Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The American Constitution on Acid




Bennett Cerf, American writer, is reported to have said:
The world can be divided into two groups: those who divide the world into two groups and those who don't.
I actually can't find the quote, so I'm the one "reporting" it.  I'm sure I read it somewhere.

I was on a Vancouver harbour ferry and made an off the cuff comment to a fellow passenger about the NSA knowing where I was on account of my cell phone.  He was a nice guy and he might have been  American because he said; "Yes, but they're keeping us safe." I'm sure Stephen Harper takes the same view.  It's a comfortable story that fits comfortably into American mythology: guardians on the walls of the Shining City. It's much more comfortable than alternative explanations; for example, that the NSA isn't keeping anybody safe; it's using Americans for its own purposes.

So it seems to me the American constitutional republic can also be divided into two groups: those who agree to be governed by the American Constitution and those who don't. Those who don't seem to be a long list; it includes most of the military and all of the spooks. The thing is, the American Oath of Enlistment, and that of all elected officials including the President, is also in two groups.  The first is to support and defend the American Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic, and the second is to follow orders.

So what happens if the first part of the oath conflicts with the second?  What happens when a person sworn to secrecy in the American military (and its huge cottage industries) believes that following orders is unconstitutional or a crime?  It's a hell of a conflict.  What didn't fly at Nuremberg was saying  "I was following orders." As the Court said of Keitel:
There is nothing in mitigation. Superior orders, even to a soldier, cannot be considered in mitigation where crimes as shocking and extensive have been committed consciously, ruthlessly and without military excuse or justification
I don't understand why the oath to the Constitution isn't a factor in the trial of Bradley Manning.  It's seems stunningly obvious that much of the American government is a domestic menace to the Constitution.  Manning and Snowden refuse to be cowed by its domestic enemies and they're kids.  They're defending the American Constitution with heart, soul and balls,  Not your flag waving, fruit salad traitors and thugs.

Courage is contagious and not a feature of the American national security state.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Thursday, June 20, 2013

The National Security State scorned
























Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d,
Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned.

William Congreve, 1697

So here's another apocryphal quote, attributed without evidence to Gandhi:

First they ignore you
Then they laugh at you
Then they fight you
Then you win 




















Ah yes, the Fruit Salad Guys, jungle fatigues behind their desks.

No really, who are the war criminals?





From George Orwell, "Who Are the War Criminals?"
My Country Right or Left

On the face of it, Mussolini's collapse was a story straight out of Victorian melodrama. At long last Righteousness had triumphed, the wicked man was discomfited, the mills of God were doing their stuff. On second thoughts, however, this moral tale is less simple and less edifying. To begin with, what crime, if any, has Mussolini committed? In power politics there are no crimes, because there are no laws. And, on the other hand, is there any feature in Mussolini's internal régime that could be seriously objected to by any body of people likely to sit in judgement on him? 

For, as the author of this book (The Trial of Mussolini by ‘Cassius’ [Michael Foot]) abundantly shows — and this in fact is the main purpose of the book — there is not one scoundrelism committed by Mussolini between 1922 and 1940 that has not been lauded to the skies by the very people who are now promising to bring him to trial. For the purposes of his allegory ‘Cassius’ imagines Mussolini indicted before a British court, with the Attorney General as prosecutor. The list of charges is an impressive one, and the main facts — from the murder of Matteotti to the invasion of Greece, and from the destruction of the peasants’ co-operatives to the bombing of Addis Ababa — are not denied. Concentration camps, broken treaties, rubber truncheons, castor oil — everything is admitted. The only troublesome question is: How can something that was praiseworthy at the time when you did it — ten years ago, say — suddenly become reprehensible now? 

Mussolini is allowed to call witnesses, both living and dead, and to show by their own printed words that from the very first the responsible leaders of British opinion have encouraged him in everything that he did. For instance, here is Lord Rothermere in 1928:
In his own country (Mussolini) was the antidote to a deadly poison. For the rest of Europe he has been a tonic which has done to all incalculable good. I can claim with sincere satisfaction to have been the first man in a position of public influence to put Mussolini's splendid achievement in its right light. ... He is the greatest figure of our age.
 Here is Winston Churchill in 1927:
If I had been an Italian I am sure I should have been whole-heartedly with you in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism... (Italy) has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.
 Here is Lord Mottistone in 1935:
I did not oppose (the Italian action in Abyssinia). I wanted to dispel the ridiculous illusion that it was a nice thing to sympathize with the underdog. ... I said it was a wicked thing to send arms or connive to send arms to these cruel, brutal Abyssinians and still to deny them to others who are playing an honourable part.
 Here is Mr Duff Cooper in 1938:
Concerning the Abyssinian episode, the less said now the better. When old friends are reconciled after a quarrel, it is always dangerous for them to discuss its original causes.
 Here is Mr Ward Price, of the Daily Mail, in 1932: 
Ignorant and prejudiced people talk of Italian affairs as if that nation were subject to some tyranny which it would willingly throw off. With that rather morbid commiseration for fanatical minorities which is the rule with certain imperfectly informed sections of British public opinion, this country long shut its eyes to the magnificent work that the Fascist régime was doing. I have several times heard Mussolini himself express his gratitude to the Daily Mail as having been the first British newspaper to put his aims fairly before the world.
And so on, and so on. Hoare, Simon, Halifax, Neville Chamberlain, Austen Chamberlain, Hore-Belisha, Amery, Lord Lloyd and various others enter the witness-box, all of them ready to testify that, whether Mussolini was crushing the Italian trade unions, non-intervening in Spain, pouring mustard gas on the Abyssinians, throwing Arabs out of aeroplanes or building up a navy for use against Britain, the British Government and its official spokesmen supported him through thick and thin. We are shown Lady (Austen) Chamberlain shaking hands with Mussolini in 1924, Chamberlain and Halifax banqueting with him and toasting ‘the Emperor of Abyssinia’ in 1939, Lord Lloyd buttering up the Fascist régime in an official pamphlet as late as 1940. 

[random emphasis not in original]

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Smedley Butler Syria Solution



Somehow, the video doesn't play. It's really good.
WELL, it’s a racket, all right.
A few profit -- and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can’t end it by disarmament conferences.  You can’t eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can’t wipe it out by resolutions.  It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.
The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation -- it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted -- to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.
Let the workers in these plants get the same wages -- all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers -- yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders -- everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches! Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.
Why shouldn’t they?
They aren’t running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren’t sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren’t hungry. The soldiers are! Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket -- that and nothing else.
Maybe I am a little too optimistic. Capital still has some say. So capital won’t permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people -- those who do the suffering and still pay the price -- make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.
Major-General Smedley Butler

The first NATO forces involved in a Syria "no fly zone" should be the North Atlantic Council, in person.  If they don't know how to fly a plane, they can enter Syria on foot.  If there's going to be more of this cruise missile shit, Obama should be on the ship firing the missiles.  He should give the orders with his ass on the line, and not skulking in some basement in Washington.

If it comes to the well known "boots on the ground" they should be the entire headquarters staff of the Joint Chiefs and of the NATO Supreme Council of whatever.  They should be the first under fire in any new military adventure against a country that actually has antiaircraft weapons.

Finally, Clapper and Alexander should put themselves in harm's way before any other American.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

NSA creates own faith-based reality...

... outraged not all Americans want to live there...

...because the faith-based community hasn't read the American Constitution, or if they have, they don't know what it means, or if they have read it and know what it means, have decided to subvert it anyway for some crazed vision of the Greater Good.















In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Ron Suskind
New York Times Magazine
October, 2004
Further, it's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.
Ed Snowden
Guardian
June 17


For me, the essence of Ed Snowden and Bradley Manning is here:

Resistance: “Dire non, c’est une affirmation”
GT: For me, resistance consists of saying “no.” But to say no is already an affirmation. It is very positive, the movement of saying no to an assassination, to a crime. Nothing is more creative, more life-affirming than saying no to an assassination, to cruelty, to the death penalty. One cannot say no to something one knows nothing about. You must have put your hands in something you hate to be able to catch it and throw it in the air.
 Germaine Tillion 
Heroine of the French Resistance


Sunday, June 16, 2013

BlackBerry hack?

Glenn Greenwald, Guardian
Is it even true?  Maybe users weren't careful enough about security, giving away their passwords.  Was the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) involved in this?  Is RIM complicit or the victim?

The Five Eyes are starting to seem like five parties to a meaningless cat fight.  Meow.

Friday, June 14, 2013

The Third Circle of Daisies






There are already two daisy chains in the Five Eyes (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand)  that collude to share information and avoid oversight:  military liason and spook liason.

Now a third level has appeared (only it was there all along) - interception of signals.  Not that you can separate all these things, but there are institutions at all three levels, and they all form circles that can't reveal anything in case the revealing upsets somebody else in the circle. Naturally, people outside the circle are by default precluded from knowing what is really being shared, even the members of elected bodies who have responsibility for oversight of these unelected, undemocratic, secret institutions.

So now we have this third daisy chain of institutions whose business is the interception of communications, legally or not. Again we have equivalent institutions in all  Five Eyes.  They are not exactly equal partners to be sure, the NSA being significantly larger than the other four combined and not shy with it. But here they are:

Canada
Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC)

New Zealand
Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)

Australia
Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) 

UK
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)

So now what?

The question is are there any real secrets worth this amount of money and erosion of civil liberties?

I can see why you wouldn't want to publish the location, floor plan, and phone number of the Canadian Ambassdor in Kabul. Or the codes used by the Canadian government to talk to its diplomats abroad, unless they're on strike. This is common sense, I think.


Another question is why Canadian Ambassadors in Beijing are safer than in Kabul.  "You may well ask that, Mattie.  You may well ask that but I couldn't possibly comment."

But what we're talking about here is the existence of huge international networks of secrecy and spookery that have no real purpose in the world other than to perpetuate themselves. As opposed, say, to actually talking to the the Government of Iran, just to pick an example at random, and establishing normal diplomatic relations.  This is also opposed to serial hissy fits by John Baird, melodramatic at the best of times, unless you like irrational shouting. Or recognizing that the King of Saudi Arabia is not our friend, and is in fact a despot who rules absolutely and uneasily on a Wal-Mart throne that his clergy regard with disdain, and in fact who aided and abetted Osama bin Laden.  The clergy, not the King.  We think.  

Also, we have John Baird lecturing Palestinians on the foolishness of their UN bid, which they won decisively and which Canada voted against "on principle" and left Canada in a minority of nine. The principle was never defined. Then he sucked up to some guy in Qatar in the newly established Timmy's which is in direct competition with Kim Kardashian.

What would be fun would be to have all the Five Eyes' data on  the web in searchable form, just like Wikileaks provided very usefully, and nobody died.  Well, the civilians in Iraq who were machine gunned from the air died, but that was an honest mistake and happened before Bradley Manning treacherously revealed it and Wikileaks infamously exposed it.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification
-George Orwell, 1946
Politics and the English Language 



Dirty Wars

Vancouver @ International Village

Ed Snowden

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Fade to black...

The twilight world of Barack Obama

















James Clapper: Obama stands by intelligence chief as criticism mounts
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has now admitted he gave the "least untruthful" answer to a direct question in March about the extent of surveillance on US citizens. The admission sets up a critical test of Clapper's relationship with the congressional committees that oversee him – committees the Obama administration is relying on for its defense of the surveillance efforts.
The Obama team is expressing support for Clapper as criticism of him mounts. "The president has full faith in director Clapper and his leadership of the intelligence community," National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told the Guardian on Wednesday.
At least one member of Congress is calling for Clapper's head. On his Facebook page, Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican, wrote that Clapper "lied under oath" to Congress.
"It now appears clear that the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lied under oath to Congress and the American people," Amash posted on Wednesday morning. "Members of Congress can't make informed decisions on intelligence issues when the head of the intelligence community wilfully makes false statements. Perjury is a serious crime. Mr Clapper should resign immediately."

U.S. concludes Syria’s Assad’s used chemical weapons on opposition, crossing Obama ‘red line’


Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Outrage in the Beltway Brothel


Storyville Madams 1907


















In the steamy atmosphere of political Washington where everyone apparently scratches everyone else's [organ of choice], there is general outrage that some no-nothing 29 year-old geek (otherwise Ed Snowden, the Daniel Ellsberg of his age according to Ellsberg, but what would he know?) has torpedoed the the American National Security State and taken down Beltway conventional wisdom-mongers at the same time.

Suddenly, the towering bosses of the NSA look like idiots, the "regime media" look like corrupt and craven courtiers (because that's what they are), various public relations companies masquerading as "think tanks" look like incestuous Sophists (because that's what they are), and Peter King  looks like a domestic enemy of the American Constitution (because that's what he is).

Even worse (or more wonderful, depending on your point of view) Obama looks like a hooker. Having sold out everything and everybody who got him elected in 2008, he's been caught in flagrante in a way impossible to spin, and he and his equally gormless Attorney-General look like amoral liars, because that's what they are. There's no dressing this up to look pretty. It's lipstick on a pig's ass.

I don't doubt that the last few years have been better with Obama than they would have been with McCain or *shudder* Sarah Palin, hockey mother from hell. On the other hand, psychotics might be better than personality disorders.  Psychotics are honest.

Anyway, no matter the views of military PR people at Bradley Manning's trial, this whole thing is an excellent spectator sport.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Ed Snowden might be safer if he were tried for treason.



There's been a lot of loose talk about Snowden being a traitor.

Here's the American Constitution on Treason, Article III:
Section. 3.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
It's not obvious Snowden has a case to answer for any of that, unless the enemies of the American Constitution are domestic, in which case both Manning and Snowden swore oaths to defend against them.  The American Deep State might itself feel betrayed by this geek of no consequence, who like Bradley Manning chose to defy the Great and the Good by going out on his own and pointing out the obvious, in this casethe treachery conducted by the G&G for the benefit of themselves.

This sort of Greater Good has been observed before and can't be pointed out too often:
"These men, largely private, were functioning on a level different from the foreign policy of the United States, and years later when New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan read through the entire documentary history of the war, that history known as the Pentagon Papers, he would come away with one impression above all, which was that the government of the United States was not what he had thought it was; it was as if there were an inner U.S. government, what he called 'a centralized state, far more powerful than anything else, for whom the enemy is not simply the Communists but everything else, its own press, its own judiciary, its own Congress, foreign and friendly governments - all these are potentially antagonistic. It had survived and perpetuated itself,' Sheehan continued, 'often using the issue of anti-Communism as a weapon against the other branches of government and the press, and finally, it does not function necessarily for the benefit of the Republic but rather for its own ends, its own perpetuation; it has its own codes which are quite different from public codes. Secrecy was a way of protecting itself, not so much from threats by foreign governments but from detection from its own population on charges of its own competence and wisdom.' Each succeeding Administration, Sheehan noted, was careful, once in office, not to expose the weaknesses of its predecessor.  After all, essentially the same people were running the governments, they had continuity to each other, and each succeeding Administration found itself faced with virtually the same enemies. Thus the national security apparatus kept its continuity, and every outgoing President tended to rally to the side of the incumbent President.

"Out of this of course came a willingness to use covert operations; it was a necessity of the times, to match the Communists, and what your own population and your own Congress did not know was not particularly important; it was almost better if they did not know..."

David Halberstam
The Best and The Brightest
[emphasis added]

Judging by the Keystone Kops conduct of Bradley Manning's court-marshal, Ed Snowden might be safer tried for treason than on the lam from fools with hardware.








If you don't like reading Glenn Greenwald...




...you really won't like reading Alexa O'Brien.









Monday, June 10, 2013

Fort Mudge Theatre of the Absurd

Walt Kelly














Thanks to Alexa O'Brien, Kevin Gosztola, Ed Pilkington, Nathan Fuller, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and other gutsy American defenders of civil liberties, we all have a ringside seat at the bizarre court-marshal of Bradley Manning at Fort Meade, a show that promises black comedy for months.

The transcripts and descriptions are hard to believe.  The overwhelming impression left after less than a working week of actual court proceedings is that the prosecution doesn't have a case. At all.  And yet, like a season of Arrested Development, we can look forward to the testimony of some Seal Team Whatever JSOC spook, camouflaged lest his identity interfere with the success of his memoir and movie rights, who will reveal that bin Laden read WikiLeaks.  I predict a large fraction of the world's population will want  to see this.

The case took three years to come to trial, the first year being sadistic incarceration by meathead Marines, and looks like it took three years because nobody could figure out charges that would stick. Light Treason?  The possibility that Manning might have been true to his oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, seems not to have occurred to anyone.  Well, I'm sure it occurred to Manning, and now his lawyers who seem both constitutionally principled and suavely ruthless.

The possibility that this decent and courageous kid - whose courtroom statement (that had to be secretly recorded) will convince anyone with half a brain that he knew exactly what he was doing and why - gets hung out to dry while Scooter Libby, just to pick a random example, gets pardoned, seems so fantastically grotesque that the military might try it anyway.

If that happens the show can only get better.

"A Lesson in Dissent"




"The date was February 22, 1943. Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie, along with their best friend, Christoph Probst, were scheduled to be executed by Nazi officials that afternoon. The prison guards were so impressed with the calm and bravery of the prisoners in the face of impending death that they violated regulations by permitting them to meet together one last time. Hans, a medical student at the University of Munich, was 24. Sophie, a student, was 21. Christoph, a medical student, was 22."

...

"One day in 1942, copies of a leaflet entitled “The White Rose” suddenly appeared at the University of Munich. The leaflet contained an anonymous essay that said that the Nazi system had slowly imprisoned the German people and was now destroying them. The Nazi regime had turned evil. It was time, the essay said, for Germans to rise up and resist the tyranny of their own government. At the bottom of the essay, the following request appeared: “Please make as many copies of this leaflet as you can and distribute them.”

"The leaflet caused a tremendous stir among the student body. It was the first time that internal dissent against the Nazi regime had surfaced in Germany. The essay had been secretly written and distributed by Hans Scholl and his friends."

The White Rose: A Lesson in Dissent
by Jacob G. Hornberger



Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes - crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure - reach the light of day?

If the German people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do not raise a hand, frivolously trusting in a questionable faith in lawful order of history; if they surrender man’s highest principle, that which raises him above all other God’s creatures, his free will; if they abandon the will to take decisive action and turn the wheel of history and thus subject it to their own rational decision; if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road toward turning into a spiritless and cowardly mass - then, yes, they deserve their downfall. Goethe speaks of the Germans as a tragic people, like the Jews and the Greeks, but today it would appear rather that they are a spineless, will-less herd of hangers-on, who now - the marrow sucked out of their bones, robbed of their center of stability - are waiting to be hounded to their destruction.

So it seems - but it is not so. Rather, by means of gradual, treacherous, systematic abuse, the system has put every man into a spiritual prison. Only now, finding himself lying in fetters, has he become aware of his fate. Only a few recognized the threat of ruin, and the reward for their heroic warning was death. We will have more to say about the fate of these persons. If everyone waits until the other man makes a start, the messengers of avenging Nemesis will come steadily closer; then even the last victim will have been cast senselessly into the maw of the insatiable demon. Therefore every individual, conscious of his responsibility as a member of Christian and Western civilization, must defend himself as best he can at this late hour, he must work against the scourges of mankind, against fascism and any similar system of totalitarianism.

Offer passive resistance - resistance - wherever you may be, forestall the spread of this atheistic war machine before it is too late, before the last cities, like Cologne, have been reduced to rubble, and before the nation’s last young man has given his blood on some battlefield for the hubris of a sub-human. Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure!
From Freidrich Schiller’s The Lawgiving of Lycurgus and Solon:

Viewed in relation to its purposes, the law code of Lycurgus is a masterpiece of political science and knowledge of human nature. He desired a powerful, unassailable start, firmly established on its own principles. Political effectiveness and permanence were the goal toward which he strove, and he attained this goal to the full extent possible under possible under the circumstances.

But if one compares the purpose Lycurgus had in view with the purposes of mankind, then a deep abhorrence takes the place of the approbation which we felt at first glance. Anything may be sacrificed to the good of the state except that end for which the State serves as a means. The state is never an end in itself; it is important only as a condition under which the purpose of mankind can be attained, and this purpose is none other than the development of all man’s power, his progress and improvement.

If a state prevents the development of the capacities which reside in man, if it interferes with the progress of the human spirit, then it is reprehensible and injurious, no matter how excellently devised, how perfect in its own way. Its very permanence in that case amounts more to a reproach than to a basis for fame; it be comes a prolonged evil, and the longer it endures, the more harmful it is....

At the price of all moral feeling a political system was set up, and the resources of the state were mobilized to that end. In Sparta there was no conjugal love, no mother love, no filial devotion, no friendship; all men were citizens only, and all virtue was civic virtue.

A law of the state made it the duty of Spartans to be inhumane to their slaves; in these unhappy victims of war humanity itself was insulted and mistreated. In the Spartan code of law the dangerous principle was promulgated that men are to be looked upon as means and not as ends - and the foundation of natural law and of morality were destroyed by that law....

What an admirable sight is afforded, by contrast, by the rough soldier Gaius Marcius in his camp before Rome, when he renounced vengeance and victory because he could not endure to see a mother’s tears!...

The state [of Lycurgus] could endure only under the one condition: that the spirit of the people remained quiescent. Hence it could be maintained only if it failed to achieve the highest, the sole purpose of a state.

From Goethe’s The Awakening of Epimenides, Act II, Scene 4.


SPIRITS:
Though he who has boldly risen from the abyss
Through an iron will and cunning
May conquer half the world,
Yet to the abyss he must return.
Already a terrible fear has seized him;
In vain he will resist!
And all who still stand with him
Must perish in his fall.
HOPE:
Now I find my good men
Are gathered in the night,
To wait in silence, not to sleep.
And the glorious word of liberty
They whisper and murmur,
Till in unaccustomed strangeness,
On the steps of our temple
Once again in delight they cry:
Freedom! Freedom!


Please make as many copies of this leaflet as you can and distribute them.

Friday, June 7, 2013

So PRISM doesn't have anything to do with the Communication Security Establishment Canada, right?

David Parkins, Globe and Mail



















"These men, largely private, were functioning on a level different from the foreign policy of the United States, and years later when New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan read through the entire documentary history of the war, that history known as the Pentagon Papers, he would come away with one impression above all, which was that the government of the United States was not what he had thought it was; it was as if there were an inner U.S. government, what he called 'a centralized state, far more powerful than anything else, for whom the enemy is not simply the Communists but everything else, its own press, its own judiciary, its own Congress, foreign and friendly governments - all these are potentially antagonistic. It had survived and perpetuated itself,' Sheehan continued, 'often using the issue of anti-Communism as a weapon against the other branches of government and the press, and finally, it does not function necessarily for the benefit of the Republic but rather for its own ends, its own perpetuation; it has its own codes which are quite different from public codes. Secrecy was a way of protecting itself, not so much from threats by foreign governments but from detection from its own population on charges of its own competence and wisdom.' Each succeeding Administration, Sheehan noted, was careful, once in office, not to expose the weaknesses of its predecessor.  After all, essentially the same people were running the governments, they had continuity to each other, and each succeeding Administration found itself faced with virtually the same enemies. Thus the national security apparatus kept its continuity, and every outgoing President tended to rally to the side of the incumbent President.

"Out of this of course came a willingness to use covert operations; it was a necessity of the times, to match the Communists, and what your own population and your own Congress did not know was not particularly important; it was almost better if they did not know..."

David Halberstam
The Best and The Brightest

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Toppest Secret at the Wall Street Journal










Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
Naturally, E.P.'s politics remained conservative. But he pitched the note higher. Even the ancestors weren't good enough. He invented a Portuguese Dukedom (some one of our family once worked in Portugal), and he conferred it, by some kind of reversion, on my elder brother Jim, who had gone to Winnipeg to work in E.P.'s office. This enabled him to say to visitors in his big house, after looking at the ancestors, in a half-whisper behind his hand, 'Strange to think that two deaths would make that boy a Portuguese Duke.' But Jim never knew which two Portuguese to kill.
-My Remarkable Uncle
Stephen Leacock

WSJ EDITORIAL/TOPSECRET/NOFORNICATION

WHO IS GLENN GREENWALD? Why is he a traitor?  Obviously he lives in Brazil, but Hemingway lived in Cuba so it can't be because Greenwald speaks Spanish.  Wait a minute....don't they speak Portuguese in Brazil?  There it is, the Portuguese Connection and the drug trade!

With low cunning, Greenwald didn't mention drugs but tried to divert attention from the War on Drugs and Portugal to the War on Terror, or in this case, the War on Anti-Terror.  Is there a War on Portugal?  Is there a Portuguese War on Anti-Terror?  An Anti-Terror War on the Portuguese?  He doesn't want citizens to notice that the free-market pharmaceutical industry is used as a cover for his attack on entrepreneurial American entrepreneurship that makes a zillion dollars from the war industries.  There's nothing "defensive" about cluster bombs so let's call a spade a spade. Greenwald's on the wrong end of the AK-47, the best rifle for killing people invented over 60 years ago in the Soviet Union. Wait! Weren't they godless Communists determined to snuff out democracy and liberty?  It's so complicated.

So what's with Greenwald and his obsessive opposition to government secrecy?  It's impossible for us to fathom but he's gay.  So's Bradley Manning.  There's an important connection there, people.  Gay people don't want to be secret:  they want to live their lives openly and peacefully and free of stigma. That's why we need to subvert the American Constitution to produce a completely safe police state in which nobody has anything to fear if they don't do, say, or even think, anything  bad.  Being gay is probably bad. We'll let you know what "bad" is, but it's what "bad guys" do.  If you don't know what a "bad guy" is, we'll tell you later, after you've done something bad, but don't expect a trial, or habeus corpus, or a jury, or hell, even the American Constitution.  The Homeland is more important and, as Diane Feinstein implied, requires that the Constitution be set aside when the "good guys" think it's necessary.

We'll get back to you.  You'll read it first in the Wall Street Journal unless somebody breaks your door down at dawn.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Now would be a good time to leak the "CAMPAIGN AGAINST TERRORISM DETAINEE TRANSFER LOG"



...all of it [unredacted].


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