Chris Hedges's Blog, page 269

What’s Really Behind Julian Assange’s Arrest

The recent arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has provoked a wide spectrum of responses in the media, but many journalists seem to recognize the Trump administration’s attack on the publisher as setting a dangerous precedent for freedom of the press. Many reports have focused on what Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer deems a mischaracterization of Assange’s character that is used to justify a heinous persecution and bury the fact that Assange, in his publishing of news, has acted much like any newspaper.

“It’s kind of a shame that we have to say, put in this disclaimer, ‘whatever you think of Julian Assange,’ ” the Truthdig editor in chief tells his guest, Bruce Shapiro, in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” “Because of course, any whistleblower is going to be attacked, and it’s the traditional argument of shooting the messenger. […] Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning more spectacularly […] distributed at least 700,000 military, war and diplomatic records. And there is no question of the news value of those records, the right of the public to know that information, the need of the public to know that information. There has not been one documented example of an injury or death as a result of the release of that information.”

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The Martyrdom of Julian Assange



by Chris Hedges

Shapiro, a contributing editor to The Nation and the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is concerned about the ethical question surrounding the alleged assistance the WikiLeaks founder proffered whistleblower Chelsea Manning when she was trying to crack a password. And yet, the potential use of the Espionage Act, which Shapiro reminds us, “has never been used against a journalist in the history of the United States, or against a publisher” is far more disconcerting to Shapiro.

“The danger to press freedom by allowing the government to root around in source relationships like this far outweighs whatever my judgments on Assange’s own character or state of mind may be,” Shapiro tells Scheer. “I think what we have to focus on now is how the government is … exploiting, you know, the complicating factors of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to undermine all kinds of watchdog reporting here in the United States.”

What’s at stake, in other words, is not one man’s life but rather the very essence of the press freedoms the U.S. was founded on. Assange’s arrest is about national security reporting, the criminalization of source-journalist relationships involving leaking and, more broadly, an “attempt to criminalize investigative reporting,” Shapiro argues. The Nation contributor also notes the courage behind Manning’s decision to return to jail rather than take further part in the government investigation into Assange.

“Chelsea Manning is doing something that I find unprecedented in the history of American journalism,” Shapiro says. “We often hear, or from time to time hear, about journalists going to jail to protect a source. I’ve never before heard of a source willingly go to jail to protect a journalist.”

Listen to the entire discussion between the two journalists regarding Assange, the rare heroism of whistleblowers and the government’s menacing assault on the First Amendment. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.  

If you have trouble viewing or hearing the podcast player posted above this notice, click this link.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it’s Bruce Shapiro, a contributing editor to The Nation magazine and the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. And we’re here to discuss–I’m probably misusing the concept of trauma as you define it. But the presence of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, has been traumatic for his critics, and certainly in the Democratic Party and elsewhere, and even for journalists. And he’s now been charged by the U.S. government with a single count of violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, for attempting unsuccessfully to understand a password or change it; he failed. And that’s led to the arrest and extradition attempt to take him from England to face this charge, and presumably other charges can be added on. And you have, the reason I wanted to talk to you, Bruce Shapiro, is that you wrote a number of articles, but most recently in The Nation, the indictment of Julian Assange as a threat to press freedom. So can you basically summarize your view of this?

 

Bruce Shapiro: Sure. And I suppose I should start by saying that my view of this is that it’s a mess. It’s contradictory, it’s complicated. And I think it’s important to separate, for this conversation, whatever personal views or political views we may have of Julian Assange as an individual, or WikiLeaks as an institution. And instead, look at the indictment and say, what are its implications for the work of journalism and journalists, what are its implications for publishing, what are its implications for free expression. That’s what I’ve tried to do. A lot of news organizations, I think, have kind of stepped back from Assange with the revelation in this indictment that he seemed to be actively trying to crack a government password at the request of his source, Chelsea Manning. Usual press practice would be to accept leaked materials, but not to participate actively in the breaking into the file cabinet, whether a real file cabinet or a virtual one. And because he crossed that line, some free press folks have said, Oh, that’s it, we don’t need to worry about it anymore. I disagree strongly. And it’s for a couple of reasons. First of all, the underlying charge is not just the limited charge of having tried to crack a password; that’s sort of a predicate to get him extradited and maybe add more later, who knows. But even in this limited indictment, it’s a conspiracy charge. The indictment charges Assange and Chelsea Manning with conspiracy, and in particular conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, which has never been used against a journalist in the history of the United States, or against a publisher. And the nature of that conspiracy is everything surrounding this act of purported password-cracking back in 2010. The indictment details Assange’s conversations with Manning, his attempt to reassure her that the effort was worth it, sort of cajoling, stroking. Talks about them discussing how best to protect her, to cover her tracks. This is the kind of conversation that journalists–especially those who report on national security, but other kinds of investigative reporters, too–have with sources every day. And so this indictment in order to get to this limited act of password-cracking, is criminalizing the work, the day-to-day work of investigative reporting. That seems to me to be very dangerous. I think the government, the Trump administration is counting on a lot of people’s dislike of Julian Assange personally to get this through to, to establish the precedent for criminalizing investigative reporters’ relationships with leakers. You know, the Obama administration, which was no friend of whistleblowers–which prosecuted more whistleblowers than any administration in history–the Obama administration looked at this same material and concluded that it would intrude on the First Amendment, that it would be a threat to freedom of the press, to prosecute Assange. It wasn’t worth it to them. The Trump administration, now Secretary of State Pompeo, formerly the head of national intelligence, the Trump Justice Department, now under Attorney General Barr, have decided for political reasons, I think, to turn around that decision by the Obama Justice Department and go after Mr. Assange. Again, whatever you think of Assange, the question is, what are the implications of this indictment for the practice of investigative reporting? And that worries me very much.

RS: Yeah, it’s kind of a shame that we have to say, put in this disclaimer, “whatever you think of Julian Assange.” Because of course, any whistleblower is going to be attacked, and it’s the traditional argument of shooting the messenger. The fact of the matter is, there’s two points to be made. First of all, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning more spectacularly, and the real victim of prosecution here so far, has–you know, they distributed at least 700,000 military, war, and diplomatic records. And there is no question of the news value of those records, the right of the public to know that information, the need of the public to know that information. There has not been one documented example of an injury or death as a result of the release of that information. So the rump of this whole issue here, the documents that were released, that really showed evidence of serious war crimes, the killing of civilians, shooting of reporters, everything else–no one has gone for jail on the other end. No one has, you know, been held accountable for any of those crimes. And Chelsea Manning, of course, has been prosecuted, and then was pardoned and is now back in jail because she won’t cooperate with the grand jury, having said she has said everything she can. The interesting thing here is that Julian Assange is in the position–the same the New York Times and the Washington Post were in the Pentagon Papers case.

BS: Well, you know–yeah.

RS: Ellsberg was Chelsea Manning, and the fact of the matter is, whether you like the publication or not, basically with the exception of this breaking the password charge, Julian Assange is a publisher. And the interesting thing is that Chelsea Manning, who supplied the password, was not charged with this, and with this failed effort. And this was used, again, to drag Julian Assange into a court in England.

BS: Well, it’s interesting. So there’s–let me just unpack a few layers. You know, there’s a big argument within journalism right now about whether Assange is really a journalist and whether WikiLeaks is really journalism. I actually think this is an irrelevant argument, because whether or not you think a public interest document dump is journalism or meets the best ethical standards or whatever, what Julian Assange unquestionably is a publisher. And the First Amendment doesn’t only protect journalists; in fact, journalism as a profession didn’t really exist when the First Amendment was passed back in 1789. The First Amendment protects publication and publishers, and that was the meaning as well of the Pentagon Papers case, right? When the Supreme Court agreed to let the New York Times and Washington Post and everybody else go ahead with publication of the Pentagon Papers, what they found is that under American law there can be no prior restraint. We do not have an official secrets act here that allows the government to put stories on spikes. And I think there’s been a lot of confusion caused by this argument about whether or not Assange is really a journalist or not. I certainly agree that the Iraq War logs, which are the documents at the heart of this conspiracy indictment, that there is an unquestioned public interest in their release. It revealed, you know, all kinds of unknown, previously unknown activity and cover-ups for accountability in deaths of civilians, and the deaths of journalists–the famous collateral damage video. You know, those–there is a public interest. Chelsea Manning is in exactly the same position as Daniel Ellsberg was in when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, with a couple of important differences. Back then, the Nixon administration wanted to use the Espionage Act to go after Daniel Ellsberg; it didn’t only because that would have revealed the Nixon administration’s illegal break-in into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. So Nixonian dirty tricks prevented this kind of a conspiracy charge at that time. And, you know, Daniel Ellsberg was a person at the top of the power pyramid when he decided to leak the Pentagon Papers. He’d been to Harvard, he had been a top Defense Department official, he worked for the Rand Corporation. Chelsea Manning was a lowly private, except a lowly private with access to the goods. And you know, the–in many ways, again, whatever you think of Assange, Chelsea Manning is doing something that I find unprecedented in the history of American journalism. We often hear, or from time to time hear, about journalists going to jail to protect a source. I’ve never before heard of a source willingly go to jail to protect a journalist. And that’s what’s happened here, with Chelsea Manning now in prison for contempt of court for refusing to cooperate with the investigation and to give more information to back up this indictment. Now, look. That said, I think we would be–Bob, you and I would not be doing our job as journalists if we didn’t acknowledge the fact that Julian Assange is a complicated and contradictory and very messy figure. You know, we’re speaking on the day that the Mueller report was released, which goes into–was just looking at it before we talked–some detail about the nature of Assange’s interactions with some of the Russian operatives behind the Clinton leaks. He’s a person who arguably contributed to the election of Donald Trump, because of his profound hatred of Bill Clinton, through the publication of those leaks. But that’s a historic irony. I mean, it’s an irony that the administration he now, he supported, is now the one to go after him. But that doesn’t diminish the press freedom stakes in this, and it doesn’t diminish the injustice of a criminal conspiracy brought against a public-interest publisher for releasing information.

RS: I understand what you’re saying. I actually consider that to be so irrelevant here. As you’ve pointed out, when we had this protection of freedom of the press, you know, the press–the point of the–same with speech–was not to honor the messenger. The press was quite scurrilous at times. I’m not agreeing with you, by the way, in your characterization of WikiLeaks.

BS: [Laughs]

RS: I’m not. I think–I would take exception. But I don’t think it’s the issue. In fact, you know, Tom Paine was considered a traitor; when he died, they dug up his body and threw his bones out to the countryside, there were plenty of people hated him so much. The press, the freedom of the press that was enshrined, the press was reviled, was attacked, whether it was town criers or wall posters or so forth. The issue–and by the way, I was a witness, a defense witness in the Ellsberg trial, and I can tell you they were digging up a lot of dirt on Ellsberg, on his personal–the reason they went into his psychiatrist’s office, or his psychologist’s office, was to get data to disparage his intention, his motives as a human being. There were even some journalists who went after him in a very scurrilous way, to you know, attack him. And that is not the issue. First of all, WikiLeaks is in a–as you point out–far stronger position than Ellsberg was. Ellsberg has pointed this out. Ellsberg had taken an oath. Ellsberg had said he would honor classification. And then he had to make the case, this was such an extreme case of hiding information from the public, that he had a constitutional obligation to reveal it. WikiLeaks, and whether the New York Times likes it or the Washington Post likes it, is in the same position they were in, in terms of our Constitution. It is not a question of whether you like the–now the Washington Post is owned by the richest man in the world; does that mean I can go challenge their motives in publishing a story, whether I like it or not? No, that’s a shoot the messenger argument; I’m not saying you’re advancing it, but I am saying I’m hearing that a lot in media circles.

BS: Oh, I–very much. Now, I will say, to its credit, that the Committee to Protect Journalists came out very strongly and very clearly describing this as a very troubling indictment, particularly for the way in which it would seem to encourage prosecutors to root around in the source reporter relationship. And kudos to CPJ for that. There are a lot of corners of American journalism, anyway, that are trying to distance themselves as far as they can from Assange, and therefore are not, I think, living up to their responsibilities to our own free-press traditions. You know, the freedom of the press is rooted not–as you say, not in the likeability or agreeability or whatever of the publisher. In the most famous libel case, the most important libel case in American history, New York Times vs. Sullivan, [Justice] Brennan, who wrote the majority opinion in that, talked about the importance of caustic speak, of offensive, even caustic speech, being protected by the First Amendment. And the same thing is true of investigative matters. Deeply controversial leaks, deeply controversial revelations about the abuse of power–sources who essentially, whether it’s Ellsberg or Manning, who have committed an act of civil disobedience by violating an oath that they took to secrecy–are part of the public interest discussion. Particularly when the stakes are so high on matters of war and peace. The reality of this indictment is that if it, if this were to become the norm, there’s a whole host of important stories from the last 20 years regarding all kinds of institutions, and regarding democratic and republican presidencies alike, that would never have come to light if reporters or publications feared being called co-conspirators for working with their sources to figure out the best way to leak material. This is, it’s a very dangerous act.

RS: Well, in fact, if you apply it to what part of the media has done in their effort to criticize Trump and talk about Russian collusion and using the Steele memo and so forth and so on, you could develop a vast conspiracy. That is the real danger. And you’re absolutely right in pointing out that the use of–and for listeners who don’t understand, let’s just be legally specific. The CFAA, which is the legislation that we’re talking about, is legislation that basically has been–well, it’s been used, it’s the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It’s used by corporations when they want to punish people, it’s used in all sorts of ways; famously, it was used against one of the true heroes of internet freedom in my book and caused his suicide. And that was Aaron Swartz, who downloaded judicial documents, again, that I think the public had a right to see; he downloaded scientific journals from JSTOR, and JSTOR even said they didn’t want him prosecuted, and yet the government used this same CFAA, with its draconian penalties, and Swartz took his own life. I mean, it was so intimidating.

BS: The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a troublingly broad and very confusing statute. Which makes it all the more dangerous that it’s sort of the predicate for this conspiracy charge, the kind of thin, thin hook to hang an entire conspiracy case on. You know, I think there is some chance that a British court looking at this, and in particular looking at the Trump Justice Department’s decision to revive a charge that the Obama administration had deliberately chosen not to pursue. There is some chance that a British court, looking at the totality of this, will say that it amounts to a political act of prosecution. Which under international law, and under UK and European law, they’re allowed to refuse extradition for what is deemed to be a political prosecution. You know, that may be a thin chance, but I think it’s a real one. This is clearly a politically motivated prosecution by an administration looking to distract attention from its own problems, by an administration eager to control the media, and an administration in particular that has threatened and taken action against reporters on other fronts. The administration’s open hostility to what Donald Trump calls “the enemies of the people” makes this a political prosecution. And that’s something, I think, that the British courts will need to pay some attention to in the course of deciding whether to hand Mr. Assange over.

RS: [omission for station break] I want to focus, in the time that remains, just a little bit more on the role of the media, particularly the establishment media. And people are generally, a lot people are very angry with Julian Assange because of what happened in the election, and basically, the release of material that had nothing to do with this charge. But the Podesta file showing that the Democratic National Committee had basically tried to undermine the Bernie Sanders campaign. And the other important thing that was revealed, again having nothing at all to do with this charge or Chelsea Manning, was the content of the speeches that Hillary Clinton gave for three quarters of a million dollars to Goldman Sachs, saying that she would like to bring these wonderful bankers back to Washington with her to straighten out the problems that we have, that of course the banks caused. And there’s such a sense of animus to, you know, anybody who hurt the chances of the democrats in that last election, and all other issues seem to be pushed aside. And what is particularly troubling in the whole treatment of Julian Assange–and Chelsea Manning, because she’s, after all, in jail now, and there isn’t much of an outcry–is there seems to be no concern that war crimes were committed by the United States, or at least the very strong possibility of serious war crimes–a war on civilians in Iraq, a country we invaded partially on the basis of misreporting by the New York Times and other establishment papers. And there seems to be no concern, in this zeal to get Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange convicted of additional charges, of what about the crimes that they revealed? What about the killing of civilians? What about the invasion of a country and doing this, the dismemberment of a whole region? And there is absolutely no sense at all–which we usually bring to whistleblowing cases; we usually say, was the information important? Did the public have a right to know it? That is, after all, the First Amendment basic argument in defense of the press, that you need a vital press. And you could not have a better example of the vitality of a press, in terms of the documents revealed by WikiLeaks. No one can challenge that, I don’t think. And yet there’s no mention of it.

BS: Well, I think there’s been some mention of it. And I think, to be fair, that American journalism is divided over Assange, and is divided over this case, and is having exactly this argument. There are an awful lot of reporters I know, editorial page editors and others, who are saying exactly what you’re describing now. Now, listen. I do, I’m going to push back gently in one way. I do think it’s important that we acknowledge that there are ways in which Mr. Assange, through his judgment and I what I think is sometimes poor judgment, has contributed to the situation. And here I’m not talking about the 2016 presidential campaign at all. I think in this case, for example, in the case of 2010, in the War Logs, while I think it is dangerous and wrong for the government to be prosecuting him now–and I’m very strongly writing against this prosecution, OK–I do think it was a poor judgment of Assange to actively participate in cracking a password. And here’s why: it actually put his source in more legal jeopardy. We’ve seen this before; back in the 1990s, the Cincinnati Enquirer had a magnificent scoop that a team of reporters worked on for a year, about corruption and criminality and violence by the Chiquita Banana company. They ran the story, and it turned out that one of the reporters on the team had been quietly, privately hacking into the executive voicemail system with a password he’d been given by a source. That action, that actually participating in the extraction of files in an active way, or voice mails in an active way, gave Chiquita–which was very politically connected–an opportunity to sue the Enquirer and its publisher. Got to go to prosecutors and get criminal charges against the reporter in that case. And this entire, huge series about crimes against humanity by a major multinational American corporation–that entire series ended up being unpublished, retracted, taken out of LexisNexis–you can find it somewhere on the internet, but it’s hard to find. The reporter ended up being charged criminally, and in order to stay out of jail, ended up giving up his source, who lost his job. When reporters, or when publishers, themselves decide–and sometimes it may be necessary. But when reporters themselves decide to cross a certain line of law, or a certain line of action, the risk to the story itself, the risk to their publications, the risk to their sources rises. I’m, you know, I teach journalism ethics, and I would be irresponsible if I didn’t say that I think Assange made some important mistakes in this case. But so what, right? The danger to press freedom by allowing the government to root around in source relationships like this, far outweighs whatever my judgments on Assange’s own character or state of mind may be. I think what we have to focus on now is how the government is using Julian Assange, and using the controversial nature of his actions, as a smokescreen to cover up a broad attack on national security reporting, a broad attack to criminalize source-journalist relationships involving leaking, a broad attempt to criminalize investigative reporting. They’re exploiting, you know, the complicating factors of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to undermine all kinds of watchdog reporting here in the United States.

RS: Yeah. And you know, the complicating factors are always there in every story of this kind. For God’s sake, we’re talking about the area of national security where the government routinely–every government in the world, but ours is masterful at it–routinely lies about every bit of information you need, and anything that would be unflattering to what they’re doing. And you can go here with the Steele memo, and how is that created, and what was this relation to government agencies? You could go through–

BS: Well, that—

RS: Anyway, but let me just, I mean, ‘cause I, I think I take your point. That the whistleblowers, yes; you know, John Kiriakou, who gave the name of a CIA person to a New York Times reporter, ended up spending years in jail. He’s the one who first revealed that we were doing torture, and they used, you know, that passing that card with the name. In this case, by the way, it’s not that he cracked the password; it was part of a password. And Chelsea Manning had asked, would he know anything about it, and they did not crack the password, it did not happen. And if people want to, I mean, I’ll post this at the end of it, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I don’t know if you would agree with me, but I think it’s the most exemplary organization. It has a libertarian bent, but that can be positive in the case of questioning government…

BS: Well, that’s right. And look, I think it’s also important to say, as both in terms of what EFF is saying and as a kind of extension of what I was saying a few minutes ago, that the source has not been born, the whistleblower has not been born who has pure motives. And the journalist has not been born who is pure of motive and character, right? We are, these are complicated, messy motivations; complicated, messy stories. But the First Amendment means nothing if it doesn’t mean the right to publish information gleaned from hopelessly messy, and indeed maybe even compromised, sources. And it means nothing if it doesn’t mean the ability of journalists, for their own complicated reasons and complicated motives and complicated characters, to pursue public interest information about abuses of power by the government.

RS: And so, I take your point, and I’m not trying to glorify anyone, a whistleblower of any sort. But I do want to say something, push back a little bit on the characterization of Julian Assange. This guy has sacrificed a great deal to do what other people have failed to do. There are a lot of people who knew about crimes being committed in Iraq and elsewhere. I always raise this question about whistleblowers. There was one Daniel Ellsberg; there were thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people who had already read the Pentagon Papers and knew that the war in Vietnam was a tissue of lies, and yet millions continued to be killed because of this lie. And in the case of Julian Assange, this incredibly valuable information that he, thanks to Chelsea Manning’s incredible courage, revealed–that seems to be lost. The rest of the media, including the media that celebrated going into Iraq on a lie–that’s the New York Times, Washington Post, and many others–celebrated going into it, bought the lies, takes no accountability for the needless civilian destruction of lives, American troops killed, what have you. And somehow, Julian Assange, who more than any other single figure enlightened us, with Chelsea Manning, about the reality of what our government was doing in Iraq–more than any of those two people–and somehow we’re sitting here nit-picking about their motives. And the scoundrels–the scoundrels who lied, none of them have been prosecuted. None of them–they all feel self-righteous. The people who voted for the war based on the lies, who were in Congress. The people who spread the lies when they were in the government. You know, including democratic and republican governments. None of them are put in our crosshairs the way we’re doing with Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.

BS: Well, and that’s why, you know, we need to view–I think American journalists, in particular, and American press freedom groups, which are trying to figure out their relationship to this complicated case–need to understand that leaking in a matter like this, and the choices that a publisher like Assange makes in a matter like this that is about war crimes, about cover-up for atrocity, that’s about misleading the public–that sometimes breaking, you know, a computer hacking law, sometimes breaking a secrecy oath, is a kind of civil disobedience as historically significant as Rosa Parks, you know, refusing to sit in the back of the bus. That is what we’re dealing with here. And that’s why I think it’s particularly notable that we pay attention to the courage of Manning at this moment, who as I said, is doing something that as a sort of journalism historian I find unprecedented, which is a source going to jail to protect a journalist. We need to be focused on Chelsea Manning as much as perhaps we are on Julian Assange. And we need to separate out the–look, the very complicated emotions that many folks have in light of the 2016 campaign. Forget about all that. Because what we’re talking about here is the basic ability of journalists to do their job, of sources to act out of conscience, of publishers to publish secrets, which has been protected by the First Amendment, and will be in grave danger if the conspiracy rap is allowed to run its course. If Julian Assange can go to prison for conspiring with Chelsea Manning over a password, really the whole nature of source-reporter relationships in American law is up for grabs.

RS: Yeah, I think that’s an important point on which to end it. I pushed back on–

BS: Yeah, I thought it was good.

RS: I think you’re being very polite. I don’t feel polite about a mainstream media that is quite willing to pass on government lies and rarely apologize for it, but when you have the rare whistleblower–my goodness, we’ve had what, 10, 12 whistleblowers in 40 years of any significance on national security. And we learn that wars were unnecessary and millions died unnecessarily. And yet these whistleblowers are always challenged. Their lives are messed up terribly; divorce, they lose their jobs. You got Thomas Drake trying to hold down a job at an Apple store, losing all their benefits. I can go through the list. And you have to really ask a question: why are there so few whistleblowers? If we’re such a great, free society, you know, where are the people of courage? Are they so worried–what are the risks they would be taking, there would be a slight kink in their career curve? But how many people, how many people on the inside, with security clearances, whether they’re in the academic world, the military world or so forth, have stepped forward and told the American people the truth they need to know in order to make intelligent decisions as an electorate? In national security, 95 to 99 percent of the information we operate on is government-tailored information, quite often fraudulent. You have that rare person, like a Julian Assange, an Edward Snowden, a Daniel Ellsberg and so forth, you can name them all right now on this program in a few minutes, and you have to ask the basic question: Where are the other folks? Where are the people with the security clearances who keep quiet while lies are sold to the American people that they know are lies?

BS: So let me close by drawing your attention and that of listeners to a wonderful organization recently set up, based in San Francisco, actually, called the Signals Network, which was set up specifically to promote the support of and defense for whistleblowers in the wake of Snowden, in the wake of Assange, in the wake of all of these cases. The Signals Network is doing very important work to advance exactly the kinds of questions that you’re asking here, and to say, how do we turn these–how do we give these people who so easily as whistleblowers, as Chelsea Manning, turn in to defendants and pariahs, how do we give them the honor, respect, and support they deserve for the courageous act of telling the public what it needs to know?

RS: Thank you, Bruce Shapiro, for that statement. And yes, those are good sources. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is another one. There are good folks out there–including, by the way, let me hasten to say, Bruce Shapiro and his writings in The Nation magazine [Laughter], which is why I wanted him on this show now. So even though he’s very polite [Laughter] towards, I think, an establishment that’s out of control and can be quite dangerous and deceitful, I do want to thank you for taking the time to do this. Bruce Shapiro, contributing editor to The Nation, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, and a longtime really important journalist on his own terms, and a media critic. I want to also thank Kat Yore and Mario Diaz, our engineers here at KCRW, and Joshua Scheer, the producer of “Scheer Intelligence,” and we’ll be back with another edition next week. Thank you.

 

Jesse Helms Rides Again

In declaring Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela America’s latest “axis of evil” and implementing Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, Donald Trump has once again demonstrated his commitment to undoing Barack Obama’s presidency—even if it means harming U.S. interests.

Named after far-right North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms and his co-sponsor, Republican Congressman Dan Burton, the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1995 sought to strangle the Cuban revolution by tightening the United States’ economic blockade while simultaneously incentivizing other countries to impose sanctions on the island nation. But there was one especially damaging section of the bill that then-President Bill Clinton had failed to remove: Title III.

Clinton ultimately recognized that this section took the United States’ economic warfare a step too far, precluding U.S. citizens, residents and companies from trading with Cuba. It also declared that no other country could do the same without facing economic reprisals.

Forcing foreign countries and their citizens to defer to U.S. law is anathema to any government that considers itself sovereign. This was stated in no uncertain terms by the European Union, the World Trade Organization and United States allies around the globe, which passed laws declaring the extraterritorial aspects of the Helms-Burton Act unenforceable, and called for sanctions against U.S. companies and their executives if they made claims under Title III.

As a result, Clinton’s—and every administration since—has exempted this section of the Helms-Burton Act from enforcement, even as they have implemented or eased other restrictions aimed at bringing the Cuban revolution to an end.

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Obama helped thaw relations with Cuba by acknowledging that the last 50 years of economic sanctions—called an “embargo” by the U.S. and a “blockade” by Cuba—had been a miserable failure from Washington’s point of view. During his time in office, he reopened diplomatic relations and eased trade and travel restrictions. Some of his measures included:

Allowing unlimited remittances to family members in 2009, which the Trump administration will limit.
Restoring people-to-people travel in 2011, which could soon be abolished.
Eliminating the need for most specific licenses to travel after December 2014, which is now being reversed.
Ending a prohibition on “U-turn” banking, allowing Cuba to escape sanctions on dollar-based transactions. This too is in the process of being overturned.

Trump hasn’t broken off diplomatic relations with Cuba, but he slashed diplomatic staff to a skeleton crew in 2018, and may be in violation of the 1994 migration accord. As of 2017, he has prohibited any transactions with a list of Cuban firms run by the commercial branch of the armed forces. Trump also scrapped the five-year multiple entry visa for Cubans to visit their families in the U.S. earlier this year.

Now, as the president pivots away from the Middle East and toward Latin America, Helms’ dark fantasy may finally come to fruition, undermining Washington’s relations with key allies around the world.

 

Border Patrol Begins Collecting Biometric Data on Children

HOUSTON—U.S. border authorities say they’ve started to increase the biometric data they take from children 13 years old and younger, including fingerprints, despite privacy concerns and government policy intended to restrict what can be collected from migrant youths.

A Border Patrol official said this week that the agency had begun a pilot program to collect the biometrics of children with the permission of the adults accompanying them, though he did not specify where along the border it has been implemented.

The Border Patrol also has a “rapid DNA pilot program” in the works, said Anthony Porvaznik, the chief patrol agent in Yuma, Arizona, in a video interview published by the Epoch Times newspaper.

Spokesmen for the Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security did not return several messages from The Associated Press seeking comment on both programs.

The Border Patrol says that in the last year, it’s stopped roughly 3,100 adults and children fraudulently posing as families so they can be released into the U.S. quickly rather than face detention or rapid deportation.

The Department of Homeland Security has also warned of “child recycling,” cases where they say children allowed into the U.S. were smuggled back into Central America to be paired up again with other adults in fake families — something they say is impossible to catch without fingerprints or other biometric data.

“Those are kids that are being rented, for lack of a better word,” Porvaznik said.

But the Border Patrol has not publicly identified anyone arrested in a “child recycling” scheme or released data on how many such schemes have been uncovered. Advocates say they’re worried that in the name of stopping fraud, agents might take personal information from children that could be used against them later.

“Of course child trafficking exists,” said Karla Vargas, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project. But she warned against implementing “a catch-all” policy that could reduce the rights of people who are legally seeking asylum.

At a round table with President Donald Trump broadcast in February, one Border Patrol official described a case he said led to eight indictments in South Carolina, including of a Guatemalan woman who said she had “recycled” children 13 times for payments of $1,500 a child. The U.S. attorney’s office in South Carolina told the AP this week that case was sealed and declined to comment on it.

The numbers of unauthorized border crossings are surging this year, with new records being set monthly for the number of families entering the U.S. outside legal points of entry. Most are from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, and many adults and children who cross seek asylum under U.S. law.

The Border Patrol has warned that its holding facilities are past capacity and that it doesn’t have the staff or resources to detain migrants. It will soon open two tent facilities at the Texas border for processing and detention, and immigration agencies are releasing families within a day or two to clear detention space.

Facing pressure from Trump to reduce illegal crossings, Homeland Security officials have blamed the high numbers partly on adults posing as parents to avoid detention.

In one case filed in federal court in El Paso this month, authorities accused a Guatemalan man of having a fake birth certificate printed that claimed he was the father of a teenager who crossed the border illegally with him. Authorities say the teen agreed to go with the man because he wanted to leave Guatemala. They could not confirm the teen’s age.

But advocates say the Border Patrol regularly cites fraud when it separates a child from an adult relative who isn’t a parent, even if the relative is the child’s effective guardian.

The Texas Civil Rights Project published a study in February that counted 272 separated families at a single Texas courthouse since June, after the official end of the zero-tolerance policy that led to thousands of family separations earlier in 2018. Of those, 234 involved adult siblings, aunts and uncles, or other relatives of the children.

DHS regulations say the department can require the fingerprints of anyone entering the country illegally, but those regulations exempt anyone under 14.

Porvaznik, the chief agent in Yuma, Arizona, told the Epoch Times that under the pilot program agents can fingerprint children under 14 “if we get permission from the adult that they’re with.”

However, legal experts say that interpretation can be challenged in court.

“DHS may claim that they can get around this bar by getting parental permission, but that interpretation is subject to court challenge,” Cornell law professor Stephen Yale-Loehr said. “To do this legally, DHS needs to go through the rulemaking process to change the regulation.”

Vargas of the Texas Civil Rights Project said she often spoke to immigrant parents who had signed paperwork they didn’t fully understand.

“It’s never presented to immigrants as, ‘You have a choice of whether or not to sign this,'” Vargas said.

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a researcher at George Mason University, said that while she has doubts about the expanded data collection, it could have an “unintended positive outcome.”

“It will be easier to conduct investigations related to trafficking of migrant children, kidnapping or other crimes that affect this vulnerable segment of the migrant population,” she said.

___

Associated Press writers Cedar Attanasio in El Paso, Texas, and Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.

Iraq War Vet Drove Car Into Crowd He Thought Were Muslims, Police Say

SAN FRANCISCO—An Iraq War veteran deliberately drove into a group of pedestrians because he thought some of the people were Muslim, California authorities said Friday.

Isaiah Joel Peoples, 34, faces eight counts of attempted murder for injuring eight people, including four who remain hospitalized. The most seriously injured is a 13-year-old Sunnyvale girl of South Asian descent who is in a coma with severe brain trauma.

“New evidence shows that the defendant intentionally targeted the victims based on their race and his belief that they were of the Muslim faith,” Sunnyvale police chief Phan Ngo said.

Peoples appeared briefly in Santa Clara County Superior Court on Friday. He did not enter a plea and is being held without bail.

The former U.S. Army sharpshooter experienced post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq, his family said. Peoples’ attorney, Chuck Smith, said Friday that the crash was in no way deliberate.

“This act was clearly the product of some mental disorder or mental defect,” Smith said after the hearing.

Peoples was on his way to a Bible class Tuesday in the Silicon Valley suburb of Sunnyvale when he told investigators he intentionally drove into a group of men, women and children, police said. The 13-year-old girl was hit along with her father and brother, who had minor injuries.

Jay Boyarsky, chief assistant district attorney for Santa Clara, said the charges carry a sentence of life in prison. He said they will file hate crime allegations if warranted.

“There is very appalling and disturbing evidence that at least one or two of these victims were targeted based on the defendant’s view of what their race or religion may have been,” he said.

Three adults also remain hospitalized with injuries that include broken limbs and fractures.

Peoples showed no remorse after his car plowed at high speed into a group of people in a crosswalk before hitting a tree, Ngo said.

Witness Don Draper said he marched over to Peoples’ car after he crashed, and he found the driver muttering over and over, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.”

But Ngo said that “he did not behave in any manner that would be considered bizarre,” when taken into custody.

Family and friends described Peoples as quiet and polite and expressed shock at his involvement. His mother, Leevell Peoples of Sacramento, said her son had “a bad episode” with PTSD in 2015, for which he was hospitalized.

Peoples was deployed to Iraq in 2005 and 2006.

Peoples was honorably discharged from the Army, and police were investigating the PTSD report, Ngo said. Peoples had no criminal record and owned one weapon, a disassembled and inoperable shotgun that was in the trunk of his vehicle, according to the police chief.

___

Associated Press writers Olga R. Rodriguez and Juliet Williams in San Francisco contributed to this report.

Weinstein Sexual Assault Trial Pushed to September

NEW YORK—Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault trial, postponed until September, is now poised to end two years after a wave of women’s allegations against him sparked the #MeToo movement.

A Manhattan judge announced the delay Friday after a closed-door hearing in which prosecutors sought to broaden their case to include some of those women’s accounts.

Weinstein’s trial had been scheduled to begin June 3, but both sides indicated they need more time to sort through witness and evidence issues. It is now set for Sept. 9, with jury selection expected to take up to two weeks and testimony lasting about a month.

Weinstein lawyer Jose Baez, who joined the case in January, saw the delay as a boon to a defense keen on discrediting his accusers and showing that any encounters were consensual.

“We had a very good day in court today. We’re glad that the trial got back to September,” Baez told reporters. “This is going to give us an ample opportunity to dig into the case.”

The three-month delay was Weinstein’s second win of the day, after Judge James Burke decided the close the courtroom and spare him from having the media and the public hear about the prosecution’s plans to bring various accusers into court.

Weinstein is charged with assaulting two women in New York City, but prosecutors want jurors to hear from many of the dozens of other women whose allegations against Weinstein haven’t led to criminal charges.

Weinstein, 67, has denied all allegations of wrongdoing. He pleaded not guilty and is free on $1 million bail.

Burke said closing the courtroom for the hearing was “the only means available to avoid the tainting of the jury pool” because the proceeding dealt with material that “is prejudicial to the defendant and is highly inflammatory.”

News coverage, he said, would serve no purpose other than to stir negative public sentiment toward Weinstein.

Lawyers for news organizations, including The Associated Press, argued that the prosecution and defense arguments didn’t meet the high legal standard for banning the media and the public.

Weinstein’s case is “a matter of immense and legitimate public interest,” and the allegations against him are already widely known, said Robert Balin, a lawyer for the news organizations.

Prosecutors said it was necessary to close the courtroom, both to protect Weinstein’s right to a fair trial and to shield the identities of accusers whose names and allegations were expected to come up during the hearing.

Weinstein lawyer Marianne Bertuna argued that news coverage could influence potential jurors and that “the court cannot be complicit with the press in denying the defendant’s right to a fair trial.”

Balin said that the allegations against Weinstein from more than 80 women have already been widely reported and that many of them, such as actresses Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd, have agreed to be identified publicly. But not all have, Illuzzi-Orbon said.

An appellate judge denied a request by the media outlets to immediately halt the proceeding but granted an expedited appeal and ordered parties to file briefs by Wednesday. The news organizations want access to a transcript of the hearing and to related documents that were filed under seal.

Weinstein himself was mum as he came and went from court. Asked how he was doing, he just nodded.

He is charged with raping a female acquaintance in his Manhattan hotel room in 2013 and performing a forcible sex act on a different woman in 2006.

In seeking to have other accusers testify, the prosecutors in Weinstein’s case appear to be echoing the strategy Philadelphia-area prosecutors used a year ago in convicting Bill Cosby at his sexual assault retrial. Hearings pertaining to such witnesses in the comedian’s case, though, were open to the media and the public.

Perhaps expecting an onslaught of accusers taking the stand, Baez sent a letter this week to the lawyer for one of them, asking for emails he says show the woman acknowledged she had a consensual relationship with Weinstein.

The AP does not identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they come forward publicly.

Boeing Is a Perfect Parable for 21st-Century Capitalism

A veteran commercial pilot and software engineer with over three decades of experience has just written the most damning account of the recent Boeing 737 fiasco. At one level, author Gregory Travis has provided us with the most detailed account of why a particular plane model once synonymous with reliability became a techno-death trap. But ultimately, his story is a parable of all that is wrong with 21st-century capitalism; Boeing has become a company that embodies all of its worst pathologies. It has a totally unsustainable business model—one that has persistently ignored the risks of excessive offshoring, the pitfalls of divorcing engineering from the basic R&D function, the perils of “demodularization,” and the perverse incentives of “shareholder capitalism,” whereby basic safety concerns have repeatedly been sacrificed at the altar of greed. It’s also a devastating takedown of a company that once represented the apex of civilian aviation, whose dominance has been steadily eroded as it has increased its toxic ties to the U.S. military. In that sense it mirrors the decline of America as a manufacturing superpower. And finally, it shows a company displaying a complete loss of human perspective in the “man vs. machine” debate.

Here’s the crux of Travis’s analysis: “Design shortcuts” led to safety hazards. The newest version of Boeing’s 737 plane, previously known for its reliability and ease of use, became a high-tech disaster. Machines overwhelmed man. And worst of all, the aviation industry regulatory overseer, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), subcontracted the safety/certification functions to Boeing itself, so there was no early warning system in place to avert the resultant tragedy.

Travis largely restricts his analysis to the 737. But his article illustrates pathologies long evident at Boeing and the FAA.

Let’s look at the last problem first: The FAA suffers from reduced funding from Congress (the Daily Beast reported that “the agency’s 2019 budget actually cut funding for the Aviation Safety Office by 1.7 percent”), and a corresponding loss of aviation expertise, as many of its top personnel have migrated to the private sector. Of course, that’s nothing new for the FAA, which has a sad history of hemorrhaging personnel since the days of the air traffic controllers’ strike/collective dismissal under Reagan (a cost control measure), as well as embracing neoliberal, supposedly market-based performance incentives that are thoroughly inappropriate for a regulatory body first and foremost responsible for flight safety.

Becoming more “industry-friendly” and starved of adequate personnel and fiscal resources to do its job properly, the FAA has therefore been forced to delegate much of its regulatory oversight and certification functions to the airline industry itself (“self-certification”) and has therefore become a case study in “regulatory capture.”

Boeing’s failures resonate with the public in a way that no complicated financial fraud possibly could. It takes a certain level of technical expertise to understand how the toxicity of a financial derivative poses dangers to an economic system; but everybody instinctively understands the tragic impact of a plane crash, like the doomed Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines 737-related accidents.

The seeds of Boeing’s destruction arguably were planted well before the 737-related mishaps. The warning signs were already evident in the 787 Dreamliner program a decade ago, which even today continues to be characterized by repeated engine design flaws and cost overruns. In a Harvard Business Review article, Professors Gary Pisano and Willy Shih first highlighted the perils of Boeing’s embrace of “demodularization”: “[T]he shift from aluminum alloys to carbon-fiber-composite materials changed things. The old modular design rules could not fully account for stress transmission and loading at the system level—something that Boeing did not get right initially.”

Boeing couldn’t get it right because the company had shifted large chunks of its design and manufacturing facilities to disparate parts around the globe—too far apart geographically, in fact, to monitor everything properly: “As a result it encountered problems assembling the pieces (such as the horizontal stabilizer from Alenia Aeronautica in Italy and the wing box from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan). Significant redesign and rework were required, and the program suffered major delays,” write Pisano and Shih.

With one part of the plane being manufactured in Italy, and another in Japan, management was unable to assess quickly the resultant design and engineering flaws before launch. Even after the initial launch delays were addressed, Dreamliner’s history has been characterized by repeated recalls and cost overruns.

Offshoring, of course, is nothing new. In our brave new world of globalized capitalism, multinational corporations like Boeing are constantly on the lookout for global labor arbitrage possibilities, which have the happy effect of curbing unit labor costs, fattening profit margins, and thereby juicing the company stock price (an increasingly important part of management compensation, irrespective of the underlying performance of the company itself in the real world). These are all part and parcel of the pathologies inherent in America’s increasingly financialized “shareholder capitalism” (see here for more details).

But Boeing’s problems extend beyond that. It is a company that has historically been very successful in the highly competitive civil aviation market since the 747 jumbo jet (“the Queen of the skies”) first dominated some 50 years ago. The 21st century has been less kind to the company, however, as its failures have been increasingly exacerbated by its growing, and increasingly toxic, ties to the U.S. defense industry.

These links began in the late 1990s when the U.S. Department of Defense helped to engineer a merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, the latter an important supplier of combat aircraft to the United States. Far from being the “largest, strongest, broadest, most admired aerospace corporation in the world,” as promised at the time of the merger by John McDonnell, chairman of McDonnell Douglas, the corrupting practices of the Pentagon soon began to infect the newly combined entity. In particular, the 787’s outsourcing strategy turned out to be a fiasco, which even then-Boeing CEO Jim Albaugh was forced to concede in a Seattle Times report.

But the Seattle Times also exposed that the rot took hold well before the 787 debacle, citing an internal Boeing Report, written in 2001 by Dr. L.J. Hart-Smith, a mere five years after the merger was consummated. Hart-Smith described the disastrous economic effects of excessive outsourcing that began to afflict Boeing almost immediately, especially as its ties to the military expanded. These problems are elaborated here by longtime defense analysts Franklin “Chuck” Spinney and Pierre Sprey:

“The so-called spin-offs offs from Defense spending can transmit the corrupting effects of the politically motivated, cost-plus economics of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) into the larger economy[.] The MICC not only subsidizes wasteful cost growth in the Pentagon, its activities infect the overall economy by soaking up scarce investment and human capital; corrupting the practices of science and engineering; distorting research content on a huge scale; while providing incentives for inefficient production and management practices, (e.g. excessive outsourcing for political reasons – aka the political engineering practices explained here and here), not to mention the politicizing of industrial management.”

Contact with the Pentagon often signals death for a civilian company because of the incentives inherent in its “cost-plus” contracts, along with the geographic disbursement of manufacturing facilities to as many parts of the country as possible in order to maximize congressional political support for increasingly expensive military boondoggles—what Spinney and Sprey term “political engineering.” These two factors bias corporate practices toward inflating costs and therefore foster waste and diminish safety. By contrast, in a traditional civilian model, profit margins are best secured by reducing costs as much as possible in order to maximize the bottom line.

As Boeing’s ties to the military increased, so too did its shoddy corporate practices. The 787 Dreamliner is still plagued with production problems, and there is little sign that Boeing has rectified them. The company has failed to reintegrate basic manufacturing and R&D to correct the original problems highlighted by Shih and Pisano (quite the contrary, as the company is increasingly shifting production to China in order to safeguard its market share there). Just this month, the New York Times has reported that “the [Charleston, South Carolina-based] factory, which makes the 787 Dreamliner, has been plagued by shoddy production and weak oversight that have threatened to compromise safety.” A former quality manager, John Barnett, a whistleblower who worked at Boeing for nearly three decades, damningly suggested to the New York Times: “I haven’t seen a plane out of Charleston yet that I’d put my name on saying it’s safe and airworthy.” Recall that Boeing originally moved some of its operations to the “right to work” state of South Carolina to undermine the strength of its unionized workforce in the state of Washington, which has had an adverse effect on the overall quality of its products.

That’s on top of the recent 737 debacle, where Boeing evidently missed safety risks in the design of the newer model, “like an anti-stall system that played a role in both crashes,” as the same New York Times article noted. But the genesis of the problem of the 737, a plane Gregory Travis (a pilot of 30 years’ standing and a software engineer of 40 years’ experience) writes was once known for its “reliability” and relative technological “simplicity,” lay in the fact that “market and technological forces pushed the 737 into ever-larger versions with increasing electronic and mechanical complexity.”

The main problem, notes Travis, was the engine redesign. The engine’s size was increased to enhance the 737’s overall energy efficiency, but it became too large to be accommodated in its traditional spot on the plane. The expansion ultimately necessitated extending the engine up and well in front of the wing. That changed the relationship between engine’s “thrust” and its center of gravity, which, in the words of Travis, caused the 737 “to ‘pitch up,’ or raise its nose… a bit too much for comfort on power application as well as at already-high angles of attack. It violated that most ancient of aviation canons and probably violated the certification criteria of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.”

“Angle of attack,” as Travis defines, refers to the angle between the wing and the relative wind blowing over it. The more a pilot lifts the nose of the airplane, the higher the angle of attack and the more the lift of the wing increases—until you reach the stall limit angle of attack, when suddenly the wing stops lifting entirely (because the relative wind’s smooth airflow over the wing has separated catastrophically from the wing surface). That’s why an airplane that adds extra “pitch up” force to the nose when the pilot commands just a slight increase in angle of attack (that is, in nose up angle) is so dangerously unstable—because it can lead to a fatal stall situation that likely was the cause of the two crashes.

Egregious violations to basic aerodynamic principles should have induced the FAA to step in and force a redesign of the Boeing’s latest incarnation of the 737 (the so-called “Max 8”) in order to minimize the safety risk. But there were two problems:

Making the required hardware modifications would have been hugely expensive (to the point where Boeing would have had to build an entirely new aircraft, rather than merely modifying a popular, hitherto safe and easy-to-fly airplane)
As noted above, the FAA was already overwhelmed, and consequently was beginning to allow Boeing to “self-certify” its own planes .

Rather than design a whole new plane the “solution” to point 1 was the installation of yet more software, in this case the “Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System,” or MCAS, for short. The goal, writes Travis, was to enable the computers to push “the nose of the plane down when the system thinks the plane might exceed its angle-of-attack limits; it does so to avoid an aerodynamic stall. Boeing put MCAS into the 737 Max because the larger engines and their placement make a stall more likely in a 737 Max than in previous 737 models.” Unfortunately, the MCAS software “solution” was a totally incompetent, unsafe Band-Aid that used the computer to counter (or perhaps more correctly, to mask) the airplane’s dangerous tendency to lift the nose too much and get the stall situation where the computer takes over from the pilot to resolve a problem that initially stemmed from a hardware issue.

As far as point 2 goes, as Travis describes it:

“As airplanes became more complex and the gulf between what the FAA could pay and what an aircraft manufacturer could pay grew larger, more and more of those engineers migrated from the public to the private sector. Soon the FAA had no in-house ability to determine if a particular airplane’s design and manufacture were safe. So the FAA said to the airplane manufacturers, ‘Why don’t you just have your people tell us if your designs are safe?’”

You can immediately spot the parallels between the 2008 global financial crisis and the Boeing crashes. Much like the FAA with Boeing, in 2008, our global monetary authorities, regulators and ratings agencies were starved of adequate resources and expertise to properly scrutinize the activities of Wall Street’s financial engineers. They were forced to accept at face value the banks’ mathematically unsound “value at risk” models to justify the soundness and fundamental safety of their newly created derivatives on the lines that the underlying asset pricing followed a “normal” distribution pattern. Of course, these derivatives did no such thing, because the price history was inadequate to establish a truly normal pattern; therefore, the math on which risk management was predicated turned out to be flawed with catastrophic consequences, as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan ultimately acknowledged.

Similarly, the MCAS software “solution” that was supposed to “fix” the engineering problem of the new 737 failed, because it was based on a flawed paradigm: no computer software can fundamentally repudiate the principles of aerodynamics. And in both cases, the regulatory capture and inadequate financial resources accorded to the authority precluded it from stepping in before disaster struck. Hence, the FAA did not once highlight the risks of the new anti-stall system when it certified the “new and improved” 737 Max 8 as airworthy some two years ago, according to the Washington Post. This is because Boeing had already attested to the plane’s fundamental fly-worthiness (much as Wall Street’s models minimized the possibility of a “black swan” discontinuity in the financial markets, which induced the relevant compliance bodies to green light them).

Consequently, both Boeing and a multitude of financial institutions post-2008 suffered “crashes.” Note as well in each case how increasing complexity becomes the enemy of effective regulation and, ultimately, safety considerations themselves. In both cases, they ignored what Travis and others call the KISS principle: “Keep it simple, stupid.”

There’s another interesting dimension to this Boeing calamity, which points to the perpetual “man vs. machine” debate that has been the story of capitalism since the days of the Luddites. Contrary to popular characterization, the Luddites were not simply technophobes, beating back the forces of progress. They were highly skilled artisans, protesting the fact that their livelihood was being displaced by automation, imposed on and displacing them like expendable commodities with virtually no consultation from the business owners themselves.

Likewise, in the new Max 8 plane, the new MCAS software was introduced without letting the pilots know about its main features. The key characteristic of MCAS is that it is activated without the pilots’ input. Worse still, according to the Verge, “both jets that crashed lacked safety features that could have provided crucial information to the crew because they were sold as options by Boeing, according to the New York Times.”

A huge failing of MCAS is that it effectively eliminates the human “feel” dimension to flying, as Travis illustrates:

“In the old days, when cables connected the pilot’s controls to the flying surfaces, you had to pull up, hard, if the airplane was trimmed to descend. You had to push, hard, if the airplane was trimmed to ascend. With computer oversight there is a loss of natural sense in the controls. In the 737 Max, there is no real ‘natural feel’…

“There is only an artificial feel, a feeling that the computer wants the pilots to feel. And sometimes, it doesn’t feel so great.

“When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS system thinks it’s about to stall, a set of motors and jacks push the pilot’s control columns forward. It turns out that the flight management computer can put a lot of force into that column—indeed, so much force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the column back, trying to tell the computer that this really, really should not be happening.” (Emphasis added.)

The MCAS computer software taxes a pilot beyond his physical capacities. And while it is true that in modern long haul commercial flying, computers do most of the actual flying, redundancy is normally built into the system to enable human beings to override the software if the pilot spots a problem. What distinguishes the newly incorporated MCAS system is that it denies the pilot’s ultimate sovereignty or, as the author starkly puts it: “It denies the pilots the ability to respond to what’s before their own eyes.”

Travis ultimately evokes Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” to indicate something of the scale of the technological dysfunction created here by Boeing: “Raise the nose, HAL.” “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

The key difference between the two situations is that in Kubrick’s masterpiece, HAL, the computer, was finally overridden by human action when circumstances necessitated and was therefore deactivated before more disaster could strike. The issue implicit in Travis’ imagery in regard to the Max 8 is that we may have taken this technophilia too far in the direction of computers to the point where today’s modern day “HAL” cannot be controlled by the pilot.

Boeing’s pathologies therefore illustrate the perils of innovation for innovation’s sake. But the company is symptomatic of a much bigger problem: We lionize the “progress” of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs, even as they produce self-driving cars (which cause fatal accidents), multifunctional smart phones (that threaten our privacy), high-tech drones (that bring airports to a standstill), or any kind of extreme automation in the workplace that degrades the role of human beings.

The crashes of the Boeing 737 jets ultimately reflect a hubristic faith in the power of the machine, a factor that is creating its own kind of dystopian 21st-century nightmare worthy of a Philip K. Dick novel. We view technology not as a man-made invention designed to help us, but as an autonomously fixed condition that bears little relation to human behavior. This lack of integration means that complexity overwhelms us, rather than enhances our quality of life. It commodifies us. Labor is just a cost input to be replaced, if possible, by a robot; it is no longer viewed as a source of demand. The same unthinking mentality that sees regulators as a dispensable encumbrance who clutter the operations of “the free market”; or safety is an optional feature that mustn’t be allowed to interfere with the bottom line; where the needs of employees are subsidiary to the profits of shareholders and management; and the military is prioritized over the needs of the civilian economy.

Boeing sadly embodies so much of our current economic and social dysfunction with predictably deadly consequences. But it is not alone or unique by any stretch of the imagination

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Will the Supreme Court Side With Trump in His War on Immigrants?

This piece originally appeared on The Progressive.

The Supreme Court appears poised to hand Donald Trump another victory in his war on immigrants.

Last year, in Trump v. Hawaii, the court upheld the President’s Muslim travel ban as a proper exercise of executive branch authority. This year’s battle, in Department of Commerce v. New York, concerns the hotly contested issue of whether a citizenship question can be included in the 2020 Census. Judging from Tuesday’s oral argument in the case, the court will divide once again on ideological lines, resulting in a 5-4 opinion in the administration’s favor.

No matter how the court rules, its decision will affect every American. The Census is used to set the number of votes each state is accorded in the Electoral College and the number of seats in the House of Representatives.

In addition, Census results are used to determine how some $880 billion per year in federal funds are distributed throughout the country for schools, road, and transportation construction, and to fund safety-net programs including Medicaid and Head Start.

The administration’s probable victory in the Census question case, based on the comments made by Justices, is seen by many as a threat to the political power wielded by blue states like California and New York that have large immigrant populations.

The Census must be taken every ten years pursuant the Constitution’s “enumeration clause” (Article I, § 2, cl. 3). Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, supplements the enumeration clause, requiring that House members be apportioned according to the “whole number” of persons in each state, not just citizens.

The federal government included citizenship questions in every Census conducted from 1820 to 1950, with the exception of 1840. In 1960, however, the Census Bureau, which became part of the Commerce Department in 1913, decided to remove the question from the basic short-form each American household is required to complete.

Bureau researchers concluded that citizenship inquiries depress the nationwide headcount for noncitizens and Hispanics, who are less likely to fill out Census forms containing such questions, out of fear their responses could be used against them or family members.

Starting in 1970 and continuing to 2000, citizenship questions were included in a longer Census form that was sent out to one in six households. But that practice was halted for the same reasons. Since 2005, the Census Bureau has collected citizenship information in the American Community Survey, which is distributed annually to 3.5 million households (approximately two percent of households nationally). The Bureau also acquires citizenship numbers from information gathered by other federal agencies, such as the Social Security Administration.

There are thus good reasons for the Census Bureau not to ask a citizenship question on the short form, and other sources of data are used by the government to gauge the total number of citizens.

Shortly after his confirmation as Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross directed the Bureau to reinstate the citizenship question in the Census short form. Appearing before the House Ways and Means Committee in March 2018, Ross testified that he acted at the request of the Department of Justice, which, he said under oath, wanted more precise citizenship data to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.

Ross’ directive was challenged in three federal lawsuits brought in New York, California, and Maryland. In each case, federal district court judges struck down the citizenship question, finding, in the words of Judge Jesse Furman, who sits in Manhattan, that Ross’ congressional testimony about the citizenship question was “pretextual.”

Emails uncovered as a result of  lawsuits revealed that the idea for reinstating the citizenship question came out of discussions between Ross, Steve Bannon, and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

Emails uncovered as a result of these three lawsuits showed that the idea for reinstating the citizenship question came not from the Department of Justice, but as a result of discussions between Ross, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, both of whom have long histories as proponents of anti-immigrant policies. As head of Trump’s since-abandoned Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, Kobach propagated the myth that millions of undocumented aliens had voted in 2016. The Department of Justice subsequently endorsed the citizenship question—at Ross’ request, not the other way around.

The Supreme Court decided to hear the New York case in February, and set it on an expedited track for a hearing and decision. A decision is expected by the end of June.

During Tuesday’s oral argument, Ross’s deception was front and center. Appearing on behalf of Ross and the Commerce Department, Solicitor General Noel Francisco asked the Justices to dismiss the challenges to the citizenship question, calling them “speculative” because no actual legal harm had yet been caused by including the question in the Census.

Francisco said he accepted the Bureau’s estimate that 6.5 million people likely wouldn’t answer the citizenship question and thus would not be counted in the Census. Nonetheless, he stuck to the administration’s position that the question would assist enforcement of voting rights, and insisted that Ross was in fact interested in enhanced enforcement.

Francisco found enthusiastic support from the court’s Republican-appointed justices. Both of Trump’s nominees—Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh—pointed with approval to the Bureau’s pre-1950 practice of including citizenship questions. Chief Justice Roberts, along with Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Samuel Alito, indicated through their questions and comments that they found the voting rights rationale credible.

Roberts failed to mention that he authored the 2013 majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. And Clarence Thomas followed his usual practice, remaining silent.

Attorney Dale Ho, representing the New York Immigration Coalition, pushed back against Francisco, noting that the Voting Rights Act has been enforced since its passage in 1965 without the inclusion of a citizenship question in the Census. His protests, along with arguments advanced by Barbara Underwood, the Solicitor General of New York, and Douglas Letter, counsel for the House of Representatives, resonated with the court’s Democrat-appointed Justices. At one point in the session, Sotomayor called the citizenship question “a solution in search of a problem.” Echoing Sotomayor, Elena Kagan called the question “contrived.”

In another more liberal era, the Supreme Court would expose Ross’ dishonesty, enjoin the Commerce Department from reinstating the citizenship question, and uphold the right of all persons residing in the country to be counted in the census.

But we’re not living in a such an era. We’re living in Donald Trump’s America, and the Supreme Court seems poised yet again to come to the President’s rescue.

Joe Biden Is Who We Thought He Was

Joe Biden has been running for president less than 48 hours, and his campaign is already proving as problematic as many of his liberal and progressive detractors had anticipated.

On Thursday, Barack Obama’s vice president formally entered the 2020 race in a video announcement, calling the upcoming election a “battle for the soul of America” and invoking the murder of Heather Heyer, who was slain during a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. Yet the Biden campaign didn’t see fit to alert Heyer’s parents about the speech until after the video had been released. “I wasn’t surprised,” her mother, Susan Bro, told The Daily Beast. “Most people do that sort of thing. They capitalize on whatever situation is handy. He didn’t reach out to me, and didn’t mention her by name specifically, and he probably knew we don’t endorse candidates.”

Later that day, after announcing he would be attending a fundraising event hosted by Comcast and Independent Blue Cross executives, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, disclosed that he had spoken several weeks ago with Anita Hill. During that call, according to Bedingfield, Biden “expressed his regret for what [Hill] endured” during the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas 28 years ago. “It did not go how he had hoped,” The New York Times reveals. From an April 25 article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Carl Hulse:

In a lengthy telephone interview on Wednesday, [Hill] declined to characterize Mr. Biden’s words to her as an apology and said she was not convinced that he has taken full responsibility for his conduct at the hearings—or for the harm he caused other victims of sexual harassment and gender violence.

She said she views Mr. Biden as having ‘set the stage’ for last year’s confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who, like Justice Thomas, was elevated to the court despite accusations against him that he had acted inappropriately toward women. And, she added, she was troubled by the recent accounts of women who say Mr. Biden touched them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable.

His appearance on The View Friday morning is unlikely to win Hill over, or anybody else for that matter. While expressing remorse for the way that she was smeared, he nonetheless maintains that he himself did nothing wrong, despite presiding over the Thomas hearing as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I’m sorry for the way she got treated, but—if you go back and look at what I said and say, I don’t think I treated her badly,” he told Joy Behar. “I took on her opposition. What I couldn’t figure out, and we still haven’t figured it out, how do you stop people from asking inflammatory questions? How do you stop these character assassinations from outside?”

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Joe Biden Unmasked



by Tangerine Bolen

This is not the first time that Biden has seemingly taken a black woman for granted this election cycle. In March, before he had made his presidential bid official, his senior advisers had floated the idea of announcing his run with a pledge to tap former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams as his vice president. Abrams ended the speculation quickly and emphatically, telling The View that “you don’t run for second place.” Although she would subsequently defend him against allegations of unwanted touching, Biden’s run has been a larger source of exasperation in Democratic circles, particularly for women of color. A report from The Associated Press earlier this week found:

In interviews, black women repeatedly pointed to a singular issue plaguing Biden’s candidacy: his handling of the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas and the Senate Judiciary Committee’s treatment of Anita Hill, a black professor who faced a panel of white male lawmakers about her sexual harassment allegations against Thomas. Biden, then a U.S. senator from Delaware, was the committee’s chairman.

[Organizer Roxy D. Hall] Williamson said that she was ‘still salty’ about the role Biden played in the hearing and that ‘it wasn’t OK then and it’s not OK now.’

As tone-deaf or just plain cynical as these blunders may be, however, perhaps none has been as egregious as Biden’s assessment of Donald Trump’s presidency. From his video announcement, emphasis mine:

I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation—who we are—and I cannot stand by and watch that happen. The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America America, is at stake.

Beneath its appeal to the country’s better angels lies a conservative, even reactionary message—one that echoes Hillary Clinton’s refrain on the campaign trail that “America is already great.” If we can just remove Trump from office, he reasons, we can right the wrong of the 2016 election and restore our nation’s “core values.” The irony, of course, is that it is the political choices of men like Joe Biden that have paved the way for our current crisis, that have helped make “America America.” And with a Republican Senate confirming federal judges at a breakneck pace, it will likely remain so for decades to come.

His record has already been explored at length, both in Truthdig and elsewhere, so it need not be revisited here. But if this is Biden’s pitch to American voters, his campaign is likely doomed from the start.

U.S. Withdrawing From Global Arms Trade Treaty, Trump Says

WASHINGTON—The Latest on President Trump and the National Rifle Association (all times local):

1 p.m.

President Donald Trump says the U.S. has decided to withdraw its support for a treaty regulating the multibillion-dollar global arms trade. It’s the latest example of the Trump administration’s dislike of international pacts.

Trump said Friday that he has decided to revoke the United States’ status as a signatory of the Arms Trade Treaty regulating international trade in conventional weapons, including small arms, battle tanks, combat aircraft and warships.

He says America is “rejecting this treaty” and “taking our signature back.”

He made the announcement during a speech in Indianapolis, Indiana, to the National Rifle Association, which claims the treaty poses a threat to the Second Amendment. The U.S. signed the treaty in 2013, but never ratified it.

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12:50 p.m.

President Donald Trump says gun owners should get ready to vote for Republicans.

He told the National Rifle Association Friday that his political opponents “want to take away your guns. You better get out there and vote.”

He spoke at the gun rights group’s annual convention for the third year in a row.

The event comes as longtime observers say the group is at its weakest moment in memory, due to serious infighting, financial issues and shifting public sentiment after a series of mass shootings.

Trump said the 2020 presidential and congressional elections are around the corner.

“It seems like it’s a long ways away. It’s not,” he said.

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12:40 p.m.

President Donald Trump is launching his speech to the National Rifle Association with a recitation of grievances about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Speaking to the gun rights group’s annual convention Friday, Trump said his political enemies “tried for a coup, didn’t work out so well. And I didn’t need a gun for that one, did I?’

The friendly audience applauded the quip, but Trump wasn’t done. He said he’s seen “corruption at the highest levels. A disgrace. Spying. Surveillance trying for an overthrow.”

Mueller’s probe found no evidence that Trump and his campaign colluded with the Russians to influence the 2016 presidential election. But his report contained detail about Trump’s efforts to shut down the investigation, fire Mueller and lie. Some Democrats say there’s ample evidence of obstruction of justice.

Attorney General William Barr said he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to prove that Trump had obstructed justice, but he noted that Mueller’s team did not exonerate the president.

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11:50 a.m.

Vice President Mike Pence says that under the Trump administration, “no one is taking your guns.”

The line got a rousing applause from the National Rifle Association in Indianapolis, where Pence was introducing President Donald Trump at the gun lobby’s annual convention.

Pence, a former Indiana governor, told the crowd, “Under this president and this vice president no one is taking your guns.”

Trump is speaking to the convention for the third year in a row.

The NRA’s convention comes as longtime observers say the group is at its weakest moment in memory, due to serious infighting, financial issues and shifting public sentiment after a series of mass shootings.

Russian Agent Maria Butina Sentenced to 18 Months for Conspiracy

WASHINGTON—Maria Butina, a Russian who admitted to secretly working for the Kremlin to infiltrate conservative U.S. political groups, was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison.

Butina has been jailed since her July 2018 arrest and had asked for a sentence of time served. But U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan imposed a sentence that would require Butina to spend an additional nine months behind bars, before being deported.

Chutkan said the sentence was meant “to reflect the seriousness of (Butina’s actions) and to promote deterrence.”

Butina’s lawyers decried the judgment as overly harsh; they had characterized Butina as a naive but ambitious international affairs student who simply didn’t realize her actions required her to register as an agent of a foreign government.

“I feel terrible for Maria’s family … I wish we could have done more to get her out sooner,” said attorney Robert Driscoll. “I do not believe an additional nine months in jail serves any purpose.”

Butina admitted last year to covertly gathering intelligence on the National Rifle Association and other groups at the direction of a former Russian lawmaker. Her guilty plea to a single charge of conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent came as part of a deal with federal prosecutors.

According to her plea agreement, the 30-year-old worked with former Russian lawmaker Alexander Torshin to use their contacts in the NRA to pursue back channels to American conservatives during the 2016 presidential campaign. All the while, she did not report her activities to the U.S. government as required by law.

In court papers filed ahead of Friday’s sentencing, Butina’s lawyers argued that she has taken responsibility for her crimes and should be credited for her cooperation with prosecutors, which they described as “full, transparent and complete.”

They said Butina has suffered by being publicly branded as a “spy” and through her months in jail.

But prosecutors, in pushing for an 18-month sentence, said that while Butina wasn’t carrying out espionage in the “traditional sense,” her actions still posed a risk.

“Such operations can cause great damage to our national security by giving covert agents access to our country and powerful individuals who can influence its direction,” prosecutors wrote.

Butina had faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Her case is unrelated to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which concluded last month.