AlterNet.org: Activism

80-Year-Old North Carolina Educator: Why I Am Going to Risk Arrest Today

Barbara Parramore, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:06:00 -0700

A lifelong educator joins the Moral Mondays protests in Raleigh, NC to fight GOP education agenda.

Today I am participating in a non-violent and peaceful protest called Moral Mondays. I join ministers, students, teachers, and other concerned citizens at the state capitol in Raleigh because I am deeply concerned about the legislation of this session of the North Carolina General Assembly. In my judgment, many laws and pending laws that will guide public policy and practice are not in the public interest, and, in many instances, will have a negative effect on the future of our state. Children and youth, who are our future, need schooling and health that fosters the best of citizenship as well as preparation for living and working in our society. I am most concerned about the bills affecting the public schools and opportunities of post-secondary education. Families and women’s health issues also relate to and affect educational opportunities.

I was born in 1932 and am a child of the Great Depression and World War II. My oldest brother went into the Army in January, 1942 and I knew many older brothers of my friends who did not survive. Part of my DNA is being concerned about family and neighbors and helping each other whenever we could. It was fathers and daughters who kept farms going; indeed, a neighborhood girl friend and her father were with my dad and me in a field working when someone came along to tell us that the war in the Pacific had ended. My brother was on the Pacific high seas that very day, and he got to come home safely, thank goodness.

Back then, neighbors and citizens knew how to care about each other, which brings me to my concern about what is happening right now to families and communities around the state. The list of bills proposed by one or both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly in spring of 2013 is long. Too many of these proposals appear to be poorly thought out. As a citizen who has not ever missed the opportunity to vote in local, state, and national elections, I now have the feeling that my voice is not being considered. Participating in a protest is my way of letting members of the General Assembly know that there are other voices that they need hear.

My career in public education began in the fall of 1954, following the Brown versus Board of Education decision, which made it unlawful to deny black children the same opportunities as white children in our public schools. For the next forty years I served as an elementary teacher, middle school mathematics and science teacher, school counselor, elementary school principal, and as a teacher of future teachers and administrators at North Carolina State University.

Six years as principal of Wiley Elementary School in Raleigh, North Carolina were a major influence in all that I have accomplished. Calvin H. Wiley, for whom the school was named, was the first state superintendent of schools. He convinced the governor not to divert school funds to the Civil War effort, among other important achievements. At Wiley School I learned first-hand how effective teachers are and the extent to which they go beyond their duties to not only teach but to establish a climate for learning that makes a difference in their students’ lives. Not only were the three R’s essential but also music and art. We considered our school as a “workshop for learning.”

Inequalities in education have always been in the forefront of my work. In the early years in public schools, there were two important changes underway: the desegregation of schools and the special education movement. Change comes slowly; for example, Wiley and another Raleigh school (Murphey) had the very first teachers in special education in the state. My teacher’s salary for that first year was provided by the Woman’s Club of Raleigh because there were no funds available. The next year, local school supplement funds were used to pay the teacher, and eventually the state began funding special education instructors. When I was principal, the teachers and I spent weeks prior to the first day of school working out transportation for students coming from all across the city. Fortunately, the rights of special needs students are very different today. Progress in education is occurring -- and I don’t want the legislature and the governor to slow it down, which various legislative proposals will surely do.

In the late 1960s, I was a statewide committee’s researcher for the legislation establishing kindergartens in North Carolina. Here, again, local funds were already supporting kindergarten classes as the state began to do so. More recently, preschool education has focused attention on preparing children for kindergarten. I salute the state's early childhood teachers whose work, I submit, is as important as the teachers of doctoral students at the university. Society loses when either level is neglected. All teachers warrant our respect and support. When conducting curriculum audits in school districts across the state during which I and members of my team visited all schools in a district, my respect increased. Teachers deserve praise, not threats.

It seems to me that the members of the General Assembly need to “make haste slowly” and not introduce and pass laws that appear to me too often to be an effort to cater to special interests rather than to foster education. Unintended consequences of such action may be more troublesome than the addressing the motivation for such laws. Here is a list specific bills that are pending and need to be defeated:

Senate Bill 337 creating an independent board to manage charter schools is a bad idea from all perspectives, especially in diluting the State’s responsibility to assure a quality education for all. One board for public elementary and secondary education is sufficient along with the elected school superintendent. Both reflect the people of the State in ways two separate boards cannot. Aldo, more information is needed before having the State pay for charter school teachers who do not have a teacher license; caution is required to safeguard students’ right to reliable and responsible instruction.
House Bill 969 has a good feature in having the state paying for students’ Advanced placement exam fees but linking teachers’ bonuses to students’ high scores is not. Too many variables make such a practice unfair to both students and teachers. An unintended consequence can be more selective students thereby fostering the higher scores whereas more students should be challenged to seek the AP status thereby benefiting from the challenge.
Senate Bill 189and House Bill 230 in expanding the definition of home schools, should it pass, will require more oversight in assuring students; rights to quality education. Transparency is essential; this may be where tiring students test scores to teacher effectiveness might be revealing.
Senate Bill 236 providing for county commissioners to take over school construction is another bad idea. School building plans need decision-making close to the users. Duplication of offices and staffs would occur as both school boards and boards of commissioners would need to collaborate. The justification for this law escapes me.

I could go on to deplore many proposed laws that tend to turn back the clock on gains made for greater equality and opportunity for citizens and their families. Employers, private and public, benefit from strong families and communities. I devoted my entire career to making sure that all of our children get the very best education possible, and I am willing to be arrested today to make my voice heard to the North Carolina General Assembly.

Barbara Parramore is Professor Emeritus at North Carolina State University.

Too Soon to Tell: The Case for Hope, Continued

Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch.com — Sun, 19 May 2013 13:01:00 -0700

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change -- not by magic, but by countless acts of courage, love, and commitment.

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Ten years ago, my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched far away and at home -- and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere, whether in a personal depression or a political tailspin, these activists believed the future would look more or less like the present. If there was nothing else they were confident about, at least they were confident about that. Ten years ago, as a contrarian and a person who prefers not to see others suffer, I tried to undermine despair with the case for hope.

A decade later, the present is still contaminated by the crimes of that era, but so much has changed. Not necessarily for the better -- a decade ago, most spoke of climate change as a distant problem, and then it caught up with us in 10,000 ways. But not entirely for the worse either -- the vigorous climate movement we needed arose in that decade and is growing now. If there is one thing we can draw from where we are now and where we were then, it’s that the unimaginable is ordinary, and the way forward is almost never a straight path you can glance down, but a labyrinth of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.

The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had not stopped the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space. They assumed -- like the neoconservatives themselves -- that those neocons would be atop the world for a long time to come. Instead, the neocon and neoliberal ideologies have been widely reviled and renounced around the world; the Republicans’ demographic hemorrhage has weakened them in this country; the failures of their wars are evident to everyone; and though they still grasp fearsome power, everything has indeed changed. Everything changes: there lies most of our hope and some of our fear.

I’ve seen extraordinary change in my lifetime, some of it in the last decade. I was born in a country that had been galvanized and unsettled by the civil rights movement, but still lacked a meaningful environmental movement, women’s movement, or queer rights movement (beyond a couple of small organizations founded in California in the 1950s). Half a century ago, to be gay or lesbian was to live in hiding or be treated as mentally ill or criminal. That 12 states and several countries would legalize same-sex marriage was beyond imaginable then. It wasn’t even on the table in 2003. San Francisco’s spring run of same-sex weddings in 2004 flung open the doors through which so many have passed since.

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we are ourselves that movement.

Unstoppabilities

Hope and history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present. Hopelessness often comes out of that amnesia, out of forgetting that everything is in motion, everything changes. We have a great deal of history of defeat, suffering, cruelty, and loss, and everyone should know it. But that’s not all we have.

There’s the people’s history, the counterhistory that you didn’t necessarily get in school and don’t usually get on the news: the history of the battles we’ve won, of the rights we’ve gained, of the differences between then and now that those who live in forgetfulness lack. This is often the history of how individuals came together to produce that behemoth civil society, which stands astride nations and topples regimes -- and mostly does it without weapons or armies. It’s a history that undermines most of what you’ve been told about authority and violence and your own powerlessness.

Civil society is our power, our joy, and our possibility, and it has written a lot of the history in the last few years, as well as the last half century. If you doubt our power, see how it terrifies those at the top, and remember that they fight it best by convincing us it doesn’t exist. It does exist, though, like lava beneath the earth, and when it erupts, the surface of the earth is remade.

Things change. And people sometimes have the power to make that happen, if and when they come together and act (and occasionally act alone, as did writers Rachel Carson and Harriet Beecher Stowe -- or Mohammed Bouazizi, the young man whose suicide triggered the Arab Spring).

If you fix your eye on where we started out, you’ll see that we’ve come a long way by those means. If you look forward, you’ll see that we have a long way to go -- and that sometimes we go backward when we forget that we fought for the eight-hour workday or workplace safety or women’s rights or voting rights or affordable education, forget that we won them, that they’re precious, and that we can lose them again. There’s much to be proud of, there’s much to mourn, there’s much yet to do, and the job of doing it is ours, a heavy gift to carry. And it’s made to be carried, by people who are unstoppable, who are movements, who are change itself.

Too Soon to Tell

Ten years ago I began writing about hope and speaking about it. My online essay “Acts of Hope,” posted on May 19, 2003, was my first encounter with Tomdispatch.com, which would change my work and my life. It gave me room for another kind of voice and another kind of writing. It showed me how the Internet could give wings to words. What I wrote then and subsequently for the site spread around the world in remarkable ways, putting me in touch with people and movements, and deeper into conversations about the possible and the impossible (and into a cherished friendship with the site’s founder and editor, Tom Engelhardt).

For a few years, I spoke about hope around this country and in Europe. I repeatedly ran into comfortably situated people who were hostile to the idea of hope: they thought that hope somehow betrayed the desperate and downtrodden, as if the desperate wanted the solidarity of misery from the privileged, rather than action. Hopelessness for people in extreme situations means resignation to one’s own deprivation or destruction. Hope can be a survival strategy. For comfortably situated people, hopelessness means cynicism and letting oneself off the hook. If everything is doomed, then nothing is required (and vice versa).

Despair is often premature: it’s a form of impatience as well as certainty. My favorite comment about political change comes from Zhou En-Lai, the premier of the People’s Republic of China under Chairman Mao. Asked in the early 1970s about his opinion of the French Revolution, he reportedly answered, “Too soon to tell.” Some say that he was talking about the revolutions of 1968, not 1789, but even then it provides a generous and expansive perspective. To hold onto uncertainty and possibility and a sense that even four years later, no less nearly two centuries after the fact, the verdict still isn’t in is more than most people I know are prepared to offer. A lot of them will hardly give an event a month to complete its effects, and many movements and endeavors are ruled failures well before they’re over.

Not long ago, I ran into a guy who’d been involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, that great upwelling in southern Manhattan in the fall of 2011 that catalyzed a global conversation and a series of actions and occupations nationwide and globally. He offered a tailspin of a description of how Occupy was over and had failed.

But I wonder: How could he possibly know? It really is too soon to tell. First of all, maybe the kid who will lead the movement that will save the world was catalyzed by what she lived through or stumbled upon in Occupy Fresno or Occupy Memphis, and we won’t reap what she sows until 2023 or 2043. Maybe the seeds of something more were sown, as they were in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 and Charter 77, for the great and unforeseen harvest that was the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the nonviolent overthrow of the Soviet totalitarian state in that country.

Second, Occupy began to say what needed to be said about greed and capitalism, exposing a brutality that had long been hushed up, revealing both the victims of debt and the rigged economy that created it. This country changed because those things were said out loud. I can’t say exactly how, but I know it mattered. So much that matters is immeasurable, unquantifiable, and beyond price. Laws around banking, foreclosure, and student loans are changing -- not enough, not everywhere, but some people will benefit, and they matter. Occupy didn’t cause those changes directly, but it did much to make the voice of the people audible and the sheer wrongness of our debt system visible -- and gave momentum to the ongoing endeavors to overturn Citizens United and abolish corporate personhood.

Third, I only know a little of what the thousands of local gatherings and networks we mean by “Occupy” are now doing, but I know that Occupy Sandy is still doing vital work in the destruction zone of that hurricane and was about the best grassroots disaster relief endeavor this nation has ever seen. I know that Strike Debt, a direct offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, has relieved millions of dollars in medical debt, not with the sense that we can fix all debt this way, but that we can demonstrate the malleability, the artifice, and the immorality of the student, medical, and housing debt that is destroying so many lives. I know that the Occupy Homes foreclosure defenders have been doing amazing things, often one home at a time, from Atlanta to Minneapolis. (Last Friday, Occupy Our Homes organized a “showdown at the Department of Justice” in Washington, D.C.; that Saturday, Strike Debt Bay Area held their second Debtors' Assembly: undead from coast to coast.)

Fourth, I know people personally whose lives were changed, and who are doing work they never imagined they would be involved in, and I’m friends with remarkable people who, but for Occupy, I would not know existed. People connected across class, racial, and cultural lines in the flowering of that movement. Like Freedom Summer, whose consequences were to be felt so far beyond Mississippi in 1964, this will have reach beyond the moment in which I write and you read.

Finally, there was great joy at the time, the joy of liberation and of solidarity, and joy is worth something in itself. In a sense, it’s worth everything, even if it’s always fleeting, though not always as scarce as we imagine.

Climates of Hope and Fear

I had lunch with Middle East and nonviolence scholar Stephen Zunes the other day and asked him what he would say about the Arab Spring now. He had, he told me, been in Egypt several months ago watching television with an activist. Formerly, the news was always about what the leaders did, decided, ordained, inflicted. But the news they were watching was surprisingly focused on civil society, on what ordinary people initiated or resisted, on how they responded, what they thought. He spoke of how so many in the Middle East had lost their fatalism and sense of powerlessness and awoken to their own collective power.

This civil society remains awake in Egypt and the other countries. What will it achieve? Maybe it’s too soon to tell. Syria is a turbulent version of hell now, but it could be leaving the dynasty of the Assads in the past; its future remains to be written. Perhaps its people will indeed write the next chapter in its story, and not only with explosives.

You can tell the arc of the past few years as, first, the Arab Spring, then extraordinary civil society actions in Chile, Quebec, Spain, and elsewhere, followed by Occupy. But don't stop there.

After Occupy came Idle No More, the Canada-based explosion of indigenous power and resistance (to a Canadian government that has gone over to the far right and to environmental destruction on a grand scale). It was founded by four women in November of 2012 and it’s spread across North America, sparking new environmental actions and new coalitions around environmental and climate issues, with flash-mob-style powwows in shopping malls and other places, with a thousand-mile walk (and snowshoe) by seven Cree youth this winter. (There were 400 people with them by the time they arrived at Canada’s Parliament in Ottawa.)

Idle No More activists have vowed to block the construction of any pipeline that tries to transport the particularly dirty crude oil from the Alberta tar sands, whether it heads north, east, or west from northern Alberta. Each of those directions takes it over native land. This is part of the reason why tar sands supporters are pushing so hard to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Thankfully, the push back is also strong. Our fate may depend on it. As climate scientist James Hansen wrote a year ago, “Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas, and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.”

The news just came in that we reached 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the highest level in more than five million years. This is terrible news on a scale that eclipses everything else, because it encompasses everything else. We are wrecking our world, for everyone for all time, or at least the next several thousand years. But “we” is a tricky word here. Some of the people I most love and admire are doing extraordinary things to save the world, for you, for us, for generations unborn, for species yet to be named, for the oceans and sub-Saharan Africans and Arctic dwellers and everyone in-between, for the whole unbearably beautiful symphony of life on Earth that is imperiled.

Part of what sustains me in the face of this potential cataclysm is remembering that, in 2003, there hardly was a climate movement. It was small, polite, mostly believed the troubles were decades away, and was populated with people who thought that lifestyle changes could save the planet -- rather than that you have to get out there and fight the power. And they were the good ones. Too many of us didn’t think about it at all.

Only a few years later, things have changed. There’s a vibrant climate movement in North America. If you haven’t quite taken that in, it might be because it’s working on so many disparate fronts that are often treated separately: mountaintop coal removal, coal-fired power plants (closing 145 existing ones to date and preventing more than 150 planned ones from opening), fracking, oil exploration in the Arctic, the Tar Sands pipeline, and 350.org’s juggernaut of a campus campaign to promote disinvestment from oil, gas, and coal companies. Only started in November 2012, there are already divestment movements underway on more than 380 college and university campuses, and now cities are getting on board. It has significant victories; it will have more.

Some countries -- notably Germany, with Denmark not far behind -- have done remarkable things when it comes to promoting non-fossil-fuel renewable energy. Copenhagen, for example, in the cold gray north, is on track to become a carbon-neutral city by 2025 (and in the meantime reduced its carbon emissions 25% between 2005 and 2011). The United States has a host of promising smaller projects. To offer just two examples, Los Angeles has committed to being coal-free by 2025, while San Francisco will offer its citizens electricity from 100% renewable and carbon-neutral sources and its supervisors just voted to divest the city’s fossil-fuel stocks.

There are so many pieces of the potential solution to this puzzle, and some of them are for you to put together. Whether they will multiply or ever add up to enough we don’t yet know. We need more: more people, more transformations, more ways to conquer and dismantle the oil companies, more of a vision of what is at stake, more of the great force that is civil society. Will we get it? I don’t know. Neither do you. Anything could happen.

But here’s what I’m saying: you should wake up amazed every day of your life, because if I had told you in 1988 that, within three years, the Soviet satellite states would liberate themselves nonviolently and the Soviet Union would cease to exist, you would have thought I was crazy. If I had told you in 1990 that South America was on its wayto liberating itself and becoming a continent of progressive and democratic experiments, you would have considered me delusional. If, in November 2010, I had told you that, within months, the autocrat Hosni Mubarak, who had dominated Egypt since 1981, would be overthrown by 18 days of popular uprisings, or that the dictators of Tunisia and Libya would be ousted, all in the same year, you would have institutionalized me. If I told you on September 16, 2011, that a bunch of kids sitting in a park in lower Manhattan would rock the country, you’d say I was beyond delusional. You would have, if you believed as the despairing do, that the future is invariably going to look like the present, only more so. It won’t.

I still value hope, but I see it as only part of what’s required, a starting point. Think of it as the match but not the tinder or the blaze. To matter, to change the world, you also need devotion and will and you need to act. Hope is only where it begins, though I’ve also seen people toil on without regard to hope, to what they believe is possible. They live on principle and they gamble, and sometimes they even win, or sometimes the goal they were aiming for is reached long after their deaths. Still, it’s action that gets you there. When what was once hoped for is realized, it falls into the background, becomes the new normal; and we hope for or carp about something else.

The future is bigger than our imaginations. It’s unimaginable, and then it comes anyway. To meet it we need to keep going, to walk past what we can imagine. We need to be unstoppable. And here’s what it takes: you don’t stop walking to congratulate yourself; you don’t stop walking to wallow in despair; you don’t stop because your own life got too comfortable or too rough; you don’t stop because you won; you don’t stop because you lost. There’s more to win, more to lose, others who need you.

You don’t stop walking because there is no way forward. Of course there is no way. You walk the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow the route. You look backward to grasp the long history you’re moving forward from, the paths others have made, the road you came in on. You look forward to possibility. That’s what we mean by hope, and you look past it into the impossible and that doesn’t stop you either. But mostly you just walk, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That’s what makes you unstoppable.

Rebecca Solnit’s first essay for Tomdispatch.com turned into the bookHope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, since translated into eight languages. Portions of this essay began life as the keynote speech at the National Lawyers' Guild gala in honor of attorney and human rights activist Walter Riley, whose own life is a beautiful example of unstoppability. Solnit’s latest book,The Faraway Nearby, will be published in June.

Keep the Arctic Cold: Why the Rush to Drill Alaska Must Be Stopped

Subhankar Banerjee, Seven Stories Press — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:23:00 -0700

A leading international voice on arctic conservation addresses President Obama’s strategy for tapping America’s northern frontier.

I wrote a letter to the editor as a follow up to the generous review “In the Beautiful,Threatened North” by Ian Frazier in The New York Review of Books of the anthology, Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point that I edited. My letter, “Can Shell Be Stopped?” has just been published in the New York Review.

After the June 6 issue (with my letter) went to the printer a few significant things happened that relate to the letter that I’ll mention here briefly. On May 10, the White House published a 13-page document, “National Strategy for the Arctic Region.” It opens with a one-page introduction by President Obama. He begins with these words: “We in the lower forty-eight and Hawaii join Alaska’s residents in recognizing one simple truth that the Arctic is an amazing place.” All fifty-five contributors in Arctic Voices, I’m sure, will be very pleased with these words from the President. But before the tears of joy could flow down my cheeks, the droplets dried up as I began to read the second paragraph: “Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region, for the economic opportunities it presents…” President Obama hides his excitement for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean by carefully choosing the euphemism—“economic opportunities.” In page 7 the true intent of the report is finally revealed: “The region holds sizable proved and potential oil and natural gas resources that will likely continue to provide valuable supplies to meet U.S. energy needs.” Of course the report mentions protecting the environment but gives no specific details. This major report from the White House was released after we came to know that on midnight on May 7, the average global CO2 concentration had reached 400 parts per million (ppm). The pre-industrial average was 280 ppm. The Scientific American reported, “[T]he last time CO2 levels are thought to have been this high was more than 2.5 million years ago, an era known as the Pliocene.” This is so significant that Scientific American now plans to publish in the coming year a “400 ppm” series of articles, “to examine what this invisible line in the sky means for the global climate, the planet and all the living things on it, including human civilization.” And George Monbiot correctly pointed out in The Guardian, “The only way forward now is back: to retrace our steps and seek to return atmospheric concentrations to around 350 ppm, as the 350.org campaign demands.” We may have forgotten, or didn’t pay attention, that the Arctic had reached 400 ppm almost exactly a year ago. A May 31, 2012 press release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stated, “The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Barrow, Alaska, reached 400 parts per million (ppm) this spring, according to NOAA measurements, the first time a monthly average measurement for the greenhouse gas attained the 400 ppm mark in a remote location. … Carbon dioxide at six other remote northern sites in NOAA’s international cooperative air sampling network also reached 400 ppm at least once this spring: at a second site in Alaska and others in Canada, Iceland, Finland, Norway, and an island in the North Pacific.” Arctic is the barometer of our planet. When it comes to climate change, if you want to know what will happen tomorrow, do not hire an astrologer, instead simply pay attention to what’s happening in the Arctic today. Dr. James Hansen and I are currently engaged in a conversation that will be published in the paperback edition of Arctic Voices in August. As Jim told me, “We must keep the Arctic cold, for us to have a stable planet.” Drilling in the Arctic Ocean is a wrong path for the planet. By asking “Can Shell Be Stopped?” in the NYR, I wasn’t interested in philosophical contemplation but rather to figure out a practical path that might stop oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean–a small but significant step toward helping to “keep the Arctic cold.”

Popular Resistance Is Percolating Across the Country -- Inspiring Activism That the Corporate Media Always Ignores

Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers, AlterNet — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:44:00 -0700

The fight against plutocracy, concentrated wealth and corporatism is decentralized, creative and growing.

Every week we are inspired by the many people throughout the country who are doing excellent work to challenge the power structure and put forward a new path for the country. The popular resistance to plutocracy, concentrated wealth and corporatism is decentralized, creative and growing.

One growing series of protests has been the “Moral Monday” demonstrations in North Carolina. They do not have ‘one demand’ but rather are challenging the systemic corruption, undermining of democracy and misdirection of a state government that puts human needs second to corporate profits – which they have dubbed ‘Robin Hood in Reverse.’ This week 49 of 200 protesters inside the capitol were arrested singing, chanting and echoing many of the same concerns that demonstrators have for the past three Mondays. Last week there were 30 arrests, the week before 17. Among those arrested was an 83 year old retired minister, Vernon Tyson, who was merely a spectator, but he gave a great interview cheering on the protests after his release. And, a group of historians were among those arrested who put these protests in the context of US history.

Another courageous protest involved seven undocumented immigrants who blocked the Broadview Detention Center where immigrants are being incarcerated. They blocked the doors to the detention facility, linking arms together using pipes, chains, and locks. They were protesting the record-high deportations under President Obama, and the lack of leadership from Illinois representatives to call for a suspension of deportations. On the West coast, the always creative Backbone Campaign supported allied faith communities with a giant banner lift over the private for-profit immigration detention center asking “Who Would Jesus Deport?” and an inflatable lady liberty exposing the unjust policies that break up families.

There was a recent victory for Seattle teachers and students that resulted from their citywide protests against standardized testing. The school district announced that testing in the high schools would not occur next year. The teachers said they will keep protesting until the tests are banned from lower grades as well.

We hope the Chicago teachers, who won a major battle with Mayor Rahm Emanuel earlier this year when they went out on strike, have great success this weekend when three days of marches are held against the mass school closings in Chicago. The teachers union has developed a great organizing strategy that unites teachers with students, parents and communities. This battle is one of many across the country to stop the thinly veiled corporatization of education.

In another education protest, the students @FreeCooperUnion continue to occupy the office of the president after one week. They are painting the walls black until he agrees to step down, and are highlighting his $750,000 annual salary. They are protesting a plan to begin to charge tuition at the university; this plan will not affect these students, but future students who attend Cooper Union.

The heart of the conflict faced in the United States is the inequity of an unfair economy supported by a corrupt two party system. This week there was a very creative protest in New York City against the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim of Mexico. He’s made his billions with the help of government allowing a monopoly on phone service resulting in Slim gouging the public. Now he gives a small percentage of that wealth back in philanthropy and people applaud him. But, the protesters were very effective, laughing out loud whenever he spoke. They responded when someone asked “Why is everyone laughing?” with “Because Slim’s philanthropy is a joke!” and followed with mocking kazoos.

In contrast to the world’s wealthiest was the Poor People’s Campaign which marched from Baltimore to Washington, DC ending at Freedom Plaza. The march occurred on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s campaign and raised issues of poverty, police violence, unfair economy and non-responsive government. Another march was announced in Pennsylvania from Philadelphia to Harrisburg from May 25 to June 3 to stop spending on prison construction and instead invest in building communities. Also, from Philadelphia the ‘Operation Green Jobs’ March from Philadelphia to Washington, DC will begin on May 18 and is organized by the Poor People’s Economic and Human Rights Campaign.

A campaign that is growing every week is the fast food worker strikes. The largest fast food walk out was held in Detroit last week, even the scabs walked out, and this week the strikes spread to their fifth city, Milwaukee, WI. It is great to see these workers, who no doubt saw themselves as powerless, standing up and demanding fairness. If you eat at fast food restaurants, this would be a good time to stop, and let them know why – you support the workers who are demanding a living wage.

US Empire and imperialism continue to cause protest. Obama’s Asia Pivot, moving 60% of the US Navy to the Asian Pacific is causing a lot of distress. On Jeju Island people are fighting for their survival against a massive Navy base. Jeju is the “Peace Island” that was harshly abused during the US occupation of South Korea after World War II before the Korean War. And, South Koreans, who regularly protest against the US military, are protesting the US war games that are practicing dropping nuclear bombs on North Korea and invading it.

Protests are mounting in the United States against the abusive Guantanamo Bay prison where more than 100 of the 166 prisoners at Guantanamo are participating in a hunger strike and two-dozen are being brutally force fed. These prisoners have been held without trial for over 10 years, and even though 88 have been approved to leave, they remain. The Green Shadow Cabinet came out with a statement describing how Obama could close the prison (and why Congress is not an excuse) and what you can do on the 100th day of the hunger strike this Friday. Show solidarity with these prisoners who are being abused by the US government.

Diane Wilson, a shrimper from the Gulf Coast who works with CODE PINK and Veterans for Peace, is on her 15th day of an open-ended solidarity hunger strike in Washington, DC. She explains why she is taking the extreme step of a hunger strike to support the Guantanamo prisoners. And S. Brian Willson is joining Diane in hunger strike.

Another protest related to US Empire occurred in Oak Ridge, TN where Transform Now Plowshares activists protested nuclear weapons by cutting through four chain-link fences and spray-painting biblical messages of nonviolence on a building that warehouses an estimated 400 tons of highly enriched uranium, the radioactive material used to fuel nuclear weaponry. This week an 83 year old nun, Sister Megan Rice, and two other activists were found guilty of damaging government property. As the jury left the courtroom the people in the courtroom sang to them “Love, love, love, love. People, we are made for love.” Sentencing is several months away and they face a potential 30 years in prison.

Environmental protests are boiling up throughout the United States. When President Obama came to New York for a fundraiser (where he raised $3 million), protesters greeted him with signs calling for him to “End the War on Mother Earth” and opposing the KXL pipeline.

Protesters from the Appalachian Mountains came to the EPA in Washington DC to protest polluted water caused by Mountaintop removal for coal. The protesters displayed the dirty, opaque water in jars in front of the EPA. And Climate Justice activists from CoalIsStupid.org blocked a freighter delivering coal in Boston with two men on a lobster boat on May 15th.

But more and more Americans are realizing that while we protest the extraction of oil, gas, uranium and coal, the reality is that the root of the problem is in the American Way of Life (AWOL). One activist from Portland made the point that the Tar Sands starts in our driveways and we need to change the AWOL in order to truly combat it. We agree that our strategy has two prongs: protest and build i.e. Stop the Machine and Create a New World.

In addition to how much energy we each use, we need to look at where our food comes from. An Occupy group in Berkeley, Occupy the Farm, made that point this week when they took over University of California land to grow farm for the community locally.

Another area where we are seeing continued growth in the movement is in thinking through how we do our work and in developing strategy to achieve our goals. We published a live streamer “Code of Ethics” developed by people who work in the citizen’s media. Note the high ethics and cooperative approach they take to getting the media out.

Many are thinking about strategy to make the movement more effective. Gar Alperovitz, a political economist who has been writing about alternatives to big finance capitalism in the United States has a new book out focused on strategy, “What then Must We Do,” and we published a review of the book by Sam Pizzigati of Inequality.org entitled: A Promising Path for Pummeling Plutocracy.

Upcoming actions:

May 17th, Support the Guantanamo hunger strikers on the 100th Day of their hunger strike with phone calls and tweets to the White House and protests in DC, NY, Chicago and other cities.

May 18th, ‘Operation Green Jobs’ March from Philadelphia to Washington, DC organized by the Poor People’s Economic and Human Rights Campaign.

May 18th to 23rd the Home Defenders League Week of Action against the banks and foreclosures in Washington, DC.

May 18th to 20th there is a weekend of protests against the closure of schools in Chicago.

May 22nd Stop the Frack Attack People’s Forum in Washington, DC.

May 25th Protests against Monsanto everywhere

May 25th to June 3rd March from Philadelphia to Harrisburg against prison spending.

June 1st, Get on the Bus For Bradley Court Martial Trial with buses leaving from Baltimore, MD, Washington DC, New York City and Willimantic, CT.

June 14th to 16th Trade Justice Action Camp in Bellingham, WA by the Backbone Campaign

June 24th to 29th is the beginning of “Fearless Summer” that starts “an epic summer of actions.”

You can order or print OccuCards to bring with you to these actions. There are cards for all of the issues being protested above and new cards are being created.

And watch for the transformation of October2011/Occupy Washington DC into Popular Resistance, daily news and resources for effective activism, coming in June. Sign up here if you want to be notified of the launch.

How Video Footage of the 'Most Powerful Antiwar Act' in U.S. History Was Rescued From Obscurity

Jake Olzen, Waging Nonviolence — Fri, 17 May 2013 10:58:00 -0700

The actions of 9 protesters who destroyed Vietnam War draft files were filmed on tape and then held by the U.S. Attorney's office.

“It is arguably the single most powerful antiwar act in American history,” Martin Sheen once recounted about the May 17, 1968 burning of draft files in Catonsville, Md., by nine unusual suspects to protest the Vietnam War. The Catonsville Nine, as they came to be called, marked the beginning of dramatic new forms of antiwar resistance. When seven men and two women — all Catholic, including two priests, Dan and Phil Berrigan — broke into a draft office, stole files and publicly destroyed them as an act of nonviolent resistance against war and imperialism, the face of protest changed. But the iconic images and audio from that historic event were almost lost in the annals of history.

Pat McGrath, a reporter with Baltimore’s WBAL-TV – an NBC affiliate – had been covering the antiwar movement for some time. Prior to the draft board raid, peace movement organizers reached out to him and gave him a heads up about the protest. In his new book, The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era, Shawn Francis Peters traces the carefully planned details that the activists and their supporters had arranged so that the press arrived just as the draft files were about to be burned.

McGrath, who can be seen in the footage holding the boom-mic, was the only television reporter alerted about the protest and arrived with his contact, local peace activist Greenville Whitman, just after the files had been doused with homemade napalm. Then John Hogan struck a match and the rest — the Berrigans, Marjorie and Tom Melville, Brother David Darst, Mary Moylan, George Mische and Tom Lewis — quickly followed suit, sealing their fate. Meanwhile, McGrath and his crew — soundman Ed Smith and cameraman Bob Boyer —captured almost all of it. Although in all of the excitement, Smith was a little slow to get the audio rolling.

In less than 24 hours, the film reel was subpoenaed by the federal government to make its case against the nine and it would be years before the public would see, first-hand, what happened that day. WBAL turned over the film and it was used as key evidence in the trial. Later, McGrath would be subpoenaed to testify as a witness to certify the film’s authenticity.

There had been a brief window of opportunity for the film footage to be broadcast, but WBAL general manger Brent Gunts unilaterally decided that the film footage would not be aired. The indirect explanation McGrath received from his boss was that there were concerns that the station might lose its FCC broadcasting license.

If it looked like WBAL had aided the protest in Catonsville, it might jeopardize its license — an argument with some merit, according to McGrath. In 1967, the Chicago CBS-affiliate WBBM had done a documentary on a “pot party” and was accused of having staged it. Some suggested that the station had aided and abetted criminal activity as co-conspirators and should therefore lose its broadcast license.

Still, Gunts never cared to inquire into the circumstances of how McGrath had been there and decided that only film shot after the police had arrived would be aired. NBC’s popular, nationally-televised evening news program “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” had dispatched a producer to WBAL to get the footage but left empty-handed.

“I was very resentful that [Gunts] would make that decision [to not air the footage] without talking to me to find out how I happened to be at Catonsville,” McGrath toldWaging Nonviolence. “That was a historic piece of film that could have been — and should have been — seen not only in Baltimore, but all over the nation.”

When the charges were originally brought against the Catonsville Nine, one of the charges was conspiracy and the U.S. Attorney’s Office wanted to know who tipped off the press. In a meeting between McGrath, WBAL’s lawyers and a U.S. assistant attorney, the station asserted its right to keep sources confidential. But shortly after that meeting, during the summer’s pre-trial hearings, McGrath began organizing WBAL workers for a union representation election.

Gunts called McGrath into the office and said he had a change of heart — McGrath would be aiding and abetting criminal activity and would have to reveal his source or be dismissed. McGrath asked for 24 hours to think it over; Gunts agreed and the first thing McGrath did was call the local union. In short order, the national executive secretary of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists phoned U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark to tell him that McGrath was involved in union activity and was about to lose his job over the conspiracy charge.

Clark called U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Stephen Sachs — who was prosecuting the case — and had the conspiracy charges dropped. In an email toWaging Nonviolence, Sachs wrote that there was “some interest on the part of the FBI in pursuing, at least by grand jury subpoena, the press’ prior knowledge of the actions at Catonsville,” but added, “I remember being unsympathetic to pursuing an investigation of any press involvement.”

Sachs, who didn’t want to see someone like McGrath lose his job over something not critical to the case, withdrew the source request and Gunts had to back off.

“I’ve always thought that Gunts used this as an excuse to try and fire me because of my union activity,” said McGrath. Station workers did end up going on a one-month strike for their union contract, which happened to be during the trial of the Catonsville Nine in the autumn of 1968.

The theatrical trial consumed Baltimore. In his book on the Catonsville Nine, Peters observed that during the week-long trial before Federal Judge Roszel C. Thomsen, thousands of supporters came to the city for solidarity protests, educational events and other festivities. Viva House, a Catholic Worker community started by Willa Beckham and Brendan Walsh, were making 2,500 dinners a night. Throughout the week, over 40 young men were said to have burned their draft cards.

Within the next three years, many of those who were in Baltimore for the trial of the Catonsville Nine would participate in other draft raid-like actions such as the Milwaukee 14, the Camden 28 and the D.C. Nine. In 1969, McGrath actually filmed the D.C. Nine protest, where nine men and women — including priests and nuns — broke the office windows of Dow Chemical Company and tossed files out into the streets of Washington, D.C.

Having learned his lesson from Catonsville, McGrath and his crew immediately sent the footage out to NBC where some of it ran on “The Frank McGee Report.”Unfortunately, that archival footage seems to have disappeared and McGrath’s efforts to find it in D.C. courthouse records were unsuccessful.

After the Catonsville Nine were convicted and sentenced to prison, McGrath retrieved his film footage from the United States Attorney’s office. But rather than returning it to WBAL’s archives, which he described as “derelict” in its archival upkeep, McGrath turned the film over to people in the movement so that it would be preserved and get some exposure.

From then after, the footage has taken on a life of its own. When Dan Berrigan’s play “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine” was performed off-Broadway in New York City, the black and white footage was projected for the audience at the end of the show. Eventually the reel made its way back to McGrath.

At some point Tom Lewis — one of the Catonsville Nine, who died in 2008 — got his hands on the footage from McGrath and put together a version for Dan Berrigan’s 75th birthday in 1995. The VHS copy of the edited footage that Waging Nonviolencehas obtained and digitized (which can be viewed above) came from that event.

Similarly, documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs (no relation to Stephen Sachs) also received some footage from Lewis which inspired her to go looking for McGrath. In 1999, Sachs met with McGrath in his home. After talking with her for some time, he asked, “Are you wondering where that film footage is?” “Yes, I am,” Sachs responded. McGrath then went down to his basement and came back with the 16mm original reel, which Sachs then borrowed and copied.

The first time that much of the footage was made publicly available was in her 2001 documentary Investigation of a Flame. Recently, Baltimore filmmakers Joe Tropea and Skizz Cyzyk utilized the 16mm footage for their new film Hit and Stay to explore the significance of Catonsville and the subsequent spin-off protests it inspired.

After 45 years and many different hands, McGrath still houses the original film reel that he rescued from obscurity. In the future, he hopes to place the historical artifact in the hands of university archives, but is not sure where yet. What can be said, though, with certainty, is that the Catonsville Nine inspired a generation. Recall the testimony of Dan Berrigan, who while on trial in Baltimore, noted that “from the beginning of our republic good men [and women] had said no and acted outside the law when the conditions so demanded.” In doing so, the Catonsville Nine set into motion a movement that, no doubt, hastened the end of the Vietnam War.

Jeremy Scahill and Noam Chomsky: The Truth About America's Secret, Dirty Wars

Jeremy Scahill, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:10:00 -0700

Scahill’s work has sparked several congressional investigations and won some of journalism’s highest honors.

The following is taken from a transcript of a special event featuring Jeremy Scahill and Noam Chomsky with Amy Goodman hosted by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, the ACLU of Massachusetts, the American Friends Service Committee of Massachusetts, the Cambridge Peace Commission and the Community Church of Boston that was broadcast by Democracy Now!.The event covered the subjects explored in Scahill's new book, Dirty Wars. The transcript starts with a speech by Scahill, who is later joined in a discussion with Goodman and Chomsky.

Jeremy Scahill: I’m really honored to be here with both Amy Goodman and Noam Chomsky. On my own Facebook page, I list Democracy Now! as my university, because I learned journalism not from the classroom. I wouldn’t have been able to be—you know, I was saying to Professor Chomsky, when we were walking, I’ve never been on Harvard and didn’t actually spend much time in an actual classroom when I was technically enrolled in college anyway. So it’s a little bit odd to be here [at the Harvard Kennedy School]. But I bring that up because I think that journalism is a trade and should be accessible to people. And I learned journalism as an apprentice under the person that I think is a great journalist of our time, and that is Amy. And I had to stalk Amy before she would agree to let me come in and volunteer at Democracy Now! I think she had—I was calling her and writing her letters, and I was saying—this was in the mid-'90s—"If you have a cat, I'll feed your cat. I’ll wash your windows." And she had to decide whether, I think, to get a restraining order against me or to let me come in and volunteer for her. And, you know, she has just been such a dear friend and teacher for so long.

And I like to think of the footnotes in my book as a tribute to Professor Chomsky, because one of the first things I do when I look at a book is to check out the notes in the index to see how serious the book is, how serious the author was about citing every fact that he states in the book. And it was something that I very much learned reading Professor Chomsky’s books. And it’s a real honor to be here with you, Noam.

We’re here at a time when a popular Democratic president, who is a constitutional lawyer by trade, has expanded, intensified, continued and, most importantly, legitimized, in the eyes of many liberals, some of the most egregious aspects of what the Bush administration called its counterterrorism policy and the Obama administration continues to call its counterterrorism and national security policy. And despite the fact that this very popular Democratic president campaigned on a pledge to radically change the way that the U.S. conducted its business around the world and, upon taking power, issued a number of executive orders that were purportedly aimed at shutting down secret prisons, ending torture and closing Guantánamo, what has actually happened is that the Obama administration has made cosmetic changes, tweaked the language, made a few adjustments to the detention program, to the—what’s called the targeted killing program, but it’s anything but targeted, as we’ve seen so often—it’s an assassination program. And this administration has sold the idea to many liberals in this country that this is a clean war, that it’s a smarter war than the ones that were being waged by his predecessor.

If you look at the administration’s claims of bringing the Iraq War to an end, you have to examine what was on President Bush’s desk the day he left office. It was the very plan that President Obama implemented. It was already in motion. So this administration did not bring an end to the Iraq War; the Bush administration’s plan was implemented. But also we’ve seen an expansion of CIA paramilitary activity in Iraq over the past several months. The largest embassy in the world is the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and strike teams continue to operate out of it alongside thousands of mercenary forces.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration is waging two wars: the conventional war that you see through embedded journalism, and then the covert war that we seldom see, which consists of special operations night raids, drone strikes and snatch operations. In Afghanistan itself, the U.S. military and the CIA continue to run detention facilities that are categorized as filtration sites, so that people can be held incommunicado because they’re not categorized as prisoners. They’re categorized as potential intelligence assets that can be used in interrogation to produce the next night raid or the next drone strike.

Under this administration, U.S. intelligence agents utilize a secret prison that is buried in the basement of Somalia’s U.S.-funded National Security Service. When Richard Rowley, the director of our film, and I flew into Mogadishu, Somalia, in the summer of 2011, and we landed in the airport—at the airport, at Aden Adde Airport, as the plane taxied and made its way to the gate we noticed what to us looked like a forward operating base that we had seen in Afghanistan. It was a large walled compound with small hangars inside of it, and then a small cluster of buildings that resembled a small village. And it looked just like other forward operating bases, except that it had a pink hue. It was sort of the—the walls had been pinkwashed on this building. And the Somalis called it the "Pink House." And when we landed and we started asking our Somali contacts, "What’s that building?" they said, "Oh, that’s Guantánamo." That was the nickname that they had given for it. But what it was shorthand for saying: "That’s where the Americans are based."

And what it turns out it was, and I found this out from interviewing Somalis who were liaisons with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. military intelligence, is that the Obama administration had initiated a targeted killing and snatch operation based out of that airport, where they were building an indigenous capability of Somalis that could hunt down individuals that were suspected to be members of or members of Al Shabab, the Somali militant group that pledged its allegiance to al-Qaeda. And these agents, I was told by the Somalis that were helping the CIA to run this program, are lined up monthly and paid $200 in cash for being part of this targeted kill-capture operation.

In the case of captured prisoners, they take the ones that they determine to have intelligence value, and they hold them in the basement of this National Security Services building, which is a bedbug-infested gulag. Prisoners are not given access to the outside world. They are not given access to lawyers. The Red Cross—when I was on Democracy Now! talking about this when I came back from Somalia, the Red Cross said it was—had never heard of the facility. And then I gave them the address on the air and told them where they could go and find it. And, to my knowledge, they haven’t followed up on it.

But I discovered—I discovered that prison because I met a colleague in Somalia, who works for an international news organization, who’s Somali, who had been put in that prison in retaliation for filming an operation that the U.S.-backed Somali forces didn’t want him taking pictures of. And he was put into that prison as a warning. And he said, when he was there, he saw American and French agents interrogating prisoners.

So I started to investigate the story, and I found out that there was a prisoner named Abdullahi Hassan, who was a Kenyan of Somali descent, who was in that prison. And he had been snatched from his home in Eastleigh, the Somali neighborhood in Nairobi, and shackled, hooded and driven to Wilson Airport in Nairobi and then shipped to Somalia, where he was put in this basement prison. And we were able to get testimony smuggled out of that prison of him describing the story and describing how he was interrogated by American agents around the clock and how he hadn’t seen a lawyer, can’t communicate with his family and has no access to the outside world. When I called the CIA for comment on the condition of this prisoner, they confirmed that he had been snatched on orders from the United States government and that he was being held in that prison, and they said he was dangerous and it’s good that he’s taken off the streets. They said that he was one of the advisers to the then-head of al-Qaeda in East Africa, Saleh Ali Nabhan.

And so, this man was snatched on orders from the U.S. government while President Obama is in office, sent to a secret prison in the basement of a U.S.-funded agency, and then interrogated, at times by U.S. intelligence and military intelligence personnel. And the CIA did not dispute any of those facts that I reported. They simply said, "Well, it’s more that we sit in on debriefings with Somalis when they’re interrogating them." So, that is the reality of one aspect of the rendition program, the secret prison program.

And I think it also speaks to torture and definitions of torture. So, President Obama and CIA Director Panetta said in early 2009 that we’re out of the secret prison business, that we brought an end to torture. But what we know and what we can prove is taking place is a sort of back-door continuation of the policy by tweaking it. In fact, it’s very similar to the rendition program under President Clinton in the 1990s.

People try to heap everything and say that the beginning of all the problems happened when Bush and Cheney were in power. Bush and Cheney continued many of the Clinton-era doctrines on these core issues. President Clinton tried to assassinate Saddam Hussein. President Clinton authorized cruise missile strikes that blew up a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan and bombed Afghanistan, as well. Clinton sustained the longest—initiated the longest-sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam under the guise of the so-called no-fly zones in the north and south of Iraq. And he also initiated the rendition program. And so, President Obama spoke of bringing an end to all of these things but then found a way to continue them.

And as the surge happened in Afghanistan and the drawdown happened in Iraq, we saw the Obama administration unveil what would become one of the lynchpins of its counterterrorism policy, and that is the intensification of U.S. drone wars. So, in Pakistan, the number of drone strikes increased exponentially under President Obama. He also began issuing a series of secret orders, at times through General David Petraeus, who was theCENTCOM commander responsible for all military operations in the Middle East. And they started to issue what are called execute orders for joint special operations forces commandos, elite SEALs, Delta Force, Army Rangers and others, to begin penetrating countries that were outside of the stated battlefields, like Yemen and Mali and Somalia and elsewhere in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and began constructing drone bases in Saudi Arabia, in Djibouti, where the U.S. has its major hub of operations in East Africa. Camp Lemonnier was a French military base that was taken over by the U.S. And so you had the expansion of these wars where you didn’t have embedded journalists, you didn’t have congressional hearings, and the administration tried to portray its drone wars as a smarter, cleaner war. But there is no such thing as a clean war.

And what we see happening right now is that the signature strikes ... has become the tip of the spear of U.S. policy in both Yemen and Pakistan, where you have what is almost—it’s a grotesque form of pre-crime, where people, because of the region that they live, the fact that they are, quote-unquote, "military-aged" males, and they may or may not have had association with certain people, makes them worthy of preemptive designation as terrorists. And so, when they are killed, and then we hear a report about 11 militants being killed or suspected militants being killed, oftentimes those are people that have been determined through the pre-crime process—and that’s even not the right term, because who knows if they were even going to commit a crime? When you’re killing people whose identities you don’t know, who you have no intelligence to speak of that they’re actually involved with criminal activity or plotting terrorist acts, and you bomb them, what you’ve done in doing that is to create new enemies that have an actual legitimate grievance against the United States. Our actions in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia are going to come back to blow against us. It will be blowback. We will pay a price for our actions around the world. There is no clean war in Yemen. There is no clean war in Pakistan.

When President Obama was asked about his resolve during the political campaign, he said, "Ask the 22 or 30"—I forget which number—"leaders of al-Qaeda who have been killed under my administration about my sense of resolve." And it’s true. They’ve killed a number of leaders. The number three man in al-Qaeda has been killed 20-something times. There’s Said al-Shihri. Said al-Shihri, who’s one of the heads of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, by my count has died eight times this year—and just released a new audiotape last week. But there have been individuals that we’re told are these notorious leaders of al-Qaeda that have been taken out, and some of them very clearly have been involved with horrid activities. But for the most part, the end result of the drone policy has been to inflame hatred, to inspire new enemies.

And a story that has affected me very deeply, that I think should be of great concern to everyone in this country, is the story of what happened in September and October of 2011, when President Obama authorized operations in Yemen that resulted in the deaths of three U.S. citizens.

Now, I want to preface what I’m about to say with this: I don’t believe that we should ever view the lives of American citizens as worth more than any other people in the world. On a moral level, there should be no difference in how we view the killing of someone in a village in Pakistan to how we view the killing of a kid born in Denver, Colorado. But it is a relevant story to us here in the United States because it cuts to the heart of how far off the cliff we’ve fallen, particularly since 9/11, and under Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

We now have a process in the chambers of power in Washington where a small group of men and women meet on Tuesdays—and they call it Terror Tuesdays—to decide who’s going to live and die around the world, to go over lists of people that are on the target list, off the target list. What’s our intelligence on this person? What patterns of life has this person engaged in? Can they be made a legitimate target? And these meetings then result in briefings to the president of people that the CIA or the Joint Special Operations Command want taken out. There are at least three separate kill lists that are being run in the U.S. government. The CIA has a kill list. JSOChas a kill list. And then the National Security Council has a working group that also keeps its own list of high-value targets. For all I know, there could be more, but those are the three that we know exist. And they’ve also developed something called the "disposition matrix," which is an attempt to create a sort of algorithm for determining if someone could be captured or we need to kill them, if someone can be taken by cooperation with a local government or we need to send in a team of SEALs, if someone should be taken out by a drone strike or if we should try to seek to capture them through other means.

This administration is normalizing the process of assassination as a central component of U.S. policy for many generations to come. And I don’t believe for a moment that if John McCain had won the election or Mitt Romney had won the election, that you would see polls indicating that 70 percent of self-identified liberals support drone strikes and that the support for it would drop only negligibly in the case of a U.S. citizen. I think that this has been a political campaign to sell this idea and this program to liberals, and the results are going to be far-reaching for generations to come.

So, on this particular operation I started to tell you about, on September 30th, 2011, President Obama was presented with a choice by Admiral William McRaven, who was the head of the U.S. special operations forces, and by the CIA. And it was a decision about whether or not he should kill an American citizen with a drone strike that had not—and this citizen had not been charged with a crime and had not been indicted and had not had evidence publicly presented against him to back up the leaks that were being used to litigate the case against a man named Anwar al-Awlaki. There was no indictment. There was no charge. There was no evidence publicly presented against him. And on this day, September 30th, 2011, President Obama served as the prosecutor, the judge, the jury, and ultimately the executioner of a U.S. citizen who had not been charged with a crime, and authorized a drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki and another U.S. citizen named Samir Khan, who was a Pakistani American from North Carolina.

Samir Khan was widely believed to have been the editor-in-chief of Inspiremagazine, the publication of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But I know the Khan family, and I spoke to his mother, Sarah Khan, and she described to me the repeated visits of the FBI to their house before Samir’s death. And the FBI said, "There’s no indictment against Samir. He’s not charged with a crime. We want to encourage you to get him to come home, but he hasn’t done anything that we feel—that we believe is unlawful. But we’re concerned about who he might be with." And so you have this American citizen killed in this operation who, the FBI was telling the family, hadn’t been charged with a crime.

After those two were killed, one Republican congressman said that, "Well, if Samir Khan wasn’t on the kill list, it’s still a bonus. It was a 'twofer,'" he called it. So these two individuals were killed in this drone strike, and the response in Washington fell into two basic camps: silence or enthusiastic support. Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, John McCain all rushed to celebrate the assassination of two U.S. citizens. The only people on Capitol Hill that made a peep after those killings were Dennis Kucinich, the former congressman from Ohio, and Ron Paul from Texas, who at the time was running an insurgent campaign for the Republican nomination for president.

Congressman Kucinich is an interesting character in this story, because he—when we first found out that they had Americans on the kill list, which it happened because The Washington Post had published a story in January 2010, Dennis Kucinich put forward a bill that said that the United States government does have the right to extrajudicially execute its citizens without due process. And only six members of Congress signed onto that legislation, not a single senator. You know, it’s ironic to watch the filibuster with Rand Paul that day and some of—and the tea party cavalcade or cavalry coming through there. Where were all of these people before the killings started in this way, when Dennis Kucinich was trying to actually get people to pay attention to it? Even after this killing, it wasn’t an issue at all in most political circles, and certainly not in the political elite circles in Washington.

But then, two weeks later, another drone strike occurred in Yemen. And this time, among the victims was a 16-year-old boy, whose only crime in life appears to have been that his last name was Awlaki and that his father was Anwar Awlaki. This was a kid who was born in Denver, Colorado, in August of 1995. He spent the first seven years of his life in the United States. And when he moved back to Yemen with his father and mother and his siblings, they were living in the family’s home in Sana’a.

And Nasser Aulaqi, his grandfather, Anwar’s father, is an upstanding citizen. He is a man who came to the United States as a Fulbright scholar in 1966 and adored and still adores the United States. He is a man who wanted his children to have a college education from the U.S. When he had come here to get his education, he wanted to stay, but he decided to devote his life to dealing with Yemen’s water crisis, which is severe. And he built the Department of Agricultural Engineering with money from the U.S. Agency for International Development in Sana’a and was trying to raise his children to be academics or to be scientists or to be engineers. And when Anwar took a different path and became an imam—and that’s a whole story that I tell in the book of his, how he became who he was. That didn’t happen in a vacuum. It had a lot to do with what the U.S. did after 9/11 that pushed him to become what he eventually was.

But this boy, this teenage boy, Abdulrahman Awlaki, hadn’t seen his father since May of 2009, because when his dad went underground, Anwar left his children with his father to raise. And this kid—I looked through all of his Facebook posts, their family videos, talked to his friends—was into hip-hop music. He had this huge unruly afro that his grandfather and his mother were constantly picking on him to cut. They wanted him to cut his hair. There’s photos of him posing with his friends like rappers. We have one video where he’s sort of in the streets reenacting a video game scene with his friends. And the videos that we’ve seen from their family show a gentle older brother to his younger siblings, and everyone we’ve talked to said that he was a quiet, gentle, smart boy. And this kid is living with his grandparents while his father has become public enemy number one, and the Americans are hunting him with the CIA and JSOC. And his grandfather is raising him with dreams of sending him to the U.S. to go to university.

And a few days before his father was killed, this kid runs away from home, from his grandparents’ house. He stole the equivalent of $40 from his mother’s purse. He packed a small bag. He hopped out the kitchen window. He boarded a bus in Babel Yemen, in the old city in Sana’a. And he took the bus to where he thought his father was, which was Shabwa province, the scene of repeated drone strikes by the U.S. trying to kill Anwar al-Awlaki. His grandmother told me that she was afraid when he left that it would be bait for the CIA, that they were maybe going to track his telephone calls, if he managed to get in touch with his father, or read his text messages. They also wonder if maybe the CIA was following him the whole time. When Rick—when Rick and I, the director of our film, when we went into the Awlaki home in Sana’a the first time, all of the—we couldn’t find an open frequency to record the audio of the interview, because there were so many waves going through the house. They were being monitored from every angle. We couldn’t find an open channel. So that family, we know, was being followed. But this—and I tell the story about how Anwar al-Awlaki’s youngest brother, Ammar, who works for an oil company, they approached him in Vienna, Austria, the CIA, and tried to pay him $5 million to give up the location of his brother. The CIA also found a bride for Anwar al-Awlaki, using a Danish spy named Morton Storm. They arranged a marriage for Anwar al-Awlaki, and so they supported his wife underground.

But this kid, Abdulrahman, he’s there. He’s looking for his father. He’s waiting in Shabwa province. And he is there when his father is killed in a drone strike—not in Shabwa but in the north of Yemen. And his grandmother called him and said, "Abdulrahman, it’s finished. You have to come home. Your father is dead." And he said, "Yeah, I’m going to come home, but the roads are blocked," because the Arab Spring was happening, and there was a revolt against Ali Abdullah Saleh, the U.S.-backed dictator in Yemen. So he couldn’t make it back to Sana’a, so he had to wait in his family’s tribal province. And he went into a depression. And his relatives were saying, "Abdulrahman, you need to get out and do something. Go out with your cousins. Go out with the other kids from the neighborhood." And one night they were all out, gathered in an outdoor restaurant at about 9:00, and a drone appeared above them and launched a missile and blew up 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, his 17-year-old cousin Ahmed and all of the other kids that were with them.

And when the reports came that this kid had been killed and was among the dead, a military—U.S. military official leaked a story that he was 21 years old. And then the Awlakis had to produce the birth certificate showing that he was born in August of 1995 in Denver, Colorado. And then they said that he was a suspected militant himself and that he was at an al-Qaeda meeting. And then they said he was actually collateral damage; he was killed because he was meeting with an Egyptian member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula named Ibrahim al-Banna. And then AQAP releases a statement saying, "That’s a lie. Ibrahim al-Banna wasn’t there, and he’s still alive." And AQAP actually has a much better track record than the U.S. government at deciding when the number two guy in al-Qaeda gets killed. I mean, they’re generally reliable when they say someone is alive or dead. And Ibrahim al-Banna, as far as we know, is still very much alive.

And so, then the question became: How was it that this kid was killed, this 16-year-old U.S. citizen, who was not his father, who played video games, hung out in the Change Square with the nonviolent revolutionaries, had an afro, listened to hip-hop, and spent most of his time being an older brother and a goof-off? How is it that he was killed two weeks after his father? The coincidence just seemed impossible to take. And I’ve spent the past almost two years trying to get an answer to this question, "Why was Abdulrahman Awlaki killed?" because, for me, the answer to that question says a lot about what kind of nation we are and what kind of nation we want to be.

And yet, there are no answers. The Obama administration has never been asked about it. President Obama has never been asked about it at all of those press conferences. He has never had to face the direct question, even though he’s in charge of the program. When Robert Gibbs was asked by an enthusiastic young reporter named Sierra Adamson about why Abdulrahman was killed, Robert Gibbs’ answer was: "He should have had a more responsible father." There is no—I can think of almost nothing more shameful than blaming the killing of a child on who their parents are or were. The paying for the sins of your parent, it is a reprehensible, criminal idea, that you would blame the killing of a child on something that their parents had done when that kid wasn’t even with his father.

Then they tried to say, "Well, he was sitting next to him." When Harry Reid, the leader of the Senate, the Senate majority leader, was asked on CNN by Candy Crowley about the killing of Anwar Awlaki, Samir Khan and Abdulrahman Awlaki, his answer was that if there were any three Americans that deserved to die, those three did. And I went after Harry Reid and tried to get him to answer, "When you said those three did, you realize that one of them was a 16-year-old boy who had never been charged with a crime and wasn’t with the other two at the time?" And his office would never provide a response as to why he said that. And as the majority leader of the Senate, he has access to the intelligence on these strikes and refused to talk about it.

Then I recently met a former senior official who was working on the kill program for the first—the entire duration of the first term of Obama and was part of the process targeting Anwar Awlaki and at the highest level of the U.S. government. And when I asked him what happened there, he said that the CIA and JSOC had told the president that Ibrahim al-Banna was alone. And he claimed we didn’t know—he said, "We didn’t know that the kid was there." And I continued to press him on that, and he said that John Brennan, who at the time was the senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, believed that either JSOC or the CIA had intentionally targeted Abdulrahman Awlaki and that Brennan ordered a review of that strike to determine how it was that he was killed. No review certainly has been published, if it ever will be. And the official said he wasn’t sure what ever happened with the review. But then he assured me, "It all was, I’m sure, a big misunderstanding, an outrageous mistake." And I said, "Well, if it was simply a mistake and he was collateral damage, why didn’t you own it? Why don’t you say it publicly?" And he said to me, "Look, we had just killed three American citizens in a two-week period, two of whom weren’t even targets—Samir Khan and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. That doesn’t look good. It was embarrassing." "It was embarrassing" is the most current answer we have as to why this administration has not answered how it was that a 16-year-old U.S. citizen was killed in this drone strike.

I’m looking forward to talking with Amy and Noam, and I want to wrap up by just saying something that brings things back locally here. You know, we all watched, of course, with horror what happened in your city, in Boston. And I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that the media coverage has unfolded, the leaks, the presumptions about motivation for these attacks. And we live in this society now where this other young man here who was—his image was put around, and it’s this student who was missing, and they said that he’s a suspect, and now he’s been found dead. And that family was dragged through the mud and tarred for something that their son had nothing to do with. And you saw the racism and the bigotry that grips people when these events happen. I was asked on this—about this when I was onMSNBC the other day by Martin Bashir. He asked me to comment on this. And I said, "Well, at the risk of seeming out of place on cable news, I’m not going to speculate until we see actual evidence or information that indicates what’s happened."

And then, a few days after this Tsarnaev kid was taken into custody, something extraordinary happened. And that was a young man named Farea al-Muslimi from Yemen testified in front of the U.S. Senate. And I know Farea. I met him in—I met him in Yemen. And he’s an extraordinary young man, incredibly articulate, sharp, manages to say scathing things about al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and in the same breath turn it to the U.S.-backed dictatorship. He’s consistent in his morals. And he’s such a young man, but he has a moral clarity that I wish so many of us had. And when he was asked about Boston, he said something that I think is profound, to the reporter who has a kid, a young man, in front of him whose own village was drone-bombed in Yemen six days before he testified in front of the U.S. Senate. And he was live-tweeting the bombing of his village from text messages he was getting from his relatives who were near the scene. And then he ends up in front of this powerful body in the United States, and reporters are asking him, "What do you think of Boston?" And he said, "The difference between you and me is that I condemn both of them. I condemn both of them." And it’s profound, if you think of it.

The media coverage of the victims of that bombing has been outstanding, of the bombing in Boston. We know the names, the stories of heroes who responded. We know the future taken away from children and grad students, because the media—the journalists are doing their job. They’re informing the public. They’re humanizing the people who were victimized and targeted in that bombing, because only if we have empathy for others and we realize the humanity of others can we actually muster up the strength to stand and do the right thing or to call for justice.

If we had that kind of coverage of the victims in the drone bombing of Farea Muslimi’s village, or we saw the humanity of Abdulrahman Awlaki and his teenage cousins who were bombed in an operation authorized by a popular, Democratic, constitutional law professor president, if we saw the humanity in the real widows of Baghdad instead of being obsessed with the real housewives of Los Angeles or Beverly Hills or whatever, if we actually see them as human beings, then the game changes, the equation changes, because you don’t view it through a nationalist lens, you don’t view it through the lens of American exceptionalism. You view it as all of our responsibility as human beings to stand up, even when someone is in power, especially when someone is in power, who you may have voted for, or who you like, or who you think is the lesser of two evils. That’s when your principles are tested. You know, a society’s values are not defined—our values are not defined by how we treat the rich and the powerful and the popular. It’s defined by how we treat the least of our people, how we treat the poorest.

And it’s also how we treat the most reprehensible. And so, I could talk for an hour about all the things that I think Anwar Awlaki did that were reprehensible. And I could talk about orders to target specific cartoonists. And we can talk about the smoke around his interactions with various people that the U.S. has determined to be terrorists. All—everything they’ve leaked in the media, maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not. But if we are not going to give that man due process, then we should change our Constitution. We live in a different society then. We shouldn’t project this idea that we have anything resembling the rule of law, unless it can apply in the most inconvenient of cases. That’s the standard that we should be judged by. And that’s our challenge. And it’s the challenge of young people—and there’s a lot of young people in the room tonight—to keep the struggle going to build a world where justice prevails and where humanity is recognized, with no difference between nationality or citizenship. Thank you.

***

AMY GOODMAN: What an honor it is to be here with Jeremy Scahill and Noam Chomsky. And I wanted to start with Noam responding Jeremy’s investigations and the description, putting it in the context of the history of U.S. foreign policy.

NOAM CHOMSKY: ... Well, I happened to get an email this morning from a person whom many of you know, Fred Branfman. He’s a counterpart of Jeremy from back in the '60s. He's the person who worked for years, with enormous courage and effort, to try to expose what were called the "secret wars." The secret wars were perfectly public wars which the media were keeping secret, government. And Fred—this was in Laos—was—he finally did succeed in breaking through, and a tremendous exposure of huge wars that were going on—a war in northern Laos attacking a peasant society that was so remote from what was happening in the Indochina wars that many of them probably didn’t even know they were in Laos. Actually, with Fred, I met many of them in refugee camps after a CIA mercenary army drove them out from areas where they had been hiding in caves for two years under intense bombardment. He then proceeded to help expose the even worse wars in Cambodia and then the air wars, in general. Anyway, background.

One thing he pointed—what he pointed—he’s a great admirer of Jeremy’s, I should say, for very good reasons, which you’ve just heard and, I hope, will read and see. But Fred made an interesting point. He reminded me of a comment by a high American official back in 1968, who Fred was trying to get to speak. It’s not easy to get these people to speak, but he did. And this official—he was asking him, "Why is this intensive bombing going on of northern Laos?" Nothing to do with the war in Indochina, just destruction of a poor peasant society, one of the most malevolent acts of modern history, I think. And he finally—the official finally explained. He said, "Look, there’s a temporary bombing of North—a cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam, and we have all these planes, and we don’t have anything to do with them. So we’ll bomb Laos."

OK, I think that’s the lesson of history that we should bare in mind in reading Jeremy’s exposures of, first, Blackwater and the mercenary army, and now JSOC, the so-called secret army—secret the same way the secret wars were secret. If you have a reporter who’s willing to—that has the courage and integrity to expose it, you can expose it. These resources are there. They’re growing. They have a self-generating capacity. They’re going to get larger and larger. They’re going to want more and more to do. And if one target disappears, they’ll be turned somewhere else. And as Jeremy hinted, they’ll be turned here.

And there’s a history of that, too. If some of you want to read about it, there’s a very important book by a historian, very good historian, Al McCoy, who, among other things, studied the history of drugs and torture and so on. But he’s a Philippine historian mainly, and he did a study of the Philippine War, the U.S. counterinsurgency war in the Philippines in the—over a century ago. It was a brutal, murderous war, hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, a horror story. And he pointed out that, at the time, after the war was over, when the so-called pacification began, the U.S. forces were—the Marines, mostly, in those days—were using the highest technology available to develop a surveillance system over the Philippine society, so they could do what—what, by our standards now, at a primitive level, the kinds of things that Jeremy described. And they did. And it’s turned the Philippines into a—this is the Philippines a hundred years later, have never escaped from this. Philippine society is permeated by the consequences of this long terror war.

But McCoy pointed out something else. He pointed out that these measures, from before the First World War, were very quickly picked up domestically, both by the British and the United States, and applied to surveillance and control techniques within their own societies—the FBI here and so on. And now that’s what we can expect, and signs of it are already around. The resources are there. They’re self-generating. They’re kept under a veil, so not too much inspection of them, though there could be, as you’ve seen. They’re going to grow. They’re going to develop. If the current targets disappear, they’ll move on to new targets, because that’s the nature of these systems, just like the planes who had nowhere to bomb so they decided to send them to bomb northern Laos. And they’ll come home. Already happening. And we can expect more and more of it. I think that’s the historical background that should very much be kept in mind.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy?

JEREMY SCAHILL: ... You know, there was a time when Amy and I, I think we were in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and we were—I’m from Milwaukee, but we were doing Democracy Now!, the show, from there, and Amy had been on a speaking tour going all around the country and had given probably, you know, 200 speeches in like 199 days or something. I mean, it was this incredible tour that she was on. And in the middle of a show, she lost her voice in—I mean, had some coughing and then lost her voice. And it was this moment on the air no one knew what to do, because this—the voice we all listen to all the time all of a sudden like went sort of dead on the air. And I think there was a congresswoman or someone on the show, who was left to kind of deal with it. And Amy’s like going like this, like—and she’s not—she’s just meaning, like, "Let’s go to break." But anyway, so, I think it’s a product of as much great speaking as you do.

One thing, though, in response to this, you know, I think that one thing that’s important to keep in mind is that very little of what this administration or the Bush administration did was actually new ideas. They were old, existing ideas and resurrections of certain plans and programs. I mean, if you look at the Phoenix program in Vietnam, which was this assassination program that was being run in Vietnam, there are very serious parallels to what the United States was doing in Iraq.

You know, the dominant historical narrative is that the surge won the Iraq War. And General Petraeus, had he not gone down for—you know, the only thing that seems to be capable of taking down the powerful is these sort of—you know, what they do in their top-secret chambers. They can wage all the so-called secret wars they want, but if they do something in their own secret life, then, you know—then you can bring them down. But Petraeus is often celebrated as this sort of hero who won the Iraq War because of the surge. But in reality, you had this merciless killing campaign that was being run by General Stanley McChrystal and Admiral William McRaven, where they were just bumping off the leadership of any cell that would pop off—pop up, but also just killing a tremendous number of people, in general.

And so, you had military figures that grew up in a certain era with an understanding of these programs. And when Cheney and Rumsfeld came into power with Bush, they really saw—but even before 9/11 happened, saw the historical moment that they had in front of them to sort of redraw maps and implement a vision of the world where Iran-Contra was a noble act and sort of the model for how the U.S. should be conducting its foreign policy. I don’t know if you—if many of you know this, but Cheney was in Congress at the time that Iran-Contra was being investigated, and he authored the minority report in the House defending Iran-Contra and viewed it as a sort of heroic, necessary action. And they had this view of the unitary executive, the idea that when it comes to these national security issues, that the White House is essentially a dictatorship and that Congress’s only function is to fund the operations but not be involved with overseeing them or having any meaningful oversight of these operations.

And President Obama really had an opportunity to roll back some of the executive branch power grabs that Bush and Cheney had engaged in. And instead, he sort of doubled down on them and has been waging this unprecedented war against whistleblowers and using the Espionage Act and reserving the right of the state to keep secret from the American people evidence that would indicate why someone was being assassinated, to keep secret—to use the state secrets privilege in repeated lawsuits brought against former officials or torturers, having cases thrown out of court, using the full power structure of the executive branch in the same excessive way that was being used under Bush and Cheney.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, you were talking about U.S. officials. Can you talk about McRaven and Gardez?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, that’s one of the stories in the book, and also you’ll see this in our film, one of the characters in our film is Admiral William McRaven, who is, I think, one of the most powerful military figures in modern U.S. history. McRaven is the current commander of SOCOM, the Special Operations Command, in charge of all special operations activity across the globe in more than a hundred countries. But McRaven was actually an original member of SEAL Team 6, the Naval Warfare Development Group—DEVGRU, it’s called now. He was an original member of SEAL Team 6 and spent much of his career in the shadows of covert and clandestine U.S. military operations. And he would have been forward-deployed to Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, but he had injured his back in a parachuting accident at a training exercise in California, where there was a—where his SEAL team was based at the time.

And so, instead of forward-deploying to Afghanistan, Admiral McRaven was tapped by General Wayne Downing, who was coming up with the—with the process for putting people on these kill lists after 9/11 and trying to take down all of the leadership of al-Qaeda or anyone that they could attach to the 9/11 attacks. And Downing asked Admiral McRaven to come and advise the National Security Council. People think of the National Security Council as this huge body. It’s the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense and the secretary of state, and then staffers. But it really is just the core officials who dictate this policy. So, if the NSC is making decisions about targeted killing, it’s really the principals that are doing national defense, national security, counterterrorism.

So McRaven became the adviser to the most powerful officials in the U.S. government in developing how to implement the hunting down and killing of Osama bin Laden and others. And at the beginning, there were, by some estimates, between seven and two dozen individuals that were put on this list for—in the beginning it was kill or capture, but the emphasis was often on kill. And McRaven saw firsthand how the White House worked, and he learned a great deal about the politics of an administration, because he was there helping to craft a policy that he would later then run when he became the head of all special operations forces.

So, McRaven is there for a couple of years, and then ends up going to Iraq, where he was the deputy commander of the Joint Special Operations Command under Stanley McChrystal, who was very close to Dick Cheney. Cheney had gotten him a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations. And McChrystal was the commander of JSOC for much of the Bush administration. McRaven is working under McChrystal, running the kill campaign in Iraq and coordinating all of these actions against against both the—what was called al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia or al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and also going after Muqtada al-Sadr’s forces and others. So he sort of understood both ends of the game: how it was run in the White House and then how it was implemented in the field.

And when President Obama came into office, the two people who were responsible for the most covert, sensitive operations, being run by primarily Cheney and Rumsfeld, outside of the chain of command, were General McChrystal and Admiral McRaven. And they became the two most influential figures in shaping the Obama administration’s counterterroism policy. And, so, President Obama really empowered those forces and actually had McRaven in the White House helping to shape the policy—not just implement the military actions, but actually shaping policy. And most people had never heard of Admiral McRaven. And, of course, he’s now a kind of iconic figure because he commanded the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. And, of course, Disney tried to trademark SEAL Team 6 after the bin Laden raid—it’s a true story.

But what I—the way that I discovered the identity of Admiral McRaven was, in February of 2010, there was a raid in Gardez in Afghanistan, in Paktia province. And a U.S. special operations team had intelligence that there was a Taliban compound and that people living in a particular compound in this area were members of the Taliban who were plotting attacks against American forces. And they raid this compound in the middle of the night, and they end up killing a number of men and two pregnant women. And it turned out that this was not a Taliban family. In fact, they weren’t even ethnic Pashtun; they were from a minority ethnic group in the province. And the man of the house was a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the U.S. forces. And his family showed me his documents. He had actually been trained by a private security company called MPRI, which is made up of very—of high-ranking former military officials, intelligence officials and others. And so, these women were killed, this Afghan police commander who had fought with U.S. soldiers against the Taliban and against the Haqqani network in his province, and whose house was filled with pictures of him and U.S. soldiers smiling in these pictures, had just been killed.

And when the commandos that—the U.S. commandos that raided the house realized that they had killed these women and that the men that they had killed were not in fact Taliban, and that what they were doing that night was the most anti-Taliban of things they could have been doing, which was to be having a party with live music celebrating the naming of a child—the men were dancing and playing instruments, and it was this loud, boisterous party, and we have their cellphone video from that night. So, they raid this house; these people are killed. Instead of saying, "Wow! We really messed up," and owning it—and that stuff happens every day in Afghanistan. People are getting killed all the time that have no attachment whatsoever to the Taliban or al-Qaeda or the Haqqani network, and the U.S. will often just pay them a little bit of money and move on, and it never makes it into the papers. That wouldn’t have been out of place. But instead of doing that, they dug the bullets out of the women’s bodies, and then they told their commanders that what had happened in the compound that night was a Taliban ambush of this family and that they had come upon these women who had been killed by the Taliban. And then they—there were leaks saying that, well, no, this was actually an honor killing, and the women were killed by their own family members. And they put out a press release, and spokespeople made these statements saying that this—that the U.S. soldiers were essentially heroes that had gone in there and saved everyone else.

But then, the family members, because they were a prominent family—one of the fathers of the women was the vice dean at Gardez University, who spoke fluent English, started calling reporters and telling people, you know, this is not what the—what NATO is saying. Then a very great reporter named Jerome Starkey actually went down there — he writes for The Times of London — and interviewed the family members and did a story saying that this was a NATO raid—he didn’t know it was JSOC at the time—that this was a botched NATO raid and that NATO had tried to cover it up. And he told the story of these families. And when Jerome Starkey did this,NATO did something extraordinary: They named him in a press release and said, "Jerome Starkey of The Times of London is lying." They actually accused him of lying. And, I mean, that could have ended Starkey’s career. And Starkey, to his credit, kept pushing and pushing, and ended up doing a number of stories and got close to that family. And Rick and I also went to this family and filmed with them, and you see this in our video, and tell this story and tell the story of what happened to Jerome Starkey, as well.

So, media attention is focused in now on this village and this one family’s compound. And eventually NATO calls up Starkey, and they said, "We’re about to put out a press release. We’re going to change our version of events." And they admit that their forces had killed, that NATO forces had killed these pregnant women and that the men were not Taliban commanders. So, the family told me and told Jerome Starkey the same thing, which is that they got a call, and a person they believed was General Stanley McChrystal was going to be coming to visit them. And at the time, McChrystal was the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. And they actually were plotting—they wanted to kill General McChrystal. They wanted to stab him to death when he came into their home. And one—and one of the men told me that "When they did this to my family, I wanted to put on a suicide vest and blow myself up among the Americans." Remember, these were U.S. allies, and now they’re saying, "I want a suicide vest, and I want to kill General McChrystal," who was the leader of the war. And an imam at their local mosque said, "No, you’re not to do that. You’re to give him hospitality, like our people do, and you’ll welcome him into your home and hear what he has to say."

So they thought that General McChrystal was coming to see them. They called Jerome Starkey. Starkey goes down there with his photographer, Jeremy Kelly, and they’re waiting with the family, thinking that McChrystal is going to show up. And up pulls this convoy of vehicles with countless Afghan military officials and some Americans interspersed with them. And in the center of this crowd is a guy with a name tag that says "McRaven" on it and has three stars on the lapel. And they’ve brought with them two sheep. And they approach the compound in the very place where the women had been killed and this police commander had been killed, and they offload these sheep, and they put a knife up to the sheep’s neck, and they were going to sacrifice the sheep. And what they were doing was a ritual from these people’s culture, the people who were the victims of this. And they were—it was like a forgiveness ritual. So they were coming—Admiral McRaven shows up with some sheep, after this family had been gunned down and then they—and they had blamed it on the family and then said it was Taliban, and that—

So, this is unfolding. This photographer, Jeremy Kelly, starts taking photos of—he didn’t know who he was at the time—of Admiral McRaven. And at the time, Admiral McRaven was the commander of the most elite, secretive U.S. military force. And he shows up with the sheep in Gardez, Afghanistan, and they’re offering to sacrifice it. And the American and Afghan forces try to stop the photographer. They try to hit the camera away. They say that Starkey and Jeremy Kelly are not allowed in. But the family—and it was so smart of them—the family said, "No, we want him here as a witness, so that someone independent is here to know what goes on today." And so they have photos, and Starkey took, in shorthand, all the notes of what McRaven said in the room that day. And McRaven admitted to the head of this household that it was his forces that had killed these pregnant women and the Afghan police commander. And he apologized.

And then there were all these stories that went out on ABC News and others that the head of the household had accepted the apology. When I spoke to him, he said, "I don’t accept their apology at all." He said, "The special forces did cruel things to us. They beat us. They ruined our life. They wiped out our economy in our compound by taking away all of these people. And they killed our pregnant women. I wouldn’t trade my two sons for the entire kingdom of the United States," is what he said. And another man chimed in, and he said, "These are these commandos with beards. We call them the American Taliban." And this is an anti-Taliban family.

And so, you know, when I watched the bin Laden raid coverage, and people started saying JSOC publicly, and we were showed that the dog was named Cairo and was a French—Belgian Malinois, or whatever, and then we know what guns were used. And, you know, Rick and I talk about this all the time. We know every detail that was leaked—and, of course, a lot of it turned out to be not true, but that’s for a different story. I was thinking, where was the coverage of—like, wall-to-wall coverage of this operation that they did? Because that would give us a little bit more of a balanced picture of what happens in the thousands of night raids that happen every year in Afghanistan or in Pakistan or in countries that we’re not even aware we’re raiding right now. And so, that story, for me, really resonated strongly, because I think we only have a tiny fraction of understanding the extent of the kinds of operations that are being done on a daily basis around the world, and we often hear about them when they go the way that those in power want or when the version that they want publicized is the one accepted by powerful media outlets.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, if you could respond to what Jeremy said. And also, you have written extensively about the killing of Osama bin Laden, and I was wondering if you could comment on that.

NOAM CHOMSKY: ....I’ve written plenty of unpopular articles, and one of the most unpopular had to do with the murder, not killing, of Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden was a suspect. There are principles, believe it or not, that are not only in the Constitution, but that go back to 800 years, to Magna Carta, the foundations of Anglo-American law. That’s—I mean, they put it in narrow terms, but the general principle, including —Jeremy is quite correct—expansion of it to people other than our own citizens, is that a person can’t be punished by the state without due process of law and a speedy trial by his peers. That’s a reasonable principle. It’s in the Constitution. It was narrow, if you look, so in the Constitution it didn’t—naturally, it didn’t apply to Native Americans, it didn’t apply to blacks, and it dubiously applied to women, who at the time were considered property, not people. But over the years, it’s been expanded. And unless it gets to the point where—that Jeremy was talking about, where it’s just human beings, we can’t call ourselves a civilized society. Anyway, those are the principles.

Osama bin Laden was a suspect. In fact, personally, I don’t have any doubt that he was responsible, but my personal opinion is nothing that stands up in a court of law. You have to have evidence. You have to have a trial, a serious trial. And it was pretty clear that the U.S. government didn’t want that. He was captured, apprehended, by, you know, the most skilled masters of war—to use the Somali warlord’s expression—that exist in the world, 80 of them, I think. He was defenseless. The first story that came out was that they had to shoot him because his wife lunged at the SEALs. And what could they do? You know, they had to kill everybody. But that story was later withdrawn. It was nothing. He was just apprehended, defenseless, murdered, body throw into the ocean, leaving obvious questions as to why. And the dangers of this operation—a lot of the aspects of this operation—so it was a criminal—in my view, just total—a complete criminal act. No justification.

But, there’s more to it than this. And I was kind of reminded of it when Jeremy talked about the Yemeni testimony at the Senate. Now, those of you might have looked at the little, tiny report on that hidden in The New York Times. He said something else, this man who testified. He said that, for years, the al-Qaeda—the Islamist radicals—al-Qaeda, they call them—had been trying to turn the people of this village against the Americans. And they didn’t succeed. But you’ve succeeded with one drone strike. You’re creating more people to kill you, as you pointed out. And the same is true of the Osama bin Laden assassination. First of all, the action itself was extremely hazardous. The Navy SEALs who were sent in were under orders to shoot their way out if they got into any trouble. Well, if they had started—the Pakistani army is a professional army, very committed, committed to the defense of the country, the sovereignty of the country. If they had been caught there and tried to shoot their way out, they wouldn’t have been left alone. The American forces next door would have come in in a massive force, and, you know, we might have been involved in a nuclear war. I mean, it was quite possible. That was part of the threat.

But there was something else that happened. Actually, it’s been reported recently, I think in Scientific American. But it was no—I mean, the way that they identified bin Laden was through a fraudulent vaccination campaign. They had doctors posing to do a anti-polio vaccination in a poor area of this town. Well, they pretty soon figured out it’s not the poor area, it’s the rich area, so they stopped the program in the middle, which is criminal in itself. Actually, running the program was criminal. You know, using a vaccination program and doctors to try to apprehend a suspect, I mean, that violates principles going back to the Hippocratic Oath. But then they stopped it in the middle, because they thought they were in the wrong area. More crimes. Then they finally identified him. But one consequence of their actions was to—there is always in these societies serious concern about what outsiders, Americans, are up to when they come in and start, you know, sticking needles in people and so on. It’s always there. Takes a lot of work to overcome that hostility. And it was being overcome in Pakistan. Now it’s gone. They will not permit people to come in carrying out vaccinations. Polio is almost gone in the world. Pakistan is one of the last places where it survives. OK, we’re encouraging the spread of polio. And as one commentator pointed out—back to the Yemeni in the Senate—one of these days, people are going to look at this crippled child and say, "You did it to us." And you can guess what’s going to happen then.

AMY GOODMAN: If you missed that testimony in the Senate, in the first-ever Senate drone hearings of this young Yemeni activist and freelance journalist, you can go to democracynow.org, because last Wednesday we played it in full. And you can watch him and also read the transcript. But, Noam, I wanted to ask you to follow up on Jeremy’s opening point around the killing—and closing point—the killing of Americans versus people anywhere.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, Jeremy’s point is exactly right. And the murder of Awlaki—and we should be honest about it—was—you take a look at The New York Times the next day. There was a headline which said something like, "West Celebrates Death of Radical Cleric." You know, good, we murdered a radical cleric. Then, concerns began to mount over the fact that he was an American. You know, bit of a problem if we go around killing Americans. And that’s pretty scandalous. I’ll just reiterate what Jeremy said. It doesn’t matter whether they’re Americans or whatever they are; they’re people. Going back to Magna Carta, the concept of people free of these—should be free of state terror, has been expanded over the years, substantially. And it should be expanded to include people. They should be free of state terror.

And I should say that I, myself, am kind of hesitant about some of the things I do myself. Right now I’m a plaintiff in a suit on the—against the NDAA, at least the NDAA proposals, Obama’s latest. The National Defense Authorization Act included—includes provisions which make it—which—optional for the government, if it chooses, to place American citizens under indefinite detention in military prisons, which is an incredible crime. You know, again, back to Magna Carta, much worse. And Chris Hedges organized a suit to try to oppose this, and I signed on, but with reservations, because what difference does it make if they’re American citizens? I mean, the same NDAA act authorized—in fact, makes it mandatory in some circumstances—for the government to place non-Americans under indefinite preventive detention. Should be—that’s what we should be—that’s what we should be concerned with.

This suit, incidentally, has taken an interesting course. Obama originally had said that he was opposed to those provisions in the act, but he would sign them. Then, when the case went to court, at the lower court level, the government case—the plaintiffs won. The judge threw out the government prosecution, on the—because the prosecution refused to answer a simple question: Will these plaintiffs be subject to administrative detention? Could they be? And they refused to answer that, so the judge threw that out. Obama immediately took it to the higher court. That shows you how much opposed he is to it. It will work its way to the Supreme Court. And given the Supreme Court, the government will probably win. Well, you know, these are things we should really be concerned about.

It’s not—if you want to know what—I’m sure you all know, but if you really want to know in detail what happens to non-citizens, read some of the testimonies. So, for example, there’s a recent book that came out by an Australian—David Hill, I think his name is. Very much worth reading. He’s a young man who was hiking around somewhere in northern Afghanistan. He was picked—

AMY GOODMAN: David Hicks.

NOAM CHOMSKY: David Hicks, yeah. He was picked up by the Northern Alliance, the U.S. allies. They sold him for bounty to the American forces. And then he describes his years in Bagram and then at Guantánamo, and it was six or seven years. The torture, the sadism, the cruelty are just indescribable. These are American soldiers, you know, elite American soldiers. You just really have to read that to—I mean, if anybody knows American history, it won’t surprise you that much, but it’s right in front of our eyes.

And he said something quite interesting in his testimony, which I was struck by. He says the soldiers—of course, these guys were shackled, bound, you know, couldn’t move, surrounded by all kinds of military police and so on. But he said the guards were afraid of the prisoners. He said the guards had been so brainwashed by whatever training they went through, that they thought these prisoners were superhuman. He said that guards would come to his cell sometimes, where he’s shackled and, you know, so on, and ask him to perform some of his feats, like, you know, climb on the ceilings. "Will you show us how you do it?" And this kind of thing. And, in fact, when they took them out to be interrogated, they’d have like a platoon of marines around them to make sure that they didn’t carry out some incredibly monstrous act that these soldiers had probably seen in a video movie somewhere. But he said they really were terrified of the prisoners.

And that tells us something else about our own society, that what are we doing to our own society when we’re creating such terror and fear among ordinary people? I mean, it’s kind of like having guns in—you know, armed policemen in schools. Is that what you want your children to see, that we live in a society where you have to have people with guns around to protect you from some unimaginable danger? And here, there’s another serious—as far as American culture is concerned, something very much to be concerned about. This is a very frightened society, always has been—goes back to colonial times. Very striking. Today it is taking a remarkable form. If you look at the—you know, the gun culture, the people who are pressing for having guns are terrified. A lot of them are simply terrified. They’re like these guards standing outside the prison. What are they terrified of? You’ve got to have guns to protect theirselves from who? The federal government, the United Nations, aliens, whoever it may be. We don’t know what horrible force is coming after us, but we have to have guns to protect ourselves. I mean, put aside the fact the guns wouldn’t do you any good and you’ll probably kill each other, but the fear throughout the society is simply incredible.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Just a couple of things in response to that. I was remembering, when you were talking about David Hicks’ story, this case that I came across in Yemen of a journalist named Abdulelah Haider Shaye. When President Obama first authorized the bombing of Yemen was in December of 2009. The first strike that we know of authorized under the Obama administration was on December 17th, 2009, in Yemen. There hadn’t been a bombing, a U.S. bombing, there, that we know of, since November of 2002. The first drone strike, actually, that was conducted outside of Afghanistan was in Yemen in 2002, and it killed a number of people, including a U.S. citizen named Kemal Derwish. And he actually was not—was not supposedly the target of that strike, but they claimed that he had ties to a terror cell called the Lackawanna Six, which, like many of the plots we’ve seen lately, seemed to have been the—in large part, the FBIbreaking up its own plot, and which is really scandalous if you look at how many times this has happened and all these cases of entrapment.

But so, President Obama starts—decides to start bombing Yemen in December of 2009. They do this strike on what they are told by the Yemeni government and by U.S. intelligence is an al-Qaeda training camp and that there is this notorious al-Qaeda figure who’s known to be in the camp. Well, it turned out that this guy, when we investigated it and went to Yemen and spoke to people that knew him and knew the infrastructure of AQAP, that he was an old jihadist who had fought in the mujahideen war in Afghanistan and had a very peripheral connection to al-Qaeda. So it seems like what happened is that, you know, the U.S. outsources a lot of its intelligence gathering in Yemen to notoriously corrupt Yemeni officials and agencies and to the Saudis, and the Saudis have their own war that they’re waging inside of Yemen. The U.S.-backed dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh was playing multiple sides—playing the Saudis, playing the U.S., playing various tribes inside the country. There were several occasions when Saleh fed the U.S. intelligence saying someone was al-Qaeda, and it turned out to being a political opponent of the regime that was being killed or assassinated by the U.S. on behalf, in the service of the dictator of Yemen.

And so, in this case, on December 17th, 2009, they bomb this village, supposedly to kill this one guy, who does not seem to have been anything even vaguely resembling a senior al-Qaeda figure in the country. And after the missile strike happens, the Yemeni government puts out a press release taking credit for the strike, saying it had conducted these air strikes. And the Obama administration congratulated the Yemeni government on taking the fight to the terrorists in Yemen.

A number of tribal leaders in Yemen got phone calls from this small, poor Bedouin village called al-Majalah that these missiles had slammed into the area and had shredded people into meat. And these tribal leaders went there, and also a young—this young journalist, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who had done reporting and work for The Washington Post, for ABC News, for Al Jazeera. He was a very, very well-known journalist in Yemen. And he was known because he was a brave guy who would go and actually interview al-Qaeda figures. Much of what the United States knows about certain leaders in al-Qaeda comes from the reporting of Abdulelah Haider Shaye. You could look at one way and say he was a very valuable guy to have out talking to these people, because it helped the U.S. intelligence officials understand or operatives understand who it was they were supposedly trying to kill. But that’s for a different story.

So this guy goes there. These tribal leaders go there. And they take photographs of the missile parts. And they then show them, broadcast them on Al Jazeera and other outlets, and share them with Amnesty International. And Amnesty International has a weapons expert come in and analyze them, and they determined that they were—that it was a cruise missile attack. And when Rick and I were in Abyan province, we had the parts filmed. They’re still there in the desert, by the way. You can go—if you want to try to go to al-Majalah, you can go there, and they’re still in the middle of the desert, with "General Dynamics" and "Made in the U.S.A." right there, visible, and we show this in our film. We show the aftermath of this bombing and the missile parts that were still there, you know, well after the bombs had dropped.

But the U.S. also—but the other bombs that they found there were cluster bombs, which of course are banned under international conventions. And the cluster bombs are basically—I saw the effect of them when the U.S. was using them in the Kosovo War in 1999. I went to the Nis marketplace after it was bombed in Serbia and saw the aftermath of it. They’re like flying land mines, and they shred everything in its path into meat and limbs. And it is horrifying to see the aftermath of any bombing, but cluster bombs are a particularly brutal weapon. And there were unexploded cluster bombs that were left there, and after the bombing had taken place, some children were playing near a cluster bomb and picked one of them up, and it blew them to pieces, two days after the bombing had happened.

So they take these pictures. They send them to Amnesty International. And these sheikhs, tribal sheikhs, organized a gathering to say that this is not the Yemeni government that did this, because Yemen doesn’t have these missiles. Amnesty does an analysis of them and determines that they were in fact U.S. weapons and that only the United States could have been responsible for that bombing.

And so, this sort of scandal was brewing inside of Yemen because the people who were killed there—there were at least 46 people killed. Fourteen of the people killed were women, and 21 were children. When the Yemeni Parliament, which is a—which is supported by the United States, went to investigate it, they listed all of the dead—their ages, their names, their genders—and I got a copy of that report and have the list of every single person that we know of that was killed in that strike. And we added it up, and it was 14 women and 21 children among the 46 dead, and in the pursuit of trying to kill this one person who the president of the United States had been told was this high-value target, who everyone in Yemen says was an older mujahideen who had primarily done his jihad in Afghanistan and not inside of Yemen.

When this started to become public, this Yemeni journalist was going on Al Jazeera and was helping other U.S. media outlets report that story, that it was in fact a U.S. strike. U.S. officials were denying it, and eventually then anonymously said, "Yes, we were behind the strike," but General David Petraeus said that no civilians were actually killed in the strike and that it’s all a big exaggeration, which was very offensive to Yemenis of all political stripes. And so, it was an enduring scandal.

And this one journalist was really pushing this story, and he continued to report on other—on the expanding U.S. air war in Yemen. And one night, in the middle of the night, he was—in the middle of the day, he was out with a friend of his who was a political cartoonist, and they were shopping, and he was snatched by U.S.-backed, U.S.-trained counterterrorism forces in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and was taken to the political security prison and was beaten bloody by the security services and told that he was to stop talking about the missile strikes. And then they released him onto the streets. And what this journalist did was to go straight to Al Jazeera and say, "I was just beaten by the political security officers, and they’re trying to stop me from talking about the U.S. missile strikes that are happening in the country."

And soon after he did that, his house was raided by the CTU, the counterterrorism unit, which is a JSOC- and CIA-trained entity. And they snatched him out of his home and disappeared him for 30 days. And no one knew where he was. And then they hauled him into a court that had been specifically set up by the dictatorship to prosecute journalists for crimes against the state, and was ultimately convicted of being an al-Qaeda facilitator, because he facilitated al-Qaeda members being able to speak to the media, and which—I’ve talked to people in U.S. intelligence who actually also believe that this case is outrageous, because they said, "You took off the streets one of the best reporters that we would read so we could actually understand what was going on in Yemen, because of the notorious corruption of all of the informants."

So he is put into this prison. He’s put on trial, total sham trial. His lawyers refuse to present a defense. No lawyer would represent him, at his own request, because he said, "I don’t want to recognize a shred of legitimacy of this process." And we have video of him when he is in prison. They bring him in front of the—into the courtroom in a cell. They have him in a cage in a cell. And as they’re pulling him away, he said, "My crime is exposing the American missile attack on the tiny Bedouin village of al-Majalah in Abyan province. They’re putting me in jail because I exposed their cruise missile attack." And he said, "This is what happens when Yemeni journalists are real journalists," and they pull him away, and they disappear him into this prison.

There was so much outrage in Yemen, from his tribe and from human rights organizations and from mainstream civil society in Yemen, that the dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, had no choice but to issue a pardon against Abdulelah Haider Shaye. This happens a lot in Yemen. Someone gets arrests, the tribes protest, and then the person is released. It’s a whole—it’s a game that’s been playing out in that country for a long time. So, he’s going to issue a pardon, and the official news service, the Saba News Agency, does a report saying that this journalist is going to be pardoned.

That day, the dictator of Yemen receives a phone call from the White House—not from some liaison, not from secretary of state—from President Obama himself, personally. And President Obama tells the dictator of Yemen that he’s deeply concerned about news that Abdulelah Haider Shaye is going to be released. And the pardon is torn up. And lest you think I’m making this up or I’ve just heard it secondhand, I know this because the White House put it on their own website in a read-out of the phone call from that day. And when I called the State Department to ask them — this is a year-and-a-half after Abdulelah Haider had been in prison since this phone call — "What is the U.S. State Department’s position on Abdulelah Haider Shaye?" they said, "Our position remains the same as that articulated by President Obama in that phone call. We believe he should be kept in prison." So this journalist is in prison because of the president of the United States making a phone call and having his pardon ripped up.

And he is not doing well in prison. I’m in touch with his family. He is—my understanding is that he’s losing—he’s starting to lose his mind, which is very common with people that are kept in solitary confinement or in these conditions.

And none of news organizations that worked with him in the U.S.—ABC News, Washington Post and—none of them have said anything about his case. Where are they? When he’s getting them sensationalist footage, when he interviewed Anwar al-Awlaki, they all wanted to broadcast his comments about Nidal Hasan, you know, who conducted the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas. And they wanted to ask—they wanted to know what Awlaki said about the underwear bomber. You know why we know what Awlaki thought about that? Because Abdulelah Haider Shaye found him, interviewed him and published it in The Washington Post, on NBC. And yet, when he’s in prison, they say nothing. It’s shameful. It’s shameful.

And that’s often what happens in these cases. Journalists—journalists, like myself and others, we go into these countries. And, you know, I encourage people to read the acknowledgments in my book, because I tell you—I name the names of all of the journalists in Yemen and Somalia and Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world who made it possible for this story to be told. And they’re the real heroes of this. Unfamous journalists, who report oftentimes not in English, take the great risks. People like me, I go in, and I can go somewhere for a few weeks or a month, and I depend on them to be able to tell these stories. And so, when something happens to one of our colleagues—Somalia, journalists are being gunned down in record numbers; in Yemen, journalists are being thrown in prison—if we don’t speak up when we have a platform and defend our colleagues, we should be ashamed of ourselves, and we should be ashamed to call ourselves journalists.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, as we wrap up, this is the week that the Bush library is being opened in Dallas, where there is an evaluation, a reevaluation going on of his record. It’s the 10th anniversary of the War in Iraq. And today we’re talking about the years of the Obama administration. Can you talk about President Obama’s record?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, let me tell you what I felt, and maybe some of the rest of you felt, when I saw the pictures of the Bush library presentation. There was a group of men standing there, former presidents, the ones that are alive. Every one of them is a major criminal. A major criminal. Obama is continuing the grand tradition—shouldn’t be a great surprise. And I guess the sentence that came to my mind at the time is actually from Thomas Jefferson, who said once that—he said, "I tremble for my country when I think that God is just, and some day will bring us to his judgment." Well, if we can’t them to some kind of judgment either, if not in the courts, at least in public opinion, then it’s kind of like what Jeremy said: We’re not doing are duty just as responsible people.

AMY GOODMAN: And let—Jeremy, we’re going to end with you. This is your second major book. Your first book was Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, where you really reframed—you reframed the whole discussion about mercenaries and the privatization of the U.S. military. Suffice it to say, here we are, what, six years later, and Erik Prince had to move, the founder of Blackwater, to Abu Dhabi, and you remain here in the United States. Less—and I wanted to ask, with this second book—and Jeremy is going to be signing afterwards, and I encourage everyone to get this book, not just for interesting summer reading, but that we can see a spring and a summer of U.S. foreign policy. When we are informed, what a difference it makes to begin with those tools, to be empowered, to challenge what we—how we are represented in the rest of the world. But I want to ask you, Jeremy, finally—your new book is called Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. What are you hoping to accomplish with this book? And why you even call it Dirty Wars?

JEREMY SCAHILL: One thing that I think you’ll notice if you read the book—you know, I’ve talked to friends about the—you know, when I wroteBlackwater. I think I’ve grown up a lot since I wrote that book, in a sense, because something really strange happened to me after I wrote Blackwater, and that was that I started to get emails and other electronic communications from people that had served in special operations forces or worked with the CIA—not senior officials. I don’t hobnob with the powerful ever. In fact, when I was talking about this official who told me what he said about the killing of Abdulrahman, I had to chase him around the campus of a university I found him on, and, you know, he did not want to speak to me. I had to sort of chase him. That’s pretty much the only interaction I have with powerful officials is chasing them somewhere.

But I started to get communications from operators and people that were doing these operations. And there was a sort of a pattern to them early on, and sometimes they would come to events and come up to me afterwards. And they would say, you know, "I don’t"—a lot of them would say, "I don’t care very much for your politics, but you were totally right about Blackwater. You know, I can’t stand them." And I got to know people in that world, in that community, because they also were—had problems with Blackwater and didn’t like various actions or problems that the company’s actions had caused for their units or the fact that they were getting paid so much more than the conventional soldiers—whatever it was. But I started a dialogue with some of these people that continues to this day, and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from them about how these operations run.

And what I tried to do in the book—I mean, I hope I succeeded, to a degree, with it—is to weave in and out of stories that show the complicated landscape of the killing fields and the men who do the operations on the ground, the figures who are identified as the targets, the civilians that are forced to live on the other side of the barrel of the gun or in the place where the bombs are going off, and to put it in a historical context.

I think if you had asked me years ago what I think—you know, what I wanted to accomplish or what I think should be done, I would have pretended to have an answer, because I think it’s—I was, you know—I was bull-headed.

I think that we, unfortunately, are only at the very beginning of a conversation that we have to—that’s urgent and that we have to have in this country about how far we, as a society, have let things go since 9/11 in the name of protecting our security. And I concur very much with what Noam said about being gripped by fear. You know, fear is a very powerful force. And if you don’t figure out a way to confront it and not be owned by it, then things like the PATRIOT Act happen, and civil liberties get rolled back. And, you know, people say, "Oh, NDAA, the people that are whining about that are crazy, and it’s conspiracy theory," and all of these things. And you just have—just study history. It starts somewhere. It starts with an idea, and then a crisis happens, and they implement the idea that’s been laying around. You know, it’s a very age-old concept.

And my hope is that people use the book as actionable intelligence, which is actually an—you know, a term in the CIA or in the targeting business. But I want it to be actionable intelligence to work toward a democratic process of confronting our own fear and also holding those in power accountable, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans. I think all of us should be defined not by the public pronouncements of politicians, but by what we do in response to the actions they’re doing in our name. And that’s the spirit I wrote this book in.

Inside the Cooper Union Occupation’s First Hours

Zachary Bell, Waging Nonviolence — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:55:00 -0700

Students took to President Jamshed Bharucha’s office demanding that he resign over his proposal to introduce tuition, a policy that would break the school’s 155-year tradition of free education.

Since last Wednesday, students at Cooper Union, a private free university in New York City, have staged an occupation of the president’s office in protest of the announcement that the school will begin charging tuition. As the occupation now goes into its second week, let me recall my eight-hour visit during its first full day: Thursday, May 9.

That morning, students took to President Jamshed Bharucha’s office demanding that he resign over his proposal to introduce tuition, a policy that would break the school’s 155-year tradition of free education. Later that day, all nine of Cooper’s full-time art faculty and some 200 students signed a statement of no confidence against Bharucha.

The administration repeatedly warned the occupiers — by then more than 100 engineering, architecture and art students — that they could face disciplinary actions, which could include being denied their degrees. The administration then proceeded to block the water fountains on the seventh floor with plywood and screwed the bathroom doors shut. It sent armed guards into the building. (The administration later said it wasn’t aware the guards would be armed.)

Yet the siege quickly broke. Administrators had told students that they would be given an ultimatum to leave in the early afternoon, but, later, they moved the deadline to 6:30 P.M. The students stayed put, and around 7:30 P.M. Vice President TC Westcott came into the president’s office and discussed options with the students. She said that the security guards and police were standing down and that Bharucha wanted to speak with them. Many students were distrustful, and someone asked her to explain why the administration locked students out of the bathrooms.

“The logic was that we wanted you to leave,” Westcott replied. She said that the administration was still considering its next moves.

For a few hours, students strategized over pizza in a post-ultimatum haze. Mike D’Ambrose, a master’s engineering student, explained the rationale of the campaign.

“It’s a one-way street once you start charging tuition,” he said, citing the City College of New York, which abandoned its commitment to free education in 1976 and never looked back. Bharucha made headlines when he announced a new plan for the university that called for sliding scale tuition based on need, meaning that some students would pay as high as $19,000 while others would still receive full scholarship.

Saar Shemesh, a transfer student studying art, feels that tuition would change the character of the historic institution: “It would mess up the dynamic that we’ve created here.” To Shemesh, it’s crucial that students are “not indebted to their parents, and not indebted to the government.” She transferred to Cooper from Brooklyn College, and she said that whereas socio-economic lines divide many campuses, Cooper Union stands out as an exception.

Around 9:30 P.M., Saskia Bos, the dean of the Cooper Union School of Art, and Sam Messer, the associate dean of the Yale School of Art, arrived at the occupation. Broadcast over the Free Cooper Union live-stream, Messer asked the students, “But how will this end? President Bharucha is not going to step down in the next week.” Victoria Sobel, an art student in her senior year who has helped organize the occupation, replied, “Why are you so sure? We were told two hours ago that we would be forced out, and we’re still here.”

The students appeared divided whether to speak with President Bharucha, an opportunity Bos was offering to arrange. Casey Gollan, an art school senior, rejected the offer — to applause from the room — explaining that Cooper students could arrange to meet with the president at any time as part of university policy. Still, last week when Gollan tried to arrange one of these meetings, Bharucha didn’t show up. “It’s called university governance,” Gollan said. “And we’ve seen how it doesn’t work.”

Many students charged that Bharucha’s absence from campus during the affair — and his avoidance of certain students since they occupied his office back in December — is indicative of his poor leadership and his fear of the Free Cooper Union campaign. Students said that if they were to meet with Bharucha at this point, it would be on their own terms, in his occupied office.

After the two deans departed, students began discussing the future of the occupation. Gollan admitted that since the occupation was “open and fluid,” students could come and go from Cooper Union’s seventh floor as they pleased, which made consensus decision-making process difficult. Yet it also made the occupation more sustainable than most — allowing students to go to class, eat, take a shower and then return to the president’s office. It also meant that more and more people in the broader Cooper Union community could get involved — swinging by the office and signing the no-confidence statement — without having to fear retribution or an overnight lock-in.

According to the students, if the no-confidence statement were to receive enough signatures from the faculty of the architecture and engineering schools, it would initiate a legal process in which the board of regents would investigate the behavior of the board of trustees, which determined the tuition policy and appointed President Bharucha. It would take some time for the school’s bureaucracy to make such dramatic changes, but this potential for delay didn’t seem to deter the students in their midnight meeting on Thursday. After all, they had a lawyer, free food and each other. When someone asked what would happen if the occupation went through graduation, grins and raised fists filled the room — followed by a few uneasy laughs.

As the meeting closed around 1:00 am, a student erased the “2” on the blackboard next to “Days of Cooper Union Occupation,” and sketched in a block letter “3.”

At the end of my nearly eight-hour sojourn to the seventh floor, I stepped into President Bharucha’s office one last time. It was draped in deep maroon emanating from a row of standing stage lights fixed with red filters. The students were deliberating over blueprints for their final projects, riffling through bags of donated protein bars and Indian food, and constructing conjoined sleeping arrangements with mounds of blankets and pillows.

It was a familiar art-school scene — except that it was in the president’s office.

On Monday the students met with President Bharucha, who agreed in the conversation to raise the following requests with the board of trustees: to arrange a meeting between the board of trustees and 15 student representatives, to add a student with voting rights to the board of trustees and to provide public minutes for all board meetings. While short of keeping Cooper Union free, these gains could change how the school is governed in significant ways for the future.

The students are now deciding whether, once again, to demand Bharucha’s resignation.

The Tragedy of Self Immolation - No One Cares Anymore

Andrew Lam, New America Media — Thu, 16 May 2013 08:48:00 -0700

Over-saturation of images and narratives of violence have resulted in a collective numbness.

Self-immolation isn't what it used to be.

This ultimate form of protest became global news in 1963 when the venerable monk Thich Quang Duc set himself ablaze in the middle of Saigon, Vietnam, protesting religious oppression. Doused in gasoline, the monk sat serenely in lotus position and lit a match. A bird of paradise thus blossomed and bloomed, and quickly charred his body.

The photographer Malcolm Browne captured Thich Quang Duc's fiery renouncement of the mortal coil, the image quickly becoming an icon of the Vietnam War era. The term "self-immolation," in fact, entered into common English usage after his death, which led to a coup d'etat that toppled the pro-Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem regime.

Half a century later, to die by fire in protest registers little more than a media blip.

As of this writing, 117 Tibetans have set themselves ablaze since 2009 in a series of protests against Chinese rule. The most recent incidents came in April, when two young Tibetan monks and a lay Tibetan woman set themselves on fire. There was little coverage of their deaths.

Indeed, with the exception of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself on fire and thus sparked what became known as the Arab Spring, self-immolation has by all accounts become a failed form of protest as an agent of change. Whether in Syria or Palestine, Greece, Italy or Vietnam, individuals continue to go up in flames as crowds look on. Since Bouazizi, in fact, 150 more Tunisians have set themselves on fire protesting the new government, according to al-monitor.

"All the Tibetans who resort to self-immolation do so because they feel they have no other way to make China and the rest of the world listen to their country's call for freedom," Byrne-Rosengren, director of the London-based advocacy group Free Tibet, told Radio Free Asia last month.

Alas, China has turned a deaf ear to their cries, while the world media has averted its eyes.

Aristotle once observed that the plot of a tragedy should be so framed that, even without witnessing the events, simply hearing of them should fill one with "horror and pity" -- even lead to insight and action. But the amphitheater of the 21st century has fallen into decay, scattered and fragmented into a multitude of media platforms. There are too many actors in too many theaters and their tragedies -- overwhelming, lacking in context, incoherent, truncated or badly reported -- have lost their grip on the human psyche.

Studies about desensitization of the modern mind are aplenty, but the general consensus is that over-saturation of images and narratives of violence have resulted in a collective numbness. A profound act of public death cannot hope to sway a world in which horror itself has lost its power.

What we want instead is entertainment, and what we gravitate toward and react to, more often than not, is profanity.

A year after Bouazizi went up in flames in Tunisia, an unknown amateur filmmaker named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula," aka "Sam Bacile," inflamed the Middle East with incendiary video clips ridiculing the prophet Muhammad. His film turned the Arab Spring of 2011 into the Autumn Rage of 2012, resulted in the death of an American ambassador in Libya, and continues to be a bone of contention in Washington.

The cynic observer can't help but wonder: If self immolation no longer works as an agent for change, then is it still worth the price? Has it been reduced to mere suicide by fire?

At its most profound the act stands as the highest form of human compassion, a confirmation of life by giving up one's own. At its most incoherent self-immolation becomes more expressive of the frustration of the powerless. The individual, enamored by death, possessed by anger, elicits neither horror nor pity but cynicism. After all, to burn with passion is very different than to be consumed by rage.

Fire -- this gift and curse to humanity -- is a terrifying beauty. Contained, it hints at elegance, cooks our food and propels our world. Out of control, it engulfs body and soul. It seduces. It overpowers. And it destroys.

Potential self-immolators may want to rethink their relationship with fire. In a world where individuals leverage more power online than in the public square, it may be that to live burning with desire to bring attention to one's cause -- regardless of the oppression and humiliation -- is the real challenge to becoming actual agents of change in the world. So why not live instead? And find new ways to force the world's attention once more back onto the stage -- and evoke pity and horror in us all.

To burn with that desire, to call our attention and hold our gaze until we weep -- isn't that worth living for?

Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of three books, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and his latest,Birds of Paradise Lost.

How I Got Back at the Strangers Who Mock Me for Being Fat

Haley Morris-Cafiero, Salon — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:48:00 -0700

For years, strangers have made fun of me for being fat. But I got my power back -- by turning the camera on them.

I was traveling with students in Barcelona in the summer of 2011, walking through La Rambla, when I noticed two guys making fun of me. I could see them in the reflection of a mirrored building, making gestures with their hands to suggest how much bigger I was than the thin girl standing next to me, her small waist accentuated by her crop top and cut-off shorts. They painted her figure in the air like an hourglass. Then they painted my shape like the convex curves of a ball. The guys were saying something, too, but there was only one word I could make out: Gorda. Fat woman.

I’ve been hearing comments like this for much all my life. Maybe someone else would have yelled at them, or shrunk inside. But I don’t get upset when this happens.

I pulled out my camera, and set up a shoot.

For about a year, I’d been taking pictures of strangers’ reactions to me in public for a series I called “Wait Watchers.” I was interested in capturing something I already knew firsthand: If the large women in historical art pieces were walking around today, they would be scorned and ridiculed.

So I found a crowded crosswalk farther down La Rambla, used my rangefinder camera to set the exposure and focus of where I would stand, and handed the camera to my assistant. I bought a cup of gelato and began eating it. I’ve learned I get more successful reactions if I am “doing” something.

In my peripheral vision, I saw a teen girl waiting for the signal to cross the street. As I stood there, eating my ice cream, I heard a repetitive “SLAP, SLAP, SLAP” of a hand on skin. I signaled to my assistant to shoot. It was only when I returned home to Memphis and got the film developed that I realized the sound was the girl hitting her belly as she watched me eat. She did this over and over. I have five frames of her with various facial expressions. I called the resulting image “Gelato.”

My struggle with my body started after I graduated high school. I played soccer my whole life, sometimes three teams at one time. I never thought about “exercising.” I just ran around, knocked people over and kicked the ball hard. When I started college, there was no more soccer and my weight ballooned from a size 7 to a size 14 in weeks.

Eventually, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism. Though I did go through phases of food restriction and over-exercise, I came to realize that I shouldn’t punish myself for something I can’t control. Self-criticism is a waste of time. I look worse with tons of make up and products in my hair. I am happy when I am not stressed — so I don’t stress.

That doesn’t mean the world is comfortable with how I look. Even though I’m a college professor, who works 12-hour days and eats healthy, even though I have none of the diseases constantly reported in the media as linked to obesity, I’m up against quite a few stereotypes as an overweight blond female artist. I’m constantly fighting strangers’ criticisms that I am lazy and slow-witted, or that I am an overly emotional slob.

I suspect that if I confronted these narrow-minded people, my words would have no effect. So, rather than using the attackers’ actions to beat myself up, I just prove them wrong. The camera gave me my voice.

The idea of the “Wait Watchers” series came one day when I was shooting on the bleachers in Times Square. I’d been doing a series of photographs in which I sought out public spaces where I’m most uncomfortable, like swimming pools and restaurants (I always feel like I’m not “allowed” to order fattening food).

Going through the film, I noticed an image with a man standing behind me. There he is, being photographed by a woman who appears to be quite beautiful, standing in the middle of the sensory assault that is Times Square. But at the moment the shutter is released, he is smirking at me. He clearly does not approve. This kind of moment had happened many times. Until that moment, I never thought I could capture it on film.

I embarked on a social experiment: to set up my camera in plain sight and document how the world reacted to me. To create my images, I seek out interesting compositions in public areas. My goal is to capture a wide range of social groups so I travel as much as I can. I’ve photographed in Spain, Peru, Chicago, New York and Memphis. My ideal settings have linear compositions or gendered references in signs in the landscape. I set up my camera in plain sight on a tripod or bench, or an assistant will take hundreds of photographs in several minutes. I then comb the images to see if I captured a reaction.

I do not know what the strangers are thinking when they look at me. But there is a Henri Cartier-Bresson moment when my action aligns with the composition, the shutter and their gaze that has a critical or questioning element. Even though they are in front of a camera, they feel they have anonymity because they are crossing behind me.

And I don’t get hurt when I look at the images. I feel like I am reversing the gaze back on to them to reveal their gaze. I’m fine with who I am and don’t need anyone’s approval to live my life. I only get angry when I hear someone comment about my weight and the image does not reflect the criticism. That’s frustrating: when I didn’t get the shot.

But since the project started getting media attention, I’ve received hundreds of emails from people thanking me. There are so many people in the world who feel they have the right – no, the obligation — to criticize someone for the way they look, and to be that recipient of those insults can feel so lonely. I got an email from a 15-year-old girl in Belgium who said my images made her “feel better and not care about what others think and live my life.” That made me proud. As for what the images mean, viewers may interpret the images as they see fit. I’m just trying to start a conversation.

What Will It Take for Us to Recognize That the Way We Live Could Be Destroying Life as We Know It?

Marty Kaplan, AlterNet — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:24:00 -0700

CO2 is at a level not seen in millions of years—if this happened in science fiction, the planet would pay attention.

Say goodnight, Earthlings.

That message — plus the slimmest of shots at an eleventh-hour reprieve — was announced to the people of the world last week.

When this happens in science fiction — 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is the classic — the planet pays attention. The flying saucer lands; an alien, in this case played by Michael Rennie, emerges; a final warning is issued: Stop it. If you don’t, you’re doomed.

Back then, the “it” was violence — the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear midnight. Last week, it was climate change — greenhouse gases, and the promise of ecological extinction.

“Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears,” ran the headline on the front page lead story in Saturday’s New York Times, with this sub-head: “CO2 at Level Not Seen in Millions of Years, Portending Major Climate Changes.”

A headline like that — millions of years? really? — normally turns up in comic books and superhero movies, not in the paper of record. In fiction, what usually comes next is a montage. At breakfast tables and on street corners, in souks and igloos, in the Oval Office and at the U.N., the shocking news galvanizes humanity into action.

In the real world, it was pretty much a one-day story.

What does it take to grab us by the eyeballs? Chris Christie’s waistline is guaranteed wall-to-wall coverage. The next Jodi Arias is waiting in CNN’s wings. The Benghazi circus will be in town at least through 2016. Sure, disaster porn is always good for ratings, but though a Superstorm Sandy may momentarily raise the specter of climate change, daily bulletins on the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere apparently aren’t Nielsen enough.

It’s not that people who know our planet’s hair is on fire aren’t trying to get our attention. The animated graph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth Science Research Lab showing how atmospheric carbon dioxide has changed over the last 800,000 years should be as horrifying as any computer-generated imagery Hollywood has to offer. Along with the news that we had hit the 400 ppm mark on the CO2 curve for the first time since the Pliocene epoch came scary quotes from scientist after scientist calling this our last chance before the point of no return. Unless we act, children born today will see temperatures rise irreversibly and sea levels rise catastrophically. Weather patterns will be disrupted, deserts and drought will spread and—in the words of Lord Stern, head of the U.K.’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment—“hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died ... [W]hen they try to migrate into new lands ... [they will be brought] into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth."

If graphs and quotes aren’t sexy enough to warrant a permanent place in the news, there are other ways to hang on to the spotlight. The Climate Reality Project’s website features 18 disturbing but entertaining videos about the price of carbon and our addiction to fossil fuels. “Do the Math,” the film that journalist Bill McKibben is using to spark his 350.org movement, has a dramatic narrative that’s compelling but not preachy. “The Years of Living Dangerously,” Showtime’s climate change documentary series now being shot, has producers who know a little something about how to capture audiences: James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Those efforts use media to engage an informed, activist public. Could such a citizenry make change? There’s plenty we can do in our personal lives to reduce our carbon footprint. Local and state policies in conservation, transportation, building design and urban planning can also curb greenhouse gas emissions. But without federal leadership like killing the Keystone XL pipeline and putting a tax on carbon, and without global commitments with teeth to enforce them, it’s hard to imagine a path back from the brink.

In the U.S., the same dysfunctions that prevent anything else useful from happening—the Senate filibuster, the gerrymandered House, the corrupt campaign finance system—also hold climate change mitigation hostage. So does denial. And though some denial can be attributed to hoax propaganda funded by the fossil fuel industry, some comes from an infantile strain in the American psyche that should not be mistaken for religious freedom.

Last week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) gave a floor speech urging his colleagues to “awaken to what carbon pollution is doing to our planet, to our oceans, to our seasons, to our storms. And I wonder, ‘Why is it that we are so comfortable asleep, when the warnings are so many and so real?’ What could beguile us away from wakefulness and duty? I was recently at a Senate meeting where I heard a member of our Senate community say, ‘God won’t allow us to ruin our planet.’ ... [That] statement ... is less an expression of religious thinking than it is of magical thinking.”

I admit that my fantasy that last week’s CO2 headlines might rally our planet like an alien invasion may make me as guilty of magical thinking as Senator God-Won’t-Allow-Us. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan was a big fan of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and as president he often referred to it. When he first met Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, he speculated that the threat of an alien invasion might get the Americans and the Soviets to cooperate. If Michael Rennie’s “Klaatu barada nikto” line is the father of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” maybe blowing past the 400 ppm barrier can be the progenitor of “Mr. Obama, cancel that pipeline.”

The following is a column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Read more of Marty Kaplan's columns here.

Feds Falsely Use Specter of Terrorism to Hunt Down Black Liberation Activist

Tom Hintze, AlterNet — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:10:00 -0700

Labeling Assata Shakur a terrorist is the latest attempt by the government to rewrite the history of radical activists.

Just 17 days after the Boston Marathon bombings, the largest spectacle of terrorism on US soil since 9/11, the FBI added the first woman to its list of “Most Wanted Terrorists” for a crime she is accused of committing more than 40 years ago. This is just the latest attempt by the federal government to rewrite the history of radical activists from the '60s and '70s and cover up the government's illegal actions aimed at stopping them.

Assata Shakur, known in court documents and wanted posters as Joanne Chesimard, was added to the list of Most Wanted Terrorists on May 2. Nearly eight years earlier, she was reclassified from fugitive to domestic terrorist under the Patriot Act in 2005. Shakur is only the second so-called domestic terrorist ever to be placed on the list; she joins Daniel Andreas San Diego, an animal rights activist, who was added in 2009. The state of New Jersey also announced that it would be contributing $1 million to her bounty, bringing the total for Assata Shakur’s capture to $2 million.

Since 1984, Shakur, a fugitive and political prisoner, has been living as a refugee, exiled in Cuba. She was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Today she might be just as famous for being Tupac Shakur’s godmother if she wasn’t being called a “top priority” by the FBI. But Assata Shakur belonged to one of the most important movements for democracy and racial justice in the 20th century, and for many people who dream of a better world, she is the apogee of hope. For the US government, though, she is the one who got away. Now, at the age of 66, Shakur may still be agitating with her words, but she cannot seriously beconsidered a national security threat.

It is an outrage and a shock to some, but for anyone who has been paying attention, it is par for the course. Since 9/11, the US government has operated with impunity, trampling civil rights, due process, and the legal claims of other sovereign nations. These two new escalations by the FBI and the state of New Jersey, repainting Shakur and other members of the black liberation movement as terrorists, is also nothing new. In fact, it is a logical extension of the repression these groups faced under COINTELPRO when they were active. Only now, it is being translated from the anachronistic language of containment into the present-day language of fear and securitization, in order to merge the narratives of older movements and newer ones, and to justify the repression against both.

Two Narratives of a Traffic Stop

There are two 40-year-old narratives underpinning this case: an official US government narrative that is open-and-shut, and another narrative that recognizes the history of repression faced by black radicals and the oppression of black communities.

Officially, Shakur’s status as a domestic terrorist stems from a shootout with police that took place on May 2, 1973. The shootout resulted in the deaths of a New Jersey state trooper and one of Shakur’s companions, Zayd Malik Shakur.

But according to the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), Assata Shakur had been pursued by state and federal authorities for several years before the incident in New Jersey because of her political affiliations and because she was a woman. “Prior to the shootout, Ms. Shakur was the subject of a nationwide hunt as part of an FBI campaign to tie her to every suspected Black Liberation Army action involving a woman. After her capture, Ms. Shakur was not charged with any of the crimes that prompted the dragnet,” the NLG states.

Assata Shakur, Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli were driving near East Brunswick when they were stopped by two New Jersey troopers for having a broken tail light. It is at this point that accounts of the incident diverge. According to theFBI, Assata Shakur murdered trooper Werner Foerster “execution-style,” in “cold-blood.” In the morass of conflicting accounts about the shootout, these facts are known for certain: Zayd Malik Shakur was killed, trooper Foerster was shot twice in the head with his own gun, and Assata Shakur sustained severe wounds in both her arms and one shoulder.

“The allegation that she was a cold-blooded killer is not supported by any of the forensic evidence,” said Shakur’s longtime attorney Lennox Hinds in an interview with Democracy Now!“If we look at the trial, we'll find that she was victimized, she was shot. She was shot in the back. The bullet exited and broke the clavicle in her shoulder. She could not raise a gun. She could not raise her hand to shoot. And she was shot while her hands were in the air.”

Following the shootout, Assata Shakur was tried for murder and more than a dozen different crimes. The NLG recalls “two bank robberies, the kidnapping of a Brooklyn heroin dealer, attempted murder of two police officers in Queens, and eight other felonies related to the turnpike shootout.” These indictments resulted in the following verdicts: “three trials resulted in acquittals, one in a hung jury, one in a mistrial, and one in a conviction. Three indictments were dismissed without trial.”

Despite two mistrials--one in 1973 and one in 1974--and despite the fact that Sundiata Acoli had already been convicted of the murder of Werner Foerster, Assata Shakur was found guilty of first-degree murder in 1977. The trial was full of constitutional violations, including a visit by a New Jersey state assembly member to the sequestered, all-white jury, urging them to convict her. After already serving four years in jail, she was sentenced to life in prison. In 1979, after spending two years in various prisons in New Jersey, members of the Black Liberation Army freed Shakur from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. She spent the next five years in hiding before fleeing to Cuba, where she wasgranted political asylum by 1984.

COINTELPRO

According to attorney Hinds, by renewing the invective against Shakur, the US government “is continuing the unrestrained abuse of power by which it attempted to destroy Assata Shakur and other black individuals and groups by surveillance, rumor, innuendo, eavesdropping, arrest and prosecution, incarceration, and murder throughout the '60s and '70s."

The litany of tactics that Hinds lists belongs to the playbook ofCOINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program of the FBI. The program was masterminded by J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau’s pre eminent founder. Origins of the COINTELPRO doctrine can be found in this declassified memo which outlines the scope of the FBI's war on black activists and radicals: “The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists, hatetype organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, members, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder."

Hinds points to the continued persecution of Assata Shakur as the continuation of COINTELPRO. But the FBI cannot continue to use that same playbook because it has been vilified in the public sphere and found to be largely illegal. Instead, it must pivot and switch to the contemporary language of repression. Label Shakur a terrorist. Make her one of the most wanted terrorists in the world.

This logic effectively covers up the existence of COINTELPRO and denies the murders, surveillance and false convictions of an entire generation of political dissidents. Many of those who experienced the might of this repression firsthand and could attest to it are now dead, and others, like Sundiata Acoli, are still in prison. Assata is the loose end the state desperately needs to tie up. Her existence and freedom link the FBI’s troubling past to its suspicious, opaque present. “Labeling Assata a terrorist and putting a bounty on her head,” says NLG executive director Heidi Bogoshian, “is a clear attempt by U.S. authorities to hide this chapter in history.”

Even worse, by further criminalizing Assata Shakur, the Justice Department under Obama is lifting up those older chapters of struggle and condemning them in the fearful language of the present, equating radicalism and militancy with terrorism. This campaign of slippery diction has condemned numerous environmental and political activists to lengthy prison terms under new state and federal anti-terrorism laws, and it is the preferred terminology used to entrap and indict Muslims at home and abroad.

Are we to look back at militant and radical labor struggles that gave us the eight-hour work day and call this the work of terrorists? Undoubtedly, this is the road we are going down.

Timing is Everything

“I believe that we have to look at this in the context of what has just happened in Boston,” Lennox Hinds told Amy Goodman. “I think that with the massacre that occurred there, the FBI and the state police are attempting to inflame the public opinion to characterize [Shakur] as a terrorist, because the acts that she was convicted of have nothing to do with terrorism.”

Hinds may be right with his suspicion. But as Trevor Aaronson points out at Mother Jones, the situation in Boston could have been prevented if the FBI had been investigating Tamerlan Tsarnaev more closely and not spending gross amounts of money to entrap and convict innocent Muslim men like Rezwan Ferdaus, who became the FBI’s target after they stopped trailing Tsarnaev in 2011. Rather than devoting valuable resources to apprehending a revolutionary, now in the twilight of her years, the FBI ought to focus its attention and budget on preventing serious attacks that put us all at risk. If there is another attack in the near future, we will be forced to ask: could it have been prevented if the FBI was paying attention where it should have been instead of pursuing Assata Shakur?

For the Next Generation of Activists

Unfortunately, this decision by the FBI is more than a bid to rewrite history. Angela Davis told Democracy Now! that “it seems to me that this act incorporates or reflects the very logic of terrorism,” Davis says. “I can’t help but think that it’s designed to frighten people who are involved in struggles today. Forty years ago seems like it was a long time ago. In the beginning of the 21st century, we’re still fighting around the very same issues — police violence, healthcare, education, people in prison.”

What message does this announcement send to activists who are in communities fighting police violence, stop-and-frisk, police murders like the killing of Kimani Gray in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn or the killing of Manuel Diaz in Anaheim? The persecution of any political activist impacts all political activists and creates a chilling effect.

Lennox Hinds points out that the decision to put Assata Shakur on the Most Wanted Terrorists list is irreversible, and as such, carries the weight of the US government’s support.“There is no way to appeal someone being put on the terrorist list,” he said. The only way to be taken off, according to the FBI’s website, is to be proven innocent in a court of law, or to be proven dead.

For Assata, it is too late to be proven innocent; she has already been wrongfully convicted. But if in the course of these new escalations we can clearly see the process by which language is being used to revise history and to manufacture terrorist threats, then maybe we can see our current moment for what it is: a time when actual threats to public safety are ignored, but a 66-year-old grandmother is considered a high-level threat.

AlterNet.org: Activism

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