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FOCUS: Only One Thing Can Stop Donald Trump |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Friday, 11 December 2015 13:01 |
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Rich writes: "Donald Trump's call for a Muslim exclusion act (which drew cheers at the rally where Trump proposed it) has drawn an almost-universal backlash nationwide, yet Trump is sticking to his guns. Is there any way this helps him?"
Donald Trump. (photo: Jonathan Drake/Reuters/Corbis)
Only One Thing Can Stop Donald Trump
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
11 December 15
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Donald Trump's ban on Muslims entering the U.S., Obama's national address, and Spotlight and the state of investigative journalism.
 onald Trump's call for a Muslim exclusion act (which drew cheers at the rally where Trump proposed it) has drawn an almost-universal backlash nationwide, yet Trump is sticking to his guns. Is there any way this helps him?
Doesn’t it seem a century ago when Trump committed what was supposed to be a cardinal sin, particularly to Republicans, and insulted the war hero John McCain? Trump was pronounced politically dead back then — this was in July — and we needn’t catalogue all of the times he’s risen like Lazarus since, after each racist, xenophobic, misogynist, or just plain lunatic pronouncement theoretically ended his campaign. So when people talk now, as you put it, of “an almost-universal backlash” to his latest and perhaps most outrageous thunderbolt of bigotry, it depends on how you define universal. That universe does not include Trump’s fans. In a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released yesterday, some 68 percent of respondents said they would bolt the GOP if their hero decided to run as an independent. In other words, this latest episode, which took place just after that survey, should help Trump as all of his other outrages have: He’ll remain at or near the top of Republican polls because he is telling his audience what it wants to hear in ever louder tones. And the “universal backlash” of the elites will only make him more of a hero with his supporters, who revel in the disdain of the Establishments of both parties and the press.
There are not enough Trump partisans to capture the presidency, no matter how much some liberals liken his rise to those of Hitler and Mussolini. There may well not be enough Trump supporters to win him the GOP nomination (though it cannot be ruled out). But there are certainly enough to destroy his party for the foreseeable future by branding it as a haven for bigots at a time when America is on its inexorable path to be a white-minority nation. So you’d think that those now at the top of the GOP would try to banish Trump by any and all available means, if only out of self-interest. That’s still not happening. Those who wield the strongest anti-Trump language among his primary opponents are those with rock-bottom poll numbers (e.g., Lindsey Graham, who told him to “go to hell”) and no clout. Jeb (!) Bush, whose poll numbers are also near rock bottom, has also pumped up his anti-Trump rhetoric, but he’s still too low-energy and too late, and he has no moral standing to attack Trump’s Islamophobia since he only recently (like Ted Cruz) proposed banning Syrian refugees who aren’t Christians. Party titans like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have condemned Trump’s latest jeremiad, but they are wusses, too fearful of both him and his fans to say they would disown him if he got the party’s nomination. (Jeb has also recently reaffirmed that he’d support Trump over Hillary.) Cruz and Marco Rubio, besides indulging in their own Muslim-bashing, have been pointedly mild in their criticisms of Trump and his views because they hope to annex his crazies should he flame out.
So who can stop Trump? Not the fat-cat GOP donors whose doomed anti-Trump strategies keep being floated to the press. Not the earnest members of the reality-based community who diligently write articles explaining that, yes, Trump’s latest proposal is unconstitutional, impossible to implement, racist, and a boost to the very ISIS ideologues Trump wants to destroy. Not the fact-checkers who show that almost every bit of evidence Trump cites, from nonexistent crowds of Muslims cheering 9/11 in New Jersey to junk polls of Muslim-American sentiment, is a lie. Trump’s adherents are going to accept Trump’s facts, just as they have accepted such “facts” from the other conservative leaders who have claimed Barack Obama was born in Africa and that climate change is a hoax.
No, the only people who can stop Trump are the obvious ones: those who actually vote or caucus in Republican primary states. Their verdict will be decisive, and come February we will start to hear from them directly in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina (where Trump’s ban-Muslims oration played to a standing ovation last weekend). It’s been a standard refrain of Establishment Republicans since the summer that Trump’s toxic views don’t represent their party — and, indeed, if Republicans don’t actually vote for Trump, he’s done, and probably as an independent as well. But what if he does attract voters in numbers consistent with his polling? In less than two months from now, we are finally going to start getting a definitive answer to the question that’s riveted us for months: Who are the Republicans?
Most GOP candidates responding to President Obama's call for calm and patience in the wake of the San Bernardino shooting attacked his address almost immediately (or sooner — Cruz offered a rebuttal before it had even begun). Was Obama right to take the higher ground, or should he have spoken more decisively?
If “more decisively” means “more angrily,” then Obama was doomed to failure. The GOP presidential field owns rage. Obama, as is his wont, was rational, not a “dead or alive” gunslinger like his predecessor, or an abject fearmonger like Trump. But if you look at what his critics had to say, including the more well-behaved neocons at The Wall Street Journal, you don’t find an alternative policy to what America is doing now — unless you count Cruz’s promise to institute a war plan to “carpet-bomb them into oblivion” and Trump’s vow to “bomb the shit out of them.” You don’t, for instance, hear any of these critics proposing that specific and large numbers of American troops be committed to the cause. You mainly find anti-Obama vitriol and vague calls for more “muscular” action that doesn’t go much beyond the “no-fly zone” that Clinton has also endorsed.
Two footnotes to Obama’s address. Forgive me for being a former drama critic, but, really, who had the brilliant idea of having the president leave his expected position behind the Oval Office desk to declaim from a podium planted in front of it? At the faux Oval Office where I work on the television series Veep, there was much talk the morning after that if we had put our show’s hapless president in such an awkward setting, we would have been criticized for exaggerating White House incompetence. Second: One politician who was widely praised by political pros for having an effective reaction to the San Bernardino killings was Chris Christie, whose constant invocation of 9/11 after the bloodbath was thought to reignite his flailing presidential campaign. But the latest New Hampshire poll from CNN/WMUR, released this week and taken after San Bernardino, finds Christie third, with 9 percent — almost identical to how Rudy Giuliani performed in the New Hampshire primary during his disastrous “noun-verb-9/11” presidential run of 2008. In first, with 32 percent, is Trump, up from 26 percent in September, and ahead of the runner-up, Rubio (14 percent), by nearly two-to-one.
After watching Spotlight, Tom McCarthy's film about the Boston Globe's 2002 sex-abuse investigation of the Catholic Church, the New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wondered where that kind of local investigative reporting might still be possible in today's vanishing newspaper industry. Did you see the film as a eulogy for a journalism world gone by?
To an extent, yes. It’s hard to miss: the AOL billboard juxtaposed with the Globe’s headquarters in one shot, and an early scene of a reporter’s newsroom retirement toast that all too painfully prefigures the many forced retirements of his colleagues yet to come. But most of all Spotlight is a celebration of investigative reporting itself — as well as a reminder of how much horrific crime the Catholic Church covered up for so long, in Boston and throughout the world.
Sullivan is right to worry about the future of local investigative reporting in an America with fewer and ever-more-impoverished newspapers. However, it’s worth recalling that some of the greatest investigative reporting in our history has happened in unexpected venues: muckrakers of the progressive era appeared in McClure’s magazine, known more for high-toned literature than fearless journalism; Seymour Hersh’s My Lai massacre exposé was disseminated by the Dispatch News Service, an upstart operation in its infancy. Those who are driven to expose corruption often do find a way, sometimes at considerable personal and financial sacrifice, and there’s no reason to believe that they won’t find outlets and maybe even salary-paying employers in the digital age.
Meanwhile, one of the heroes of Spotlight, the Globe’s then-new editor Martin Baron (captured with remarkable fidelity onscreen by Liev Schreiber), is now the (fairly) new editor of the Washington Post, which is also the beneficiary of a cash infusion from its deep-pocketed new owner, Jeff Bezos. Baron’s brilliance at bringing his readers a hard-hitting news report, investigative and otherwise, is on display daily in a paper that now seems well on its way to reclaiming the glory of its fabled Ben Bradlee era. If you’re not reading it, you should be: It makes you feel that, Spotlight notwithstanding, all in newspapers is not lost.
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FOCUS: Saudi Arabia and the UN's Human Rights Scandal |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Friday, 11 December 2015 11:49 |
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Kiriakou writes: "Saudi Arabia has completed its first three months as Chair of the United Nations Human Rights Council. If anything exemplifies the irrelevance of the United Nations and the body's seeming inability to put its collective foot down on human rights abuses around the world, it is having Saudi Arabia as the leader of the UN body that is supposed to protect those human rights around the world."
Faisal Trad, Saudi Arabia's ambassador in Geneva, has been elected Chair of the UN Human Rights Council panel that appoints independent experts. (photo: UN)
Saudi Arabia and the UN's Human Rights Scandal
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
11 December 15
 audi Arabia has completed its first three months as Chair of the United Nations Human Rights Council. If anything exemplifies the irrelevance of the United Nations and the body's seeming inability to put its collective foot down on human rights abuses around the world, it is having Saudi Arabia as the leader of the UN body that is supposed to protect those human rights around the world.
You remember Saudi Arabia. It's the country in the Middle East with which the United States has had a “special relationship” since the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. It's the country from which the U.S. buys 17 percent of its oil. It's the country that intervened in May in Yemen's civil war and has killed about 650 civilians per month ever since, all in the name of “combating Iran.” It's the country that 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were from. It's also a country that has an absolutely dismal record of human rights abuses.
Indeed, the executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization that monitors the performance of the United Nations, said of Saudi Arabia's Human Rights Council chairmanship. “It is scandalous that the UN chose a country that has beheaded more people this year than ISIS to be head of a key human rights panel.” He's right.
In the past three months the Saudis have made no pretense of respecting human rights. On November 17, a Saudi court sentenced artist Ashraf Fayadh to death on charges of apostasy. His crime? He wrote a poem that the royal family didn't like. And Fayadh's case is the rule, rather than the exception. The Saudis this year also have sentenced a 17-year-old to die by crucifixion for taking part in an anti-royal demonstration. They have sentenced a liberal blogger to a public flogging, which also often results in death; and a Saudi court gave a British senior citizen a sentence of 350 lashes for having a bottle of homemade wine in his car.
Congress has mandated that every year the State Department prepare a Human Rights Report on every country in the world. This document is supposed to aid the Department in formulating its foreign policy and to help hone the human rights issues on which the U.S. can help other countries. The 2014 Human Rights Report for Saudi Arabia, the most recent year for which the report is available, is a chilling document. And the implication of its conclusions is that the U.S. either has no influence in Saudi Arabia whatsoever or that our government has chosen to ignore Saudi Arabia's gross human rights abuses because the country is a major U.S. supplier of oil and a major consumer of U.S. defense systems.
You be the judge. The report's opening paragraphs set the tone for the next 57 pages:
The most important human rights problems reported included citizens' lack of the ability and legal means to change their government; pervasive restrictions on universal rights such as freedom of expression, including on the internet, and freedom of assembly, association, movement, and religion; and a lack of equal rights for women, children, and noncitizen workers ... Other human rights problems reported included abuses of detainees; overcrowding in prisons and detention centers; investigating, detaining, prosecuting, and sentencing lawyers, human rights activists, and antigovernment reformists; holding political prisoners; denial of due process; arbitrary arrest and detention; and arbitrary interference with privacy, home, and correspondence. Violence against women, trafficking in persons, and discrimination based on gender, religion, sect, race, and ethnicity were common.
If we know the nature of Saudi Arabia's human rights problems and we know that the country is executing activists, artists, children, political opponents, women, and others, shouldn't the White House do something about it? I would posit that it should.
If history is any indication, oppressive governments around the world have a finite existence. You can't keep all the people down all the time. A country ruled with an iron fist by 15,000 cousins cannot be a model of stability. With a hostile Iran to the east, Shia Iraq to the north, Israel to the northwest, and a hostile and war-torn Yemen to the south, the Saudis ought to be thinking of ways to improve their internal stability and attract international support, beginning with a policy of improving human rights and civil liberties.
Washington apparently doesn't have the stomach or political foresight to push them in that direction. Both the White House and the State Department have just pretended that no problems exist. It's up to the Saudis to turn the ship around before it's too late. If they fail to do that, it could be royal heads that end up on the chopping block.
John Kiriakou is an Associate Fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. He is a former CIA counterterrorism operations officer and former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Freedom of Press Launches Fundraiser to Aid Heroic Journalists in Police Brutality Investigations |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
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Friday, 11 December 2015 09:38 |
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Greenwald writes: "The Freedom of the Press Foundation was created in late 2012. The primary objective, beyond the original project of destroying the extra-judicial financial blockade of WikiLeaks, was 'to ensure that truly independent journalistic outlets - devoted to holding the U.S. government and other powerful factions accountable with transparency and real adversarial journalism - are supported to the fullest extent possible.'"
Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago pictured here with Police Superintendent Garry F. McCarthy, who the mayor recently fired from his post. (photo: Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)
Freedom of Press Launches Fundraiser to Aid Heroic Journalists in Police Brutality Investigations
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
11 December 15
 major scandal is currently engulfing the Chicago Police Department and the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel. It was all triggered by disclosure of a horrific video showing what appears to be the cold-blooded murder by a police officer of 17-year-old African-American Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times. That video shocked the nation and led to the arrest of the police officer as well as a Justice Department investigation of the department.
For more than a year, the city fought to suppress that video, ensuring Emanuel’s re-election could proceed without knowledge of what happened. A New York Times op-ed by former University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explicitly accused Emanuel and the city of deliberately covering up the video to help the mayor’s re-election campaign, arguing that “the video of a police shooting like this in Chicago could have buried Mr. Emanuel’s chances for re-election.” Harcourt added, “These actions have impeded the criminal justice system and, in the process, Chicago’s leaders allowed a first-degree murder suspect, now incarcerated pending bail, to remain free for over a year on the city’s payroll.”
That this video is now public is largely due to the heroic, relentless work of a young independent journalist in Chicago, Brandon Smith. Numerous large media outlets filed requests for that video under the state’s FOIA laws, and simply took “no” for an answer when the city claimed its release would jeopardize an ongoing investigation. Smith, however, regarded the city’s claims with skepticism rather than blind reverence, retained his own lawyers, and sued the city in court. He won, and a Chicago judge ordered release of the video.
And now, as my colleague Juan Thompson reported yesterday, the resulting transparency is shining light on other police killings in the city. As he wrote, “The Chicago Police Department has an extensive and troubling legacy of violence. Over the last five years, Chicago officers have fatally shot 70 people, more than any other big-city police department in the U.S.”
In late 2012, the Freedom of the Press Foundation was created by Daniel Ellsberg, The Intercept’s co-founder Laura Poitras, John Cusack, Xeni Jardin, various EFF officials such as J.P. Barlow, and myself (along with those founders, the board now includes Intercept technologist Micah Lee and Edward Snowden). As I wrote when we announced its formation, the primary objective, beyond the original project of destroying the extra-judicial financial blockade of WikiLeaks, was “to ensure that truly independent journalistic outlets — devoted to holding the U.S. government and other powerful factions accountable with transparency and real adversarial journalism — are supported to the fullest extent possible.”
Brandon Smith is exactly the type of independent journalist we had in mind when we formulated that mission. As he recounts in the discussion I had with him (transcript below), he has struggled significantly since leaving his job years ago as a reporter for a local paper in Ohio in order to work independently, yet he just broke one of the biggest and most important police brutality stories of the decade through intrepid determination and an adversarial posture to those in power. Funding will enable him to continue not only the substantial work left to be done on the Laquan McDonald case, which he details here, but a wide range of other investigative projects he is pursuing.
Today, Freedom of the Press Foundation is announcing a new crowd-sourced fundraising campaign called the Transparency for Police Fund, which “will fund local journalists around the United States to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other transparency lawsuits aimed at uncovering police misconduct and video evidence of brutality against unarmed men and women.” The first two recipients are Smith as well as Invisible Institute, a journalism and transparency group in the South Side of Chicago that was also instrumental in forcing release of the McDonald tape.
Future recipients of the fund will be named in 2016 based on feedback from local communities and their work in exposing police brutality. Police brutality is a massive, out-of-control, and woefully under-reported pathology in the U.S., overwhelmingly affecting the poorest and most marginalized communities, with racially disparate harm. Few factions need greater accountability and journalistic scrutiny than the nation’s police departments.
The donate page created by the foundation enables you to choose where to earmark your donation, and you can specify whether you’d like to see it go to the brave journalists who forced the Laquan McDonald video into the public, and/or to the general fund, which will go to those future grantees in other cities who are currently involved in Freedom of Information Act or public records lawsuits for similar videos.
Below is the transcript of my discussion with Brandon Smith about his work in pursuing release of this video and about his journalism more generally (edited for clarity and length). This is exactly the kind of journalistic ethos that needs more support. I really hope everyone who can will donate to this fund to support him, the institute, and future police brutality investigations. You can do so here.
GREENWALD: So let’s begin by your describing what interested you in the Laquan McDonald case and what you did to get the tape?
SMITH: My interest was really piqued when a friend of mine put me in a group text conversation with a friend of his. And this other friend who I had never met except via this group text thing, he said he’s an activist and that I should really look into this case of Laquan McDonald. I was like ‘Ok, why should I look into it?’ He says he’s pretty sure that a bunch of other media outlets had filled FOIA requests — for the video — and had been denied since the video was not out.
And he told me via text that he thought it should be out and that the courts could probably force it out. So, he basically found me out through this mutual friend because he knew I had sued for a prior FOIA case against the city.
GREENWALD: What was that case, that prior case?
SMITH: It was three FOIA requests rolled into one. Two requests to the police department, and one to Streets & Sanitation about recycling of all things.
GREENWALD: Ok, so you had a little bit of history pursuing FOIA requests in the court. One of the things that I’ve always wondered about in reading about the work you did in this case is there are obviously a lot of big media outlets in Chicago like The Chicago Tribune and a bunch of network affiliates and other reasonably well founded media outlets. Why did it fall on you to pursue this case on the courts? What was it that they were doing about being told essentially by the city and the police department to go away?
SMITH: Well, so its… I do agree with a lot of people who say that they, these other media outlets failed in their watchdog job. But it’s not so much like a really obvious failure it’s more of like, just a general trusting on their part of government and process. You know, I was a newspaper reporter for five years in Ohio and I got into the same groove of trusting my sources and like getting into a relationship with my sources. And so when they say, “Oh, the investigation is ongoing, to release a video would mean to screw up our investigation,” then I’m sorry to say that I was one of those reporters that just didn’t say boo to that.
And over the years I’ve kind of developed this independent mindset that I think is really important in our work and I wish more people had it.
GREENWALD: I mean, I understand what you’re saying, and you’re being very generous in your description of the behavior of other journalists and I don’t even necessarily disagree with it. At the same time, it’s kind of remarkable because it’s not as though there’s some ancillary principle in journalism that you know is one of the details that says, “Oh hey, by the way, you should subject official claims to some skepticism.” It’s kind of completely central. It’s probably the defining feature of what journalism is supposed to be. So for you to say that journalists are operating without it is in one sense unsurprising to a lot of people but in another quite remarkable. What do you think explains that?
SMITH: Oh man, I mean, I have adopted the same kind of radical mindset that you and many others have. And so, like, it’s hard to have, to give like a blanket diss to all journalists everywhere. But like, people are really getting far too cozy with their sources. I mean, that’s the bottom line. Hey, I think it starts way back in journalism school. I know you were a lawyer way back when, I don’t know if you went to journalism school or not. I went to two different journalism schools and it wasn’t drilled into us to question authority in this way. And then, you know, in your first few jobs you’re often set up covering city council meetings and just sort of like reporting what is said in them and like all this bullshit! Well, I mean…yes, and it is bullshit!
That kind of reporting is not reporting as it’s been described by people for the public. You know, when people talk about journalism they describe this watchdog adversarial thing where an authority is questioned, but what that does is it serves to kind of placate people like, “Oh, the journalists have got our backs, you know. The journalists are questioning authority enough so I don’t have to.”
And frankly like, not a lot of people, like, so many people these days — with the kind of destruction of the middle class — they are working too hard to feed their families so it really falls on journalists to question this authority and we’re not.
GREENWALD: So you describe yourself as an independent journalist, when you got this case what kinds of journalism were you doing? In what capacity and how have you been funding it?
SMITH: I mean, it’s a group effort. It’s like, me, and my family, and chosen family here in Chicago kind of funds my life. And you know, like, freelance fees are pitiful — we’re talking like twenty cents a word, which is not a living wage generally for anything you have to extensively report. Anything other than events really, that’s not a living wage. So yeah, reporting has not been funding my journalism, other stuff has and other ways of making money.
And I think that’s the way for several like, people in Chicago who do this kind of work, independent journalism. It’s not a full time thing; they have other things to support themselves. And it would be great to have more provision to fund their work, the work of everyone who really gets it in their head that something should be investigated.
GREENWALD: Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, part of what we want to do is create and start raising money for exactly that kind of fund — focused on police brutality and abusive citizens using police power — but also raise money specifically to make the journalism that you personally are doing more potent and easier. So, what kinds of journalism do you envision doing if you were better funded? I mean, one of the things that triggered my attention in terms of our ability to raise funds for you and people like you was this GoFund project that you created before this case. So, what were you hoping to accomplish with that? Was it more just being able to earn a living while you do this sort of journalism or do you have a bigger project in mind?
SMITH: Oh yes, I have a dozen or two-dozen bigger projects that I’ve started work on. At any rate — and it’s really hard to continue the work on them because it takes so much time. These are largely worked on through FOIA requests and we’re talking about stories in the nature of privatizing public assets, police surveillance technology, which as you know is sometimes more potent that NSA. I have some things having to do with pollution, because to me pollution ends up in the poorest places: communities of color. And other things…
With the money I raise from the Freedom of the Press campaign, I will be able to commit full-time to spearheading my investigations.
For months they’ve been relegated to the back burners of life, because I’ve had to do things other than journalism to make money. The craziest thing is that I have about 50 smart and capable friends—most of whom have day jobs outside journalism—who want to volunteer to help with the investigations. I haven’t even had time to direct them.
These friends refer to our group as “Allegedly.” We own the domain alleged.ly and will have a simple landing page there by late tonight with a logo, a mission statement (also pasted below), and—when the FotP campaign goes live—a link to donate. Soon we’ll have a bit of a blog there, but like ProPublica, we’ll likely partner with larger media for their built-in audience and to procure compensation for our reporters.
Here’s a sampling of the stories I’ve dug up but haven’t fleshed out:
– abuse at Chicago’s police “black site” that’s even more horrific than what’s been reported before
– where law enforcement in Chicago placed its first surveillance cameras and how that differs from what they were telling the public about the program
– how the Illinois state victims compensation program, in its nonchalance, has ruined the credit of almost all victims of violent crime
– exactly what percentage of the bills passed by our statehouse were nearly verbatim form bills written by extremist think tanks
– why isn’t anybody talking about the half dozen cleanups of deadly pollution within Chicago’s city limits each year?
– what Chicago Police Department spends its “civil forfeiture” money on
– which beloved Chicago companies and “nonprofits” do a ridiculous amount of business with the defense industry and intelligence communities
– why police keep using stingrays and hailstorms prior to subjects’ arrest, despite the 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that says police can’t invade cellphone privacy after arresting someone
– educational disparities in Chicago’s city school system, particularly when it comes to computer science education
– inspecting the cozy relationship chemical companies have with the agencies tasked with regulating them, in conjunction with new research on plastics that interact with almost all our food, disrupting our endocrine systems
As background if you need it, the first $5,000 of my GoFundMe campaign will be used to purchase physical necessities for my continued reporting. I itemized those in an update on that campaign. I just increased the goal to $8,000 in case I get a bunch more visitors. The difference will purchase functional, mostly physical, items for the operation of the group I describe above. (I’ll also devote some portion of my FotP funds to this end.) It might include our very affordable office rent; transcription services for certain timely interviews; web hosting; SecureDrop hardware (though most of that is in place); food and drink for meetings; and components of an AV editing station.
Within our organization, we already have the volunteer services of not just journalists but FOIA lawyers, police brutality lawyers, data analysts, filmmakers, GIS experts, security professionals, privacy researchers, community organizers, radio documentarians, composers of music, social scientists, web designers, long-form authors, startup founders, and program managers.
And here’s our working mission statement:
To investigate abuses of the public and public assets by Chicago’s leaders and institutions, through interrogating the city’s systemic problems.
To use transparency laws to demand documents and data that might uncover the extent and causes of those injustices.
To protect whistleblowers who might shed light on problems of which the public is yet unaware.
To equip a group of capable and engaged citizens with the tools and guidance they need to investigate the issues that matter to them.
To use our findings to produce educational, interesting, and empowering works for public consumption with the intent of creating a more fair and just Chicago.
Just kind of a quick run down of the effects of two FOIA requests, literally just two FOIA requests. The first one of course was for the video and the second was like, last week basically for everything involved with the case. And a lot of other media organizations kind of followed me in that second request so the response went out to everyone for that but it would be great to sort of mention what the effect of two FOIA’s is. In this case it’s like — see I put it up on my Twitter page, kind of the summary — you have a murder charge of course, the police chief being fired, the department of justice civil rights investigation of the city, and also, most recently, the head of the police review authority quit. So two FOIA’s made that happen and of course they were well placed FOIA’s, you know, and it has to do with talking to people and reading the news and caring and figuring out what’s important. But all that to say that the people seem to still have some power and I’m happy to tell people that.
GREENWALD: All right, excellent. Well, I’m really excited. I think, you know, obviously, I think the thing you’ve done here is like a model of independent journalism. It’s incredibly impressive and easily created an earthquake both in Chicago but then more broadly like in terms of the whole debate around police departments in large cities so congratulations on that. It’s incredibly impressive what you’ve done and I hope that we can raise a lot of money for you so you can formalize the work you’re doing and continue to do it.
SMITH: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. The most heartening thing about all of this is that a lot of people seem to feel more empowered now, after they have read all of these stories about this, and how like, I’m not kind of an establishment journalist. I’m just like sort of some guy just like them.
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What Donald Trump and ISIS Have in Common |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=33264"><span class="small">Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, TIME</span></a>
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Thursday, 10 December 2015 14:55 |
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Abdul-Jabbar writes: "Trump's latest enemy du jour are Muslims. He's the schoolyard bully rallying classmates to make fun of the skinny kid with glasses."
Donald Trump. (photo: AP)
What Donald Trump and ISIS Have in Common
By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, TIME
10 December 15
The 2016 candidate has more in common with the terrorist group than he does with America
 he terrorist campaign against American ideals is winning. Fear is rampant. Gun sales are soaring. Hate crimes are increasing. Bearded hipsters are being mistaken for Muslims. And 83 percent of voters believe a large-scale terrorist attack is likely here in the near future. Some Americans are now so afraid that they are willing to trade in the sacred beliefs that define America for some vague promises of security from the very people who are spreading the terror. “Go ahead and burn the Constitution — just don’t hurt me at the mall.” That’s how effective this terrorism is.
I’m not talking about ISIS. I’m talking about Donald Trump.
This is not hyperbole. Not a metaphor. Webster defines terrorism as “the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal; the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.”
If violence can be an abstraction — and it can; that’s what a threat is — the Trump campaign meets this definition. Thus, Trump is ISIS’s greatest triumph: the perfect Manchurian Candidate who, instead of offering specific and realistic policies, preys on the fears of the public, doing ISIS’s job for them. Even fellow Republican Jeb Bush acknowledged Trump’s goal is “to manipulate people’s angst and fears.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” Now, we don’t require by law that our candidates tell the truth. They can retweet (as Trump did) racist “statistics” from a white supremacist fictional organization that claimed 81% of murdered whites are victims of blacks, when the truth is 84% of whites are murdered by whites. They can claim (as Trump did) to have seen on TV thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering on 9/11, even though there is no evidence of this. They can say (as Trump did) Syrian refugees are “pouring” into the country when only 2,000 have come (out of 4.3 million U.N.-registered refugees). Then, when caught lying (as Trump has been over and over), they can do what every belligerent child does: deny, deny, deny.
While Trump is not slaughtering innocent people, he is exploiting such acts of violence to create terror here to coerce support. As I have written before, his acts could be interpreted as hate crimes. He sounds the shrill alarm of impending doomsday even though since 9/11, about 30 Americans a year have been killed in terrorist attacks worldwide — as The Atlantic pointed out, “roughly the same number as are crushed to death each year by collapsing furniture.” Trump’s irresponsible, inflammatory rhetoric and deliberate propagation of misinformation have created a frightened and hostile atmosphere that could embolden people to violence. He’s the swaggering guy in old Westerns buying drinks for everyone in the saloon while whipping them up for a lynching.
About 30,000 foreign fighters have gone into Syria to join ISIS, thousands of them from Europe and at least 250 from the United States. What most of us in these bountiful countries can’t understand is how our young, raised with such opportunity, choose to abandon our values to embrace a culture of pitiless violence. Before going, many of these recruits spend much of their time on social media being brainwashed by propaganda videos. One 23-year-old woman, a devout Christian and Sunday school teacher, was recruited via Skype. The recruiter spent hours with the lonely woman teaching her the rituals of Islam. Maybe that’s because, according to some psychologists, the brain’s default setting is simply to believe because it takes extra work to analyze information.
The same process works for Trump’s supporters. They are impervious to facts or truth because their (understandable) frustration and anger at partisan greed and incompetence have fatigued them out of critical thinking. Like deranged newscaster Howard Beale in Network, they are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore. To express their outrage, they have rallied around a so-called “outsider” with no political experience, no detailed policies, and whacky ideas that subvert the very Constitution that he would be required to swear to uphold. Electing him would be like asking the clown at a child’s birthday party to start juggling chainsaws.
But understanding and even having sympathy for his followers’ feelings of political impotence doesn’t excuse their dangerous behavior. There is never an excuse for people blindly following a leader who consistently lies to them, who exaggerates threats and who proposes remedies that are unconstitutional. It’s shameful enough that Trump’s solutions run contrary to American values, but it’s more shameful that his followers refuse to acknowledge it. Such brainwashed behavior is demeaning to them and harmful to the country. Perhaps that’s why Trump enjoys the endorsement of several white supremacist groups, one of which proclaimed on their website: “Heil Donald Trump—The Ultimate Savior” and called for him to “Make America White Again!” Don’t worry — he’s trying his hardest.
Trump’s latest enemy du jour are Muslims. He’s the schoolyard bully rallying classmates to make fun of the skinny kid with glasses. When President Obama said that “Muslim-Americans are our friends and our neighbors; our co-workers, our sports heroes,” Trump quickly tweeted: “What sport is he talking about, and who?” The press immediately provided him with a list, as well as photos of Trump with prominent Muslim-American sports figures, including Shaquille O’Neal, Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali and, yes, me. What makes his statement even more insidious is the suggestion that, even if there were no Muslim sports heroes, Muslims would somehow be lesser people, less worthy. This cruel and dim-witted thinking is not the stuff presidents are made of.
Trump’s claims that he might support registering Muslims as well as call for a ban of Muslims from entering the United States — even U.S. citizens abroad — have elevated him to the level of a James Bond super-villain. And like those villains, he is doomed to failure. Even former Vice-President Dick Cheney condemned Trump: his proposals go “against everything we stand for and believe.”
There’s absolutely no evidence that his unconstitutional ideas would help in any way—quite the opposite. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson criticized Trump’s proposal as “irresponsible, probably illegal, unconstitutional and contrary to international law, un-American, and will actually hurt our efforts at homeland security.”
One of my favorite poems is “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats, in which he describes, in a chillingly obtuse and mystical way, a second coming — not of Christ, but of something much darker and sinister:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
When I read the description of the beast, it’s “gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” I can’t help but think of Trump and his cynical strategy of using misinformation, half-truths and deception in order to gain access to a position that should only be held by those who would be repulsed by that strategy.
Indeed, what rough beast slouches toward Washington to be born?
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