News Releases

President Obama is scheduled to speak at the National Defense University today at 2 p.m. on his drone killing policies and holding individuals at Guantanamo, about 100 of whom are reportedly currently on a hunger strike. The New York Times reports: “the administration on Wednesday formally acknowledged for the first time that it had killed four American citizens in drone strikes outside the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, arguing that its actions were justified by the danger to the United States.”

CARLOS WARNER, carloswarnerlaw at gmail.com, @Carlos_Warner
Warner is an attorney with the Federal Public Defender of the Northern District of Ohio. He represents 11 Guantanamo prisoners. He said today: “Lifting the Executive Order restricting transfers to Yemen is a good start. More importantly, if the President is serious about closing the prison, he must appoint someone with power within the White House. If the President only pledges to reopen an office in the State Department and start the Periodic Review Boards, he is not serious about closing Guantanamo.”

BRUCE FEIN, bruce at thelichfieldgroup.com
Fein was deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy. He said today regarding reports that execution of drone strikes will shift in many cases from the CIA to the Pentagon: “This would be a step backward on transparency, would mean even less congressional oversight. Will not be reported as covert actions to House and Senate Intelligence Committees. CIA must report anticipated covert actions to Intelligence Committees under Title 50. Title 10 for military has no such thing.”

Regarding reports that the administration would end so-called “signature strikes” — which can be based on traits such as males of a certain age range, Fein stated: “It insinuates signature strikes have been illegal homicides.”

Fein stated: “The Constitution’s makers deplored the combination of legislative, executive, and judicial powers in a single branch as the very definition of tyranny. President Obama thus shoulders a heavy burden in seeking to explain how his playing prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner to kill any citizen or non-citizen anywhere on the planet justified by his secret say-so alone, unaccountable to federal courts or congressional oversight, satisfies constitutional due process and the separation of powers. The Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin never claimed greater unchecked authority in liquidating the kulaks and exterminating all his perceived enemies.”

Fein recently write the piece “Learning From Shakespeare” and recently wrote a letter with Ralph Nader to Obama: “In light of your obligation to explain ‘by what authority,’ we were dismayed that you refused to send a witness to testify on April 23, 2013, regarding the legality of your predator drone targeted and signature killing programs before Senator Richard Durbin’s Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution. That disdain for the rule of law and congressional oversight contrasts unfavorably with President Gerald Ford’s willingness to testify personally before a House Judiciary Subcommittee on his pardon of former President Richard Nixon.”

NOOR MIR, noor at codepink.org, @thedronalisa
ROOJ ALWAZIR, Rooj129 at gmail.com, @WomanfromYemen
MEDEA BENJAMIN, medea at codepink.org
ALLI McCRACKEN, alli at codepink.org
McCracken, Mir, Alwazir and Benjamin — who wrote the book Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control — are activists who will be holding a news conference outside Obama’s speech venue beginning at 11 a.m., organized by CodePink.

REBECCA GRIFFIN, via Reva Patwardhan, rpatwardhan at peaceactionwest.org
Griffin is political director for Peace Action West. She said today: “The administration has ramped up a dangerous tactic that could have far-reaching consequences. According to the New America Foundation, only 2 percent of those killed in drone strikes in Pakistan are militant leaders. While the administration claims that it focuses on terrorists that pose an imminent threat, the white paper leaked from the Justice Department shows a definition of imminence that goes far beyond people on the verge of carrying out attacks on the United States. The administration uses the nearly twelve-year-old Authorization for the Use of Military Force as part of its legal justification for drone strikes, going well beyond its original scope. Military officials claimed in a recent Senate hearing that it would authorize use of force almost anywhere in the world, prompting Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) to call it the ‘most astoundingly disturbing hearing’ he had been to in the Senate.

“The administration is risking blowback and killing innocent civilians without making a case that these targets pose a serious imminent threat to our security. Furthermore, this administration is setting a dangerous precedent for future presidents, as well as other countries, for the broad use of armed drones.”

The Guardian reports: “Apple has called for U.S. corporate tax rates to be slashed after it admitted sheltering at least $30 billion of international profits in Irish subsidiaries that pay no tax at all.

“In a dramatic display of how threats from multinational corporations are driving down taxes across the world, chief executive Tim Cook warned Congress that he would refuse to repatriate a total of $100 billion stashed offshore unless it acted to slash the 35 percent U.S. rate.”

JAMES HENRY, [in the Netherlands, 6 hours ahead of U.S. ET] jamesshelburnehenry at mac.com
Available for a limited number of interviews with major media, Henry is lead researcher for the report “The Price of Offshore Revisited” from the Tax Justice Network. Last year they estimated that total wealth in tax havens was between $21 trillion and $35 trillion dollars. He is currently in the Netherlands.

He said today: “Companies like Apple are fond of saying that they don’t break the law, but it’s an empty argument since they are largely responsible for what the law says, since big companies have such an influence over malleable tax law. And of course, slave owners made the same arguments in the 1850s, factory owners using child labor made the same arguments in the 1890s and sweatshop owners in Bangladesh made the same argument just last month.

“Apple stashes most of its global profits in Ireland, where a couple of thousand employees work. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers build iPads and such and virtually no taxes are paid there. Royalty payments regarding patents are funneled through the Netherlands, which grants an even lower tax rate than Ireland. Companies used to act this way towards states in the U.S., but the formulary apportionment system ended the worst abuses.

“We really need a Truth Commission on this whole large-corporate offshore tax arena. The fact is, Apple is just one of many manufacturers that are playing these games, using offshore loopholes to absolutely decimate corporate tax revenues. These practices really took off in the late 1990s, when the Clinton administration suddenly made it much easier to set up unlimited numbers of foreign entities that are allowed to enjoy all the benefits of tax treaties. As if they really were separate from their parent corporations, with substantive activities in the low-tax jurisdictions where they end up. So it is no accident that the share of corporate after tax income in GDP is at an all time high, while labor’s share, and real incomes, are shrinking. Combined with the right’s insistence on budget cuts and austerity, what we really have is an undeclared class war, pure and simple. And labor did not start it — it was started by the corporate elite.”

Henry was recently featured in “The Tax Free Tour” — a new in-depth look at global tax havens from Dutch Public TV that, among other things, answers the question: How does Apple only pay 1.9 percent on its overseas profits when the U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent — explaining tax avoision techniques like “double Irish with a Dutch sandwich.” Also, see taxodus.net — an online game about global tax dodging. Henry is former chief economist at the international consultancy firm McKinsey & Co.

AP reports: “Guatemala’s top court has thrown another curve into the genocide case of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, overturning his conviction and ordering that the trial be taken back to the middle of the proceedings.

President Ronald Reagan meeting with Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt.

“The ruling late Monday threw into disarray a process that had been hailed as historic for delivering the first guilty verdict for genocide against a former Latin American leader.”

ALLAN NAIRN, allan.nairn at yahoo.com
Currently in New York City, Nairn is an investigative reporter who covered the recent trial in Guatemala and was slated to be a witness.

He said today: “The institutional army and the oligarchs have been worried that the Rios Montt verdict will interfere with their right to kill civilians.

“This court ruling has nothing to do with the law. Still, it annuls the sentence — but not the trial, which can be continued again.

“This is another round in the political battle about whether Guatemala will enforce its murder laws.”

Guatemala’s current president, Otto Pérez Molina, was interviewed on CNN en Español recently and questioned about Allan Nairn’s charges of his culpability in crimes. Just after the question was asked, the satellite was mysteriously cut off; the reporter returned to it later in the interview. See: “Democracy Now!”

See Nairn’s recent writings on his website: allannairn.org

COLEEN ROWLEY, rowleyclan at earthlink.net
Rowley is a former FBI special agent and division counsel whose May 2002 memo described some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures and was named one of Time Magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002.

She said today: “Despite long-time warnings that the Obama administration’s ‘war on whistleblowers’ had become a ‘war on journalists,’ and the government’s admitting, in the course of the Bradley Manning court martial, that it would treat the New York Times the same as WikiLeaks — given the fact that WikiLeaks has been secretly indicted for publishing information pertaining to the U.S. government — the U.S. media has obviously not taken the full First Amendment implications seriously enough. The jarring wake-up call only comes with news of the FBI dragnet investigation targeting several AP reporters’ and editors’ communications in connection with a story about a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen and the revelation that FOX News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen was himself considered a co-conspirator for having aided and abetted a leak of information about North Korea.

“It seems the U.S. has nearly regressed to the Nixon mentality when his Department of Justice sought court orders to stop the printing presses upon 19 different newspapers’ successive attempts to publish the “Pentagon Papers.” In some cases governmental secrecy shields illegal actions and there are numerous examples but in other cases, the drive to ‘shape the message’ through its own tightly controlled press releases, high-level spokespersons and sometimes even through its own system of ‘leaking’ to favored reporters, is simply more secrecy for secrecy’s sake. …

“Excessive governmental secrecy enables and facilitates wrongdoing in many ways (similar to all criminality) and is steeply increasing. According to the Information Security Oversight Office, almost 92 million documents were classified in FY 2011 compared to around 6 million in 1996.

“For instance, the increasing secrecy being employed by the Obama administration to prevent scholarly and judicial review of the Office of Legal Counsel memos that purport to ‘legalize’ its “lethal targeting policies” along with his administration’s creation of due process-free ‘kill lists’ on a global battlefield works in much the same way as the Bush administration’s once hidden series of OLC ‘torture memos.’ Once those OLC ‘torture memos’ were finally made public, they were then used as officials’ ‘golden shield’ to prevent accountability under the notion that officials were just following ‘legal advice.’”

After President Obama received a “Transparency Award” in 2011, Rowley co-drafted a petition of 20 whistleblowers to “Rescind Obama’s ‘Transparency Award’ Now!” The signers included: Former FBI official and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds; Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers; former CIA analyst Raymond McGovern; former Pentagon analyst Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski; and former National Security Agency analyst Russ Tice.

The petition read: “On March 28, 2011, President Obama was given a ‘transparency award’ from five ‘open government’ organizations: OMB Watch, the National Security Archive, the Project on Government Oversight, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and OpenTheGovernment.org. Ironically — and quite likely in response to growing public criticism regarding the Obama administration’s lack of transparency — heads of the five organizations gave their award to Obama in a closed, undisclosed meeting at the White House.

* “President Obama has not decreased but has dramatically increased governmental secrecy! …

* “There were 544,360 requests for information last year under the Freedom of Information Act to the 35 biggest federal agencies — 41,000 requests more than the year before. Yet the bureaucracy responded to 12,400 fewer requests than the prior year, according to an analysis by the Associated Press. …

* “Ignoring his campaign promise to protect government whistleblowers, Obama’s presidency has amassed the worst record in U.S. history for persecuting, prosecuting and jailing government whistleblowers and truth-tellers. President Obama’s behavior has been in stark contrast to his campaign promises which included live streaming meetings online and so forth, and rewarding whistleblowers. Obama’s Department of Justice is twisting the 1917 Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks — more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. …

* “President Obama has set a powerful and chilling example for potential whistleblowers through the abuse and torture of Bradley Manning, whose guilt he has also publicly stated prior to any trial by his, Obama’s, military subordinates. …”

JAMES GOODALE, via Devi Shah, dkshah at debevoise.com
Available for a limited number of interviews, Goodale represented The New York Times in the landmark Pentagon Papers case, when the Nixon White House attempted to stop the Times from publishing top secret documents about the Vietnam War leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. Goodale just wrote the book Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles.

He said: “If in fact he [President Obama] goes ahead and prosecutes Julian Assange [of WikiLeaks], he will pass Nixon [in attacking the First Amendment]. He’s close to Nixon now. The AP example is a good example of something that Obama has done but Nixon never did.”

Asked about the reporter “shield law” proposed by Sen. Charles Schumer and backed by the Obama administration, Goodale said: “I just thought that was quite ridiculous, because the bill that Obama asked Schumer to put into the House has an exception for national security. In other words, if you’re a reporter and you’re talking about national security, the law doesn’t apply. But what is the whole controversy about today with respect to AP? It’s about a national security exception to the privilege that you would think reporters would otherwise have. So, Obama puts it out, thinking the public doesn’t know what I know, and I’m really going to be good to reporters, but it doesn’t protect them at all in the AP situation.”

Goodale questioned the “national security” rationale invoked by the administration: “When you look back at the so-called secrets … it’s all a bunch of malarkey. … The case [of government claims] with the Pentagon Papers was a bunch of — bunch of hot air. So, therefore, when we hear today the attorney general saying, ‘This is the worst secret I have ever seen disclosed,’ you know, beware, because, invariably, these secrets turn out to be non-secrets. They are the ability of the government to protect themselves and their own information and their own political power.”

Goodale connected this to over-classification: “Obama has classified, I think, seven million — in one year, classified seven million documents. Everything is classified. So that would give the government the ability to control all its information on the theory that it’s classified. And if anybody asks for it and gets it, they’re complicit, and they’re going to go to jail. So that criminalizes the process, and it means that the dissemination of information, which is inevitable, out of the classified sources of that information, will be stopped.”

Goodale noted the threat to the First Amendment has been building: “My book is meant to be a clarion call to the journalist community: Wake up! There’s danger out there. You may not like Assange, but wake up! The First Amendment is really going to be damaged, if Obama goes forward [prosecuting Assange] and succeeds, he will have succeeded where Nixon failed.” See Goodale’s full interview on “Democracy Now!” and his piece at the Daily Beast “Is Obama Worse For Press Freedom Than Nixon?”

MARCY WHEELER,  emptywheel at gmail.com, @emptywheel
A noted blogger on legal issues, Wheeler writes at EmptyWheel.net. Her recent pieces include: “Obama’s Headlong Rush to Counterterrorism Transparency” and “AP President Focuses on White House Claims about OBL Anniversary Threats” which notes that AP head Gary Pruitt stated that as the AP had their story about a terror plot: “At the same time, the administration, through the Press Secretary and the Department of Homeland Security were telling the American public that there was no credible evidence of a terrorist plot related to the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. So that was misleading to the American public. We felt the American public needed to know this story.”

TREVOR TIMM, trevor at pressfreedomfoundation.org, @TrevorTimm
Timm is co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. His latest piece notes that Sunday on “Face the Nation,” “President and CEO of the Associated Press Gary Pruitt called the Justice Department’s seizure of AP’s call records ‘unconstitutional’ and said it has already had a chilling effect on newsgathering.” Timm also recently wrote: “Justice Department Investigation of AP Part of Larger Pattern to Intimidate Sources and Reporters.”

The Bradley Manning Support Network notes that “June 1 will mark the beginning of Bradley Manning’s fourth year in prison and the start of his trial.” Manning has acknowledged being the source for WikiLeaks of the “Collateral Murder” video and a trove of documents WikiLeaks has made public.

See Guardian report: “Julian Assange Reveals GCHQ Messages Discussing Swedish Extradition,” which states: “WikiLeaks founder uses subject access request to access British agency chatter, which allegedly calls extradition ‘a fit-up’”

KEVIN GOSZTOLA, kevin.gosztola at firedoglake.com, @kgosztola
Gosztola is co-author of Truth & Consequences: The U.S. vs. Bradley Manning. He said today: “This assault on freedom of the press is an outgrowth of this administration’s war on whistleblowers or alleged leakers.” See Gosztola’s articles on whistleblowers at FireDogLake.

Contrary to the administration’s claims this week, Gosztola writes in “The Obama Administration’s Propensity for Chilling News Sources” that: “The Obama administration has not maintained any kind of a reasonable balance. The framing by the administration, where it is suggested that freedom must be balanced against national security interests, is not only a false choice but also a tension sustained to give the administration cover as it expands and claims new powers.

“In exhibiting a disdain for the free flow of information, the administration has targeted a record number of alleged leakers or whistleblowers. It prosecuted former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who is now serving a 30-month jail sentence for providing the name of someone involved in the CIA’s rendition, detention & interrogation program to a reporter. It pursued former NSA employee Thomas Drake, who provided details on fraud, waste, abuse and illegality to a Baltimore Sun reporter. It put former FBI linguist Shamai Leibowitz in prison for 20 months for providing a ‘blogger’ documents on a possible Israeli strike on Iran.”

Gosztola also recently wrote “No Justification for Obama’s War on First Amendment,” for Salon which states: “Lawmakers have expressed outrage, but citizens should understand that they helped create the political climate for which the Justice Department would find it permissible to engage in this conduct. This is an inevitable result of leaks hysteria on Capitol Hill in June of last year.

“Recall, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Mike Rogers, Sen. John McCain, then-Sen. Joe Lieberman, Rep. Peter King and others urged the Justice Department to investigate ‘leaks’ on the Obama administration’s ‘kill list’ to reporters at the New York Times.”

And in “Holder’s Gutless Recusal & the Justice Department’s Seizure of AP Records,” Gosztola writes: “Holder recused himself early in the investigation into the leak and delegated authority to Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole, which means he would be the one in charge of deciding whether to subpoena records from press organizations. …

“Multiple representatives asked Holder if Cole could come before the committee to answer questions. Not surprisingly, Holder cautioned against this because he is the lead prosecutor in an ‘ongoing prosecution.’ So, who answers for this? Cole cannot. Holder won’t. Everyone below is not in a position to make official statements publicly. Everyone escapes accountability.”

CNN’s Gloria Borger noted on Tuesday: “White House spokesman Jay Carney says the White House changed the wording from ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ to be more accurate. So what does that mean? Thanks to the digging of Glenn Kessler in The Washington Post, it looks very much like the Benghazi consulate ‘was not a consulate at all but basically a secret CIA operation.’”

In fact, Goodman wrote in November for ConsortiumNews that: “the consulate was the diplomatic cover for an intelligence platform and whatever diplomatic functions took place in Benghazi also served as cover for an important CIA base.” See: “The Why Behind the Benghazi Attack.”

MELVIN GOODMAN, goody789 at verizon.net
Goodman is director of the National Security Project at the Center for International Policy. He was an analyst at the CIA for 24 years. His most recent book is the just-released National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. Goodman just wrote the piece “The Real Benghazi Scandal” for CounterPunch, which states: “When congressional Republicans complete manipulating the Benghazi tragedy, it will be time for the virtually silent Senate intelligence committee to take up three major issues that have been largely ignored. The committee must investigate the fact that the U.S. presence in Benghazi was an intelligence platform and only nominally a consulate; the politicization by the White House and State Department of CIA analysis of the events in Benghazi; and the Obama administration’s politicization of the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General, which has virtually destroyed the office and deprived congressional intelligence committees of their most important oversight tool.

“When U.S. personnel were airlifted from Benghazi the night of the attack, there were seven Foreign Service and State Department officers and 23 CIA officers onboard. This fact alone indicates that the consulate was primarily diplomatic cover for an intelligence operation that was known to Libyan militia groups. The CIA failed to provide adequate security for Benghazi, and its clumsy tradecraft contributed to the tragic failure. On the night of the attack, the small CIA security team in Benghazi was slow to respond, relying on an untested Libyan intelligence organization to maintain security for U.S. personnel. After the attack, the long delay in debriefing evacuated personnel contributed to the confusing assessments.”

Goodman lists a series of major failures by the CIA where no one was held accountable. The most recent: “The politicization of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 was the worst intelligence scandal in the CIA’s history, but there were no penalties for those who supported CIA director George Tenet’s efforts to make phony intelligence a ‘slam dunk’ as well as Deputy Director John McLaughlin’s ‘slam dunk’ briefing to President George Bush. The CIA’s production of an unclassified white paper for the Congress on the eve of the vote to authorize force in October 2002 marked the misuse of classified information to influence congressional opinion, but there were no consequences.

“The destruction of the torture tapes, a clear case of obstruction of justice in view of White House orders to protect the tapes, led to no recriminations at the CIA. The controversy over the use of drone aircraft; the intelligence failure that accompanied the Arab Spring in 2011; and the inadequate security presence in Libya in the wake of the killing of Muammar Gaddafi have not received the necessary scrutiny. Any CIA component in the Middle East and North Africa is a likely target of militant and terrorist organizations because of the Agency’s key role in the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ and the Obama administration’s increasingly widespread use of drone aircraft.

“The ability of the Nigerian underwear bomber to board a commercial airline in December 2009 marked an intelligence failure for the entire intelligence community, but there was no serious attempt to examine the breakdown in coordination between five or six intelligence agencies, let alone pursue accountability. Instead, President Obama halted all efforts to return home Yemeni prisoners at Guantanamo.”

Charlie Savage and Leslie Kaufman reported Monday in The New York Times: “Federal investigators secretly seized two months of phone records for reporters and editors of The Associated Press in what the news organization said Monday was a ‘serious interference with A.P.’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news. … the timing and the specific journalistic targets strongly suggested they are related to a continuing government investigation into the leaking of information a year ago about the Central Intelligence Agency’s disruption of a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner.”

THOMAS DRAKE, @Thomas_Drake1
Available for a limited number of interviews, Drake was a senior executive of the U.S. National Security Agency. Last year he successfully concluded a legal ordeal with the federal government, including an Espionage Act centered indictment over the past several years. He blew the whistle on vast illegal electronic surveillance and data mining inside the U.S. and other government wrongdoing. He recently received awards for his role as a whistleblower. He has warned of “a key decision made shortly after 9/11, which began to rapidly turn the United States of America into the equivalent of a foreign nation for dragnet blanket electronic surveillance. … When you open up the Pandora’s Box of just getting access to incredible amounts of data, for people that have no reason to be put under suspicion, no reason to have done anything wrong, and just collect all that for potential future use or even current use, it opens up a real danger — and to what else they could use that data for, particularly when it’s all being hidden behind the mantle of national security.”

RAY McGOVERN, rrmcgovern at gmail.com
McGovern is a veteran CIA analyst. He said today: “Holder? Obama? Embarrassed by gross violation of the First Amendment? The always-held-harmless-by-gutless-politicians giant telecoms? What, we worry?

“Have you not heard? ‘After 9/11 everything changed.’ As for whistleblowers on waste, fraud, and abuse — and occasional war crimes — again, not to worry. If making public our combing through AP’s records doesn’t intimidate them, as it no doubt will for most, we’ll think of something else.

“And we are to believe that the White House didn’t know anything about it, because Jay Carney said so? Puleeze!”

McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and gave the President’s Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates.

MARCY WHEELER, emptywheel at gmail.com, @emptywheel
A noted blogger on legal issues, Wheeler writes at EmptyWheel.net. She has written a series of stories on the scandal, including “‘A Full Two Month Period’ that Covers John Brennan’s Entire Drone Propaganda Campaign.”

TREVOR TIMM, trevor at pressfreedomfoundation.org, @TrevorTimm
Timm is co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and just wrote the piece “Justice Department Investigation of AP Part of Larger Pattern to Intimidate Sources and Reporters.”

Bloomberg reports today: “U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Stockholm for meetings with Swedish leaders before traveling to the northern reaches of the country for a meeting on the sweeping climate changes affecting the Arctic.”

Reuters reported over the weekend: “The amount of climate-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere topped 400 parts per million at a key observing station in Hawaii for the first time since measurement began in 1958, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Friday. To many scientists, crossing the 400 ppm threshold, which means that there are 400 molecules of carbon dioxide for every million molecules in the air, is a bit like the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising above 15,000 points.”

MICHAEL DORSEY, mkdorsey at professordorsey.com, @GreenHejira
Dorsey is visiting scholar and professor of environmental policy in Wesleyan University’s College of the Environment. He said today: “The 400 ppm milestone is worrisome, but there is still time for government action, domestically and internationally.

“The Arctic Council is genuinely trying to tackle the problem of unfolding climate catastrophe, but the White House’s ongoing commitment to oil exploration and exploitation may nullify the Council’s work.

“We passed the 400 ppm milestone as a result of the strong growth of global CO2 emissions from the human-driven burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. The President and the White House are in part to blame. The President has spectacularly failed to forge bold policies to avert climate catastrophe. It’s not surprising that there is no senior climate policy team inside the White House that is working on any aggressive plan to end investments and financing in the fossil fuels sector.

“Last year alone, the administration and congress facilitated giving America’s largest five oil companies more than $350 million per day — more than $14.5 million dollars an hour — in subsidies. The average worker got about $23 an hour.

“Eliminating just the fossil fuel subsidies related to consumption by 2020 would reduce annual global primary energy demand by nearly 5 percent and carbon dioxide emissions by 5.8 percent, or 2.6 gigatons — equivalent to almost half of U.S carbon dioxide emissions.

“The U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimates that the cost of the health effects in the United States alone attributed to fossil fuel use approaches $120 billion annually.

“Now more than ever the President and the White House must lead the nation and the planet on a more aggressive pathway to stop new fossil fuel projects — like Keystone XL and continued offshore oil and gas development.”

The Boston Globe editorialized over the weekend: “When the esteemed physicist Stephen Hawking announced his decision to boycott Israel’s Presidential Conference, a gathering of politicians, scholars, and other high-profile figures scheduled for June, the response was as predictable as the movement of the cosmos that inspired Hawking’s career. The conference chair, Israel Maimon, called the move ‘outrageous and improper,’ while Omar Barghouti, a founder of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement that advocates protests against Israeli policies, declared, ‘Palestinians deeply appreciate Stephen Hawking’s support.’

“In fact, the decision to withdraw from a conference is a reasonable way to express one’s political views. Observers need not agree with Hawking’s position in order to understand and even respect his choice. The movement that Hawking has signed on to aims to place pressure on Israel through peaceful means. In the context of a Mideast conflict that has caused so much destruction and cost so many lives, nonviolence is something to be encouraged. That is equally true of attempts to inspire cooperation on the Palestinian side.

“Chances for a peaceful solution in Israel and Palestine are remote enough without overreactions like Maimon’s. Foreclosing nonviolent avenues to give people a political voice — and maybe bring about an eventual resolution — only makes what is already difficult that much more challenging.”

ALANA KRIVO-KAUFMAN, alana at jvp.org
Krivo-Kaufman is with the We Divest Coalition. She can also arrange interviews with student activists. The group put out a statement about actions today: “At 4 p.m., student activists will be protesting outside of TIAA-CREF’s national headquarters. … Students from colleges throughout the New York metropolitan area will be calling for TIAA-CREF, one of the largest retirement funds in the country, to divest from all companies benefiting from the Israeli occupation of Palestine.” See: thefuturedivests.tumblr.com.

Students involved in the actions include:

Carolyn Klaasen, Jewish Voice for Peace-NY Chapter, Union Theological Seminary: “We are future doctors, lawyers, teachers, professors, and non-profit employees. As future professionals, we are future pension holders and TIAA-CREF clients. TIAA-CREF prides itself on socially responsible investing. We are gravely concerned with TIAA-CREF’s investments in corporations profiting from egregious human rights abuses.”

Sundus Seif, Students for Justice in Palestine, Brooklyn College: “On Feb. 7, more than 200 shareholders filed a resolution to divest from Veolia, a corporation that provides segregated transportation services to Israeli settlers living on Palestinian land in the West Bank. TIAA-CREF’s challenge of the resolution at the SEC contradicts its stated commitment to socially responsible investing and shareholder advocacy. Ultimately, we will remember if TIAA-CREF demonstrated a commitment to socially responsible investing in Israel-Palestine when we choose our retirement fund.”

See report from The Real News: “Hawking and the Growing Israel Boycott Movement.”