AlterNet

Florida man told her it was an antibiotic.

John Andrew Welden is charged with the murder of a person who was never born.

As Tampa’s WFTS-TV news reports, Welden is facing first-degree murder charges for allegedly giving his pregnant girlfriend Remee Lee an abortion pill and telling her it was an antibiotic. Welden worked in his father’s Florida clinic, a “specialty infertility practice.” When Lee began bleeding and experiencing cramps, she went to her local hospital, where doctors informed her the container labeled as amoxicillin was in fact the labor-inducing Cytotec. The fetus died in utero. “I was never going to do anything but go full term with it,” she told reporters this week. “And he didn’t want me to.” It’s an appalling tale, which will once again force us to ponder what constitutes a human life — and when one has taken it.

Very different fetal-homicide laws are on the books in roughly 80 percent of American states. In Arizona, for example, the charge can apply toward “any stage of development” for a fetus, while Arkansas limits it to an “unborn child of 12 weeks or more gestation.” South Dakota stipulates the accused must have known, “or reasonably should have known, that a woman bearing an unborn child was pregnant.”

In Welden’s case, he’s being charged under the Protection of Unborn Children Act. His state has tough laws for killing the unborn that also include DUI manslaughter, vehicular homicide and willful killing. In Ohio, where kidnapping suspect Ariel Castro will stand trial, he faces possible charges of aggravated murder. Castro is accused of allegedly beating one of his reported victims until she miscarried the pregnancies she endured in captivity. Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty has said he will pursue “each act of aggravated murder” — and a conviction could lead to the death penalty.

And in Philadelphia, of course, Kermit Gosnell was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder for killing three infants — by severing their spinal cords – who were born live during the late-term abortions he provided. Pennsylvania law has a whole category of offenses, including first- and second-degree murder, for any unborn child “from fertilization until live birth.” What distinguishes the Gosnell case — and has often been lost in all the shouting about it — was that the murder charges were for babies, not fetuses. Yet the issue of what constitutes the taking a life is not always an easy one to discuss or decide.

As much as we need the law to be clear, the reality of life and death is often far more ambiguous. As Jon Hurdle and Trip Gabriel noted this week in the New York Times, much of the furor over cases like Gosnell’s is the question of “why a procedure done to a living baby outside the womb is murder, but destroying a fetus of similar gestation before delivery can be legal.” Remee Lee, meanwhile, was six weeks and five days pregnant when she lost her baby. Should taking a life that wouldn’t have been viable outside the womb carry the same consequences as killing an adult? Would the alleged crime be different if she’d been three months pregnant? Six months? Nine?

I believe that human life begins at conception. I believe that if you force a woman, either by violence or deception, to lose a fetus, you have taken a life. But I also shudder at the prospect of the anti-choice lobby exploiting revolting crimes to prevent women from access to their constitutional right to abortion. We have spent the last several years watching it happen, as abortion opponents have tried to leverage fetal-protection laws to chip away at choice. That’s why we need to continue to be vigilant in articulating the difference between a choice a woman makes and an act of violence against her body and her fetus, an act that robs her of that very freedom she is entitled to. We must be clear that being pro-choice is not tantamount to condoning repulsive, criminal behavior. Remee Lee told reporters this week that she’s grieving because she “dreams of becoming a mom.” And this, she says, “was my chance.”

 

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The Kevin who took a steak knife to his ex's throat is not the Kevin I know.

Here’s what the news reported: An area man murdered his former girlfriend in the upper-level apartment of his split-level home. He sat with her body for 20 to 40 minutes, then phoned the local police, claiming a complete mental breakdown. I don’t know what just happened, he said, but you need to come quick. He waited for police on the sidewalk with his hands behind his head, and officers lowered him into their squad car just past dawn without incident.

What they did not say is this: I was his close friend. He walked me home before it happened. Kevin Schaeffer liked pizza and history and music, and most especially the band Dr. Dog. He wanted to move away — to Nashville, to San Francisco — and in every memory I have of him, he wears a purple sweat shirt, one I’m not certain he even owned. He was president of the college radio station, a Dean’s Honors student, and a history major who also liked writing. He could draw a very convincing Rastafarian. The year prior, he’d attempted suicide by lining a bathtub with electronics, but returned to our college campus just five days later, where we assumed he was receiving treatment. He was not receiving treatment. He had been suffering from long-term, severe depression and suicidal ideation for over a year on the night he killed her, and yet our conversation was pleasant: We talked that night about the Badlands, canine rain boots, an upcoming potluck, a tie-dyed cake. I’d learned how to do it online, I told him — it just involved food dye and a little patience.

“That sounds amazing,” he said, nodding. “I’d eat that cake for sure.”

It was April of 2009, just four weeks before our graduation at Gettysburg College, and we were just 22. I never thought I’d know a murderer. Certainly Kevin never thought he’d be one. My biggest concern that night was packing: how in the world I’d fit a swivel chair into the back of my Toyota Camry.

“That’s easy,” Kevin had told me. “You just put it in on a diagonal.”

Then 12 hours passed, and I sat in my living room, watching “The Price Is Right” in my pajamas, while blocks north, police combed through Kevin’s apartment, stripped him of his possessions, and told him to look into the camera.

“Straight ahead,” they might have said, and then they pressed his inky finger to a pad of paper.

* * *

Kevin and I had been friends at that point for nearly four years, since the first week of freshmen year. Gettysburg College was a private school of just over 2,000 students, and it sat surrounded by the historic battlefields that had once served as the turning point of the Civil War. Forty-six thousand men died on the fields surrounding our private campus, but we ever only knew the college green, the library, an Irish bar, a Dairy Queen. That evening, we’d gone for drinks at a bar that had once been used as a makeshift hospital, but I only joked about the bodies: how undoubtedly their blood once soaked and permeated into the floors.

To me it was funny: the subtext of violence in everything. I couldn’t see the bodies or the men strapped to leather gurneys. I couldn’t hear their cries or the gunfire or the hulking cannons. I ordered a Bay Breeze with extra limes, and then Kevin walked me home.

So when the newspapers announced what happened, I sat down and wrote a letter. He was my friend and was now in prison; everything else seemed arbitrary.

I can’t make sense of what you did,I wrote. I will try to understand, but I obviously wish this hadn’t happened.

This was all I could say — the only things I knew with absolute certainty I would never regret. I knew even then that details might emerge even before Kevin received my letter, and so to say that I’d be there for him, or that I trusted it’d been a mistake — there seemed a risk in each admission.

It took 18 months for defense and prosecuting attorneys to finalize their case, and all the while, I wrote him monthly: a careful letter detailing my life. When finally the lawyers were ready to present their arguments, they chose to settle for a plea bargain, instead. Kevin was sentenced to 27 to 50 years in a maximum-security prison, but this in lieu of an arduous trial, one that would be undoubtedly difficult for everyone involved. He was not obligated to receive mental health treatment, not required to ever talk about what happened. and because there was never a trial, the only information I’ll ever have is what I first heard on the evening news.

* * *

I still write Kevin once a month. I tell him about everything: how I visited the Iowa State Fair, for example, or how I saw an astronaut carved from butter. How I’d eaten the state’s largest pork tenderloin and half of the 50 food items served on sticks. And I think — every time — about asking: What happened that night and how in the world could it?

But instead I say nothing, because I fear I am not equipped. I have no idea how to handle his mental illness, which I know is still ongoing, because every few months — along with his letter — he includes a new graphic story: a woman stabs a man in the neck, or blood oozes into a loaf of bread. He is trying — the best he can — to work through whatever happened, but there are no professionals assisting him along the way, no trained specialists to help him get better. He’ll spend nearly his whole life in prison, safe from society but never himself.

It is tempting — considering recent events — to jump to a grandiose conclusion, to assert what I have learned, to say that my friendship with Kevin Schaeffer has taught me everything, including this world. That in knowing him, I know myself. But the truth is, I’ve learned nothing, and I’m not certain I ever will, except that our society is one of indifference and apathy for the mentally ill. Through Kevin, I’ve learned the facts: that the rate of mental illness in inmates is five times that of the general population, that it’s rising with every year, that we put the sick in prisons because we don’t know what else to do. And in the past three years alone, $2.2 billion has been cut from state mental-health budgets.

“Wishing that mental illness would not exist has led our policymakers to shape a healthcare system as if it did not exist,” announced Paul Appelbaum, president of the American Psychiatric Association, in his inaugural address.

I think even about the media coverage, how the footage is always sensational: the body, the blood, the mother, how she grieves deep into her husband in some suburban, fenced-in yard.

Meanwhile, they keep appearing: I mean here, of course, Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Jared Loughner, the Tsarnaev brothers. We hate these men because it’s easy, but we never consider what remains difficult: that mental illness is real and pressing, that if left untreated, it results in violence. That rather than fear or ignore the ill, we should work for treatment and a resolution.

I feel like an animal, Kevin wrote me once. I feel locked inside a cage.

* * *

This month marked the four-year anniversary of all that happened, and still I wait for a letter that comes monthly. The envelopes are always stamped to indicate they originated in a prison, and when I stand in my foyer and hold them, I think, Friend. I don’t think, Crime.

It seems to me someone should be listening to him, even if that person is only me.

So I read with attention about each new cellmate, each new book, each new class, or the radio Kevin’s finally saving for so that he can again listen to music.

A friend or family member asks me what he was like, and it’s all I can do to just be honest. “He was one of my best friends,” I say. “He was normal. He made great salsa.”

The Kevin I know is not the Kevin anyone imagines. They know only the man in a jumpsuit, his hands shackled to his waist. We crave for things to be simple — a case of a bad man who was bad — but Kevin was my friend, and that night, he walked me home. He is both the man I remember and the one who now lives in prison. Our friendship isn’t one documented by the cameras, not by the news anchors or their scripts. Above all, I know this: It is not a switch one can simply turn off.

Write back, Kevin writes, and each month, I always do.

 

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There’s no safe level of exposure to this dangerous toxin still lurking in millions of homes, but that truth is consistently under attack from industry-funded public relations excecutives.

 

From BillMoyers.com: 

INTRO:Science can be a battleground — witness the politics of climate change, the teaching of evolution, the uncharted terrain of genetic modification and stem cell research, among other contentious issues. But when industries release untested chemicals into our environment — putting profits before public health — our children are the first to suffer. Nowhere is this more troubling than in the ongoing story of lead poisoning.

Bill talks with David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, public health historians who’ve been taking on the chemical industry for years — writing about the hazards of industrial pollution and the neglect of worker safety — despite industry efforts to undermine them. Their latest book, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children, is the culmination of 20 years of research. Markowitz and Rosner warn that, for young children, there’s no safe level of exposure to this dangerous toxin still lurking in millions of homes.

The authors discuss thwarted efforts to hold the lead industry accountable, failed attempts to find cheap solutions, and the cost to the future of our children. As long as the chemical industry and its powerful lobbies prevail in blocking efforts to reform outdated laws, Markowitz and Rosner say, we will continue to float in a soup of toxins — inhaling, drinking, and absorbing chemicals that we may learn, years later, have put us all in harm’s way.

***

 

BILL MOYERS: At the end of a week that reminded us to be ever vigilant about the dangers of government overreaching its authority, whether by the long arm of the IRS or the Justice Department, let’s pause to think about another threat, from too much private power over public policy.

All too often, instead of acting as a brake, government becomes the enabler of corporate power and greed, undermining the very rules and regulations intended to keep us safe.

Think of inadequate inspections of food and those infections which kill 3,000 Americans each year and make many millions sick. Think of the 85,000 industrial chemicals available today. Only a handful have been tested for safety. Think of the explosion of perhaps as much as half a million pounds of ammonium nitrate in that Texas fertilizer plant. People can die when government winks at bad corporate practices.

As long as there are insufficient checks and balances on big business and its powerful lobbies, you and I are at their mercy. Which is why their ability to buy off public officials is an assault on democracy and a threat to our lives and health. Keep that in mind as I introduce you to David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz.

Some years ago, their book, Deceit and Denial, told how the chemical industry tried to conceal the truth about untested and unregulated chemicals in our food, water, and air. Twenty companies responded with a vicious campaign to smear their reputations. That proved hard to do, actually, impossible.

Gerald Markowitz is a distinguished professor of history at both John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. David Rosner is co-director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University where he also teaches science and history.

This is their new book, which revisits a chemical menace you might have thought was behind us, but isn’t: Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children.

BILL MOYERS: Gerald Markowitz, David Rosner, welcome.

DAVID ROSNER: Thank you.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Thank you.

BILL MOYERS: Your book concludes that after all these years, lead is still a problem.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Absolutely. You know, in some ways the story of lead is a great success. We’ve reduced the amount of lead in children's blood and we've gotten lead out of gasoline and we've gotten lead out of paint. But there are still children who have too much lead in their blood. And it is endangering their life chances, endangering their futures.

BILL MOYERS: Does it kill?

DAVID ROSNER: It doesn't kill anymore. It used to send kids into convulsions, into comas and into paroxysms and ultimately killed them up until the 1980s. But we've gotten lead levels down to the point where we're now discovering new, even in some sense, more troubling problems.

BILL MOYERS: What's the most important thing you've discovered about lead since we last talked?

DAVID ROSNER: Well, that in what we would once have considered miniscule amounts lead in children can cause neurological damage, causes behavioral problems, attention deficit disorders, dyslexia. Studies show that children who are exposed in utero can have permanent neurological changes that put them at risk later in life for learning disabilities that lead to failure in school and IQ loss. There are a whole series of problems that we never even thought about in the old days, so to speak.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: It's shocking that we know that children can be prevented from any kind of lead poisoning if they are, live in a home that is lead free. And this is no longer, you know, a priority of the country. We still have many homes millions of homes that contain lead that are endangering our children.

BILL MOYERS: Is it the cost of getting rid of the lead from homes that are already established and we're living in, is that the main barrier?

DAVID ROSNER: For some it is. But the history of public health, and that's what we are, historians, is rife with examples of decisions that are very costly that we decided are necessary for the population as a whole.

But somehow because we have in some sense accepted a definition of what the problem is and who the victims are and we've devalued their lives, we decided not to address this issue because it's quote, “too costly.”

GERALD MARKOWITZ: We really made a morally bankrupt calculation that it is less costly to endanger the health and futures of our children rather than to protect them by paying to remove lead from their homes.

DAVID ROSNER: The message really should be is we need to really think of lead as one symbol, one symptom of this much larger problem of the pollution of our children, pollution of their lives, the pollution of all of us from a whole host of toxic materials that we are, we've grown accustomed to using and tend to put out of our consciousness.

BILL MOYERS: When I first met you, people were saying, scientists were saying, that the smaller the dose of lead, the exposure to lead, the safer it would be.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Scientists now say that it is very likely there is no safe level of lead, that any amount of lead in a child's body, in a child's blood, you know, causes a variety of neurological and intellectual problems. So this is really a sea-change in our understanding of what, the amount of a toxin that causes a problem for children.

DAVID ROSNER: We no longer have children convulsing and going into comas. In other parts of the world they still are from lead exposures. In Africa, in Nigeria, children still are exposed to huge amounts of lead from a variety of sources. And a recent article indicates that we're still selling lead paint, for example, to other countries despite the fact that we in this country no longer use it on our walls. But if you look at where lead poisoning is most prevalent, when you look at the communities that are most affected by lead they're usually communities, poor communities, working class communities, parts of the cities that are more run down because the lead that is dangerous is the lead that comes off of walls of old buildings. And walls of old buildings that are not maintained give off more lead than walls of old buildings that have been recently renovated. It's hard to believe how much lead there is in an old home. I mean, we often think of paint as just a lot of liquid with a little bit of color. But in fact, when you looked at lead paint and you lifted it in your grandfather's garage or, you know, my grandfather's garage, it was very, very heavy. And that's because about, in that can of paint there was 15 pounds of lead. And that was being painted on walls, three coats on each wall, every five to ten years, whatever the renovation took. We were putting literally hundreds and hundreds of pounds of lead, a deadly toxin at that point, that a small fingernail's worth could actually cause convulsions, into the children's environment.

BILL MOYERS: Well, there were ads actually promoting lead paint as the right paint for your home.

DAVID ROSNER: They said that lead paint was a friend of the child and that it could be spread on any surface and it could be fun to do. And they showed these ads in which children are painting their toys, painting their cabinets, painting their walls, painting their furniture with a poison. At the same time when all these cases are appearing in the medical press about lead poisoned children, at the same time when in their own internal documents they're saying, we have these examples, we have, we're being attacked because children and babies are getting poisoned by lead on their cribs.

And so you see this kind of progression of this problem from the 1930s when it once killed children and sent them into comas straight through the early 2000s and now when the CDC says there are a half million children, I mean half million children at risk, a half million children with elevated blood lead levels. This would be a national epidemic, I mean, if this were meningitis, if this were polio. I mean, could you imagine the reaction of the society?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: And the industry said over 50 years ago that this was an insoluble problem, it was a problem of, caused by slums, it was a problem caused by who they called uneducable parents. And so that they washed their hands of the problem and they have still washed their hands of the problem. Parents have played, excuse me, paid the cost of lead poisoning. Landlords have even paid the cost of lead poisoning. The government has paid the cost of lead poisoning. The industry has not paid to get that lead off the walls so future generations of children can be protected.

BILL MOYERS: What your critics say is, look, it's like gasoline in cars. We didn't intend harmful effects to come from a product that was fueling America's economy. We found out later and we're trying to cut back on emissions.

This applies as well to lead and other toxins in our environment. Nobody intended it, it proved to be a consequence of, as even you say in here, the enormous amount of material we've taken out of the earth and turned into the engine of our prosperity.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Well, unfortunately they didn't give them the information about the dangers of lead that they had. They knew that lead was killing children in the 1930s. They knew that researchers were uncovering lead and they were fighting those, the diagnoses of lead poisoning in children. They, even into the 1970s and '80s, they went after researchers like Herbert Needleman who were uncovering the low levels of lead that were damaging children. They were not innocent purveyors of a product. They were actively involved in the political dialog attempting to increase their profits at the expense of public health.

BILL MOYERS: I interviewed Herbert Needleman some years ago for a documentary on Kids and Chemicals. Let's take a look.

BILL MOYERS in Kids and Chemicals: In the late 1970s Dr. Needleman studied the baby teeth of healthy schoolchildren in two Boston suburbs […]

DR. HERBERT NEEDLEMAN in Kids and Chemicals: When we looked at the data, we found that children who had high lead in their teeth, but who had never been identified as having any problems with lead, had lower IQ scores, poorer language function, and poorer attention.

BILL MOYERS in Kids and Chemicals: It was a stunning discovery, and no one knew it better than the lead industry. Leaded gasoline was the single greatest source of lead exposure, and as a result of Needleman’s work the Environmental Protection Agency sped up efforts to ban it. The lead industry fought back, denying Needleman’s science.

JEROME COLE in Kids and Chemicals: Lead has been used in gasoline for over 60 years. There’s simply no evidence that anyone in the general public has ever been harmed by this usage […]

DR. PHILIP LANDRIGAN in Kids and Chemicals: The lead industry attacked it viciously and they attacked Dr. Needleman himself. They accused him of scientific misconduct and they actually filed charges against him at his university and at the National Institutes of Health.

DR. HERBERT NEEDLEMAN in Kids and Chemicals: It’s like a death sentence. If you’re found guilty of scientific misconduct you’re out of business; your reputation is ruined; you’re through.[…]

BILL MOYERS in Kids and Chemicals: The assault went on for three years. For three years, Dr. Needleman stood his ground.

DR. PHILIP LANDRIGAN in Kids and Chemicals: Those were tough years in Dr. Needleman’s life. Eventually those charges were shown to be baseless and the people that brought them forward who had portrayed themselves as neutral scientists were, in fact, revealed as consultants to the lead industry. It took several years for the truth to out. But he triumphed.

DR. HERBERT NEEDLEMAN in Kids and Chemicals: I knew I was right. I mean, I knew that the work was good. I knew that my colleagues who worked with me on it were honest people. But I realized that science is not always the polite intellectual activity that it appears to be; that environmental science sometimes becomes something closer to warfare.

BILL MOYERS: So that's why you called this Lead Wars, I assume?

DAVID ROSNER: That's right.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Yes.

DAVID ROSNER: That's where the title comes from. This is one of the, you know, tactics of this industry, of these industries to essentially control the regulators, to find ways of both undermining, in Herb Needleman's case, the integrity or the scientific integrity of the researcher by trying to attack his personality or his research, his data, but also trying to find ways of getting the regulatory agencies in government to see anyone who in any way cast doubt on their product as biased as opposed to a neutral observer. But it wasn't only lead. The more industries we look at, the more like other industries the lead story is.

BILL MOYERS: How so?

DAVID ROSNER: Well, you look at the asbestos story. Our homes are still, you know, covered with asbestos. It's on, in old homes, it's on the shingles that, you know, we use, it's in the floor coverings that, the vinyl that we use, it’s on the roofs. It's on our boil, older boilers still, but when you look at the history of asbestos the knowledge about that product goes back literally decades and decades and decades.

Then you look at the silica industry, the, when you look at the vinyl chloride industry, when you look at the PCB story. And the same unfortunate, the same unfolding of, what can you say but corporate greed.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: And in addition to the corporate greed there is their war on science. The attacks on global warming. There is a war on bisphenol A, which is in a wide variety of products, it is virtually in every human being in the United States--

BILL MOYERS: What is it?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: It is basically an ingredient in plastic that is in the linings of cans, it's even in receipts that we get every day from a clerk at a store, the credit card receipt. And we take that and that has bisphenol A on it. And we end up absorbing that.

There's been a tremendous amount of research that shows that it is an endocrine disruptor, that it causes a disruption of the endocrine system that can affect reproduction, that can affect development of the fetus. But it's also a carcinogen. And so this is a real problem that the industry has been fighting to cast doubt on really amazing science that has been done by a wide variety of people.

BILL MOYERS: Just this April California's Environmental Protection Agency put it on its toxins list. The American Chemistry Council is suing California to keep this off of that list of dangerous substances.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: And they are supporting research that, as David said creates doubt about the independent scientists who are finding these variety of subtle and not so subtle effects. And they are determined, as they did, as we talked about in tobacco, in global warming, in lead, in asbestos, to make people not be convinced. And if they're not convinced, if they have a question in their mind, then they can continue to sell their chemical.

BILL MOYERS: You two have been yourselves the subject of harassment, legal suits, attacks, efforts to discredit you, right?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Absolutely.

DAVID ROSNER: There was an article in a legal journal that kind of warned us about what was going to happen. It talked about the title of our book--

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Which was Deadly Dust.

DAVID ROSNER: --which was called Deadly Dust. And it said, you know, we could let Rosner and Markowitz play by themselves in their own little play yard of historians, but they, their book has appeared in lawsuits against the industry. And it has become the dominant narrative or it's becoming the dominant narrative of how silicosis is understood. Therefore we have to do something about them. They didn't quite say it in those words, but that was the implication.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Well, they said, you know, be an academic and talk only to academics. But when you talk to the public that's dangerous.

DAVID ROSNER: And then very shortly afterwards we found Deceit and Denial, the next book we did came under enormous attack. They actually subpoenaed the press, they subpoenaed the foundation that supported us, the Milbank Foundation.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: They subpoenaed the peer reviewers of the book for a university press.

DAVID ROSNER: And then they hired a historian to call us unethical, lousy historians, to attack minor footnotes in the book that weren't wrong, but he claimed were wrong. It was quite an attack. And I think the biggest thing they do, though, is try to introduce doubt. One of the issues that they constantly are raising is you don't have definitive, you don't have definitive proof that in 60 years, for example, children might develop cancer from exposure to bisphenol A, right. You don't have the long term studies that we think are really essential.

But you introduce doubt about the data and then you find other people to introduce studies that raise questions about it. So you introduce, it's really the production of uncertainty. Produce uncertainty about the issue and we as an industry have no obligation to prevent disease. And it's completely antithetical to everything that public health could, public health's supposed to be about preventing disease and you always work on imperfect data. You never have the long term 60-year study that tells you you're going to have damage 60 years from now. So that's one of the tactics, it's just to keep saying there's a question, there's a question.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: And to attack people like Herbert Needleman, and to create the kind of uncertainty that gives parents pause. Should I act or should I not act? And that is probably the, as David says, the most dangerous thing they do.

BILL MOYERS: But it's consistent with what you have learned as historians this industry and others have done over the years to whistleblowers, to truth tellers, to neutral scientists and journalists who are just simply trying to report what the public should know.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: But if you can't contest the message then you go after the messenger. But think about all the younger academics who are deciding what they're going to study, what they're going to work on. And for those people it is a real decision. Are they going to go up against powerful industries or are they going to do something safe? And our fear is that more and more younger scholars and younger scientists will end up doing something safe rather than something that could really make a difference in the public arena.

BILL MOYERS: Both of you were witnesses in that big case in Rhode Island. Can you summarize that and what happened?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Well, this was the longest civil trial in Rhode Island history, or at least up to that point. And it was a remarkable effort by the attorney general of the state of Rhode Island to prevent future damages for lead’s harm to the children of Rhode Island. It was really a public health lawsuit, an amazing public health lawsuit.

BILL MOYERS: As I understand it Senator Whitehouse whom I have met had this problem before he was a senator. He had inadvertently exposed his own children to lead when he renovated his house. And then he became attorney general and brought this suit to try to hold the industry accountable.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: It took, unfortunately, his personal tragedy to get him to take this extraordinarily important action. And we were asked to testify in that case to provide the historical evidence of what the lead industry knew about the dangers and what did they do with that knowledge, which basically was to deny that there was a problem, to say that this was a public relations problem for them rather than a public health problem.

Our documents showed that they had been, they'd known about what they were creating, they'd known that children would be poisoned, they were discussing children dying as early as the 1920s and '30s, and yet they had created this huge environmental mess of millions and millions of pounds on the walls of Rhode Island, all of which was waiting to poison future generations.

DAVID ROSNER: And that they had done nothing about it, they continued to market. And that really, I think, enraged the jury.

GERALD MARKOWITZ And we were thrilled, just thrilled when at the end of this trial the jury came back and for the first time in lead industry lawsuits they held three lead companies responsible for cleaning up the mess, in the form of lead paint on the walls of houses throughout Rhode Island.

BILL MOYERS: So the jury said the industry has to clean up and pay for it?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: For the first time?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: First time.

DAVID ROSNER: This was the high point of our professional careers, the idea that we could use history and we could use the legal system really prevent disease for the future, not just pay back for the damages already done that were irreversible to children, but to actually prevent future generations. This was a suit that actually was going to demand somewhere between $1 billion and $4 billion from the companies to clean up the mess they had created. The low point of our lives, our professional lives, came two years later when the Supreme Court in Rhode Island overturned the decision.

BILL MOYERS: And what was the basis for them taking it back?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Basically, they said that the lawsuit was filed under the wrong law, that it was filed under public nuisance law rather than under liability law.

DAVID ROSNER: What's interesting now is that there's another suit coming up in California. And there was fear that the California suit would not go forward because they thought the precedent of the Rhode Island Supreme Court denying the legitimacy of the suit would undermine that case. The Court in California rejected the arguments of the Supreme Court in Rhode Island. The Supreme Court of Rhode Island had said this can't go under, there is no standing in future generations to get damages from these companies because they haven't been damaged yet. Until the kids are damaged you can't actually sue. And California has said that absolutely, public health law is all based upon preventing disease. All regulations are in order to prevent future damage, therefore it can go forward in California. So we're quite excited because in June this court is, this case is going to be heard by a California jury.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me about the Baltimore case that you write about.

DAVID ROSNER: In the 1980s, researchers at Hopkins wanted to find a way of remedying the conditions of Baltimore's housing, which lead was all over the place. And they were trying to find a way of doing it cheaply. So what they did is they set up three kinds of housing, one of which has been renovated to $1,650 worth of renovation, another to $3,500 and the last to $7,000 worth of renovation.

And then they recruited mothers, young mothers with children between the ages of six months to five years to live in these different houses, knowing that each house had lead exposures, but that if they could find which was the cheapest and which was the most effective way of lowering the blood lead level, not actually eliminating lead but lowering it a little bit.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: And perhaps the most troubling part of the experiment was that we've seen the consent forms and the consent forms do not tell parents that living in these homes may cause their children to be lead poisoned.

And as a result they ended up exposing 100 kids to less than fully abated homes expecting that most of those blood lead levels of those children would go down. And in fact, for most of the children their blood lead levels did go down. But some of the children, their blood lead levels went up.

DAVID ROSNER: What the court says is they were using children as human guinea pigs, as canaries in the mine so to speak, they were using them to measure the effectiveness of each one of their methods of abating lead. You know, this is young women, single mothers by and large with children, young children. And--

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Overwhelmingly African American.

DAVID ROSNER: And this is the, one of the most prestigious medical institutions in the country, Johns Hopkins.

BILL MOYERS: Weren't they trying to figure out how little could be spent to protect children in the short term? And wasn't that the wrong question altogether, don’t we need to solve these problem for the long run?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Absolutely. And the lead researchers understood that the only way to solve the problem of lead poisoning in children was to get rid of all the lead from the walls. But they didn't think that there would be the political will to do that.

BILL MOYERS: Why don't we have that political will?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Basically the industry has bought that political system.

DAVID ROSNER: For the past 40 years really we've been living under this set of assumptions about the scarcity in our society, how we can't afford anything and how government can't do anything. Government is the problem, not the answer. That's diametrically opposed to virtually all principles of course of public health which sees government as something that really could do something good. And but we've been taught over and over again that it's too expensive and government is the problem. And therefore we're incapacitated.

BILL MOYERS: With millions, billions of dollars at stake in profits aren't they following a kind of logic of capitalism?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: They absolutely are following the logic of capitalism. But we are all research subjects in a grand experiment where we are being exposed to literally thousands of chemicals that we have no data about. And do we want to know in ten, 20, 30 years that these are going to be either making us gravely ill or killing us?

Do we want our grandchildren to be exposed to this toxic soup of chemicals and only to find out when they're in their 30s and 40s that this is endangering their lives? And there really is a way that we can handle that problem. There is legislation in Congress now, the “Safe Chemicals Act,” which would require the EPA to test all existing and, existing chemicals and the 700 chemicals that are introduced every year and to not allow those that are dangerous to continue.

BILL MOYERS: But Jerry, you know that, as you write in here about the politics of science, that the industry went to Congress in 2005 and got fracking, even before it had come to full blossom, got fracking exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act. And you think, and you have hope for any kind of legislation such as you just described?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Well, I have hope that there were actually 29 senators who were willing to cosponsor this piece of legislation, but no, I don't have hope that it's going to pass. I think only if environmental groups all around the country, and there are hundreds of environmental groups around the country, really mobilize a mass movement to demand that Congress protect our health, we really care about our health, but we are not doing the political mobilizing that is necessary in order to put that caring about health into legislative action.

BILL MOYERS: So how is the politics of science affecting the fate of America's children?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: You know, in our lifetime we have seen the abandonment of the commitment to try to help those who are most vulnerable in our society. And instead of that commitment today we ask how much does it cost. And by that we mean how many dollars does it cost. We don't ask what does it cost in terms of the health of our children, what does it cost in terms of the futures of our children and of our society.

 

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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.”  Related Stories

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The Koch bros are rumored to be possible bidders for the Tribune company and its large regional papers including the LA Times ... their grandfather Harry Koch would be proud.

This article first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation.

There’s a rumor going around that the Koch brothers are interested in buying up the Tribune Company, which includes the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun… And there’s a lot of speculation about what would happen if they did.

Some worry, and rightly so, that the Kochs—whose combined wealth makes them the biggest billionaires on the planet—would integrate the Tribune Co. with the rest of their free-market thinktank-industrial complex, and turn its newly acquired news media property into a gigantic business propaganda machine. Half the reporters at the Los Angeles Times even took a vote saying they’d quit if the Kochs bought the paper.

Others are positively enthusiastic about the possible takeover. Slate’s Matthew Yglesias, for one, argued that "America would be better off for it" because the Kochs would spent lots of money building a better "conservative media product."

But while the country’s media commentators busy themselves trying to predict what Koch ownership would mean for newspapers, many of them are overlooking one important fact: We already know. Because the Koch family has a long history of newspaper ownership.

The Kochs and newspapers go waaay back, right back to their grandfather Harry Koch (yep, that’s a real name), who emigrated to America from the Netherlands in 1888 and bought a newspaper in a podunk railroad town in North Texas called Quanah. With the power of the press behind him, ol' Harry Koch went on to make a fortune for himself and his brood by aggressively rah-rahing on behalf of railroad and banking interests, fighting organized labor and savaging New Deal programs.

Not much is known is known about Harry Koch. Charles and David Koch don’t like to talk about him much. And when they do talk about Grandpa Harry, they don’t tell the truth. Like a lot of billionaires, they want the public to think they're self-made, that they came from humble beginnings, and so they portray their grandpa as if he was a po' immigrant who lived on the edge of poverty, barely scratching out an existence from his tiny newspaper business.

"The whole area was very poor and people didn’t have the money to pay for their subscriptions. So they would pay in produce or chickens or eggs," Charles Koch recalled.

When I travelled to Quanah for the Texas Observer in 2011 to investigate the life of Harry Koch, and to understand the environment that spawned the most powerful brother-oligarchs of our time, I discovered that the truth is much more interesting than Charles' tale. Quanah, Texas, is the world as Harry Koch made it, through his newspapers and railroad. His sons have been remarkably true to the Darwinian-capitalist views Harry ceaselessly proclaimed in his newspaper. So, if you want to know what the Koch brothers have in mind for our country, start by taking a look at the newspaper that their Grandpa Harry Koch ran.

***

Harry Koch was born in Holland in 1867 into a wealthy family that owned farmland, ran a linseed oil mill and operated a shipping business that ran sailboats between his seaside hometown of Workum, and Amsterdam. Harry Koch's mother died when he was a child, and his father remarried a much younger woman—the daughter of a local banker—and had seven new kids with her.

Life at home didn’t satisfy young Harry. As soon as he turned 21, he emigrated to the United States, hoping to get in on the railroad boom of the late 19th C.

Real estate speculation was a major part of the railroad racket. Railroad companies had acquired huge tracts of public land for free by government grant, and needed to sell it off as quickly and as profitably as possible. That meant railroads were on the constant lookout for sympathetic newspaper publishers to help promote and sell the countless boom towns that had been planned around railroad platforms all across the nation. The railroad town newspaper publishers' job was to hype up local real estate booms and land grabs, providing an opportunity for railroads to dump their properties on gullible settlers at inflated prices

Enter: Harry Koch.

After bouncing around and learning the ropes of the newspaper business, Harry settled in the tiny frontier town of Quanah up near the panhandle, bought two of the town’s newspapers, merged them into the Quanah Tribune-Chief, and quickly established himself as the region’s most ambitious railroad booster.

When Harry moved to Quanah, the town barely existed. There was a cluster of wooden shacks, a crude railroad platform and a whole lot of sunbaked dirt — all of it owned by the Fort Worth and Denver Railway Company. The company had created Quanah just a few years earlier, and wanted to sell as much land in the area as quickly as possible.

Harry’s job was simple: sell Quanah land to as many suckers as he could con. So he dutifully filled his newspaper with wild stories of prosperity, boasting about Quanah’s fertile soil, and the fine qualities of its inhabitants, and the curative properties of the climate.

It wasn’t an easy sell. In the 1890s, North Texas was hit by a massive crop failure, a severe economic depression and low commodity prices, a triple hit that devastated the region and sent many farmers looking for greener pastures. But that didn’t faze Grandpa Harry Koch, who acted like nothing bad had happened, and went about his business hard-selling the superb productivity of the parched, dead land: "Crop failures have been unknown in this valley for twenty years," Grandpa Koch declared in his paper.

He’d print anything, so long as it lured settlers with some loose change in their pockets.

Harry Koch ran his newspaper, the Tribune-Chief like an unofficial sales and advertising division of the Fort Worth and Denver Railway Company, working on commission and kickbacks. Records show that the Ft. Worth-Denver Railway paid Harry directly for his "advertising services." Sometimes the railroad remunerated him in land instead of cash, allowing him to cash in on a real estate bubble that he was helping to inflate. The more he hard-sold the riches of Quanah, the more cash he pocketed.

Grandpa Koch worked hard, and he was credited with helping turn the town into a major regional transportation hub with three different railroad lines going through it. It didn't hurt that he got rich in the process.

Over time, Harry took an increasingly active role in regional development, investing in local businesses and branching out into oil exploration. In 1910, he finally hit the big time: Harry Koch became the founding director, and one of the biggest shareholders, of a local railroad company, the Quanah, Acme & Pacific, which covered a short spur through a handful of towns in North Texas.

After two decades of promoting other people’s railroads, Harry got in on the railroad action himself — and all the perks that went along with it, including the easy money railroads made by bribing and extorting towns desperate to be connected to the railway line. And of course, Harry Koch's Tribune-Chief went all out in the promotional department, printing full-page advertisements for company shares and land in towns created and owned by Koch’s railroad.

Harry Koch went from being a booster to a small time railroad baron, an Ayn Rand hero of the Texas scrub. It was a huge step up in prestige and wealth, and he owed his rise to the way he used his newspaper business.

But Harry Koch wasn’t just about making money for himself. Harry saw himself as a civic-minded publisher who worked for the greater good of his community. He used his paper to educate his readers about complex political, economic, religious and cultural matters. And given that railroad workers were constantly striking for better pay, and farmers in the Populist movement agitated for nationalizing the railroads, regulating Wall Street and breaking up monopolies, the people of Texas were in dire need of the sort of proper education about the free-market facts, that Grandpa Harry Koch heroically provided.

Here are some of Grandpa Harry Koch's editorial highlights:

On unions & strikes:

Harry Koch was no friend of unionized labor. In 1897, not long after he moved to Quanah, Harry penned an impassioned editorial expressing his outrage over the way he was treated by the street railway workers of Galveston, Texas, who decided to strike on the day the National Editorial Association came to town for its annual convention, thereby rudely interrupting a procession of lavish dinners, boozing and partying. Harry was there, and described how the respectable guests were put in the awful predicament of having to walk, with their feet, from one bar to the next. But the newsmen didn’t have to endure the humiliation for long. "Santa Fe officials took pity on the suffering newspaper men and made up a train to Woolman’s lake where the oyster roast was to be held," Grandpa Harry wrote.

On government regulations:

Harry disapproved of financial regulations—or, for that matter, regulations or laws of any kind. He was an anarcho-libertarian before the term was invented! "If we depended upon laws to make us perfect the United States should be a near Utopia and Texas would be the most heavenly spot on earth," wrote Harry, sounding like one of the gazillions of libertarians paid to imitate Grandpa Harry in the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, and elsewhere. This insight didn't stop Grandpa Harry from laughing at the thousandsof people who had been defrauded by Charles Ponzi, calling them "suckers" and "idiots."

"In dear old Boston, 11,126 suckers are to hold a conference to discuss ways and means to recover some of the money they entrusted to Ponzi, a former convict. We sincerely hope most of these creditors will bring a guardian along, otherwise it may endanger the peace of the community to have so many idiots come together."

On Rockefeller and oligarch philanthropy:

Harry Koch defended fellow industrialist John D. Rockefeller from critics who accused the robber baron of setting up Chicago University to whitewash his crimes:

"True, Rockefeller’s money is tainted, but how much money is there in circulation that has not at one time or another been possessed by dishonorable men or women? … No person is altogether good or bad, and it seems to us that as long as a bad man is willing to put his money to a good cause, build universities, churches or hospitals, he should not be refused and encouraged to use his money to baser ends."

On ethnic diversity:

Harry Koch frequently weighed in on matters of race. Among other things, Charles Koch's grandpa wrote that he believes "Jews are poor politicians" and that black folks can’t be expected to live up to the moral standards of the white race.

"Marrying comes as easy to some negroes as changing their places of residence. One old negro who died here not long ago, had at least three wives living in Quanah, and several more in neighboring towns. Nobody ever thinks about prosecuting a negro for bigamy, and we suppose it is right not to hold Africans but partly civilized too strictly amenable to laws made by and for white people."

On monopoly power:

Koch published a passionate defense of monopolies and trusts, which he said got a bum rap for no reason at all.

"It is fashion this day and time for democratic newspapers to jump on to trusts and denounce them, whether good or bad. As for the Tribune-Chief, we are enough of a heretic to look upon them with a passive eye and believe that capital has the right to combine. Trusts mark a natural and important and interesting phase of our development. There is nothing in them to be afraid of: they cannot hurt the people, although we, if we pleased, could crush them. We are the people, they are our servants, our creation, altogether ours. We should therefore hold ourselves towards the trusts as masters, proud of what is good in them, anxious to remedy what is evil. And when Europe pales at the tramp of our industrial march, let us remember that we owe to the trusts much of this new-borne prestige… "Let this thing be borne in mind as significant, that all real trusts, all that are destined to succeed and endure, are established on a basis of permanent lower prices for their products. Everybody knows that sugar and oil have been considerably cheaper since these industries have been under trust control. And the same is true, barring periods of fluctuation, of all industries under effective monopoly, from steel rails to cigarettes…"

On democracy:

Harry loved monopolies — but not so much democracies, which he called "Mob-ocracy."

In a 1934 editorial headlined "Democracy’s Problem," Charles Koch's grandpa expressed to readers his concern that democracy might not be all that it’s made out to be: "Mobocracy has long since been discarded as undesirable, even if attainable, and representative democracy has in operation disclosed many defects. . ." (According to the Cato Institute, founded by Harry’s grandson Charles, our wise Founding Fathers agree with Mr. Koch: "Contrary to what propaganda has led the public to believe, America’s Founding Fathers were skeptical and anxious about democracy. They were aware of the evils that accompany a tyranny of the majority. The Framers of the Constitution went to great lengths to ensure that the federal government was not based on the will of the majority and was not, therefore, democratic.")

On public pensions:

Harry Koch raised the "welfare queen" alarm even before the country passed its first welfare laws.

In 1935, Harry Koch described how a dangerous mob of black people descended on his newspaper after a rumor spread "among Quanah’s colored population that the Tribune-Chief contained a request from the government that every man past sixty should report as an applicant for an old age pension." Harry says that was enough to get "every elderly negro in town" cramming into Tribune-Chief‘s offices. It was proof positive that African-Americans (whom you might recall Harry considered "partly civilized" and unable to observe "laws made by and for white people") were already scheming to exploit government programs made for honest white folk.

The funnies:

The Quanah Tribune-Chief kept readers entertained with funny tales about the local black community's zany hijinx in racist, segregated Texas. Here’s one:

An old Negro, passing a graveyard, saw the grave of a man he had known and paused to read the words on the tombstone. Finally he had it: "I still live," read the inscription. "Jes’ look at dat," exclaimed Old Ned. "Who he think he fooling’? If I’m ever dead, I sho’ll be man enough to own up to it."

On eugenics:

Blame Heredity, Not Nature Both the Texas Senate and House are reported to be favoring bills providing for the sterilization of some of the inmates of insane asylums and prisons. Such measure is expected to greatly cut down the number of habitual criminals and mental freaks.

On the assassination of elected officials:

In the 1930s, Harry Koch’s Tribune-Chief joined the smear campaign against Huey Long, the popular Democratic Senator from Louisiana who was keen on challenging FDR from the left. To Harry, Huey was a covert Bolshevik for proposing to cap individual' net worth, and to set up a genuine welfare system that would redistribute the wealth. After the Louisiana Senator was by a killed by a lone gunman in 1935, Harry all but approved of the murder:

"Huey Long was shot by a doctor Sunday evening after he had left the Louisiana legislature. Fighting people like he did and depriving them of a livelihood, the shooting did not come unexpectedly. Bill Maddox, who went to school with him said Huey was very bright but greatly disliked by the other boys, while Huey’s younger brother says he had to do his fighting for him."

On Pinkos:

Of course, Huey Long wasn’t the only covert commie plotting to undermine the United States. As he fought against the New Deal, Harry Koch became a chronic Red-baiter. In a 1938 editorial, he warned his readers (particularly the ones who were "Americans who believe in America") that "Communists were working particularly within the schools" and that "it is the duty of every parent to inspect closely material of a radical nature which is infiltrated ever as skillfully into the public school system."

What Harry didn’t tell his readers was that his own son, Fred Koch, had just come back from the Soviet Union, where he was under contract with Comrade Stalin to build 15 refineries, train commie engineers and beef up Soviet energy independence. Fred made a killing working for the Soviet Union, taking home a $5 million nut for himself, but that didn’t stop Fred Koch from carrying on his father’s red-baiting tradition. Fred Koch took the obsession to new paranoid heights when he helped found the John Birch Society in 1958, after which he toured Elk Lodges and YMCAs across America, arguing for the reimposition of segregation, denouncing President Kennedy as communist agent and traitor, and warning people of a diabolical commie plot to subvert America using labor unions, gays, Jews, blacks and that most evil and cunning of all Soviet-trained commie traitors, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

***

When I stepped out of Quanah’s little courthouse, my eyes squinting from hours of staring at dim microfilm, it was as if I was still in Harry Koch’s horrible little dreamworld, because Quanah today is the perfect expression of the Koch family’s ideal world — as ignorant, poor and powerless as Harry would have wanted it to be. Every local I met acted like a pliant peasant: they were too poor, too sick and too tired to care.

In 2011, the Koch family still owned most of downtown Quanah, as well as the gypsum factory on the outskirts of town. Another billionaire owned a massive cattle ranch outside the city limits, where hired hands earn $150 a day—flat rate. "I gotta make sure there enough water, I gotta move them from one patch of land to another, I gotta round em up and drive them into a pen for transportation... you name it, I gotta do it. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to get it done. Five hours, two hours or 18 hours. It pays $150," one of the ranch hand told me. "That’s just the way it is."

If Harry Koch were still alive, he wouldn’t even have to keep putting out his paper, because Quanah, and all the hundreds of other towns like it all over Texas, have so internalized the Kochs' Darwinian ideology, now under the banner of "libertarianism," that heavy-handed persuasion is no longer as necessary as it was in the days when labor unions and socialism were powerful forces.

Perhaps that’s the real reason why the Kochs are so interested in applying Grandpa Harry's formula to the few remaining newspaper holdouts, especially targeting a major coastal city like L.A. — one of the last regions in America that hasn't yet been Quanah-fied.

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We must take grievances about America’s Mideast oppression seriously.

Quick, somebody tell CIA Director John Brennan about the handwriting on the inside wall of the boat in which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding before Boston-area police riddled it and him with bullets. Tell Brennan that Tsarnaev’s note is in plain English and that it needs neither translation nor interpretation in solving the mystery: “why do they hate us?”

And, if Brennan will listen, remind him of when his high school teachers, the Irish Christian Brothers, taught him the meaning of “handwriting on the wall” in the Book of Daniel and why it became an idiom for predetermined, imminent doom.

CBS senior correspondent John Miller, who before joining CBS served in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, broke the handwritten-note story Thursday onCBS This Morning. He described what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev scribbled on the side of the boat as he lay bleeding “from multiple gunshot wounds” in the boat. Here, according to Miller’s sources, is what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s note said:

“The [Boston] bombings were in retribution for the U.S. crimes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan [and] that the victims of the Boston bombing were collateral damage, in the same way innocent victims have been collateral damage in U.S. wars around the world.  Summing up, that when you attack one Muslim you attack all Muslims.”

My experience with now-CBS-This-Morning’s Charlie Rose is that he does listen closely. Thus, I believe it is to his credit that he seemed determined, with his follow-up question, to drive home what I think is by far the most important point:

Co-anchor Charlie Rose: “Does it [the note] answer questions about motives?”

Miller: “Well it does … there it is in black and white – literally.”

Co-anchor Norah O’Donnell: “But they still believe he was self-radicalized and not part of a larger group, right?”

Miller: “That’s right. …”

Note to CIA Director Brennan

If you didn’t understand much about such motives three years ago, after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to down an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, here’s a chance to learn. I actually felt embarrassed for you when you – then-White House counter-terrorism adviser – were asked on Jan. 7, 2010, two weeks after the almost-catastrophe over Detroit, to explain why people want to kill Americans. I’m sure you remember; it turned out to be Helen Thomas’s swan song.

It took the questioning of the then-89-year old veteran correspondent Thomas to show how little you were willing to share (or how little you knew) about what leads terrorists to do what they do. As her catatonic White House press colleagues took their customary dictation, Thomas posed an adult query that spotlighted the futility of government plans to counter terrorism with more high-tech gizmos and intrusions on the liberties and privacy of the traveling public.

She asked why Abdulmutallab did what he did: “And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why.” It was a highly revealing dialogue; this is how it went. Remember?

You: “Al-Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents. … They attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that he’s (sic) able to attract these individuals. But al-Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.”

Thomas: “And you’re saying it’s because of religion?”

You: “I’m saying it’s because of an al-Qaeda organization that used the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.”

Thomas: “Why?”

You: “I think this is a — long issue, but al-Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.”

Thomas: “But you haven’t explained why.”

Actually, there is a ton of information explaining why people try, for example, to explode bombs in Times Square, in airliners over Detroit, in remote CIA outposts in Afghanistan just to kill Americans, even when it means killing themselves. [See, for example, Consortiumnews.com’s “Answering Helen Thomas on Why.”]

It was painful to watch you suggest on Jan. 7, 2010, that, apparently in some mysterious way, some folks are hard-wired at birth for the “wanton slaughter of innocents,” and your contention that – in the case of Abdulmutallab – al-Qaeda/Persian Gulf was able to jump-start that privileged 23-year old Nigerian, inculcate in him the acquired characteristics of a terrorist, and persuade him to do the bidding of al-Qaeda/Persian Gulf.

Your words were a real stretch as to how the well-heeled Abdulmutallab, without apparent prior terrorist affiliations, was suddenly transformed into an international terrorist ready to die while killing innocents.

Perhaps no one told you that the young Nigerian had particular trouble with Israel’s wanton slaughter of more than a thousand civilians in Gaza the year before, a brutal campaign defended by Washington as justifiable self-defense. You ought to take the time to learn about these things.

Till next time, Ray.

How to Spin This One

An important element in intelligence analysis is to understand the why, what’s the motive. That doesn’t mean you sympathize with what someone did. It does mean that you understand that knowing why is an important starting point for future prevention of similar acts.

Yet, virtually no one in the U.S. political/media hierarchy has dared to discuss, in a candid way, the issue of motivation. All the American people normally get is boilerplate about how al-Qaeda evildoers are perverting a religion and exploiting impressionable young men.

There is almost no discussion about why so many people in the Muslim world object to U.S. policies so strongly that they are inclined to resist violently and even resort to suicide attacks. So how will the media spin Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s handwritten note?

Well, we’ve already watched CBS’s Norah O’Donnell come up with the familiar “self-radicalization” shibboleth. She tied the concept to a lack of ties with a larger group, but “self-radicalization” is normally employed to create the impression that hard-wired “violent Muslim extremists” simply look in the mirror one day and say to themselves, My, this looks like a good day to self-radicalize.

Also regularly trotted out is the “homegrown-violent-extremists” moniker employed as recently as Thursday by FBI Director Robert Mueller III in Senate testimony.

Other “mainstream media” and government officials will keep blaming terrorism on Islam, as the Wall Street Journal does Friday in repeating the claim that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told the FBI earlier that he and his dead brother “were acting as jihadists motivated by Muslim religious anger at the U.S.” (In other words, pay no heed to what he scribbled on the side of the boat as he thought he was dying.)

Rarely has there been any official or quasi-official acknowledgement of the main problem. But there was a major exception in the fall of 2004 in an unclassified study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board. Directly contradicting what President George W. Bush was saying at the time, the board stated:

“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States.”

That’s not spin. That’s the assessment of professionals who were reading the handwriting on the wall.

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You can't hit 400 ppm CO2 and still think "all of the above" is a rationale energy strategy.

A lot has happened in the last week. The Earth hit the 400 parts per million CO2 threshold for the first time in human history. Scientists tell us this is bad news if we want to prevent runaway climate change. "If we continue to burn fossil fuels at accelerating rates, if we continue with business as usual, we will cross the 450 parts per million limit in a matter of maybe a couple decades," scientist Michael Mann told Democracy Now! "We believe that with that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we commit to what can truly be described as dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate." 

If you didn't know this already, we should be listening to Mann and to other scientists. I thought this was settled a long time ago, but someone keeps giving print space to climate deniers, so a new survey of 12,000 peer-reviewed studies on the climate was just completed and the not-so-shocking conclusion was this, as Mother Nature Network reports: 

Published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the analysis shows an overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that humans are a key contributor to climate change, while a "vanishingly small proportion" defy this consensus. Most of the climate papers didn't specifically address humanity's involvement -- likely because it's considered a given in scientific circles, the survey's authors point out -- but of the 4,014 that did, 3,896 shared the mainstream outlook that people are largely to blame.

In light of this news, it makes it even more infuriating to see that the Obama administration has spent the week prostrating to the fossil fuel lobby. Here are four disturbing things the administration's been up to.

1. Moniz Hearts Fracking

Obama tapped nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz to head the Energy Department and the Senate gave a big thumbs-up to Moniz on Thursday. Many environmental groups had concerns that Moniz was too pro-fracking, and those concerns are clearly warranted. Moniz's first order of business Friday was to clear the way for 20 years of liquified natural gas exports via Freeport LNG Terminal on Quintana Island, Texas. 

Of course, we've already been sold the story that we're suposed to frack the crap out of the country in the name of energy security, but we knew all along it was for industry profit, right? Brad Jacobson recently detailed for AlterNet about how Congress members are clamoring for export plans to be fast-tracked -- although what Americans will get out of the deal will be higher gas prices and less energy security. 

2. Thanks for Nothing, Sally

While the nomination of Moniz disappointed many environmentalists, some were cheered by REI exec Sally Jewell taking over the Interior Department. Those same folks might not be cheering after Jewell announced the Bureau of Land Management's newest regulations (or lack thereof) for fracking on our public lands.

As Sierra Club's Michael Brune reported Friday:

The new rules are disappointing for many reasons: Drillers won't be required to disclose what chemicals they're using, there is no requirement for baseline water testing, and there are no setback requirements to govern how close to homes and schools drilling can happen. Once again, though, the policy documents an even bigger failure to grasp a fundamental principle: If we're serious about the climate crisis, then the last thing we should be doing is opening up still more federal land to drilling and fracking for fossil fuels.

3. No Time for Farmers

The group Bold Nebraska reported this week that Obama turned down an invitation to hear from Nebraska farmers and ranchers about their concerns that the Keystone XL pipeline could destroy their livelihoods. Of course, the President is a busy guy, right? And besides, the White House said he was not "taking any meetings on the pipeline."

Or is he? The group writes:

Bold Nebraska was therefore surprised the President is meeting with staff at Ellicott Dredges, a company that just testified in Congress in support of Keystone XL and makes equipment that creates the tailing ponds, which are massive bodies of polluted water and a byproduct of the tar sands mining process.

"I simply do not understand why President Obama can find the time to visit a company that helps hold 12 million liters of toxic tar sands water but cannot find the time to visit ranchers who put over $12 billion of Nebraska-grown food on Americans' dinner tables every year," said Meghan Hammond, a young farmer whose family land is at risk with the current route in Nebraska.

4. Who Needs the Arctic? (Hint: We Do)

Subhankar Banerjee, a photographer and longtime Arctic activist, was recently appalled by a new report from the Obama administration on the future of the Arctic. And the rest of us should be, too. Banerjee writes about the report:

“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.

We know that Obama talks a good talk about climate protection, but his second term has proven thus far that he's completely out of touch with reality. You can't hit 400 ppm CO2 and still think "all of the above" is a rationale energy strategy.

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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.

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Predatory pricing practices can be found nearly everywhere in healthcare.

 

 

If there is one problem that symbolizes the ongoing national healthcare emergency, it is the rampant price gouging in the healthcare industry that continues to price too many Americans out of access to care and into financial ruin. Not only is the problem not solved by the Affordable Care Act, but it is a likely reason many will continue to demand more effective reform, as in expanding and extending Medicare to cover everyone.

Predatory pricing practices can be found nearly everywhere in healthcare, by the drug companies, insurance companies, medical suppliers, outpatient clinics, boutique medical services, and many others as chronicled this spring in Time magazine.

U.S. hospitals are among the biggest abusers, as illuminated in recent datareleased by Medicare on hospital charges for a variety of common procedures as well as brand new findings by the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy, the research arm of the National Nurses United, based on Medicare cost reports.

The nurses’ data augments the Medicare findings, and goes the next step, illustrating a trend of rising high hospital charges while providing context to a very ugly picture and the deplorable impact on anyone who needs healthcare.

Here’s the sobering numbers:

• · U.S. hospitals charge on average $331 dollars for every $100 of their total costs, in statistical terms a 331 percent charge to cost ratio.
• · While hospital charges over costs have been climbing steadily over the past 15 years – the charges took their biggest leap ever in 2011– a 22 point vault.
• · From 2009 to 2011 (the most recent year for which the data is available), hospital charges lunged upward by 16 percent, while hospital costs only increased by 2 percent.
• · U.S. hospital profits, pushed upward by the high charges, hit a record $53.2 billion, while nurses see more and more hospitals cutting patient services and limiting access to care.
• · One case study is California where hospitals soared past the national average with a charge to cost ratio of 451 percent, or $451 for every $100 of costs.

That similar pricing practices occur elsewhere in the healthcare industry is hardly an excuse for the private hospitals to act more like Wall Street corporations than responsible, community based institutions. It should be no shock that the lowest charges are by government-run hospitals that operate in public, not in secret, and have far more accountability and transparency.

Hospitals ought to act as responsible providers of needed medical care, not loan sharks. Piling up profits in large part by jacking up prices is at sharp odds with the glossy feel good ads from hospitals we see so often on our TV screens, newspaper pullouts, sponsorship of sports teams, and on mass transit placards.

Hospital lobbyists have tried for years to convince us all that predatory pricing policies don’t matter. These are just “list” prices that few people actually pay, they claim, and it is a random phenomenon that two hospitals in the same city, or even on the same block, might have widely varying prices for similar patient services.

But the grotesque reality tells a different story.

We’re not the only ones who think so. As Glenn Melnick, a USC health economist, told a reporter, "If (hospital prices are) meaningless how come hospitals spend all this money on consultants to raise them? Why haven't they stayed flat for the past 15 years? Why do hospitals keep raising them if they have no impact?"

While it is true that major payers seldom pay the list price, hospitals typically bargain with insurance companies over reimbursements. Anyone who has ever bought a car knows that the higher the list price, the more you end up paying. That’s true with hospital charges as well.

The inevitable result is insurance companies respond by ratcheting up their charges to employers and individuals. In California, for example, since 2002, premiums have risen 170% -- more than five times the inflation rate, as noted in a California Healthcare Foundation survey last month.

An alarming, if predictable ripple effect follows. As the CHF survey noted, in the past decade, the percentage of California employers providing health coverage dropped from 71 to 60 percent; 21 percent said they’d increased workers’ co-insurance premiums while 17 percent said they had reduced benefits or increased other out of pocket costs. More than one-fourth of workers in small firms have deductibles of $1,000 or more on their health plan.

Then there’s the uninsured who do not have the collective clout to bargain down the list price. Hospitals say they write off a lot of those bills, but clearly not all of them. How many distressing stories have we all heard about patients staggered by $50,000 or $100,000 un-payable medical bills while being hounded by the hospitals or bill collection agencies to pay up?

Patients and families, even those paying for insurance, have a stark choice. Use your health coverage and get socked with huge out of pocket costs that may mean choosing between medical bills, housing costs, food, or other necessities, or facing financial calamity, or forgo needed care.

As the Washington Post recently noted, the Affordable Care Act has not ended the deplorable story of medical bills accounting for more than half of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S.

Even many of those now paying for health insurance either through their employer or as individuals, or who will be required to buy insurance under the ACA, choose not to use it because of the high co-insurance, deductibles, co-pays, and all the add ins that get thrown in by the hospitals, such as professional fees, facility fees, pathology fees, anesthesia fees, and so on.

A 2011 Commonwealth Fund study found that the U.S. stands out among high income countries with as many 42 percent of Americans skipping doctors’ visits, recommended care, or not filling prescriptions due to cost.

Consequently, people end up in emergency rooms for medical problems that should have been resolved earlier at far less cost and pain. It is also why two recent reports disclosed that the U.S. has the lowest life expectancies and the highest first day infant death rate among major industrial countries.

It’s long past time to fix this nightmare, and sadly the ACA won’t meet that test. At a minimum we need to crack down on price gouging by all the corporations that control our health, with real penalties for lack of compliance.

But a longer vision is needed. Replace our profit focused health care system with one based on patient need and quality care as all those other countries with national or single payer systems that surpass us in access, quality, and cost, have long figured out.

 

 

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As the hunger strike stretches into its 100th day, here are the four worst things about how the U.S. is handling the ongoing protest.

Friday marks 100 days since the beginning of the hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay that has recaptured international attention on the offshore prison President Obama promised to close when seeking office five years ago.

As of Thursday, military officials say that 102 out of 166 detainees are participating in the strike. Lawyers say that number is closer to 130. 

Since the hunger strike began 100 days ago, international groups including the European Parliament, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and several nations with detainees at GITMO have stepped up pressure on the Obama administration to release detainees or close the prison altogether.

As the strike continues past its 100th day, here are four of the most disturbing facts about the situation at Guantanamo. 

1. The torturous force-feeding

Thirty of the 166 prisoners held at Guantanamo are being subjected to force-feeding--a practice that’s considered torture and in violation of international law by the UN human rights office. Earlier this week, the ACLU, as well as a handful of human rights organizations, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel urging a halt to force-feeding at GITMO. 

While the military says it’d be “inhumane” to let the prisoners starve themselves, several human rights and medical groups disagree. 

“Under those circumstances, to go ahead and force-feed a person is not only an ethical violation but may rise to the level of torture or ill-treatment,” said Peter Maurer, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The military’s force-feeding procedure involves shoving a tube into a prisoner’s nose, through the sinuses, throat, and eventually, stomach. The process inflicts severe pain and discomfort. According to an analysis of military documents by Al Jazeera, prisoners are forced to “to wear masks over their mouths while they sit shackled in a restraint chair for as long as two hours” while a liquid nutritional supplement is pumped into their stomach. “At the end of the feeding, the prisoner is removed from the restraint chair and placed into a ‘dry cell’ with no running water,” Al Jazeera explains. “A guard then observes the detainee for 45-60 minutes ‘for any indications of vomiting or attempts to induce vomiting.’ If the prisoner vomits he is returned to the restraint chair.”

2. Alleged attempts to “break” hunger strikers 

Several reports have emerged that Guantanamo guards are mistreating hunger strikers in an effort to “break” them. Lawyers for Yemini prisoner Musaab al-Madhwani says guards are targeting strikers by denying them drinking water, forcing them to drink non-potable tap water, and keeping their cells at “extremely frigid” temperatures, reports AFP. In a complaint, lawyers said, “When Musaab and his fellow prisoners requested drinking water, the guards told them to drink from the faucets … The lack of potable water has already caused some prisoners kidney, urinary and stomach problems.”

Another lawyer tells RT that guards are removing striking detainees from communal living spaces and forcing them to live in single cells to break their spirit.

3. More than half of GITMO’s prisoners have been cleared for release. Ninety percent haven’t even been charged with a crime.

Eighty-six of 166 prisoners at GITMO have already been cleared for release, yet legal and bureaucratic barriers have kept them detained indefinitely. First of all, Congress imposed restrictions on detainee transfers, requiring proof that potential transfers would never pose a threat to U.S. national security in the future. In a press conference last month, President Obama reiterated this fact, saying that he’s “going to need some help from Congress.” Yet, as several commentators have pointed out, Congress also granted Obama the power to use waivers to transfer detainees, a power he has not exercised once.

Complicating things is the 56 Yemeni nationals detained at Guantanamo. As AlterNet's Alex Kane explained, Yemen is “a strong U.S. ally that also has a problem with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a group that has plotted attacks against the U.S. After a 2009 terrorist plot that purportedly originated in Yemen was halted, the Obama administration decided to halt repatriation of detainees to Yemen.”

4. No alternative to leaving -- except in a coffin

The hunger strike reportedly began as a response to prison guards mishandling personal property and detainees’ Qu’rans. But as several commentators, organizations and detainees themselves have pointed out, that was just a tipping point. The strike represents prisoners’ boiling frustrations for being kept from their families in inhumane conditions, some being held for more than 11 years.   

 "Officials say two detainees have attempted suicide since the strike began."

“The men are not starving themselves so they can become martyrs...They’re doing this because they’re desperate,” said Wells Dixon an attorney representing five GITMO detainees. “They’re desperate to be free from Guantanamo. They don’t see any alternative to leaving in a coffin. That’s the bottom line.”

Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, through a phone call with his lawyer, explained that the hunger strike is driven by a last-resort mentality in an op-ed for the New York Times last month:

The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply … I have vomited blood.

And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.

I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.

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Proponents of military involvement have it all wrong: The United States should de-escalate hostilities.

Politically-driven demands for direct US intervention in Syria – more arms to the rebels, establishing a 'no-fly' zone, creating a safe area somewhere – have been flying around for months. So far, President Obama and the Pentagon leadership have resisted the political pressure. But Obama’s resistance has been weak and cautious; we don’t have enough evidence yet, it’s not clear the red line has been crossed. The clear implication is that if there is more evidence, if some claimed red line is crossed, then all bets are off – and in today’s diplo-speak, “all options are on the table.”

Now, allegations of chemical weapons being used in Syria and Israeli airstrikes against Syrian military targets have given rise to a whole escalating campaign for direct US military intervention. And it’s getting very dangerous.

Neo-Con redux

Most, though not all, of the calls for intervention come from the same people who led the calls for invading Iraq: neo-cons and other hard-line militarists, pundits and Congressmembers, mainly Republicans but plenty of Democrats too, including the 'humanitarian hawks', those who never saw a human rights crisis that didn’t require US military involvement to solve. It’s not a coincidence that many of the loudest voices – people like Republican Senator and defeated presidential contender John McCain and others – have been calling for direct intervention and regime change for more than two years now, starting way before any allegations of chemical weapons ever surfaced.

Making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows last week in the midst of the 'chemical weapons' hysteria, McCain’s call for escalating US intervention in Syria was that Obama needs to do “what we've been demanding for more than two years.” It was actually a fascinating acknowledgement that McCain's concern isn't with any alleged chemical weapons use – it's the same regime change he's been demanding since Syria's edition of the Arab Spring erupted more than two years ago, when no such chemical weapons allegations were on the table.

But the bi-partisan support for militarism remains. At least as far back as President Johnson in the 1960s, too many liberal Democrats believed they could only advance a domestic social agenda of civil rights, health care, education, etc., if they were prepared to out-macho the Republicans. They reversed the lesson Martin Luther King taught us, of the need to link civil rights to the struggle for peace if either is to have any chance. And what we’ve seen instead is a pattern of Democrats in government who still act on the belief that a hawkish, militarized foreign policy is necessary to advance any social policy that benefits anyone beyond the 1%.

The cost

The drumbeat is spreading. Former New York Times editor Bill Keller, reprisinghis 2003 “reluctant” support for the Iraq war, once again supports US armed intervention in Syria. Why will this time be better? Well this time, unlike Iraq ten years ago, Syria represents a “genuine, imperiled national interest, not just a fabricated one. A failed Syria creates another haven for terrorists, a danger to neighbors who are all American allies, and the threat of metastasizing Sunni-Shiite sectarian war across a volatile and vital region."

Guess he hasn’t looked very carefully at Iraq today. His point about what happens if Syria collapses is true (despite his leaving out the far more dire impact on the Syrian people), but he ignores the crucial point that his description of a future failed Syria if we don’t intervene, matches precisely what exists today in Iraq – as a direct result of US intervention. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the exploding Sunni-Shi’a violence across Iraq and over the borders into Syria among other places; today’s post-intervention Iraq is precisely what Keller warns of if the US doesn’t join the Syrian civil war. He didn’t look at Lebanon, where the already-shaky confessional system French colonialists imposed in the 1930s is under renewed strain from the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees pouring into the country, as well as the political-military pressure of the Syrian civil war itself. He didn’t look at Jordan, where more than 500,000 Syrian refugees have stretched the country’s social fabric to a near-breaking point.

Oh yeah, as to his abject years-later apology for getting it wrong on Iraq, a mistake he recently called “humbling?" Not to worry – he’s figured it all out. This time will be different, because “getting Syria right starts with getting over Iraq.” For Keller, and for too many like him, it seems that “getting over Iraq” is today’s equivalent of the Iraq-era “getting over Vietnam.”

It is important to recognize one of the key differences between this drumbeat for war and that of the pre-Iraq period in 2002-03: unlike the years of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, the most important war hawks are not occupying the White House and the top echelons of the Pentagon. While not enough – Obama’s resistance to the calls for war is dangerously weak – the administration’s position is a far cry from echoing those calls for war. The Vice-President, Secretaries of State and Defense, none of them are pushing for war. And in the Pentagon, General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described himself as “cautious” regarding greater US military intervention in Syria, because of explicit “doubts that it would halt the violenceor achieve political reconciliation.” That’s all important – even though so far the proponents of a new US war in the Middle East have shown far more energy and intensity than its opponents. That’s what has to change.

The failure of militarism

What neither side of the Washington debate have considered, however, is that the overall escalating crisis in the Middle East is taking place in the context of the significant decline of US power and influence. With US economic and diplomatic power reduced, military force remains the one arena in which the US is the indisputable champ. The $800 billion annual US military budget has become largely irrelevant in determining history. The US-NATO campaign in Libya was partly, though not entirely, an attempt to remilitarize problem-solving in the region and thus re-legitimize US centrality. But it failed.

What the civil war in Syria and the Arab spring have exposed is that the massive political and social transformation and real regime change underway is led by people themselves – largely without military force and certainly with no role for the US. US military involvement serves only to escalate the destruction, while distracting from other failures. The people on the ground engaged in those political struggles don’t want US military intervention; the only ones who benefit are the arms manufacturers whose CEOs and shareholders continue to reap billions of blood dollars in profit.

War hurts civilians, but US wars hurt and kill civilians far from the US – so consequences remain far from US public consciousness. The problem for US policymakers is that an arms embargo also hurts their key campaign contributors: the arms dealers. The US remains the largest arms exporter in the world; can anyone doubt that sending US arms to one side of Syria’s civil war (even, or especially, if it extends the war) helps justify things like the pending $10 billion arms deal to Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE? Or that instability in Syria, whatever its cause, can only help reinforce calls for increasing the existing $30 billion ten-year commitment of US military aid to Israel? No wonder the international Arms Trade Treaty – not to mention any potential for global gun control – remain far from the top of the agenda in Washington.

Chemical weapons? 

Let's start with the 'even if' argument. Use of chemical weapons is illegal; there are separate international laws prohibiting such weapons, and any use, by any side, is undoubtedly a war crime. But how would escalating the civil war with more arms to the opposition side, or creation of a Libya-style US or US-NATO no-fly zone, prevent any further use of chemical weapons – inherently something as easily hidden in a civilian garage as in a military storage facility? It would not; it would only insure that more Syrians would die and be forced from their homes.

As it was in Libya, creation of a no-fly zone is widely understood as a step towards regime change. According to Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense during the US intervention in Libya, the first act in imposing a no-fly zone is an extensive bombing campaign – an act of war. This time around, that would mean bombing Syria, to destroy its sophisticated anti-aircraft system. How many civilians would die in that bombardment, given the widespread presence of anti-aircraft facilities across the country, including in populated areas?

We should also note that Israel’s ability to send bombers to attack several discrete sites in Syria, apparently from the skies above Lebanon, has little relation to the consequences of flying the dozens of US sorties flown directly into Syrian airspace that would be needed to neutralize the entire strategic Syrian anti-aircraft system. Drones won't be enough for this one. So when the first US bomber pilot is shot down, and special forces are sent in to rescue him, what happens to the 'no boots on the ground' rule? Ignore it because the special forces guys wear sneakers instead of boots? Do we really want to claim that killing more Syrians with conventional bombs, to prevent the future possible use of alleged chemical weapons, is somehow a legitimate 'humanitarian' effort?

Second, we should note that even the US government officials themselves acknowledge they don't have specific enough evidence chemical weapons were used at all. And even if they were (which is certainly a possibility), they appear to have no evidence of who used them. Reports from UN human rights investigator Carla del Ponte point to use by the rebel forces, not the regime. Footage circulating on the Internet shows several ill people whose symptoms appear to include dilated pupils and a bit of foaming from their mouths, but no evidence of who and where they are, when or where they were injured or got sick. A Syrian doctor who treated them tells al-Jazeera that since they showed no sign of bombing or other trauma, no broken limbs or shrapnel, than it must be chemical weapons – but he provides no evidence of why it could not be one or more of the variety of other diseases and poisons (including several common fertilizers) that a quick Internet search indicates can cause those same symptoms. In a hugely complicated civil war, where the fighters on one side include many defectors and weapons from the other side, that means there's simply no definitive evidence of what side, if any, may have used chemical weapons at all. 

That's an awful lot of "no evidence" on which to base a new threat of a massive military escalation. And of course, it sounds way too familiar. Who among us has forgotten the certainty of George Bush's lying claims of WMDs in Iraq – yellowcake uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes from China, and of course the ubiquitous Curveball, the source of all that secret information…?

Third, the chemical weapons issue is being used very much as a partisan issue. For neo-conservatives and Republicans there is little downside to supporting unlimited militarism: if Obama and the Democrats resist using military force, they are deemed weak on national security. If they do use force, Obama and the Democrats will be blamed for the inevitable disasters that follow [see Benghazi…]. Certainly there are Democratic hawks, including supporters of so-called “humanitarian intervention,” who never saw a human rights crisis that didn’t need a military response, crying for greater US military involvement. But it's also being used for Republican attacks on Obama. Republicans remain far more supportive of many of Obama’s war policies – his troop surge in Afghanistan, the Libya attack (despite the claimed outrage over Benghazi), the escalating drone war and more – than most Democrats. So they are all too eager to use the current Syria crisis to portray the president as soft on “terrorism,” unwilling to enforce his own “red lines,” and overall insufficient as commander-in-chief.

Finally, the presence or even use of chemical weapons does nothing to change the fundamental illegality of any US military escalation. The fact that use of those weapons represents a violation of international law does not legitimize any military action by an outside party. The international laws of war have not changed – the only two ways a military attack by one country against another can be legal is in response to a UN Security Council authorization, which does not exist, or in the case of immediate self-defense. And there is no way even the most hawkish warmongers among the pundits or the Congress can claim that an unconfirmed small-scale use of an illegal weapon against a few Syrians somehow represents an immediate national threat to the United States. Any US attack – with or without a Congressional mandate (which unfortunately would be all too likely forthcoming if requested) – would still be a violation of international law.

Israel enters the fray

And right now there’s the new question of Israel’s recent attacks on Syria. The rationale for those missile strikes, reported to have killed scores of people including both civilians and high-level Syrian military officers, remains opaque. Ordinarily, the assumption would be that Israel is striking Hezbollah, the key ally of its sworn enemy Iran, in the interest of both weakening Iran and ratcheting up pressure on Washington to escalate military involvement against Syria. The distinction this time is that while Tel Aviv’s focus may well have been on Iran and Hezbollah, the impact of its attack on Syria’s civil war doesn’t serve Israeli interests. Israel has not been leading the charge against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, nor urging the US or others to escalate their involvement in Syria for the simple reason that Assad’s regime, like that of his father from 1970 till 2000, has been very helpful to Israel. Despite all the puffed up rhetoric about Syria as part of a regional 'axis of resistance', the Assad family has largely kept the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights pacified, the border quiet, and the Palestinians in Syria under their control. Instances of cross-border violence were short-lived and rare.

It should not be forgotten that the Assad regimes have also been very useful to the United States. In 1991 Hafez al-Assad sent his air force to join Bush Senior’s Operation Desert Storm attack on Iraq. By 2002 Bashar al-Assad was a partner in Bush Junior’s “extraordinary rendition” program of the global war on terror – accepting prisoners from the US, including Canadian Maher Arar, for interrogation and torture at the hands of Syria’s feared security police.

The great Israeli journalist Gideon Levy described the Israeli attacks on Syriain Ha’aretz:

The truth is, this is just a pilot run. Israel is prodding U.S. President Barack Obama, catching him in his use of the words ‘red line,’ challenging and provoking him to reach the real thing: bombing Iran. Israel wants to reveal the president's nakedness on the Syrian matter in order to present him as naked on the Iranian issue. Perhaps he won't bomb Syria, as Israel requested; the key thing is that he should bomb Iran. This policy of manipulating the American president, at the expense of Syrians' blood, perhaps will pan out in the short run. But it will also make Israel even more loathed in Washington.

The real purpose, as well as the outcome of Israel’s strikes remains uncertain. But whatever the goal, what remains clear is their complete illegality. As is the case with Israel’s nuclear arsenal, unacknowledged by Israel but universally documented outside Washington and Tel Aviv, the Israeli attacks on at least three sites in Syria have neither legitimacy nor legality and must be condemned. No international law allows preventive attacks (these were not even the legally-ambiguous preemptive strikes), not even when they are carried out by Washington’s most-favored ally. Again it’s the 'even if' rule:Even if one of the targets was indeed a shipment of missiles heading for Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel still has no legal right to attack Syria.

The silence of not only the US (where it is expected) but in Europe, in capitals in the global South and in the United Nations in response to the Israeli bombing represents the serious problem of double standards in the application of international law. That means global apartheid in foreign policy: not only in the distinction between how poor people’s weapons (suicide attacks, chemical weapons, close-up and personal killing with guns….) and rich countries’ weapons (nuclear arsenals, cruise missiles, drones, B-52 bombing…) are responded to, but in the broader dualism of good/bad violence. It’s the acceptable, perhaps regrettable but necessary violence of the cowboy, the colonizer, the conquistador, the rich, in the form of the US, NATO, Israel, versus the unacceptable, inherently evil violence of the Indians, the colonized, the occupied, the poor.

What if, just for another example, Syria decided it had had enough of Jordan allowing Saudi and Qatari weapons to transit its territory en route to Syrian rebels, and Syria took preventive action by bombing Jordanian military targets near Amman? What if dozens of Jordanian civilians and military officers were killed by Israeli bombs – and what if those killed included some of the 200 or so CIA officers now training Syrian rebels in Jordan? Would the US government simply acknowledge Syria’s right to prevent its enemies from getting arms? Would the United Nations secretary general confine himself to an expression of “concern” and urge “all sides” to be calm?

The Israeli airstrikes ultimately raise the political pressure on President Obama; they don’t change the situation on the ground or change the illegality of any US military attack on Syria.

(And note, this is all besides the hot-button question of just who these armed rebels really are, anyway…)

So what should the US do? 

The first thing is to de-escalate the fighting – to staunch the horrific bloodletting that Syria’s civil war is creating for the Syrian people. Initially, that means stopping the arms shipments to all sides. That means negotiating directly with Russia, on a quid pro quo agreement to stop US and allied training and arms shipments to the rebels, in return for an end to Russian and allied arms shipments to the Syrian government.

Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent Moscow meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the follow-up diplomacy underway hold out a small bit of optimism. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced a joint commitment to “undertake an obligation to use the possibilities that the US and Russia have to bring both the Syrian government and the opposition to the negotiating table.” The first move was a Russian-US call for an international conference with the Syrian government and the opposition. So far, there is no indication that either the US or Russia are prepared make any concession towards pulling back from military support of their respective Syrian sides – but renewed calls for such a conference could be an important start. We should also push to insure that negotiations look carefully at what the economic incentives and pressures are for each of the players as part of seeking non-military approaches to move forward.

The US should also take more responsibility for funding the huge cost of caring for the millions of Syrian refugees and internally displaced. The UN’s humanitarian funding appeals for Syria remain seriously under-resourced– yet Washington’s “humanitarians” continue to debate only military action. A new US policy would include full funding for all United Nations agencies’ appeals, as well as a campaign of diplomatic pressure on all sides to honor international obligations to protect non-combatants.

And instead of debating between a no-fly zone and bombing Syrian weapons depots, or which factions to arm, why not consider deployment of an international human rights observer force? Even without a peace to keep or enforce, a thoroughly international observer team sent under UN auspices (who would have to volunteer as individuals for an extraordinarily risky assignment) might serve to deter some of the worst attacks on all sides.

The US should also support a broad UN mandate for a truly internationally credible inspection team authorized and empowered to investigate all claims of chemical weapons use, by any side in the conflict. The White House cavalierly dismissed del Ponte’s report that her UN team found potential chemical use by the rebel side, not the Syrian regime. But any serious UN investigation must be based on a mandate to identify all violations by all sides. (Perpetrators of any violations of the chemical weapons convention must be held accountable, but the timing of achieving such justice may have to wait for an end to the fighting.)

With an arms embargo and chemical weapons investigation in place, the parties on the ground and their regional and international backers must begin serious negotiations to end the whole set of wars (national, regional, sectarian, global) now being waged in Syria, and to resolve the conflict on a political basis. Those negotiations will have to include the government of Syria, the armed rebels, and the still-struggling non-violent democratic opposition movement that first launched the Syrian spring more than two years ago. To bring the sides to the table, their strategic backers will have to be involved as well – Iran and Russia, and the US, France and Britain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, will all have to play a role to push their recalcitrant allies to negotiate. The United Nations will have to take the diplomatic lead. And problematic as it is in so many ways, the Arab League will probably need to be involved as well, though perhaps in the form of individual member states of the Arab League participating separately. 

To have any hope of long-term viability, those negotiations must be grounded in the broader effort towards creation of a WMD-free zone throughout the Middle East. Once and for all the UN goal articulated back in 1991 must finally be implemented. When the Security Council passed resolution 687 that year to end the first Gulf War, Article 14 called for “establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery and the objective of a global ban on chemical weapons.” No exceptions. That means Israel's unacknowledged arsenal of 200-400 high-density nuclear bombs in its Dimona plant would have to be brought under international supervision and destroyed. It means neither Iran nor anyone else in the region would ever be able to create a nuclear weapon any time in the future. And it means all the existing chemical and biological stockpiles – the poor countries' WMDs – would be identified and destroyed. The US drafted and supported that resolution 22 years ago. It's time Washington moved to implement it.

Conflict oil?

Finally, there should be consideration in the UN – and especially among civil society organizations around the world – of the need to create an international 'conflict oil' regime similar to the work on conflict diamonds, conflict minerals, etc. While continuing to oppose the broad economic and oil sanctions imposed by the US and its allies that have so undermined diplomatic potential and harmed civilian populations in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, international civil society can shape campaigns with Syrian and regional civil society to challenge the use of oil resources as a fuel for conflict and war.

That's the context within which a Syrian arms embargo would really begin to mean something. None of this will be easy. But proposing military escalation as a response to fuzzy, uncertain allegations of chemical weapons, or imposing a no-fly zone because Israel attacked Syria, let alone threatening military force to overthrow a regime, is a far too dangerous road. We've been there before. President Obama needs to get out in front and say “We will not allow ourselves to be bamboozled into war again by unproven claims of WMDs. We will not allow supporters of regime change to hide their intentions in the anodyne language of ‘humanitarianism.’ We have learned the lessons of our dumb war in Iraq. We will not go to war.” But so far, he refuses to say anything so definitive.

That puts the obligation squarely on our shoulders. As we’ve seen with the rising power of global and US civil society movements to use boycotts, divestment and sanctions to end Israel’s violations of international law and human rights, we must take responsibility as people to raise the political costs of a new war in the Middle East so high, that it stays off the table for good.

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Three continue to be held at the local jail in the lastest example of criminalizing kids for being kids

From arresting an honors student whose science experiment went wrong to hauling kids off to jail for snoozing in class, local newspapers have been filled recently with increasingly scary stories about the criminalization of students and youth.

Thanks to North Carolina, we now have the latest example of police and the criminal justice system interfering with kids, simply for being kids. This year, a handful of students at Enloe High School in Raleigh North Carolina appear to have plotted perhaps the most unimaginative prank in high school history: tossing water balloons at other students. But thanks to aggression from the school's administration and local police, the prank didn't end peacefully. In anticipation of the prank, school officials called in "increased security" and teachers held their students inside classrooms. After the balloons flew, seven boys were arrested, at least one handcuffed after being taken down down the asphalt by police. Six are being charged with disorderly conduct, while one is being charged with assault and battery.   Russ Smith, senior director of security for the school system, told local station WRAL that school officials are taking the incident seriously. "Somebody gets hit with a water balloon. They don't like it. So, the potential is there for there to be a physical altercation," Smith said.  Three of the boys remained in custody overnight, with one held on $3,000 bail.  Anyone who attended high school will remember seniors' end-of-the-year pranks. They're usually harmless and relatively uninventive acts: moving furniture out of classrooms, soaking younger students with squirt guns, parking cars in the wrong places. In the Fast Times at Ridgemont High era, water balloons would have been all fun and games. But today, as police and security guards increasingly patrol high school hallways, this joke was no laughing matter. Watch the local news report here:  

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"Should the IRS campaign be successful, it will ... eliminate tens of thousands of well paying jobs, [and] destroy hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue."

 

Dispensaries providing marijuana to doctor-approved patients operate in a number of states, but they are under assault by the federal government. SWAT-style raids by the DEA and finger-wagging press conferences by grim-faced federal prosecutors may garner greater attention, but the assault on medical marijuana providers extends to other branches of the government as well, and moves by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to eliminate dispensaries' ability to take standard business deduction are another very painful arrow in the federal quiver.

The IRS employs Section 280E, a 1982 addition to the tax code that was a response to a drug dealer's successful effort to claim his yacht, weapons purchases, and even illicit bribes as business expenses. Under 280E, individuals involved in the illicit sale of controlled substances -- including marijuana, even medical marijuana in states where it is legal -- cannot claim standard business expenses on their federal taxes.

"The 280E provision which requires certain businesses to pay taxes on their gross income, as opposed to their net income, is aimed at shutting down illicit drug operations, not state-legal medical marijuana dispensaries," said Kris Hermes, spokesman for the medical marijuana defense group Americans for Safe Access." Nonetheless, the Obama Administration is using Section 280E to push these local and state licensed facilities out of business."

The provision can be used to great effect. Oakland's Harborside Health Center was hit with a $2 million IRS assessment in 2011 after the tax agency employed Section 280E against. Harborside is fighting that assessment, even as it continues to try to fend off federal prosecutors' attempts to shut it down by seizing the properties it leases. Similarly, when the feds raided Richard Lee's Oaksterdam University that same year, it wasn't just DEA, but also IRS agents who stormed the premises. Lee said it was because of a 280E-related audit.

The attacks on Harborside and Oaksterdam were part of an IRS campaign of aggressive audits using 280E to deny legitimate business expenses, such as rent, payroll, and all other necessary business expenses. These denials result in astronomical back tax bills for the affected dispensaries, threatening their viability -- and patients' access to their medicine.

"Should the IRS campaign be successful; it will throw millions of patients back in to the hands of street dealers; eliminate tens of thousands of well paying jobs, destroy hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue; enrich the criminal underground; and endanger the safety of communities in the 17 medical cannabis states," said Harborside's Steve DeAngelo as he announced the 280E Reform Project to begin to fight back.

It's going to be an uphill battle. In the last Congress, Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) introduced House Bill 1985, the Small Business Tax Equity Act, designed to end the 280E problem for medical marijuana businesses, but it went to the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee, where it was never heard from again.

Still, something needs to happen, said Betty Aldworth, deputy director of the National Cannabis Industry Association, which this year is working with members of Congress to try to find a fix for the 280E problem.

"When Section 280E was created in the 1980s, no one imagined state-legal marijuana providers," Aldworth told the Chronicle. "Whether or not it is part of a larger effort to curtail the development of regulated models for providing marijuana, which is a model that is clearly preferable to leaving this popular and relatively safe medicine (or adult product) in the underground market, these onerous tax rates have severely hampered the development of the regulated market."

It's a brake on the overall economy, Aldworth said.

"Not only has it resulted in stymieing job development, but it also curtails other economic activity such as reinvestment in business and the rippling positive effects of that spending," she argued. "And in many cases, it has created a tax burden that is simply unbearable: many providers have had to close their doors and lay off their staffs because the tax burden was simply too great."

Because of this unintended application of 280E, medical marijuana providers are paying overall taxes at a rate two to three times those of other small businesses, Aldworth said.

"It's important to note that just as they want to apply for licenses, follow regulations, and otherwise participate in the legal business community, state-legal marijuana providers also want to pay their fair share of taxes," she pointed out. "Most small businesses pay an effective tax rate of between 13% and 27% on net income, according to the Small Business Administration. State-legal marijuana providers pay an average effective tax rate of 65-80%. An industry that can provide thousands of jobs is being held back by these crazy tax rates."

While the lobbyists look to Congress for a fix, one academic tax law expert thinks he has hit upon a novel solution, but not everyone agrees.

Benjamin Leff, a professor at American University's Washington College of Law, raised eyebrows at a Harvard University seminar this spring when he presented his report,Tax Planning For Marijuana Dealers, where he suggested that dispensaries get around 280E by registering with the IRS as tax-exempt social welfare organizations, known as 501(c)(3)s or 501(c)(4)s.

The IRS has already ruled that medical marijuana providers can be exempt under 501(c)(3) because its "public policy doctrine" does not allow charitable organizations to have purposes contrary to law, but in the paper, Leff argued that "a state-sanctioned marijuana seller could qualify as tax-exempt under 501(c)(4), since the public policy doctrine only applies to charities, and 501(c)(4) organizations are not charities."

The organization would have to be operated to improve the social and economic conditions of a neighborhood blighted by crime or poverty, by providing job training, employment opportunities, and improved business conditions for commercial development in the neighborhood, just like many existing community economic development corporations that run businesses.

"When taxes get too high, you can drive compliant dispensaries out of business," Leff told the Chronicle.

Americans for Safe Access' Hermes would agree with that, but he's not so sure about Leff's idea.

"The concept of medical marijuana dispensaries registering with the federal government as a 501(c)(4) in order to sidestep section 280E is novel and may be hypothetically valid," he said. "However, the IRS will refuse to grant tax-exempt status to a business that the agency believes is violating federal law. Perhaps, it would be possible for a dispensary to obtain 501(c)(4) status under false pretenses, but such status would not very likely withstand an IRS audit."

There are better ways, he said.

"A much more realistic and sensible approach -- pending a change to the federal classification of marijuana for medical use -- is to amend the tax code to exclude state-lawful medical marijuana businesses from Section 280E," Hermes recommended. "This is the kind of legislation that Congress should pass in order to allow states to implement their own medical marijuana laws, without undue interference by the federal government."

"I agree with everything he said," Leff replied. "But it's not just the Obama administration that is using 280E this way. The Supreme Court has held that there is no exception to the Controlled Substances Act for state-level legal marijuana sales, and since 280E makes references to Schedule I controlled substances, it applies to legal marijuana unless Congress changes the law. I totally agree that Congress should amend 280E to exempt marijuana selling that is legal under state law. Congress could also amend the Controlled Substances Act to remove marijuana from it, which would probably also make sense," he added.

Whether it is by act of Congress, internal policy shifts, or creative thinking by law school professors, some way has to be found to exempt state-permitted medical marijuana providers from the clutches of 280E and its punitive tax burden aimed at dope dealers, or there may not be any medical marijuana providers.

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The topless performance artist is suing the NYPD for repeated arrests, harassment and committing her to psychiatric institution.

 

 MANHATTAN (CN) - "Topless paparazzo" Holly Van Voast claims in court that New York City police repeatedly arrested and institutionalized her for legally baring her breasts while wearing a Marilyn Monroe wig and Don Juan mustache. Van Voast aka Harvey Van Toast sued New York City, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, the Metropolitan Transit Authority and dozens of police officers in Federal Court. The 46-year-old performance artist calls going topless part of her commitment to "personal, artistic and gender freedom," inspired a "broad artistic community of punk drag" performers such as Little Kimchi, Misty Meaner and Mary Jo Cameltoe, according to the complaint. Van Voast says the law has been on her side since 1992, when the New York State Court of Appeals dismissed an indecent exposure violation against Rochester woman Ramona Santorelli. Ignoring the "clear command" of the Santorelli ruling, the NYPD "has stopped, detained, harassed, arrested, summonsed, charged and/or prosecuted plaintiff on dozens of occasions - solely for exercising her right to be to be topless in public in New York City. The NYPD has repeatedly charged and arrested Ms. Van Voast for appearing topless in public although she has committed no crime," the complaint states. "On multiple occasions when plaintiff was peacefully going about her business in New York City, the NYPD has wrongfully detained and charged Ms. Van Voast, either with 'Indecent Exposure' pursuant to New York Penal Law § 245.01, or with a host of other sham charges. The NYPD has charged Ms. Van Voast on these occasions not because she was doing anything illegal, but for the impermissible and unconstitutional purpose of penalizing and deterring her from being topless in public." The NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne told the Village Voice in June 2011 that toplessness was legal. "The state's highest court established long ago that women have the same right as men to appear topless in public," Browne told the Voice. Two months later, Van Voast says, police detained and charged her for toplessly waltzing into the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station without a "permit." That charge was adjourned in contemplation of dismissal. Another indecent exposure charge for walking topless in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn on Oct. 23, 2011 was dismissed entirely. On March 14, 2012, Van Voast says, she chose the P.S. 6 elementary school in Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side neighborhood to send her message. "Plaintiff chose that location to stand specifically to express her opinion that the sight of women's breasts is not dangerous to children, and that claims of 'protecting' children from toplessness were misplaced," the complaint states. She claims that two unidentified officers took her for psychiatric evaluation to New York Presbyterian Hospital, where she was held against her will for about six days. After she appeared topless at the Bronx Day Parade on May 20, 2012, police sent her for evaluation at Montefiore Hospital, where she was handcuffed to a bed for "an extended period of time," according to the complaint. Oblivious to irony, NYPD officers sent her to St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital for being topless in front of a Hooters restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, she claims. The complaint recites several more such incidents. Van Voast claims the NYPD tried to justify its actions by issuing a "FINEST" message on Feb. 3 this year, instructing police to take "enforcement action" against "male or female individuals who are simply appearing in public unclothed above their waist." Van Voast demands punitive damages and legal fees for constitutional violations and negligent supervision. She is represented by pugnacious civil rights attorney lawyer Ron Kuby and Katherine Rosenfeld, with the heavy-hitting law firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady. A New York City Law Department spokeswoman told Courthouse News that the New York State Court of Appeals decision does allow women to be topless in public, but that the decision included "various qualifiers" prohibiting "lewdness," among other things. "We will review the allegations in the complaint, which at this point are just that, allegations," the spokeswoman said. She said Thursday that the NYPD had not yet been served with the complaint. She added that she could not speak to whether the Santorelli qualifiers applied in this case. The text of the Santorelli opinion is vague on that. The majority opinion states: "Considering the statute's provenance, we held in Price that a woman walking along a street wearing a fishnet, see-through pull-over blouse did not transgress the statute and that it 'should not be applied to the noncommercial, perhaps accidental, and certainly not lewd, exposure alleged.'" The opinion does not state that New York Penal Law § 245.01 applied to lewdness, but a concurring opinion says the opposite. "Nor can it be argued that Penal Law § 245.01 was intended to be confined to conduct that is lewd or intentionally annoying," the concurring opinion states. "First, there is absolutely no support in the legislative history for such a construction. Second, a construction of Penal Law § 245.01 requiring lewdness would be of highly questionable validity, since it would render Penal Law § 245.00 [prohibiting the exposure of 'intimate parts' 'in a lewd manner'] redundant." Neither of Van Voast's attorneys replied to a request for comment.  Related Stories

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The freshman rep explained, "we’ve normalized perversion and perverted God’s natural law."

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is overturning Roe v. Wade. Or, at least, that’s what freshman Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) seemed to suggest in a speech earlier this month:

Just in the last several days, a Bismarck news anchor mistakenly uttered vulgarity on live television. He’s been heralded by celebrities from New York to California as some sort of pop icon. His bosses have been called goons because they fired him. We learned this week that the Pentagon is vetting its guide on religious tolerance with a group that compared Christian evangelism to rape, and advocated that military personnel and colluding chaplains who proselytize should be court-marshalled.

Forty years ago, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned abortion on demand. And we wonder why our culture sees school shootings so often.

Cramer’s link between recent school shootings and a 40 year-old Supreme Court decision is certainly an unusual take on what causes events to transpire, but his attempt to present abortion as more dangerous to society than weakly regulated access to firearms is far from unique. Indeed, in five states, it is significantly harder to obtain an abortion than it is to purchase a gun.

The congressman’s statement appears to be part of a broader theory about how bad things are happening in the United States because people have turned away from Cramer’s version of Christianity. At another point in the speech, he claims that “[i]nnocent people in New York have airplanes flown into their places of work, and marathoners in Boston are victims of bombs, yet Christianity is singled out as bigotry in our public institutions because politicians and academics lack the courage to speak truth. We’ve normalized perversion and perverted God’s natural law to the point where the only thing not tolerated anymore is a stand for truth.”

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“Folks, this is a game changer. And not just because it looks like it was made by Hasbro."

 

“Will America be a place where anyone can get a gun regardless of mental health or criminal record or will face the nightmare of not that?” Colbert began on his show last night.

Our favorite fake conservative talk host took on the latest and perhaps easiest avenue to firearm acquisition: a 3D printer and the Internet. That’s right. News reports recently unveiled that a fully operational gun had successfully been created with a 3D printer, “making it the fastest way of getting a gun in America next to opening a checking account in Texas.”

Colbert introduced us to the 3D gun pioneer, 25-year-old University of Texas Law Student Cody Wilson, founder of Defense Distributed. In an interview, Wilson says he is making high-capacity magazines easily available online because of “The collectivization of manufacturing” or something, and “I don’t know.”

“That’s a real rallying cry,” Colbert observed. “‘What do we want? Guns. Why do we want them? I don’t know.’”

“Folks, this is a game changer. And not just because it looks like it was made by Hasbro,” Colbert continued, mocking the rather toyish look of the new weapons.

Wilson’s Defense Distributed calls the gun Wikiweapon, “because like Wikipedia, it will also be used to settle bar bets.”

Concerned, the Feds ordered Wilson’s company to remove the files that provide the blueprint for 3D guns. But as Colbert notes, that move will probably have limited effectiveness.

“And we all know that once something is deleted from the Internet, it is as gone as Anthony Wiener’s crotch,” Colbert quipped.

Watch:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,Video Archive

 

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The maddening episode reveals how Washington works.

There’s so much that’s upside-down and ill-informed about the "IRS scandal" unfolding in Washington, starting with the fact that no one has pointed a finger at the people who created these abuses in the first place: senior political consultants and lawyers. And doesn’t anyone see the hypocrisy of the GOP for calling out the IRS for targeting groups (that lied about being charities) when that party has been targeting black and brown voters for years via every imaginable "voter-fraud" law?

It would be stunning if the current "scandal" led to an informed discussion about the lies and loopholes and campaign law-evading tactics used by both parties in the post-Citizens United era, where lawyers exploited legal ambiguities to run campaigns with little or no accountability. However, that’s not going to happen when too many of the politicians screaming scandal were elected using these dark money deceits.

Let’s go through some of the most maddening aspects of this evolving episode, with an eye to identifying the real scandal and the real culprits.

1. The IRS made mistakes with both parties. The scandal mongers have said that the IRS went too far in pressing Tea Party groups for information when applying for federal non-profit tax status. Lost in this fine print is a critical fact. As Bloomberg.com reported, IRS staffers sent the same questionaire to Democratic groups suspected of not being charities but political as well. So it’s not just an "attack" on Republicans. 

2. The real issue is the IRS isn’t doing its job. On Wednesday, Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse gave a speech in the Senate where he laid out the fictions used by political groups to masquarade as charities. He pointed out that industry groups—like PhRMA, the drug company lobby—file reports to IRS and Federal Election Commission filled with contradictory information about their political activities. “Making a material false statement to a federal agency is not just bad behavior, it’s a crime,” he said. But “the Department of Justice won’t prosecute false statements… unless the case has been referred by the IRS… [and] the IRS never makes a referral.”  

“So it is very wrong that the IRS required additional information from a number of organizations based on a screen incorporating their Tea Party orientation,” Whitehouse said. “Picking on the little guy is a pretty lousy thing to do; rolling over for the powerful and letting them file false statements is pretty lousy too.”

3. Team Obama’s hysterical overreactions. The adminstration’s reactions, from the president to Attorney General Eric Holder, have fed the hysteria and given the GOP a green light to turn the Tea Party into victims. Not only did the firing of the IRS acting director come prematurely, but Obama’s overreaction cements the notion that many local Tea Party groups—frequently funded by the Koch brothers—were entitled to be treated the same under tax law as the March of Dimes. Moreover, Holder’s statement that he was recusing himself while announcing the FBI investigation just picks another fight between the administration and congressional Republicans. What Obama could have done was take the risk of explaining how the system really works—what’s broken—and the solutions, even though he has been a beneficiary of it.

4. Charities are not political front groups.The question of who turned charities into political front groups has barely been discussed. The answer, of course, is the same as it always has been: election lawyers and campaign consultants who look for loopholes in the law so clients can run for office using any tactic with little or no accountability.

Media coverage of this scandal has had the wrong starting line. It wasn’t the IRS that deluged its staff with thousands of applications from political groups pretending to be charities. It was groups following the advice or example of campaign consultants such as Karl Rove. He was the first to use this ruse on a large scale in order to run a shadow presidential campaign where he could hide his donors’ identities.

The way this works is simple. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling deregulated campaign finances, political operators looked for ambiguities to exploit and turned to non-profit tax law—knowing the agency's primary focus has nothing to do with electioneering. One of the legal ambiguities is the fiction that "public education" and "lobbying" activities by non-profits groups are not political (and thus subject to election law) if they comprise more than 50 percent of that group’s activities.

So that’s what Karl Rove ginned up with his non-profit Crossroads GPS, which spent $123 million for the 2012 federal elections, according to the Sunlight Foundation, with 70 percent raised from secret donors. The IRS still has not issued a ruling on whether Rove’s group violated non-profit tax law.

5. The IRS’s top GOP critics were elected this way. Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey might be the GOP frontman on federal gun controls, but on this issue he has compared the IRS scrutiny to President Richard Nixon’s infamous enemies list. Of course, two political non-profits, Rove’s Crossroads GPS and the Republican Jewish Coalition spent $17.6 million on his behalf by the time Election Day rolled around last fall. He’s hardly the only member of Congress whose rise to power was helped by political front groups masquerading as tax-exempt charities.

One of the unwritten but enduring Washington rules is that both political parties will not tinker with the tactics that helped them gain power—because they mastered the system to get elected. But that is not even the biggest GOP hypocrisy surrounding this "scandal."

6. Lies are so big they hide in plain sight. The party known for voter suppression and intimidation now feels targeted? The spectacle of Republicans protesting that its groups were targeted by the IRS, when the only business of some of these groups was to lead the GOP’s 2012 voter suppression efforts, is just unbelievable. The GOP has spent years trying to discourage and suppress voting blocks that it perceives will back Democrats, such as black and brown voters, and students. Its entire "voter fraud" canard is based on policing the polls in myriad ways targeting millions of voters. 

But now the GOP is upset—with Speaker of the House John Boehner saying he wants the guilty put in jail—because groups like True The Vote were not given the same tax status as the Girl Scouts? They have spent years in state after state imposing tougher ID laws, criminalizing voter registration drives, curtailing early voting, and on and on.

There are so many reasons why this "scandal" reflects what’s really wrong in our political culture. But watching it unfold literally is like watching the blind leading the blind—and the rest of us have to live with the results of these political subterfuges. This scandal is about the perpetuation of lies and deceits in modern campaigns and politics. Meanwhile, the solution, more transparency and disclosure, is going nowhere.

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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.

 

 

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What happened to kids being kids?

 

Brianna Pena, a 5-year-old, was told she could not return to her kindergarten classroom at her Bronx, NY, charter school until she was “psychiatrically cleared” to return by a medical professional.  It was her first day at a new school.  She didn’t know anyone and repeatedly cried, “Nobody cares about me!” School officials insist that Brianna kept “yelling and throwing chairs” during the incident.  Administrators placed her on a list of so-called “psychiatric suspensions.”

In Bartow, FL, Kiera Wilmot, a 16-year-old student was expelled from Bartow High School and arrested for conducting an unapproved chemistry experiment.  She combined some household chemicals in an 8-ounce water bottle and the top popped off, giving off a small explosion.  According to the school principal, Ron Pritchard, "she made a bad choice. ... She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did.”  She was charged with possession of and discharging a weapon on school property.

Brianna’s and Kiera are but two examples of the growing “discipline” crisis besetting schools throughout the country.  School administrators are resorting to an increasing number of questionable tactics to address problems associated with the breakdown of the classroom as a learning environment.  These include the use of local EMS workers to remove pre-teen children as well as such high-tech methods as RFID tracking and CCTV video surveillance.  An increasing number of officials are resorting to aggressive in-school policing, with on-campus uniformed and armed officers ticketing and arresting more and more kids.  All to contain “disruptive” students often engaged in what was once considered bad behavior but is now criminalized conduct. 

Reports that American education is in crisis appear in the media almost every day. From Pres. Obama to mayors across the country, everyone complains about the country’s supposedly failing education system.  Each promises to fix the problem – and it only seems to be getting worse.  Yet, efforts to police schools reflect the further shifting of education spending from the classroom to the administrative apparatus of control.  

A major contributing factor to this crisis is the failed “zero tolerance” discipline program promoted by the Bush administration and still in force in school systems throughout the country.  Like its abstinence-only sex ed program, Bush policies made a serious issue worse.  The effort to enforce classroom discipline through the expulsion and punishment of students is an example of the moral absolutism propagated during much of the last few decades. It further extends the “school-to-prison pipeline” by aggressively incarcerating ever-younger children, particularly African-American and Hispanic youth.

***

Some cities, like New York, are increasingly turning to costly emergency medical services to restrain students. Cashmiere Turner, a 7th grader at New York’s Intermediate School 151 in the Bronx, struggled both academically and socially in the classroom.  Her mother, Sonya, repeatedly sought school administrators’ help with her daughter’s learning problems and the bullying she faced, but was ignored.  In October 2011, school officials claimed that the troubled teen acted out, attempting to harm herself.  They contacted Cashmiere’s mother, who rushed to the school only to find that the officials had also contacted the local EMS.  Refusing to let Ms. Turner take her daughter home, EMS workers and police officers brought her to a local hospital that found her neither a threat to herself nor others.  She was released, but not before the hospital billed her mother an estimated $1,300 for services rendered.

The city’s Board of Education (BOE) reports that during 2010-2011 school year, EMS was called 947 times to handle disruptive or dangerous kids; this is up 12 percent from the previous year.  Nelson Mar, an attorney with Legal Services NYC-Bronx, represented both Brianna Pena and Cashmiere Turner, warns, “minor children are removed by EMS for childhood behavior or misbehavior which does not rise to the level of a medical emergency.”  He points out that at one Bronx hospital, there were 58 EMS calls from schools during a 10-day period in February 2011. Most troubling, doctors and psychologists found that only 3 percent of the kids brought to an Emergency Room were admitted to the hospital.

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stewardship, removal and suspension are among the principal means to enforce discipline in the classroom. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the BOE’s “Citywide Standards on Discipline and Intervention” – the discipline code -- reported infractions increased 49 percent and “zero tolerance” infractions resulting in a suspension doubled between 2001 and 2010. 

Part of this increase was due to the nearly two-fold increase in the number of code “infractions,” from 38 (2001) to 67 (2007).  The NYCLU found that infractions range from using profane language and throwing chalk to being insubordinate and can lead to a student’s suspension from school for a year.  And “zero tolerance infractions” are the worse, misbehavior requiring suspension.  Over the last decade, they jumped from 7 (in 1998-2001) to 29 (2007-2008, 2008-2010); they declined to 21 (2010-2011).  Not surprising, black students, who make up a third (33%) of the student population, received more then half (53%) of the suspensions.

In New York, school administrators have increasingly turned to EMS to address disciplinary problems.  Mar reports that in the 2011-2012 school year, 3,435 calls were placed to the EMS, up from the 3,024 calls in 2009-2010, a 13.5 percent increase; these calls are separate from calls to NYC police that, during the same period, declined to 241 from 291, a 17.2 percent decrease.  “The practice of removing misbehaving students by EMS is a costly waste of EMS and hospital resources,” Mar warned.

* * *

A high school student from Hoover, AL, was recently beaten by a school official and then arrested for falling asleep in school, according to a recent lawsuit.  Ashlynn Avery is not your typical teenager.  She suffers from diabetes, asthma and sleep apnea.  Sadly, while sitting in the in-school suspension room and reading “Huckleberry Finn,” she dozed off.  She asserts that the classroom supervisor seized the book and hit her with it; he claims it was an accident.  The police were called and the girl was “forcefully” arrested, causing her to have a seizure, vomit, pass out and end up in the hospital. 

To enforce discipline, school systems across the country are employing harsher techniques and turning to the local police. In Maine, educators report an increase in school disruptions with students pulling fire alarms and scratching and bruising teachers.  The state is considering allowing teachers to use restraints or seclusion on misbehaving students; the current bill limits such actions to those authorized in writing by a student's parent, whether this will remain in the final bill is an open question.  In Connecticut over the last few years, nearly 1,700 students were arrested, almost two-thirds of them for breach of peace, minor fights and disorderly conduct.  In-school busts account for 20 percent of all youth arrests in the state.

In Georgia, school misbehavior incidents bring in the local police.  In Milledgeville, GA, a small town about 90 miles from Atlanta, Salecia Johnson, a 6-year-old student at Creekside Elementary School, was handcuffed and taken away in a patrol car to the police station.  According to the Baldwin County schools Superintendent, Geneva Braziel, the police were called due to Johnson’s "violent and disruptive" behavior that threatened other classmates and school staff.  In Clayton County, police recently arrested seven students at the North Clayton High School for disorderly conduct; Precious Woods was busted for spiting on a fellow student who had thrown a trashcan at her and Trinell Kennedy was arrested for using profanity during the same incident.

 

In Albuquerque, NM, during the 2009-2010 school year, 900 of the district's 90,000 students were referred to the criminal justice system.  More than 500 of were handcuffed, arrested and brought to juvenile detention.  More than 200 were arrested for minor offences, including disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, refusing to obey and interference with staff.  (In response to a 2010 class-action lawsuit, student arrests fell by 53 percent.) 

 

Things are far worse in Texas.  In a 2010 report, Texas Appleseed, a public-interest group, found that each year more than 275,000 non-traffic tickets are issued to juveniles.  It reports that the vast majority of offences are due to classroom disruptions and disorderly conduct.  It noted that in 1989, only 9 school districts in Texas had separate police agencies while in 2010 more than 160 had police units.  Ticketed students received fines of between $250 and $500 or do community service in lieu of fines.

 

* * *

 

Steven Teske, MA, JD, and a Judge, Juvenile Court of Clayton County, Jonesboro, GA, writing in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, defines zero tolerance as “policies operate under the assumption that removing disruptive students deters other students from similar conduct while simultaneously enhancing the classroom environment.” His detailed analysis makes clear not only that the policy doesn’t work, but contributes to the deepening crisis of American education and harms children.

 

The concept of zero tolerance originated during the Reagan-era’s so-called “war on drugs.” It entered the educational sector in 1994 when Pres. Bill Clinton signed the Gun-Free Schools Act that required a student’s 1-year suspension if s/he was found possessing a firearm.  In the wake of the Columbine shootings of 1999, the law has been expanded to include any so-called weapon, including Kiera Wilmot’s chemistry experiment.  Under Pres. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, zero tolerance was linked to teaching-to-the-test policies as a solution to the education crisis. 

 

The increased policing of the classroom is part of the effort to transform schools from “educational” institutions that cultivate citizenship to “training” campuses inculcating workplace discipline.  It is a battle that has shaped American education since mass public schooling was introduced more then a century ago.

In New York during the ‘90s, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani adopted a zero-tolerance city-management approach as part of his “get-tough" policies.  It originally was designed to curb minor offenses, like squatters in abandoned buildings, subway graffiti artists, squeegee car-window cleaners, panhandlers and street prostitutes; they were part of the “quality of life” troubles gripping the city.  In parallel, Giuliani implemented a zero-tolerance program in city schools to address such issues as fighting, smoking and other forms of inappropriate behavior.

Zero tolerance policies are now being applied to a broad range of disciplinary infractions, both major and minor.  A 2012 report by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) makes clear the painful consequences of zero tolerance.  It warns, “minority students across America face harsher discipline, have less access to rigorous high school curricula, and are more often taught by lower-paid and less experienced teachers.” It found that African-American students, particularly males, make up 18 percent students, but 35 percent of suspended students and 39 percent of those expelled.  Suspended students face a greater risk of dropping out of school or getting involved in criminal activity even though their initial misbehavior was minor.

A host of factors are contributing to the increase in behavior-based disruptions.  Shrinking school budgets have lead to increased class size and cut backs of in-school therapeutic support.  Teachers are not sufficiently trained to deal with in-class disruptions. Mounting child and family poverty rates, especially in poor and minority communities, only aggravate a bad situation.

Behavior problems are real issues; they interfere with teaching and learning and are occurring throughout the country.  A recent study by Scholastic magazine and the Gates Foundation found that 68 percent of elementary, 64 percent of middle school and 53 percent of high school teachers reported increased behavior problems.

Local and state officials across the country are making school discipline a political issue.  In 2012, New York City Council Member Robert Jackson declared: “I’m tired of hearing stories about children who are having tantrums or behavior problems being taken out of school by police or EMS! ... This is unacceptable! … Having police and EMS respond in these situations is both expensive and traumatizing for children and youth.”

Also in 2012, Maryland’s State Board of Education banned zero-tolerance approaches.  They replaced the failed policy with one emphasizing rehabilitation over punishment, believing it would led to more classroom time and higher achievement for students.  In Florida, following a much-publicized 2007 case in which the police arrested a kindergartner who threw a tantrum during a jelly bean-counting contest, a bill was introduced to block police from arresting children who commit acts that do not pose serious safety threats.

In the wake of Newtown, CT, shootings new question have arisen about the effectiveness of zero tolerance.  In December 2012, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, convened the nation’s first Congressional hearing on “Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” He stressed that instead of making schools safer, the policy has redefined “rather normal behavior” into criminal activity.

Many civil liberties lawyers, educators and parents believe that the zero tolerance approach to classroom misbehavior needs to be replaced by one based on a more humane classroom environment and whole-person curriculum.  They point to such programs as Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS), Safe Responsive Schools (SRS) Restorative Practice and “social-emotional learning” as alternative programs.  “Although many of these approaches are already utilized in some form in many public schools in New York City,” Mar warns, “the BOE has not adopted a policy requiring all NYC public schools to utilize these methods.” “Instead,” he adds, “the BOE fails to even encourage the use of these in their policies.”   

 

Only by ending the tyranny of zero tolerance and providing full financial and other support to schools, especially in poor and minority  neighborhoods, will the school-to-prison pipeline be broken.  And only then will we begin to meaningfully address the deeper crisis of American troubled education system.

 

* * *

David Rosen writes the Media Current column for Filmmaker and regularly contributes to CounterPunch, Huffington Post and the Brooklyn Rail, check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com; he can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net.

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Is your anxiety about falling asleep keeping you awake? Or are your neurons to blame?

 

We've all experienced a sleepless night or two, and for some people that's actually the norm. But why do we experience insomnia at all? What is going on in our minds and bodies, to cause this awful condition? Here's what scientists know so far.

The prevalence of insomnia in adults varies widely, depending on how the condition is defined. Most broadly, someone has insomnia if he or she simply suffers from difficulty falling asleep, waking up over and over during the night, or nonrestorative sleep — and according to that definition, up to 50 percent of adults experience insomnia. But only around 20 percent of the population deals with insomnia, if we're going by the 4th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, where insomnia is considered a sleeping disorder (pdf) that lasts at least a month and causes daytime distress.

In any case, our understanding of insomnia is constantly evolving. For many years, insomnia was considered just a symptom of other issues, including depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. The prevailing thought was that if you treated the dominant condition, insomnia would subside as well. Insomnia is now known to be a syndrome in its own right, one that occurs alongside (is comorbid with) other disorders. So if you suffer from depression and insomnia, both issues should be treated at the same time — rather than just treating your depression alone.

To doctors, this type of insomnia, which is not caused by other medical issues or medicines, is called primary insomnia (as opposed to its sibling, secondary insomnia). They further describe the condition by how long it lasts — acute insomnia occurs for days or weeks, while chronic insomnia goes on for a month or more.

The basic models

In the past few decades, scientists have proposed a number of models to describe how chronic primary insomnia arises. One of the foundational paradigms was the "3-P model," referring to the supposed Predisposing, Precipitating and Perpetuating factors of the condition.

The model says that certain attributes, including being highly anxious or a perfectionist, may first make you more susceptible to insomnia. Then, some precipitating event, such as a death in the family or a new job, throws your sleep out of balance, causing acute insomnia. Finally, poor attitudes and perceptions perpetuate insomnia — these can include heightened uneasiness and tension regarding sleep, or poor sleep hygiene.

Over the years, other models have come along, some of which adapted concepts of the 3-P model. For example, the cognitive model, proposed a little over a decade ago, explains that insomniacs are overly worried about sleep and about what happens if they don't get enough of it. These negative thoughts trigger arousal and emotional distress, which essentially plunges people into an anxious state, causing them to actively monitor themselves and the environment for sleep-related threats (noises, body sensations and the like). Of course, this only exacerbates sleeplessness.

But insomnia (and the models to explain it) isn't limited to the psychological realm. Theneurocognitive model explains that people with insomnia show more high-frequency electrical activity in the brain (EEG) when they're going to sleep compared with normal sleepers. This cortical arousal suggests that insomniacs have enhanced sensory or information processing and long-term memory formation during a time when normal sleepers do not, which could ultimately affect sleep. For example, the enhanced sensory processing may make insomniacs more sensitive to and aware of what's going on in the environment.

Hyperarousal?

A common theme in these models and others is this idea of arousal. In fact, many researchers now consider insomnia to be a state of 24-hour hyperarousal, brought on by the interplay between psychological and physiological factors.

Current models suggest insomnia is caused by an interaction between behavioral and neurobiological factors. Courtesy of Elsevier.

On the psychological side of things, we have some of what we've already discussed. One useful cognitive model called the AIE (attention–intention-effort) pathway says that people with insomnia focus their attention on sleep, which leads to an active intention and effort to fall asleep.

The idea here is that normal sleep is automatic and involuntary — it's the result of a de-arousal process that allows homeostatic and circadian factors to engage sleep. But by actively trying to engage sleep themselves, insomniacs are impeding these natural processes and actually maintaining a state of arousal.

Interestingly, scientists have seen evidence of AIE even in the daytime naps of insomniacs. Numerous studies have looked at the Multiple Sleep Latency Test, which involves four or five 20-minute nap opportunities set two hours apart. If someone has gotten poor sleep because of insomnia, it stands to reason that they would be able to fall asleep quicker than someone who slept well the night before — but test after test has shown just the opposite. Some researchers are now speculating that the increased nap latency of insomniacs is due to the demands of the test, which directly asks participants to attempt to sleep at that very moment (insomniacs have basically conditioned themselves to enter a state of arousal when they make a conscious effort to sleep).

This induced arousal, at night and during naptime, has several lines of supporting physiological evidence. For example, studies have shown that insomniacs have higher whole-body metabolic rates — measured by looking at oxygen consumption at periodic intervals throughout the day — than normal sleepers.

Using PET scans, researchers have also investigated brain metabolism differences between insomniacs and normal sleepers. They saw similar results: insomnia patients had elevated global brain metabolism, both asleep and awake. Moreover, the study showed that insomniacs had smaller metabolism declines in wake-promoting regions of the brain when going from waking to non-REM sleep. In addition to this, a recent study found that insomnia patients have increased waking EEG.

Scientists have also examined the body temperatures, galvanic skin responses and heart rates of insomniac patients (all of which are physiological indicators of arousal). The results are not entirely conclusive, but suggest insomniacs have elevated electrodermal activity during the day, and may have elevated heart rates and altered heart rate variability during sleep; also, elderly insomnia patients have elevated core body temperatures at night (given the inconsistencies in the research, we can't say much else about other insomniacs).

Studies on hormone levels have also yielded interesting results, supporting the hyperarousal theory. Patients with primary insomnia apparently secrete less nighttime melatonin, which is known to regulate sleep and wake cycles. On the other hand, norepinephrine, which helps mediate wakefulness, is increased in insomnia patients, even at night. Stress hormones, including cortisol and ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone) may also be elevated in insomniacswhen compared with controls.

Flip-flopping

Scientists' understanding of insomnia points to the condition being a state of hyperarousal, which is mediated by cognitive and physiological factors. But the exact mechanisms behind the arousal are not clear.

Some research suggests that the neurobiology of sleep-wake regulation may provide some answers. To put it simply, the tendency to sleep is regulated by a balance between sleep-promoting neurotransmitter systems and wake-promoting neurotransmitter systems. To facilitate sleep, a group of neurons in the hypothalamus called the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus (VLPO) release the inhibitory neurotransmitters galanin and GABA to shut off the arousal (wake) system. So a faulty VLPO flip-flop switch may prevent the brain from de-arousing.

At the same time, however, other evidence suggests that sleep arises from bottom-up processes. In this sense, sleep may be a local process, an intrinsic property of individual neurons or group of neurons. This concept of local sleep would suggest that hyperarousal is not something that happens globally in the brain — it may instead be a "use-dependent dysfunction" in specific neural circuits.

Future research will no doubt tease out these finer details. And other work may elucidate the role that genetics play in chronic primary insomnia. But the ultimate goal of insomnia research, of course, is to find an effective way to stop the condition in its tracks. Given that insomnia apparently costs us billions of dollars each year, curing the syndrome could have a huge positive impact in a lot of areas.

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