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| Craig Murray Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist |
on July 3, 2013 >>http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/07/all-law-is-gone-naked-power-remains/ >>The forcing down of the Bolivian President’s jet was a clear breach of the Vienna Convention by
Spain and Portugal, which closed their airspace to this Head of State
while on a diplomatic mission. It has never been thought necessary to
write down in a Treaty that Heads of State enjoy diplomatic immunity
while engaged in diplomacy, as their representatives only enjoy
diplomatic immunity as cyphers for their Head of State. But it is a
hitherto unchallenged precept of customary international law, indeed arguably the oldest provision of international law.
To the US and its allies, international law is no longer of any consequence. I can see no evidence that anyone in an official position has even noted the illegality of repeated Israeli air and missile strikes against Syria. Snowden, Manning and Assange all exposed illegality on a massive scale, and no action whatsoever has been taken against any of the criminals they exposed. Instead they are being hounded out of all meaningful life and ability to function in society.
I have repeatedly posted, and have been saying in public speeches for ten years, that under the UK/US intelligence sharing agreements the NSA spies on UK citizens and GCHQ spies on US citizens and they swap the information. As they use a shared technological infrastructure, the division is simply a fiction to get round the law in each country restricting those agencies from spying on their own citizens.
I have also frequently remarked how extraordinary it is that the media keep this “secret”, which they have all known for years.
The Guardian published the truth on 29 June:
| This article has been taken down pending an investigation. | |
As you can see from the newssniffer site linked above, for many hours there was just a notice stating that the article was “taken down pending investigation”, and then it was replaced on the same URL by the Guardian with a different story which does not mention the whistleblower Wayne Madsen or the intelligence sharing agreements!!
I can give, and I would give on oath, an eye witness guarantee that from my direct personal experience of twenty years as a British diplomat the deleted information from Wayne Madsen was true.
A little over three decades ago, I enrolled in an international law course at Yale Law School taught by the school's former dean, Eugene Rostow, who had been a prominent government official as well as eminent scholar in the field.
I was enthusiastic about the opportunity to learn in such a setting. Yet I substituted another seminar after the first day's readings and lecture. That sample suggested to me, perhaps incorrectly, that the course might turn out to be a prolonged study of the word-smithing to justify "might makes right" rationalizations. Many students have high hopes of enduring keys to neutral principles of law. It struck me that the studies were best oriented for those on the fast-track to power, and were unlikely to be practical for someone of my circumstances.
Several momentous global events this week remind me of that decision, as does the publication today of my new book, Presidential Puppetry.
The 350-page historical study (with another 150 pages of notes and
sources) had its genesis in several of the injustices that we have
explored for years on these pages.One was the federal prosecution on bogus corruption charges of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, who is currently serving a long prison sentence for an obvious frame-up based on his 1999 request to a wealthy man to donate to a non-profit group. Such travesties led me to chronicle in Puppetry a century of presidential decision-making that benefits a hidden elite regardless of what would appear to be "the law."
I'll describe the book more completely soon in a separate announcement.
For now, Independence Day is an apt time for reflection on the Constitution and freedom. Major news events this week illustrate the fragility of our freedoms and rule of law. These freedoms are easy for us to take for granted while they erode. In watching the fireworks on an evening like tonight, how often do we think of the original terror of the War of 1812 -- or that in the nations like Syria currently devastated by war? Our protections might not completely disappear so that we would all notice -- especially with all of the sexy entertainment and other distractions available to us. The true danger is that freedoms will continue to evaporate in a process largely unseen or unrecorded, except in the horrid experiences of victims.
The topics below include:
- The arrogant, undemocratic and near-lawless culture becoming more apparent on the U.S. Supreme Court as it concluded its 2012-13 term last week.
- Politicization of the Justice Department as it pursues cases applying different criteria according to the clout and other status of the targets.
- Arbitrary United States rationales to increase arms deliveries to Syrian rebels, thereby increasing devastation in the civil war in apparant violation of international law.
- Hypocrisy and arguably lawbreaking in U.S. surveillance on the American public. The Flickr photo above right shows German protesters against spying wearing masks of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.
- Assaults on "Economic justice," such as doubling on July 1 the interest rate paid by millions of young people for their student loans.
In that spirit:
Supreme Court. As the court finished its annual term, most public attention focused on two decisions. One was the court's 5-4 party line decision by the Republican majority to overturn the 1960s Voting Rights Act. The act enabled special Justice Department Review for major changes in voting laws enacted by the former slave-holding states in the South that had resisted black voting in modern times. The court's Republicans ruled that the reviews were no longer necessary even though Congress had reauthorized the reviews in 2006 by a 98-0 Senate vote and a 390-33 House vote. The majority also downplayed evidence that Republican-led Southern states (like several Northern states) were fear-mongering about nearly non-existent "voting fraud" to impose harsh new voter ID requirements that had the effect of limiting black, poor, and other traditionally Democratic-leaning voter groups.
In sum, the court's decision illustrated the power of a radically activist, result-oriented majority.
Despite claims by the jurists while seeking confirmation that they deferred to Congress, the majority clearly substituting their personal judgments and political agendas in place of the votes of overwhelming majorities in Congress. This is a lawless body, and that includes the so-called "liberals" who enable the misconduct by acquiescence.
The court's second headline decisions involved votes to overturn the 1990s Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), thereby enabling gay marriage in states that enacted such laws. The two decisions with divided majorities were notable for, among other things, similarly replacing votes in Congress and also a rant by the court's longest-serving justice, Republican Antonin Scalia. He illustrated yet again that he feels entitled to make court decisions according to his personal ideology with only a patina of legal reasoning, despite his scholarly credentials. Scalia's Republican colleague, Samuel Alito, further demonstrated the sense of entitlement pervasive among the court's lifetime appointees when he used facial expressions to mock Justice Ruth Ginsberg while she was reading a dissenting opinion he disliked in a separate case. The spectacle illustrated yet again how the court's members function in significant part as unelected and unaccountable activist legislators despite their pretensions of objectivity and rule of law.
Justice Department Politicization
Several lower court judgments, mostly endorsed by the Justice Department, underscored how much the justice system depends on whether prosecutors want to enforce laws in a neutral manner of like punishment for like crime.
Among
the more striking examples: White House National Intelligence Director
James Clapper admitted that he misled Congress when he testified in
March that any collections of domestic data were inadvertent. Clapper
apologized July 3 for what was called his 'erroneous' answer on NSA surveillance
that was exposed as a lie by a long history news reports, most
dramatically those in June occasioned by the leaks of the former NSA
contractor Snowden. Clapper, a retired former lieutenant general,
explained that he had given lawmakers the “least untruthful answer
possible.”Some of those our Project has sympathetically profiled because of their disproportionate punishment include Hollywood film director John McTiernan, left, and former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik. Both Republicans (proving that party label does not necessarily provide preference) they have served long prison sentences initiated by the Bush administration for far less important mistatements than Clapper's, delivered in far less public or otherwise official circumstances. McTiernan, director of several Hollywood blockbuster movies, is serving a year in prison for essentially a one-word misleading comment to an FBI agent who phoned McTiernan at home. Prosecutors seemingly wanted to nail them for maximum punishment for reasons outside the scope of the indictment. Kerik was bulldozed into a guilty plea under more complicated circumstances but also highly unfair under close examination.
Another example of disproportionate sentences involves those who deleted information from their computers. A federal judge imposed
a one-day jail sentence last month on former Bush administration
Special Counsel Scott Bloch, right, who had lied to Congress and also
ordered three computers wiped clean of material from his office computer
that had been sought by investigators. Bloch had been notorious
in the whistleblower community for using his office to thwart precisely
the kinds of investigations it was supposed to advance. By contrast,
Charles Spadoni, a Connecticut lawyer who deleted in 1999 several files
when he feared his boss might come under investigation for bribery, is
finishing up a prison sentence this summer after 14 years of
often-successful litigation fighting in his case. But he could not in
the end overcome the relentless pressure of a DOJ determined to crucify
him for a far less serious offense than Bloch's by most reasonable
standards. The big difference? Bloch was a member of the informal
fraternity of "law-enforcers."Finally, a Virginia federal judge ruled in June that United States courts have no jurisdiction over CACI International, a Virginia contractor implicated in the torture and other mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq between 2003 and 2004. The ruling, along with a similar one exempting another contractor from liability for the rape, torture and kidnapping of one of its American employees in Iraq, underscored court complicity in essentially exempting from liability anywhere in the world the activities of the powerful defense companies who increasingly implement American foreign policy and exert powerful de facto control over all branches of American government because of their taxpayer-funded financial clout and essential role in running core government operations.
Syria's Civil War & Egyptian Coup
Zbigniew
Brzezinski was the top foreign policy advisor to the 2008 Obama
campaign and also held Cabinet rank as President Carter's National
Security Advisor. He gave an illuminating interview
last month in which he described President Obama's support for Syria's
rebels as lacking a sound rationale. "I still do not understand why," he
told his interviewer, "we concluded somewhere back in 2011 or 2012—an
election year, incidentally—that [Syria President Bashar] Assad should
go." Brzezinski,
right, is now a counselor and trustee at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies. He is not simply a high-official but widely
regarded as the best-connected and most influential Democrat to the
inner circle of elite power brokers. He co-founded with David
Rockefeller the Trilateral Commission, for example. It is extraordinary
for him to diss something so important as Obama's decision to support
Syria's rebels.Brzezinski is not alone. A number of commentators have pointed out that the United States and NATO allies have been helping tyranical Gulf monarchies overthrow a sovereign government in Syria with scant claim of justification under international law. Reports of Hezbollah and Iranian troops helping Assad are rarely matched in the West or Gulf states by even-handed reports of how many of the "rebels" are non-Syrian jihadists recruited from around the world to intervene in Syria's affairs to create a religious state.
The recent claim of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government, or "regime" as the Western press describes it, does not qualify legally as a rationale under recognized doctrines, especially when the evidence is so modest and subject to manipulation as "false flag" concoction. More generally, independent commentators increasingly note that removal of Assad would likely lead to even greater killing and lack of freedom. Such Gulf monarchies as Qatar and Saudi Arabia are leading the arms smuggling and recruitment of foreign fighters to aid the rebellion. Yet their own countries are not democracies, and they are supporting rebels who want Syria run under similar strict Islamist law.
Assad gloated July 3 that the Egyptian military's ouster the nation's Muslim Brotherhood president vindicated the Syrian government’s two-year fight against rebels, which his government calls terrorists sustained by jihadists from more than 40 nations. Assad, left, in an interview with the pro-government Al Thawra newspaper, said the fall of Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, proved that Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood are unfit to rule in the Mideast.
Surveillance Scandals
Nearly a month after Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian first broke the surveillance revelations of Snowden, the former NSA contractor, it's useful to put them into brief context. First, the documents and headlines merely confirmed to a wider audience what experts had been saying for years. Snowden's daring revelations, mainstream treatment by the Guardian and then Barton Gellman of the Washington Post confronted the public with the reality that communications are being swept up en masse and stored in ways once regarded as impossible in a democracy.
Yet many in the establishment media, some of whose owners are deeply implicated in the surveillance via their relationships with social media companies and otherwise, have triviliazed the disclosures by turning the story into a personality-driven focus on Snowden and subsequent manhunt for his capture. That is far more acceptable for reporters and owners alike than challenging government officials.
Critics largely confined to blogs have more disturbing commentaries about the collapse of law revealed by the records retention. Far more important than Snowden's character or future are the implications for the public. Government intelligence personnel and the private contractors that run much of the systems can retrieve personal records for unworthy goals.
Some critics argue the real targets of the surveillance are not "terrorists" but instead the law-abiding domestic populations of the United States and allied countries. These reports document how data is available for such illicit purposes as political influence at elections or intimidation. Another use is commercial advantage for private contractors who operate with little effective oversight, as indicated by Snowden's ability to obtain huge amounts of information without a college degree and just three months on the job with one of the most influential and prestigious contractors, Booz Allen Hamilton, which is owned by the uber-powerful Carlyle Group.
Former Wall Street Journal associate editor Paul Craig Roberts, a longtime conservative scholar, has been one of the most outspoken critics. In Stasi In The White House, Roberts wrote of Obama: "He has destroyed U.S. civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. In place of a government accountable to law, he has turned law into a weapon in the hands of the government. He has intimidated a free press and prosecutes whistleblowers who reveal his government's crimes. He makes no objection when American police brutalize peacefully protesting citizens. His government intercepts and stores in National Security Agency computers every communication of every American and also the private communications of Europeans and Canadians, including the communications of the members of the governments, the better to blackmail those with secrets." But Roberts, like most who have strong criticism of both parties and their powerful Wall Street backers, is in effect confined totally to alternative media these days after a lifetime of eminent positions in academia, government, and business.
As Roberts accurately notes, the Justice Department has criminalized reporting on such matters by initiating spy investigations of whistleblowers and some reporters, while intimidating many other journalistic organizations by threatening expensive legal action. Another tactic is to appeal to patriotism or secret law to stifle stories. Additionally, all establishment journalists face loss of access to officials (which can lead to loss of job in extreme but hard to prove ways.
As
a result of these factors, many of the more aggressive reporters have
faced professional attacks of intimidation threatening their livelihood
and instilling a chilling effect on the public's ability to obtain news.
New York Times national security reporter James Risen, who has
undergone years of federal intimidation and litigation, told a
conference in 2012 that is impossible to have a democracy is if large
segments of government are off limits to independent reporting.Since then federal authorities have been exposed as undertaking secret surveillance of more than 100 Associated Press reporters and suggesting that Fox News reporter Jamie Rosen might be a criminal suspect for aiding and abetting a leak.
That
got the attention of the establishment media organizations. But far
more serious are the attacks on independent journalists who undertake
much of the most important reporting. Greenwald, for example, has been
not so subtly undermined by fellow reporters.Former Navy intelligence analyst and NSA analyst Wayne Madsen, left, this week underwent far worse attacks. After the Observer, one of the UK's leading newspapers, featured him June 30 as a commentator on a Sunday front-page analysis shown at right, a vicious smear campaign attacked him, the story and the newspaper. This prompted the newspaper to cave-in by pulling the story from late editions and integrating its findings into other coverage.
Not content with that success, the network apparently consisting of ultra-right military and media ideologues sought to smear Madsen so that he would be further tarnished as a commentator for future stories and otherwise in his career as a pundit and author.
For context, Madsen invites controversy by writing cutting-edge commentaries and investigative reports about leaders of all major parties, as well as about prominent individuals on both the right and left. Sometimes his exposes break allegations of sex scandal and blackmail in ways impossible to verify unless sworn testimony were required from all involved. He is more than willing to ramp up feuds in print and otherwise by unleashing his inner Don Rickles in a manner more akin to private Friars Club encounters than the tamer fare on television. In sum, he is fair game for a certain level of criticism.
But what happened to him over the last few days was extraordinary for several reasons. As critics noted, the attacks resulted in a major paper dropping a story. Furthermore, the attacks on close examination have roots in a sub-rosa network with a history of censoring the media, including the 2004 set-up and ouster of CBS Anchor Dan Rather and his team, as I report in my book.
Most important, the main allegations against Madsen this week were transparently bogus but accepted as fact by mainstream publications. I played closer attention to this than most, in part because Madsen helped me in research for my book. But anyone interested in vibrant reporting should care about at least the brief outline. It illustrates how major news organizations are susceptible to orchestrated pressure campaigns.
Prompted by Twitter feeds and other unreliable sources, the Daily Beast/Newsweek and the Poynter Institute were two of the major assailants of Madsen and the Observer based essentially on personal attacks on Madsen for reporting on stories irrelevant to his specialty of the NSA. More interestingly, Madsen and authoritative evidences shows that the attacks were bogus, and yet the publications have not corrected their errors.
As one error, the Poynter Institute claimed that Madsen was the sole source for the Observer story. But it was largely based on declassified NSA documents. In fact, he had published a similar story four years ago in a column, "NSA's meta-data email surveillance program exposed." That story and its documentation provides the essence of a major Snowden revelation that has been prompting worldwide headlines the past week, including in the Guardian and Der Speigel. As another error, the Poynter Institute and Daily Beast/Newsweek claimed that the Observer had quoted Madsen without interviewing him or knowing his background. The smear campaign was especially striking because the reporters involved purported to be media critics.
I
left reader comments pointing out these errors since the columnists
declined to correct themselves. Also, several other experts weighed in
to deny the smears. One was Craig Murray, a former United Kingdom
ambassador and university rector. "Wayne Madsen, a former U.S. Navy
lieutenant who first worked for the NSA in 1985, Murray wrote in a
column, "names Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and
Italy as having secret deals with the US. I can give, and I would give
on oath, an eye witness guarantee that from my direct personal
experience of twenty years as a British diplomat the deleted information
from Wayne Madsen was true."
Murray, shown at left, went on to write his column, All Law is Gone: Naked Power Remains.
The former ambassador cited especially the decision of United States
allies to impose a forced landing of an airplane carrying Bolivian
President Evo Morales, right, in the vain hope of arresting Snowden as a
passenger and delivering the leaker to the United States. 
"The
forcing down of the Bolivian President’s jet was a clear breach of the
Vienna Convention by Spain and Portugal, which closed their airspace to
this Head of State while on a diplomatic mission," Murray wrote.
"The
forcing down of the Bolivian President’s jet was a clear breach of the
Vienna Convention by Spain and Portugal, which closed their airspace to
this Head of State while on a diplomatic mission," Murray wrote.
To the US and its allies, international law is no longer of any
consequence. I can see no evidence that anyone in an official position
has even noted the illegality of repeated Israeli air and missile
strikes against Syria. Snowden, Manning and Assange all exposed
illegality on a massive scale, and no action whatsoever has been taken
against any of the criminals they exposed. Instead they are being
hounded out of all meaningful life and ability to function in society. I
have repeatedly posted, and have been saying in public speeches for ten
years, that under the UK/US intelligence sharing agreements the NSA
spies on UK citizens and GCHQ spies on US citizens and they swap the
information. As they use a shared technological infrastructure, the
division is simply a fiction to get round the law in each country
restricting those agencies from spying on their own citizens.
I have also frequently remarked how extraordinary it is that the media keep this “secret," which they have all known for years.
Economic Justice
Most of these topics are fairly well rooted in traditional law. But I think it appropriate also to touch at least briefly on the important concept of economic justice, vague and subjective though it is. President Obama and the Congress are imposing virtually unprecedented austerity on major segments of the population while producing for pet military projects very high levels of unpopular spending little public discussion. Thus college loan interest rates doubled on July 1 for all college students, creating a heavy burden for many.
Separately, the Washington Post reported, Obama administration delivers ‘a nasty surprise’ to black college students, parents. Columnist Courtney Milloy wrote, "When it comes to dashing the hopes of thousands of college-bound African Americans, you’d hardly think of President Obama as a culprit. Maybe the right-wing-dominated Supreme Court. But not Obama, the black Harvard law grad who likes to cite higher education as a path into the middle class and who pledges to make student loans more accessible to black scholars. And yet, in what United Negro College Fund President Michael Lomax calls “a nasty surprise,” the Obama administration has begun denying student loans to disproportionately large numbers of black parents because of blemished credit histories."
Earlier this year, the Obama administration allowed recruitment to lapse for the Job Corps, an employer of last resort for those willing to assume the burdens. Just before the Independence Day holiday, the president postponed for a year implementation of the employer mandate for Affordable Health Care Act, underscoring how a spirit of compromise has been destroying even his ostensibly greatest achievement. Meanwhile, scholars David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu published The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. They show many ways whereby health outcomes can deteriorate when the economy goes into a deep recession and government washes its hands of results.
Author and consumer activis Ralph Nader last month asked, Has There Ever Been A Bigger Con Man In White House? But for those preoccupied with day-to-day living, its hardships and joys, the harshest appraisals are likely to come in mainstream weak tea of such books as pundit Jonathan Alter's new book on the election, ‘The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies. A Washington Post reviewer described the book this way:
" Jonathan Alter’s The Center Holds
[shown at right] offers an elegant, intelligent, crisply constructed
account of President Obama’s second two years in the White House and his
quiet march to a second term. It will be required reading for any
serious student of the Obama presidency, present or future. Alter is
unabashedly pro-Democratic and sympathetic to his subject. Yet he is
scrupulous in flagging down missteps and screwups by the Obama
administration (and Obama himself), which saves the book from being a
one-sided homage to a sitting president."
We also see Obama in a rare display of pique as he climbs down from the
stage following a 2010 speech to the National Urban League after
spotting black activist and philosopher Cornel West seated in the front
row. West had dissed Obama for not being a true progressive, declaring
that he couldn’t “in good conscience” tell black voters to support this
candidate. Obama became visibly angry, saying to West: “I’m not
progressive? What kind of [expletive] is this?”
I have admired Alter's work in the past. Yet my research persuades me that it is those in the public, not Obama, who have reason to be angry. Even in Africa, some reported that his welcome was muted part because of concerns Africans feel he hasn’t lived up to promises. Nonetheless, presidents current and past possess a fantastic ability to promote themselves and their favorite causes.
This feel-good mantra was on full display during the just-completed presidential trip to Africa. First Lady Michelle Obama described on her blog her thrill at being able to meet her predecessor, Laura Bush, and her husband George on the trip, as shown at left.
Summing Up
At this point in the history of the Justice Integrity Project and my overlapping book research, I ascribe to President Obama a big part of the lack of uniform justice exhibited by the Justice Department and courts.
Many of the most notorious examples had their roots in the Bush era. But he and his appointees have enforced nearly all of them and have carved out their own areas of overzealous abuse. Among them are double the number of spy indictments under the 1917 Espionage Act than all of his predecessors combined. Most of the Obama cases involve leakers, arguably public spirited, seeking to alert the news media to abuses in government when internal procedures fail.
Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman's daughter, Dana Siegelman, reminded me of the victims of all kinds when contacted me this week to ask if there was something the Justice Integrity Project could do to help the defendants and their families she had encountered during the radio interviews and lectures in her campaign to achieve justice for her father. She is now studying to retake grad school exams after long interruptions to help her father, now imprisoned on a seven-year term after a Karl Rove plot to achieve one of the nation's most notorious political prosecutions.
As it happened, I saw former Obama White House Counsel Robert Bauer heading my way a Washington street about 6:30 p.m. on July 3. Bauer held the White House job from December 2009 to 2011, and later became general counsel for the Obama for America 2012 reelection campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Bauer's wife, former Obama White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, is another high-level player in Washington.
I felt a little bit bad for slowing Bauer up by talking at the end of what looked like a long day for him before the holiday.
But
it was a rare chance to remind him of our previous meeting after he
spoke at the Cato Institute a few months previous. I had mentioned there
the continuing injustice of Siegelman-style imprisonments and the
unwillingness of the Obama administration to undertake meaningful
reform.This week, I updated him that the White House had been reluctant to provide substantive responses to my requests for comment and records. My words were not a question so much as a reminder that no comment does not mean no story. Bauer, shown at a right in a Wikipedia photo, heard me out as we walked about 30 steps to a corner. He seemed to have a sore throat that muted his voice in what may have been painful. So, I didn't press him for any response.
Upstairs at the National Press Club a few minutes later, several colleagues who had served in government informed me after I mentioned the encounter that I had violated the city's norms by initiating such a discussion with a busy man on the street.
Guilty as charged, I suppose. Whatever the case, it strikes me that those of us who investigate the justice system and document great abuses have an obligation to speak up at least briefly in such chance encounters. Media events are largely staged, and with potential repercussions for reporters who are too blunt. The public, for the most part, rarely meets any these Washington eminences.
In this instance, my purpose was not to try to persuade Bauer to do anything specific, especially before a holiday, but merely to remind him that those unjustly imprisoned are not always forgotten. The pattern of high-level corruption leading to Siegelman's frame-up ultimately led to my book, Puppetry, which covers a century of similar dark intrigues. But that's another story, coming soon.
Contact the author Andrew Kreig or comment
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