Native American 2nd grader kicked out of class for traditional Mohawk haircut
RT | September 21, 2015
It was a banner week for kicking children out of class. Along with Ahmed Mohamed and his homemade clock, a Native American student in Utah was told to lop off his Mohawk or leave school… until tribal leaders were forced to step in.
Jakobe ‘Kobe’ Sanden entered his second-grade classroom rocking a ‘hawk, not because it looked cool but because of his Native American roots. But the 7-year-old was kicked out of class because the “distracting” hairstyle was a potential violation of Arrowhead Elementary School’s dress code.
His mother, Teyawwna Sanden, was shocked when Susan Harrah, the principal of the Santa Clara school, called her to say she needed to pick up Kobe and get his hair cut.
“We had the students that weren’t used to it,” Harrah told KSTU. “They had called that out. So the teacher brought the student to my attention.”
The school’s online handbook stipulates only that “hair color should be within the spectrum of color that hair grows naturally.” The school district’s dress code goes further, stating: “Students have the responsibility to avoid grooming that causes a distraction or disruption, interrupting school decorum and adversely affecting the educational process.” It also notes that “Extremes in body piercings, hair styles and hair colors may be considered a distraction or disruption.”
Mrs. Sanden expressed her frustration with the school’s reaction on Facebook.
“So f’n irritated right now,” she wrote. “I get a call from the boys’ school and she said Kobe’s not allowed to have a Mohawk … that’s it’s school policy. WTH! Really? It’s hair!”
Kobe’s father, Gary Sanden, was traveling on business, but reached out to the Washington County School District’s superintendent of primary education.
“I was sympathetic to what they were saying ‒ that it was not conducive to learning,” he told the Washington Post. “But I couldn’t understand how it could be a distraction to the kids.”
The superintendent told Mr. Sanden to obtain letters from tribal leaders supporting the family’s claim that the hairstyle is part of their heritage.
“That’s like calling up the governor of our state,” he said. “But I called and got the letter. My wife did too.”
Mr. Sanden is a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians, which is based out of New York. Mrs. Sanden belongs to the Kaibab Band of Paiutes Indians.
“It is common for Seneca boys to wear a Mohawk because after years of discrimination and oppression, they are proud to share who they are,” Seneca Nation Tribal Councilor William Canella wrote. “It’s disappointing that your school does not view diversity in a positive manner, and it is our hope that Jakobe does not suffer from any discrimination by the school administration or faculty as a result of his hair cut.”
Canella told Native News Online that it was “ironic” that he had to step in to address such a situation at a school named Arrowhead. The Utah school is near several Indian reservations, including the Shivwits Band of Paiutes, which is less than 10 miles from the school, and the Kaibab Paiutes near the Utah-Arizona border.
Harrah told the Salt Lake Tribune that she felt the school had handled the hairstyle hubbub with aplomb, though she was surprised by the attention it received because “It took about a half hour of my time.”
“If there’s any kind of a hairstyle that is a distraction, then we have to tell the parents that we’ve got a problem,” she said. “There’s a protocol that we go through, and I felt like it was handled efficiently and that we respected their culture.”
Mr. Sanden disagreed, however, noting that Kobe had to sit by himself in Harrah’s office for part of the day.
“That’s the sad part of the whole situation,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune. “To ostracize him like that ‒ that’s stuff from the ’50s.”
“It could have been handled 10 different ways,” he added.
Kobe’s removal from class happened less than three weeks after Malachi Wilson, a 5-year-old member of the Navajo Nation, was sent home on his first day of kindergarten at F.J. Young Elementary in Seminole, Texas because his long hair violated that district’s dress policy. The school required Malachi’s mother, April Wilson, to obtain documentation proving her son’s indigenous heritage, Indian Country Today reported.
In Louisiana last August, a Rastafarian teenager was suspended for three weeks from South Plaquemines High School for his dreadlocked hairstyle. The unnamed student claimed that not cutting his hair was a religious mandate, and his mother presented a letter from the 1st Church of Rastafar I explaining the religious significance of not cutting one’s dreadlocks. He eventually received an exemption from the school.
Anonymous general who predicts anti-Corbyn mutiny should be named by GCHQ – SAS veteran
RT | September 21, 2015
A former SAS soldier has blasted the anonymous British Army general who predicted a military coup if Jeremy Corbyn is elected prime minister. He said the comments threaten democracy and that the military has no excuses for declining to investigate.
Ben Griffin, who served in the Parachute Regiment and the Special Air Service in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now a member of anti-war group Veterans for Peace UK, told RT the general’s comments published in the Sunday Times are an affront to democracy.
“Why is this General cowering behind a reporter?” he said.
“He should go public with his statement. He is threatening the democratic will of the British people and he exposes the lie that the armed forces exist to protect our freedoms.”
After calls for an investigation began, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is reported to have told the Independent newspaper it would not launch a leak investigation due to there being too many generals to investigate.
There are around one hundred generals currently serving in the British Army.
Asked if this excuse was feasible, Griffin pointed out that the government had something of a monopoly on surveillance.
“GCHQ could tell the MoD today which general it was,” he said, referring to the government’s world-leading signals intelligence agency.
“GCHQ collect the metadata of all phone calls and emails so they will have a record of which generals have been in touch with the journo who wrote the story,” he added.
The general in question, who is said to have served in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, told the Sunday Times a Corbyn general election victory in 2020 would precipitate “mass resignations at all levels and you would face the very real prospect of an event which would effectively be a mutiny.”
“Feelings are running very high within the armed forces,” the individual said. “You would see a major break in convention with senior generals directly and publicly challenging Corbyn over vitally important policy decisions such as Trident, pulling out of NATO and any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces.”
He appeared to pledge a military rebellion, with the army directly intervening in democracy.
“The Army just wouldn’t stand for it,” the general claimed.
“The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardize the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul to prevent that.
“You can’t put a maverick in charge of a country’s security.”
The Lattimer Massacre: When an Entire Police Force Stood Trial
By Mark Hand | CounterPunch | September 18, 2015
“It was not a battle because they were not aggressive,
nor were they defensive because they had no weapons
of any kind and were simply shot down like so many
worthless objects, each of the licensed life-takers
trying to outdo the others in the butchery.”– Inscription on monument erected in Lattimer, Pa.
If officials wanted to shine a light on the horrors of the past, every day could be the anniversary of some type of atrocity committed by a government agency or corporation. But leaders get to pick and choose which events are more important than others. American officials, just like leaders in all countries, want the nation memorializing incidents that serve their political and economic interests.
Sept. 10 is one of those days when government officials committed a major atrocity. But 9/10 never became a national day of remembrance.
Sept. 10, 2015, marked the 118th anniversary of the Lattimer Massacre in the anthracite coal mine region of eastern Pennsylvania. Like the 9/11 attacks, the mass murder in Pennsylvania was used as a springboard for something bigger. But in the case of the Lattimer Massacre, the murder of striking coal miners served as inspiration to build a more equitable society, not as an excuse to kill and harm more people.
All told, Luzerne County, Pa., sheriff deputies killed 19 unarmed miners and wounded at least 38. No sheriff deputies were killed. “The primary result of the massacre was rapid growth in unionism in the anthracite coal region. During the next four months approximately 15,000 new names were added to the UMWA rolls,” the United Mine Workers of America explains on its website.
The UMWA views the Lattimer Massacre as a major event in U.S. history. Even the commonwealth of Pennsylvania saw the actions by the local police on Sept. 10, 1897, as extreme and excessive. State prosecutors brought murder and felonious shooting charges against Luzerne County Sheriff James Martin and 78 of his deputies in the wake of their attack on the workers.
In the late 19th century, pro-labor sentiment was strong in the U.S. and, at least in this case, state prosecutors wanted the sheriff and his deputies held accountable. But as it turned out, the prosecutors were ill-prepared for the trial and ultimately argued a lackluster case against the defendants, all of whom were found not guilty of the charges after a five-week trial in 1898.
Labor activism, especially in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania, had been growing steadily since the mid-1800s. The Molly Maguires, a shadowy Irish labor organization, waged a violent battle against coal operators. In the late 1870s, 20 Mollies were hanged after being found guilty of murder and other charges.
In the wake of the crackdown on the Molly Maguires, labor activism in the region waned. But union activity in the anthracite coal fields picked up again as the century neared an end. Only two decades removed from the violent battles between the coal operators and the Mollies, state officials could have easily overlooked the Lattimer killings.
To their credit, Pennsylvania state prosecutors in 1897 tried to hold the police accountable in Luzerne County. The massacre occurred in the village of Lattimer, north the city of Hazleton, Pa., when Martin’s posse of deputies fired at between 300 and 400 coal miners, mostly of Slovak, Polish Lithuanian and German ethnicity, who were marching from Harwood, Pa., to Lattimer.
The miners wanted a pay raise of 15 cents per employee, the ability to select their own doctor, the right to get paid for work even if the machines they work were out of order, and the freedom not to have to buy from the company store. Workers had already shut down several other mines in the region. Expanding the strike to Lattimer would be a huge victory for the miners because it would go a long way to shutting down the entire the area and forcing the companies to grant workers’ demands.
Fearing their private guards could not pacify the striking workers, the coal mine owners solicited the help of Sheriff Martin, who responded by rounding up dozens of local men to serve as deputies. They met the hundreds of striking miners marchers in Lattimer, one of whom was holding an American flag. After the sheriff tried to tear the flag and grabbed one of the marchers, the deputies opened fire. The flag bearer was the first man hit. The striking miners began to disperse, running to get away from the shooters. Some deputies moved to different locations so they could take better aim at fleeing marchers, shooting them in the back as they ran.
The massacre at Lattimer was the largest in U.S. labor history until the Ludlow massacre in Colorado 17 years later when Colorado National Guard and mine guards attacked a camp of striking workers, killing two dozen people, including miners and their wives and children.
Michael Novak, a long-time scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in 1978 published one of first major books on the massacre. “The story of the guns of Lattimer has been strangely neglected in history books, even in histories of violence in America, even in labor histories,” Novak wrote in The Guns of Lattimer, “The reasons may be that Lattimer’s victims did not speak English and, more than others, have lacked a public voice.”
Novak’s book was sympathetic to the miners. “The whole body of four hundred marching men, unarmed, incompetent in English, carefully carrying two American flags, and painfully aware that in the Austro-Hungarian Empire they could conduct no such open and peaceful protest as they did here,” Novak wrote. “That their march should have ended in brutal bloodshed — the worst labor massacre in the history of Pennsylvania and in the nation until that time — deepened in them and in other Slavic communities around the nation a familiar sense of tragedy and injustice.”
Several other books and scholarly articles have covered the massacre. The latest book, The Lattimer Massacre Trial, published by Dorrance Publishing Co., provides a unique look at the event. The book was compiled by Pasco L. Schiavo, a prominent lawyer in the city of Hazleton and the person who now owns the land on which the massacre occurred.
Born and raised in Hazleton and a descendent of Italian immigrant coal miners, Schivao compiled day-to-day newspaper reports from the 1898 Lattimer trial of the sheriff and 72 deputies, a chronological collection that includes pre-trial jury selection, witnesses’ testimony and the final verdict. Schivao’s book contains clippings from The Press, what he calls a “reputable Philadelphia, Pennsylvania newspaper which is no longer in existence.”
The newspaper articles covered the trial in detail and included verbatim some of the statements made by the witnesses testifying at the trial, “something which is particularly important in light of the court transcripts or records of testimony having been lost years ago,” Schivao writes in the book’s introduction.
In his closing argument, the prosecuting attorney emphasized that “the strikers were peaceable and unarmed.” Only a handful of the slain strikers were shot from the front; the rest of them were shot in the back. Referring to the deputies, the district attorney stated “if these boys had protected the lives of these poor creatures of God with the same solicitude they displayed in protecting the property of the employers there would be no case here today.”
Even though none of the deputies was killed, witnesses for the defense claimed the strikers were armed with pistols and clubs. In a post-mortem published in The Times of Philadelphia, the newspaper’s writers argued that the assembly of strikers “was utterly lawless, and when the members refused to disperse upon notice from the Sheriff, given in the presence of his armed deputies, they not only openly defied the law, but they precipitated the destruction of life by violently resisting the Sheriff when in the performance of his lawful duty.”
Schiavo told a Hazleton newspaper that he chose to compile the book because the newspaper articles “report as close to the truth as possibly on a daily basis.” On the other hand, “the books and other publications I have read tend to give a slant one or another as to what really happened at Lattimer,” he was quoted as saying in the Aug. 2 article.
Even today, debate continues on whether the deputies were justified in killing the workers. Dan Sivilich, president of the Battlefield Restoration and Archaeological Volunteers Organization, told a local newspaper that the “the sheriff was not stupid.”
“As soon as those miners entered the gate, and they entered mine property, someone opened fire on them. At that point, they were trespassing, and deadly force is allowed when someone is trespassing on your property,” Sivilich said.
Lethal police force is still being used on a regular basis against U.S. residents who are viewed as expendable. Few of the perpetrators are facing prosecution. The same is true in other countries. A similar massacre occurred in South Africa in August 2012 when police opened fire on striking miners at the Lonmin platinum mine near Rustenburg, South Africa, killing 34 miners and wounding an additional 78. The police violence, known as the Marikana Massacre, was the single most lethal use of force by South African police against civilians since the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 when the nation’s official policy of apartheid was in full force.
Instead of bringing criminal charges against the police, South African authorities charged the surviving miners with murder. The authorities used the doctrine of common purpose against the survivors, assigning responsibility upon them for the murders because they participated in the strike. The murder charges, however, were later dropped and all 270 miners were released.
At least Pennsylvania authorities did not stoop so low to bring murder charges against the surviving miners in Lattimer. In remembrance of the slain miners, a small memorial now stands at a highway intersection in Lattimer. The memorial includes a monument with an inscription and the names of the killed miners. A shovel and a pick-axe lean against the front of the monument, and a small rail wagon with a pile of anthracite coal sits behind it.
“The migrant workers that struck during the summer of 1897 imagined a better world for themselves, one that offered them the baseline of equal living and working conditions to the longer-established nativized miners,” the Lattimer Massacre Project website says.
Mark Hand can be found on Twitter @MarkFHand.
RICO!
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | September 17, 2015
You have signed the death warrant for science. – Peter Webster
In case you don’t know what RICO is (Wikipedia):
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as the RICO Act or simply RICO, is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. The RICO Act focuses specifically on racketeering, and it allows the leaders of a syndicate to be tried for the crimes which they ordered others to do or assisted them, closing a perceived loophole that allowed a person who instructed someone else to, for example, murder, to be exempt from the trial because he did not actually commit the crime personally.
RICO was enacted by section 901(a) of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 While its original use in the 1970s was to prosecute the Mafia as well as others who were actively engaged in organized crime, its later application has been more widespread.
Senator Whitehouse
Senator Whitehouse has proposed to use RICO laws against climate change skeptics and fossil fuel companies, in a WaPo article The fossil fuel industry’s campaign to mislead the American public. Excerpts:
The Big Tobacco playbook looked something like this: (1) pay scientists to produce studies defending your product; (2) develop an intricate web of PR experts and front groups to spread doubt about the real science; (3) relentlessly attack your opponents.
In the case of fossil fuels, just as with tobacco, the industry joined together in a common enterprise and coordinated strategy.
The tobacco industry was proved to have conducted research that showed the direct opposite of what the industry stated publicly — namely, that tobacco use had serious health effects. Civil discovery would reveal whether and to what extent the fossil fuel industry has crossed this same line. We do know that it has funded research that — to its benefit — directly contradicts the vast majority of peer-reviewed climate science. One scientist who consistently published papers downplaying the role of carbon emissions in climate change, Willie Soon, reportedly received more than half of his funding from oil and electric utility interests: more than $1.2 million.
The Weekly Standard has a hard hitting article: Senator Whitehouse: Use RICO laws to prosecute climate skeptics. Excerpts:
Obviously, there’s a lot of money hanging in the balance with regard to energy policy. But when does coordinating “a wide range of activities, including political lobbying, contributions to political candidates, and a large number of communication and media efforts” go from basic First Amendment expression to racketeering? The tobacco analogy is inappropriate in regards to how direct the link between smoking and cancer is. Even among those who do agree that global warming is a problem, there’s a tremendously wide variety of opinions about the practical effects. Who gets to decide whether someone is “downplaying the role of carbon emissions in climate change” relative to the consensus? If message coordination and lobbying on controversial scientific and political issues can be declared racketeering because the people funding such efforts have a financial interest in a predetermined outcome, we’re just going to have to outlaw everything that goes on in Washington, D.C.
In February, Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., attempted a McCarthyite witch hunt against climate scientists he found disagreeable. And Sheldon Whitehouse is sitting U.S. Senator. He’s now publicly encouraging legal persecution of people who conduct scientific research and/or those that have opinions about it he disagrees with. He wrote this opinion in the Washington Post on Friday, and no one much noticed or batted an eye at the consequences of what he’s advocating here. Such calls for draconian restrictions on speech are becoming alarmingly regular. And if more people don’t start speaking out against it, sooner or later we’re actually going to end up in a place where people are being hauled into court for having an opinion that differs from politicians such as Senator Whitehouse.
20 U.S. climate scientists
When I first spotted this, I rolled my eyes – another day, more insane U.S. climate politics. What really motivated this post is the following letter, from 20 U.S. climate scientists. Letter reproduced in full [link]:
Letter to President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, and OSTP Director Holdren
September 1, 2015
Dear President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, and OSTP Director Holdren,
As you know, an overwhelming majority of climate scientists are convinced about the potentially serious adverse effects of human-induced climate change on human health, agriculture, and biodiversity. We applaud your efforts to regulate emissions and the other steps you are taking. Nonetheless, as climate scientists we are exceedingly concerned that America’s response to climate change – indeed, the world’s response to climate change – is insufficient. The risks posed by climate change, including increasing extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and increasing ocean acidity – and potential strategies for addressing them – are detailed in the Third National Climate Assessment (2014), Climate Change Impacts in the United States. The stability of the Earth’s climate over the past ten thousand years contributed to the growth of agriculture and therefore, a thriving human civilization. We are now at high risk of seriously destabilizing the Earth’s climate and irreparably harming people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people.
We appreciate that you are making aggressive and imaginative use of the limited tools available to you in the face of a recalcitrant Congress. One additional tool – recently proposed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse – is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change. The actions of these organizations have been extensively documented in peerreviewed academic research (Brulle, 2013) and in recent books including: Doubt is their Product (Michaels, 2008), Climate Cover-Up (Hoggan & Littlemore, 2009), Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes & Conway, 2010), The Climate War (Pooley, 2010), and in The Climate Deception Dossiers (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2015). We strongly endorse Senator Whitehouse’s call for a RICO investigation.
The methods of these organizations are quite similar to those used earlier by the tobacco industry. A RICO investigation (1999 to 2006) played an important role in stopping the tobacco industry from continuing to deceive the American people about the dangers of smoking. If corporations in the fossil fuel industry and their supporters are guilty of the misdeeds that have been documented in books and journal articles, it is imperative that these misdeeds be stopped as soon as possible so that America and the world can get on with the critically important business of finding effective ways to restabilize the Earth’s climate, before even more lasting damage is done.
Sincerely,
Jagadish Shukla, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Edward Maibach, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Paul Dirmeyer, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Barry Klinger, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Paul Schopf, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
David Straus, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Edward Sarachik, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Michael Wallace, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Alan Robock, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Eugenia Kalnay, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
William Lau, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO
T.N. Krishnamurti, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
Vasu Misra, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
Ben Kirtman, University of Miami, Miami, FL
Robert Dickinson, University of Texas, Austin, TX
Michela Biasutti, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY
Mark Cane, Columbia University, New York, NY
Lisa Goddard, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY
Alan Betts, Atmospheric Research, Pittsford, VT
I am familiar with all of these names, and know a few of them fairly well. The list includes several members of the National Academy of Science, and numerous IPCC authors. Apart from Trenberth and Robock, as far as I know, none of these individuals have made previous public/political statements about climate change. In fact, one of them told me (say a decade ago), that he had worked hard to keep his head below the radar and stay out of all the politics and the fighting. Another (Mike Wallace) wrote a jacket blurb for Roger Pielke Jr’s latest book The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change (note: Pielke Jr was one of the Grijalvi 7).
My first reaction was that this was some kind of joke, or that some of these individuals didn’t know what they were signing. The document originated from the Institute of Global Environment and Society, of which Jagadish Shukla is President (and first signatory, and presumably the instigator). So it seems that at least the 6 individuals associated with the IGES knew what they were signing.
The quote from Peter Webster at the start of this post was included in an email that he sent to one of the signatories. The (anonymous) response:
After reading Senator Whitehouse op ed in the Washington Post, I thought the senator should be supported by the scientific community. Similarities with the tobacco industry are compelling. This is just a small step for me to get engaged with social/policy relevant issues.
Forgive them (?)
Well, that letter reflects, at best, a great deal of naiveté by the signatory. Perhaps some of them had their arm twisted by the instigators/advocates, and were just trying to be collegial.
To paraphrase the other JC:
Forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Dear signatories of this letter:
I will try to clarify here what you have done, and why it is wrong.
First, you have been duped by the Merchants of Doubt book/movie. See my previous blog post Bankruptcy of the ‘merchants of doubt’ meme, which includes reviews by other social scientists.
Second, the consensus on human caused climate change is not as overwhelming as you seem to think. See my recent blog post The conceits of consensus, which includes a detailed analysis of an extensive survey of climate scientists (not to mention extensive critiques of the Cook et al. analysis).
Third, the source of funding is not the only bias in research, and the greatest bias does not necessarily come from industry funding, see these posts:
- Conflicts of interest in climate science
- Is federal funding biasing research?
- Industry funding and bias
- Industry funding: witch hunts
- Scientific integrity versus ideologically fueled research
Fourth, scientists disagree about the causes of climate change for the following reasons:
- Insufficient observational evidence
- Disagreement about the value of different classes of evidence (e.g. models)
- Disagreement about the appropriate logical framework for linking and assessing the evidence
- Assessments of areas of ambiguity and ignorance
- Belief polarization as a result of politicization of the science
The biggest disagreement however is about whether warming is ‘dangerous’ (values) and whether we can/should do something about it (politics). Why do you think your opinion, as scientists, matters on values and politics?
Fifth, what you have done with this letter is advocacy. This is a very dicey role for a scientist to play, fraught with reputational and ethical land mines. Here are several essays on this topic, written from a range of perspectives:
- (Ir)responsible advocacy by scientists
- Ins and outs of the ivory tower
- The adversarial method versus Feynman integrity
- Advocacy science and decision making
- Too much advocacy?
- Refocusing debate about advocacy
- Rethinking climate advocacy
- Ethics of communicating scientific uncertainty
- Tamsin on scientists and policy advocacy
- Mann on advocacy and responsibility
- Climate scientists joining advocacy groups
- Science, uncertainty and advocacy
What you have done with your letter is the worst kind of irresponsible advocacy, which is to attempt to silence scientists that disagree with you by invoking RICO. It is bad enough that politicians such as Whitehouse and Grijalvi are playing this sort of political game with science and scientists, but I regard it as highly unethical for scientists to support defeating scientists with whom you disagree by such methods. Since I was one of the scientists called out in Grijalvi’s witch hunts, I can only infer that I am one of the scientists you are seeking to silence.
Peter Webster did not exaggerate when he wrote:
You have signed the death warrant for science.
Film Review: Olvidados
By José Raúl Guzmán | NACLA | September 17, 2015
Forgotten / Olvidados is one of the most important Bolivian films to emerge recently, marking a high point of technical achievement for the country’s film industry. The film serves as powerful indictment of the military personnel who were responsible for thousands of deaths and disappearances of political dissidents in Latin America during Operation Condor, estimated at 30,000 forced disappearances, 50,000 deaths, and 400,000 arrests. Beginning in 1975 the political campaign of repression spanned across Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay—carried out by the right-wing military dictatorships and backed by the CIA. The ruthless campaign of suppression targeted opposition movements, including students, Marxists, Communists, and political parties that were deemed threats to the authoritarian governments.
Mexican actor, Damián Alcáraz plays General José Mendieta, a callous official tasked with the arrest, torture of dissidents under the guise of Operation Condor. General Mendieta shows some initial reluctance at carrying out the orders from his superiors. In his old age, the atrocities he committed in the past start to weigh on his psyche. The ruling class responsible for spearheading forced disappearances has rarely faced the justice system or been made to answer for their crimes. The perpetrators of such atrocities have grown old and frail, dying of old age, something denied to the many victims they executed.
After General Mendieta suffers a heart attack during a walk around the city, in which he encounters one of his former victims, he begins to craft a letter to his son Pablo (Bernardo Peña), now living in New York. In the letter he admits his involvement in the campaign of terror. In flashbacks we see how he was one of the masterminds of Operation Condor, where students, activists, and political opponents were followed, their meetings infiltrated by military personnel; when the order arrived, soldiers descended, forcibly taking their targets in broad daylight. The journalist Marco (Carlos Cotta) and his wife Luíca (Carla Ortiz) are among those taken by the military.
“Ramon Diaz. Thirty-nine. Monica Paz. Twenty-five. Luis Maldini. Sixty. Horacio Belette. Forty-two, Laura Gonzalez. Forty-three,” a jailed, dissident utters the names and age of those he shared his jail cell with the night before, but were taken away in the dark of the night by military forces. The repetition of their names serves as a mnemonic device to keep the identities alive, should any of the newly arrived prisoners manage to escape alive. While imprisoned the dissidents argue over their ideals that led to their imprisonment asking if their involvement in pursuit of social justice was it worth it.
The strength of the film lies in its painfully accurate portrayal of torture. The most powerful scenes occur in the jail cells, when the dissidents are subjected to torture and in the streets where protesters voice their opposition to the military dictatorship. The torture techniques used by the US officials in the Middle East against perceived terrorist threats were perfected decades earlier—in the CIA backed campaigns against political opponents in Latin America. When torture is still glorified by some political circles, the realistic portrayal of the toll of electrocution, water torture, rape, and isolation, dispels the fantasy that torture can be a useful method to extract information. The film makes evident, that anyone under duress will say what is needed to end the pain.
It is less successful in offering insight into the history of the region, offering but a glimpse of archival footage of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and a brief look at the training of soldiers at the infamous School of the Americas by US military personnel.
Forgotten was directed by Mexican Carlos Bolado, whose filmography has focused on social justice themes including Tlateloco: Verano del 68, the documentary about the 1968 student massacre in Mexico City, and Colosio: The Assassination, a film about the murder of Mexico’s presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. Filmed over 3 months in Bolivia, Chile and New York, the Chilean desert offers a lush backdrop—a jarring contrast against the brutality of the military repression.
The film was written and produced by actress Carla Ortiz who was born in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The film was years in the making, with Ortiz saying “that we urgently need to recuperate our historical memory, in order to not let history repeat itself” adding “it is important for the Americans to understand what their government keeps doing wrong or keeps on abusing its power for their benefit.” The disappearance of students, activists, and political dissidents, and the continued impunity and lack of prosecutions of the perpetrators of Operation Condor remains an injustice that plagues Latin America.
With the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of forty-three students from the Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, Mexico approaching, Forgotten reminds us that military repression has a long and painful history across the continent, the tactics employed by repressive military forces now, have been perfected through decades of forced disappearances of dissidents.
The film opens in theaters on September 18, in New York and October 2, in Los Angeles followed by a December release on HBO Latino.
New Hampshire library to implement Tor above DHS objections—and how
PrivacySOS | September 16, 2015
A few weeks ago the Department of Homeland Security tried to intervene in a local library’s privacy program. Last night, the community roundly rejected those calls, explicitly choosing freedom over fear. Library board meetings don’t usually attract crowds, media, or protest. But something highly unusual—and extraordinarily encouraging—happened last night in a small town on the New Hampshire/Vermont border.
The drama unfolded in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where dozens of residents attended a library board meeting and spoke passionately about privacy and freedom before a gaggle of reporters and even some out of town activists. People in the room told me the energy was incredible. Some people cried. At the end of the meeting, the crowd that had gathered to passionately discuss issues at the heart of civic action and democracy erupted in cheers, elated at their collective success and lived commitment to the state motto: Live Free or Die.
The question before the public at the meeting last night was whether or not the Kilton Library in Lebanon should implement a Tor middle relay. Doing so would make the library a part of a global network of internet anonymity nodes offering users some measure of security and safety to people living under the terror of despotic regimes and abusive boyfriends alike. Weeks prior, the cops and the feds had managed to pull the plug on the project, a collaboration among the library, the Tor Project, and the Library Freedom Project.
But despite the Feds’ backroom fear mongering, the people of Lebanon, New Hampshire were not scared—and unlike DHS, which was mysteriously nowhere to be found last night, the people did their lobbying in full public view.
Nearly everyone who attended spoke in favor of the library’s plan to participate in Tor’s global internet freedom network. The only people who voiced opposition were the police chief and the town manager. But in the face of overwhelming community support, to include a local newspaper’s editors, even these few opponents were quick to temper their criticism of Tor, stressing that they would never tell the public it couldn’t do something like this if people want to.
People clearly want to. The room was so festive and pro-privacy that at the end of the meeting, the library board appeared unsure of what to do. It was so obvious that for a moment they just looked around. The people had spoken, and they weren’t scared, despite what DHS had told the local police, and what the local police had told the library. The library director stood up and proclaimed: the Tor node will return! The crowd cheered.
There were many remarkable moments during the public testimony. One woman, a library employee originally from Colombia, said that she wished a technology like Tor had existed in her country during a period of extreme repression in the early 2000s. It could have helped people, she said.
Library board chairman Francis Oscadal got philosophical, saying, “With any freedom there is risk. It came to me that I could vote in favor of the good … or I could vote against the bad. I’d rather vote for the good because there is value to this.” Please mark that quote and return to it; it’ll be endlessly relevant.
The Kilton Library and the community of Lebanon, New Hampshire have put the world on notice: privacy isn’t shameful and we don’t have to apologize for wanting to be free. We’d all do well to take heed, and gain some courage from their collective wisdom. Instead of fearing the bad in the world, and reacting based on those fears, we should vote for the good.
Britain Moves From Democracy to Authoritarian State in Pernicious Veil of Secrecy
By Graham Vanbergen | TruePublica | September 16, 2015
One should not forget that “Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control”.
When David Cameron won the 2015 election one of the first things he said was; “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone”. This ominous statement immediately threw a dark shroud over Britain’s civil liberties laws, its openness and participation.
Few of the mainstream establishment press thought this was worthy of mention. From ZeroHedge – It’s not just those domestic extremists and crazy “conspiracy theory” kooks who took serious issue with UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s overtly fascist language when it comes to freedom of expression in Great Britain.” The Independent was more sanguine – “This is the creepiest thing David Cameron has ever said.”
New powers being brought in by the Conservatives should be of great concern to everyone. They are expected to be the introduction of banning orders for organisations who use hate speech in public places, but whose activities fall short of proscription and include;
- New Extremism Disruption Orders to restrict people who seek to radicalise young people;
- Powers to close premises where extremists seek to influence others;
- Strengthening the powers of the Charity Commission to root out charities who misappropriate funds towards extremism and terrorism;
- Further immigration restrictions on extremists;
- A strengthened role for Ofcom to take action against channels which broadcast extremist content.
Simply take out the word ‘extremist’ from those five points and you have the existence of something completely different. Of course you could be forgiven for thinking that the government would not abuse such laws. But they already allow for such abuses to take place on current terror laws, for instance:
- The BBC is using laws designed to catch terrorists and organised crime networks to track down people who dodge the £145.50 licence fee.
- The Metropolitan Police Service has also come under fire for using the same powers to access the phone logs of journalists on two newspapers to trace their protected sources.
- In addition, Big Brother Watch discovered 372 councils had been authorised (by gov’t) to use the terror laws 9,607 times -the equivalent of around eleven spying missions a day to hunt down non-payment of council tax.
- Seven public authorities, including the BBC, refused under the Freedom of Information Act to disclose why or how often they had used the powers. The BBC now refuses 48% of such requests.
What is most striking about these events are that publicly funded bodies such as the BBC, the Police and local authorities are refusing to answer perfectly reasonable Freedom of Information Act requests. They are exercising powers they shouldn’t have but were given by a government that the electorate were not consulted on and do not approve of in the first place.
There is proof that local authorities have even used terror laws to surveillance dog fouling, underage sunbed users and people breaking smoking bans.
Now that the Conservative government in Britain has it’s feet under the desk it is preparing to enact new legislation that, under the guise of the “war on terror,” that will vastly expand police-state powers and essentially criminalise speech and other political activity.
Presented officially as an anti-terrorism bill, the proposed measures will be targeted at any popular opposition to the government’s policies of aggressive militarism abroad and austerity measures in Britain, or for that matter anything the government deems worthy of oppressing.
The new bill will include a series of measures targeting groups and individuals deemed by the government to be “extremist.” This term is defined so vaguely as to encompass a wide array of political activity.
The new bill will create extremist “disruption orders” for individuals and “banning orders” for groups. The targets for these new police powers will be those who have conducted “harmful” behaviour.
The “harmful” behaviour covers activities that pose “a risk of public disorder, a risk of harassment, even alarm or just distress or creating a ‘threat to the functioning of democracy’.”
This will be used to criminalise campaigns critical of government policy and protests, which are frequently dispersed by the police on precisely the grounds that they disrupt public order. The language also indicates that the government would have the authority to target those merely planning such activity prior to it taking place – and they would do that through mass surveillance.
UK intelligence agency GCHQ has already been caught acting unlawfully by spying on two international human rights organisations. In addition, last year it was revealed that GCHQ were illegally eavesdropping on sacrosanct lawyer-client conversations in order to both disrupt and make gains on negotiations. GCHQ failed to follow its own secret procedures. “If spying on human rights NGOs isn’t off-limits for GCHQ, then what is?” said Privacy International.
From here we can see we now have a vast illegal state surveillance system that Mussolini would have had wet dreams about. The government is slowly closing down Britain’s very open society and they intend on doing so using one of Britain’s finest philosophers and a well tried theory.
The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a single watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behaviour constantly.
The internet has become the architecture of the state managed panopticon.
Speaking to the Guardian weeks after his appointment as the UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci described British surveillance oversight as being “a joke”, and said the situation is worse than anything George Orwell could have foreseen.
Terror laws we have are already being abused. One is reminded of 82 year old Mr Wolfgang‘s pass being seized and he then detained under the Terrorism Act for interrupting Tony Blair’s speech at the Labour party conference in 2005.
Some of the most egregious cases of misuse include: a council in Dorset putting three children and their parents under surveillance to check they were in the catchment area for the school they had applied to.
Like the prisoners of Jeremy Bentham’s building – there is nowhere to hide in the panopticon.
A report by the House of Lords Constitution Committee, Surveillance: Citizens and the State, had warned in 2009 that increasing use of surveillance by the government and private companies was a serious threat to freedoms and constitutional rights, stating, “The expansion in the use of surveillance represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the Second World War. The government’s of 2010 and 2015 have taken no notice at all.
‘Tempora‘ was one such government mass surveillance and spying programme among many. It is alleged that GCHQ produces larger amounts of metadata than America’s NSA. By May 2012 300 GCHQ analysts and 250 NSA analysts had been assigned to sort data.
The amount and type of data collected and stored is mind-boggling. Every email, phone call, location data, relationships, family and friends, affairs, work, income, expenditure, social habits, it simply has no end. You would not write down the passwords to your email account, bank or Amazon account, social media platforms and give a stranger the list. But that is exactly what GCHQ and other organisations have got.
‘Optic Nerve‘, another UK state surveillance mission, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing. They have stored naked pictures of you, your little daughter and pictures you have sent to family and friends in a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy. This was a biometric exercise of epic scale – collating nearly 2 million citizen images in just a few months.
On May 13th 2013, Edward Snowden made a dash via Hong Kong to Moscow. That June the spying and surveillance revelations came forth. And what came forth was the stunning realisation that our government has been lying to us about the sheer scale of state surveillance conducted on a truly industrial scale.
Not happy with all this illegal state activity over its citizens, new orders that the government are now seeking contain bans on individuals broadcasting their views on television, and anyone subject to an order will be compelled to submit any written publication, including social media posts, to the police before it is printed. In addition, the orders will make it illegal for individuals to attend or address public gatherings or protests.
Banning orders will allow the government to outlaw any organisations it feels is not in their interests. If such a move is taken, anyone found to be a member of such an organisation will be guilty of a criminal offence. Authorities will also be able to shut down premises used by groups.
Human rights group Privacy International branded the new proposal as an “assault on the rights of ordinary British citizens.”
As the Guardian’s home affairs editor wrote in an analysis of the proposal, “the official definition of non-violent extremism is already wide-ranging” and, as Big Brother Watch has pointed out, the national extremism database already includes the names of people who have done little more than organise meetings on environmental issues.”
Last year the government even attempted to hold an entire terrorism trial in secret before abandoning it at the last minute.
Together with a sweeping attack on democratic rights and legal norms, the Conservatives’ anti-terror bills will further advance the government’s right-wing agenda. Cameron’s proposals make clear that the Conservatives are determined to vastly expand the repressive powers of the state.
In little more than five years the state has gone from an open society of democratic principle to one that resembles an authoritarian state. Soon, it will be impossible to have a dinner party with friends without the state knowing about it and wanting to know the purpose of your gathering. Quite the opposite of his ‘big society’.
The British government and its intelligence services are acting under a pernicious veil of secrecy to the detriment of all citizens.
EFF Urges Department of Justice Not to Fund LAPD’s Body Cameras
By Jennifer Lynch | EFF | September 16, 2015
Next week the Department of Justice will likely decide whether to issue a grant to the Los Angeles Police Department to purchase 700 body-worn video cameras. Because LAPD’s body camera policy fails to ensure accountability and transparency and would, in fact, hide almost all camera footage from the public, we are urging the DOJ to deny funding.
LAPD applied for the grant to fund its body-worn camera program through the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) Body-Worn Camera Pilot Implementation Program earlier this year. After the shootings in Ferguson, Missouri and other places around the country created a national discourse about the need for police accountability, President Obama announced plans to “strengthen community policing,” including contributing $75 million over three years to provide a 50 percent match grant to states and localities that purchase body worn cameras. LAPD could be the first law enforcement agency to receive funds under the grant.
Los Angeles could also become the largest city in the country to use body cameras on a wide scale. LAPD has already purchased 860 cameras using private donations and plans to purchase 7,000 cameras total. The city has a goal of outfitting every LAPD officer with a body camera.
But amid these ambitious plans, LAPD has enacted a body camera use policy that runs completely counter to every reason to employ body cameras in the first place. At its heart, the policy appears designed to protect law enforcement officers rather than members of the public who they have sworn to serve.
The policy fails for four main reasons:
- It does not provide for any public access to body camera video—even in cases of shootings or alleged misconduct. In fact, LAPD has made clear that it will not release video footage unless required to do so in court—or unless the chief, in his discretion, believes it would be “beneficial.”
- It not only permits but requires officers to review body camera footage before they write up their reports—even before they provide an initial statement to investigators when they are involved in critical uses of force or accused of grave misconduct.
- It has no consequences for officers who fail to turn on their cameras during use-of-force incidents.
- It provides no clear rules to prevent LAPD from using body cameras as a tool to surveil the public at large. It doesn’t address the use of back-end analysis tools such as facial recognition on footage; nor does it provide guidelines for use of the cameras during First Amendment-protected activity.
Given LAPD’s notorious history of police misconduct, secrecy, unlawful surveillance, and resistance to outside review stretching back to at least the 1930s, perhaps it should come as no surprise that the agency has enacted a policy to protect its own rather than ensure accountability and transparency. The policy is also consistent with the hard-line stance LAPD has taken with respect to releasing automated license plate camera (ALPR) data. However, the DOJ should not add insult to injury by funding this program.
LAPD’s policy not only runs counter to recommendations from the ACLU, but also to recommendations from law enforcement organizations like the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), an “independent research organization” whose board of directors is made up of police chiefs from agencies around the country. PERF has recommended that
with certain limited exceptions . . . , body-worn camera video footage should be made available to the public upon request—not only because the videos are public records but also because doing so enables police departments to demonstrate transparency and openness in their interactions with members of the community.
Even one of Los Angeles’ own police commissioners—who cast the lone dissenting vote against the policy—criticized it for its failure to address release of footage to the public and for allowing officers to review footage before writing reports. He said that LAPD’s process for adopting the policy “undermines the goal here of accountability and trust.”
LAPD’s policy also runs counter the BJA grant program’s requirements. The program requires recipients to enact policies for body camera use that, “at a minimum increase transparency and accessibility, provide appropriate access to information, allow for public posting of policy and procedures, and encourage community interaction and relationship building.” LAPD’s policy fails to meet even these baseline goals.
The President intended DOJ’s body camera program to “build and sustain trust between communities and those who serve and protect these communities.” But if the DOJ is really serious about doing so, this is not the way. The DOJ must send a message to other grant applicants by denying LAPD’s funding request. Police-worn body cameras are fraught with enough potential threats to civil liberties; we don’t need harmful policies designed to shield police action from public scrutiny reinforcing these threats.
Read our letter to the Department of Justice here.
‘Lipstick on a pig’: EC’s proposed corporate court system slammed by campaigners
RT | September 16, 2015
Campaigners sharply condemned a European Commission (EC) proposal to create a new corporate court system to replace its highly controversial Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism on Wednesday.
The ISDS system is central to an EU-US trade agreement being negotiated behind closed doors, which could allow corporations to sue governments if they act against their interests.
Known as The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the trade deal has been shunned by almost 3 million European citizens. Some 97 percent of respondents to an EC consultation flatly rejected the trade deal’s ISDS dimension.
The EC put forward a proposal for an alternative court system on Wednesday – a move it said would make the ISDS mechanism more transparent and allow states to appeal against multinationals’ legal challenges. But campaigners say the suggested changes are merely cosmetic, and would still allow corporations to sue governments in secret court settings.
Another EU-Canada trade deal known as the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which is currently awaiting ratification, contains an old version of the ISDS mechanism. It has also received widespread opposition from campaigners worldwide.
Global Justice Now director Nick Dearden said the EC’s proposed new court system is effectively “a PR exercise.”
“The European Commission says that this new proposal is based on ‘substantial input’ from its public consultation, but 97 percent of the thousands of responses it received in this consultation were clearly opposed to ISDS in any form,” he said on Wednesday.
“This alternative proposal is essentially a PR exercise to get around the enormous controversy and opposition that has been generated by ISDS.”
Dearden said the proposed corporate court system will still give corporations unnerving new powers.
“The Commission can try to put lipstick on a pig, but this new proposal doesn’t change the fundamental problem of giving corporations frightening new powers at the expense of our national democracies,” he said.
“Although a little more transparency is no bad thing, the real issue at hand here is that of corporate power.
“This change shows the European Commission is feeling the pressure of nearly 3 million people opposing TTIP and CETA, the two looming deals featuring ISDS,” Dearden added. He noted, however, that the EC has failed to halt the ratification of CETA.
Redacted documents detailing covert meetings between the EC and powerful tobacco lobbyists recently compounded fears TTIP would allow tobacco giants to sue governments that attempt to legislate in the public interest.
The documents, which confirmed the EC had met with lobbyists paid to peddle the interests of Big Tobacco, were published in late August.
This glaring lack of transparency sparked widespread fear among TTIP’s critics that the trade deal would empower tobacco giants to sue governments that seek to regulate the tobacco industry more stringently.
Powerful tobacco firms have previously used comparable trade deals to sue the governments of other states, who sought to crack down on its advertising.
US tobacco giant Phillip Morris previously took legal action against the Australian government after it introduced mandatory plain cigarette packaging. The firm is also embroiled in a $25-million lawsuit against Uruguay’s government in a bid to stop it from enlarging health warnings on cigarette packaging.
Are Neocons an Existential Threat?
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | September 15, 2015
The neoconservatives arguably have damaged American national interests more than any group in modern history. They have done more harm than the marginal Communists pursued by Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, more than the Yippies of the 1960s, more than Richard Nixon’s Watergate burglars in the 1970s or the Iran-Contra conspirators in the 1980s.
The neocons have plunged the U.S. government into extraordinarily ill-considered wars wasting trillions of dollars, killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, and destabilizing large swaths of the planet including the Middle East, much of Africa and now Europe. Those costs include a swelling hatred against America and a deformed U.S. foreign policy elite that is no longer capable of formulating coherent strategies.
Yet, the neocons have remained immune from the consequences of their catastrophes. They still dominate Washington’s major think tanks as well as the op-ed pages of virtually all the leading newspapers, including The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. They hold down key positions in the State Department, and their “liberal interventionist” pals have the ear of President Barack Obama.
Clearly, the neocons are skilled operatives, knowing how to arrange a steady stream of funding for themselves, from military contractors donating to think tanks, from U.S. taxpayers footing the bill for organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, and from ideological billionaires set on aligning U.S. foreign policy with hard-line Israeli desires.
The neocons are adept at writing op-ed articles that twist any set of facts into support for their ideological cause; they supply just the right quote that fits into the news cycle’s latest narrative; and they host policy conferences that attract powerful politicians and fawning media coverage.
But are the neocons a force that can coexist with the American Republic? Have they become an existential threat not only to the constitutional structure crafted in 1787 but to continued life on the planet? Are they locked on a course of action that could lead to a nuclear holocaust?
Clearly, the neocons’ commitment to Israeli interests violates a key principle established by the nation’s early presidents who all warned against “foreign entangling alliances” as a fundamental threat to a citizens’ republic that would transform America into a warrior state that would inevitably sap the nation’s liberties.
That loss of liberty has surely happened. Not only is there now bipartisan support for a surveillance state that can spy on the personal lives of American citizens, but the U.S. government has wedded itself to the concept of “strategic communications,” a catch-phrase that merges psychological operations, propaganda and P.R. into a seamless approach toward managing public perceptions at home and abroad.
When information is systematically pushed through a filter designed to ensure consent, the core democratic concept of an informed electorate has been turned on its head: The people no longer oversee the government; the government manipulates the people.
Neocon Tactics
All this has been part of the neocon approach dating back to the 1980s when key operatives, such as Robert Kagan and Elliott Abrams, were part of inter-agency task forces designed to whip the American people into line behind the government’s aggressive war policies. Guided by seasoned CIA propagandists, such as Walter Raymond Jr., the neocons learned their lessons well.
But the neocons are no longer just threatening the existence of the Republic; they are now endangering the continuation of life itself. They have decided to launch a new Cold War against Russia that will push the world toward the brink of thermo-nuclear war.
Of course, the neocons will frame their doomsday strategy as all Vladimir Putin’s fault. They will insist that they are just standing up to “Russian aggression” and that anyone who doesn’t join them is a “stooge of Moscow” or “weak.” They will dictate the shape of the debate just as they have in countless other situations, such as guiding Americans to war in Iraq over non-existent WMD stockpiles.
The neocon pundits will write seemingly authoritative op-eds about devious Kremlin strategies which will glue black hats on the Russians and white hats on whomever is on the other side, whether the neo-Nazis in Ukraine or the Islamic State/Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria. Americans will be whipped up into a frenzy that will demand a direct clash with the “Russ-kies” or “regime change” in Moscow.
There will be little or no concern about the risks. With the neocons, there never is. The assumption is that if “Amur-ika” is tough, the other side will back down. Then, with U.S.-led economic sanctions from the outside and U.S.-funded NGOs stirring up trouble from the inside, “regime change” becomes the cure-all.
Everyone who’s important in Official Washington – everyone on the talk shows and op-ed pages – knows that these disruptive situations always play out just the way they’re diagramed inside the top think tanks. A hand-picked “democratic reformer” who’s traveled the think-tank circuit and gotten the seal of approval – the likes of Iraq’s Ahmed Chalabi – will easily be installed and then the target country will do whatever the neocons dictate. After all, that approach worked so well in Iraq. The neocons always know best.
Raising the Stakes
Yet, with Russia, the stakes are even higher than with Iraq. Yes, it’s easy to find fault with Vladimir Putin. I myself have a personal rule that men over 40 should keep their shirts on when out in public (unless maybe they’re actors in a Bond film or going for a swim at the beach).
But Putin at least is a rational player in global affairs. Indeed, he has tried to cooperate with President Obama on a variety of key issues, including convincing Syria to surrender its chemical weapons and getting Iran to make concessions in the nuclear deal – two contributions to world peace that infuriated the neocons who favored bomb-bomb-bombing both Syria and Iran.
At a dinner party in Europe this summer, I was asked by a well-informed British woman what should be done with Putin. My answer was that Putin doesn’t frighten me; it’s the guy who comes after Putin who frightens me – because despite the neocons’ confidence that their “regime change” plans for Moscow will install a malleable moderate, the more likely result would be a much harder-line Russian nationalist than Putin.
The idea of the nuclear codes being handed to someone determined to defend the honor of Mother Russia is what scares me. Then, the clumsily aggressive neocons in Washington would have their reckless counterpart in Moscow, with neither side having the wisdom of a John F. Kennedy or a Nikita Khrushchev as displayed during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Would American neocons or a Russian super-nationalist have the wisdom and courage to back down, to compromise, to make the concessions necessary to avoid plunging over the edge? Or would they assume that the other guy would blink first and that they would “win” the showdown?
I recall what William R. Polk, one of Kennedy’s mid-level aides during the Cuban Missile Crisis, wrote recently about what happens to the human mind under such stress.
“Since human beings make the decisions, we must be aware of decision makers’ vulnerabilities,” Polk wrote. “During the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was one of about 25 civilians fully engaged in the events. I was not at the center but in the second or third ‘echelon.’ So I did not feel the full strain, but by the Thursday of the Crisis, I was thoroughly exhausted. My judgment must have been impaired even though I was not aware of it.
“I do remember, however, a terrible episode – fortunately lasting only a few minutes – at which I thought to myself, ‘let’s just get it over with.’ When later I met with my Soviet counterparts, I got the impression, although they denied it, that my feelings were not unique. How the strain impacted on the inner group I can only guess.”
If someone as stable and serious as Bill Polk had such thoughts – “let’s just get it over with” – what might happen when American neocons or hyped-up Russian nationalists are inserted into the decision process? That is an existential question that I don’t want to even contemplate.
Endless Putin-Bashing
And, if you doubt that the neocons will engage in over-the-top Cold War-style Putin bashing, you should read the op-ed by The Washington Post’s neocon deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl on Monday, entitled “Putin shifts fronts: With a move into Syria, he continues his in-your-face maneuvers.”
Diehl delves into Putin’s psyche – a process that is so much easier than doing real reporting – and concludes that Putin’s decision to join the fight in Syria against the Islamic State and Al Qaeda is just another attempt to stick his finger in the eye of the righteous but clueless United States.
Diehl, of course, starts off with the neocon-approved narrative of the Ukraine crisis, ignoring the key role of neocon Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (Robert Kagan’s wife) in midwifing the Feb. 22, 2014 coup that overthrew democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych and installed an intensely anti-Russian regime on Russia’s border. Nuland even handpicked the new Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, telling U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in a phone call several weeks before the coup that “Yats is the guy.”
The coup-makers then dispatched neo-Nazi militias (and Islamist militants) to wage a bloody “anti-terrorism operation” against ethnic Russian Ukrainians who resisted the “regime change.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine Merges Nazis and Islamists.”]
But all that complexity is neatly boiled down by American neocons and the mainstream U.S. media as “Russian aggression.” Regarding the Syrian civil war, some neocons have even joined with senior Israeli officials in claiming that a victory by Al Qaeda is preferable to the continuation of Assad’s secular regime. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Syria’s Nightmarish Narrative.”]
Yet, however the story goes, the biggest bad guy is Putin, always with sinister motives and evil intent. So, in explaining the situation in Ukraine and Syria, Diehl writes:
“Throughout the summer, Russia’s forces in eastern Ukraine kept up a daily drumbeat of attacks on the Ukrainian army, inflicting significant casualties while avoiding a response by Western governments. On Sept. 1, following a new cease-fire, the guns suddenly fell silent. Optimists speculated that Vladimir Putin was backing down.
“Then came the reports from Syria: Russian warplanes were overflying the rebel-held province of Idlib. Barracks were under construction at a new base. Ships were unloading new armored vehicles. Putin, it turns out, wasn’t retreating, but shifting fronts — and executing another of the in-your-face maneuvers that have repeatedly caught the Obama administration flat-footed.”
The rest of the op-ed is similarly didactic and one-sided: Putin is the villain and Obama is the rube. In Diehl’s world, only he and other neocons have what it takes to take on Putin and put Russia down.
Any alternative explanation for Russia’s action in Syria is brushed aside, such as Putin deciding that a victory by either Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front – as favored by Israel – or the even more bloodthirsty Islamic State is unacceptable and thus Assad’s regime must be stabilized to avert a major geopolitical catastrophe.
Typically, the neocons breeze past the frightening logic of what the collapse of Assad’s military would mean for the Middle East, Europe and the world. After all, once Israeli leaders decided to throw in their lot with Al Qaeda in Syria, the die was cast as far as the neocons were concerned.
But the notion that the neocons can micromanage the outcome in Syria, with “moderate” Al Qaeda taking Damascus rather than the more “radical” Islamic State, reflects the arrogant know-nothing-ism of these U.S. opinion leaders. More likely, Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front would coordinate with their former allies in the Islamic State and share in the Sunni revenge against Syria’s Christian, Alawite, Shiite and other minorities.
So, while the Islamic State would busy itself chopping off heads of “heretics,” Al Qaeda could use its new headquarters in Damascus to plot the next round of terror attacks against the West. And, as destabilizing as the current refugee flow into Europe has been, it would multiply astronomically as the survivors of the Islamic State/Al Qaeda bloodletting flee Syria.
With Europe in chaos and the neocons still insisting that the real enemy is Russia, the possible consequences would be frightening to contemplate. Yet, this is the course that the neocons have set for the world – and nearly all the Republican candidates for president have signed on for the journey along with Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
In 2014, arch-neocon Robert Kagan, whom Secretary of State Clinton selected as one of her advisers while also promoting his wife, Victoria Nuland, told The New York Times that he could embrace a Clinton presidency: “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue … it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.” [For more, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Is Hillary Clinton a Neocon-Lite?” and “Obama’s True Foreign Policy ‘Weakness.’“]
So far, virtually no one in the 2016 presidential race or in the mainstream U.S. news media is seriously addressing the reality of the neocons’ “regime change” chaos spreading across the Middle East and the prospect of a destabilized Europe. What limited discussion there is on the campaign trail mostly echoes Jackson Diehl’s Putin-bashing.
No one dares confront the existential question of whether the United States and the world can continue to tolerate and accommodate the neoconservatives.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
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- Iraqi resistance group urges Saudi leadership to admit defeat, lift Yemen siege
- Trump’s Retreat: How Al-Aqsa Flood Took Down the US Empire
- Israel’s Military Actions in Lebanon Grossly Violate International Law — Lavrov
- Seyed M. Marandi: US-Iran War Inevitable: Kuwait and Bahrain May Fall
- Leaders Condemn Ansarallah Attack on Saudi Arabia While Ignoring Illegal War Against Yemen
- Leaked: Britain’s Covert Iraqi Psyops Network
- Yemeni Armed Forces Warn Airlines Against Using Saudi Airports, Exempt Mecca and Medina
- If Americans Knew
- Yellow Line moves again as Israel closes in on trapped Gazans – Daily Update
- Israeli Attacks Kill Seven Palestinians in Gaza Including Six-year-old Girl
- Gaza: Ceasefire Anniversary Marks Year of Failed Promises
- The American Conservative: Mike Huckabee Should Resign
- A C-Section in Shackles: A Palestinian Woman’s Harrowing Birth in Israeli Detention
- ‘He’s Desperate’: AIPAC Begins Spending Against Abdul El-Sayed to Boost Mike Rogers:
- Trump, Hormuz, and the Looming Economic Catastrophe
- For three years, Israel has killed a child in Gaza every 71 minutes – Daily Update
- Israeli forces kill another child in Gaza – Daily Update
- Gaza ceasefire exists in name only, say more than 100 organizations
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
