Obama Regime Seeks Permission To Lie In Response To Freedom Of Information Requests – Even To The Courts
Jerry Policoff | OEN | October 25, 2011
One of the President Obama’s first promises after becoming President of the United States was a commitment to usher in a new era of unprecedented government transparency. Instead the Obama administration has exhibited what may be an unprecedented obsession with government secrecy including blocking numerous law suits by invoking the doctrine of “State Secrets.” The administration has even come up with an interpretation of the Patriot Act which many in Congress who have seen it claim is overly broad and bestows more power on the Executive Branch than was intended by Congress when they passed it.
Unfortunately those in Congress who have seen this document are not permitted to divulge its content, and we, the public, cannot see it because the administration has chosen to classify it as a “State Secret.” In other words, you might be doing something that the Obama Administration believes violates the Patriot Act, but you won’t know it until they indict you for breaking a law you did not know existed (I might be breaking it just by penning and publishing this article).
Now the Obama/Holder Justice Department is attempting to re-write the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), empowering or even compelling government agencies to deny the very existence of records they know to exist if they believe they are legitimately exempted from disclosure. Of course they are most likely the sole arbiter of whether they are indeed exempt from disclosure. In effect the Obama/Holder Justice Department wants to be free to legally lie about the existence of records in response to FOIA requests. Apparently they want to avoid the embarrassment and inconvenience of being officially rebuked by the courts for doing exactly that (lying to a Federal judge), as occurred earlier this year when, in a strongly worded opinion, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney wrote that the “Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court.” The solution is simple: re-write the law so the government, in many circumstances, can affirmatively mislead the court.
Despite substantial opposition by such groups as the ACLU, The National Press Club, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, OpentheGovernment.org., Judicial Watch, et al to this radical re-write of the FOIA Law, this controversial effort by the Obama Administration to evade the very transparency it so passionately promised to deliver has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media which is supposed to the guardian of the people’s right to know.
Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or neither, this move by the Obama administration should trouble you deeply. Is this change we can believe in???
Below are snippets of reports on this controversy, none of them from a mainstream media source. That was not my intent. I just could not find any. I learned about it just this morning in an e-mail from the National Law Journal:
National Press Club Urges Administration to Reconsider Draft Rule on Freedom of Information
“Under the new Department of Justice proposal, in replying to a request for information under the freedom-of-information law, if the information is allowed to be withheld under certain statutory exceptions, then federal officials “will respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist”– even if that is not the case.
“No rule or law should allow, let alone require, the government to mislead the press or the public about anything,” said Mark Hamrick, a broadcast journalist with the Associated Press who is the 2011 president of the National Press Club. “If enacted, it appears that this proposed rule would offend the precepts that informed the Freedom of Information Act, and it would tarnish the government’s credibility.
“What’s more, the change seems unnecessary,” he said. “If agencies are exercising legally allowable exceptions to the law and withholding certain records, they can just continue to do as they do today: neither confirm nor deny the information’s existence.”
~
Justice Dept. proposes lying, hiding existence of records under new FOIA rule
“The Justice Department has proposed the change as part of a large revision of FOIA rules for federal agencies. Specifically, the rule would direct government agencies who are denying a request under an established FOIA exemption to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist,” rather than citing the relevant exemption.
The proposed rule has alarmed government transparency advocates across the political spectrum, who’ve called it “Orwellian” and say it will “twist” public access to government.
In a public comment regarding the rule change, the ACLU, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org, said the move “will dramatically undermine government integrity by allowing a law designed to provide public access to government information to be twisted to permit federal law enforcement agencies to actively lie to the American people.”
Conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch has also lambasted the proposed rules change
“Upon taking office, President Obama released a memorandum declaring his administration was “committed to operating with an unprecedented level of openness. Specifically, he pledged to bolster the strength of the FOIA act, calling it “the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government.”
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Government Could Hide Existence of Records under FOIA Rule Proposal
“The ACLU, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and OpenTheGovernment.org said the move would “dramatically undermine government integrity by allowing a law designed to provide public access to government to be twisted.
“Open government groups also contend that the proposed rule could undermine judicial proceedings.
In a recent case brought by the ACLU of Southern California, the FBI denied the existence of documents. But the court later discovered that the documents did exist. In an amended order , U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney wrote that the “Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court.”
DOJ’s draft FOIA rule was first published in March , but DOJ re-opened comment submissions in September at the request of open-government groups. The new comment period ended October 19.”
Former Obama envoy George Mitchell comes out as ‘Israel’s lawyer’
By Ali Abunimah – The Electronic Intifada – 10/26/2011
While he held the job of President Barack Obama’s peace process envoy, former US Senator George Mitchell generally maintained a good reputation. He came into the job with high regard because of his role in Northern Ireland.
During his Middle East tenure, Mitchell was notoriously tight-lipped, allowing people to believe that behind the stony face was a tough and fair “honest broker” who would privately take Israel to task in ways that the US could not do publicly.
But this was always an illusion. As detailed minutes of previously secret meetings, revealed in the Palestine Papers showed, Mitchell was very much ‘Israel’s lawyer’ – to use Aaron Miller’s famous term – just like all previous US envoys and officials. Mark Perry and I analyzed some of these documents revealing Mitchell’s role as Israel’s enabler.
Now, Mitchell has spoken out at London’s Chatham House on 17 October, and in his own words – as reported by Israel’s Haaretz. His comments largely confirm that in his general approach and in very specific ways, Mitchell was actively working to [further] Israel’s agenda and was never remotely an “honest broker.” Here are some highlights from the Haaretz article with my analysis.
Endorsing collaboration with occupation despite disastrous effects on Palestinians
From Haaretz:
“Order and personal security [in the West Bank] have been established in a way that never was previously,” stated Mitchell. “The problem is that that effort cannot be sustained in the absence of progress, or at least the hope of progress on the political front. It will break down internally on the Palestinian side, and it will break down in relations with the Israelis. And it is to President Abbas’ credit that, notwithstanding the fact that we haven’t been able to get into meaningful negotiations, he has maintained co-ordination and co-operation on the security front and it continues.
In other words, Mitchell sees it as positive and praiseworthy that Mahmoud Abbas is unconditionally collaborating with Israeli occupation forces without any benefit for Palestinians. When Mitchell talks about “order and personal security” he means order and personal security for Israeli occupiers and settlers and perhaps at certain periods for Palestinians restricted to the showcase Area A ghetto-cities of Ramallah and Nablus. But for Palestinians living all over the occupied West Bank and eastern occupied Jerusalem there is neither order nor personal security.
In the eastern occupied Jerusalem neighbhorhoods of Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, hundreds of families live with the insecurity of knowing their houses are targeted for destruction for the benefit of Jewish settlers.
In the southern West Bank tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouin face the prospect of forced removal from their land, and everywhere else – especially during the current olive harvest – Palestinians face attacks by Israeli government-backed colonial settlers.
This is the “order and security” that Mitchell is praising.
Interfering in Palestinian politics, opposing reconciliation
From Haaretz:
Speaking on Gilad Shalit’s release, Mitchell said that the subject is extremely sensitive for Israelis, and that the deal has positive aspects. Yet he insisted that the prisoner exchange had yielded negative results, such as strengthening Hamas vis-a-vis the Palestinian Authority.
It has been known since January, thanks to the Palestine Papers, that the Palestinian Authority lobbied strenuously against the prisoner exchange precisely in order to deny Hamas any credit. Yet there were also persistent reports that Mitchell and the US vetoed the deal going through earlier. Mitchell’s reported comments add weight to that assessment.
Mitchell’s logic can be inferred: his priority was to keep the Palestinian leadership weak and divided so that the most subservient element, the Abbas-led PA, would be more vulnerable to a US-brokered deal on Israel’s terms. This contrasts markedly with his approach in Ireland, where the US supported a broad Irish nationalist common front encompassing the Republic of Ireland government, and the “moderate” and “extremist” nationalist parties in Northern Ireland to strengthen their negotiating positions vis a vis the British-backed unionists.
Shock, horror, Israel might have to “choose” democracy
Haaretz:
Changing demographic realities will compel Israel to make fateful choices, Mitchell suggested.
“Israel, if the two state solution is lost, will have to choose between being a Jewish state and a democratic state,” he said. “And that’s a choice they should not have to make.”
Mitchell makes clear with these words that he shares Israel’s racist perception of Palestinians not as rights-bearing human beings but as a ‘demographic threat’ to Jewish supremacy.
His priority – like that of the rest of the US Zionist foreign policy establishment, and like President Obama – is not justice, or even “peace” but first and foremost maintaining racial and colonial privileges for Israeli Jews. What alarms Mitchell most of all is that Israelis should ever have to abide by democratic principles in which all people have equal political rights, regardless of their membership in one or another ethnoreligious group.
Israel, Mitchell tells us, should never be forced to choose democracy. Instead it was his job to try to goad Palestinians into accepting a bantustan on Israel’s terms that would spare Israel that terrible “choice.”
Palestinian Authority not subservient enough for Mitchell’s liking
If we take the Haaretz report as a complete and accurate report of Mitchell’s comments (admittedly something that can’t be taken for granted), what’s notable is that he attacks the PA for not seizing the opportunity of Israel’s so-called 10-month “settlement freeze” but he was silent about the fact that the freeze was fake all along:
Haaretz says:
Mitchell also criticized the Palestinian Authority’s responses to American efforts to renew negotiations with Israel. He claimed that the Palestinians were unwilling to accept the 10-month settlement construction freeze declared by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in November 2009; the Palestinians contended that this freeze was “useless,” and refused to engage in negotiations.
“They refused to enter into the negotiations until nine months of the 10 had elapsed,” Mitchell said. “Once they entered, they then said [the freeze] was indispensable. What had been worse than useless a few months before then became indispensable and they said they would not remain in the talks unless that indispensable element were extended.”
A few crucial facts: First, the “settlement freeze” never even nominally included eastern occupied Jerusalem, where Israel has been most aggressive in demolishing Palestinian homes and expanding its racist colonies. Second, in the rest of the West Bank the “freeze” was never a freeze since it only included “new” construction and excluded the thousands of colony homes at various stages of completion.
Finally, once the formal 10-month “freeze” ended, Israel immediately embarked on a building boom which Israel’s Peace Now termed “the most active period in many years.”
So Mitchell doesn’t appear to have been concerned about the reality, but only about the PA’s willingness to go along with a fiction that there was a “freeze” when there never was.
All of this only confirms that Mitchell himself learned nothing from his experience in Northern Ireland.
No matter which personalities are appointed to “peace process” roles in a US administration, a commitment first and foremost to Israel’s racist and colonial agenda and to the safety and “security” of its occupation are always the highest priorities, with Palestinian rights nowhere on the horizon.
Lynching Black Africans in Libya
By THOMAS C. MOUNTAIN | CounterPunch | October 25, 2011
Bodies of black men hanging from highways. Bound and tortured bodies of Africans dumped along the roadsides. Am I talking about Libya or Louisiana?
And all under the approving eye of the first Black President of the USA.
The lynching of Africans in Libya has been so bad that African leaders across the continent have been forced to raise their voices in protest. When the President of Nigeria, the USA’s unofficial enforcer in West Africa leads an African wide outcry against the lynching of his citizens in Libya one would assume that it was heard in the Obama White House.
With the murder or expulsion of most of Libya’s African migrant population well on its way came the massacre and ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of Black Libyans.
And all the while Barack Obama and his band of criminal cohorts in the western capitals and television news channels strung together words like “pro-democracy”, “freedom fighters” and “liberation” to describe the orgy of looting and lynching being carried out.
When Black Libyans took up arms to defend their families and homes from the Libyan lynch mobs they found themselves the beneficiaries of “pro-democracy” high explosives, delivered from on high by a freedom loving NATO air force.
Bombed from on high, lynched on the ground, the only choice is flee for your lives and that is what hundreds of thousands of Black Libyan have been forced to do.
And all under the approving eye of the first Black President in the White House.
Should we be surprised at such serpentine behavior by the first Black President? Isn’t this the guy who raised over $500 million to help him buy the White House, with $300 million of that from Wall Street?
Isn’t this the guy who surrounded himself before his election with the very worst criminals from the Clinton White house such as Anthony Lake, Susan Rice, Gayle Smith and Eric Holder?
But isn’t Barack Obama supposed to know what it’s like to be a black man in America? Didn’t he used to attend a militant black church where the minister preached the Lord’s damnation upon the racist and genocidal rulers of the USA?
The brutal truth is that, like the shepherd’s dog taken as a pup from its mother to suckle at the tit of a sheep, Barack Hussein Obama spent those most critical teenage years being the only black kid in a school of thousands (Note; this writer attended the same school as Barack Obama, Punahou, some half a dozen years before him).
Punahou is one of the most elite schools in the USA, founded in Hawaii by Yankee missionaries who so famously brought the bible and took the Hawaiians land.
Today Punahou’s alumni include names that adorn the headquarters of multinational corporations like Dole Foods.
Barack Obama discovered what the white man wanted to hear from a black boy at an early age and apparently never forgot it.
From Punahou eventually to Harvard, Obama learned what the elite needed to hear if you wanted to get ahead even if it meant black is white, up is down and wrong is right.
So today we have the spectacle of a son of an African, the first Black President in the White house, broadcasting his approval for all the world to see that Libya or Louisiana, if lynching Africans is what it takes, God Bless the USA…and no where else.
Thomas C. Mountain is the only independent western journalist in the Horn of Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He can be contacted at thomascmountain at yahoo dot com.
An Insidious Threat to the Occupy Movement
Obama has overseen the mass destruction of US jobs, all the while protecting the 1%
By ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH | Counterpunch | October 14, 2011
The threat I am referring to is not that of being pepper-sprayed, arrested, beaten or imprisoned. It is a different type of threat: a stealthy challenger that while pretending to advance the goals of the Occupy Movement tends to undermine it from within—more or less like the proverbial elephant in the room. I am referring to the threat of preemption, or cooptation, posed by the Democratic Party and union officials. In light of their unsavory record of undermining the revolutionary energy of social movements, projections of sympathy for the anti-Wall Street protesters by the White House, the Democratic Party officials and union leaders can be viewed only with suspicion.
Expressing sympathy for the protester, President Obama recently stated: “I think people are frustrated, and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.” At the same time he also defended the decision to bail out banks and other Wall Street speculators, arguing that the decision was necessitated by the need to salvage our financial system. It is obvious that, as usual, the president is talking from both side of his mouth.
On the same day (October 6th) that the president projected sympathy for the protesters, Vice President Biden also expressed similar sentiments. Comparing the Wall Street protests with the Tea Party, he stated: “The Tea Party started, why? TARP. They thought it was unfair – we were bailing out the big guy.” The vice president’s reference to the Tea Party is by no means fortuitous; there are clear indications the Democrats are trying to utilize the Occupy movement the way the Republicans do the Tea Party. “The mushrooming protests could be the start of a populist movement on the left that counterbalances the surge of the Tea Party on the right, and closes what some Democrats fear is an ‘enthusiasm gap,’” reported the New York Times on Friday, October 7th.
Projections of sympathy for the Occupy movement have not been limited to the White House. Many officials of the Democratic Party have either personally appeared at the Zuccotti Park to express support or sent statements of support for the protesters. Likewise, a number of union leaders joined a large protest rally held in New York City’s Foley Square on October 5th to show sympathy for the protesters.
Then there are the liberal political pundits and media outlets such as the New York Times that are also trying the build bridges between the Democratic Party and the Occupy movement in an effort to channel the protesters’ energy to the party’s electoral machine. For example, the New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman recently wrote: “And there are real political opportunities here. Not, of course, for today’s Republicans. . . . But Democrats are being given what amounts to a second chance. The Obama administration squandered a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies. . . . Now, however, Mr. Obama’s party has a chance for a do-over.”
On the face of it there is nothing wrong with the Democratic Party officials or union leaders expressing support for the protesters. In light of their actual economic policies, however, that support can be characterized only as hypocritical. The Democrats are as much responsible for the economic problems that have triggered the protests as their Republican counterparts. The Obama administration has played an especially destructive role in pursuing a devastating neoliberal austerity agenda in term of bailing out the Wall Street gamblers, extending the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy, expanding the US wars of choice—and then cutting vital social spending to pay for the financial resources thus usurped.
Equally blameworthy are union bureaucrats who have enabled the White House and the Congress in the implementation of such brutal austerity programs. Hollow posturing aside, the AFL-CIO has opposed neither the neoliberal austerity policies at home nor the imperialist wars of aggression abroad. Well-paid union officials have not even seriously challenged factory closures; nor have they earnestly resisted brutal cuts in workers’ wages and benefits.
In projecting sympathy for the Occupy Movement, the Democrats are essentially trying to have their cake and eat it too! Their efforts to express support for the protests can be interpreted only as opportunistic and utilitarian: to identify themselves with the rapidly spreading popular protests against the status quo, to mask the Obama administration’s neoliberal devotion to Wall Street, and to harness the energy of the protesters in order to garner their vote in the 2012 elections.
If successful, this would not be the first time the Democratic Party would have derailed and dissipated social struggles for change; it has a long record of such policies of betrayal, going back all the way to the Populist Movement of the late 19th century. Barack Obama’s promise of change in the 2008 elections in pursuit of garnering the grassroots’ vote was only the latest of the Democrats’ strategy of playing the good cop in order to contain radical energy. Two years earlier they had managed to undermine a vigorous antiwar movement by voicing the protesters’ demands to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if they won the majority seats in the Congress. Having thus gained the control of both houses of the Congress in the mid-term election of 2006, they shamelessly backed away from their promise to antiwar voters.
One can only hope that the Occupy Movement is armed with the knowledge of the Democratic Party’s record of cooptation and betrayal of radical movements; and will therefore chart a political movement of the working people and other grassroots independent of both parties of big business.
~
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.
Why Did the United States Invade Afghanistan?
By Tim Kelly | FFF | October 12, 2011
The tenth anniversary of the U.S. led war in Afghanistan came and went with very little attention from the mainstream media. U.S. policymakers are nevertheless confronted with many questions regarding that conflict, such as its affordability, the effectiveness of various strategies, and even whether U.S. forces should remain in that country at all.
Those are all important issues, but the one question I believe to be the most important and fundamental regarding the war probably won’t be discussed: Was the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan necessary?
President Obama, who had campaigned as an opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a war of choice said of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.”
Obama’s words might have made for a good sound bite, but the evidence shows that, like the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan is, indeed, a war of choice.
Many supporters of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan argue that even if the military campaign has turned into a quagmire, the initial attack was a just and necessary response to 9/11. Perhaps President Obama provided the best summary of this position in a speech at West Point. Obama said:
We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women and children without regard to their faith or race or station.… As we know, these men belonged to al Qaeda a group of extremists who have distorted and defiled Islam.… After the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden — we sent our troops into Afghanistan
Here we have the conventional view: The 9/11 attacks were carried out by 19 fanatical Muslims acting on the orders of Osama bin Laden, the founder and leader of al-Qaeda, who was being given sanctuary by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; and the invasion became necessary when they stubbornly refused to turn him over to U.S. authorities.
The Bush administration then commenced a bombing campaign and invasion of Afghanistan, asserting the need to capture or kill bin Laden and crush his terrorist organization so that they could not launch another deadly attack on the American homeland.
The problem with this narrative is that the claim that the Taliban had stubbornly refused to turn over bin Laden is not true.
CNN reported on September 21, 2001,
The Taliban … refused to hand over bin Laden without proof or evidence that he was involved in last week’s attacks on the United States. … The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan … said Friday that deporting him without proof would amount to an “insult to Islam.” (emphasis added)
CNN also provided an explanation for the Taliban’s “refusal,” reporting: “Bin Laden himself has already denied he had anything to do with the attacks, and Taliban officials repeatedly said he could not have been involved in the attacks.”
So the Taliban were not really refusing to turn him over but rather were demanding certain conditions be satisfied before they did so. That is not unusual. Governments routinely have evidentiary standards that must be met before they grant an extradition request. Bush, however, was not in a diplomatic mood, and he told the Taliban “the demands were not open to negotiation or discussion.”
The refusal by the Bush administration to put any evidence on the table made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the Taliban to turn bin Laden over. The Washington Post ran a story in October 2001 that quoted Milton Bearden, a former CIA official, who said the Taliban needed a “face-saving formula.” While the Bush administration was saying, “Give up bin Laden,” the Taliban were saying, “Do something to help us give him up.”
Even after the U.S. bombs began falling in October, the Taliban tried to negotiate by offering to turn bin Laden over to a third country if the United States would cease hostilities and provide evidence of his guilt. But Bush remained adamant, saying, “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.” London’s Guardian, reporting on this story, printed an article entitled “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer To Hand Bin Laden Over.”
Why was the Bush administration so stubbornly opposed to meeting the Taliban’s reasonable demand that they release at least some of the copious evidence they claimed to have gathered against bin Laden? After all, such a gesture might have spared the United States and her NATO allies, and the people of Afghanistan, the costs and consequences of a war that is now entering its eleventh year.
Well, the answer to that question could be that U.S. officials might well have lacked solid evidence of bin Laden’s complicity notwithstanding their certainty that he was behind the attacks. Certainly, the U.S. government has never shown such evidence to the American people.
Let’s review how the Bush administration presented its case against Osama bin Laden after 9/11.
Here is what Secretary of State Colin Powell said during a September 23, 2001, appearance on Meet the Press:
QUESTION: Are you absolutely convinced that Usama bin Laden was responsible for this attack?
SECRETARY POWELL: I am absolutely convinced that the al-Qaida network, which he heads, was responsible for this attack. You know, it’s sort of al-Qaida — the Arab name for it is “the base” — it’s something like a holding company of terrorist organizations that are located in dozens of countries around the world, sometimes tightly controlled, sometimes loosely controlled. And at the head of that organization is Usama bin Laden. So what we have to do in the first phase of this campaign is to go after al-Qaida and go after Usama bin Laden. But it is not just a problem in Afghanistan; it’s a problem throughout the world. That’s why we are attacking it with a worldwide coalition.
QUESTION: Will you release publicly a white paper, which links him and his organization to this attack, to put people at ease?
SECRETARY POWELL: We are hard at work bringing all the information together, intelligence information, law enforcement information. And I think, in the near future, we will be able to put out a paper, a document, that will describe quite clearly the evidence that we have linking him to this attack. And also, remember, he has been linked to earlier attacks against US interests and he was already indicated for earlier attacks against the United States.
The next day there were banner headlines appearing in newspapers across the country telling Americans of the Bush administration’s imminent report on bin Laden’s guilt. The New York Times ran a story citing a government official who claimed evidence “reaches from the southern tip of Manhattan to the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan.”
But by the following day, the Bush administration was backpedaling. The White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, said there were no plans to produce a report and that Powell’s remarks had been “misinterpreted.” At a joint press conference with President Bush, Secretary Powell withdrew his pledge, saying that “most of the evidence” is classified.
Within days, all mention of the promised “white paper” had disappeared from the news media, which continued to credulously repeat the U.S. government’s narrative of events.
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, citing officials from the Department of Justice and the CIA, said the real reason the Bush administration reneged on its pledge to release the evidence was a “lack of solid information.”
Further questions were raised regarding the U.S. government’s charges against Osama bin Laden by the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists webpage. While the page mentioned bombings in Kenya and Tanzania as terrorist acts for which bin Laden was wanted, it made no mention of the 9/11 attacks. When the FBI was asked about this conspicuous omission, Rex Tomb, the Bureau’s chief of investigative publicity replied: “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.”
So, the U.S. government’s case against Osama bin Laden was not good enough to take to court, but it was good enough to take the country to war, a war that has killed or maimed countless people who had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. The anger arising from the invasion and occupation of the country has created a perpetual supply of terrorist recruits, enabling U.S. officials to use the never-ending “war on terror” to eviscerate the Bill of Rights. And we now have a president who asserts the authority to kill off any person he deems a “threat.” I submit that this claim of unaccountable power represents a far greater threat to the peace and security of the country than any terrorist or group of terrorists could ever pose.
Surveying the evidence, it is clear the Bush administration did not even come close to exhausting its diplomatic options in the fall of 2001 and that some other route could have been chosen to respond to the 9/11 attacks. Moreover, the invasion of Afghanistan did not even succeed in its principal goal: the capturing or killing of Osama bin Laden. According to the U.S. government, that mission was accomplished almost ten years later by a team of Navy Seals in an operation lasting only a few hours … in neighboring Pakistan.
The “Fast And Furious” Used Car Salesman “Threat” Falls Apart
Moon of Alabama | October 13, 2011
The failed used car salesman Mansour J. Arbabsiar, who is accused in the “Iran kills Saudi ambassador” movie plot, is a hapless idiot and petty criminal whose businesses deals always went wrong. He couldn’t even match his socks, smoked marihuana and drank a lot of alcohol, was nonreligious, an opponent of the Iranian regime and only cared about money. A business man who knows him calls him “worthless” and his neighbors believed he was dealing in drugs.
But Arbabsiar had some money through inherited land holdings in Iran. Those holdings may well be the source of the $100,000 wired from Iran to the Drug Enforcement Administration informant. Israel’s Mossad, the MEK cult or some drug dealers in Iran are other possible sources for the money.
The Obama administration insists that it has proof of Iranian government involvement in the assassination plot. Some anonymous officials though are already walking back that claim. It seems that they have no proof at all, just a hunch.
Every Iran expert interviewed thinks the story as presented is nonsense: Alireza Nader from Rand Corp, Kenneth Katzman of the Congressional Research Service, former CIA agent Robert Baer, Carter era NSC official Gary Sicks, Bush 2 NSC official Hillary Mann Leverett (also here), Muhammad Sahimi of PBS/Tehran Bureau and Iran scholar Hamid Serri.
To me the indictment reads as if a nutty Mansour J. Arbabsiar attempted a drug deal which was then turned into a terrorism entrapment by and through the paid criminal Drug Enforcement Administration informant.
The Obama administration seems to use this case for three purposes:
- Diversion from the subpoena to AG Holder in the Fast and Furious gun running case which was served yesterday, from the #OccupyWallStreet movement and the general economic malaise
- To get some momentum for additional international sanctions on Iran
- To prop up the connections with the Saudi regime as it had threatened to distance itself from the U.S. over the U.S. veto of a Palestinian state
The administration’s case for the “plot” is now falling apart. Yesterday’s hype in the media has by now been replaced with doubts and mistrust. Given the obvious weakness of the case this was predictable.
But why then did the Obama administration use this case at all? Why come up with such a weak case that was sure to make it a laughing stock?
Occupy Wall Street, Denounce the Democrats
By Margaret Kimberley | BAR | October 12, 2011
In 2009, the New York state legislature imposed a tax surcharge on residents earning $1 million or more per year. This “millionaire’s tax” was passed with the proviso that it expire on December 31, 2011. When Democrats in the state capital proposed extending this tax on the rich, Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo said no, and the surcharge was history.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters held a march, dubbed the millionaire’s march, to demand that the rich pay their fair share of taxes. They marched past the New York City homes of billionaire David Koch, News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch, and Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase. For some strange reason, they did not march past the offices of the Democratic governor.
This stunning inaction is a bad omen that the Occupy Wall Street movement is doomed to fail unless it changes course quickly. The only way to protest income inequality or bailouts of the financial services industry is to protest against the people in power, even when they happen to be Democrats. Occupy Wall Street appears destined to turn into yet another effort to soft pedal Democratic complicity in the current economic crisis. OWS activists must not only disconnect themselves from the Democratic Party, but have the courage to protest them as strongly as they would Murdoch and Koch.
Agitation in favor of the “99%” against the “1%” is useless if it doesn’t address the bipartisan nature of the attack on the working people of this country. It is a bad sign indeed when the likes of Nancy Pelosi express support for OWS. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee hypocritically asks for “100,000 strong standing with Occupy Wall Street.” It strains credulity to believe that the people in charge of raising corporate cash for democrats really want to see changes in our political system.
It is Barack Obama, not George W. Bush, who made a lie of the dictum that Social Security is the “third rail of politics.” It is now in the slaughterhouse along with all other government programs, waiting its turn to be eviscerated. The Democrats have excelled in committing the crimes which Republicans have only dreamed about, and they will only grow bolder if they are not called to account.
As a witness to the protest in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti park, this columnist did not see one sign or hear any general assembly statements denouncing the Democratic Party. It is easy to shout down Geraldo Rivera and Fox news, that condemnation is low hanging fruit for any intelligent person.
It will be harder to say that Andrew Cuomo and his political aspirations are as much a part of the problem as Messrs. Koch and Dimon. The propaganda which ignores Democratic Party perfidy is very deeply imbedded in the American people. If they don’t hear the voices of the American left telling them the truth of the country’s condition, then our situation is a dire one indeed.
The coming days and weeks will give the occupiers ample opportunity to speak out as the Obama administration ratchets up its efforts to realize right wing fantasies. On the same day that marchers missed a golden opportunity to expose the Democratic Party’s complicity in letting wealthy New Yorkers get away with their ill gotten gains, the administration charged Iranian citizens in a bizarre and unbelievable plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington. Will the OWS forces move to protest when Obama makes the inevitable case for war, or will they revert to letting Democratic crimes against humanity go unopposed?
While OWS promises to remain unco-opted by any political party, it has not moved further to include the Democrats in its denunciations. Partly as a result of its leaderless, decentralized nature, OWS has been slow to solidify any demands. Words like breaking up the concentration of wealth and power will be meaningless without a more pointed critique of the political system, a critique which should be no respecter of persons or party.
Mass action is the only way to prevent further inequality, and further American aggression around the world. Occupy Wall Street can be the beginning of a great movement, or a lost opportunity. The experiment may be in its beginning stages, but the learning curve has to be brief if OWS is to not only remain free from political interference, but make good on its claims of fighting for the interests of working people.
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Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.com.
No problem– Obama’s State Dep’t spokesperson is married to Romney’s neocon foreign policy adviser
By Philip Weiss on October 12, 2011
Here is a crazy story no one is talking about that is evidence of the Israel lobby’s role in our politics. Last week, Mitt Romney announced a foreign policy team that includes Robert Kagan, a neocon who pushed for the Iraq war.
But Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, who is a spokesperson for the State Department. Laurie Bennett notes the strangeness of this conjunction:
Victoria Nuland’s role as spokesperson for the State Department, deemed strange by some who remember her tenure as principal deputy national security adviser to then Vice President Dick Cheney, has become stranger yet.
Her husband, Robert Kagan, has joined Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign as a foreign policy adviser.
Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, also advised the McCain campaign in 2008.
Ordinarily this would cause a lot of strain. Nuland would be under pressure. Chris Matthews would be asking what the heck she’s doing in a political job at State when her husband is preparing the opposition.
But in fact, Nuland’s Cheney resume and her marriage to Kagan are actually credentials in the Democratic Party: they demonstrate Obama’s sensitivity to the Israel lobby. And party bosses are happy to have these playing cards now that Obama is under siege from his own party about Israel.
Kagan pushed the Iraq war to George Bush as a battle to help Israel. He and his neocon friends wrote, “If we do not move against Saddam Hussein and his regime, the damage our Israeli friends and we have suffered until now may someday appear but a prelude to much greater horrors… Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight. Israel’s victory is an important part of our victory.”
So Nuland’s presence is like Dennis Ross’s presence in the same building as Middle East adviser–a man the ADL calls an “advocate” for Israel, who was lately chairman of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute in Jerusalem. Or Stuart Levey’s former role in Obama’s Treasury department in the same position he had under George Bush– and Levey is a man whose college dissertation, written under Martin Peretz, was about the importance of preserving the Zionist dream.
All these appointments allow Israel advocates to say to lobbyists and donors: Obama loves Israel, look who he has serving him in these big jobs.
At Salon, As’ad AbuKhalil gets at the same point in a piece on another Romney adviser, Walid Phares.
The appointment of Phares to a position in the Romney campaign is not surprising. In years past, such an appointment would have been considered extreme and cast doubt on the wisdom of the candidate– but no more. Middle East policymaking is now dominated by the Israel lobby and its affiliates. Advocacy of Israeli positions has replaced professional qualifications as the criteria for service.
What a Whopper! U.S. Throws All the Demons in the Mix for the Mother Of All Anti-Iran Psy-Ops
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | October 11, 2011
Who said Barack Obama would bring sobriety and dignity to U.S. foreign policy? The president’s men, and Top Woman Hillary Clinton, have thrown every stereotypical demon of middle American nightmares into the psychological operations gumbo, to create a war hysteria against Iran. No reflexive terror button is left unpunished, no racial hysteria unexploited. Bubble, bubble, boil and trouble, the administration is cooking up an almost comically infernal witches brew just in time for Halloween.
What a confabulation! There’s the Mexican drug cartel hit men, the specter of a bomb exploding in a crowded, upscale Washington eatery, plus attacks on Israelis and, of course, in the background, the elite Quds unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And if you believe the government story – well, that proves you are the typical America, and any idiot can keep you in a state of endless war.
How convenient this alleged plot is, to weave together the interests of the Mexican narco-regime, which is at war with some of its drug billionaires and in league with others, and a permanent lackey of the United States; Saudi Arabia, the most reactionary regime on the planet, where one family demonstrates its fitness to control the world’s largest oil reserves by building a skyscraper three times the height of the Empire State Building in the middle of a vast desert, and is also a collaborator with the United States in turning back the Arab Spring; and Israel, the uncontested champion violator of international law and United Nations resolutions, which maintains its supremacy in the Middle East and unique relationship to the United States by keeping the region permanently on the brink of Armageddon.
All four players now claim Iran has all but declared war on virtually everybody by plotting to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. But the whole thing smells more like the FBI’s schemes to frame Black men in Miami and Newburgh, New York, for terroristic attacks that never did, or could, happen.
Attorney General Eric Holder, the American entrapper-in-chief, says the Iranians wanted to pay $1.5 million to Mexican hit men to kill the ambassador, possibly by blowing up a DC restaurant where lots of congresspersons also dined. But it turns out that a Drug Enforcement Administration “confidential source” in Mexico was the guy the Iranians supposedly contacted for the hit, and that he came up with the bombing idea, and that the restaurant doesn’t even exist. A naturalized American who also kept his Iranian passport is now in custody. His alleged partner is an Iranian who, if you believe the U.S. government, was connected somehow to the Iranian Quds force. We are supposed to accept that this is how the Iranians make war against the western world.
Mexico says the plot was a threat to its national security, although it is not alleged that even one Mexican hit man was actually contacted. Israel – well, the Israelis are always trying to get the U.S. to attack Iran, so there’s nothing new, there. And the Saudis are pretending to be the injured party, even though they years ago promised the use of their airspace to Israel and the United States for the purpose of bombing Iran.
Iran calls the tale “a children’s story.” Which pretty much sums it up, except these American, Saudi, Mexican and Israeli children are vicious, straight out of Lord of the Flies.
A Dangerous Precedent
By Ron Paul | October 10, 2011
According to the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, Americans are never to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The Constitution is not some aspirational statement of values, allowing exceptions when convenient, but rather, it is the law of the land. It is the basis of our Republic and our principal bulwark against tyranny.
Last week’s assassination of two American citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, is an outrage and a criminal act carried out by the President and his administration. If the law protecting us against government-sanctioned assassination can be voided when there is a “really bad American”, is there any meaning left to the rule of law in the United States? If, as we learned last week, a secret government committee, not subject to congressional oversight or judicial review, can now target certain Americans for assassination, under what moral authority do we presume to lecture the rest of the world about protecting human rights? Didn’t we just bomb Libya into oblivion under the auspices of protecting the civilians from being targeted by their government? Timothy McVeigh was certainly a threat, as were Nidal Hassan and Jared Lee Loughner. They killed people in front of many witnesses. They took up arms against their government in a literal way, yet were still afforded trials. These constitutional protections are in place because our Founders realized it is a very serious matter to deprive any individual of life or liberty. Our outrage against even the obviously guilty is not worth the sacrifice of the rule of law. Al-Awlaki has been outspoken against the United States and we are told he encouraged violence against Americans. We do not know that he actually committed any acts of violence. Ironically, he was once invited to the Pentagon as part of an outreach to moderate Muslims after 9/11. As the US attacks against Muslims in the Middle East and Central Asia expanded, it is said that he became more fervent and radical in his opposition to US foreign policy.
Many cheer this killing because they believe that in a time of war, due process is not necessary – not even for citizens, and especially not for those overseas. However, there has been no formal declaration of war and certainly not one against Yemen. The post-9/11 authorization for force would not have covered these two Americans because no one is claiming they had any connection to that attack. Al-Awlaki was on a kill list compiled by a secret panel within President Obama’s National Security Council and Justice Department. How many more Americans citizens are on that list? They won’t tell us. What are the criteria? They won’t tell us. Where is the evidence? They won’t tell us.
Al-Awlaki’s father tried desperately to get the administration to at least allow his son to have legal representation to challenge the “kill” order. He was denied. Rather than give him his day in court, the administration, behind closed doors, served as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner.The most worrisome aspect of this is that any new powers this administration accrues will serve as precedents for future administrations. Even those who completely trust this administration must understand that if this usurpation of power and denial of due process is allowed to stand, these powers will remain to be expanded on by the next administration and then the next. Will you trust them? History shows that once a population gives up its rights, they are not easily won back. Beware.
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A low-fat, high-carb diet has been the largest public health experiment in history. It’s past time for a rethink.
By Malcolm Kendrick | RT | November 25, 2020
New research suggests that four billion people globally will be overweight in 2050. This trend can be traced back to the ‘low-fat, high-carb’ guidelines first issued in the 70s, and should prompt a major U-turn on dietary advice.
A recent report from the Potsdam Institute predicts that by 2050 there will be four billion overweight people in the world, with one-and-a-half billion of them obese. This is not entirely surprising. The world has been getting fatter for years, and things do not seem to be slowing down.
Why is this happening? … continue
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