Amy Goodman's Blog, page 19

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

For the first time in its 120-year history, the Sierra Club engaged in civil disobedience, the day after President Barack Obama gave his 2013 State of the Union address. The group joined scores of others protesting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which awaits a permitting decision from the Obama administration. The president made significant pledges to address the growing threat of climate change in his speech. But it will take more than words to save the planet from human-induced climate disruption, and a growing, diverse movement is directing its focus on the White House to demand meaningful action.

The Keystone XL pipeline is especially controversial because it will allow the exploitation of Canadian tar sands, considered the dirtiest oil source on the planet. One of the leading voices raising alarm about climate change, James Hansen, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote of the tar sands in The New York Times last year, “If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.” New research by nonprofit Oil Change International indicates that the potential tar-sands impact will be even worse than earlier believed. Because the proposed pipeline crosses the border between the U.S. and Canada, its owner, TransCanada Corp., must receive permission from the U.S. State Department.

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By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

John Brennan and John Kiriakou worked together years ago, but their careers have dramatically diverged. Brennan is now on track to head the CIA, while Kiriakou is headed off to prison. Each of their fates is tied to the so-called war on terror, which under President George W. Bush provoked worldwide condemnation. President Barack Obama rebranded the war on terror innocuously as “overseas contingency operations,” but, rather than retrench from the odious practices of his predecessor, Obama instead escalated. His promotion of Brennan, and his prosecution of Kiriakou, demonstrate how the recent excesses of U.S. presidential power are not transient aberrations, but the creation of a frightening new normal, where drone strikes, warrantless surveillance, assassination and indefinite detention are conducted with arrogance and impunity, shielded by secrecy and beyond the reach of law.

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By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., thus launching the modern-day civil-rights movement. Monday, Feb. 4, is the 100th anniversary of her birth. After she died at the age of 92 in 2005, much of the media described her as a tired seamstress, no troublemaker. But the media got it wrong. Rosa Parks was a first-class troublemaker.

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*By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

PARK CITY, Utah — As President Barack Obama prepared to be sworn in for his second term as the 44th president of the United States, two courageous journalists premiered a documentary at the annual Sundance Film Festival. “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield” reaffirms the critical role played by independent journalists like the film’s director, Rick Rowley, and its narrator and central figure, Jeremy Scahill. The increasing pace of U.S. drone strikes, and the Obama administration’s reliance on shadowy special forces to conduct military raids beyond the reach of oversight and accountability, were summarily missed over the inaugural weekend by a U.S. press corps obsessed with first lady Michelle Obama’s new bangs. “Dirty Wars,” along with Scahill’s forthcoming book of the same title, is on target to break that silence ... with a bang that matters.

Scahill and Rowley, no strangers to war zones, ventured beyond Kabul, Afghanistan, south to Gardez, in Paktia province, a region dense with armed Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network, to investigate one of the thousands of night raids that typically go unreported.

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Aaron Swartz wanted nothing more than to change the world. He was doing just that until he ended his own life, at the age of 26, on Jan. 11. Aaron was a social justice activist, gifted with deep understanding of how computers and the Internet work, and how they could empower people around the world with the freedom to connect. Self-effacing and insatiably curious, he accomplished much in his too-short life. He took a lead role in defeating SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, a federal law that would have indelibly changed the operation of the Internet, granting corporations sweeping online censorship powers. Aaron became the target of zealous federal prosecutors who accused him of serious computer crimes, which his father, his lawyer and others say contributed to his suicide.

At the age of 14, Aaron helped develop RSS, “Really Simple Syndication,” which changed how people get online content, allowing people to subscribe to different sources of information. RSS is how millions get their podcasts. He also helped develop the “Creative Commons” alternative to copyright, which encourages authors and publishers to share content. He founded a company, Infogami, that merged with Reddit, which allows users to collectively rank and promote contributed content, and is now one of the most popular websites globally. He attended Stanford, then, by 2010, became a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

While at Harvard, his legal troubles began. He used the Internet at nearby MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to access a repository of digitized academic articles run by a nonprofit company called JSTOR, which apparently noticed a massive amount of downloads from a single user and contacted MIT to investigate.

Ultimately, Aaron was arrested outside MIT, with a laptop and some hard drives that purportedly contained about 4 million electronic articles. JSTOR declined to press charges, and Aaron returned all the articles. That didn’t matter to Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. attorney in Boston who was appointed in 2009 by President Barack Obama. Along with Deputy U.S. Attorney Stephen P. Heymann, these two prosecutors piled 13 federal felony charges onto Aaron under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a problematic and overly broad law intended to target people stealing secrets from government computers or from financial institutions.

Aaron’s family released a statement, saying: “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal-justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.”

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By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

It takes courage to enter a war zone willingly, armed with a microphone and a camera as a journalist. That is what Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj was doing in Dec. 2001, as he was entering Afghanistan from Pakistan to cover the U.S. military operations there. While his colleague was allowed in, al-Hajj was arrested, in what was to be a harrowing, nightmarish odyssey that lasted close to seven years, most of it spent as prisoner 345, the only journalist imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay — without charge. Al-Hajj is out now, back at work at Al-Jazeera and reunited with his family. His recollections of the horror of detention by the United States should be front and center in the forthcoming confirmation hearings for President Barack Obama’s choice the lead the CIA, John Brennan. It has been 11 years since the Guantánamo prison was opened, and four years since President Obama promised to close it within a year.

“He speaks very eloquently [about] what many hundreds of other detainees suffered, who cannot tell their story,” Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told me. “The brutality he suffered in Afghanistan, the fact that he was turned over for political reasons or for a bounty, the arbitrariness of his detention in Guantanamo and the brutality of his treatment there.”

I sat down with Sami al-Hajj last month at Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar. He now heads up the network’s human rights and public liberties desk. Tall, dignified, in his flowing white robe that is standard attire for the men in Qatar, al-Hajj told me in his best English what he endured.

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By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Amidst the White House and congressional theatrics surrounding the so-called fiscal-cliff negotiations, a number of bills were signed into law by President Barack Obama that renew some of the worst excesses of the Bush years. Largely ignored by the media, these laws further entrench odious policies like indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping and the continued operation of the U.S. gulag in Guantanamo. The deal to avert the fiscal cliff itself increases the likelihood that President Obama may yet scuttle an unprecedented cut in the Pentagon’s bloated budget. It’s not such a happy new year, after all.

On Sunday, Dec. 30, the White House press secretary’s office issued a terse release stating “The President signed into law H.R. 5949, the ‘FISA Amendments Act Reauthorization Act of 2012,’ which provides a five-year extension of Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.” With that, the government’s controversial surveillance powers were renewed until the end of 2017. The American Civil Liberties Union called it the “heartbreak of another Senate vote in favor of dragnet collection of Americans’ communications.”

A champion of progressive causes in the U.S. House of Representatives, Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, is leaving Congress after 16 years, after his Cleveland district was eliminated due to Republican-controlled redistricting following the 2010 census. Days before his departure from Congress, I asked him about the FISA reauthorization.

“The FISA bill is just one example,” Kucinich replied, “We’re entering into a brave new world, which involves not only the government apparatus being able to look in massive databases and extract information to try to profile people who might be considered threats to the prevailing status quo. But we also are looking at drones, which are increasingly miniaturized, that will give the governments, at every level, more of an ability to look into people’s private conduct. This is a nightmare.”

Add to that, the nightmare of indefinite detention without charge or trial. Just over a year ago, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012, also known as the annual NDAA. That 2012 version of the sprawling NDAA contained a controversial new provision granting the U.S. military far-reaching powers to indefinitely detain people–not only those identified as enemies on a battlefield, but others perceived by the military as having “supported” the enemy. Chris Hedges, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times who was part of a team of reporters awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism, sued the Obama administration because, in his reporting, he regularly encounters those the U.S. government defines as terrorists: “I, as a foreign correspondent, had had direct contact with 17 organizations that are on that list, from al-Qaida to Hamas to Hezbollah to the PKK, and there’s no provision within that particular section [of the NDAA] to exempt journalists.”

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By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

While the final funerals for the victims of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre have been held, gun violence continues apace, most notably with the Christmas Eve murder of two volunteer firefighters in rural Webster, N.Y., at the hands of an ex-convict who was armed, as was the Newtown shooter Adam Lanza, with a Bushmaster .223 caliber AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. James Holmes, the alleged perpetrator of the massacre last July in Aurora, Colo., stands accused of using, among other weapons, a Smith & Wesson AR-15 with a 100-round drum in place of standard magazine clip. Standing stalwartly against any regulation of these weapons and high-capacity magazines, the National Rifle Association continues to block any gun-control laws whatsoever, and even trumpets its efforts to block the global Arms Trade Treaty, slated for negotiations at the United Nations this March.

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By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

The initial shock of the latest semiautomatic weapon-fueled massacre has passed, but the grief only grows. Now the funerals occur with a daily drumbeat. It will take not 27, but 28 funerals, as the Newtown, Connecticut, shooter, Adam Lanza, took his own life after slaughtering his mother at home, then 20 children, aged 6 and 7, and six women at the Sandy Hook Elementary School who tried to protect them.

Since President Barack Obama took office, there have been at least 16 major mass shootings, after which he has offered somber words of condolence and called for national healing. But what is really needed is gun control, serious gun control – as was swiftly implemented in Australia in 1996, after another gunman went on a senseless shooting spree. That massacre occurred in Port Arthur, Tasmania, and the shooter was from nearby New Town.

On 28 April 1996, Martin Bryant, a troubled 28 year-old from New Town, Tasmania, took a Colt AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to the nearby tourist destination of Port Arthur. By the time he was arrested early the next day, he had killed 35 people and wounded 23. The reaction in Australia was profound, especially since it was a nation of gun lovers, target shooters and hunters.

The massacre provoked an immediate national debate over gun control. Strict laws were quickly put in place, banning semiautomatic weapons and placing serious controls on gun ownership. Since that time, there has not been one mass shooting in Australia.

Rebecca Peters took part in that debate. She is now an international arms control advocate, and led the campaign to reform Australia’s gun laws after the Port Arthur massacre. Days after the Newtown massacre, I asked Peters to explain how the gun laws changed in Australia in 1996:

“The new law banned semiautomatic rifles and shotguns, assault weapons, and not only new sales … we banned importation sales, we banned ownership, so currently owned weapons were prohibited. The government bought those guns back at a rate of about the retail price plus about 10%. You couldn’t get them repaired. You couldn’t sell them. It was a very comprehensive ban.

"The buyback ended up buying back and destroying more than about 650,000 of these weapons, which is the largest buyback and destruction program for guns anywhere in the world."

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By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Pfc. Bradley Manning was finally allowed to speak publicly, in his own defense, in a preliminary hearing of his court-martial. Manning is the alleged source of the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history. He was an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, with top-secret clearance, deployed in Iraq. In April 2010, the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks released a U.S. military video of an Apache helicopter in Baghdad killing a dozen civilians below, including two Reuters employees, a videographer and his driver. One month after the video was released, Manning was arrested in Iraq, charged with leaking the video and hundreds of thousands more documents. Thus began his ordeal of cruel, degrading imprisonment in solitary confinement that many claim was torture, from his detention in Kuwait to months in the military brig in Quantico, Va. Facing global condemnation, the U.S. military transferred Manning to less-abusive detention at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

As he now faces 22 counts in a court martial that could land him in prison for the rest of his life, his lawyer argued in court that the case should be thrown out, based on his unlawful pretrial punishment.

Veteran constitutional attorney Michael Ratner was in the courtroom at Fort Meade, Md., that day Manning took the stand. He described the scene: “It was one of the most dramatic courtroom scenes I’ve ever been in. ... When Bradley opened his mouth, he was not nervous. The testimony was incredibly moving, an emotional roller coaster for all of us, but particularly, obviously, for Bradley and what he went through. But it was so horrible what happened to him over a two-year period. He described it in great detail in a way that was articulate, smart, self-aware.”

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