(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

I have long since ceased to be shocked at the awful things that governments do while unctuously mouthing platitudes about freedom and democracy and the rule of law. This kind of deep and blatant hypocrisy is now so commonplace that while it still angers me, it no longer has the power to surprise. What still has the capacity to shock, however, is how people are so passive in the face of their government’s most appalling actions, letting the pro-establishment media decide for them what they should care about. While we hear about the tea-partiers all day long, how many people noticed or cared about the McCain-Lieberman bill that authorized harsh treatment for people who were merely suspected of evil intent? How many media outlets publicized its features? The media were much more excited over Tiger woods returning to playing golf, as cartoonist Matt Bors points out.
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

It is interesting how the US media is always shocked, just shocked, when they see people in other countries seem to be oblivious to the abomination of torture. A recent French TV show essentially repeated the famous Stanley Milgram experiment which found that ordinary people were often willing to obey instructions to inflict torture on other people. The French show found a similar result, the difference being that in the Milgram experiment, 62% of people obeyed despicable orders while it was 80% in the latest incarnation.

The Game of Death has all the trappings of a traditional TV quiz show, with a roaring crowd chanting “punishment” and a glamorous hostess urging the players on.

Christophe Nick, the maker of the documentary, said they were “amazed” that so many participants obeyed the sadistic orders of the game show presenter.

“They are not equipped to disobey,” he told AFP.

US commentators wondered what might be wrong in the French psyche that enabled the contestants to inflict such pain of people. They were either oblivious about the Milgram precedent or to the fact that the US government routinely practices torture and that the hit show 24 is one that unashamedly promotes torture.

While Obama has claimed for himself the kingly power to order the death of anyone whom he thinks deserves it, other fans of authoritarian rule are now seeking to enshrine some of those powers into law. John McCain and Joe Lieberman have introduced the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act that “would empower the U.S. military to arrest anyone, U.S. citizen or otherwise, who is suspected of terrorist associations and detain them indefinitely, without right to a trial.” If the captured person is deemed to be an “unprivileged enemy belligerent”, that person would be denied all rights, including Miranda rights and the rights to a lawyer. That person would then be placed in the custody of a “high-value detainee interrogation group”, which is a euphemism for people trained in the art of torture. “If there is any disagreement about a person’s unprivileged enemy belligerent according to the above criteria, the final determination goes to the President. Once determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent, a person, regardless of citizenship status, can be detained indefinitely, without trial, until terrorist threats against the U.S are determined to be over.”

This law hasn’t been passed yet but can we doubt that it will be, given the mood of the country? Glenn Greenwald comments:

Meanwhile, the bill recently introduced by Joe Lieberman and John McCain — the so-called “Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act” — now has 9 co-sponsors, including the newly elected Scott Brown. It’s probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act… It’s basically a bill designed to formally authorize what the Bush administration did to American citizen Jose Padilla — arrest him on U.S. soil and imprison him for years in military custody with no charges.

This bill has produced barely a ripple of controversy, its two main sponsors will continue to be treated as Serious Centrists and feted on Sunday shows, and it’s hard to imagine any real resistance to its passage. Isn’t it shocking how easily led and authoritarian the French are? (my italics)

The hypocrisy of the US policy against terrorists is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born exile who worked for the CIA.

There’s ample evidence Posada tried to assassinate a world leader, hatched a plot that killed scores, and dismembered a tourist in a hotel bombing. Yet he is not being tried for any of those offenses, because the government botched the case and shredded critical evidence. In the end, Posada is being accused of lying to authorities, a slap on the hand that would outrage the nation if he were, for instance, an Arab. But he’s Cuban, and that makes all the difference.
…
[W]ith the help of millions of American tax dollars, Posada began a bloody, half-century-long campaign against the Castro government. He set off pencil bombs in the island’s capital and coordinated the 1961 Bay of Pigs attack from Central America. After the invasion failed, he was among exiles who attended an elite Army academy in Georgia; he graduated two years later as a spy and lieutenant.

He then tried to kill Castro using a gun disguised as a camera and plastic explosives stuffed into a Prell shampoo bottle. In 1976, he masterminded the downing of Cubana Flight 455 with 73 people onboard. Six years later, pressured by the United States, a Venezuelan court cleared him; then it bizarrely changed course and decided on a retrial. But the wily spy bribed guards, escaped, and two decades later bombed Havana hotels, causing millions of dollars in damage and killing an Italian tourist.
…
[T]he FBI, which spent millions of dollars over several decades probing Posada’s spy work, inexplicably shredded most of its evidence. What’s more, the Reagan administration hired Posada as part of the Iran-Contra scandal.

U.S. pressure has even had an effect abroad. A Panamanian court convicted Posada of plotting to kill Castro during an Ibero-American Summit. Then, in 2004, President Mireya Moscoso pardoned Posada. (my italics)

The US has grandly said that any country that harbors terrorists should expect to be treated like a terrorist nation and be subject to all the consequences that ensue. Indeed this is the claimed basis for many of the assassinations that the US has conducted in foreign countries. And yet the US has long provided refuge to Posada, who has actually been convicted of terrorist acts.

Cuba has as much reason, if not more, to kill Posada as the US has to target the people it has killed. But imagine if the Cuban government sent in drones to kill Posada in the US. Even if in the process they did not kill ordinary American civilians the way that American assassination attempts in other countries often do, there would be such outrage and condemnations that Cuba would be invaded within days.

And yet, when the US does exactly the same thing to others, it goes unnoticed.

POST SCRIPT: Jon Stewart vs. Bernie Goldberg and Fox News

I don’t know why people try to take on Stewart. Even an average stand-up comedian can rip apart smart and reasonable people and make them look stupid because they are good with words and can think on their feet. Stewart is not only well above average, he even has a talented team of writers at his disposal and his own show. He is always going to have the last word and you are always going to lose. Goldberg seems to be too dense to understand this and keeps getting mauled.

The clip is worth watching to the end just to see Stewart do a great impersonation of a gospel church preacher, followed by a Groucho Marx dance routine.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Bernie Goldberg Fires Back

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

In yesterday’s post, I highlighted the order by Obama to kill a US-born citizen Anwar al-Awlaki because he believes that he has been inciting people to violence. In other words, he has been targeted for summary execution, not because of any actions, but because of things he is alleged to have said. Columnist and analyst Glenn Greenwald, who is also a constitutional lawyer, recounts the legal history of the rights of free speech.

The question of where First Amendment-protected radical advocacy ends and criminality begins is exactly the sort of question with which courts have long grappled. In the 1969 case of Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed a criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who — surrounded by hooded indivduals [sic] holding weapons — gave a speech threatening “revengeance” against any government official who “continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race.” The Court held that the First Amendment protects advocacy of violence and revolution, and that the State is barred from punishing citizens for the expression of such views. The Brandenburg Court pointed to a long history of precedent protecting the First Amendment rights of Communists to call for revolution — even violent revolution — inside the U.S., and explained that the Government can punish someone for violent actions but not for speech that merely advocates or justifies violence. (my italics)

Given this extremely broad interpretation by the Supreme Court of the protections granted by the constitution to free speech, how does the government get away with the claim that it can actually kill anyone whose speech it dislikes? It is using the fear and paranoia that has been carefully cultivated by the Bush-Cheney-Obama regimes to make people so fearful of vague threats that they are willing to shred the hard-won rights laid out in the constitution and put their fate in the hands of a protective father-figure. The ‘home of the brave’ has become the home of people hiding under their beds.

How the government gets people to acquiesce in these policies is to use anonymous sources to leak to the media that someone is a very, very bad person who deserves to die. The media dutifully report this and then excitedly and gleefully report as a success in the ‘war on terror’ when that person is reported killed, no matter if other people are killed along the way. No one seems to ask how we really know if this person is bad if there hasn’t been a trial, and whether mere assertions by government officials (often anonymous) are sufficient to deny that person’s right to life or even due process rights. It seems as if all that is necessary is to use the words ‘war on terror’ or to call someone a ‘terrorist’ for the constitution to be shredded.

As Greenwald says:

[I]n Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist. He then dispatches his aides to run to America’s newspapers — cowardly hiding behind the shield of anonymity which they’re granted — to proclaim that the Guilty One shall be killed on sight because the Leader has decreed him to be a Terrorist.
…
All of this underscores the principal point made in this excellent new article by Eli Lake, who compellingly and comprehensively documents what readers here well know: that while Obama’s “speeches and some of his administration’s policy rollouts have emphasized a break from the Bush era,” the reality is that the administration has retained and, in some cases, built upon the core Bush/Cheney approach to civil liberties and Terrorism.
…
When Obama was seeking the Democratic nomination, the Constitutional Law Scholar answered a questionnaire about executive power distributed by The Boston Globe‘s Charlie Savage, and this was one of his answers:

5. Does the Constitution permit a president to detain US citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants?
[Obama]: No. I reject the Bush Administration’s claim that the President has plenary authority under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants.

So back then, Obama said the President lacks the power merely to detain U.S. citizens without charges. Now, as President, he claims the power to assassinate them without charges. Could even his hardest-core loyalists try to reconcile that with a straight face? As Spencer Ackerman documents today, not even John Yoo claimed that the President possessed the power Obama is claiming here.

In another post Greenwald pursues this theme:

Here again, we see one of the principal and longest-lasting effects of the Obama presidency: to put a pretty, eloquent, progressive face on what (until quite recently) was ostensibly considered by a large segment of the citizenry to be tyrannical right-wing extremism (e.g., indefinite detention, military commissions, “state secrets” used to block judicial review, an endless and always-expanding “War on Terror,” immunity for war criminals, rampant corporatism — and now unchecked presidential assassinations of American citizens), and thus to transform what were once bitter, partisan controversies into harmonious, bipartisan consensus.

As regular readers know, I quote Greenwald extensively because, unlike most commentators in the mainstream media, he not only knows about what he writes but he cares deeply about upholding basic civil and constitutional rights. If you are not reading him regularly, you are missing a lot.

POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show (February 2009) on fear-mongering

Using these kinds of tactics, any and every atrocity is justified under the guise of ‘protecting’ us. (For some reason, after the 3 second Comedy Central introduction, you have to click the pause button and then the play button to start the video.)

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Why Are You Such a Dick? – Audio Tape

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

It seems to have been accepted as the norm that the US has the right to declare that certain countries are free fire zones in which they can kill civilians, irrespective of whether they are young, old, men women, or children, purely because they happen to be in the vicinity of people the US has deemed its enemies. Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen are now among countries where the US sends unmanned drones on assassination missions that often go wrong and result in innocent people being blown to bits. Obama has been the most enthusiastic user of such methods. If you live in any of those countries, you run the risk of being gunned down by US forces at any time.

Dana Priest of the Washington Post reported back in January that:

U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials.
…
Obama has ordered a dramatic increase in the pace of CIA drone-launched missile strikes into Pakistan in an effort to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban members in the ungoverned tribal areas along the Afghan border. There have been more such strikes in the first year of Obama’s administration than in the last three years under President George W. Bush, according to a military officer who tracks the attacks.

Obama also has sent U.S. military forces briefly into Somalia as part of an operation to kill Saleh Ali Nabhan, a Kenyan sought in the 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned resort in Kenya.
…
In November 2002, a CIA missile strike killed six al-Qaeda operatives driving through the desert. The target was Abu Ali al-Harithi, organizer of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Killed with him was a U.S. citizen, Kamal Derwish, who the CIA knew was in the car.

Word that the CIA had purposefully killed Derwish drew attention to the unconventional nature of the new conflict and to the secret legal deliberations over whether killing a U.S. citizen was legal and ethical.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests,” said one former intelligence official.

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, “it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,” a senior administration official said. “They are then part of the enemy.” (my italics)

The US government has been murdering people as a matter of policy for a long time but it used to be done covertly because it used to be considered an illegal and shameful act. Older people can remember the uproar that greeted the revelations in 1975 of the Church Committee when the government’s assassination policy was revealed. But now it is quite brazen in its assertion that it has the right to kill people at will.

The latest outrage that is passing almost unnoticed is an order by the Obama administration authorizing the ‘capture or killing’ of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Islamic cleric who is supposed to be the person who inspired and the Christmas day underwear bomber as well as the army major who murdered his fellow soldiers at an army base in the US. Awlaki is a US-born citizen who is now believed to be in Yemen.

In other words, the US government has decided that it has the right to simply murder anyone, even US citizens, whom the president has decided should be murdered. As Glenn Greenwald says:

Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.” They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy?

Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens. That’s just the essence of war. That’s why it’s permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they’re captured and helplessly detained. But combat is not what we’re talking about here. The people on this “hit list” are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration — like the Bush administration before it — defines the “battlefield” as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That’s quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.

The ability to throw someone into secret prisons without trial and indefinitely deprive them of all their rights and even subject them to torture isn’t enough for Obama. He has now asserted that he has the omniscience to find people guilty and impose the death sentence on them without any trial or giving the victims the right to any defend themselves or to even know the charges against them. If King Obama says someone should be murdered, that is it. All the might and power of the US can now be used to simply gun down that person in the street anywhere in the world and no questions will be asked.

POST SCRIPT 1: Ron Paul on shredding the constitution

POST SCRIPT 2: Talk

Today (Monday, April 19) at 7:45pm I will be talking to Case people about my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom in the 5th floor Library in the Clocktower building of The Village at 115.