Author: James Bovard

Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles deserves another Pulitzer Prize for this superb cartoon.  Some people are singing hallelujahs over the Supreme Court’s recent decision that police cannot automatically search people’s cell phones.  However, the Supreme Court has done nothing to negate the government’s prerogative to kill people based on secret memos, secret evidence, and utter bunk.

I started ragging on the U.S. government’s assassination policy long ago when Obama was a presidential candidate who pledged to obey the Constitution. A 2011 story I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor (“Assassination nation: Are there any limits on President Obama’s license to kill?”) evoked a torrent of testy online comments:

* “Hopefully there will soon be enough to add James Bovard to the [targeted killing] list.”

* “We need to send Bovard and the ACLU to Iran. You shoot traders and the ACLU are a bunch of traders.”

* “Now if we can only convince [Obama] to use this [assassination] authority on the media, who have done more harm than any single terror target could ever dream of…”

* “James bovard… We would all be better off if bigots like you stopped writing crap.”

* “You guys who are against killing these guys are going to be the death of all of us.”

As the Counterpunch piece noted – “Unfortunately, the primary difference between some assassination advocates and Washington apologists for targeted killing is that the latter use spellcheckers. For both groups, ‘due process’ is an anachronism – if not a terrorist ploy. And for both groups, boundless groveling to the Commander-in-Chief is the new trademark of a good American. Anything less is national suicide.”

***

On Twitter  @jimbovard     www.jimbovard.com

On this day in 1876, Gen. George S. Custer led his 7th Cavalry regiment to their demise in Montana.  The Battle of Little Big Horn was one of the biggest defeats suffered by the U.S. Army in the war against the Indians.   It is only in recent years that proper attention has been paid to the role of atrocities by Custer and other military leaders in stirring up the wrath of oppressed Indians.

I visited the Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument 45 years ago during a cross-country trip as a 12-year-old boy to a Boy Scout Jamboree in Idaho. Like most Scouts, I subscribed to the Patriotic Version of American History. After visiting the battlefield, I scribbled (or copied) a note that the Seventh Cavalry’s “heroic defense made the nation yearn for details that no white man lived to tell.” Many years later, I learned that Custer’s men were wiped out in part because the Army Quartermaster refused to permit them to carry repeating rifles – which supposedly wasted ammo. The Indians didn’t have a quartermaster, so they had repeating rifles, and the rest is history.

 Custer also played a leading role in the 1864 desolation of the Shenandoah Valley, where I was raised a century later. After failing to decisively vanquish southern armies in the battlefield, Lincoln and his generals decided to win the war by brutalizing civilians. In August  1864, Gen. U.S. Grant  ordered  the destruction of all the barns, crops, and livestock in the Shenandoah Valley.  The etching to the left shows his troops after torching much of the town of Mt. Jackson, Virginia.  The population of Warren County, my home county, fell by 20% during the 1860s. Did anyone who refused to submit to Washington automatically forfeit his right to live?  The desolation from the war and the systemic looting in its aftermath (ironically labeled “Reconstruction”) helped keep the South economically prostrate for generations.

During the 1864 campaign, Custer was under the command of Gen. Phil Sheridan.  Sheridan later became notorious for slaughtering Indians as a top commander out west.  He is best known for telling an Indian chief in 1869: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”  He apparently felt the same way about Southerners – or at least “secessionists” and their wives and children.

Sheridan’s campaign to starve Shenandoah Valley residents into submission evoked fierce opposition from the  guerillas led by Col. John S. Mosby, the “Grey Ghost of the Confederacy.” Late in the war, when Confederate armies were being trounced or pinned down everywhere, a few hundred Mosby partisans tied up ten thousand Yankees. Mosby suffered none of the Sir Walter Scott-style sentimentality that debilitated many Southern commanders. Instead of glimmering sabers, his men carried a pair of .44 caliber revolvers. There was so much fear of Mosby that the planks on the bridge across the Potomac were removed each night, for fear that he would raid the capital. Reading about him as a boy,  I was impressed how a few well-placed attacks could throw the entire government into a panic. (Herman Melville captured the dread that northern troops had of Mosby in his epic poem, A Scout to Aldie.)

Mosby’s men were vastly outnumbered but they fought valiantly to try to stop Sheridan’s torching of the valley.   Sheridan responded by labeling Mosby’s men war criminals and announcing that they would be executed if captured.  The North stretched the definition of illegal enemy combatant at the same time it redefined its own war crimes out of existence.  Six of Mosby’s men were hung in Front Royal, Virginia in September 1864.

In the weeks after the hanging of his men, Mosby’s men captured 700 northern troops.  In early November, his troops hanged several captured Yankees in retaliation.  A sign was attached to one of the corpses: “These men have been hung in retaliation for an equal number of Colonel Mosby’s men, hung by order of General Custer at Front Royal.  Measure for measure.”  Recognizing the perils to his own troops, Sheridan ceased executing captured Mosby’s guerillas.

Unfortunately, most of the war crimes of the Civil War have been forgotten in the rush to sanctify a pointless vast loss of lives.  Recasting the war as a triumph of good over evil was an easy way to make atrocities vanish.  And failing to recognize the true nature of that war lowered Americans’ resistance to politicians commencing new wars that promised to vanquish evil once and for all.

For more discussion of my two cents on the Civil War, check the memoir essays in Public Policy Hooligan.

On Twitter @jimbovard

The New York Times has a good story today headlined, “War Gear Flows to Police Departments.”  Unfortunately, the Pentagon’s leftovers have been corrupting domestic law enforcement since the 1990s.  Following is a piece I wrote for Playboy in 2000 on  the militarization of SWAT teams.  The article includes a discussion of Waco and the 1999 high school shootings in Littleton, Colorado.

Playboy March, 2000

FLASH. BANG. YOU’RE DEAD : SWAT teams make dramatic TV but horrible justice; the increase in the number of SWAT teams has led to violent, and sometimes misguided, justice

By James Bovard

When University of Texas student Charles Whitman climbed the Texas Tower in 1966 and began shooting people, the Austin police were caught underarmed. Officials called in off-duty cops and asked for citizens to bring their deer rifles. TV footage showed puffs of concrete as cops’ return fire chipped away at the sniper’s position. Eventually, officers climbed the stairs to the observatory deck and patrolman Ramiro Martinez emptied his handgun into the suspect. Then, seizing a shotgun from a fellow officer, he finished the job.

The well-publicized shootings provided the pretext for many police departments to gear up for war and changed both the weaponry and tactics of law enforcement.

Police chief Daryl Gates launched the nation’s first Special Weapons and Tactics team in Los Angeles in 1971. Gates’ unit became famous for demolishing homes with tanks that were equipped with battering rams. Law enforcement went on steroids and became larger than life.

Continue reading “Militarizing Law Enforcement: Collateral Damage from War on Terror”

This is the 70^th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. It is a great blessing that western Europe is now at peace – regardless of how much political leaders squabble at the commemoration ceremony. D-Day back in the news reminds me of my first visit to World War Two venues.

In 1977, after dropping out of college, I hustled up the money to take off for a two-month hitchhiking tour of Europe. After landing and spending five days in Paris, I headed to the city’s western suburbs to catch a ride to Normandy.

Like most American kids in the 1960s, I loved TV series on World War Two – from Combat to Rat Patrol to Hogan’s Heroes. I was also transfixed by movies like “The Longest Day” (1962) and “Is Paris Burning?” (1966). I hoped to visit the landing sites, especially Omaha Beach – where the fiercest fighting took place on June 6.

But the hitching went badly. Perhaps French drivers were appalled by my use of a loaf of French bread to try to flag down a ride – like a giant thumb. (I avoided that flourish later in the summer when hitching in south France.) After several hours of strikeouts, I caught a ride with a trucker going to Le Havre, a port city fairly distant from the famous landing beaches. I had long since exhausted my meager French vocabulary, so I caught a boat to Southampton.

Continue reading “D-Day: My First Encounter with Hitler’s Sea Wall, 1977”

On this day 150 years ago, General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had their last great victory over the Army of Potomac.   General Grant was convinced that the Southerners were whupped and that he merely had to attack a few more times and Lee’s forces would surrender or dissolve.   Lee outfoxed Grant again and his troops were well-entrenched at Cold Harbor.  Grant’s officers did zero reconnaissance and the northern troops charged into a hellfire in which up to 7000 soldiers were cut down in the first quarter hour.  Grant compounded the damage to his troops by refusing to admit he had been beaten; he dithered with messages to Lee that meant that the wounded Yankees lay in the hot sun for several days before they were retrieved.  By that point, most of the wounded were dead.

Grant lied to the War Office about the carnage his army had suffered.  As Historynet.com noted, “Grant’s initial report to General Halleck, sent at 2 p.m., was shocking in its understatement. He reported, ‘Our loss was not severe, nor do I suppose the enemy to have lost heavily.'” Grant’ss coverup was assisted by top officials in the Lincoln administration.  The Republican Party was having their convention a few days later and it would have not helped Lincoln’s reelection campaign to publicly admit that the Army of the Potomac had had its worst bludgeoning since the 1862 battle of Fredericksburg.

As a 1997 article in Civil War Times noted:

Occurring when it did, the Battle of Cold Harbor could have caused dissension at the Republican convention in Baltimore, threatening the renomination of Lincoln or at least marring the appearance of almost universal Union support for his second term. It certainly would have brought a tremendous outcry from the Democratic press, triggering an increase in the activities of subversive Peace Democrat, or Copperhead, societies and Confederate agents in Canada. And it would have enhanced support for the already substantial peace movement in the North. If the Northern public had learned of the disastrous charge and the tragic neglect of the wounded soldiers, Lincoln and Grant might have lost their jobs after the election.

The Battle of Cold Harbor was the type of incident for which the Democratic press had waited for three years. This was particularly true of Copperhead newspapers, which relished occasions to castigate Lincoln and his administration. In June 1864 they bungled their biggest opportunity.

Union Col. Joshua Chamberlain, one of the heroes of Gettysburg, later wrote, “We were not called upon or permitted to report our casualties during that whole campaign from the Rapidan to the Rappahannock to the James and Appomattox, for fear the country could not stand the disclosure.”

Abraham Lincoln is deified by most historians for his exaltation in the Gettysburg Address about “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  But Lincoln, like many subsequent presidents (including Obama), was careful not to muddy self-government by permitting citizens to know the full extents of the debacles that their government committed in their name.

On Twitter @jimbovard    http://www.jimbovard.com/blog/

The Supreme Court announced today that it refused to hear a federal court case involving the Obama administration’s targeting of New York Times reporter James Risen.  Risen has been in the federal cross-hairs since January 2008 because of details in his 2006 book, A State of War, about a botched CIA effort to subvert Iran’s nuclear program.  The same book also blew the whistle on the NSA’s illegal warrantless wiretapping.  The New York Times had sat on that story for more than a year at the Bush administration’s request.  The Times only published the NSA expose after it was clear that Risen’s book was coming out.

The Obama administration has been squeezing Risen to compel him to testify on his confidential sources.  Risen has refused and the Times and a wide array of media groups rallied to his cause.

The Obama administration’s brief on this case told the Supreme Court that “reporters have no privilege to refuse to provide direct evidence of criminal wrongdoing by confidential sources.”

But the key is that the Obama administration (and several of its predecessors) thereby sought to make it a federal crime to expose federal criminality.

I will be writing more on this case shortly.  Here is a 2006 review I wrote for the American Conservative on Risen’s excellent book.    Watching the Detectives

Review: State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, James Risen, Free Press,

James Risen’s State of War has opened a Pandora’s Box for the Bush administration that no amount of howling, scowling, or bogus terrorist-attack warnings will be able to close. Risen’s revelations on pervasive National Security Agency warrantless spying on Americans shred the final pretenses to legality of the Bush administration. Now the debate is simply whether, as Bush and his supporters claim, the president is effectively above the law and the Constitution during a time of (perpetual) war.

Risen has been a national security reporter for the New York Times for many years. He was not one of the Times reporters who simply recycled hokum from the White House Iraq Group. In October 2002, he wrote a piece shooting down the Bush administration’s claims that Mohammad Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, one of the favorite neocon justifications for attacking Iraq.

Risen had the story on NSA wiretapping before the 2004 election, but the Times, under pressure from the administration, sat on the piece for at least 14 months. The paper’s timidity may have awarded George W. Bush a second term as president. After the Times finally published Risen’s story in mid-December, Bush seized upon the exposé to portray himself as heroically rising above the statute book to protect the American people. The administration has been boasting about its “terrorism surveillance program” ever since.

Bush announced that “the NSA program is one that listens to a few numbers called from the outside of the United States and of known al Qaeda or affiliate people.” Except that the program also listens to calls from inside the United States to abroad. And, in some cases, it has wiretapped calls exclusively within the United States. No one knows how flimsy the standard may be that the administration is using for associating people with terrorist suspects—consumption of more than a pound of hummus a week?

Risen revealed that the “NSA is now eavesdropping on as many as five hundred people at any given time” in the United States. Bush’s “secret presidential order has given the NSA the freedom to peruse … the email of millions of Americans.” The NSA’s program has been christened the “J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Vacuum Cleaner.”

In 1978, responding to scandals involving political spying on Americans in the name of counterespionage, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The act prohibited wiretapping of domestic phone calls without a warrant. The special FISA court, however, sets a much lower standard for securing search warrants than is required by other federal courts.

The FISA court has approved almost every one of the more than 17,000 search warrant requests the feds have submitted since 1978. Federal agencies can even submit retroactive requests up to 72 hours after they begin surveilling someone. The number of FISA-approved wiretaps has doubled since 2001. Yet the Bush administration whines that FISA makes the U.S. government a helpless giant against terrorists.

Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales claim that the warrantless wiretaps are based on Congress’s authorization to use military force against the people who attacked the United States. But if that measure actually nullified all domestic limits on the president’s power, then Americans have been living under martial law since Sept. 18, 2001, when Congress passed the resolution. Bush and Gonzales also assert that the president has inherent power to tap phone calls, thanks to Article II of the Constitution. This is the same “commander-in-chief override” that Gonzales invoked after the Abu Ghraib scandal to justify the Bush administration ignoring the federal Anti-Torture Act.

The Founding Fathers, in the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, decreed that government searches must be based on probable cause and approved by a neutral magistrate. The Bush wiretapping program is based solely upon the president’s edict. Shift supervisors at the National Security Agency decide which Americans get wiretapped. But a GS-13 civil servant is not constitutionally on par with a federal judge.

Risen is soft on Michael Hayden, the former Air Force general who was NSA chief when the illegal spying began shortly after 9/11. Risen notes that Hayden “hosted off-the-record dinners for the press at his home at Fort Meade.” He does not recite the menu for the dinners, but the fare seems to have paid off handsomely. Risen neglects to mention that Hayden deceived Congress in Oct. 17, 2002 testimony regarding FISA. Hayden told Congressman Porter Goss—now the Director of Central Intelligence—that once a person enters the United States, “that person would have protections as what the law defines as a U.S. person. And I would have no authorities to pursue it” outside of a court-authorized wiretap. But the NSA was vigorously pursuing the calls and e-mails of many people within the United States at that time regardless of the law.

Perhaps because of his obedience in carrying out warrantless wiretaps, Hayden was promoted by Bush in 2005 to be the number-two intelligence official within the federal government. If the NSA wiretap scandal continues heating up, Bush may be obliged to give Hayden a presidential Medal of Freedom, as he did to former CIA director George “Slam Dunk” Tenet.

The subtitle of the book is “The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” and Risen provides many insights into the perversion of that agency’s intelligence and analysis in the Bush era. Before the 2003 invasion, the CIA swayed many Iraqi-Americans to return to their homeland to pump relatives who were scientists for information on Saddam’s weapons programs. When the bravehearts returned to the U.S. and reported that the programs had been shut down, the CIA buried their reports, refusing even to forward the information to senior Bush policymakers. The CIA did express its gratitude to Sawsan Alhaddad, a Cleveland doctor who risked her life to ask her nuclear scientist brother in Baghdad for information, by giving her an American flag that had purportedly flown over CIA headquarters.

Some CIA flops are due to the dumbing down of its analyses. The popularity of cable news networks pressures policy makers to respond to endless transient crises. Risen points out that some CIA analysts learned that to get ahead, “they had to master the trick of writing quick, short reports that would grab the attention of top policy makers. CIA analysts had become the classified equivalent of television reporters, rather than college professors. The result was that fewer analysts were taking the time to go back and challenge basic assumptions.”

State of War provides excellent new insights into how much evidence the Bush administration and the CIA scorned in building the case to attack Iraq. Risen notes, “Israeli intelligence played a hidden role in convincing Wolfowitz that he couldn’t trust the CIA, according to a former senior Pentagon colleague. Israeli intelligence officials frequently traveled to Washington to brief top American officials, but CIA analysts were often skeptical of Israeli intelligence reports, knowing that Mossad had very strong—even transparent—biases about the Arab World.” But nothing could undermine Mossad’s credibility for neoconservatives like Wolfowitz and Feith, determined to believe anyone and anything that sanctified attacking Saddam.

The most compelling material in this book, however, remains the exposure of domestic intelligence abuses. The NSA illegal surveillance uncovered by Risen dwarfs the Patriot Act controversies. Many Republicans have nonetheless rushed to embrace and defend the Bush administration’s warrantless spying. Bush’s comments on his “terrorism surveillance program” got a standing ovation from GOP congressmen during his State of the Union address. Republicans are staking their honor on the Bush administration’s honesty—on the assertion that all the wiretaps were carefully targeted to people linked to al-Qaeda suspects. This is a reckless wager. If the wiretaps were actually limited to calls to and from al-Qaeda suspects, it would have been easy as pie to get FISA warrants.

It is naïve to believe that the feds will behave properly once they are permitted to violate the law. During J. Edgar Hoover’s later years, the FBI carried out more than 2,000 COINTELPRO operations to spy on Americans they disliked, using the intelligence gathered to incite street warfare between violent groups, wreck marriages, portray innocent people as government informants, sic the IRS on citizens, and cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, and other organizations. Even the John Birch Society was secretly targeted by the feds. If the current rulers are using 1960s standards, practically any opponent of the Bush administration could be targeted for illegal surveillance.

What other presidential orders have been issued since 2001 that explicitly exempt U.S. government agencies from federal law and the Constitution? Bush has surrounded himself with people who continually assure him that his power is absolute during wartime. Newsweek reported that Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, recently informed the Senate Intelligence Committee that Bush could order killings of suspected terrorists within the U.S. Considering the administration’s dismal record in identifying bona fide versus bogus terrorists since 9/11, this license to kill could wreak havoc on the nation’s convenience stores and taxi companies.
Some wearisome Washington platitudes creep into State of War. Risen declares, “Bush does deserve credit for making the spread of democracy in the Middle East a centerpiece of his agenda for his second term.” But Bush deserves no credit for recycling idealist rhetoric while perpetuating policies that breed hatred, violence, and chaos across a large part of the globe. Risen judiciously notes, “It sometimes seems as if the Bush administration is fighting the birthrate of the entire Arab world.”

Risen’s revelations are propelling congressional and media investigations into the NSA warrantless wiretapping. The actual abuses will very likely prove to be far more widespread and shocking than what has been disclosed so far. Perhaps the best epithet for Bush’s civil liberties record is the saying of Lily Tomlin: “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”
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James Bovard is author of the just published Attention Deficit Democracy (St. Martin’s/Palgrave) and 8 other books.

On Twitter @jimbovard      www.jimbovard.com      http://jimbovard.com/blog/