Amy Goodman's Blog, page 16

Nuclear's Demise, From Fukushima to Vermont

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Welcome to the nuclear renaissance.

Entergy Corp., one of the largest nuclear-power producers in the United States, issued a surprise press release Tuesday, saying it plans "to close and decommission its Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Vernon, Vt. The station is expected to cease power production after its current fuel cycle and move to safe shutdown in the fourth quarter of 2014." While the press release came from the corporation, it was years of people's protests and state legislative action that forced its closure. At the same time that activists celebrate this key defeat of nuclear power, officials in Japan admitted that radioactive leaks from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe are far worse than previously acknowledged.

"It took three years, but it was citizen pressure that got the state Senate to such a position" nuclear-energy consultant Arnie Gunderson told me of Entergy's announcement. He has coordinated projects at 70 nuclear plants around the country and now provides independent testimony on nuclear and radiation issues. He explained how the state of Vermont, in the first such action in the country, had banned the plant from operating beyond its original 40-year permit. Entergy was seeking a 20-year extension. "The Legislature, in that 26-to-4 vote, said: 'No, we're not going to allow you to reapply. It's over. You know, a deal's a deal. We had a 40-year deal.' Well, Entergy went to first the federal court here in Vermont and won, and then went to an appeals court in New York City and won again on the issue, as they framed it, that states have no authority to regulate safety." Despite prevailing in the courts, Entergy bowed to public pressure.

Back in 2011, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, who called Entergy "a company that we found we can't trust," said on "Democracy Now!": "We're the only state in the country that's taken power into our own hands and said that, without an affirmative vote from the state legislature, the Public Service Board cannot issue a certificate of public good to legally operate a plant for another 20 years. Now, the Senate has spoken ... saying no, it's not in Vermont's best interest to run an aging, leaking nuclear-power plant. And we expect that our decision will be respected."

The nuclear-power industry is at a critical crossroads.

Click to read the rest of the column published at The Guardian.

Manning Wronged AND Miranda's Rights

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

“There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people,” wrote the late historian Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States.”

These words were included in a statement by Pfc. Bradley Manning, read by his defense attorney David Coombs, at a press conference following Manning’s sentencing to 35 years in military prison for releasing hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks. The statement accompanies Manning’s request to President Barack Obama for a presidential pardon.

Across the Atlantic, David Miranda, the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained under Britain’s terrorism laws at London’s Heathrow Airport, his electronic equipment was confiscated, and he was interrogated and threatened with prison.

Both events have heightened the already intense level of scrutiny on the expanding, seemingly unchecked reach of the U.S. government. Miranda is rattled, but free. Manning will soon head, shackled, to begin serving his sentence. NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden remains in temporary political asylum somewhere in Russia, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continues his residence in exile, not far from Heathrow, in the cramped Ecuadorean Embassy in London. What is remarkable is that this patchwork of individuals has set this brave, new world of global war and surveillance reeling.

“It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing,” Manning wrote in the statement read by Coombs. “Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.”

As he said at the opening of his court-martial, Manning released the confidential material to “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy.” The most graphic example was his release of the Apache attack helicopter video, where at least a dozen civilians were killed. The video includes radio transmissions between the soldiers, joking about the violence they were committing.

While the video, released by WikiLeaks under the title “Collateral Murder,” is graphic, the additional releases by Manning shed a bright light on the classified wars being waged by the U.S. government, far from public view. The War Diaries (http://wardiary.wikileaks.org) include hundreds of thousands of field reports from both Afghanistan and Iraq. In cold military jargon, the classified documents reveal the scale of the brutality of war, the routine violence, and the daily killing of civilians.

Coombs continued with Manning’s statement: “In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.”

Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are the two journalists who have collaborated on the Snowden leaks from the outset. Last weekend, David Miranda, a citizen of Brazil, was detained by British authorities for nine hours under Schedule 7 of the U.K. Terrorism Act of 2000.

Lord Charles Falconer, who helped introduce the law into the British House of Lords, says Miranda’s detention was an abuse of the law. “Publication in the Guardian is not instigating terrorism,” Falconer wrote in that paper. “The state may wish that journalists would not publish sensitive material, but it is up to journalists, not the state, to decide where to draw the line.” While Miranda is not a journalist, he has long assisted his partner Greenwald in his work, and the authorities in Britain, including Prime Minister David Cameron, who reportedly had advance knowledge of Miranda’s detention, knew full well that he was no terrorist.

The violation of Miranda’s rights has created a political firestorm in Britain, whose equivalent to the National Security Agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), has come under equal scrutiny for widespread surveillance.

David Coombs finished reading Manning’s statement at the post-sentencing press conference: “When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.” Addressing President Obama, Manning wrote: “If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.”

The morning after his sentencing, Manning issued a statement that read, in part, " As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I hope that you will support me in this transition."

"Stop-and-Frisk": The World According to Questlove

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Hip-hop hit a milestone this week, turning 40 years old. The same week, federal district court Judge Shira Scheindlin, in a 195-page ruling, declared the New York City Police Department's practice of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional. Hip-hop and stop-and-frisk are central aspects of the lives of millions of people, especially black and Latino youths.

Ahmir Thompson was just two years old when hip-hop got its start in 1973, but already had shown his talent for music. Thompson is now known professionally as Questlove, an accomplished musician and producer, music director and drummer for the Grammy Award-winning hip-hop band The Roots, which is the house band on the NBC show "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon." He and The Roots soon will move with Fallon to the even more popular "The Tonight Show."

Despite his success, Questlove confronts racism in his daily life. But he has built a platform, a following, which he uses to challenge the status quo — like stop-and-frisk.

"There's nothing like the first time that a gun is held on you," Questlove told me.

Click to read the rest of the column published at The Guardian.

Suggested Vacation Reading for President Obama: "Catch-22"

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

As the Obama family heads to their annual summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard, perhaps the president should take along a copy of "Catch-22" for some beach reading. Joseph Heller's classic, satirical antiwar novel, published in 1961 and based on his experiences as a bombardier in the second world war, is sadly relevant today, as Obama's wars, in Afghanistan and beyond, drag on.

Heller's title refers to a fictional military rule that said you could get out of military duty if you were crazy, but if you requested relief from military duty, you were clearly sane, so must serve. He wrote:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr [a pilot in the novel] was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.

Barack Obama ran as the antiwar alternative when he was a primary challenger to Hillary Clinton, whose nomination as Democratic presidential candidate in 2008 was widely held to be inevitable. It was his October 2, 2002, speech in Chicago where he declared his opposition to the imminent invasion of Iraq, calling it "a dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics." As a U.S. senator, he pledged to filibuster any bill that granted retroactive immunity to large telecommunication corporations that co-operated with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens. And on his first day in office, you might recall, he vowed to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay.

Has Obama ended the war in Iraq? Certainly not for the Iraqis. July was one of the bloodiest months there since the height of the insurgency against the U.S.-imposed Iraqi government. So far this year, more than 4,000 Iraqis have been killed, mostly by bomb blasts that targeted civilians, and close to 10,000 have been injured, in attacks by Sunnis against Shias or vice versa.

On July 22, a military assault was launched against the Abu Ghraib prison, made notorious 10 years ago by the shocking photos of abuse of prisoners at the hands of their US captors. Five hundred prisoners were freed in the course of the attack, including, reportedly, many senior al-Qaeda leaders.

Transparency International has ranked Iraq the seventh-most corrupt government on the planet, narrowly edging out Sudan, Afghanistan, North Korea and Somalia. Thirteen U.S. soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in July, including Specialist Caryn Nouv, a 29-year-old mother of two.

Obama's embrace of the surveillance state is now well-known, following revelations from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. It was in December 2007 when Obama's Senate office issued a press release stating:

"Senator Obama unequivocally opposes giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies and has co-sponsored Senator Dodd's efforts to remove that provision from the FISA bill. Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill, and strongly urges others to do the same."

Months later, not only did he not filibuster the bill, he voted for it. Now, President Obama is refusing to meet with President Vladimir Putin in Russia next month, since Putin granted Snowden temporary asylum there.

Then there's Guantánamo and Bradley Manning.

Click to read the rest of the column published at The Guardian.

Bradley Manning's Convictions

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

“What a dangerous edifice War is, how easily it may fall to pieces and bury us in its ruins,” wrote Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th-century Prussian general and military theorist, in his seminal text “On War,” close to 200 years ago.

These lines came from the chapter “Information in War,” a topic that resonates today, from Fort Meade, Md., where Pfc. Bradley Manning has just been convicted of espionage in a military court, to the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lived for more than a year, having been granted political asylum to avoid political persecution by the United States, to Russia, where National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden has been granted temporary asylum.

Manning’s conviction sparked momentary interest among members of the elite media in the U.S., who spent scant time at the two-month court- martial, located just miles north of Washington, D.C. Manning’s supporters expressed relief that he was found not guilty of the most serious charge, aiding the enemy, which would likely have carried a sentence of life in prison. He was convicted on 20 of 22 charges, and could face up to 136 years in prison. The sentencing hearing is underway.

“Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures have exposed war crimes, sparked revolutions and induced democratic reforms,” Assange said from the embassy. “He is the quintessential whistle-blower.”

Interestingly, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote about the leaks to Sen. Carl Levin in 2010, saying, “The review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure.”

Manning made a statement at the start of the court-martial, wherein he took responsibility for the leaks, but, importantly, expressed his motivation. He commented specifically on the Apache attack helicopter video that recorded the slaughter of a dozen civilians in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. Two of those killed worked for the Reuters news agency, cameraman Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, a father of four.

We can listen to Manning in his own words, thanks to an unauthorized audio recording of his statement, anonymously leaked. He said: “The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemly delightful blood-lust the aerial weapons team seemed to have. They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life, and referred to them as quote-unquote ‘dead bastards,’ and congratulated each other on their ability to kill in large numbers. ... For me, this seemed similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.”

One of the charges for which Manning was found guilty was “wanton publication.” It’s unprecedented in military law. Manning’s lawyer called it a made-up offense. The real offense, for which no one has been charged, is the wanton disregard for human life that Manning exposed.

Manning’s leak gave Reuters, and the world, a graphic view of the horror of modern war, of the violent death of two media workers in the line of duty.

As the young soldier also said in his eloquent statement, “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained [in the leaks], it could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Indeed, he did spark such a debate.

Read the rest of this column at The Guardian.

America's Real Subversives: FBI Spying Then, NSA Surveillance Now

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

As the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington approaches, commemorating that historic gathering where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous "I have a dream" speech, it is important to recall the extent to which King was targeted by the government's domestic spying apparatus. The FBI operation against King is one of the most shameful episodes in the long history of our government's persecution of dissenters.

Fifty years later, Edward Snowden, who is seeking temporary asylum to remain in Russia, took enormous personal risk to expose the global reach of surveillance programs overseen by President Barack Obama. His revelations continue to provoke worldwide condemnation of the United States.

In a heavily redacted, classified FBI memo dated January 4, 1956 — just a little more than a month after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger — the Mobile, Alabama, FBI office stated that an agent "had been assigned by [redacted] to find out all he could about Reverend Martin L. King, colored minister in Montgomery and leader in the bus boycott … to uncover all the derogatory information he could about King."

The FBI at that time was run by its founding director, J. Edgar Hoover, who was deploying the vast resources he controlled against any and all perceived critics of the United States. The far-reaching clandestine surveillance, infiltration and disruption operation Hoover ran was dubbed "COINTELPRO," for counterintelligence program.

The FBI's COINTELPRO activities, along with illegal operations by agencies like the CIA, were thoroughly investigated in 1975 by the Church Committee, chaired by the Democratic US senator from Idaho, Frank Church. The Church committee reported that the FBI "conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of first amendment rights of speech and association." Among COINTELPRO's perverse activities was an FBI effort to threaten Martin Luther King, Jr. with exposure of an alleged extramarital affair, including the suggestion, made by the FBI to King, that he avoid embarrassment by killing himself.

Following the Church committee, Congress imposed serious limitations on the FBI and other agencies, restricting domestic spying. Among the changes was the passage into law of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA compelled the FBI and others in the government to go to a secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in order to engage in domestic wiretapping.

Then came September 11, 2001, and the swift passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, granting broad, new powers of surveillance to intelligence agencies, including the FBI. Section 215 of that act is widely criticized, first for allowing the FBI to obtain records of what books people are signing out of the library. But now, more than 10 years later, and thanks to the revelations that have come from the Snowden leaks, we see that the government has used this law to perform dragnet surveillance on all electronic communications, including telephone "metadata," which can be analyzed to reveal intimate details of our lives, legalizing a truly Orwellian system of total surveillance.

In what is considered to be a litmus test of the potential to roll back the Obama administration's domestic spy programs, a bipartisan coalition of libertarian Republicans and progressive Democrats put forth an amendment to the latest defense authorization bill. Justin Amash, a Republican, and John Conyers, a Democrat, both of Michigan, co-sponsored the amendment, which would deny funding to the NSA to collect phone and data records of people who are not subjects of an investigation.

Read the rest of this column on The Guardian's website.

Let the Light of Mandela Shine on U.S. Injustice

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

As the world celebrates Nelson Mandela’s 95th birthday, it is timely to reflect on his life, spent fighting for equality for people of color who long suffered under South Africa’s apartheid regime. Mandela was arrested in 1962, a year before Martin Luther King Jr. would give his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. After 27 years in prison, Mandela was released in 1990. Four years later, he would become the first democratically elected president of South Africa.

We should use Mandela’s incredible life to shine a light on injustice in the United States, as George Zimmerman is acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin, and as a massive hunger strike envelops the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, where scores of men have been held without charge for more than a decade.

When President Barack Obama visited South Africa recently, he took his family to Robben Island, the notorious apartheid-era prison off the coast of Cape Town. First lady Michelle Obama said of the experience, “It was amazing to see Mandela’s cell, a tiny room—about 6 feet wide—where he spent 18 of the 27 years he was in prison. He slept on a thin mat on the floor, and when he stretched out to sleep at night, his toes touched one wall, while his head grazed the other. The walls were two feet thick with no decorations, and he was given a bucket to use as a toilet.”

President Obama signed the Robben Island guest book, writing: “On behalf of our family we’re deeply humbled to stand where men of such courage faced down injustice and refused to yield. The world is grateful for the heroes of Robben Island, who remind us that no shackles or cells can match the strength of the human spirit.”

“We don’t need a lecture; we need a leader,” Col. Morris Davis told me. He is a retired Air Force colonel, and was the chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay until he resigned in 2007, refusing to use statements obtained through torture. He went on: “When President Obama and his family visited South Africa, he took Sasha and Malia to visit [Robben Island]. And at the same time, he’s operating an island prison in Guantanamo, where the majority have been cleared to be transferred out. There are people that have been there for 11 and a half years that we have cleared to be transferred home, and they still sit in prison.”

Read the rest of this column at Truthdig.org.

Let The Light of Mandela Shine on U.S. Injustice

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

As the world celebrates Nelson Mandela’s 95th birthday, it is timely to reflect on his life, spent fighting for equality for people of color who long suffered under South Africa’s apartheid regime. Mandela was arrested in 1962, a year before Martin Luther King Jr. would give his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. After 27 years in prison, Mandela was released in 1990. Four years later, he would become the first democratically elected president of South Africa.

We should use Mandela’s incredible life to shine a light on injustice in the United States, as George Zimmerman is acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin, and as a massive hunger strike envelops the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, where scores of men have been held without charge for more than a decade.

When President Barack Obama visited South Africa recently, he took his family to Robben Island, the notorious apartheid-era prison off the coast of Cape Town. First lady Michelle Obama said of the experience, “It was amazing to see Mandela’s cell, a tiny room—about 6 feet wide—where he spent 18 of the 27 years he was in prison. He slept on a thin mat on the floor, and when he stretched out to sleep at night, his toes touched one wall, while his head grazed the other. The walls were two feet thick with no decorations, and he was given a bucket to use as a toilet.”

President Obama signed the Robben Island guest book, writing: “On behalf of our family we’re deeply humbled to stand where men of such courage faced down injustice and refused to yield. The world is grateful for the heroes of Robben Island, who remind us that no shackles or cells can match the strength of the human spirit.”

“We don’t need a lecture; we need a leader,” Col. Morris Davis told me. He is a retired Air Force colonel, and was the chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay until he resigned in 2007, refusing to use statements obtained through torture. He went on: “When President Obama and his family visited South Africa, he took Sasha and Malia to visit [Robben Island]. And at the same time, he’s operating an island prison in Guantanamo, where the majority have been cleared to be transferred out. There are people that have been there for 11 and a half years that we have cleared to be transferred home, and they still sit in prison.”

Read the rest of this column at Truthdig.org.

This Year’s Best-Kept Secret: The Next Generation of Community Radio

A microphone and a radio transmitter in the hands of a community organizer imparts power, which some liken to the life-changing impact when humans first tamed fire. That’s why the prospect of 1,000 new community radio stations in the United States, for which the Federal Communications Commission will accept applications this October, is so vital and urgent.

Workers toiling in the hot fields of south-central Florida, near the isolated town of Immokalee, were enduring conditions that U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy called “slavery, plain and simple.” Some worked from dawn to dusk, under the watch of armed guards, earning only $20 a week. Twenty years ago, they began organizing, forming the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Ten years later, working with the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Prometheus Radio Project, the workers started their own radio station, Radio Consciencia, to serve the farmworker community and inform, mobilize and help the struggling workers forge better lives.

As the largest media corporations on the planet have been consolidating during the past two decades, putting the power of the media in fewer hands, there has been a largely unreported flowering of small, local media outlets. An essential component of this sector is community radio, stations that have emerged from the Low-Power FM (LPFM) radio movement. This October, community groups in the U.S. will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to apply to the FCC for an LPFM radio-station license. But the mainstream media are hardly reporting on this critical development.

“This is a historic opportunity for communities all over the country to have a voice over their airwaves,” Jeff Rousset, national organizer of the Prometheus Radio Project, told me on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “The airwaves are supposed to belong to the public. This is a chance for groups to actually own and control their own media outlets.” The Prometheus Radio Project formed in 1998. It was named after the Greek mythological hero who first gave fire to humans to make their lives more bearable.

Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, “pirate” radio stations, unlicensed by the FCC, were launched in communities across the U.S. by people frustrated with the failures of the commercial and public media system, which was increasingly closed to the communities and seemingly beholden to corporate underwriters and interest groups. Harassed for their broadcasting efforts by federal agents, the pirates formed Prometheus, intent on changing the federal laws and opening the radio dial to a new generation of noncommercial, community-based stations. After 15 years of organizing, they won. Rousset said, “We’re going to turn static into sound and use that to amplify people’s voices all over the country.”

Read the rest of this column at Truthdig.org.

This Independence Day, Thank a Protester

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

More than 160 years ago, the greatest abolitionist in U.S. history, the escaped slave Frederick Douglass, addressed the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass asked those gathered, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” His words bear repeating this Independence Day, as the United States asserts unprecedented authority to wage war globally, to spy on everyone, everywhere. Independence Day should serve not as a blind celebration of the government, but as a moment to reflect on the central place in our history of grass-roots democracy movements, which have preserved and expanded the rights proclaimed in the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Douglass answered his question about the Fourth of July, to those gathered abolitionists: “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

Douglass not only denounced the hypocrisy of slavery in a democracy, but worked diligently to build the abolitionist movement. He fought for women’s suffrage as well. These were movements that have shaped the United States. The civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s set a permanent example of what can be achieved by grass-roots action, even in the face of systemic, violent repression.

Today, movements continue to shape our society. The trial of George Zimmerman, accused of murdering Trayvon Martin, would not be happening now in Florida were it not for a mass movement. Sparked by the seeming official indifference to the shooting death of yet another young, African-American male, nationwide protests erupted, leading to the appointment of a special prosecutor. A month and a half after Martin was killed, Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder.

Read the rest of this column at Truthdig.org.