By Elayne Clift

Imperial henchman John Brennan: point man for the drone program. His supposed cross-examination by Congress is mere window-dressing. Drone targets to him are just “cancerous tumours”.—Eds

For the first time in history a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out military missions — killing people — in countries where the U.S. is not officially at war. Shouldn’t we be worried about that?

I had to see the controversial film “Zero Dark Thirty” for myself in order to decide if, as charged, it advanced the case for “enhanced interrogation methods,” military-speak for torture. It did not, in my view.   What it did was affirm the hideous and inhumane nature of torture no matter where it is carried out, and by whom. It should never be used by any country that positions itself as a moral leader.

Now I need to see the documentary “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield.” It is likely to confirm my growing antipathy toward the ever-increasing use of drones, especially following the recently leaked memo that has alarmed so many in public and private quarters.

Reading a piece by George Monbiot in the Guardian in December made me think about drones.   The essay, called “Bug Splats,” was written shortly after the Newtown massacre.   Why, Mr. Monbiot, wondered, were the murders of children by a deranged man in Connecticut any more worthy of the world’s grief than the children killed in countries like Pakistan as a matter of American policy?   If the victims of drone strikes are mentioned at all, he wrote, “they are discussed in terms which suggest they are less than human.”   An article in Rolling Stone Magazine, he said, alleged that “people who operate drones describe their casualties as “bug splats’ since seeing bodies through a green video image gives them the sense of an insect being crushed.”

This is harsh and emotional stuff.   So I went in search of fact and further opinion.   Facts were hard to come by since much of what happens with drones is classified. But here are some things I learned. The Pentagon has about 7,000 drones.   A decade ago it had 50 of them.   In the 2012 budget the Obama administration asked Congress for almost $5 billion for more drones, now seen as crucial for fighting terrorism.   A reported 1,900 insurgents in Pakistan’s tribal regions have been killed by American drones since 2006 and in 2011 a drone killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

Here’s the problem: the United States is not at war with Pakistan or Yemen and that makes their use in these countries officially illegal.   For the first time in history a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out military missions — killing people — in countries where the U.S. is not officially at war.

Proponents of drone use argue that so long as they are grounded in sound intelligence information, they enable the U.S. to attack terrorists with a fair degree of precision without risking American lives.   Mistakes happen in war, they say, but not as much “collateral damage” — killing of innocents — occurs as would if bombs or troops were being used.   If we didn’t use drones, they argue, what action could the U.S. take to stop Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations?

But concerns are beginning to surface as drones become more ubiquitous and more deadly.   A United Nations panel led by Ben Emerson, special investigator for the UN Human Rights Council, has begun to look at “drone strikes and other forms of remotely targeted killing.”   Of particular concern are 25 selected drone strikes that have been conducted in recent years in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and the Palestinian territories.   Noting that it is not only the U.S. coming under scrutiny – 50 other states have the technology to develop “active drone arsenals” — Emerson says “it is completely unacceptable to allow the world to drift blindly toward the precipice without any agreement between states as to the circumstances in which drone strike targeted killings are lawful, and on the safeguards necessary to protect civilians.”

Such safeguards will not come soon enough for the 64 children killed during the first three years of Mr. Obama’s administration.   (Drone attacks began during the Bush administration. One of them killed 69 children.)   During those three years, a report by the Stanford and New York university law schools suggests, there were 259 drone strikes. They killed an estimated 569 civilians. Some say that is a conservative estimate.

It is worrying, then, that Mr. Obama’s choice to head the CIA is John O. Brennan, deputy national security advisor, a man who calls drone targets “cancerous tumors.”   No wonder kids in places like Yemen are afraid to go to school and people think twice before attending weddings or funerals that might be mistaken for a gang of plotters.

Writing in the Guardian in January, Simon Jenkins sounded this alarm:   “The greatest threat to world peace”is from drones and their certain proliferation. ” Drones are now sweeping the global arms market [with] some 10,000 said to be in service”some reports say they have killed more non-combatant civilians than died in 9-11.”

The threat of serious backlash looms. A Yemeni writer told The New York Times that al Qaeda recruiters “wave pictures of drone-butchered women and children.” National membership of Al Qaeda in Yemen is now three times larger than it was in 2009.

If that doesn’t worry you consider this: last February President Obama signed a law compelling the FAA to allow drone use for commercial endeavors in this country. These uses range from selling real estate to dusting crops and monitoring wildlife.   Hollywood may even use drones to film and local police will be freer to deploy flying robots.   While drone manufacturers drool, safety concerns increase.

I understand that drones, used with an abundance of caution for selective anti-terrorism operations, backed by stringent legislation, may be a necessary part of our arsenal. But I can’t get the picture of those innocent children out of my mind.   And no one should have to fear going to school, attending a wedding or mourning at a funeral, especially when the one being buried is a child.

Submitters Website: www.elayneclift.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elayne Clift is a writer,lecturer, workshop leader and activist. She is senior correspondent for Women’s Feature Service, columnist for the Keene (NH) Sentinel and Brattleboro (VT) Commons and a contributor to various publications internationally. Her latest book is ACHAN: A Year of Teaching Thailand (Bangkok Books, 2007). She is also the editor of Women, Philanthropy and Social Change: Visions for a Just Society (UPNE/Tufts U., 2007). She lives in Saxtons River, Vt. and invites readers to visit her website: www.elayneclift.com

The Bush regime’s response to 9/11 and the Obama regime’s validation of this response have destroyed accountable democratic government in the United States. So much unaccountable power has been concentrated in the executive branch that the US Constitution is no longer an operable document.

Whether a person believes the official story of 9/11 which rests on unproven government assertions or believes the documented evidence provided by a large number of scientists, first responders, and structural engineers and architects, the result is the same. 9/11 was used to create an open-ended “war on terror” and a police state. It is extraordinary that so many Americans believe that “it can’t happen here” when it already has.

We have had a decade of highly visible evidence of the construction of a police state: the PATRIOT Act, illegal spying on Americans in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the initiation of wars of aggression–war crimes under the Nuremberg Standard–based on intentional lies, the Justice Department’s concocted legal memos justifying the executive branch’s violation of domestic and international laws against torture, the indefinite detention of US citizens in violation of the constitutionally protected rights of habeas corpus and due process, the use of secret evidence and secret “expert witnesses” who cannot be cross-examined against defendants in trials, the creation of military tribunals in order to evade federal courts, secret legal memos giving the president authority to launch preemptive cyber attacks on any country without providing evidence that the country constitutes a threat, and the Obama regime’s murder of US citizens without evidence or due process.

As if this were not enough, the Obama regime now creates new presidential powers by crafting secret laws, refusing to disclose the legal reasoning on which the asserted power rests. In other words, laws now originate in secret executive branch memos and not in acts of Congress. Congress? We don’t need no stinking Congress.

Despite laws protecting whistleblowers and the media and the US Military Code which requires soldiers to report war crimes, whistleblowers such as CIA agent John Kiriakou, media such as Julian Assange, and soldiers such as Bradley Manning are persecuted and prosecuted for revealing US government crimes. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33804.htm The criminals go free, and those who report the crimes are punished.

The justification for the American police state is the “war on terror,” a hoax kept alive by the FBI’s “sting operations.” Normally speaking, a sting operation is when a policewoman poses as a prostitute in order to ensnare a “John,” or a police officer poses as a drug dealer or user in order to ensnare drug users or dealers. The FBI’s “sting operation” goes beyond these victimless crimes that fill up US prisons.

The FBI’s sting operations are different. They are just as victimless as no plot ever happens, but the FBI doesn’t pose as bomb makers for terrorists who have a plot but lack the weapon. Instead, the FBI has the plot and looks for a hapless or demented person or group, or for a Muslim enraged over the latest Washington insult to him and/or his religion. When the FBI locates its victim, its agents approach the selected perpetrator pretending to be Al-Qaeda or some such and ply the selected perpetrator with money, the promise of fame, or threats until the victim signs on to the FBI’s plot and is arrested.

Trevor Aaronson in his book, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s War on Terrorism, documents that the FBI has so far concocted 150 “terrorist plots” and that almost all of the other “terrorist cases” are cases unrelated to terrorism, such as immigration, with a terror charge tacked on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LpTOrNQ3G9Q#! The presstitute American media doesn’t ask why, if there is so much real terrorism requiring an American war against it, the FBI has to invent and solicit terrorist plots.

Neither does the media inquire how the Taliban, which resists the US invasion and attempted occupation of Afghanistan, fighting the US superpower to a standstill after 11 years, came to be designated as terrorists. Nor does the US presstitute media want to know how tribesmen in remote regions of Pakistan came to be designated as “terrorists” deserving of US drone attacks on the citizens, schools and medical clinics of a country with which the US is not at war.

Instead the media protects and perpetrates the hoax that has given America the police state. The American media has become Leni Riefenstahl, as has Hollywood with the anti-Muslim propaganda film, Zero Dark Thirty. This propaganda film is a hate crime that spreads Islamophobia. Nevertheless, the film is likely to win awards and to sink Americans into both tyranny and a hundred-year war in the name of fighting the Muslim threat.

What I learned many years ago as a professor is that movies are important molders of Americans‘ attitudes. Once, after giving a thorough explanation of the Russian Revolution that led to communist rule, a student raised his hand and said: “That’s not the way it happened in the movie.”

At first I thought he was making a witty joke, but then I realized that he thought that the truth resided in the movie, not in the professor who was well versed in the subject. Ever since I have been puzzled how the US has survived for so long, considering the ignorance of its population. Americans have lived in the power of the US economy. Now that this power is waning, sooner or later Americans will have to come to terms with reality.

It is a reality that will be unfamiliar to them.

Some Americans claim that we have had police states during other wartimes and that once the war on terror is won, the police state will be dismantled. Others claim that government will be judicious in its use of the power and that if you are doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear.

These are reassurances from the deluded. The Bush/Obama police state is far more comprehensive than Lincoln’s, Wilson’s, or Roosevelt’s, and the war on terror is open-ended and is already three times longer than World War II. The Police State is acquiring “squatter’s rights.”

Moreover, the government needs the police state in order to protect itself from accountability for its crimes, lies, and squandering of taxpayers‘ money. New precedents for executive power have been created in conjunction with the Federalist Society which, independent of the war on terror, advocates the “unitary executive” theory, which claims the president has powers not subject to check by Congress and the Judiciary. In other words, the president is a dictator if he prefers to be.

The Obama regime is taking advantage of this Republican theory. The regime has used the Republican desire for a strong executive outside the traditional checks and balances together with the fear factor to complete the creation of the Bush/Cheney police state.

As Lawrence M. Stratton and I documented in our book, The Tyranny Of Good Intentions, prior to 9/11 law as a shield of the people was already losing ground to law as a weapon in the hands of the government. If the government wanted to get you, there were few if any barriers to a defendant being framed and convicted, least of all a brainwashed jury fearful of crime.

I cannot say whether the US justice system has ever served justice better than it has served the ambition of prosecutors. Already in the 1930s and 1940s US Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland and US Attorney General Robert Jackson were warning against prosecutors who sacrifice “fair dealing to build up statistics of success.” Certainly it is difficult to find in the ranks of federal prosecutors today Jackson’s “prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.”

Just consider the wrongful conviction of Alabama’s Democratic governor, Don Siegelman by what apparently was a Karl Rove plot to rid the South of Democratic governors. The “Democratic” Obama regime has not investigated this false prosecution or given clemency to its innocent own. Remember how quickly Bush removed the prison sentence of Cheney’s operative who revealed the name of a CIA undercover agent? The Democrats are a cowed and cowardly political party, fearful of justice, and as much a part of the corrupt police state as the Republicans.

Today the purpose of a prosecution is to serve the prosecutor’s career and that of the party that appoints him or her. A prosecutor’s career is served by high conviction rates, which require plea bargains in which the evidence against a defendant is never tested in court or before a jury, and by high profile cases, which can launch a prosecutor into a political career, as Rudy Giuliana achieved with his frame-up of Michael Milken.

Glenn Greenwald explained how Internet freedom advocate Aaron Swartz was driven to his death by the ambition of two federal prosecutors, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant US Attorney Stephen Heymann, who had no aversion to destroying an innocent person with ridiculous and trumped-up charges in order to advance their careers. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/ortiz-heymann-swartz-accountability-abuse

It is rare for a prosecutor to suffer any consequence for bringing false charges, for consciously using and even paying for false evidence, and for lying to judge and jury. As prosecutors are rarely held accountable, they employ illegal and unethical methods and routinely abuse their power. As judges are mainly concerned with clearing their court dockets, justice is rarely served in America, which explains why the US has not only a larger percentage of its citizens in prison than any other country on earth, but also the largest absolute number of prisoners. The US actually has more of its citizens in prison than “authoritarian” China which has a population four times larger than the US. The US, possibly the greatest human rights abuser in history, is constantly bringing human rights charges against China. Where are the human rights charges against Washington?

In America the collapse of law has gone beyond corrupt prosecutors and their concocted false prosecutions. Unless it needs or desires a show trial, a police state does not need prosecutors and courts. By producing legal memos that the president can both throw people into prison without a trial and execute them without a trial simply by stating that some official in the executive branch thinks the person has a possible or potential connection to terrorism, tyranny’s friends in the Justice (sic) Department have dispensed with the need for courts, prosecutors and trials.The Bush/Obama regime has made the executive branch judge, juror, and executioner. All that is needed is an unproven assertion by some executive branch official. Here we have the epitome of evil.

Evidence is no longer required for the president of the US to imprison people for life or to deprive them of their life. A secret Justice Department memo has been leaked to NBC News that reveals the tyrannical reasoning that authorizes the executive branch to execute American citizens on the basis of belief alone without the requirement of evidence that they are terrorists or associated with terrorists. http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-exclusive-justice-department-memo-reveals-legal-case-for-drone-strikes-on-americans?lite

In “freedom and democracy” America, innocent until proven guilty is no longer the operative legal principle. If the government says you are guilty, you are. Period. No evidence required for your termination. Even Stalin pretended to have evidence.

The United States government is working its way step by step toward the determination that any and every critic of the government is guilty of providing “aid and comfort” to Washington’s “terrorist enemies,” which includes the elected Hamas government in Gaza. The only critics exempted from this rule-in-the-making are the neoconservatives who criticize the US government for being too slow to throttle both its critics and “anti-semites,” such as former US President Jimmy Carter, who criticize the Israeli government’s illegal appropriation of Palestinian lands. Most of Palestine has been stolen by Israel with Washington acquiesce and aid. Therefore, nothing is left for a “two-state solution.”

There is no doubt whatsoever that the Israeli government’s theft of Palestine is illegal; yet, Washington, on which Israel is totally dependent, does nothing about law. Law, we don’t need no stinking law.” Washington has might. Might is right. Get used to it.

Not only for Palestinians has law ceased to exist, but also for Americans, and for Washington’s NATO puppets in the UK and Europe, pitiful remnants of once great nations now complicit in Washington’s crimes against humanity. The Open Society Justice Initiative, a NGO based in New York, has issued a report that documents that 54 governments are involved in Washington’s rendition and torture program. Twenty-five of the governments that help Washington to kidnap, disappear, and torture people are European. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/cia-rendition-report-uk-court

The opening decade of the 21st century has seen the destruction of all the law that was devised to protect the innocent and the vulnerable since the rise of the now defunct moral conscience of the West. The West’s moral conscience never applied outside of itself. What happened to people in Europe’s colonies and to native inhabitants of the US and Australia is a very different story.

Nevertheless, despite its lack of coverage to the powerless, the principle of the rule of law was a promising principle. Now America under Bush and Obama, two peas of the same pod, has abandoned the principle itself.

The Obama police state will be worse than the Bush/Cheney police state. Unlike conservatives who in times past were suspicious of government power, Obamabots believe that government power is a force for good if it is in the right hands. As Obama’s supporters see him as a member of an oppressed minority, they are confident that Obama will not misuse his power. This belief is akin to the belief that, as Jews suffered so much at the hands of Hitler, Israel would be fair to the Palestinians.

Glenn Greenwald writes that “the most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33847.htm

This is the power of a dictator. That Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were said to have this power was part of their demonization as “brutal dictators,” a justification for overthrowing their governments and murdering the dictators and their supporters.

Ironic, isn’t it, that the president of the United States now murders his political opponents just as Saddam Hussein murdered his. How long before critics move from the no-fly list to the extermination list?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Additional reading: The legal analysis in the URL below written by seasoned attorneys shows that Obama is a tyrant. The point made by the attorneys is too clear to be debatable. http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/assassin_in_chief.html

By Tom Mellana, editorial page editor, The Stamford Advocate/ Greenwich Time

Caught in trap, howling in fear and pain. How long can we tolerate this kind of depraved nonsense? Enough is enough.

In Stamford Advocate it’s: “End state-sanctioned animal cruelty”
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/End-state-sanctioned-animal-cruelty-4257149.php
End state-sanctioned animal cruelty

State-sanctioned animal cruelty must be stopped
Tom Mellana

Question: What would you call someone who intentionally hurts an animal, any animal, and locks it up to wallow in pain, fear and misery, leaving it to die a slow death, often after hurting itself further in a panicked attempt to free itself from its confines?

The state would call that person an animal abuser, and has laws on the books to punish him.

Strange, then, and tragic, that a person can commit those same behaviors, only this time out in the woods, and the state suddenly calls him a sportsman. It has laws on the books to help him.

It might come as a shock to some that we still allow animal trapping in this state, but allow it we do. Metal clamps that slam shut on an animal’s leg, devices that squeeze a body tight underwater until it drowns, are somehow considered acceptable forms of hunting.

It is a cruel practice that belongs to another time. Yet recent efforts to ban trapping in Connecticut have met vociferous opposition from the state Department of Energy & Environmental Protection and so-called sportsmen’s groups. It is hard, however, to see anything sporting about nailing a contraption to the ground that will cause an animal hours upon hours of torture followed by death.

Modern-day trappers like to claim that today’s traps, including “padded” metal ones, don’t cause animals pain. We invite any to provide a demonstration on their own limb as proof.

Padded or not, traps must slam together hard and retain a tight squeeze on a leg or paw to prevent an animal from getting away. According to animal rights organizations that have studied the practice, while the initial snap can cause injury, more severe wounds often occur as trapped animals struggle to free themselves. They break their teeth trying to bite the metal trap, rip their flesh and break their bones as they frantically fight to get away. Animals have even been known chew off their own foot to free themselves.

Sorry if you didn’t expect to encounter such a gross image when turning to this page. But that is the terrible reality of trapping.

Most efforts to outlaw trapping have concentrated on the danger the devices pose to pets and even children. Indeed, a bill introduced to the Legislature last year was titled: “An Act Concerning Child Safety by Restricting the Placement of Leghold Traps.” It was defeated (see letter to the editor: http://bit.ly/TLupBk).

(See also a Greenwich resident’s account of her dog being caught in a trap: http://bit.ly/XP2aQb.)

It is infuriating to imagine a child or pet being injured (in the case of a pet, possibly killed) by a trap. But even if the devices posed zero threat to unintended victims (which trappers often claim), the practice should be unacceptable in a civilized society, regardless of the target. It is cruel to squeeze and drown a beaver to death for its pelt. It is cruel to attempt to control the coyote population by subjecting the animals to metal leg traps.

The subject of hunting has been debated on these pages many times over many years. That is an argument that will not end anytime soon.

But we should all agree that a practice as inhumane as trapping is wrong. Flat-out wrong. It is unconscionable that the state continues to condone such cruelty. It has no place in modern life. The Legislature should ban it, in this session.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Mellana is the editorial page editor of The Advocate and Greenwich Time newspapers in Fairfield County, Conn. He’s been a print journalist for 20 years. Born in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., he’s lived in Tarrytown for the last five years with his wife, Suzanne, and The Cat — and enough comic books to drive both wife and cat insane.

Contact him at thomas.mellana@scni.com

ADDENDUM

To the editor,

I would like to ask anyone who opposes the barbaric use of leghold traps to petition the Obama Administration to end trapping in the U.S.  It only takes a moment to create an account in order to sign and send a clear message to the White House!  When the petition reaches its goal of 100,000 signatures by February 19th, 2013, the White House must comment on it.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/ban-trapping-america-all-other-civilized-countries-have-already-done-based-cruelty-and-torture/4vhVGVbz

We petition the Obama Administration to:

“Ban trapping in America, as all other civilized countries have already done; based on cruelty and torture.

We the signed want the trapping of our wildlife banned in our country; as it is in all other civilized nations.

A trapped animal is a terrified animal in unimaginable agony, exposed to predators and the elements, dehydration, starvation, and extreme psychological distress in separation from their young–finally meeting a brutal end.

Traps are indiscriminate—many family pets and unintended animals have suffered and died in traps. Children are always at risk for stepping into a trap, particularly since trappers want to expand their range to national parks.

Since trappers only comprise 2% of our population, and have openly stated “the main reason I trap is not for financial gain, but for fun–you never know what you will get!”

Let us move out of the dark ages of trapping – say 98%!”

For the animals, I thank you!

Natalie Jarnstedt
atia.uno@gmail.com
Greenwich, CT 06830

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The president’s men drib and drab out their rationale for how President Obama decides which Earthlings live or die. A newly leaked “white paper” claims the president can transfer his killing authority to unnamed, unranked “informed, high level” officials. Thus, the people-killing process “is whatever the president or the nearest ‘informed, high-level official of the U.S. government’ says it is.

“The white paper empowers Obama to delegate the kill-at-will authority.”
Unlike the bombast that characterized the Bush administration’s assaults on U.S. and international law, the Obama regime tends to dribble out its rationales for gutting the Bill of Rights and every notion of global legality. This president prefers to create a fog – let’s call it the fog of his war against human rights – as he arrogates to himself the power to perpetually imprison or to summarily execute anyone, at any time, anywhere in the world. Obama assures us such authority is constitutionally rooted – it’s in there, believe me, he tells us – but he never produces legal chapter and verse to prove that presidential dictatorship is lawful. Instead, we get dribs and drabs of the administration’s position from lawyers defending Obama’s preventive detention law in the courts, or from informal statements by the attorney general, or even little tidbits gleaned from an Obama conversation with comedian Jon Stewart.

The latest hors d’oeuvre to be dished out comes in the form of a leak. I say “dished out” because leaked documents are commonly placed in public view by the administration in power, to test the political waters. This leaked Justice Department “white paper [7]” appears to have been drawn up after the execution-by-drone of U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki, in Yemen. It justifies the killing of anyone occupying a position of status in al-Qaida, or with the ever-changing universe of groups said to be “associated” with al-Qaida. The document stretches the definition of “imminent threat” to cover anyone engaged in activities directed against the U.S., whether or not an actual operation is planned or in progress. Most interestingly, the white paper empowers Obama to delegate the kill-at-will authority to “an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government.” Which has a certain logic, since dictators certainly have the power to delegate the carrying out of their unjust acts to whomever they choose.

“It justifies the killing of anyone occupying a position of status in al-Qaida.”

Eleven U.S. senators are asking for further clarification of the administration’s legal position. But that is just more fog, since the Congress overwhelmingly passed Obama’s preventive detention law – twice!! – a law based on the same assumption that due process of law does not apply when the president says it’s wartime. Therefore, the commander-in-chief can lock up any American, without charge or trial, forever, or until he declares peace. The U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, has made the administration’s position clear enough. Due process, he says, does not necessarily mean [8] access to the judicial process – meaning, a trial. The process is whatever the president or the nearest “informed, high-level official of the U.S. government” says it is. Obama had redefined war, itself. The president told the Congress, after bombing Libya for eight months, that by his definition – which is the only one that counts – no state of war exists unless Americans become casualties, even if the U.S. kills tens of thousands, or millions. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was fond of saying that the arc of history bends towards justice. In the long term, that may be true. But Martin’s arc is not bending towards justice under this administration. It bends towards fascism, with a Black presidential face.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [9].
http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20120206_gf_KillAuthority.mp3
[10]
Anwar Awlaki Eric Holder leaked white paper preventive detention ba radio commentary
Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/obama-and-co-make-law-they-kill
Links:
[1] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/anwar-awlaki
[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/eric-holder
[3] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/leaked-white-paper
[4] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/preventive-detention
[5] http://blackagendareport.com/category/other/ba-radio-commentary
[6] http://blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/yes_we_can_murder.jpg
[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/us/politics/us-memo-details-views-on-killing-citizens-in-al-qaeda.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/us/politics/holder-explains-threat-that-would-call-for-killing-without-trial.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print
[9] mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
[10] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblackagendareport.com%2Fcontent%2Fobama-and-co-make-law-they-kill&linkname=Obama%20and%20Co.%20Make%20Up%20the%20Law%20as%20They%20Kill

Editors’ Note: Behind all the glitz and celebratory hoopla, Koch was merely a highly opportunistic Reagan Democrat. An anti-union,  self-promoting charlatan. —PG

By Fred Mazelis, wsws.org
6 February 2013
The death of Ed Koch, the three-term mayor of New York City, has provoked a predictable deluge of tributes from the political, economic and media establishments, culminating in a funeral on February 4 attended by Bill Clinton, the three living former New York mayors, several former governors and numerous other political figures.
Koch, who died on February 1 at the age of 88, has been called a historic figure, a man almost single-handedly responsible for the supposed “rebirth” and “rescue” of New York City.

Koch was no doubt a significant political figure, but not in the way that the editorialists, politicians and pundits pretend. He “rescued” New York much the same way Ronald Reagan “rescued” the US.

The many tributes to Koch don’t mention that his tenure at City Hall, from 1978 through 1989, coincided almost exactly with the so-called Reagan era. These two men, the grade B retired actor and the liberal turned loudmouth reactionary, had much in common. They both pretended to speak for the aggrieved middle class, while working at the behest of the ruling establishment to shift official politics sharply to the right and spearheading a social counterrevolution directed against the working class and especially its poorest and most vulnerable sections.

For Koch’s wealthy friends, including multimillionaire retired politicians and other members of the top 1%, New York City has undoubtedly become a happier place. They are expressing their gratitude for the services he rendered. For the many millions of struggling working people, however, the legacy of Koch is no cause for celebration.

Koch’s political trajectory reflected the sharp turn to the right of a broad social layer, beginning in the 1970s. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal called attention to this in its editorial on the late mayor when it referred approvingly to Koch as “a liberal mugged by reality.”

This is a reference, not attributed by the editors, to Koch’s contemporary, Irving Kristol, the so-called godfather of neo-conservatism, who first coined the phrase. Kristol, who died in 2009, was a student radical in his youth who became a figure beloved in the most right-wing Republican circles for his hatred of socialism and his full-throated support for American imperialism, up to and including the war crimes in Iraq.

When Kristol spoke of liberals mugged by reality he was referring to a social layer that prospered in the period after the Second World War, a selfish and thoroughly self-centered stratum that made it into the upper middle class and in some cases into even wealthier circles, and turned viciously against the great majority of the population beneath them.

Kristol fancied himself an intellectual, while Koch did not. Kristol became a leading advisor to top Republican circles, while Koch remained a Democrat, although a Democrat who often supported Republicans. Their trajectories were quite similar, however—the New York liberal or left-wing radical, tracing their origins back to the more than two million Jewish immigrants who flocked to New York in the decades before Ed Koch was born in 1924, and who came to typify the oversimplified adage that advancing age went hand-in-hand with a turn to the right.

The future mayor was born in the Bronx. His father, a small businessman who went under in 1931, moved the family to nearby Newark, New Jersey and then to Brooklyn. Koch, who served in the Army in World War II, later got a law degree and became active in liberal circles. By the 1960s he was a well-known “reform Democrat,” who, as head of the Village Independent Democrats, became known for ousting the longtime Manhattan Democratic Party boss Carmine DeSapio. Koch was a prominent backer of “anti-war” Democratic presidential aspirant Eugene McCarthy in 1968.

After eight years in Congress representing the Manhattan East Side district previously held by former Mayor John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, Koch entered a crowded primary campaign for the Democratic nomination for mayor in 1977. Running as a law-and-order advocate in the immediate aftermath of New York’s brush with bankruptcy, Koch won the primary and then the mayoralty itself, only weeks after the New York City blackout, accompanied by massive looting that symbolized the city’s desperate state.

Koch parlayed his penchant for “straight-talking” demagogy into three terms as mayor. He was adept at articulating the anger and frustration of more politically backward sections of the middle class. These layers were encouraged to see the social problems of the 1970s not as the consequence of the crisis of the profit system, but as the fault of “lazy” welfare recipients, “overpaid” city employees, the unemployed and the young.

As mayor, Koch made a name for himself through his vicious denunciations of supposed welfare abuse and alleged softness on crime. He made a racial appeal, addressing himself to those who feared “changing neighborhoods” and crime while usually avoiding rhetoric that could be called overtly racist. He combined this with equally violent attacks on municipal workers and other sections of the working class.

When the school bus drivers went out on strike in early 1979—the same section of workers fighting to defend their job security today—Koch denounced them as “goons” and “bastards.” The next year, when New York’s powerful 35,000-strong subway and bus workforce defied the anti-strike Taylor Law in an eight-day walkout, Koch led a crowd across the Brooklyn Bridge, hysterically whipping up sections of the middle class.

In his third term Koch began to outlive his usefulness for the ruling elite. Voters began to tire of his antics, especially as economic problems continued. The thinly-veiled appeals to racism found infamous expression in such incidents as the death of Michael Griffith in Howard Beach, Queens in 1986 and the killing of 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins in Brooklyn in1989. This was accompanied by a series of police shootings, including the shotgun killing of 66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs in her own apartment in 1984.

The stock market crash of October 1987, towards the end of Koch’s years in office, deepened a crisis that had never disappeared. The city’s transit system and other public services were badly under funded. The beginning of the crack epidemic testified to the hopelessness that was especially widespread among minority workers and youth. The drug crisis fueled street crime and a murder rate that reached an all time high in 1990, just after Koch left office.

Corruption scandals that erupted in Koch’s last years badly dented Koch’s public image. Although he was not personally implicated, the scandals involving Democratic leaders in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens were attributed to Koch’s negligence. Known for his crude narcissism, Koch was faulted for being more interested in his appearances in the press and on television than in the details of city government. When he ran in the Democratic primary in 1989 for an unprecedented fourth term, he was defeated.

Koch found life after his years in office to be quite rewarding. He secured a cushy position in the major law firm of Bryan Cave, and kept busy with such ventures as writing movie reviews, public appearances at $20,000 each, turning out murder mysteries, and becoming a judge on the tabloid television show “The People’s Court.” While continuing to live in a comfortable rental apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, he became a millionaire many times over.

In 2004, Koch—nominally still a Democrat—endorsed George W. Bush for re-election and spoke at the Republican National Convention. His right-wing views were bound up with his political identification with Zionism. He unconditionally backed the Iraq war and derided the Democrats for not having the “stomach to go after the terrorists” and supposedly advancing “an anti-Israel philosophy.”

An examination of Koch’s legacy exposes the class reality behind the orchestrated praise for his accomplishments. The expansion of affordable housing is claimed as his greatest achievement, with a $5 billion capital program in the mid-1980s allegedly leading in subsequent decades to more than 200,000 new apartments. In fact the crisis of affordable housing has never been greater, with huge numbers of workers paying up to 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and with the official count of occupants of the city shelter system hitting new records every month.

The claim that Koch ushered in campaign finance reform is particularly laughable, considering the fact that for the past 12 years the mayor has been a multibillionaire who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of his vast fortune to win the keys to Gracie Mansion.

As for inequality, even Koch’s most enthusiastic admirers are not talking about that, not five years after the financial collapse and amidst continuing mass unemployment coupled with massive Wall Street bonuses and daily revelations of the incestuous and corrupt relations between the financial parasites and every level of government.

Koch typified in his own brash way a shift to the right by the whole political establishment. The ruling class needed demagogues like Koch as its crisis not only made it impossible to provide reforms as in the past, but made it necessary to take those timid reforms back.

In mourning Koch, the financial oligarchy and its media are no doubt conscious that the extreme social polarization that prevails in New York City and around the country make it increasingly difficult to secure a popular base for the redoubled assault on social conditions of the broad mass of working people that is being driven by the crisis of capitalism.

Fred Mazelis is a political writer with the World Socialist Web Site, an informaiton arm of the Social Equality Party.