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Petraeus Won't Serve a Day in Jail; Neither Should Snowden |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29990"><span class="small">Trevor Timm, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Friday, 06 March 2015 09:51 |
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Timm writes: "The sweetheart deal the Justice Department gave to former CIA director David Petraeus for leaking top secret information compared to the stiff jail sentences other low-level leakers have received under the Obama administration has led to renewed calls for leniency for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden."
David Petraeus. (photo: Barbara Sax/Getty Images/AFP)
Petraeus Won't Serve a Day in Jail; Neither Should Snowden
By Trevor Timm, Guardian UK
06 March 15
 he sweetheart deal the Justice Department gave to former CIA director David Petraeus for leaking top secret information compared to the stiff jail sentences other low-level leakers have received under the Obama administration has led to renewed calls for leniency for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. And no one makes the case better than famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg, the first person ever charged under the Espionage Act or any other statute for leaking the Pentagon Papers to Congress and seventeen newspapers, told me on Thursday: “The factual charges against [Edward Snowden] are not more serious, as violations of the classification regulations and non-disclosure agreements, than those Petraeus has admitted to, which are actually quite spectacular.”
It’s hard to overstate the shocking nature of the government’s case against Petraeus. The information that he gave Paula Broadwell, his friendly biographer with whom he was then having an extramarital affair, was among the most sensitive in the US government. According to the indictment, Petraeus gave Broadwell eight black books containing “classified information regarding the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions, quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council meetings … and [his personal] discussions with the president of the United States.”
Much of this was Top Secret, and some was SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) higher than Top Secret – and he admitted in his plea to lying to the FBI about his leaks, knowing that doing so was a crime in itself.
Despite the gravity of Petreaus’ actions, he agreed to a single misdemeanor guilty plea for improperly “retaining” classified information, and prosecutors agreed to recommend a sentence of two years probation and no jail time.
Compare that to the actions of Chelsea Manning, who is serving 35 years for leaking classified information. As Ellsberg noted: “Chelsea Manning had access to SCI every day… where she worked in Iraq. She chose to disclose none of it, nothing higher than Secret”.
Or there’s John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer, who passed on to an investigator the names of two covert agents whose names were also never published. He received thirty months in jail and a felony conviction 2013. (As CIA director, Petreaus praised Kiriakou’s conviction just days before lying to the FBI about his own leak.) And Ellsberg himself faced 115 years for his leaks: “The Pentagon Papers I disclosed were all Top Secret. I’d been cleared for SCI too, but disclosed none of it, unlike Petraeus.”
Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer, was also just convicted of leaking classified information to New York Times journalist James Risen last month, “having first revealed it to Congress, as I did”, according to Ellsberg. Sterling was convicted of felony counts under the Espionage Act, and faces sentencing at the end of April. Ellsberg says Sterling’s “violations of security regulations were in no way more serious than what Petraeus has now admitted to”, and that, while it’s too late to do anything about his conviction, the judge should take the Petraeus plea bargain into account at his sentencing.
“If disclosing the identities of covert agents to an unauthorized person and storing them in several unauthorized locations deserves a charge with a maximum sentence of one year,” Ellsberg said, “then Edward Snowden should face not more than that same one count.”
Snowden’s US lawyer Ben Wizner made a similar point on Thursday to US News and World Report. “If Petraeus deserves ex ceptional treatment because of his service to the nation,” he said, “then surely the same exception should be offered to Edward Snowden, whose actions have led to a historic global debate that will strengthen free societies.”
Ellsberg told me: “Although I’m in no way authorized to negotiate on his behalf – only his lawyers can do that – I feel certain Snowden would come back tomorrow if he got the same deal as Petraeus. What he said to me when I visited him in Russia a few months ago is he wanted one or two years at most.” Snowden’s main concern? “He doesn’t want to discourage other whistleblowers by accepting more prison time than that, compared to the option of exile”, according to Ellsberg.
Critics have long claimed there’s a two-tiered system of justice for leakers: low-level officials get prosecuted like spies under the Espionage Act, while the powerful like Petraeus can leak with abandon and don’t have to worry about any charges at all. The CIA directors that immediately preceded and followed Petraeus leaked top secret classified information to reporters: Leon Panetta leaked secret details of the Osama bin Laden raid to the Zero Dark Thirty filmmakers; and John Brennan told reporters about a double agent that disrupted a bomb plot in Yemen. While another low level official went to jail for that story, John Brennan not only was spared from punishment, but eventually was rewarded with a promotion.
A third CIA director provides an even more direct precedent to the Petraeus case: after he resigned as director in 1996, John M Deutch was found to have stored on his uncleared personal home computer – which he used for internet access – information as sensitive as Petraeus’, including covert agent identities. He was given misdemeanor plea bargain exactly like Petraeus’, which he was about to sign when he was preemptively pardoned by President Clinton.
Petraeus is apparently an exception only because his leaks came to the attention of the FBI inadvertently, and they involved a large volume of exceptionally sensitive information.)
The government had the chance to hold Petreaus out as an example on the same felony Espionage Act charges they’ve leveled (unfairly) against every conscientious whistleblower they’ve indicted. Their answer? Leaking should no longer be a felony. Let’s make sure we hold them to that, and not only for CIA Directors.
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To Save the Environment, Don't Manufacture What You Can't Clean Up |
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Friday, 06 March 2015 09:33 |
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Jensen writes: "Some of the most important questions confronting us are: what should we do about this culture's industrial wastes, from greenhouse gases to pesticides to ocean microplastics?"
Deepwater Horizon spill. (photo: Joel Sartore)
To Save the Environment, Don't Manufacture What You Can't Clean Up
By Derrick Jensen, CounterPunch
06 March 15
 ome of the most important questions confronting us are: what should we do about this culture’s industrial wastes, from greenhouse gases to pesticides to ocean microplastics?
Can the capitalists clean up the messes they create? Or is the whole industrial system beyond reform? The answers become clear with a little context.
Let’s start the discussion of context with two riddles that aren’t very funny.
Q: What do you get when a cross a long drug habit, a quick temper, and a gun?
A: Two life terms for murder, with earliest release date 2026.
And,
Q: What do you get when you cross a large corporation, two nation states, 40 tons of poison, and at least 8,000 dead human beings?
A: Retirement with full pay and benefits. Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide. Bhopal.
The point of these riddles is not merely that when it comes to murder and many other atrocities, different rules apply to the poor than to the rich. And it’s not merely that ‘economic production’ is a get-out-of-jail free card for whatever atrocities the ‘producers’ commit, whether it’s genocide, gynocide, ecocide, slaving, mass murder, mass poisoning, and so on.
Do we even care? We already know they don’t …
The point here is that this culture is clearly not particularly interested in cleaning up its toxic messes. Obviously, or it wouldn’t keep making them. It wouldn’t allow those who make these messes to do so with impunity. It certainly wouldn’t socially reward those who make them.
This may or may not be the appropriate time to mention that this culture has created, for example, 14 quadrillion (yes, quadrillion) lethal doses of Plutonium 239, which has a half-life of over 24,000 years, which means that in a mere 100,000 years that number will be all the way down to only about 3.5 quadrillion lethal doses: Yay!
And socially reward them it does. I could have used a whole host of examples other than Warren Anderson, who was playing on the back nine long after he should have been hanging by the neck (he was sentenced to death in absentia, but the US refused to extradite him).
There’s Tony Hayward, who oversaw BP’s devastation of the Gulf of Mexico and who was ‘punished’ for this with a severance package worth well over $30 million. Or we could throw another couple of riddles at you, which are really the same riddles:
Q: What do you call someone who puts poison in the subways of Tokyo?
A: A terrorist.
Q: What do you call someone who puts poison (cyanide) into groundwater?
A: A capitalist: CEO of a gold mining corporation.
We could talk about frackers, who make money as they poison groundwater. We could talk about anyone associated with Monsanto. You can add your own examples. I’d say you can ‘choose your poison’ but of course you can’t. Those are chosen for you by those doing the poisoning.
Civilization’s ability to overcome our native common sense
I keep thinking about one of the most fundamentally sound (and fundamentally disregarded) statements I’ve ever read. After Bhopal, one of the doctors trying to help survivors stated that corporations (and by extension, all organizations and individuals) “shouldn’t be permitted to make poison for which there is no antidote.”
Please note, by the way, that far from having antidotes, nine out of ten chemicals used in pesticides in the US haven’t even been thoroughly tested for (human) toxicity.
Isn’t that something we were all supposed to learn by the time we were three? Isn’t it one of the first lessons our parents are supposed to teach us? Don’t make a mess you can’t clean up!
Yet that is precisely the foundational motivator of this culture. Sure, we can use fancy phrases to describe the processes of creating messes we have no intention of cleaning up, and in many cases cannot clean up.
And so we get phrases like ‘developing natural resources’, or ‘sustainable development’, or ‘technological progress’ (like the invention and production of plastics, the bathing of the world in endocrine disruptors, and so on), or ‘mining’, or ‘agriculture’, or ‘the Green Revolution’, or ‘fueling growth’, or ‘creating jobs’, or ‘building empire’, or ‘global trade’.
But physical reality is always more important than what we call it or how we rationalize it. And the truth is that this culture has been based from the beginning to the present on privatizing benefits and externalizing costs. In other words, on exploiting others and leaving messes behind.
Hell, they call them ‘limited liability corporations’ because a primary purpose is to limit the legal and financial liability of those who benefit from the actions of corporations for the harm these actions cause.
Internalizing insanity
This is no way to run a childhood, and it’s an even worse way to run a culture. It’s killing the planet. Part of the problem is that most of us are insane, having been made so by this culture. We should never forget what RD Laing wrote about this insanity:
“In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex [and I would say this entire way of life, including the creation of messes we have neither the interest nor capacity to clean up], we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity.
“We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high IQs, if possible.”
We’ve all seen this too many times. If you ask any reasonably intelligent seven-year-old how to stop global warming caused in great measure by the burning of oil and gas and by the destruction of forests and prairies and wetlands, this child might well say, “Stop burning oil and gas, and stop destroying forests and prairies and wetlands!”
If you ask a reasonably intelligent thirty-year-old who works for a ‘green’ high tech industry, you’ll probably get an answer that primarily helps the industry that pays his or her salary.
Part of the brainwashing process of turning us into imbeciles consists of getting us to identify more closely with-and care more about the fate of-this culture rather than the real physical world. We are taught that the economy is the ‘real world’, and the real world is merely a place from which to steal and on which to dump externalities.
Does nature have to adapt to us? Or us to nature?
Most of us internalize this lesson so completely that it becomes entirely transparent to us. Even most environmentalists internalize this. What do most mainstream solutions to global warming have in common? They all take industrialism as a given, and the natural world as having to conform to industrialism.
They all take empire as a given. They all take overshoot as a given. All of this is literally insane, in terms of being out of touch with physical reality. The real world must always be more important than our social system, in part because without a real world you can’t have any social system whatsoever. It’s embarrassing to have to write this.
Upton Sinclair famously said that it’s hard to make a man understand something, when his job depends on him not understanding it.
I would add that it’s hard to make people understand something when the benefits they accrue through their exploitative and destructive way of life depend on it. So we suddenly get really stupid about the waste products produced by this culture.
When people ask how we can stop polluting the oceans with plastic, they don’t really mean, “How can we stop polluting the oceans with plastic?” They mean, “How can we stop polluting the oceans with plastic and still have this way of life?”
And when they ask how we can stop global warming, they really mean, “How can we stop global warming without stopping this level of energy usage?”. When they ask how we can have clean groundwater, they really mean, “How can we have clean groundwater while we continue to use and spread all over the environment thousands of useful but toxic chemicals that end up in groundwater?”
The answer to all of these is: you can’t.
First we must recover our sanity. Then we must act
As I’ve been writing this essay about the messes caused by this culture, there’s an allegorical image I can’t get out of my mind. It’s of a half-dozen Emergency Medical Technicians putting bandages on a person who has been assaulted by a knife-wielding psychopath.
The EMTs are trying desperately to stop this person from bleeding out. It’s all very tense and suspenseful as to whether they’ll be able to staunch the flow of blood before the person dies.
But here’s the problem: as these EMTs are applying bandages as fast as they can, the psychopath is continuing to stab the victim. Worse, the psychopath is making wounds faster than the EMTs are able to bandage them. And the psychopath is paid very well for stabbing the victim, while most of the EMTs are bandaging in their spare time.
And in fact the health of the economy is based on how much blood the victim loses – as in this culture, where economic production is measured by the conversion of living landbase into raw materials, e.g., living forests into two-by-fours, living mountains into coal.
How do we stop the victim from bleeding out? Any child can tell you. And any sane person who cares more about the health of the victim than the health of the economy that is based on dismembering the victim can tell you. The first thing you need to do is stop the stabbing. No amount of bandages will make up for an assault that is ongoing, indeed, one that is accelerating.
What do we do about this culture’s fabrication of industrial wastes? The first step is stop their production. Actually the first step is that we regain our sanity, that is, we transfer our loyalty away from the psychopaths, and toward the victim, toward, in this case, the planet that is our only home.
Once we do that, everything else is technical. How do we stop them? We stop them.
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The "Snowden Is Ready to Come Home!" Story: A Case Study in Typical Media Deceit |
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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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Thursday, 05 March 2015 15:07 |
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Greenwald writes: "When U.S. political and media figures say Snowden should 'man up,' come home and argue to a court that he did nothing wrong, they are deceiving the public, since they have made certain that whistleblowers charged with 'espionage' are legally barred from even raising that defense."
Edward Snowden. (photo: The New Yorker)
The "Snowden Is Ready to Come Home!" Story: A Case Study in Typical Media Deceit
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
05 March 15
 ost sentient people rationally accept that the U.S. media routinely disseminates misleading stories and outright falsehoods in the most authoritative tones. But it’s nonetheless valuable to examine particularly egregious case studies to see how that works. In that spirit, let’s take yesterday’s numerous, breathless reports trumpeting the “BREAKING” news that “Edward Snowden now wants to come home!” and is “now negotiating the terms of his return!”
Ever since Snowden revealed himself to the public 20 months ago, he has repeatedly said the same exact thing when asked about his returning to the U.S.: I would love to come home, and would do so if I could get a fair trial, but right now, I can’t.
His primary rationale for this argument has long been that under the Espionage Act, the 1917 statute under which he has been charged, he would be barred by U.S. courts from even raising his key defense: that the information he revealed to journalists should never have been concealed in the first place and he was thus justified in disclosing it to journalists. In other words, when U.S. political and media figures say Snowden should “man up,” come home and argue to a court that he did nothing wrong, they are deceiving the public, since they have made certain that whistleblowers charged with “espionage” are legally barred from even raising that defense.
Snowden has also pointed out that legal protections for whistleblowers are explicitly inapplicable to those, like him, who are employed by private contractors (rendering President Obama’s argument about why Snowden should “come home” entirely false). One month after Snowden was revealed, Daniel Ellsberg wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post arguing that Snowden did the right thing in leaving the U.S. because he would not be treated fairly, and argued Snowden should not return until he is guaranteed a fully fair trial.
Snowden has said all of this over and over. In June 2013, when I asked him during the online Guardian chat why he left the U.S. for Hong Kong, he said: “the US Government, just as they did with other whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home . . . That’s not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it.” In January 2014, AP reported about a new online chat Snowden gave: “Snowden said returning would be the best resolution. But Snowden said he can’t return because he wouldn’t be allowed to argue at trial that he acted in the public interest when he revealed the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs.” In that chat, he said: “Returning to the US, I think, is the best resolution for the government, the public, and myself.”
In his May 2014 interview with NBC News’ Brian Williams, Snowden said: “I don’t think there’s ever been any question that I’d like to go home.” That led to headlines like this one from CBS News — on May 29, 2014, more than nine months ago:
CBS News headline noting Snowden's desire to return to the states. (photo: The Intercept)
For many months, it has also been repeatedly reported there have been negotiations between the DOJ and Snowden’s lawyers for the terms of his return, though those negotiations have gone nowhere. In April 2014, the New York Times reported that Snowden “retained a well known Washington defense lawyer last summer in hopes of reaching a plea deal with federal prosecutors that would allow him to return to the United States and spare him significant prison time.” In June 2014, Bill Gertz reported that “Federal prosecutors recently held discussions with representatives of renegade National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden on a possible deal involving his return to the United States.”
Snowden’s U.S. lawyers have repeatedly said the same thing. In April 2014, New York magazine — under the headline “Snowden Hired Lawyer to Negotiate a Plea Deal” — reported:
Government officials said negotiations with Snowden’s lawyers remained at an early stage, and it doesn’t appear that there’s any deal on the horizon. However, Ben Wizner, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represents Snowden, said he is still “interested in returning home” from Moscow, where he has temporary asylum. Wizner continued:
“He is and always has been on America’s side. He would cooperate in extraordinary ways in the right circumstances. But he does not believe that the ‘felon’ label is the right word for someone whose act of conscience has revitalized democratic oversight of the intelligence community and is leading to historic reforms.”
Headline from April 2014 on Snowden's lawyer. (photo: The Intercept)
Yesterday, in Moscow, Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena held a press conference to promote his new book, was asked about Snowden’s case, and said exactly what has been known for almost two years: “He has a desire to go back, and we are doing everything possible to make that happen.” Kucherena added that lawyers in various countries have been working on Snowden’s behalf to negotiate terms for a fair trial.
Various media outlets then took these redundant, anodyne comments and distorted them into some brand new BREAKING!! event — as though Snowden suddenly decided for the first time he wants to Come Home — and then proceeded to extract from this fake narrative a series of utterly misleading, false and propagandistic claims about Snowden, Russia and the NSA. The first instance I saw of this was yesterday morning, from Politico’s digital editorial director Blake Hounshell, looking as always to generate Politico clicks by hyping empty garbage:
Blake Hounshell tweet on Snowden's lawyer. (photo:The Intercept)
That was retweeted by dozens of journalists and others, treating it like some sort of new confession on Snowden’s part that he’s suddenly “ready to return” home. Over and over, print and television media outlets then spent the rest of the day screeching that Snowden has now decided he wants to come home!!! “Snowden Seeks to Return Home,” proclaimed the headline of the New York Times, while the article strongly suggested this was a new desire created by life in Moscow: Snowden “would like to return to the U.S. after nearly two years of exile in Russia.” The NSA-allied website Lawfare cited the article to claim: “Edward Snowden wants to come home.” ABC pronounced: “NSA Leaker Edward Snowden Wants to Return Home.” Reuters: “Fugitive ex-NSA contractor Snowden seeks to come home: lawyer.” And on and on and on.
Countless cable shows similarly treated this like some sort of breaking, revealing news about Snowden’s life in Russia and his desperation to return to the Land of the Free — all based on things that happened over and over during the last 20 months. The most hilariously inane was this CNN discussion of “BREAKING NOW” news hosted by Wolf Blitzer, involving his know-nothing panelists: CNN “counter-terrorism analyst” (i.e., former CIA counter-terrorism official) Phillip Mudd, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, and Newt Gingrich, all of whom put on their Serious Expert Faces to spout utter idiocy. Let’s look at some of what they said:
CNN discussion on Snowden's lawyer. (photo: The Intercept)
Mudd: “I don’t understand why someone who is one of the most remarkable leakers we’ve ever seen gets to flee overseas, and then talk to the Department of Justice about what he wants for his trial. Come home, son, and spend your 30 years in jail. He’s cooked.”
CNN’s “expert” is apparently unaware that the DOJ very frequently — almost always, in fact — negotiates with people charged with very serious felonies over plea agreements. He’s also apparently unaware of this thing called “asylum,” which the U.S. routinely grants to people charged by other countries with crimes on the ground that they’d be persecuted with imprisonment if they returned home.
Also, with this prevailing mentality being spewed by former government officials and current news network “experts” — “come home, son, and spend your 30 years in jail. He’s cooked” — does anyone have difficulty seeing why Snowden believes he would not get a fair trial?
Ignatius: “It must be very difficult to be Edward Snowden, living in the Moscow of Vladimir Putin, at a time when Putin’s opposition is being murdered in the streets, so I can’t help but think that Snowden wants out, and the fact that he’s willing to negotiate, which he said before he wouldn’t do, is interesting.”
It’s hard to overstate how false and misleading this is. Snowden had never said he wouldn’t negotiate for his return; as I’ve demonstrated, he’s been negotiating this through his lawyers informally for a long time, and his position has always been the same: he’d like to return home if he could be assured a fair trial. David Ignatitus just made all of this up, all based on this fake news item that Snowden has had some sort of sudden change of heart.
Then there’s the bit about living in the Russia “of Vladimir Putin.” For more than 60 years, U.S. elites have been eager to tell Americans that anyone living in Russia is inherently miserable. That’s particularly true of Western dissidents: the apocryphal stories of British defector Kim Philby being destroyed by a dark, lonely, miserable existence that culminated in his drinking himself to death are often invoked to suggest that a similar fate awaits Snowden (who doesn’t drink, who lives with his longtime girlfriend, who is regarded as a hero by millions and millions of people around the world, who receives awards and prestigious appointments, and who is incredibly gratified and fulfilled both by what he did and his current life).
That’s all Ignatius is up to with these claims, all based on the obvious media-created fiction that Snowden has suddenly realized how desperate he is to leave Russia. Again, this entire conversation — like the whole media blitz yesterday about this story — is all based on utter fiction.
This “everyone-in-Russia-is-miserable” line has been a staple of U.S propaganda since the end of World War II, and remarkably, nothing has changed. Indeed, the climate created by our New Cold Warriors is, in some respects, even more desperate than the “he’s-a-Soviet-shill” tactics pioneered in the 1950s (yesterday, BuzzFeed investigated a journalist for the Thought Crime of writing articles which BuzzFeed’s blogger Miriam Elder deemed to be “pro-Russia,” and thus smeared him with evidence-free innuendo as a likely paid Kremlin agent). Yes, many political rights are severely abridged in Russia, but there are over 140 million people living in Russia and some of them are fulfilled human beings living fulfilled human lives (BREAKING!) while there is substantial human misery in the U.S. as well.
Snowden did not choose to live in Russia. He was forced to remain there when trying to leave because the U.S. government revoked his passport and bullied the Cubans out of offering him safe passage on his way to Latin America. But whether jingoists like David Ignatius can comprehend this or not, Snowden (as most people would) actually considers living in Moscow with his girlfriend and freely participating in the vital global debate he provoked to be preferable to withering in a cage inside the repressive U.S. penal state.
Blitzer: “What do you think, Mr. Speaker? He could spend the rest of his life in Moscow — it might be chilly there in the winter — but it’s better, presumably, than jail?”
I can’t overstate how many times I’ve heard people say that Snowden must be miserable in Moscow because of how cold it gets in the winter. Leave aside the bizarre view that climate is the greatest factor in determining how happy and fulfilled someone’s life is, and further leave aside the notion that all 140 million Russians must have a horrible life because it’s cold during the winter. There are other places — such as Canada, North Dakota, Sweden, Boston — that are also extremely cold; do people believe that residents there are, as a result of the weather, inherently doomed to horrible lives?
Gingrich: “I think if we can find a way to get him home, get the rest of the documents that he has not leaked . . . it’s worth doing, but I think he’d have to serve jail time, and it’d probably be fairly lengthy. I don’t think the country would tolerate this level of betrayal, not having some very significant jail time —
Blitzer: “You say lengthy. What do you think?
Gingrich: “I’m not an expert in this, but I’d say more than 10 years.”
Where to start? First, Gingrich’s belief that it’s possible to “get the rest of the documents that he has not leaked” is simply adorable. Second, Gingrich is a fascinating choice for CNN to have pontificate on proper punishments given that he is the first House Speaker to ever be punished for ethics violations, for which he was fined $300,000. Third, David Petraeus was just allowed to plead guilty for leaking extremely sensitive secrets — not out of a whistleblowing desire to inform the public but simply to satisfy his mistress — and will almost certainly spend no time in jail; Gingrich, Blitzer, Ignatius and friends would never dare suggest that the General should go to prison (just as DC’s stern law-and-order advocates who demand Snowden’s imprisonment would never dare suggest the same for James Clapper for having lied to Congress).
Most important, if you were Snowden, and you constantly heard U.S. political and media elites consigning you to prison for a decade or longer before your trial started, would you remotely believe assurances that you’d get a fair trial? What rational person would ever willingly submit themselves to a penal state that imprisons more of its citizens than any other in the world, run by people with this mentality?
And when you examine case studies like this of what U.S. media is not just capable of doing but eager to do — concoct a completely false narrative based on fictitious events and then proceed to spend a full day drawing all sorts of self-serving and propagandistic lessons from it — why would anyone regard what comes spewing forth from them with anything other than extreme suspicion and contempt?
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The NRA's Stranglehold Threatens the Whole World |
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Thursday, 05 March 2015 15:05 |
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Beauchamp writes: "The National Rifle Association's outsize influence on American politics, including its notorious suppression of universal background checks and further research into gun violence, is well known. But it may come as a surprise that the NRA influences U.S. foreign policy as well - specifically, the implementation of international treaties."
Members of the Reston-Herndon Alliance to End Gun Violence hold a vigil against the National Rifle Association. (photo: AFP/Paul J. Richards)
The NRA's Stranglehold Threatens the Whole World
By Scott Beauchamp, Al Jazeera America
05 March 15
The organization’s resistance to international arms control reveals its true mission: corporate lobbying
he National Rifle Association’s outsize influence on American politics, including its notorious suppression of universal background checks and further research into gun violence, is well known. But it may come as a surprise that the NRA influences U.S. foreign policy as well — specifically, the implementation of international treaties.
Most guns used in armed conflicts aren’t manufactured in the combat zones where they end up. They are made in more developed countries and then shipped elsewhere. This process is possible because of a lack of global cooperation in regulating arms shipments. As Oxfam has pointed out, there are more international laws governing the trade of bananas than governing guns. Governments simply don’t know when guns are being sold, where they’re going or how they’re going to be used.
The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is the United Nations’ bid to assert some semblance of control over the unregulated $85-billion-a-year international arms market. As Reuters described it, the treaty “aims to set standards for all cross-border transfers of conventional weapons, ranging from small firearms to tanks and attack helicopters. It would create binding requirements for states to review cross-border contracts to ensure that weapons will not be used in human rights abuses, terrorism, violations of humanitarian law or organized crime.”
Most observers, including representatives of the 130 nations that have already signed, welcomed the effort to track where weapons are going and how they are used. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called the ATT a “significant step” in making the world a safer place. Only three countries opposed the treaty: Syria, Iran and North Korea.
Enter the NRA, one of the most powerful pressure groups in Washington, with over 5 million members and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year. Even though the ATT would not regulate domestic sales, the NRA vehemently opposes U.S. ratification of the treaty. It charges that that the ATT would create a worldwide gun registry and transfer power from Congress to the U.N. But for all intents and purposes, the U.S. already tracks overseas sales of guns, and the ATT would not automatically create a registry of individual owners. Congressional authority to approve treaties hasn’t been impinged; the treaty, after all, will take effect only if it’s ratified by the Senate.
If the NRA’s complaints seem wild and unfounded, it is because the organization is not a think tank or academic institution. It’s a lobbying group whose strength is its influence in Congress. And power in Congress depends on more than cogent arguments. By its own estimate, the NRA donated $35 million dollars to candidates in last November’s elections. The politicians purchased by the NRA reliably defy popular sentiment and vote against gun regulation.
So in 2011, after the NRA came out against the ATT, 58 members of the Senate sent letters of opposition to President Barack Obama and then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas said, “We will oppose ratification of an Arms Trade Treaty presented to the Senate that in any way restricts the rights of law-abiding U.S. citizens to manufacture, assemble, possess, transfer or purchase firearms, ammunition and related items.” His statement is odd, since the treaty presented to the Senate contained no such provisions.
Besides dragging their feet on ratification, Moran and his cohort have even insisted that the NRA be allowed to voice its complaints during negotiations over the details of the treaty. Rachel Stohl, who was a consultant to the United Nations ATT process, wrote that the meetings were “only open to those organizations that could demonstrate a record of actively promoting the Arms Trade Treaty and supporting its objectives and purpose” — which makes sense, since the treaty is already international law. It would serve no purpose to let an organization that disagrees with the basic premise of the law obstruct its implementation.
Why would an organization whose original purpose was to advocate for gun safety and offer marksmanship classes expend so much effort attacking an international treaty that has no bearing on the Second Amendment? The bloviating makes sense only if you consider what the NRA actually is. It’s not an idealistic nonprofit like the ACLU. It’s not a populist defender of the Second Amendment. It’s not the voice of hunters and sportsmen. Membership dues and program fees constitute less than half the NRA’s budget. The rest comes from the $12-billion-a-year firearm industry. At least 16 firearm manufacturers and sellers contribute, with some even donating a fixed percentage of their sales to the organization.
The NRA speaks for business interests, not ideals. As former Ambassador Dan Simpson wrote for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, what the NRA “wants is not to preserve Americans’ Second Amendment rights. What it wants is to increase sales of guns.” We already suffer from the NRA’s stranglehold on our domestic gun policy. Now people in conflict zones around the world will suffer because the gun lobby has hijacked an important aspect of our foreign policy.
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n what could be a prelude to a Presidential run in 2016, on Friday Joe Biden released to the public both e-mails that he has written while serving as Vice-President for the past six years.
