This Can't Be Happening!

(This article was written as an exclusive for Counterpunch magazine, where the full story can be read, along with photos of the crime scene). It is the first of a three-part series.
 

Ibragim Todashev, 27, a Russian immigrant friend of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was shot and killed last May 22 in the middle of the night by the FBI at the violent end of a five-hour interrogation in his home in Orlando. Now the FBI, ten months later, is claiming that its agent was attacked by Todashev, and was justified in killing him. But a Counterpunch investigation raises grave questions about what really happened in that apartment.

While it’s of course conceivable that this was just a hugely botched investigation by two inept and bungling FBI agents, our investigation suggests that Todashev may have been killed trying to flee a brutal interrogation, and that he may have even been deliberately executed by the FBI.

Questions raised in this case range from why FBI agents failed to follow Bureau’s long-established interrogation protocol, leaving just one agent to question the witness, to why a suspect known to be a competitive mixed martial arts expert was left unrestrained during a hostile and high-pressure interrogation, how Todashev was shot, including a bullet to the top of the head, and finally to how he could have been shot seven times, clearly with intent to kill given where he was hit, if he was considered by the Bureau to be a key witness in the Boston Marathon case.

The exit from the room of the interrogation into the foyer to the front door, showing where Todashev was shot and died, and a photo of his body, as it appeared when provided by the coronor to his widow, showing the FBI shot to the head
 

The FBI and other law enforcement sources, as I reported earlier in the online publication WhoWhatWhy.com, have leaked a series of widely at odds explanations to selected mainstream news media organizations as to how and why Todashev was shot and killed. Initially Bureau sources leaked to reporters that he had variously grabbed a sword off the wall, or left the room and returned from the kitchen with a pipe or a broomstick, or alternatively with a knife.

All of those leaked stories foundered on common sense. The “sword” in question turns out to have been a decorative scmitar with no sharp edge, hung on the wall and with a broken handle. There was no explanation for how the agent, who may have been accompanied in the room by a Massachusetts State Trooper, could have allowed Todashev to leave his seat and go to that sword, or alternatively to the kitchen area of the room to pick up any of the other alleged implements of destruction. Ultimately, the Bureau conceded that Todashev had actually been unarmed the whole time.

You might not know it from watching TV news, but FBI statistics show that crime in the U.S.—including violent crime—has been trending steadily downward for years, falling 19% between 1987 and 2011. The job of being a police officer has become safer too, as the number of police killed by gunfire plunged to 33 last year, down 50% from 2012, to its lowest level since, wait for it,1887, a time when the population was 75% lower than it is today.

So why are we seeing an ever increasing militarization of policing across the country?

Given the good news on crime, what are we to make of a report by the Justice Polivcy Institute, a not-for-profit justice reform group, showing that state and local spending on police has soared from $40 billion in 1982 to more than $100 billion in 2012. Adding in federal spending on law enforcement, including the FBI, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Drug Enforcement Agency and much of the Homeland Security Department budget, as well as federal grants to state and local law enforcement more than doubles that total. A lot of that money is simply pay and benefits. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that the ranks of state and local law enforcement personnel alone swelled from 603,000 to 794,000 between 1992 and 2010. That’s about two-thirds as many men and women as the entire active-duty US military.
What these statistics make clear is that policing in America is ramping up even as the crime rate is falling.

For example, SWAT team actions have soared from hundreds annually in the 1970s to thousands a year in the ‘80s to 40,000 a year by 2005, according to a report by the libertarian CATO institute. The author of that report, and academic experts studying the issue, now estimate there may have been as many as 70,000-80,000 such raids in 2013 alone. Hard figures are not available: the Justice Department does not keep records on SWAT-team usage…

Cops attack unemployed workers in New York's Tompkins Square in 1874

 
For the rest of this article, please go to WhoWhatWhy News, where it originally appeared.

 
For all practical purposes, John McCain is the equivalent in our culture to those ancient robed ayatollahs in Iran we damn for standing in the way of democratic change.

The 77-year-old McCain parlayed his suffering as a Vietnam War POW into one of the more durable political careers in Washington. In his heart, he may feel he should be President of the United States instead of his 2008 opponent Barack Obama. Thanks to all this political history and current US cultural realities, McCain plays the role of a wise, spiritual “ayatollah” of militarism. Instead of peace-making and the progressive change that would strengthen the nation from the bottom up, we get elite militarist braggadocio that strengthens the top ranks of an already top-heavy order and ratchets up costly war fever.

Senator John McCain

For many, McCain’s old-warrior message is mythic and laden with spiritual gravitas. Like the ayatollahs do on the international stage, McCain takes the pulse of our imperial culture, then assumes a hard and fast line that intensely polarizes conditions and, in doing so, taps into all the usual American symbols of exceptionalism. He just did this masterfully in a New York times op-ed that plays shamelessly to the far-right imperial class.

It also ratchets up a condition of belligerence and reminds me of the slogan from Veterans For Peace that always resonates with me at times like this: “Wars are easy to start and very difficult to stop.” As we know, that was true in Vietnam, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. None of those adventures ended well or in our favor. All that this kind of easy militarization of an international problem does is, one, appease hyperventilating militarists and, two, slow the demonized enemy down a little.

Chances are the exact same less-than-perfect ending of such military adventures could have been reached through diplomacy. The militarist right will, of course, chuckle confidently that this is naive liberalism, even appeasement. The trouble is a diplomatic alternative entails some element of humility, which is unknown to the elite militarist class. So the diplomatic option never is given a chance to work. It’s damned without ever being tested.

Rio de Janeiro in 1964 remained the de facto seat of the Brazilian government and home to its corps of international diplomats. Despite the fact that Brasilia, the modernist architectural ghost town erected in the scrublands of the country’s isolated interior was designated Brazil’s new capital in 1960, the foot dragging went on for years before the embassies and the governing bureaucrats accepted the inevitability that they would have to, not just occasionally commute between Rio and the new capital, but actually decamp and live there. Think of the founders and the whole apparatus of State being forced to abandon cosmopolitan Philadelphia in 1800 for swampy, malarial Washington. By 1964 standards, going to Brasilia, today Brazil’s 4th largest city, was worse.

Thus, when the coup unfolded on March 31, 1964 that brought down the democratically elected government of Joao (Jango) Goulart, American diplomats were still pulling strings on behalf of the Putschists from their comfortable embassy board rooms on the Avenida Woodrow Wilson in downtown Rio. And yours truly, a wet behind the ears undergraduate at the local Jesuit university for a year, in a Zelig-like coincidence, witnessed the military takeover from a window facing Copacabana beach in a building where the deposed president himself had an apartment.

Michael Uhl in March 1964 looking out a window onto the Copacabana, pictured at right circa 1960s.

The dictatorship and its afterglow endured a quarter century until the direct election by popular vote of Fernando Collor de Mello in 1989, following the creation a year earlier of a new constitution, by far Brazil’s most democratic. Even then the military hovered in the wings having inserted into the new charter, according to historian Daniel Aarao Reis, the authoritarian wedge “of the military’s right to intervene in the national political life if they are summoned by the head of one of the three branches of government.”

Now, with twenty five years of democratic governments under their belt, and a flow of peaceful transitions from one presidential term to the next – including the resignation of President Collor under investigation for corruption – a Brazilian electorate many times larger than the one that brought Jango to office in 1961, might finally imagine itself immune from any future threat to democratic rule by the military, despite the menacing clause that lies dormant in their constitution.

Of all the people to come to the rescue of the Constitution, who would have thought it would be Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA).

Feinstein, after all, as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009, has yet to see an NSA violation of the Constitution, an invasive spying program or a creative “re-interpretation” of the law that she hasn’t applauded as being lawful and “needed” to “keep people safe.”

Feinstein, too, was one of the first to fly into paroxysms of outrage at National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, absurdly condemning him for being a “traitor,” though she surely knows that the Constitution very narrowly defines treason as “levying war” against the US, or providing “aid and comfort to the enemy.” As Snowden surely did not “levy war” against anyone but perhaps the NSA, and even according to the government did not provide any information to America’s “enemies” (whoever that may be in today’s unipolar world, while he may have “stolen” NSA information, he didn’t by any stretch, commit “treason.”

Feinstein, lastly, in her position as chair of the Senate Military Construction and Appropriations Subcommittee, grew rich thanks to military contracts directed to her husband, private equity and real-estate tycoon Richard Blum. (It wasn’t just military contracts either. He also managed to get to get the contract to manage the private sale of all the Postal Service properties being unloaded in tCongress’s ongoing dismantling of the national mail system.)

That is to say, this is a woman who clearly puts herself and her need for money (she’s reportedly worth over $80 million, though for most of her life she has done nothing but work as a salaried politician) first and the needs of her country somewhere way down near the floor. (Maybe that’s why she can’t understand Snowden, who put his life on the line for a principle, and not for personal gain — something that’s probably beyond Feinstein’s comprehension.)

And yet after years of CIA criminality, including torture of terror suspects, even those against whom there was no evidence, lying to Congress, and manufacturing of evidence that led to the disastrous and criminal invasion of Iraq — for all which there were no consequences in the Congress or in her Senate committee — it was Sen. Feinstein who finally called out the CIA for spying and lying.

Sen. Feinstein, busy using her political position to enrich herself, has been a spy agency apologist, but now she's attacking the CIA (Roots Action photo)

Federal prosecutors last week dropped several of the most significant charges facing Internet activist and journalist Barrett Brown — charges that could have drawn a jail sentence of 105 years.

The dropped charges, essentially “fraud” and “theft”, involved Brown’s publishing a website link to a trove of documents (from WikiLeaks) detailing the activities of defense and surveillance contractor Stratfor Global Intelligence. That highly controversial charge — accusing Brown of something most Internet activists (and many users) do all the time — sparked an avalanche of protest by journalists of every stripe, including mainstream publications.

Understandably, those who felt threatened by these draconian government actions were more than pleased by the decision to drop the charges and it was hailed as a victory for free speech and a free Internet.
 

Barrett Brown Outside the Manning Trial: a link the government understands

But several charges against Brown remain, including conspiracy to publish personal information, “obstruction of justice” and threatening an FBI agent. These charges, after the theft charges were dropped, become even more absurd and vindictive than they originally were. But they are still very serious: if convicted, Brown could face 70 years in prison. So the question now becomes why the government is pushing these charges after it decided to drop the others?

The answer may provide an insight into the way our government is seeking to silence journalists and freeze on-line activists. Based on the charges dropped and those retained, the Brown case has gone from an attack on a powerful Internet investigative technique called “crowd-sourcing” to an attack on the Internet’s real power: crowd response.

 
[Listen to John Grant discuss this piece with Dave Lindorff on the new Progressive Radio Network program “ThisCantBeHappening!” archived here.]
 

Making political sense out of the events in Ukraine and Crimea has become great sport. Does it mean a new Cold War? Is Vladimir Putin a better, more “potent” man than Barack Obama? Who has bigger balls?

We’re naturally reminded of those twisted times when the post-World War Two imperial United States stood toe-to-toe with the imperial Soviet Union. It was Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev fighting for the souls of smaller, peripheral nations like Vietnam, where, in lieu of direct confrontation, Indochinese peasants were slaughtered in the millions and 58,000 Americans died.

Today is different. The Cold War is over. The Soviet Socialist Empire is gone. The American Capitalist Empire remains. We’re told ad nauseum it’s all because of Ronald Reagan. Most Americans have internalized the imperial reality as The Myth of American Exceptionalism and accept the nation’s natural right to intervene anywhere on the globe. Though the weaponry has significantly advanced, the rhetoric hasn’t changed much from the days of Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote in 1910 in his little book called American Problems about “The Management of Small States Which Are Unable to Manage Themselves.”

President Obama under a painting of the ballsy Teddy Roosevelt, and TR's book cover — with fasces

He emphasized that the United States had no interest in “interfering” with poor countries. “The needs of civilization and humanity are sufficiently met by protecting them from outside aggression.” We need to protect them from others.

That, of course, is the reason we interfered in the lives of the Vietnamese for 30 years once Truman betrayed our Vietnamese ally and handed their country back to the French in 1945. Of course, Truman did it to “protect” the Vietnamese from communists. If you watched Rachel Maddow’s recent MSNBC documentary on why the Bush regime, lies aside, really invaded and occupied Iraq, it’s the same theme. We invaded Iraq for oil. But not for ourselves. No. So “he” wouldn’t control the oil. He being Saddam Hussein. We did it for the Iraqi people. Two oilmen who somehow got into the White House sent American soldiers to kill and die to gain control of Iraqi oil. There’s no argument on that score anymore. Like the peace movement said from the beginning, it was War For Oil. Of course, while Bush overthrew the Saddam government, he also empowered the seventy percent Shiite element aligned with his bitterest enemy, Iran.

Hear the latest ‘ThisCantBeHappening’ program on the Progressive Radio Network.

Host Dave Lindorff, founder of this newssite, interviews Progressive Literary Agent Francis Goldin, a life-long fighter for freedom, democracy and socialism in America, talks about her life of struggle, and about her three goals at the age of 89. She also talks about one of those projects that has already come to fruition: publication of the book Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA, which features chapters on what’s wrong with capitalism, on how socialism would change everything from criminal justice to the environment to education to health care to work and to love, and on how we get from here to there.

Authors of the book include people like Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Bill Ayers, Frances Fox-Piven, and Lindorff himself (writing on health care under socialism).

To hear the one-hour interview, which was broadcast live on PRN.fm last Wednesday, just click on the image of Goldin’s new book below.

Listen to the 'ThisCantBeHappening' radio show, with host Dave Lindorff, Wednesdays at 5 ET or on the web at “PRN.fm Also, remember to tune in this Wednesday when Dave interviews fellow TCBH! journalist John Grant about Ukraine and America’s global war-mongering.

Members of the U.S. Senate, who now of late are blasting Russia for violating “the rule of law’ in the Ukraine, trashed that same fundamental legal precept during a vote to reject the man President Obama recently nominated to head the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department.

Senate Republicans, with the support of a handful of Democrats, including Pennsylvania’s two Senators, rejected the nomination of Debo Adegbile, followed a venomous, falsehood-filled campaign against him launched by the National Fraternal Order of Police and exploited by conservative opponents of Obama (see the article below by my colleague Dave Lindorff).

The flashpoint Adegbile opponents used to frame their opposition to him was this highly qualified lawyer’s indirect and very remote involvement in appeals filed on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Philadelphia journalist who was convicted for the 1981 slaying of a Philadelphia policeman. Abu-Jamal’s contentious conviction has been condemned by entities as diverse as Nelson Mandela,, the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus and Amnesty International, a widely admired legal organization that produced a lengthy analysis back in 2000 declaring his trial and appeals process “deeply flawed” and saying it “clearly failed to meet the minimum international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal proceedings.”

Adegbile worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, an organization that officially entered the Abu-Jamal case in January 2011, more than nine years after a federal district declared Abu-Jamal’s controversial death sentence unconstitutional. That federal court action, upheld by a federal appeals court panel and ultimately by the U.S. Supreme Court, led to Abu-Jamal’s sentence being automatically converted to life in prison much, to the chagrin of police unions in Philadelphia and beyond, who had for years been campaigning for the former Black Panther Party member’s execution. Adegbile, a voting rights law expert for the LDF, was not the lead (or even backup) LDF lawyer on the Abu-Jamal case.

Protest outside federal courthouse in downtown Philadelphia demanding the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is widely considered a ‘political prisoner’ in America (Linn Washington photo)

Maureen Faulkner, widowed as a young wife by the shooting death of her husband, Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, has spent the over 32 years since his death on a crusade, first to have the man convicted of his death, Mumia Abu-Jamal, executed, and then, since the overturning of his death sentence on Constitutional grounds, trying to ensure that he remains a pariah in prison.

She has been assisted in her quest by a labor organization and political lobby, the Fraternal Order of Police, which has helped her to widely publicize her claims, often factually challenged, that Abu-Jamal was fairly tried and found guilty of murder, and that he is, moreover, a monster deserving the worst that the US penal system can dish out.

One of the FOP’s favorite claims in that campaign of vilification is a story that the widow Faulkner also tells at every opportunity, namely that during the early days of the 1982 murder trial, when the prosecutor held up the slain officer’s bloody shirt to display the bullet holes in it, Abu-Jamal, seated at the defense table, turned around and “smiled at me.”

It is, to be sure, a disturbing image.

It is also not possible to have occurred.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), rejected Civil Right Division nominee Debo Adegbile,Maureen Faulkner and Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA)