THE AP SPYING SCANDAL AND THE CRISIS OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

By Joseph Kishore

The Obama administration’s secret seizure of the phone records of Associated Press reporters is the latest attack on core democratic rights in the United States.

Last week, the Justice Department acknowledged that it had obtained a subpoena in February of this year to require telecommunications companies to turn over two months of phone records on some 20 lines used by the AP. The subpoena was part of an investigation into an alleged leak of classified information that had occurred the year before.

It is likely that many more media outlets have been similarly targeted, and the administration has refused to respond to requests that it reveal what other records were seized. Anyone who speaks to the media about any matter has to assume that their phone numbers and contact information have been or could be made available to the government by secret court order.

There could hardly be a clearer violation of the First Amendment guarantee of the freedom of the press.

On Thursday, Obama made his first comments on the case in a press conference at the White House. His remarks exposed the fact that the president, who swore an oath to defend the Constitution, is utterly indifferent to and ignorant of the democratic principles that it upholds.

Obama proclaimed that the freedom of the press, a right enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution, must strike a “balance” with the prerogatives and interests of the military-intelligence apparatus. This argument essentially invalidates the unambiguous declaration of the First Amendment that no law shall be promulgated “abridging the freedom of speech or of the press…” But according to Obama, this constitutional guarantee of the people’s rights can be tossed aside when it interferes with operations and interests of state.

In another statement that exposed the president’s cynicism and indifference toward the democratic principles articulated in the Bill of Rights, Obama stated that, “free press, free expression and the open flow of information help hold me accountable… and help our democracy function.”

Thus, for Obama—who, according to his official curriculum vitae, taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago—freedom of the press and speech merely “help our democracy function.” With these words, Obama argued implicitly that freedom of the press and speech are somehow external to democracy, and that there can be a democracy without these rights! They may be useful as a matter of procedure, assisting “democracy.” But “democracy,” without these rights, is a meaningless phrase. When constitutional rights conflict with the operations conducted by the Pentagon and CIA, then, according to Obama, government can and should violate them.

This is the antithesis of democracy. Obama was also asked at the press conference what he felt about comparisons between the scandals plaguing the administration and those that occurred under Nixon. The president brushed aside the question, saying the reporter could “draw your own conclusions.” In fact, Obama has carried out operations that go far beyond the crimes and misdemeanors for which Nixon was forced out of office in 1974.

An urgent warning is necessary: The assault on democratic rights is far more advanced than the American people realize. Every basic democratic right included in the Bill of Rights—freedom of the press, freedom of association, free speech, the protection against warrantless searches and seizures, due process, the right to a trial by jury and public counsel, the ban on torture—has been systematically undermined.

The AP spying scandal is entirely in line with the policies and practice of the Obama administration, the most anti-democratic in US history. Obama has prosecuted six current or former government officials for leaking classified information, double the number prosecuted by all previous presidents combined.

The administration has declared the right to assassinate anyone, anywhere, including US citizens, without due process. Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder declared that the president has the right to order the killing of a US citizen within the United States.

At the same time, the government is increasing its spying operations on the American people. The administration is preparing to push for a new law that will allow it to tap directly into Facebook, Google and other Internet companies, a major expansion of government efforts to gain access to every digital communication.

The AP revelations, moreover, come only a month after the Boston Marathon bombings, which was followed by the military-police lockdown of the entire city. The precedent was set to respond to any such event with what amounts to martial law and the abrogation of constitutional protections against warrantless searches.

Two basic factors underlie the destruction of American democracy: the unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny fraction of the population and the unending expansion of American imperialism abroad.

Both these factors are rooted in the crisis of American capitalism and the character of the American ruling class. Writing in 1916, Lenin noted, “Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. Whatever the political system, the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and an extreme intensification of antagonisms in this field.”

The American financial aristocracy “strives for domination,” in the United States and around the world. Headed by Obama, the ruling class has engaged in a ceaseless process of plunder, which has only escalated since the crash of 2008. Trillions of dollars have been handed over to the banks, while basic social services have been starved of resources and the working class has been driven deeper into poverty.

At the same time, there is not a part of the globe in which the American military and intelligence apparatus is not engaged in ceaseless intrigue, drone bombings or outright war and occupation. At the same press conference in which he defended the AP spying, Obama, standing beside Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, issued new and more bellicose threats against Syria. The US and its European allies are preparing an escalation of the campaign against Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, threatening to unleash a regional war with disastrous consequences.

The American corporate and financial elite, pursuing a deeply unpopular policy at home and abroad, stands in irreconcilable conflict with democratic forms of rule. The defense of democracy is, therefore, a fight against the ruling class and the capitalist system upon which it is based.

FEDS CLAIM PHONE-RECORDS SEIZURE JUSTIFIED

Holder says AP leak on al-Qaida plot put U.S. at risk

Government officials say they reached out for huge quantities of Associated Press reporters’ telephone records because a double agent in the war on terror was compromised by a story – even though the news agency’s reporting on the issue didn’t mention the agent.

In fact, it was now-CIA Director John Brennan, who then was Barack Obama’s terror adviser, who told members of Congress that the U.S. had “inside control” of the situation, and media then reported on the use of a double agent.

That’s according to a profile of the government’s justification for pursuing the reporters’ telephone records published in the Los Angeles Times, which was one of the publications that reported on the double agent after Brennan documented the situation to Congress.

Government officials told the newspaper that it was an AP story on May 7, 2012, about a foiled plot to blow up a passenger jet that prompted the controversy, a story the AP held for five days at the request of the CIA.

But the report said that story did not mention the informant.

Ultimately, the fallout from the revelation that a double-agent existed infuriated British officials, whose intelligence agency had developed the source, and Saudi Arabian intelligence officials were “dismayed.”

Times writer Kevin Dilanian said the sequence developed like this:

The informant was a British citizen who was born in Saudi Arabia and was recruited by Britain to work as a double agent inside al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. His information led to a drone strike by the U.S. that killed al-Qaida’s Fahd Mohammed Ahmed Quso on May 6, 2012. The informant also expressed a desire to blow up a U.S. passenger jet and was outfitted with a bomb. The informant left Yemen and delivered the bomb to authorities and intelligence officials hoped to send him back to Yemen. But al-Qaida covered its tracks when the information about a double agent surfaced.

The Times report, which did not identify the U.S. officials who were sources, said the Justice Department then went after the telephone records of more than 20 lines belonging to AP reporters to investigate the “leak” of details.

The beleaguered Attorney General Eric Holder, who also is fighting a defense of the IRS’ admitted policy of attacking and blocking conservative organizations seeking formal recognition, said the Yemen failure is “among, if not the most serious, in the top two or three most serious leaks that I’ve every seen.”

The Times quoted another unidentified CIA attorney who said that’s simply an exaggeration.

“Any time you’ve got a human being involved who was compromised, it’s serious,” he told the Times. “But it certainly wasn’t one of the top two or three that I would have picked. And I never heard of a leak investigation throwing out a dragnet over this many reporters.”

It was the New York Times that reported it was Verizon Wireless that turned over reporters’ phone records to the government “without any attempt to obtain permission to tell them so the reporters could ask a court to quash the subpoena.”

The company refused to comment on any “particular” case.

But University of Maryland journalism school Dean Lucay Dalglish warned such actions would make reporters less able to research and report news.

The case developed this week when the Justice Department confirmed it snooped into media phone records because of the blown Yemen operation. It was one of just three major scandals to land on the White House — the others being the Benghazi terror attack and the IRS decision to target conservative groups with apparent harassment.

Twenty separate lines assigned to AP staff were investigated, prompting a backlash from the legacy media, which largely has been rooting for Obama during his move into and tenure at the White House.

Slate’s Ryan Gallegher said, “The debacle is likely to come as a much needed wake up call for some reporters, even if companies fail to change their questionable practices. The message is simple: Don’t communicate with sensitive sources on the phone, regardless of who your carrier is. Encryption is an option, but safest is to do things the old-fashioned way: face-to-face, with a notepad and a pen.”

Congress has taken note of the dispute, with a bill being introduced to prevent another grab of records. The “Telephone Records Protection Act” is only one sentence but would prevent the government from seizing such records with only an administrative subpoena. Instead, a court order would be required.

Obama was quoted by Iran’s PressTV saying he’s confident Holder is doing the job correctly, even as national Republican leaders called for his resignation.

Holder himself defended the move, even though he said he was “not aware” of the seizure of the records.

AP officials have said the seizure was inappropriate and have demanded the return of the records.

“We held that story until the government assured us that the national security concerns had passed,” AP chief Gary Pruitt said in a prepared statement.

MIDDLE EASTERNERS CAUGHT TRESPASSING AT BOSTON RESERVOIR

Explained they were ‘chemical engineers’ interested in water supply

Word Net Daily

Seven people from Pakistan, Singapore and Saudi Arabia – the country of 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers – were caught trespassing in the middle of the night at a reservoir  from which Boston draws its drinking water.

The report by the local CBS affiliate noted that the five men and two women said they were chemical engineers and were in the area because of “their education and career interests.”

Last week, WND reported the FBI alleged a Muslim man who was arrested in a recent terror plot in New York was planning to kill as many as 100,000 people by contaminating the air or water supply in a major U.S. city.

In that case, Ahmed Abassi, 26, was studying chemical engineering at Laval University in Quebec City, reported Canada’s CBC News.

Abassi’s plan did not materialize beyond discussions, but he also has been linked to Chiheb Esseghaier, one of two Canadian residents arrested in the alleged plot to derail a Via passenger train.

In the more recent case, authorities in Belchertown, Mass., told CBS that the seven were trespassing at Quabbin Reservoir, described as one of the country’s biggest man-made public water supplies.

Boston’s drinking water comes from the Quabbin and Wachusett Reservoirs.

Massachusetts state police told the station “there was no evidence that the seven were committing any crime beyond the trespassing.”

Authorities said the FBI was investigating and the inspections of the water supply have been increased. The suspects, who reported addresses from various cities, including Amherst and New York, were being summonsed for trespassing.

BILL BLOCKS IRS FROM ENFORCING OBAMACARE

Lawmaker: ‘We’re going to do all we can to make certain it doesn’t get that power’

World Net Daily

Just days after the IRS admitted making life miserable for conservative organizations applying for tax-exempt status, Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., warned that the agency cannot be trusted to enforce Obamacare and is pushing legislation to strip the IRS of any new powers connected to the law.

On Thursday, ABC News reported the IRS official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations when the agency targeted tea-party groups is now in charge of the IRS office responsible for enforcing Obamacare. Also, the Daily Caller reported the agency is the subject of a class action lawsuit alleging that “15 of its agents improperly seized 10 million Americans’ medical records.”

However, the “Keep the IRS Off Your Health Care Act of 2013″ would bar the IRS from “implementing or enforcing” any components of the health care laws.

“We always opposed utilizing the IRS in this fashion. They have no expertise in that area, and we just think that it’s inappropriate to have the IRS involved in people’s health care,” said Price, a physician and member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee that will hold hearings on IRS abuses Friday.

“When it became clear that the IRS has been abusing it’s privilege of gaining information from folks and treating certain Americans differently than other Americans, then that was just an unconscionable bridge too far, and we said, ‘Well, we’ve got to do something about this,” Price told WND. “This bill, H.R. 2009, simply says that the IRS may not be involved in any aspect of the president’s health care law.”

Updated reports on the depth of the IRS scandal suggest the politically motivated activities were far more widespread than the IRS admits. Price said the rampant bullying of Americans based on political beliefs proves the agency should be nowhere near the U.S. health care system.

“It was not just targeting groups that were applying for a tax-exempt status but that they were asking for information about who were the donors to those entities and then going after the donors themselves. This is much broader than picking on an organization or two,” Price said.  ”If you let your mind draw a parallel to health care, then it’s wholly possible that the IRS could then determine whether or not the health care you were purchasing or where you were going was the kind of health care they wanted you to have or they wouldn’t allow you to have or didn’t comply with their dictates or their mandates in something so very, very personal as health care.

“As a physician, I can tell you that is absolutely irresponsible and unconscionable, and we’re going to do all that we can to make certain that the IRS doesn’t get that power,” Price said.

Not surprisingly, many House Republicans are enthusiastically backing Price’s bill and the congressman said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, intends to introduce the bill on the Senate side. Democrats are not lining up behind the legislation yet, but Price believes some of them might.

“Many of them are also disgusted by what the IRS has done, and I think the next step for them is to answer, ‘Well, in that case, don’t you believe that the IRS ought to be strictly confined to its original mission and do so in a transparent way as opposed to expanding its mission to get into people’s health care?’” Price said.

The congressman does not believe that the IRS will suddenly play by the rules just because it was caught in the current scandal. He said a “trust but verify” approach would be needed to determine whether the IRS really cleaned up its act, and there’s not enough time for it to prove real reforms have taken place before Obamacare is implemented

Price does not believe the explanation that this targeting of conservative groups and individuals was the work of a few rogue, low-level staffers.

“This had to come from somewhere up the chain,” he said. “Was it the individual in charge of the tax-exempt division? Was it the secretary of the treasury? Or does it go further than that? That’s what we need to answer with our oversight.”

Price does not buy President Obama’s carefully worded denials about what his staff knew about this scandal.

“Call me skeptical, but I believe the White House was involved in this activity,” he said.

HOUSE VOTES TO FULLY REPEAL OBAMACARE FOR THIRD TIME

By John Parkinson | ABCNews

The House of Representatives voted today to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act, 229-195. This was the third vote for full repeal, and the 37^th overall vote the House has taken to disrupt, dismantle, defund or repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R.-Minn.) called the vote shortly before 6:30 p.m.

Two Blue Dog Democrats, Reps. Mike McIntyre (D-N.C.) and Jim Matheson (D-Utah), voted along with 227 House Republicans in support of the bill.

No Republicans opposed repeal, although five GOPers missed the vote.

In a statement following the vote, House Speaker John Boehner said the vote was “all about jobs.”

“The president’s health care law is already undermining our economy — employers are cutting workers and cutting hours, costs are going up, and even Democrats are worried the whole thing is headed for a train wreck,” Boehner, R-Ohio, stated.

“There are also serious concerns about whether the IRS should be involved in our health care at all, let alone as the law’s chief enforcer,” he added. “Fully repealing ObamaCare will help us build a stronger, healthier economy, and will clear the way for patient-centered reforms that lower health care costs and protect jobs.”

The bill stands no chance of passing in the Senate, or reaching the president’s desk.

SOUTH CAROLINA OBAMACARE NULLIFICATION BILL BEING HELD UP IN COMMITTEE

by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D. | The New American

Since May 2, the bill prohibiting South Carolina’s participation in ObamaCare has been held up in the state Senate Finance Committee.

Seems constitutionalists in the Palmetto State aren’t content to sit idly by while the legislation is held up by a powerful state lawmaker.

In an interview with The New American, one of the leaders of the effort to pass a bill in South Carolina to nullify the president’s healthcare behemoth announced that groups of grassroots activists will demonstrate Friday (May 17) at the workplace of the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee — State Senator Hugh Leatherman. The same group plans to hand out pamphlets exposing the dangers of ObamaCare in Senator Leatherman’s neighborhood on Saturday.

The people are fired up, but so are many of Leatherman’s colleagues who have worked hard to get the bill passed through the state House of Representatives.

Tom Davis is such a senator. Davis, who cosponsors a bill criminalizing participation in the indefinite detention of citizens under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), posted a message on his Facebook page announcing that “heads will roll” if the state senate fails to pass the ObamaCare nullification bill already passed by the state House of Representatives.

Davis doesn’t identify the owners of those possibly ill-fated noggins.

On May 1, by a vote of 65-39, the South Carolina state House of Representatives passed HB 3101. The bill prohibits state officers and agents from carrying out the myriad mandates contained in President Obama’s medical care morass.

Although passage of the bill by the state House is praiseworthy and a positive move toward resisting the tyranny of the federal government, the bill as passed is markedly weaker than the bill as originally drafted.

For example, while the original bill was an outright nullification of ObamaCare, imposing criminal penalties on anyone who attempted to enforce its provisions within the sovereign borders of South Carolina, the bill as passed by the House voids only those parts of the ObamaCare act that the state deems “unconstitutional.”

Furthermore, rather than allowing state officials to hold anyone — including federal agents — accountable for participating in the application of the ObamaCare mandates to citizens of South Carolina, in its present form, the prohibitions apply only to state employees.

Section 1-7-180 of the bill does empower the state attorney general to protect the state from any attempt to harm the state by enforcing ObamaCare. The section reads:

Whenever the Attorney General has reasonable cause to believe that a person or business is being harmed by implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and that proceedings would be in the public interest, the Attorney General may bring an action in the name of the State against such person or entity causing the harm to restrain by temporary restraining order, temporary injunction, or permanent injunction the use of such method, act, or practice.

The bill goes further in protecting South Carolinians from the financial impact of ObamaCare by giving a dollar-for-dollar tax deduction to anyone assessed a federal tax penalty for failure to conform to the ObamaCare mandates.

Healthcare exchanges — government-run insurance marketplaces — are outlawed in the South Carolina bill, as well. Section 38-71-44 of the bill forbids the state or any political subdivision thereof from established an ObamaCare exchange.

Additionally, state, county, and municipal agencies are prohibited from purchasing insurance from any exchange set up by a nonprofit organization.

Moreover, any health insurance policy purchased in violation of the provisions of the South Carolina bill is declared void and unenforceable in state courts.

Despite attempts to weaken the bill, it remains a forceful and formidable nullification of the federal healthcare act soon to be imposed on states, despite its obvious unconstitutionality.

While Senator Leatherman sits on this important bill, there is word that South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, is herself sitting on the fence.

During an appearance on the Bob McLain radio show, Governor Haley was asked by a listener if she would sign the ObamaCare bill into law if it ever got to her desk. Haley responded that she wasn’t sure and that she’d have to read the bill more closely.

Opponents of South Carolina’s effort to thwart the president’s tyrannical carrying out of the mandates of his pet project (and of nullification in general) point to the so-called Supremacy Clause of Article VI of the Constitution to portray the state’s tack as an example of illegal aggression toward federal law.

This argument is easily dismissed.

The Supremacy Clause does not declare that all laws passed by the federal government are the supreme law of the land, period. What it says is that the “laws of the United States made in pursuance” of the Constitution are the supreme law of the land.

In pursuance thereof, not in violation thereof. None of the provisions of ObamaCare is permissible under any enumerated power given to Congress in the Constitution; therefore, they were not made in pursuance of the Constitution, and they are not the supreme law of the land.

Alexander Hamilton promoted this interpretation of Article VI when he wrote in The Federalist, No. 33:

If a number of political societies enter into a larger political society, the laws which the latter may enact, pursuant to the powers intrusted [sic] to it by its constitution, must necessarily be supreme over those societies and the individuals of whom they are composed…. But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the larger society which are not pursuant to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such. [Emphasis in original.]

Supporters of South Carolina’s nullification bill understand that the states retain numerous rights under the Constitution, including the obligation to block unconstitutional federal usurpation of state sovereignty.

Senator Davis, his colleagues in the South Carolina state legislature, and their legion of liberty-minded grassroots activists stand on firm constitutional and legal ground in their opposition to acts of the federal government that exceed its constitutional authority.

This understanding married to the fact that time is of the essence if ObamaCare is to be stopped at the state border is perhaps what has compelled these concerned citizens to take the show on the road and peacefully and lawfully demonstrate in areas where they know the Finance Committee chairman will hear them.

All state legislatures have an obligation to liberty and to their citizens to follow the example of South Carolina (and Oklahoma) by exercising their rights protected by the 10th Amendment and their natural right to rule as sovereign entities and refusing to enforce the myriad unconstitutional mandates of ObamaCare.

Nullification is a concept of constitutional law that recognizes the right of each state to nullify, or invalidate, any federal measure that exceeds the few and defined powers allowed the federal government as enumerated in the Constitution.

This power is founded on the assertion that the sovereign states formed the union, and as creators of the compact, they hold ultimate authority as to the limits of the power of the central government to enact laws that are applicable to the states and the citizens thereof.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare decision, supporters of American federalism are encouraged to see state legislators boldly asserting their right to restrain the federal government through application of the very powerful and very constitutional principle of nullification.

FEDS WANT TO LOWER LIMITS AND CRIMINALIZE ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION

Donna Anderson
Infowars.com

In a move opponents believe will have no measurable effect on public safety, the National Transportation Safety Board is urging state governments to lower the allowable limits for drivers from 0.08 percent to 0.05 percent, a move it says will reduce fatalities caused by drunk drivers. Even MADD, the most vocal anti-drunk driving group in the world, would rather pursue other options.

Currently, all 50 states have adopted a legal limit of 0.08 percent. Alcohol-related traffic fatalities have dropped from 21,098 in 1985 to 10,000 in 2011, but NTSB says progress has stalled. “There are at least 10,000 reasons to tackle this issue,” said Deborah A. P. Hersman, the chairwoman of the board.

But statistics tell a different story. In 2010, The U. S. Department of Transportation reported a total of 32,885 traffic fatalities. Out of that total, 31.10 percent, or 10,228, involved drivers with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.08 percent or higher. Only 5.32 percent, or 1,720, fatalities involved a BAC of 0.07 percent or less, indicating that the problem isn’t with social drinkers who know their limits and drink responsibly.

The MADD website states that about one-third of all drivers arrested or convicted of driving while intoxicated or driving under the influence of alcohol are repeat offenders, and 50 to 75 percent of convicted drunk drivers continue to drive on a suspended license.

Response from various states suggests the move to lower the legal limit is being met with resistance. In Ohio, The Columbus Dispatch points out that in 2011 Ohio had 11.5 million residents and total traffic fatalities of 1,015. Alcohol-related fatalities were listed at 316. “Of the alcohol-impaired drivers who caused a fatality, 95 percent had a blood-alcohol level of over 0.10, and 55 percent were over 0.20.”

Sarah Longwell, the managing director of the American Beverage Institute, calls the measure “ludicrous.”

“Moving from 0.08 to 0.05 would criminalize perfectly responsible behavior,” she said. And “further restriction of moderate consumption of alcohol by responsible adults prior to driving does nothing to stop hard-core drunk drivers from getting behind the wheel.”

Mother’s Against Drunk Driving (MADD) doesn’t entirely support the measure, either. The group favors mandatory installation of a Breathalyzer system for drivers convicted of drunk driving, and they’re all for passive alcohol sensors and “administrative license revocation” because they believe these measures show strong potential for reducing alcohol-related traffic fatalities.

However, J. T. Griffin, a Washington representative for MADD, says the National Transportation Safety Board is “trying to focus on a group of people who are more social drinkers, who haven’t been targeted in a while.” MADD would not oppose the change, he said, but would pursue other remedies.