American Bar Association lists Obama choice as part of group
WND - As President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee comes under heavy fire for allegedly being a “racist,” Judge Sonia Sotomayor is listed as a member of the National Council of La Raza, a group that’s promoted driver’s licenses for illegal aliens, amnesty programs, and no immigration law enforcement by local and state police.
According the American Bar Association, Sotomayor is a member of the NCLR, which bills itself as the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S.
Meaning “the Race,” La Raza also has connections to groups that advocate the separation of several southwestern states from the rest of America.
Over the past two days, Sotomayor has been heavily criticized for her racially charged statement: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
The remark was actually made during a 2001 speech at the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law. The lecture was published the following year in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal.
The comment is being zeroed in on by voices from the political right.
“I’m not saying she’s a racist, but the statement sure is,” columnist Ann Coulter said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“Imagine a judicial nominee said ‘my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman,’” blogged former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. “Wouldn’t they have to withdraw? New racism is no better than old racism. A white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”
Radio’s Rush Limbaugh noted, “And the libs of course say that minorities cannot be racists because they don’t have the power to implement their racism. Well, those days are gone because reverse racists certainly do have the power to implement their power. Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he’s appointed one. …”
But others are suggesting Sotomayor’s racial views will have little impact on her confirmation to the bench.
“She’s gonna get confirmed. Get out of the way of the truck,” political analyst Dick Morris said tonight on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Host Bill O’Reilly responded, “The core conservative person … does not understand that the GOP is shrinking and needs to expand.”
The NCLR is applauding the Obama for his selection of Sotomayor.
“Today is a monumental day for Latinos. Finally, we see ourselves represented on the highest court in the land,” said Janet Murguia, NCLR’s president and CEO.
As WND previously reported, La Raza was condemned in 2007 by former U.S. Rep. Charles Norwood, R-Ga., as a radical “pro-illegal immigration lobbying organization that supports racist groups calling for the secession of the western United States as a Hispanic-only homeland.”
Norwood urged La Raza to renounce its support of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan – which sees “the Race” as part of an ethnic group that one day will reclaim Aztlan, the mythical birthplace of the Aztecs. In Chicano folklore, Aztlan includes California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and parts of Colorado and Texas.
Laura Johnson, a member of the Florida National Guard, says goodbye to her daughter Britney Johnson as she prepares to deploy to Iraq yesterday
Daily Mail - The Pentagon is prepared to leave fighting forces in Iraq for as long as a decade, the top U.S. Army officer said today.
General George Casey’s comments came as a U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq today, making May the deadliest month for the American armed forces since September.
An Associated Press tally shows that at least 20 American service members have died so far this month, compared with 25 in September.
Four U.S. civilians also have been killed in Iraq since Friday.
In all, at least 4,302 members of the U.S. military have died in Iraq since the began in March 2003, according to the AP.
Gen Casey spoke despite an agreement between the United States and Iraq that would bring all American troops home by 2012.
The Army chief of staff said the world remains dangerous and unpredictable, and the Pentagon must plan for extended U.S. combat and stability operations in two wars.
‘Global trends are pushing in the wrong direction,’ Gen Casey said. ‘They fundamentally will change how the Army works.’
He spoke at an invitation-only briefing to a dozen journalists and policy analysts from Washington-based think-tanks. He said his planning envisions combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for a decade as part of a sustained U.S. commitment to fighting extremism and terrorism in the Middle East.
Gen Casey’s calculations about force levels are related to his attempt to ease the brutal deployment calendar that he said would ‘bring the Army to its knees.’
Casey would not specify how many combat units would be split between Iraq and Afghanistan. He said U.S. ground commander Gen Ray Odierno is leading a study to determine how far U.S. forces could be cut back in Iraq and still be effective.
Gen Casey said his comments about the long war in Iraq were not meant to conflict with Obama administration policies.
President Barack Obama plans to bring U.S. combat forces home from Iraq in 2010, and the United States and Iraq have agreed that all American forces would leave by 2012.
Although several senior U.S. officials have suggested Iraq could request an extension, the legal agreement the two countries signed last year would have to be amended for any significant U.S. presence to remain.
As recently as February, Defence Secretary Robert Gates reiterated the U.S. commitment to the agreement worked out with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
‘Under the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government, I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011,’ Mr Gates said during an address at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
‘We will complete this transition to Iraqi responsibility, and we will bring our troops home with the honour that they have earned.’
The United States currently has about 139,000 troops in Iraq and 52,000 in Afghanistan.
Mr Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq war as quickly as possible and refocusing U.S. resources on what he called the more important fight in Afghanistan.
That will not mean a major influx of U.S. fighting forces on the model of the Iraq ’surge,’ however.
Mr Obama has agreed to send about 21,000 combat forces and trainers to Afghanistan this year. Combined with additional forces approved before former President George W. Bush left office, the United States is expected to have about 68,000 troops in Afghanistan by the end of this year.
That’s about double the total at the end of 2008, but Mr Obama’s top military and civilian advisers have indicated the number is unlikely to grow much beyond that.
Gen Casey said several times that he wasn’t the person making policy, but the military was preparing to have a fighting force deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan for years to come. He said his planning envisions 10 combat brigades plus command and support forces committed to the two wars.
Larry Sinclair - The US Congress titles a bill that would protect Barack Obama, FactCheck.org, Joe Biden and the Media as well as Hawaii State Officials from ever having to produce the actual documents and from ever being prosecuted for presenting fraudulent documents the “Free Flow Of Information Act” yet it would do anything but provide for the free flow of information. In fact this Bill does everything to protect those who lie, forge documents and use the media and the Internet to perpetrate their frauds on the American people which Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi continue to do.
You read the bill and decide for yourself, do not take the spin that the Obama idiots have put on this. This Bill would guarantee Barack Obama will never be held accountable for producing forged birth documents and the media, MSNBC, FactCheck.org, Moveon.org, Mediamatters.org etc… will be protected from prosecution as well as from ever having to produce the actual documents.
Politico has reported on a “handful” of Obama administration officials who were in attendance at this year’s Bilderberg meeting at the Astir Palace hotel in Vouliagmeni on the Aegean Sea in Greece. James Steinberg and Richard Holbrooke gave presentations on foreign policy while Paul Volcker addressed economic issues at the elitist confab, according to the news website.
It is illegal under the Logan Act for U.S. government officials to meet behind closed doors with leaders of foreign countries.
James Steinberg, Obama’s Deputy Secretary of State, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Richard Holbrooke is Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Obama administration and is positioned at the very apex of the CFR. He is a Trilateral Commission member and a virtual fixture at Bilderberg meetings. Paul Volcker is the former chairman of the Federal Reserve under Carter and Reagan and heads up Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. He is a Trilateral member and has had a long association with the Rockefeller family, not only with his positions at Chase Bank and the Trilateral Commission, but also through membership of the Trust Committee of Rockefeller Group.
David Rockefeller is an honorary life director of the CFR, founder the Trilateral Commission, and founding member, life member, and member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group.
A source at the meetings told Politico Holbrooke briefed attendees on the Obama administration’s “unified approach” to dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan. In March, Obama announced a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan after a “review” by the State Department where Holbrooke serves as point man on the region. During Holbrooke’s appointment in January, Obama declared Afghanistan and Pakistan to be the central front in the war on terrorism.
In addition to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Bilderbergers discussed how to best exploit the global recession and swine flu, according to Bilderberg reporter Jim Tucker’s inside sources. “Bilderberg owns President Obama,” writes Tucker. “His goal, as dictated by Bilderberg, is to persuade the new Senate (to be seated in January 2010), to ratify the ICC [International Criminal Court] treaty late on a Saturday night, too late for the Sunday papers or to make changes in the Sunday TV talkies.”
The International Criminal Court was first proposed in 1998 at a UN treaty conference in Rome. The treaty purports to establish a worldwide UN criminal court that will have jurisdiction over every nation on earth. It currently does not have legitimate authority over American citizens because the Constitution does not permit the judicial function to be surrendered to an international body. According to Tucker’s sources, Bilderberg members hope to get the treaty ratified by the Senate in 2010 in violation of the Constitution.
Other Obama administration attendees included Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, James Jones, Obama’s National Security Advisor, and Lawrence Summers, Director of the White House’s National Economic Council, according to the 2009 Bilderberg attendee list.
“You will not read of this in the Bilderberg-controlled Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times or hear about it on network news broadcasts,” Tucker added.
Politico admits “the gathering produced barely a blip in the American mainstream media,” with the exception of brief reports by the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press. Most of the coverage on Bilderberg meetings is provided by the alternative press, most notably the American Free Press, Infowars, and Prison Planet.
According to Politico, the Bilderberg’s “ultra-exclusive roster of globally influential figures has captured the interest of an international network of conspiracists, who for decades have viewed the Bilderberg conference as a devious corporate-globalist scheme.” Politico’s source said that any suggestion that Bilderberg is secretly anointing world leaders or plotting global policy is the provenance of “the black helicopter crowd.”
“As in past years, the near-absence of mainstream media coverage left Bilderberg-veil-piercing duties to a group of self-styled Bilderberg hunters whose reporting and speculation fill fringe, libertarian-leaning websites, newspapers and AM radio shows popular with those whose worldview is characterized by a deep and angry suspicion of the ruling class rather than any prevailing partisan or ideological affiliation,” writes Kenneth P. Vogel for Politico.
Politico is an establishment news website owned by media mogul Robert Allbritton and edited by former Washington Post scribes. Donald Graham, CEO of the Washington Post Company, was on the 2009 Bilderberg attendee list.
Salon.com - Obama proposed a new system of Indefinite Preventive Detention yesterday in his National Security speech that is stunning in its illegality.
Obama is proposing we keep people locked up not for the crimes they have committed and we prove they committed in a court of law, but on the chance that they might commit crimes in the future. There will be no trial, for no crime exists to be charged. There is only the nebulous threat of “future acts” to justify depriving people of their liberty potentially indefinitely.
Is this justice?
Imagine you are picked up off the street for daring to write something provocative in your blog. Perhaps you vaguely threaten to relocate to Afghanistan and work with a humanitarian aid organization there. Unkown to you the humanitarian aid organization might possibly be associated with the Afghan resistence. Perhaps the head of the aid organization is the third cousin twice removed of a suspected warlord causing our march for empire trouble on the border. Based on that alone you could be kept in a cell forever. After all, letting you out of that cell might mean you really would do what you threatened and we can’t have that.
Don’t think it couldn’t happen.
Read here the story of a red crescent worker arrested for perhaps having the phone number of a possibly terror related individual, Take a Walk in Lakhdar Boumediene’s Shoes. Our government kidnapped Boumediene, tortured him, kept him in a cell for seven years and seven months, had him sign an agreement not to sue and then deported him last week.
Many men have been swept up off the streets these past eight years not for what they did or said or who they knew and associated with, but based on anonymous and often false accusations from third parties who in return collected bounties equal to several year’s wages. Many thousands still languish in our cells around the world with no hope of a hearing or legitimate trial and now Obama is proposing a system that will allow uncharged detainees to be held without trial FOREVER and he wants to make this system “legal.” Maybe the DOJ will start producing memos to back Obama up.
Indefinite detention with no trial is unconstitutional and morally abhorrent. Bush would never have been allowed to get away with it and indeed the American Civil Liberties Union and Center for Constitutional Rights have fought de facto indefinite detention for years now.
So the question now is will Obama worship, unthinking partisanship, and irrational fear rule the day and allow this grotesque new proposal to come (officially and quasi-legally) into existence?
You who think Obama cannot do wrong (hope! change!) despite the growing number of civilian corpses and refugees in Af/Pak due to his policies need to start paying more attention to what he is really doing and saying.
On this issue Obama is proving that the new boss may in fact be worse than the old boss.
If you don’t believe Obama really plans to lock people up potentially forever for “future crimes,” Rachel Maddow lays it all out coherently and eloquently in the Youtube clip above which includes footage of Obama proposing and justifying this new system of indefinite preventive detention.
The ACLU doesn’t miss a trick and their Executive Director, Anthony D. Romero, has already responded:
“We welcome President Obama’s stated commitment to the Constitution, the rule of law and the unequivocal rejection of torture. But unlike the president, we believe that continuing with the failed military commissions and creating a new system of indefinite detention without charge is inconsistent with the values that he expressed so eloquently at the National Archives today.”
From the NY Times article on Obama’s speech: “It is very troubling that he (Obama) is intent on codifying in legislation the Bush policies of indefinite detention without charge,” Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said after the speech. “That simply flies in the face of established American legal principle.”
Transcript of the YouTube clip (I typed this out by ear and it is rough - so no bitching) Maddow sums up the horror in the last paragraph:
Maddow: We will begin tonight with a tale of two speeches, both from the same man, both from President Obama. One speech that could have been billed as a ballad to the contsitution, a proclamation of American values, a repudiation of the lawless behavior of the last presidention administration. And another speech annoucing a radical new claim of presidential power that is not afforded by the constitution and has never been attempted in American history even by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Remarkably President Obama today made both of those speeches simultaneously.
Standing inside the national Archives in front of the actual original constitution, Predident Obama delivered a blistering critique of theBush administration in which he called their actions and their legacy literally a mess.
Clips from Obama’s speech yesterday: Our government made a series of hasty decisions. … Poorly planned haphazard approach. …too often we set those principles aside as luxories we could not afford. Our government made decisions based on fear, rather than foresight. The decisions that were made over the past eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable.
Maddow: “…An ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable.” Ouch! Then moments later he announced his own, his own ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism.
President Obama today proposed something new. Something called prolonged detention. Doesn’t sound that bad, right? Prolonged detention.
Did you ever see the movie Minority Report? It was based on a Philip K Dick short story. Came out in 2002 and starred Tom Cruise. Remember? He played a police officer in something called the Department of Pre-Crime. Pre-Crime is where peole are arrested and incarceratated to prevent crime they have not yet committed.
(Clip from Minority Report where Tom Cruise character arrests a man for a murder that is to be committed in the future. Man cries, but I haven’t done anything.)
Maddow: You didn’t do anything, but you’re gonna. Future murder. Creepy, right? Putting somebody in jail not for what they have done, but for what you’re very sure they are going to do.
Clip from Obama’s speech: There may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes. In some cases because evidence may be tainted but who none-the-less pose a threat to the security of the United States.
Maddow: We’re not prosecuting them for past crimes, but we need to keep them in prison because of our expectation of their future crimes.
Clip from Obama’s speech: Al Queda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States and those that we capture like other prisoners of war must be prevented from attacking us again.
Maddow: Prevented. We will incarcerate people preventively. Preventive incarceration. Indefinite detention without trial. That’s what this is. That is what Obama proposed today if you strip away the euphamisms.
One civil liberties advocate told the New York Times today quote, “We’ve known this was on the horizon for many years, but we were able to hold it off with George Bush. The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama Administrtion over these powers is really stunning.”
And it is stunning. Particularly to hear President Obama claim the power to keep people in prison indefinately with no charges against them, no conviction, no sentence, just imprisonment. It’s particularly stunning to hear him make that claim in the middle of a speech that was all about the rule of law.
Clip from Obama’s speech: We must do so with an abiding confidence in the rule of law. …our government was defending positions that undermine the rule of law. …to ensure they are in line with the rule of law.
Maddow: How can a president speak the kind of poetry that P resident Obama does about the rule of law and call for the power to indefinitely preventively imprison people because they might committ crimes in the future. How can those two things co-exist in the same man, even in the same speech?
Well that brings us to the self-consciously awkward embarrassing part of this speech today. After condeming the Bush administration for what he called their ad hoc legal strategy for trying to make things seem legal that patently weren’t, this is what President Obama proposed.
Clip of Obama Speech: That’s why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law. We must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. …We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified. …our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining Guantanamo detainees that cannot be transferred. Our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.
Maddow: You’ll construct a legal regime to make indefinite detention legal. You will… what does he say? Develop an appropriate legal regime so you can construct a whole new system outside the courts even outside the military comissions so you can indefinitely imprison people without charges. And you will build that system from scratch. What’s that somebody said about ad hoc legal strategies?
Just for context here in the United Kingdom where there isn’t even a bill of rights, there has been a major debate about whether people can be held in preventive detention. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair wanted three months to be the outer limit for how long anyone could be held. There was a big political fight about it. Parliament ended up limiting that power to 28 days. 28 days is still the longest period of preventive detention that’s allowed under law in any comparable democracy anywhere in the world
How long would President Obama’s proposed indefinite detention last? He’s not saying yet, but here is how he’s defining the threat he says makes indefinite detention necessary.
Clip of Obama’s speech: Right now, in distant training camps and in crowded cities, there are people plotting to take American lives. That will be the case a year from now, five years from now, and — in all probability — 10 years from now.
Maddow: Ten years from now? So you could get arrested today and locked up without a trial without being convicted without being sentenced for say ten years until the threat of your future criminal behavior passes? Prolonged detention he’s calling it.
This was a beautiful speech from President Obama today with patriotic even moving language about the rule of law and the constitution and one of the most radical proposals for defying the constitution we have ever heard made to the American people.
Infowars - A despairing country elected a president who promised change. Americans arrived from every state to witness in bitter cold Obama’s swearing-in ceremony. The mall was packed in a way that it has never been for any other president.
The people’s good will toward Obama and the expectations they had for him were sufficient for Obama to end the gratuitous wars and enact major reforms. But Obama has deserted the people for the interests. He is relying on his non-threatening demeanor and rhetoric to convince the people that change is underway.
The change that we are witnessing is in Obama, not in policies. Obama is morphing into Dick Cheney.
Obama has not been in office four months and already a book could be written about his broken promises.
Obama said he would close the torture prison, Guantanamo, and abolish the kangaroo courts known as military tribunals. But now he says he is going to reform the tribunals and continue the process, but without confessions obtained with torture. Getting behind Obama’s validation of the Bush/Cheney policy, House Democrats pulled the budget funding that was to be used for closing Guantanamo.
The policy of kidnapping people (usually on the basis of disinformation supplied by their enemies) and whisking them off to Third World prisons to be interrogated is to be continued. Again, Obama has substituted a “reform” for his promise to abolish an illegal policy. Rendition, Obama says, has also been reformed and will no longer involve torture. How would anyone know? Is Obama going to assign a U.S. government agent to watch over the treatment given to disappeared people by Third World thugs? Given the proclivity of American police to brutalize U.S. citizens, nothing can save the victims of rendition from torture.
Obama has defended the Bush/Cheney warrantless wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency and broadened the government’s legal argument that “sovereign immunity” protects government officials from prosecution and civil suits when they violate U.S. law and constitutional protections of citizens. Obama’s Justice Department has taken up the defense of Donald Rumsfeld against a case brought by detainees whose rights Rumsfeld violated.
In a signing statement this month, Obama abandoned his promise to protect whistleblowers who give information of executive branch illegality to Congress.
Obama is making even more expansive claims of executive power than Bush. As Bruce Fein puts it: “In principle, President Obama is maintaining that victims of constitutional wrongdoing by the U.S. government should be denied a remedy in order to prevent the American people and the world at large from learning of the lawlessness perpetrated in the name of national security and exacting political and legal accountability.”
Obama, in other words, is committed to covering up the Bush regime’s crimes and to ensuring that his own regime can continue to operate in the same illegal and unconstitutional ways.
Obama is fighting the release of the latest batch of horrific torture photos that have come to light. Obama claims that release of the photos would anger insurgents and cause them to kill our troops. That, of course, is nonsense. Those resisting occupation of their land by U.S. troops and NATO mercenaries are already dedicated to killing our troops, and they know that Americans torture whomever they capture. Obama is fighting the release of the photos because he knows the barbaric image that the photos present of the U.S. military will undermine the public’s support for the wars that enrich the military/security complex, appease the Israel Lobby, and repay the campaign contributions that elect the U.S. government.
As for bringing the troops home from Iraq, this promise, too, has been reformed. To the consternation of his supporters, Obama is leaving 50,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The others are being sent to Afghanistan and to Pakistan, where on Obama’s watch war has broken out big time with already one million refugees from the indiscriminate bombing of civilians.
Meanwhile, war with Iran remains a possibility, and at Washington’s insistence, NATO is conducting war games on former Soviet territory, thus laying the groundwork for future enrichment of the U.S. military/security complex. The steeply rising U.S. unemployment rate will provide the needed troops for Obama’s expanding wars.
Obama can give a great speech without mangling the language. He can smile and make people believe his rhetoric. The world, or much of it, seems to be content with the soft words that now drape Dick Cheney’s policies in pursuit of executive supremacy and U.S. hegemony.
American Bar Association lists Obama choice as part of group
