Paul Craig Roberts: Progressives Want "Direct Action" But a Disarmed Public
Progressive William Rivers Pitt has lost patience with the Obama regime and with British Petroleum (“Enough of This Crap,” June 15, Truthout). To break through the news blackout that BP maintains over the ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill, he wants a hundred thousand Americans to “just show the hell up down there and demand access.”Chris Floyd: Sincerely Yours: Another Legal Triumph for the Obama-Yoo AdministrationPitt is correct that this “is the kind of direct action that has been missing from our national narrative, not just in the Gulf but all over.” Obama, he says correctly, is a “narcotic” for progressives. Apparently, for many progressives having a black man, or a 50 per cent black man, in the White House is what is important, not the fact that he is a continuation of Bush/Cheney.
If a hundred thousand people marched on the Gulf Coast, “big things would happen.” Pitt writes that “either the people would break through those unconscionable corporate barriers and show the world what is really going on in the Gulf, or the forces BP has arrayed against the truth would react with violence, which would tell us everything we need to know about what is happening, and would be enough to break that God damned criminal corporation finally and forever.”
It was, of course, the Bush-Cheney-Obama administration that permitted the drilling. BP didn’t go about it on its own. This aside, and also putting aside my sympathy with Pitt’s outrage, here we have a progressive advocating direct action that likely would end in violence, not merely from BP mercenaries but from local, state, and federal government forces. The anomaly in the picture is that it is progressives who have been most determined to disarm the American people. What would the one hundred thousand do when withering fire is directed at them? Amerika’s forces of “law and order” and conquest enjoy killing people. It doesn’t matter if they are women and children. In fact, killing women and children is the way to win 30-year wars like the one we are one-third through in Afghanistan.
And don’t think the government wouldn’t kill Americans. Remember the 100 murdered Branch Davidians that Bill Clinton and Janet Reno dispatched? The US government has never regretted the million dead Iraqi civilians and the unknown multitude of dead Afghan civilians. Have you forgotten Kent State where college kids were gunned down by the US National Guard? Youtube has tens of thousands of videos of cops getting their jollies by body slamming 90-year old grandmothers and tasering 10-year old kids. Just the other day Obama official Dennis Blair announced that he had a list of Americans to assassinate. In every society the worst people always get into unaccountable positions of power. It is these people who are the threat to Americans’ lives and liberty, not the Taliban and Iranians.
James Bovard at Antiwar.com points out one of the more egregiously sick-making of the many atrocious "arguments" employed by Barack Obama in his successful effort to block the efforts of Maher Arar to seek justice for his unjust rendition and proxy torture in the Great War of Global Terror.
Obama bade his legal henchmen -- his own personal John Yoos, as it were -- to tell the Supreme Court that it should kill the Canadian citizen's case seeking compensation for his unlawful arrest by U.S. officials, who then rendered him not unto Caesar but to the untender mercies of Syria's torture cells. The Robed Ones agreed, dismissing, without comment, Arar's appeal of a lower court ruling that quashed his case -- a decision that Scott Horton rightly likened last year to the Dred Scott case, which upheld the legality of slavery, even in states which prohibited it.
The Arar ruling upholds the "legality" of a new, universal form of slavery, i.e., the United States government can deprive anyone in the world of their freedom, and dispose of their bodies as it sees fit: torture, "indefinite detention," or even "targeted assassination." The fact that it is a man of partly African descent who is now outstripping the Southern slavers in this extension of servitude to the entire world is one of those poisonously bitter ironies with which history abounds.
But grim and depraved as Obama's position is, it is not without its comic elements. As Bovard notes, one of the "arguments" offered by the Obama/Yoo administration was that the case should be dismissed because it might call into question “the motives and sincerity of the United States officials who concluded that petitioner could be removed to Syria.” We kid, as they say, you not.
Continued. . .
