In October, the inevitable was announced: Struggling Newsweek magazine would be finished as a print publication as of the end of the year. But the last mass newsweekly left, Time, also made an announcement of sorts: It was out of the factchecking business.
The “fiscal cliff” is another hoax designed to shift the attention of policymakers, the media, and the attentive public, if any, from huge problems to small ones. The fiscal cliff is automatic spending cuts and tax increases in order to reduce the deficit by an insignificant amount over ten years if Congress takes no action…
I put this first bit together to make it easier to grasp the depth and breadth of this scholarly and legal indictment.
Scholar Names Top US War Criminals
More Than Thirty Top U.S. Officials Guilty of War Crimes
According to the distinguished American international law authority, Francis Boyle, a Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois, Champaign, and the author of numerous books on the subject, “More than 30 top U.S. officials, including presidents G.W. Bush and Obama, are guilty of war crimes or crimes against peace and humanity,” and “legally akin to those perpetrated by the former Nazi regime in Germany.” “In international legal terms, the U.S. government itself should now be viewed as constituting an ongoing criminal conspiracy under international law,” Boyle said in an address Dec. 9th to the Puerto Rican Summit Conference on Human Rights at the University of the Sacred Heart in San Juan. The serial aggressions of the U.S. violate such basic documents of international law as the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, Boyle said. As well, they violate the Pentagon’s own U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 on The Law of Land Warfare, which applies to the President himself as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Armed Forces under Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. U.S. administrations since 9/11 may be charged with “crimes against peace” for their attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, “and perhaps their longstanding threatened war of aggression against Iran,” Boyle said. Boyle said the so-called “targeted killing” of human beings in a non-battlefield situation is “pure murder” under basic principles of Anglo-American common law and international criminal law. And in this case, where these murders are both widespread and systematic, these murders constitute a Crime against Humanity under Article 7(1)(a) of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court. Although the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, Boyle said, “nevertheless President Obama is subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC and its Prosecutor for murdering people in ICC member States.”
Boyle's List of War Criminals:
Civilian Both presidents since 2001
Their vice-presidents – Dick Cheney and Joseph Biden
Secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta
Secretaries of State Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and Hillary Clinton
National Security Advisors Stephen Hadley, James Jones, and Thomas Donilon
Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and James Clapper
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Directors George Tenet, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus
Military
Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Some Regional Commanders-in-Chiefs, especially for the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), and more recently, AFRICOM
Chairman General Martin Dempsey, U.S. Army
JCS members including Admiral James Winnefeld Jr.; General Raymond Odierno, Chief of Staff of the Army; General James Amos, Commandant of the Marine Corps; Admiral Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations; and General Mark Welsh, Chief of Staff of the Air Force
Central Command heads since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan include Lt. General Martin Dempsey; Admiral William Fallon; General John Abizaid; General Tommy Franks; Lt. General John Allen; and current commander General James Mattis. General Carter Ham of AFRICOM bears like responsibility.
With the post 9/11 rise of the leviathan national security state, the rule of law in the United States under the Constitution is increasingly rule by secrecy, surveillance and executive fiat.
Under the guise and veil of “national security” and “protecting” America through enabling act legislation and state “privilege,” the United States government embarked on an unparalleled expansion of secret government power after 9/11, operating largely in the dark, while using extra-judicial executive authority for justifying its policies, including secret spying on its own citizens in violation of the Constitution.
Speakers Radack, Drake and Binney will highlight their searing experiences with the Department of Justice and the National Security Agency, when they were marked as criminal targets of the US government due to their whistleblower disclosures involving rendition/torture, national security, multi-billion fraud, pervasive institutional corruption, violations of the 1st and 4th Amendments, civil and human rights, illegal surveillance on a vast scale and other unlawful secret government conduct and wrongdoing.
They will also discuss the serious and compelling implications resulting from their excruciating ordeals centered on the nexus of secrecy, transparency, technology, privacy, anonymity, Internet and the law as well as actions people can take to deal with the reality of the growing surveillance state and its direct threats to human rights, liberty and freedom around the world in both our off- and on-line lives.
The common thread in Against Security is that effective security comes less from the top down and more from the bottom up. Molotch’s subtitle telegraphs this conclusion: “How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger.” It’s the word ambiguous that’s important here. When we don’t know what sort of threats we want to defend against, it makes sense to give the people closest to whatever is happening the authority and the flexibility to do what is necessary. In many of Molotch’s anecdotes and examples, the authority figure—a subway train driver, a policeman—has to break existing rules to provide the security needed in a particular situation. Many security failures are exacerbated by a reflexive adherence to regulations.
Amazon Page
Molotch is absolutely right to hone in on this kind of individual initiative and resilience as a critical source of true security. Current U.S. security policy is overly focused on specific threats. We defend individual buildings and monuments. We defend airplanes against certain terrorist tactics: shoe bombs, liquid bombs, underwear bombs. These measures have limited value because the number of potential terrorist tactics and targets is much greater than the ones we have recently observed. Does it really make sense to spend a gazillion dollars just to force terrorists to switch tactics? Or drive to a different target? In the face of modern society’s ambiguous dangers, it is flexibility that makes security effective.
We get much more bang for our security dollar by not trying to guess what terrorists are going to do next. Investigation, intelligence, and emergency response are where we should be spending our money. That doesn’t mean mass surveillance of everyone or the entrapment of incompetent terrorist wannabes; it means tracking down leads—the sort of thing that caught the 2006 U.K. liquid bombers. They chose their tactic specifically to evade established airport security at the time, but they were arrested in their London apartments well before they got to the airport on the strength of other kinds of intelligence.
