A Time to Break Silence

Dear Mr. President,

On the eve of the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s electrifying “I Have a Dream” speech, there are many articles and analyses of its—and his—impact, but there’s another speech, “A Time to Break Silence” which is equally important and as relevant today as it was when he gave it on April 4, 1967. It was a powerful anti-Vietnam War speech, not appreciated by the Johnson Administration or any administration since. Anti-war sentiment is never popular with the power elite, for war is a path to power. I haven’t seen a single mention of the Break Silence speech and that’s a shame for there are important, indeed critical lessons we need to learn from it. Dr. King, a fellow Nobel Peace Prize recipient, saw the connection between war and poverty, between war and injustice, war and the crushing of hope and aspiration at home and abroad. Although the speech is about Vietnam, it is also about Afghanistan today, the parallels strikingly similar. Near the end he says: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” We are approaching—maybe already in—that state of spiritual death as a nation and blindly headed deeper into it, for the drums of war beat once more for “intervention,” this time in Syria. It reminds me of the runup to the invasion of Iraq—the evidence of WMDs/the evidence of chemical weapons, the list of atrocities by Saddam Hussein/the list of atrocities by the Assad regime, the moral duty to rid the world of a tyrant, etc. No talk of cutting off arms to both sides in this horrendous slaughter or finding another path to peace. You make secret deals to arm the rebels—many, jihadists, terrorists and those we deem our enemies elsewhere—who are also guilty of atrocities. Outside Europe and Washington, there is little enthusiasm for military intervention but never mind, as reported in today’s NYT (“Arab League Rejects Attack Against Syria” p. A1), “…administration officials said they did not regard the lack of an imprimatur from the Security Council or the Arab League as insurmountable hurdles given the carnage last week.” And what of the carnage we cause if we bomb them? It’s a time to break silence, Mr. President, a time to speak out against the obscenity of war, a time to put aside the false myth that violence is a path to peace. You have yet another opportunity to be worthy of that Nobel Peace Prize. I urge you to show you deserved it.

America's Search for Terrorists in the EU, the UN and 80 Embassies

Dear Mr. President,

“…the people at the NSA don’t have an interest in doing anything other than making sure that….we can prevent a terrorist attack.” Your words, August 9. But “Special Collection Service,” “Rampart-T,” “Magothy” and “Apalachee” gives the lie to your assurances. These programs, Der Spiegel reported today, have nothing to do with counterterrorism but are evidence the NSA is massively spying on the UN, the EU and heads of state—friend and foe alike—and it’s not like you didn’t know all along; you get this information in your daily briefings. (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-nsa-documents-show-how-the-us-spies-on-europe-and-the-un-a-918625.html) The innocent routine won’t work anymore. You, the sincere liar and consummate con-man has been evident close up for years but now it’s clear to the rest of the world as well. Oh, how they wanted to believe you, like you, trust you. But truth is catching up to you no matter how brutally you try to suppress it. According to Spiegel, the NSA has bugged, copied hard drives and tapped into secure computer networks of EU embassies in Washington and New York, even has direct access to their VPN, the most secure type of private network there is. And not only the EU, but the Atomic Energy Commission, UN headquarters in New York and 80 embassies around the world. That approaches god-like omniscience, Mr. President, the ability to know everyone’s secrets. But it also violates the treaties, agreements and pacts we made with the UN, the EU and our allies. What does the White House have to say about these latest revelations? “…we gather intelligence abroad just like every other nation.” Well, not really. Not on this scale. If your administration spent a fraction of the energy on promoting peace and understanding as it spends on snooping and assassination, we’d be a lot more secure. Let’s understand why 9/11 happened, why there’s so much animosity toward us and what we can do to promote peace instead of war. The roots of 9/11 and Al Qaeda were never investigated or understood. Neither was the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, or your covert wars in Yemen and Pakistan. Our ship of state got hijacked by evildoers as a result of 9/11 just like the planes that flew into the twin towers and the Pentagon—by ideologues and fanatics—and nothing has changed in 12 years except we have entered a state of perpetual war and an enduring cycle of hatred, repression and violence, and that is the real tragedy of 9/11.

Manning, Bales, Hasan: Victims of America’s Wars

Dear Mr. President,

To read the newspapers lately you’d never know there’s a war in Afghanistan; that we still have 60,000 troops there. Not one article in the NYT for weeks; only those little Names of the Dead boxes that appear occasionally, evidence that people are still fighting and dying there. Today a Polish soldier died; yesterday, 3 NATO troops were killed by a roadside bomb; Wednesday, the NYT listed First Lt. Tim Santos as the 2,246^th American casualty of the Afghan war; but the only news is about our exit by the end of 2014, how the war is winding down, how many troops we’ll leave for “training and support.” The evidence of war appears in other ways however, like collateral damage, not from abroad but here on the home front. This week Pfc. Manning was sentenced to 35 years for exposing war crimes in Iraq, Sgt. Bales received a life sentence for killing 16 unarmed Afghan civilians and Maj. Hasan was found guilty of killing 13 and wounding 32 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas. All 3 are as much victims of the war as if they were battlefield casualties. The war is coming home in more subtle and ominous ways too, ways that threaten both individual citizens and democracy itself: the morphing from a democracy to a security state. The line between military and civilian is blurred and the differences are hard to distinguish. Police forces across the land are up-armored with high tech weapons and military tactics, riot police and SWAT teams are indistinguishable from soldiers on a battlefield and there are so many overlapping and intertwined “security forces”—DHS, TSA, FBI, NSA, DEA, ATF, etc. that it’s impossible to tell one from the other. In NYC and other places it is now policy to “shoot-to-stop”—meaning kill—rather than disable and the tactics of Guantanamo have come to our prisons; in California it is now legal to force feed hunger-strikers. Technology that tracks terrorists is also used to spy on Americans, mock trials and secret laws are accepted as the new normal; the right to dissent is being systematically squelched, the right to assemble criminalized, the Constitution trampled, the government more opaque and the American people seem to accept all this with astounding passivity. There are a few pockets of resistance but they are isolated, ignored by the press, and it is almost too late, for the security forces are now so pervasive and powerful that any protest can be quickly suppressed. This is your legacy, Mr. President, the end of democracy.

Feistein Defends NSA, Trashes Snowden

Dear Senator Feinstein,

Your letter today defending the NSA and its surveillance programs is as unconvincing and wrong-headed as your letters of August 8 and 15 which also defended them. You repeat the claim that “these NSA programs are effective and have contributed to the disruption of more than 50 terrorist plots and arrests on charges of terrorism” in spite of the fact that this has been discredited repeatedly, most recently in Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on July 31—the same day your op-ed appeared in the Washington Post defending the NSA and mongering fear about terrorists and how “New bombs and techniques are in the making” and we must stay on alert. Today’s NYT (“Top Secret Court Castigated NSA On Surveillance” p. A1) reports that former chief judge of the FISC, John Bates, ruled in 2011 that the NSA consistently and systematically collected and analyzed Americans’ communications without a warrant in violation of the Constitution and that there was “a pattern of misrepresentation by agency officials in submissions to the secret court.” The current chief judge recently said that the secret court is totally dependent on the information NSA gives it and is ill-equipped to provide adequate oversight. It’s clear also that Congress is not protecting We the People or the Constitution from assault by the intelligence community; indeed, both the House and Senate committee chairs are in lock-step with the agencies, their fiercest defenders. In your letter today: “Edward Snowden is not a whistleblower, and I stand by my previous comments that his actions have caused serious harm to our nation's counterterrorism and intelligence gathering efforts.” I maintain that Edward Snowden is far more concerned with democracy and the nation’s security than you or Rogers or any of the other destroyers of democracy. Our security will never be won at the point of a gun or a Hellfire missile or by Special Forces kicking down doors in the dead of night or drones circling villages in the mountains and valleys of Pakistan and Yemen and Afghanistan. Security will only come when our leaders ask, Why do they hate us? and go beyond the simpleton Bush response: Because they hate freedom. When we respect them and their culture, treat them as fellow human beings, when we stop invading and spreading violence and terror, when we stop despoiling their lands and stealing their resources, supporting and arming autocrats who repress them, only then will we be secure and live in peace.

Freedom of the Press in an Alien World

Dear Mr. President,

Back in the day, it was only totalitarian dictatorships that arrested people without cause and shut down newspapers. The U.S. and its allies, we were taught, permitted free speech, dissent and newspapers critical of their government. Those days seem far away, wrapped in a mist of idealistic mythology, for it turns out we and our allies are not that different from the old communist regimes of Eastern Europe or the banana republics of Latin America or the repressive totalitarianism of China and North Korea. We may be subtler but the intent and end result is much the same. It was revealed today in several articles in the Guardian, that our close partners, the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which is funded by, and takes orders from the NSA, showed up at Guardian office in London a few weeks after publishing the first reports from the Snowden files and demanded the files. They were stolen property, they claimed and the paper had no right to them. (Never mind that the files were taken from American intelligence data bases, not British.) The Guardian refused. GCHQ showed up a week after that and again demanded the files, claiming this time that the paper’s computer network could be hacked by Russian or Chinese intelligence to access valuable secrets. Again the Guardian refused. A week later they threatened to take the paper to court and freeze further reporting. After much back and forth, the Guardian agreed to destroy the hard drive and memory of the computer the files were stored on and on Saturday, July 20, 3 Guardian people used grinders and drills to demolish the MacBook Pro the files were stored on as 2 GCHQ people took notes and photographed the event. Not exactly sledgehammers and chainsaws, but this, after all, is the digital age. It made no difference that copies of the files are also kept in the U.S., Brazil and elsewhere, or that the reports will continue, it was, like the detention of David Miranda, an act of intimidation—not just to the Guardian but to all Western newspapers. The Guardian’s editor looks wistfully at the protection afforded journalists in America by the 1^st Amendment, but after the recent federal appeals court decision that the 1^st Amendment no longer applies to journalists, that seems in doubt. One by one the safeguards of democracy fall and we find ourselves in a strange new land. As Dorothy famously said to her dog after landing in Oz, “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Matiullah Turab's View of American Security

Dear Mr. President,

It’s been said that poets are the true revolutionaries and I suspect that’s because poets have the ability to pierce the veil of propaganda, bullshit and hypocrisy and speak the truth in powerful, stirring and memorable ways. Lorca was assassinated by the Spanish, Pasolini by the Italians, Roque Dalton by Salvadorians (possibly with the help of the CIA)…there are many, many others. Matiullah Turab is an Afghan ironworker by day who, by night writes “poetry as hard and piercing as the tools he uses by day.” (today’s NYT, “An Afghan Poet Shapes Metal and Hard Words” p. A1) He is not interested in writing about nature or romance: “A poet must write about the plight and pain of the people,” he says. And so he does, writing for “ordinary Afghans weighed down by the grinding corruption and disappointment that have come to define the last decade of their lives.” He writes simple, truthful, hard poems that counter the spin of “government, diplomats, religious leaders and the media.” (How we need an American version of Matiullah Turab!) He has no use for the Afghan government, politicians in general, the Taliban or the Americans. Here’s what he has to say about the U.S.:

O flag-bearers of the world

you have pained us a lot in the

name of security

You cry of peace and security

and you dispatch guns and

ammunition

After reading the article and listening to an online video clip of Turab reciting one of his poems, I watched a short clip of Josh Earnest, the principal deputy White House press secretary tell the press during the daily briefing this morning that the Brits had given us a “heads-up” that they were detaining David Miranda but denied we had anything to do with it. The contrast between Matiullah Turab and Josh Earnest couldn’t have been starker and the reason people have no use for politicians (or their spokespersons) more clear. U.S. involvement in the detention and questioning of Miranda (and confiscation of his laptop, cell phone, DVDs and memory sticks) couldn’t be clearer. The questioning was relentless, the threat of arrest and imprisonment constant, but the questions were not about terrorism or terrorist plots, only about Greenwald, Snowden and Poitras and other random questions—who he knows in the Brazilian government, why Brazilians were protesting. He was never accused of being a terrorist but treated like one. I don’t understand Pashto, but I’d rather listen to Matiullah Turab’s truth than Josh Earnest’s lies any day.

Matiullah Turab

Tag Team Politics: Obama & Cameron vs. the Press

Dear Mr. President,

The war on whistleblowers has been in full swing for years: Kiriakou’s in prison, Drake’s selling Apple computers for a living, Bradley Manning’s been in military prisons for the past 3 years and will probably spend the rest of his life there, and Edward Snowden had to ask Russia for asylum to keep from being dragged back to the U.S. and thrown in the gulag along with the others. WikiLeaks is boxed in and Julian Assange is cornered in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. The war on reporters got exposed recently when we learned that AP and Fox News phones—and certain of their reporters’—were being tapped, and last month a federal appeals court decided that the 1^st Amendment no longer applies to reporters so James Risen of the NYT will no doubt spend time in the clink for refusing to reveal the source of a leak. But today the war on the press took a nasty turn when David Miranda was detained at Heathrow as he was changing planes on his way home to Rio from Germany. Sure he’s Glenn Greenwald’s partner and sure, he was staying with Laura Poitras in Berlin, but really, a terrorist? The UK’s Terrorism Act of 2000 permits authorities at airports and ports to detain someone for up to 9 hours without charges or a lawyer present while they’re questioned. I know, this was the UK, not the U.S., but it has the heavy hand print of the U.S. all over it, a clear act of intimidation—if you can’t get the target, harass their family and loved ones. Miranda’s not a reporter or whistleblower; there was no probable cause and he was questioned not about terrorism but about NSA’s surveillance. According to Greenwald’s article today, almost no one is held for the maximum 9 hours—but Miranda was—all that time incommunicado even though Guardian lawyers and Brazil’s ambassador to the UK were trying to intervene (Greenwald’s connections). Miranda’s laptop, memory sticks CDs and cell phone were confiscated, no doubt to search for Snowden files, but chances of finding any are just about nil since Snowden taught both Greenwald and Poitras how to keep their communications and files out of the NSA’s hands. The Security State is shedding all pretense at obeying the law. “We’re above the law,” they seem to be saying, :the law is what we say it is.” The war on terror continues to seep across borders even into the homeland but the terrorist threats are no longer abroad; they’re right here at home in the form of whistleblowers and journalists and those who believe in democracy.