Larry Flynt's Blog, page 11

Making Enemies

INSIDE THE FBI’S TERROR FACTORY

Interview by Mark Johnson

In the wake of the Boston bombings, a disturbing fact is being obscured: The FBI actually creates more terror plots than it cracks.

You may not see it much on the news, but the FBI doesn’t only get involved in major terrorist events after they happen—in many cases it’s there at the very beginning. Government agents have been running sting operations, providing supposedly dangerous dupes with everything from motive to means. Investigative reporter Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, reveals that while the agency is busy collaborating with criminals and ensnaring innocent citizens to justify its budgets, real threats are being ignored.

HUSTLER: Your book came out just before the Boston Marathon bombings. Did that event damage your argument or vindicate it?

TREVOR AARONSON: The Boston case really gets at the question I answer in the book: What has the FBI been missing while it’s been so focused on sting operations? The Boston case suggests that real threats like the Tsarnaevs are going unnoticed.

Is there any likelihood that an FBI informant was involved in that case?

Anything I would say on that would be speculative, but the family has said that Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s contact with the FBI lasted for long periods of time. It’s not unusual for the FBI to approach a Muslim, realize that he is not a threat and then try to recruit him as an informant. Whether or not Tamerlan was ever an informant, the FBI claims publicly that they investigated him in January 2011, and he wasn’t a threat. That’s where they say officially that their tracking of him stopped.

In that same month they had Rezwan Ferdaus on their radar. This was a guy who came to their attention through a heroin-addicted informant paid by the FBI.

Ferdaus allegedly told him this story of how he had a plan to load a remotecontrolled airplane with explosives and fly it into the U.S. Capitol. Obviously the idea was pat ently ridiculous, but what was even worse was the fact that Ferdaus didn’t have any means of doing this plot on his own. He had no money. He had no access to weapons. He was just a loud-mouthed miscreant.

Instead of pursuing Tamerlan Tsarnaev in January 2011, the FBI decided to launch this sting operation against Ferdaus. They had the informant introduce two undercover agents to Ferdaus who were posing as al-Qaeda operatives. They said, “We can help you make your plan possible,” and gave him $4,000, which he used to purchase a remote-controlled airplane. They then paid for a trip to Washington, where he scouted out locations. Then in the final stage they gave him explosives and C4 for the bomb.

At that point they arrest Rezwan Ferdaus and charge him with conspiracy to destroy a federal building and material support for terrorism. He had no capacity for committing an act of terrorism on his own. It was the FBI informant and under cover agents that gave him everything he needed. This guy, in FBI parlance, was far “more aspirational than operational” and yet they spent all of these FBI resources investigating him.That same month they reportedly said of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, “No, he’s not a threat; let’s not worry about him.”

The FBI also missed Faisal Shahzad, who delivered a bomb to Times Square in 2010. It didn’t go off, but what was amazing is the FBI didn’t know a thing about him until he delivered that bomb.

Why does the FBI operate this way when it’s not working?

One of the things they say is: If you’re an FBI agent, and you get a tip that this guy says he wants to commit an act of terrorism, you don’t want to be the FBI agent who says let’s let him mature out of it, then in six months discover that he actually found out a way to get a bomb, delivered it to a shopping mall and killed innocent people.

But this is really a bureaucratic problem. The FBI now gets $3 billion for its counterterrorism program. It’s the largest part of its budget. So the FBI has to find a way to say, “Hey, look at us. We’re spending your money and keeping you safe.” The evidence shows that the threat really isn’t there. The sting operations are really only netting these guys who never have the capacity, never have the weapons, never have the plan; in some cases they never even have the idea.

There’s a case, for example, in Newburgh, New York, right outside of New York City. They ran this sting operation on a man with a history of mental illness named James Cromitie and gave him the idea for the attack. He was going to plant bombs at a synagogue in the Bronx and use a Stinger missile that would take down airplanes taking off from the local airport. The FBI would provide everything he needed: the Stinger missiles, the transportation, the bombs, everything.

About halfway through the sting operation they became concerned that Cromitie would wise up and back out. If he backed out, they wouldn’t have any charges they could bring. They realized Cromitie was a felon. He’d gone to jail earlier in life for selling crack cocaine, and if they could get him with a gun, they’d have a backup felony gun charge if the sting fell apart.

The informant gives Cromitie $500 and says, “Go to New York City and buy a gun.” Cromitie spends the whole evening searching around for someone that he could buy a gun from and isn’t able to find anyone—isn’t able to buy a gun in New York City! He comes back to the informant and says, “Sorry. I couldn’t get a gun. Here’s your money back.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller testified before Congress, describing what a great danger James Cromitie would have been had he been able to move forward in his terrorist plot. But the same man that the FBI director describes to Congress as being dangerous is the man who with $500 in his pocket couldn’t even buy a gun. How dangerous can a terrorist be when left to his own devices he can’t buy a Saturday Night Special in New York City?

Who are these informants?

Average people who live standup lives don’t make good informants, so the FBI ends up having to use people who have criminal records. Take Shahed Hussain. This was a man who fled Pakistan because he had been accused of murder and comes to the United States. He was running a number of scams, one of which was working with DMV employees to help illegal immigrants get driver’s licenses so they could become cabbies in New York City. When he got caught, they converted him into an informant. Most of the informants who act as agents provocateur for the FBI have some really colorful pasts, including drug-dealing, robbing tollbooths and very violent crimes.

There was a recent case in Seattle that targeted a man who had schizoaffective disorder, which meant he had trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy, which obviously made him very easy to be manipulated. The informant who targeted him was a five-time sex offender with a history of child molestation! The most odious man you could possibly imagine had then been hired by the FBI to move forward in the sting operation.

How many FBI terror plots do we know about?

Since 9/11 there have been approximately 175 defendants who have been caught in sting operations where the FBI provided the means and opportunity—and in some cases the idea—for the crime. When you compare that to people who actually pose a significant danger, it’s jawdroppingly low. There are about seven, if you count the Tsarnaev brothers, who posed a significant threat. Since 9/11 there are still far more people killed by lone gunmen like we saw in Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut, than there have been people killed by Islamic terrorists.

If the FBI were to go into areas where there are groups of white supremacists and offered people the opportunity to commit violence in the same way it offers the people in the fringes of Muslim communities to commit violence, you would find those same people who would say yes. The problem is the FBI doesn’t do that.

Don’t the serious guys know what the game is by now so they can avoid it?

I’ve heard the joke a number of times from Muslims that when they pray on Friday, they just assume the guy next to them is an informant. The Tsarnaevs did appear to be bumblers, but they were sophisticated enough to put together a bomb. That means that they were smart enough not to go to the mosque and start talking about how they wanted to get involved in an act of terrorism and engage an informant who leads them along. The really dangerous guys aren’t likely to fall for a simple trap.

How much money does an informant make?

You can make six-figure paydays plus expenses and have your phone paid for. Shahed Hussain, the accused murderer from Pakistan, was paid $100,000 for his work in the Newburgh case. That’s in addition to a performance incentive, which is a set amount of money that an informant will make upon the successful prosecution of a defendant. Agents have told me those can be tens of thousands of dollars as well. So a good informant on an individual case that may last four to six months is making $100,000 plus maybe another $30,000 to $40,000 in performance incentives. You do that a couple of times a year, and you’re making serious money.

These are men that because of their backgrounds aren’t likely to make a lot of money in the free market. So the FBI gig is really about as good as it gets. What’s concerning from a justice perspective is that they have a direct financial incentive in prosecutions. They’re not looking for the person who is going to pose a danger; they’re looking for the next sucker that they can get in a terrorism sting operation because they know that means money for them.

How do these cases stand up in court? Isn’t it entrapment?

Any entrapment defense is hard to win because it requires you to go to the jury and say, “You know, I committed that crime, but I wouldn’t have been able to do it were it not for the government agent overpowering my will.” In terrorism cases 11 people have formally argued entrapment as a result of a sting, and none has been successful. The government has been very successful in putting on the stand government experts with dubious credentials who will testify about how “this defendant watched a militant jihadi video produced by al-Qaeda and known to help with the self-radicalization process, so this man was radicalized before the government agent was introduced.”

One government expert named Evan Kohlmann gets paid to testify about how people self-radicalize just by watching jihadi videos. What’s ridiculous is I’ve watched jihadi videos, you have, your readers probably have—they’re on the news. There isn’t this huge rash of terrorists who come out after watching jihadi videos.

The other issue is that because the government controls the whole sting, they could choose to make it a minor crime. They could give the guy a gun and say, “Shoot this man in the kneecap in the name of jihad,” but they don’t. They give him a huge sophisticated bomb that even an organized criminal organization would have trouble obtaining and get him to unleash it in a downtown area where if it were real, it would kill hundreds, if not thousands of people. The jury hears that, and it overwhelms whatever empathy they could have for the defendant.

The FBI measures its success through cases and prosecutions. If they can prosecute somebody and find him guilty, in the FBI’s view this is a successful policy. There was a case in Portland Oregon, that involved an impressionable 19-year-old man who got involved in a plot to bomb a Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony. At his trial it came out that there was an email from inside the FBI where they talked about how because this guy was a loser and smoked marijuana, he was very susceptible to their advances, to getting involved in a plot. An email like that suggests that the FBI’s number-one focus isn’t so much on figuring out who’s dangerous and then going after those guys. The FBI is interested in making a case that can make careers and get you promoted.

What red flags should honest people look out for so they don’t get caught up in these stings?

Informants usually fit a pattern. They tend to be overly obsessed with talking about inflammatory subjects or U.S. foreign policy, and they’re always the first one to take the conversation beyond “this is messed up” to “what are you going to do about it?”

Everyone’s allowed to have extremist views in the United States. Nothing has stopped the First Amendment. But the FBI is using the First Amendment almost as a tip sheet. They will find people who post extremist things on Facebook and use an informant to target that person. There are actually very few people in this country going around advocating violence. So if someone comes up to you and is trying to incite you to try to get into some sort of violent act for a political cause, there’s a good chance that’s an FBI informant.

Justin Bieber

The time has come to celebrate. The international nightmare known as Justin Bieber has entered self-destruction mode. By the time you read this, there’s at least a 50-50 chance this talentless pile of wuss will be dead, maimed, jailed, held in a basement by crazed adolescent lesbians or crucified by hordes of Beliebers for changing his fucking hairstyle. Even atheists should start praying he circles the drain swifter than Lindsay Lohan on her way to BevMo.

But wait a second. Why do we give a shit? Because in this apparently meaningless phenomenon, there’s a dire warning: Our country is now populated by infantile drones. Quality is dying. What matters is how well you can hit the lowest-common- denominator, two-dimensional image and make the idiocracy piss away a million dollars a minute.

This Auto-Tuned asswipe is currently the entertainment industry’s premier profit whore, despite the fact that—according to a Public Policy Polling survey—a solid majority of Americans actively hate him. “Haters are just confused admirers,” Bieber retorts. We must be very, very confused.

But majority opinion doesn’t matter because Bieber heads a greed-driven promo machine of musical pedophiles. They tap into the pliant minds and emotions of young girls, exploiting their natural insecurities along with the nascent fantasies that the poor kids don’t yet know have zero to do with reality.

Wait, you say, don’t smut peddlers do the same thing? No, we prey on pathetic grown men. That’s why it’s called adult entertainment. Adults have legal decision-making power. Why should underaged girls get to decide what gets shoved down our collective cultural throats?!

If you think something like Ass-to-Mouth Whores From Planet Cumguzzle is disgusting, try listening to Bieber crap like “Baby” or “Rich Girl” all the way through. The vomit will project from your belly like a ballistic missile headed for North Korea—a place, incidentally, Bieber knows all about: “Whatever they have in Korea, that’s bad,” he’s said. When drugs and stupidity finally deep-six his career, he can always host a show on Fox News.

Which brings us to the best reason to hate Justin Bieber: He’s a Ted Nugent in training wheels. As his testicles drop, so does his IQ. Already a Jesus freak, to the point of tattooing the phony savior on his leg (always classy), he’s also thrown in with the gaybashers, pro-lifers and rape apologists. “Everything happens for a reason,” squawks the Christian parrot. The subject gave birth to a classic Bieberism: “I don’t really believe in abortion. It’s like killing a baby.” That one no doubt prompted a sweaty booty call from Pat Robertson.

Speaking of failed abortions, there is a reason to let the kid off the hook: his fame pimping mom, Pattie Mallette. She likes to brag that she refused to abort Bieber. But like most white-trash pro-lifers, her parenting skills were dead on arrival. Did the kid have a chance to not be trash?

“Baby,” coincidentally, was Bieber’s first monster hit. Let’s speculate on the psychological buttons that song pushed. Even more than they do his music, his Beliebers love him. They’d chop off their limbs for him and bleed out blissfully as he rifled through their pockets. Why? Do his hordes of teen fans fantasize about being knocked up with a Bieber baby that would tie them to him forever? Or is he the baby millions of Beliebers have already aborted and feel guilty about as they huddle in the corners of their pain and reread their Twilight books?

Whatever the sad fantasy, one thing is certain: He’s an empty thing to project their pathetic needs onto—like a pet rock but with less talent. As any con man can tell you, preying on shriveled dreams is a frickin’ gold mine.

But like most buttholes that get used up and blown out too fast, Biebs the person is starting to rebel against Biebs the commodity. Nearly every tab loid move he makes these days is a blatant effort to pull the escape hatch.

No. 1, he adopted a monkey— a more evolved creature than most of his fans—apparently to prove he’s on the Michael Jackson fast track to Whackoville.

Exhibit 2: Bieber has been leadfooting his cars down L.A.’s already deadly freeways in an apparent attempt to show that if James Dean could merge his body with metal at the height of his fame, so can he. He even roars around his gated community, nearly mowing down the local brats. When his neighbors confront him, he allegedly spits at them like a meth freak on bath salts. Hulking ex-NFL wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson even chased the Biebs down—raising hopes that the Canadian curse would be shipped back home in a body bag. Sadly, Biebs ran into his house like a little bitch and locked all the doors.

Thirdly, Biebs the moneybot has been malfunctioning. He shows up late for shows or cancels, ends up passing out or puking when he does show up, has sudden freakouts at photographers, and pals around with a black kid so he can blame everything on him. (That last bit he learned from Lohan.)

At press time the Biebs was trying to blast himself into space by jumping onboard the Virgin Galactic. How obvious could it be? The kid wants out. Bieber is aware that Bieber has become a colossal asshole, and to escape Bieber, Bieber may have to kill him.

Alas, we suspect the nice youngster from Ontario is already dead, consumed by the overgroomed, swaggerized narcissist that carries his name.

It’s just a matter of time before what’s left pulls a Britney Spears, shaves his head and descends into total incoherence. Not even that would be original, but it would be better than Bieber releasing any more so-called albums. All hail the downward spiral. Short of going back in time and convincing Pattie to have that abortion after all, it’s our only hope.

They Can Follow You Everywhere

GOOGLE AND UNCLE SAM CONTINUE THEIR RELENTLESS ASSAULT ON PERSONAL PRIVACY.

by Nat Hentoff

I’ve previously mentioned my gratitude to Google for its swift and verifiable answers to my research questions. But the Silicon Valley leviathan is increasingly a menace to what’s left of our privacy.

Now being developed is Google Glass, a controversial glasses-like device that “allows users to access the Internet, take photos and film short snippets,” reported David Streitfeld in a New York Times story. “Glass is promoted by Google as ‘seamless and empowering.’ It will have the ability to capture any chance encounter…and broadcast it to millions in seconds.”

Feel a little clammy?

So does HUSTLER contributor Robert Scheer. In a TruthDig.com post titled “Google’s Spy masters Are Now Worried About Your Secrets” he wrote: “Every time there is a so-called terrorist attack on American soil, pressure to ramp up the reach of our increasingly omnipresent surveillance state spikes, sweeping ever-larger numbers of people and more intimate information concerning their lives into national databases.”

Where’s the indignation among the citizenry? Fear of terrorists has conditioned us to ditch the Fourth Amendment.

Scheer continued: “These technological invasions of our privacy serve to undermine the bold assertion of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that the protection of personal, private space is essential to the freedom of the individual.”

Did you wave goodbye?

Quoted by Scheer are lofty Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who coauthored the Wall Street Journal article “The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution.” Ever heard of biometric information? In their words, it “can be used to identify individuals through their unique physical and biological attributes…. With cloud computing, it takes just seconds to compare millions of faces…. By indexing our biometric signatures, some governments will try to track our every move and word, both physically and digitally.”

Meanwhile, corporations like Google can collect data on what we buy and increase profits by selling it to third parties.

Schmidt defended Google’s data-sharing in 2009 when, as its CEO, he told CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, “If you have something you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

I don’t expect Google Glass to be mentioned much, if at all, in upcoming national, state and local elections. Maybe Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a Democrat who remains loyal to the bedraggled Constitution, or Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky will remind us that the American Revolution began simmering in part because the colonists were enraged by British customs agents raiding their offices and homes without warrants, just as the FBI does now habitually.

Along with privacy, this ceaselessly voracious technology is taking from us our most effective weapon against an ever more enveloping police state: free speech. Tucked into David Streitfeld’s peek at Google Glass was a keen observation by Bradley Shear, an expert on social media at George Washington University: “Google Glass will test the right to privacy versus the First Amendment.”

Google Glass and potentially more effective destroyers of individual privacy continue to surpass our wildest imaginations. How many of us could have even conceived of a high-speed, übercomprehensive search engine, much less Google Glass, 20 years ago? And how many protesting journalists, Constitution-defending politicians and outraged citizens will be able to withstand the scrutiny of their private lives by the likes of Google and Barack Obama and the tech-savvy villains following in their footsteps?

I insist that this country’s best chance to again become a self-governing Constitutional republic is if more and more teachers are willing to stand up to tyranny and the invasion of privacy. They will enable new generations of voters to fully understand what it is to be a free American in charge of their government.

The true America has survived the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and later the Civil War, including Lincoln’s violation of his northern opponents’ civil liberties; the first Red Scare and J. Edgar Hoover; the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War; anti-Communist zealot Joe McCarthy’s 1950s witch-hunt; and it is surviving terrorism.

But will America survive what Google Glass portends it will become?

Dangerous Powers

A KEY SENATE COMMITTEE QUESTIONS THE PRESIDENT’S AUTHORITY TO BYPASS CONGRESS IN THE WAR ON TERROR.

by Robert Scheer

Finally, even that old hawk John McCain woke up to the fact that Congress had betrayed its Constitutional obligation after 9/11 by granting President George W. Bush and those who’d come after him unlimited executive power to take the nation to war. In panic over the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, what had seemed like a good idea in 2001 has been interpreted by Presidents Bush and Obama as authorization for a never-ending war against terrorism, free of any Congressional oversight.

In May of this year the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing where highranking Defense Department officials asserted that the United States could wage war anywhere and anytime the president desired.

In response, Senator McCain (R-Arizona) warned: “This authority…is no longer applicable to the conditions that prevailed, that motivated the United States Congress to pass the authorization for the use of military force that we did in 2001. For you to come here and say we don’t need to change it or revise or update it, I think is, well, disturbing.”

What McCain was referring to was the fact that he and almost everyone else in Congress caught in the grip of post-9/11 hysteria had hastily voted to betray the essential wisdom of the separation of powers enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Without any serious debate over the historic consequences, the House of Representatives and Senate approved the “Authorization for Use of Military Force.” Basically a blank check, the 60-word paragraph stated: “That the president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

With that mandate, Congress destroyed the wall between the executive and legislative branches that the authors of the Constitution had so prudently enshrined in Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, which reserves to Congress the power “to declare War.” The president’s duty as commander-in-chief is to conduct that war and not to decide whether it should be undertaken.

But this past May, McCain and his colleagues were rudely reminded of the awesome power they had surrendered to the president as the aforementioned Defense Department officials calmly affirmed the obvious reality that President Barack Obama was no more obligated than George W. Bush to seek Congressional permission before taking the nation to war. The senators seemed genuinely shocked to be told of the consequences of Congress’s irresponsible action 12 years earlier.

The abrupt moment of truth for McCain and others at that Senate committee hearing came when Pentagon officials told the senators that the “Authorization for Use of Military Force” allowed the United States to now invade Syria or any other spot on the globe where the president could claim that terrorists were active.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) had a question for Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of Defense who oversees special operations: “Would you agree with me, the battle field is anywhere the enemy chooses to make it?”

Not mincing his words, Sheehan replied, “Yes, sir, from Boston to FATA [Pakistan's federally administered tribal areas].” He went on to testify that this power to intervene anywhere without Congressional approval would be needed for “at least ten to 20 years.”

“This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here,” bristled Maine’s independent Senator Angus King. “You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today. … Under your reading, we’ve granted unbelievable powers to the president, and it’s a very dangerous precedent.”

Dangerous indeed, as an almost-unanimous Congress should have realized when, blindly surrendering to fear, our nation’s law makers—including John McCain—thoughtlessly subverted the core meaning of the Constitution that they had solemnly pledged to uphold. It is time for Congress to make amends by annulling that dangerous carte-blanche authorization before a president takes us into the next dumb war.

Don’t Be Ashamed

The recent trend of firing teachers for previously working in the adult industry or posing nude is outrageous. One of them, Olivia Sprauer, was even canned for just being a swimsuit model. This kind of policy belongs to the era of sexual repression, not the 21st century. It’s time to keep backward morality out of the classroom.

I would not want anyone who modeled or performed for my magazines, movies or websites to ever regret it or be later punished for it. Adult work is legitimate work. Performers and models contribute to the economy and pay taxes like everyone else. They should not have to endure a backlash for the rest of their lives as a result of an activity that was fully legal and victimless.

As for the charge that a teacher’s “questionable” past or moonlighting job interferes with their work, no one has been able to show that there is anything about modeling or performing that prevents a person from being a capable teacher. In fact, that kind of life experience may even make them better at their jobs.

Besides the injustice, there’s the hypocrisy. Erotic entertainment is everywhere, and everyone watches it. You can bet that the people who boot these teachers out are the same ones who get off on the photos and movies they claim to condemn.

I applaud the fired teachers who go to court to get their jobs back. It’s a tough battle, but they are helping to establish a body of legal precedent that will eventually put a stop to this kind of discrimination.

Ken Cuccinelli

What kind of absolute, total asshole tries to outlaw blowjobs? This one does. With his recent attempt to reinstate Virginia’s throwback “Crimes Against Nature” law, the state’s attorney general has once and for all declared himself the mortal enemy of all men. If Ken “The Cooch” Cuccinelli had his way, there’d be no oral sex, no anal, no handjobs, no anything that doesn’t result in a God-fearing baby. Hell, he’d probably even outlaw those “VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS” bumper stickers. But here’s the really bad news for Virginians: This anti-sex goon is trying to be your next governor.

The Cooch’s recent effort to suck all the fun out of his state came after his prosecutors failed to nail a 47-year-old dude who asked a 17-yearold girl to blow him. They ignored the obvious charge of attempted statutory rape and instead tried to dust off the state’s musty, crusty sodomy law since it would slap the old creeper with a rock-hard felony rather than just a limp misdemeanor. The U.S. Appeals Court—which exists in the 21st century—rendered a smackdown. The Cooch stepped in to stiffen up his cherished sodomy law. The court had to again slowly spell out unconstitutional for him.

That case involved a man and a girl, but Cuccinelli claims his war on penis-polishing is aimed at gays. He’s so afraid of another man falling onto his dick that he’s willing to ban any kind of sex that doesn’t involve a vagina. “My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong,” he crows. What the fuck does that mean? It’s okay to be gay as long as you keep it bottled up until your balls explode? Can any straight dude ever imagine saying, “I sure do love the ladies, but I ain’t ever gonna fuck one”?

Cuccinelli has tried before to turn his obsessive cock blocking into legal precedent. In 2010 he spouted an official—and failed—recommendation that Virginia’s public colleges and universities not include sexual orientation and gender identity in their nondiscrimination policy. What’s next? Straight-only water fountains?

Let’s be clear about this: The idea of men fucking each other makes a lot of guys nauseous. But there’s a big difference between not wanting to think about it too much and Cuccinelli trying to turn his homophobia into state-sponsored hate. Consenting adults should be able to fuck whomever they want and not have to be treated like second-class citizens for it. This is America, Kenny, not Saudi Arabia or Botswana or some damn place.

According to The Cooch, the kind of blow jobs he can’t stop picturing “don’t comport with natural law.” The irony here is that Ken “Crimes Against Nature” Cuccinelli has already demonstrated louder and longer than a goose in heat that he doesn’t know shit about nature.

Take his positions on global warming and pollution, which boldly display his ignorance that even Virginians need fresh air, water and a lack of hurricanes to live. Like a blustering Tea Party sock puppet, Cuccinelli plugs his ears and hollers blah, blah, blah at any mention of the Environmental Protection Agency.

He claimed the EPA “falsified data” in an attempt to drive Virginia’s “economy into the ground.” Why would the EPA would want to do that? Cuccinelli’s not clear on that, but he’s darn sure it has something to do with that black man in the White House, the one who also dared to raise fuel-efficiency standards in line with the Clean Air Act. (We won’t even bother to go into The Cooch’s flirts with birtherism and his war on Obamacare. It’s the same old racist, obstructionist Tea Party claptrap.)

We can already hear Ken braying in objection: He’s not anti-environment; he’s against the government telling free enterprise what to do! Unfortunately, that’s more Teabag ger lip service. Taken as a whole, Cuccinelli’s collective crusades reveal him as a typical rightwing ideologue who cares more about his imaginary wishworld than reality.

No one knows that better than Virginia’s scientists. They’ve had The Cooch up their asses for so long, the state is now suffering a brain drain. Abusing his legal power to carry out a witch-hunt against climate researchers, Cuccinelli embarked on a long campaign to discredit the University of Virginia’s former assistant professor Mich – ael Mann, along with his colleagues, on the basis of the state’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. The Cooch’s claims of phony data were ruled vague and unwarranted—unlike Mann’s precise, peer-reviewed work. According to Kenny’s logic, climate change is a giant scam cooked up by crafty eggheads to milk taxpayers out of all that sweet funding cash.

The scam theory is one of Kenny’s most pervasive and insidious themes. In his recent manifesto The Last Line of Defense, The Cooch vilifies all forms of assistance and funding as no better than theft and subsidized addiction. Medicare is “despicable,” welfare is “unconstitutional,” and covering healthcare needs specific to women is like being forced to pay for “kumquats.” In Virginia, being a donkey’s ass won’t necessarily lose you an election, but Cuccinelli’s bag-of-hammers approach to women’s issues just might.

While the attorney general was at it, he decided to piss all over the minority vote as well. Not only did he openly oppose the federal government’s lawsuit against Arizona’s “show me your papers” law, he also tried to authorize Virginia cops to ask anyone they stop to prove their legal status. The one good thing about Kenny is that he’s a useful blueprint of what’s unfixable about the Republican Party.

Virginia’s state Senate Democratic leader, Richard Saslaw, summed up Cuccinelli: “He was Tea Party before there was a Tea Party.” And what if he gets elected governor? “The state is screwed,” Saslaw said with a fine choice of words.

Obviously, there’s only one good way to use Cuccinelli’s beloved “Crimes Against Nature” law: to stop him from sodomizing Virginia.

Jazz Is Still Kickin’

MOST AMERICANS DIG OTHER KINDS OF MUSIC, BUT THE ONE SYMBOLIZING FREEDOM WILL NEVER BE SILENCED.

by Nat Hentoff

I began reporting on jazz and knowing its key players in the late 1940s, also learning life lessons from them ever since. Tenor saxophonist Ben Webster advised, “Listen, kid, when the rhythm section ain’t making it, go for yourself!” I’ve done that in hassles with editors and wives.

Obituaries for my favorite musical genre began when rock overran jazz’s popular big-band period (Benny Goodman, et al), and they keep marching on. Benjamin Schwarz recently added one in The Atlantic: “The End of Jazz: How America’s Most Vibrant Music Became a Relic.”

Such a relic that jazz combos are still booked around the world. For example—I kid you not—in Siberia. Meanwhile, Jazz Times magazine reported that UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has “officially designated International Jazz Day…to highlight jazz and its diplomatic role of uniting people in all corners of the globe every April 30.” As jazz legend Duke Ellington (1899-1974) marveled, “The music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.”

So how come these grimly misinformed obituaries keep blowing clinkers only in America? “Kids here just aren’t interested in this music anymore,” they lament, “so its audience keeps on dwindling.”

Really? There are more and more high school jazz bands nationwide, and many of them participate in the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington support program and annual competition. Among those impressing the judges is the jazz band at my alma mater, Boston Latin School.

When I attended BLS in the 1940s, jazz was never mentioned and certainly never performed. During a visit there many years later, I delighted in its band’s swinging rendition of Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” Later I told the young musicians that Duke would have been very pleased. They were stunned that I was so old, I had actually known the jazz icon.

And I was stunned at what I heard at the 2012 Mingus High School Competition & Festival at New York City’s Manhattan School of Music. I had been told by established jazz musicians that Charles Mingus’s repertoire would be too difficult for high school jazz bands to play. Well, they not only wowed me but also John Thomas Dodson, conductor of the Adrian (Michigan) Symphony Orchestra.

After one band went lights out with “Haitian Fight Song” and “Better Git It in Your Soul,” Dodson posted on his Mingus Lives blog: “I’m guessing that many of the high-school students had never even heard of Charles Mingus before they began to work their minds, ears and instruments around his music. By now, his work has become a part of them.”

I advise the authors of jazz obituaries to also wake up to Jazz House Kids in Montclair, New Jersey. As noted on its website, this community based organization “provides the framework for students to cultivate the talent, discipline, skills and principles they need to play, sing and appreciate America’s original musical art form.” Mike Lee, head of music instruction at Jazz House Kids, notes that some of its most advanced student musicians “range in age from nine to a grand old 12.” Too young for obituaries?

Since my three lifelong vocations are education, jazz and the Constitution, I’ll proudly mention my kinship with the late jazz percussionist and composer Max Roach. In 1960, as the civil rights movement was gaining momentum, I was A&R director at Candid Records when it released his album We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite. “You write a lot about the Constitution,” Max told me years ago. “So ours are individual [jazz] voices listening intently to all the other voices. That’s how the Constitution works.”

Whether or not We the People still have a living Constitution after Bush and Cheney and, more damagingly, Obama, I have many immor tal reasons to rejoice: Max Roach, Duke Elling ton, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sidney Bechet, James Moody, Billie Holiday and all the other creators of the spirit-lifting, thought-provoking life force this country has given the world.

Even if jazz, like our personal liberties, becomes another casualty of Americans’ apathy, this freedom music will keep on living around the globe anyway. As Sidney Bechet told me, “You can’t keep this music down wherever it wants to go.”

Stalkers Paradise

PERSONAL INFO IS EASIER THAN EVER TO DIG UP—AND IT JUST MIGHT BE TOTALLY ERRONEOUS TO BOOT!

by Robert Scheer

The snoopers are our new best friends? Unbelievable but true when, for the first time in human history, it is the norm for people to volunteer to be spied upon. Folks eagerly pay for the very apps that betray their privacy with a ruthless efficiency unmatched by the most oppressive tyrants of old.

The secret agents of a Hitler or Stalin were limited to monitoring people’s mail, eavesdropping on the telephone or clumsily tailing suspects they wanted to get the goods on. But that’s primitive junk-snooping by the standards of today’s surveillance state. Now people willingly authorize the use of their location and trigger access to every movement, purchase and conversation to any corporation or government agency that cares to “mine” their data, along with information from the rest of the world’s population.

Whereas in the past the files of a dictator’s Gestapo were barely read and almost impossible to collate as they gathered dust under lock and key, today’s data searches are conducted with a speed and thoroughness that defies comprehension. The movie you watched, your thoughts about its content posted on Facebook, the dialogue it provoked among friends—including the most intimate or wildest thought any of them have on any subject from the political to the pornographic—are instantly and permanently revealed to just about anyone curious enough to inquire.

The revolution in information technology has left in its wake a stalkers paradise. The sanctity of self has been rendered nonexistent, and the very idea of the individual as an independent entity exploring life in private is an endangered species.

Although we kind of know that we are all under a totally invasive microscope, we soothe any incipient anxiety with the rationalization that the supercomputer searches only zero in on the bad guys and never innocent folks like us. When one of the evildoers gets caught, we cheer wildly and marvel at the technology that made it possible, never thinking that it is a privacy-destroying weapon that could easily target saints like ourselves.

That was my first reaction when I read about how a prosecutor in Pasadena, California, was able to sift through 30 billion files in order to track the movement of a murder suspect. That means law-enforcement agencies can easily sift through as massive a database to nail you on any allegation even if you are never charged, let alone convicted, of a crime.

An exaggeration you say? Hardly, as the New York Times recently made crystal clear. In a story looking at how data-mining is affecting all aspects of our lives, it divulged that “retailers across the country have helped amass vast databases of workers accused of stealing, and are using that information to keep employees from working again in the industry.”

The operative word is accused, but as the Times reported, those accusations can be of the flimsiest sort and “often contain scant details about suspected thefts and routinely do not involve criminal charges. Still, the information can be enough to scuttle a job candidate’s chances. Some of the employees, who submit written statements after being questioned by store security officers, have no idea that they admitted committing a theft or that the information will remain in databases.”

Permanent databases are as easily searched as they are prone to error. Files containing the groundless suspicion of a hostile supervisor that you might have shoplifted can be combined with a friend’s Instagram photos from your long-ago bachelor party, an overdue credit card bill, medical records, divorce proceedings and adolescent ramblings about a horrendous first date you can’t even remember posting somewhere on the Internet, all of which present to the world a creepy view of you that you are unaware is in circulation and that needs to be corrected.

This is all because we have no laws protecting your private data from being widely disseminated without your “opt-in” permission to share such personal information across infinite platforms. When you granted permission to a computer prompt to “use your location,” all you wanted was the hint of a good restaurant nearby. For that you squandered the right to dine, and think, in private. Surely the sacred right to privacy deserves better legal protection than that.

Hands Off Social Security

For those of us who took President Obama’s pledges of “hope” and “change” seriously, his administration has been a disappointment. But few of his concessions have been as painful as his recent budget proposal to cut Social Security benefits by lowering cost-of-living adjustments. The new measure—dubbed the Chained Consumer Price Index—would hit the most vulnerable people in the country, our seniors. The ranks of the retired have paid into the system their whole lives. Shafting them now is wrong.

Obama’s bad call makes him the first President to propose cutting Social Security benefits to seniors since the program was founded in 1935. Not even Republican Presidents have gone that far. The Social Security Act was a direct response to the disproportionate suffering of seniors and the disabled during the Great Depression. It is one of the greatest milestones to progress. We, as a society, recognized that the weaker among us should not be abandoned, that we have a responsibility to take care of them. That responsibility is not up for negotiation. Contrary to the hard right’s propaganda, Social Security is not socialism. It is a common-sense, capitalist strategy: Keep the entire population financially stable, and you keep the economy strong.

It is true that the population is getting older, and the economic burden is growing. However, the solution is not to cut benefits but to increase revenue. If the wealth class in this country were taxed fairly, the government’s budget problems would disappear. Let’s hope that by the time you read this, President Obama will have come to his senses and taken Social Security off the table for good.

Deadly Cycle

HOW VIOLENCE THRIVES IN THE MIDDLE EAST

by Simone Wilson, reporting from Israel and Gaza

It’s one of the world’s most elusive holy grails: lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. From a distance the conflict seems absurd. But for the people who live it day to day, the reasons are as real as life and death. As deadly exchanges again flare up, our reporter explores why the emotional wounds on both sides refuse to heal.

The bombs over the Gaza Strip—a small stretch of Mediterranean scrubland along the western coast of Israel, about one-third the size of Los Angeles—often seem to materialize from thin air. In seconds an Israeli F-16 has swooped down over its target, let go its missile with a gut-splitting noise and opened up the earth below into a thunderous well of smoke, flames and flying concrete. After the boom, it takes the people on the ground a few moments to realize if they’re dead or alive—if the guy who was sitting next to them is now on the floor with a shard of glass through his skull, or if the sounds of bloody hysteria are coming from farther off, somewhere across war-torn Gaza City.

“It’s like you’re dying in every second,” says Khader al- Kurdi. The 21-year-old college student has lived through four wars and many more small conflicts, the most recent of which stretched over one week in November 2012, leaving over 150 Gazans lifeless under the rubble. But the worst of the violence, recalls al-Kurdi, came in the winter of 2008 when Israel launched Operation Cast Lead. Tanks and soldiers roved the streets and F-16s bombed from above, killing about 1,400 Gazans in three weeks of fighting. The experience “charged me with hate toward Israel,” says al-Kurdi.

RECURRING NIGHTMARE

Just a few miles off, in southern Israeli towns such as Sderot and the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council (a collection of liberal farming communes called kibbutzim), civilians have 15 to 45 seconds to find a bomb shelter at the first scream of an air-raid siren.

As residents brace for one of Gaza’s homemade Qassam rockets to hit, these slow-motion moments of pain anticipation are their own special brand of torture. “When there’s an alarm, and all the kids are outside, they’re running just like ants,” says a sixth-grade teacher at Sha’ar Hanegev Elementary School. “In a few seconds the field is empty. It’s like a trigger. They’re all programmed to be playing and happy and dancing and skipping, and within one second they switch into emergency mode.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) estimates that Hamas—the U.S.- classified terrorist organization that rules Gaza—has hurled more than 8,000 rockets over the fence since Hamas took power in 2006, killing 60 and injuring hundreds more.

If a rocket isn’t intercepted by the IDF’s advanced “Iron Dome” airdefense system before coming to earth, its random trajectory ensures that no space is safe and no mind at ease. Windows explode, homes shake on their foundations, and shrapnel zings across the gardens of Sha’ar Hanegev’s many kibbutzim. “It looks like a big arrow with fire, and when it bombs, it blocks your ears,” says Gal, an 11-year-old student at Sha’ar Hanegev Elementary who recently saw a rocket fall in his grandma’s front yard. A rocket killed a young boy in the back of a Sha’ar Hanegev school bus in April 2011; and another killed community hero Jimmy Kdoshim, a father of three who was known to drop lollipops to local kids as he flew over the farmland on his parachute.

The children of Sderot and Sha’ar Hanegev have heard stories about terrorists getting loose from Gaza on foot too. “I have a recurring nightmare that a man in a keffiyeh [Arab headdress] breaks into the window and shoots me,” says Eliav, 11.

ULTIMATE ROADBLOCK

Kids on both sides, when instructed by their parents and headmasters to sit straight in their chairs and speak with the nice American journalist, recite that they don’t hate the people on the other side of the wall and that they only want peace. But it’s apparent that their mistrust for each other runs deep.

“We educate for peace and mediation and coexistence,” says Sha’ar Hanegev principal Anat Regev. “But here it’s not so simple because they were born into this situation. They’ve been bombed all the time. You cannot take it for granted that they will want peace.”

Yael Tzalka, an American teaching volunteer at a junior high in Rishon LeZion—which a Hamas rocket narrowly missed in November 2012—observes that “a lot of these kids are liberalminded but really fed up at the same time…. Some of them end up being like, ‘Just kill them all.’ They’re like, ‘Why do we have to go through terrorism?’”

A recent study showed that almost 45% of seventh- and eighth-graders in the Israeli border town of Sderot show signs of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to the constant threat of rockets. And in Gaza, researchers say the PTSD rate has shot up to almost 70% among high-school students who live in the region’s heavily bombed refugee camps.

Eyad El-Sarraj, one of Gaza’s most respected scholars and doctors, has described this endless cycle of psychological trauma as the ultimate roadblock to peace. After Operation Cast Lead he noted in a New York Times op-ed that “Palestinian children in the first intifadah [uprising] 20 years ago threw stones at Israeli tanks trying to wrest freedom from Israeli military occupation. Some of those children grew up to become suicide bombers in the second intifadah ten years later.” El-Sarraj added, “It does not take much to imagine the serious changes that will befall today’s children.”

ANGRIER GENERATION

Although they have likewise seen unthinkable war atrocities in their day, most elderly residents of Gaza and Israel—and those in the larger Palestinian West Bank—at least have a firsthand understanding of the enemy. They remember a time when Israelis and Palestinians worked alongside each other in factories, when they shook each other’s hands to close business deals, when a one-state solution didn’t sound like an absurd joke.

“We want to live in peace,” insists Gaza City resident Majed al-Kurdi, 49. “I want my son to be able to live, to work, to visit America and visit Israel.”

But his eldest son interjects. “No, I don’t want to,” says Khader. “He wants. I don’t. How can the place who stole your land give you peace? I don’t know how.”

With a few exceptions, historians and older residents in Israel and the two Palestinian territories agree that the younger generations are getting angrier—and, in effect, taking a more conservative attitude toward the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The wounds of Operation Cast Lead had hardly healed in Gaza—its children were still mourning their classmates, still playing in the rubble of bombed-out skeleton buildings—when Israel decided to “mow the lawn,” as conservatives have dubbed it, again in November 2012. (According to the IDF, the attack was in response to 100 Hamas rockets aimed at southern Israel over a 24-hour period.)

“I hate them,” says Ariel, an 11-year-old Israeli girl whose hometown of Be’er Sheva came under attack during the conflict. She compares the feeling of watching Hamas military commander Ahmed al-Jabari get blown up by an Israeli missile to the joy that Hansel and Gretel felt upon pushing the witch into the oven.

Adel, a clean-cut ten-year-old walking the streets of Gaza City, says he was friends with the al-Dalou family, who lost 11 members—including four children—when their home was turned into a massive crater by Israel during the 2012 operation. Asked if he could say one thing to the Israelis, Adel crosses his arms and declares, “I want to fight you.”

RIPPED TO SHREDS

Oftentimes the only interactions between Israeli and Palestinian youth are angry, impersonal exchanges over the Internet—where one’s humanity is reduced to a profile pic. “On social networks such as Facebook and YouTube, [Israelis] share their bad opinions, and I can read it and feel how they feel about us,” says Khader al-Kurdi.

In December 2012, when a young Israeli woman serving her mandatory time in the IDF shot Mohammed Salima at a checkpoint in the West Bank after the 17-year-old allegedly pulled a toy gun on a fellow border policeman, Palestinians and their supporters ripped her to shreds on the Internet. They passed around a link to her reported Facebook profile—which, like those of most women her age, was filled with duck faces and bikini shots—and labeled her a “terrorist,” “bitch,” “Zionist whore” and “child killer.”

Just days after the cease-fire, at a bar in Tel Aviv (Israel’s secondlargest and most modern city), a charismatic twentysomething wearing lit-up devil horns starts spitting Arabic like a party trick. His friends and observers snicker, calling it the “nigger language.” Probe another partygoer about the Gazan children who died during the 2012 conflict, and he’ll tell you that while they may look cute, in the end they’re just “suicide bombers in training.”

Over tea and coffee at her family’s home in Gaza City, 18-year-old Samar al-Kurdi—whose baby cousin was fatally crushed during Operation Cast Lead—asks, “How can I have an Israeli friend if the people in Israel hate the Palestinians?” Her little brother begins dancing around in the driveway, singing a popular new song from Egypt called “I Love Israel.” The ironically titled tune plots out various ways to destroy the land of the Jews—such as pouring gasoline on it or hanging it from a noose.

NATIONALISTIC EDUCATION

Psychologists have found that those exposed to war traumas often resort to simple, good-guy-bad-guy storytelling to make themselves feel better. “When you are being attacked, the main challenge of society is to cope with the situation,” says Dr. Eran Halperin, an Israeli professor who studies the causes of political extremism. “And the ultimate way to cope with the situation is to create a very, very clear and one-sided story to justify the fact that we have to be in this situation.”

Dr. Rony Berger, another Israeli psychologist, adds that “people exposed to trauma and who develop PTSD are more likely to adopt anti-democratic extreme measures against anybody that is not like themselves.”

In the case of Israel and the Palestinian territories, experts say that the two populations’ lack of exposure to one another, combined with societal influences like war propaganda and a nationalistic K-12 education, is contributing to each side’s increasingly us-versus-them mentality.

“Education in Israel today is very far from a peace-loving education,” says Mordechai Bar-On, an Israeli historian who once served as chief education officer for the IDF. “Even if it’s not extremely right-wing, which it sometimes is, even the normal schooling system is overtly nationalistic and overtly pessimistic.”

The mandatory draft for all Israeli men and women over 18 may serve to strengthen this early surge of patriotism, breeding a country of hardened soldiers. “For the majority of the people, after being exposed to the typical Israeli education, military service has a negative impact,” Bar-On explains. “It tends to fortify your patriotism— your belief that only a strong hand can solve your problems, that you have to defend yourself, that the Arabs are no good, that the Arabs are primitive people, etc.”

Nir, a 24-year-old student in Be’er Sheva, attests that after serving in the IDF, he became more supportive of the Israeli government. “When you are serving, you see things differently than when you are a civilian,” he asserts. During his time as a guard in the West Bank, Nir says he heard crazy stories about Palestinian extremists from fellow soldiers and saw that they weren’t going to give up until they took back Israel from the Jews.

STATE OF TRAUMA

The education system in Gaza is likewise getting a heavy dose of Islamist extremism under Hamas rule. And there are many to influence: Over half the population of Gaza is under the age of 15.

German TV journalist Richard Schneider, who has done extensive reporting in the Palestinian territories, says that at a recent Hamas rally he witnessed some supporters “take their children, put plastic guns in their arms, give them plastic suicide belts, call them shaheeds and everything’s wonderful. Many of the kids are educated that this is something good.”

Yusef—a cherubic Gazan five-year-old in a shirt that reads, “Experts agree that you are an IDIOT”—pokes his head out from behind his father and pretends to fire his toy machine gun at the visiting American. His family says he became so frightened during the recent conflict that he would sob during the night and had to sleep in his parents’ bed.

“If they keep on fighting us, I am going to let Yusef fire rockets toward them,” says his father, Shaban al-Kurdi.

Whereas Israel has the resources and priorities to patch up rocket damage as quickly as it appears, Gaza’s wounds have been left to flap in the wind. Little reminders of the occupier’s wrath pop up everywhere: empty window frames whose glass was blown out by an F-16; daily power outages resulting from both war damage and the blockade of natural resources; a little girl’s Mary Janes poking from the rubble of her family home.

Mohamed, another member of the al-Kurdi family, says that two of his friends from school, along with his Arabic teacher, were killed in the most recent Israeli bombings. “They didn’t do any bad things to make Israel kill them,” the 16-year-old says, his knee jiggling compulsively. He seems especially upset about the bombing of Gaza’s central soccer stadium, a popular spot for games and concerts that Israel claimed was being used as a launching point for Hamas rockets.

So Mohamed was proud when the rockets finally hit Tel Aviv—a record distance for Hamas—in November 2012. In an assignment for his English class, he wrote: “For the first time in war history, the resistance shelled the capital of Israel, Tel Aviv city, and Israelis escape to shelter like mouse.”

Psychologists say that strong feelings of hatred and aggression— of grouping the other side into one big evil entity as a defense mechanism—spike during wartime, when fear and trauma run high.

During the November violence, Gaza freelancer Wasseem El-Sarraj—the son of Dr. Eyad El-Serraj—documented his own hardening to peace in the pages of The New Yorker. “It’s my first harb (war), and it has stirred in me feelings that I had tried hard to suppress,” wrote the journalist. “I never wanted to see Israel as an evil force. I said to myself that that sort of thinking, that sort of emotion, would not be helpful, would not be constructive, would not be ‘me.’ I had wanted to work with Israelis; to reconcile, I suppose. After four years of living in Gaza, this has become an untenable position for me.”