Terrorism

President-Elect Obama and Getting the Change We Deserve

dlindorff — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:40:04 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Now that the street dancing is over, and President-elect Barack
Obama is measuring the drapes for the new Oval Office (let’s hope he
loses the mounted Saddam Hussein matching pistol set and that he has
the direct hard-wired link between the Vice President’s Office and the
Pentagon severed), it’s time to start focusing on how to make this new
president live up to his mantra of “Change We Can Believe In.”

Well over 65 million people voted Obama in on the belief that he
meant what he said with that largely empty slogan. They are going to be
hugely disappointed if he doesn’t deliver.

Yet Obama’s first steps as president-to-be are not promising. His
first official appointment, naming Rep. Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of
Staff, was probably the worst possible sign of “No Change.” Emanuel, a
fellow member of the Chicago political gang, far from being something
new, is a relic of the Clinton administration, where he served as a
political strategist, pushing the disastrous “triangulation” strategy
that gave us the end of welfare benefits for poor women, the gutting of
habeas corpus, deregulation of the banking system, and an economic
program that favored bond traders over working people. Worse yet, the
naming to such a key post of Emanuel, a rabid Zionist who actually
holds dual US and Israeli citizenship and was a member of the Israeli
Defense Force (IDF), will poison Obama’s chances to broker a real,
lasting peace deal between Israel and Palestine by aligning him clearly
with the Israeli side in every Palestinian’s eyes.

Other appointments aren’t likely to be much better. Obama’s
advisers during the campaign, especially on economics and foreign
policy, have been not forward-thinking “change”-oriented outsiders, but
rather hoary old-timers like Paul Adolph Volcker and Zbigniew Brezinsky
(both veterans of the Carter presidency!). Why would we expect his
cabinet appointments to be any different? (I recently attended a talk
that featured Volcker, who was Federal Reserve Chairman under Carter
and Reagan, along with Nobel economists Robert Mundell and Joseph
Stiglitz. Volcker sounded almost senile as he rambled on and on in a
barely comprehensible mumble about the need for a “global” currency.)

But the point is, no one should have expected anything different
from Obama. Let’s face it; If he had run a campaign using Stiglitz as
his chief economic policy guy and Ramsey Clark as his foreign policy
expert, his candidacy would have gone down in flames. And don’t tell me
`Good, we should have all voted for Ralph Nader.’” The political left
in the US is a pathetic joke. Instead of a unified third party on the
left, we had that 1-5% sliver of the electorate divided between
independent Ralph Nader and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia
McKinney! How stupid is that? If the left cannot unite when its public
standing and support is so pathetically small, how can it expect anyone
to back it (I’m being generous here in using the singular to describe
such a fractured group of people)?

No, it was correct to elect Obama. Failure to do so (and remember,
he only won the popular vote by a slender 6-percent margin, and many of
the key states that provided his much larger electoral vote victory
were won by margins that thin or thinner including 034 percent in North
Carolina), would have meant a President John “Bomb-Bomb” McCain and his
loopy VP Sarah Palin.

But as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and others, myself included,
have long said, change in America has not for the most part been made
from the top down, or through the electoral process. It has been the
result of political struggle in the workplace, on the campus and most
importantly in the streets. And that brings us to where we are today.

Progressives should complain loudly at the pathetic nominations
that Obama is making to his new administration. The new president-elect
should take heat for appointing old Clintonian hacks and for “reaching
out” to Republicans in the interest of “bi-partisanship.” But more
importantly, we on the left need to work hard to organize, demonstrate,
and protest to achieve our goals and to make President Obama and the
new solidly Democratic Congress do the right (left) thing.

For me, the two most important issues we need to focus laser-like upon are ending the wars, and obtaining worker rights.

It is time to plan a massive march, to coincide with Inauguration
Day, to demand a prompt end to the Iraq War and occupation, and a
negotiated solution to the chaotic war in Afghanistan. The protest
should also demand an end to the so-called “War” on Terror, beginning
with the immediate closing of Guantanamo’s prison, and of all the black
sites around the world.

Secondly, the left and the labor movement need to organize a million-worker march on Washington--hell, a two-million worker
march--to demand immediate passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, a
long-delayed reform of US labor law that would end almost 50 years of
bias against workers that has seen employers able to simply flout the
law and prevent workers from forming unions. Under the proposed act,
which already passed the House in the last session of Congress only to
die in the Senate (before having a chance to be killed by the
president), workers would no longer have to go through years of delay
trying to get a secret-ballot election in the workplace; they would
only have to obtain signed cards supporting a union from a majority of
employees. It would mandate that employers bargain in good faith with a
new union, and would mandate a contract if management stonewalled
negotiations. It would also, for the first time, impose penalties for
violating workers rights—for example firing union activists and their
supporters.

Why is this bill so important? Because without a powerful labor
movement, we will never see the Democratic Party, or any third party of
the left, become a serious force for progressive change. It is working
people, and only working people, organized into powerful unions, who
have the potential of pushing the government into making progressive
change, but with union representation now down to less than 8 percent
of the private workforce, and 13 percent of the entire workforce,
counting public employees, what chance is there of such a thing
happening?

Polls over the years have consistently shown that, despite all the
media propaganda against unions, and the lack of any education about
the union movement or the importance of unions in our schools, between
60% and 70% of American workers nonetheless say that they would like to
have a union on their job if they could get one. The problem is, with
the laws and the Labor Relations Boards stacked against them, they
cannot get a union, and indeed, put their jobs and their families at risk by even trying to get one.

Obama and most of the Democrats who won election in this cycle have
pledged to pass this act this year. They also owe their victories to
the extraordinary effort that what’s left of the labor movement put
into getting them elected. Workers and leftists of all stripes need to
act now to demand that they make good on that promise and on the debt
that they owe.

It is the first essential step in moving a President Obama and a
Democratic Congress—as of now still in the grip of the corporatocracy,
with little in the way of any countervailing organized pressure from
the left—in a progressive direction.

The time for dancing is over, but nothing is easy. Now it’s time
for marching, for shouting, for sitting in and for organizing to get
the “Change” we’ve earned.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphie-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

This Country is Nuts!

dlindorff — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:45:20 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Okay, I have to vent here. We all get a little crazy sitting alone
at our keyboards in this business, and it's finally gotten to me.

I know there are serious signs of a complete mental breakdown in the
US, with polls reporting that millions of people are actually excited
at having a low-rent religious fanatic who consistently mispronounces
pundit as "pundint" (shades of Dubya!), pilfers state funds for her
family's personal use, lies about her alleged opposition to Washington
pork, claims the bloody war in Iraq is "God's will," forces her
17-year-old daughter to make a momentary mistake into a lifetime one by
marrying the kid who got her pregnant, and refers to blacks as "sambo"
and to Alaska's indigenous people as "arctic arabs," running for vice
president on the ticket with a man who is a walking medical disaster
waiting to happen.

These are probably the same people who still give the worst
president in the history of the Union a 30 percent approval rating, who
keep watching reality TV shows (perhaps thinking they're real), and who
still think having 180,000 US troops indiscriminately slaughtering
Iraqis, Afghanis and Pakistanis is making the US "safe."

But right now I want to talk about Homeland Security and the US Postal Service, two small examples of domestic insanity.

I tried to mail a book to my father last Saturday for his 86th
birthday. In order to make sure it would get there by Tuesday, I sent
it in one of those flat-rate Priority Mail envelopes--the ones that
promise two-day delivery. It cost me $4.80 (five 90-cent stamps, one
24-cent stamp and two 3-cent stamps). I drop the little package off
after hours into the mail slot in the lobby of my local post office.

Yesterday, my envelope was in my mailbox, though, with a blue
sticker attached headed: "Important Customer Information: We regret
that your mail was not collected or is being returned to you due to
heightened security requirements. All mail that bears postage stamps
and weighs more than 13 ounces MUST be taken by the customer to a
retail service associate at a Post Office."

Okay, so dad won't get his present on his birthday.

I called the local PO to ask what was going on, and was told that
any package over 13 ounces with stamps has to be handed in person to a
counter employee.

"With stamps?" I asked. "What if I had worked at a company and had a
metered stamp put on it and then dropped it in a mailbox or mail slot?"

"Then it would go," I was told. "Because we'd have a meter number to trace who mailed it."

Let's see. The meter would trace the package to whatever big company
I might have worked at, but I don't see how that would help them trace
it to the actual mailer.

Now, what about if I brought my package to the counter? Would it be
opened and checked? No, I was told. I would simply be asked by the
counter clerk whether the package contained any banned substances, like
bodily fluids, liquids or bombs. If I said no, it would be accepted for
mailing. ("I know this sounds silly," the postal worker on the phone
told me, "but I don't make the rules. It's Homeland Security.")

Wow. The Post Office and the Department of Homeland Security are
sure keeping our mail trucks and our airlines safe with this clever
policy.

I mean, we can be sure that those stoopid Ayrabs wouldn't think to
put a metered stamp on the bomb they send through the mails. And that
asking at the counter thing, that would sure catch anyone trying to
slip some deadly substance into the mail stream. The clerks are
probably trained to look for certain kinds of markers of suspicious
behavior--a tic, a shifty look, or some reticence in the answer given.

Right.

So this is what it has come to in America. We're ready to put an
refugee from the "Jerry Springer" show a missed heartbeat away from the
White House, and we keep our mail and our aircraft industry safe from
terrorists by returning (through the mail, mind you!!) packages that
are left in a mailbox if they have postage stamps on them.

Dad, if you're reading this, I'm sorry your present is going to
arrive late. Take it up with Mike Chertoff, the guy who made sure
everyone got out of New Orleans alive when that city was hit by
Hurricane Katrina.

Is this a great country or what?
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Extra! Dog Bites Man! Read All About It!

dlindorff — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:23:00 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In the category of yawn-inducing stories that we knew all about
before they happened, comes word that the jury of senior uniformed
officers sitting in judgement of Osama Bin Laden’s chauffeur in the
first Bush-league military tribunal to actually go to a hearing at
Guantanamo Naval Station found the prisoner, Salim Hamdan…

Drum roll please…

Guilty of supporting terrorism.

I pause here for gasps of astonishment.

It’s awfully silent…

Really, did anyone expect anything else? The officers, who all have
careers to think about that would surely be severely crimped if they
went off script and found the man innocent of the charges, heard
evidence that was obtained through torture. They heard reports of
confessions from a man who himself was subjected to torture, by the
admission of the military itself, and who was never afforded an
attorney during those interrogations.

Okay. So now we need to ask, do we all feel safer, knowing that a
car driver whose claim to fame is that he used to drive the Evil One
from house to house and wife to wife is going to be locked up for life?

Wait a minute. He is already being locked up for life. At least, he
was captured in November 2001, and shipped to Guantanamo in May 2002,
and he’s been held there ever since—for over six years—awaiting this
trial, er, I mean tribunal. There certainly was no prospect of his ever
being let go before the tribunal, so I’m not sure what the point of
this exercise was really.

So now we can move on to the next tribunal—this one involving Ahmed
Khadr, a Canadian boy picked up in Afghanistan at the age of 15, who’s
been held now for six years on the base. His “crime” is that he was
bombed by the US Air Force, and then shot up (in the back) by US
Special Forces, but he somehow managed, at least allegedly, to toss a
grenade at his attackers, killing one (actually there is some testimony
that he didn’t actually toss the grenade, but then, why quibble about
details, right?).

Does anyone want to guess about the outcome of his “trial”?

Back in journalism school, I remember being told that the classic
definition of a news story was “Man Bites Dog!” The notion was that if
something totally predictable happens, like a dog biting a man, it
ain’t really news. Only if it is unexpected does it have any real news
value. By that standard, Hamdan’s conviction should be relegated to a
one-sentence notice in the news briefs section, but I’m guessing it’ll
be page one tomorrow all over America: Terrorist Convicted!

What we really need to be asking is why taxpayer dollars are being
spent on this shameful farce, which makes a joke of American “justice”
around the world.

Salim Hamdan is one of three things:

* a vile terrorist, in which case he should be tried in a regular
court of law by a jury of citizens, with all the rights available under
our Constitution

* a prisoner of war, in which case he should be sent back to
Afghanistan, since that war is now technically over (he is not a member
of the Taliban).

* an innocent schmuck who was working for a living driving a rich
bearded guy around the Hindu Kush, and who got picked up instead of his
boss, who’s still plotting ways to blow us all up while the US
government wastes its time and its personnel prosecuting his driver.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Then again, maybe it is news after all: “US Attacked By Terrorist Gang, Mastermind’s Driver Gets Life Seven Years Later”
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a journalist and columnist based in
Philadelphia. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St.
Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work
can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Recipe

Chip — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:11:38 -0400

So many diversions, so little time! That is part of the strategy, of course. Impoverish people so they must work harder to maintain their daily lives, while simultaneously overwhelming them with info overload and ersatz news. Decentralize the crimes themselves through a network of events and operatives over a time continuum, and choke off government scrutiny and regulation by reduced funding. Buy off the people's government. Throw in classic disinformation methods, and wrap it all in the cross (invoking religious endorsement) and the flag (inferring without actualizing authentic patriotism).

Blend, at a moderate but continuously increasing pace, with intermittent but increasingly harrowing instances of terror.

Voila!

You have Fascism via the NWO.

Shoot Your Friends First: The Cheney Doctrine

dlindorff — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:28:17 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Some people are expressing consternation and disbelief at a report
by journalist Seymour Hersh that Vice President Dick Cheney had
discussed the idea in his office of having some Navy Seals dress up as
Iranians, and then putting them in faked Iranian speedboats to make a fake
attack on US ships in the Persian Gulf. The ensuing faked battle, with
fake Iranians shooting at US ships and US ships firing back, he
suggested, could be used to spark a war between the US and Iran.

` I don’t know why people would find it hard to believe that this
vice president would think up an idea like having Americans shoot at
other Americans in the interest of his own warped view of national
security.

After all, this is a guy who shoots his own friends.

Besides, Cheney is in good company in this kind of thinking. We know
from reports of the meeting filed by British intelligence that
President Bush engaged in the same kind of thing when he was having
trouble getting the country and the rest of the civilized world behind
his and Cheney’s plan to attack Iraq. It was disclosed years later that
in early 2003, Bush suggested to Prime Minister Tony Blair that the US
could paint a U-2 spy plane in UN colors and fly it over sensitive
parts of Iraqi airspace, so that Saddam Hussein would order it show
down. That, he argued, would anger enough UN member states to win a
security resolution to support a war on Iraq, and failing that, would
give the US an excuse to go in on its own. Blair was reportedly
horrified at this kind of kamikaze thinking—but not horrified enough to
expose the president as a nutcase.

So that’s where we are today folks. A president and a vice president
who both think that it’s a great idea to either send some of your own
troops under false flags into harm’s way to get shot at so you can
start a war, or, even worse, to dress up some of your soldiers as the
enemy you want to go after, and have them open fire on your own guys so
that you can claim you were attacked, and then go to war.

Who gets tricked by all these mad schemes?

Not the Iranians, or in the earlier instance, the Iraqis. They know
they aren’t attacking American forces. No. It’s us, the American
people, who are being tricked. Cheney knows that most Americans think
the idea of attacking Iran—especially when we’re five years into an
interminable war in Iraq and seven years into another war in
Afghanistan, neither of which has an end in sight—is really, really
stupid. So they’re trying to think up a way to trick us into supporting
doing such a stupid thing. And the only thing they can come up with to
overcome our reticence is making us think that our guys are being
attacked.

Now let me say that I’ve been a skeptic about people who claim the
9-11 attacks were an “inside job”—that the US government actually
organized those attacks. I know all the arguments and evidence, but it
always seemed to me that it was over the top to think that our leaders
would try to deliberately kill Americans in order to achieve some
policy goal. And yet, here we have Dick Cheney, the real brains (such
as they are) behind the Bush administration, discussing a plan, using
American forces, to fake an attack on other American forces.

It makes me wonder whether maybe Cheney deliberately shot his friend
Harry Whittington, either to flush those damned elusive quail he was
after, or so that he could generate public sympathy for the embattled
President Bush. And it even makes me wonder whether crazy Dick actually
did have a hand in bringing down those Twin Towers. He may be too
stupid to pull something like that off, but he has made it clear that
it isn’t moral scruples that would prevent him from doing such a
monstrous thing.

As ludicrous, pathetic and outrageous as this administration is, we
need to take this latest Hersh report seriously. It seems clear that
Cheney has a predilection for using fratricide to achieve his nefarious
ends.

It’s one thing when he does it with his own rifle, though. It’s
another when he does it with the world’s most mighty military machine.
______________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available
in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Mukasey's Excellent Idea: War All the Time, Enemy Combatants Everywhere

dlindorff — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:55:16 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has caught some flak for
proposing, in an address to the American Enterprise Institute, that
Congress should declare war on Al Qaeda.

Instead, he should be applauded for his brilliant idea.

First of all, Mukasey is admitting, whether he wants to admit it or
not, that the Bush/Cheney program of capturing alleged terrorists and
holding them for years as enemy combatants without charge in detention
centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and various
undisclosed locations around the globe, and of torturing many of them,
are illegal actions that violate US law and International Law. So let’s
give him credit for that.

Second, he wants to make these criminal acts retroactively legal
and future such acts legal, by declaring Al Qaeda to be some kind of an
entity and to declare America to be at war with that entity. Of course,
doing this wouldn’t exactly solve the torture problem, since the Geneva
Conventions are fairly clear about the fact that you just cannot
torture. You can’t even treat captives in a war in a degrading manner,
which pretty much rules out things like stress positions and
waterboarding, unless perhaps conducted by polite men in butler
uniforms who address the victims as “sir” and deliver hors derves and
wine spritzers during the process.

But what’s brilliant about Mukasey’s idea is that it could be so easily expanded beyond just terrorism.

Once you accept the idea that a gang of armed men can be declared
war on like a country, it opens up a whole universe of enemies against
which the US could declare war.

Start with the war on drugs. Remember that one? It was never a war,
and no one ever really thought of it as one, but we could now make it a
real one, and have Congress declare war on drugs. Then, using Mukasey’s
war on terror model, we could just have cops grab drug dealers and
suspected drug dealers, and maybe even users, and just lock them up
without charge to be held for the duration of the war, like he wants to
do with terrorists.

But why stop there?

Congress could declare war on drunk drivers. Now there’s a scourge
that is killing Americans at a frightening rate. With a war on drunks
behind the wheel, we would no longer see people hiring lawyers and
getting their charges reduced to some trivial moving violation that
allows them to get back behind the wheel. We’d just lock ‘em up and
hold ‘em until the war was over.

Next we could have a war on littering. I, for one, am sick of
seeing our streets lined with soggy used soda cubs, balled up used
diapers and shriveled wet condoms, and all those plastic shopping bags,
If we could just start locking up enemy combatant litterers, the whole
country would look a whole lot better in no time.

Finally, Congress could declare a real war on poverty. We had one
of those back in the mid-‘60s, but we lost. Not for lack of trying, but
poor people kept getting poor again and dragging the rest of us down.
If Congress would declare war, the government could start rounding up
the enemy combatant poor, and locating them away for the duration. I
understand Halliburton is already building camps around the country
which could be used for this purpose.

Now I admit Mukasey and the Bush/Cheney administration are a bunch
of heartless bastards, and I wouldn’t want to see them treating the
enemy combatant poor the way they treat drug dealers or hardened
litterers, but with the poor, it could be a humanitarian kind of thing.
I mean, the enemy combatant poor would certainly get treated better in
those camps, with three squares a day and schools for the kids, than
they are doing on their own right now.

So I say let’s move forward with this idea. The Founding Fathers
couldn’t have been so blind that they were only referring to nation
states when they talked about Congress having the power to declare war.
They were a bunch of creative, forward-thinking men, and I’m sure they
would have liked the idea of broadening the meaning of war a bit to
include things like international criminal gangs, domestic criminals,
litterbugs and the poor.

I say, declare war and bring ‘em on!
____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a journalist and columnist based in Philadelphia. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

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I Was a Victim of the Government’s Absurd and Over-Hyped War on Terror

dlindorff — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:37:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I was injured thanks to the government’s ridiculous airport
security program last week on a US Air flight from Chicago to
Philadelphia. I also saw how pointless the whole thing is, if the
supposed goal is really to prevent airline hijackings.

First, my injury. Because of a silly fear that I might blow up a
plane with explosives tucked into my running shoes, I, along with
everyone else in the security checkpoint line at O’Hare, including
two-month-old babies wearing little booties, had to doff my footwear.
Clad in just socks, I tried to maneuver my way around a metal counter
that held those plastic trays carrying my laptop, my shoes, my belt and
change and keys, and my carry-on bag, and in the process my unprotected
big toe hit a sharp piece of metal protruding from the table.

The metal sliced right under my toenail, making a painful and
bloody cut into the soft tissue under the nail. Cursing and bleeding, I
made my way through the metal detector, and collected my goods.

Now, inside my bag, unbeknownst to the Transportation Security
Administration inspectors, was a bottle of mouthwash. It was larger
than the approved 2-oz size, and it was not in an approved sealed
plastic bag. But TSA inspectors looking into their video screens at the
X-Ray machine didn’t see it, because I made sure that it was vertical
as it passed through. All they saw was a little circle of plastic.
Likewise, on an earlier flight, I had made my way aboard with a Swiss
Army knife. By standing it in my carry-on bag so that it would be
vertical for the X-Ray, I was able to slip it through and onto the
plane.

Now clearly I’m not a terrorist (though for a time, thanks to my
anti-Bush, anti-war journalism, and an expose about the TSA’s “no-fly”
list abuses, I was on the watch list, and would get a circled “S”
written on my boarding passes that ensured that I would be pulled aside
to have my carry-on luggage hand searched). But if I were a terrorist,
I sure wouldn’t try to commandeer a plane with a jackknife. I’d want
something bigger. But that would be simple. One could easily carry on a
10-inch blade the same way. If one were nervous about doing that, it
could be a ceramic or better, a Plexiglas blade—plenty dangerous, but
invisible to X-rays and metal detectors.

For that matter, if I were into suicide bombing and wanted to
manufacture a liquid explosive, why on earth would I try to do it by
smuggling on two large jars of ingredients, when I could just put them
in plastic baggies and carry them aboard in my pockets? Unless you
happen to be singled out for special handling, nobody at the security
checkpoints pats you down. They just have you walk through the metal
detectors while TSA inspectors are busy patting down randomly selected
elderly nuns and racially profiled people, like unfortunate Sikh men
wearing turbans.

Any dedicated terrorist hijacker could figure out numerous ways to
get explosives and weapons onto a plane past these security
arrangements.

And that’s not even counting having the weapons smuggled into an
airport gate area along with all the goods that are offered for sale
there, where they could be picked up after a hijacker had already
cleared security. There is no way that all the newspapers, magazines,
clothing, trinkets, bottles of booze and personal hygiene products,
etc., are screened adequately as they are brought in each day to fill
the concession stands for the day’s business. First of all, one would
have to open and check every bottle and box offered for sale.

If you were genuinely worried about protecting against hijackers,
you would have those inspections at the entrance to each plane, not at
the entrance to the terminal, and you wouldn’t have all that commerce
inside the security zone. Ah! But what a roar of outrage we’d hear from
the business community if that lucrative business venue were eliminated!

Which brings me to the real question: Why do we have all this
pointless and easily breached security, not to mention a list that
contains an astonishing one million names of suspected “terrorists”?

Clearly, the security program is not about protecting the flying
public, or the nation’s tall buildings. That could be done much more
cheaply by putting air marshals on all flights, the way they do at El
Al, the Israeli airline that has never had a successful hijacking.

No, this is all about heightening the fear level of the American people, to routinize us to living in a police state.

The truth is, nobody is really interested in trying to hijack
planes anymore. First of all, the “crash into buildings” tactic is
dead. Pilots are now flying armed in armored cockpits that cannot be
easily entered, and would not accede to a terrorist’s demands any
longer, knowing what happened last time. And passengers would not sit
passively in a cabin takeover attempt, either. As a result, we don’t
have to worry about such things any longer.

The ease with which security could be breached, and the fact that
it hasn’t happened now for seven years, is evidence enough that nobody
is even trying to do it.

So let’s do away with all this time-consuming, costly, and politically motivated nonsense before I injure my other big toe.
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and
columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s
Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Torture for the Torturers

dlindorff — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:04:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I don’t believe in torture, but right now, I’d like to see a few
people subjected to some of the torture techniques that they approved
for use against US captives in the so-called War on Terror.

I’d be satisfied if they just stuck to the ones used against
15-year-old Omar Khadr—techniques that a US federal judge established
constituted torture under the Geneva Conventions.

I have a 15-year old son, so I’m particularly aware of what an
atrocity it has been the way the US has treated Khadr, and some 2500
other young boys and teenagers that it admits to having captured and
labeled as “enemy combatants” in its so-called “war on terror.”

Khadr, recall, was sent at the age of 14 to Pakistan by his
allegedly terrorist-linked Canadian father to attend a madrassa—one of
those fundamentalist Muslim schools. Like a number of students of those
schools, he was indoctrinated in jihad and ended up fighting with the
Taliban in Afghanistan against the warlords that opposed them. When the
US attacked Afghanistan, in 2001, Khadr got caught up in a war against
America. According to the charge against him, he was arrested in 2002
after US Special Forces found him and some adult fighters hiding out in
a remote compound in the mountains. The Americans called in an air
strike, and then moved into the rubble to find out who was left—quite
probably, according to some testimony in the case—to finish them off.
Someone, still alive after the attack, tossed a grenade which killed
one of the Americans and blinded another. The others sprayed the
wounded fighters, gravely injuring Khadr and killing one of his older
companions.

Khadr was accused of being the grenade tosser, and was reportedly
tortured in Afghanistan, before being shipped off to Guantanamo, where
he remains six years later, facing a military tribunal. He was
interrogated there, not just by Americans, but by Canadians too.

A citizen of Canada, and clearly someone who was captured and held
in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which hold that children are
“protected persons,” not to be held as POWs if captured in wartime, but
rather to be treated as victims of war, Khadr has thus far been
abandoned to his fate by his own government. The Conservative prime
minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, anxious to have Canada serve as a
willing servant of US military power and foreign policy, has not lifted
a finger to help him.

Now a court in Canada has ordered the Canadian government to
release videotapes it was keeping secret of Khadr’s interrogations, and
they make for ugly viewing. Khadr is shown weeping, holding up his
wounded arms, pleading to be given treatment, pleading to be returned
to Canada. It’s a disgusting scene, especially when we learn that he
had already been “softened up” for his Canadian interrogators by
American torture specialists at Guantanamo who subjected this boy to
three weeks of sleep deprivation and god knows what other creative
techniques which we recently learned were copied from the methods
developed by the North Koreans and applied to American captives in the
Korean War.

It all makes you disgusted to be an American—especially with so
many Americans still justifying this kind of grotesque behavior.

But back to my desire to see some torture inflicted. My profound
wish is that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former Department
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
Canadian Prime Minister Harper all be subjected to no less than a month
of torture, to include water boarding, at least 2-3 weeks of sleep
deprivation, a variety of 24-stints of being forced into stress
positions (Rumsfeld’s should be standing), some violent slapping
around, and a bit of creative sexual humiliation. Since we don’t know
at this point that anal sodomizing was officially sanctioned, or just
was something that the torturers on the ground came up with that was
then ignored by superiors, I’m willing to let that one be left up to
those performing the torture, but I sure won’t object if it happens.

At this point, I can’t think of anything less than such a
punishment that would be fitting for these monsters who are currently
still running our, and Canada’s, governments.

When I think of what kind of twisted minds these people must have
in order to actually have met in the White House and approved such
methods for use against human beings—human beings who under our
Constitution are to be afforded the presumption of innocence, and who
are promised to be protected against “cruel and unusual” punishments
(or in Harper’s case to have known about it and then not protested,
even to protect a child born in his own country)—it makes me sick to my
stomach.

If there is a hell, I am sure there is in it some special circle
reserved for such monsters, but I think, having seen what was done at
their direction and with their approval to young Khadr (who after all,
if he really ever did toss that grenade, was only doing what any US
soldier would hope to have the courage to do in wartime if his unit
were attacked), that hell is too good for these leaders. They all need
and deserve the special punishment of having done to them what they
ordered or allowed to be done to others.

Sadly, my wish to see them suffer such a fate is unlikely to be
granted. One can at least hope, though, that they will have their names
etched somewhere for posterity on some memorial to the victims of war
crimes and to the eternal condemnation of the perpetrators of such
bestiality.
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a journalist and columnist based in Philadelphia.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now in paperback). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Videos from June 13 Iraq Forum, "Reframing the Iraq War Discussion," in Cherry Hill, NJ

dlindorff — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:16:21 -0400

Adam Kokesh of Iraq Veterans Against the War (Part 1)

Kokesh Reams Rep. Robert Andrews (D-NJ) for Backing the War (Part 2)

Dave Lindorff on the Bush/Cheney Push for War with Iran (Part 1)

Dave Lindorff on the Bush/Cheney Push for War with Iran (Part 2)

America has a Double Standard When It Comes to Kids. Victims if Prostitutes, Terrorists if They Are Caught Fighting the US

dlindorff — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:44:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Double standards when it comes to children are pretty
appalling—especially when it comes to “our” kids vs. “their” kids, but
here in America they aren’t limited to just right-wingers.

Take reaction to the US Supreme Court’s latest ruling that you
cannot execute rapists—even those who rape children—on the theory that
only killing someone justifies execution.

Politicians who make their careers by promoting state sponsored
murder have been quick to condemn this latest “liberal outrage” by
calling for more laws that would make execution the punishment for
raping a child (admittedly a monstrous crime).

"Anybody in the country who cares about children should be outraged
that we have a Supreme Court that would issue a decision like this,"
says Republican Alabama Attorney General Troy King, who said the
court’s 5-4 decision makes America “a less safe place to grow up.”

Even Barack Obama has weighed in, along with John McCain, in
condemning the court’s decision, saying that states should be free to
pass death statutes for child rape.

Texas Republican Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, supporting death for
“repeat child molesters, says, “Our top priority remains protecting our
most precious resource — our children." (Huh? I thought in Texas it was
oil.)

Then there’s the FBI’s latest sweeping busts of child prostitution
rings, which rescued 21 juveniles from sex-selling rings. In announcing
the arrests of some 300 people, FBI Director Robert Mueller said, "Our
top priority in these cases has always been to identify children
victims and move swiftly to remove them from these dangerous
environments.”

"These kids are victims,” said Ernie Allen, president of the
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “They lack the
ability to walk away. This is the 21st-century slavery."

The question is, where are Mueller and Allen and these allegedly
concerned politicians when it comes to children who are forced or lured
into fighting against the US, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq? Where are
they when those children are captured by US military forces and
incarcerated with adult captives in hell-holes like Bagram Airbase in
Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or Guantanamo, where there was
a special children’s section called Camp Iguana? I certainly haven’t
heard a word from either Obama or that famous POW McCain in defense of
America’s child war prisoners.

Take Omar Khadr, shot and then captured and tortured by US forces
at the tender age of 15 in 2002 in Afghanistan and held for six years
in Guantanamo. Last week, I reported on his story
and on plans to try him by military tribunal as a terrorist because he
had dared, allegedly, to toss a grenade at US Special Forces troops who
had called in an air strike on him and several adult fighters, killing
one US soldier (at least one witness to the incident, a US soldier,
says it was not Khadr who three the grenade). Nobody’s saying that
Khadr was a victim. Nobody’s saying that he “lacked the ability to walk
away” from the Taliban forces that his father and older brothers had
him join at the age of 14 a year before. Nobody’s saying he should be
“identified” and “removed from these dangerous environments.”

Nobody in government or in child protection organizations is even
investigating to see if Khadr, as a 15-year-old captive, was tortured!
Indeed, the US has been blocking both Khadr’s military defense attorney
and his Canadian lawyer (Khadr is a Canadian citizen) from getting
military records giving the details of his capture and subsequent
treatment.

Canadian journalist Chris Cook reports that the Canadian government
actually argued in Canadian court against releasing the US reports in
its possession claiming doing so might “upset relations” between Canadian and
the United States. (The Canadian Supreme Court in May rejected that
pathetically subservient claim by a 9-0 vote, ordering full disclosure.)

The thing is, Khadr is just one of at least 2500 children who have
been captured and held as “enemy combatants” by the US in the
Bush/Cheney so-called “War” on Terror.

Like child prostitutes, these captives, if they were even actually
involved in operations against the US (who would know, since they’ve
never been given hearings in court, and since in many cases the
evidence, such as it is, against them is the result of torture, either
of the children themselves, or of others), are at worst child soldiers,
who cannot be held responsible for their actions. Indeed, under the UN
Charter and the Geneva Convention, as amended by a protocol signed by
the US in 2002, any of them who, at the time of their capture, were
under 18, as was Khadr, are to be considered not POWs or “enemy
combatants,” but rather victims, who need care and treatment.

Aside from Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who has filed an article of
impeachment against President Bush, charging him with a war crime for
holding these children, and for authorizing rules of engagement that
have encouraged the killing of children as young as 14, who are
“presumed” to be combatants, and for the six other members of the
House who have co-signed his impeachment bill (Rep. Robert Wexler,
D-FL, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-CA, Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-CA, Rep. Tammy
Baldwin, D-WI, Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-NY, and Rep. Sam Farr, D-CA), no
members of Congress have called for the protection of children captured
or held by US military forces.

Their, and the American public’s “concern” for the welfare of
children is narrowly limited to those who are lured or forced into
prostitution. That’s it.

Of course, we should not be surprised at this double standard. Most
of these same politicians are also quick to support laws that take
young children from poor (and usually minority) urban backgrounds who
commit violent crimes and have them tried, and punished, as adults.
Again, these children are as much victims as the kids who become child
prostitutes, but there’s no love lost on them by these “child welfare”
charlatans.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net