The Racist Right

What were two Republicans thinking, calling Obama 'tar baby' and 'boy'?
Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado and commentator Pat Buchanan, a former candidate for president, both apologized Wednesday for using racially charged terms to refer to Obama.

By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer / August 3, 2011
Atlanta --Christian Science Moniter--

The specter of two national Republican figures apologizing for calling President Obama, the first African-American president, alternately a "tar baby" and "boy" gave new fuel to speculation on the left that, underneath much of the criticism of the president and his policies, lurks the shadow of racism.

Last week, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R) of Colorado, on a Denver talk radio show, said, “Even if some people say, ‘Well the Republicans should have done this or they should have done that,’ they will hold the president responsible. Now, I don’t even want to have to be associated with him. It’s like touching a tar baby and you get it, you’re stuck, and you’re a part of the problem now and you can’t get away.”

The term tar baby comes from the 19th century Uncle Remus stories, where B'rer Fox uses a doll made of a lump of tar to trap B'rer Rabbit, who gets more stuck the more he pummels and kicks the tar baby. In more recent parlance, tar baby is widely considered racial slur.

Other Republicans, including Sen. John McCain and Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, have in recent years apologized for using the phrase "tar baby," although in reference to various government policies and projects, not a black man.

And then Tuesday night, former GOP presidential candidate and MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan, in a tête-à-tête with the Rev. Al Sharpton, referred to Obama as "your boy." “My what?” Sharpton shot back. “My president, Barack Obama? What did you say?”

Mr. Buchanan hinted that he was using a boxing analogy, replying that the president was "your boy in the ring."

Lamborn, who apologized to Obama in a letter, said in a separate statement Wednesday that he shouldn't have used a term "that some find insensitive" and meant to criticize presidential policies that have "created an economic quagmire for the nation, and [which] are responsible for the dismal economic conditions our country faces."

“Some folks took what I said as some kind of a slur,” Buchanan said on Wednesday. “None was meant, none was intended, none was delivered.”

Nevertheless, to some critics, the gaffes are illuminating bits of evidence to underscore what many believe is an essentially racist view of Obama by some in America's conservative circles.

Given that language is the primary purveyor of our deepest thoughts, as well as the fact that language use is often unconscious, "even a slip of the tongue can reflect the kind of prevalence of racism that still exists within our culture," says Shawn Parry-Giles, director of the Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership at the University of Maryland in College Park. "Progressives would say it's part of a larger conspiracy to target voters to use Obama's race as a means to help defeat him."

For especially conservative critics of the president, on the other hand, the gaffes hint how the shifting sands of language and perception have become intensified in the not-quite-post-racial Obama era, where some attempts to criticize the president have far overshot the lines of political correctness.

Progressives and tea party members, moreover, continue to be embroiled in a war of words and images where liberals charge tea partyers with latent racism for some depictions of Obama, and tea party folks say their critics use derogatory terms tied to social class.

"You talk about intent and reception in politics, where intent does matter, but reception is everything," says Professor Parry-Giles. "In an ideal world, when these situations happen ,they can be a source of productive discussion about how language can harm and hurt, and that what may have been appropriate 20 years ago or part of the vernacular is no longer there. Oftentimes, though, it just ends up being a partisan moment on either side."

Fear The Radical Right and witness its assault on freedom

The Tea Party Doctrine - Kings of Patrimonialism
and Mujahideen Jihadist Theology

- Anders Brevik
- Jared Lee Loughner
- English Defense League
- Hutaree
- Christian Terrorism
- Lionheart (EDL expatriate)

*Big men, that is politicians who distribute resources to their relatives and supporters- are ubiquitous in the contemporary world, including the U.S. congress. If political development implied movement beyond patrimonial relationships and paternalistic politics, one also had to explain why these practices survived in many places and seemingly modern systems often reverted to them. (pXIII)

*The conservatism of societies with regard to rules is then a source of political decay. Rules of institutions created in response to one set of environmental circumstances become dysfunctional under later conditions, but they cannot be changed due to people heavy emotional investments in them. This means that social change is often not linear- but rather follows constant small adjustments to shifting conditions- a pattern of prolonged stasis followed by catastrophic change. (p44)

*...the struggle to replace "tribal" politics with more impersonal form of political relationship continues in the twenty-first century (p50)

* the reciprocal exchange of favors between leaders and followers, whose leadership is won rather than inherited based on the leaders ability to advance the interest of the group; i.e. patron politics, political machines (p78)

*But of all the ways to make distinctions between people and classes, inequality of taxation is the most pernicious and most apt to add isolation to inequality. Tax exemption was (is) the most hated of all privileges.(p351)

*Democratic public's do not necessarily always resist high taxes, as long as they think they are necessary for an important public purpose like the defense of the nation. What they dislike is taxes being taken from them illegally, or public monies that are wasted, or that go to corrupt purposes. (p419)

*The idea of the equality of recognition- The rise of modern democracy gives all people the opportunity of ruling themselves, on the basis of the mutual recognition of the dignity and rights of their fellow humans. (p445)

*Two types of political decay- institutional rigidity and repatrimonilization- oftentimes come together as patrimonial officials with a large personal stake in the existing system seek to defend it against reform. And if the system breaks down altogether, it is often only patrimonial actors with their patronage networks that are left to pick up the pieces. (p454)

*The ability of societies to innovate instiutionally thus depends on wherther they can neurtralize existing political stakeholders holding vetoes over reform. Sometimes economic change weakens the position of existing elites in favor of new ones, who push for new institutions. (p456)

Quotes from Francis Fukuyama arguablu Neo-Conservative book The Origins of Political Order

Boycotting fascism?

Policies that have frustrated Palestinians for years are now being applied to middle-class Israelis, too.
Mark LeVine
--aljazeera--
During the last week angry young residents of Tel Aviv have been staging a sit-in, or, more accurately, a tent-in, along fashionable Rothschild Boulevard to protest their being priced out of the housing market in Israel's cultural and economic capital. The protests have drawn the attention of the Israeli and international media, with The Guardian even comparing the protesters to the pro-democracy revolutionaries in Egypt and other Arab countries.

The protests might be new, but the process against which the tent-dwellers are protesting has been going on in Tel Aviv, like other world cities, for at least two decades. But until recently, the main victims of high housing prices weren't young middle-class Israeli Jews no longer able to afford to live close to the cultural and economic action in Tel Aviv, but poor Palestinian residents of Jaffa who were being pushed out by gentrification and had nowhere else to go.

In the wake of the 1948 war, when Jaffa, like most other Palestinian towns and villages, was emptied of the vast majority of its population, the once-proud city turned poor and decrepit neighbourhood of Tel Aviv underwent a process of Judaisation, with only around 5,000 of the former population of at least 70,000 Palestinians remaining. That population increased several-fold in later decades, but when Jaffa suddenly became a fashionable neighbourhood for Israel's emerging yuppie Jewish class beginning in the late 1980s, prices began to rise.

By a variety of legal and economic mechanisms the growing Palestinian population was squeezed out of Jaffa's remaining neighbourhoods like Ajami and Jebaliya, which were quite desirable because of their seaside location. Residents complained of a clear policy of Judaisation through planning and other mechanisms, but were rebuffed when they took their case to the Tel Aviv municipality.

"What can we do; the market is the market," more than one official would declare. In other words, it wasn't the explicit policy of the state, but rather natural market forces that were pushing working-class Palestinians, and their Jewish neighbours, out of these neighbourhoods.

Of course, this argument was nonsense. The Israeli state has been deeply involved in the neoliberalisation of the country's economy, of which Tel Aviv was the natural epicentre. As part of this process it was quite adept at using so-called "market forces" as part of its toolbox for enabling greater Jewish penetration of Palestinian towns and neighbourhoods that were deemed priorities for Judaisation. That Jews were also victims was not relevant, as they were being replaced by even more Jews, and those pushed out always had "somewhere else" to go.

Young Jews could "pioneer" neighbouring towns like Bat Yam - the equivalent of moving from Manhattan to less-desirable but soon-to-be-gentrifying parts of Brooklyn or Queens in the 1980s. Palestinians, however, had literally nowhere to move to except a few Palestinian cities which themselves were experiencing housing shortages.

Resistance was largely futile; more than one Palestinian family set up tents to live in Jaffa's ill-kept parks after being evicted from their homes, both as a protest against their eviction and because they couldn't afford to live anywhere else. The tents became part of the landscape after a while, and ultimately disappeared.

In the meantime, gentrification continued apace, whether faux-Ottoman-era monstrosities like the Andromeda Hill development or the even more perverse Peres Centre for Peace, built - tellingly - on land expropriated from Jaffan refugees including the neighbourhood's cemetery, whose remaining gravestones teeter on the hill along the Centre's southern border.

Meanwhile, late last year the Israeli Supreme Court okayed the construction of a housing development for a religious Zionist group in the heart of Ajami, on refugee land leased to them by the Municipality and Israeli Lands Administration, despite strong protests by local Palestinian residents and Israeli human rights groups.

And while this process plays out, the remaining Arab parts of Ajami suffer from drugs, violence and government neglect (as illustrated in the 2010 film "Ajami"), while activists who press too hard against the situation can be assured of receiving various grades of the "Shabak education" that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line have always experienced when they challenged the basic premises of Israeli rule.

From markets to boycotts?

As long as this process was confined to Jaffa, most Israelis, including residents of Tel Aviv, didn't think too much about it. After all, what was happening in Jaffa was the same thing that happened across the country for decades; it was the modus operandi for how the State of Israel was built.

What's different today? Today it's middle-class Israelis who are being pushed out and have nowhere to go; at least not anywhere they want to go. Rich Israeli expats and Diaspora Jews who've bought up much of Ajami's housing stock are now also among the most important buyers of apartments in Tel Aviv, while the young Ashkenazi Jews who are currently living in tents are being told that they should move to the "periphery" and pioneer far less desirable parts of the country than Tel Aviv's satellite towns.

Gay activists complain that they only feel at home in Tel Aviv, while would-be cultural creatives have little desire to move to development towns populated by working-class Mizrahi Jews or recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union or Ethiopia.

This is a fascinating story, you might be saying to yourself. But what does it have to do with a story about "boycotting fascism," as this column is titled? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The suffering of young Israelis at the hands of the Tel Aviv housing market illustrates a larger phenomenon which is presently affecting the fabric of Israeli society as a whole: Processes and policies which for years or even decades have been deployed on or affected the Palestinian community, on both sides of the Green Line, are now affecting mainstream Jewish Israelis negatively as well. But hardly anyone understands the genesis of the problem, and so the anger is either misdirected or dissipates because, after all, the market is the market: what can you do?

Another example of this process is the debate surrounding the passing last week by the Knesset of the so-called "Anti-Boycott" bill that has now made it illegal for Israelis to call for or engage in boycotting Israel or even the settlements or settlement-made products, allowing the boycott's targets to sue boycott supporters for damages without having to prove actual harm from the action.

The new law has caused a firestorm of protest in and outside Israel, with left-wing critics claiming it will lead outsiders to wonder if "there is actually a democracy here", and, even more damaging, to argue that its
passage heralds the arrival of fascism in Israel, whether "quiet" or "purposeful and palpable".

Among the arguments that this law reflects such a move is that it restricts freedom of expression, reflects a clear tyranny of the majority within Israeli politics, erases the distinction between Israel and the Occupied Territories, will cripple efforts of various peace groups to help resuscitate the moribund peace process, and is part of a larger process to strip the Supreme Court of its independence. More broadly, in the words of
the usually conservative Maariv columnist Ben Caspit, it represents a right wing that "is running amok" and threatening the supposedly democratic fabric of Israel.

But just as with the housing problem in Tel Aviv, these claims hold true only if one is considering Israeli Jewish society. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, and much more so for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Israel has always been - to use the word presently in play - fascist.

Fascism or nationalism the problem?

The basic formula for fascism, that of a highly militarised, corporatist state that manages relations between labour and capital in the name of a mythically defined "people" to the exclusion of all those deemed outside the collective, well defines the kind of ethnonationalism that has long dominated Zionist ideology.

Moreover, the kind of exclusivism that is at the heart of all nationalist identities is ramped up on ideological steroids in the authoritarian nationalist discourses that underlay fascism, as the Italian and German experiences have tragically shown. Ethnonationalisms, and particularly those that emerge in settler colonial settings such as Israel, South Africa, the United States, Australia and French Algeria, are also based on extreme forms of exclusivism and territorial expansionism that must deny basic rights and even humanity to indigenous populations in order to achieve the goal of securing control and/or sovereignty over the "homeland".

Israeli geographer Juval Portugali defines nationalism as the "generative social order" of Zionism, cementing the relationship between the Jewish/Israeli people and the territory it reclaimed. This generative order has historically been exclusivist far more often than it has been open to plural identities, which is why the (re)emergence of nationalisms have so often brought war in their wake - especially when they have been joined with a colonial settler project.

In Israel this process is evidenced in the powerful role of the Israeli state and army in all aspects of the life of the country, from the socialist Labour-dominated pre-1948 period through the neoliberal present. It has shaped a political reality in which Palestinians, whether citizens of the Israeli state or occupied inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, have always been accorded lesser rights, by law and custom, than Jews.

Political theorists might reasonably argue that Israel doesn't fit the classic mode of a fascist society, particularly since its ruling parties and ideologies do not self identify as such. But if you're Palestinian, the fact that the fascist tendencies have been "silent" to Israeli Jewish or much of the world's ears has not lessened their painful impact.

And so it is not surprising, to recall the complaints of those criticising the new anti-boycott law, that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line have long been deprived of the basic civil and political rights of equal citizenship. Their freedom of expression has long been curtailed to varying degrees, they have always suffered from the tyranny of the Jewish majority, there has never been a distinction between the Occupied Territories and Israel (thus the massive expansion of the settlement enterprise even during Oslo), and the Supreme Court has never stepped outside the mainstream Israeli political consensus supporting the occupation - whether of Jaffa or East Jerusalem.

Put simply, the Left has "run amok" in the territories as much as the Right. Indeed, the whole notion that there is a basic difference between the Zionist Left and Right has historically been little more than a "good cop-bad cop" rhetorical strategy to confuse foreigners about their basic agreement on core issues surrounding control over the territory of Mandate Palestine.

Of course, Palestinians have long understood this, even if Americans and Europeans have chosen to remain more or less wilfully ignorant. Labour, Likud or Kadima: the occupation just keeps grinding on. (As I write these lines, Haaretz is reporting the the IDF Civil Administration is engaged in yet another major land grab in the heart of the West Bank, trying to have large tracts of land, including those containing "illegal" outposts, declared state land so they can be permanently taken over by Israel in advance of any peace agreement.)

The future of boycotts

Against this long-term level of institutionalised domination and discrimination, Palestinians have tried many means of resistance, none of which have proved very successful to date. In a recent column I have discussed some of the culturally-grounded, non-violent means of resistance that might achieve a measure of success against the power of the Israeli state.

As Yousef Munayyer points out in his recent op-ed, the new anti-boycott law has at least had the salutory effect of stimulating more interest in the boycott and larger BDS movement. He also points out, quite rightly, that since the occupation cannot exist without the massive support of the Israeli state, the whole premise of most of the movements against whom the law is intended - left-wing Israeli groups seeking to boycott settlement products or cultural/educational institutions - is deeply flawed, since only by taking on the entire apparatus of the Israeli state can a boycott movement hope to stop the occupation juggernaut.

The challenge confronting such a movement, however, is that ideologies sharing the DNA of fascism are genetically predisposed to believing that the world is against them and that their existence is constantly in peril from within and without. In the Israeli case, the more successful a boycott movement becomes, the more the Israeli state, with the support of a large share of the public, will feel justified in using any means at its disposal - from shooting unarmed protesters to launching massive propaganda campaigns - to fight back.

Moreover, its leaders and their foot-soldiers are becoming more willing to demonise and act against even members of the collective who challenge official ideology and policies. This is of course not unique to Israel today, nor to the authoritarian regimes of the Arab world, as William Cook's July 21 op-ed describing similarities between Israeli and American government subversions of freedom of expression makes clear. And the rabid hatred of left-of-center Norwegians by mass murderer Behring Breivik attests to the ease with which this disease can spread to even the most seemingly stable and democratic societies.

Against such a powerful adversary, Palestinians and their supporters in the BDS movement will need to craft an extremely creative and persuasive set of arguments, and the strategies to spread them globally, in order to have a chance of overcoming the overwhelming advantages possessed by the Israeli government and its supporters. In my next column, I'll look at some of the key principles, strategies and tactics of the movement today and explore how their strengths and weaknesses bode for the near future of the struggle against the Occupation.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at the University of California: Irvine, and author, most recently, of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the soul of Islam (Random House 2008) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2009).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

German Innocent but Accused of Terrorism by USA

Brit pol: 'Right-wing nutters' stop debt deal
--politico.com--
By: Reid J. Epstein
July 25, 2011 06:35 AM EDT

A top British finance minister says the world’s biggest economic threat is from “right-wing nutters” in Congress who would send the U.S. government into default.

Speaking to the BBC about the European rescue package for troubled Greece, U.K. Business Secretary Vince Cable said Washington’s political showdown over the debt ceiling threatens to overshadow financial troubles on the continent.

“The irony of the situation at the moment, with markets opening (Monday) morning, is that the biggest threat to the world financial system comes from a few right-wing nutters in the American congress rather than the euro zone,” Cable said on Sunday, Reuters reported.

Cable is the second-ranking member of the left-wing Liberal Democratic Party in Parliament. The Liberal Democrats joined Conservatives to form a coalition government after the 2010 British elections.

Cable drew controversy in December when he was caught on tape saying he was “declaring war” on News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch. Prime Minister David Cameron then stripped Cable of his authority to rule over the News Corp. takeover of satellite broadcaster BSkyB and forced him to apologize.

Forget Anonymous: Evidence Suggests GOP Hacked, Stole 2004 Election
By John Thorpe
Benzinga Staff Writer
July 21, 2011 1:07 PM

Three generations from now, when our great-grandchildren are sitting barefoot in their shanties and wondering how in the hell America turned from the high-point of civilization to a third-world banana republic, they will shake their fists and mutter one name: George Effin' Bush.

Ironically, it won't be for any of the things that liberals have been harping on the Bush Administration, either during or after his term in office. Sure, misguided tax cuts that destroyed the surplus, and lax regulations that doomed the economy, and two amazingly awful wars in deserts half a world away are all terrible, empire-sapping events. But they pale in comparison to what it appears the Republican Party did to get President Bush re-elected in 2004.

"A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush," according to Bob Fitrakis, columnist at http://www.freepress.org and co-counsel in the litigation and investigation.

If you recall, Ohio was the battleground state that provided George Bush with the electoral votes needed to win re-election. Had Senator John Kerry won Ohio's electoral votes, he would have been elected instead.

Evidence from the filing suggests that Republican operatives — including the private computer firms hired to manage the electronic voting data — were compromised.

Fitrakis isn't the only attorney involved in pursuing the truth in this matter. Cliff Arnebeck, the lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. He asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. His response sent a chill up my spine.

"Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not," Spoonamore said. In case that seems a bit too technical and "big deal" for you, consider what he was saying. SmarTech, a private company, had the ability in the 2004 election to add or subtract votes without anyone knowing they did so.

The filing today shows how, detailing the computer network system's design structure, including a map of how the data moved from one unit to the next. Right smack in the middle of that structure? Inexplicably, it was SmarTech.

Spoonamore (keep in mind, he is the IT expert here) concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, "SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle."

A "man in the middle" is not just an accidental happenstance of computing. It is a deliberate computer hacking setup, one where the hacker sits, literally, in the middle of the communication stream, intercepting and (when desired, as in this case) altering the data. It's how hackers swipe your credit card number or other banking information. This is bad.

A mirror site, which SmarTech was allegedly supposed to be, is simply a backup site on the chance that the main configuration crashes. Mirrors are a good thing.

Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud. In a previous sworn affidavit to the court, Spoonamore declared: "The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control."

Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."

SmarTech was part of three computer companies brought in to manage the elections process for Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican. The other two were Triad and GovTech Solutions. All three companies have extensive ties to the Republican party and Republican causes.

In fact, GovTech was run by Mike Connell, who was a fiercely religious conservative who got involved in politics to push a right-wing social agenda. He was Karl Rove's IT go-to guy, and was alleged to be the IT brains behind the series of stolen elections between 2000 and 2004.

Connell was outed as the one who stole the 2004 election by Spoonamore, who, despite being a conservative Republican himself, came forward to blow the whistle on the stolen election scandal. Connell gave a deposition on the matter, but stonewalled. After the deposition, and fearing perjury/obstruction charges for withholding information, Connell expressed an interest in testifying further as to the extent of the scandal.

"He made it known to the lawyers, he made it known to reporter Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story, that he wanted to talk. He was scared. He wanted to talk. And I say that he had pretty good reason to be scared," said Mark Crispin Miller, who wrote a book on the scandal.

Connell was so scared for his security that he asked for protection from the attorney general, then Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Connell told close friends that he was expecting to get thrown under the bus by the Rove team, because Connell had evidence linking the GOP operative to the scandal and the stolen election, including knowledge of where Rove's missing emails disappeared to.

Before he could testify, Connell died in a plane crash.

Harvey Wasserman, who wrote a book on the stolen 2004 election, explained that the combination of computer hacking, ballot destruction, and the discrepancy between exit polling (which showed a big Kerry win in Ohio) and the "real" vote tabulation, all point to one answer: the Republicans stole the 2004 election.

"The 2004 election was stolen. There is absolutely no doubt about it. A 6.7% shift in exit polls does not happen by chance. And, you know, so finally, we have irrefutable confirmation that what we were saying was true and that every piece of the puzzle in the Ohio 2004 election was flawed," Wasserman said.

Mark Crispin Miller also wrote a book on the subject of stolen elections, and focused on the 2004 Ohio presidential election. Here is what he had to say about it.

There were three phases of chicanery. First, there was a pre-election period, during which the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell, was also co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, which is in itself mind-boggling, engaged in all sorts of bureaucratic and legal tricks to cut down on the number of people who could register, to limit the usability of provisional ballots. It was really a kind of classic case of using the letter of the law or the seeming letter of the law just to disenfranchise as many people as possible.

On Election Day, there was clearly a systematic undersupply of working voting machines in Democratic areas, primarily inner city and student towns, you know, college towns. And the Conyers people found that in some of the most undersupplied places, there were scores of perfectly good voting machines held back and kept in warehouses, you know, and there are many similar stories to this. And other things happened that day.

After Election Day, there is explicit evidence that a company called Triad, which manufactures all of the tabulators, the vote-counting tabulators that were used in Ohio in the last election, was systematically going around from county to county in Ohio and subverting the recount, which was court ordered and which never did take place. The Republicans will say to this day, 'There was a recount in Ohio, and we won that.' That's a lie, one of many, many staggering lies. There was never a recount.

And now, it seems, there never will be.

You can reach the author by email john@benzinga.com or on twitter @johndthorpe.

Science of Spying- 1965 CIA Propoganda

Conservative doctrine continues to plague the poor.

Secret Government- A Constitution In Crisis

"I’m not saying that Caylee Anthony’s death is less horrible because so many other children are killed by the adults in their short, brutal lives. But I am saying that all children who are murdered deserve attention, not just certain children."

Why I Won’t Follow The Casey Anthony Trial
Jun. 28 2011 - 6:21 pm --forbes.com--
By KIRI BLAKELEY

I admit I know virtually nothing about the trial of Casey Anthony, who is accused of killing her almost three-year-old toddler, Caylee. I find the media and the public’s obsessive preoccupation with this murder trial to be morbid, just as it was with the 1996 Jon Benet Ramsey murder case.

But, most of all, I just find it—put it politely— selective. Virtually every month in New York City a young child is murdered either by his or her mother or the mother’s boyfriend or the adult responsible for the child—and hardly any of them ever gets the kind of national round-the-clock media coverage that Caylee Anthony’s death is receiving.

In September of last year, four-year-old Marchella Brett-Pierce was found beaten and starved to death in her Brooklyn home. She’d been tied to her bed and weighed only 18 pounds. Her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, her grandmother, and even two child welfare workers who had falsified visitation documents were all arrested. Katie Couric did a small piece on it for CBS News, but there was no national outcry along the lines of what Caylee Anthony is getting.

In March, 18-month-old Louis Dewayne Mosely was beaten to death while in foster care in Brooklyn. I bet you’re asking, who? No People magazine cover for Louis like there was for Caylee. In June, 5-year-old Jamar Johnson was beaten to death by his mother for breaking the television set. She actually watched him writhe in agonizing pain for five days before he died. There will be no long lines to get into the trial of Jamar Johnson’s mother, if there ever is one, like the lines that form for the Casey Anthony trial. The New York Times even wrote on Sunday about how the trial has become a tourist destination, with people from all over the country traveling to see it.

Have I mentioned that Marchella, Louis and Jamar were all black?

I’m not saying that Caylee Anthony’s death is less horrible because so many other children are killed by the adults in their short, brutal lives. But I am saying that all children who are murdered deserve attention, not just certain children.

Kiri Blakeley writes about women, entertainment, and media. Follow her on Twitter.

Is Clarence Thomas's Humble Georgia Museum a Huge Ethics Issue?
06/25/11 03:04 AM ET --ARTinfo---

A quaint historical museum in Pin Point, Georgia, that is set to open this fall has become the target of an exhaustive ethics examination by the New York Times. Why would the Times devote almost 3,000 words to a community heritage museum? Pin Point, as it turns out, is also the birthplace of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and it was Thomas who introduced Pin Point residents to his friend Harlan Crow, a Dallas real-estate tycoon and major conservative donor, who would ultimately fund the museum. According to some legal analysts, Thomas's role in Crow's decision to donate may have troubling ethical implications.

Pin Point lies along the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor designated by Congress, a passage of coastal fishing towns settled by the descendants of slaves. Algernon Varn, whose father ran the fishing cannery there, long hoped to save the site from development, but it wasn't until he bumped into Thomas, who was in town promoting his memoir, that the project began to move forward. Thomas introduced Varn to Crow, a longtime friend. Through an exhaustive paper trail review, the Times confirmed that Crow is the anonymous donor behind the $1.3 million restoration of the property and forthcoming museum project. Varn was told to keep Crow's identity anonymous.

The question of ethics violations comes down to whether Thomas misused "the prestige of office" to persuade Crow to take on the project, said Raymond J. McKoski, a retired state judge in Illinois. (Supreme Court justices are not explicitly bound to the complex code of conduct for federal judges because it is enforced by lower ranking judges. That's right, they are literally above the law -- though the Times points to several justices who said they adhere to it regardless.) "Some of it depends on the conversations that took place," McKoski told the Times of the ethical quandary. "Who brought up the idea? How willing was Mr. Crow to do it? What exact questions were asked by Justice Thomas?"

This isn't the first time Crow has donated to projects directly or indirectly honoring Thomas. (According to the federal ethics code, judges are not supposed to know who makes a donation in their honor.) The Times gathers an exhaustive list of shady gifts and donations, including Mr. Crow's financing of a Savannah library dedicated to Justice Thomas and his gift of a bible that once belonged to Frederick Douglass. Thomas also received a $15,000 bust of Abraham Lincoln from a group affiliated with Crow.

So, after all this commotion, what will the museum actually look like? The modest, almost astonishingly unglamorous-sounding Pin Point Heritage Museum will be housed in the A.S. Varn & Son Factory, a former seafood cannery that was the economic backbone of Pin Point -- and where Thomas's mother worked as a crab picker -- until it closed in 1985.

Each structure on the property -- including the oyster factory, can storage building, and marshfront dock -- will be stabilized and restored. A patio area will host live demonstrations of crabbing, canning, and shrimp net making. Inside, 3,000 square feet of exhibition space -- modest by museum standards -- will house educational exhibits, live demonstrations, interactive displays, and a 30-minute documentary film, all devoted to the generations of residents in Pin Point.

Friendship of Justice and Magnate Puts Focus on Ethics
By MIKE McINTIRE
6/18/2011 --NYtimes.com--

PIN POINT, Ga. — Clarence Thomas was here promoting his memoir a few years ago when he bumped into Algernon Varn, whose grandfather once ran a seafood cannery that employed Justice Thomas’s mother as a crab picker.

Mr. Varn lived at the old cannery site, a collection of crumbling buildings on a salt marsh just down the road from a sign heralding this remote coastal community outside Savannah as Justice Thomas’s birthplace. The justice asked about plans for the property, and Mr. Varn said he hoped it could be preserved.

“And Clarence said, ‘Well, I’ve got a friend I’m going to put you in touch with,’ ” Mr. Varn recalled, adding that he was later told by others not to identify the friend.

The publicity-shy friend turned out to be Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate magnate and a major contributor to conservative causes. Mr. Crow stepped in to finance the multimillion-dollar purchase and restoration of the cannery, featuring a museum about the culture and history of Pin Point that has become a pet project of Justice Thomas’s.

The project throws a spotlight on an unusual, and ethically sensitive, friendship that appears to be markedly different from those of other justices on the nation’s highest court.

The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas.

In several instances, news reports of Mr. Crow’s largess provoked controversy and questions, adding fuel to a rising debate about Supreme Court ethics. But Mr. Crow’s financing of the museum, his largest such act of generosity, previously unreported, raises the sharpest questions yet — both about Justice Thomas’s extrajudicial activities and about the extent to which the justices should remain exempt from the code of conduct for federal judges.

Although the Supreme Court is not bound by the code, justices have said they adhere to it. Legal ethicists differed on whether Justice Thomas’s dealings with Mr. Crow pose a problem under the code. But they agreed that one facet of the relationship was both unusual and important in weighing any ethical implications: Justice Thomas’s role in Mr. Crow’s donation for the museum.

The code says judges “should not personally participate” in raising money for charitable endeavors, out of concern that donors might feel pressured to give or entitled to favorable treatment from the judge. In addition, judges are not even supposed to know who donates to projects honoring them.

While the nonprofit Pin Point museum is not intended to honor Justice Thomas, people involved in the project said his role in the community’s history would inevitably be part of it, and he participated in a documentary film that is to accompany the exhibits.

Deborah L. Rhode, a Stanford University law professor who has called for stricter ethics rules for Supreme Court justices, said Justice Thomas “should not be directly involved in fund-raising activities, no matter how worthy they are or whether he’s being centrally honored by the museum.”

On the other hand, the restriction on fund-raising is primarily meant to deter judges from using their position to pressure donors, as opposed to relying on “a rich friend” like Mr. Crow, said Ronald D. Rotunda, who teaches legal ethics at Chapman University in California.

“I don’t think I could say it’s unethical,” he said. “It’s just a very peculiar situation.”

Justice Thomas, through a Supreme Court spokeswoman, declined to respond to a detailed set of questions submitted by The New York Times. Mr. Crow also would not comment.

Supreme Court ethics have been under increasing scrutiny, largely because of the activities of Justice Thomas and Ms. Thomas, whose group, Liberty Central, opposed President Obama’s health care overhaul — an issue likely to wind up before the court. Mr. Crow’s donation to Liberty Central was reported by Politico.

In January, the liberal advocacy organization Common Cause asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Justices Thomas and Antonin Scalia should have recused themselves from last year’s Citizens United campaign finance case because they had attended a political retreat organized by the billionaire Koch brothers, who support groups that stood to benefit from the court’s decision.

A month later, more than 100 law professors asked Congress to extend to Supreme Court justices the ethics code that applies to other federal judges, and a bill addressing the issue was introduced.

It is not unusual for justices to accept gifts or take part in outside activities, some with political overtones.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer has attended Renaissance Weekend, a retreat for politicians, artists and media personalities that is a favorite of Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg participated in a symposium sponsored by the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, and a philanthropic foundation once tried to give her a $100,000 achievement award. She instructed that the money be given to charity.

But in the case of Justice Thomas and his dealings with Mr. Crow, the ethical complications appear more complex.

Conservative Ties

Mr. Crow, 61, manages the real estate and investment businesses founded by his late father, Trammell Crow, once the largest landlord in the United States. The Crow family portfolio is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and includes investments in hotels, medical facilities, public equities and hedge funds.

A friend of the Bush family, Mr. Crow is a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation and has donated close to $5 million to Republican campaigns and conservative groups. Among his contributions were $100,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group formed to attack the Vietnam War record of Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, and $500,000 to an organization that ran advertisements urging the confirmation of President George W. Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Crow has not personally been a party to Supreme Court litigation, but his companies have been involved in federal court cases, including four that went to the appellate level. And he has served on the boards of two conservative organizations involved in filing supporting briefs in cases before the Supreme Court. One of them, the American Enterprise Institute, with Mr. Crow as a trustee, gave Justice Thomas a bust of Lincoln valued at $15,000 and praised his jurisprudence at an awards gala in 2001.

The institute’s Project on Fair Representation later filed briefs in several cases, and in 2006 the project brought a lawsuit challenging federal voting rights laws, a case in which Justice Thomas filed a lone dissent, embracing the project’s arguments. The project director, an institute fellow named Edward Blum, said the institute supported his research but did not finance the brief filings or the Texas suit, which was litigated pro bono by a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s.

“When it came time to file a lawsuit,” he said, “A.E.I. had no role in doing that.”

Coming Up With a Plan

In addition to his interest in politics and policy, Mr. Crow is well known for his keen devotion to history.

A backyard garden at his $24 million Dallas residence is dominated by old statues of dictators he has collected from fallen regimes, including Lenin and Stalin. His private library is packed with 8,000 rare books and artifacts, including a Senate roll call sheet from Justice Thomas’s confirmation and a “thank you” letter from the justice, according to local news reports.

There are a number of reasons Justice Thomas might be thankful to Mr. Crow. In addition to giving him the Douglass Bible, valued 10 years ago at $19,000, Mr. Crow has hosted the justice aboard his private jet and his 161-foot yacht, at the exclusive Bohemian Grove retreat in California and at his grand Adirondacks summer estate called Topridge, a 105-acre spread that once belonged to Marjorie Merriweather Post, the cereal heiress.

Christopher Shaw, a folk singer who said he had been invited several times to perform at Topridge, recalled seeing Justice Thomas and his family “on one or two occasions.” They were among about two dozen guests who included other prominent Republicans — last summer, the younger Mr. Bush stopped by.

“There would be guys puffing on cigars,” Mr. Shaw said. “Clarence just kind of melted in with everyone else. We got introduced at dinner. He sat at Harlan’s table.”

Mr. Crow’s $175,000 donation to the library in Savannah in 2001 started out anonymous, but it was eventually made public amid opposition to the project by some local black leaders who did not like Justice Thomas’s politics. Similarly, Mr. Crow sought to keep his role in the museum quiet.

At first glance the Pin Point Heritage Museum, scheduled to open this fall, would seem an unlikely catalyst for an ethical quandary. That Pin Point’s history is worthy of preservation is not in dispute.

Part of the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor designated by Congress, it is representative of tight-knit Southern coastal settlements that trace their roots to freed slaves and were often based around fishing. In Pin Point, the Varn crab and oyster cannery, founded in the 1920s, was a primary source of jobs until it closed in 1985.

Mr. Varn and his wife, Sharon, said they had long hoped the property could be saved from commercial development but had little success coming up with a plan. That changed after their chance encounter with Justice Thomas, who was visiting his childhood home with a television news crew.

Justice Thomas, 62, was born and raised near the cannery overlooking the Moon River, where it was not uncommon for babies to rock in bassinets made of crab baskets while their mothers shucked oysters. He sympathized with the Varns’ wishes and said he had a friend who could help, Mr. Varn said.

The Varns eventually sold their property in April 2008. During a recent interview at their home near the cannery, they made it clear that they were “not supposed to say” who the buyer was, and a news release issued last November by a Savannah public relations firm said the museum was being “privately funded by an anonymous donor.”

But the paper trail leads back to Mr. Crow, and in interviews at the project site, people working on it acknowledged that he was financing it. Property records show a company called HKJRS/Pinpoint bought the land for $1.5 million, and incorporation records say the company is controlled by a Dallas-based partnership run by Mr. Crow.

Project documents reviewed by The Times show a preliminary construction budget of $1.3 million, but it is unclear if that includes expenses related to the content and design of the museum.

Justice Thomas remains closely involved with the project. Emily Owens, a museum spokeswoman who works for Mr. Crow’s company, said the justice “played a big part” in creating a video documentary that will be part of the museum experience. He hosted a design team from Dallas for a four-hour meeting at his Supreme Court offices in February.

And he has had a role in picking people to help with the museum. Barbara Fertig, a history professor at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, said that she was asked to meet with Justice Thomas last spring and that “by the end of the meeting, he said he would like me to work on this project.”

She said she had “never been particularly curious” about why Mr. Crow is financing it, adding that costly preservation projects are often possible only because of philanthropy motivated by friendships. Justice Thomas and Mr. Crow would seem to fall into that category, Ms. Fertig said.

“I’ve been in the company of the two of them together,” she said, “and they certainly really are friends.”

The Code of Conduct

That friendship is important to determining whether Justice Thomas’s interactions with Mr. Crow conflict with the code, said Raymond J. McKoski, a retired state judge in Illinois who wrote a law review article on charitable fund-raising by judges. If Justice Thomas did not “misuse the prestige of office” in getting Mr. Crow to take on the project, it should not be a concern, he said.

“Some of it depends on the conversations that took place,” Mr. McKoski said. “Who brought up the idea? How willing was Mr. Crow to do it? What exact questions were asked by Justice Thomas?”

Beyond the admonition against fund-raising, the code generally discourages judges from partaking in any off-the-bench behavior that could create even the perception of partiality. It acknowledges the value in judges’ being engaged with their communities, lecturing on the law and doing charitable work, but draws a line where those activities might cause a reasonable person to worry that a judge is indebted to or influenced by someone.

“The code of conduct is quite clear that judges are not supposed to be soliciting money for their pet projects or charities, period,” said Arn Pearson, a lawyer with Common Cause. “If any other federal judge was doing it, he could face disciplinary action.”

The justices are not bound by the federal judiciary’s conduct code, because it is enforced by a committee of judges who rank below the justices. Even so, Justices Breyer and Anthony M. Kennedy said in testimony before Congress in April that the justices followed the code.

Beyond the code, the justices must comply with laws applying to all federal officials that prohibit conflicts of interest and require disclosure of gifts. Justice Thomas’s gift acceptances drew attention in 2004, when The Los Angeles Times reported that he had accumulated gifts totaling $42,200 in the previous six years — far more than any of the other justices.

Since 2004, Justice Thomas has never reported another gift. He has continued to disclose travel costs paid by schools and organizations he has visited for speeches and teaching, but he has not reported that any travel was provided by Mr. Crow.

Travel records for Mr. Crow’s planes and yacht, however, suggest that Justice Thomas may have used them in recent years.

In April 2008, not long after Mr. Crow bought the Pin Point property, one of his private planes flew from Washington to Savannah, where his yacht, the Michaela Rose, was docked.

That same week, an item appeared in a South Carolina lawyers’ publication noting that Justice Thomas was arriving aboard the Michaela Rose in Charleston, a couple of hours north of Savannah, where the Crow family owns luxury vacation properties. The author was a prominent lawyer who said she knew of the visit because of a family connection to Mr. Crow.

Justice Thomas reported no gifts of travel that month in his 2008 disclosure. And there are other instances in which Justice Thomas’s travels correspond to flights taken by Mr. Crow’s planes.

On Jan. 4, 2010, when Justice Thomas was in Savannah for the dedication of a building in his honor, Mr. Crow’s plane flew from Washington to Savannah and returned to Washington the next day. Justice Thomas reported in his financial disclosure that his travel had been paid for by the Savannah College of Art and Design, which owned the building.

In his 2009 financial disclosure, Justice Thomas reported that Southern Methodist University in Dallas — Trammell Crow’s alma mater — had provided his travel for a speech there on Sept. 30. Flight records show that Mr. Crow’s plane flew from Washington to Dallas that day.

Among the questions The Times submitted to Justice Thomas was whether he was on any of those flights, and if so, whether the colleges reimbursed him or Mr. Crow. The colleges declined to comment.

One item not required to be reported in Justice Thomas’s financial disclosures is the millions of dollars Mr. Crow is spending on the museum. That is because the money is not being given to the justice as a gift.

For Algernon and Sharon Varn, who said they were thrilled to see a cherished piece of local history being restored, the museum is a gift to the community. While it is about more than Justice Thomas, they said, he deserves credit for putting them together with someone who had the money and the interest to make the project a reality.

“He was instrumental in getting the process started, because he wanted it preserved to show that no matter where you came from, you can go where you want,” Mr. Varn said. “He had a meager existence, and yet look where he is today. It’s a great American story.”

US police smash camera for recording killing

Miami man hid phone memory card in his mouth to preserve footage in battle over recording tools.
Chris Arsenault Last Modified: 21 Jun 2011 16:34

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but Narces Benoit's decision to videotape a shooting by Miami police landed him in jail after officers smashed his cell-phone camera.

It was 4am on May 30 when Benoit and his girlfriend Erika Davis saw officers firing dozens of bullets into a car driven by Raymond Herisse, a suspect who hit a police officer and other vehicles while driving recklessly. Herisse died in the hail of lead, and four bystanders also suffered gunshot wounds, the Miami Herald newspaper reported.

Police noticed the man filming the shooting and an officer jumped into his truck, and put a pistol to his head, Benoit said. The video shows officers crowding around Herisse's vehicle before opening fire, followed by indistinguishable yelling at onlookers, including Benoit, to stop filming.

The cop yelled: "Wanna be a [expletive] paparazzi?" Benoit recounted in a TV interview.

"My phone was smashed, he stepped on it, handcuffed me," the 35-year-old car stereo technician told CNN.
Despite his phone being destroyed, Benoit was able to save the footage by taking the memory card out of the device and putting it in his mouth before handing it over to police, he said, adding that officers smashed several other cameras in the chaos which followed the shooting.

Legal issues

"There are two questions at play here that need to be separated," said Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California. "One is: to what extent is it illegal to record officers doing their duties? And secondly, did the police destroy someone's property and evidence?"

"Whether or not the recording was illegal, the police conduct as alleged would be illegal in any case," Volokh told Al Jazeera. In Florida, it is legal to record conversations, unless the conversation is "confidential", which this public altercation likely was not, Volokh said.

After having his phone smashed, and being taken to a police station to be photographed, Benoit was summoned to appear before the state attorney on June 3 with "any and all video and all corresponding audio recorded on May 30 that captured incidents occurring [sic] prior to, during and after a police-involved shooting", according to court documents.

Benoit and Davis have hired a lawyer. The couple stopped giving interviews soon after the incident, Reese Harvey, their attorney, told Al Jazeera. Harvey also declined to comment about the couple's possible plans for legal action against the Miami police.

The incident is the latest in a series of debacles involving citizens using mobile phones to record police actions.

"The impact of citizen recording of police brutality, or activity in general goes back at least 20 years to the LA riots," said James Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a research organisation. "It [video recording] increasingly raises questions about surveillance; whether surveillance from citizens can put a check on power," he told Al Jazeera.

Sparked by video of police beating Rodney King, in what many saw as an example of institutionalised racism, the 1992 Los Angeles riots left more than 50 people dead and caused about $1bn in property damage.

"As almost everyone in the US has a cameraphone at this point, it's very common to have any kind of police activity in a crowded setting recorded by citizens, usually from multiple angles," said Jamais Cascio, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future. "These kinds of events are unusual and people will want to show friends and family, and, increasingly, because people are learning that it can be important to have evidence of police misconduct."

And, with the spread of easily accessible recording technology, US security forces are being joined by counter-parts around the globe in being concerned about mobile technologies.

"Echoes of Rodney King in Karachi and Miami", was the headline of a New York Times blog, analysing a recent case from Pakistan, where a television journalist recorded security forces killing Sarfraz Shah, an apparently unarmed teenager. The video sparked protests across the country.

Speaking about the recent case in Florida, Police Chief Carlos Noriega told the Miami Herald that the couple's allegations were the first he'd heard of officers allegedly threatening people or destroying cameras or mobile phones.

"It was quite a chaotic scene," the chief said of the late night shooting. "We were trying to figure out who was who and it was a difficult process. Not once did I see cameras being taken or smashed," he said, adding that Benoit's video is evidence which could help investigators.

Technology 'outpacing' laws

While visual evidence, through government surveillance cameras and individuals' phones, can help make prosecutions, police unions and likeminded groups argue that police officers might second-guess themselves if they know they are being recorded and delay making necessary decisions. There are also arguments about privacy; mainly that conversations between private individuals and security forces should not be recorded by third parties.

And even though Eugene Volokh and other legal experts believe recording public police activities isn't a crime in Florida, that doesn’t mean police are happy about it.

"In the United States, the laws about the recording of police activity vary considerably from state to state. In Massachusetts, for example, existing laws that forbid recording someone without their permission have been extended to prohibit the recording of police. In Illinois, the law now explicitly bans the recording of police," Cascio told Al Jazeera. "I believe that citizens should have the right to record the actions of officials on duty; Citizens can't really fight back when they see police misconduct, their only tool is the ability to document the misbehaviour."

Some experts argue that laws, often designed to deal with audio wiretapping of telephone conversations and now applied to video recordings, are not keeping pace with new technologies. Volokh, however, is not one of those people.

"It isn't a technical question; it might be a question about basic values," Volokh, the legal scholar, said. "How much do you value people’s ability to gather the news and how much you value privacy?"

There may be a debate on whether the increasing frequency of security forces, and society in general, being caught on tape is primarily a technological question or an issue of values. But advances in the former may make debates about the latter redundant.

"Efforts to forbid these recordings are ultimately futile. Cameras are becoming smaller, and are able to record and upload video quickly. I've seen otherwise normal-looking glasses with built-in cameras," Cascio said. "The technology is rapidly outpacing any attempt to control it using dated and misapplied laws."

40th Anniversary of the War on Drugs - June 17, 2011

Today marks the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s declaration of a “War on Drugs.” To highlight the impact that the drug war has on communities around the world, more than a dozen SSDP chapters are organizing candlelight vigils in cities across the country.

40th Anniversary of the War on Drugs June 17, 2011

Friday, June 17th, marks the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s declaration of a “War on Drugs.” To highlight the impact that the drug war has on communities around the world, more than a dozen SSDP chapters are organizing candlelight vigils in cities across the country.

Dem lawmakers to Obama: Use executive tools to aid immigrants
By Mike Lillis - 05/25/11 01:19 PM ET
A group of liberal Democrats is urging President Obama to put his money where his mouth is regarding immigration reform. The lawmakers, led by Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), say the president has prioritized the issue in sound but not in action.

While acknowledging that Congress has failed to enact any meaningful immigration reforms in recent years, the Democrats say the White House has similarly failed to use its own tools to ease the hardships on those affected. They're asking Obama to scale back his aggressive deportation policy, particularly in cases when children are seeking an education or families would be split apart. "While we must work to pass comprehensive immigration reform to fix our broken system, we must also stop needlessly deporting the parents and the spouses of U.S. citizens — and others who are here, who are studying and working and raising families and contributing to our country," Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) told reporters Wednesday outside the Capitol.

"We are asking the president — who we know is on the side of the immigrants — to use his power now to stop these deportations," she said.

Gutierrez, who in March launched a national tour to bring the stories of illegal immigrants to 20 cities, announced Wednesday that he's adding 10 more cities to the tour. The purpose, he said, is "to have their stories heard until they finally penetrate the White House and we finally penetrate the consciousness of the president."

Naming steps the White House could take immediately, the Illinois Democrat promoted deportation deferrals for roughly 1 million illegal-immigrant students who would have been eligible under the DREAM Act, a Democratic bill creating a pathway for legal status for some college students and military personnel.

The DREAM Act bill passed the House in December, but failed in the Senate, not having the support to defeat a GOP filibuster.

The Democrats are also urging Obama to clarify the parameters of "extreme hardship" cases, a designation allowing those targeted for deportation to remain in the country. Current immigration law has no specific definition for extreme hardship.

"The president should define extreme hardship today," Gutierrez said. "He has the power. We don't need any more legislative action here [on that issue]."

Brittney Babo, a registered nurse living in Ridgeley, W.Va., said Wednesday that she recently filed for the extreme hardship waiver on behalf of her husband of more than four years, Serge, who was deported to his native Cameroon last August. Appearing with their two young children, Babo urged Obama to meet with families like hers who have been torn apart by current immigration laws.

"You're moving in the right direction," she said to Obama, "but it's not enough."

The Democrats said cases like Babo's are clear indications that current immigration laws are harming the country more than improving it.

"Are we better off for snatching the father of these children away from his family?" Schakowsky asked. "What sense does this make?"

It's not that Obama has ignored the issue; earlier this month, the president visited El Paso, Texas, where he delivered a headline-grabbing speech calling on Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform, including the DREAM Act.

"There is a consensus around fixing what’s broken," he said. "Now we need Congress to catch up to a train that’s leaving the station."

The president in recent weeks has also met with lawmakers, business leaders and religious figures in search of an immigration-reform solution that's eluded presidents of both parties for years.

Gutierrez said he was "happy and delighted" that Obama has the issue on his radar, but also charged that there's much more the White House could be doing.

"Do we really need a courtroom to prove that this mother is going to live in extreme hardship?" Gutierrez asked, referring to Babo. "The administration can do something right away."

Last month, Gutierrez warned that he could withhold support for Obama next year if the White House doesn't fight harder for immigration reform.

Since taking over the White House more than two years ago, Obama's Department of Homeland Security has cracked down aggressively on illegal immigrants, with deportations approaching 400,000 annually under his watch, according to Schakowsky.

In El Paso, the president defended the tough enforcement.

"Regardless of how they came, the overwhelming majority of these folks are just trying to earn a living and provide for their families," Obama said. "But they’ve broken the rules, and have cut in front of the line. And the truth is, the presence of so many illegal immigrants makes a mockery of all those who are trying to immigrate legally."

Critics, including the Democrats who spoke out Wednesday, said he needs to pay more attention to the human toll of his deportation policies.

"These are families, they are not criminals," said Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.). "The laws are broken, but it doesn't mean that we continue to break up families."

Reps. Jim Moran (D-Va.) and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) also appeared at Wednesday's event.

Marine Survives Two Tours in Iraq, SWAT Kills Him
Tim Cavanaugh | May 16, 2011
--reason.com--
"Please send me an ambulance and you can ask more questions later, please!"

Guerena tells the dispatcher that her husband had returned home about 6:30 a.m. after work and was sleeping.

Prompted by the dispatcher, Guerena says her husband was shot in the stomach and hands.

The dispatcher asks Guerena to put her cheek next to her husband's nose and mouth to see if he's breathing, but she replies in Spanish that her husband is face- down.

The operator tells Guerena to grab a cloth and apply pressure to his wounds, but the wife responds frantically: "I can't! I can't! There's a bunch of people outside of my house. I don't know what the heck is happening!"

A dispatcher asks if the people outside are the SWAT members. "I think it's the SWAT, but they ... Oh my God!" Guerena says.

A dispatcher asks that she open the door for the SWAT, but Guerena replies that the door was already opened by police.

"Is anybody coming? Is anybody coming?" she asks.

The operator tells Guerena help is on the way, but they're still trying to figure out what happened.

"I don't know, that's it, whatever I told you, that's it," Guerena says.

Just after the five-minute mark, Guerena's end of the line goes silent.

The two dispatchers spend about four minutes talking to each other and calling out for Guerena while trying to figure out if the call is coming from the same residence where the warrant was served. At the end of the 10-minute 911 call, a dispatcher says she has confirmation that Guerena is outside with deputies on the scene.

This is from Arizona Daily Star reporter Fernanda Echavarri's effort to piece together the death of Jose Guerena, 26, at the hands of a Pima County, Arizona SWAT team. Guerena, who joined the Marines in 2002 and served two tours in Iraq, was killed just after 9 a.m. May 5. Guerera had just gone to bed after working a 12-hour shift at a local mine when his home was invaded as part of a multi-house crackdown by sheriff's deputies.

Like enemy of the state Osama bin Laden, Guerena died with his wife close by. Widow Vanessa Guerena, who hid with her four-year-old son when sheriff's deputies raided the home, fills in detail that has been slow to come from Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik’s office:

"When I came out the officers dragged me through the kitchen and took me outside, and that's when I saw him laying there gasping for air," Vanessa Guerena said. "I kept begging the officers to call an ambulance that maybe he could make it and that my baby was still inside."

The little boy soon after walked out of the closet on his own. SWAT members took him outside to be with his mother.

"I never imagined I would lose him like that, he was badly injured but I never thought he could be killed by police after he served his country," Vanessa Guerena said.

The family's 5-year-old son was at school that morning and deputies say they thought Guerena's wife and his other child would also be gone when they entered the home.

Guerena says there were no drugs in their house.

Deputies said they seized a "large sum of money from another house" that morning. But they refused to say from which of the homes searched that morning they found narcotics, drug ledgers or drug paraphernalia. Court documents showing what was being sought and was found have not been made public. A computer check on Guerena revealed a couple of traffic tickets and no criminal history.

Tucson KGUN’s Joel Waldman says the SWAT team prevented paramedics from going to work on Guerena for one hour and fourteen minutes.

The sheriff’s department maintains that Guerena was holding an AR-15 when the paramilitary force fired 71 bullets in his home, but other key parts of the government story have collapsed. While PCSD initially claimed Guerena fired the weapon he was alleged to have been holding, the department now says it was a misfire by one of the deputies that caused this deadly group panic inside a home containing a woman and a toddler:

A deputy's bullet struck the side of the doorway, causing chips of wood to fall on his shield. That prompted some members of the team to think the deputy had been shot, [PCSD spokesman Michael] O'Connor said.

May 14, 2011
Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater’s Founder
By MARK MAZZETTI and EMILY B. HAGER
--NYtimes.com--
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand.

The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom.

Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.

The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.

The U.A.E.’s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country’s biggest foe, the former employees said. The training camp, located on a sprawling Emirati base called Zayed Military City, is hidden behind concrete walls laced with barbed wire. Photographs show rows of identical yellow temporary buildings, used for barracks and mess halls, and a motor pool, which houses Humvees and fuel trucks. The Colombians, along with South African and other foreign troops, are trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion, according to the former employees and American officials.

In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.

The United Arab Emirates — an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state — are closely allied with the United States, and American officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in Washington.

“The gulf countries, and the U.A.E. in particular, don’t have a lot of military experience. It would make sense if they looked outside their borders for help,” said one Obama administration official who knew of the operation. “They might want to show that they are not to be messed with.”

Still, it is not clear whether the project has the United States’ official blessing. Legal experts and government officials said some of those involved with the battalion might be breaking federal laws that prohibit American citizens from training foreign troops if they did not secure a license from the State Department.

Mark C. Toner, a spokesman for the department, would not confirm whether Mr. Prince’s company had obtained such a license, but he said the department was investigating to see if the training effort was in violation of American laws. Mr. Toner pointed out that Blackwater (which renamed itself Xe Services ) paid $42 million in fines last year for training foreign troops in Jordan and other countries over the years.

The U.A.E.’s ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, declined to comment for this article. A spokesman for Mr. Prince also did not comment.

For Mr. Prince, the foreign battalion is a bold attempt at reinvention. He is hoping to build an empire in the desert, far from the trial lawyers, Congressional investigators and Justice Department officials he is convinced worked in league to portray Blackwater as reckless. He sold the company last year, but in April, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

To help fulfill his ambitions, Mr. Prince’s new company, Reflex Responses, obtained another multimillion-dollar contract to protect a string of planned nuclear power plants and to provide cybersecurity. He hopes to earn billions more, the former employees said, by assembling additional battalions of Latin American troops for the Emiratis and opening a giant complex where his company can train troops for other governments.

Knowing that his ventures are magnets for controversy, Mr. Prince has masked his involvement with the mercenary battalion. His name is not included on contracts and most other corporate documents, and company insiders have at times tried to hide his identity by referring to him by the code name “Kingfish.” But three former employees, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements, and two people involved in security contracting described Mr. Prince’s central role.

The former employees said that in recruiting the Colombians and others from halfway around the world, Mr. Prince’s subordinates were following his strict rule: hire no Muslims.

Muslim soldiers, Mr. Prince warned, could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims.

A Lucrative Deal

Last spring, as waiters in the lobby of the Park Arjaan by Rotana Hotel passed by carrying cups of Turkish coffee, a small team of Blackwater and American military veterans huddled over plans for the foreign battalion. Armed with a black suitcase stuffed with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of dirhams, the local currency, they began paying the first bills.

The company, often called R2, was licensed last March with 51 percent local ownership, a typical arrangement in the Emirates. It received about $21 million in start-up capital from the U.A.E., the former employees said.

Mr. Prince made the deal with Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. The two men had known each other for several years, and it was the prince’s idea to build a foreign commando force for his country.

Savvy and pro-Western, the prince was educated at the Sandhurst military academy in Britain and formed close ties with American military officials. He is also one of the region’s staunchest hawks on Iran and is skeptical that his giant neighbor across the Strait of Hormuz will give up its nuclear program.

“He sees the logic of war dominating the region, and this thinking explains his near-obsessive efforts to build up his armed forces,” said a November 2009 cable from the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi that was obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

For Mr. Prince, a 41-year-old former member of the Navy Seals, the battalion was an opportunity to turn vision into reality. At Blackwater, which had collected billions of dollars in security contracts from the United States government, he had hoped to build an army for hire that could be deployed to crisis zones in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. He even had proposed that the Central Intelligence Agency use his company for special operations missions around the globe, but to no avail. In Abu Dhabi, which he praised in an Emirati newspaper interview last year for its “pro-business” climate, he got another chance.

Mr. Prince’s exploits, both real and rumored, are the subject of fevered discussions in the private security world. He has worked with the Emirati government on various ventures in the past year, including an operation using South African mercenaries to train Somalis to fight pirates. There was talk, too, that he was hatching a scheme last year to cap the Icelandic volcano then spewing ash across Northern Europe.

The team in the hotel lobby was led by Ricky Chambers, known as C. T., a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had worked for Mr. Prince for years; most recently, he had run a program training Afghan troops for a Blackwater subsidiary called Paravant.

He was among the half-dozen or so Americans who would serve as top managers of the project, receiving nearly $300,000 in annual compensation. Mr. Chambers and Mr. Prince soon began quietly luring American contractors from Afghanistan, Iraq and other danger spots with pay packages that topped out at more than $200,000 a year, according to a budget document. Many of those who signed on as trainers — which eventually included more than 40 veteran American, European and South African commandos — did not know of Mr. Prince’s involvement, the former employees said.

Mr. Chambers did not respond to requests for comment.

He and Mr. Prince also began looking for soldiers. They lined up Thor Global Enterprises, a company on the Caribbean island of Tortola specializing in “placing foreign servicemen in private security positions overseas,” according to a contract signed last May. The recruits would be paid about $150 a day.

Within months, large tracts of desert were bulldozed and barracks constructed. The Emirates were to provide weapons and equipment for the mercenary force, supplying everything from M-16 rifles to mortars, Leatherman knives to Land Rovers. They agreed to buy parachutes, motorcycles, rucksacks — and 24,000 pairs of socks.

To keep a low profile, Mr. Prince rarely visited the camp or a cluster of luxury villas near the Abu Dhabi airport, where R2 executives and Emirati military officers fine-tune the training schedules and arrange weapons deliveries for the battalion, former employees said. He would show up, they said, in an office suite at the DAS Tower — a skyscraper just steps from Abu Dhabi’s Corniche beach, where sunbathers lounge as cigarette boats and water scooters whiz by. Staff members there manage a number of companies that the former employees say are carrying out secret work for the Emirati government.

Emirati law prohibits disclosure of incorporation records for businesses, which typically list company officers, but it does require them to post company names on offices and storefronts. Over the past year, the sign outside the suite has changed at least twice — it now says Assurance Management Consulting.

While the documents — including contracts, budget sheets and blueprints — obtained by The Times do not mention Mr. Prince, the former employees said he negotiated the U.A.E. deal. Corporate documents describe the battalion’s possible tasks: intelligence gathering, urban combat, the securing of nuclear and radioactive materials, humanitarian missions and special operations “to destroy enemy personnel and equipment.”

One document describes “crowd-control operations” where the crowd “is not armed with firearms but does pose a risk using improvised weapons (clubs and stones).”

People involved in the project and American officials said that the Emiratis were interested in deploying the battalion to respond to terrorist attacks and put down uprisings inside the country’s sprawling labor camps, which house the Pakistanis, Filipinos and other foreigners who make up the bulk of the country’s work force. The foreign military force was planned months before the so-called Arab Spring revolts that many experts believe are unlikely to spread to the U.A.E. Iran was a particular concern.

An Eye on Iran

Although there was no expectation that the mercenary troops would be used for a stealth attack on Iran, Emirati officials talked of using them for a possible maritime and air assault to reclaim a chain of islands, mostly uninhabited, in the Persian Gulf that are the subject of a dispute between Iran and the U.A.E., the former employees said. Iran has sent military forces to at least one of the islands, Abu Musa, and Emirati officials have long been eager to retake the islands and tap their potential oil reserves.

The Emirates have a small military that includes army, air force and naval units as well as a small special operations contingent, which served in Afghanistan, but over all, their forces are considered inexperienced.

In recent years, the Emirati government has showered American defense companies with billions of dollars to help strengthen the country’s security. A company run by Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser during the Clinton and Bush administrations, has won several lucrative contracts to advise the U.A.E. on how to protect its infrastructure.

Some security consultants believe that Mr. Prince’s efforts to bolster the Emirates’ defenses against an Iranian threat might yield some benefits for the American government, which shares the U.A.E.’s concern about creeping Iranian influence in the region.

“As much as Erik Prince is a pariah in the United States, he may be just what the doctor ordered in the U.A.E.,” said an American security consultant with knowledge of R2’s work.

The contract includes a one-paragraph legal and ethics policy noting that R2 should institute accountability and disciplinary procedures. “The overall goal,” the contract states, “is to ensure that the team members supporting this effort continuously cast the program in a professional and moral light that will hold up to a level of media scrutiny.”

But former employees said that R2’s leaders never directly grappled with some fundamental questions about the operation. International laws governing private armies and mercenaries are murky, but would the Americans overseeing the training of a foreign army on foreign soil be breaking United States law?

Susan Kovarovics, an international trade lawyer who advises companies about export controls, said that because Reflex Responses was an Emirati company it might not need State Department authorization for its activities.

But she said that any Americans working on the project might run legal risks if they did not get government approval to participate in training the foreign troops.

Basic operational issues, too, were not addressed, the former employees said. What were the battalion’s rules of engagement? What if civilians were killed during an operation? And could a Latin American commando force deployed in the Middle East really be kept a secret?

Imported Soldiers

The first waves of mercenaries began arriving last summer. Among them was a 13-year veteran of Colombia’s National Police force named Calixto Rincón, 42, who joined the operation with hopes of providing for his family and seeing a new part of the world.

“We were practically an army for the Emirates,” Mr. Rincón, now back in Bogotá, Colombia, said in an interview. “They wanted people who had a lot of experience in countries with conflicts, like Colombia.”

Mr. Rincón’s visa carried a special stamp from the U.A.E. military intelligence branch, which is overseeing the entire project, that allowed him to move through customs and immigration without being questioned.

He soon found himself in the midst of the camp’s daily routines, which mirrored those of American military training. “We would get up at 5 a.m. and we would start physical exercises,” Mr. Rincón said. His assignment included manual labor at the expanding complex, he said. Other former employees said the troops — outfitted in Emirati military uniforms — were split into companies to work on basic infantry maneuvers, learn navigation skills and practice sniper training.

R2 spends roughly $9 million per month maintaining the battalion, which includes expenditures for employee salaries, ammunition and wages for dozens of domestic workers who cook meals, wash clothes and clean the camp, a former employee said. Mr. Rincón said that he and his companions never wanted for anything, and that their American leaders even arranged to have a chef travel from Colombia to make traditional soups.

But the secrecy of the project has sometimes created a prisonlike environment. “We didn’t have permission to even look through the door,” Mr. Rincón said. “We were only allowed outside for our morning jog, and all we could see was sand everywhere.”

The Emirates wanted the troops to be ready to deploy just weeks after stepping off the plane, but it quickly became clear that the Colombians’ military skills fell far below expectations. “Some of these kids couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn,” said a former employee. Other recruits admitted to never having fired a weapon.

Rethinking Roles

As a result, the veteran American and foreign commandos training the battalion have had to rethink their roles. They had planned to act only as “advisers” during missions — meaning they would not fire weapons — but over time, they realized that they would have to fight side by side with their troops, former officials said.

Making matters worse, the recruitment pipeline began drying up. Former employees said that Thor struggled to sign up, and keep, enough men on the ground. Mr. Rincón developed a hernia and was forced to return to Colombia, while others were dismissed from the program for drug use or poor conduct.

And R2’s own corporate leadership has also been in flux. Mr. Chambers, who helped develop the project, left after several months. A handful of other top executives, some of them former Blackwater employees, have been hired, then fired within weeks.

To bolster the force, R2 recruited a platoon of South African mercenaries, including some veterans of Executive Outcomes, a South African company notorious for staging coup attempts or suppressing rebellions against African strongmen in the 1990s. The platoon was to function as a quick-reaction force, American officials and former employees said, and began training for a practice mission: a terrorist attack on the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, the world’s tallest building. They would secure the situation before quietly handing over control to Emirati troops.

But by last November, the battalion was officially behind schedule. The original goal was for the 800-man force to be ready by March 31; recently, former employees said, the battalion’s size was reduced to about 580 men.

Emirati military officials had promised that if this first battalion was a success, they would pay for an entire brigade of several thousand men. The new contracts would be worth billions, and would help with Mr. Prince’s next big project: a desert training complex for foreign troops patterned after Blackwater’s compound in Moyock, N.C. But before moving ahead, U.A.E. military officials have insisted that the battalion prove itself in a “real world mission.”

That has yet to happen. So far, the Latin American troops have been taken off the base only to shop and for occasional entertainment.

On a recent spring night though, after months stationed in the desert, they boarded an unmarked bus and were driven to hotels in central Dubai, a former employee said. There, some R2 executives had arranged for them to spend the evening with prostitutes.

Mark Mazzetti reported from Abu Dhabi and Washington, and Emily B. Hager from New York. Jenny Carolina González and Simon Romero contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia. Kitty Bennett contributed research from Washington.