SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) --
“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
(Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
Before Neera Tanden can become Director of the Office of Management
and Budget, Senators must approve. And before that, they must ask
questions. Here are some suggestions for what they should ask.
1. You supported
an attack on Libya that proved fraudulently marketed, illegal, and
catastrophic in results, after which you argued in an email to your
colleagues for trying to force Libya to pay via oil profits for the
privilege of having been bombed. You wrote that this would be a good
solution to a U.S. budget deficit. One of your colleagues replied that
such a policy might create a financial incentive for attacking more
countries. What countries, if any, would you most favor attacking and
then billing for the service?
2. Reclaiming, thank you, reclaiming my time, what
criteria do you think one should use if one were to select the countries
most appropriate to attack and then bill for it?
3. You suggested in your email that the U.S. public
would better support future wars if the wars’ victims paid for them. You
hope to oversee a budget that is tipped more heavily toward militarism
than most, and possibly any, other national government on earth. A
majority of U.S. discretionary spending goes into militarism. You come
to the job from a think tank funded, in part, by weapons companies and
foreign dictatorships that do business with those weapons companies — a
think tank that has taken very weapons-friendly positions, even refusing
to oppose the war on Yemen. How does that qualify you to oversee the
sort of conversion to peaceful practices that will be required for
survival and prosperity?
4. You suggested in that same email that the
alternatives to making countries pay for being bombed would be to cut
Headstart or the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women,
Infants, and Children, or Medicaid. How do those alternatives make it
onto the list of possibilities, while reducing military spending does
not, reducing police and prison and border patrol and ICE and CIA and
NSA spending does not, taxing corporations does not, taxing billionaires
does not, taxing financial transactions does not, taxing carbon does
not?
5. You spent much of your nine years running a think
tank courting major corporate donors, and producing corporate-friendly
policies. You instructed your staff to check whether content might
offend big donors prior to publishing. You even censored major work
products to appease big donors, such as deleting a report chapter on New
York police abuse of Muslims after Michael Bloomberg chipped in over $1
million. You also censored criticism of the government of Israel and
gave a platform in Washington to its leader. You kept much of your think
tank’s funding secret, and the reasons why were pretty clear from what
became public. How does this qualify you to serve the public in an open
and transparent and representative government?
6. You’ve long advocated cutting Social Security,
one of the most successful and popular U.S. government programs ever. Is
that still your position, and why or why not?
7. You claim that you pushed, while observers say
you punched, a reporter for asking Hillary Clinton about her support for
the war on Iraq. Can you provide the Senate with guidelines for the
sort of questions to which the proper response is physical assault? Does
this question qualify? Do you, honestly, right now, want to punch me?
8. You have outraged numerous political opponents,
including members of both major political parties in this Senate. Much
of what you’ve already been asked about, we only know about because you
outraged your own employees. You once outed an anonymous victim of
sexual harassment, which shocked and outraged those involved. What
qualifies you as the best person to work harmoniously with every agency
in the U.S. government?
9. You sought to delegitimize the 2016 U.S.
presidential election, not with serious documented complaints, but with
baseless claims that the Russian government infiltrated and manipulated
the vote counting. Did you believe those claims? Do you believe them
now? Do you take any responsibility for the large numbers of other
people who believe them now?
10. What would be one example of a situation in which you would choose to become a whistleblower?
Twas the night before Christmas, And all through the States, Children were starving; no food on their plates. Facing eviction, families in despair, Waiting on Congress, who just didn't care. Leadership nestled snug in their beds, Only worried about pork for lobbyist friends.
from @PopularResistance description of the podcast linked above.
Miko Peled is an author, writer, speaker, and
human rights activist living in the United States. He is considered by
many to be one of the clearest voices calling for justice in Palestine,
support of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
(BDS) and the creation of a single democracy with equal rights in all of
historic Palestine. Educated in Jerusalem, Japan and the United States,
Peled is also an accomplished professional martial artist. For 23
years, Peled ran a martial arts school that was dedicated to teaching
leadership skills and non-violent conflict resolution through martial
arts.
Miko is also a contributor to several online publications (Mint Press, The Electronic Intifada, Democracy Now, Mondoweiss), authors this blog (mikopeled.com), and produces The Miko Peled Podcast,
all of which he dedicated to advocating for the creation of one
democratic state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians. He
travels regularly to Palestine where he speaks and works with the
popular resistance, the BDS movement, and other justice groups. As a
result, he has been arrested several times by the Israeli authorities
for his activism.
The Justice Department is setting a dangerous precedent that threatens reporters — and the truth.
By Laura Poitras
Ms.
Poitras is a filmmaker and journalist who has reported extensively on
national security issues. She shared a Pulitzer Prize for public service
with The Guardian and The Washington Post for her reporting on the
N.S.A.’s mass surveillance program and is a founding board member of the
Freedom of the Press Foundation.
I
am guilty of violating the Espionage Act, Title 18, U.S. Code Sections
793 and 798. If charged and convicted, I could spend the rest of my life
in prison.
This is not a
hypothetical. Right now, the United States government is prosecuting a
publisher under the Espionage Act. The case could set a precedent that
would put me and countless other journalists in danger.
I
confess that I — alongside journalists at The Guardian, The Washington
Post and other news organizations — reported on and published highly
classified documents from the National Security Agency provided by the
whistle-blower Edward Snowden, revealing the government’s global mass surveillance programs. This reporting was widely recognized as a public service.
The Espionage Act
defines the unauthorized possession or publication of “national
defense” or classified information as a felony. The law was originally
enacted during World War I to prosecute “spies and saboteurs.” It does
not allow for a public interest defense, which means a jury is barred
from taking into account the difference between a whistle-blower
exposing government crimes to the press, and a spy selling state secrets
to a foreign government.
Before
Sept. 11, 2001, the Espionage Act was rarely used in the context of
journalism. The most notable exception is the case of Daniel Ellsberg,
who in 1971 was charged with violating the Espionage Act for providing
news organizations, including The Times,
with the Pentagon Papers. The charges against Mr. Ellsberg were dropped
when the illegal methods of the government’s evidence gathering —
breaking into his psychiatrist’s office and warrantless wiretapping —
were exposed.
All
this changed after Sept. 11, when the Espionage Act became a tool of
the government to selectively prosecute sources and whistle-blowers, and
to intimidate journalists and news organizations seeking to publish
reports that the government wanted to suppress.
During Barack Obama’s presidency alone, the Justice Department
prosecuted eight journalism-related Espionage Act cases against sources,
more leak prosecutions than all previous administrations combined.
Nicholas Kristof: A behind-the-scenes look at Nicholas Kristof’s gritty journalism, as he travels around the world.
One of the most alarming
abuses of the Espionage Act under President Obama was the case of
Stephen Kim, a State Department analyst who in 2010 was indicted under
the law for disclosing classified information to the Fox News journalist
James Rosen. In the Justice Department’s search warrant, Mr. Rosen is
described as a possible “co-conspirator.”
Mr. Rosen was ultimately not charged, but tragically Mr. Kim pleaded
guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act and served 10 months
in prison. (I co-produced a film about the case.)
Despite
this escalation of prosecuting whistle-blowers and sources, the
government had never crossed the line to charging journalists or
publishers for receiving or releasing classified information — until
last year.
That was when the Justice
Department indicted Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of
WikiLeaks, with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act, on top of one
earlier count of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The
charges against Mr. Assange date back a decade, to when WikiLeaks, in
collaboration with The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel and
others, published the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, and subsequently partnered with The Guardian to publish State Department cables.
The indictment describes many activities conducted by news
organizations every day, including obtaining and publishing true
information of public interest, communication between a publisher and a
source, and using encryption tools.
I made a film about Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks called “Risk.” I filmed Mr. Assange for many years, and as the film shows, we had seriousdisagreements.
There are many reasons to be critical of Mr. Assange, and I have not
shied away from them. But we should be clear about what he is being
prosecuted for and the stakes for press freedom.
WikiLeaks’ publications exposed war crimes, revealed previously undisclosed civilian deaths in American-occupied Iraq, detailed government corruption in Tunisia on the eve of the Arab Spring, and generated countlessotherreports that dominated the front pages of newspapers around the world throughout 2010 and 2011.
WikiLeaks
was responsible for the most unvarnished reporting on American
occupations and foreign policy since the start of the “war on terror,”
and helped to shift the public consciousness.
None
of the architects of the “war on terror,” including the C.I.A.’s
torture programs, have been brought to justice. In contrast, Mr. Assange
is facing a possible sentence of up to 175 years in prison.
He
is detained at Belmarsh, a high-security prison in London, recently
under lockdown because of a coronavirus outbreak, and fighting
extradition to the United States. A British judge is expected to rule on
his extradition on Jan. 4. On Wednesday, 15 members of Britain’s Parliament issued a letter
to the secretary of state requesting to meet with Mr. Assange ahead of
the extradition decision, citing concerns of press freedom.
I
have experienced the chilling effect of the Espionage Act. When I was
in contact with Mr. Snowden, then an anonymous whistle-blower, I spoke
to one of the best First Amendment lawyers in the country. His response
was unnerving. He read the Espionage Act out loud and said it had never
been used against a journalist, but there is always a first time. He
added that I would be a good candidate because I am a documentary
filmmaker without the backing of a news organization.
It
is impossible to overstate the dangerous precedent Mr. Assange’s
indictment under the Espionage Act and possible extradition sets: Every
national security journalist who reports on classified information now
faces possible Espionage Act charges. It paves the way for the United
States government to indict other international journalists and
publishers. And it normalizes other countries’ prosecution of
journalists from the United States as spies.
To
reverse this dangerous precedent, the Justice Department should
immediately drop these charges and the president should pardon Mr.
Assange.
Since Sept. 11, this country
has witnessed an escalating criminalization of whistle-blowing and
journalism. If Mr. Assange’s case is allowed to go forward, he will be
the first, but not the last. If President-elect Joe Biden wants to
restore the “soul of America,” he should begin with unequivocally
safeguarding press freedoms under the First Amendment, and push Congress
to overturn the Espionage Ac
We demand that progressives in Congress refuse to vote for Nancy Pelosi until she pledges to bring Medicare for all to the floor of the House. Force the vote!
Sign the petition to keep Human Rights Defender Issa Amro from going to military prison. Call on the UN and EU to tell Israel to drop the baseless, politically motivated charges. Stand With Issa
Yannick Giovanni Marshall is an academic and scholar of African Studies.
Former
President Barack Obama speaks at a rally as he campaigns for Democratic
presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden on Monday,
November 2, 2020, at Turner Field in Atlanta [File:P/Brynn Anderson]
“If
you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal
justice system so that it’s not biased and treats everybody fairly, I
guess you can use a snappy slogan, like ‘Defund the Police’, but, you
know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it.”
The quote above is taken from an interview the former United States
President Barack Obama gave to Snapchat show Good Luck America.
If there must be leaders – and leaders on fairness – they should not
be men who once presided over an imperialist state. There is no fairness
in drone strikes, deportations and detention, the attempted felling of
democratically-elected leaders or being the chief caretaker of colonial
land theft and the institutional violence that renders Indigenous and
Black populations at the greatest risk of succumbing to poverty and
police violence.
It is problematic for the former president to perform the role of
communication sage when his own sloganeering of “hope” and “change” did
not prove sufficient to meet the hopes for an end to torture and deaths
in custody. Or change in any satisfactory way discriminatory systems of
punishment and civil asset forfeiture. Or stymie the efforts of the
succeeding, less racial-equity-minded administration to resume a killing
spree on death row via the resumption of federal executions or the
deliberate mismanagement of a pandemic that disproportionately kills
non-white people.
Problematic, too, is associating activists’ articulation of a
programme to immediately divest from and incapacitate a classist and
historically anti-Black institution with a marketing strategy.
Far worse, however, is Obama’s work to reinforce the myth that
campaigns for Black survival must, first and foremost, work to present
themselves in the best light to invite wider society. Wider society is
the problem.
The
course of history is often changed by small groups of like-minded
people. The Combahee River Collective, the Black Panthers, MOVE, small
cells of enslaved people overthrowing the slave wagon en route to
transport them like cargo to a plantation. If these groups abandoned the
truth they felt in their bones, if they adjusted their message to
accommodate broader swaths of society they would not have been as
effective as they were.
The work of radical Black freedom is directed against dominant
society. What that society has been conditioned to find acceptable, what
it finds pleasing, what it finds warranted and the limits to what it
thinks is possible is our problem. We get to no satisfactory place by
conforming or drawing nearer to anti-Black society.
If all Black movements adjust their language as Obama suggests we
should, there would be no record of our truth, nor our fundamental and
passionate disagreement with the state of things. Unadulterated radical
Black imagining and voicings of a future free from anti-Blackness would
be erased from history. The only record we would have of our dissent is
sheepish pleadings to a racist society, sanded down to fit inoffensively
into fragile liberal ears.
There exists no audience that would be roused from the edges of their
seats by a clever, well-crafted motto. None who were not already
elbowing their way to the front lines of struggle as soon as they heard
about George Floyd, or Atatiana Jefferson or the Zong massacre. It is
not so much that our demands risk losing a big audience, as the big
audience window-shops our struggle. We have entirely too much faith in
the revolutionary will of those who respond to the ten-thousandth racist
murder with “it is so sad”.
Obama, himself, admitted that he was the kind of person who read
Frantz Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks not for what they meant to our lives
but to pick up women. In this, he models the fleeting, parasitical
interest in the intellectual labour of Black radical thinkers that is
not always convertible to useful activism.
One wonders if Toni Morrison might have wriggled out of their
photographed embrace if she knew Obama may have sprayed the CliffsNotes
of her novels on himself like cheap cologne.
The
great white whale of support for Black lives will always prove elusive.
Polls have shown that the increase in support for the uprising against
racist killing is a chimera, vanishing almost as soon as it becomes
measurable. Those genuinely affected by George Floyd’s death in a
life-changing way are now radical and will not be turned away by what
may feel to some as a too-angry chant or too impractical demand.
Those, on the other hand, who were pushed by the swell of a crowd
forced to sit and watch an eight minute and 46-second killing so nakedly
discriminatory it debilitated, for a moment, their go-to excuses of
“bad apples” and see-through calls for retraining, are now relievedly
ebbing away with that crowd back to their settled places of faith in
“America, the fundamentally good”. To devote one’s talents to the work
of getting them back is a fool’s errand.
Instead of appealing to the people who can always stomach a bit more
anti-Black state violence, it may be better to rally those who have had
enough. Those who are not moved due to the efficacy of slogans but by
their disgust with institutionalised and constantly legitimated white
supremacist violence.
Liberal support is not indispensable to the cause of Black freedom.
In fact, liberalism is one of the most effective tools in keeping Black
liberation at bay. It glorifies waiting peacefully for justice. Not even
dogs are asked to sit during their abuse.
And it is liberals Obama has in mind when he speaks about a potential
audience. As a man who has had his effigy lynched and is called an
American-hating terrorist more than any person alive, he knows better
than most that conservatives do not come around no matter how much
deference is shown, how many times magnanimity is performed, or how many
times a Black hand reaches across to “the other side”.
Maybe slogans designed to save our lives should not be designed,
primarily, for others. Maybe direct and forthright statements have
longer longevity, provide better comfort and inspiration to those they
are intended to serve than the ones watered down to please an audience
ambivalent on the question of justice.
The
black glove-fisted chants of “Black Power” may, in the end, prove to
have done more good for the cause of freedom than “keep hope alive”.
Maybe #landback addresses a specific injury, agitates for material
reparations, and is a necessary cutting through the colonising culture
that trained its young to sing “this land is your land, this land is my
land”.
The bugle has sounded but the liberal reinforcements are not coming.
Instead, they have pretty much carried on with their lives save the
occasional nod to the phrase “the country is going through a racial
reckoning”. A phrase that suggests the demand for “accountability” is
the equal and opposite reaction to a hemisphere’s half a millennium of
anti-Black asphyxiation.
It is not clear how we would arrive at a criminal justice system that
treats everybody fairly in a country where half of the electorate voted
for the re-election of a white supremacist administration. Some of
these 73 million are senators, wardens, police union presidents,
security guards, judges and correctional officers. It is no more likely
that they are interested in an equitable society than yesterday’s
segregationists and confederates whose monuments they fight to preserve.
Revolutionaries, when they are white, are held up as models by
politicians like Obama. Even when their “snappy slogans” are a good deal
more aggressive, polarising and threatening than “Defund the Police”.
Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!” was likely not
warmly received by British loyalists and yet he is praised.
Certainly, the Black people he enslaved and had whipped had just as
much right to be just as forceful. Certainly, the protest against the
“general warrant” that gave British colonial administrators the right to
rampage through settler homes can also be adopted by Black people
against the institution these settlers birthed. The one which broke down
Breonna Taylor’s door and shot. The one which gropes teenagers against
cars and stops and searches the vehicles of Black people who seem to be
addicted to having their tail lights out.
Obama’s implication that substantial change only comes about after a
door-knocking campaign and recruitment from those who have shown a
passing interest in Black survival is not supported by historical
evidence. It is a nationalist myth. One that shouts we are in this
together as one American people instead of bearing witness to society as
it is: a concatenation of local struggles, warring classes and
interests, historical patterns of discrimination, and an entrenched and
popular disinterest in justice for Black people.
The
liberals are not coming. Their war horses will never leave the stable
no matter how flowery the invitation. We would do well to stop listening
to Obama and get on with the business of uncompromising struggle for
freedom.
"Whoever speaks of “crisis” today risks being dismissed as a bloviator, given the term’s banalization through endless loose talk. But there is a precise sense in which we do face a crisis today. If we characterize it precisely and identify its distinctive dynamics, we can better determine what is needed to resolve it. On that basis, too, we might glimpse a path that leads beyond the current impasse—through political realignment to societal transformation.?
![Former President Barack Obama speaks at a rally as he campaigns for Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden on Monday, November 2, 2020, at Turner Field in Atlanta [File: AP/Brynn Anderson]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/AP_20307723037596.jpg?resize=770%2C513)
