Author: Dave LIndorff

 
Bowe Bergdahl, the POW held for five years by the Taliban in Afghanistan who was recently traded for the release of five Taliban detainees from Guantanamo Bay, has been convicted in the halls of Congress and in most of the media as a deserter — even a traitor or a Taliban convert — all without any trial or even any evidence. John Grant, a veteran of the Vietmam War, where desertions were common, says it’s an old story: As America’s losing wars wind down, those who advocated the in the first place and pushed for their continuation try to create a “stabbed in the back” narrative to explain the humiliating defeat of US military forces.

Listen to this discussion, which was aired on the Progressive Radio Network last Wednesday, June 11, at PRN.fm.

Bowe Bergdahl as a POW captive of the Taliban in a TV image from Al Jezzeera TV (click on image to go to the interview on PRN.fm)

ThisCantBeHappening! has just learned that our little news organization was listed, in an alert fired off to all 78 Fusion Centers by Kelly Wilson, Director of the Washington DC Fusion Center’s Regional Threat and Assessment Center, as a potential threat.

The stated role of the Fusion Centers, which were created (and lavishly funded) in the wake of 9-11, was to link federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in order to better detect and combat terrorists inside the US. So what about this threat posed by ThisCantBeHappening!, though? Well, as Threat Assessment Director Wilson explains in her alert, the threat is that TCBH! published an article suggesting that the Fusion Centers played a central role in orchestrating the attacks on Occupy Movement actions in cities all across the US.

As she states in her alert:
 

“Although at this time these reference to fusion centers and Occupy seems [sic] to be compartmentalized I wanted to make you aware of these references in case the national news media begins [sic] speculating about fusion center involvement.”
 

Wilson includes in her alert a headline and several key paragraphs from our Nov. 15, 2011 article (which was later proven by us and others to be totally accurate), as well as a link to our entire article on those connections. The selected quotation she chose read as follows:
 

Police State Tactics: Signs Point to a Coordinated National Program to Try and Unoccupy Wall Street and Other Cities

“…Shortly afterwards, on Oct. 25, [Oakland Mayor Jean] Quan authorized the first brutal police assault on Occupy Oakland. It led, among other things, to the critical wounding of Scott Olsen, an Iraq War veteran who was among the protesters, and was hit in the forehead by a police tear gas canister fired at close range.

“Who organized that critical conference call [among 18 mayors]? Was it Quan or one of the other mayors, or was it someone in the federal government? [Oakland attorney Dan] Siegel says he doesn’t know, and Quan isn’t saying.

“But both Siegel and [National Lawyers Guild Executive Director Heidi] Boghosian say they strongly suspect federal involvement in the planning of the recent spate of police violence against the occupiers. Says Siegel [who resigned in disgust from his post as an advisor to Quan following the brutal OPD assault on Occupy Oakland], ‘It’s only logical to assume that the Fusion Centers are involved, [Wilson’s emphasis] especially after the Oakland occupiers shutdown of the port in Oakland…’”

Homeland Security Fusion Center alert sent to all Fusion Centers by DC Office of Threat Assessment concerning ThisCantBeHappening! (click on image to go to original image at the Partnership for Civil Justice, which obtained the memo through the Freedom of Information Act)
 

Dr. Gary Yohe, Huffington Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University, and vice chair of the just-released third National Climate Estimate, talks about this latest report, which instead of looking out at a grim future of flooded coastlines, epic droughts and floods and soaring temperatures, looked at the evidence already confronting Americans in every state of the union.

In this broadcast of the “ThisCantBeHappening!” weekly radio program hosted by TCBH! member Dave Lindorff on the Progressive Radio Network, Yohe explains that perhaps just telling people about what’s coming in future decades may not be the best way to galvanize the public into action to slow the progression of global warming. Instead, he suggests, showing people the hard evidence of the changes already underway may do more to convince the skeptical that global warming is real and that it is a serious threat to us all, and to our descendants.

Listen to this May 28 broadcast by going to the podcast at: PRN.fm or by clicking on the image below.

Prof. Gary Yohe, vice-chair of National Climate Assessment, and a scene from the current record Texas drought

Back during World War II — a bitterly fought, bloody conflict that lasted seven years (four years for the US) — many German prisoners of war were held in camps in the US. Others held by US forces, French forces and British forces were held in camps in Britain and France. While many of these prisoners died of disease and even starvation or a combination of the two, most were released fairly quickly after the war ended, unless they were suspected of war crimes, in which case they were held for more questioning and investigation. By the end of 1948, virtually all remaining German prisoners captured by the US, British and French had been released and repatriated to Germany. (The fate for German POWs in the Soviet Union was much worse, largely because of German brutality on the Eastern Front during the war there.)

It’s worth recalling this history as we look at the hysteria that is erupting now over the release of five Taliban fighters from long captivity in the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

These men, who are prisoners of war, captured in Afghanistan where they were fighting the US invading army, were released in a prisoner swap that freed Bowe Bergdahl, a US soldier captured by the Taliban five years ago when he strayed from his base in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border.

To hear the howls from Republicans and even some Democrats like California Sen. Diane Feinstein, you’d think these five prisoners, who have been put under the jurisdiction of officials in Qatar, which promises to hold them in that country and to monitor their activities for a year, pose a mortal threat to the US, and to every American living here.

It’s the same hysteria that has prevented the Obama administration from simply closing down the Guantanamo concentration camp and either freeing or moving its remaining prisoners to federal prisons in the US.

POW swap: One US POW, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, for five Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo
 

Our prissy Secretary of State John Kerry, hair carefully coiffed for his interview, told NBC’s Brian Williams last week that fugitive National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden should “man up” and return to the US to “stand in our system of justice and make his case.”

The supposedly “manly” Kerry (whose claim to “courage” is having employed the high-calibre machine gun mounted on his Mekong River gunboat to blow away unarmed fishermen and lightly armed Viet Cong freedom fighters, or having called in air strikes on them) has been hiding his later youthful history of standing up against the Vietnam War, and of condemning American war crimes there. He surely knows from his carefully buried past as a critic of the Vietnam War plenty of fellow American veterans, as well as Vietnam-era deserters and also draft resisters, who did just that — they “made their case” in “our system of justice.” And Kerry also surely knows what happened to them: most ended up getting shuffled off to jail by an American “justice” system that, particularly when it comes to national security and opposition to the state, operates on the Lewis Carroll principle of “verdict first, trial afterwards.”

Yet Kerry, in that same NBC interview with Williams, forged right on and, as the fourth man in line under the US Constitution to assume the Presidency if something were to happen to the president, vice president and speaker of the House, declared that Snowden is guilty as charged, saying, “This is a man who has betrayed his country.”

Um…What trial decided that, Mr. Secretary? The one you want him to come submit to?

And Kerry is not alone in convicting Snowden in absentia and without a trial. He is only echoing the sentiments of his boss, President Barack Obama, who has already made it clear that he thinks Snowden is guilty under the Espionage Act — that hoary World War I-era law that his administration has revivified from a legal crypt to prosecute whistleblowers and under which Snowden has been indicted by the US Justice Department. As Obama put it at a White House press conference, “The way in which these disclosures happened has been damaging to the United States and damaging to our intelligence capabilities…I think that there was a way for us to have this conversation without that damage. As important and as necessary as this debate has been, it’s important to keep in mind this has done unnecessary damage.”

Which of these two guys needs to 'man up' and do what's right?
 

I was shocked to find myself in almost perfect agreement today with a recent column by the neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer.

Usually Krauthammer has me groaning, but yesterday his column nailed it.

He was writing about what he correctly observes as the end of “American hegemony” in the global political sphere.

As Krauthammer lays this “grim” picture out, six years of President Obama’s weak-kneed foreign policy, “compounded by” his “proposed massive cuts in defense spending, down (sic) to pre-Pearl Harbor levels,” have allowed a revanchist Russia and a newly aggressive China to make “an open challenge to the post-Cold War, US-dominated world that Obama inherited and then weakened beyond imagining.”

Krauthammer cites as his main evidence of this “major alternation in the global balance of power” the deal just struck between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who, during a visit to Shanghai last week by the Russian leader, inked an agreement for Russia to sell some $400 billion worth of its natural gas to China over the next 30 years. The deal would include the building of a $70-billion pipeline from Russian gas fields in Siberia to China’s industrial heartland, and would “deflate” a threat made by the US and Europe during the current Ukrainian crisis to end Europe’s reliance on Russian gas.

Krauthammer also pointed to President Xi’s call for a new Asian region security system that would link China, Russia and (gasp) Iran — an arrangement which, if implemented, he warns could “mark the end of a quarter-century of unipolarity and … herald a return to a form of bipolarity — two global coalitions: one free, one not — though with communism dead, not as structurally rigid or ideologically dangerous as Cold War bipolarity. Not a fight to the finish, but a struggle nonetheless — for dominion and domination.”

Setting aside Krauthammer’s breathless horror at this new “bi-polar” global political environment, and his ideologically-blinded description of the US/NATO “side” as “free” as opposed to the Russia/China “side’s” being “not free” (and adding the observation that actually a $400-billion deal over 30 years is really not that big a thing, working out to just over $13 billion a year), there is much here that does accurately portray what is happening.

Missing from Krauthammer’s analysis, typically, is the history behind this development.
Neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer sees America's decline in new pacts between China's Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin
 

The Justice Department is really pumping out the pointless prosecutions these days.

First it was an absurd indictment of five Chinese military computer hackers who are charged with hacking into some major US companies to steal trade secrets — notably about nuclear power technology and solar energy. Then it was a negotiated settlement with Credit Suisse, one of the world’s big global banking enterprises, based in this case in Switzerland, in which the bank agreed to plead guilty to criminally aiding and abetting some 20,000 US taxpayers in avoiding US taxes over a period of decades.

At first blush, these might sound like big deals, but if you think about it, they are both meaningless gestures designed to make the US public think the Justice Department is doing something.

In the China hacking case, you have China’s military doing exactly what the US military, in the form of the National Security Agency, has been caught doing — hacking into corporate computer systems to steal not just trade secrets, but also to gain an inside track on trade negotiations. And of course, we have already learned that the NSA has done even more nefarious things, like intercepting computers and switching equipment during shipment, before they are delivered to customers abroad, with NSA staff inserting bugs and malware thus rendering that equipment an open book to NSA snoops.

Besides the sheer absurdity of the US, of all countries — the world’s major abuser of the Internet — indicting China for engaging in some relatively small way in exactly what the US has been caught doing on a grand scale, there’s the question of just why this alleged Chinese spying on American companies is seen as so egregious, while the NSA’s much more invasive spying on the American people is seen as no big deal at all.

Oh yeah., I forgot: This is all about profits and capitalism. What has the US Justice Department all in a lather about this Chinese spying on US corporations isn’t national security, and it isn’t violation of privacy. It’s the violation of “property rights” — specifically corporate property rights.

US AG Eric Holder has a hands-off attitude towards seriously prosecuting US bankers, US war criminals, or 1st Amendment rights abuses
 

Part II of Dave Lindorff’s interview by Kathy Swift on Santa Barbara’s RadioOccupy. Lindorff continues talking about his investigation into the FBI’s and Homeland Security Department’s hidden campaign to crush the Occupy Movement, based upon the thousands of documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act campaign of discovery by the Partnership for Civil Justice. Lindorff also talks about his investigation into the men from Craft International, the Dallas-based mercenary firm who’s personnel appear to have been hired (by someone — likely the DHS) to be at the Boston Marathon a year ago.

To hear this program, please go to RadioOccupy

From left: Three Craft International guys at finish line before bombings (note backpack with white square and hat in lower corner with Craft’s scull logo), two Craft men communicating with someone, FBI image of exploded backpack (note similar black color and white squre marking), and craft guys running after bombing (without his pack!). Clearly there are some explanations needed from the government, but nobody will admit to hiring Craft to be present at last year’s Boston Marathon.

If you would like to hear Part I of this radio interview, which focuses on Lindorff’s investigation into a plot, revealed in several FBI secret documents obtained through FOUA, to assassinate the “leaders” of the Houston Occupy movement and possibly other Occupy actions around the country, please click here

Occupy activist Cecily McMillan, convicted on May 5 of second-degree felony assault of a New York cop whom she and witnesses claimed had grabbed her breast from behind, bruising it, stood her ground before her sentence was rendered, refusing the judge’s insistence that she should “take responsibility for her conduct.”

Risking the possibility that Judge Ronald Zwiebel might sentence her to the maximum seven years for the charge she was convicted of, McMillan would only apologize for what she termed “the accident” of involuntarily throwing back her elbow when grabbed by behind from someone she could not even see (the cop was also in plainclothes, so even if she had seen him she would have been justified in protecting herself). Insisting to the judge that she lived in accordance to the “law of love,” she said, in her pre-sentencing statement, “Violence is not permitted. This being the law that I live by, I can say with certainty that I am innocent of the crime I have been convicted of… I cannot confess to a crime that I did not commit. I cannot throw away my dignity in return for my freedom.”

It was a bold and risky stand for the 25-year-old New School for Social Research graduate student to take, given the high sentencing stakes. In the end, though, the judge, — who during the trial had blocked her defense from presenting key evidence that she had acted in her own defense against being groped by a cop (for example the police officer’s record of brutality and corruption), while allowing the prosecution to present evidence and statements normally not considered permissible in a trial (such as presenting to the jury evidence about an arrest of McMillan that had not yet been tried or adjudicated) — sentenced her to only a short term in jail.

She still has a five-year felony probationary sentence, which leaves her a convicted felon, a serious impediment to employment, and one that could leave her subject to limitations on her freedom of movement for five years.

McMillan’s many supporters nonetheless hailed the short sentence, which could see her released in as little as 60 days, as a victory, one which many attributed to the massive outpouring of support she has received since her arrest, during her trial, and since especially since her conviction. That support has included a jailhouse visit by two members of Pussy Riot, who condemned her conviction and jailing, a letter of of support from the president of the New School, support from five members of the New York City Council (but so far not a word from New York City’s supposedly leftist and former activist Mayor Bill De Blasio), an online petition signed by over 167,000 people, and an unusual letter from nine of the 12 jurors in her case calling on the judge not to sentence her to any jail time.

Image of Cecily McMillan being arrested as the NYPD clears Zuccotti Park during a six-month memorial celebration of the Occupy Movement in March 2012
 

In this edition of Progressive Radio Network’s “ThisCantBeHappening” radio program, host Dave Lindorff, focuses on the case of Occupy Movement activist Cecily McMillan, currently jailed at Riker’s Island without bail while awaiting sentencing on a conviction of felony assault of a police officer.

With a sentencing hearing set for next Tuesday which could result in a jail term of up to seven years, Lindorff discusses this case with McMillan’s attorney, Martin Stolar, and Lucy Parks, a member of her support team at JusticeforCecily.com. Stolar explains how the New York state judge hearing the case prevented McMillan’s defense from making their case to the jury that she had not assaulted police officer, but had in fact been the victim of assault when the officer grabbed her right breast from behind her, causing her instinctively to throw up her arms, hitting him in the eye with an elbow.

Both Stolar and Parks say the heavy charge of assault against a police officer leveled against McMillan by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr.,, and the Judge’s blatantly prejudicial handling of the case, including his refusal to grant bail pending the sentencing hearing, demonstrate that it’s really all about sending a message that protest in New York City, especially against the banking industry, won’t be tolerated.

To hear a podcast of this program, which aired on PRN.fm on May 14, click here or on the photo of Cecily McMillan below.

Jailed Occupy activist Cecily McMillan, convicted in a biased courtroom of assault on a police officer, faces a possible 7-year sentence at a hearing this coming Tuesday. For information on attending and protesting this travesty of justice, go to JusticeforCecily.com