Bulletin #713
Subject: Conspiracies &
“CONSPIRACY THEORIES.”
09/11/2016
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
Today is the 15th anniversary of 9/11, and there is a wide-spread call
for an investigation into the suppressed evidence around this event. Against the head winds of neo-liberalism’s anti-rationalist, post-scientific dogma
that governs the cultural hegemony of corporate capitalism today, a movement is
growing, demanding “transparency” which is of course a declaration of class
warfare against corporate capitalist hegemony. No corporate interest is going
to concede voluntarily to the demand that all “business” be conducted in public
view, with full accountability.
Marx once warned that there is “no royal road to knowledge,” which
is to say that scientific understanding requires struggle. Almost a century
later, the French philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard,
developed this idea in one of his classic works, La
formation de l’esprit scientifique
(1938), in which he observed: “S’il n’y a pas eu de question, il ne peut y avoir
connaissance scientifique. Rien ne va de soi. Rien n’est donné. Tout est construit. »
Bachelard goes on to introduce his epistemological
study by explaining the obstacles which clutter the path to scientific
knowledge and which have to be overcome if one is to arrive at a scientific
understanding of a subject.
Rendre géométrique la représentation, c’est-à-dire dessiner
les phénomènes et ordonner en série les évènements décisifs d’une expérience,
voilà la tâche première où s’affirme l’esprit scientifique. C’est en effet de
cette manière qu’on arrive à la quantité figurée, à mi-chemin entre le
concret et l’abstrait, dans une zone intermédiaire où l’esprit prétend
concilier les mathématiques et l’expérience, les lois et les fait. Cette tâche
de géométrisation qui sembla souvent réalisée –soit après le succès du
cartésianisme, soit après le succès de la mécanique newtonienne, soit encore
avec l’optique de Fresnel— en vient toujours à révéler une insuffisance. Tôt ou
tard, dans la plupart des domaines, on est forcé de constater que cette
première représentation géométrique, fondée sur un réalisme naïf des
propriétés spatiales, implique des convenances plus cachées, des lois
topologiques moins nettement solidaires des relations métriques immédiatement
apparentes, bref des liens essentiels plus profonds que les liens de la
représentation géométrique familière. On sent peu à peu le besoin de travailler
pour ainsi dire sous l’espace, au niveau des relations essentielles qui
soutiennent et l’espace et les phénomènes. La pensée scientifique est alors
entraînée vers des « constructions » plus métaphoriques que réelles,
vers des « espaces de configuration » dont l’espace sensible n’est,
après tout, qu’un pauvre exemple. Le rôle des mathématiques dans la Physique
contemporaine dépasse donc singulièrement la simple description géométrique. Le mathématique est non plus descriptif mais formateur. La
science de la réalité ne se contente plus du comment
phénoménologique ; elle cherche le pourquoi mathématique.(pp.7-8)
Another challenge to “business as usual” is found in Murray Rothbard’s introductory essay to Etienne de La Boétie’s (1530-1563) Discourse
of Voluntary Servitude, in which he draws comparisons of this early
modern French philosopher/poet with La Boétie’s
Florentine predecessor, Niccolò
Machiavelli (1469-1527) and with the British philosopher, David Hume
(1711-1776) ; then proceeds to explain the global influence of La Boétie’s writing through his influence on LeoTolstoy.
Rothbard cites the French historian
Pierre Mesnard, who observed that for La Boétie as for Machiavelli, authority can only be grounded
on acceptance by the subjects: “except that the one teaches the prince how to
compel their acquiescence, while the other reveals to the people the power that
would lie in their refusal”.(p.31) As for David Hume, who wrote his famous
essay, Of
the First Principles of Government, some two hundred years later, Rothbard writes that the British philosopher independently
discovered the same principle that La Boétie had
discovered, but showed a greater allegiance to the power of established authority
:
Nothing
appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a
philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the
few, and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments
and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this
wonder is effected, we shall find , that, as Force is
always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them
but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and
this maxim extends to the most despotic and military governments, as well as to
the most free and most popular.(cited by
Rothbard, fnt. 9, p.14)
In contrast to Hume, according to Rothbard,
La Boétie argues that the more one yields to tyrants,
the stronger they become, and if tyrants “are simply not obeyed,” they become
“undone and as nothing.” Furthermore, Rothbard argues
that,
La Boétie … exhorts the “poor, wretched, and stupid peoples”
to cast off their chains by refusing to supply the tyrant any further with the
instruments of their own oppression. The tyrant, indeed, has nothing more than
the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough
eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so
many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if
they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except
through you? How would he dare assail you if he had not cooperation from you?
La Boétie concludes his exhortation by assuring the masses
that to overthrow the tyrant they need not act, not shed their blood. They can
do so by “merely willing to be free.” In short:
“Resolve to serve no more,
and you are at once freed.”(p.17)
La Boétie calls for mass civil
disobedience, not insurrection that would replace one tyranny for another. This
early view of democracy, Rothbard points out, is
based on the idea of natural law
taking precedence over custom and
so-called divine law. Thus “the
consent of the governed” is not confused with “tradition” or “the Will of God.”
La Boétie’s celebrated and creatively original call for civil
disobedience, for mass non-violent resistance as a method of the overthrow of
tyranny, stems directly from two premises: the fact that all rule rests on the consent
of the subject masses, and the great value of natural liberty. For if tyranny
really rests on mass consent, then the obvious means
for its overthrow is simply by mass withdrawal of that consent. . . . . The
Tory David Hume did not, unsurprisingly, draw similar conclusions from his
theory of mass consent as the basis of all governmental rule.(p.16-17)
La Boétie’s insurrectionary philosophy
influenced Leo Tolstoy, who cited a long passage from Voluntary Servitude in his book, The
Law of Love and the Law of Violence(1908),
after which he concludes:
It would
seem that the workers, not gaining any advantage from the restraints that is
exercised on them, should at least realize the lie in which they are living and
free themselves in the simplest and easiest way: by abstaining from taking part
in the violence that is only possible with their co-operation.
(Tolstoy, cited by Rothbard, fnt.
19, on p.19)
Furthermore, Tolstoy’s Letter
to a Hindu (1908), which played a central role shaping Ghandi’s tactics of mass non-violent action, was largely
indebted to the political philosophy of La Boétie.
Power is secured, according to La Boétie,
by “specious ideology, mystery, circuses, [and] in addition to these purely
propagandistic devices . . . the purchase by material benefits….” La Boétie writes :
Roman
tyrants … provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble . . . .
Tyrants would distribute largesse, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterces : and then everybody would shamelessly cry, “Long
live the King! The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a
portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them
what they were receiving without having first taken it from them. A man might
one day be presented with a sesterces and gorge himself at the public feast,
lauding Tiberius and Nero for handsome liberality, who on the morrow, would be forced to abandon his
property to their avarice, his children to their lust, his very blood to the
cruelty of these magnificent emperors, without offering any more
resistance than a stone or a tree stump.
The mob has always behaved in this way –eagerly open to bribes.(p.27)
La Boétie adds still another technique to
his list of methods used by a minority to secure political power over a majority
of followers. The purchase of consent is further elaborated, according to La Boétie, by what he describes as a “continuing and permanent
purchase,” namely the formation of “a hierarchy of subordinate allies, a
loyal band of retainers, praetorians and bureaucrats” which in the original
words of La Boétie
constitutes “the mainspring and the secret of domination, the support and
foundation of tyranny.”(pp.27-28) This is a large sector of society, in La Boétie’s view, which is not merely duped with occasional
and negligible handouts from the State, but instead exist as beneficiaries
living from the proceeds of despotism. Their support of tyranny is not
based on illusion or habit or mystery; theirs is the hierarchy of patronage, permanently maintained by the fruits of plunder.
He gives the following illustration: five
or six advisors are the chief beneficiaries of the king; these half dozen men
in a similar manner maintain six hundred, who profit under them; the six
hundred maintain six thousand by the same means, and so on… “in order that they
may serve as instruments of avarice and cruelty, executing orders at the proper
time and working such havoc all around that they could not last except under
the shadow of the six hundred….” In this way, the “fatal pyramid” trickles down
through the ranks of society, until “a hundred thousand and even a million,
cling to the tyrant by this cord to which they are tied.”(p.28)
Nevertheless, Rothbard concludes his
introduction to La Boétie’s Discourse
of Voluntary Servitude on an optimistic note :
La Boétie provides us with a hopeful note on the future of a
free society. He points out that once the public experiences tyranny for a long
time, it becomes inured and heedless of the possibility of an alternative
society. But this means that should State despotism ever be removed, it would
be extremely difficult to reimpose statism. The bulwark of habit would be gone, and statism would be seen by all for the tyranny that it is. If
a free society were ever to be established, then, the chances for its
maintaining itself would be excellent.(p.38)
Today
the question of tyranny has been raised once more :
Are criminal activities by private corporate interests being concealed by the
rhetoric of “Conspiracy Theory”? And if
this is true, what public action can be organized to address this criminal
behavior which we have been asked to simply accept as acts of realism ?
What better time to address these
questions than on the anniversary of 9/11 . . . ?
+
Senator Bob Graham says President Bush Directed
American Intelligence Agencies Not To Pursue Saudi
Government Role in 9/11 Attack
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17225
Senator Bob Graham, former co-chair of the
Senate Intelligence Committee tells Paul Jay that Bush and Cheney created a
culture of "not wanting to know" among American intelligence agencies
about potential terrorist attacks pre-9/11 and "aggressive deception"
in rewriting history since the attacks took place
+
The
Tide is Turning: The Official Story Is Now The
Conspiracy Theory
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45429.htm
by Paul Craig Roberts
+
Looking
at 9/11 in the Context of the Wall Street Bailout of 2008
by
Pam Martens: September 8, 2016
Plus 12 more items below
which bring into focus contemporary class struggles, at every level of our existence.
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor of American
Studies
University of Grenoble-3
Director of Research
University of
Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced
Study of American Institutions and Social Movements
The University of
California-San Diego
a.
Most People Today Want to be
Propagandized
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45437.htm
by Daniel Lattier
===========
b.
From: mkroopkin
Sent: Friday, 9 September,
2016
Subject: Sept 9 national
prison strike updates.
NATIONAL PRISON STRIKE AGAINST SLAVERY IN THE USA
(IWW
IWOC Organizers updated strike info and support requests)
Break the corporate news media blackout!
Spread it on social media, blogs and email!
-- WILDCAT NEWS SERVICE
===========
c.
Thousands of Prisoners Strike Against
Forced Labor
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17220
On the
45th anniversary of the Attica uprising, Prison Radio's Noelle Hanrahan explains how and why prisoners organized what may
be the largest prison strike in US history.
===========
d.
From protesters to
“protectors” : The American Indian Movement at
Standing Rock
Canine Expert
Decries "Egregious" & "Horrific" Dog Attacks on Native
Americans Defending Burial Site
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/6/canine_expert_decries_egregious_horrific_dog
|
||||||||||
===========
e.
The Trumpillary War Machine Is Bad
News
http://davidswanson.org/node/5267
by
David Swanson
===========
f.
From: Mark Crispin
Miller
Sent: Wednesday, 7
September, 2016
Subject: [MCM] What's scarier? That Hillary may have Parkinson's, or that
we're not allowed to ask? (3)
Does Hillary have Parkinson's? Watch
this (quick, before it disappears):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr1IDQ2V1eM
While making clear that he has not examined her himself, and
that he has no use
for her "politically or
morally," Dr. Ted Noel presents a troublingly persuasive case
that Clinton does have
Parkinson's Disease—a possibility that should be openly and
thoroughly discussed, considering
what's at stake.
But such discussion is verboten—as
some citizens have lately learned the hard
way. Eight days after Dr. Drew
Pinsky told his radio audience that he was
"gravely
concerned, not just about
[Hillary's] health, but about her healthcare," his show
was abruptly canceled (by HLN,
CNN's sister network):
http://pagesix.com/2016/09/04/dr-drew-loses-show-after-discussing-hillarys-health/
Likewise, HuffPost contributor David
Seaman claims to have been "terminated"
by the outlet after reporting
on the furor over Hillary's health—his publishing
access revoked, and his two
pieces on the subject "pulled without notice of any
kind, completely deleted from
the Internet":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHhNr5jeTIw
This blackout makes several things unfortunately clear:
1) that Hillary Clinton very
likely does have
Parkinson's, if not some other
incapacitating illness—or all that
speculation would be duly answered, not
suppressed and ridiculed;
2) that freedom of the press in the
United States today is unavailable to anyone
who strays from the Official
Line (and not just on this story)—which really means
that freedom of the press in
the United States today is more a swell idea than a
reality; and
3) that freedom of the press in the
United States today is threatened less by the
theatrically abusive Donald Trump, and
the explosive goons who swarm his
rallies, than by the corporate
personnel and "liberal" hacks who maintain the
Establishment consensus.
Now, there are those Democrats who will, inevitably, see this
piece on Hillary's
apparent illness as a tacit
"vote" for Trump—as if the fact that he is (also)
obviously sick means somehow that she's well enough to serve as president.
In any case, we would not now be faced with this horrific
"choice" if Hillary
had not been forced on us by
her party, and the media (and the hackers who
"elected" her in primaries
from coast to coast, despite the will of those
electorates).
So what the Democratic Party should do now—and would, if it were
actually
a democratic party—is dump
their ailing candidate ASAP, and quickly pass
the torch to Bernie Sanders,
who's well enough, and clean enough, and
offering a vision popular enough, to wipe the floor with
Donald Trump,
beating him by an unprecedented
landslide.
===========
g.
From: Herman, Edward S.
Sent: Tuesday, 6 September, 2016
Subject: U.S Elections: Exercise in Mendacity + Clinton/Obama, Yale
Law advisor, Killer Koh + Moral Movement for Justice
+ Trump & Drones.
A great article on the mendacious
election.
ed herman
From Counterpunch, SEPTEMBER 6, 2016 : http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/06/the-us-election-an-exercise-in-mendacity/
The US Election: an Exercise in
Mendacity
by GARY LEUPP (Professor of
History at Tufts University, and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the
Politics of Illusion)
What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it, Brick?
Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?… There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity…
You can smell it. It smells like death.
— Big Daddy to son Brick in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Big Daddy might have been talking about the current U.S.
presidential election, which currently wraps the nation in a putrid bubble that
can be smelled around the planet. To call it a democratic process would surely
be mendacious.
Leave aside the fact that bourgeois elections are generally
structured in such a way as to screw over the 99%. Polls during the primaries
consistently indicated that Bernie Sanders led either Hillary Clinton or Donald
Trump in voter support. But devious rules and manipulations, and the
now-revealed skewing of the primary process by the DNC, and the solid backing
of the news networks deliberately downplaying Clinton’s negatives while
belittling Sanders, delivered the convention vote to the former secretary of
state.
Meanwhile Trump became Republican nominee because the mainstream
media for months followed a strategy of simultaneously treating his candidacy
as a joke but then cutting to coverage of his every utterance (as “breaking
news”) even though he just repeated his same old tired, vapid, solipsistic
rant that was anything but news. At the same time, they ignored Sanders’
speeches, or at least failed to convey their content, as reporters merely
covered Sanders events as curious gatherings of enthusiastic youth. In that way
Trump was able to reach his base; pick off, one by one, his GOP rivals; and
gradually win polite treatment as a respectable candidate.
This was not a case of Wall Street pouring money into the
candidate’s coffers thus determining the outcome. (Look how little good Jeb
Bush’s war chest did him!) It was a case of the bourgeois media determining
that the broadcast of Trump’s flow-of-conscious narcissistic diatribes drew in
viewers and of course sold the products advertised one out of every four
minutes you watch TV. (Ultimately in this system the advertisers decide what
constitutes “truth” on TV.)
We know that Hillary Clinton lied. She obviously did when she told
Congress she had never forwarded emails marked classified from her personal
email through her personal, unauthorized server. The FBI has made this very
clear. While this particular sin is not a concern for me (I am perfectly happy
when officials of mendacious governments reveal their dishonesty through lack
of caution) it’s a clear that the candidate is (as her rival charges)
“crooked.” And she didn’t, as she told Congress, just have one cell
phone; she had 13 while secretary of state and had her minions smash at least
two with hammers for some reason. And she did email her daughter Chelsea the
very day of the Benghazi attack in 2012 that the attackers were “an Al Queda-like group” (notice the misspelling) while the State
Department was instructed to blame the attack on a mob enraged over a dumb Islamophobic Youtube video.
Trump on the other hand lies so continuously and naturally, making
stuff up as he goes along, that his mendacity is truly unmeasurable.
He has never recanted his claims that Obama was born in Kenya and did poorly at
Harvard. (He now just tells CNN, “I’m not talking about that anymore.” The lie
served its purpose in bringing Trump into Republican politics, helping to rally
the racist base that propelled him to the party’s nomination. So the purpose of
the lie has been served. What talk about it anymore?) He tells us thousands of
Muslims in New Jersey cheered the fall of the World Trade Center; that he knows
Vladimir Putin “very well” and that the Russian leader has called him a
“genius;” that he opposed the war on Iraq in 2003. Made-up statistics so roll
from his tongue that fact-checkers weary of their refutation. Everybody knows
he doesn’t care about facts. That is, for many of his fans, who like Karl Rove
disdain the “reality-based community,” part of his outsider appeal.
The Trump supporter thinks, what
difference does it make if he makes up stories about Muslims? The Clinton
supporter asks (with increasing indignation towards the questioner), what
difference does it make if she lied about her emails, and about Benghazi, and
got her party’s nomination through the machinations of mendacious people like
Debbie Wasserman Schultz?
Both say, look, we have a two-party system. You have to
choose one.
In other words, so what that the whole system is soaked in shit?
It’s the best system in the world, damn it, so just wade through it
and enjoy the stench for the duration.
The whole presidential race is a farce, but perhaps the most
mendacious part of it is the alleged role of Russia in the
process. Major newspapers run editorials blithely asserting with zero evidence
that Trump is an “agent” (if maybe an unwitting one) of Putin. Clinton’s key
foreign policy speech the other day targeted Putin as the “godfather” of
Europe’s right-wing anti-migrant parties, a truly ridiculous proposition. The
DNC, having been exposed by the leaked emails as an undemocratic
operation from start to finish, has avoided discussion of the obvious
corruption and—with astonishing success—gotten the entire mainstream media to
blame Russia for the leak and to claim that Russia is trying to influence the
U.S. elections.
Meanwhile the press daily, successfully, promotes the lie that
Russia is threatening its neighbors, and invading Ukraine, while in fact the
record of U.S. expansion and aggression since the end of the Cold War—Gulf War,
1991; strikes on Iraq, 1991-2003; NATO bombing of Bosnia, 1993-95; NATO
bombing of Serbia, 1999; invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, 2001-present;
invasion and occupation of Iraq, 2003-present; NATO destruction of Libya, 2011;
intervention in Syria, 2011-present—so far exceeds the paltry Russian record of
significant military actions since 1991 (the 6-day war with neighboring Georgia
after the Georgian attack on South Ossetia, 2008 and the peaceful re-annexation
of Crimea in 2014 after the U.S.-funded coup in Kiev) that any comparison is
ludicrous. Yet everyday, by news directors’ policy,
the pot calls the kettle black.
Lies (in which Clinton was deeply complicit) led to the U.S.-led
destruction of Iraq and Libya. Lies underlie U.S. policy on Syria. Some of the
biggest liars in past efforts to hoodwink the people into supporting more war
(Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol,
Paul Wolfowitz) are backing
Hillary, whose Washington Post Pinocchio count is “sky-high,”
for president.
In Tennessee Williams’ play Big Daddy tells his son Brick, “I’ve
lived with mendacity. Why can’t you live with it? You’ve got to live with it.
There’s nothing to live with but mendacity.”
We’ve got to live with the mendacity for awhile. But the silver
lining of this mendacious election is that come November the U.S. will have its
least popular, most discredited president ever. He or she will face mass,
visceral opposition from day one. Youth who have organized around the Bernie
banner against Wall Street will join with the Black Lives Matter movement and
rally against Hillary as she prepares for another Libya-type regime change war, or against Trump as he tries to implement his racist
proposals.
The worst thing a system based on lies should have as its
window-dressing a leader with mass support. We will not, thankfully, have one
in the near future. Rather than a rigged election, we need real regime
change.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
From:
Prof. Francis Boyle, Univ. of Illinois, Champaign, Law
School
Harold Hongju Koh, Hillary Clinton’s
former legal advisor at the State Department has
been invited as an ‘endowed speaker’ at the U.I. College of Law, twelve days
prior to the November election. Koh, currently a Yale
Law School professor and former Dean, is a close friend of Yale Law School
graduates Bill and Hillary Clinton. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton
as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor; and by
President Obama, as senior legal advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:
he provided legal advice to her during the 2009 coup in Honduras, the 2011
US/NATO attack on Libya, and Obama’s ongoing drone assassinations – as well as
damage-control in her email controversy. He won’t say what that advice was,
claiming “attorney-client privilege” – despite the Supreme Court ruling against
attorney-client confidences between government lawyers and government
officials.
An avid advocate of
the targeted killing program, “Killer Koh” supports
the legality of what he terms “extrajudicial killing” in Pakistan, Yemen and
other Middle Eastern countries in the US “war on terror,” saying it complies
“with all applicable law, including the laws of war,” and citing the ‘principle
of proportionality’ in “taking great care in planning and execution to ensure
that only ‘legitimate’ objectives are targeted and that collateral damage is
kept to a minimum.” In a feeble attempt at transparency, the Obama
administration recently released a modest admission that some “116 civilians”
may have been victims of U. S. drone attacks – a figure that is not
reconcilable with the accounts of eyewitnesses, journalists and human rights
researchers, who have documented many thousands of casualties. President Obama
said – in a revealing moment of self-reflection – “Turns out I’m really good at
killing people … Didn’t know that was gonna be a
strong suit of mine” (from Mark Halperin & John Heilemann, “Double Down: Game Change 2012”).
If Hillary Clinton
is elected president, with the advice of Tim Kaine
and Killer Koh, she may be even more eager to
mass-murder than her predecessor: the number of casualties would likely exceed
that of Obama’s kill list, just as his toll today greatly outnumbers G. W.
Bush’s.
Late on Friday 5
August, the White House grudgingly complied with an
Federal Court order (from an ACLU suit) and released a redacted “President’s
Policy Guidance” (PPG) on Obama’s program of targeted killings. The PPG
stipulates that “nothing in this PPG shall be construed to prevent the
President from exercising his Constitutional authority … to authorize lethal
force against an individual who poses a continuing, imminent threat to another
country’s persons.” (Killing US citizens requires specific approval by the
President). Death lists are drawn up weekly by the ‘nominating committee’ and
are reviewed by lawyers of the nominating agencies (CIA, Pentagon, NSC, officials of the State Department and “deputies and
principals of the nominating committee”).
Of the seven Middle
Eastern countries where drone assassinations take place, “active war zones” –
Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan (it’s not clear if Libya is included) – do not
require prior approval. With this protocol in place, the White House and the
National Security Council are insulated from outside scrutiny, even by
Congress. It assumes that the Commander in Chief can do anything s/he wants; it
would provide a President Clinton #2, with the approval of hawks Tim Kaine and Harold Koh, immense
power and license to kill.
Koh as the (former) State Department lawyer has publicly defended
extrajudicial killing as “due process under the Constitution in the age of
moral and political degeneration.” In a speech at the Oxford Political Union in
2013 he said, “This Administration has not done enough to be transparent about
the legal standards and decision making process … fostering a growing
perception that the program [extrajudicial killing] is not lawful and
necessary…,” adding that this lack of transparency is counterproductive and has
led to the “negative public image” of targeted killing. Does Prof. Koh think the recent exposure of the (heavily redacted) PPG
ordered by the Court provides the “transparency” to satisfy critics of the
legality of targeted killing?
Although Koh has been described as a prominent advocate of human and
civil rights (apparently exclusively of US citizens), he has been an “equal
opportunist” as a legal advisor to Reagan, Clinton and Obama administrations –
all of whom have violated the human rights of foreign nationals. He hardly
represented human and civil rights as a member of the Department of Justice’s
Office of Legal Counsel to the President in the Reagan administration, when
that office justified violations of international law, the Charter of United
Nations and the US Constitution, in grievous violation of human rights and
attempts to destabilize the countries of Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua
(attempting to withdraw from the International Court of Justice, which
denounced the US for bombing Nicaraguan harbors), Guatemala, Libya, Angola and
elsewhere in southern Africa; and when it supported the South African apartheid
government against its black population, supported Israel’s invasion and
massacres of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and supported illegal
Israeli settlements in the Palestinian Occupied Territories – for which the US
exercised its veto in the U.N. Security Council, in opposition to sanctions
against US. In addition, the Reagan administration and its legal advisors
refused to support nuclear test ban treaties, instead proliferating first-strike
nuclear weapons, SDI (“star wars”) and MX missiles. Not a record to be proud of
for someone serving as legal counsel to the president.
The opportunity
extended Harold Koh to lecture potential scholars of
political and international law poses the question, Is
the University of Illinois College of Law – with its record of sanctions –
qualified to educate future lawyers, when it sponsors a person of Harold H. Koh’s character in these politically charged times?
The Nuremberg
Military Tribunal in 1947 stated unequivocally that the crimes of the ten
civilian Nazi defendants who were convicted of murder and other atrocities,
conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity of civilians and
nationals of occupied territories, were liable to
severe penalty whether or not they had engaged in military action. The
Nuremberg judgment still stands in international
law.
A reception to
protest Professor Koh’s appearance is planned at the
north courtyard of the College of Law before the lecture on the afternoon of
October 28.
(Midge O’Brien was
an academic professional in U. of I. life science laborotories
over twenty years and secretary in the Union of Professional Employees; was an
election judge twelve years; a member of Nuclear Freeze, and Prairie
Alliance against nuclear power; and an anti-war activist since 1965. She
is a member of the Green Party.)
___________________________________________________________________________________
Where: Central Connecticut
State University, 1615 Stanley Street, New Britain
When: Thursday, September 8, 6:30
p.m.
What: Please join the D.U.E. Justice
Coalition in welcoming the Rev. Dr. William Barber, president of the North
Carolina NAACP and architect of the Moral Mondays movement, to Connecticut and
listen to his message about achieving social and economic justice. Rev. Dr.
Barber will speak to the urgency of creating a movement for advancing five key
issues for our state: good jobs and fair wages, universal access to quality
public education, a vibrant and fairly funded public sector, racial justice,
and democracy in our state and in our work places. This event is sponsored by
the D.U.E. Justice Coalition, a statewide coalition of 40 faith, civil rights,
labor, advocacy, and public policy organizations, including the Greater
Hartford NAACP; Connecticut AFL-CIO; Council on American-Islamic Relations;
Connecticut Conference, United Church of Christ; Connecticut chapter, Working
Families Organization; Sierra Club; and MoveOn.org leaders of Connecticut.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
At least President
Trump would ground the drones
Simon Jenkins
After the ham-fisted military
antics of the Obama years, the rest of the world could do with a jolt of good
old-fashioned Republican isolationism
Friday 22 July 2016 , The Guardian
Britons are never
happier than when ridiculing the vulgarity of American politics. Donald Trump’s
acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Cleveland last night was
therefore a gift. It was as vacuous a catalogue of cliches
as Barack Obama’s “Yes we can” speeches in 2008.
This is colouring-book oratory, and
intended as such. A more serious question is, what
would a Trump presidency be like for the outside world?
Trump’s foreign
policy line has been clearer than his domestic one: it is a revival of
Republican isolationism. He attacks Hillary Clinton for bringing “death,
destruction and weakness” to the Middle East, citing the interventions in Iraq,
Libya and Syria.
He refrained from
mentioning the role of his Republican forebear George W Bush. But he has
indicated a clear rejection of world free trade, immigration, and any notion of
American sanctuary. Trump’s hostility to Mexican migrants and incoming Muslims
has been only mildly diluted.
On collective
security, he has attacked “our allies riding on our back”, in a stark invitation
to Europe to start thinking afresh about its defence
priorities.
Trump is right to
point out that Obama’s global antics have been ham-fisted. The continuing continuing chaos in the Middle East may be an easy target,
but he has persistently opposed these interventions. Obama’s fascination with
the drone as a weapon of aggression, his failed “reset” with Russia, the
decline in relations with China, and the clumsy remarks about Brexit all illustrated an ineptitude as self-appointed
global policeman.
Last week American
jets massacred 73 civilians, including 50 women and children, in the Syrian
village of Manbij. Imagine if Isis had done this.
Obama’s wars remain unresolved and immoral.
A jolt of realpolitik from an isolationist Republican would be no bad
thing. Of course, Bush too was vigorously isolationist in his pre-9/11 mode in
2000, but the days when the world’s collective security hung on a Washington
heartbeat are over. Behind the bombast, a period of transatlantic withdrawal
and reflection is in order.
As far as Britain is
concerned, Trump welcomed Brexit, albeit as a token
of his own popular defiance against a ruling class. He would presumably honour this by reversing Obama’s end-of-the-queue attitude
to a trade deal with Britain. Either way, the tectonic plates are shifting. A
Trump presidency would, like Brexit, be a leap into the unknown. But even the darkest clouds can
have silver linings.
===========
h.
From: Jim
Cohen
Sent: Tuesday, 6 September
2016
Subject: article on US elections
(en français)
Friends,
Here’s an article I have just
“committed” in French on the U.S. left in the 2016 elections. Hope you enjoy it
and that it doesn’t enrage you or anyone in your immediate circle.
Trump contre Clinton, mais encore ? Pourquoi et comment je voterai à gauche
dans la présidentielle étatsunienne
Minor detail, regarding the photo
below the article: the editor’s caption is slightly off the mark and will soon
be corrected. Ex-State Sen. Nina Turner (D-Ohio) is seen speaking not at a
Sanders gathering but at a more ecumenical gathering in which people planning
to continue with Sanders and people thinking of voting Green were mixing
together and having dialogue. I happened to attend that gathering, known as the
People’s Convention (July 26th) because there was room for me there,
whereas at the official Democratic Party Convention, there was absolutely no
room; even many approved aides to delegates (especially Sanders delegates) were
unable to get inside…
Bonne lecture, your feedback would
be most appreciated.
warm regards / amicalement,
Jim
===========
i.
It's All About Russia
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45411.htm
by Philip Giraldi
Hillary
and the neocons know who to blame for Trump
===========
j.
Dick Cheney’s Song of America
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1544.htm
by David Armstrong
The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The
overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It
calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority
and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It
calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United
States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely
powerful.
===========
k.
Will Israel Be Put On Trial For War
Crimes?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45435.htm
An
expected visit by ICC delegation could increase the risk of Israeli officials
being tried for war crimes.
===========
l.
Chelsea
Manning Begins Hunger Strike
‘I Need Help. I Am Not Getting Any.’
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/chelsea-manning-hunger-strike_us_57d32677e4b00642712da91f
“Until I am shown
dignity and respect as a human again, I shall endure this pain before me.”
by
Mollie Reilly