This Can't Be Happening!

Tinduf, Algeria — News about the historic change of relations between the United States and Cuba triggered cheers across the five Sahrawi refugee camps located near this Sahara Desert city located 1,100-miles southwest of Algeria’s capital of Algiers on the Mediterranean Sea.

That news elevated hopes among many Sahrawi that the major changes in relations between the U.S. and its longtime, bitter enemy Cuba would lead to the U.S. pushing for changes with its longtime ally – Morocco.

Morocco is the country that has illegally occupied the Western Sahara, the ancestral homeland of the Sahrawi, since a 1975 invasion. Morocco controls 80+ percent of the Western Sahara, including its mineral rich inland region and coastal fisheries that generate billions of dollars in exports annually -– money that helps fund Morocco’s expensive occupation.

Since 1991, when Morocco and the Polisario Front (which represents the Sahrawi) ended a 16-year long war over Morocco’s invasion, America’s major ally in North Africa has repeatedly reneged on its agreement with the United Nations to hold a voter referendum in the Western Sahara where residents would decide their future through a democratic vote.

“We woke up very happy with the historical announcement of President Obama establishing new relations with Cuba. We hope that Mr. Obama will take another historic position and enforce international law on the Western Sahara. We are tired of waiting,” Adda Ibrahim said.

Ibrahim is the governor of Smara, the largest of the five Sahrawi refugee camps surrounding Tindof. Over 160,000 Sahrawi live in those camps, many ever since they fled Morocco’s 1975 invasion. Other camp residents were forced to flee over the years from Morocco’s brutal occupation of the Western Sahara. All camp residents live in bleak conditions on barren desert land where summer temperatures frequently hit 130 degrees.

Sahrawi refugee camp in Algeria, and Morocco's not-so-great wall fencing of the Polisario-controlled zone in Western Sahara
 

Is it just me or does anyone else think like me that this whole uproar over the supposed foreign “threat” to Americans’ freedom in the form of warnings against showing a low-brow Hollywood comedy, “The Interview” is a pathetic farce?

It hit bottom for me today when I read in the New York Times that viewers who flocked to one theater to see this over-hyped move kicked it off by collectively pledging Allegiance and singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

First of all, let me point out that if the tables had been turned and some other country’s film industry had cranked out some movie depicting the assassination of the current president of the United States, does anyone think that the US government would not go ballistic in protest, no doubt threatening trade boycotts or worse — maybe drone attacks on the studio in question? (Certainly that would be a possibility if the offending nation were Islamic.)

But on top of this, we already know that the initial claim that the threats against theaters showing the film, and the hack of Sony, the film company that made the movie, was wrong, and that they were not the work of the North Korean government, but rather of some private hacking organization. It wouldn’t surprise me to someday discover that Sony, stuck with what looked like a dog, paid some shady outfit to “hack” them and make threats all in order to build “buzz” around the film’s release.

Whatever or whoever it was behind the threats against this film, it worked like a charm. Americans, who probably would have ignored this movie like a remake of “Ishtar,” have been flocking to it in a jingoistic fervor to see Kim Jong-un’s head explode, even as the US government, which had been threatening retaliation against North Korea, has now had to back away from those threats as it becomes clearer that Pyongyang was not behind them.

Randall Park as Kim Jong-un, as his head explodes in 'The Interview, and Jeremy Renner as doomed journalist Gary webb in 'Kill the Messenger’
 

For the past three months, I and other leaders of the organization May First/People Link have been under a federal subpoena to provide information we don’t have. During that time, we have also been forbidden by a federal court “gag order” to tell anyone about that subpoena, although we had already announced it and commented on it before the order was sent. Finally, we were forbidden from telling anyone about the gag order itself.

It all sounds comical but any laughter would end if we violated that “gag order,” because that would be a felony and we could face prison sentences and huge fines.

We were silenced by our own government in a case we had nothing to do with and over information we didn’t have…and we couldn’t tell anyone about any of it.

The flag they should be flying!
 

The court order has now expired as of December 18 and I am now free to talk about it.

Last fall an apparently unbalanced survivalist steeped in anti-government paranoia murdered a Pennsylvania State Trooper and seriously wounded another Trooper during a sniper attack. Recently an apparently unbalanced man with a criminal past murdered two New York City policemen as they sat in their patrol car hours after he allegedly shot a former girl friend.

Authorities said Eric Frien, the man now charged with attacking the State Troopers, acted out of anti-government beliefs to “wake people up” because he wanted to make a “change in government.”

Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the man who executed those two New York City policemen before he shot himself on a subway platform acted out of beliefs opposed to police brutality according to announcements from authorities based on Brinsley’s Internet postings.

Brinsley shot the officers as revenge for the police killings of Eric Garner in the Staten Island section of New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, authorities claimed, based on his internet messages. He reportedly rode a bus from Baltimore to NYC, authorities said. After shooting his former girl friend. In NYC, he then went to Brooklyn, where he randomly shot Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, who were on a temporary assignment there in a squad car.

The murderous act of the unbalanced Eric Frien, who is white, and the murderous act of the unbalanced Brinsley, who is black, however, have triggered starkly different responses from law enforcement supporters.

Few of those law enforcement supporters publicly berated the entire anti-government movement during or after the 48-day search that ended in the capture of Frien -– a manhunt that cost Pennsylvania over $10-million.

Yet, shortly after those brutal murders by Brinsley, many supporters of law enforcement unleashed a barrage of caustic barbs at the anti-brutality movement and persons targeted by law enforcement supporters for backing anti-brutality protests. Law enforcement supporters have been incensed by the anti-brutality protests that have roiled cities across the country during the past few weeks.

Those law enforcement supporters that linked the lone act of Brinsley to all critics of police brutality significantly did not link the lone act of Frien to all critics who consider government to be the enemy. While anti-brutality protests have been predominately peaceful although sometimes raucous, anti-government activism includes vocal proponents whose adherents have a long history of violent and often murderous attacks police and prosecutors, and even on the public, terrorism actions that have killed dozens, including children.

Ismaaiyl Brinsley and Eric Frien, two crazed cop-killing self-styled vigilantes, two completely different responses from media and police defenders.
 

Let me make it clear from the outset of this article: I’m against violence and killing, and I’m certainly no advocate of killing police officers.

But having said that, it must be stated that the combination of a national gun culture that makes obtaining guns and deadly bullets as easy as buying a newspaper, combined with the increasing availability of videocam evidence of infuriating police murders of innocent, unarmed people, including kids, is a recipe for the kind of vigilantism that we just witnessed in New York City, where a Baltimore man, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, took it upon himself to wreak what he considered deserved vengeance on the NYPD by randomly selecting and assassinating two New York cops sitting in their squad car.

Random acts of retributive violence like this are only to be expected when you have police treating the public — and especially certain segments of the public, notably people of color — like presumptive criminals or a people under occupation.

This is not a question of right or wrong. Hell, the two policemen killed by the apparently mentally distubed Brinsley, ironically a Chinese and a Latino cop, had nothing to do with the killing of Eric Garner, a black man, by white police officer Daniel Pantaleo. It’s simply a reality: If the growing murderousness and thuggishness of some (especially white) police behavior towards people of color, and towards the public in general, continues in this country, it is totally predictable that such acts of vengeance or vigilantism will increase, perhaps even becoming more focused to target the actual perpetrators of unjustified homicides, such as the recent killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Garner in New York and 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, should their uniformed killers be given a free pass by prosecutors.

Eric Garner being strangled by a NY police officer, and a squad care, its window blown out by shots that killed two NYPD cops in what was reportedly a twisted act of vengeance.
 

There is a lot of congratulating of President Obama going on among people on the left in the US over the announced agreement reached between the White House and Raul Castro to end America’s half-century isolation of the only Communist nation in the Americas.

But the congratulations are premature and naive.

Whatever the reasons for the announcement that the US and Cuba are swapping some long-held prisoners and are going to exchange embassies (The US closed its embassy in Havana in 1962), the reality is that this will not end Washington’s obsession with overthrowing the socialist government installed in 1959 by Fidel Castro’s successful anti-imperialist armed rebellion.

Not only does having an American embassy in your country not mean your country will be left alone by the imperialist Washington — it means that in the heart of your national capital, you will have a diplomatically protected headquarters for agents working for the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and a host of other Washington three-letter spy outfits.

Look at Venezuela, where the US has an embassy out of which it has run operations ever since the initial election of the late Hugo Chavez seeking to topple the elected leadership of that oil-rich nation. Look at Honduras, where the US has long had an embassy which only recently played a key role in the overthrow and exile of that country’s progressive elected president. Look at Ukraine, where the US had an embassy that was the command center for a CIA-led program that ultimately orchestrated the overthrow of the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovich. And look at Pakistan, where a few years ago, with the arrest of a CIA contractor working undercover in the US consulate in Lahore for the brazen day-light cold-blooded murder of two young Pakistani intelligence agents, and the outing, over a short period, of three CIA station chiefs, all working under diplomatic cover, we learned that the US embassy was running a program of civilian bombings designed to foment fratricidal religious conflict in that country.
The US Embassy in Havana in 1961, when it was shut down by the Eisenhower administration
 

CAUTION! To paraphrase Bill O’Reilly, you are now entering a no-censor zone that discusses obscene activity.
 

The Christmas movie from Sony Pictures I want to see is Seth Rogan and James Franco rectally feeding Dick Cheney at the climax of a movie sequel called The Enhanced Interview: Saving the Homeland One Dick At a Time.

Rogan and Franco have a good track record at getting money for movies that break taboos. Both are actor/directors not queasy about biological functions. Rogan co-directed the movie The Interview that caused an international incident by having an actor play the real Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and, among all the dick jokes, exploding his head into biological goo; and Franco just directed an excellent film called Child Of God based on a Cormac McCarthy novel in which a mentally ill, homeless redneck is shown from behind cleaning his dirty ass crack with a stick and, later, having sex with a female corpse for whom he has purchased a red dress. Rectal feeding and/or re-hydration of an actor playing Dick Cheney would not be much of a hurdle for these brave cineastes.

While the North Korea movie may be an adolescent and politically irresponsible comedy, Child of God is a dark, small-budget gem. The kind of biological/psychological frankness the film engages in would have never been shown in theaters or on TV before the cell phone images of torture from Abu Ghraib in Iraq seeped into the American consciousness. Scenes of red-blooded American men and women torturing naked male Iraqi prisoners in one of Saddam Hussein’s hideous dungeons shocked the American aesthetic. Sadistic behavior bordering on sodomy as US military policy? Hey, that doesn’t comport with American values!

But, then again, I’m afraid it does.

Scott Haze in Child of God; Dick Cheney; James Franco, left, and Seth Rogan up the creek in North Korea
 

For this advancement (or degradation) in cultural aesthetics — at its worse, there’s the film series brand Saw — we have to thank the advent of cell phone cameras and government torture facilitators like Dick Cheney, who as a young man was soft, delicate and privileged enough to willfully avoid service in Vietnam, but as an old man with a bum ticker became powerful and ruthless enough to advocate torturing human beings in dungeons with hooks in the ceiling and drains in the floor to whoosh away all the hosed off blood, piss and shit from the previous eight-hour work shift. Cheney is even cold-blooded enough to say on Meet The Press that he doesn’t care that innocent people were tortured under his program: “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.” This is a man comfortable in a secure and luxurious mansion who has never gotten any torturous biological matter on him.

I’m white.
But I can’t breathe.
I’m suffocating.
Maybe I’m dying.
 

I tried to run
But I got caught
Thinking terrible thoughts about my twisted country.
Dangerous and dark thoughts,
Like a German might have thought
When the Nazis were beating up Jews.
And the zeitgeist was shouting at me to stop.
Don’t shoot! I shouted,
Peeing my pants,
I’m white!
I’m the same color as Jesus!
But the zeitgeist
Wasn’t a Christian.
Wasn’t even a white cop.
He was a friggin’ octopus!
And he wasn’t interested in anything I had to say.
I only had enough air to get out one more lie:
I gasped,
America is awesome!
But I was falling
And my sight was obscured by a red curtain
As the zeitgeist pulled me down.

Algiers — The Western Sahara is not just a section of the famous desert that dominates North Africa.

The Western Sahara is a country on the Atlantic Ocean coast of North Africa with the dubious distinction of being the “Last Colony” on the vast continent of Africa. The current colonizer of this mineral-rich nation is the neighboring country of Morocco, which for decades has been conducting a viciously brutal occupation. A long history of human rights violations by Morocco in the Western Sahara have drawn wide condemnation from diverse entities including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United States, ironically an ally of Morocco.

The plight of the Saharawi people, the indigenous population of the Western Sahara, was the focus of a conference in Algiers last weekend that attracted participants from across Africa , Europe and the Americas. That conference featured Saharawians who have been tortured and imprisoned by Moroccan authorities as well as experts who detailed various facets of Morocco’s illegal occupation, including that country’s failures to comply with United Nations mandates to conduct a voter referendum for determining the future of Western Sahara.

“Morocco confiscated our land. Built a wall dividing our country. It violates human rights while plundering our natural resources,” Mohammed Abdelaziz, the President of the Western Sahara, said during his address at the opening ceremony of the 5th International Conference of Algiers. Called “The Right of Peoples to Resistance: the case of the Saharawi People,” the conference was held at Algeria’s Palace of Culture in the nation’s capital.

“We need a free, fair and just referendum to exercise the right of self- determination to create an independent state” President Abdelaziz said.
Mohammed Abdelaziz, president of the Western Sahara, and head of movement engaged in Africa's last anti-colonial struggle (photo by Linn Washington)
 

Sometimes you really don’t need to write much to do an article on something. Writing about the inanity of Justice Antonin Scalia, the ethics-challenged, lard-bottomed, right-wing anchor of the Supreme Court, is one of those times.

Scalia just weighed in on the CIA torture issue in an interview for a Swiss broadcast network, saying that he didn’t think there was anything in the US Constitution that would prohibit torture under all circumstances, and positing a situation — a suspect with knowledge about a hidden nuke to be detonated in Los Angeles — that he suggested would make torture an acceptable tactic.

First of all, if Scalia can say “I don’t know what article of the Constitution” would “contravene” harsh treatment of suspected terrorists, he is either terminally ignorant, or has figured out some talmudic-like gymnastic reasoning to allow him to argue that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment doesn’t apply to torture. Perhaps he thinks that punishment can only refer to what is meted out to a person after conviction, but as he surely knows, for literally centuries the court has been clear that the treatment of suspects is also covered by that ban. Furthermore, the Founders Scalia claims to have such respect for, clearly had in mind the abuses British colonial forces visited upon arrested and detained colonists when they wrote that ban into the Bill of Rights.

But beyond that, the argument about a suspect who knew about a hidden nuke, or an Anthrax or Small Pox bomb, which is hardly an original idea of Scalia’s, has always been silly. Establishing that torture is always illegal, and that its perpetrators are committing a heinous crime, would never stop some cop or FBI agent or CIA agent from torturing such a suspect if he or she thought it could produce the information needed to find and prevent such a bomb. Who would think about future punishment in such a crisis?

Nobody. And if such a situation came to pass, and the bomb was found and disarmed, no one would ever prosecute whoever came up with the information that saved the day. So it’s not a valid argument against an absolute ban on torture at all.

What should be banned is idiots, jerks and self-aggrandizing ideologues like Scalia on the High Court — especially ones who are happy to accept gifts from people who have cases pending before the court.

Justice Antonin Scalia, the intellectual light-weight who anchors the right-wing of the Supreme Court