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The viewpoint that humans in large groups are dangerous has informed the policies and tactics of governments and police forces for more than a century, and like many prescientific musings, much of it is wrong. David McRaney investigates in the latest episode of You AreNot So Smart.
from
Huffington Post:
WASHINGTON -- A U.S.-led attack on Syria without United Nations support would be a war crime regardless of congressional approval, Noam Chomsky, the antiwar activist and author, said in response to President Barack Obama's announcement that he would seek Hill approval.
"As international support for Obama’s decision to attack Syria has collapsed, along with the credibility of government claims, the administration has fallen back on a standard pretext for war crimes when all else fails: the credibility of the threats of the self-designated policeman of the world," Chomsky told HuffPost in an email.
Chomsky recently traveled to the region to learn more about the Syria crisis, and his comments there led some to believe he was open to military intervention if negotiations failed to produce peace. "I believe you should choose the negotiating track first, and should you fail, then moving to the second option" -- backing the rebels -- "becomes more acceptable," he said.
But his comments to HuffPost indicate that he remains opposed to any military action that came without U.N. approval.
"[T]hat aggression without UN authorization would be a war crime, a very serious one, is quite clear, despite tortured efforts to invoke other crimes as precedents," he added.
Liberals more associated with the establishment than Chomsky, who have nevertheless tended to be critical of the president's foreign policy, cheered his decision to involve Congress as a step away from an increasingly imperial presidency and toward more democratic accountability of war making.
Chomsky upended the field of linguistics with a devastating critique of B.F. Skinner in 1959 that changed the way people think about human cognitive development. He has led a parallel career as a leading anarcho-syndicalist author, historian and activist.
from
AlterNet:
If no one knows if our security-industrial complex is making us safer, why have we built it? Why are we still building it, at breakneck speed?The following is an excerpt from Rachel Maddow's new book, "Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power,"
In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a “Public Safety Complex” around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith–esque fire station. In the cascade of post-9/11 Homeland Security money in the first term of the George W. Bush administration, our town’s share of the loot bought us a new fire truck—one that turned out to be a few feet longer than the garage where the town kept our old fire truck. So then we got some more Homeland money to build something big enough to house the new truck. In homage to the origin of the funding, the local auto detailer airbrushed on the side of the new truck a patriotic tableau of a billowing flaglike banner, a really big bald eagle, and the burning World Trade Center towers.
The American taxpayers’ investment in my town’s security didn’t stop at the new safety complex. I can see further fruit of those Homeland dollars just beyond my neighbor’s back fence. While most of us in town depend on well water, there are a few houses that for the past decade or so have been hooked up to a municipal water supply. And when I say “a few,” I mean a few: I think there are seven houses on municipal water. Around the time we got our awesome giant new fire truck, we also got a serious security upgrade to that town water system. Its tiny pump house is about the size of two phone booths and accessible by a dirt driveway behind my neighbor’s back lot. Or at least it used to be. The entire half-acre parcel of land around that pump house is now ringed by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and fronted with a motion-sensitive electronically controlled motorized gate. On our side of town we call it “Little Guantánamo.” Mostly it’s funny, but there is some neighborly consternation over how frowsy Little Guantánamo gets every summer. Even though it’s town-owned land, access to Little Guantánamo is apparently above the security clearance of the guy paid to mow and brush-hog. Right up to the fence, it’s my neighbors’ land and they keep everything trim and tidy. But inside that fence, the grass gets eye-high. It’s going feral in there.
###
It’s not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It’s the big-ticket stuff too. Nobody ever made an argument to the American people, for instance, that the thing we ought to do in Afghanistan, the way we ought to stick it to Osama bin Laden, the way to dispense American tax dollars to maximize American aims in that faraway country, would be to build a brand-new neighborhood in that country’s capital city full of rococo narco-chic McMansions and apartment/office buildings with giant sculptures of eagles on their roofs and stoned guards lounging on the sidewalks, wearing bandoliers and plastic boots. No one ever made the case that this is what America ought to build in response to 9/11. But that is what we built. An average outlay of almost $5 billion a month over ten years (and counting) has created a twisted war economy in Kabul. Afghanistan is still one of the four poorest countries on earth; but now it’s one of the four poorest countries on earth with a neighborhood in its capital city that looks like New Jersey in the 1930s and ’40s, when Newark mobsters built garish mansions and dotted the grounds with lawn jockeys and hand-painted neo-neoclassic marble statues.
Walking around this Zircon-studded neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khān (named for the general who commanded the Afghan Army’s rout of the British in 1842), one of the weirdest things is that the roads and the sewage and trash situation are palpably worse here than in many other Kabul neighborhoods. Even torqued-up steel-frame SUVs have a hard time making it down some of these desolate streets; evasive driving techniques in Wazir Akbar Khān often have more to do with potholes than potshots. One of the bigger crossroads in the neighborhood is an ad hoc dump. Street kids are there all day, picking through the newest leavings for food and for stuff to salvage or sell.
There’s nothing all that remarkable about a rich-looking neighborhood in a poor country. What’s remarkable here is that there aren’t rich Afghan people in this rich Afghan neighborhood. Whether or not the owners of these giant houses would stand for these undrivable streets, the piles of garbage, the sewage running down the sidewalk right outside their security walls, they’re not here to see it. They’ve moved to Dubai, or to the United States, or somewhere else that’s safer for themselves and their money. (Or our money.) Most of these fancy properties in Wazir Akbar Khān were built by the Afghan elite with profits from the international influx of cash that accompanied the mostly American influx of war a decade ago—built to display status or to reap still more war dollars from the Western aid agencies and journalists and politicians and diplocrats and private contractors who need proper places to stay in the capital. The surges big and small have been good to the property barons of Wazir Akbar Khān: residential real estate values were reportedly up 75 percent in 2008 alone. Check the listings under Kabul “villas” today and you’ll find properties priced from $7,000 to $25,000 a month with specs like this: four floors, a dozen rooms, nine toilets, three big kitchens, sleeps twenty.
No one sold the American people on this incarnation of Wazir Akbar Khān as one of the desired outcomes of all those hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent in Afghanistan. But it is what we have built at Ground Zero Afghanistan. Whatever we were aiming at, this is the manifest result.
Consider also the new hundred-million-dollar wastewater treatment facility in Fallujah, Anbar Province, Iraq, which provides only spotty wastewater treatment to the people of that city. In 2004, after the US military all but demolished Fallujah in the deadliest urban battle of the Iraq War, it was decided that the way to turn the residents of the recalcitrant Sunni Triangle away from Al-Qaeda and toward their country’s fledgling government would be to build a sewage system for all of Fallujah. The initial $33 million contract was let to a South Carolina company in June 2004, while the city was still smoldering. There was no time to waste. The Bush administration’s Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office identified the sewage system as a “key national reconciliation issue.” The goal was to have it up and running by the beginning of 2006.
Nearly five years after the deadline, having clocked in at three times its initial budget, there was still not a single residence on line. Accordingly, the plan was “descoped”—scaled down—to serve just a third of the city. In the midst then of doing a third of the work for triple the money, there was talk of walking away from the project without connecting even that one-third of Fallujah residences to the aborted plant. We had built a shit-processing plant that didn’t process shit.
And it gets worse. According to a 2008 report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, about 10 percent of the money paid to Iraqi subcontractors for the Fallujah project ended up in the hands of “terrorist organizations.” According to that same report, residents near two particular pump stations “[might] become angry” if the system ever did come on line, because “funding constraints” made “odor control facilities” impractical. Even households that were not part of the collection system would still be subject to what the Iraqi minister of municipalities and public works delicately called the “big stink.” The eighty-page report also noted, with dry finality, “The project file lacked any documentation to support that the provisional Iraqi government wanted this project in the first place.”
When, finally, late in 2011, seven years into the project, at a cost of $108 million, we managed to get a quarter of the homes in Fallujah hooked into that system, this partial accomplishment was not met with resounding huzzahs. “In the end it would be dubious to conclude that this project helped stabilize the city, enhanced the local citizenry’s faith in government, built local service capacity, won hearts or minds, or stimulated the economy,” the Special Inspector General said in 2011. “It is difficult to conclude that the project was worth the investment.” A hundred million American dollars, partially diverted to the groups fighting US troops, to build (poorly) a giant, unwanted wastewater-treatment project that provides nothing but the “big stink” for three-quarters of the city. No one would argue for something like this as a good use of US tax dollars. But it is in fact what we bought.
###
Here at home, according to an exhaustive and impressive two-year-long investigation by the Washington Post, the taxpayer-funded Global War on Terror also built enough ultra-high-security office space (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities, or SCIF, in bureaucrat-speak) to fill twenty-two US Capitol Buildings: seventeen million square feet of offices in thirty-three handsome and generously funded new complexes powered up twenty-four hours a day, where an army of nearly one million American professionals spies on the world and the homeland. It’s as if we turned the entire working population of Detroit and Milwaukee into high-security-clearance spooks and analysts.
The spy boom has been a beautiful windfall for architects, construction companies, IT specialists, and above all defense contractors, enriching thousands of private companies and dozens of local economies hugging the Capital Beltway. All those SCIFs and the rest of the government-contractor gravy train have made suburban Washington, DC, home to six of the ten wealthiest counties in America. Falls Church, Loudoun County, and Fairfax County in Virginia are one, two, and three. Goodbye, Nassau County, New York. Take that, Oyster Bay.
The crown jewel of this sprawling intelligopolis is Liberty Crossing, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington—an 850,000-square-foot (and growing) complex that houses the National Counterterrorism Center. The agency was created and funded in 2004 because, despite spending $30 billion on intelligence before 9/11, the various spy agencies in our country did not talk to one another. So the $30 billion annual intelligence budget was boosted by 250 percent, and with that increase we built ourselves a clean, well-lighted edifice, concealed by GPS jammers and reflective windows, where intelligence collected by 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies under government contract is supposedly coordinated.
It is a big, big idea, and perhaps necessary—the financial commitment to it implies at least that we think it is. But it turns out Liberty Crossing is a bureaucratic haystack into which the now even more vast intelligence community tosses its shiniest needles. When a businessman relayed to CIA agents in Nigeria that his son seemed to be under the spell of terrorists and had gone to Yemen, perhaps for training, that duly reported needle got sucked into the fifty-thousand-reports-per-year haystack, only to be discovered after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit and tried to set off a bomb he’d stuffed into his underpants. “The complexity of this system defies description,” a retired Army lieutenant general and intelligence specialist told the Post reporters. “We can’t effectively assess whether it’s making us more safe.”
###
If no one knows if it’s making us safer, why have we built it? Why are we still building it, at breakneck speed? Liberty Crossing is slated to almost double in size over the next decade. Remember the fierce debate in Congress over whether or not it’s worth it to do that? No? Me neither. But we keep building it. We keep chugging along.
National security is a real imperative for our country—for any country. But the connection between that imperative and what we do about it has gone as frowsy as my hometown’s little pump station in high August. Our national security policy isn’t much related to its stated justifications anymore. To whatever extent we do argue and debate what defense and intelligence policy ought to be, that debate—our political process—doesn’t actually determine what we do. We’re not directing that policy anymore; it just follows its own course. Which means we’ve effectively lost control of a big part of who we are as a country. And we’ve broken faith with some of the best advice the founders ever gave us.
Our constitutional inheritance didn’t point us in this direction. If the colonists hadn’t rejected British militarism and the massive financial burden of maintaining the British military, America wouldn’t exist. The Constitutional Convention debated whether America should even have a standing army. The founders feared that maintaining one would drain our resources in the same way that maintaining the eighteenth-century British military had burdened the colonies. They worried that a powerful military could rival civilian government for power in our new country, and of course they worried that having a standing army around would create too much of a temptation to use it. Those worries about the inevitable incentives to war were part of what led to the division of government at the heart of our Constitution, building into the structure of our new country a deliberate peaceable bias.
But in the past generation or two, we’ve drifted off that historical course. The steering’s gone wobbly, the brakes have failed. It’s not a conspiracy, there aren’t rogue elements pushing us to subvert our national interests to instead serve theirs. It’s been more entertaining and more boneheaded than that.
The good news is we don’t need a radical new vision of post–Cold War American power. We just need a “small c” conservative return to our constitutional roots, a course correction. This book is about how and why we’ve drifted. It wasn’t inevitable. And it’s fixable.
Copyright © 2012 Rachel Maddow From the book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
from
Alternet, by Steven Rosenfeld
Across America many cities and police forces are eyeing new ways to crack down on protesters.
The First Amendment right to assemble and protest is going to get a black eye in 2012—as it has every time there has been an upsurge in America’s social justice movements.
Already in city after city, protesters and civil rights lawyers are troubled by proposed and newly enacted anti-protest rules, many of which are likely to be found unconstitutional if they have their day in court. In the meantime mayors, police and in some cases federal agencies are making detailed plans to thwart protests at local and national events.
In many cities, ordinances aimed at Occupy protesters are emerging to restrict protests and anything resembling camping on sidewalks, streets and parks. New fees are being drawn up to discourage large demonstrations. Anti-leafleting and postering rules are also muzzling people trying to spread the word about events. And all of that is being shepherded with a new pretext for using paramilitary tactics, replacing last year’s "health and safety" excuse for sweeping away Occupy sites with the rationale of protecting "national security" in a presidential election year.
“It looks to me like the law enforcement preparations are similar to what we have seen at most of the political conventions or other major events over the last dozen years, which is paramilitary policing against a civilian population,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund and co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee. “This tends to be different than the way Occupy actions have been handed for the most part, although one can point to Oakland or the New York Police Department [as exceptions]. But I would stress that it is not new.”
Verheyden-Hilliard and her colleagues, including hundreds of volunteer attorneys across America who helped defend Occupy protests last fall, are not just continuing to litigate numerous instances of abusive policing—such as the trap-and-detain tactics used in mass roundups in New York, Oakland and the use of excessive force on university campuses. They are tracking the latest versions in a well-known policing playbook now being fine-tuned for 2012’s big events, such as Chicago’s NATO summit in May, the national political conventions in late summer, and the anticipated re-emergence of local Occupy protests when the weather warms.
“People do overcome,” Verheyden-Hilliard said. “But I think you have to have a fair and honest assessment of what the grounds are in front of you in order to be able to succeed. We think that people should know the hurdles they are facing. Yet at the same time, it is not all hand-wringing. There are a lot of people who go over the top and say fascism is here. Fascism is not here. We are still out in the streets.
“We still have democratic abilities to be out in the streets. It’s just that there are real problems that people are facing. People have to know what they are, but they can fight them and they can overcome them.”
What follows are the main pages from the anti-protest playbook being fine-tuned by municipal officials in advance of 2012 protests.
Tactic 1: Expanding Permit Requirements: Municipalities -- and not just Charlotte, South Carolina, where the Democratic National Convention will be held, and Tampa, Florida, where the Republican National Convention will be held -- are adopting local ordinances requiring protesters to apply for permits months or weeks in advance, even if they haven’t unveiled all of their rules for the events. That idea is not only to prevent spontaneous assembly, but also to create deterrents, leading to tactic two: charging protesters for exercising their rights.
Tactic 2: Charging Protesters for Municipal Costs: In supposedly liberal cities, such as San Francisco and Syracuse, New York, city halls have told protest groups they have to pay for the costs of (unwanted) police escorts and other fees to discourage marches. The fees—which can be challenged in court and thrown out if found to be selectively applied—are in Charlotte’s new rules for the Democratic Convention and include “hiring and paying off-duty law enforcement officers, or reimbursing the city for costs of providing on-duty law enforcement officers, to appropriately police street closures.” In Tampa, the new rules require protesters apply 60 days in advance for special permits and obtain insurance.
These fees are in addition to fines against groups if people put up their signs, posters or leaflet supporting their cause. New York City and Washington, DC, has versions of these anti-leafleting and poster rules. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, Public Citizen has sued over a new county rule forcing protesters to pay for its legal costs. “There’s hundreds of different rules about it,” Verheyden-Hilliard said, saying these fees were one of the “under the radar” trends and obstacles facing protesters in 2012.
Tactic 3: Demonizing Protesters In Pre-Event Press Conferences: The track record of police saying there are mounting public health emergencies was a central feature before Occupy evictions in New York’s Zuccotti Park, Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza, Washington’s McPherson Square and elsewhere. In Chicago, police officials looking ahead to May’s NATO summit have begun to invoke the 2012 corollary: security concerns, saying downtown businesses are anticipating riots with police saying that they do not know how many protesters will show up, “some of whom could become violent.” These smear tactics not only justify spending vast sums of public money on policing, but they also deter peaceful people from coming out to join the protest.
Tactic 4: Creating Exclusion Zones and Segregating Protesters: There have been many court rulings asserting the First Amendment right of assembly in the street and on sidewalks. However, that has not stopped a range of municipalities and even state legislatures from eyeing or passing laws that range from making protesting in the street in front of a private home illegal—such as legislation passed by the Georgia Senate last week or Charlotte’s new protest rules—or that bar camping on city property. Charlotte’s anti-camping provisions were used to shut down the city’s Occupy protest.
The sidewalk and camping restrictions are part of a trend of declaring larger areas of cities off-limits to protesters. In Washington, DC, which has some of the most protest-friendly rules in the nation (after repeatedly being sued and losing in federal court), the city is eyeing a proposal to extend sidewalk restrictions to all parkland—targeting future Occupy encampments. This trend continues with more sweeping measures like declaring a large swath of a city a special security zone, such as at the NATO summit and during the national political conventions, where paramilitary forces will be deployed.
Some restrictions are reasonable, such as the U.S. Coast Guard closing and patrolling the Lake Michigan shore and Chicago River during the NATO summit. But others, such as Charlotte’s new rules, impose broad and likely unconstitutional restrictions. These start with banning any object or activity that blocks roads, outlaws crossing police lines, bars possessing anything the police say can conceal a weapon or person’s identity (backpacks and scarves), limits the hanging of banners on private property without permission from property owners, and makes it illegal to use police scanners inside the security perimeter (but does not stop police from spying on protesters, including using helicopters).
The national political conventions each receive $50 million for security from the federal government. In Tampa, Florida, where the Republican Convention will be held in late August, the downtown will be sealed off from public access, roads closed, and the city will spend $30 million hiring 4,000 additional law enforcement personnel, local papers report. Tampa police already have spent nearly $300,000 on an armored SWAT vehicle and $1.18 million on “video linkages” between ground police and helicopters, the news reports say. Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn also has been hostile to would-be protesters, telling local papers, “Just because they want to occupy something doesn’t mean we are obligated to provide them with an opportunity to camp out in a public park or on a sidewalk.” He has all but rejected the Florida ACLU’s efforts to negotiate.
In Charlotte, the police won’t “talk about $25 million in new equipment for the DNC,” the Charlotte Observer reported in a January article that talked about how the technology and equipment will affect how local policing is conducted for years. The ordinance upgrades in Charlotte and Tampa do not expire after the conventions. Civil libertarians expect both events to be highly militarized with protesters treated poorly.
“Exclusion zones are appalling,” Verheyden-Hilliard said. “We completely oppose and do not negotiate for any type of pens or pits in which people can stand. Our view is that people have the right to be on the streets and sidewalks and it is not a compromisable right. But that is definitely what you are going to see this year.”
Tactic 5: Mass Arrests, Punitive Detention: As many Occupy protesters learned last fall, the police have the bullhorns, handcuffs, pepper spray, waiting vans and jail cells at their disposal if they want to conduct sweeps, and use trap and detain tactics. Perhaps the best-known example was the mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge—which is being litigated to possibly impose rules on New York police to prevent similar arrests and to clear the records of those arrested. However, it is an unfortunate reality that despite all the constitutional protections and subsequent court victories, including collecting damages, the police can and do overpower protesters.
Perhaps the best warning to protesters of impending police overreach can be found in the rules that Washington, DC was forced to adopt in 2005, after it lost a series of suits and a sympathetic city council wanted to restrict police excesses. Washington’s revised standards include: restrictions on using police lines, restrictions on ordering an crowd to disperse or to end an event; a ban on arresting someone who is parading without a permit. It requires that protesters be given time to comply with an order; restricts the use of riot gear; limits the period of arrest and detention; restricts the use of pepper spray; prohibits inhumane use of handcuffs or physical restraints; requires food and water be given to anyone arrested; requires those arrested be given a statement on how to obtain a quick release; requires detailed arrest records be kept; and requires police to display badges.
Even with these standards in law—which are a list of tell-tale signs of police excesses—Washington city officials this week are eyeing legislation to ban "crowding" in city parks, and an attorney representing the police department was chastised by a federal judge this week for knowingly submitting false affidavits in an ongoing lawsuit over past protests.
Hope Not Fear
Despite these obstacles, civil rights lawyers are already looking at ways to defend First Amendment rights at 2012’s largest events: the NATO summit and political conventions. Also, there is a large cadre of lawyers across the country who gained experience during last fall’s Occupy protests and can be deployed quickly as events spiral.
“Nationally, what we were able to accomplish this past fall in terms of legal support was unprecedented,” Verheyden-Hilliard said. “I am the co-chair of National Lawyers Guild mass defense committee, and as Occupy actions sprung up all over the country, we were able to pull together hundreds of volunteer attorneys, law students and legal workers in cities and towns throughout the U.S. without notice.”
But looking toward the national political conventions, the hurdles are more formidable, she said, because the police and various federal agencies are not discussing their plans.
“We are working with legal teams in Tampa and Charlotte who are looking at ordinance challenges, permitting issues, etc.,” Verheyden-Hilliard said. “As it unfolds I would expect there to be legal challenges, but part of the initial hurdle is trying to pin down from law enforcement what the restrictions are going to be. One of the tactics that the government uses is to try to wind down the clock and not provide information on restrictions until the last minute so that you are only able to go to court on a short time-frame and without opportunity to develop a record to overcome the pretextual and untested security claims that will be presented to the judge. The fact is they know well in advance what they are planning to do.”
There are other major factors the police cannot control, however. The first is the number of people who will protest—whether it is in local Occupy protests or national political events. When enough people take to the streets, police cannot arrest everyone. Nor can they control the media from covering police overreach and excessive force. Together those factors can change the political climate and force governments at the local, state and national level to adopt reforms—not because legislators are feeling benevolent, but because they are worried about what is happening in the streets.
Steven Rosenfeld covers democracy issues for AlterNet and is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).
© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
