News Releases

CNN is reporting: “The U.S. Postal Service will end Saturday home delivery of letters and other first-class mail, but will still deliver packages, starting in August.”

GRAY BRECHIN, [email]
Brechin is founder and project scholar of the Living New Deal Project. He said today: ”With the reduction of mail delivery to from six to five days and possibly fewer, the USPS management continues its losing strategy of degrading service and driving away customers that began with radical staffing cutbacks at our post offices and continues with the outright sale of those post offices across the U.S.

“We are watching a daylight bank heist with no cop on the beat. The press has entirely missed he point that over its 221-year history, U.S. taxpayers paid for a portfolio of public properties and art that is now worth a fortune to anyone who can gain access to it. By putting the USPS into its current death spiral, Congress has forced the USPS to liquidate the public’s assets. It has designated the commercial real estate giant CBRE as its exclusive agency to sell our properties, a company largely owned and chaired by private equity billionaire Richard C. Blum, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband. The USPS is custodian of post offices and art of extraordinary quality, but at the current pace of downsizing, all of its properties will soon be thrown onto the market and the U.S. will be without the public postal service mandated by the Constitution. The USPS announced last week that it will sell the central Bronx Post Office with its great cycle of Ben Shahn murals. Yesterday, the shocked residents of Chelsea in Manhattan learned that the Postal Service will sell its beloved neighborhood post office with its two New Deal sculptures.”

“We are watching a daylight bank heist with no cop on the beat. The press has entirely missed he point that over its 221-year history, U.S. taxpayers paid for a portfolio of public properties and art that is now worth a fortune to anyone who can gain access to it. By putting the USPS into its current death spiral, Congress has forced the USPS to liquidate the public’s assets. It has designated the commercial real estate giant CBRE as its exclusive agency to sell our properties, a company largely owned and chaired by private equity billionaire Richard C. Blum, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband. The USPS is custodian of post offices and art of extraordinary quality, but at the current pace of downsizing, all of its properties will soon be thrown onto the market and the U.S. will be without the public postal service mandated by the Constitution. The USPS announced last week that it will sell the central Bronx Post Office with its great cycle of Ben Shahn murals. Yesterday, the shocked residents of Chelsea in Manhattan learned that the Postal Service will sell its beloved neighborhood post office with its two New Deal sculptures.”

See: SaveThePostOffice.com

Also, see the IPA news release “Nader: Post Office Crisis ‘Manufactured’,” in which Ralph Nader states: “The deep hole of debt that is currently facing the U.S. Postal Service is entirely due to the burdensome prepayments for future retiree health care benefits imposed by Congress in the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. By June 2011, the USPS saw a total net deficit of $19.5 billion … [this] deficit almost exactly matches the $20.95 billion the USPS made in prepayments to the fund for future retiree health care benefits by June 2011. If the prepayments required under PAEA were never enacted into law, the USPS would not have a net deficiency of nearly $20 billion, but instead be in the black by at least $1.5 billion.” Nader stressed that, in terms of retirees’ health benefits, the Postal Service is required to do things that “no other government or private corporation is required to do and is an incredibly unreasonable burden.”

Today Glen Greenwald writes in “Chilling Legal Memo from Obama DOJ Justifies Assassination of U.S. Citizens” that: “The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with U.S. citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.

“Since then, senior Obama officials including Attorney General Eric Holder and John Brennan, Obama’s top terrorism adviser and his current nominee to lead the CIA [with his nomination hearings scheduled for Thursday], have explicitly argued that the president is and should be vested with this power. Meanwhile, a Washington Post article from October reported that the administration is formally institutionalizing this president’s power to decide who dies under the Orwellian title ‘disposition matrix’.

“Last night, NBC News’ Michael Isikoff released a 16-page ‘white paper’ prepared by the Obama DOJ that purports to justify Obama’s power to target even Americans for assassination without due process. This is not the primary OLC memo justifying Obama’s kill list — that is still concealed — but it appears to track the reasoning of that memo as anonymously described to the New York Times in October 2011.

“This new memo is entitled: ‘Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a US Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force’.”

MARJORIE COHN, [email], http://www.marjoriecohn.com
Professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, Cohn is also the author of The United States and Torture. She said today: “The white paper runs afoul of international and U.S. law. It allows the killing of a U.S. citizen who is not on the battlefield if ‘an informed, high level [government] official’ thinks the target is a senior al-Qaeda leader who poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the U.S. The memo permits the government to target anyone remotely associated with al-Qaeda even when there is ‘no clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.’

“Under well-established principles of international law, the need for self-defense must be ‘instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.’ The UN Charter allows the use of military force only in self-defense when responding to an armed attack. It is up to the Security Council, not a U.S. official, to determine whether there is a breach of or threat to international peace and security. The Geneva Conventions define willful killing as a grave breach, which constitutes a war crime. Moreover, the Constitution’s Due Process Clause forbids the government from depriving anyone of life without due process of law. That requires a hearing and opportunity to present evidence. Executing someone with a drone does not constitute due process.” Cohn co-wrote the piece “Killer Drone Attacks Illegal, Counter-Productive.”

MARCY WHEELER, [email], @emptywheel
A noted blogger on legal issues, Wheeler writes at EmptyWheel.net. She just wrote the piece “The Timing of the White Paper” and the piece “This Isn’t the Memo You’re Looking For,” which states: “As important as it is to see the white paper DOJ gave Congress to explain its purported legal rationale, it is just as important to make clear what this white paper is not. First, it is not the actual legal memos used to authorize the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki and who knows who else. As Michael Isikoff notes in his story, the Senators whose job it is to oversee the Executive Branch — even the ones on the Senate Intelligence Committee that are supposed to be read into covert operations — are still demanding the memos, for at least the 12th time. The release of this white paper must not serve to take pressure off of the White House to release the actual memos.

“Which brings me to an equally important point: memos. Plural. NBC suggests and the close tracking appears to support that this white paper is a version of the OLC memo written in June 2010 and reported on — the last time there was clamor to release the targeting killing authorization publicly — by Charlie Savage. …”

NORMAN SOLOMON, [email]
Founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and author of War Made Easy, Solomon just wrote the piece “Ten Years After Powell’s U.N. Speech, Old Hands Are Ready for More Blood,” which states: “When Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003, countless journalists in the United States extolled him for a masterful performance — making the case that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The fact that the speech later became notorious should not obscure how easily truth becomes irrelevant in the process of going to war. … The New York Times editorialized that Powell ‘was all the more convincing because he dispensed with apocalyptic invocations of a struggle of good and evil and focused on shaping a sober, factual case against Mr. Hussein’s regime.’ The Washington Post was more war-crazed, headlining its editorial ‘Irrefutable’ and declaring that after Powell’s U.N. presentation ‘it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.’

“Yet basic flaws in Powell’s U.N. speech were abundant. Slanted translations of phone intercepts rendered them sinister. Interpretations of unclear surveillance photos stretched to concoct the worst. Summaries of cherry-picked intelligence detoured around evidence that Iraq no longer had WMDs. Ballyhooed documents about an Iraqi quest for uranium were forgeries.”

“Assumptions about U.S. prerogatives also went largely unquestioned. In response to Powell’s warning that the U.N. Security Council would place itself ‘in danger of irrelevance’ by failing to endorse a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the adulation from U.S. media embraced the notion that the United Nations could only be ‘relevant’ by bending to Washington’s wishes. A combination of cooked intelligence and geopolitical arrogance, served up to rapturous reviews at home, set the stage for what was to come. …

“A decade ago, Colin Powell played a starring role in a recurring type of political dramaturgy. Scripts vary, while similar dramas play out on smaller scales. The new secretary of state, John Kerry — like the one he just replaced, Hillary Clinton — voted for the Iraq war resolution in the Senate, nearly four months before Powell went to the U.N. Security Council.”

GLEN RANGWALA, [email]
Rangwala is University Lecturer and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge University in England. While many spent the time after the invasion of Iraq claiming “now we know Bush lied,” Rangwala was among the analysts the Institute for Public Accuracy turned to during the build-up for war who noted the official falsehoods in real time — before the invasion. The day after Powell’s speech, it was lauded by Susan Rice (now U.S. ambassador to the U.N.) on NPR: “I think he [then Secretary of State Colin Powell] has proved that Iraq has these weapons and is hiding them, and I don’t think many informed people doubted that.” The same day, an IPA release quoted Rangwala: “Powell claimed that UNMOVIC head ‘Dr. Blix pronounced the 12,200-page declaration rich in volume but poor in information and practically devoid of new evidence.’ … In fact, Blix has said that ‘In the fields of missiles and biotechnology, the declaration contains a good deal of new material and information covering the period from 1998 and onward. This is welcome.’” The following day, IPA featured Randwala on another news release titled “Powell Cited Sham ‘Fine Paper’.”

During the same period, an IPA analysis of Bush’s State of the Union Address quoted Rangwala debunking several of Bush’s claims, for example: “The United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons materials sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax.” Rangwala: “This is just plain wrong. Anthrax spores produced in 1990 were in liquid slurry form. They would have deteriorated markedly by the mid-1990s.”

RAY McGOVERN, [email]
McGovern is a veteran CIA analyst and recently wrote the piece “When Truth Tried to Stop War,” which states: “Ten years ago, Katharine Gun, then a 28-year-old British intelligence officer, saw an e-mailed memo from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that confirmed for her in black and white the already widespread suspicion that the U.S. and U.K. were about to launch war against Iraq on false pretenses.

“Doing what she could to head off what she considered, correctly, an illegal war of aggression, she printed a copy of the memo and arranged for a friend to give it to the London Observer. ‘I have always ever followed my conscience,’ she said, explaining what drove her to take such a large risk.

“Those early months of 2003 were among the worst of times — and not just because the U.S. and U.K. leaders were perverting the post-World War II structure that those same nations designed to stop aggressive wars, but because the vast majority of U.S. and U.K. institutions including the major news organizations and the nations’ legislatures were failing miserably to provide any meaningful check or balance.

“On Jan. 31, 2003, NSA’s Frank Koza, head of ‘Regional Targets’ (RT) sent a ‘HIGH-Importance,’ Top Secret email to Britain’s NSA counterpart, GCHQ, where Katharine Gun worked. The email asked that British eavesdroppers emulate NSA’s ‘surge’ in electronic collection against Security Council members ‘for insights … [on] plans to vote on any Iraq-related resolutions … the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals or to head off surprises. … [T]hat means a … surge effort to revive/create efforts against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, as well as extra focus on Pakistan U.N. matters.’ Koza’s ‘surge’ instruction left no doubt in Gun’s mind that Bush and Blair were hell-bent to have their war – legal or illegal … As Gun explained later to Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, authors of The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War, she calculated that if people could see how desperate Bush and Blair were to have an appearance of legitimacy for war, ‘Their eyes would be opened; they would see that the intention was not to disarm Saddam but in fact to go to war.’

“The report shook the government of Tony Blair and caused consternation on several continents. In the U.S., however, it was not a big story. For The New York Times, whose editors were either cheering on false articles about Iraq’s WMD or going into a self-protective career crouch, it was no story at all.” 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.

For more, see: “The Katherine Gun Case”

MAKANI THEMBA, [email], @Makani_Themba
Executive director of the Praxis Project, a national organization supporting community-based media and policy advocacy to advance equity and justice, Themba said today: “Last night’s power outage at the Super Bowl gave the world a glimpse of the daily challenges many New Orleans residents still face in the wake of rebuilding post-Katrina. Thanks to misplaced priorities that place war and partisan politics over our nation’s infrastructure needs, cities like New Orleans suffer. From New Jersey to New Orleans and beyond, we have watched recovery dollars spent in discriminatory ways. Suburban, more affluent areas and tourist zones get the lion’s share and communities — especially low resource communities and communities of color — wait for months and even years for relief. Studies published by the National Housing Institute and others have shown how these historic patterns of racism exacerbate present-day gaps but there has been no significant policy effort to address this inequity. The fact that New Orleans got the lights back on so quickly is a testament to its resilience and know-how. However, cities cannot put the lights back on or undertake the gargantuan task of rebuilding without their fair share of public dollars.”

John Kerry is being sworn in as Secretary of State this afternoon, taking over from Hillary Clinton.

STEPHEN ZUNES, [email]
Professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, Zunes recently wrote the piece “The Case Against Kerry.” He said today in assessing Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy: “It is not unusual for a president to want to be his own secretary of state, but rarely has a secretary so badly wanted to be her own president. Unlike most administrations — in which the State Department would sometimes challenge the hawks in the National Security Council — it has been the other way around under Obama, as the NSC was forced to play the moderating voice to the hawkish Secretary of State Clinton and her appointees. Clinton pushed for stronger U.S. support for pro-Western dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain, as well as the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. She successfully convinced the initially critical White House to support the right-wing golpistas in Honduras who ousted that country’s democratically-elected government in 2009. She was a major proponent of NATO’s military intervention in Libya’s civil war and has encouraged a more active U.S. role in the Syrian conflict. …

“Clinton came to the State Department with a penchant for military solutions to complex political problems and a propensity to exaggerate alleged threats against the United States and its allies. As a senator, she had supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq, attacked the United Nations, opposed restrictions on land mines and cluster bombs, defended war crimes by allied right-wing governments, and largely embraced Bush’s unilateralist agenda. While she moderated her positions somewhat once she became Secretary of State, Clinton was one of the administration’s more hawkish voices.”

ROBERT PARRY, [email]
Parry is editor of Consortiumnews.com and his most recent book is America’s Stolen Narrative. He recently wrote the piece “The Iraq War ‘Surge’ Myth Returns,” which states: “At confirmation hearings for Defense Secretary-designate Chuck Hagel, Official Washington will reprise one of its favorite myths, the story of the ‘successful surge’ in Iraq. Politicians and pundits have made clear that the Senate Armed Services Committee should hector Hagel over his opposition to President George W. Bush’s 2007 ‘surge’ of 30,000 troops into that failed war. …

“Any serious analysis of what happened in Iraq in 2007-08 would trace the decline in Iraqi sectarian violence mostly to strategies that predated the ‘surge’ and were implemented by the U.S. commanding generals in 2006, George Casey and John Abizaid, who wanted as small a U.S. ‘footprint’ as possible to tamp down Iraqi nationalism. …

“The hard truth is that this bloody folly was not ‘salvaged’ by the ‘surge’ despite what the likes of Michael O’Hanlon, George F. Will and John McCain claim. The “surge” simply extended the killing for a few more years and bought Bush and Cheney their ‘decent interval.’” Hagel was indeed forcefully questioned about the “surge” by Sen. John McCain.

PHILIP WEISS, [email]
Late Thursday, Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post tweeted: “At Hagel hearing, 136 mentions of Israel and 135 of Iran. Only 27 refs to Afghanistan. 2 for Al Qaida. 1 for Mali.”

Weiss is co-editor of MondoWeiss.net, and just wrote the piece “Hagel Offers Himself as Secretary of Israel’s Defense,” which states: “The most urgent questions were about Israel, and many came from liberal Democrats insisting that Hagel is pledged to going to war against Iran if it acquires a nuclear weapon.

“Hagel was suitably craven. ‘I’ve said that I’m a strong supporter of Israel. .. I’ve said that we have a special relationship with Israel. … I’ve never voted against Israel in my career. … I’ve been to Israel many times,’ he told Jack Reed of Rhode Island.

“While Kirsten Gillibrand of New York made no bones about ‘the most urgent issues — Israel and Israel’s security issues. … We are fundamentally tied to [Israel].” Then Gillibrand demanded that if there has to be a continuing resolution in the event of a budget crunch, Hagel’s Pentagon will take pains to keep money going to Israel for its Iron Dome missile defense.

“Does she believe this or is this just now the religion of Washington?

“Hagel repeatedly asserted that he regards Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Revolutionary Guard of Iran as terrorist organizations. He abandoned every bold stand he has taken on Israel. …

“But the most revealing part of the spectacle was watching Hagel stand up to John McCain when McCain said he had been wrong to oppose the Iraq surge in 2007 and the Afghanistan surge in 2009 — and then watching Hagel fold pathetically when Lindsey Graham asked him to condemn Israeli settlements.”

Also yesterday, Reuters reported: “U.N. human rights investigators called on Israel on Thursday to halt settlement expansion and withdraw all half a million Jewish settlers from the occupied West Bank, saying that its practices could be subject to prosecution as possible war crimes.”

President Obama has nominated Sen. Chuck Hagel to head the Pentagon; hearings are scheduled for Thursday. Some Senators have attacked Hagel for supporting the group Global Zero. The group has released a statement: “Setting the Record Straight on Chuck Hagel’s Global Zero Position on Nuclear Weapons.”

ALICE SLATER, [email]
Slater is the New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and is on the coordinating committee of Abolition 2000, a nuclear disarmament network. She said today: “By signing the Global Zero declaration calling for a verified approach to the elimination of nuclear weapons by 2030, Chuck Hagel opened up a space to begin the heretofore taboo conversation about abolishing nuclear weapons. He is following in the footsteps of four rusty cold warriors, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry and George Shultz who raised the issue in a stunning 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed and have been back-tracking ever since in a series of subsequent articles.

“Nevertheless, the unspoken agreement not to discuss banning the bomb has been breached and the abolition word has been mentioned. In his Prague speech, Obama followed up on Kissinger and company, calling for a nuclear free world which ‘may not happen in my lifetime.’ Hillary Clinton misquoted him by stating he had said it may not happen ‘in our lifetime or successive lifetimes.’ Not to be outdone, Kerry, in his confirmation hearing, has reduced the call for nuclear abolition as a goal ‘worth aspiring to’ which might take ‘many centuries to achieve.’

“Despite these disclaimers, the military-industrial-academic-congressional complex is fighting back to preserve their crumbling nuclear ‘deterrent’ as more countries join the nuclear club or aspire to keep a bomb in the basement through the use of so-called ‘peaceful’ nuclear power. The best thing about the Hagel controversy, is that nuclear abolition is finally being discussed. Numerous Commissions and studies have found that the longer we hang on to our nuclear bombs, in violation of our treaty obligations in the Non-Proliferation Treaty to get rid of them, the more countries will acquire them, creating ever greater national insecurity. Next month Norway will convene a meeting of nations to discuss the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war, which will add more heft to this conversation.

“The world has banned mustard gas, chemical and biological weapons, landmines and cluster bombs. There is no good reason to cling to our nuclear ‘deterrent’ which is incapable of protecting us against the real threats we face in the world from non-state actors and ‘suicide bombers’ who cannot be deterred. We know how to verify and monitor nuclear disarmament. We would be much less vulnerable if we proceeded to do so with the cooperation of other nuclear weapons states. Since there are 20,000 nuclear weapons on the planet and 19,000 of them are in the U.S. and Russia, it’s up to our two nations to begin. And Russia won’t discuss this until the U.S. is ready to give up its plans to plant missiles on Russia’s borders and to dominate the earth from space. I don’t think Hagel’s Global Zero position addresses this provocative U.S. policy which is essential if we are to have the cooperation we need from Russia and China to finally ban the bomb.”

President Obama is scheduled to address immigration policy today at a speech in Las Vegas.

JEFF BIGGERS, [email]
Biggers is author of State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream. He stresses the need to look at “border security realities, including the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border and the largely forgotten impact — including thousands of migrant deaths — from Operation Gatekeeper passed by President Bill Clinton nearly 20 years ago.” See a recent review of his book in the El Paso Times: “Taking back Arizona: Author casts state’s politics as community vs. carpetbaggers.”

MAEGAN ORTIZ, [email], @mamitamala
Ortiz is publisher of VivirLatino. She recently wrote the piece on “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” titled “It’s Like #CIR All Over Again,” which states: “There is so much hype about what comprehensive immigration reform could be that the rhetoric about what may happen is really an industry on it’s own. …Some are anxious for a real sign that President Obama is serious about reform. His tenure in office has brought increased funding for enforcement and record deportation numbers.”

Most recently, she wrote “Blueprint for a Road that Already Is,” which states: “And they’re off! ‘The Road to Immigration Reform Starts Today!’ announced one organizational email. They are talking about a set of immigration reform principles — not an actual bill — that was released today by a bi-partisan group of eight senators. … What’s interesting about all the congratulatory messages that ask people to support immigration reform is that they lack an actual analysis of what is in the principles. Since the principles include ‘a pathway to citizenship,’ it’s assumed to be good enough.” Ortiz lists nine points that are skewing the discussion:

1: The border is “secure” so let’s stop pouring money into agencies and organizations that put more boots on the ground and enforcement technology.

2: Being able to live in the United States “with papers” shouldn’t be based on some merit system that awards the “smart” immigrants. If we really want to award success then we need to look at how the educational system in the U.S. perpetuates cycles of poverty and underachievement, filtering a limited amount of “success stories.”

3: Employment verification systems like E-Verify have proven themselves flawed and harmful to the labor market so stop the push to make this mandatory. … We will not accept the introduction of a biometric identification card which has been the subtext for much of … the discussion in years past.

4: We don’t want a guest worker program. We want fair labor standards for farmworkers. How is the proposed Agricultural Worker Program different from H-2A visa program already in place?

5. This get-to-the-back-of-the-line language means people who are already in the United State will have to wait how long before they can get papers? Ten years? Twenty years? Is this the beginning of an expanded DACA-like [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] program that will allow people to stay in the U.S. in a limbo status indefinitely? How do immigration court backlogs figure into this line?

6: Who will determine what makes an immigrant “seriously criminal” or a threat to national security and thus ineligible for citizenship and targeted for deportation?

7. Limits on accessing federal public benefits for “lawful probationary immigrants” helps to perpetuate poverty and poor health outcomes in immigrant communities. This isn’t being “tough” — this is punishment.

8: Having an English language requirement in order to earn a green card is reminiscent of Jim Crow era literacy laws. There is already a proficiency requirement to become a naturalized citizenship. Making it a requirement for permanent residency has one intention, to limit the amount of people eligible.

9: Creating a fast track to citizenship for DREAMers and some agricultural workers while leaving others to languish in undefined lines will serve to further separate families who have mixed statuses and mixed immigration histories. No to a hierarchy of applicants.

KEVIN GOSZTOLA, [email], @kgosztola
Gosztola just wrote the piece “CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou, Sentenced to 30 Months in Jail, Wears Conviction as ‘Badge of Honor’,” which states: “A former CIA officer, who was the first member of the agency to publicly acknowledge that torture was official U.S. policy under the administration of President George W. Bush, has been sentenced to 30 months in jail. He was convicted in October of last year of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act when he provided the name of an officer involved in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program to a reporter.

“Kiriakou granted Firedoglake an interview the day before his sentencing.

“He was initially indicted for allegedly releasing classified information to journalists that included the identities of a ‘covert CIA officer’ and details on the role of ‘another CIA employee in classified activities.’ The Justice Department also charged him with three counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count for ‘allegedly lying to the Publications Review Board of the CIA’ so he could include classified information in his book in addition to the charge of violating the IIPA.

“The Justice Department under President Barack Obama wanted to convict him under the Espionage Act, as they have tried but thus far failed to do in the prosecution of a record number of alleged leakers or whistleblowers. In fact, Kiriakou described how the FBI tried to set him up in 2010:

“‘In the summer of 2010, a foreign intelligence officer offered me cash in exchange for classified information. I turned down the pitch and I immediately reported it to the FBI. So, the FBI asked me to take the guy out to lunch and to ask him what information he wanted and how much information he was willing to give me for it. They were going to put two agents at a nearby table. They ended up canceling the two agents but they asked me to go ahead with the lunch so I did. After the lunch, I wrote a long memo to the FBI — and I did this four or five times.

“‘It turns out — and we only learned this three or four weeks ago — there never was a foreign intelligence officer. It was an FBI agent pretending to be an intelligence officer and they were trying to set me up on an Espionage Act charge but I repeatedly reported the contact so I foiled them in their effort to set me up.’

“He addressed the fact that government prosecutors in their sentencing filing showed they were upset that he had supporters and media calling him a ‘whistleblower.’

“‘There is a legal definition of whistleblower and I meet that legal definition,’ Kiriakou declared. ‘I was the first person to acknowledge that the CIA was using waterboarding against al Qaeda prisoners. I said in 2007 that I regarded waterboarding as torture and I also said that it was not the result of rogue CIA officers but that it was official U.S. government policy. So, that’s whistleblowing. That’s the definition of whistleblowing.’

“The Justice Department fervently disagrees. …”

Gosztola tweeted today: “John Kiriakou’s wife was harassed by CIA when he published op-eds. IRS audited him every year since ’07. Today, DoJ put him in prison.” Gosztola is co-author of Truth & Consequences: The U.S. vs. Bradley Manning. His recent pieces include “‘Rise of the Drones’ Is Mostly a PBS Infomercial for the Military Defense Industry.“

AP reports: “The Pentagon is lifting its ban on women serving in combat, opening hundreds of thousands of front-line positions and potentially elite commando jobs after generations of limits on their service, defense officials said Wednesday.”

HELEN BENEDICT, [email]
Available for a limited number of interviews, Benedict is author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq the novel Sand Queen and the article “The Scandal of Military Rape” for Ms. Magazine.

She said today: “As a writer who has been interviewing female veterans for many years now, I have argued for a long time that the lifting of the ground combat ban will help military women win the respect they deserve. … The most recent study released by the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office [PDF] shows that one in three military women has been sexually assaulted while serving, the majority by comrades. That means about 52 women a day.”

LEAH BOLGER, [email]
President of Veterans for Peace, Bolger said today: “It’s kind of a civil rights issue, certainly anyone who is capable of doing any job should be able to do it. However, I don’t see this as cause for a big celebration. We should be trying to abolish war. The U.S. shouldn’t be sending ANY combat troops to these wars.” Bolger can also talk about cases of sexual assault and harassment in the military.