|
FOCUS: ICE Is a Renegade National Police Force Operating Beyond the Law |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 20 April 2018 10:58 |
|
Pierce writes: "There is a fully deputized, well-armed national police force operating in this country like we've never seen operate before."
ICE agents make an arrest. (photo: Getty)
ICE Is a Renegade National Police Force Operating Beyond the Law
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
20 April 18
It is a violation of the foundational principles of this country.
 here is a fully deputized, well-armed national police force operating in this country like we’ve never seen operate before. It cannot truly be called lawless because it is operating under the laws as executed by the national Executive, consented to by the national Legislature, and approved of, tacitly, by the people who elected the members of the former two branches. In another sense, however, in its contempt for the rights of citizens guaranteed by the Constitution, it is acting not against the law, but in a dark space beyond it, where the law is as weak and irrelevant as gravity is in outer space. From Syracuse.com:
John Collins was standing outside the milk house at his dairy farm this morning when he heard yelling coming from inside. He ran in, he says, and saw his worker, Marcial de Leon Aguilar, pinned up against the window by armed men. The men did not identify themselves and were screaming at Aguilar, Collins said. "I run and say, 'What the hell is going on in here?'" Collins said.
There is no question more vital to the survival of democracy than, “Hey, what the hell is going on here?”
Then the men told Collins they were officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He asked them for a warrant or some paperwork to explain what they were doing. They had none, he said, so he ordered them to get off his property and leave Aguilar alone. As this happened, Collins said, Aguilar's children watched. They were waiting nearby for the school bus to come. Collins said the officers put Aguilar in handcuffs and took him across the rural road to their vehicles. At least seven officers had come onto the small farm, Collins said.
Seven fully armed cops storm a farm to bust one guy? Was he an undocumented immigrant from fcking Krypton?
Collins said he followed the officers cross the street and asked them why they were taking Aguilar, but he didn't get a straight answer. He also continued to ask for paperwork, but was not offered any by the ICE officers. Aguilar and his wife, Virginia, are Guatemalan. Aguilar has worked for Collins for about nine months, Collins said. Aguilar, his wife, and his children live in a home on Collins' property. Collins said Aguilar had proper documentation to work for him. And he's been paying taxes since working for Collins. Aguilar's wife, Virginia, and the couple's four children were not in the U.S. until recently. She was caught crossing the border, illegally, with the children. Collins said she has been meeting with ICE officers since she arrived, and is seeking asylum for herself and the children because of the violence in Guatemala. Collins said Virginia met with ICE officers as recently as last week, and has another meeting scheduled for this Friday. At times, Aguilar has accompanied his wife, who is pregnant, to some of the meetings, Collins said.
Sounds like both the Aguilars and the Collinses have been playing it pretty straight.
"ICE needs a warrant. If they go on someone's property without one, they are violating the law," said immigration law expert and Cornell law professor Stephen Yale-Loehr. Collins said the officers gave him nothing when he continued to ask. Collins followed the ICE officers across as they took Aguilar, in handcuffs, to their three waiting vehicles."I told them you can't come in here without a warrant," Collins said. "They can't take someone and throw them up against the wall because of the color of their skin."
News travels slowly upstate. Mr. Collins may have missed what happened to the country on November 9, 2016.
It’s long past time for ICE to get a cavity search by the institutions of democracy. This, of course, will not happen under the current president* nor under the current Congress. Rein these cowboys in before a whole lot of somebodies get badly dead.
Collins attempted to take photos and video with his phone. When he did that, he said, one of the ICE officers grabbed his phone and threw it into the road. Then they handcuffed him and threatened to arrest him for hindering a federal investigation, he said. But then the officers uncuffed him and left with Aguilar in the backseat of a dark Dodge Caravan. "This was something you see on TV," Collins said. "You don't expect it to be here."
But see, that’s the thing. Eventually, it always happens here. Wherever you are. That’s what James Otis meant. This entire country started as a revolution against arbitrary and unwarranted searches and seizures. That’s what originally lit the fire in Boston that spread to the other colonies. Looked at in the long view of history, this country’s origin story is a Fourth Amendment story.
If it can happen to people in the Arizona desert, or in the barrios of Los Angeles, or in the meat-packing plants in Iowa or Kansas, it can happen on a dairy farm in rural New York. If it can happen to families in El Paso, it can happen to the Collinses in Rome, New York. And if it can happen to the Collinses, it can happen to us all. That’s the fundamental truth of the American experiment.
What a scene does this open! Every man prompted by revenge, ill-humor, or wantonness to inspect the inside of his neighbor's house, may get a Writ of Assistance. Others will ask it from self-defence; one arbitrary exertion will provoke another, until society be involved in tumult and in blood.
—James Otis, on the Writs of Assistance, Superior Court of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1761.
 |
|
James (Dick Tracy) Comey, What Did You Expect? |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 20 April 2018 08:52 |
|
Ash writes: "A lot of people are still really sore about James Comey blowing up Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Imagine that. And with each day that we endure the very stable genius-king, who never should had a prayer of being president to begin with, the ire of the subjects grows."
Former FBI director James B. Comey. (photo: Susan Walsh)
James (Dick Tracy) Comey, What Did You Expect?
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
20 April 18
 lot of people are still really sore about James Comey blowing up Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Imagine that. And with each day that we endure the very stable genius-king, who never should have had a prayer of being president to begin with, the ire of the subjects grows.
To be fair to Hillary Clinton and everyone else whose sanity is being tested, Comey flat-out blew it. It was a blunder he should have known never to make, and his first clue ought to have been all the other high-ranking officials at the FBI imploring him not to do it.
It would, however, be a mistake to allow current events to obscure the better angels of Comey’s nature.
In the rush to honor the life of Grandma Barbara Bush, there is beckoning to forget or at least reinvent her son George W. Bush, the narcissistic, genocidal, anti-democratic enemy of the Constitution who rose to assume the presidency, likely without winning the presidential election.
George W. Bush’s transgressions, while a bit less theatrical than the current headache in the Oval Office, were better targeted, more thoroughly premeditated, significantly more lethal, and did far greater damage to the Constitution (thus far).
Detailing the full scope of Bush’s transgressions would, at the very least, be a novel-length undertaking. One incident, however, does give us valuable insight into the character of James Comey.
In 2004, James Comey was the Deputy Attorney General. His boss then, Attorney General John Ashcroft, had been hospitalized. A “severe case of pancreatitis” necessitated the removal of his gallbladder. A survivable operation, but nothing to be trifled with. During Ashcroft’s recovery from what doctors described as a successful procedure, there was, however, a complication — but one political, not medical in nature.
Facing widespread and growing opposition to his legally dubious warrantless eavesdropping program instituted in the aftermath of the attack of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush was scrambling for legal validation to continue the surveillance.
Ashcroft, the Attorney General, Comey, his deputy, and then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III were on record as opposing any form of warrantless surveillance as legally unjustifiable. A pitched battle was underway, out of public view, between Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller and White House officials over allowing the program to continue.
The conflict over the warrantless eavesdropping program came to a boil on the night of March 10, 2004, in Ashcroft’s hospital room. Bush, White House chief of staff Andrew Card and then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales had devised a plan to go to Ashcroft’s bedside in the hospital and attempt to persuade him to sign an authorization of the surveillance program on behalf of the Department of Justice as he lay recovering from surgery.
Comey caught wind of the plan and raced to the hospital to literally head-off Card and Gonzales, who were also en route, authorization documents in hand. Comey arrived first, but Card and Gonzales were undeterred. What ensued was a tense exchange that resulted in Card and Gonzales being rebuffed and retreating empty-handed.
In the days that followed, Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller and other DoJ officials threatened to resign if the warrantless eavesdropping program were allowed to continue. Bush reluctantly backed down and accepted court participation.
The contradiction obviously is that, as the documents Edward Snowden placed in the public record clearly illustrate, warrantless surveillance continued at a mind boggling pace.
Warrantless surveillance in the digital age has evolved into a bit of a hydra. There are a number of U.S. government entities capable of initiating such programs, often working in concert with a myriad of private companies. It’s not clear, however, that Comey in his capacity first as Deputy Attorney General or later as FBI Director authorized such programs. He appeared more likely to have opposed unwarranted surveillance.
While Comey seems to lack the political savvy required for the FBI directorship, he clearly believes that the rule of law matters and that it is his duty to uphold it, to this day. He sees an independent role for Justice Department officials as indispensable and strives to meet these expectations in the manner in which he conducts his affairs.
He is a man of infinitely greater personal integrity than Donald Trump, and can well be expected to prove that in the coming months.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
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.
|
|
|
I Was Outed as a CIA Officer. But Pardoning Scooter Libby Hurts All of Us. |
|
|
Thursday, 19 April 2018 13:57 |
|
Plame writes: "Donald Trump is not known for nuance, and so the timing of his pardon of former vice president Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury more than a decade ago, aroused suspicions."
Former chief of staff for Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby. (photo: James Lawler Duggan/Reuters)
I Was Outed as a CIA Officer. But Pardoning Scooter Libby Hurts All of Us.
By Valerie Plame, The Washington Post
19 April 18
Valerie Plame says that future assets may question whether they can be protected from the perils of a blown cover.
 onald Trump is not known for nuance, and so the timing of his pardon of former vice president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury more than a decade ago, aroused suspicions. Didn’t the president have better things to do, like meet with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to plan the attack on Syria? Was Trump really going to go where President George W. Bush himself resolved not to go, despite repeated and intense badgering by Cheney, who in the last days of the Bush presidency said to him, “I can’t believe you’re going to leave a soldier on the battlefield”?
Yet on Friday, Trump found time to pardon Libby. He had heard that Libby had been “treated unfairly.” I doubt it had much to do with Libby. Or me, a central figure in the case. Or justice. Trump’s critics might be forgiven for thinking that the pardon was more about sending an explicit message to a select audience of Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen, among others, that if they are convicted of a crime against national security in service to Trump, their loyalty will be rewarded with clemency.
But what gets lost in this assessment is why Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the first place, and why it matters today. In 2003, my husband, Joe Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times criticizing the Bush White House’s central premise for the invasion of Iraq: Saddam Hussein represented an imminent nuclear threat. Joe wrote that the intelligence had been distorted and “cherry-picked” in an attempt to sell the war to the American people. Shortly afterward, senior White House officials betrayed my identity to various media sources. I was at the time a covert CIA ops officer. Joe and I were subjected to years of character assassination. Scooter Libby was the only administration aide indicted in connection with the leak of my identity, but the special prosecutor on the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, said at the conclusion of the trial that there was “a cloud over the office of the vice president.”
“Outing” a covert operative imperils many. It risks not only the officer’s safety — there are many who want a CIA officer dead — but the entire network of foreign assets being run by the officer. In some cases, the assets’ lives and even those of their families may be jeopardized. The danger is real. For example, I handled an asset who was a prominent nuclear scientist in a rogue country. He provided the CIA with invaluable intelligence on how his regime went about procuring nuclear-weapons components. If his government had known he was meeting with me in third countries and passing critical information, he would have been killed. No question. I don’t know the fate of all my assets, but I do know that anyone who thought that my CIA identity was “well known around Washington” (as the columnist Robert Novak wrote in The Washington Post in 2003) and that I did not have covert operational responsibilities in the lead-up to the Iraq War is dead wrong.
Unintended consequences can extend for years: For example, imagine a Russian hacker has critical intelligence about his government’s efforts to undermine the 2016 U.S. elections. The hacker, however, also knows the story of my outing and decides not to cooperate with the CIA at any cost. He elects to take his precious intelligence to a service that can keep its secrets — like Mossad.
In the leak of my name, so much political chaff has been thrown up by partisans of the convicted Libby that the understanding and appreciation for why some things must remain secret has been lost.
In a curious twist, the problematic law under which Fitzgerald carried out his investigation, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, was written by Victoria Toensing. (Yes, the same Toensing who, with her husband, Joseph diGenova, was recently poised to join Trump’s legal team representing him in Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian election meddling and possible collusion with Trump campaign associates — and the lawyer who represents Libby.)
The act was written primarily in response to several incidents in the 1970s in which covert CIA officer identities were revealed and, in one instance, possibly contributed to the identification and assassination of the CIA Athens chief of station in 1976. The act is due for some review. No one was indicted for violating that law in my case, but what I know for sure is that nobody can truly assess the damage continuing in the field as a result of the outing of my covert identity.
The pardon power of the president cannot be challenged constitutionally; it should be wielded with enormous diligence and prudence. In granting his pardon to Scooter Libby, Donald Trump seems to have avoided the careful process of review within the Justice Department that has been established to consider pardons.
Our national security is at serious risk when there is daylight and distrust between the president and the CIA. When President-elect Trump compared the intelligence community to Nazi Germany, he cast doubt over the future of his relationship with its hard-working and patriotic members. His chaotic presidency has exposed deep erosion in our democracy; the shoreline has vanished much faster than most of us ever imagined. In all the noise, it’s become increasingly difficult to separate issues that matter from those that are ephemeral. The pardon of Scooter Libby, the most senior aide to the vice president, who received a fair trial before an exacting trial judge and jury and was found guilty of the crimes of which he was accused, matters deeply.
|
|
FOCUS: Corrupt Democrats Trash Constituents Over F-35 Basing in Vermont |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 19 April 2018 11:56 |
|
Boardman writes: "The third-term Democratic mayor has now asked the Air Force to impose its deafening fighter-bomber on a neighboring city for no cogently articulated reason, following a process bereft of integrity, rigor, or honor."
Protesters demonstrate against F-35 being based near Burlington, Vermont. (photo: Getty)
Corrupt Democrats Trash Constituents Over F-35 Basing in Vermont
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
19 April 18
Author’s Note: Since the Burlington mayor’s non-veto veto of his city council’s anti-F-35 resolution, two other affected towns have acted. On April 16, the city council in Winooski, which sits in the airport’s flight path, voted unanimously for a resolution opposing the F-35. Also on April 16, the city council in South Burlington voted 3-1 for an anti-F-35 resolution. No Vermont town is on record supporting the warplane.
Burlington mayor betrays majority of constituents for what?
And why?
 n April 11, the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, announced that he was betraying a 55% majority of Burlington voters and a 75% majority of his city council that had opposed basing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter at the Burlington Airport in South Burlington. The mayor betrayed his constituents in the limpest way, not by vetoing the popular resolution opposing the F-35, but by sending it on without his signature, while appending a dishonest and misleading cover letter inviting unelected leaders to have their way with Vermont. The third-term Democratic mayor has now asked the Air Force to impose its deafening fighter-bomber on a neighboring city for no cogently articulated reason, following a process bereft of integrity, rigor, or honor.
Earlier this year, when Miro Weinberger was in a challenging, three-way race for re-election as mayor of Burlington, he seemed to make promises. He said things that sounded like promises, things that voters reasonably understood to be promises. One of those promises was a deceptively worded non-commitment commitment to reconsider the justice of basing the nuclear-capable F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in the neighboring city of South Burlington, even though South Burlington has no say in the matter.
Weinberger was slip-sliding his way along the F-35 question because he has a long, unambiguous record of supporting the military escalation of the airport in the most populated region of Vermont, and this year voters had finally put the question on the ballot, against serious opposition from officialdom. Weinberger, a former airport commissioner, apparently needed to sidestep a question on which he had never shown any official doubt despite health, safety, military, economic and other evidence that the world’s most expensive weapons system was going to do more harm than good to Vermont. Weinberger was first elected with 58% of the vote in 2012 and re-elected with 68% in 2015. As it turned out, he couldn’t win a majority in 2018. He finished with 48%, enough to avoid a run-off.
That same Town Meeting Day, March 6, 55% of Burlington voters approved a non-binding resolution asking the US Air Force to base the F-35 in some other state and provide the Vermont Air National Guard with a different mission that would be safer, healthier, and more appropriate to a densely populated area in Vermont. On March 26, the Burlington City Council voted 9-3 to send the F-35 removal request to the Air Force along with a number of clarifying questions. This set the stage for Weinberger’s remarkably unheroic stance in favor of further militarizing a neighboring town that his obtuse April 9 letter doesn’t even mention by name (this Orwellian obliteration is also a feature of his April 11 op-ed commentary). This letter to Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson is both dishonest and obtuse, asserting in its first paragraph:
As Mayor, I am the only official elected by all City voters, and I am the elected official most directly responsible for the management of the Burlington International Airport.
Weinberger doesn’t quite say “La Cité, c’est moi” like Louis XIV, but the intent is the same. By omission he denigrates the city council, which is also “elected by all City voters.” But every single council member won on March 6 with more than 53% of the vote, and three of them won with greater than 90% majorities. The preference of “all City voters” was pretty clear. Worse, the mayor dismisses the popular vote against the F-35 by people who are “all City voters.” Supporters of the anti-F-35 resolution outpolled the mayor by more than 700 votes. The anti-F-35 resolution drew almost as many total votes as the mayoral race (164 more) and more votes than any other ballot question besides climate change (12 more, approved by 85%). The mayor might ask himself how good the F-35 is for climate change. And lastly, the mayor ignores the reality that the airport is an example of municipal colonialism, located in another city, where voters have no say in the matter. The mayor’s unstated anti-democratic arrogance is staggering. In the letter’s next sentence, he compounds his arrogance with deceit:
After carefully reviewing and considering the Council’s action, the advisory public vote, and current public concerns, I remain a strong supporter of basing F-35s at Burlington International Airport.
There is no evidence in the record to support the mayor’s claim of any care in reviewing and considering the votes of the council or the city. He was dismissive of their views before the election, and now he has formally dismissed them as if they have no weight. He has never shown much care for any “current public concerns” about the F-35, having refused for years to engage with those who express those concerns. And here, again, the mayor relegates the people of South Burlington to nonentities for whom no care is needed. The care he expresses in his letter is only for the Air Force and the Vermont Air National Guard. By the mayor’s own account in a city press release, the only careful review and consideration he engaged in was “consultation with the Vermont Air National Guard (VTANG) and federal officials.” The mayor adds that this is the first time he has refused to sign a council resolution, but he doesn’t explain why beyond his long held, unexamined personal opinion. Is he a militarist? As a former developer, does he have conflicts of interest in the development aspects of this expansion? What’s really going on? He doesn’t say. Instead he reads the minds of the voters, dismissively imputing confusion to them:
The vote signals community concerns about the planned basing. I believe that some of these concerns stem from conflicting and inaccurate information that the public has heard about the F35s. Your [the Air Force’s] responses to the questions in the resolution will help clarify the information being considered by our community.
Astoundingly, he acknowledges concerns, most of which he has already dismissed as meaningless. He does not identify any concern, much less address it. He talks about “conflicting and inaccurate information,” most instances of which have come from the Air Force, VTANG, the Vermont Congressional delegation and their supporters. From the beginning, the F-35 project has been a sugar-coated poison pill that Senator Patrick Leahy and his allies have expected the public to swallow gratefully before they find out too late who damaged them. The mayor is sleazily non-specific here, at least in part because his case is weak. Nowhere in his letter does the mayor address a single specific issue. One measure of his argument’s weakness is that he asks an interested party – the Air Force – to tell the customer why this clunker is such a bargain. A mayor with intellectual integrity would address what he sees as important issues, or better yet he would seek some disinterested process for sorting out facts from propaganda (including his own). Ironically, the Air Force was originally opposed to basing the F-35 in a populous area like Burlington, so maybe they could clarify why that’s different now that there are even more people here. But the mayor isn’t really concerned with informing people truthfully, as he makes clear:
The vote [for the anti-F-35 resolution] also is an indication of some local opposition to the basing. The extent of the opposition demonstrated by the vote is difficult to measure, however, as the ballot item wording was confusing, and premised on the existence of a less impactful alternative mission. Also attached is an analysis of the ballot item performed by a respected local professor that expands on these concerns about the ballot question.
Supporters of the F-35 have avoided serious discussion of the plane as much as possible for a decade. They have never supported any democratic decision-making. The Burlington vote is only the second referendum on the F-35. The first, in Winooski in 2013, also resulted in popular rejection of the warplane. Weinberger mocks this as “some local opposition to the basing” as a way of evading the reality that F-35 shills have gone out of their way to avoid knowing any more about the opposition than they have to. Theirs has been a deliberately anti-democratic approach all along, including an electoral coup funded by dark money against the South Burlington city council when serious opposition emerged there. So when Weinberger says, with unintended irony, that the “extent of the opposition demonstrated by the vote is difficult to measure” that’s mainly because he has absolutely no interest in measuring it.
Instead, Weinberger raises a VTANG talking point with no demonstrable substance: “the ballot item wording was confusing,” which is what F-35 supporters tried to make people believe. The ballot item might have been cleaner, but its fundamental meaning was clear enough as indicated by the numbers of people who voted for or against it. Weinberger and VTANG’s specious argument is that no one can support VTANG without supporting the F-35. They rarely put it that clearly, but that’s what it always comes down to. The ballot item argued that people could support VTANG and oppose the F-35. That argument makes them crazy. It forces them to deal with the substance of the F-35 instead of dancing their little patriotic flag-waving jig in favor of a weapon of mass destruction designed to carry out war crimes.
The fight over the F-35 in Vermont is a minuscule example of how hard it is to resist the military-industrial-congressional complex. Senator Leahy can wax lyrical about gun control in Vermont, but the devoted F-35 champion shows by his actions that his disregard for the people around the airport in South Burlington is little different from his disregard for the US-Saudi genocidal bombing of another, larger poor community in Yemen. Congressman Peter Welch has shown more interest in regulating unmanned private drones that he has in protecting any of his constituents from the F-35, much less challenging American-backed disease and famine warfare against Yemen. These people, like Weinberger, are Democratic establishment career politicians, but there is no Republican objection to the F-35 either.
Senator Bernie Sanders – famously an Independent – was the mayor of Burlington before there was an F-35. But as a congressman and senator, Sanders has consistently supported basing the plane in Vermont. In a TV appearance March 30, Sanders performed a typical soft shoe, referring to the F-35’s huge cost over-runs as a legitimate concern, but basically shuffling off the decision to Weinberger, even though Sanders said he could see “no alternative” to having the F-35 in Vermont. There are, of course, alternatives, but Sanders like others chooses not to see them. For Sanders, this is more an issue of faith than reason, this is about some strange sort of totemic hero worship:
“for many, many reasons I think the national guard deserves to have that plane here”
The National Guard deserves to have a weapon of mass destruction in Vermont? What kind of argument is that? This is not an argument at all. This is a shared article of faith among F-35 worshippers. Maybe they deserve to have sacrificial virgins, too. Are we going to go there? And what does the rest of Vermont deserve? Maybe it deserves a political leadership class less in thrall to the national war machine that has been out of control for decades and needs serious reining in.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
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.
|
|
