Bruce Springsteen announced earlier today via Twitter that he is canceling his performance in North Carolina this weekend because of the organized assault by the state legislature against human rights.
Category: Heroism
Hero of the Day
And the accursed flag comes down
A woman scaled the flagpole in front of the South Carolina Statehouse Saturday morning and temporarily removed the Confederate flag that flew there. The woman was arrested by State Capitol police along with a man who had entered the grounds with her, the Associated Press reported. The flag was replaced and raised a short time later.
The woman, who was not identified by authorities, was named on social media as Brittany “Bree” Newsome, an activist from North Carolina. Her actions inspired the hashtag #KeepItDown, which was one of the top trending topics on Twitter in the U.S. Saturday. Later in the day, the hashtag #FreeBree was also trending in the U.S.
According to BreeNewsome.com, a site linked to a Twitter account belonging to a user with the name Bree Newsome and mentioned by numerous users in conjunction with the #KeepItDown hashtag, Newsome is an activist and graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Here is hoping that this happens regularly until it comes down forever.
I Wish that I Were This Good a Jew
Baci Weiler, a woman in New York City with a buzz cut and wearing baggy trowsers and t-shirt, was was approached by a Chabad Lubovich representative and lent her Tefillin* so that she could pray.
In Orthodox Judaism, Tefillin are only to be worn by men, so Ms. Weiler posted the picture of this (Since deleted) to Facebook:
This happened last friday at a chabad table. Apparently, buzzed hair + baggy t-shirt + charedi lack of any concept of fluidity in gender expression = egalitarianism. Tefillin with a bracha [blessing], administered by a chabadnik! bimheira beyameinu [Hebrew for “it should come speedily in our time].
It should not have been a big deal, and no one but her FB friends should have seen it, but at this point, through the vagaries of the Internet, it ends up getting some mainstream coverage. (The Jerusalem Post picked it up.)
Well. Baci Weler was horrified at the idea that the Chabadnik who offered her Tefillin was being subjected to mocking, and she offered the most sincere and spiritual that I have ever read:
Two days ago, I posted a couple of photos of myself…
Two days ago, I posted a couple of photos of myself putting on tefillin at a Chabad stand in Union Square. Watching these photos spread, I’ve had time to reflect on their implications. These thoughts are still not fully formed, but I hope both my critics and supporters read them carefully and charitably.
The encounter itself was brief, shocking, and personally significant. I did not plan or initiate this interaction. I was approached and misgendered. Being seen as a man, despite being a woman, was paradoxically validating: for just a minute, I was no longer an Other – the mechitza that has frustrated me for years dissolved. As he carefully wrapped the tefillin shel yad around my arm, I felt connected – to him, to God, to tradition, to the Jewish people. It was a powerful moment, but also painful and wrong – because it was under false pretenses. Though his mistaken assumptions – products of the harmfully rigid gender roles with which he grew up – instigated the encounter, I let it continue without correcting him. Though I didn’t force him to do something wrong, I allowed him to do something he presumably would have been uncomfortable doing given complete knowledge of the situation. Despite our ideological differences, I owed him this basic level of respect as a fellow Jew and as a human. For that I am sorry.
Beyond this, my post was interpreted as personally mocking him, and for that I am also sorry. This was not my intention. The post is a separate entity from the encounter itself, and its goal was dual: on one level, I was knowingly making a sharp, ironic political statement – a criticism of a religious ideology with which I fundamentally disagree. It transcended the human interaction and presented us as caricatures of our respective religious identities. I am not retracting this criticism, but I don’t want to be lauded for encouraging that kind of dehumanization. On another level, and more importantly, the photo – also separate from the encounter itself – is powerful because it depicts an instance of accidental pluralism and of shared joy in the mitzvah of hanachat tefillin. It is a serendipitous glimpse of the world I wish I lived in: a world where both he, a bearded chabadnik guy, and I, a buzz-cut egalitarian girl, could be “frum”, regardless of gender or labels, equally bound by mitzvot. I’ll end as I did before: Bimheira Beyameinu.
I don’t think that I would ever achieve this level of Kavanah.†
Ms. Weiler might want to consider the Rabbinate as a career.
H/T Failed Messiah.
*Boxes that contain scripture, and are placed on the non-dominant arm and head in order to conduct certain prayers.
†The spiritual focus and awareness required for prayer to “take”.
Bad Day at the Office ……… Or Maybe a Good Day at the Office
You definately owe him a pint
Shorthouse is on the left
A jumper for the Red Devils UK army parachute team had his chute fail.
One of his fellow paratroopers caught his failed parachute with his legs, and lowered both of them into the a nearby harbor:
A Red Devil parachutist had a lucky escape when his chute failed to open during an airshow – but a team-mate caught him in mid-air.
The Army freefall parachute display team was performing at the Whitehaven Air Show in Cumbria on Friday night when the parachute failed.
Pictures on social media show the men coming down together and crashing into the harbour waters.
A message on the show’s Facebook page said both were all right.
It said: “We can confirm that the Red Devil parachutists are both safe and sound. For the first time in 25 years they had a parachute fail.
“One team member caught his team-mate and brought him into Queens Dock. Our safety procedures worked perfectly and a huge thank you to Whitehaven Marina for getting them out of the water so quickly.”
………
“It’s a testament to the training and the skill of the British Forces and we are just happy that last night’s drama had a happy ending.
“Within ten minutes of landing the lads were tucking into pie and peas and a pint and there was an audible sigh of relief in the crowd when we were able to announce they were both safe.”
………
An Army spokesman said: “We can confirm that there was an incident during the Whitehaven Air Show, when a member of the Red Devils display team’s parachute failed to open correctly.
“A team mate assisted in his safe landing, both men were unharmed, and we are now investigating to find out the cause of the incident.”
You have to love the understated response of both men:
Cpl Mike French, 34, was performing at the Whitehaven Air Show in Cumbria on Friday when the accident happened.
His parachute wrapped around Cpl Wayne Shorthouse but they managed to land in the harbour.
Cpl Shorthouse, 32, said he was no hero and both men had been trained for such a scenario.
Cpl French said the plan had been for his parachute to be caught by Cpl Shorthouse as the first stage of building a formation.
“As soon as I had made contact with Wayne from the back, I looked up and saw the parachute was a little bit wrapped around,” said Cpl French.
“It was pretty much straight away you realise it’s not exactly how we planned to do it but then training kicks in and members of the Parachute Regiment, the British Army, we always train for every eventuality.
“Display parachuting and especially canopy formation within display parachuting is a very difficult and dangerous aspect of sky diving so constant training is one of the things that kept us [safe], the communication and Wayne having a good parachute above his head.”
Asked if he could repay his colleague, Cpl French said: “A pint of beer maybe.”
Cpl Shorthouse, however, said he was “just doing his job”.
Both men said they were looking forward to the next display.
Both of their responses are seriously bad-ass.
Cpl French should definitely get Cpl Shorthouse a pint of bitter.
Straight Talking Politician of the Week
Rotterdam’s mayor, who is himself a Muslim, has some choice words for Islamists who wish to eschew modernity, “Pack your bags, and f%$# off.”
The Moroccan-born mayor of the Dutch port city of Rotterdam said in a television appearance on Tuesday that Muslims like himself who choose to live in the West should adopt a more tolerant worldview or “pack your bags and f%$# off.”
………
Aboutaleb moved with his family to the Netherlands when he was a teen. During the television program Nieuwsuur (News Hour), he spoke to Islamists living in the West, saying, “It is incomprehensible that you can turn against freedom.”
“But if you don’t like freedom,” he continued, “for heaven’s sake pack your bags and leave.”
“If you do not like it here because some humorists you don’t like are making a newspaper, may I then say you can f%$# off,” Aboutaleb said.
Straight talk from a politician, how quaint.
I wish that there were more politicians like Aboutaleb, and fewer snollygosters out in the political sphere.
Thank You Lassana Bathily
He was an employee at the Hyper Cacher supermarket who managed to get about 15 people into hiding during the hostage taking and subsequent siege:
As the authorities in France worked on Saturday to piece together the sequence of events at a kosher supermarket in Paris where a gunman and four hostages were killed on Friday, there was an outpouring of praise online for a young employee credited with saving the lives of some customers by hiding them in a cold-storage room.
The employee, Lassana Bathily, 24, was identified in the French news as a Muslim from Mali who worked at the supermarket, Hyper Cacher, near the Porte de Vincennes in eastern Paris.
………
When the people he had hidden came out at the end of the siege, Mr. Bathily said, “they congratulated me.”
“They said, ‘Really, thanks for thinking of all these ideas.’ I said, ‘It’s nothing, it’s life.’ ”
It ain’t nothing.
You kept your head, and helped a lot of people.
It is a big deal.
This Would Not Have Happened Without Snowden Leaks
The FISA Court just rejected the NSA’s request to hold onto to phone metadata forever:
A federal surveillance court has rejected the Obama administration’s bid to hold onto millions of phone records beyond the current five-year limit.
The ruling is a rare rebuke for the government from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court has rejected less than 1 percent of government spying requests over the past 30 years.
But Judge Reggie Walton said he found the Justice Department’s argument for extending the retention of phone records “simply unpersuasive.”
Government lawyers had argued that they needed to retain the data as evidence for the slew of privacy lawsuits filed in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks about National Security Agency surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other groups are suing to shut the program down, claiming it violates the constitutional rights of millions of Americans.
………
But the federal judge noted that none of the privacy groups have tried to force the NSA to hold onto the data for their lawsuits. He wrote that the groups are seeking “the destruction of the [telephone] metadata, not its retention.”
Walton concluded that there is no legal requirement for the NSA to retain the data, and that any motivation for retaining the records is outweighed by the privacy harm.
Without Snowden, there would never have been the lawsuits, and even if there had been the suits, without the focus on the rubber stamp nature of the FISA court, the request would simply have been quietly granted.
Thank you Edward Joseph Snowden.
Greenwald to Return to US ……… Stay Out of Private Aircraft
I think that Glenn Greenwald overestimates the moral and political constrains on the behavior of the US state security apparatus and the executive branch.
If he returns to the United States they will attempt to destroy him:
When big-name public figures and Edward Snowden critics first started suggesting Glenn Greenwald and other writers who’d published his surveillance disclosures might be in legal jeopardy, Greenwald assumed that both the clamor and the actual risk to journalists would quickly subside, and eventually disappear.
That was about six months ago. Today, Greenwald believes he miscalculated. In an exclusive interview Wednesday he said that the ominous rhetoric directed at him has actually escalated. It’s discouraged him from visiting the United States, where he still has strong family and professional ties. And though he intends to reenter the country sooner rather than later, he’ll do so despite the fact that he believes he faces a much greater risk of detention than most of the other journalists who have access to some or all of Snowden’s files.
“As the story kind of went on I thought the prospect of something happening to the journalists would dissipate to zero. I actually think that the risk is higher than it’s ever been,” Greenwald told me. “My parents are getting older, my nieces [live there] — none of that is something I’m going to go home for now … I had a foundation that wanted to sponsor and pay for and market aggressively a six-city speaking tour to talk about the NSA story and the revelations. I would have completely loved to have done it … on the assurance that nothing would happen. And because we couldn’t get it from the U.S. government, I had to cancel.”
When we last spoke in August, Greenwald was cognizant of the risks he’d face if he visited the United States, but he was also pointedly defiant. “I take more seriously the Constitution’s guarantee of a free press in the First Amendment,” he said at the time. “So I have every intention of entering the U.S. as soon as my schedule permits and there’s a reason to do so.”
Journalist Gary Webb was driven to suicide for revealing that the Contras were smuggling crack into the United States.
With Padilla, they kept him in solitary for years, and when he needed dental work, they kept him blindfolded through the entire trip.
There are people who want to destroy you, and they have the means, and your only protection would be the good will of one Barack Hussein Obama, which, along with $7.50 will get you a Starbucks latte.
They want to make him dead.
Barack Obama, Fire James Clapper Now
If you want to give a guy the keys to our security apparatus, they cannot hold the Constitution of the United States of America in contempt:
James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, appeared today before the Senate Intelligence Committee, his first appearance since outright lying to that Committee last March about NSA bulk collection. In his prepared opening remarks, Clapper said this:
Snowden claims that he’s won and that his mission is accomplished. If that is so, I call on him and his accomplices to facilitate the return of the remaining stolen documents that have not yet been exposed to prevent even more damage to U.S. security.
Who, in the view of the Obama administration, are Snowden’s “accomplices”? The FBI and other official investigators have been very clear with the media that there is no evidence whatsoever that Snowden had any help in copying and removing documents from the NSA.
If there were any credible evidence of foreign agency involvement, it would have been leaked by Obama and His Evil Minions™, if not publicly trumpeted in a press conference.
Clapper, the man whom Edward Snowden proved to have lied to Congress, should not be allowed to have access classified of any kind.
Here’s hoping that Mr. Snowden wins the Nobel Peace Prize he was recently nominated for.
He is far more deserving that President “I Have a Drone”:
One of the biggest debates over the last year was whether Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who ignited a storm of controversy when he revealed a huge number of covert measures by the NSA, was a traitor or a hero. Today, the latter camp got a big boost after it was announced that Snowden had officially been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
While Nobel Peace Prize nominations are typically kept secret for 50 years, those who submit nominations can make them public themselves sometimes. Thousands of different people, including academics, elected officials, and former recipients can make nominations for whomever “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses” over the preceding year.
Snowden was nominated by Norway’s Socialist Left Party politicians Baard Vegar Solhjell, a former environment minister, and Snorre Valen, a member of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, where Valen announced the whistleblower’s nomination earlier today.
Calling His Bluff
Just watch an LGBT activists confronting a bigot politician Ron Webb, who has proposed reversing the Shreveport city council’s fairness ordinance forbidding discrimation against the LGBT in employment and housing, by reading Leviticus and offering him a stone so that Webb could kill her as the Bible calls for.
When confronted with the reality of the situation, Councilman Webb fled with his tail between his legs.
As Rachel Maddow is wont to say, it’s the, “Best thing in the world today.”
H/t Americablog.
Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows – NYTimes.com
Now We Know Who These Heroes Are
On March 8, 1971, in Media, PA, a group of anonymous brave dissidents stole records from a local FBI office, revealing J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program, of domestic spying and sabotage, and they mailed to various media sources.
Well, they are no longer anonymous:
The perfect crime is far easier to pull off when nobody is watching.
So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.
They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.
The burglary in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971, is a historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another unflattering light on government spying and opened a national debate about the proper limits of government surveillance. The burglars had, until now, maintained a vow of silence about their roles in the operation. They were content in knowing that their actions had dealt the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed enormous power and prestige during J. Edgar Hoover’s lengthy tenure as director.
“When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.”
Mr. Forsyth, now 63, and other members of the group can no longer be prosecuted for what happened that night, and they agreed to be interviewed before the release this week of a book written by one of the first journalists to receive the stolen documents. The author, Betty Medsger, a former reporter for The Washington Post, spent years sifting through the F.B.I.’s voluminous case file on the episode and persuaded five of the eight men and women who participated in the break-in to end their silence.
Unlike Mr. Snowden, who downloaded hundreds of thousands of digital N.S.A. files onto computer hard drives, the Media burglars did their work the 20th-century way: they cased the F.B.I. office for months, wore gloves as they packed the papers into suitcases, and loaded the suitcases into getaway cars. When the operation was over, they dispersed. Some remained committed to antiwar causes, while others, like John and Bonnie Raines, decided that the risky burglary would be their final act of protest against the Vietnam War and other government actions before they moved on with their lives.
These people are patriots and heroes, and the end
The passage of years has worn some of the edges off the once radical political views of John and Bonnie Raines. But they said they felt a kinship toward Mr. Snowden, whose revelations about N.S.A. spying they see as a bookend to their own disclosures so long ago.
They know some people will criticize them for having taken part in something that, if they had been caught and convicted, might have separated them from their children for years. But they insist they would never have joined the team of burglars had they not been convinced they would get away with it.
“It looks like we’re terribly reckless people,” Mr. Raines said. “But there was absolutely no one in Washington — senators, congressmen, even the president — who dared hold J. Edgar Hoover to accountability.”
“It became pretty obvious to us,” he said, “that if we don’t do it, nobody will.”
Law breaking and abuse of power, revealed by patriots.
J. Edgar Hoover was a deeply evil man who had no respect at all for civil rights and due process, and he had managed to blackmail his way into an unassailable center of power, and they helped stop him.
The distribution of these documents to the press, may not have been the end of abuses by the US state security apparatus, nor even the beginning of the end of abuses by the US state security apparatus, but at the very least it was the end of the beginning, to paraphrase Winston Churchill.
I would also note that in 1971 the press was not so cowed by the government that they would sit on the story, as the New York Times did in 2004.
People like this, and I am including Edward Snowden in this, are essential for the protection of democracy and civil rights.
Could My Relatives Please Confirm Who Sent Which T-Shirt?
OK, I know that Dad sent me this, because it came with gummy worms:
But who sent me this one?
Sometimes, Chanukah is confusing.
Give Snowden a Medal and a 6-Figure Pension, Already
Surprise! Snowden’s actions have inspired other whistle blowers:
The “courage” of Edward Snowden is “contagious,” according to lawyer and transparency advocate Jesselyn Radack, who says that additional employees at the National Security Agency are now coming forward with what they consider objectionable practices by their employer.
In an interview with ABC News on Thursday, Raddack revealed that an influx of NSA whistleblowers, inspired by Snowden, are now knocking on the doors of her organization.
According to Radack, several more whistleblowers have approached the Government Accountability Project (GAP)—the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization where she is the director of National Security and Human Rights—since Snowden’s story broke earlier this year.
“There definitely could be more revelations in addition to those that Snowden has revealed and that are continuing to come out,” she told ABC News.
The Obama administration’s “war on whistleblowers” is backfiring, said Radack.
“I think the government hopes to chill speech by employees in the national security and intelligence fields, especially those at the NSA and CIA, but the unintended consequence is [that] more and more whistleblowers are coming through the doors of the Government Accountability Project (GAP),” said Radack. “I think courage is contagious, and we see more and more people from the NSA coming through our door after Snowden made these revelations.”
Courage is contagious.
This must be Barack Obama’s worst nightmare.
How Ordinary People Can Do Heroic things………
Susan De Guardiolia has confronted the bureaucratic agents of tyranny, and she won:
Fundamentally, the routine expansion of what can only be described as a creeping police state can be stopped by citizens who know their rights.
You do not have to be a lawyer to do this.
You simply have to know a few things:
- Am I being detained?
- If the answer is no, leave. If they refuse to answer, repeat the question, politely.
- If a policeman asks to search your belongings (including vehicle), then they need your consent to search. Clearly state your refusal to consent.
Police officers will frequently make voluntary compliance appear mandatory.
Know your rights.
There is a Lot More to Come From Edward Snowden
The NSA is now admitting that Snowden impersonated NSA officials to get his documents.
I think that this quote is particularly telling:
“Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was,” said a former U.S. official with knowledge of the case. “This is why you don’t hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.”
That comment won the Internet.
More significantly, they still don’t know what Snowden got his hands on:
The NSA still doesn’t know exactly what Snowden took. But its forensic investigation has included trying to figure out which higher level officials Snowden impersonated online to access the most sensitive documents.
The NSA has as many as 40,000 employees. According to one intelligence official, the NSA is restricting its research to a much smaller group of individuals with access to sensitive documents. Investigators are looking for discrepancies between the real world actions of an NSA employee and the online activities linked to that person’s computer user profile. For example, if an employee was on vacation while the on-line version of the employee was downloading a classified document, it might indicate that someone assumed the employee’s identity.
The NSA has already identified several instances where Snowden borrowed someone else’s user profile to access documents, said the official.
This official called the damage a 12 on a scale of 10 to 12.
If you believe, as I do, that our society and our security have been harmed by the secrecy fetish of our state security apparatus, then this is an unalloyed good.
This Takes Guts
Glenn Greenwald lives in Brazil, though he regularly returns to the United States.
In response to an offer of protection from Brazilian officials, Greenwald has stated that he will not be applying for protection from US prosecution:
A Brazilian official has taken the unusual step of publicly announcing that the Brazilian government will offer Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald protection from the U.S. government after determining he risks facing legal action if he returns to the U.S.
To receive protection from Brazil, Greenwald would have to officially request it. But though he takes the risk of prosecution seriously, Greenwald tells me he has no intention of taking the Brazilian government up on the offer — and that he plans to return to the U.S. sooner than later, come what may.
“I haven’t requested any protection from the Brazilian government or any other government because, rather obviously, I’ve committed no crime — unless investigative journalism is now a felony in the U.S.,” Greenwald said via email. “But the fact that Brazilian authorities believe there is a real possibility that the U.S. would unjustly prosecute journalists for the ‘crime’ of reporting what the U.S. government is doing is a powerful indictment of the U.S.’s current image in the world — just as was the requirement that the U.S. promise it will not torture or kill Snowden if he’s returned. It’s an equally potent reflection of the massive gap in opinion between the U.S. Government and the rest of the world when it comes to how the NSA disclosures, my reporting, and Snowden are perceived.”
………
“Given that the Obama DOJ has adopted theories that would criminalize journalism in both the WikiLeaks Grand Jury proceeding and the investigation of James Rosen, given that it has waged what most observers agree is an unprecedented war on whistle-blowers, and given that several prominent political figures and journalists have called for my prosecution, I obviously take the risk seriously,” Greenwald adds. “But I take more seriously the Constitution’s guarantee of a free press in the First Amendment. So I have every intention of entering the U.S. as soon as my schedule permits and there’s a reason to do so.”
If he sets foot in the United States while Obama is president, he will be harassed, and almost certainly detained, at least briefly. (The reality will likely be worse.)
Going to Lunch, and It Was On the Radio
Bradley Manning was acquitted of the most serious charge, Aiding the Enemy.
I do not think that Manning “won”, because I expect him to get at least 20 years, but Barack Obama, and the US state security apparatus lost.
They means that the American people had a sort of a win, though.
It Means that She Frightens Them………
Politico, the epitome of the mindless and soulless Washington, DC stupidity, has published a hit piece on Elizabeth Warren.
They now see her as a threat.
Why Ellsberg Could Turn Himself In, and Edward Snowden Cannot
Basically, it comes down to the fact that while Ellsberg might have been at risk by illegal activities of the Nixon administration, he was not at risk by the law itself, while Edward Snowden would be tortured as a matter of law and Department of Justice policy:
Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree. The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago.
After the New York Times had been enjoined from publishing the Pentagon Papers — on June 15, 1971, the first prior restraint on a newspaper in U.S. history — and I had given another copy to The Post (which would also be enjoined), I went underground with my wife, Patricia, for 13 days. My purpose (quite like Snowden’s in flying to Hong Kong) was to elude surveillance while I was arranging — with the crucial help of a number of others, still unknown to the FBI — to distribute the Pentagon Papers sequentially to 17 other newspapers, in the face of two more injunctions. The last three days of that period was in defiance of an arrest order: I was, like Snowden now, a “fugitive from justice.”
Yet when I surrendered to arrest in Boston, having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day. Later, when my charges were increased from the original three counts to 12, carrying a possible 115-year sentence, my bond was increased to $50,000. But for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. Helping to end that war was my preeminent concern. I couldn’t have done that abroad, and leaving the country never entered my mind.
There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to “incapacitate me totally”).
(FYI, “incapacitate me totally” means assassination by Nixon’s people)
I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.
He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.” (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)
What he is saying here is that Snowden will be tortured if he ever enters US custody.
Hell, they did that almost 20 years ago in the case of Wen Ho Lee, where he spent months in pretrial solitary, largely because the prosecutors, and the counter-espionage apparatus, wanted to break him.
BTW, when we look at the NSA surveillance regime, it is what a former East German Stasi officer would call a totalitarian state’s wet dream:
Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.
“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.
In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.
You know, if your surveillance regime is something that gives a former Stasi agent a stiffie, you are doing something profoundly evil.
Props to Gary Gensler………
He’s been canned by the Obama administration for being too hard on the banksters, but on the way out, is implementing the meaningful derivatives reforms for which he was fired:
US regulators are likely to close a crucial loophole in Dodd-Frank rules in the next few weeks, in a move that will cost US banks many millions of dollars of revenues in the US$640trn derivatives market.
Several sources familiar with the internal discussions at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission say that the current exemption – which allows US banks executing derivative trades outside the country to bypass tougher capital holding and reporting requirements – will be allowed to expire on July 12.
CFTC chairman Gary Gensler, the only person with the authority to call a vote on extending the exemption, is said to oppose any extension and a spokesman confirmed that no vote had been scheduled.
“He’s determined not to extend,” said a lawyer familiar with discussions between lobbyists and the chairman. “And if it’s true that Gensler is leaving, maybe he wants this to be his final act before leaving.”
This is clearly a very large f%$# you to Barack Obama, Jack Lew, and (particularly) Timothy Geithner, and it is a well deserved f%$# you.
Obama and his and His Evil Minions™ have been determined to subvert meaningful banking regulations, and it’s nice that someone is standing up to him.
It will cost the banks some money, but I do not care:
If the exemption expires, all swaps deals involving US banks would be subject to the Dodd-Frank rules. Banks would have to set aside significantly more capital against each trade, which would eat into profits and potentially even drive clients to other banks.
Such deals would also become subject to much more onerous reporting requirements and would have to be cleared through an exchange – which could also reduce profitability and push away custom.
Figures from the US Treasury show that US financial institutions reported derivatives trading revenues of US$4.4bn in the fourth quarter of 2012, a 73% increase on the previous year.
There is an old saying about people who are inconvenient, “It’s better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”
I thank Gary Gensler for pissing in. On the matter of financial regulation, it is a very well deserved smack down.
H/T Naked Capitalism.