---------------------- The First Amendment to the Constitution establishes the freedom of speech, press, and assembly. It has been said that the lone pamphleteer can exercise these rights to the same extent as a corporation or politician, in an "honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent." ---------------------- The Lone Pamphleteer aims to embrace that freedom in an era of expanding corporate rights and contracting individual liberties. ----------------------Click on a topic below to see posts on that subject. ----------------------
“Like suicide, sexual assault is skyrocketing in the military. Why? Could it be that the problem is deeply structural? Could it be that it’s related to the domination culture the military embodies, not to mention the brutally immoral, pointless wars we’ve been waging for the past decade-plus? Could it have something to do with the idea that what goes around comes around?
“In a culture based on winning, the rapist is the “winner.” Maybe that’s the problem. And it permeates not just personal behavior but national policy.”
Obama’s speech appeared to expand those who are targeted in drone strikes and other undisclosed “lethal actions” in apparent anticipation of an overhaul of the 2001 congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against al Qaida and allied groups that supported the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
In every previous speech, interview and congressional testimony, Obama and his top aides have said that drone strikes are restricted to killing confirmed “senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces” plotting imminent violent attacks against the United States.
But Obama dropped that wording Thursday, making no reference at all to senior operational leaders. While saying that the United States is at war with al Qaida and its associated forces, he used a variety of descriptions of potential targets, from “those who want to kill us” and “terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat” to “all potential terrorist targets.”
The previous wording also was absent from a fact sheet distributed by the White House. Targeted killings outside of “areas of active hostilities,” it said, could be used against “a senior operational leader of a terrorist organization or the forces that organization is using or intends to use to conduct terrorist attacks.”
The preconditions for targeted killings set out by Obama and the fact sheet appear to correspond to the findings of a McClatchy review published in April of U.S. intelligence reports that showed the CIA killed hundreds of lower-level suspected Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants in scores of drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal are during the height of the operations in 2010-11.
Nearly 4,000 people are estimated to have died in U.S. drone strikes since 2004, the vast majority if them conducted by the CIA in Pakistan’s tribal area bordering Afghanistan.
The fact sheet also said that those who can be killed must pose a “continuing and imminent threat” to “U.S. persons,” setting no geographic limits. Previous administration statements have referred to imminent threats to the United States – the homeland or its interests.
“They appear to be broadening the potential target set,” said Christopher Swift, an international legal expert who teaches national security studies at Georgetown University and closely follows the targeted killing issue.
At the same time, new presidential guidance on targeted killings that Obama signed Wednesday appeared designed to address charges by some legal scholars and civil and human rights groups that the administration has relied on an overly broad definition of “imminent” that exceeds the international legal standard.
In his speech, Obama introduced the phrase “continuing and imminent” in what Swift saw as an effort to better define when the U.S. government can use lethal force.
“The standard for the use of force appears to be narrowing because they’ve introduced the standard of imminent and continuing,” Swift said. “Imminent means that the threat poses clear, credible and immediate risk of violence.”
Swift said he still has serious problems with the administration’s criteria for targeted killing because it has yet to publicly identify beyond the Afghan Taliban and al Qaida’s regional affiliates the groups that it considers “associated forces” of the terrorist network and the criteria it uses to define them.
Several other experts said they also remained troubled because Obama continued to keep secret details of the procedures that the administration uses in deciding who can be targeted in drone strikes and other lethal operations off traditional battlefields.
“I don’t think anyone should feel reassured by anything that President Obama said about the use of lethal force,” said Zack Johnson of Amnesty International. [++]
Documents Show Exxon Lied in Aftermath of Tar Sands Pipeline Rupture: Oil giant knew of dangerous toxins in Arkansas’ Lake Conway, yet claimed waterway was “oil free”
A new batch of documents received by Greenpeace in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has revealed that Exxon downplayed the extent of the contamination caused by the ruptured pipeline. Records of emails between Arkansas’ DEQ and Exxon depict attempts by Exxon to pass off press releases with factually false information. In a draft press release dated April 8, Exxon claims “Tests on water samples show Lake Conway and the cove are oil-free.” However, internal emails from April 6 show Exxon knew of significant contamination across Lake Conway and the cove resulting from the oil spill.
When the chief of Arkansas Hazardous Waste division called Exxon out on this falsehood, Exxon amended the press release. However, they did not amend it to say that oil was in Lake Conway and contaminant levels in the lake were rising to dangerous levels, as they knew to be the case. Instead, they continue to claim that Lake Conway is “oil-free.” For the record, Exxon maintains that the “cove,” a section of Lake Conway that experienced heavy oiling from the spill, is not part of the actual lake. Exxon maintains this distinction in spite of Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel saying unequivocally “The cove is part of Lake Conway…The water is all part of one body of water.” Furthermore, Exxon water tests confirmed that levels of Benzene and other contaminants rose throughout the lake, not just in the cove area.
Read more at greenpeaceblogs.org.
The Secret Donors Behind the Center for American Progress and Other Think Tanks
by Ken Silverstein for The Nation
While think tanks portray themselves as altruistic scholarly institutions, they emphasize their political influence when courting donors. “If you have a particular area of policy interest, you can support a specific research effort under way,” the Brookings Institution says in one pitch for cash. Those interested in ”a deeper engagement”—read: ready to fork over especially large sums of money—get personal briefings from resident experts and can work directly with senior Brookings officials to draw up a research agenda that will “maximize impact on policymaking.”
The Center for Strategic and International Studies advertises itself as being “in the unique position to bring together leaders of both the public and private sectors in small, often off-the-record meetings to build consensus around important policy issues.” It allows top-tier donors to directly sponsor reports, events and speaker series.
Read more here.
We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide. And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide. But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically speaking, late last night. A possibility might be “terracide” from the Latin word for earth. It has the right ring, given its similarity to the commonplace danger word of our era: terrorist.
The truth is, whatever we call them, it’s time to talk bluntly about the terrarists of our world. Yes, I know, 9/11 was horrific. Almost 3,000 dead, massive towers down, apocalyptic scenes. And yes, when it comes to terror attacks, the Boston Marathon bombings weren’t pretty either. But in both cases, those who committed the acts paid for or will pay for their crimes.
In the case of the terrarists — and here I’m referring in particular to the men who run what may be the most profitable corporations on the planet, giant energy companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Shell — you’re the one who’s going to pay, especially your children and grandchildren. You can take one thing for granted: not a single terrarist will ever go to jail, and yet they certainly knew what they were doing.
—“Terracide and the Terrarists, Destroying the Planet for Record Profits,” Tom Engelhardt
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175703/
(via tomdispatch)
“If we introduce the tar shale and the tar sands as a source and exploit those resources to a significant extent, then the problem [of climate change] becomes unsolvable.”
-Leading climate scientist James Hansen, fresh off his resignation from NASA (read more in The Age)
Phil Ochs performing “Joe Hill” on Swedish television in July, 1968
(via theamericanbear)
Matt Bors
Emma Goldman on political acts of violence
“To simply condemn the man who has committed an act of political violence, in order to save my skin, would be as unpardonable as it would be on the part of the physician, who is called to diagnose a case, to condemn the patient because the patient has tuberculosis, cancer, or some other disease. The honest, earnest, sincere physician does not only prescribe medicine, he tries to find out the cause of the disease. And if the patient is at all capable as to means, the doctor will say to him, ‘Get out of this putrid air, get out of the factory, get out of the place where your lungs are being infected.’ He will not merely give him medicine. He will tell him the cause of the disease. And that is precisely my position in regard to acts of violence. That is what I have said on every platform. I have attempted to explain the cause and the reason for acts of political violence.
“It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice which drives the political offender to his act. To condemn him means to be blind to the causes which make him. I can no more do it, nor have I the right to, than the physician who were to condemn the patient for his disease. You and I and all of us who remain indifferent to the crimes of poverty, of war, of human degradation, are equally responsible for the act committed by the political offender. May I therefore be permitted to say, in the words of a great teacher: ‘He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.’ Does that mean advocating violence? You might as well accuse Jesus of advocating prostitution, because He took the part of the prostitute, Mary Magdalene.”
—Emma Goldman, Address to the Jury, delivered during her anti-conscription trial, New York City, July 9, 1917
“When the day came, Graeber and his allies had to fend off two different enemies: the people who wanted to stop the occupation and the people who wanted to organize it. Occupy Wall Street succeeded, and survived, in its original location—Zuccotti Park, halfway between Wall Street and the World Trade Center site—for nearly two months, much longer than anyone predicted. It inspired similar occupations around the country, creating a model for radical politics in the Obama era. And it became known, more than anything, for its commitment to horizontalism: no parties, no leaders, no demands.”
-Kelefa Sanneh: “Paint Bombs: David Graeber’s ‘The Democracy Project’ and the anarchist revival” | The New Yorker
American skies aren’t supposed to open for another couple of years to drones flown by commercial operators, but they’re already getting liftoff with Silicon Valley investors.
On Wednesday, a drone start-up called Airware plans to announce that it has raised $10.7 million in a round of financing led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Google Ventures, the investment arm of the search giant, is also pitching in money.
Although the term drone conjures up images of unmanned military planes that can shoot missiles from the sky, Airware is developing technology for the budding array of commercial uses for unmanned aerial vehicles, as they are also known. The company, based in Newport Beach, Calif., and founded by former aerospace engineers from Boeing and other companies, has created a combination of hardware and software that can be added to drones made by other companies to make them more programmable, Jonathan Downey, the chief executive of Airware, said in an interview.
For-profit uses of drones in the United States isn’t technically legal yet, but that will change soon. Last year, Congress ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to figure out how to integrate drones into domestic airspace safely by 2015. The growing interest in the technology, especially from law enforcement agencies, which have already begun using drones in some cases, has prompted heated debates about the privacy implications of flying surveillance cameras.
Even without the ability to serve the United States market, Airware has had to turn away customers in recent months, Mr. Downey said. He said the company will use its new financing to hire more people.
“We don’t have to have the U.S. market to be successful,” he said. “We have a lot of customer interest globally.”
This article suggests the main purposes of commercial and personal drone use will be for the common good: preventing the poaching of rhinos in Kenya, search-and-rescue operations, vaccine delivery to remote areas in Africa and Asia, and inspections of open-air mining in France. That might all be true, but I think it’s worth at least stepping back to consider the dangerous implications of mass producing autonomous unmanned planes capable of both complete surveillance and destruction, and then selling them to the highest bidders.
To quote Jurassic Park… “I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here, it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now… you’re selling it, you wanna sell it. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
