Is a Military Coup OK if the President Is Abusive?

By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News

10 February 17

omedian Sarah Silverman recently tweeted that her 10 million followers should “wake up & join the resistance” to President Donald Trump, adding, “Once the military is w/us fascists get overthrown. Mad king & his handlers go bye bye.” That would be a military coup, and it’s not as crazy as it might sound.

There’s practically no precedent for domestic political intervention by the military. I say “practically” because in 1933, General Smedley Butler testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities that a group of wealthy businessmen was plotting to form a right-wing veterans’ organization and to use it to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt and install Butler as president. There was never any proof of the plot, and most media outlets dismissed it as a hoax. Still, some foreign observers of American politics think that now, all these years later, a coup is a possibility.

I recently received an email from a friend who is a senior official in Greece’s left-wing government. He said that he and many of his colleagues – cabinet and subcabinet-level officials – have been “extremely anxious about the events unfolding after the election of Donald Trump.” Many of his colleagues, he said, “believe that a coup is in the making to overthrow Trump. This would serve to prevent his rapprochement with Russia, it would pacify his opponents in the Middle East, and it would ease the tensions we are already seeing between the United States and China.” Furthermore, my friend said, a majority of Americans voted against Trump in the election. That might make a coup more palatable to many Americans.

Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) once told me that the greatest day in American history was August 9, 1974. On that day at noon, Richard Nixon resigned and left Washington and Gerald Ford was inaugurated as president. There were no riots. There were no tanks in the streets. There was no declaration of martial law. It was business as usual. The Constitution worked exactly the way it was supposed to.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t believe there is going to be a coup against Trump, military or otherwise. I don’t believe that anybody is actively planning a coup. But just the fact that people are talking about it is alarming. Usurpations of power by force are not the American way.

With that said, we have a president who steamrolls over Congress and rules by executive order, a president who dismisses the country’s most highly-respected newspapers of record as “fake news,” a president who race-baits federal judges whose decisions he doesn’t like, a president who advocates the use of police violence against peaceful demonstrators on university campuses, a president who refuses to separate from his business interests as he makes until millions of dollars because of his governmental position.

The only way forward is to resist. We have to stay in the streets. We have to keep up the momentum in the movement that seems to be coming out of the demonstrations we’ve seen and participated in since the inauguration. We have to focus on voter registration and turnout. We have to push our elected officials to bottle up the Trump agenda in Congress. But what we don’t have to do is encourage a coup. Replacing one fascist with a group of others isn’t the answer.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.

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.

Trump's Pipeline and America's Shame

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

09 February 17

he Trump Administration is breaking with tradition on so many fronts—renting out the family hotel to foreign diplomats, say, or imposing travel restrictions on the adherents of disfavored religions—that it seems noteworthy when it exhibits some continuity with American custom. And so let us focus for a moment, before the President's next disorienting tweet, on yesterday's news that construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline will be restarted, a development that fits in perfectly with one of this country's oldest cultural practices, going back to the days of Plymouth Rock: repressing Native Americans.

Just to rehash the story briefly, this pipeline had originally been set to carry its freight of crude oil under the Missouri River, north of Bismarck. But the predominantly white citizens of that town objected, pointing out that a spill could foul their drinking water. So the pipeline's parent company, Energy Transfer Partners, remapped the crossing for just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. This piece of blatant environmental racism elicited a remarkable reaction, eventually drawing representatives of more than two hundred Indian nations from around the continent to a great encampment at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, near where the pipeline was set to go. They were joined, last summer and into the fall, by clergy groups, veterans groups, environmental groups—including 350.org, the climate-advocacy organization I co-founded—and private citizens, who felt that this was a chance to begin reversing four centuries of literally and figuratively dumping on Native Americans. And the protesters succeeded. Despite the German shepherds and pepper spray let loose by E.T.P.'s security guards, despite the fire hoses and rubber bullets employed by the various paramilitary police forces that assembled, they kept a nonviolent discipline that eventually persuaded the Obama Administration to agree to further study of the plan.

More remarkably, it was the U.S. Army that took the lead—the same agency that had massacred and harassed Native Americans since its founding. On December 4th, Jo-Ellen Darcy, the Army's assistant secretary for civil works, announced that the easement required for E.T.P. to dig beneath the Missouri would not be granted. Instead, the Army Corps of Engineers would prepare an environmental-impact statement, a lengthy process that effectively put the pipeline on hold. "It's clear that there's more work to do," Darcy said at the time. "The best way to complete that work responsibly and expeditiously is to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing." So the Corps set about organizing public hearings and taking testimony; until Tuesday afternoon, we were in the middle of that period, with signatures coming in by the hundred thousand. But at three o'clock yesterday, acting on the President's suggestion that the environmental review be "expedited," the Army reverted to ancient form, shutting down the public-comment process and issuing the permits that E.T.P. needs to begin digging again. Suddenly there was not "more work to do." Somehow, in the eighteen days since Donald Trump had taken office, Robert Speer, the acting secretary of the Army, had obtained "sufficient information" to grant the approval.

One feels for the Army brass. Had they continued to act responsibly and in line with their previous commitments, their careers likely would not have progressed. (Speer is apparently no Sally Yates, though those of us worried about the choleric Trump and his proximity to the nuclear-launch codes must hope that someone in the Pentagon is.) In any event, digging is scheduled to begin as early as this afternoon. There should, and will, be substantial protests. The first demonstrations began in major cities today, and the Standing Rock Sioux have asked Americans to descend on Washington, D.C., on March 10th. By that point, the pipeline may be all but finished, but the tribe and its attorneys at the environmental group Earthjustice have vowed to keep fighting it in the courts, even once it is carrying oil.

The bigger battle, however, may be in the tribunal of public opinion. The pipeline is a bad idea on many grounds, none of which is likely to sway Trump. (The fact that the oil it carries has the same carbon footprint as nearly thirty coal-fired power plants would perhaps seem a plus to him.) Tom Goldtooth, the executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, recently noted that Trump has yet to meet with any Native American leaders since taking office, which is possibly for the best, given the casual racism that might ensue. But the protests at Standing Rock have reopened the question of how the rest of America, those of us not in the White House, will treat the continent's original inhabitants. In this standoff, we have confronted our oldest and one of our most shameful stories. That shame will deepen now—which may, once Trump is gone, allow us to move closer to real reconciliation. At any rate, we owe a great debt to the protesters, who have acted with a dignity conspicuously lacking in the Oval Office.