This Can't Be Happening!

On the first day of the federal government shut-down, as hundreds of tourists were turned away from the shuttered Liberty Bell and other fabled sites within the Independence National Historical Park in downtown Philadelphia, Richard Dyost stood near the building housing the Bell and received a big laugh.

Dyost, wearing a tall hat featuring marijuana leaves, was among a group that included site-visit-spurned tourists, who watched federal park rangers and Philadelphia police get ‘punked’ like the people once targeted for pranks on the defunct cable television program named “Punk’d.” These particular law enforcers were pranked by protestors opposed to the federal government’s prohibition of pot.

Pro-pot protestors had announced a smoke-out at the Liberty Bell for the afternoon of Tuesday, October 1.

Park rangers (working despite the government shut-down), Philadelphia police, as well as representation from the U.S. Attorneys Office in Philadelphia, assembled to arrest protestors attempting to smoke the illegal substance – an enforcement spectacle that has occurred with regularity over the past few months during monthly pro-pot demonstrations outside the Liberty Bell.

Weed protester Richard Dyost pulled a fast one on Park police at a protest on Philadelphia's Independence Mall

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

ThisCantBeHappening! just into its fourth year of publication, has learned that we have won our fourth Project Censored Award, this time for Dave Lindorff’s article Incidents raise suspicions on motive: Killing of Journalists by US Forces a Growing Problem, published in TCBH! on Nov. 22, 1012.

In a press release headlined The News that Didn’t Make the News, announcing release of this year’s book on the year’s most censored news, Censored 2014, Project Censored writes that the Committee to Protect Journalist had noted that the killing of journalists had risen 40% in 2012 over 2011, and had published a risk list of the most dangerous places to work as a journalist (Brazil, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, and Ecuador topped the list), and went on to say:
 

“The New York Times ran a story on the CPJ report on February 15, 2013, noting the alarming rise in the number of journalists killed and imprisoned during 2012. However, the Times’ report did not address the possible UN resolution or freedom of press as a transnational right.

“Dave Lindorff, of ThisCantBeHappening!, writes that ‘the incidence of journalists killed by US forces in recent US conflicts has been much, much greater than it ever was in earlier wars, such as the one in Vietnam, or in Korea or World War II,’ begging the question of whether some of the deaths have been ‘deliberate, perhaps with the intent of keeping journalists in line.'”
 

We’re proud to be operating a collectively-run news organization that, despite its small size (just a crew of seven) and limited resources (our annual budget approaches $4000!), we are averaging one Project Censored award per year, so far.

TCHB! wins a fourth Project Censored Award, and publication in this year's list of the top 25 censored stories of 2012-13 (click on image to buy the book)

 
All we are saying is give peace a chance
– John Lennon
 

Whether war or cooperation is the more dominant trait of humanity is one of the oldest questions in human discourse. There are no satisfying answers for either side exclusively, which seems to suggest the answer is in the eternal nature of the debate itself.

David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist. In an op-ed in The New York Times called “Are We Hard-Wired For War?” he tells a powerful story from Cherokee legend. A girl goes to her grandfather and tells him of a dream she had of two wolves viciously fighting. He tells her that her dream represents the “two forces within each of us struggling for supremacy, one embodying peace and the other war.”

But, grandfather, she asks, who wins?

His answer: “The one you feed.”

I’m a Vietnam veteran and have been a member of Veterans For Peace for 28 years. In the 1990s, the organization took up the theme Abolish War!

I could never quite absorb what that meant. I always wanted to know who was going to hold the gun to the heads of the war-mongers of the world? Now, c’mon you guys, just stop that! The idea is still alive in the peace movement, as in the new book by David Swanson called War No More: The Case For Abolition.

President Obama, Iranian President Rouhani and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the UN Tuesday

I enthusiastically share the sentiments of the Abolish War! movement but doubt its effectiveness. Non-violence, in Gandhi’s sense as a “truth force,” is a powerful political tool to oppose unjust power, but how does anyone abolish war and make it just go away? War, by definition, would seem to trump such good-intentioned legislation. War isn’t something that can be ordered out of existence; it has to be wooed and coaxed into submission by forces working for peace. Fears have to be allayed. Furies have to be soothed.

Imagine U.S. House Speaker John Boehner blasted on weed.

Given Boehner’s teary-eyed trait, he’d probably cry uncontrollably when high on pot alternating his crocodile tears with hysterical laughter…perhaps even laughing at some of that dumb shi-tuff he and his GOP colleagues constantly do on Capitol Hill.

Imagining a stoner Boehner

With Boehner and his GOP congressional confederates battling the Obama White House over federal budget expenditures and debt ceiling limits, there could be value in putting pot legalization into this partisan wrangling if Boehner is honest when claiming these fiscal imbroglios are really about federal government expenditures exceeding revenue.

Putting an end to the federal government’s failed pot prohibition policies, now nearing the eighty-year mark, would provide tremendous sources of new revenue. The federal government could save the estimated $10-billion-plus now spent annually on just law enforcement. The federal government could reap additional billions from taxing what experts estimate is the now untaxed $113-billion per year illegal marijuana industry. Plus ending prohibition would save millions now spent on the anti-pot propaganda oozing from government agencies.

The failed 'War' on Drugs; looking for drugs on the Mexican border

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

This article originally appeared in WhoWhatWhy
 

The US is demanding, in negotiations at the UN, that all Syrian chemical weapons, stocks and production facilities be eliminated by June 30 of next year. This shockingly short deadline has an element of hypocrisy, because the US itself has been dragging its feet and incredibly slow about eliminating its own stocks of chemical weapons.

US Secretary of State John Kerry has referred to Syria as having one of the largest chemical stockpiles in the world. But the US and Russia both still have stocks of chemicals many times as large. Syria’s neighbor Israel, which refuses to admit it has the weapons and has yet to ratify the treaty banning them, is suspected of also having a large arsenal.

The US caches, at 3100 tons, are three times as large as Syria’s reported 1000 tons.

16 years after it signed a UN Treaty requiring it to eliminate all chemical weapons, the US still has a stockpile three times Syria’s, and insists it will take another decade to get rid of it all (Pentagon photo)
 

The United Nations Convention on Chemical Weapons, which Washington ratified in 1997, required signers to eliminate all stocks of chemical arms by 2012. But the US, like Russia, requested an extension to 2023. It claimed that “difficulties involving old chemical warheads” and environmental issues were making it impossible to comply within the framework of the treaty.

Destroying the stocks is no small task. The Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot, in Pueblo, Colorado, still houses an estimated 2611 tons of mustard gas and the Blue Grass Army Depot, Blue Grass, Kentucky, may have on site 523 tons of sarin (the same weapons whose use in Syria caused such an uproar), VX and mustard gas agent. That’s a whole lot of poison to dispose of safely.

Some $10 billion has been spent to date on the process of locating and destroying the US chemical arsenal—and the ultimate cost may top $30 billion. According to the US Army Chemical Materials Agency (USCMA), two huge destruction facilities are being constructed at a cost of billions of dollars each at the Pueblo and Blue Grass sites, by war profiteer extraordinaire Bechtel Parsons.

In other words, disposing of chemical weapons is not something you just do, like snapping your fingers…
 

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

Last week, Verizon, the telephone giant, went to court to accuse the Federal Communications Commission of “overstepping its authority” and reverse the authority’s over-step. It’s a legal wrangle that, bottled and distributed, would be a safe substitute for sleeping pills.

Lurking behind the nearly unintelligible and ridiculously referential courtroom arguments, however, is a clear picture of the difference between the corporate vision of the Internet’s future and the way the rest of us want it. At this point, corporations are pouring resources into imposing their vision of the Internet and, if they do, there won’t be an Internet as we know it.

This is the debate around net neutrality, one of those terms everyone’s heard but most of us don’t really completely understand.

In a nutshell, the battle is over the use of “broadband”, the faster Internet service that is the norm in many places in this country and soon will be nationwide. With broadband you can access just about anything that anyone can post on the Internet in close to real-time and its potential for ever-increasing speed makes it the track on which the train of technological innovation travels. Enter the corporations.

A Pro-Neutrality Demo: The Slogan Says It All
 

Major telecommunications companies (like Verizon and Comcast) say they should be able to charge you more money for being able to access certain kinds of content through their broadband connections and are pushing for the right to “scale” their systems with different prices for different levels of access. It’s sort of like cable television: you rent the cable hook-up (and pay for it monthly) and the company gives you access to certain channels. If you want to watch the latest movies or sports or other “interest specific” channels, you pay an additional monthly fee for a “package” that includes those channels.

The Internet currently operates differently. You pay for your hook-up and access anything you want. True enough, some websites charge you for content but it’s the website that’s doing that. You may not be able to access the content of a website but you can get to it. That is “net neutrality”; it means everyone has the same level of access on the Internet. It’s “neutral”.

That, in fact, is the very purpose of the Internet and so Internet activists have always been fierce in defending it. Part of the problem is that, technologically, if a company has the power to block certain content (like movies), it has the power to block any content (like your website) and that’s a power Internet activists don’t want us to give up.