Why do the Iranian people distrust the United States? Because they “hate our freedoms”, as Bush said about Al Qaida? Or do they have genuine reasons?

How many of us know the history of America and England’s involvement in the illegal and covert overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953?

My guests today are Daniel Burwen & Ash Aiwase, two of the guys behind Operation Ajax, one of the most exciting apps I’ve seen developed for the iPad so far.

Check out the trailer:

I chatted with Daniel and Ash recently about how Operation Ajax came about and how the iPad can make a dent in the Universe.

You can hear No Illusions on Stitcher SmartRadio,  Stitcher allows you to listen to your favorite shows directly from your iPhone, Android Phone,  BlackBerry  or Palm phones

On-demand and on the go!

Dont have Stitcher? Download it for free today at Stitcher.com or in the app stores.  Stitcher SmartRadio- The Smarter Way to listen to radio.

Follow @cameronreilly

Just in case you were wondering what happened with that bill before the U.S. Senate that I mentioned in last week’s show? Well… it passed.

Via the World Socialist Web Site:

The US Senate voted Thursday night to approve a military funding bill that codifies into law the criminal state practices begun under Bush — and continued under Obama — in the name of the “global war on terror.”

It explicitly authorizes the military’s indefinite detention without trial of American citizens and mandates that all non-citizens charged as terrorists—including those arrested on US soil—be detained indefinitely by the military rather than brought to trial in a civilian court.

The legislation was part of the National Defense Authorization Act, which provides $662 billion to finance the US military machine and its multiple wars abroad. The act passed the Democratic-controlled body by an overwhelming margin of 93 to 7, underscoring once again that there exists no serious constituency for the defense of democratic rights within any section of the American ruling elite or its two big business parties.

Thrown out by this legislation is the right guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution for all those accused of a criminal offense to a “speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury,” and the core provision of the Fifth Amendment declaring that no person shall be deprived of liberty “without due process of law.” It legalizes the abrogation in practice over the past decade of the bedrock principle of habeas corpus, which requires that the state bring a detained individual before an independent court and show just cause for imprisonment.

Read More: World Socialist Web Site

Here’s an interesting sidenote. When I searched for the NDAA in Google News, I was flat out finding a link to the legislation on many large news sites.

Here’s what Trotsky said about the rise of Fascism. 

At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium — the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat — all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.

From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a period of years. And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, it does not mean only that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance the patterns set by Mussolini — the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role — but it means first of all for the most part that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism….

Sound familiar?

News updates from around the globe. Includes the following stories:

Former Tasmanian MP found guilty of having sex with a 12 year old girl, but gets no jail time. 

Time Magazine Doesn’t Want To Show U.S. Citizens Pictures Of Revolution. 

U.S. Senate Are Voting On Legislation That Allows Their Military To Arrest Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime, and in Any Country. Including the U.S.A.

More US Soldiers Committed Suicide Than Died in Combat

US Military Manipulates the Social Media

U.S. Army and Psychology Largest Experiment Ever

You can hear No Illusions on Stitcher SmartRadio,  Stitcher allows you to listen to your favorite shows directly from your iPhone, Android Phone,  BlackBerry  or Palm phones

On-demand and on the go!

Dont have Stitcher? Download it for free today at Stitcher.com or in the app stores.  Stitcher SmartRadio- The Smarter Way to listen to radio.

Revolution? In the U.S.A.? It’s not happening.  It’s not happening.  It’s not happening.  It’s not happening.  It’s not happening.

Doug La Follette (born June 6, 1940) is an American academic, environmental activist, and politician from the state of Wisconsin. A Democrat, he is the current Secretary of State of Wisconsin and has served in that role since 1983. He is also a Fulbright Distinguished American Scholar and the author of the 1991 book The Survival Handbook: A Strategy for Saving Planet Earth.

I had the chance to chat with Secretary La Follette this morning for an hour about the attempts to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, President Obama’s track record in his first term and the trend of U.S. politics since Reagan.

On today’s podcast, I look at why conservative white males are ignorant, how Wall Street scammed America, why capitalism is doomed, and why religion in Australia is in decline.

Links:

Conservative White Male Effect on Climate Change Measured

The Decade’s Biggest Scam

How Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Loans from Fed

Is Capitalism Doomed?

Smokers and the obese cheaper to care for, study shows.

Religion becoming extinct in NZ & Australia

Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?

The American Christian Pastor Who Wants To Start An Atheist Register

Photo by mel!nka.
Music by D-funk (featuring Snoop Dogg).

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I have plenty of concerns about the Bin Laden assassination this week, both in terms of what actually happened and how it is being reported. How could the US President make so many mistakes in his explanation of events? Is it legal to assassinate someone who hasn’t had a trial to determine guilt? Does questioning a government’s version of events automatically make you a crazy conspiracy theorist?
These are some of the questions I explore in today’s show. Would love to know your thoughts.
T-shirt image from $6 Shirts.

Nine Afghan Boys Killed by NATO Helicopters – NYTimes.com

The Greens up two to 15 per cent

British UFO reports

Rudd condemns air strike on Afghan boys

UFOs over Sydney – the intergalactic neighbours drop by

The Capitalist’s Paradox

Bank of England governor blames spending cuts on bank bailouts

Four time bombs that will blow up Wall Street

Manning faces new charges, possible death penalty

The Podcast Network is sponsored by Suave Lifestyle Group, incorporating Suave Outdoor Living (they build decking and pergolas in Brisbane) and Perdomo Cigars Australia.

More recent Chomksy video. This one has him speaking about the continued imperialist policies of the USA under the Obama administration and the fate of the people in Gaza.

In March 2008 I wrote a blog post called “Who Does Obama Work For?” I was interested in where the funding for his election campaign was coming from. This was still early in the campaign, about 7 months before the election. At the time, his biggest single source of funding was Goldman Sachs and their employees. (The same source, OpenSecrets.org, now lists Goldman as only the second largest contributor, after the University of California). Apparently Michael Moore also makes mention of this fact in his new film, Capitalism (which I’m yet to see…. Rob Irwin, I’m looking at you).

I just remembered this today while listening to a recent episode of No Agenda where they mentioned that Adam Storch, a Goldman Sachs VP, has been made “COO of SEC Enforcement” under the Obama administration.

It looks like investing in Obama was a good bet for Goldman. Their stock value increased from $53.31 a share when Obama was elected to about $187.32 today. And they’ve skated through the financial crisis (which some people think they deliberately  created) and hold many powerful positions in the Obama administration.

Other high level financial positions held in the Obama administration by former Goldman Sachs executives are Neel Kashkari, heading the TARP bailout; Mark  Patterson, Chief of Staff for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; Gary Gensler, top executive at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; and finally Goldman has its top lobbyist, Michael Paese, Rep. Barney Frank’s top aide, who is the chair of the House Financial Services Committee. (source)

This is one of the inescapable downsides of capitalism. The people with the money buy the power. They also buy the media which, in turns, indoctrinates people with a belief in how great capitalism is.

Go back to sleep, America. Goldman Sachs is in control.

Here’s a transcript of a chat I’ve been having on a Facebook thread belonging to an American conservative. I think it’s a demonstration of a) how little some Americans have actually thought through this issue and b) how little some Americans are able/willing to hold an intelligent debate about the subject. They would prefer to rant, bully and abuse. It’s the typical response I’m used to when discussing religion with similar people. When they can’t put forward an intelligent argument, they just attack like rabid dogs.

Richard Yadon

This is a bad bill all the way around. It will not improve health care quality and will actually raise the cost of health care.

13 hours ago

Art Collins

We have a very GOOD healthcare system. There are some areas that need to be improved, but not replaced by Socialized Medicine. Anyone who thinks otherwise, needs to pack up and move out.

13 hours ago

Joanne Davis

http://finance.senate.gov/

12 hours ago

Christine Steele Gates

We have a mostly free market system that could use MORE free market, not less. Gov’t over-involvement will limit competition and limit innovation. NO THANKS!!!

3 cheap reforms needed to the current system:
1) Tort reform (loser-pays)
2) Legalize interstate medical insurance sales… Read More
3) End employment-base group insurance

These 3 ideas are no-cost to the taxpayer. We can’t afford $900 billion with 10% unemployment and a seriously declining dollar. We can’t trust this government either.

12 hours ago

Damon Dean

This is likely the decisive moment for action. Today will tell if we become a socialist state, or remain a republic!

10 hours ago

Cameron Reilly

Art, according to WHICH metric does the USA have a “good healthcare system”? Which country are you comparing the USA to? Zimbabwe?

Damon, what a load of nonsense. Is Australia a “socialist state”? No. Yet we have far superior healthcare to the USA. And nobody in Australia would swap our system for your system. You folks need to pull your heads out.

6 hours ago · Delete

Joanne Davis

Australian population update: According to an Australian Bureau of Statistics report in early June 2009, the Australian population had hit 21.6 million by the end of 2008.

U.S. Population 304,059,724 – Jul 2008 — 304,059,724 vs 21,600,000

Cameron – there is a “slight” difference in total population; Australia does not have “land borders’ with illegals flowing into your country.… Read More

This health care insurance/care bill that they are trying to RAM through against the majority of American’s wishes, will reduce care, cost more and they absolutely, in “their own words” are trying to force the US into a “single payer system” run by the Federal Gov’t. Single payer is filled with corruption, cost over-runs (Medicare and Medicaid). Our Gov’t states if this bill passes they will fix the corruption? If that is true, then they should have fixed the corruption long ago.

NO THANKS!

4 hours ago

Cameron Reilly

Joanne, what does population size have to do with it?

What data do you have that says the majority of Americans are against it? Wasn’t Obama voted in BY the majority of Americans on a platform for change?

And single payer is NONE of those things you are suggesting. In Australia we have had a single payer system for 35 years and nobody complains about it. It works. … Read More

While I’ll agree that the US govt is corrupt, that’s got nothing to do with single payer healthcare. On the contrary – it’s the corruption in your system that’s trying to spin single payer healthcare as bad.

I would love to see those Americans who are against improving healthcare to compare the US system with Australia and tell me what’s so wrong with our system.

2 hours ago · Delete

Marcus McConkey

Delete/block the troll Obama operative Cameron.

2 hours ago

Penny Baird Mercer

It ain’t over till it’s over! We lost this battle, but we knew we would. Remember the ALAMO! Keep fighting!

about an hour ago

Cameron Reilly

Marcus’ comment basically sums up the lack of intelligent debate some people can put up for this topic. If I put forward a different argument, I’m a “troll” or an “operative” (which is amusing considering I’m a) an Aussie and b) a vociferous Obama critic) and should be blocked.

about an hour ago · Delete

Marcus McConkey

Cameron, it really comes down to (IMO) no one cares or should care what a non-voting, non-U.S. citizen THINKS, let alone ignorantly articulates here. It’s called “civilizational confidence”. Look into it, Australia will benefit.

WHO cares what you think of Obama, or the latest rounds of still unreleased healthcare legislation? Stick to what you know and can quantify with some actual experience. You’ve probably never set foot in a U.S. hospital, but again, NO ONE CARES IF YOU HAVE.

Joanne has gone to great lengths to share the ramifications of the last published healthcare legislation (which most of us here actually read and now understand) and you jump in here like an imbecile looking for attention. That’s what TROLLS do. … Read More

We don’t have the time or the inclination to educate you.

24 minutes ago

Cameron Reilly

Marcus, again, your venomous attacks don’t do you any favours. Are you completely unable to engage is intelligent dialogue?

Perhaps if some Americans, such as yourself, took the time to actually educate yourself about what citizens of other countries, who already HAVE a single payer healthcare system, think about such systems, you might cure … Read Moreyourself of your delusional attitudes towards the Obama legislation. Despite Joanne’s analysis of the theoretical ramifactions, there are 100 million people living in democratic, capitalist countries, such as Australia, Canada and the UK, who actually live quite happily under a single payer healthcare system and have for decades. If American’s current approach is to superior to a single payer system, you might ask why the people of these other countries aren’t demanding changes to THEIR healthcare system.

I know you’ve all seen this video before, but here’s my translation:

The white team are the Democrats trying to push through health care.

The black team are the Republicans trying to stop it.

And the moonwalking bear? He’s America’s Military Industrial Complex, selling 70% of the world’s arms, overthrowing countries, and stealing natural resources from developing countries.

Wendell Potter, former Corporate Communications Exec at insurance giant Cigna, was on Bill Maher’s show last week talking about how Big Insurance are screwing Americans. He talks, among other things, about how he worked when at Cigna to discredit Michael Moore’s film "SICKO" when it came out but how the film was "exactly right". Watch the interview here.

In a related story, it seems that the woman who came up with the "death panels" rhetoric, Betsy McCaughey, is the same woman who worked with Big Tobacco to develop a disinformation campaign to kill health care reform under the Clinton administration.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, has written an excellent post up on CBS (surprisingly) about America’s addiction to war:

"The U.S., with $37.8 billion in arms sales (up $12.4 billion from 2007), controlled 68.4% of the global arms market in 2008. Highly competitively speaking, Italy came "a distant second" with $3.7 billion. In sales to "developing nations," the U.S. inked $29.6 billion in weapons agreements or 70.1% of the market. Russia was a vanishingly distant second at $3.3 billion or 7.8% of the market."

And here is what I think is the killer line:

"Few Americans are comfortable thinking about this,"

But the end of the sentence has it back to front:

"… which may explain why global-arms-trade pieces don’t tend to make it onto the front pages of our newspapers."

Perhaps if more newspapers wrote about America’s warmongering more often, then more people might be comfortable thinking about it. It’s been my experience that nearly all Americans I’ve spoken to – including those that are intelligent, well-read and anti-war – find it almost impossible to conceive that America is the cause of many of the world’s tensions instead of the last great salvation. They have been drinking to Kool Aid for so long it’s next to impossible for most Americans to even CONSIDER the alternative view.

Engelhardt finishes with two powerful paragraphs:

"And peace itself? Simply put, there’s no money in it. Of the nearly trillion dollars the U.S. invests in war and war-related activities, nothing goes to peace. No money, no effort, no thought. The very idea that there might be peaceful alternatives to endless war is so discredited that it’s left to utopians, bleeding hearts, and feathered doves. As in Orwell’s Newspeak, while "peace" remains with us, it’s largely been shorn of its possibilities. No longer the opposite of war, it’s just a rhetorical flourish embedded, like one of our reporters, in Warspeak.

What a world might be like in which we began not just to withdraw our troops from one war to fight another, but to seriously scale down the American global mission, close those hundreds of bases — recently, there were almost 300 of them, macro to micro, in Iraq alone — and bring our military home is beyond imagining. To discuss such obviously absurd possibilities makes you an apostate to America’s true religion and addiction, which is force. However much it might seem that most of us are peaceably watching our TV sets or computer screens or iPhones, we Americans are also — always — marching as to war. We may not all bother to attend the church of our new religion, but we all tithe. We all partake. In this sense, we live peaceably in a state of war."

Read the entire article, it’s well worth it.

Do you really think America wasn’t involved in torture, secret prisons or wanton death and destruction before 9/11?

The record shows that they existed before. In fact, 9/11 was in many ways a REACTION to those things, not the cause of them. The USA has NEVER lived up to the virtues Temporal Flush mentions here. Read Zinn’s “People’s History”. The myth of America may survive in the minds of many Americans who don’t read the history of their own country, but outside if the US borders, many people know the other side of the story.

All 9/11 provided was justification to be more aggressive with programs that had been running for many decades in one form or another and continue today under the Obama administration.

There are two Americas – the mythical one that most Americans seem to believe is real, the country that are the good guys, the white knight, the protector of democracy and freedom – and then there is the real America, the one run by corporations and the wealthy elite, the one that, for the entire country’s history, has oppressed the poor and the weak in countries around the globe and at home. The one that stole land at the point of a gun, first from the Native Americans, then from the Mexicans, then from the Cubans, then from the Alaskans, then from the Hawaiins. The one that built its power and wealth on the back of the slave and segregation and imported Chinese labour. The one that did and does deal with the most despicable dictators around the globe to protect American corporate interests.

9/11 may have brought some of the other America to your attention, but it’s a mistake to think that it started then. It’s always been there. You just weren’t paying attention.

That’s the allegation made by Hal Turner’s lawyer in his defense. If it turns out to be true – and I’m sure the FBI will deny it until the cows come home – it’s just more evidence that Governments like conflict. If they keep us fighting amongst ourselves about Right vs Left, it leaves us less time thinking about how to get on with building a fairer and more just society. 

It reminds me that we often need to scratch the surface of news stories – sometimes there is a story behind the headline – people who stand to profit from an event, people who were manipulating an event.

It’s like the current rash of angry, outraged women speaking out at the "town hall" meetings in the United States who get lots of coverage on Fox News. I’ve been wondering whose payroll they are on.

August 6 and 9 are the 64th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, perhaps the greatest single acts of terrorism committed in human history.

Here are some links worth reading.

• The Lies About Hiroshima by John Pilger (recent Sydney Peace Award winner)
• Chronology on Decision to Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasak
• HIROSHIMA: WHO DISAGREED WITH THE ATOMIC BOMBING?

Iran? North Korea? Cuba? China?

No – the United States of America.

If President Obama and the Democratic Party aren’t willing to prosecute the people responsible for torturing and imprisoning a 12 year-old child, without a trial, without hope of defense, then what does that say about the current American administration?

Rolling Stone magazine has a Hunteresque story about Goldman Sachs:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

This is what Chrissy and I watched this morning in bed. Not your usual breakfast TV. It’s a terrific talk. (via Beyond The Fringe)

A great summation by David Swanson on AfterDowningStreet on his post about all of Obama’s broken promises so far:

The lesson is not that you voted for the wrong guy, given the choices. The lesson is not that rightwingers who hate Obama are right about anything. The lesson is not even that Obama has betrayed you. The key lesson should be that change does not come from electing someone. Change comes from forcing our culture to change, creating better communications systems, and disrupting the pleasant existence of our representatives in Congress. But we’ll never stop cheering for nonviolent activists in other countries and become them ourselves as long as we believe our role consists of loving or hating an elected official, and one whose job was supposed to consist of merely executing the will of the legislative branch.

I watched Obama’s Cairo speech live via YouTube (how amazing is that?). My initial impressions were very positive. I, like everyone else, was in awe at his smooth delivery and words of peace. He’s certainly a breath of fresh air as an American President after Bush (even if I do like to refer to him as ‘the infallible chocolate Jesus’, a term I borrowed from Bill Maher who, in turn, borrowed it from Tom Waits. Oh and anyone who thinks that makes me racist, grow a brain. One uptight American blocked me on Twitter for referring to Obama as chocolate Jesus. If I called him the ‘Black Messiah’, would that be racist?).

Anyway, I was impressed with Obama’s speech… until… I watched it again the next day and I started to think about it from the perspective of the citizens of the Middle East and what THEY want to hear Obama say.

Anyone who has read anything about the history of USA – Middle East relations, knows that the reason people in the Middle East are angry about the USA has nothing to do with religious differences or even George Bush specifically. They are angry because for 60 years the USA has been interfering in their countries, overthrowing their governments and taking their natural resources and wealth at the point of a gun. The USA have supported Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the oppression of the Palestinian people. The USA have supported oppressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, Egypt, and various African countries (eg Uganda) in return for access to the natural wealth of those countries while the citizens have remained in poverty.

None of this is news to people living in the Middle East. This is their history. This is their reality.

So if Obama genuinely wanted to "change" relations between the United States and the people living in the Middle East, he would have talked less about religious differences and said something more like:

"For the last 60 years, America has terrorized your countries, murdered your citizens and stolen your natural wealth. I am here to promise you that will never happen again and you no longer need to fear us."

Until the USA admits their past crimes and pays compensation to the victims, everything else is just blowing smoke.

It seems to me that Obama’s speech was targeted, not at the citizens of the Middle East, but at Americans who, after feeling ashamed (understandably) by Bush’s warmongering rhetoric, are just relieved not to be portrayed on the international stage as a bunch of neocons. Is this enough, though? I mean, I understand it, but if Americans want to be taken seriously on the international stage again, surely they need to be seen to be talking about the REAL ISSUES, not cosmetics?

Of course, most Americans haven’t read Chomsky or Pilger or Zinn or Monbiot or anything else written by critics of American policy (and I’m not talking about Democrat vs Republican which is just theatre distracting people from the real issues) so they don’t even understand what the real issues are. Most of them still don’t understand that the 9/11 attacks were RETRIBUTION and not terrorism. They were REVENGE for atrocities committed by Americans for decades against the people of the Middle East.

And, of course, most Americans have spent their entire lives being conditioned 24×7 by the American media, being told that they are the good guys, that even when they do wrong it’s an honest mistake made for the right reasons, that Americans are the saviours of the worlds (no wonder they think they’ve elected the messiah).

So few Americans can even begin to comprehend that their Presidential elections are a farce and that Obama is just another in a long line of candidates specially designed by PR professionals to appeal to a certain demographic. As I heard Bill Maher say on a recent show: "You don’t get to be President when you are 46 and black unless you have powerful friends in very high places who believe you will look after their interests. And so far all he’s done is look after the interests of his buddies he went to Harvard with, the American elite."

Obama is a Hollywood President. He looks good, sounds good, has a good backstory, he’s obviously smart, smooth, and can sell the sizzle. And after the Bush years, most Americans can’t get past the joy of the sizzle and ask "where’s the sausage?" They can’t even stand to hear criticism of Obama. Even Bill Maher gets booed on his show when he criticizes Obama.

Anywayyyy…. regarding the Cairo speech, apparently Noam Chomsky has the same concerns.

While there is some doubt as to the author of this article in AlterNet (the byline says it’s by Clive Anderson, while the bio down the bottom says it’s by Australia’s own Clive Hamilton), the subject matter is fascinating. And a little bemusing. I had always assumed that George W. Bush’s religiosity was a sham, a cynical attempt to convince the unthinking American God-fearing public to go along with his crazy schemes. This article, however, claims that Bush told French President Jacques Chirac that:

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins".

Apparently Chirac himself confirms this in a new book published in France last March and the conversation had been published earlier by a French theology professor who the French government turned to for clarification about what the hell Bush might have been talking about.

I seriously never thought of Bush as really nuts. I figured he just put on the whole Jesus-lovin’ Texan ol’ boy routine purely as manipulation, just as a way to squeeze extra votes out of the Religious Right. Could I have been wrong? Is Bush simply insane?

And if Obama continues his "war" in Afghanistan (I still laugh at how the US likes to declare that it’s a war but refuse to classify their prisoners as Prisoners Of WAR under the Geneva Convention), is he perpetuating Bush’s Holy Jihad?

Yet again we see Christianity used as a justification for the murder of tens of thousands of civilians. It’s just another reason why we need to treat Christianity in the same way we treat any other intolerant, violent philosophy – with extreme disdain and our own (non-violent) intolerance.

Noam Chomsky has written a penetrating piece on the USA’s history of using torture, explaining that it isn’t a new thing and that Obama really isn’t putting a stop to the USA’s use of torture – he’s just returning their use of it to pre-Bush tactics.

As Allan Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out: "What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system’s torture, which is done by foreigners under U.S. patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so."

Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but "merely repositioned it," restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. "[H]is is a return to the status quo ante," writes Nairn, "the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more U.S.-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years."

He also explains that the Obama administration is continuing to fight the courts to allow the USA to continue to send prisoners to international prisons where they will continue to be denied basic legal and human rights, away from the prying eyes of the US legal system.

While Obama, like Bush, eloquently affirms our unwavering commitment to international law, he seems intent on substantially reinstating the extremist Bush measures. In the important case of Boumediene v. Bush in June 2008, the Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional the Bush administration claim that prisoners in Guantanamo are not entitled to the right of habeas corpus.

Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald reviews the aftermath. Seeking to "preserve the power to abduct people from around the world" and imprison them without due process, the Bush administration decided to ship them to the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, treating "the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game — fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process."

Obama adopted the Bush position, "filing a brief in federal court that, in two sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this issue," arguing that prisoners flown to Bagram from anywhere in the world (in the case in question, Yemenis and Tunisians captured in Thailand and the United Arab Emirates) "can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind — as long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo."

In March, however, a Bush-appointed federal judge "rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that the rationale of Boumediene applies every bit as much to Bagram as it does to Guantanamo." The Obama administration announced that it would appeal the ruling, thus placing Obama’s Department of Justice, Greenwald concludes, "squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions," in radical violation of Obama’s campaign promises and earlier stands.

Of course, it now looks like Obama’s first Presidential act – closing down Gitmo – might not happen after all. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

(Thanks to Marcelo Castro for the link to the Chomsky piece.)