It is no secret that the Israel lobby exerts enormous power over US policy in the Middle East. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt described the structure of the lobby, how it operates, and the results of its actions in their book The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy and you can read my three part review here and here and here. The power of the lobby is such that even the publication of such a book by two establishment scholars (Mearsheimer is at the University of Chicago and Walt is at Harvard University) caused controversy and their long article on this topic that was a precursor to the book was rejected by American publications that led to it eventually being published in England in the London Review of Books.
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Two of the enduring myths in American politics is that there is deep animosity between the two major parties and that the US Senate is the greatest deliberating body in the world. But as Glenn Greenwald points out, backroom bipartisanship is the norm when it comes to serving the interests of the one-party state, such as extending the USA Patriot Act. Public debates are either largely symbolic where the outcome has been pre-determined or involve issues that are not important to the pro-war/pro-business one party that rules this country. The idea of having a genuine debate on an important issue in which the outcome is not pre-determined is viewed with horror by the leadership of both parties.

The extent to which the Senate goes out of its way to avoid discussing major legislation in public is described well in this letter in response to the Greenwald post, in which Senator Rand Paul describes how little work is done by the Senate and how hard it is to get the Senate to debate important issues, such as war. The method of choice to prevent a debate on anything is what is known as a ‘fake quorum call’.

I reviewed the film here.

The doctrine that corporations are ‘persons’ and thus have the same rights as human beings originated in 1886 under dubious circumstances and there is a movement to repeal it. Greg Coleridge of the American Friends Service Committee has forwarded to me a petition to repeal this doctrine.

Dear friend,

In May 1886 United States Supreme Court clerk J.C. Bancroft Davis, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company, inserted a headnote to the United States Reports pertaining to the Court’s decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

Thus without a formal court ruling, this simple act set a precedent and effectively established corporations as legal persons entitled to the same rights as living, breathing persons under the 14th amendment.

What has followed is 125 years of case law giving corporations Constitutional Rights leading to the destruction of our democracy at the hands of greedy corporations. The most recent, of course, is the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission that opened the floodgates of corporate money in elections. From the environment, energy, and healthcare to jobs, education and the economy, the greed of big multi-national corporations is laying waste to the American dream, and our democracy.

The 125th anniversary of the Santa Clara Railroad case is upon us. AFSC has for more than 15 years been addressing corporate constitutional rights. As an endorser of Move to Amend, we at the Northeast Ohio AFSC hope you’ll mark this anniversary by signing the petition at Move to Amend.org. Our shared goal is to collect 125, 000 signatures for the 125th anniversary of corporate personhood.

We must come together to reclaim our democracy for living, breathing, people by eliminating corporate personhood through Constitutional amendment.

Whatever issue arises, at its root you’ll find a corporation standing between “we the people” and the solution. If we are to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and posterity,” then we must put an end corporate personhood.

Please sign the Motion to Amend

Democratically yours,

Greg Coleridge
Director

PS – You can help Move to Amend get to 125,000 signatures. Find out more here!

I have added my name to the list of over 111,000 signatures. I hope you will too.

As is usual in these situations, information is now coming out that many of the details surrounding the killing of bin Laden, such as that he was armed and was killed in a firefight, were false, which makes his killing highly problematical. Other lies were that he used his wife as a shield and that he lived in luxury in a palatial mansion. No doubt this was part of a propaganda effort to discredit bin Laden in the eyes of his admirers by portraying him as a soft and cowardly hypocrite, not a warrior. It turns out that though the compound was large, the house itself was modest with not even air-conditioning, and much of the land was used to grow vegetables and keep chickens and a cow.

Another false story surrounded the photograph of Obama and his national security team staring intently at something. We were led to believe that they were watching a live feed of the raid on the bin Laden compound, perhaps even the shooting of bin Laden himself. Now that story has also been thrown into doubt since it has emerged that the feed went dead for about 25 minutes after the raid began. It turns out that even the photos that appeared in the next day’s papers of Obama speaking to the nation were staged after he had actually finished speaking.

At this point, all that I am willing to believe is that 80 commandos arrived in three helicopters of which one was destroyed, they killed bin Laden and two other people and wounded a woman, captured some computers and documents, and dumped his body into the ocean.

After the last election when the interviews she gave to the media turned into debacles, Sarah Palin has avoided them, except for those where she knows she will get softball questions from friendly hosts on Fox News.

But on a recent trip to India to give a speech, she agreed to an interview with the Editor-in-Chief of India Today, perhaps not realizing that other countries also have real journalists. That interview did not go that well, either.

Chris Floyd reports on how the New York Times buried those facts in the latest WikiLeaks release on Guantanamo to hide the details that were embarrassing to the US.

Almost as sickening as the atrocities themselves, however, is the way the release has been played in the New York Times, whose coverage of the document dump will set the tone for the American media and political establishments. The Times’ take is almost wholly devoted to showing how evil and dangerous a handful of the hundreds of Gitmo detainees were, and to justifying Barack Obama’s betrayal of his promises to close the concentration camp. We are treated to lurid tales (many if not most of them extracted under torture, but who cares about that?) of monsters seething with irrepressible hatred of America, and so maniacally devoted to jihad that they inject themselves with libido-deadening drugs to ward off any sexual distractions from their murderous agenda.

There is almost no mention in the Times coverage of the many innocent people — including children — who spent years in the concentration camp, athough the main story about the documents does note, in an eyeblink, the case of one prisoner who was falsely imprisoned on the word of an Afghan official trying to hide his own complicity with insurgents. (Damn treacherous furriners!)

He points out that the international press had no difficulty discerning the real story in the same dossier, as this except from the Guardian shows:

The US military dossiers, obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian, reveal how, alongside the so-called “worst of the worst”, many prisoners were flown to the Guantánamo cages and held captive for years on the flimsiest grounds, or on the basis of lurid confessions extracted by maltreatment. The files depict a system often focused less on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters, than on extracting intelligence.

Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim. The old man was transported to Cuba to interrogate him about “suspicious phone numbers” found in his compound. The 14-year-old was shipped out merely because of “his possible knowledge of Taliban…local leaders”

The documents also reveal … Almost 100 of the inmates who passed through Guantánamo are listed by their captors as having had depressive or psychotic illnesses. Many went on hunger strike or attempted suicide.

The full Guardian dossier on this latest release also has an analysis by Julian Glover who says:

The leaked files published by the Guardian and the New York Times reveal horror that lies only partly in the physical things that were done to inmates – the desperate brutality of heated isolation cells, restraining straps and forced interrogation.
…
But what is given new prominence by these latest Guantánamo files is the cold, incompetent stupidity of the system: a system that tangled up the old and the young, the sick and the innocent. A system in which to say you were not a terrorist might be taken as evidence of your cunning.
…
It didn’t work, much of the time. These files show that some of the information collected was garbage and that many of those held knew nothing that could be of use to the people demanding answers from them. Far from securing the fight against terror, the people running the camp faced an absurdist battle to educate a 14-year-old peasant boy kidnapped by an Afghan tribe and treat the dementia, depression and osteoarthritis of an 89-year-old man caught up in a raid on his son’s house.

Other cases are just as pathetic. Jamal al-Harith, born Ronald Fiddler in Manchester in 1966, was imprisoned by the Taliban as a possible spy, after being found wandering through Afghanistan as a Muslim convert. In a movement of Kafkaesque horror the Americans held him in Camp X-Ray simply because he had been a prisoner of its enemy [My italics]. “He was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics,” the files record.
…
At times, I have feared that obsessing over the injustices of Guantánamo Bay has become a surrogate for a wider hatred of America. Read the files, and you’ll realise that obsession is the only possible humane response.

I would have said that what happened and is still happening at Guantanamo should be the nation’s everlasting shame, if I didn’t feel that we had lost the capacity to feel shame.

I don’t understand what is driving those people who demand that the photos of the dead bin Laden be released, other than the need to satisfy some prurient interest or to gloat. It is not that photos of dead people should never be published. Publishing the images of war dead and wounded can play an important role in highlighting the tragic cost of wars. But bin Laden’s photographs would serve no such a purpose. It would be more like publishing the photos of people executed for crimes or shot in gunfights and seems like a partial step backwards to the days of public executions to satisfy people’s blood lust

While I am in general in favor of not keeping information secret, such information should have some public benefit. What benefit would be gained by releasing the photos? It will not serve as proof that bin Laden is dead because die-hard skeptics can claim that the photos are faked, just like some are claiming that Obama’s birth certificate is a fake or that the moon landing was faked or that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks. They will then demand the release of the videos. There will never be definitive proof that will satisfy the skeptics and at some point you have to take the circumstantial evidence in support of a basic fact as conclusive, though one can legitimately have doubts about specific details.

I don’t see any reason to doubt the claim that bin Laden was killed in this attack. I don’t see any upside for the Obama administration to fake the news about the death and plenty of downside. So many people are involved that a lie could easily be revealed and blow up in their faces. Furthermore bin Laden had faded from the news a long time ago and the sense of urgency to capture him had dissipated to a low level of nagging dissatisfaction, so why create such a sensational falsehood?

I think it is very clear that the US government wanted bin Laden killed and not captured alive. The fact that he was unarmed and they were able to carry his dead body out along with computers and other stuff suggests that they could have easily overpowered him and taken him alive if they had really wanted to.

While he should have been given a fair trial, we seem to have gone long past the stage where people concern themselves with such quaint old-fashioned legal niceties and now live in an age of summary justice. While a captured bin Laden might have been a useful source of information, what to do with him would have been so problematic as to outweigh the benefits of treating him like a criminal. An open trial might have revealed embarrassing information about the former links between him and al Qaeda and the Taliban with the US and Pakistan. A secret trial or a kangaroo court comprised of a military tribunal followed by an execution would have been long drawn out and had negative implications. People in the US already get into hysterics about giving low-level Guantanamo detainees a trial in civilian courts or to even house them in prisons on the US mainland. Imagine their reaction if bin Laden were to be held in a US prison.

I think it is clear that the commandos had orders to kill him, although killing an unarmed person is a potentially illegal act, which is why Attorney General Eric Holder has conveniently come up with the novel doctrine that it was justifiable as an act of ‘national self defense’, whatever that is.

Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA, said that they were not certain that bin Laden was in the house, which clarifies another mystery which was why they carried out a high risk operation like they did without simply sending in a drone to bomb the building. After all, it is not like the government worries that much about innocent civilians being killed in their air strikes.

If they had held on to the dead body, that would become a hot potato too. What could they do with it? Where could they bury it? If his family asked for it, how could they respond? Once they had possession of the body, they would have to find ways to get rid of it. Later summarily dumping it into the sea with the whole world watching would have been explosive. It was this reason, rather than any concern to follow Islamic customs, that I think led to the hurried burial at sea, so that the world was presented with a fait accompli.

I think the US government carried out the mission this way because they wanted to make sure that bin Laden was dead, that they had proof, and also did not want his body and funeral and grave to become political symbols. I think it is reasonable to conclude that the bare bones of the story, that the US government gave the order to kill bin Laden and bury his body at sea, is true. The release of the photos and videos will not add anything to it.

Some people reacted to the death of bin Laden with hooting and cheering and raucous celebrations, as if this serious and somber event was like their home sports team winning a big game. But not everyone, even in New York City, responded this way.

I was not sure if this was a hoax video, in which a normal subway ride taken at some other time had had the voice added. It looked like the person doing the shouting had also taken the video and I was not sure why he would post a video that made him look foolish, unless he thought that the apathetic response of the people revealed the lack of patriotism of people living in the bicoastal areas who, as we are repeatedly told, are not ‘real’ Americans like those in the mythical ‘heartland’.

It was the non-reaction of almost everyone in the subway car to someone shouting about anything that was surprising to me and made me suspect a possible hoax. If I had been there, I would have at least looked around to see who was making such a ruckus.

But I am not a New Yorker. Maybe this is how they react to anyone trying to get their attention in a public place.

Remember the Obama campaign event in San Francisco is which a woman sang a song protesting Bradley Manning’s treatment? It appears that the White House is miffed at the reporter who released the video and is threatening to exclude her newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle from future events.