Naomi Wolf

In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the "trespass bill", which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to "turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks." He said he felt humiliated: "It made me feel like less of a man."

In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices’ decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven’t been introduced into a prison population.

Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There’s the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram – Der Spiegel reports that "former inmates report incidents of … various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex". There was the stripping of Bradley Manning is solitary confinement. And there’s the policy set up after the story of the "underwear bomber" to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine – made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff – with images so vivid that it has been called the "pornoscanner".

Believe me: you don’t want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.

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Tom Carter

“It is hard to conceive of a more profound constitutional violation than the torture of a US citizen on US soil,” wrote lawyers for Jose Padilla in a petition filed Monday with the US Supreme Court. A lawsuit brought by Padilla, who was illegally “disappeared,” imprisoned and tortured by the US government for four years, was thrown out by lower courts on the grounds that the courts have no authority to subject the wartime actions of the executive branch to “judicial scrutiny.”

Padilla’s treatment constituted a test case for the incommunicado detention and torture of US citizens by the military without any judicial process. The Padilla case, as much as any other to date, illustrates the disintegration of democracy in the US and the erection of the legal scaffolding of a police state.

According to the precedent set by the Padilla case, federal authorities and the military may unilaterally abduct, imprison and torture a US citizen, in clear violation of the Bill of Rights, without anyone ever being held accountable. If this can be done to one individual, there is nothing in principle preventing the government from doing it to hundreds or thousands or millions of individuals.

On June 2, 2002, Jose Padilla, a US citizen, was declared by then-president George W. Bush to be an “enemy combatant.” On this basis, i.e., the sole say-so of the president, US military personnel seized Padilla from a Chicago jail, where he was incarcerated pursuant to a “material witness” warrant, and transported him to the Consolidated Naval Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, a military prison.

“It would be almost two years before anyone beyond the Brig’s doors heard from Mr. Padilla again,” the petition states. For nearly four years, Padilla was subjected to continuous physical and psychological torture, from which he suffered permanent brain damage.

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Stephen Lendman

Obama plans more wars. The peace candidate can't get enough of them. Hawkishness defines his agenda. So does belligerently transforming independent regimes into client ones. The business of America is war. Permanent war is policy. Peace is abhorred. Preventing it is prioritized. So is controlling Eurasia's vast oil, gas, and other resources unchallenged. War profiteering depends on conflict. It's the American way. Post-WW II, it's been that way. One war leads to others. Proxy ones are waged.

Sums spent are enormous. Post-9/11 alone, estimates run into the multi-trillions. A June Brown University Watson Institute for International Studies (WIIS) "Cost of War" report said up to $5,444 trillion was spent and projected with all related expenses and obligations included.

In their book titled, "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict," Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes explained costs way beyond official numbers.

Wars incur many costs besides Pentagon budgets. They include medical care for injured combatants and veterans, federal benefits provided veterans, expenses for veterans paid by state and local governments, construction in occupied countries, supplemental budget and hidden add-ons, black budgets, intelligence costs, national debt interest related to war, weapons R & D, and other categories few people consider.

Among them - the macroeconomic consequences of militarism and war. They include lost industrialization, crumbling infrastructure, other neglected homeland needs, and suffering millions at home on their own, uncared for, unwanted, ignored, and forgotten to assure steady funding for America's war machine.

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Bill Van Auken

President Barack Obama used a visit to Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum Monday to unveil a set of new sanctions against Iran and Syria and to promote the administration’s use of “human rights” as a pretext for aggressive war and regime change.

The new sanctions target Syrian and Iranian intelligence agencies as well as telecommunications and Internet providers for use of information technology to monitor and repress political opposition. They have been rolled out under conditions in which the United Nations is deploying its monitors in Syria to oversee a ceasefire and as Iran prepares for a second round of negotiations next month in Baghdad with the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany) over its nuclear program.

The timing of this latest round of sanctions, coming on top of a whole series of unilateral US and European Union measures aimed at crippling the Syrian and Iranian economies, strongly indicates that Washington is merely using negotiations with both countries as a cover for preparing war and regime change.

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The BRussells Tribunal

KUALA LUMPUR, 12 April 2012 - The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal will be hearing the second charge of Crime of Torture and War Crimes against former U.S. President George W. Bush and his associates namely Richard Cheney, former U.S. Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld, former Defence Secretary, Alberto Gonzales, then Counsel to President Bush, David Addington, then General Counsel to the Vice-President, William Haynes II, then General Counsel to Secretary of Defense, Jay Bybee, then Assistant Attorney General, and John Choon Yoo, former Deputy Assistant Attorney-General. The charge reads as follows:

The Accused persons had committed the Crime of Torture and War Crimes, in that: The Accused persons had wilfully participated in the formulation of executive orders and directives to exclude the applicability of all international conventions and laws, namely the Convention against Torture 1984, Geneva Convention III 1949, Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Charter in relation to the war launched by the U.S. and others in Afghanistan (in 2001) and in Iraq (in March 2003); Additionally, and/or on the basis and in furtherance thereof, the Accused persons authorised, or connived in, the commission of acts of torture and cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment against victims in violation of international law, treaties and conventions including the Convention against Torture 1984 and the Geneva Conventions, including Geneva Convention III 1949.

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) following the due process of the law is bringing this charge against the accused. In 2009, the Commission, having received complaints from torture victims from Guantanamo and Iraq, proceeded to conduct a painstaking and an in-depth investigation for close to two years. Two charges on war crimes were drawn and filed against the accused persons.

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Paul Craig Roberts

This photograph from Sept. 15, 2001, shows the Statue of Liberty
from Jersey City, N.J., as the lower Manhattan skyline is shrouded
in smoke following the US Government's attacks on the World
Trade Center in New York. (Photo: Associated Press)

Reason is an important part of human existence. Some are capable of it. Imagination and creativity can escape chains. Good can withstand evil.

The extraordinary film, The Matrix, affirmed that people could be unplugged. I believe that even americans can be unplugged.

When did things begin going wrong in America?

“From the beginning,” answer some. English colonists, themselves under the thumb of a king, exterminated American Indians and stole their lands, as did late 18th and 19th century Americans. Over the course of three centuries the native inhabitants of America were dispossessed, just as Israelis have been driving Palestinians off their lands since 1948.

Demonization always plays a role. The Indians were savages and the Palestinians are terrorists. Any country that can control the explanation can get away with evil.

I agree that there is a lot of evil in every country and civilization. In the struggle between good and evil, religion has at times been on the side of evil. However, the notion of moral progress cannot so easily be thrown out.

Consider, for example, slavery. In the 1800s, slavery still existed in countries that proclaimed equal rights. Even free women did not have equal rights. Today no Western country would openly tolerate the ownership of humans or the transfer of a woman’s property upon her marriage to her husband.

It is true that Western governments have ownership rights in the labor of their citizens through the income tax. This remains as a mitigated form of serfdom. So far, however, no government has claimed the right of ownership over the person himself.

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Patrick Martin

US and Afghan officials announced Sunday that they had reached a draft agreement committing the United States to continuing military and financial support to the puppet regime in Kabul long after the scheduled withdrawal of the bulk of US ground troops at the end of 2014.

The pledge of long-term involvement in Afghanistan flies in the face of popular sentiment in the United States, the European countries and Australia, where there is overwhelming opposition to continuing the occupation of Afghanistan and a war that has dragged on for eleven years.

Neither of the envoys who negotiated the agreement, US ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Afghan national security adviser Rangin Spanta, would release its text, or even outline its main features, ostensibly to give time for their respective governments to review and approve the drafts.

The deal will become final when signed by US President Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. It will not be submitted for Senate ratification, making the agreement’s longterm effect contingent on Obama’s reelection in November. In effect, it is a promissory note from Obama to Karzai to keep funding the regime in Kabul, assuming Obama remains in the White House and Karzai survives the pullout of most US and NATO ground troops.

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Stephen Lendman

Graffiti protesting the Formula One Bahrain Grand Prix in the
village of Barbar, west of Manama, on April 9. (AFP - Getty)

Perhaps Bahrain April 22 was a first.

Imagine a sporting event featuring state-sponsored terror and blood in the streets. Imagine one with race drivers and event organizers mindless of raging crimes against humanity nearby. Hollywood script writers wouldn't touch it. Producers wouldn't let them.

The atmosphere was surreal. Attendance was sparse. A normally full grandstand was half empty. It's a wonder anyone came. Observers said more security forces than spectators showed up. Most teams, drivers, mechanics, engineers, and other personnel preferred to stay home. Nonetheless, they came.

Formula 1's reputation was tarnished. Instead of pulling out, it went ahead anyway. Although favorite Sebastian Vettel took the checkered flag, no one won the contest. It was more travesty than sporting event.

The Al Khalifa monarchy's media strategy backfired. Instead of burnishing Bahrain's image, journalists focused more on rage against injustice, blood in the streets, police state violence, security forces and armored vehicles surrounding the Bahrain International Circuit (BIC), and clouds of black smoke rising nearby.

Even though the heavily guarded venue let the race come off without incident, Bahraini protesters won on Sunday.

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Adnan Al-Daini

A bus and taxi pass Big Ben on Westminster Bridge in London

Politicians are completely out of touch with ordinary citizens regarding taxpayer funding of political parties.  People are disgusted with the influence exercised by an unscrupulous rich elite, that is able to bend politicians and policies to its will using its wealth. 

Powerful corporations and lobbying groups reinforce the stranglehold on political life, freezing out the ordinary voter, and adding to the sense of disenchantment with politicians and politics generally. 

The Prime Minister and the leader of the Labour party suggested a cap on private donations of £50,000, and £5,000 respectively, and all the major parties take the view that the electorate will not support state funding.   Something tells me that this view is based more on self-interest and wishful thinking than on reality. Let the debate begin in earnest and we will see.

A cap on private donations of even £5,000 is still far too high, with those able to afford such a donation having more influence on parties and their policies, than those who can afford substantially lower sums. 

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Gilad Atzmon

Marine Le Pen is a French politician, a lawyer by profession and the president of the Front National (FN) since 16 January 2011. She is the youngest daughter of the French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, former president of the FN and currently its honorary chairman. In 2010, she was a candidate for the leadership of the FN set up by Jean-Marie Le Pen on 5 October 1972. She successfully succeeded him during the FN congress in Tours, Indre-et-Loire. On 16 January 2011, she was elected with 67.65% (11,546 votes) as the second president of the Front National. She was a candidate in the 2012 French presidential election. On 22 April 2012, she polled 17.90% (6,421,802 votes) in the first round and finished in third position behind François Hollande and incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy. (Wikipedia)

Marine Le Pen and The French’s Front National are the big winners in the French elections yesterday. France’s Front National scored the best ever presidential campaign first-round result (18% of the votes).

As elsewhere in Europe, the French far right is dealing with matters other political parties prefer to avoid or shove under the carpet. Yesterday results proves that many French are primarily concerned with issues to do with immigration and ‘identity loss’. While the so called ‘far Right’ engages with these matters, the Left and the Centre parties perform an escapist attitude – they prefer to vet the discussion via different means such as political correctness and even legislation. The media, would also shy away from the subject and would prefer to gate-keep any attempt to deal with the ‘unpopular’ topic.

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Patrick Martin

In a cynical and duplicitous editorial Saturday, the New York Times stepped up its campaign for US political subversion and military action against Syria, while demanding Washington adopt a more aggressive posture against Russia and China. The editorial, headlined “Assad’s Lies,” is itself a compendium of lies, as the newspaper reprises its role in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq, when it peddled the Bush administration’s lies about supposed Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” in order to neutralize the widespread popular opposition to the war.

The Times indicts Assad for “cruelty and blindness,” which would hardly make him unique in the region. Virtually all the US allies and client states in the Middle East—Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the military dictatorship in Egypt, the Netanyahu government in Israel—display those characteristics. This week, for example, has seen violent repression of anti-government protests in Bahrain and Tunisia, both right-wing regimes closely tied to the United States, along with saber-rattling threats by Israeli officials of a unilateral attack on Iran, an action that would represent a war crime of monstrous proportions.

The Times editorial is written in its typically hand-wringing tone, bemoaning the “bloodbath” in Syria and the danger of a “wider war,” although the policy advocated by the newspaper—and carried out by the Obama administration—leads inexorably to both outcomes. The Times would like its readers to forget the fact that the US government is directly or indirectly arming the opposition in Syria, using both American Special Forces and US proxies like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Moreover, where does the danger of “wider war” come from—the beleaguered Assad is hardly likely to invade any of his neighbors—if not from the intervention of a US-led coalition along the lines of the NATO operation against Libya last year.

Most sinister is the editorial’s indictment of Moscow and Beijing, as it presents US motives in the Syrian crisis as humanitarian, even altruistic, while vilifying Russia and China for “playing a pointless geopolitical game.”

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Stephen Lendman

Romain Grosjean of France and Lotus drives in for a pitstop
during the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix at the Bahrain
International Circuit on April 22, 2012 in Sakhir (Bahrain).

On Sunday, April 22, Bahrain's Grand Prix went on as scheduled. This year's grand prize is disgrace, not glory.

Formula 1's governing board shamed itself by not pulling out. So did participating drivers. Agreeing to race in a virtual war zone shows nothing matters but winning and money - lots of it. Going along turns a blind eye to state terror.

Mass street protests for justice don't matter. Nor do brutal security force crackdowns. London Guardian writer Richard Williams said F1's "supremo Bernie Ecclestone" has a "habit of taking the money and asking no questions."

Already a billionaire, his money lust is insatiable. Even with race day blood on the streets he wants more. So do participating drivers. Many are multi-millionaires. Passing up one stop on the circuit hardly matters. Sacrifice isn't their long suit. Neither is doing the right thing.

They turn race competition into a perversion of sport. Thanks to Ecclestone, said Williams, "a sport whose conscience was only troubled by its environmental impact now looks like a pariah."

Welcome to Bahrain. Witness two spectacles for the price of one - Grand Prix racing and security force viciousness on street protesters in one of the world's most repressive dictatorships.

One protester death was reported. Salah Abbas Habib's body was found on a Al Shakhoura rooftop. A well-known activist leader, he was arrested the previous night with others. Reportedly they were tortured. His body showed evidence of shotgun injuries and abuse.

Police tried to prevent journalists and others from seeing it. Photos revealed what they tried to suppress.

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Gilad Atzmon

Tragically, we understand that we are spiraling down into an inevitable long and dark winter.

When we were young there was hope in the air. There was good reason to look ahead. Some of us enrolled at university, but we also knew that if life did not shine on us, there were plenty of factories that offered enough jobs to those who were willing to toil. Yet it seems our children are not so lucky. Not much is awaiting them. The Western economy is on the brink of collapse.

When we were young, there were two ideologies around. In a cold manner, they bitterly chewing away at each other. One ideology maintained that equality and justice were the means towards liberation, whilst the other contended that celebrating one’s symptoms was actually the true meaning of human liberty. But it seems that these two ideologies have had very little impact on our life. In practice, we were all celebrating our symptoms - we were buying, selling, eating and drinking, but we somehow also enjoyed believing that ‘equality was a good thing’. Eventually these grand ideologies faded away and, not only do we not have ideologies anymore, we are not even capable of thinking ideologically. In the post ideological era, which we now inhabit, we kill millions in the name of ‘liberation’, we rain down depleted uranium shells on crowded cities whilst promising to export ‘liberal democracy,’ and we export Western ‘justice’ in Coca Cola cans.

When we were young, we reserved some respect for our political system. We somehow accepted that liberal democracy reflected our true values and beliefs. Fundamentally, we believed that it was a well-meaning idea and the best of all options. Hence we believed that at least theoretically, our democratically elected representatives were largely a true reflection of our desires. We were not stupid but we were somewhat naïve.

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Peter Symonds

Photo: Still smouldering oil tankers, after a convoy of some 25 trucks carrying oil for Nato forces in Afghanistan was attacked by suspected Islamic militants on the outskirts of Islamabad, October 2010; a congressional investigation found that some of the $14bn annual cost of running Nato supply lines leaks into the hands of the Taliban. (EPA/W Khan)

The meeting of NATO defence and foreign ministers this week in Brussels was dominated by a sense of desperation and crisis over the worsening military quagmire in Afghanistan. The US is escalating military operations in an effort to shore up the detested Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, even as the US and its allies prepare to withdraw the bulk of foreign combat troops by the end of 2014.

The vulnerability of the US-led occupation was driven home last Sunday by co-ordinated, high-profile attacks against NATO and Afghan government targets in Kabul. While NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu praised the response of the Afghan security forces, nothing could hide the fact that a handful of Taliban fighters penetrated the highest security areas of the capital, held Afghan police and troops at bay for 18 hours and were only defeated with the support of US helicopter gunships.

Speaking in Brussels alongside Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged last weekend’s attack in Kabul. She nevertheless intoned the mantra: “The transition is on track, the Afghans are increasingly standing up for their own security and future, and NATO remains united in our support.”

In reality, the US strategy in Afghanistan is in tatters. Under the guise of its bogus “war on terror,” American imperialism invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to transform it into a client state and base of operations to further its ambitions in Central Asia. After more than a decade of war, large areas of the country, especially in the south and east, are controlled by anti-occupation militias, including the Taliban and the Haqqani network.

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Sheldon Richman

In 1861 Samuel A. Cartwright, an American physician, described a mental illness he called “drapetomania.” As Wikipedia points out, the term derived from drapetes, Greek for “runaway [slave],” and mania for madness or frenzy.

Thus Cartwright defined drapetomania as “the disease causing negroes to run away [from captivity].”

“[I]ts diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers,” Cartwright wrote in a much-distributed paper delivered before the Medical Association of Louisiana. Yet this disorder was “unknown to our medical authorities.”

Cartwright thought slave owners caused the illness by making “themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals.” Drapetomania could also be induced “if [the master] abuses the power which God has given him over his fellow-man, by being cruel to him, or punishing him in anger, or by neglecting to protect him from the wanton abuses of his fellow-servants and all others, or by denying him the usual comforts and necessaries of life.”

He had ideas about proper prevention and treatment:

[I]f his master or overseer be kind and gracious in his hearing towards him, without condescension, and at the sane [sic] time ministers to his physical wants, and protects him from abuses, the negro is spell-bound, and cannot run away. . . .

If any one or more of them, at any time, are inclined to raise their heads to a level with their master or overseer, humanity and their own good requires that they should be punished until they fall into that submissive state which was intended for them to occupy in all after-time. . . . They have only to be kept in that state, and treated like children, with care, kindness, attention and humanity, to prevent and cure them from running away. [Emphasis added.]

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