Trap Door Spiders

Trap Door Spiders

New York men’s literary dining club the Trap Door Spiders was founded by science fiction, fantasy, and military author Fletcher Pratt in 1944. The group started as a way for a few writer pals to escape the day—and, apparently, escape the new wife of influential writer and chemist John Drury Clark. It seems the friends weren’t fond of opera singer Mildred Baldwin. The invitation-only group was a debating society. The men opened the evening’s festivities with a meal and conversation, in which members had to “provide the others with a good reason for his continued existence.” Isaac Asimov was the group’s most famous member, with L. Sprague de Camp following closely behind. Notable guests included L. Ron Hubbard and Frederik Pohl. Asimov created a fictional group in a book series based on the club called “The Black Widowers.”

The world is ruled by a powerful, secretive few

Secret Societies Control the World

If you were really a member of the global élite, you'd know this already: the world is ruled by a powerful, secretive few. Many of the rest of us peons have heard that in 2004 both candidates for the White House were members of Yale University's secretive Skull and Bones society, many of whose members have risen to powerful positions. But Skull and Bones is small potatoes compared with the mysterious cabals that occupy virtually every seat of power, from the corridors of government to the boardrooms of Wall Street.

Take the Illuminati, a sect said to have originated in 18th century Germany and which is allegedly responsible for the pyramid-and-eye symbol adorning the $1 bill: they intend to foment world wars to strengthen the argument for the creation of a worldwide government (which would, of course, be Satanic in nature). Or consider the Freemasons, who tout their group as the "oldest and largest worldwide fraternity" and boast alumni like George Washington. Some think that despite donating heaps of cash to charity, they're secretly plotting your undoing at Masonic temples across the world. Or maybe, some theorize, the guys pulling the strings aren't concealed in shadow at all. They might be the intelligentsia on the Council on Foreign Relations, a cadre of policy wonks who allegedly count their aims as publishing an erudite bimonthly journal and establishing a unified world government — not necessarily in that order.

RACISM, PARANOIA AND DESPERATION MARK NETANYAHU’S ELECTION CAMPAIGN



Over the final fortnight of Israel’s election campaign, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has gone from being celebrated for slaying President Barack Obama in the US Congress to looking and sounding more like one of Obama’s least-loved predecessors: Richard Nixon.

 

Tired, confused, desperate and paranoid are just a few of the epithets that have been hurled at Netanyahu in the last days of the campaign.

With his ratings sinking as the final polls were published at the end of last week, he raced to offer interviews to every media outlet that would host him. On Sunday night, Netanyahu held a last-minute rally in Tel Aviv organised by the settler movement to try to revive his flagging fortunes.

According to polls, his Likud party is likely to be beaten into second place on Tuesday by the Zionist Union, a centre-left coalition jointly headed by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni.

In response, Netanyahu has concentrated on what he does best: fear-mongering.

Warning that the whole of the right will fall with him, if he is defeated, he ascribed his difficulties not to personal failings but to a sinister plot by “foreign groups”.

They have supposedly been helping his opponents – not only the Zionist Union but also the Joint List, a united front of Arab parties representing Israel’s large Palestinian minority that are running together for the first time and currently polling in third place.

In a comment worthy of Nixon at his most insecure, Netanyahu warned that there was “a huge, worldwide effort to topple the Likud”. Illegitimate funding from “European states” and “leftwingers overseas” might “get the Arab [Joint] List up to 16 seats, thereby determining the overall result of the election”.

His main campaign ad featured a foolish Israeli liberal offering directions to a truckload of armed Islamic State jihadists trying to find the road to Jerusalem. “Turn left,” the Israeli man told them.

Aside from the lack of evidence for a foreign plot, either by leftist Europeans or Jew-hating jihadists, Netanyahu’s chutzpah has plumbed new depths.

Media reports have noted that he has received more funding from overseas – chiefly from Jewish tycoons in the US – than any candidate in Israel’s history. If foreigners are indeed meddling in Israeli politics, it is on Netanyahu’s behalf.

Complicated electoral maths

Nonetheless, even should he fail to rally supporters, Netanyahu’s path to the opposition is far from obvious. Many voters are undecided and their last-minute decisions will shape the result.

In Israel’s complicated electoral maths, a poor performance will also not necessarily block Netanyahu from forming the next government. That will depend on horse-trading to win the support of smaller parties.

Another possibility, if the result is inconclusive between the right and the centre, is that Netanyahu and Herzog may agree to a national unity government.

But equally, if Netanyahu’s tally of seats falls much below his currently predicted 20, he will struggle to hold on to his position as Likud party leader. Party elders are already describing the campaign as a “colossal failure”.

Netanyahu’s troubles reflect two trends that have come to the fore in this election.

The first is that the Likud’s traditional position at the heart of the nationalist camp is no longer assured. As Netanyahu has pushed rightwards, the party has splintered in ways that have weakened its standing and shrunk its support base.

The settlers have preferred a far-right party, Jewish Home, led by Naftali Bennett, dedicated to their own discrete interests. Unlike the equivocating Netanyahu, Bennett is outspoken in demanding that Israel annex most of the West Bank to secure the settlements.

Other elements of Likud have moved towards what Israelis call the centre.

This process began with Ariel Sharon and Tzipi Livni nearly a decade ago, when they broke away to form Kadima after carrying out the so-called “disengagement” from Gaza that Netanyahu and others in Likud opposed.

Kadima itself gradually collapsed following the loss of Sharon, but its successors may prove more durable. At the most recent election, the glamorous TV news anchor Yair Lapid emerged as a surprise success story with his new Yesh Atid party.

In this election he has been joined at the centre by Likud renegade Moshe Kahlon, who set up the Kulanu party.

Lapid and Kahlon largely ignore the “regional threats” that obsess Netanyahu and instead talk about the economy. They promise to break up monopolies controlled by a handful of wealthy families and return money to ordinary Israelis’ pockets.

Separately or together, they could turn out to be this election’s kingmakers, deciding whether Netanyahu or Herzog is crowned. Both have decidedly frosty relations with Netanyahu.

Lavish lifestyle

Unlike his centrist rivals, Netanyahu has come to be seen over the course of the campaign as too closely aligned with the families that dominate the economy, and unwilling to confront them.

Accusations that he and his unpopular wife, Sara, indulge in a lavish lifestyle and bully staff have been swirling around for many years. But at this election the mud has finally stuck.

In Israeli politics, seemingly marginal incidents often accrete larger significance. Revelations during the campaign of the enormous sums the Netanyahus have spent on their entertainments bill and of Sara Netanyahu personally pocketing loose change – amounting to hundreds of dollars – in deposits on returned bottles appear to have cemented an image of the Netanyahus as corrupt.

Netanyahu has responded by focusing on his favourite topic: security.

That was partly why he trooped off to Congress this month to warn of the dangers of a deal with Iran, and why last week his party implied that he was revoking his 2009 pledge to Obama that he would back a two-state solution.

According to Netanyahu, an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would suck in groups from Iran to the Islamic State group, creating a “terror state” next door.

But the scare-mongering may be falling flat in part because the centrist parties are not offering a much more conciliatory message on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The views of the so-called “peace camp” in Israel have been articulated on billboards across the densely populated centre of the country by a group named the Association of National Security Experts, headed by relatively dovish former army generals.

Their posters, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname Bibi, warn: “With Bibi [and] Bennett, we’ll be stuck with the Palestinians forever.”

In their view, the solution is to cut off the occupied territories like some gangrenous limb.

But compared to the centrist parties, even this message is radical. Herzog, Lapid and Kahlon have all suggested that there is no “partner” on the Palestinian side for a peace agreement.

That hopeless diagnosis appears to be shared by a majority of the Israeli public. Some 70 percent of Israeli Jews believe peace talks are futile, and 64 percent say that it makes no difference which party leads the country on the Palestinian issue “because there is no solution”.

In such circumstances, the centre has benefited by focusing on social and economic hardship.

The White House, fearful that its role as guarantor of an endless peace process is in jeopardy, broke its own promise not to intervene in the election by insisting last week that the next Israeli government must join it in renewing peace talks.

Blast of fresh air

If Jewish politics is committed to the status quo on the defining political challenge facing Israel, the Joint List has arrived for most of Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinian citizens as a blast of fresh air.

It is a united front of usually disputatious Arab parties ranging from socialists to Islamists and democratic nationalists.

Led by Ayman Odeh, a personable lawyer who is new to Knesset politics, the List has largely avoided dealing in specific policies to concentrate on reversing the growing disillusionment of the Palestinian minority in the Knesset.

The previous two elections have seen barely more than half the Arab electorate turn out. Polls predict the Joint List could nudge its tally of seats from the current 11 shared across three parties to as many as 15.

Of the three main post-election scenarios, two suggest that the Joint List – if it can hold together – might carry some political weight in the Knesset.

A right-wing Netanyahu government will mean no change, apart from a probable intensification of anti-Arab legislation.

The Joint List has rejected joining a Herzog-led government, but it would probably agree to support the centrists from outside, as a way to prevent Netanyahu’s return to power.

That would require payback from Herzog, probably in the form of increased budgets for Palestinian communities in Israel.

The third scenario is the most intriguing. If a national unity government is formed, the Joint List might accept the position of the formal opposition. That would provide it – for the first time ever – with regular meetings with the prime minister and the chair of several major committees.

But the latter two scenarios also expose the Joint List, and the wider Palestinian minority, to a backlash from the right, which can be expected to step up Netanyahu’s ugly insinuations of “foreign” interference.

Last week, to barely any protest inside Israel, foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman called for disloyal Palestinian citizens to be beheaded.

This from a man who has called the Joint List a “terror organisation” and Odeh, who is committed to Jewish-Arab cooperation, a “fifth column”.

His campaign slogan has been “Umm al-Fahm to Palestine”, calling for the inhabitants of large Palestinian communities in Israel to be stripped of their citizenship.

The danger is that the right – from Lieberman to Netanyahu – may be content to have the various Arab parties in one list, exploiting that unity to paint them all as traitors, meddling in the affairs of a Jewish state.

The greater the Joint List’s success and influence, the more it is likely to face claims that it is really a fifth column in the Knesset.

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Ferguson gunman who shot police officers remains at large

Chief now admits protesters could have been intended targets

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Paramedics lift one of two police officers who were shot while standing guard in front of the Ferguson Police Station …

An intense manhunt for the gunman who shot and severely wounded two police officers in Ferguson, Mo., has yet to yield a suspect, St. Louis County Chief of Police Jon Belmar announced late Friday.

“I cannot tell you at this time that an arrest is imminent,” Belmar said at a news conference.

Investigators are following dozens of leads, but still need the public’s help, the chief said.

“We've received scores of tips … but we haven’t been inundated,” he said.

The shooting occurred early Thursday in front of the Ferguson Police Department just as a small group of protesters began to disperse.

The injured men, who have not been identified, were standing side by side in a line of 25 officers when three shots rang out.

A 32-year-old officer from nearby Webster Groves was struck in the face, and a 41-year-old officer from St. Louis County was shot in the shoulder. Both were rushed to a local hospital in serious condition, but released about 12 hours later.

“I would hope that they’re going to have a full recovery,” the chief said Friday.

Belmar initially described the shooting as an “ambush” and felt confident the “shots were directed exactly at my officers.”

But under questioning by reporters a day later, the chief said he is unclear if the shooter was deliberately aiming at police or protesters.

“It’s hard to say,” he said. “Regardless of whether we have two police officers or whether or not we have folks in the crowd [shot], it’s a tragedy either way because it undermines everything that everybody is trying to do in this.”

Investigators are fairly certain the shots were fired from a handgun about 120 yards across the street from the Police Department. That would be a lengthy — but not impossible — shot with a pistol, the chief said.

“I wouldn’t characterize this as a miracle shot by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “I don’t necessarily prescribe to the fact that this has to be a marksman somewhere with a scope. It may turn out to be, but I don't think that would have to have been necessary in this case.”

Belmar also backed off previous comments about the gunman’s potential motivation.

“It’s kind of really hard to speculate what kind of nexus there may or may not have existed regarding the shooters and any individuals who may have been out there,” the chief said. “I don’t know who did it at this point. It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that it happened there.”

Several protest leaders have publicly denounced the attack. More than 100 people gathered in Ferguson Thursday night for a candlelight vigil to end violence.

The Ferguson Police Department has been a point of convergence for protesters and national media since the Aug. 9 shooting death of Michael Brown, who was black and unarmed, by a white police officer. The incident sparked on-and-off clashes between demonstrators and police. But violence had been muted in recent months until Wednesday night.

Witnesses told reporters the evening had been mostly peaceful before the shooting, though the crowd had grown larger by the hour following the resignation of embattled Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson on Wednesday afternoon.

Jackson is the sixth Ferguson employee to resign or be fired in the wake of last week's critical Department of Justice report that accused the city of racist and unconstitutional police and court practices.

A separate federal investigation cleared Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Brown, 18. The officer resigned from the department after a St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict him in late November.

US sending Humvees, radars, and drones to Ukraine's front lines

The U.S. will provide more substantial arms and military equipment to Ukraine in the form of $75 million worth of armored Humvees, drones and counter-mortar radars. Much of it will help the Ukrainian military with situational awareness and targeting enemy artillery, but the list of goods does not include “lethal aid” that members of Congress and Ukraine supporters have asked President Barack Obama to authorize.

“This new assistance is part of our ongoing efforts to help sustain Ukraine’s defense and internal security operations and resist further aggression,” a senior administration official told reporters in an email. Missing from the announcement were Javelin portable anti-tank missiles requested by the Ukrainian military.

The announcement comes after months of pressure from Ukrainian officials and a recent push from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers.

“I think the administration has felt political pressure to do something…. This may well be a response to that political pressure,” Steven Pifer, Brookings senior fellow and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told Defense One. Pifer co-authored a report last month that is based on interviews with front line commanders in the Ukrainian military and argued that the U.S. should provide anti-tank and anti-battery weapons, but especially radars and unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, to detect enemy positions.

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Zacarias Moussaoui and The Ghosts of 9/11

More than 14  years and five months after an attack which took more than 2800 lives in ways so horrible that the U.S. Government and the nation’s television networks seamlessly colluded—in real time—to prevent the American people from seeing what really was happening, last month some were finally hailing a “break” in the case. 

In a deposition in a lawsuit filed by families of 9/11 victims against the Saudi Government,  Zacarias  Moussaoui, the man authorities dubbed the 20th hijacker, fingered a dozen prominent Saudis—including several Princes of the Royal House of Saud— as patrons of Al Qaeda whose support enabled the 9/11 attack.

His accusations were based on first-hand knowledge he gained, he said, while head of digital fundraising for Osama bin Laden.

Bob Graham, former chair of the Joint Congressional Intelligence Committee inquiry into 9/11, used the opportunity to again call for the release of 28 blank pages dealing with Saudi Arabian complicity.

KABUKI-LITE IN WASHINGTON D.C.

Said Graham, “The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier.”

Author Anthony Summers seconded Graham’s call for the release of the material on the Saudis.  

Both men cited the suspicious flight two weeks before 9/11 of the wealthy family of Abdulaziz al-Hijji, his wife, Anoud, and her father, Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to a Saudi prince, from their mansion in Sarasota, which records show was visited by Mohamed Atta.

When the Saudi family’s panicked flight from Sarasota became public, FBI officials acknowledged the investigation, but said it had turned up no connection to 9/11 — statements contradicted by the handful of records made public in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

The exercise is an elaborate charade. Its Kabuki Theater—whose theme is conflict between humanity and feudal lords—for Washington insiders. Its not supposed to be told, as it is here, from the point of view the Overlords themselves. 

Pointing the finger of blame at the Saudis is an easy sale.  But it isn’t even news. A decade ago Craig Unger’s “House of Bush, House of Saud detailed Saudi complicity in 9/11. So did elfin JFK assassination apologist,  CIA asset, and plagiarist Gerald Posner’s “Why America Slept.”

Fighting for disclosure of information about Saudi involvement in 9/11 is a noble pursuit, and I’ve also uncovereddetails of the cover-up of Saudi involvement.  But for Graham and Summers it comes in lieu of exposing the other side of the coin: the errors of omission of the FBI, and criminal activities of agencies of America’s national security state.

This wasn’t Zac’s first rodeo

Last month’s deposition wasn’t the first time Zacarias Moussaoui has made an important contribution to what we know about the 9/11 attack. 

His trial a decade ago produced twin bombshells—Mohamed Atta’s cell phone records, and an undisclosed aviation incident in Clearwater—each of which would have been at least as explosive, had anyone shown any interest—as the classified pages about the Saudis of the Joint Intelligence Committee report. 

Both involve American failings, specifically FBI malfeasance in their investigation into 911,  showing the Bureau’s official chronology—the chief tool in every criminal investigation—to have been a tissue of half-truths, distortions and lies. Neither Graham nor Summers have ever evinced any concern over either disclosure. 

Bob Graham and Anthony Summers muster their outrage only to point the finger of blame outwards. These two highly intelligent men can’t be under the illusion that the Saudis were playing solitaire with themselves in pre-9/11 Florida. They know there was a CIA or military intelligence operation bringing Saudi and other Arab student pilots to the U.S. in 2000 and 2001.

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Technology should be used to create social mobility – not to spy on citizens

Spying is cheap, and cheaper every day. Many people have compared NSA/GCHQ mass spying to the surveillance programme of East Germany’s notorious Stasi, but the differences between the NSA and the Stasi are more interesting than the similarities.

The most important difference is size. The Stasi employed one snitch for every 50 or 60 people it watched. We can’t be sure of the size of the entire Five Eyes global surveillance workforce, but there are only about 1.4 million Americans with Top Secret clearance, and many of them don’t work at or for the NSA, which means that the number is smaller than that (the other Five Eyes states have much smaller workforces than the US). This million-ish person workforce keeps six or seven billion people under surveillance – a ratio approaching 1:10,000. What’s more, the US has only (“only”!) quadrupled its surveillance budget since the end of the Cold War: tooling up to give the spies their toys wasn’t all that expensive, compared to the number of lives that gear lets them pry into.

IT has been responsible for a 2-3 order of magnitude productivity gain in surveillance efficiency. The Stasi used an army to surveil a nation; the NSA uses a battalion to surveil a planet.

Spying, especially domestic spying, is an aspect of what the Santa Fe Institute economist Samuel Bowles calls guard labour: work that is done to stabilise property relationships, especially the property belonging to the rich.

The amount a state needs to expend on guard labour is a function of how much legitimacy the state holds in its population’s reckoning. A state whose population mainly views the system as fair needs to do less coercion to attain stability. People who believe that they are well-served by the status quo will not work to upset it. States whose populations view the system as illegitimate need to spend more on guard labour.

It’s easy to see this at work: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, China and North Korea spend disproportionate sums on guard labour. Highly redistributive Nordic states with strong labour laws, steeply progressive taxation and tenant protection spend less on guard labour. They attain social stability through the carrot of social programmes, not the stick of guard labour.

In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty uses the wealth disparity on the eve of the French Revolution as a touchstone for the moment at which the perception of the state’s illegitimacy goes to infinity, when even emptying the treasury for guard labour will not keep the guillotine at bay. Piketty is trying to convince global elites (or at least the policymakers beholden to them) that it’s cheaper to submit to a redistributive 1% annual global wealth tax than it is to buy the guards to sustain our present wealth disparity.

There’s an implied max/min problem here: the intersection of a curve representing the amount of wealth you need to spend on guards to maintain stability in the presence of a widening rich/poor gap and the amount you can save on guards by creating social mobility through education, health, and social welfare is the point at which you should stop paying for cops and start paying for hospitals and schools

US Expands Russian-Aimed Propaganda Budget by More than 100%

Victoria Nuland said that the State Department is vastly increasing its budget for battling what she calls “the Kremlin’s pervasive propaganda campaign poisoning minds across Russia, on Russia’s periphery, and across Europe.”

“This year, the [Broadcasting Board of Governors] is committing $23.2 million to Russian-language programming,” Nuland told the committee. “A 49% increase since [fiscal year 2014].”

The State Department is also requesting an additional $20 million, which would “ramp up efforts to counter lies with truth.”

The money will be used for a variety of purposes. According to Nuland’s testimony, part of the funds will be used to support student exchange programs and promote civil watchdog groups. But much of the money will also be used to “counter Russian propaganda through training for Russian-speaking journalists,” as well as providing access to “fact-based” news outlets.

Nuland also claimed that President Obama had consulted with US agencies over arming the Ukrainian military.

“These issues are still under review internally, including the types of equipment…that would respond directly to some of the Russian supply,” Nuland said.

Russia has repeatedly denied its involvement in the Ukrainian conflict.

In addition to the increased BBG budget, Congress has already authorized $10 million to support Russian-language media throughout eastern Europe. This authorization was given through the Ukraine Freedom Support Act. 

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Manipulating Eisenhower

In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower was a strong supporter of the fledgling Jewish state and had supplied Israel with advanced U.S. weaponry. Yet, despite Eisenhower’s generosity and good intentions, Israel sided with the British and French in 1956 in a conspiracy against him. Israeli leaders joined a secret arrangement that involved Israel invading Egypt’s Sinai, which then allowed France and Great Britain to introduce their own forces and reclaim control of the Suez Canal.

In reaction to the invasion, the Soviet Union threatened to intervene on the side of Egypt by sending ground troops. With Cold War tensions already stretched thin by the crises in Hungary and elsewhere, Eisenhower faced the possibility of a showdown between nuclear-armed adversaries. Eisenhower demanded that the Israeli-spearheaded invasion of the Sinai be stopped, and he brought financial and political pressures to bear on Great Britain and France.

A ceasefire soon was declared, and the British and French departed, but the Israelis dragged their heels. Eisenhower finally presented Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion with an ultimatum, a threat to cut off all U.S. aid. Finally, in March 1957, the Israelis withdrew.

Even as it backed down in the Sinai, Israel was involved in another monumental deception, a plan for building its own nuclear arsenal. In 1956, Israel had concluded an agreement with France to build a nuclear reactor in the Negev desert. Israel also signed a secret agreement with France to build an adjacent plutonium reprocessing plant.

Israel began constructing its nuclear plant in 1958. However, French President Charles de Gaulle was worried about nuclear weapons destabilizing the Middle East and insisted that Israel not develop a nuclear bomb from the plutonium processing plant. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion assured de Gaulle that the processing plant was for peaceful purposes only.

After John F. Kennedy became President, he also wrote to Ben-Gurion explicitly calling on Israel not to join the nuclear-weapons club, drawing another pledge from Ben-Gurion that Israel had no such intention. Nevertheless, Kennedy continued to press, forcing the Israelis to let U.S. scientists inspect the nuclear reactor at Dimona. But the Israelis first built a fake control room while bricking up and otherwise disguising parts of the building that housed the plutonium processing plant.

In return for allowing inspectors into Dimona, Ben-Gurion also demanded that the United States sell Hawk surface-to-air missiles to the Israeli military. Kennedy agreed to the sale as a show of good faith. Subsequently, however, the CIA got wind of the Dimona deception and leaked to the press that Israel was secretly building a nuclear bomb.

After Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson also grew concerned over Israel’s acquiring nuclear weapons. He asked then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Eshkol assured Johnson that Israel was studying the matter and would sign the treaty in due course. However, Israel has never signed the treaty and never has admitted that it developed nuclear weapons.

Torture Impunity and Police Shootings

A danger from the “war on terror” was always that it would encourage the spread of an authoritarian U.S. state, ignoring international law abroad and constitutional rights at home, a process that is now growing more apparent with impunity for both torturers and police who kill minorities...

The international fallout from last week’s long-delayed release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 500-page executive summary of its still-classified 6,000 report on CIA torture could hardly be more intense, with calls coming from the United Nations, foreign governments and the human rights community for prosecutions of those who carried out or authorized the torture techniques described in the report, including senior officials from the Bush administration.

But judging from the self-assured comments of CIA and former administration officials, there is no real concern over the possibility of any criminal liability, a lack of accountability which has led to a palpable arrogance among those who would be behind bars if laws were actually enforced on an equal basis in the United States.

President George W. Bush signing Military Commissions Act of 2006.

The above-the-law sense of entitlement was perhaps most clearly on display in former Vice President Dick Cheney’s appearance this Sunday on “Meet the Press,” stating that when it comes to using torture, “I’d do it again in a minute.”

When presented with gruesome details from the Senate report on torture – for example the newly revealed “enhanced interrogation technique” of “rectal feeding,” i.e., anal rape – and asked for his definition of what might constitute “torture” in a legal sense, Cheney retorted that torture is “an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York on 9/11.”

Short of this rather high bar, nothing, by definition, that the United States does to its detainees could conceivably be considered torture.

Similarly, when asked about the large number of innocent people (26 out of 119 CIA detainees, according to the report) who had tragically been detained and tortured in error, for example Gul Rahman – a victim of mistaken identity who was chained to the wall of his cell, doused with water and froze to death in CIA custody – Cheney stated indifferently that these individuals essentially don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. The only problem that Cheney had was “with the folks that we did release that end up back on the battlefield.”

“I’m more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent,” he said. Taken to its logical conclusion, Cheney’s reasoning would seem to hold that it is preferable to indefinitely detain and torture a million innocent people than to allow one “bad guy” to slip through the cracks. The implications of this logic are, needless to say, chilling (not to mention completely at odds with the legal principle of presumed innocence).

A Courtroom Defense

At times, watching Cheney make these cold rationalizations on “Meet the Press,” it may have occurred to viewers that the more appropriate venue for this interview would have been on the witness stand of a courtroom. After all, what Cheney was defending was not just controversial policy choices, but clearly defined crimes of torture and murder.

Although he was sure to emphasize that “All of the techniques that were authorized by the President were, in effect, blessed by the Justice Department,” the fact remains that providing the cover of law to a crime makes it no less of a crime.

This is a point that UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism Ben Emmerson specifically made last week following the release of the report. In a statement, Emmerson said, “The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorized at a high level within the U.S. government provides no excuse whatsoever. Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability.”

Emphasizing that all individuals responsible for “the criminal conspiracy” described in the Senate report “must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes,” Emmerson noted that “international law prohibits the granting of immunities to public officials who have engaged in acts of torture.”

Judging from Cheney’s arrogant display on “Meet the Press,” however, there appears to be very little appreciation for the niceties of international law such as its expressed prohibition on official immunity when it comes to the crime of torture. He seems to be quite confident, indeed, that official immunity is unnecessary when there is an implied unofficial immunity that is granted to public officials in the United States, this being the case whether it pertains to CIA torture or police brutality.

Police Shootings

The same arrogance that Cheney is so casually displaying can also be seen in the closely paralleled story of the recent spate of police shootings and killings of innocent or unarmed African-Americans, and the remarkable wave of demonstrations that has taken hold across the United States in response.

With large-scale protests happening in most major American cities over the past month – particularly since grand juries decided not to indict the police officers who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City – one might think that cops would be extra careful these days not to come across overly arrogant or obdurate. This, however, would not be the case.

In response to the NFL’s Cleveland Browns’ wide receiver Andrew Hawkins taking the field on Sunday wearing a T-shirt protesting recent police shootings in Ohio – reading “Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford” on the front and “The Real Battle for Ohio” on the back – Jeff Follmer, president of the Cleveland police union, claimed the shirt was disrespectful and he disparaged the very idea of athletes holding opinions about anything other than sports.

“It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law,” Follmer said in a statement. “They should stick to what they know best on the field.” In other words, keep your opinions to yourself, boy, and just play football. Follmer also demanded an apology from the Clevelend Browns organization, which to their credit, the Browns did not extend.

Instead, the Browns fired back with a statement saying the organization endorses the rights of players “to project their support and bring awareness to issues that are important to them if done so in a responsible manner.”

Hawkins also weighed in with comments to the media that revealed, in fact, a deep knowledge and understanding of what law and justice mean (or should mean), contrary to Follmer’s condescending remarks. “Justice,” he said, “is a right that every American should have. Justice means that the innocent should be found innocent. It means that those who do wrong should get their due punishment.”

His six-minute locker-room monologue to reporters ended with him choking up while drawing a parallel between his own young son and the tragic death of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy shot by police in Cleveland on Nov. 22 while holding a toy gun.

“My number one reason for wearing the T-shirt was the thought of what happened to Tamir Rice happening to my little Austin. And that scares the living hell out of me,” he said.

Protests and Fears

This genuine, personal fear of police violence is one that has been widely expressed over the last several weeks of protests taking hold across the country. As Democracy Now’s Aaron Maté reported from New York’s “Millions March” on Saturday, one of the dominant themes being expressed on the streets was “a sense of not feeling safe, not feeling safe themselves and not feeling safe for their loved ones, people of color in heavily policed communities.”

Interviewing protester Darrell Greene, Maté asked him to explain his sign, which read “Me, my father, my son. Who’s next?”

Greene responded, “At this point, I know I’m a productive citizen, and I don’t feel safe in my own community. I’ve never been in trouble with law enforcement. And from what I’m seeing on the news and what’s been going on, I really wonder: Am I next? I’m wondering if the people in my community are next. We’re all productive citizens, and we’re in fear for our life. We feel like it’s open season on all minorities, and we want to know if we’re really safe.”

Protester Nilan Johnson echoed these sentiments. “I’m here because Americans, period, are being preyed on, right now,” he said. “African-Americans are once again fighting for the right to be human, and I think that’s horrible.”

Asked whether he feels, as a person of color, whether he is unsafe in his community, Johnson replied, “That’s – I feel that daily, so I feel that’s a preconditioned nature now. I feel threatened and marked and cornered. And everybody here feels the same way. And we’re trying to keep our humanity.”

If not a direct byproduct of the war on terror’s excesses and the impunity that law-breakers at the highest levels of government enjoy, this feeling of powerlessness, insecurity and injustice is certainly closely related. Indeed, as far back as 2007, civil rights leaders were drawing these connections, in particular in a report prepared for the United Nations entitled “In The Shadows Of The War On Terror: Persistent Police Brutality and Abuse of People of Color in the United States.”

Since 9/11, the report explained, “there have been dramatic increases in law enforcement powers in the name of waging the ‘war on terror,’” while simultaneously, counter-terrorism policies have “created a generalized climate of impunity for law enforcement officers, and contributed to the erosion of what few accountability mechanisms exist for civilian control over law enforcement agencies.”

This has led to an erosion of public discussion and accountability with respect to the use of excessive force against people of color, while at the same time, “systemic abuse of people of color by law enforcement officers has not only continued since 2001 but has worsened in both practice and severity,” according to the report. As a representative of the NAACP put it, “the degree to which police brutality occurs … is the worst I’ve seen in 50 years.”

Troubling Trend

Even establishment publications such as the Wall Street Journal have noticed the troubling trend of rising police violence and its connections with the war on terror. As a feature article in WSJ put it in August 2013, “the war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the U.S. scene: the warrior cop – armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.”

This threat to liberties is compounded when the justice system fails to hold accountable those who break the law and violate people’s rights. Whether it is Eric Garner in New York or Gul Rahman in Afghanistan, the victims of injustice must have redress, and “those who do wrong should get their due punishment,” in the words of Cleveland Browns wide receiver Andrew Hawkins.

As human rights advocates and civil libertarians have warned since the early days of the “war on terror,” human rights violations of terror suspects will eventually set the United States on a slippery slope in which authorities deem it optional whether to respect the human rights of anyone, including U.S. citizens. At that point, anyone is fair game, and all of us, including law-abiding Americans, may find ourselves at the mercy of an unsympathetic authoritarian state.

Only mass default will end the world's addiction to debt

The world is sinking under a sea of debt, private as well as public, and it is increasingly hard to see how this might end, except in some form of mass default.

Greece we already know about, but the coming much wider outbreak of debt repudiation will not be confined to sovereign nations. Last week, there was another foretaste of what’s to come in developments at Austria’s failed Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank International . Taxpayers have had enough of paying for the country’s increasingly crisis-ridden banking sector, and have determined to bail in private creditors to the remnants of this financial road crash instead - to the tune of $8.5bn in the specific case of Hypo Alpe-Adria. Finally, creditors are being made to pay for the consequences of their own folly.

You might have thought that a financial crisis as serious as that of the past seven years would have ended the world economy’s addiction to debt once and for all. It has not. If anything, the position has grown even worse since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

According to recent analysis by McKinsey Global Institute, global debt has increased to the tune of $57 trillion, or 17pc, since 2007, with little sign of a slowdown in sight. Much of this growth has been in emerging markets, which were comparatively unaffected by the financial crisis. Yet even in the developed West, private sector deleveraging has been limited and, in any case, more than outweighed by growing public indebtedness. The combined public sector debt of the G7 economies has grown by 40pc to around 120pc of GDP since the crisis began. There has been no overall deleveraging to speak of.

Where the West left off, Asia has taken up the pace, with a credit-induced real estate bubble that makes its pre-crisis Western counterpart look tame by comparison, much of it fuelled, as in Western economies, by growth in the shadow banking sector.

China’s total indebtedness has quadrupled since 2007 to $28 trillion, according to estimates by McKinsey. At 282pc of GDP, the debt burden is now bigger, relative to output, that the US.

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Obama’s hypocritical stance on China’s plan to require backdoors in tech products

President Obama wants China to know that the United States government is the only one that can ask Western tech companies to include backdoors in their consumer products.

Obama told Reuters that China’s mandates “would essentially force all foreign companies, including U.S. companies, to turn over to the Chinese government mechanisms where they can snoop and keep track of all the users of those services.” That, obviously, would be bad.

But the most telling part of the interview came from Obama’s remarks on tech companies’ willingness to hand over such access to a government — not a “foreign” government, just “a government” — despite increasing pressure to do so. As he explained to Reuters:

Those kinds of restrictive practices I think would ironically hurt the Chinese economy over the long term because I don’t think there is any U.S. or European firm, any international firm, that could credibly get away with that wholesale turning over of data, personal data, over to a government.

That’s interesting, considering the US has been attempting to gain such access to tech platforms for the last several years, and FBI Director James Comey has been lobbying to force tech companies to include backdoors in their consumer products. Sound familiar?

Those efforts prompted a group of Congressmen, led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), to introduce a bill that would prevent the FBI from requiring the creation of those backdoors.

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Bernanke Wants the U.S. President to Declare “Economic Emergencies” in Future Crises

Presidents should get the power to declare economic emergencies along the lines to declare war, said former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Monday.

It might make sense to give “the president some ability to declare emergencies or take extraordinary actions and not put that all on the Fed,” Bernanke said at a conference. “The constitution gives the president significant flexibility to respond to military situations,” in part because they are chaotic, he noted.

“I am sure it is not politically possible, but it would be worth thinking about,” the former Fed chairman said.

– From the MarketWatch article: Presidents Should Be Able to Declare Economic Emergencies: Bernanke

For those of us who remain horrified and disgusted by the 2008-09 Federal Reserve and U.S. government bailout of the kleptocratic oligarchs who created the crisis, the above comments by the mastermind of this historic theft should be extremely concerning.

Although bankers and oligarchs got everything they wanted and more from the post crisis panic, what seems to bother Bernanke is that some of the response measures had to be pursued publicly. By calling for the U.S. President to declare economic emergencies in future crises, he is explicitly saying he doesn’t want Congress involved at all, even if just ceremonially. This man is a dyed in the wool fascist.

MarketWatch reports that:

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Presidents should get the power to declare economic emergencies along the lines to declare war, said former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Monday.

While the Fed retains the authority it needs to respond to another financial crisis, financial crises “tend to have a certain chaotic element to them,” that no one can predict, Bernanke said during a panel discussion sponsored by The Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy.

In light of this, it might make sense to give “the president some ability to declare emergencies or take extraordinary actions and not put that all on the Fed,” Bernanke said at a conference. “The constitution gives the president significant flexibility to respond to military situations,” in part because they are chaotic, he noted.

“I am sure it is not politically possible, but it would be worth thinking about,” the former Fed chairman said.

After the House initially rejected the proposal and stock markets tumbled, Congress reconsidered and the measure was signed into law and became the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

After coming across the above, I got to thinking about the process for declaring national emergencies. I performed a quick search and read a little bit about the National Emergencies Act of 1976. It was passed in response to a spate of national emergencies initiated by President Richard Nixon, and was intended to ensure Congress exerted more oversight on such declarations for obvious reasons.

Unsurprisingly, Congress hasn’t been doing its job. As USA Todaypointed out in a special report last year:

The 1976 law requires each house of Congress to meet within six months of an emergency to vote it up or down. That’s never happened.

Here are some additional excerpts:

In his six years in office, President Obama has declared nine emergencies, allowed one to expire and extended 22 emergencies enacted by his predecessors.

Since 1976, when Congress passed the National Emergencies Act, presidents have declared at least 53 states of emergency — not counting disaster declarations for events such as tornadoes and floods, according to a USA TODAY review of presidential documents. Most of those emergencies remain in effect.

Even as Congress has delegated emergency powers to the president, it has provided almost no oversight. The 1976 law requires each house of Congress to meet within six months of an emergency to vote it up or down. That’s never happened.

In May, President Obama rescinded a Bush-era executive order that protected Iraqi oil interests and their contractors from legal liability.Even as he did so, he left the state of emergency declared in that executive order intact — because at least two other executive orders rely on it.

Seriously?

Invoking those emergencies can give presidents broad and virtually unchecked powers. In an article published last year in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, attorney Patrick Thronson identified 160 laws giving the president emergency powers, including the authority to:

• Reshape the military, putting members of the armed forces under foreign command, conscripting veterans, overturning sentences issued by courts-martial and taking over weather satellites for military use.

• Suspend environmental laws, including a law forbidding the dumping of toxic and infectious medical waste at sea.

• Bypass federal contracting laws, allowing the government to buy and sell property without competitive bidding.

• Allow unlimited secret patents for Army, Navy and Air Force scientists.

All these provisions come from laws passed by Congress, giving the president the power to invoke them with the stroke of a pen. “A lot of laws are passed like that. So if a president is hunting around for additional authority, declaring an emergency is pretty easy,” Scheppele said.

 

 After President Richard Nixon declared two states of emergency in 17 months, Congress became alarmed by four simultaneous states of emergency.

It passed the National Emergencies Act by an overwhelming majority, requiring the president to cite a legal basis for the emergency and say which emergency powers he would exercise. All emergencies would expire after one year if not renewed by the president.

Bush’s Proclamation 7463 provides much of the legal underpinning for the war on terror. Bush cited that state of emergency, for example, in his military order allowing the detention of al-Qaeda combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and their trial by military commission.

The post-9/11 emergency declaration is in its 13th year. Eleven emergencies are even older.

The National Emergencies Act allows Congress to overturn an emergency by a resolution passed by both houses — which could then be vetoed by the president. In 38 years, only one resolution has ever been introduced to cancel an emergency.

Congress, useless as usual. Unless of course a corporate giveaway is crafted by lobbyists, in which case it flies through both chambers and becomes law instantaneously.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, President Bush declared a state of emergency allowing him to waive federal wage laws. Contractors rebuilding after the hurricane would not have to abide by the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires workers to be paid the local prevailing wage.

“The history here is so clear. The Congress hasn’t done much of anything,” said Harold Relyea, who studied national emergencies during a 37-year career at the Congressional Research Service. “Congress has not been the watchdog. It’s very toothless, and the partisanship hasn’t particularly helped.”

If anything, Congress may be inclined to give the president additional emergency powers. Legislation pending in Congress would allow the president to invoke an emergency to waive liability for health care providers and to sanction banks that do business with Hezbollah.

Scheppele, the Princeton professor, said emergencies have become so routine that they are “declared and undeclared often without a single headline.”

Bernanke may be a kleptocratic oligarch criminal, but stupid he is not. He knows exactly what kind of power an “economic emergency” would grant to the executive, which is exactly why he wants it to happen.

A Republic or Democracy this is not.  

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