#OWS Update: Live: Protesters Attempting a "Re-Occupation" On the Three Month Anniversary of OWS via Alternet.org, december 17, 2011
Today marks the three month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, Bradley Manning's birthday, and the one-year anniversary of Tunisian Street Vendor Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation which began the "Arab Spring."
And in honor of all these occasions, many OWS activists in New York are attempting to "liberate" or "re-occupy" a downtown space on the #D17 day of action. The days' schedule is said to include a re-opening of the OWS library, puppet shows, performances by such luminaries as Lou Reed and Patti Smith, and potentially, if occupiers decide to stay on in Duarte Park, a whole lot of arrests.
and : Moyers: Why 'We The People' Must Triumph Over Corporate Power
Bill Moyers reminds us that repairing American democracy begins with reasserting that corporations do not have the same constitutional rights as citizens. via Alternet.org, December 11, 2011
and from Jim Hightower : If You Are Not Outraged, You Are Not Paying Attention: 5 Major Ways Corporate Elites Are Degrading America
While it can be disheartening to see the smallness of those in power, don't let it get you down, for they want us to become so disheartened that we give up. via Alternet, December 14, 2011
Now to other news of the American Empire:
It is is absolutely appalling and infuriating and disturbing that so many supporters and defenders of President Obama ignore his cavalier attitude towards the rights of American Citizens and so called belligerents.
President Obama proves over and over again that he is not a defender of the basic rights of American citizens let alone the rights on non-US citizens.
Obama like President Bush and Dick Cheney see these issues as merely a matter of semantics.
Obama is still supporting the notion of indefinite detention of US citizens . He has also added to this the legal use of US military against US citizens .
Obama has also made it legal to assassinate US citizens along with non-US Citizens .
Obama claims the US no longer uses torture techniques on detainees and yet he has approved the use of Enhanced interrogation techniques on alleged terrorists or those deemed enemies of the state.
The enhanced Interrogation techniques when reviewed are just more "torture Techniques' dressed up to appear benign and as being within international law which in fact they are not.
As I have mentioned previously President Obama has also defended the use of banned weapons such as Cluster bombs, White phosphorus/Napalm on civilians and the use of Drones against civilian targets and the use of landmines and Bunker Buster Bombs and the right if necessary to use Nuclear Weapons in a first strike.
Obama also refuses to release the prisoners in Guantanamo or other military or CIA detention centers many of whom have never been formally charged or tried in an open civilian court. Instead Obama and others on his staff assure us as Cheney did that these are the worst of the worst.
President Obama has also resisted the pleas of Human Rights organizations and International law to sign on to the Child Soldier designation by which Child Soldiers are to be treated not as belligerents or enemy combatants but as victims who are in need of rehabilitation not brutal draconian incarceration.
As we have seen in the case of alleged wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning Obama has justified holding him prisoner for about two years and has kept him in solitary confinement for most of that time.
Extended internment in solitary confinement is considered by international law as cruel and unusual punishment tantamount to torture.
And with the unnecessary war of Aggression against Libya billed as a Humanitarian mission we see that president Obama is just another American President out to expand the American Empire at the end of a bayonet and non-stop carpet bombing of non-military facilities and the mass murder of Libyan civilians by the tens of thousands .
Now President Obama asks the American people to believe that he will not use the extraordinary power given to his office and to the US military to assassinate US citizens, or to put them in indefinite detention or to torture them or to use the US military on American citizens. He claims he needs these powers just in case??? He sounds as bad as president Bush and Cheney and the gang.
As Joshua Holland argues President Obama is turning out to be not much better than Bush & Co. in their expanding the executives powers.
Dem Think-tank on NDAA: Obama Says He Won't Detain Citizens, and That's Good Enough for Us! by Joshua Holland Via Alternet, December 16, 2011
Ken Gude of the so-very-closely-aligned-with-Obama Center for American Progress offers up the dumbest argument you'll find in defense of the detention provisions contained in the National Defense Authorization Act.
It is so dumb, in fact, that it disputes itself. Behold:
The detainee provisions are seriously flawed, but it is inaccurate and irresponsible to claim, as both the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch have, that this bill represents a return to the “McCarthy era.” This argument overlooks the key factor in assessing the scope of military detention. President Obama has made clear he does not want military detention in the United States, and Congress has already recognized that he has discretionary power to interpret detention authority to rule that out.
Obama says he won't consign American citizens to military detention, and that's good enough for us!
Now skip to the end:
Yes, a future president may interpret that authority differently, but that is both a fight for another day ...
As many have pointed out, the detention powers in the NDAA aren't new. Bush rammed them through an intimidated Congress after 9/11, and they were later limited to a degree by a series of Supreme Court decisions.
NDAA reaffirms and codifies those executive powers, 10 years after the attacks, and severs them from 9/11. Gude is probably right that this administration won't detain U.S. citizens accused of terrorism -- which doesn't do much for the due process of non-citizens -- but what about President Chelsea Clinton or a lunatic like Michele Bachmann? What about the next administration to feature a Dick Cheney?
Whatever else one wants to say about the administration's handling of the NDAA, it proved an old political cliché: regardless of who is in office at the time, once grabbed, the executive branch never gives up power without a fight.
Though the US government and the Obama White House publicly declared they were in favor of reform and moves towards democracy in Arab nations it appears to have been just the same old public lies while secretly taking actions to stop reform in these countries.
But we have been aware of this duplicity on the part of the Obama administration going back to Obama 's lack of criticisms of Israel's war in Gaza and later Obama's support for the military coup in Honduras and his lack of criticisms in the wake of the murders by the IDF on one of the ships in the Free Palestine Flotilla or his defense of the brutal crack down in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain while inciting citizens to violence in Iran and so forth.
More disturbing news about US helping dictators and authoritarian anti-democracy regimes to crush the Arab Spring Uprisings. I am not at all surprised this has been typical of American foreign policies going back to the US backed Coups in Guatemala and Iran in 1953 and the support given by the US to Saddam 's brutal Regime from 1979 to 1990 when Saddam invaded Kuwait.
Saddam was America's greatest ally when he was engaged in a war with Iran afterwards not so much. The war with Iran would have not lasted more than a few months if America and the West had not been pressing Saddam to keep the war going while they gave him military support.
Startling New Evidence Shows US Troops Helped Despotic Regimes Battle the Arab Spring Uprisings by Nick Turse at Tomdispatch via Alternet.org, December 13, 2011
During 2011, U.S. troops regularly partnered with and trained the security forces of numerous regimes that were actively beating back democratic protests.
As the Arab Spring blossomed and President Obama hesitated about whether to speak out in favor of protesters seeking democratic change in the Greater Middle East, the Pentagon acted decisively. It forged ever deeper ties with some of the most repressive regimes in the region, building up military basesand brokering weapons sales and transfers to despots from Bahrain to Yemen.
As state security forces across the region cracked down on democratic dissent, the Pentagon also repeatedly dispatched American troops on training missions to allied militaries there. During more than 40 such operations with names like Eager Lion and Friendship Two that sometimes lasted for weeks or months at a time, they taught Middle Eastern security forces the finer points of counterinsurgency, small unit tactics, intelligence gathering, and information operations -- skills crucial to defeating popular uprisings.
These recurrent joint-training exercises, seldom reported in the media and rarely mentioned outside the military, constitute the core of an elaborate, longstanding system that binds the Pentagon to the militaries of repressive regimes across the Middle East. Although the Pentagon shrouds these exercises in secrecy, refusing to answer basic questions about their scale, scope, or cost, an investigation by TomDispatch reveals the outlines of a region-wide training program whose ambitions are large and wholly at odds with Washington’s professed aims of supporting democratic reforms in the Greater Middle East.
On May 19th, President Obama finally addressed the Arab Spring in earnest. He was unambiguous about standing with the protesters and against repressive governments, asserting that “America’s interests are not hostile to people’s hopes; they’re essential to them.”
On Bradley Manning see latest :
Daniel Ellsberg Talks Bradley Manning Sarah Seltzer Via Alternet.org., December 17, 2011
The case of alleged WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning, who is undergoing preliminary military hearings, is a worrisome one for civil liberties advocates, and has been the target of much activism to that end, as AlterNet readers know.
Today is Manning's birthday, and he spent it in court:
Manning, a one-time intelligence analyst stationed in Baghdad, is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive items including Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, State Department cables and a classified military video of a 2007 American helicopter attack in Iraq that killed 11 men, including a Reuters news photographer and his driver
and so it goes,
GORD.
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