Month: June 2013

Nixon, Kissinger and Mitchell sittin’ ’round talkin’ ’bout enemies, leftwingers and sonabitches

by digby

“If whole file cabinets can be stolen and made available to the press you can’t have orderly government anymore.”

That was over 50 years ago. And the only thing that fell apart was Richard Nixon’s criminal administration. I’d say the lesson is to be very skeptical of government officials who say the sky will fall if the public finds out what they’re doing.

Two weeks later, by the way, this happened:

By “going after that son-of-a-bitch” Ellsberg, it turned out hat he meant breaking into his psychiatrist’s office.

I don’t expect that President Obama has done anything like this. But can we imagine President Ted Cruz doing it? Or how about if John McCain had won and Sarah Palin assumed the presidency in case McCain has prematurely shuffled off his mortal coil?

The fact is that Richard Nixon got caught breaking the law. So did Ronald Reagan. So did George W. Bush. And the Pentagon papers showed that the Kennedy and Johnson administration’s were not exactly above board when it came to the war either. This kind of power will be abused. And the only thing they really have to fear is being exposed for doing it. It’s the one thing we have.

Courtesy Greg Mitchell.
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Stand Your Ground if you’re white (and a man)

by digby

A tale of two “stand your ground” cases:

A man in Florida shoots a man he finds having sex with his wife, killing him. A woman in Florida shoots the wall to scare off an abusive husband, harming nobody. Guess which one was acquitted? Guess which one was convicted?[…]

Both defendants used the defense of “stand your ground,” a Florida law that holds that a person has “no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself.” The man who shot his wife’s lover to death was successful and walks free. The woman who shot at a wall to scare an abusive husband failed and sits in jail.

The disparity between these outcomes should be shocking. But, sadly, it’s not, once you take into account the fact that Wald is white and Alexander is black.

The story goes on to detail the racial disparities in both successful “stand your ground” defenses and homicide convictions. It’s so obvious one wonders what it will take to confront it.

But I was struck by something else in these two cases: the fact that the law seems to assume that a man has a right to abuse and kill people over his own perception of “ownership” of a woman.

In the first case, a 70 year old man shoots his next door neighbor when he catches him having sex with his wife. His defense is that he thought his wife was being raped but the evidence says he knew his wife had been having sex with the man both before and after the marriage and never used the word “rape” in any of the original statements. He used the word “fornicate” which isn’t exactly the same thing.

He was acquitted ostensibly on the grounds that he was “protecting” his wife, but the more likely reason was that he was seen as rightly protecting his male “honor” because he’d been cuckolded by the younger man. The good news, I suppose, is that he didn’t shoot the wife. Progress indeed.

The other case went like this:

She was estranged from her abusive husband, Rico Gray, and had a restraining order against him. Thinking he was not at home, she went to their former house to get some belongings. The two got into an argument. Alexander says that Gray threatened her and she feared for her life. Gray corroborates Alexander’s story: “I was in a rage. I called her a whore and bitch and … I told her … if I can’t have you, nobody going to have you,” he said, in a deposition. When Alexander retreated into the bathroom, Gray tried to break the door. She ran into the garage, but couldn’t leave because it was locked. She came back, he said, with a registered gun, which she legally owned, and yelled at him to leave. Gray recalls, “I told her … I ain’t going nowhere, and so I started walking toward her … I was cursing and all that … and she shot in the air.” Even Gray understands why Alexander fired the warning shot: “If my kids wouldn’t have been there, I probably would have put my hand on her. Probably hit her. I got five baby mommas and I put my hands on every last one of them, except for one … I honestly think she just didn’t want me to put my hands on her anymore so she did what she feel like she have to do to make sure she wouldn’t get hurt, you know. You know, she did what she had to do.” And Gray admits Alexander was acting in self-defense, intending to scare and stop but not harm him: “The gun was never actually pointed at me … The fact is, you know … she never been violent toward me. I was always the one starting it.” Ultimately nobody was hurt. Nobody died. On May 12, 2012, it took a jury 12 minutes to find Alexander guilty of aggravated assault. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Last week a Texas man was acquitted for killing a woman when she refused to have sex qith him after he’d given her $150.00 — under a law that says you have a right to protect your property after dark.

I don’t have anything to base this on other than my intuition, but it just seems to me that we aren’t quite as removed as we think we are from the barbaric practices regarding women and “honor” for which we rightly condemn the fundamentalists.

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I gotcher oversight for ya right heah …

by digby

So, is everyone ok with this?

Appearing on Fox News’ America Live this afternoon, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) called for the prosecution of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald for his reporting on the classified National Security Agency information given to him by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Republican congressman also likened Greenwald’s reporting to a hypothetical situation wherein World War II-era reporters had revealed the time and date of the so-called “D-Day” invasion, suggesting he believes the Guardian reporting is tantamount to treason.

“Not only did [Greenwald] disclose this information, he said he has names of CIA agents and assets around the world and threatening to disclose that,” King said when asked by host Megyn Kelly why he wants to prosecute the reporter. “I think [prosecuting reporters] should be very targeted and very selective and a rare exception. In this case, when you have someone who discloses secrets like this and threatens to release more, yes, there has to be legal action taken against him.”

He then asserted: “This is a very unusual case with life-and-death implications for Americans.”

Kelly asked the congressman what the difference is, then, between Greenwald and others who report on leaks, such as Fox News reporter James Rosen, who was famously targeted by a Department of Justice investigation for his role in reporting classified information about North Korea.

“Rosen never said he would release information that could kill Americans and release CIA operatives around the world. That, to me, is an attack against Americans, putting American lives at risk,” King replied.

Actually, Rosen is accused of putting a North Korean asset at risk and Greenwald’s scoops do nothing of the sort, but let’s not have the facts get in the way of Peter King’s psychopathy.

The question I have for people who are defending the government’s behaviors in these cases: is it really a good idea for someone like this man — who as far as I can tell has absolutely NO integrity or even common sense — to have access to America’s biggest secrets?

This authoritarian abuser of the Bill of Rights serves on these three committees in the House:

Committee on Homeland Security
As chair, King serves as an ex officio member of all subcommittees.

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Subcommittee on Terrorism, HUMINT, Analysis and Counterintelligence

United States House Committee on Financial Services

Thank goodness a fine fellow such as him is performing those oversight duties. I feel so safe.

Look, I’m all for having better representatives and work to make that happen. If I had my way, Peter King would not be in congress and he most certainly would be let nowhere near the intelligence, Homeland Security and Financial Services committees. But I’m afraid there are always going to be people like him in government charged with overseeing the secret national security apparatus and caring for our rights. And as long as the government can create a series of Catch-22s that prevent anyone outside a very small group of representatives and jurists from having knowledge of these programs — and even those who do being prevented from saying anything when they see abuses, c.f. Udall and Wyden — the field will be tilted in favor of the Peter Kings who have no respect for the Constitution or the citizens of this country. Secrets and democracy are like oil and water.

It’s not so much that he thinks journalists should be jailed. That’s just creepy. It’s that he clearly does not see any need whatsoever to balance the rights of the citizens against what he sees as threats. (Some terrorists are “good guys” dontcha know) He has never met a surveillance program he didn’t defend and he clearly has no regard for the First and Fourth Amendments.

And this man, who obviously finds the US Constitution an nuisance at best, is out there condemning people for disobeying their oath to keep government’s secrets. It’s mind boggling.

Greenwald shouldn’t feel alone, however. King has been agitating to jail members of the free press for quite some time. And during all that time he’s either been chairman of the Homeland Security committee or the House Intelligence committee. Isn’t oversight great?

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Big Swinging Wanker of the day

by digby

I agree with David’s post below, in that in a perfect world we’d have some sort of “force for good” that would stop mass carnage around the world. (One might even think something like “God” would take up such a cause, but clearly he’s not interested in the job.) But since we obviously have no human institutions capable of organizing such missions or putting such problems at the top of our priority lists, we’re stuck with a bunch of very bad options when these horrors present themselves. It’s frustrating and heartbreaking. But I think we all know that the Imperial United States — even with the best of intentions, which is not a given — often causes more problems than it solves in these situations. Huge caution required.

Anyway, I wanted to comment on what exactly Bill Clinton said:

Clinton warned that it would be unwise to opt against action because “there was a poll in the morning paper that said 80 percent of you were against it.”

“[Y]ou’d look like a total wuss,” he continued. “And you would be. I don’t mean that a leader should go out of his way or her way to do the unpopular thing, I simply mean when people are telling you ‘no’ in these situations, very often what they’re doing is flashing a giant yellow light and saying, ‘For God’s sakes, be careful, tell us what you’re doing, think this through, be careful.”

Clinton went on to say that a poll showing a lack of support wouldn’t provide cover for Obama if things got worse down the road. The president would just be left looking “like a total fool,” he said.

Yeah, looking like a wuss is a huge reason to make decisions of war and peace. And the uppermost thing in Obama’s mind must always be whether he will look foolish if he fails to intervene in a civil war in the most volatile part of the world.

I had always admired Clinton for not being one of those idiots who saw foreign policy as a dick measuring contest. I assumed it was because he was secure in that area in other ways and didn’t need to swing it all over the place to reassure himself …

Apparently, he was just hiding his insecurities.

Apropos of this story, Rick Perlstein commented on Facebook today:

A too-good-to-check story has it a perplexed foreign policy mandarin once asked LBJ what the point was of escalation in Vietnam, and that the President pulled out his generous endowment in response and laid it upon the table: “This is the point.” Plus ça change. Good to know.

I’d be tempted here to propose that things would be different if a woman were in charge, but I’m afraid some women would feel they have more to prove in this department even than the average man.

Humans are primitive. And powerful humans are even more primitive than most.

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Bill Clinton wants us to “win” in Syria. “Win” what, exactly?

by David Atkins

I’ve received more than my share of lashes for being something of an unashamed liberal interventionist, but I’ll be the first to strongly disagree with Bill Clinton on this:

Bill Clinton told Sen. John McCain he agrees that President Barack Obama should act more forcefully to support anti-Assad rebels in Syria, saying the American public elects presidents and members of Congress “to see down the road” and “to win.”

At another point during a closed-press event Tuesday, Clinton implied that Obama or any president risks looking like “a total fool” if they listen too closely to opinion polls and act too cautiously. He used his own decisions on Kosovo and Bosnia as a point of reference.

The former president also said commanders-in-chief should avoid over-interpreting public opinion polls about whether the United States should get involved in crises overseas…

“Some people say, ‘Okay, see what a big mess it is? Stay out!’ I think that’s a big mistake. I agree with you about this,” Clinton told McCain during an event for the McCain Institute for International Leadership in Manhattan Tuesday night. “Sometimes it’s just best to get caught trying, as long as you don’t overcommit — like, as long as you don’t make an improvident commitment.”

That is the worst possible foreign policy advice. Syria isn’t just messy: it’s a catastrophe of disarray. It’s much more complicated than this, of course, but simply and charitably speaking it’s as follows: on one side is Assad, mass murderer, dictator and human rights violator. On the other side is a group of hardcore Sunni islamists and Al Qaeda affiliates. Pick your poison.

In a perfect world, there would a large, capable multinational force that could threaten to narrowly destroy the leadership of both sides unless they instituted a cease fire, then extradite Assad, begin a reconciliation process and hold elections under the watchful eye of peacekeepers and election observers–without the ability for any nation to privatize the assets of the country or exploit them for self-interested gain.

We don’t live in that world. There is no such force, in large part because the United States, the EU, Russia and China are much too fond of playing Risk with one another to worry about dead and dying Syrian children. Much better to consider proxy wars with Iran or Israel, and to fret about the fate of Gazprom in the East and Exxon in the West. Important things. Realpolitik, don’t you know. Why, these proud nations ask themselves, should they do anything so noble as to cooperate to make peace and save lives? Pushing chess pieces around the world stage is much more interesting. Plus, they can claim the moral high ground: to stop the mass slaughter of children in a brutal and bloody civil war with no good guys would be imperialism. It’s far nobler just to let the slaughter go on unabated. That’s the progressive approach, or so they say.

All sorts of good reasons on the right and on the left, then, for the nations of the world not to cooperate with each other. Not on this, not on climate change. Not on anything, really. It’s all good.

So we have no such cooperative organized alliances of nations. The UN is toothless and functionally useless. Which in turn leaves a bunch of solitary nation-states to intervene or not as their leaders see fit. That seems productive.

Which brings us to the United States and Syria. Yes, the United States could arm the Syrian rebels, which in turn would lead to increased bloodshed by Sunni extremists against, well, anyone who doesn’t buy into their brand of religious fanaticism. Or the United States could do the unthinkable and help the mass murdering dictator conduct his campaign of genocide. Both of these would entail massive blowback, nor is it clear that they would do even temporary good.

Or the United States could do nothing, watch Syrians slaughter one another en masse, and eye Russia and China balefully as all three glower at each other to make sure that none of them impact any of the others’ precious, precious oil and gas interests.

Given the short-sighted stupidity of the world’s current political structures, that’s actually the best bet at this time. It’s appalling that Bill Clinton doesn’t know that. Doing nothing beyond persistent diplomacy (which accomplishes nothing in this case) is the right approach. So do nothing.

But that’s not something to be proud of. The fact that nothing good can be done in Syria isn’t something to shrugged over insouciantly with a self-satisfied smugness about national self-determination. It should be the profound shame of every citizen of every nation in the world, and an indictment of the profound greed and cowardice of their leaders.

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A beautiful film of nature’s destructive potential

by digby

Wow

On June 3rd of this year after four years of trying, Arizona photographer and storm chaser Mike Olbinski finally got the shot he’d been searching for: the formation of a gigantic rotating supercell. After four trips to the central plains since 2010, Oblinski and friend Andy Hoeland were tracking storms in northern Texas last week when they spotted this unbelievable cloud formation. The duo were actually forced to drive right through the storm system (which didn’t spawn a tornado) to obtain this unworldly footage that might as well have been shot on Jupiter, but in the end it was all worth it. Make sure to view it in HD, full-screen, and you can read more about the once-in-a-lifetime encounter over on his blog.

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The Irish Taliban are threatening PM Enda Kenny for expanding women’s rights

by David Atkins

Fundamentalist activists in Ireland are are threatening PM Enda Kenny over his efforts to lift Ireland’s total abortion ban, including with letters written in blood:

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny says anti-abortion activists in his predominantly Roman Catholic country are inundating his office with threatening packages and letters condemning him as a baby-killer, some written in blood.

“I am now being branded … around the country as a murderer, that I’m going to have on my soul the death of 20 million babies,” Kenny said Wednesday as he described a mass campaign to flood his post box and telephone switchboard with anti-abortion messages.

But Kenny told lawmakers his 2-year-old government was determined to reform Ireland’s blanket ban on abortion in a bill being published Wednesday night following months of backroom haggling.

The proposed law would strengthen the ability of doctors to perform abortions only in rare cases where the woman’s life was endangered from continued pregnancy, including her own threat to commit suicide if denied a termination.

An opinion poll being published Thursday in The Irish Times found strong public support for wider abortion rights than that proposed in the bill. But it recorded substantial opposition to suicide threats as justifiable grounds.

The bill is a small step in the right direction, yet it has the fundamentalists up in arms over the threat to patriarchy and a bizarre interpretation of their religion not even supported by a close reading of their own sacred texts.

It doesn’t matter if it’s here, Ireland, Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. It’s always the same impulse, and it always deserves the same scorn and crushing defeat in the cause of a more equitable world.

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They have no clue what’s out there


by digby

I don’t know if she meant to say this in the way I heard it, but yesterday on Hardball Dana Priest said that these surveillance agencies need young people because the people in charge are “older and less fluent in the technology and they have no clue what’s out there — that they themselves have put out there.”

If that’s true — and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is, it’s yet another reason not to trust these people with all this private information. Many of the people at the top, the ones who are charged with carrying out the privacy policies, don’t know what the hell they are doing.

And lord knows, the congress doesn’t …

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Headline ‘o the day

by digby

The U.S. job market is still worse than at any point during the last downturn

Wow, that’s quite a success story there. One can only wonder what might have happened if the the majority of the political establishment had not succumbed to the siren call of austerity.

The good news is that it’s getting better than it was. So that’s something.

Chris Hayes: “It’s not some Orwellian abstraction. It’s America’s history”


by digby

Last night Chris Hayes tried to give his audience some perspective on the fears and concerns of civil libertarians who are mistrustful of the government when they assure us they will not abuse their power. He used the famous example of Martin Luther King.

I’m sure that for some of you that is ancient history (and I have heard a lot from supporters of the program that my mistrust is a function of my addled old age and nostalgia for my youth rather than anything savvy modern people should take seriously.) But Chris Hayes is hardly a senile old woman and yet he makes some excellent points that this ancient observer thinks are worthy of consideration:

Transcript:

We begin tonight with this man, former Alabama governor George Wallace who 50 years ago today made his infamous stand in the schoolhouse door. a principled stand on behalf of evil. in defiance of the united states justice department , governor George Wallace stood outside the University of Alabama personally blocking two black students from enrolling there.

(VIDEO) I stand here today as Governor of this sovereign state and refuse to submit to the illegal use of power by the central government.

Today, 50 years later when we look back on that moment on June 11th, 1963, we can tell very clearly the heroes and the villains. George Wallace was obviously the villain in this story, and Vivian Malone and James Hood, the two students blocked by George Wallace from registering that day, were heroes, along with the rest of the civil rights movement, folks like Martin Luther King Jr., the people who are fighting for integration, they’re the heroes. They’re the good guys, but the United States government at the time, it was not at all clear. In 1963, President Kennedy, himself, said this of Dr. King.

(AUDIO) The trouble with king is everybody thinks he’s our boy. King is so hot these days it’s like Marx coming to the white house.

He admitted later he asked the FBI to make an intensive investigation of Martin Luther King. And that on October 10th, 1963, he personally authorized the FBI to begin wiretapping King’s phones. The Kennedys were most certainly not alone in these attitudes toward Dr. King in the 1960s, much of the security apparatus of the cold war American state was obsessed with the idea that the civil rights movement was infiltrated by communists, and working to tear down U.S. society from the inside. And no single person captured the fear and paranoia of the security apparatus more than Dr. Martin Luther King. 

So faced with what they perceived as a threat, the security state did what all security states do when faced with a perceived threat. They surveilled Dr. King around the clock. They stalked his every move, broke into and bugged his office. They bugged his hotel rooms and they tapped into his phones. The FBI and Jay Edgar Hoover were obsessed with ruining Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

In 1964, after Hoover called King the most “notorious liar in the country” in a press conference, a package was sent to King in the mail, a package the House select committee ultimately traced back to the FBI. Inside this package, one of the most remarkable artifacts in American history was an anonymous letter addressed to Martin Luther King and a copy of an electronic surveillance tape apparently to lend credence to threats of exposure of derogatory personal information made in the letter. We don’t know to this day for sure what was on that tape. The heavy speculation throughout the years it was of personal and sexual nature recorded by a device planted in Dr. King’s hotel room. 

The letter that came with the tape read in part, “you know you are complete fraud and a great liability to all of us negroes. The American public will know you for what you are, an evil abnormal beast. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” The committee considered it highly likely that Director Hoover had before the fact knowledge of the action. 

So that’s a letter encouraging Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself, sent to King from the FBI. This happened in American history. It’s just one example out of many of how the full weight of the surveillance state constructed to fight the cold war was used against the people working for racial equality. It may have been constructed to defeat the Russians and the genuine threat of global communism, but it was deployed on people like Carmichael and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

This is all particularly relevant today. Not just because it’s generally good to take heed of the lessons from history, but because of the spy novel-esque mystery that is unfolding in the news right now which involves the uncovering of a massive and sophisticated surveillance apparatus being operated by the United States government. The whereabouts of the 29-year-old at the center of the intrigue, intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, has been unknown since he checked out of a Hong Kong hotel after filming a jaw-dropping interview in which he took credit for leaking classified documents exposing government phone and internet spying tactics and programs. 

Since his video confession, he has officially been fired. The consulting firm Booz Allen announcing the firing today saying he worked there for less than three months and earned a salary of $122,000 a year. (Notably is quite a bit less than the 200 grand he claimed to have been making.) The Justice department is reportedly already working on pursuing criminal charges against Snowden which is said to be the first step necessary to force him to return to the U.S. And the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration today charging that the newly released phone record collection being done by the government is illegal. The ACLU is asking the judge to bar the mass collection of domestic phone logs and to order existing records to be purged. Arguing the program, quote, “gives the government a comprehensive record of our associations and public movements, revealing a wealth of detail about our familial, political, professional, religious and intimate associations.” 

But all of that said, when you look at public opinion, Americans appear at the moment, at least, you may be watching this feel this way, to be fairly tolerant of this kind of surveillance. when you ask as pollsters from the “Washington Post” and Pew did this week if it’s more important for the government to investigate terror threats or preserve Americans’ privacy. An overwhelming majority, 62% say investigate threats even if it violates our privacy. Those numbers are, well, I think totally understandable because everybody wants the government to catch terrorists, and the lack of privacy seems fairly abstract. 

Most Americans probably feel pretty far removed from the days of Jay Edgar Hoover spying on Dr. Martin Luther King and with some good reason. If you ask me, in the abstract, do you think it’s okay for the government to be able to access millions of Americans’ phone records and internet activity as long as those tools are just for catching terrorists and they’re never, ever abused, I would be tempted to say, yes, that’s totally okay. 

But there’s a pretty major sticking point, and that is the as long as it’s not abused part. Because history tells us that is not actually a thing — a nonabused massive government surveillance apparatus. That is not what Dr. Martin Luther King tells us. Frankly, you don’t even have to look at history. Just look at the news from the fall of 2008 when a pair of NSA whistleblowers came forward to talk about what was being done with the agency’s surveillance tools way back then.

(VIDEO) I would say that after 9/11, particularly with the fact we were listening to satellite phone communications, rather than targeting military entities in the middle east, we were actually listening to a lot of everyday ordinary people who really in many ways had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. … 

The times when I was told, hey, check this out, there’s something really some good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny. Go check it out and it would be some colonel making pillow talk . 

And you would listen? 

It was there, stored the way you look at songs on your Ipod.

That was our post-9/11 anti- terrorist surveillance state at work just a few years ago. examples of big sweeping surveillance programs misfiring are all over the place. just last month, NBC’s Michael Isikoff flagged reports that a special home run security unit was closely monitoring anti-wall street demonstrations including tracking the Facebook pages and websites of the protesters and writing reports on the “potential impact on commercial and financial sector assets in downtown areas” right around the time the U.S. government received the second warning about the radical Islamic ties of alleged Boston marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. 

When you construct a massive surveillance apparatus, history tells us that it will be brought to bear not just on, quote, “the enemy” but on the people who threaten society’s power structure. On whoever exists at the political margins, whether it’s Martin Luther King Jr. or some Occupy Boston protesters. It’s not some Orwellian abstraction. It’s America’s history — and America’s recent history —and left unchecked I fear for America ‘s future.

I do too.

*Taken from a rough transcript.