Flags at Half-Staff for Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela (1918 - 2013) has died at age 95.  He was on my list of most admired and was a huge inspiration to the world for his opposition to apartheid most of his life.  President Obama ordered flags flown at half-mast in his honor.

President Obama recounted to the nation on Thursday how he drew inspiration from Mandela during his first public speech.

"My very first political action, the first thing I ever did that involved an issue or a policy or politics, was a protest against apartheid. I studied his words and his writings," he said in a televised address shortly after Mandela's death was announced.

"And like so many around the globe, I cannot fully imagine my own life without the example that Nelson Mandela set, and so long as I live I will do what I can to learn from him."

"He no longer belongs to us," Obama said. "He belongs to the ages."

However the US government opinion of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) movement that he led were blacklisted as terrorists by the US until a 2008 law was signed by then-President Bush removing it from the terrorist list.

The Daily Beast notes:
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted against a resolution urging that he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise, given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.

Nixonesque Presidency?

Are we tired of the burdens of Liberty and the Constitution?  Jonathan Turley thinks so, and he wrote a strong polemic on the subject that was picked up in the Washington's Blog today.  I'm not buying all the stuff about Obama being the worst of the lot, after all I think George W Bush was worse, but all in all that would be damning with faint praise for Obama.

Here is one highlight from the article that hits home to me.

Nixon was known for his attacks on whistle-blowers. He used the Espionage Act of 1917 to bring a rare criminal case against Ellsberg. Nixon was vilified for the abuse of the law. Obama has brought twice as many such prosecutions as all prior presidents combined [and see this]. While refusing to prosecute anyone for actual torture, the Obama administration has prosecuted former CIA employee John Kiriakou for disclosing the torture program.

 I disagree with the premise that "Nixon was vilified for the abuse of the law."  He was impeached for involvement in the Watergate break-in, and in my view much of the rest of the assertions in the article about Nixon are an attempt to rewrite history.  George W Bush and Reagan did a lot of the same stuff.

I do agree however that our government (Congress and the Administration alike) has largely abandoned the inconvenient restrictions contained in the Constitution when they would thwart the goals of extremists in both bodies of government.  Come to think of it, I think the Supreme Court did the same in the "Citizen's United" ruling.

All the actors are capitalizing on fear, and using that fear to trample on our civil rights, as well as engage in barbaric excesses of torture and incarceration at Guantanamo.

George Orwell had it right that the rulers need a state of constant war to get everyone to accept breaching our constitution.

Homeland Insecurity

The bombing at the Boston Marathon is puzzling, where was the security?  According to the Washington's Blog there was plenty of it, hundreds of Police, National Guards, they even had bomb sniffing dogs at the start and finish line, so how did it happen?

Homeland Security is an enormously expensive group, but paradoxically the budgets for domestic bombing prevention has been gutted, first by Bush then even more under Obama.  This is an amazing failure.

We also might ask, "Why is Terrorism on the rise"?  How about Oil Wars for a starter?  Here is an analysis from the Washington's Blog.

Killing innocent civilians is one of the main things which increases terrorism. As one of the top counter-terrorism experts (the former number 2 counter-terrorism expert at the State Department) told me, starting wars against states which do not pose an imminent threat to America’s national security increases the threat of terrorism because:

One of the principal causes of terrorism is injuries to people and families.

The Iraq war wasn’t even fought to combat terrorism. And Al Qaeda wasn’t even in Iraq until the U.S. invaded that country.
And top CIA officers say that drone strikes increase terrorism (and see this).
Furthermore, James K. Feldman – former professor of decision analysis and economics at the Air Force Institute of Technology and the School of Advanced Airpower Studies – and other experts say that foreign occupation is the main cause of terrorism
University of Chicago professor Robert A. Pape – who specializes in international security affairs – points out:

Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.
***

Each month, there are more suicide terrorists trying to kill Americans and their allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Muslim countries than in all the years before 2001 combined.
***
New research provides strong evidence that suicide terrorism such as that of 9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance. Although this pattern began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, a wealth of new data presents a powerful picture.

More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation, according to extensive research [co-authored by James K. Feldman - former professor of decision analysis and economics at the Air Force Institute of Technology and the School of Advanced Airpower Studies] that we conducted at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism, where we examined every one of the over 2,200 suicide attacks across the world from 1980 to the present day. As the United States has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, which have a combined population of about 60 million, total suicide attacks worldwide have risen dramatically — from about 300 from 1980 to 2003, to 1,800 from 2004 to 2009. Further, over 90 percent of suicide attacks worldwide are now anti-American. The vast majority of suicide terrorists hail from the local region threatened by foreign troops, which is why 90 percent of suicide attackers in Afghanistan are Afghans.