Month: June 2013

Via Matthew Feeney at Reason, Irish politician Clare Daly calls Obama a “war criminal” and asks if he’s going for the “hypocrite of the century award.”

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made no bones about his view of Twitter as a threat to his regime, dubbing it a “danger to society.” Other officials in his government ruled Twitter “deadlier than car bombs.”

Twitter sure could make some Turkish officials angry, but since the company has no presence in Turkey there is literally nothing that Erdogan could do. He’s hoping to change that.

Turkey’s Communications Minister Binali Yildrim is calling on Twitter to open an office somewhere in Turkey so that the next time they get mad at them they can go someplace inside Turkey to do something about it.

Needless to say, Twitter is seen as unlikely to open an office in Turkey just so they employees can be threatened face-to-face next time Erdogan gets mad.

The U.S. Department of Defense guided the National Security Council’s development of an official Obama administration position on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers clean-up of toxic waste site in Pennsylvania. U.S. taxpayers will pay up to half a billion to clean up the former Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation toxic dump, even as plaintiffs sue NUMEC’s successors for hundreds of millions in wrongful death and health-related lawsuits. Meanwhile, the highest declassification panel in the United States may finally decide to release files confirming what top CIA officials have long claimed – that NUMEC’s sole original purpose was as a smuggling front that illegally diverted U.S. government-owned weapons-grade uranium into the Israeli nuclear weapons program in the 1960s.

US Energy Department documents (PDF) released under FOIA on June 19 reveal new details about secret discussions held by the CIA, DoD, FBI, NSC, and EPA about NUMEC a year ago. The 2012 meetings took place after a contractor ran into unexpected difficulties cleaning up the NUMEC waste dump in Parks Township. Emails coordinating the “scrambled together” Washington meeting reveal surprisingly top-down DoD and Obama administration leadership of the cleanup. “Pentagon is bringing their proposed path forward to NSC staff to discuss admin position…” states one email from Douglas Tonkay of the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management. But why would the DoD and White House be so intimately involved in a mundane toxic cleanup? Because the NUMEC question is anything but mundane.

Beginning in the 1960s, NUMEC received 25 tons of government-owned weapons-grade uranium to process into nuclear fuel for the US Navy and top-secret programs such as nuclear rockets and satellite fuel. NUMEC “lost” more HEU than any government contractor, leading to ongoing FBI, CIA and NSA investigations into whether the plant’s owners had collaborated with Israeli intelligence operatives and nuclear weapons development experts who frequented the plant. According to a Department of Energy report in 2001, the now-shuttered NUMEC now holds the dubious record of "losing" more weapons-grade uranium (PDF) than any other US processing facility. Although CIA officials such as former Tel Aviv Station Chief John Hadden publicly claimed NUMEC was “an Israeli operation from the start,” American presidents from LBJ to Obama successfully quashed all public requests for release of thousands of pages of NUMEC-related top-secret government documents. Official US treatment of NUMEC as a pollution issue, rather than a crime scene and challenge to governance, has punished direct victims sickened by the shoddy smuggling-front’s operations.

Continue reading “Obama’s NUMEC Nuclear Diversion Cover-Up”

This isn’t much positive to say about the virtues of Congressional oversight in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s leaks of the NSA’s vast domestic surveillance apparatus. Congress has been little more than an active participant in the systematic violation of Americans’ rights and privacy.

But as I wrote in a recent piece at The Huffington Post, there is a growing opposition to broad NSA surveillance from people on both sides of America’s terribly narrow political spectrum. The press reports on this issue, most notably from the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, have sparked a public reaction that is being reflected in Congress, in however limited a way.

Over at the ACLU’s blog, Michelle Richardson claims “a civil-libertarian energy is stirring” in Congress and provides a list of “six bipartisan pieces of legislation to rollback NSA spying [that] have been introduced” in the last three weeks.

• The LIBERT-E Act (H.R. 2399)—from Reps. Conyers (D-Mich.), Amash (R-Mich.), and 31 other bipartisan cosponsors—would limit Section 215 of the Patriot Act and force disclosure of the secret court orders and/or legal reasoning behind all of these surveillance programs.
• The Ending Secret Law Act (S. 1130 and H.R. 2475)—sponsored by Sens. Merkley (D-Ore.), Lee (R-Utah) and 10 others in the Senate and Reps Schiff (D-Calif.), Rokita (R-Idaho) and five others in the House—forces the administration to release the secret court orders that have interpreted this statute and our constitutional rights. If disclosure would harm national security, the attorney general would have to write and release an unclassified summary of the secret court orders or explain why they can’t. This language got 37 “yes” votes on the Senate floor during the FISA debate this past December.
• S. 1182—from Sens. Udall (D-Colo.), Merkley, and five other bipartisan Senators—would tighten the requirements for getting a Patriot Section 215 order.
• The Restore Our Privacy Act (S. 1168) from Sen. Sanders (I-Vt.) would require the government to state with specific and articulable facts why each thing sought is relevant to an investigation.
• The Fourth Amendment Restoration Act (S. 1037), introduced by Sen. Paul (R-Ky.), would direct the government to interpret the Fourth Amendment as prohibiting searches of phone records without a warrant based on probable cause in both intelligence and criminal investigations.
• And yesterday Senate Judiciary Chairman Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced the FISA Accountability and Privacy Protection Act based on his past Patriot Act reform bills to rein in the Patriot Act and increase transparency.

This is really a testament to the effectiveness of Snowden’s leaks and Greenwald’s reporting. Many of these proposals are half-measures that would do little to penetrate the executive branch’s unconstitutional intelligence apparatus as a whole. But they are something, and are worth following for anyone inclined to call their representatives to urge support of these attempts to rein in domestic spying.

Copperhead, which Ron Maxwell directed from my adaptation of Harold Frederic’s novella, opens in theaters June 28, with a second wave of openings July 19. You can find where it’s playing at copperheadthemovie.com. Herewith my introduction to the newly published edition containing Frederic’s story and my screenplay; it’s available at dzancbooks.org/copperhead.

Harold Frederic, born in 1856, was a native of Utica, which though it is the eighth largest city in New York can fairly stake a claim to being, pound for pound, the literary capital of the state. Frederic lived a short but full – perhaps overly full – life. In brief, he began his career as a Utica and later Albany newspaper editor, in which capacity he was celebrated as a wit and bon vivant. He was a good friend of fellow Upstater and U.S. President Grover Cleveland, whose Jeffersonian Democratic political convictions Frederic shared. He left his native grounds – for good – in 1884 to become a New York Times foreign correspondent based in London. Between 1886 and his death in 1898, Harold Frederic published more than a dozen books, most famously The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), a tale of a simple Upstate Methodist minister’s loss of faith which is widely considered a masterpiece of late-19^th century American realism. (F. Scott Fitzgerald called The Damnation of Theron Ware "the best American novel" written before 1920.) Frederic was also a bigamist whose wife and mistress (and their children) lived about fifteen miles apart in the precincts of London. He spent weekdays with one family and weekends with the other. He suffered a stroke in 1898 and had the bad luck to be under the care of his Christian Scientist mistress, who refused medical treatment for the stricken author. Frederic died, and she was tried, unsuccessfully, for manslaughter.

The Copperhead – its title taken from the derisive serpentine epithet applied to Northern critics of the Civil War – was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine in 1893 and published in book form that same year. It was brought out in England the next year as The Copperhead and Other Stories of the North in the American War. The novel, or novella, or longish short story, as you prefer, would reappear in several collections of Frederic’s fiction, most notably in The Civil War Stories of Harold Frederic, under the imprint of Syracuse University Press and with an introduction by Edmund Wilson.

In every incarnation it sold poorly, as Frederic’s work usually did. But then The Copperhead hit none of the expected notes. It catered neither to "Battle Hymn of the Republic" Northern righteousness nor "Dixie" Southern romanticism.

Continue reading “War – and Peace – at the Movies”

Within his July 1 Time cover story, you almost wish Joe Klein would just say it — how he yearns for one of those national service programs always suggested as the answer, at least among the chewy authoritarian center, to all of America’s problems.

He never does, though. But the implications throughout his piece — even starting with the headline — suggest no reason why Klein should object to such a grand project.

The headline: “Can Service Save Us?” — the subhed: “It just might. By helping returning troops regain their sense of purpose, veterans’ groups are proving that public service is therapeutic.” The start of the pieces looks at how initial reports suggest that hands-on community helping diminishs the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in American veterans. Good. Awesome. Doctors and veterans’ groups should pursue that, as a few have begun to. And it’s annoying to be told that helping people is nice! by a magazine, but at least Klein’s piece thinks helping people after disasters is a nice thing to do. Which it is. So yippee for him. No problems there.

But this is Time magazine. Worse still, this is Joe Klein. And Klein is just one man among that special breed of soft-sounding authoritarian pundits who are convinced that we, as a nation, have lost our way in a haze of people doing what they want. The only solution to that imaginary fog is that something that may work for veterans (who have been trained to work as a unit and to derive their worth from working in a group) should — maybe — be put on all people of this could-be-great nation. Or, more likely, all young people. Because young people, in Klein’s words are “couch dwellers.”Yet, there seems to be within them “a general hunger for service”.  But that’s not enough because we in America have “slouched from active citizenship to passive couch potato-hood.”

Worst still is “…our waning sense of civil engagement, our weirdly hollow democracy in which active citizenship has been displaced by marketing and political sloganeering.”  Weirdly hollow like, say, spouting off Robert Putnam-style fearmongering without a shred of evidence to back your accusations of American decline  as either some new problem, or even a definition of what that problem is in the world beyond Time magazine? What the hell, Joe Klein, is “active citizenship”?

This all builds up to Klein’s big question — “Would it be so bad if the rest of us became more attuned to the values and can do spirit our veterans have brought home from the military?”

Klein obviously thinks not, but under his thin veneer of semi-objectivity, he never even answers his own query. But the song of military greatness runs all through this piece. Their brotherhood, their sorrow and injury over their lost (mostly) brothers, the complete lack of critical thinking on just what the military does… Nobody is expecting Time to write a searing, anti-military article. But by subscribing to the dominant narrative of troops as heroes — albeit broken ones — Klein gets to have his cake and eat it. He can frame his piece in an a-political manner, he can tip-toe around national service, while still getting across a fundamentally political message: the troops are there to save us all, let’s be more like the troops.

A scrap of questioning, one sentence that admits that PTSD may not just stem from seeing the blood of your own side spilled, would have helped Klein. But there is nothing but praise for these damaged patriots who helped people abroad, and are now learning to help them here. Hell, if you didn’t know anything about the military before reading Klein’s piece, you might come away with the idea that it’s some sort of occasionally dangerous, international Scouting adventure. Even those who wish to argue the merits of a standing army — or one constantly adventuring abroad — should have the intellectual honesty to clarify just what soldiers do.

This is not to say anyone antiwar should revel in the PTSD in soldiers coming back from war. Maybe helping out in disaster zones will improve their health. Great! Though it’s hard not to wish they had done that in the first place. But why, again, must this good mental health news translate to a greater national purpose for the rest of us un-Great slobs?

Because people like Klein do not trust individuals to live their own lives. America is not a humming, chaotic mess of people loving and living and working to them. At least it shouldn’t be. When individuals are left to their own devices, some elusive, abstract notion of “Greatness” is not being pursed. And that is intolerable to such people. Especially when it comes to the younger generations.

Why not just have a draft then, if these young people owe something to the nation, and need to be molded by its Greatness?

Why don’t the elderly have a similar obligation? Why is always the young who are so green that they demand the fine-tuning of the Nation’s Hand to make them blossom into “active citizens”? Indeed, why are the supposed attributes to be found in the military, or “service” so apolitical as to be not worthy of discussion? Is serving Obama’s America as worthy as serving Bush’s which is just as good as serving Nixon’s or Wilson’s? And if so, what does it matter what the government or the military does — what wars they fight and why and how — if serving them is always the highest ideal?

But really, a draft! Why not if we’re in such miserable shape? I’m sure that that’s the ideal method of imparting the military’s “can do spirit”.

Because, thank God, that notion remains unpopular. The article’s side-graph reassures the reader that only 22 percent of respondents support the idea of “mandatory” national service. So that’s comforting, as is Rep. Charlie Rangel’s constant failure to bring back conscription. We’re in difficult shape in America when it comes to freedoms, but at least there seems to be a lingering aversion to the idea that young people belong to the government to quite this extent. Maybe that’s one lesson from Vietnam that stuck.

So my prayer is that the Kleins, the David Brooks, the Thomas Friedmans, and the Aaron Sorkins of the world remain forever frustrated that America is not all it could be. And that the government continues to allow too many young people to follow their own paths, pursue their own interests, and even help people – -all without the military or the clunky, bureaucratic mess sure to come out of any official institution of “national service.”