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Standing Rock Sioux Chair on Militarized Repression and Ongoing Lawsuit to Stop Dakota Access Pipeline |
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Saturday, 17 June 2017 14:00 |
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Excerpt: "The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has won a major legal victory in federal court which may have the power to force the shutdown of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration failed to conduct an adequate environmental review of the pipeline, after President Trump ordered the Army Corps to fast-track and greenlight its approval."
Protesters at Standing Rock. (photo: Matt Hamon)
Standing Rock Sioux Chair on Militarized Repression and Ongoing Lawsuit to Stop Dakota Access Pipeline
By Dave Archambault, Nick Tilsen and Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
17 June 17
 he Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has won a major legal victory in federal court which may have the power to force the shutdown of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration failed to conduct an adequate environmental review of the pipeline, after President Trump ordered the Army Corps to fast-track and greenlight its approval. The judge requested additional briefings next week on whether the pipeline should be shut off until the completion of a full review of a potential oil spill’s impacts on fishing and hunting rights, as well as environmental justice. The pipeline faced months of massive resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, members of hundreds of other indigenous tribes from across the Americas, as well as non-Native allies. We speak with Standing Rock Sioux Chair Dave Archambault II and Nick Tilsen, executive director of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has won a major legal victory in federal court which may have the power to force the shutdown of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration had failed to conduct an adequate environmental review of the pipeline, after President Trump ordered the Army Corps to fast-track and greenlight its approval. The judge requested additional briefings next week on whether the pipeline should be shut off until the completion of a full review of a potential oil spill’s impacts on fishing and hunting rights, as well as environmental justice. The pipeline faced months of massive resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, members of hundreds of other indigenous tribes from across the Americas, as well as non-Native allies, as well.
Speaking at a rally last week, President Trump said he signed the memo to greenlight the pipeline with his eyes closed.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m pleased to announce that the Dakota Access pipeline, which I just mentioned, is now officially open for business, a $3.8 billion investment in American infrastructure that was stalled. And nobody thought any politician would have the guts to approve that final leg. And I just closed my eyes and said, "Do it." ...
You know, when I approved it—it’s up. It’s running. It’s beautiful. It’s great. Everybody’s happy. The sun is still shining. The water is clean. But, you know, when I approved it, I thought I’d take a lot of heat. And I took none, actually none. People respected that I approved it. But I take so much heat for nonsense that it probably overrode—it probably overrode the other. It’s like a decoy.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, last week, just after Trump’s comments, but before Judge Boasberg ruled this week, I spoke with the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Dave Archambault. He was here in New York. He was joined by Nick Tilsen, executive director of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. I asked Standing Rock Sioux Chair Dave Archambault about the tribe’s lawsuit challenging the pipeline.
DAVE ARCHAMBAULT II: From the very beginning, we asked the Corps of Engineers, "What impact will this pipeline have on our people?" And the Corps of Engineers never could answer that. Their response is, "We’re doing an environmental assessment, and we’re going to see what impact it will have on the environment." And there’s no impact. That’s their—that’s what they state. So when we say, "Well, we need to do a further look and see what really happens when infrastructure projects have an impact on our people"—and we’ve experienced many infrastructure projects in the past, such as a railroad system. The railroad system facilitated the near-extinction of buffalo herds. When we were at 70 million buffalo in 1800, by 1889 we’re down to less than a hundred. And it was the railroad track system that did that. There’s interstates. There’s telecommunications. There’s dams. All these infrastructure projects have a significant impact on us. So that’s the question we asked. And to get the answer, it required a full, in-depth environmental impact statement. So, we were able to, with the past administration, say, "Let’s at least do the environmental impact statement." With this administration, the EA: "There’s not going to be any impact to you or to your people," which we know is—if or when this pipeline breaks, we will be the first impacted.
AMY GOODMAN: There were leaks even before it went operational?
DAVE ARCHAMBAULT II: Yes, there were.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what that means? It wasn’t operational, so how were there leaks?
DAVE ARCHAMBAULT II: Yeah, they started putting pipeline—like, where the valves—to test the valves, they put oil through the pipelines. And it leaked significant amounts, even though it was a test. So, we understood and we knew that there were going to be leaks. It wasn’t even fully operational, and they were already experiencing leaks and getting fined for 200,000 gallons of oil being leaked. And so—and then they said, "We’ll clean it up, and we fixed it. It’s OK now." But, you know, that just goes to show that this pipeline is not clean. It’s not pretty. It’s not a beautiful thing. It’s something that’s going to come back and haunt—not us, maybe not us today, but the future.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to what President Trump said? He just closed his eyes and signed it.
DAVE ARCHAMBAULT II: Yeah, when President Trump comes out with statements like that, it just is revealing his true character. It tells America what kind of person he is, when we all know that his first agenda was to sign this presidential memorandum. He was actually calling it an executive order, and then they switched it to a presidential memorandum. But it’s because he has his own interest in this pipeline. He was sponsored, with his campaign, by Kelcy Warren. He had shares for Energy Transfer Partners. He had political interests. All the people who support him are saying this has to be done. So, for him to say, "I blindly did this," it’s a complete lie, and it tells what kind of character this man really has.
AMY GOODMAN: Nick Tilsen, your response when you heard President Trump say he did this with his eyes closed, signing off on the final permit to allow the Dakota Access pipeline to be built under the Missouri River, and then that there was no response afterwards?
NICK TILSEN: Yeah, I mean, I think that the reality of him signing with his eyes closed, that’s probably the truth. It’s probably what he did do. I mean, he’s been a—he’s been a prop of the energy companies, who are having their heyday. And that’s just the reality. I mean, we’ve seen, you know, one of the biggest outcries in protest in decades, and historical amounts of protest, in Dakota Access. And for him to—for him to say that there was—that it was met with no response is a total lie. That’s one of his—another alternative facts that he has, when the reality is, you know, tens of thousands of people sacrificed. We sacrificed our freedoms to protect this water. We sacrificed everything that we had. And it was women and children and families, and indigenous people with our allies from all over the country and all over the world. People around the world understand what happened at Standing Rock. And I think this is a constant sort of PR thing that says, "Oh, nobody cares." But the reality is, people do care.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask about an explosive new investigation by The Intercept that reveals how international private security firm TigerSwan targeted Dakota Access water protectors with military-style counterterrorism measures. TigerSwan began as a U.S. military and State Department contractor, hired by Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. The investigation based on leaked internal documents, which show how TigerSwan collaborated closely with law enforcement agencies to surveil and target the nonviolent indigenous-led movement. In the documents, TigerSwan also repeatedly calls the water protectors "insurgents" and the movement "an ideologically driven insurgency," even uses words like "jihadi." Chairman Dave Archambault?
DAVE ARCHAMBAULT II: You know, it just goes to show who law enforcement is going to listen to. And law enforcement listens to the political leaders. And the political leaders are bought by corporations. So, in North Dakota, we have a senator who has interests in the oil fields. We have a—
AMY GOODMAN: Who is that?
DAVE ARCHAMBAULT II: Senator Hoeven. He has an interest in the wells, that he owns. We have Senator Cramer and Senator—or, Congressman Cramer and Senator Heitkamp. They receive some of the largest amounts of contributions from the fossil fuel industry. We have a governor—at that time, Governor Dalrymple—who had some intermixings with China oil. And so, this whole political leadership in North Dakota will say, "We have to have this pipeline go in." And because they’re saying this, they’re only going to listen to the corporation and the company. And they’re going to give direction to the law enforcement.
And it’s frustrating to me, because we had countless meetings with law enforcement. And we let them know that there’s infiltrators. This is not all the demonstrators who are creating this. We don’t know who all the people are. All along, they’re listening to the company’s security, private security firms. They’re working hand in hand with the company’s private security firms. They’re having daily meetings, daily briefings, with the company’s security firms and ignoring completely tribal leadership. And all we were doing is trying to make sure that safety was the number one priority, where these guys, if the reports from TigerSwan—on TigerSwan are true, they weren’t—they weren’t looking out for safety. They were looking to incite and to harm. And that’s disturbing.
AMY GOODMAN: Standing Rock Sioux Chair Dave Archambault and Nick Tilsen, executive director of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. I spoke with them before Federal Judge James Boasberg ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration failed to carry out an adequate environmental review of the pipeline. The judge, Judge Boasberg, has requested additional briefings next week on whether the pipeline should be shut off until the completion of a full review of the potential oil spill’s impacts on fishing and hunting rights, as well as environmental justice. We’ll be back with the men in a moment.
AMY GOODMAN: "Mother Forgive Us" by Wendy Colonna, here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we return to my conversation about the Dakota Access pipeline with Standing Rock Sioux Chair Dave Archambault and Nick Tilsen of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
AMY GOODMAN: When we were there Labor Day weekend, when I first met you out there at the camps, you know, we could see the planes. And whenever I would point them out and ask, people would say, "Oh, they’re just surveilling us." It became business as usual. And, Nick, I was wondering if you could talk about this and the significance of when you have these private paramilitary firms—TigerSwan founded by a Delta Force member, former Delta Force member—where you have these companies, as Chairman Dave was just describing, working with local law enforcement and the effect it has. I mean, then I’d like to go into your own personal history and your remarkable family history. But what this means?
NICK TILSEN: I mean, I don’t think anybody is surprised, so any—any water protectors that were out there. These reports that are coming out basically prove—they prove that this is the—this is the modern form of COINTELPRO. That’s what it is.
AMY GOODMAN: The Counterintelligence Program of the FBI—
NICK TILSEN: Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: —that targeted Black Panthers and people of color for years under Hoover.
NICK TILSEN: This is a modern, contracted version of it, who’s designed in using basically all of the lessons that they have been building off of fighting terrorism, but using it on their own people. And this is—this is real. Like, in the camp and all the organizing and all the stuff that we did, we knew that this was happening. We couldn’t prove that it was happening, but we knew that, to an element, it was happening. We would show up at these protests. We’d have security officers and police who knew us by first name, who knew where we came from, who knew where in the camp we were staying. There was all kinds of stuff that happened during that time.
And I think the reality is, like the American public needs to realize that, you know, when we were organizing the camp, we were not allowed to fly our own planes over. We were not allowed to have our own observations. And we thought about doing that. We thought about getting resources to be able to do that. There was a no-fly zone. So there was a no-fly zone in place over the camp. Meanwhile, counterintelligence companies are allowed to come and surveil—survey us. This is the—this is a misuse of the democracy. And this is a fundamental issue of our time.
I’m glad that these reports are coming out now, and not 20 years from now, because them coming out now lets the broader movements that are now converging together understand that this is happening. And this is something that the public has have a public outcry over. To use—to use counterintelligence tactics against peaceful water protectors who are expressing our constitutional rights to—for freedom of speech, this is—this is an outrage. And I think that, moving forward, we have to be—we have to be diligent. Like the movement has to be diligent in recognizing that this is a reality. And those that support us have to recognize what we’re fighting against. You know, we show up with our prayers. We show up with our bodies. We show up with our children and our families to these protests. And these guys are showing up with all the technology that’s possible and all the weaponry that’s possible. And this is a—this is a fight over the future of this country.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about your family, your family’s history. You’re from Pine Ridge.
NICK TILSEN: Yeah. So my mother, JoAnn Tall Janis, is from Pine Ridge. My father, Mark Tilsen, is from the Minneapolis Twin Cities area. My grandfather, Ken Tilsen, was a civil rights attorney and attorney for the American Indian Movement. And my parents met around the time of Wounded Knee. And so I got to really grow up around like activist type of family.
AMY GOODMAN: And for those who don’t know what Wounded Knee was?
NICK TILSEN: Wounded Knee—Wounded Knee was the siege or occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, that was organizing from different indigenous people from around the country, about—
AMY GOODMAN: In South Dakota.
NICK TILSEN: In South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, about three miles from where I live. And it was—it was—the generation before, it was their Standing Rock, right? It was the time in which people spoke out about all these grave injustices against all indigenous people. And it sort of sparked—sparked a movement throughout, you know, the future of Indian country about what it means. And so, I always compare—I was growing up in a family, hearing all these stories about Wounded Knee and about the American Indian Movement, and always asked, "I wonder what our Wounded Knee is going to be. I wonder what—I wonder what our generation’s Wounded Knee is going to be." And then Standing Rock happened.
And I think the most important point here is, if you looked at after Wounded Knee, the trajectory of Indian country began to change. Different policies were changed to our Indian country. And that’s one of the—that’s one of the stories, I guess, that we have here, one of the opportunities that we have as Indian country here, is that where we go from here for the indigenous rights struggle in this country is huge. There’s a consciousness that it’s raised. There’s people that are fired up. And have the—we have the possibility and the potential to shape what the next, you know, 40, 50 years looks like for indigenous people.
AMY GOODMAN: Your great-grandmother was Meridel Le Sueur?
NICK TILSEN: Yep.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us who she was?
NICK TILSEN: Meridel Le Sueur was—she was a poet. She was an activist. She was a writer. And she was a bold believer in a different world. And, you know, she was a poet. She was a writer of poetry books. But she also, you know, fought for the women’s right to vote. She was an organizer in the labor movement, big sacrificer for some of the rights that we have today and sort of—not sort of. She’s a legend, I guess, beyond our family and did a lot of—did a lot of things that helped shape this country. And to me, you know, as—to me and our generation, I think we still derive a lot of courage from the courage that she had.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you were arrested, September.
NICK TILSEN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And what were you doing?
NICK TILSEN: On September 14th, there was a group of us—there as a group of us that locked down to machinery. This was during the period of time where they moved—they moved the buffer zone. So, there was a buffer zone; there was no construction within 20 miles. But what the companies had done is they moved to a seven-day workweek outside of that 20 miles. So this whole time, they knew that they were going to get approval. They just moved out. So we said, "Well, instead of sit back and waiting for them, let’s take the fight to them. Let’s use nonviolent direct action, and let’s use our abilities to take the fight to them." And so we went to the—we went to a construction site, came upon the machinery. And immediately when they’ve seen us, they tried to run us over with the excavators. They swung the buckets at us, barely missed us. We ended up climbing, using our bodies, climbing up on the machinery and shutting the construction down.
AMY GOODMAN: What were you charged with?
NICK TILSEN: I was charged with four different charges. Three misdemeanors—disorderly conduct, obstruction of a government function—disorderly conduct, obstruction of a government function. The felony charge was reckless endangerment. And it was a felony charge. This is one of the first felonies that they—one of the first felony charges that they did in Standing Rock was on the day that I was arrested and with the folks that I was taking the action with.
And it was a pretty important thing, because they were trying to use it as a tactic. They were going to—they were trying to use it as a tactic to overcharge people, essentially, to use the political and the legal system to discourage people. And I think I was probably about the 40th person arrested. So their strategy to discourage people didn’t work. I think there was over 700 people, you know, after I was arrested, that were arrested.
But the disorderly conduct charge is a serious charge. I’m still facing that charge. I’m set to go to trial on August 17th. The difference between a misdemeanor disorderly—or reckless endangerment charge and a felony is that they’re basically saying I had extreme indifference for human life, for locking myself to a piece of machinery to protect water.
AMY GOODMAN: How many people are still facing trials, facing charges?
NICK TILSEN: Hundreds. I mean, I think—yeah, I was on the Water Protector Legal Collective email chain recently, and I think there’s still, you know, between 400 and 600 people facing charges.
AMY GOODMAN: Chairman Dave Archambault, you, too, were arrested.
DAVE ARCHAMBAULT II: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: When were you arrested? And has your case gone to trial?
DAVE ARCHAMBAULT II: Yes, I was arrested on August 12th. And last week, I just got done with my trial, and I was acquitted. Right after that, the Dakota Access pipeline filed a temporary restraining order on me. And that was granted. So, the tribe filed a temporary restraining order on the company, and the judge said, "We’re not granting this." But as soon as they file one on me, the judge grants it. And then, after that, they filed a civil suit in federal court against me to try to pin all the costs and expenses that the protest is creating on me. And I would say maybe about three weeks ago that one was dismissed, because you can’t—you can’t pin a certain—I think it has to be $75,000 or more on one individual, and they couldn’t put that on me.
AMY GOODMAN: So you were charged with a misdemeanor. And what happened? Were you jailed?
DAVE ARCHAMBAULT II: Yes, I went to jail. And we bonded out the same day.
AMY GOODMAN: You were—were you strip-searched?
DAVE ARCHAMBAULT II: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Were you put in an orange jumpsuit?
DAVE ARCHAMBAULT II: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And you were jailed?
DAVE ARCHAMBAULT II: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Nick, the same?
NICK TILSEN: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, strip-searched, jailed. I had a broken foot at the time. Yeah, we weren’t treated very well in there. I mean, we didn’t get our bedding in. Actually, some of the other—there was other Native brothers that were in jail for other things, and they were the ones advocating for us to get our bedding and different stuff, because they had been in there for a while.
AMY GOODMAN: At this point, hundreds of members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other tribes and non-Native allies still face trial.
NICK TILSEN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to this exposé about TigerSwan and them calling the resistance, meaning you, Chairman Dave Archambault, also you, Nick Tilsen, and so many others, the "insurgency"? What do you make of that, even referring to your resistance as a kind of "jihadi" insurgency, Nick?
NICK TILSEN: Insurgents. How is it possible? How is it possible that any indigenous people are insurgents on their own land? Our land has been overrun by corporations, by the militarization of our lands and our communities and our people. It’s impossible for us, as indigenous people on our only land, to be insurgents. If there’s insurgents, it’s the company. If there’s insurgents, it’s the private military company. It’s impossible for us to be insurgents on our own land. We did at Standing Rock what our ancestors did. We did at Standing Rock, which was stand in prayer, we did things founded in our culture, our spirituality. This is women, children, families, people that came there to sacrifice. We were not insurgents. We were people fighting for what was right, simply fighting for what we believed in and protecting water on behalf of 17 million Americans.
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Trump Is Quietly Expanding All of Obama's Wars |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44647"><span class="small">Abigail Tracy, Vanity Fair</span></a>
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Saturday, 17 June 2017 13:56 |
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Tracy writes: "On the campaign trail, Donald Trump pitched Americans on an immiscible foreign-policy agenda, combining elements of staunch isolationism and a rejection of Bush-era interventionism with promises to 'bomb the shit out of ISIS.'"
Soldiers in Basra. (photo: PA)
Trump Is Quietly Expanding All of Obama's Wars
By Abigail Tracy, Vanity Fair
17 June 17
The president has agreed to increase troops in Afghanistan.
 n the campaign trail, Donald Trump pitched Americans on an immiscible foreign-policy agenda, combining elements of staunch isolationism and a rejection of Bush-era interventionism with promises to “bomb the shit out of ISIS.” But in his four months as president, Trump, characteristically, has done something of a 180-degree turn. He turned over much of his military policy and decision-making to the same “embarrassing” generals he previously claimed to know more than; he authorized a missile strike and boots on the ground in Syria, a country he had repeatedly warned against getting involved with; and he increased troop levels in Iraq, doubling down on a tactic he had called “a horrible mistake.”
Now, the Trump administration is considering sending more troops into the war in Afghanistan, which he previously called “a complete waste.” On Tuesday, the president gave Defense Secretary James Mattis the authority to determine the number of troops in Afghanistan, The New York Times reports, a rejection of the management levels adopted by the Obama administration.
With the new latitude, the Pentagon is expected to send as many as 4,000 new troops to fight al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, according to an Associated Press report citing a Trump administration official. But as was the case with Trump’s decision to strike Syria, it is unclear whether the move is part of any broader military strategy. Bloomberg’s Eli Lake reports that while Trump signed off on the cap removal, he has yet to sign off on a plan. The president also has yet to present his strategy to destroy ISIS, which he gave Mattis 30 days to devise shortly after the inauguration. Mattis reportedly turned in his plan on February 27, but Trump has not publicly modified or approved it.
This dynamic has left some lawmakers frustrated. During a meeting last week in which Mattis conceded to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the U.S. is “not winning in Afghanistan right now,” John McCain derided the delay of a broader strategy. “We are now six months into this administration; we still haven’t got a strategy for Afghanistan,” the Arizona senator said. “It makes it hard for us to support you when we don’t have a strategy. We know what the strategy was for the last eight years—don’t lose. That hasn’t worked.”
Mattis responded, “We are putting it together now, and there are actions being taken to make certain that we don’t pay a price for the delay,” he said. “We recognize the need for urgency, and your criticism is fair, sir.”
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Threats to Campus Speech Don't Alarm Media When They Come From the Right |
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Saturday, 17 June 2017 13:53 |
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Higgins writes: "What speech on college campuses is free speech? If you've been following media coverage of college campus unrest over the past few months, you'd be forgiven for thinking the sole threat to freedom of speech on the quad in 2017 comes from a left-wing movement aimed at crushing any dissent from liberal values."
People with helmets gather among members of opposing political factions at the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California. (photo: Stephen Lam)
Threats to Campus Speech Don't Alarm Media When They Come From the Right
By Eoin Higgins, FAIR
17 June 17
 hat speech on college campuses is free speech?
If you’ve been following media coverage of college campus unrest over the past few months, you’d be forgiven for thinking the sole threat to freedom of speech on the quad in 2017 comes from a left-wing movement aimed at crushing any dissent from liberal values. Protests leading to the cancellation of talks by Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter at the University of California, Berkeley, in February and April respectively, received breathless and sensationalized media coverage.
But threats to “free speech” are treated differently in the media when you’re on the left—and particularly so for campus speech. When students are stopped from supporting Palestine, stopped from protesting perceived faculty racism, or when prominent left-wing voices are silenced by threats from speaking to students, corporate media are mostly silent. Media handling of campus controversies indicates a double standard on college speech that falls along political lines.
Nowhere has this divide been clearer in recent months than at Evergreen State College, a small liberal arts school in Olympia, Washington. This May, students at the college found themselves the focus of attention when racial tensions on campus spilled into the national media.
When marginalized communities suggested white students and faculty leave campus for the college’s annual Day of Absence, biology professor Bret Weinstein objected. Traditionally during the Day of Absence, students and faculty of color leave campus for the day for offsite workshops and classes. The idea for the event comes from Douglas Turner Ward’s play of the same name, in which white residents in a small town wake up to realize all the African-American citizens have disappeared. The Day of Absence has been an Evergreen tradition since the 1970s.
This year, students of color proposed that white students and faculty might benefit from leaving campus on the Day of Absence to learn about racism. According to The Stranger (6/14/17), the event proved so popular that the 200-seat space reserved for the off-campus activities had a waitlist, and some students even had to be turned away from the events. Some in the Evergreen community, however, heard the call for the altered event as a demand— and their reaction made things worse.
Weinstein used less-than-tactful language to protest the new spin on the Day of Absence (suggesting that white professors were victims of “a de facto hierarchy based on skin color”) in emails that were published by the Cooper Point Journal (3/20/17), a student paper. While Weinstein said he had no problem with previous events, when people of color “voluntarily absent[ed] themselves from the shared space to think about their vital and under-appreciated roles,” to encourage white people to be the ones to step away and think about their role was “an act of oppression in and of itself.”
Protests followed, including a disruption of one of the professor’s classes that spilled into the hallway and was caught on camera. The images of Weinstein being harangued by Evergreen students caught the attention of the fringe conservative media. From there, it was only a short jump for Weinstein to appear on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight (5/25/17), where the host listened with concern as Weinstein related his tale of woe, in a segment labeled “Campus Craziness.”
Five days later, another major Murdoch property, the Wall Street Journal (5/30/17), provided a platform for a Weinstein op-ed headlined “The Campus Mob Came for Me—and You, Professor, Could Be Next.”
“Whites were asked to leave for a ‘Day of Absence,’” Weinstein’s chilling account began. “I objected. Then 50 yelling students crashed my class.”
Not to be outdone, the New York Times devoted two allotments of its valuable opinion-page real estate to tut-tutting the protesters. Opinion staff editor Bari Weiss (6/1/17) scolded Evergreen students, saying that “reasonable debate has made itself absent at Evergreen.” And columnist Frank Bruni (6/3/17) used his Sunday column to bemoan the “campus inquisitions” that had used accusations of racism as “a retreat from anything that we could really call ‘discourse.’”
You wouldn’t know it to read these accounts of the events in Olympia, but the unrest on campus wasn’t the only issue brewing under the surface in the Pacific Northwest. Indications of what was coming were clear shortly after Weinstein’s May 25 appearance on Carlson’s show. The next day in Portland, Oregon, two hours to the south of Olympia, a white supremacist named Jeremy Christian murdered two men and injured a third when they intervened in his verbal abuse of two Muslim women on public transit.
A week later, on June 1, the same day the Times published Weiss’ op-ed, a man phoned in what Olympia police described as a “credible threat” to the campus. It prompted an evacuation of the college that lasted through Friday, June 2. To his credit, Bruni mentioned the incident in his June 3 piece—though he said the threat’s “exact relationship to the protests was unclear,” despite the caller having referred to Olympia as a “communist scumbag town” when he made his mass-murder threat, according to audio obtained by KIRO 7 News on June 2.
This wasn’t in a vacuum, either; Evergreen administrators had sent out a warning to students the night before that they could be threatened as a result of coverage from right-wing media:
Earlier today we learned of a KIRO radio broadcast in which local conservative talk-show host Dori Monson interviewed Joey Gibson, leader of Patriot Prayer, a group scheduled to convene for a free-speech rally in Portland on Sunday, June 4. In this interview, Gibson implies that attention will be directed to Evergreen following the Portland rally.
Continued threats shut down the school again for a few hours on June 5, and have forced the college to move its graduation ceremonies to its satellite campus in nearby Tacoma.
Yet despite these threats to the student body, there has been no breathless coverage from Fox News, no space on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page for targeted members of the Evergreen community, no opinion pieces in the New York Times about the threat to the free speech of the left-leaning students.
What there has been is space for more essays and reactions over the past weeks to Weinstein’s supposed silencing—though the professor appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience (6/2/17), one of the nation’s most popular podcasts, and again on Tucker Carlson (6/12/17) for a second round of “Campus Craziness.” Despite his concerns for “safety,” Weinstein made no mention of the multiple threats to the college.
The victim-blaming has only been more extreme at two of the right’s “prestige” publications, both of which have recently published articles on the unrest that elide questions of cause-and-effect to tell a simpler story. At the Weekly Standard (6/19/17), Charlotte Allen misdescribed the threats against students that shut down the school as “the activities of the 200 or so protesters [that] culminated in a literal shutdown of the college.” At the National Review (6/8/17), Tiana Lowe said that
the Evergreen State College mob has incited violence against a professor, gotten said professor, Bret Weinstein, to flee campus in fear for his physical safety, inflicted $10,000 in property damage on campus, shut down classes, and forced graduation to be held off-campus as a result.
Without any space for a counter-narrative in any media with substantial reach, this obfuscation of the nuanced facts of the situation will go unchallenged.
This is part of a pattern. Take the treatment of Princeton African-American studies professor Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor, who was forced to cancel appearances on the West Coast after her criticism of Trump at a Hampshire commencement speech drew the attention of Fox News (5/28/17) and its audience.
“Since last Friday,” Taylor wrote in a statement explaining the cancellation, “I have received more than 50 hate-filled and threatening emails.”
Yet Taylor’s cancellation was not a major topic of news coverage, and Taylor was given no space in the country’s newspapers to explain how these violent right-wing threats were infringing on her freedom of speech. The highest-profile coverage of Taylor’s harassment came from the New Republic‘s Sarah Jones (6/2/17) and the Guardian‘s Steven Trasher (6/5/17), both of whom questioned the inattention to Taylor’s First Amendment rights from the most vocal defenders of free speech in the mainstream media.
It’s not only Taylor, of course—New York’s Fordham University banned the group Students for Justice in Palestine from establishing a chapter at the school without giving a coherent reason. That’s a sadly familiar story on college campuses in the US, where courses deemed too pro-Palestinian are banned, professors can be denied tenure because of tweets condemning the 2014 war on Gaza, and even campus activism against the occupation is subject to censorship.
There’s little mainstream media coverage of these instances of speech suppression, though. Indeed, the actions against Palestinian solidarity on campus by schools like Fordham have gone on under a virtual media blackout.
Compare that with the plethora of think pieces, longreads and sensational reporting devoted to the threat from the left to the free speech of the right, and you have some idea of the double standard at play here. Apparently there are two tiers of speech in America, at least as far as the media are concerned—that worth protecting, and that of the left.
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FOCUS: It Doesn't Take a Russian to Hack an American Election |
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Saturday, 17 June 2017 12:08 |
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Excerpt: "Attorney General Jeff Sessions has confirmed the Russians hacked into as many as 39 state databases, and did all they could to affect the electronic vote count that put Donald Trump in the White House. But Americans could have done it much more easily."
Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Getty Images)
It Doesn't Take a Russian to Hack an American Election
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
17 June 17
 ussia, Russia, Russia!!! But what about the Americans?
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has confirmed the Russians hacked into as many as 39 state databases, and did all they could to affect the electronic vote count that put Donald Trump in the White House.
But Americans could have done it much more easily.
Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach set in motion a Jim Crow/Crosscheck purge of hundreds of thousands of mostly black, Hispanic, and Asian American citizens prior to the election in at least 29 states.
Now Trump has appointed Kobach to an “Election Integrity” commission. His co-commissioner is J. Kenneth Blackwell, who as Ohio secretary of state helped steal the 2004 presidential election.
Why isn’t this pair of election thieves being called to testify before Congress? Why is there no national viewing of Greg Palast’s “Best Democracy Money Can Buy” on precisely this topic?
The electronic flipping techniques Blackwell used in Ohio 2004 are part of the “black box voting” syndrome documented by Bev Harris. No Russians needed.
“Made in America” was the virtual statistical impossibility that Hillary Clinton won the exit polls in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, but lost them ALL in the official vote count and thus the Electoral College.
And how about the 70,000+ ballots from heavily Democratic areas of Michigan that officially showed no presidential choice, an insanely improbable outcome easily produced by a hacker’s algorithm. Again, no Russians necessary.
Likewise, the sequential improbabilities in Wisconsin and beyond make it clear that rigging elections will continue as long as we have vulnerable registration rolls, electronic voting, an Electoral College, corporate campaign funding, and much more.
Meanwhile, there’s a high likelihood the upcoming special Congressional race in Georgia has already been hacked … by Americans!! As reported by Palast, thousands of Asian American citizens have already been purged from the voter rolls to pave the way to Congress for Georgia’s former secretary of state. Again, no Russians needed.
It may seem like borscht, but election theft is as American as apple pie.
In reality, the Americans have been stripping and flipping elections here and worldwide for many decades. Here’s some history:
In 1950, the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) was founded as a division of the School of Social Sciences and Public Affairs at American University. In 1953, it became a non-profit organization involved with the CIA, and was used as a propaganda tool in the overthrow of Iran’s Mossadegh. It then emerged as a key player in the rise of electronic voting.
In 1974, the US General Accounting Office commissioned a year-long study on the rise of electronic voting equipment. In 1975, Rory G. Saltman, an electronics expert at the National Bureau of Standards, warned, “Increasing computerization of election-related functions may result in the loss of effective controls over these functions by responsible authorities and … this loss of control may increase the possibility of vote fraud.” (National Bureau of Standards Special Publication #500-30).
In 1975, the CIA admitted to a US Senate investigative committee chaired by Senator Frank Church that it was engaged in 5000 “benign” operations, which involved, among other things, electronic election rigging in the Third World. Election theft was preferable to a bloody coup, said the Agency.
In its coverage of the 1980 Iowa Republican Caucus, the Manchester (New Hampshire) Union-Leader wrote that the campaign of former CIA Director George H.W. Bush “has all the smell of a CIA covert Operation…. Strange aspects of the Iowa operation [include] a long, slow count and then the computers broke down at a very convenient point, with Bush having a 6% bulge over Reagan.” Bush won the primary over Reagan, 31.6% to 21.5%. This breakdown of tabulating equipment at a key point in the vote count became a staple of the electronic tabulation process in elections to come.
In 1981, the Reagan-Bush administration established ties between the BSSR and the International Center for Election Law & Administration (ICELA). The CIA-linked BSSR provided initial funding for the ICELA to promote the spread of electronic voting machines worldwide.
In 1984, The New York Times revealed that a company called The Computer Election System of Berkeley, California, created a software program and related equipment “used in more than a thousand county and local jurisdictions to collect and count 34.4 million of the 93.7 million votes cast in the United States,” more than a third of the total votes. President Reagan signed National Security Directive NSDD245. The New York Times revealed that the secret directive involved “a branch of the National Security Agency investigating whether a computer program that counted more than one-third of all the votes cast in the United States in 1984 is vulnerable to fraudulent manipulation.”
On December 18, 1985, legendary New York Times reporter David Burnham reported in “California Official Investigating Computer Voting Security” that state attorney general John Van de Kamp found major errors in the computerized vote count from the 1984 election in California and elsewhere. Problems were found in at least thirteen areas nationwide, including Illinois, Montana, and North Dakota. Van de Kamp said he was “concerned about what he sees as a potentially serious problem.”
In 1985, the director of International Center on Election Law and Administration stated that electronic voting presents “a massive potential for problems” and that it “centralizes the opportunity for fraud,” according to Harris’s “Black Box Voting.”
On November 25, 1986, Dr. Michael Ian Shamos, a computer scientist employed by the Pennsylvania Bureau of Elections as an electronic voting systems examiner, reported in “An Outline of Testimony on Computer Voting Before the Texas Legislature” that: “When one company or a conglomerate of companies apply unauditable software from a general distribution point, or participate directly in ballot setup procedures, there exists the possibility of large-scale tampering with elections. An errant programmer or tainted executive could influence or determine the outcome of a majority of election precincts in a country.”
In the 1988 New Hampshire Republican primary, during the first large-scale US use of computer voting machines in a presidential election, former CIA Director George H.W. Bush trailed Bob Dole by eight points in polls taken on Election Day. But when the votes were electronically tallied, Bush beat Dole by nine points. Such a 17-point turnaround qualifies among mainstream election statistical analysts as a “virtual statistical impossibility.”
In August 1988, Roy Saltman wrote “Accuracy, Integrity and Security in Computerized Vote Tallying” for the National Bureau of Standard’s Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology. He warned that “the possibility that unknown persons may perpetrate undiscoverable frauds” was a key problem with electronic voting systems.
In 1988, Ronnie Dugger, longtime editor of The Texas Observer, wrote a major piece on the move toward electronic-based elections in The New Yorker. He warned that the capacity now exists for “altering the computer program or the control punch cards that manipulate it, planting a time bomb, manually removing an honest counting program, and replacing it with a fraudulent one, counting fake ballots, altering the vote recorder that voters use at the polls or changing either the logic that controls precinct-located vote-counting devices, or the voting summaries in these units’ removable data-hyphen storage unit.” Dugger concluded: “The problem in this segment of the computer business, as in the field at large, is not only invisibility but also information as electricity.”
In 1996, Chuck Hagel ran for US Senate in Nebraska against popular incumbent Democratic governor Ben Nelson. Hagel had never held elective office. But he was part-owner of ES&S, a computerized voting machine company whose machines were used in conducting the statewide election. Michael McCarthy, president of ES&S, was Hagel’s campaign treasurer. Hagel became Nebraska’s first Republican elected to the US Senate in 24 years. Hagel’s part ownership of ES&S was hidden from the public during the campaign. One Nebraska newspaper called Hegel’s victory a “stunning upset.” Some 80% of the state’s ballots were cast and counted on ES&S machines.
After the presidency was given to George W. Bush in Florida 2000, Harris posted a series of internal Diebold memos relating to a critical electronic miscount in Volusia County that helped swing the election. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now part of Diebold, complained, “I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded.” Another, from Talbot Ireland, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold, referred to key “replacement” votes in Volusia County as “unauthorized.”
In the November 2002 Georgia election, incumbent US senator Max Cleland lost his seat to right-wing Republican Saxby Chambliss in an unexpected last-minute upset. It was the first election in which Georgia had used Diebold voting machines, and just prior to Election Day in an unusual move, the president of Diebold’s election unit Bob Urosevich brought in illegal software updates to the system. Harris found a set of files called “rob-georgia” among the secret voting machine database files.
In 2003, Ohio businessman Walden “Wally” O’Dell promised in a fundraising letter to wealthy GOP supporters that he would deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush. O’Dell ran Diebold, which owned and operated the bulk of Ohio’s electronic voting machines. Diebold also controlled the software that would count the votes that decided the 2004 presidential election.
In March 2004, we published the article “Diebold, Electronic Voting, and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” on freepress.org and on motherjones.com predicting that Ohio would be the new Florida in the 2004 presidential election because of the partisan connections of George W. Bush to the private owners of the electronic voting machines and vote tabulation software. The key source for the article, Athan Gibbs, was an African American entrepreneur who had invented a voting machine that gave each voter a verified voting receipt. Approximately one week after the article ran, Gibbs was killed when his car was hit by a truck on an interstate highway.
Machines used in the Ohio 2004 election in Columbus came from Ransom Shoup, convicted in 1979 for conspiring to defraud the federal government in connection with a bribe attempt to obtain voting machine business, according to the Commercial Appeal newspaper of Memphis.
On July 20, 2011, Free Press published an election contract signed with GovTech, Michael Connell’s private IT company, allowing the theft of the Ohio 2004 electronic vote count, plus a graphic architectural map of the secretary of state’s election night server layout system linked to the IT site in Tennessee. Both documents were filed in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case.
There is much much more, now published in our e-book “The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections” (www.freepress.org).
In 2016 there was plenty of evidence of Russian interference.
But in an American election, the likeliest strippers, hackers, and flippers are still American. If Congress and the media ever get around to investigating Kris Kobach, Ken Blackwell, and other likely homegrown suspects, we are ready to testify.
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of the new STRIP & FLIP DISASTER OF AMERICA’S STOLEN ELECTIONS: FIVE JIM CROWS AND ELECTRONIC ELECTION THEFT (www.freepress.org).
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If Mueller's Investigation Gets Too Dangerous for Trump, He Will Fire Him |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Saturday, 17 June 2017 08:54 |
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Reich writes: "Several major developments in the Trump-Russia investigation over the past 24 hours don't look good for the administration. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating."
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
If Mueller's Investigation Gets Too Dangerous for Trump, He Will Fire Him
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
17 June 17
 everal major developments in the Trump-Russia investigation over the past 24 hours don't look good for the administration. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating:
- Whether Trump tried to obstruct justice. Mueller will soon interview National Intelligence Director Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers as to whether Trump pressured them to interfere with the FBI's investigation. (Reminder: Obstruction of justice is an impeachable offense. It was at the heart of Richard Nixon’s and Bill Clinton’s impeachments.)
- Jared Kushner's business ties to Russia. In December, Kushner met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Russian state-owned bank and a longtime Putin ally. Kushner later failed to report the meeting on his White House security clearance forms.
- Money laundering by Trump associates. Not only are such undisclosed financial transactions illegal, they could point towards a broader arrangement between Trump insiders and Russia. Investigators are looking into a mysterious $3.5 million mortgage former campaign manager Paul Manafort received just after leaving the campaign.
- Vice President Mike Pence, who has has hired his own lawyers for the Russia investigation. Trump consulted Pence before he fired FBI Director James Comey, and Pence could soon have to answer questions about obstruction of justice. The decision comes as many inside the White House expect to be subpoenaed by Meuller.
Mueller seems to be doing a thorough investigation. Which means Trump will make a thorough attempt to disparage, demean, and intimidate him. If Mueller's investigation becomes too dangerous for Trump, Trump will try to fire him.
What do you think?
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