What year is it again?

New York Times
March 31, 2010

Federal Judge Finds N.S.A. Wiretaps Were Illegal
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush.

In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been “subjected to unlawful surveillance,” the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages.

The ruling delivered a blow to the Bush administration’s claims that its surveillance program, which Mr. Bush secretly authorized shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was lawful. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitored Americans’ international e-mail messages and phone calls without court approval, even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, required warrants.

The Justice Department said it was reviewing the decision and had made no decision about whether to appeal.

The ruling by Judge Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, rejected the Justice Department’s claim — first asserted by the Bush administration and continued under President Obama — that the charity’s lawsuit should be dismissed without a ruling on the merits because allowing it to go forward could reveal state secrets.

The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state-secrets privilege as amounting to “unfettered executive-branch discretion” that had “obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.”

That position, he said, would enable government officials to flout the warrant law, even though Congress had enacted it “specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority.”

Because the government merely sought to block the suit under the state-secrets privilege, it never mounted a direct legal defense of the N.S.A. program in the Haramain case.

Judge Walker did not directly address the legal arguments made by the Bush administration in defense of the N.S.A. program after The New York Times disclosed its existence in December 2005: that the president’s wartime powers enabled him to override the FISA statute. But lawyers for Al Haramain were quick to argue that the ruling undermined the legal underpinnings of the war against terrorism.

and so on....

Scott Brown

Needing to vent a bit. When fascism comes to america, it will be driving a pick-up? The campaign focused on his "beat-up pick-up truck," which is a 2005 GMC--whoah, a car that is more than 3 years old? Surely such a thing has never been seen and certainly not being driven by a politician. Guess I should run for office driving around my '88 Corolla. Anyway, another rhetorical device in the campaign was referring to the seat vacated by Ted Kennedy as "the people's seat." The headline over at Fox News is "Boston Tea Party." The point is that this is a man of the people, fighting for the people. And what does that mean today? Apparently it means: 1. Support for waterboarding. 2. anti-immigrant sentiment 3. opposition to the health plan. And probably some rhetoric in there about fat-cat bankers and handouts. Also, Martha Coakley apparently doesn't know anything about baseball.

So, what do democrats do? Race to the middle. Instead of articulating populist sentiment in a more progressive way, they move to reject the health plan...For example, Jim Webb (D-Virginia), quoted in the Wall St. Journal is 'calling the race “a referendum not only on health care reform but also on the openness and integrity of our government process” Webb said Democrats need to hold off on further action until Brown is formally sworn in to the chamber.' And this is exactly what pisses people off about democrats. They have no principles. As soon as the political winds seem to be blowing in a different direction, they give up their ideas. But of course, they cannot be against the fat-cat bankers, except rhetorically. They're just the other wing of the corporate party. Goldman was Obama's biggest contributor. From Ostertag at the Huffington Post:

I noted that that, by the end of June, Wall Street had already given Obama $9.5 million, that four out of his top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants, with Goldman Sachs at the top of the list. Even conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks was appalled: "Over the past few years, people from Goldman Sachs have assumed control over large parts of the federal government. Over the next few they might just take over the whole darn thing."

But really, this sort of thing is just a populist, practically conspiracy theory, perhaps even a veiled anti-Semitism. So, Scott Brown may not quite be a fascist, and the democrats may not be much better. But in the tendency to blame "the speculators" about oil prices and the middle men about the economy lurks something both puzzling and ominous. Adorno and Horkheimer were on this back in the 40s: "Just because the psychology of the individual can construct itself and its content only from the synthetic schemata supplied by society, contemporary anti-Semitism takes on its empty but impenetrable character. The Jewish middleman fully becomes the image of the devil only when economically he has ceased to exist" (Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 171).
It is not the middleman that has ceased to exist, of course, but rather his/her having any real freedom in relation to the economy. But, this makes for an excellent scape-goat and then to link these folks to Obama and the democrats makes for excellent strategy. There is something pathological going on here.

Obama, Wire Tapping, State Secrets

If I remember correctly, we started this thing in part because of the original revelation of the secret wire-tapping by the Bush administration. The Obama administration, despite this claim, from his campaign website,

Secrecy Dominates Government Actions: The Bush administration has ignored public disclosure rules and has invoked a legal tool known as the "state secrets" privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court.

continues to assert the "state secrets" privilege in Jewel v. NSA. Here's a time-line.

Italian Post-Fascists merge with Berlusconi's party

From Reuters.

Reading Hegel

Reading Hegel: The Introductions
G.W.F. Hegel (Edited and introduced by Aakash Singh and Rimina Mohapatra)

Price: $35.00 AUD, $25.00 USD, £16.00 GBP
(check Book Depository and Amazon for good discounts of 20-40% off)

This book is available OA from re.press (www.re-press.org)

ISBN-13: 978-0-9805440-1-5 (paper)

Description
Bringing together for the first time all of G.W.F. Hegel¹s major
Introductions in one place, this book ambitiously attempts to present
readers with Hegel¹s systematic thought through his Introductions alone. The
Editors articulate to what extent, precisely, Hegel¹s Introductions truly
reflect his philosophic thought as a whole. Certainly each of Hegel¹s
Introductions can stand alone, capturing a facet of his overarching idea of
truth. But compiled all together, they serve to lay out the intricate
tapestry of Hegel¹s thought, woven with a dialectic that progresses from one
book to another, one philosophical moment to another.

Hegel¹s reflections on philosophy, religion, aesthetics, history, and
law‹all included here‹have profoundly influenced many subsequent thinkers,
from post-Hegelian idealists or materialists like Karl Marx, to the
existentialism of Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre; from the
phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl to Martin Heidegger, Jacques
Derrida and other post-moderns, to thinkers farther afield, like Japan¹s
famous Kyoto School or India¹s Aurobindo. This book provides the opportunity
to discern how the ideas of these later thinkers may have originally
germinated in Hegel¹s writings, as well as to penetrate Hegel¹s worldview in
his own words, his grand architecture of the journey of the Spirit.

Contents
Editors¹ Introduction: The Circle of Knowledge
Chapter 1: Phenomenology of Spirit
Chapter 2: Science of Logic
Chapter 3: Philosophy of Right
Chapter 4: Philosophy of History
Chapter 5: Philosophy of Fine Art
Chapter 6: Philosophy of Religion
Chapter 7: History of Philosophy
Editors¹ Epilogue: The End of Introductions
Further Readings
Index

Adorno's Gesammelte Schriften

Don't believe it, but some one has put it here.

Boumediene v. Bush

Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts - NYTimes.com

Didn't Hegel or Marx write somewhere that the law is shibboleth against which false friends of democracy prove themselves such? The formative principle of modern democratic history sustained by a one-vote majority...

For Postertity, Just in Case

I had been increasingly convinced that the regime in power would not attack Iran before it left the palace. But, alas, this report, seems to indicate the only stumbling block now is Robert Gates. There are no sources cited and so it might just be another attempt to rile up the right for an attack. But, we know what happens to stumbling blocks.

Here's the entire text, posted on May 9th by Philip Giraldi:

There is considerable speculation and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants. The camp that will be targeted is one of several located near Tehran. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was the only senior official urging delay in taking any offensive action. The decision to go ahead with plans to attack Iran is the direct result of concerns being expressed over the deteriorating situation in Lebanon, where Iranian ally Hezbollah appears to have gained the upper hand against government forces and might be able to dominate the fractious political situation. The White House contacted the Iranian government directly yesterday through a channel provided by the leadership of the Kurdish region in Iraq, which has traditionally had close ties to Tehran. The US demanded that Iran admit that it has been interfering in Iraq and also commit itself to taking steps to end the support of various militant groups. There was also a warning about interfering in Lebanon. The Iranian government reportedly responded quickly, restating its position that it would not discuss the matter until the US ceases its own meddling employing Iranian dissident groups. The perceived Iranian intransigence coupled with the Lebanese situation convinced the White House that some sort of unambiguous signal has to be sent to the Iranian leadership, presumably in the form of cruise missiles. It is to be presumed that the attack will be as “pinpoint” and limited as possible, intended to target only al-Qods and avoid civilian casualties. The decision to proceed with plans for an attack is not final. The President will still have to give the order to launch after all preparations are made.

Hopefully this is just some guy on the internet talking out of his ass. But just in case, here's another report that debunks the "Made in Iran" claims.

"US confession: Weapons were not made in Iran after all"

In a sharp reversal of its longstanding accusations against Iran arming militants in Iraq , the US military has made an unprecedented albeit quiet confession: the weapons they had recently found in Iraq were not made in Iran at all.

According to a report by the LA Times correspondent Tina Susman in Baghdad: “A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin. When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.”

The US , which until two weeks ago had never provided any proof for its allegations, finally handed over its “evidence” of the Iranian origin of these weapons to the Iraqi government. Last week, an Iraqi delegation to Iran presented the US “evidence” to Iranian officials. According to Al-Abadi, a parliament member from the ruling United Iraqi Alliance who was on the delegation, the Iranian officials totally refuted “training, financing and arming” militant groups in Iraq . Consequently the Iraqi government announced that there is no hard evidence against Iran.

In another extraordinary event this week, the US spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner, for the first time did not blame Iran for the violence in Iraq and in fact did not make any reference to Iran at all in his introductory remarks to the world media on Wednesday when he described the large arsenal of weapons found by Iraqi forces in Karbala.

In contrast, the Pentagon in August 2007 admitted that it had lost track of a third of the weapons distributed to the Iraqi security forces in 2004/2005. The 190,000 assault rifles and pistols roam free in Iraqi streets today.

In the past year, the US leaders have been relentless in propagating their charges of Iranian meddling and fomenting violence in Iraq and since the release of the key judgments of the US National Intelligence Estimate in December that Iran does not have a nuclear weaponisation programme, these accusations have sharply intensified.

The US charges of Iranian interference in Iraq too have now collapsed. Any threat of military strike against Iran is in violation of the UN charter and the IAEA's continued supervision on Iran's uranium enrichment facilities means there is no justification for sanctions.

CASMII calls on the US to change course and enter into comprehensive and unconditional negotiations with Iran.

Pentagon’s TV Analyst Propaganda Program - New York Times

Reposited for posterity's sake


Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand - New York Times

Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

Shit Hitting the Fan?

A nice and gloomy description of the last few months from Sharon Astyk's blog.

A couple of excerpts:

When climate change and peak oil thinkers run out of other things to worry about, there’s always the endless, inevitable debates about whether we are facing a “fast crash” or a “slow grind.” And I admit, I’m worried about my fellow environmentalists - because I think they are about to lose their favorite distraction. When no one was looking, we got an answer. Fast crash wins. And we’re in it now....
So here we are - the “We regret to inform you that what you have imagined to be “civilization” is now falling apart” post. See if it strikes you the way it struck me.

snip

In early 2008, the world’s food and energy train came off the rails. What was startling was that it didn’t happen either gradually or in a linear way - instead, things simply fell apart at an astounding rate, faster than anyone could have predicted without being accused of lunacy.

It started with biofuels and growing meat consumption rates. They drove the price of staple grains up at astounding rates. In 2007, overall inflation for food was at 18%, which created a new class of hungry, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. In 2008, the month to month inflation was higher than 2007’s annual inflation. At that rate, the price of food overall was set to double every other year. Rice, the staple of almost half the world’s population rose 147%, while wheat grew 25% in just one day. Price rises were inequitable (as was everything else) so while rice prices rose 30% in rich world nations like the US, Haitian rice prices rose 300%.

And she doesn't even mention the new stem rust variant, Ug99 that right now threatens 1/4 of the world's wheat crop.

Is Feith Thrasymachus or just a douche bag?

From Phillipe Sands new article at Vanity Fair on the development of US post-911 interrogation policy, Dougie Feith waxes nostaglic:

Feith’s argument prevailed. On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum that turned Guantánamo into a Geneva-free zone. As a matter of policy, the detainees would be handled humanely, but only to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity. “The president said ‘humane treatment,’ ” Feith told me, inflecting the term sourly, “and I thought that was O.K. Perfectly fine phrase that needs to be fleshed out, but it’s a fine phrase—‘humane treatment.’ ” The Common Article 3 restrictions on torture or “outrages upon personal dignity” were gone.

“This year I was really a player,” Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory. I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority. He was not. “The problem with moral authority,” he said, was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”

Time magazine finally catches on to the Scam that is Biofuels

Time March 27, 2008.

Must read article

Abu Ghraib

The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib.

by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris

I had almost forgotten this day...

4 charged in 1999 arson fire at Michigan State University:

"EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Federal authorities say four people have been charged in a 1999 arson fire at Michigan State University and were working on behalf of a radical environmental group.

The government said Tuesday that the four named were affiliated with the Earth Liberation Front, an underground organization that has been listed among the FBI's top domestic terrorism targets.

The Dec. 31, 1999, fire caused $1 million in damage and destroyed the fourth floor of the East Lansing university's historic Agriculture Hall.

The Earth Liberation Front claimed responsibility, saying Michigan State was targeted because of genetic engineering research related to crops."

Gitmo Chief Prosecutor and Defense Dept General Counsel Resign

In case you missed this -- Maj. Col. Davis resigned as chief prosecutor of the Gitmo tribunals. He recently had this to say to THE NATION about his Department of Defense General Counsel William Haynes.

Think Progress » Top Gitmo lawyer: ‘We can’t have acquittals.’:

DAVIS: "I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions."

Today, Haynes announced that he would be returning to the private sector.

GITMO lawyers on Zubaydah's Treatment and Mental State

Washington Post

Yet Zubaydah's mind may be beyond our reach. Regardless of whether he was "insane" to begin with, he has gone through quite an ordeal since his arrest in Pakistan in March 2002. Shuttled through CIA "black sites" around the world, he was subjected to a sustained course of interrogation designed to instill what a CIA training manual euphemistically calls "debility, dependence and dread." Zubaydah's world became freezing rooms alternating with sweltering cells. Screaming noise replaced by endless silence. Blinding light followed by dark, underground chambers. Hours confined in contorted positions. And, as we recently learned, Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding. We do not know what remains of his mind, and we will probably never know what he experienced.

Anti-war veterans' group: War crimes are 'encouraged'

The Raw Story | Anti-war veterans' group: War crimes are 'encouraged':

"The killing of innocent civilians is policy,' said veteran Mike Blake. 'It's unit policy and it's Army policy. It's not official policy, but it's what's happens on the ground everyday. It's what unit commanders individually encourage.'

Veteran Matt Howard concurred: 'These decisions are coming from the top down,' Howard said. 'The tactics that we use, the policies that the military engages, will create situations, create dynamics, create -- ultimately -- atrocity."

Banco del Sur vs IMF showdown sunday, sunday, sunday

* South American Countries Agree to Found Banco Del Sur
By Jeb Blount

Bloomberg - October 8, 2007

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aTCCDSFNqrzY

Seven South American countries agreed to establish
Banco del Sur, a regional development bank championed
by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in an effort to
expand regional trade and growth with their own
resources.

Chavez, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
and the presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador,
Paraguay and Uruguay will inaugurate the bank on Nov.
3, in Caracas according the "Declaration of Rio de
Janeiro" signed by finance ministry officials of the
seven countries today.

"Banco del Sur is the beginning of a new financial
architecture for the South," said Rodrigo Cabezas,
Venezuela's finance minister, in comments to reporters
in Rio de Janeiro. "Our development won't be put at
the service of other countries." Today's meeting
included officials from Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay,
Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

Torture and mass killings in Burma

Monk reveals how Burmese security forces tortured protesters

Matthew Weaver
Thursday October 11, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

New evidence emerged today of the torture of monks and other protesters in Burma, as the security forces arrested more prominent anti-government activists.

A recently released monk revealed today that he and hundreds of others were interrogated to provide the names of the ringleaders of the protests.

When they failed to answer they were kicked and beaten, he told Reuters news agency.

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, he said they were packed in so tightly at a makeshift prison at the Technical Institute campus in Rangoon that they could not lie down.

Radiohead Update email

THANK YOU FOR ORDERING IN RAINBOWS. THIS IS AN UPDATE.

YOUR UNIQUE ACTIVATION CODE(S) WILL BE SENT OUT TOMORROW MORNING (UK TIME). THIS WILL TAKE YOU STRAIGHT TO THE DOWNLOAD AREA.

HERE IS SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE DOWNLOAD:

THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.

MOST COMPUTERS NOW HAVE ZIP SOFTWARE AS PART OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM; IF YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT, YOU NEED TO GET WINZIP OR ZIPIT INSTALLED PRIOR.