10 Shocking Facts About Baltimore

10 Shocking Facts About Baltimore

A quarter of the city's inhabitants live in abject poverty.

By Bill Quigley

Were you shocked at the disruption in Baltimore? What is more shocking is daily life in Baltimore, a city of 622,000 that is 63 percent African American. Here are 10 numbers that tell some of the story.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/24/24510.html

5: Blacks in Baltimore are more than 5.6 times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than whites even though marijuana use among the races is similar. Baltimore county has the fifth highest arrest rate for marijuana possessions in the USA.
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/1114413-mj-report-rfs-rel1.pdf

5.7: Over $5.7 million has been paid out by Baltimore since 2011 in over 100 police brutality lawsuits. Victims of severe police brutality were mostly people of color and included a pregnant woman, a 65-year-old church deacon and an 87-year-old grandmother.
http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/

6: White babies born in Baltimore have six more years of life expectancy than African American babies in the city.http://urbanhealth.jhu.edu/media/reports/healthdis_baltimore.pdf

8: African Americans in Baltimore are eight times more likely to die from complications of HIV/AIDS than whites and twice as likely to die from diabetes related causes as whites.
http://urbanhealth.jhu.edu/media/reports/healthdis_baltimore.pdf

8.4: Unemployment is 8.4 percent city wide. Most estimates place the unemployment in the African American community at double that of the white community. The national rate of unemployment for whites is 4.7 percent, for blacks it is 10.1.http://www.dllr.state.md.us/lmi/laus/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/local/wp/2014/05/14/fact-check-ganslers-dramatic-line-on-unemployment-in-baltimore/

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm

9: African American babies in Baltimore are nine times more likely to die before age one than white infants in the city.http://urbanhealth.jhu.edu/media/reports/healthdis_baltimore.pdf

20: There is a 20-year difference in life expectancy between those who live in the most affluent neighborhood in Baltimore versus those who live six miles away in the most impoverished.
https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2013/04/24/hopkins-conference-tackles-link-between-wealth-and-health/

23.8: 148,000 people, or 23.8 percent of the people in Baltimore, live below the official poverty level.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/24/24510.html

56: 56.4 percent of Baltimore students graduate from high school.  The national rate is about 80 percent.http://www.education.umd.edu/TLPL/centers/MEP/Research/College/MD%20Grad%20Rates_1.2014.pdf

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014391.pdf

92: 92 percent of marijuana possession arrests in Baltimore were of African Americans, one of the highest racial disparities in the US.https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/1114413-mj-report-rfs-rel1.pdf

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. He is also a member of the legal collective of School of Americas Watch, and can be reached at quigley77@gmail.com

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Inglorious Goobers: Progressives Line Up to Defend Corrupt Clintons

Inglorious Goobers: Progressives Line Up to Defend Corrupt Clintons

It's amusing to see how our staunch progressives -- who believe so deeply in a level playing field and fair play, who railed so vociferously against crony capitalism back in Bush-Time -- are now twisting themselves in knots to dismiss the stories about that long-festering font of corruption, the Clinton Foundation. Suddenly, what was once evil and corrosive -- peddling elite insider influence for private profit -- is just old hat, no big deal, business as usual. Indeed, Digby, the very avatar of "anguished support" (Tarzie's deeply apt description of our progressives' blind self-tethering to a party whose leaders -- like the Clintons, like Obama -- are so servile to Big Money and war profiteering that they make Dick Nixon look like Diogenes), points us to an "excellent piece" by the ever-overexcited Charles Pierce, esquire (sorry, I mean Charles Pierce of Esquire), which sounds this very theme.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html?_r=0

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/for-clintons-speech-income-shows-how-their-wealth-is-intertwined-with-charity/2015/04/22/12709ec0-dc8d-11e4-a500-1c5bb1d8ff6a_story.html

https://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/michael-eric-dysons-hatchet-eulogy-for-cornell-west/

http://digbysblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/qotd-charlie-pierce.html

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a34563/hillary-rodham-clinton-meets-the-clinton-rules/

Pierce, wearing his prodigious classical learning lightly, informs us that "every politician since Cato" has engaged in the multimillion-dollar crony fluffing and policy twisting that the Clintons have been practicing for years. This kind of thing -- say, taking more than $100 million in "donations" from an uranium magnate who then reaps gargantuan profits when the Clinton-headed State Department greenlights the sale that makes said magnate richer and gives Russia (led by a man that Hillary ignorantly likens to Hitler) control of one-fifth of America's uranium production capacity -- is just "business as usual," says Pierce. "Every politician" does this, every single one of them -- and has done since the high and palmy days of Rome. You may agree or disagree with Professor Pierce -- but no one can deny that this is a deeply informed, richly nuanced piece of analysis.

Pierce, renowned in progressive circles for his sharp-edged acumen, here plays the naif -- Goober Pyle Goes to Washington. He scratches his head like a simple, honest feller befuddled by the silver-tongued talk of fancy-pants nabobs, and says that, as far he can tell, the detailed stories in the New York Times and Washington Post are just peddling a nebulous conspiracy theory, something about how President Hillary would be beholden to foreign donors or that the couple were pocketing Foundation cash or something. This is not, of course, the import of the stories, which lies in their fresh confirmation and amplification of the Clintons' particularly successful example of elite influence-peddling. But a simple shrug of the shoulders blows this straw man away, and Pierce is off to the races in his time machine, reliving the false accusations that assailed the Clintons back in Starr-Time.

And of course, many of the allegations assiduously peddled by partisan operators and the respectable press in those days were false, or petty, or pointless. And yes, the Clintons beat the rap (except for Bill's law license), and ended up with Bill as the most popular politician in America (a rank he still holds, incidentally) and Hillary in the US Senate.

But all of this was a sideshow. The learned Theban of Esquire somehow omits some salient facts from his magical history tour. For even as right-wing agents were needling Clinton about failed land deals and Oval Office canoodling, Clinton was overseeing the deaths of up to half a million innocent children (and many more innocent adults) through the draconian sanctions he imposed on Iraq. This, even though Clinton and US intelligence knew in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed all of its weapons of mass destruction. As I noted back in 2005, confirmation of this fact came from "from none other than the man in charge of the Iraqi WMD program, Saddam's defecting son-in-law, Hussein Kamel. Kamel's wealth of information on the destruction of Iraq's WMD 'was so extensive it was almost embarassing,' said UN interrogators."

This was not secret, by the way; it was reported in Time Magazine and other venues. And it was later confirmed independently by UN inspectors in 1998, who had verified the destruction of 95 percent of Iraq's WMD arsenal before they were stopped from finishing the job by Bill Clinton's four-day bombing assault on the country. Clinton justified the attack -- which killed dozens, perhaps hundreds of civilians -- by pointing to Iraqi "interference" in the almost completed inspections. The Iraqis were being quarrelsome, because they believed America had planted spies among the supposedly neutral inspectors. Clinton sternly denied such lies, and ordered the attack. (Conveniently, it occurred during his impeachment hearings.) However, just one year later, guess what: the UN admitted that, er, America had planted spies among the supposed neutral inspectors: "UNSCOM had directly facilitated the creation of an intelligence collection system for the United States in violation of its mandate."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/iraq/stories/unscom010699.htm

Oh well. Bombing raids under false pretenses and the senseless death of half a million children due to sanctions based on "causes" known to be false -- I guess that's just "business as usual" too, eh Charles? As for Hillary's later vote to OK a whole war based on false pretenses (which, once again, saw the arms inspectors pulled out before they could confirm, again, the fact that Iraq had no WMD) -- well, hell, "every politician" since the dawn of time has done the same, ain't they, Goob?

But none of this matters to our progressives. Nor does Hillary's bloodthirsty record as Secretary of State, her vital role in the vast War Machine, ever pushing for more aggressive responses, for overturning governments (as in Honduras), for arming dictators (like her "close family friend," Hosni Mubarak), for targeted assassinations and drone attacks, for allying with extremists to reduce whole nations to chaos (Libya). Who can forget that moment when the mask slipped and Hillary revealed the true, brutal nature of our bipartisan ruling elite -- her gleeful exultation after Moamar Gadafy was sodomized and killed: "We came, we saw, he died!"

No, what matters is that Republican "ratfuckers" trumped up charges against the Clintons 20 years ago. (Charges that related only to personal and financial behaviour; the Republicans didn't care about the bombing and killing; they would've liked more of it.) The sleaziness of the Clintons' enemies absolves them of all blame, apparently. Any evidence of their corruption -- financial, legal or moral -- no matter what the source, is, ipso facto, nothing more than the noxious fumes of conspiracy.

As with Obama, there seems to be no crime or morally corrupt practice they will not countenance if it is committed by the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party. As Tarzie points out, they will "anguish" over their support -- both Digby and Pierce preceded their Clinton apologias with stern posts criticizing the drone attack that killed two al Qaeda hostages, and two other Americans said to be al Qaeda members. Digby took issue with the "targeted assassination" program and Pierce pointed out that the drone campaign only creates more enemies for America. But the fact that Hillary Clinton will certainly continue these polices -- and will probably intensify them -- doesn't stop the progressive duo from taking up the cudgels for her when someone questions her ethical and financial probity. The values and moral principles that underlie their attacks on the various depredations of the Terror War that Obama has expanded suddenly disappear at the first scent of partisan warfare. Their "ultimate concern" (to use Paul Tillich's term) is the political victory of the Democratic Party -- no matter what crimes and horrors its leaders perpetrate. However anguished their support, nothing will ever induce them to withdraw it.http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/23/drone-strike-al-qaida-targets-white-house

There will be much, much more in this vein as the long, degrading freak show of the presidential campaign drags on. What our progressives once despised, they will soon defend. (As with Obamacare, which was originally -- and rightly -- scorned by progressives like Digby as an egregious sell-out to corporate interests and a death-blow to hopes for genuine health care reform, only to become a precious jewel to be adamantly defended against all attacks.) That thousands are dying, that extremism is spreading, that chaos is accelerating, that inequality is growing, that millions of people are suffering horribly from the deliberate choices of their champions does not, in the end, override their tribal instincts. And in this way, they help our rapacious elite insider to keep rat-fucking us all.

Visit Chris Floyd's website http://www.chris-floyd.com

Perhaps YOU Should Do Some Soul Searching, Mr. President?

If it is true that the lack of education and jobs are the cause of black distress in Baltimore and throughout America, why in the hell is Obama issuing unlawful Executive Orders to bring tens of millions of foreign illegal aliens into the nation?

Perhaps YOU Should Do Some Soul Searching, Mr. President?

Barack Obama finally took time to address the arson, looting, and violent assault on law enforcement officers in the city of Baltimore, less than 50 miles from the comfy confines of the White House and all the privileges that come to those lucky enough to call 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue home.

The One took the opportunity to make political hay from the tragic events by blaming society for ignoring poverty, and by demanding a campaign of ‘soul-searching’ for the police, the looters, and all of the rest of America, except, that is, his administration and the flawed Democrat politicians in charge of the afflicted city.

Obama’s dance around the facts included his curious silence concerning the statement by Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a Democrat, about “Leaving space to destroy,” a perfect synopsis of the liberal mindset on violence, riots, and looters.

Above all else, the Mayor was reminding PC-addled residents, that she was watching out for the best interests of the looters, rioters, arsonists and other destroyers, while every one else was fretting, unnecessarily, about the safety and lives of the police.

Clearly, in the mind of Mayor Blake, the police needed no advocacy since they were armed to the teeth and, after all, it was they who killed Freddie Gray, said murder providing provocation for the justifiable mob violence, which needed space.

Barack Obama picked up on the Mayor’s odd thesis with these words: We can’t just leave this to the police,” Obama said. “There are police departments that have to do some soul-searching. I think there are some communities that have to do some soul-searching. But I think we as a country have to do some soul-searching. This is not new. It’s been going on for decades.”

“Obama said that the country had left behind impoverished communities that had been “stripped of opportunity”, in which children born into poverty are given little chance to obtain an education or to make a living outside the drug trade”

Once again, the ugly head of progressive lunacy emerges as Obama blamed lack of opportunity, poverty, and societal indifference for the fact that Baltimore has been torched and police officers seriously injured!

If only white society would join us in spending another 13-14 trillion dollars, he was suggesting, we could transform Baltimore into a bountiful metropolis, worthy of emulation throughout America and the world.

A question lingers: If it is true that the lack of education and jobs are the cause of black distress in Baltimore and throughout America, why in the hell is Obama issuing unlawful Executive Orders to bring tens of millions of foreign illegal aliens into the nation?

Illegal aliens who are not citizens, do not speak English, are unskilled, and who will compete directly with black CITIZENS for employment and prosperity opportunities?

Perhaps Obama himself should do some soul searching to determine why stuffing Democrat Party voter rolls with foreign invaders through unconstitutional Executive Orders is more important than the well being and success of black CITIZENS?


By John Lillpop

It’s time for Americans to embrace freedom of speech over political correctness

United Nation’s World Press Freedom Day

It’s time for Americans to embrace freedom of speech over political correctness


BALTIMORE — As we prepare to celebrate the United Nation’s World Press Freedom Day this Sunday,  U.S. journalists and reporters from many nations are still braving death threats from Islamic terrorists across the globe.

Tragically, many journalists and photographers have already been killed by these fanatics who suddenly emerged in the 21st Century as if in a time capsule from medieval times.

One of the worst attacks occurred on the morning of this January 7 in Paris when two brothers belonging to Al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen stormed their way into the offices of France’s satirical weekly newspaper, Charlie Hebdo.

Armed with AK-47 assault rifles, those terrorists killed 11 people and injured 11 others inside the building. After the terrorists left the weekly’s offices, they added to death count by killing a French National Police Officer who had just arrived at the scene.  Several related attacks killed another five people in the nearby region of ile-de-France, bringing the murder toll to 16.

What did the Charlie Hebdo staff members and the other journalists do to deserve such grisly deaths? They drew satirical sketches of the Prophet Muhammad, which is perfectly legal in France and most other European democracies where freedom of expression is an enshrined right.

France, upholding its honor with typical gallic elan, responded swiftly to the attacks, rounding up known and suspected terrorists in Paris and throughout the country.

On January 11, some two million people, including more than 40 world leaders, gathered in Paris for a rally of national and global unity. Sadly, President Barack Obama was not among them.

However, American journalism itself has hardly been a pillar of courage in standing up to Islamic extremism. Only a handful of newspapers have reprinted the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. Scandinavian newspapers, with a fraction of the U.S. dailies’  circulation, have reprinted dozens of those cartoons.

This coming Sunday is a perfect time for American newspapers and television networks to show solidarity with their martyred colleagues by displaying one or more of the cartoons criticizing the Prophet Mohammed that prompted such violent reprisals.

It would be wonderful, indeed, if most of the 1,400 American daily newspapers and the 1,700-plus TV stations displayed at least one of the offending cartoons that led to the deaths of their heroic colleagues abroad.

Leading American organizations of journalists also should also make major statements that show unbridled support for World Press Freedom Day.

Sigma Delta Chi, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Columbia University School of Journalism could sponsor a daylong event in the ballroom of the National Press Club in Washington sometime this summer to honor this most basic freedom.

As United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon recently declared: “Only when journalists are at liberty to monitor, investigate and criticize policies and actions can good governance exist.”

He’s right.  It’s time for American newspapers and TV stations to show their mettle by running one of the many cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad — not to insult Muslims, but merely to show the world that freedom of the press remains sacrosanct in the United States.

 By Whitt Flora

It’s not the rioters but the cops politicians want off the streets

While America burns, self-professed civil rights activists feather their nests, and lib-left politicians solidify their power

It’s not the rioters but the cops politicians want off the streets




It doesn’t matter that Freddie Gray deliberately may have been trying to injure himself, banging about in a van.  It doesn’t matter because the truth doesn’t matter to those rioting in the streets.  It doesn’t matter because the violent protests in Baltimore have zippo to do with Gray’s death but everything to do with the anarchy that seeks to replace the blue line in Baltimore and in other American cities.

Gray’s death, no matter how it came,  was the excuse—not the reason—for rioters to take to the streets.

Rent-a-Mob recruiting went out on social media.  Rioters from outside were flooded in to Baltimore, and you can depend on them not having to thumb a ride to get there.  Mayor Stephanie Rawllngs-Blake gave them their “space” by calling for a police stand down.  The stage was set.

The pattern for racial unrest is etched blood red in Baltimore, Ferguson, New York—and in other cities to come.  The pattern is patently visible to any with their eyes open to see.

It’s no longer just buildings being set ablaze.  In Baltimore rioters doused pizza store owner Essam el Ghannam with lighter fluid and tried to set him on fire, Monday night.



While prime time television was holding some 17 million viewers enrapt with the transgender transition of 65-year-old, Kardashian-inspired Bruce Jenner and with other sensationalized ‘news’, the Lib-Left was standing down for open season on the police.

Not only is the possibility of getting injured or killed on duty destined to thin out the ranks of the blue line, politicians exaggerating the image of police brutality now seek to saddle them with body cameras.

The body cameras they want to foist on officers may as well be printed out with signs that read, “I am a police officer, I cannot be trusted”.

Before it’s all over cartoonists will depict cops carrying bananas rather than guns in their holsters.

Will confirmation of Freddie Gray’s “intentionally trying to injure himself” quell the mobs that pillaged and burned in Baltimore?

“A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/prisoner-in-van-said-freddie-gray-was-banging-against-the-walls-during-ride/2015/04/29/56d7da10-eec6-11e4-8666-a1d756d0218e_story.html

“The prisoner, who is currently in jail, was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him. His statement is contained in an application for a search warrant, which is sealed by the court. The Post was given the document under the condition that the prisoner not be named because the person who provided it feared for the inmate’s safety.

“The document, written by a Baltimore police investigator, offers the first glimpse of what might have happened inside the van. It is not clear whether any additional evidence backs up the prisoner’s version, which is just one piece of a much larger probe.

“Gray was found unconscious in the wagon when it arrived at a police station on April 12. The 25-year-old had suffered a spinal injury and died a week later, touching off waves of protests across Baltimore, capped by a riot Monday in which hundreds of angry residents torched buildings, looted stores and pelted police officers with rocks.

“Police have said they do not know whether Gray was injured during the arrest or during his 30-minute ride in the van. Local police and the U.S. Justice Department both have launched investigations of Gray’s death.”

The outcomes of any inspections, no matter how valid, will get no respect from the Baltimore rioters.  They could be shown video of Grey severing his own spinal cord, but it wouldn’t matter.

Protesters taking to the streets to loot and burn don’t want the truth—they want anarchy for the ultimate breakdown of civil society.

Rioters, who will be called away to the next city to protest alleged police brutality and who got their “space” from Mayor Rawlngs-Blake, will be looking for it again.

Honest,  small business owners who pay the mayor’s freight got to see the businesses they built with their own sweat and hard work reduced to ashes overnight.

Reuters reported that 19 buildings and 144 vehicles were damaged in the riots and 20 police officers were injured.

What were the Obamas and their chief mentor, Valerie Jarrett, doing while folk were losing their livelihoods on Tuesday night?  Gorging on Wagyu steak at a dinner honoring Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

What do civil rights activists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson do every time another American city is hit by devastating racial riots?

Make money on them.

While America burns, self-professed civil rights activists feather their nests, and lib-left politicians solidify their power.

It’s not the rioters and thugs the politicians of the day want off the streets of America, it’s the cops.


By Judi McLeod

Circumstantial Evidence

“A generation or two ago,,.. a person so encrusted in a reputation for scandal would not be considered a possible presidential contender. She would be ineligible. Now she is inevitable.”

Circumstantial Evidence

Imagine that you are the former Governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, both sitting in jail after having been found guilty last year of public corruption for accepting golf outings, lavish vacations and $120,000 in “sweetheart” loans. Compared to the Clintons they are just two failed bit players.

Writing in the May issue of Commentary, Jonathan S. Tobin, a senior editor, noted the lack of a “smoking gun” in the case of just the latest Clinton scandals. “But what Democrats and all Americans should be asking about this argument is why some people get prosecuted for corruption on such circumstantial evidence while others are considered likely to be elected president.”

“Just because a prosecutor isn’t likely to haul the Clintons into court over all these astonishing coincidences (or at least not so long as the Democrats control the Department of Justice), that doesn’t mean their behavior doesn’t smell to high heaven,” said Tobin. “The court in which the Clintons deserve to be condemned is that of public opinion.”

The Clintons have conspired and sometimes acted in direct contradiction of the law to rely on the concept of circumstantial evidence. Hillary’s use of her own private email server and her later destruction of that server is a classic example of this behavior. The high-paid speeches which Bill gave put him into a gray area of collusion, benefitting from the influence Hillary had as Secretary of State. Ultimately, the donations to their foundation by foreign governments rank far above a mere misdemeanor. It was too often just blatant bribery.

I fear that far too many Americans do not realize that our nation and its system of justice are on the cusp of encountering serious damage. Merely condemning the Clintons for what we know at this point is simply not enough.

What is needed is a widespread denunciation of their actions over recent years.

The Clintons have been given a free pass from the day they entered politics
What is really needed is a decision by the Democratic Party to withhold the right to run in its primaries for the office of president, based on her actions deleting emails and accepting donation to the foundation.

The U.S. media needs to be more vocal that Hillary withdraw her candidacy.

Why would a media mute its criticism and a political party ignore the obvious revelations, even if deemed circumstantial evidence, of the corruption demonstrated by the Clintons?  The Clintons have been given a free pass from the day they entered politics.

As Peggy Noonan, a Wall Street Journal columnist, has said, “We are defining political deviancy down.” That degrades the process by which we select and elect the men and women who are given the role and responsibility of lawmakers.

As Noonan notes of Hillary, “The story is that this is what she does, and always has. The rules apply to others, not her.” As recently as 2012, the State Department forced the resignation of a U.S. ambassador for “in part setting up an unsanctioned private email system.”

“In 1992 the Clintons were new and golden. Now, so many years later, their reputation for rule breaking and corruption is so deep, so assumed that it really has become old news. And old news isn’t news.”

Except when it is. When old news is an unbroken succession of wrong-doing it is incumbent on everyone involved with the present “campaign” by Hillary Clinton to be the next President to not avoid the stink that arises from both the earlier and most recent revelations.

“A generation or two ago,” said Noonan, “a person so encrusted in a reputation for scandal would not be considered a possible presidential contender. She would be ineligible. Now she is inevitable.”

Those earlier generations have been replaced by those more intent on celebrity than substance. They have the attention span of fungus. They lack any vision for America, having never really learned about or absorbed the lessons that the Greatest Generation and others passed onto us.

Are there enough of them to plunge America into the Clinton cesspool by electing her President? One can only pray that the answer is no.

 Alan Caruba,

Savages With Cell Phones

Savages With Cell Phones

Race riots usually begin with criminality and end with criminality. They're protests by criminals on behalf of a dead criminal.


The stores with smashed windows aren't the means to express outrage, but the end. The purpose of criminality is criminality. The police exist so that stores can remain unrobbed and random pedestrians can remain unbeaten. The protests express opposition to that policy by robbing stores and assaulting random white people.

The police were never the problem. The looters and rioters were.

The counterculture has not changed dramatically since the 70's, but it has tossed aside any appearance of idealism. The new counterculture draws in two groups, disaffected upper middle class white youth and lower class black youth. Their goals are purely materialistic, looted iPods and government subsidies for housing, education and anything else they can think of.

Divestment is the common denominator. Neither the white leftist nor the lower-class black rioter is invested in his society. The white rioter is a globalist, the black rioter is an outsider. Neither are invested in the city and country they are busy trashing.

These are the children of the welfare state with little in common except a rejection of the commercial way of life. Neither the entitled white university brat or the posturing ghetto teenager has any interest in working. The businesses they smash are an alien thing to them. Small businessmen do not go about smashing stores. The people who do think of commodities as something they trick or intimidate others into giving to them. And that covers everyone from municipal unions to thugs driving around BMW's.

This lawless materialism is the essence of the welfare state. "Loot as much as you can, or someone else will." If you don't grab government benefits or sneakers in store windows, someone else will. The rich are grabbing, the pols are grabbing-- time to queue up and loot your share. Communism made this way of thinking so commonplace that all of Russia became one black market. And we are not far behind.

What kind of people behave this way? Those who have come to think of wealth as an infinite pile from which everyone grabs as much as they can. This is where the ethos of the socialist left and hip-hop comes together. Obama gleefully spending millions on himself and trillions on national giveaways for his donors and supporters is the most obnoxious fusion of this phenomenon.

The angry rioter is a sacred figure in the progressive pantheon of social justice. The shirtless men in bandanas carting away cell phones are so outraged by injustice that they are willing to take to the streets and do what progressive hipsters taking social justice selfies of themselves in souvenir t-shirts plastered with the face of the latest victim of “white supremacism” can only dream about.

The race riot isn’t a bubbling stew of outrage out of which wounded souls emerge to cry out for justice. It’s a complicated criminal conspiracy in which the perpetrators rarely suffer any consequences.

The rioters aren’t outraged, they’re usually bored young men, frustrated and lacking in empathy. Many of them have gang ties or a criminal record stretching back to kindergarten.

They’re the same people who commit crimes in any other non-outraged context.


The rest are there to get some attention while providing them with protective coloration. 9 out of 10 people screaming frenziedly while holding up “Black Lives Matter” signs would eagerly scream and hold up “Justin Bieber 4 President” or “Baltimore Loves the KKK” signs if it got them positive attention and a shot at being on television.

Technological savvy melded with barbaric behavior, the 21st century mobile devotee turned raider is a wake up call in more ways than one. These are not mere race riots, they are the self-organization of the end of our civilization.

The classic raid has come to the cities of West, its hallmarks are not frustration but careful planning, followed by a violent rush. They are the reemergence of an old way of life that most people think died with the Vikings.

The law banished the raider back into the dim pages of history,  but law depended on a civilization which is now collapsing. Police officers need the support of the public to hold the line. And the left has now openly reverted to its pro-criminal advocacy while elements of the right, particularly those funded by the Koch Brothers, advocate for criminals.

The traditional raider saw himself as part of an outside group. The modern raider has global identities that are at odds with the country he lives in. When he joins a raiding party, it is as a member of one of those groups looting a society whose welfare is of no interest to him.

The left's motives for rebelling are different than those of minority looters. But the end result is similar enough. A disregard for the civilization becomes a disregard for its laws. And that leaves self-interest as the only hedge against anarchy. But what interest do people who do not work for a living have in preserving the businesses of others? None at all. As far as they are concerned, smash a store, it will collect the insurance, and reopen, or another will open up in its place. And even if it doesn't, then so what? It's not "our businesses" anyway.

The commercial tribalism of the rapper who conflates casual violence and criminality with honor follows a pattern of glorifying crime that predates and postdates race, its ubiquity dating back centuries, from the highwayman to the 1920's bank robber, and is almost as socially disruptive and even more contagious.

The narrative is the same. Its idealism and honor covers up the blatant materialism and greed that its lawbreaking enables. And the message is also the same. Civilization's end.

The return of the raider as an instant message enabled gang is a phenomenon at odds with progress. It is a warning that darker times are returning, that while everyone may pack phones that have more processing power in one inch than a room of computers did 30 years ago, the march of progress is moving backward.

But the real purpose of a riot isn’t to benefit the rioters. It’s to benefit those who incite the riot. The rioters and looters react in response to riot-friendly conditions created from above. If you build the political infrastructure for a riot, the rioters and looters will come.


The #BlackLivesMatter riots are the product of a new generation of Sharptons, ambitious activists feeding hate, of the New Black Panther Party’s obsession with becoming relevant, of the ragged hipster ends of Occupy Wall Street drifting from occupation to occupation, of Muslim agents dreaming of turning African-Americans into a fifth column and of Obama’s clumsy efforts to keep on playing community organizer by feeding racial grievances and then pretending to rise above them.

Those who gain from unleashing chaos and violence are not the powerless, but the powerful. Sharpton rose to his important role as Obama’s liaison on a trail of bodies. Someone operating here hopes to be the next Sharpton. Meanwhile Obama is playing a perverse fusion of Sharpton and MLK, amping up a bad situation and then telling blacks and whites that they need to rise above it.

As always, the ringleader tries to keep his hands clean while convincing the establishment that he can turn the violence on or off any time he wants to.

Obama exploits the riots he cultivated for his own political ends. The looter at the top is not through looting yet.


 by Daniel Greenfield

The Shot Heard ‘Round the ‘Hood

The Shot Heard ‘Round the ‘Hood

Baltimore Police: On the Offensive or Defensive?
[courtesy Google Images]

Earlier tonight (Tuesday, April 28th), the Washington Times published a “breaking news” article entitled “Baltimore protesters defy 10 p.m. curfew, remain in streets.”  The headline is pretty much self-explanatory.  The Baltimore city government issued a curfew that ordered the Baltimore people off the streets by 10PM.  The rioters refused to obey.  So far, the city couldn’t or wouldn’t enforce.
Now what?  Will cops start to shoot rioters out after 10PM or will the rioters be emboldened by the city government’s inability to to enforce its order by more looting and setting fire to more stores?
http://link.washingtontimesemail.com/52c5945d60cc4f65f73befe62jnxd.68wm/VUA9e0mOe-fypPc3A0cfc

Here’s a video of one skirmish between what may have been 30 to 50 Baltimore police and about 15 to 20 black teens.  You’d think the cops could easily handle these teens, but the cops are on their good behavior and not shooting the rioters.  The rioters are are throwing rocks, bottles and chunks of concrete.  The cops are blocking the projectiles with their shields.  Then the cops break ranks and make a “trot” for it to get out from under the flying rocks.  (The cops would've made a “run” for it, but they were generally a little too fat to run, so they trotted.)


The cops could’ve overpowered the rioters if they’d been willing to shoot their guns or use other high-tech weapons against the teens.   But, the cops are probably under strict orders not to shoot anyone unless the the rioters start shooting at cops.  Because the cops couldn’t shoot, the rioters won a small victory.

That victory will empower the rioters to lash out more boldly against the cops.  Sooner or later, one of the rioters may shoot a cop, or a cop may lose his temper and shoot a rioter.  Or maybe the National Guard will arrive and shoot a rioter. No matter who shoots first, fi anyone shoots, the other side can be expected to arm themselves and get ready to  shoot a bunch of their adversaries.

It just may be that we are waiting to hear that first shot–that first “shot heard ’round the ‘hood”.   If that first shot is fired by either side and results in a fatality, all hell may break loose in Baltimore.  Baltimore just might provide the first instance of a shooting riot in recent American history.

video     00:07:15

The Limits of Propaganda

The Limits of Propaganda 



As Paul Craig Roberts has recently reported, the US government is in the process of launching an all-out war on truth. Those who express views contrary to the party line out of Washington will be labeled a threat. Eventually they may find themselves carted to one of the concentration camps which Halliberton (Dick Cheney's old company) has constructed for $385 million. But that may take a while. In the meantime, we can expect lots of other, less dramatic developments. Indeed, some of these are already happening. Here they are, listed in order of severity.

1. Self-censorship. Those who have previously tried to get the truth out no matter what become more reticent and prone to equivocation when reporting on “hot” issues.

2. Topic-avoidance. They start avoiding certain “hot” issues that they feel are most likely to get them into trouble.

3. Response to harassment. A few incidents of mild official harassment cause certain blogs to start watering down their content, or pulling down content in response to harassment.

4. Blacklisting. The officials start censoring content on a case-by-case basis, blocking or shutting down certain internet sites that they consider seditious.

5. Blocking communications. The officials start dealing with the “hard cases” of uncooperative individuals who remain, shutting down their communications by disabling their cell phones, shutting down internet access, and by imposing travel restrictions so that the “hard cases” are forced to remain in places where they can be watched.

6. Detention. Those found to be truly uncooperative, who try to circumvent the restrictions, are rounded up and shipped off to the above-mentioned camps.

This may seem like a dire prognosis, but actually I just want to present a relatively complete list of public measures for your consideration. Yes, there will be a few “hard cases” who will insist on getting right in the face of Washington officialdom in futile hopes of somehow affecting the political process or winning over a few of their compatriots. But at some point such individuals become indistinguishable from people with mental problems. That is because if you live in the US, actually know how the political system there operates, and still think that the US is a democracy, then you DO have a mental problem. You can't have it both ways: either you buy into the official propaganda, or you don't.

Also, it bears pointing out that the vast majority of people in the US are quite happy listening to Washington's propaganda, be it from Fox or NPR, don't consider it propaganda, and have been conditioned to consider anyone who attempts to tell them the truth to be tin hat-wearing conspiracy theorist nut case. And that means that tin hat-wearing conspiracy theorist nut cases have a role to play. They are important to have, in the same way that a village idiot is important to have, so that children can learn what idiocy looks and sounds like. So, why bother sending them to a concentration camp?

And so it seems likely that the village idiots... ahem, truth-tellers will remain free-range for the time being, unless they really lose it and start tilting at windmills. But then that becomes a bona fide mental health issue.

Unless, of course, full-on war hysteria breaks out. In that case, while the external goons are busy pretending to be “not winning, not losing” but somehow “keeping America safe” in yet another wretched part of the world, the internal goons have to be kept busy. Rounding up undesirables would give them something to do.

That's the state of affairs in the United States and its subservient territories: Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand and a few others. But Washington's propaganda isn't working at all well in the rest of the world, be it Russia or China or Latin America. In all of these places, Washington's message control has more or less failed. This is why the people in Washington are in a bit of a panic, and labeling internal dissidents as a “threat” is just them flailing in search of an answer. They can't stop lying, and they can't even pretend to rule the world if everyone knows that they are lying, so their only option is to try to squelch every voice except their own. They may succeed at this within the US (some would say they already have) but as far as the rest of the world—good luck!



By Dmitry Orlov
Dmitry Orlov is a Russian-American engineer and a writer on subjects related to "potential economic, ecological and political decline and collapse in the United States," something he has called “permanent crisis”. http://cluborlov.blogspot.com

Meet The Only Person Being Punished After The Senate Torture Report

Meet The Only Person Being Punished After The Senate Torture Report



Five months after the Senate Intelligence Committee released its gruesome report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, someone is finally paying steep professional consequences. Except it’s not the former torturers. Or their superiors. Or even the CIA officials who improperly searched the computers that Senate investigators used to construct the study.
http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/executive-summary.pdf

It’s the person who helped expose them.

Alissa Starzak, a former Democratic majority staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, played a critical and controversial role during her time on the panel: She was a lead investigator for the torture report, and was one of two staffers involved in an ongoing feud over damning internal CIA documents obtained by the committee.

Currently serving as deputy general counsel for the Defense Department, Starzak was nominated last July to serve as general counsel to the Army.

But the critics of the torture investigation -- namely, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr (R-N.C.) -- are orchestrating a quiet campaign to stall Starzak's nomination.

Burr confirmed to The Huffington Post that he is working to keep the former investigator from getting approved by the Senate.

Opponents of the investigation already succeeded in stifling Starzak’s nomination once before. After first being submitted by the White House last July, Starzak easily cleared the Senate Armed Services Committee -- then led by Democrats -- by voice vote in December, even though the explosive feud over the torture report was unfolding at the time. But her nomination was held up by Senate Republicans after she passed through the Armed Services Committee.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/07/10/president-obama-announces-more-key-administration-posts

https://www.congress.gov/nomination/113th-congress/1849?q=%7B%22search%22%3A[%22alissa+starzak%22]%7D

After the nomination expired at the conclusion of the last Congress, the White House resubmitted the longtime government lawyer for the general counsel post in early January. By then, however, Republicans were in the majority. And now, the handful of GOP lawmakers familiar with Starzak’s role in the torture report drama are planning to make her and her former colleagues pay.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/01/13/presidential-nominations-sent-senate

“I think she’s always been a little bit of leverage,” said one lawmaker familiar with the controversy over Starzak’s nomination, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive committee matters. “This is an opportunity to figure out what happened ... And I don’t know any other way to do it.”

Starzak, 41, has had a fast rise through Washington’s legal ranks. After a handful of private sector jobs following her graduation from University of Chicago Law School, she made the jump to a government job as a CIA lawyer in 2005.http://www.insidecounsel.com/2014/07/17/starzak-to-be-nominated-for-army-gc-post

After a stint at the agency, in 2007 Starzak became a counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, then under the control of Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.). Two years later, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) took the reins of the committee and, along with then-ranking member Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), announced what was initially supposed to be a bipartisan review of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program.

Republicans quickly withdrew, saying the study would be a partisan witch hunt, which left Feinstein’s staff to go it alone. Starzak was one of two staffers -- the other, Dan Jones, is still with the intelligence committee -- tasked with leading the massive investigation.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/25/AR2009092503745.html

Locked away in a secure CIA facility in northern Virginia, Starzak and Jones led a small team of committee staffers as they sifted through millions upon millions of secret documents related to the agency’s torture program.

Starzak, though, never saw the study through to its protracted, complicated completion. She left the panel in 2011 to take a job at the Defense Department as deputy general counsel for legislative affairs, where she continues to work while awaiting Senate confirmation to the army post.

Still, Starzak’s impact on the final product was significant. In December, on the day the committee released the executive summary of the torture report, Feinstein personally called attention to Starzak for her role.

“I want to thank the Senate Intelligence Committee staff who performed this work. They are dedicated and committed public officials who sacrificed, really sacrificed, a significant portion of their lives to see this report through to its publication,” Feinstein said in a floor speech. She went on to thank several staff, including “Alissa Starzak, who began this review as co-head and contributed extensively until her departure from the committee in 2011.”
http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=d2677a34-2d91-4583-92a4-391f68ceae46

Starzak’s colleagues agree that she was instrumental in the behemoth research phase of the report.

But her true legacy arguably can’t be found in the study’s 6,900 pages. Rather, Starzak’s real impact has to do with the discovery of a separate document, an explosive set of files that has fueled one of the most controversial spy agency dramas in recent memory. That document, much to the CIA’s chagrin, is still locked in a Senate safe. And the spies’ allies on Capitol Hill are intent on holding Starzak hostage until they get answers.

Sometime in 2010, in a windowless CIA basement, Starzak and Jones found this particular file while combing through documents related to the torture program. The documents were made available to the Senate staffers in a shared electronic reading room provided by the CIA.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/22/panetta-review-cia_n_6334728.html

At the time, the file -- an internal review of the agency’s torture program that confirmed the operation had been badly managed and ineffective -- didn’t stand out, according to committee accounts. It was encouraging, since the agency’s findings seemed to align with what the investigators themselves were discovering. But it was one file in a trove of literally millions. And the markings on the file, which indicated it was a deliberative draft and privileged, were not different from those on other documents.

Starzak and Jones saved the documents in this file, which would come to be known as the Panetta Review, to the walled-off Senate side of a computer system being shared by the intelligence committee staffers and the CIA. As the investigation continued, the documents remained there, not inspiring any particular controversy until mid-2013, two years after Starzak had left the committee.

It was in June 2013 that the CIA, now under the leadership of John Brennan, sent the committee its official response to the completed torture study. The agency largely defended its use of torture -- in stark contrast with what the Panetta Review said -- which tipped Senate staffers off to the document’s importance.http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/how-cia-director-john-brennan-became-americas-spy-and-obamas#.eqpKQz6n4E

After the CIA issued its response, Senate investigators sat through dozens of hours of meetings with agency staff in an effort to resolve the discrepancies between the official CIA line and the Senate’s findings. But those meetings yielded little. Newly aware of the relevance of the Panetta Review -- as it backed their findings and undermined the agency’s official response -- staffers slipped the document back to their secure committee spaces sometime in late 2013.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/03/07/220273/senate-staffers-slipped-secret.html

That move sparked what would ultimately become a constitutional crisis between the CIA and the Senate. After learning the staffers had somehow gotten their hands on the Panetta Review, Brennan ordered agency personnel to sift through the walled-off Senate computers, breaching a prior agreement under which the CIA had promised not to access those drives. The agency maintained that intelligence committee staffers had already broken that agreement by removing the Panetta Review documents from the facility in the first place.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/31/torture-panetta-review_n_6078194.html

In early 2014, the spies referred the matter to the Justice Department, alleging that the staffers had improperly accessed agency computers when they first came across the Panetta Review documents in that basement in 2010. The DOJ said in June 2014 that it hadn't found grounds to open an inquiry. By then, Starzak was long gone.http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/07/10/233005/justice-sees-no-crimes-in-senate.html

Critics are now holding up Starzak’s nomination -- and say they are willing to kill it entirely if need be -- to get more answers about the Panetta Review. Specifically, they say, they want the committee’s Democratic staffers to provide more information about how the file was discovered in 2010 and how, in late 2013, staffers slipped the printed documents back to the committee’s secure office spaces, in apparent violation of an agreement with the agency.

That Starzak was not around for the latter doesn't necessarily mean that her confirmation can't be used to fill in the critical blanks about an investigation that she was a part of -- and that Republicans have slammed from day one.

“Clearly it looks like … [she] knew that this document existed, knew that people were reading it and as a counsel didn’t try to keep people from doing it,” the lawmaker familiar with the controversy said. “[I want] information that fills in the blanks of what happened. And she clearly knows something.”

The lawmaker conceded that Starzak may not have been the one who actually took the document, but argued that she should have been more proactive in keeping her colleague’s eyes off of it. In her role as a lawyer, the lawmaker said, Starzak should have been "questioning whether somebody breached their ethics" when the Panetta Review documents were viewed.

But committee Democrats don’t think that argument holds water.

“Any claim that staff should not have read the Panetta Review is baffling,” said Feinstein, who was not aware of the specifics of the current effort to hold up Starzak’s nomination. “All of the documents reviewed by the committee -- including the Panetta Review -- were provided by the CIA, were accessed on computers made available by the CIA and were located using a CIA search tool. Many of those documents were marked internal or deliberative, the very sort of CIA communications the study was tasked with reviewing. In fact, the CIA’s official response to the study, which Director Brennan himself handed me in June 2013, was marked deliberative."

"The notion that we should not have read these documents defies common sense," she added.

Republicans on the panel have made no secret that they disapprove of the way the committee’s Democratic staff conducted themselves, including their handling of the Panetta Review.

In the Republican rebuttal to the intelligence committee’s torture report, a handful of GOP members -- including Burr -- slammed Democratic staff for wrongly accessing and taking the Panetta Review documents.http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/minority-views.pdf

Even after the CIA admitted it had indeed breached the Senate’s walled-off computer drives, committee Republicans continued to encourage a separate inquiry into staff conduct, run by the Senate’s Sergeant-At-Arms office.

That inquiry, though, ended inconclusively, leaving Republicans’ questions unresolved. Starzak’s nomination, it seems, has emerged as a chance to get answers.

For Starzak's defenders, though, this is inching close to an abuse of the confirmation process.

“Alissa Starzak’s nomination should not be held up over the Panetta Review. Any senator with questions about how Senate Intelligence Committee staff found the Panetta Review or what they did with it should read my March 2014 floor speech or ask me,” Feinstein said.
http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2014/3/feinstein-statement-on-intelligence-committee-s-cia-detention-interrogation-report

Those who worked with Starzak say that she was not privy to the controversial removal of the Panetta Review from the CIA facility in 2013, since she had left the panel more than two years prior.

“She was not informed or part of that decision,” a Democratic aide who worked with Starzak said. “Even if you think Senate staff did something wrong, she was gone before any of that happened.”

According to The Washington Post, it was Jones who printed out portions of the Panetta Review and brought it back to the committee’s secure office spaces in late 2013. The Huffington Post has subsequently learned that Jones advocated within the panel to preserve the committee’s own copy, though it's unclear to whom he made this appeal. Moreover, Jones only took some, not all, of the Panetta Review documents -- the rest of the review’s thousands of pages remain on the shared computers in that CIA basement.http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-finds-no-wrongdoing-in-search-of-computers-used-by-senate-investigators/2015/01/14/df049b6e-9c08-11e4-96cc-e858eba91ced_story.html

Starzak may wind up being one of the bigger professional casualties of a broader campaign against the panel’s Democratic staff that has been waged behind closed doors since the Panetta Review controversy originally came to light.

The first strike came in a December 2014 article fingering Starzak as one half of a duo that allegedly hacked into CIA computers in order to obtain the Panetta Review in 2010. Negative media coverage followed in a handful of conservative outlets. The apparent campaign spooked the panel’s Democrats, who quickly realized that their critics, now in the majority, were out for blood, one U.S. official familiar with the Intelligence Committee said earlier this year.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/12/24/obamas-nominee-for-pentagon-post-implicated-in-alleged-theft-cia-documents/

http://www.redstate.com/2014/12/28/alissa-starzak/

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/397777/who-oversees-overseers-fred-fleitz

The media reports, though, only foreshadowed bigger problems for the report’s investigators.

In the immediate aftermath of the study’s release, the Democratic staffers were hailed as oversight heroes, willing to stare down the CIA and go against the White House's wishes. But as the public spotlight faded, new realities set in. Government job offers dried up. It became more difficult, if not impossible, to get confirmed for nominated positions under the new Republican-run Senate. Most committee staffers still refuse to talk, afraid of retribution or being branded as leakers, which could put their security clearances at risk.

And then there is the personal toll. The intelligence panel’s investigation itself was a nearly six-year undertaking that took thousands of hours and put strains on staffers’ families and relationships. After the CIA’s criminal referral to the Justice Department, there was growing concern over legal costs, which the staffers would likely have to take on themselves.

For the moment, the chaos has quieted. Jones and several of his colleagues who worked on the torture report remain on the panel’s staff list, and Starzak continues to work at the Pentagon while quietly awaiting Senate confirmation.

Starzak’s former colleagues, though, say the Republicans’ effort isn’t worth the cost.

"Small win for GOP, but a big loss for our country. Alissa is a bright legal talent and I was fortunate to work with her,” said Eric Chapman, a former Democratic staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee who worked with Starzak on the report. “It is a shame that it appears her prior work on the [intelligence committee] is preventing the advancement of her nomination.”

The exact dynamics of the hold that originally kept Starzak from confirmation when she was first nominated in July 2014 are unclear, though a source familiar with the matter says the effort was led by former Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who served as the intelligence panel’s ranking member until he retired in January. It’s unclear whether Chambliss’ hold was ever officially registered with leadership, and requests for clarification from former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) office were not returned.

Currently, the hold is stuck in the Senate Armed Services Committee, where its chair, John McCain (R-Ariz.), is holding Starzak and several other civilian nominations hostage for reasons completely unrelated to the torture probe.http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/republican-senate-obama-nominees-117128.html

Burr can’t register an official hold until Starzak is voted through McCain's committee, and it could not be discerned how widely his intentions are shared among his fellow Republicans on the intelligence panel.

It's unclear when the logjam will break. But word has started getting around Capitol Hill about the intelligence committee chairman’s campaign.

“We’re aware that Sen. Burr and other senators have had concerns about Miss Starzak,” said an aide to the Senate Armed Services Committee, who added that no confirmation hearing had been scheduled for Starzak. The aide declined to discuss the matter further.

The Pentagon declined to make Starzak available for an interview.

"We are hopeful for the timely and favorable consideration of Ms. Starzak's nomination to be General Counsel of the Army,” Navy Cmdr. Amy Derrick-Frost said. “The Senate has a long history of working in a bipartisan, principled fashion to consider DoD nominations."

The CIA, meanwhile, has cleared itself of any wrongdoing in the spat over the torture report -- and has continued to challenge the Senate investigators’ claims that torture was ineffective.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/14/cia-senate-spying_n_6458074.html

The Justice Department declined to investigate the CIA’s apparent breach of Senate computers, and has additionally said it won’t reopen any investigation into the agency’s abuse of torture tactics.

With little appetite from the White House to press for accountability from the spies -- either for torture or for the apparent snooping into Senate computers -- it seems the only people being forced to suffer consequences are the ones whose names Feinstein announced on the Senate floor last December.

“They have worked days, nights, weekends for years, in some of the most difficult circumstances. It’s no secret to anyone the CIA did not want this report coming out,” Feinstein said in that powerful speech. “I believe the nation owes them a debt of gratitude.”

Burr’s office declined to provide further comment on the record for this story. The White House declined to comment, and McCain’s office did not respond to a request for comment.


By Ali Watkins

This is an American Torture Story

This is an American Torture Story


By Noam Chomsky

 Majid Khan was at the mercy of CIA interrogators for 1,200 days -- at least. During that time, he was stripped. He was forced into ice water baths. He was "hung up" for a day in a sleep deprivation position. He was denied solid food for seven days.

After about a year, Majid Khan went on hunger strike to protest the treatment he was receiving. The CIA responded with "involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration." Majid's lunch tray, consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was "pureed" and "rectally infused." This happened repeatedly. Eventually, Majid Khan attempted to cut his wrists.

I'm interested in the power of words. Terms like "enhanced interrogation" or "rectal feeding" are clever disguises for the true term we should be using to describe the CIA's treatment of Majid and more than 100 others: Torture.

The CIA can try to bury the truth of these atrocities, but it's up to us to hold the agency responsible. Tell U.S. authorities that no one should get away with torture.
https://webmail.west.cox.net/do/redirect?url=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.e-activist.com%252Fea-action%252Fbroadcast.record.message.click.do%253Fea.url.id%253D394522%2526ea.campaigner.email%253D81Pp1pDJmBhl9JazMZWMhJmQCvNVYxKY%2526ea.campaigner.id%253DioScAQ9JJA%25252BZkArzVWMSmA%253D%253D%2526ea_broadcast_target_id%253D0

From 2002 to 2008, the U.S. government disappeared more than 100 men and subjected dozens of them to torture using some of the same "interrogation methods" they used against Majid Khan.

Despite the release of a report recently issued by a Senate committee, which provides evidence of these horrific crimes, the U.S. Justice Department refuses to act.

In fact, the department apparently refuses to even read the report - keeping it in a sealed envelope, unopened.

But the truth is undeniable, and no amount of wordplay can disguise it. Tell the U.S. Department of Justice that it must read and respond to the Senate's report on torture.
http://act.amnestyusa.org/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1839&ea.campaign.id=37672&ea.tracking.id=MessagingCategory_Torture&ac=W1504EATOR3&ea.url.id=394523&forwarded=true

Torture is a crime and no one should get away with it. It's up to us to enforce that. Join us in telling this American torture story and use the power of your voice to speak out for justice.

The Kingpin Strategy

The Kingpin Strategy

Assassination as Policy in Washington and How It Failed, 1990-2015


 As the war on terror nears its 14th anniversary -- a war we seem to be losing, given jihadist advances in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen -- the U.S. sticks stolidly to its strategy of “high-value targeting,” our preferred euphemism for assassination.  Secretary of State John Kerry has proudly cited the elimination of “fifty percent” of the Islamic State’s “top commanders” as a recent indication of progress. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself, “Caliph” of the Islamic State, was reportedly seriously wounded in a March airstrike and thereby removed from day-to-day control of the organization. In January, as the White House belatedly admitted, a strike targeting al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan also managed to kill an American, Warren Weinstein, and his fellow hostage, Giovanni Lo Porto.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/asia/2-qaeda-hostages-were-accidentally-killed-in-us-raid-white-house-says.html

More recently in Yemen, even as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula took control of a key airport, an American drone strike killed Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaish, allegedly an important figure in the group’s hierarchy.  Meanwhile, the Saudi news channel al-Arabiya has featured a deck of cards bearing pictures of that country’s principal enemies in Yemen in emulation of the infamous cards issued by the U.S. military prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an aid to targeting its leaders.  (Saddam Hussein was the ace of spades.)http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-32341836
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2015/04/aqap-announces-death-of-sharia-official-in-us-drone-strike.php

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2798050/dead-hand-deck-52-wanted-iraqi-playing-cards-given-soldiers-start-war-shows-fall-saddam-ace-spades-hussein-s-army.html


Whatever the euphemism -- the Israelis prefer to call it “focused prevention” -- assassination has clearly been Washington’s favored strategy in the twenty-first century.   Methods of implementation, including drones, cruise missiles, and Special Operations forces hunter-killer teams, may vary, but the core notion that the path to success lies in directly attacking and taking out your enemy’s leadership has become deeply embedded.  As then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in 2010, “We believe that the use of intelligence-driven, precision-targeted operations against high-value insurgents and their networks is a key component” of U.S. strategy.
http://www.sify.com/news/clinton-defends-operations-in-afghanistan-news-international-klqdueibdda.html

Analyses of this policy often refer, correctly, to the blood-drenched precedent of the CIA’s Vietnam-era Phoenix Program -- at least 20,000 “neutralized.” But there was a more recent and far more direct, if less noted, source of inspiration for the contemporary American program of murder in the Greater Middle East and Africa, the “kingpin strategy” of Washington’s drug wars of the 1990s. As a former senior White House counterterrorism official confirmed to me in a 2013 interview, “The idea had its origins in the drug war.  So that precedent was already in the system as a shaper of our thinking.  We had a high degree of confidence in the utility of targeted killing. There was a strong sense that this was a tool to be used.”

Had that official known a little more about just how this feature of the drug wars actually played out, he might have had less confidence in the utility of his chosen instrument.  In fact, the strangest part of the story is that a strategy that failed utterly back then, achieving the very opposite of its intended goal, would later be applied full scale to the war on terror -- with exactly the same results.

The Kingpin Strategy Arrives

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was the poor stepsister of federal law enforcement agencies.  Called into being by President Richard Nixon two decades earlier, it had languished in the shadow of more powerful siblings, notably the FBI.  But the future offered hope.  President George H.W. Bush had only recently re-launched the war on drugs first proclaimed by Nixon, and there were rich budgetary pickings in prospect.  Furthermore, in contrast to the shadowy drug trafficking groups of Nixon’s day, it was now possible to put a face, or faces, on the enemy.  The Colombian cocaine cartels were already infamous, their power and ruthless efficiency well covered in the media.

For Robert Bonner, a former prosecutor and federal judge appointed to head the DEA in 1990, the opportunity couldn’t have been clearer.  Although Nixon had nurtured fantasies of deploying his fledgling anti-drug force to assassinate traffickers, even soliciting anti-Castro Cuban leaders to provide the necessary killers, Bonner had something more systematic in mind.  He called it a “kingpin strategy,” whose aim would be the elimination either by death or capture of the “kingpins” dominating those cartels.

Implicit in the concept was the assumption that the United States faced a hierarchically structured threat that could be defeated by removing key leadership components.  In this, Bonner echoed a traditional U.S. Air Force doctrine: that any enemy system must contain “critical nodes,” the destruction of which would lead to the enemy’s collapse.

In a revealing address to a 2012 meeting of DEA veterans held to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the kingpin strategy’s inauguration, Bonner spoke of the corporate enemy they had confronted.  Major drug trafficking outfits, he said, “by any measure are large organizations. They operate by definition transnationally. They are vertically integrated in terms of production and distribution. They usually have, by the way, fairly smart albeit quite ruthless people at the top and they have a command and control structure. And they also have people with expertise that run certain essential functions of the organization such as logistics, sales and distribution, finances, and enforcement.”  It followed therefore that the removal of those smart people at the top, not to mention the experts in logistics, would render the cartel ineffective and so cut off the flow of narcotics to the United States.

Pursuit of the kingpins promised rich institutional rewards.  Aside from the overbearing presence of the FBI, Bonner had to contend with another carnivore in the Washington bureaucratic jungle eager to encroach on his agency’s territory. “DEA and CIA were butting heads,” recalled the former DEA chief in a 2013 interview. “There was real tension.” Artfully, he managed to negotiate peace with the powerful intelligence agency, “so now we had a very important ally. CIA could use DEA and vice versa.”

By this he meant that the senior agency could use the DEA’s legal powers for domestic operations to good advantage.  This burgeoning relationship brought additional potent allies. Not only was his agency now closer to the CIA, Bonner told me, but “through them, the NSA.” A new Special Operations Division created to work with these senior agencies was to oversee the assault on the kingpins, relying heavily on electronic intelligence.

This new direction would swiftly gain credibility after the successful elimination of the most famous cartel leader of all.  Pablo Escobar, the dominant figure of the Medellín cartel, was an object of obsessive interest to American law enforcement.  He had long evaded U.S.-assisted manhunts before negotiating an agreement with the Colombian government in 1991 under which he took up residence in a “prison” he himself had built in the hills above his home city. A year later, fearing that the government was going to welsh on its deal and turn him over to the Americans, Escobar walked out of that prison and went into hiding.

The subsequent search for the fugitive drug lord marked a turning point. The Cold War was over; Saddam Hussein was defeated in the first Gulf War in 1991; credible threats to the U.S. were scarce; and the danger of budget cuts was in the air. Now, however, the U.S. deployed the full panoply of surveillance technology originally developed to confront the Soviet foe against a single human target. The Air Force sent in an assortment of reconnaissance planes, including SR-71s, which were capable of flying at three times the speed of sound. The Navy sent its own spy planes; the CIA dispatched a helicopter drone.

At one point there were 17 of these surveillance aircraft simultaneously in the air over Medellín although, as it turned out, none of them were any help in tracking down Escobar.  Nor did the DEA make any crucial contribution. Instead, his deadly rivals from Cali, Colombia’s other major trafficking group, played the decisive role in the destruction of that drug lord’s power and support systems, combining well-funded intelligence with bloodthirsty ruthlessness.

His once all-powerful network of informers and bodyguards destroyed, Escobar was eventually located by homing in on his radio and gunned down as he fled across a rooftop on December 2, 1993.  Though the matter is open to debate, a former senior U.S. drug enforcement official assured me unequivocally that a sniper from the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Delta Force had fired the killing shot.

Following this triumph, the DEA turned its attention to the Cali cartel, pursuing it with every resource available: “We really developed the use of wiretaps,” Bonner told me.  Patience and the provision of enormous resources eventually yielded results. In June and July 1995, six of the seven heads of the Cali cartel were arrested, including the brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez-Orijuela, and the cartel’s cofounder, José “Chepe” Santacruz Londoño.  Although Londoño subsequently escaped from jail, he would in the end be hunted down and killed.  Continued U.S. pressure for the rest of the decade and beyond resulted in a steady flow of cartel bosses into prisons with life sentences or into coffins.

Cartel Heads Go Down and Drugs Go Up

The strategy, it appeared, had been an unqualified success.  “When Pablo Escobar was on the run, for all practical purposes, his organization started going down... ultimately it was destroyed.  And that's the strategy we have called the kingpin strategy,” crowed Lee Brown, Bill Clinton’s “drug czar,” in 1994.

In public at least, no officials bothered to point out that if that strategy’s aim was to counter drug use among Americans, it had achieved precisely the opposite of its intended goal.  The giveaway to this failure lay in the on-the-street cost of cocaine in this country.  In those years, the DEA put enormous effort into monitoring its price, using undercover agents to make buys and then laboriously compiling and cross-referencing the amounts paid.

The drugs obtained by these surreptitious means, however, were of wildly varying purity, the cocaine itself often having been adulterated with some worthless substitute. That meant that the price of a gram of purecocaine varied enormously, since a few bad deals of very low purity could cause wide swings in the average. Dealers tended to compensate for higher prices by reducing the purity of their product rather than charging more per gram. As a result, the agency’s price charts showed little movement and so gave no indication of what events were affecting the price and therefore the supply.

In 1994, however, a numbers-cruncher with the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Pentagon’s in-house think tank, began subjecting the data to more searching scrutiny. The analyst, a former Air Force fighter pilot named Rex Rivolo, had been tasked to take an independent look at the drug war at the request of Brian Sheridan, the hardheaded director of the Defense Department’s Office of Drug Control Policy who had developed a healthy disrespect for the DEA and its operations.

Having tartly informed DEA officials that their statistics were worthless, mere “random noise,” Rivolo set to work developing a statistical tool that would eliminate the effect of the swings in purity of the samples collected by the undercover agents. Once he had succeeded, some interesting conclusions began to emerge: the pursuit of the kingpins was most certainly having an effect on prices, and by extension supply, but not in the way advertised by the DEA. Far from impeding the flow of cocaine onto the street and up the nostrils of America, it was accelerating it. Eliminating kingpins actually increased supply.

It was a momentous revelation, running entirely counter to law enforcement cultural attitudes that reached back to the days of Eliot Ness’s war against bootleggers in the 1920s and that would become the basis for Washington’s twenty-first-century counterinsurgency wars. Such a verdict might have been reached intuitively, especially once the kingpin strategy in its most lethal form came to be applied to terrorists and insurgents, but on this rare occasion the conclusion was based on hard, undeniable data.

In the last month of 1993, for example, Pablo Escobar’s once massive cocaine smuggling organization was already in tatters and he was being hunted through the streets of Medellín. If the premise of the DEA strategy -- that eliminating kingpins would cut drug supplies -- had been correct, supply to the U.S. should by then have been disrupted.

In fact, the opposite occurred: in that period, the U.S. street price dropped from roughly $80 to $60 a gram because of a flood of new supplies coming into the U.S. market, and it would continue to drop after his death.  Similarly, when the top tier of the Cali cartel was swept up in mid-1995, cocaine prices, which had been rising sharply earlier that year, went into a precipitous decline that continued into 1996.

Confident that the price drop and the kingpin eliminations were linked, Rivolo went looking for an explanation and found it in an arcane economic theory he called monopolistic competition. “It hadn’t been heard of for years,” he explained. “It essentially says if you have two producers of something, there’s a certain price. If you double the number of producers, the price gets cut in half, because they share the market.

“So the question was,” he continued, “how many monopolies are there? We had three or four major monopolies, but if you split them into twenty and you believe in this monopolistic competition, you know the price is going to drop. And sure enough, through the nineties the price of cocaine was plummeting because competition was coming in and we were driving the competition. The best thing would have been to keep one cartel over which we had some control. If your goal is to lower consumption on the street, then that’s the mechanism. But if you’re a cop, then that’s not your goal. So we were constantly fighting the cop mentality in these provincial organizations like DEA.”

The Kingpin Strategy Joins the War on Terror

Deep in the jungles of southern Colombia, coca farmers didn’t need obscure economic theories to understand the consequences of the kingpin strategy. When the news arrived that Gilberto Rodríguez-Orijuela had been arrested, small traders in the remote settlement of Calamar erupted in cheers. “Thank the blessed virgin!” exclaimed one grandmother to a visiting American reporter.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175988/tomgram:_andrew_cockburn,_how_assassination_sold_drugs_and_promoted_terrorism/.%2509Alan%2520Weisman,%2520%25E2%2580%259CThe%2520Cocaine%2520%2520Conundrum,%25E2%2580%259D%2520Los%2520Angeles%2520Times%2520Magazine,%2520September%252024,%25201995

“Wait till the United States figures out what it really means,” added another local resident. “Hell, maybe they’ll approve, since it’s really a victory for free enterprise. No more monopoly controlling the market and dictating what growers get paid. It’s just like when they shot Pablo Escobar: now money will flow to everybody.”

This assessment proved entirely correct. As the big cartels disappeared, the business reverted to smaller and even more ruthless groups that managed to maintain production and distribution quite satisfactorily, especially as they were closely linked either to Colombia’s Marxist FARC guerrillas or to the fascist anti-guerrilla paramilitary groups allied with the government and tacitly supported by the United States.

Much of Rivolo’s work on the subject remains classified. This is hardly surprising, given that it not only undercuts the official rationale for the kingpin strategy in the drug wars of the 1990s, but strikes a body blow at the doctrine of high-value targeting that so obsesses the Obama administration in its drone assassination campaigns across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa today.

Rivolo was, in fact, able to monitor the application of the kingpin strategy in the following decade.  In 2007, he was assigned to a small but high-powered intelligence cell attached to the Baghdad headquarters of General Ray Odierno, who was, at the time, the operational U.S. commander in Iraq.  While there he made it his business to inquire into the ongoing targeting of “high-value individuals,” or HVIs.  Accordingly, he put together a list of 200 HVIs -- local insurgent leaders -- killed or captured between June and October 2007.  Then he looked to see what happened in their localities following their elimination.

The results, he discovered when he graphed them out, offered a simple, unequivocal message: the strategy was indeed making a difference, just not the one intended. It was, however, the very same message that the kingpin strategy had offered in the drug wars of the 1990s.  Hitting HVIs did not reduce attacks and save American lives; it increasedthem. Each killing quickly prompted mayhem. Within three kilometers of the target’s base of operation, attacks over the following 30 days shot up by 40%. Within a radius of five kilometers, a typical area of operations for an insurgent cell, they were still up 20%. Summarizing his findings for Odierno, Rivolo added an emphatic punch line: “Conclusion: HVI Strategy, our principal strategy in Iraq, is counter-productive and needs to be re-evaluated.”

As with the kingpin strategy, the causes of this apparently counter-intuitive result became obvious upon reflection.  Dead commanders were immediately replaced, and the newcomers were almost always younger and more aggressive than their predecessors, eager to “make their bones” and prove their worth.

Rivolo’s research and conclusions, though briefed at the highest levels, made no difference.  The kingpin strategy might have failed on the streets of American cities, but it had been a roaring success when it came to the prosperity of the DEA.  The agency budget, always the surest sign of an institution’s standing, soared by 240% during the 1990s, rising from $654 million in 1990 to over $1.5 billion a decade later.  In the same way, albeit on a vaster scale, high-value targeting failed in its stated goals in the Greater Middle East, where terror recruits grew and terror groups only multiplied under the shadow of the drone.  (The removal of al-Baghdadi from day-to-day control of the Islamic State, for instance, has apparently done nothing to retard its operations.)  The strategy has, however, been of inestimable benefit to a host of interested parties, ranging from drone manufacturers to the CIA counterterrorism officials who so signally failed to ward off 9/11 only to adopt assassination as their raison d'être.

No wonder the Saudis want to follow in our footsteps in Yemen. It’s a big world. Who’s next?



By Andrew Cockburn
Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine.  An Irishman, he has covered national security topics in this country for many years.