Month: August 2013

This is the anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Nixon knew that his defense was doomed and chose to throw in the towel without a Senate trial. But President Gerald Ford compounded the damage from Nixon’s presidency when he issued a sweeping pardon of Nixon that practically condemned future generations of Americans to being governed by lawless presidents.

Ford is a hero in Washington in part because he covered up the crimes of the state. His most famous action was his pardoning of Richard M. Nixon, the man who chose him to be vice president after Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in disgrace. Nixon was guilty of illegally invading a foreign country (Cambodia); of perpetuating the war in Vietnam for political purposes and his 1972 reelection campaign; of violating the rights of tens of thousands of Americans with the illegal FBI COINTELPRO program; of sanctioning CIA violence and subversion around the globe; and Watergate, as well as many other offenses. Nixon also created Amtrak.

Many people assume that President Ford pardoned Nixon only for Watergate. In reality, Ford’s pardon was so sweeping — forgiving Nixon for any and every possible crime he may have committed — that it would have exempted Nixon even from charges of genocide:Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969, through August 9, 1974.

Ford’s pardon effectively closed the book on holding Nixon culpable for his crimes against the Constitution, Americans, and millions of other people around the world.

If Nixon had been publicly tried and a full accounting of his abuses made to the American public, it may have been far more difficult for subsequent presidents to cover up their crimes. Politicians remembering Nixon’s punishment and humiliation might have been slower to lie the nation into unnecessary foreign wars. If Ford was hell-bent on pardoning his friend, he should have had the decency to wait until the evidence was on the table.

And those who are concerned about how Nixon would have personally suffered from being prosecuted for all his crimes are cold-hearted towards the tens of thousands of Americans who have been killed and maimed in subsequent unnecessary wars. Making one politician pay the price of his conduct could have saved Americans and the world vast suffering.

But the friends of Leviathan have benefited immensely from the obscuring, if not the burying, of the vast majority of the crimes of the Nixon era. The more clearly people recalled Nixon’s abuses, the more difficult it would be to sway them to accept that government is inherently benevolent and trustworthy. The media’s Nixon rendition routinely starts and stops at Watergate. It is typical of the establishment media to treat a crime against a competing political party as a far graver offense than the trampling of the rights of tens of thousands of Americans by COINTELPRO (which began in the late 1950s and metastasized under Lyndon Johnson).

Ford’s pardon of Nixon set a precedent of absolute immunity for the president for all crimes committed in office. Ford’s pardon proclaimed a new doctrine in American law and politics — that one president can absolve another president of all his crimes and all his killings. His pardon signaled the formal end of the rule of law in America.

The lesson that Ford’s top advisors seemed to draw from the pardon is that the government can break the law with impunity. Ford’s former chief of staff, Dick Cheney, brought this doctrine into the Bush administration, where it helped unleash torture around the world.

“Publicly, we say one thing. Actually, we do another.” So said Richard Nixon, the man who ushered in one of the most secretive and criminal presidential administrations in American history. Surprisingly for some, President Barack Obama is ably following in Nixon’s footsteps.

As just about everyone now knows, NSA contractor Edward Snowden began leaking classified material back in June which documented the immense powers the NSA possesses to surveil Americans’ electronic communications. The intelligence agency sweeps up the telephone data of virtually every American and has the ability to spy on virtually anybody’s internet activity at a keystroke.

These revelations made a fool of James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, who months earlier told Congress that the NSA does not collect information on millions of Americans. He later apologized with the Orwellian excuse that his blatant lie was the “least untruthful” answer he could think of.

The Obama administration and several members of Congress then went on the defensive, consistently telling the American people that the NSA surveillance programs are legal, constitutional, and checked by thorough congressional oversight.

Those were lies too. Members of Congress that are supposed to be able to provide oversight are systematically denied basic information about surveillance capabilities by the NSA. And in 2011, a secret ruling from the FISA court found significant parts of the NSA’s domestic spying activities to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment as well as legal statutes on the rulebooks. That ruling remains a government secret.

You’d think the Obama administration would tire of all this lying. But on Jay Leno this week, Obama yet again claimed, “There is no spying on Americans.”

And now, two days later, there is another smack-you-in-the-face contradiction in the press that proves once again that the President and his national security surrogates are methodically lying to the American people.

Charlie Savage in The New York Times reports that, “The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.”

“While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas,” Savage adds, “that it is systematically searching — without warrants — through the contents of Americans’ communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations.”

The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer reacts to the story thusly:

The program described by the New York Times involves a breathtaking invasion of millions of people’s privacy. The NSA has cast a massive dragnet over Americans’ international communications, collecting and monitoring all of them, and retaining some untold number of them in government databases. This is precisely the kind of generalized spying that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit.

The Obama administration has been caught flat-out lying to the American people about the NSA surveillance activities too many times to count at this point. Beyond exposing the invasive dragnet spying on Americans, this all reveals an important insight into the unprecedented veil of secrecy President Obama has cloaked the government in: secrecy is by and large not meant to protect “sources and methods” or even “national security,” but rather to protect our political leaders from public scrutiny.

Nixon put it in simpler words than anybody. The mantra of the powerful, and indeed the fundamental Obama-era principal, is to simply say one thing, and do another.

Lots of people are asking good questions about the veracity of the Obama administration’s claims regarding this latest terrorist attack that they foiled by intercepting electronic communications between Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of core al Qaeda, and Nasir al Wuhayshi, a high level operative in the Yemeni affiliate.

See here for why the official leaks to The Daily Beast don’t add up. And here for why Conor Friedersdorf is skeptical. He says it “wouldn’t shock me if the closure of diplomatic facilities abroad is entirely threat based — or if the threat were being exaggerated to undermine the growing Congressional backlash to NSA surveillance.”

Marcy Wheeler is similarly skeptical. But she hits on what I see as the most important point: the Obama administration has made a number of official leaks, many of them baffling and, as Conor puts it, “pregnant with unexplained happenings,” and many of them purport to reveal significant details about the intelligence community’s ability to spy on terrorists, “and thus far, no one from the government has called for the NYT, McClatchy, and WaPo sources to be jailed. How … telling.”

Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, has been harshly criticizing Edward Snowden and calling for his immediate prosecution. But in the wake of the leaks about America spying on specific terrorists in specific times and specific areas, Hayden says it was important “to put them on the back foot, to let them know that we’re alert…”

Let them know that we’re alert? Is that not precisely what Hayden and others claimed Snowden did, to the detriment of U.S. national security? In July, Hayden screamed that Snowden “will likely prove to be the most costly leaker of American secrets in the history of the Republic,” because of “the undeniable operational effect of informing adversaries of American intelligence’s tactics, techniques and procedures.”

Which is it?

This is the 49th anniversary of Congress’s passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, by which the Lyndon Johnson administration lied the nation into the Vietnam War. The resolution was spurred by false assertions of multiple North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. ships. At a National Security Council meeting on the evening that the first report came in, Johnson asked, “Do they want war by attacking our ships in the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin?” CIA chief John McCone answered, “No. The North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to our attack on their off-shore islands. They are responding out of pride and on the basis of defense considerations.” The fact was that the United States had orchestrated an attack by South Vietnamese commandos on North Vietnamese territory before the alleged conflict began. But Johnson lied and commenced bombing, and Congress rushed to cheer him on.

Last night, President Obama appeared on the Jay Leno show and declared: “We don’t have a domestic spying program.” He explained: “What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an email address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat.” Why would Obama continue to shovel such bilge? Does he assume that no one has read a newspaper for the past 2 months, or what?

Here’s a review essay I wrote for the American Conservative in 2011 on how government lying has become pervasive.

Leviathan’s Lies: Review of Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics, John J. Mearsheimer, Oxford University Press, 2011.
By James Bovard

Politicians nowadays treat Americans like medical orderlies treat Alzheimer’s patients, telling them anything that will keep them subdued. It doesn’t matter what untruths the people are fed because they will not long remember. But in politics, forgotten falsehoods almost guarantee new treachery.

Continue reading “Obama, NSA, Gulf of Tonkin, & Governing as Lying”

Shimon Gapso, an Israeli mayor of Upper Nazareth, recently said that Upper Nazareth is a Jewish city and “will be Jewish forever.” In response to this, and in consideration of anti-Arab statements Gapso allegedly made in the past (and, say, his opposition to the establishment of Arab schools in his city), Israeli civil rights groups called on the attorney general to investigate Gapso’s racism.

Now, he has written an Op-Ed in the Haaretz newspaper to answer his detractors. To prove he’s not a racist, he reminds us that the Bible is racist.

Yes — I’m not afraid to say it out loud, to write it and add my signature, or declare it in front of the cameras: Upper Nazareth is a Jewish city and it’s important that it remains so. If that makes me a racist, then I’m a proud offshoot of a glorious dynasty of “racists” that started with the “Covenant of the Pieces” [that God made with Abraham, recounted in Genesis 15:1–15] and the explicitly racist promise: “To your seed I have given this land” [Genesis 15:38].

When the Jewish people were about to return to their homeland after a long journey from slavery in Egypt, where they were enslaved for racist reasons, the God of Israel told Moses how to act upon conquering the land: he must cleanse the land of its current inhabitants. “But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those of them whom you allow to remain… as I thought to do to them, so will I do to you” [Numbers 33:55–56].

Clearly Gapso is trying to say that his comments are no different than what you can find in the Torah – and obviously that doesn’t contain any racism – so he’s free and clear. But this strategy doesn’t exactly do the trick because, ahem, there is tons of racism contained in the Old Testament.

Gapso then takes to sarcasm regarding Israel’s national founding:

Since then, racially pure kibbutzim without a single Arab member and an army that protects a certain racial strain have been established, as have political parties that proudly bear racist names such as “Habayit Hayehudi” — “the Jewish home.” Even our racist national anthem ignores the existence of the Arab minority — in other words, the people Ben-Gurion did not manage to expel in the 1948 war. If not for all that “racism,” it’s doubtful we could live here, and doubtful that we could live at all.

Really, does he think this is helping his case?

To say that you want a state or city “for the Jewish people” but then deny race has anything to do with it strikes me as strange. And then to point to a religious text filled with racism and genocide as a justification of race-based states – that’s even stranger.

As The Times of Israel reported in February, Alon Liel, a former Israeli Foreign Ministry director-general and ex-ambassador to South Africa, believes Israel currently qualifies as an apartheid state.

“In the situation that exists today, until a Palestinian state is created, we are actually one state. This joint state — in the hope that the status quo is temporary — is an apartheid state,” Liel said recently in Jerusalem.

This is not a fringe view. An Israeli survey conducted last year found that most Israeli Jews support the establishment of an apartheid regime in Israel if it formally annexes the West Bank and a majority explicitly favor systematic discrimination against Israeli Arabs.

The Cato Institute’s Justin Logan at POLITICO argues “Washington’s war hawks are gearing up to scare you with another phantom devil: isolationism.”

…“isolationist” was designed as a slur and remains one. No one calls himself an isolationist. It’s always intended to link the target with the ignominious record of Americans in the 1930s who were slow to recognize the threat from Nazi Germany. But the term itself was coined around the turn of the 20th century by the imperialist A. T. Mahan to disparage opponents of American overseas expansion. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter McDougall showed, America’s “vaunted tradition of ‘isolationism’ is no tradition at all, but a dirty word that interventionists, especially since Pearl Harbor, hurl at anyone who questions their policies.”

Coincidentally, perhaps, the third thing you should know is that the people trying to create anxiety about isolationism favor an interventionist military policy that has fallen out of favor with the public. After the twin disasters of Iraq and now Afghanistan, they are pawing the ground for more wars in Syria and Iran…

And that’s what’s really going on here — using rhetoric to remove any sensible alternative to America’s expansive grand strategy.

Here’s how you can tell the isolationist label is a slur and not descriptive: Washington’s war hawks have even called Obama an isolationist! Well, sometimes they modify it and choose “neo-isolationist.” In that sense, the isolationist slander does not have anything to do with an ideology that favors pulling away from the world in foreign policy, commerce, culture, immigration and everything else. Instead, it means one who disagrees with the foreign policy prescriptions of the accuser.

As Robert Golan-Vilella wrote at The National Interest, that label “only begins to make sense if your default assumption is that the United States can and should be intervening everywhere, all the time.”

“The problem is the default assumption for many in our political elite,” Matt Duss writes, “seems to be that the United States has the right—nay, the duty—to get into everyone’s business, everywhere, all the time. Anything less represents an abdication.”

But Logan makes perhaps a more important point here: the hawks who throw this label around at anyone who disagrees with their expansive foreign policies are trying to use this ad hominem rhetoric to promote more of their own reckless wars. Or, as Logan puts it, “to remove any sensible alternative to America’s expansive grand strategy.”

See here for my previous post on the isolationist slur.