Right Wing Terror Goes Global

Islamic terrorists have used the Internet for recruitment and the dissemination of their toxic hatred.  Now, it appears the same phenomenon is taking place with far right and white supremacy.  How else to explain the horrific murder of 49 at a mosque in New Zealand, hardly a nation known for racial strife and a flood of non-white immigrants.  The Washington Post looks at the slaughter:

Forty-nine people are dead and scores more are injured after a heavily armed gunman clad in military-style gear opened fire during prayers at a mosque in the center of Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday. A second mosque was also targeted in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called a well-planned “terrorist attack,” making for “one of New Zealand’s darkest days.”

Authorities said they had four people in custody — three men and one woman — but later clarified that only three were believed to have been involved in the violence. One man in his late 20s, whom the authorities declined to name, was charged with murder and was expected to appear in court on Saturday morning. The suspects had not been on security watch lists, officials said.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said 41 people were killed at Al Noor Mosque on Deans Road, opposite a large downtown park. Seven more were fatally shot about three miles away at a mosque in Linwood, an inner suburb of Christchurch, and another person died at the hospital.

Health officials said 48 patients, including both young children and adults, were being treated for gunshot wounds at Christchurch Hospital, while additional victims were seeking medical treatment elsewhere. Around 200 family members were at the hospital awaiting news about loved ones.

Portions of the ghastly attack at the downtown mosque were broadcast live on social media by a man who police confirmed had also released a manifesto railing against Muslims and immigrants. The 74-page document states that he was following the example of notorious right-wing extremists, including Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015.

The manifesto, littered with conspiracy theories about white birthrates and “white genocide,” is the latest sign that a lethal vision of white nationalism has spread internationally. Its title, “The Great Replacement,” echoes the rallying cry of, among others, the torch-bearing protesters who marched in Charlottesville in 2017.

The digital platforms apparently enlisted in the shooting highlight a distinctly 21st-century dimension of mass gun violence — one sure to put more pressure on social media companies already under scrutiny about how they police their services.

An editorial in the New York Times further looks at the toxic poison being spread by far right extremists.  Here are excerpts:

On Friday, a man in his late 20s strapped on a helmet camera, loaded his car with weapons, drove to a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand and began shooting at anyone who came into his line of vision. He broadcast the act of mass terror live for the world to watch on social media.

A 17-minute video of a portion of the attack, which leapt across the internet faster than social media censors could remove it, is one of the most disturbing, high-definition records of a mass casualty attack of the digital age — a grotesque first-person-shooter-like record of man’s capacity for inhumanity.

Videos of attacks are designed to amplify the terror, of course. But what makes this atrocity “an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence,” as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described it, is both the methodical nature in which the massacre was conducted and how it was apparently engineered for maximum virality.

[T]he Christchurch shooting feels different, in part due to its perpetrator’s apparent familiarity with the darkest corners of the internet. The recording contains numerous references to online and meme culture, including name-checking a prominent YouTube personality shortly before beginning the attack.

The digital trail the shooter left behind appears to depict a white supremacist motivation for the attack. There is much, at this early date, that is unknown despite what’s been posted online. The 87-page manifesto, for instance, is filled with layers of ironic, self-referential commentary, apparently written to specifically enrage the communities that appear to have helped radicalize the gunman in the first place.

As terrifying as the violence itself is how well the online community worked in the gunman’s favor and the sinking notion that this may be our new reality. Not only has conspiratorial hate spread from the internet to real life, it’s also weaponized to go viral.

Meanwhile, here in the USA we have an occupant of the White House who fans white supremacist hate, rage and resentment daily. Will something like this soon happen in America with ts ridiculous gun culture?  Be very afraid. 

New York Times Slams Rentboy Raid

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Are the Deeply Religious Insane?

As regular readers know, I have a very low regard for the Christofascists and others who reject objective reality, logic, reason, and scientific fact in favor of "religious faith" and claims based on the writings of ignorant, uneducated (in modern terms) and generally unknown authors - Islam being an exception since the author of the Koran is know even if no less ignorant.  As the world hurtles forward in modernity and science provides explanations and solutions to countless situations, the Christofascists and those like them of other faiths nonetheless cling to unsubstantiated myths and beliefs of Bronze Age herders.  Is this behavior a demonstration of insanity.  A fun piece in Salon that using a satire piece as its launching pad suggests that the answer to this question is a resounding "yes."  Here are article highlights:

The headline on the [satirical] News Nerd was almost too good to be true: “American Psychological Association to Classify Belief in God As a Mental Illness.”  A study, the story beneath it read, had led the APA to conclude that “a strong and passionate belief in a deity or higher power, to the point where it impairs one’s ability to make conscientious decisions about common sense matters, will now be classified as a mental illness.”  Faith’s recurrent lethality was adduced: “Every year thousands of people die after refusing life-saving treatment on religious grounds.”  Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, said the article, refuse lifesaving transfusions (on account of biblical prohibitions against the drinking of blood).

Most gratifyingly, for a rationalist, the author quoted a certain Dr. Lillian Andrews, who opined that, “Religious belief and the angry God phenomenon has caused chaos, destruction, death, and wars for centuries.  The time for evolving into a modern society and classifying these archaic beliefs as a mental disorder has been long overdue.”

A “strong and passionate belief” in a (nonexistent) God does our world immeasurable harm: look no further than ISIS or al-Qaida.  In fact, look no further than the damage religion causes to progressive causes of every sort (and thus to our psychological well-being) in the United States, from women’s reproductive rights to same-sex marriage to teaching science in schools to depriving federal coffers of $82.5 billion a year (in tax exemptions).  Consider the enrichment of all sorts of faith-charlatans who thrive off the gullibility of millions of Americans.  Recall the sick “purity movements” that allow meddlesome parents to ruin the lives of their daughters.

I could go on.  In any case, it was to be expected that sooner or later psychologists would catch on to the quasi-psychotic elements (including detachment from reality, belief in spirits, hearing “the voice of the Lord, and so on) inherent in religion.

The fine-print disclaimer at the foot of the News Nerd’s page ruthlessly dispelled my elation: The story, like the others the site publishes, was “for entertainment purposes only,” and “purely satirical.”  In other words, a spoof.  . . . psychologists were not yet ready to diagnose firm belief in God as what it is: an unhealthy delusion.

Yet the satire in the News Nerd’s piece derives its efficacy from an obvious truth: belief in a deity motivates people to behave in all sorts of ways — some childish and pathetic, others harmful, a few outright criminal — most of which, to the nonbeliever at least, mimic symptoms of an all-encompassing mental illness, if of widely varying severity.

Why childish?  A majority of adults in one of the most developed countries on Earth believe, in all seriousness, that an invisible, inaudible, undetectable “father” exercises parental supervision over them, protecting them from evil (except when he doesn’t), and, for the mere price of surrendering their faculty of reason and behaving in ways spelled out in various magic books, will ensure their postmortem survival.  Wishful thinking characterizes childhood, yes, but, where the religious are concerned, not only.  That is childish.

To have all the resources to begin reliably fathoming the mysteries of the universe, and yet to cast them aside for slavish fidelity to primitive fables (most of which deserve no more “reverence” than tales from the Brothers Grimm) that no one past the age of six or seven should believe . . .   well, such is the very definition of pathetic.

But the harm is greater than that.  All in all, the most pernicious constellation of rubbish misbeliefs forming the core of the Abrahamic faiths concerns women, blamed for sin itself (the “original sin”), and the Fall of all mankind.  Every mainstream misogynistic superstition stems from the rotten old myth of Genesis: woman as made not in God’s image, but from one of Adam’s spare parts, and thus inferior to man.  Woman as temptress, woman as unreliable, woman as “unclean.”  The rest of the Old and New Testaments inculcate an array of injurious ideas: that women depreciate after their initial sexual encounter, and serve only to bear children and satisfy the lust of their mates.  

Religion as child abuse has, of course, always formed the mainstay of faith.  A desire to indoctrinate the unsuspecting young in faith’s dark, lurid dogmas before science, reason, and the enlightening joys of secularism take over and help them mature into healthy adults has for decades motivated a controversial homeschooling movement afflicting some 2.5 million children in the United States.

Homeschooling amounts to allowing the faith-deranged to infect their young with their disorder.  But it covers only the academic year.  Summertime, some of those same faith-deranged foist the God delusion on their defenseless children via a noxious plethora of “Bible camps.”  For a shocking look inside this perverted institution, check out the masterly (if enraging) 2006 documentary “Jesus Camp,”. . .

“Jesus Camp” shows children at the gruesomely named North Dakota camp “Kids on Fire” suffering through a miasma of brainwashing involving the abusive instillation of fear, self-loathing, and guilt, an incitement to al-Qaida-style martyrdom for the sake of Christ, . . . . The searing documentary exercised a salutary effect on the “Kids on Fire” camp, which is to say, it led to its demise.  Unfortunately, there are plenty of others like it.

Suffice it to say that religion is the chief motivator of terrorism the world over.  Apologists can rant themselves red in the face trying to ascribe such crimes to anything but faith, but the truth is, any Islamic fundamentalist can claim, with irrefutable textual justification, to be acting in accordance with “holy writ.”

Terrorism aside, though, faith’s role in the death of its own votaries could well serve as sufficient evidence for classifying strongly-held religious convictions as symptomatic of a possibly homicidal mens rea (criminal intent).  Here the courts have proved complicit, aided by our prevailing custom of exculpating religion and deferring to the religious.  

If the News Nerd’s APA story was a hoax, professionals are, nonetheless, taking note of the danger it was parodying.  A San-Franciscan human development consultant named Dr. Marlene Winell, herself a survivor of a Pentecostal upbringing, has bruited the idea of “religious trauma syndrome” and established its symptoms as “anxiety . . . depression, cognitive difficulties, and problems with social functioning.”  Kathleen Taylor, an Oxford neuroscientist, has proposed treating religious fundamentalism itself as a “mental disturbance.”

The religious blather about evil in the world yet are too blind to see that much of the evil we see stems directly from religion.  It's time that deference to religion and the deeply religious end. 

America’s 10 Worst Terror Attacks by Far Right Extremists and Christian Fundamentalists

If one only listens to Fox News and various right wing news outlets, one would quickly believe that only Muslims commit terror attacks and atrocities.  However, a post at Civil Commotion sets one on the right path:

There is something here that needs to be faced: Islam today is what Christianity once was — domineering and brutal. The Roman church ruled the West for 1000-years, and gave us the grotesque indecencies of the Inquisition, the witch burnings, and the auto da fe (sometimes claiming the lives of dozens in a single huge fire); it did not, inspired by its own teachings, end violence. It was secularism that tamed Christianity, the [Albert] Mohlers and [former Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin] Cochrans of the past, and secularism is more needful than ever as they come to grips with the fact that their backward-looking worldview has lost to the progress of knowledge.

The pious Christian crowd and Fox News followers obviously won't like hearing the truth.  A piece in The Raw Story  reminds us of some of the heinous deeds done by fundamentalist Christians and elements of the far right.  Here are highlights:

From Fox News to the Weekly Standard, neoconservatives have tried to paint terrorism as a largely or exclusively Islamic phenomenon. Their message of Islamophobia has been repeated many times since the George W. Bush era: Islam is inherently violent, Christianity is inherently peaceful, and there is no such thing as a Christian terrorist or a white male terrorist. But the facts don’t bear that out. Far-right white male radicals and extreme Christianists are every bit as capable of acts of terrorism as radical Islamists, and to pretend that such terrorists don’t exist does the public a huge disservice. . . . many terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried out by people who were neither Muslims nor dark-skinned.

In fact, most of the terrorist activity occurring in the United States in recent years has not come from Muslims, but from a combination of radical Christianists, white supremacists and far-right militia groups.

Below are 10 of the worst examples of non-Islamic terrorism that have occurred in the United States in the last 30 years.

1. Wisconsin Sikh Temple massacre, Aug. 5, 2012. The virulent, neocon-fueled Islamophobia that has plagued post-9/11 America has not only posed a threat to Muslims, it has had deadly consequences for people of other faiths, including Sikhs. . . . .  On Aug. 5, 2012, white supremacist Wade Michael Page used a semiautomatic weapon to murder six people during an attack on a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Page’s connection to the white supremacist movement was well-documented . . .

2. The murder of Dr. George Tiller, May 31, 2009. Imagine that a physician had been the victim of an attempted assassination by an Islamic jihadist in 1993, and received numerous death threats from al-Qaeda after that, before being murdered by an al-Qaeda member. Neocons, Fox News and the Christian Right would have had a field day. A physician was the victim of a terrorist killing that day, but neither the terrorist nor the people who inflamed the terrorist were Muslims. Dr. George Tiller, who was shot and killed by anti-abortion terrorist Scott Roeder on May 31, 2009, was a victim of Christian Right terrorism, not al-Qaeda.

3. Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church shooting, July 27, 2008. On July 27, 2008, Christian Right sympathizer Jim David Adkisson walked into the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee during a children’s play and began shooting people at random. Two were killed, while seven others were injured but survived. Adkisson said he was motivated by a hatred of liberals, Democrats and gays, and he considered neocon Bernard Goldberg’s book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, his political manifesto. 

4. The murder of Dr. John Britton, July 29, 1994. To hear the Christian Right tell it, there is no such thing as Christian terrorism. Tell that to the victims of the Army of God, a loose network of radical Christianists with a long history of terrorist attacks on abortion providers. One Christian Right terrorist with ties to the Army of God was Paul Jennings Hill, who was executed by lethal injection on Sept. 3, 2003 for the murders of abortion doctor John Britton and his bodyguard James Barrett. Hill shot both of them in cold blood and expressed no remorse whatsoever; he insisted he was doing’s God’s work and has been exalted as a martyr by the Army of God.

5. The Centennial Olympic Park bombing, July 27, 1996. Paul Jennings Hill is hardly the only Christian terrorist who has been praised by the Army of God; that organization has also praised Eric Rudolph, who is serving life without parole for a long list of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Christianity. Rudolph is best known for carrying out the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics—a blast that killed spectator Alice Hawthorne and wounded 111 others. 

6. The murder of Barnett Slepian by James Charles Kopp, Oct. 23, 1998. Like Paul Jennings Hill, Eric Rudolph and Scott Roeder, James Charles Kopp is a radical Christian terrorist who has been exalted as a hero by the Army of God. On Oct. 23, 1998 Kopp fired a single shot into the Amherst, NY home of Barnett Slepian (a doctor who performed abortions), mortally wounding him. Slepian died an hour later.

7. Planned Parenthood bombing, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1994. Seldom has the term “Christian terrorist” been used in connection with John C. Salvi on AM talk radio or at Fox News, but it’s a term that easily applies to him. In 1994, the radical anti-abortionist and Army of God member attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts, shooting and killing receptionists Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols and wounding several others.  . . . .  The Army of God has exalted Salvi as a Christian martyr and described Lowney and Nichols not as victims of domestic terrorism, but as infidels who got what they deserved. 

8. Suicide attack on IRS building in Austin, Texas, Feb. 18, 2010. When Joseph Stack flew a plane into the Echelon office complex (where an IRS office was located), Fox News’ coverage of the incident was calm and matter-of-fact. Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa seemed to find the attack amusing and joked that it could have been avoided if the federal government had followed his advice and abolished the IRS. Nonetheless, there were two fatalities: Stack and IRS employee Vernon Hunter.

9. The murder of Alan Berg, June 18, 1984. One of the most absurd claims some Republicans have made about white supremacists is that they are liberals and progressives. That claim is especially ludicrous in light of the terrorist killing of liberal Denver-based talk show host Alan Berg, a critic of white supremacists who was killed with an automatic weapon on June 18, 1984. The killing was linked to members of the Order, a white supremacist group that had marked Berg for death. Order members David Lane (a former Ku Klux Klan member who had also been active in the Aryan Nations) and Bruce Pierce were both convicted in federal court on charges of racketeering, conspiracy and violating Berg’s civil rights and given what amounted to life sentences.

10. Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, April 19, 1995. Neocons and Republicans grow angry and uncomfortable whenever Timothy McVeigh is cited as an example of a non-Islamic terrorist. Pointing out that a non-Muslim white male carried out an attack as vicious and deadly as the Oklahoma City bombing doesn’t fit into their narrative that only Muslims and people of color are capable of carrying out terrorist attacks. . . . . Prior to the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing McVeigh orchestrated was the most deadly terrorist attack in U.S. history: 168 people were killed and more than 600 were injured.

The foregoing is not intended to diminish the heinous nature of the terror attacks in Paris last week.   But, if one reads the excerpts above, one thing becomes quickly apparent: most of the terror attacks, like in the Paris attacks, were motivated at least in part by fundamentalist religious belief.   Yes, we need to rid the world of Islamic extremism.  We also need to rid the world of fundamentalist Christian extremism as well.

The Connection Between ISIS and Lack of Education

I've noted often that to thrive extremist forms of religion require ignorant and uneducated populations.  Hence why Christianity's main growth area at present is in the most backward regions of Africa.  It's also the reason that American Christofascists seek to gut education programs in America and rewrite text books to support their poisonous belief system which begins to disintegrate in the face of scientific and modern knowledge.  But religious extremism is not limited to Christian extremists as demonstrated by ISIS (or ISIL as it is sometimes called).  To survive Islamic extremism also needs ignorant and uneducated populations.  Apiece in the New York Times makes the case that to defeat ISIS not only must America and its allies use military might, but they also need to over time  attack the underlying basis for religious extremism: lack of educated populations.  Here are excerpts:

As we fight the Islamic State and other extremists, there’s something that President Obama and all of us can learn from them. For, in one sense, the terrorists are fighting smarter than we are.

These extremists use arms to fight their battles in the short term, but, to hold ground in the long run, they also combat Western education and women’s empowerment. They know that illiteracy, ignorance and oppression of women create the petri dish in which extremism can flourish.

That’s why the Islamic State kidnapped Samira Salih al-Nuaimi, a brave Iraqi woman and human rights lawyer in Mosul, tortured her and publicly executed her last week. That’s why the Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai, then 15 years old, after she campaigned for educating girls. And that’s why Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls in northern Nigeria and announced that it would turn them into slaves.

In each case, the extremists recognized a basic truth: Their greatest strategic threat comes not from a drone but from a girl with a book. We need to recognize, and act on, that truth as well.

For similar reasons, the financiers of extremism have invested heavily in fundamentalist indoctrination. They have built Wahhabi madrassas in poor Muslim countries like Pakistan, Niger and Mali, offering free meals, as well as scholarships for the best students to study in the gulf.

Shouldn’t we try to compete?

Shouldn’t we use weapons in the short run, but try to gain strategic advantage by focusing on education and on empowering women to build stable societies less vulnerable to extremist manipulation?

[W]e’re not playing the long game, as the extremists are. We are vastly overrelying on the military toolbox and underemploying the education toolbox, the women’s empowerment toolbox, the communications toolbox. We’re tacticians; alas, the extremists may be better strategists.It’s not a question of resources, because bombs are more expensive than books. The United States military campaign against the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL, will cost at least $2.4 billion a year and perhaps many times that

Obama seems to have dropped his 2008 campaign promise to establish a $2 billion global fund for education. And the United States gives the Global Partnership for Education, a major multilateral effort, less in a year than what we spend weekly in Syria and Iraq.

[T]he historical record of the last half-century is that education tends to nurture a more cosmopolitan middle class and gives people a stake in the system.

Girls’ education seems to have more impact than boys’ education, partly because educated women have markedly fewer children. The result is lower birthrates and less of a youth bulge in the population, which highly correlates to civil conflict.

I support judicious airstrikes in the short term against the Islamic State, but that should be only one part of a policy combating extremism.
So let’s learn from the extremists — and from those brave girls themselves who are willing to risk their lives in order to get an education. They all understand the power of education, and we should, too.

The USA never seems good at playing the long game.  We need to think in the long term as well as short term military action.  We also need to recognize the threat that our home grown extremists of every faith represent and oppose efforts to dumb down education and fill our text books with religious based fairy tales.  It's no coincidence that overall belief in Bible inerrancy directly correlates with one's low level of education.

Budweiser Pulls Out Of Sochi Olympics

In what hopefully will become a trend Budweiser has decided at the last minute to pull all of its personnel out of Sochi citing fears for their safety.   Other media reports indicate that few foreign visitors have appeared in Sochi, so one can only hope that Vladimir Putin's ego drive Winter Games are a bust in terms of PR and allowing  Putin to preen in the limelight.  Huffington Post has details:

At the last minute, Budweiser has decided to pull out its employees from the Sochi Winter Olympics. The “King of Beers” will not host its usual Olympics beer blast, a huge party designed to promote its brand image worldwide.

According to a report at TMZ, “it’s all because the company is not comfortable with the situation in Russia.”

“A rep for Anheuser-Busch confirms to TMZ Sports … there will be no Club Bud in Sochi.”  TMZ adds, “we’ve seen an email from a Budweiser rep which says the company does not want its U.S.-based representatives in Sochi … and the message is clear — the terrorist threat is simply looming too large.”

A new CNN poll finds 57 percent of Americans think a terror attack at the Sochi Olympics, which begin tonight, is “likely.”

NYPD Designated Entire Mosques as Terrorism Organizations

A story out of New York City underscores the danger of allowing police and government authorities to engage in domestic spying under the guise of "fighting terrorism" and/or protecting "national security."  The New York Police Department ("NYPD") has used the excuse of "fighting terrorism organizations" to designate entire mosques and all congregants as potential terrorists.  One can only imagine the outcry if certain extreme Christian churches and organizations such as the Family Research Council were treated in this manner.   Despite one's total innocence, you could unwittingly find yourself the subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.  I find this growing police state atmosphere to be disturbing to say the least.  Here are highlights from a piece in the Virginian Pilot:

The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorism organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen "terrorism enterprise investigations" into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like.

Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprise.

The documents show in detail how, in its hunt for terrorists, the NYPD investigated countless innocent New York Muslims and put information about them in secret police files. As a tactic, opening an enterprise investigation on a mosque is so potentially invasive that while the NYPD conducted at least a dozen, the FBI never did one, according to interviews with federal law enforcement officials.

The revelations about the NYPD's massive spying operations are in documents recently obtained by The Associated Press and part of a new book, "Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America." The book by AP reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman is based on hundreds of previously unpublished police files and interviews with current and former NYPD, CIA and FBI officials.

The disclosures come as the NYPD is fighting off lawsuits accusing it of engaging in racial profiling while combating crime. Earlier this month, a judge ruled that the department's use of the stop-and-frisk tactic was unconstitutional.

The American Civil Liberties Union and two other groups have sued, saying the Muslim spying programs are unconstitutional and make Muslims afraid to practice their faith without police scrutiny.

 

Both Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly have denied those accusations. They say police do not unfairly target people; they only follow leads.

"As a matter of department policy, undercover officers and confidential informants do not enter a mosque unless they are following up on a lead," Kelly wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal. "We have a responsibility to protect New Yorkers from violent crime or another terrorist attack - and we uphold the law in doing so."

An NPYD spokesman declined to comment.

The NYPD did not limit its operations to collecting information on those who attended the mosques or led prayers. The department sought also to put people on the boards of New York's Islamic institutions to fill intelligence gaps.

We've seen this type of conduct before - in the Third Reich.   I can just imagine how real Islamic terrorist will use this conduct by NYPD to recruit enemies of America.

Is the NSA's Surveillance Unconstitutional?

As noted before, I do not like the growing police state tendencies in America as most recently revealed in the NSA's sweeping surveillance operations that despite claims to the contrary to pull American citizens into the web of communications being monitored and in some cases being turned over to other police and law enforcement agencies.  I am all for stopping terrorists, but when American citizens are subject to the same levels of surveillance as on finds in China, Russia and Iran, something seriously wrong has happened to freedom in this country.  A column in the Washington Post looks at why the NSA surveillance of Americans is likely unconstitutional.  Here are excerpts:

 

The National Security Agency’s recently revealed surveillance programs undermine the purpose of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was established to prevent this kind of overreach. They violate the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure. And they underscore the dangers of growing executive power.

 The intelligence community has a history of overreaching in the name of national security. In the mid-1970s, it came to light that, since the 1940s, the NSA had been collecting international telegraphic traffic from companies, in the process obtaining millions of Americans’ telegrams that were unrelated to foreign targets. From 1940 to 1973, the CIA and the FBI engaged in covert mail-opening programs that violated laws prohibiting the interception or opening of mail. The agencies also conducted warrantless “surreptitious entries,” breaking into targets’ offices and homes to photocopy or steal business records and personal documents. The Army Security Agency intercepted domestic radio communications. And the Army’s CONUS program placed more than 100,000 people under surveillance, including lawmakers and civil rights leaders.
 

Congress passed the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to limit sweeping collection of intelligence and create rigorous oversight. But 35 years later, the NSA is using this law and its subsequent amendments as legal grounds to run even more invasive programs than those that gave rise to the statute.

 

We’ve learned that in April, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) ordered Verizon to provide information on calls made by each subscriber over a three-month period. Over the past seven years, similar orders have been served continuously on AT&T, Sprint and other telecommunications providers.

Another program, PRISM, disclosed by the Guardian and The Washington Post, allows the NSA and the FBI to obtain online data including e-mails, photographs, documents and connection logs. The information that can be assembledabout any one person — much less organizations, social networks and entire communities — is staggering: What we do, think and believe.

To the extent that the FISC sanctioned PRISM, it may be consistent with the law. But it is disingenuous to suggest that millions of Americans’ e-mails, photographs and documents are “incidental” to an investigation targeting foreigners overseas.
 

Under section 215 of the Patriot Act, the government no longer has to prove that the target is a foreign power. It need only state that the records are sought as part of an investigation to protect against terrorism or clandestine intelligence.

 

How can every call that every American makes or receives be relevant to a specific investigation?”

As a constitutional matter, the Supreme Court has long held that, where an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy, search and seizure may occur only once the government has obtained a warrant, supported by probable cause and issued by a judge. The warrant must specify the places to be searched and items to be seized.

[T]he Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment does not protect foreigners from searches conducted abroad. But it has never recognized a foreign intelligence exception to the warrant requirement when foreign-targeted searches result in the collection of vast stores of citizens’ communications.  Americans reasonably expect that their movements, communications and decisions will not be recorded and analyzed by the government.

The FISC is supposed to operate as a check. But it is a secret court, notorious for its low rate of denial. From 1979 to 2002, it did not reject a single application. Over the past five years, out of nearly 8,600 applications, only two have been denied.

Liberal or conservative, Americans who value freedom ought to be very concerned about what is happening in the name of national security.  I suspect these concerns are what motivate Edward Snowden to release the information that he did. 
 

 

U.S. Mining Data From 9 Leading Internet Firm - Firms Deny Knowledge

The full scope of the police state like tactics of the U.S. Government's spying on American citizens continues to unfold and, in my view, ought to be very disturbing to those who value privacy and freedom.  Some will say "I have nothing to hide, and I don't care" but that mindset is missing the bigger issue: unless one is a suspect of criminal activities, your personal information and data should not be subject to scrutiny by the government or anyone else.  What we are seeing is that all of us under a level of scrutiny that makes the former Soviet Union's KGB look like a rant beginner in information gathering.  And it needs to be stressed that this program of domestic spying began under Chimperator George W. Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney not the Obama administration, although it is troubling that Obama has not ceased some of the worse abuses.  A Washington Post story looks at the fact that the situation with Verizon is merely the tip of the iceberg.  Here are highlights:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush’s secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority.

Congress obliged with the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection. PRISM recruited its first partner, Microsoft, and began six years of rapidly growing data collection beneath the surface of a roiling national debate on surveillance and privacy. Late last year, when critics in Congress sought changes in the FISA Amendments Act, the only lawmakers who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “I would just push back on the idea that the court has signed off on it, so why worry? This is a court that meets in secret, allows only the government to appear before it, and publishes almost none of its opinions. It has never been an effective check on government.”

Several companies contacted by The Post said they had no knowledge of the program, did not allow direct government access to their servers and asserted that they responded only to targeted requests for information.

Government officials and the document itself made clear that the NSA regarded the identities of its private partners as PRISM’s most sensitive secret, fearing that the companies would withdraw from the program if exposed. “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don’t harm these sources,” the briefing’s author wrote in his speaker’s notes.

Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

Every police state has always claimed justification for spying on its citizens.  America has taken this nightmarish surveillance to frightening new levels.  I for one will not be sleeping better at night. 

Benghazi Was Neither a Terrorist Attack Nor an Act of Terror

Some may say it is an issue of semantics, but sometimes words do have meaning and legal definitions have purposes and consequences.  Not that this reality ever crosses the minds of the Christofascist/Tea Party base of the GOP or their political whores in the GOP Congressional caucus.  Their sole focus is on trashing Barack Obama and to a slightly lesser extent Hillary Clinton.  They have proposed little in the way of solid policy proposals and instead seek only obstruction and attacks on the White House.  Yes, it scores points with the increasingly ignorant base of the GOP - a large portion of which has no idea where Benghazi even is - but it lends nothing towards moving the nation forward or solving pressing issues.  A piece in the American Prospect lays out what calling the Beghazi attack terrorism or an act terror is not correct.  Here are excerpts:

I am hereby declaring 99 Pinocchios on Barack Obama, all the people who work for him, everyone in the Republican party, and most everyone in the press who has reported on Benghazi.

This is about what has to be one of the most inane disagreements in the history of American politics, the argument about whether Obama called the Benghazi attack an "act of terror" or a "terrorist attack." Incredibly, people are still bickering over this. The other day Darrell Issa expressed his outrage that Obama had, in his diabolical attempt to cover up the incident, used the phrase "act of terror," which, let's be honest, is almost like saying, "Way to go, al Qaeda!", instead of using the far, far, far more condemnatory phrase "terrorist attack." It's like the difference between saying "steaming pile of bullshit" when you ought to say "steaming bullshit pile"—anyone who can't tell the difference between the two obviously can't be trusted to run the country.

But here's what nobody seems to get: Benghazi was not a terrorist act. Or an act of terror. Or an act of terrorism.

Before my Republican friends start getting red in the face, that doesn't mean it wasn't awful. Many awful things are not terrorism. Pearl Harbor wasn't terrorism. Jeffrey Dahmer's murders weren't terrorism.  .  .  .  .   Terrorism is something quite specific: the intentional killing of civilians in order to achieve a political end. It's the "civilian" part that makes it terrorism and not something else. Perhaps some conservatives think that any violent action committed by Muslims is terrorism, but it isn't.-

As it happens, there's a nice succinct definition of terrorism in U.S. law, section 2656f(d) of Title 22 of the United States Code, which reads, "the term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents."

So why wasn't Benghazi terrorism? Because the people targeted weren't civilians. As The Wall Street Journal has reported, "The U.S. effort in Benghazi was at its heart a CIA operation, according to officials briefed on the intelligence. Of the more than 30 American officials evacuated from Benghazi following the deadly assault, only seven worked for the State Department. Nearly all the rest worked for the CIA, under diplomatic cover, which was a principal purpose of the consulate, these officials said." CIA officials are not civilians. That doesn't make their deaths any less tragic or painful for their families, but it's the truth. Nor is a CIA outpost a civilian target.

Of all the things you could say about Benghazi, why is this the one Republicans are so obsessed with? My guess is because they have so little else to work with. But they're being abetted by the Obama administration, which continues to play this game, because they've bought into the idea that if you call an attack "terrorism," that means you're really mad about it and you'll be tough and strong in your response, while if you call it something else you're not very mad and you'll be all wimpy about it.

Well said and accurate.

GOP Ties Immigration Reform Bill to Boston Terrorists

The ugliness and bigotry of today's Republican Party seems to truly know no limits as GOP elected officials leap at opportunities to pander to the racism and downright nastiness of the GOP base in the wake of the tragedies in Boston this week.  Not only do prominent Republicans want to suspend legal protections afforded to every American citizen, but they also want to use the Boston nightmare as a rationale for turning back efforts at desperately needed immigration reform.  And behind it all is the fury of angry conservative Christian white males in particular who simply cannot deal with the loss of the special privileges and deference that they have enjoyed for so many years.  One of the assholes leading the anti-immigrant charge is Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, a true douche bag if there ever was one in my opinion.  The Des Moines Register ahs details on Grassley's anti-immigrant rant.  Here are excerpts:

The Boston Marathon bombings cast a shadow Friday over the start of debate on sweeping legislation to remake the U.S. immigration system, as some Republicans argued that the role of two immigrant suspects raised questions about gaps in the system.

Once officials learn the immigration history of the suspected marathon terrorists, that information will help figure out how to reform the system, Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley said Friday.

“While we don’t yet know the immigration status of people who have terrorized the communities in Massachusetts, when we find out, it will help shed light on the weaknesses of our system,” Grassley said during the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Friday morning on the so-called Gang of Eight’s immigration reform bill.

“How can individuals evade authority and plan such attacks on our soil?” said Grassley, the top Republican on the committee. “How can we beef up security checks on those who wish to enter the United States? How do we ensure that people who wish to do us harm are not eligible for benefits under the immigration laws, including this new bill before us?”

Others went further.

“It’s too bad Suspect No. 1 won’t be able to be legalized by Marco Rubio, now,” conservative commentator Ann Coulter wrote on her Twitter account, referring to the suspect killed in the shootout. Rubio, a Florida Republican, is one of the main Senate authors of the legislation.

On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Ia., said Congress should be cautious about reforming immigration policies right now. King said the focus should be national security, not a path to legalization for immigrants who came to the country illegally.

 There's more, but the main point to take away is that if one isn't a racist, an jingoistic nationalist, a far right Christianist religious extremist or a homophobe, you really do not have a place in today's GOP.  And as for fiscal conservatism, the GOP lost all credibility on the issue when Chimoerator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney took America to war in unfunded operation (in Afghanistan and Iraq) based on lies and untruths after first enacting massive tax cuts to the wealthy.  Half of the current national debt tracks directly to failed GOP policies.

Captured But Still No Explanation as to Why

 

Calm is at last returning to the Boston area after last night's capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, the second of the Boston Marathon bombers.  Yet so far, there seems to be no clear explanation of what triggered the carnage and brutal attack on innocent strangers.   There are indications, however, that the older of the bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26,may have drifted into religious extremism and may have been radicalized while visiting Russia last year.    Some family members, in fact, blame the older Tsarnaev for leading his younger brother on a path to darkness.   A column in the New York Times ponders about what lead to such violence and apparent derailing of lies that had seemed in some ways to be tracking the proverbial American dream.  Here are highlights:

“A picture has begun to emerge of 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an aggressive, possibly radicalized immigrant who may have ensnared his younger brother Dzhokhar — described almost universally as a smart and sweet kid — into an act of terror,” The Boston Globe reported Friday. 

The Globe quoted a person named Zaur Tsarnaev, who the newspaper said identified himself as a 26-year-old cousin of the suspects, as saying, “I used to warn Dzhokhar that Tamerlan was up to no good.” Tamerlan “was always getting into trouble,” he added. “He was never happy, never cheering, never smiling. He used to strike his girlfriend. He hurt her a few times. He was not a nice man. I don’t like to speak about him. He caused problems for my family.”

But what about that image of Dzhokhar as sweet?  On Friday, BuzzFeed and CNN claimed to verify Dzhokhar’s Twitter account. The tweets posted on that account give a window into a bifurcated mind — on one level, a middle-of-the-road 19-year-old boy, but on another, a person with a mind leaning toward darkness. 

Like many young people, the person tweeting from that account liked rap music, saying of himself, “#imamacbookrapper when I’m bored,” and quoting rap lyrics in his tweets. 

He tweeted quite a bit about women, dating and relationships; many of his musings were misogynistic and profane. Still, he seemed to want to have it both ways, to be rude and respectful at once, tweeting on Dec. 24, 2012: “My last tweets felt too wrong. I don’t like to objectify women or judge anyone for their actions.” 

He was a proud Muslim who tweeted about going to mosque and enjoying talking — and even arguing — about religion with others. But he seemed to believe that different faiths were in competition with one another. On Nov. 29, he tweeted: “I kind of like religious debates, just hearing what other people believe is interesting and then crushing their beliefs with facts is fun.” 

His politics seemed jumbled. He was apparently a 9/11 Truther, posting a tweet on Sept. 1 that read in part, “Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job.” On Election Day he retweeted a tweet from Barack Obama that read: “This happened because of you. Thank you.” But on March 20 he tweeted, “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.” This sounds like a take on a quote from Edmund Burke, who is viewed by many as the founder of modern Conservatism: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” 

Hopefully, we will find out what motivated the horrible acts that injured so many and took innocent lives.  The younger Tsarnaev strikes me as accurate on one point: religions are in competition.  Both fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam claim that only they are right and that all need to conform to their toxic belief systems.  And both ultimately cause their followers to view those who are different or who hold different beliefs to as less than fully human and, as a result, set the stage for evil.    Don't believe me?  Just listen to what the Christofascists are saying about Muslims and immigrants in the wake of the Boston bombings.  I continue to believe that a religion free world would be a far better place.

Hate and Violence Rear their Face in Boston

Hate and violence showed their face today in Boston as heinous criminals used the happy events around the Boston Marathon to weak death and horrible injuries on innocents for some sick person or persons.  So far, authorities have no idea whether those responsible for the carnage are domestic terrorists - Christofascists, white supremacists or perhaps Tea Party extremists - or foreign terrorists such as Islamic extremists or isolated sick and simple one or more warped individuals.  What we do know is that the bombs that went off appear to have been homemade and likely were of a size to fit in a bag pack and that given the presence of ball bearings and shrapnel like materials, the aim was to maim and kill.  Obviously, I hope the perpetrators are found and I could think of some unique punishments that they deserve - yes, I do believe in cruel and unusual punishment, and those responsible deserve something horrific.  CNN has some of the latest available details.  Here are highlights:

Two bombs struck near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, turning a celebration into a bloody scene of destruction.

The blasts threw people to the ground. Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said Monday night that the death toll had risen to three. Scores were injured at the scene.

One of the dead was an 8-year-old boy, according to a state law enforcement source.

Hospitals reported at least 141 people are being treated, with at least 17 of them in critical condition and 25 in serious condition. At least eight of the patients are children.

At least 10 people injured had limbs amputated, according to a terrorism expert briefed on the investigation.

Doctors are "pulling ball bearings out of people in the emergency room," the expert said, suggesting the bombs were designed to propel shrapnel.

"Any responsible individuals, any responsible groups, will feel the full weight of justice," President Barack Obama vowed.

Boston "is a tough and resilient town," he said, adding that Americans will stand by Bostonians "every single step of the way."

Federal authorities are classifying the bombings as a terrorist attack, but it's not clear whether the origin was domestic or foreign, a federal law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation said.

A federal law enforcement official told CNN that both bombs were small, and initial tests showed no C-4 or other high-grade explosive material, suggesting that the packages used in the attack were crude explosive devices.

Investigators warned police to be on the lookout for a "darker-skinned or black male" with a possible foreign accent in connection with the attack, according to a law enforcement advisory obtained by CNN. The man was seen with a black backpack and sweatshirt and was trying to get into a restricted area about five minutes before the first explosion, the lookout notice states.

Also, a Saudi national with a leg wound was under guard at a Boston hospital in connection with the bombings, but investigators cannot say he is involved at this time and he is not in custody, a law enforcement official said Monday evening.

There were no credible threats before the race, a state government official said.  There is no suspect in custody, but many people are being questioned, Davis said.

In addition to scrutinizing images of surveillance cameras in the area, the FBI likely was issuing subpoenas for records from cell towers in the area to isolate and trace calls from around Copley Square at the time of the blasts, according to a former federal law enforcement official who now works in the intelligence community.

Who ever is responsible, if they think this type of barbarism will win sympathy for their cause, they are sadly mistaken.

 

Condoleeza Rice Pours Cold Water On "Benghazi-Gate"

Mitt Romney and demagogues in the Republican Party have been working strenuously to turn the sad events in Benghazi, Libya on September 11th into some sort of scandal - a Benghazi Gate" if you will.  Imagine their angst when former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice threw cold water on the effort by stating that it was not as unusual for the White House and State Department to be lacking information as the GOP talking heads have tried to claim it to be.  Indeed, Rice flat out said that sometimes it is difficult to know what is really happening, especially with fast moving events.  Here are highlights from Think Progress where Rice pokes a hole in the GOP storyline:

Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice broke with the majority of her party last night on Fox News, as she tried to hit the brakes on the right wing’s politicization of the recent attack in Libya.

Host Greta Van Susteren asked Rice directly and repeatedly about a set of emails uncovered by Reuters. In what has been dubbed “Benghazi-Gate,” the conservative media has jumped on the emails as definitive proof that the Obama administration has been lying about what it knew and when in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Rice’s response was likely not what Van Susteren expected:

RICE: But when things are unfolding very, very quickly, it’s not always easy to know what is really going on on the ground. And to my mind, the really important questions here are about how information was collected. Did the various agencies really coordinate and share intelligence in the way that we had hoped, with the reforms that were made after 9/11?

So there’s a big picture to be examined here. But we don’t have all of the pieces, and I think it’s easy to try and jump to conclusions about what might have happened here. It’s probably better to let the relevant bodies do their work.

 Yes, Rice definitely peed in the Cheerios of many of the right wingers who always put ideology and hatred of Obama ahead of reality.