Tag: ek Politics

Troops referred to Ferguson protesters as ‘enemy forces’, emails show

by Joanna Walters, The Guardian

Friday 17 April 2015 12.12 EDT

As the Missouri national guard prepared to deploy to the streets of Ferguson last year during protests sparked by the shooting death of Michael Brown, the troops used highly militarised language such as “enemy forces” and “adversaries” to refer to citizen demonstrators.

Documents detailing the military mission divided the crowds that national guards would be likely to encounter into “friendly forces” and “enemy forces” – the latter apparently including “general protesters”.

A briefing for commanders included details of the troops’ intelligence capabilities so that they could “deny adversaries the ability to identify Missouri national guard vulnerabilities”, which the “adversaries” might exploit, “causing embarrassment or harm” to the military force, according to documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request by CNN.

And in an ominous-sounding operations security briefing, the national guard warned: “Adversaries are most likely to possess human intelligence (HUMINT), open source intelligence (OSINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), technical intelligence (TECHINT), and counterintelligence capabilities.”

In less military-style language, the briefing then goes on to detail how protesters might obtain this intelligence – a list of sources no more technical than public records, social media and listening to conversations “being carried out in public” by civic officials or law enforcement, according to the report.

The Missouri governor, Jay Nixon, deployed the state national guard to Ferguson in August after local police forces caused international uproar by firing teargas on demonstrators while armed with gear that even US military veterans said was better suited for the streets of Afghanistan than an American suburb.

After Walter Scott Shooting, Scrutiny Turns to 2nd Officer

By MANNY FERNANDEZ, The New York Times

APRIL 17, 2015

Clarence W. Habersham Jr., the first officer to arrive on the scene after the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man named Walter L. Scott, is drawing intense scrutiny both for the questions surrounding his response to the shooting and for what his role has illuminated about the pressures and expectations black officers face in largely white police departments.

Critics of Officer Habersham, 37, including black leaders and lawyers, have called for him to be prosecuted for what they say was his failure to provide adequate aid to Mr. Scott, 50, and for appearing to go along with what many viewers of a video of the shooting believe was an attempt by Michael T. Slager, the white officer who fatally shot Mr. Scott in the back, to plant a Taser by his body.

Officer Habersham later said in a brief police report that he tried to aid the victim by putting pressure on his wounds, but critics say the video does not show him performing CPR or acting with urgency in response to the shooting.

…

On April 4, Officer Habersham arrived on the scene after Mr. Slager, 33, who has since been charged with murder, fired eight shots at Mr. Scott as he was some distance away, fleeing after a traffic stop and a confrontation. In the video, as Mr. Scott lies in a grassy lot after Mr. Slager has handcuffed him, Officer Habersham can be seen crouching over Mr. Scott and at other times standing over him while directing medics to the lot on his radio. He does not appear to perform CPR on Mr. Scott, and he did not claim to have done so in his two-sentence report, stating that he “attempted to render aid to the victim by applying pressure to the gunshot wounds.” Yet there are moments in the video when neither officer appears to be tending to Mr. Scott as he lies dying.

Some experts question that response.

“I wouldn’t have expected him to jump immediately into CPR,” Seth W. Stoughton, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and a former police officer, said of Officer Habersham. “You need to treat the bullet holes first to make CPR even remotely effective. But I didn’t really see him doing that. When I see two officers on scene with someone who has just been shot, I certainly do not expect to see both of them standing up and away from the body, neither one of them offering aid.”

Mr. Slager is shown in the video picking up an object from another part of the lot and then dropping either that object or something else by Mr. Scott’s body. Officer Habersham was standing over Mr. Scott, putting on blue medical gloves, when Mr. Slager dropped the object, and it is unclear in the video if he saw it happen. Civil rights activists contend that the dropped object was a Taser that Mr. Slager said Mr. Scott had tried to take from him.

The shooting is also being investigated by state and federal agencies.

…

Officer Habersham and four other officers are accused in a federal lawsuit filed last year of beating a black robbery suspect who was handcuffed in November 2011. It was unclear whether Officer Habersham participated in the beating, witnessed it but failed to stop it or played some other role, if any, but the lawsuit also accuses him and other officers of failing to render aid to the suspect.

“This is the Old South, and you have the Old South mentality here,” said Edward Bryant, president of the North Charleston chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. “The whites are always in charge. They’re the lead person, and Mr. Habersham is being in that role as they had it in the 1800s.”

Meaning of course that of Quimbo and Sambo.

Now it’s not like my Viking heritage is devoid of this, I invite the study of Vidkun Quisling who in many respects is even more reprehensible than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stereotypes.  I once traveled with a Norwegian through New Haven and mentioned it was Benedict Arnold’s home town.

“Who is he?”, she asked.

“Well, he’s kind of the U.S. Quisling.”, I replied sort of off handedly but also to prove I was at least passingly familiar with the history of Scandinavia.

She turned to me and said, with real anger in her voice, “How do you know that name!”

Umm… well… uh…

Folks, this struggle is not about identity politics.  It’s not about your race, your creed, your gender, or sexual orientation.  It is a class struggle and identity politics is just another distraction to keep the corporatist Billionaires in charge and their political toadies in office.  It’s not a struggle of White and Black, it’s a struggle of Blue and Green and Gold above all against every one else.

Maybe if I had said it was the city Jim Morrison got arrested for obscenity in.

I once went to the New Haven Arena to watch a hockey game.  It’s now the headquarters of the New Haven division of the FBI.

Officer Cleared; Protesters Crash Cops’ Protest

by Paul Bass, New Haven Independent

Mar 27, 2015 3:31 pm

A week of building tensions over race and policing came to a peak as chanting cops crashed a press conference announcing the exoneration of an officer – and then anti-police demonstrators crashed the cops’ interruption.

…

A citizen video captured the officer slamming the handcuffed girl to the ground, sparking public criticism. The video went viral. It became a Rorschach test revealing America’s divide on policing. Some saw a handcuffed girl manhandled by an officers. Others saw an endangered officer carefully protecting himself and the public against a lawbreaker. The lack of crucial facts about the case, compounded by a week of missteps by the police department in communicating with the public, exacerbated tensions in town.

…

The teen’s mother, Valerie Boyd, reacted to the decision by saying “there’s no justice.”

“The department of training failed [the officer] as well as they failed me and my daughter. The department is at fault. He should have been retrained coming into New Haven as a police officer. He should have been given the proper procedures of how to apprehend a suspect,” Boyd said.

“He’s back on the street. I don’t feel safe.”

…

The officers’ crashing of the press conference was in turn crashed by protesters critical of the police protest. These demonstrators, most of whom were black, called the police protesters racists who are deaf to the concerns of the black community.

…

“We’re protecting you, you dumbbell!” shot back one of the pro-police protesters.

I am a class traitor.  Welcome to Stars Hollow Connecticut “the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve … where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

How Ron Wyden became the scourge of the left on trade

By Doug Palmer, Politico

4/17/15 7:49 PM EDT

Ron Wyden has long aspired to be a major Senate dealmaker, but one of his biggest breakthroughs to date – negotiating a landmark trade bill – has put him at odds with his Senate leader and Democratic friends, and has earned him scorn from liberals who think he’s sold out.

“Like a vote for the Iraq War or statements of support for the Social Security-cutting Bowles-Simpson plan, a vote for fast track and the TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership] will never be forgotten and will haunt members of Congress for years to come,” said Jim Dean, chair of Democracy for America.

…

“Over and over again we’ve been told that trade deals will create jobs and better protect workers and the environment,” Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey said after the deal was announced. “Those promises have never come to fruition. Now some in the Senate are ready to dive into another mistaken trade deal.”

…

The two sides soon hit a snag over Wyden’s idea for a new mechanism to potentially turn off the fast-track procedures at the same time that Democracy for America and Move On, another progressive group, were criticizing Wyden for even talking with Republicans about the bill and threatening to try to defeat him in Oregon’s 2016 Senate Democratic Party primary.

…

But critics remain unsatisfied. They say the final provision for potentially stripping fast track from a trade agreement was too weak to make a significant difference.

Review of Comcast Deal Is Said to Raise Concerns

By EMILY STEEL and BEN PROTESS, The New York Times

APRIL 17, 2015

The staff lawyers at the Justice Department reviewing Comcast’s proposed $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable have raised concerns about the merger and are leaning toward recommending that it be blocked, according to a person with knowledge of the deliberations.

…

If approved, the merger would reshape the country’s television and broadband infrastructure. Other deals hinge on the merger’s approval, including the Charter Communications $10.4 billion bid for Bright House Networks that would ultimately create the nation’s second-largest cable operator.

Media executives and public interest groups have raised concerns that an enlarged Comcast would have too much power over the future of the Internet and television. Among the fears are that Comcast would use its extra heft to force consumers to pay more for declining service and to push around Internet companies and TV networks, stifling innovation and diversity of programming.

“There’s no question is my mind that this deal is anything other than blatantly anticompetitive,” said Michael Copps, a former Democratic member of the F.C.C. and a special adviser to the Common Cause public interest group. “It fails not just the antitrust metrics, but the public interest metrics, too.”

Now, imagine a world in which Comcast, Time Warner, Charter, and Bright House sue in a secret Star Chamber of corporation judges not only for the immediate revenue from the expected (but not proven) boost to their stock prices and are awarded not only that, but any future income they could nebulously claim was an indirect result of this monopolist deal and the U.S. Government would be forced to tax you…

Yes YOU!

to pay them that without actually doing any work at all.

That my friends is Investor State Dispute Settlement and is the great steaming shit sandwich that Barack Obama and Ron Wyden want you to eat.

Don’t be fooled by social issues like Marriage Equality and Marijuana Legalization.  They are mere bread and circuses.  These people are whores to the bone and would sell their mothers for a nickle.  They are cheaper to buy than Judas.

Happy Fast Track/TPP peons.  Embrace the Suck.

What went wrong is what usually goes wrong, no matter the context, when you have a history of colonialism, ongoing interference from outside forces, sectarian blindness, and massive wealth at the service of mischief.

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Tensions Flare Between Iraq and Saudi Arabia in U.S. Coalition

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and ERIC SCHMITT

APRIL 15, 2015

The dueling Iraqi and Saudi narratives began when Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq, who this week is making his first official visit to Washington, spoke early in the day to a small group of reporters at Blair House, the White House guest residence for visiting dignitaries. He said the Saudi campaign and the fighting in Yemen had created huge humanitarian problems.

“There is no logic to the operation at all in the first place,” Mr. Abadi said. “Mainly, the problem of Yemen is within Yemen.”

Mr. Abadi, who is in Washington seeking American military help in the fight against the Islamic State as well as billions of dollars to shore up his sagging economy, then suggested that the Obama administration agreed with him in his concerns about the Saudi campaign.

“They want to stop this conflict as soon as possible,” Mr. Abadi said. “What I understand from the administration, the Saudis are not helpful on this. They don’t want a cease-fire now.”

…

The United States is flying Predator and Reaper reconnaissance drones over Yemen and transmitting the information to a 20-person American military coordination team divided among Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain, overseen by Maj. Gen. Carl E. Mundy III, the deputy commander of Marines in the Middle East, said a senior American military official who wanted to remain anonymous because he was discussing targeting procedures.

Under the arrangement, Saudi Arabia gives lists of potential targets to the American analysts for vetting. “We are not choosing their targets, but upon request, we’re providing intelligence to help Saudi Arabia with their precision, effectiveness and avoidance of collateral damage,” the official said.

Yanis Varoufakis and Joseph Stiglitz

Greece: Default or Grexit?

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Posted on April 17, 2015

A critical issue to keep in mind is that a default does not bring Greece relief. The prospect of a Grexit (remember, it’s rational for Greek depositors to prepare for the worst) means an acceleration of the ongoing bank run. The imposition of capital controls would further fray nerves domestically, given that polls show majority opposition to leaving the Eurozone. Ongoing cash hoarding plus uncertainty will further weaken the already very sick Greek economy. That will hit tax receipts. If Greece has to resort to issuing TANs or other government scrip to pay workers and pensioners, that will likely further damage confidence. Thus Greece will remain in the Troika’s sweatbox.

Thus even with its intention of remaining in the Eurozone, Syriza may be forced to contemplated a Grexit as it struggles to finance its budget after its primary surplus has vanished. Of course, that assumes that the government remains popular after it imposes capital controls and starts issuing funny money. But if it does, a Grexit is not impossible, since the creditors’ continued unwillingness to fund a defiant Greece will make it harder and harder for the government to meet commitments that it has defined as red lines, such as paying pensions and spending on humanitarian relief.

Thus even if a Grexit is probably not an immediate result of a Greek default, that does not necessarily mean that Greece remains in the Eurozone. Even though the costs of an exit are extremely high, the costs of staying in are set to increase.

Stingray spying: FBI’s secret deal with police hides phone dragnet from courts

by Jessica Glenza and Nicky Woolf, The Guardian

Friday 10 April 2015 10.49 EDT

Multiple non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) revealed in Florida, New York and Maryland this week show federal authorities effectively binding local law enforcement from disclosing any information – even to judges – about the cellphone dragnet technology, its collection capabilities or its existence.

In an arrangement that shocked privacy advocates and local defense attorneys, the secret pact also mandates that police notify the FBI to push for the dismissal of cases if technical specifications of the devices are in danger of being revealed in court.

The agreement also contains a clause forcing law enforcement to notify the FBI if freedom of information requests are filed by members of the public or the media for such information, “in order to allow sufficient time for the FBI to seek to prevent disclosure through appropriate channels”.

The strikingly similar NDAs, taken together with documents connecting police to the technology’s manufacturer and federal approval guidelines obtained by the Guardian, suggest a state-by-state chain of secrecy surrounding widespread use of the sophisticated cellphone spying devices known best by the brand of one such device: the Stingray.

…

The Florida agreement – obtained from the Hillsborough County sheriff’s office by the Guardian after a series of Stingray-related Freedom of Information Act requests sent over the past seven months – reads in part:

“The Florida Department of Law Enforcement will, at the request of the FBI, seek dismissal of the case in lieu of providing, or allowing others to use or provide, any information concerning the Harris Corporation wireless collection equipment/technology, its associated software, operating manuals, and any related documentation.”

…

The provision for pushing cases for dismissal rather than reveal information about Stingray capabilities and scope, he said, represented “the FBI’s consistent policy of making local police maintain extraordinary and extreme secrecy”.

…

This kind of sweeping secrecy has led to tense exchanges in courtrooms, and the crumbling of prosecution’s cases, as they attempt to maintain secrecy. City councils may even be unaware that the police departments they oversee are using the devices if the local force has signed similar agreements with the FBI.

Now, defense attorneys appear to be catching on to the practice. In Tallahassee, Florida, the ACLU has amassed a list of more than 300 cases where they believe Stingrays have been used to locate clients, and at least one Florida case recently came undone when defense attorneys began to dig into the involvement of Stingrays.

The good news is that this piece of garbage needs to be wrtten at all.

Why the Trans-Pacific Partnership Matters

By ROGER C. ALTMAN and RICHARD N. HAASS

APRIL 3, 2015

But the congressional outlook for this approach – called Trade Promotion Authority, or fast-track negotiating authority, because it does not allow amendments or filibustering – has dimmed. Without it, the agreement would collapse, the victim of endless amendments. The coming vote, therefore, is the equivalent to a vote on the TPP itself. Should it die, the adverse impact on American national security would be great.

The trade debate coincides with growing challenges to America’s allies. In the Western Hemisphere, the governments of Canada and Chile, which are parties to the trade negotiations, believe the accord (despite domestic critics) will stimulate growth. In Asia and the Pacific, parties to the deal – not only our allies Japan and Australia, but also Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia – see the trade accord as a way of counterbalancing China’s economic might. This is why trade is central to our foreign policy; without this deal, the so-called pivot to Asia will be hollow.

…

Free trade leads to greater overall prosperity. The gains from free trade need to be widely shared, but defeating the TPP would not solve America’s problems with inequality. Instead, it would further rattle our allies. “Further” is the key word here, as there already are rising doubts about American reliability – the result of the debt-ceiling crises, government shutdowns, the failure to follow through on threats in Syria and, most recently, the letter addressed to Iran from 47 senators. If the TPP fails, countries that, rightly or wrongly, see Washington as ineffective will pay America less heed.

It’s reasonable to debate the merits of this major trade agreement. But the critics have exaggerated and distorted the economic costs of the accord, while all but ignoring its benefits – and the strategic costs of a rejection. The real choice is between supporting a trade accord that would help most Americans and serve the country’s strategic aims, and defeating it, which would leave the country poorer and the world less stable.

So, basically, ignore your lying eyes and follow us blindly because we’re very serious people and if you say that the Emperor has no clothes you’ll ruin our credibility and we will haz a sad.

(h/t Lambert at Naked Capitalism)

How to Beat a Polygraph Test

By MALIA WOLLAN, The New York Times

APRIL 10, 2015

“A polygraph is nothing more than a psychological billy club used to coerce and intimidate people,” says Doug Williams, a former Oklahoma City police detective and polygraph examiner who for 36 years has trained people to pass the lie-detector test. The first step is not to be intimidated. Most tests include two types of questions: relevant ones about a specific incident (“Did you leak classified information to The New York Times?”) and broader so-called control questions (“Have you ever lied to anyone who trusted you?”). The test assumes that an innocent person telling the truth will have a stronger reaction to the control questions than to the relevant ones. Before your test, practice deciphering between the two question types. “Go to the beach” when you hear a relevant question, Williams says. Calm yourself before answering by imagining gentle waves and warm sand.

When you get a control question, which is more general, envision the scariest thing you can in order to trigger physiological distress; the polygraph’s tubes around your chest measure breathing, the arm cuff monitors heart rate and electrodes attached to you fingertips detect perspiration. What is your greatest fear? Falling? Drowning? Being buried alive? “Picture that,” Williams says.

…

Federal legislation prohibits most private employers from using polygraphs. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that lower courts can ban them as evidence, and the scientific community has repeatedly raised concerns about their ability to accurately detect lies. Still, the federal government and state and local law-enforcement agencies continue to administer them. Last November, the Justice Department charged Williams with witness tampering after he gave his polygraph tutorial to undercover agents posing as federal-job applicants who had engaged in illegal activities. Even with a looming court date, Williams is coaching clients and crusading against “this dangerous myth of lie detection.” The government, he says, is really after him for exposing the test’s fallibility: “I’ve made them look like fools and con men.”

Not that I would ever advocate being less than truthful in the face of a polygraph, particularly one given by men in uniforms (like a $20 lab coat).

(h/t Lambert at Naked Capitalism)

(note- Original, unedited video.  You may not want to watch it, but you probably should.)

Civil Rights Attorney Says Cops Have Been Shooting Unarmed People in the Back for Years

The War on Black America

by GLEN FORD, Counter Punch

April 09, 2015

The United States produced a bumper crop of what Billie Holiday would call “Strange Fruit,” in March: at least 111 bodies, the majority of them unarmed men of color, shot down by police in the blood-fertilized streets of American cities. If one just counts the unarmed victims, that’s a rate of about two extrajudicial executions per day, roughly twice the “one every 28 hours” cited by the Malcolm X Grassroots Network’s 2012 report, Operation Ghetto Storm.

Yet, in the same month, President Obama declared Venezuela a threat to the national security of the United States, based largely on the death of 14 “dissidents” during a period of anti-government disturbances back in 2014. Many of the dead were pro-government activists killed by “dissidents.” By contrast, Philadelphia police have been shooting an average of one person a week for the last eight years, the overwhelming majority of them Black and brown, according to a new U.S. Justice Department report. As Frederick Douglass said, “for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”

All across the country, the granting of impunity for the perpetrators of summary execution of Black men, women and children is “everyday practice” – now certified as “best practice” by Attorney General Eric Holder, who claims court precedents preclude prosecution of killer cops except under the most extreme conditions.

Chill dudes.  Obama got this.

Ex-F.B.I. Agent Claims Retaliation for Dissent in Anthrax Inquiry

By SCOTT SHANE, The New York Times

APRIL 8, 2015

(A) former senior F.B.I. agent who ran the anthrax investigation for four years says that the bureau gathered “a staggering amount of exculpatory evidence” regarding Dr. Ivins that remains secret. The former agent, Richard L. Lambert, who spent 24 years at the F.B.I., says he believes it is possible that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax mailer, but he does not think prosecutors could have convicted him had he lived to face criminal charges.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Tennessee last Thursday, Mr. Lambert accused the bureau of trying “to railroad the prosecution of Ivins” and, after his suicide, creating “an elaborate perception management campaign” to bolster its claim that he was guilty. Mr. Lambert’s lawsuit accuses the bureau and the Justice Department of forcing his dismissal from a job as senior counterintelligence officer at the Department of Energy’s lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in retaliation for his dissent on the anthrax case.

…

Mr. Lambert says the bureau also gathered a large amount of evidence pointing away from Dr. Ivins’s guilt that was never shared with the public or the news media. Had the case come to trial, “I absolutely do not think they could have proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” He declined to be specific, saying that most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act and was unlikely to become public unless Congress carried out its own inquiry.

Review: Judith Miller’s ‘The Story: A Reporter’s Journey’

by Terry McDermott, The New York Times

APRIL 7, 2015

In late 2002 and through 2003, Judith Miller, an investigative reporter at The New York Times, wrote a series of articles about the presumed presence of chemical and biological weapons and possible nuclear matériel in Iraq. Critics thought the articles too bellicose and in lock step with the George W. Bush administration’s march to war. They all included careful qualifiers, but their overwhelming message was that Saddam Hussein posed a threat.

Ms. Miller’s defense of her work then was straightforward: She reported what her sources told her. She has now written a book-length elaboration of that defense, “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey.” The defense is no better now than it was then.

…

The string of exclusive articles she produced before the Iraq war had the effect of buttressing the Bush administration’s case for invasion.

She had built her career on access. She describes finding, cultivating and tending to powerfully situated sources. She writes that she did not, as some critics of her prewar reporting supposed, sit in her office and wait for the phone to ring. She pounded the pavement. And an ambitious reporter with the power, prestige and resources of a large news organization behind her can cover a lot of road.

Opponents of the Iraq invasion and media critics of her reporting accused her of being a secret neoconservative thirsting for war. Whatever her actual politics, though, the agenda that comes through most strongly here is a desire to land on the front page. She rarely mentions an article she wrote without noting that it appeared on the front page or complaining that it did not.

…

(S)he was the sole reporter embedded with the military team charged with finding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. It failed, meaning so had she. Ms. Miller concedes that the Bush administration’s case for war was built largely on Iraq’s presumably ambitious weapons program. In describing what went wrong with one particular claim, she offers a defense that is repeated throughout the book: “The earlier stories had been wrong because the initial intelligence assessments we reported were themselves mistaken – not lies or exaggerations.”

Ms. Miller’s main defense is that the experts she relied upon – intelligence officials, weapons experts, members of the Bush administration and others – were wrong about Mr. Hussein’s weapons. She acknowledges being wrong but not making any mistakes. She quotes herself telling another reporter: “If your sources were wrong, you are wrong.” This is where she gets stuck.

And this is where Terry McDermott ends his Rand Paul 5 minutes of lucidity.

Journalists, especially those who have a talent for investigative work, are taught early to write big, to push the story as far as possible. Be careful; nail the facts; be fair, but push hard. Nobody pushed harder than Ms. Miller. In this case, she wound up implicitly pushing for war.

A deeper critique of her own reporting, and through that example a critique of the entire enterprise of investigative reporting, would examine its inherently prosecutorial nature. Investigators – journalistic or otherwise – are constantly trying to build a case, to make things fit even when they don’t obviously do so. In the process, the rough edges of the world can be whittled away, nuance can become muddled in the reporter’s head, in the writing, or in the editing.

Investigative Reporting?!  INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING?!

Let’s try whoring your soul, bootlicking sychophancy, shilling for war criminals.

What Judith Miller did has nothing to do with investigative reporting.  It was “access journalism.”

And as excited as I am to be here with the President, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of FOX News. FOX News gives you both sides of every story: the President’s side, and the Vice President’s side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking? Reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they’re super-depressing. And if that’s your goal, well, misery accomplished.

Over the last five years you people were so good, over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!

Congress must end mass NSA surveillance with next Patriot Act vote

by Trevor Timm, The Guardian

Wednesday 8 April 2015 12.01 EDT

Despite doing almost everything in their power to avoid voting for substantive NSA reform, Congress now has no choice: On 1 June, one of the most controversial parts of the Patriot Act – known as Section 215 – will expire unless both houses of Congress affirmatively vote for it to be reauthorized.

…

While the government claims that its other uses of Section 215 are “critical” to national security, it’s extremely hard to take their word for it. After all, the government lied about collecting information on millions of Americans under Section 215 to begin with. Then they claimed the phone surveillance program was “critical” to national security after it was exposed. That wasn’t true either: they later had to admit it has never stopped a single terrorist attack.

We also just learned two weeks ago that the NSA knew the program was largely pointless before the Snowden leaks and debated shutting it down altogether. Suddenly, after the Snowden documents became public, NSA officials defended it as “critical” again when they had to go before an increasingly skeptical Congress.

…

Whatever else they’re doing with Section 215 behind closed doors, the phone surveillance program is illegal. As the author of the Patriot Act, Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner has said: “I can say that without qualification that Congress never did intend to allow bulk collection when it passed Section 215, and no fair reading of the text would allow for this [mass phone surveillance] program”.

It’s also likely unconstitutional, as the first federal judge to look at the program ruled almost a year ago. Judge Richard Leon wrote at the time in his landmark opinion: “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval”.

These days, Congress can barely get post office names passed, let alone comprehensive reform on any subject affecting the American people. So the fact that they haven’t passed NSA reform yet says more about their near-total dysfunction than the American public’s views about privacy.

But now they have no choice. A year and a half ago, the House came within a few votes of cutting off funding for Section 215 in an unorthodox appropriations vote and, since then, opposition to the NSA’s massive spying operation on Americans has remained strong.

Only time will tell if Congress will actually receive this message. But if citizens call their representatives, they might just get it. Then, come June, the NSA will have a lot less of our private data at their fingertips.

Of course the proximate issue is whether the prospective deal with Iran is ‘another Munich’.

Now I’ll leave aside some minor contemporary details like the fact that as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Iran is perfectly within its rights to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes in any way they see fit, and that Ayatollah Khameini “has also issued a fatwa saying the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam.”, and that Pakistan (Sunni) is a non-participant that openly has nuclear weapons and Israel (another non-participant) almost certainly has them but will not admit it, or that Saudi Arabia (participant) has stated that they will purchase them if they deem it desirable.

Let us think instead about Munich.

The logic (in so far as it can be called logic and not simply Islamophobic bigotry or resentment that a popular revolt replaced a US puppet regime of despots and torturers) of those who cry ‘appeasement’ is that it was clear by 1938 that Hitler was a monster who could only be stopped by War.

Well, duh.

That was clear from March 1936 when the Rhineland was re-militarized.

The two Western Allies, Britain and France, immediately launched crash re-armament programs that were none too popular with the war weary taxpayers.  The recently consolidated Soviet Union was understandably deeply suspicious of them since they had just spent the last 10 years trying to roll back the Revolution and restore the Romanovs (or some other non-Communist regime).  In any event its military was in no shape for offensive action against Germany and while it did start a re-armament program (partly for its economic effects) it was made even less effective by Stalin’s paranoia and purges.

I would ask, what makes you think that military action by France and Britain in 1938 supporting an isolated ‘Ally’ a thousand miles away would have been any more effective than when it was actually attempted in 1939 in ‘defense’ of Poland?

May I remind you the result of that was the fall of all of Western Europe with the exception of Britain who barely survived?

Now it is true that several members of the German General Staff thought annexation of the Sudetenland was too ambitious and would result in defeat, but there was opposition in that quarter throughout the War to many of Hitler’s more aggressive plans including the Invasion of France.

There is a body of evidence, not conclusive to be sure but not easily dismissed, that Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier understood the weakness of their militaries and the strategic difficulties of operating so far from their lines of supply.  In any event they didn’t (contrary to popular belief) simply throw Czechoslovakia under the bus.  They got a commitment from Hitler to respect the border of the Czech and Slovak majority areas.

The fact that Hitler ignored it makes it seem worse in 20/20 hindsight, however I once again ask- how could they have achieved better results in 1938 than they ultimately got in 1939?

So what is the position we are in today?

Even the most optimistic war hawks concede that should they decide to do so, conventional military action (and I’m talking full on ground assault and pounding their cities to dust) will prevent the Iranians from acquiring nuclear capability for at best 5 to 10 years after we end our occupation (Iran is roughly 4 times the size and twice the population of California and, if we sent every single member everywhere of our Armed Forces and Reserves including Generals, would only outnumber us 35 to 1).

But the truth is much, much worse than that.  They will kick our ass.

The latest Russian and Chinese anti-ship missiles are no joke and Carriers are big targets that have no business in a confined space like the Straights of Hormuz.  The Straights are literally carpeted in mines and our Mine Sweeping capability is a joke because no one good wants to Captain a Minesweeper and no Admiral wants to budget for it.  While it might not have the commodity shock it once did it will only take a single hit to close the Straights to commercial traffic.

Should we somehow struggle ashore, how long could we stay?  Hard to say, we’re still in Iraq after all but then again Iraq is almost exactly the size and population density of California.

Nuke ’em from orbit?  Admirable sentiments Ripley and effective against aliens on a planet far, far away.  In the real world nuclear attacks of the level necessary to achieve “victory” would be globally environmentally damaging and probably not something the Russians and Chinese would let pass without some kind of response.  I suspect that even Europe might be a tad upset and if you think the future of US Hegemony is to be found in an alliance with Sunni Muslims led by Saudi Arabia and Israel I might advise you to seek professional help for your delusions.

Creating your own reality is a symptom of severe mental illness you know.