♦ A month and a week after BP and Halliburton blew the bottom of the ocean open, we've finally gotten a glimmer of the truth about the situation from an official source who isn't lying. White House Energy Wonk Carol Browner has obliquely admitted the obvious — BP's Gulf of Mexico gusher could be unstoppable until August. Browner didn't add "if then", but if she had, well, that might have been more honesty than Americans are allowed at this point. LINK
♦ The Obama administration has decided to hold four dozen souls in prison, probably for the rest of their lives, though there's no evidence that any of them were involved in any crime. LINK
♦ The use of drones by US intelligence agencies to target suspected militants in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, with no judge, no jurty, no sofeguards or accountability, and while routinely but "accidentally" killing innocent citizens, lacks the accountability required under international law, a U.N. human rights expert has said. Well, duh. LINK
♦ This year's Defense Authorization Act instructs the Department of Defense to "conduct an investigation of the conduct and practices of lawyers" who represent clients at Guantanamo. It's blatant intimidation, of course, un-American if you still believe the ideals of civic class, but utterly American in practice. LINK
♦ The Obama administration maintains that it has the right to abduct anyone anywhere in the world and imprison them without charges, without a trial, without habeus corpus, without any of the civilized niceties that Americans say they're so proud of. And a US Court of Appeals agrees.
This is, of course, the endorsement of world-wide tyranny. LINK
♦ The Bush-Cheney administration discussed using predator drones to reign death from above on suspected drug kingpins in Mexico. The Obama administration is considering using the deadly devices on militants in Somalia and Yemen, and against pirates who attack commercial ships. It's morally repulsive, probably illegal if international law matters, and yet there it is. LINK
♦ Millions of Americans arrested for but not convicted of crimes will likely have their DNA forcibly extracted and added to a national database, according to a bill approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday. By a 357 to 32 vote, the House approved legislation that will pay state governments to require DNA samples, which could mean drawing blood with a needle, from adults "arrested for" certain serious crimes. Not one Democrat voted against the database measure, which would hand out about $75 million to states that agree to make such testing mandatory. LINK
♦ You'll recall that British Petroleum didn't have a plan for what to do in the event of a major oil mess in the Gulf of Mexico. In BP's environmental impact analysis, they simply said a major spill was "unlikely" and hinted that such an event was virtually impossible. And you'll recall that when what couldn't happen happened, BP's original estimate for more than a week after its April 20 oil rig catastrophe was that 1,000 barrels a day were spewing from the ocean's floor, a lowball lie corrected only when activists and government scientists called bullcrap.
Since then BP's estimate has been that 5,000 barrels of oil a day are spewing from the ocean's floor, but experts not on BP's payroll say BP is lying again, and the endless eruption of oil is a hell of a lot more than BP is letting on. LINK, LINK
♦ Judge Lewis Kaplan (appointed by Clinton in 1994) has pronounced that a filmmaker must turn over all of his unedited film footage to Chevron. So Joe Berlinger, who thought he was making a film dissecting Chevron's involvement in destruction of the rain forests, was instead — against his will — working as an unpaid agent of the giant oil company. LINK
♦ Attorney General Eric Holder, who seems to view his job in the tradition of predecessors like John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey, wants to roll back some Miranda protections just an eentsy-weentsy bit. There's no reason or rationale for this beyond further appeasement of the right-wing anti-constitution crowd.
In a nutshell, what's happened here is that radio mouth Rush Limbaugh and other leading lights of the Republican Party have said that some people don't deserve Miranda rights, and the Obama administration has shrugged and said OK. Because they're cowards and weasels who don't give a damn about protecting the US Constitution and American values from those who stand opposed, like Limbaugh.
If Obama or Holder said simply, bluntly, "America has laws and we're going to follow those laws", they'd rise ten points in the polls overnight. And, much more importantly, we'd see that we have an administration that takes its oaths of office seriously — but they don't. They make that plain daily. LINK
♦ This disaster in the Gulf, amazingly under-reported by mainstream media, has the potential to sink the environment and economy of America and, to a lesser extent the world. Yes, it is that awful and moreso. The damage already done is huge, but it's trivial compared to the potential damage if the gusher isn't somehow capped.
♦ The usual Republicans and Democrats who are really Republicans are lining up to call for, basically, suspension of civil rights in America. Senators like John McCain (R-Arizona) and Orin Hatch (R-Utah) are demanding that certain Americans not be accorded the same Miranda reading and, presumably, other rights constitutionally promised to Americans.
♦ The Pentagon has officially banned four reporters from covering the kangaroo trials at Guantanamo, because these reporters had named Joshua Claus, an interrogator who threatened a 15-year-old Canadian prisoner with rape as a "technique" to get him to talk.
♦ It's a war crime, of course, when CIA operatives order or pilot killer drone attacks — a common US strategy against suspected terrorists and wedding parties in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and probably other nations.
But don't expect any prosecutions or change in policy. The Obama administration is ignoring ample evidence of the Bush-Cheney administration's obvious war crimes and committing war crimes of their own. Which makes it doubtful that the notion of such crimes against humanity as something to be punished will survive.
♦ Swirling in a sea of bad press about its ongoing safety problems and huge auto recalls, Toyota has agreed to be fined $16.4-million for illegally not notifying US officials about some of its life-threatening manufacturing defects. This penalty is described in the coverage as a record, the largest civil penalty ever assessed to an automaker by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
Does that sound impressive? It's not. As usual when giant corporations "agree" to well-publicized fines, the fine is a pittance compared to the company's profits. In 2009 Toyota reported $21.1-billion in profits, and this "record fine" amounts to less than one-tenth of one percent of that.
Translate that to a human scale by imagining that you'd killed numerous people, through something you'd accidentally done but intentionally concealed. Instead of being prosecuted, your punishment will be a fine amounting to a little less than your annual income (let's say you make $30,000) minus your annual expenses (say, $27,000) with the last three zeroes lopped off. $30- $27 means your "Toyota scale" fine would be three bucks.
♦ CIA chief Porter Goss literally laughed as he approved the destruction of videotaped American torture and interrogation sessions.
♦ Virtually all the giant American banks and their lobbyists are standing together to oppose letting the public know which banks received how much of 2008's $2-trillion federal bailout for banks. They've already lost at the Appeals Court level, but they're taking it to the Supreme Court, where Big Money rarely if ever loses.
♦ We've asked this question before, but with a nudge from Democracy Now let's ask again:
Why is it that Bradley Birkenfeld, the whistleblower in the UBS banking scandal, is serving a longer prison sentence than any of the bank executives who were involved in the criminality and didn't blow any whistles?
Birkenfeld's lawyer is asking President Obama to grant clemency in the case. "The government’s sending a terrible, terrible message: don’t blow the whistle; if you do, we’ll take the information you gave us, use it against you, and put you in jail."
Is that the message that the US government wants to send? There's so much corruption at the highest levels of government and finance that it's all to easy to respond cynically, and say yes, that's the message they want to send. With a stroke of his pen, President Obama could let Birkenfeld out of prison, countermand that message, and undo some of the damage that's been done here. People who spot corruption should be encouraged, not discouraged, from coming forward.
♦ The Obama administration, though, seems more interested in making sure that whistles aren't blown, as evidenced by its prosecution of Thomas Drake. Allegedly, Drake fed classified information to the Baltimore Sun, leading to an exposé about major failures and cost over-runs with the NSA's spying programs. Seems to me that when a good purpose is served, it's counterproductive to throw the book at someone who did the right thing.
♦ President Obama has ordered the killing of an American citizen, without a trial, without a public presentation of evidence, solely on his say-so.
This is something Mafia dons do, but it's a power beyond even the Bush-Cheney administration's public admissions. It's unconstitutional, it's vile, it's wrong, it's the very definition of tyranny, and if it's allowed to stand without massive public protest then within a few years it'll be routine.
♦ The National Science Board, an agency of your federal government, is trying to suppress scientific data about the ignorance of Americans.
Suppressing data is, of course, the opposite of science. Heads should roll, but probably won't.
♦ Attorney General Eric Holder remains blithely and impeachably unconcerned with the myriad reports of US and US-backed torture of prisoners, but here's where Holder draws the line: the Justice Department is investigating whether the American Civil Liberties Union (donate) broke the law as it followed and photographed the CIA agents involved in torture.
♦ America's torture policies during the Bush-Cheney administration were far more brutal than anyone from the Bush-Cheney gang has admitted. No surprise in that, except the surprise of seeing it acknowledged in the mainstream media.
♦ Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) has introduced legislation that would allow the American military to detain American citizens, without trial, for as long as military officials wish.
♦ Christopher Handley has been sentenced to six months in prison for possession of offensive comics. Drawings.
♦ A federal court has ruled that the families of two men who were killed at Guantanamo can't sue. Read this real slow and understand it really well: The court's ruling is that the dead had no rights and their case can't be heard in federal court, because they had been deemed "enemy combattants" by the Bush-Cheney administration.
That's a power Barack Obama now claims, which makes me feel a lot less safe and secure here in the "homeland" — there's no legal process to prevent you or I from being declared "enemy combattants". The constitution does not apply.
♦ In a federal court hearing involving Saeed Mohammed Saleh Hatim, a long-time prisoner at Guantanamo, the US Justice Department did not contest Hatim's testimony that he had been tortured at Guantanamo, and that he made incriminating statements only to make the torture stop. There have been similar assertions, similarly not contested by the Justice Department, in other cases.
As Harry Shearer notes, "the essential point here is that the US Justice Department does not dispute that prisoners in American custody have been tortured. Case closed. Literally."
♦ "License to kill" orders from President George W Bush are still in effect, never having been countermanded by President Obama. The Bush (and now Obama) orders grant "authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests".
♦ A new report from the DoJ Inspector General's office spotlights just how laughably little attention the feds and telephone companies pay to proper procedure in obtaining warrants. Here we have telecom employees working in the same office as FBI employees, with wiretap orders so lax they were just jotted on Post-It notes, or simply verbal requests.
And the Obama administration issued a secret rule almost two weeks ago saying it was legal for the FBI to have skirted federal privacy protections. It's OK because the President says it's OK — does that sound familiar?
♦ A task force for the Obama administration has recommended that at least 50 "war on terror" prisoners remain at Guantanamo or elsewhere, in limbo for the rest of their lives. The US government remains unwaveringly convinced that these men pose a danger to the world, but they're "too difficult to prosecute", code lingo for "If we prosecute them, it'll come out that the US had these people tortured".
♦ A study finds 12% of children imprisoned in America's juvenile justice system report being sexually abused in custody, either by staff or by fellow inmates. Let's all pretend to be surprised, OK?
♦ The ACLU has obtained a two-page CIA cable ordering the destruction of videotaped torture sessions, a memo which seems like obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence to me. Expect no response whatsoever from the Justice Department — if justice was at all what they're after, a parade of Bush-Cheney officials would be marching to trial.
♦ Sure seems curious that Bradley Birkenfeld, the whistleblower in the UBS banking scandal, is the only person involved who's being sent to prison. Especially since he blew the whistle before anyone knew diddly about the crimes, and he specifically blew the whistle on his client, California billionaire Igor Olenicoff, yet he's somehow been convicted of protecting Olenicoff.
♦ While heading the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, US Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner tried to cover up billions and billions in payouts to Goldman Sachs and Société Générale. Basically, AIG was a giant slush fund that made crooked banksters whole when they should've lost their shirts.