Obama Regime Refuses to Investigate Alleged DEA Killing of Women and Child in Honduras
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | February 17, 2013
Democrats on Capitol Hill want the Obama administration to investigate the deaths of four civilians in Honduras last year during an anti-cocaine raid involving U.S. law enforcement agents. But administration officials have balked at the request.
On May 11, 2012, four villagers in a boat on the River Patuca, two pregnant women, a 21-year-old man and a 14-year-old boy, were killed when local police entered the town of Ahuas in northeastern Honduras to conduct a counternarcotics operation. Another four boat passengers were injured by gunfire. It was later learned that members of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) participated in the raid, which raised questions of whether Americans were responsible for the killings.
The Honduran government investigated the incident and concluded the DEA was not at fault for the deaths.
But 58 House Democrats were not satisfied with the probe, which they called “deeply flawed” in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. calling for the U.S. to conduct its own examination.
Officials with the State Department and the Department of Justice said their agencies have no intention of reopening the matter, according to The Washington Times.
More:
Government Won’t Probe of DEA Raid in Honduras (by Guy Taylor, Washington Times)
Collateral Damage of a Drug War (Center for Economic and Policy Research) (pdf)
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Obama and Co. Make Up the Law as They Kill
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford | February 6, 2013
Unlike the bombast that characterized the Bush administration’s assaults on U.S. and international law, the Obama regime tends to dribble out its rationales for gutting the Bill of Rights and every notion of global legality. This president prefers to create a fog – let’s call it the fog of his war against human rights – as he arrogates to himself the power to perpetually imprison or to summarily execute anyone, at any time, anywhere in the world. Obama assures us such authority is constitutionally rooted – it’s in there, believe me, he tells us – but he never produces legal chapter and verse to prove that presidential dictatorship is lawful. Instead, we get dribs and drabs of the administration’s position from lawyers defending Obama’s preventive detention law in the courts, or from informal statements by the attorney general, or even little tidbits gleaned from an Obama conversation with comedian Jon Stewart.
The latest hors d’oeuvre to be dished out comes in the form of a leak. I say “dished out” because leaked documents are commonly placed in public view by the administration in power, to test the political waters. This leaked Justice Department “white paper” appears to have been drawn up after the execution-by-drone of U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki, in Yemen. It justifies the killing of anyone occupying a position of status in al-Qaida, or with the ever-changing universe of groups said to be “associated” with al-Qaida. The document stretches the definition of “imminent threat” to cover anyone engaged in activities directed against the U.S., whether or not an actual operation is planned or in progress. Most interestingly, the white paper empowers Obama to delegate the kill-at-will authority to “an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government.” Which has a certain logic, since dictators certainly have the power to delegate the carrying out of their unjust acts to whomever they choose.
Eleven U.S. senators are asking for further clarification of the administration’s legal position. But that is just more fog, since the Congress overwhelmingly passed Obama’s preventive detention law – twice!! – a law based on the same assumption that due process of law does not apply when the president says it’s wartime. Therefore, the commander-in-chief can lock up any American, without charge or trial, forever, or until he declares peace. The U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, has made the administration’s position clear enough. Due process, he says, does not necessarily mean access to the judicial process – meaning, a trial. The process is whatever the president or the nearest “informed, high-level official of the U.S. government” says it is. Obama had redefined war, itself. The president told the Congress, after bombing Libya for eight months, that by his definition – which is the only one that counts – no state of war exists unless Americans become casualties, even if the U.S. kills tens of thousands, or millions. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was fond of saying that the arc of history bends towards justice. In the long term, that may be true. But Martin’s arc is not bending towards justice under this administration. It bends towards fascism, with a Black presidential face.
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Related article
- White Paper Asserts Obama Administration May Kill Americans Without Due Process (news.firedoglake.com)
Nepotism prevalent at Justice Department, says Inspector General report
By Jordy Yager – The Hill – 07/26/12
The Justice Department’s inspector general found at least seven instances of federal employees engaging in illegal attempts to hire family members at the agency, according to a report issued Thursday.
The report is the third investigation in less than a decade that has found numerous examples of illegal hiring practices, amounting to nepotism, within the DOJ.
The latest series of nepotistic attempts came after Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) alerted the IG to complaints he received in 2010 from a former DOJ employee-turned-whistleblower.
Wolf said the report was “alarming” and called on the DOJ employees, whose attempts at hiring relatives are exposed in the IG’s report, to be punished by the department.
“The report issued by the Department of Justice Inspector General today is alarming, especially given that the department has twice been warned about these illegal practices before,” said Wolf, the chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the DOJ’s budget, in a statement.
“I expect for the employees involved in this nepotism ring to be punished under full extent of the law. I also expect the department to move quickly to enact the necessary reforms to prevent this from happening again.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, criticized the DOJ in the wake of the IG’s report, saying that the agency is running “wild.”
At an executive committee meeting on Thursday, Grassley called on Attorney General Eric Holder to take legal action against the employees cited in the report. Grassley has butted heads with Holder for most of the attorney general’s time in office, saying that the DOJ constantly “stonewalls” his requests for information and action.
“This is another example of the Justice Department run wild,” said Grassley. “It is troubling to me how employees within the Department colluded and schemed to hire one another’s relatives in order to avoid rules against nepotism.
“At the very least, the Attorney General needs to hold these employees accountable — with more than just disciplinary action,” he said. “Laws were broken and false statements were made. The Department can’t simply sweep this under the rug. Employees need to be punished.”
The IG’s report found seven examples of employees within the DOJ’s Justice Management Division (JMD) attempting to hire the family members of their fellow employees.
According to the IG’s report, in two separate instances a pair of employees, who worked in different sections of the DOJ, engaged in schemes to hire the other’s child. In another example, a DOJ employee tried to secure employment for his cousin and nephew.
The IG released two prior reports on nepotistic hiring practices in 2004 and again in 2008, in which they found that employees manipulated the DOJ’s hiring process to favor certain candidates.
In 2008, the IG recommended that the department conduct ethics training and establish a “zero-tolerance” policy for future attempts at illegal hiring.
In a memorandum issued earlier this week, Assistant Attorney General for Administration Lee Lofthus wrote the IG to say that he would strengthen and clarify training for employees, with particular attention on the agency’s nepotism rules.
Lofthus also said that by Friday his office would be implementing a three-prong set of disclosure forms that would require DOJ employees to disclose any family member who they are aware of applying for a job within the agency. It would also require any DOJ applicant to reveal a family member who works for the department.
Lofthus said, according to the IG report, the actions of illegal hiring were a result of intentionally “bad behavior” and not ignorance of the rules or a lack of training on the DOJ’s part.
“The OIG report concludes by saying most of the misconduct identified in the report did not stem from ignorance of the rules, but rather was the result of bad behavior by individuals insufficiently impressed with the principles of fair and open competition.”
Obama’s Justice Department Rushes to the Rescue of LIBOR Criminals
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | July 18, 2012
The Obama Justice Department is in theater mode, again, pretending to threaten the bankster class with criminal penalties – prison time! – for their manipulation of the global economy’s benchmark interest rates. The Justice Department claims to be building criminal and civil cases in the LIBOR scandal, which in sheer scope is the biggest fraud by international capital in history. But that’s all a front, a farce. Barack Obama has spent his entire presidency protecting Wall Street, starting with his rescue of George Bush’s bank bailout bill after it’s initial defeat in Congress, in the last days of Obama’s candidacy. He packed his administration with banksters, passed his own bailout and, in collaboration with the Federal Reserve, channeled at least $16 trillion dollars into the accounts of U.S. and even European banks – by far the greatest transfer of capital in the history of the world. Obama has reminded the banksters that it was he who saved them from the “pitchforks” of an outraged public. He pushed through Congress so-called financial reform legislation that left derivatives – the deadly instruments of mass financial destruction that were at the heart of the meltdown – untouched.
Wall Street may or may not remain loyal to Obama, but Obama has been loyal to Wall Street, the guys who gave him the campaign cash to become a viable candidate. His Attorney General, Eric Holder, a corporate lawyer to the core, is busily staging a pre-emptive LIBOR prosecution of bankers in order to shield them from legal action by a host of other government agencies and, ultimately, from the global universe of parties that have been harmed by the bankster’s schemes– a list that stretches to infinity. Holder’s job is to monopolize the LIBOR case, to the extent legally and humanly possible, grabbing jurisdiction and consolidating the cases against the banks with the aim of reaching a settlement that does not further destabilize the financial system.
Holder and his boss already pulled that trick earlier this year with settlement of the bank “robo-signing” scandal – a scheme that would have ranked as the “crime of the century” until LIBOR came along. A small group of state attorney generals were holding up an administration-brokered settlement that effectively gave the banksters immunity from prosecution, in return for a measly $25 billion payout. Obama used every power of his office to pressure the state law officers into line. The last one capitulated with a promise from Obama that a “special unit of prosecutors” would expand the investigation into abusive mortgages practices. You haven’t heard a peep about it, since.
Now Obama and Holder are playing the same diversionary game, making tough noises about criminal investigations of the LIBOR conspirators. But the Justice Department has already given immunity to Barclay’s Bank, of Britain, and to the Swiss banking giant UBS. More immunities will follow. The reason Eric Holder is staging criminal investigations is because that’s the only way he can protect the bankers, through immunities and by gradually narrowing the scope of the case. In the end, there will be settlements all around, and the banksters will move on to even more fantastic heights of criminality – thanks to the loyal, protective hands of President Obama.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Related articles
- Richard (RJ) Eskow: Crooked Bankers Are Corrupting Government: The Real LIBOR Story (huffingtonpost.com)
The ACLU and Obama’s Assassination Program
By Binoy Kampmark | Dissident Voice | April 2, 2012
Due process and judicial process are not one and the same. The Founders weren’t picky. Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock-paper-scissors – who cares?
— Stephen Colbert, March 6, 2012
The policies around the assassination program of the United States are surreal.
Trafficking in murder while espousing noble things is a habit regimes fall into, though the more sinister ones tend to use weasel words to conceal that fact. The Obama administration, having long abandoned its role as the knight in shining armour, is now rusting away with the effects of realpolitik.
The ACLU has been trying through Freedom of Information channels to force a disclosure of the guidelines the administration uses in targeting foreign nationals or American citizens through the infamous drone program that has become de rigueur in military circles. The CIA has insisted that it cannot confirm or deny the existence or non-existence of those records that cover the targeting of individuals, or whether it is even employing such vehicles in the first place. They are “intelligence sources and methods information that is protected from disclosure by section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949, as amended”. In such circles, the response is termed the Glomar response, after the CIA’s refusal in 1976 to confirm or deny its relationship with Glomar Explorer, a drill ship created at the direction of Howard Hughes for the agency to recover the sunken Soviet submarine, the K-129.
In the words of Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, as reported by Salon (March 26). “At this point, the only consequence of pretending that it’s a secret program is that the courts don’t play a role in overseeing it.” With the courts left out in the cold, the administration can run riot. This, of course, is its self-appointed prerogative.
The Obama administration is engaging in a lexical game of murder, a game that has certainly silenced many of those who would have expressed outrage at the assortment of abuses perpetrated by the Bush administration. Tinker with the words, and the result is considered perfectly justifiable in the name of a higher state interest. This is Cheney with the gloss, Rumsfeld with the polish. Adjust the terms of reference, and assassination is an entirely rum thing.
Obama’s front man in this entire business, in true tasteless fashion, is Eric Holder. Instead of defending the law as is the incumbent duty of any Attorney General, he has a nasty tendency to get sick on it. He brings in his broom to clean up, and in its place he leaves the slime of gibberish. At Northwestern University Law School, he clearly repudiated the position he had taken regarding the Bush administration, whose policies in the ‘war on terror’ had occasioned ‘needlessly abusive and unlawful practices’. That, however, was in 2008. The new Holder was a different beast, more prone to splitting hairs. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’, we are made to realise, ‘are not one and the same’. The President, according to Holder, is not required to seek permission from any court before targeting American citizens abroad (Washington Times, March 12).
Supposedly, the targeting of such individuals is constrained by guidelines. The problem with such dangerous talk is that guidelines are merely points on paper, the scrawl of the moment. They have a tendency of disappearing as quickly as they appear. These guidelines tend to revolve around the nature of the target (an operative of a terrorist group seeking to actively kill American citizens, for one; that the target poses an imminent threat to the US; that the capture of the target is impractical; and that the target is to be eliminated on the basis of ‘relevant law of war principles’ (Washington Times, March 12). Such determinations do not lie in the legal domain. They are rather matters of political expediency.
An administration up to its eyeballs with legal rhetoric is bound to eventually be told it has no clothes, that its efforts are simply acts of distortion. The time it seems, courtesy of the ACLU’s efforts, is now.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He can be reached at bkampmark@gmail.com
Related articles
- Demolishing Due Process (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- U.S. drones targeting rescuers and mourners (salon.com)
Demolishing Due Process
By Ron Paul | March 19, 2012
It is ironic but perhaps sadly appropriate that Attorney General Eric Holder would choose a law school, Northwestern University, to deliver a speech earlier this month in which he demolished what was left of the rule of law in America.
In what history likely will record as a turning point, Attorney General Holder bluntly explained that this administration believes it has the authority to use lethal force against Americans if the President determines them to be a threat to the nation. He tells us that this is not a violation of the due process requirements of our Constitution because the President himself embodies “due process” as he unilaterally determines who is to be targeted. As Holder said, “a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to ‘due process.'” That means that the administration believes it is the President himself who is to be the judge, jury, and executioner.
As George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley wrote of the Holder speech:
“All the Administration has said is that they closely and faithfully follow their own guidelines — even if their decisions are not subject to judicial review. The fact that they say those guidelines are based on notions of due process is meaningless. They are not a constitutional process of review.”
It is particularly bizarre to hear the logic of the administration claiming the right to target its citizens according to some secret selection process, when we justified our attacks against Iraq and Libya because their leaders supposedly were targeting their own citizens! We also now plan a covert war against Syria for the same reason.
I should make it perfectly clear that I believe any individual who is engaging in violence against this country or its citizens should be brought to justice. But as Attorney General Holder himself points out in the same speech, our civilian courts have a very good track record of trying and convicting individuals involved with terrorism against the United States. Our civilian court system, with the guarantee of real due process, judicial review, and a fair trial, is our strength, not a weakness. It is not an impediment to be sidestepped in the push for convictions or assassinations, but rather a process that guarantees that fundamental right to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
I am encouraged, however that there appears to be the beginning of a backlash against the administration’s authoritarian claims. Just recently I did an interview with conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham who expressed grave concern over using these sorts of tactics against Americans using the supposed war on terror as justification. Sadly, many conservative leaders were silent when Republican President George W. Bush laid the groundwork for this administration’s lawlessness with the PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention without trial, and other violations. Similarly, as Professor Turley points out, “Democrats previously demanded the ‘torture memos’ of the Bush administration that revealed poor legal analysis by Judge Jay Bybee and Professor John Yoo to justify torture. Now, however, Democrats are largely silent in the face of a president claiming the right to unilaterally kill citizens.” The misuse of and disregard for our Constitution for partisan political gain is likely one reason the American public holds Congress in such low esteem. Now the stakes are much higher. Congress and the people should finally wake up!
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Liberal Whores
By Margaret Kimberley | Black Agenda Report | March 7, 2012
If liberals are good for anything, it is being outraged about all the wrong things. If one were to measure the amount of media debate in the past week, the conclusion might be that a law student being called a slut was the worst thing happening in the nation and the world. Liberals can’t be bothered to protest against war, even if they did so during the Bush administration, or indefinite detention, or targeted killings, or drone strikes, or the destruction of Libya or Somalia.
Rush Limbaugh, a man who would have to have been invented if he didn’t exist, called law student Sandra Fluke, a “slut” and a “whore” after she testified in favor of religious institutions being required to include contraception in their health care plans.
The liberals then lost their collective minds. There was no limit to their ire. One would have thought that Rush Limbaugh was killing Afghan children with drones, or torturing black Libyans, or planning to attack Iran. Of course, Limbaugh has absolutely no power to do any of those things. He is a celebrity, a media personality who advocates the right wing point of view. He is a sexist and a racist, but he has no power to take anyone’s life. That is Barack Obama‘s job.
Obama, like all American presidents, is among the slickest politicians of all time, but he is certainly no fool. He knew that Limbaugh handed him a political gift and he ran with it. Obama personally telephoned the aggrieved young woman while his liberal sycophants demanded that advertisers drop Limbaugh’s program. Republicans joined in the beat down and admonished the erstwhile standard bearer for his offensive language. Limbaugh was political toast, and Obama was king.
What could happen if these same people used as much energy opposing policies that literally kill thousands of people around the world? Quite a lot would change, but they don’t take actions against people in power because they don’t really care about what they do.
At the same time that these angry and outraged citizens were claiming victory against a radio personality they ought to be ignoring, the attorney general of the United States publicly claimed that the president of the United States has the right to kill at will whenever he feels like it.
Eric Holder traveled to an august educational institution, Northwestern University, and told a group of law students that they should get any crazy ideas about civil liberties out of their little heads. Holder asserts that the president can in fact decide to kill anyone he wants, as long as he claims that person is a terrorist. He doesn’t have to bother with indictments, charges, court rooms and other such old fashioned notions. Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son were both American citizens and were both killed by their president because he and a secret panel said they should die.
In making the case against the constitutional requirement for due process, the chief law enforcement officer in the country says that, “Due process and judicial process are not one in the same.” If that statement seems strange, it is because it is a bold faced lie. Never before, not even in the Bush administration, did lawyers make such bizarre arguments.
Despite being the attorney general, Holder is like middle level managers everywhere, saying that black is white or up is down if his boss says so. If his boss says that a person is a terrorist, then that person is dead and the rules will be changed to make it all very legal.
It is too bad that no one leapt to the defense of the Northwestern University law students who were forced to hear Holder’s offensive statements. There was no Sandra Fluke treatment for them. No one will call them and sympathize because they were exposed to vile language. In this case the offensive language came straight from the top, so if anyone was offended, well it is just too bad.
Perhaps liberals are sluts and whores. They are people of easy virtue, they don’t really have any principles and they sell themselves pretty cheaply. If Eric Holder isn’t a whore, then who is?
The same can be said for his boss too. No one becomes president without making the rounds on many a casting couch, the rich people’s casting couch. If they give the thumbs up, then the presidency is within reach. No one should be called a whore merely because they are sexually active. Selling oneself in order to be the head killer in chief on the planet is another matter. That is slut work of the very highest order.
Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
Eric Holder Tortures the Constitution
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | March 7, 2012
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder this week attempted to explain how the U.S. Constitution allows the American president to be a law unto himself – to be judge, jury and executioner. Those are the powers that President Obama claims are inherent in his office: the right to kill at will, based on evidence only he is fit to examine and assess. This is a system of law without courts, without evidence that either the public or the condemned person has a right to see, or to contest. One man, with the power of life and death over any inhabitant of the planet, including citizens of the United States.
They used to call such people kings. But even the English kings of old – at least since the signing of the Magna Carta 800 years ago – were compelled to recognize the principle that free men could only be punished based on the law of the land. The United States Constitution is rooted in the principle of due process of law, with the courts as final arbiters of whether the law has been served.
With the passage of preventive detention without trail or charge, and President Obama’s claim to have sole power to target any human being for death, the rule of law has been eviscerated, abolished by presidential decree and congressional acquiescence. A pillar of civilization has been toppled, but most people in the United States appear not to have noticed.
It turns out that due process of law is not what we thought it was, these last two centuries. Attorney General Holder defended the president’s authority to summarily execute, without sanction of the courts, or formal charges, or even evidence of crime, persons designated by him as enemies of the United States. You can’t get more king-like than that. Holder acted as if he’d found a previously undetected loophole in the Constitution. “‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process,’” he said, “are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security.” According to Holder, “The Constitution guarantees due process,” but it does not guarantee judicial process. In other words, the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee people access to the courts, even if they are targeted for execution. If that were true, it would be a worthless Constitution, but the U.S. Supreme Court has convincingly ruled, in a 2004 case, that citizens who are detained as enemy combatants have a right to confront the government on the facts of the matter “before a neutral decision maker” – that is, before a court of some kind. Certainly, such rights would apply to someone the president wants killed.
Ah, but this is war, says Eric Holder, and different rules apply. We could ask the rhetorical question: When does this war end? But Obama is clearly claiming to have rights that are inherent in the president’s national security powers. War is…whatever he says it is. Or, whatever President Romney or President Santorum say it is.
The Attorney General ultimately justifies the trashing of the Constitution on national security grounds. We have reached our national “hour of danger,” he says.
Holder is right about that. The danger is upon us, and it emanates from the White House. There’s a name for the danger: it’s called fascism, which happens when militarists and the worst capitalists get together and abolish due process and the rule of law – which the First Black President of the United States has already done.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Related articles
- Obama’s Kill Policy (jonathanturley.org)
- Eric Holder: U.S. Government Can Kill U.S. Citizens if the Threat is Serious and Capture “isn’t feasible” (reason.com)
- Holder’s Regressive Defense of Targeted Killings (dissenter.firedoglake.com)
Obama Oil Speculation Task Force Ignores Oil Speculation
By Matt Bewig | AllGov | March 05, 2012
Despite a growing consensus that speculators are behind recent price increases, the government’s almost year-old oil speculation task force has done little more than talk about the problem. From the beginning of January to the end of February, the average retail price per gallon of gasoline jumped 42 cents from $3.30 to $3.72–a spike of 12.7% in just eight weeks. This year’s pain at the pump is eerily similar to last year’s, when gas prices jumped 77 cents from $3.19 to $3.96 in just eleven weeks between February 21 and May 9–a leap of 24.1%.
In response to last year’s problem, in April 2011, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder announced the creation of the Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group, which was supposed to root out speculators who buy and sell oil futures based on the predicted price of oil. The trouble is, oil industry experts now estimate that financial speculators account for about 65% of the trading in oil futures contracts, up from 30% historically, leading many to conclude that the reversed ratio explains the high and volatile oil and gasoline prices. One analysis estimated that as much as 30% of the current price can be attributed to speculation. While the task force, which has met only four or five times, has been assisting a Federal Trade Commission investigation into gas prices since June 2011, a key problem is that most price speculation is legal, unless a trader relies on insider information or commits fraud, both of which can be difficult to prove.
Nevertheless, the fact that the U.S. today is producing more of its own oil than it has in years, and supply is actually outstripping demand, has many demanding action on gasoline prices. This year, however, the President is emphasizing his proposal to eliminate tax breaks that net the oil companies about $4 billion per year. Given the lack of success of the oil speculation task force, those tax breaks are probably safe for now.
To Learn More:
Whatever Happened to Task Force on Oil Speculation? (by Kevin G. Hall, McClatchy Newspapers)
U.S. Use of Gasoline is Down, Yet Pump Prices are Up as Speculators Move In (by Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky, AllGov)
Gas Prices Up, but so Are Profits and Exports as Refiners Hold Back Production (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
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- Obama’s Oil Speculation Task Force Has Met Just A ‘Handful Of Times’ Since Its Creation (thinkprogress.org)
- speculation is expensive! (dimitrisnowden.wordpress.com)
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Revisionist History Books Banned by Amazon
By Michael Hoffman • Unz Review • August 25, 2018
On August 13, 2018 Amazon banned Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, which was published in 2011 and sold by Amazon for the past seven years. Along with the much larger study, Judaism Discovered, (sold by Amazon since 2008), it has had an international impact both as a softcover volume as well as a digital book circulating on the Amazon Kindle.
Sales to India, Japan and the Middle East were rapidly growing. The digital Kindle format is particularly important for the free circulation of books because it bypasses borders and customs and hurdles over the prohibitive cost of shipping which the US Postal Service imposed on mail to overseas destinations several years ago (eliminating economical surface mail).
Amazon has also banned The Great Holocaust Trial: The Landmark Battle for the Right to Doubt the West’s Most Sacred Relic (sold by Amazon since 2010).
These volumes maintain a high standard of scholarly excellence, had a majority of favorable reviews by Amazon customers, are free of hatred and bigotry and have sold thousands of copies on Amazon. Out of the blue we were told that suddenly “Amazon KDP” discovered that the books are in violation of Amazon’s “content guidelines.” Asking for documentation of the charge results in no response. It is enough that the accusation has been tendered. The accused are guilty until proved innocent, although how proof of innocence is presented is anyone’s guess. There is no appeals process. This is what is known as “Tech Tyranny.”
There is a nationwide purge underway that amounts to a new McCarthyism — blacklisting and banning politically incorrect speech and history books under the rubric of “hate speech” accusations, initiated in part by two Zionist thought police organizations, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). It’s a flimsy pretext for censoring controversial scholarly books that can’t be refuted.
In addition to our books being hate-free, we note that there are hundreds of hate-filled Zionist and rabbinic books brimming with ferocious bigotry for Palestinians, Germans and goyim in general, which are sold by Amazon. … continue
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- Dialing Back The Panic: German Physics Prof Sees No Evidence Of Climate Tipping Points!
- Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon Challenges The Climate Consensus … It’s The Sun, Not CO2
- Regional Cooling Since The 1980s Has Driven Glacier Advance In The Karakoram Mountains
- Greenland Petermann Glacier Has Grown 30 Kilometers Since 2012!
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