jmcmichael

The DOJ’s escalating criminalization of speech →

Over the past several years, the Justice Department has increasingly attempted to criminalize what is clearly protected political speech by prosecuting numerous individuals (Muslims, needless to say) for disseminating political views the government dislikes or considers threatening.  The latest episode emerged on Friday, when the FBI announced the arrest and indictment of Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, charged with “providing material support” to a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)).

What is the “material support” he allegedly gave?  He produced and uploaded a 5-minute video to YouTube featuring photographs of U.S. abuses in Abu Ghraib, video of armored trucks exploding after being hit by IEDs, prayer messages about “jihad” from LeT’s leader, and — according to the FBI’s Affidavit — “a number of terrorist logos.”  That, in turn, led the FBI agent who signed the affidavit to assert that ”based on [his] training and experience, it is evident that the video … is designed as propaganda to develop support for LeT and to recruit jihadists to LeT.”  The FBI also claims Ahmad spoke with the son of an LeT leader about the contents of the video and had attended an LeT camp when he was a teenager in Pakistan.  For the act of uploading that single YouTube video (and for denying that he did so when asked by the FBI agents who came to his home to interrogate him), he faces 23 years in prison.

Let’s be very clear about the key point: the Constitution — specifically the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment — prohibits the U.S. Government from punishing someone for the political views they express, even if those views include the advocacy of violence against the U.S. and its leaders.

–Glenn Greenwald, The DOJ’s escalating criminalization of speech

Rules of American justice: a tale of three cases →

The Rules of American Justice are quite clear:

(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.

(2) If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.

(3) If you are a victim of American war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any entitlement to see the inside of a courtroom.

(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you.

- Glenn Greenwald

Second stage of Egyptian revolution underway; military regime using recently produced American ammunition and chemical weapons to kill and injure citizens in Tahrir square

Q: How Will Plutocrats Dominate a World? A: Bots →

Event: Bloomberg, the emblematic plutocrat, raids Liberty Square to drive out the Occupy Wall Street protest.  In fact, looking across America, it’s amazing how irritating peaceful protest is to its plutocrats, particularly if it is directed against them rather than some useless issue (that the commerical conservatives/liberals love to waste time on).

The question this should raise: how do a very, very small group of neo-feudal plutocrats control a global population (of economic losers) in the modern context?  

Right now?  Lawfare and the buraucracy of the nation-state.  As things continue to degrade, that veneer of legality and constraint will fade and become less effective.  

Long term?  Bots.  Software bots.  Drones.

Iranian Terror Plot: Fake, Fake, Fake →

The narrative reads like a formulaic melodrama: two Iranians, one a naturalized US citizen, purportedly approached someone they thought was a member of a Mexican drug cartel – according to the indictment, it was a “sophisticated” drug cartel, not the plebeian sort – and proposed paying him $1.5 million to murder Adel al Jubeir, the Kingdom’s ambassador in Washington – oh, and by the way, the Iranians supposedly said, “Are you guys any good with explosives?”

The key to understanding just how fake this story is can be found in the New York Times report, which informs us:

“For the entire operation, the government’s confidential sources were monitored and guided by federal law enforcement agents, Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District, said in the news conference. ‘So no explosives were actually ever placed anywhere,’ he said, ‘and no one was actually in ever in any danger.’”

Translation: the whole thing is phony from beginning to end.

This fabrication marks a new trend in the field of anti-Iranian war propaganda. Previously, the War Party was relying on the same technique they used in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq: the old “weapons of mass destruction” gambit. The big problem with that is it’s old, and tired: no one believes it anymore. Once burned, twice shy, as the saying goes. This latest lie is a fresh angle on a continuing theme, merely substituting Iran for the traditional bogeyman known as al-Qaeda.

That this story involves the Mexican drug cartels, and Attorney General Eric Holder proclaiming that we’re going to “hold the Iranian government accountable,” has got to be some kind of sick joke: after all, here is a man who stood by and watched while US law enforcement agents let guns travel over the US border to arm those very same cartels. Is this “coup” for the Justice Department the pay-off for that harebrained scheme – and when is Holder going to be held accountable?

That our government would float a narrative like this without any apparent regard for the basic rules of fiction-writing – create believable characters who do believable things – is Washington’s way of showing contempt for the Iranians, the American people, and anyone else who stands in the way of their war agenda. They don’t care if it’s not believable. They think Americans will swallow anything, that we’re too busy trying to survive day-to-day, these days, to inquire much further than the “official” account. And of course our brain-dead media, which is reduced to a chiefly stenographic role, isn’t going to ask any inconvenient questions.

- Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com

Coming Soon: The Drone Arms Race →

Secret panel can put Americans on "kill list" →

(Reuters) - American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

Manhattan Judge Spares the CIA →

The Central Intelligence Agency has avoided a potential showdown with a Manhattan federal judge.

Judge Alvin Hellerstein (pictured) yesterday declined to find the CIA in contempt for destroying videotapes of its interrogations of Sept. 11 detainees, concluding that it would serve no beneficial purpose to penalize the agency, according to this AP report.

Hellerstein also noted in his ruling that the CIA has put in place new procedures to prevent such destruction from happening again.

The decision came in a lawsuit filed in 2004 by the ACLU against the Defense Department, the CIA, and several other government entities engaged in the arrest, detention, interrogation and rendition to other countries of prisoners caught up in the events following the 9/11 attacks. Filed under the Freedom of Information Act, the suit seeks the release of a range of governmental records.

The government, AP reports, has acknowledged that in 2005 it destroyed 92 videotapes, including those containing interrogations of a high-level al-Qaeda lieutenant who claimed he suffered physical and mental torture at the hands of the CIA.

In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay; they’d remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world; and conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S.

We do not believe that such human rights violation on the part of our government justify what has been done to us: not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments - including the government of Iran - to act in kind.

—  Shane Bauer, one of two American hikers hikers imprisoned for more than two years by Iran on extremely dubious espionage charges and in highly oppressive conditions

(Source: salon.com)