It's not serious law enforcement. It is political posturing. This will bring the law into contempt. It will bring the mechanisms of prosecution into contempt and eventually it will destroy the legal system."

"Justice is now justice for corporations," he went on. "Anybody who interferes with the corporations, who interferes with their profits, who interferes with their rights, will become labeled 'terrorists.' They become people we need to get rid of. Judges, politicians and lawyers all feed at the same corporate trough. And that is why their decisions increasingly are corporate decisions."

Downs holds out a faint hope that it may be possible to force the Justice Department to turn over exculpatory evidence—evidence of a defendant's innocence that by law the prosecution must disclose to the defendant but an obligation that the prosecutors frequently ignore. He said he is certain there is exculpatory evidence in government vaults that could free many of those pre-emptively prosecuted. Government prosecutors, however, do not willing sabotage their own cases by turning over evidence that would exonerate those they seek to condemn. Downs knows it is a quixotic fight, but he is working to get the undisclosed exculpatory evidence in pre-emptive prosecution cases released to defense lawyers.

"That's my one hope of getting these guys out of jail—I don't see any other way," he said.

The corruption in the judiciary, Downs argues, is so pervasive that it is probably irreversible in the short run. Already dissidents such as peace activists, environmentalists and outspoken intellectuals have been treated as terrorists. Downs expects soon to see labor organizers and those in Occupy encampments treated as terrorists, especially if domestic dissent spreads. Yet despite his pessimism he has no intention of surrendering.

"I take comfort from organizations like the White Rose in Germany," he said, referring to the anti-Nazi group that defied Hitler and saw most of its members arrested and executed. "They were doomed almost from the beginning. How long could you defy Hitler before you were rounded up and shot? It appeared to be a futile effort. And yet, after the war, when people went back and began to rebuild the German nation, they could look to the White Rose as an example of what German culture was really about. There were Germans who cared about peace, freedom and tolerance. I'm working now as much for the historical record as for those still in jail."

"When I was 6," Mehanna told the court Thursday at his sentencing, "I began putting together a massive collection of comic books. Batman implanted a concept in my mind, introduced me to a paradigm as to how the world is set up: that there are oppressors, there are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the oppressed. This resonated with me so much that throughout the rest of my childhood I gravitated towards any book that reflected that paradigm—'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' and I even saw an ethical dimension to 'The Catcher in the Rye.' "

"By the time I began high school and took a real history class, I was learning just how real that paradigm is in the world," he went on. "I learned about the Native Americans and what befell them at the hands of European settlers. I learned about how the descendants of those European settlers were in turn oppressed under the tyranny of King George III. I read about Paul Revere, Tom Paine, and how Americans began an armed insurgency against British forces—an insurgency we now celebrate as the American Revolutionary War. As a kid I even went on school field trips just blocks away from where we sit now. I learned about Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, John Brown, and the fight against slavery in this country. I learned about Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs and the struggles of the labor unions, working class and poor. I learned about Anne Frank, the Nazis, and how they persecuted minorities and imprisoned dissidents. I learned about Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggle. I learned about Ho Chi Minh, and how the Vietnamese fought for decades to liberate themselves from one invader after another. I learned about Nelson Mandela and the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Everything I learned in those years confirmed what I was beginning to learn when I was 6: that throughout history, there has been a constant struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors. With each struggle I learned about, I found myself consistently siding with the oppressed, and consistently respecting those who stepped up to defend them—regardless of nationality, regardless of religion. And I never threw my class notes away. As I stand here speaking, they are in a neat pile in my bedroom closet at home."

"In your eyes, I'm a terrorist, and it's perfectly reasonable that I be standing here in an orange jumpsuit," he told the court at the end of his statement. "But one day, America will change and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the U.S. military in foreign countries, yet somehow I'm the one going to prison for 'conspiring to kill and maim' in those countries—because I support the mujahedeen defending those people. 

They will look back on how the government spent millions of dollars to imprison me as a 'terrorist,' yet if we were to somehow bring Abeer al-Janabi back to life in the moment she was being gang-raped by your soldiers, to put her on that witness stand and ask her who the 'terrorists' are, she sure wouldn't be pointing at me."

Via: "Truth-Out"

America's Descent Into Darkness

Slouching Towards Nuremberg

MORRIS BERMAN writes,

Strange things are happening in the United States these days, and every day seems to bring additional scary news.  The similarity to the erosion of civil liberties in Germany during the 1930s is a bit too close for comfort. Many will regard this statement as hyperbole, and, to some extent, it is. But let’s take a close look at what is going on before we dismiss the comparison out of hand.

In terms of the historical record for Germany, legal discrimination against Jews certainly existed before the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and grew steadily over time. There was always a feeling in the Jewish community—most of whom regarded themselves as Germans, after all—that “OK, that’s the worst of it.” Hence, the decision to stay. Then came the next set of restrictions, and again the response: “This is as far as it will go.” It was like the classic experiment of turning up the heat on frogs placed in warm water. Gradually, they get boiled to death, because the increase of heat is incremental.  It was only toward the end of the thirties that the choice began to look like: jump or die. Finally, it became simply, die.

In 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service banned “non-Aryans” from the civil service.

In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and “Aryans.”  They also prohibited sexual intercourse between Jews and “Aryans,” and the employment of “Aryan” females under forty-five years of age as domestic workers in Jewish households. In addition, Jews could not work as lawyers, doctors, or journalists; could not use state hospitals; and could not be educated by the state past the age of fourteen. They could not enter public parks, libraries, or beaches, and could not receive winnings from the national lottery.

In 1938, Jews with first names that were not characteristically Jewish had to adopt the middle name Sara (if female) or David (if male). Passports of German Jews were stamped with a “J”.

In 1939, Jews living in German-occupied Poland had to wear the yellow star. This was extended to all Jews living within Nazi-controlled areas in 1941.

By way of comparison, one thing that makes me particularly nervous is what has been called the “conspiracy of silence.” Almost nobody spoke up in Germany as this process was unfolding, and the American public has been similarly silent about the events documented below. Indeed, I would venture to say that 98% of the American public (maybe more) is unaware of events such as these, or of the passage of repressive legislation, and that they wouldn’t care even if they did know about it. (“Hey, I ain’t no Ay-rab!”) The classic quote that has come down to us is from Martin Niemoeller, a German pastor and theologian who wound up in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps (he was liberated by the Allies in 1945). It goes something like this:

“First they came for the communists, but I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, but I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me, but by that time there was no one left to speak out.”

The signs of a gradual slide towards Nuremberg, and concomitant citizen apathy, are very much present in the current political milieu. Let’s have a look at what has been going on in the decade since 9/11. I’m going to discuss the following topics:

I. The creation of a political climate in which the police are out of control, arbitrarily free to intimidate anyone for virtually anything

II. The persecution of whistleblowers, protesters, and dissenters

III. The dramatic expansion of the surveillance of American citizens on the part of the National Security Agency (NSA)

IV. The corruption of the judicial system by means of show trials of Muslim activists

V. The construction of political detention centers, also known as Communication Management Units (CMU’s)

VI. The shredding of the Bill of Rights by means of the National Defense Authorization Act

VII. Future scenarios: The “disappearing” of intellectual critics of the U.S. government?

I. The creation of a political climate in which the police are out of control, arbitrarily free to intimidate anyone for virtually anything

The evidence for this is perforce anecdotal, but events such as the ones discussed below are getting to be so common that we have to keep in mind that when you have accumulated enough anecdotes, the result is called “data.”

-In June 2011 the sheriff of Nelson County, North Dakota, called in a Predator B drone from the local Air Force base to capture three men who had stolen some cows. Once the unmanned aircraft located the suspects, police rushed in to make the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with the help of a Predator spy drone. It turns out that predator drones are frequently used for domestic investigations all over the U.S.—by the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and by state and local law enforcement officials.

-In July 2011 police in a small town in Georgia shut down a lemonade stand being run by three girls, ages 10-14, who were trying to save up for a trip to a local water park. The police said that they didn’t know what was in the lemonade; and in addition, that the girls needed a business license, a peddler’s permit, and a food permit in order to run the stand. The permits, by the way, cost $50 a day.

-In January 2012 the library system of Charlton, Massachusetts, called the police to collect some overdue books charged to Hailey Benoit—a five-year-old girl.

-Also in January 2012, a young couple was arrested in Baltimore for asking a police woman directions to highway I-95. They spent the night in jail.

-In April 2012 the Supreme Court ruled that jail authorities may strip search people arrested for minor offenses before they are jailed while awaiting a hearing. Individuals have been strip searched for offenses such as biking with an inaudible bell, walking a dog without a leash, and driving with a noisy muffler. The sexual humiliation involved in these searches, writes Naomi Wolf, is clearly a way of keeping the masses in line, politically docile. How long, she asks, before saying anything controversial online or on the phone (see Item III, below) will result in the “guilty” party facing arrest and sexual humiliation?  I think we need to pause a moment before we summarily dismiss this as paranoia.

II. The persecution of whistleblowers, protesters, and dissenters 

This has been going on throughout the past decade, first under President Bush, and then more aggressively under President Obama.  According to the New Yorker, “the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness.” To which the New York Times added: “In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions.” In the famous case of Bradley Manning, who revealed government documents to Wikileaks, Mr. Obama publicly declared him guilty before he went to trial or was convicted of a crime. The overall result is that the government has basically criminalized public servants who speak out to expose waste or corruption or unethical behavior. Whistleblowing and dissent have, in themselves, become criminal activities.

-Since 2006 the filmmaker Laura Poitras, who made a documentary about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, has been detained and questioned at airports more than forty times. Government agents confiscate her computer and notebooks without a warrant. She is hardly an isolated case. With no oversight or legal framework for its activities, the Department of Homeland Security routinely singles out individuals who are suspected of no crimes, detains them at the airport when they return to the U.S. from an international trip, and then seizes their laptops, cameras, cellphones, notebooks, and credit card receipts.

-William Binney, an intelligence official who worked for the NSA for nearly forty years, resigned in October 2001 when massive domestic spying became the norm. Binney and several other NSA officials reported their concerns about this to Congress and the Department of Defense.  In 2006, he exposed the NSA practice of installing secret monitoring rooms in major U.S. telecommunications facilities.  Finally, in 2007, a dozen FBI agents charged into his house with guns drawn, pointed their weapons at his head, and interrogated him at length. Three other ex-NSA employees were raided the same day.

- You can now go to jail in the United States simply for speaking. In July 2011, environmental activist Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in prison for his repeated declaration that environmental protection required civil—i.e., nonviolent—disobedience. One wonders if the same judge, Dee Benson, would have also put Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi in jail, had he been around during their lifetimes.

-In March 2012 the president signed H.R. 347, the so-called trespass bill, into law, which allows the government to jail anyone protesting near someone with Secret Service protection for up to ten years. This makes it quite easy for the government to criminalize protest per se, because the exclusion zones defined by the law have no clear boundaries. In fact, they can be as large as the law wants them to be; which means that the free speech zone is a moving target.

III. The dramatic expansion of the surveillance of American citizens on the part of the National Security Agency (NSA)

-On 19 July 2010 the Washington Post reported that 854,000 people work for the National Security Agency in thirty-three building complexes amounting to 17 million square feet of space, in the DC Metro and suburban area. Every day, collection systems at the NSA intercept and store 1.7 billion emails and phone calls of American citizens, in what amounts to a vast domestic spy system. Writing in the New Yorker on 23 May 2011, Jane Mayer reported that the NSA has three times the budget of the CIA, and has the capacity to download, every six hours, electronic communications equivalent to the entire contents of the Library of Congress. They also developed a program called Thin Thread that enables computers to scan the material for key words, and they collect the billing records and the dialed phone numbers of everyone in the country. In violation of communications laws, ATT, Verizon, and BellSouth have opened their electronic records to the government. At the height of its insanity, the Stasi in East Germany was spying on 1 out of 7 citizens. The U.S. is now spying on 7 out of 7.

-To make the surveillance of American citizens even more comprehensive (assuming that is even possible), the NSA is currently building the biggest-ever data complex in Bluffdale, Utah, as part of a secret surveillance program code-named “Stellar Wind.” The center, scheduled for completion in 2013, will be twice as large as the U.S. Capitol, and contain 100,000 square feet of computer space, at a cost of $2 billion.  In addition, the NSA has established listening posts throughout the country as part of this operation.  All in all, there are now 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related to counterterrorism and homeland security in about 10,000 locations across the U.S. The goal is to store and review the e-mails, phone calls, online shopping lists, and virtually every bit of information about every single American. Everything you do, from traveling to buying groceries, will be displayed on a graph. William Binney (see above, Item II) has stated that we are about two millimeters away “from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

IV. The corruption of the judicial system by means of show trials of Muslim activists 

This was discussed at length by Chris Hedges on truthdig, 16 April 2012. That very week, Tarek Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced to 17½ years in prison. He was convicted of conspiring to kill American soldiers in Iraq and giving material support to al-Qaeda. No proof of these charges was provided. What seems to have been the more relevant issue is that Mehanna had spoken out against U.S. foreign policy, and had refused to become a government informant.

These types of trials have been going on since 9/11. In them, federal lawyers are allowed to prosecute people on “evidence” that the defendants are not allowed to see. Stephen Downs, a lawyer who has defended Muslim activists since 2006, has documented the phony charges used to label these people as terrorists and then put them behind bars, typically for long stretches of time. He told Hedges: “People who have committed no crime are taken into custody, isolated without adequate recourse to legal advice, railroaded with fake or contrived charges, and ‘disappeared’ into prisons designed to isolate them.” Basically, they are condemned before they have committed a crime, in a process that Downs calls “pre-emptive prosecution.”

Downs discovered all this in 2006, when Yassin Aref, the imam of a mosque in Albany, New York, was entrapped in a government sting operation. What then happened, he told Hedges, was that the government “put together a case that was just one lie piled on top of another lie, and when you pointed it out to them they didn’t care. They didn’t refute it. They knew it was a lie….But the facts are irrelevant. The government has decided to target these people.” Essentially, he went on, the government lawyers “must know they’re prosecuting people before a crime has been committed based on what they think the defendant might do in the future.” These are, in other words, kangaroo courts.

The bottom line, of course, is that if you destroy the judicial system, then finally nobody is safe. The government could wind up railroading anyone they don’t like, and I very much doubt that this possibility is far-fetched.  First they came for the Muslims…

V. The construction of political detention centers, also known as Communication Management Units (CMU’s) 

Where do the suspected Muslim terrorists go? It turns out that the government is using secret prison facilities to house inmates accused of non-violent activities, i.e. of allegedly being tied to terrorist groups. As it turns out, these are not just Muslim groups; the CMU’s are also being used to house environmental activists. The first CMU was built in 2006 in Terre Haute, Indiana; in 2008 a second facility was constructed in Marion, Illinois. Restrictions on contact with the outside world are quite severe—for example, having all phone calls monitored and limited to fifteen minutes per week. Among the so-called terrorists housed in these units are the following:

-Rafil Dhafir, an Iraqi-born oncologist from Syracuse, New York, who created a charity called Help the Needy to provide food and medicine to the people of Iraq who had been suffering from U.S. economic sanctions. He was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison for violating those sanctions. (I cite some of these in Dark Ages America; they include a ban on the importation of medicine and toilet paper.)

-Daniel McGowan, an environmental activist who committed two acts of arson to protest logging in the Pacific Northwest, was sentenced to seven years.  He was not convicted of any terrorist crime or being affiliated with any terrorist group, although the government claimed that he was a member of the Earth Liberation Front, which they regard as a domestic terrorist organization.  One thing that did not help was his public visibility, both through media appearances and his website.

-Andrew Stepanian, recently released—the first prisoner ever to be released from a CMU. He spent three years in jail, which included six and a half months at the Marion facility, for trying to shut down an animal testing laboratory. He was then put under house arrest in New York. In fact, he was not accused of any violent crime or property destruction.

What distinguishes the CMU’s from other jails is that they are political prisons. All of the defendants are incarcerated there for what appear to be ideological reasons. Meanwhile, the definition of “terrorist” continues to grow (see below, Item VI); it won’t necessarily stop with Muslims or environmental rights activists.  Significantly, the word “ecoterrorism” was coined by corporations in the early 1980s. The CMU’s even contain antiwar tax protesters. In general, the legal wall separating “terrorist” from “dissident” is starting to break down, if, indeed, it hasn’t already.

VI. The shredding of the Bill of Rights by means of the National Defense Authorization Act 

The NDAA, also known as the “indefinite detention bill,”  was signed into law by President Obama on 31 December 2011. It has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by Mr. Obama or any future president to military detain U.S. citizens.  As in pre-Magna Carta days, you can simply be swept up and put away forever—disappeared—with no explanation of why, no right to call a lawyer or anybody else, and no right to a trial.  You can actually be tortured to death, if the government decides it is in the national interest. The NDAA is probably the greatest rollback of civil liberties in the history of the United States. Under the Act, literally anyone can be described as a “belligerent,” or as they are now called, “covered person.” The president claimed that he signed the bill only to provide funding for American troops, and that he had been reluctant to sign it because it included American citizens. This b.s. was subsequently exposed by one of the bill’s sponsors, Senator Carl Levin, who revealed that it was Mr. Obama himself who insisted that the indefinite detention clause include U.S. citizens.  Meanwhile, the White House had been conducting a misinformation campaign to secure this incredible dictatorial power while portraying the president as some type of reluctant absolute ruler. It is also important to note that there was virtually no coverage of this issue on the part of the mainstream media. In effect, as Naomi Wolf has written, the U.S. “is sleepwalking into become a police state.” The New American website posted the following comment on the new law:

“The universe of potential ‘covered persons’ includes every citizen of the United States of America. Any American could one day find himself or herself branded a ‘belligerent’ and thus subject to the complete confiscation of his or her constitutional civil liberties and nearly never-ending incarceration in a military prison.”

You don’t have to be convicted of terrorism to be rounded up, under this new law; you only have to be suspected of terrorist activity. And as Senator Rand Paul pointed out prior to the passage of the bill, the Department of Justice now has a list of “identifying characteristics” of terrorists that includes having one or more fingers missing from your hands; having more than seven days’ worth of food in your house; and having a loaded weapon on your property—which describes half the households in the United States. In effect, with the NDAA, if the government, for any reason, doesn’t like you—for example, if you are simply a critic of the U.S., nothing more—they can brand you a terrorist and put you away forever, with literally no one knowing what happened to you.

Note also that even before the passage of this law, the president had the legal right, even though it violates the Geneva accords, to designate anyone on the planet an enemy, and have him or her assassinated. Thus on 30 September 2011, Mr. Obama had two American citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, assassinated because of suspected—i.e. not proven—al-Qaeda membership and terrorist activity.  Two weeks later, the CIA killed al-Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son. The real problem in these cases is not whether these people were actually guilty of terrorism; it’s that the Constitution says that no matter how heinous the crime, every American citizen has a right to his or her day in court. If I remember correctly, it does not say that the president has the right to rub them out without a trial.

(Just as an aside, there are, in general, more people under “correctional supervision” in America than there were in the Russian gulag under Stalin, at its height. Writing in the New Yorker on 30 January 2012, Adam Gopnik declared: “Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today.”)

VII. Future scenarios: The “disappearing” of intellectual critics of the U.S. government? 

This leads me to my final point. The distinctive characteristic of American democracy, from 1776, was the protection of the individual and the preservation of individual rights. That no longer exists. Anyone is a potential terrorist now; anyone can be persecuted, prosecuted, and in effect, destroyed. Democracy is only possible if dissent is not only permitted, but also respected. This too is finished. What does this mean for someone such as myself?, is something I lay awake nights thinking about. I have published three books, and half a collection of essays, showing where we have gone wrong, predicting our eventual collapse—indeed, this repression is part of that collapse—and arguing that the U.S. no longer has a moral compass; that it is spiritually bankrupt. I run a blog that is anything but polite: it says the U.S. is finished; that it is essentially a corporate plutocracy, run by a gangster elite; that the American people are basically morons, with little more than fried rice in their heads; and that anyone with half a brain and the means to do so should emigrate before it’s too late. I’m not really a threat to the U.S. government, largely because I am not a political activist and because it’s not likely that more than 74 people out of 311 million regularly read my blog (it’s probably more like 24, in fact). But as the definition of terrorism widens in this country, what is to prevent the creation of a category known as “intellectual terrorism” from arising, and putting folks like myself in that category? What is to prevent the government from calling such activity a clear and present danger to national security? As must be obvious by now, the government can do anything it wants to; as in Nazi Germany, we now have a government of men, not of laws. Indeed, the “laws” are little more than a pretext for whatever the government wishes to do.

Is the following scenario completely paranoid? Five or ten years down the line, as I fly into the DFW Airport en route to giving a lecture somewhere, or simply visiting friends, I am suddenly surrounded by government agents, whisked off to a holding cell, and eventually sent to Guantanamo. Nobody knows what happened to me, and I’m not allowed to phone anyone—not my lawyer, not a friend, and certainly not Chris Hedges, who is probably being tortured in the adjoining cell. Two points to remember here, historically speaking:

-When a country puts laws such as torture or indefinite detention or arbitrary assassination on the books, sooner or later it will use these legal instruments.  They won’t just lie dormant, in other words. As in the case of technology, once the mechanisms are there, the temptation to employ them simply becomes too great to resist. That is what is happening today.

-In a world that is politically construed along Manichaean lines—which, as I have argued elsewhere, America has been doing since Day 1—the first line of attack is against the enemy outside. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about Protestants or Catholics or al-Qaeda operatives or infidels of any kind, the first order of business is to go to war with them. But as the British anthropologist Mary Douglas shows in her book Purity and Danger, or Norman Cohn demonstrates in The Pursuit of the Millennium, if the war goes on long enough, inevitably the enemy is also seen to be a fifth column, i.e. within the walls of the body politic itself.  They become Huguenots or Marrano Jews or heretics of whatever stripe, and as in the case of Goya’s famous painting, Saturn Devouring His Son, the country begins to eat itself alive.  Everybody becomes an enemy; no one is safe any longer. And so I believe that I, and you, really do have reason to worry.

Somewhere along the line, God stopped blessing America.  We are not marching to Pretoria; rather, we are slouching towards Nuremberg.  To quote Edward R. Murrow, Good Night, and Good Luck.

Morris Berman’s latest book is Why America Failed.

©Morris Berman, 2012

Via: "CounterPunch"