Category: Uncategorized

 
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
– D.H. Lawrence

 
The moderate conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote a column titled “Men on the Threshold” employing a famous image of John Wayne in the 1956 film The Searchers as a symbol of the American male worker facing a growing crisis of unemployment.

Brooks certainly has the right to do what he likes with such mythic imagery. And he writes, “Classics can be interpreted in different ways.” But in this instance, in the name of truth and justice, he should be brought up on charges of premeditated and aggravated misuse of myth.

David Brooks and Ethan Edwards "on the threshold"

Ethan Edwards is considered Wayne’s best acting role. There’s none of the usual John Wayne swaggering big-man nonsense with sidekicks like Dean Martin or Fabian. Here, he’s a mean and cruel sonuvabitch who sets out with a younger man across the barren Texas plains to find a girl kidnapped by Indians whose family they had massacred. The search lasts seven years. We learn he intends to kill the girl (Natalie Wood) once he finds her, since she has been ruined by becoming the sexual mate of an Indian.

In the end, Edwards softens enough to return the girl to her family. In the famous scene at the end, Edwards stands silhouetted in the doorway of a rough home with the dusty Texas plains behind him. While the family is rejoicing and welcoming its lost daughter back into the fold of civilization, Edwards stands alone, apparently unable to enter. As the popular interpretation goes, his hard cold-bloodedness was what brought the girl back to civilization, but that same violent temperament won’t permit him to fit into the domestic scene inside. He turns and walks off, presumably to find other frontiers.

No argument, this is a powerful image of American history and Manifest Destiny from a truly magnificent classic film. But, let’s not kid ourselves and New York Times readers, it has nothing to do with the plight of American male workers in 2013. It’s a case of expropriating a classic, tough masculine image from popular culture to represent a theme Brooks wants to emphasize. At best, it’s facile; at worst, cynically opportunistic.

The tumble of revelations and developments involving the Internet has produced a pastiche of truths that, when examined closely, show links between what might usually be considered separate news stories.

This week we encounter a stunning ruling by the judge in the Bradley Manning case while, in a totally different setting, the people who come as close to governance of the World Wide Web as we get can’t decide on a major Internet issue that significantly affects your freedom.

On Thursday, the Manning case’s presiding judge Colonel Denise Lind — who is also determining the verdict — announced that she is going to consider the government’s contention that Manning was “aiding the enemy” when he blew his whistle. The defense had moved that she drop that charge. Yesterday, my colleague John Grant wrote incisively on the social and political impact of this ruling. I want to say a bit about the view of the Internet that drives Colonel Lind’s decision.

Meanwhile, the W3C (short of World Wide Web Consortium), which is is as close as we come to a world “authority” on web browser standards, continues to grapple with a major issue popularly called “Do Not Track”. It’s an attempt by the Consortium to agree on “standards” (the do-and-don’t rules for web development) for tracking: the way that somebody you don’t know, have never heard of and have certainly given no permission to is recording your every move on the Web and doing whatever the heck it wants with that information.

The Elusive Don't Track Option and Judge Denise Lind (sketch by Clark Stoeckley, Bradley Manning Support Network)
 

The two developments are linked by a profoundly perverted notion of the Internet and a destructive vision of what it should become. They highlight, taken in tandem, a truly frightening development.

Succintly put, if you have an Internet that acts as it’s supposed to, everybody is going to have access to whatever is published. Effectively, anything you publish on the Internet could, given the right circumstances, “aid” an enemy and you’ll never know it. That’s the character of the Internet — it’s open. On the other hand, it’s also supposed to protect your privacy: what you decide to publish is open, who and what you are isn’t…until they started tracking.

 
We now have clarity from a full-bird colonel in judicial robes that Bradley Manning is to be charged with “aiding the enemy.” OK, not much of a surprise here. Colonel Denise Lind’s ruling seems pretty predictable.

Her ruling may make things simple for all the right-leaning pod-people who salute everything a field grade military officer says, but for the rest of us, it raises a profound and rather perplexing question: Exactly who is the “enemy” in this case?

Court martial scene with Colonel Denise Lind, lower right, and Pvt. Manning in drawings by Clark Stoeckley

The military and intelligence agency brass and their enablers will tell you it’s some nefarious and nebulous network called al Qaeda, which we should all know by now is a substitute for our old Cold War enemies and fictional entities like Spectre in the original Ian Fleming spy pulps. That is, al Qaeda has become The Boogie Man.

American patriots on the right will get no argument from me that there are, indeed, people and affiliations that mean real harm to Americans (including me) and that we need to protect ourselves from them. But that doesn’t address the question whether al Qaeda and other “terrorist” groups are being exploited as the boogie man for the convenience of the Pentagon, the CIA, NSA and demagogues like New York Congressman Peter King.

I fear a lot of “the hunt for al Qaeda” narrative is standard militarist fear-mongering employed to justify embarrassing and often illegal secret behavior that would shrivel up if it were really exposed to the light of day. Boogie men like al Qaeda are also useful to advance the careers and interests of the usual gang of capitalists and oppressive wealthy dominators that made this nation what it is today — the nation that Bill O’Reilly was wondering the other night might be going down the tubes like Old Rome.

Ah, the rule of law. How often we hear our government leaders angrily demand that the rest of the world adhere to this sacred stricture, most recently as it demands that countries — even countries with which the US has signed no extradition treaty like Russia or China — honor the US charges leveled against National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and send him to the US for trial.

But the rule of law, in truth, means little to the US, which routinely thumbs its nose at the whole notion.

Take the case of Robert Seldon Lady, the former CIA station chief in Rome Italy. Lady, along with 21 other CIA operatives, was charged years ago with the illegal 2003 kidnapping off a street in Milan of a man that the US claimed was a suspected terrorist. Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr was thrown into a van and then secretly renditioned first to a secret CIA “black site,” and later to Egyptian police, who, he says, tortured him for the US. Four years later, Nasr was released after an Egyptian court ruled that he was not guilty of anything.

Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr was kidnapped off a Milan street by a gang of CIA agents led by CIA station chief Robert Lady, now convicted, sentenced and being sought by Italy on a fugitive warrant, but protected from extradition by the US

The Snowden saga continues to get weirder.

Let’s just pretend for a moment that the US government has it right, and that Edward Snowden, the renegade CIA and NSA employee who signed up with a government intelligence contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, so as to steal a huge swath of National Security Agency data that has the potential to destroy US intelligence operations around the globe, lay bare the NSA’s secret architecture and alert the world’s terrorists to how they are being monitored, is as vile traitor out to destroy America.
Where is the last place under such circumstances that the US would want him to wind up? For me, I’d say there’d be three of them: Iran, China and Russia.

Trapped in a Moscow airport: Is Russia where the US wants Snowden to end up?

I received the text message from my buddy blasting the acquittal of George Zimmerman minutes before I boarded an airplane in London in route to South Africa.

To say I was not surprised by the acquittal handed down by the predominately white, all-female jury is an understatement.

That verdict freeing wannabe cop Zimmerman, whose self-defense excuse rested on his conflicted claims that he shot a teen through the heart during a confrontation that Zimmerman started – after Zimmerman ignored explicit orders from police to stand-down – is so symbolic of so many structural problems that have corroded the core of American society since its colonial-era start.

Unarmed teen Trayvon Martin was walking to his father’s home after purchasing candy and ice tea when targeted by Zimmerman who – seeing a black teen wearing a hoodie – told police dispatchers Martin was “up to no good” and looked like he was on drugs. Zimmerman’s observations, made at night in the rain, about Martin being up-2-no-good and on-drugs reeked of racial profiling – a fact downplayed by prosecution and studiously avoided by defense during Zimmerman’s trial.

While a part of me wanted to side with my buddy’s ire at Zimmerman’s not even getting a wrist-slap conviction on a lesser charge for his punk admission that he killed a kid who he said beat him up during a scuffle, another side of me remained detached, reminded as I was of the details in so many stories that I’ve covered in thirty-plus years of being a journalist.

I’ve seen too many racially unbalanced juries render acquittal verdicts in too many race-tainted cases where clear evidence of the white defendant’s culpability existed – culpability obscured by lack-luster prosecution and other perverse judicial system procedures/postures.
Travon Martin, 17, slain by a white gunman while buying some candy

In Edward Everett Hale’s short story “The Man Without a Country,” US Army Lt. Philip Nolan, following a court-martial, is exiled from his country, his citizenship snatched away, leaving him doomed to sail the seven seas confined to a Navy vessel, unable to make any country his home. His crime: being seduced by a treacherous leader to betray the US of A, the country of his birth.

Edward Snowden, 30, child of a career Coast Guard officer who signed up in the military after 9-11 to defend his country, later going to work at the CIA and the National Security Agency, was also seduced by treacherous leaders — first President George Bush, and then President Barack Obama–into participating in actions that betrayed his country, actions that breached the First and Fourth Amendments of the US Constitution that as a military officer and later a CIA and NSA employee he had sworn to “uphold and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’

At first glance, we have a case of reality mimicking fiction here, with two once promising young military men being led astray and ending up adrift in a pathetic exile. But in truth, fiction and reality diverge greatly from one another at that point.

Lt. Nolan turns on his homeland and then spends the rest of his misearble life — 55 years — regretting his youthful action.

Snowden, however, gradually woke up to realize he had been deceived by the vile propaganda of a fake “War” on terror, and, in his position at the NSA, came to see that the two men who had been president during his young and impressionable adulthood were shredding the US Constitution, spreading fear among the public in order to be handed the power and the money to build an unimaginably complex and omnipresent secret surveillance program in service to a national security state that was destroying anything to do with real democracy in the United States.
Two men without a country: The fictional Philip Nolan, and the very real Edward Snowden

 
When people think of Florida, they think of oranges and pink flamingos, palm trees and beaches, the blue-green ocean. They think of Disney and margaritas. … But it has a feral heart, a teeming center that would rage out of control if not for the concrete and rebar that keeps it caged.
 
-Lisa Unger, from Black Out
 

As I watched the trial of George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, and absorbed the verdict of six White or Hispanic women jurors, my involvements with race in Florida as a kid all rushed front and center in my mind. The trial was an amazing racial lightning rod saturated with the unpleasant legacy of race in America, especially in the South. It seems appropriate that it unfolded in Florida, which has become the nation’s most bizarre and confused state.

Given this, it’s easy to understand why Seminole County Circuit Judge Debra Nelson sternly kept race out of the trial. In the end, while it may have tempered sensationalism in her court, the decision feels like an example of the problem itself and very much a real shortcoming of the trial. The way things work, thanks to the double jeopardy issue, the State cannot appeal the verdict. Had it gone the other way, appeal geniuses like Alan Dershowitz had already begun working the angles for a lengthy appeal process, like he was ready to do for O.J. Simpson and did for Claus Von Bulow.

As it stands, the only appeal process George Zimmerman has to face is possible threats to his life. His security concerns are no doubt serious; one might say, while he may have “walked,” it might be prudent if he walked fast under an assumed name to a secret location.

Judge Debra Nelson, Trayvon Martin and Trayvon's mother, Sybrina Fulton

The most amazing thing about the trial was that the dead victim seemed to be the one on trial. I was often confused which legal team was the “prosecutor” and which one was the “defense.” It felt to me that the defense attorneys, especially Don West, were acting like prosecutors, while the prosecutors were acting like defense lawyers. As it turned out, the real prosecutors were acting pretty ineffectually in that role. You had to wonder whether this might be because it’s anathema to prosecutors to seriously question the actions or motives of a police officer or — in this case, a “wanna-be cop.”

In an interesting footnote to the case, George’s father, Robert Zimmerman, a full-time magistrate from 2000-2006 in Virginia, wrote an e-book entitled Florida v Zimmerman: Uncovering the Malicious Prosecution of My Son George in which he calls the Congressional Black Caucus a “pathetic, self-serving group of racists… advancing their purely racist agenda.” He also writes that the NAACP “simply promotes racism and hatred for their own, primarily finical [sic], interests.”

Edward Snowden, the bete noir of the US national security state, who has leaked information that the National Security Agency is spying on all electronic communications of Americans, and on hundreds of millions of others around the globe, as well as on the leaders and the embassies of even many US allies, is accepting an offer of political asylum that has been extended by Russia, where he has been spending weeks in limbo in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, unable to fly to asylum elsewhere because of heavy-handed US pressure.

According to an RT-TV report, Snowden, in accepting the Russian offer, will have to abide by a condition set by Russian President Vladimir Putin that he not continue releasing documents harmful to the US.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden with two Russian human rights group activists at Moscow airport press briefing
 

This deal leaves a lot of questions unanswered:

First of all, Snowden has already turned over a huge trove of information to reporters at the Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper in the UK, as well as lesser amounts of documents to Der Spiegel magazine in Germany and to other publications in other countries. It would appear that he can no longer control, at this point, whether or not those news organizations continue to publish articles based on the documents in their possession, It is also unclear what the Russian government response would be concerning Snowden’s protected status should any of those organizations, as is likely, continue to publish embarrassing or damaging disclosures about the NSA. Asked by reporters at an airport press conference whether he would continue to release details about the NSA himself while in Russia, Snowden’s answer was simple: “My job is done.” That “job,” though, was providing the leaked information to reporters. Snowden himself has not publicly disclosed the information.

Snowden also correctly pointed out the distinction between “damaging America,” and exposing the NSA. “No actions I take or plan are meant to harm the US… I want the US to succeed,” he said in answer to a question. Would Putin consider further leaks about the US government’s spying on its own citizens “damaging” to America? Open question.

In any event, Putin has made clear that Russia would never extradite Snowden. As he put it, “Russia has never extradited anyone and is not going to do so. Same as no one has ever been extradited to Russia.” Besides, the cat’s already out of the bag, in terms of the big revelations Snowden made public.

Straphangers in New York City became a mass of unwitting guinea pigs Tuesday in a system-wide test by the New York Police Department and the Brookhaven Lab to determine how successful a terrorist organization could be at poisoning the city’s underground commuters with toxic gas.

According to reports in the local media like the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the test, funded by a $3.4-million grant from the US Department of Homeland Security, involved releasing small amounts of allegedly “harmless” gas into the subway at various places in Manhattan south of 59th Street, and then testing to see how widely and quickly it dispersed through the five boroughs through subway tunnels and in subway cars.

The gas used, called a perfluorocarbon, besides posing a serious threat to the ozone layer that has led to its being largely banned from industrial use, is suspected of causing tumors in animals, and of impacting immune systems and liver and endocrine systems. The odorless chemical is also very long-lasting once absorbed by the body, and while the dispersed gas would in very low and surely harmless concentrations, that might not be the case in the 21 stations where it was being released initially–especially as citizens were not told where the actuall releases were taking place “for security reasons.”

Several such tests are planned over the summer. Tuesday was just test number one.

The real question is why the NYPD, Brookhaven Lab, and the Department of Homeland Security would run such a test in the first place. It’s pretty much a no-brainer that if some terrorist outfit decided to disperse sarin gas into the Times Square subway station at rush hour it would spread mayhem north, south and cross-town in no time. No need for a perfluorocarbon gas test to figure that out. The best I can figure is that Homeland Security, a super-agency created in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, is always looking for ways to boost its budget by spending whatever it can, and by further terrorizing the public into supporting politicians who will keep allocating more money to to the agency year after year.

NYPD and Homeland Security are demonstrating how to poison the city's straphangers