commondreams.org/views/2015/02/03/demobilized-usa-why-there-no-massive-antiwar-movement
Tuesday, February 03, 2015
TomDispatch
Demobilized in the USA: Why There Is No Massive Antiwar Movement
I.F. Stone, the urge to serve, and remembrance of wars past
by
Tom Engelhardt
Members of a women's brigade hold a banner protesting the Vietnam War at a march led by former Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 15, 1968. Behind them are other protesters and the U.S. Capitol building. Carrying the sign, from left, are: Ruth Krause, Mrs. Vel Phillips, Wenn Griffin, Ruth Warwick, and Lucy Montgomery. (Photo: AP/State Department)
Well, it’s one, two, three, look at that amputee,
At least it’s below the knee,
Could have been worse, you see.
Well, it’s true your kids look at you differently,
But you came in an ambulance instead of a hearse,
That’s the phrase of the trade,
It could have been worse.
-- First verse of a Vietnam-era song written by U.S. Air Force medic Bob Boardman off Country Joe McDonald’s "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag"
There was the old American lefty paper, the Guardian, and the Village Voice, which beat the Sixties into the world, and its later imitators like the Boston Phoenix. There was Liberation News Service, the Rat in New York, the Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta, the Old Mole in Boston, the distinctly psychedelic Chicago Seed, Leviathan, Viet-Report, and the L.A. Free Press, as well as that Texas paper whose name I long ago forgot that was partial to armadillo cartoons. And they existed, in the 1960s and early 1970s, amid a jostling crowd of hundreds of “underground” newspapers -- all quite above ground but the word sounded so romantic in that political moment. There were G.I. antiwar papers by the score and high school rags by the hundreds in an “alternate” universe of opposition that somehow made the rounds by mail or got passed on hand-to-hand in a now almost unimaginable world of interpersonal social networking that preceded the Internet by decades. And then, of course, there was I.F. Stone’s Weekly (1953-1971): one dedicated journalist, 19 years, every word his own (except, of course, for the endless foolishness he mined from the reams of official documentation produced in Washington, Vietnam, and elsewhere).
"What’s missing is any sense of connection to the government, any sense that it’s 'ours' or that we the people matter."
I can remember the arrival of that newsletter, though I no longer know whether I subscribed myself or simply shared someone else’s copy. In a time when being young was supposed to be glorious, Stone was old -- my parents’ age -- but still we waited on his words. It helped to have someone from a previous generation confirm in nuts and bolts ways that the issue that swept so many of us away, the Vietnam War, was indeed an American atrocity.
The Call to Service
They say you can’t go home again, but recently, almost 44 years after I saw my last issue of the Weekly -- Stone was 64 when he closed up shop; I was 27 -- I found the full archive of them, all 19 years, online, and began reading him all over again. It brought back a dizzying time in which we felt “liberated” from so much that we had been brought up to believe and -- though we wouldn’t have understood it that way then -- angered and forlorn by the loss as well. That included the John Wayne version of America in which, at the end of any war film, as the Marine Corps Hymn welled up, American troops advanced to a justified victory that would make the world a better place. It also included a far kinder-hearted but allied vision of a country, a government, that was truly ours, and to which we owed -- and one dreamed of offering -- some form of service. That was deeply engrained in us, which was why when, in his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy so famously called on us to serve, the response was so powerful. (“And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”) Soon after, my future wife went into the Peace Corps like tens of thousands of other young Americans, while I dreamed, as I had from childhood, of becoming a diplomat in order to represent our country abroad.
And that sense of service to country ran so deep that when the first oppositional movements of the era arose, particularly the Civil Rights Movement, the impulse to serve was essential to them, as it clearly was to I.F. Stone. The discovery that under your country’s shining veneer lay a series of nightmares might have changed how that sense of obligation was applied, but it didn’t change the impulse. Not at all.
In his writing, Stone was calm, civil, thoughtful, fact-based, and still presented an American world that looked shockingly unlike the one you could read about in what wasn’t yet called “the mainstream media” or could see on the nightly network news. (Your TV still had only 13 channels, without a zapper in sight.) A researcher par excellence, Stone, like the rest of us, lacked the ability to see into the future, which meant that some of his fears (“World War III”) as well as his dreams never came true. But on the American present of that time, he was remarkably on target. Rereading some of his work so many decades later set me thinking about the similarities and differences between that moment of eternal war in Indochina and the present endless war on terror.
Among the eeriest things about reading Stone’s Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia coverage, 14 years into the next century, is how resonantly familiar so much of what he wrote still seems, how twenty-first-century it all is. It turns out that the national security state hasn’t just been repeating things they’ve done unsuccessfully for the last 13 years, but for the last 60. Let me offer just a few examples from his newsletter. I think you’ll get the idea.
* With last June’s collapse of the American-trained and -armed Iraqi army and recent revelations about its 50,000 “ghost soldiers” in mind, here’s Stone on the Laotian army in January 1961: “It is the highest paid army in Asia and variously estimated (the canny Laotians have never let us know the exact numbers, perhaps lest we check on how much the military payroll is diverted into the pockets of a few leaders) at from 23,000 to 30,000. Yet it has never been able to stand up against handfuls of guerrillas and even a few determined battalions like those mustered by Captain Kong Le.”
* On ISIS’s offensive in Iraq last year, or the 9/11 attacks, or just about any other development you want to mention in our wars since then, our gargantuan bureaucracy of 17 expanding intelligence outfits has repeatedly been caught short, so consider Stone’s comments on the Tet Offensive of February 1968. At a time when America’s top commander in Vietnam had repeatedly assured Americans that the Vietnamese enemy was losing, the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front (the “Vietcong”) launched attacks on just about every major town and city in South Vietnam, including the U.S. Embassy in Saigon: “We still don’t know what hit us. The debris is not all in Saigon and Hue. The world’s biggest intelligence apparatus was caught by surprise.”
* On our drone assassination and other air campaigns as a global war not on, but for -- i.e., to recruit -- terrorists, including ourpresent bombing campaigns in Iraq and Syria, here’s Stone in February 1968: “When the bodies are really counted, it will be seen that one of the major casualties was our delusion about victory by air power: all that boom-boom did not keep the enemy from showing up at Langvei with tanks... The whole country is slowly being burnt down to ‘save it.’ To apply scorched-earth tactics to one’s own country is heroic; to apply it to a country one claims to be saving is brutal and cowardly... It is we who rally the people to the other side.” And here he is again in May 1970: “Nowhere has air power, however overwhelming and unchallenged, been able to win a war."
Demobilizing Americans
And so it goes reading Stone today. But if much in the American way of war remains dismally familiar some five decades later, one thing of major significance has changed, something you can see regularly in I.F. Stone’s Weekly but not in our present world. Thirteen years after our set of disastrous wars started, where is the massive antiwar movement, including an army in near revolt and a Congress with significant critics in significant positions?
Think of it this way: in 1968, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was J. William Fulbright, a man who came to oppose U.S. policy in Vietnam and wrote a book about this country titled The Arrogance of Power (a phrase no senator who hoped to stay in Washington in 2015 would apply to the U.S.). The head of the Senate Armed Services Committee today: John McCain. ‘Nuff said.
In the last six decades, the American national security state has succeeded strikingly at only one thing (other than turning itself into a growth industry): it freed itself of us and of Congress. In the years following the Vietnam War, the American people were effectively demobilized, shorn of that sense of service to country, while war was privatized and the citizen soldier replaced by an “all-volunteer” force and a host of paid contractors working for warrior corporations. Post-9/11, the citizenry was urged to pay as much attention as possible to “our troops,” or “warriors,” and next to none to the wars they were fighting. Today, the official role of a national security state, bigger and more powerful than in the Vietnam era, is to make Americans “safe” from terror. In a world of war-making that has disappeared into the shadows and a Washington in which just about all information is now classified and shrouded in secrecy, the only way to be “safe” and “secure” as a citizen is, by definition, to be ignorant, to know as little as possible about what “our” government is doing in our name. This helps explain why, in the Obama years, the only crime in official Washington is leaking or whistleblowing; that is, letting the public in on something that we, the people, aren’t supposed to know about the workings of “our” government.
In 1973, President Richard Nixon ended the draft, a move meant to bring a rebellious citizen’s army under control. Since then, in a host of ways, our leaders have managed to sideline the citizenry, replacing the urge to serve with a sense of cynicism about government (which has morphed into many things, including, on the right, the Tea Party movement). As a result, those leaders have been freed from us and from just about all congressional oversight and so have been able to do what they damn well pleased. In practice, this has meant doing the same dumb, brutal, militarized things over and over again. From the repetitive stupidity of twenty-first-century American foreign -- that is, war -- policy, you might draw the conclusion (though they won’t) that the citizenry, even in revolt, has something crucial to teach the state.
Serving the Country in Opposition
Nonetheless, this demobilization of us should be seen for what it is: a remarkable achievement. It means that you have to be of a certain age (call me “I.F. Pebble”) even to remember what that urge to serve felt like, especially once it went into opposition on a massive scale. I.F. Stone was an early model for just that. In those years, I was, too, and there was nothing special about me. Untold numbers of Americans like me, military and civilian, engaged in such acts and thought of them as service to country. Though they obviously didn’t fit the normal definition of American “patriotism,” they came from the same place.
In April 1968, not so many months after the Tet Offensive, I went with two close friends to a rally on Boston Common organized by an anti-draft group called the Resistance. There, the three of us turned in our draft cards. I went in jacket and tie because I wanted to make the point that we weren’t hippy radicals. We were serious Americans turning our backs on a war from hell being pursued by a country transforming itself before our eyes into our worst nightmare.
Even all these years later, I can still remember the remarkable sense of exhilaration, even freedom, involved and also the fear. (In those years, being a relatively meek and law-abiding guy, I often found myself beyond my comfort zone, and so a little -- or more than a little -- scared.) Similarly, the next year, a gutsy young woman who was a co-worker and I -- I had, by then, dropped out of graduate school and was working at an “underground” movement print shop -- drove two unnerved and unnerving Green Beret deserters to Canada.
Admittedly, when they began pretend-machine-gunning the countryside we were passing through, I was unsettled, and when they pulled out dope (no drugs had been the agreed-upon rule on a trip in which we were to cross the Canadian border), I was ready to be anywhere else but in that car. Still, whatever my anxieties, I had no doubt about why I was doing what I was doing, or about the importance of helping American soldiers who no longer wanted to take part in a terrible war.
Finally, in 1971, an Air Force medic named Bob Boardman, angered by the stream of American war wounded coming home, snuck me into his medical unit at Travis Air Force Base in northern California. There, though without any experience as a reporter, I “interviewed” a bunch of wigged-out, angry guys with stumps for arms or legs, who were “antiwar” in all sorts of complex, unexpected, and outraged ways. It couldn’t have been grimmer or more searing or more moving, and I went home, wrote up a three-part series on what I had seen and heard, and sold it to Pacific News Service, a small antiwar outfit in San Francisco (where I would subsequently go to work).
None of this would have been most Americans’ idea of service, even then. But it was mine. I felt that my government had betrayed me, and that it was my duty as a citizen to do whatever I could to change its ways (as, in fact, I still do). And so, in some upside-down, inside-out way, I maintained a connection to and a perverse faith in that government, or our ability to force change on it, as the Civil Rights Movement had done.
That, I suspect, is what’s gone missing in much of our American world and just bringing back the draft, often suggested as one answer to our war-making problems, would be no ultimate solution. It would undoubtedly change the make-up of the U.S. military somewhat. However, what’s missing in action isn’t the draft, but a faith in the idea of service to country, the essence of what once would have been defined as patriotism. At an even more basic level, what may be gone is the very idea of the active citizen, not to speak of the democracy that went with such a conception of citizenship, as opposed to our present bizarro world of multi-billion-dollar 1% elections.
If, so many years into the disastrous war on terror, the Afghan War that never ends, and most recently Iraq War 3.0 and Syria War 1.0, there is no significant antiwar movement in this country, you can thank the only fit of brilliance the national security state has displayed. It successfully drummed us out of service. The sole task it left to Americans, 40 years after the Vietnam War ended, was the ludicrous one of repeatedly thanking the troops for their service, something that would have been inconceivable in the 1950s or 1960s because you would, in essence, have been thanking yourself.
Missing in Action
Here are I.F. Stone’s last words from the penultimate paragraph of the final issue of his newsletter:
“No one could have been happier than I have been with the Weekly. To give a little comfort to the oppressed, to write the truth exactly as I saw it, to make no compromises other than those of quality imposed by my own inadequacies, to be free to follow no master other than my own compulsions, to live up to my idealized image of what a true newspaperman should be, and still be able to make a living for my family -- what more could a man ask?”
Here is the last verse that medic wrote in 1971 for his angry song (the first of which led off this piece):
But it’s seven, eight, nine,
Well, he finally died,
Tried to keep him alive,
but he lost the will to survive.
The agony that his life would have been,
Well, you say to yourself as you load up the hearse,
At least, it’s over this way, it could have been worse.
And here are a few words the extremely solemn 23-year-old Tom Engelhardt wrote to the dean of his school on rejecting a National Defense Fellowship grant to study China in April 1968. (The “General Hershey” I refer to was the director of the Selective Service System which had issued a memo, printed in 1967 by the SDS publication New Left Notes, on “channeling” American manpower where it could best help the state achieve its ends.):
“On the morning of April 3, at the Boston Common, I turned in my draft card. I felt this to be a reply to three different types of 'channeling' which I saw as affecting my own life. First of all, it was a reply to General Hershey’s statement that manpower channeling ‘is the American or indirect way of achieving what is done by direction in foreign countries where choice is not permitted.’ I disassociated myself from the draft system, which was flagrantly attempting to make me live a life without freedom...
“Finally, I entered into resistance against an American government which was, with the help of the men provided by the draft, attempting the most serious type of ‘channeling’ outside our own country. This is especially obvious in Vietnam where it denies the people of South Vietnam the opportunity to consider viable alternatives to their present government. Moreover, as that attempt at ‘channeling’ (or, as it is called, ‘Winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people’) met opposition, the American government, through its armed forces, committed acts of such unbelievable horror as to be unbearable to a thinking person.”
Stone’s sign-off, that medic’s song, and my letter all are documents from a time when Americans could be in opposition to, while also feeling in service to, their country. In other words, they are documents from a lost world and so would, I suspect, have little meaning to the young of the present moment. Can there be any question that today’s young are a volunteering crew, often gripped by the urge to help, to make this world of ours a better place? Can you doubt as well that they are quite capable of rising to resist what’s increasingly grim in that terrible world, as the Occupy moment showed in 2011? Nor, I suspect, is the desire for a government that they could serve gone utterly, as indicated by the movement that formed around Barack Obama in his race for the presidency (and that he and his team essentially demobilized on entering the Oval Office).
What’s missing is any sense of connection to the government, any sense that it’s “ours” or that we the people matter. In its place -- and you can thank successive administrations for this -- is the deepest sort of pessimism and cynicism about a national security state and war-making machine beyond our control. And why protest what you can’t change?
TD Note: Ron Unz of the Unz Review is archiving and posting a range of old publications, including all issues of I.F. Stone’s Weekly. This is indeed a remarkable service to the rest of us. To view the Weekly, click here. I.F. Stone’s family has also set up a website dedicated to the man and his work. To visit it, click here.
© 2014 TomDispatch.com
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald). Previous books include Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (co-authored with Nick Turse), The United States of Fear, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Protest Colin Powell/Powell's Disgraceful Lies
Retired Gen. Colin Powell will be speaking on Wed., Feb. 4, 2015 at 8 PM at Goucher College's Kraushaar Auditorium, 1021 Dulaney Valley Rd., Towson 21286, as part of the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Visiting Professorship Series. The son of Jamaican immigrants, Powell was born in Harlem in 1937 and was raised in the South Bronx. He later became the 65th secretary of state and the first African American to hold the position. His talk, entitled “Diplomacy: Persuasion, Trust, and Values” is an insult to all of us who protested the Iraq War. So the Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore will protest outside from 7:15 to 8 PM. RSVP to Max at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski at Verizon dot net. If you choose to go inside to protest, there is a $10 general admission. On February 5, 2003, Powell made a presentation at the United Nations claiming Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction as a prelude to the invasion. The hypocrite actually opposed the war.
Colin Powell's Disgraceful Lies
By David Swanson
February 18, 2011
Editor’s Note: It remains one of the great unacknowledged embarrassments of the American news media: how nearly every top pundit swooned over Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations justifying the U.S. invasion of Iraq – and how they suffered no career damage for their gullibility.
Indeed, the New York Times’ Bill Keller, who hailed Powell’s “skillful parsing of the evidence” on Iraq’s supposed WMD, was actually promoted to the top job as executive editor AFTER he endorsed Powell’s lies. (Keller replaced Howell Raines who became the fall-guy for trusting dishonest reporter Jason Blair.)
In other words, the consequence for getting hoodwinked by a reporter – dismissal – but for buying into lies that get hundreds of thousands killed – promotion.
This upside-down accountability goes a long way to explaining why the mainstream media has become such an integral part of a corrupt establishment, incapable of addressing the profound hypocrisies and injustices that pervade American foreign policy and financial system.
As for Colin Powell, he remains such a respected national figure that he gets to preside over the patriotic fanfare that precedes the Super Bowl. But David Swanson -- in this guest essay -- explains how Powell profoundly betrayed the nation's honor:
In the wake of WMD-liar Curveball's videotaped confession, Colin Powell isdemanding to know why nobody warned him about Curveball's unreliability. The trouble is, they did.
Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world's media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you, I mean to spew one world-class, for-the-record-books stream of bull, to utter nary a breath without a couple of whoppers in it, and to look like you really mean it all?
What gall. What an insult to the entire world that would be.
Colin Powell doesn't have to imagine such a thing. He has to live with it. He did it on Feb. 5, 2003. It's on videotape.
I tried to ask him about it in the summer of 2004. He was speaking to the Unity Journalists of Color convention in Washington, D.C. The event had been advertised as including questions from the floor, but for some reason that plan was revised.
Speakers from the floor were permitted to ask questions of four safe and vetted journalists of color before Powell showed up, and then those four individuals could choose to ask him something related – which of course they did not, in any instance, do.
President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry, then the Democratic nominee for president, spoke as well. The panel of journalists who asked Bush questions when he showed up had not been properly vetted.
Roland Martin of the Chicago Defender had slipped onto it somehow (which won't happen again!). Martin asked Bush whether he was opposed to preferential college admissions for the kids of alumni and whether he cared more about voting rights in Afghanistan than in Florida.
Bush looked like a deer in the headlights, only without the intelligence. He stumbled so badly that the room openly laughed at him.
But the panel that had been assembled to lob softballs at Powell served its purpose well. It was moderated by Gwen Ifill. I asked Ifill (and Powell could watch it later on C-Span if he wanted to) whether Powell had any explanation for the way in which he had relied on the testimony of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law.
Powell had recited the claims about weapons of mass destruction but carefully left out the part where that same gentleman had testified that all of Iraq's WMDs had been destroyed. Ifill thanked me, and said nothing. Hillary Clinton was not present and nobody beat me up.
I wonder what Powell would say if someone were to actually ask him that question, even today, or next year, or ten years from now. Someone tells you about a bunch of old weapons and at the same time tells you they've been destroyed, and you choose to repeat the part about the weapons and censor the part about their destruction. How would you explain that?
Well, it's a sin of omission, so ultimately Powell could claim he forgot. "Oh yeah, I meant to say that, but it slipped my mind."
But how would he explain this:
During his presentation at the United Nations, Powell provided this translation of an intercepted conversation between Iraqi army officers:
"They're inspecting the ammunition you have, yes.
"Yes.
"For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.
"For the possibility there is by chance forbidden ammo?
"Yes.
"And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there."
The incriminating phrases "clean all of the areas" and "make sure there is nothing there" do not appear in the official State Department translation of the exchange:
"Lt. Colonel: They are inspecting the ammunition you have.
"Colonel: Yes.
"Lt. Col: For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.
"Colonel: Yes?
"Lt. Colonel: For the possibility there is by chance, forbidden ammo.
"Colonel: Yes.
"Lt. Colonel: And we sent you a message to inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas.
"Colonel: Yes."
Powell was writing fictional dialogue. He put those extra lines in there and pretended somebody had said them. Here's what Bob Woodward said about this in his book, Plan of Attack.
"[Powell] had decided to add his personal interpretation of the intercepts to rehearsed script, taking them substantially further and casting them in the most negative light. Concerning the intercept about inspecting for the possibility of 'forbidden ammo,' Powell took the interpretation further: 'Clean out all of the areas. . . . Make sure there is nothing there.' None of this was in the intercept."
For most of his presentation, Powell wasn't inventing dialogue, but he was presenting as facts numerous claims that his own staff had warned him were weak and indefensible.
Powell told the UN and the world: "We know that Saddam’s son, Qusay, ordered the removal of all prohibited weapons from Saddam's numerous palace complexes." The Jan. 31, 2003, evaluation of Powell's draft remarks prepared for him by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research ("INR") flagged this claim as "WEAK."
Regarding alleged Iraqi concealment of key files, Powell said: "key files from military and scientific establishments have been placed in cars that are being driven around the countryside by Iraqi intelligence agents to avoid detection."
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as "WEAK" and added "Plausibility open to question." A Feb. 3, 2003, INR evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell's remarks noted:
"Page 4, last bullet, re key files being driven around in cars to avoid inspectors. This claim is highly questionable and promises to be targeted by critics and possibly UN inspection officials as well."
That didn't stop Colin from stating it as fact and apparently hoping that, even if UN inspectors thought he was a brazen liar, U.S. media outlets wouldn't tell anyone.
On the issue of biological weapons and dispersal equipment, Powell said: "we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq."
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as "WEAK":
"WEAK. Missiles with biological warheads reportedly dispersed. This would be somewhat true in terms of short-range missiles with conventional warheads, but is questionable in terms of longer-range missiles or biological warheads."
This claim was again flagged in the Feb. 3, 2003, evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell's presentation: "Page 5. first para, claim re missile brigade dispersing rocket launchers and BW warheads. This claim too is highly questionable and might be subjected to criticism by UN inspection officials."
That didn't stop Colin. In fact, he brought out visual aids to help with his lying
Powell showed a slide of a satellite photograph of an Iraqi munitions bunker, and lied:
"The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions . . . [t]he truck you [...] see is a signature item. It's a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong."
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as "WEAK" and added: "We support much of this discussion, but we note that decontamination vehicles – cited several times in the text – are water trucks that can have legitimate uses... Iraq has given UNMOVIC what may be a plausible account for this activity – that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives; presence of a fire safety truck (water truck, which could also be used as a decontamination vehicle) is common in such an event."
Powell's own staff had told him the thing was a water truck, but he told the UN it was "a signature item…a decontamination vehicle." The UN was going to need a decontamination vehicle itself by the time Powell finished spewing his lies and disgracing his country.
He just kept piling it on: "UAVs outfitted with spray tanks constitute an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons," he said.
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this statement as "WEAK" and added: "the claim that experts agree UAVs fitted with spray tanks are ‘an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons’ is WEAK."
In other words, experts did NOT agree with that claim.
Powell kept going, announcing "in mid-December weapons experts at one facility were replaced by Iraqi intelligence agents who were to deceive inspectors about the work that was being done there."
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as "WEAK" and "not credible" and "open to criticism, particularly by the UN inspectorates."
His staff was warning him that what he planned to say would not be believed by his audience, which would include the people with actual knowledge of the matter.
To Powell that was no matter.
Powell, no doubt figuring he was in deep already, so what did he have to lose, went on to tell the UN: "On orders from Saddam Hussein, Iraqi officials issued a false death certificate for one scientist, and he was sent into hiding."
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as "WEAK" and called it "Not implausible, but UN inspectors might question it. (Note: Draft states it as fact.)"
And Powell stated it as fact. Notice that his staff was not able to say there was any evidence for the claim, but rather that it was "not implausible." That was the best they could come up with. In other words: "They might buy this one, Sir, but don't count on it."
Powell, however, wasn't satisfied lying about one scientist. He had to have a dozen. He told the United Nations: "A dozen [WMD] experts have been placed under house arrest, not in their own houses, but as a group at one of Saddam Hussein's guest houses."
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as "WEAK" and "Highly questionable." This one didn't even merit a "Not implausible."
Powell also said: "In the middle of January, experts at one facility that was related to weapons of mass destruction, those experts had been ordered to stay home from work to avoid the inspectors. Workers from other Iraqi military facilities not engaged in elicit weapons projects were to replace the workers who’d been sent home."
Powell's staff called this "WEAK," with "Plausibility open to question."
All of this stuff sounded plausible enough to viewers of Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. And that, we can see now, was what interested Colin. But it must have sounded highly implausible to the UN inspectors. Here was a guy who had not been with them on any of their inspections coming in to tell them what had happened.
We know from Scott Ritter, who led many UNSCOM inspections in Iraq, that U.S. inspectors had used the access that the inspection process afforded them to spy for, and to set up means of data collection for, the CIA. So there was some plausibility to the idea that an American could come back to the UN and inform the UN what had really happened on its inspections.
Yet, repeatedly, Powell's staff warned him that the specific claims he wanted to make were not going to even sound plausible. They will be recorded by history more simply as blatant lies.
The examples of Powell's lying listed above are taken from an extensive report released by Congressman John Conyers: "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War."
David Swanson is the author of War Is A Lie at http://warisalie.org
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Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Colin Powell's Disgraceful Lies
By David Swanson
February 18, 2011
Editor’s Note: It remains one of the great unacknowledged embarrassments of the American news media: how nearly every top pundit swooned over Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations justifying the U.S. invasion of Iraq – and how they suffered no career damage for their gullibility.
Indeed, the New York Times’ Bill Keller, who hailed Powell’s “skillful parsing of the evidence” on Iraq’s supposed WMD, was actually promoted to the top job as executive editor AFTER he endorsed Powell’s lies. (Keller replaced Howell Raines who became the fall-guy for trusting dishonest reporter Jason Blair.)
In other words, the consequence for getting hoodwinked by a reporter – dismissal – but for buying into lies that get hundreds of thousands killed – promotion.
This upside-down accountability goes a long way to explaining why the mainstream media has become such an integral part of a corrupt establishment, incapable of addressing the profound hypocrisies and injustices that pervade American foreign policy and financial system.
As for Colin Powell, he remains such a respected national figure that he gets to preside over the patriotic fanfare that precedes the Super Bowl. But David Swanson -- in this guest essay -- explains how Powell profoundly betrayed the nation's honor:
In the wake of WMD-liar Curveball's videotaped confession, Colin Powell isdemanding to know why nobody warned him about Curveball's unreliability. The trouble is, they did.
Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world's media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you, I mean to spew one world-class, for-the-record-books stream of bull, to utter nary a breath without a couple of whoppers in it, and to look like you really mean it all?
What gall. What an insult to the entire world that would be.
Colin Powell doesn't have to imagine such a thing. He has to live with it. He did it on Feb. 5, 2003. It's on videotape.
I tried to ask him about it in the summer of 2004. He was speaking to the Unity Journalists of Color convention in Washington, D.C. The event had been advertised as including questions from the floor, but for some reason that plan was revised.
Speakers from the floor were permitted to ask questions of four safe and vetted journalists of color before Powell showed up, and then those four individuals could choose to ask him something related – which of course they did not, in any instance, do.
President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry, then the Democratic nominee for president, spoke as well. The panel of journalists who asked Bush questions when he showed up had not been properly vetted.
Roland Martin of the Chicago Defender had slipped onto it somehow (which won't happen again!). Martin asked Bush whether he was opposed to preferential college admissions for the kids of alumni and whether he cared more about voting rights in Afghanistan than in Florida.
Bush looked like a deer in the headlights, only without the intelligence. He stumbled so badly that the room openly laughed at him.
But the panel that had been assembled to lob softballs at Powell served its purpose well. It was moderated by Gwen Ifill. I asked Ifill (and Powell could watch it later on C-Span if he wanted to) whether Powell had any explanation for the way in which he had relied on the testimony of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law.
Powell had recited the claims about weapons of mass destruction but carefully left out the part where that same gentleman had testified that all of Iraq's WMDs had been destroyed. Ifill thanked me, and said nothing. Hillary Clinton was not present and nobody beat me up.
I wonder what Powell would say if someone were to actually ask him that question, even today, or next year, or ten years from now. Someone tells you about a bunch of old weapons and at the same time tells you they've been destroyed, and you choose to repeat the part about the weapons and censor the part about their destruction. How would you explain that?
Well, it's a sin of omission, so ultimately Powell could claim he forgot. "Oh yeah, I meant to say that, but it slipped my mind."
But how would he explain this:
During his presentation at the United Nations, Powell provided this translation of an intercepted conversation between Iraqi army officers:
"They're inspecting the ammunition you have, yes.
"Yes.
"For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.
"For the possibility there is by chance forbidden ammo?
"Yes.
"And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there."
The incriminating phrases "clean all of the areas" and "make sure there is nothing there" do not appear in the official State Department translation of the exchange:
"Lt. Colonel: They are inspecting the ammunition you have.
"Colonel: Yes.
"Lt. Col: For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.
"Colonel: Yes?
"Lt. Colonel: For the possibility there is by chance, forbidden ammo.
"Colonel: Yes.
"Lt. Colonel: And we sent you a message to inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas.
"Colonel: Yes."
Powell was writing fictional dialogue. He put those extra lines in there and pretended somebody had said them. Here's what Bob Woodward said about this in his book, Plan of Attack.
"[Powell] had decided to add his personal interpretation of the intercepts to rehearsed script, taking them substantially further and casting them in the most negative light. Concerning the intercept about inspecting for the possibility of 'forbidden ammo,' Powell took the interpretation further: 'Clean out all of the areas. . . . Make sure there is nothing there.' None of this was in the intercept."
For most of his presentation, Powell wasn't inventing dialogue, but he was presenting as facts numerous claims that his own staff had warned him were weak and indefensible.
Powell told the UN and the world: "We know that Saddam’s son, Qusay, ordered the removal of all prohibited weapons from Saddam's numerous palace complexes." The Jan. 31, 2003, evaluation of Powell's draft remarks prepared for him by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research ("INR") flagged this claim as "WEAK."
Regarding alleged Iraqi concealment of key files, Powell said: "key files from military and scientific establishments have been placed in cars that are being driven around the countryside by Iraqi intelligence agents to avoid detection."
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as "WEAK" and added "Plausibility open to question." A Feb. 3, 2003, INR evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell's remarks noted:
"Page 4, last bullet, re key files being driven around in cars to avoid inspectors. This claim is highly questionable and promises to be targeted by critics and possibly UN inspection officials as well."
That didn't stop Colin from stating it as fact and apparently hoping that, even if UN inspectors thought he was a brazen liar, U.S. media outlets wouldn't tell anyone.
On the issue of biological weapons and dispersal equipment, Powell said: "we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq."
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as "WEAK":
"WEAK. Missiles with biological warheads reportedly dispersed. This would be somewhat true in terms of short-range missiles with conventional warheads, but is questionable in terms of longer-range missiles or biological warheads."
This claim was again flagged in the Feb. 3, 2003, evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell's presentation: "Page 5. first para, claim re missile brigade dispersing rocket launchers and BW warheads. This claim too is highly questionable and might be subjected to criticism by UN inspection officials."
That didn't stop Colin. In fact, he brought out visual aids to help with his lying
Powell showed a slide of a satellite photograph of an Iraqi munitions bunker, and lied:
"The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions . . . [t]he truck you [...] see is a signature item. It's a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong."
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as "WEAK" and added: "We support much of this discussion, but we note that decontamination vehicles – cited several times in the text – are water trucks that can have legitimate uses... Iraq has given UNMOVIC what may be a plausible account for this activity – that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives; presence of a fire safety truck (water truck, which could also be used as a decontamination vehicle) is common in such an event."
Powell's own staff had told him the thing was a water truck, but he told the UN it was "a signature item…a decontamination vehicle." The UN was going to need a decontamination vehicle itself by the time Powell finished spewing his lies and disgracing his country.
He just kept piling it on: "UAVs outfitted with spray tanks constitute an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons," he said.
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this statement as "WEAK" and added: "the claim that experts agree UAVs fitted with spray tanks are ‘an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons’ is WEAK."
In other words, experts did NOT agree with that claim.
Powell kept going, announcing "in mid-December weapons experts at one facility were replaced by Iraqi intelligence agents who were to deceive inspectors about the work that was being done there."
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as "WEAK" and "not credible" and "open to criticism, particularly by the UN inspectorates."
His staff was warning him that what he planned to say would not be believed by his audience, which would include the people with actual knowledge of the matter.
To Powell that was no matter.
Powell, no doubt figuring he was in deep already, so what did he have to lose, went on to tell the UN: "On orders from Saddam Hussein, Iraqi officials issued a false death certificate for one scientist, and he was sent into hiding."
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as "WEAK" and called it "Not implausible, but UN inspectors might question it. (Note: Draft states it as fact.)"
And Powell stated it as fact. Notice that his staff was not able to say there was any evidence for the claim, but rather that it was "not implausible." That was the best they could come up with. In other words: "They might buy this one, Sir, but don't count on it."
Powell, however, wasn't satisfied lying about one scientist. He had to have a dozen. He told the United Nations: "A dozen [WMD] experts have been placed under house arrest, not in their own houses, but as a group at one of Saddam Hussein's guest houses."
The Jan. 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as "WEAK" and "Highly questionable." This one didn't even merit a "Not implausible."
Powell also said: "In the middle of January, experts at one facility that was related to weapons of mass destruction, those experts had been ordered to stay home from work to avoid the inspectors. Workers from other Iraqi military facilities not engaged in elicit weapons projects were to replace the workers who’d been sent home."
Powell's staff called this "WEAK," with "Plausibility open to question."
All of this stuff sounded plausible enough to viewers of Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. And that, we can see now, was what interested Colin. But it must have sounded highly implausible to the UN inspectors. Here was a guy who had not been with them on any of their inspections coming in to tell them what had happened.
We know from Scott Ritter, who led many UNSCOM inspections in Iraq, that U.S. inspectors had used the access that the inspection process afforded them to spy for, and to set up means of data collection for, the CIA. So there was some plausibility to the idea that an American could come back to the UN and inform the UN what had really happened on its inspections.
Yet, repeatedly, Powell's staff warned him that the specific claims he wanted to make were not going to even sound plausible. They will be recorded by history more simply as blatant lies.
The examples of Powell's lying listed above are taken from an extensive report released by Congressman John Conyers: "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War."
David Swanson is the author of War Is A Lie at http://warisalie.org
To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.
https://consortiumnews.com/2011/021811a.html.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Monday, February 2, 2015
CIA, Israel Plotted Senior Hezbollah Commander's Killing: Report
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/28367-cia-israel-plotted-senior-hezbollah-commanders-killing-report
A woman supporter of the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah movement holding an image of the movement's slain commander Imad Mughniyeh during a Hezbollah parade in the city of Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon. (photo: AFP/Mahmoud Zayyat)
CIA, Israel Plotted Senior Hezbollah Commander's Killing: Report
By Agence France-Presse
01 February 15
The CIA and Israel's spy agency Mossad were behind an elaborate plot to kill Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in a 2008 car bomb attack in Syria, the Washington Post reported.
Citing former intelligence officials, the newspaper reported that US and Israeli spy agencies worked together to target Mughniyeh on February 12, 2008 as he left a restaurant in the Syrian capital Damascus.
He was killed instantly by a car bomb planted in a spare tire on the back of a parked car, which exploded shrapnel in a tight radius, the Post said.
The bomb, built by the United States and tested in the state of North Carolina, was triggered remotely by Mossad agents in Tel Aviv who were in communication with Central Intelligence Agency operatives on the ground in Damascus.
"The way it was set up, the US could object and call it off, but it could not execute," a former US intelligence official told the newspaper.
A senior Hezbollah commander, Mughniyeh was suspected of masterminding the abduction of Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s and of the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina that killed 29 people.
He was also linked to the bombing of the US marine barracks at Beirut airport in 1983, in which 241 American servicemen died, and the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, in which a US navy diver was killed.
The CIA declined to comment to the Post about the report.
According the newspaper, the authority to kill required a presidential finding by George W Bush. Several senior officials, including the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and the national security advisor, would have had to sign off on the order, it added.
- 'Find, fix and finish' -
The former officials that spoke to the newspaper said Mughniyeh was directly involved in arming and training Shiite militias in Iraq that were targeting US forces, and though it occurred in a country where the United States was not at war, his assassination could be seen as an act of self-defense.
"They were carrying out suicide bombings and IED attacks," one former official told the Post, referring to alleged Hezbollah operations in Iraq.
They added that getting approval from the most senior echelons of the US government to carry out the attack against Mughniyeh was a "rigorous and tedious" process, and it had to be proven that he was a true menace.
"What we had to show was he was a continuing threat to Americans," the official told the Post.
"The decision was we had to have absolute confirmation that it was self-defense."
The newspaper said that during the Iraq war, the Bush administration had approved a list of operations aimed at Hezbollah, and according to one official, this included approval to target Mughniyeh.
"There was an open license to find, fix and finish Mughniyeh and anybody affiliated with him," a former US official who served in Baghdad told the Post.
According to the newspaper, American intelligence officials had been discussing possible ways to target the notorious Hezbollah commander for years, and senior US Joint Special Operations Command agents held a secret meeting with the head of Israel's military intelligence service in 2002.
"When we said we would be willing to explore opportunities to target him, they practically fell out of their chairs," a former US official told the Post.
Though it is not clear when the agencies realized Mughniyeh was living in Damascus, a former official told the newspaper that Israel had approached the CIA about a joint operation to kill him in Syria's capital.
The agencies collected "pattern of life" information about him and used facial recognition technology to establish his identity after he walked out of a restaurant the night he was killed.
© 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
A woman supporter of the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah movement holding an image of the movement's slain commander Imad Mughniyeh during a Hezbollah parade in the city of Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon. (photo: AFP/Mahmoud Zayyat)
CIA, Israel Plotted Senior Hezbollah Commander's Killing: Report
By Agence France-Presse
01 February 15
The CIA and Israel's spy agency Mossad were behind an elaborate plot to kill Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in a 2008 car bomb attack in Syria, the Washington Post reported.
Citing former intelligence officials, the newspaper reported that US and Israeli spy agencies worked together to target Mughniyeh on February 12, 2008 as he left a restaurant in the Syrian capital Damascus.
He was killed instantly by a car bomb planted in a spare tire on the back of a parked car, which exploded shrapnel in a tight radius, the Post said.
The bomb, built by the United States and tested in the state of North Carolina, was triggered remotely by Mossad agents in Tel Aviv who were in communication with Central Intelligence Agency operatives on the ground in Damascus.
"The way it was set up, the US could object and call it off, but it could not execute," a former US intelligence official told the newspaper.
A senior Hezbollah commander, Mughniyeh was suspected of masterminding the abduction of Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s and of the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina that killed 29 people.
He was also linked to the bombing of the US marine barracks at Beirut airport in 1983, in which 241 American servicemen died, and the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, in which a US navy diver was killed.
The CIA declined to comment to the Post about the report.
According the newspaper, the authority to kill required a presidential finding by George W Bush. Several senior officials, including the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and the national security advisor, would have had to sign off on the order, it added.
- 'Find, fix and finish' -
The former officials that spoke to the newspaper said Mughniyeh was directly involved in arming and training Shiite militias in Iraq that were targeting US forces, and though it occurred in a country where the United States was not at war, his assassination could be seen as an act of self-defense.
"They were carrying out suicide bombings and IED attacks," one former official told the Post, referring to alleged Hezbollah operations in Iraq.
They added that getting approval from the most senior echelons of the US government to carry out the attack against Mughniyeh was a "rigorous and tedious" process, and it had to be proven that he was a true menace.
"What we had to show was he was a continuing threat to Americans," the official told the Post.
"The decision was we had to have absolute confirmation that it was self-defense."
The newspaper said that during the Iraq war, the Bush administration had approved a list of operations aimed at Hezbollah, and according to one official, this included approval to target Mughniyeh.
"There was an open license to find, fix and finish Mughniyeh and anybody affiliated with him," a former US official who served in Baghdad told the Post.
According to the newspaper, American intelligence officials had been discussing possible ways to target the notorious Hezbollah commander for years, and senior US Joint Special Operations Command agents held a secret meeting with the head of Israel's military intelligence service in 2002.
"When we said we would be willing to explore opportunities to target him, they practically fell out of their chairs," a former US official told the Post.
Though it is not clear when the agencies realized Mughniyeh was living in Damascus, a former official told the newspaper that Israel had approached the CIA about a joint operation to kill him in Syria's capital.
The agencies collected "pattern of life" information about him and used facial recognition technology to establish his identity after he walked out of a restaurant the night he was killed.
© 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Pentagon Makes No Secret of Wanting to Monitor Social Change Activism
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Pentagon Makes No Secret of Wanting to Monitor Social Change Activism
By Nafeez Ahmed
[1] / AlterNet [2]
January 30, 2015
The US military is increasingly concerned about the risks to social, political and economic stability from resource stress and climate change, and whether they might lead governments to collapse. That’s the upshot of the latest call for proposals from the Pentagon’s flagship social science research program, the Minerva Research Initiative.
Minerva is a multi-million-dollar research program led by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and founded in 2008 under the watch of then-defense secretary Robert Gates. The final deadline for submissions for the latest research round is next month.
Preparing for ‘shocks’
The research call [3], which was put out near the end of last year by the Office of Naval Research, shows that the Pentagon is particularly taken aback by sudden “societal shifts like those seen recently in North Africa and the Middle East,” as well as in “Central Eurasia.”
The 2011 Arab spring saw the toppling of western-backed dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, and the breakdown of Syria and Libya into protracted civil war. Various studies [4] have repeatedly highlighted the previously overlooked role of droughts, food crises and economic problems caused by climate change [5] in dramatically undermining the capacity of the region’s largely authoritarian states to maintain a cap on domestic grievances.
Now the Minerva program wants to fund researchers examining “the factors that affect societal resilience to external ‘shock’ events and corresponding tipping points.” This year the Pentagon is investing a total of $8 million in projects from almost any academic discipline, which must of course be relevant to “contemporary DoD strategic priorities.”
Given that the upheaval in the Arab world took all observers by surprise, it is not surprising that “the Department of Defense is interested in better anticipating and identifying potential areas of unrest, instability, and conflict,” particularly in “regions and states… of strategic interest to the DoD.” The Minerva announcement specifically requests policy-oriented research that will “inform strategic thinking about resource allocation across defense missions (including in the cyber realm)”—in other words, to help determine where the US military should focus operations.
Unlike previous Minerva projects, this year’s program is explicitly for both “basic and applied scientific research,” which means that the research could be applied to directly support military operations.
Resource stress
The research call contains an entire section dedicated to “Resources, economics, and globalization,” including an appeal for contributions that explore “a causal relationship between the effects of environmental stress and/or climate change and stability and security.”
A major factor for study is the role of “resource scarcity or imbalance, including food and water insecurity” in aggravating “state instability.” The variables this could cover include “resource supply, ownership, control, and access”; “rising energy consumption—including impacts on human health and prosperity”; and “changes in global energy markets, including evolving patterns of energy production and use.”
The Pentagon also wants to see modeling of the interplay between demographic trends and population growth, as well as wider economic issues like “wealth distribution.” The research call, for instance, mentions the security implications of “aging populations and shrinking working age populations worldwide.”
The demographic issue of the disparity between ageing and working age populations is not relevant to regions like the Middle East or Africa, which mostly are experiencing a youth bulge. Rather, as a sobering report [6] published last August by the ratings agency Moody’s, these trends apply mostly to the industrialized western world, and could have serious economic consequences.
The Minerva research call doesn’t mention this, but in recent years leading economists [7] have warned that in the US, UK and western Europe, the decline in people of working age compared to the rise of a non-working elderly population may pose a serious problem for developed economies as pension pay-outs become strained against a reduced workforce, declining productivity, and a diminishing tax base. Some argue that this alone could contribute to a renewed economic recession—and persistent widening inequality, looming debt issues and resource stress, could amplify the danger.
The Pentagon’s concern about such economic questions in the context of resource stress, raises questions about whether the US military anticipates a risk of domestic unrest due to sustained economic crisis.
Also mentioned are changing patterns of migration, which are placing a strain on national identities while also bringing up new dangers from “immigrant assimilation and segregation.”
Some scientists warn that the increasing exodus of rural populations into cities could see an urban future [8] dominated by crowded megacities—cities with more than 10 million inhabitants. In the context of future climate change and resource stress, the question of how such megacities could meet the needs of their populations is palpable.
No wonder the Minerva program is keen to measure the risk of social and political collapse for large urban centres. Its new announcement calls for research to analyze “factors determining societal resilience in megacities. Under what conditions might a governing body fail to cope with rapid urbanization?”
Political mobilization
The Pentagon also wants to understand how all this links with the dynamics of social and political change more generally, with another section requesting input on “mobilization for change.” The research call mentions a specific concern with how political activism can lead to terrorism and violence, and its overall approach tends to see an individual’s or group’s interest in change activism as implying vulnerability to "radicalization":
“The Department of Defense is interested in better understanding what drives individuals and groups to mobilize for change and the mechanisms of that mobilization, particularly when violent tactics are adopted. This research will help inform understanding of where organized violence is likely to erupt, what factors might explain its spread, and how one might circumvent its dissemination.”
At first glance, this seems fairly innocuous, but it reveals a disturbing ideological bias in the Pentagon’s conception of social and political dissent. The assumption that the adoption of “violent tactics” is linked to the issues that motivate people to “mobilize for change” conflates the dynamics of change activism in general with a risk of being involved in “organized violence.”
Given this assumption, state efforts to circumvent the “dissemination” of violence could end up on the slippery slope of seeing political activism itself as a potential threat, which must therefore be monitored or even suppressed—as is already [9] happening.
But the Pentagon is not just interested in the question of violence. The DoD wants to understand the precise dynamics of political dissent for its own sake, too.
The Minerva announcement asks for proposals investigating “underlying mechanisms of mobilization”; “factors that foster or inhibit an individual’s transition from passive support of fringe social movements to active political mobilization”; “analyses of the topology, power structure, productivity, merging and splitting, and overall resilience of change-driven organizations. Why and how do groups merge or splinter?”; as well as “approaches exploring contributors to and mechanisms for political mobilization.”
This is a general demand for wide-ranging research on the nature of civil society, and the operations and interrelationships of activist groups campaigning for social and political change.
Mapping Muslim discourses… via non-Muslim antiwar groups?
Previous Pentagon-funded Minerva projects have similarly conflated [10] violent and non-violent political activists by defining activists working with NGOs and political parties as both “sympathetic to radical causes” and “supporters of political violence.” The thrust of much of this earlier research has focused on trying to understand “social contagions,” and the risk of “insurgencies” due to various forms of social breakdown—both in the US homeland and in foreign theatres of strategic interest to the US.
The focus of a range of such projects has been on developing new quantitative tools and models, including advanced data-mining methods and algorithms, by which to automatically categorize [11] activist groups and rank them on a threat-scale to US interests. Last year, I obtained exclusive access to some of the online research tools connected to a project based at Arizona State University (ASU) examining “radical” and “counter-radical” Muslim discourses and movements in Southeast Asia, West Africa, and Western Europe.
One ASU project paper, "Multiscale Modeling of Islamic Organizations in the UK
[12]," presented at an academic conference in Washington, DC in 2013, reveals the Orwellian scope of such research.
The study's authors describe their development of “a ranking system that utilizes ranked perspectives to map 26 UK Islamic organizations on a set of socio-cultural, political and behavioral scales based on their web corpus.” In reality, the list of organizations studied included 10 more organizations, some of which were non-Muslim organizations.
Data for the Pentagon-funded research project consisted of a collection of nearly 10,000 documents downloaded from the websites of 36 UK organizations that were then ranked on various scales by three independent experts.
Prof. Sajjad Rizvi of the University of Exeter’s Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies was one of the independent academics asked to rank the UK organizations. He said that he was not informed of the project’s relationship to the US government or military, and thought the research design was poor.
“A colleague asked me to do it," said Rizvi, "but my understanding was that it was to develop a tool for social science research. I had no idea about government links. I thought the questions and concepts did not make sense and I wasn’t at all convinced about the overall method.” He also criticized the tool’s abject inability [13] to meaningfully define violence, political radicalism, religious belief, and distinctions between them – and complained that his feedback to the project investigators was ignored.
The project gathered some of its data via an "expert wisdom gathering tool," a bespoke website for academic experts [14] to grade and scale these organizations. According to the online tool, the organizations rated for their threat-level included largely peaceful civil society organizations such as British Muslims for Secular Democracy, Islamic Relief, Islamic Society of Britain and the Quilliam Foundation, as well as activist pro-Palestinian organizations which have been critical of UK government policy, such as the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK, Cage Prisoners and Interpal.
Despite the claim of focusing on Muslim discourses of extremism, included on the list are non-Muslim organizations opposed to US and British foreign policies—namely the 32 county sovereignty committee (32CSM [15]), the Irish Republican separatist group often described as the political wing of the Real IRA; and the Socialist Workers Party, which since 2003 has run the UK’s leading anti-war network, the Stop The War Coalition (STWC).
STWC’s supporting organizations include the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the National Union of Journalists, the Centre for Nuclear Disarmament, Friends of Al-Aqsa, the Green Party, Military Families Against War, Media Workers Against War, the Kurdish Federation, and Britain’s major trade unions, Unison and United.
The "expert wisdom gathering tool" also showed intent to scale or rank organizations in Germany, France, Europe generally, Nigeria, Niger, Senegal, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, although only the UK and Indonesia sections contained active lists of groups.
Tracking ‘radicals’
In addition to above, the ASU project has also produced a powerful visualization tool called LookingGlass [16], capable of identifying and locating individuals and ranking their propensity for terrorism, based on long-term tracking and automated discourse analysis of their social media posts. Algorithms are applied to “large amounts of text collected from a wide variety of organizations’ media outlets to discover their hotly debated topics, and their discriminative perspectives voiced by opposing camps organized into multiple scales.”
These are then used to “classify and map individual Tweeter’s message content to social movements based on the perspectives expressed in their weekly tweets.” The LookingGlass platform is able “to track the geographical footprint, shifting positions and flows of individuals, topics and perspectives between groups.”
Unlike previous systems, the Pentagon’s appropriation of LookingGlass can provide “real-time contextual analysis of complex socio-political situations that are rife with volatility and uncertainty. It is able to rapidly recognize radical hot-spots of networks, narratives and activities, and their socio-cultural economic, political drivers,” and is able to identify and track specific “radical” and “non-radical” individuals, along with shifts in their beliefs and affiliations to “radical” and “non-radical” movements and organizations.
Tweets can kill
Unbeknown to many, Arizona State is officially an NSA-designated university. Its Information Assurance Center (IAC), based in the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision System Engineering – where the programming of data-mining tools for the Pentagon has occurred – is a certified National Center of Excellence in education and research by the NSA and US Department of Homeland Security.
Arizona State's IAC also collaborates with the school's Center for Emergency Management, which provides training for “homeland security professionals” in “government/industry” on “disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery and management.”
According to NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, a former senior executive of the agency, the algorithms being developed by ASU’s data-mining projects were similar to algorithms used by US intelligence to identify targets for the CIA’s "signature" drone strikes [16]against unidentified groups of terrorism suspects.
When I asked Drake whether the ASU algorithms could in fact be used to fine-tune the intelligence community’s algorithms for drone strikes, he told me:
“Your hunch is right. Having the US government and Department of Defense fund this kind of research at the university level will bias the results by default. This is a fall-out of big data research of this type, using algorithms to detect patterns when the patterns themselves are an effect – and mixing up correlation with causality. Under this flawed approach, many false positives are possible and these results can create an ends of profiling justifying the means of data-mining.”
Projects like LookingGlass could therefore be used to augment [17] not just the Pentagon’s capacity for mass surveillance at home and abroad, but also to identify targets [18] for terrorism watch-lists, and worse, extrajudicial assassination. In the unforgettable words [19] of Gen. Michael Hayden, former NSA and CIA chief:
“We kill people based on metadata.”
The Pentagon’s Minerva initiative demonstrates that the military’s alarming propensity to see a politically active citizenry as a potential terror threat is directly linked to the growing recognition that ‘non-traditional’ security issues like resource stress are already undermining state legitimacy. Unfortunately, such short-sighted responses focused on expanding military intelligence powers will only undermine it further.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [20]
[21]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/pentagon-makes-no-secret-wanting-monitor-social-change-activism
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/nafeez-ahmed-0
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://www.onr.navy.mil/~/media/Files/Funding-Announcements/BAA/2014/14-013-FINAL.ashx
[4] http://climateandsecurity.org/2014/03/26/review-two-new-studies-on-syria-drought-climate-change-natural-resource-management-and-the-uprising/
[5] http://www.americansecurityproject.org/climate-change-the-arab-spring-and-food-prices/
[6] http://citywire.co.uk/wealth-manager/news/demographic-crisis-13-nations-set-to-be-super-aged-by-2020/a766345#i=1
[7] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-baby-boomers-retirement-means-for-the-u-s-economy/
[8] http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/world-population-trends-signal-dangers-ahead
[9] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jan/21/fracking-activism-protest-terrorist-oil-corporate-spies
[10] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown
[11] http://www.occupy.com/article/exposed-pentagon-funds-new-data-mining-tools-track-and-kill-activists-part-i#sthash.sdcAQcTM.dpuf
[12] http://www.public.asu.edu/~hdavulcu/MINERVA/SocialCom2013/submission1.pdf
[13] http://www.occupy.com/article/exposed-pentagon-funds-new-data-mining-tools-track-and-kill-activists-part-ii
[14] http://www.occupy.com/article/exposed-pentagon-funds-new-data-mining-tools-track-and-kill-activists-part-ii#sthash.orjNOp7V.dpuf
[15] http://www.32csm.net/
[16] http://www.occupy.com/article/pentagon-funds-new-data-mining-tools-track-and-kill-activists-part-iii
[17] http://www.nafeezahmed.com/2014/10/are-you-activist-your-tweets-could-kill.html
[18] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/plan-for-hunting-terrorists-signals-us-intends-to-keep-adding-names-to-kill-lists/2012/10/23/4789b2ae-18b3-11e2-a55c-39408fbe6a4b_story.html
[19] http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/may/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/
[20] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Pentagon Makes No Secret of Wanting to Monitor Social Change Activism
[21] http://www.alternet.org/
[22] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Pentagon Makes No Secret of Wanting to Monitor Social Change Activism
By Nafeez Ahmed
[1] / AlterNet [2]
January 30, 2015
The US military is increasingly concerned about the risks to social, political and economic stability from resource stress and climate change, and whether they might lead governments to collapse. That’s the upshot of the latest call for proposals from the Pentagon’s flagship social science research program, the Minerva Research Initiative.
Minerva is a multi-million-dollar research program led by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and founded in 2008 under the watch of then-defense secretary Robert Gates. The final deadline for submissions for the latest research round is next month.
Preparing for ‘shocks’
The research call [3], which was put out near the end of last year by the Office of Naval Research, shows that the Pentagon is particularly taken aback by sudden “societal shifts like those seen recently in North Africa and the Middle East,” as well as in “Central Eurasia.”
The 2011 Arab spring saw the toppling of western-backed dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, and the breakdown of Syria and Libya into protracted civil war. Various studies [4] have repeatedly highlighted the previously overlooked role of droughts, food crises and economic problems caused by climate change [5] in dramatically undermining the capacity of the region’s largely authoritarian states to maintain a cap on domestic grievances.
Now the Minerva program wants to fund researchers examining “the factors that affect societal resilience to external ‘shock’ events and corresponding tipping points.” This year the Pentagon is investing a total of $8 million in projects from almost any academic discipline, which must of course be relevant to “contemporary DoD strategic priorities.”
Given that the upheaval in the Arab world took all observers by surprise, it is not surprising that “the Department of Defense is interested in better anticipating and identifying potential areas of unrest, instability, and conflict,” particularly in “regions and states… of strategic interest to the DoD.” The Minerva announcement specifically requests policy-oriented research that will “inform strategic thinking about resource allocation across defense missions (including in the cyber realm)”—in other words, to help determine where the US military should focus operations.
Unlike previous Minerva projects, this year’s program is explicitly for both “basic and applied scientific research,” which means that the research could be applied to directly support military operations.
Resource stress
The research call contains an entire section dedicated to “Resources, economics, and globalization,” including an appeal for contributions that explore “a causal relationship between the effects of environmental stress and/or climate change and stability and security.”
A major factor for study is the role of “resource scarcity or imbalance, including food and water insecurity” in aggravating “state instability.” The variables this could cover include “resource supply, ownership, control, and access”; “rising energy consumption—including impacts on human health and prosperity”; and “changes in global energy markets, including evolving patterns of energy production and use.”
The Pentagon also wants to see modeling of the interplay between demographic trends and population growth, as well as wider economic issues like “wealth distribution.” The research call, for instance, mentions the security implications of “aging populations and shrinking working age populations worldwide.”
The demographic issue of the disparity between ageing and working age populations is not relevant to regions like the Middle East or Africa, which mostly are experiencing a youth bulge. Rather, as a sobering report [6] published last August by the ratings agency Moody’s, these trends apply mostly to the industrialized western world, and could have serious economic consequences.
The Minerva research call doesn’t mention this, but in recent years leading economists [7] have warned that in the US, UK and western Europe, the decline in people of working age compared to the rise of a non-working elderly population may pose a serious problem for developed economies as pension pay-outs become strained against a reduced workforce, declining productivity, and a diminishing tax base. Some argue that this alone could contribute to a renewed economic recession—and persistent widening inequality, looming debt issues and resource stress, could amplify the danger.
The Pentagon’s concern about such economic questions in the context of resource stress, raises questions about whether the US military anticipates a risk of domestic unrest due to sustained economic crisis.
Also mentioned are changing patterns of migration, which are placing a strain on national identities while also bringing up new dangers from “immigrant assimilation and segregation.”
Some scientists warn that the increasing exodus of rural populations into cities could see an urban future [8] dominated by crowded megacities—cities with more than 10 million inhabitants. In the context of future climate change and resource stress, the question of how such megacities could meet the needs of their populations is palpable.
No wonder the Minerva program is keen to measure the risk of social and political collapse for large urban centres. Its new announcement calls for research to analyze “factors determining societal resilience in megacities. Under what conditions might a governing body fail to cope with rapid urbanization?”
Political mobilization
The Pentagon also wants to understand how all this links with the dynamics of social and political change more generally, with another section requesting input on “mobilization for change.” The research call mentions a specific concern with how political activism can lead to terrorism and violence, and its overall approach tends to see an individual’s or group’s interest in change activism as implying vulnerability to "radicalization":
“The Department of Defense is interested in better understanding what drives individuals and groups to mobilize for change and the mechanisms of that mobilization, particularly when violent tactics are adopted. This research will help inform understanding of where organized violence is likely to erupt, what factors might explain its spread, and how one might circumvent its dissemination.”
At first glance, this seems fairly innocuous, but it reveals a disturbing ideological bias in the Pentagon’s conception of social and political dissent. The assumption that the adoption of “violent tactics” is linked to the issues that motivate people to “mobilize for change” conflates the dynamics of change activism in general with a risk of being involved in “organized violence.”
Given this assumption, state efforts to circumvent the “dissemination” of violence could end up on the slippery slope of seeing political activism itself as a potential threat, which must therefore be monitored or even suppressed—as is already [9] happening.
But the Pentagon is not just interested in the question of violence. The DoD wants to understand the precise dynamics of political dissent for its own sake, too.
The Minerva announcement asks for proposals investigating “underlying mechanisms of mobilization”; “factors that foster or inhibit an individual’s transition from passive support of fringe social movements to active political mobilization”; “analyses of the topology, power structure, productivity, merging and splitting, and overall resilience of change-driven organizations. Why and how do groups merge or splinter?”; as well as “approaches exploring contributors to and mechanisms for political mobilization.”
This is a general demand for wide-ranging research on the nature of civil society, and the operations and interrelationships of activist groups campaigning for social and political change.
Mapping Muslim discourses… via non-Muslim antiwar groups?
Previous Pentagon-funded Minerva projects have similarly conflated [10] violent and non-violent political activists by defining activists working with NGOs and political parties as both “sympathetic to radical causes” and “supporters of political violence.” The thrust of much of this earlier research has focused on trying to understand “social contagions,” and the risk of “insurgencies” due to various forms of social breakdown—both in the US homeland and in foreign theatres of strategic interest to the US.
The focus of a range of such projects has been on developing new quantitative tools and models, including advanced data-mining methods and algorithms, by which to automatically categorize [11] activist groups and rank them on a threat-scale to US interests. Last year, I obtained exclusive access to some of the online research tools connected to a project based at Arizona State University (ASU) examining “radical” and “counter-radical” Muslim discourses and movements in Southeast Asia, West Africa, and Western Europe.
One ASU project paper, "Multiscale Modeling of Islamic Organizations in the UK
[12]," presented at an academic conference in Washington, DC in 2013, reveals the Orwellian scope of such research.
The study's authors describe their development of “a ranking system that utilizes ranked perspectives to map 26 UK Islamic organizations on a set of socio-cultural, political and behavioral scales based on their web corpus.” In reality, the list of organizations studied included 10 more organizations, some of which were non-Muslim organizations.
Data for the Pentagon-funded research project consisted of a collection of nearly 10,000 documents downloaded from the websites of 36 UK organizations that were then ranked on various scales by three independent experts.
Prof. Sajjad Rizvi of the University of Exeter’s Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies was one of the independent academics asked to rank the UK organizations. He said that he was not informed of the project’s relationship to the US government or military, and thought the research design was poor.
“A colleague asked me to do it," said Rizvi, "but my understanding was that it was to develop a tool for social science research. I had no idea about government links. I thought the questions and concepts did not make sense and I wasn’t at all convinced about the overall method.” He also criticized the tool’s abject inability [13] to meaningfully define violence, political radicalism, religious belief, and distinctions between them – and complained that his feedback to the project investigators was ignored.
The project gathered some of its data via an "expert wisdom gathering tool," a bespoke website for academic experts [14] to grade and scale these organizations. According to the online tool, the organizations rated for their threat-level included largely peaceful civil society organizations such as British Muslims for Secular Democracy, Islamic Relief, Islamic Society of Britain and the Quilliam Foundation, as well as activist pro-Palestinian organizations which have been critical of UK government policy, such as the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK, Cage Prisoners and Interpal.
Despite the claim of focusing on Muslim discourses of extremism, included on the list are non-Muslim organizations opposed to US and British foreign policies—namely the 32 county sovereignty committee (32CSM [15]), the Irish Republican separatist group often described as the political wing of the Real IRA; and the Socialist Workers Party, which since 2003 has run the UK’s leading anti-war network, the Stop The War Coalition (STWC).
STWC’s supporting organizations include the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the National Union of Journalists, the Centre for Nuclear Disarmament, Friends of Al-Aqsa, the Green Party, Military Families Against War, Media Workers Against War, the Kurdish Federation, and Britain’s major trade unions, Unison and United.
The "expert wisdom gathering tool" also showed intent to scale or rank organizations in Germany, France, Europe generally, Nigeria, Niger, Senegal, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, although only the UK and Indonesia sections contained active lists of groups.
Tracking ‘radicals’
In addition to above, the ASU project has also produced a powerful visualization tool called LookingGlass [16], capable of identifying and locating individuals and ranking their propensity for terrorism, based on long-term tracking and automated discourse analysis of their social media posts. Algorithms are applied to “large amounts of text collected from a wide variety of organizations’ media outlets to discover their hotly debated topics, and their discriminative perspectives voiced by opposing camps organized into multiple scales.”
These are then used to “classify and map individual Tweeter’s message content to social movements based on the perspectives expressed in their weekly tweets.” The LookingGlass platform is able “to track the geographical footprint, shifting positions and flows of individuals, topics and perspectives between groups.”
Unlike previous systems, the Pentagon’s appropriation of LookingGlass can provide “real-time contextual analysis of complex socio-political situations that are rife with volatility and uncertainty. It is able to rapidly recognize radical hot-spots of networks, narratives and activities, and their socio-cultural economic, political drivers,” and is able to identify and track specific “radical” and “non-radical” individuals, along with shifts in their beliefs and affiliations to “radical” and “non-radical” movements and organizations.
Tweets can kill
Unbeknown to many, Arizona State is officially an NSA-designated university. Its Information Assurance Center (IAC), based in the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision System Engineering – where the programming of data-mining tools for the Pentagon has occurred – is a certified National Center of Excellence in education and research by the NSA and US Department of Homeland Security.
Arizona State's IAC also collaborates with the school's Center for Emergency Management, which provides training for “homeland security professionals” in “government/industry” on “disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery and management.”
According to NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, a former senior executive of the agency, the algorithms being developed by ASU’s data-mining projects were similar to algorithms used by US intelligence to identify targets for the CIA’s "signature" drone strikes [16]against unidentified groups of terrorism suspects.
When I asked Drake whether the ASU algorithms could in fact be used to fine-tune the intelligence community’s algorithms for drone strikes, he told me:
“Your hunch is right. Having the US government and Department of Defense fund this kind of research at the university level will bias the results by default. This is a fall-out of big data research of this type, using algorithms to detect patterns when the patterns themselves are an effect – and mixing up correlation with causality. Under this flawed approach, many false positives are possible and these results can create an ends of profiling justifying the means of data-mining.”
Projects like LookingGlass could therefore be used to augment [17] not just the Pentagon’s capacity for mass surveillance at home and abroad, but also to identify targets [18] for terrorism watch-lists, and worse, extrajudicial assassination. In the unforgettable words [19] of Gen. Michael Hayden, former NSA and CIA chief:
“We kill people based on metadata.”
The Pentagon’s Minerva initiative demonstrates that the military’s alarming propensity to see a politically active citizenry as a potential terror threat is directly linked to the growing recognition that ‘non-traditional’ security issues like resource stress are already undermining state legitimacy. Unfortunately, such short-sighted responses focused on expanding military intelligence powers will only undermine it further.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [20]
[21]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/pentagon-makes-no-secret-wanting-monitor-social-change-activism
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/nafeez-ahmed-0
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://www.onr.navy.mil/~/media/Files/Funding-Announcements/BAA/2014/14-013-FINAL.ashx
[4] http://climateandsecurity.org/2014/03/26/review-two-new-studies-on-syria-drought-climate-change-natural-resource-management-and-the-uprising/
[5] http://www.americansecurityproject.org/climate-change-the-arab-spring-and-food-prices/
[6] http://citywire.co.uk/wealth-manager/news/demographic-crisis-13-nations-set-to-be-super-aged-by-2020/a766345#i=1
[7] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-baby-boomers-retirement-means-for-the-u-s-economy/
[8] http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/world-population-trends-signal-dangers-ahead
[9] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jan/21/fracking-activism-protest-terrorist-oil-corporate-spies
[10] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown
[11] http://www.occupy.com/article/exposed-pentagon-funds-new-data-mining-tools-track-and-kill-activists-part-i#sthash.sdcAQcTM.dpuf
[12] http://www.public.asu.edu/~hdavulcu/MINERVA/SocialCom2013/submission1.pdf
[13] http://www.occupy.com/article/exposed-pentagon-funds-new-data-mining-tools-track-and-kill-activists-part-ii
[14] http://www.occupy.com/article/exposed-pentagon-funds-new-data-mining-tools-track-and-kill-activists-part-ii#sthash.orjNOp7V.dpuf
[15] http://www.32csm.net/
[16] http://www.occupy.com/article/pentagon-funds-new-data-mining-tools-track-and-kill-activists-part-iii
[17] http://www.nafeezahmed.com/2014/10/are-you-activist-your-tweets-could-kill.html
[18] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/plan-for-hunting-terrorists-signals-us-intends-to-keep-adding-names-to-kill-lists/2012/10/23/4789b2ae-18b3-11e2-a55c-39408fbe6a4b_story.html
[19] http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/may/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/
[20] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Pentagon Makes No Secret of Wanting to Monitor Social Change Activism
[21] http://www.alternet.org/
[22] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Fracking Linked to 4.4 Magnitude Quake in Alberta, Making It the Largest Fracking-Related Quake Ever
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/312-16/28348-fracking-linked-to-44-magnitude-quake-in-alberta-making-it-the-largest-fracking-related-quake-ever
An anti-fracking activist from Alberta demonstrates fracking's impact on water. (photo: cbc.ca)
Fracking Linked to 4.4 Magnitude Quake in Alberta, Making It the Largest Fracking-Related Quake Ever
By CBC News
31 January 15
Alberta's provincial energy regulator says a significant earthquake in northern Alberta was likely caused by hydraulic fracturing.
If fracturing is confirmed as the cause, scientists say, it will have been the largest earthquake ever to result from using the method.
Residents in the town of Fox Creek noticed the earthquake a week ago on Jan. 22. It was of 4.4 magnitude, severe enough to cause minor damage.
"It felt like a big gust of wind hit the house. The door flew open and the couch moved," said Kelli Mcphee, who was at home watching a scary movie in her living room at the time. hydraulic fracturing
“My husband grabbed a bat and started walking around the house because we didn't know what it was.”
Fox Creek, a town of about 2,000 people, is largely sustained by oil and gas development.
That work often uses hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a process that injects a high-pressure mixture of water and chemicals into the earth to break through rock.
In an emailed statement to CBC, the Alberta Energy Regulator said its monitoring system picked up strong evidence that fracking caused this recent earthquake and likely triggered others too, although it is "impossible to definitively state that it was not a naturally occurring event."
The link between fracking and earthquakes is a phenomenon that several scientists are now studying.
“We have been seeing earthquakes for about the last year in that area, starting with events just above magnitude 3,” said David Eaton, a professor of geophysics at the University of Calgary.
“In most cases, those earthquakes have occurred in association with industry activity such as hydraulic fracturing.”
Eaton and Gail Atkinson, a seismologist at Western University, said if the quake is proved to be caused by hydraulic fracking, it would be the largest one in the world caused by the method.
British Columbia has a policy that requires operations to halt if they trigger an earthquake greater than a 4.0 magnitude.
Alberta does not have a similar rule.
© 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
An anti-fracking activist from Alberta demonstrates fracking's impact on water. (photo: cbc.ca)
Fracking Linked to 4.4 Magnitude Quake in Alberta, Making It the Largest Fracking-Related Quake Ever
By CBC News
31 January 15
Alberta's provincial energy regulator says a significant earthquake in northern Alberta was likely caused by hydraulic fracturing.
If fracturing is confirmed as the cause, scientists say, it will have been the largest earthquake ever to result from using the method.
Residents in the town of Fox Creek noticed the earthquake a week ago on Jan. 22. It was of 4.4 magnitude, severe enough to cause minor damage.
"It felt like a big gust of wind hit the house. The door flew open and the couch moved," said Kelli Mcphee, who was at home watching a scary movie in her living room at the time. hydraulic fracturing
“My husband grabbed a bat and started walking around the house because we didn't know what it was.”
Fox Creek, a town of about 2,000 people, is largely sustained by oil and gas development.
That work often uses hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a process that injects a high-pressure mixture of water and chemicals into the earth to break through rock.
In an emailed statement to CBC, the Alberta Energy Regulator said its monitoring system picked up strong evidence that fracking caused this recent earthquake and likely triggered others too, although it is "impossible to definitively state that it was not a naturally occurring event."
The link between fracking and earthquakes is a phenomenon that several scientists are now studying.
“We have been seeing earthquakes for about the last year in that area, starting with events just above magnitude 3,” said David Eaton, a professor of geophysics at the University of Calgary.
“In most cases, those earthquakes have occurred in association with industry activity such as hydraulic fracturing.”
Eaton and Gail Atkinson, a seismologist at Western University, said if the quake is proved to be caused by hydraulic fracking, it would be the largest one in the world caused by the method.
British Columbia has a policy that requires operations to halt if they trigger an earthquake greater than a 4.0 magnitude.
Alberta does not have a similar rule.
© 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
EXCLUSIVE: 84-year-old activist nun imprisoned in Brooklyn jail hellhole for breaking into nuclear facility, exposing security flaws
For the sake of Megan and all the women with whom she shares a single, very inadequate living space, the America Province of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus is hoping to bring pressure to bear on those who are responsible to change such inhumane conditions and are looking for other congregations and justice promoters who are working on prison reform or other related issues.
If you would like to learn more or if you would like to join them in their efforts, please contact:
Sandra Lincoln, SHCJ
PLT Member
Society of the Holy Child Jesus, American Province lincoln@up.edu
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/exclusive-nun-84-brooklyn-jail-hellhole
BY LINDA STASI
EXCLUSIVE: 84-year-old activist nun imprisoned in Brooklyn jail hellhole for breaking into nuclear facility, exposing security flaws
Sister Megan Rice and two other activists broke into the facility outside Knoxville, Tenn., in 2012 to bring attention to the dangers of unimpeded nuclear proliferation. They also exposed gaps in national security by showing how easy it was to get in. Now, Sister Megan lives in horrifying conditions in a single room with 111 other women in the Metropolitan Detention Center.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Monday, January 19, 2015, 2:30 AM
BILL CLARK/GETTY IMAGES Sister Megan Rice, 84, was sentenced to 35 months in prison for breaking into a nuclear facility when she was 82.
Beige is the new black for imprisoned Sister Megan Rice, an 84-year old Catholic nun and anti-nuclear activist.
The nun, who spent 40 years teaching in the poorest parts of Africa and returned to the U.S. due to malaria, is now living in deplorable prison conditions, wearing a beige uniform and stuffed in with 111 other women into a single room at a federal prison right here in New York City.
Her criminal odyssey began in 2012, when she and two other activists from the Plowshares anti-nuclear organization — Michael Walli, 63, and Gregory Boertje-Obed, 57 — were dropped off in the middle of the night outside the Y-12 Oak Ridge nuclear facility outside Knoxville, Tenn.
It’s one of the largest nuclear facilities in the United States, and she was there to bring to the attention of all Americans the dangers of unimpeded nuclear proliferation.
Armed with spray paint, bolt cutters and a few other supplies, they first hung large banners on the facility’s chain-link fence, then cut 14-inch inverted L-shape openings in the three fences that “protect” the facility.
They crawled through the openings they had cut, then stood up and walked to the building — easily avoiding any electronic motion sensors and video cameras — without encountering a single guard.
THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES Sister Megan Rice (center) is seen awaiting her federal trial for breaking into a nuclear facility in 2012.
Once they reached the highly enriched uranium-materials facility, “I wrapped some pillars in crime tape,” she told Daily News. “We splashed a vial of human blood on the wall.”
They spray-painted quotes from the Bible such as, “Swords into plowshares,” and banged on the building with hammers. Then they waited to be arrested. They waited some more.
Finally, “We saw a car with a guard slowly driving up. He stopped, and radioed to the police that protesters had gotten in.”
The TV series “Orange Is the New Black” has women living in opulence compared with the real-life conditions of Sister Megan and her fellow inmates, who have been shoved into the Metropolitan Detention Center, designed generally to hold male prisoners until trial, not to hold women after conviction.
Sister Megan’s “cell” is a gymnasium-size dorm unit with 60 bunk beds for the 111 women, placed a few feet apart. Along one wall are six half-enclosed toilet stalls, six sinks and six shower stalls, and in the middle of the room, 10 dining/work/play tables that can seat 60 women. There is no outdoor courtyard and no mess hall, and food is passed on trays to the women individually through a small window. Little occupational or addiction therapy, no real shot at education other than a GED.
ERIK SCHELZIG/APSigns warn against trespassing onto the Y-12 nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The women eat in the same unit in which they defecate, sleep, shower and wash.
And this is the United States of America, where “Real Housewife” and federal prisoner Teresa Giudice lives in luxury at the federal prison in Danbury, Conn., compared to the inhumane conditions Sister Megan and her cellmates are enduring in New York City.
“In prisons around this country — so overcrowded by unjust laws, poverty and war-making — the patience and endurance of those I live with here is a constant source of admiration and hope that change is possible when the focus can be on what is of real value to the common good,” Sister Megan said.
Her crime? Breaking into a federal nuclear facility at age 82.
The nun ended up proving, in this age of easy terrorism, both how unguarded and how vulnerable our nuclear facilities are to even low-level terrorists.
The activists broke into the facility at night and hung anti-nuke signs, splashed blood on building walls, sprayed grafitti and used hammers to tap on building concrete.
THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES
Her actions, underreported by the media and downplayed likely because of the embarrassment caused to the White House and federal prosecutors, proved that it is harder to break into a convenience store than it is to break into a federal nuclear facility.
I got to meet the sister last week, months after applying for clearance, being denied and then finally getting approval. On a freezing cold night, I walked into the Metropolitan Detention Center and stored everything in a locker but a few one dollar bills allowed for the vending machines.
At 5 p.m., the official start of visiting hours, we were brought into a large, chilly room with armless chairs lined up in rows overseen by one guard. On one side was a sad “playroom” for the prisoners’ children, perhaps 8-by-10 feet, with nothing but a few dirty stuffed animals.
Visiting was supposed to be from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., but it wasn’t until 5:45 p.m. that prisoners were brought in.
I recognized Sister Megan — she was the only 84-year-old woman. She also had a big smile, wide-spread arms and a missing front tooth.
Sister Megan became a Catholic nun at age 18.
She wore a prison-issued sweatsuit under her beige uniform to combat the cold in the visitor’s room.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to wear the sweatsuit, so they may not allow me to,” she said without a hint of self-pity.
Instead a guard came by to admonish her for moving her chair a few inches out of line in order to lean forward to look at me as we spoke. She immediately pushed it back.
Sister Megan Rice was born in 1930 in New York City — her father was an obstetrician and her mother held a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
At 18, she became a nun, studying at Harvard and earning degrees in biology from Villanova and Boston College. She joined the order of Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus.
JOE MARINO/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sister Megan is serving her sentence in deplorable conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
She knew she’d go to prison for breaking into the nuclear facility as a protest, she told me, but believes it’s up to people without children who have nothing to lose to take the risks others can’t afford.
“The question — how can we overcome the secrecy and blatant distortion of the truth of the horrific risks to planet Earth’s survival as we know it as long as we fail to transform the nuclear weapons and energy industries into possible, life-enhancing alternatives, and begin with dismantlement now? We are all equally responsible to stop known crimes, according to our unique gifts and abilities,” Sister Megan said.
The Y-12 Nuclear Facility, which they breached in less than seven minutes, and which can theoretically be breached by real terrorists, houses 100,000 tons of highly enriched uranium. According to Robert Gleason, author of “The Nuclear Terrorist” from Tor-Forge, this uranium is bomb-grade and so explosive that one grapefruit-size chunk, if dropped onto another chunk of the same size from a height of 6 feet, would cause an explosion at least half the size of Hiroshima. The weapons-grade highly enriched uranium held there is, in fact, the most dangerous, destabilizing substance in the world. There is enough uranium to wipe out life as we know it, and yet it was guarded by a few rent-a-cops at this federally financed facility.
Sister Megan was sentenced to 35 months — in part because of her age — for interfering with national security and damaging property. Her co-defendants got 62 months each. Earlier they were ordered to pay $52,000 for the estimated damage, which she says the government never substantiated. She believes the damage was no more than a few hundred dollars. The facility didn’t bother to find or even fix the cuts in the fences for five months — until they were shown them by members of Plowshares.
The three are responsible for paying back the $52,000, about which Sister Megan said, “None of us has any assets anyway. (I live my) vow of poverty.”
To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest gift you could give me.
In fact, upon sentencing, the sister told the judge, “Please have no leniency with me. To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest gift you could give me.”
After serving at another federal lockup, Sister Megan was transferred last year to the Brooklyn center, to the single floor opened to house the 111 female prisoners.
The thousands of male prisoners there — who are treated more humanely and not crowded into a single room (Al Sharpton once served 90 days there) — include suspected Al Qaeda terrorist Abid Naseer, accused of plotting to bomb the U.S. and Britain; and suspected murder procurer/drug trafficker Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts of the online marketplace Silk Road.
Sister Megan’s lawyer, Marc Shapiro, told me, “With headlines these days, we, as a society, are on high alert and take very seriously claims that individuals desire to undermine the national defense. Regardless, when the three senior citizens entered the facility to spread their message of global peace, (they) engaged in no behavior that injured or could have injured our national defense.”
Unlike her counterparts on TV, Sister Megan is incredibly serene despite the horrifying conditions that are impossible to comprehend in America in 2015. She says she’s content to live her life among the “beautiful women here who are my friends,” doing God’s work. The only thing she needs is a dental bridge so that she may once again have a front tooth.
Sister Megan Rice is scheduled for release in November. She will be 85.
Copyright New York Daily News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
If you would like to learn more or if you would like to join them in their efforts, please contact:
Sandra Lincoln, SHCJ
PLT Member
Society of the Holy Child Jesus, American Province lincoln@up.edu
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/exclusive-nun-84-brooklyn-jail-hellhole
BY LINDA STASI
EXCLUSIVE: 84-year-old activist nun imprisoned in Brooklyn jail hellhole for breaking into nuclear facility, exposing security flaws
Sister Megan Rice and two other activists broke into the facility outside Knoxville, Tenn., in 2012 to bring attention to the dangers of unimpeded nuclear proliferation. They also exposed gaps in national security by showing how easy it was to get in. Now, Sister Megan lives in horrifying conditions in a single room with 111 other women in the Metropolitan Detention Center.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Monday, January 19, 2015, 2:30 AM
BILL CLARK/GETTY IMAGES Sister Megan Rice, 84, was sentenced to 35 months in prison for breaking into a nuclear facility when she was 82.
Beige is the new black for imprisoned Sister Megan Rice, an 84-year old Catholic nun and anti-nuclear activist.
The nun, who spent 40 years teaching in the poorest parts of Africa and returned to the U.S. due to malaria, is now living in deplorable prison conditions, wearing a beige uniform and stuffed in with 111 other women into a single room at a federal prison right here in New York City.
Her criminal odyssey began in 2012, when she and two other activists from the Plowshares anti-nuclear organization — Michael Walli, 63, and Gregory Boertje-Obed, 57 — were dropped off in the middle of the night outside the Y-12 Oak Ridge nuclear facility outside Knoxville, Tenn.
It’s one of the largest nuclear facilities in the United States, and she was there to bring to the attention of all Americans the dangers of unimpeded nuclear proliferation.
Armed with spray paint, bolt cutters and a few other supplies, they first hung large banners on the facility’s chain-link fence, then cut 14-inch inverted L-shape openings in the three fences that “protect” the facility.
They crawled through the openings they had cut, then stood up and walked to the building — easily avoiding any electronic motion sensors and video cameras — without encountering a single guard.
THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES Sister Megan Rice (center) is seen awaiting her federal trial for breaking into a nuclear facility in 2012.
Once they reached the highly enriched uranium-materials facility, “I wrapped some pillars in crime tape,” she told Daily News. “We splashed a vial of human blood on the wall.”
They spray-painted quotes from the Bible such as, “Swords into plowshares,” and banged on the building with hammers. Then they waited to be arrested. They waited some more.
Finally, “We saw a car with a guard slowly driving up. He stopped, and radioed to the police that protesters had gotten in.”
The TV series “Orange Is the New Black” has women living in opulence compared with the real-life conditions of Sister Megan and her fellow inmates, who have been shoved into the Metropolitan Detention Center, designed generally to hold male prisoners until trial, not to hold women after conviction.
Sister Megan’s “cell” is a gymnasium-size dorm unit with 60 bunk beds for the 111 women, placed a few feet apart. Along one wall are six half-enclosed toilet stalls, six sinks and six shower stalls, and in the middle of the room, 10 dining/work/play tables that can seat 60 women. There is no outdoor courtyard and no mess hall, and food is passed on trays to the women individually through a small window. Little occupational or addiction therapy, no real shot at education other than a GED.
ERIK SCHELZIG/APSigns warn against trespassing onto the Y-12 nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The women eat in the same unit in which they defecate, sleep, shower and wash.
And this is the United States of America, where “Real Housewife” and federal prisoner Teresa Giudice lives in luxury at the federal prison in Danbury, Conn., compared to the inhumane conditions Sister Megan and her cellmates are enduring in New York City.
“In prisons around this country — so overcrowded by unjust laws, poverty and war-making — the patience and endurance of those I live with here is a constant source of admiration and hope that change is possible when the focus can be on what is of real value to the common good,” Sister Megan said.
Her crime? Breaking into a federal nuclear facility at age 82.
The nun ended up proving, in this age of easy terrorism, both how unguarded and how vulnerable our nuclear facilities are to even low-level terrorists.
The activists broke into the facility at night and hung anti-nuke signs, splashed blood on building walls, sprayed grafitti and used hammers to tap on building concrete.
THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES
Her actions, underreported by the media and downplayed likely because of the embarrassment caused to the White House and federal prosecutors, proved that it is harder to break into a convenience store than it is to break into a federal nuclear facility.
I got to meet the sister last week, months after applying for clearance, being denied and then finally getting approval. On a freezing cold night, I walked into the Metropolitan Detention Center and stored everything in a locker but a few one dollar bills allowed for the vending machines.
At 5 p.m., the official start of visiting hours, we were brought into a large, chilly room with armless chairs lined up in rows overseen by one guard. On one side was a sad “playroom” for the prisoners’ children, perhaps 8-by-10 feet, with nothing but a few dirty stuffed animals.
Visiting was supposed to be from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., but it wasn’t until 5:45 p.m. that prisoners were brought in.
I recognized Sister Megan — she was the only 84-year-old woman. She also had a big smile, wide-spread arms and a missing front tooth.
Sister Megan became a Catholic nun at age 18.
She wore a prison-issued sweatsuit under her beige uniform to combat the cold in the visitor’s room.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to wear the sweatsuit, so they may not allow me to,” she said without a hint of self-pity.
Instead a guard came by to admonish her for moving her chair a few inches out of line in order to lean forward to look at me as we spoke. She immediately pushed it back.
Sister Megan Rice was born in 1930 in New York City — her father was an obstetrician and her mother held a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
At 18, she became a nun, studying at Harvard and earning degrees in biology from Villanova and Boston College. She joined the order of Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus.
JOE MARINO/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sister Megan is serving her sentence in deplorable conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
She knew she’d go to prison for breaking into the nuclear facility as a protest, she told me, but believes it’s up to people without children who have nothing to lose to take the risks others can’t afford.
“The question — how can we overcome the secrecy and blatant distortion of the truth of the horrific risks to planet Earth’s survival as we know it as long as we fail to transform the nuclear weapons and energy industries into possible, life-enhancing alternatives, and begin with dismantlement now? We are all equally responsible to stop known crimes, according to our unique gifts and abilities,” Sister Megan said.
The Y-12 Nuclear Facility, which they breached in less than seven minutes, and which can theoretically be breached by real terrorists, houses 100,000 tons of highly enriched uranium. According to Robert Gleason, author of “The Nuclear Terrorist” from Tor-Forge, this uranium is bomb-grade and so explosive that one grapefruit-size chunk, if dropped onto another chunk of the same size from a height of 6 feet, would cause an explosion at least half the size of Hiroshima. The weapons-grade highly enriched uranium held there is, in fact, the most dangerous, destabilizing substance in the world. There is enough uranium to wipe out life as we know it, and yet it was guarded by a few rent-a-cops at this federally financed facility.
Sister Megan was sentenced to 35 months — in part because of her age — for interfering with national security and damaging property. Her co-defendants got 62 months each. Earlier they were ordered to pay $52,000 for the estimated damage, which she says the government never substantiated. She believes the damage was no more than a few hundred dollars. The facility didn’t bother to find or even fix the cuts in the fences for five months — until they were shown them by members of Plowshares.
The three are responsible for paying back the $52,000, about which Sister Megan said, “None of us has any assets anyway. (I live my) vow of poverty.”
To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest gift you could give me.
In fact, upon sentencing, the sister told the judge, “Please have no leniency with me. To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest gift you could give me.”
After serving at another federal lockup, Sister Megan was transferred last year to the Brooklyn center, to the single floor opened to house the 111 female prisoners.
The thousands of male prisoners there — who are treated more humanely and not crowded into a single room (Al Sharpton once served 90 days there) — include suspected Al Qaeda terrorist Abid Naseer, accused of plotting to bomb the U.S. and Britain; and suspected murder procurer/drug trafficker Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts of the online marketplace Silk Road.
Sister Megan’s lawyer, Marc Shapiro, told me, “With headlines these days, we, as a society, are on high alert and take very seriously claims that individuals desire to undermine the national defense. Regardless, when the three senior citizens entered the facility to spread their message of global peace, (they) engaged in no behavior that injured or could have injured our national defense.”
Unlike her counterparts on TV, Sister Megan is incredibly serene despite the horrifying conditions that are impossible to comprehend in America in 2015. She says she’s content to live her life among the “beautiful women here who are my friends,” doing God’s work. The only thing she needs is a dental bridge so that she may once again have a front tooth.
Sister Megan Rice is scheduled for release in November. She will be 85.
Copyright New York Daily News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
NFL Gets Billions in Subsidies From US Taxpayers
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/28353-nfl-gets-billions-in-subsidies-from-us-taxpayers
The NFL's teams make over $10 billion in annual revenue, yet the NFL pays no taxes. (photo: Getty)
NFL Gets Billions in Subsidies From US Taxpayers
By Chris Isidore, CNN
31 January 15
If you're a U.S. taxpayer then you're subsidizing the wildly profitable National Football League, regardless of whether you're a fan.
The NFL is the most profitable pro sports league in the U.S., raking in an estimated $1 billion in profits on $10.5 billion in revenue last season, figures that are sure to increase this year.
Those massive profits are made possible in part by the billions of taxpayer dollars that local governments spend on teams, coupled with tax breaks worth hundreds of millions for the teams, the league, their sponsors and fans.
"I've been studying this for 15 years, and I still can not believe cities and states are lined up begging to give money to these very profitable [teams]," said Villanova professor Rick Eckstein, an expert on stadium finance.
Here's a rundown:
Stadium construction: Twenty new NFL stadiums have opened since 1997 with the help of $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds, according to an analysis by the advisory firm Conventions, Sports and Leisure. Local governments pony up to build these venues to attract or keep teams in their towns.
Two more stadiums now under construction in Minneapolis and Atlanta are being built with $700 million in government funds.
Taxpayers paid for most of the University of Phoenix Stadium, which opened in 2006 and is home to this Sunday's Super Bowl -- to the tune of about $300 million.
Teams even get tax breaks on the money they actually do spend on construction. Most of that spending is financed with tax free municipal bonds, which were originally created by Congress to help fund roads and schools.
A 2012 analysis by Bloomberg showed that U.S. sports teams will save $4 billion over the life of those bonds, with the NFL being the largest beneficiary. The owners of the Arizona Cardinals saved an estimated $125 million on the bonds issued to build the University of Phoenix Stadium.
Hidden help: The league also gets a financial boost in a less obvious ways, said Eckstein. Elected officials vying for a team to come to their town often serve up discounted city services, such as utilities or police patrolling a stadium on game day.
Teams also often get big breaks on their property taxes.
"There is a shift going on from obvious brick and mortar subsidy to more hidden, subtle form of subsidy," he said.
Tax breaks for the NFL's biggest customer: Corporate America: NFL teams sell between $1.5 billion to $2 billion worth of luxury and high-end club seats a year, according to Bill Dorsey, the chairman of the Association of Luxury Suite Directors. A single suite can cost as much as $750,000 a season. Almost all suites and club tickets are bought by corporate clients, which write the cost off as a business entertainment expense.
Sponsors also spend about $190 million a year for the right to plaster a local venue with their logo, according to research firm IEG. Even when corporate names are hung on city-owned stadiums, the teams keep all those profits, not the cities. And companies can deduct all of those expenditures as marketing expenses.
Not for profit: The NFL's not for profit status strikes critics as particularly unseemly, given its financial might. But it's categorized that way because the league's profits are distributed to each of the teams, rather than kept by the league itself.
The league probably only saves about $10 million a year as a non-profit, according to Richard Phillips, research analyst with Citizens for Tax Justice, which is a rounding error for a league as profitable as the NFL.
© 2015 Reader Supported News
The NFL's teams make over $10 billion in annual revenue, yet the NFL pays no taxes. (photo: Getty)
NFL Gets Billions in Subsidies From US Taxpayers
By Chris Isidore, CNN
31 January 15
If you're a U.S. taxpayer then you're subsidizing the wildly profitable National Football League, regardless of whether you're a fan.
The NFL is the most profitable pro sports league in the U.S., raking in an estimated $1 billion in profits on $10.5 billion in revenue last season, figures that are sure to increase this year.
Those massive profits are made possible in part by the billions of taxpayer dollars that local governments spend on teams, coupled with tax breaks worth hundreds of millions for the teams, the league, their sponsors and fans.
"I've been studying this for 15 years, and I still can not believe cities and states are lined up begging to give money to these very profitable [teams]," said Villanova professor Rick Eckstein, an expert on stadium finance.
Here's a rundown:
Stadium construction: Twenty new NFL stadiums have opened since 1997 with the help of $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds, according to an analysis by the advisory firm Conventions, Sports and Leisure. Local governments pony up to build these venues to attract or keep teams in their towns.
Two more stadiums now under construction in Minneapolis and Atlanta are being built with $700 million in government funds.
Taxpayers paid for most of the University of Phoenix Stadium, which opened in 2006 and is home to this Sunday's Super Bowl -- to the tune of about $300 million.
Teams even get tax breaks on the money they actually do spend on construction. Most of that spending is financed with tax free municipal bonds, which were originally created by Congress to help fund roads and schools.
A 2012 analysis by Bloomberg showed that U.S. sports teams will save $4 billion over the life of those bonds, with the NFL being the largest beneficiary. The owners of the Arizona Cardinals saved an estimated $125 million on the bonds issued to build the University of Phoenix Stadium.
Hidden help: The league also gets a financial boost in a less obvious ways, said Eckstein. Elected officials vying for a team to come to their town often serve up discounted city services, such as utilities or police patrolling a stadium on game day.
Teams also often get big breaks on their property taxes.
"There is a shift going on from obvious brick and mortar subsidy to more hidden, subtle form of subsidy," he said.
Tax breaks for the NFL's biggest customer: Corporate America: NFL teams sell between $1.5 billion to $2 billion worth of luxury and high-end club seats a year, according to Bill Dorsey, the chairman of the Association of Luxury Suite Directors. A single suite can cost as much as $750,000 a season. Almost all suites and club tickets are bought by corporate clients, which write the cost off as a business entertainment expense.
Sponsors also spend about $190 million a year for the right to plaster a local venue with their logo, according to research firm IEG. Even when corporate names are hung on city-owned stadiums, the teams keep all those profits, not the cities. And companies can deduct all of those expenditures as marketing expenses.
Not for profit: The NFL's not for profit status strikes critics as particularly unseemly, given its financial might. But it's categorized that way because the league's profits are distributed to each of the teams, rather than kept by the league itself.
The league probably only saves about $10 million a year as a non-profit, according to Richard Phillips, research analyst with Citizens for Tax Justice, which is a rounding error for a league as profitable as the NFL.
© 2015 Reader Supported News
Under Suspicious Circumstances, FBI Places Brother of No-Fly Litigant on Most Wanted Terrorist List
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/28355-under-suspicious-circumstances-fbi-places-brother-of-no-fly-litigant-on-most-wanted-terrorist-list
Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald. (photo: AP)
Under Suspicious Circumstances, FBI Places Brother of No-Fly Litigant on Most Wanted Terrorist List
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
31 January 15
In late December 2010, 18-year-old Somali-American Gulet Mohamed was detained in Kuwait without charges and tortured, almost certainly at the behest of U.S. officials. Through a cellphone smuggled into the detention camp by another inmate, Gulet was able to call me and New York Timesreporter Mark Mazzetti and recount what happened; that morning, we both publishedarticles reporting on the detention, and (with Gulet’s consent) I published the recording of the 50-minute call I had with him, showing him in extreme distress as he described his ordeal.
After Kuwaiti officials concluded they had no cause to detain him, the teenager was told that he would be deported back to the U.S. as soon as his family presented a plane ticket. Once they did that, he was taken to the airport, only to be told by United Airlines that he was barred from boarding the plane because he had recently been placed by the U.S. Government (in secret, with no hearing or explanation) on the no-fly list. In other words – as has happened many times before to American Muslims – Gulet’s own government secretly exiled him with no due process by placing him on a no-fly list while he was traveling overseas. Only after a stand-off with the Kuwaitis did the U.S. Government issue a one-time waiver to allow him to fly back to the U.S. He remains on the no-fly list.
Once back in the U.S., Gulet (pictured, right) – who, to this day, has never been charged with a crime – sued the U.S. Government for violation of his constitutional rights, a case that challenges not just Gulet’s specific treatment but the no-fly process itself. The federal judge presiding over the lawsuit, Bush-43-appointee Anthony Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia, issued a series of rulings demonstrating clear skepticism about the DOJ’s arguments in defense of the no-fly system. As my Intercept colleague Cora Currier reported in October, Judge Trenga rejected the DOJ’s argument that what was done to Gulet was a “state secret” and therefore could not be adjudicated by any court, thus ensuring the case would be fully heard.
As Gulet’s lawyer, Gadeir Abbas, told The Intercept last night, Judge Trenga has repeatedly signaled serious concern about the no-fly system, including asking why less restrictive means (e.g., subjecting suspects to greater airport security scrutiny, putting air marshals on their planes) couldn’t be used. The judge has also written eloquently about the substantial degradation and harm that comes to someone barred by their own government from boarding an airplane, with no charges to contest and no real process to challenge the prohibition.
One of the most important hearings yet in this case – the argument on the DOJ’s motion for summary judgment – was long-scheduled to take place this morning in Judge Trenga’s Virginia courtroom. Yesterday, the FBI suddenly announced - via Twitter, a specially made YouTube video, and a dramatic posting on its site – that Gulet’s older brother, Liban, has now been named to the agency’s Most Wanted List as its “New Most Wanted Terrorist.” The agency revealed that Liban is now charged with material support for terrorism for allegedly recruiting on behalf of the Somalian group Al Shabaab, and is offering $50,000 “for information leading to his arrest and conviction.”
Liban, who was working as a taxi cab driver when Gulet was detained and tortured, was one of his brother’s most vocal and eloquent advocates. I met with him several times in Washington, DC, and listened as he recounted with great sadness the psychological after-effects on his younger brother from his ordeal in Kuwait, as well as Liban’s own contained anger at being constantly surveilled and placed on the no-fly list despite never being charged with any crime.
In April 2012, I wrote about one of my meetings with Liban, describing the indignities he (and so many other young U.S. Muslims) experienced after going to the airport to try to visit Somalia for the first time, only to be told at the airport that he was barred by his own government from flying (at the time I wrote that article, he was unwilling to be publicly identified in connection with that event due to his fear that government harassment would intensify). The FBI claims he left the U.S. to join Al Shabab in Somalia a couple of months later: “Traveling with his U.S. passport, Mohamed is thought to have left the United States on or about July 5, 2012.”
I obviously have no idea whether Liban has done anything the FBI accuses him of doing: the indictment remains sealed. But independent of that issue, there is a serious question about why the FBI waited until the day before a key hearing in Gulet’s no-fly case to so melodramatically brand his brother as one of the world’s “most wanted terrorists,” particularly since they have had the arrest warrant for almost a full year.
What is beyond doubt is that the FBI has previously used dubious criminal charges, specifically terrorism accusations, to demonize and punish those who had the temerity to challenge the legality of the U.S. Government’s terrorism policies. One of the most egregious such instances involved Yonas Fikre, in a case very similar to Gulet’s.
In 2011, Fikre, an Eritrean-American businessman, was detained without charges and repeatedly tortured by the United Arab Emirates, again almost certainly at the behest of the U.S. Government (as was true in Gulet’s case, the U.S. Government, rather than seek to help him while being tortured by a foreign government, sent FBI agents to harshly interrogate him in captivity). Exactly as happened to Gulet (and so many others), Fikre was also placed on the no-fly list while overseas, exiling him from his own country and preventing his return. Unable to travel to his own country, he was forced to go to Sweden where he sought asylum. His detention and torture by the UAE, a close U.S. ally, occurred after he repeatedly refused to act as an FBI informant against American Muslims in the Portland area where he lived.
While in Sweden in April, 2012, Fikre (pictured, right) went public with his allegations about the torture he endured and the U.S. role in it. He then sued the FBI for complicity in his torture, as well as violation of his constitutional rights for placing him with no due process on the no-fly list, effectively exiling him.
Literally two weeks after Fikre went public with his allegations, the FBI suddenly announced that it was criminally charging him, along with his brother (a taxi driver), with a felony count of “structuring”: where someone tries to avoid banking reporting obligations by deliberately depositing amounts less than the $10,000 reporting threshold. No terrorism charges were included, and his lawyer at the time pointed out the obvious: “I think it’s retaliation and retribution.”
As the advocacy group Identity Project noted, Fikre was charged “with the pettiest of purely procedural violations of Federal law,” and thus “it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Fikre’s real ‘crime’ is exposing US torture and exile of its own citizens, and embarrassing the US by seeking asylum abroad.” Last October, the FBI unceremoniously dropped all charges against Fikre, while his brother pled guilty to one count of failing to file a tax return.
Now, on the eve of a crucial court hearing that threatens the viability of the no-fly list, the FBI suddenly announces that the plaintiff’s brother is one of the World’s Most Wanted Terrorists. The judge in this case now knows that the plaintiff’s brother has been so branded by the U.S. Government, significantly increasing the political pressure on the judge not to rule in Gulet’s favor. To say that this accusation against Liban Mohamed, and the FBI’s motive in trumpeting it, deserves great skepticism is to greatly understate the case.
© 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald. (photo: AP)
Under Suspicious Circumstances, FBI Places Brother of No-Fly Litigant on Most Wanted Terrorist List
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
31 January 15
In late December 2010, 18-year-old Somali-American Gulet Mohamed was detained in Kuwait without charges and tortured, almost certainly at the behest of U.S. officials. Through a cellphone smuggled into the detention camp by another inmate, Gulet was able to call me and New York Timesreporter Mark Mazzetti and recount what happened; that morning, we both publishedarticles reporting on the detention, and (with Gulet’s consent) I published the recording of the 50-minute call I had with him, showing him in extreme distress as he described his ordeal.
After Kuwaiti officials concluded they had no cause to detain him, the teenager was told that he would be deported back to the U.S. as soon as his family presented a plane ticket. Once they did that, he was taken to the airport, only to be told by United Airlines that he was barred from boarding the plane because he had recently been placed by the U.S. Government (in secret, with no hearing or explanation) on the no-fly list. In other words – as has happened many times before to American Muslims – Gulet’s own government secretly exiled him with no due process by placing him on a no-fly list while he was traveling overseas. Only after a stand-off with the Kuwaitis did the U.S. Government issue a one-time waiver to allow him to fly back to the U.S. He remains on the no-fly list.
Once back in the U.S., Gulet (pictured, right) – who, to this day, has never been charged with a crime – sued the U.S. Government for violation of his constitutional rights, a case that challenges not just Gulet’s specific treatment but the no-fly process itself. The federal judge presiding over the lawsuit, Bush-43-appointee Anthony Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia, issued a series of rulings demonstrating clear skepticism about the DOJ’s arguments in defense of the no-fly system. As my Intercept colleague Cora Currier reported in October, Judge Trenga rejected the DOJ’s argument that what was done to Gulet was a “state secret” and therefore could not be adjudicated by any court, thus ensuring the case would be fully heard.
As Gulet’s lawyer, Gadeir Abbas, told The Intercept last night, Judge Trenga has repeatedly signaled serious concern about the no-fly system, including asking why less restrictive means (e.g., subjecting suspects to greater airport security scrutiny, putting air marshals on their planes) couldn’t be used. The judge has also written eloquently about the substantial degradation and harm that comes to someone barred by their own government from boarding an airplane, with no charges to contest and no real process to challenge the prohibition.
One of the most important hearings yet in this case – the argument on the DOJ’s motion for summary judgment – was long-scheduled to take place this morning in Judge Trenga’s Virginia courtroom. Yesterday, the FBI suddenly announced - via Twitter, a specially made YouTube video, and a dramatic posting on its site – that Gulet’s older brother, Liban, has now been named to the agency’s Most Wanted List as its “New Most Wanted Terrorist.” The agency revealed that Liban is now charged with material support for terrorism for allegedly recruiting on behalf of the Somalian group Al Shabaab, and is offering $50,000 “for information leading to his arrest and conviction.”
Liban, who was working as a taxi cab driver when Gulet was detained and tortured, was one of his brother’s most vocal and eloquent advocates. I met with him several times in Washington, DC, and listened as he recounted with great sadness the psychological after-effects on his younger brother from his ordeal in Kuwait, as well as Liban’s own contained anger at being constantly surveilled and placed on the no-fly list despite never being charged with any crime.
In April 2012, I wrote about one of my meetings with Liban, describing the indignities he (and so many other young U.S. Muslims) experienced after going to the airport to try to visit Somalia for the first time, only to be told at the airport that he was barred by his own government from flying (at the time I wrote that article, he was unwilling to be publicly identified in connection with that event due to his fear that government harassment would intensify). The FBI claims he left the U.S. to join Al Shabab in Somalia a couple of months later: “Traveling with his U.S. passport, Mohamed is thought to have left the United States on or about July 5, 2012.”
I obviously have no idea whether Liban has done anything the FBI accuses him of doing: the indictment remains sealed. But independent of that issue, there is a serious question about why the FBI waited until the day before a key hearing in Gulet’s no-fly case to so melodramatically brand his brother as one of the world’s “most wanted terrorists,” particularly since they have had the arrest warrant for almost a full year.
What is beyond doubt is that the FBI has previously used dubious criminal charges, specifically terrorism accusations, to demonize and punish those who had the temerity to challenge the legality of the U.S. Government’s terrorism policies. One of the most egregious such instances involved Yonas Fikre, in a case very similar to Gulet’s.
In 2011, Fikre, an Eritrean-American businessman, was detained without charges and repeatedly tortured by the United Arab Emirates, again almost certainly at the behest of the U.S. Government (as was true in Gulet’s case, the U.S. Government, rather than seek to help him while being tortured by a foreign government, sent FBI agents to harshly interrogate him in captivity). Exactly as happened to Gulet (and so many others), Fikre was also placed on the no-fly list while overseas, exiling him from his own country and preventing his return. Unable to travel to his own country, he was forced to go to Sweden where he sought asylum. His detention and torture by the UAE, a close U.S. ally, occurred after he repeatedly refused to act as an FBI informant against American Muslims in the Portland area where he lived.
While in Sweden in April, 2012, Fikre (pictured, right) went public with his allegations about the torture he endured and the U.S. role in it. He then sued the FBI for complicity in his torture, as well as violation of his constitutional rights for placing him with no due process on the no-fly list, effectively exiling him.
Literally two weeks after Fikre went public with his allegations, the FBI suddenly announced that it was criminally charging him, along with his brother (a taxi driver), with a felony count of “structuring”: where someone tries to avoid banking reporting obligations by deliberately depositing amounts less than the $10,000 reporting threshold. No terrorism charges were included, and his lawyer at the time pointed out the obvious: “I think it’s retaliation and retribution.”
As the advocacy group Identity Project noted, Fikre was charged “with the pettiest of purely procedural violations of Federal law,” and thus “it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Fikre’s real ‘crime’ is exposing US torture and exile of its own citizens, and embarrassing the US by seeking asylum abroad.” Last October, the FBI unceremoniously dropped all charges against Fikre, while his brother pled guilty to one count of failing to file a tax return.
Now, on the eve of a crucial court hearing that threatens the viability of the no-fly list, the FBI suddenly announces that the plaintiff’s brother is one of the World’s Most Wanted Terrorists. The judge in this case now knows that the plaintiff’s brother has been so branded by the U.S. Government, significantly increasing the political pressure on the judge not to rule in Gulet’s favor. To say that this accusation against Liban Mohamed, and the FBI’s motive in trumpeting it, deserves great skepticism is to greatly understate the case.
© 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Chemical Company’s War on an Environmental Whistleblower
Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Chemical Company’s War on an Environmental Whistleblower
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/18/“dude_why_didn’t_you_just_sue_these_people”_portrait_of_an_environmental_whistleblower/
Lindsay Abrams
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Salon
In an era where scientists are eyed with suspicion and science itself is treated as something to be debated by politicians and industry lobbyists, the last thing you’d ever want to be is the researcher whose findings conflict with corporate interests. You might find yourself followed, your reputation dismantled, your very well-being threatened — all of which happened to University of California-Berkeley biologist Tyrone Hayes when he discovered that atrazine, one of our most commonly used herbicides, might be causing gender and reproductive deformities in frogs, with potential implications for human health.
Hayes’ research was enough to provoke a years-long war between him and Syngenta, the company that manufactures atrazine; the saga already got the 8,000-word treatment last year in the New Yorker as well as in a 2011 Mother Jones story. But filmmaker Jonathan Demme told Salon he felt there was even more to add to Hayes’ story, which he produced in mini-documentary form for the first episode of “The New Yorker Presents,” a new series streaming on Amazon Prime.
In the film, Demme and Hayes return to the South Carolina neighborhood where he grew up, and through conversations with his family trace his history in a way that provides a new answer to the question Syngenta’s communications manager, in notes that eventually were made public, wrote that she was determined to figure out:
“What’s motivating Hayes?”
Salon spoke with Demme and Hayes about the documentary’s creation and about Hayes’ life and work beyond atrazine. Our conversations, which follow, have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I was hoping you could start by telling me a little bit about what appealed to you about Hayes as a documentary subject?
Jonathan Demme: I’ll tell you the long version and you can figure out what the answer is. My daughter sent me a copy of the article on Tyrone the moment the magazine came out and said, “You’ve got to read this. Wouldn’t this make a great movie?” Then I said, “Oh my God. This guy is so amazing. It would make a great movie.” I called a friend of mine who works at The New Yorker and asked how people explore rights to New Yorker stories, but he wasn’t sure. A couple months later, I get a phone call and I’m invited to do a documentary for the premiere edition of New Yorker Online and I’m like, “What? That’s great! Which one?” And they sent me the Tyrone Hayes story.
I dove in. What appealed to me was that it’s in a day and age where whistleblowing has become very dangerous, and whistleblowers are few and far between. Here’s a whistleblower who actually was victorious, and I thought, wow, that’s a great story. The fact that Tyrone’s black has a lot of resonance for me. I’m very interested in the state of the black nation and I thought, wow. This guy is really something. That’s how I got into it.
Could you talk about the significance of going with him to his home and to his community? For me, it created a much different portrayal of what’s motivating his work, as opposed to what campaigns to discredit him are suggesting.
My favorite takeaway from this whole experience has been that. Rachel [Aviv]’s New Yorker article is wonderful; it was written almost with a film noir-y kind of approach. It hinged on, “Is there any possibility that Syngenta’s position that Tyrone is unhinged is possible?” And then of course, a full portrait emerges.
I wanted to know what makes this man tick. Whenever I do a portrait documentary, and I love doing portrait documentaries, I think that’s always a thing that you want to answer. I was much more interested in that than I was in kind of re-playing the Syngenta story that Rachel had done so beautifully in the magazine. I requested, “Could we go to your home town? Could we meet your folks? Can we see where you live now and kind of follow you like that, like a fly on the wall?” Going to South Carolina opened up this extraordinary perspective.
By the way, I’m very hopeful and committed to the idea of doing an expanded version of this documentary. We certainly have an even deeper, richer story that we can tell. When we went down there, it opened up with this history, this legacy of an African-American going all the way back to slavery times. Hearing about his grandmother, and visiting his grandmother’s house, and getting into the dimension of the inter-marriage, and how in the olden days passing for white was considered a value and what have you — seeing Tyrone in that context, and seeing him more and more as an outsider, who was deeply gifted with this brain of his, and how he dared, as a super-outsider, to go to an Ivy League college. He talks about how marginalized he felt there. But he hung in and he graduated and he winds up at Berkeley. Now — and I hope our 15-minute version shows this to a certain extent or gives a taste of it — he gathers around him all these outsiders to become his lab assistants and his students to conduct these experiments with. He provides a home and a career path to people who need that, who for one reason or another, the decks are stacked against them: by being a woman in male-dominated science world, or whatever.
By the time we finished the filming, I thought, this is the real Tyrone Hayes story. The Syngenta chapter is just a blip in his life. He is not simply the whistleblower who went toe-to-toe with big chemistry. He is a dedicated humanist who is immersed in his science, turns other people on to the impact of that realm of science on the planet and on mankind. He just brings all these people in. He’s like a major, major American. To me, he’s just like a superhero. And the Syngenta chapter? Yeah, that’s cool. But check out who he really is and the totality of his life thus far. Then you’ve really got a story.
Did it seem to you that this outsider status was one of the reasons why he was able to stand up to Syngenta and hold out for so long when they were attacking him?
Yes, I do, and I hope that the short version of our film gets this across. He drew tremendous strength from his mom and dad. There were times when I asked Tyrone, not in the film, but I was like, “Dude, why didn’t you just sue these people?” And he said, “No. I’m not into that.” He took it all with a strong resilience and with a sense of humor. He didn’t let it get him down. And I do think very much that a life that started out in a very major way as an outsider — in segregated South Carolina, black student in the Ivy League, black scientist showing up at Berkeley — that’s a strengthening dynamic. There’s no doubt about it.
This is your realm, but in a day in age when we are destroying ourselves and our planet, these people who dare to look at that and try to do something about it, like Tyrone and his band of warriors, hats off to them, right?
Jonathan Demme told me it was his idea to follow you back to your home and your community. Were you apprehensive about doing that?
Tyrone Hayes: No, I wasn’t apprehensive at all. Growing up in South Carolina at my grandmother’s house, there were places in that childhood that were pivotal in my career and who I am and what I ended up doing and why I love what I’m doing. There were some things that didn’t make it into the final cut, like going to see my old science teacher who played a very critical, important role, but by the time I got to high school I already had the love of biology. That’s where it started, so there was no apprehension at all.
I became aware of your story from the original New Yorker article. What has the response to that piece been like for you?
The single most common term that comes to my mind is “game-changer.” It was important in several ways: one is, I think, the message. The problems of atrazine, the problems with industry acting poorly, all of those things became available to a much wider audience than others that I had had through scientific literature or through news media. Just the widespread sharing of information, I think, was incredibly important.
It was also a game-changer in the sense that many of the things Syngenta has done in acting poorly, for those documents to become available. Rachel Aviv wrote the whole side of the Syngenta story based on their own handwritten documents, so the things I could tell you I knew they were doing, like buying my name on the Internet and planning to harass my father and my family and my students… I knew those things were happening.
But to see that they would actually write things down like “set a trap” or that their goal was to discredit me, that really bought a lot of peace of mind. I felt like I had persevered. I’ve been with this burden for a long, long time and finally, because of their own handwritten documents it was now publicly available.
Lots of people came out with financial support for the lab. People mailed in checks to support my laboratory based on the article! So it had a very positive impact.
Has Syngenta backed off at all?
Well, after the documentary airs [we spoke prior to the release] I suspect I’ll get letters from their lawyers and a little more harassment. Their actual attacks center around a new scientific publication from my laboratory or some news media or new type of exposure. There were attacks and letters written around the New Yorker article, around my appearance on Democracy Now, and so I suspect there will be attacks coming now because of the documentary.
Could you tell me a little bit about the implications of your findings thus far?
Atrazine is significant because it is an active endocrine disruptor. It can have devastating effects on individuals during development as well as on populations, so there’s a big concern for wildlife and fish and amphibians. There’s also growing concern for public health and for human exposure. There are a number of studies showing effects like increased breast cancer, increased prostate cancer and genital malformations in boys exposed when the mother is pregnant.
These findings are backed by laboratory control studies that show that atrazine can do these types of things to animals in the wild. The real big concern is both for environmental exposure as well as exposure of wildlife and, in particular, exposure to minority populations. Minorities are more likely to live and work in areas where they’re exposed to chemicals like atrazine, which we know are associated with health disparity and adverse health outcomes. In particular, the Hispanic population working in agriculture is a big concern, not just for atrazine. Atrazine, I think, is a poster child for what we need to be worried about in this day and time.
We’re used to seeing attacks like this on people who study climate change, who get challenged on the grounds of their findings being inconclusive or have their motives questioned. What do you feel is misunderstood about your research, that prompts these same kinds of attacks?
I think one falsehood that the companies are putting out is that my work is the only work that shows that atrazine causes problems, or that my work hasn’t been replicated. Those statements are absolutely, 100 percent false.
The other thing that’s important is that it’s not just my work but dozens of laboratories around the world have shown that atrazine causes hormonal problems in everything from fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds to laboratory rodents and people. In fact, I just published a paper with 21 authors from 12 different countries showing that these effects have been reproduced in laboratories around the world. But what Syngenta does is they pick out one person they think is vulnerable and they lead the public to think it’s just one crazy guy who’s done science that’s not repeatable. And that’s just simply not true, certainly not for atrazine.
Could you tell me a little bit more about the “East of Eden” passage [about the frogs in California's Salinas Valley] that you read at the end of the documentary? Did you pick that out?
When I talk in my lectures about what’s happened to Salinas, I use that piece of work that was written in 1952, around the time we started using all these pesticides and chemicals in agriculture, because it describes the abundance of amphibians in Salinas prior to chemical-based agriculture. I think what’s important about the piece is that in ways it’s even more important than a piece of scientific literature. It wasn’t a scientist going around counting frogs, it was a literary artist who noticed that the frogs were such a part of the landscape that he included it in his work. I love that piece because it shows how different that habitat and that area has become since that time.
The other reason I love the piece is that I really advocate for liberal arts education and I think it’s important to really learn in all kinds of different places to get different points of views. I’m being hypocritical because when I was in college all I wanted to take was science; I hated having to take comparative literature and all these other things, but hopefully now students can see the value of really being well-rounded and getting a good liberal arts education.
To answer your question about whether I picked that piece out: no. I was giving a talk once and someone in the audience was a scholar of Steinbeck and said, hey, you know he talks about frogs in the book, and that’s how I was introduced to it. There are actually a couple of passages where he talks about frogs in there.
And so what’s next for you? Are you continuing to focus on atrazine?
As I see it now, I focus on atrazine in the sense that I still think there’s a lot to be done with public education and policy, again, using it as a poster child. In my own scientific work, atrazine is really just a tool. It’s really one of the chemical tools we’re using to try to understand things like how you develop into a male or a female and how you develop, for example, your gender identity; to try to understand the roles of hormones and chemicals in breast cancer.
It is the focus in terms of my involvement in public and in trying to raise awareness of what we’re doing to the environment — although, I guess there it’s a tool as well. Really, it’s just the poster child to point out to us that we need to rethink how we’re doing things and how we’re regulating things and how we’re treating wildlife and how we’re treating each other.
Lindsay Abrams is a staff writer at Salon, reporting on all things sustainable. Follow her on Twitter @readingirl [1], emaillabrams@salon.com [2].
Source URL: https://portside.org/2015-01-31/chemical-company%E2%80%99s-war-environmental-whistleblower
Links:
[1] https://twitter.com/readingirl
[2] http://labrams@salon.com
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Chemical Company’s War on an Environmental Whistleblower
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/18/“dude_why_didn’t_you_just_sue_these_people”_portrait_of_an_environmental_whistleblower/
Lindsay Abrams
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Salon
In an era where scientists are eyed with suspicion and science itself is treated as something to be debated by politicians and industry lobbyists, the last thing you’d ever want to be is the researcher whose findings conflict with corporate interests. You might find yourself followed, your reputation dismantled, your very well-being threatened — all of which happened to University of California-Berkeley biologist Tyrone Hayes when he discovered that atrazine, one of our most commonly used herbicides, might be causing gender and reproductive deformities in frogs, with potential implications for human health.
Hayes’ research was enough to provoke a years-long war between him and Syngenta, the company that manufactures atrazine; the saga already got the 8,000-word treatment last year in the New Yorker as well as in a 2011 Mother Jones story. But filmmaker Jonathan Demme told Salon he felt there was even more to add to Hayes’ story, which he produced in mini-documentary form for the first episode of “The New Yorker Presents,” a new series streaming on Amazon Prime.
In the film, Demme and Hayes return to the South Carolina neighborhood where he grew up, and through conversations with his family trace his history in a way that provides a new answer to the question Syngenta’s communications manager, in notes that eventually were made public, wrote that she was determined to figure out:
“What’s motivating Hayes?”
Salon spoke with Demme and Hayes about the documentary’s creation and about Hayes’ life and work beyond atrazine. Our conversations, which follow, have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I was hoping you could start by telling me a little bit about what appealed to you about Hayes as a documentary subject?
Jonathan Demme: I’ll tell you the long version and you can figure out what the answer is. My daughter sent me a copy of the article on Tyrone the moment the magazine came out and said, “You’ve got to read this. Wouldn’t this make a great movie?” Then I said, “Oh my God. This guy is so amazing. It would make a great movie.” I called a friend of mine who works at The New Yorker and asked how people explore rights to New Yorker stories, but he wasn’t sure. A couple months later, I get a phone call and I’m invited to do a documentary for the premiere edition of New Yorker Online and I’m like, “What? That’s great! Which one?” And they sent me the Tyrone Hayes story.
I dove in. What appealed to me was that it’s in a day and age where whistleblowing has become very dangerous, and whistleblowers are few and far between. Here’s a whistleblower who actually was victorious, and I thought, wow, that’s a great story. The fact that Tyrone’s black has a lot of resonance for me. I’m very interested in the state of the black nation and I thought, wow. This guy is really something. That’s how I got into it.
Could you talk about the significance of going with him to his home and to his community? For me, it created a much different portrayal of what’s motivating his work, as opposed to what campaigns to discredit him are suggesting.
My favorite takeaway from this whole experience has been that. Rachel [Aviv]’s New Yorker article is wonderful; it was written almost with a film noir-y kind of approach. It hinged on, “Is there any possibility that Syngenta’s position that Tyrone is unhinged is possible?” And then of course, a full portrait emerges.
I wanted to know what makes this man tick. Whenever I do a portrait documentary, and I love doing portrait documentaries, I think that’s always a thing that you want to answer. I was much more interested in that than I was in kind of re-playing the Syngenta story that Rachel had done so beautifully in the magazine. I requested, “Could we go to your home town? Could we meet your folks? Can we see where you live now and kind of follow you like that, like a fly on the wall?” Going to South Carolina opened up this extraordinary perspective.
By the way, I’m very hopeful and committed to the idea of doing an expanded version of this documentary. We certainly have an even deeper, richer story that we can tell. When we went down there, it opened up with this history, this legacy of an African-American going all the way back to slavery times. Hearing about his grandmother, and visiting his grandmother’s house, and getting into the dimension of the inter-marriage, and how in the olden days passing for white was considered a value and what have you — seeing Tyrone in that context, and seeing him more and more as an outsider, who was deeply gifted with this brain of his, and how he dared, as a super-outsider, to go to an Ivy League college. He talks about how marginalized he felt there. But he hung in and he graduated and he winds up at Berkeley. Now — and I hope our 15-minute version shows this to a certain extent or gives a taste of it — he gathers around him all these outsiders to become his lab assistants and his students to conduct these experiments with. He provides a home and a career path to people who need that, who for one reason or another, the decks are stacked against them: by being a woman in male-dominated science world, or whatever.
By the time we finished the filming, I thought, this is the real Tyrone Hayes story. The Syngenta chapter is just a blip in his life. He is not simply the whistleblower who went toe-to-toe with big chemistry. He is a dedicated humanist who is immersed in his science, turns other people on to the impact of that realm of science on the planet and on mankind. He just brings all these people in. He’s like a major, major American. To me, he’s just like a superhero. And the Syngenta chapter? Yeah, that’s cool. But check out who he really is and the totality of his life thus far. Then you’ve really got a story.
Did it seem to you that this outsider status was one of the reasons why he was able to stand up to Syngenta and hold out for so long when they were attacking him?
Yes, I do, and I hope that the short version of our film gets this across. He drew tremendous strength from his mom and dad. There were times when I asked Tyrone, not in the film, but I was like, “Dude, why didn’t you just sue these people?” And he said, “No. I’m not into that.” He took it all with a strong resilience and with a sense of humor. He didn’t let it get him down. And I do think very much that a life that started out in a very major way as an outsider — in segregated South Carolina, black student in the Ivy League, black scientist showing up at Berkeley — that’s a strengthening dynamic. There’s no doubt about it.
This is your realm, but in a day in age when we are destroying ourselves and our planet, these people who dare to look at that and try to do something about it, like Tyrone and his band of warriors, hats off to them, right?
Jonathan Demme told me it was his idea to follow you back to your home and your community. Were you apprehensive about doing that?
Tyrone Hayes: No, I wasn’t apprehensive at all. Growing up in South Carolina at my grandmother’s house, there were places in that childhood that were pivotal in my career and who I am and what I ended up doing and why I love what I’m doing. There were some things that didn’t make it into the final cut, like going to see my old science teacher who played a very critical, important role, but by the time I got to high school I already had the love of biology. That’s where it started, so there was no apprehension at all.
I became aware of your story from the original New Yorker article. What has the response to that piece been like for you?
The single most common term that comes to my mind is “game-changer.” It was important in several ways: one is, I think, the message. The problems of atrazine, the problems with industry acting poorly, all of those things became available to a much wider audience than others that I had had through scientific literature or through news media. Just the widespread sharing of information, I think, was incredibly important.
It was also a game-changer in the sense that many of the things Syngenta has done in acting poorly, for those documents to become available. Rachel Aviv wrote the whole side of the Syngenta story based on their own handwritten documents, so the things I could tell you I knew they were doing, like buying my name on the Internet and planning to harass my father and my family and my students… I knew those things were happening.
But to see that they would actually write things down like “set a trap” or that their goal was to discredit me, that really bought a lot of peace of mind. I felt like I had persevered. I’ve been with this burden for a long, long time and finally, because of their own handwritten documents it was now publicly available.
Lots of people came out with financial support for the lab. People mailed in checks to support my laboratory based on the article! So it had a very positive impact.
Has Syngenta backed off at all?
Well, after the documentary airs [we spoke prior to the release] I suspect I’ll get letters from their lawyers and a little more harassment. Their actual attacks center around a new scientific publication from my laboratory or some news media or new type of exposure. There were attacks and letters written around the New Yorker article, around my appearance on Democracy Now, and so I suspect there will be attacks coming now because of the documentary.
Could you tell me a little bit about the implications of your findings thus far?
Atrazine is significant because it is an active endocrine disruptor. It can have devastating effects on individuals during development as well as on populations, so there’s a big concern for wildlife and fish and amphibians. There’s also growing concern for public health and for human exposure. There are a number of studies showing effects like increased breast cancer, increased prostate cancer and genital malformations in boys exposed when the mother is pregnant.
These findings are backed by laboratory control studies that show that atrazine can do these types of things to animals in the wild. The real big concern is both for environmental exposure as well as exposure of wildlife and, in particular, exposure to minority populations. Minorities are more likely to live and work in areas where they’re exposed to chemicals like atrazine, which we know are associated with health disparity and adverse health outcomes. In particular, the Hispanic population working in agriculture is a big concern, not just for atrazine. Atrazine, I think, is a poster child for what we need to be worried about in this day and time.
We’re used to seeing attacks like this on people who study climate change, who get challenged on the grounds of their findings being inconclusive or have their motives questioned. What do you feel is misunderstood about your research, that prompts these same kinds of attacks?
I think one falsehood that the companies are putting out is that my work is the only work that shows that atrazine causes problems, or that my work hasn’t been replicated. Those statements are absolutely, 100 percent false.
The other thing that’s important is that it’s not just my work but dozens of laboratories around the world have shown that atrazine causes hormonal problems in everything from fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds to laboratory rodents and people. In fact, I just published a paper with 21 authors from 12 different countries showing that these effects have been reproduced in laboratories around the world. But what Syngenta does is they pick out one person they think is vulnerable and they lead the public to think it’s just one crazy guy who’s done science that’s not repeatable. And that’s just simply not true, certainly not for atrazine.
Could you tell me a little bit more about the “East of Eden” passage [about the frogs in California's Salinas Valley] that you read at the end of the documentary? Did you pick that out?
When I talk in my lectures about what’s happened to Salinas, I use that piece of work that was written in 1952, around the time we started using all these pesticides and chemicals in agriculture, because it describes the abundance of amphibians in Salinas prior to chemical-based agriculture. I think what’s important about the piece is that in ways it’s even more important than a piece of scientific literature. It wasn’t a scientist going around counting frogs, it was a literary artist who noticed that the frogs were such a part of the landscape that he included it in his work. I love that piece because it shows how different that habitat and that area has become since that time.
The other reason I love the piece is that I really advocate for liberal arts education and I think it’s important to really learn in all kinds of different places to get different points of views. I’m being hypocritical because when I was in college all I wanted to take was science; I hated having to take comparative literature and all these other things, but hopefully now students can see the value of really being well-rounded and getting a good liberal arts education.
To answer your question about whether I picked that piece out: no. I was giving a talk once and someone in the audience was a scholar of Steinbeck and said, hey, you know he talks about frogs in the book, and that’s how I was introduced to it. There are actually a couple of passages where he talks about frogs in there.
And so what’s next for you? Are you continuing to focus on atrazine?
As I see it now, I focus on atrazine in the sense that I still think there’s a lot to be done with public education and policy, again, using it as a poster child. In my own scientific work, atrazine is really just a tool. It’s really one of the chemical tools we’re using to try to understand things like how you develop into a male or a female and how you develop, for example, your gender identity; to try to understand the roles of hormones and chemicals in breast cancer.
It is the focus in terms of my involvement in public and in trying to raise awareness of what we’re doing to the environment — although, I guess there it’s a tool as well. Really, it’s just the poster child to point out to us that we need to rethink how we’re doing things and how we’re regulating things and how we’re treating wildlife and how we’re treating each other.
Lindsay Abrams is a staff writer at Salon, reporting on all things sustainable. Follow her on Twitter @readingirl [1], emaillabrams@salon.com [2].
Source URL: https://portside.org/2015-01-31/chemical-company%E2%80%99s-war-environmental-whistleblower
Links:
[1] https://twitter.com/readingirl
[2] http://labrams@salon.com
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