Just Following Orders at Guantanamo

Dear Mr. President,

An article published on the New England Journal of Medicine’s website Wednesday urges Navy doctors at Guantanamo to mutiny and stop force-feeding hunger strikers, calling it “aggressive assault.” In response, Navy Captain Robert Durand said, “People follow lawful orders. It’s Department of Defense policy to preserve life through lawful means.” (Miami Herald, “Doctors of hunger-strike detainees urged to mutiny”, June 13, 2013) Military policy is to preserve life? Really? “Just following orders” is the standard response of all those complicit in torture, murder and brutality. That excuse didn’t work for the Nazis at Nuremburg and it is no more valid now than it was then. 104 prisoners in the American Gulag of Guantanamo are now officially classified hunger strikers; 43 are force-fed. This doesn’t include 14 CIA prisoners in the top-secret Camp 7—Capt. Durand is “forbidden” to include them in the count. Are they too, on a hunger strike? Force-fed? A mutiny by Guantanamo doctors would be, at the very least, moral and ethical. “Just following orders” was an inadequate defense at Nuremburg; the orders being followed were ruled unlawful. Force-feeding at Guantanamo has been ruled torture and condemned by the World Medical Association, the UN, the AMA and medical groups around the world. You are on the wrong side of history, Mr. President, the wrong side of ethics, the wrong side of morality, the wrong side of humanity. You embraced not only Bush the Lesser’s Global War of Terror but the lawlessness of his neocon administration and their dream of Empire. You have taken suppression of whistle-blowers to new extremes, the lack of transparency to levels unimagined a decade ago, and made war acceptable foreign policy. Meanwhile, the harpies in Congress spread fear and ignorance, support your murderous wars of aggression, and willingly implement a police state where everyone is watched and no one is free, where inequality is accepted as normal and doublethink is perceived as logical truth. You have betrayed not only We the People, but millions around the world who believed your promises of Hope, Change and the restoration of justice. Four and a half years later we have a world more unjust, more violent and more unequal, a world rampant with fear and hatred, a world of Kill Lists, targeted assassinations and indefinite detention, a world of rich and poor and no in-between. Welcome to Obama’s world where even starving for justice is no longer allowed.

The Inquisition and the Wizard

Dear Mr. President,

“The war crimes tribunal for the Guantanamo prisoner [Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri] charged in the attack on the USS Cole is going into a closed session dealing with a subject so secret even the defendant can’t hear it.” (SF Chronicle, June 14, p. A2) For reasons of "national security," Col. James Pohl ruled yesterday. The Inquisition has returned and 14^th century religious law now rules American jurisprudence in the 21^st century. It’s not only in Guantanamo; it’s also in the Ft. Meade trial of Bradley Manning where he is not permitted to testify to his motives, where witnesses who knew and supervised him will not be permitted to testify on his behalf and where a witness for the prosecution—a member of Seal Team 6—will remain hidden and unidentified. Kangaroo courts and Show Trials have replaced the rule of law and the Constitution in Obama’s Amerika, a land where secrecy reigns and injustice prevails, where freedom of speech is becoming an anachronism, the security state knows everything about everybody and there is “nothing to fear if you’ve done nothing wrong,” one of the most chilling phrases from George Orwell’s 1984. Also yesterday, the Supreme Court “issued a regulation barring most demonstrations in front of the courthouse” (NY Times, p. A14) and Senator Feinstein’s reaction to the revelations of all-encompassing spying by the NSA is to tighten security even more so low level contractors like Edward Snowden and military analysts like Bradley Manning can’t download classified information from the government’s massive databases onto flash drives and share that information with reporters and WikiLeakers. (But with 1.3 million people having Top Secret clearance, it’s hard to tighten security and still share information among the sprawling intelligence/military network.) It’s a dystopian vision of Obama’s Amerika, but it’s the one our Nobel Peace Prize winning Democratic president brought into being. You have embraced every policy Bush and his neocons created, and continued, expanded and morphed them in ways the neocons never dreamed. You are not Bush Lite but Bush Heavy. You are not the lesser evil but the more effective evil. You are not, as so many argue, a helpless prisoner of a Republican Congress, for your own party is complicit in your endless wars against man and the planet. You are the wizard behind the curtain, the issuer of proclamations, a sideshow for the rich while the evil you do goes on behind closed doors and out of sight.

Nazi Germany, Nazi America

Dear Mr. President,

Following WW II the spectacle of the Nuremberg trials convinced us that some monstrous evil had turned the German people into a nation of mindless goose-stepping Nazis who condoned injustice and bigotry, violence and murder, who could not distinguish right from wrong, good from evil. How could people be like this? we wondered in our smug satisfaction of knowing we had saved the world from tyranny. How could the Germans let Hitler come to power? How could they allow the extermination of Jews? How could they be so evil? Hannah Arendt gave what happened in Germany, a name: “the banality of evil.” Going about your daily business and not speaking out, doing nothing to oppose the evil your government does. Those who did speak out, who openly opposed what was happening were severely punished—beatings, imprisonment, or death. It took a disastrous defeat in war and a new generation to purge Germany’s national sense of shame. We were so smug, so secure in our superiority and sense of exceptionalism. Then came 9/11 and Bush divided the world neatly into good and evil: we’re good, they’re evil; you’re either with us or with them; they hate us for our freedom—and most people went along. Cheney warned that we might have to go to the dark side and we did—renditions, torture, sometimes death—but our government told us it was necessary to protect us. Guantanamo was opened to house illegal combatants and prevent future attacks and that was accepted too. Warrantless wiretapping followed, then all-encompassing surveillance of everywhere, indefinite detention, secret laws, Kill Lists, targeted assassinations, drone attacks far from any battlefield and a war of terror without end on perceived enemies. We now live in a state of siege, a state of fear where our government operates in secrecy, openly lies to Congress and anyone who would dare expose the truth is severely punished. Among others, Bradley Manning and now, Eric Snowden. In spite of the revelations exposed by these men, there is no public outcry, no mass protests. Senators and representatives rage against the traitors, support the liars, and don’t care about injustice and the loss of freedom. Only a few stand up against the abuse of power but they are shouted down and ignored. The rest go about their business and are complicit in criminality by the state. The technology has changed, the names have changed, but the evil is the same today as it was then. The banality of evil. Welcome to Nazi America.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up: Snowden and the NSA

Dear Mr. President,

You can’t make this stuff up. The pundits tell us that the leaker of the NSA’s surveillance program must be a high level intelligence official but it turns out to be Edward Snowden, a 29-year old computer security contractor for the NSA, an employee of Booz Allen, which markets itself as “the premier protector of America’s classified computer infrastructure.” Snowden, like Bradley Manning before him, was a young idealist with unlimited access to secret information who believed in the Constitution and the need for transparency in a democracy, the power elite’s worst nightmare. Snowden, early on, felt an obligation to help free people from oppression and in 2003 signed up for the Army Special Forces training so he could go to Iraq but quickly became disillusioned: “Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone.” (Today’s NYT, p. A13) He broke his leg during a training accident, was discharged and went to work as a computer tech with access to first, the CIA’s secrets and then the NSA’s. He watched you advance policies he thought you would rein in and, like Manning, revealed information showing the abuses of government. Both Manning and Snowden are bright and articulate and the contrast to our sclerotic politicians could not be more striking. In today’s Times, McCain blathers about how the threat of terrorism is growing steadily and we need this surveillance. Excuse me, Senator, but this sounds like an admission that we lost the Global War on Terror. Then there’s Feinstein, whose descent into senility and doublethunk is frightening. She’d be willing to hold hearings on the importance of the surveillance program every month, she says, but the information is classified and can’t be made public. Then she gives examples of how the information was used to foil two plots—Mumbai and the NYC subway. As the Times points out, however, the Mumbai attack was not foiled: more than 160 people were killed and in a separate article, Rep. Mark Udall claims the NY subway plot was foiled not by the NSA, but by British police who tipped us off. Clapper, the guy who flat out lied to Sen. Wyden, said the leaks had caused “huge grave damage, Rep. Mike Rogers continued to deny the scale and scope of the surveillance and both he and Feinstein want Snowden prosecuted. You, on the other hand, project an image of restraint and welcome the debate. Ha! If you had a shred of decency, you’d give Mr. Snowden your Nobel Peace Prize.

Boundless Informant, Boundless Lies

Dear Mr. President,
First it’s the AP phone logs, then the Fox reporter phone logs, then the Verizon phone logs, then PRISM, then that secret directive for defensive and offensive cyberwarfare and now it’s Boundless Informant. What it all shows is that none of our leaders, least of all you, are to be trusted. First the snooping is “limited,” then it isn’t, the data “critical for national security” but it isn’t, it’s “saved lives in foiling terrorist plots”—that turns out not to be true either. “We don’t know how many people are being monitored. Don’t have the capability,” the NSA director tells Congress. A lie. Senator Wyden asks James Clapper, director of national intelligence: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” “No sir,” Clapper responds. Another lie. Now you tell the American people that congressional oversight is our best guarantee that we’re not being spied on? You think anyone believes that? There is no congressional oversight. The NSA lies to Congress—bald-faced lies—and those who actually want to rein in the runaway surveillance state of America have their hands tied by the likes of Feinstein in the Senate and Rogers in the House. I bet you’d like to get Glenn Greenwald in the same cell with Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, call in a drone strike and make all 3 of them disappear. And then there’s that leaker-at-large, the one who’s causing all the mischief, the one who believes the Constitution is still in effect. Where’s Seal Team 6 when you need them? So how’s that summit with China’s President Xi going, Mr. President? Did he bring along a copy of the Heat Map from Boundless Informant that shows a lot of spying on China? Directive 20 that’s an all-hands-on-deck to map out cyberwar? Or did the two of you compare notes, chuckle over all the uproar and agree to keep in touch? What gets me is, in addition to all the lies and obfuscations, the trampling of privacy and 4^th Amendment, and all the scare tactics, is that we’re trying to solve the wrong problems. The problem isn’t terrorists in Waziristan and Helmand or al Qaeda franchises in Africa that keep popping up like Taco Bells. That problem’s pretty easy to solve. We stop killing them, they stop killing us. Of course the hard part is seeing them as humans and treating them with respect. Then we tackle the real problems: hunger, health, global warming. Call off the wars, stop snooping and start acting like a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Obama Through the Lens of PRISM

Dear Mr. President,

Turns out your snoops at the NSA/CIA/FBI complex know everything about everybody—not only every phone call made but the PRISM program collects every online photo, Facebook comment, Google query, bank transaction, Skype connection, Yahoo email… The disgruntled intelligence official who leaked all this about the phone logs and PRISM didn’t perform an act of whistle-blowing so much as an act of self-immolation, knowing it won’t take long to figure out who provided the information. Either he or she is already on a plane to Ecuador or, false identity papers in hand, visiting a plastic surgeon. What irony that you’re on your way to press Xi about China’s hacking and spying. I call that poetic justice. You got testy about all this coming out, calling it hype and decrying the leak. “If people don't trust Congress and the judiciary then I think we are going to have some problems here.” (today’s Guardian). I hope so. Not only don’t people trust Congress and the judiciary but they don’t trust you either, Mr. President. For 4½ years you’ve broken promise after promise, continued and expanded your predecessor’s policies that you railed against in 2008 to get elected, promoted wars of aggression, suppressed information, ignored laws domestic and foreign, violated the Constitution, ordered assassination of perceived enemies… why should we trust you? And why should we trust the rubber stamp FISA court which operates in secret and approved every request made in 2011 and from its creation in 1978 through the end of 2004, granted 18,761 warrants and rejected 5? And why should we trust Congress who long ago abandoned We the People in favor of the 1%? Even the staid NY Times called Senator Feinstein’s defense of the secret snooping absurd—“…the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future,” she said. Then she added that she didn’t actually know how the data collected was used. (Time to step down, Senator Feinstein.) I thought one of the most interesting quotes in the multiple stories on the secret spying programs was in a story on page A17 of today’s Times: “‘You have a president who’s basically arguing against himself,’ said James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. ‘It’s almost Shakespearean. In the speech, he’s saying we’re going to stop doing this stuff, it’s bad. But then he keeps doing it.’” I see more Machiavelli than Shakespeare but it’s definitely a Shakespearian tragedy for the world.

Sliding Down the Slippery Slope of Tyrrany

Dear Mr. President,

It’s no surprise that the NSA collects massive amounts of data on Americans. The secret spying on AP and Fox reporters are the tip of the iceberg. Today we learn Verizon turns over phone logs, tomorrow it’ll be AT&T and all the others. According to Senator Love-Them-Drones Feinstein, this is nothing new; it’s been in place for the past 7 years. I think you’re counting on the Facebook generation’s indifferent to this latest invasion of privacy. After all, Facebookers put all kinds of personal stuff out there for people to see. “No problem,” they say. Until it is. I suppose we’ll learn that not only are phone logs collected on business users but also residential users and that, oh, by the way, so are the conversations. After all, there’s that new billion dollar million square foot data center in Utah ready to collect and sift everything we do and say in their search for terrorists at home and abroad. It’s clear that the NSA snoops regard everyone—Islamists, Christians, Afghans, Americans, Uzbeks—as a threat to national security. That’s the way it works sliding down the slippery slope of tyranny. Today I watched John D. McHugh’s short film, “Afghanistan: Drawdown” (http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2013/05/2013529133226564418.html). It follows a company of U.S. soldiers and their Afghan counterparts on patrol in Kandahar province. McHugh filmed there in 2006 and returned to see how well-prepared the Afghans are to take over when we leave at the end of 2014. Anyone watching the film can see that the tens of billions we spent recruiting, equipping and training the Afghans to fight off the Taliban when we leave was a total waste of money. They’d see that the Taliban is still strong, that Afghanistan is as much a disaster as was Iraq, and that when (if) we leave, the fighting will continue, the bloodshed and misery will continue and the Taliban will take control. As for Al Qaeda, they too, won. The fall of the Twin Towers was just the beginning. Look at America pre-9/11 and today. We live in a National Security state where we’re searched and spied on, where speech is no longer free and our rights no longer taken for granted, where the bulk of our budget is spent on war and social services and the social safety net is diminishing. We live in a state of fear bordering on tyranny where the president makes secret laws and secret deals and decides who will live and who will die. Welcome to the new world order. Welcome to Obamaworld.