Amy Goodman's Blog, page 14

The FBI, the NSA and a Long-Held Secret Revealed

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

This week, more news emerged about the theft of classified government documents, leaked to the press, that revealed a massive, top-secret surveillance program. No, not news of Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency, but of a group of anti-Vietnam war activists who perpetrated one of the most audacious thefts of government secrets in U.S. history, and who successfully evaded capture, remaining anonymous for more than 40 years. Among them: two professors, a day-care provider and a taxi driver.

Passionately opposed to the U.S. war in Vietnam, this group of seven men and one woman was certain that the FBI, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, was spying on citizens and actively suppressing dissent. In order to prove their case, they broke into an FBI field office in the Philadelphia suburb of Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971, and stole all the files inside. What they found, and mailed to the press, exposed COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program, a global, clandestine, unconstitutional practice of surveillance, infiltration and disruption of groups engaged in protest, dissent and social change. Their courageous act of nonviolent burglary shook the FBI, the CIA and other agencies to the core. They triggered congressional investigations, increased oversight and the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. These activist burglars, most of whom have come forward this week, revealing their names for the first time, have not only a remarkable story to tell about the past, but a critical and informed perspective on Snowden, the NSA and government spying today.

“The citizens’ right to dissent is the last line of defense for freedom,” John Raines told me. He was a professor of religion at Temple University when he, his wife, Bonnie, and the others who intended to break into the FBI office formed what they called the “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI.” Since John and Bonnie Raines had three children under the age of 10 at the time of the burglary, I asked how they decided to engage in an act that could have sent them both to prison for years. John replied, “We routinely ask, as a society, mothers and fathers to take on as part of their work highly dangerous activities. We ask that of all policemen. We ask that of everybody that works for the fire department. We ask that of mothers and fathers who are sent overseas to defend our freedoms in the Army and Navy. We routinely ask of people to take on jobs that risk their families.” He went on, “As citizens, we stepped forward and did what we had to do because nobody in Washington would.”

Under the leadership of a physics professor from Haverford College, Bill Davidon, the group met and meticulously planned their action. John and Bonnie Raines hosted most of the meetings in their attic. Bonnie posed as a college student writing a paper on career opportunities for women in the FBI, and got an inside look at the Media field office. Keith Forsyth, the cabdriver, took a correspondence course in locksmithing and made his own lock-pick tools to avoid notice of authorities. They chose the night of March 8, 1971, because international attention was gripped by the world heavyweight boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. The bout, said Forsyth, “would add to the distraction, not only of the police, but of just people in general.”

They broke into the office, stole all the files inside and took them to a farmhouse an hour outside of Philadelphia. They pored over the liberated documents, shocked at what they read. One memo detailed an FBI conference on the New Left, predicting that more FBI interrogations of activists would “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.” That line struck a chord with one of the reporters who received the leaked documents, Betty Medsger of The Washington Post. President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, tried to get the Post to suppress Medsger’s stories. “Two editors, from the beginning, realized it was a very important story and pushed it — Ben Bradlee and Ben Bagdikian,” she told me. The paper published, and history was made. At the time, Medsger did not know the identities of the activists. This week, she published a book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI,” in which she names most of the burglars, with their assent. A documentary film has also been produced, soon to be released, titled “1971.”

In response to the book’s revelations this week, naming the burglars, FBI spokesman Michael Kortan said, “A number of events during that era, including the burglary, contributed to changes in how the FBI identified and addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform of the FBI’s intelligence policies and practices, including the creation of investigative guidelines by the Department of Justice.”

If we were to apply Michael Kortan’s standards to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, President Barack Obama would drop the charges against him and welcome him back to the U.S., with thanks. Let’s hope Snowden doesn’t have to wait 43 years.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.

© 2014 Amy Goodman

Related: See the burglar's interview on Democracy Now! on January 8.

Congress to the Unemployed: Eat Confetti

Is this really how we want to start the new year, by denying unemployment benefits to more than a million Americans who have lost their jobs? The bipartisan budget agreement passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama protects military spending, but promises to throw the most desperate in our economy into increased financial hardship, thrusting hundreds of thousands of families beneath the poverty line. The long-term unemployment rate is at the highest it has been since World War II, while the percentage of those receiving the benefits is at its historic low. Meanwhile, Wall Street bankers are popping the corks, celebrating a banner year for the stock market. As brokers await their bonuses, many more of the unemployed will head for the breadlines.

“This is the wrong thing to happen at the wrong time for our economy,” Imara Jones told me. He is the economic justice contributor for Colorlines.com, and served in the Clinton White House, where he worked on international trade policy. “Jobless benefits are actually stimulative to the economy,” he said. “Every $1 we provide to someone of unemployment benefits yields $1.60 in economic activity. And that’s why the loss of these benefits is going to rob our economy of $41 billion.” People living on the edge financially spend what they have to get by. Those in the top echelons of our economy, the top 1 percent, can take their income and hold on to it, or stash it away into an offshore account.

The unemployment-insurance program traditionally granted 26 weeks of replacement pay for workers who lost their jobs through no fault of their own. The extended benefits, signed into law by President George W. Bush, lengthened the time period to up to 99 weeks. Benefits average just $300 a week. According to The Washington Post, the average job search lasts 35 weeks, so the current 26-week benefit will create added stress on families already struggling.

Click here to read the rest of this column at Truthdig.org.

Obama’s New Normal: The Drone Strikes Continue

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

There has been yet another violent attack with mass casualties. This was not the act of a lone gunman, or of an armed student rampaging through a school. It was a group of families en route to a wedding that was killed. The town was called Radda—not in Colorado, not in Connecticut, but in Yemen. The weapon was not an easy-to-obtain semiautomatic weapon, but missiles fired from U.S. drones. On Thursday, Dec. 12, 17 people were killed, mostly civilians. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has consistently tracked U.S. drone attacks, recently releasing a report on the six months following President Barack Obama’s major address on drone warfare before the National Defense University (NDU) last May. In that speech, Obama promised that “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.” The BIJ summarized, “Six months after President Obama laid out U.S. rules for using armed drones, a Bureau analysis shows that covert drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan have killed more people than in the six months before the speech.” In a nation that abhors the all-too-routine mass killing in our communities, why does our government consistently kill so many innocents abroad?

One significant problem with assessing the U.S. drone-warfare program is its secrecy. U.S. officials rarely comment on the program, less so about any specific attack, especially where civilian deaths occur. As Obama admitted in the speech, “There’s a wide gap between U.S. assessments of such casualties and nongovernmental reports. Nevertheless, it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties.” The BIJ’s estimate of the death toll from U.S. drone strikes during the past 12 years in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia is well over 4,000.

While the U.S. media shower attention on the hypothetical prospects that in the next few years, Amazon.com will deploy clever little drones to deliver your holiday orders, it is important to take a hard look at what these airborne robots are actually doing now. “Democracy Now!” correspondent Jeremy Scahill has been exposing U.S. covert warmaking for years, most recently in his book and film “Dirty Wars.” The film was just shortlisted for an Oscar for best documentary. After the Academy Award nomination was made, he told us, “I hope that people pay attention to these stories, that Americans will know what happened to the Bedouin villagers in al-Majalah, Yemen, where three dozen women and children were killed in a U.S. cruise missile strike that the White House tried to cover up.”

In his NDU address, Obama said, “We act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people.” Neither Obama nor any of his aides have explained just what kind of threat the wedding convoy presented to the American people. The government of Yemen, following local custom, made reparations to the victimized families, reportedly delivering 101 Kalashnikov rifles and a little over $100,000.

Read the rest of this column at Truthdig.com.

Obama Wrongs the Bill of Rights

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

President Barack Obama proclaimed Dec. 15 Bill of Rights Day, praising those first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution as “the foundation of American liberty, securing our most fundamental rights — from the freedom to speak, assemble and practice our faith as we please to the protections that ensure justice under the law.” The next day, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon called Obama’s surveillance policies “almost Orwellian” in a court order finding the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone metadata very likely unconstitutional. If that was not enough, the president’s own task force on the issues, the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, delivered its report, which the White House released, with 46 recommendations for changes.

One adviser to the panel, Sascha Meinrath of the Open Technology Institute, was skeptical, telling me that “intelligence-community insiders, administration officials, comprise the entirety of this five-member group. I do not see how you can do a truly independent review of surveillance when so many people are tied in.” The panel is chaired by former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell, and is managed under the auspices of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, run by James Clapper. Clapper is widely considered to have lied in a Senate hearing on this issue. When asked by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., if the NSA collected phone records on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans, Clapper replied, “No, sir.” Following the Snowden leaks, Clapper admitted to NBC News that his answer was the “least untruthful” manner to say no.

Judge Leon’s ruling relates to just one of several filed after the June disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the vast, global surveillance system vacuuming up personal data from billions of people. A separate federal lawsuit in New York, ACLU v. Clapper, seeks to end the mass surveillance completely, and to have all the data collected so far deleted.

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, called Edward Snowden “a patriot,” noting: “As a whistle-blower of illegal government activity that was sanctioned and kept secret by the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government for years, he undertook great personal risk for the public good. And he has single-handedly reignited a global debate about the extent and nature of government surveillance and our most fundamental rights as individuals.”

Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, reiterated the White House’s hard line this week: “Mr. Snowden has been accused of leaking classified information, and he faces felony charges here in the United States.”

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Mandela: The Man and the Movement

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Nelson Mandela’s passing last week at the age of 95 has been met with a global outpouring of remembrance and reflection. A giant of modern human history has died. Mandela is rightly remembered for his remarkable ability to reconcile with his oppressors, and the political prescription his forgiveness entailed for the new South Africa. “Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another,” Mandela said in his inaugural speech in Pretoria, on May 10, 1994. In the same speech, he pledged, going forward, “to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.” Mandela has passed, but what he has passed on to succeeding generations is his deep belief in the power of movements to make change.

He spent his early years in the African National Congress (ANC) organizing noncooperation, like the Defiance Campaign in 1952, when he was photographed burning his passbook, the dreaded photo documentation without which black South Africans could not travel within their own country. By 1960, following the Sharpeville Massacre, where the white government’s police forces killed at least 69 people who were protesting the pass laws and the passbooks, the government banned the ANC. Mandela and others went underground, forming the ANC’s armed wing, calling it Umkhonto we Sizwe, or “Spear of the Nation.”

Read the full column here.

"Poverty Wages in the Land of Plenty"

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

The holiday season is upon us. Sadly, the big retailers are Scrooges when it comes to paying their staffs. Undergirding the sale prices is an army of workers earning the minimum wage or a fraction above it, living check to check on their meager pay and benefits. The dark secret that the retail giants like Wal-Mart don’t want you to know is that many of these workers subsist below the poverty line, and rely on programs like food stamps and Medicaid just to get by. This holiday season, though, low-wage workers from Wal-Mart to fast-food restaurants are standing up and fighting back.

“Wal-Mart was put in an uncomfortable spotlight on what should be the happiest day of the year for the retailer,” Josh Eidelson told me, reporting on the coordinated Black Friday protests. “These were the largest protests we’ve seen against Wal-Mart ... you had 1,500 stores involved; you had over a hundred people arrested.” Wal-Mart is the world’s largest retailer, with 2.2 million employees, 1.3 million of whom are in the U.S. It reported close to $120 billion in gross profit for 2012. Just six members of the Walton family, whose patriarch, Sam Walton, founded the retail giant, have amassed an estimated combined fortune of between $115 billion-$144 billion. These six individuals have more wealth than the combined financial assets of the poorest 40 percent of the U.S. population.

Read the full column here

Talking Turkey About Climate Change

Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Another extreme weather event is disrupting one of the most popular traditions here in the United States, Thanksgiving. Meteorologists at The Weather Channel have named the winter storm “Boreas,” after the ancient Greek god of the north wind, the bringer of winter. They report that at least 14 people have been killed so far by the storm, and 58 million people have been impacted. Boreas is dumping snow and freezing rain across the northeast of the country on the busiest travel days of the years. TV weather reports follow a standard format: the intrepid crew stands alongside a snowy highway or at an airport with stranded passengers. Why not use these fossil-fueled backdrops as an opportunity to discuss climate change? Why not talk about how our lifestyles, so profoundly dependent on greenhouse gas emissions, from driving cars to flying in planes, contribute directly to disruptive weather?

Click here to read the rest of this column

Talking Turkey about Climate Change

Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Another extreme weather event is disrupting one of the most popular traditions here in the United States, Thanksgiving. Meteorologists at The Weather Channel have named the winter storm “Boreas,” after the ancient Greek god of the north wind, the bringer of winter. They report that at least 14 people have been killed so far by the storm, and 58 million people have been impacted. Boreas is dumping snow and freezing rain across the northeast of the country on the busiest travel days of the years. TV weather reports follow a standard format: the intrepid crew stands alongside a snowy highway or at an airport with stranded passengers. Why not use these fossil-fueled backdrops as an opportunity to discuss climate change? Why not talk about how our lifestyles, so profoundly dependent on greenhouse gas emissions, from driving cars to flying in planes, contribute directly to disruptive weather?

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Corporate Lobbyists Flood Warsaw Climate Talks

Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

WARSAW, Poland — The United Nations is holding this year’s climate conference in Warsaw, a city steeped in history. Nicolaus Copernicus, the famous Polish astronomer who first posited that the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, is celebrated here. The Frederic Chopin Airport is named for the brilliant composer who lived here. The pioneer in the science of radiation, Marie Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (she won two of them), was born here.

Here also was the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the many awful hallmarks of the Holocaust, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were imprisoned before being shipped off to their deaths at Treblinka and other Nazi concentration camps. It was under the oppression of the German occupiers that the Jews of the Ghetto rose up, in a courageous act of self-defense. Later, inspired by the Ghetto uprising, the non-Jewish residents of Warsaw rose up as well and fought for two months before being crushed. By the end of World War II, six million Poles, half of them Jews, had been killed. Eighty-five percent of Warsaw was demolished.

This is where the so-called COP 19 is being held, the 19th conference of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UNFCCC. Sequestered in the new National Stadium, thousands of negotiators from the body’s 198 member countries hurry through the temporary, canvas-walled corridors erected on the stadium’s field, along with representatives of countless nongovernmental organizations and members of the press. This year’s meeting has a new feature: corporate sponsorship.

“This is perhaps the most corporate climate talks we have ever experienced ... not to say that previous ones haven’t had a large corporate influence,” Pascoe Sabido told me. “But what’s different this time is the level of institutionalization, the degree to which the Polish government and the U.N., the UNFCCC, have welcomed this with open arms and have actively encouraged it.” Sabido works with Corporate Europe Observatory, which published the pamphlet, “The COP 19 Guide to Corporate Lobbying: Climate Crooks and the Polish Government’s Partners in Crime.” Among them, Pascoe says, are “General Motors, known for funding climate skeptic think tanks like the Heartland Institute in the U.S.; you have BMW, which is doing equal things in Europe, trying to weaken emission standards.” LOTOS Group, the second-largest Polish petroleum corporation, has its logo emblazoned on the 11,000 tote bags handed out to delegates here.

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Typhoon Haiyan Demands Climate Action at the U.N. Summit in Warsaw

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Typhoon Haiyan, a storm of historic proportions, has devastated the largely impoverished population of the Philippines. Thousands of people are dead, hundreds of thousands are stranded with almost no food or water, and millions have been impacted. The struggle to survive competes with the race to bury the dead, treat the wounded and suffer through the onslaught of tropical storms in Haiyan’s wake. In seeming synchrony, halfway around the world, thousands of negotiators, scientists, politicians and journalists are gathering for the annual United Nations Climate Change summit, held this year in Warsaw, Poland. The changing seas that this week have whipped the Philippines demand a sea change in the worldwide response to global warming.

As COP 19 opened in Warsaw — the 19th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol — one courageous climate negotiator took center stage, demanding action on climate change.

“What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness. The climate crisis is madness,” said Naderev “Yeb” Saño, representing the typhoon-ravaged Philippines, as the summit opened. “We can stop this madness right here in Warsaw,” Saño said.. This was not his first appeal to the U.N. body. Last year, when the summit was in Doha, Qatar, and not long after Typhoon Bopha killed 1,100 people in the Philippines, Saño implored the gathered negotiators, holding back tears: “The outcome of our work is not about what our political masters want. It is about what is demanded of us by 7 billion people. I appeal to all: Please, no more delays, no more excuses. Please, let Doha be remembered as the place where we found the political will to turn things around.”

Doha did not turn things around. Report after report reinforces the science: Catastrophic climate change is accelerating. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the association of more than 1,800 scientists that is leading the global study of climate change, and which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore in 2007, recently released its fifth assessment report. With increasing certainty, the IPCC reports, the climate is changing, and humans are the cause.

Jeff Masters is a meteorologist and founder of the popular weather website Weather Underground. Unlike most U.S.-based television weather forecasters, who rarely link extreme weather events to climate change, Masters regularly makes the connection. He said on Democracy Now! recently, “The proportion of these sorts of high-end Category 5 storms has increased ... when we do get them there’s a higher proportion of them coming in at these super-high intensities.” Masters and the IPCC point out that no individual weather event can be directly attributed to climate change, but that the frequency and intensity of the storms will increase.

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