CThru.com Presents Tony Ward

Posted by John Grant

I was just reading an 1898 essay by Leo Tolstoy on the Spanish American War in which he satirizes the United States for defeating the “decrepit and doting old man”  that was the Spanish Empire and, as “a young man in full possession of his strengths,” taking over Spain’s imperial role in Cuba and, especially, in the Philippines. The US beats this “decrepit old man” (known for his cruelty) and “knocks out his teeth, breaks his ribs, and then ecstatically tells his exploits to a vast public of just such young men as he is, and this public rejoices and praises the hero who has maimed an old man.” This from a writer who saw real bloody combat in several places and wrote War And Peace. This is late Tolstoy, when, in the eyes of many, he had gone off the deep end to preach Christian pacifism. War to him at this stage is organized “murder.” He is disgusted with governments who tell their citizens their wars are undertaken to protect them. “What you (governments) say of the threatening danger and of your concern about protecting us against it is a deception.” Sounds familiar, given the past nine years, when our leaders launched two major wars, one of which we are escalating in spite of opposing popular opinion — a war our military commanders have begun assuring the occupied Afghans is about “protecting the Afghan people.”

Now we must absorb the idea of assassination orders for US citizens. Our leaders now openly declare the right to murder American citizens deemed “enemy combatants” — or some such label worked out by PR-savvy lawyers aware of the post-9/11 fear and the lynch mob state of mind in parts of America. First we were worried about warrant-less wiretapping of citizens. Then, it was the three-year “slow torture” of a US citizen in a brig in South Carolina. Now we have graduated to warrant-less assassinations. The President says it’s OK, so sit back on the couch and watch the rest of Hitman4. And the current Supreme Court is probably fine with assassination hits of anybody as long as they are in the pursuit of American Power & Wealth.

The target dejure is the US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemini Muslim cleric who had conversations with both the Fort Hood shooter and the underpants bomber. US intelligence has him pegged as Satan’s child, but, let’s be honest, US intelligence is not the most reliable arbiter of truth and they have been good at providing popular fodder for demonization campaigns. Al-Awlaki has told reliable Arab journalists he did not encourage either of the above to commit the acts they did, though, after the fact, he said what they did was honorable. Al-Awlaki is currently in hiding for his life, but he seems to argue he was a sympathetic ear to these disturbed men, not their instigator. Like the many people involved in some fashion with the loosely confederated global insurgency we are currently engaged with, al-Awlaki is clearly angry at our invasions and on-going occupations of Muslim lands, our support of Israel for its occupation of Palestine and a perceived general war against Islam. The argument for assassinating people like al-Awlaki is the exact same reasoning used in the Phoenix Program to assassinate nationalist Vietnamese leaders opposed to the US occupation of Viet Nam. The difference is the current war is being played out in a globalized context and our assassinations are done by the CIA or by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the hunter-killer teams commanded so well by General Stanley McChrystal and now operating in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. They currently favor the use of drones directed by some operator in Arizona with a Diet Pepsi on the console next to him to assassinate people by taking out entire buildings. Of course, no one gets a trial; guilt is established in secret by … well, no one is sure.

It’s becoming easier to understand why Tolstoy ended up where he did relinquishing literary and commercial success to take on the war powers of his day. Think back to the 1980s and the outrage in the nation over “war off the books” by Oliver North and his patriotic warriors during the Reagan years. One’s head spins at the moral distance we have traveled since those innocent days. Thanks to rapid technological advances and stagnant human morality, the notion of war off the books is now beyond steroids as a metaphor and approaching some kind of secret robot dystopia in which the soma of the age is a popular culture where The Killer reigns supreme as an iconic figure of comedy and romance.

It’s been 112 years since Tolstoy wrote about how the US employed a campaign of “murder” to supplant the Spanish and create its own fledgling empire out of the spoils. That empire is now in full plumage and its leaders are ordering the assassination of people around the world based on their motivational influence. That our imperial wars are the prime motivational element in these speaker’s arguments is rarely mentioned. Given the distance we have come in the past 20 years, it’s interesting to imagine where things might go in the next 20 years.

John Grant

Posted By John Grant

……….Reform comes slowly and not without a struggle. Here’s a joyous example from El Salvador. On a June trip I visited Oscar Romero University in Chalatenango province, a former rebel zone of much fighting. Now, there are kids with cell phones and laptops walking around campus. My friends Francisco and Barbara Acosta, in the photo below, founded the university 18 years ago, but for a number of years they have been in a fight with a small group of usurpers who, under the right-wing ARENA government, took over to fraudulently soak the university for their own interests. The 2009 election of President Mauricio Funes, from the FMLN Party, has meant a shift in political control to the left in El Salvador, though the current political climate is tricky. In November, the Salvadoran Ministry of Education officially recognized a new administration for the university. The old administration, however, did not agree to leave gracefully.

……….Francisco Acosta is a former seminarian and a highly-respected Salvadoran activist/diplomat. He was born and raised in the shadow of the Guazapa Volcano, which became a strong rebel zone during the war years. Many of his family members were killed before and during the war. He and his wife Barbara have been devoted to getting control of the university back into the hands of the Salvadoran people Oscar Romero fought so hard for and died for. It has not been an easy fight. After the Ministry Of Education’s November ruling, the struggle culminated in a four day standoff with the rector from the past administration who refused to leave his office and brought in armed gang members in an effort to hold onto his power. During the standoff, students demonstrated at the school’s gate. Finally the outgoing rector saw the light and left on January 28, allowing the school to be turned over to the good guys. It was a time for rejoicing and partying. 

Posted by John Grant

Those of us who participated in the September 12th march on the Army Experience Center at the Franklin Mills Mall recall the arrest of Cheryl Biren, along with six others. I remember Biren there taking photos, it turns out, for OpEdNews.Com, a news and opinion blog site. Biren was doing her job covering the event when she was arrested by Philadelphia police.
The AEC is a tax-funded, $13 million experimental store selling the US Army as a brand to kids as young as thirteen. It employs violent computer games (“war porn”) and shooting simulators with human targets to entice mall-crawling kids into joining the military — at a time the economy is staggering from a lack of jobs. The Center is controversial and raises serious questions about how we educate our youth in today’s world and how well we equip them to analyze information in a critical fashion. 

Many of us “free-lance” or “independent” or, let’s go all the way, “radical” journalists regularly encounter the kind of difficulty Biren ran into covering the AEC march, since police departments are more and more taking it upon themselves to decide who is a legitimate journalist and who isn’t. 
When cops decide who and what constitutes a real journalist they end up permitting only those working for the mainstream, corporate media, people with corporate ID cards, pre-arranged police permits, backup staff at the office, expensive equipment, van drivers and someone to get them coffee. Anyone on a tight budget and sympathetic to the ideas expressed by demonstrators at marches like the one at the AEC are seen as loose cannons and, naturally, suspect in the eyes of the police. And since no one in the mainstream, corporate media has much interest in covering such demonstrations — well, you can see the problem.

In my case, I was there and I took some photos. I, then, chose not to challenge the cops and I left as they began pushing people out the doors. My timidity, of course, is precisely what the police approach is meant to encourage. Any reporter who stayed behind to assert their first amendment right to witness and report the arrests was subject to arrest. This is what Biren did.
We see this sort of thing a lot these days; it’s a variant on the Facts On The Ground strategy. Act first — deal with the repercussions later. The police make an arrest to eliminate a journalist, no matter how illegal the action might be, then they drop the charges and employ public relations later. During the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia, the city paid out millions in lawsuit settlements for illegal arrests. On January 13, the Philadelphia DA followed this pattern and dropped all charges against Biren – four months after her arrest and an uncertain amount of grief and legal expenses later.

The 1st Amendment outlaws “abridging” the “freedom of the press.” It does not say “freedom of the well-paid, corporate press with police permits.” When the 1st Amendment was written there were no press badges; all the bureaucratic hurdles and mazes came later. 
A.J. Leibling added this famous nugget to the mix: “If you really want freedom of the press you have to own one.” Leibling could not have foreseen the age we live in, but, now, with the advent of the internet and the capacity for virtually anyone to fashion a news blog and get out there and cover news, Leibling’s observation may be more than just a witty remark.
Maybe it’s time for those of us on the left to take a hint from James Bopp Jr., the right-wing conservative lawyer from Terre Haute, Indiana, behind the recent Supreme Court case that opened the flood gates to corporate money in campaign ads. He calculated the whole thing and designed the case to obtain the decision recently dropped on American democracy like a bomb. He is now about to launch a similar case aimed to eliminate any and all restrictions on corporate funding of political campaigns.

Maybe it’s time we tip our hats to the Bopps of this culture and do some original legal thinking of our own — pull off our own “Bopp coup” in the courts — to establish that the police cannot use prejudice or whim as a basis to decide who shall report on and document their actions and who shall not. As long as a reporter is cooperative, not violent or not actively participating in whatever the cops are focusing on, it should be made clear in law that sympathy for a cause or action being covered by a reporter is not a valid reason to lump that reporter in with those being arrested. 
It’s an important Constitutional question. Can a government police force quash, silence or prevent a reporter from doing his or her job by making a phony arrest? It happens so much these days it has become part of the fabric of our times, and it contributes to the distancing of citizens more and more from the decisions and actions of their government.

As the recent corporate funding case suggests, the current Supreme Court tends to come down on the side of money and power. But the Constitution clearly does not require a reporter be equipped with money or power, or more to the point, to be connected to a corporation. Current police practice in cases like Biren’s amounts to the harassment and silencing of reporters for failing to have the proper political “juice” behind them.
If the democratic vistas of the internet we hear so much about are real, then all a reporter needs to legitimately assert 1st Amendment rights is a pen & pad, a camera and a blogsite. 
To borrow the famous film line from The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”

Photos Copyright John Grant