Obama Regime: Federal Agents Should Be Allowed To Hold Guns To The Heads Of Children
Ninth Circuit to DEA: Putting a Gun to an 11-Year-Old’s Head Is Not OK
By Mike Riggs | Reason | June 18, 2012
At 7 a.m. on January 20, 2007, DEA agents battered down the door to Thomas and Rosalie Avina’s mobile home in Seeley, California, in search of suspected drug trafficker Louis Alvarez. Thomas Avina met the agents in his living room and told them they were making a mistake. Shouting “Don’t you fucking move,” the agents forced Thomas Avina to the floor at gunpoint, and handcuffed him and his wife, who had been lying on a couch in the living room. As the officers made their way to the back of the house, where the Avina’s 11-year-old and 14-year-old daughters were sleeping, Rosalie Avina screamed, “Don’t hurt my babies. Don’t hurt my babies.”
The agents entered the 14-year-old girl’s room first, shouting “Get down on the fucking ground.” The girl, who was lying on her bed, rolled onto the floor, where the agents handcuffed her. Next they went to the 11-year-old’s room. The girl was sleeping. Agents woke her up by shouting “Get down on the fucking ground.” The girl’s eyes shot open, but she was, according to her own testimony, “frozen in fear.” So the agents dragged her onto the floor. While one agent handcuffed her, another held a gun to her head.
Moments later the two daughters were carried into the living room and placed next to their parents on the floor while DEA agents ransacked their home. After 30 minutes, the agents removed the children’s handcuffs. After two hours, the agents realized they had the wrong house—the product of a sloppy license plate transcription—and left.
In 2008, the Avinas—mom, dad, and both daughters—filed a federal suit against the DEA for excessive use of force, assault, and battery in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. That court ruled in favor of the DEA, and the Avinas appealed. Last week, the family got justice.
While the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals defended the agents’ rough treatment of Thomas and Rosalie, it also declared that yanking the Avina children of their beds and putting guns to their heads did, in fact, constitute the “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” (Read the Obama administration’s defense of the DEA agents.)
“A jury could find that the agents pointed their guns at the head of an eleven-year-old girl, ‘like they were going to shoot [her],’ while she lay on the floor in handcuffs, and that it was excessive for them to do so,” reads the Ninth Circuit’s decision, which was filed June 12. “Similarly, a jury could find that the agents’ decision to force the two girls to lie face down on the floor with their hands cuffed behind their backs was unreasonable.”
More from the decision:
Under our case law, an issue of material fact exists as to whether the actions of the agents were excessive in light of the ages of B.S.A. (age eleven) and B.F.A. (age fourteen) and the limited threat they posed. See Tekle, 511 F.3d 839 (holding that officers were not entitled to summary judgment on excessive force claim where officers pointed guns at an eleven-year-old boy’s head during the arrest of the boy’s father); Motley v. Parks, 432 F.3d 1072, 1089 (9th Cir. 2005) (en banc) (holding that officer’s act of pointing a gun at an infant during the search of a gang member’s house was objectively unreasonable); see also McDonald ex rel. McDonald v. Haskins, 966 F.2d 292, 294-95 (7th Cir. 1992) (holding that officer’s act of pointing his gun at a nine-year-old’s head during the search of home was excessive use of force). Accordingly, we reverse the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the United States on B.F.A.’s and B.S.A.’s claims for assault and battery.
In a footnote, the court wrote:
Although there is evidence that the agents released the girls from their handcuffs once they realized how young they were, there is also evidence that the agents knew, prior to entering the girls’ bedrooms, that the girls were children. Rosalie testified that, as the agents were heading towards the girls’ rooms, she screamed at the agents several times, “Don’t hurt my babies.” Moreover, one of the agents testified at his deposition that, when he first saw one of the girls (presumably the older of the two girls), she appeared to be “12 [or] 13 years old.”
The ruling concludes:
Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the Avinas, a rational trier of fact could find that agents engaged in “extreme or outrageous” conduct when the agents: (1) pointed their guns at the head of eleven-year-old B.S.A. “like they were going to shoot [her]” while B.S.A. was lying on the floor in handcuffs; (2) forced eleven-year-old B.S.A. and fourteen-year-old B.F.A. to lie face down on the floor with their hands cuffed behind their backs; (3) left B.S.A. and B.F.A. in handcuffs for half an hour; and (4) yelled at eleven-year-old B.S.A. and fourteen-year-old B.F.A. to “[g]et down on the f[uck]ing ground.” See Tekle, 511 F.3d at 856 (holding that officers were not entitled to summary judgment on claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress where officers pointed guns at eleven-year old’s head during the arrest of the eleven-year-old’s father); see also id. at 859 (Fisher, J., concurring). Accordingly, we reverse the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the United States on B.F.A.’s and B.S.A.’s claims for intentional infliction of emotional distress.
As a side note: While this raid was conducted under President George W. Bush, the deputy administrator of the DEA at that time was Michele Leonhart. She is now the administrator of the DEA, thanks to an appointment by President Barack Obama. Furthermore, the Obama Administration could have declined to defend the DEA in this case. Instead, Obama’s Justice Department has decided to make the case that federal agents should be allowed to hold guns to the heads of children.
Related articles
- DEA Embroiled In Prostitution Scandal (huffingtonpost.com)
- The DEA and the Massacre in the Moskitia (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Here’s How the Obama Administration Defended DEA Agents Who Put a Gun to a Little Girl’s Head (reason.com)
Guantanamo’s Goon Squads Still Torturing Under Obama
By Sherwood Ross | Aletho News | June 17, 2012
Despite President Obama’s pledge to end torture, the brutalization of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo prison continues under his regime.
Guantanamo is where a thug squad called the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF) tortures inmates while pointing their required video cameras at the floor to hide their beatings.
In illegal and cowardly assaults on tied-up inmates that violate the Geneva Conventions, five or more Pentagon IRF MP’s will spray Mace in a prisoner’s face and then gang-beat him. The MP’s are known to break bones, gouge eyes, squeeze testicles, inject disease, force the prisoner’s head into a toilet or bang it on a concrete floor, smear the prisoner with feces, douse him with noxious chemicals, urinate on him and even sodomize him. A prisoner may also be virtually buried alive in total darkness underground for as long as three weeks, during which he is denied adequate food and sleep. Prisoners have also been hog-tied in painful positions for hours on end. In short, Guantanamo’s prisoners have suffered tortures far worse than France’s notorious Devil’s Island.
The above facts about Guantanamo are according to distinguished investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill in an article published for “World View News Service.” He quotes Michael Ratner, president of the Center For Constitutional Rights (CCR) as saying: “They (the IRF) are the Black Shirts of Guantanamo. IRFs can’t be separated from torture. They are part of the brutalization of humans treated as less than human.” Adds Scott Horton, a leading expert on the U.S. military and constitutional law, “They (the IRF) were trained to brutally punish prisoners in a brief period of time, and ridiculous pretexts were taken to justify” the beatings. (One prisoner said he was beaten for feeding crumbs to some lizards.)
“I have seen detainees suffer serious injuries as a result of being IRF’ed,” said David Hicks, an Australian citizen held at Guantanamo. “I have seen detainees IRF’ed while they were praying or by refusing medication.”
In his book, “An Innocent Man in Guantanamo,” (Palgrave/macmillan), Murat Kurnaz, held there for five years even though it was clear to U.S. authorities he was innocent, writes, “Blows from the IRF team were the basic form of punishment at Camp X-Ray… beating us and then chaining our hands and feet, connecting those chains with a third one. You couldn’t move your arms, they were pressed to your body. Then they’d leave you sitting there like that and take away your blanket and the thin mattress. It could take days before they’d unshackle you… ” Perhaps the ultimate in sadism, Kurnaz recalls, “fathers had to watch as their sons were beaten, and vice versa.”
Kurnaz writes that when General Geoffrey Miller took over Guantanamo in 2003 the plight of the prisoners “dramatically worsened.” “The interrogations got more brutal, more frequent, and longer. The first order General Miller issued was to commence Operation Sandman, which meant we were moved to new cells every one or two hours. The general’s goal was to completely deprive us of sleep, and he achieved it.” Kurnaz said that if he dozed off an IRF guard would punch him in the face.
The CCR has called upon the Obama regime to immediately end the use of IRF teams at Guantanamo. One Guantanamo defense lawyer said that after Obama took office his clients reported “a ramping up in abuse.” Horton says, “detainees should be entitled to compensation for injuries they suffered,” reports Scahill.
“As Commander in Chief of United States Armed Forces under the terms of the United States Constitution, President Obama has an absolute obligation to terminate torture and war crimes committed by the IRFs on Gitmo,” says Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign. “Failure to do so renders him liable for these international crimes under international criminal law, U.S. domestic criminal law, and U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 on the Law of Land Warfare under the doctrine of Command Responsibility. The best way to do this would be to terminate the IRFs on Gitmo.” Boyle is author of “Tackling America’s Toughest Questions” (Clarity).
Scahill says that while Barack Obama, almost immediately upon taking office, issued an executive order saying he was going to close down Guantanamo within a year and that he was going to respect the Geneva Convention while his administration reviewed Guantanamo, the (IRF) force under Obama has continued to torture prisoners.
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Sherwood Ross formerly worked as a reporter and columnist for major dailies and wire services. He currently heads a Miami, Florida-based public relations firm for worthy causes. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com.
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Unilateral sanctions on Iran to hurt Russia-US ties: Russian official
Xinhua – June 17, 2012
MOSCOW – Potential U.S.sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program will “deal a blow” to Russian-U.S. relations, a senior Russian official said Sunday, presuming a hard-line stance before the long-waited meeting of the heads of the two states.
Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov told reporters that U.S. sanctions on Iran would “run against international law and affect third countries.”
Moscow could not accept if Russian firms and banks become potential victims of such unilateral actions from the U.S., Ushakov warned.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama are to meet on the sidelines of the upcoming Group of 20 summit Monday in the Mexican city of Los Cabos.
The two leaders had agreed by phone in early May that they would meet for one and a half hours during the summit, Ushakov said, which would be the first since Putin returned to the top seat.
Putin’s absence from the Group of Eight summit last month in the United States and Obama’s no-show decision at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum meeting in Russia’s Vladivostok in September augured a possible cool-down of the already soured Russia-U.S. relations amidst Putin’s tough words concerning the U.S.-led missile defense system in Europe.
A new round of talks between Iran and the six major world powers — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — is due on Monday in Moscow, a month after the last round of “six plus one” talks was held in the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
Secret Obama Trade Agreement Would Allow Foreign Corporations to Avoid U.S. Laws
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | June 15, 2012
In order to secure a new international trade agreement with Pacific nations, the Obama administration appears willing to grant foreign corporations the power to avoid U.S. laws.
This revelation came in the form of a leaked document posted online by Citizens Trade Campaign. The material came from negotiations to establish a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact and its authenticity verified by Public Citizen.
According to the Huffington Post, which also reviewed the document, foreign corporations operating within the U.S. could disregard certain domestic requirements and regulations by appealing to an international tribunal—that would have the power to overrule American law.
“The outrageous stuff in this leaked text,” wrote Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, “may well be why U.S. trade officials have been so extremely secretive about these past two years of [trade] negotiations.”
Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Congress have complained about the secretive talks and being kept in the dark. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has introduced legislation requiring the administration to disclose details of the discussions.
Although Congress has not been privy to the negotiations, 600 U.S. corporate advisers have enjoyed access to TPP texts and been permitted to advise U.S. negotiators.
~
Obama Trade Document Leaked, Revealing New Corporate Powers And Broken Campaign Promises (by Zach Carter, Huffington Post)
Public Interest Analysis of Leaked Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Investment Text (by Lori Wallach and Todd Tucker, Public Citizen)
Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement Chapter (CitizensTrade.org)
What will be in the New U.S. Asia-Pacific Trade Agreement? It’s None of Our Business (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
U.S. Escalates Military Penetration of Africa
By Glen Ford | Black Agenda Report | June 13, 2012
According to the Army Times newspaper, the United States will soon deploy a brigade of about 3,000 troops – “and likely more” – for duty “across the continent” of Africa. The “pilot program”has all the markings of a permanent, roving presence, joining the 1,200 U.S. soldiers stationed in Djibouti and the 100-plus Special Forces dispatched to Central Africa by President Obama, last October.
As always and everywhere, the U.S. is looking for bases to occupy – although the U.S. military command in Africa doesn’t call them bases. Rather, “as part of a ‘regionally’ aligned force concept,’ soldiers will live and work among Africans in safe communities approved by the U.S. government,” said AFRICOM’s Maj. Gen. David Hogg.
The First Black U.S. President, who in 2009 lectured Africans that “corruption” and “poor governance,” rather than neocolonialism, were the continent’s biggest problems, has made the U.S. military the primary interlocutor with African states. Functions that were once the purview of the U.S. State Department, such as distribution of economic aid and medical assistance, are now part of AFRICOM’s vast portfolio. In Africa, more than anyplace in the world, U.S. foreign policy wears a uniform – which should leave little doubt as to Washington’s objectives in the region: Africa is to be dominated by military means. Obama’s “good governance” smokescreen for U.S. neocolonialism is embedded in AFRICOM’s stated mission: “to deter and defeat transnational threats and to provide a security environment conducive to good governance and development.” Translation: to bring the so-called war on terror to every corner of the continent and ensure that U.S. corporate interests get favorable treatment from African governments.
AFRICOM’s array of alliances and agreements with African militaries already embraces virtually every nation on the continent except Eritrea and Zimbabwe. All but a handful of Black African states routinely take part in military maneuvers staged by Americans, utilizing U.S. command-and-control equipment and practices. The new, roving U.S. brigade will further institutionalize U.S. ties with the African officer class, part of AFRICOM’s mission to forge deep “soldier-to-soldier” relationships: general-to-general, colonel-to-colonel, and so forth down the line. The proposed network of “safe communities” to accommodate the highly mobile U.S. brigade is a euphemism for joint bases and the most intense U.S. fraternization with local African militaries. Regime change will never be farther away than a drink at the officers club.
According to the Army Times article, the composition of the new brigade, in terms of military skills, is not yet known. However, the brigade is conceived as part of the “new readiness model,” which “affords Army units more time to learn regional cultures and languages and train for specific threats and missions.” This sounds like special ops units – Rangers and Special Forces – which have been vastly expanded under President Obama (and are quite capable of carrying out regime-change operations on their own or in close coordination with their local counterparts).
In most cases, coups will be unnecessary. Regional African “trade” blocs like ECOWAS, the 16-member Economic Community of West African States, and IGAD, the six-nation Intergovernmental Authority on Development, in East Africa, have provided African cover for U.S. and French military/political designs in the Ivory Coast and Somalia, respectively. These blocs will doubtless become even more useful and compliant, as U.S. military commanders and their African counterparts get cozier in those “safe communities.”
Americans, no matter how bloody their hands, have always liked to think of themselves as “innocents abroad.” “As far as our mission goes, it’s uncharted territory,” said AFRICOM’s Gen. Hogg. Not really. The Americans are following a European chart in Africa that goes back centuries, and their own long experience in the serial rape of Latin America, where the close fraternization of U.S. and Latin American militaries in recent decades smothered the region in juntas, dirty wars, torture-based states, and outright genocide.
The U.S. and its African allies perpetrated of the worst genocide since World War Two: the death of six million in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Uganda, which acts as a mercenary for the U.S. in Africa, is complicit in mega-death in Congo and Somalia. As Milton Allimadi, publisher of Black Star News, reported: “In 2005 The International Court of Justice (ICJ) found Uganda liable for the Congo crimes. The court awarded Congo $10 billion in reparations. Uganda’s army plundered Congo’s wealth and committed: mass rapes of both women and men; disemboweled pregnant women; burned people inside their homes alive; and, massacred innocents.”
Naturally, as a henchman of the United States, Uganda has not paid the $10 billion it owes Congo. Ugandan leader Yoweria Museveni, who became Ronald Reagan’s favorite African after seizing power in 1986 with a guerilla army packed with child soldiers, and who for decades waged genocidal war against the Acholi people of his country, now plays host to the Special Forces continent sent by President Obama, ostensibly to fight the child soldier-abusing Joseph Kony and his nearly nonexistent Lord’s Resistance Army.
Rwanda, the Pentagon’s other hit man on the continent, has been cited by a United Nations report as bearing responsibility for some of the millions slaughtered in Congo, as part of its ongoing rape and plunder of its neighbor.
Gen. Hogg says AFRICOM’s mission is to combat famine and disease. Yet, the AFRICOM-assisted Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in late 2006 led to “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa – worse than Darfur,” according to United Nations observers. The 2007 humanitarian crisis and the escalating U.S.-directed war against Somalia made the 2010 famine all but inevitable.
Ugandan soldiers, nominally working for the African Union but in the pay of the Pentagon, kept watch over western interests in the starving country, as did the 1,200 soldiers stationed at the U.S. base in neighboring Djibouti – a permanent presence, along with the French garrison.
There’s nothing “uncharted” or mysterious about AFRICOM’s mission. The introduction of the 3,000-strong mobile brigade and a network of supporting bases prepares the way for the arrival of much larger U.S. and NATO forces – the recolonization of Africa. Gen. Hogg swears up and down there are no such plans. “For all the challenges that happen and sprout up across Africa, it really comes down to, it has to be an African solution,” he said.
That’s exactly the same thing they said in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
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Bankrupt Black Leadership, Nukes and Environmental Racism
By Bruce A. Dixon | Black Agenda Report | June 13, 2012
For more than a generation, in the last third of the twentieth century, black America was the immovable rock that anchored the left side American political life. Places like Detroit, New Orleans and St. Louis were literally and figuratively where the left lived.
It was a time when civil rights organizations and African American politicians could reasonably be expected to object, to protest, to publicly resist blatant crimes against their constituents on the part of governments and corporations. But by the turn of the 21st century, corporations had begun to finance the rise of a new class of elite black political leaders, politicians like Atlanta’s Kasim Reed and Shirley Franklin, Philadelphia’s Michael Nutter, and Newark’s Corey Booker, and of course President Barack Obama. At the same time, those corporations became the major funders of what used to be called civil rights organizations like the Urban League, the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Council.
Except for ceremonial bows and obeisances like Black History Month and pleas to vote for them on election day, Black America’s political leaders are now free from most obligations to black people, and what used to be vigilant, vocal civil rights organizations are silent in the face of corporate crimes like environmental racism against black communities, let alone the wider implications of these crimes for all Americans.
One of the best examples of this is in Georgia, where the Obama administration in 2009 granted Southern Companies $800 million to underwrite the construction of two nuclear reactors next to a pair of leaky existing nukes in a poor, mostly black Georgia town where almost every family has a cancer case or two. But who would raise the cry? The Southern Christian Leadership Council, perhaps, based in nearby Atlanta? No way. The CEO of Southern Companies headed up SCLC’s building fund, raising millions to pay for its Auburn St. headquarters. So SCLC is silent.
Although poor rural black people are the first to pay the price of this atrocity, they won’t be the only ones. Georgia’s Public Service Commission, which is supposed to look out for consumers has allowed the power company to add $10 to $20 per month to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of utility bills to underwrite construction costs of this deadly monstrosity. Even officials of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have noted that the reactor design is similar to those of the ill-fated Fukushima reactors in Japan, and ought to be re-evaluated in the light of that disaster.
This is a textbook example of how the cutting loose of the black political class from black people has affected the entire American polity. The radioactive poisoning of poor black communities alone should have roused SCLC and the black political class to action defending its supposed constituency. If the Bush-Cheney gang had done such a thing, cries of “environmental racism” would ring across the country. But corporate-funded black leaders, who should be the canaries in the coal mine, don’t allow themselves to criticize the corporate-funded black president. So the silence of the black political class enables the theft of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions from ratepayers statewide and permit the construction of the first of a new and hazardous generation nuclear plants that threaten the safety of millions.
Predator Nation: Obama and Corporate Crime
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER | CounterPunch | June 12, 2012
When Charles Ferguson accepted the Academy Award in 2010 for his documentary film Inside Job, he told 30 million people viewing the award ceremony that “three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single senior financial executive has been prosecuted and that’s wrong.”
Two years later, still no prosecution.
So, now Ferguson is out with a book – Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America (Random House, 2012.)
It reads like an indictment.
Check that.
It reads like a number of indictments.
And Ferguson is hoping that federal prosecutors will pick up the book and get some ideas.
And why exactly have there been no prosecutions of high level Wall Street investment bank executives?
Politics?
“Not exactly,” Ferguson says.
“It’s important to bear in mind the direct personal incentive structures of many of the people involved,” Ferguson told Corporate Crime Reporter last week. “The revolving door phenomenon now effects the Justice Department and federal prosecutors to a very substantial extent.”
“The previous federal prosecutor for the southern district of New York, Mary Jo White, now does white collar criminal defense and makes a great deal more money than she did as a federal prosecutor. I think that phenomenon is very well entrenched, very thoroughly entrenched.”
“Indeed Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division was head of the white collar criminal defense practice at Covington & Burling. They represent most of the major banks and investment banks in the United States.”
And his boss, Eric Holder, the Attorney General, came from the same firm.
“Exactly,” Ferguson said. “So, when you say politics, you sort of think of Republicans, Democrats, ideology, large scale political and policy debates. I don’t think that’s the only thing going on here. I think you have to consider incentives – individual, personal, financial and professional.”
When Rudy Giuliani was U.S. Attorney, he had no qualms about prosecuting Michael Milken. What has changed?
“One thing that has changed is that the amount of wealth and political power held by the financial sector has gone up by at least an order of magnitude,” Ferguson said.
“Another thing that’s changed is the amount of money that the financial sector spends on politics and acquiring political power and influence has also gone up by at least an order of magnitude.”
“And thirdly, the divergence, the difference between public sector salaries and incomes and private sector salaries and incomes has widened enormously.”
“So again, for those at the level of large scale political behavior and at the level of individual incentive, things have changed dramatically since the 1980s.”
As an undergrad, Ferguson studied mathematics at the University of California Berkeley and went on to study political science at MIT.
He then went on to organize an early software company – Vermeer Technologies – which was sold in 1996 to Microsoft for a reported $133 million.
He was an early fan of President Obama.
“I donated my legal maximum to his campaign in 2008,” Ferguson says.
But at a press conference in October 2011, Obama addressed the question of why no high level Wall Street executive has been prosecuted.
“So, you know, without commenting on particular prosecutions– obviously, that’s not my job, that’s the attorney general’s job – you know, I think part of people’s frustrations, part of my frustration, was a lot of practices that should not have been allowed weren’t necessarily against the law, but they had a huge destructive impact,” Obama said. […]
What was Ferguson’s reaction when he heard Obama say – the actions “weren’t necessarily against the law”?
“My reaction was very negative,” Ferguson said. “First of all the statement is thoroughly inaccurate and incorrect, but secondly it’s very difficult for me to believe that he doesn’t know that.”
“Given what we now know, it’s very difficult for me to believe that President Obama actually believes that there was no significant criminality in the housing bubble and the financial crisis.”
Russell Mokhiber edits the Corporate Crime Reporter.
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Judge Forrest and the NDAA
By CARL J. MAYER | CounterPunch | June 11, 2012
In 1774 the American patriot John Adams said of John Witherspoon (the Scottish Presbyterian Minister and co-signer of the Declaration of Independence): “He is as high a Son of Liberty, as any man in America.”
Future generations may well say of United States Federal District Court Judge Katherine B. Forrest that she is as high a Daughter of Liberty as any person in the land.
Judge Forrest, of the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, issued a ruling on May 16 that will be regarded as a watershed moment in reversing a decade-long bi-partisan assault on civil liberties and the Constitution. Her honor took the extraordinary step of issuing a preliminary injunction and striking down as unconstitutional a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would have allowed for the indefinite detention of United States citizens in military prisons without trial or counsel.
This so-called “Homeland Battlefield Act” was thought by many to be the latest and most egregious incursion on the liberties of all Americans, coming on the heels of warrantless wire-tapping, the USA Patriot Act, drones flying over American cities and the use by American police of Para-military garb and tactics.
Like John Adams and John Witherspoon, Forrest can hardly be characterized as a radical. A former entertainment lawyer with the powerhouse corporate law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore, Forrest is an Obama appointee.
Nor can her opinion be characterized as precipitous or far-flung. To the contrary, Judge Forrest’s sober 68-page ruling was firmly rooted in established First Amendment and due process precedent. Judge Forrest almost had no choice but to strike down the offending statute because its terms were so vague: the law would have captured anyone accused of giving “substantial support” to Al-Qaeda or “associated forces.” These terms are not only inherently nebulous and imprecise, but they were not defined in the statute. Like most lawyers, in all my years of legal practice, I have never encountered a law that does not have a definitional section: the NDAA did not.
To remove any doubt, at trial Judge Forrest cross-examined the United States Government lawyers about whether they could give assurances to the plaintiffs in the case – all of whom were either journalists or activists with no ties to terrorists, other than reporting – that their speech and conduct would not subject them to the provisions of the NDAA. Repeatedly, Justice Department lawyers refused, in open court, on the record, to offer any such assurances. As Judge Forrest wrote in her opinion: “At the hearing on this motion, the government was unwilling or unable to state that these plaintiffs would not be subject to indefinite detention under [Section] 1021 [of the NDAA]. Plaintiffs are therefore at risk of detention, of losing their liberty, potentially for many years.”
The government could appeal Judge Forrest’s ruling, but the plaintiffs in the case have publicly called on the President, a former constitutional scholar himself, to announce that he will abide by the sound reasoning of Judge Forrest, forgo an appeal and voluntarily enter into a permanent injunction that would forever ensure that American’s rights to trial by jury would be secure.
Candidate Romney would be wise to take a similar position. Indeed as many Republicans oppose the NDAA as Democrats. In fact, a coalition of conservative and Republican groups took the extraordinary step of filing an amicus curiae brief in Federal District Court. The signatories to the brief included a Virginia Republican State Senator, the Conservative Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Gun Owners of America.
The Congress, just days after Judge Forrest’s ruling, failed to pass an amendment to the NDAA that would have fixed some of the constitutional problems with the statute. On May 25, the Friday before the Memorial Day weekend, the Justice Department filed a motion for reconsideration (which are virtually never granted) before Judge Forrest signaling the Administration’s determination to keep fighting to overturn decades of constitutional jurisprudence and enshrine indefinite, undefined detention as the law of the land.
The most astonishing moment at trial before Judge Forrest was the sound of silence. The government refused to call any witnesses from any of the national security agencies that could have explained why undermining the civil liberties of civilians in this country is necessary to fight terrorism. The government simply cannot explain why habeas corpus and trial by jury should be jettisoned when these concepts date back hundreds of years and were enshrined by the Supreme Court during active war time as far back as the Civil War.
On June 6, 2012, in another courageous opinion, Judge Forrest denied the Obama administration’s request for reconsideration and made clear that her order is so broad that it applies to every area of the country and by implication protects all journalists and activists in America.
The battle to restore civil liberties in America has begun.
Carl J. Mayer, with Bruce Afran, was lead-counsel representing the plaintiffs in Hedges v. Obama, decided by Judge Forrest on May 16, 2012.
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Obama says Washington is ‘more attentive’ to Israelis than Palestinians
Press TV – June 6, 2012
US President Barack Obama has once again voiced unwavering support for Tel Aviv, reiterating that Washington is “decidedly more attentive” to Israel than it is to the Palestinians.
Obama made the remarks on Tuesday at a meeting between White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew and a visiting delegation of the US Orthodox Jewish community, Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Wednesday.
The US president also called on the audience not to cast doubts on his loyalty to his Israeli allies.
Referring to his amicable personal relationship with the hawkish Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama highlighted that he understands that the Israeli official wishes “no restraints”.
When asked about what he had found out from events regarding Israel-Palestine talks to end the conflict between the two sides, Obama said “it’s really hard,” and pointed to numerous possibilities for misunderstanding.
The remarks come after the US House of Representatives announced its plans on May 7 to allocate nearly USD one billion for the 2013 fiscal year for Israel’s missile systems.
“This funding level is the highest ever appropriated in a single year” for Israeli missiles, Rep. Steve Rothman (D-NJ), a member of the committee, said in a statement.
Tel Aviv is the top recipient of military aid from the United States.
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MSNBC: No Time for Obama’s Kill List?
By Peter Hart | FAIR | June 1, 2012
The New York Times‘ lengthy report (5/29/12) on Barack Obama’s drone “kill list” should provoke serious questions: Is such a program legal? How does it square with Obama’s criticism of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” policies? What does it tell us about how the administration identifies “militants” who are targeted for assassination?
But those questions have been raised only in fits and starts–and are basically absent from the liberal cable news channel MSNBC. In fact, a far more interesting discussion of these questions can be heard on Fox News Channel.
It’s not all good on Fox, naturally. Host Bill O’Reilly and guest Dennis Miller (5/29/12) joked about whether they were on the kill lists . Geraldo Rivera defended the program on Fox & Friends (6/1/12). Fox “liberal” Bob Beckel did the same on Fox‘s The Five (5/29/12):
To even suggest that somehow there is something wrong with a kill list, for you to suggest that shows you how rabidly anti-Obama you are.
Part of that discussion focused on what the reaction would be if we were reading about George W. Bush’s drone kill list–a contrast that was raised on other Fox shows, and a legitimate one.
It wasn’t just that angle that Fox covered, though. On Special Report (5/30/12), James Rosen looked at the White House’s “fuzzy math” at counting civilian deaths from drone strikes. A Special Report panel (5/29/12) used a soundbite from the ACLU to illustrate criticism from the left.
But what about the channel that would seem the natural place for some of that left-leaning analysis? MSNBC has been mostly quiet. A search of the Nexis news database turns up nothing on Obama’s kill list. The program Morning Joe had one discussion (5/29/12) where the panelists mostly supported the program, though host Joe Scarborough expressed some reservations.
What was more newsworthy? MSNBC‘s prime time shows seemed to have plenty of coverage of “birther” Donald Trump.
And it is worth noting one left-leaning TV host who did present a critical take on the Obama drone program was Current host Cenk Uygur (5/29/12). Some might remember that he briefly hosted a show on MSNBC but left amidst disputes over whether management wanted him to tone it down. Draw your own conclusions.
*Also: Kevin Gosztola has a good piece about drones and media coverage at FireDogLake (6/1/12). And it should be noted that ABC correspondent Jake Tapper (5/29/12) asked some strong questions to White House press secretary Jay Carney, particularly about civilian deaths and how the administration was defining “militants.” As best I can tell, Tapper’s exchange with Carney was not included in any ABC broadcasts, but can be viewed at the link above (starting around the 13:00 mark)
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Book Review
In 2007, Michael Parenti Called Out The Greater Israel Project
The Dissident | January 28, 2026
In my last article, I covered the left-wing scholar Michael Parenti- who passed away at the age of 92 this week- and his prophetic writings on the Ukraine proxy war in 2014.
Parenti’s writings on the Israel lobby and the greater Israel project were equally prophetic.
In his 2007 book “Contrary Notions” Parenti called out “Israel First” Neo-cons and Israel’s role in the Iraq war, and predicted to a tee the future Israeli/American wars in the Middle East in service of Greater Israel and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
In a section of the book aptly titled “Israel First”, Parenti wrote… continue
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