Trump heats up war with Iran with disturbing posts

By Reginald Johnson

In another unhinged social media post today, President Trump said that "we" know where Ayatollah Khameni, the Supreme Leader of Iran is hiding, and "we could take him out now" but won't "for now." Trump demanded Iran surrender to avoid further death and destruction. Trump sounds like some mob boss plotting the death of his enemies.

 He also said in another post that "we" control the skies over Iran, making it abundantly clear the US is working closely with Israel on the attack against Iran. There's no pretense anymore that the US is not fully involved in the Iran war.

 The American people have to rise up and say NO to this war! This could turn into a catastrophic regional war, or even a world war, where millions would die.

 Though the horse is out of the barn, people should still back Sen. Tim Kaine's Senate resolution to block Trump from attacking Iran without Congressional approval. Call 202-224-3121 and demand your senators support the resolution.

At this stage, people better start demanding impeachment as well. Trump is acting recklessly and in violation of the Constitution in many ways.

 

 

Freedom of Speech and Donald Trump

                 

                      

By Reginald Johnson

   Does Donald Trump have freedom of speech like all other Americans?

  Yes, unfortunately he does.

 Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of our system, stemming from the very first amendment to the Constitution, which bars Congress from passing any law which would abridge that right.

  In the U.S., you can pretty much say or write anything, unless you’re advocating something illegal.

This separates our system from a lot of other places, where if you criticize the government or some high official too much, you could wind up in jail or worse.

  It’s very important to protect the first amendment. Without it, our constitutional system is shot.

  That’s why it’s a bit concerning that some protesters have gotten it into their heads that the best way to combat Trump and his offensive views is by showing up at his rallies and either shouting him down or interrupting him so many times that he can’t effectively communicate.

   The New York Times reported that at a recent event in New Orleans, Trump’s speech was interrupted repeatedly. The Times wrote “an almost continual stream of protesters interrupted a Trump event, sometimes dropping to the ground to make guards drag them out, or heckling back at Mr. Trump’s supporters with their own crude language and gestures.”

  Other campaign events by Trump have also been interrupted on multiple occasions.

  Some protesters said after the aborted Trump rally in Chicago that they had successfully “shut down” Trump’s appearance, set for an arena at the University of Illinois. The rally had drawn hundreds of protesters inside the arena, and the Trump campaign cancelled the event just after the candidate was scheduled to speak. The event descended into chaos after the announcement, with Trump supporters and protesters yelling at each other and exchanging punches.

  “Shutting down” free speech is not a good thing, no matter what you think of the person doing the speaking.

  Anyone running for office has a right to make their case. People who don’t like their views don’t have the right to prevent that.

  Let me say right here I do not like Donald Trump. He's shown himself to be bigoted, denigrating Mexican and Muslim immigrants and hesitating at one point to repudiate KKK leader David Duke. Except for a few remarks he’s made about the need to avoid overseas interventions and his opposition to trade treaties (not expressed very coherently), I have no use for this man.

   He’s also made irresponsible remarks about protesters, saying he wouldn’t care if they got punched out or remarking that “in the old days” they’d take demonstrators “out on a stretcher.”

  He also said he would pay the legal fees for anyone who beat up a protester who was “getting ready to throw a tomato.”

  These inflammatory remarks may well have fueled some incidents of violence, notably the sucker-punching of a demonstrator by a Trump supporter as the protester was being removed from a rally. Trump said last weekend that he didn’t want to see any violence at his events, but he refused to criticize the man who threw the punch.

  For his views and his incendiary remarks, Trump deserves to be condemned. The question is where and when.

 If a candidate from any party has obtained a hall or space to hold a campaign rally and make his or her pitch on why they should be elected, that person and his supporters should not be subjected to protests in the same area.

 However, it is entirely appropriate to hold demonstrations or protests outside the hall or space. Opponents of Trump should hold mass demonstrations outside the venues where Trump is going to speak. Protest rallies with hundreds or thousands of people will get press attention.  Critics can set up soft picket lines outside Trump events, carry placards, hand out leaflets and try to buttonhole event-goers and tell them why Trump is not a good candidate.

 Opponents can also take out ads in the paper, write letters, and write op-eds criticizing Trump.

  There’s plenty of ways to show opposition to candidates besides engaging in blocking tactics at campaign rallies.

  Should anti-Trump protesters continue their efforts at interrupting speeches, it is likely that opponents of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders will decide to return the favor and show up at rallies for those candidates and disrupt their speeches. Campaign rallies could degenerate into circuses, which is not fair to either to the candidates trying to make their case or the people who came to hear what they have to say.

 

   

 

  

              

Fighting Back Against NSA Spying

                                            

By Reginald Johnson

        After a successful national protest earlier this month against the sweeping surveillance over Americans’ phone calls and email activity by the National Security Agency, it’s critical to keep up the pressure on Congress to rein in the spying programs.

    According to the website “The Day We Fight Back,” which promoted the Feb. 11 event of the same name, some 555,000 emails were sent to members of Congress urging them to rein in the NSA through reform legislation;  89,000 phone calls to Congress were made; some 301,000 people signed a petition demanding privacy as a human right; the website the daywefightback.org  was shared 420,000 times on Facebook; and more than 37 million people worldwide saw the “The Day We Fight Back” banner on the website the day of the protest.

  “Together we demonstrated that activists, organizations and companies can work in unison to fight mass surveillance and laid a foundation for escalation over the months to come,” said a statement on the website following the protest.

   The statement added that the fight still has a long ways to go. “To push back against surveillance, we need to keep acting to educate and urge our representatives to take action,” it said.

   The Feb. 11 protest was organized by a coalition of civil liberties organizations, digital rights groups, companies and activists who are determined to force the government to curtail the dragnet surveillance that was exposed last year by whisteblower Edward Snowden. The former contractor for the NSA released a trove of classified documents which showed that the NSA was tracking the phone records, email communications,  social network activity and web activity of hundreds of millions of Americans and foreigners.

  Billions of records of phone calling “metadata” --- showing who made a call, to whom, how long the call was, and the location of those taking part ---- are being swept up by the government.

  According to The Washington Post, one of the papers which published the revelations made by Snowden, the NSA is also harvesting both the metadata and content of emails, web activity, social networks and chats, as part of what the agency calls “upstream collection.”

   The government claims that the NSA surveillance is both constitutional and a necessary tool in fighting terrorism.

  But civil liberties advocates claim that the NSA spying program is a clear violation of the Constitution’s guarantees of the right to privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of association.

   The American Civil Liberties Union, which is part of the coalition fighting the NSA surveillance, says that the agency’s “aggregation of metadata constitutes an invasion of privacy and an unreasonable search” and is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. Also, the phone tracking program violates the First Amendment “because it vacuums up sensitive information on associational and expressive activity.”

  The ACLU is suing the government to end the spying program and have all the collected data deleted.

  According to Josh Levy, of the internet rights group Free Press, the NSA surveillance programs “attack our basic rights to connect and communicate in private, and strike at the foundations of democracy itself. Only a broad movement of activists, organizations and companies can convince Washington to restore these rights.”

    During the “Day We Fight Back” protest, people either calling or emailing their representatives in Congress were urged to tell them to support the USA Freedom Act, which would end the bulk collection of phone data by the government and make the deliberations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) --- which authorizes NSA surveillance programs --- more transparent.

   Another bill is going through Congress, offered by U.S. Dianne Feinstein, D-Ca., relating to the NSA. However, the bill, though offering some cosmetic reforms in the FISA process, would largely keep in place the existing NSA surveillance programs.

   Several members of the Connecticut congressional delegation were called by this reporter in the “Day We Fight Back” protest. A staff member for U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4, said the congressman was still weighing whether to support the USA Freedom Act. A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy also said the senator hadn’t taken a position on the bill yet.

  The position of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., was clear, however. Blumenthal is a co-sponsor of the USA Freedom Act, a staffer said.

   Activists see an urgency in rolling back the legal authority for the spying programs, as more and more revelations keep coming out about how extensive the government surveillance is, both in the United States and abroad.

  Recently The Guardian newspaper in the UK reported that the British spy agency GCHQ, with aid from the NSA, had intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of Internet users not suspected of wrongdoing.

  

   

                  

Rand Paul: Making a Point

By Reginald Johnson



I don’t care what pundits like Larry O’Donnell and “mature” members of Congress may say, Rand Paul deserves a lot of credit for standing up for the Constitution the other day.

The libertarian senator from Kentucky may be way off base on a number of other issues, but performed a tremendous service by filibustering the John Brennan nomination as CIA director, and questioning the Obama drone program.

Brennan was eventually confirmed, hours after Paul’s marathon, in a vote largely along party lines.

But people were still buzzing later about Paul’s 13-hour traditional “talking filibuster,” which spotlighted the administration’s constitutional excesses with respect to the use of drones and the war on terrorism.

Paul rightly criticized the administration for giving signals that it might use killer drones to take out an American on U.S. soil, if suspected of terrorism. Such an act would be a blatant violation of the Constitution’s due process and habeas corpus guarantees.

In a letter sent to Paul recently, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the government did not rule out the use of lethal force against citizens in the U.S.

Holder declared that under undefined “extraordinary circumstances” the president could “authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.”

Paul said the vote on confirming Brennan --- who was the architect of the drone program which has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths --- should be held up until the administration issued a clear statement, in writing, saying it would not kill Americans on U.S. soil.

Already, drones were used to kill three Americans abroad. One of them was suspected of terrorist activities against the U.S. None of them were involved in combat against the United States.

Paul discussed the fact that government agencies have drawn up lists of “terrorist suspects” --- which have included the names of people who have expressed radical views, unpopular views or are dissidents. Such lists have been passed on to local law enforcement agencies recommending surveillance of those individuals, he said.

The senator said it is one thing for the government to target individuals who are taking up arms against the government, and another thing to target people who are simply critics of the government or affiliated with an unpopular group.

Paul demanded to know what standards were being used to draw up the watch lists, and what standards were being used to draw up kill lists, something Obama has directly been involved in.

“This filibuster is not so much about Brennan as it is about constitutional principles,” said Paul.

The lawmaker offered the Democrats a proposal that he would drop his filibuster and allow a vote to go ahead if they agreed to a non-binding “Sense of the Senate Resolution” which said “Use of drones to execute or target an American citizen on American soil who poses no imminent threat clearly violates the constitutional due process rights of citizens.”

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., speaking for the Democrats, conceded that many of the issues Paul raised were legitimate. Nonetheless, he turned the offer down.

The filibuster ended after midnight Thursday morning when Paul took a bathroom break. Later, there was some debate on the floor, with Sen. John McCain defending the drone program and saying the filibuster was out of place. McCain, who is becoming increasingly annoying, admonished the younger Paul “to calm down.”

That’s right, let’s all “calm down” about illegal drone strikes and assaults on the Constitution.

When the vote took place, it fell rather disgustingly along party lines. Almost all Republicans voted against Brennan, in most cases simply to oppose Obama, though some may share Paul’s liberterian views. Only three people on the left side of the aisle voted to oppose. They were Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, both Democrats, and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders is one of the few real progressives on the Hill.

Then the wise, so-called liberal pundits like Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC weighed in with derision for Paul’s filibuster. O’Donnell called Paul “relentlessly ignorant” and deemed the filibuster a publicity stunt. The same network’s Ed Schultz said Paul was “grandstanding” and grabbing attention for a presidential run.

Though both commentators said the drone issue was an important one, Paul had somehow mishandled the matter. Neither one bothered to actually discuss the questions raised by Paul.

The Republican senator did score a victory Thursday morning, however, when Holder sent him a terse letter saying that the President does not have the authority to use a “weaponized drone” to kill an American on U.S. soil who is not engaged in combat.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK:Women for Peace and a strong critic both of the drone program and Brennan’s nomination, said Paul should have devoted time in his filibuster to talking about the terrible results of past drone strikes overseas, the massive loss of civilian life, and Brennan’s role in heading up the “nefarious program.”

Nonetheless, in a piece she authored for Common Dreams, she lauded Paul’s stand:

“While progressives have all sorts of reasons to dislike Rand Paul’s Tea Party, small government libertarian views, killer drones is one issue on which progressives should make common cause with Paul and his growing legions of supporters,” she wrote.

She continued, “After all, it’s not about the messenger but the message. And compared to the Democratic Senators who have, with few exceptions, remained either silent or support President Obama’s killer drones, Rand made a heroic stand. In gratitude, progressives should ‘Stand with Rand.’ “ http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/07-7