This week, O’Connor launches a California book tour, beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area. On Monday, O’Connor sat down for a video interview with Prison Radio, where he discusses aspects of this story not addressed in this text interview. Marking the book release, Prison Radio has recorded a special message from Kevin Cooper himself. To learn more about Cooper’s case and what you can do to help, visit his website.

Prison Radio:  How did you get involved in Kevin Cooper’s case?

J. Patrick O’Connor:  During the fall of 2008, I was in the Bay Area on a book tour for The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal.  During the tour, supporters of Kevin’s approached me at various venues and asked me to consider writing a book on Kevin’s case.

PR:  How did you go about writing this book?

JPO:  I took on this project with no preconceived notions of Kevin’s guilt or innocence. Each case is different, radically so.

My first step was to read and notate the trial transcripts, documents of over 8,000 pages.  I then read all the police reports, witness interviews, and various newspaper accounts. I reviewed the most shocking crime scene and autopsy photos I’ve ever seen — and those I will never forget.  The autopsy reports on the four victims spoke of an incredibly frenzied killing field inside the Ryens’ master bedroom.

Finally, I read all of the appeals and the judicial rulings.  By this time I was ready to begin interviewing various people involved in Kevin’s trial and his subsequent appeals.

PR:  What’s the main obstacle to researching a case that is 25 years old?

JPO:  The biggest problem is that a number of key people involved in the investigation and trial have died, have retired, or have simply forgotten important factual details.

Another obstacle is that because Kevin technically still has appeals open to him, the San Bernardino County D.A.’s Office refused to discuss the case with me.  Nonetheless, I was able to interview Kevin’s trial attorney, his investigator, and the lead prosecutor at his trial as well as many other people familiar with Kevin’s trial and appeals.  For important background on the Ryens, I was able to interview Peggy Ryen’s half-sister and Doug Ryen’s sister.

PR:  Did you ever interview Kevin Cooper?

JPO:  I visited with Kevin for nearly three hours at San Quentin in the summer of 2009.  During this intense interrogation — I was in the process of deciding whether to take on this book possibility — I could sense Kevin felt a number of my questions were intrusive, if not insensitive.  There were things about his past and about his stay at the hideout house, and his fleeing to Mexico that I simply had to know to be able to go forward.

By the end of the interview I was taken with his equanimity and his resolve to prove he was wrongfully convicted of the gruesome Chino Hills murders. Over the next two years, I was able to pose many other questions to Kevin in written form, through his defense team at the Orrick law firm.

PR:  What convinced you that Kevin was innocent of these crimes?

JPO:  A lot of different things. To just cite one here: The prosecution and the police withheld and destroyed evidence that would have exonerated Kevin — evidence that was so exculpatory to him that had it been revealed Kevin would not have even been on trial for these murders.

PR:  Can you provide some background on Kevin Cooper’s case?

JPO:  Kevin Cooper was convicted of the brutal murders of a Chino Hills, California family and a young houseguest in 1985, and has been on death row at San Quentin since then. Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and The Framing of Kevin Cooper, shows how the sheriff’s office and the district attorney’s office of San Bernardino County framed Cooper for these horrific murders and how the justice system has failed him at almost every turn in his long, drawn-out appeal process.

If it were not for a court-ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal injection controversy, Cooper – with no appeals remaining – would have been executed by now. It is expected the moratorium will not be lifted until at least 2013.

Two days before the murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes, Cooper escaped from a nearby prison and holed up in a vacant house 125 yards below the murdered family’s hilltop house.  Two days after the San Bernardino sheriff’s department established that Cooper had hid out there, it locked in on him as the lone assailant despite numerous eye witness reports that implicated three, young white men as the perpetrators.

From that day forward, four days after the murders were discovered, the sheriff’s department discarded information that pointed at other perpetrators, destroyed evidence that exculpated Cooper, and planted evidence that implicated him.

PR:  What eyewitness testimony is there pointing to other perpetrators?

JPO:  The only survivor of the attack, 8 1/2-year-old Josh Ryen, told ER personnel and a sheriff’s deputy that his assailants were three white men. Cooper is black.

Around midnight on the night of the murders, a couple, attempting to exit a driveway in their truck, saw three, young white men driving rapidly down the only road that leads away from the Ryens’ house in a station wagon that it turned out was stolen from the murdered family.

Shortly after that sighting, two women in a nearby bar saw two young white men, one wearing coveralls, with blood splatter on their faces and clothing.

Four days after the murders, another woman turned into the sheriff’s office bloody coveralls her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, had left on the floor of her closet.  The woman stated she had other information that implicated her boyfriend in the murders but wanted to be interviewed by homicide detectives.  She would have told them that her boyfriend’s hatchet was missing and that he no longer had the tan T-shirt he wore the Saturday of the murders.

PR: What aspects of the crime scene challenge the case against Cooper?

JPO:  The murders were committed with at least three, and probably four, weapons: a hatchet, an ice pick and one or two knifes. The theory that one perpetrator could or would use three or four weapons, is fundamentally counterintuitive.  At trial the prosecutor argued that Cooper was ambidextrous, which he is not.

Nor could one person control two able-bodied adults and three children running around the house, one of whom, Jessica, made it outside the house during the attack. The adult victims were each fit, 41-year-old chiropractors and both were mobile during the onslaught and fought hard for their lives, sustaining numerous defensive wounds to their hands and arms.

The crime scene evidence, according to the medical examiner, showed that the mother was cradling the daughter before the mother died, which meant one of the attackers had brought Jessica back into the house.  More than anything else, this meant there had to be more than one assailant because each parent kept a loaded gun in the master bedroom where the assault occurred.

There was an uncommon viciousness to the attack as though the killers meant not only to murder but to send a message of payback or retribution.  The medical examiner counted 144 wounds on the four murder victims, including 28 fractures and two amputations.  While Cooper’s trial was in progress, an inmate in a California prison told prison authorities and a San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detective that his cellmate had confessed to the Chino Hills murders, stating it was an Aryan Brotherhood hit but the three killers had gone to the wrong house.

PR:  What about the destroyed evidence you cited earlier?

JPO:  During Cooper’s preliminary hearing, the sheriff’s office destroyed the bloody coveralls.  The sheriff’s office claimed it never conducted any tests of the coveralls and admitted it never sent homicide detectives around to interview the woman who had turned them in.

The sheriff’s office also destroyed a bloody blue T-shirt discarded not far from the bar. Coupled with a tan T-shirt found the next day near the bar, the two bloody T-shirts were strong proof that at least two assailants had murdered the Ryens and Chris Hughes.  Testing of the tan T-shirt showed the blood on it matched the blood profile of Doug Ryen and no one else.

PR:  You also said that evidence was planted?

JPO:  Years later, in 2002, as Cooper was attempting to prove his innocence with DNA testing now afforded death row inmates by the California Legislature, his blood was now found on the tan T-shirt. To Cooper and his appeal attorneys, this showed rank tampering and planting of evidence, a belief that was greatly reinforced when it was revealed in 2004 that the vial containing Cooper’s blood, taken from him when he was arrested and kept all those years in the crime lab, was discovered now to contain the DNA of at least one other person.

A hatchet sheath and a bloody green button from a prison jacket were found at the hideout house a day after two detectives had searched the house and found nothing of evidentiary value.  Under oath one of the detectives denied looking in the bedroom but crime scene technicians lifted his fingerprints from the door of the closet where Cooper slept.  It would be established at Cooper’s trial that when Cooper escaped he was wearing a brown jacket, not a green one.

PR:  In 2004, Cooper came within hours of being executed before an extremely rare en banc ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed his execution and granted him a successive habeas corpus hearing in federal district court in San Diego. Can you explain more about this 2004 ruling?

JPO:  In particular, the Ninth Circuit ordered the district court to conduct DNA testing on the numerous blonde or light brown hairs found clutched in Jessica’s hand and other similar hairs deposited on other victims.

The Ninth also ordered EDTA testing to determine if Cooper’s blood had been planted on the tan T-shirt.  EDTA is an anti-clotting substance used in crime labs to preserve blood in vials, to prevent it from coagulating and breaking down. If tests conducted showed high levels of EDTA on the blood attributed to Cooper on the T-shirt, it would establish tampering.  If tampering were established, it would call into question all the forensic evidence the prosecution used to link Cooper to the crime scene.

It seemed that Cooper, after nineteen years of asserting his innocence from death row, would be vindicated.  At a minimum, the district court would have had to order a new trial or exonerate him outright.

Federal District Court Judge Marilyn Huff was not going to let that happen.  She had turned down both of Cooper’s previous habeas appeals, finding evidence of his guilt “overwhelming.”

PR:  How did Judge Marilyn Huff treat Cooper’s third habeas appeal?

JPO:  Over a period of a year, Judge Huff periodically held evidentiary hearings.  As she did, she methodically thwarted Cooper’s attorneys at every turn, refusing to allow Cooper’s experts to participate in the EDTA testing.  When the private lab the court hired to test Cooper’s blood on the T-shirt found elevated levels of EDTA, Judge Huff allowed the lab to retract its findings three weeks later on the grounds the lab itself was contaminated with EDTA during the testing.

Judge Huff dispensed with any further EDTA testing by ruling that the EDTA testing of the tan T-shirt conducted was not conclusive and that EDTA testing in general was an unproven science and of no value.  She was wrong on both counts:  both Cooper’s expert and the private lab found high levels on EDTA on the samples tested from the tan T-shirt and EDTA testing is a proven science.

The extreme bias against Cooper that Judge Huff displayed with impunity throughout the evidentiary hearings was at its most obvious when it came to the DNA testing of the hair clutched in various victims’ hands ordered by the en banc Ninth Circuit.  When a portion of those hairs had been tested in 2002, they were found to have no antigen roots, denoting that the hairs had fallen out rather than been yanked out during the assault.  Those hairs, the tests showed, were either from the victims themselves or were dog hairs.

There could be no purpose in retesting those hairs. However, over half of the hairs in the victims’ hands or adhered to their bodies had not been tested in 2002 and may well have contained antigen roots.    If the mitochondrial testing of those hairs resulted in a DNA that excluded all the victims and Cooper, there would be proof positive that someone other than Cooper was a perpetrator.  Judge Huff, incredibly, ordered testing only of the already tested hairs.

PR:  Did anything new come out at this point?

JPO:  During the evidentiary hearings, Cooper’s lawyers inadvertently learned for the first time about the bloody blue T-shirt found not far from the bar.  How could Judge Huff get around the implications of a bloody blue and a bloody tan T-shirt found one day apart near the bar?

In addition, the prosecution’s not disclosing the blue T-shirt to the defense was a major Brady violation that was so exculpatory to Cooper on its own that it mandated a new trial.

Judge Huff’s way around this inconvenient hurdle was to find that the blue T-shirt was in reality the tan T-shirt, even though the blue shirt was found the day before the tan shirt in a different location from the bar and the woman who found the bloody blue shirt testified at the hearing that the shirt she found was blue.

Judge Huff’s handling of Cooper’s habeas proceedings led Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Fletcher to write, “There’s no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing and flouted our direction to perform the two tests.”

PR:  Judge Fletcher also made a strong statement about Cooper’s case, as a guest speaker at Gonzaga University School of Law on April 12, 2010.

JPO:  Yes, Judge Fletcher delivered a lecture on the subject of the death penalty, holding that the problems with the administration of it are widespread and endemic rather than merely regional or local.

To illustrate he cited the Kevin Cooper case, stating “The case I am about to describe is horrible in many ways.  The murders were horrible.  Kevin Cooper, the man now sitting on death row, may well be – and in my view probably is – innocent.  And he is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed him.”

Judge Fletcher, a Rhodes Scholar who roomed with Bill Clinton at Oxford University, said what happened in the Cooper case “is a familiar story.  It is by no means the usual story.  But it happens often enough to be familiar.  The police are under heavy pressure to solve a high profile crime.  They know, or think they know, who did the crime.  And they plant evidence to help their case along.”

PR:  A closing thought?

JPO:  Kevin Cooper has now spent half of his life on death row for a crime he had nothing to do with.  He is, in a word, a scapegoat.

Occupy is still an infant, having been born in New York September 17 with Occupy Wall Street. It is not even five months old and already the local daily tries to editorialize it into ashes. Rumors of our death are premature. We have made mistakes, including in Oakland. We’re learning and experiencing what one activist calls “growing pains.”

Provoked by police violence in Oakland, a few cornered occupiers among the 2000 present reacted. That has not happened here. The Sonoma County Occupy Town Hall Affinity Group,of which I am a member, opposes violence, as do the overwhelming majority of Occupy groups and individuals.

I do, however, respect the right of self-defense by those cornered by the police. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, ”Violence is the voice of the unheard.”  And as President John F. Kennedy said at a 1962 speech at the White House, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

What would you do when surrounded by a large group of armed, masked, threatening, charging, and rioting armored men? I praise the brave souls willing to face such police violence. As one occupier wondered, “What’s next? Live ammunition?”

Punishing people in a democracy should be the job of the courts, not the police, which Oakland police are notorious for doing. They fan the flames.

Court-appointed monitors, according to The Bay Citizen recently wrote in their quarterly report that the police response to Occupy Oakland protests this fall raised ‘serious concerns’ about the department’s ability to ‘hold true to the best practices in American policing,’ and promised a thorough investigation of the matter. Last week, a judge moved the police department closer to a federal takeover, writing that he was in ‘disbelief’ that the department had yet to finish a series of court-ordered reforms.

Why did the Press Democrat not report these relevant facts? The PD carefully selects what to report and what to exclude. A daily newspaper should represent various voices of its community, rather than just the status quo.

Occupy has “officially overstepped its welcome,” the PD alleges. Since when has the PD ever welcomed Occupy or officiated over such matters? The argument that what a few people did in one city reduces the national Occupy movement to ashes is without merit.

The PD asks occupiers to condemn the violence in Oakland. I condemn the police brutality and criticize the much less violent behavior of a few activists. I have done so within our movement and publicly, as have other Occupy co-leaders.

Now, will the Press Democrat denounce the violence of the Oakland police, who exercise unlawful authority? Or is there a double standard here?

Burning the American flag is an inflammatory and futile act of frustration that dilutes the main messages of the majority of occupiers and our many supporters, which is to bring about fundamental changes in our economic and political systems. When I was commissioned an officer in the U.S. Army, I swore an oath to defend my country against external and internal threats. I have kept that vow, which is a big reason that I am part of the Occupy movement, as are many veterans.

Violence by occupiers is a tactical mistake. The guns, other weapons, and media are in the hands of the protectors of the wealthy 1%. Violence is also a strategic and moral error.

The real violence that we should oppose includes the following: banks that gambled and foreclosed on the homes of millions; corporations that buy politicians with their big bucks; and stripping workers’ pensions and health care benefits.

Occupy does need to mature. Young people, especially, are desperate today. Their college debts are astronomical and their job options are minimal. Desperation can lead to violence. Long-term organizing is more likely to be successful.

“Ashes,” you fantasize. Yet on February 9 the Sonoma County Town Hall will host its third of ongoing monthly gatherings in a downtown Sebastopol church; 130 to 140 people attended the previous two. On February 17 the new Occupied Press, North Bay, will show the film “Battle in Seattle,” about the l999 shut-down of the World Trade Organization. On February 25 Occupy Santa Rosa will support teachers unions in a day of action in support of public education.

These are samples of the dozens of activities lead by Sonoma County Occupy groups as we prepare to move from a reflective winter into an action-oriented spring. Do these indicate “ashes?” You wait. You watch. You see.

Perhaps your editorial represents what we can expect from the new conservative Florida owners of the Press Democrat. Perhaps we need a new newspaper here that reflects the 99%.

It’s best not to think about politics up there. Last time I went up, there were three black vultures preening on the serpent’s head not ten feet from where I sat. They were so quiet, it took minutes before I saw them looking at me. Makes a strong impression when you’re all alone up there.

What a great way to manifest yourself, if you’re the devil, as black vultures. Carrion birds won’t hurt you. They only eat what’s dead, like cast-off faith and trust and admiration. Nice touch, being triune, too, as father, son and who knows what, in the jokey way the devil has of parodying sacred absurdities.

This was no portentous sermon. The big one hissed and the little one screeched a bit. Demonic possession is great – no voices or intrusive thoughts, you just enjoy a brainstorm and take credit.

So, sitting there like Goodman Brown, when he calms down and thinks it through. Everybody comes here. What could all these humans have in common that’s so awful? What’s this unspeakable secret that everyone keeps?  I had one of those inspirations of horrid blasphemy: it’s rights and rule of law, universal to mankind yet utterly secret. Here in America, public life must never be defiled by universal law and rights. Law and rights show our patriotic exploits through the victims’ eyes. That takes our sacred things and makes them dirty, with all the power of the old oath, Bloody Mary.

The election was everywhere below, an inescapable miasma. It’s said to be important in America. It’s called democracy, the thing that makes us good, and it’s imaginary, just like god. How to desecrate that sacred thing? Just stop pretending. Hold our pointless choices to the standards of the outside world, with rights and rule of law. Obtrude the secrets that Americans aren’t allowed to know.

Let the sacrilege begin. To the candidates let’s apply the minimal standards of the civilized world. They fail spectacularly, bloviating in swinish contempt for the commitments America has made supreme in its own law. Most ordinary voters are less ignorant of presidential duties and commitments. Who cares which candidate is better, if none of them make the cut?

And what about the man who’s now doing the job, and wants to keep it? Job evaluation means a checklist, and none of this nonsense about character and greatness, only work rules. Does the incumbent president measure up? But perhaps it demeans the dignity of office to treat him like other any working stiff. Let’s hope so.

What happens when we vet a presidential candidate in the commonest, most fundamental ways? First, we make sure he’s not a criminal. Before they would let me play angel of mercy in Africa they took my fingerprints, to be sure that I was not the sort of person that would molest needy children or rape powerless women. Fair enough. We’ll do a background check on the incumbent. We’ll set the bar as low as we can, and look only at peremptory norms. Peremptory norms are the bedrock expectations of the civilized world, the law of intolerable, inexcusable transgressions.

Let’s begin our background check with the Convention Against Torture (CAT), supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution, signed by President Reagan and ratified October 27, 1990. CAT Article 12 requires:

Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.

On January 11, 2009, President Obama said, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” As a matter of policy, the incumbent president does not want his subordinates to “spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.” Breaking Article 12 makes Obama Torturer in Chief.

Now in America we’re encouraged to pound our chests and cheer torture of helpless captives as a badge of patriotic courage. In our generally censorious culture, we’ve been inoculated with ambivalence to view torturers as athletes with chalk in their cleats, heroically toeing the line as they pitch out of bounds. You don’t see the sort of hysteria that attaches to, say, sex offenses, where some simpleton pees out of doors or gets a crush, and he’s judicially branded for life, hounded from place to place by mobs of frantic parents. Makes you wonder what it would take to make outrage trump cruelty. Which atavistic impulse would prevail if the President of the United States were presiding over sexual torture?

Well, we’re going to find out. It seems that something adverse has turned up in the incumbent’s background check.   A compromising photo.

Rape. We don’t tolerate that. That’s why we had to bomb Serbia and Libya. Under Article 1 of the Torture Convention, official acquiescence to torture is an essential element of the crime. Executive acquiescence goes beyond obstruction of justice: it makes the president an outlaw everywhere, subject to universal-jurisdiction law with no statute of limitations. President Obama is Rapist in Chief, ensuring impunity for the rank-and-file of torture, who hold the captive women down and squeeze their breasts and fuck them. And not only women but boys.  President Obama oversees the gingerly don’t-ask-don’t-tell for soldiers whose orientation is to anal rape.

In extenuation it is said that President Obama is afraid of his subordinates. Dean Christopher Edley of U.C. Berkeley Law School recounted a meeting that ruled out prosecution for fear of a revolt by the government’s torture bureaus.

However, that cuts no ice under Torture Convention Article 2, paragraph 2:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

The US government wished this clause away in its 2006 report to the UN Committee against Torture – all’s fair in war, America maintained – but the Committee affirmed the consensus of the world that nothing can justify torture.

The Committee pointedly cited sexual humiliation as a breach of US obligations under the CAT. The world knows what our government did. The world has seen the photographic fact of that woman bent over for rape. The world has seen the photographic fact of a naked shackled captive with an object thrust up his anus.

The Committee wrote:

The State party should ensure, in accordance with the Convention, that mechanisms to obtain full redress, compensation and rehabilitation are accessible to all victims of acts of torture or abuse, including sexual violence, perpetrated by its officials.

The Committee remarked that the US is hiding from the Special Rapporteur on Torture. Our state has kept the Special Rapporteur at bay, but the Committee against Torture was not so easy to escape – we agreed to its oversight in signing the Convention Against Torture. The international experts confronted the United States with the chapter and verse of its obligations, in stark contrast with its conduct. Merely reading our commitments aloud to us paints a mortifying picture of the United States as a barbarous throwback state.

The United States of America is an enclave where jus cogens, the essential rudiment of civilization, does not apply. The United States signed the CAT with reservations that unlawfully undermine its purpose, and with meaningless declarations meant to hedge its restrictions on the state. Americans lack federal torture statutes that afford us the protections of the Convention. Our laws hem torture round with qualifiers that make much torment officially OK. We don’t enforce the laws on torture when we delegate it to servile satellite states or secret dungeons. We illegally exempt our high officials from the law.

The better to torture its victims in peace, the United States government refused to sign the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance – but the Committee pointed out that every prisoner we disappeared is a per se breach of the Torture Convention.

In breach of Article 10, America ensures that its troops and police wallow in brutish ignorance of the universal law on torture. In defiance of Article 14, America denies redress to torture victims: our state refuses torture victims’ recourse to the Committee against Torture, and drowns their appeals in bureaucratic mire at home.

America institutionalizes torture in Supermax isolation. For the public at large, in insouciant contempt of the historic horrors of electrical torture – the archetypal symbol of totalitarian crime – our state issues instruments of electrical torture to civilian police nationwide, who use them with impunity for punishment and restraint.

The US government has not yet released its fifth Periodic Report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, due November 19, 2011. It promises lively controversy on the campaign trail as the US reports to the Committee, answers its questions, and publishes the conclusions of the independent international experts.¹ Or so one would think. Surely voters will be anxious to learn if their most urgent concern has been addressed: at the outset of the Obama administration, the question voted highest on change.gov was,

Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.

Clearly the answer is no. We shall see if the electorate takes no for an answer.

President Obama is self-evidently in violation of Torture Convention Article 12. But at least he stopped the torture, right?

Ask Gulet Mohamed,  tortured in Kuwait on President Obama’s watch, with US officials on the spot to take away his rights, under threat of worse to come.

It’s only getting worse. With the knowledge and approval of the President’s federal security bureaucracy, local police departments are institutionalizing Israeli techniques for CAT-illegal torture and degradation with a nationwide program of “law enforcement education.”  The non-violent dissenters of the occupy movement have already been subjected to the signature abuses of Zionist repression: nerve damage from hours in tight restraints; the arbitrary violence of Shamir’s infamous “force, might, beatings;” use of tear gas canisters as lethal projectiles.

All right, then. Inarguably, President Obama is a criminal: hostis humani generis, enemy of all mankind. But perhaps we ought to look at the whole person. Maybe he behaves a little better with respect to aggression. After all, aggression is the highest of all high crimes, and a hanging offense, for the Nazis we caught – America hallowed the principle at Nuremberg. As UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) stated:

No consideration of whatever nature, whether political, economic, military or otherwise, may serve as a justification for aggression. A war of aggression is a crime against international peace.

Oh dear, tsk, tsk. Our little background check turns up a problem here too. President Obama waged illegal war in Afghanistan and Iraq. His continuing war in Afghanistan was not authorized by the relevant UNSC Resolution, 1368 (2001). Use of force in this case breaches Articles 46, 48 and 51 of the United Nations Charter, supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution. The now-covert war he commands in Iraq similarly flouts UNSC Resolution 1441, which authorized no use of force. The UN Secretary General termed our war on Iraq illegal.

The wars Obama started are no better. US use of force in Yemen and Somalia is undertaken without UN supervision, in direct breach of UN Charter Chapter VII. Pakistan publicly denounced the US for a ‘deliberate act of aggression’ when President Obama commanded an armed attack on defense forces inside Pakistan.

In Libya, President Obama overstepped the objectives of UNSCR 1973 (2011). The objectives are crucial because use of force is illegal when not under UN supervision. Disregarding the scope of the no-fly zone, President Obama destroyed civilian infrastructure and defensive emplacements in Sirte and elsewhere in support of one combatant faction, interfering with national self-determination in breach of UN Charter Article 2.4. In using, force President Obama aborted African Union efforts at pacific settlement of disputes, required by the supreme law of our land: the Kellogg-Briand Pact and UN Charter Chapter VI.

Illegal use of force against Iran will be laid to President Obama’s account as well. His common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, the precedent of Count 1 at Nuremberg, is deniable for now, plausibly or not, but evident in partial execution, and complete.

The last time the United States went to war with Iran, in the largest naval battle since World War II, our leaders ran afoul of the law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) called the US attack disproportionate and unjustified by necessity. We ran to the UN and cried self-defense, but the ICJ rejected that claim.  Our first war on Iran has been ruled an act of aggression. Our new war, with its unsolved murders and mysterious explosions, raises sticky issues in the evolving doctrine of state responsibility for intentionally wrongful acts. President Obama has put the poisoned chalice to his lips. We’ll see if he drinks.

So Obama’s an aggressor too. Well, perhaps he keeps his nose clean once he gets into an illegal war. Let’s apply humanitarian law. While America has run from the accountability of the Rome Statute, its provisions merely institutionalize universal-jurisdiction humanitarian law. So President Obama may get off scot-free on Rome Statute Article 8.2.c.iv, for the extra-judicial execution of Osama bin Laden when rendered hors de combat by detention. But he’s still on the hook for the equivalent crime under universal jurisdiction. The prohibitions come from the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention, to which our state is party. In fact, the Hague Convention relaxed American law a bit, as murder of prisoners was a capital offense under Military Order 100. In the case at hand the evidence is clear – we took that woozy mugshot of the captured invalid Osama right before we shot him. Then there’s Rome Statute Article 8.2.a.i, which criminalizes the willful killing of civilians Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, along with 90 per cent of our Pakistani drone-war casualties.

Crime goes to the applicant’s character, you might say. With a position of trust in a criminal state, crime is a purely notional embarrassment, and easy to suppress, in America’s cult of personality – but soon legal exposure may be more than an annoyance for elder statesmen craving society’s esteem. Late last year, in ICC-02/05-01/09, the pre-trial chamber of the International Criminal Court denied immunity to heads of state.  The decision leaves plenty of wiggle room for executive lips and shysters like Gonzales and Koh, but it reflects the world’s resolve to end impunity.

For peaceful little countries, it’s great sport to shoo our criminal elder statesmen with the law. Mischievous Swiss lawmaker Dominique Baettig chased George Bush away with public recognition of torture charges. Fortunately for our diminutive warlord, planned protests afforded a face-saving security pretext for his flight from justice.  Lawyers Against the War gave it a whirl in Canada.  Naturally the charges sank without a ripple in America’s servile snowbound hinterlands, but the meticulously documented charges promise lots more fun. They’ll throw the same book at ex-president Obama. CAT Article 12 makes it his crime, too.

When his turn comes, the charges are likely to be lurid. President Obama doesn’t merely fail to investigate torture, he has his diplomats obstruct independent efforts to redress it. When Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon took up the case of one of Spain’s own torture victims, as the law requires, the US government “fought tooth and nail” to obstruct Garzon’s investigations. To keep official torturers out of reach of the law, the Obama administration disappears charges as well as human beings, perverting justice at home and abroad.

Torturer, aggressor, war criminal. Clearly, rule of law is not Obama’s strong suit. But, as legal wizard Johnny Cochran said, let’s not rush to judgment. What has he done for me lately? That is how we’re taught to think.

Let’s stick with what we are entitled to demand, that the candidate honor the commitments and obligations essential to a sovereign state: our universal human rights. Take minimal civil and political rights, as guaranteed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), supreme law of the land.

Patriotic brainwashing keeps that legal fact repressed deep in Americans’ subconscious. No one in America holds presidential aspirants to the standards of the civilized world. What does sometimes happen is wistful evocation of a less demanding standard, our quaint old long-gone Bill of Rights.

Still it’s easy to pile up annals of despotic overreach. Conor Friedersdorf reels off 14 outrages. Collectively they make a mockery of CCPR Articles 9, 6, 17, 19, 12, 14, 10, and 16. There are many hapless victims beyond Friedersdorf’s myopic view – Gulf States inhabitants, Occupy dissidents, debtors, and people of color – and they might add Articles 1, 7, 11, and 21 to the civil and political rights that have gone through President Obama’s shredder.

Partisan dead-enders maintain that despite the President’s high crimes and overt contempt for civil and political rights, the Democratic alternative offers certain social and material advantages. At this point it would be a waste of time to take the pathetic scraps on offer and systematically compare them to the minimal requirements of the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR).  That test reveals the piteous and terrible failure of a puffed-up corporate puppet. He shrinks shyly from state duties to respect core rights, and fails utterly to protect our human rights from corporate depredations. But in search of some indicative examples, let’s measure the pleadings of a random Democratic loyalist against the relevant human rights standards.

Achievement: “Obama has overhauled the food safety system.”

Well, that is certainly worth doing. Article 11 of the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states:

The States Parties to the present Covenant, recognizing the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programmes, which are needed:

(a) To improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition and by developing or reforming agrarian systems in such a way as to achieve the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources.

Our ruling class won’t ratify that covenant, so technically, the President is not on the hook for his gross derelictions: lip service to government duties respecting freedom from hunger, and servile negligence that allows corporate interests to destroy fisheries and foodstocks. With America’s Gulf Coast fisheries poisoned by corporate malfeasance, the FDA underestimates the toxicity of Gulf Coast shrimp by four orders of magnitude.  The US government permits Monsanto to impose the “substantial equivalence” doctrine, muzzling scientific inquiry into food safety. To test the food that patent monopolists force-feed us, Americans have to depend on Chinese research. And in fact, the Chinese have found an insidious taint. The Obama administration is colluding with pesticide producers to forestall independent pesticide research. As the censorship continues, commercial interests exterminate bees and the plants that they pollinate worldwide.

Achievement:  “Advanced women’s rights in the work place. Ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in our military. Stopped defending DOMA in court. Passed the Hate Crimes bill. Appointed two pro-choice women to the Supreme Court.”

More insulting scraps of rights. At the outset of his term the president had the majority to sign and ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), codifying comprehensive rights and impelling them with an international framework of independent review. He did not. The president shares the US Government’s provincial compulsion to reinvent all wheels and agonize over bad imitations of the world-standard protections accepted everywhere else. It’s more than stubborn ignorance – it’s fear of any world consensus that our rulers can’t control.

“Expanded access to medical care and provided subsidies for people who can’t afford it. Expanded the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Fixed the preexisting conditions travesty [and rescissions] in health insurance.”

Let’s look at what our president’s job is, if he claims to head a sovereign state: CESCR Article 12:

1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

2. The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for:

(a) The provision for the reduction of the stillbirth-rate and of infant mortality and for the healthy development of the child;

(b) The improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene;

(c) The prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases;

(d) The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.

The President’s medical tinkering seems to be a feckless stab at paragraph 2(d). In the event, the President undermined the proven approach of monopsony health-care procurement and delivered a captive market to predatory corporate middlemen. Here again, we have lip service to government duties and utter failure to protect.

Achievement: “Invested in clean energy. Overhauled the credit card industry, making it much more consumer-friendly. While Dodd-Frank bill was weak in many respects, it was still an extremely worthwhile start at re-regulating the financial sector.  He created a Elizabeth Warren’s dream agency: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He’s done a lot for veterans. He got help for people whose health was injured during the clean-up after the 9/11 attacks.”

A motley ragbag that falls apart under cursory examination. Not a hint of the duties of the state. You can sell rubbish like this with a straight face if you can keep Americans ignorant of world standards. Civil law is historically more cognizant of state duties, and most other nations are attuned to evolving international norms, but Americans are educated as provincials. In terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the state has failed if you don’t know your rights. But to fanatical theocrat Gary North and his holy electoral vanguard, protecting humans from the overreaching powers of states is “giving equal time in society to the devil.” Americans’ backward ignorance is actually sacred.

What’s more, all that financial boasting invites review in light of the Convention Against Corruption (CAC), supreme law of the land.  CAC Articles 18 and 19 address trading in influence and abuse of functions. Our government has told international reviewers that existing federal law prohibits abuse of function and trading in influence. Our government admits that it has not reviewed the effectiveness of that law. So the blatant and ubiquitous sleaze of public life turns out to be a crime! But corruption is a vital institution here. The graft of contending lobbyists, that’s our sole remaining check and balance. It is all that’s left of our state. So when the sordid story of bank reform is told, President Obama may not even be able to say, with the hapless villain Richard Nixon, “I am not a crook.”

And they want me to go to the polls and vote for this. They actually expect my consent-of-the-governed seal of approval for a criminal despot who can’t even make the trains run on time, and for the failed state that horked him up. Let his party die off like the Whigs. No, I want what I’ve got coming: rights and rule of law. No party gives me that. Saying so desecrates everything that’s sacred to this purulent police state. It’s blasphemy to hold the state to any standards. That’s how you learn that every word they tell you is a filthy lie. It is Satan’s irresistible lure : Now are ye undeceived.

Come, devil, for to thee is this world given. Hail the New World Order. Blasphemy is powerful. Satan’s old and wise. He knows depraved institutions always have a sanctifying rite. Defile it – nothing happens, but the institution’s power is gone. The pedophile church has a solemn rite: you must eat cheap pulpy bread and make believe it’s flesh. The crucial rite of the United States is the election, a travesty of futile choice. You must make believe you’re choosing what you want. To profane it breaks the brittle spell. Stop taking the host, and the priests can’t rape your child. Stop casting your vote, and the troops can’t rape that terrified woman that they’re gripping by the hair.

1. N.B. Broken link: sometime after January 20, State took down this handy listing of recent torture and human rights reviews.

Why is Ron Paul America’s last chance?

Because he is the only candidate who is not owned lock, stock, and barrel by the military-security complex, Wall Street, and the Israel Lobby.

All of the others, including President Obama, are owned by exactly the same interest groups. There are no differences between them. Every candidate except Ron Paul stands for war and a police state, and all have demonstrated their complete and total subservience to Israel. The fact that there is no difference between them is made perfectly clear by the absence of substantive issues in the campaigns of the Republican candidates.

Only Ron Paul deals with real issues, so he is excluded from “debates” in which the other Republican candidates throw mud at one another: “Gingrich voted $60 million to a UN program supporting abortion in China.” “Romney loves to fire people.”

The mindlessness repels.

More importantly, only Ron Paul respects the US Constitution and its protection of civil liberty. Only Ron Paul understands that if the Constitution cannot be resurrected from its public murder by Congress and the executive branch, then Americans are lost to tyranny.

There isn’t much time in which to revive the Constitution. One more presidential term with no habeas corpus and no due process for US citizens and with torture and assassination of US citizens by their own government, and it will be too late. Tyranny will have been firmly institutionalized, and too many Americans from the lowly to the high and mighty will have been implicated in the crimes of the state. Extensive guilt and complicity will make it impossible to restore the accountability of government to law.

If Ron Paul is not elected president in this year’s election, by 2016 American liberty will be in a forgotten grave in a forgotten grave yard.

Having said this, there is no way Ron Paul can be elected, for these reasons:

Not enough Americans understand that the “war on terror” has been used to create a police state. The brainwashed citizenry believe that the police state is making them safe from terrorists.

Liberals, progressives, and the left-wing oppose Ron Paul, claiming that “he would abolish the social safety net, privatize Social Security and Medicare, throw the widows and orphans into the street, abolish the Federal Reserve,” etc.

Apparently, liberals, progressives, and the left-wing do not understand that privatizing Social Security and Medicare and destroying the social safety net are policies that many conservative Republicans favor and are policies that Wall Street is forcing on both political parties. In contrast, a President Ron Paul would be isolated in the White House and would never be able to muster the support of Congress and the powerful interest groups to achieve such radical changes. Moreover, Ron Paul has made it clear that a welfare-free state cannot be achieved by decree but only by creating an economy in which opportunity exists for people to stand on their own feet. Ron Paul has said that he does not support ending welfare before an economy is created that makes a welfare state unnecessary.

Candidate Paul cannot take any steps to reassure Americans that he would not throw them to the mercy of the free market, because his libertarian base would turn on him as another unprincipled politician willing to sacrifice his principles for political expediency.

If libertarians were not inflexible, candidate Paul could endorse Ron Unz’s proposal to solve the illegal immigration problem by raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour, so that Americans could afford to work the jobs that are taken by illegals.

Economist James K. Galbraith is probably correct that Unz’s proposal would boost the economy by injecting purchasing power and that the unemployment would be largely confined to illegals who would return to their home country. However, if Ron Paul were to treat Unz’s proposal as one worthy of study and consideration, libertarian ideologues would write him off. Whatever liberal/progressive support he gained would be offset by the loss of his libertarian base.

Why can’t libertarians be as intelligent as Ron Unz and see that if the Constitution is lost all that remains is tyranny?

In short, Americans cannot see beyond their ideologies to the real issue, which is the choice between the Constitution and tyranny.

So we hear absurd accusations that Ron Paul, a libertarian “is a racist.” “Ron Paul is an anti-semite.” “Ron Paul would favor the rich and hurt the poor.”

We don’t hear “Ron Paul would restore and protect the US Constitution.”

What do Americans think life will be like in the absence of the Constitution? I will tell you what it will be like, but first let’s consider the obstacles Ron Paul would face if he were to win the Republican nomination and if he were to be elected president.

In my opinion, if Ron Paul were to win the Republican nomination, the Republican Party would conspire to refuse it to him. The party would simply nominate a different candidate.

If despite everything, Ron Paul were to end up in the White House, he would not be able to form a government that would support his policies. Appointments to cabinet secretaries and assistant secretaries that would support his policies could not be confirmed by the US Senate. President Paul would have to appoint whomever the Senate would confirm in order to form a government. The Senate’s appointees would undermine his policies.

What a President Ron Paul could do, assuming Congress, controlled by powerful private interest groups, did not impeach him on trumped up charges, would be to use whatever forums that might be permitted him to explain to the public, judges, and law schools that the danger from terrorists is miniscule compared to the danger from a government unaccountable to law and the Constitution.

The reason we should vote for Ron Paul is to signal to the powers that be that we understand what they are doing to us. If Paul were to receive a large vote, it could have two good effects. One could be to introduce some caution into the establishment that would slow the march into more war and tyranny. The other is it would signal to Washington’s European and Japanese puppets that not all Americans are stupid sheep. Such an indication could make Washington’s puppet states more cautious and less cooperative with Washington’s drive for world hegemony.

What America Without the Constitution Will Be Like

In the January 4 Huff Post, attorney and author John Whitehead reported on the militarization of local police. Some police forces are now equipped with spy drones. Whitehead reports that a drone manufacturer, AeroVironment Inc., plans to sell 18,000 drones to police departments throughout the country. The company is also advertising a small drone, the “Switchblade,” which can track a person, land on the person and explode.

How long before Americans will be spied upon or murdered as extremists at the discretion of local police?

Recognizing the privacy danger, if not the murder danger, the American Civil Liberties Union has issued a report, “Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance.”

The ACLU believes, correctly, that liberty is threatened by “a surveillance society in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded, and scrutinized by authorities.”

The ACLU calls on Congress to legislate privacy protections against the police use of drones. I support the ACLU because it is the most important defender of civil liberty despite other misguided activities, but I wonder what the ACLU is thinking. Congress and the federal courts have already acquiesced in the federal government’s warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency. The Bush regime violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act many times, and all involved, including President Bush, should have been sent to prison for many lifetimes, as each violation carries a 5-year prison term. But the executive branch emerged scot free. No one was held accountable for clear violations of US statutory law.

The ACLU might think that although the federal executive branch has successfully elevated itself above the law, state and local police forces are still accountable. We must hope that they are, but I doubt it.

The militarization of local police has received some attention. What has not received attention is that state and local police are also being federalized. It is not only military armaments and spy technology that local police are receiving from Washington, but also an attitude toward the public along with federal oversight and the collaboration that goes with it. When Homeland Security, a federal police force, comes into states, as I know has occurred in Georgia and Tennessee, and doubtless other states, and together with the state police stop cars and trucks on Interstate highways and subject them to warrantless searches, what is happening is the de facto deputizing of the state police by Homeland Security. This is the way that Goering and Himmler federalized into the Gestapo the independent police forces of German provinces such as Prussia and Bavaria.

Homeland Security has expanded its warrantless searches far beyond “airline security.”

The budding gestapo agency now conducts warrantless searches on the nation’s highways, on bus and train passengers, and at Social Security offices. On Tuesday January 3, 2012, the Social Security office in Leesburg, Florida, apparently a terrorist hotspot, became a Homeland Security checkpoint. The DHS Gestapo armed with automatic weapons and sniffer dogs demanded IDs from local residents visiting their local Social Security office.

Thomas Milligan, district manager for the Social Security Administration office, said staff were not informed their offices were about to be stormed by armed federal police officers. DHS officials refused to answer questions asked by local media and left with no explanation at noon, reports infowars.com.

The DHS gestapo justified its takeover of a Leesburg Florida Social Security office as being an integral part of “Operational Shield,” conducted by the Federal Protective Service to detect “the presence of unauthorized persons and potentially disruptive or dangerous activities.”

One wonders if even brainwashed flag-waving “superpatriots” can miss the message. The Social Security office of Leesburg, Florida, population 19,086 in central Florida is not a place where terrorists devoid of proper ID might be visiting. To protect America from the scant possibility that terrorists might be congregating at the Leesburg Social Security office, the tyrants in Washington sent the Federal Protective Service at who knows what cost to demand ID from locals visiting their Social Security office.

What is this all about except to establish the precedent that federal police, a new entity in American life, the Federal Protective Service, has authority over state and local police offices and can appear out of the blue to interrogate local citizens.

Why the ACLU thinks it is going to get any action out of a Congress that has accommodated the executive branch’s destruction of habeas corpus, due process, and the constitutional and legal prohibitions against torture is beyond me. But at least the issue is raised. But don’t expect to hear about it from the “mainstream media.”

Americans in 2012, although only a few are aware, live in a concentration camp that is far better controlled than the one portrayed by George Orwell in 1984. Orwell, writing in the late 1940s could not imagine the technology that makes control of populations so thorough as it is today. Orwell’s protagonist could at least have hope. In 2012 with the erasure of privacy by the US government, protagonists can be eliminated by hummingbird-sized drones before they can initiate a protest, much less a rebellion.

Never in human history has a people been so easily and willingly controlled by a hostile government as Americans, who are the least free people on earth. And a large percentage of Americans still wave the flag and chant USA! USA! USA!

The Bush regime operated as if the Constitution did not exist. Any semblance of constitutional government that remained after the Bush years was terminated when Congress passed and President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act. One wonders how the National Rifle Association, the defender of the Second Amendment, will now fare. If there is no Constitution, how can there be a Second Amendment? If the President, at his discretion, can set aside habeas corpus and due process and murder citizens based on unproven suspicions, why can’t he set aside the Second Amendment?

Indeed, it is folly to expect a police state to tolerate an armed population.

The NRA is very supportive of the police and military. Now that these armed organizations are being turned against the public, how will the NRA adjust its posture?

Many NRA members, pointing to the “Oath Keepers,” former members of the military who pledge to defend the Constitution, and to police chiefs who support the Second Amendment, believe that the police and military will disobey orders to attack citizens.

But we already witness constantly the gratuitous brutality of “our” police against peaceful protesters. We witness military troops all over the world murder citizens who protest government abuses. Why can’t it happen here?

If you don’t want it to happen here, you had better figure out some way to get Ron Paul into the Presidency and to get him a cabinet and subcabinet that will support him.

Meanwhile, the police state grows. On January 4, 2012, the Obama regime announced by decree, not by legislation, the creation of the Bureau of Counterterrorism which will among other tasks “seek to strengthen homeland security, countering violent extremism.”

Take a moment to think. Do you know of any “violent extremism” happening in the US?

The regime is telling you that it needs a new police bureau with unaccountable powers to “strengthen homeland security” against a nonexistent bogyman.

So who will be the violent extremists who require countering by the Bureau of Counterterrorism? It will be peace activists, the Occupy Wall Street protesters, the unemployed and foreclosed homeless. It will be whoever the police state says. And there is no due process or recourse to law.

Given the facts before you, you are out of your mind if you think Ron Paul’s rhetoric against the welfare state is more important than his defense of liberty.

Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a well-conceived and attractive book about the first weeks of the Occupy Wall Street movement that was recently published by the Left imprint Verso Books. It reads like a journal, except the entries are not from just one writer, but a collection of several. They range from the well-known like prison activist and Black Panther Angela Davis to a young activist named Manissa Mahawaral. Edited by a small group of occupiers and the editors of the journals n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy, and The New Inquiry, this text primarily covers the scene at the Zurcotti Park encampment in Lower Manhattan where the Occupy Wall Street movement more or less began. Part diary and part reflection, some of its most compelling moments come when the younger occupiers write about various realizations they have during the course of the occupation.

My favorite anecdote of this type is from an activist involved in the Occupy movement in Oakland, CA. When she first began participating, she found the dislike of the police from certain members of the camp to be disturbing. After all, they too were part of the so-called 99%. However, after a few days in the camp and the violent police attacks on the Oakland camp and protests following the first raid on Oscar Grant Plaza, her understanding of law enforcement’s role in protecting the wealthy and powerful changed dramatically. “I am ashamed,” she writes. “I was so naive about the cops in Oakland, but even more than this I am furious… that the police are allowed to brutalize people….” It is moments like this where the Occupy movement becomes transcendent and more than the collection of individuals, groups and and encampments that it is. Interspersed throughout the book are a number of drawings and collages that are not only visually appealing but also clever statements about the essential issues involved.

The book is not just a collection observations from the frontlines. Also included are analyses of the economic reasons behind the movement from Left Business Observer editor Doug Henwood and a fascinating discussion of the history of the space where Occupy Atlanta was situated. This latter piece is also one of several pieces that discusses the role of people of color in the movement.

As one of the first of many books about the Occupy movement to be published, Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America sets a high standard. One hopes it is read by many, especially among those that couldn’t or didn’t make it to an Occupy camp before the State’s onslaught on them. This movement should not die.

Hot on the heels of the aforementioned book come OR Books addition. Titled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America, this work covers similar ground to Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America. What it lacks in graphics, it makes up for in content. Written in a continuous narrative broken into chapters, Occupying Wall Street differs from the collection of vignettes contained in the Verso Books text, while also maintaining a more or less chronological telling of the original Zurcotti Park encampment from its beginning to its eventual destruction by the police on November 15, 2011. In addition, Occupying Wall Street spends more time placing the Occupy movement in the context of the international wave of protest that has swept from Greece to Britain to Tunisia and Egypt to the United States and a multitude of other localities around the globe.

Written by a larger collective of writers who modestly call themselves Writers for the 99%, the OR Books text functions as a description of life at Zurcotti Park and within the Occupy movement over the period noted above. If Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a journal of the Occupy Wall Street movement, then Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America is the literary equivalent of a wonderfully written diary. These two books are not exclusive to each other. in fact they are companion volumes that read together provide an engrossing and well-told description of one of the most hopeful protest movements to erupt in the capitalist world in decades.

The Young Lords Rise From the Pages

Speaking of attractive books to arrive recently on my bookshelf, the Haymarket Books reprint of the Young Lords 1971 book Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971 certainly deserves a mention. The Young Lords Party was a revolutionary group of Puerto Rican youth that organized primarily among the young and working-class residents of New York’s Puerto Rican barrios during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Borrowing some of their style from the ideologically similar Black Panthers, this group was a dominant force in barrio politics during much of their existence. Their straightforward approach to solving some of the economic and political inequities in the barrio attracted thousands of supporters in the barrio and hundreds of powerful enemies in Christie Mansion and other edifices of power in New York. When I attended briefly attended Fordham University in the Bronx from Fall 1972 through Spring 1974 one of my smoking buddies was an active member of the group. His knowledge of Marxist theory was impressive as was his commitment to the struggle in the barrio. Needless to say, he and I had many intense discussions that taught me — as no book possibly could — the colonial situation of the Puerto Rican people and helped me unlearn years of misinformation about that island nation.

Palante is a history, explanation and discussion of the Young Lords Party from the perspective of its members in 1971. There is no bourgeois nationalism repeated in these pages. Instead, in the best tradition of other revolutionary nationalism, Palante argues that cultural and social freedom for the Puerto Rican nation is inseparable from economic freedom and a socialist revolution. For those uncertain of the difference, let me quote writer Earl Ofari from a 1969 article he wrote about the two phenomena as they relate to the black people of the United States :

“Revolutionary nationalists, unlike cultural nationalists, recognize that it is impossible to resolve the problems of black people under the structure of American Capitalism. This has led Huey Newton to correctly point out that one who adheres to the philosophy of revolutionary nationalism must of necessity be a socialist. For revolutionary nationalists, by and large, take the position that in order to oppose capitalism it is mandatory that one adopt an outlook of international working class solidarity with particular emphasis on the struggles of Third World people against Imperialism.”

The Young Lords believed the same analysis applied to the situation of the Puerto Ricans.

Looking at it today, the most striking aspect of this book is not the audacious (by today’s standards) writings calling for a revolution in the United States and an independent Puerto Rico. It is the collection of photographs. Difficult to pry one’s eyes away from, the photos herein rank up there with the best photojournalism has to offer. The struggles of the young revolutionaries and the people they worked with are evident in the faces on these pages and the places and actions set down in a darkroom forty years ago. The pride of a people realizing its power and the anger of that people realizing why and who has wronged it radiates from the stark black and white images that fill the last half of this beautiful work.

In her book, Nelson writes that “the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological.” On a practical level, the BPP provided free community health care services, including preventative education. Simultaneously, the BPP railed against the medical-industrial complex, declaring that health care was “a right and not a privilege.” Ronald “Doc” Satchel, the minister of health for the Chicago BPP, wrote in the BPP newspaper that “the medical profession within this capitalist society…is composed generally of people working for their own benefit and advancement rather than the humane aspects of medical care.” A newsletter published by the Southern California chapter argued that “poor people in general and black people in particular are not given the best care available. Our people are treated like animals, experimented on and made to wait long hours in waiting rooms.”

By 1970, People’s Free Medical Clinics had become a requirement for every BPP chapter. In 1972, the BPP revised point six of the founding ten-point-platform, adding a demand for “completely free healthcare for all black and oppressed people…We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventative medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide ourselves with proper medical attention and care.”

While citing Martin Luther King’s 1966 declaration that “of all forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane,” one chapter provides an important historical context for the BPP’s health activism by detailing what Nelson calls “the long medical civil rights movement,” that began long before the BPP. “Mobilized in response to the distinctly hazardous risks posed by segregated medical facilities, professions, societies, and schools; deficient or nonexistent healthcare services; medical maltreatment; and scientific racism, activism challenges to medical discrimination have been an important focal point for African American protest efforts and organizations. The Panthers were heirs to health activism that directly reflected tactics drawn from this tradition,” writes Nelson.

Nelson says the central focus of her scholarly work is on “the intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality.” She has co-edited Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001) and Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (scheduled to be released in March, 2012). To learn more, please visit Alondra’s web site.)

Angola 3 News: In our recent interview with Billy X Jennings from It’s About Time BPP, one theme explored was how, with rare exception, the mainstream media has misrepresented the BPP. However, it seems that even the radical and anti-capitalist media has generally underreported the health activism that is the focus if your book. How did the BPP’s health activism relate to their better-known stances against white supremacy, capitalism, and police violence?

Alondra Nelson: Yes, it’s true. The Black Panthers’ health activism has been under-reported across the ideological spectrum. Their critics obviously did not want to cast them in a positive light. And, as your question suggests, even the Party’s supporters said little about this important aspect of the BPP’s work. I think it’s plausible to say that many on the Right and some of us on the Left — in very different ways and for completely opposite reasons — were captivated by a vision of the Party that did not include its health politics. Depictions of African Americans working in their neighborhoods, wearing white medical coats, was unspectacular compared to images of Black radicals wearing leather jackets and carrying guns.

It is ironic that our collective memory of the Panthers remains so incomplete because their health activism — from their political writing about medical issues in The Black Panther newspaper to their practice of DIY healthcare — exemplified the anti-racist, anti-capitalist stance for which they are known. In fact, the reality of health inequality brought the BPP’s political perspective into sharper relief because it offered stark and specific examples of how economic and racial oppression literally damaged bodies, families and communities.

As you know, the BPP was originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a name that reflected that protecting communities from police brutality was a primary motivation for the group’s founding. The BPP exposed the misuse of power whether it was at the hands of police officers or physicians. So, it’s also useful to think of the Panthers as being engaged in medical self-defense.

In Los Angeles, Party members Ericka Huggins and Elaine Brown, nursing professor Marie Branch, Dr. Terry Kupers, and others established that chapter’s People’s Free Medical Clinic. But, like all of the BPP’s health activism, this work extended beyond the clinic, including in this case, confronting police brutality. (Branch shared meeting notes with me from the 1970s from her personal archive where the formation of BPP health programs and prisoners’ protection from medical discrimination were seamlessly discussed). The LA Panthers advocated for, and provided health care for, incarcerated persons; some of these men and women needed medical attention because they had been abused while in police custody.

A3N: How does the story of the BPP’s health activism, as presented in your book, contribute to and challenge the traditional presentations of the BPP by both the mainstream and alternative media?

AN: Body and Soul offers an account of the BPP that moves away from the narrow confines of the so-called “culture wars,” in which the Party can only ever be a positive force or a negative element. Paying attention to the Party’s health activism calls into question the inaccurate stereotype of the activists as aimless thugs.

We also gain a different perspective on things we thought we already knew about the BPP; like the fact that the Panthers were avid followers of Fanon, Che and Mao, whose writings were required reading for all members. Through the prism of health, one can see very clearly the influence of Fanon’s dissection of colonial medicine in Algeria on the Panthers’ understanding of medical discrimination in the U.S. We can take seriously the fact that Fanon and Che were physicians as well as political thinkers. We can appreciate that Mao, who established the “barefoot doctors” lay health worker program, made available to the Party not only broad revolutionary principles, but also specific ideas about health care as political practice.

A3N: What do you think were the most successful tactics employed by the BPP as part of its health activism? Strategically speaking, what lessons from the BPP’s health activism do you think are most applicable for today’s activists to learn from?

AN: In addition to setting up their own clinics, they used legal approaches not dissimilar from the NAACP to voice their opposition to problematic biomedical research. The Party leadership realized early on that “policing the police” would not be the only method they used in their effort to topple racism and capitalism. The Panthers were pretty flexible tacticians.

One of the lessons that the BPP offers today’s activists is that they should be more loyal to the desired outcome than to the tactic. The sit-in came to be associated with the southern civil rights movement just as the mic check is now emblematic of the Occupy movement. But these groups also used other tactics: marching, occupying, sermons, etc. Social movements are dynamic phenomena; circumstances are constantly changing. So too should tactics.

One of the BPP’s more fascinating tactics was what I call, after sociologist Lily Hoffman, the “politics of knowledge.” Working in this vein, the Panthers engaged and reinterpreted scientific ideas about race and disease. They reinterpreted scientific theories about the causes of sickle cell anemia, for example, by placing the prevalence of the disease in the context of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the medical-industrial complex and contemporary racism.

The Panthers’ use of this tactic — the politics of knowledge — should remind today’s activists that “framing” matters. It is important to be able to translate political arguments — health-related ones and other ones — into language, into stories, really, that resonate with the broader public. The Party could be expert at this.

The Nixon administration and mainstream philanthropies would ultimately co-opt the issue of sickle cell anemia. But the BPP played a key role in raising awareness about the disease and in situating it in a powerful political language that could mobilize communities.

A3N: Along with chapters focusing on the BPP’s free medical clinics and the campaign to educate the Black community about, and test for, Sickle Cell Anemia, another chapter focuses on the BPP’s involvement with a diverse coalition that successfully organized against the formation of the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA in 1973. You write that BPP felt that the Center’s “biologization of violence” line of research would ultimately “craft a narrative of Black and Latino violent pathology” that would serve to “make already marginalized populations more vulnerable to medicine as a tool of social control,” and “effect the further criminalization of social groups—black males, the incarcerated—and in turn justify calls for increased surveillance and social control.”

While writing that the defeat of the Center was a “notable triumph,” you note further that it “was somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory for Newton and his allies, as blocking resources to the center as an entity would not prevent individual researchers from pursuing other sources of support for their investigations.” With this in mind, how has biologization of violence research progressed since the 1970s? How much influence has it had on public policy?

AN: Attempts to attribute the causes of violence to biology (and closely related to this, criminality) are a very old story. In the late 19th century, the influential Italian criminologist, Lombroso, claimed that new methods (e.g., phrenology) and theories (e.g., social Darwinism) showed that the tendency toward criminal behavior was inherited.

More than one hundred years later, similar ideas persist. In the 1990s, during the first Bush presidency, Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, set-up a “violence initiative” to explore the biological models of social unrest in urban settings. Your readers may recall that around the same time another Bush official, referencing studies on violence among non-human primates, said that disproportionately black and brown “inner cities” were like “jungles.” (The initiative and controversial commentary around it would recall the heated debate the Panthers were engaged in over plans to form a “violence center” at UCLA in the 1970s that may have had an especially harmful impact on black and Latino youth and men).

Recently behavioral researchers have aimed to link the presence of what has been called the “warrior gene” to violent, criminal behavior. At a time when we are learning even more about the complexities of genetic inheritance, about the epigenome and the systems biology, it simply does not make sense that one single genetic marker could have such a dramatic, determinative effect.

A3N: What role has biologization of violence research played in justifying the mass incarceration explosion that began in the 1970s, increasing the prison population from 300,000 to 2.4 million today, giving the US the highest incarceration rate and the largest total prisoner population in the world?

AN: To the extent that the longstanding efforts that I have just described have kept in circulation the fallacy that there is a definitive link between human biology and violence, theses ideas have indeed served as a justification for the expansion of the carceral system.

This is where the policy implications of the biologization of violence come to the fore: If violence is “in your genes” or “in your blood,” then one can justify policies that lock people away because these people are “lost causes.”

And, in turn, the idea that there is a innate predisposition to violence contributes to the decline of support for rehabilitation and reparative justice programs.

A3N: Since the 1970s, has the US come any closer to realizing the BPP’s public health goals? If BPP co-founder Huey P Newton were alive today, what do you think he would say about President Obama’s “Affordable Care Act?”

AN: The revised ten-point platform was prescient in capturing one side of the recent debates about widening health inequality in the U.S. and what to do about it. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that Newton and the Party would have appreciated the historic nature of what President Obama accomplished — a feat that many administrations before his had variously tried to accomplish and failed to do. Perhaps Newton would have even observed that the Affordable Care Act is a very small step in the right direction.

However, some journalists and pundits have noted the similarity between President Obama’s historic Affordable Care Act and the national insurance plan that former President Nixon backed unsuccessfully. Given the animus between the Party and Nixon, and the way this administration and its agents worked to destroy the BPP, it is hard to imagine that Newton would have been in strong support of recent healthcare reform legislation. There would have certainly been opposition to the fact that President Obama’s plan is a boon for insurance companies because the Panthers demanded, “healthcare for the people, not for profit.”

At a time when Irish peace activists have been illegally imprisoned in Israel after their humanitarian ship the MV Saoirse was hi-jacked in international waters by Israeli commandos, hosting these ‘Israeli Film Days’ sends out the worst possible message: that Filmbase is indifferent to its exploitation as a site of propaganda for the state that perpetrates such atrocities.  To cancel the event at this point would… be perceived worldwide as an honourable gesture of solidarity with the oppressed Palestinian people who have called for an international cultural boycott of the Israeli state.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) also issued an “Open Letter to Filmbase“, expressing its surprise

that a prominent Irish cultural institution would allow the Israeli embassy to carry out this audacious ‘Brand Israel’ activity on its premises hardly two weeks after Irish peace activists were illegally apprehended by the Israeli navy in international waters, humiliated, and imprisoned in Israel…

These approaches were rejected by Filmbase, despite much dissension among its employees, not all of whom supported the decision to host the event. The opening of the festival, a wet and miserable evening, saw Filmbase “defended” by a force of at least two dozen Garda­í. Members of the IPSC, the Irish Anti-War Movement, Act for Palestine  and others demonstrated noisily and peacefully, displaying Palestinian flags and placards with such slogans as “End the Siege of Gaza” and “Boycott Israel”.  The arrivals of the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore, and the Minister for Defence and Justice Alan Shatter were greeted with particularly vociferous cries of  ”shame! shame!”

A number of individuals engaged in peaceful direct action by infiltrating the proceedings; some of these – including a female Palestinian IPSC member wearing hijab – were ejected from the foyer. Others gained access but were ejected one by one after successively interrupting the Israeli Ambassador’s welcoming speech, during which the chanting of slogans from outside was clearly audible.

All in all, the atmosphere was fraught but good-humoured. Nonetheless, shortly after the guests had retired to a sound-proof cinema within Filmbase to view the first film, and just before the demonstration was scheduled to disperse, the Gardaí suddenly decided to clear Curved Street, thus prolonging the protest and, indeed, contriving to direct it partly against themselves. While not descending to the levels of their Egyptian or Syrian colleagues, the Gardaí behaved with a roughness they had hitherto reserved for demonstrations outside the Israeli Embassy itself.

Ironically, inside Filmbase at that very moment Minister Gilmore was referring to those who “are demonstrating outside this theatre as I speak and they are fully entitled to do so in a peaceful fashion.” Clearly his colleague Minister Shatter, the former Chairman of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties who now has ultimate responsibility for police tactics, was of a different opinion.

Those demonstrators standing in front of Filmbase were pushed unceremoniously on to Dame Lane, a side street flanking the building. Shortly thereafter, the decision was taken to march around the block to join up with the demonstrators on the parallel side street, Eustace Street. At this, the Gardaí blocked Eustace Street at the point where it meets Curved Street, thus denying access to the IFI to anyone wishing to enter it from the north and, quite ineptly, denying Eamon Gilmore – whose official car was parked outside the IFI – an escape route. At this point the luckless Tánaiste chose to emerge from Filmbase, and was forced to make an ignominious exit on to Dame Street in reverse gear.

Fintan Lane, co-ordinator of the Irish Ship to Gaza, who barely two weeks previously had been one of those Irish citizens detained in an Israeli prison with little or no support from Mr Gilmore, started to speak about his experience. At that moment, a senior Garda officer stepped up behind him and forcibly wrested the megaphone from him. The officer explained that he was confiscating the megaphone, which could be collected from Pearse Street Garda Station once the “Film Days” were over, i.e. in four days’ time. Contrary to regulations, no receipt for the confiscated property was supplied to the IPSC.

Thus ended the first protest against the “Israeli Film Days”.  Each successive day saw demonstrations of varying sizes, none as dramatic as the first, but all stewarded by a host of Gardai sometimes outnumbering the protestors.

*****

Filmbase, by its own account, “is a not-for-profit resource centre for filmmakers. Our building… is a public space where filmmakers can network, hire filmmaking equipment, take training courses and receive support and information about working within the Irish film industry.”

There appears to be no mention here of providing cinematic showcases for rogue regimes. One suspects that the Israelis approached Filmbase rather than the nearby Irish Film Institute (IFI) because of the IFI’s decision in 2006 to cancel the Israeli Embassy’s partial sponsorship of its Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in the wake of Israel’s murderous onslaught on Lebanon that summer. The then IFI Director Mark Mulqueen stated that:

[t]he decision [was] taken in light of the current activities of the Israeli Government and prompted by the performance of your Ambassador in explaining these acts to the Irish public.

Either no such considerations deterred Filmbase, or a specific body-count must be met (a few hundred? a few thousand?) before the “activities of the Israeli Government” are deemed unacceptable.

It should be noted that Mulqueen did not cancel the showing of an Israeli film in the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, but merely rejected Israeli sponsorship (which should not, of course, have been accepted in the first place). Similarly, when the classic “shooting and weeping” Israeli film Waltz with Bashir was on show in Irish cinemas in 2008, the IPSC neither protested nor advised anybody not to see it, because there was no direct propagandistic link between its screening and the Government of Israel.

In the case of the “Israeli Film Days”, something quite different was at issue: the festival was organised, funded and presented by the Israeli Foreign Ministry (which has stated that it “sees no difference between propaganda and culture”) through its Dublin Embassy. Furthermore, the presence of two high-ranking ministers of the Irish Government alongside the Israeli Ambassador at the opening turned the entire festival into a kind of interstate love-in, and Filmbase into an ersatz Israeli Embassy.

In a letter sent by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) in reply to a number of people who had protested about Irish Government involvement in the “Film Days”, we read that the Tánaiste “believed strongly that efforts to prevent the festival being held at all amounted to an attack on free speech in Ireland, which he did not hesitate to oppose. He attended the opening of the festival to make this clear.”

But, as we have seen, free speech was never the issue: had Filmbase chosen to show the films concerned without any Israeli Government backing, it would have been welcome to do so – although clearly this was never an option, as the festival was purely a money-making venture for the “cultural institution” in question.

However, the question arises: if the Government of Iran hired Filmbase for “Iranian Film Days”, would Messrs Gilmore and Shatter have attended the opening in company with the Iranian Ambassador? Undoubtedly there would be protests against such a festival, but would the Tánaiste’s purported respect for free speech nonetheless have obliged him to take such a stand?

According to the DFA’s letter,

[a]ttempts to impose a cultural boycott only play into the hands of those in Israel who claim that Ireland’s consistent criticisms of Israeli policies are based on antipathy rather than on our genuine and valid concerns about the human rights abuses arising from the continued occupation of the Palestinian territories.

However, surely “antipathy” is the only valid response to Israel’s “abuses”? The DFA’s stance seems to echo the Christian maxim “hate the sin, love the sinner”, the love being proven by trading and diplomatic privileges that allow the sinner to go on sinning against the dispossessed Palestinians.

The truth would appear to be that the Irish Government has been coming under steady pressure from Israel to “clean up its act” and dissociate itself from Irish civil society’s predominantly critical stance towards the Zionist state. A notorious article in Ynet, the most influential Israeli online news site, flatteringly described Ireland as “the most hostile country in Europe”, recycled a lie circulated online by Israel’s supporters that “Anti-Israel elements recently vandalized a Dublin auditorium [i.e. Filmbase] slated to host a concert by Israeli singer Izhar Ashdot”, and cited a statement by an Israeli official that “the Irish Government is feeding its people with anti-Israel hatred…What we are seeing here is clear anti-Semitism.”

Thus the Tánaiste’s presence, rather than attesting to his noble commitment to free speech, would appear to have been a placatory gesture to the Israeli regime. No doubt this was deemed particularly politic given the parlous state of the Irish economy, and the fervent desire of the Government to keep on the good side of its vehemently pro-Israeli EU “partners” and of Uncle Sam, provider of so much investment in our vulnerable little island.

In a sense Mr Gilmore was emulating the former Greek Prime Minister Papandreou who, in violation of Greece’s foreign policy traditions, blocked the June 2010 Gaza-bound flotilla from leaving Greek waters after Israeli Prime Minister “Netanyahu… decided to come to the aid of his newfound friend in a meeting of foreign ministers and European leaders, imploring them to provide Greece with financial aid.”

The DFA letter began with an assertion that “[t]he Government does not support academic, cultural or other boycotts against Israel.” Given that Palestinian civil society is calling for precisely such boycotts, and that this call is inspired by the campaigns that helped end Apartheid in South Africa, what Mr Gilmore is, in fact, admitting is that the Irish Government rejects the will of the persecuted Palestinian people in favour of enhanced links with the regime that persecutes them. No longer can Irish people bask in the illusion that their Government is somehow an exception to the pro-Israeli EU norm – and perhaps it is good, finally, to have this exposed.

Inevitably, given its vulnerability in the face of hostile free market norms, culture is engaged in a constant negotiation with the state. That negotiation is traditionally transacted with what Pierre Bourdieu called “the left hand of the state, the set of agents of the so-called spending ministries which are the trace, within the state, of the social struggles of the past. They are opposed to the right hand of the state, the technocrats of the Ministry of Finance, the public and private banks and the ministerial cabinets.” Thus culture survives while staving off enlistment as a mere reflection of the state’s invariably suspect self-image.

In this instance Filmbase has chosen, fatally, to negotiate with the right hand of the state, indeed to transform itself temporarily – for profit – into an arm of the state. The result has been an occupation of Temple Bar by police who, at the behest of a Zionist Justice Minister, violated the civil rights of Irish protestors in the interests of the rogue Israeli state. In the process, Filmbase betrayed many of its own constituents – those film directors and actors, for example, who signed the PACBI-IPSC “Irish artists’ pledge to boycott Israel“.

Simultaneously it betrayed Temple Bar’s self- image as a kind of utopian cultural space, preserving an ethos of bohemianism and independence. Perhaps it is also good, finally, to have this exposed.

I know the police cause you trouble
They cause trouble everywhere
But when you die and go to heaven
There’ll be no policeman there

— Hobo’s Lullaby by Goebel Reeves

On September 17, 2011, a group of protesters gathered at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan under the banner:  Occupy Wall Street.  Within weeks the Occupy movement and its message of income inequality and corporate dominance of the political process spread across the nation and the globe.  By the end of October occupations were reported in some 2,000 cities worldwide.

On or about November 10, a conference call engaging some eighteen American cities initiated a coordinated crackdown on OWS encampments.  Police actions from that day forward have been persistent, forceful and often violent.  How else do you explain the use of tear gas, pepper spray, batons and pepper pellets to disperse, corral and arrest non-violent protesters?

Evidence has emerged that federal authorities, including Homeland Security, were tapped to advise or coordinate the assault.  While a contentious debate has broken out concerning the particulars, who else but a federal agent could have coordinated mayors and police chiefs in disparate communities across the nation?

Moreover, if it is not so, where are the denials?  What political advantage can be gained by maintaining neutrality in this fight?  Is the president with us or with them?  As the late great Howard Zinn said:  You can’t be neutral on a moving train.

To the students who were pepper sprayed or the activists who were gassed or the protesters who were clubbed, it does not matter who gave the order or who remained silent to maintain deniability.

It probably did not matter who gave the orders to the officers on the street either.  The orders were given and the officers carried them out.  But it might have mattered how those orders were phrased.

I know something about what it is to be an officer of the law.  My father patrolled a beat in our town for twenty years.  In the summer of Watts he served as a liaison to the minority community.  An honest, fair and impartial cop, he told me what his captain said as he was called to duty at the community college where students were staging a protest of the Vietnam War:  “We are supposed to uphold the law and keep the peace.  We’re not supposed to take sides… but you know what side we’re on!”

I learned then that there were two kinds of law officers:  cops and pigs.  My father was a cop.  Those who lead with their clubs, those who pepper spray student protesters, and those who form lines of oppression against peaceful demonstrators and clear the way with tear gas and rubber bullets are pigs.

As a general lot, cops have always tended to be reactionary and intolerant.  Confronted with any dissident group, raw instinct draws them to an adversarial posture.  When pressed into crowd control they strike a pose and draw a line:  Us versus Them.

My father knew better back then and the police on the streets should know better now.  The cause of the occupiers is fundamentally different than the antiwar demonstrators.  The very same people the occupiers oppose are waging war against police, firefighters, teachers and nurses.  Police forces across the nation are being downsized, their salaries and benefits under assault, their right to collective bargaining challenged and their unions under siege.

The rest of the workforce faces job exportation.  Public employees face privatization.  Charter schools are just an excuse to hire non-union teachers.  Private security forces will soon replace police and private contractors will take over fire departments in the name of budgetary restraint.

The occupiers speak for everyone who draws a paycheck.  Consider that the next time you are called to clear out an occupied encampment.  Consider it a dress rehearsal for the Hoovervilles to come, when thousands upon thousands erect makeshift camps not out of choice but out of necessity.

As for the mayors who gave the stamp of approval for this crackdown, your political careers are over.  The occupiers were doing your job.  They were performing a public service.  They provided food, shelter, clothing and care for the forgotten homeless.

We could see the writing on the wall early on.  At first the media was intrigued.  They characterized the occupy movement as the Tea Party of the left and tried to frame it as a partisan divide.  But the occupiers refused to sell out.  It was not a partisan movement.  The media then stepped up its criticism:  The movement was without leaders and without a clear message.  (Ironically, the message was as clear as ending the war.  It could easily be summarized as taking back our government from the corporate elite.  Us against Them.)  Next, they began to focus on health and safety, rats and public urination.  (Welcome to life on the streets.)  They took their cues from the mayors and ran stories on the detrimental effects on small businesses and the costs of policing the occupations.

It was all smoke screen.  It was all prelude to the crackdown that was to come.  The corporate media answers to their corporate masters and they tipped their hands.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the presidential wannabe with his Wall Street pedigree, took the lead in showing America how to step on the little guys who dared stand up against the real power brokers of the world.  How does libertarianism square with suppressing freedom of speech and the right to assemble in protest?  As if we didn’t already know, the mayor made it clear whom he stands with in his irrepressible quest for the highest office.

It’s over, Bloomberg.  You might have thought the media blockade was a stroke of genius but it didn’t work out.  We’re all reporters now and every act of brutality was recorded for posterity.

Before you pat yourself on the back, you didn’t stop the movement.  You only pushed it back.  You can’t kill an idea.  The movement will transform, grow and prosper.  It is written in the wind.  You might as well try to shoot down the sun.

As for the men and women in blue, the next time you are called to action to enforce crowd control on nonviolent protesters, the next time you are ordered to clear encampments in parks and public spaces, remember who cut your health benefits after September 11, remember who cut your wages and broke your unions, remember why your children will not be going to the university, remember how your neighbors lost their jobs, their homes, their pensions and take a step back.

t’s us against them and, like it or not, you are with us.

The camps are important free-speech centers, a long overdue mass protest of the capitalist austerity program. Hopefully, the movement will be able to turn the tide against the police crackdown.

But, looking beyond the haze of tear gas, occupiers are starting to ask, “What’s next?” How can the Occupy movement create desperately needed change?

The movement’s amazing potential will be squandered if it does not develop past existence as a network of utopian, process-obsessed symbolic encampments. Or “victory” is reduced to settling for a few surface reforms — higher taxes on stock transactions or slaps on the wrist for Wall Street crooks.

To avert this, the mobilization needs to consciously evolve beyond its current orientation, “We are the 99 percent.” That’s a slogan anyone can embrace, from the CEO of Men’s Wearhouse to tea partiers and head-busting police.

Race and sex matter

For the mobilization to make a deep and lasting impression, the survival issues of the bottom of the 99 percent have to move to the top of the agenda. Putting the focus there will raise the movement’s sights, because the needs of those who are most oppressed challenge the very foundations of capitalism — a system dependent on their unequal status.

For this to happen, the leadership of women, immigrants, and people of color, especially women of color, is critical.

These are people disproportionately hurt by the Great Recession, experiencing far higher rates of joblessness, home foreclosures, and poverty. Whether it’s cancer rates or incarceration, they suffer more.

In giving their concerns priority, the movement of “the 99 percent” will actually unify greater numbers of people. The survival needs of people who have the least — like a living wage job, health care, retirement security — are also basic to everyone’s survival, and capitalism is putting them out of reach for more and more people.

Placing a political focus on women and people of color means developing a program and demands that can bridge the multiple divisions that capitalism is so expert at creating. In turn, embracing the leadership of women and people of color will help the Occupy movement evolve into a fighting force for real change. And the good news is that this leadership already exists.

When Occupy Wall Street was two weeks out of the gate, the New York People of Color working group formed. Asian American tenant organizers are involving occupiers in protesting greedy landlords in Chinatown. Occupy Harlem is fighting police policies that target Blacks and Latinos.

In Occupy Philly, Black women are campaigning against a racist youth curfew law and connecting it to Pennsylvania’s penchant for funding prisons over schools and community programs. And in Colorado, the American Indian Movement’s platform for indigenous rights was adopted by Occupy Denver.

Across the U.S., people of color are forming Occupy the Hoods and caucuses that enable them to intervene on issues such as police violence — issues often new to white occupiers. Women, queer, and transgendered activists are likewise pushing their concerns forward through caucuses and teach-ins.

These working groups and actions amplify perspectives that are routinely brushed under the rug by the 1 percent. A next step is to bring this leadership front and center.

The power of labor

Just as issues of women and people of color too often get lost in the shuffle without conscious leadership, the movement risks co-optation without the grass roots of organized labor centrally involved.

This doesn’t mean letting union officials take over, as some young protesters fear. For rank-and-file unionists it does mean bringing labor’s struggles to the Occupy movement, while pushing unions and labor leaders to defend it.

For unionists, Occupy Wall Street offers a historic opportunity to build the independent and radical working-class movement that organized labor must develop to remain alive.

The November 2 general strike in Oakland, Calif., is the clearest example yet of the power of a movement uniting workers and the disenfranchised.

Spurred by the violent dispersal of Occupy Oakland, including the police assault against an Iraq War veteran, and by the corporate attack against longshore workers in Longview, Wash., labor activists agitated for a general strike. The idea caught fire, and the Occupy Oakland general assembly approved it.

The action drew up to 30,000 people and shut Oakland’s port. Occupy Oakland adopted compelling demands for the strike put forward by leftists and unionists, including “end police attacks on our communities” and “defend Oakland schools and libraries.” The strike indicted “an economic system built on inequality and corporate power that perpetuates racism, sexism and the destruction of the environment.”

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union, with seasoned Black and radical leadership in the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area, helped pave the way for this. In the past, Local 10 has shut the port to protest the Iraq War and police murder of Oscar Grant. Occupy Oakland built on this legacy.

A strong next step for the Occupy movement would be to start new occupations at state Capitols to fight budget cuts — to confront the government enabler of Wall Street. Joining with the organized, collective power of labor could make this happen.

Moving forward with a united front

To build for sustained actions, the best vehicle is the united front. This is a powerful alliance of different political tendencies with a working-class program and leadership.

The united front is the direction to go for Occupy activists who are rightfully worried their movement will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or Madison Avenue. With labor and the disenfranchised united, it is highly unlikely that the agenda will be confined to cosmetic reforms or cheerleading Democrats who “feel our pain.”

As the 2012 election season nears, movement opportunists will zero in on the Occupy movement to funnel it into status-quo election campaigns. If the occupations orient to the needs of the most oppressed and fuse with the power of labor, 2012 can be a year where fed-up people in the U.S. did more than just occupy — they started to fight back and win.

• This article first appeared in the Freedom Socialist newspaper.

Loud music boomed out over the Plaza. Dancers moved like shadows in the dimly lit amphitheater. It was nearly midnight. I watched them for a while, then began a stroll around the perimeter. The entire scene was almost surreal. A Native American had moved into a tree above the Plaza, built himself a roosting place and hung out a large sign reading, “Ohlone Land” (the name of the indigenous people). As I stood there admiring his arrangement, I heard the creaking of un-oiled wheels. Three women rolled past me, wheeling a fourth woman on a book-cart who was somehow reading aloud in the dark to the other three.

I moved on, notebook in hand. Someone asked me if I were a writer; I said, “Tonight I’m a war correspondent.” Though I said that with a chuckle, I wasn’t actually joking; this Plaza was a war zone, a contested space. No sentries had been posted; with so many people up and around, there was no need for it. We knew the day and even the hour of the impending raid; a sympathetic insider had told us that the police would come at 4 a.m., just as they had three weeks earlier, on
October 25th.¹ About a hundred of us were arrested that morning.

The grassy area of the Plaza stood two and a half feet above the perimeter. It was still covered with tents, though not as thickly as a few days before. Perhaps a third of them had been taken down in anticipation of the impending raid, and there were now broad avenues through which one could push a shopping cart.

I continued on along 14th, nearly to Broadway. There, above the Plaza entrance hung a large banner. “OAKLAND COMMUNE,” it proclaimed to the world. This was more than just a camp, it had become a symbol of hope and a center of resistance to the dominant one percent. Only two weeks earlier, the general assembly had called a “general strike”–a day of action that had mobilized as many as 50,000 people and shut down the Port on November 2nd. So perhaps not too surprisingly, the power elite viewed Occupy as an invasive native species, and launched a campaign of “low-intensity” warfare which included physical violence, tear gas and pepper spray, as well as ongoing attacks in the corporate media, including slanted and inaccurate news coverage.

In front of the banner, between the entrance and the intersection, stands a flagpole with a metal plaque honoring Marine Corps war dead. According to the inscription it had been erected in 1935. On this monument a group of antiwar veterans² had fastened a Marine Corps emblem with photos of Scott Olsen, the Iraq war veteran and peace activist who’d been critically injured by police during a previous action. Around the base of the pole were numerous burnt-out candles, placed there in his honor.

A couple of motorcycles roared noisily by, then were gone, and music from the amphitheater re-occupied the night air. There wasn’t much traffic at this hour–just past midnight, five minutes into the morning of November 14th. Up ahead was the BART entrance escalator which descended to the subway station under Broadway. Access to BART is part of what makes this such an excellent location. And we were smack dab on the front steps of city hall, right in their face.

Turning left, following the perimeter, I passed the Interfaith tent. Farther along was the library, the only tent in our camp with electric lights; it even displayed a string of Christmas tree lights. “Where do you get the electricity?” I asked a fellow who was reading a book. He shook his head, “I was wondering about that myself,” he said, glancing around. A cord disappeared under a book shelf, to some mysterious source.

I chatted with a semi-retired carpenter, Paul Bloom, who’d been at the Port of Oakland when the police attacked us back in 2003. Now he was living in a tent here in the Plaza. If evicted he had another place he could stay, he told me.

Completing my circuit, I found myself once again at the amphitheater. A dozen people were still dancing. There was a brief halt when the amplifier broke down and the music stopped. Soon they got it going again, now playing the song “The Revolution will not be televised.” Ironically, as I later discovered, the subsequent events of this night were indeed televised–on TV channels and the internet around the world.

“Mic check!” the words rang out, and were repeated, “Mic check!”

The music stopped again, this time so people could hear.

“Police are assembling at the Coliseum,” announced a tall fellow reading from a text message. This was followed by a series of reports on police activity at the Coliseum, where police were reportedly staging for a raid. I glanced up at the clock on the city hall tower, but I couldn’t read it as it was almost directly overhead. Stepping out on the brick pavement by the kitchen, I got a clear view of the other clock, the one on the Tribune tower. It was 1:30 a.m.

Moments later, people were passing out painter’s masks dipped in vinegar. For tear gas, it was explained. I thought this was a bit premature, as the police were unlikely to arrive for another two or three hours.

“Occupy Oakland!” a guy was shouting with a bullhorn. “Can I hear an ‘Occupy Oakland’?”

“Occupy Oakland!” people shouted back. “Occupy Oakland!”

A couple of women were taking down the kids’ tent, which was now empty, the children having been evacuated. The kitchen crew was dismantling their gear and loading onto a truck. Others were moving about with similar tasks. Nobody seemed to be really rushing. Some were clustered in small groups, talking, chatting. A ambiance of festivity still lingered in the air. The scene was rather like breaking camp at the end of a weekend outing.

Twenty minutes had passed since the police activity had first been reported. It was 1:50 a.m.

“Wake up the camp!” the cry rang out, “Everybody up! Gather by the kitchen!” Everybody knew why the kitchen was specified. It was adjacent to the city hall, a convenient place everybody knew. Before long, several dozen people had assembled to determine our course of action.

Glancing around me, I saw some familiar faces, people with whom I’d been arrested during the previous raid, not quite three weeks earlier.

A hundred of us had linked arms and firmly stood there, not moving, as overwhelming numbers of riot police had advanced on us, clubs in hand, shoulder weapons pointing our way. That was what shock & awe looked like, and we hadn’t backed down. But we hadn’t saved the camp. If there was a point to be made, hadn’t we already made it? Our discussion began.

“Are we going to defend the camp?”

“We don’t have enough people.”

“Then what are we going to do?”

In total contrast to the last time we were raided, nobody was dashing around setting up barricades. Experience had shown us that barricades didn’t help much. So what were we going to do? That question was being passed back and forth. To hold the Plaza we’d need a couple thousand people, maybe more. There were perhaps as many as a hundred of us meeting near the kitchen, plus an undetermined number scattered throughout the camp, gathering up their belongings, or performing other last minute tasks.

Leo Ritz-Barr of the Events Committee suggested that we move to 14th and Broadway, a strategic intersection at the entrance to the Plaza. Business would definitely not go on as usual if we blocked it.

“Think of how your actions will affect others,” he admonished us. If one or two people threw rocks at the police, others might be injured in the response. Most of us wanted to keep this non-violent and avoid casualties.

Text messages were sent out to rouse our supporters to come and join us. We had a list of people who’d promised to come when notified, sort of a 21st century version of the Colonial Minutemen, in our case, both women and men. Today’s Redcoats were the riot police in Darth Vader helmets.

I borrowed a cell phone and called a friend. “I’ll be there by 4 a.m.,” he assured me.

The discussion continued. “If we are scattered,” someone was saying, “the convergence point for tomorrow is the library at 4 p.m.” That instruction had been repeated many times during the last few days, especially during the evening’s General Assembly. The phone number of the National Lawyers’ Guild was also announced and repeated.

“I think it’s good to be mobile,” said Andrea Prichett of Cop Watch, seconding Leo’s opinion. “We should go out to 14th and Broadway.”

That seemed to be our best option. We knew we couldn’t save the camp because we couldn’t hope to stop the police, who were certain to come in overwhelming numbers. But we could stop traffic.

“Strategic retreat, then?”

It was now 2:50 a.m., and we began our trek to 14th & Broadway, which was only a few hundred feet away. Passing the Interfaith tent, I saw eight or nine people sitting in front of it, a semicircle of candles placed before them. They’d chosen to stay.

Reaching the intersection, we set up shop and began beating on drums. They were actually plastic buckets and garbage cans, but they worked splendidly, echoing loudly in the otherwise quiet pre-dawn hours. Six or seven people were pounding them furiously, and they resonated like the heartbeat of a newborn era. We chanted, “The Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!” and “We are the 99%!” and “No justice — no peace!”

“Who’s got the power?
We’ve got the Power!
What kind of power?
People power!”

With the drumming and chanting, it was a loud and lively scene, and it kept getting louder. Eerie notes issued from a bugler playing the Deguello.

Although there had been only about 100 of us, certainly less than 150, now as I looked about me, there seemed to be more. 200 maybe? Or could it be 300? It was as though our drumming, bugling and chanting were conjuring up more people. Some minutes later when I again tried to estimate our numbers it looked more like 400, or possibly 500. Really? Could it now be this many?

“Daniel!” I heard someone call my name, and looking around I saw Jonathan Nack, whom I knew from the Port Action committee. Then I saw several others whom I knew. Steve Gilmartin, whom I’d phoned earlier, was there, and I saw old friends and acquaintances I hadn’t seen for months or even years. It was like a reunion. “Thank you! Thank you!” I kept saying, “Thank you for coming!”

The new arrivals were people who’d gotten our text message and come out to support us. Of course the great majority of the crowd were people I didn’t know. There were many, many people there, and I felt very grateful to all of them.

The drums kept beating. The moon overhead shined brightly in the clear, dark sky. It was nearly a full moon.

“There they are!” someone shouted.

A ghostly phalanx of riot police could be seen coming down Broadway on foot from the north. A moment later, we saw more approaching from the south, and then from the east and west on 14th. They were a good block away, presumably in riot gear; I couldn’t see that well in the dim light. They moved slowly. Dark ominous figures.

“They’re everywhere!” said a woman who looked to be about 25 years old. “We’re completely surrounded.” Saying that she let out a laugh of one who’s been through it all. I recognized her as the woman who’d assigned sentry posts a couple weeks before, on the eve of the previous raid.

The advancing police seemed to have halted, a block or two away from us on all sides.

Steve looked at me, grinned and said teasingly, “Based on your studies of military strategy, what do you think we ought to do?”

I looked at him sagely and replied, “Something quick and decisive. Give me a couple days to research it.”

Then, chanting “Whose street? Our street!” we left the intersection where we had gathered, circled the perimeter of our camp, and returned to the intersection of 14th and Broadway. What to do now? A few more moments of confusion, some discussion, people tossing ideas back and forth.

“Mic check!” someone yelled out.

“Mic check!” the of us rest yelled back.

“We need thirty individuals to defend the camp!” the speaker said. There was a hint of military jargon in the way he said that. Probably an ex-GI; several of our people were veterans.

A couple dozen of us followed him into the camp, the rest of us remaining at the intersection.

“They’re going to kettle us,” someone said, saying he’d gotten it off the police scanner. Kettle us? I’d never heard the term before, but I could guess that it meant mass arrest. Someone else spoke up and said the police probably expected us to be listening in on their scanner and might be using it to give disinformation. Perhaps to scare us into leaving. Maybe so, but a mass arrest did indeed seem
likely.

That was followed by a report that that the police were letting people out if they went east on 14th. Anyone who didn’t want to get arrested could get out that way. Most of us didn’t want to get arrested. I didn’t, neither did Steve, nor many others here. We tossed more ideas back and forth.

“There are 500 of us,” said a woman with shoulder length blond hair. She was Mindy Stone, one of the hundred occupiers who had linked arms
and been arrested during the pre-dawn raid of Oct 25th. “If they arrest all 500 of us, that would be quite a statement for us. Let’s stay where we are.”

And that’s what we did. Almost nobody left. We continued our rally right there. As the police closed in around us we again took up beating our drums loudly. We formed a circular picket line in the intersection.

“We are OCCUPY!
We’re never going to DIE!
Every time you kick us out, we are going to MULTIPLY!”

This was of course right in the middle of downtown Oakland. Dawn was soon coming and people would be arriving for work to find the center of the city shut down.

The riot police then advanced right up to us at the intersection, blocking us off from the Plaza, then halted and set up a metal barricade between us and them. As on October 25th, there were overwhelming numbers of them. It was shock and awe all over again, but we’d gotten used to it now, and the effect was wearing off. While some of us kept the picket line going in the center of the intersection, most people crowded up to the barricade, staring and gawking at the line of riot police, taking photos of them, observing them as though they were monkeys in a zoo. It was hard to believe that anyone could find cops so fascinating to look at.

There were police from all over, cops from Gilroy, sheriff’s deputies from Santa Clara. Hundreds of them. Nine agencies were involved, at a cost to the taxpayers of $500,000, I heard later. At one point, a chant arose. “You’re sexy, you’re cute! Take off your riot suit!”

This went on for a couple hours or more. At one point someone announced that we were on every TV channel in the world, and a loud cheer went up. “We’re also on Al-Jazeera!” And everybody cheered even more wildly, and chanted:

“Oakland! Oakland! The world is watching Oakland!”

Meanwhile, with us corralled there, local police were entering the camp. “Shame! Shame! Shame!” we chanted as they entered our camp, arresting 33 people there and ripping up our tents.

We’d saved many of the most valuable and crucial items from the camp, but most tents had remained and were being destroyed, later sent to a landfill. It was painful to watch. I thought of Nov 2nd, when a handful of people smashed windows, and the media called it “vandalism,” (which I agree it was). But when city officials send police to destroy the meager possessions of poor people, of homeless people, the corporate media’s editorialists don’t call it “vandalism,”
they applaud the action and call it necessary and decisive.

It doesn’t even seem to occur to city officials, media pundits, or anyone else speaking for the 1% that even the simplest possessions of poor people might be all they have. Or, they might be personal items; one occupier lost the poetry he’d been composing. Everything goes to the dump, and that’s symbolic of the way the 1% who dominate our society has chosen to treat us, to devalue us. Recently it was revealed that the cremated ashes of American soldiers who’d died in Iraq and Afghanistan were deposited in a landfill.³ It epitomizes what we are fighting against, and what we are fighting for: economic justice and human dignity.

And it needs to be understood that the mayor and city council behind this raid were NOT a gaggle of rightwing Republicans. They were liberal Democrats who were hypocritically expressing support for the Occupy movement, while brutally suppressing it at great financial cost.

The scene was disgusting, but not demoralizing. The world-wide coverage of this event almost made up for our losses. Our message was certainly getting out, while the city officials who’d ordered this police action seemed to us like the sort of people who would pound nails in tofu and think they were accomplishing something.

Then, unexpectedly, the police to the south of us on Broadway withdrew. So they weren’t going to mass arrest the 500 of us after all.

As the day dawned, we were still occupying this key intersection. It would not quite be business as usual this morning. But I hadn’t slept all night, and feeling I’d done my part for now, I packed up my notebook and was about to leave, when:

“Mic check!”

“Mic check!”

“One of our brothers is still occupying!”

The man was still perched in his tree above the Plaza. And, as of
this writing, he’s still up there.

1. The Port & The Plaza–Raid of October 25, 2011.
2. Iraq War Veterans–casualties at Occupy Oakland.
3. Remains of US troops killed in Iraq dumped in a landfill.

The old adage: “if you’re a hammer, everything you see is a nail” never had a clearer application than as it applies to the conduct of America’s “finest.” The initial police response to non-violent conduct by activists in the Civil Rights Movement was the same – batons, attack dogs, and brutality. It was not until those responses proved to be unsuccessful, even counter-productive, that the segregationist South modified its response.

Rather than silencing dissent, police violence and abuse frequently provides the very spark that a docile, unfocused movement needs to grow and develop consciousness. It is not that police officers are inherently cruel and violent (although there are many who are drawn to that profession as a vehicle for carrying out such fantasies), rather it is the fact that police are never taught alternatives to violence as methods of keeping the peace. In fact, many police departments employ combat soldiers, fresh from their apprenticeship in war zones, to “serve and protect” just as they learned how to do it in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the other areas where Americans ply our trade.

Every parent in the country knows that violence and repression are the worst teachers in an individual’s arsenal. While many parents believe it is occasionally acceptable to spank a naughty child in order to teach it a lesson, none with an ounce of intelligence and sanity, would administer violent beatings on a regular basis. Indeed, if a parent were to inflict constant physical abuse upon a child, he would be immediately relieved of his or her parental responsibilities.

So why is it that when police departments, foreign mercenaries, Pentagon bureaucrats and others involved in America’s repressive bureaucracies resort to violence as their first and only method of mass control, the society sits idly by, and accepts the conduct as inevitable?

One would expect that the police and prosecuting agencies of the country would be the first to develop alternative, nurturing solutions to social challenges. Yet the opposite is true. District Attorneys are the first to cry foul if non-violent inmates are to be released from outrageously long prison sentences. Police spend half of their time warning the public about how dangerous living in America can be, and the other half of the time beating on people and sending them to prison.

This country imprisons a greater percent of its population than any “democratic” country on earth — 5 times more of our population than any country in Europe.

That the politics of fear and threats of violence are perpetuated by police and military agencies that profit from repression should come as no surprise. That the American people would condone these lies by tolerating police brutality in our communities, is simply shocking. One would expect that the American public would be the first to intervene in situations of unwarranted violence and abuse; yet we tolerate levels of imprisonment and state-sanctioned violence that most people of the world would rise up against.

There have always been those who benefit from a police state. The notorious capitalist robber baron, Jay Gould, proudly proclaimed that he “could hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.” The economics of the military-industrial complex provide the most recent stunning example of this phenomenon. We are spending over half of the American economy fighting nations that pose no threat to anyone but themselves.

There is a price to be paid by allowing a police state to flourish unabated. The image of Lt. Pike arrogantly assaulting the seated students at their peaceful demonstration is a chilling image akin to similar scenes in Pinochet’s Chile or apartheid South Africa. A docile population can easily find itself more threatened and endangered by uncontrolled state domination than a society that relies upon the citizenry itself to protect its rights.

The Occupy Movement, the non-violent demonstration at Davis, and the civil disobedience that is becoming part and parcel of this unequal society are a result of social problems that will be resolved through dialogue, disagreement and struggle. Police violence will only exacerbate the problems that are festering in this country. It is part of the problem, not a solution.

Angie Tibbs:  Dr. Ezzat, let’s start at the beginning.  In January 2011 hundreds of thousands of Egyptians began their Tahrir Square occupation; you were on the ground there as a journalist and as a medical doctor. Would you recreate the mood of the demonstrators, and, in fact, of the country?

Ashraf Ezzat:  Egyptians still refer to those 18 days (January 25- February 11) as the glorious days of the revolution. Those days will undoubtedly carve their place in the modern history of Egypt. And contrary to what the mainstream media concluded, the Tahrir Square saga that captured the world may have been called for by some activists using the internet social media, but it was mainly fueled and triggered by years of political corruption and oppression. The build-up for this uprising has been brewing for years and specifically after Mubarak made it clear he was bequeathing the presidency for his son, Gamal.

Hence, the general mood of the Egyptians was a blend of dissatisfaction, anger and a potent urge for change. It is funny but it seems that the Egyptians had a clear-cut idea what they wanted from the first day they took to the streets. I joined the protests from the second day; the people on the streets were not divided about their demands.  You could see it in their eyes and hear it as they chanted “Bread, freedom and social justice” … and those three demands are what the “Tahrir Square” is still fighting for.

Dr. Ashraf Ezzat in Tahrir Square

AT:  One of the demands of the protesters was for President Mubarak to step down, effectively ending his 30 year authoritarian rule.  This he did on February 11, at which time the military council took over the country, promising to bring about democracy and to respect the wishes of the people. Did this happen, and did anyone expect it would happen?

AE: The military council of armed forces (SCAF), whose generals are Mubarak’s handpicked appointees, did nothing in the last ten months to promote democracy in the country; on the contrary, the generals, and through their ineptness or unwillingness actually to restore security on the street, have helped to bolster the tide of the counter-revolution.

And hadn’t it been for the thousands who lately returned to Tahrir Square to denounce the military rule and ask for a hand-over of power to a civilian salvation government, the revolution would have been done with and declared dead.

The majority of the Egyptian people kind of hoped the military would lead them out of these difficult times but while most of Egyptians didn’t doubt the capability of SCAF to do so, a lot of activists and political analysts suspected that the way SCAF has been handling things would eventually put the country on the road to democracy.

AT: Are you saying that there were those who believed that in time the SCAF would have, if left in power, brought about democracy?

AE: No, I meant to say that the downfall of Mubarak was so abrupt that nobody actually had seen it coming, not even the military which is part and parcel of the despotic old regime. And while stunned by the uprising’s rapid pace, military generals were following how this people vs. regime uprising was going to end, and they decided not to take sides until this whole thing was almost settled.

And when it was obvious, despite the White House’s pro-Mubarak stance, that the people were gaining the upper hand in this uprising the military, only at that moment, decided to side with the people and this is when the protesters in Tahrir square chanted “ The people and military are joined hand in hand”

But not everybody was fooled by this “wait and see” approach by the military. A lot of activists and political analysts knew that the self-serving generals would try to somehow steer this transitional period in their favor. And that is exactly what they did when they proposed a new draft for a constitution that would shield the military from parliamentary scrutiny and which declares the military the guardian of “constitutional legitimacy,” suggesting the armed forces could have the final word on major policies.

AT:  How did Egyptians feel about the military and the police from the commencement of the Mubarak regime up to the demonstrations of January 2011?

AE: Actually Mubarak’s regime was just a police regime. A giant police apparatus that stifled dissent by violent means and that only served and protected the corrupt elite and the president. The citizen/police relation has been quite tense over years of coercion and misconduct. Throughout most of Mubarak’s rule Egyptians feared and somehow distrusted the police.

But in the last couple of years and prior to his ouster they began to loathe the corruption that swept across the whole security apparatus that turned the policeman into a thug with a badge, placed him above the law and allowed him to get away with almost anything … even crimes.

The famous case of the killing of Khalid Saeed, young Egyptian man from Alexandria, who was beaten to death by security forces after he was indicted on framed charges, has incited unprecedented anger and helped trigger the revolution in January. 

While the majority of Egyptians had negative feelings for the police they honored and respected the military for its patriotic role of protecting the sovereignty of the state and for the long and heroic confrontation with Israel especially after the 1973 war.

But I hope that Egyptians will make the necessary and fair distinction between the military forces or the army as a whole and the generals in the military council when they come to judge the conduct of SCAF in the transitional period that followed January 25 revolution.

AT:  In the months since the occupation of Tahrir Square ended, have there been any changes meaningful to Egyptians?

AE: Though a lot of things have remained the same if not for the worse, I would say that the only thing that really changed in the life of Egyptians is their ability to say NO to anything and anyone. And also to vote freely, as we all have witnessed the huge turnout for the first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections.

The Egyptian people broke the fear barrier and this, for people who have been enduring under tyranny for centuries, is quite an achievement. Moreover, I truly believe that once placed on the path of real democracy, the whole world will witness a new and amazingly different Egypt.

AT: Since the demonstrations ended in February, thousands of people have been arrested and tried before military tribunals, yet throughout the occupation of Tahrir Square there appeared to be good relations between the protesters and the security forces.  What caused these widespread arrests and are they continuing?

AE: As I mentioned before, many of the Tahrir activists viewed the stance of the military with suspicion and as days went by it became obvious that the generals were trying to give the old regime a comeback chance. The scenario of chaos and sectarian violence that Mubarak threatened would engulf the country if he was to step down was beginning to be unleashed.

Shortly after the toppling of Mubarak, Egypt began to witness months of unrest, economic plunge, lack of security forces on the street, sectarian violence and a series of churches attacks which culminated in the lethal clashes with a Coptic rally on October 9 that left 27 killed by the military forces in what is now known as the Maspero massacre.

But this was not what the revolutionary youths and activists demanded when they initiated the January uprising. This was not why people got killed in the protests. The people didn’t topple Mubarak to have a military dictatorship instead.

So this is why the honeymoon with the military didn’t last and it wasn’t long before many activists began to point the finger at SCAF for all the scenarios aimed at thwarting the revolution tide. And it wasn’t long either before the thousands – almost 15,000 according to Human Rights Watch – were thrown behind bars and tried before military tribunals until this very day.

AT:  Protesters have again taken to the streets of Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt, and the police are responding, thus far killing over 30 people. What has prompted this, and what do you anticipate happening as a result?

AE:   According to the counter-revolution plan, which the United States fully backed, the military was supposed to grab the power permanently. To set the stage for such scenario, the military in the last ten months has done everything possible not only to thwart the advance of the revolution but to turn the Egyptians against the idea itself as the plan augmented the sense of vulnerability and insecurity of the average Egyptian citizen and cunningly linked it to the revolution.

And just when the generals thought they had managed to hijack the revolution, they were in for a big surprise.

Emboldened by the power they’ve got and by the American support, the generals dared to propose a new draft for a constitution that could only pave the way for a military fascism and this is where they went wrong.  This blatant exploitation on part of the military council triggered the pouring of thousands into Tahrir Square once again in what is now dubbed “the second revolution”.

AT:  The military council is now promising presidential elections before July of 2012.  Is this a satisfactory response to the current uprising? Will the Egyptian people accept this or will they view it as an attempt by the military to divert world attention from its ongoing crackdown? Furthermore, do Egyptians accept the military as a caretaker government? 

AE: Egyptians didn’t flock back to Tahrir Square to demand elections. The protesters in Tahrir Square have made it clear that they don’t want the military council as a caretaker and moreover they insist that the council should step aside and hand over power to a civilian salvation government. In January the protesters in Tahrir Square wanted Mubarak to step down, and in November they wanted the military to step aside.

AT:  Were you surprised to hear the US State Department initially praising the “exercise of self-restraint and professionalism” of the Egyptian security forces with respect to the present demonstrations?

AE:  There seems to be a growing number of people in and around the Tahrir Square angry at being fired on by weapons supplied from countries like the US, making nice noises about democracy and restraint in Egypt. The US government and its weapon companies continue to supply tools of repression, usually for profit, to those who they well know will use them to violate human rights and repress their own citizens.

So once again the unexpected course of the Egyptian revolution – and contrary to the conspiracy theorists who view the Arab revolutions as orchestrated by the CIA & the neo-cons – has exposed the flagrant American double standards in the Middle East and especially in regard to the Arab spring.

The mere fact that protesters refused to meet Mrs. Clinton, the American secretary of state, on her first visit to Cairo after the ouster of Mubarak should tell us how the revolutionary youths of Egypt view the United States’ stance on their revolution.

AT: Do you see a connection between the Egyptian military and possible US and Israel future plans for Egypt?    

AE: I doubt the Egyptian military would undertake any move that could jeopardize its patriotic history, but I would certainly be relieved if this current top command of Egypt military could be replaced soon.  No matter how we look at it, those generals of Egypt military council are part of the old regime.

Indeed our reading into the current turmoil and change gripping Egypt and the rest of the Arab world is bound to open our eyes to a brand new Arab world in the making right now – but not the Condoleezza Rice’s new Middle East. New forces are emerging and the United States will soon have to relinquish its old diplomacy in Middle East that relied mainly on the so called strong allies/dictators and try to prepare for the rise of a new political front – most probably of Islamists – that will rule in Tunisia, Libya, and Cairo and maybe Syria.

AT:  What is happening in Egypt today, and what is the mood of the people?

AE: The parliamentary polls opened amid escalating protests that reject the newly appointed prime minister and a build-up of public opinion that demands the generals must go back to their barracks. The general mood is split between the youths who seem determined to take the revolution to the farthest limit and the older generation who believe that stability and compromise is what the country needs right now.  It is split between the conservative front who thinks it is time we gave our support for the Muslim Brotherhood (the longtime outlawed Islamist political group) and the liberal groups who, despite their modest preliminary showing in the parliamentary polls, believe that we should separate the mosque from the state.

In that sense, you could say the current struggle is between the old and the new or the past and future; in other words, between the conservatives and the liberals. But I don’t think Egypt, the land of moderate Islam and the liberal hub of the Arab world, will get lost as long as the Tahrir Square spirit remains with us.

Given notice of the movement’s intentions, Portland Mayor Sam Adams, a “liberal” Democrat, warned on Friday that the city would not tolerate another occupation because “we simply cannot afford another encampment in our city.”  (The city’s Parks Department claims that park “restoration” due to the first occupation will cost $85,000, though many of the itemized charges were for annual expenditures and other pre-existing park conditions.)  In his statement, the mayor also continued to espouse his empathy “with the founding frustrations of the Occupy movement,” but made it clear that he wouldn’t hesitate to send in the city’s militarized police force as a token of this professed “empathy.”

The mayor’s antagonisms and near freezing temperatures notwithstanding, a crowd around a thousand strong still gathered Saturday afternoon and set out for a march through the city’s downtown, self-policing themselves as they spilled out onto the streets.  The march ended at the previously undisclosed re-occupy location, Shemanski Park, located in the northern end of the city’s South Park Blocks, about an hour later.  Upon arrival, tents were set up and coffee was served: Occupy Portland had its new home.

By 8:30 p.m., however, riot police had arrived and began broadcasting a notice that the park was closing a half hour early due to an emergency decree, leaving all who remained to face arrest.  I asked an officer just why the emergency decree had been declared, but unsure himself, he merely reiterated that I faced arrest if I stayed.  Soon after, the police line moved on the remaining protesters, who, numbering a few hundred, began to chant: “Show me what a police state looks like!  This is what a police state looks like!”  The advancing police then began to readily thrust their billy clubs into protesters’ chests, while others chose to take aim at protesters’ heads and necks.

Once the police line had advanced nearly halfway through the park, the police, unprovoked, charged at the slowly retreating protesters, swinging and thrusting their batons with a level of indiscriminate violence nearing that of a cop riot.  Making a hasty retreat, I could see one protester chased by a lone officer—baton poised overhead ready to strike—for nearly 30 yards before the officer tackled the man to the ground.  A group of protesters was able to quickly pull the man away before a swarm of riot cops could arrive to apprehend him.

In all, the fleeting police melee saw numerous minor injuries in addition to more severe injuries as well, with at least one protester taken away in an ambulance.  Nineteen protesters were also arrested as the police cleared the park, all charged with criminal trespass in the second degree and interfering with a police officer.  And with numbers dwindling, and facing raging cops, the park was cleared relatively fast.

Pushed out of the park and onto the adjacent streets, the remaining protesters slowly began to reassemble and began a spontaneous march on city hall.  After a brief regrouping at city hall, the re-energized protesters decided to once again take to the streets.

The impromptu march continued for the next hour, winding through the city and clogging Saturday night traffic in process.  And as the march progressed, the numbers continued to grow as more Portlanders joined in, swelling the crowd to once again near a thousand.  The defiant and militant atmosphere also remained rather festive.  Dance remixes and other music from Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” to War’s “Low Rider” was blared by a set of speakers mounted on an accompanying bike.  At least one temporary stop was made for street dancing.  All this left the incessant warnings broadcast to vacate the streets by the trailing police easily drowned out and hardly audible.

The scene created a rather stark juxtaposition for the countless onlookers emerging from the city’s bars, clubs, and restaurants.  For all the marching and dancing protesters eliciting cheers from many of the onlookers were pursued up and down the city’s streets by armored police vehicles, adorned with the very same cops that had nearly rioted against the peaceful protesters mere hours earlier.  The city and police fear campaign reverberating throughout the local media echo chamber about Occupy violence was exposed to a wide swath of the city to be a mere mockery.

Eventually, the improvised march wound its way back to the South Park Blocks and back to Shemanski Park, two hours after its official closing time and the earlier violent ouster.  And as the emptied park came into view to the marchers, they impulsively broke into a sprint as they shouted, “Take the park!”  With music still provided, dancing soon resumed within the reclaimed park to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”  Word soon spread that the police had given up their chase and retreated; the mayor rather belatedly realizing that he’d rather have protesters peaceably assembled in a park, than overtaking the streets of downtown.

After over an hour of cat and mouse, Occupy Portland had prevailed in its bid to reoccupy a city park.  The police, it was clear, had been outwitted in front of the entire city.  All that was left for them was to slink away into the night, their truncheons and pepper spray in tow.  And as I write now Sunday afternoon, the park remains occupied.

The tactical victory of Occupy Portland over the police this weekend is sure to inject added energy and life into the movement that the local media had just recently begun to write off.  It also serves as a viable lesson on outmaneuvering the police, which will undoubtedly be of worth in the coming weeks as Occupy Portland, along with thirteen other western Occupy movements, seeks to take up the call of Occupy Oakland to shut down all west coast ports on the 12th of this month .  Although even if this ambitious direct action is to fall short in Portland, this weekend demonstrated that Occupy Portland continues to evolve, and is becoming increasingly more flexible and mobile in the process.  Moving forward, just how best to use this dynamism in the coming weeks and months appears to be the most significant issue facing the rejuvenated movement at the present.

I mention this to explain why I’ve been reluctant to jump with both feet on the Occupy bandwagon. I first thought that if nothing else the approaching winter would do them in; if not, it would be the demands of their lives — they have to make some money at some point, attend classes somewhere, lovers and friends and family they have to cater to somewhere; lately I’ve been thinking it’s the police that will do them in, writing finis to their marvelous movement adventure — if you hold the system up to a mirror the system can go crazy.

But now I don’t know. Those young people, and the old ones as well, keep surprising me, with their dedication and energy, their camaraderie and courage, their optimism and innovation, their non-violence and their keen awareness of the danger of being co-opted their focusing on the economic institutions more than on the politicians or political parties. There is also their splendid signs and slogans, walking from New York to Washington, and not falling apart following the despicable police destruction of the Occupy Wall Street encampment. They’ve given a million young people other ideas about how to spend the rest of their lives, and commandeered a remarkable amount of media space. The Washington Post on several occasions has devoted full page or near-full page sympathetic coverage. Occupy is being taken increasingly seriously by virtually all media.

Yet, the 1960s and 70s were also a marvelous movement adventure — for me as much as for anyone — but nothing actually changed in US foreign policy as a result of our endless protests, many of which were also innovative. American imperialism has continued to add to its brutal record right up to this very moment. We can’t even claim Vietnam as a victory. Most people believe that the US lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, Washington in fact achieved its primary purpose: preventing the rise of what might have been a good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model.

It has greatly helped Occupy’s growth and survival that they have seldom mentioned foreign policy. That’s much more sensitive ground than corporate abuse. Foreign policy gets into flag-waving, “our brave boys” risking their lives, American exceptionalism, nationalism, patriotism, loyalty, treason, terrorism, “anti-American”, “conspiracy theorist” … all those emotional icons that mainstream America uses to separate a Good American from one who ain’t really one of us.

Foreign policy cannot be ignored permanently of course, if for no other reason than that the nation’s wealth that’s wasted on war could be used to pay for anything Occupy calls for … or anything anyone calls for.

The education which Occupy has caused to be thrust upon the citizenry — about corporate abuse and criminality, political corruption, inequality, poverty, etc., virtually all unprosecuted — would be highly significant if America were a democracy. But as it is, more and more people can learn more and more about these matters, and get more and more angry, but have nowhere to turn to, to effectuate meaningful change. Money must be removed from the political process. Completely. It is my favorite Latin expression: sine qua non — “without which, nothing”.

USrael and Iran

There’s no letup, is there? The preparation of the American mind, the world mind, for the next gala performance of D&D — Death and Destruction. The Bunker Buster bombs are now 30,000 pounds each one, six times as heavy as the previous delightful model.

But the Masters of War still want to be loved; they need for you to believe them when they say they have no choice, that Iran is the latest threat to life as we know it, no time to waste.

The preparation of minds was just as fervent before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And when it turned out that Iraq did not have any kind of arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) … well, our power elite found other justifications for the invasion, and didn’t look back. Some berated Iraq: “Why didn’t they tell us that? Did they want us to bomb them?”

In actuality, before the US invasion high Iraqi officials had stated clearly on repeated occasions that they had no such weapons. In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: “We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.”¹

In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: “The fact is that we don’t have weapons of mass destruction. We don’t have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry.”²

Hussein, himself, told Rather in February 2003: “These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there.”³

Moreover, Gen. Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq’s secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.⁴

There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world that the WMD were non-existent.

And if there were still any uncertainty remaining, last year Hans Blix, former chief United Nations weapons inspector, who led a doomed hunt for WMD in Iraq, told a British inquiry into the 2003 invasion that those who were “100 percent certain there were weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq turned out to have “less than zero percent knowledge” of where the purported hidden caches might be. He testified that he had warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a February 2003 meeting — as well as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in separate talks — that Hussein might have no weapons of mass destruction.⁵

Those of who you don’t already have serious doubts about the American mainstream media’s knowledge and understanding of US foreign policy, should consider this: Despite the two revelations on Dan Rather’s CBS programs, and the other revelations noted above, in January 2008 we find CBS reporter Scott Pelley interviewing FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed:

Pelley: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?

Piro: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

Pelley: He had ordered them destroyed?

Piro: Yes.

Pelley: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?⁶

The United States and Israel are preparing to attack Iran because of their alleged development of nuclear weapons, which Iran has denied on many occasions. Of the Iraqis who warned the United States that it was mistaken about the WMD — Saddam Hussein was executed, Tariq Aziz is awaiting execution. Which Iranian officials is USrael going to hang after their country is laid to waste?

Would it have mattered if the Bush administration had fully believed Iraq when it said it had no WMD? Probably not. There is ample evidence that Bush knew this to be the case, or at a minimum should have seriously suspected it; the same applies to Tony Blair. Saddam Hussein did not sufficiently appreciate just how psychopathic his two adversaries were. Bush was determined to vanquish Iraq, for the sake of Israel, for control of oil, and for expanding the empire with new bases, though in the end most of this didn’t work out as the empire expected; for some odd reason, it seems that the Iraqi people resented being bombed, invaded, occupied, demolished, and tortured.

But if Iran is in fact building nuclear weapons, we have to ask: Is there some international law that says that the US, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not? If the United States had known that the Japanese had deliverable atomic bombs, would Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been destroyed? Israeli military historian, Martin van Creveld, has written: “The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.”⁷

It can not be repeated too often: The secret to understanding US foreign policy is that there is no secret. Principally, one must come to the realization that the United States strives to dominate the world. Once one understands that, much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding Washington’s policies fades away. Examine a map: Iran sits directly between two of the United States’ great obsessions — Iraq and Afghanistan … directly between two of the world’s greatest oil regions — the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea areas … it’s part of the encirclement of the two leading potential threats to American world domination — Russia and China … Tehran will never be a client state or obedient poodle to Washington. How could any good, self-respecting Washington imperialist resist such a target? Bombs Away!

American exceptionalism — A survey

The leaders of imperial powers have traditionally told themselves and their citizens that their country was exceptional and that their subjugation of a particular foreign land should be seen as a “civilizing mission”, a “liberation”, “God’s will”, and of course bringing “freedom and democracy” to the benighted and downtrodden. It is difficult to kill large numbers of people without a claim to virtue. I wonder if this sense of exceptionalism has been embedded anywhere more deeply than in the United States, where it is drilled into every cell and ganglion of American consciousness from kindergarten on. If we measure the degree of indoctrination (I’ll resist the temptation to use the word “brainwashing”) of a population as the gap between what the people believe their government has done in the world and what the actual (very sordid) facts are, the American people are clearly the most indoctrinated people on the planet. The role of the American media is of course indispensable to this process — Try naming a single American daily newspaper or TV network that was unequivocally against the US attacks on Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam. Or even against any two of them. How about one? Which of the mainstream media expressed real skepticism of The War on Terror in its early years?

Overloaded with a sense of America’s moral superiority, each year the State Department judges the world, issuing reports evaluating the behavior of all other nations, often accompanied by sanctions of one kind or another. There are different reports rating how each lesser nation has performed in the previous year in the areas of religious freedom, human rights, the war on drugs, trafficking in persons, and counterterrorism, as well as maintaining a list of international “terrorist” groups. The criteria used in these reports are mainly political, wherever applicable; Cuba, for example, is always listed as a supporter of terrorism whereas anti-Castro exile groups in Florida, which have committed literally hundreds of terrorist acts, are not listed as terrorist groups.

“The causes of the malady are not entirely clear but its recurrence is one of the uniformities of history: power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image.” — Former US Senator William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (1966)

“We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people –– the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. … God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.” — Herman Melville, White-Jacket (1850)

“God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern policy and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.” — John le Carré, London Times, January 15, 2003

“Neoconservatism … traded upon the historic American myths of innocence, exceptionalism, triumphalism and Manifest Destiny. It offered a vision of what the United States should do with its unrivaled global power. In its most rhetorically-seductive messianic versions, it conflated the expansion of American power with the dream of universal democracy. In all of this, it proclaimed that the maximal use of American power was good for both America and the world.” — Columbia University Professor Gary Dorrien, The Christian Century magazine, January 22, 2007

“To most of its citizens, America is exceptional, and it’s only natural that it should take exception to certain international standards.” — Michael Ignatieff, Washington Post columnist, Legal Affairs, May-June, 2002

Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, US Army War College, 1997: “Our country is a force for good without precedent.”

Thomas Barnett, US Naval War College: “The US military is a force for global good that … has no equal.” — Guardian (London), December 27, 2005

John Bolton, future US ambassador to the United Nations, writing in 2000: Because of its unique status, the United States could not be “legally bound” or constrained in any way by its international treaty obligations. The U.S. needed to “be unashamed, unapologetic, uncompromising American constitutional hegemonists,” so that their “senior decision makers” could be free to use force unilaterally.

Condoleezza Rice, future US Secretary of State, writing in 2000, was equally contemptuous of international law. She claimed that in the pursuit of its national security the United States no longer needed to be guided by “notions of international law and norms” or “institutions like the United Nations” because it was “on the right side of history.” — Z Magazine, July/August 2004

“The president [George W. Bush] said he didn’t want other countries dictating terms or conditions for the war on terrorism. ‘At some point, we may be the only ones left. That’s okay with me. We are America’.” — Washington Post, January 31, 2002

“Reinhold Niebuhr got it right a half-century ago: What persists — and promises no end of grief — is our conviction that Providence has summoned America to tutor all of humankind on its pilgrimage to perfection.” — Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations, Boston University

In commenting on Woodrow Wilson’s moral lecturing of his European colleagues at the Versailles peace table following the First World War, Winston Churchill remarked that he found it hard to believe that the European emigrants, who brought to America the virtues of the lands from which they sprang, had left behind all their vices. — The World Crisis, Vol. V, The Aftermath, 1929

“Behold a republic, gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor to the world’s progress and the accepted arbiter of the world’s disputes.” — William Jennings Bryan, US Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, In His Image (1922)

Newsweek editor Michael Hirsch: “U.S. allies must accept that some U.S. unilateralism is inevitable, even desirable. This mainly involves accepting the reality of America’s supreme might — and truthfully, appreciating how historically lucky they are to be protected by such a relatively benign power.” — Foreign Affairs, November, 2002

Colin Powell speaking before the Republican National Convention, August 13, 1996: The United States is “a country that exists by the grace of a divine providence.”

“The US media always has an underlying acceptance of the mythology of American exceptionalism, that the US, in everything it does, is the last best hope of humanity.” — Rahul Mahajan, author of: The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism, and Full Spectrum Dominance

“The fundamental problem is that the Americans do not respect anybody except themselves,” said Col. Mir Jan, a spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry. “They say, ‘We are the God of the world,’ and they don’t consult us.” — Washington Post, August 3, 2002

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” — Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State, 1998

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.
To my dear readers in the United States and around the world — In the spirit of the season, I wish each of you your choice of the following:

Merry Christmas
Happy Chanukah
Joyous Eid
Festive Kwanza
Happy New Year
Gleeful Occupy
Erotic Pagan Rite
Internet Virtual Holiday
Heartwarming Satanic Sacrifice
Devout Atheist Season’s Greetings
Possessed Laying-on-of-Hands Ceremony
Really Neat Reincarnation with Auras and Crystals
And may your name never appear on a Homeland Security “No-fly list”.

May you not vex a marginally literate high school graduate with a badge, a gun, and a can of pepper spray.

May your abuses at the hands of authority be only cruel, degrading and inhuman, nothing that Mr. Obama or Mr. Cheney would call for torture.

May you or your country never experience a NATO or US humanitarian intervention, liberation, or involuntary suicide.

May neither your labor movement nor your elections be supported by the National Endowment for Democracy.

May the depleted uranium, cluster bombs, white phosphorous, and napalm which fall upon your land be as precisely guided and harmless as the State Department says they are.

May you receive for Christmas a copy of An arsonist’s guide to the homes of Pentagon officials.

May you not fall sick in the United States without health insurance, nor desire to go to an American university while being less than wealthy.

May you re-discover what the poor in 18th century France discovered, that rich people’s heads can be mechanically separated from their shoulders if they refuse to listen to reason.

May you be given the choice of euthanasia instead of having to watch Republican primary debates.

1. CBS Evening News, August 20, 2002.
2. ABC Nightline, December 4, 2002.
3. 60 Minutes II, February 26, 2003.
4. Washington Post, March 1, 2003.
5. Associated Press, July 28, 2010.
6. 60 Minutes, January 27, 2008. See also: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [FAIR] Action Alert, February 1, 2008.
7. New York Times, August 21, 2004.

According to a 2010 AFL-CIO analysis of 299 U.S. companies in the S&P 500, average gross CEO pay was about 11.4 million dollars, 343 times the median wage (the widest gap in the world). Banksters, big agribusiness and corrupt lawmakers make healthy food inaccessible for growing numbers of people around the world while basic health care continues to become prohibitively expensive thanks to bloated medical, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Meanwhile corporate-owned media distracts and disinforms the masses just enough for the top-heavy self-destructively corrupt system to drag on a little longer.

So when a group of activists (organized largely through the internet and social media) took a stand to occupy Wall Street, they also occupied the collective imagination. Occupiers’ critiques of corrupt political and economic systems are nothing new but today they’re so transparently and demonstrably true, occupation sites spread like wildfire across the country and world faster than the establishment’s concerted efforts to extinguish it with propaganda and violent coercion.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) represents another tipping point for international outrage in the context of a global struggle for justice and democracy. From late last year mass anti-austerity protests swept through European and Mediterranean countries while earlier this year Arab Spring revolutionary movements sprang up in the Middle East and North Africa (which I previously wrote about here) and in some cases continue today. Though there’s differences in the nature of the situations and struggles, what’s shared in common is growing awareness and desire to put an end to mass suffering and injustice due to neoliberal policies dictated by powerful institutions.

Such institutions include Wall Street, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the U.S. Government, and all other governments and organizations they’re aligned with and/or have influence over. Their policies include elimination of trade barriers, regressive taxation, private central banks, budget cuts for social services, privatization of public resources and deregulation.

The top 1% would like us to believe these measures are necessary to strengthen the economies of nations and improve government efficiency but in reality it has done the opposite. There’s overwhelming evidence from around the world linking neoliberalism to erosion of democracy and national sovereignty, militarism, increased corruption and wealth disparity, weakened infrastructures, widespread unemployment and poverty, inflation, worker exploitation, and environmental degradation.

Because wealth and power of big banks and corporations drastically increases under this system, the 1% would also like us to think no alternatives are possible. However, following a long tradition of dissident movements, OWS owes its existence to the desire to create alternatives that put people over profits.

Like all evolving social movements, Occupy Wall Street isn’t perfect. They’ve made strategic mistakes and have internal struggles but have also shown remarkable determination and ability to learn and adapt. One of the most common critiques leveled against OWS is “they lack focus and need a specific list of demands.” Such criticism is unavoidable for organizations that are not single-issue but seek to change a complex system responsible for multiple interrelated problems.

The structure of OWS also confuses people because unlike hierarchical models most are familiar with, occupiers tend to be open-source, decentralized and collaborative. Decisions are made through General Assemblies using a process of consensus decision making, a form of participatory democracy. As with most forms of direct democracy it’s often a slow and difficult, but far more open and inclusive to a diversity of voices than republics and non-democratic systems. It also ensures that the decisions made benefit as many people as possible as equally as possible.

What critics forget is that America’s forefathers (all wealthy white men) didn’t get around to drafting a constitution and declaration of independence until after the revolution. OWS might not yet have an official list of demands but it’s not difficult to find statements and documents online to get an idea of their values and goals, such as the NYC General Assembly’s Principles of Solidarity.

Other common charges against the Occupy Movement frequently parroted by corporate news include “protesters are too lazy to get a job”, “they’re just a bunch of dirty hippies” and “they’re looking for a confrontation with police”. These stereotypes can be dispelled simply by visiting an occupation site or talking to people at OWS rallies. Judging from the people I’ve met and heard interviews with, many have part time positions while others include students seeking jobs with which they can pay off student loans. Some unemployed activists were recently laid off and are still searching for jobs. To put their situation in perspective, in the sixties the unemployment rate was just over 4% while today the rate has more than doubled. When counting workers who are “underutilized” and “marginally attached”, the rate jumps to 16.7%. Out of the approximately 14 million unemployed in America, 46%, or over 6 million have been unemployed for 6 months or longer. In some cases unemployed homeowners at risk for foreclosure are trapped by underwater mortgages and couldn’t relocate even if they did find jobs elsewhere.

Though in our current system most of us need jobs and wages to access basic needs like food, shelter and clothing, all could be provided for free with just a fraction of the current number actually working. Approximately 60,000 tons of food is wasted annually to keep prices high while banks faced with a glut of foreclosed homes demolish them to avoid taxes, maintenance costs and devalued markets. Companies such as H & M and Walmart have even been caught destroying unused clothing. More jobs might encourage more complacency but would do nothing to resolve structural problems such as overproduction outstripping demand, wealth disparity, devastating economic bubbles, corporate monopolization, and a culture of greed and hyperconsumerism.

What could be a solution is a better socio-economic system, the creation of which is one of the Occupation’s fundamental principles of solidarity.

Ad hominem attacks against OWS regarding hygiene and appearance initially struck me as oddly childish and superficial. Camping without a shower would have the same effect on anyone and it has nothing to do with the issues. Then I recalled how characterizing groups as “dirty” and subhuman is typical of ruling elites’ tried and true “divide and conquer” strategy. In this case it seems like an attempt to prevent the average corporate news consumer from paying attention to the ideas of OWS and identifying with them as part of a unified 99%.

A leaked memo from a lobbying firm has already confirmed an $850,000 proposal to spread “negative narratives” about the Occupy Movement. Occupiers are also certainly not all hippies. OWS includes people representing a wide spectrum of backgrounds and ideologies. Many tend to be on the progressive side but I’ve also met libertarians at Occupy events holding some beliefs associated with the Tea Party. Not surprisingly, at a recent joint Occupy/Tea Party forum in Memphis, the two groups clashed on certain issues but also found points of agreement such as frustration regarding unresponsiveness of government to average citizens and opposition to bank bailouts and crony capitalism.

With further conversation the groups may find many other common interests such as ending perpetual wars on terror and drugs, eliminating NAFTA and similar unfair trade agreements, abolishing or restructuring the Federal Reserve, prohibiting militarized police state tactics, protecting civil liberties, creating fair election and mass media systems, and keeping pollutants out of our air, food and water. These are shared goals that 99% of the rest of the world could agree with as well.

Most critics who accuse OWS of trying to pick a fight with police usually don’t understand the purpose of non-violent civil disobedience and believe more conventional channels of political expression such as voting or letter writing are enough to fix the system. A central insight of OWS is that our problems go beyond politics to sources of power and wealth gaming the system and are, in fact, part of the same beast. Unfortunately voting and letter writing in themselves can do little to counteract massive amounts of money used to finance campaigns, shape legislation, and influence politicians and public opinion. When there are no longer true avenues of political and judicial redress, civil disobedience is exactly what is needed. It’s a tactic that has been used with great success in the Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam War and Women’s Suffrage movements as well as the American Revolution. Critics who complain about tax dollars wasted on policing Occupy sites need to remember that city officials decide how to spend that money (and how much violence police use).

There has been incidences and allegations of sexual assault occurring on or near OWS camps reflecting a sad reality of our patriarchal society that even within groups trying to change the society it could still happen. Though a relatively rare occurrence, it’s a serious issue more OWS General Assemblies need to openly address and create preventative measures for as some have already done.

Conservative news channels like FOX focus disproportionately on reported crimes and isolated incidents associated with the Occupy Movement to create a false image of police simply defending themselves and the community. If that seems far-fetched, just google keywords “fox news” “ows” and “violence”. Other corporate news also cover such incidents in addition to police violence but usually within a limited context and far less air time than similar protests in the Middle East.

Independent and alternative media (including citizen journalists using social media, blogs and YouTube) have been by far the source of the most detailed and comprehensive coverage of OWS. Without independent cameras on the street, fewer people would have known about the mass pepper spraying, beating, tasering and rubber bullet shooting (all effectively forms of mass torture) of peaceful protesters across the country.

Numerous videos and accounts can be found online revealing a pattern of coordinated violent crackdowns at all major Occupy sites including New York, Atlanta, Nashville, Austin, Denver, Berkeley, U.C. Davis, Portland, and Seattle (where among the victimized crowd were an 84 year old activist, a Methodist Pastor in clergy robe, and a young pregnant woman who miscarried a week later). Or how in Oakland, Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen suffered a fractured skull from a gas canister shot at close range and 8 days later Afghanistan and Iraq War vet Kayvan Sabeghi was beaten by police while trying to return home. Unnecessary indiscriminate and excessive police brutality is nothing new, but citizens now have a greater ability to document and report it than ever before without censorship and distortion.

Such incidences of violent police provocation could have escalated to wide-scale riots were it not for the self-control of the Occupiers and their determination to remain a peaceful movement. They understand that besides being in a struggle for survival, they’re involved in a philosophical struggle for the hearts and minds of the world. To resort to violence would be to adapt the mentality of the oppressors and be maligned as threats to national security (though that’s often how they’re treated by the State).

Police and military are well armed and trained to deal with violence but they’re not prepared to deal with public shaming and unarguable facts that may someday override orders, threats and conditioning from the 1%. There’s probably nothing ruling elites fear most than an awakened 99% united in solidarity, including people of all political and religious persuasions, occupations, races, and nations. Once that happens, one percenters know it’s “game over” so we should expect them to do everything in their power to divide and conquer, especially if, as recent research has theorized, some of them may be literally psychotic.  To counteract this effort, it’s more important than ever to think critically and stay informed. Be aware that it’s perfectly legal for corporate news media to lie and there’s plenty of sources online to find more accurate and up-to-date information.

Better yet, visit a local Occupy site or event to get firsthand knowledge about who they are and what they believe in. By becoming, in effect, a citizen journalist you’ll be well equipped to challenge common fallacies about OWS when talking to family, friends, coworkers and strangers. Whether they realize it or not, we’re all in it together.

A Global Occupation may not bring utopia (probably nothing ever will), but it’s the best opportunity yet to prevent our world from falling further into dystopia.

Patriot Act

On May 27, 2011, President Obama, over widespread bipartisan objections, approved a Congressional four year extension of controversial parts of the Patriot Act that were set to expire.  In March of 2010, Obama signed a similar extension of the Patriot Act for one year.  These provisions allow the government, with permission from a special secret court, to seize records without the owner’s knowledge, conduct secret surveillance of suspicious people who have no known ties to terrorist groups and to obtain secret roving wiretaps on people.

Criminalization of Dissent and Militarization of the Police

Anyone who has gone to a peace or justice protest in recent years has seen it – local police have been turned into SWAT teams, and SWAT teams into heavily armored military.  Officer Friendly or even Officer Unfriendly has given way to police uniformed like soldiers with SWAT shields, shin guards, heavy vests, military helmets, visors, and vastly increased firepower.  Protest police sport ninja turtle-like outfits and are accompanied by helicopters, special tanks, and even sound blasting vehicles first used in Iraq.  Wireless fingerprint scanners first used by troops in Iraq are now being utilized by local police departments to check motorists.  Facial recognition software introduced in war zones is now being used in Arizona and other jurisdictions.  Drones just like the ones used in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan are being used along the Mexican and Canadian borders.  These activities continue to expand under the Obama administration.

Wiretaps

Wiretaps for oral, electronic or wire communications, approved by federal and state courts, are at an all-time high.  Wiretaps in year 2010 were up 34% from 2009, according to the Administrative Office of the US Courts.

Criminalization of Speech

Muslims in the US have been targeted by the Obama Department of Justice for inflammatory things they said or published on the internet.  First Amendment protection of freedom of speech, most recently stated in a 1969 Supreme Court decision, Brandenberg v Ohio, says the government cannot punish inflammatory speech, even if it advocates violence unless it is likely to incite or produce such action.  A Pakistani resident legally living in the US was indicted by the DOJ in September 2011 for uploading a video on YouTube.  The DOJ said the video was supportive of terrorists even though nothing on the video called for violence.  In July 2011, the DOJ indicted a former Penn State student for going onto websites and suggesting targets and for providing a link to an explosives course already posted on the internet.

Domestic Government Spying on Muslim Communities

In activities that offend freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and several other laws, the NYPD and the CIA have partnered to conduct intelligence operations against Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere.  The CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans, works with the police on “human mapping”, commonly known as racial and religious profiling to spy on the Muslim community.  Under the Obama administration, the Associated Press reported in August 2011, informants known as “mosque crawlers,” monitor sermons, bookstores and cafes.

Top Secret America

In July 2010, the Washington Post released “Top Secret America,” a series of articles detailing the results of a two year investigation into the rapidly expanding world of homeland security, intelligence and counter-terrorism.   It found 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence at about 10,000 locations across the US.  Every single day, the National Security Agency intercepts and stores more than 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications. The FBI has a secret database named Guardian that contains reports of suspicious activities filed from federal, state and local law enforcement.  According to the Washington Post, Guardian contained 161,948 files as of December 2009.  From that database there have been 103 full investigations and at least five arrests the FBI reported.  The Obama administration has done nothing to cut back on the secrecy.

Other Domestic Spying

There are at least 72 fusion centers across the US which collect local domestic police information and merge it into multi-jurisdictional intelligence centers, according to a recent report by the ACLU.  These centers share information from federal, state and local law enforcement and some private companies to secretly spy on Americans.  These all continue to grow and flourish under the Obama administration.

Abusive FBI Intelligence Operations

The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented thousands of violations of the law by FBI intelligence operations from 2001 to 2008 and estimate that there are over 4000 such violations each year.  President Obama issued an executive order to strengthen the Intelligence Oversight Board, an agency which is supposed to make sure the FBI, the CIA and other spy agencies are following the law.  No other changes have been noticed.

Wikileaks

The publication of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks and then by main stream news outlets sparked condemnation by the Obama administration officials who said the publication of accurate government documents was nothing less than an attack on the United States.  The Attorney General announced a criminal investigation and promised “this is not saber rattling.” Government officials warned State Department employees not to download the publicly available documents.  A State Department official and Columbia officials warned students that discussing Wikileaks or linking documents to social networking sites could jeopardize their chances of getting a government job, a position that lasted several days until reversed by other Columbia officials.  At the time this was written, the Obama administration continued to try to find ways to prosecute the publishers of Wikileaks.

Censorship of Books by the CIA

In 2011, the CIA demanded extensive cuts from a memoir by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, in part because it made the agency look bad.  Soufan’s book detailed the use of torture methods on captured prisoners and mistakes that led to 9-11. Similarly, a 2011 book on interrogation methods by former CIA agent Glenn Carle was subjected to extensive black outs.  The CIA under the Obama administration continues its push for censorship.

Blocking Publication of Photos of U.S. Soldiers Abusing Prisoners

In May 2009, President Obama reversed his position of three weeks earlier and refused to release photos of US soldiers abusing prisoners.  In April 2009, the US Department of Defense told a federal court that it would release the photos.  The photos were part of nearly 200 criminal investigations into abuses by soldiers.

Technological Spying

The Bay Area Transit System, in August 2011, hearing of rumors to protest against fatal shootings by their police, shut down cell service in four stations.  Western companies sell email surveillance software to repressive regimes in China, Libya and Syria to use against protestors and human rights activists.  Surveillance cameras monitor residents in high crime areas, street corners and other governmental buildings.  Police department computers ask for and receive daily lists from utility companies with addresses and names of every home address in their area.  Computers in police cars scan every license plate of every car they drive by.  The Obama administration has made no serious effort to cut back these new technologies of spying on citizens.

Use of “State Secrets” to Shield Government and Others from Review

When the Bush government was caught hiring private planes from a Boeing subsidiary to transport people for torture to other countries, the Bush administration successfully asked the federal trial court to dismiss a case by detainees tortured because having a trial would disclose “state secrets” and threaten national security.  When President Obama was elected, the state secrets defense was reaffirmed in arguments before a federal appeals court.  It continues to be a mainstay of the Obama administration effort to cloak their actions and the actions of the Bush administration in secrecy.

In another case, it became clear in 2005 that the Bush FBI was avoiding the Fourth Amendment requirement to seek judicial warrants to get telephone and internet records by going directly to the phone companies and asking for the records.  The government and the companies, among other methods of surveillance, set up secret rooms where phone and internet traffic could be monitored.  In 2008, the government granted the companies amnesty for violating the privacy rights of their customers.  Customers sued anyway. But the Obama administration successfully argued to the district court, among other defenses, that disclosure would expose state secrets and should be dismissed.  The case is now on appeal.

Material Support

The Obama administration successfully asked the US Supreme Court not to apply the First Amendment and to allow the government to criminalize humanitarian aid and legal activities of people providing advice or support to foreign organizations which are listed on the government list as terrorist organizations.   The material support law can now be read to penalize people who provide humanitarian aid or human rights advocacy. The Obama administration Solicitor General argued to the court “when you help Hezbollah build homes, you are also helping Hezbollah build bombs.”  The Court agreed with the Obama argument that national security trumps free speech in these circumstances.

Chicago Anti-war Grand Jury Investigation

In September 2010, FBI agents raided the homes of seven peace activists in Chicago, Minneapolis and Grand Rapids seizing computers, cell phones, passports, and records.  More than 20 anti-war activists were issued federal grand jury subpoenas and more were questioned across the country.  Some of those targeted were members of local labor unions, others members of organizations like the Arab American Action Network, the Columbia Action Network, the Twin Cities Anti-War Campaign and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.  Many were active internationally and visited resistance groups in Columbia and Palestine.  Subpoenas directed people to bring anything related to trips to Columbia, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Israel or the Middle East.  In 2011, the home of a Los Angeles activist was raided and he was questioned about his connections with the September 2010 activists.  All of these investigations are directed by the Obama administration.

Punishing Whistleblowers

The Obama administration has prosecuted five whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all the other administrations in history put together.  They charged a National Security Agency advisor with ten felonies under the Espionage Act for telling the press that government eavesdroppers were wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on misguided and failed projects.  After their case collapsed, the government, which was chastised by the federal judge as engaging in unconscionable conduct allowed him to plead to a misdemeanor and walk.  The administration has also prosecuted former members of the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI.  They even tried to subpoena a journalist and one of the lawyers for the whistleblowers.

Bradley Manning

Army private Bradley Manning is accused of leaking thousands of government documents to Wikileaks.  These documents expose untold numbers of lies by US government officials, wrongful killings of civilians, policies to ignore torture in Iraq, information about who is held at Guantanamo, cover ups of drone strikes and abuse of children and much more damaging information about US malfeasance.  Though Daniel Ellsberg and other whistleblowers say Bradley is an American hero, the US government has jailed him and is threatening him with charges of espionage which may be punished by the death penalty.  For months Manning was held in solitary confinement and forced by guards to sleep naked.  When asked about how Manning was being held, President Obama personally defended the conditions of his confinement saying he had been assured they were appropriate and meeting our basic standards.

Solitary Confinement

At least 20,000 people are in solitary confinement in US jails and prisons, some estimate several times that many.  Despite the fact that federal, state and local prisons and jails do not report actual numbers, academic research estimates tens of thousands are kept in cells for 23 to 24 hours a day in supermax units and prisons, in lockdown, in security housing units, in “the hole”, and in special management units or administrative segregation.  Human Rights Watch reports that one-third to one-half of the prisoners in solitary are likely mentally ill.  In May 2006, the UN Committee on Torture concluded that the United States should “review the regimen imposed on detainees in supermax prisons, in particular, the practice of prolonged isolation.”  The Obama administration has taken no steps to cut back on the use of solitary confinement in federal, state or local jails and prisons.

Special Administrative Measures

Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) are extra harsh conditions of confinement imposed on prisoners (including pre-trial detainees) by the Attorney General.  The U.S. Bureau of Prisons imposes restrictions such segregation and isolation from all other prisoners, and limitation or denial of contact with the outside world such as: no visitors except attorneys, no contact with news media, no use of phone, no correspondence, no contact with family, no communication with guards, 24 hour video surveillance and monitoring. The DOJ admitted in 2009 that several dozen prisoners, including several pre-trial detainees, mostly Muslims, were kept incommunicado under SAMS.  If anything, the use of SAMS has increased under the Obama administration.

These twenty concrete examples document a sustained assault on domestic civil liberties in the United States under the Obama administration.  Rhetoric aside, how different has Obama been from Bush in this area?

The German philosopher and sociologist Max Weber wrote in his book Politics As Vocation that one condition of a legitimate government depended on how “its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim on the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence in the enforcement of its order.” When that government feels it is under attack and believes that nothing but force will work to end those attacks, then it brings out the police and gives them free rein. In the United States in 2011, that means tear gas, pepper spray and truncheons; in Egypt of 2011 it means that and much more. Nor does it matter if one government is an elected nominally liberal civilian government, a dictator, or a military regime.

As far as the US and the wave of protest occurring there goes, the State has a firm monopoly on violence. Indeed, the increasingly violent police attacks on Occupy protests have been met with an even greater chorus of civilians calling for nonviolent witness. Any protester that challenges this insistence on nonviolence is quickly challenged as a potential police provocateur, a selfish jerk, thug or some other variant of deviant. While the fact exists that nonviolent witness is an incredibly powerful tactic of protest, it is a moral protest. Therefore, it assumes that those whose actions one is protesting actually have morals similar to the protesters and can be convinced to change policies by the moral power of the protesters’ arguments.

Unfortunately, such is often not the case. For example, the chancellor of University of California (UC) Davis, whose actions created the situation last week where several students were pepper-sprayed at point blank range by campus police, seems to be truly shaken by the police actions her orders unleashed. However, given the history of UC policing, I doubt very much that there will be a sea change in how UC police use force on campus. Furthermore, one has to wonder if that chancellor would be having the moral misgivings she seems to be having if the pepper-spraying incident had not received the coverage it has.

Do I think the recent police violence against protesters in the US means that it’s time for protesters to move to armed struggle or even throw rocks at cops? No, of course not. My only intention in pointing out the limits of nonviolent resistance is that those limits are something that the authorities don’t necessarily recognize or care about.

Like many folks that have been involved in opposing the state, I have had my share of physical run-ins with the police. Truncheons, tear gas, pepper spray, all of it. Yet, the worst beating I ever received from the police was not at a protest. It happened when the police answered a noise complaint at an apartment I was at one night. After an argument between the cop and one of the apartment residents, the cop kicked in the door, tearing it off its hinges. He called for backup. I went outside through a back door. As I tried to leave one of the six policeman standing around saw me and attacked. Within minutes I was on the ground with three officers on me. One was twisting my arms around to cuff me and the other two were pushing my face into the concrete of the sidewalk. Another was beating my legs with his nightstick. I was thrown into the car of the cop who began the whole episode and as we drove to the station he told me that my friends and I were dead meat if he ever saw me when he was not in uniform. I said nothing. When we got to the jail he placed me in a holding cell and began to beat me with his fists and club. If it weren’t for the jailer arriving, he probably would have beat me unconscious. This experience is not that uncommon, especially in poorer neighborhoods (and especially in neighborhoods populated by people of color.)

Police handled the attacks on the Occupy camps, which in the authorities’ minds were nothing but magnets for those without houses, much as they do any attempts to roust the homeless. The fact that these attacks were played out in the media occurred because the camps were protest camps instead of non-political camps of the homeless.

Furthermore, the presence of college students, labor activists and other “middle-class” residents not only brought cameras to the camp roustings, but people with some connections capable of speaking the language of the authorities and the media. This presence made what is a common occurrence to the people living on the streets into a national news story. In other words, the police violence visited on the homeless every day was exposed, if only briefly, to the world.

Historically, police violence is a fact of life in every society. In a society based on a capitalist economy, the police serve those that have the most money and property. When the authorities and their policies are under attack, the police will always be called in to protect the former. No official should be shocked when the police act brutally. There is a reason the most thuggish of the uniforms are often the ones called to disperse angry crowds. If there are officials shocked or upset at the brutality unleashed by the police under their command, they can resign like two members of the Oakland mayor’s staff did in the wake of the police raids on Occupy Oakland or they can defend their thugs like Mayor Bloomberg. As for the chancellor of UC Davis? Only time will tell if those tears she recently shed at a speakout on campus are genuine. Meanwhile, hardly any one but their friends and family weep for those the police brutalize off campus.

During the fateful 18 days in January and February when Egyptians took to the streets by the millions to topple the brutal Mubarak dictatorship, President Obama remained largely silent, refusing to call directly for democracy until it was clear that young Egyptians were about to topple the dictator’s three-decade-long rule.

In the months since then, as thousands of Egyptians have been attacked, imprisoned, sexually assaulted and murdered by their government, the United States has not merely remained silent, but has continued to provide crucial diplomatic, economic and military aid to the regime responsible for these crimes.

The latest Egyptian protests were sparked by growing anger over signs that the military leadership plans to hold on to power indefinitely. The military rulers say they will relinquish power once presidential elections are held, but have refused to commit to a plan and a timetable for handing over power to a democratically elected government.

The first of many rounds of voting for parliament is scheduled to begin November 28, but the military has not agreed to form a new government based on these elections. Moreover, it is trying to limit any civilian government from having control over the military’s budget. And it has postponed a presidential election to an indefinite time late in 2012 or in 2013.

Now the façade of a democratic transition has been ripped away and Egyptians are once again battling the military government in Tahrir Square for the future of their country, with at least 35 civilians killed since Saturday. The Obama administration remains as quiet as it was in the early days of the revolution. Such silence is both morally indefensible and politically and strategically disastrous for the United States.

The United States, with $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt every year, supplies a large part of the Egyptian military budget. But it refuses to use its considerable leverage. During Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s visit to Egypt in October, he actually praised the Egyptian military. “I really do have full confidence in the process that the Egyptian military is overseeing,” he said, “I think they’re making good progress.”

On Monday, November 21, White House spokesman Jay Carney only mustered up the courage to call for restraint from “all sides”—as if the pro-democracy activists were somehow equally responsible for the violence. When asked if the generals should specify the date for a presidential election, Carney replied, “I don’t want to dictate specifics to Egypt.”

As during the Mubarak era, the administration appears to believe that U.S. interests, including Egypt’s peace accord with Israel, are more important than the lives of the Egyptian people.

The march for freedom in Egypt cannot be stopped and when Egyptians finally rid themselves of the military government and establish a democratic system, the United States will have few friends in Egypt, or the Arab world more broadly, if it is seen as having supported the military rather than the people at this pivotal moment.

A principled U.S. position would be to immediately issue a strong condemnation of the violence unleashed by the Egyptian military on its people. The U.S. government should suspend all military aid to the Egyptian government until it stops attacking peaceful protesters, and until it releases the 12,000-plus citizens jailed since Mubarak’s ouster and commits to handing over power to a transitional civilian government as soon as parliamentary elections are completed. President Obama should coordinate with other Western allies and supporters of the Egyptian government to develop a clear and strong policy in support of a rapid transition to democracy and apply the full weight of international diplomatic, economic and legal pressure on the military junta towards that end.

Anything less will be a stain on the United States that will haunt this administration, and the United States more broadly, for years to come.

Join us in signing this letter urging President Obama to condemn the military crackdown and stand with Egypt’s brave citizens struggling for democracy.

The arrest could not await an opportunity to persuade the FBI of the seriousness or sanity of the matter, Bloomberg said, as the evildoer had apparently packed a marijuana bong with Christmas lights and was prepared to attempt unspeakable acts imminently. Although the materials were intentionally defective, having been provided to the terrorist on Saturday by the NYPD, a careful analysis identified a greater than one percent likelihood of an attack on a local Home Depot store with which the terrorist had previously quarreled over malfunctioning plumbing materials and staff he accused of “not knowing their elbow pipes from their assigned aisles.”

Bloomberg revealed a plot that included packing Christmas Bombs with nails in hopes of nailing returning U.S. troops to crosses. The Mayor said he would be making public the records of attempted communications between the bomber and Muslim cleric Lex Luther, who may or may not have ever reciprocated the attempted communications. Asked what motivated the terrorist to act in this moment, Bloomberg indicated that a video may have been the catalyst. In what the Mayor referred to as a “super fast moving investigation” it was apparently not yet clear what this video consisted of. The District Attorney has subpoenaed Netflix records from October and all but promised an “October surprise”.

Bloomberg responded to a series of questions on the significance of the Lex Luther connection, explaining repeatedly that no fewer than 36 blogs have tied Luther to funding from George Soros, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and a plan to publicly ask His Royal Highness Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Sa’ud of Saudi Arabia his views on beheading hippies and Socialists. Furthermore, Bloomberg explained, one of the top Mercedes diesel mechanics in Tribeca, an expert who has also blown up automobiles for NYPD film productions in preparation for hastily thrown together press conferences, has agreed to testify that Iran could develop nuclear weapons if left no clear alternative for actual survival.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly interrupted the flow of the press conference on Sunday to switch on a live video of a hypersonic flying bomb cruising on its way to a predetermined target. Kelly said he believed the target was Diana L. Taylor, a close acquaintance of Mayor Bloomberg. Kelly announced that New York would immediately be declaring war on Iran, which — he pointed out — hates us all for our freedoms.

Bloomberg interjected that, “Without me you would all be dead by now.”

Kelly followed up with, “If I can’t save you, nobody can.”

The press conference was repeated in every detail in Pig Latin with Bloomberg donning a Guantanamo prisoner’s orange outfit out of what he said was “solidarity with my left-leaning constituents.”

OWS doesn’t sound convinced by the NYPD claims, and I wait with curiosity to find out what will transpire when people go to claim them. I’m sure that the books will be quite usable if they weren’t destroyed. Lord knows, time in dumpsters or “sanitation trucks” will do wonders for page crispness and scent. I actually like to do my reading at dumps for the ambiance.

Here’s a little trick brought to you by a lover of simplicity: did you know that you can look at any political group or entity in power, then look at how they treat books? Do they value or destroy them? This will allow you to figure out who the good guys are! Pretty simple, huh? Decent entities do not fear sunlight or the free exchange of ideas. It’s a certain truth. Folks who burn books or tear down libraries are never who you want in charge. But they always seem to find their way there, don’t they?

It’s obvious when a nation has reached a dangerous time — when books are targeted as dangerous trash to remove. Hey, that’s sort of how they treated the OWS protesters themselves. They are full of ideas and open horizons – the Bloomberg billionaires don’t want that sort of thing to dwell in the minds of the staff (or would be staff). And the first OWS encampment was a hotbed for the sharing of these ideals.

And let me get this straight….in order to improve on the hygiene of the park, they took items in trash trucks to redistribute later? Sure.

None of it makes sense because once again, they destroy to save, beat to bring order, and create filth to bring cleanliness.

And certainly a myriad of possessions in the camp were treated with the destructive glee end of a beating stick. The NYPD is claiming that other items can be picked up with a photo id. Umm, yeah — that’s probably a safe thing to do! Go hand over your identification and get a “sorry, don’t know where your laptop is, but make sure you enjoy the hand up your crotch next time you go to an airport!” And I’m still skeptical that all the books will be returned. Books are dangerous, as are the thoughts that percolate after reading them. They were not to be saved, nor should the humanity behind their donation be noticed. But we shall see where we are on the trajectory towards Kakistocracy (look it up…it’s a word that fits)- if they return the books in usable condition or not.

A shared library full of truthful books is emblematic of a decency that they probably want to extinguish. Wow, even anarchists will return books for others to use in a timely fashion — who knew?! We can’t let it out that community can occur, even when a homeless subset who are violent are dumped nearby (wink, wink from the agent saboteurs). It’s amazing that the OWS NY camp held together as well as it did with tricks and malice in their every direction.

That was truly one of the first endearing stories that emerged from OWS — that of the shared library. Picturing those books in that goddamn city dumpster/trash truck-whatever it was should fill all with a disgust for the Bloombergs of the world. They are the true barbarians. Gilded gorillas, nothing more, confusing their wealth with worth.

I wonder if the outcry about the books had some low level employees dumpster fishing late Tuesday night, pulling out books to return? Did they realize at that moment that they were part of the 99%?

Education is not a free right of a free man according to those who want to destroy the OWS core values. It is to be financed, only through student loan penury and later servitude in an institution geared to grind out only the facilitators to the elite. It’s also no accident that in our society libraries so often face the budget cuts while graft laden deals mark much of even our local expenditures. Roads to hell, paved not with good intentions, but with deals that drain coffers. Rotten from the top, rotten to the core. And OWS sees it, hence all the drama.

But yes, Bloomberg, you cleaned up your girlfriend’s park, didn’t you? Funny so many stretches in NYC don’t get the same attention. A friend mentioned to me that perhaps a poor neighborhood should put in a big statue of a bull. That seems to ensure police patrols and presence.

I hope that in this coming time of winter solitude, the long nights and introspection will mark another chapter of the OWS protests. A hibernation and rejuvenation. And I hope that with the coming of spring, that the movement will re-emerge with vigor and righteous anger. I want to see Punxatawny Phil emerge, not just with a shadow, but with rabies.