Privacy, Tyranny

Chris Hedges on Bill C-51 and the corporate state

H.G. Watson
rabble: March 15, 2015

[…]Why did you want to travel all the way to Toronto to be a part of the protests against Bill C-51?

Chris Hedges: I’ve been fighting you know the [erosion] of civil liberties in the United States for a long time. I sued president Obama over section 1021 of the National Defence Authorization Act, which permits the U.S. military overturning over 150 years of law to carry out domestic policing on American city streets, to seize American citizens who “substantially support” the Taliban, Al Qaeda or something called associated forces — another kind of nebulous phrase — strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military facilities.

I was also part of the lawsuit that worked its way up to the Supreme Court on warrantless wire-tapping. I covered the Stasi state in East Germany, I spent 20 years in some of the most despotic regimes around the globe as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and I think because of that, understand that this is not the kind of power that you ever want to give to a government. 

We can’t talk about free citizens in the state where everyone has all of their electronic forms of communication not only monitored, but stored in perpetuity in government computers. It doesn’t matter if they’re not using it. History has shown that if the government feels threatened or they seek greater control — and I think that is the trajectory of the corporate state — they will use it. The goal of wholesale surveillance, and something that Hannah Arendt wrote about in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is not to discover crimes but to give information to the government that it can use if it decides to arrest a certain category of the population. I think this is extremely grave.

What I find disturbing is that although the revelations of Edward Snowden are known, we’re not reacting. We don’t understand the danger that’s in front of it, when you talk about a population that is watched and tracked 24 hours a day. The relationship between a population that is monitored on that level and knows that [the government watches] them is a relationship between masters and slaves — you can’t even use the word liberty anymore and we’re already at that point.

I want to go back to the point you mentioned, that we’re not reacting. Why do you think that is?

People are politically passive because they have kind of given up on the system. That’s certainly true — more true — in the United States where Congress has a nine per cent approval rating. Only 38 per cent of the population even bothers to cast a ballot anymore. I think the other thing is that they don’t quite understand how incredibly dangerous handing any government this kind of power is.

So I think it’s those two factors, coupled with the fact [that] our mass radical movements — more so again in the United States, but Canada is not immune to this — have been largely broken. Labour unions are under assault, and I find that frightening. 

That’s why I was willing to fly up here because if we don’t react in a sustained way then we will see cemented into place one of the most frightening dystopias in human history — something that dwarfs anything ever dreamed of by the communist Stasi state in East Germany.

In terms of this particular bill, do you think that this fits into a wider trend of similar legislation in the western world?

Of course it fits into a wider trend — not only into the western world but in Canada. Canadians are monitored as closely as U.S. citizens are as closely as British citizens or any other. This is a global phenomenon and the corporate state — and Harper is representative of the corporate power and the corporate state — seeks this kind of control because they know what is coming with climate change and the inevitable financial collapse that is looming now that global speculators are back on a spree as they were before 2008. With a flick of a switch essentially we have both the legal and physical mechanisms through the creation of massive security forces — militarized police forces — to in essence declare a militarized state both in Canada and the United States. Or should we have another catastrophic act of domestic terrorism anything like that, all the mechanisms are there… we have to fight it now.

So do you think that this bill will actually will do anything towards its stated goal of combatting terrorism?

None of these bills are about terrorism. Terrorism is the excuse. That’s what 9/11 was and that’s what this gunman who carried out this attack on Parliament Hill — they seize on that the same way, for instance, the Nazi party seized on the Reichstag fire to strip away civil liberties in Germany. What people forget is that the next day, after the Nazis essentially eviscerated all civil liberties for the German population, everything appeared normal. Everyone went to work; came home; had dinner. They had ceded to themselves this kind of power in the name of fighting terrorism.

But for most people there’s a kind of normalcy and they don’t quite yet understand what a sea change this has been, and how dramatic this change is, and of course how terrifying it is. Totalitarian systems, they creep forward because they have to break any kind of obstacles or opposition that lie in their path. By the time people grasp what has happened to them, its kind of too late. There are no mechanisms left by which they can fight back. That’s kind of where we’re headed; that’s what is going on.

In what ways can we combat this kind of surveillance?

Well I’ve spent a lot of time with Julian Assange, who believes in encryption up to a point. Even Assange says finally the best encryptors — and he is one of them — will finally not be able to keep channels of privacy open. So he’s kind of optimistic in the short term but not in the long term.

I don’t encrypt. Rather than trying to build a parallel encryption mechanism I think what we have to do is carry out sustained and long term acts of civil disobedience in order to try and force the state to back down. I think that’s the only hope we have left. I think that we have to build radical mass movements and radical alternatives. Political parties I don’t trust. I see with the Democrats, they will, under the bush administration, decry the assault on civil liberties, but Obama’s assault on civil liberties has been far more egregious than that carried out by Bush. I don’t think the traditional political establishment has any intention — I can’t speak for Canada, I’m not Canadian, but that is certainly true in the United States that neither the Republican nor the Democrats have any intention of rolling any of this back 

You’ve written a little bit about radicalization and how it really stems from alienation from society. Do you think Bill C-51 that can contribute to radicalization in Canada?

Of course it does because what you do is you target a certain segment of the population and Muslims have already been targeted in the United States and Canada for harassment and abuse and discrimination even though they haven’t done anything. This breeds a kind of rage, especially among the young who feel caught between two cultures already and then feel alienated from two cultures. This feeds into exactly the propaganda that jihadists hand out, which is why you have roughly 20,000 foreign fighters with ISIS, 3,000 or 4,000 of them from Europe and Canada.

What would you propose as a way of them making sure people don’t feel like they are alienated or isolated?

Don’t take away their rights. Don’t take away their right to privacy; don’t take away their right to dissent.

Don’t take away — you know, a functioning democracy is a mechanism by which reform: incremental and peaceful reform can be carried out. When you [shut down] that mechanism you inevitably radicalize, especially your disenfranchised.

You know, if we don’t win this fight, then we are going to cement into place a species of corporate totalitarianism which will usher in a dystopia of terrifying proportions.

(Read the full article and listen to the interview at rabble)

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Health/Environment

Johnson & Johnson Admits to Selling Baby Medicine Contaminated with Metal

Tylenol Maker Admits to Selling Liquid Medicine Contaminated with Metal

Sam Frizell
Time: March 11, 2015

A Johnson & Johnson subsidiary will pay $25 million after pleading guilty to a federal crime

The maker of Tylenol pleaded guilty in a Federal Court on Tuesday to selling liquid medicine contaminated with metal.

McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, pleaded guilty in a Federal District Court in Philadelphia to a criminal charge of manufacture and process of adulterated over-the-counter medicines. The company agreed to a $25 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice.

The company launched wide-ranging recalls in 2010 of over-the-counter medicines including Infants’ Tylenol and Children’s Motrin.

Those recalls came on the heels of others from 2008 to 2010 that involved hundreds of millions of bottles of Tylenol, Motrin, Benadryl and other consumer products. Metal particles contaminated the liquid medicines, which also suffered from moldy odors and labeling problems.

(read the full article at TIME)

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Geopolitics/War, WTF

Canadian Intelligence Agent Allegedly Arrested in Turkey, Accused of Helping ISIS

Ben Makuch
Vice: March 12, 2015

[…]
According to the Daily Sabah, Turkish authorities arrested the agent after they helped three British girls recently join the ranks of the Islamic State. Speaking to Turkish television on the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq from the Turkish border, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu accused a member of a foreign intelligence service of helping to ferry those British girls into the warzones of northern Syria.

“We were informed by Britain about three girls who left to join ISIS a few days after they departed for Turkey,” said Çavuşoğlu during the interview. “This person was working for the intelligence service of a country participating in the coalition against ISIS. This country is not the United States or a member of the European Union. I told this to the British foreign secretary and he replied ‘as usual.”

The Daily Sabah reports that several Turkish media outlets claim that the individual currently in detention is a Canadian, while it is known that the current coalition against ISIS includes Canada, Australia, and other Arab countries within the region.

A spokesperson for the Minister of Public Safety said the department is “aware of these reports,” but added “(w)e do not comment on operational matters of national security.”

The report comes on the heels of expanded foreign spying powers for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and Bill C-51 that promises to bolster the legal capabilities of law enforcement agencies to surveil and arrest terrorist threats in Canada.

(read the full article at Vice)

UPDATE: While the government hasn’t confirmed specifics, they are willing to say that the individual is neither Canadian nor a Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) spy. Though when asked if CSIS were operating in countries like Turkey, Minister of Public Safety Steven Blaney exclusively told VICE Canada, “I believe CSIS is operating in a region where there is potential high-risk travellers.”

It’s well known that the corridor between Turkey and Syria is the major trafficking point for foreign fighters joining up with ISIS.

One alleged Canadian fighter told VICE in June that the Turkish border with Syria is where foreigners join the militant organization in its fight against Syrian, Iraqi, and Kurdish forces.

While declining to comment on specifics due to operational security, Blaney maintains that any activities CSIS is engaged in “have been conducted respecting Canadian laws.”

(full update at Vice)

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Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

Torture of Palestinian detainees by Israel soared in 2014 – report

RT: March 8, 2015

The instances of torture of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli services soared sharply in the second half of 2014, after the killings of three Jewish teenagers in June, says data from military courts and anti-torture bodies, collected by Haaretz.

All in all, 51 cases of torture were reported in the second half of last year, according to an attorney representing those accused of security offences. The data was obtained by Haaretz from military courts, and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.

“In years past there were a few rare cases. But something has changed,” the attorney said.

Twenty-three Palestinians sent a number of complaints of torture they had suffered in 2014 by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. Each of the plaintiffs said they experienced several methods of torture.

In the first part of 2014, eight instances of torture were reported. They included beatings and sleep deprivations. However, the second half of the year saw ‘darker’ methods of interrogation, which included tying up suspects in what is called “banana” and the “frog” positions.

Of fifty-one instances of torture, there were 19 complaints of sleep deprivation, 18 of tying, 12 of beatings and 2 of shaking.

2014 saw 59 torture complaints, which is a rise, compared to 2013 (16 instances of violent means), 2012 (30), and 2011 (27).

Thousands of Palestinian detainees were tortured by Israelis up to 1999, a year when the High Court of Justice prohibited the systematic use of torture. However, it left a small ‘window’ for Israeli services: an interrogator could claim that there was an urgent need to flout the law. The rules when this “need” can be implemented are not open to the public.

Different types of torture are mentioned in the Shin Bet documents, officials in the military court who saw them told Haaretz. They include blindfolding, beating, slapping, forcing a suspect to stand for hours with hands at his sides and tying people up in the “banana” position. All these methods are less brutal than covering the head with a sack, tying in the “frog” position and sleep deprivation, say the documents.

(Read the full article at RT)

Geopolitics/War

Noam Chomsky: Defeating ISIS Starts with the US Admitting Its Role in Creating This Fundamentalist Monster

Amy Goodman
Democracy Now! : March 3, 2015

We air the second part of our two-day interview with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author. Chomsky is institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught for more than 50 years. As Iraq launches an offensive to retake Tikrit and Congress prepares to debate an expansive war powers resolution for U.S. strikes, Chomsky discusses how he thinks the U.S. should respond to the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

Below is an interview with Chomsky, followed by a transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Today, part two of our discussion with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he’s taught for more than half a century. On Monday on Democracy Now!, Aaron Maté and I interviewed him about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech on Iran to Congress. Today, in part two, we look at blowback from the U.S. drone program, the legacy of slavery in the United States, the leaks of Edward Snowden, U.S. meddling in Venezuela and the thawing of U.S.-Cuba relations. We began by asking Professor Chomsky how the U.S. should respond to the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s very hard to think of anything serious that can be done. I mean, it should be settled diplomatically and peacefully to the extent that that’s possible. It’s not inconceivable. I mean, there are—ISIS, it’s a horrible manifestation of hideous actions. It’s a real danger to anyone nearby. But so are other forces. And we should be getting together with Iran, which has a huge stake in the matter and is the main force involved, and with the Iraqi government, which is calling for and applauding Iranian support and trying to work out with them some arrangement which will satisfy the legitimate demands of the Sunni population, which is what ISIS is protecting and defending and gaining their support from.

They’re not coming out of nowhere. I mean, they are—one of the effects, the main effects, of the U.S. invasion of Iraq—there are many horrible effects, but one of them was to incite sectarian conflicts, that had not been there before. If you take a look at Baghdad before the invasion, Sunni and Shia lived intermingled—same neighborhoods, they intermarried. Sometimes they say that they didn’t even know if their neighbor was a Sunni or a Shia. It was like knowing what Protestant sect your neighbor belongs to. There was pretty close—it wasn’t—I’m not claiming it was—it wasn’t utopia. There were conflicts. But there was no serious conflict, so much so that Iraqis at the time predicted there would never be a conflict. Well, within a couple of years, it had turned into a violent, brutal conflict. You look at Baghdad today, it’s segregated. What’s left of the Sunni communities are isolated. The people can’t talk to their neighbors. There’s war going on all over. The ISIS is murderous and brutal. The same is true of the Shia militias which confront it. And this is now spread all over the region. There’s now a major Sunni-Shia conflict rending the region apart, tearing it to shreds.

Now, this cannot be dealt with by bombs. This is much more serious than that. It’s got to be dealt with by steps towards recovering, remedying the massive damage that was initiated by the sledgehammer smashing Iraq and has now spread. And that does require diplomatic, peaceful means dealing with people who are pretty ugly—and we’re not very pretty, either, for that matter. But this just has to be done. Exactly what steps should be taken, it’s hard to say. There are people whose lives are at stake, like the Assyrian Christians, the Yazidi and so on. Apparently, the fighting that protected the—we don’t know a lot, but it looks as though the ground fighting that protected the Yazidi, largely, was carried out by PKK, the Turkish guerrilla group that’s fighting for the Kurds in Turkey but based in northern Iraq. And they’re on the U.S. terrorist list. We can’t hope to have a strategy that deals with ISIS while opposing and attacking the group that’s fighting them, just as it doesn’t make sense to try to have a strategy that excludes Iran, the major state that’s supporting Iraq in its battle with ISIS.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the fact that so many of those who are joining ISIS now—and a lot has been made of the young people, young women and young men, who are going into Syria through Turkey. I mean, Turkey is a U.S. ally. There is a border there. They freely go back and forth.

NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s right. And it’s not just young people. One thing that’s pretty striking is that it includes people with—educated people, doctors, professionals and others. Whatever we—we may not like it, but ISIS is—the idea of the Islamic caliphate does have an appeal to large sectors of a brutalized global population, which is under severe attack everywhere, has been for a long time. And something has appeared which has an appeal to them. And that can’t be overlooked if we want to deal with the issue. We have to ask what’s the nature of the appeal, why is it there, how can we accommodate it and lead to some, if not at least amelioration of the murderous conflict, then maybe some kind of settlement. You can’t ignore these factors if you want to deal with the issue.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about more information that’s come out on the British man who is known as “Jihadi John,” who appears in the Islamic State beheading videos. Mohammed Emwazi has been identified as that man by British security. They say he’s a 26-year-old born in Kuwait who moved to the U.K. as a child and studied computer science at the University of Westminster. The British group CAGE said he faced at least four years of harassment, detention, deportations, threats and attempts to recruit him by British security agencies, which prevented him from leading a normal life. Emwazi approached CAGE in 2009 after he was detained and interrogated by the British intelligence agency MI5 on what he called a safari vacation in Tanzania. In 2010, after Emwazi was barred from returning to Kuwait, he wrote, quote, “I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started. But know [sic] I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London.” In 2013, a week after he was barred from Kuwait for a third time, Emwazi left home and ended up in Syria. At a news conference, CAGE research director Asim Qureshi spoke about his recollections of Emwazi and compared his case to another British man, Michael Adebolajo, who hacked a soldier to death in London in 2013.

ASIM QURESHI: Sorry, it’s quite hard, because, you know, he’s such a—I’m really sorry, but he was such a beautiful young man, really. You know, it’s hard to imagine the trajectory, but it’s not a trajectory that’s unfamiliar with us, for us. We’ve seen Michael Adebolajo, once again, somebody that I met, you know, who came to me for help, looking to change his situation within the system. When are we going to finally learn that when we treat people as if they’re outsiders, they will inevitably feel like outsiders, and they will look for belonging elsewhere?

AMY GOODMAN: That’s CAGE research director Asim Qureshi. Your response to this, Noam Chomsky?

NOAM CHOMSKY: He’s right. If you—the same if you take a look at those who perpetrated the crimes on Charlie Hebdo. They also have a history of oppression, violence. They come from Algerian background. The horrible French participation in the murderous war in the ’90s in Algeria is their immediate background. They live under—in these harshly repressed areas. And there’s much more than that. So, you mentioned that information is coming out about so-called Jihadi John. You read the British press, other information is coming out, which we don’t pay much attention to. For example, The Guardian had an article a couple of weeks ago about a Yemeni boy, I think who was about 14 or so, who was murdered in a drone strike. And shortly before, they had interviewed him about his history. His parents and family went through them, were murdered in drone strikes. He watched them burn to death. We get upset about beheadings. They get upset about seeing their father burn to death in a drone strike. He said they live in a situation of constant terror, not knowing when the person 10 feet away from you is suddenly going to be blown away. That’s their lives. People like those who live in the slums around Paris or, in this case, a relatively privileged man under harsh, pretty harsh repression in England, they also know about that. We may choose not to know about it, but they know. When we talk about beheadings, they know that in the U.S.-backed Israeli attack on Gaza, at the points where the attack was most fierce, like the Shejaiya neighborhood, people weren’t just beheaded. Their bodies were torn to shreds. People came later trying to put the pieces of the bodies together to find out who they were, you know. These things happen, too. And they have an impact—all of this has an impact, along with what was just described. And if we seriously want to deal with the question, we can’t ignore that. That’s part of the background of people who are reacting this way.

AARON MATÉ: You spoke before about how the U.S. invasion set off the Sunni-Shia conflict in Iraq, and out of that came ISIS. I wonder if you see a parallel in Libya, where the U.S. and NATO had a mandate to stop a potential massacre in Benghazi, but then went much further than a no-fly zone and helped topple Gaddafi. And now, four years later, we have ISIS in Libya, and they’re beheading Coptic Christians, Egypt now bombing. And with the U.S. debating this expansive war measure, Libya could be next on the U.S. target list.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, that’s a very important analogy. What happened is, as you say, there was a claim that there might be a massacre in Benghazi, and in response to that, there was a U.N. resolution, which had several elements. One, a call for a ceasefire and negotiations, which apparently Gaddafi accepted. Another was a no-fly zone, OK, to stop attacks on Benghazi. The three traditional imperial powers—Britain, France and the United States—immediately violated the resolution. No diplomacy, no ceasefire. They immediately became the air force of the rebel forces. And, in fact, the war itself had plenty of brutality—violent militias, attacks on Africans living in Libya, all sorts of things. The end result is just to tear Libya to shreds. By now, it’s torn between two major warring militias, many other small ones. It’s gotten to the point where they can’t even export their main export, oil. It’s just a disaster, total disaster. That’s what happens when you strike vulnerable systems, as I said, with a sledgehammer. All kind of horrible things can happen.

In the case of Iraq, it’s worth recalling that there had been an almost decade of sanctions, which were brutally destructive. We know about—we can, if we like, know about the sanctions. People prefer not to, but we can find out. There was a sort of humanitarian component of the sanctions, so-called. It was the oil-for-peace program, instituted when the reports of the sanctions were so horrendous—you know, hundreds of thousand of children dying and so on—that it was necessary for the U.S. and Britain to institute some humanitarian part. That was directed by prominent, respected international diplomats, Denis Halliday, who resigned, and Hans von Sponeck. Both Halliday and von Sponeck resigned because they called the humanitarian aspect genocidal. That’s their description. And von Sponeck published a detailed, important book on it called, I think, A Different Kind of War, or something like that, which I’ve never seen a review of or even a mention of it in the United States, which detailed, in great detail, exactly how these sanctions were devastating the civilian society, supporting Saddam, because the people had to simply huddle under the umbrella of power for survival, probably—they didn’t say this, but I’ll add it—probably saving Saddam from the fate of other dictators who the U.S. had supported and were overthrown by popular uprisings. And there’s a long list of them—Somoza, Marcos, Mobutu, Duvalier—you know, even Ceaușescu, U.S. was supporting. They were overthrown from within. Saddam wasn’t, because the civil society that might have carried that out was devastated. He had a pretty efficient rationing system people were living on for survival, but it severely harmed the civilian society. Then comes the war, you know, massive war, plenty of destruction, destruction of antiquities. There’s now, you know, properly, denunciation of ISIS for destroying antiquities. The U.S. invasion did the same thing. Millions of refugees, a horrible blow against the society.

These things have terrible consequences. Actually, there’s an interesting interview with Graham Fuller. He’s one of the leading Middle East analysts, long background in CIA, U.S. intelligence. In the interview, he says something like, “The U.S. created ISIS.” He hastens to add that he’s not joining with the conspiracy theories that are floating around the Middle East about how the U.S. is supporting ISIS. Of course, it’s not. But what he says is, the U.S. created ISIS in the sense that we established the background from which ISIS developed as a terrible offshoot. And we can’t overlook that.

(source : democracynow.org – -)

RELATED: Truth in Media: Origin of ISIS

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Corporate Welfare, WTF

Lobbyists Can Legally Screw Politicians in North Carolina, Says Ethics Commission

Elizabeth Nolan Brown
Reason: March 4, 2015

Sex acts provided to politicians “to lobby or to develop goodwill” do not violate state ethics policies, nor must this activity be disclosed, ruled the North Carolina Ethics Commission.

Under North Carolina law, lobbyists must report gifts and “things of value” worth more than $10 per day given to someone covered by the state ethics act or their family. But “consensual sexual relationships do not have monetary value and therefore are not reportable as gifts or ‘reportable expenditure made for lobbying,'” stated the commission in its opinion, a response to a formal inquiry from the state’s Lobbying Compliance Commission. The inquiry was made in a “largely hypothetical context,” the ethics commission notes.

“Opinions issued by the Ethics Commission are generally a good deal more banal, dealing with subjects such as under what circumstances it is legal for state officials to accept scholarships to conferences,” North Carolina’s WRAL.com reports.

Joal Broun, the Secretary of State’s lobbying compliance director, declined to comment on why she requested the ethics opinion, deferring questions to the Secretary of State’s spokeswoman Liz Proctor. Proctor said that a private attorney posed the question to the Secretary of State’s Office last in 2014. “We agreed that the question needed to be decided,” she said. Therefore, the office submitted the question to the Ethics Commission.

[…] WRAL News obtained a copy of the four-page request for an opinion from another source. Parts of it are graphic, describing specific sexual acts that might be at issue, but it does not implicate a particular set of people or specify a particular set of facts.

The request for an opinion asks five specific questions of the ethics commission, including (emphasis mine):

– Do sexual favors or sexual acts that a person provides to a designated individual to lobby or to develop goodwill or both on behalf of another, trigger the registration obligation?
– Are sexual favors or sexual acts that a lobbyist or a lobbyist principal provides not for the purpose of lobbying a gift as defined by the Ethics Act that must be reported?
– Is a designated individual who receives sexual favors or sexual acts that a lobbyist or a lobbyist principal provides outside North Carolina obligated to report such sexual favors or sexual acts as required by N.C.G.S. § 120C-800?

Note that the lobbying commission isn’t just asking about personal relationships that happen to develop between lobbyists and politicians but lobbyists providing sex to politicians as a form of lobbying. That’s A-OK, apparently. “However, a lobbyist or lobbyist principal’s provision of paid prostitution services by a third party to a designated individual could constitute a gift or thing of value, albeit an illegal one, depending on the particular facts,” the commission added.

Got that? Lobbyists paying for prostitution for politicians? Must be reported. Lobbyists secretly engaging in prostitution with politicians? No big thing.

(read the full article at Reason)

Tyranny, WTF

The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site’

Spencer Ackerman
The Guardian : February 24, 2015

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:

Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
Shackling for prolonged periods.
Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.

“Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”

The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.

Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.

“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.

Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.

“This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”

(read the full article at The Guardian)

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Privacy, Tyranny

Canadian anti-terror bill opens door for human rights abuses, law scholars argue

John Barber
The Guardian : February 27, 2015

More than 100 Canadian law professors have warned the prime minister, Stephen Harper, that a sweeping new anti-terror law introduced by his Conservative government is a “dangerous piece of legislation” that threatens to undermine the rule of law, human rights and democracy itself.

Although one poll showed that four out of five Canadians supported the proposed law shortly after it was tabled last month, criticisms that originated with scattered human-rights groups have since been amplified by a growing chorus of the nation’s leading jurists, academics, editorial-writers and opinion-makers.

The latest open letter follows an earlier plea to scrap the bill signed by four former Canadian prime ministers, five former supreme court justices and several cabinet ministers.

“Protecting human rights and protecting public safety are complementary objectives, but experience has shown that serious human rights abuses can occur in the name of maintaining national security,” the former prime ministers and supreme court jurists wrote. “Given the secrecy around national security activities, abuses can go undetected and without remedy. This results not only in devastating personal consequences for the individuals, but a profoundly negative impact on Canada’s reputation as a rights-respecting nation.”

The law professors present a close legal analysis of the proposed law, concluding with a sharp criticism of the government’s attempt to speed it through parliament.

“It is sadly ironic that democratic debate is being curtailed on a bill that vastly expands the scope of covert state activity when that activity will be subject to poor or even non-existent democratic oversight or review,” the experts wrote.

Amid growing criticism and a filibuster in parliament, the Conservatives reluctantly agreed late in the week to extend the previously abbreviated schedule for committee hearings on the bill, impeding what had hitherto been its fast track into law.

The move raised hope among opponents that the Harper government will ultimately be forced to accept amendments to curtail the sweeping new police and spy powers contained in the bill.

Drafted in response to two attacks by lone terrorists this year, including one that ended with a hail of bullets in the corridor of the House of Commons in Ottawa, Bill C-51 significantly loosens current restrictions on police and spies seeking to disrupt terrorist activity. But critics claim that it also opens the way for the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) to target legitimate dissent, making criminals of environmentalists, native people and other protesters hostile to the government.

Previously, the prime minister has derided the criticisms as “ridiculous” and critics as members of a conspiracy-addled “black helicopter fleet”. But the latest fusillade from some of the country’s leading legal scholars is the most forceful attack so far levelled against the increasingly controversial new bill.
‘Neither extremists, nor dismissive of threats’

In a letter running more than 4,000 words and covering “some (and only some)” of the terror bill’s alleged defects, the professors warn that the new law would not only do little to fight terrorism, it could actually set back the cause.

“In this respect,” they wrote, “we wish it to be clear that we are neither ‘extremists’ (as the Prime Minister has recently labelled the Official Opposition for its resistance to Bill C-51) nor dismissive of the real threats to Canadians’ security that government and Parliament have a duty to protect.

“Rather, we believe that terrorism must be countered in ways that are fully consistent with core values (that include liberty, non-discrimination, and the rule of law), that are evidence-based, and that are likely to be effective.”

The growing resistance to the new measures has eclipsed the popular approval that greeted the bill when the prime minister introduced it in January, vowing revenge against “violent jihadists” who “want to harm us because they hate our society and the values it represents”.

(read the full article at The Guardian)

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Corporate Welfare, Health/Environment

Kill the Messenger

Peggy O’Mara: February 17, 2015

I watched the movie, Kill the Messenger, recently. It’s the story of Gary Webb, an investigative journalist who wrote a series of stories in 1996 about the connections between the CIA and the Nicaraguan contras. The CIA denied his allegations and his story created a firestorm of criticism of both the government and the media, according to Don Wycliff of The Chicago Tribune. Wycliff goes on to say;

I think he got the treatment that always comes to those who dare to question aloud the bona fides of the establishment. First he got misrepresented…. Then he was ridiculed as a conspiracy-monger….In the end, Web was rendered untouchable.

In the film, Jeremy Renner, who plays Web, says, “When you are right above the target, they give you the most flack. They conceptualize you.” To conceptualize someone is a means of distracting from the original story by shifting the focus to the storyteller and raising doubts about his or her veracity and character. Effectively, it means to kill the messenger.

MEDIA MANIPULATION

Conceptualizing is one of the techniques used today to manipulate the media and is often achieved through astrosurfing. According to Source Watch, “astroturf refers to apparently grassroots-based citizen groups or coalitions that are primarily conceived, created and/or funded by corporations, industry trade associations, political interests or public relations firms.”

Campaigns & Elections magazine defines astroturf as a “grassroots program that involves the instant manufacturing of public support for a point of view in which either uninformed activists are recruited or means of deception are used to recruit them.”

Astroturf is a perversion of the grassroots for the purpose of manipulating others into changing their opinions for fear of being “outliers.” In “Vaccines, PR and the News Cycle,” Kristen Michaelis says,

In the large firms that tend to represent corporate, political, or celebrity interests, there are entire divisions of hundreds of interns dedicated to monitoring and influencing online media — doing everything from leaving comments on blogs and news sites to harassing users on Twitter, from leaving a string of hostile anonymous asks on Tumblr blogs to charging headlong into Facebook discussions.

SIGNS OF PROPAGANDA AND ASTROTURFING

In her Ted Talk, veteran journalist, Sharyl Attkisson, identifies the signs of propoganda and astroturfing:

  •  Use of inflammatory language such as crank, quack, nutty, lies, pseudo, paranoid and conspiracy.
  • Claims to be debunking myths that aren’t myths at all.
  • Attack an issue by conceptualizing or attacking the people, personalities and organizations surrounding it rather than addressing the facts.
  • Most of all, astrosurfers tend to reserve all of their public skepticism for those exposing wrong doing rather than the wrong doer. Instead of questioning authority, they question those who question authority.

Watch Attikson’s Ted Talk.

THE VACCINE INDUSTRY AND PR

One of the most notorious astroturf companies is Bonner & Associates. According to Source Watch, “Bonner & Associates is a lobbying/public relations firm that specializes in “grassroots” and third party campaigns. Its website says it “locate[s], educate[s], and mobilize[s] … [o]rganizations and constituencies that matter politically … to support our clients’ positions credibly and effectively.” In 1995, Campaigns and Elections magazine estimated that astrosurf lobbying had become an $800 million industry.

Bonner & Associates has used pretend grass roots campaigns to loosen fuel-efficiency standards, support clear cutting of forests, defeat the Clinton administration’s proposed health care reform, and oppose the Kyoto Agreement on climate change. In 2002 O’Dwyers PR Daily reported that Bonner & Associates “has done work for Boeing, Ford Motor, Merck, Proctor & Gamble and Northrop Grumman, among others.”

Merck is the sole manufacturer of the MMR vaccine. Headquartered in Kenilworth, New Jersey, Merck has 70,000 employees and reported $18.2 billion in US revenues in 2014 and $42.2 billion worldwide.

An article, “The Expanding Vaccine Market” on the Pharmaceutical Processing website outlines the growth picture for vaccines worldwide:

Vaccines continue to be one of the brighter spots for  pharmaceutical companies in the current market, and revenues for vaccine products are expected to continue their double-digit growth in the future..

The Market for Vaccines

The vaccine market is generally separated into two segments: pediatric and adult. Pediatric is larger but adult vaccine revenues have grown faster….World sales of pediatric vaccines exceeded $12.7B in 2010, increasing 10.1% over 2009 sales of $11.5B on rising sales of combination, varicella and other products. Sales of pediatric vaccines are projected to increase at a compound annual rate of 8.4% from 2010 to 2015.

Most vaccine revenues are earned by five companies: Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Pfizer, and Novartis. They held nearly 80% of the market as of 2010.

THE CDC AND PR

Pharmaceutical companies are not the only ones who engage in public relations to support their point of view. So does the US government and in particular, the CDC. On Tuesday, February 10th, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee held a Hearing on Vaccine-Preventable Diseases at which pediatricians and CDC officials stressed the need for mandatory vaccines. In the powerful article “Top 10 Lies Told During the Vaccine-Preventable Diseases Hearing“ one critic says, “The hearing was one long propaganda session devoted to getting those who are questioning vaccines to stop doing so.”

Glen Nowak is a Professor of Advertising and Public Relations and director of the Grady College’s Center for Health and Risk Communication. He spent six years as director of media relations at CDC and six years as communications director for CDC’s National Immunization Program. While at the CDC, Nowak prepared a power point entitled “Increased Awareness and Uptake of Influenza Immunization” to help increase the rate of flu vaccine. In the power point, Nowak makes several recommendations regarding effective communication and vaccines. They include the following:

  • Associate the disease with severe illness and/or outcomes.
  • Associate the disease with cities and communities that have significant media outlets.
  • Associate the disease with people not generally perceived to get serious complications from it.
  • Use medical experts and public health authorities to publicly state concern and alarm and to urge vaccination.
  • Frame the risk as “very severe,” “more severe than last or past years,” and “deadly.”
  • Publish continued reports from health officials and the media that the disease is causing severe illness and/or affecting lots of people—helping to foster the perception that many people are susceptible to a bad case of the disease.
  • Show visible/tangible examples of the seriousness of the illness (e.g. pictures of children, and people getting vaccinated)
  • Continually reference the importance of vaccination.

Even Disneyland got in the act. As the measles outbreak spread last month, Disneyland executives sent a series of emails to California health officials asking them to emphasize that the theme park was not responsible for the illnesses and was safe to visit.

In one of the email exchanges, Disneyland’s chief medical officer, Dr. Pamela Hymel, forwarded to California’s top epidemiologist, Dr. Gil Chavez, a statement from Disneyland’s public relations arm with “some points,” including: “It is absolutely safe to visit these places, including the Disneyland Resort, if you are vaccinated.”

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE

All this reminds me of a lyric from “Ballad of a Thin Man” by Bob Dylan.

Because something is happening here

But you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mister Jones?

Many have commented on the extreme vitrol and the viscious hyberbole that has accompanied the public discourse about the recent measles epidemic. It is now clear to me that the discourse is more than public. It is bought and paid for.

(read the full article at peggyomara.com)

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