The US government pretends to live under the rule of law, to respect human rights, and to provide freedom and democracy to citizens. Washington’s pretense and the stark reality are diametrically opposed.
US government officials routinely criticize other governments for being undemocratic and for violating human rights. Yet, no other country except Israel sends bombs, missiles, and drones into sovereign countries to murder civilian populations. The torture prisons of Abu Gahraib, Guantanamo, and CIA secret rendition sites are the contributions of the Bush/Obama regimes to human rights.
Washington violates the human rights of its own citizens. Washington has suspended the civil liberties guaranteed in the US Constitution and declared its intention to detain US citizens indefinitely without due process of law. President Obama has announced that he, at his discretion, can murder US citizens whom he regards as a threat to the US.
The politics of fear in insecurity are now the staple of American politics. They were used habitually during the Cold War to create powerful vested interests in a permanent war economy. These interests are clearly reflected in the pattern of political practices of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) that maintains and increases the flux of money flowing through the MICC. It is this flux that gives the MICC its from and vitality.
By 1990, the MICC's political practices had been honed to the point that they became self-sustaining and the cold-war-level defense budget proved impossible to turn off when the Cold War ended and the grossly inflated Soviet threat evaporated in 1991. In the Pentagon, we sarcastically referred to the unstoppable budget steamroller as the Pentagon's self-licking ice cream cone.[1]
The self-licking ice cream cone was in place, morphed, and survived. An after some some fits and starts in alternative threat inflation options during the 90s (e.g., the wars of the Yugoslav Succession, theories of being a indispensable power and humanitarian intervention), 9-11 provided the MICC with a political cover to morph its marketing appeal into fighting what it called the long war on terror. But 9-11 was also exploited cynically as a justification to create another political cash cow, which can be though of as domestic spinoff to the MICC, since many of the same players are involved — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), thus expanding the MICC's network of vested interests and bringing them more directly into the domestic arena. The attached op-ed in the Guardian by Naomi Wolf gives a hint of where this evolution is headed — and if you think she is being alarmist, note particularly her brief description of DHS's emerging self-licking ice cream cone (highlighted in yellow near the end of her essay).
The long war in terror may be winding down, and the alleged need for a DHS is evaporating, but like the MICC, the ‘DHS self licking ice cream cone' is likely to exhibit the kind of adaptability needed live on in a pathological mutation of its supposed intent. [2]
For those readers with a synthetic bent of mind, think about the implications of Wolf's op-ed in the context of the questions I will pose at the end of the next blaster.
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[1] New readers will find detailed albeit overlapping explanations of how the MICC's self-licking ice cream cone operates here, here, here, and here.
[2] There is another, more subtle dimension to the these political-economic evolutions: Over time, the economically pathological but politically expedient practices of the MICC undermined the commercial competitiveness of the manufacturing companies involved in weapons making. The employees and owners of these companies became ever more dependent on government money flows for their survival and growth. But, as Seymour Melman correctly predicted in his 1983 book Profits Without Production, the MICC's practices also contributed materially, together with deleterious effects of financialization, deregulation, speculation, and globalization, to deindustrialize and hollow out the high-income US economy. This political-economic evolution led directly to the Wall Street Casino that crashed in 2007-8. It is now clear that the pathological transformation of the great American economic engine took off in the late 70s, and it produced the stagnation of middle class wages and the grotesque inflation of the income disparity between and poor and rich, especially the super rich that lies at or very near root of our economic problems. So, the politics of fear are now melded seamlessly with the politics of economic insecurity (reflected in dependency, anger, and scapegoating) to shape the political discourse of the lower 80% (who are struggling to make ends meet and provide a future for their children while paying off a huge debt burden) as well as the super rich who fear the masses will rise up against them to take their wealth … it is this melding that is feeding the political and legal selection pressures underpinning the kind of evolution described by Ms. Wolf.
n a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the “trespass bill”, which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.
Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to “turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.” He said he felt humiliated: “It made me feel like less of a man.”
In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices' decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven't been introduced into a prison population.
Dale R. Corson, a nuclear physicist who died last week, is best remembered as the Cornell University President who peacefully led his campus through the turmoil and upheaval of the Vietnam era. But he also played an influential role in deliberations over the role of secrecy in scientific research.
Dr. Corson chaired a 1982 committee of the National Academy of Sciences that produced a landmark study entitled “Scientific Communication and National Security,” which became known as the Corson Report.
In sober and measured tones, the Corson Report pushed back against calls for increased secrecy in government-funded science:
“Current proponents of stricter controls advocate a strategy of security through secrecy. In the view of the Panel security by accomplishment may have more to offer as a general national strategy. The long-term security of the United States depends in large part on its economic, technical, scientific, and intellectual vitality, which in turn depends on the vigorous research and development effort that openness helps to nurture… Controls on scientific communication could adversely affect U.S. research institutions and could be inconsistent with both the utilitarian and philosophical values of an open society.”
President Reagan cited Dr. Corson in National Security Decision Directive 189, “National Policy on the Transfer of Scientific, Technical and Engineering Information,” which seemed to affirm that fundamental research should remain unrestricted to the maximum extent possible. In fact, however, that directive imperfectly reflected the input of the Corson Report, noted Harold C. Relyea in his book “Silencing Science: National Security Controls and Scientific Communication.”
Still, many of the issues identified by Dr. Corson and his colleagues, and the concerns they expressed, remain current today and have not reached an unequivocal resolution, as evidenced most recently by the latest U.S. government policy on dual use biological research.
Several newspapers in southern Florida are reporting that trash collectors are receiving training from their employer Waste Management to work with local law enforcement to report crimes and other suspicious activities. The training is part of a program called Waste Watch that is designed to leverage the fact that “drivers are familiar with their routes and are in the same neighborhoods every day” which “puts them in the unique position to spot unusual activity and anything out of the ordinary.” Press releases from Waste Management describe the program as a way of opening “channels of communication with the authorities to help keep them informed and alert of what’s happening in their city’s streets and alleys.”
WASHINGTON — Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.
The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.
With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.
All might find this interesting from the perspective that a Judge did not buy into a government claim that clearly showed a lack of integrity on its part. While the Administration can bluster all it wants about other people, it appears that it doesn't want that right extended to its population…..
DETROIT – A federal judge on Tuesday gutted the government's case against seven members of a Michigan militia, dismissing the most serious charges in an extraordinary defeat for federal authorities who insisted they had captured homegrown rural extremists poised for war.
U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts said the members' expressed hatred of law enforcement didn't amount to a conspiracy to rebel against the government. The FBI had secretly planted an informant and an FBI agent inside the Hutaree militia starting in 2008 to collect hours of antigovernment audio and video that became the cornerstone of the case.
“The court is aware that protected speech and mere words can be sufficient to show a conspiracy. In this case, however, they do not rise to that level,” the judge said on the second anniversary of raids and arrests that broke up the group.
Roberts granted requests for acquittal on the most serious charges: conspiring to commit sedition, or rebellion, against the United States and conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. Other weapons crimes tied to the alleged conspiracies also were dismissed.
“The judge had a lot of guts,” defense attorney William Swor said. “It would have been very easy to say, ‘The heck with it,' and hand it off to the jury. But the fact is she looked at the evidence, and she looked at it very carefully.”
The trial, which began Feb. 13, will resume Thursday with only a few gun charges remaining against militia leader David Stone and son Joshua Stone, both from Lenawee County, Mich. They have been in custody without bond for two years.
Prosecutors said Hutaree members were antigovernment rebels who combined training and strategy sessions to prepare for a violent strike against federal law enforcement, triggered first by the slaying of a police officer.
But there never was an attack. Defense lawyers said that highly offensive remarks about police and the government were wrongly turned into a high-profile criminal case that drew public praise from Attorney General Eric Holder, who in 2010 called Hutaree a “dangerous organization.”
