Listics

Here’s my senator doing the right thing today. What’s your senator doing to prevent the erosion of the fourth amendment and to hold the administration accountable for its lawlessness? (Click here for a tool to make calling your senator painless).

Mr. FEINGOLD: Mr. President, I strongly support Senator Dodd’s amendment to strike the immunity provision from this bill, and I want to thank the Senator from Connecticut for his leadership on this issue. Both earlier this year when the Senate first considered FISA legislation and again this time around, he has demonstrated tremendous resolve on this issue, and I have been proud to work with him.

Now, Mr. President, some have tried to suggest that the bill before us will leave it up to the courts to decide whether or not to give retroactive immunity to the companies that allegedly participated in the President’s illegal wiretapping program. Make no mistake – this bill will result in immunity being granted, because it sets up a rigged process with only one possible outcome.

Under the terms of this bill, a federal district court would evaluate whether there is substantial evidence that a company received “a written request or directive … from the Attorney General or the head of an element of the intelligence community … indicating that the activity was authorized by the President and determined to be lawful.”

But, Mr. President, we already know from the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee that was issued last fall that the companies received exactly such a request or directive. That is already public information. So under the terms of this proposal, the court’s decision would be predetermined.

As a practical matter, that means that regardless of how much information the court is permitted to review, what standard of review is employed, how open the proceedings are, and what role the plaintiffs are permitted to play, the court will essentially be required to grant immunity under this bill.

Now, proponents will argue that the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against the companies can participate in briefing to the court. This is true, but they are not allowed access to any classified information. Talk about fighting with both hands tied behind your back. Mr. President, the administration has restricted information about this illegal wiretapping program so much that roughly 70 members of this chamber don’t even have access to the basic facts about what happened. So let’s not pretend that the plaintiffs will be able to participate in any meaningful way in these proceedings — in which Congress has made sure that their claims will be dismissed.

This result is extremely disappointing. It is entirely unnecessary and unjustified, and it will profoundly undermine the rule of law in this country. I cannot comprehend why Congress would take this action in the waning months of an administration that has consistently shown contempt for the rule of law – perhaps most notably in the illegal warrantless wiretapping program it set up in secret.

Mr. President, we hear people argue that telecom companies should not be penalized for allegedly taking part in this illegal program. What you don’t hear is that current law already provides immunity from lawsuits for companies that cooperate with the government’s request for assistance, as long as they receive either a court order or a certification from the Attorney General that no court order is needed and the request meets all statutory requirements. But if requests are not properly documented, FISA instructs the telephone companies to refuse the government’s request, and subjects them to liability if they instead decide to cooperate.

When Congress passed FISA three decades ago, in the wake of the extensive, well-documented wiretapping abuses of the 1960s and 1970s, it decided that, in the future, telephone companies should not simply assume that any government request for assistance to conduct electronic surveillance was appropriate. It was clear that some checks needed to be in place to prevent future abuses of this incredibly intrusive power – the power to listen in on people’s personal conversations.

At the same time, however, Congress did not want to saddle telephone companies with the responsibility of determining whether the government’s request for assistance was legitimate or not.

So Congress devised a system that would take the guesswork out of it completely. Under that system, which is still in place today, the companies’ legal obligations and liability depend entirely on whether the government has presented the company with a court order or a certification stating that certain basic requirements have been met. If the proper documentation is submitted, the company must cooperate with the request and is immune from liability. If the proper documentation has not been submitted, the company must refuse the government’s request, or be subject to possible liability in the courts.

This framework, which has been in place for 30 years, protects companies that comply with legitimate government requests while also protecting the privacy of Americans’ communications from illegitimate snooping.

Granting companies that allegedly cooperated with an illegal program the new form of retroactive immunity that is in this bill undermines the law that has been on the books for decades – a law that was designed to prevent exactly the type of abuses that allegedly occurred here.

Even worse, granting retroactive immunity under these circumstances will undermine any new laws that we pass regarding government surveillance. If we want companies to follow the law in the future, it sends a terrible message, and sets a terrible precedent, to give them a “get out of jail free” card for allegedly ignoring the law in the past.

Mr. President, just last week a key court decision on FISA undercut one of the most popular arguments in support of immunity — that we need to let the companies off the hook because the state secrets privilege prevents them from defending themselves in court. A federal court has now held that the state secrets privilege does not apply to claims brought under FISA. Rather, more specific evidentiary rules in FISA govern. Shouldn’t we at least let these cases proceed to see how this plays out, rather than trying to solve a problem that may not even exist?

And that’s not all. Mr. President, this immunity provision doesn’t just allow telephone companies off the hook. It also will make it that much harder to get to the core issue that I’ve been raising since December 2005, which is that the President broke the law and should be held accountable. When these lawsuits are dismissed, we will be that much further away from an independent judicial review of this illegal program.

On top of all this, we are considering granting immunity when roughly 70 members of the Senate still have not been briefed on the President’s wiretapping program. The vast majority of this body still does not even know what we are being asked to grant immunity for. Frankly, I have a hard time understanding how any Senator can vote against this amendment without this information.

I urge my colleagues to support the amendment to strike the immunity provision from the bill.

Andrea Gibson via Normand ICH

Declaration of Peace

Today marks the fifth year since the decider accomplished his mission. The table was tilted and all the wealth rolled into his side’s pockets. All of the benefits accrued to the rich, all the rewards. All of the costs have been borne by the poor, all the risks. As of today I have no enemies on this globe and my peace has come with a price unpaid. What is the cost of justice? How shall we value truth? What pain will we feel as we excise the shrapnel of deceit from the body politic? What stains will permanently discolor our social fabric? The cold war is long over — Churchill and Stalin and Truman and Khrushchev long dead. There never was a war on terror. We defeated Iraq and have lost ourselves in its occupation. We ousted the Afghan Taliban and wandered aimlessly in the mountains seeking bin Laden, the golem we built. The rich and the powerful are weighing the odds that thermonuclear horror in Tehran will distract us, the drums of constant war drive us mad, erode our faculties, assure continuity of the oligarchic rule that has brought us to the brink of extinction.

But I am at peace. I have no enemies on this globe. I have only my duty to the people and the truth. It’s my job to speak up and dissect the myth of Adam Smith, to remind people of the insanity that informed their economists and game theorists, the ones who provided the scaffolding of rationalization for the politics of greed.

I am not at war. I am simply a citizen looking for justice.

http://www.broadbandcensus.com

Go the site, take the census, and do the speed test. Drew Clark introduced us to this new “crowdsourcing” application this morning at F2C. Grab a button for your blog.

Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, broadband census, drew clark

Patrick Lang blogs at Sic Semper Tyrannis.

Colonel W. Patrick Lang is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces (The Green Berets). He served in the Department of Defense both as a serving officer and then as a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service for many years. He is a highly decorated veteran of several of America’s overseas conflicts including the war in Vietnam. He was trained and educated as a specialist in the Middle East by the U.S. Army and served in that region for many years. He was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. In the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) he was the “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism,” and later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service.” For his service in DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” This is the equivalent of a British knighthood. He is an analyst consultant for many television and radio broadcasts.

His presentation on current events is brilliantly informed and balanced. His commenters are also of the same stripe — people with insights informed by experience and direct knowledge.

From his post “Iraqi Forces vs. the Extremists”…

It is clear that US policy is to back Maliki/Dawa/ISCI/Badr Corps (Iraqi Forces) against Moqtada al-Sadr and his “army” of “shirtless ones.” Fine. Why not? I guess the US has no choice but to back someone.

I suppose that the powers that be will shift the Main Supply Route (MSR) to the west (Nasiriyah) if the Basra area becomes too obstructed.

My problem with the present course of events is the ruthlessness of the propaganda campaign being successfully waged by the Bush Administration. The president has succeeded in “framing” the discussion in such a way that Maliki and his assembly of Badr Corps militias are represented as being the equivalent of George Washington suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion. The noble Maliki is portrayed as motivated by a selfless desire for “national” unity. The MSM has re-transmitted that idea without serious question.

In fact he is merely acting on behalf of an emerging alignment of pro-Iranian forces in Iraq that have successfully pulled the wool over American eyes.

… and from a post titled “UCMJ extends to civilian contractors - Gates” we learn that according to the Secretary of Defense Blackwater bullies no longer have license to murder, rape, and pillage (which has to take a lot of the fun and profit out being a mercenary):

The [Gates] directive provides authority for officers and NCOs to arrest and detain persons seen conducting a crime and for military authorities to pursue investigations that may lead to trial by general court martial.

The directive requires DoD to inform the US Department of Justice (DoJ) that it is proceeding against particular civilians. This provision exists to allow DoJ to take charge of the case involving civilians if it wishes. If DoJ declines then the military is authorized to proceed under its own legal system.

A commenter suggests, “But most of these private armies are neither serving with or for the Dept. of Defense. Most are attached to State or to the private contractors and are not under those contractual obligations that the DOD imposes. So the DOD [may have] no jurisdiction….” Interesting discussion ensues.

Col. Lang has a healthy skepticism for most things that smell of Cheney or Bush. He writes respectfully of Obama, and supportively of Clinton. He has no time for McCain whom he considers to be ill informed. I liked this bit:

The Vice President seems as insulated from reality as always and absolutely shameless in his public denials of reality in Iraq. What’s the deal with him? Is he really impaired somehow or is it about the money as the “oilies” insist?

Then, there is John McCain. He does seem impaired. Lieberman had to remind him that AQ is a Sunni group who hate the government of Iran?

The Democrats need to sober up and get Hillary and Obama onto the same ticket. I don’t care who gets the top spot.

The government of the United States of America has been under siege by its enemies for decades. Ironically, the right wing destruction of critical infrastructure and services in the name of deregulation and lower taxes consolidates the power that our democracy granted the government in the hands of a corporate oligarchy with no commitment to the rule of law, human rights, or individual freedom.

It takes a brave man or a strong union to stand against the privateers who have stolen the commons and privatized public service. Not too long ago the phrase private security brought to mind rent-a-cops patrolling shopping mall parking lots and retired police officers supplementing their pensions as night watchmen. Today we think Blackwater. Ninety percent of Blackwater’s business comes through US government contracts. Most of those are no bid. Under the Bush administration, the country has begun to outsource military and intelligence work that we as citizens have expected our government to deliver. The government so far has failed to effectively control their actions [pdf] and the Department of Justice is either unwilling or unable to hold them responsible for their illegal actions.

According to Scott Horton,

Blackwater is anything but a “normal” security contractor. Its relationship with the Bush Administration is truly extraordinary in many respects. Blackwater is an unabashedly political entity, which aligns itself fully, and ideologically with the Republican Party. Its founder and owner, Erik Prince, who has been profiled very effectively by Jeremy Scahill in his comprehensive book, Blackwater, was born to wealth and privilege in the family of an automobile parts magnate with a long track record of involvement in Republican and Religious Right politics.

Democrat Marshall Adame is running for congress against incumbent Republican Walter “Freedom Fries” Jones in the 3rd Congressional District of North Carolina. Adame, a US Marine for 22 years and a Vietnam veteran with two sons in the US Army currently serving in Iraq, says,

I have interacted with many mercenary groups, including Blackwater. There is no place in the American force structure, or in American culture for mercenaries. They are guns for hire; No more, no less. The primary motivation is money. In most cases it does not matter who’s money.

Private Security Organizations as extensive as Blackwater, for example, should not be allowed to operate in war zones as augments of the United States of America. Private Armies represent the very things we depise as a people. Servants to the highest bidder with true allegiance to no-one.

According to the Raleigh News&Observer Blog, Blackwater responded with the following internal communication, a message that spawned some hate mail and threats:

All:

There is a man named Marshall Adame who is running for congress in our district. He just put a quote online which says he wants this company and all of us to cease to exist.

Do you like your jobs? Are you sick and tired of the slanderous bullshit going on in DC?

If so, would you all mind joining me in reminding Mr. Adame that he is running for office in our backyard. Tell all your friends and family too. We welcome their assistance in making this point very clear to Mr. Adame……

Anyone who wants to send a letter may do so at the following address…..

MARSHALL ADAME FOR CONGRESS
PMB #161
1250 WESTERN BLVD. #L2
JACKSONVILLE, NC 28546

His email is info@marshalladame4congress2008.com

He was too cowardly to put a phone number on the web. I ask that you keep your comments to Mr. Adame professional (well, mostly professional). We help him if our comments get threatening or too crass. Let’s run this goof out of Dodge….!

Bill Mathews
Executive Vice President
Blackwater Worldwide
850 Puddin Ridge Road
Moyock, NC 27958

Blackwater is just the most visible and extreme example of the emergence of lawless power in the vacuum of democratic government regulation under rightist rule. Garbage disposal services also come to mind. I’ll save that for another blog post.

You can contribute to Marshall Adame’s campaign for Congress in the 3rd district of North Carolina at ActBlue. It’s not enough to elect Senator Clinton or Senator Obama to the Presidency. We have to give them a Democratic majority that will work with them.

Technorati Tags: vote Democratic, cleaning up the trash, time for a change, support peace candidates, if you can’t find a peace candidate at least vote Democratic

In 1946, one study exposed seventeen subjects to radioactive iron. The second study, which involved a series of seventeen related subexperiments, exposed fifty-seven subjects to radioactive calcium between 1950 and 1953. It is clear that the doses involved were low and that it is extremely unlikely that any of the children who were used as subjects were harmed as a consequence. These studies remain morally troubling, however, for several reasons. First, although parents or guardians were asked for their permission to have their children involved in the research, the available evidence suggests that the information provided was, at best, incomplete. Second, there is the question of the fairness of selecting institutionalized children at all, children whose life circumstances were by any standard already heavily burdened.

Human history, Reuchlin argued, divides into three periods. In the first, a natural period, God revealed Himself to the Patriarchs through the three-lettered name of “Shaddai” (ydv,+s dy). In the period of the Torah, He revealed Himself to Moses through the four-lettered name of the Tetragrammaton (hwhy, yhwh). In the period of redemption He revealed Himself through five letters: the Tetragrammaton with the addition of the letter shin, thus spelling “Yehoshuah” (hvwhy, yhw+sh) or “Jesus.” Thus Reuchlin’s arrangement was able to combine the Jewish belief in three ages (that of the Chaos, that of the Torah, and and that of the Messiah) with the tripartite Christian division of a reign of the Father, a reign of the Son, and a reign of the Holy Spirit.

It is probably obvious that Chaos, Torah, and Messiah together yield Taos, New Mexico when factored with the number 57 (four of the first six US Presidents were inaugurated at age 57 and 57 human experimental subjects were dosed with sublethal injections of radiation at Fernald — coincidence? I doubt it).

Mitt Romney tried to sell off the Fernald School and bury the State of Massachusetts’ association with the history of eugenics skunking up the place. No Ronald Reagan, he didn’t get the job done, but his political heir, Deval Patrick, is fighting it out in court, doing his best to ditch the albatross of State liability and complicity in yahweh knows how many nasty human experiments. Clean protocols for human experimental subjects were implemented quite recently.

It took the libertarian heirs of Reagan years to finalize plans for the destruction of the public health service Agnews hospital offered. When Governor Reagan turned out the first wave of developmentally disabled and behaviorally impaired patients to find their way to the refrigerator cartons and hot air grates of San Francisco in the early seventies, it seemed like privatization and the sale of the facility would soon follow. But twenty-five years elapsed before Sun Microsystems was able to grab that brass ring of public/private cooperation, and it would be another ten years or more before they were able to turn the rest of the patients out to “private care” in “community settings.”

Technorati Tags: my way or the hwhy, community based care, privatization of public service, christianity, numerology, ronald reagan, deval patrick, at least we don’t have mitt romney to kick around anymore, irony of mental hospital with same name as republican felon vice president, Harvard, MIT, human experimental subjects,

Technorati Tags: le electile disfunction, @loic votre nombre s’il vous plait, quelque chose la reindeer, book contract a la congo belgique, thinking fontly auf dich

Thanks to Charles Follymacher for this link to Prometheus 6. I’ve spent some time over the last several months reading and thinking about disparities of treatment in the criminal justice system in the US. One of the gross inequities involves differential sentencing guidelines for crack versus powder cocaine. Judge Greg Mathis writes,

Ten years after the sentencing laws were enacted, the average federal drug sentence for African-Americans was 49 percent higher than that of whites, the number of women in prison for drug offenses increased by 421 percent, and there was a more than 80 percent increase in the federal prison population. Under the previous law, a dealer with five grams of crack cocaine received the same punishment as one who had 500 grams of powder cocaine — a 100-to-1 disparity. Supporters of the inequitable sentencing claimed crack cocaine was more dangerous than powder cocaine and should therefore come with stricter sentences. Studies later showed that crack cocaine was no more dangerous than powdered cocaine.

Commenting on the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding inequitable sentencing, Mathis says,

[Now,] A little over 20 years later, the Supreme Court has issued a ruling that gives judges much more power when sentencing drug offenders. With this new freedom, judges can use their influence to encourage rehabilitation and education, saving taxpayers billions and turning around the lives of many young people of color.

Charles’ link points to data that are subject to interpretation and that Prometheus 6 calls bullshit. The growth of a healthy black middle class is happening at the same time as incarceration rates for young black males are through the roof. The source essay from the Electronic Village that Prometheus 6 analyzes may have some factual errors, and it may perpetuate some myths. But the last part of the essay is an imprecation for us to help each other, for black people to help get the young men in the community a hand up in terms of educational success. The Villager’s essay ends with this:

Please consider these simple goals that can lead to solutions for fixing the problems of young Black men:
Short term

1. Teach all Black boys to read at grade level by the third grade and to embrace education.
2. Provide positive role models for Black boys.
3. Create a stable home environment for Black boys that includes contact with their fathers.
4. Ensure that Black boys have a strong spiritual base.
5. Control the negative media influences on Black boys.
6. Teach Black boys to respect all girls and women.

Long term

1. Invest as much money in educating Black boys as in locking up Black men.
2. Help connect Black boys to a positive vision of themselves in the future.
3. Create high expectations and help Black boys live into those high expectations.
4. Build a positive peer culture for Black boys.
5. Teach Black boys self-discipline, culture and history.
6. Teach Black boys and the communities in which they live to embrace education and life-long learning.

I could pick these lists apart some from my own biases, but in general don’t they outline a solid programmatic response to a real problem? Even if the numbers in the essay are wrong, the assumptions skewed, the facts remain that a lot of children in working class black homes face problems that end in jails, institutions, or death. Let’s keep our eye on the progress we’re making, like the latest Supreme court decision, and like the successful emergence of a solid self sustaining healthy black middle class, but let’s not count the battle won until it’s over.