Author: Dave LIndorff

What’s wrong with Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson’s killing of the unarmed 18-year-old black teenager, Michael Brown, and with a Grand Jury decision not to indict him for that outrageous slaying, is what is wrong with American law enforcement and American “justice” in general.

Both actions were permeated not only with racism, which clearly played a huge rule in both the verdict rendered by a Grand Jury composed of nine whites and only three blacks, and in this tragic police killing by a white cop of a black youth, but also by a mentality on the part of police — and apparently by at least a majority of the citizen jurors on a panel evaluating Wilson’s actions — that cops are authorities who must be obeyed without question, on pain of death.

Let’s recall the most crucial evidence in this killing: According to the New York Times it was two shots into the top of the head by Officer Wilson that killed Brown — shots that multiple witnesses confirm were fired after the unarmed Brown was on his knees, already seriously wounded by four other apparently non-lethal shots to arm, neck and upper right chest, with his hands raised and pleading “Don’t shoot.” The Times also reports that those shots, apparently fired when Brown’s head was leaning forward, or from a position above him, appeared to have been fired “not from close range,” — determination based upon an absence of gun powder residue around the area of the entry wounds.

It should not matter in the slightest whether or not Brown had first struck Officer Wilson inside his squad car during a scuffle, as claimed by the cop, or even that the officer, as he testified in an unusual appearance before jurors, “felt terrified” at that time. Nor does it matter, beyond being evidence of an inherent racism, that Wilson says he thought that Brown, approaching him at his car initially, “looked like a demon.” If the non-lethal shots that first hit Brown in arm, neck and upper chest had been fired at that early point, perhaps Wilson would have been justified in firing them in self defense, but it’s what happened after Brown tried to leave the scene that matters.

Michael Brown, dead in the road, Ferguson cops on patrol, and Brown's killer, Officer Darren Wilson
 

You read it in USA Today: The latest “threat to America” is “thousands of jihadis” with Western passports,” returning from battle in Syria and Iraq to wreak havoc and destruction in the “US homeland.”

It’s a nightmare profoundly hoped for by the US Department of Homeland Security, that massive security-state bureaucracy looking for a raison d’être.

According to the USA Today article, there “may be” thousands of so-called Islamic State fighters who have western passports, including “perhaps” some 150-300 Americans. The fear expressed in this heavy-breathing piece is that since these fighters, once in Syria or Iraq, will be coming under fire by US planes, which are bombing IS forces and, reportedly, killing hundreds of them, and that they will turn their anger from the apostates they went abroad to fight to the US government and perhaps the American people who were supporting this campaign that is trying to kill them and their IS comrades-in-arms.

Another way to look at this would be to say, “A fine mess you’ve gotten us into Mr. Obama!”

What we’re talking about here, really, if these numbers are to be believed (and who knows if they are correct really?), is old-fashioned blow-back — that term hailing from the cloak-and-dagger Cold War world of the CIA and KGB that refers to how covert wars and covert overthrows of governments can have a nasty habit of producing unintended consequences which end up turning the tables on the initiator of an action. The CIA’s overthrow of the elected government of Iran and installation of the dictatorial Shah of Iran is a good example. It led ultimately to an anti-American revolution led by the fanatic if anti-imperialist imam Ruhollah Khomeini and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran — hardly the intent of the original CIA plotters and their Washington masters.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 orchestrated by Vice President Dick Cheney and his neo-con braintrust is another example of blowback. By destroying the government of Saddam Hussein, Cheney and his gang destroyed the country of Iraq, ignited a vicious civil war between Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites, and ultimately brought forth the Islamic State forces. In a smaller example of blowback, the CIA and Pentagon secretly trained and armed fanatic Islamic Sunni fighters opposed to Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, only to have those fighters decide a better target was the oppressive Shi-ia regime in Iraq. The US-trained Sunni fighters became the core of the Islamic Republic which the US is now committed to trying to destroy. Hence the concern about US jihadi fighters who are part of the IS army turning their wrath on the US.

Syrian Islamic rebels receiving weapons and training from US, UK and French special forces in Lebanon in 2013 (How’s that workin’ out?)
 

One searches almost in vain for honest reporting on the Ukraine conflict in the US corporate media, which is simply parroting the US government position, which is that the rebels in eastern Ukraine are simply tools of Russian aggression against Ukraine.

Yet the murderous shelling of the people of the rebel regions of Lugansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine is almost certainly wholly the work of an aggressive Kiev-government led Ukraine military, which has been ramping up its forces in the east in preparation for a renewed assault on the two separatist states of Lugansk and Donetsk.

Each time there is a report of shelling of either city, Lugansk or Donetsk, the US media either completely fail to mention who might be responsible, or they report that “both sides” accuse each other of being responsible, though this is clearly absurd, since even those same media also refer to Donetsk and Lugansk as “rebel-held” or “separatist-held,” or as “rebel strongholds.” Why, one ought to ask, would the rebels shell their own territory, much less the capitals of their respective rebel regions?

The model for how such incidents are to be reported was set on Oct. 6 by America’s version of Pravda, Voice of America. In its article that day, headlined NATO Concerned about E. Ukraine Cease-Fire Violations, it states:
 

The new head of NATO said the Western military alliance is concerned about the large number of violations of the cease-fire in eastern Ukraine, which he indirectly blamed on pro-Russian separatists.
 

Following in lockstep with that approach, here’s what the US media had to say about the conflict in recent weeks:
 

The New York Times (Nov. 9):

A shaky cease-fire in eastern Ukraine looked ever more tenuous on Sunday as European monitors confirmed reports of unmarked military vehicles driving through rebel-held territory while Donetsk, the region’s biggest city, endured a nightlong artillery battle.

The monitoring group, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said that long columns of unmarked military vehicles, some towing howitzers, were spotted over the weekend. The monitors did not speculate as to the origins of the trucks or the people inside them, but Ukrainian officials said the statements bolstered their claims that Russia was again arming and training separatists.

…On Sunday, after what journalists in Donetsk described as the heaviest night of artillery shelling in and around the city in at least a month, the O.S.C.E. observers saw two more unmarked military columns. The observers noted 17 trucks in each column, some equipped with Grad ground-to-ground rocket launchers and others towing more howitzers.
 

Comment: Notice the focus here on the unidentified military vehicles, but not a word about who would have been firing that heavy artillery barrage into rebel-held Donetsk. A real news organization — as opposed to a propaganda organ — would have asked that question and would have sought answers. Clearly the rebels weren’t bombarding their own capital city, but the Times didn’t mention that absurdity.
 

Does this look like something rebel fighters in east Ukraine would have done to their own 'stronghold' and capital of Donetsk?
 

The latest news on the burgeoning police state in the US — a page-one investigative report in the New York Times disclosing that at least 40 agencies of the US government from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Supreme Court (!) are using undercover agents to spy on and even to entrap law-abiding American citizens — suggests that we have passed the tipping point.

One can no longer speak in terms of the US as a country that is moving towards becoming a police state. We are living in a police state.

The Times reports that IRS personnel have been going undercover posing as accountants and even as physicians to root out tax fraud, that the Supreme Court has been dispatching some of its guards (all of whom have been trained in undercover work) “dressed down” in civilian clothes to mingle with protesters (notably abortion-rights activists) to spy on people simply exercising their First Amendment rights outside the court building, that the USDA sends out agents posing as Food Stamp recipients to try and entrap shop-owners to commit Food Stamp fraud, and that even NASA and the Smithsonian Institution have undercover operatives. Undercover cops and agents are assuming the identities of teachers, doctors, journalists and even priests.

This information has to be put together with the rampant militarization of local police forces, who have become an occupying army, and with the proliferation of spying activities by state and local police agencies, encouraged by the establishment by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security of myriad “Joint Anti-Terrorism Strike Forces, and of 76 so-called Fusion Centers. These latter are totally unregulated operations that meld the spying activities of state and local cops and the myriad three-lettered intelligence units of the federal government, as well as private corporate security units, with no specific agency assuming oversight responsibility.

I used to scoff at the wild-eyed claims made by people on the right and left who said that we were living in a police state. Having lived for a year and a half in China, where a police state has been operating now for 65 years, and having visited police states in Eastern Europe during the days of the Soviet Union, I have seen and experienced what life is like when the police, secret and overt, run rampant, and I knew the US was not like those places.

I’ve changed my mind, though. The only difference I see now, knowing what we know about the breadth and depth of police activity in the US, between what’s happening here and what happens in places where police states have long existed, is that in long-standing police states, everyone knows they are being watched and are subject to arbitrary arrest. while here in the US, many Americans remain blissfully ignorant of what has happened to their vaunted freedoms.

Images of Police State USA: Inside the Houston Fusion Center (l), and militarized cops confronting First Amendment protesters
 

Emily Yates, a US Army veteran of two tours in Iraq and an activist with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), was at a demonstration last year on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall protesting against a looming US plan to begin a massive bombing assault on Syria. While standing in the shade of a couple of trees (it was a sweltering summer day), she was confronted by some burly National Park Police officers, who told her to leave.

She wanted to know why, since she was standing in a public park, directly across the street from Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence, US Constitution and Bill of Rights were all composed and signed. But instead of informing her of a reason why she couldn’t be there at one of the nation’s top tourist venues, four of them attacked her from behind, pressed her down painfully over the back of a park bench, cuffed her and hauled her off to a federal lock-up, where she was held for 72 hours in solitary and then charged, rather ludicrously, with assault of the four officers.

Yates, a resident of Oakland, CA who makes her living as a folksinger, was recently tried before a federal magistrate in Philadelphia (she was charged with misdemeanor assault, not felony assault, which meant she was not allowed to demand a jury trial). This federal judge, a former federal drug prosecutor, did not not allow her to bring in the shrink from a VA hospital in California who had diagnosed her with PTSD, in part the result of an attempted rape by two fellow US servicemen in Iraq — testimony which would have explained her panicked reaction to being grabbed by the National Park cops.

In the end, Yates was sentenced to three years — sentence suspended — for her “crime.”

Interviewed by Dave Lindorff and John Grant on the Progressive Radio Network program “This Can’t Be Happening!” this past Wednesday, Yates makes the point that her arrest, her abuse at the hands of National Park Police, and her outrageous sentence, are all evidence of how the US has become a police state — a particular irony to her since she and other veterans are always being saluted for having gone abroad to “defend our freedoms.”

To hear her whole story, and some of her songs, including “Talking National Park Service (Beat My Ass Black & Blues),” just click on the image below.

Screen grab of Emily 'assaulting' several National Park Police (click on the image to view the whole incident)

The irony of all these flags and a banner saying ‘Thank you for your service’ has apparently been buried (photo by Dave Lindorff)

The sclerotic Democratic Party was trounced yet again yesterday, as Republicans outdid projections and appear to have taken at least seven Senate seats away from the Democrats, giving them control of the both houses of Congress.

The blame is being placed on President Obama for this drubbing, and he richly deserves it. Basically, his presidency has been one long string of disappointments to and outright betrayal of those who voted for him “hoping for change,” as Obama has caved on or compromised away virtually every progressive promise he made during his two campaigns.

As a constitutional scholar, he had promised to restore respect for the law to the presidency, and instead has made end runs around every law imaginable, refusing to prosecute the war criminals of the Bush/Cheney presidency, the CIA, and the military, refusing to prosecute the FBI for violating the Patriot Act, refusing to prosecute the bankers whose crimes brought the US and the global economy to a grinding halt and left the US crippled going on six years now.

He has run the most secretive administration in history, even employing the 1917 Espionage Act against leakers and whistleblowers, and threatening journalists with jail for publishing those leaks. Under his watch, too, the Homeland Security Department secretly orchestrated the nationwide crushing of the Occupy movement by local police departments, while the White House, all the while, offered homilies about the sanctity of the right to protest. (His HSD’s Office of Threat Assessment actually labelled this publication a “threat” for publishing an article exposing that role — a discovery which we now proudly display on our masthead above.)

Claiming to have been a “community organizer,” Obama hung the labor movement that had backed his campaign for president out to dry, declining to push for a promised and desperately needed reform of the National Labor Relations Act that would have ended the interminable and easily delayed process of requiring a secret ballot election to form a union, by reverting to the old system of obtaining a majority of signed cards from workers.

On climate change, which he had once called the issue of our time, his administration actually actively worked behind the scenes, with the help of the National Security Agency, to subvert efforts by international leaders to reach an international consensus on action in 2009 in Denmark. This Obama treachery allowed the world to lurch on towards a climate-change armageddon.

Two Losers: President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, a Republican

A few days ago, I published a short story linking to a PRN.fm radio interview I did with noted international law attorney Francis Boyle, whom I pointed out was a drafter of the US Biological Weapons and Anti-Terrorism Act passed into law in 1981, which act supposedly barred the United States from continuing to keep or to develop new germ warfare weapons.

Boyle told me, on last Wednesday’s radio program “This Can’t Be Happening!,” that he believes the Zaire Ebola strain that is wracking Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea in west Africa, originally came from one of several BSL4-level bio-research labs operated in those countries and funded by a combination of the Center for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health and the US Defense Department, perhaps because of testing of Ebola being conducted there, or because of some containment breach.

Boyle pointed out the oddity that the epidemic is the Zaire strain, which has in the past been limited to Zaire in central Africa, and not a local strain found in fruit bats in west Africa — the alleged vector that news reports have claimed is being suspected of initiating the outbreak of the disease. As he noted, fruit bats don’t migrate, and certainly didn’t fly 2200 miles from central Africa to Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

For running this alarming interview with Boyle, I have received some criticism from readers who suggest that Boyle’s facts are weak.

Since then I have been checking out some of his claims and suspicions.

One particularly interesting one is his claim that a BSL4 lab handling Zaire Ebola in Kenema, Sierra Leone, was shut down in July by order of the Sierra Leone government.

Ebola virus
 

International law professor Francis Boyle is not just an expert on germ warfare. He wrote the book on it (Biowarfare and Terrorism, Clarity Press, 2005). But Boyle also drafted the US Biological Weapons and Anti-Terrorism Act, passed unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1989. That’s important, because as Boyle tells Dave Lindorff, host of the Progressive Radio Network program “This Can’t Be Happening!” associated with this news site, the Ebola epidemic that is wracking countries in west Africa, is a product of US three BSL-4 level bio-weapons labs that operate in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Boyle says that his research shows that the Pentagon, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have for years been developing weaponized Ebola virus variants and other dread diseases, using genetic modification techniques — including even merging Ebola germs with the virus for the common cold!. He also says that the initial outbreak of Ebola in west Africa occurred in the environs of one of those US bio-weapons labs located in Kenema, Sierra Leone, a situation which led the government of that country to actually shut down the US-owned facility.

Why, you might ask, would the US, which with the passage of the 1989 law banning bio-weapons research, put the US in compliance with the Biological Weapons Geneva Convention banning germ warfare, be then setting up and germ warfare labs in African countries? Boyle explains that Liberia, a former US colony still dominated by the US, and Guinea, are conveniently not signatories of the convention.
Boyle points that the particular strain of the disease that has struck in west Africa is Zaire Ebola, which occurs naturally in Zaire, a full 2200 miles away. He calls official reports claiming it may have come from bats in the West African jungle “twaddle,” and says that the virus could not, on its own, have jumped from a non-outbreak in Zaire to cause an outbreak in west Africa.

To hear Professor Boyle’s full half-hour interview, as broadcast this past Wednesday on PRN.fm, please click here.

On the same program, during the second half of the one-hour, TCBH!’s own Linn Washington talks about how the state of Pennsylvania has passed, with no debate, a law that bars the state’s prisoners — both inmates and those who have completed their jail sentences and returned to society — from talking or writing about their cases if a “victim” of their crime complains to a state or county prosecutor that doing so is causing that person “mental anguish.”

Ft. Detrick, MD, the US military's main site for researching germ warfare. Attorney Frances Boyle says the US uses the excuse of needing to produce weaponized viruses in order to create vaccines for them as a way to continue developing ever more dangerous bio-weapons, like the virulent Ebola strain now decimating west African communities.

Ebola is coming! Ebola is coming! America is doomed!

That, in essence, is the message of the US corporate news media, always on the lookout for the next sensational story with which to stir up hysteria among the public in the interest of higher ratings.

But the thing is, this time, unlike Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear weapons and poison-gas-spewing drone aircraft, Al Qaeda’s non-existent “sleeper cells,” and now ISIS and its supposed army of infiltrators coming to separate our heads from our shoulders, the threat is real.

True to form though, the threat is not what the media are claiming it is.

Ebola is a certainly terrible scourge in poor countries in Africa, where a handful of doctors are expected to provide care to thousands of people and to keep persons who contract the disease isolated so that the infection doesn’t spread. Ebola has spread so rapidly in the war-ravaged little nation of Sierra Leone that doctors there have decided they have to surrender the high ground of bringing all infected people into medical facilities for treatment, and to fall back to advising families who have a member who contracts Ebola to treat them at home as best as they can.

In the US, we have plenty of doctors, and plenty of hospitals with the ability to initiate steps to avoid the spread of disease.

But we do not have universal access to health care — especially to the kind of front-line health care that an epidemic calls for: access to a physician at the first sign of illness, access to affordable medication to treat disease, and even in many cases access to an emergency room.

Worse yet, are US labor policies, which are as if designed by some evil villain to hasten the spread of contagious disease.

Consider this: Most, if not virtually all waiters, busboys, chefs and cleaning staff at restaurants in the US do not get paid sick days–with the exception of those few who have union contracts and have managed to negotiate sick days in their contracts. If they feel like they are getting sick workers with no paid sick leave must do their best to hide their symptoms and go to work. Ditto for the maids and housekeepers who tend to the homes of the wealthy. And the same is true for the majority of the low-paid staff at privately run daycare centers.
Would madam like some Ebola with that order? (Without sick pay, many waiters have to come to work sick in the US)