Sen. Rand Paul's Historic Filibuster Against John Brennan & Drones Live on C-Span2

Streaming Live on C-Span2: http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN2/

Rand Paul's Senate Website: http://www.paul.senate.gov

Final SIGIR Iraq Report's Bottom Line: Peter Van Buren Was Right

IMHO, that's the takeaway from the long corporate-style document called "Learning from Iraq: A Final Report From the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction." 

You can read the IG report online in its entirely here: http://www.sigir.mil/learningfromiraq/index.html. 

But if you've read Peter Van Buren's We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, you already knew.

RubinReports: Is Chuck Hagel America's Haman?

From Barry Rubin's RubinReports: The Book of Esther: A Political Analysis

Third, Haman provides the classic,  statement of non-theological antisemitism that could easily fit into the nineteenth and twentieth century and even today, mirroring the kinds of things hinted for example by nominee for secretary of defense Chuck Hagel. Haman explained:

“There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples…of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s law, and it is not in your majesty’s interest to tolerate them.”

In other words, the Jews comprise what would later be called a separate national group. It is impossible to assimilate them; they are disloyal due to dual loyalty; and despite their apparent weakness they plot against you.

I'm sure that Hagel is not antisemitic in any conscious way yet he echoes the same themes that Haman used. Haman might have said that he was not a "Jewish" minister but a "Persian" minister, who would not bow down to the Jewish lobby whose interests subverted those of the nation.  

A contemporary problem in understanding antisemitism today is that hegemonic political, intellectual, and informational forces in the West want to measure antisemitism by conscious intent and not by the use of well-worn historical (these are even in the Bible!) themes, though that is precisely the criterion that they do use in examining just about any other sort of bigotry. They also begin by excluded all non-Western populations from possibly being antisemitic. But Haman was residing in a non-Western society.  

We Meant Well: We Are All Bradley Manning by Peter Van Buren

We are All Bradley Manning: 1000 Days in Jail without a Conviction

February 25, 2013 // 3 Comments

Tags: Free Speech, Manning, Wikileaks
Posted in: Democracy, Iraq

Bradley Manning, the young army private who allegedly disclosed the Wikileaks files, must be given a fair, open and speedy trial. He has been held over three years, often in solitary and inhumane conditions. He has been convicted of no crime. This is simply and self-evidently wrong.

The crimes Manning is accused of, a cascading series of offenses all restating that he leaked classified material, hurt no one; the government, in fact, has gone out of its way to declare that it need not show any damage done in its pursuit of the death penalty for Manning. The US Department of State, whose 100,000 leaked cables have been on the internet for over three years, formed then quickly disbanded a “task force” designed to show all the terrible things that resulted from Manning’s alleged disclosures. The Department has since, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, itself released documents Manning is threatened with the gallows for releasing. No harm has been shown, no lives lost, no American goals thwarted.

I probably had dinner with Bradley Manning when we were both stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq at the same time (I worked for the Department of State). The office where he allegedly did his dirty work was down the hall from mine, so it is hard to believe we never walked past each other or shared a table in the single cafeteria on base.

In 2011 as a State Department employee, I linked from my personal blog to a document on the Wikileaks site, a document that may have been provided by Manning. In return for this simple internet link, the State Department took away my security clearance, threatened me with prosecution and stripped me of my career of 24 years as a diplomat, all without any review, due process or opportunity to rebut their silly accusation that I too had disclosed classified material, via a hyperlink. My life changed, with a stroke of a pen, as is said.

Bradley Manning, convicted of no crime, is in his third year of incarceration. He spent part of the first year in a literal cage in Kuwait, followed by a year or more in custody where he was stripped of his clothing, not allowed contact with any humans besides his jailers and constantly mocked, ridiculed a and taunted, all without any review, due process or opportunity to rebut the accusations against him. With a stroke of a pen, as is said.

A lot of things happen now in America with the stroke of a pen: innocent people end up on no-fly lists, Occupy organizers have their phone calls and emails monitored, jobs are denied to hard working people after some “background check” fails and in the ultimate, a drone may kill a person. All without any review, due process or opportunity to rebut.

Our nation was founded on a set of ideas, some dating as far back as the Magna Carta. Chief among those ideas was an overriding principle that the people should be able to live their lives unmolested by their government, and that to ensure that, restraints were written into law that would prevent the government from taking away someone’s privacy, freedom or life arbitrarily. Courts, open and public, would weigh the government’s desire to deprive people of their lives against these broader principles. It was what made America a special place, perhaps the only nation founded on an idea. We have abandoned those concepts. We have failed Bradley Manning and we have failed ourselves.

I don’t know what Bradley Manning did, and neither do you. A court must decide, in a speedy and open manner because that is what our America is about. Everyday Manning is denied that right—and it was 1000 days as of February 23—we are all denied that right. America is nothing but a sum of its people, and when we deny justice to one we deny it to all. Give Bradley Manning a fair, speedy and open trial for his sake, for our own sake and for this nation’s sake.

SOURCE: We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren

RubinReports

RubinReports on The State of the Union...

Lars Hedegaard, Defender of Freedom

Lars Hedegaard, Defender of Freedom

Peter Van Buren on Drones & the 5th Amendment

From: http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2013/02/08/sticking-to-our-rights-to-protect-our-rights/

Q: If a foreign organization kills an American overseas for political reasons, it is called…
A: Terrorism.

Q: If the United States kills an American overseas for political reasons, it is called…
A: Justice.

The Government of the United States, currently under the management of a former professor of Constitutional law, is actively killing its own citizens abroad without any form of due process. This is generally seen as a no-no as far as the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta and playground rules goes. The silly old Fifth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees “no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law” and include no exceptions for war, terrorism, or being a really shitty human being.

On or about May 7, 2011 a US military drone fired a missile in Yemen (which is another country that is not our country) aimed at American Citizen Anwar al Awlaki, a real-live al Qaeda guy. The missile instead blew up a car with two other people in it, quickly dubbed “al Qaeda operatives” since we killed them. The US has shot at al Awlaki before, including under the Bush administration. In justifying the assassination attempt, Obama’s counterterrorism chief Michael Leiter said al Awlaki posed a bigger threat to the U.S. homeland than bin Laden did, albeit without a whole lot of explanation as to why this was. But, let’s be charitable and agree al Awaki is a bad guy; indeed, Yemen sentenced him to ten years in jail (which is not execution, fyi) for “inciting to kill foreigners” and “forming an armed gang.”

While the al Awlaki killing is old news, the new news is that the drone that did him fly out of a previously secret U.S. base in Saudi Arabia. Conveniently, that base was secret pretty much only from the American public, as it turns out that an “informal arrangement among several news organizations that had been aware of the location for more than a year.” Those news organizations included the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press and Fox. The limp newsies kept the secret because the Obama administration claimed disclosure might carry “potential national-security risks.” The U.S. militarization of Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Gulf War is often cited by al Qaeda as one of its prime recruitment tools, so the disclosure indeed reveals a significant dumb ass decision by the U.S.

Attorneys for al Awlaki’s father tried to persuade a US. District Court to issue an injunction preventing the government from the targeted killing of al Awlaki in Yemen, though a judge dismissed the case, ruling the father did not have standing to sue. My research has so far been unable to disclose whether or not this is the first time a father has sought to sue the US government to prevent the government from killing his son but I’ll keep looking. The judge did call the suit “unique and extraordinary” so I am going to go for now with the idea that no one has previously sued the USG to prevent them from murdering a citizen without trial or due process. The judge wimped out and wrote that it was up to the elected branches of government, not the courts, to determine whether the United States has the authority to murder its own citizens abroad.

Just to get ahead of the curve, and even though my own kids are non-terrorists and still in school, I have written to the president asking in advance that he not order them killed. Who knows what they might do? One kid has violated curfew a couple of times, and another stays up late some nights on Facebook, and we all know where that can lead.

The reason I bring up this worrisome turn from regular person to wanted terrorist is because al Awlaki used to be on better terms with the US government himself. In fact, after 9/11, the Pentagon invited him to a luncheon as part of the military’s outreach to the Muslim community. Al Awlaki “was considered to be an ‘up and coming’ member of the Islamic community” by the Army. He attended a luncheon at the Pentagon in the Secretary of the Army’s Office of Government Counsel. Al Awlaki was living in the DC area at that same, the SAME AREA MY KIDS LIVE, serving as Muslim chaplain at George Washington University, the SAME UNIVERSITY MY KIDSmight walk past one day.

Even though Constitutional law professor Obama appears to have skipped reading about the Fifth Amendment (release the transcripts! Maybe he skipped class that day!), courts in Canada have not.

A Toronto judge was justified in freeing an alleged al Qaeda collaborator given the gravity of human rights abuses committed by the United States in connection with his capture in Pakistan, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled. Judges are not expected to remain passive when countries such as the US violate the rights of alleged terrorists, the court said Friday.

“We must adhere to our democratic and legal values, even if that adherence serves in the short term to benefit those who oppose and seek to destroy those values,” said the Canadian court.

Golly, this means that because the US gave up its own principles in detaining and torturing this guy, the Canadians are not going to extradite him to the US. That means that the US actions were… counterproductive… to our fight against terrorism. The Bill of Rights was put in place for the tough cases, not the easy ones. Sticking with it as the guiding principle has worked well for the US for about 230 years, so why abandon all that now?

Meanwhile, I’ll encourage my kids to stay inside when they hear drones overhead.

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Destroying Rights Guaranteed Since the Magna Carta

From: We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren

Destroying Rights Guaranteed Since the Magna Carta
by Peter Van Buren

Here are the Department of Justice’s legal argumentsgranting permission to the president to assassinate Americans if they are connected with al Qaeda, essentially destroying rights guaranteed citizens since the Magna Carta– right to life, right to a trial, right to due process.

This will be one of the documents historians study years from now while chronicling the end of the American experiment in democracy. Those historians will conclude that no foreign power defeated us; we ate ourselves.

Torture as American Policy

The release of these legal arguments comes on the same day that the Open Society Foundation detailed the CIA’s effort to outsource torture since 9/11 in excruciating detail. Known as “extraordinary rendition,” the practice concerns taking detainees to and from U.S. custody without a legal process — think of it like an off-the-books extradition — and often entailed handing detainees over to countries that practiced torture. The Open Society Foundation found that 136 people went through the post-9/11 extraordinary rendition, and 54 countries were complicit in it. The U.S. worked with Iran to take new prisoners, and sent others into Assad’s Syria for torture.

Justification to Ignore the Constitution

According to MSNBC, the undated DOJ memo is entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force.” It was provided to members of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees in June by administration officials on the condition that it be kept confidential and not discussed publicly. The white paper was represented by administration officials as a policy document that closely mirrors the arguments of classified memos on targeted killings by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The administration has refused to turn over to Congress or release those more detailed memos publicly, or even to overtly confirm they existence.

In the DOJ white paper, it is determined that in order for the United States of America to kill one of its own citizens, all that is needed is that “an informed, high-level official of the U.S. Government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” and that capture is not feasible and of course that the laws of war are followed. For those tracking the amount of blood on the president’s hands, note that no review takes place, no due process, no jury, no anything, just death because the president (or, technically, any anonymous informed high-level official) says kill that man, woman or child. This is considered by the Department of Justice to be “a lawful act of national self-defense.”

DOJ specifically states that if the targeted individual had rights under the Fourth Amendment and the Due Process Clause, such rights would not “immunize him from a lethal operation.”

The Fourth Amendment is a now-quaint part of the U.S. Constitution that guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. The Due Process Clause is contained in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. It once acted as a safeguard from arbitrary denial of life, liberty, or property by the Government. The clear intent of Due Process, appearing twice in the Constitution, is to assure Americans that the government cannot act against them outside of a judicial process, a set of laws to protect against the government having too much power.

The Department of Justice also concludes that the murder of an American Citizen under such circumstances “would not violate certain criminal provisions prohibiting the killing of U.S. nationals outside the United States; nor would it constitute the commission of a war crime or an assassination prohibited by Executive Order.”

It was found that “the realities of the conflict and the weight of the government’s interest in protecting its citizens from an imminent attack are such that the Constitution would not require the government to provide further process to such a U.S. Citizen before using lethal force.”

The document notes that “the condition that the operational leader present an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” Instead, DOJ asserts a “broader definition of imminence.”

Neatly, to conclude their argument, the Department of Justice states that due to the unique circumstances of the conflict with terror, “there exists no appropriate judicial forum to evaluate these constitutional considerations.”

The End of the Experiment

One is left literally gasping for air, pale with anger, wondering what we have become in America. Have we stooped to the level of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, which in precise legalese justified the Holocaust? Have we reached the point where we believe we must destroy our beautiful Constitution in order to save it?

Of what value anymore is the oath all Federal employees take, the same oath Obama took on the steps of the Capitol last month, promising to defend and uphold the Constitution? What value is that oath when with a memo he deems that that Constitution does not apply when there is killing to be done abroad. What type of nation declares war on its own citizens?

Those questions are left rhetorical for now, but this much is now true: the president of the United States has granted himself legal justification to ignore the most basic tenet of freedom– the right to live– and empowered himself to kill his own citizens without any form of due process or judicial procedure. It is an easy way for a writer to grab headlines, claiming such-and-such is the end of our rights, such as the limits imposed on habeas corpus, online spying, no-fly lists, restrictions on free speech, etc. But now we have truly approached the edge, because when you are dead, killed extra judicially by your own government, well, no other theoretical rights really matter anymore.

Abu Graib, Guantanamo, the CIA secret prisons, imprisonment without trial of Bradley Manning, those are not aberrations or exceptions– they were practice. These are indeed the darkest of days for our democratic experiment.

Barry Rubin Reports on the Middle East

Read it here: RubinReports

George W. Bush, Painter

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2013/02/on-death-of-barney-dog-george-bush.html

Mark Steyn on Hillary's Benghazi Testimony

From his column in the Orange County Register (http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/difference-409271-one-obama.html):

A couple of days later, it fell to the 45th president-in-waiting to encapsulate the ethos of the age in one deft sound bite: What difference does it make? Hillary Clinton's instantly famous riposte at the Benghazi hearings is such a perfect distillation that it surely deserves to be the national motto of the United States. They should put it on Paul Krugman's trillion-dollar coin, and in the presidential oath:

"Do you solemnly swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?"

"Sure. What difference, at this point, does it make?"

Well, it's the difference between cool and reality – and, as Hillary's confident reply appeared to suggest, and the delirious media reception of it confirmed, reality comes a poor second in the Obama era. The presumption of conservatives has always been that, one day, cold, dull reality would pierce the klieg-light sheen of Obama's glamour. Indeed, that was the premise of Mitt Romney's reductive presidential campaign. But, just as Beyoncé will always be way cooler than some no-name operatic soprano or a male voice choir, so Obama will always be cooler than a bunch of squaresville yawneroos boring on about jobs and debt and entitlement reform. Hillary's cocksure sneer to Sen. Johnson of Wisconsin made it explicit. At a basic level, the "difference" is the difference between truth and falsity, but the subtext took it a stage further: no matter what actually happened that night in Benghazi, you poor sad loser Republicans will never succeed in imposing that reality and its consequences on this administration.

And so a congressional hearing – one of the famous "checks and balances" of the American system – is reduced to just another piece of Beltway theater. "The form was still the same, but the animating health and vigor were fled," as Gibbon wrote in "The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire." But he's totally uncool, too. So Hillary lip-synced far more than Beyoncé, and was adored for it. "As I have said many times, I take responsibility," she said. In Washington, the bold declarative oft-stated acceptance of responsibility is the classic substitute for responsibility: rhetorically "taking responsibility," preferably "many times," absolves one from the need to take actual responsibility even once.

In the very same self-serving testimony, the Secretary of State denied that she'd ever seen the late Ambassador Stevens' cables about the deteriorating security situation in Libya on the grounds that "1.43 million cables come to my office" – and she can't be expected to see all of them, or any. She is as out of it as President Jefferson, who complained to his Secretary of State James Madison, "We have not heard from our ambassador in Spain for two years. If we have not heard from him this year, let us write him a letter." Today, things are even worse. Hillary has apparently not heard from any of our 1.43 million ambassadors for four years. When a foreign head of state receives the credentials of the senior emissary of the United States, he might carelessly assume that the chap surely has a line of communication back to the government he represents. For six centuries or so, this has been the minimal requirement for functioning interstate relations. But Secretary Clinton has just testified that, in the government of the most powerful nation on Earth, there is no reliable means by which a serving ambassador can report to the Cabinet minister responsible for foreign policy. And nobody cares: What difference does it make?

Nor was the late Christopher Stevens any old ambassador but, rather, Secretary Clinton's close personal friend "Chris." It was all "Chris" this, "Chris" that, when Secretary Clinton and President Obama delivered their maudlin eulogies over the flag-draped coffin of their "friend." Gosh, you'd think if they were on such intimate terms, "Chris" might have had Hillary's email address, but apparently not. He was just one of 1.43 million close personal friends cabling the State Department every hour of the day.

Four Americans are dead, but not a single person involved in the attack and the murders has been held to account. Hey, what difference does it make? Lip-syncing the national anthem beats singing it. Peddling a fictitious narrative over the coffin of your "friend" is more real than being an incompetent boss to your most vulnerable employees. And mouthing warmed-over clichés about vowing to "bring to justice" those responsible is way easier than actually bringing anyone to justice.

And so it goes:

Another six trillion in debt? What difference does it make?

An economic stimulus bill that stimulates nothing remotely connected with the economy? What difference does it make?

The Arab Spring? Aw, whose heart isn't stirred by those exhilarating scenes of joyful students celebrating in Tahrir Square? And who cares, after the cameras depart, that Egypt's in the hands of a Jew-hating 9/11 truther whose goons burn churches and sexually assault uncovered women?

Obama is the ultimate reality show, and real reality can't compete. Stalin famously scoffed, "How many divisions has the Pope?" Secretary Clinton was more audacious: How many divisions has reality? Not enough.

The DiploMad 2.0: "What Difference Does it Make?"

The DiploMad 2.0: "What Difference Does it Make?": Diplomad says Hillary Clinton got away with murder in her Congressional testimony about Benghazi

To the matter at hand. There is so much wrong with what Hillary said that I can only cover a few points.  Her whole attitude was one of taking a victory lap. She is leaving the State Department, and she ran out the clock on  Benghazi. Her phrase "At this point" sums it up. The steam has gone out of the issue, and the tactic of delay, obfuscation, and deception has worked; the administration has eluded responsibility for a major foreign policy disaster of criminal proportions. They did it before with "Fast and Furious" and they have done it again. State's Accountability Review Board report, of course, was a whitewash; it was a carefully worded truce between Chicago and Foggy Bottom. It avoided dealing with the fundamentals of the Benghazi disaster, i.e., the foreign policy of this administration, and, in exchange, the bureaucrats were not held responsible for the decisions they took in implementing that foreign policy. Nobody was to blame for anything. 

As a lawyer, Hillary must know how absurd her line "what is the difference?" sounds. Here we have an administration that insists on treating acts of terror against Americans as criminal matters, e.g., call in the FBO to "the crime scene," yet here we have the Secretary of State saying it really makes no difference what motivated the "criminals" or whether the "crime" was premeditated and planned in conjunction with others. More important, however, if it made no difference why did the administration send out that horrid political hack Susan Rice to lie about it all? To blame it on a video? Where was Hillary? Why wasn't she out front telling us all on the Sunday talk shows that it made "no difference?"     Why have Rice lie?

It, of course, "does make a difference." If the attack was a well-planned one, who planned it? Were any foreign states involved? Why didn't our intel pick it up? If it was a spontaneous event, why didn't it occur to anybody at State or in the Embassy in Libya that the date of September 11 was a particularly propitious one for such "spontaneous" events? Why was Stevens in Benghazi on September 11? Why was that facility still open when the security situation in the city had been deteriorating rapidly? The questions just pour forth; you can think of dozens more.

I have written many times before about the idiocy of our policy in Libya and North Africa (see my archives), and won't repeat all that. Let me just say that hearings did not explore the biggest issue of all. What did the administration think would happen in North Africa once Mubarak and Qaddafi were removed?

Peter Van Buren on the Fate of John Kirakou

Peter Van Buren on the Fate of John Kirakou on We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren:

...

The one man in the whole archipelago of America’s secret horrors facing prosecution is former CIA agent John Kiriakou. Of the untold numbers of men and women involved in the whole nightmare show of those years, only one may go to jail.

And of course, he didn’t torture anyone.

The charges against Kiriakou allege that in answering questions from reporters about suspicions that the CIA tortured detainees in its custody, he violated the Espionage Act, once an obscure World War I-era law that aimed at punishing Americans who gave aid to the enemy. It was passed in 1917 and has been the subject of much judicial and Congressional doubt ever since. Kiriakou is one of six government whistleblowers who have been charged under the Act by the Obama administration. From 1917 until Obama came into office, only three people had ever charged in this way.

The Obama Justice Department claims the former CIA officer “disclosed classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities.”

The charges result from a CIA investigation. That investigation was triggered by a filing in January 2009 on behalf of detainees at Guantanamo that contained classified information the defense had not been given through government channels, and by the discovery in the spring of 2009 of photographs of alleged CIA employees among the legal materials of some detainees at Guantanamo. According to one description, Kiriakou gave several interviews about the CIA in 2008. Court documents charge that he provided names of covert Agency officials to a journalist, who allegedly in turn passed them on to a Guantanamo legal team. The team sought to have detainees identify specific CIA officials who participated in their renditions and torture. Kiriakou is accused of providing the identities of CIA officers that may have allowed names to be linked to photographs.

Many observers believe however that the real “offense” in the eyes of the Obama administration was quite different. In 2007, Kiriakou became a whistleblower. He went on record as the first (albeit by then, former) CIA official to confirm the use of waterboarding of al-Qaeda prisoners as an interrogation technique, and then to condemn it as torture. He specifically mentioned the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah in that secret prison in Thailand. Zubaydah was at the time believed to be an al-Qaeda leader, though more likely was at best a mid-level operative. Kiriakou also ran afoul of the CIA over efforts to clear for publication a book he had written about the Agency’s counterterrorism work. He maintains that his is instead a First Amendment case in which a whistleblower is being punished, that it is a selective prosecution to scare government insiders into silence when they see something wrong.

If Kiriakou had actually tortured someone himself, even to death, there is no possibility that he would be in trouble. John Kiriakou is staring down a long tunnel of 30 months in jail because in the national security state that rules the roost in Washington, talking out of turn about a crime has become the only possible crime.
...

Never Again

For at least six years it was the policy of the United States of America to torture and abuse its enemies or, in some cases, simply suspected enemies. It has remained a U.S. policy, even under the Obama administration, to employ “extraordinary rendition” — that is, the sending of captured terror suspects to the jails of countries that are known for torture and abuse, an outsourcing of what we no longer want to do.

Techniques that the U.S. hanged men for at Nuremburg and in post-war Japan were employed and declared lawful. To embark on such a program with the oversight of the Bush administration, learned men and women had to have long discussions, with staffers running in and out of rooms with snippets of research to buttress the justifications being so laboriously developed. The CIA undoubtedly used some cumbersome bureaucratic process to hire contractors for its torture staff. The old manuals needed to be updated, psychiatrists consulted, military survival experts interviewed, training classes set up.

Videotapes were made of the torture sessions and no doubt DVDs full of real horror were reviewed back at headquarters. Torture techniques were even reportedly demonstrated to top officials inside the White House. Individual torturers who were considered particularly effective were no doubt identified, probably rewarded, and sent on to new secret sites to harm more people.

America just didn’t wake up one day and start slapping around some Islamic punk. These were not the torture equivalents of rogue cops. A system, a mechanism, was created. That we now can only speculate about many of the details involved and the extent of all this is a tribute to the thousands who continue to remain silent about what they did, saw, heard about, or were associated with. Many of them work now at the same organizations, remaining a part of the same contracting firms, the CIA, and the military. Our torturers.

What is it that allows all those people to remain silent? How many are simply scared, watching what is happening to John Kiriakou and thinking: not me, I’m not sticking my neck out to see it get chopped off. They’re almost forgivable, even if they are placing their own self-interest above that of their country. But what about the others, the ones who remain silent about what they did or saw or aided and abetted in some fashion because they still think it was the right thing to do? The ones who will do it again when another frightened president asks them to? Or even the ones who enjoyed doing it?

The same Department of Justice that is hunting down the one man who spoke against torture from the inside still maintains a special unit, 60 years after the end of WWII, dedicated to hunting down the last few at-large Nazis. They do that under the rubric of “never again.” The truth is that same team needs to be turned loose on our national security state. Otherwise, until we have a full accounting of what was done in our names by our government, the pieces are all in place for it to happen again. There, if you want to know, is the real horror.

...

Songs of War - Al Jazeera World - Sesame Street Songs Tortured US Prisoners

Songs of War - Al Jazeera World - Al Jazeera English

Eliyho Matz's Persian Letter...

LET’S SAY A KADDISH…

BY: ELIHO MATZ

“The meaning of life consists in the search for the meaning of life.”

Terry Eagleton:

The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction

Jewish Biblical tradition encourages the belief in miracles.  The tradition of miracles is transplanted into Christian and Islamic beliefs, and stands as a core foundation of universal human existence. 

One of Judaism’s Biblical miracles is revealed in the story of Esther, which stems from the Jewish Persian tradition.  Jewish tradition is, in fact, heavily indebted to ancient Persian civilization.  Jewish ideas have been influenced by Persian thought ever since the Israelites were forced out of their ancient land of Israel/Canaan.  The encounter between the Israelites and the Persians captivated Jewish civilization ever since its inception twenty-five hundred years ago.  Under Persian influence, Jews developed the Bible and the Talmud between 450 BCE and 500 CE.  The relationship did not end there; it has continued into modern times.  Jewish merchants of Persian extraction roamed the planet from early times.  Iran today has a substantial Jewish minority still living in the midst of Shi’a Iran, an Islamic republic.

The settling of Jews in the Fertile Crescent around 500 BCE brought them into contact with Persian/Iranian civilization.  This early civilization of the Persians provided Judaism with its most important tenets of core Jewish beliefs.  For example, the concept of one God, central to Judaism, is an offshoot of their Zoroastrian worship.  It was during this period of influence that the Jewish Bible was initially developed as a religious literary document that undertook to explain Jewish existence in detail.  Why the Bible was written in the first place is not known, but it remains the foundation of Jewish claims to the antiquity of Jewish ancestry.  With its overtones of hatred toward Egypt, the Bible definitely reflected the political tendency of the Jews to accommodate the historical Persian animosity toward the ancient Egyptians.  The Persians, after a long series of wars with the Pharaonic Egyptians, finally conquered the land of the Pharaohs in the year 525 BCE. 

Politics is an ancient/modern game of options, possibilities and win-or-lose situations.  According to Biblical tradition, the Jews who were permitted to return to ancient Israel with their leaders Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah, were granted the privilege by decree of the Persian King Cyrus.  I am sure that many serious historians have been puzzled by this decree.  Jews, since that decree, have celebrated it as another miracle in their history.   But, of course, to the politically minded person, the question is, “What was the Tit-for-Tat?  I would guess that those ancient Jews paid for their permit to return to their ancient land: it is possible that the Jews were actually the mercenary soldiers that the Persians needed for their ongoing campaigns to defeat the Egyptians, and thus the privilege to return to the ancient land was paid by military service.  Some of those Jewish soldiers ended up at Elephantine (Yev) in Upper Egypt, or what is today the place of the gigantic Aswan Dam.  This community of border military police is well known today in Jewish historical circles.  So, after all, there was a definite Tit-for-Tat:  the Persians benefited from the Jewish warriors; and the Jews were rewarded by being granted residence in ancient Canaan, as well as the status of privileged  citizens of the Persian Empire.

The Jewish warrior tradition did not end there.  Rather, it continued to reveal itself in the Maccabean revolt against the Greeks, as well as in the revolt against the Romans, of course with catastrophic results.  The worship of warlike people continues today within the Israeli Nation, where the military has been an inspiration as well as a steady source of Israeli politicians. 

         The second incident seen as a miracle in the Persian context comes in the Biblical Book of Esther.  A beautiful Jewish girl is sacrificed for whatever reason, but, to put it in elegant English, the King was obviously  looking for sex.  The interaction between the beautiful Jewish woman and the Persian King led to saving the Jews from extinction.  The moral of the story is, “Don’t mess with us Jews.”  Of course, that miracle was just a miracle, and not an indication of real politics -- Jews prefer to follow miracles. 

In the context of the more than fifteen-hundred years of Persian-Jewish interaction, Judaism developed and thrived.  At the beginning of the early stages the Bible emerged, and later the Talmud, published in 500 CE.  As time passed, Persian Jews also learned the art of trading from the Persian merchants, and eventually, those Jews took a leading role in the East-West trade between China and the West.  In around 900 CE, in the region of Babylon (part of ancient Persia), Jews produced the first Jewish prayerbook, the Siddur.  In addition, they also published the Passover Haggadah.   Several more items of Jewish significance were produced under Persian intellectual influence.  One was the Ketubah, the Jewish matrimonial contract.  In the Talmud we are told that the purpose of the Ketubah is to make sure that it is difficult for the husband to divorce his wife.  Another was the Kaddish prayer for the dead.  Like the Ketubah, this prayer is written in Aramaic, which was the lingua franca of the Persian Empire.  Also, another important prayer written in Aramaic was the Kol Nidre prayer, which begins the service for the Yom Kippur Day of Atonement. 

The Persian Jewish merchants who roamed between East and West established safe and secure stops between China and Europe.  They reached these Jewish safe-havens of Bukhara and other cities via the Khazarian Empire, and thus this passage helped lay the path for the introduction of Judaism to the future Khazarian converts to Judaism.  These merchants’ activities were critical for their introduction of both business and religion to the communities along their route.    Jewish traders continued to roam between East and West for the next few hundred years, until they were later replaced by Italian merchants, one of whom was Marco Polo.  Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice” is an expression of that change.  It is no surprise that Marco Polo exemplified that change of trade: while visiting the Mongolian court, he used the lingua franca of the Mongolians, which was Persian [Laurence Bergreen, Marco Polo (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), pp. 135-136]. 

While the Jewish merchants carried out their East-West trade, the Yiddish language and Jewish culture were developing in full swing.  Turkic Khazaria lost its empire and what was left were the Yiddish-speaking  Khazarian Jewish converts who settled in small villages all over the former Khazarian Empire.  Their Yiddish language reveals a most interesting DNA.  For example, the word Davenin, which means “to pray,” is a critical Yiddish word whose origin is Turkic.  And there are many other indicators that show the connection between Khazaria and Yiddish Judaism.  Two other important events critical to Judaism developed because of the Persian-Jewish connection.  The first is that the entire Jewish matrimonial structure changed between the Third and Sixth centuries CE.  Suddenly, the determining force behind the “Jewishness” of children started to depend on the mother, not, as had been the ancient custom, on the father (imagine how in Biblical times we said, “B’nei Ya-akov” [Children of Jacob], but now suddenly we were saying, “Children of Rachel”).  The men who traveled from Persia to the far distances of the East and married other women, or had concubines, caused this alteration in the basic nature of Judaism.  Later, in the Tenth Century, again because of the merchants’ activities, Rabenu Gershom Meor Hagolah (in Europe) decreed that Jewish men could marry only one woman.  I would suspect that the Jewish daily prayer recited by men, “Thank God for not making me a woman,” would stem from the Jewish merchants’ activities.  So it is, to thank God for not making me a woman, because if I were I would not be able to travel on the difficult roads to bring parnuseh, wages, to support a family.  With their Far East trade, it is also possible that the Jewish merchants picked up some Chinese customs.  One example is the skullcap, or Yarmulke, a second is the practice of marking the burial place of the dead with small stones, and a third is the style of humor that is an ancient Chinese tradition to insult each other in teahouses.  For an example of this humor, one should only hear Don Rickles and many other old-style Jewish comedians!

Despite the vast span of years that have passed from ancient to modern times, the Persian people have remained on their land -- not like the Jews, who were scattered and converting communities around the world to Judaism.  The Persians went through the process of Islamization, and with it oral and written linguistic changes.  Christianity and Islam were both influenced by Jewish writings and ideas, and the Iranians adopted synthesized Persian/Jewish ideas that Judaism had recycled.  Recently, for whatever political reasons, the Iranians have chosen to create an Islamic Republic ruled by Ayatollahs.  Whether this type of political system will provide them with the tools to live in modern times, only time will tell.  In his recently published book The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran (New York: Doubleday, 2008), Hooman Majd depicts modern Iranian society in a vibrant and critical light.  It is worthwhile reading.  Despite the drastic political changes, the Iranian people are really the same as they were in ancient times: vibrant, argumentative, dreamlike, and, of course, they are waiting for their Messiah to arrive at any minute to bring them a better world.  Today’s Israeli society is likewise awaiting its Messiah, in spite of the fact that Zionism was established as a secular movement rather than a religious one.

The Jews, I mean the East European converted Jews, went through their own transitions.  Some moved to Western European countries, others at the end of the Nineteenth Century and the beginning of the Twentieth came to America, and still others, who became Zionists, moved to ancient Israel, then called Palestine and part of the Ottoman Empire.  The Twentieth Century was the most chaotic century for Jews in their three-thousand year existence as a religious civilization.  Between 1939 and 1945, millions of Jews were exterminated by the German Nazi regime.  Eastern Europe, the birthplace of Yiddish-speaking Jews, became the greatest graveyard for them.  Historians are still trying to figure out exactly how that happened.

In the Holocaust, we did not miraculously have a Queen Esther to defend or protect the Jews.  As far as the protective Jewish God, we can consult Elie Wiesel where that God was (in his book Night, he himself tries to figure this out).  As perhaps the most prominent Auschwitz survivor, his persona has become “psychological” help for Jews, but he has also joined the ranks of many historians and others who have failed to contribute in a more pertinent way to dealing historically, philosophically or politically with the Holocaust events.  His writing and thought does not lead me to be inspired.  Between 1882-1948, the Zionist leaders in Palestine developed a survival kit for the future Israelis.  During the Holocaust years, they did not deviate from this focus, and the leading Zionist leaders in Palestine did not engage in any great effort to save European Jews.  Worse, continuing in a failed effort, Ben Gurion came short of leading the new Israeli nation on the path to a constitutional democracy: an Israeli constitution was never written.  Consequently, “Israeli law” is as liquid as olive oil.  Try to walk on two feet on a floor sprayed with olive oil, and see what kind of miracles will happen to you!   It is my firm belief that the absence of an Israeli constitution is at the root of the cause of all Israeli political troubles inside or outside the country.  No, no, I do not think Israelis yet have plans to write a constitution.           

A perhaps more pertinent issue in this essay is the future of America’s Jews, and its non-representative organizations.  Tony Judt, in his autobiography, expresses this observation of American Jews: “Many American Jews are sadly ignorant of their religion, culture, traditional languages, or history.  But they do know about Auschwitz, and that suffices” [Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet (New York: Penguin Books,2010), p. 202].  The recitation of the Jewish Kaddish prayer on American Jews can start now -- I am not the first American Jew to suggest that idea.  During the Holocaust, Chaim Greenberg, in his essay called “Bankrupt” suggested a similar idea in response to the inaction of American Jewish leadership during the Holocaust.  A few weeks ago, towards the end of 2012, the NY Times, the newspaper of record, reported the announcement that the Washington, DC, Holocaust museum is marking its twentieth anniversary.  One should pay attention to the statistical data cited: “As of Aug.1 [2012], according to the museum, it has drawn more than 34.1 million visitors, about 90 percent of them non-Jewish, and 34 percent of them school-age children” (NYT, Dec 11, 2012, p. B-4).  By what statistical method did this museum arrive at these numbers?  And what is the use of these statistics, unless to show that Jews are simply not interested in visiting such a place.  The reason for the establishment of this museum, or others like it, in the United States is a mystery to me.  If the museums are established as an “insurance policy” to safeguard the future of Jews and Judaism, then I think they are misleading themselves.  What educational values do they offer?  It is frustrating.  Shouldn’t they be in Europe?  For example, in Paris, or in Vienna, or in some minor cities where the Europeans can look at themselves and try to remember what they did to Jews. 

In 1979 at Yeshiva University in New York, I published my Master’s thesis, “The Response of American Jewry and Its Representative Organizations Between November 24, 1942, and April 19, 1943, to Mass Killing of Jews in Europe”.  The impetus for my choosing this topic came when Dr. David S. Wyman, a my former professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, was in the final phases of his important book on America’s behavior during the Holocaust.  His greatest academic difficulty in those days was how to enter into the archives of Jewish organizations; most of them were closed to him.  I, however, was able to gain access and carry out the research that he was unable to do there.  I examined the papers of most Jewish organizations that had offices in NY City.  While working on my MA project, I also met Hillel Kook (a.k.a. Peter Bergson) and Samuel Merlin, two heroic but tragic individuals who during the days of the Holocaust raised hell in the US on behalf of European Jews.  The Jewish people, I mean the Jew in the street, supported them, but not the leadership of American Jews.  Put off by their outspoken and radical methods, the totality of American Jewish organizational leadership wanted them deported, or at least jailed (the files in the FBI indicate this clearly).  One of the great achievements of these two men during WWII was that they were instrumental in helping to bring about the creation of the War Refugee Board (WRB).  In truth, it was not exactly what Mr. Bergson and his allies in the US Congress had envisioned: they did not ask for an agency for refugees, but rather for an act of the President and the diplomatic military authorities to save Jews.  In his book The Abandonment of the Jews (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), Dr. Wyman explained the process that led to the creation of the WRB.  I once wrote an article explaining that, too [“Political Actions vs. Personal Relations” in Midstream (April, 1981), pp. 41-48].  But the Holocaust Museum in Washington prefers the old-fashioned Jewish miracle explanation (let’s not forget the Esther miracle), for according to them and other “scholars” and many “advanced” studies, it was Henry Morgenthau Jr., the “miraculous Jewish” Treasury Secretary, who convinced FDR to do something to save Jews, which is factually incorrect.  FDR as a politician, and quite an accomplished one, understood one thing for sure: political public pressure, and that pressure was provided by Mr. Bergson and his non-Jewish allies in the Congress.

For his efforts to stand up for Jewish rescue, and for his foresight about the practical political structures necessary to the establishment of the new Israeli nation, I believe that Peter Bergson was probably the most important Jewish individual to live in the Twentieth Century.  He was a Palestinian British Jew who arrived in the United States in the 1940’s.  His activities between 1940 and 1948 reflected a deep sense of his burden of responsibility toward the Holocaust, which, over the past ten years, I have written a number of articles about.  His activities are important to explain, but the Jewish Holocaust museums prefer not to mention them.  Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Holocaust Museum in Washington have ignored his activities on behalf of Jews, and do not appear to be changing their minds yet.  In the 1980’s, while I worked in Bergson’s office in NYC, he and I used to debate, or converse, about issues that included the Holocaust and the Israeli nation.  One of the topics we covered was Elie Wiesel.  Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, a writer and a Nobel Prize winner, has become a symbolic guru of American Jews.  I personally do not hold much respect for this individual: first, because he has nothing to contribute intellectually to the future of Jews; second, Mr. Wiesel, when he arrived in NYC during the Fifties, was a victim in a pedestrian- automobile accident near 42^nd Street.  The money to save his life was provided by Peter Bergson.  Ever since Bergson’s death, I have never seen any public statement or an article in an important newspaper or magazine by Wiesel about Peter Bergson.  While he did make an effort to make sure that Bergson’s name would be mentioned at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, I do not think that this was enough of a gesture.

And now, something about American Jewish organizations, representative or not representative of America’s Jews.  In recent years, they have all pursued the political policy of supporting almost every action of Israeli politics.  This totally subservient approach and non-critical political outlook is harming American Jews, as well as the Israelis.  We can start again our Kaddish (of course spoken in Aramaic, or Middle Persian) for American Jews.

I would like to end this article with a short story.  Peter Bergson, who, as I stated above, was I believe the most important Jewish individual of the Twentieth Century.  While trying to save European Jews, he also spent quite a bit of time meditating on the future of the Israeli Nation.  He called it the “Hebrew” Nation.  In the early months of 1944, he purchased a building and raised the flag of the Hebrew Republic, which eventually became the Israeli national flag.  Ironically, the building Bergson purchased belonged to the Iranian people and had been their Embassy in Washington!  The flag had been created in the early Twentieth Century in the town of Rishon LeZion, which at the time was part of Ottoman Palestine.  As a matter of coincidence, Rishon LeZion was also the birthplace of the modern Hebrew language.  This small town created the first Hebrew kindergarten and grammar school of modern times.  So the cycle has come full circle: it is Biblical Hebrew coming from the Persian tradition in the Assyrian alphabet that went through the Yiddish and was recycled into what we now call modern Hebrew.  It was my birthplace as well and the place where I started reading and writing in Hebrew.  It was only when I came to America that I started meditating on the subject I wrote about.

Happy New Year!

All good wishes for 2013! May the New Year bring you health, wealth, happiness and peace...

Eliyho Matz on the UN's Palestine Vote

IT’S 1776 IN PALESTINE: NOVEMBER 29, 2012

by Eliyho Matz

 Well, after sixty-five years of a convoluted labyrinth path, the Palestinian people finally reached the “almost” status of a nation.  Thirty-five years ago when I arrived in New York, I spent quite a bit of time with Hillel Kook, better known in America as Peter Bergson.  Peter Bergson had  come to the United States as a young man from what was then called British Palestine.  During WWII he was the head of the Irgun delegation in the USA.  While most Jewish lay leaders and rabbis hesitated and were not sure what steps to take to save European Jews, Bergson conducted an aggressive campaign here in America and to some degree succeeded convincing the FDR administration to take some action to save Jews.  For his efforts, leading Jews in this country informed against him to the FBI: his FBI file is large, but thankfully he was not deported.

After the War, between 1946 and 1948 Bergson directed his attention to creating the Israeli nation, which he called the Hebrew Nation.  As an important means of advertisement and propaganda in America, he used the slogan “It’s 1776 in Palestine.”  Most Americans understood clearly and related to what this signified, and thus in 1947 the United States supported the creation of the Israeli Nation. 

It is a bit baffling now, after all these years that the Palestinians have struggled to define themselves politically, that the United States and Israel have found fault with that effort of self-determination.   Therefore, let us say it again today: “It’s 1776 in Palestine, November 29, 2012.”

Eliyo Matz on the Gaza-Israel Conflict

                     THE HORSE AND THE BULL

                      Reflections and Thoughts on the Latest Flare-up

Between Israelis and Palestinians,

November 2012

All the Winners are Losers, All the Losers are Winners:

Some Thanksgiving Day Thoughts By Eliyho Matz, aka Sitting Book

            The latest expression of hostility between Israelis and Palestinians erupted in the Middle East in mid-November 2012.  There is no need to dig for new reasons to explain why the current conflict started, for this is an on-and-off fight that has been going on for years.  Ever since the first Israeli (Jewish) settlers arrived in what we call the “Ancient Land of Israel,” we had the beginning of a political, ethnic, religious enmity between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.  The Israeli Jews  succeeded in creating a nation-state in 1948.  The Palestinians rejected the idea of a nation-state in 1948.  The wars in 1948 and 1967 led directly to the confused war of 2012.

         The leaderships of the Israelis and the Palestinians failed to achieve any sort of a geo-political solution, and there are many reasons for that.  It is evident that the Israeli nation is today in control militarily of the Palestinians; this means that  Israelis control the lives of millions of Palestinians.  The Palestinians are resisting, some passively, some with arms.  The current November 2012 conflict is, in my opinion, a result of the B. Netanyahu government to avoid any negotiations with the Palestinians.  What I mean is, the Israeli settlers on the West Bank have pushed the Netanahu government to the brink of political stalemate, and Netanyahu ready for new elections in January 2013, has created a war, so he thinks, to avoid dealing with Palestinian sovereignty.

         Palestinian Gaza, under the Hamas government, has declared its desire to exterminate the Israelis, thus giving Netanyahu the ability to prolong the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, along with the opportunity not to negotiate with any Palestinians.  Of course, Netanyahu’s calculations are wrong.  The geo-politics of the world-at-large, and the unreasonable Israeli desire to use military force to solve problems associated with the Palestinians, will only hurt the Israelis in the long run.

         The American settlers who moved West encountered American Indian resistance.  The American Indians resisted because their land, their livelihood and their culture were being decimated.  The crescendo of the struggle between the settlers and the Indians happened at the Battle of Little Big Horn in June 1876.  Both American Indian leaders, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, defeated the American force led by General Custer.  The conclusion of the battle was clear.  But even though the American Indians were courageous and won the battle, in the end they lost in their geo-political war against the American government and settlers.

         In Israel, Israeli settlers who illegally occupy the West Bank with the support of the Israeli government and of course the Higher Authority of the Israeli G-ds, have led the Israeli nation into a battle using the biblical code name that sounds like an American Indian name, “Pillar of Cloud,” to deceive the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.  Unfortunately, the Israeli trick did not work, and the Pillar of Cloud became a cloud of dust.  The Hamas showed resilience and fought back.  The Israelis revealed their strength in the battle, but lost the war.  Mr. Netanyahu can tell many stories, but his trick did not work; nothing has changed, and there are still millions of Palestinians who need to be dealt with.  He and his “Custered” generals have been defeated.  What to do next will depend on the wisdom of the Chiefs of the Palestinians, that is, if they want to apply a bit of wisdom, as well as on the wisdom of the Israeli voters in the upcoming elections. 

         Here is one suggestion: the Israeli nation established in 1948 made a public statement called “The Israeli Declaration of Independence.”  This Declaration was an attempt to copy the Western idea of a declaration of political intent.  Thus it was designed to make it clear to all what the intention of the Declaration of Independence was, i.e., Israeli sovereignty.  However, if one reads the Israeli Declaration of Independence, he or she can immediately see that the Israelis were not sure exactly what they were declaring.  Thus, Mr. Netanyahu recently declared Israel to be a “Jewish State,” while the Declaration spoke of an “Israeli Nation” and about tolerance to Israel’s inhabitants and neighbors.  If wise Palestinians understand that incongruity, they should make a public reading of the Israeli Declaration of Independence in Gaza, in the West Bank, in New York, and in other places of their choosing.  This act alone could topple the Netanyahu attempt to prevent them from becoming a nation of Palestinians, similar to the Israelis. 

         A few additional observations on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

a.)    The leaderships of both the Israelis and the Palestinians are defective.  The question is, of course, what do we do with defective leaderships?

b.)   Is the leadership of both sides doing what it is doing because it is trapped in its own rhetoric?

c.)   Both sides have plenty of Crazy Horses and Sitting Bulls, but not the leadership of reasonable people to solve the issues.

d.)   We all have to remember that the final goal of solving the conflict is an alliance between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

e.)    Is the world, that is America, I mean the American leadership, willing to see item “d” as a viable solution?