Hillary Clinton’s thugs

The following is reprinted with permission from DemocracyNow: This week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a major address calling for Internet freedom around the world. As Clinton condemned the Egyptian and Iranian governments for arresting and beating protesters, former U.S. Army and CIA officer Ray McGovern was violently ejected from the audience and arrested after he stood up and turned his back in a silent protest of America’s foreign policy. Ray McGovern joins us from Washington, D.C. [includes rush transcript] Ray McGovern, former senior CIA analyst whose duties included preparing the President’s Daily Brief and chairing National Intelligence Estimates. He was beaten and arrested while silently protesting a speech by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week. He is a member of the group, Veterans for Peace.

JUAN GONZALEZ: On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton gave a major address calling for Internet freedom around the world. Speaking at George-–Washington University, Clinton condemned the Egyptian and Iranian governments for arresting and beating protesters.
HILARY CLINTON: What happened in Egypt and what happened in Iran, which this week is once again using violence against protesters seeking basic freedoms, was about a great deal more than the Internet. In each case, people protested because of the frustration with the political and economic conditions of their lives. They stood and marched and chanted and the authorities tracked and blocked and arrested them.
AMY GOODMAN: Just moments before Hillary Clinton spoke those words, a 71-year-old man was violently ejected from Clinton’s own event and arrested for turning his back on the Secretary of State. TV cameras caught part of what happened.
HILARY CLINTON: Than the government pulled the plug. So phone service was cut off. A TV satellite signals were jammed. Internet access was blocked for nearly the entire—
RAY McGOVERN: [Screaming]This is America! This is America! Who are you? Who are you?
JUAN GONZALEZ: The voice you heard screaming was that of Ray McGovern as he was dragged away by security guard that left him bruised and bloodied. He was then arrested. McGovern is a former Army intelligence officer and a 27-year veteran of the CIA. He was one of the daily briefers for President George H.W. Bush. He has since become a vocal critic of US foreign policy. He joins us in Washington, D.C. Ray, you were seriously hurt. Tell us what happened. RAY McGOVERN: I was pounced upon. I was blindsided, really. I was looking straight to the back, minding my own business. The only offense was standing up when everyone else was sitting down. Without any warning, I was pounced upon by and, what I call large manhandled by a fellow that looked like an NFL football player in plain dress. I don’t know who he was, that is why you hear me screaming, "Who are you? Who are you?" And I never did get the answer to that. So it was quite abrupt, quite violent. And the supreme irony, of course, sounds like something right out of Franz Kafka, four paragraphs later, Hillary Clinton is saying what you just quoted her as saying. You know, one has to keep one’s sense of humor in all of this, especially when one bears these kinds of bruises. I cannot show you the ones down below. I was listening on the way in, I tuned in a little late to your show. And when I heard Clinton say, that little clip, "We strongly oppose the use of violence," this is yesterday. We have deep concern over the actions of security forces. And I’m saying, yes! She is going to apologize. Like my Veterans for Peace colleagues asked her to do. Then I realized, she is talking about Bahrain. Straight out of Kafka. AMY GOODMAN: So, you were seriously hurt. What parts of your body? What did they do to you? RAY McGOVERN: Well, they put two sets of handcuffs on me roughly. They were the iron or steel handcuffs. They dug into my wrists. You can see some of the stuff right here. They put them behind my back of course and I started—bleeding profusely over my pants. We have the pants, they are full of blood. When somebody said, "Is that his blood?" One of the cops said, "No, no I pricked my finger". Right. The whole back seat of the pants is surfused with blood. They throw me-–well they didn’t throw me, they placed me in a patrol car—I try not to exagerate here—and I was taken up to one of the police headquarters in D.C. Mugshotted, fingerprinted to a fair thee well, and put in a cell of the size of Bradley Manning now occupies in Quantico. AMY GOODMAN: Ray we only have a minute but why were you there? Why did-–were you standing up? RAY McGOVERN: I was standing up in silent witness to the fact that Hillary Clinton is responsible or partly responsible for the countless thousands of Iraqis, Americans, Afghans, and God help was, Iranians—I hope not—and that she should not get the idea that everyone is going to sit down and applauded politely when there are so many of us that are usually excluded from these sessions who are feeling very, very sad and very angry at the foreign policy of our government. Very seldom do have a chance to express that. I thought that I expressed that in a most nonviolent way by simply quietly with my back to her with a T-shirt that said "Veterans for Peace." AMY GOODMAN: Well Ray McGovern, we want to thank you for being with us, former top briefer of Vice President George H.W. Bush. Ray worked for the CIA for more than a quarter of a century.

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Lack of Al Jazeera on cable TV bears on need for net neutrality

If you want to follow the uprising in Egypt through Al Jazeera, you almost certainly won't find it on cable TV. Here's why. This is yet another reason why we desperately need net neutrality. Violating net neutrality would turn the Internet into cable TV. Your carrier would become your nanny, screening information it deemed to be inappropriate or inconvenient.

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Avoid These Topics to Help End Civilization

Courtesy of WikiMedia There are four subjects the polite American avoids discussing in public: Politics, Religion, Sex, and Money. The ostensible reason for this taboo is to avoid offending anyone. But here I argue that this over-correctness is a causative factor in the decline of a civilization. Let's do money, first. As far as I know, this is a particularly American obsession. My European parents had to learn not to talk about money when they came to this country. Other places, the question, "So, how much do you make?" is as normal as "Are you married?" But in the U.S.A, we maintain a fiction of a classless society. We ask the same question only obliquely: "Where did you go to school?" is a good indicator of family income and social position. It is to the advantage of the landed class employers that their serfs employees not compare incomes, as well. By not allowing people to honestly gauge their economic value, they stay insecure. And insecurity leads to all manners of submissive behaviors, shoring up the security of the ruling classes, both secular and religious. Sex is a more generally repressed topic. There is no stronger drive, yet we must never directly say what we feel about it. Western churches even teach that one should deny and ignore the strongest drives within ourselves, leading to all sorts of perverse (read as counter-social) behaviors. To discuss it in public would allow people to see how normal their lusts really are, removing a major source of insecurity. Minor curiosities would not blossom into obsessions and perversions. Such openness would reduce the influence of those very organizations that profit from its repression, like churches and (other) marketing firms, whose urgent short-term goals are only occasionally and accidentally in line with continuing our civilization. Religion is a big one. People wear "subtle" symbols to let others of the same brand know they can be approached on the subject. The third eye, a cross or fish, a Koranic verse, and a star are some of the more obvious "secret" symbols. But it is a major faux pas to overtly declaim about your own faith to someone who may not agree. Unless, of course, the purpose is to stir controversy or solicit, two disreputable (completely human) drives. Again, by not knowing when and to whom you may come out,one feels insecure. This gives the leaders the upper hand. Especially when they strive to sow divisiveness, as in malignant fundamentalist sects. Finally, politics. This is the least stringent of the social prohibitions. I think this is in part because the churches and marketing firms rule the field, anyway. In our land, there are basically two sides: The established American parties, and those who can barely tell them apart. The parties do have differences. One wants to conserve our resources, reduce capitalist predation, and protect the underclass in hopes of a better tomorrow, and the other wants government to protect the minorities (specifically the rich, the unborn, and corporations) and let God (or the invisible hand) sort out the others until the imminent judgment day. So it occurred to me that hiding from these basic topics destabilizes civilization. Social groups balkanize into small, trusted segments that define themselves by their perceived differences. Each of the 30,000 Christian sects publicly claim the sum of all members of all denominations as supporting them, yet privately know that most of the 30,000 others are wrong and hell-bound. We have been divided, and conquered. If the people knew where they stood, and knew where the leaders stood, we would have actual checks and balances as were envisioned by our founders. Without such things, our nation may well founder.

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Substitute NYT for Wikileaks and substitute Iran for the United States

Wikileaks continues to be punished for being one of the few organizations brash enough to inform us what our governments are really doing and why. This is intolerable, of course, because the U.S. government is being run by big corporations and wealthy people who, for the most part, are driven by greed--so sorry to break this to the kids who are studying civics in grade school, where they don't tell you about armies of lobbyists, and they don't tell you that the banks own Congress. The true powers that be are running the federal government in secret and they are, regrettably, running it into the ground. That's what one should expect when there is no sunshine to keep powerful people accountable. What we have is a needlessly warmongering, debt-ridden secret and personally invasive brave new government.   I truly wish I didn't believe these things. Consider that our government first attacked Wikileaks by starving it financially, despite the lack of any charges filed against it. They did this by harassing Amazon and various financial organizations to make sure that Wikileaks had no funds to fight in Round II, which is underway. We now know that there are secret subpoenas being issued by the US, and thank goodness that Twitter had the decency to inform its users that their privacy is being invaded, unlike the big U.S. telecoms, who have a long documented track record for turning over our private information without informing us (encouraged very much by President Obama's agreement to grant them retroactive immunity for past invasions of our privacy.  Julian Assange sums up the current grand jury proceedings like this, and we know of this only because the U.K. Guardian has continually refused to be the lapdog of the U.S.:

The emergence of the Twitter subpoena – which was unsealed after a legal challenge by the company – was revealed after WikiLeaks announced it believed other US Internet companies had also been ordered to hand over information about its members' activities. WikiLeaks condemned the court order, saying it amounted to harassment. "If the Iranian government was to attempt to coercively obtain this information from journalists and activists of foreign nations, human rights groups around the world would speak out," Assange said in a statement.
Glenn Greenwald comments further:
It's worth recalling -- and I hope journalists writing about this story remind themselves -- that all of this extraordinary probing and "criminal" investigating is stemming from WikiLeaks' doing nothing more than publishing classified information showing what the U.S. Government is doing: something investigative journalists, by definition, do all the time. And the key question now is this: did other Internet and social network companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) receive similar Orders and then quietly comply? It's difficult to imagine why the DOJ would want information only from Twitter; if anything, given the limited information it has about users, Twitter would seem one of the least fruitful avenues to pursue. But if other companies did receive and quietly comply with these orders, it will be a long time before we know, if we ever do, given the prohibition in these orders on disclosing even its existence to anyone. UPDATE III: Iceland's Interior Minister, Ögmundur Jónasson, described the DOJ's efforts to obtain the Twitter information of a member of that country's Parliament as "grave and odd." While suggesting some criticisms of WikiLeaks, he added: "if we manage to make government transparent and give all of us some insight into what is happening in countries involved in warfare it can only be for the good."

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Unchecked secret power

The December 27, 2010 issue of The Nation comments on a noteworthy piece of reporting by The Washington Post:

In July the Washington Post published 'Top-Secret America,' a series of articles based on a two-year investigation by Dana Priest and William Arkin. The report meticulously documented the growth of a vast secret government in the wake of September 11, encompassing at least 1,271 government organizations, 1,931 private companies and an estimated 854,000 individuals with top-secret security clearance. Secret America, Priest and Arkin wrote, has become 'so large, so unwieldy and so secretive' that it is not only unaccountable, it is practically unknowable--even to the officials charged with administering it. The series elicited much praise from fellow journalists, but from the government there was-- nothing. The Posts report generated not one congressional hearing, subpoena or reform. As far as we know, Secret America continues its work unchecked and unchastised. . . The Post didn't tell secrets so much as outline the contours of the shadow world from which they originate; WikiLeaks rips off the veil. It's the exposure of the secrets that has the world's power elite so rattled.

Here's a link to the Washington Post's articles and introductory video--the secret network of government agencies is so extensive that the authors of Secret American describe it as America's "fourth branch of government, which emerged subsequent to 9/11." Amy Goodman of Democracy Now recently discussed Secret America with Julian Assange. Here's what Assange had to say:

Dana Priest’s article on the CIA black sites had all the names of the countries removed from it after a request by the White House to the editors of the Post. Similarly, it is standard Washington Post practice, whenever Dana Priest is to reveal a new story showing significant allegations of abuse, say, by the CIA, to call up the press office the night before to give them the heads-up, as a courtesy move. That doesn’t seem like independent journalism to us. It seems to us that a journalist’s relationship should be with the public, on the one hand, and with their sources, on the other hand, who are providing them with information to give to the public. It seems that the Post is engaging in a sort of an unclear cooperation with the very organizations that it’s meant to be policing. So we’re a little bit hesitant about dealing with them.

But the recent Dana Priest article covering the extensive expanse of money going into the top-secret industry in the United States is encouraging. So perhaps, if that’s a sign of the movement by the Washington Post to a more combative form of journalism, then we would be happy to work with them.

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