3 - 2010 - Antiwar.com Blog

Federal Judge: Bush Administration was Criminal Conspiracy

Federal judge Vaughn Walker ruled today that the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program was illegal.

This has been obvious ever since the New York Times blew the lid off of the National Security Administration’s massive surveillance operation in late 2005. It is amazing that the issue is still open to dispute.

Unfortunately, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that busloads of White House, Justice Department, and National Security Administration officials will be going to jail for this crime.

Marc Thiessen Finally Sours On Torture

It was with some disappointment that I read todayâ€™s new column from Marc Thiessen, the former George W. Bush speechwriter, new Washington Post columnist, and noted waterboarding enthusiast. After all, the previous day had seen the arrests of nine people in connection with a terrorist plot against law enforcement officers in Michigan. According to the New York Times, the nine â€œplanned to kill an unidentified law enforcement officer and then bomb the funeral caravan using improvised explosive devices based on designs used against American troops by insurgents in Iraq.â€ While there was no word about whether there were any accomplices still at large, media reports noted that the nine were part of a larger militant group, leaving open the possibility that some of their comrades might still be hatching similar designs.

Surely, I thought, Thiessen would take the lead in demanding that the government â€œget toughâ€ with the would-be terrorists, declare them enemy combatants, and have them waterboarded to get all the details about their group. Recall his reaction to the last major terror attempt in Michiganâ€“the failed Christmas Day airline bombing plot by the â€œunderwear bomberâ€ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Thiessen excoriated the Obama administration repeatedly for treating Abdulmutallab as a criminal, reading him his Miranda rights, and failing to waterboard him for information. Given all this, how could Thiessen fail to be outraged by the governmentâ€™s intolerably lax response to the Michigan bombing plot?

Yet todayâ€™s Thiessen column brings no mention of the terror plot; instead, it is a rather dry piece on the Nevada Senate race lacking all of the passion that Thiessen brings to his praises of torture. What caused him to suddenly lose interest in Keeping America Safe from terrorists?

The simplest explanation for the discrepancy is this: Abdulmutallab is a dark-skinned Muslim with an â€œArab-soundingâ€ name, while the Michigan Nine are right-wing white Christian militants with Anglo-Saxon names. (Before anyone claims that the difference is that the Michigan Nine are U.S. citizens and Abdulmutallab isnâ€™t, recall that Thiessen and his allies also supported declaring U.S. citizen Jose Padilla an enemy combatant and holding him indefinitely without charges.) It appears that Thiessenâ€™s enthusiasm for â€œenhanced interrogation techniquesâ€ only lasts as long as the suspects in question are Muslims.

Iâ€™ve often suspected that a great deal of right-wing support for torture is based on a (perhaps-unconscious) assurance that its victims will always be people with funny names who look and talk different from â€œreal Americansâ€. Even in the case of an undeniably repulsive mass murderer like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I suspect much of the enthusiasm for torturing and denying judicial process to KSM would dissipate if he had a nice American name like â€œTimothy McVeighâ€. Thiessenâ€™s inconsistencies are just another piece of evidence for this theory.

The Hutaree and MSNBC Militias

Over the weekend in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio, eight men of the “Hutaree Militia” were arrested (a ninth turned himself in Monday), and all have been charged with “seditious conspiracy,” “attempting to use weapons of mass destruction,” and firearms violations. Two of the nine are charged with “instructing” others how to make bombs. The indictment [.pdf] charges that these member of the so-called Hutaree Militia had plans to lure cops into various ambushes in furtherance of their plan for war against the Antichrist.

All the rest of the Michigan militias are telling the press that they had nothing to do with the accused, having long considered them trouble, and they reportedly even refused some of the Hutarees sanctuary once the arrests began.

A safe first guess on a case like this is that the Feds have just made up another one. The formula is always the same for them: Find a person or a small group of people who are gullible and bordering on criminal, then trick them into saying, or sometimes even doing, something stupid and/or evil. See for example the Miami 7, the Detroit 5, the Lodi 1, the NY 2, the NY 4…

In this case it seems that the self-proclaimed militia leader and his son somehow joined up with a very strange character named Khristopher Sickels and a few others and planned to make IEDs and use them against local police.

The funny part is, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported Monday, “The FBI had infiltrated the group for several months,” attributing this information to Detroit News 4, though the closest thing this writer can find to that on their Web site is the assertion that “federal authorities had been monitoring the Hutaree members for some time.”

I’m betting Maddow’s interpretation that they had actually been infiltrated is accurate and that the worst of whatever these people actually did was at the urging of said federal agent.

(By the way, does “weapons of mass destruction” have a definition at all these days? It started out as a cute way for the empire to conflate mustard gas with hydrogen bombs, but now rifles and homemade land mines – at least in the hands of non-U.S. government employees – are included as well.)

Maddow, as Lew Rockwell pointed out on Monday, was beside herself with glee at the prospect of these citizens being tried by the federal government for “seditious conspiracy,” which, as she put it, is an “obscure 19th-century law” which allows the national government to imprison people who haven’t actually done anything. Wow, that really is “interesting.”

And if you stay tuned for the next segment, you can watch Maddow push her expert guest to conflate everyone to the right of her into the imminent threat of the right-wing populist, Patriot, neo-Nazi, End Timeser, abortion-doctor killer, Republican, Tea Party Armed Insurrection of Danger! He refused, but this Maddow lady is only getting started. Just wait till she becomes director-for-life of the New National Homeland FEMA Camp, Northern Command. We’ll all be seditious terrorist-hate-crime-enemy-belligerents.

You’ll wish you’d joined a militia then.

But anyway…

Over at the Reason blog Brian Doherty caught more liberals cheering on the police state and recommended a great article, “The Paranoid Center,” by Jesse Walker. And at LRC, Anthony Gregory asks why Maddow left out the role of end times beliefs in mass support for the government’s aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East.

Update: See, the FBI orchestrated the whole thing. They had infiltrated the group for at least 8 months, and it was their guy who was offering explosives expertise, etc. Long live the right to confront one’s accusers.

Peña/Bandow on Closing U.S. Military Bases

Charles PeÃ±a and Doug Bandow debate Lawrence Korb and Frank Gaffney on closing down the U.S. empire of bases.

Pt. 2
Pt. 3

(Somebody get Gaffney a squeaky red nose and rainbow-afro wig please, huh?)

Update: Dr. Gordon Prather – a real nuclear expert – uses facts to destroy Gaffney’s ridiculous EMP scaremongering here.

Drug War Shame: Severely Ill Man Fired, Cut from Health Care

I just interviewed Joseph Casias, the poor man with an inoperable brain tumor and sinus cancer so bad you can barely understand him when he speaks, who was fired in November by Wal-Mart after he tested positive for marijuana. For the last four months, Casias had been smoking marijuana, which was legally prescribed to him under Michigan state law, to ease his chronic pain –Â anÂ alternative to the pain pills which he complained were habitual and had too many side affects. He never got high before coming to work; for the last five years he was so good at his job, that he was made Associate of the Year and was promoted late last year. He aspired to manager, even district manager, and knew that in in a city like Battle Creek where Wal-Mart is the employer, he was a blessed man.

When he was promoted, Casias — a 29-year-old husband and father of two children, ages 8 and 7 — was finally able to enroll in the Wal-Mart health plan. Up until then, he was one of the country’s 40-plus million uninsured. He told me every 6-month check-up is about $5,000 out-of-pocket. As a result, he is swimming in thousands of unpaid medical bills, and plagued by collection agencies. Getting health insurance was a big step forward for this man and his family. Losing a job in Michigan, which has the highest unemployment in the country, is a tremendous punch in the gut. “I gave them everything I got,” Casias told me.

And Wal-Mart took it — and now more. Conveniently for his employers, they won’t have to pay for his cancer treatment, because they fired him right after he enrolled in the health care plan. To all you people out there who say private industry can solve our health care crisis, I have a GM sedan to sell you. Wal-Mart even wanted to block this guy’s unemployment benefits!

I interviewed Casias as part of an upcoming piece (check back on Tuesday) on the local and state roadblocks facing the medical marijuana movement, but I was so mad when I got off the phone I had to write it out immediately. This is a man who doesn’t know how long he has to live, having to face his young children, fired from a job he worked so diligently and loyally at, for something he was told by the State of Michigan was legal. The fact that a Godzilla company like Wal-Mart, which shamelessly professes “family values” and offers this phony-baloney glossy-photo understanding for families struggling through the financial crisis, can arbitrarily fire a model employee, ignore state law (which was adopted by a referendum of the people!) and rip away his long-awaited enrollment into a legitimate health care plan — is nothing short of an abomination.

India’s Most Delicious Weapon

One of my favorite subjects is the militarization of everything, from fashion trends to disaster aid. Now the Indian Army intends to weaponize the hottest chili pepper in the world.

The tiny “bhut jolokia,” or “ghost chili,” will be used to make nonlethal gas grenades to immobilize hiding suspects.

A scientist at India’s military R&D division said “[t]his is definitely going to be an effective nontoxic weapon because its pungent smell can choke terrorists and force them out of their hide-outs,” where they will then presumably be machine-gunned.

Thanks to Ivan Osorio at CEI for the tip.