Saturday, March 11, 2017

The Empire Should be Placed on Suicide Watch

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By 


In all the political drama taking place in the US as a result of the attempted color revolution against Trump, the bigger picture sometimes gets forgotten. And yet, this bigger picture is quite amazing, because if we look at it we will see irrefutable signs that the Empire in engaged in some bizarre slow motion version of seppuku and the only mystery left is who, or what, will serve as the Empire’s kaishakunin (assuming there will be one).
I would even argue that the Empire is pursuing a full-spectrum policy of self-destruction on several distinct levels, with each level contributing the overall sum total suicide. And when I refer to self-destructive behavior I don’t mean long-term issues such as the non-sustainability of the capitalist economic model or the social consequences of a society which not only is unable to differentiate right from wrong, but which now decrees that deviant behavior is healthy and normal. These are what I call “long term walls” into which we will, inevitably, crash, but which are comparatively further away than some “immediate walls”. Let me list a few of these:
Political suicide: the Neocons’ refusal to accept the election of Donald Trump has resulted in a massive campaign to de-legitimize him. What the Neocons clearly fail to see, or don’t care about, is that by de-legitimizing Trump they are also de-legitimizing the entire political process which brought Trump to power and upon which the United States is built as a society. As a direct result of this campaign, not only are millions of Americans becoming disgusted with the political system they were indoctrinated to believe in, but internationally the notion of “American democracy” is becoming a sad joke.
And just to make things worse, the US corporate media is finally revealing its true face and has now unapologetically shown the entire world that not only is it not in any way “fair” or “objective”, but that it is a 100% prostituted propaganda machine which faithfully serves the interests of the US “deep state”.
A key element of the quasi-constant brainwashing of the average American has always been the regular holding of elections. Never mind that, at least until now, the outcome of these elections made very little difference inside the US and none at all outside, the goal was never to consult the people – the goal has always been to give the illusion of democracy and people-power. Now that the Democrats say that the Russians rigged the elections and the Republicans say that it was the Democrats and their millions of dead voters who tried stealing it, it become rather obvious that these elections were always a joke, a pseudo-democratic “liturgy”, a brainwashing ritual – you name it – but never about anything real.
The emergence of the concept of the 1% can be “credited” to the Obama Administration, since it was during Obama that the entire “Occupy Wall Street” movement took off, but the ultimate unmasking of the viciously evil true face of that 1% must be credited to Hillary with her truly historical confession in which she openly declared that those who oppose her were a “basket of deplorables”. We already knew, thanks to Victoria Nuland, what the AngloZionist leaders thought of the people of Europe, now we know what they think of the people of the USA: exactly the same thing.
The bottom line is this: I don’t think that the moral authority and political credibility of the US have ever been lower than today. Decades of propaganda by Hollywood and the official US media machine have now collapsed and nobody buys that counter-factual nonsense anymore.
Foreign policy suicide: let’s see what options there are to choose from. The Neocons want a war with Russia which the Trump people don’t. The Trump people, however, want, well maybe not a war, although that option is very much on the table, but at least a very serious confrontation with China, North Korea or Iran, and about half of them would also like some kind of confrontation with Russia. There is absolutely nobody, at least at the top, who would dare to suggest that a confrontation or, even worse, a war with China, Iran, North Korea or Russia would be a disaster, a calamity for the USA. In fact, serious people with impressive credentials and a lot of gravitas are discussing these possibilities as if they were real, as it the US could in some sense prevail. This is laughable. Well, no, it is not. But it would be if it wasn’t so frightening and depressing. The truth is very, very different.
While it is probably not impossible for the United States to prevail, in purely military terms, against the DPRK in a war, the potential risks are nothing short of immense. And I don’t mean the risk posed by the North Korean nukes which, apparently, is also quite real. I mean the risk of starting a war against a country which has Seoul within conventional artillery range, an active duty army of well over one million people and 180,000 special forces. Let us assume for a second that the DPRK has no air force and no navy and an army composed of only 1M+ soldiers, 21k+ artillery pieces and 180k special forces. How do you propose to deal with that threat? If you have an easy, obvious solution, you have watched too many Hollywood movies. You probably also don’t understand the terrain.
But yes, the DPRK also has major wseaknesses and I cannot exclude that the North Korean armed forces would rapidly collapse under a sustained attack by the US and the ROK. I did not say that I believe that this would happen, only that I don’t exclude it. Should that happen, the US might well prevail relatively rapidly, at least in purely military terms. However, please keep in mind that any military operation has to serve a political goal and, in that sense, I cannot imagine any scenario under which the US would walk away from a war against the DPRK with anything remotely resembling a real “victory”. There is a paraphrase of something Ho Chi Minh allegedly told to the French in the 1940s which I really like. It goes like this:” we kill some of you, you kill a lot of us, and then we win”. That is how a war with the DPRK would probably play out. I call this the “American curse”: Americans are very good at killing people, but they are not good at winning wars. Still, in the case of the DPRK there is at least a possibility of a military victory, even if at a potentially huge cost. With Iran, Russia or China there is no such possibility at all: a war with any of them would be a guaranteed disaster (I wrote about a war in Iran here and about a war with Russia too many times to count). So why is it that even though out of the 4 possible wars, one is a potential disaster and the 3 others are a guaranteed disaster, why is it that these are discussed as if they were potential options?!
The reason for that can be found in the unique mix of crass ignorance and political cowardice of the entire US political class. First, a lot (most?) of US politicians believe in their own silly propaganda about the US armed forces being “the best” in “the world” (no evidence needed!). But even those who are smart enough to realize that this is a load of baloney which nobody outside the US still takes seriously, they know that saying that publicly is political suicide. So they pretend, go along, and keep on repetitively spewing the patriotic mantra about “rah, rah, USA, USA, ‘Merica number one, we are the best” etc. Some figure that since the US spends more on aggression that the rest of the planet combined, that must mean that the US armed forces must be “better” (whatever that means). To the birthplace of “bigger is better” the answer is self-evident. It is also completely wrong.
Eventually, something crazy inevitably happens. Like in Syria were the State Department had one policy, the Pentagon another and the CIA yet another one. The resulting cognitive dissonance is removed by engaging in classical doublethink: “yes, we screwed up over and over, but we are still the best”. Ironically, that kind of mindset is at the core of the American inability to learn from past mistakes. If the choice is between an honest evaluation of past operations and political expediency, the latter always prevails (at least amongst civilians, US servicemen are often far more capable of self-critical evaluation, especially in ranks up to Colonel and below, the problem here is that civilians and generals rarely listen to them).
The result is total chaos: the US foreign policy is wholly dependent on the US ability to threaten the use of military force, but the harsh reality is that every country out there which dared to defy Uncle Sam did that only after coming to the conclusion that the US did not have the means to crush it militarily. In other words, only the weak, which are already de-facto US colonies, fear the USA. Or, put differently, the only countries who dare to defy Uncle Sam are the strong ones (that was all quite predictable, but US politicians don’t know about Hegel or dialectics). And just to make it worse, there is no real US foreign policy. What there is is only the sum vector of the different foreign policies desired by various more or less covert “deep state” actors, agencies and individuals. That resulting “sum vector” is inevitably short-term, focuses on a quickfix approach, and unable to take into account any complexity.
As for the US “diplomacy” it simply doesn’t exist. You don’t need diplomats to deliver demands, bribes, ultimatums and threats. You don’t need educated people. Nor do you need people with any understanding of the “other”. All you need is one arrogant self-enamored bully and one interpreter (since US diplomats don’t speak the local languages either. And why would they?). We saw the most compelling evidence of the total rigor mortis of the US diplomatic corps when 51 US “diplomats” demanded that Obama bomb Syria. The rest of the world could just observe in amazement, sadness, bewilderment and total disgust.
The bottom line is this: there is no “US diplomacy”. The US have simply let that entire field atrophy to the point were it ceased to exist. When so many baffled observers try to understand what the US policy in the Ukraine or Syria is, they are making a mistaken assumption – that there is a US foreign policy to being with. I would argue that the US diplomacy slowly and quietly passed away, sometime after James Baker (the last real US diplomat, and a brilliant one at that).
Military suicide: the US military was never a very impressive one, certainly not when compared to the British, Russian or German ones. But it did have a couple of very strong points including the ability to produce a lot of technical innovations which made it possible to produce new, sometimes quite revolutionary, weapons. And if the US track record on ground operations was rather modest, the US did prove to be a most capable adversary in naval and aerial warfare. I don’t think that it can be denied that for most of the years following WWII the US had the most powerful and sophisticated navy and airforce in the world. Then, gradually, things started getting worse and worse as the costs of the very expensive ships and aircraft shot through the roof while the quality of the produced systems appeared to be gradually degrading. Weapons systems which looked nothing short of awesome in the lab and test grounds proved to be almost useless once they to to their end user on the battlefield. What happened? How did a country which produced the UH-1 Huey or the F-16 suddenly start producing Apaches and F-35s?! The explanation is painfully simple: corruption.
Not only did the US military industrial complex bloat beyond any reasonable size, it also cloaked itself in so many layers of secrecy that massive corruption became inevitable. And when I speak of “massive corruption” I am not talking about millions but billions or even trillions. How? Simple – the Pentagon claimed did not have the accounting tools needed to properly account for the missing money and that the money was therefore not really “missing”. Another trick – no bid contracts. Or contracts which cover all the private contractor’s costs, no matter how high or ridiculous. Desert Storm was a bonanza for the MIC, as was 9/11 and the GWOT. Billions of dollars got printed out of thin air, distributed (mostly under the cover of national security), hidden (secrecy) and stolen (by everybody in this entire food chain). The feeding frenzy was so extreme that one of my teachers as SAIS admitted, off the record of course, that he had never seen a weapons system he did not like or which he did not want to purchase. This man, whom I shall not name, was a former director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Yes, you read that right. He was in charge of DIS-armament. You can imagine what the folks in charge of armament (no “dis) were thinking…
With the stratospheric rise of corruption, the kind of US general which had to be promoted went from fighting men who remembered Vietnam (where they often lost family members, relatives and friends) to “ass-kissing little chickenshits” like David Petraeus. In less than half a century US generals went from combat men, to managers, to politicians. And it is against this lackluster background that a rather unimpressive personality like General James Mattis can appear, at least to some, like a good candidate for Secretary of Defense.
Bottom line: the US armed forces are fantastically expensive and yet not particularly well-trained, well-equipped or well-commanded. And while they still are much more capable than the many European militaries (which are a joke), they are most definitely not the kind of armed forces needed to impose and maintain a world hegemony. The good news for the US is that the US armed forces are more than adequate to defend the US against any hypothetical attack. But as the backbone of the Empire – they are close to useless.
I could list many more types of suicides including an economic suicide, a social suicide, an educational suicide, a cultural suicide and, of course, a moral suicide. But others have already done that elsewhere, and much better than I could ever do myself. So all I will add here is one form of suicide which I believe the AngloZionist Empire has in common with the EU: a “Suicide by reality denial”: this is the mother and father of all the other forms of suicide – the stubborn refusal to look at reality and accept the fact that “the party is over”. When I see the grim determination of US politicians (very much including the people supporting Trump) to continue to pretend as if the US hegemony was here to stay forever, when I see how they see themselves as the leaders of the world and how they sincerely believe that they need to get involved in every conflict on the planet, I can only come to the conclusion that the inevitable collapse will be painful. To be fair, Trump himself clearly has moments of lucidity about this, for example when he recently declared to Congress
Free nations are the best vehicle for expressing the will of the people — and America respects the right of all nations to chart their own path. My job is not to represent the world. My job is to represent the United States of America. But we know that America is better off, when there is less conflict — not more.
These are remarkable words for which Trump truly deserves a standing ovation as they are the closest thing to a formal admission that the United States have given up on the dream of being the World Hegemon and that from now on the US President will no longer represent the interest of trans-national plutocracies but he will represent the interests of the American people. This sort of languge is nothing short of revolutionary, whether Trump truly delivers on that or not. Unlike everybody else, Trump does not appear to suffer from “suicide by reality denial” syndrome, but when I look at the people around him (nevermind the prostitutes in Congress) I wonder if he will ever get to act on his personal instincts.
Trump is clearly the best man in the Trump administration, he seems to have his heart in the right place and, unlike Hillary, he is clearly aware of the fact that the US armed forces are in a terrible shape. But a good heart and common sense are not enough to deal with the Neocons and the US deep state. You also need an iron will and a total determination to crush the opposition. Alas, so far Trump has failed to show either quality. Instead, Trump is trying to show how “tough” a guy he is by declaring that he will wipe out Daesh and by giving the Pentagon 30 days to come up with a plan to do this. Alas (for Trump), there is no way to crush Daesh without working with those who already have boots on the ground: the Iranians, the Russians and the Syrians. It is really that simple. And every American general knows that. Yet everybody is merrily plowing ahead is if there was some kind of possibility for the US to crush Daesh without establishing a partnership with Russia, Iran and Syria first (Erdogan tried that. It did him no good. Now he is working with Russia and Iran). Will the good folks at the Pentagon find the courage to tell Trump that “no, Mr President, we cannot do that alone, we need the Russians, the Iranians and the Syrians”? I very much doubt it. So, yet again, we are probably going to see a case of reality denial, maybe not a suicidal one, but a significant one nonetheless. Not good.
Who will be the Empire’s kaishakunin?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn used to say that all states can be placed on a continuum which ranges from states whose authority is based on their power to states whose power is based on their authority. I think that we can agree that the authority of the US is pretty close to zero. As for their power, it is still very substantial, but not sufficient to maintain the Empire. It is, however, more than adequate to protect the interests of the United States as a country provided the United States accept that they simply don’t have the means to remain a world hegemon.
If the Neocons succeed in their attempt to overthrow or, failing that, paralyzing Trump, then the Empire will have the choice between an endless horror or a horrible end. Since the Neocons don’t really need a war with the DPRK, which they don’t like, but which does not elicit the kind of blind hatred Iran does, my guess is that Iran will be their number one target. Should the AngloZionists succeed in triggering a war between Iran and the Empire, then Iran will end up being the Empire’s kaishakunin. If the crazies fail in their manic attempts at triggering a major war, then the Empire will probably collapse under the pressure of the internal contradictions of the US society. Finally, if Trump and the American patriots who do not want to sacrifice their country for the sake of the Empire succeed in “draining the DC swamp” and finally crack-down hard on the Neocons then a gradual transition from Empire to major power is still possible. But the clock is running out fast.

In a fact-challenged era, will public access to federal data be the next casualty?

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BY STUART LEAVENWORTH AND ADAM ASHTON


Wondering who is visiting the White House? The web-based search has gone dark. Curious about climate change? Some government sites have been softened or taken down. Worried about racial discrimination in housing? Laws have been introduced to bar federal mapping of such disparities. Federal rules protecting whistleblowers? At least one has been put on hold.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has made a series of moves that have alarmed groups with a stake in public access to information: historians, librarians, journalists, climate scientists, internet activists, to name a few. Some are so concerned they have thrown themselves into “data rescue” sessions nationwide, where they spend their weekends downloading and archiving federal databases they fear could soon be taken down or obscured.
Previous presidential transitions have triggered fears about access to government data, but not of this scope. “What is unprecedented is the scale of networking and connectivity of groups working on this, and the degree it is being driven by librarians and scientists and professors,” said Alex Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, a group that tracks transparency in government.
The White House declined to comment, but Trump’s supporters say the administration’s detractors are overreacting. Trump is committed to open government, said Ben Marchi, a Trump supporter and Republican operative. In a recent interview with McClatchy, Marchi noted how, prior to announcing the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to serve on the Supreme Court, the White House released a list of 21 candidates under consideration.
Yet moves by the Trump administration have helped stoke the fears. In February, the U.S. Department of Agriculture removed animal cruelty data from its website, prompting protests from animal welfare advocates, including the Humane Society, which has filed a lawsuit against the USDA. Some Democrats in Congress have protested as well.
Also in February, the Trump administration suspended an Obama regulation aimed at protecting whistleblowers who work for Department of Energy contractors. The regulation would have permitted civil penalties against contractors that retaliate against whistleblowers. Supporters of the rule say its rescission will make it harder for contract workers, including those at the federal government’s nuclear facilities, to come forward with complaints of waste, abuse and safety concerns.
WHAT IS UNPRECEDENTED IS THE SCALE OF NETWORKING AND CONNECTIVITY OF GROUPS WORKING ON THIS, AND THE DEGREE IT IS BEING DRIVEN BY LIBRARIANS AND SCIENTISTS AND PROFESSORS.Alex Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation
“Is this reaction overblown?” said Howard, in response to a question about the pushback by open-government groups. Trump, he said, has made clear that he will seek to prosecute leakers and has labeled the media an “enemy of the people.” He’s dismissed climate change science and raised questions about the use of vaccines.
“The reaction we are seeing is driven by concerns unique to this administration,” Howard said. “It’s because of the antipathy this president has shown toward government statistics and scientific knowledge.”
During his eight years in office, President Barack Obama was hardly a darling of open-government advocates. His Justice Department prosecuted nine cases against whistleblowers and leakers, compared with three by all other previous administrations. In one of those investigations, the government secretly seized records for telephone lines and switchboards that more than 100 Associated Press reporters used in their Washington bureau and elsewhere.
But Obama also took some steps to increase transparency, including establishing a web-based log of visitors to the White House. That log allowed journalists and others to track lobbying at the White House, including links between the Obama administration and the pharmaceutical industry.
But easy access to the log disappeared after Trump was sworn in and the National Archives and Records Administration stopped paying a contractor to maintain an embedded Web application for the Obama-era visitation records.
They’re still available at the Obama White House archive, but only on zip files that are difficult to download and analyze. As of the end of the business day Friday, the Trump administration had not built a webpage with information about recent visitors to the White House, although it has said it will post such records “on an ongoing basis, once they become available.”
Other information of interest also has disappeared. The phone book for employees at the U.S. Department of Energy has been removed from DOE’s website. Several federal websites have been altered to eliminate or tone down evidence linking human activities to global climate change, according to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a group that has been tracking changes in federal and state websites.
One of these websites is Energy Kids, which the Energy Information Administration launched nearly 20 years ago to help teach schoolchildren about sources of energy. Since Trump took office, the educational website has been altered, including the removal of two pie charts reporting the link between coal and greenhouse gas emissions, according to ProPublica, which based its report on tracking by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.
All incoming administrations put their ideological stamps on federal websites and accessibility of government data. When George W. Bush was president, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency attempted to close several of its public research libraries, triggering a blowback from environmental groups and Congress.
Yet Trump’s election, like no other, has set off alarm bells for those who want to keep public information public. Fearing that federal data could soon be rendered inaccessible, librarians, scientists and other professionals started networking on how to salvage what they could.
“We started thinking, how could we organize a bucket brigade that could draw attention to the ways that data is vulnerable?” said Bethany Wiggin, founding director of the environmental humanities program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Wiggin and others started organizing dozens of “data rescue” sessions nationwide, in which net activists were invited to bring their laptops and ideas for federal data sets deemed vulnerable. Over the last two weeks of February, organizers held data rescues in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Colorado, Washington, D.C., Minnesota, Connecticut, Texas and Wisconsin.
Even before these coalitions started organizing, scientists threw themselves into the task of archiving data of professional interest.
For several decades, Dr. Garen Wintemute has been preparing reports on gun violence and the workings of the gun industry. An emergency room doctor, he grew interested in preventing gun violence back in the early 1980s, when he treated gunshot victims at a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand.
On the day Trump was inaugurated, Wintemute got a call from a colleague, who reported that the White House had removed a climate change page from its website. Fearing that federal data on gun violence might soon similarly vanish under a president with close ties to the National Rifle Association, Wintemute called together his partners at the University of California, Davis Violence Prevention Research Program. He then ticked off the records he wanted to archive.
Within minutes, the team was downloading a crime victimization survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. They scoured the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, gathering data on retail gun sales. They preserved mortality records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which includes a field for deaths caused by firearms.
Wintemute said he could imagine a scenario where either Congress or the White House ordered that data stricken. “I don’t think the CDC would do that of their own volition, but they might be directed to,” said Wintemute, whose team in a single day archived all the key federal records they deemed vulnerable. They are now stored on a secure server at UC Davis.
Another concern of data users is that a Trump-led federal government won’t continue to collect information as in the past.
Earlier this year, a group of Republicans, including U.S. Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Marco Rubio of Florida and U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, introduced legislation to undo a 2015 Obama regulation aimed at reducing past patterns of housing segregation. The Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017 includes a provision that bars federal funding to “design, build, maintain, utilize or provide access to a federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing.”
Open-government groups see this bill as a blatant effort to limit federal research, and a precursor of things to come. Rubio, however, says the legislation is squarely aimed at stopping the federal government from dictating zoning decisions to local governments. “Top-down, one-size-fits-all regulations by Washington bureaucrats won’t help make affordable housing more accessible to those who need it,” Rubio said in a statement to McClatchy.
How Trump may approach access to federal data is not entirely known, but one upcoming appointment will provide a signal. In coming weeks, the administration will appoint a director to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. That is a powerful but little-known agency – part of the Office of Management and Budget – charged with guiding federal policy on information technology, information policy, privacy and statistics.
At a recent data rescue event in Washington, a Georgetown University professor urged those in attendance to pay attention to that appointment. “That is going to be a key position in the federal collection of data going forward,” said Raphael Calel, an assistant professor in Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “If you have congressmen to call, senators to call, that is one to keep an eye on.”



Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article137432033.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article137432033.html#storylink=cpy
The White House declined to comment, but Trump’s supporters say the administration’s detractors are overreacting. Trump is committed to open government, said Ben Marchi, a Trump supporter and Republican operative. In a recent interview with McClatchy, Marchi noted how, prior to announcing the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to serve on the Supreme Court, the White House released a list of 21 candidates under consideration.
Yet moves by the Trump administration have helped stoke the fears. In February, the U.S. Department of Agriculture removed animal cruelty data from its website, prompting protests from animal welfare advocates, including the Humane Society, which has filed a lawsuit against the USDA. Some Democrats in Congress have protested as well.
Also in February, the Trump administration suspended an Obama regulation aimed at protecting whistleblowers who work for Department of Energy contractors. The regulation would have permitted civil penalties against contractors that retaliate against whistleblowers. Supporters of the rule say its rescission will make it harder for contract workers, including those at the federal government’s nuclear facilities, to come forward with complaints of waste, abuse and safety concerns.
WHAT IS UNPRECEDENTED IS THE SCALE OF NETWORKING AND CONNECTIVITY OF GROUPS WORKING ON THIS, AND THE DEGREE IT IS BEING DRIVEN BY LIBRARIANS AND SCIENTISTS AND PROFESSORS.Alex Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation
“Is this reaction overblown?” said Howard, in response to a question about the pushback by open-government groups. Trump, he said, has made clear that he will seek to prosecute leakers and has labeled the media an “enemy of the people.” He’s dismissed climate change science and raised questions about the use of vaccines.
“The reaction we are seeing is driven by concerns unique to this administration,” Howard said. “It’s because of the antipathy this president has shown toward government statistics and scientific knowledge.”
During his eight years in office, President Barack Obama was hardly a darling of open-government advocates. His Justice Department prosecuted nine cases against whistleblowers and leakers, compared with three by all other previous administrations. In one of those investigations, the government secretly seized records for telephone lines and switchboards that more than 100 Associated Press reporters used in their Washington bureau and elsewhere.
But Obama also took some steps to increase transparency, including establishing a web-based log of visitors to the White House. That log allowed journalists and others to track lobbying at the White House, including links between the Obama administration and the pharmaceutical industry.
But easy access to the log disappeared after Trump was sworn in and the National Archives and Records Administration stopped paying a contractor to maintain an embedded Web application for the Obama-era visitation records.
They’re still available at the Obama White House archive, but only on zip files that are difficult to download and analyze. As of the end of the business day Friday, the Trump administration had not built a webpage with information about recent visitors to the White House, although it has said it will post such records “on an ongoing basis, once they become available.”
Other information of interest also has disappeared. The phone book for employees at the U.S. Department of Energy has been removed from DOE’s website. Several federal websites have been altered to eliminate or tone down evidence linking human activities to global climate change, according to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a group that has been tracking changes in federal and state websites.
One of these websites is Energy Kids, which the Energy Information Administration launched nearly 20 years ago to help teach schoolchildren about sources of energy. Since Trump took office, the educational website has been altered, including the removal of two pie charts reporting the link between coal and greenhouse gas emissions, according to ProPublica, which based its report on tracking by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.
All incoming administrations put their ideological stamps on federal websites and accessibility of government data. When George W. Bush was president, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency attempted to close several of its public research libraries, triggering a blowback from environmental groups and Congress.
Yet Trump’s election, like no other, has set off alarm bells for those who want to keep public information public. Fearing that federal data could soon be rendered inaccessible, librarians, scientists and other professionals started networking on how to salvage what they could.
“We started thinking, how could we organize a bucket brigade that could draw attention to the ways that data is vulnerable?” said Bethany Wiggin, founding director of the environmental humanities program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Wiggin and others started organizing dozens of “data rescue” sessions nationwide, in which net activists were invited to bring their laptops and ideas for federal data sets deemed vulnerable. Over the last two weeks of February, organizers held data rescues in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Colorado, Washington, D.C., Minnesota, Connecticut, Texas and Wisconsin.
Even before these coalitions started organizing, scientists threw themselves into the task of archiving data of professional interest.
For several decades, Dr. Garen Wintemute has been preparing reports on gun violence and the workings of the gun industry. An emergency room doctor, he grew interested in preventing gun violence back in the early 1980s, when he treated gunshot victims at a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand.
On the day Trump was inaugurated, Wintemute got a call from a colleague, who reported that the White House had removed a climate change page from its website. Fearing that federal data on gun violence might soon similarly vanish under a president with close ties to the National Rifle Association, Wintemute called together his partners at the University of California, Davis Violence Prevention Research Program. He then ticked off the records he wanted to archive.
Within minutes, the team was downloading a crime victimization survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. They scoured the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, gathering data on retail gun sales. They preserved mortality records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which includes a field for deaths caused by firearms.
Wintemute said he could imagine a scenario where either Congress or the White House ordered that data stricken. “I don’t think the CDC would do that of their own volition, but they might be directed to,” said Wintemute, whose team in a single day archived all the key federal records they deemed vulnerable. They are now stored on a secure server at UC Davis.
Another concern of data users is that a Trump-led federal government won’t continue to collect information as in the past.
Earlier this year, a group of Republicans, including U.S. Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Marco Rubio of Florida and U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, introduced legislation to undo a 2015 Obama regulation aimed at reducing past patterns of housing segregation. The Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017 includes a provision that bars federal funding to “design, build, maintain, utilize or provide access to a federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing.”
Open-government groups see this bill as a blatant effort to limit federal research, and a precursor of things to come. Rubio, however, says the legislation is squarely aimed at stopping the federal government from dictating zoning decisions to local governments. “Top-down, one-size-fits-all regulations by Washington bureaucrats won’t help make affordable housing more accessible to those who need it,” Rubio said in a statement to McClatchy.
How Trump may approach access to federal data is not entirely known, but one upcoming appointment will provide a signal. In coming weeks, the administration will appoint a director to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. That is a powerful but little-known agency – part of the Office of Management and Budget – charged with guiding federal policy on information technology, information policy, privacy and statistics.
At a recent data rescue event in Washington, a Georgetown University professor urged those in attendance to pay attention to that appointment. “That is going to be a key position in the federal collection of data going forward,” said Raphael Calel, an assistant professor in Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “If you have congressmen to call, senators to call, that is one to keep an eye on.”

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article137432033.html#storylink=cpy

US Attorney General Sessions praises Guantanamo as a “very fine place”

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By Bill Van Auken

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions Thursday indicated that he will recommend to President Donald Trump that new “enemy combatants” be sent to the infamous detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for incarceration and trial by so-called military commissions.
Responding to questions from right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, Sessions described Guantanamo as “just a very fine place for holding these kind of dangerous criminals.” He added that the US government had “spent a lot of money fixing it up” and insisted that “a lot of the criticisms have just been totally exaggerated.”
Fifteen years after the first prisoners were brought to the island detention camp after being drugged, hooded and shackled, 41 remain imprisoned there. All but ten of them have never been charged with any crime, much less brought to trial. A number of them have been classified as “forever prisoners,” who the government does not want to be release but cannot try because of the criminal torture to which they were subjected by US interrogators.
Since it was opened in January 2002, the Guantanamo detention center has stood as an international symbol of US imperialist aggression and criminality. Those detained there have provided chilling testimony of a regime of physical and psychological torture, sexual assaults and humiliation meted out by US military and CIA personnel under the orders and supervision of the Bush White House.
Torture continued under the Obama administration with the brutal forced feeding of detainees on hunger strike.
Sessions had declared his support for keeping the Guantanamo detention center in operation during his Senate confirmation hearings in January, while leaving open the possibility that American citizens alleged to be tied to terrorism could be brought before military commissions.
Asked in the Thursday interview whether he would recommend to Trump to send new “enemy combatants” to Guantanamo, Sessions replied: “Yes. Oh, there’s plenty of space. We are well equipped for it. It’s a perfect place for it. Eventually, this will be decided by the military rather than the Justice Department. But I see no legal problem whatsoever with doing that.”
While a total of 780 prisoners have been held at Guantanamo since the detention camp’s opening, the last time that a new prisoner was brought there was in 2008.
Sessions’ interviewer pressed him on the failure of the military commissions at Guantanamo to successfully try more than a handful of detainees, asking whether he expected to “accelerate that process” and was in favor of “expediting” it.
The attorney general responded in the affirmative, declaring, “We’ve got to get the military on board” in order “to get this thing figured out and start using it in an effective way.” He reiterated his belief that those deemed “enemy combatants” should be tried by the military at Guantanamo rather than “bringing these people to federal court in New York and trying them in federal court where they get discovery rights to find out our intelligence and get court-appointed lawyers and things of that nature.”
The drumhead tribunals at Guantanamo violate virtually every right a genuine court affords to a defendant under the US Constitution, allowing the introduction of evidence extracted through torture as well as secret evidence concealed from the accused. Defense attorneys are placed under what amounts to military discipline, while the juries deciding the fate of the accused are composed of military officers, who need only a two-thirds majority to convict.
These kangaroo courts were codified into law under President Barack Obama, who vowed on his first full day in office to close down Guantanamo, but over the course of eight years in the White House signed one Pentagon funding bill after another that mandated that the detention camp remain open.
Now this barbaric legacy has been handed by the Obama administration to Trump, whose attorney general wants to “streamline” and “expedite” a wholly illegitimate and makeshift system of “military justice.”
A draft of an executive order circulated within the administration last month calls for the US to “continue detention operations at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay" for "enemy combatants" captured in “armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces, including individuals and networks associated with the Islamic State.”
With the Trump administration steadily escalating US military interventions in Iraq and Syria, and the Pentagon calling for stepped up operations in Afghanistan, the number of prisoners sent to the concentration camp in Cuba could grow rapidly.
While justified, along with mass domestic spying, the crackdown against immigrants, drone-missile assassinations and military aggression abroad, in the name of an unending “war on terror,” the defense of Guantanamo and military tribunals is also directed at preparing domestic repression.
During his election campaign, Trump crudely vowed that he would keep Guantanamo open and “load it up with some bad dudes.” He added that he would have “no problem” with sending American citizens to Guantanamo and trying them before military commissions.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer was asked at a press conference last month whether Trump intended to send US citizens to Guantanamo. Spicer replied: “He believes Guantanamo Bay does serve a very healthy purpose in our national security in making sure we don’t bring terrorists to our seas, but I’m not gonna get into what we may or may not do in the future.”

Trump administration invokes “state secrets” in CIA torture case

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By Barry Grey

On Wednesday, the Trump administration filed a brief invoking the "state secrets" privilege in an attempt to block current and former Central Intelligence Agency officials from testifying in a civil suit brought by former detainees who were subjected to torture at a secret CIA interrogation center, or "black site," in Afghanistan.
The motion, filed by the Trump Justice Department based on an affidavit by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, also seeks to quash the release of portions of 172 internal CIA documents.
Among the CIA officials the government is seeking to shield from being forced to testify is Gina Haspel, named by President Trump to the post of deputy CIA director and confirmed by the US Senate. Haspel, a 32-year veteran of the agency, ran a CIA torture site in Thailand in 2002, during the Bush administration, where she oversaw the torture of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, both of whom were repeatedly waterboarded.
She also gave the order in 2005 to destroy videotapes of the interrogation sessions at the Thai site.
The administration, headed by a man who boasts of his enthusiasm for torture, including waterboarding, intervened in the case of Salim v. Mitchell, which is underway in Federal District Court in Spokane, Washington under the purview of Judge Justin Quackenbush. The suit was filed in 2015 by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, who survived a savage regime of CIA torture, and the family of Gul Rahman, who died at the Afghan site in 2002 after being left naked and shackled to a wall in the freezing cold.
The plaintiffs are suing two military psychologists, James E. Mitchell and John "Bruce" Nessen, who were contracted by the CIA to devise the torture program and help administer it. The two men made millions of dollars for their efforts.
Salim, a Tanzanian who was apparently a victim of mistaken identity, and Soud, a Libyan, claim they suffered lasting psychological and physical damage as a result of their treatment at the hands of the CIA.
In an article posted on its website Thursday, the ACLU wrote: “In accordance with detailed protocols that two CIA-contracted psychologists based on experiments on dogs, the men [Salim and Soud] were confined in dungeons, hung by their arms from the ceiling for days, stuffed into coffin-like boxes, and kept naked, degraded and starved.” The ACLU adds that the two men were subjected to waterboarding and prolonged sleep deprivation.
An article published last month by the Dissenter gives a graphic illustration of the types of techniques developed and implemented by Mitchell and Nessen, including what they called “learned helplessness.” Describing the treatment of Salim after he was abducted, the publication writes:
“The lawsuit alleges the CIA immediately established conditions for ‘learned helplessness’ by cutting off all of Salim’s clothes and then forcibly inserting ‘an object into his anus,’ causing Salim ‘excruciating pain.’ They took photos, put Salim in a diaper, pants, and a short-sleeved shirt. He then had earplugs stuffed in his ears, a hood placed over his head, and a pair of goggles and headphones placed over his hood and earplugs. Then, he was cuffed and shackled. He was ‘disoriented and terrified’ and brought on board an aircraft, where he was chained to the floor and flown for at least eight hours.”
Up to now, no case filed by CIA torture victims has survived in the US courts, largely as a result of state secrets motions filed by the Bush and Obama administrations to get the lawsuits tossed out.
The Obama administration, which intervened repeatedly to shut down anti-torture suits and shield Bush administration officials who oversaw and carried out the program, decided against filing a state secrets motion in the current case, in part because the information on which the plaintiffs have based their case is already in the public domain.
The ACLU lawyers are not asking for access to classified information, basing themselves instead on the declassified (and highly redacted) executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture published in December of 2014. That report discusses both the torture of Salim and Soud and the key role played by Mitchell and Nessen in the “enhanced interrogation” program.
It is the defendants, Mitchell and Nessen, who are seeking the testimony of Haspel and former CIA officials implicated in the torture program, including the agency’s former top lawyer, John Rizzo, the former head of its Counterterrorism Center, José Rodriguez Jr., James Cotsana, a former CIA officer who the defendants claim oversaw their activities, and Cotsana’s successor as chief of special missions of the CIA’s counterterrorism center and chief of the agency’s renditions group, who has not been identified.
The judge previously approved requests for oral depositions by Rizzo and Rodriguez, but the CIA refused to allow Cotsana to testify.
The defense has also asked for dozens of documents from the CIA and the Justice Department. Its contention is that Mitchell and Nessen worked under the authority and supervision of the CIA and they should therefore be protected, as government officials, from civil liability.
In invoking state secrets, the administration has not demanded that the case be shut down, limiting itself instead to seeking to block testimony from CIA officials and prevent the release of internal documents. However, the defense has indicated that it might move for dismissal of the case on the grounds that it is being prevented by the government’s intervention from mounting an effective case.

There's a new 'most dangerous' man in global economics

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By 



On Monday, the head of the White House's National Trade Council, Peter Navarro, laid out the objectives of his trade agenda in a speech before the National Association of Business Economists.
The thrust of Navarro's speech was that the "liberal trading order" the world has known for 70 years has been unfair to the richest country in the world. Bad deals have taken the most valuable jobs — manufacturing jobs — from American workers. They have boxed the US out of markets abroad. Countries like China are engaging a strategy of "conquest by purchase," buying up US assets, especially.
Navarro didn't just attack China — he picked on 15 other countries, many of which are US allies. Their offense, he said, is contributing to the US's manufacturing trade deficit by exporting more goods to our country than the US does to theirs. That, he said, has been a drag on US GDP growth for decades.
Navarro's speech was an elaboration on his column for The Wall Street Journal, published late Sunday, that appalled many in the economic community. He vowed to go after so-called currency manipulators, could articulate no position on the strength of the US dollar, and said that understanding the US's Export-Import Bank — which helps businesses across the country invest and expand here and abroad, but has also been attacked from the right — was "above my pay grade."
He wants the US to bully countries like Germany into demolishing the euro and to tear up other long-standing trade deals. He dismissed the risk that these countries might retaliate against such a notion, or that automation means many manufacturing jobs will never return.
In short, Navarro just became the most dangerous man in global economics.

Get this man a time machine

"We're trying to skate to where the puck's going to be," Navarro said during his speech as he described the American economy he's aiming for.
The puck he was talking about, though, is actually located somewhere in the 1970s. Navarro wants to bring "second- and third-tier" jobs in the global manufacturing supply chain back to the US to close the trade deficits with other countries.
These deficits, he says, are the primary drag on the US economy. But trade deficits are all but irrelevant to GDP growth. As for the jobs he wants to bring back, some have gone to countries with lower wages, others have been lost to automation — a fact Navarro dismissed.
"The production of manufactured goods tends to have both a higher job multiplier and command higher wage levels," he said. "It follows that if the US is to increase its rate of job creation and see its income levels rise, and in the process rejuvenate the once vibrant manufacturing hubs of states like Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, we must focus on enhancing and expanding our industrial base through prudent tax, regulatory, and energy policy."
The biggest problem with that comment is that here in 2017, the sector of the economy that promises the most growth — and overwhelmingly dominates the economy — is the services sector.

Now, wages in the services sector vary. After all, "services" captures everything from retail employees and taxi drivers to investment bankers and nurses.

But Navarro insisted that instead of educating Americans so they could get high-paying services jobs, the government's focus should be to "reclaim all supply-chain and manufacturing capabilities that would otherwise exist if the playing field were leveled."
He pinned America's manufacturing and trade-deficit woes on 16 "problem" countries, including Japan, South Korea, and Germany.
"While the percentage of Americans working in manufacturing is 8% today, Germany, by contrast — which has some of the most advanced robotics in the world — continues to employ 20% of its workforce in manufacturing."
In 2014, the International Monetary Fund calculated that if the US manufacturing sector stood alone, it would be the eighth-largest economy in the world.
Germany's entire economy came in fourth. One economist and trade expert, Lee Branstetter of Carnegie Mellon University, told Business Insider a few weeks ago that Germany was the "greatest 19th-century economy in the world."
"The best Germany can do is make carburetors," he said. "They make wheel bearings and fuel-injections systems. It's really strange that the top economist in the administration wants us to be like them."

Enemies everywhere

If Navarro wants the US to be like Germany, it's definitely in a "Single White Female" kind of way. He's envious of its manufacturing sector, but he also considers the country a currency manipulator for being in the eurozone, which includes weaker economies that keep the value of the currency below where Navarro thinks it should be.
He said Germany uses the argument" of being in the eurozone to avoid trade deals with the US, which "may or may not be true." As such, Germany would be "one of the most difficult trade deficits we're going to have to deal with."
Yes, it would be difficult to get Germany to violate the terms of its agreement with the eurozone. On that point, Navarro is at once delusional and correct.
The notion of even trying to get Germany to violate its pacts with the EU has an incredibly chilling effect, because this is where it's clear that Navarro has no respect for another country's government or sovereignty. He does not see honesty or fairness in even the US's closest allies' dealings with us. With such a mindset, how could you find a level playing field, if it ever existed?
Navarro also displayed a penchant, which he shares with President Donald Trump, for spreading unverified claims that fit his worldview.
"Fact of the day — I can't verify this, but I've been told by several people this is true — China is buying one company a day in Germany," he said.

Questions about the potential fallout of his policies were dismissed. He grazed over the idea that America's "tough negotiations and cracking down on cheating" could lead to retaliation from trading partners and higher prices for goods that Americans use every day.
"To me, this seems like an elitist, out-of-touch argument because it assumes that the poorest segments in our society would rather have cheap products than a good job and a good paycheck," he said.
Navarro's responses made the economists sitting before him visibly unsettled. He tried to engage them a few times, but it was always awkward. At one point, he enthusiastically asked those who believed corporate America needed a tax cut to raise their hands. Crickets.
Thankfully, it's clear that Navarro's ideas are radical, even within Trump's economic-policy team.
Last week, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told CNBC he did not consider Germany a currency manipulator. And in his speech, Navarro was visibly upset that he would have to wait until at least April before Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin determined whether to designate China a currency manipulator. (I've explained why it's not.)
Navarro would clearly prefer to charge at his perceived enemies right away.