Obstruction of Justice

Obstruction of Justice by Chris Hedges on Truthdig.com

If you don't know about the case of Dr. Al-Arian, then you should read this article.

To try to give the short version, Dr. Al-Arian was a professor at Univ of South Florida who vocally supported Palestinian rights. After years of FBI surveillence, he was arrested and tried on terrorism charges. The jury acquitted him on most charges, and hung 10-2 in his favor on others.

Government lawyers made wild assertions that showed a profound ignorance of the Middle East and exposed a gross stereotyping of the Muslim world. It called on the FBI case agent, for example, who testified as an expert witness that Islamic terrorists were routinely smuggled over the border from Iran into Syria, apparently unaware that Syria is separated from Iran by a large land mass called Iraq. The transcripts of the case against Al-Arian—which read like a bad Gilbert and Sullivan opera—are stupefying in their idiocy. The government wiretaps picked up nothing of substance; taxpayer dollars were used to record and transcribe 21,000 hours of banal chatter, including members of the Al-Arian household ordering pizza delivery. During the trial the government called 80 witnesses and subjected the jury to inane phone transcriptions and recordings, made over a 10-year period, which the jury curtly dismissed as “gossip.” It would be comical if the consequences were not so dire for the defendant.

A jury, on Dec. 6, 2005, acquitted Dr. Al-Arian on eight of the counts in the superseding indictment after a six-month trial in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. On the 94 charges made against the four defendants, there were no convictions. Of the 17 charges against Al-Arian—including “conspiracy to murder and maim persons abroad”—the jury acquitted him of eight and was hung on the rest. The jurors, who voted 10 to 2 to acquit on the remaining charges, could not reach a unanimous decision calling for his full acquittal. Two others in the case, Ghassan Ballut and Sameeh Hammoudeh, were acquitted of all charges.

After losing before a jury, the federal government refused to drop the case. Instead they promised to move forward with another years-long trial on the charges on which the jury hung. In order to end the ordeal, Dr. Al-Arian agreed to a plea bargain where he would leave this country. A part of the deal was that he refused to testify in other cases. So, then a federal prosecutor had him hauled up to Virginia to force him to testify in other cases. When Dr. Al-Arian refused, citing his plea bargain deal, he was charged with contempt of court and kept in federal prisons.

Despite the refusal of a jury to convict him, he's been held in federal prisons for years.

PS ... note that while the author refers to the Bush Justice Dept and 'right-wing' prosecutors, the Obama Justice Dept is still pursuing the case. And note also that incredible amounts of extra jail time that they are asking for comes from the 'Patriot Act II', which was supported by Obama and the Democrats.

Some times, all you can do is cry ...

If Only the World Had Listened by Robert Fisk in The Independent

I don’t know if I met Tom Hurndall. He was one of a bunch of “human shields” who turned up in Baghdad just before the Anglo-American invasion in 2003, the kind of folk we professional reporters make fun of. Tree huggers, that kind of thing. Now I wish I had met him because – looking back over the history of that terrible war – Hurndall’s journals (soon to be published) show a remarkable man of remarkable principle. “I may not be a human shield,” he wrote at 10.26 on 17 March from his Amman hotel. “And I may not adhere to the beliefs of those I have travelled with, but the way Britain and America plan to take Iraq is unnecessary and puts soldiers’ lives above those of civilians. For that I hope that Bush and Blair stand trial for war crimes.”

Hurndall got it about right, didn’t he? It wasn’t so simple as war/no war, black and white, he wrote. “Things I’ve heard and seen over the last few weeks proves what I already knew; neither the Iraqi regime, nor the American or British, are clean. Maybe Saddam needs to go but ... the air war that’s proposed is largely unnecessary and doesn’t discriminate between civilians and armed soldiers. Tens of thousands will die, maybe hundreds of thousands, just to save thousands of American soldiers having to fight honestly, hand to hand. It is wrong.” Oh, how many of my professional colleagues wrote like this on the eve of war? Not many.

We’re Paying Congress for This?

We’re Paying Congress for This? by Stanley Kutler on Truthdig

As someone who became aware of politics back when my mom had the Watergate hearings on TV in the house every day, this is something I'm painfully aware of. Congress no longer does real investigations.

And now comes Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank’s choreographed extravaganza in the House of Representatives, supported by an echoing committee, with sound bites worthy of a night in the Borscht Belt. The ostensible probe of executive bonuses at AIG—forget about any investigation of the company’s decisions that so damaged the financial world—offered a painful reminder of Congress’ now largely ignored unique power of investigation, derived from its constitutionally sanctioned authority to legislate. True, Congress has abused this power from time to time, but that is no argument against its existence.

Rep. Frank provided a perfunctory, carefully staged hearing this month. His fellow committee members had been prepped and primed—seemingly by their press aides rather than by any legal staff.

I stopped that excerpt in mid-paragraph because this is undoubtably true. The whole purpose of a Congressional hearing these days is to give each member 5 or 10 minutes to talk in front of a camera. That is the whole point of a modern congressional hearing. It was true when the Republicans were refusing to do any oversight of their president, and it was true for the last two years when the Democrats refused to do any oversight on a Republican President.

Hearings used to be much more open-ended. The main questioners of witnesses were the legal staff of the hearing that had spent long hours compiling and reviewing evidence and taking depositions from key witnesses. Each congress-critter would also ask questions, but the time they had for this wasn't nearly so limited as today.

In a modern hearing, its all designed to fit into a nice slot on C-span, and to provide each congress-critter with film clips of them looking officious asking questions at a hearing. But, you can see how each Congress-critter usually only gets one 5 minute slot to do this in. This of course makes it possible for any witness to dodge answering questions by running out that 5 minutes and moving on to the next questioner. The whole thing is just a giant PR show, and getting any real information out of the witnesses is not the point.

Its clear that replacing the Republicans with Democrats didn't change this. And that's very unfortunate because congressional hearings play a key role in our democracy. We are supposed to have separate but equal branches of government that provide checks and balances upon each other. And if any of these is supposed to be strongest, it is supposed to be the Congress, not the Executive Branch. Having an independent Congress with the power to investigate is a key pillar in what is supposed to be our free and democratic government.

Each Congress-critter takes an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. When they shirk that key constitutional duty to instead just posture for the cameras, they are doing grave damage to our country. Want to know who's 'un-American' these days? Watch a Congressional hearing. But its not some supposed secret communist who's the un-American person on your screen. Its the congress-critters who are failing to live up to the oath they took with their hand on a bible at the start of the session of Congress.

What Price Hollywood?

What Price Hollywood? by Chris Hedges on Truthdig.com

Chris Hedges on 'celebrity culture.' Brilliant, as usual with Mr. Hedges. I guess maybe going to the seminary after years of working in war zones gives one an excellent perspective on American culture ... or what passes for culture.

Been reading Cornell West of late. He points out that for a long time, American culture compared itself to and strove to achieve what European culture was achieving. American culture tended to be either a copy. Or the sort of insecure statements that tried to assert American culture as independent of European culture.

Of course, that's changed since WWII and the assumption of the United States of the role of great power in the world. Today its American culture that blasts itself into every brain, and to which other cultural ideas try to compete or imitate. But, is this really culture at all? Journeys to Graceland or Hollywood to gawk at 'the stars'? Or trips to Las Vegas where we can pretend to be a celebrity ourselves and try to live like one, as long as one has the money?

In Washington, Public Policy and Private Wealth are Hopelessly Tangled

In Washington, Public Policy and Private Wealth are Hopelessly Tangled by William Pfaff on Truthdig.com

Good article on health care ....

To get back to Washington, while ex-Sen. Daschle is a reputed expert on health systems, he has also, since leaving the Senate, made a quarter of a million dollars as speaker, consultant and adviser to private health insurance and health-care companies.

Does anyone think that, as secretary of health and human services, he would have recommended a new system that cuts out the private health insurance industry? The insurance companies are the ones that killed Hillary Clinton’s health proposals eight years ago. Where do you think the money goes that makes American health care the most expensive in the world? It’s not going into nurses’ salaries.

My one problem with the article is that he perpetuates the myth that Obama is some sort of saint trying to work around all of this corruption. To check that, let's go to Maplight.org. There we can find who the health insurance industry gives money to in Congress. Hey, look, there's Obama as the number 1 recipient of health insurance money in Congress at $232,000.

Note carefully that this is only money given to Congressional campaigns. I don't believe it includes any health insurance money that's a part of the $700,000,000.00 that just got Obama elected President. This is only money given to Senate campaigns from 2001 to 2008. Interestingly, Obama's first campaign was in 2004. So, he either became the largest recipient of health insurance money in that one race, or they were giving a lot of money to his 2010 accounts on top of other money that probably went to his Presidential campaign.

Now, is it any big surprise that Obama's first choice for HHS was someone else who gets hundreds of thousands of dollars from the health insurance industry? And he sure as heck ain't gonna pick a proponent of 'single-payer', or maybe someone like the head of the CA Nurses union to replace Daschle.

The Language of Death

The Language of Death By Chris Hedges on truthdig.com

The incursion into Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel. It is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use the lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase of the decades-long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. The assault on Gaza is about creating squalid, lawless and impoverished ghettos where life for Palestinians will be barely sustainable. It is about building ringed Palestinian enclaves where Israel will always have the ability to shut off movement, food, medicine and goods to perpetuate misery. The Israeli attack on Gaza is about building a hell on earth.

Remember, every Democrat in the US Senate and all but four Democrats in the US House just stood up and said that they are extremely supportive of Israel creating this 'hell on earth'. Gotta love those Democrats.

The refusal by political leaders from Barack Obama to nearly every member of the U.S. Congress to speak out in the major media in defense of the rule of law and fundamental human rights exposes our cowardice and hypocrisy. Those who openly condemn the Israeli crimes, including Israelis such as Yuri Avnery, Tom Segev, Ilan Pappe, Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, as well as American stalwarts Noam Chomsky, Dennis Kucinich, Norman Finkelstein and Richard Falk, are ignored or treated like lepers. They are denied a platform in the press. They are rendered nearly voiceless. Falk, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied territories and a former professor of international law at Princeton, was refused entry into Israel in December, detained for 20 hours and deported. Never mind that nearly all these voices are Jewish.

later ...

The lesson of the Holocaust is that when you have the capacity to halt genocide, and you do not—no matter who carries out that genocide or who it is directed against—you are culpable. And we are very culpable. The F-16 jet fighters, the Apache attack helicopters, the 250-pound “smart” GBU-39 bombs are all part of the annual $2.4 billion in military aid the U.S. gives to Israel. Palestinians are being slaughtered with American-made weapons. They are being slaughtered by an Israeli military we lavishly bankroll.

In last year's elections, I voted Green in every race I could. From Cynthia McKinney for President on down the ballot. Democrats would tell me that I 'wasted' my vote. But I voted for a party that would not be so supportive of genocide as the Democrats are being right now. I voted for a party that does stand for peace and justice and international law.

Those who voted Democrat voted for a party that supports and enables and cheers on genocide.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich on His Battle With the Banks

Rep. Dennis Kucinich on His Battle With the Banks by Rep. Dennis Kucinich on Truthdig.com

Once they were as gods, but the deities of the American banking system are now in ruins, plunged from their pedestals into the maw of taxpayer largesse. Congress voted to give the banks $700 billion, lifting them temporarily out of their sepulcher of debt, while revealing a deep truth about the condition of America’s financial powers:

They never had the money they said they had as they constructed their debt-based monetary system which now lies in ruins. Their decisions on behalf of depositors, shareholders and investors were lacking in basic integrity and common sense. Green gods bailing out with their golden parachutes.

There was a time when their power was real. Come with me to Cleveland 30 years ago today.