Author: Dave LIndorff

Last week President Obama was largely successful at blacking out from the American public word that Nobel Peace Prize nominee Malala Yousafzai, the courageous Pakistani advocate of girls’ education nearly killed by Taliban gunmen a year ago, used a photo-op invitation to the White House to ask the president to halt to his drone killings of Pakistanis. But Obama cannot so easily silence the condemnations today of his remote drone “Murder, Inc.” program by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

In a pair of reports released yesterday, the two respected human rights organizations blasted the US for its use of missile-firing drone aircraft over Pakistan and Yemen to kill alleged Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, saying that both campaigns were causing extensive civilian deaths. Both reports — Human Right’s Watch’s report on the Yemen drone campaign, and Amnesty International’s report on the much larger Pakistani drone campaign, assert that the heavy civilian casualties from the strikes may constitute war crimes. The Amnesty report goes further, suggesting that even leaving aside the civilian killings, the extra-judicial killing of Taliban and Qaeda leaders themselves constitute war crimes under the Geneva codes.

While drone strikes date back to the presidency of Bill Clinton, and were employed to a significant extent in Afghanistan and Pakistan under President George W. Bush, since President Obama took office in January 2009, the frequency of drone-fired missile attacks, particularly in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province, has soared. One analysis by the New America Foundation suggests that there have been 365 such strikes there–313 of them on Obama’s watch as commandeer in chief. These attacks are said to have killed between 1,611 and 2767 militants,along with with between 258 and 307 civilians. Other estimates of civilian casualties are higher, with the organization Drones Watch, which investigates drone strikes by the US in Pakistan, reporting that as of last January over 3000 people had been killed, “the vast majority of them civilians.” That report gave the names and ages of 172 of the dead in those attacks who were all children.

China has begun selling armed drones in the international arms bazaar, meaning the US has lost its drone monopoly

This article originally appears in WhoWhatWhy.com
 

The New York Times has a venerable history of eliding references to any US role in overthrowing governments or murdering foreign leaders. But an article in Thursday’s edition by Times reporter Simon Romero (Latin America Brings Up Its Dead, Seeking Truth to Help Settle the Past) raises the censorship bar.

Running at over 1200 words, the article describes the exhumation of the remains of the likes of leftist Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda, deposed leftist Brazilian Presidents Joao Goulart and Juscelino Kubitschek, ousted Chilean President Salvador Allende Gossens and his predecessor Eduardo Frei Montalva—all of whose deaths are viewed with suspicion by Latin Americans. Yet Romero manages to mention a possible US role only once, and then only indirectly and with reference to a half-century old case —when he notes that Brazil’s elected President Goulart had been ousted from office in a 1964 military coup “supported by the United States.”

That is the only reference to the US in the entire article.

Quite remarkably, given the amount that has been exposed over the years about it, Romero mentions the role of a Latin America-wide assassination program called Operation Condor—without once noting that the whole thing was orchestrated or at least encouraged and enabled by the US.

Condor’s Wingmen

Condor was a vast conspiracy that involved the cooperative efforts of the intelligence agencies of all the military dictatorships in the region which, during the 1970s and 1980s, killed as many as 35,000-50,000 people, mostly leftist leaders, labor activists, and opponents of those dictatorships.
Chile's elected President Salvador Allende Gossens’ death in a US-sponsored coup in Chile was followed by a continent-wide campaign of CIA-sponsored political murders under Operation Condor

For the rest of this article, please go to: www.whowhatwhy.com

Talk about turnabout being fair play.

In a surprising break with the pattern of looniness that seems to characterize law and politics in the state of Kansas, the state’s Supreme Court on Friday indefinitely suspended the law license of former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline in a unanimous ruling that found Kline had violated 11 rules of professional conduct in the course of directing his department’s epic jihad against abortion providers in the state.

In a 154-page decision, the highest court’s seven judges (five of whom were replacing five sitting jurists who had recused themselves in the case) found that Kline had “failed to recognize” the line between “overzealous advocacy” and his professional obligations as the state’s top prosecutor in his pursuit of an anti-abortion political agenda.

The high court wrote: “The violations we have found are significant and numerous, and Kline’s inability or refusal to acknowledge or address their significance is particularly troubling in light of his service as the chief prosecuting attorney for this state and its most populous county.”

Many abortion rights defenders in Kansas believe that Kline’s Ahab-like legal assault on late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was a major factor in revving up the hatred among anti-abortion zealots that led one fevered activist associated with the Operation Rescue group to shoot the doctor to death as he was greeting parishioners at his church in 2009. The shooting occurred just a month after AG Kline’s attempt to convict the doctor on a number of criminal allegations produced an acquittal on all counts. (The killer, Scott Roeder, had sat in court through much of the trial.)

Today’s ruling could also provide an opening for another long-time Kline target, Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus, an associate of the murdered doctor who provided the second opinions required under state law for patients seeking an abortion from Tiller’s office, to finally get justice. After Tiller’s murder, Kline shifted the focus of his jihad to Neuhaus, opening an investigation into her work as a second-opinion referring doctor. According to Neuhaus’s attorney Bob Eye, Kline’s office ordered her, as part of that investigation, to bring in her patient records. When Neuhaus objected that her patient records were confidential, Kline promised that the confidentiality of the records and her patients would be protected. As Eye put it, “Kline assured her that she’d be leaving his office with her records.”

Disgraced former Kansas AG Phill Kline argued unsuccessfully to salvage his law license before the state's top court

OCT 20 UPDATE: This fundraising campaign concluded having raised an astonishing $74,000 towards the needed goal of $92,600 for saving Dr. Neuhaus’s family home from the anti-abortion witchhunters in Kansas. Please keep contributing to put them over the top.
 

There iare only a few hours left to raise the funds to save Dr. Kris Neuhaus’s family’s farm from the anti-abortion mob in Kansas.This campaign has raised an astonishing $72,600 (couning online pledges and mailed in checks) towards the needed $92,600, all in just seven weeks’ time. Let’s go all the way now and send the zealots in Kansas a message!

The fundamentalist kooks appointed by Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback to the state’s Board of Healing Arts, not for their medical expertise but for their anti-abortion zealotry (many aren’t even physicians!), already took away Dr. Neuhaus’s license to practice medicine in a vindictive move based solely on the fact that she had worked as a consultant to Dr. George Tiller, the murdered abortion doctor. Now, in an even more vindictive move, the same board, which had flown in phony experts from out of state to testify against her, have billed her for $92,000 — the amount they claim they spend on the hearing that stole away her right to practice medicine.

She and her husband, independent radio journalist Mike Caddell, cannot come up with that kind of money — especially with Dr. Kris barred from practicing the profession she studied so hard to be able to do. If they can’t come up with the money, they lose the farm that’s been in Mike’s family for generations, and where they live with their son, who is still in high school. For more details see the earlier article we ran on her case or go directly to the Indiegogo site where you can read more, and where you can make a donation to the cause.

Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus

Here’s a concrete battle against religious zealotry and in defense of women’s rights right here in America which we can win! Join Gloria Steinem, Katha Pollitt, me and others who are standing with Dr. Neuhaus.

Whether you contribute or not, please send this appeal out to as many people as you know and help make it go viral. You can use the “send email” link at the bottom of the article to send to five email addresses at a time.

After that courageous Pakistani advocate of girls’ right to an education, Malala Yousafzai, had her meeting with President Obama and his wife Michelle and older daugher Malia in the White House, the White House issued a press release and a photo, saying that the presidential couple had invited this youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize nominee to visit “to thank her for her inspiring and passionate work on behalf of girls’ education in Pakistan.”

It hardly did justice to the courage of a young girl who, for publicly demanding that children of her gender be allowed to study in a society where many Muslim fundamentalists consider the education of women a dangerous threat, continues her advocacy even after she was attacked on her way to school and targed with a nearly fatal shot to the head by a Taliban death squad .

But the White House press release was worse than just dismissive of this brave girl.

It further diminished the import of her visit, and her remarkable courage, by failing to note that she had taken the opportunity of her visit to tell the president directly to his face that he should halt the drone attacks that he has been ordering on suspected Taliban “leaders” in western Pakistan — drone attacks that have often been calculated to kill not just targeted individuals but many innocent men, women and children in the vicinity of the blasts.

As Malala recalls the moment in a statement she released herself after her meeting with the commander in chief of the most powerful war machine the world has ever known:
 

“I thanked President Obama for the United States’ work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees. I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact.”

Malala Yousafzai at a meeting with President Obama, Michelle and Malia, in the White House (official White House photo)

President Obama ran for president promising change. What his backers didn’t realize was that he wasn’t talking about changing America for the better. He was talking about changing his position whenever he found himself in a confrontation with Republicans. There’s a reason that beginning with Obama’s 2008 campaign, and on through the past five years of his presidency, we have gotten used to a presidential behavior called “pivoting.”

Pivoting, as applied to President Obama and his administration, is a euphemism for surrendering quickly on a seeming position of principle, strength or tradition, and moving in an entirely different, and often treacherous direction that betrays what before appeared to be a principle.

With the US having just lost two wars in the Middle East, for example, last year the president announced that he was “pivoting” away from more war to shifting America’s military to Asia. That hasn’t worked out so well either, so I’m guessing we’ll probably soon see a new pivot, shifting the military focus perhaps to South America?

Back in 2009 and 2010, when the economy was tanking, and President Obama was spending so much time promoting his health care “reform” agenda, on multiple occasions he and his press office would announce that he was “pivoting” to jobs, or to dealing with the unemployment crisis. These pivots wouldn’t amount to anything, because later he’d pivot to another issue and drop the focus on jobs.

Pivoting, it turns out, is really a way of saying that he doesn’t have any real commitment to some issue, but is going to pretend to focus on it for a while.

It’s characteristic of a guy who really doesn’t stand for anything, but tries to look like he does.

That is dangerous in the present moment, with a hard core of Congressional Tea Party fanatics leading the Republicans in the House in extorting the government with the threat of default by refusing raise the national debt limit — a bizarre situation that no other country faces because no other country has such a law requiring the government to keep its total borrowing below an arbitrary limit set annually by Congress.

President Pivot: Looking for an excuse to sell us all out and blame Republicans

The family farm in America may be going the way of the dodo, thanks to the corrupt political influence of corporate agribusiness, but here’s a chance for us all to concretely save at least one family’s farm.

Dr. Kris Neuhaus for years was the only physician in Kansas with the guts to stand up to the anti-abortion zealots and provide a legally required second opinion for women needing a late term abortion from Dr. George Tiller, the abortion doctor murdered by one of those zealots as he handed out programs at his Church at a Sunday service. Since that murder Dr. Neuhaus has been targeted for destruction, not just by the anti-abortion fanatics, but by the entire state government, led by Gov. Sam Brownback.

As recounted by Katha Pollitt in a recent Nation magazine article, and as we wrote earlier, the state’s so-called Board of Medical Arts, a body stacked by Gov. Brownback with non-physicians whose only “qualification” is a virulent anti-abortion stance, acting on a “complaint” by an associate of the very guy who murdered Tiller, went after Dr. Neuhaus’s medical license. After a sham “hearing” to which the board brought in several quack “experts” to challenge Dr. Neuhaus’s evaluations of medical necessity for an abortion, the board stripped Dr. Neuhaus of her license to practice medicine, depriving the poor women she served of medical care, and depriving Dr. Neuhaus of a way to earn a living at the skill she had spend years acquiring.

Now Dr. Neuhaus and her husband Michael Caddell, a journalist, sometime contributor to ThisCantBeHappening!, and host of a daring public affairs program called Radio Free Kansas, are being ordered to reimburse this sham Board of Medical Arts for the very quacks they flew in to testify against Dr. Neuhaus at her “hearing.” The bill: $92,000. If they can’t pay, they lose heir home — a 10-acre dirt farm that has been handed down to Mike, and that is the only home their teenage son has ever known.

Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus

I was working on a story about the FBI’s harassment, intimidation and extortion of friends and associates of Ibragim Todashev, the man they executed at the end of a six-hour night-time interrogation in his apartment in Orlando, Florida earlier this year. Since his death, which the FBI initially claimed, variously, was the result of his lunging at an officer, or trying to grab the officer’s gun, or attacking the officer with a sword or a broom, but later admitted it couldn’t explain, the agency has been systematically picking up and intimidating, Gestapo-style, his girlfriend and other friends and associates, reportedly threatening them with deportation or arrest if they don’t agree to assist the FBI by spying on local mosques or middle eastern restaurants in Florida’s Islamic neighborhoods.

One particularly egregious case involved a friend of the late Todashev’s named Ashur Miraliev, who last month was picked up by the FBI, which claimed he was wanted for questioning on a charge of “intimidating a witness” to an alleged bar fight (a local, not a federal charge). Miraliev, according to the Florida office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), says that the agents, once they had him, never asked about that case, but wanted to question him about his relationship to Todashev, who had been a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two brothers accused of the Boston Marathon bombing, and who died in a shootout with Boston police. Miraliev said he demanded an attorney, but was told he couldn’t have one, and was then grilled for hours in violation of his Miranda rights. He remains in a local jail on $50,000 bail on the “intimidation” charge, and has been there now for 15 days, unable to raise the bail.

I tried to call the FBI for comment, since one news report had quoted the FBI’s top flak, Paul Bresson, as claiming that the FBI would never question a witness who had requested an attorney’s presence, unless the witness agreed to be questioned without legal counsel. I wanted to ask how voluntary such questioning could be in this case, since Miraliev would clearly have known that his friend Todashev was killed by the FBI during his attorney-free interrogation. Not the kind of situation in which one would be comfortable refusing to answer questions, one would think!

Anyhow, when I called the FBI Public Affairs office, the phone just rang on and on. There was not even a voice-mail recording offering a journalist a chance to leave a message.

Tatiana Gruzdeva, 19, and Ashur Miraliev, 20, friends of Ibragim Todashev, a young man blown away by an FBI agent during a midnight interrogation in his home, have both been harassed and threatened by the FBI, and are now locked up — Miraliev in a local jail and Gruzdeva in solitary confinement at an immigration detention center facing deportion

I no longer recognize my country.

Back in 1997, after two years living in China, and five more living in Hong Kong, during which time, as a correspondent for Business Week magazine, I slipped in and out of China regularly as a journalist to report on developments there, I got a good dose of life in a totalitarian society. When I alit from the plane in Philadelphia where my family and I were about to start a new chapter of our lives, I remember feeling like a big weight had been lifted off my chest.

The sense of freedom was palpable.

Almost immediately, though I got an inkling that something was amiss. An art teacher in Upper Dublin, the suburban town where we had bought a house, had just been arrested, charged with theft of $400 in school art supplies. Of course, my initial reaction was, “Great school district we’re in, if the teachers are stealing from the school!”

The teacher, Lou Ann Merkle, who had been arrested and finger-printed pending arraignment, was fired and was facing trial on a felony charge of stealing public property. But in a few weeks, as I followed the story in the local weekly paper, it became clear that there had really been no theft (she was taking old supplies which were being replaced with new ones, intending to bring them to a local community center used by low-income children who went there for day care and after-school care. Moreover, when stopped by the principal and told to return the supplies, she grudgingly complied. She was arrested anyway later). I learned over subsequent weeks of news reports that Merkle actually was being hounded by an obsessive power-tripping school administration simply for being an “activist” and outspoken teacher. A school board hearing I attended was packed in December of that year with over a hundred angry parents and former students of Merkle’s demanding that the board drop its case against her. It did not, but a county judge had the good sense to do exactly that, ruling that “no crime occurred here.” (Merkle, who got her job back with back pay, later sued the school district and won a significant judgement against it.)

This was one small example of government tyranny run amok but since then I have seen it become the norm in a United States where people are now being arrested for almost everything — kids jailed without trial for shoplifting, hitchhikers jailed for arguing, correctly, with cops that it is not illegal for them to thumb for a ride, non-white youths in many cities stopped and frisked for “walking while black or hispanic” and then getting busted on trumped up charges (resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, disturbing the peace, etc.) when the cops find no guns or drugs on them, protesters beaten and gassed and jailed for simply trying to exercise their First Amendment rights.

But that is just the surface.

Massive arrays of NSA computers now monitor every communication of every American. To what end?

President Obama’s address to the UN General Assembly was such an astonishing string of brazen lies and falsehoods it must have had the assembled international delegates choking on their tea or coffee. Whether he was declaring that “together we have worked to end a decade of war” even as he was just blocked from unilaterally launching a war against Syria, or saying “we have limited the use of drones,” when his administration has upped their use from 51 strikes in Pakistan under the prior Bush administration to 323 so far under his own administration, as David Swanson has so meticulously documented in his Top 45 Lies in Obama’s Speech at the UN, it was all lies.

But for Americans, perhaps nowhere was his lying so blatant and obscene as when he vowed that “we will not stop asserting principles that are consistent with our ideals, whether that means opposing the use of violence as a means of suppressing dissent…” This, after all, was being said just one week after the second anniversary of the launching of the Occupy Movement, which we now know, thanks to documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice under the Freedom of Information Act, was crushed nationwide by a campaign of violent police assault coordinated at the highest levels of the FBI, Homeland Security Department and other federal police and intelligence agencies.

The US government’s heavy-handed campaign to destroy Occupy, and the concern it showed even before the first protester set foot in Manhattan’s financial district on September 17, 2011, showed how terrified the nation’s corporate elite and their political servants in Washington are of any mass political movement, however small, that doesn’t “play by the rules.”

Washington had lately grown comfortable with the protests of anti-war activists and social justice activists who, over the last decade or more had fallen into a rut of politely coming together for permitted marches and demonstrations in Washington, New York or other venues, seeking permission first to gather, and then to march along predetermined routes which would be lined by police barricades, and riot-gear-equipped and militarized police. Even arrests were choreographed with police in advance, so that prominent activists could get themselves cuffed and booked, all with dignity and calm on the part of arresting officers.

LAPD cops in riot gear break up peaceful Occupy action in Los Angeles, part of a coordinated national attack on the movement