THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DECREE

"There is no terrorism like state terrorism." --Arundhati Roy

"...The United States government is now structured so that, like an automobile needing gasoline, it needs war in order to function, in order to operate and be fueled. It's really, I think, best thought of as this insatiable beast, that needs as its primary nourishment, continuous war." -- Glenn Greenwald, Boardman Lecture (22 March) (my bold)

We have come further along now to the demise of democracy, with the gradual erasure of constitutional rights, rubbing out one piece and then another; while a charismatic African-American president just adds further irony to the loss.  He alone is not responsible; but is assisted by his own party; and also prevails with a nod from his republican adversaries in Congress. We wanted to turn to someone like Obama, in 2008, who spoke of law and respect for our rights under the Constitution; but whatever we might have expected of him, he didn't really curb state terror and lawlessness.

In his speech of last month, Greenwald starts with some fundamental ideas from military historian, Andrew Bacevich: America is currently in a state of endless war. And war is no longer one of the  practical instruments of foreign policy;--nor is it a means by which the policy is pursued,--so much as it has become "a foreign policy goal unto itself."

And Greenwald warns us that Obama has taken the abuse of power further than Bush dared:

The most tyrannical power that any government can possibly assert, which is the power to target its own citizens for execution far from any battlefield, without a shred of due process or transparency;--that's a power that the Obama administration has not only claimed for itself,--but now publicly justified, and in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, exercised.

You cannot conceive of a more tyrannical power than the power to kill American citizens without due process. 

But how can we be sure the persons (even US citizens) that the president wants to assassinate now without any due process at all, are really guilty? They haven't been afforded real trials. How do we know if those assassinated were really affiliated with al-Qaeda?--if they were involved with "associated forces"?--or with those "belligerent" to the US? They could have been framed by some malevolent faction in their country, or condemned by faulty intelligence.

Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, got especially squeamish when reporters repeated the term, "targeted assassination"; for as he sees it, a real distinction applies; and he went on to say that "targeted killing"was the right way to describe it. Nothing to worry about. Killing is normal  government business; assassination, on the other hand, would be illegal.

Aren't American values just a twisted mutation after all this? The Attorney General thinks that secret life-or-death deliberations over the fate of an accused citizen, and the subsequent decision to carry out execution, and soberly assassinate/kill the person, is quite the normal thing to do. Eric Holder goes on the record, to add that executive due process requires no component of judicial due process. However, the founders of this country wrote due process into the Constitution; and they wrote it with no uncertain words, to include judicial due process as part of the rights of the accused.

Obama has signed terrible bills into law, voicing only some anemic words of protest. The NDAA, for example, which allows for the military to arrest US civilians on the "Homeland Battlefield", if it comes to that: and this new power permits indefinite detention of American citizens, when the president has a mind to declare an emergency.

"Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed". Remember those words?


But to come back to the question of state terrorism,  John Pilger writes:

Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected: "momentous, spine-tingling": the Guardian. "The American future," wrote Simon Schama, "is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed ..." The San Francisco Chronicle's columnist saw a spiritual "lightworker [who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet". Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America's corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement.   [...]

 On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to "secure territory and populations" overseas but to fight in the "homeland" and provide "support to the civil authorities". In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a "market" extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November.

The political class, riding on the inflatable US Empire, puffed up near to bursting, on petrodollars of uncertain worth, looks to be increasingly agnostic on the question of democracy. When their bosses (not us, but the 1%) demand their compliance, these politicos jump where they are told to jump. And it seems they are corrupt, operating with an indifference to human suffering, oriented in terms of the rewards they will reap for loyalty and their years of faithful service to the looters, embezzlers, and the officer class, and the defense lobby and war profiteers. When push comes to shove they are indifferent to democracy. The world according to decree is alright with them.

Dick Cheney's long-nurtured vision of the "Unitary Executive"is quite in style now in Obama's White House. Though this could be impeachable, or criminal on the face of it; the Defense Chief, Leon Panetta, nonetheless caused Senator Sessions some dismay, when the senator questioned him about where the administration would go, in order to find the legal basis for going to war. Panetta's evasive replies were aimed at avoiding the sticky issue--that is--the legal responsibility of the president to consult with Congress and obtain congressional approval, before going to war.

The aloof Defense Secretary was unconcerned about the senator's concerns, and less than concerned himself, about coming to Congress, in order to establish  a legal basis for going to war; although he took pains not to say so directly. The administration believes it has the authority, in and of itself, to decide which nation it attacks; and this is based on its conviction that it knows best how, and when to defend the United States. As far as the basis of legality was concerned, that would arise, Leon Panetta said, from the consensus of the "international community" or our NATO allies.

Senator Sessions might have been wondering if our president, a constitutional scholar, had known better than to ignore Congress when he ordered the bombing attacks on Libya--that went on for months--without ever bothering to establish a legal basis for war. But Sessions wasn't about to challenge the administration with that question.

Yes indeed, there's a beast already loose in this land. It extracts wealth and resources from people who can't defend themselves; and this same beast has been exporting misery and hideous violence to foreign lands for as long as any of us can remember. It runs on insatiable greed. It's been busy for decades with its obscene work: seeing to the dismantling of democracy, hammering on public education, corrupting information; and all the while pretending to make us safe. Hypnotizing us with its endless military bullshit. It's no problem for the beast to rummage through our computer disks, our financial and medical records; nothing to do but infiltrate our political life with spies and hostile agents who try to sabotage peaceful change.  Even the word, peace, has been evicted from our political vocabulary by this beast.

Speaking for the beast, Panetta's responses in the US Senate signaled the true apotheosis of imperial power;  and not just its supremacy, but what the word signifies, the real deification of this kind of power: murder premeditated in secret, and carried out by executive decree.

Random Thoughts On Going Insane

The Repug campaign has taken on all the aspects of a carnival nightmare, complete with gargoyles, spooky clowns, and a musical sound track by Saint Saens or Maurice Ravel. As I watch it unfold from day to day, the one thing about it that I look forward to is its shock and awe quality as a perversion of entertainment--its appeal to the baser instincts.

It's as if the entire American audience is massing nightly to witness a hideous traffic accident, to applaud and cheer at the sight of crunched metal, smoke and fire, severed limbs and decapitations. Thus, as one after another candidate breathes his or her last gasp and drops out, having spent millions for a brief star performance in what appears to be less a presidential campaign than a Jerry Springer reality show, I can't help but feel a little--how can I say it?--a little let down. A sinking feeling, like watching the air leak out of a cut tire. First Michele Bachman, now Rick Perry. Romney may be next. Gosh, I'm gonna miss all those crazy loons. But hey, Santorum's still in. And Ron (Let 'em die) Paul--God bless him! And look--is that Herman Cain peeking up from the swamp? Bless you, Stephen Colbert. There's hope for this thing, yet. But I do wish Trump would come back. At least Donald knew what it was really all about.

Meanwhile, it seems that Facebook is making people sad. Yes, it's true. According to some university studies--one from Stanford, for instance--people who spend a lot of time on Facebook tend on average to be unhappier with life and have a vague sense that life is not fair. Gee, I'm not on Facebook, and somehow I already knew that life wasn't fair. Well, I guess the Facebook people are not looking at life in quite the same way that I am.

At any rate, it seems that the more time one spends looking at hundreds of one's friends, near-friends, pseudo-friends, friends from the past, friends from the future, associates and pseudo-associates, one begins to get depressed. The reason for that is that finally, one can only take so much of: "Gee, look at me, look at my smiling face, look how happy and successful I am. See me playing, see me with my dog, see me on vacation, dining out, partying down with my friends, living it up. See me, see me, see me. . . ." The whole thing it turns out apparently gives off a false impression. So you begin to compare yourself. You begin to feel less happy and more like a miserable, pathetic excuse for a human being, compared with all those legions of leering grinning people. The same study showed that those who actually spend time with other real people out in the world, instead of vicariously sucking up pseudo-friendship on the web, tend to have a happier, or at least, a more realistic outlook on life.

william skink TRANSIENT

he wasn’t dead yet
but he would die just a few hours later
after I left
after I sat there looking him over
feet gnarled from old frostbite
swollen ankles, those hobbled legs
and skin like wax paper colored by the quitting
of his liver—

and he quit that broken body broken by booze
on the seventh day of October
just a few days after the cold rain had finally begun to fall

Harley said he was there when Joe collapsed
so he waved down a cop
who brought the ambulance to take him along river Clark Fork
away from the streets he slept on
to at least have the dignity of departure
washed and laid out on soft fabric and plush drugs

his sea of blood leading slowly to that stillness—

the dark October clouds outside the window—
Joe knew he was drinking down death
but he honored certain codes
and though proud of hustling, insisted no cussing
during business hours because (he told me once)
there might be kids around

the local paper would call him transient and
be done with him

this local poet says fuck that, his name was Cock-Eyed Joe
and I hope he finds peace beyond
because there is none here

--William Skink

AN END OF THE IRAQ WAR IS ANNOUNCED AMID STRANGE ACCOLADES

There is no proper farewell that can be said to the people of Iraq that would not announce reparations, that would not include expressions of remorse, along with an admission of crimes committed and wrongs done by the US military. President Obama's official ceremonies marking the end of the war were occasions for broad smiles and declarations of unqualified success.

What was begun with bravado and a disregard for the deaths and suffering of Iraqi civilians, has ended with the same superficial rhetoric, the same military preening, the same myths, the same contrived proofs to justify the war and its horrible toll of torture, grief, maiming and killing.  Perhaps a permanent war economy is what Obama and the US Generals meant by using the word, success.

This kind of war spreads beyond Iraq, with constant adaptations and a fluid concept of enemy; with its battlefield declared to exist almost anywhere, including our own country; and this is what has made possible the militarization of our whole society.  The legacies of our presidents are intrinsically arranged by making war and have their origins in violence.  Neither George W. Bush nor the current president, Obama, is to be satisfied with the destruction of one foreign country only, or the deaths of thousands upon thousand of innocents, or the bombing into rubble of works built by the labor of generations. And governments are their targets: some of these are changed, others erased. And the societies are ordered to conform, or else face chaos and disintegration.

The horror of Fallujah doesn't bother "no shock" Obama, as it didn't bother Bush; not the dogs howling during the attack, nor the smell of death saturating the city, a place described after the siege as "a city of ghosts". Bedridden invalids, white-haired husbands and wives, were shot to death in their beds. Families were machine gunned while trying to swim to safety. Boys were denied the opportunity to flee the city with their parents because, for the sake of revenge, the Americans had marked them for death; and one of the young ones was photographed dead, lying face up on the sidewalk, still clutching in his right hand the white handkerchief, with which he tried to surrender.

These wrongs to which we are all answerable cannot be evaded, they cannot be covered over with bluster or national piety; and we remain responsible for holding our leaders responsible.

Chris Floyd is eloquent as he writes about this, and comes directly to the point:

[President Obama] spoke of suffering, he spoke of sacrifice, he spoke of loss and enduring pain -- but only for the Americans involved in the unprovoked war of aggression, and their families. He did not say a single word -- not one -- about the thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed by this "fulfilled mission," this "extraordinary achievement," this" success." These human beings -- these sons and daughters, fathers, mothers, kinfolk, lovers, friends -- cannot be acknowledged. They cannot be perceived. It must be as if they had never existed. It must be as if they are not dead now.

The divorce from reality here is beyond description. It is only the all-pervasiveness of the disassociation that obscures its utter and obvious insanity. There is something intensely primitive and infantile in the reductive, navel-gazing, self-blinding monomania of the American psyche today. Think of the ancient Greeks, who constructed their psyches and their worldview around an epic poem, the Iliad, that depicted their enemies, the Trojans, with remarkable sympathy, understanding and insight -- while depicting their own leaders as a band of shallow, squabbling, murderous fools. Here was a moral sophistication, a cold-eyed grasp of reality -- and a level of empathy for one's fellow human beings -- far beyond the capacity of modern American society, and infinitely beyond the reach of the murderous fools who seek to lead it.

Democracy and empire cannot coexist. By the time the plutocrats took control of Ancient Rome, they too had stopped paying taxes, and destroyed the republic in pursuit of their selfish aims. They too were intoxicated with the plunder, the profits of military exploits, the pure rapine, the sights of destruction and submission in the Colosseum , the lust of the eye. In the 21st Century, the financial terrorism we are seeing is about constructing obedient and submissive subjects; and it, too, is war waged by other means. This financial malevolence is not only tolerated by our political class but also facilitated by them, because they are willing to sell their services and betray the people. They and their masters have no moral compunctions; and will not hesitate to use war, state terrorism, and financial anarchy, to make slaves of the rest of us.

Our country failed in Iraq. Our leaders told lies about the reasons for going to war. And we were defeated in Iraq because we fell into depravity in that country. And to not be clear in our minds about that war's depravity, is both unacceptable and dangerous, because it invites a deeper defeat.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich sounded alarms last week, concerning the National Defense Authorization Act that passed through Congress, and was handed to President Obama, to sign into law:

This bill authorizes permanent warfare anywhere in the world. It gives the president unchecked power to pursue war. It diminishes the role of this Congress. The founders saw Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which places in the hands of Congress the war power, as essential to a check and balance against the executive abuse of power. This legislation diminishes Congress’ role in that regard.

This legislation authorizes the military to indefinitely detain individuals without charge or trial, including the detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. In short, what this bill does is it takes a wrecking ball to the United States Constitution and gives enormous power to the government or the state. I want friends on both sides of the aisle to understand this; we are giving the state more power over individuals with this bill. It’s the wrong direction.

Our children deserve a world without end, not war without end.

A TRIBUTE IN MUSIC TO BRADLEY MANNING

Almost Gone by Graham Nash and James Raymond

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS HAS DIED

"The evil men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." --Julius Caesar

Hitchens could, even near the end of his life, write an essay about Lincoln, that did not bear any of the affectation of his public performances. After 9/11 he went nuts and lost his bearings, in a kind of anti-fundamentalist fundamentalism; but in his time he spoke with some eloquence and wit against Reagan and all his works, against the murderous reign of the death squads, against Kissinger. This does not mitigate the sense of loss about his deterioration in the public square; yet it seems to me that he was once a comrade against authoritarian madness, and fought against injustice in his own fashion. How Hitchens fell into justifying the Iraq War and the Islamophobic worldview, is perhaps explained in terms of a nervous breakdown. I don't know; but it seems such an incomprehensible departure from what once issued as reason from him.

What has been said about his vanity and ego is probably true, along with the dogfight-like debates, which were by no means the best of him. I remember reading his essays many years ago, and thinking that he was a good man to have in our corner.

His personal friend, Robert Scheer, writes of Christopher Hitchens:

Despite the vehemence of our debates, both public and personal, he and his saving grace and wife, Carol Blue, held a gathering at their home to discuss a book I wrote on the subject. This was a man unafraid of intellectual challenge and committed to pursuing the heart of the matter. 

 That was his driving force, a seeker of truth to the end, and a deservedly legendary witness against the hypocrisy of the ever-sanctimonious establishment. What zeal this man had to eviscerate the conceits of the powerful, whether their authority derived from wealth, the state or a claim to the ear of the divine. 

 Hitch was the opposite of the opportunistic pundits who competed with him for public space. He took immense risks, not the least in offering himself for waterboarding before concluding it was unmistakably torture, or challenging the greatness of God, knowing full well that he was exposing himself as an object of wildly irrational hate.

To watch the kind of dissipation Hitchens went through is painful, with his former self blurring in the process.  There was too much drinking, too much grandstanding, too much desire to play the enfant terrible of the Left. Who can occupy such a personal space of ego while our history every day grows sicker? But it is my instinct to feel sad for him, for the fall any human being may suffer, to remember his acts of personal courage, and his talent which once counted for something.

WE HAVE TO STOP MAKING THE SAME MISTAKES

Some disappointed supporters of President Obama have come right up to the edge of disowning the president; but have pulled back from the brink to reconstruct support for him, because they think the alternative is worse. There are other ways I could express this dilemma; but it will probably be for the best, insofar as the best is also appalling, when the Obama team is out of the White House.

Chris Hedges has expressed our problem more elegantly; but the political system is so compromised, especially at the national level of presidential elections, that the candidates of either party are pre-screened and vetted by the corporate powers that run this country. Obama is pliable alright and almost perfectly malleable; but not by us, the people.

The republican suits, Mitt Romney and Herman Cain, will fit the bill in their own way, and express the same malleability if they are nominated and elected. But our improvement as a nation lies elsewhere. Our dooms, the ones that are threatening us, are multi-headed to be sure; but there is more people power or constructive energy on the streets of New York, in the Occupy Movement. Our answers and the torch of activism is firmly placed in the hands of the young generation and those who can lend a hand to them.

 The re-election of Obama--if possible-- is a muddle, a waste of time, and a complete political train wreck.

 For the Democratic Party (if it can be salvaged) it is far more important for it to survive President Obama, than to become entangled in his re-election. This Obama administration's corruption, its failure to prosecute criminals, and its coziness with the corrupt elements of this society, are all things that will bury us deeper in the muddle we are already in.

Mitt gave a scary speech a couple of weeks ago, in front of some kids in uniform. It was all about our American religion of being the biggest hombre among nations, strutting our stuff forever, as we have every right to do, adopting as our holy writ, the notion that no nation or group of nations, should ever be allowed to grow so powerful as to even balance us. And this, of course, is the death head's dogma that leads directly to Apocalypse.

 But Obama, whose administration now has its tarry fingerprints all over the Keystone Pipeline, has shown with equal and dreadful portent where our dooms gather and how they grow. The president withdraws from Iraq, since it is a dead loss, and squares off toward bloodier patches in Pakistan, flailing away in Afghanistan, menacing Iran, pacifying Libya into a failed state or a broiling civil war.

The US foreign policy is the same, the underlying belief system is the same, no matter the party in the White House. And if we as citizens keep churning up the same hopeless Faustian bargain, we are lost. The forces in our country of environmental destruction, economic war waged against us, and runaway militarism and aggression are sure to destroy us; if we don't help change this country in a fundamental way.

 It's time that we join hands and go on to organize.

OBAMA AND THE SUPER-DUPER CONGRESS OF 12

"This deal trades peoples' livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals, and I will not support it".  -- Rep. Raul Grajalva of Arizona

The sideshow of panic and hysteria is over now. The ratcheting up of high drama over a US Government debt default, that was never going to happen, has achieved its intended effect. Wall Street has what it wants. Obama has broken with the Franklin Roosevelt legacy; he is the first Democratic president to offer up the sacrifice, a chipping away at Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The country's owners are smiling now, as its lickspittles in Congress cobble together a consolidated committee, composed of 6 Republicans and 6 Democrats drawn from the House and Senate, to be a kind of political ramrod that will authorize draconian budget cuts, one way or another. The rigged process of this commissar committee, which represents both political parties, will present Congress with decisions which cannot be debated or amended in the normal way before becoming law.

The new commissar committee will also contain a novelty called "a trigger".  This substitutes severe pre-configured budget cuts, in the event that the committee can't reach compromise; and the effect is to keep a sword dangling over the special interests of each party; theoretically these would be armaments or defense funds for the Republicans, and social programs dear to the Democrats.

And the Pentagon got $50 billion up front, as a door prize.

As emotions kept on building, Paul Craig Roberts, Reagan's former Assistant Treasury Secretary, warned that the crisis was an artificial one:

The US government will never default on its bonds, because the bonds, unlike those of Greece, Spain, and Ireland, are payable in its own currency. Regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised, the Federal Reserve will continue to purchase the Treasury’s debt.  If Goldman Sachs is too big to fail, then so is the US government.

There is no budget focus on the illegal wars and military occupations that the US government has underway in at least six countries or the 66-year old US occupations of Japan and Germany and the ring of military bases being constructed around Russia. [...]  

In contrast, Social Security is solvent.  Medicare expenditures are coming close to exceeding the 2.3 per cent payroll tax that funds Medicare, but it is dishonest for politicians and pundits to blame the US budget deficit on “entitlement programs.” 

There was also the little matter of Section 4, Article XIV of the Constitution:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law [...] shall not be questioned.

Last December, a reporter asked President Obama whether he wasn't concerned that House Speaker Boehner would use the debt ceiling issue as leverage to get the spending cuts the Republicans were talking up and demanding. Obama's response was that he trusted Boehner to do the right thing. This is the rhetoric of the president's trademark bipartisanship. It has become the record of his presidency, and concerns a big part of his pitiful legacy. The repetition of this pattern is of course absurd; and when the president offered cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, he did so because these cuts were his objective; and he put them on the table without the Republicans even asking for them.

Barack Obama's marketing campaign was so brilliant that we voted for him in the primaries and General Election with no real insight into him, without clear understanding;  some of us without a second thought continued to make excuses for him, until his fakery and favoritism to Wall Street and his pernicious  fancy for George W. Bush's global style of war became too obvious to ignore. We are all punished for electing this man.

Usually a crisis is needed to create a vacuum into which these toxic details are fed. Wall Street does not like real crises, of course – except to make quick computer-driven speculative gains on the usual fibrillation of today’s zigzagging markets. But when it comes to serious money, the illusion of a crisis is preferred, staged melodramatically to wring the greatest degree of emotion out of the audience much like a good film editor edits a montage sequence. [...] --Michael Hudson

 A country that has fallen on hard times, as ours has, must face the grim political realities that exist now. The right-wing is exulting, and it is being seen in the arena of politics, taking what it wants by intimidation. But this is mostly for show because too many elected Democrats are playing along. The Labour Party in Britain and the Socialist Government in Greece have been playing this same double-crossing game. The United States, and other countries as well, are now at the mercy of the central banks, at the mercy of Wall Street; and the warning that issued long ago from FDR's great voice, was about the threat of the moneyed powers, of the few, who if left unchecked, would come to consider the government itself as a mere appendage to their own affairs.

A person of integrity, like Raul Grijalva,  reminds us of the stakes and the risks. But there must be others like him, ready to act with integrity, who have concern for justice, who are involved, who hear the bell that is tolling for each of us, calling all of us to save ourselves and our loved ones, and our country. This responsibility cannot be left to the parties, except on condition that these can be freed from the domination of the few, and learn to serve the people again.

It was certainly by design, and not by crisis, that we ended up with the super-duper committee of 12. But from whom did these spring to life? Who wants to claim any of them? The Tea Party may have played the midwife to this unlucky birth; but the Senate, controlled by Democrats, was nonetheless their mother. And their daddy is none other than Barack Obama.

TEAM OBAMA MENACES NYT REPORTER, JAMES RISEN, WITH SUBPOENA

Persons who would otherwise be willing to speak to me would surely refuse to do so if they perceived me to be not a journalist who keeps his word when he promises confidentiality but one who would break it in the interest of government prosecutors.
--James Risen

Besides the news about James Risen, there are a couple of other items that point to what governments, especially repressive ones, will do to maintain or restore their precious narratives. For instance, it was reported that on her arrival, actress Michelle Yeoh was met by officials in Myanmar (Burma) and was informed that she was blacklisted and was being immediately deported. This was simply because she had played the part in a movie, of the country's number one dissident, Aung San Suu Kyi, the tireless and ever-arrested champion of a return to democracy. The Junta must keep up appearances.

Another example is Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani attorney whose once warm relationship with US officials went cold after he agreed to represent claimants whose relatives were killed by US drone bombers. They are filing suit against the CIA. Suddenly his application for a visa to attend a Columbia University human rights conference in New York has run into a problem; although after several inquiries, the State Department won't disclose what the problem is.

"...[M]y relationship with the US government changed dramatically in 2010, when I decided to take on the case of Karim Khan. Karim Khan was away from home on New Year's Eve 2009 when two missiles fired from what we believe was a CIA-operated drone struck his family home in North Waziristan and killed his son, aged 18, and his brother, aged 35. Informed over the phone of their deaths, he rushed back to find his home destroyed and his brother's family--now a widow and two-year-old son--devastated.

Khan believes his son and brother were innocent victims. His brother, who had taken the surname Iqbal in honour of the famous Pakistani poet, was a schoolteacher who had returned to their ancestral village, shortly after finishing his master's degree in English literature, because he believed education was vital for his countrymen's improvement. Khan's teenage son helped out at another government school in the area. [...]

So, why would the US government want to prevent me from discussing these cases at Columbia law school? Perhaps, it is because our legal challenge disrupts the narrative of "precision strikes" against "high value targets" as an unqualified success against terrorism, at minimal cost to civilian life.

There are some narratives in the Washington establishment that bang around the corridors after office hours like Marley's Ghost-- oblivious to the shuffling and re-shuffling of cabinet officers-- as well as the peculiar personalities of presidents, who are only transient beings. These narratives have become institutional. And if you are able to effectively contradict or damage the state narrative; then you are bound to be in trouble, serious trouble, with this government.

James Risen, who broke stories about Bush's illegal warrantless wiretapping, and wrote about the SWIFT program of data mining of financial records, is presently trying to fight off a subpoena that would bring him before a grand jury. Team Obama wants Risen to help them convict Jeffery Sterling, a former CIA person, who they accuse of leaking intelligence about a bungled Agency operation against Iran, that happened 11 years ago during the Clinton Administration. Risen wrote a book, State of War, released in 2006, that contained a description of "Operation Merlin". In the minds of the CIA, this was a plot to deliver blueprints clandestinely into the hands of Iranian scientists; the idea was to hand them a design, which if it was pursued to construction, would result in a flawed, unusable weapon. The CIA pushed ahead with Merlin, even after a cooperating scientist told them that the flaws in the blueprint were too obvious, and it would be quickly spotted as worthless by the Iranians who would be receiving it.

Glenn Greenwald, who writes with precision about the Risen case and the climate of fear that the DOJ wishes to instill among us, also notes the odd history of the subpoena, which, for a long while, has had Risen's name on it:

The subpoena to Risen was originally issued but then abandoned by the Bush administration, and then revitalized by Obama lawyers.

The objective once pursued by the Bush team is now in the hands of Obama's prosecutors:

The DOJ wants Risen to testify under oath about whether Sterling was his source.

The orthodoxy of information is expressed in the way this government controls the narrative about Iran, and other issues, and the way it seeks to punish those who challenge its tightly-wrapped propaganda.

It didn't matter to the Bush administration that there was no precedent for prosecuting a member of the press under any statute that covered leaking classified information. But that didn't stop the threats that were made against James Risen. In 2006, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales reacted to the publication of Risen's new book, State of War, making it clear that the Justice Department was raising the issue of prosecution of reporters.

In his affidavit to US District Court, Eastern District of Virginia, Risen wants the court to quash the Obama administration subpoena that seeks to force his testimony. In Risen's own words:

On January 13, 2006, the week after my book hit the shelves, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales held a press conference at which he publicly announced that the department of Justice was actively considering the prosecution of journalists under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful, classified information.

In mid-March, after Attorney General Gonzales raised publicly the possibility of prosecuting journalists, the director of the CIA, Porter Goss, suggested that it was his "hope" and "aim" that the leak investigations would lead to subpoenas requiring me to reveal my confidential source[s]. Only two months into the investigation, Goss explained:"It is my aim and it is my hope that we will witness a grand jury investigation with reporters present being asked to reveal who is leaking this information.

Does the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover still rattle around the FBI's office in Washington? Maybe like Old Marley in Dickens' story, "A Christmas Carol", he rattles his chains late at night? It was Old J. Edgar who said "Justice is incidental to law and order". This seems to have become the unspoken motto of the Obama administration. The new Attorney General has finally put the high officials of the Bush years off limits for prosecution. The crimes done in the White House stay in the White House; that's another way of looking at it.

Obama gave a speech honoring whistleblowers and the service they do for the country; but when Thomas Drake blew the whistle, reporting fiscal irregularities in his government department, the Administration started prosecuting him under the Espionage Act.

Does the Junta need to keep up appearances?

WHITE HOUSE LIES ABOUT IRAN'S NUKES, SAYS HERSH

CORNEL WEST IS SNUBBED BY THE WHITE HOUSE AND REBUKED BY SOME LIBERALS

Cornel West, a prominent African-American professor and man of letters, has recently ruffled feathers in parts of the liberal class, by calling President Barack Obama "a black mascot" in the service of Wall Street. The president was already stung by accusations from West that he is not much of a progressive. Such criticisms were not well received by some of the president's admirers either. West played a prominent role in Obama's 2008 campaign.

Chris Hedges has argued for a long time that liberal institutions, which were operating as a political safety valve for justice in American history, have largely failed now, because they have basically become derelict. The universities, the liberal church, the labor unions, the national press, have been made complicit in the country's rush to war, or were bought off, cowed into silence, driven further away from responsibilities they once took seriously; meanwhile, democracy and the law are hauled down, bit by bit.

There is pressure to control the conversation: pressure on teachers who answer to an increasing corporate structure in universities; and there is never-ending pressure on working people to surrender more of their dignity and security in the workplace. There is so much tragic pressure put on our jobless youth, to turn themselves over to the military and its wars of occupation, the madness that destroys minds and bodies.

Bernie Sanders, in his famous Marathon Speech on the floor of the Senate, said "...more tax breaks for the very rich is only one symptom of an economic and political system that is grotesquely failing the average American. The simple reality is that the middle class of America is collapsing, poverty is increasing, and the gap between the very wealthiest people and everyone else is getting wider. How did this happen?"

I saw the other day a story about the protests in Madrid. These are real protests that shake up the establishment. When Hedges writes that liberals have become pragmatists about the choice of lesser evils, that they fancy themselves as a respectable liberal class, it is on condition that they comply with the narrow parameters of political discourse, as it is permitted. The morally courageous are viewed with alarm as soon as they reveal too much. This is the sense I take from what he suggests is prophetic. This is painful in a personal sense because our commitment to justice does not compare favorably with that of protesters on the streets in Tahrir Square or in Madrid.

Nader was vilified in an irrational welter of emotion where it is endlessly claimed that he cost Gore and the country the election in 2000; this is the default position because either this is true or there was coup d’etat that was the beginning of the end of the rule of law in this country. It is too dangerous from a psychological viewpoint to accept responsibility for what happened. Much safer and more comfortable by far to shift the blame.

Reverend Wright was demonized of course for denigrating the idea that God reflexively blesses America. Every US president ends an oration with the words “May God Bless the United States of America”. Many in this country go all clammy and dread the uncomfortable topics whenever conversation turns to our own imperial slaughters abroad, the CIA’s political assassinations, torture, and other of America’s chronic crimes against peace.

Cornel West is revealing the betrayal. And he is attacked as hysterical and trivialized and is accused of petty spite. One would think from the moralizing language of some of his detractors that they suggest that he is like a rejected, wounded suitor. Is it too much to confront the implications of betrayal that is at once personal and political? No we have to go on believing in Obama’s good intentions. In the end the servants and courtiers in the liberal class will rally to his support and will recommend this course of action; moreover they will be crying that the system can still represent the people.

In Madrid, the masses have figured out that the Spanish government doesn’t represent the people. Winner-take-all parties want to bar smaller parties from representation. Voices of the people have been pushed into a place of obscurity, where no elected official hears or responds to them. And the representatives are seen now as wholly owned by corporate powers.

Liberals as a political class have participated in their own moral uprooting, as Chris Hedges has consistently warned us. This is the prophetic part and the sounding of an alarm. All this fiddling with designer politics and “boutique activism of political correctness” distracts us. Those who are committed to the primacy of justice can often be vilified, and have been vilified. We have to be clear about the warning signs in this country; just as a people can civilize themselves and defend what is just, they can also lose sight of justice, and can even debase themselves in the long run, and effectively censor the subjects which are considered unsafe to discuss. They can walk carelessly over virtues they once possessed and be uncivilized.

On Sunday, a couple was arrested for slow dancing in DC inside the Jefferson Memorial. And in other news this past week, the president has shrugged off the legal requirements of the War Powers Act of 1973. He doesn't know what all the fuss is about; after all, Libya is just a little war. The law demands one of these three conditions to be met: "...a declaration of war, specific statutory authorization, or a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."