Warning Voices –

Someone issuing a warning must be believable to be effective. After a long record of fear mongering our unbelievable government officials are no longer effective. Bloggers as a body have struggled for credibility due to many factors, so the most conscientious among us issue our warnings judiciously. We want to avoid suffering the fate of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” an Aesop’s fable. It ends with this:

An old man tried to comfort the boy as they walked back to the village.

“We’ll help you look for the lost sheep in the morning,” he said, putting his arm around the youth, “Nobody believes a liar…even when he is telling the truth!”

Decades ago, Daniel Ellsberg suffered much at the hands of his government for getting out the truth. He has a new warning for us. The story from comanchecountychronicle says, “PENTAGON INSIDER HAS DIRE WARNING.” (It comes from my blog friend, betmo, on 8/13/08). To quote:

This article from the AmericanFreePress is by Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg offers insights into the looming attack on Iran and the loss of liberty in the United States at a recent American University symposium. What follow are his comments from that speech. They have been edited only for space.

By Daniel Ellsberg

Let me simplify . . . and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9-11. That’s the next coup that completes the first.

The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution . . . what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the

Ellsberg is still speaking truth to power

world-in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.

There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.

All these violations were impeachable had they been found out at the time but in nearly every case the violations were not found out until [the president was] out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.

A Salon.com blogger who has credibility with a good number of us is a civil rights lawyer named Glenn Greenwald. I often quote him in my posts about national security and the Bush administration. Happily, he is now on the radio a couple of times a week. One of his recent broadcasts concerns the passage not long ago by Congress, of a very disastrously amended Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and Halperin’s major responsibility for lending incorrect credibility to the flawed measure . Read the transcript of listen to the podcast: Salon Radio: Morton Halperin.

A blogger I admire because of his commitment to original material is Simon Owens at Bloggasm: Earlier this month he sent me an e-mail about a piece I had cross-posted at The Reaction. I quote Simon’s message:

8/7/08, subject– “news tip for the Reaction”

Hey Carol, I read your post today mentioning Glenn Greenwald’s piece about the questions that he raised concerning ABC’s reporting on the anthrax attacks. I got a chance to talk to Greenwald on the phone yesterday and wrote a feature article about my conversation with him and two journalism professors from New York University and Columbia University. My article is published here. Anyway, I thought this was something you and your readers would find interesting.

Take care, Simon

Countering fear mongering or combating the secrecy about wrong-doing by government officials is among the main goals of blogs such as mine, specializing in the national security vs. civil liberties sphere. Bloggers issuing warnings must be believable to be effective. Bloggers as a group are growing in credibility due to many factors, including issuing our warnings judiciously. We must choose our sources carefully and listen to our guts about what is true and what is not. We will never be effective if we lie. And it is exceedingly hard to find out the truth. We must avoid the temptation to be like the little boy who cries wolf. We all want to avoid suffering the fate in the Aesop’s fable.

Cross-posted at The Reaction and South by Southwest.

My “creativity and dreaming” post today is at Making Good Mondays.

Technorati tags: news news and politics politics journalism blogs national security credibility

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The Language of the Neo-Conservatives Unmasked..

Monday morning’s Op-Ed piece by William Kristol is the most direct command a neo-conservative can use. His title: Be Afraid. Please. Kristol’s premise is that electing Obama with a Democratic-controlled Congress will give Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid free reign. The direct quote is: “But if the voters elect Obama as president, they’ll be putting Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in untrammeled control of our future.”

Frankly, after the last eight years of Bush, Cheney, and yes, Bill Kristol, I would be thrilled to let Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have untrammeled control of our future. The Neo-Cons have had untrammeled control and have destroyed the US economy, led us into an unnecessary and elective war, trashed the environmnet, ignored the crumbling infrastructure in the USA, and generally made the USA the laughing-stock of the world. Do I think Obama walks on water? Absolutely not. He’s flawed, deeply so. Pelosi has been quite disappointing. But I would much rather have their flaws in charge than another four years of the Bush/Cheney administration.

Kristol writes about the November election: “Maybe they’ll decide it’s more important to have John McCain as commander in chief than Barack Obama as orator in chief.” His focus, of course, is war. War. Be afraid. He wants voters to be afraid, because fear keeps people paralyzed. How can you make change, when paralyzed by fear? McCain is a known quantity - Bush Lite - while Obama is an unknown, a (deep disdain in the tone, per neo-con style) “lib.”

Obama is not a liberal. He’s a centrist, always has been, much like Bill Clinton was, much like Hillary Clinton is. We’ve become unable to elect a true liberal in this nation. If we were, we’d have Dennis Kucinich as the presumptive Democratic nominee. But Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee, and he gets my vote for these three words: The Supreme Court. More, really. He gets my vote because I will not support a man who has said that we need to stay in Iraq for 100 years.

And I will not allow the Neo-Cons to continue to bully me into a place of fearful submission. Bill Kristol wants you to be afraid. It’s time to tell him that HE should be afraid, because we are angry, fed up, done. Pack it up, Bill.

Crossposted at Journeys with Jood.

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If you’re the wrong color, religion or ethnicity-You might be a terrorist.

Add to that..you don’t even have to be suspected of a terrorist crime. Profiling is fearmongering at its best. To do profiling without even suspecting the individual of a crime first goes against the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Yet the FBI is considering this method of ‘ferreting out’ terrorists.From Jurist:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Thursday blasted a proposed plan that would allow Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents to consider a person’s race, religion, or ethnicity in deciding whether to open a terrorism investigation. CAIR decried the plan as “unconstitutional and un-American,” saying that it could allow security agents to target Muslims and Arab-Americans for harassment. A US Department of Justice spokesman responding to press reports on the plan - which has neither been finalized nor formally announced - denied that the new guidelines would allow profiling, noting that ethnicity is only one of many factors to be considered and that it is only when all those factors as a whole are deemed suspicious that an investigation can be opened. Under the proposed guidelines as explained to AP by unnamed sources, agents would be able to initiate investigations even in instances where there is no evidence of a crime, something required under current guidelines. AP has more. Fox News has additional coverage.

Rights complaints by Muslims in the US rose 25 percent in 2006, according to an annual report on civil rights released by CAIR last year. The group attributed the jump to a rise in anti-Muslim bias. The majority of reported complaints came against government agencies, including the DOJ.

Its wrong on every level m’dear reader.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.-Ben Franklin 1755

On this day in which we ‘celebrate’ uber-nationalism and militarism..think about the Bill of Rights and the signing of our Constitution. Think about what is more important..our freedoms or our perceived safety from those faceless, nameless terrorists that BushCo keeps banging into our heads 365 days a year.

If the top story doesn’t piss you off, then try the next one on for size…also from Jurist:

Federal judge orders Google to turn over YouTube user data in Viacom lawsuit

A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York Tuesday ordered Google to turn over databases containing logs of every time any IP address has accessed any YouTube video. Viacom had requested access to the databases in a lawsuit brought for copyright infringement, arguing that Google and YouTube knowingly made copyrighted material available on their websites without permission. District Judge Louis Stanton rejected Google’s claim that turning over user information would invade users’ privacy in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act, finding that an IP address or YouTube username alone was not enough to identify users. The court did, however, reject Viacom’s bid to compel Google to turn over larger databases which include user-provided text summaries of hosted videos. Technology and privacy advocates sharply criticized the order, saying that it would set a dangerous precedent for internet privacy. Computerworld has more. BBC News has additional coverage.

Google has recently started to push for stronger online privacy protection after strong criticism by privacy groups. In September 2007, Google called for stronger privacy legislation at a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference. In June 2007, Google announced that it would reduce retention of user search data to 18 months in response to a European Commission investigation into whether the company complied with EU privacy rules.

What I took from this is..the EU’s privacy rules are stronger than ours evidently. Go figure..Now, a word from Dennis Kucinich:

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Holy Joe’s fearmongering Sunday

From C&L a Face the Nation stump for Liebermann. Holy Joe is fearmongering his ass off.

It’s a two minute video..and thankfully that is about all I can take of this bag of batshit.

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