This Can't Be Happening!

To: Jofi Joseph, Washington DC

Dear Mr Joseph:

I read of your firing as a low-level national security adviser in the White House thanks to your “snarky” tweeting about various Obama administration officials above you in the pecking order.

I understand you are contrite and a bit embarrassed and said that your tweeting escapade as @NatSecWonk started as innocent fun and turned into something else. Even the New York Times reporters who told your story on their front page today seemed hard pressed not to treat it comically. The headline was: “White House Official’s Career Twitters Out.” Twittering out is hardly a dignified downfall. In the annals of schadenfreude over the downfall of promising national office holders via the internet, at least you did not tweet anyone images of your penis.

Jofi Joseph

From here on out I’m going to treat your situation seriously, since I feel your predicament is instructive. I know you and your wife certainly see it as serious, since she remains on the Washington national-security-state power merry-go-round.

On the Rachel Maddow Show Wednesday night, yours was not the only Twitter-based story. Maddow gave much more time to, and was quite laudatory about, a tweeter named Tom Matzzie, a man who once worked for MoveOn.org.

Mattzie made blow-by-blow tweets from a Washington to New York Acela train of a loud, off-the-record cell phone interview being given in the seat directly behind him. The interviewee, Michael Hayden, as you must know, was the NSA director under President Clinton and CIA director under Presidents Bush and Obama; he now works for the Chertoff Group, which according to its website, “provides business and government leaders with the same kind of high-level, strategic thinking and diligent execution that have kept the American homeland and its people safe since 9/11.”

When Hayden was informed via his cell phone that an ordinary schmuck had just done a surveillance job on him from the seat ahead, the master spy introduced himself and graciously posed with Matzzie for a photograph. As any good spy knows, it’s important to always remain cool and make the best of things when caught with your pants down. (The photo is at the end of this missive.)

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.

  Ed Forchion, recognized as America’s foremost black marijuana legalization activist, freely admits that he “agitates” people – powerful people from prosecutors to politicians and even more mainstream anti-pot prohibition advocates who bristle at his antics.

The activism of Forchion, often outrageous like his March 2000 stunt of smoking a marijuana joint inside the New Jersey State Assembly chamber while dressed in bold black and white stripped jailhouse garb, has drawn praise and prison terms.

Forchion’s activism has produced a few legal victories like a February 2003 federal court ruling enhancing Free Speech rights for all pot legalization advocates. That ruling also freed Forchion from a prison stint arising from his clash with NJ probation authorities over their demands that he stop publicly criticizing Drug War racism.

Forchion’s imprisonments during the past year arising from yet another pot possession conviction triggerd him to pursue perhaps his most bodacious act to date, another attempt to formally change his name, this time seeking a name change to: Just a Nigger.

Protesting for pot legalization gets him treated like "Just a Nigger" so Ed Forchion is making that his name (click photo to visit his website)

For the past week I’ve been talking with anyone I could shoehorn about the shooting death of Miriam Carey on the streets of Washington DC. As with any homicide — and that’s how it would be classified for the autopsy — there are differing opinions and mitigating circumstances to consider.

For instance, the mitigating circumstance most articulated by officialdom and the media to justify the killing of Miriam Carey is that the threat of terrorism is in the forefront of the minds of police officers in the nation’s capital, where 17 days earlier a random gunman had murdered 12 people at the Navy Yard.

Miriam Carey

In the case of Miriam Carey, 34, the consensus seems to be her killing was a tragedy in which police officers were justified in killing her. They were, accordingly, honored on the floor of Congress for doing their duty during a time of great national stress aggravated by an unprecedented shutdown of the federal government. The capital police officers who killed Miriam Carey were working without pay. The media news cycle has moved on, and the government shutdown remains the big story.

John Constantino on fire on the Washington Mall; his last words were about "voting rights"

Likewise, we didn’t hear much about John Constantino. The day after Miriam Carey’s killing, the 64-year-old Mount Laurel, New Jersey, man, also an African American, drove to the capital city, and at about 4:30 in the afternoon, on the mall between the Air & Space Museum and the National Gallery, sat down on the grass facing the Capitol building, poured gasoline all over himself and set himself ablaze. Witnesses reported he said something about “voters’ rights” or “voting rights.” The married father of three grown children died later in the hospital. A lawyer hired by Constanino’s family said his act was not political and that he was mentally ill.

Constantino’s neighbor, Joe Horner, told a different story to a New York Daily News reporter. Constantino, Horner said, “didn’t like the government for some reason. … He said to me, ‘They’re no good. They don’t look out for us and they don’t care about anything but their own pockets.’ ”

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

Recently, Richard Stallman published an article in Wired about Free and Open Source Software and its alternative, “Proprietary Software”. As he has for 30 years now, he vigorously called for the use and defense of FOSS and warned about the nefarious nature of Proprietary.

As if the worthy Stallman needed an illustration to dramatize his point, the Adobe Corporation last week announced that hackers had stolen from its servers the password and credit card information, of almost three million of its users as well as a huge amount of code from some of its programs — probably ColdFusion and Adobe Acrobat. That theft is potentially the most serious breach of user information in recent history and, because of the popularity of Acrobat, could prove devastating to computer users world-wide. Such theft is, in the end, only possible with Proprietary Software.

Right and wrong: Richard Stallman and Acrobat's logo
 

Since the spectacular theft is being reported (or under-reported) in ways that miss some important issues, analysis is called for, starting with the pertinent definitions.