Cops get $4 million after killing black man

In 2010, George Diego and Allan Corrales of the Los Angeles Police Department shot and killed an unarmed black man, Steven Eugene Washington. The case was one of several high-profile shootings that activists protesting under the auspices of “Black Lives Matter” brought up with LAPD Chief Charlie Beck when they met with him in January: Washington had been walking down Vermont Avenue, minding his own business, when Diego and Corrales drove by in their cruiser, deemed said walking suspicious, and shot him in the head, telling investigators that they feared his cell phone was a gun; the phone wasn’t even in his hand, but it was dark and so was he and so the officers were placed on desk duty instead of being fired.

The officers did have their day in court, though – they sued, alleging discrimination. Would a white cop who kills an unarmed black man get stuck behind a desk or would they get a promotion and be hailed as a hero on AM radio? A jury ruled in their favor, awarding over $4 million to the two killer cops whose only punishment had been getting to keep their jobs as police while facing none of the risks cops cite to justifying killing civilians.

“God damn America.” – Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The week in me

Over at Salon, I argue that torture is as American as slavery and genocide.

At Take Part, I report on a Drone Expo held in Los Angeles over the weekend where protesters were called racial slurs for interrupting a war profiteer.

And at Capital and Main, I report on how about 200 lawyers and law students held a "die-in" outside an LA courthouse to protest police brutality and a legal system they know is rigged.

Also: I forgot to link to this before, so here's something I wrote for Salon about how Amazon's decision to kick WikiLeaks off its servers was tied to the major contract it later received courtesy the US intelligence community.

LAPD, doing the best that it can, kills another homeless man

On Monday, the LAPD's Deon Joseph took to the preferred platform of cops and developers, the Los Angeles Downtown News, to attribute blame for the humanitarian crisis on Skid Row to everyone but those in law enforcement:

When it comes to policing Skid Row, it seems as if my fellow officers and I are keeping our fingers in the cracks of a dam to prevent it from breaking. Though many people may not realize it, we are in the throes of a mental health state of emergency.

An extremely marginalized class of the Central City East community today is vulnerable to the criminal element that operates in Skid Row. That segment of the community is the mentally ill.

"We have done the best that we can," Joseph wrote. "It is not the LAPD that has failed the mentally ill or the public. It is our society that has failed them."
There is of course a good deal of truth to that -- American society has failed the poor and mentally ill -- but it's a self-serving truth that glosses over the fact that it is the LAPD which everyday harasses the homeless residents of downtown Los Angeles, keeping them from sitting or lying on the street during the day; it is men and women with badges who put the mentally ill in jail. The police are not a benign force on Skid Row, but an active participant in the efforts to clear the homeless out of sight in order to clear the way for developers and upper-middle class gentrifiers.
Indeed, 2 days after Joseph's Op-Ed, "Skid Row residents met . . . with Los Angeles police to protest the death of a mentally ill homeless man who fell off a rooftop after officers shocked him with a Taser as he attempted to avoid arrest," according to The Los Angeles Times:

[Carlos] Ocana, known to his friends as Amado Ocania, was one of a group of Cuban emigres who spend their days at the skid row intersection.

Roberto, a member of the group who would give only his first name, said in an interview that Ocana had scrambled up the billboard after a security guard discovered him sleeping on top of the one-story building, which houses a mini-market, and called police.

Roberto, speaking through an interpreter, said Ocana had taken off his shirt and was waving it in an obvious signal of surrender when he came down the ladder. He also said Ocana had longstanding mental health issues that were well-known to the officers, and that police refused to let his friends try to talk him down.

"He was scared. SWAT came with big guns -- real, real guns," Roberto said.

Go ahead and blame "society" for willfully neglecting its poor and disenfranchised -- society deserves it -- but don't forget that the police and their big guns are the armed wing of those among us who care the least: the rich.

Non-American had rights, court finds

A US court has ruled that a Mexican teenager who was shot dead, in Mexico, by a US Border Patrol agent had the same rights as an American-born human being, reports the Associated Press:

U.S. District Judge David Briones found in 2011 that the family could not sue because the shooting's effects were "felt in Mexico." But the appeals court said that "territorial approach" would allow agents to establish "zones of lawlessness."

It "would establish a perverse rule that would treat differently two individuals subject to the same conduct merely because one managed to cross into our territory," the appeals court ruling says.

####

Extending that right to people injured across the border by U.S. agents standing on U.S. soil, would inform the officials that they are not allowed to arbitrarily inflict harm . . . ."

I like this ruling almost as much as I like the AP's headline, "Court: Teen in Mexico shot by US agent had rights." Given the fetishiziation of the "founding fathers," it's sort of amazing that this ruling would be controversial, particularly among the "patriot" set," given that the likes of Thomas Jefferson wrote -- if didn't actually believe -- that all human beings are endowed with certain inalienable rights by "their Creator," not by governments which grant said rights based on which side of an arbitrary political border one's mother gave birth.

More interesting, though, is how the court picked up on the fact that not acknowledging that Mexicans have rights would allow US border agents to act with impunity, knowing that their actions against a certain group of people -- those on that side of a line on a map -- could never be challenged in a court of law. That would be a real problem, wouldn't it? Of course, we need not imagine what would happen if that were the case; we need only look to Afghanistan or Iraq or Pakistan or Yemen to see what happens with Americans with weapons are given license to do whatever they please without consequence (for them). If they're far enough away, not even American citizens have rights; the family of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen killed by US bombs in Yemen, doesn't even have standing to challenge his killing. He was unilaterally declared a threat by the executive branch and there's nothing anyone can do about it now.

"But international law!" shouts some pipsqueak in the bleachers. Well, listen here, nerd: International law is for losers, not the imperial powers which draft and enforce it. It's for war criminals in Africa, not the war criminals in Europe and America. The only law that one needs to know is that if the United States does something, that means it's legal. How many divisions does the president of Amnesty International got?

While Mexicans along the US border may have just been granted rights -- let's wait to see how the appeal turns out before celebrating -- the rest of world is one big zone of lawlessness for those killing on behalf of the US government.

Syria is not Iraq (and apples are not oranges)

Like other Democratic consultants with careers to keep in mind, Robert Creamer, husband of liberal Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, is currently busy reassuring progressives that Barack Obama's desired attack on Syria will be "completely different" from the shock and awe that George W. Bush and Senate Democrats helped bring to Baghdad. And, it should be said, there's a lot of truth to that. They are, indeed, different situations occurring at different times (the US government had more allies when it destroyed Iraq, for instance).

But while the situations differ and lazy comparisons should always be avoided, Creamer's number one reason for why Syria is not Iraq is wrong in a big way. Being generous, it's the result of a lazy misremembering of history. Being realistic, it's a lie.

According to Creamer, writing for The Huffington Post:

1). The President is asking for a narrow authorization that the U.S. exact a near-term military price for Assad's use of chemical weapons. He is not asking for a declaration of War - which is exactly what George Bush asked from Congress in Iraq.

George W. Bush did not ask Congress for a declaration of war, which no president has done since WWII. He asked Congress to pass an, "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq." Barack Obama, meanwhile, is asking Congress to pass an, “Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against the Government of Syria to Respond to Use of Chemical Weapons."

Obama's request does include a clause stating that it is not intended to authorize the use of "combat" troops on the ground. At the same time, while there does not appear to be much elite interest in a full-scale occupation of Syria at this point -- though calculations on all sides of the conflict could change when the bombs start falling -- the AUMF recognizes the president's "inherent" right to use military force to counter what he perceives to be threats to national security. Limits on "combat" troops are there for political reasons, not legally binding ones.

In other words, what Obama is asking for is "exactly" what Bush asked for, which is: political cover for using the US military any way he sees fit. What's different is the target and the perception that there's no real risk of being embroiled in a quagmire: just a few bombing raids carried out in time to pick up the kids from soccer practice.

You may be not at all surprised to learn that Creamer, who somehow managed to get this basic fact wrong, is a convicted liar. Indeed, he pleaded guilty to multiple felonies for defrauding a bank. But the people Creamer is lying to now don't run banks. Defrauding the public in order to sell a war won't get him a conviction, but a new hot tub and perhaps an appearance or two on a liberal chat show.

In terms of the dishonesty involved in selling a war on it, Syria is looking a lot like Iraq, actually.

How to get away with murder (non-state actor edition)

If you're wearing a uniform, murdering someone you don't like and getting away with it is only marginally harder than shooting a Rubik's cube with a police-issued Glock. For the rest of us, it can be a real pain in the ass, success depending on a lot more than a blue code of silence. You really have to plan this stuff out! And with this modern life, with all its iPhones and picking Joey up from soccer practice and crushing institutional poverty, who has the time?

If you want to get away with murder while still maintaining a social life, here's a few helpful tips:

1. Be a cop. I know we've covered this already, and this guide explicitly set out to help those aren't cops, but it's really the best way. And if your frenemy lives abroad, be a soldier.

2. Be related to, and on good terms with, a cop or other member of law enforcement. Have a sheriff's deputy for an uncle? Make him your favorite uncle.

3. This is a good one: Pick a fight – and lose it. Once you start losing, you can do what your favorite uncle does: pull out a gun and murder the target. In many jurisdictions, you are permitted to use lethal force in self defense. This can be tricky, because technically your target may be able to claim the same defense, particularly since you started the fight, so the trick is start losing early and pull your gun first.

As far as the law and any future jury is concerned, the clock starts when the person who pulls the trigger first gets scared they'll get their ass kicked.

4. This is by far the most important factor in whether you can pull this off: have lighter skin than the victim the thug.

Does he fear getting droned too?

Barack Obama said some shit today. Among the shit he said was this, in response to reports his administration is tracking every phone call made in America, while also directly tapping into the servers of Facebook and Google:

"I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs," Obama said. "My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards."

The president says he was skeptical of this power until, friends, you have to hear this funny story: the power became his. And what head of state wants to be less powerful than their predecessor? Also there was scrubbing and safeguarding involved (we can't really get into details).

But Obama won't be a head of state forever, he reminded the press, actually saying this out loud in front of people who didn't snicker:

"With respect to my concerns about privacy issues: I will leave this office at some point—sometime in the next three and a half years—and after that I'll be a private citizen," he said. "And I suspect that on a list of people who might be targeted so that somebody could read their emails or listen to their phone calls, I’d probably be pretty high on that list. So it's not as though I don't have a a personal interest in making sure my privacy is protected."

If you honestly believe the world's most powerful man is honestly concerned he will be subject to the same sort of scrutiny as other private citizens -- and, more importantly, that he fears facing the same consequences (what, is he going to be Jose Padilla'd?) -- you should immediately transfer power of attorney to a trusted love one. Once he leaves office, Obama will be making millions of dollars a year giving speeches at stockholder meetings. Maybe a spook or two will glance at his email now and again, but that won't be because of any program he established; they'd do that anyway. And legally speaking, he'll face the same consequences as George W. Bush.

When presidents and former presidents do it, that means it's not illegal.

Also, this. Obama said this:

"If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here."

Barack Obama already claims the right to unilaterally kill all sorts of people endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them I recall being "life." We have some problems here.

The enabling opposition

My latest column for Al Jazeera addresses progressive Democrats and their faux-opposition to murder by drone. Check it out, kid.

Bin Laden raid not one in milllion after all

In remarks reported by the U.S. government's official news network, Voice of America, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- like every other Obama administration official this election season -- recounts with pride that glorious spring day when, flowers blooming and birds chirping, a team of Navy SEALs found what they admit was an unarmed Osama bin Laden and shot him dead.

While the rah-rah, Obama-got-Osama! stuff is passé and unremarkable at this point, what's noteworthy is Clinton's boast in her speech that the bin Laden raid was not out of the ordinary at all. It wasn't a one-off, spectacularly exceptional raid undertaken because the target was the world's most wanted terrorist, she says. Gosh no. America does this sort of stuff all the time!

"This may sound really exotic and scary to you all, but we've probably done something similar to this - helicopter in, take the target, look for who you're after, and get out of there - we have probably done it now 1,000 times."

Indeed, the U.S. military has terrorized the people of Afghanistan for years now with night raids that, according to the occupying force's own statistics, have killed hundreds if not thousands of innocent civilians. Being poor brown people, though, the dead don't have names, their passing not trumpeted by every Democratic strategist within shouting distance of a microphone.

Life is so unimportant to self-styled liberal humanitarians that it doesn't even factor into their ostensibly all-encompassing contingency planning, as Voice of America notes:

Even with that experience on the ground, Clinton said President Barack Obama's advisors worked through every contingency they could think of in assessing the bin Laden raid: What if something went wrong with the helicopters, like in the failed effort to rescue hostages in Iran in 1980? When was the next moonless night? What would Pakistan do?

Conspicuously not asked: What if the raid ends up killing innocent bystanders? What if it was a case of mistaken identity and Navy SEALs ended up massacring an innocent family? What if, in their zeal to find and kill bin Laden by faking a vaccination a program in effort to track him down by way of DNA, the U.S. government triggered a polio outbreak in Pakistan?

That's not the only conspicuous absence, though. Check out this description of the raid and see if you can see what's missing:

As the raid progressed, a helicopter damaged its tail section on a wall of the bin Laden compound, so another chopper was sent in from Afghanistan. SEALs moved women and children from the house to shield them from an explosion set off to destroy the damaged helicopter while other SEALs brought out what they hoped was bin Laden's body. "All of this is happening - the body is going out, the women and children are coming in, the reserve helicopter is on its way, but it's not there yet," Clinton says. "There was a lot of breath-holding." 

Somehow Osama bin Laden went from being Osama bin Laden to being a "body," yet in a speech dedicated solely to celebrating his killing, how he was actually killed goes unmentioned. Kind of weird -- and it kind of makes you wonder: Maybe even the likes of Clinton feel a tinge of shame about an execution-style killing of an unarmed man, no matter how nasty of a man he might have been. Or, perhaps, they just fear bragging about those particulars might remind people that the original tale of a cowardly, trembling Osama hiding behind one of his wives was a lie.

Either way, it's probably best to keep the story ambiguous.

America's Only Elected Socialist (TM) on state murder

I certainly don't agree with everything he says, but I have to hand independent Senator Bernie Sanders this: he has forcefully, and repeatedly, condemned President Obama's expansion of the war on terror and his recent authorization of the assassination of two American citizens without charge or trial.

Oh, wait, I'm thinking of Ron Paul.

Well, then. What does American's only elected self-styled socialist from the People's Republic of Vermont think about the due-process free killing of Americans? It's kind of dumb question, really: Obviously a man who "values the rule of law" and opposed the use of torture under the Bush administration would oppose the lawless, extrajudicial -- and immoral -- killing of his fellow countrymen. I mean, if you think waterboarding is unacceptable and un-American, then you surely can't be cool with a president unilaterally assassinating anyone in the world he chooses based on secret and admittedly patchy evidence.

Right?

CNN's Wolf Blitzer recently tried to figure that out:

Blitzer: Did President Obama do the right thing in ordering the killing of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki?

Sanders: Uh, that's a long discussion. Probably longer than the amount of time we now have.

Blitzer: Go ahead, give me 30 seconds.

Sanders: Well, the answer is that I, you know, that when you have an American citizen killed by the United States government, it raises some real questions. On the other hand, when you have somebody who's a terrorist at war with the United States, that's the other side of that equation. 

Stirring. On the one hand, Bernie Sanders casts himself as tough, no-nonsense socialist fightin' for the average American. On the other hand, he caucuses with the Democrats and campaigned for his seat in the Senate alongside "one of the great leaders" of that august institution, Barack Obama.

Was the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki legal?

I argue that isn't the right question.

The liberal deference to murder

"This is a very complicated case, Maude. You know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous."

'The Army is full of a bunch of scumbags'

From Harper's magazine, here's a revealing Facebook chat between Christopher Winfield (C.W.) and his son, Adam (A.W.), after the latter witnessed members of his Army platoon in Afghanistan stage the murder of an innocent Afghan civilian:

A.W.: Did you not understand what I just told you what people did in my platoon?

C.W.: Murder.

A.W.: Yeah, an innocent dude. They planned and went through with it. I knew about it. Didn’t believe they were going to do it. Then it happened. Pretty much the whole platoon knows about it. It’s OK with all of them pretty much. Except me. I want to do something about it. The only problem is I don’t feel safe here telling anyone. The guy who did it is the golden boy in the company who can never do anything wrong and it’s my word against theirs.

C.W.: Was it an Afghan they killed?

A.W.: Yes. Some innocent guy about my age just farming. They made it look like the guy threw a grenade at them and mowed him down. I was on the Stryker and wasn’t on the ground when it took place. But I know they did it because they told me. Everyone pretty much knows it was staged. If I say anything it’s my word against everyone. There’s no one in this platoon that agrees this was wrong. They all don’t care.

#####

A.W.: I was going to keep my mouth shut but they fucked with the wrong guy this time. I’ve about had it with this Army. Last night I was so mad I almost quit altogether and told them I refuse to go on missions with them but they would really get me in trouble then.

C.W.: Four months left. You will make it through. We will work on this problem too.

A.W.: Well, if you talk to anyone on my behalf I have proof that they are planning another one in the form of an AK-47 they want to drop on a guy.

C.W.: How many are involved?

A.W.: Well, it was two guys who did it, actually killed the dude. But the whole platoon knew about it for the most part. I think our platoon leader doesn’t know and maybe like two dudes. Everyone just wants to kill people at any cost. They don’t care. The Army is full of a bunch of scumbags I realized.

Just a few bad apples is all. And remember: if you don't think "our" troops are "the good guys," you're a very naughty liberal.

Give him a trial? Give me a break

Look, I don't even know why we're debating this. The guy was responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Men, women and children. Little babies. He did not deny this – hell, he reveled in it. Wore it as a badge of honor. Dude was guilty as sin. And some whiny bitches are wringing their hands whining and bitching about giving the dude a trial? Give me a break. Putting him on trial would take forever, give him a platform, stir up the crazies... and there's always the non-zero probability he could be found innocent. A trial is fruitlessly pro forma in a case like this.

Obviously – painfully so – George W. Bush should be summarily executed.

Fair is fair

Now that every good, patriotic liberal believes Barack Obama is personally responsible for the success or failure of every U.S. military action undertaken during his watch, can we call the dude a mass murderer yet?

Related Reading: Barack Obama: He's Not Your Friend, But What If He Was?

Hypothetical violence: still not as scary as actual violence

I’ll concede one point: I got her first name wrong. My bad. But for having 12 shots of Cuervo*, I think the piece came out fairly well.

Otherwise, though, this blog post purporting to debunk Chris Floyd and me for our criticisms of political science professor and Nation contributor Melissa (!) Harris-Lacewell makes for a perfect example of the mental corruption that accompanies partisanship, a depressing but timely illustration of how once one political faction gains power it almost immediately starts acting like the one it just replaced.

Providing a perfectly smug case-study of the archetypal Humorless Liberal, the blog post in question begins by deferring to the power of authority, noting Harris-Lacewell -- who recently suggested Tea Partiers were seditious opponents of the state's status as the ”legitimate owner of the tools of violence, force, and coercion” -- just “happens to be a tenured professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton,” whereas I am but an "independent journalist” (complete with scare quotes). There's also the unsubtle suggestion that I could be a misogynist, and of course no mainstream liberal attack on Obama's critics is complete without the mandatory musing that, hmm, maybe you're just a racist.

The substance of the piece, if you will, is that I -- by arguing that liberals wary of violence should focus most of their attention on the state and its prisons and wars rather than the largely hypothetical threat posed by Tea Partiers -- fail to take the threat of “domestic terrorism” seriously, too caught up am I in the violence of empire rather than the rhetoric of Glenn Beck. The evidence for why one should quake in fear of an impending spate of domestic terrorism? The arrest of nine yokels in the Hutaree militia who, while probably not the kind of people I'd invite to my weekend barbecue, never actually hurt anyone and were only arrested on trumped up charges of planning to use “weapons of mass destruction."

Facts aside, "The deaths of two dozen people in a remote village might not be as far away as Davis seems to think," the blogger gravely writes. Of course, if George Bush were president and the accused a supposed al-Qaeda cell in, say, Miami, liberals like my critic would probably view the government showboating over their arrests with a good deal of proper skepticism (and might even recognize that when it comes to Christian militias, one should fear those employed by the state the most). A Democrat in office, however -- and the right’s preferred target of poor black people replaced with liberals’ preferred target, religious hicks with guns -- and that skepticism fades away.

So, seemingly, does opposition to war:

Floyd and Davis are not so much scornful of her use of the word “seditious” as they are at her failure to hop on their hobby horse, the evil American empire. Well, it is an empire, and it does quite a bit of evil. I spent more of my life than I care to think about on one small example, the crushing of elected government in Honduras. But all empires do evil. If the Chinese rise to power, one can predict that they, too, will do evil.

In other words: if it’s not Barack Obama and the USA killing and invading, it’ll be somebody else, so why all the fuss? Such a weird little hobby horse too (good thing no one's found my blog on crystal skulls).

Then there is this:

And, it turns out, Melissa Harris-Lacewell is not the defender of empire that they paint her as. True, her writings are about her professional interests. She has not written about peace and justice issues, though she is affiliated with the Princeton Peace and Justice Center [ed. note: that's meaningful]. Like most college professors, she shies away from advocacy in her writings.

It is also suggested that Harris-Lacewell has never "applauded" government force, and that her silence on issues of war, peace and justice can perhaps be explained by the fact she is "aware that only a small fraction of government revenues go to 'state violence'", a laughable claim easily proved false with a simple Google search.

Having written an entire essay -- and apparently beginning every poli-sci class -- with a vigorous defense of the state’s “legitimate” monopoly on the use of violence, which she by all accounts views approvingly, Harris-Lacewell’s greatest problem is not that she applauds state violence per se, but, like this critic, she assumes it, takes it for granted. Her greatest sin is one of omission: if she is deeply upset about the victims of the wars Barack Obama is expanding, she doesn't show it -- instead appearing curiously friendly toward the man directly responsible for their deaths, not deigning to mention the thousands killed under the man she once absurdly wrote is "stunningly similar to Martin Luther King, Jr.," a statement that surprisingly has not resulted in a lawsuit from the King estate.

In that earlier piece, Harris-Lacewell argued that King, like Obama, was a “pragmatic political strategist,” noting that he worked to help President Lyndon Johnson politically despite having major differences with him. Why? Because he recognized that he “needed Johnson to pass civil rights legislation"; he recognized the need to be pragmatic, sensible, willing to compromise his beliefs when it served the greater good.

That might be all good and true, but what Harris-Lacewll left out -- and what my critic and other liberals might wish to consider -- is that King later rejected that strategy of compromise when he began speaking publicly and without reservation in opposition to the mass murder the American state was carrying out against the people of Vietnam; a war, one should remember, that was fully embraced by the liberal establishment of that time and tacitly accepted by many others in exchange for the promises of a Great Society at home. But as King said then, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.”

King recognized that, if one was serious about opposing violence, then it was the state one most oppose, and that it was the duty of the person of conscience to call out those perpetrating the violence -- even when the perpetrators were liberal Democrats. In the same remarks he also quoted a statement approved by churgoers from the Riverside Church in New York City: "A time comes when silence is betrayal."

The silence of Harris-Lacewell and other cheerleaders for the Obama administration is deafening.

-----
* Joking. I would never drink Jose Cuervo.

[I initially wrote that Chris Floyd was described by the blogger as a “guy,” when in fact it was Michael J. Smith.]

That anti-patriotic feeling

Many opponents of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have over the years declared that, while they may have objected to the invasions and continue to abhor the ongoing occupations, they nevertheless support the troops fighting on the ground, an assertion considered necessary to insulate antiwar folks from claims of insufficient patriotism. But while I understand why people utter the cliche, and sympathize with what it is I think most are trying to say -- that the politicians who start the wars are more to blame for the ensuing catastrophes than the 18 year old grunts sent to fight them -- I also think assertions about supporting those who physically carry out the war crimes reflect a very confused, fatally flawed conception of morality, whereby those who order murder are rightly and unsparingly condemned but those who actually do the killing are absolved of all responsibility, as if by joining the military one also abandons all capacity for judging right from wrong.

Granted, military training does consist of dehumanizing brainwashing, with soldiers taught to have no mercy for The Enemy and that, if the life of an American is perceived to be in danger, to shoot first and cover up later. But then those who join the military know this. It's no great mystery what joining the armed forces what it entails: it means killing people whenever one's commanding officer says so. Sure, ads might depict military life as little more than one big American Gladiator episode, but I think most who join are aware they may be asked to murder on behalf of their government in a war, even if they're blinded by a naive, superficial notion of patriotism. And since no conflict the U.S. has fought over the last half a century could reasonably be construed as one of last resort in strict self-defense, the overwhelming odds are those who sign up for the military will be killing people in unjust, illegal wars -- wars that, as John Caruso ably demonstrates, entail daily atrocities like those depicted in the WikiLeaks video making the rounds.

So yes, let us condemn the emperors first, but let us not forget that the we-were-just-following-orders defense has a rather sullied history and was rejected at Nuremberg for good reason. While most soldiers are probably good people who love their children -- not unlike their commander-in-chief -- they are willing participants in an immoral, vicious endeavor; let's not pretend otherwise. As Herbert Spencer once remarked while detailing his own "anti-patriotic" feeling amid a previous Western conquest of Afghanistan, “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves."

Henry David Thoreau, however, put it best and thus gets the last word:

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts -- a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniment, though it may be,

"Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, 

As his corse to the rampart we hurried;

Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot

O'er the grave where our hero was buried."

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders--serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.

What 'legitimate' violence looks like

The video posted below by the invaluable website WikiLeaks might depict a grotesque atrocity being carried out by U.S. forces in Iraq, but it is useful to note that, while certainly abhorrent and something to avoided when possible, that war crime was legitimately sanctioned by our duly-elected representatives in Washington, who as embodiments of the state are deserving of our utmost respect, as we know from reading The Nation. What would be called "murder" with little hesitation if you or I carried out is -- through the miracle of the electoral process -- transmogrified into the mere bureaucratic exercise of the state's legitimate monopoly on the use of violence, meaning that while one may question the wisdom of a murderous policy that has killed thousands upon thousands of innocent Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani, Yemeni and Somali civilians, one dare not question the legitimacy of the murderers, lest you end up like one of those wild-eyed, seditious Tea Party-types.

On to more important things: you hear that crazy shit Glenn Beck said the other day?

Obama condemns violence in Iran. No word about Pakistan.

Speaking to reporters about the ongoing unrest in Iran, U.S. President Barack Obama declared he was “appalled and outraged” by the events of the past few days, stating that “we deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere it takes place.”

Meanwhile . . .

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An airstrike believed to have been carried out by a United States drone killed at least 60 people at a funeral in South Waziristan on Tuesday, residents of the area and local news reports said.

Details of the attack, which occurred in Makeen, remained unclear, but the reported death toll was exceptionally high. If the reports are indeed accurate and if the attack was carried out by a drone, the strike could be the deadliest since the United States began using the aircraft to fire remotely guided missiles at members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The United States carried out 22 previous drone strikes this year, as the Obama administration has intensified a policy inherited from the Bush administration.

Of course, it would be a grave act of moral equivalence to equate the deaths of a few Pakistanis -- excuse me, “suspected Taliban militants” -- with those protesters who have been victimized by the Iranian regime. After all, it is widely accepted that those accused of being terrorists or opponents of U.S. military action (or do I repeat myself?) are entitled to no legal safeguards save the right to be murdered alongside their families by an unmanned Predator drone -- assuming, that is, they have brown skin and live in a far off land.

Also: Twitter. It’s hard to empathize with a people that aren’t up to date with the latest in American social networking fads.

Chas Freeman for Chinese Premier

(Nominee for the National Intelligence Council Chairmanship Chas Freeman drives a tank toward a protester in Tiananmen Square)

President Obama's reported pick to head the National Intelligence Council (NIC), former ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman, has been praised by critics of U.S. foreign policy for being one of the few Obama foreign policy appointees who isn't a crazed, warmongering Likudnik. Indeed, Freeman has been pilloried by all the usual suspects -- like indicted AIPAC spy Steve Rosen -- for his outspoken denunciations of the Iraq war and the "bipartisan consensus" that enabled it. As Jim Lobe writes, "He doesn't pull punches," and barring the nomination of Noam Chomsky as Secretary of State, he seems about as good a foreign policy pick as one could expect out of the U.S. government.

Unfortunately, opponents of the Freeman pick, like The Weekly Standard's buffoonish Michael Goldfarb, have uncovered the would-be NIC chairman opining on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the Chinese government's response to it. Now, if you're a normal human being (i.e. not a respected American foreign policy official), you probably think that the Chinese state was and continues to be nothing but a vicious, oppressive gang termed a "government" because it has the biggest and baddest weapons. But if you're Chas Freeman, you believe the Chinese government is a bunch of appeasing, limp-wristed pansies who have been all too forgiving to their subjects:

. . . the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than -- as would have been both wise and efficacious -- to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo's response to the mob scene at "Tian'anmen" stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action.

For myself, I side on this -- if not on numerous other issues -- with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans' "Bonus Army" or a "student uprising" on behalf of "the goddess of democracy" should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy. I cannot conceive of any American government behaving with the ill-conceived restraint that the Zhao Ziyang administration did in China, allowing students to occupy zones that are the equivalent of the Washington National Mall and Times Square, combined. while shutting down much of the Chinese government's normal operations. I thus share the hope of the majority in China that no Chinese government will repeat the mistakes of Zhao Ziyang's dilatory tactics of appeasement in dealing with domestic protesters in China.

Reading this generously -- very generously -- one could argue that, well, at least Freeman grants the Chinese state the same right to repression his comrades in the U.S. government undoubtedly believe they are entitled to. That is, when it comes to brutality and unchecked state power, Freeman's no American exceptionalist.

On the other hand, Freeman's bemoaning of the "ill-conceived restraint" of the Chinese government -- the same government that, according to the Chinese Red Cross, killed roughly 3,000 people at Tiananmen Square -- is nothing if not monstrous. Why, how dare those Chinese protesters upset the "normal functions" of the Chinese government by protesting in favor of silly things like human rights and basic liberties, Freeman writes, showing just how far removed those who would presume to lead us are from basic norms of human decency.

This is an important fact to keep in mind: that while some members of the foreign policy establishment may be better than others, when held against the same moral standards you or I are held to in our daily lives, they are nearly all psychopaths. Strip away all the ex post facto rationalizations for the state (see: the "social contract") and one begins to realize we're ruled by a gang of fools, charlatans and criminals that just so happen to have a bunch of guns and tanks to back up their proclamations and edicts. That Chas Freeman is one of the good guys, relatively speaking, is a pretty good indication of this.