"...clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing." - Gamal Abdel Nasser
"Back in Mexico after a frantic week in the Yankee capital, these days a cross between asylum for the chronically paranoid, besieged city, and kindergarten run by a totalitarian Mommy. Cops everywhere, metal detectors everywhere else, concrete stop’em-bombs on sidewalks, pop-up metal barriers on streets on Capitol Hill. Bin Laden won, big time. Crazy people hear voices, right? In Washington everybody hears them. At the airport of course the gurgley over-enunciated “security” announcements by some dimwit elocution major who sounds like she wants to lick the microphone. On the subway we are urged by other recorded Mommies to watch each other and report suspicious behavior. What behavior isn’t suspicious late at night on an urban train system? “Yeah, officer, they’re like, swarthy and got beards and funny clothes and talk some weird language….” Voices, instructions, warnings. We are the Admonished People. Free? No. Brave? No. Watched, warned, told, herded, yes. Urban robots. Just what Georgey Wash and Tommy Jefferson had in mind, I think...
Think: What higher form of patriotism is there than not sending our kids to die in pointless wars serving only to funnel yet more money to military industry? How many dead in his district, and in the country, wouldn’t be if the rest of Congress had followed his lead? Most of them couldn’t find Iraq if they were standing in it. And how many millions of Iraqis, Pakistanis, Afghans, Cambodians, Viets, Laos, and so on have we killed for nothing? Don’t get me started..."
"A New York judge Tuesday vacated the conviction of a man who spent nearly a quarter of a century behind bars for a Brooklyn slaying that occurred while he was vacationing in Florida. Jonathan Fleming, 51, was found guilty in 1989 in the death of Darryl Rush in the Williamsburg section and served the next 24 years and 8 months in prison, according to the Kings County district attorney's office. He was released Tuesday afternoon. Fleming has always maintained he was on a family trip to Disney World in Florida when Rush was shot to death early on the morning of August 15, 1989, in a dispute over stolen money. After years of reviewing documents and re-interviewing witnesses as part of a joint investigation between his attorneys and the Brooklyn district attorney's Conviction Review Unit, it was determined that the only evidence tying him to the crime was an alleged witness who later recanted her statement...
Fleming told his attorneys he had paid a bill for phone calls made from his Florida hotel room the night before Rush was killed, and he believed the receipt was in his pocket when police arrested him. But authorities told the defense he had no such receipt, according to Koss. In the course of the investigation, the Conviction Review Unit found the receipt in police records, time stamped and dated -- solidifying Fleming's claim that he was in Florida at the time of the killing, according to the district attorney's office. "This is proof of alibi that was basically purposely withheld," Koss said."
"Over the last 40 years, the U.S. government has relied on extreme fear-mongering to demonize transparency. In sum, every time an unwanted whistleblower steps forward, we are treated to the same messaging: You’re all going to die because of these leakers and the journalists who publish their disclosures! Lest you think that’s hyperbole, consider this headline from last week based on an interview with outgoing NSA chief Keith Alexander:
"But whenever it suits the agency to do so–meaning when it wants to propagandize on its own behalf–the NSA casually discloses even its most top secret activities in the very countries where such retaliation is most likely. Anonymous ex-officials boasted to the Washington Post last July in detail about the role the agency plays in helping kill people by drones. The Post dutifully headlined its story: “NSA Growth Fueled by Need to Target Terrorists.” And now, Keith Alexander’s long-time deputy just fed one of the most pro-NSA reporters in the country, the Los Angeles Times‘ Ken Dilanian, some extraordinarily sensitive, top secret information about NSA activities in Iraq...
John “Chris” Inglis just revealed to the world that the NSA was–is?–intercepting every single email, text message, and phone-location signal in real time for the entire country of Iraq. Obviously, the fact that the NSA has this capability, and used it, is Top Secret. What authority did Chris Inglis have to disclose this? Should a Department of Justice leak investigation be commenced?
...A primary argument NSA typically makes in such cases is that disclosure would endanger the lives of NSA personnel by inviting retaliation from people in those countries who might become angry when learning that their calls are being intercepted en masse. From the Post article: ”NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, in an e-mailed statement, said that ‘continuous and selective reporting of specific techniques and tools used for legitimate U.S. foreign intelligence activities is highly detrimental to the national security of the United States and of our allies, and places at risk those we are sworn to protect.’” Leave aside how corrupted this rationale is: It would mean that no bad acts of the U.S. government should ever be reported, lest those disclosures make people angry and want to attack government agents. Indeed, that is the rationale that the Obama administration used to protect evidence of Bush-era torture from disclosure (to disclose torture photos, Obama said, “would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger”).
What is so extraordinary is that the NSA–at exactly the same time it is telling news organizations that disclosing its collect-it-all activities will endanger its personnel–runs to it favorite L.A. Times reporter and does exactly that, for no reason other than to make itself look good and to justify these activities... This demonstrates how brazenly the NSA manipulates and exploits the consultation process in which media outlets are forced (mostly by legal considerations) to engage prior to publication of Top Secret documents: They’ll claim with no evidence that a story they don’t want published will “endanger lives,” but then go and disclose something even more sensitive if they think doing so scores them a propaganda coup. "
"...the public will only be permitted to see a tiny fraction of the 6300-page report. This kind of secrecy is typical in America today, where the government knows more and more about the citizenry and the citizenry is permitted to know less and less about the government. And the topics we’re permitted to know the least about all involve government criminality and corruption, along with anything that might embarrass the powers-that-be. It’s hard to imagine the founders would recognize this state of affairs as “democracy.”
...it’s clear Obama wants the issue to go away. As he infamously (and ridiculously) put it several years ago, he wants the country “to look forward, not backward.” What could that possibly mean, in the context of crimes? Crimes by definition have already happened. Investigating and prosecuting them (and deterring future ones) *requires* looking backward, there’s no other way to do it. The only thing I’ve heard along these lines that can match it for sheer idiocy and deceitfulness is former vice president Cheney’s comment, delivered as part of a eulogy for former president Ford, that "there can be no healing without pardon.” What? Human nature is such that there’s unlikely to be healing without *justice*, so unless Cheney thinks “pardon” and “justice” are the same thing, his thoughts on this topic are incoherent, politically-driven nonsense.
As for Obama: the United States is party to the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, signed by president Reagan, ratified by the Senate, and by virtue of Article VI of the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land. The UNCAT not only prohibits torture; it also requires member states to investigate credible allegations of torture and to prosecute accordingly. Both former president Bush and former vice president Cheney have confessed in writing and on video to ordering waterboarding. Attorney General Eric Holder acknowledged during his confirmation hearings that waterboarding is torture. In failing to direct the Justice Department (an increasingly Orwellian name in modern America, akin to the Ministry of Truth), president Obama is violating his constitutional obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Which, if you think about it, is pretty much the core thing the chief executive is supposed to be doing. At least according to that pre-9/11 document called the Constitution.
...substantial portions of the government will continue to push the “torture worked” narrative, if not to keep themselves out of prison (no danger of that, as Obama has made clear), then to at least salvage their reputations. Watch in particular for the Cheneyesque linguistic dodge, something along the lines of, “We derived actionable intelligence from detainees who underwent enhanced interrogation.” Note the absence of any causal link. You won’t hear “torture produced this intel” — because it didn’t. But that’s what they want you to think, even if a prisoner gave actionable intelligence *before* he was tortured. After all, such a prisoner technically fits the “prisoners who were tortured gave up valuable intel” narrative. Technically true, but in fact deliberately misleading...
I don’t think proper accountability of an intelligence apparatus as vast, sprawling, and virtually unknowable as America’s is really possible. If it were, the Church and Pike Committee reforms of 1975 would have worked. Instead, even the safeguards that emerged from that era, such as the FISA “court," have been perverted and suborned. The only real solution I can see is to radically scale back America’s entire infrastructure of secrecy, which would obviously include its intelligence agencies. I don’t think this is likely, because Americans have been conditioned to be so afraid of The Scary Brown-Skinned Terrorists that we’re now prepared to entertain almost any internal threat to liberty as long as we’re promised that living under conditions that would have made the Stasi mad with jealousy is the only way to Keep Us Safe.
For some reason, Americans are incredibly resilient — or call it blasé — in the face of 500,000 annual deaths from tobacco, 34,000 annual deaths from car accidents, and 32,000 annual deaths from firearms. But even the remotest chance — and statistically, it is the remotest chance — of death from a terror attack turns us into petrified children, unable to think, incapable of reason, desperate for Daddy to do whatever it takes to protect us. Welcome to the 21st century in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. "
"An assistant district attorney was verbally berated and banished from a Bronx judge’s courtroom after failing to reveal evidence that would have freed a man held at Rikers Island on bogus rape charges, The News has learned. The prosecutorial faux pas has raised questions about the integrity of the Bronx District Attorney’s office, multiple courthouse sources told the Daily News last week. “To my mind, this is an utter and complete disgrace — not just for you, but for your office in general,” Bronx Criminal Court Judge John Wilson told Bronx assistant district attorney Megan Teesdale before dismissing the case on March 21. The defendant, Segundo Marquez, had been held at Rikers Island for more than eight months awaiting trial on reduced misdemeanor rape charges stemming from a 2010 incident."
