The Game Is Rigged: Why Americans Keep Losing to the Police State
“The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens.”—Leo Tolstoy
By JOHN W. WHITEHEAD | RUTHERFORD INSTITUTE | December 13, 2014
My 7-year-old granddaughter has suddenly developed a keen interest in card games: Go Fish, Crazy Eights, Old Maid, Blackjack, and War. We’ve fallen into a set pattern now: every time we play, she deals the cards, and I pretend not to see her stacking the deck in her favor. And of course, I always lose.
I don’t mind losing to my granddaughter at Old Maid, knowing full well the game is rigged. For now, it’s fun and games, and she’s winning. Where the rub comes in is in knowing that someday she’ll be old enough to realize that being a citizen in the American police state is much like playing against a stacked deck: you’re always going to lose.
The game is rigged, and “we the people” keep getting dealt the same losing hand. Even so, we stay in the game, against all odds, trusting that our luck will change.
The problem, of course, is that luck will not save us. The people dealing the cards—the politicians, the corporations, the judges, the prosecutors, the police, the bureaucrats, the military, the media, etc.—have only one prevailing concern, and that is to maintain their power and control over the country and us.
It really doesn’t matter what you call them—the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that while they are dealing the cards, the deck will always be stacked in their favor.
Incredibly, no matter how many times we see this played out, Americans continue to naively buy into the idea that it’s our politics that divide us as a nation. As if there were really a difference between the Democrats and Republicans. As if the policies of George W. Bush were any different from those of Barack Obama. As if we weren’t a nation of sheep being fattened for the kill by a ravenous government of wolves.
We’re in trouble, folks, and changing the dealer won’t save us: it’s time to get out of the game.
We have relinquished control of our government to overlords who care nothing for our rights, our dignity or our humanity, and now we’re saddled with an authoritarian regime that is deaf to our cries, dumb to our troubles, blind to our needs, and accountable to no one.
Even revelations of wrongdoing amount to little in the way of changes for the better.
For instance, after six years of investigation, 6,000 written pages and $40 million to write a report that will not be released to the public in its entirety, the U.S. Senate has finally concluded that the CIA lied about its torture tactics, failed to acquire any life-saving intelligence, and was more brutal and extensive than previously admitted. This is no revelation. It’s a costly sleight of hand intended to distract us from the fact that nothing has changed. We’re still a military empire waging endless wars against shadowy enemies, all the while fattening the wallets of the defense contractors for whom war is money.
Same goes for the government’s surveillance programs. More than a year after Edward Snowden’s revelations dominated news headlines, the government’s domestic surveillance programs are just as invasive as ever. In fact, while the nation was distracted by the hubbub over the long-awaited release of the Senate’s CIA torture, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court quietly reauthorized the National Security Agency’s surveillance of phone records. This was in response to the Obama administration’s request to keep the program alive.
Police misconduct and brutality have been dominating the news headlines for months now, but don’t expect any change for the better. In fact, with Obama’s blessing, police departments continue to make themselves battle ready with weapons and gear created for the military. Police shootings of unarmed citizens continue with alarming regularity. And grand juries, little more than puppets controlled by state prosecutors, continue to legitimize the police state by absolving police of any wrongdoing.
These grand juries embody everything that’s wrong with America today. In an age of secret meetings, secret surveillance, secret laws, secret tribunals and secret courts, the grand jury—which meets secretly, hears secret testimony, and is exposed to only what a prosecutor deems appropriate—has become yet another bureaucratic appendage to a government utterly lacking in transparency, accountability and adherence to the rule of law.
It’s a sorry lesson in how a well-intentioned law or program can be perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes. The war on terror, the war on drugs, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school zero tolerance policies, eminent domain, private prisons: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns. However, once you add money and power into the mix, even the most benevolent plans can be put to malevolent purposes.
In this way, the war on terror has become a convenient ruse to justify surveillance of all Americans, to create a suspect society, to expand the military empire, and to allow the president to expand the powers of the Executive Branch to imperial heights.
Under cover of the war on drugs, the nation’s police forces have been transformed into extensions of the military, with SWAT team raids carried out on unsuspecting homeowners for the slightest charge, and police officers given carte blanche authority to shoot first and ask questions later.
Asset forfeiture schemes, engineered as a way to strip organized crime syndicates of their ill-gotten wealth, have, in the hands of law enforcement agencies, become corrupt systems aimed at fleecing the citizenry while padding the pockets of the police.
Eminent domain, intended by the founders as a means to build roads and hospitals for the benefit of the general public, has become a handy loophole by which local governments can evict homeowners to make way for costly developments and shopping centers.
Private prisons, touted as an economically savvy solution to cash-strapped states with overcrowded prisons have turned into profit- and quota-driven detention centers that jail Americans guilty of little more than living off the grid, growing vegetable gardens in the front yards, or holding Bible studies in their back yards.
Traffic safety schemes such as automated red light and speed cameras, ostensibly aimed at making the nation’s roads safer, have been shown to be thinly disguised road taxes, levying hefty fines on drivers, most of whom would never have been pulled over, let alone ticketed, by an actual police officer.
School zero tolerance policies, a response to a handful of school shootings, have become exercises in folly, turning the schools into quasi-prisons, complete with armed police, metal detectors and lockdowns. The horror stories abound of 4- and 6-year-olds being handcuffed, shackled and dragged, kicking and screaming, to police headquarters for daring to act like children while at school.
As for grand juries, which were intended to serve as a check on the powers of the police and prosecutors, they have gone from being the citizen’s shield against injustice to a weapon in the hands of government agents. A far cry from a people’s court, today’s grand jury system is so blatantly rigged in favor of the government as to be laughable. Unless, that is, you happen to be one of the growing numbers of Americans betrayed and/or victimized by their own government, in which case, you’ll find nothing amusing about the way in which grand juries are used to terrorize the populace all the while covering up police misconduct.
Unfortunately, as I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we’re long past the point of simple fixes. The system has grown too large, too corrupt, and too unaccountable. If there’s to be any hope for tomorrow, it has to start at the local level, where Americans still have a chance to make their voices heard. Stop buying into the schemes of the elite, stop being distracted by their sleight-of-hands, stop being manipulated into believing that an election will change anything, and stop playing a rigged game where you’ll always be the loser.
It’s time to change the rules of the game. For that matter, it’s time to change the game.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead [send him mail] is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He is the author of A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State and The Change Manifesto (Sourcebooks).
Copyright © 2014 The Rutherford Institute
Obama Administration Fights to Keep Details of Justice Department Torture Report Secret
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | December 12, 2014
While the media parsed the details of the Senate committee’s report on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torturing of detainees last decade, the Obama administration was fighting in court to prevent documents from another investigation into the spy agency’s program from being examined by a leading national newspaper.
The New York Times has sued in federal court to obtain thousands of pages from a U.S. Department of Justice probe into the torture of detainees by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration. The materials that the newspaper wants to see include “10 reports and memorandums totaling 1,719 pages — more than three times the number of pages in the Senate report,” wrote the Times’ Charlie Savage, who is a party to the lawsuit. The documents in question include transcripts of interviews by a special prosecutor with about 100 witnesses as well as documents explaining why no charges were ever filed.
The Justice probe into the CIA program was conducted by prosecutor John H. Durham, who spent four years delving into the controversy but ultimately recommended to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. to not file charges against the agency or any of its employees or contractors. Holder followed Durham’s suggestion and refrained from going after the CIA.
The Justice Department filed court documents on the same day that the Senate Intelligence Committee released its 524-page report on the CIA’s rendition and torture program. It argued in its filing with the New York federal court that all of the pages requested by the Times should remain locked away “because disclosing them could affect the candor of law enforcement deliberations about whether to bring criminal charges,” according to Savage.
To Learn More:
U.S. Tells Court That Documents From Torture Investigation Should Remain Secret (by Charlie Savage, New York Times )
New York Times v. Department of Justice (U.S. District Court, Southern New York)
Judge Gives Obama Administration until December to Justify Withholding 2,100 Photos of U.S. Use of Torture in Iraq and Afghanistan (by Danny Biederman and Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
Obama Refuses to Turn Over 9,400 CIA Torture and Interrogation Documents to Congress (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
5 not-so-peaceful Obama actions since nabbing Nobel Prize
RT | December 10, 2014
Five years on from President Barack Obama scooping a Nobel Peace Prize, and the White House has taken anything but a Zen approach to foreign policy under his watch. Here are the top 5 not-so-peaceful moves the laureate has made in the past half-decade.
1. Afghan Surge
Obama didn’t start the war gin Afghanistan, but he certainly took a page from his predecessors playbook in trying to finish it. He recognized his precarious position at prize time.
“But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the commander-in-chief of a nation in the midst of two wars,” he said after accepting the Nobel Prize in Oslo, Norway, on December 9, 2009.
While he said the war in Iraq was “winding down,” things in Afghanistan were just starting to heat up. A week before accepting the prize, Obama announced he was sending 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan as part of his “surge policy,” intended to beat back the Taliban and train Afghan security forces to take the country into their own hands. The following years would become the deadliest for both US troops and Afghan civilians. Again, it wasn’t Obama’s war. But then came…
2. Military strikes in Libya
Following UN Resolution 1973 on March 17, 2011, which called for “an immediate ceasefire” in Libya and authorized the international community to set up a no-fly zone to protect civilians, Obama, along with his NATO allies, would soon launch military strikes to turn the tide of the 2011 Civil War in the North African state. NATO conducted 9,700 strike sorties and dropped over 7,700 precision bombs. A Human Rights Watch report would go on to detail eight incidents where at least 72 Libyan civilians died as a result of the aerial campaign.
But the real damage to overthrowing the Gaddafi regime came in the ensuing years, with the country descending into a civil war between Islamist forces and the weak post-revolutionary government. In August, Obama admitted his Libyan policy was a failure, but not because he chose to intervene militarily. Rather, he says the problem was that America and its European partners did not “come in full force” to take Gaddafi out. Although his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to rejoice in his death, wryly noting “We came, we saw, he died.”
3. Drone Wars in Yemen, Pakistan
Since the US first started targeting Yemeni militants in 2002, Obama has launched all but one of the 15 airstrikes and 101 drone strikes in the country. According to the web portal New America.net, which has meticulously complied data on the strikes, up to 1,073 people have been killed in the strikes. An estimated 81-87 of those killed were civilians, while the identity of another 31-50 remains unknown. But Yemen was just one prong in Obama’s so-called Drone War, though, as we shall see, it was the site of a game-changing incident.
Unlike in Yemen, drone strikes in Pakistan were in favor long before Obama came to power. A report conducted by Stanford and New York Universities’ Law schools found that between 2,562 and 3,325 people were killed by drone strikes in Pakistan between June 2004 and mid-September 2012. Anywhere between 474 and 881 of those were civilians, and 176 were children. While Obama didn’t start the Pakistani drone war, he aggressively expanded it.
Between 2004 and 2007, only 10 drone strikes were launched in Pakistan. The following year saw 36 such strikes, and 54 were launched in 2009.
But 2010 would be the deadliest year by far, with 122 strikes launched and 849 people killed. He would go on to authorize 73 and 46 strikes in 2011 and 2012 respectively.
Following widespread opposition at home and abroad, in May 2013, Obama promised a new era of transparency to protect civilians, saying control of the program would be transferred from the CIA to the Pentagon. But…
4. Obama has a secret kill list
In February 2013, the Obama administration’s internal legal justification for assassinating US citizens abroad came to light for the first time. According to the Justice Department document, the White House has the legal authority to kill Americans who are “senior operational leaders,” of Al-Qaeda or “an associated force” even if they are not actively engaged in any active plot to attack the US.
In September 2011, a US drone strike in Yemen killed two American citizens: Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. The following month, a drone strike killed al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, who was born in Colorado.
The concept of the US president exercising the right to kill US citizens without the benefit of a trial has resonated throughout American culture.
In the comic-book-inspired film ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’, the issue of targeted killings and “kill lists” features prominently in the plot.
5. Redrawing red lines
President Barack Obama drew a red line around Syria’s use of chemical weapons, pushing the international community to punish Damascus with military strikes following the August 21 Ghouta Attack.
After the UK balked at airstrikes, Moscow and Washington took the diplomatic route, resulting in a historic deal that has seen Damascus abandon its chemical weapons stockpiles.
But US-led airstrikes on Syria were only postponed. On August 8, 2014, the United States started bombing so-called Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq to protect embattled Kurds. The following month, the US would launch airstrikes against IS militants in Syria as well. Of all the US military interventions in recent years, the battle against the IS has been met with widespread approval. Still, Syria was the seventh country Obama has bombed in six years.
Quite a feat for a Nobel Peace Prize-winner.
St. Louis police charge young protester on Ferguson Commission
Press TV – December 8, 2014
A prominent young Ferguson protester has been charged with misdemeanor assault for brief contact with law enforcement officers while trying to access the closed down city hall.
The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department this week convinced the local prosecutor’s office to charge Rasheen Aldridge because he allegedly made physical contact with an officer who was blocking access to St. Louis City Hall during a demonstration last month, the Huffington Post reported.
The 20-year-old activist has been protesting in and around Ferguson, where unarmed African American 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death in August by a white police officer named Darren Wilson.
Aldrige, along with a number of other demonstrators tried to enter the city hall on Nov. 26, less than 2 days after the grand jury decision not to indict Wilson was announced.
According to video footage evidence, Aldridge — who is just 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 110 pounds — was pushed by a large city marshal who shoved Aldridge, and the protester’s hand touched and perhaps pushed the official.
“The contrast that we see … between the actions of police that are caught on camera versus the actions of protesters that are caught on camera, how and whether these things are prosecuted — the disparity is remarkable,” Rev. Starsky Wilson, the co-chair of the Ferguson Commission.
“I’ve had a team of my church members who have been involved in actions, including being present for some of those actions downtown last Wednesday, and they were concerned about the level of aggression that they saw from police out on those lines, particularly from City Hall,” Wilson said.
Gov. Jay Nixon last month named Aldridge to the Ferguson Commission, a task force created to address problems in the St. Louis region in the wake of Brown’s death.
On Dec. 1, on behalf of the commission, Aldridge attended the White House to meet with President Barack Obama to discuss law enforcement relationship with local people and minorities.
He later said he left the meeting “disappointed” with Obama, whom he used to consider his “idol.”
US regime releases six Guantanamo detainees to Uruguay
Reprieve | December 7, 2014
Six cleared Guantanamo prisoners – including Reprieve client Abu Wa’el Dhiab – have today been released to Uruguay.
Mr Dhiab, a 43-year-old Syrian who was cleared by the US Government in 2009, had been on a peaceful hunger strike since early 2013 to protest his detention without charge. As a result, he had been repeatedly subjected to force-feeding, which continued into at least November this year, according to the Department of Defense.
Mr Dhiab had also been engaged in litigation – supported by his lawyers at international legal NGO Reprieve – challenging abusive force-feeding practices at Guantanamo. The case resulted in an order by a federal judge that video tapes showing his force-feeding must be released. The Obama Administration appealed the order last week, and the case remains ongoing.
The US military’s force-feeding techniques, in which a six-member riot squad tackle a detainee and strap them into a multi-point restraint chair, have been condemned by the UN and national and international medical organizations. So far, only Mr Dhiab’s security-cleared lawyers at Reprieve and the court have been allowed to see the tapes showing his force-feeding and a process known as ‘Forcible Cell Extraction’ (FCE). However, 16 major US media organisations – including ABC, AP, CBS, McClatchy, The New York Times, Reuters and the Washington Post – have intervened in the case demanding that the tapes be released in the public interest.
Mr Dhiab, whose wife and three children are Syrian refugees from the ongoing armed conflict, has previously said he would gratefully accept any country’s offer of hospitality. He has also said Americans should be permitted to see the videos of his force-feeding, stating: “I want Americans to see what is going on at the prison today, so they will understand why we are hunger-striking, and why the prison should be closed. If the American people stand for freedom, they should watch these tapes. If they truly believe in human rights, they need to see these tapes.”
Cori Crider, a Director at Reprieve and a lawyer for Mr Dhiab, said: “We are grateful to the government of Uruguay – and President Mujica in particular – for this historic stand. Very few people can truly comprehend what the cleared men in Guantánamo suffer every day, but I believe Mr. Mujica is one of them. Like President Mujica, Mr Dhiab spent over a dozen years as a political prisoner. Mr Dhiab was never charged, never tried. President Mujica spent two years at the bottom of a well; for most of the past two years, Mr Dhiab has had a team of US soldiers truss him up like an animal, haul him to a restraint chair, and force-feed him through a tube in his nose. The President’s compassion has ended that torture.
“Despite years of suffering, Mr Dhiab is focused on building a positive future for himself in Uruguay. He looks forward to being reunited with his family and beginning his life again. Let’s not forget that Mr Dhiab and the others freed today leave behind many men just like them: cleared prisoners warehoused in Guantánamo for years.”
Full details of Reprieve’s force-feeding litigation can be found at the Reprieve US website.
Obama to Continue Arming Nation’s Police with Military Gear, But with Some Tweaks
By Noel Brinkerhoff and Danny Biederman | AllGov | December 3, 2014
He expressed serious concerns over the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent public outcry over the heavily militarized response by the police to the protests. He went so far as to say the nation needed to keep its police forces from turning too much into military units. But in the end President Barack Obama is unwilling to slow down or stop the transfer of military weapons and equipment to law enforcement agencies.
Instead, he just wants to tweak the federal programs responsible for helping militarize police departments across the United States.
“We found that in many cases these programs actually serve a very useful purpose,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest. Supporters claim that providing surplus military gear to local law enforcement help police departments that are strapped for funds. A review by the Obama administration found that nearly half a million pieces of military-type gear—including mine-resistant vehicles and night-vision equipment—have landed in the hands of local police departments across the U.S.
An announcement out of the White House this week said the administration would establish new standards and guidelines for programs, such as the much discussed 1033 program operated by the Pentagon. But officials won’t end them or scale them back.
This from a president who said in August “there is a big difference between our military and our local law enforcement, and we don’t want those lines blurred.”
Now, he just wants to improve “transparency and consistency” when it comes to federal efforts that have transformed police officers into looking like soldiers with body armor and assault rifles that ride around in tanks.
One change Obama wants is for more officers to be equipped with body cameras to record their actions while on duty. This plan would cost $75 million and buy upwards of 50,000 cameras for local departments to employ.
He also is seeking better coordination between the five federal agencies that provide military hardware and other items to police and sheriffs.
“Agencies do little to coordinate efforts and often lack mechanisms to hold police accountable for misusing equipment,” according to The Wall Street Journal, so Obama has “directed his staff to draft an executive order to develop common standards for the programs. He said the new standards would ensure that law enforcement agencies aren’t building a militarized culture.”
Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, was critical of the Obama administration’s unwillingness to curb the outflow of military gear to the nation’s police. “It is possible to constrain these programs with oversight, but it doesn’t seem like many people are really wanting to do it,” he told the Journal. “The gear that they have needs to be reassessed…some of it has no legitimate law enforcement purpose.”
To Learn More:
Obama Calls for Policing Standards, Funding in Wake of Ferguson (by Colleen McCain Nelson and Byron Tau, Wall Street Journal )
7 Ways the Obama Administration Has Accelerated Police Militarization (by Radley Balko, Huffington Post )
Obama Offers New Standards on Police Gear (by Mark Landler, New York Times )
Obama: Wants to Avoid ‘Militarized’ Police Culture (by Nedra Pickler, Associated Press )
Unions Successfully Beat Back Movement to De-Militarize Police (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
Militarization of the Police…Ferguson Edition (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
$4.2 Billion in Military Hardware Donations Fuels Militarization of U.S. Police Forces (by Danny Biederman and Noel Brinkerhoff)
Obama appeals order to publish Guantanamo force-feeding tapes
Reprieve | December 2, 2014
The Obama administration has today appealed against a federal judge’s ruling that videotapes showing force-feeding of a Guantanamo prisoner should be released.
The ruling, made by Judge Gladys Kessler in October this year, was the first of its kind and came after sixteen major US media organizations, including the New York Times, AP, and McClatchy newspapers, asked for the tapes to be made public under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
The tapes show the force-feeding and ‘forcible cell extraction’ of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who has long been cleared for release. Mr Dhiab is represented by international human rights NGO Reprieve. Reprieve lawyers are virtually the only people outside government to have seen the footage and have described it as ‘disturbing’, but are forbidden under classification rules from revealing its contents.
Cori Crider, a director at Reprieve and Mr Dhiab’s attorney, said: “President Obama promised us the most transparent administration in history – at this point is that promise anything other than a joke? You have to ask who actually watched this footage when making the decision to hide this evidence from the American people. It boggles the mind that the same President who makes speeches asking whether force-feeding is ‘who we are’ can ask a Court, with a straight face, to hide the reality of force-feeding from the press and public.”
“The tapes are a national scandal – but the best approach is to rip off the Band-Aid, confess the mistake, and fix the abuse going on at the base. Obama made the wrong call today, but Reprieve will keep fighting to get the truth in these videotapes out. We believe Americans can handle the truth. They have the right to see the tapes.”
The US Government’s brief is available here.
Guantanamo force-feeding is illegal, says UN body
Reprieve | November 28, 2014
A United Nations panel has said that the force-feeding of hunger-striking detainees at Guantanamo Bay is a violation of the UN Convention Against Torture.
The report, released today by the UN Committee Against Torture, said that the practice “constitutes ill-treatment”, and called on the US to halt it. The Committee also noted that “detainees’ lawyers have argued in court that force feedings are allegedly administered in an unnecessarily brutal and painful manner” – an apparent reference to US litigation brought by international human rights NGO Reprieve on behalf of cleared Syrian detainee Abu Wa’el Dhiab.
As part of those legal proceedings, the Obama Administration has until Tuesday, December 2nd to appeal a recent court order to release over ten hours of classified footage showing the force-feeding of Mr Dhiab.
Commenting, Cori Crider, Strategic Director at Reprieve and Mr Dhiab’s attorney, said: “The UN is entirely right – abuse at Guantánamo is still happening on Obama’s watch, and I’ve seen the force-feeding footage to prove it. This assessment could not be more timely – the Obama administration has until next week to either face up to a court order to release these force-feeding videos, or to file an appeal, in hopes of covering up the evidence. The right course is clear – the American public has a right to see what’s being done in their name. Obama should release the tapes without delay, and end these abuses once and for all.”
Further detail on Reprieve’s force-feeding litigation can be found at the Reprieve US website.
Civilians killed in US drone attacks: Rights group
Press TV – November 28, 2014
A rights group says many civilians have been targeted and killed in US drone attacks in Pakistan and other countries where such raids are carried out, Press TV reports.
The UK-based rights group Reprieve revealed that civilians have been killed in Pakistan and other places before militants were targeted by US assassination drones.
Reprieve has presented several cases on how ruthlessly the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has killed civilians but declared them militants through dubious reports in the media, which regularly cite anonymous Pakistani and US officials.
In one such case, the CIA killed 221 people, including over 100 children, in Pakistan in search of just four militants. This is while three of the militants are reportedly still alive and the fourth one has died of natural causes.
In another example, the report pointed out that on average each militant was targeted and reported killed more than three times before they were actually killed.
To kill one militant, sometimes “more than 300 people have been killed,” said Mirza Shazad Akbar, Reprieve’s representative in Pakistan.
“A former US drone operator said that by looking at the monitor and looking at people’s movement, he could actually tell who is a bad person and who is a good person… This is the extent of… the [US] flawed intelligence,” Akbar added.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg of the scale of tragedy in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where more than 3,800 people have been killed with the same pattern of the so-called precise surgical drone strikes.
The US carries out targeted killings through drone strikes in several Muslim countries, such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. Washington claims the targets of the drone attacks are militants, but local officials and witnesses maintain that civilians have been the main victims of such raids over the past few years.
The United Nations and several human rights organizations have identified the US as the world’s number-one user of “targeted killings,” largely due to its drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Obama Justice Dept. Insists Details of Anti-Iran Campaign are so Secret they won’t Say Why It’s Secret
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | November 25, 2014
The Obama administration has asserted that the secretive nature of its demand for throwing out a lawsuit brought against an anti-Iran organization is consistent with previous hush-hush attempts to stymie the judicial system. Officials just can’t say why that’s so … because it’s (that’s right) a secret.
United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is being sued by Greek shipping magnate Victor Restis for defamation after the group accused Restis of doing business with Iran and violating the U.S. sanctions against that country.
In what amounts to a trust-us-we-really-know-what’s-best argument, the Department of Justice filed a brief (pdf) in federal court recently that seeks to explain—in a non-explainable way—why it wants the case against UANI tossed. All officials have been willing to say is the case could expose government secrets. They won’t say what kind of secrets they are, or which agency might be involved in the matter.
“Once the Court is satisfied that there is a ‘reasonable danger’ that state secrets will be revealed . . . any further disclosure demanded by plaintiffs would be a ‘fishing expedition’ that the Court should not countenance because it amounts to ‘playing with fire’ on national security matters,” according to the brief.
Legal observers have called the administration’s legal position “extraordinary and unprecedented,” according to Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.
Justice lawyers have countered that there “have been cases, like this one, where specific details concerning the Government’s interest in a private lawsuit could not be described on the public record,” per their brief. A case from 22 years ago, Terex Corporation v. Richard Fuisz and Seymour Hersh, was cited to back their argument. Aftergood wrote that the government asserted the state secrets privilege in that case, but didn’t identify the source. The case was dismissed.
In the latest brief, the administration again insisted that the government “cannot publicly reveal the scope or nature of the privileged information at issue here. Whatever impact exclusion of this information would have on the parties’ ability to establish their claims or valid defenses, the Government believes that further proceedings would inevitably risk the disclosure of state secrets if this case were to proceed.”
To Learn More:
Some State Secrets Cases Are a Secret, Govt Says (by Steven Aftergood, Federation of American Scientists)
In State Secrets Case, Feds Say Mum’s the Word (by Adam Klasfeld, Courthouse News Service )
Victor Restis v. American Coalition against Nuclear Iran (U.S. District Court, Southern New York)
The Mysterious Case of the Obama Administration Claiming State-Secrets Privilege in a Private Defamation Lawsuit (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
Mystery Surrounds U.S. Justice Department Move to Wrap Anti-Iran Group in Shroud of Secrecy (by Noel Brinkerhoff and Steve Straehley, AllGov )
Obama Regime Indicates Support for Fresh Sanctions Against Venezuela
By Cory Fischer-Hoffman | Venezuelanalysis | November 21, 2014
Caracas – On Wednesday at a US Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing to consider Anthony Blinken’s nomination as deputy secretary of state, the Obama administration’s frontrunner indicated a willingness to support further sanctions against Venezuela.
The Obama administration had previously opposed taking punitive action against Venezuela for what the U.S. government says were “human rights abuses” committed during anti-government unrest this year, on the basis that this may lead to a diplomatic clash with Venezuela’s allies in the region.
However this week’s declarations by Blinken demonstrate a change in the executive’s stance towards the South American country. Blinken, who would be working directly under Secretary of State John Kerry, stated that “We would not oppose to moving forward with additional sanctions.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL.) has introduced legislation to the US Senate that would impose sanctions through freezing the financial assets of 27 Venezuelan government officials and would provide more funding to pro-opposition groups in Venezuela.
In response to Blinken’s statement to the Senate that “We would look forward to working with you to go further [to impose sanctions on Venezuela]” Rubio said, “I am encouraged that the Obama administration finally announced its support for legislation pending before the Senate that would impose visa and financial sanctions on individuals committing human rights abuses in Venezuela.”
Following the opposition-led political violence that left 43 people dead in Venezuela last February-May, the Obama administration placed a travel ban and visa freeze on a handful of high-ranking yet unidentified Venezuelan officials. These policy changes went into effect in July but until this week, the Obama presidency rejected imposing any further sanctions.
A video was recently released showing Venezuelan opposition leader Leopolodo López calling for “the exit”of President Maduro at a Foundation for Politically Persecuted Venezuelans Abroad (VEPPEX) in Florida in 2013. As Lopez still awaits trial for charges of instigation and perpetration of violent acts in February this year, and has refused to attend some court hearings, his imprisonment has attracted international attention.
The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, called for the release of Lopez in late October and then earlier this month, the U.N. Committee Against Torture questioned Venezuela about the alleged abuses committed by security forces during the period of acute opposition protests.
For this period, there are currently 183 human rights violations and 166 cases of cruel treatment officially registered for investigation in Venezuela. The Venezuelan government has repeatedly stated that these cases are being investigated and that human rights are respected in Venezuela, and they therefore see these international accusations as an infringement on their sovereignty.
Meanwhile, U.S. Florida congressional representatives Joe Garcia and Debbie Wasserman Schultz have authored a letter to President Obama asking that Venezuelans be given special consideration for “delayed enforced departure” which the Miami Herald describes as “a protection similar to the one granted to people with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS.”
Both shifting the status of Venezuelan immigrants to a special category, generally reserved for individuals facing persecution, and freezing assets of Venezuelan officials would signify a significant policy shift for the Obama administration with respect to Venezuela.
The Venezuelan government considers U.S. attempts at applying sanctions as an act of foreign intervention which forms part of a wider local and international effort to attack and undermine the Bolivarian project.
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Why Saudi Ties to 9/11 Mean U.S. Ties to 9/11
By Kevin Ryan | Dig Within | September 27, 2015
Media interest in Saudi Arabian connections to the crimes of 9/11 has centered on calls for the release of the 28 missing pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry’s report. However, those calls focus on the question of hijacker financing and omit the most interesting links between the 9/11 attacks and Saudi Arabia—links that implicate powerful people in the United States. Here are twenty examples. … continue
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