Terrorism Charges Dropped Against RNC 8.

Terrorism charges against the eight protesters arrested for plotting to disrupt the Republican National Convention have been dropped while lesser felony charges remain in place.
[…]
other charges of conspiracy to commit riot and conspiracy to commit criminal damage to property ‘in furtherance of terrorism” will be dismissed,’ writes Twincities.com.
Since their arrest, the eight protesters have received national attention and support from the greater activist community. The terrorism charges against them came from Minnesota’s 2002 Patriot Act.
“We believe the terrorism charges would have been a distraction at trial,” said Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner in a press release. “Dismissing those charges will help us focus on the core illegal conduct that occurred. Under the circumstances, the terrorism charge just complicates the case.”
[…]
The Minnesota Independent reports that the decision to drop the terrorism charges could be motivated by politics on Gaetner’s part. Gaertner is seeking Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party backing for governor. But her pursuit of terrorism charges against the eight protesters has not gone down well with party activists.
“She obviously got too much bad publicity about it and she’s backing away,” said Jordan Kushner, an attorney for one of the defendants, to The Independent. “But the problem is that all the charges are politically motivated and unjustified.”
Ramsey County prosecutors will make a motion to amend the complaint against the protesters and dismiss the terrorism counts at a hearing on May 26.

At some point they would have to define in a court of law exactly what “terrorism” is as it pertains to the Minnesota law, or the Patriot act, and of course it’s all bullshit, if not a threat of terrorism itself.

Posted by: anna missed | Apr 10 2009 9:19 utc | 3

Greenwald:
TPM: “Obama Mimics Bush on State Secrets”
Two great articles from Chris Floyd: Hero blues: liberals line up with militarism and Hope abandoned: Obama protects and promotes CIA torture mavens.

Posted by: andrew | Apr 10 2009 10:12 utc | 5

A must read: The quiet coup.

Posted by: andrew | Apr 10 2009 11:38 utc | 7

Police station suicide attack kills eight

At least eight people were killed, including five American soldiers, and 20 wounded in a suicide lorry bombing in Iraq’s northern city of Mosul today.
The explosives-laden lorry ploughed into a police station in the southern part of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, Lt Col Mohammed al-Juburi told the AFP news agency.
An interior ministry official in Baghdad said at least eight people were killed in the blast and another 20 were wounded.
“Five US coalition soldiers were killed, and one wounded from a suicide vehicle borne improvised explosive device attack earlier today in Mosul,” a US army statement said.
…
Earlier today two roadside bomb attacks near Baghdad killed three people and wounded seven others, according to local security officials.

Posted by: b | Apr 10 2009 13:19 utc | 9

This started as a reply in the “crowbar” thread, but It’s such a strange bird I thought I might fly better over here…
The political idea behind denying supplies to the “enemy” was to stress the civilian population enough so they would either demand change or rise-up against their government and force change…
Isn’t legitimate then, for the civilian population to demand change or force change when they lack the resources to pay their mortgages, for their health care or their food?
Don’t know why but my thoughts are shooting everywhere this morning like buckshot out of a street sweeper…
I can go back to beginning of the banking mess when we were told (as we are still being told) that some institutions are “too big to fail” BS… Economic warfare against the people, “blockading” their access to capital resources and stealing their tax dollars to give to a few rich assholes…
First they took money from the poor, but I didn’t say anything for I wasn’t poor. Then they took the money from the lower middle class and I said nothing, for I wasn’t of that class either.
Then they came for the middle class and I said nothing (i may have even laughed) but I said nothing for I wasn’t of the middle class either.
Then they came to take my millions and I stood, staring in awe and amazement that my fortune would be taken by the very people I thought of as my own…
Then naked and poor he was thrown out on the cold street where he immediately became a meal for a pack of feral dogs… To dream.
We interrupt this rant to insert this other piece of rant…
There is an economic war being waged right now and the greedy assholes are scrambling to find nice cushy jobs in the NWO’s middle management where they’ll get paid keeping the rest of us moving with their various cattle prod; brutal force to economic force.
Speaking of things that need to be done, an interview at Wide-Eyed with RNC protesters who were arrested. Jesse Sparkles:
Historically speaking, “permitted” dissent has not typically led to social change because it relies on a strategy that is weak from the start—asking for permission to make a demand. Instead, the un-permitted actions aimed at “crashing the convention” on September 1 never asked for permission and it was those actions—at times wild and always unpredictable—that made those in power tremble. And indeed the actions—whether they were people locking themselves together to block highway off-ramps or unannounced marches of a few hundred that refused to obey the police—provided inspiration to those on the streets. Every time a bus was blocked, the energy in the crowd would escalate and people could—for at least a short moment—feel that their efforts were contributing to a collective “crashing” of the convention. I also made the decision to engage in the un-permitted actions because at the RNC in 2004 over 200,000 people marched and nobody cared—not the media and certainly not the Republican delegates who never saw the protest. The un-permitted actions allowed protestors to take their message straight to the delegates whether it was by blocking their buses on the opening day or disrupting their fundraising parties on subsequent days.
And now back to our originally scheduled rant:
Can there be anything less capitalist than keeping goods from moving freely? Isn’t this much like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face? In a “free” society I’d be able to trade with anyone I felt like doing business with. Should any government be allowed to stand in my way? And especially my government that would have taxes from the transaction going into its operating budget?
As I said I’m a bit scattered this morning…

Posted by: DavidS | Apr 10 2009 14:23 utc | 11

street: “More of the Same” at the New York Times

The New York Times should take a look in the national and institutional mirror before it charges foreign governments or anyone else with confusing “change” with “more of the same.”
Last Monday’s Times contains an article with an ironic title: “In Cuba, Change Means More of the Same, With Control at the Top.” This “news” item reports that “rather than dismantling Cuba’s socialist framework,” Cuba’s President Raul Castro “seems to be trying to make it work more efficiently.” Castro, the Times reports, seeks to keep power concentrated “at the top.”
Well, okay, but what is U.S. President Barack Obama – Mr. “Change” himself and heralded as such by the Times‘ editorial board and many of its top columnists – trying to accomplish other than to make the American corporate profits system “work more efficiently” without “dismantling the [capitalist] framework” and with power (and wealth) still concentrated “at the top”?

scahill: Rahm Emanuel’s Think Tankers Enforce ‘Message Discipline’ Among Liberals’

The White House is ‘helping’ liberal groups to get their political messages in sync with the official line.
Over the past several weeks, independent journalists and anti-war activists have tried to shine a spotlight on how groups like the Center for American Progress and MoveOn, which portrayed themselves as anti-war during the Bush-era, are now supporting the escalation and continuation of wars because their guy is now commander-in-chief. CAP has been actively pounding the pavement in support of the escalation in Afghanistan, the rebranding of the Iraq occupation and, more recently, Obama’s bloated military budget, which the group said was “on target.” MoveOn has been silent on the escalation in Afghanistan and has devoted substantial resources to promoting a federal budget that includes a $21 billion increase in military spending from the Bush-era.
What is clear here is that CAP and MoveOn are now basically psuedo-official PR flaks targeting “liberals” to support the White House agenda. This, though, should not come as a shock to those who have closely monitored these groups. They were the primary force behind Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), “a coalition that spent tens of millions of dollars using Iraq as a political bludgeon against Republican politicians, while refusing to pressure the Democratic Congress to actually cut off funding for the war.” Now, according to John Stauber, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, the Center for American Progress is now running “Progressive Media which was begun by Tom Matzzie and David Brock in 2008 and now ‘represents a serious ratcheting up of efforts to present a united liberal front in the coming policy wars….’ [These groups] are working hard to push Obama’s policies, including rationalizlng or defending his escalation of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan as “sustainable security.”
On Wednesday, Ben Smith at Politico reported on the latest development in this White House-coordinated campaign to use these think-tankers to whip up support for its agenda. It is a newly formed coalition, the Common Purpose Project, which blogger Jane Hamsher describes as “one of the many groups Rahm Emanuel has set up to coordinate messaging among liberal interest groups.”
…

Posted by: b real | Apr 10 2009 14:35 utc | 13

…—…-
I like it better when Hendrix sings it

Posted by: DavidS | Apr 10 2009 16:02 utc | 15

re b’s dawn link, a matter of weeks after the US moves into baluchistan we have the makings of a civil war..
Kachkol Ali, an advocate and former leader of the opposition in the Balochistan assembly, had alleged at a press conference four days back that the three leaders had been whisked away by security officials from his chamber on April 3. They had gone to the court to attend the hearing of a case against them.
that doesn’t sound very talibani to me.

US courts put corporations on notice over human rights

In Wednesday’s ruling, Judge Shira Scheindlin said that the South African plaintiffs could pursue claims against Daimler, GM and Ford “for aiding and abetting torture … extrajudicial killing, and apartheid.”
Scheindlin also cleared the way for lawsuits against IBM for “aiding and abetting arbitrary denationalization and apartheid,” and against Rheinmetall — the German parent company of Swiss-based arms manufacturer Oerlikon — for “aiding and abetting extrajudicial killing and apartheid.”
Michael Hausfeld, one of the attorneys representing the apartheid victims, hailed “a major advancement in international law.”
“I think it’s a landmark decision, extremely significant in the field of corporate responsibility and human rights violations,” he told AFP.
“The court upheld a standard for determining when and under what circumstances a corporation could be held accountable for aiding and abetting a violation of customary international law.”

Posted by: annie | Apr 10 2009 16:28 utc | 17

Extremist Web Sites Are Using U.S. Hosts

On March 25, a Taliban Web site claiming to be the voice of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” boasted of a deadly new attack on coalition forces in that country. Four soldiers were killed in an ambush, the site claimed, and the “mujahideen took the weapons and ammunition as booty.”
Most remarkable about the message was how it was delivered. The words were the Taliban’s, but they were flashed around the globe by an American-owned firm located in a leafy corner of downtown Houston.
The Texas company, a Web-hosting outfit called ThePlanet, says it simply rented cyberspace to the group and had no clue about its Taliban connections….The Taliban’s account was pulled last week when a blogger noticed the connection and called attention to it. But the odd pairing of violently anti-American extremists and U.S. technology companies continues elsewhere and appears to be growing.
…
In some cases, the complaints come from governments. Pakistan has been venting to U.S. officials about militants’ use of North American Internet services since last fall, when an investigation of the Mumbai terrorist rampage, which involved Pakistanis, revealed that the attackers had communicated using Internet phone calls routed through another server based in Houston.
American and Pakistani officials say the issue has raised tensions within diplomatic and intelligence circles in both countries and has reignited a high-level internal debate over the legality and efficacy of shutting off or restricting access to such services.
A senior Pakistani official said repeated requests to Washington to shut down controversial sites have gone unheeded — and American authorities’ seeming reluctance has become “an irritant.”…..”They’re very reluctant or very slow to deal with this. We’re saying at least if you monitor them, then share with us the information so we can take them out,” the official said.

houston? i’m so shocked

Posted by: annie | Apr 10 2009 16:52 utc | 19

memory hole flotsam: recall description of “truckloads.”
Some individuals, such as the American intelligence asset Ahmed Chalabi, took Baathist records and have printed them to sell at a profit.
did not delve. Need a search engine that excludes material after 2006.

Posted by: rjj | Apr 10 2009 17:11 utc | 21

& on another note – as b & others have pointed out – why is it that it is always 30 insurgents killed – no matter whether it is afghanistan, iraq or pakistan – they must make it easy for statisticians

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Apr 10 2009 17:33 utc | 23

@#18
The aim of the Feiths, Perles, Derschowitzs was always to destroy Iraq as a secular nationalist state and replace it with a tripartite sectarian cripple of a country. This was evident before the invasion, and much more so after, with Bremner’s regime.
So it is not surprising that the Baath party infrastructure, army and bureaucracy, was destroyed. Good luck finding anything about preinvasion Iraq, apart from gassed Kurds, rape rooms, and people shredders…images dear to zionist propagandists and shabbus goyim, now replaced by Iranian booga wooga.
Re Chalabi, see here, Yediot Aharonot.
http://tinyurl.com/2pwbt
Chalabi’s Israeli link took place 13 years ago. KZ, a Defense Ministry official, revealed details of his first meeting with Chalabi in London this week. “Chalabi immediately projected Middle Eastern warmth. He is very intelligent and surprised me with his great knowledge about us. He knew each of the components of our political gallery, the ministers, the influential MKs, IDF Intelligence and Mossad heads.
………
Maj. Gen. (reserves) Danny Rothschild, who headed the IDF Intelligence research branch, received Chalabi’s telephone numbers in London in 1990 and went to meet him in secret. Only very rarely was IDF Intelligence able to make links to a senior Iraqi exile who displayed such great quantities of good will. They discussed Israel’s efforts to get information on the fate of the IDF POWs and MIAs.
………
Rothschild and Chalabi met in the sumptuous office of the Iraqi exile in western London and spoke for long hours about the future of the region. Rothschild remembers that he wrote a classified report. The information on the Israeli MIAs and POWs, which Chalabi promised through his contacts in Teheran, never materialized, neither in Rothschild’s next two meetings with Chalabi.
This did not prevent Israeli security officials from recommending Chalabi to the American administration and connecting him to senior advisers in the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA. As a result of the recommendations, James Woolsley, the former CIS director, gave him his patronage.
So much for the interesting story that Chalabi is/was an Iranian agent. Hilarious.

Posted by: Thrasyboulos | Apr 10 2009 18:27 utc | 25

Rachel Corrie, murdered in cold blood by the IDF without a peep of protest from our worthless government, would have been 30 today.

Posted by: ran | Apr 10 2009 19:10 utc | 27

Thrasyboulos @25: it’s my belief that the Ba’ath party and its partners have won the war, not lost it. And if Chalabi really destroyed all those records, then our own experts must be just as baffled as I am by the composition of the resistance.

Posted by: alabama | Apr 10 2009 21:41 utc | 29

Thrasyboulos, I get the feeling that Obama’s is going to get us out of Iraq, but as to other places, I have no earthly idea of what he’s up to. You may be right.

Posted by: alabama | Apr 11 2009 1:28 utc | 31

Thrasyboulos quotes Yediot Aharonot …

“Chalabi’s Israeli link took place 13 years ago. KZ, a Defense Ministry official, revealed details of his first meeting with Chalabi in London this week…”

…but chalabi’s been tied up with that rats’ nest at the U of chicago for decades… wohlstetter, perle, wolfowitz, khalilizad… all spiritual descendents of leo strauss.

A scion of an aristocratic Iraqi family, Chalabi fled Baghdad at the age of 13, in 1958, when the corrupt Iraqi Hashemite monarchy was overthrown by a coalition of communists and the Iraqi military. In the late 1960s, Chalabi studied mathematics at the University of Chicago with Wohlstetter, who introduced him to Richard Perle more than a decade later.
The Lie Factory mother jones and many others

the only real question about these guys is whether they really are loyal to israel, or are just using israel’s exemption from criticism to escape criticism of themselves.
wouldnt be that surprising if they wrote israel off if it advanced their project to achieve “benevolent global hegemony”… but they might be stalemated by zionist fanatics who still believe in israel’s samson option.

Posted by: wadosy | Apr 11 2009 2:09 utc | 33

again

Posted by: annie | Apr 11 2009 3:39 utc | 35

marijuana. increasingly the consensus is decriminalize or flat out legalize, regulate, TAX, which is already happening in some places. this article may seem to just provide, on the surface, further indication that Obama is either a liar or powerless, but beneath the surface, the war against the herbal wonder plant has, as its key component, a long standing corporate/federal demonization campaign against a scientifically proven beneficial and surprisingly versatile crop.
tonight i watched the curious continuity of a “special investigation” into pot culture on MSNBC, followed by Maddow talking to Kumar (Kal Penn)
you know, that funny weed smoking hollybollywood india token who was recently killed off from his stint on Fox’s House to become, get this, associate director at the white house office of public liason.
marijuana has historical/cultural/political/medicinal/economic/judicial/corporate components that make it more than just a funny sideshow. Obama can crack snide jokes about the online community’s overwhelming support of this topic, but his actions increasingly proves his words are meaningless.
i’ll say it again (cough, cough) Obama is either a liar, or powerless, when all he has to do is stop using govt’ resources to usurp public supported state decisions about the use of a plant our founders valued.

Posted by: Lizard | Apr 11 2009 6:47 utc | 37