American Assassination History for Dummies

 

Civil Liberties  

Not Safe for Work Corporation / By Mark Ames                 

American Assassination History for Dummies

         

The idea that President Obama’s extrajudicial drone-assassinations of American citizens is "unprecedented" and "radical" is to ignore decades of recent history.

February 20, 2013  |  

 

 

Like this article?

Join our email list:

Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email.

 

 

 

 

 

This article first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation.
It’s hard to have a serious conversation about America’s drone assassination policy when no one seems to have a basic grasp of recent history. This cultural amnesia epidemic is starting to get me down— which is partly my fault for paying more than two minutes’ attention to Twitter at a single go.
The problem starts with Reagan, as problems so often do. Most people on the left take for granted that Reagan’s executive order 12333 "banned assassinations" — which is not just a false interpretation, but really awful mangling of one of the dark turning points in modern American history.
That same ignorance of the history of assassination policy runs right through today, with the repetition of another myth: That President Obama’s extrajudicial drone-assassinations of American citizens is "unprecedented" and "radical" and that "not even George Bush targeted American citizens."
The truth is a lot worse and a lot more depressing.
To understand the backstory to Reagan’s deceptive "assassination ban" in 1981, you have to know a bit about what was going on in the 70s, that brief period of American Glasnost, in the aftermath of Watergate and the military’s collapse after losing Vietnam.
All sorts of dirty Cold War secrets were pouring out in that brief period — in late 1974, Seymour Hersh broke the story that the CIA had been illegally spying on thousands of American antiwar dissidents inside of our borders, in violation of the law and the charter that brought the CIA into existence . Later, Vice President Rockefeller’s report said the CIA spied on 300,000 Americans.
Remember, the American public and most of the Establishment back then were very different from today’s. There’s some truth to the "Liberal Establishment" culture that ruled until Reagan took over — those people were serious about their do-gooder intentions and their civic duties and all that, whatever the results on the ground were — nothing at all like today’s armchair Machiavellis and backseat Nietzsches who dominate our political culture, a culture where everyone's jostling to scream "You can’t handle the truth!" at imaginary liberal do-gooders...
One of Hersh’s most incredible exposés focused on an undercover CIA spook who told of how they penetrated the Weather Underground from very early in the Columbia U protest days, right up through their nationwide bombing campaign. Which may finally answer how it was that a handful of upper class Ivy Leaguers managed to expertly set off bombs all across the country, spring Timothy Leary from Vacaville Prison, and "evade" law enforcement officials for so many years — only to get off with a slap on the wrist when they finally went up for air.
Ah well, but that’s another story. What started the assassination policy trend that frames today’s politics was a slip-up by President Ford. It’s a real-life Chevy Chase moment, only instead of stumbling over his podium and crashing to the floor for laughs, the real President Ford called a "meet ‘n’ greet" with theNew York Times’ top editors, wherein the President "slipped" and "blurted out" that he hoped they never found out about the CIA assassination program — an assassination program that none of them had ever seriously suspected until President Ford blurted it out over lunch. Whoa, Liberty! Down, boy!
Here’s how the scene is described in the book Challenging the Secret Government by UC Davis Prof. Kathryn Olmsted:

Toward the end of the luncheon, the subject of the Rockefeller Commission came up. The Times had criticized the dominance of conservatives on the commission. Ford explained that he needed men who could be trusted not to stray from their narrow mission of investigating the CIA’s domestic activities. Otherwise, he said, they might come up on matters that would "ruin the U.S. image around the world" and harm the reputation of every U.S. president since Truman.
"Like what?" asked [editor A.M.] Rosenthal, always the hard-nosed reporter.
"Like assassinations!" Ford blurted out, quickly adding, "That’s off the record."

Doh!
By standard mainstream journalism rules, Ford’s "blurt" wasn’t off the record. But more importantly: fuck the rules, this was bombshell news, from the highest (and bumblingest) source in the land! Tom Wicker and Rosenthal both insisted on publishing the scoop — Wicker was convinced that Ford meant to blurt it out for reasons unknown, it was hard to imagine someone who spent decades close to J Edgar Hoover and other intelligence officials could be that unbelievably stupid.
But cowardice won the day — Wicker and Rosenthal were overruled by the rest of the Times execs and editors who were there, and they had to sit on their scoop and watch while a grandstanding jackass (in the good sense) named Daniel Schorr stole it from under their noses.
Yep, that crusty old voice on NPR was once one of the pushiest assholes in journalism. Schorr, who worked for CBS News during the post-Watergate era, had heard the rumors about Ford’s "assassination gaffe" at the New York Times. Schorr had assumed that Ford was talking about domestic assassinations of Americans, but he needed confirmation from someone high up. So he arranged an off-the-record interview with CIA chief William Colby, and got another "gaffe" scoop:

Finally, I said, as casually as I could, that I had heard President Ford had a problem about the CIA and assassinations. Colby fell silent.
"Has the CIA ever killed anybody in this country?" I asked directly.
His reply was quick and even: "Not in this country."
"Not in this country!" I stared at Colby as it sank in on me that I had been on the wrong track, but had now been put unintentionally on the right one.

Two gaffes, two Chevy Chase fall-on-their-faces screw-ups buy two of the highest and most experienced lawyer-intelligence officials in the land. What’re the odds!
Then again, there really was something of a whiff of failure in the air those years — Hell, even our assassins couldn’t hit the side of a barn if they stood right in front shooting, as Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme proved that year, the Lucille Balls of would-be presidential assassins...
This is where the slapstick ends, and things get deadly serious and depressing. Over the next several months, the Church Commission and Pike Commission exposed a number of CIA assassination plots — in the Congo, Haiti, Chile, Cuba, Indonesia, Dominican Republic, who knew where else — and the public reacted with genuine shock and horror. Not just the public, but most of the Liberal Establishment was shocked and horrified also — Democrats and Republicans, back when they had "moderate" and "liberal" Republicans in Congress. Hypocrites, sure, but after a couple of decades with the Col. Jessups who dominate our political discourse today, I’d take those old pre-Carter Cold War liberal hypocrites any day.
The CIA assassination program shocked the public more than any other revelation from that period. JFK and MLK conspiracy theories went mainstream. Robert Redford wouldn’t take a script if he wasn’t being chased by CIA villains. Everyone hated the CIA in America, and the fastest way to becoming a hero was being hated right back — like Daniel Schorr was.
In mid-1975, Schorr was anointed "CIA Enemy No 1" by none other than ex-CIA director and silver-spoon fascist Richard Helms himself — which Schorr proudly recounted in his memoir Clearing The Air:

Though, in a sense, my broadcast about assassination plots may have helped to spark the investigation that had brought Helms back [from Teheran, where Helms served as US ambassador], I was not thinking of it in personal terms as I waited in the corridor, with three or four other reporters, for him to emerge from the Vice President’s office and to invite him to be interviewed before camera staked out in the press room across the hall.
As I offered my hand in greeting, with a jocular, "Welcome back," Helms’ face, ashen from strain and fatigue, turned livid. "You son-o-f-a-bitch!" he raged. "you killer! You cocksucker! ‘Killer Schorr’ — that’s what they ought to call you!"

In that atmosphere, in early 1976, President Ford issued executive order 11905 — which has been wrongly described over the years as "banning assassinations," but at the time Ford signed it, 11905 was more properly understood as a window dressing largely designed to keep the liberal activist Democratic Party Congress from legislating changes to the CIA themselves. (Keep in mind, the Democratic Congress that swept into power after Watergate was, for a brief time, aggressively reformist and nothing like the Democratic Party of today.) Even Ford’s language banning assassinations or CIA domestic spying left a lot to be interpreted — a recurruing problem later on, with the exception of Carter.
Sen. Frank Church, who headed the Church Committee (sort of a "Truth Commission), dismissed Ford’s "reforms" when they were first announced in early March 1976, as Newsweek reported at the time:

"Over-all, the President’s proposal is clearly to give the CIA a bigger shield and a longer sword with which to stab about," argued Sen. Frank Church.
["Ford’s CIA Shake-Up", Newsweek, March 1, 1976]

Rather than creating conditions for greater accountability, Ford centralized power in the White House — and as Newsweek reported, the biggest beneficiary of Ford’s reforms (and likely its author) was none other than new CIA chief George H. W. Bush:

Ford's Executive order put its emphasis on a firmer chain of command - starting with the President - even though the investigations of most intelligence abuses have shown them to be the result of White House interference, not uncontrolled cloak-and-daggering. Might increased Presidential control lead to more abuses in the future?
"I would hope that the American people will elect a President who will not abuse that responsibility," Ford said. "I certainly don't intend to."
The biggest beneficiary of the new plan was CIA director Bush, who now will serve as chairman of the new Committee on Foreign Intelligence ... The committee will control the budgets for all the nation's foreign intelligence operations as well as the domestic counterintelligence activities of the FBI.

Finally, although Ford technically banned assassinations, his order left a giant loophole that could allow the CIA to spy on American dissidents all over again, as Newsweek reported:

Aside from the ban on assassinations, however, no new limits were set on covert operations overseas.
Ford did set some limits on surveillance, electronic eavesdropping and infiltration aimed at U.S citizens or groups. But [...] critics said his Executive order was ambiguous enough to open the way for domestic operations previously considered questionable or prohibited by law. The CIA, for example, illegally opened mail for twenty years; last week Ford proposed the agency be given authority to do so under appropriate court orders. Under Ford's proposal, a court order would also allow the FBI and NSA to bug U.S. citizens for intelligence purposes; at present, this can be done only in criminal cases.

But then something went wrong in Bush-Ford’s plans — the curse of the bumbling American fascist returned, in the form of Gerald Ford’s 1976 campaign chief, Dick Cheney, who flubbed Ford’s odds-on election victory simply by being there and putting in his two cents. That meant a do-gooder peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter was in control at the peak of the last gasp of Democratic Party liberal activism.
As everyone knows, Carter’s presidency was one long bummer. But what most people don’t know — or have forgotten — is that Carter did more than any president to bring the national security state under control. Especially the CIA, which Carter gutted, purged, and chained down with a whole set of policies and guidelines meant to protect American citizens’ civil liberties.
In his first year in office, Carter purged nearly 20% of the Agency’s 4500 employees, gutting the ranks of clandestine operatives, sending hundreds of dirty trickster vets into the private sector to seethe for the next few years. Carter signed an executive order worked out with Frank Church and the Senate committee on intelligence putting more serious limits on the CIA’s powers — unequivocally banning assassinations, restricting the CIA’s ability to spy domestically, and putting their covert operations under strict oversight under the president, Congressional committees and the attorney general. The CIA’s paramilitary was even disbanded, though not banned.
Carter’s people understood that real fundamental change in the CIA and national security state would only come through democratic politics — through passing laws. He and Sen. Church tried, but they were outmaneuvered and ground into mulch.
A Washington Post article from the summer of 1978 captured the changing mood, and the first early wave of gloom setting in with Democrat reformers that their days were over and their chance was missed:

Two years ago, when David Atlee Phillips and like-minded defenders of the Central Intelligence Agency set out on the college lecture circuit, they were routinely confronted by hecklers and protesters denouncing them as "assassins."
The climate has changed. The investigations are over. The recriminations have subsided. The apologists have turned into advocates, urging, even demanding a stronger hand for the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community despite the record of abuses.
A comprehensive piece of legislation, the National Intelligence Reorganization and Reform Act of 1978 (S.2525), has been drafted and debated at Senate hearings for months now, but all sides dismiss it as nothing more than a talking paper, a starting point.
Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), who served as the chairman of the original Senate Intelligence Committee and its unprecedented investigations, thinks it is already too late.
"Reforms have been delayed to death," he said in an interview. "This has been the defense mechanism of the agency and it could easily have been foreseen . . . Memories are very short. I think the shrewd operators, the friends of the CIA, recognized that time was on their side, that they could hold out against legislative action."

And yet even as comparatively progressive as Carter’s and Church’s proposed reforms were — this was the brief high point for civil liberties, it’s all downhill from here — nevertheless, pretty much everyone across the spectrum hated Carter’s and Church’s reforms for their own reasons, and Carter did little to inspire.
Carter’s gutting of the CIA and his new guidelines restricting domestic surveillance by the FBI and other agencies won him few friends among grandstanding professional liberals. If anything the country turned against Carter as the world went to shit around him — Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Jonestown — paving the way for Reagan to "restore" American power.
Which brings us to early 1981, and Reagan’s executive order 12333 which has been falsely described as "banning assassinations" by critics of Bush and now Obama.
Scott Horton, writing in Harpers last year, has a good description:

But as with so much U.S. national-security legislation, this order turns out to be far less than meets the eye. Simplified, [Reagan’s EO] could be summarized this way: "No one shall be assassinated—unless the president authorizes it, in which case we will refrain from calling it an assassination."

But it’s much worse than that.
From the minute Reagan’s team took power, they went to work rewriting the rules to give themselves enormous unlimited power to re-animate the empire and the national-security state. In early 1981, it didn’t seem possible that the political culture could slide back so far after all those hard-won battles; by the end of the year, it was as if there’d never been a Church Committee or reforms of any kind.
To get a sense of how this developed, here’s a kind of timeline I put together:
March 10, 1981: "Reagan Administration Weighs Broader CIA Role in Domestic Spying"
The Reagan administration is considering a broad expansion of the CIA's authority to use break-ins, physical surveillance and covert infiltration of American groups and businesses, sources say. (AP)
June 15, 1981: "Recouping Under Reagan; CIA Is on the Rebound"
The Central Intelligence Agency, whose public image and private morale have been battered during much of the past decade, appears to be regaining some of its lost money, manpower and maneuvering room under the Reagan administration. (WaPo)
October 13, 1981: "Draft Order May Let CIA Resume Its Police Ties"
The Central Intelligence Agency, under a proposed administration order, apparently could resume many of its ties with local and state police agencies in addition to embarking on its own infiltrations of domestic organizations. (WaPo)
October 22, 1981: "Reagan Official Says Carter Overprotected Civil Liberties"

A Reagan administration official said Thursday a proposed order relaxing restrictions on CIA domestic activity is needed to strike a new balance between civil liberties and national security.
"President Carter went too far in protecting civil liberties. He erred in placing too many restrictions on the intelligence community," the official said at a briefing held on the condition that his name and position not be used. (AP)

In December 1981, Reagan signed the executive order 12333 undoing the previous decades’ reforms with the stroke of a pen. For cover, Reagan’s people planted fake scare stories through Jack Anderson about non-existent Libyan assassination squads infiltrating U.S. borders, waterskiing their way across the Great Plains to spring John Hinckley and wreak havoc on the American Way of Life.
And that is the back story to Reagan’s executive order 12333, the one that allegedly banned assassinations and allegedly made him so much more progressive than Bush or Obama.
Reagan not only gave the CIA carte blanche in the US to spy, but he also massively expanded the powers of the FBI and law enforcement to spy on Americans domestically with another executive order in 1983, paving the way for a repeat of all the awful abuses uncovered by Sen. Church, which only started coming to light at the end of Reagan’s presidency.
As reported in the AP on March 7, 1983:

Rules Relaxed On FBI Surveillance
Attorney General William French Smith today relaxed the rules governing FBI surveillance of domestic groups that advocate social change through violence….
Specifically, the guidelines make these changes:
* Allow the FBI to use new informants and infiltrators during a preliminary inquiry, where there is not yet enough evidence to warrant a full investigation. Levi had restricted those techniques to full investigations.
* Specifically authorize the FBI to continue low-level monitoring through informants and other means of groups that have gone dormant and pose no "immediate threat of harm." The FBI had been closing such investigations when a group went one year without committing violence.
* Authorize, for the first time, full investigations based solely on public statements advocating crime or violence when there is an apparent intent to carry out the threat.
* Authorize the FBI to collect publicly available information that satisfies a law enforcement purpose but does not necessarily involve a group under investigation.

Cut to: 1988, and we’re on repeat from the 70s, like a bad sitcom, with scandals and exposes of police state overreach.
Here’s one example from the Chicago Tribune dated January 31, 1988:

SECRET GUIDELINES ALLOWED FBI TO STRETCH PRIVACY LAW, FILES REVEAL
Files of an FBI investigation of groups opposing President Reagan's policy in Central America show that secret guidelines for national security investigations gave the agents enormous latitude to delve into the lives of Americans who simply had criticized government actions.
The disclosures from FBI files have raised questions in the public and Congress about whether the relaxed guidelines, designed to make it easier for agents to examine groups suspected of trying to "achieve political or social change" through violence, are a sufficient protection for individual rights. President Reagan has ordered an internal review of the FBI surveillance, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said Friday.

As you can probably guess, the Democrats made some noise, complained, opened hearings — but no one had the courage or stamina to go through all that again.
Meanwhile, on the assassination front, here’s a snapshot of what Reagan’s EO 12333 led to. This WaPo article, "Covert Hit Teams Might Evade Presidential Ban" dated February 12, 1984, needs to be unpacked to understand how little things have changed in the past three decades:

The Reagan administration has debated whether to authorize covert operations abroad that would allow military or CIA hit teams to secretly attack terrorist groups responsible for recent bombings of U.S. installations. By one account the debate is still going on and no decision has been made.
[S]ome CIA and military officials argue that the most effective way to retaliate--with the fewest mistakes and fewest innocent victims--is through a surgical strike by a hit team, run and organized by the United States but probably composed of U.S. military personnel or even foreign nationals.
Air strikes or bombardments with 16-inch, one-ton shells from the battleship New Jersey do not have the precision of a small hit team with a definite target, these officials have argued.
One senior intelligence official in Beirut recently said that air strikes, while in theory more "morally" acceptable and conventional, have killed many unintentionally.

This amazing passage gets right to one of the dark absurdities that informs our own debate today about how to fight terrorism — that it’s "legal" and considered essentially "normal" to shell with destroyers or bomb villages from the air if terrorists are suspected of being in those villages — but considered completely beyond the pale of civilized behavior to actually aim and target suspected terrorists.
It was a similar debate as this in the Bush years that led to increased use of drones and targeted assassinations — and now that we’re using drones, the sense is that the American imperial machine has crossed a Rubicon of death and evil unheard of. What Reagan’s war on terror reveals to our post-Reagan eyes is the absurdity of conducting imperial wars, period — whatever the choice of weapon is.
And then there’s this black comedy part of the story — putting the fate of the American imperial machine and justice in the hands of lawyers and "rule of law"-tards rather than in the public forum where it belongs:

Those officials opposed to using hit teams say it would be assassination. And, they noted, an executive order concerning the intelligence community, first signed by President Ford in February 1976 and later reaffirmed by Presidents Carter and Reagan, prohibits assassination. The order says: "No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination."
One official said the order could be revoked or simply ignored, arguing that covert action against terrorists could be defined as something other than "political assassination." This apparently could be done in secrecy. The law does not require the administration to give Congress prior notification of covert operations.
Both a White House and a State Department official confirmed last week that the use of a covert hit team was still being debated. They indicated that if any effort was made, the CIA would probably not be involved and the action would be called and considered "military activity" or even a "commando strike."

See what happens when you put assassination policy in the hands of lawyers? It’s not even assassination anymore — it’s "military activity"! And terrorists aren’t political targets! And you didn’t support Bush’s invasion of Iraq, you supported the institutions that supported the institution of the presidency which decided independently of the institutions you supported to invade Iraq. Duh!

* * * *
Around this time, another revelation about Reagan and assassinations was discovered by the great investigative reporter Robert Parry working at the AP: A new CIA training manual for Latin American death squads, published in 1983, included instructions on various methods of murdering and torturing. Hundreds of thousands in Central America were butchered, disappeared, raped and tortured during Reagan’s tenure, by death squads trained up by our forces. All carried out under Reagan’s alleged "ban" on assassinations:

The House Intelligence Committee chairman Wednesday night denounced a CIA psychological warfare manual produced for Nicaraguan rebels as "repugnant" and a "disaster for U.S. foreign policy."
The manual advises U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebels that some officials of the nation's leftist government can be "neutralized" with the "selective use of violence" and recommends the hiring of professional criminals to carry out "selective jobs."
...The manual suggests arranging a violent demonstration that will lead to the death of one or more rebel supporters and the creation of a "martyr." It also instructs the rebels in how to coerce Nicaraguans into carrying out assignments against their will.

Reagan’s people claimed that the AP got ahold of one of a handful of defective copies of the CIA manual, swearing on their grandmothers’ graves that the real CIA manuals distributed around Latin America made no mention of assassination.
But as soon as George Bush Sr became president in 1989, he dispensed with whatever remained of the charade with an "aw, fuck it" attitude — and that was that:

Administration Redefines Ban on Foreign Assassinations
The Bush administration, without changing an executive order banning assassinations of foreign leaders, has chosen to legally interpret "assassination" as referring only to premeditated political murder, according to a published report.
Unidentified administration officials quoted by the Times said the ruling would significantly expand the scope of military operations the United States could legally launch against terrorists, drug lords or fugitives abroad, the newspaper reported.
"None of the executive orders defined the term assassination, which created a lot of confusion," a Pentagon official said. "This ruling takes away the excuse for indecision.".

Did you catch that? Does it even matter anymore? You can already see where the real problem lies here — the complete absence of any politics, leaving American democracy at the mercy of lawyers and their various interpretations of "rule of law."
The Clinton years don’t bring any improvements — the best you can say about Clinton is that he didn’t escalate the Reagan-Bush national security state evils to new insane levels. Instead, he played the liberal by squirting a few for the hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans massacred under US supervision — then got his little wars on in Kosovo and cruise-missile attacked Saddam Hussein.
Ironically, during one of Clinton’s Baghdad-bombings in 1998, Republicans backed by all the armchair Machiavelli pundit class started making a bunch of noise demanding Clinton stop pretending once and for all that we don’t assassinate foreigners, on the theory that being "hypocritical" about assassinating foreigners is somehow a lot worse than tearing off our shirts outside the proverbial bar, screaming, "Yeah, we assassinate! Whatcha gonna do about it, huh? We’re here, brah! Not fuckin’ afraid to admit it, we assassinate, cuz that’s how we roll, brah!"
Clinton, however, chose to stick with his liberal hypocrite strategy. Ultimately, it made no goddamn difference to his successor, George W. Bush, but in hindsight you really do have to wonder why our culture got so laughably sanctimonious about a "hypocritical" assassination policy versus what the other side demanded, "at least being open about it." No one ever explained how being "open" about assassinations made us more just.

* * * *
Which brings us to our time. May 4, 2001. George W. Bush just seated himself in the White House. That same month, who should be lobbying for a bill granting Dubya unfettered power to assassinate whomever he wants butlibertarian hero Bob Barr, as reported in the Tulsa World:

Tough guys: Time to get back into the assassination business?
In case there was any doubt that the tough guys are back in charge in Washington, some of the new unilateralists making American policy these days seem to want to get us officially back into the assassination business.
[W]e search out individuals who might be inclined to harm one or more of us -- and we kill them. Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia is stepping up to that one, and he seems to be doing it on White House orders or suggestion.
Barr, who wanted to take out President Clinton last year, has other targets in his sights this time. On Jan. 3, he introduced HR 19, "The Terrorist Elimination Act of 2001." It is a bill, in its own words, "to nullify the effect of certain provisions of various Executive Orders."

A few months later, Bob Barr’s services were no longer needed by the Bush Administration.
Which brings me to the last part of this attempt at jolting your short-term memory. One of the other myths informing our feckless and half-baked debates is the meme going round claiming that President Obama, by approving extrajudicial assassinations of Americans suspected of being terrorists, crossed a line that supposedly "even Bush" never dared to cross.
For example, Wired recently declared:

Like the Bush administration before it, the Obama administration white paper rejects any geographical restriction on where it can launch its drone strikes and commando raids. But the Bush administration actually stopped short of declaring that it had the authority to kill American citizens.

And Salon’s Joan Walsh expressed outrage over the lack of liberal outrage at Obama’s "policies that Bush stopped short of, like targeted assassination of U.S. citizens loyal to al-Qaida."
(Walsh’s outrage is shared by other outraged liberals.)
There are more examples of this, but you get the point.
For better or for worse — I say for worse — this story doesn’t have a neat made-for-TV narrative arc of evil. It’s pretty goddamn flat throughout, excepting the Carter years. And that non-dramatic flat evil holds true with Obama as well.
First, it’s not true that Americans were not assassinated by extrajudicial drone or missile attacks during the Bush years. There are two for sure that we know of: The first American-born citizen assassinated by a targeted drone attack was Kemal Derwish, blown up by a Predator in Yemen in 2002.
As Dana Priest wrote in the Washington Post:

Word that the CIA had purposefully killed Derwish drew attention to the unconventional nature of the new conflict and to the secret legal deliberations over whether killing a U.S. citizen was legal and ethical.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," said one former intelligence official.

That piece was written in 2010, but early in Bush’s term, articles like this one from the New York Times in 2003 made it clear that Bush approved of extrajudicial targeted assassinations of American suspected terrorists:

On Nov. 3, 2002, a missile fired from a C.I.A. Predator drone incinerated a car carrying six men through the Yemeni desert. The target, according to government sources, was Qaed Salim Sinan al Harethi, believed to be a key Qaeda operative in the Cole attack. But in a report issued Nov. 19 by the Yemen news agency, Saba, the country's interior minister, Maj. Gen. Rashad al-Alimi, confirmed that one of the passengers was Kamal Derwish.
Afterward, American officials said the president had the power to order a strike on Al Qaeda operatives overseas, including American citizens.
In a recent interview, Mr. Ridge said Mr. Derwish's death had been discussed within the administration. "If that's what you have to do under these circumstances of 9/11 to protect America," he said, "that's what we have to do."

Ridge’s interview confession to Lowell Bergman can be found at the PBS site.
The second American targeted for assassination that we know of was Ruben Shumpert of Seattle, killed by a US missile strike in Somalia in 2008.
And now here we are today, with a "progressive" president who absorbed all the rancid policies of Ronald Reagan and George W Bush and adopted them as his own as titular head of the American Empire.
Now, if someone could just distill that down to 140 characters.

Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com and Not Safe for Work Corporation. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

GOP Mission: Dismantling Democracy

 

Civil Liberties  

AlterNet / By Steven Rosenfeld             

GOP Activists Behind Three Troubling Supreme Court Cases Aimed at Dismantling Our Democracy

The 2013 Supreme Court term could roll back decades of progressive law.

 

 

February 20, 2013  |  

 

 

Like this article?

Join our email list:

Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email.

 

 

 

Three troubling U.S. Supreme Court cases -- one that has already undermined public participation in elections and two new ones threatening to further tilt the balance toward wealthier and whiter slices of society—have all been brought by Republican activists who want to change the rules to benefit their shrinking political party.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a campaign finance case in which a wealthy Alabama Republican sued because he wanted to give more money than federal law allows in two-year election cycles. Shaun McCutcheon, the businessman-activist, joined by the Republican National Committee, challenged the $46,200 limit on donations to candidates and their committees, and $70,800 donation limit to other political committees. Less than 1 percent of Americans give this much to campaigns.
Next week, in another lawsuit originating with activist Republicans, Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court will hear a case on whether the heart of the federal 1965 Voting Rights Act, Section 5, is outdated and should be overturned. That section lets the Justice Department veto changes in election laws in 16 states that have had histories of race-based discrimination in elections. The VRA was used in 2012 to block GOP-backed voter ID laws in several states, as well as to overturn GOP-drawn legislative districts in Texas that diluted the possibility of electing Latinos to Congress. Republicans argue that racism in elections is a thing of the past. However, dozens of briefs filed by liberals argue that is not the case.

And in 2010, the Supreme Court, in the infamous Citizens United case, ruled that wealthy individuals and unions could make unlimited donations to political groups that were not formally connected to a candidate’s campaign. That suit originated with GOP activists’ efforts to smear then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in a fall 2008 video.

The Citizens United ruling and another that followed in federal court were responsible for 2012’s billionaire political venture capitialists who bankrolled super PACs, which were shadow campaigns for specific candidates—first in the Republican primaries and then used by both parties in the fall election. These uber-wealthy groups were responsible for filling the airwaves in swing states with political mud, which dumbed down the debate and prevented down-ballot candidates from getting their messages out.

Stepping back from the devilish details of election law, this disturbing pattern emerges: Republican activists, with the backing of their party, have been successful in using the federal courts to rewrite—and to try to further rewrite—the rules of who participates and has the biggest megaphones in American elections. And they’re doing so as the Supreme Court has a Republican president-appointed majority that believes the wealthiest Americans and big businesses should spend freely in elections (suggesting they’ll rule for McCutcheon), and has previously said there were serious questions whether the Voting Rights Act’s Section 5 was needed.

To be fair, the Democrats and President Obama are not angels when it comes to campaign finance reform. The president has done nothing to clean up the system that he mastered to gain office. And the Democrats have copied the GOP’s big money tactics, notably super PACs. However, it is the GOP that is leading the attacks on the equalitarian structures remaining in U.S. elections.

Next week, it will be an amazing spectacle to watch the arguments unfold at the Supreme Court as Republicans argue that there are no race-based prejudices at play in American elections—and accuse the Democrats and civil rights groups of cynicism for saying the Voting Rights Act is still needed. This will be an example of lawyering at its worst—arguing anything on behalf of a client and hoping those on the bench are uninformed enough about the realities to believe it.

You might think that the Supreme Court is smarter than that, but its political niavete was on full display in the Citizens United ruling, where the conservative majority said that wealthy individuals, unions and corporations could 1) make unlimited donations to supposedly "independent" political committees—those not working with specific candidate campaigns; and 2) that the public would know who the big donors were because their identities and contributions would be fully disclosed.
Both assumptions were more than a little wrong. Many 2012 super PACs were run by political consultants who previously had worked for the same candidates their super PACs backed; and donor identities were hidden by political non-profits run by Karl Rove and his ilk, shielded by federal tax law. 

The Court’s pro-electioneering spending prejudice was seen in announcing that it would hear the McCutcheon case. Election law experts were not surprised and have said for some time that the Roberts Court is poised to dismantle modern campaign finance laws. Still, the decision to hear the case caused dismay in progressive circles because it threatened the one remaining legal pillar in federal campaign finance law—that contributions could be limited to prevent the appearance or occurance of corruption. Even though there are plenty of loopholes for big money in American elections, this case could set precedents to unravel those modest controls.

It’s noteworthy that these attacks on the legal underpinnings of how elections are run come from a political party whose largely white and aging base is shrinking when seen against America’s demographic changes.

The Republican Party may be in disarry and fighting among themselves—such as the Tea Party faction accusing and backtracking from calling Karl Rove a Nazi—and it may be increasingly unpopular among young voters and communities of color. But when it comes to targeting the rules that dictate who can participate in and influence American elections, it has been successful in bringing cases to the Supreme Court that have and can continue to further unbalance participation in American elections. The Republican Party may be declining, but it is not going quietly into the night.          

Steven Rosenfeld covers democracy issues for AlterNet and is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

Documents Found in Meth House Show the Inner Workings of a Dark Money Group Linked to 23 Conservative Candidates

Election 2012  

ProPublica / By Kim Barker, Rick Young, Emma Schwartz

Documents Found in Meth House Show the Inner Workings of a Dark Money Group Linked to 23 Conservative Candidates

The documents offer a rare glimpse into the world of dark money, showing how Western Tradition Partnership appealed to donors, interacted with candidates and helped shape their election efforts.

October 29, 2012  |  

 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

 

This post was co-published with PBS' Frontline.

The boxes landed in the office of Montana investigators in March 2011.
Found in a meth house in Colorado, they were somewhat of a mystery, holding files on 23 conservative candidates in state races in Montana. They were filled with candidate surveys and mailers that said they were paid for by campaigns, and fliers and bank records from outside spending groups. One folder was labeled "Montana $ Bomb."

The documents pointed to one outside group pulling the candidates' strings: a social welfare nonprofit called Western Tradition Partnership, or WTP.

Altogether, the records added up to possible illegal "coordination" between the nonprofit and candidates for office in 2008 and 2010, said a Montana investigator and a former Federal Election Commission chairman who reviewed the material. Outside groups are allowed to spend money on political campaigns, but not to coordinate with candidates.

"My opinion, for what it's worth, is that WTP was running a lot of these campaigns," said investigator Julie Steab of the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices, who initially received the boxes from Colorado.

The boxes were examined by Frontline and ProPublica as part of an investigation into the growing influence on elections of dark money groups, tax-exempt organizations that can accept unlimited contributions and do not have to identify their donors. The documents offer a rare glimpse into the world of dark money, showing how Western Tradition Partnership appealed to donors, interacted with candidates and helped shape their election efforts.

Though WTP's spending has been at the state level, it's best-known nationally for bringing a lawsuit that successfully challenged Montana's ban on corporate spending in elections, extending the provisions of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Citizens United decision to all states.

The tax code allows nonprofits like WTP to engage in some political activity, but they are supposed to have social welfare as their primary purpose. As reported previously by ProPublica and Frontline, when WTP applied for recognition of its tax-exempt status, it told the IRS under penalty of perjury that it would not directly or indirectly attempt to influence elections — even though it already had.
The group is now locked in an ongoing dispute with Montana authorities, who ruled in October 2010 that the nonprofit should have registered as a political committee and should have to disclose its donors. WTP sued. A hearing is set for March.

In the meantime, the group has changed its name to American Tradition Partnership, reflecting its larger ambitions. This month, it sent Montana voters a mailer in the form of a newspaper called the Montana Statesman that claimed to be the state's "largest & most trusted news source."

The front page accused the Democratic gubernatorial candidate of being soft on sex offenders.

Donny Ferguson, American Tradition Partnership's spokesman and executive director, did not specifically address the documents found in Colorado or allegations of coordination made against WTP.

"American Tradition Partnership always obeys every letter of every applicable law," he wrote in an emailed response to questions. "ATP does not, and never will, endorse candidates or urge voters to vote for or against candidates. ... These false allegations are old hat."

On its website, the group says its primary purpose is issue advocacy and combating radical environmentalists, whom it sometimes calls "gang green." It describes itself as a grassroots group backed by a broad membership of small donors.

When asked about the documents found in Colorado, Jim Brown, a lawyer for the group, said he was unfamiliar with them.

After being shown some of the documents by Frontline, Brown, in a follow-up email, said his review indicated that they appeared to belong to a company called Direct Mail. Direct Mail and Communications is a print shop in Livingston, Mont., run by a one-time key player in WTP and his wife.
Brown urged Frontline to turn over the documents. "If the documents are purported to be what you say they are, then you may knowingly be in possession of stolen property," Brown wrote.

The records are in the hands of the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices, which considers them public and reviewable upon request.

* * *

In the anything-goes world of modern campaign finance, outside groups face one major restriction: They are not allowed to coordinate with candidates. That's because contributions to candidates and parties are still capped to limit donors' direct influence, while contributions to outside groups are unlimited.

The Federal Election Commission has a three-pronged test for proving coordination: Did an outside group pay for ads, phone calls or mailers? Did these materials tell people to vote for or against a candidate, or praise or criticize a candidate in the weeks before an election? Finally, did the candidate, or a representative, agree to the expenditure?

Many concerns have been raised about coordination in this election because of close ties between outside groups and campaigns. Super PACs supporting President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney are run by their former staffers. Super PACs and campaigns have used the same consultants, who insist in interviews that they have firewalls.

Proving coordination is extremely difficult, however. Since 2007, the FEC has investigated 64 complaints of coordination, but found against candidates and groups only three times, fining them a total of $107,000, a review of FEC enforcement actions shows.

Montana, which has similar rules, also receives few complaints about such activity, Steab said.

The boxes from Colorado contained a mixture of documents from candidates and outside groups.

Folders labeled with the names of Montana candidates held drafts and final letters of support signed by candidates' wives and drafts and final copies of mailers marked as being paid for by the campaigns. The folders often appeared to have had an accounting of what had been sent and paid for scrawled on the front.

Several folders included copies of the signatures of candidates and their wives. "Use this one," someone wrote in red pen next to a cut-out rectangle on a page with five signatures from one candidate.

Steab, the Montana investigator, said she believed these cut-out signatures were then affixed to fliers from the candidates.

Besides material from the campaigns, the boxes also contained mailers on 2008 and 2010 races in Colorado and Montana from Western Tradition Partnership and six other groups. There were bank statements for several groups, including the Coalition for Energy and the Environment, the Alliance of Montana Taxpayers and the Conservative Victory Fund.

In all the documents, one name repeatedly popped up: Christian LeFer. Even though two Montana Republican politicians founded WTP, investigators determined that LeFer was the man behind the scenes.

LeFer, who is described as WTP's director of strategic programming in memos in 2009, said in an email that the documents "appear to be stolen property" and that, as he'd had no access to them, he couldn't respond to most of ProPublica's questions, "which seem to be based on an erroneous and fanciful interpretation of what they mean."

LeFer did not address whether WTP had coordinated with candidates. Although former employees and candidates said LeFer helped his wife run Direct Mail and Communications — the printing company that Brown, the lawyer, suggested was the owner of the boxes of documents found in Colorado — LeFer said he did not "run or direct the activities" there.

Direct Mail listed its principal office address in Montana filings as being the sameColorado address WTP initially used.

Two outside groups with documents in the boxes — the Montana Committee to Protect the Unborn and Montana Citizens for Right to Work — listed their addresses on bank statements as the same post-office box in Livingston used by LeFer and Direct Mail. LeFer was also the executive director of Montana Citizens for Right to Work, an anti-union group.

Former state Rep. Ed Butcher said LeFer and Western Tradition Partnership aided candidates with no experience.

"They'll come in, if candidates want some help, they'll come in and help them," said Butcher, who described LeFer as "a Karl Rove type political strategist" who "stays in the background."

Butcher's file in the Colorado boxes was labeled "Butcher Primary '08 mail samples." It included an email from LeFer to Butcher with a survey about unions. There was a campaign donation form, and drafts of fliers and a letter from Butcher's campaign.

A "wife questionnaire" for Butcher's wife Pam said she met her husband "on a blind date arranged by his buddy that neither of us wanted." The questionnaire listed her children's names and that she had been taking care of her disabled mother for five years.

A letter on pink paper from Pam Butcher was in a file marked "wife letters." The letter, which contained much of the information in the questionnaire, was marked as being paid for by Butcher's campaign.

Butcher said his wife might have run her letter past LeFer. "He may have asked, 'Do you need any help?' and she said, 'Yeah, I need to get this family letter out,'" said Butcher, who won the Republican primary in 2008 by 20 votes.

A folder for another successful candidate, Mike Miller, included a fax cover sheet from Miller to LeFer, forwarding Miller's filled-out Montana candidate surveys for two outside groups, the National Gun Owners Alliance and the National League of Taxpayers. It also held a candidate survey asking Miller if he had any research about his opponent, including "any recent scandals."
Miller confirmed to Frontline that LeFer was an unpaid adviser on his campaign, but would not elaborate further.

Trevor Potter, a former federal election commissioner who now runs the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group that advocates for more restrictions on money in politics, reviewed the documents found in the boxes.

"This is the sort of information that is, in fact, campaign strategy, campaign plans that candidates cannot share with an outside group without making it coordinated," Potter said.

"You need to know more, but certainly if I were back in my FEC days as a commissioner, I would say we had grounds to proceed with an investigation and put people under oath and show them these documents, and ask where they came from and where they were."

* * *

After the 2008 election, Montana started investigating whether WTP should have disclosed its donors.

The inquiry progressed slowly until 2010, when a former WTP contractor handed over internal fundraising records, saying she was worried about what the group was doing.

The documents showed that the group raised money specifically by telling people and corporations that they could give unlimited amounts in secret.
"The only thing we plan on reporting is our success to contributors like you who can see the benefits of a program like this," said one document, a 2010 election briefing to read to potential donors. "You can just sit back on election night and see what a difference you've made."

A target list of potential donors included an executive at a talc mine, the Montana representative of an international mining group and a Colorado executive for a global gold-mining company.

One note about a potential donor advised: "Married rich, hard to get a hold of. Have a beer with him." Another said: "Owns big ranch, signed a hit piece I wrote on cty cmms'r last year (don't mention), should give $$ $10,000 ask."
Other notes suggested that solicitors "See Christian" or "Talk to Christian," apparently references to LeFer.

The documents cited the group's success in 2008, saying in a confidential grassroots membership development proposal that 28 Montana state legislators "rode into office in 100% support of WTP's responsible development agenda."
By 2010, the partnership was active in state races in Montana and Colorado.
That October, Montana authorities said Western Tradition Partnership had violated campaign-finance law and should be fined. They said the group's purpose in 2008 was "not to discuss issues, but to directly influence candidate elections through surreptitious means."

The Montana investigation also said the evidence was overwhelming that WTP had established the Coalition for Energy and the Environment, known as CEE, as a "sham organization" to act as a front for expenditures actually made by WTP.

But the investigation also found that "sufficient evidence has not been disclosed to establish coordination between WTP/CEE and any candidate. Concern and healthy skepticism is warranted, however."

That was before the boxes from Colorado turned up.
A convicted felon named Mark Siebel said he stumbled on them inside a known meth house near Denver at some point in late 2010.

It's not clear how they got there. Siebel said a friend found them in a stolen car. After reading through some of the documents, he reached out to people he thought might be interested in them — primarily Colorado candidates attacked by Western Tradition Partnership. A lawyer married to one of the candidates shipped the boxes off to Montana investigators.

By that time, however, the Montana probe into the group's activities in the 2008 election was over. Steab also said that there was no way to determine for certain where the documents were from and who owned them. There was no whistleblower, and no information about how the records ended up in Colorado.
Despite this, Steab said, she found the documents very telling.

"It looks to me that there was a lot of coordination — but I don't know that it's coordination that everyone is aware of in all cases," she said. She said she spoke to one candidate who told her he was upset about all the negative mailers against his opponent.

This year, American Tradition Partnership is as active as ever. It's suing to try to overturn contribution limits in Montana, so far unsuccessfully. The group sent out mailers attacking candidates before the June primary in Montana, reporting none of them to the state as political expenditures. It later put out a press release saying that 12 of the 14 candidates it backed had won.

For the general election, the group appears to be targeting Montana's attorney general, Steve Bullock, the Democratic candidate for governor. As attorney general, Bullock fought the partnership's lawsuits against the state, including the one that ended up in the Supreme Court.

The first issue of the partnership's Montana Statesman newspaper, dated Oct. 7, which agroup press release said was sent to 180,000 voters, featured four photographs on thefront page: Three of registered sex offenders, and one of Bullock, accusing him of allowing one in four sex offenders to go unregistered. "Bullock admits failure," the headline announced. A full-page ad accused Bullock of taking illegal corporate contributions and of "criminal hypocrisy."

The Statesman's editor and publisher is none other than Ferguson, the partnership's executive director, described as an "award-winning newspaper veteran" who has been "commended by other newspapers for his 'honest, intelligent and issue-oriented' approach."

Ferguson didn't respond to a question about his journalism credentials.
"Conservative group American Tradition Partnership now one of nation's biggest media outlets," said a press release on the group's website, adding that the newspaper would publish "several" editions through Election Day and into 2013.
 

Kim just finished her term as the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where she studied, wrote and lectured on Pakistan and Afghanistan and U.S. policy. She was the South Asia bureau chief for the Tribune from 2004 to 2009 and was based in New Delhi and Islamabad.

Romney Tests the Limits on Lying

Romney Tests the Limits on Lying

October 11, 2012

 

Americans may see themselves as worldly cynics when it comes to political lying, observing that all politicians do it. But Mitt Romney is testing the limits with his ever-shifting positions and outright lies, notes Lawrence Davidson.

By Lawrence Davidson

Mitt Romney might be the most brazen political liar since James Polk, who served as the 11th U.S. president (1845-1849) and lied through his teeth – to Congress, to his cabinet, to the newspapers – to get the country into a war with Mexico.

Of course, other presidents have lied to a similar end, for instance President Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War and President George W. Bush on the Iraq War. But Polk operated with the same audacious “lying is part of what I do” disposition that Mitt Romney does.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney with a new campaign slogan, "Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose!" (Photo credit: mittromney.com)

If one has any doubt about Mitt Romney’s mendacious temperament, the first presidential debate should have put it to rest. According to one analyst, Romney let loose with “27 myths in 38 minutes,”  finishing with a big grin after most of these prevarications. He produced trumped-up assertions, false statistics and wild exaggerations about taxes, energy independence, job creation, the deficit, Medicare, “Obamacare,” and military spending.

If the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri came back to life today and produced an updated list of lost souls for the “Inferno” section of his Divine Comedy, Romney would certainly earn a spot in the 8th rung of hell. That is where Dante placed, among others, the “falsifiers, those who attempted to alter things through lies or alchemy.” Their punishment was “based on horrible … diseases such as rashes, dropsy, leprosy and consumption.”

By the way, there seems to be a suspicion that Romney  also cheated during the first debate. The debate rules say that the candidates cannot use “prepared notes.” However, a video of the debate shows that he had put what looks like a white piece of paper down on his podium, or maybe it was just his handkerchief. But who could believe that Romney might cheat?

Some Specifics

The second presidential debate, scheduled for Oct. 16, will be partially about foreign policy. As a run-up to the moment, Romney gave a speech on foreign affairs. It should be kept in mind that between Oct. 8th and Oct. 16 he might completely change his positions. The man has such a flip-flop record that this is quite possible.

However, assuming he doesn’t do that, let’s take a look at just how truthful are his foreign policy statements:

As Robert Parry points out in Consortium News, Romney lied when he said Obama “has not signed one new free trade agreement in the past four years.” Obama has in fact signed three (South Korea, Panama and Columbia). Romney also lied when he said that Obama was “silent” during the suppression of demonstrations in Iran after the reelection of President Amadinejad. Obama spoke out on multiple occasions.

By the way, one might not approve of NAFTA-style trade agreements. I certainly don’t. But that does not make Romney’s lies about Obama’s actions acceptable.
Parry goes on to detail how Romney’s accusation that Obama’s foreign policy is “weak” is  groundless. After all, he is talking about the man who wages war in Afghanistan, helped bring down the dictatorship in Libya, and took down Osama bin Laden. Parry explains that Romney credits a lot of this to the U.S. military as if Obama had nothing to do with it.

Once more, Obama’s foreign policy has much about it that can be criticized. So, why do it through sheer falsehoods?  Perhaps because Romney actually has no problem with Obama’s actions, but does not want the public to associate them with the president.

Then there is Romney’s sudden embracing of a Palestinian state when just a few months ago he described such a goal as “almost unthinkable to accomplish.” At that time the reason he gave for his position was that Palestinians are not interested in peace. That was an outrageous lie.

It is hard to believe that he has now changed his mind. More likely he is attempting to preclude any charge that he has abandoned the search for peace, even as he asserts that Obama has not displayed leadership toward that same end.

When it comes to the Arab Spring, Obama allegedly missed “an historic opportunity to win new friends and share our values in the Middle East.” Who would these friends be? Those fighting against “evil tyrants and angry mobs who seek to harm us.”

This is so much gobbledygook. Most of the evil tyrants are our longstanding old friends and the angry mobs are the only hope for any governmental improvement.

Parry points out that the real difference between Romney and Obama is that Romney is much more the militarist. He has embraced neocon advisers, given carte blanche to Israel and verbally attacked Russia as “without question, our No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

All of this suggests that between Obama (who is certainly no saint and has plenty of blood on his own hands) and Romney, it is the latter who is more likely to get the nation into yet another war. As Juan Cole has observed, “wars and lots of other conflicts are not a foreign policy vision, they are a nightmare.”

Does Lying Work?

So, does this serial falsification work? Can it actually help get a mythomanic elected president? It seems that the answer is yes.

According to a Pew Research Center poll taken after the first Obama-Romney debate,  “It’s official. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney…erased President Barack Obama’s lead.” According to a graph of the poll results Romney’s picked up five percentage points to come even with Obama. Sixty-four percent of voters “thought that Romney was more informative than President Obama.”

The liar is more informative!? How is that possible? Well, you start with a lot of ignorance. The ignorance is not a function of lack of intelligence, but a function of lack of accurate contextual knowledge.

As a consequence the level of understanding of the average American about government policy on national issues such as  health care, energy independence, job creation, the deficit, military spending and even taxes is considerably lower than their average IQ. It is even worse when we get to foreign policy and its formulation.

Into the resulting knowledge vacuum come the misleading statements and assertions of politicians, so-called experts, and media spokesman of all descriptions. Fox News has made millions of dollars selling advertising that accompanies biased opinion passed off as fact.

In the end what the majority of Americans think they know about both domestic and foreign policy is based on media hear-say. Romney’s assertive and stylized lying fits well into this scenario. And his style also passes for strength and self-confidence.

Is it Pathological?

Romney’s lying is so pervasive, so ever-present, that one starts to wonder if it is pathological. There is a mental illness characterized by habitual lying. It goes by the name of Pseudologia Fantastica. Here are some of the characteristics of this ailment:

a. The lies told “are not entirely improbable” and “upon confrontation, the teller can admit them to be untrue, even if unwillingly.” In other words, the liar is aware that he or she is lying.

b. The lies told cast the teller in a favorable light.

c. The tendency to lie is a long-lasting one and not the product of the moment. It reflects an innate trait of the personality.

Well, Romney fits this pattern when it comes to the first two traits. It is hard to tell about the third. We will have to await the in-depth biographies that are certain to hit the market in short order. However, there is no doubt that the man has an easy facility for lying. One doubts if it keeps him up at night.

When the powerful lie it is a problem for all of us. That is because we do not usually act on the basis of what is true. Rather we act on the basis of what we think is true. When it comes to foreign policy, what the powerful and the media tell us is what most of us accept as true.

This distinction between what is true and what we think is true is critically important. If what we believe is true approximates the reality outside of us, then our plans and actions usually work out. If, however, what we think is true is off the mark, we can end up walking right off a cliff.

In the last 50 years Americans have been walking off cliffs quite regularly, with the result that millions have been killed and maimed. They have done so in large part because they have a hard time knowing when they are being lied to, especially about foreign policy.

If the Pew poll cited above is any predictor, nothing is going to change any time soon. Elect Mitt Romney and that walk toward the cliff might turn into a run. Reelect Obama, and the cliff will probably remain our self-destructive destination, but perhaps the pace will be more measured.

Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America’s National Interest; America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic Fundamentalism.

Tags: Barack Obama, James Polk, Lawrence Davidson, Mitt Romney

Reagan-Bush Legacy of Political Abuse

Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995

Reagan-Bush Legacy of Political Abuse

By Michael Winship
January 28, 2011 

Editor’s Note: The Reagan-Bush legacy to the United States includes a politicized Judiciary and a blatant disregard for laws restricting the powers of the Executive – all done while knowing that the national political-media structure would do nothing to demand accountability.

With Reagan-Bush political descendants again wielding substantial power, the country is faced with the dilemma of what to do when such a group holds itself above the law and the traditional checks on that power no longer work, as Michael Winship notes in this guest essay:

The Detroit Tigers are retiring the great baseball manager Sparky Anderson's number 11 this season. "It's a wonderful gesture," Detroit Free Press columnist Michael Rosenberg wrote. "I just wish Sparky could see it." 

Anderson won three World Series -- one managing the Tigers, two with the Cincinnati Reds -- and passed away this past November. Rosenberg said, "Retiring his number now is the baseball version of waiting until a relative dies to say thank you."

That's because it comes 16 years after Anderson left the Tigers in a bitter feud with owner Mike Ilitch. Yet as Sparky once said, "I've got my faults, but living in the past is not one of them. There's no future in it."

I wish I could say the same, let bygones be bygones and the rest, but when it comes to two other baseball devotees, the Presidents Bush, it's tough. Father and especially son left behind a heap of wreckage.

I hear some of you say forget it, time to move on. Maybe, but theirs is not a legacy that simply fades in the distance and leaves us in peace. What they did continues to impact our lives in deleterious ways, notably when it comes to the full speed, head-on collision of partisan politics with American justice.

Just this week, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) released a long overdue, 118-page report concluding that George Jr.'s White House used government agencies for Republican pep rallies and sent officials off on electioneering trips using taxpayer money, especially in the lead-up to the 2006 midterm elections.

These are violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activities in the workplace and forbids the use of tax revenues for political purposes.

According to the OSC's findings the abuses were "a systemic misuse of federal resources." 

As the website Talking Points Memo reported, "The Office of Political Affairs (OPA) in Bush's White House, overseen by Karl Rove, dispatched cabinet officials to campaign for Republican candidates on the federal dime and forced federal political appointees to attend political meetings during work time."

One memo, at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, read, "This meeting is mandatory. It will essentially be the same large meeting that we had last year about this time. So, please clear your schedule, put your pom-poms on, and let's go!!!"

There won't be any punishment for the cheerleaders -- unless you count Democrats taking back the House and Senate in 2006, despite Rove and the GOP pulling out all the stops with their White House boiler room operation. 

No request has been made asking the Justice Department to file charges; Rove and any other miscreants fled the scene of the crime before Inauguration Day 2009 and can no longer be prosecuted. The Obama White House, however, has moved its Office of Political Affairs to Democratic National Committee HQ and the presidential re-election effort to Chicago. What could possibly go wrong in Chicago?

Attempting to rectify another Bush injustice this week, the Obama administration named two new commissioners to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which currently has an imbalance of four Republicans (two claim to be "independents") to three Democrats (one commissioner's reappointment by House Speaker Boehner will even things up -- it's a little complicated).

Talking Points Memo: "The Bush administration stacked the commission with conservatives by having two of the commissioners switch their affiliation from Republican to independent. The move, said the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, was legal. 

“But it was also, as former Commission Chairman Gerald Reynolds (a Republican appointee) acknowledged, intended to 'game' the system. The scheme unfolded in 2004, and the panel has since focused on racism against white people and claimed that measures intended to aid minority groups are discriminatory."

Meanwhile, the Bush family's Supreme Court appointees -- along with that mossback relic of the Reagan era, Antonin Scalia -- habitually thumb their noses at the very notion of an independent and impartial judiciary. 

Last week, the citizen's lobby Common Cause formally requested that the Justice Department investigate whether Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas (Bush Sr.'s notorious appointee) should have been disqualified from hearing the Citizens United case, last year's landmark ruling that lifted restrictions on corporate political contributions, allowing huge amounts of secret cash to pour into our elections.

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Common Cause President and CEO Bob Edgar wrote, "It appears both justices have participated in political strategy sessions, perhaps while the case was pending, with corporate leaders whose political aims were advanced by the decision. 

“With respect to Justice Thomas, there may also be an undisclosed financial conflict of interest due to his wife's role as CEO of Liberty Central, a 501(c)(4) organization that stood to benefit from the decision and played an active role in the 2010 elections."

Justice Thomas dismissed his failure to report his wife's income -- not only from the right-wing Liberty Central but also the conservative Heritage Foundation -- as a "misunderstanding of the filing instructions." 

As for those "political strategy sessions," Thomas and Scalia attended secretive, invitation-only desert retreats, fundraisers held by billionaire Charles Koch, who, with his brother David, owns the energy giant Koch Industries, the second largest private company in the United States, and bankrolls the right wing, including elements of the Tea Party movement.

At those sessions, discussions may have been held about Citizens United while the case was under consideration; certainly, many of those in attendance have taken full advantage of the ruling and poured millions into the campaigns of conservative candidates -- Common Cause reports that Koch Industries' political action committee spent $2.6 million on last year's elections, in addition to tens of millions contributed by Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing group founded by the two brothers. 

(The 2011 Koch retreat takes place this weekend; thousands plan to gather in nearby Rancho Mirage, California, to protest.)

This isn't the first time Justices Scalia and Thomas have hobnobbed with corporate bigwigs and right-wing muck-a-mucks. Scalia is a regular headliner at the right-wing Federalist Society. In 2009, Thomas was featured at the Heritage Foundation's annual fundraiser and in 2008 delivered the Wriston Lecture at the conservative Manhattan Institute, an event that costs $5,000 to $25,000 to attend. 

Conservative court colleague and George W. Bush appointee Samuel Alito has also given the Wriston Lecture and attended fundraisers for The American Spectator magazine and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the wonderful folks who gave us ACORN hoaxster James O'Keefe.

(Thanks for this information to the progressive ThinkProgress website. And yes, I know liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has allowed the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund to name a lectureship after her; that's an issue, too.)

"The Supreme Court is the guardian of its own integrity," The Boston Globe editorialized on Thursday. "That means staying above politics and maintaining an air of dispassionate consideration of constitutional issues. 

“The court is not an elected body, and shouldn't function like one. This is especially important because, unlike with an elected body, there are few external constraints on the justices: They set their own rules, and the need for comity on the court largely prevents them from policing each other. Their shared commitment to maintaining judicial decorum is all that binds them."

No one is above the law, it's said, but Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito certainly behave like they are.

None of them attended Tuesday's State of the Union address -- certainly not the first time that's happened, but still symbolically disrespectful. Sadly, unlike baseball legend Sparky Anderson's, their numbers are unlikely to be retired any time soon. 

Michael Winship was senior writer at Bill Moyers Journal on PBS and is president of the Writers Guild of America, East.     

Far Right Says "Our Speech is Freer than Yours!"

Salon / By Sally Kohn

Far Right: Our Speech is Freer!

Wing nuts insist on their right to spew hate -- but demand that those who criticize them be "held accountable".

September 16, 2012  |  

This story was originally published at Salon.

A month ago, when an armed man attacked the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., conservatives blamed the fact that the organization had been labeled a “hate group” for inciting the attack. Never mind that the hate group label was intended to condemn the sort of violence that the Family Research Council’s extreme homophobic vitriol encourages. Tony Perkins, head of the FRC, said that groups that labeled his organization a hate group should be “held accountable for their reckless use of terminology.”

But now, when an offensive anti-Islam film promoted by a right-wing Christian preacher is clearly to blame for violent riots spreading thought the Middle East and appeared to have played a role in the death of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, the far right in America is defending extremist rhetoric against Islam and attacking the Obama administration for condemning the inflammatory film. Blind to the diplomatic urgency of quelling violence, let alone their own hypocrisy, conservatives joined Mitt Romney in accusing the president of not standing up for free speech.

The only way to square this circle is to understand that conservatives in America are not free speech absolutists but rather apply the notion of “American exceptionalism” to their own tribal superiority. In their minds, blaspheming the religion of a billion of the world’s people and sparking violent outrage is permissible free speech because, well, these conservatives believe that Islam is an inferior and evil religion. As Michelle Malkin tweeted in an exchange we had on the day after the Libya and Egypt attacks, “What part of the centuries-old rallying cry “BEHEAD THOSE WHO INSULT ISLAM” don’t you understand?” (the caps are hers). Malkin then pointed me to a book by Bruce Bawer that argues that when we do crazy things like contextualize the violence of a fringe few in the broader sea of a billion peaceful Muslims who are horrified by such violence, we are “appeasing” radical Islam and therefore surrendering our values, especially freedom of speech.

But such “American exceptionalism” applies extra special to fundamentalist Christians within our own borders. Presumably these most exceptional of the exceptional should feel free to call gay people criminals and child molesters who should all be deported, and their right to free speech trumps the rights of others to label this speech hateful. Those spewing the hate are simply “expressing their beliefs” but those responding are being “reckless.” It doesn’t seem to matter that, for instance, on this issue, the vast majority of Americans oppose the extreme anti-gay rhetoric of the radical Christian right. Attempting to restrict universal freedoms to select subsets of a national community is about self-righteousness, not what’s right.

To be clear, the violence perpetrated in the name of this video, or for any other reason, is utterly unjustified and unacceptable. And the filmmakers behind this film are not guilty of directly inciting such violence. Yet to ignore the role of provocation in uprisings such as these is not only to ignore basic facts but to dangerously abdicate any role we might play, as individuals or as a nation, in choosing to either enable such violence or end it. It is not impinging on free speech to suggest we use our speech wisely and with attention to its impact.

Incidentally, for those of you wondering about our other deeply held American values, such as freedom of religion, the far right applies exceptionalism there, too. They have been on a mission in recent years to cast the men who created a secular government that explicitly separates Church and State as deeply activist Christians who were mortified by Islam and would presumably be more so now. In other words, our values may be deeply held but they are not widely applied.
American extremists wear our nation’s values like body armor to protect
themselves but wield America’s values like weapons when attacking their enemies. To any sane observer, such inequitable application of our nation’s traditions would seem as irresponsible as actively fanning the flames of anti-Islamic hatred while American lives and the lives of innocent people around the globe are clearly at stake. But the far right in America increasingly views itself as a nation unto itself, a chosen few within a chosen nation, able to rationalize all sorts of hatred and ugliness while condemning the same behaviors in others — which is dangerously akin to a holy war, not one that the American right is fighting against but actually starting themselves.

Sally Kohn, Chief Agitation Officer of the Movement Vision Lab, is a community organizer, writer and political commentator. You can read more about her work at: http://movementvision.org.

6 Right-Wing Zealots That Would Blow Up the World for Political Gain

BELIEF 

AlterNet / By Joshua Holland

6 Right-Wing Zealots That Would Blow Up the World for Political Gain

Toxic right-wingers and their fanatical followers are desperate to ignite a "clash of civilizations."

September 12, 2012  |  

 

Photo Credit: Associated Press

 

 

Step back from the news cycle a moment and what you see is a week in which toxic, wildly irresponsible right-wingers have been trying to set a series of fires around the world, stoking their mythical "clash of civilizations" out of religious bigotry or for political gain, or a little bit of both.

That's the context in which Mitt Romney has had a couple of very rocky days, although as we’ll soon see, he is far from alone.

The Romney-Ryan campaign achieved a new low on September 11. In the morning, Romney promised reporters that he has detailed foreign policy plans, but refused to offer any details. But before the day was out, his campaign was spreading a blatant falsehood about a series of riots in Egypt and Libya that had left four Americans dead, including ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Romney shamelessly claimed that Obama's “first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” He was referring to a statement issued by the embassy in Cairo before the deadly attacks, condemning a ridiculous anti-Islam film that was believed to have sparked the riots.

Then, on Wednesday morning, Romney scheduled a press conference a half-hour before Obama was scheduled to address the nation from the White House. Romney doubled-down on his claim, saying, “It's a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values.” As if Terry Jones' overheated religious bigotry isn't in fact antithetical to our values. (Romney, ever the opportunist, had condemned Jones' Islamophobic provocation in 2010, and in typical form, he did in fact condemn the movie later on Wednesday, just as the Egyptian embassy had the previous night.)

Hours later, it got worse when the New York Times reported that there may not have been a direct connection between the film and the deadly attacks in Benghazi. While “initial accounts of the assault in Benghazi were attributed to popular anger over what was described as an American-made video that lampooned the Prophet Muhammad,” reported Peter Baker, David Kirkpatrick and Alan Cowell, “administration officials in Washington said the attack in Libya may have been plotted in advance.”

While the protesters in Cairo appeared to be genuinely outraged over the anti-Islam video, the attackers in Benghazi were armed with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Officials said it was possible that an organized group had either been waiting for an opportunity to exploit like the protests over the video or perhaps even generated the protests as a cover for their attack.

CNN reported that “the attack immediately followed a call from al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for revenge for the death in June of a senior Libyan member of the terror group Abu Yahya al-Libi,” and was likely perpetrated by a pro-Al Qaeda group known as the “Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades.”

Romney had, as Obama later said, shot first and aimed later. This was the moment that Mitt Romney lost the mainstream media entirely, and quite possibly the campaign. The problem wasn't just Romney's utter lack of class in politicizing a deadly attack on Americans abroad while that attack was ongoing, it was his facial expression – he wore a smug, self-satisfied smirk as he left the podium, and that image is likely to dog him in the coming days.

But it's worth pausing and considering the larger narrative on which the Romney camp is basing its claim that Obama is ultimately at fault for the riots in Egypt and Libya. According to a set of talking-points the Romney campaign issued to its supporters and surrogates, the underlying issue is this: “We have seen a foreign policy of weakness, indecision, and a decline in American influence and respect – and yesterday we saw the consequences.”

Ordinary people will find this assertion to be nothing less than bizarre. Obama, after all, escalated the conflict in Afghanistan, turned drone strikes from a military capability into an administration policy and ordered the assault that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. But Romney has surrounded himself with neoconservative extremists like John Bolton, who are heavily invested in the idea that there is a "clash of civilizations" dividing East and West. Reading between the lines, the problem is not Obama's concrete policy choices so much as his refusal to condemn Islam as a death-cult or indulge Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's apocalyptic view that Iran poses an existential threat to the state of Israel.

They are not alone. Right-wing religionists – Christian, Jewish and Muslim – all have a vested interest in making their imagined global conflict a reality. It was Osama bin Laden's goal, just as it's the goal of Pam Geller or those on the fringes of the Israeli settler movement.

And there are more. Here are some other actors that have recently tried to blow up the world in service of their perverse ideologically and theologically informed hatreds, damn the consequences.

Conservative Islamists in Libya and Egypt; Egyptian Right-Wing Media

A 13-minute trailer for a wildly provocative film called either The Innocence of Muslims or Mohammed, Prophet of the Muslims (but which could have been called The Chronicles of the Elders of Islam) was uploaded to YouTube in July and received little notice. According to the Daily Mail, the trouble started when someone translated the trailer into Arabic and uploaded it to YouTube. It was “since featured on Egyptian media reports for several days with ultraconservative clerics going on air to denounce it.”

While Muslims across the political spectrum were offended, according to multiple reports those who rioted in Cairo and Benghazi were “conservative Islamists,” whose thin skin and lack of tolerance led to the chaos.
It wasn't “Muslims,” writ large, who perpetrated the outrageous attacks. It was the Islamic religious right, which sees itself under siege from modern, secular society in much the same way our own Christian right sees itself as under constant siege by perfidious secular humanists.

On Wednesday, hundreds of residents of Benghazi took to the streets to condemn the attacks on the Embassy. Their message:

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Whomever's Behind That Stupid, Bigoted Film

As the New York Times notes, the origins of the film are “shrouded in mystery.” Early reports suggested that the film was produced by an Israeli-American real estate developer named Sam Basile, but no such person could be tracked down. Some have suggested that “Sam Basile” is a pseudonym. But someone claiming to be Basile offered several interviews with media outlets, during which he “called Islam 'a cancer,' and said he had raised $5 million from about 100 Jewish donors” to fund the film.

Rumors of who was behind the film – all unconfirmed – abound. Some have suggested the usual suspects: Pam Geller or Robert Spencer or their fellow travelers. The one person who has publicly admitted to being involved with the film is a man named Steve Klein, whom Max Blumenthal describes as “a Hemet, California-based insurance salesman who claims to have led a 'hunter-killer team' in Vietnam.”

Klein is a right-wing extremist who emerged from the same axis of Islamophobia that produced Anders Behring Breivik and which takes inspiration from the writings of Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Daniel Pipes.
It appears Klein (or someone who shares his name and views) is an enthusiastic commenter on Geller’s website, Atlas Shrugged, where he recently complained about Mitt Romney’s “support for a Muslim state in Israel’s Heartland.” In July 2011, Spencer’s website, Jihad Watch, promoted a rally Klein organized alongside the anti-Muslim Coptic extremist Joseph Nasrallah to demand the firing of LA County Sheriff Lee Baca, whom they painted as a dupe for Hamas.

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Stein, who said of the 15 or so people behind the film, “They're from Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, they're some that are from Egypt. Some are Copts but the vast majority are Evangelical." Copts are an Egyptian Christian sect that has long faced persecution in its own long-standing conflict with the country's Muslim majority.

The film was designed to provoke a reaction, to push their right-wing religionist counterparts to acts of hatred and stupidity. On Wednesday, a lot of confused people suggested that the embassy's statement condemning this trash somehow conflicts with our First Amendment right to free speech, which might make some sense if anyone, anywhere, had suggested the filmmakers weren't within their constitutional rights in producing the film. Or if the First Amendment was a guarantee that you could say whatever you wanted and not be criticized. Of course, just because you have the right to do awful things that you know are likely to lead to bloodshed doesn't mean you should do awful things that are likely to lead to bloodshed. Make no mistake: they got what they wanted in sparking those riots.

American Islamophobes Terry Jones, Morris Sadik

The New York Times reports that another “ultraconservative cleric,” Terry Jones, “began promoting the video along with his own proclamation of Sept. 11 as ‘International Judge Muhammad Day.’” Jones sparked deadly riots in 2010 when he threatened to burn a stack of Korans in a high-profile quest for attention (Defense Secretary Robert Gates reportedly talked him out of the stunt).

According to the Guardian, “The film clip was also spotted and promoted last week by Morris Sadik, an Egyptian Coptic Christian based in California who runs a small virulently Islamophobic group called the National American Coptic Assembly. It was later denounced by mainstream Copts in Egypt, but it was too late to stop it going viral.”

Extremists everywhere you look.

Bibi 

All of this happened just days after another far-right ideologue tried to use the high stakes of the presidential race to blackmail the United States into supporting a disastrous war in the Middle East.

Bibi Netanyahu is a secularist, but his administration is heavily influenced by Israel's religious right, and he has cast the conflict over Iran's nuclear enrichment as part of the clash of civilizations, saying again and again that it's an existential threat to Israel's existence.

In the past weeks, Netanyahu has insisted that the United States lay out specific “red lines” that Iran couldn't cross without inviting American military action, and added the implied threat that if no such statement was forthcoming, Israel might embroil the whole region in chaos with a unilateral strike.
Netanyahu was playing a weak hand because he sensed he had to play it now. He knows that his leverage decreases dramatically after the election – especially if Obama wins – and was trying to push for an “end-game” in the standoff over Iranian enrichment.

Time magazine's Joe Klein said of the blackmail attempt, “I don’t think I’ve ever, in the forty years I’ve been doing this – and I’m trying to search my mind through history – have heard of another example of an American ally trying to push us into war as blatantly, and trying to influence an American election as blatantly as Bibi Netanyahu and the Likud party in Israel is doing right now. I think it’s absolutely outrageous and disgusting. It’s not a way that friends treat each other. And it is cynical and it is brazen.”

Then, earlier this week, Likud officials tried to ratchet up the sense that it's in “conflict” with Washington by leaking a story that Netanyahu, who will be in New York for a United Nations conference, had requested a meeting with Obama and been turned down. National security reporter Laura Rozen first reported that a number of countries had been informed that Obama would not be available to meet on the sidelines of the UN confab, and that Israel was “the only one to raise [an] outcry.” She later noted that a National Security Council spokesperson denied that such a meeting had been requested in the first place.

...and the Iranians

But let's not give the Iranian regime a pass. There's no evidence to suggest Iran is seeking nuclear weapons -- and it does have a right to enrich nuclear materials for non-military purposes under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – but its stubborn refusal to definitively settle the question by giving international inspectors everything they've requested has led to crippling sanctions that have done an enormous amount of harm to the Iranian economy, and in turn to ordinary Iranians. In part, Iran is “standing on principle” so it can blame the West for its domestic problems, but in part it's because Iran too genuinely sees itself engaged in a clash of civilizations.

The Good News

These extremists are playing a very dangerous game. As Al-Monitor notes, “Pro-Western, secular forces in the Middle East are already in peril, and fragile new democratic governments cannot adequately police their frustrated and angry young constituents.”

But the good news is that these craven attempts to capitalize on people's fear of the "other” won't work. The Obama administration has pushed back forcefully on Netanyahu's strong-arm tactics, essentially calling his ill-advised bluff. Hillary Clinton said that the U.S. is “not setting deadlines,” and insisted that sanctions were the administration's tool of choice for pressuring Iran. Seventy percent of Americans agree with that approach, and Bibi only weakened himself with the gambit.

As for the religious fundamentalists -- here and abroad, Christian, Muslim and Jewish -- they've been trying to stoke a clash of civilizations for over a decade, and have only succeeded in persuading a small minority of mentally challenged people to follow their lead. They remain a danger – as we've seen time and time again – but they will continue to reside at the margins. Most people just want to rasie their kids in peace.

As for Romney, his antics on Tuesday and Wednesday may well be the end of his campaign. With even many of his Republican supporters running away from him as if he were on fire, the media establishment judged that the candidate had inserted his foot directly into his mouth in a very serious way. It was a desperate attempt to shift the dynamics of the race – a Hail-Mary pass by a candidate looking at a 7-point deficit in Gallup's tracking poll – and it didn't work.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He's the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.