No, Nanette, Government is NOT Your 'Friend' or ' Daddy'!

Right: Nazi defendants wait to be tried at Nuremberg. It was the 'good Germans,' who saw no evil after Hitler came to power , who were responsible for the chaos the 3rd Reich caused.

"Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for the purpose of a temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open." - Thomas Jefferson, in 'Notes on Virginia'.

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. AND TO RENDER THEM SAFE, THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED." - Thomas Jefferson, 'Notes on Virginia'.

Yesterday, our dear friend 'Nanette' visited from Aurora, and we had a really good breakfast before having a heavy conversation about Snowden, the NSA, citizens and rights.  'Nanette' like so many 'Muricans, felt in her heart of hearts that Snowden had "betrayed" his country  and merely created hysteria about the NSA mass surveillance programs like PRISM. There was nothing whatever to fret about and the NSA was merely carrying out its mission to protect us from the millions who want to kill us. If you didn't do anything wrong, NSA wouldn't be tracking your every move. Just be a 'good guy' and move on, oh, and stop complaining!

When I mentioned the 'continuity of Government' (COG) program given teeth by the  Bushistas through Sec. 215 of the Patriot Act, and how it provided for domestic protestors (like Occupy Wall Street and anti-frackers) to be labeled "terrorists" - and noted  how the Occupy demonstrators were tracked and hounded-  she merely shrugged her shoulders:

"I don't protest or complain so I have nothing to worry about."

When I told her that the same Sec. 215 allowed federal agents to break into a home and rifle through computer files and other documents without having to tell you, she just smiled - that was for others to worry about because she had nothing to cause any alarm. Only photos of her two kitties.

When I noted the 'Main Core' program and how 8 million innocent Americans were already listed under it, people who'd done nothing except perhaps speak out against the Afghan adventure and the waste of money involved, she just laughed. It doesn't mean a thing and no one is going to do anything with it. She would become a true believer if people started to get arrested and their doors get knocked down.

To her it was quite fine and dandy and not worth worrying or fretting over because, after all, government was good to us, our "friend" or at least 'Daddy': it paved our roads, it paid our benefits - like her Social Security and Medicare- and it regulated her foods so there were no salmonella infections, and supplied money for our schools (ok, at least the better ones through 'No Child Left Behind' and 'Race to the Top') and it protected us from all those bad guys that Clapper and Alexander keep warning us about.

When I cited the stat - from a Gideon Rachman Financial Times article, e.g.






and that "the average American had only a one in 500,000 chance of being killed in a terrorist attack", compared to  a one in 346,000 chance of being annihilated by a large asteroid (> 0.5 km dia.) she again just shrugged. She still knew in her heart of hearts that the government was protecting her.

When I informed her the same gov't she praised for paving her roads also started wars that couldn't be paid for, she was mostly speechless. Finally, she agreed I had a point. When I added to that those unpaid for wars (as well as tax cut for the rich) meant cuts to her domestic S.S. and Medicare benefits she said she'd "wait and see". I added that, in case she forgot, the Supreme Court in a ruling some years back stated that no benefits are enshrined and the government could reduce them or even eliminate them.

In other words, her image of a benevolent government largely depended on who was in power:  which party - and who in that party had what agenda in the Executive branch. It was certainly not a 'slam dunk' that in each election cycle we'd get the government we need or want. (And no one can dismiss the power of money to trump our votes,  negating her argument that "we" get the gov't we deserve via our voting choices.)  It could be a malevolent one with no citizen rights at heart, and no incentive to "promote the general welfare" as stated in the Preamble of the Constitution. As for the Bill of Rights, it was a truism that if people didn't use them then they'd lose them.


'Nanette' in this sense did appear to see the paradox of the NSA going ape shit to reign in terrorists with its mass surveillance dragnet (that didn't discriminate good guys from bad)  but not attending to the millions of cockeyed gun owners with their AR-15s, Bushmaster .223s and other weapons - all 2nd amendment rights aficionados, when thousands of times more people were murdered than killed by terrorists each year.


But then these gun zealots - unlike 4th amendment civil libertarians - might go bonkers if threatened with the remote loss of any of their current rights.. At least she saw the divergence in government obsession between protecting 2nd and 4th amendment rights. The 2nd amendment folks struck fear in the heart of government, but not 4th amendment rights folks. (As I noted in an earlier blog post, protecting 4th amendment rights is always more difficult because they are largely intangible and people don't see when they're losing them. By contrast a gun owner can instantly see when he's losing his Bushmaster or Glock 9mm).

I tried my best to show Nanette it is the citizen's job to oversee and pay attention to what the government is doing, and not be asleep at the switch. I read to her Jefferson's quotes (above) and indicated that a real citizen had to treat government more or less like a toddler of immense power that might wander off the beaten path at any time -depending on political winds, or outside agents.

As MIT's Noam Chomsky put it in a recent interview:

"Governments are power systems. They are trying to sustain their power and domination over their populations and they will use what means are available to do this. By now the means are very sophisticated and extensive and we can expect them to increase. So for instance, if you read technology journals you learn that in robotics labs for some years there have been efforts to develop small drones, what they call “fly-sized drones,” which can intrude into a person’s home and be almost invisible and carry out constant surveillance. You can be sure that the military is very much interested in this, and the intelligence systems as well, and will soon be using it."

So true.  The saddest part of our exchange is the extent to which I realized that Nanette was like the millions of good Germans who, had they paid attention and done their homework, might have averted the catastrophe of the Third Reich - by not turning a blind eye to what was going on. (In Nanette's view that'd never happen today since we're more "civilized". Hmmm... I reminded her that the Germans with their Goethe and Bach also fancied themselves to be).

Ironically, we Americans - who had to sacrifice so many lives to liberate Europe from Hitler's grasp- had no tolerance for any of the 'good Germans' - a historical point many 'good Americans' today would do well to ponder.  Go back to the end of World War II and the American occupation of Germany in the years after 1945. We assailed the “weak” German people and mocked them for not standing up to the growing metastasis of Hitler’s Reich which they obviously saw but did nothing about. Hell, too many sided with Hitler, praised him and embraced his ideology while turning a blind eye to the wrongs. The last straw was the Enabling Act (1933) which essentially obliterated the last vestiges of the Weimar Republic. Our military also dragged out these “good Germans” and trotted them into the remnant concentration camps to see first hand what their Fuhrer and his minions did. They were marched in and forced to look at the naked, gassed bodies stacked like cordwood until they puked.

Meanwhile, our then military leaders rounded up the remaining high profile Nazis, including Hermann Goering (see photo) , and dragged them before a Tribunal to be accountable for their actions. (Read the book, ‘Judgment at Nuremburg’ or see the movie). Though they gave the excuse they were only “following orders” we didn’t buy it. We demanded a higher moral standard that NO one is obliged to follow orders to serve such vile ends and there exists higher moral law that trumps “orders” or “oaths”.

The U.S. insisted instead that violating a government order was mandated by the principle (VI) that the United States trumpeted in the Nuremberg war crime trials. Principle VI came to be known as the Nuremberg Code and clearly states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to orders of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."


Note this Principle’s injunction is exactly analogous to what Edward Snowden followed. He had allegedly binding orders and “oaths” by which the government found it expedient to limit his actions, but he saw (as the U.S. military leaders did at Nuremberg) that the option of a higher moral choice dictated he inform the American people – whose liberties were at stake and threatened – of what was being done in their name. As Robert Scheer noted in a June 25 blog, ‘The Good Germans in Government’:

Read the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and tell me that Edward Snowden is not a hero in the mold of those who founded this republic. Check out the Nuremberg war crime trials and ponder our current contempt for the importance of individual conscience as a civic obligation

I ended our conversation (moving back to more light-heated fare)  by suggesting to Nanette that she read the 4th amendment again and carefully, and take note that mass warrants were not permitted. The government had to seek out and issue individualized warrants specific to the perpetrators and context. It didn't matter if this "took time", or was "inconvenient" - that is what the amendment stated.

Why, I asked her, should we empower the government to take away our 4th amendment rights any more than the gun owners allow the government to take  away their 2nd amendment rights?

She had no answer, but she promised to read the Bill of Rights again as her first resolution for this year. Let us hope millions of our fellow citizens do the same, in between their shopping excursions, instagrams and Facebook-ing.

Meanwhile, the fathead fool and dickhead Peter King (R- NY) has flipped out at the NY Times editorial board calling them "apologists for terrorists"- for calling for clemency for  Edward Snowden. See,

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/02/gops_peter_king_flips_out_on_the_new_york_times/

This asshole still claims Snowden is a “traitor” -  despite the fact Ed has done more to protect this nation's honor and principles than the fat bag of blowhard gas has done in all his years sitting in congress.  The real traitors are pigs like King, and we need to call them out and say so!

Too Many Americans Don’t Deserve Liberty

Right: Nazi defendants wait to be tried at Nuremberg


"Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for the purpose of a temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open." - Thomas Jefferson, in 'Notes on Virginia'.


"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. AND TO RENDER THEM SAFE, THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED." - Thomas Jefferson, 'Notes on Virginia'.


"Need a reason to worry about the NSA spying scandal? Try this: you legally protest an oil company in your town, are arrested, and wind up in court facing federal terrorism charges and a personal eternity behind bars. The evidence presented against you was gathered by NSA monitoring of your telephone usage and social media communications.” - William Rivers Pitt's blog post, 'You, TERRORIST!'

" I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return"-  Sen. Frank Church, referencing the NSA in 1975.

Today, July Fourth, Americans celebrate their independence and “liberty” but the sad fact is too many haven’t a clue. Hell, most can’t even name three of the Bill of Rights far less describe what they’re about. The word “liberty” (like “freedom”) is too easy to bandy about and is often lost in a morass of rhetoric – usually in propping up a specious nationalism or exceptionalism, as if we believe we’re the only nation to discover it. But I can tell any American reading this that’s a myth, because in places from Germany to Barbados to Switzerland people enjoy REAL liberty and often far more than we brag about. For example, in Austrian town squares (Innsbruck, Salzburg) we saw street characters panhandling with assorted unique outfits – from “Mozart” to “Charlie Chaplin”. In most U.S. cities they’d be run off – costumes or not. Is that liberty? You tell me. But we’ve all been brainwashed to believe we have a lock on the magical entity called “liberty”.

What is worse, the last 3 weeks have shown me that too many Americans don’t deserve liberty. We know who they are: the ones who have called for Edward Snowden’s head, labeled him a “traitor” – acting like sheeple instead of free-thinking people. They’ve meekly followed and imbibed the propaganda spewed by the corpora-media and the security state which is the real culprit. (In terms of trashing the 4th amendment). They’re the one who’ve followed the lead of the American puppet media by making Snowden and his travails, asylum seeking and persecution the story instead of the vile overreach he disclosed – which as others have pointed out – leads the way to tyranny (especially via the COG program)


What does that make these mock Americans? In my book it makes them “Good Germans”. Go back to the end of World War II and the American occupation of Germany in the years after 1945. We assailed the “weak” German people and mocked them for not standing up to the growing metastasis of Hitler’s Reich which they obviously saw but did nothing about. Hell, too many sided with Hitler, praised him and embraced his ideology while turning a blind eye to the wrongs. The last straw was the Enabling Act (1933) which essentially obliterated the last vestiges of the Weimar Republic. Our military also dragged out these “good Germans” and trotted them into the remnant concentration camps to see first hand what their Fuhrer and his minions did. They were marched in and forced to look at the naked, gassed bodies stacked like cordwood until they puked.


Meanwhile, our then military leaders rounded up the remaining high profile Nazis, including Hermann Goering (see photo) , and dragged them before a Tribunal to be accountable for their actions. (Read the book, ‘Judgment at Nuremburg’ or see the movie). Though they gave the excuse they were only “following orders” we didn’t buy it. We demanded a higher moral standard that NO one is obliged to follow orders to serve such vile ends and there exists higher moral law that trumps “orders” or “oaths”.


The U.S. insisted instead that violating a government order was mandated by the principle (VI) that the United States trumpeted in the Nuremberg war crime trials. Principle VI came to be known as the Nuremberg Code and clearly states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to orders of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."


Note this Principle’s injunction is exactly analogous to what Edward Snowden followed. He had allegedly binding orders and “oaths” by which the government found it expedient to limit his actions, but he saw (as the U.S. military leaders did at Nuremberg) that the option of a higher moral choice dictated he inform the American people – whose liberties were at stake and threatened – of what was being done in their name. As Robert Scheer noted in a recent blog (June 25, ‘The Good Germans in Government’):


"Read the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and tell me that Edward Snowden is not a hero in the mold of those who founded this republic. Check out the Nuremberg war crime trials and ponder our current contempt for the importance of individual conscience as a civic obligation”


So why have so many of our compatriots mindlessly branded him a traitor? Because those forlorn consumers have lost track of their rights as well as obligations as citizens, and basically surrendered them to the state. Columnist John Kass summed it up in his piece ‘We Gave Up Our Freedom After 9/11”. As he writes:

"We gave up our freedom after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. President George W. Bush and congress ceded it away. We were afraid and we gave it up."


Well, not all of us did! Instead we recognized how the Bushies were emulating the Nazis! Those of us who are now labeled “traitor –supporters” or civil liberties “extremists” have refused to whine and pout for the spy state to "keep us safe", i.e.  from events that have the same probability of occurrence as large asteroid hits. We instead doubled down on our commitment to organizations like the ACLU or became members of the ACLU’s Guardians of Liberty, fully recognizing what the Bushies were up to because we paid attention instead of going shopping at the Mall (as Bush ordered after 9/11).
 

Am I a civil liberties “extremist”? Damned right if that means a citizen who understands that the Constitution is not just “a piece of paper” (as Bush once called it) and that the rights inherent in the Bill of Rights are real, apply to individuals, and not mere “compromise abstractions” but rather hold the key to American identity – what truly sets us apart. And once those rights are gone, believe me they won’t be coming back! Once they are gone we will cease to be the nation my ancestor,  Conrad Brumbaugh,  envisaged and fought for in the Revolutionary War as one of the Pennsylvania Regiment.

 

What would Conrad think now nearly 240 years after the War of Independence? He’d likely barf nonstop at the spectacle of what too many of the current crop of Americans have devolved to: arrant, whiny, weak, sissy consumers,  who’d rather calumniate someone trying to preserve their liberties than recognize the real threat to their existence. He’d then likely crawl back into his grave shaking his head but echoing Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote.

And all those soldiers supposedly “fighting for our freedoms” ? Hell, they're not even allowed to access the UK Guardian website, lest it contaminate their minds, see e.g.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/01/us-military-blocks-guardian-troops   Some freedom. Maybe those troops need to fight for their own freedoms, as opposed to ours. If they aren't even allowed the basic freedom of what to read, what the hell are they fighting for anyway?

See also the planned demonstrations sponsored by the civil liberties group  'Restore the Fourth" and targeting  faux liberal  (but definite Neoliberal) Dianne Feinstein:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/04/restore-the-fourth-protesters-nsa-surveillance


Readers would  also do well to bear in mind the words of Bruce Schneier, a security specialist, who wrote in The New York Times:


"The argument that exposing these documents helps the terrorists doesn't even pass the laugh test; there's nothing here that changes anything any potential terrorist would do or not do."


If our minds are "to be improved" to the extent of keeping the government - OUR government- on the straight and narrow (as Jefferson enjoined us), we need to have the critical thinking skills as well as historical ballast to recognize PR that doesn't pass laugh tests when it's trotted out. Irrespective of who it issues from.

It's Still Stupid to Launch an Attack on Iran

As undercurrents of discontent for Iran's nuclear program continue to bubble to the surface and we behold the Israelis already preparing for Iranian counter-attacks (to a near future bombing raid on Iranian facilities), the fact remains there is no defensible logic which could justify such an attack.

Even leave out for the moment the report in a recent issue of The Economist ('Smart Concrete', March 3rd, p. 89) that recently developed U.S. "bunker buster", 30,000 lb. bombs may not be able to penetrate Iranian underground facilities, fortified as they are now with "ultra-high performance concrete" (UHPC) - this is a nanoscale variation, often incorporating oxides of titanium or zirconium. Other variants have used polypropylene fibers and quartz flour (known as 'fume') to attain the same effect, according to the piece.

In other words, attacking Iranian facilities using these Massive Ordinance Penetrators ("MOPS' ), which can break through 60 m of ordinary concrete, will not necessarily be a walk in the park. And if not for the U.S., it won't be for Israel either, unless they do something reckless like using tactical nukes - the basis for the horrific nuclear war flick, 'Threads', e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/03/anxious-to-start-war-with-iran-see-this.html

But there are other reasons to refuse to be cajoled into a costly, maybe super-costly, war. One of them is Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. All it has are highly enriched fuels which could be used for reactors. The U.S. Intelligence community has already twice concluded there is no evidence that Iran has committed to any decision to make a nuclear weapon. So, are we now again, to be pushed into a 3rd conflict - like the specious one in Iraq based on ridiculous claims of them getting "yellowcake" - abetted by a 'dog and pony' show before the UN?

Meanwhile, London's International Institute for Strategic Studies concurred.

There is also a major fault in the logic that if Iran goes nuclear it'll set off a nuclear arms race in the region. We have examples that counter such reasoning. When North Korea went nuclear, neither Korea or Japan followed suit. And when Israel went nuclear, neither Egypt or Saudi Arabia followed suit.

Also, comparing attainment of nukes to India and Pakistan doesn't wash, since we've seen both those countries go to war three times in 30 years yet nukes weren't used. In fact, one could argue that since going nuclear they've been more restrained, somewhat analogous to the basis for "mutually assured destuction" (MAD) that existed between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold war.

Neither does the argument that any nukes "might fall into the hands" of terrorists make sense. After all Iran has endured, including massive sanctions (the latest being cut off from the international electronic banking SWIFT system) how or why would they be so cavalier in allowing their hard won attainments to be usurped by loonies? It is all scare tactics.

Finally, the (mainly) Israeli argument that Iranians are prepared to commit mass suicide if it means the extermination of Israel is hyperbolic babble. (This was the claim of the Israeli Ambassador on a recent Bill Maher show). A truer take was offered by Gen. Martin Dempsey on Fareed Zakaria's CNN program some time back, when he referred to Iran as a "rational actor" - that means ultimately invested in survival not self-extermination for a manic, irrational cause (as the Christian fundies are in the U.S. of A., who can't wait for Armageddon to occur and the world's cities vaporized to pave the way for Jaysus' 2nd coming. Oh, and that means all the Jews except 100,000 "chosen ones" vaporized too, though until then these fundie U.S. Xtians are happy to use Israel as the base for their prophecies to unfold!)

As observed by U.S. intelligence specialist, Paul Pillar, in an essay in The Washngton Monthly:

"More than three decades of history show that the Islamic Republic's rulers, like most rulers elsewhere, are overwhelmingly concerned with preserving their regime and their power....in this life and not some future one."

Israel, before it mounts its bombs to attack Iran might want to process that. They also might wish to look again at Principle VI under the Nuremberg laws, passed after the Nazis were brought to heel. Principle VI clearly states:

"The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law: (a) Crimes against peace: (i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i). "

As for Obama and his administration, he'd be stupid to cooperate in such a violation, leading as it would to even higher spiking oil prices, and very likely an end to his aspirations to get a 2nd term - which I for one believe he deserves.