CNN commentator Roland S. Martin has a piece up today (July 22) entitled, Obama birth issue is nutty that proceeds to make good fun of the wingnuts. But since one of George W. Bush’s first serious actions as President after 9-11 was to arrange the biggest government overhaul since the New Deal – by inventing the so-called “Department of Homeland Security” – there are Americans out in the hinterland who are suddenly quite confused about their legal status. I’m one of them, and so is recent Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. Who, like me, actually wasn’t born in the United States of America.

McCain, like me, was a Navy brat. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone, I was born in the Philippines. There used to be a clear law on the books that held the children of American citizens born in a foreign country are indeed ‘natural born’ American citizens, even if they automatically get dual citizenship for the country in which they were born. I had that until I was 18, though after that I would have had to formalize, and I was never very fond of Ferdinand and Imelda “Shoe-Lady” Marcos. So I let it slide. Still, if nobody questioned McCain’s citizenship qualification for POTUS, the fervor with which wingnuttia rants about Obama seems even crazier. I mean, even if Hawaii hadn’t been a state when he was born, did not all Hawaiians receive automatic citizenship when it WAS made a state? It was a territory, after all. Like Puerto Rico. Which apparently some wingnuts in Congress think is a foreign country too, thus Judge Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t be a citizen. Weird.

The last day job I held was in the period after 9-11 when DHS became the designated troublemaker for Americans of all kinds. My problems started when Human Resources was informed that my birth certificate didn’t qualify as “proof of citizenship” for me to have gotten the job. So I responded that my state driver’s license and Social Security card should suffice if HR couldn’t manage to read the line that designated US citizenship for both my parents and myself on that Philippine-issued birth certificate. They told me I had to get a birth certificate from a state here in the US. So I asked them which state they’d suggest I pretend to be born in, thinking there must be a racket in California or somewhere that provides fake birth certificates for people like me who weren’t actually born there. They were not amused.

Then they found a “discrepency” on my Social Security card. Seems I had used the name I’ve always gone by in addition to the first name on my birth certificate, when I had the last name changed after I got married back in 1969. I was informed they could no longer make my pay checks out to my legal name (which WAS on the card), and which is the name on my bank account. The bank then proceeded to tell me it couldn’t cash my checks! I was informed I’d have to take unpaid time off work – for which I’d get in trouble because no one would approve it – to stand in line at the SS office to have the name changed again. So I could work. I began to get the very strong feeling they didn’t want me there.

So I wrote a nice missive to HR telling them that I’d been paying taxes for more than 35 years under the NUMBER on my SS card, and that the IRS – a duly authorized agency of the federal government – had never once complained or refused my money. I further wrote that when I got married, I had my named changed to his on that card, and nobody ever asked to see a court order or required me to get one that “legally” changed my last name. In fact, I had dropped my given middle name entirely and used the first initial of my original last name on all legal matters from that time on. Also a CUSTOM, not something for which I ever had to go to court. I further said that if I were to be required per DHS’s audit to legally change my name, they were going to have to go after every single married woman in the country who had ever taken her husband’s name or used their maiden name’s initial for their middle. That’s about 55% of the entire population, not something this nation had the money to accomplish while spending $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I did end up quitting that job just because I know when I’m not wanted. Now write full time freelance, and my boss has never asked me to prove I’m a citizen or argued with me about what name I care to attach. Oh… and he uses direct deposit to pay me, in the account with my terrorist name attached.

I call it my “terrorist” name because DHS was supposed to be chasing terrorists, not messing up the lives and livelihoods of lifelong American citizens and taxpayers in good standing. Thus they must have believed I’m some sort of terrorist. I prefer the title “Terrierist,” since I’m quite fond of small dogs. You’d think these folks would have better things to do in the wake of 9-11, perhaps going after real terrorists or something. Guess that’s what I get for thinking.

I presume these crazy wingnuts would be doing this same weird Dervish Dance if John McCain were President right now. I mean, he absolutely wasn’t born in the United States, while Barack Obama absolutely was. And while they’re at it, they should make a new law that says the wives of military officers stationed overseas are forbidden to visit them or live with them, on the off-chance a baby might be born somewhere outside of Kansas. Sheesh!

Most of these idiots are so dumb and so ill-educated that they can’t even find California on a map, much less Panama or Philippines or Iraq. Why are they being given time and attention in the media? Shouldn’t we be ashamed of the morons among us, the fact that they represent a good 20% of our population? Is that inbreeding, environmental toxins, or just insane?

Whatever it is, I’m glad I’m not one of them. And I think there should be an IQ test administered to all employees of the Department of Homeland Security to ensure we don’t have to actually deal with any of these defectives in our day-to-day lives.

Sure, there have been tin-foil hat conspiracy theories aplenty for as long as anyone alive can remember. The Jewish bankers got together with the German Illuminati and plotted the ‘New World Order’, getting its first nail in the coffin in 1913 with the Federal Reserve, going straight from there to instigating WW-I with a well-planned assassination in Sarajevo, culling the first wave of accumulated wealth in 1929 to start the Great Depression, which could only be alleviated in the end by WW-II.

And they needed an excuse to overrule America’s strong isolationism at the time, so they didn’t bother to do anything about the incoming Japanese fleet as it sailed en masse toward Pearl Harbor. Not exactly a “false flag” operation, but certainly despicable. REAL false flag operations got famous when the wholly fictional Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ allowed the US military to ensconce itself in perpetuity in South Vietnam, admittedly (by several ‘memoirs’ since, by people who could know) for the purpose of testing the nifty new armaments and chemical warfare agents amassed when they ‘forgot’ to cut the wartime military budget after Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war.

Then there was 9-11. A textbook case made for tin-foil speculation, undoubtedly. Huge skyscrapers imploding perfectly from jet fuel in the upper stories, a whole different, un-damaged skyscraper that mysteriously collapsed in the same fashion late that afternoon for no apparent reason, a hole in the danged Pentagon but zero signs of anything that might have caused it, etc., etc., etc. I doubt anybody’s unaware of the grand conspiracy theories for that dreadful day.

Then, just a week later, some journalists and a congresscritters received letters in the mail containing weaponized anthrax spores and badly printed notes from what we were told was just another Arab terrorist. Only that wasn’t true either, as quickly became known. Why, it turns out that the weaponized anthrax spores came from the US Army’s own bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

At first the FBI fingered an Egyptian researcher for the dirty deed, but couldn’t make a case of it. They looked for a short time at an Israeli researcher too, but backed right off that one quick. So they went after a regular American researcher in the lab, and paid him nearly $6 million just a couple of months ago for ruining his life. Desperate, they settled on another guy, and he is said to have killed himself last week with Tylenol (something not fun, takes about 5 days to die). Which must of course make him the lone gunman in this particular incident, right?

If you agree, you’ll just love the incredible amount of gossamer ‘evidence’ being used to convict a dead guy who held high enough clearance to work in an Army bioweapons lab for 28 years, was in all appearances an upstanding family man, and had ZERO run-ins with the law – all on the highly dubious ‘testimony’ of a highly suspicious non-professional psychiatric ‘babysitter’ (now in hiding) with a rap sheet for DUI and domestic violence as long as your arm – is quite absurd. They’re really losing their touch at this late date. This stuff is way, way flimsier than magic bullets, perfectly ‘dropped’ skyscrapers and dead terrorists that turned up alive and well.

For those of you who like a thoroughly twisted Ludlum plot as well as a seriously holey conspiracy theory, don your tin-foil beanies and follow some of the links below to the ongoing drama. Looks like I’m not the only person who keeps a big salt lick handy when the gub’ment starts handing out badly crafted lies…

Links:

WSJ: Bruce Ivins Wasn’t the Anthrax Culprit [Opinion, Richard Spertzel, head of biological weapons section Unscom '94-'99]
NYT: Anthrax Evidence Called Mostly Circumstantial
Salon: Glenn Greenwald on the anthrax investigation
John McQuaid: Bentonite and ABC’s credibility
BuzzFlash: Jean C. Duley… tell us again…
Anthrax Vaccine – Meryl Nass
The Hidden Anthrax Letters Suspect
The Death of Mr. Ivins

The full text of the letter is below the fold:

April 3, 2008

The Honorable Michael Mukasey ?Attorney General of the United States ?U.S. Department of Justice ?950 Pennsylvania Ave., NW ?Washington, DC 20530

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

We are writing about two disturbing recent revelations concerning the actions and inactions by the Department of Justice and the federal government to combat terrorism. These include a public statement by you that appears to suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of the federal government’s existing surveillance authority to combat terrorism, as well as possible malfeasance by the government prior to 9/11, and the partial disclosure of the contents of a secret Department memorandum concerning Executive Branch authority to combat terrorism, which has been previously requested to be provided to Congress. We ask that you promptly provide that memorandum and that you clarify your public statement in accordance with the questions below.

First, according to press reports, in response to questions at a March 27 speech, you defended Administration wiretapping programs and proposals to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by referring to a pre-9/11 incident. Before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, you stated, “we knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went. You’ve got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn’t come home, to show for that.”1

This statement is very disturbing for several reasons. Initially, despite extensive inquiries after 9/11, I am aware of no previous reference, in the 9/11 Commission report or elsewhere, to a call from a known terrorist safe house in Afghanistan to the United States which, if it had been intercepted, could have helped prevent the 9/11 attacks. In addition, if the Administration had known of such communications from suspected terrorists, they could and should have been intercepted based on existing FISA law. For example, even assuming that a FISA warrant was required to intercept such calls, as of 9/11 FISA specifically authorized such surveillance on an emergency basis without a warrant for a 48 hour period.2 If such calls were known about and not intercepted, serious additional concerns would be raised about the government’s failure to take appropriate action before 9/11.

Accordingly, we ask that you promptly answer the following questions:

1. Were you referring to an actual pre-9/11 incident in the portion of your statement quoted above? If not, what were you referring to?

2. Do you believe that a FISA warrant would have been required to intercept a telephone call from a known terrorist safe house in Afghanistan to the United States in 2001? If so, please explain.

3. Even assuming that such a warrant would have been required, do you agree that even before 9/11, FISA authorized emergency interception without a warrant for a 48-hour period of phone calls from a known terrorist safe house in Afghanistan to the United States?

4. Assuming that you were referring to an actual pre-9/11 incident in your statement, please explain why such phone calls were not intercepted and appropriately utilized by federal government authorities in seeking to prevent terrorist attacks.

Second, in the March, 2003 Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memorandum publicly released on April 1, 2008, the contents of a secret October, 2001 OLC memorandum were partially disclosed. Specifically, the 2003 memorandum explains that in an October 23, 2001 memorandum, OLC “concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.”3 On two prior occasions – in letters of February 12 and February 20, 2008, – Chairman Conyers requested that the Administration publicly release the October 23, 2001, memorandum .4 The memorandum has not been received despite these specific requests.

Based on the title of the October 23, 2001 memorandum, and based on what has been disclosed and the contents of similar memoranda issued at roughly the same time, it is clear that a substantial portion of this memorandum provides a legal analysis and conclusions as to the nature and scope of the Presidential Commander in Chief power to accomplish specific acts within the United States. The people of the United States are entitled to know the Justice Department’s interpretation of the President’s constitutional powers to wage war in the United States. There can be no actual basis in national security for keeping secret the remainder of a legal memorandum that addresses this issue of Constitutional interpretation. The notion that the President can claim to operate under “secret” powers known only to the President and a select few subordinates is antithetical to the core principles of this democracy. We ask that you promptly release the October 23, 2001, memorandum.

Please provide your responses and direct any questions to the Judiciary Committee office, 2138 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515 (tel:202-225-3951; fax: 202-225-7680). Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

John Conyers, Jr. ?Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary

Jerrold Nadler ?Chairman, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

Robert C. “Bobby” Scott ?Chairman, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security

Of course, sternly worded letters are not very impressive in DC these days, given that the Bush administration regularly ignores any and all demands from Congress for information. The ‘Unitary Executive’ policy that Dick Cheney has worked so hard to institute for so many decades does not have room for a Constitutional separation of powers or any respect for the Congressional duty of oversight.

I predict Mukasey will ignore this demand as well, and that Bush will assert presidential privilege to prevent him from talking to the Judiciary Committee. But at least We the People can see that some members of Congress still take their oaths and jobs seriously, which is a hopeful sign for the future. Or maybe it’s all just for show.

Our ever-vigilant U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey committed a major faux-pas last week when trying to work up some crocodile tears during a speech touting “necessary” domestic spying in San Francisco. Attempting to blame a lack of power-to-spy for the 3,000 American fatalities on September 11, 2001, Mukasey revealed…

Officials “shouldn’t need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that’s the call that we really want to know about. And before 9-11, that’s the call we didn’t know about. We knew that there was a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went.”

Holy Moley, Batman!!! Did the AG just tell us something nobody in the BushCo administration bothered to tell the 9-11 Commission during its investigation? That US officials KNEW of a call from an Al Queda “safe house” in Afghanistan to someone in the United States, but didn’t listen in because they were scared of breaking the law?

Is Mukasey trying to tell us that US intelligence agencies – including NSA who monitors virtually ALL telecommunications, and the CIA who knows where Al Queda’s “safe houses” are – have no understanding of the FISA law that has been on the books since 1978? What in the world DO they teach these spooks at training camp?

Fact of the matter is that not only does FISA (and other intelligence rules and regulations) allow tapping of the Afghanistan phone line, it allows – and has always allowed – immediate surveillance of the call on both ends, including the receiver here in the states for a full 72 hours without any kind of warrant! All they had to do was listen in, and if it were about planning the terrorist acts on 9-11, take it to the FISA court, get the warrant retroactively, and all the evidence recorded is usable in court against the plotters. Heck, they could have listened in anyway to the U.S. receiver and never bothered with a warrant, they just couldn’t use that tap as evidence in court later on (presuming they bust the perps instead of simply take ‘em out).

Writer and Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald has been on top of the story. Says Greenwald in his latest post…

“Yesterday, I contacted Lee Hamilton, the 9/11 Commission Vice Chairman, to ask him whether the Commission was ever told about Mukasey’s alleged Afghan Terrorist 9/11-planning telephone calls and/or the Bush administration’s failure/inability to eavesdrop on such calls. Hamilton refused to comment, first claiming that he was in meetings all day yesterday and had no time to talk to me. When asked if he would comment today or whenever he had the time, he said he was not going to comment on this ever, since he had not read Mukasey’s speech. Calls to 9/11 Executive Director Philip Kelikow seeking comment were not returned and 9/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean could not yet be reached.”

I think the situation is fairly obvious. Either Mukasey is flat-out lying in order to promote BushCo’s unwarranted power grab and declaration of retroactive immunity for illegal domestic spying, or BushCo knows a lot more about what happened on 9-11 (and who was involved, before the act) than they were willing to tell the American people or the duly constituted and empowered investigation of those events.

Greenwald’s update on the story cites 9-11 Commission Executive Director Philip Kelikow as dismissing Mukasey’s revelation as immaterial to the investigation. Apparently he just made it up on the spot to gain sympathy for retroactive immunity and expanded spying powers.

How willing are we to buy that excuse?

Links:

Michael Mukasey’s tearful lies
Priorities

The Pentagon announced on February 11 that it is charging six detainees at Guantanamo Bay with war crimes, and will be seeking the death penalty for all. According to ex-JAG officers, it has already been decided that all will be convicted, and all will die. The highlights will be secret evidence and confessions gathered under torture from people who have been held for years sans habeas corpus.

Ross Tuttle’s Rigged Trials at Gitmo appears online from The Nation. Looks like BushCo are fixing to compound their own war crimes. Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Gitmo’s military commissions detailed a conversation with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes, who now oversees the tribunal process for the Department of Defense…

“[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.’”

This Years’ Osama bin Laden

When it was announced last week that bin Laden had sent another of his annual video greeting cards to America, I didn’t even bother to view any out-takes or try to guess if this year’s bin Laden is the real McCoy or just another bad actor too fat or too black to pull it off. I figure if George Bush isn’t concerned enough about him to care, why should I?

Again counter-terrorism expert Larry Johnson agrees with my take, though he beat me to the analysis this time. On his blog he calls it The Bin Laden Video Nonsense and complains about this bin Laden’s dyed beard – Grecian Formula for facial hair.

Some Other Years’ Osama bin Laden

Though to be honest, I’m not convinced there actually is such a person as Osama bin Laden. Oh, there might once have been one. A disgruntled fundamentalist from a too-rich Saudi family who had enough contacts in Islamic terrorist circles to make him useful to our interests in Afghanistan back when the world’s poorest nation and primary opium supplier was the Soviets’ problem.

Why bin Laden hates the U.S. has been analyzed to death in the last six years, so I won’t repeat it. I don’t think it matters because I think he died years ago. His money may still be buying guns and IEDs and recruiting gun-ho suicidal maniacs to the cause, so in a way he does live on in the offspring of his ideas and ideals.

Osama bin Laden entered my consciousness from the overwhelmed CNN message board launched within minutes of the coordinated al Quaeda attacks on the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. Having kin in the foreign service who had only the month before left an embassy in Africa for new assignment, the bombings came way too close to home. Went to CNN’s board because information was coming in fast and furious from the scenes – much faster than news reports or articles could be written and aired.

At any rate, after just a few hours of watching the action, I came away from the analysis with the impression that this Saudi mercenary and Mujahadeen legend was the spiritual inspiration and endowment angel of al Quaeda. As opposed to being a physical presence within it and personally guiding all its operations.

Which explains a lot, both about the propaganda machine the current Bush administration built up around bin Laden (including the annual video greeting cards that always seem to star someone who doesn’t look much like bin Laden), and the complete lack of actual concern in that administration about bin Laden or where he might be hiding. If the man’s dead, why waste the effort to ‘find’ him?

Bin Laden was once a useful hired gun for the U.S. to use against the Soviets and has proved a quarter of a century later to be an even more useful bogey-man to use against America. His visage feeds the fearful hype Bush-Cheney manipulated so masterfully to get us into the current (and never-ending) Oil Wars, and to keep the citizenry scared enough to tolerate the gutting of our Constitution and reorganization of the government toward a police state in the wake of 9-11.

So despite sad remembrances on the 6th anniversary of the attacks, the cartoon bin Laden video greeting card didn’t interest me, scare me or anger me. It’s just more hype. One of these days perhaps a majority of Americans will stop being afraid of a dead man and ask the cyborg who was actually running the show from a bunker in an ‘undisclosed location’ why he allowed the entire bin Laden family to fly back to Arabia without questioning following 9-11.

Or why we didn’t just separate Osama’s portion of the family fortune from the al Quaeda death machine right then and there. As ‘Deep Throat’ told Bob Woodward in the basement of a parking garage outside D.C. about the skullduggery of a previous war-mongering administration, “Follow the Money.”

None of us were flying in those fearful days. Remember how strange the sky looked without contrails? So blue, and so quiet. We were still mourning nearly 3,000 deaths in the most horrendous attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Now the U.S. death toll in Iraq – which had nothing to do with 9-11 – is approaching 4,000. Estimates for Iraqi civilians dead due to our invasion and occupation hit more than 100,000 last year (not that we’re actually counting).

Death and destruction breeds death and destruction. We all know this, yet we play that game anyway. On Monday General Patreus testified to Congress about how he needs another 6 months to gage whether the surge is working in Iraq. While more U.S. soldiers continue to pay the ultimate price, and many more are maimed for life.

Maybe it’s time to start the lottery on who gets to be the last brave American soldier to die for George Bush’s mistake, and when. Or we could just have a Photoshop contest for the star of the next Osama bin Laden video greeting card. I don’t know about any of you, but I know I could probably ’shop up a Max Headroom CG version that would be more believable than the last few that have been used as a poor excuse for American politicians to sacrifice more of our rights on the altar of Forever-War.

Unhappy Anniversary, America.