Author Archives: Dave Krueger

Prosecutors and DEA officials switch sides in drug war

From The Guardian:

After working to take down cartels, former officials say America’s ‘war on drugs’ is misguided and the human cost too high

US prosecutors and other senior officials who spearheaded the war against drug cartels have quit their jobs to defend Colombian cocaine traffickers, saying their clients are not bad people and that United States drug policy is wrong.

Senior former assistant US attorneys and Drug Enforcement Administration agents are turning years of experience in investigating, indicting and extraditing narcos to the advantage of the alleged traffickers they now represent.

Pardon my skepticism, but this seems less like an ideological change of heart and more like a career opportunity.  Compare it to officials in U.S. regulatory agencies quitting in order to take high paying jobs in the industries they used to regulate or in the affiliated lobbying organizations.  I know there are law enforcement officers who oppose the drug war, but I just choke on the suggestion that a career DEA agent or federal prosecutor suddenly sees the light and realizes that he has needlessly been destroying people’s lives all these years.

U.S. to strike Iran in June as Israel sits it out?

That seems to be the message that Obama will deliver to Netanyahu when he visits Israel next month according to the Times of Israel:

hen he visits Israel next month, US President Barack Obama will tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that a “window of opportunity” for a military strike on Iran will open in June, according to an Israeli TV report Monday evening.

Obama will come bearing the message that if diplomatic efforts and sanctions don’t bear fruit, Israel should “sit tight” and let Washington take the stage, even if that means remaining on the sidelines during a US military operation, Channel 10 reported. Netanyahu will be asked to refrain from any military action and keep a low profile, avoiding even the mention of a strike, the report said, citing unnamed officials.

So much for the idea that the U.S. and Israel are allies rather than Israel being nothing more than a protectorate of the U.S.

In London Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry said an Iran with nuclear weapons was “simply unacceptable” and warned the time limit for a diplomatic solution was running out.

Well, John, what’s America’s position on Israel having nuclear weapons?  Oh, that’s right. Israel is our friend, so the rules are different for them.  And since when is diplomacy equal to threatening a country with military attack if they don’t surrender their sovereign right to  arm themselves against other nuclear powers like say, Israel?

There is no moral high ground in the U.S position on Iran.  It is simply a case of a super power imposing its will on another country by force in response to the demands of a powerful lobby.  And you can’t expect a government with the biggest military on the planet no to use it.  And our military is so large, our government uses it often.

The strategy being used against Iran is identical to the strategy that led to the invasion of Iraq and just as transparent.  Make impossible demands on the target country and, when they can’t comply, attack.  Iraq was invaded because they couldn’t prove they had no WMD.  They couldn’t prove a negative.  The outcome of such a strategy is inevitable which is exactly why it was used.

NSA: Our spying on you is Constitutional. Trust us.

Glenn Greenwald comments on governmental use of secrecy to avoid Constitutional challenge to its warrantless wire-taping.

Both the Bush and Obama DOJ’s have relied on one tactic in particular to insulate its eavesdropping behavior from judicial review: by draping what it does in total secrecy, it prevents anyone from knowing with certainty who the targets of its surveillance are. The DOJ then exploits this secrecy to block any constitutional or other legal challenges to its surveillance actions on the ground that since nobody can prove with certainty that they have been subjected to this eavesdropping by the government, nobody has “standing” to sue in court and obtain a ruling on the constitutionality of this eavesdropping.

Amnesty International sued the government over this very strategy and…

The Obama justice department succeeded in convincing the five right-wing Supreme Court justices to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, which vastly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. In the case of Clapper v. Amnesty International, Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion, released today, which adopted the argument of the Obama DOJ, while the Court’s four less conservative justices (Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan) all dissented. This means that the lawsuit is dismissed without any ruling on whether the US government’s new eavesdropping powers violate core constitutional rights.

So, the bottom line is this:

When the new 2008 FISA eavesdropping law was passed, all sorts of legal scholars debated its constitutionality, but it turns out that debate was – like the Constitution itself – completely academic. As both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly proven, they are free to violate the Constitution at will just so long as they do so with enough secrecy to convince subservient federal courts to bar everyone from challenging their conduct.

Now, what’s all this crap I keep hearing, often from libertarians, that the government’s job is to protect our rights?  Naively putting the government in charge of limiting its own powers is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.  The government couldn’t care less about your rights and when some politician suggests otherwise, he should be laughed off the stage.

P.S.  As you may have noticed, I tend to post about almost everything Greenwald says in his column at The Guardian.   Readers would do themselves a favor by skipping my posts and going directly to Greenwald’s column.  Nonetheless, I will continue to highlight his writings because he is a rarity in his prolific even-handed criticism of the rapid expansion of the police state under both political parties.  I am grateful that The Guardian gives him the means to reach a really broad audience.

Americans in Afghanistan: The new Taliban?

In yesterday’s column, Glenn Greenwald, quoting from articles in The Guardian and New York Times, notes that U.S. forces in Afghanistan have been involved in torture, kidnapping, and murder of innocent Afghan citizens.

So that’s where the US is after almost 12 years of waging war in that country, the longest war in its history. The US is blamed on equal terms with the Taliban, at least. It maintains and supports (if not directs) non-government militias which are perceived, with ample evidence, as being death squads and torture units. Thus do we find, yet again, that the fruits of US humanitarian interventions – liberating the oppressed and bringing freedom and democracy to the world – are little more than replicating the abuses of the tyrannical regime it targeted, just under a different owner.

The war on sex workers

The February Reason magazine has a great article by Melissa Gira Grant on the “An unholy alliance of feminists, cops, and conservatives” that targets the commercial sex industry.  Those of you who arrived at this site via Sex Hysteria! are already familiar with my past writings about how conservatives and liberals have joined forces in a fight to wrest from women the right to control their bodies, their sex lives, and their incomes.

Melissa Grant’s article presents an excellent portrayal of the movement to ban sex work, how it evolved into what it has become, and what its strategies are to eliminate the world’s oldest profession.  My few comments don’t begin to do the article justice.

While these crusaders prefer to be called abolitionists, they are much closer to prohibitionists in terms of their end goals.  They have been hard at work to recast their message in a way that makes it much simpler and easier to sell.  By focusing on prostitution as separate from pornography, the  movement has eliminated opposition from that part of the women’s movement that supports First Amendment rights.

To garner further support through the tools of newspeak, they broadened the definition of sexual exploitation to include essentially all commercial sex work. Essentially, all prostitution is now human trafficking, conflating voluntary prostitution with sex slavery, instantly painting themselves as if they were out to rescue women from bondage, hence their adopting the mantra of “abolitionists” and identifying themselves with the Civil War era abolitionist movement.

To shed the stigma associated with advocating the arrest and imprisonment of those they are claiming to be rescuing, they now define prostitutes as victims of their customers and campaign for tougher laws against soliciting prostitution.    When sex workers reject the characterization that they are victims, the prohibitionists ignore them: Anyone who claims to be selling sex by choice are simply deluding themselves.

The power of this strategy hinges on one factor above all others.  By characterizing these victims as adolescents (which can mean anyone under 22 years old), they combine the issue of sex with children, instantly disarming people’s natural skepticism.  The mainstream media totally buys into the theme and quotes these organizations without question.  The logic works like this: All prostitution is human trafficking and almost all prostitutes begin as children, therefore to voice opposition to this movement is the same as condemning children to live as sex slaves.

The extent to which these organizations distort the facts is nothing short of stunning.  They know they are doing it, but they’ve convinced themselves that they’re saving children, so the ends justify the means.  They know that they will get a warm reception by CNN and be seen by a million people, but those who actually question and investigate their claims reach only a few thousand.  They can’t lose.

And what is the ultimate result of all this crusading to deny woman the right to make their own decisions about their own lives?  The bad side is that it drives prostitution deeper into a lawless underground where exploitation, danger, and fear are an inevitability.  There is no good side.

Read the whole article.

Democrats versus Republicans

Here, I made this handy little chart to help people make up their minds about whether to support democratic or republican politicians.

repsvsdems

Whether you decide to support republicans or democrats you’re going to be disappointed about half the time.   By not choosing either, you will be disappointed almost all the time.  But, regardless of your choice, politicians will still be the same.  Whether you choose to be a democrate or republican doesn’t alter the fact that there are really only two kinds of people in the U.S.: Those that govern and those who are governed.

Zero Dark Thirty’s fall from grace

When it first debuted, Zero Dark Thirty was praised as being the darling of the Oscars.  But, when it was finally seen as promoting a political agenda, a discredited political agenda at that, it went down in flames.  Glenn Greenwald discusses whether it’s really the role of film critics to judge a film on its politics rather than just its aesthetics.

In an era where virtually everything the government does is shielded from disclosure, democratic accountability, and even the rule of law, films such as Zero Dark Thirty that purport to tell political stories are inherently highly political, likely to have an enormous impact on how political events are perceived. When blatant falsehoods are presented as truth on critical questions – by a film that touts itself as a journalistic presentation of actual events – insisting on apolitical appreciation of this “art” is indeed a reckless abdication.

And if Zero Dark Thirty wasn’t enough, consider that other critics’ favorite, Argo.  Nima Shirazi sums it up very well.

Over the past 12 months, rarely a week – let alone month – went by without new predictions of an ever-imminent Iranian nuclear weapon and ever-looming threats of an American or Israeli military attack. Come October 2012, into the fray marched “Argo,” a decontextualized, ahistorical “true story” of Orientalist proportion, subjecting audiences to two hours of American victimization and bearded barbarians, culminating in popped champagne corks and rippling stars-and-stripes celebrating our heroism and triumph and their frustration and defeat.

Just as champions of Israel like to disregard history before 1948, Americans tend to conveniently disregard history before the Iranian hostage crisis.  In interviews, Afleck seems not to have a grasp of the importance of the CIA role in shaping Iranian hostility toward America.  He apparently thinks the embassy take-over was disconnected from past CIA involvement in Iran.

Wrong, Ben.  One reason was the fear of another CIA-engineered coup d’etat like the one perpetrated in 1953 from the very same Embassy. Another reason was the admission of the deposed Shah into the United States for medical treatment and asylum rather than extradition to Iran to face charge and trial for his quarter century of crimes against the Iranian people, bankrolled and supported by the U.S. government.  One doesn’t have to agree with the reasons, of course, but they certainly existed.

I recommend reading in their entirety the articles of both Greenwald and Shirazi.  These few quotes don’t do justice to their thorough analysis of how far short these movies fell in terms of portraying reality and why that is important.

Nothing seems to be more difficult for the average American to grasp than the idea that America’s aggressive interference (both covert and overt) with the internal affairs of other sovereign nations creates powerful resentments that lead to deadly consequences.  Instead they insist on believing that we are “the good guys” and therefore, by definition, attacks on the U.S. are unwarranted and are perpetrated by “the bad guys”.

Saturday Morning Version of the Friday Night Music Video

I saw Fiddler on the Roof at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville in 1989.  It was their 25th anniversary tour and the lead role was played by Topol who also played the lead role in the movie.  In fact, the day we saw it was also Topol’s 54th birthday.  I had, of course, already seen eth movie and the stage version was just as impressive.  It was the movie version of Fiddler on the Roof that convinced me that a movie version of Les Misérables could be done well.

This is Topol singing the most memorable song in the production.

Does the President’s power to execute American citizens extend to American soil?

Apparently, the Obama administration isn’t saying even though they have repeatedly been asked.  From Greenwald:

The Justice Department “white paper” purporting to authorize Obama’s power to extrajudicially execute US citizens was leaked three weeks ago. Since then, the administration – including the president himself and his nominee to lead the CIA, John Brennan – has been repeatedly asked whether this authority extends to US soil, i.e., whether the president has the right to execute US citizens on US soil without charges. In each instance, they have refused to answer.

It seems pretty obvious that the Obama administration is unlikely to agree to a restriction on his power to use drones as he sees fit without a knock-down-drag-out fight and it is equally unlikely that a majority in Congress will put forth that degree of resistance.  while the democrats would be outraged by such a position from a republican president, they aren’t so bothered when the president is from their own party.  Another case of, “It’s okay when our guy does it.”