The subtlety of monolithic Islam bigotry

By Frank Moraes

On Wednesday, I published "Je Suis Charlie." And I stand by most of what I wrote. But there was one thing that I wrote that was based upon hearsay rather than actual research: "In the case of Charlie Hebdo, any outrage is totally unjustified because the magazine took on everyone." It was also based upon the cover illustration to the left that mocked both a Muslim and a Hasidic Jew. But I think there might be a problem with this contention.

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald wrote "In Solidarity With a Free Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons." It is a reaction to a push by many all over the political spectrum who claim that we should celebrate the offending cartoons that supposedly caused the recent massacre of innocents in Paris. It is an interesting and thoughtful analysis of the issue. (Contrast it with Jonathan Chait's incredibly uninteresting response, "Charlie Hebdo Point-Missers Miss Point.") I'm not quite sure where I stand on it. But this part struck me:

With all due respect to the great cartoonist Ann Telnaes, it is simply not the case that Charlie Hebdo "were equal opportunity offenders." Like Bill Maher, Sam Harris and other anti-Islam obsessives, mocking Judaism, Jews and/or Israel is something they will rarely (if ever) do. If forced, they can point to rare and isolated cases where they uttered some criticism of Judaism or Jews, but the vast bulk of their attacks are reserved for Islam and Muslims, not Judaism and Jews.

I don't speak French, so I'm not in a position to say. But it made me realize that the cover illustration above may actually indicate the fundamental problem with my own thinking. The problem, as I now see it, is that the Muslim is generic and the Jew is not. The implication is simply, "all Muslims and particular Jews." But I don't think that this is intentional. It is more along the lines of, "All Japanese look alike!" What such claims actually mean is that the speaker has little experience with Japanese people. (I've had this problem myself -- cured by years of Japanese cinema watching.)

It is pathetic, of course, that I now feel I must mention that I'm free speech absolutist. It is not just that it is obviously wrong to kill people for the "offense" of saying things you disagree with. The idea that people should not have the right to encourage draft resistance during a war ("shouting fire in a crowed theater") is simply ridiculous. Just the same, it is curious, isn't it, that we do not have such clearly political -- First Amendment -- rights, but we do have the right to snipe at minority groups in any way that we choose -- including "the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with Holocaust survivors..."

According to Juan Cole, two-thirds of Muslim heritage French people don't even consider themselves religious -- much less "radical." The problem here is that even among the very small world population of Jews (less than 20 million), we distinguish. But the 1.6 billion Muslims are monolithic for us. And that's why that Charlie Hebdo cover struck me as fairly even-handed (I would have preferred a Christian in there -- but intolerance is not limited to any religion or non-religion).

Bigotry is, at base, about classification -- treating individuals as members of a group. It is a very big issue that I fight with in myself constantly regarding racism. I fear that many people who, like me, worry about racism, don't worry about such grouping problems when it comes to religion. After all, people supposedly choose their religions. There are a couple of problems with that. First, people don't choose their religions. Almost every religious person is a member of the faith they grew up in. Second, as we know only too well, there is very little that can be generalized about a hippy Unitarian and a right-wing evangelical Protestant. The same is true of all people. I'm sure there are even cruel Jains.

I would hate for the tragedy in Paris to leave us with nothing but what we should have always known: people shouldn't be killed because others find them offensive. Worse still is the idea that this is all about Islam, because if these actions really spoke of the religion, those 1.6 billion Muslims would have forced us to live under a worldwide caliphate by now. I suppose that it is asking too much for everyone to take this as an opportunity to examine themselves. But it really is on all of us non-Muslims, because it isn't like the terrorists are going to start wearing "gang colors." And it is wrong to ask Muslims to abandon their heritage so we can better spot those we ought to fear. (Not that it would work, of course.)

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

The Guardian and The Washington Post deservedly win a Pulitzer for exceptional work exposing NSA surveillance, but Snowden remains the real hero

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Truly great journalism is rewarded:

The Guardian and the Washington Post have been awarded the highest accolade in US journalism, winning the Pulitzer prize for public service for their groundbreaking articles on the National Security Agency's surveillance activities based on the leaks of Edward Snowden.

The award, announced in New York on Monday, comes 10 months after the Guardian published the first report based on the leaks from Snowden, revealing the agency's bulk collection of US citizens' phone records.

In the series of articles that ensued, teams of journalists at the Guardian and the Washington Post published the most substantial disclosures of US government secrets since the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam war in 1971.

The Pulitzer committee praised the Guardian for its "revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, helping through aggressive reporting to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy".

But of course the journalists, Glenn Greenwald and others, could only do what they did because of Snowden:

Snowden, in a statement, said: "Today's decision is a vindication for everyone who believes that the public has a role in government. We owe it to the efforts of the brave reporters and their colleagues who kept working in the face of extraordinary intimidation, including the forced destruction of journalistic materials, the inappropriate use of terrorism laws, and so many other means of pressure to get them to stop what the world now recognises was work of vital public importance."

And yet while these two newspapers and the journalists who work (or worked) for them receive a prestigious award for their hard work, however well-deserved, Snowden remains stuck in Russia, unable to travel anywhere else because the U.S. won't allow it, with the federal government more interested in persecuting him than giving him a fair hearing (just consider how whistleblowers are treated), called a traitor even by many on the left back home for daring to expose the government's illegal activities (and for many because Obama is the president), attacked from the right and other corners of the national security state, and otherwise denied from being treated the way he deserves to be treated... which is, as I see it, a truly heroic patriot who performed an extraordinary service for the American people, however ungrateful many of them are.

If there any justice at all in this matter, he would be welcomed home with open arms, a courageous whistleblower who blew the lid off a ubiquitous and out-of-control surveillance state that undermines the very essence of American democracy.

Obama proposes NSA reforms to protect and perpetuate the surveillance state

By Michael J.W. Stickings

By now, you probably know that President Obama gave a major speech today in which he called for reforms to NSA surveillance:

President Obama, acknowledging that high-tech surveillance poses a threat to civil liberties, announced significant changes Friday to the way the government collects and uses telephone records, but left in place many other pillars of the nation’s intelligence programs.

Responding to the clamor over sensational disclosures about the National Security Agency's spying practices, Mr. Obama said he would restrict the ability of intelligence agencies to gain access to phone records, and would ultimately move that data out of the hands of the government.

But in a speech at the Justice Department that seemed more calculated to reassure audiences at home and abroad than to force radical change, Mr. Obama defended the need for the broad surveillance net assembled by the N.S.A. And he turned to Congress and the intelligence agencies themselves to work out the details of any changes.

Yes, fine, the president is trying to strike a middle ground between enthusiasts of a mostly unregulated surveillance state and those calling for a significant rollback of surveillance so as to protect civil liberties, but for the most part his speech put him firmly on the side of the former. He will make it more difficult for the NSA to access data, but he has no intention of stopping it from doing what it's doing, and in that sense he is merely trying to ensure that surveillance continues in more or less exactly the same way it has been conducted up to now.

And indeed, he's really only doing this because Edward Snowden, whom I consider a hero, blew the lid off what the NSA is doing and aroused both public and political opposition to the surveillance state. If it hadn't been for Snowden, this wouldn't be happening -- people would still be in the dark, nothing would have changed, and we wouldn't even be getting these mostly superfluous "reforms."

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NSA smacked down over massive data collection of Americans' phone records

By Michael J.W. Stickings

What Orwell feared.

The fight for Americans' privacy rights and civil liberties against an increasingly totalitarian surveillance state just got a major boost:

A federal district judge ruled on Monday that the National Security Agency program that is systematically keeping records of all Americans' phone calls most likely violates the Constitution, describing its technology as "almost Orwellian" and suggesting that James Madison would be "aghast" to learn that the government was encroaching on liberty in such a way. 

The judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, ordered the government to stop collecting data on the personal calls of the two plaintiffs in the case and to destroy the records of their calling history. But Judge Leon, appointed to the bench in 2002 by President George W. Bush, stayed his injunction "in light of the significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues," allowing the government time to appeal it, which he said could take at least six months.

"I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary' invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval," Judge Leon wrote in a 68-page ruling. "Surely, such a program infringes on 'that degree of privacy' that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment," which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. 

Let's keep this in perspective. This is just one judge. The government will appeal. It is likely that an appeal will be successful, more or less, and that the NSA will be authorized to continue doing most, if not all, of what it is doing now. And, regardless, given the available technology, the surveillance state is here to stay. (The question is just how vast and unregulated that surveillance state will be, and in the end whether Americans' retain anything of their essential American-ness.)

But this is nonetheless a victory -- hopefully not just a temporary one -- for the forces of liberty and privacy, and it's pretty much entirely thanks to Edward Snowden and those, like Glenn Greenwald, who have worked so hard, against the shrieking cries of the establishment and its supporters across the spectrum, to reveal the truth, as Charles Pierce explains (via Libby):

Let us be clear. No matter what you think of Snowden, or Glenn Greenwald, and no matter what you think of what they did, this ruling does not happen if the NSA doesn't let a contractor walk out of the joint with the family jewels on a flash drive. This ruling does not happen if we do not know what we now know, and we don't know any of that unless Snowden gathers the data and leaks it to the Guardian. This entire country was founded after a revolution that was touched off to a great extent by the concept of individual privacy.

Personally, I think very highly of what they did. And for this fight to have any chance at all, we need much more of it.

Police state intimidation: British authorities detain Glenn Greenwald's partner at Heathrow Airport

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Honestly, the surveillance state apologists all across the spectrum, on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world, can go fuck themselves.

Because this is how their beloved "democratic" governments operate, this is what they do when you dare challenge their undemocratic rule, their regime of secrecy and surveillance:

The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last less than an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours.

Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.

*****

"This is a profound attack on press freedoms and the news gathering process," Greenwald said. "To detain my partner for a full nine hours while denying him a lawyer, and then seize large amounts of his possessions, is clearly intended to send a message of intimidation to those of us who have been reporting on the NSA and GCHQ. The actions of the UK pose a serious threat to journalists everywhere.

"But the last thing it will do is intimidate or deter us in any way from doing our job as journalists. Quite the contrary: it will only embolden us more to continue to report aggressively."

It is indeed such a profound attack, and I hope that Greenwald and others, undeterred and indeed strengthened by this appalling incident, continue to expose the illegal and/or at the very least deeply troubling activities that in the U.S., the U.K., and elsewhere are corroding the core elements of a free society, undermining the democratic principles that are the essence of enlightened self-governance, and eating away in very real terms at the basic rights that we all supposedly hold so dear and for which, over the centuries, so much blood was spilled.

Greenwald is right about the Beltway media's shameless shilling for the surveillance state

By Michael J.W. Stickings

CBS News's Bob Schieffer is generally held up as a paragon of unblemished journalistic virtue, an objective newsman from the disappearing old school, a presence of insurmountable repute, a host / moderator version of the dean of the Beltway media elite itself, David Broder. Something like that. Whatever the details of the honor, he is widely seen as objectivity personified, and so to be revered, and not questioned, for he is eternally above the partisan fray.

What a bunch of fucking bullshit.

Schieffer is hardly the worst of the bunch, and perhaps he's ultimately better than many -- which is faint praise, to be sure -- but he's hardly objective (as if anyone really is), and often it's all too clear which side he's on: the side of the center-right establishment, generally friendly to Republicans and their agenda.

Case in point: His three guests yesterday on Face the Nation for a discussion of NSA surveillance? I'll let Glenn Greenwald explain:

Schieffer led another NSA discussion and invited on three of the most pro-NSA individuals in the country: [former CIA/NSA head Michael] Hayden, GOP Rep. Peter King, and Democratic Rep. Charles "Dutch" Ruppersberger, whose district includes the NSA and who is the second-largest recipient in Congress of cash from the defense and intelligence industries. No criticisms of the NSA were heard. Instead, Schieffer repeatedly pushed even Hayden to go further in his defense of the NSA and in his attacks on Snowden than Hayden wanted to...

This on top of his previous attacks on Snowden:

Two weeks ago, Schieffer interviewed NSA critic Sen. Mark Udall and told him that his concerns were invalid. "We have laws and all that sort of thing. So the fact that they would have this ability, there's nothing to suggest that they are doing this. And there seem to be a lot of safeguards to prevent them from doing that," Schieffer said. The TV host added: "Fifty-six terror plots here and abroad have been thwarted by the NASA [sic] program. So what's wrong with it, then, if it's managed to stop 56 terrorist attacks? That sounds like a pretty good record." (Schieffer's claims were all false: see, for instance, here, here, and here).

Bob Schieffer pushing the establishment (in this case, Obama Administration) line and getting a lot wrong in the process? Nothing new there.

Such is what passes for objectivity -- for fairness and balance -- in Washington.

American hypocrisy on extradition

By Frank Moraes 

Glenn Greenwald wrote a very insightful article the other day on the hypocrisy of the United States government and and media. It circled around this business of Obama calling off the summit with Vladimir Putin. The White House gave a number of reasons for this including the fact that Russia is persecuting homosexuals. But everyone excepts the fact that it is just that Russia was given Edward Snowden temporary asylum.

Since when did the United States government give a flying fuck about the treatment of the powerless anywhere, even in the United States. After all, it was only last year that Obama "evolved" on the issue of gay marriage. As it is, Obama is perfectly fine with locking up cannabis and cocaine users for decades at a time -- even though he has quite publicly admitting to doing the same thing himself. So it's all about Snowden, because if there is one thing that the administration does care about, it is punishing whistleblowers, or as Obama calls them, "people involved in espionage."

Greenwald noted that the United States and Russian do not have an extradition treaty. So Putin isn't doing anything unusual, much less illegal. But guess who the United States does have an extradition treaty with? Italy. And yet, our great nation of laws broke its treaty when the Italian government asked for the extradition of Robert Lady and other CIA operatives who were convicted in absentia of kidnapping for the purpose of torture. And last year, the United States refused to extradite Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada to face genocide charges in Bolivia. And a couple of years before that, we wouldn't extradite terrorist Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela.

But we need to have our priorities. These three examples are only kidnapping for the purpose of torture, genocide, and terrorism. Snowden is accused to leaking potentially embarrassing documents. And let us not forget, these three men only harmed poor and weak people. Snowden annoyed some very powerful people. That's the kind of crime that must be punished!

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Edward Snowden and U.S. hypocrisy

By Frank Moraes

Glenn Greenwald mentioned an interesting bit of American hypocrisy over the weekend that relates directly to what is going on with Edward Snowden. In 2001, Muslim cleric Abu Omar was granted asylum by Italy because he was being persecuted by the Mubarak government in Egypt. Then, two years later, a group of CIA agents kidnapped him off the street in broad daylight. They took him back to Egypt, where he spent four years in prison being tortured. He was originally charged with belonging to an illegal group, but the charges were ultimately dropped.

In February of this year, four members of the Italian secret service were convicted of complicity in this kidnapping and were given six to ten years in prison. What about the American CIA operatives? In 2009, the Italian government indicted 23 of them, including Milan station chief Robert Lady. The United States would not cooperate (justice is for the little people and foreigners) so the Italian government had to convict them in absentia. Greenwald made three points about this at the time. First, such convictions would never happen in our country; government officials have done far worse and we just ignore it. Second, our government did everything it could to interfere with the Italian judicial process. And third, our lack of accountability is an indication that we don't have a truly independent court system. The article is very good and well worth reading in full.

Since retiring, Robert Lady has lived in Latin America. Last week, while crossing the boarder into Panama, Lady was arrested at the request of Italy who wanted to extradite him to serve his sentence for the kidnapping. But on Friday, he was released following some negotiations with the U.S. State Department. And that is probably as it should be. I think that countries ought to look out for their citizens, although as in this case, the United States has far too much power in this regard.

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Your privacy is not their concern: Microsoft, the NSA, and the rise of the surveillance state

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This isn't quite the military-industrial complex, but it's something similar, and similarly nefarious, and it shows just how the national security state operates, the government enlisting the support of corporations in its quest for universal surveillance, your civil liberties be damned:

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

*****

Microsoft's latest marketing campaign, launched in April, emphasizes its commitment to privacy with the slogan: "Your privacy is our priority."

Similarly, Skype's privacy policy states: "Skype is committed to respecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal data, traffic data and communications content."

But internal NSA newsletters, marked top secret, suggest the co-operation between the intelligence community and the companies is deep and ongoing.

But Snowden and Glenn Greenwald are the bad guys, right? Because knowing about what's going on is apparently worse than what's actually going on.

Seriously, where's the fucking outrage?

The myth of objective journalism

By Frank Moraes 

The primary difference between Fox News and MSNBC is not ideology; it is that Fox pretends to be objective. Yes, in general, MSNBC does a better job of reporting actual facts and doesn't go out of its way to mislead. But they are both advocacy groups: one for the Republican Party and the other for the Democratic Party. But no one ever claims that MSNBC provides the Truth that the other networks don't want the people to know.

Other than this fact, I have no problem with Fox News. I believe strongly that news organizations should have an explicit political inclination because they all have an implicit inclination. But even worse than that Fox who any reasonable person can see is just GOP-TV, I'm concerned about the middle-of-the-road media outlets. I'm visiting my sister and I just overheard some reporting on the TV from a local station, KTVU. They were covering information about the company that did Edward Snowden's background check. It was anything but objective. The coverage was akin to the coverage of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial.

This has long been a thorn in my side: the idea that centrists are not ideological. They are -- every bit as ideological as those of us on the left and the right. It is just that their ideologies are usually incoherent. Let's think about my favorite centrist example: Nazis. On one side you have the Nazis who want to kill all the Jews, on the other you have people who don't want to harm any Jews, and in the middle you have those who just want to give all Jews life in prison. It's clear than the centrist position is ideological.

Similarly with Edward Snowden, the centrist position that he did something dangerous that put us all in danger is just as ideological as my position that he did the American people a great favor that did not put us in any danger. Matt Taibbi wrote an excellent article yesterday about this issue, "Hey, MSM: All Journalism is Advocacy Journalism." It is basically a defense of Glenn Greenwald.

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Glenn Greenwald is a pornographer!

By Frank Moraes 

It looks like a couple of newspapers are interested in Glenn Greenwald's past. In particular, they want to know about his history as a pornographer. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to say, "You can't make this stuff up." But that's not true. This is exactly the kind of thing that I write: the intrepid journalist breaks a major story and all anyone cares about is the fact that he once was co-owner of a business that distributed adult movies. If I wrote it, I would set it in the future where pornography was illegal to set up the tragicomic ending where a prostitute is lionized for murdering him to get money for a fix.

Anyway, the whole thing is nonsense. I am an admirer of Glenn Greenwald and regardless of anything else, I am grateful to Edward Snowden for the revelations. But when did this story become about them? There is a real story that few in the media seem particularly interested in. Maybe it is just that it's a lot easier to dig into Greenwald's decades-old business dealings or Snowden's chatroom musings about the gold standard. Looking into the NSA is hard. Of course, that's why people should be so grateful to Greenwald and Snowden.

In another Greenwald column, he discussed the Espionage Act. That law goes back to the bad days of World War I. It was what Oliver Wendell Holmes was defending when he said that one couldn't shout "fire in a crowded theater." That law was never about espionage and always about silencing critics of United States foreign policy.

I hadn't given it too much thought, but it is remarkable that until Obama -- over 91 years -- the Espionage Act had only been used three times total and in the last 4+ years, Obama has used it 7 times. I've heard the stat before, of course. But given that I didn't have much hope for Obama anyway, I didn't think much about it. But it is important to put this into context. James Goodale recently said, "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom." Obama might want to think about that. In the long run, his great legacy may not be Obamacare but rather a major move backwards in government transparency and individual privacy.

It seems to me that the forces of darkness are winning. I'm sure that to some extent, this is just an indication of my frame of mind. But it does seem that Obama is winning in those areas where he is wrong and the conservatives are winning in all the other areas. I will not give up the fight, but it weighs heavily on me. And the consolation prizes like same-sex marriage aren't nearly enough.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Another Republican, Obama?

By Frank Moraes 

I have had major problems with the nomination of James Comey to head the FBI. But now I'm not sure. You see, today Glenn Greewald wrote, "James Comey is far from the worst choice to lead the FBI." That's probably about equivalent to most people saying, "James Comey is the best person we could realistically get."

Of course, Greenwald wrote that after an article blasting Comey for two very troubling actions while working for George W. Bush. The biggest one is that Comey was the guy who signed off on the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program. You probably remember that. It was big among liberals at the time. I was outraged. Of course, the Obama administration has been no better. In fact, the Obama administration followed the Bush lead by giving all of the phone companies immunity. Well, it was Comey who signed off on that, claiming that it was legal.

Also of concern: Comey signed off on the use of torture. Of course, he was against it and repeatedly said so. But in the end, he did it. That doesn't exactly speak to the mainstream narrative that he's a guy who stands up for principle. I'm sure you know the story of him fighting with Alberto Gonzales over something that was so illegal even Comey disagreed with it. If not, here is Rachel Maddow the other night gushing about it:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

But my problem with James Comey doesn't have to do with any of this. I figure Comey probably isn't a bad choice for the job. But just like with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, "Is no Democrat good enough?" I understand that as often as not these days, Republican bureaucrats are more liberal than Democrats. But I don't like the optics. And I especially don't like them with regards to security and military positions. It makes it look like Republicans really are better at these things than Democrats. In a fundamental sense, this means that Obama really doesn't care about his party. And that's a bad thing at a time when Republican politicians care only about theirs. 

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Because I was not a terrorist...

By Frank Moraes 

Everyone knows Martin Niemöller's "First they came for the communists..." poem. These days, we mostly hear it from conservatives because it is based on the slippery slope argument that is so beloved on the right. But I think the poem is fundamentally wrong; oppression doesn't happen that way.

I was thinking about this yesterday while reading Glenn Greenwald. He was writing about some reporting in the Los Angeles Times that quoted an anonymous source who said that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev repeatedly asked for a lawyer and was refused "since he was being questioned under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule." This is a big deal if it is true. It is one thing to not tell a suspect his rights, it is quite another to withhold those rights. And there is nothing in the public safety exemption of the Miranda rule that allows the government to refuse a suspect his right to representation for hours or even days.

And that's what got me thinking about the Niemoller quote. It is not that we don't speak up for the "communists" because we are not one. It is that we don't speak up for them because we hate them. I know the reaction of the vast majority of people in this country to my belief that Tsarnaev deserves all of the guarantees of the Constitution. They would say something along the lines of, "He's a terrorist! We shouldn't give him any rights at all!" So may I humbly offer a rewrite:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I hated the communists.

And that really is the way rights are lost. This is why we allow the Nazis to have parades. It isn't because we like them. As a culture, we hate them. But as John Adams wrote, we have "a government of laws, and not of men." And if we can't listen to him, perhaps we can listen to that hippy Jew, "Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me."

I don't have any specific fondness for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. But I have a great fondness for this country and especially its ideals. And if one criminal can destroy that, we are all lost. 

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How we feel about those we victimize

By Frank Moraes 

Last night, I tried to convey my feeling that we focus (largely because the media profit from it) on big tragic events while we ignore rapid and endless "mundane" tragedies of life in the United States. And I do feel that way. But I admit: it is a provincial view. But there is no one like Glenn Greenwald to break me out of my provincial haze.

In an article, "The Boston Bombing Produces Familiar and Revealing Reactions," he makes many observations. I recommend reading it yourself. But what I think is the most important observation is that people should note that however they feel about this attack on innocents in Boston, it is the same as the people in Pakistan feel about U.S. drone attacks on innocents there.

Unfortunately, I can almost hear what people would say in response to this, "But that's war! The United States isn't trying to kill innocent civilians." (I will leave the more vile counters like "They all hate us!" alone.) I find this argument anachronistic. Since at least Sherman's march to the sea, warfare has not been limited to conflicts between armies. Total war, where civilians are considered a critical aid to armies, is standard now. It is ridiculous to imagine our military leadership as focused on honor like some ossified old British general from the middle 19th century.

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Parody trailer: Zero Dark Thirty

By Frank Moraes

Ed. note: As I haven't seen the movie yet, I'm withholding comment, particularly with respect to its treatment of torture.

But it seems to me that the filmmakers, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, want to have it both ways, claiming it's both a historical document that tells the inside story of the hunt for bin Laden and a somewhat fictionalized account of what happened.

In most cases, this would be fine. Cinematic depictions of true stories always include dramatization. But in this case we're dealing with the issue of torture as well. Bigelow and Boal say that the depiction of torture doesn't amount to an endorsement. They're just showing the way it was. But was it? There is good reason to believe, based on all that we know of what happened, that the facts differ from what is presented in the film, that torture did not in fact lead to the acquisition of useful intelligence. This is why commentators like Glenn Greenwald and leading political figures like John McCain have been so critical of the film: because of its dishonesty, because it is wrong.

Again, normally this wouldn't matter much. There's always some looseness with the facts in historical films. But how are we supposed to have a meaningful discussion about what happened, about torture, based on what's presented in this film, if what's depicted in the film is wrong?

-- MJWS

**********

While making dinner recently, I was watching The Rachel Maddow Show. A commercial came on for the film Zero Dark Thirty, which readers of my site will know is a torture apologia that looks like a typical Hollywood action film. It has been attacked by three senators as being "grossly inaccurate."
The commercial had scenes from the movie with periodic quotes from all the idiot critics who are heaping praise on the film. I thought, what if instead we had quotes from the knowledgeable political commentators who have attacked the the film? So I did it, and here it is:


I'm more proud of this than any of the videos I have done, which doesn't say that much. But this came out exactly the way I envisioned. If you like it, give me a thumbs up over on YouTube.

The problem with John Brennan

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The focus yesterday was on Chuck Hagel, whom President Obama tapped for defense secretary, but the president's nominee for post-Petraeus CIA director, White House insider and key Obama advisor John Brennan, deserves some attention as well, because it says a lot -- a lot that isn't good -- about Obama's national security values and priorities.

While I continue to object to Hagel's nomination, I don't object to Hagel himself. He's a conservative Republican, but his record on U.S. militarism over the past decade has been extremely good, turning on the Iraq War when it was rather unpopular to do so, particularly for a Republican, and proving to be an admirable realist in his approach to the military. (As something of a liberal interventionist, I find his realism admirable but hardly sufficient. But I'll take his realism over the right-wing militarism you find among the neocons. That's an easy call.)

Indeed, my problem with the nomination is not so much that it's going to Hagel but that it's going to a Republican when there are strong Democratic alternatives, including especially Michèle Flournoy, who would be just as good, if not better. As Jon Chait pointed out yesterday, the only thing that really sets Hagel apart is the fact that he's been the target of a vicious smear campaign led by neocon Bill Kristol. Although, to be fair, he does have other things going for him as well, including the fact that he's a vet and that he has a strong relationship with both Obama and Vice President Biden. 

Anyway, my point is that whatever my concerns I can accept Hagel at the Pentagon. He'll be fine. Far more troubling is Brennan's appointment, which suggests once more that the president's objective is not just to continue the Bush-Cheney national security state but to extend and expand it (even if on at least one key issue, torture, he has pulled back).

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Obama can have Hagel, but...

By Frank Moraes

My colleague Michael J.W. Stickings makes what I think is the strongest case against Obama's pick of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense, "Obama Misses Opportunity With Hagel Nomination." Basically, the optics are all wrong on this. Why is our Democratic president yet again picking a Republican as defense secretary? I think I know: Obama cares more about his legacy than he does the legacy of his party.

Despite decades of shrill and incompetent military policy from Republicans, the American people still consider them strong on national security. Of course, one could use this to argue that it doesn't matter who Obama nominates. If 9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan weren't enough to change perceptions, what difference would a Republican defense secretary nomination make? But I think it does matter. The ineptitude of the Bush Jr years have made the Republican footing on national security much less firm.

Glenn Greenwald has been boosting for Hagel for a long time. In his most recent writing on the subject he deals with liberal displeasure with the (then) upcoming nomination, "Chuck Hagel and Liberals: What Are the Priorities?" He argues that there are two liberal complaints and that neither is very strong. First, there is the claim that Hagel is anti-gay. Greenwald rightly points out that this is long in the past and that he has apologized for it. The second is the optics concern of Michael's and mine. To this Greenwald points out that the current defense secretary, Leon Panetta, is a strong Democrat.

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Why does PSY hate us?

By Frank Moraes

I don't read Glenn Greenwald every day, I quote Glenn Greenwald every day. He is a great writer who really gets to the core of political issues in a way that is rare indeed. Yesterday, he asked a question, "Which of these two stories is causing more controversy and outrage in the US?" And then he offered two quotes. The first was from the New York Daily News about anti-American lyrics written by Korean rapper PSY. The second was from The Guardian about American troops in Afghanistan targeting children with "hostile intent." His point that there is an uproar about the lyrics and silence about killing children in a foreign land.

His broader point is that Americans accept this myth that our government just goes around minding its own business and then people attack us for no reason at all! Now, Greenwald is not making the case that America is evil and we deserve to be attacked. Rather it is that these attacks don't come out of a vacuum. And until we grow up as a people and understand that, there will be ever more people angry at our policies of, for example, targeting Islamic children with our military.

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Bradley Manning's crime

By Frank Moraes

There are things that make me so angry that I tend not even to write about them. I suspect that some readers will find this amusing, because I seem to be angry much of the time. And that's true, so what I just said should be given the proper amount of weight. One of those things is the pretend Benghazi scandal. I have to give the Republicans high marks for tenacity, but this is simply an outrage. There is no scandal in this matter and people like McCain are losing much of their unearned credibility.

An issue that makes me even more angry is almost everything about the Bradley Manning case. The worst that any reasonable person can say about this young man is that he should have done a better job of being a whistleblower. And I agree. But he's a kid. And he is a classic whistle blower: a disillusioned true believer. Perhaps he should be punished, but surely he has already been punished enough.

The more we know about the military justice system's treatment of this kid, the more disgusting it is. There is no doubt that the military are trying to send a strong message to any other potential whistle blower: we will torture you long before we prove that you've done anything wrong. For that is what has been going on: the military has been torturing Bradley Manning. Of course, it isn't just to send a message; they have also been hoping that he would roll over on Julian Assange.

Glenn Greenwald published an article in The Guardian Friday, "Bradley Manning: a Tale of Liberty Lost in America." In it, he gives a really good overview of the case in a very short article. But he makes a really stark contrast between how the current administration has chosen to dispense justice:

Compare this aggressive prosecution of Manning to the Obama administration's vigorous efforts to shield Bush-era war crimes and massive Wall Street fraud from all forms of legal accountability. Not a single perpetrator of those genuine crimes has faced court under Obama, a comparison that reflects the priorities and values of US justice.

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Sorry, Glenn Greenwald, but Ron Paul's no diamond in the rough

By Nicholas Wilbur

(Ed. note: For my part, I'll just say that I like Glenn a lot and admire his strong positions in support of civil liberties and against American militarism. But I also dislike Ron Paul a great deal and find it rather difficult to approve of any sort of liberal / progressive admiration for him, even if he's right on a number of key issues, more so even than most Democrats. He's just so terribly wrong on so much else. -- MJWS)

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Barack Obama is running unopposed for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

Admittedly, that may be the single most obvious observation made thus far in the 2012 presidential election cycle.

Sadly, it's one that deserves some attention -- particularly for politically plugged-in progressives who've willingly subjected themselves to the broken record of purely ideological, unabashedly partisan, and intellectually vacuous sound bites that comprise the score of torturous GOP debates held over the last eight agonizing months.

The blindly faithful Obamabots who initially cursed the bleeding hearts for even suggesting that another Democrat should challenge Obama for the presidency are now regretting that someone didn't step in. At least it would have elevated the national dialogue above the monotonous (and backward) calls for further deregulation, even lower tax rates, and the end of "Obamacare" that all of the GOP candidates have used as the foundation of their presidential platforms.

In the absence of a real Democratic primary, the party of sanity has been drowned out by the angry slurs of anti-government Republicans who've held a monopoly on the past year's mainstream political news coverage with more than 20 debates held so far -- and eight more scheduled before a GOP nominee is chosen and a Democrat is finally allowed to jump into the ring.

In the mean time, we can't allow the intellectual deprivation of 24/7 GOP primary news to turn us into conservatives.

I'm talking to you, Glenn Greenwald, and whoever stumbled upon your two-part, 8,500-word series on the superiorly progressive platform of Ron Paul.

Greenwald doesn't explicitly or implicitly endorse Paul. The Salon.com blogger makes that quite clear in a novella-length clarification column dedicated to those who drew that fallacious and ridiculous conclusion from his original Paul piece, which touted the "anti-war, pro-due-process, pro-transparency, anti-Fed, anti-Wall-Street-bailout, anti-Drug-War advocate" and therefore "progressive" credentials of the Texas congressman.

"[I]t is indisputably true," Greenwald states, that Paul is "the only political figure with any sort of national platform... who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial." He is "the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard." 

By "vital issues," Greenwald almost assuredly isn't referring to Paul's promise to abolish the Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, and Interior departments during his first year in office.

By "vital issues," we can all assume he's not talking about the libertarian stance of completely deregulating the financial sector or upending decades-old equality laws forbidding schools and businesses from discriminating against students and customers based on race, gender, disability, or sexual orientation.

He's talking mostly about Paul's staunch opposition to military intervention of any kind, in any case, for any reason, in any part of the world -- an idea, given the costly and embarrassing debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, that most Americans, particularly liberals, can support.

To that I say this: Hitler may have a non-alcoholic recipe for Manischewitz wine that's to die for, but that doesn't mean you should invite him to your bar mitzvah.

If Greenwald, or anyone else for that matter, is so desperate to find a candidate who is unequivocally, philosophically, morally, practically, and theoretically opposed to war, he doesn't need to scan the deserts of Texas with a metal detector looking for a bomb shelter full of libertarians.

Ralph Nader still lives in D.C. Chris Hedges lives in Princeton. According to Democratic Underground, Dennis Kucinich lives in a cardboard box somewhere in downtown Cleveland.

These guys may not be running for president, but each of them has as good a chance as Paul of being elected. Paul may get stage time, but what does that matter when only three percent of eligible voters tune in?

The American masses know the name "Ron Paul." They may have seen a "Ron Paul Revolution" T-shirt or heard his fans call in to morning radio talk shows and yell "Ron Paul" before abruptly hanging up, but other than the radical policy positions hyped by the media -- legalizing heroin and prostitution, calling economic sanctions against Iran an "act of war," abolishing "the Fed" (as if most Americans know what that means) -- he's just a cantankerous old man ranting about a fantastical conspiracy theory to castrate the government.

Rick Santorum believes children should grow up with two parents. I happen to agree, but sharing one idea about one issue isn't enough for me to write a 8,500-word screed touting Santorum as "the only political figure with any sort of national platform."

Besides that, the "vital issues" aren't war policies, transparency, or due process, and to claim that they are only perpetuates the decades-old notion that progressives are out-of-touch puritopians -- the reason why they've failed to live up to their namesake over the past 40 years. ("Terrorism" and "Afghanistan" rank just below "illegal immigration" on the American people's list of top concerns -- at four percent and three percent, respectively.)

Opposing war doesn't require that you morph into a gun-toting, deregulation-touting free-market libertarian. If you want to herald an anti-war viewpoint, progressive readers would be better off with a history lesson on Howard Zinn, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., or John Lennon. Leo Tolstoy might work, too. Nor do you have to make a hero out of a radical just because his policy position differs ever-so-slightly from the other dunces with whom he shares a stage during a primary.

President Obama may consider using this mind-numbing Republican primary election as a torture technique for all the U.S. citizens he indefinitely detains thanks to the National Defense Authorization Act, but we shouldn't let the fatigue we've suffered from this GOP freak show break us down to the point of praising a kooky libertarian's very unprogressive platform.

Ron Paul is appealing in theory because he has about the same record of advancing his libertarian views as liberals have of advancing theirs.

So he opposes war.

Whoopty-fuckin'-doo. So does Martin Sheen.

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)