In response to my earlier post condemning the murder of the Iranian scientist as an act of terrorism, one commenter posed a serious objection that calls for a detailed response that I thought merited a new post in its own right.

To equate the Iranian weapons scientists assassinations with the equivalent against the US or Israel is silly. Neither the US nor Israel has threatened to destroy Iran simply because it exists. In addition, most of the world feels that Iran getting a nuclear weapon is A Really Bad Thing.

In short: If you were Israel (or the US, for that matter), what’s the alternative, assuming sanctions won’t work? This Administration has narrowed its demands on Iran to a much greater degree than the previous, drawing the line at a nuclear weapon (rather than previously with enrichment et al). Which is one of the reasons most of the rest is going along with the sanctions to one degree or another.

I assume that you would not have been opposed to assassinations against WWII Germany or Japan (and we conducted them, to be sure; the most noteworthy being Yamamoto). Yet when we’re talking nukes, you can’t wait until the war has started. So, again…..what’s your alternative?

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To commemorate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I am linking to a post I wrote on this occasion in 2008 that tried to expose readers to the fact that towards the end of his life, King was actively campaigning against a wide range of injustices, not just racial ones.

People sometimes forget that he was widely read in politics, economics, history, and philosophy and used all of them in his writings, especially the later ones, to forcefully make the case for justice.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley has been on a tear recently. His recent op-ed in the Washington Post lists ten reasons why the US should no longer consider itself the land of the free.

While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.

Just go down the list to see how the bogus ‘war on terror’ waged by both Bush/Cheney and Obama has been used to steadily strip away all the protections that used to be considered sacrosanct. It is both shocking and depressing.

Glenn Greenwald uses the recent murder of an Iranian scientist to meticulously document how the word terrorism has been drained of any objective meaning and has become a propaganda term to be used only to describe acts that are taken against the interests of the US and Israel. If the US and Israel commit such acts, or are even suspected of doing so, then the loaded word is scrupulously avoided and euphemisms substituted, such as the more clinical ‘targeted assassination’.
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Matt Taibbi’s articles in Rolling Stone and his blog are essential reading for those wanting to know about the financial shenanigans that have rocked the country, and the excesses of Wall Street executives.

In a blog post with the above title, he provides yet another example of both aspects.

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners at Guantanamo, brought there on military transport planes, shackled hand-to-waist, waist-to-ankles, their ankles bolted on the airplane floor, their ears and eyes goggled and their heads hooded. Glenn Greenwald describes how over that period, the principles of justice have been steadily subverted, first by Bush/Cheney and now by Obama, resulting in nightmarish treatment of people becoming routine.

It is worth reading the accounts of two of the people who were detained for long periods in Guantanamo.
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Last week Stephen Colbert had a good segment that dealt with the National Defense Authorization Act that Congress and the White House rushed through during the holiday season with little or no discussion of its dangerous features. I wrote before about how it authorizes the military to detain anyone to be held indefinitely without trial.

The New York Times an interesting profile of Colbert and a look behind the scenes of his show.

Iranian nuclear scientists are getting murdered, the latest case being reported today. Glenn Greenwald asks the right question: Why is this not denounced here as terrorism?

Does anyone doubt that some combination of the two nations completely obsessed with Iran’s nuclear program — Israel and the U.S. — are responsible? (U.S. officials deny involvement while pointing the finger at Israel, whose officials will not comment but “smile” when asked; the CIA has “targeted” Iran’s scientists in the past, several of whom have disappeared only to end up in U.S. custody, including one who “resurfaced in the United States after defecting to the CIA in return for a large sum of money”). At the very least, there has been no denunciation from any Obama officials of whoever it might be carrying out such acts.

I have always been interested in politics and still am but as time goes by my focus has shifted from electoral politics to mass movement politics. I simply cannot get too interested in the 2012 presidential and congressional elections, except insofar as they shed some light on the state of the nation. I still follow the process, but cursorily and with detachment and amusement, the way that I follow sports. I will check the results and the standings but the outcomes do not stir in me the passions they once did. It is mass movement politics on which I pin my hopes of creating a more just society.

Matt Taibbi captures my feelings almost exactly in this article, saying many of the things I have been saying, but more interestingly. In a single essay he lays bare the corrupt reality that elections in the US have become. He notes that in 94% of the races, the candidate who raises the most money wins. And then he shows that the same groups of investment banks and legal firms that serve those banks, basically the one-percenters, contribute heavily to both presidential candidates.

The article is excellent, if depressing. I started to excerpt some key passages but they got so long that it is best if you read the article for yourself. I will restrict myself to just one quote.

The 1% donors are remarkably tolerant. They’ll give to just about anyone who polls well, provided they fall within certain parameters. What they won’t do is give to anyone who is even a remote threat to make significant structural changes, i.e. a Dennis Kucinich, an Elizabeth Warren, or a Ron Paul (hell will freeze over before Wall Street gives heavily to a candidate in favor of abolishing their piggy bank, the Fed). So basically what that means is that voters are free to choose anyone they want, provided it isn’t Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, or some other such unacceptable personage.

If the voters insist on supporting such a person in defiance of these donors – this might even happen tonight, with a Paul win in Iowa – what you inevitably end up seeing is a monstrous amount of money quickly dumped into the cause of derailing that candidate. This takes overt forms, like giving heavily to his primary opponents, and more covert forms, like manufacturing opinions through donor-subsidized think tanks and the heavy use of lapdog media figures to push establishment complaints.

And what ends up happening there is that the candidate with the big stack of donor money always somehow manages to survive the inevitable scandals and tawdry revelations, while the one who’s depending on checks from grandma and $25 internet donations from college students always winds up mysteriously wiped out.

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald gives his take on the US elections in the pages of The Guardian, explaining why the Republican race has become so bizarre. Because Barack Obama is governing as a centrist Republican, he has forced the Republican candidates to take extreme right-wing positions, merely to contrast themselves to him.

The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.

In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party’s ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.

In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party’s defining beliefs. Depicting the other party’s president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.

US elections have two stages. In the first, known as the primaries, any candidate who threatens the status quo of rule by oligarchy is ruthlessly weeded out by a coalition of oligarchy, party leadership, and their allies in the major media. This ensures that some major issues will never be discussed seriously in the second stage of the general election.

But in this second stage, the two pro-oligarchy party candidates will be portrayed as radically different in order to give voters the illusion that we really have a choice and that democracy is thriving. It is not that there is no difference at all between the two candidates but that the differences involve largely social issues that I call GRAGGS issues (god, race, abortion, guns, gays, sex) that the oligarchy does not much care about either way. This is why I think that real challenges to oligarchic control will only come about because of real anger in the streets, similar to that spawned by the Occupy Wall Street movement, at the way that the country is run.

I think that this is why it is important for people to realize that they should never give their total allegiance to candidates. Support them on those issues you agree with but be willing to also harshly criticize them on those that you don’t.