All I know is, we send people to war and they come back broken.
Category: Terra Terra Terra!
No free speech for you!
It really is crazy, how willing we are to let the government criminalize anything they want. Like the new legislation “to protect our kids” Obama talked about during the SOTU. Via WhoWhatWhy.org:
In fact, the new cybersecurity legislation would further criminalize the kind of activity for which Brown is due to be sentenced in Dallas federal court on Jan. 22. Judge Sam A. Lindsay will decide whether to let Brown, 33, off with time served for the more than two years he’s already spent behind bars, or imprison him for a maximum of eight-and-a-half years. Brownstruck a deal to plead guilty to, among other charges, a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) felony.
That particular element of the case against Brown demonstrated how he, as a journalist, worked with hackers to expose corporate behavior. The CFAA violation involved his efforts to shield one of his sources, Anonymous hacktivist Jeremy Hammond, from prosecution. Hammond, a self-described anarchist based in Chicago, broke into the computer systems of the private intelligence firm Stratfor hoping to expose wrongdoing and corporate malfeasance.
Brown’s prosecution fits a pattern that has seen the U.S. government treat online journalists, crusading bloggers and idealistic hacktivists as enemies more than new-style investigative reporters. Already, his sentence stands to chill those who would emulate him in conducting real-time, public research into leaked data troves. At the last hearing in Brown’s case, in December, journalist Quinn Norton testified that his prosecution was “absolutely chilling” to 21st Century journalism.
Easier Prosecutions
With President Obama’s legislation, it will become easier for prosecutors to pursue such people. The proposals would, among other things, broaden the meaning of “unauthorized access” such that the Department of Justice could more easily turn the sharing of hyperlinks into illegal “trafficking” as they see fit. Prosecutors accused Brown of that but dropped nearly that entire indictment amid sharp criticism that they were bending the law and attacking free speech.
‘We are all outlaws in the eyes of America’
http://youtu.be/m4vg2uOR3fk
We are all outlaws in the eyes of America. — “We Can Be Together,” Jefferson Airplane
Think about this: they’re willing for anyone who opposed them to die. That’s America? Counterpunch:
New documents obtained from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security by the Partnership for Civil Justice and released this past week show that the FBI and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies began a campaign of monitoring, spying and disrupting the Occupy Movement at least two months before the first occupation actions began in late September 2011.
As early as August, while acknowledging that the incipient Occupy Movement was “peaceful” in nature, federal, state and local officials from the FBI, the DHS and the many Fusion Centers and Joint Terrorism Task Force centers around the country were meeting with local financial institutions and their private security organizations to plot out a strategy for countering the Occupy Movement’s campaign.
Interestingly, one document obtained by PCJ from the Houston FBI office refers to what appears to have been a plan by some group, the name of which is blacked out in the released document, to determine who the leaders were of the Occupy Movement in Houston, and then to assassinate them with “suppressed” sniper rifles, meaning sniper rifles equipped with silencers.
The chilling document in question reads as follows:
“One identified BLANK as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protesters in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary. An identified BLANK had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas. BLANK planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest group and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership by suppressed sniper rifles.”
The wording does not sound like it’s some crank Tea Party faction they’re talking about — especially the words “deemed necessary” and the reference to “gathering intelligence against the leaders of the protest group.” Fortunately, in any case, no such assassination campaign materialized in Houston or anywhere else during the wave of Occupy actions across the country, but at the same time, there were never any arrests of whatever organization or individuals that the FBI clearly knew to be planning such a terrorist action against the Occupy activists.
The kill team
Since so many people are successfully selling us on the hagiography that is “American Sniper,” I thought I’d remind you of this film that came out last July: “Kill Team”. It was on PBS’ Independent Lens last night:
Kill Team is not just a video game anymore, not just the inevitable pairing of two of the most popular words in American English. “Kill Team” is now a movie, and against the odds it’s not a celebration of killing, but a particular take on an actual series of events made widely known by Rolling Stone.
U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan developed the practice of killing civilians for sport, placing weapons beside the bodies or otherwise pretending to have been attacked, keeping body parts as trophies, and celebrating their “kills” in photographs with the corpses.
For months, according to Rolling Stone, the whole platoon knew what was going on. Officers dismissed complaints from the relatives of victims, accepted completely implausible accounts, and failed to help victims who might still be alive (instead ordering a soldier to “Make sure he’s dead.”)
A key instigator, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, arrived in Afghanistan recounting a successful murder of a family in Iraq and bearing tattoos recording his kills. “Get me a kill” soldiers asked who wanted to participate in the kill team. Killers were treated as heroes, and the widespread understanding that they were killing civilians who’d never threatened them didn’t seem to damage that treatment.
“Drop-weapon” has been a common term among vets returning to the United States from Afghanistan and Iraq for over a decade, referring to a weapon used to frame a victim. “We’re just the ones who got caught,” says Pfc. Justin Stoner in the film. He also raises an important question that the film does not seriously pursue, remarking: “We’re training you from the day you join to the day you’re out to kill. Your job is to kill. You’re infantry. Your job is to kill everything that gets in your way. Well, then why the hell are you pissed off when we do it?”
Eleven soldiers have been convicted of crimes as part of the kill team, including Gibbs who has been sentenced to life in prison. Why were these kills crimes and others not, wonders Stoner. (I might add: Why are the murders committed by the “American Sniper” not crimes?) It’s a question worthy of consideration. The cover stories for the kills, including claims that people made some threatening movement, don’t seem enough to justify these murders even if they had been true. What were the soldiers doing in these people’s villages to begin with?
That’s the question the movie opens with the soldiers asking themselves. They’d been trained for exciting combat and then sent to Afghanistan to be bored, hungry for action, eager to test out their training. This is a point often missed by those who advocate turning the U.S. military into a force for good, an emergency rescue squad for natural disasters, or a humanitarian aid operation. You would have to train and equip people for those jobs first. These young men were trained to kill, armed to kill, prepped to kill, and left to kick sand around.
They began premeditating the worst sort of premeditated murder. They openly recount their conversations in the film. They had weapons to drop, grenades that weren’t “tracked,” they’d pretend someone had a grenade and kill him. Who? Anyone. They saw everyone as fair game.
And they did as planned. And they were welcomed back to the “FOB” as heroes. And they did it again. And again.
Continue reading “The kill team”
Gitmo sgt: Three ‘suicides’ were tortured to death
CIA investigates, then clears itself in computer spying
I don’t know about you, but I feel much better now!
An internal CIA review concluded that agency employees committed no wrongdoing when they surreptitiously searched a computer system used by Senate investigators in a multiyear probe of the agency’s brutal interrogations of terrorism suspects.
The CIA panel found that “no disciplinary actions are warranted” for agency lawyers and computer experts who were involved in the incident, which led to an extraordinary public rupture between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee last year.
[…] The dispute centers on the committee’s discovery in 2010 of an internal CIA report commissioned by then-director Leon E. Panetta that in many aspects agreed with the Senate committee’s damning conclusions about how the interrogation program was run. A senior aide on the Senate panel secretly made a copy of the document and took it to Capitol Hill without informing the agency.
[…] The determination that no employees should face discipline is also likely to anger lawmakers and critics who have repeatedly chastised the agency for a seeming unwillingness to hold its employees accountable, even in cases of botched counterterrorism operations and egregious abuse.
A message from the dispossessed
Chris Hedges on the Paris massacre:
The terrorist attack in France that took place at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was not about free speech. It was not about radical Islam. It did not illustrate the fictitious clash of civilizations. It was a harbinger of an emerging dystopia where the wretched of the earth, deprived of resources to survive, devoid of hope, brutally controlled, belittled and mocked by the privileged who live in the splendor and indolence of the industrial West, lash out in nihilistic fury.
We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism. And rather than understand the roots of that rage and attempt to ameliorate it, we have built sophisticated mechanisms of security and surveillance, passed laws that permit the targeted assassinations and torture of the weak, and amassed modern armies and the machines of industrial warfare to dominate the world by force. This is not about justice. It is not about the war on terror. It is not about liberty or democracy. It is not about the freedom of expression. It is about the mad scramble by the privileged to survive at the expense of the poor. And the poor know it.
If you spend time as I have in Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Sudan, as well as the depressing, segregated housing projects known as banlieues that ring French cities such as Paris and Lyon, warehousing impoverished North African immigrants, you begin to understand the brothers Cherif Kouachi and Said Kouachi, who were killed Friday in a gun battle with French police. There is little employment in these pockets of squalor. Racism is overt. Despair is rampant, especially for the men, who feel they have no purpose. Harassment of immigrants, usually done by police during identity checks, is almost constant. Police once pulled a North African immigrant, for no apparent reason, off a Paris Metro subway car I was riding in and mercilessly beat him on the platform. French Muslims make up 60 to 70 percent of the prison population in France. Drugs and alcohol beckon like sirens to blunt the pain of poor Muslim communities.
Continue reading “A message from the dispossessed”
Pondering the possibilities
So I’m wondering: Was the Charlie Hedbo event staged? Did it happen the way they’re telling us? Once the shock was over, I kept thinking there was something off about it. (Especially since, against the express wishes of the U.S., France just backed Palestine in the vote that would allow them to bring a motion to investigate Israeli war crimes. It just seems like very convenient timing.)
Someone I know posted this on Facebook, saying, “I saw Lawrence O’Donnell play this footage on his program Wednesday night — and he commented that the network censors would not allow the video to be shown without blurring, supposedly because it was too gruesome. Now we can see why it was really blurred out.”
Well, you know, I don’t believe everything I see on the internet. Who’s to say this is the real missing footage? Yet I find myself very resistant to the official version of events. And the whole thing about the alleged perpetrator’s wallet being found in the car is a hallmark of “deep state” events we’ve seen before.
What are your thoughts?
I am so sick of these racist right-wing fuckers
Colorado is one of those states that attracts political extremes. They have some really liberal residents, and also some of the most radical right-wingers in the country. Gee, I wonder which ones were responsible for this?
An explosion outside an NAACP office building in Colorado on Tuesday morning that rattled neighbors was caused deliberately, officials say.
An improvised explosive device was detonated against the exterior wall of the NAACP building on South El Paso Street in Colorado Springs around 10:45 a.m. Mountain time. No one was injured, said Amy Sanders, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Denver.
A gasoline can had been placed near the device but did not ignite during the explosion, Sanders said.
The sidewalk and the local NAACP headquarters building, which also houses a barbershop, suffered minor damage, she said.
FBI Denver and the Colorado Springs Police Department are on the scene. A man aged about 40 is a person of interest in the investigation. He may be driving a 2000 or older-model dirty white pick-up truck with paneling, a dark-colored bed liner, an open tailgate and a missing or covered license plate.
Holy torture
Conservative Christians are invoking their God-given right to support torture. Somehow, this does not surprise me. After all, conservatives are people who like to ignore the transcendental and instead refer to the Bible as a cosmic penal code.
The Catholic Church has an unfortunate history in these matters (as do the Protestants) but I don’t think anyone should claim those episodes as templates. Or as truly Christian. But that’s just me!
The author quotes Thomas Aquinas reducing criminals to beasts. Maybe Tom was just having a bad day:
Perhaps before he had a chance to clarify his writings on the matter, St. Thomas Aquinas declared he would write no more. On 6 December 1273 he reportedly experienced a long episode of ecstasy during Mass, and later said that such things had been revealed to him that his previous writings seemed nothing in comparison.
You see? He had a transcendent experience that put his writings in a whole new light.
This has always been the problem with religions. Somebody has a transcendent experience, he or she tells their friends, who eventually try to form a group and try to codify the sublime. It’s silly. And conservatives do love their rules, so when you give them authority to use a Bible as a blunt instrument, they’re never happier. Imagine how disingenuous the author of this statement must be:
If we choose not to torture someone so we can save a life, then we are placing the dignity of the criminal over the life and dignity of the innocent person who is about to die.
You have to love that. You’re not “choosing” to torture, the circumstances force you. It’s actually the Christian thing to do! But here’s the hole in that little scenario: The times of which we speak are not episodes of “24.” Nope. There is no timer on a nuclear bomb, we do not “know” anything. We torture on the off chance we’ll get some useful information. And if the person we torture gives us gibberish (because he’s being tortured), let’s torture him some more.
For many years now, representatives of our nation (propped up by the bed-wetting night terrors of our neocon establishment) used this morally bereft argument to torture. And conservative Christians embrace it! The author argues at great length and with a deep fervor that God wouldn’t have a problem with torture. She quotes the Old Testament (conservatives love the Old Testament — none of that pesky “turn the other cheek” stuff) to illustrate that God is actually quite bloodthirsty. So there!
You know, you can argue all you want about torture (incidentally, we did sign the Geneva Conventions, promising not to use it), but don’t go fucking blessing yourself over it. Just don’t.
Everyone knows the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes — and in this case, does.