Iraq’s anti-American Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, launched an initiative Saturday calling for peaceful coexistence among all Iraqis after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country. The last soldiers left Dec. 18.
Al-Sadr, whose militiamen were blamed for sectarian killings during the worst years of Iraq’s violence, is seeking to assert his political weight Iraq after the U.S. pullout.
Al-Sadr’s proposal comes just two days after a terrifying wave of Baghdad bombings killed 69 people and wounded nearly 200. The bombs tore through mostly Shiite neighborhoods of the Iraqi capital, evoking fears the country could descend into a new round of sectarian violence.
Al-Sadr’s associates handed out to the media a 14-point “peace code” proposal written by the radical cleric. It warns against spilling Iraqi blood and urges respect for all religions, sects and ethnic groups.
Al-Sadr’s aide Salah al-Obeidi described the code as an attempt “to preserve the unity of the country and save it from fighting.”
Sen. Kirk had some grounding words to say about the Constitution:
I took the time, as we all should from time to time, serving in this body, to re-read the Constitution of the United States yesterday. The Constitution says quite clearly: 'In the trial of all crimes -- no exception -- there shall be a jury, and the trial shall be held in the State where said crimes have been committed.' Clearly, the Founding Fathers were talking about a civilian court, of which the U.S. person is brought before in its jurisdiction.
They talk about treason against the United States, including war in the United States. The Constitution says it "shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
The following sentence is instructive: No person -- 'No person,' it says -- 'shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.' I would say that pretty clearly, 'open court' is likely to be civilian court.
Further, the Constitution goes on, that when a person is charged with treason, a felony, or other crime, that person shall be 'removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime' -- once again contemplating civilian, state court and not the U.S. military. As everyone knows, we have amended the Constitution many times. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution is instructive here. It says: 'The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures' -- including, by the way, the seizure of the person -- 'shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, except upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.'
Now, in section 1031(b)(2), I do not see the requirement for a civilian judge to issue a warrant. So it appears this legislation directly violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution with regard to those rights which are inalienable, according to the Declaration of Independence, and should be inviolate as your birthright as an American citizen.
Recall the Fifth Amendment, which says: 'No person' -- by the way, remember, 'no person'; there is not an exception here. 'No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment,' hear the words, 'of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War' -- meaning there is a separate jurisdiction for U.S. citizens who are in the uniformed service of the United States. But unless you are in the service of the United States, you are one of those 'no persons' who shall be answerable for a 'capital' or 'infamous crime,' except on 'indictment of a Grand Jury.'
The Sixth Amendment says: 'In all criminal prosecutions' -- not some, not by exception, in all criminal prosecutions -- 'the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed' ... I go on to these because I regard all of these rights as inherent to U.S. citizens, granted to them by their birth in the United States.
Does your senator agree with all that? If not, isn't it about time that you elected someone who does?
More broadly, the Davis case threatens to give the government free rein in selecting speech by its employees it does not like and punishing it. It’s okay to blog about your fascination with knitting or to support official positions. If you happen to be Iranian or Chinese or Syrian, and not terribly fond of your government, and express yourself on the subject, the U.S. government will support your right to do it 110% of the way. However, as a federal employee, blog about your negative opinions on U.S. policies and you’ve got a problem. In fact, we have a problem as a country if freedom of speech only holds as long as it does not offend the U.S. government.
Morris Davis’s problem is neither unique nor isolated. Clothilde Le Coz, Washington director of Reporters without Borders, told me earlier this month, “Secrecy is taking over from free speech in the United States. While we naively thought the Obama administration would be more transparent than the previous one, it is actually the first to sue five people for being sources and speaking publicly.” Scary, especially since this is no longer an issue of one rogue administration.
Government is different than private business. If you don’t like McDonald’s because of its policies, go to Burger King, or a soup kitchen, or eat at home. You don’t get the choice of federal governments, and so the critical need for its employees to be able to speak informs the republic. We are the only ones who can tell you what is happening inside your government. It really is that important. Ask Morris Davis.
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
- that all men are created equal,
- that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
- that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
- --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
- --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
- Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
- But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security
Perhaps the most important concept of America, perhaps the most fundamentally 'American' thing in all of history is the belief that we do indeed get to choose our federal government. That power really does come from and justly resides with We The People. Not the government. Not some King or President. Power comes from We The People, and we have the right and the duty to our great nation of America to choose our Federal government and to choose it well.
A team of Russian doctors wrote to the president of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, as follows:
“Today, 24 March, 2011, NATO aircraft and the U.S. all night and all morning bombed a suburb of Tripoli – Tajhura (where, in particular, is Libya’s Nuclear Research Center). Air Defense and Air Force facilities in Tajhura were destroyed back in the first 2 days of strikes and more active military facilities in the city remained, but today the object of bombing are barracks of the Libyan army, around which are densely populated residential areas, and, next to it, the largest of Libya’s Heart Centers. Civilians and the doctors could not assume that common residential quarters will be about to become destroyed, so none of the residents or hospital patients was evacuated.
“Bombs and rockets struck residential houses and fell near the hospital. The glass of the Cardiac Center building was broken, and in the building of the maternity ward for pregnant women with heart disease a wall collapsed and part of the roof. This resulted in ten miscarriages whereby babies died, the women are in intensive care, doctors are fighting for their lives. Our colleagues and we are working seven days a week, to save people. This is a direct consequence of falling bombs and missiles in residential buildings, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries, which are operated and reviewed now by our doctors. Such a large number of wounded and killed, as during today, did not occur during the total of all the riots in Libya. And this is called ‘protecting’ the civilian population?”
Reps. Kay Granger (R-Tex.) and Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) announced the formation of a Congressional Joint Strike Fighter Caucus with 49 members from both parties. Its purpose: to protect funding for the F-35 stealth fighter. The plane, as the most expensive weapons program in history, is one of the biggest potential targets in the defense budget.
The members of the caucus are also some of the top recipients of political money from the company that designs and builds the fighter, Lockheed Martin. The company’s political action committee and its employees have given the caucus members $1.3 million in political contributions over their careers, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
An independent commission in Bahrain has issued a report on the massive crackdown on pro-democracy protesters earlier this year, faulting the government for brutality against the dissidents as well as the broad use of torture against detainees.
“A number of detainees were tortured,” confirmed the commission’s head, M. Cherif Bassiouni. The report detailed the use of electric shocks and beatings against arrested protesters, and that at least 700 of the detainees are still in custody.
On November 11, 1918, the world finally had enough of the irrational killing spree known as World War I. Fifteen million individual human beings had perished in what was the largest military conflict the world had yet seen. Armistice Day, marking the end of the war, was declared a holiday by the Allied nations. Some countries still observe it every November 11.
Although the day was memorialized by governments whose integrity in the whole matter we can question, there is no doubt that there was much to celebrate in the end of hostilities. World War I convinced much of the world of the insanity of war.
Thanks mostly to mutual defense treaties among nations that had no real reason to fight each other, what started out as a royal family feud and regional squabble exploded into a global bloodbath. Serbia was joined by Britain, France, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Italy, Russia, Portugal, Montenegro, Japan, Brazil and, eventually, the United States, to fight Austria-Hungary’s alliance, which included Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. This madness was triggered when a Bosnian Serb secessionist, sponsored by members of the Serbian military, assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. One act of violence—over one localized territorial dispute—resulted in the loss of lives, property and liberty of tens of millions of human beings.
At the end of the Korean War, President Eisenhower signed a bill in 1954 that changed the name of the national holiday to Veteran’s Day. Perhaps it made no sense any more to honor an Armistice that had been overshadowed by World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War. Whereas after World War I, the United States brought its armed forces home, the war against Communism guaranteed that the United States would henceforth have little interest in armistice, in truce, in peace.
And our country’s been at war ever since, with more and more veterans to observe every November.
The new deficit-reduction plan from a majority of Democrats on the congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (the "supercommittee") marks a dramatic departure from traditional Democratic positions — and actually stands well to the right of plans by the co-chairs of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission and the Senate's "Gang of Six," and even further to the right of the plan by the bipartisan Rivlin-Domenici commission. The Democratic plan contains substantially smaller revenue increases than those bipartisan proposals while, for example, containing significantly deeper cuts in Medicare and Medicaid than the Bowles-Simpson plan. The Democratic plan features a substantially higher ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases than any of the bipartisan plans.
Last week’s assassination of two American citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, is an outrage and a criminal act carried out by the president and his administration. If the law protecting us against government-sanctioned assassination can be voided when there is a “really bad American,” is there any meaning left to the rule of law in the United States? If, as we learned last week, a secret government committee, not subject to congressional oversight or judicial review, can now target certain Americans for assassination, under what moral authority do we presume to lecture the rest of the world about protecting human rights?
Awlaki’s father tried desperately to get the administration to at least allow his son to have legal representation to challenge the “kill” order. He was denied. Rather than give him his day in court, the administration, behind closed doors, served as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. The most worrisome aspect of this is that any new powers this administration accrues will serve as precedents for future administrations. Even those who completely trust this administration must understand that if this usurpation of power and denial of due process is allowed to stand, these powers will remain to be expanded on by the next administration and then the next. Will you trust them? History shows that once a population gives up its rights, they are not easily won back. Beware.
"You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.
In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation."
You deplore the demonstrations taking place on Wall Street. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals with merely effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place on Wall Street, but it is even more unfortunate that the nation's power structure left the 99% with no alternative.
In any non-violent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exists; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through all of these steps at Wall Street. There can be no gainsaying that economic injustice engulfs our nation. Wall Street's control of our economy, our media and our government is well known. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Americans have experienced unjust treatment in the courts. We are experiencing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, activists have sought for years to negotiate with Wall Street leaders. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation."
It is this impulse to challenge Wall Street directly that shows how reasonable and necessary is the Occupy Wall Street protest movement underway in lower Manhattan (not far from where George Washington was inaugurated President). Those who have decided not to leave their tarpaulin homes, and who are being brutally treated by the New York police department, have an instinctively better solution for the country than those who want to throttle demand further by austerity (the GOP) and those who want to call for a stimulus without any challenge to the financial mandarins who would rather send the U. S. economy into a swamp than lose their own power over the world economic system (Obama).
Absent a fight against finance capital: to call for austerity is an act of cruelty; to call for a stimulus is illusionary.
So we face a historic opportunity. We have the chance to show that America values the dignity of the street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of the dictator. There must be no doubt that the United States of America welcomes change that advances self-determination and opportunity. Yes, there will be perils that accompany this moment of promise. But after decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be.
Of course, as we do, we must proceed with a sense of humility. It’s not America that put people into the streets of Tunis or Cairo -– it was the people themselves who launched these movements, and it’s the people themselves that must ultimately determine their outcome.
Not every country will follow our particular form of representative democracy, and there will be times when our short-term interests don’t align perfectly with our long-term vision for the region. But we can, and we will, speak out for a set of core principles –- principles that have guided our response to the events over the past six months:
The United States opposes the use of violence and repression against the people of the region. (Applause.)
The United States supports a set of universal rights. And these rights include free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly, the freedom of religion, equality for men and women under the rule of law, and the right to choose your own leaders -– whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus, Sanaa or Tehran.
And we support political and economic reform in the Middle East and North Africa that can meet the legitimate aspirations of ordinary people throughout the region.
Our support for these principles is not a secondary interest. Today I want to make it clear that it is a top priority that must be translated into concrete actions, and supported by all of the diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at our disposal.
Let me be specific. First, it will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy.
On March 31, 1968, United States President Lyndon Baines Johnson told a national television audience that he would not seek and would not accept the nomination of the Democratic Party for another term in the White House. “When the address was over,” author Hampton Sides notes, “a euphoric Johnson leaped from his chair and bounded from Oval Office to be with family. ‘His air was that of a prisoner let free,’ the First Lady wrote: ‘We were all fifty pounds lighter and ever so much more lookin’ forward to the future’…The president described his mood this way: ‘I never felt so right about any decision in life.’”
Harassed and depressed by antiwar demonstrators, urban riots, rampaging youth, unruly professors and reporters, and a deadly colonial quagmire in Southeast Asia, Johnson felt that (as he later told historian Doris Goodwin) he “was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions.” And by Bobby Kennedy. He wanted out. He left and it felt good.Read that paragraph, and you can see the failure of the left and the antiwar movement during the Obama years. You could say that Obama is mired in a deadly colonial quagmire in SouthWEST Asia. Other than that, none of these things that drove LBJ from office exist under Obama.
Only one-quarter of those surveyed say news orgs get the facts right, a new low since 1985 when the question was first asked. Two-thirds (66 percent) say stories are often inaccurate, a new high. And nearly three-quarters of Americans believe that journalists try to cover up their mistakes, rather than admit them.
VIENNA – U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu accused Iran of nuclear "denial, deceit and evasion" on Monday, warning that Tehran's decision to move some uranium enrichment facilities to an underground bunker brings it closer to being able to producing the fissile core of a warhead.Ok, as a nuclear engineer, that's just nonsense. Either that, or its an open announcement of American intentions of bombing Iran. Take your pick. Certainly, the location of the equipment has nothing to do with the physics of uranium enrichment. The same equipment works pretty much the same above ground or underground. You don't get better efficiency or higher levels of enrichment because you are underground.
“Will this be the happiest day of your life?” a local interviewer asked me, referring to the approaching recognition of the State of Palestine by the U.N.
I was taken by surprise. “Why would that be?” I asked.
“Well, for 62 years you have advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel, and here it comes!”
“If I were a Palestinian, I would probably be happy,” I said. “But as an Israeli, I am rather sad.”
Let me explain.
Three days ago, Benjamin Netanyahu told Cathy Ashton, the pathetic “foreign secretary” of the European Union, that he would agree to anything short of Palestinian statehood. That may sound strange, in view of the “historic” speech he made less than two years ago, in which he expressed his support for the two-state solution. (Perhaps he was thinking of the State of Israel and the State of the Settlers.)
In the few remaining weeks before the U.N. vote, our government will fight tooth and nail against a Palestinian state, supported by the full might of the U.S. This week Hillary Clinton trumped even her own rhetorical record when she announced that the U.S. supports the two-state solution and therefore opposes any U.N. vote recognizing a Palestinian state.
According to the army, the Palestinians will get rubber-coated bullets and tear gas, but not the “Skunk.” The Skunk is a device that produces an unbearable stench which attaches itself to the peaceful demonstrators and will not leave them for a long time.
I am afraid that when this chapter comes to an end, the stench will attach itself to our side and that we shall not get rid of it for a long time indeed.
Let’s give free rein to our imagination for just one minute. Imagine that in the coming U.N. debate something incredible happens: The Israeli delegate declares that after due consideration Israel has decided to vote for recognition of the State of Palestine. The assembly would gape in disbelief. After a moment of silence, wild applause would break out. The world would be electrified. For days, the world media would speak of nothing else.
The minute of imagination has passed. Back to reality. Back to the Skunk.
In testimony to the House Oversight and Government Reform National Security Subcommittee, top Pentagon official Brigadier General Stephen Townsend conceded that contractor funding is still ending up in the hands of the Taliban. The comments come a month after the military estimated that $360 million had ended up in the hands of the Taliban and other criminals in Afghanistan,
“Seeing the materials FBI agents are being trained with certainly helps explain why we’ve seen so many inappropriate FBI surveillance operations broadly targeting the Muslim-American community, from infiltrating mosques with agents provocateur to racial- and ethnic-mapping programs,” Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the American Civil Liberties Union, tells Danger Room after being shown the documents. ”Biased police training can only result in biased policing.”
