Judge: 'Sufficient Facts' Exist That U.S. Spied on Islamic Charity Lawyers

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge ruled Monday that "sufficient facts" exist to keep alive a lawsuit brought by two U.S.-based lawyers for a Islamic charity who say they were eavesdropped on without warrants.

The suit involves two American lawyers accidentally given a Top Secret document showing they were eavesdropped on by the government when working for a now-defunct Islamic charity in 2004. Their suit looked all but dead in July when they were initially blocked from using that document to prove they were spied on.

The case tests whether a sitting U.S. president may bypass Congress — in this case whether President Bush abused his power by authorizing his secret spying program in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

"I don't want President Obama to have that power any more than I do President Bush," said Jon Eisenberg, the attorney for the two lawyers who are suing the administration.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said the lawyers' amended lawsuit, even absent the classified document, showed there was enough evidence for the case to continue. The amended lawsuit pieces together snippets of public statements from government investigations into Al-Haramain, the Islamic charity the lawyers were working for and, among other things, a speech about their case by an FBI official.

"The plaintiffs have alleged sufficient facts to withstand the government's motion to dismiss," Walker ruled in a 25-page opinion (.pdf). Walker said the nation's spy laws now demand that he view the classified document and others to decide whether the lawyers were spied on illegally and whether Bush's spy program was unlawful.

The case concerns lawyers Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor, whose case appears now the most likely to lead to a ruling on the legality of Bush's warrantless-wiretapping program. That program started after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and involved various initiatives that peered into Americans' phone and internet usage without court approval — a surveillance program ratified by Congress last year in legislation immunizing participating telecommunication companies.

Walker is also considering a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation challenging whether Congress unconstitutionally granted immunity to telecommunications companies from those lawsuits accusing them of assisting the Bush administration to secretly spy on Americans without warrants.

Walker's decision Monday came six months after he ruled that he could look at the Top Secret document in private to see if the surveillance was illegal, but only if the lawyers could first find independent evidence they were allegedly spied on in violation of how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was written at the time.

On Monday, Walker ruled: "To be more specific, the court will review the sealed document ex parte and in camera. The court will then issue an order regarding whether plaintiffs may proceed — that is, whether the sealed document establishes that plaintiffs were subject to electronic surveillance not authorized by FISA."

During oral arguments before Walker last month, Justice Department special counsel Anthony Coppolino said the lawyers for the Saudi-based Al-Haramain charity — designated a terror group by the United States — did not have enough evidence to make a case. "This is speculation, this is conjecture, this is not evidence," he said.

The government has never declared whether it had proper court authorization to eavesdrop on the lawyers' U.S.-based telephone conversations with Saudi charity officials.

See Also:

• NSA-Spied-On Lawyers Get Day in Court and New Yorker Profile ...
• Spied-On Lawyers May Get Second Chance in NSA Lawsuit
• NSA Judge: 'I feel like I'm in Alice in Wonderland'
• U.S. 9th Circuit Deals Setback to NSA Surveillance Victim
• Analysis: Some Secret Documents Are Too Secret Even for Critical ...
• House Panel to Ask for NSA Spying Probe
• Judge: President's 'State Secrets' Privilege Can't Shield ...
• Secret Spying Showdown Hits Federal Appeals Court Wednesday ...
• Analysis: Spy Ruling Portends Hurdles for AT&T Eavesdropping Case ...

Judge Reinstates Islamic Group's Wiretapping Suit

SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge on Monday reinstated an Islamic charity's lawsuit challenging a Bush administration surveillance program.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said there is enough primary evidence showing the charity might have been the target of government-tapped telephone calls that were done without court approval under the administration's so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program.

The U.S. lists the Saudi Arabia-based charity as a terrorist organization. The U.S. branch was based in Ashland, Ore.

The judge had tossed out the case in July but reversed himself when lawyers for the U.S. branch of the now-defunct Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation produced transcripts of congressional testimony and public speeches of high-ranking government officials discussing the surveillance program.

Government lawyers in Washington couldn't be reached for comment late Monday.

In court papers, the government argues that national security interests bar Al-Haramain's lawsuit, and authorities have refused to confirm or deny any eavesdropping. It also argued that allowing such a lawsuit would open a floodgate of litigation by people merely suspecting they were targets.

The lawsuit accuses the government of listening in to telephone calls in early 2004 between a charity officer living in Saudi Arabia and two of his Washington lawyers.

The charity's officer, Soliman al-Buthi, claims he uncovered the alleged wiretapping when a Treasury Department official accidentally turned over a top secret call log to Al Haramain's lawyers.

Another federal judge ordered the lawyers to return the document to the government, and Walker later ruled that they couldn't use it to file their initial lawsuit because the Justice Department argued such disclosure would harm national security.

But now that the charity has shown _ at least preliminarily _ that it might have been subject to warrantless wiretapping through government officials' public disclosures, the top secret document is now back in play in the lawsuit.

Walker said he would read the document in private and determine whether it conclusively proves that the charity was the subject of eavesdropping done with a warrant.

"I feel reasonably confident that a simple glance at that document would tell anyone that our clients were surveilled," said Jon Eisenberg, Al-Haramain's lead attorney.

The judge ordered the government to provide top security clearance to three of the charity's lawyers, including Oakland-based Eisenberg.

In 2007, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also barred the foundation lawyers from using the call log as evidence after the Bush administration argued such a move would harm national security interests.

But the appeals court sent the case back to Walker to determine whether the administration's claim to state secrets privilege is trumped by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The act, known as FISA, requires government investigators to obtain a warrant from a secret court in Washington to conduct electronic eavesdropping of suspected terrorists inside the country.

Walker ruled that FISA does have precedence over the state secrets privilege and said the lawsuit can proceed.

© 2009 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Wednesday, 31 December 2008

by Rady Ananda

The American Prison Gulag, already one-half Black, is becoming increasingly co-ed. "The US jailed one in 746 women in 2006, up from one in 100,000 back in 1925. Compared to other nations, the female portion of the prison population is highest in the US - at 9%." Melissa Mummert's film, Perversion of Justice, tells the "story of Hamedah Hasan and her three children" to "exemplify the need to repeal the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, and the mandatory minimum laws."

Perversion of Justice: Gulag America

by Rady Ananda

This article was originally posted at OpEdNews.

In 1925, the US jailed 1 in 100,000 women. In 2006, it jailed 1 in 746. The 1984 Sentencing Reform Act and mandatory minimum sentence laws need to be repealed for the protection of families, communities and society as a whole. The film, Perversion of Justice, highlights the experiences of one family victimized by these laws.

Perversion of Justice

A film by the Reverend Melissa Mummert

Border Walk Productions

Changemaker Award at the 2008 Media That Matters Festival

Run time: 30 minutes Website: www.PerversionOfJustice.com

In Perversion of Justice, filmmaker Melissa Mummert potently calls for prison sentencing reform. She highlights the victimization of one family caused by extreme penalties imposed for peripheral support of small time drug dealers. Examining the social costs, Mummert exposes the rank injustice and provides action links for battling outrageous terms meted for nonviolent crimes.

The story of Hamedah Hasan and her three children exemplify the need to repeal the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, and the mandatory minimum laws. Legal commentators bolster the argument, including the trial judge. The film asserts that the public cost for warehousing nonviolent prisoners is $30,000 a year. A review of legal documents reveals that over a four-year period, the drug selling operation earned $180,000. Divided among the three defendants, that's $15,000 a year in earnings. Society deserves a more judicially and fiscally sane policy in dealing with drug offenders.

Perversion of Justice is perfectly adapted for showing at faith-based and social justice meetings, allowing time for Q&A within a one-hour format. This 8-minute teaser should provoke interest in the 30-minute version that won the Changemaker Award at the 2008 Media That Matters Festival:

No stranger to the US penal system, Mummert watched her father's peace advocacy land him a six-month prison stay. In 1992, he organized a protest of the missile silo sites in Missouri. His crime: planting a white pansy on Air Force soil. With her father's activist background, it is not surprising that Mummert chose to intern at a prison while a student at Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley.

While interning as a prison chaplain, Mummert learned of harsh sentences imposed on drug users and small time dealers, and began to research the topic. She pored through several case studies provided by Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Hamedah made the best case for public review: she had no prior run-ins with the law, her actions only peripherally supported small time drug deals, and she is a single parent who was pregnant at the time of sentencing. No better case for leniency could be made.

Mass Incarceration

But compassion is not a hallmark of the US justice system, where female incarceration rates jumped 64% from 1995 to 2006. For a longer view showing a cultural shift toward imprisonment, the US jailed one in 746 women in 2006, up from one in 100,000 back in 1925. Compared to other nations, the female portion of the prison population is highest in the US - at 9%. In 2006, two-thirds of incarcerated women in the US were mothers; and three-fourths had symptoms or a clinical diagnosis of mental illness, and/or received treatment from a mental health professional in 2005. (WAP)

Worse, Hamedah Hasan is black in a nation that universally convicts people of color at rates far above those for whites, and for longer terms. In 2006, the incarceration rate per 100,000 for whites was 409, and 2,468 for blacks. That's an imprisonment rate of nearly 3 in 100 for blacks, or six times higher than for whites. The film mentions Hasan's "Do Not Snitch" value; given these statistics, that value better serves human rights than cooperating with authorities.

Even the form of cocaine most readily available to poor blacks - crack cocaine - receives far harsher sentences than does the powdered form. Hamedah Hasan's case is featured in the most recent issue of Crack the Disparity, which also reports that the Obama-Biden Transition Team "has made elimination of the federal sentencing disparity for crack cocaine offense a key goal on its Agenda for Change" under its Civil Rights agenda.

"In 2006, two-thirds of incarcerated women in the US were mothers."

The Sentencing Project reports that "The rapid growth of women's incarceration - at nearly double the rate for men over the past two decades - is disproportionately due to the war on drugs." The federal Bureau of Prisons generally agrees: "As a result of Federal law enforcement and new legislation that dramatically altered sentencing in the Federal criminal justice system, the 1980s brought a significant increase in the number of Federal inmates. In fact, most of the Bureau's growth from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s was the result of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 (which established determinate sentencing, abolished parole, and reduced good time) and mandatory minimum sentences enacted in 1986, 1988, and 1990." This chart graphically shows the marked increase for all inmates (prison and jails) for the past 100 years:

Sources: Justice Policy Institute and PEW Center on the States

Featured in Perversion of Justice, the trial judge in Hamedah's case is no stranger to balking at sentencing guidelines. Richard George Kopf was appointed to the federal bench by George the Elder in 1992. Early this year, he published his Top 10 List of sentencing debacles. Here's one:

"9. You don't need experience in actually sentencing people in order to totally screw up the law of sentencing. It is telling and painfully obvious that not a single Justice ever had to look a federal defendant in the eye while not knowing what law to apply."

Under the federal guidelines, Judge Kopf was required to sentence Hamedah to two life sentences, two 40-year sentences, two 20-year sentences and two more sentences at 5 and 4 years each. He felt awful. "This is the most unfair perversion of justice that I can think of." Pointing out the difference between small time and kingpin drug dealers, he clarifies, "The problem is that we begin to treat the Hamedah Hasans of the world like the Noriegas of the world."

Under new guidelines, he was able to reduce her sentence to 27 years. She appealed for further reduction and Kopf modified her sentence to 12 years. But, zealous prosecutors fought and won a reversal of the 12-year sentence. Now serving in a medium security prison at Victorville (California), Hasan is due to be released in 2016.

A Global Look at Prisons

At 5% of the world's population, the US imprisons a fourth of the 10 million reported prisoners globally. Of 218 nations surveyed by the International Centre for Prison Studies (ICPS), the US ranks No. 1, far and away jailing more of its citizens than China, which ranks 118; Burma-Myanmar, at 117; and Zimbabwe, at 104. The Pew Center on the States shocked the nation early this year with its widely disseminated and devastating report, 1 in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008. Not only does the US have the highest incarceration rate in the world, but also the highest number of all prisoners worldwide.

Prison conditions vary widely across nations. The ICPS summarized data from 2003 through 2006 in a report released this year, International Profile of Women's Prisons. In this detailed study of twenty countries, Germany rises as an advocate of one of the most proactive prison systems in the world. It models what an enlightened view of incarceration means:

"The object of imprisonment is to enable prisoners to lead a life of social responsibility without committing criminal offences. This means that life in penal institutions shall be approximated as far as possible to general living conditions outside [and] that detrimental effects of imprisonment shall be counteracted."

"In separating children from their mothers, the US penal system harms families."

Germany's rehabilitation policy goal is backed up by conditions that support family life in their "open" prisons where children up to age six live with their mothers:

"Mothers live with their children in self contained flats which consist of a kitchen, bathroom, one bedroom and a living room. They do not have the appearance of cells but look more like well-equipped family houses. The building also does not look like a prison but more like a student flat from the outside.

"There are no bars at the windows and every flat has its own balcony. Also, mothers can go outside. According to a prison guard, the prison is very open and there are no fences. Staff do not wear uniforms because they do not want to create distance between themselves and the children."

In stark contrast, the US federal prison system does not allow mothers to keep their newborns. Hamedah gave birth to her third daughter while in federal prison. State prisons also generally do not allow mothers to keep their newborns, but some do for up to three months, and in some venues up to 18 months. In separating children from their mothers, the US penal system harms families, a point stressed in Perversion of Justice.

Like the Wall Street Bailout: Taxpayer Costs and Private Profits

The US penal system has grown into a massive prison industrial complex (PIC) in the past three decades. Over 350 prisons have been built since 1980. In addition to the big firms running private prisons (GEO Group, Corrections Corporation of America, Management and Training Corporation, Cornell Companies, Inc., etc.), a host of industries feed off incarceration. One blogger posted over 100 companies that do business with prisons. In commenting last year on the growth of the U.S. prison industry, Neal Peirce wrote:

"[A]ny governor faces formidable political obstacles trying to pare back America's vast prison-industrial complex. In California, it's the Correctional Peace Officers Association, an astounding 31,000 members strong.... It has more than 2,000 members earning over $100,000 a year; its contract-guaranteed pension benefits are today superior to those of the state university system.... The three-strikes law is its full-employment act."

The PIC also relies on mass media to promote its growth and expansion. Violent crime has steadily declined over the past 20 years. Yet, cable and network television provide a steady stream of crime and punishment shows, from fiction to infomercials that celebrate the prison industrial complex and a gulag culture. Earlier this month, I received a viral email exemplifying PIC's propaganda, showing several pictures of a modern, shiny new prison and a slate of "facts" comparing prison life to work life. It ends with a wish for imprisonment.

The US prison system is privatized in more than half the states and at the federal level in 14 of its 194 facilities, using cheap prison labor to create products that are sold domestically and overseas. In this comprehensive 1998 article, Eric Schlosser shows how the PIC creates billions of dollars in profits for private corporations while underwriting the costs with public funds, hiring at non-union wages, and avoiding bureaucratic red tape.

Mummert's film only touches on the social impacts of harsh drug sentencing policies, but the PIC is wide open for reform, if not outright abolishment. Social scientists argue that prisons create far more problems for society than other methods of dealing with crime. Many advocate for full voting rights, ending felon disenfranchisement. Some advocate the abolition of prisons, given abuse of prisoners and political corruption that inevitably occur when humans cage humans.

About Media That Matters

If you feel inspired to take action in your community, Media That Matters sells DVD collections for showing films, as well as providing nuts and bolts advice on how to organize screenings. They'll even help publicize your event. Launched in 2001 by Arts Engine and one of the oldest and largest online film festivals, the MTM Film Festival is an annual global showcase of short films with "insight, humor and creativity that make audiences think, laugh and take action on today's most pressing social issues." Each short screened in the festival is accompanied by "Take Action Links," interactive tools that empower audiences to become activists at the click of a button.

"Media That Matters stands apart from other film festivals in that it really engages audiences and makes them feel part of something bigger, whether you're participating at home or at a screening," said Katy Chevigny, co-founder and executive director of Arts Engine. "These are films that not only entertain, but also inspire and motivate."

The eighth annual Media That Matters Film Festival launched on May 28th and is currently touring the world. Shorts for a dozen films can be viewed online, covering topics ranging from post-Katrina New Orleans to Argentina workers, to African Hip-Hop, to the disappearance of honey bees, to e-waste, and more.

Buy and show Perversion of Justice to support Mummert's work, and visit her website to support Hamedah Hasan's clemency appeal.

Check out these annotated Prison Resources.

Rady Ananda can be contacted at drum4peace@gmail.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Ananda offers special thanks to Roy Walmsley of the International Centre for Prison Studies for his help in clarifying calculation methodology of incarcerated foreigners, and for his incredible work in this field.

The US Army Document That Proves the US is the World’s Number One Sponsor of World Terrorism

In a ‘manual’ which is officially to be released only to ’students from foreign countries on a case-by-case basis only’, the US Army outlines a program of what it now calls ‘irregular warfare’, in fact US state sponsored terrorism, insurgency, and PSYOPS.

1-21. Waging protracted IW depends on building global capability and capacity. IW will not be won by the United States alone but rather through combined efforts with multinational partners. Combined IW [Irregular Warfare, euphemism for TERRORISM] will require the joint force to establish a long-term sustained presence in numerous countries to build partner capability and capacity. This capability and capacity extends U.S. operational reach, multiplies forces available, and provides increased options for defeating adversaries. The constituent activities of IW are:

• Insurgency.
• COIN.
• UW.
• Terrorism
• CT.
• FID.
• Stability, security, transition, and reconstruction (SSTR) operations.
• Strategic communication (SC).
• PSYOP.
• Civil-military operations (CMO).
• Information operations (IO).
• Intelligence and counterintelligence (CI) activities.
• Transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms dealing, and illegal financial transactions that support or sustain IW.
• Law enforcement activities focused on countering irregular adversaries.

1-22. The above list of operations and activities can be conducted within IW; … –Headquarters, Department of the Army, Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare, September 2008[PDF]

Ignoring 1) the mountainous body of evidence that US policy and the CIA, specifically, is the root-cause of the vast majority of the what is commonly called ‘world terrorism’; and 2) the equally impressive body of hard evidence that 911 was an inside job, the Army cites 911 as the pretext by which the US should embark above the policy as outlined above.[See: Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes ] 1-18. The 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States highlighted the increased danger of warfare conducted by other-than-state enemies. Recognizing that such irregular threats by nonstate actors would be a likely and even dominant pattern throughout the 21st century, national policy makers dictated that planners must analyze and prepare for such irregular threats. It was clear that previous assumptions about the terms “conventional,” “traditional,” or “regular” warfare, and reliance solely on a “regular” or “conventional warfare” doctrine were inadequate. IW was a significant theme in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report. In April 2006, the Pentagon drafted the execution roadmap for IW as a means of combating this growing threat from actions beyond conventional state-to-state military conflict. –Headquarters, Department of the Army, Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare, September 2008 [PDF]

Elsewhere, the document cites the threat posed to the US by “WMD—such as nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. But I have yet to find a single word, phrase, sentence or paragraph in which the manual mentioned the threat posed the rest of the world by some forty years or more of US meddling, threats, covert operations, US sponsored assassinations, and overt threats of bombing and/or war and invasion. Instead, we get platitudes that are made absolutely meaningless by the remainder of this arrogant, imperialistic document.

A-64. Democracy and the protection of fundamental liberties were the basis for the creation of the United States more than 200 years ago. Since then, a central goal of U.S. foreign policy has been to promote respect for democracy and human rights throughout the world. The DOS— .. Promotes democracy as a way to achieve security, stability, and prosperity for the entire world. .. Helps establish and assist newly formed democracies. op cit

It is odd that as the US is said to be ‘defending’ Democracy, it is subverting it. It is said that the United States must be concerned about the possibility that terrorists may acquire WMD, ignoring the fact that the US leads the world in the manufacture, sale and distribution of WMD. Let’s put this another way: the US military spending is greater than that spent by the rest of the world’s nations combined. If terrorists should ever obtain WMD, the chances are good that they will get them from the US, perhaps with monies raised selling cocaine to the one of the largest drug dealers on the planet Earth: the CIA!

During the 40s and 50s, most of the public was unaware of what the CIA was doing. Those who knew thought they were fighting the good fight against communism, like James Bond. However, they could not keep their actions secret forever, and by the 60s and 70s, Americans began learning about the agency’s crimes and atrocities. (3) It turns out the CIA has:

• Corrupted democratic elections in Greece, Italy and dozens of other nations;
• Been involved to varying degrees in at least 35 assassination plots against foreign heads of state or prominent political leaders. Successful assassinations include democratically elected leaders like Salvador Allende (Chile) and Patrice Lumumba (Belgian Congo); also CIA-created dictators like Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic) and Ngo Dinh Diem (South Vietnam); and popular political leaders like Che Guevara. Unsuccessful attempts range from Fidel Castro to Charles De Gaulle.
• Helped launch military coups that toppled democratic governments, replacing them with brutal dictatorships or juntas. The list of overthrown democratic leaders includes Mossadegh (Iran, 1953), Arbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Velasco and Arosemena (Ecuador, 1961, 1963), Bosch (Dominican Republic, 1963), Goulart (Brazil, 1964), Sukarno (Indonesia, 1965), Papandreou (Greece, 1965-67), Allende (Chile, 1973), and dozens of others.
• Undermined the governments of Australia, Guyana, Cambodia, Jamaica and more;
• Supported murderous dictators like General Pinochet (Chile), the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos (Phillipines), “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier (Haiti), General Noriega (Panama), Mobutu Sese Seko (Ziare), the “reign of the colonels” (Greece), and more;
• Created, trained and supported death squads and secret police forces that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, leftists and political opponents, in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Angola and others;
• Helped run the “School of the Americas” at Fort Benning, Georgia, which trains Latin American military officers how to overthrow democratic governments. Subjects include the use of torture, interrogation and murder;
• Used Michigan State “professors” to train Diem’s secret police in torture;
• Conducted economic sabotage, including ruining crops, disrupting industry, sinking ships and creating food shortages;
• Paved the way for the massacre of 200,000 in East Timor, 500,000 in Indonesia and one to two million in Cambodia;
• Launched secret or illegal military actions or wars in Nicaragua, Angola, Cuba, Laos and Indochina;
• Planted false stories in the local media;
• Framed political opponents for crimes, atrocities, political statements and embarrassments that they did not commit;
• Spied on thousands of American citizens, in defiance of Congressional law;
• Smuggled Nazi war criminals and weapon scientists into the U.S., unpunished, for their use in the Cold War;
• Created organizations like the World Anti-Communist League, which became filled with ex-Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, Italian terrorists, Japanese fascists, racist Afrikaaners, Latin American death squad leaders, CIA agents and other extreme right-wing militants;
• Conducted Operation MK-ULTRA, a mind-control experiment that gave LSD and other drugs to Americans against their will or without their knowledge, causing some to commit suicide;
• Penetrated and disrupted student antiwar organizations;
• Kept friendly and extensive working relations with the Mafia;
• Actively traded in drugs around the world since the 1950s to fund its operations. The Contra/crack scandal is only the tip of the iceberg –- other notorious examples include Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and Noreiga’s Panama.
• Had their fingerprints all over the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X. Even if the CIA is not responsible for these killings, the sheer amount of CIA involvement in these cases demands answers; [editor's note, see: Evidence That the CIA Murdered RFK]
• And then routinely lied to Congress about all of the above.

The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (4) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an “American Holocaust.” –Steve Kangas: The Origins of the Overclass

The US Army document, cited above, is an arrogant, imperialistic and ill-considered response to a growing ‘threat’ –but a threat that is posed only to US monopolists and death merchants, i.e., the Military/Industrial Complex, a fancy name for Murder, Inc. The US has, in fact, squandered the limitless goodwill that had been extended our nation at the end of World War II. The US has failed to make positive use of the world support for allied efforts to codify war crimes, to hold Nazi War Criminals responsibility for heinous crimes. But now –we have a recent US military document that the US Army would prefer to keep secret no doubt because it reveals to the world that those principles espoused at Nuremberg are either no longer operative or they were a fraud, the US didn’t really mean it. Or perhaps they forgot to tell the world that the laws applied to everyone but themselves. The Army has now revealed to the world that no nation is safe from US terrorism, US attack, US subversion of indigenous cultures and governments, US bullying or the US use of WMD against them. That is because the US believes itself to be a world-wide empire, in fact, a single nation that presumes to rule the world.

The well-informed countries –western Europe –know perfectly well what our game is. General de Gaulle took France out of NATO because he suspected that we were in the empire–building business, and he didn’t want to go along with it yet, simultaneously, France remained an ally in case there was a major war with the Soviets. I don’t think we should take too seriously those eastern European countries. In due course, they will wake up, as Turkey did, that we are dangerous. –Gore Vidal, The Erosion of the American Dream

I have repeatedly stated that the US regime of George W. Bush was not legitimate. How can I make it any clearer? “Illegitimate” means that the regime of George W. Bush was no more legitimate than the crooked regimes of tin horn dictators in banana republics. The Bush regime differed little in terms of competence or statesmanship. Now, in a cynical document that the US Army had never intended be disseminated publicly, we have confirmation that the position of the US vis a vis the rest of the world is based not upon Democracy or legitimacy. It is, rather based entirely upon force, aggression and US terrorism. Addendum:

Is the United States going to put dictatorship into effect under the guise of the anti-terrorist struggle? What may trigger another major transformation in 2009? The answer is obvious: another 9/11 in the USA.

Terrible and bloody events are in store for the world in the beginning of 2009. Most likely, the world will witness a reality show with a nuclear blast, which will be used as a reason for the US administration to change the world order again and leave the new Great Depression behind. There is every reason to believe that the Russian Federation may suffer as a result of this possible initiative too.

Joe Biden made a sensational statement on October 19, 2008. He said that Barack Obama would have to undergo an ordeal during the first six months of his stay in the White House. It will be the time of a very serious international crisis, when Obama would have to make tough and possibly unpopular decisions both in home and foreign politics.

Biden said that there were four or five scenarios for the development of the international crisis. Afghanistan, North Korea or the Russian Federation may become the source of one of them.

When Obama learned of Biden’s speech, he tried to explain everything with rhetorical exaggerations. However, Biden’s remarks gave food for thought, taking into consideration the fact that former secretary of state Madeleine Albright described his remarks as statement of fact. –USA needs nuclear explosion to turn the world into dictatorship

Addendum:

A comment amond several found on Buzzflash re this article:

But we already knew the US under sociopathic Bush is a terrorist nation..Bush,Rumsfeld,Rice,Hannity,Limbaugh,Cheney,Bolton,et al are all implicators in this world terrorism by threatening Iraq and Iran.It is certainly a terror to the Iraqui/Iranian people by the US.

My response is that it will be argued in ‘defense’ of the GOP that Bush, Rice et al were just an ‘aberration’. But the SIGNIFICANCE of the Army document is that they were NOT an aberration. It’s the MIC S.O.P.

As I have said numerous times: the Bush administration is illegitimate. Secondly, the MIC is a polite euphemism for a Murder Inc on an international, industrial scale. Death and destruction are the US’s chief exports. Our currency is all but worthless and, like Rome when it invaded Dacia for its gold, the US invades other nations for its resources, primarily oil. At last, The US resembles Rome in that Rome subverted ‘fair wages’ with ’slavery’, in effect, putting working people out of work for good! It became a permanent ‘underclass’. The US has accomplished the same thing by enriching ONLY the uppper one percent of the population –a disparity of both wealth and income that clearly parallels that of Rome in its last throes. Additional resources:

• Steve Kangas: The Origins of the Overclass
• Gore Vidal: It’s Time to Take Action Against Our Wars on the Rest of the World
• Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes
• The five pillars of the U.S. military-industrial complex
• Why the CIA is the World’s Number One Terrorist Organization

Source: http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/december2008/301208Document.htm

YouTube, Twitter: Weapons in Israel's Info War

Days after sending aircraft to strike Hamas militants in Gaza, the Israeli government is launching a campaign to dominate the blogosphere.

Among other things, the Israeli military has started its own YouTube channel to distribute footage of precision airstrikes. And as I type, the Israeli consulate in New York is hosting a press conference on microblogging site Twitter. It's pretty interesting to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reduced to tweets of 140 characters or less ("We hav 2 prtct R ctzens 2, only way fwd through neogtiations, & left Gaza in 05. y Hamas launch missiles not peace?"; "we're not at war with the PAL people. we're at war with a group declared by the EU& US a terrorist org").

The Jerusalem Post quotes Maj. Avital Leibovich, the head of the Israeli Defense Forces' foreign press branch on the digital media campaign. "The blogosphere and new media are another war zone," she says. "We have to be relevant there."

It appears, however, that some of the YouTube posts have already been scrubbed. A note on the page of the pro-Israel YouTube channel reads: "We are saddened that YouTube has taken down some of our exclusive footage showing the IDF's operational success in operation Cast Lead against Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip. ... It is also worth noting that one of the videos removed had the highest number of hits (over 10,000) at the time of its removal."

[PHOTO: Reuters via Daylife.com]

ALSO:

• Israeli Jets Drop 'Small Smart Bomb' in Gaza Strikes
• Israel Targets 'Terror Tunnels' (and Viagra Highway)
• Paper: Gaza Campaign Planned Months in Advance
• Israel Unleashes Relatiatory Air Armada
• Hamas Fighters 'Using Hezbollah as a Model'

US veto blocks UN anti-Israel resolution

The UN Security Council has been unable to force an end to Israeli attacks against Gaza due to the intervention of the United States. Washington once again used its veto powers on Sunday to block a resolution calling for an end to the massive ongoing Israeli attacks against the Gaza Strip. The council has only been able to issue a 'non-binding' statement that calls on Israel to voluntarily bring all its military activities in the besieged region to an immediate end. The statement comes as Israel has begun a fresh wave of air strikes on Gaza on Sunday, killing at least six people. At least 230 people were killed and 800 wounded in similar attacks on Saturday. The number of Palestinians deaths has so far risen to 271. The council called on the parties to address the humanitarian crisis in the territory but has not criticized the Israeli air attacks. Croatian UN Ambassador Neven Jurica read out the non-binding statement on behalf of the 15-member body that "called for an immediate halt to all violence" and on the parties "to stop immediately all military activities." "The members of the Security Council expressed serious concern at the escalation of the situation in Gaza," he said, as the president of the council. The council also requested the opening of border crossings into Gaza to address the serious humanitarian and economic needs in Gaza and to ensure medical treatment and a continuous supply of food and fuel. US representative to the UNSC, Zalmay Khalilzad, defended the Israeli move, saying Tel Aviv has the right to self-defense. "I regret the loss of any of all innocent life," he said, adding that Hamas rockets precipitated this situation. Palestinian fighters in the Gaza Strip say they fire rockets into Israel in retaliation for the daily Israeli attacks against them. Unlike the state-of-the-art Israeli weapons and ammunition, the home-made Qassam rockets rarely cause casualties. The US, a staunch ally to Israel, has so far vetoed over 40 anti-Israeli resolutions sought by the council since 1972. Since 2004, Washington has prevented the adoption of four other resolutions that called for Tel Aviv to halt its operations in the Gaza Strip. DB/AA/DT

Related News Israel launches new wave of Gaza attacks Egypt opens Rafah crossing to Gazans The Palestinian story: Remember us

America’s Immigration ‘Concentration Camps’ — A Growing ‘Prison-Industrial Complex’

The prison-industrial complex refers to interest groups that represent organizations that do business in correctional facilities, such as prison guard unions, construction companies, and surveillance technology vendors, and to the belief that these actors may be more concerned with making profits than actually rehabilitating criminals or reducing crime rates….[Read More]

City of Immigrants Fills Jail Cells With Its Own

Writes: NINA BERNSTEIN — | CLICK FOR PICTURES | THE “IMMIGRANT GOLD RUSH” - THE PROFIT MOTIVE BEHIND IMMIGRANT DETENTION [PDF Document] |

CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.

Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse.

After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt — only blocks from home, but in a separate world.

In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime — people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest.

If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion.

Wyatt offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work.

Last spring, The New York Times set out to examine this small city of 19,000 and its big detention center as a microcosm of the nation’s new relationship with immigration detention, which is now sweeping up not just recent border-jumpers and convicted felons but foreign-born residents with strong ties to places like Central Falls. Wyatt, nationally accredited, clean and modern, seemed like one of the better jails in the system, a patchwork of county lockups, private prisons and federal detention centers where government investigations and the news media have recently documented substandard, sometimes lethal, conditions.

But last summer, a detainee died in Wyatt’s custody. Immigration authorities investigating the death removed all immigration detainees this month — along with the $101.76 a day the federal government paid the jail for each one. In Central Falls, where many families have members without papers, a state campaign against illegal immigrants spread fear that also took a toll: People went into hiding and businesses lost Latino customers in droves. Slowly, the city awoke to its role in the detention system, and to the pitfalls of the bargain it had struck.

In a sinking economy, immigration detention is a rare growth industry. Congress has doubled annual spending on it in the last four years, to $2.4 billion approved in October as part of $5.9 billion allotted for immigration enforcement through next September — even more than the Bush administration had requested.

Seeking a slice of that bounty, communities like Farmville, Va., and Pahrump, Nev., are signing up with developers of new detention centers. Jails from New England to New Mexico have already made the crackdown pay off — for the private companies that dominate the industry, for some investors and, at least in theory, for places like Central Falls, a city so strapped that the state pays for its schools.

Here, a specially created municipal corporation built the jail in the early 1990s to hold federal inmates, and last year more than doubled its size. As the City Council president, William Benson Jr., put it, “The more inmates they have, the more money we get.”

Yet in a community whose 1.3 square miles are said to be too small for secrets — “If you sneeze on Washington Street, someone on Pine Street says, ‘Gesundheit,’ ” Mr. Benson said — city officials, overwhelmingly non-Latino, seemed uninformed about who those inmates were. “Nobody knows exactly who’s down there,” he said. “I hear some are Arab terrorists.”

The mystery is in some ways understandable. Though immigration detainees made up one-third of the daily population and a majority of the 4,200 men and women who moved through Wyatt’s 722 beds in a year, most were from other states, and those from Rhode Island did not remain long: Immigration and Customs Enforcement typically transferred them within a week.

Some were legal immigrants who had served time for serious crimes. But increasingly they were the kind of people who in the past would not have been arrested — people without papers, similar to some of the people who play, cheer and live in Wyatt’s shadow. Sometimes the same people.

Anthony Ventetuolo Jr., one of Wyatt’s developers and now the jail’s chief executive, said that who the inmates were made no difference to the jail, which was run like a business, under strict standards. “I’m not interested in getting involved in the politics of immigration,” he said. “All we do is detain people that our clients tell us to detain.”

Swallowed by the System

Over 10 years, Maynor Cante, 26, hardly glanced at the jail he passed as he hurried between home, two jobs and St. Matthew’s Church, where he led a prayer group. ……CONTINUED HERE

| READ FULL ARTICLE HERE |

T-shirt sparks ACLU to act

Wednesday, December 17, 2008 2:22 PM PST

Mariah Jimenez

Mariah Jimenez is standing up for her rights. She is proud of her actions.

The Big Bear High School sophomore class president and the ACLU joined forces after Jimenez was asked to change her shirt on Nov. 3. The shirt was printed with “Prop 8 Equals Hate.” On Nov. 4, California voters approved Proposition 8, which banned same sex marriages.

The American Civil Liberties Union says Jimenez must be allowed to wear the shirt because its message is protected under state and federal constitutions regarding free speech.

Jimenez wore the shirt all day without incident. During her sixth-period class, her teacher, Sue Reynolds, told her the shirt was divisive and drew a line down the school, Jimenez told The Grizzly. The sophomore was sent to the principal's office and given a choice-change her shirt or spend the rest of the day in his office. Jimenez chose to change her shirt.

Jimenez wrote a letter to the editor of The Grizzly that afternoon. In the letter she wrote, “While I am passionate about this cause, I was a little apprehensive of wearing my shirt for fear of being treated poorly by fellow students. What I encountered was verbal harassment, students replying with ‘Vote yes on 8.' But that was not what concerned me most.”

Jimenez's letter ended with, “I feel strongly about my beliefs and think that it is atrocious that my First Amendment rights are being compromised. We all need to embrace tolerance a little more, especially when trying to influence the youth of America, even if we don't agree with others' opinions.”

The ACLU got involved when Jimenez's mother contacted the organization, and the attorneys agreed to take the case. Carole Ferraud, superintendent of Bear Valley Unified School District, was contacted and informed that the school violated Jimenez's rights. An apology was requested.

“The apology was unacceptable,” Jimenez said. She said Ferraud wrote a letter that stated the matter was handled.

The ACLU wrote a response letter to Ferraud and Mike Ghelber, Big Bear High School principal, protesting Ghelber and Reynolds' actions. Jimenez said she is waiting for the outcome of that letter.

“I want acknowledgment that my First Amendment rights were violated,” Jimenez said. For her, Prop. 8 is a human rights issue, she said. She said the fact that it passed is a step backward. The Bible bans interracial marriages and homosexual marriages, she said. Passing Prop 8 opens the door to ban interracial marriages, she said. “What's next?”

Jimenez said she hopes the ACLU's involvement will help change policy. She said she is proud she stood up for her rights, and that she is willing to fight for what she believes in.

“I will never get married,” Jimenez said. But she has friends who are gay and want to get married. She wants them to be able to make that choice and be happy, she said.

Jimenez is a member of the Big Bear High School girls golf team. She has been involved in school politics for several years. Her mother was an assistant coach for the high school wrestling team for several years.

Ferraud did not return a phone call before press time.

Contact reporter Judi Bowers at 909-866-3456, ext. 137 or by e-mail at jbowers.grizzly@gmail.com.

Warfare and the Terms of Engagement

(Excerpt from an essay in “Abolition Now: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex,” co-published by Critical Resistance and AK Press)
—by Dylan Rodríguez

We are collectively witnessing, surviving, and working in a time of unprecedented state-organized human capture and state-produced physical/social/psychic alienation, from the 2.5 million imprisoned by the domestic and global US prison industrial complex to the profound forms of informal apartheid and proto-apartheid that are being instantiated in cities, suburbs, and rural areas all over the country. This condition presents a profound crisis—and political possibility—for people struggling against the white supremacist state, which continues to institutionalize the social liquidation and physical evisceration of Black, brown, and aboriginal peoples nearby and far away. If we are to approach racism, neoliberalism, militarism/militarization, and US state hegemony and domination in a legitimately “global” way, it is nothing short of unconscionable to expend significant political energy protesting American wars elsewhere (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) when there are overlapping, and no less profoundly oppressive, declarations of and mobilizations for war in our very own, most intimate and nearby geographies of “home.”

This time of crisis and emergency necessitates a critical examination of the political and institutional logics that structure so much of the US progressive left, and particularly the “establishment” left that is tethered (for better and worse) to the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC). I have defined the NPIC elsewhere as the set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class social control with surveillance over public political discourse, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements. This definition is most focused on the industrialized incorporation, accelerated since the 1970s, of pro-state liberal and progressive campaigns and movements into a spectrum of government-proctored non-profit organizations.

It is in the context of the formation of the NPIC as a political power structure that I wish to address, with a less-than-subtle sense of alarm, a peculiar and disturbing politics of assumption that often structures, disciplines, and actively shapes the work of even the most progressive movements and organizations within the US establishment left (of which I too am a part, for better and worse): that is, the left’s willingness to fundamentally tolerate — and accompanying unwillingness to abolish — the institutionalized dehumanization of the contemporary policing and imprisonment apparatus in its most localized, unremarkable, and hence “normal” manifestations within the domestic “homeland” of the Homeland Security state.

Behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil liberties, and law, and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist criminalization, there is an unspoken politics of assumption that takes for granted the mystified permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production of targeted and massive suffering, guided by the logic of Black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies and essential violence of the American (global) nation-building project. To put it differently: despite the unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social and political repression, and violent policing that compose the mosaic of our historical time, the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond the US) does not care to envision, much less politically prioritize, the abolition of US domestic warfare and its structuring white supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of the present and future. Our non-profit left, in particular, seems content to engage in desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts to manage the casualties of domestic warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly, critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars.

Not long from now, generations will emerge from the organic accumulation of rage, suffering, social alienation, and (we hope) politically principled rebellion against this living apocalypse and pose to us some rudimentary questions of radical accountability: How were we able to accommodate, and even culturally and politically normalize the strategic, explicit, and openly racist technologies of state violence that effectively socially neutralized and frequently liquidated entire nearby populations of our people, given that ours are the very same populations that have historically struggled to survive and overthrow such “classical” structures of dominance as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial slavery, and other genocides? In a somewhat more intimate sense, how could we live with ourselves in this domestic state of emergency, and why did we seem to generally forfeit the creative possibilities of radically challenging, dislodging, and transforming the ideological and institutional premises of this condition of domestic warfare in favor of short-term, “winnable” policy reforms? (For example, why did we choose to formulate and tolerate a “progressive” political language that reinforced dominant racist notions of “criminality” in the process of trying to discredit the legal basis of “Three Strikes” laws?) What were the fundamental concerns of our progressive organizations and movements during this time, and were they willing to comprehend and galvanize an effective, or even viable opposition to the white supremacist state’s terms of engagement (that is, warfare)? This radical accountability reflects a variation on anticolonial liberation theorist Frantz Fanon’s memorable statement to his own peers, comrades, and nemeses:

“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current struggles. Now that we are in the heat of combat, we must shed the habit of decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning incomprehension at their silence or passiveness.”

Lest we fall victim to a certain political nostalgia that is often induced by such illuminating Fanonist exhortations, we ought to clarify the premises of the social “mission” that our generation of US based progressive organizing has undertaken.

In the vicinity of the constantly retrenching social welfare apparatuses of the US state, much of the most urgent and immediate work of community-based organizing has revolved around service provision. Importantly, this pragmatic focus also builds a certain progressive ethic of voluntarism that constructs the model activist as a variation on older liberal notions of the “good citizen.” Following Fanon, the question is whether and how this mission ought to be fulfilled or betrayed. I believe that to respond to this political problem requires an analysis and conceptualization of “the state” that is far more complex and laborious than we usually allow in our ordinary rush of obligations to build campaigns, organize communities, and write grant proposals. In fact, I think one pragmatic step toward an abolitionist politics involves the development of grassroots pedagogies (such as reading groups, in-home workshops, inter-organization and inter-movement critical dialogues) that will compel us to teach ourselves about the different ways that the state works in the context of domestic warfare, so that we no longer treat it simplistically. We require, in other words, a scholarly activist framework to understand that the state can and must be radically confronted on multiple fronts by an abolitionist politics.

revolutionbythebook.akpress.org

Police State Propaganda

One mark of a rising police state is a lapdog media that is sympathetic to those in power. And when it goes out of its way to portray agents of the state in a compassionate and heroic light, no one will dare raise criticism for fear of being branded unpatriotic. Enter Homeland Security U.S.A.:

This is how it starts.

* News * World news * Israel and the Palestinian territories Israeli blockade 'forces Palestinians to search rubbish dumps for food'

UN fears irreversible damage is being done in Gaza as new statistics reveal the level of deprivation

• Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
• The Observer, Sunday 21 December 2008
• Article history

Impoverished Palestinians on the Gaza Strip are being forced to scavenge for food on rubbish dumps to survive as Israel's economic blockade risks causing irreversible damage, according to international observers.

Figures released last week by the UN Relief and Works Agency reveal that the economic blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza in July last year has had a devastating impact on the local population. Large numbers of Palestinians are unable to afford the high prices of food being smuggled through the Hamas-controlled tunnels to the Strip from Egypt and last week were confronted with the suspension of UN food and cash distribution as a result of the siege.

The figures collected by the UN agency show that 51.8% - an "unprecedentedly high" number of Gaza's 1.5 million population - are now living below the poverty line. The agency announced last week that it had been forced to stop distributing food rations to the 750,000 people in need and had also suspended cash distributions to 94,000 of the most disadvantaged who were unable to afford the high prices being asked for smuggled food.

"Things have been getting worse and worse," said Chris Gunness of the agency yesterday. "It is the first time we have been seeing people picking through the rubbish like this looking for things to eat. Things are particularly bad in Gaza City where the population is most dense.

"Because Gaza is now operating as a 'tunnel economy' and there is so little coming through via Israeli crossings, it is hitting the most disadvantaged worst."

Gunness also expressed concern about the state of Gaza's infrastructure, including its water and sewerage systems, which have not been maintained properly since Israel began blocking shipments of concrete into Gaza, warning of the risk of the spread of communicable diseases both inside and outside of Gaza.

"This is not a humanitarian crisis," he said. "This is a political crisis of choice with dire humanitarian consequences."

The revelations over the escalating difficulties inside Gaza were delivered a day after the end of the six-month ceasefire between Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers, which had been brokered by Egypt in June, and follow warnings from the World Bank at the beginning of December that Gaza faced "irreversible" economic collapse.

The deteriorating conditions inside Gaza emerged as Tony Blair, Middle East envoy for the Quartet - US, Russia, the UN and the EU - warned explicitly yesterday that Israel's policy of economic blockade, which had been imposed a year and a half ago when Hamas took power on the Gaza Strip, was reinforcing rather than undermining the party's hold on power. In an interview in the Israeli newspaper Haartez, Blair warned that the collapse of Gaza's legitimate economy under the impact of the blockade, while harming Gaza's businessmen and ordinary people, had allowed the emergence of an alternative system based on smuggling through the Hamas-controlled tunnels. Hamas "taxed" the goods smuggled through the tunnels.

It was because of this that Blair wrote to Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, earlier this month demanding that Israel permit the transfer of cash into Gaza from the West Bank to prop up the legitimate economy.

"The present situation is not harming Hamas in Gaza but it is harming the people," Blair said yesterday. Calling for a change in policy over Gaza, he added: "I don't think that the current situation is sustainable; I think most people who would analyse it think the same."

Blair's comments came as an Israeli air strike against a rocket squad killed a Palestinian militant yesterday, the first Gaza death since Hamas formally declared an end to a six-month truce with Israel.

Also yesterday, a boat carrying a Qatari delegation, Lebanese activists and journalists from Israel and Lebanon sailed into Gaza City's small port in defiance of a border blockade. It was the fifth such boat trip since the summer. The two Qatari citizens aboard the Dignity are from the government-funded Qatar Authority for Charitable Activities.

"We are here to represent the Qatar government and people," said delegation member Aed al-Kahtani. "We will look into the needs of our brothers in Gaza, and find out what is the most appropriate way to bring in aid."

The arrival of the delegation reflects the growing anger in the Arab world over the Gaza siege, directed at Israel but also at Egypt, which has allowed the border crossings at the southern end of the Strip to remain sealed.

On Friday, thousands of people joined a rally in Beirut organised by Lebanon's Shia Hezbollah movement against Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Addressing the Beirut crowd, Hezbollah deputy leader Sheikh Naim Kassem called on Arab and Islamic governments to act to help lift the Gaza blockade, and urged Egypt to take an "historic stance" by opening its border crossing with Gaza.

"Silence on the [Gaza] blockade is disgraceful. Silence on the blockade amounts to participation in the [Israeli] occupation," Kassem said.

Parents Say Four Cops Beat Girl, 12

GALVESTON (CN) - Four plainclothes Galveston police officers beat a 12-year-old girl in the head in her own yard, beat her with a flashlight, accused her of being a prostitute and threatened to shoot her puppy, while responding to a call about white prostitutes, the girl's parents claim in Federal Court. The girl, an honor student, who was dressed in gym shorts and a T-shirt when the cops beat her, is black.

The girl's mom sent her outside to flip the switch on the breaker box because the house had lost power. She was doing that when four plainclothes cops emerged from an unmarked car and ran toward the girl. One cop said, "You're a prostitute. You're coming with me," the complaint states.

The defendant officers are Justin Popovich, Sean Stewart, David Roark and Sgt. Gilbert Gomez.

The terrified girl grabbed onto a tree and shouted, "Daddy, Daddy!" The parents ran outside and saw their daughter "hysterical and holding on to the tree with one arm; two officers were striking (the girl's) head, face and throat," the complaint states. "The officer who was holding Plaintiff covered her mouth. The officer was ultimately identified as David Roark."

The complaint continues: "The Officer stated that they had received a call reporting three prostitutes in the neighborhood and that drug dealing was 'going down.' The officer hit Plaintiff in the back of head with a flashlight, hit her neck, throat, slapped her across the face, and told her to get off the tree. ... The family's five month old puppy grabbed the officer's leg. The officer threatened if they did not grab the dog, he would shoot it. It was ultimately learned that the dispatch call the officers were responding to reported three white females soliciting one white male and one black male drug dealers."

The girl required medical attention for head, back and throat pain, a sprained wrist, contusions and abrasions, black eyes, double vision, loss of hearing, nausea and vomiting, blood in her ear, and bled from the nose. She has since had behavioral problems, nightmares and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Three weeks later, she was arrested at school for allegedly assaulting a public servant. The complaint does not state explicitly that the girl was arrested for allegedly assaulting the cops who beat her, or for some other alleged incident. The family had to hire an attorney; a mistrial was declared on day one of her trial.

The family seeks punitive damages for constitutional violations and illegal arrest and detention. They are represented by Anthony Griffin.

The Pentagon is muscling in everywhere. It's time to stop the mission creep.

By Thomas A. Schweich

Sunday, December 21, 2008; Page B01

We no longer have a civilian-led government. It is hard for a lifelong Republican and son of a retired Air Force colonel to say this, but the most unnerving legacy of the Bush administration is the encroachment of the Department of Defense into a striking number of aspects of civilian government. Our Constitution is at risk.

This Story

• The Pentagon is muscling in everywhere. It's time to stop the mission creep.
• Monday, December 22, 11 a.m. ET: Outlook: Make Sure Civilians Call the Shots

President-elect Barack Obama's selections of James L. Jones, a retired four-star Marine general, to be his national security adviser and, it appears, retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair to be his director of national intelligence present the incoming administration with an important opportunity -- and a major risk. These appointments could pave the way for these respected military officers to reverse the current trend of Pentagon encroachment upon civilian government functions, or they could complete the silent military coup d'etat that has been steadily gaining ground below the radar screen of most Americans and the media.

While serving the State Department in several senior capacities over the past four years, I witnessed firsthand the quiet, de facto military takeover of much of the U.S. government. The first assault on civilian government occurred in faraway places -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- and was, in theory, justified by the exigencies of war.

The White House, which basically let the Defense Department call the budgetary shots, vastly underfunded efforts by the State Department, the Justice Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to train civilian police forces, build functioning judicial systems and provide basic development services to those war-torn countries. For example, after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Justice Department and the State Department said that they needed at least 6,000 police trainers in the country. Pentagon officials told some of my former staffers that they doubted so many would be needed. The civilians' recommendation "was quickly reduced to 1,500 [trainers] by powers-that-be above our pay grade," Gerald F. Burke, a retired major in the Massachusetts State Police who trained Iraqi cops from 2003 to 2006, told Congress last April. Just a few hundred trainers ultimately wound up being fielded, according to Burke's testimony.

Until this year, the State Department received an average of about $40 million a year for rule-of-law programs in Afghanistan, according to the department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs -- in stark contrast to the billions that the Pentagon got to train the Afghan army. Under then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Defense Department failed to provide even basic security for the meager force of civilian police mentors, rule-of-law advisers and aid workers from other U.S. agencies operating in Afghanistan and Iraq, driving policymakers to turn to such contracting firms as Blackwater Worldwide. After having set the rest of the U.S. government up for failure, military authorities then declared that the other agencies' unsuccessful police-training efforts required military leadership and took them over -- after brutal interagency battles at the White House.

The result of letting the Pentagon take such thorough charge of the programs to create local police forces is that these units, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, have been unnecessarily militarized -- producing police officers who look more like militia members than ordinary beat cops. These forces now risk becoming paramilitary groups, well armed with U.S. equipment, that could run roughshod over Iraq and Afghanistan's nascent democracies once we leave.

Or consider another problem with the rising influence of the Pentagon: the failure to address the ongoing plague of poppy farming and heroin production in Afghanistan. This fiasco was in large part the result of the work of non-expert military personnel, who discounted the corrosive effects of the Afghan heroin trade on our efforts to rebuild the country and failed to support civilian-run counter-narcotics programs. During my tenure as the Bush administration's anti-drug envoy to Afghanistan, I also witnessed JAG officers hiring their own manifestly unqualified Afghan legal "experts," some of whom even lacked law degrees, to operate outside the internationally agreed-upon, Afghan-led program to bring impartial justice to the people of Afghanistan. This resulted in confusion and contradiction.

One can also see the Pentagon's growing muscle in the recent creation of the U.S. military command for Africa, known as Africom. This new command supposedly has a joint civilian-military purpose: to coordinate soft power and traditional hard power to stop al-Qaeda and its allies from gaining a foothold on the continent. But Africom has gotten a chilly reception in post-colonial Africa. Meanwhile, U.S. competitors such as China are pursuing large African development projects that are being welcomed with open arms. Since the Bush administration has had real successes with its anti-AIDS and other health programs in Africa, why exactly do we need a military command there running civilian reconstruction, if not to usurp the efforts led by well-respected U.S. embassies and aid officials?

And, of course, I need not even elaborate on the most notorious effect of the military's growing reach: the damage that the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and such military prisons as Abu Ghraib have done to U.S. credibility around the world.

But these initial military takeovers of civilian functions all took place a long distance from home. "We are in a war, after all," Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told me by way of explaining the military's huge role in that country -- just before the Pentagon seemingly had him removed in 2007 because of his admirable efforts to balance military and civilian needs. (I heard angry accounts of the Pentagon's role in Neumann's "retirement" at the time from knowledgeable diplomats, one of them very senior.) But our military forces, in a bureaucratic sense, soon marched on Washington itself.

As military officers sought to take over the role played by civilian development experts abroad, Pentagon bureaucrats quietly populated the National Security Council and the State Department with their own personnel (some civilians, some consultants, some retired officers, some officers on "detail" from the Pentagon) to ensure that the Defense Department could keep an eye on its rival agencies. Vice President Cheney, himself a former secretary of defense, and his good friend Rumsfeld ensured the success of this seeding effort by some fairly forceful means. At least twice, I saw Cheney staffers show up unannounced at State Department meetings, and I heard other State Department officials grumble about this habit. The Rumsfeld officials could play hardball, sometimes even leaking to the press the results of classified meetings that did not go their way in order to get the decisions reversed. After I got wind of the Pentagon's dislike for the approved interagency anti-drug strategy for Afghanistan, details of the plan quickly wound up in the hands of foreign countries sympathetic to the Pentagon view. I've heard other, similarly troubling stories about leaks of classified information to the press.

Many of Cheney's and Rumsfeld's cronies still work at the Pentagon and elsewhere. Rumsfeld's successor, Robert M. Gates, has spoken of increasing America's "soft power," its ability to attract others by our example, culture and values, but thus far, this push to reestablish civilian leadership has been largely talk and little action. Gates is clearly sincere about chipping away at the military's expanding role, but many of his subordinates are not.

The encroachment within America's borders continued with the military's increased involvement in domestic surveillance and its attempts to usurp the role of the federal courts in reviewing detainee cases. The Pentagon also resisted ceding any authority over its extensive intelligence operations to the first director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte -- a State Department official who eventually gave up his post to Mike McConnell, a former Navy admiral. The Bush administration also appointed Michael V. Hayden, a four-star Air Force general, to be the director of the CIA. National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley saw much of the responsibility for developing and implementing policy on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- surely the national security adviser's job -- given to Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, Bush's new "war czar." By 2008, the military was running much of the national security apparatus.

The Pentagon opened a southern front earlier this year when it attempted to dominate the new Merida Initiative, a promising $400 million program to help Mexico battle drug cartels. Despite the admirable efforts of the federal drug czar, John P. Walters, to keep the White House focused on the civilian law-enforcement purpose of the Merida Initiative, the military runs a big chunk of that program as well.

Now the Pentagon has drawn up plans to deploy 20,000 U.S. soldiers inside our borders by 2011, ostensibly to help state and local officials respond to terrorist attacks or other catastrophes. But that mission could easily spill over from emergency counterterrorism work into border-patrol efforts, intelligence gathering and law enforcement operations -- which would run smack into the Posse Comitatus Act, the long-standing law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement. So the generals are not only dominating our government activities abroad, at our borders and in Washington, but they also seem to intend to spread out across the heartland of America.

If President-elect Obama wants to reverse this trend, he must take four steps -- and very quickly:

1. Direct -- or, better yet, order -- Gates, Jones, Blair and the other military leaders in his Cabinet to rid the Pentagon's lower ranks of Rumsfeld holdovers whose only mission is to increase the power of the Pentagon.

2. Turn Gates's speeches on the need to promote soft power into reality with a massive transfer of funds from the Pentagon to the State Department, the Justice Department and USAID.

3. Put senior, respected civilians -- not retired or active military personnel -- into key subsidiary positions in the intelligence community and the National Security Council.

4. Above all, he should let his appointees with military backgrounds know swiftly and firmly that, under the Constitution, he is their commander, and that he will not tolerate the well-rehearsed lip service that the military gave to civilian agencies and even President Bush over the past four years.

In short, he should retake the government before it devours him and us -- and return civilian-led government to the people of the United States.

Thomas A. Schweich served the Bush administration as ambassador for counter-narcotics in Afghanistan and deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement affairs.