The People's Record

Essential Reading: “With Liberty and Justice for Some” by Glenn Greenwald

­­“As a litigator who practiced for more than a decade in federal and state courts across the country, I’ve long been aware of the inequities that pervade the American justice system,” journalist and forthright civil liberties advocate Glenn Greenwald begins his candid quest through the maze of government and elite impunity. As a former pawn in the injustice system, Greenwald provides an insider’s view on the racist, classist legal process that all too often leaves the country’s most vulnerable in the punitive shadows as the political class enjoys the luxuries of complete exemption.  

The tour of the nepotistic system begins with a Bush-era focus on the privileges of the government officials. From torture practices to warrantless domestic spying, the Bush administration has yet to face any legal prosecution for its crimes dating back to the early 2000s. Violations of peace treaties, such as the Geneva Conventions and the Conventions Against Torture, have not even been investigated although legal action against the administration’s illegal practices was a 2008 campaign promise from President Barack Obama.

But the immunity dates even further back. Nixon’s felonies of authorizing the Watergate break-in and obstructing an investigation were pardoned by his handpicked vice president, Gerald Ford. Ford’s pardon would later be applauded by none other than another criminal: Ford’s former chief of staff and former vice president Dick Cheney, who had already crafted an international web of torture prisons and organized warrantless spying of Americans. Both hailed the pardon as an act of heroism, rather than an act of justifying elite immunity. The pardon would go on to set a dangerous precedent that shielded the Reagan administration from prosecution after the Iran-Contra scandal in 1986 in which officials had sold arms to the Ayatollah Khomeini regime, violating the Boland Amendment Reagan himself had signed into law four years earlier.

An important point Greenwald hits right on target is how each succeeding president campaign promises to prosecute former administrations for legal wrongdoings. Clinton vowed to investigate H. W. Bush crimes and Obama campaigned on prosecuting Bush administration felonies. But once they settled comfortably in the White House, the promises dissipated for one selfish reason: so that they themselves could eventually be protected for future crimes.

But government cronies also enjoy such invincibility. Greenwald illustrates private sector immunity, specifically with the telecomm industry and its assistance in warrantless wiretapping. Post-9/11 scare tactics justified the Bush administration’s illegal eavesdropping prohibited by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a policy the president justified as anti-terrorism precautions. With help from private sector entities, such as AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon, hundreds of thousands of Americans were illegally spied on in the marriage of private and public sectors. As Greenwald notes, “Such melding of the public and private forces now characterizes most areas of government, and has resulted in the creation of a single large, self-protecting entity.” Through retroactive immunity, private sector companies conspired with government administrations to make a complete mockery of the rule of law, creating an illegal armor of defense for themselves while other Americans are prosecuted without question.

There is no better illustration of the powerful protected from the law than the too big to jail banks that brought on the financial crisis of 2008. Not only did the offenders receive the generous $700 billion taxpayer bailout, they escaped without a scratch while millions of Americans sunk into financial ruin. The crisis spiraled into a long-term unemployment crisis, millions of home foreclosures and a swelling student loan bubble ready to burst.  But as ordinary Americans suffered, Wall Street tycoons prospered at alarming rates. “America’s financial elites have not only stockpiled vast amounts of material wealth but also acquired control over all the government and legal institutions that might stand in the way of their corruption and stealing,” Greenwald writes.

Of course, just as the elite revel in puppeteering the injustice system, most Americans, especially the poor and people of color, are destroyed by the heavy hand of the law. The United States prison state has expanded virally with the country having 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. “What it represents is a deliberate choice by the political class to lock up more and more people for longer periods and for ever more trivial offenses,” Greenwald notes.  Between the failed War on Drugs and an exploding private prison industry, the American injustice system continues to claim more lives than the crimes being committed do.

By the book’s epilogue, Greenwald has sufficiently crafted the argument of elite impunity. The rule of law in the United States only exists for those who are not able to manipulate it: the working class, the poor and people of color. Through retroactive immunity, the absence of watchdog media and reciprocated pardons, liberty and justice have become a privilege for the wealthy and governmental elite, completely dismissing on the rule of law.

- Graciela 

Glenn Greenwald: Election year garbage

October 9, 2012

These episodes, all from the last 24 hours, demonstrate why I cannot wait for the election to be over:

Mitt Romney, Monday, in his heralded foreign policy speech:

“This is the struggle that is now shaking the entire Middle East to its foundation… . In short, it is a struggle between liberty and tyranny, justice and oppression, hope and despair.”

Mitt Romney, yesterday, in the same speech, moments later:

“I will deepen our critical cooperation with our partners in the Gulf.”

So to recap: we’re in a war for freedom against tyranny, and for justice against oppression - a war which Mitt Romney will fight in close alliance with the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

Then we have this, from Romney’s foreign policy speech, in which the GOP nominee diagnoses what he sees as the problem in the Middle East:

“The attacks against us in Libya were not an isolated incident. They were accompanied by anti-American riots in nearly two dozen other countries, mostly in the Middle East, but also in Africa and Asia. Our embassies have been attacked. Our flag has been burned. Many of our citizens have been threatened and driven from their overseas homes by vicious mobs, shouting ‘Death to America.’ These mobs hoisted the black banner of Islamic extremism over American embassies on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks.”

And here are his solutions:

“Drones and the modern instruments of war are important tools in our fight … . I will not hesitate to impose new sanctions on Iran, and will tighten the sanctions we currently have. I will restore the permanent presence of aircraft carrier task forces in both the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf region - and work with Israel to increase our military assistance and coordination… . I will reaffirm our historic ties to Israel and our abiding commitment to its security - the world must never see any daylight between our two nations. I will deepen our critical cooperation with our partners in the Gulf.”

To summarize: in light of extreme anti-American sentiment, we must drone-bomb more, kill Iranian civilians with sanctions, send more symbols of military occupation to their region, move still closer to Israel (which could only be accomplished by some sort of new surgical procedure to collectively implant us inside of them), and even more vigorously supportthe repressive Gulf regimes. In other words, to solve the problem of anti-American hatred in the region, we must do more and more of exactly that which - quite rationally - generates that hatred.

Then we come to this, regarding Romney’s foreign policy speech, from
Andrew Sullivan, Monday:

“[Spencer] Ackerman points out that Romney’s foreign policy sounds a lot like Obama’s … . ‘the policies Romney outlines in his speech differ, at most, superficially from Obama’s.’”

Michael Cohen, the Guardian, Monday:

“[O]ne would be hard-pressed to find a single substantive difference between what Romney is proposing as a candidate and Obama is actually doing as president.”

Michael Cohen, the Guardian, several paragraphs later:

“In the end, Romney doesn’t have much of a coherent policy agenda and his critique is wildly off-base. His real problem, though, is that he barely seems to grasp how the world – and, in turn, American power – actually works.”

Barbara O’Brien, Monday, reviewing Romney’s foreign policy speech:

“Please, people, this man must not become President. Must. not. become. President. A Romney administration would be a global catastrophe.”

This was reflective of the two-pronged consensus in Democratic partisan circles yesterday: (1) Romney’s foreign policy speech advocated what is basically a replica of what Obama is already doing; (2) when it comes to foreign policy, Romney is a dangerous, bellicose extremist. Both of those propositions are hard to dispute (the second is harder than the first), and the combination of those two precepts - and the logical conclusion it generates - is particularly worth reflecting on today, the third anniversary of the selection of Barack Obama as the 2009 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Finally we arrive at one of the latest progressive endorsements for Obama’s re-election, from Deepak Bhargava in the October 22 issue of The Nation, entitled “Why Obama?”:

“[H]owever we judge the past four years, it is crucial that we lean into this election without ambivalence, knowing that while an Obama victory will not solve all or even most of our problems, defeat will be catastrophic for the progressive agenda and movement… .

“We confront a conservative movement that is apocalyptic in its worldview and revolutionary in its aspirations. It is not an exaggeration to say that this movement wants to roll back the great progressive gains of the twentieth century … .[including] the great pillars of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid …

“We need to protect and strengthen Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other critical programs, particularly those serving the most vulnerable people.”

Presidential debate, October 3:

“MR. LEHRER: ‘Mr. President, do you see a major difference between the two of you on Social Security?’

“PRESIDENT OBAMA: ‘You know, I suspect that on Social Security, we’ve got a somewhat similar position.’”

The Washington Post, July 6, 2011, “In debt talks, Obama offers Social Security cuts”:

“President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.”

It’s a bit bizarre, to put that generously, to insist that protecting Social Security is one of the prime reasons to dedicate oneself to Obama’s re-election when he not only worked hard to cut that program substantially, but himself said just last week that he and his opponent have a “somewhat similar position” on that issue.

Whatever is awful about the American political process is magnified in the election season, and exponentially intensifies each day as the election approaches. That would all be perfectly tolerable if not for the fact that the election process is 18 months long, or close to 1/3 of each president’s term. One of the most effective tactics for keeping the electorate distracted and confused is ensuring that the time when they pay the most attention to the political process is exactly the time when political reality is most obscured.

Source

As the empire(s) of the West, mainly the United States continues to decline, corporate influence continues to grow and the absolute absurd garbage that dominates the corporate media driven conversation becomes more and more transparently nonsensical and dishonest. How many more election cycles will we make it through before we reach a tipping point? I just can’t understand why people waste their productive energy on campaigning for these maniacs instead of spending their energy on building movements to apply pressure to WHOEVER is in office, regardless of what political team they’re on. 

Glenn Greenwald: Obama’s Libya response highlights his foreign policy mentality

October 4, 2012

Extreme secrecy, extrajudicial assassinations, and a self-perpetuating militarism are driving Benghazi responses.

Three new articles - one today from the New York Times, one today from Associated Press, and another on Tuesday from the Washington Post - describe the approach being planned by the Obama administration to the consulate attack in Benghazi. All three highlight the standard and now-familiar attributes of Obama’s approach to foreign policy.

The Times describes how the Pentagon and CIA are “laying the groundwork for operations to kill or capture militants implicated in the deadly attack on a diplomatic mission in Libya”, while “the top-secret Joint Special Operations Command is compiling so-called target packages of detailed information about the suspects.” That could “include drone strikes, Special Operations raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden and joint missions with Libyan authorities.” The Post adds that “the White House has held a series of secret meetings in recent months to examine the threat posed by al-Qaida’s franchise in North Africa and consider for the first time whether to prepare for unilateral strikes.”

Meanwhile, AP - under the headline “White House Widening Covert War in North Africa” - describes how, even before the consulate attack, “small teams of special operations forces arrived at American embassies throughout North Africa” in order, among other things, to “set up a network that could quickly strike a terrorist target”. That is because “the administration has been worried for some time about a growing threat posed by al-Qaida and its offshoots in North Africa.” The Post similarly reports that this is all being driven by “concern that al-Qaida’s African affiliate has become more dangerous since gaining control of large pockets of territory in Mali and acquiring weapons from post-revolution Libya.”

Changing White House response

Last week, I wrote about the false, self-serving claims initially emanating from the White House about the Benghazi attack, and how much that tracked the process that produced similarly false claims from Obama officials about the bin Laden killing. On Monday, Jon Stewart mocked the inability of Obama officials to keep their story straight on these attacks, while today, Mother Jones’ Adam Serwer proposes five questions about Libya which Obama should be asked in tonight’s (last night’s) presidential debate.

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Glenn Greenwald: Sweden detains Pirate Bay founder in oppressive conditions without charges

October 02, 2012

The case underscores the prime fear long expressed by Assange supporters about the Swedish justice system.

My very first week writing regularly at the Guardian generated intense conflict with numerous members of the British media because that happened to be the week when Ecuador granted asylum to Julian Assange (a decision I defended), and - for reasons that warrant sustained study by several academic fields of discipline - very few people generate intense contempt among the British commentariat like Assange does. One of the prime arguments I have always made about the Assange asylum case is that his particular fear of being extradited to Sweden is grounded in that country’s very unusual and quite oppressive pre-trial detention powers: ones that permit the state to act with an extreme degree of secrecy and which can even prohibit the accused from any communication with the outside world.

That is what has always led Assange to fear going to Sweden: that those detention procedures could be used to transfer him to the US without any public scrutiny (only the most willfully irrational, given evidence like this, would deny that this is a real threat). And that is the argument on behalf of Assange that has produced the greatest amount of anger: in part because some self-loving westerners find the suggestion inconceivable and offensive that a nice western nation (as opposed to some Muslim or Latin American country) could possibly be oppressive in any real way.

But now we have a case that confirms exactly those claims about Sweden’s justice system, and since it has nothing to do with the WikiLeaks founder, one hopes these issues can be viewed more rationally. Gottfrid Svartholm is the founder of the file-sharing Pirate Bay website who has been prosecuted by the Swedish government for enabling copyright infringements. At the behest of Sweden, he wasrecently arrested in Cambodia and then deported to Stockholm, where he has now also been accused (though not charged) with participating in the hacking of a Swedish company.

Svartholm is now being held under exactly the pretrial conditions that I’ve long argued (based on condemnations from human rights groups) prevail in Sweden:

“Gottfrid Svartholm will be kept in detention for at least two more weeks on suspicion of hacking into a Swedish IT company connected to the country’s tax authorities. According to Prosecutor Henry Olin the extended detention is needed ‘to prevent him from having contact with other people.’ The Pirate Bay co-founder is not allowed to have visitors and is even being denied access to newspapers and television… .

“Since he hasn’t been charged officially in the Logica case the Pirate Bay co-founder could only be detained for a few days.

“But, after a request from Prosecutor Henry Olin this term was extended for another two weeks mid-September, and last Friday the District Court decided that Gottfrid could be detained for another two weeks.

“To prevent Gottfrid from interfering with the investigation the Prosecutor believes it’s justified to detain him for more than a month without being charged. The Pirate Bay co-founder is not allowed to have visitors and is being refused access to newspapers and television… . The Prosecutor hasn’t ruled out a request for another extension of Gottfrid’s detainment in two weeks, if the investigation is still ongoing.”

The claim that produced the most vitriol was that Sweden vests remarkable power in prosecutors and courts to keep accused suspects completely hidden from public view, with no communication or other contact with the outside world, and that this power is exercised with some frequency. Now we have confirmation of that claim from, of all people, the Swedish prosecutor in this case, Henrik Olin, who said in an interview outside the courtroom:

“‘According to the Swedish system, when the preliminary investigation is finished, I as prosecutor will decide whether to prosecute him… . In the Swedish system it is quite usual for people to be detained on this legal ground, and it gives me the possibility to prevent him from having contact with other people.’”

Unlike in the British system, in which all proceedings, including extradition proceedings, relating to Assange would be publicly scrutinized and almost certainly conducted in open court, the unusual secrecy of Sweden’s pre-trial judicial process, particularly the ability to hold the accused incommunicado, poses a real danger that whatever happened to Assange could be effectuated without any public notice. That has always been, and remains, the prime fear for his being extradited to Sweden: a fear that could be, and should be, redressed by negotiations between Ecuador, Sweden and the UK to assure that he can go to Sweden while having his rights protected.

Source

Glenn Greenwald: Iraqi-American is imprisoned by US for saving his family from US sanctions

September 29, 2012

I’m currently traveling around the US on a speaking tour, and as I’vewritten before, one of the prime benefits of doing that is being able to meet people and their families whose lives have been severely harmed by the post-9/11 assault on basic liberties. Doing that prevents one from regarding these injustices as abstractions, and ensures that the very real human costs from these government abuses remain vivid.

Such is the case with the treatment of Dr. Shakir Hamoodi, an Iraqi-American nuclear engineer who just began a three-year prison sentence at the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas penitentiary for the “crime” of sending sustenance money to his impoverished, sick, and suffering relatives inIraq - including his blind mother - during the years when US sanctions (which is what caused his family’s suffering) barred the sending of any money to Iraq.

Yesterday in Columbia, Missouri, I met with Hamoodi’s son, Owais, a medical student at the University of Missouri (MU) School of Medicine, and Hamoodi’s son-in-law, Amir Yehia, a Master’s student in MU’s School of Journalism. The travesty of this case - and the havoc it has wreaked on the entire family - is repellent and genuinely infuriating. But it is sadly common in post-9/11 America, especially for American Muslim communities.

Hamoodi came with his wife to the US in 1985 to work toward his PhD in nuclear engineering from MU and, not wanting to return to the oppression of Saddam’s regime, stayed in the US. He was offered a research professor position at the university, proceeded to have five American-born children, all of whom he and his wife raised in the Columbia community, and then himself became a US citizen in 2002.

But US-imposed sanctions after the First Gulf War had decimated the value of Iraqi currency and were causing extreme hardship for his large family who remained in Iraq. That sanctions regime caused the death ofat least hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including 500,000 Iraqi children. In 1991, the writer Chuck Sudetic visited Iraq, wrote in Mother Jonesabout the pervasive suffering, starvation and mass death he witnessed first-hand, and noted that the US-led sanctions regime “killed more civilians than all the chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons used in human history”.

The sanctions regime decimated Hamoodi’s family. His elderly blind mother was unable to buy basic medication. His sister, one of 11 siblings back in Iraq, suffered a miscarriage because she was unable to buy $10 antibiotics. His brother, a surgeon, was earning the equivalent of $2 per month and literally unable to feed his family.

Hamoodi was earning a very modest salary at the time of roughly $35,000 per year from the university, but - as would be true for any decent person of conscience - could not ignore the extreme and growing suffering of his family back in Iraq. Because sending money into Iraq from the US was physically impossible, he set up a bank account in Jordan and proceeded to make small deposits into it. From that account, small amounts of money - between $20 and $100 - were dispersed each month to his family members.

When other Iraqi nationals in his Missouri community heard of his helping his family, they wanted to help theirs as well. So Hamoodi began accepting similar amounts of money from a small group of Iraqis and ensured those were disbursed to their family members suffering under the sanctions regime. From 1993 until 2003, when the sanctions regime was lifted after the US invasion, Hamoodi sent an average of $25,000 each year back to Iraq, totaling roughly $250,000 over the decade: an amount that fed and sustained the Iraqi relatives of 14 families in Columbia, Missouri, including his wife’s five siblings.

Nobody, including the US government, claims that these amounts were intended for anything other than humanitarian assistance for his family and those of others in his community. Everyone, including the US government, acknowledges that these funds were sent to and received only by the intended recipients - suffering Iraqi family members - and never got anywhere near Saddam’s regime, terrorist groups, or anything illicit. As a Newsweek article on the Hamoodi case made clear:

“The cash … was doled out mostly in dribs and drabs, even the authorities concede; $40 a month to the son of a friend trying to eat while attending medical school, $80 to Hamoodi’s blind mother. There was no suggestion that Hamoodi … aided terrorists, or that the money wound up in Saddam Hussein’s hands; his elaborate email trail served as receipts, as tidy as his bookkeeping at the store.

“‘I would get messages from my sisters, I have 11 siblings,’ he says, as he shares a somber meal - piquant red peppers from South Africa, French cheeses, crusty baklava - with his wife and sons at the long dining room table. ‘They would be starving. Starving. So I did what anyone, any American, would do.’”

But in 2002 and 2003, Hamoodi was not just a nuclear engineer. He was also a very outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s plan to attack Iraq. And his position as a nuclear engineer made him a particularly potent threat to the case for that invasion, as he continuously insisted that Saddam did not have an active nuclear weapons program and that the case for the war was grounded in lies. In his antiwar activism, he emphasized how much already-suffering Iraqi civilians would suffer more, and how the invasion would lead to mass instability.

Finish the article here

Glenn Greenwald on how the US media angrily marvels at the lack of Muslim gratitude

September 15, 2012

One prominent strain shaping American reaction to the protests in the Muslim world is bafflement, and even anger, that those Muslims are not more grateful to the US. After all, goes this thinking, the US bestowed them with the gifts of freedom and democracy – the very rights they are now exercising – so how could they possibly be anything other than thankful? Under this worldview, it is especially confounding that the US, their savior and freedom-provider, would be the target of their rage.

On Wednesday, USA Today published an article with the headline “After attacks in Egypt and Libya, USA Today asks: Why?” The paper appeared to tell its readers that it was the US that freed the Egyptian people from tyranny:

“Attacks in Libya that left four US diplomats dead – including Ambassador Christopher Stevens – and a mob invasion of the US Embassy in Cairo, in which the US flag was torn to shreds, have left many to wonder: How can people the USA helped free from murderous dictators treat it in such a way?”

Did you know that the “USA helped free” Egyptians from their murderous dictator? On Thursday night, NBC News published a nine-minute reporton Brian Williams’ “Rock Center” program featuring its foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, reporting on the demonstrations in Cairo, which sounded exactly the same theme. Standing in front of protesting Egyptians in Tahrir Square, Engel informed viewers that this was all so very baffling because it was taking place “in Cairo, where the US turned its back on its old friend Hosni Mubarak”, and then added:

“It is somewhat ironic with American diplomats inside the embassy who helped to give these demonstrators, these protesters, a voice, and allowed them to actually carry out these anti-American clashes that we’re seeing right now.

That it was the US who freed Egyptians and “allowed them” the right toprotest would undoubtedly come as a great surprise to many Egyptians. That is the case even beyond the decades of arming, funding and general support from the US for their hated dictator (to his credit, Engel including a snippet of an interview with Tariq Ramadan pointing out that the US long supported the region’s dictators).

Beyond the long-term US support for Mubarak, Egyptians would likely find it difficult to reconcile Engel’s claim that the US freed them with the”made in USA” logos on the tear gas cannisters used against them by Mubarak’s security forces; or with Hillary Clinton’s touching 2009 declaration that “I really consider President and Mrs Mubarak to be friends of my family”; or with Obama’s support for Mubarak up until the very last minute when his downfall became inevitable; or with the fact that the Obama administration plan was to engineer the ascension of the loathed, US-loyal torturer Omar Suleiman as Mubarak’s replacement in the name of “stability”.

Given the history of the US in Egypt, both long-term and very recent, it takes an extraordinary degree of self-delusion and propaganda to depict Egyptian anger toward the US as “ironic” on the ground that it was the US who freed them and “allowed” them the right to protest. But that is precisely the theme being propagated by most US media outlets.

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US drone strikes target rescuers in Pakistan – and the west stays silent

August 20, 2012

The US government has long maintained, reasonably enough, that a defining tactic of terrorism is to launch a follow-up attack aimed at those who go to the scene of the original attack to rescue the wounded and remove the dead. Morally, such methods have also been widely condemned by the west as a hallmark of savagery. Yet, as was demonstrated yet again this weekend in Pakistan, this has become one of the favorite tactics of the very same US government.

A 2004 official alert from the FBI warned that “terrorists may use secondary explosive devices to kill and injure emergency personnel responding to an initial attack”; the bulletin advised that such terror devices “are generally detonated less than one hour after initial attack, targeting first responders as well as the general population”. Security experts have long noted that the evil of this tactic lies in its exploitation of the natural human tendency to go to the scene of an attack to provide aid to those who are injured, and is specifically potent for sowing terror by instilling in the population an expectation that attacks can, and likely will, occur again at any time and place:

“‘The problem is that once the initial explosion goes off, many people will believe that’s it, and will respond accordingly,’ [the Heritage Foundation’s Jack] Spencer said … The goal is to ‘incite more terror. If there’s an initial explosion and a second explosion, then we’re thinking about a third explosion,’ Spencer said.”

A 2007 report from the US department of homeland security christened the term “double tap” to refer to what it said was “a favorite tactic of Hamas: a device is set off, and when police and other first responders arrive, a second, larger device is set off to inflict more casualties and spread panic.” Similarly, the US justice department has highlighted this tactic in its prosecutions of some of the nation’s most notorious domestic terrorists. Eric Rudolph, convicted of bombing gay nightclubs and abortion clinics, was said to have “targeted federal agents by placing second bombs nearby set to detonate after police arrived to investigate the first explosion”.

In 2010, when WikiLeaks published a video of the incident in which an Apache helicopter in Baghdad killed two Reuters journalists, what sparked the greatest outrage was not the initial attack, which the US army claimed was aimed at armed insurgents, but rather the follow-up attack on those who arrived at the scene to rescue the wounded. From the Guardian’s initial report on the WikiLeaks video:

“A van draws up next to the wounded man and Iraqis climb out. They are unarmed and start to carry the victim to the vehicle in what would appear to be an attempt to get him to hospital. One of the helicopters opens fire with armour-piercing shells. ‘Look at that. Right through the windshield,’ says one of the crew. Another responds with a laugh.

“Sitting behind the windscreen were two children who were wounded.

“After ground forces arrive and the children are discovered, the American air crew blame the Iraqis. ‘Well it’s their fault for bringing kids in to a battle,’ says one. ‘That’s right,’ says another.

“Initially the US military said that all the dead were insurgents.”

In the wake of that video’s release, international condemnation focused on the shooting of the rescuers who subsequently arrived at the scene of the initial attack. The New Yorker’s Raffi Khatchadourian explained:

“On several occasions, the Apache gunner appears to fire rounds into people after there is evidence that they have either died or are suffering from debilitating wounds. The rules of engagement and the law of armed combat do not permit combatants to shoot at people who are surrendering or who no longer pose a threat because of their injuries. What about the people in the van who had come to assist the struggling man on the ground? The Geneva conventions state that protections must be afforded to people who ‘collect and care for the wounded, whether friend or foe.’”

He added that “A ‘positively identified’ combatant who provides medical aid to someone amid fighting does not automatically lose his status as a combatant, and may still be legally killed,” but – as is true for drone attacks – there is, manifestly, no way to know who is showing up at the scene of the initial attack, certainly not with “positive identification” (by official policy, the US targets people in Pakistan and elsewhere for death even without knowing who they are). Even commentators who defended the initial round of shooting by the Apache helicopter by claiming there was evidence that one of the targets was armed typically noted, “the shooting of the rescuers, however, is highly disturbing.”

Read the full Glenn Greenwald article

Late night viewing: Glenn Greenwald’s talk “Civil Liberties Under Obama” at last year’s Socialism Conference in Chicago, Illinois: he talks about how Obama has continued & in some cases worsened civil liberty policies created by the Bush administration. 

“When the government systematically proves that it is both willing & able to transgress the limits it is supposed to be subjected to, supposed to be because when people got together & formed a country & said, ‘We consent to your authority as long as you honor & respect these limits’… what arises is a climate of fear in the country. That’s not just the outcome, but the purpose.”