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Unions join government propaganda campaign to compel citizens to submit to strip searches & groping

Unions are joining the Department of Homeland Security's domestic propaganda campaign to persuade citizens that electronic strip searches and physical groping of their private parts are good for them.

American citizens, they argue, must submit to being peeped at and felt up by uniformed personnel if they wish to exercise their right to travel.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is urging the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to protect TSA workers from the people. 

A November 17 AFGE news release calls for the TSA to wage a propaganda "public education" campaign to promote the state-sponsored sexual groping "pat-downs."

TSA has launched a video and other literature to propagandize the public to submit. The Orwellian title of the campaign is "Helpful Hints for Holiday Travelers."

MSNBC reports that the National Treasury Employees Union "has launched a campaign in support of the TSA to educate the public about the critical role played by TSA officers in helping secure the safety of air travel."

Of course, the public already knows this - the issue here is how the unions are working hand-in-glove with government agents to propagandize the public to submit to the electronic strip searches and physical groping of their genitalia by uniformed personnel. 

Government propaganda campaign to make public submit to strip searches

A US government propaganda campaign aimed at the domestic population is in the works.

The perceptions-and-behavior-modification campaign is designed to neutralize the American public's opposition to the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) move toward electronic strip-searches and invasive groping of airport passengers.

Caught off-guard by the widening public backlash to the excessively intrusive "security" procedures at the nation's airports, the Department of Homeland Security is trying to disarm the public of its opposition.

(Photo: A Muslim TSA guard, wearing sharia-compliant head covering, gropes a Catholic nun during a "security" search at a US airport.)

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano isn't off to a very good start, saying that the electronic strip-searches and the invasive groping of passengers who refuse a strip search are necessary because of the Nigerian terrorist who arrived in the United States with explosives in his underwear in December 2009.

However, what Napolitano did not say was that the CIA had specific advance warning of a possible terrorist attack by that very individual - in the form of an urgent face-to-face meeting that the terrorist's father requested with the CIA station in Abuja - and that the CIA and TSA failed to ensure that the terrorist was placed on the TSA's no-fly list.

Because of that government failure, the TSA is now forcing the entire traveling public to submit to electronic strip searches, be groped in the breasts, genitals and buttocks by TSA personnel, or be arrested or fined.

Napolitano began the propaganda campaign against the American public with a November 15 op-ed in USA Today. Starting off with the example of the Christmas bomber and the need for a "layered approach" to screening terrorists (without mentioning the CIA's failure at the outermost layer), Napolitano says the strip-search machines are necessary, safe and preferred:

"As part of our layered approach, we have expedited the deployment of new Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) units to help detect concealed metallic and non-metallic threats on passengers. These machines are now in use at airports nationwide, and the vast majority of travelers say they prefer this technology to alternative screening measures.

"AIT machines are safe, efficient, and protect passenger privacy. . . .

"All images generated by imaging technology are viewed in a walled-off location not visible to the public. The officer assisting the passenger never sees the image, and the officer viewing the image never interacts with the passenger. The imaging technology that we use cannot store, export, print or transmit images." (Emphasis added)

Much of Napolitano's points are of debatable accuracy or truthfulness, and a lot of the public isn't buying her argument, or her euphemisms such as "pat downs." (I've been through the "pat downs" and think the term "heavy petting" is more accurate.)

It's propaganda time

So now, the government finds itself having to launch an aggressive propaganda "public education" campaign to manipulate public perceptions, attitudes, and behavior. Here's what AP is reporting right now:

". . . airports have been urging the government to engage in an aggressive public education campaign regarding the new screening, said Debby McElroy, the [Airports Council International-North America] executive vice president.

"'TSA is trying to address a real, credible threat, both through the advanced imaging technology and through the pat-downs,' McElroy said. 'We think it's important that they continue to address it with passengers and the media because there continues to be a significant misunderstanding about both the safety and the privacy concerns.'"

The government's domestic propaganda campaign is just beginning. As far as Homeland Security is concerned, we must submit - or else.

What is wrong at VOA? Iranian Revolutionary Guard defends VOA against critic

For those who continue to doubt that a long-overdue personnel shakeup is due at the Voice of America's Persian News Network (PNN), here's a new development from inside Iran.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has come out and defended VOA/PNN against criticism from one of the regime's leading opponents, student opposition leader Amir Abbas Fakhravar.

Fakhravar escaped from Iran and has been the leading figure in Washington behind the need to bring new management to PNN and to get rid of personnel who have shown a consistent bias toward the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as an antipathy toward the secular opposition. He is one of my colleagues as a visiting lecturer at the Institute of World Politics.

Several days ago, Fakhravar gave a presentation at the Heritage Foundation, in which he poured more criticism upon VOA/PNN.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard commented on Fakhravar's Heritage talk in articles posted in Farsi the Revolutionary Guard's "Young Journalists Club" website; and reprinted on Ammariyon, a website belonging to Ansar-e-Hezbollah, the special forces of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The Revolutionary Guard comment also appeared on the US-based Sar-e-khat website.

The translation into English is awkward and downright weird, but, I am told, is faithful to the Revolutionary Guard's original. The translators use the odd word "devilry" as a literal translation of fetne, a term that Khamenei and Revolutionary Guard figures have used to label the student protesters.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard comments certainly do more to validate the extensive credentials of Fakhravar as a true enemy of the regime (some wags in Washington are spreading nasty untruths about him). They should also energize the actions afoot at the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to clean out PNN immediately and thoroughly.

Here's the translated article:

The Voice of Devilry in Voice of America

In a commentary during a recent interview with the Heritage Foundation, Amir Abbas Fakhravar, one of the leaders of "the devilry" in the United States, who fled the country after the defeat of his student devilry, has called for an increase in Voice of America and BBC's interference and swaying power for creating disorder and chaos in Iran's affairs.

Citing the Heritage Foundation website, the Journalists' Club reports that Fakhravar, who has friendly relations with George Bush and American senators and who has met with Vaclav Havel, the architect of colored coup d'etats, several times, has named imposing sanctions on Iran and an increase in VOA/PNN's swaying power in Iran as the two most effective ways to create and lead civil disorder.  In his opinion, VOA is the only media that can, alongside BBC Farsi, become a liaison between the protesters in Iran and the leaders of the devilry inside and outside Iran. 

After VOA's failure to guide the leaders of the devilry during the post presidential elections protests, some experts including a few senators have proposed reforming this media in order to increase its influence and Fakhravar agrees with them.

It is noteworthy to mention that Amir Abbas Fakhravar also known as Siavash was one of the founders of the Independent Student Movement in Iran and his anti-regime activities peaked in 1994 and in 2006 he fled to the United States. During his stay in the U.S., he has repeatedly called for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. He has also spoken against the regime in the U.S. Senate and in the course of the post-election devilry, he has made tireless efforts to lead the protesters."

Special ops forces should snatch WikiLeaks founder, counterspy says

(My article reposted from BigPeace.com)  The United States government should issue an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Australian who published tens of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on his website, and try him on espionage charges. And if Assange doesn’t face the charges voluntarily, the U.S. should send in a commando team to snatch him anywhere in the world.

That’s what a senior former U.S. counterspy is urging.

In an exclusive interview with BigPeace.com, former Deputy National Counterintelligence Executive Kenneth E. deGraffenreid says that Assange should be arrested and charged as a spy for revealing more than 90,000 secret and top-secret U.S. military documents on his website.

But Assange has made it a point not to enter the United States since he posted a segment of a secret U.S. military combat video last May, in which U.S. troops are purported to be seen firing at civilians in Iraq. The military has detained an Army intelligence analyst, PFC Bradley Manning, whom it believes illegally copied the video and passed it to Assange.

The publishing of tens of thousands of classified military documents so that the enemy can see them is a far more serious crime than the video case currently under investigation, says deGraffenreid. “This is espionage by internet. If we can get Assange on U.S. soil, he should be arrested,” he tells BigPeace. Earlier, deGraffenreid told BigPeace that Manning should be tried on espionage charges instead of the lesser crime of mishandling classified information. Assange says he has another 15,000 documents yet to post online.

And if Assange won’t come to the U.S. voluntarily? “We have a Special Operations Command that can capture Assange anywhere in the world, and bring him to the U.S. where he can be arrested and charged with espionage,” deGraffenreid says.

That’s what the U.S. did to apprehend terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [pictured], the architect of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. “Receiving U.S. classified documents, as part of a conspiracy to steal classified information and put them in the public domain where our enemies can see them, is a crime,” according to deGraffenreid, now a professor of intelligence studies at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school of national security in Washington, DC.

Assange and his source or sources acted conspiratorially, deGraffenreid notes, citing a report in the Guardian, a leading British newspaper. “Assange was doing intelligence tradecraft. He appeared in different cities, using secret ‘paroles’ or recognition signals so that he and his sources can identify one another, and went to a variety of news outlets to make sure that, once started, the dissemination of the classified information could not be stopped. The conspirators went to different editions so that if publication got stopped in one place it wouldn’t be stopped in another,” says deGraffenreid.

“Illegally giving or receiving 100,000 secret files about our counterterrorism efforts, and making them available to the terrorists to read, is clearly aiding and abetting terrorism,” the former counterspy asserts.

Under the post-9/11 counterterrorism statutes, it would be easy to prosecute Assange as well as his source or sources within the U.S. military. “Our counterterrorism laws are breathtaking in their worldwide applicability,” according to deGraffenreid, who served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy after the 9/11 attacks. “The United States has asserted that it has the right to go to other countries, capture suspects, bring them back here and arraign them.”

Spy hunter says WikiLeaks should be treated as espionage case

(My article reposted from BigPeace.com)  One of the nation’s highest-ranking former spy hunters says that the individuals responsible for the theft and publication of tens of thousands of secret military documents should be prosecuted under federal espionage laws.

The Obama Administration is pursuing the disclosure of more than 90,000 secret documents to WikiLeaks.org as merely the mishandling of classified information – a far less serious offense than espionage.

Administration supporters say that the leak was not espionage. But one of the country’s most successful counterintelligence officials argues the contrary – and says that legal precedent proves it.

“We have an excellent precedent in the case of Samuel Loring Morison,” the naval intelligence analyst who compromised top secret U.S. imagery intelligence capabilities, says Kenneth E. deGraffenreid [pictured], who as Deputy National Counterintelligence Executive from 2004-2006 was the nation’s second-ranking counterintelligence official. Morison served a two-year sentence on conviction of espionage for having compromised U.S. secrets – not to a foreign intelligence service, but to a British publishing company.

“The Morison case was an espionage case. Morison was charged with espionage because he provided classified information to a foreign power,” deGraffenreid tells BigPeace.com. It doesn’t matter that the foreign power was a private media company housed in one of the most solid and reliable American allies: “Morison stole U.S. secrets and provided them to Jane’s, the British military publisher. It was like taking U.S. defense secrets and laying them out in the street in front of the Russians.”

Morison was convicted in1985 of taking only three classified images and providing them to Jane’s, where he was a contributor to the annual reference work, Jane’s Fighting Ships, about the world’s navies. Manning, and perhaps others, provided at least 90,000, and perhaps more than 100,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Morison said he had a policy motive, to leak the satellite imagery of the construction of a Soviet nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, in order to convince the public to increase defense spending. By contrast, Manning, as an active-duty soldier, is reported to have stolen the classified files and provided them to WikiLeaks in order to undermine the war effort.

“If you’re trying to hurt the United States, that’s part of the crime. That’s why it’s espionage,” deGraffenreid says. “If you put this stuff out on the Internet or in the New York Times or the Guardian, any sentient being knows that the bad guys – the Taliban, the Russians, the Chinese or al Qaeda – can read the secrets. It doesn’t matter if he says he didn’t mean for them to get the information because he was just trying to influence U.S. policy.”

DeGraffenreid was White House Senior Director of Intelligence Programs and Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan on the National Security Council from 1981 to 1987, and an architect of the successful decapitation of the Soviet KGB stations in the U.S. after the “Year of the Spy” in 1985. During the administration of President George W. Bush, he served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and later as Deputy National Counterintelligence Executive.

WikiLeaks is an international website operated by Julian Assange, an Australian citizen. As such, those who provided the documents to WikiLeaks should be charged under the Morison precedent, according to deGraffenreid. Under that precedent, it does not matter that Assange does not work for the Australian government or that Australia is a staunch U.S. ally.

The prime suspect in the leak is reported to be Private First Class Bradley Manning, age 22, of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. Manning is an intelligence analyst with a top secret/sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI) security clearance who served in Iraq, but used military computers to download classified information concerning Iraq and Afghanistan. He is presently under military detention at an Army facility in Kuwait, where he is suspected of leaking military combat video to WikiLeaks.

Army investigators are treating Manning as their main suspect in the much larger document leak, but have not officially named him or made the formal allegation. An investigation is underway. Manning’s military-appointed lawyer routinely refers media inquiries to Army public affairs in Baghdad, which is not commenting on the documents case.

News organizations howled at the Reagan Administration’s prosecution of Morison and decried the conviction as a blow to free speech, but the conviction was not overturned and now serves as a precedent to prosecute the WikiLeaks case, deGraffenreid says.

According to deGraffenreid, the national secrets that Manning and perhaps others provided to WikiLeaks is almost beyond comprehension. “If you’re providing 100,000 files, at some point quantity has its own quality about it. One is compromising so much material that it’s devastating. This is what happened when John Walker provided the crypto key for 20 years to the Soviets. He simply allowed the KGB to read so much that it’s not even possible to do a serious damage assessment.”

“Morison was probably more confused than malicious, in terms of motivation,” says deGraffenreid. The spy’s defense was that he was trying to impress editors at Jane’s, where he was angling for a job after retiring from the U.S. government.

“Morison was doing the wrong thing, and it was appropriate that he was tried and punished. But Manning is actually mal-motivated. In terms of scope, what he is alleged to have done is far worse than the Morison case, because he was trying to undermine the war effort. If we are at war and a soldier is helping the other side, if that isn’t espionage, then what is it?”

Adding to the confusion of the case is the fact that espionage laws – and the public’s perception of spying – haven’t kept up with technology. “If he had stolen a single document and gave it to someone with the intention that it spread to our enemies or potential enemies, it would be seen as espionage. But because it’s on the internet, somehow there’s a failure to identify this for what it is,” says deGraffenreid, who is now a professor of intelligence studies at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school in Washington, DC.

Like our counterterrorism laws were in 2001, U.S. espionage laws are obsolete and need to be modernized, deGraffenreid says. “Most U.S. espionage laws were written during World War I, and they sound archaic if you read the legislative history. They still sound a little archaic. Not a few people in government fear that if they use the espionage laws on the books, some left-wing judge would strike them down. When I was in government we had to back off putting the blocks to people because Justice Department lawyers didn’t believe in what they were doing or that the espionage laws could be sustained.”

Morison was convicted in 1985 under a World War I-era statute. With the support of mainstream media organizations, he appealed his conviction. In 1988, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his appeal. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case later that year, thus upholding the statute and the use of the espionage statute in unauthorized disclosure. President Bill Clinton pardoned Morison on January 20, 2001.

“One has to be childishly naïve to think when you put this out for the whole world to read, that terrorists and hostile foreign intelligence services would not read it, and that that doesn’t matter. The fact is that the bad guys got these U.S. military secrets. It’s the same as if the perpetrator went into a safe and took secret and top secret documents and physically handed them to a foreign national. Had Manning done that, it would have looked exactly like the espionage cases for which others are serving life sentences. But the fact that he allegedly transmitted electronic files, it looks different.”

There is also the idea that the theft and publication of classified documents is somehow legitimate under whistleblowing principles to expose alleged wrongdoing. “Most of the people who commit espionage use weak defenses, like whistleblowing. Those defenses don’t work. If some of the documents contain top-secret codeword material applicable under what is called the comment statute – United States Code 18, Section 798 – it doesn’t matter who you give the information to. If you give it to someone who’s unauthorized, it’s an espionage crime.”

The federal investigation of the WikiLeaks case is being handled by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, not by military counterintelligence or the FBI, which handles civilian spy cases. “You need the Criminal Investigation people, but it’s far easier in the bureaucratic culture to go after someone for mishandling classified information than espionage,” he adds, reflecting on his tenure as the nation’s Deputy Counterintelligence Executive. “The moment prosecutors start an espionage case, a lot of the military lawyers and generals turn to jelly. It’s very hard to push these things in such bureaucratic cultures.”

DeGraffenreid says there is a big difference between mishandling classified information, which is what the U.S. appears to be pursuing against Manning, and espionage. “The punishments are much lighter for mishandling classified information. If you and I were obligated to protect information and we lost it, or were negligent and allowed the janitor to pick it up, that’s ‘mishandling’ classified information. Espionage is different: you are illegally distributing the classified information on purpose to aid a foreign entity or government.”

Judges and juries tend to be harsher on spies than federal prosecutors are, says deGraffenreid. “Most juries convict on espionage and most judges throw the book at spies who get convicted. Often the judges hand down stronger sentences than the government asks for.”

Prosecute the prosecutors

Accountability is important for all aspects of government and for the private companies that provide goods and services to government agencies. Wrongdoing at all levels must be investigated where laws may have been broken.

Just as it was necessary to determine if five elite Blackwater security guards broke the law while protecting the lives of US diplomats in Iraq, so it is necessary to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated the Constitution while prosecuting the men.

Federal Judge Ricardo M. Urbina not only threw out the federal government's case against the Blackwater five last week - he ripped the Justice Department in a blistering, 90-page opinion. (Download Blackwater_123109)

The judge's ruling reads like an indictment of the Justice Department lawyers - a damning accusation for which the prosecutors must be held accountable. Judge Urbina denounced lead prosecutor Kenneth Kohl's team as committing a "reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights." (See excerpts, below.)

The Washington Post, which has been no friend of Blackwater by any means, said in a January 6 editorial that the judge's decision was "infuriating" but "correct." According to the Post editors, Judge Urbina "excoriated Justice Department prosecutors who 'knowingly endangered the viability of the prosecution' by flouting legal rules and constitutional provisions that made dismissal of the charges inevitable."

Knowingly flouted constitutional provisions? That's pretty tough talk. Sounds to me like a federal crime. The Post continued, "The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which polices prosecutorial misconduct, should scrutinize those responsible."

That's a very good point of departure. But scrutiny of the Justice Department lawyers isn't enough. They must be held accountable. They must be publicly identified, publicly made to account for their un-constitutional misconduct, and then be administratively fired from the government, disbarred from the legal profession, and be subjected to any applicable civil and criminal penalties.

A terrible tragedy took place in greater Baghdad's Nisoor Square in September 2007, in which a firefight resulted in many innocent Iraqis being killed. The government was right to investigate and seek justice. But it was absolutely wrong to trample the Constitution and deny the guards their rights. Here's how the Washington Post described the miscarriage of justice:

"The Blackwater contractors were summoned by State Department interrogators shortly after the incident and told they could lose their jobs if they did not cooperate. Because the government was essentially forcing the contractors to give up their constitutional right against self-incrimination, it guaranteed that any information provided would not be used in a criminal investigation."

In fact, as Judge Urbina determined, the information was used anyway - violating the rights of the accused. As the Post put it:

"Rather than remain secret, the Blackwater statements, which included details about which weapons were used and who fired them, were soon widely disseminated. They were shared with the FBI and the Justice Department's Criminal Division; entire statements were leaked to the press and posted on the Internet. . . .

"Prosecutors also failed aggressively to press witnesses on whether their recollections were colored by reading the Blackwater accounts. The Justice Department argued repeatedly that it did not rely on the Blackwater statements to build its case. Judge Urbina painfully and precisely debunked these assertions. the judge also rightly rebuked the Justice team for withholding from a grand jury exculpatory information.

"The murder of innocents should never go unpunished. Justice Department prosecutors were right to investigate" a possible '"criminal event.' They were right to try to build a case despite the enormous hurdles introduced by the immunized statements. But they went terribly wrong when they disregarded the rule of law and focused only on achieving a desired result."

Mary Jacoby adds more to the story in MainJustice.com.

I hope that the five Blackwater men - all military veterans who put their lives on the line daily to protect American diplomats in one of the world's most hostile environments - turn the tables on the people who unethically prosecuted and illegally persecuted them in the name of "justice." 

Blackwater men Donald Ball, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Paul Slough and Nicholas Slatten had their day in court and the federal judge threw out the charges. As much as the press and politicians might want to find them guilty, they are innocent in the eyes of the law.

Now it's time to prosecute the prosecutors. Let's start with Assistant US Attorneys Kenneth Kohl and Jonathan Malis, Justice Department trial attorney Stephen Ponticello, and anybody else whom Judge Urbina said willfully violated the Constitution and denied the five accused military veterans their constitutional rights. Just like the Blackwater men and everyone else, reckless prosecutors must be held accountable.

* * *

Excerpts from Judge Urbina's ruling

• "The government attempts to characterize [lead prosecutor Kenneth] Kohl’s failure to heed [a Justice Department advisor's cautionary] directives as a mere 'miscommunication.' Yet to accept this characterization, the court would have to accept the following: that Kohl, a seasoned and accomplished prosecutor, failed" a litany of implausible procedures. (p. 82)
• "These inconsistent, extraordinary explanations smack of post hoc rationalization and are simply implausible. The only conclusion the court can draw from this evidence is that Kohl and the rest of the trial team purposefully flouted the advice of the taint team when obtaining the substance of the defendants’ compelled statements, and in so doing, knowingly endangered the viability of the prosecution." (pp. 82-83)
• "This reckless behavior was in keeping in with the way the prosecution conducted itself throughout the grand jury process, as it withheld the testimony of numerous percipient witnesses who had provided substantial exculpatory evidence to the first grand jury, presented the second grand jury with distorted and self-serving 'summaries' of the accounts of other witnesses and implied to the second grand jury that the defendants had given inculpatory statements to State Department investigators which the government could not disclose to the grand jury because they were given 'in exchange for immunity.'" (p. 83, footnote 63)
• "The government argues that the trial team could not, as a matter of law, have used the defendants’ compelled statements because the statements only contained exculpatory information. . . . Yet, as the court has already observed, in each of the authorities on which the government relies to support this assertion, the determination that there was no Kastigar violation [of the Fifth Amendment to the Bill of Rights] resulted from the fact that the statement was not useful to the prosecution under the circumstances of that case. . . . In this case, by contrast, it is abundantly clear that the defendants’ compelled statements did have a value to the prosecution." (p. 83)
  
  
• "In the face of the unrefuted evidence that the trial team risked the entire prosecution in aggressively seeking out the defendants’ compelled statements, which provided a wealth of valuable information, the government asks this court to credit the conclusory assertions of Kohl and the rest of the trial team that they made no use of these statements to further the prosecution. . . . The government asks too much." (p. 84)
• "It simply defies common sense that the prosecution would go to such incredible lengths to obtain the defendants’ compelled statements, flouting the advice of the taint team and taking actions that even Kohl acknowledged came 'close to the line,' and then make no use whatsoever of the fruits of their efforts." (pp. 84-85)
• "These facts do not describe a case of fleeting exposure late in the game that may have tangentially affected the trial team’s thought processes. . . . Rather, they reveal that the trial team went to great lengths and knowingly took great risks, at the early stages of the prosecution, to obtain statements that provided a wealth of information valuable to the prosecution. Given the prosecution’s early, ongoing and intentional immersion in the defendants’ compelled statements, the government bore the burden of demonstrating that it made no significant nonevidentiary use of the defendants’ statements." (p. 85)
• "Indeed, Kohl testified that until his April 2008 meeting with [a special Justice Department advisor who advised against tainting the prosecution from illegal, compelled evidence], he believed that the September 16 interviews [compelled of the defendants] were 'fair game.' . . . But if Kohl actually believed that the September 16 statements were fair game, it seems highly unlikely that the trial team would not have used those statements in guiding their investigation and prosecution of the case." (p. 85, footnote 64). Here, it appears that Judge Urbina is calling Assistant US Attorney Kenneth Kohl a liar.
• "The government’s utter failure to meet this burden [to protect the defendants' Fifth Amendment rights by building its case free of taint from the compelled statements of the accused] requires dismissal of the indictment against all the defendants." (p. 85)
• "The Government's Myriad . . . Violations Cannot Be Excused as Harmless Error" (p. 88)
• ". . . far from being unimportant and insubstantial, the defendants’ compelled statements pervaded nearly every aspect of the government’s investigation and prosecution, and the government’s use of those statements appears to have played a critical role in the indictment against each of the defendants. Accordingly, the court declines to excuse the government’s reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights as harmless error." (p. 89)
• ". . . the indictment is fatally tainted. . . ." (p. 89, footnote 66)
• "When a judge, upon close examination of the procedures that bring a criminal matter before the court, concludes that the process aimed at bringing the accused to trial has compromised the constitutional rights of the accused, it behooves the court to grant relief in the fashion prescribed by law. Such is the case here." (p. 90)
  

A show of hands, please: Who wants to prosecute the Navy SEALs on Pearl Harbor Day?

It's Pearl Harbor Day. How is the Navy marking the anniversary of the sneak attack? By putting three of its most elite sailors on trial on spurious, absurd charges.

An al Qaeda training manual advises terrorists to allege that their captors have tortured them so they can use their detention for political warfare purposes.

Osama bin Laden, no doubt, views overzealous US military prosecutors and other legal quacks as assets in their terrorist arsenal.

Apparently the legal weenies in the military haven't caught on to this terrorist propaganda technique.

Today, Monday, December 7, military prosecutors had two Navy SEALs arraigned before a military court for allegedly committing the heinous crime of punching a notorious terrorist in the belly and giving him a fat lip, and for supposedly misleading military investigators who took the terrorist's claim seriously. A third will be processed later.

Military prosecutors are using the terrorist's allegations to go after the SEALs and throw them in the brig.

The terrorist, Ahmed Hashim Abed, masterminded the notorious 2004 ambush, murder and mutilation of four Blackwater security men in Fallujah, Iraq. The terrorists video-recorded the killings and then hanged the broken bodies of two of the men from a bridge (pictured).

Here are the three SEALs and the allegations the terrorist and prosecutors made against them:

• Petty Officer 2nd Class Matthew McCabe of Perrysburg, Ohio, was arraigned today on charges of assaulting the terrorist. After capturing the terrorist in September, McCabe allegedly punched him in the stomach and in the lip - or so the terrorist alleges. McCabe is also charged with "dereliction of duty." He deferred entering a plea.
• Petty Officer 1st Class Julio Huertas of Blue Island, Illinois, was arraigned today for alleged dereliction of duty, lying to investigators, and impeding an investigation. He pled not guilty.
• Petty Officer 2nd Class Jonathan Keefe of Yorktown, Virginia, is slated to face a separate arraignment before a court martial, on charges of dereliction of duty and lying.

McCabe's trial is January 19, 2010. Huertas is to go on trial on January 11.

People are pushing back at the military's legal insanity. Over the weekend, thousands turned out in frigid New York weather to protest the civilian trial of terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, with many voicing support for the three SEALs.

Today, on Pearl Harbor Day, former Navy SEAL Scott Taylor, who is running for Congress, led a protest outside the Naval base at Norfolk, in support of his persecuted brothers. Taylor echoes my own observations from special operations professionals who are disgusted with how political correctness has crippled the military. "I know that within our community we are really upset with the political correctness on the operational level that is infused there," Taylor tells a local TV station. (Click here for Taylor's Facebook page.)

As of this posting, more than 83,824 people have joined the Facebook group, "Protest the Prosecution of 3 Navy SEALs." I joined it early on, and urge my readers to do the same. Be sure to read the great comments. An electronic petition on behalf of the SEALs has generated more than 13,000 signatures in five days.

A similar movement has started in support of US intelligence officers and others whom bureaucrats and twisted prosecutors have harassed and put on trial. That group, StandWithIntelligence.com, was founded by a Marine who himself was unjustly prosecuted for killing two Iraqi insurgents. The Marine was found innocent.

Military prosecutors - anonymously, of course - say that there's a lot more to the punch-the-terrorist-in-the-lip-and-belly story, but I don't believe them. Interestingly, the Navy's news website is silent about the issue this Pearl Harbor Day. Indeed, the name of Matthew McCabe appears nowhere on Navy.mil.

This prosecution is insanity. As the Washington Times recently editorialized, if the SEALs had simply killed Abed - as they probably should have - they never would have been put on trial.

It's time for major pushback from the public against out-of-control military bureaucrats, prosecutors, and trial lawyers. It's time to expose THEM and hold THEM accountable for being such unwittingly reliable assets of the enemy that the enemy writes a training manual on how to exploit them.

US military enabled Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's propaganda photos. Why?

Some in the US military still don't seem to care about how terrorist propaganda can be used to incite attacks on our country and our allies.

They have a policy of allowing the detainees at Guantanamo to pose for pictures in "holy warrior" costumes and pass them on to terrorist websites to inspire new attacks.

A Navy spokesman at Gitmo says he has no problem with that.

I'm sure a lot of us would like to know the names and ranks of the uniformed knuckleheads who helped terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed polish his propaganda image in time for his civilian trial.

Since 2003, the world's only real look at the 9/11 mass murder mastermind was the imagery that US soldiers took when they captured him. No real charismatic presence there - just a chunky, disheveled, filthy-looking slob.

Others have said that the US military planned out the ugly imagery of KSM in order to tear apart his mystique. I know we have plenty of PSYOP and information ops people who could do that if they were allowed to, but I also know that it wasn't planned. It was simply a bureaucratic process of public affairs officers releasing photos of the terrorist after his capture.

And it could have stayed that way. But some bureaucrats in the US military allowed KSM - in the supposedly tough confines of Guantanamo - to grow a long militant beard, have access to a traditional "holy warrior" costume, and pose for photos last July. The pictures were openly out of Guantanamo to the terrorist's family members and posted on pro-al Qaeda websites. The pictures are supposed to appeal to Islamist militants and show KSM as some sort of great sheik and holy warrior.

KSM's new, made-in-Guantanamo image shows him swathed in pure white, spotlessly clean, wearing a red-and-white headdress. In one pose he stares, doe-eyed, directly into the camera, a slight smirk on his face. In another he's kneeling, with prayer beads in his right hand.

The pictures restore the terrorist's propaganda image among his followers and potential followers. Which is why the pro-al Qaeda websites posted them. But it doesn't explain why the US military allows them to be created under the noses of the guards and probably at US taxpayer expense.

Clearly not everybody in the US military is on board with this "war of ideas" thing, and that some are so narrow-minded and criminally bureaucratic that they're fine with allowing one of the world's worst terrorists to un-do the ugly image of him bestowed on him by our warfighters.

MSNBC and others reported in September that terrorists were using the made-in-Gitmo photos to "inspire" attacks on the United States.

The International Committee of the Red Cross says that, based on a US military policy from last February, the Guantanamo detainees are allowed to have pictures taken of themselves and may choose which poses they would like to send their families. The ICRC says that there are no restrictions on distribution of the photos; the policy thus allows the detainees to pass the photos to terrorist supporters for propaganda purposes.

MSNBC cited a US officer at Guantanamo as saying that the US military doesn't care whether or not the policy aids enemy propaganda:

"Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, a spokesman for the prison where the US holds about 225 men, said the military is not concerned with distribution of the images and takes no position on how families of prisoners handle their photos," according to MSNBC.

No wonder we're not winning the war!

Our troops live and die by how the terrorists are perceived. We don't need bureaucrats within the military to do the enemy's work.

Newest member of the 'world's greatest deliberative body'

Just when we thought the US had invested enough to convince the world that we're not a degenerate nation that deserves to be destroyed by terrorists, the guy in this picture is on the verge of being named the latest member of the United States Senate.

The vote count controversy continues in Minnesota, where Senator Norm Coleman (R) is challenging a sketchy recount that might turn sort-of comedian Al Franken (D, pictured) into a US Senator.

Seven years after 9/11: The world isn't convinced that Al Qaeda did it

Here's some food for thought: Seven years since the 9/11 attacks, large numbers of people around the world do not believe Al Qaeda was the perpetrator. An increasing number believe that the US was behind the attack so it could justify an invasion of Iraq.

That's the startling result of a poll of 16,000 people in 17 countries. WorldPublicOpinion.org conducted the poll, which asked who was responsible for the terrorist attacks in 2001. The Voice of America carries the story.

The results lead to two major conclusions. First, the credibility of the United States is at an all-time low. Second, a lot of people are extremely gullible and willing to believe anything.

Of people in the 17 countries surveyed, majorities in only 9 believed Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. Among the 17 countries, an average of 46 percent blamed Al Qaeda, and 15 percent say the United States government did it. That's twice as many as those who pin the blame on Israel.

"I think it is very striking, given that even bin Laden has publicly made statements affirming that al-Qaida was behind the September 11th attacks," WorldPublicOpinion.org Director Steven Kull tells the Voice of America.

"In Turkey, 36 percent have this view [that the US did it], Turkey, one of our allies. Palestinian territories, 27 percent have this view. In Mexico, 30 percent have this view, and perhaps most surprising of all, in Germany, 23 percent have the view that the United States was behind the 9/11 attacks," Kull says.

"Some people backed themselves into the belief, saying, 'Well, the US had an interest in this, therefore it is clear that it must be the case.' And that interest that is suggested is that the US was looking for an excuse to go to war with Iraq," according to Kull.

A lot of Muslims are still in denial. Muslims are the most likely demographic set to blame the United States, saying that the attacks were morally wrong and contrary to Islamic belief.

"So it is very hard for them to accept that a Muslim could do such a thing. At the same time, they do feel some resonance with many of the things that bin Laden says, so they feel some conflict about this," Kull said. "They are basically using a kind of defense mechanism to deny the strong evidence that al Qaida was behind 9/11, as a way of resolving the kind of internal conflict they feel."

"Broadly, I think what this tells us is that there is a lack of confidence in the United States around the world. It is striking that even among our allies, the numbers that say al-Qaida was behind 9/11 do not get above two-thirds, and barely become a majority. So this is a real indication that the United States is not in a strong position to, in a sense, tell its story. The American narrative is not as powerful in the world today."