Along with others, I’ve spent the last four years documenting the extreme, often unprecedented, commitment to secrecy that this president has exhibited, including his vindictive war on whistleblowers, his refusal to disclose even the legal principles underpinning his claimed war powers of assassination, and his unrelenting, Bush-copying invocation of secrecy privileges to prevent courts even from deciding the legality of his conduct (as a 2009 headline on the Obama-friendly TPM site put it: “Expert Consensus: Obama Mimics Bush On State Secrets”). Just this week, the Associated Press conducted a study proving that last year, the Obama administration has rejected more FOIA requests on national security grounds than in any year since Obama became president, and quoted Alexander Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney for its national security project, as follows:
“We’ve seen a meteoric rise in the number of claims to protect secret law, the government’s interpretations of laws or its understanding of its own authority. In some ways, the Obama administration is actually even more aggressive on secrecy than the Bush administration.”
Re-read that last sentence in italics. Most of those policies have been covered here at length, and I won’t repeat them here. But what is remarkable is that this secrecy has become so oppressive and extreme that even the most faithful Democratic operatives are now angrily exploding with public denunciations.
Category: The Regime
That’s okay
We weren’t using our 4th Amendment rights, anyway!
Death to whistleblowers?
Why, it’s almost as if they want to discourage people from telling us what our government is up to!
Military sexual assault conviction overturned
Lt General Craig A. Franklin, a U.S. Air Force Commander, has overruled and tossed out a military court jury’s decision that found Lt. Colonel James Wilkerson guilty of sexually assaulting his subordinate, a woman service member who serves in the Air Force as a physician’s assistant. The assault occurred while the victim lay sleeping.
“Franklin’s decision to set aside the verdict freed Wilkerson after four months in a South Carolina brig, erased his conviction and restored the F-16 pilot, who’d been selected for promotion, to full-duty status,” Stars and Stripes reported.“Lt General Craig Franklin, commander of the Third Air Force based at Ramstein in Germany, exercised his discretion under the Uniform Code on Military Justice and concluded that the entire body of evidence was insufficient to meet the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. As the ‘convening authority,’ Franklin, who did not interview the victim, was not required to provide further explanation for his ruling and his disposition is final,” the Guardian UK reports.
The examined life
I’ve often thought the same thing. Every time I hear about something interesting, I either look it up on the Google or buy a book. I’m interested in a lot of different things, and I sometimes think to myself that I’m building a case for the prosecution of a future me in a future society. Because that’s just how I roll!
Dick
About every five years, Maureen Dowd writes a great one. This is it.
The plot thickens
Remember the Jonathan Pollard spy case? Read this from Whowhatwhy.com.
Now, documents that the CIA has been fighting to withhold for years, released to relatively little public notice in recent months, show that Pollard’s advocates may have been right. The documents were obtained and released by the nonprofit, private, National Security Archive. A federal panel agreed with the Archive that the CIA had no basis for continuing to withhold its 1987 Damage Assessment.
The whole idea behind Pollard’s conviction and life sentence was that he was harming the United States by spying on it for Israel. But one recently-released CIA document, a “damage assessment” of the case from 1987, suggests that the crux of what he was collecting for Israel was not about the United States at all.
The CIA document shows that Pollard’s Israeli handlers were particularly keen on getting information that they believed vital to Israel’s defense, including material on Egyptian missile programs, Syrian unmanned planes, and Soviet air defenses. They were especially interested in what Soviet advisers were talking to their Syrian clients about.
The new revelations are important because they cast a more nuanced light on a hot-button issue—and give credence to the notion that even allies constantly seek to obtain information from each other that they believe essential to their own security—regardless of how they obtain it.
Roundup
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has launched a nationwide campaign to assess police militarization in the United States.
Meanwhile, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer begs the state legislature to expand Medicaid, saying, “The human cost of this tragedy can’t be calculated.”
Then there’s this from Tennessee:
Incredulous Vanderbilt officials were forced to come to the legislature today to argue against a bill yanking the university police’s authority to make arrests. This brilliant proposal comes from the Christian Right, which wants to punish Vanderbilt for its all-comers policy.
Evangelicals led by the Tennessee Family Action Council’s David Fowler say Vanderbilt’s policy is an affront to our freedoms because it would force conservative Christian clubs to accept gay people as members if any should ever wish to join for reasons not easy to imagine. That’s right, Vanderbilt’s nondiscrimination policy actually discriminates against conservative Christians. So the state should sanction Vanderbilt by essentially abolishing its police force. We’re not making this up.
Dems rejected Rand Paul’s offer to end his filibuster because they refused to vote for a non-binding resolution that said targeting U.S. citizens on U.S. soil with drones violated their rights. I don’t even know what to say.
US special forces veteran links General Petraeus to torture in Iraq
A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq. Another special forces veteran, retired Colonel James Coffman, worked with Steele and reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services.
• This is an edited version of a longer film. Watch our full-length film investigation about James Steele
Something like apartheid
But of course, the same rules don’t apply to Israel as they do everywhere else and we’re certainly not allowed to even have a public discussion about it:
An Israeli bus company is launching new bus lines that will effectively separate Jews and Arabs traveling from the West Bank into central Israel. Although the official word is that the new bus lines are only meant to help decrease overcrowding, Ynet News talked to several drivers who said that if Palestinians try to board the “Israeli lines” they’ll be asked to leave. And although the bus lines are supposed to be for everyone, their existence was only advertised in Palestinian villages in the West Bank through flyers in Arabic.
The new bus lines come after reports last year that Israel’s transportation ministry was looking into setting up new bus lines after complaints from settlement residents that Palestinians on their buses constituted a security risk, notes Haaretz. The new buses will not go into the settlements, which Palestinians are not allowed to enter.
“Obviously, everyone will start screaming ‘apartheid’ and ‘racism’ now,” one driver toldYnet. “This really doesn’t feel right, and maybe [the ministry] should find a different solution, but the situation right now is impossible.”