Archive for the ‘State Terrorism’ Category
The Intercept – New Online Journal
THE//INTERCEPT
Here is the new online journal from First Look Media. A collaboration between Jeremy Scahill, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Pierre Omidyar.
We are very excited to welcome everyone to The Intercept, a publication of First Look Media (FLM). The Intercept, which the three of us created, is the first of what will be numerous digital magazines published by FLM. Read more
The opening article is: The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program
The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. Read more
Glenn Greenwald: “*** no American, no matter your political affiliation or ideology, should accept the idea that the president of the United States has the power to order American citizens killed, not on a battlefield or anywhere else that is in a war zone, but simply on the suspicion that they intend to engage in future criminal behavior. To describe that power is to describe the most extremist and out-of-control government you can get.”
America’s Slide into Hell
by Glenn Greenwald.
MONDAY, JUN 25, 2012 04:01 AM PDT
Collapsing U.S. credibility
Condemning foreign governments for abusive acts while ignoring one’s own is easy. But the U.S. leads the way.
Why this is important. Here is Greenwald’s Update excerpt:
UPDATE:
A related point was made by Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1967, when he delivered an extraordinary speech designed to address complaints that his anti-war activism was distracting from his civil rights work, and he explained why the latter was impossible without the former (h/t Duncan Mitchel)
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.
But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.
Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
Last January, I wrote about King’s speech and how it relates to current political activism.
[Source]
–Joe
Real Meaning of “Ahimsa” – Punishment
The Real Meaning of “Ahimsa” – James MacLeod and Mike Flugennock Cartoons
In view of the letter published in the Times-Standard newspaper by Tom Nash, a so-called “OWS supporter” and the picture of the police punishing peaceful protesters published in this article by Kevin Gosztola: UC Davis Chancellor Called to Resign After Police Pepper Spray Students, this is a really appropriate demonstration or representation of reality from James MacLeod and Mike Flugennock. Then there is this from the Daily Kos: America’s Tacit Approval of Police Brutality – that draws the connection or parallel issue with the Humboldt County Sheriff’s history of brutalizing and torturing peaceful people.
What I’d like to know is how any REAL MAN or woman for that matter can stand on the sidelines and watch peaceful people, women in particular, be brutalized by ONE lone thug? No man with even an ounce of dignity, manhood, and honor would not defend his women to the death. That’s the secret Occupy People. Once the Masters of this brutality realize those are the terms or rules of engagement, they will stop. There is no greater force on this Earth than a man committed to defending his family no matter who or what the threat.
Nonviolence…?
Mike Flugennock: “After a decade of observing police thuggery against protests in Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York City along with the recent police attacks on unarmed protesters at Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland, and comparing it against similar scenes I witnessed in video from Athens, Bahrain and Cairo, I can’t help but conclude that Nonviolence™ is an ideological luxury affordable only to the cushy-living white middle-class activists of the United States.” [Emphasis added]
YET, the reality of the Occupy Movement is caught here by James MacLeod:
James MacLeod adds:
The physical or defacto reality of the so-called doctrine “Ahisma,” as practiced is actually granting permission for the police to criminally brutalize and punish non-compliant, disobedient, peaceful people. Tom Nash’s letter misrepresents Gandhi’s teachings and practice as somehow being subservient, slavish, abjectly obedient and call that: “Non-Violence.” The very kind of passive stance as defined by Tom Nash, in his misbegotten belief that the “movement” needs “large segments of the 99% to be “sympathetic” clearly demonstrates his lack of cognitive understanding of this worldwide movement. Perhaps he should read this very good explanation by Glenn Greenwald: Here’s what attempted co-option of OWS looks like – Here you can get a hint of what’s really going on with the Occupy Movement. To quote: “[B]ut the U.S. desperately needs a citizen movement devoted to working outside of political and legal institutions and that is designed to be a place of dissent against it.”
Continuing to operate according to “rote learning” based upon contaminated “self-serving distortions and preconceived ideas” IS the sure way to fail. Martin Luther King’s interpretation of Gandhi stems from an abundantly American way of thinking rooted solidly in a feminine belief system. This, of course, is exactly how the dominant female way of thinking wants their masculine counterpart to perform. Since the end of World War II this form of Non-Violence is what’s been practice all over the world by all peoples that bowed down and willingly subjugated themselves and their families to a whole generation of authoritarian, dictatorial, top-down rule. What Gandhi taught and actually practiced was NON-COOPERATION.
If there is one thing that the United States of America has established in stone – it’s total legitimate right to exist as an independent nation rest totally upon this established legal right – is the inherent legitimate, legal rights of people, most particularly American citizens, the individual’s right to SELF-DEFENSE. Which is consistent with Gandhi’s teachings. For reference, Wikipedia makes note: “Avoidance of verbal and physical violence is also a part of this principle, although ahimsa recognizes self-defense when necessary, as a sign of a strong spirit.” The belief that husbands had the right to physically beat their spouses anytime and in anyway for whatever they judged them guilty, ended in America a long time ago.
Everyone should keep in mind the words of Swellsman. What he says is extremely important and probably should be printed out and posted on all would-be Occupy Movement people’s walls so everyone can see. And Tom Nash and all those that support his way of thinking or believing, they should take a lesson:
And, yeah . . . the rest of us might want to think about trying to undo some of the power and public relations imbalance that we have allowed to creep into law enforcement’s favor by our past apathy in the face of public abuses.
Despite what they’ll tell you, and what we’ve been conditioned to believe, the cops are not the law. The law resides in a system, not in a person, not even in a group of people. Cops are merely citizens – just like you and me – who have been given special dispensation to arrest people under certain circumstances and then turn them over to that system . . . and nothing more.
And it seems to me that America would be a lot better off trying to keep that basic fact in mind.
Real Meaning of “Ahimsa” – NON-COOPERATION
[Picture Source] – [Update :: From the Swellsman’s Blog about how the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputies were on the cutting edge of torturing peaceful people with impunity. (Always a link to Digby on the Joe Blow Report on Blogspot)
Update: Like me, Digby also was reminded of the Humboldt County pepper-spray incident from the late 90s. She has a post up at her joint that fleshes out what happened there, including the fact that one sheriff deputy apparently was recorded telling the young woman whose eyeballs he had coated with pepper spray: “We’re done torturing you now.” Additional fun fact: it took 12 years and 3 separate trials (the first two, apparently, ended in deadlock) but the protesters did eventually win their suit against the county and its deputies for use of excessive force. Each plaintiff was awarded $1 in nominal damages.
Tom Nash’s letter to the Times-Standard is offered in “Read the rest…
The NEW Meaning for “Second-Class Citizen”
[UPDATE Below]
America redefines the meaning of being a Second Class Citizen.
US Kills Anwar al-Awlaki, a US Citizen
The “Rule of Law” ?
[UPDATE :: Tuesday, October 18, 2011]
Joe Blow and the Unpeople
Noam Chomsky connects the dots and identifies the root cause of war. Here is an excerpt posted on Democracy Now:
MIT Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky, the world renewed linguist and political dissident, spoke Monday night at Barnard College in New York City about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, just hours before Israel and Hamas completed a historic prisoner exchange. “I think [Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit] should have been released a long time ago, but there’s something missing from this whole story. There are no pictures of Palestinian women, no discussion, in fact, in the story of, what about the Palestinian prisoners being released? Where do they come from?” Chomsky says. “There is a lot to say about that. For example, we do not know — at least I do not read it in The Times — whether the release includes the elected officials who were kidnapped and imprisoned by Israel in 2007 when the United States, the European Union, and Israel decided to dissolve the only freely elected legislature in the Arab world.” Chomsky also discussed the recent U.S. assassination of U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. “Almost all of the critics, of whom there were not many, criticized the action or qualified it because of the fact that al-Awlaki was an American citizen,” Chomksy says. “That is, he was a person, unlike suspects who are intentionally murdered or collateral damage, meaning we treat them kind of like the ants we step on when we walk down the street — they’re not American citizens. They are unpeople, therefore, they can be freely murdered.”
Then there’s this: U.S. Accused of Killing 16-Year-Old American Citizen in Yemen Drone Strike – More Unpeople.
In news from Yemen, the U.S. government is being accused of killing a 16-year-old U.S. citizen in a drone strike last week. The teenager — Abdulrahman al-Awlaki — become the third American killed in Yemen in a U.S. drone strike in the past three weeks. He was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born cleric assassinated in a separate drone strike last month. Initial news accounts reported Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was 21 years-old, but his family says he was only 16. They said he was born in Denver in 1995. Nasser al-Awlaki, the boy’s grandfather said, “To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al-Qaeda militant. It’s nonsense. They want to justify his killing, that’s all.”
–Joe
Who Is Ali Farzat?
I found this story posted on Cartoon Movement August 26, 2011: Cartoonist Attacked by Syrian Regime compliments of Mike Flugennock at Sinkers.org.
This is what the scum of the Earth do to try to tell other people that they really are the worthless garbage. Every person on this Earth that believes they are decent, God-fearing, freedom-loving people have a vested interest in what’s done to their fellow men and women.
While the world’s media focus is on Libya and the downfall of Gaddafi, let us not forget that editorial cartoonists elsewhere are struggling for freedom. Well-known Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat was brutally attacked by masked men, who broke his hands (to stop him drawing) and left him on the road outside Damascus. A stark reminder of the dangers cartoonists can face, but also of how they are feared by oppressors.
The comics blog at the Washington Post has called for cartoonists from all over the globe to draw cartoons in support of Ali Farzat. We hope to see some of these in our newsroom.
All the Christian and Non-Christian do-gooders that are all the time preaching love and forgiveness in their hearts are hardly any consolation to this man, and the lucky ones that were NOT murdered. President Barack Obama and his enablers’ gutless, feckless blather and non-action are no consolation either.
As someone that occasionally feels the wrath for speaking out about the obvious, here’s Mike’s offering:
–Joe
The Law and the Lawless – Are We Barbarians?
David Mizner on Daily Kos has a very thought-provoking article where he raises some timely and important questions ALL Americans need to confront in: Don’t Apologize, Greenwald. Don’t Back Down. Here he steps up to support Glenn Greenwald’s efforts to confront the criminal conduct of this country and its leaders, as he says:
“But I think he chose his words with utmost care. They were designed to expose in stark terms the shaky moral and legal footing of the U.S’s claim that it can basically do whatever the hell it wants in the name of FIGHTINGEVIL.
And he should be able to do so without progressives claiming hysterically and dishonestly that he’s “comparing” Obama to OBL. Even mass murderers have rights, and even the United States is bound by international law, or should be.”
As someone that also supports Glenn Greenwald’s strong critique of “American exceptionalism” this is an issue that needs to be emphasized on this Report.
Here is another interesting link with the following excerpt about the interview of Lew Rockwell: 200. Rule of Law? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Rule of Law – Brian Wilson interviews Lew Rockwell on WSPD
Government is not exempt from moral law. Murder, kidnapping, theft, prison, torture, execution, assassinations, corruption of judges, and telling the big lies followed by cover up are all business as usual for our elective dictatorship regime. Rather than baying at the moon and dancing in the streets painted blue, white and red, over what might have been the take down of Osama bin Laden, more Americans should get skeptical about government blather. Most may not really want liberty, but thinking minorities accomplish everything. Ron Paul’s newest book Liberty Defined gives us the unstoppable weapon – the truth.
These are the kinds of issues that we think need to be emphasized. Why? Because what goes around ALWAYS comes around.
–Joe
Osama Bin Laden Killed; the Impact? – MacLeod Cartoon
I just couldn’t pass this one up.
It’s been my opinion for some years now, that at some point the world population will get over their governments love affair with America and will stop tolerating the American assault on sovereign rights and begin to enforce the American-style (Osama bin Laden) Justice on individual Americans. Probably why I think the cartoon is so appropriate. The question is, was this the match that lights that fire?
–Joe
Osama Bin Laden Killed; the Reaction – MacLeod Cartoon
MacLeod Cartoon
It’s not just the media that wants to see this. It a whole lot of American too.
Glenn Greenwald puts forth a rather more practical perspective despite the wanton orgy. For the complete article and update on Salon.com click the title-link.
Killing of bin Laden: What are the consequences?
He starts by saying:
The killing of Osama bin Laden is one of those events which, especially in the immediate aftermath, is not susceptible to reasoned discussion. It’s already a Litmus Test event: all Decent People — by definition — express unadulterated ecstacy at his death, and all Good Americans chant “USA! USA!” in a celebration of this proof of our national greatness and Goodness (and that of our President). Nothing that deviates from that emotional script will be heard, other than by those on the lookout for heretics to hold up and punish. Prematurely interrupting a national emotional consensus with unwanted rational truths accomplishes nothing but harming the heretic (ask Bill Maher about how that works).
And concludes by saying:
In sum, a murderous religious extremist was killed. The U.S. has erupted in a collective orgy of national pride and renewed faith in the efficacy and righteousness of military force. Other than that, the repercussions are likely to be far greater in terms of domestic politics — it’s going to be a huge boost to Obama’s re-election prospects and will be exploited for that end — than anything else.
–Joe
Bradley Manning Gets Moved to Fort Leavenworth – Cartoon
[UPDATE Below – “President Obama speaks on Manning and the rule of law“]
Glenn Greenwald details the important role of the blogosphere in getting Manning’s case enough attention. I just hope that Leavenworth, and ‘access to other inmates’, doesn’t lead to a worse situation for PFC Manning.
[UPDATE :: Sunday, April 24, 2011]
Glenn Greenwald has an extremely good article, “President Obama speaks on Manning and the rule of law“
Here is an excerpt that I think just about says it all:
That Obama has to resort to the most brazen hypocrisy and factually confused claims to defend Manning’s treatment should hardly be surprising (and as Politico‘s quoted experts noted, Obama was also deeply confused when he claimed yesterday that he, too, would be breaking the law if he released unauthorized classified information, since the President has the unfettered right to declassify what he wants). Those engaged in purely unjustifiable conduct can, by definition, find only incoherent and nonsensical rationale to justify what they’re doing. The President’s remarks yesterday (April 22, 2011) provide a classic case of how true that is.
–Joe
Social Security Lies
The Truth Squad
The fact that scare tactics used since Social Security’s creation has left many Americans worried about it’s future says more about the effectiveness of political propaganda than the true conditions of Social Security’s finances. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said: “Repetition does not transform a lie into truth”; however, it certainly can misinform. Contrary to Senator Rand’s assertion, Social Security is NOT broke or broken and young people do not support cutting the program’s benefits. In fact, the Recession Generation understands all too well the need for the stable and reliable income Social Security provides for millions of Americans who’ve contributed to the system.
[National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare]
–Joe
The Joe Blow Report 2 