Democrats Reauthorize Patriot Act Despite Government’s Long History Of Abuses

By Peter Castagno on Nov 21, 2019 10:15 am

https://citizentruth.org/democrats-reauthorize-patriot-act-despite-governments-long-history-of-abuses/

“The Patriot Act extension passed the House with nearly all Democrats voting for it. When Pres. Trump signs it into law, Democrats will be just as responsible for warrantless surveillance as Trump and the GOP. Neither party is looking out for you.” – Rep. Justin Amash

House Democrats voted almost unanimously to extend the Patriot Act in their budget bill on Tuesday, granting massive surveillance powers to a president they are trying to impeach because of the danger his corruption poses to national security. The apparently contradictory action reflects a long tradition of bipartisan consensus in giving intelligence agencies free rein to violate the constitution and abuse their covert powers.

“Very cool way to resist Trump by ensuring he continues to have terrifying authoritarian surveillance powers,” tweeted Evan Greer, deputy director for digital rights advocacy group Fight For The Future.

What is the Patriot Act?

The Patriot Act of 2001 was the essential legislation that enabled the NSA and other government agencies to conduct mass surveillance and warrantless searches against Americans with no oversight. First introduced by Joe Biden in 1995 as The Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995, the bill was enacted after 9/11 under the pretense of fighting terrorism.

Because of its extreme mandate, the Patriot Act included sunset clauses to fade out its provisions unless Congress voted for their reauthorization. Congress has repeatedly done so, including the latest three month extension, which was quietly included in a government funding resolution by House Speaker Pelosi, who once called the bill “a massive invasion of privacy,” and other Democratic leaders.

“The Patriot Act extension passed the House with nearly all Democrats voting for it,” tweeted Rep. Justin Amash. “When Pres. Trump signs it into law, Democrats will be just as responsible for warrantless surveillance as Trump and the GOP. Neither party is looking out for you. That’s why I’m an independent.”

Amash, a former Republican who left the party in protest of Trump’s leadership, proposed an amendment to remove the Patriot Act extension from the budget bill, but it was blocked by Democrats on the Rules Committee. Only 10 Democrats voted against the resolution, including “the Squad” of Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar. The bill passed 231-192, mostly on party lines.

“The continuing resolution would reauthorize a mass surveillance authority that has never been proven useful and that has consistently broken the laws and rules governing surveillance,” tweeted Demand Progress.

U.S. Government’s History Of Abusing Surveillance Powers

Beyond the violation of civil liberties posed by mass government surveillance of citizens, critics argue the U.S. government’s history of abusing its covert powers for sinister purposes proves it is too irresponsible to merit such vast power.

The Snowden leaks revealed how the National Security Agency (NSA) violates the fourth amendment to spy on American citizens, but beyond the NSA, agencies like the FBI, CIA, DHS, and DEA have all abused mass surveillance powers. The scope of their activities is not publicly known.

The FBI, for example, has a long list of crimes including the Palmer Raids and torturing Puerto Rican independence activists, and has long devoted public resources to illegally surveilling nonviolent civil society groups and protest movements.

Patriot Act Dangerously Expands CIA Powers

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warns that perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the Patriot Act is expanding the CIA’s power to spy on Americans. The ACLU cites Operation CHAOS, when the CIA spied on student activists and people opposed to Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, as an example of the agency’s willingness to infringe on lawful political activity protected under the first and fourth amendments.

The CIA’s involvement in coups, executions, mind control experiments, and other nefarious pursuits have led critics, including multiple presidents, to view it as more of an unaccountable criminal organization than a legitimate democratic institution.

After being asked about the creation of the CIA, President Truman told his biographer: “I think it was a mistake. If I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have done it.”

“Those fellows in the CIA don’t just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there’s nobody to keep track of what they’re up to,” said Truman. “They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they’ll have something to report on. They’ve become … it’s become a government all of its own and all secret. They don’t have to account to anybody.”

“That’s a very dangerous thing in a democratic society, and it’s got to be put a stop to,” said Truman. One month after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who once said he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds,” Truman publicized his warnings with a Washington Post op-ed titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.”

Eisenhower also famously warned the American public of “the military industrial complex,” the unaccountable nexus of intelligence organizations and their corporate, political, and military allies which he believed would subvert US democracy without the vigilance of an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”

Journalist David Talbot, who detailed the life of CIA director Allen Dulles in his book “The Devil’s Chessboard,” views Snowden’s revelations as a manifestation of Eisenhower and Truman’s warnings: “The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went.”

Snowden shares Talbot’s fears that new technology will give the surveillance state unprecedented power. “The greatest danger still lies ahead, with the refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities, such as facial and pattern recognition,” the whistleblower told the Guardian in September.

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Aaron Maté: from Russiagate to Ukrainegate, liberals enlist in self-defeating Cold War

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9ZzERen_U8&feature

Sydney Morning Herald columnist defends Swedish frame-up of Assange

By Oscar Grenfell

22 November 2019

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/22/assa-n22.html

In an opinion piece on Wednesday, Nick Miller, European correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, mounted a desperate rearguard defence of the bogus Swedish investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which had been dropped the day before.

Miller’s argument was summed up in the headline, which declared “Assange has not been vindicated, he has merely outwaited justice.”

Miller sympathetically cited the pathetic statements of the Swedish prosecutors, who claimed that witness recollections had “weakened” due to the passage of time and that there was therefore “insufficient evidence” to proceed with a “preliminary investigation”—which they had dragged-out for nine years and had already dropped twice.

The journalist repeated all of the talking points that have been used in the media to misrepresent the Swedish investigation.

Assange, Miller claimed, had “managed to stay out of the hands of the law for long enough.” It was, he wrote, “a grim kind of pragmatism for this truth warrior, to deny women the right to seek justice, to have their claims tested in court, because of a legal jurisdictional gambit which itself is an attempt to avoid a trial.”

Miller’s article did not mention the statement of one of the women to a friend, indicating she had never intended to pursue a criminal complaint against Assange in the first place, and that it was “the police who made up the charges.” Nor did he cite the finding of the initial prosecutor Eva Finne, in August 2010, who stated: “I do not think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” Finne dismissed the police fabrications, stating that the “conduct alleged… disclosed no crime at all.”

As is now widely recognised, the allegations in Sweden were revived in 2010 due to a political decision that was inseparable from the frenzied US-led pursuit of Assange over his exposures of American war crimes and global diplomatic conspiracies.

The frame-up character of the investigation is attested to by the litany of “irregularities” in the case. These range from the police changing one of the women’s statements without informing her, to the fact that the only physical evidence in the case, a torn condom, contained no DNA, to the decision of the authorities to leak witness statements to the press in defiance of Swedish law.

The almost innumerable violations of Assange’s legal and democratic rights were set out in detail in two letters sent by United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer to the Swedish government this year. The Swedish authorities were unable to respond to any of his substantive inquiries. None of this rated a mention in Miller’s article.

Most perniciously, Miller’s article was aimed at promoting the fraudulent claim that Assange “evaded justice” and sought to hamper the investigation.

In reality, Assange took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012, after the British judiciary took the unprecedented decision to uphold a Swedish extradition request—issued by a prosecutor, not a court—so that Assange could be asked “questions.”

The Swedish authorities did not say why they needed to extradite Assange in order to interview him. Nor has it ever been explained why they refused to guarantee that they would not dispatch him to the United States if he came into their custody.

It was the prosecutors, not Assange, who sought to prevent any resolution of the investigation. For years, they refused to interview Assange in London, or via video-link. Contrary to Miller’s insinuations, this is standard practice. Swedish prosecutors interviewed more than 40 individuals outside of their jurisdiction during the same period that they would not speak to Assange in London.

Prosecutors finally relented and interviewed Assange in November 2016. They dropped the case in May 2017.

Miller’s suggestion that Assange needed to be in Sweden for charges to be laid is similarly false. Swedish prosecutors charged individuals in absentia of serious crimes, including murder and assault, during the same time period they did not charge Assange.

In a particularly cynical paragraph, Miller decried Assange’s “more wide-eyed supporters,” who “flirt with absurd, evidence-free conspiracy theories: that the women were US secret service ‘honeytraps,’ that the Swedish investigation was a CIA-led operation to lure Assange into a jurisdiction where he would be instantly, illegally whisked away to Virginia—or renditioned to Guantanamo, or worse.”

As Miller would be aware, the Swedish authorities did in fact collaborate with the US “extraordinary rendition” program, allowing CIA operatives to kidnap individuals on their territory.

Correspondence released under Freedom of Information requests has revealed direct political interference in the case by other states, which would be inexplicable if the investigation was not a component of the British and US conspiracy against Assange.

Emails showed that the British Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) insisted in 2010 and 2011 that Swedish authorities reject Assange’s offer to question him in Britain, or via video link, rather than seeking his extradition arrest. A January 2011 email from the CPS to Swedish prosecutors stated: “Please do not think that the case is being dealt with as just another extradition request.”

The documents also revealed that Sweden had been considering dropping the investigation in 2013. The British CPS insisted that it continue, with one of its representatives writing: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!” Other emails, including one from the FBI to the chief Swedish prosecutor, were deleted. Conveniently, nobody involved could remember their contents.

Not all Sydney Morning Herald articles, moreover, have been so dismissive of questions about the background of Anna Ardin, one of the Swedish complainants who is presented in glowing terms by Miller.

A December 2010 article in the Herald, headlined “Victims, jilted lovers or undercover agents,” noted that “serious questions are being asked about one of Julian Assange’s accusers.”

The SMH article pointed out that the day after Ardin had supposedly been assaulted, she publicly tweeted that she wanted to take Assange to a “crayfish party.” It reviewed revelations that Ardin had previously worked with right-wing anti-Castro organisations in Cuba. Her activities had led the Cuban government to request that she leave the country. Ardin had also interned at the Swedish embassy in Washington.

The article stated:

Australian journalist and expert on espionage Philip Knightley, who is backing Assange in his battle with the British courts, does not believe Ardin is a CIA agent.

“There’s no direct evidence,” he told the Sun-Herald. But he said that decades of dealing with spy agencies had led him to suspect that she fitted the model of someone who could be useful to intelligence agencies.

“She’s someone they would consider an asset. I do not think she has been recruited for this mission but once she realised she was in this position, she might have known the right people to contact.”

The essence of Knightley’s theory is that Ardin is someone whose high-level political activity inside Sweden’s historically dominant party—and her ability to travel to contentious destinations such as Cuba and make connections with hostile emigre communities as part of her academic research—would make her a valuable source for Sweden’s boutique spy agency.

In 2010, the Sydney Morning Herald did not consider reporting such serious questions to be engaging in “conspiracy theories.” The article concluded by noting that the Swedish investigation was unfolding in a context where the “WikiLeaks founder is certainly the target of an angry superpower.”

Nine years on, there is no question that the investigation was a frame-up. It served Washington’s essential aims of embroiling Assange in the legal system, besmirching him and undermining his support.

All of those journalists, such as Miller, who have promoted the bogus case have served as the propagandists of this operation. While many of them have loudly condemned government attacks on the media, including Australian Federal Police raids targeting journalists in June, they helped foster the climate in which press freedom could be attacked through their relentless slander of Assange.

Australian bushfire crisis spreads as PM denies climate change link

By Mike Head

22 November 2019

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/22/bush-n22.html

Even before summer has begun, bushfires and toxic smoke have threatened the lives, health and homes of millions of people in nearly every Australian state and territory this week. The fire emergencies that first erupted two weeks ago in two states have spread across the country, worsened by dust storms, asthma alerts and electricity blackouts.

By last night, the number of homes lost to bushfires this season in New South Wales (NSW) alone had reached 612 with crews continuing to battle 50 blazes across the state. Similar conditions, rated as “catastrophic” or “code red,” were experienced in South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania, as well as Western Australia and Queensland.

Fire authorities in every part of the continent are warning of a terrible summer ahead. There is no relief in sight for months from searing temperatures, a devastating drought and other climatic severities, including wild winds and dry lightning strikes.

Apocalyptic scenes of raging walls of flames, orange skies and acrid hazes forcing residents to wear face masks in major cities have also fuelled a political crisis. Both the Liberal-National Coalition government and the official Labor Party opposition have sought to shut down criticism and debate over the underlying impact of climate change and the inadequacy of firefighting resources.

After remaining silent for about a week, because he was jeered by fire victims, Prime Minister Scott Morrison yesterday attempted to respond to the public outrage, but only succeeded in making it worse. On Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio, he first declared that statements that official inaction on climate change had contributed to the fire season do not “bear up to credible scientific evidence.”

Second, Morrison said he had not met with 23 former fire and emergency services chiefs, who warned of the unprecedented conditions in April, because his government already had advice about the upcoming season. “This is why we put the additional resources into our emergency services and our aviation firefighting assets,” he said. “We were getting on with the job.”

Even by the government’s own data, Australia’s greenhouse emissions, overwhelmingly generated by large corporations, have continued to rise—up by 0.6 percent in the year to March. A host of scientific reports has demonstrated that global warming is worsening the fire dangers. While the link is complex, warmer weather increases the number of days each year on which there is high or extreme bushfire risk.

As for “getting on with the job,” the 23 former fire chiefs warned that twice as many large aircraft water bombers were needed. Firefighting budgets have been cut in several states in recent years and operations everywhere depend on over-stretched volunteers. Fire authorities have repeatedly warned residents that they cannot count on assistance in the event of sudden and unpredictable fires.

Adding to the discrediting of Morrison, mayors from 12 fire-affected regional areas called on the government to acknowledge the climate link and said all emergency services needed better funding for a longer fire season and increasingly severe disasters.

However, Labor has worked with the government to seek to suppress the fire debate. Labor leader Anthony Albanese has avoided any fire-related appearances or comments himself after being heckled by a victim. Labor’s Senate leader Penny Wong echoed him by calling for the immediate focus to be on firefighters and the victims, not the underlying issues.

Melbourne, Victoria’s capital, yesterday had its hottest November day for more than a century—reaching 40.9 degrees Centigrade and 44.3 degrees in suburban Laverton. About 60 fires broke out across the state and more than 80,000 households were cut off electricity in a total of 462 towns, after a network failure that also sparked a fire. Orange dust hit Melbourne and many towns, reducing visibility and potentially triggering respiratory problems, along with thunderstorms and high grass pollen levels.

Emergency Management Victoria raised the bushfire warning in northern parts of the state to Code Red. It was the first time a Code Red had been issued since the new rating was introduced in 2014, following the “Black Saturday” fires that killed 173 people in February 2009. Such warnings put the onus on residents to flee their homes before a fire strikes, rather than stay and try to defend their properties.

For three days, residents of Sydney, the NSW capital, have suffered acrid smoke that drifted from nearby fires, among the 50 burning throughout the state. The city’s air quality index hit 2,000 on Tuesday—anything above 200 is considered hazardous—and the haze was not expected to clear until today. People with breathing difficulties were advised to stay indoors, avoid exercise and use reliever medicine if appropriate.

In the northern state of Queensland, 63 uncontained fires were still burning and the number of homes destroyed over the past two weeks rose to 20. Fire authorities said only 80 fire trucks remained on the front lines. Exhausted volunteers were rested in the expectation that more extreme conditions would soon return.

Several fires broke out in the southern island state of Tasmania, driven by some record high temperatures and wind gusts of up to 100 kilometres per hour.

“Tasmanians should expect more days of extreme fire danger this bushfire season which is why every household in a bushfire-prone area needs to have a survival plan,” Tasmanian Fire Service controller Bruce Byatt said.

South Australia’s two-day fire emergency eased yesterday, but 40 of the 60 blazes continue. A fire that threatened communities near Yorketown on the state’s Yorke Peninsula had been sparked by a network power fault, local authorities revealed on Thursday.

At the height of the emergency, the Yorke Peninsula mayor, Darren Braund, said many residents had taken shelter overnight in the Edithburgh Town Hall but had been told to leave. “People are very worried, a lot of anxious people, hoping their properties are OK,” Braund said. His comments reflected the trauma suffered by many people around Australia.

As with the fires that have killed more than 80 people and forced mass evacuations in California over the past two years, Australia’s worsening bushfire crisis underscores the failure of the profit-driven capitalist system to address the root causes, and to allocate the resources necessary to protect people from the increasingly catastrophic consequences.

GM lawsuit: UAW engaged in criminal conspiracy with FCA to cut labor costs

22 November 2019

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/22/pers-n22.html

On Wednesday, General Motors filed a 95-page federal lawsuit asserting that Fiat-Chrysler (FCA) and the UAW engaged in “a systematic and near decade-long conspiracy to bribe senior officials to corrupt the collective bargaining process,” “buy labor peace,” “slash labor costs,” and thereby “gain a wage advantage over its competitors.”

GM’s lawsuit was not filed on behalf of autoworkers. GM is demanding billions of dollars for itself on the grounds that the UAW gave billions more in concessions to FCA than it did to GM. And having just conspired with the UAW to starve out 50,000 striking autoworkers in the US, GM makes clear its gratitude for UAW collaboration. The first paragraph of the complaint reads: “The UAW and its officials are not Defendants to this lawsuit,” while GM stresses its aim to build a “stronger future” between the UAW and the company.

But the complaint includes critical and previously unknown details from court filings and internal GM-UAW deliberations that workers must know. These details expose the UAW as a legal arm of the corporations. The complaint states:

• “From July 2009 until at least 2017, FCA Group, through a pattern of racketeering activity, acquired and maintained an interest in and/or control of the UAW, and in particular its decisions and actions regarding CBAs [collective bargaining agreements], which FCA Group and the other Defendants operated as an 18 U.S.C. §1962(b) RICO [Racketeer Influenced And Corrupt Organizations Act] enterprise (‘FCA-Control Enterprise.’)”

• “Defendants used this control to influence the UAW’s negotiation of certain CBAs and other agreements, and then to control the UAW’s day-to-day actions in implementing these agreements as more fully alleged herein.”

• The UAW “became [then-Fiat CEO Sergio] Marchionne’s main counterparties in Fiat’s business plan even while he explored a collaboration with Chrysler” before Fiat’s 2009 takeover of the bankrupt US automaker. “The UAW was Fiat’s bridge to establish a domestic footprint given the UAW’s significance in the US automotive market.”

• The UAW and FCA made several “side letter” agreements which were not known to autoworkers over the past decade: “From this private understanding purchased through the conspiracy that FCA would not be subject to a Tier Two cap, FCA hired Tier Two workers with abandon, possessing the incredibly valuable foreknowledge that it would not be penalized by any reinstatement of the cap. By 2015, Tier Two workers made up around 42 percent of the UAW membership at FCA—double the proportion of Tier Two workers at GM.”

• Another UAW-FCA “side letter” agreement included a plan for “significantly reducing FCA’s health care costs.”

• “Through these bribes, FCA effectively exercised control of the UAW with respect to the grievance process… The benefits, concessions, and advantages illegally purchased by FCA included at least a unique level of support from UAW leaders for FCA’s World Class Manufacturing program (‘WCM’), a streamlined internal worker grievance process, manipulation of certain contractual limits on Tier Two and temporary employees, other ‘side letter’ agreements, and even a unique agreement to support FCA’s ‘long-term business plan.’”

• When FCA needed to take control of its stock holdings, the UAW agreed to sell its majority stake on the company’s orders. “Fiat apparently ‘scripted’ [former UAW Vice President General] Holiefield at a UAW Executive Board meeting to support Fiat’s goal of buying all of the UAW Trust’s stake. Iacobelli emailed that Holiefield would ‘create a dialogue pursuant to our outline’ at the meeting, which, upon information and belief, involved having the UAW support a complete sale of its Chrysler interest to Fiat. This scripting helps demonstrate the degree of Fiat’s control over the UAW and its top officials.”

• When FCA attempted to carry out a merger with GM in 2015, former UAW President Dennis Williams was “FCA Group’s messenger” for bringing FCA’s proposal to GM. “UAW President Williams and Vice President Cindy Estrada” attended a meeting with GM’s CEO and leadership on June 18, 2015, GM reports, at which the UAW “relayed and championed Marchionne’s merger proposition” and were “working at Marchionne’s behest as a result of the bribery scheme.”

• During 2015 contract negotiations, UAW leadership was involved in a conspiracy with GM itself. “The UAW’s principal negotiators represented to GM that they could ‘sell it’—that is, the deal that was on the table—to the UAW’s members,” GM admits.

• The UAW selected FCA as its target company in 2015 as part of this conspiracy: “On September 13, 2015, the UAW unexpectedly announced that it had chosen FCA as the ‘target,’ a position secured through the years-long bribery scheme between FCA Group and UAW leaders.”

The contracts signed by this criminal organization over the past two decades were reached in bad faith. They are illegitimate and legally inoperable. The workers who have been fleeced by UAW corruption at all three companies are owed billions and billions of dollars in lost wages and dues.

This means tens of thousands of dollars in money owed to each worker, regardless of whether they are currently employed by the Big Three or laid off, forced to take a buyout or retired.

GM’s assertion that the UAW engaged in “racketeering” only with one corporation but not with the others is legally baseless, because “racketeering” by federal definition stains the “whole organization” and all of its actions. Moreover, several UAW-GM executives are among those who have been charged in the corruption scandal.

FCA responded to the filing by warning “we will not be slowed down by this act.” The company has made it known it has no intention of giving up its cost-competitiveness when it signs a new agreement with the UAW covering 47,000 FCA workers.

The UAW responded to GM’s complaint by writing, “We are confident that the terms of those contracts were not affected” by the bribery for which multiple UAW officials have pled guilty in federal court.

This blatantly false statement—issued by union executives who have grown “fat, dumb and happy” through years of corporate bribery—proves that the conspiracy is ongoing and will not be changed by any reshuffling of personnel at the top of this criminal organization.

The Democratic Party, “socialist” publications like Jacobin magazine (which has not written a single article on the UAW corruption scandal in 2019) and self-described “reformers” claim the UAW can be “cleaned up” or changed from within. This has as much likelihood of success as efforts to transform the mafia into a charitable society.

The UAW is not a “workers' organization” capable of reform, it is a labor contractor that functions as an arm of the corporation, as the GM complaint shows. It is legally indistinguishable from the corporations. They function, GM asserts, as a single legal entity.

The betrayal of the GM strike and the ramming through of a concession-ridden contract at Ford does not mean the fight is over. On the contrary. Industry publications have warned of growing opposition among FCA workers, and GM and Ford workers will quickly come into conflict with the companies and the UAW as the UAW seeks to impose the terms of its new agreements. This opposition must be mobilized against the illegitimate contracts and the union-company dictatorship in the factories.

New organizations are needed to carry forward this struggle. The WSWS Autoworker Newsletter calls for the formation of rank-and-file factory committees, which are independent of and in opposition to the UAW. Autoworkers should convene meetings to discuss the facts exposed in the GM lawsuit and prepare an independent, international strategy for fighting the Big Three automakers.

Eric London

Krystal Ball reveals Bernie's path to victory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jvmYT9OTXY