We Say Fight Back!

Direct Action versus foreclosures On Detroit’s east side is a weather-beaten 1921 bungalow flanked by weedy lots and three abandoned houses.

The bungalow has long been occupied by a woman who wants to buy it and fix it up — just the kind of person any neighborhood wants. But any day now, a judge could order her out.

Lela Whitfield doesn’t plan on moving. Her mission is to stay rooted to her childhood home on Manistique and to keep trying to buy it. And that has drawn activists, church leaders, lawyers and neighbors, all trying to stop not only her eviction but the incessant tide of foreclosures and evictions across Detroit.

As soon as they get word that a bailiff is on the way to remove Whitfield’s possessions from the house, activists from Detroit Eviction Defense pledge they will crowd Whitfield’s curbside on Manistique, creating a human curtain of protection. At the risk of being arrested for trespassing on bank-owned property, the activists will try to block the bailiff, other members of the eviction crew and the roll-off trash bin that will be sent to Whitfield’s house.  www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2015/08/15/foreclosure-reverse-mortgage-detroit-fannie-mae-eviction-hud-katrina/31798169/

www.ivaw.org/why-we-are-against-wars

A Synopsis of Fascism And Social Revolution By R. Palme Dutt (published 1936)

Introduction

Fascism is an inevitable result of capitalism and its decay if the social revolution is delayed.

Chapter 1

Fascism is the logical result of the fact that the form of private ownership of the means of production can progress no further and must create violent crises, stagnation, and decay. Only the social organization of production can sanely organize production, and this can only come through social revolution.

The world available for capitalist exploitation now contracts. Fascism is a further stage of capital in crisis. A massive world army of unemployed people grows, and as this world crisis grows, so does the need of bosses to lower the costs of production. There are but two alternatives, social revolution or destruction. The class struggle now intensifies. .

Chapter 2

After WWI there was a brief period of capitalist stabilization based on (a) the defeat of the world revo (b) the use of social democracy and concessions to workers and © the strength of American capitalism, not hurt by the war and not yet wholly fouled by decay. This was a hollow form of stabilization which could not ·last.

But social democracy masked the class struggle and disorganized workers so they were not ready for the crisis ahead. (more richgibson.com/synopsisfascim.htm)

above, redacted pages from the incisive, even funny, book, Guantanamo Diary

Hunger Strikes Continue at Gitmo Since the age of 23, Tariq Ba-Odah has been detained at the U.S. prison facility at Guantánamo Bay. Never charged with a crime, Ba-Odah went on hunger strike eight years ago to protest his indefinite detention, as well as the brutal treatment he is alleged to have suffered at the hands of his captors.

Now a 36-year-old man, Ba-Odah weighs less than 75 pounds. Despite having been cleared for release by a multi-agency review board in 2009, he remains behind bars with his release still a subject of legal wrangling by the Obama administration. In response to his rapidly deteriorating physical condition, his lawyers recently filed a petition for habeas corpus, citing the U.S. government’s legal obligations to free seriously ill prisoners.

Last week, Justice Department lawyers asked for an extension in the deadline to respond to his habeas filing. A New York Times article published at the time cited an interagency conflict between the State Department and Department of Defense as contributing to Ba-Odah’s continued legal predicament. An article published Monday by the Daily Beast, citing anonymous White House sources, purported to explain the nature of this dispute further, suggesting that Defense Secretary Ash Carter is refusing to sign release orders for the 52 Gitmo prisoners who have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement, not wanting to take responsibility for their possible future actions. firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/13/hunger-striking-detainee-tests-obamas-will-close-guantanamo/

The Little Red Schoolhouse

 

How NY State Teaches kids to hate reading: Test Questions and answers for 3rd graders    www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/11/nyregion/new-york-standardized-test-questions.html

Chicago Schools Announce 450 more layoffs Chicago Public Schools announced on Monday that more than 450 teachers will be laid off, with notices to be sent out the same day.

“As in the past, CPS will offer affected teachers the opportunity to reapply for positions within CPS,” CPS said in a statement. “As CPS works to keep classroom cuts to a minimum, fewer teachers will be impacted this year than any point in the past five years, with 479, or less than 2 percent, of teachers impacted.” www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/CPS-Announces-More-Than-450-Layoffs-321269771.html#ixzz3ivNmpy65

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

Chalmers Johnson on the empire of Bases ( a reminder) As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize — or do not want to recognize — that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire — an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can’t begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.

Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose names sum up our martial heritage — Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another.

Our installations abroad bring profits to civilian industries, which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or, like the now well-publicized Kellogg, Brown & Root company, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation of Houston, undertake contract services to build and maintain our far-flung outposts. One task of such contractors is to keep uniformed members of the imperium housed in comfortable quarters, well fed, amused, and supplied with enjoyable, affordable vacation facilities. Whole sectors of the American economy have come to rely on the military for sales. On the eve of our second war on Iraq, for example, while the Defense Department was ordering up an extra ration of cruise missiles and depleted-uranium armor-piercing tank shells, it also acquired 273,000 bottles of Native Tan sunblock, almost triple its 1999 order and undoubtedly a boon to the supplier, Control Supply Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its subcontractor, Sun Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida.

At Least Seven Hundred Foreign Bases

It’s not easy to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases. Official records on these subjects are misleading, although instructive. According to the Defense Department’s annual “Base Structure Report” for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and has another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories.  www.tomdispatch.com/post/176033/best_of_tomdispatch%3A_chalmers_johnson_on_garrisoning_the_planet/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The US’ 2014 Base Structure report, 2014, for those doubters about the massiveness of the US military empire: www.acq.osd.mil/ie/download/bsr/Base%20Structure%20Report%20FY14.pdf

Sacramento Prison uprising: 1 Dead, 5 wounded in Max Security prison 1

prisoner was killed and others injured Wednesday when inmates at a maximum-security prison outside of Folsom rioted on Wednesday, state corrections officials said.

The prison yard fight began shortly before 1 p.m., according to a written report provided by the agency, which did not include the number of inmates involved. Corrections officers responded with pepper spray and warning shots from rifles, the report said.  www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-ff-inmate-killed-in-california-riot-20150812-story.html

Embedded video: The murder of the young in Mexico   news.vice.com/video/talking-heads-the-murder-of-the-young-in-mexico

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Health experts criticized Coca-Cola’s funding of a nonprofit organization of scientists who focus on fighting obesity through exercise, not diet. “Coca-Cola’s agenda here is very clear,” said Marion Nestle, a highly respected nutrition expert. “Get these researchers to confuse the science and deflect attention from dietary intake.”http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/nytnow/your-monday-evening-briefing.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

The east side of Detroit ran out of firefighters to respond to emergencies Monday morning, leaving entire neighborhoods without fire protection and forcing skeleton crews to battle blazes that spread to four occupied homes and contributed to the injury of a firefighter.

Separate fires broke out in four houses between 1:05 a.m. and 2:30 a.m., drawing all 60 firefighters from the east side. Some of the firefighters were hampered by defective rigs and fire hydrants.

Detroit also left Hamtramck without adequate fire protection by calling its neighbor’s fire crew to a house blaze that was 7 miles away, violating the pair’s 8-month-old pact that limits automatic mutual aid to a 1-mile radius of Hamtramck’s borders.motorcitymuckraker.com/2015/08/12/detroit-runs-out-of-firefighters-during-destructive-night-on-east-side/

Detroit Pols Shocked! It’s not a great cruise ship destination  Taxpayers anted up $22 million for a new Detroit riverfront building to entice Great Lakes cruise ships and other passenger traffic. They built it — but the ships never came.

Instead, four years after construction of the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority public dock, the building is used almost exclusively by a politically connected catering company for deluxe weddings and other parties.

Only one cruise ship has docked this year at the sleek, 21,000-square-foot building near the Renaissance Center — an improvement from zero in 2014. The Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority building, meanwhile, gets plenty of party use by its caterer, Troy-based Continental Services.  www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2015/08/13/cruise-ship/31681911/

The Pacification of Black Lives Matter Rebellions aren’t simply repressed. They’re pacified. While repression—the iron hand—is useful to terrorize a population into submission, the issues animating a rebellion must be partially redressed—the velvet glove—to forestall a further reaching revolutionary upsurge. The most effective way to defeat rebellion is to blunt its grievances and overtake its leaders. This is precisely what is happening with the Black Lives Matter movement.

For the past year, much attention has focused on the most dramatic responses to the Black Lives Matter movement: the militarized police and smoke grenades, states of emergency and curfews, government surveillance and fears of infiltration. While these forms of repression should not be discounted, they should be properly understood. Heavy-handed responses polarize the struggle. The middle ground disappears and both sides radicalize. For those seeking to maintain the status quo, this is not the best outcome.

It’s much better to co-opt moderates and divide the opposition. After the initial explosion in Ferguson following Mike Brown’s death, Governor Jay Nixon put a black officer, Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ronald S. Johnson, in charge. Johnson immediately won praise, when he ordered his officers shed their riot gear and started walking with marching demonstrators. In this new context, liberal organizations began to separate themselves from more radical demonstrators. The NAACP organized events “to channel the anger over Brown’s death into positive action such as getting people to register to vote and to obtain college grants.” Johnson and other police executives marched at the head of a NAACP demonstration. The response to the Ferguson Rebellion had shifted from crude repression to subtle pacification.

Established non-profit organizations are essential to this work.  www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/14/non-profits-and-the-pacification-of-the-black-lives-matter-movement/

Currency Wars Can Become Hot wars: China  For years, China looked like the principled noncombatant. As other countries, seeking to secure an economic advantage, let the value of their currencies slide on international markets, China held firm on the value of its money.

But this week, China jumped into the fray. In a surprise decision on Tuesday, the country’s authorities began sharply devaluing its currency, the renminbi. While the plunge paused on Friday, the renminbi was still down 4.4 percent against the dollar this week, a huge drop for China.

The abrupt move opens a new phase in what some analysts see as a long-raging global currency war, a development that could leave the United States exposed and undermine efforts to pull the world economy out of the doldrums.

The yen, the euro and several other major currencies have fallen in recent years against the dollar as the Federal Reserve has cut back its stimulus and policy makers elsewhere have sought to obtain gains for their sluggish national economies.

But the countries that don’t join the devaluations, like the United States right now, can end up suffering, if they export less and import more. A steep drop in the value of the renminbi could also intensify some of the forces that, in the view of some economists, have caused the American economy to underperform.

“The risks of a deflationary, secular stagnation in the U.S. would be increased by a large devaluation of the renminbi,” said Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary. Mr. Summers, however, cautioned against overreacting. “One has to be very careful about regarding market fluctuations and uncertainty among market participants as a crisis that demands major government interventions.”

Even so, the Fed faces a dilemma as it contemplates raising interest rates for the first time in more than nine years. A rate increase could drive the dollar up even more against other currencies, creating a vexing obstacle for the American economy at a crucial moment in its recovery.

“We’ve been in a currency war for six years,” said Stephen S. Roach, a senior fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University. “China is now moving on its currency, and other countries are using their currencies as a tool to relieve distress, and that is potentially destabilizing.”

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

By late June, police had closed roughly 41% of the 142 criminal homicide cases recorded by that time this year, as well as another 19 cases from 2014 and 2013. Also, of the 299 criminal homicide cases recorded in 2014, 53% of them had been closed by midway through this year, records indicate.  www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2015/08/09/detroit-homicides/31396637/

Armed White Oath Keepers in Ferguson not Shot by Coppers John, an Oath Keeper from Missouri who wouldn’t provide his last name, said his group was at the protest to protect writers with the conservative website Infowars.com. He said journalists are sometimes robbed or beaten when trying to cover volatile events and that his group wanted to ensure Infowars writers were free to document the protests.

Infowars denied hiring Oath Keepers for private security and said it is not affiliated with the group, “although as a media organization we respect them for encouraging active military and retired veterans to study the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

John said he recognized it could be problematic if Ferguson residents and protesters openly carried weapons, but added that his group is highly trained. He acknowledged that anyone with a firearm might be perceived with concern by police already on high alert because people have shot at and hurled bottles and other objects at officers.  www.freep.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/11/armed-oath-keepers-arrive-ferguson/31453655/

Hillbillary would climb a tree to tell a lie The issues around Clinton’s e-mails have also intensified as it has become clear that a number of her statements defending her actions now appear to be false.

As she did that Sunday in Iowa, Clinton has said multiple times that she never sent or received any e-mails containing information that was classified at the time.

But the intelligence community’s inspector general, reviewing a small sample of Clinton’s private e-mails, has contradicted that claim. While the e-mails may not have been marked that way, they contained classified information. The IG said this week that he had discovered information in two e-mails that intelligence agencies considered to be top secret, the highest category of classification.  www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-clintons-team-went-from-nonchalant-to-nervous-over-e-mail-controversy/2015/08/14/347f1066-405e-11e5-9561-4b3dc93e3b9a_story.html?hpid=z1

Al Jazeera Mag: Following the National Socialists  spent the next year documenting the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement (NSM) of which Hall was a member. I wanted to get a first-hand glimpse of a group organising around the ideals and rhetoric of white nationalism in a US nowhere near entering the ‘post-racial’ epoch many hoped would be ushered in by Barack Obama’s election.

Hall was the NSM’s West Coast Unit leader. An unemployed plumber and father of five who bought his family’s groceries with food stamps, he was charismatic and politically active in his community; once running for office with Riverside California’s Western Municipal Water District and securing 33 percent of the vote.

From the supermarket parking lot, Jeff led me, a two-person crew from HBO and members of a local television station, to a motel just down the road where 25 or so NSM members had gathered. These were the members who had travelled from out of state. Some sat in their rooms with the doors open; others hung over the railing of the second floor walkway running along the back of the building. There were a few women and a handful of teenagers.  www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/06/magazine-documenting-america-white-nationalists-150609095548558.html

In the narco-colony, Mexico, activist murdered for searching for the 43 Miguel Angel Jimenez Blanco’s body was found near his home in a town in the south-western state of Guerrero.

He had led search parties after the disappearance of 43 students in the nearby town of Iguala last year threw light on hundreds of other missing people.

Guerrero is a region plagued by gang and drug violence.

At least 15 people were killed there over the weekend.

Mr Jimenez Blanco’s body was found in the taxi he owned in the small town of Xaltianguis.

He had been part of an organisation which had supported the search for the students in the hills around Iguala. He had also helped dig up a number of graves of murdered people that were found during the search for the students.

He had helped organise a group called The Other Disappeared, mostly women who meet every Sunday to search the hills for the remains of their loved ones.  www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-33843774

Solidarity for Never

Broward Fla Teachers Union Boss Charged–embezling $300,000 from members–his predecessor is in prison for molesting children  Broward Teachers Union President Pat Santeramo is due in court Monday to face new federal fraud charges, court records show.
Santeramo, 67, was indicted on two mail fraud charges, accused of misappropriating more than $35,000 from the Broward school district’s “accountability program,” according to court records filed Friday….In a separate case, Santeramo is scheduled to go to trial Oct. 19 in Broward Circuit court on state charges that he misappropriated about $300,000 from the union and contractor kickbacks.  www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-btu-pat-santeramo-new-charges-20150809-story.html

Detroit Kangaroo Jury Tosses DFT’s Steve Conn from presidency–back to the traditional sellouts After a seven-month tenure marked by clashes between rival union factions, Steve Conn was ousted as president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers after being found guilty of misconduct.

The union’s executive board announced Conn’s removal Wednesday in a notice posted on Local 231’s website.

“In rendering this verdict the Executive Board has determined that the course of conduct alleged, while described in the charges of a small number of members, has a serious detrimental effect on the entire membership, whose willingness to participate in the union is discouraged both because of concerns for their safety at meetings, and because of concern that their participation will be neither welcomed nor allowed,” the notice read.  www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2015/08/12/detroit-teachers-union-president-ousted/31557069/

AFT in Orlando Illegally Removes Popular Elected President  Ousted Orange County Classroom Teachers Association President Diana Moore spoke out publicly for the first time since the National Teachers Association took over the local union and removed local leaders from their positions.

Moore said she plans to file a defamation lawsuit against the American Federation Teachers, who she said accused her of violating bylaws.

Moore told Channel 9 that political maneuvering is behind her ouster.  “You know, you have to read between the lines. I am running to take this state in a different direction,” Moore said.

Moore said she came under political attack once she announced she’s running for statewide president of the Florida Education Association.

The AFT announced Wednesday they were taking over the Orange County teachers union, saying,  “The action follows a year of dealing with officer and member complaints about the erosion of democratic rights and the increasing dysfunction of their local union, and attempting every voluntary mechanism to right the ship.” (VIDEO INSIDE)  www.wftv.com/news/news/local/ousted-orange-county-teachers-union-president-plan/nnCQQ/

US Invades Cuba, Again. Castroites applaud this time.

Che rolls over, again.

UTLA Bosses Wants a 33% Dues Hike ($ rules all US Capitalist unions)

UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl announced an internal campaign to increase dues by $19 per month for full-time members, or a total of $228 per year. This will raise annual dues for UTLA members from $689 to $917.

There is some justification for this. One of the few other large locals to use the same system was the Broward Teachers Union, and we all know how that ultimately turned out.

On the other hand, UTLA’s officers may be overstating their need for such a large increase. Though its dues are low compared with other large locals, UTLA is still a $40 million enterprise, with at least a dozen officers and staff making six-figure salaries. And the union’s bottom line appears healthy, with net assets of $28.3 million in 2013  www.eiaonline.com/intercepts/2015/08/04/utla-plans-33-dues-increase/

How Unionites Made Scott Walker A Presidential Contender (and would do it all over again) Scott Walker’s campaign for the White House carries a “Union Made” label.

Four years after the attempt to recall Wisconsin’s Republican governor, leaders from across the political spectrum agree on this: that failed effort helped Walker become a front-runner for the GOP nomination for president.

The episode made Walker the first governor in U.S. history to survive a recall and gave him the national political and fundraising network he draws on today. Just don’t expect the recall’s organizers to voice any regrets.

“I really felt in my heart and my gut that we were going to take Scott Walker down,” said Michael Brown, the Appleton web developer who founded the United Wisconsin website used to gather recall signatures.

Outside Wisconsin, some Democrats felt something much more unsettling in their stomachs. The political team of President Barack Obama sought to quietly discourage what longtime adviser David Axelrod has called the “ill-conceived ’12 recall” and, when that failed, kept the president at a safe distance from it while Obama successfully campaigned for re-election later that year.

“I just felt it was strategically wrong,” Axelrod said of the recall at a charity event in Madison on Wednesday. “Walker benefited from that and he emerged stronger from that experience.”

Wisconsin taxpayers ended up paying $14 million for the recalls against Walker and state senators and related primaries, which resulted only in control of the state Senate flipping briefly to Democrats for a few months in the last half of 2012.

For their part, Republicans agree with Axelrod, saying there’s a reason that Walker returns at every opportunity to the recall as an example of how he “fights and wins” for conservatives. He passed Act 10, his 2011 law repealing most collective bargaining for most public employees, and then won the 2012 recall by a greater margin than he had his first election.  www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/recall-launched-scott-walkers-rise-but-opponents-have-few-regrets-b99551519z1-321152021.html

Spy versus Spy

CIA Agent who exposed Bush’s Iraq war lies is dead  Tyler S. Drumheller, a former senior American intelligence official who publicly asserted that President George W. Bush’s administration had knowingly hyped fabricated evidence of Iraq’s arsenal of biological weapons to justify the 2003 invasion, died on Aug. 2 in Falls Church, Va. He was 63.

The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Linda Drumheller, said.

Three years after the invasion and after his retirement from the Central Intelligence Agency, where he had been chief of the European division, Mr. Drumheller took the unusual step of publicly saying that he had warned his superiors that an Iraqi defector who claimed Iraq was equipped with mobile, lethal germ factories was mentally unstable.

Mr. Drumheller also said that before the war, one of Saddam Hussein’s own ministers had confided to American intelligence that the Iraqis had not stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.

“So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam’s inner circle that he didn’t have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?” Ed Bradley asked Mr. Drumheller on the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in 2006.

“Yes,” he replied.

When Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, repeated the claim before the United Nations Security Council, Mr. Drumheller recalled in a 2007 interview with the English-language website of the German news weekly Der Spiegel, “the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found that they had just ignored it.

“The policy was set,” he said in the interview. “The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy.” www.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/us/tyler-drumheller-ex-cia-official-who-disputed-bush-dies-at-63.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150810&nlid=2254121&tntemail0=y&_r=0

John Kirakou: Let us talk about torture The CIA’s torture-era leadership won’t repent. Even after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report saying in no uncertain terms that the CIA had tortured its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that torture never elicited any actionable intelligence that saved American lives, Bush-era CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and several of their underlings announced plans to release a book justifying torture.

They intend to repeat a lie over and over again in this book: that torture worked. They hope that the American people are either so gullible or so stupid that they’ll believe it. It’s up to the rest of us to ensure that our government swears off committing this crime against humanity.

I know that these former intelligence leaders are lying because I worked with them at the CIA. When I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, they came down on me like a ton of bricks.

It’s not necessarily news that these former CIA heavyweights believe in torture, even if they refuse to call it what it is. Many television news outlets still run clips of George Tenet’s 2007 appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in which he repeats “We do not torture! We do not torture!” as though he were unhinged and living in a dream world. Perhaps what Tenet needs to do is to read the United Nations Convention on Torture, to which the United States is a signatory.

This global accord says that torture is “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining…information or a confession, punishing him for an act…or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or when such pain or suffering is inflicted by…a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

It’s plain and simple: The CIA tortured its prisoners. They can call it anything they want. It’s still torture.  otherwords.org/lets-talk-about-torture/

ATT helped Spying on Internet The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.

While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed N.S.A. documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the N.S.A. access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.

The N.S.A.’s top-secret budget in 2013 for the AT&T partnership was more than twice that of the next-largest such program, according to the documents. The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency.

One document reminds N.S.A. officials to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities, noting, “This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.”

The documents, provided by the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, were jointly reviewed by The New York Times and ProPublica. The N.S.A., AT&T and Verizon declined to discuss the findings from the files. “We don’t comment on matters of national security,” an AT&T spokesman said.  www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-nsa-spy-on-an-array-of-internet-traffic.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Chelsea Manning to Solitary Chelsea Manning, the transgender Army private convicted of leaking national security secrets, faces a hearing Tuesday for prison infractions that could result in solitary confinement.

Manning, who was intelligence analyst Bradley Manning when arrested in 2010, is charged with disrespect of a prison officer and is accused having books and magazines including Vanity Fair and Cosmopolitan, among other offenses.

Her lawyers say she is being harassed.

The ACLU said in an email that Manning was charged with disrespect for requesting a lawyer when she felt she was being accused of misconduct. Other charges included disorderly conduct for sweeping food on the the floor, possessing an expired tube of toothpaste and possessing “prohibited property” — some of them documents pertaining to trans rights and government transparency including the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture.

Prison documents also list several books and magazines, including a Cosmopolitan issue that included an interview www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/12/chelsea-manning-solitary/31586513/with Manning and a Vanity Fair issue with Caitlyn Jenner on the cover.

Why was the FBI Attacking James Baldwin?   James Baldwin’s FBI file contains 1,884 pages of documents, collected from 1960 until the early 1970s. During that era of illegal surveillance of American writers, the FBI accumulated 276 pages on Richard Wright, 110 pages on Truman Capote, and just nine pages on Henry Miller. Baldwin’s file was closer in size to activists and radicals of the day — for example, it’s nearly half as thick as Malcolm X’s.

In his new biography, All Those Strangers, Douglas Field decodes these files with great literary and historical finesse. Baldwin often said that his relation to politics was that of a “witness,” but he was vehemently stalked, harassed and even censored by the FBI. Field asserts that after looking through Baldwin’s FBI file, it’s clear his phone was tapped and that government agents, posing as publishers or car salesmen, followed him as he traveled to France, Britain and Italy.

The biography has landed at a particularly sharp moment in our awareness of government surveillance. We now have not only the National Security Agency and its global spying, but the FBI and local law enforcement agencies targeting political activists, such as supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. And the NYPD, for instance, has its own counterterrorism unit that has surveilled entire communities.

Why did the FBI spy on Baldwin? He was a novelist, essayist and critic, one of the most distinguished writers and thinkers of his time. His skin was black, his sexuality fluid, and his politics tended toward the left, a combination that was enough to turn him into a target for the FBI.

Yet looking at his FBI file, even the most basic facts of his life are riddled with inaccuracies. There is, for instance, a description of Baldwin as “white, early 20s, 6′, neat.” In another file, Baldwin is listed as the author of “Go Tell It to the Mountains” and “Another World.” His first and third novels are in fact titled Go Tell It On The Mountain and Another Country. Such baffling errors read like a precursor to the ways in which bulk collection of metadata today often results in wellsprings of misinformation.  firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/15/fbi-spy-james-baldwin/

The Magical Mystery Tour

How IS Justifies rape 

“He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God”

Rape has become a central part of the religious beliefs of members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) extremist group, according to a chilling new report in the New York Times.

The report found that men in ISIS believe sexually violating women and girls of the Yazidi religious minority is sanctioned, and even encouraged by the Quran. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” a 12-year-old rape victim told the Times.

These incidents of rape are bound in a larger, formal institution of sex slavery within the group, which can be used as a recruiting tool for young men.  www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/middleeast/isis-enshrines-a-theology-of-rape.html?_r=0

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HnH-MguElU

So long: 

Hernan Ramirez Rurange was sentenced to 20 years in prison this week with 13 others convicted for involvement in kidnapping and murder.

A retired Pinochet-era Chilean general and former head of the DINA secret intelligence unit committed suicide Thursday at the age of 76, after being convicted of dictatorship crimes earlier this week.

Former General Hernan Ramirez Rurange was one of 14 military personnel convicted Tuesday for involvement in the kidnapping and murder of Eugenio Berrios, a chemist and secret police agent under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. 

He was disappeared in the early 1990s after escaping from hiding in Uruguay. He had been sent there as part of DINA's Operation Silence to avoid testifying in cases of assassinations carried out by secret police in the 1970s in the dictatorship-era Operation Condor.

Ramirez was sentenced to a total of 20 years and two days in prison this week: 10 years and one day for being the mastermind behind Berrios' kidnapping, and another 10 years and one day for illicit association.

The former general died in the hospital after shooting himself in the head Thursday. His suicide immediately after the sentencing provoked strong reactions on social media. 


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