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One thing is clear amidst the shower of confusion and contradiction that bathes the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing: the legal and technological structure of a police state is in place and can be quickly activated. As if on cue, while the hunt for the bombers was ongoing, the House of Representatives obligingly enhanced that police state capability by passing the draconian Cyber Intelligence and Protection Act (CIPA). If approved by the Senate and signed by the President, it will greatly expand the government’s intrusion into all our lives.

It wasn’t a good week for freedom.

State of Seige? Scene from the Watertown Investigation
Images are always important. They frame our memories and memory is the sketch artist of our consciousness. Here’s an image. Boston — an enduring symbol of this country’s democracy, intellectual pursuit and progressive thinking — is deserted because the government won’t let people come out of their homes. Armoured vehicles cruise neighborhoods and people from at least four different agencies or mercenary companies walk the streets with military weapons stopping methodically to pull people from their houses at gunpoint and search them and sometimes their homes. All the while, broad sections of public street and gathering places are under camera surveillance and the government processes that footage and acts on it within hours.

We’re not yet in a police state but we can be with a single command. Last week demonstrated that.

I’m not a conspiracy-minded person, but something definitely stinks about this whole Boston Marathon bombing story.

From what we’re reading about the case, the FBI had for at least two and possibly as many as five years been investigating Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old older brother killed during a shootout between police and the two brothers, Tamerlan and 19-year-old Dzhokhar. They had interviewed Tamerlan in his home, warned him they were watching what he ate, what he looked at on his computer, etc. They knew he had gone to Russia, Dagestan and Chechnya.

Then there’s the money thing. We’re told that Tamerlan had dropped out of community college because of money problems, right? Community college? That costs almost nothing to attend. That’s the whole point of community colleges: everyone can afford them. And he was reportedly only going part-time! But then, the two brothers are driving around in a Mercedes and wearing fancy clothes?

We’re talking about two brothers, both graduates of public school, with a father who was ill and living in Dagestan, who had worked as a curbside mechanic while in the US, and a mother who had a in-home beauty salon business, and these lads somehow were stylish dressers and drove around in an expensive car — expensive to buy even used, and terribly expensive to maintain, too.

Where did all that money come from? We don’t know. Tamerlan was reportedly working at things like delivering pizza during that period This while living with his wife and caring at home for their young daughter, now three. Tamerlan’s artist wife was said to be supporting the struggling family by working “60-80 hours a week” as a home health care aide, one of the lowest-paying jobs you can find, often paying less than minimum wage.

Why is all this troubling? Because time and time again, when purported terrorist plots are “disrupted” and alleged terrorists are arrested, it turns out they are inept dupes who have been led into their “plots” by FBI provocateurs.

A stylishly dressed Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his Mercedes-Benz: hard-luck guy or someone with a government sugardaddy?

The Boston Marathon bombing has already demonstrated the best and the worst of America for all the world to see.

First, let’s talk about the best. When the bombs detonated, despite the shock and the horror of the blown-off legs and arms, and the blood on street and sidewalk, and without knowing what else might be coming, ordinary citizens jumped into action to try and help the gravely wounded and the dying. Average people with no experience in this kind of mayhem stepped up without hesitation to care for strangers, applying tourniquets, carrying people who couldn’t walk to hospital tents, or just holding a hand and calling for help.

People pored over their cellphone photo records and camera files, looking for photos that could help identify the killers. Without their volunteer actions, the police and federal agencies would have had no clue who they were looking for. With them, it was quick work pinpointing and identifying the two men who appear to have placed the two bombs.

Later, while police failed to catch one of the brothers suspected of having been a bomber, despite placing all of metropolitan Boston under a kind of martial law, it was a citizen who, after the so-called “lock-down” of the city had been lifted, spotted the suspect and alerted police.

Now for the worst.

Let’s start with the martial law. Okay, it wasn’t a declaration, but with police and the Mayor ordering everyone in Boston and its suburbs to stay inside and lock their doors, “answering only to police,” it was virtually the same thing.

Boston under state of siege: a preview of martial law?

I was trying to travel to that city.
Now I think I’ll just stay here
Where I can’t even smell a car.
I think I’ll think twice before I go anywhere.

I was once an anarchist.
I didn’t want to kill
Or bomb anyone
Which is why I was an anarchist!
But I was really angry.
I saw red because my government
Wanted to send me to kill in Vietnam.
I refused to be manipulated
By people I didn’t respect.

And I’m still red-angry
At a government
That can lock down a city.
(And it’s not even my city!)

I want to unlock this city of my red anger.

This city is having a bad dream.
This city is having a bad day.
Helicopters, armored police,
Going house to house,
Door to door.
Creeps me out.

The way I see it, we had two acts of terrorism in the US this week. The first took place at the end of the historic Boston Marathon, when two bombs went off near the finish line, killing three and seriously injuring dozens of runners and spectators. The second happened a couple days later in the town of West, Texas, where a fertilizer plant blew up, incinerating or otherwise killing at least 15, and injuring at least 150 people, and probably more as the search for the dead and the injured continues.

It’s pretty clear that the Boston Marathon bombing was an act of terrorism, with police making arrests and having killed one of the two suspects who had earlier been captured on film and video at the scene of the bombings.

The villains in the West Fertilizer Co. explosion can be much more easily identified: the managers and owners of the plant.

West Fertilizer was built starting back in 1962 in the middle of the small town of West, TX, a community founded in the 19th century and named after the first local postmaster, T.M. West. It makes no sense, of course, to locate such a facility that uses highly toxic anhydrous ammonia as a primary feed stock (a compound that burns the lungs and kills on contact, and that, because it must be stored under pressure, is highly prone to leaks and explosive releases), and one that makes as its main product ammonium nitrate fertilizer, around lots of people. Ammonium nitrate, recall, is the highly explosive compound favored by truck bombers like the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. It was the fertilizer, vast quantities of which were stored at the West Fertilizer plant site, which caused the colossal explosion that leveled much of the town of West.

Building such a dangerous facility in the midst of a residential and business area, and allowing homes, nursing homes, hospitals, schools and playgrounds to be built alongside it, is the result of a corrupt process that is commonplace in towns and cities across America, where business leaders routinely have their way with local planning and zoning commissions, safety inspectors and city councils. Businesses small and large also have their way with state and federal safety and health inspectors too.

Images of terror in America, East and West (left: The Boston Marathon bombing, right: the West Fertilizer blast)

 
I write a lot of critical things about militarism, our unnecessary wars and our growing surveillance/police state. So it was heartwarming to watch the videos and listen to the stories from the Boston Marathon bombing about civilian “first-responders” who chose not to flee but to wade into a very messy situation.

It’s clear that quick action by some very ordinary citizens — people without badges or weapons — made the difference between three dead and seven or eight dead. For me, such civilian involvement in incidents like this presents a model for an alternative to the malignant post-911 world we now live in. Driven by fear, suspicion and secrecy, officialdom and police agencies have too often become remote agencies of great suspicion themselves.

It’s true the FBI and the immense fusion of surveillance, police and military elements that effectively declared martial law in Boston did run to ground the bombers in incredibly short time. Very impressive. It’s the collateral damage that scares me, the passivity of those without badges, uniforms and weapons in the face of an arrogant blitzkrieg of police and military self-aggrandizement and mission overkill.

We would all benefit if the impulse toward secrecy was discouraged and more information could be shared with the American public. This doesn’t mean an FBI or police investigation should be transparent and media TV trucks should follow cops doing their investigative work. It would require citizens to step up more. What this means is, for the good of the nation, police agencies need to be more vulnerable, since much of what is made secret is not for security reasons but to avoid embarrassment and to cover up unpleasant or even illegal activity by authorities.

The story of my friend Carlos Arredondo is a case in point.

Carlos Arredondo, with hat, and others rush Jeff Bauman to an ambulance as Carlos pinches the femoral artery

Carlos is a much-touted hero in the Boston bombing for his quick and unflinching intervention that saved the life of a man who would have very quickly bled to death from devastating wounds to his legs. I know Carlos through Veterans For Peace. Ever since his Marine son Alexander was killed in Iraq in 2004, Carlos has dedicated his life to working for peace. As if the loss of one son was not tragedy enough, a second son committed suicide due to depression connected to the loss of his brother in Iraq.

I’ve talked with Carlos several times here and there across the country where he would appear with a pick-up truck and trailer assembly festooned with antiwar statements, large posters of his son Alex and many American flags. Carlos is a strong, humble Costa Rican man with a wonderful Spanish accent. He’s now an American citizen. Looking at his truck and trailer, some might see Carlos as an eccentric; but for me and many others his warm humanity always trumped any suggestion of eccentricity. Carlos is a man with a huge heart, a beautiful man caught up in the meat-grinder of a dark and ugly political period. More important, he’s also a very social being who refuses to remain silent or apart from others.

So it was not surprising that Carlos waded into the horrific scene and helped out. As Carlos was headed home afterwards, his sweat shirt soaked with blood, a You Tube video shows him telling a young woman on the street what just happened. His hands are visibly shaking from the experience he had just undergone. Here’s a radio interview with Carlos.

I ran the Boston Marathon back in 1968, and, my feet covered with blisters inside my Keds sneakers, dragged across the finish line to meet my waiting uncle at a time of about 3 hours and 40 minutes. It was close enough to the time that the current bombing happened in this year’s race — about four hours from the starting gun — that had I been running it this year, I might still been near enough to the finish line to have heard the blasts.

That really brings home to me the horror of what just happened.

At the same time, I’m reminded that back when I ran my Boston Marathon, which was only weeks after the Viet Cong’s bloody Tet Offensive, we didn’t give a thought to the idea of the Viet Cong bringing their war home to America. Now you have to at least wonder whether this bombing might in some way have been linked to America’s various wars abroad.

We don’t at this point have a clue who was behind this atrocity, but whether it was some foreign terrorist organization, a contingent of Taliban fighters seeking to bring the Afghan War to the US, or a domestic right-wing group protesting abortion, the income tax or the country’s “Kenyan” president, it should be a wake-up call to the nation that our violent national culture and our imperial pretensions will eventually reap us a whirlwind.

A country that goes around blowing up children in Afghanistan by the score, as happened last week in Kundar Province, Afghanistan, that claims for itself the right to kill anyone, anywhere, if the president or his designees in the Pentagon and the CIA decide that person is a threat or an annoyance (and that is willing to kill lots of innocent bystanders, including women and kids, to do it), a country that encourages its police to act like an occupying military force in their jurisdictions, breaking into homes in SWAT gear at dawn, pointing assault rifles in people’s faces, arresting people on trumped-up charges, such a country and its people at some point must realize that such behavior invites a violent response.

Two acts of terror: US bombing kills 10 children in Afghanistan, and twin bombs strike Boston Marathon

If it wasn’t clear up to now, it was made crystal clear last week. The co-defendent in the Bradley Manning trial is the Internet itself.

In one of the case’s most disturbing pre-trial hearings, Judge Col. Denise Lind ruled last week that prosecutors can offer as evidence files seized from Osama Bin Laden’s computer as well as the testimony of a Navy Seal, part of the Bin Laden assasination team, who found them. His identity will not be revealed and the defense can cross-examine him only from a very specific and limited list of court-approved questions.

The ruling is important not only because it shows the almost unimaginable absurdity of the Manning case but because it reveals the true intent of the Obama Administration in pursuing it.
 

Bradley Manning and the Video — fragment of a leaflet from the Georgia Green Party
 
The hearing was about the “standard of proof” necessary to prove two charges: espionage and aiding the enemy. It also took up what kinds of evidence would be permitted in the trial to support those charges.

According to the prosecutors, Manning committed espionage and aided the enemy by giving them important intelligence and he did that by putting it on the Internet. That’s it; that’s the crime. His real intent is irrelevant. The government is arguing that, if you put something on the Internet that some nefarious rascal downloads, you are effectively aiding that person materially in any “relevant” crime he or she might commit. It doesn’t matter if there’s no evidence that the person read it and no need to prove that you intended for him or her to retrieve it. Effectively, it makes the use of the Internet a potential crime.

Judge Lind ruled that to prove “espionage” you have to show that the defendent actually intended for this material to be read by the enemy; that was a defeat for the prosecution. But, she ruled, the government can pursue its theory to support the “aiding the enemy” charge.

One up and one down for Pvt. Manning. Two down for the rest of us. The Judge’s decision is important for the trial but what’s most important for all of us is what the Obama Admininstration is thinking and doing. It’s now clear that the Administration believes that these very same acts and standards apply to both crimes. While the “aiding the enemy” charge only relates to military personnel, the “espionage” charge can be levelled at everyone and, while it failed to win the ruling in this case, it’s clear that President Obama believes he can charge any of us with “espionage” for using the Internet as it’s currently used.

What’s wrong with the Obama administration’s proposal to change the way Social Security checks are adjusted for inflation from using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to instead using something called a “chained” CPI?

Let’s start with the fundamental problem: Social Security is not a cause of the federal budget deficit, and will not be for years, even if nothing is done to raise more revenue for the program.

Sure the US will eventually have to come up with more money to pay the benefits earned by retirees in the Baby Boom generation, but that problem of an eventual shortfall in Social Security tax revenues can be easily solved by simply eliminating the cap — currently $113,000 in annual income — that is subject to the FICA tax. If the cap were completely eliminated, so that all income was subject to the tax, as is the case with the Medicare tax, the shortfall would be nearly eliminated. Any remaining shortfall could be erased too, by extending some kind of FICA tax to unearned income from investments. My favorite is one that is common in Europe: a small — say 0.25% — tax on short-term stock and bond trades.

But there is a bigger problem with this Obama proposal to cut both Social Security benefits and Medicare funding: Adopting a long-time Republican proposal, it only looks at those programs in isolation, and concludes that they need to be cut. Our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president does not look at the biggest and most wasteful spending in the entire federal budget, which is the military. That bloated white elephant, which this year is sucking up close to $800 billion, not counting the interest on money borrowed to pay for past wars and armaments, could be cut in half or even by three-quarters, and it would still leave the US military budget larger than any other nation’s in the world. The US would be no less safe in that case. In fact, it would be a hell of a lot safer because we would no longer have US troops stationed expensively and provocatively in 1000 foreign locations.

Nobody in Congress is talking about slashing military spending and spending the savings on medical care, Social Security, education and other pressing needs. The public needs to demand this.

Obama on his campaign pledge not to cut Social Security: 'Hey, that was just a campaign promise…

Lindorff on Iran, Korea and the US:

On Iran: “The Iranians have enough money to buy a bomb if they wanted one, on the black market, so I think all of this has been hugely overblown in US propaganda, and Israeli propaganda.”

“If Iran got the bomb, I don’t think they’d use it. I think they’re not crazy. Israel has about 200 nuclear bombs and very high quality delivery systems and Iran would be toast if they used it and they know that. So what you’d actually have if Iran had the bomb would be a similar situation — only probably more stable — than the one you have in India and Pakistan, two countries that really hate each other having nuclear countries, with the difference being that those two countries have borders that are flash points. There are no borders that are flash points between Iran and Israel. So actually I think if Iran had the bomb it would make Israeli diplomacy more difficult, but it might in the end have a salutory effect on the two having to reach a kind of modus vivendi.”

On Korea: “You have the equivalent of a medieval absolute monarchy and so what’s going on in Korea is palace politics, and … I think the US would be wise to let what is happening in that close-to-failed state play out without irritating it to the point of a war.”

On the US: “I would argue that when it comes to adhering to international norms, that probably the biggest outlier state right now is the United States itself. The US has assumed for itself the authority to do whatever it wants regardless of international norms. And I would look at the invasion of Iraq, the threatened war against Iran–which does not pose an imminent threat to the US certainly, and probably to anybody–and the use of a place like Guantanamo that defies all international norms, and the use of drone attacks in any country we want to attack. These are all the actions of what would qualify as a rogue state.”

Lindorff on RT-TV's 'Cross-Talk' Program with the Hudson Institute’s Richard Weitz and Zachary Keck, editor of ‘Diplomat’ magazine (click on image to play program on YouTube)