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.








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




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







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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.
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"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.
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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
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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.
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Sunday, June 2, 2013

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



...all of it [unredacted].


To enlarge, click image and  then right click to open in new tab.






















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