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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=34656"><span class="small">Dana Nuccitelli, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 05 December 2016 13:46 |
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Nuccitelli writes: "Sadly, we live in a post-truth world dominated by fake news in which people increasingly seek information that confirms their ideological beliefs, rather than information that's factually accurate from reliable sources."
A man reading a copy of the Oxford Dictionary of English. 'Post-truth' has been named as Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year after a spike in its use around the Brexit vote and Donald Trump's presidential bid. The phrase has long applied to climate denial as well. (photo: Ian Nicholson/PA)
Fake News Tries to Blame Human-Caused Global Warming on El Niño
By Dana Nuccitelli, Guardian UK
05 December 16
Climate scientists and real science journalists pushed back, holding the post-truth crowd accountable
 uman carbon pollution is heating the Earth incredibly fast. On top of that long-term human-caused global warming trend, there are fluctuations caused by various natural factors. One of these is the El Niño/La Niña cycle. The combination of human-caused warming and a strong El Niño event are on the verge of causing an unprecedented three consecutive record-breaking hot years.
Simply put, without global warming we would not be seeing record-breaking heat year after year. In fact, 2014 broke the temperature record without an El Niño assist, and then El Niño helped push 2015 over 2014, and 2016 over 2015.
Sadly, we live in a post-truth world dominated by fake news in which people increasingly seek information that confirms their ideological beliefs, rather than information that’s factually accurate from reliable sources. Because people have become incredibly polarized on the subject of climate change, those with a conservative worldview who prefer maintaining the status quo to the steps we need to take to prevent a climate catastrophe often seek out climate science-denying stories.
Into that environment step conservative columnists David Rose at the Mail on Sunday, parroted by Ross Clark in The Spectator and James Delingpole for Breitbart, all trying to blame the current record-shattering hot global temperatures entirely on El Niño. Perhaps saddest of all, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee tweeted the Breitbart piece, to which Senator Bernie Sanders appropriately responded:
An über cherry-picked argument
The conservative columnists made their case by claiming that, with the recent strong El Niño event ending, temperatures are “plummeting,” thus blaming the record heat on El Niño. There are several fatal flaws in their case.
First, the “plummet” they cite is not in global temperatures on the surface where we live, and where temperatures are easiest to measure accurately, but rather in satellite estimates of the temperature of the lower atmosphere above the portions of Earth’s surface covered by land masses. Second, although the satellite data extend as far back as 1979, and the global surface temperature data to 1880, they cherry pick the data by only showing the portion since 1997. Third, the argument is based entirely upon one relatively cool month (October 2016) that was only cool in that particularly cherry-picked data set.
The argument is easily debunked. While there was a strong El Niño event in 2015–2016, there was an equally strong event in 1997–1998. The two events had very similar short-term warming influences on global surface temperatures, but according to Nasa, 2016 will be about 0.35°C hotter than 1998. That difference is due to the long-term, human-caused global warming trend. In fact, according to Nasa, even October 2016 was hotter than every month on record prior to 1998. These “plummeting” post-El Niño temperatures are still as hot as the hottest month at the peak of the 1998 El Niño.
In fact, just three days after the conservative columnists’ pieces came out, the November 2016 satellite data was published. It turned out to be the hottest November in the entire record. Oops.
Pushback from climate scientists and real science journalists
Climate scientists have strongly pushed back against this misinformation. Climate scientist Adam Sobel told the Guardian, “they’re not serious articles” and “grossly misinterpret” the data. For Climate Feedback, seven scientists graded David Rose’s piece, and gave it a “very low” credibility score of -1.9 (the lowest possible score is -2.0). The scientists described Rose’s article as “incredibly misleading,” “flawed to perfection,” and “completely bogus.”
Real science journalists have also taken the biased conservative pieces to task (I define real science journalists as those whose primary goal is to accurately inform readers about science, as opposed to fake science journalists whose primary goal is to distort science in order to advance an agenda). For example, see the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, Carbon Brief, and climate science bloggers.
Science, facts, and truth aren’t changed by ideology or opinion
Admitting that conservatives have pushed us into a post-truth world, Donald Trump supporter and CNN political commentator Scottie Nell Hughes said on The Diane Rehm Show:
People that say facts are facts, they’re not really facts … Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts. And so Mr. Trump’s Tweets amongst a certain crowd, a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some facts amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up.
On issues of belief, like politics, it’s true that differing opinions are roughly equally valid. While policy questions can be supported by evidence and data, ultimately they often come down to subjective individual preferences and opinions. In science, that’s not true. A scientific theory or argument is either supported by evidence and data, or it’s not. Opinions are not equally valid. We all live on the same planet, in the same universe, governed by the same laws of physics. Whether we lean toward liberal or conservative ideology, those physical laws don’t change.
Unfortunately, conservatives are increasingly likely to deny this reality. As Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus told Fox News:
as far as this issue on climate change … he has his default position, which most of it is a bunch of bunk
This is effectively the default position of the Republican Party, and it’s the only major political party in the world in denial about scientific reality. The party can take that position because the conservative media outlets that its voters consume misinform them with post-truth nonsense like this.
Unfortunately, when it comes to science, we don’t get to choose our own truths. Scientists and science journalists effectively held the post-truth crowd accountable on this story. They’ll have their work cut out for them in the coming years.
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FOCUS: Publish, Punish, and Pardon: Nine Things Obama Could Do Before Leaving Office to Reveal the Nature of the National Security State |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=28584"><span class="small">Pratap Chatterjee, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Monday, 05 December 2016 12:44 |
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Chatterjee writes: "Here are nine recommendations for action by the president in his last 40 days when it comes to those three categories: publish, punish, and pardon."
President Barack Obama. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Publish, Punish, and Pardon: Nine Things Obama Could Do Before Leaving Office to Reveal the Nature of the National Security State
By Pratap Chatterjee, TomDispatch
05 December 16
Imagine this scenario: you’ve occupied an office for eight years and now you’re about to move out. You know who's going to move in and, by reputation, he’s a fellow with a minimal ability to control himself who might conceivably be a danger to others. So here’s one thing you undoubtedly wouldn’t do: leave a loaded revolver in the top desk drawer and a stash of extra ammunition in the closet.
However -- if you’ll excuse the analogy -- that seems to be exactly what President Obama and his national security team are doing when it comes to Donald Trump.
Consider two news stories of last week. The Washington Post reported that, in its last days, the Obama administration is intent on giving the secretive and elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) new powers to strike globally. As Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Dan Lamothe write, JSOC will gain
“expanded power to track, plan, and potentially launch attacks on terrorist cells around the globe, a move driven by concerns [about] a dispersed terrorist threat as Islamic State militants are driven from strongholds in Iraq and Syria... When finalized, it will elevate JSOC from being a highly valued strike tool used by regional military commands to leading a new multiagency intelligence and action force. Known as the ‘Counter-External Operations Task Force,’ the group will be designed to take JSOC’s targeting model -- honed over the last 15 years of conflict -- and export it globally to go after terrorist networks plotting attacks against the West.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that, in the last moments of his second term, President Obama is expanding the legal basis for the war on terror by formally adding the Somali group al-Shabaab to “the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001” war authorization that Congress passed not long after the 9/11 attacks. (Mind you, al-Shabaab didn’t even exist in 2001.) As Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Mark Mazzetti point out, this is “a move that will strengthen President-elect Donald J. Trump’s authority to combat thousands of Islamist fighters in the chaotic Horn of Africa nation... [and will] shore up the legal basis for an intensifying campaign of airstrikes and other counterterrorism operations, carried out largely in support of African Union and Somali government forces.”
Maybe we have to think of that Oval Office desk as stuffed with loaded weaponry from all these years of wars, raids, assassination campaigns, and the like. When Trump moves in he’ll find a formidable national security apparatus at his command, one that in its capabilities has left even the totalitarian regimes of the previous century in the shade. If only we could say that Barack Obama had at least made a serious attempt to blunt or rein in the powers of that state within a state, but no such luck. Instead, he's leaving a striking (and still expanding) series of oppressive and aggressive powers loaded and ready for action for the new president.
The irony is that even with just a few weeks left, Obama could still act in ways that might make at least a modest difference on some of those powers. He could, as TomDispatch regular Pratap Chatterjee makes clear today, at least lift the all-enveloping veil of secrecy around the national security state and let the American public know just what has been done in our name in these years and what exactly is about to be handed over to his edgy successor.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Publish, Punish, and Pardon
Nine Things Obama Could Do Before Leaving Office to Reveal the Nature of the National Security State
 n less than seven weeks, President Barack Obama will hand over the government to Donald Trump, including access to the White House, Air Force One, and Camp David. Trump will also, of course, inherit the infamous nuclear codes, as well as the latest in warfare technology, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s fleet of killer drones, the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance and data collection apparatus, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s enormous system of undercover informants.
Before the recent election, Obama repeatedly warned that a Trump victory could spell disaster. “If somebody starts tweeting at three in the morning because SNL [Saturday Night Live] made fun of you, you can’t handle the nuclear codes,” Obama typically told a pro-Clinton rally in November. “Everything that we've done over the last eight years,” he added in an interview with MSNBC, “will be reversed with a Trump presidency.”
Yet, just days after Obama made those comments and Trump triumphed, the Guardian reported that his administration was deeply involved in planning to give Trump access not just to those nuclear codes, but also to the massive new spying and killing system that Obama personally helped shape and lead. “Obama’s failure to rein in George Bush’s national security policies hands Donald Trump a fully loaded weapon,” Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, observed recently. “The president’s failure to understand that these powers could not be entrusted in the hands of any president, not even his, have now put us in a position where they are in the hands of Donald Trump.”
In many areas, it hardly matters what Barack Obama now does. In his last moments, for example, were he to make good on his first Oval Office promise and shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Trump could reverse that decision with the stroke of a pen on January 20, 2017.
So, at this late date, what might a president frightened by his successor actually do, if not to hamper Trump's ability to create global mayhem, then at least to set the record straight before he leaves the White House?
Unfortunately, the answer is: far less than we might like, but as it happens, there are still some powers a president has that are irreversible by their very nature. For example, declassifying secret documents. Once such documents have been released, no power on earth can take them back. The president also has a virtually unlimited power of pardon. And finally, the president can punish high-level executive branch or military officials who abused the system, just as President Obama recalled General Stanley McChrystal from his post in Afghanistan in 2010, and he can do so until January 19th. Of course, Trump could rehire such individuals, but fast action by Obama could at least put them on trial in the media, if nowhere else.
Here, then, are nine recommendations for action by the president in his last 40 days when it comes to those three categories: publish, punish, and pardon. Think of it as a political version of “publish or perish.”
Drones
1. Name innocent drone victims: Last July, the Obama administration quietly released a statement in which it admitted that it had killed between 64 and 116 innocent people in 473 drone strikes in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen between January 2009 and the end of 2015. (Never mind that the reliable Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based in Britain, has recorded a total closer to 800 innocent deaths from the same set of strikes.)
President Obama should immediately name those innocent people his administration has admitted killing, while providing the dates and locations of the incidents, where known. There is a precedent for this: on April 23, 2015, Obama apologized for the deaths in a drone strike in Pakistan of Giovanni Lo Porto and Warren Weinstein, an Italian and an American held captive by Al Qaeda, whom he identified by name. Why not release the names of the rest?
Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni engineer, has been asking for just such a response. His brother-in-law Salem and nephew Waleed were killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2012. Yemeni officials gave Jaber $100,000 in cash that they swore was compensation from the U.S. government, but if so, Washington has not acknowledged what it did. Reprieve, a British-based group that supports drone victims, has sued President Obama to get a public apology for Jaber.
2. Make Public Any Reviews of Military Errors: When Obama apologized for the killings of Lo Porto and Weinstein, he said that he had ordered a full review of any mistakes made in that drone strike. “We will identify the lessons that can be learned from this tragedy and any changes that should be made,” he announced. Until January 20th, he has the power to make such documents public and prove that lessons have actually been learned. (The only document available on the subject to date is the $1.2 million settlement agreement between Lo Porto’s parents and the U.S. embassy in Rome published by Stefania Maurizi in the Italian newspaper L’Espresso.)
There is precedent for such publication. The Pentagon released transcripts and data from an airstrike that resulted in the killing of 23 Afghan villagers on February 21, 2010, in Uruzgan Province after a drone crew mistook them for Taliban militants. Documents relating to U.S. air strikes against a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz on October 3, 2015, have also been released.
How many similar military investigations (known as AR 15-6 reviews) have been conducted into accidental killings in the war on terror? According to Airwars, another British-based organization, we know, for instance, that the U.S. is looking into a strike that killed at least 56 civilians in Manbij, Syria, this past July. There are guaranteed to be many more such investigations that have never seen the light of day.
The Obama administration consistently claims that groups like Airwars and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism do not have the full story. This flies in the face of multiple reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Al-Karama, researchers at Stanford and Columbia universities, and even the United Nations, all of whom have investigated and identified a growing number of drone-strike deaths among those without any links to terror or insurgent movements. If evidence to the contrary really exists, this would be the moment for Obama to prove them wrong, rather than simply letting more “collateral damage” be piled on his legacy.
3. Make Public the Administration’s Criteria for Its “Targeted Killings”: In July and August, under pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Obama administration released a series of documents revealing the procedures it uses to identify and target for assassination individuals responsible for terrorist activities in much of the world -- and the way it has justified such killings internally. If anything, however, those documents (known as the presidential policy guidance, or PPG) have merely suggested how much of the process still remains beyond public view.
“Frustratingly, too much remains secret about the program, including where the PPG actually applies, what its general standards mean in practice, and how evidence that those standards have been met is evaluated -- in addition to who the government is killing, and where,” writes Brett Max Kaufman, an ACLU staff attorney.
When Donald Trump first sends out a CIA drone to kill someone chosen by his White House, he will be able to claim that he is doing so under the secret system set up by Obama. Without access to the procedures that Obama pioneered, we will have no way of knowing whether Trump will be telling the truth.
None of these three suggestions would be difficult or even controversial (though don’t hold your breath waiting for them to happen). With each, Obama could increase transparency before he inevitably hands over control of the targeted-killing program to Trump. None of this would even faze a future Trump administration, however. So here are a few suggestions of things that might matter for all of us if Obama did them before Trump enters the Oval Office.
Surveillance
4. Disclose Mass Surveillance Programs: Even though Senator Obama opposed the collection of data from U.S. citizens, President Obama has vigorously defended the staggering expansion of the national security state during his two terms in office. "You can't have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience," he said in 2013, days after Edward Snowden leaked a trove of National Security Agency data that transformed our view of what our government has collected about all of us. "You know, we're going to have to make some choices as a society."
Thanks to Snowden, we also now know that the U.S. government secretly received permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect all U.S. telephone metadata via programs like Stellarwind; created a program called Prism to tunnel directly into the servers of nine major Internet companies; tapped the global fiber optic cables that lie on the ocean beds; collected text messages via a program called Dishfire; set up a vast database called X-Keyscore to track all the data from any given individual; and even built a program, Optic Nerve, to turn on users’ webcams, allowing for the collection of substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. (For a searchable index of all such revelations so far, click here.)
Ironically, a report from the FBI that was finally published in April 2015 shows that this vast effort was largely useless in identifying terrorists. “In 2004, the FBI looked at a sampling of all the [Stellarwind] tips to see how many had made a ‘significant contribution’ to identifying a terrorist, deporting a terrorism suspect, or developing a confidential informant about terrorists,” wrote New York Times reporter Charlie Savage who spent years fighting for access to the documents. “Just 1.2 percent of the tips from 2001 to 2004 had made such a contribution. Two years later, the FBI reviewed all the leads from the warrantless wiretapping part of Stellarwind between August 2004 and January 2006. None had proved useful.”
These days smart criminals and terrorists use encryption or other means like burner phones to make sure that they can’t be followed. The only senior operatives being hacked these days seem to be Democratic Party officials like John Podesta and millions of ordinary citizens whose data is stolen by criminals. So why not reveal just what programs the government used in these years, what was done with them, why it failed, and what lessons were (or weren’t) learned? Evidence of the national security state’s massive waste of time and resources might indeed be useful for us to have as we think about how to improve our less than 100% privacy and security. Such disclosures would not imperil the government’s ability to seek warrants to lawfully intercept information from those suspected of criminal wrongdoing or terrorism.
5. Make Public All Surveillance Agreements With Private Companies: To this day, the U.S. government has secret agreements with a variety of data companies to trawl for information. Some companies are deeply uneasy about this invasion of their customers’ privacy, if only because it probably violates the terms of service they have agreed to and could cause them to lose business (given that they face competition from non-U.S. companies and more secure alternatives).
Take Yahoo, for example. The Justice Department obtained a court order in 2015 to search all users’ incoming emails for a unique computer code supposedly tied to the communications of a state-sponsored “terrorist” organization. The company has requested that the government declassify the order to clear its name. It has yet to do so.
Of course, not all companies are as eager to see their government deals revealed. Consider AT&T, the telecommunications giant. Police departments across the country pay it as much as $100,000 a year for special access to the telephone records of its clients (without first obtaining a warrant). The program is called “Hemisphere” and the company requires buyers to keep its existence secret.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based activist group, calls this “evidence laundering.” As Adam Schwartz, senior staff attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's civil liberties team, puts it: "When police hide their sources of evidence, the accused cannot challenge the quality or veracity of the government’s investigation, or seek out favorable information still in the government’s possession. Moreover, hiding evidence from individuals who are prosecuted as a result of such surveillance is antithetical to our fundamental right to an open criminal justice system."
Surely such an argument ought to convince a former law professor? President Obama could easily strike a major blow for fair trials by revealing the extent and the details of these local police contracts, which are essentially an open secret, as well as any other agreements the national security state has with private companies to spy on ordinary citizens. Once again, this would not hamper the government’s ability to seek warrants when it can convince a judge that it needs to intercept individual communications.
6. Make Public All Secret Law Created in Recent Years: The last thing we’d want would be for Donald Trump and his future White House adviser, white nationalist Steve Bannon, to enter the Oval Office and start making secret law by wielding executive powers to, say, round up Muslims or deny women their rights.
Stopping Trump from taking this route and creating his own body of secret law is going to be hard indeed, given that Obama has probably signed more secret orders than any previous president. As Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, noted in a recent report, the Obama administration has failed to release a minimum of 74 of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opinions and memos that have been the secret basis for government actions on national security issues -- including detention, interrogation, intelligence activities, intelligence-sharing, and responses to terrorism. In addition, as many as 30 rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court between 2003 and 2013 have not been made public. And an astonishing 807 international agreements, including bilateral ones to control the transportation of narcotics, signed by the U.S. between 2004 and 2014 have never seen the light of day.
Trump, of course, has refused even to publish his tax returns (previously a presidential campaign ritual), so if Obama doesn’t come clean, don’t expect Trump to release any of the secret law his predecessor made in the next four years. This moment, then, represents a unique opportunity for the president to fulfill his promise of 2009 to create the most open presidency of all time. Sadly, no one expects him to do so. The Obama administration has apparently “abandoned even the appearance of transparency,” according to Anne Weisman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan NGO that tracks government accountability.
Since it’s very unlikely that Obama will reverse course on surveillance and secret law in the next 40 days, here at least are some suggestions on what he might still accomplish as the nation’s chief law enforcer.
Punish
7. Punish Anyone Who Abused the Drone or Surveillance Programs: We don’t really know who ordered the drone strikes that knocked off so many innocent people. But the names of the architects of the program are known and, more importantly, the president undoubtedly has all the names he needs.
And if Obama does want to clean house before Trump takes over, why not identify and dismiss the individuals who designed the NSA’s surveillance programs that infringed in major ways on our privacy without uncovering any terrorists?
8. Punish Those Responsible for FBI Domain Management Abuses: Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the FBI has developed a network of more than 15,000 informants as part of its Domain Management program. Many of them were recruited to infiltrate Muslim communities to identify terrorists. For the last 15 years, this vast sting program has been used to round-up Muslims -- those dumb enough to fall for FBI enticements at least -- and put them in prison.
In the process, plenty of “terror operations” were created, but few real ones broken. We already know the details of many of the abuses involved. Back in 2011, for instance, a Mother Jones investigation found that 49 “successful” prosecutions of “terrorists” were the result of sting operations set up by FBI agents provocateurs. “You realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts,” Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch wrote in a report on the program in 2014.
Whistleblowers have come forward to expose the abusive tactics employed by the FBI in such cases. Take Craig Monteilh, an ex-convict hired by the Bureau to infiltrate mosques in southern California. After he had a change of heart, Monteilh helped local Muslims sue the agency. The case was, in the end, reluctantly dismissed by District Judge Cormac Carney who wrote that "the state secrets privilege may unfortunately mean the sacrifice of individual liberties for the sake of national security." Other informants, like Saeed Torres, have since come forward to expose other aspects of the program. The government has never acknowledged any of this.
It is very likely that this same group will be called upon to support Donald Trump’s orders if a Muslim registry is ever set up. So this would be the moment for Obama to crack down in some fashion on this hapless system of profiling and entrapment before the Trump administration can expand it.
Pardon
9. Pardon Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and the other whistleblowers: Last but not least, why not pardon Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and the other whistleblowers who served the public good by letting us know what the president wouldn’t? As of now, Barack Obama will go down in history as the president who prosecuted more truth-tellers, often under the draconian World War I-era Espionage Act, than all other presidents combined. Stephen Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou, and Thomas Drake were government officials who talked with journalists. They were subsequently jailed or had their lives turned upside down. Others like Chelsea Manning and Barrett Brown have been jailed for hacking or for the release of documents relating to surveillance, U.S. wars abroad, and other national security matters.
Gabe Rottman of the ACLU sums the situation up this way: “By my count, the Obama administration has secured 526 months of prison time for national security leakers, versus only 24 months total jail time for everyone else [who ever leaked] since the American Revolution.”
On this issue, Obama has already made his position clear enough. Of Snowden, in particular, he told Der Spiegel earlier this month, “I can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves.”
For a constitutional law professor, that’s a terrible argument. “The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment,” the Supreme Court ruled in 1866. “It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment. The power is not subject to legislative control.”
It also flies in the face of history and of the president’s own actions. “Richard Nixon hadn’t even been indicted when Gerald Ford issued a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon,” comments the Pardon Snowden campaign. “Nor had the thousands of men who had evaded the Vietnam War draft, who were pardoned unconditionally by Jimmy Carter on his first day in office. President Obama himself pardoned three Iranian American men earlier this year in the framework of the nuclear deal with Iran. Like Snowden, the three had been indicted but hadn’t stood trial when they were pardoned.”
Given how rarely Obama has issued presidential pardons, it seems unlikely that he will act. “He’s pardoned fewer people than any president since James Garfield, who was fatally shot in 1881 after less than three months in office,” writes Steven Nelson at U.S. News & World Report. Indeed, Bush pardoned twice as many people as Obama in his first seven years in office, a record that he might want to ameliorate. (In fairness, it should be noted that Obama has set a record for commuting jail sentences.)
Will Obama act on any of these nine recommendations? Or will he simply hand over the vast, increasingly secretive national security state that he helped build to a man whom he once declared to be “unfit” not just for the presidency but even for a job at a retail store. “The guy says stuff nobody would find tolerable if they were applying for a job at 7-Eleven,” Obama told an election rally in October.
Now, it’s his move. Forget about 7-Eleven; Obama will not have to apply for, or campaign for, his next well-paid job, whatever it may be. But there is the little matter of his legacy, of truth, and oh, yes, of the future security of the country.
Pratap Chatterjee, a TomDispatch regular, is executive director of CorpWatch. He is the author of Halliburton's Army: How A Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. His next book, Verax, a graphic novel about whistleblowers and mass surveillance co-authored with Khalil Bendib, will be published by Metropolitan Books in 2017.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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FOCUS: The Smear Campaign Against Keith Ellison Is Repugnant but Reveals Much About Washington |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
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Monday, 05 December 2016 11:30 |
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Greenwald writes: "Ever since he announced his candidacy to lead the Democratic National Committee, Keith Ellison, the first American Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, has been the target of a defamation campaign that is deceitful, repugnant, and yet quite predictable."
Keith Ellison. (photo: St. Paul Pioneer Press Out/AP)
The Smear Campaign Against Keith Ellison Is Repugnant but Reveals Much About Washington
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
05 December 16
 ver since he announced his candidacy to lead the Democratic National Committee, Keith Ellison, the first American Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, has been the target of a defamation campaign that is deceitful, repugnant, and yet quite predictable. At first expressed in whispers, but now being yelled from the rooftops by some of the party’s most influential figures, Ellison is being smeared as both an anti-Semite and enemy of Israel — the same smears virtually any critic of the Israeli government reflexively encounters, rendered far worse if the critic is a prominent American Muslim.
Three days ago, the now ironically named Anti-Defamation League pronounced Ellison’s 2010 comments about Israel “deeply disturbing and disqualifying.” Other Israel advocates have now joined in. What are Ellison’s terrible sins? He said in a 2010 speech that while he “wanted the U.S. to be friends with Israel,” the U.S. “can’t allow another country to treat us like we’re their ATM.”
As the full speech makes clear, he was referring to the indisputable fact that while Israel continues to take billions of dollars every year from the U.S. — far more than any other country receives in aid — it continually disregards and violates U.S. requests to stop ongoing expansion of illegal Israeli settlements, often in ways seemingly designed to impose the greatest humiliation on its benefactor:
Stop, you know why are we sending a mill — $2.8 billion dollars a year over there when they won’t even honor our request to stop building in East Jerusalem? Where is the future Palestinian state going to be if it’s colonized before it even gets up off the ground? …
… Now you got Clinton, Biden, and the president who’s told them — stop. Now this has happened before. They beat back a president before. Bush 41 said — stop, and they said — we don’t want to stop, and by the way we want our money and we want it now. [Ellison laughs.] Right? You know, I mean we can’t allow, we’re Americans, right? We can’t allow another country to treat us like we’re their ATM. Right? And so we ought to stand up as Americans.
Equally sinful in the eyes of the ADL was this statement on U.S. foreign policy:
The United States foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of 7 million people. A region of 350 million all turns on a country of 7 million. Does that make sense? [A male says “no.”] Is that logic? Right? When the people who, when the Americans who trace their roots back to those 350 million get involved, everything changes.
As J.J. Goldberg of The Forward noted, Ellison wasn’t lamenting the insidious influence of U.S. Jews — as the ADL shamefully claimed — but rather was “plainly describing how American Muslims could have greater influence on American policy if they learned to organize.”
And agree or disagree with those positions, it is an indisputable fact that Israel receives far more in U.S. aid than any other country yet continually does exactly that which numerous U.S. presidents have insisted it not do, often to the detriment of U.S. interests. And many prominent foreign policy experts — including David Petraeus — have warned that excessive U.S. support for the worst actions of the Israeli government endangers U.S. national security by alienating Arabs in the region and fueling support for anti-American terrorism. The idea that a member of Congress is not permitted to debate these policies without being branded an anti-Semite is sheer insanity: malicious insanity at that.
But that insanity is par for the course in Washington, where anyone who even questions U.S. policy toward Israel is smeared in this way — from James Baker to Howard Dean to Bernie Sanders and even Donald Trump. So pernicious is this framework that the U.S. Senate just passed legislation expressly equating what it regards as unfair criticism of the Israeli government with “anti-Semitism.” And when one is an American Muslim, ugly stereotypes and pervasive Islamophobia are added to this toxic brew to make the smears worse by many magnitudes.
This smear campaign against Ellison received a major boost Friday night when the single largest funder of both the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban, said at the Brookings Institution, a part of which he funds: “If you go back to his positions, his papers, his speeches, the way he has voted, he is clearly an anti-Semite and anti-Israel individual.” Saban added: “Keith Ellison would be a disaster for the relationship between the Jewish community and the Democratic Party.”
That Saban plays such a vital role in Democratic Party politics says a great deal. To the New York Times, this is how he described himself: “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.” In late 2015, Ali Gharib wrote in The Forward: “Saban’s top priority isn’t a liberal vision of American life. It’s Israel.” When Hillary Clinton in 2015 condemned the boycott movement aimed at ending Israeli settlements, she did it in the form of a letter addressed personally to Saban.
The Democratic Party’s central reliance on billionaire funders like Saban is a key reason that debates over Israel policy are not permitted within the party. It’s why any attempt to raise such issues will prompt systematic campaigns of reputation destruction like the one we’re witnessing with Ellison.
To get a sense for just how prohibited the most benign and basic debates are when it comes to Israel, consider the quotes from Ellison’s college days dug up by CNN as supposedly incriminating. In 1990, while a law student at the University of Minnesota, Ellison blasted the university president for condemning a speaking event featuring the anti-Zionist civil rights icon Kwame Ture (also known as Stokely Carmichael); Ellison’s argument was that all ideas, including Zionism, should be regarded as debatable in a college environment:
The University’s position appears to be this: Political Zionism is off-limits no matter what dubious circumstances Israel was founded under; no matter what the Zionists do to the Palestinians; and no matter what wicked regimes Israel allies itself with — like South Africa. This position is untenable.
In other words, Ellison — 26 years ago, while a student — simply argued that college campuses should not be deemed “safe spaces” in which debates over Israel are barred: an utterly mainstream view when the topic to be debated is something other than Israel.
Leave aside the bizarre attempt to use someone’s college-aged political activism against them three decades later. As my colleague Zaid Jilani very ably documented several days ago, even the most inflammatory of Ellison’s campus statements — including his long-ago-renounced praise for the Nation of Islam — were grounded in righteous opposition to “white supremacy and the policies of the state of Israel” and “show him expressing sympathy for the plight of underprivileged whites and making clear that he was not antagonistic toward Jewish people.” Writing about the smear campaign circulating on the internet against Ellison, The Forward’s Goldberg said he found “the evidence to be either frivolous, distorted or simply false.”
As CNN itself acknowledged when digging up these old Ellison quotes: “None of the records reviewed found examples of Ellison making any anti-Semitic comments himself.” How is that, by itself, not the end of the controversy?
The reason why it isn’t is a glaring irony. With the advent of Donald Trump and policies such as banning all Muslims from the country, Democrats this year incorporated anti-Islamophobia rhetoric into their repertoire. Yet what is being done to Ellison by the ADL, Saban, and others is Islamophobia in its purest and most classic form.
Faiz Shakir is a senior adviser to Harry Reid who previously worked for Nancy Pelosi and the ThinkProgress blog at the Center for American Progress. He explains, from personal experience, that the vile treatment to which Ellison is now being subjected is common for American Muslims in political life:
In that last tweet, Shakir is referring to the fact that, to their credit, other Democratic voices — such as American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, J Street, and, most important, Chuck Schumer — continue to defend Ellison. J Street’s statement made the critical point: “It is time to retire the playbook that aims to silence any American official seeking high office who has dared to criticize certain Israeli government policies.”
But even these commendable defenses of Ellison illustrate how constricted the permissible range of views on Israel is within the Democratic Party. J Street vouched for Ellison by saying that he “is and has long been a friend of Israel” and is “a champion of pro-Israel, pro-peace policies.” Schumer went further, saying that while he disagrees with Ellison on numerous issues, “I saw him orchestrate one of the most pro-Israel platforms in decades.” Notably, demonstrating steadfast support for the polices of the Israeli government is literally a job requirement to lead the Democratic National Committee — and for every other significant position in Washington.
But Ellison has actually fulfilled that requirement. Even his opponents admit: “Ellison unambiguously self-identifies as pro-Israel, supports a two-state solution without reservation, has repeatedly said that Israel has a right to defend itself and expressed the importance of protecting and maintaining Israel’s security, and there is no evidence that he has ever supported or advocated for BDS.” It’s true that, as Jay Michaelson wrote in an excellent Daily Beast column, Ellison “has been critical of Israeli settlements, of right-wing Israeli governments, and of America’s unconditional support for Israel.” But even his Israel advocacy is rather banal, as Goldberg wrote:
It must be acknowledged that Ellison’s first loyalty in the Middle East is not to Israel. He is a Muslim, and he makes no secret of his sympathy for the Palestinians. That said, he is a Muslim peacenik. Since entering politics, he has consistently spoken out in favor of the two-state solution, by which he means Israel and a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security. He’s been active on that front, frequently partnering with J Street and other liberal Zionist groups on efforts to promote peace and security.
In other words, Ellison is a mainstream liberal Democrat, albeit situated on the left wing of the party as it is currently constituted in Congress (which is not very far to the left given that Nancy Pelosi resides in a nearby ideological precinct).
What makes him such an easy and vulnerable target for smear campaigns such as the one Saban and the ADL are pursuing is that he is Muslim — a black Muslim to boot. Just look at the obvious codes in this paragraph from Michael J. Koplow, the policy director of the Israel Policy Forum, writing in Haaretz under the headline “Keith Ellison Has a Real Israel Problem”:
Ellison is not a figure whom anyone would normally expect to be a supporter of Israel. He is an African-American Muslim who did not grow up in a particularly Jewish area of the country, came of age after 1967, when Israel’s image as a David began shifting to that of a Goliath, did not have any prominent Jewish mentors, and has a background in radical politics. As a student, he was harshly critical of Zionism and its legitimacy.
While Koplow cites these facts not to endorse the stereotypes but to affirm Ellison’s bona fides as someone one would not expect to be an Israel supporter, those are the demographic attributes giving the fuel to this revolting campaign. As Michaelson, who previously worked with the ADL, acknowledged: “There’s plenty of Islamophobia within my Jewish community as well,” and “the ADL is a perfect example,” citing the group’s shameful opposition to the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan.
If you’re a Democrat, it’s easy to embrace the language of anti-Islamophobia when it comes to condemning Donald Trump and other Republicans. It’s more difficult, but more important, to do so when that poison is coming from within the Democratic Party itself.
One of the few silver linings of the ugly Trump rhetoric on Muslims can and should be (and has been) a unified rejection of this sort of toxicity, regardless of where it comes from. Democrats who are sincere about wanting to oppose anti-Muslim bigotry can do so by defending Keith Ellison from these incredibly ugly, baseless, and defamatory attacks.
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The Victory at Standing Rock Could Mark a Turning Point |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=19600"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 05 December 2016 09:15 |
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McKibben writes: "The defeat of an energy company by indigenous activists shows what nonviolent unity can accomplish. There are lessons here as we enter a challenging new age."
Protesters celebrated after learning that the Army said it would not allow an oil pipeline to be drilled near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. (photo: Alyssa Schukar/NYT)
ALSO SEE: Federal Government Blocks Dakota Access Oil Pipeline Route
The Victory at Standing Rock Could Mark a Turning Point
By Bill McKibben, Guardian UK
05 December 16
The defeat of an energy company by indigenous activists shows what nonviolent unity can accomplish. There are lessons here as we enter a challenging new age
 he news that the US federal government has refused to issue the permit needed to run a pipeline under the Missouri river means many things – including that indigenous activists have won a smashing victory, one that shows what nonviolent unity can accomplish.
From the start, this has been an against-the-odds battle. Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the pipeline, is as wired as they come: its line of credit links it to virtually every bank you’ve ever heard of. And operating under a “fast-track” permit process, it had managed to win most of its approvals and lay most of its pipe before opponents managed to mount an effective resistance.
But that opposition finally did arise, and it centered on the last place the pipeline would have to cross: the confluence of the Missouri and the Cannonball rivers. It wasn’t standard-issue environmental lobbying, nor standard-issue protest, though there was certainly some of both (lawyers took the company to court, activists shut down bank branches). At its heart, however, in the great camp that grew up along the rivers, this was a largely spiritual resistance. David Archambault, the head of the Standing Rock Sioux who demonstrated great character and dexterity for months, kept insisting that the camp was a place of prayer, and you couldn’t wander its paths without running into drum circles and sacred fires.
As a result, overlapping epochs of sad American history were on display. When native American protesters sat down in front of bulldozers to try and protect ancestral graves, they were met with attack dogs – the pictures looked like Birmingham, Alabama, circa 1963. But it went back further than that: the encampment, with its teepees and woodsmoke hovering in the valley, looked like something out of an 1840s painting. With the exception that this was not just one tribe: this was pretty much all of native North America. The flags of more than 200 Indian nations lined the rough dirt entrance road. Other Americans, drawn in part by a sense of shame at this part of our heritage, flooded in to help – when the announcement came today, there were thousands of military veterans on hand.
Indigenous organizers are some of the finest organizers around the globe – they’ve been key to everything from the Keystone fight to battling plans for the world’s largest coal mine in Australia. If we manage to slow down the fossil fuel juggernaut before it boils the planet, groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network and Honor the Earth will deserve a great share of the credit. Right now, for instance, Canada’s First Nations are preparing for “Standing Rock North” along the route of two contested pipelines out of Canada’s tarsands. But in the Dakotas it’s been particularly special: they’ve managed to build not just resistance to a project, but a remarkable new and unified force that will, I think, persist. Persist, perhaps, even in the face of the new Trump administration.
Trump, of course, can try and figure out a way to approve the pipeline right away, though the Obama administration has done its best to make that difficult. (That’s why, instead of an outright denial, they simply refused to grant the permit, thus allowing for the start of the environmental impact statement process). But if Trump decides to do that, he’s up against people who have captured the imagination of the country. Simply spitting on them to aid his friends in the oil industry would clarify a lot about him from the start, which is one reason he may hesitate.
In any event, though, time is measured somewhat differently in the dispute between this continent’s original inhabitants and the late-coming rest of us. For five hundred years, half a millennia, the same grim story has repeated itself over and over again. Today’s news is a break in that long-running story, a new chapter. It won’t set this relationship on an entirely new course – change never comes that easily. But it won’t ever be forgotten, and it will influence events for centuries to come. Standing Rock, like Little Big Horn or Wounded Knee, or for that matter Lexington Green and Concord Bridge, now belongs to our history.
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pair of cases the Supreme Court will hear Monday could quietly hobble efforts to combat partisan gerrymandering—destroying, in the process, the Democratic Party’s hopes of undoing any legislation signed into law by President Trump.
