OMNI BILL OF RIGHTS DAY DECEMBER 15, 2013 NEWSLETTER #5, Compiled by Dick Bennett for a
Culture of Peace and Justice. (#1
Dec. 15, 2008; #2 Dec. 15, 2009; #3 Dec. 15, 2011; #4 Dec. 15, 2012)
These
newsletters provide facts and opinions regarding the many subjects of world
peace, social and economic justice, human rights, and democracy for the benefit
of all who know a well-informed citizenry is essential to a democracy.
Chase
Madar alerts us to the great danger of the Manning trial to our democracy. “. . . the government now has even greater
incentive to prosecute as a spy any confidential source who passes classified
information to the press, criminalizing what has long been a vital. . .conduit
of essential public information. Such
collateral damage to the Fourth Estate will not be mourned by a government that
has become aggressively intolerant of leaks, whistleblowers and, it often
seems, a well-informed citizenry.” The Nation (Aug. 19/26, 2013). See the article below.
OMNI
NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL DAYS PROJECT
My blog: War
Department/Peace Department
My Newsletters:
Index:
See: Constitution Day Newsletters, Human Rights
Day December 10 Newsletters, and newsletters on Civil Liberties, Detainees, FBI,
Homeland Security, National Security State, NSA, Security, Surveillance, Torture,
War on Terror, and others.
“The Constitution was designed to keep government off the backs of the
people. The Bill of Rights was added to keep the precincts of belief and
expression, of the press, or political and social activities free from
surveillance.” Justice William O.
Douglas’s dissenting opinion in Laird v.
Tatum (1972).
Contents of #1 and #2 at end
Contents
#3 Dec. 15, 2011
Assaults on Bill of Rights
Habeas Corpus
2011 Patriot Act
If Homeland Battlefield: End of Bill of
Rights
Fascist Police State?
Military Detention USA
Defending the Bill of
Rights
Jefferson and Madison
4th Amendment
Victory
Electronic Privacy
Susan Herman
Tom Engelhardt
FDR: Economic Bill of Rights
Contents of
#4 Dec. 15, 2012
Bill of Rights Day 2012
FISA, NDAA, and Other
Anti-Democratic Regressions
BORDC vs. Decline of
Liberties
ACLU vs. SB1867
PRA vs. Right Wing
Patriot Act
Bradley Manning
BORDC Newsletter
Contents #5 Dec. 15, 2013
President’s Proclamation
Google Search: Attacks on
Bill of Rights
Boghosian, Spying on Democracy
National Lawyers Guild
Solomon, Justice Dept. vs.
Free Press
Madar, Prosecution of
Manning Endangers US Journalism and Democracy
Natapoff, Snitching
Potter, Green is the New Red
Pretzel, Defying Hitler
Here is the link to all OMNI newsletters:
http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/
Presidential Proclamation -- Bill of
Rights Day, 2013
BILL OF RIGHTS DAY,
2013
BY THE PRESIDENT OF
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PROCLAMATION
When America 's Founders declared our independence,
they set forth an idea that became our Nation's defining creed: "We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty America
The Bill of
Rights is the foundation of American liberty, securing our most fundamental
rights -- from the freedom to speak, assemble, and practice our faith as we
please to the protections that ensure justice under the law. For almost two and
a quarter centuries, these 10 Constitutional Amendments have served as a basis
from which civil society could grow and flourish. They have encouraged
innovation and defended Americans who questioned, challenged, and dared our
Nation to be greater.
Thomas
Jefferson once wrote, "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws
and constitutions, but laws and constitutions must go hand in hand with the
progress of the human mind." Our liberties opened heated debate over the
questions of citizenship and human rights, driving progress in the American
mind. We learned that our Nation, built on the principles of freedom and equality,
could not survive half-slave and half-free. We resolved that our daughters must
have the same rights, the same chances, and the same freedom to pursue their
dreams as our sons, and that if we are truly created equal, then the love we
commit to one another must be equal as well. Americans with disabilities tore
down legal and social barriers; disenfranchised farmworkers united to claim
their rights to dignity, fairness, and a living wage; civil rights activists
marched, bled, and gave their lives to bring the era of segregation to an end.
As we celebrate the anniversary of the Bill of Rights, let us reach for a day
when we all may enjoy the basic truths of liberty and equality.
NOW,
THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United
States of America , by virtue of the authority vested in
me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States United States
IN WITNESS
WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirteenth day of December, in the
year of our Lord two thousand thirteen, and of the Independence
of the United States of America
BARACK
·
LEARN
BILL
OF RIGHTS DAY
December 15, 2013
AT THE CENTER
Who Wants to Be a “Bill”-ionaire?
Learn about our first 10 amendments during this
fast-paced, interactive game show.
Special Signers’ Hall Tour
Take a special tour of Signers’
Hall to learn about the
history of the Bill of Rights and why it was left out of the original
Constitution.
IN THE CLASSROOM
Constitution Hall Pass
The first 10 amendments to the Constitution guarantee so
many of our rights and freedoms that we use every single day. Join us as we
learn the story of the Bill of Rights, from the time of the Founders right up
to today! You’ll see how James Madison originally proposed the Bill of Rights,
and how it was up to Congress and the states to decide which amendments made
the cut. We’ll show you which rights are actually protected by the Bill of
Rights, and you’ll even learn about how students just like you have used those
amendments to stand up for their principles—even if it meant taking their case
all the way to the Supreme Court! Come along and get to know your rights as we
take a look at the Bill of Rights!
WATCH ONLINE
HERE »
Lesson Plans
Activities
Games
GOOGLE
Search Results, Attacks on Bill of Rights, first page, Dec. 14, 2013
[I give these searches now and then to help us assess the
quality of Google Searches. –Dick]
1.
The Bill of Rights Under Attack - Adam Goldfein
Nov 27, 2013 - The Bill of Rights Under Attack. Source: Thinkstock.
Below is the Bill of Rights, complete with the
recent examples of how it is being curtailed.
2.
Statists Use Twisted Logic To Attack The Bill Of Rights Alex Jones ...
May 8, 2013 - Brandon Smith Alt Market
May 8, 2013. In the war for the continued existence of our Nation's
Constitutional principles, I had long wondered ...
3.
Eric's Bill of Rights Status Report
- Eric's Site
Let's take a look at the Bill of Rights and see which aspects
are being pushed on or threatened. The point here is not the degree of each attack or its rightness
or ...
4.
Bill of Rights Under Attack - Action America
The Bill of Rights - Under Attack By small increments, the Bill of Rights is being subverted. John
Gaver January 3, 2006. John Gaver The Constitution and Bill of ...
5.
Attack on the Bill of Rights -- KEVIN
CRAIG - "Liberty Under God ...
What is the fundamental character of America America
6.
Stop attacks on Bill of Rights | The
Marion Star | marionstar.com
Aug 4, 2013 - When the first colonists
came to America
7.
The Kick Them All Out Project - Bill of Rights Under Attack: A
Timeline
Bill of Rights Under Attack: A Timeline. Wednesday,
December 05 2007 @ 11:41 AM EST Contributed by: BMcDonald. Views: 19,546. Many
people will think ...
8.
Under ATTACK: Liberty and the Bill of Rights | Bearing
Drift
Oct 30, 2012 - Bill of Rights "assault"
poster Let's get foundational, shall we? I know there's a certain frentic
craziness to election season. There are promises ...
9.
Is Obama is destroying the Constitution? - Civil Liberties
... deep attacks on the Constitution,
generally and the Bill of Rights specifically. ...direct attack on the Constitution's
separation of powers, as is his appointment of ...
10.
Scorecard: How Many Rights Have Americans REALLY Lost ...
Feb 21, 2013 - This post explains the
liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights – the ...“A belief that one's
personal and/or national “way of life” is under attack”.
·
ABOUT
Spying on Democracy: Author details rise in
surveillance
September 26, 2013 9:00 am
Heidi Boghosian. Photo by Nina Subin
In the last few months, Americans’
expectations about government interference in their lives has been turned
completely upside down. Edward Snowden’s leaks have shown that the National
Security Agency has paid millions to Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft, as
well as telephone companies, for data about its customers. The government has
information on hundreds of millions of its law-abiding citizens.
Heidi Boghosian’s new book, Spying on Democracy:
Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance, which details the myriad ways
governments and corporations are spying on us — and not necessarily to the
benefit of the nation — couldn’t be more timely.
Boghosian, the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild,
details the increase in surveillance of ordinary citizens and the dangers she
believes it poses to our privacy and to democracy. Boghosian will be talking
about Spying on
Democracy at Berkeley
Arts and Letters on Sept. 30 at 7:30 p.m.
Investigative journalist Robert Scheer will interview her. In advance of the
discussion, Berkeleyside caught up with Boghosian:
9/11 happened more than a decade ago. Osama Bin Laden was killed a
few years ago, significantly reducing Al Qaeda’s reach. The U.S. is withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan
Boghosian: Surveillance is highly
profitable business, and control of information is attractive to those in
power. By sustaining a number of perpetual “wars,” from the war on drugs to the
war on terror, business lobbyists and government justify the need for more
increasingly sophisticated monitoring systems. The infrastructure — both
physical and attitudinal — for accelerated surveillance was erected well before
9/11. The U.S. Army has monitored the political activities of Americans since
World War I. Aided by early computers during the Johnson administration, Army
officials collected data and coded it to reflect a number of arbitrary categories
about a person’s beliefs. As AT&T grew to become the largest repository of
mass records, detailed dossiers of individuals were also amassed and stored by
corporations. At the same time, military spending was in decline after the Cold
War, so many businesses began developing surveillance equipment to sell to the
government and boost profits. Going forward, it should be easy to justify
surveillance with each ensuing national security crisis.
In your book Spying on
Democracy, you write about the various ways the government and corporations
collect information on American citizens. In his forward, Lewis Lapham calls
this “hydra-headed.” You write about how since 9/11 there has been
unprecedented coordination and exchange of some of this information between the
government and the corporate world. What can they discover when they share
information that they cannot do on their own?
Boghosian: The government can piece together
disparate bits of information collected by corporate data aggregators to create
personal profiles of Americans. Virtually any kind of sensitive information
about an individual is readily available from data brokers, from religious
practices, ethnic and racial information, interactions with other individuals,
health issues, financial holdings, to reading habits. It’s difficult to know
the scope of this information (although we know that Acxiom holds information
on approximately 500 million consumers around the globe) as the field of data
mining and reselling has been largely unregulated. But glimpses into different
ways the government partners with businesses, and the reach of the data it
accesses, emerge often by accident. The covert Project Hemisphere, for example,
pays AT&T employees to work with the Drug Enforcement Agency in accessing
stored telephone records dating back 26 years.
With the ubiquity of Facebook, people post photos of their
families, children, parties, and outings. Do you think people are aware of how
Facebook uses this information? Should people be concerned? How does giving
away this information chip away at our democracy?
Boghosian: Few users of Facebook and other social media sites
read the user policies or understand what they mean if they do read them. The
government seems reluctant to improve policymaking that protects users, and may
even benefit from improved and sophisticated social media marketing devices
(the next presidential candidate may be marketed to voters based on what we put
on Facebook). People should be concerned about the loss of control over
personal information for several reasons. First, technology has both beneficial
and detrimental uses. Despite the conveniences of affordable and personal
telecommunications devices, the accumulation and storage of personal data risks
being misused. Individuals who criticize corporate policies, for example, may
be targeted, stigmatized and even labeled as criminally suspect merely for
their political views. Second, vast quantities of stored data contain high
levels of inaccuracy with no way for us to know what is in our electronic files
and no way to correct them.
The recent revelations of NSA spying shows that the government has
the ability to monitor everyone’s phone calls and computer communication. You
write that routinely collecting such a vast amount of data may actually make
the United States
Boghosian: Routine and widespread data collection undermines U.S.
Another concern is that knowing that
every communication is being monitored has the effect of making individuals
conform to the status quo and watch what they say. President Obama’s “Insider
Threat” program calls on government employees to monitor colleagues and report
those who seem at risk of leaking information. Such subjective monitoring by
peers stifles creative thought, especially where we most need it, since it may
deter staff from sharing innovative ideas or from thinking expansively about
ways to solve security challenges. Finally, the more we rely on private
surveillance and information retrieval systems the more room there is for
error. The transmission of erroneous records and false information—or having
that information fall into hostile hands—can have devastating consequences for
national security.
Why hasn’t there been more outrage about the revelations?
Boghosian: It takes a lot of courage these days to speak out
publicly and to resist the enormous power of corporate America
What can people do to maintain their privacy and push back against
the uptick in data collection and surveillance?
Boghosian: The most important step is to become aware of the
extent to which corporations build in mechanisms to get you to hand over
personal information. Once you start seeing how quickly ads pop up for similar
products after your order something online, or when you read questionnaires
that ask you personal questions, you begin to realize that you have choices.
While it’s difficult to extract ourselves from the technological connective
tissue, we can all be smarter about guarding personal data. Don’t give out your
social security number. Don’t give out your address, email address or fill out
forms asking for the number of members of your household.
Let your elected officials know that
you need them to step up and enact legislation calling for more transparency in
government, and for more regulation of corporations that collect and share our
data. Support any of the many organizations doing work to curtail the hold that
an overreaching government and multinational corporations have on our
democracy. The executive branch tends to exert too much power in times of
uncertainty; we need the people to remind the legislative and judicial branches
that they must hold the executive in check.
Boghosian will appear at Berkeley
Arts & Letters on Sept. 30 at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Berkeley San
Francisco
Last summer, Boghosian shared a “data diary,” with the New York Times, recording all the
moments in a day in which she was recorded.
Berkeleyside publishes many articles every day. To see all our
stories in chronological order, and read ones you may have missed, check out
our All the News grid.
Executive Director,
National Office
Heidi Boghosian is the executive director of
the National Lawyers Guild. She is the co-host of the weekly civil liberties
radio show Law and Disorder on Pacifica 's
WBAI in New York Temple Law School Boston
University and a BA from Brown University
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Obama’s
Justice Department: Trumpeting a New Victory in War on Freedom of the Press
There’s something
profoundly despicable about a Justice Department that would brazenly violate
the First and Fourth Amendments while spying on journalists, then claim to be
reassessing such policies after an avalanche of criticism—and then proceed, as
it did this week, to gloat that those policies made possible a long prison
sentence for a journalistic source.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation crest on
August 3, 2007 in Washington ,
DC
The Federal Bureau of Investigation crest on
August 3, 2007 in
Welcome to the Obama Justice
Department.
While mouthing platitudes about
respecting press freedom, the president has overseen methodical actions to
undermine it. We should retire understated phrases like “chilling effect.” With
the announcement from Obama’s Justice Department on Monday, the thermometer has
dropped below freezing.
You could almost hear the slushy flow
of public information turning to ice in the triumphant words of the U.S. attorney
who led the investigation after being handpicked by Attorney General Eric
Holder: “This prosecution demonstrates our deep resolve to hold accountable
anyone who would violate their solemn duty to protect our nation’s secrets and
to prevent future, potentially devastating leaks by those who would wantonly
ignore their obligations to safeguard classified information.”
Translation: This prosecution shows the depth of our contempt for civil
liberties. Let this be a lesson to journalists and would-be leakers alike.
Audibly on the chopping block are
provisions in the Bill of Rights such as “freedom … of the press” and “no
Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized.”
The Obama administration’s pernicious
goal is to normalize circumstances where journalists can’t credibly promise
confidentiality, and potential leakers don’t believe they can have it. The
broader purpose is to destroy independent journalism—which is to say, actual
journalism -- which is to say, freedom of the press.
Impacts are crystal clear to just about
any journalist who has done reporting that’s much more than stenographic
services for official government and corporate sources. When unofficial sources
are choked off, not much is left other than the Official Story.
The Official Story is routinely
somewhere between very selective and mendacious. A case in point, ironically
enough, is the Justice Department’s righteous announcement that the prison term
for the leaker of information to The Associated Press reflected the
Department’s “deep resolve to hold accountable anyone who would violate their
solemn duty to protect our nation’s secrets.”
“Hold accountable anyone”? (Laugh, scream
or cry; take your pick.)
Like others before it, the Obama
administration has made a frequent practice of leaking classified “secrets” to
media outlets—when its calculus is that revealing those secrets will make the
administration look good. Of course in those cases the Justice Department
doesn’t bother to track down the leakers.
Such extreme hypocrisy in high places
has become so normalized that major media outlets often seem completely inured
to it.
Hours after the Justice Department’s
announcement on Monday that its surveillance of AP phone records had resulted
in a lengthy prison sentence, the PBS “NewsHour” did not devote a word to it.
Perhaps the program could not find a few seconds to shave off the lengthy
beach-ball interview that Judy Woodruff conducted with former President
Clinton.
To the top echelons of
quasi-journalistic enterprises that are bankrolled by corporate advertisers and
underwriters, the disappearance of confidentiality—along with routine
violations of the First and Fourth Amendments—might hardly matter. Official
sources flood the media zone.
But the New York Times coverage should have given attentive readers indigestion
over breakfast Tuesday: “A former F.B.I. agent has agreed to plead guilty
to leaking classified information to The Associated Press about a foiled bomb
plot in Yemen last year … Federal investigators said they were able to
identify the man, Donald Sachtleben, a former bomb technician, as a suspect in
the leak case only after secretly obtaining AP reporters’ phone logs, a move that set off an
uproar among journalists and members of Congress of both parties when it was
disclosed in May.”
The Times added: “Sachtleben … has agreed to serve 43
months in prison for the leak, the Justice Department said. His case is the
eighth leak-related prosecution under the Obama administration. Only three such
cases were prosecuted under all previous presidents.”
How did the Justice
Department catch Sachtleben in the first place? By seizing records of calls on more than 20 phone lines used
by Associated Press reporters over a two-month period.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 License
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding
director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books
include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death”
and "Made Love, Got War: Close En
“The Trials of Bradley Manning
His conviction on
Espionage Act charges poses grave dangers for American journalism.”
July 31, 2013 | This article appeared in the August 19-26, 2013 edition
of The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/article/175512/trials-bradley-manning#axzz2blwtgXTu
[The subtitle in the no. of The
Nation that I received is: “He’s a Convenient Scapegoat for a Decade of
Foreign Policy Disasters, and He Has Been Treated Accordingly.” I strongly recommend the article, for it
explains why the treatment of Manning has been reprehensible and why the case
is so important to the future of US
·
Chief prosecutor Maj. Ashden Fein in closing arguments. Seated behind him are defense attorney David Coombs, left, and Bradley Manning. Illustration: Clark Stoeckley, from his book The United States vs. PFC Bradley Manning.
[Madar criticizes the ACLU and other
rights organizations for their feeble support of Manning. Here’s the passage:
“Although Manning does have some
high-profile defenders—Michael Moore, Glenn Greenwald, Ron Paul, Dennis
Kucinich, Code Pink—the field is not crowded. The reflexive willingness of most
of the American right to bay for Manning’s scalp has been less remarkable than
the silence of progressives. The ACLU once raised money for Daniel
Ellsberg’s legal defense, and one might have expected its former president,
liberal lion Norman Dorsen, to roar in support of Manning. But even as he
condemned Manning’s prison treatment, Dorsen said, “We’ve got to be tough on
the people in the government who are like Manning… how are you going to run the
government if people are free to leak things to the world using their
individual judgment?” In fact, the human rights industry, though it railed
against Manning’s confinement, has had little to say about the charges. (The
ACLU and Amnesty International mainly limited themselves to condemning the most
serious charge of aiding the enemy.)”
Is the criticism justified? --Dick]
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Raimund Pretzel, Defying Hitler: a Memoir. 2002.
[Perhaps helps us identify the causes and measure the
extent to which the US
Written in 1939 and
unpublished until 2000, Sebastian
Haffner’s [Pretzel’s pseud.] memoir of the rise of Nazism in Germany
Contents #1 Dec. 15, 2008
Celebrate December 15
Free Materials
Patriot Act vs. Civil
Liberties
Bill of Rights Day 2008 and
ACLU
Related Protections of Liberty
Habeas Corpus
Posse Comitatus vs.
Militarism
Contents #2 Dec. 15, 2009
President’s Proclamation
ACLU and Civil Liberties
BORDC
Civil Liberties and Civil Rights
For Students
Several links on Bill of Rights and the
Patriot Act
END BILL OF
RIGHTS DAY DEC. 15, 2013 NEWSLETTER
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