NOAH GIMBEL: On Tuesday, January 17, volunteers from the campaign to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker submitted over a million petitions to the state government accountability board. A year ago, Governor Walker's Budget Repair Bill drew major global attention to the Midwestern state. Promising to strip the collective bargaining rights from most public-sector workers, the controversial legislation inspired some of the largest labor protests that the state, and indeed the country, had seen in decades. With a Republican majority in both the state house and senate, the bill passed after protestors spent weeks in and around the Capitol. But the opposition of the people of Wisconsin did not die there. They determined to recall the governor.

Mary Bottari, Director of the Center for Media and Democracy's Real Economy Project, has followed the recall campaign from the start.

MARY BOTTARI, CENTER FOR MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY: Well the drive to recall Scott Walker was truly a grassroots movement. It was folks out in the cold standing by the side of the road waving petitions, setting up permanent little tables in front of coffee shops or in front of grocery stores or department stores, or driving around the state. You could see people of all ages, a lot of retirees out there, some with canes, working really hard on the recall effort. It was organized under rubric of an organization called United Wisconsin, which was grassroots folks just coming together and making this happen. And then they joined forces later in the day with the Democratic party to get those petitions filed.

GIMBEL: Despite the recall efforts, Governor Walker promises that his job-creation strategy needs more time, and that his union-busting budget cuts are an integral part of his economic policy.

BOTTARI: Well, Scott Walker's response to all this—and he did not do a lot of interviews on the day the petitions were filed. His talking point on this has been it's out-of-state unions: this whole thing is being rigged up by out-of-state unions, with out-of-state money and out-of-state people and out-of-state volunteers. This is a very familiar theme to Wisconsonites. Wisconsin is in its sixth month of straight job losses right now. We lost 14,000 jobs in November.

GIMBEL: The success of the recall campaign thus far suggests that Wisconsonites aren't willing to wait patiently for Walker's vision to unfold. But that's not to say that the recall is a sure thing. Last August, recall elections were held in Wisconsin for six Republican state senators. As money flowed into the election from both sides, only two of those seats were lost to Democrats, leaving them one seat short of a majority.

But according to Mary Bottari, the ideological rift between the governor and the people of the state has since widened even further.

BOTTARI: Folks just think that trying to ram the bill through the legislature, you know, collecting money from outside the state, outside interests, being associated with groups like ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is just not what we're used to here in Wisconsin. And we slashed $1.6 billion out of schools here in Wisconsin at the same time that we gave $2 billion in tax breaks to our richest citizens and corporations in the state. So these are the issues that people have been dwelling on. And the last poll taken on the recall issue that was made public was in November of last year, and at that point 58 percent of people in the state supported the recall effort.

GIMBEL: And as recall petitions are counted, those numbers are proving meaningful.

BOTTARI: The numbers coming out of Wisconsin are astounding. They gathered 1 million signatures for the recall of Scott Walker, the governor, and 900,000 more signatures for the recall of lieutenant governor and four state senators. It was not an easy task to do. Wisconsin has set one of the highest recall bars in the United States of the 19 states that have recall statutes. You have to get 25 percent of the vote from the last statewide election. So these folks had to gather 540,000 signatures to trigger this recall. They doubled that: they got almost 50 percent of the votes in the last statewide election.

GIMBEL: As a recall election is now almost certain to take place as early as this summer, the people of Wisconsin will now hold primary elections to field a candidate to run against Walker. For his part, the governor will not show up for the race empty-handed.

BOTTARI: On the day the petition was filed—actually, the hour the petition was filed, Scott Walker was on Wall Street. He was at a fundraiser hosted by Citibank, the world's original too-big-to-fail bank that received $45 billion in federal bailout funds. He was there for a fundraiser. Right now, as he is under recall, he can raise unlimited sums. It's a strange quirk in our recall law, and until election is actually triggered, he can get checks, and unlimited amounts, from people around the United States. And he's making these fundraising forays down to—for instance, he went down to Texas and he got a $250,000 check from Bob Perry, the Texas Swift Boat billionaire. He's now on Wall Street. And that little fundraiser was hosted by Frank Greenberg of AIG, the company that took the American financial crisis and turned it into a global disaster by selling credit default swaps around the world. So that's where Scott Walker was on the day this recall petition was filed.

GIMBEL: In a year full of elections, the recall of Scott Walker will doubtless be among the most closely watched and the most expensive.

For the Real News, I'm Noah Gimbel in Washington.

Originally Posted By DYNV
they were talking about illegal wars like it was everyday business, like buying milk at the corner-store (deapanneuuur), innocent killings ratio I simply can't qualify ; a Nazi lining up 10 innocent after one of their own died pale in comparison.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the 25th anniversary of FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the media watch group in New York, which just celebrated the 25 years of the reports they’ve come out, documenting media bias and censorship, and scrutinized media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints.

One of those who addressed the hundreds of people who gathered to celebrate FAIR was the world-renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky. This is some of what he had to say.

NOAM CHOMSKY: The U.S. and its allies will do anything they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world. The reason is very simple. Across the region, an overwhelming majority of the population regards the United States as the main threat to their interests. In fact, opposition to U.S. policy is so high that a considerable majority think the region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons. In Egypt, the most important country, that’s 80 percent. Similar figures elsewhere. There are some in the region who regard Iran as a threat — about 10 percent. Well, plainly, the U.S. and its allies are not going to want governments which are responsive to the will of the people. If that happens, not only will the U.S. not control the region, but it will be thrown out. So that’s obviously an intolerable result.

In the case of WikiLeaks, there was an interesting aside on this. The revelations from WikiLeaks that got the most publicity — headlines, euphoric commentary and so on — were that the Arabs support U.S. policy on Iran. They were quoting comments of Arab dictators. Yes, they claim to support U.S. policy on Iran. There was no mention of the Arab — of the Arab population, because it doesn’t matter. If the dictators support us, and the population is under control, then what’s the problem? This is like imperialism. What’s the problem if it works? As long as they can control their populations, fine. They can have campaigns of hatred; our friendly dictators will keep them under control. That’s the reaction not just of the diplomatic service in the State Department or of the media who reported this, but also of the general intellectual community. There is no comment on this. In fact, coverage of these polls is precisely zero in the United States, literally. There’s a few comments in England, but very little. It just doesn’t matter what the population thinks, as long as they’re under control.

Well, from these observations, you can conclude pretty quickly, pretty easily, what policies are going to be. You can almost spell them out. So in the case of an oil-rich country with a reliable, obedient dictator, they’re given free rein. Saudi Arabia is the most important. There were — it’s the most repressive, extremist, strongest center of Islamic fundamentalism, missionaries who spread ultra-radical Islamism from jihadis and so on. But they’re obedient, they’re reliable, so they can do what they like. There was a planned protest in Saudi Arabia. The police presence was so overwhelming and intimidating that literally nobody even was willing to show up in the streets of Riyadh. But that was fine. The same in Kuwait. There was a small demonstration, very quickly crushed, no comment.

Actually, the most interesting case in many respects is Bahrain. Bahrain is quite important for two reasons. One reason, which has been reported, is that it’s the home port of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, major military force in the region. Another more fundamental reason is that Bahrain is about 70 percent Shiite, and it’s right across the causeway from eastern Saudi Arabia, which also is majority Shiite and happens to be where most of Saudi oil is. Saudi Arabia, of course, is the main energy resource, has been since the '40s. By curious accident of history and geography, the world's major energy resources are located pretty much in Shiite regions. They’re a minority in the Middle East, but they happen to be where the oil is, right around the northern part of the Gulf. That’s eastern Saudi Arabia, southern Iraq and southwestern Iran. And there’s been a concern among planners for a long time that there might be a move towards some sort of tacit alliance in these Shiite regions moving towards independence and controlling the bulk of the world’s oil. That’s obviously intolerable.

So, going back to Bahrain, there was an uprising, tent city in the central square, like Tahrir Square. The Saudi-led military forces invaded Bahrain, giving the security forces there the opportunity to crush it violently, destroyed the tent city, even destroyed the Pearl, which is the symbol of Bahrain; invaded the major hospital complex, threw out the patients and the doctors; been regularly, every day, arresting human rights activists, torturing them, occasionally a sort of a pat on the wrist, but nothing much. That’s very much the Carothers principle. If actions correspond to our strategic and economic objectives, that’s OK. We can have elegant rhetoric, but what matters is facts.

Well, that’s the oil-rich obedient dictators. What about Egypt, most important country, but not a center of — major center of oil production? Well, in Egypt and Tunisia and other countries of that category, there is a game plan, which is employed routinely, so commonly it takes virtual genius not to perceive it. But when you have a favored dictator — for those of you who might think of going into the diplomatic service, you might as well learn it — when there’s a favored dictator and he’s getting into trouble, support him as long as possible, full support as long as possible. When it becomes impossible to support him — like, say, maybe the army turns against him, business class turns against him — then send him off somewhere, issue ringing declarations about your love of democracy, and then try to restore the old regime, maybe with new names. And that’s done over and over again. It doesn’t always work, but it’s always tried — Somoza, Nicaragua; Shah in Iran; Marcos in the Philippines; Duvalier in Haiti; Chun in South Korea; Mobutu in the Congo; Ceausescu is one of Western favorites in Romania; Suharto in Indonesia. It’s completely routine. And that’s exactly what’s going on in Egypt and Tunisia. OK, we support them right to the end — Mubarak in Egypt, right to the end, keep supporting him. Doesn’t work any longer, send him off to Sharm el-Sheikh, pull out the rhetoric, try to restore the old regime. That’s, in fact, what the conflict is about right now. As Amy said, we don’t know where it’s going to turn now, but that’s what’s going on.

Well, there’s another category. The other category is an oil-rich dictator who’s not reliable, who’s a loose cannon. That’s Libya. And there, there’s a different policy: try to get a more reliable dictator. And that’s exactly what’s happening. Of course, describe it as a humanitarian intervention. That’s another near historical universal. You check history, virtually every resort to force, by whoever it is, is accompanied by the most noble rhetoric. It’s all completely humanitarian. That includes Hitler taking over Czechoslovakia, the Japanese fascists rampaging in northeast China. In fact, it’s Mussolini in Ethiopia. There’s hardly any exceptions. So you produce that, and the media and commentators present — pretend they don’t notice that it has no — carries no information, because it’s reflexive.

And then — but in this case, they could also add something else, which has been repeated over and over again, namely, the U.S. and its allies were intervening in response to a request by the Arab League. And, of course, we have to recognize the importance of that. Incidentally, the response from the Arab League was tepid and was pretty soon rescinded, because they didn’t like what we were doing. But put that aside. At the very same time, the Arab League produced — issued another request. Here’s a headline from a newspaper: "Arab League Calls for Gaza No-Fly Zone." Actually, I’m quoting from the London Financial Times. That wasn’t reported in the United States. Well, to be precise, it was reported in the Washington Times, but basically blocked in the U.S., like the polls, like the polls of Arab public opinion, not the right kind of news. So, "Arab League Calls for Gaza No-Fly Zone," that’s inconsistent with U.S. policy, so that, we don’t have to honor and observe, and that disappeared.

Now, there are some polls that are reported. So here’s one from the New York Times a couple days ago. I’ll quote it. It said, "The poll found that a majority of Egyptians want to annul the 1979 peace treaty with Israel that has been a cornerstone of Egyptian foreign policy and the region’s stability." Actually, that’s not quite accurate. It’s been a cornerstone of the region’s instability, and that’s exactly why the Egyptian population wants to abandon it. The agreement essentially eliminated Egypt from the Israel-Arab conflict. That means eliminated the only deterrent to Israeli military action. And it freed up Israel to expand its operations — illegal operations — in the Occupied Territories and to attack its northern neighbor, to attack Lebanon. Shortly after, Israel attacked Lebanon, killed 20,000 people, destroyed southern Lebanon, tried to impose a client regime, didn’t quite make it. And that was understood. So the immediate reaction to the peace treaty in Israel was that there are things about it we don’t like — we’re going to have to abandon our settlements in the Sinai, in the Egyptian Sinai. But it has a good side, too, because now the only deterrent is gone; we can use force and violence to achieve our other goals. And that’s exactly what happened. And that’s exactly why the Egyptian population is opposed to it. They understand that, as does everyone in the region.

On the other hand, the Times wasn’t lying when they said that it led to the region’s stability. And the reason is because of the meaning of the word "stability" as a technical meaning. Stability is — it’s kind of like democracy. Stability means conformity to our interests. So, for example, when Iran tries to expand its influence in Afghanistan and Iraq, neighboring countries, that’s called "destabilizing." It’s part of the threat of Iran. It’s destabilizing the region. On the other hand, when the U.S. invades those countries, occupies them, half destroys them, that’s to achieve stability. And that is very common, even to the point where it’s possible to write — former editor of Foreign Affairs — that when the U.S. overthrew the democratic government in Chile and instituted a vicious dictatorship, that was because the U.S. had to destabilize Chile to achieve stability. That’s in one sentence, and nobody noticed it, because that’s correct, if you understand the meaning of the word "stability." Yeah, you overthrow a parliamentary government, you install a dictatorship, you invade a country and kill 20,000 people, you invade Iraq and kill hundreds of thousands of people — that’s all bringing about stability. Instability is when anyone gets in the way.

AMY GOODMAN: World-renowned political dissident and linguist, Noam Chomsky, speaking at the 25th anniversary of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

From: Darryl Robinson
Date: Friday 12 March 2010 2.47pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Permission Slip

Hello David
I don't see what any of that has to do with this play. It's important for children to have balance in their life and spirituality is as important in a childs life as everything else. There's an old saying that life without religion is life without beauty.
Darryl Robinson, School Chaplain



From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 12 March 2010 3.36pm
To: Darryl Robinson
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Permission Slip

Dear Darryl,
I agree completely that balance is an important component of a child's education. I will assume then that you will also be organising a class excursion to a play depicting the fifteen billion year expansion of the universe from its initial particle soup moments following the big bang through to molecule coalescion, galaxy and planetary formation and eventually life?
Perhaps your church youth group could put together an interpretive dance routine representing the behaviour of Saturn's moon Hyperion, shattered by an ancient collision and falling randomly back together, tugged to and fro by the gravitational pull of Titan, sixteen sister moons, the multi-billionfold moonlets of Saturn’s rings, Saturn’s gravitational field, companion planets, the variability’s of Sol, stars, galaxy, neighbouring galaxies... or possibly not, according to an old saying, there is no beauty in this.
Also, while I understand that the play is to be held outside school grounds, due to the fact that it is illegal to present medieval metaphysic propaganda in public schools, it is also my understanding that you are now required by law, as of last year, to go by the title Christian Volunteer rather than School Chaplain. A memo you may have missed or filed in your overflowing 'facts that cease to exist when they are ignored' tray.
Regards, David.

Originally Posted By CJBSEXX
Using toilet paper will not kill whales !

DynV about 1 hour ago

What a nice track!

Originally Posted By M-A-X
Non, ce l'était pas. Très bon party!

THOMAS DRAKE, WHISTLEBLOWER, FMR. NSA OFFICIAL: I've entitled my acceptance speech "Is This the Country We Want to Keep?" I want to first thank the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence for bestowing upon us this truly special honor.

I want to thank you, Jesselyn, for your introduction to me as a fellow whistleblower. I simply cannot say enough about your incredible energy, your diligence, your persistence, your dedication, and your tireless efforts that you so well demonstrated and displayed on my behalf during the government's criminal case against me. It was Jesselyn who wrote and spoke about my case with such outstanding focus and compelling clarity, in terms of both content and context. It was Jesselyn who so masterfully crafted the message about the government's egregious abuse of protected communications in their criminal indictment against me as a whistleblower for the purpose of reprisal, retaliation, retribution, suppression, and stamping out dissent. It was Jesselyn that got my case in spades and completely understood the gross injustices I experienced at the hands of our own government because I was a whistleblower. It was Jesselyn's many, many radio interviews, blogs, news articles, op-eds, TV appearances in both the alternative and the mainstream media, as well as her countless and untold hours working behind the scenes on my behalf, that made a huge and telling difference. Suffice it to say, Jesselyn truly became my public voice and my public conscience, speaking out and writing fearlessly and courageously, bringing truth to power with all her truly superb outreach and advocacy. And so I'm incredibly grateful for all that you have been, Jesselyn, and have done for me as a whistleblower, and the totality of your superb efforts and actions that so immensely helped in achieving a huge and decisive victory against an implacable government prosecution, and thereby keeping me free.

We live in sobering times, a time in which liberty is under significant and persistent duress. Jesselyn and I are two whistleblowers yoked together by the tragedy of 9/11. As government employees we became embroiled in two of this era's most controversial programs in their infancy—torture and warrantless wiretapping—as prime evidence of the government's abject abuse of power and the bypassing of the law.

As a Justice Department ethics attorney, Jesselyn advised that the FBI not interrogate John Walker Lindh, an American, without counsel. The FBI ignored this advice, and the interrogation formed the base of a criminal prosecution in which Radek's conclusion that the FBI committed an ethics violation disappeared from Justice files and was withheld—I repeat, withheld—from the court.

In my case, while a senior official at the National Security Agency, I found out about the use of electronic eavesdropping on Americans, turning this country into the equivalent of a foreign nation, for the purposes of blanket surveillance and data mining, blatantly disregarding a 23-year legal regime that was the exclusive means for the conduct of such electronic collection and surveillance, which carried criminal sanctions when violated. I also discovered that NSA had withheld critical and crucial intelligence prior to 9/11 and after 9/11, as well as data and information that was available but remained undiscovered, and if shared—if shared—could have made a decisive difference alone in preventing the 9/11 attacks from ever happening. I also learned about a massively expensive and failing surveillance program under development called Trailblazer that largely served as nothing more than a funding vehicle to enrich government contractors and keep government program managers in charge, when a cheap, highly effective, and operational alternative called ThinThread was available in-house that fully protected Americans' privacy rights under the law, while also providing superior intelligence to this nation.

These secret programs which deliberately bypassed the Constitution and existing laws were born during the first few critical weeks and months following 9/11 as a result of a willful decision made by the very highest levels of this government. Such shortcuts and end-runs were not and never necessary, as lawful [incompr.] existed that would have vastly improved our intelligence capability with the very best of American ingenuity and innovation, as well as time-honored noncoercive interrogation techniques.

Jesselyn and I both—we both raised our concerns through internal channels, including our bosses and inspector generals. In my case, I also spoke with the NSA Office of General Counsel and became a material witness for two 9/11 congressional investigations. I also became a material witness for a multiyear Department of Defense Inspector General audit of Trailblazer and ThinThread, NSA, based on a September 2002 hotline complaint that attempted to expose massive fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement at NSA and the NSA's use of a data collection program that was far more costly, far more threatening to American citizens' privacy rights, and far less effective in supporting intelligence requirements, rather than the readily available alternative named ThinThread. This complaint was signed by my former NSA colleagues Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis, and Bill Binney, as well as Diane Roark, the former professional staffer from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who had oversight accountability for NSA, and had all retired by this time from government service. I was the unnamed senior official in this complaint, working directly at NSA.

The throwing out of ThinThread was due to a multibillion dollar buy-versus-make, money interests, and political connections, all surrounding personal gain and institutional self-interest. The throwing out of ThinThread was also due to blatant ignorance and disregard for policy under the Federal Acquisition Regulations and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. Either way, the same result: critical breakthrough information technology; security and defense innovation and ingenuity. The very best of who we are as Americans was denied to the American people and precluded from use in providing for the common defense under the Constitution, as were a number of other programs, with an incalculable loss of intelligence, as part of the great historical tragedy of what could have been, including the disruption, even the prevention, of 9/11.

ThinThread had a laudatory purpose: find the terrorists, modernize a very outdated signals intelligence system from end to end, and thus protecting the U.S., its soldiers, and its allies by doing it all legally. However, it got caught up in the bureaucratic jealousy, turf, and debilitating internal corporate political jockeying and bickering that afflicts all too many large organizations once they necessarily become more organized and bureaucratic after departing the initial creative stage.

ThinThread also illustrates in spades the widespread difficulty of protecting the iconoclastic, creative, and out-of-the-box, contrary-to-the-status-quo thinking people and their new, even revolutionary ideas, a problem especially difficult within an—when an organization has an effective monopoly in this country like NSA. In part it was a threat because it was developed rapidly on a shoestring budget by a small staff, the NSA equivalent of a Silicon Valley garage startup, with a far superior, vastly less complex design, and only cost about $3 million to get it to a fully operational and ready demonstration stage that worked, instead of the multiple billions spent over several years on the old technology with almost nothing to show for it except for some very fancy PowerPoint slides.

With all the unitary executive privilege, all the secrecy and exigent conditions used as the excuse to torture, deny due process, and engage in off-the-books electronic surveillance, Jesselyn and I followed all the rules as whistleblowers until it fundamentally conflicted with our oath to uphold the Constitution. Then we both made a fateful choice to exercise our First Amendment rights. We went to the press with patently unclassified information, about which the public had a right to know.

However—however—rather than address its own corruption, ineptitude, and illegality, the government made us targets of federal criminal leak investigations, part of a vicious—I repeat, vicious—campaign against whistleblowers that started under Bush and has now come to full fruition under Obama, inverting the logical paradigm. We were transmogrified from public servants trying to improve our government, into traitors and enemies of the state. The government subjected us to severe retaliation that started with forcing us from our jobs as career public servants, rendering us unemployed and unemployable, while [incompr.] a wrecking ball into the conditions of our jobs, in my case a security clearance, and in Jesselyn's case, state bar licensure. We were blacklisted and no longer had a stream of income, while simultaneously incurring attorneys fees and necessitating second mortgages on our respective homes. But that was nothing, that was nothing compared to the overkill reprisal to come, placement on the no-fly list for Jesselyn and prosecution under the Espionage Act for me.

What we experienced sends unequivocally a chilling message, an unequivocally chilling message about what the government can and will do when one speaks truth to power: a direct form of political repression and censorship. If sharing issues—if sharing issues of significant and even grave public concern which do not in any way compromise our national security is now considered a criminal act, we have strayed far from what our founding fathers envisioned. When exercising First Amendment rights is now considered espionage, this is anathema to a free, open, and democratic government.

As Americans, we did everything we could to defend the constitutional rights of all U.S. citizens, which were violated and abused by our own government when there was no reason to do so at all, except as an excuse to go to the proverbial dark side, by abrogating unaccountable, irresponsible, and off-the-books unilateral executive power in secret. Once exposed, these unconstitutional detours were predictably justified by vague and undefined claims of national security, while aided and abetted by shameless fearmongering on the part of government. And so I must say, I must say it is pure sophistry to argue that the government can operate secretly with unbridled immunity and impunity, especially for such blatant illegalities as torture and wiretapping without warrants, from those it is constitutionally bound to serve and protect when providing for the common defense of this nation, and then persecute and prosecute the very people who revealed such wrongdoing and malfeasance.

Before the war on terrorism, our country well recognized the importance of free speech, privacy, legal counsel, and the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. If we sacrifice these basic liberties according to the false dichotomy that it is required for security, then we transform ourselves from an oasis of freedom into a [incompr.] that terrorizes its own citizens when they step out of line. These are the hallmarks—these are the hallmarks—these are the hallmarks of tyranny and despotism, not democracy, and are increasingly alien to the Constitution and our American way of life.

Jesselyn and I stand alongside other whistleblowers before us, like Dan Ellsberg and Coleen Rowley, who also nominated me for the Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize, as well as Larry Wilkerson, an Integrity in Intelligence award recipient. We did not take an oath to see secrecy and subterfuge used as cover for subverting the Constitution and violating the law. Our oath to the Constitution took primacy.

But I fear for the Republic. When Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman at the end of the Constitutional Convention and it went out for ratification to the 13 states, he was asked, what has been created here? He said, a Republic, if you can keep it. So what expired on 9/11? The Constitution?

Jesselyn and I became whistleblowers, and our whistleblowing was both a warning and an alert to those in government, and eventually the public, about serious wrongdoings and dangers and malfeasance created and then concealed within our government. Our whistleblowing also occurred because there was profound institutional failure, a multilayered breakdown in accountability. And today we have a frightening lack of responsibility and accountability within the national security complex, and it poses—I will mince no words here—it poses a direct threat to all our personal freedoms, as well as a clear and present danger to our constitutional republic. Both cannot coexist as a social and legal contract is being broken. Our government has profoundly lost its constitutional compass and it's been tainted to its core. And yet it is our enshrined liberties, it is our enshrined liberties that are our national security. What country do we want to keep?

Jesselyn and I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution, versus an oath of loyalty to the organization and [incompr.] used to bypass and break the law. But what is meant by personal integrity and loyalty? Our personal integrity meant that we held consistently firm and true to the ideals and values centered on upholding and defending the Constitution. By loyalty, we were steadfast in our allegiance of law of the land. However, loyalty when blind in this place ceases to be a virtue and turns into a corrupting mechanism to hide and obfuscate wrongdoing, embarrassment, and coverup. We blew the whistle because we saw grave injustice and wrongdoing occurring within our respective organizations.

In my recently successfully concluded case that ended decisively in my favor, the government wanted to put me away in prison for many, many years—in fact, at one point they threatened me with 35 years in prison—for simply telling the truth as a whistleblower and exposing government wrongdoing and illegalities. The government found out everything they could about me and turned me into an enemy of the state, everything they could about me over many years, before I was even indicted. Having this secret ability, this secret ability to collect and analyze data with few if any substantial constraints, especially on people, is seductively powerful, and when particularly done without the person's permission and done so in secret, it is the ultimate form of control over another. So it shows [incompr.] big business and violate the Constitution. All of it was so unnecessary. American ingenuity and the Constitution were quite sufficient to protect and defend the country with the best and under the law. There was no—I repeat—no need to go to the dark side.

Those who've served in the military understand what it means when the flag is flown upside down. It means you're under duress. It is a sign of distress. When the government hides behind its veil of secrecy, when it professes openness and transparency while practicing opaqueness and deceit, that's when its citizens need to become very aware of what that future might hold regarding what liberties they believe they possess that are then eroded, and even taken away, in the name of national security.

Modern governments today increasingly perform mass surveillance of their citizens, explaining—explaining that they believe that it's necessary to protect them from dangerous groups such as terrorists, criminals, or politically subversive dissenters, in order to track the citizenry and maintain social control. Read the history books. We are fast approaching—we are fast approaching a genuine surveillance society in the United States, a dark Orwellian future where every move, our every transaction, our every communication, and our every contact is recorded, compiled, and stored away, ready to be examined and used against us by the authorities whenever they want to at any time. What country do we want to keep?

Mass surveillance will erode our privacy, and yet privacy is an absolutely essential prerequisite to the exercise of our precious individual freedoms, the inalienable rights we have as human beings to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness. And yet the erosion of privacy also weakens the very constitutional foundations and boundaries of our democracy.

Five centuries ago, Machiavelli explained how to undertake a revolution from above without most people even noticing. On his Discourses on Livy, he wrote that one, quote, "must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different from the old ones", unquote. In other words, keep the old government structures; meanwhile, you make profound changes to the actual system, because the appearances are all that most people notice. So, today, instead of seeing the mere corpse of the republic in which we supposedly live, we only see the clothing. Those clothes would appear to look the same as before, even if increasingly worn. We have had a quiet revolution that has not eliminated our elected representatives; it has simply made them largely irrelevant, especially since Congress is largely preoccupied with Wall Street.

It has been a long journey to our current state of affairs, and wars and conflicts have been a major catalyst in that journey, especially since World War II. Most wars fought by the United States have added power to the executive branch while taking away power from the Legislature. I consider—again, being a student of history, I consider the immediate aftermath of World War II as a real turning point, when the American dream began to go south, at the very moment when the U.S. sat astride the world at the pinnacle of power. And therein lies our problem, for this is when the American republic began its transformation to a national security state and then exponentially accelerated as a result of 9/11 into a top-secret America. Eisenhower warned us about the rise in this kind of a complex in his farewell address in 1961. Frank Church feared the future and that given the right circumstances, turning back might not be possible if the national security surveillance complex turned its enormous capabilities on the U.S. with even more advanced technology. We now live in a post-9/11 America, only suddenly to discover that we are not doing the driving, our brakes are failing, and others are in the front and back seat, and some are even following us.

What country do we want to keep?

We increasingly no longer govern ourselves, as in of, for, and by the people. Consider the nonstop number of U.S. military actions around the world these days. And when did Congress last issue a formal declaration of war, the only branch of government, the only body in the United States federal government system that can actually declare war? When was that? Consider the ramming through—is absolutely up-to-date, right now, in this moment, what's going on. Consider the ramming through of the Patriot Act a bare month after 9/11, an act, I would add, that NSA was already violating with even more secret programs when it was obvious that not a single member of Congress read it through thoroughly. Does any single member of Congress read their bills through thoroughly? And have you wondered what is really the secret interpretation by the executive branch of section 215 in the Patriot Act? And what about Section 1031, 1031, the current National Defense Authorization Act bill that would authorize the indefinite detention, I repeat, the indefinite detention of American citizens.

I used to monitor East Germany when I flew in RC-135s during the latter part of the Cold War—an absolutely fascist state. Given what I have experienced over the past number of years, I have a lot of bad memories.

Or how about habeas corpus, gutted on October 14 of this year when Janice Rogers Brown of the Appeals Court for the District of Columbia held that in habeas suits—for all the lawyers, at both the table and in audience, this should really ring with disturbing alarm—judges must grant official government records the presumption of regularity, defined as simply accepting that an official act has been done and that it will be presumed until the contrary is proved, that the said act complied with any necessary formalities and the person who did it was duly appointed. With such a massively expanded ability by the government to spy on your personal life, we might as well bid adieu to the Fourth Amendment, the foundation of a citizen's integrity as an individual person and in their personal affects in this country, as well as your ability to speak and associate freely with others under the Fourth Amendment. Have we become the proverbial boiling frogs?

What country do we want to keep?

Consider the conviction, as I summarized now for you, held by this country's founding fathers, that a functioning constitutional republic and democracy requires what? An informed citizenry. So what happens in the case of an uninformed citizenry? The experiment—the experiment in government by the people is doomed to failure and would inevitably transform into what we increasingly see today. Is this the day of [incompr.] Is our exceptionalism an excuse to end-run the very foundational precepts of this republic and violate certain [incompr.] that must never ever be transgressed, like torture is never—. I went through all those things you hear about in terms of enhanced interrogation techniques. I went through that as an air crew member during the Cold War, just to know what it was like. Imagine my horror when I read and heard from others what we did—used it for. Torture is never an acceptable human value under any circumstances. And eroding away the First and Fourth Amendments removes the very heart of the experiment's exceptionalism. Machiavelli had it right, and as the old song goes, something's got to give.

What else are we willing to give up? I gave up a lot. I have a lot to deal with in facing what I faced with the government for the past four years.

Are we becoming the national security state under surveillance always, the N.S.S.U.S.A.? Is secret government the new fig leaf for a quaint and outmoded Constitution? Orwell's 1984 is real, and now already, I repeat, already screamingly relevant. Only the government can create a police state. No one else can. And our technology can now make that happen. There is a long list, a long list of both private industry and government actions that are ripping away our privacy and our Fourth Amendment rights as we speak and our ability to speak freely about it. I challenge you, I challenge you all to demand accountability, to update our protections in the internet age, to insist upon adherence to the Constitution, conservative and liberal and independent like. Even in the open press we know enough about what both the industry and government are doing.

Do you care? What will you do about it? What country do we want to keep?

Do we want to continue to have a burgeoning military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-surveillance-cybersecurity-media complex? For whom does it benefit? Do we want to concede the eroding of basic human rights? Why? Because we fear enemies and that creates a need for security, and are then persuaded that human rights are ignored because of the primacy of the national security state beyond legitimate protections and identifying those who would actually do us harm, both abroad and domestically, as a unifying cause for obsessing over national security and the use of fear by the government to control the public and private agenda? What country do we really want to keep?

So I leave you with this as I channel Frederick Douglass. On August 3, 1857, Frederick Douglass delivered a West India Emancipation speech. At Canandaigua, New York, on the 23rd anniversary of the event, he said, quote (please listen very carefully): "The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters." Let me translate into today's language. Power and those in control concede nothing, I repeat, concede nothing without a demand. They never have and they never will. Every one of us, every one of us in this room and beyond this room, each and every one of us must keep demanding, must keep fighting, must keep thundering, must keep plowing, must keep on keeping things struggling, must speak out, and must speak up until justice is served, because where there is no justice there can be no peace.

What country do we want to truly keep? Consider what actions you will take when you leave this evening. After all, it is our country. So take the necessary action to conserve the very best of who we are and can be for this generation, as well as future generations to come.

Kill, kill yourself
Kill, kill your weakest mind
You are crying with a rusty knife
You find comfort in nasty drugs
This is your life

I am the speed of blood
I am made by speed of blood
My blood made by evil white
My soul made by evil black
This is my knife

I am the speed
Speed of blood

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Washington. The congressional supercommittee having failed to reach an agreement on deficit cutting is now supposed to give rise to triggered cuts in social and military spending, military spending cuts around $60 billion a year starting in 2013 for ten years. If you set aside the underlying assumptions that American needs such a big military, one of the defense of such a budget has been the employment it creates. Well, just how much bang for the buck do you get from military spending? The PERI institute, which a few years ago did a groundbreaking study on all of this, has now updated that work, and now joining us to talk about that is Bob Pollin. He's the codirector of the PERI institute, and he joins us from Amherst, Massachusetts. Thanks for joining us, Bob.

ROBERT POLLIN, CODIRECTOR, PERI INSTITUTE: Thanks very much for having me, Paul.

JAY: So what was the methodology of your study, and what conclusions did you come to?

POLLIN: The data in our study are based directly on statistics gathered by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The U.S. Department of Commerce actually just surveys businesses and says, what do you do to produce what you produce? The inputs are all the materials, all the people, all the energy, all the land, all the buildings, and the outputs are the things you produce, like weapons or a military fighting for us. So that's what we used. It is very straightforward methodology. We have been have heavily criticized by people in the--lobbyists in the defense industry, but there's really no criticism, unless you want to say that what the Department of Commerce is doing is wrong. So that's our methodology.

JAY: Okay. So the military industry will say, do say that they have mostly unionized jobs, mostly high-paid jobs, and as a result, that's good for the economy, and you shouldn't weaken that.

POLLIN: The evidence that we gathered shows some basic things, that--. The military budget is on the order of $700 billion a year. So of course when you spend $700 billion you are going to create a whole lot of jobs. There's just no way around that. So there is nothing--there is no argument against the notion that the military budget creates a lot of jobs. But that's not the relevant question. The relevant question is: if we took the same money, or at least some portion of that money, and spent it on other things, would we get more jobs or fewer jobs relatively speaking? That's the central question that we ask in our study. So in the military, if you spend $1 billion, the evidence shows you get about 11,200 jobs, okay, roughly 11,000 jobs per $1 billion of spending. If you spend the money on the green economy, you get 17,000 jobs--not 11,000; 17,000. So you get about 50 percent more jobs. If you spend the money in education, you get 26,000 jobs, as opposed to 11,000 jobs. So you get two and a half times more jobs spending on education than you do on the military. Now, what about the issue, oh, well, they're high-quality jobs in the military? In fact, you will get more high-quality jobs spending on infrastructure, spending on the green economy, spending it on health care, than you will spending on the military. So you get plenty of jobs for engineers, technicians, jobs in all categories. You just get more of them than spending on the military.

JAY: So I guess it's a bit ironic that some of the people that defend the military spending are the same people that are opposed to any kind of direct government stimulus or government jobs program.

POLLIN: Yeah, that is--one of the interesting things that has come out of this is that the people that [snip] criticize government spending expansion because government can't create any jobs. That's their mantra. However, when it comes to the military, what's their mantra? We can't cut the military, because it creates so many jobs. Well, of course, the military does create jobs. Spending money on anything--public sector, private sector, combined--that will create jobs. The key point here is that spending on the military is a relatively poor source of job creation, both in terms of numbers of jobs and in terms of overall numbers of high-quality jobs.

JAY: So dig into the dynamic or mechanic of this. Why does that happen? For example, if you compare education to military, why do you have almost--I think, almost double the number of jobs created if you compare education to military?

POLLIN: More than double. And the reason--there's no abracadabra here. It's very straightforward. If you spend $1 million on something, how you get a differential number of job creation depends on, number one, the amount of money that you spend on people. If you spend more on people and relatively less on equipment, relatively less on land, buildings, energy, then you'll get more jobs. So it's--the term is labor intensive. When you spend more on education, it's more labor intensive--more of what you do is spent on people. The other factor that is crucial is how much do you spend in the domestic economy versus outside the U.S.? So, clearly, with the military a relatively high proportion is spent outside the U.S., so you create fewer jobs within the U.S., whereas in education, in the green economy, in infrastructure, in health care, a relatively higher proportion is spent in the U.S. And so those two factors, labor-intensity and relative domestic content (the amount spent in the U.S.), will generate more jobs for a given amount of spending.

JAY: Well, if you look at these automatic budget cuts that are being talked about which are not going towards other kinds of spending--they're talking about just directing it towards deficit cutting, so it's--they're not going to take these cuts and put it into the kind of spending you're talking about. But how significant are these triggered cuts?

POLLIN: The news media and the Congress are presenting these as if they're potentially calamitous, but if we're talking about cuts in the range of fifty to sixty billion dollars a year over ten years--so that would be $600 billion over ten years--these are actually pretty small. The Pentagon's budget right now is over $700 billion officially. So we're talking about less than a 10 percent cut. Meanwhile, we also, of course, have ended two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan. The budget for those two wars over the last year was $163 billion. So we're only cutting about one-third the amount that we're spending on those two wars that have ended.

JAY: Well, Afghanistan ain't ended yet.

POLLIN: Okay. Assuming it does end. So the point is that we are actually adding to the amount of military spending going for everything else besides Iraq and Afghanistan with these cuts. This is not a significant cut.

JAY: So what does Defense Secretary Panetta mean when he says this is going to be almost $1 trillion and add 1 percent to the unemployment line?

POLLIN: Well, because they don't have any evidence to back up the 1 percent cut in the unemployment rate. They also--when they talk about that, they don't talk about shifting the spending into something else. They just say, okay, let's take this amount of money, and poof, it goes away. Now, that's true. If you take out money from the economy on anything, military spending or anything else, you take out spending, you have fewer people getting employed. That's why we have an employment crisis now more generally. We need to get more spending into the economy. The point, though, is if you take the money out of the military and you put it into the green economy, you get more jobs. If you put it into education, you get still more jobs. Even--even if you just say, okay, we're going to take the money out of the military and give it back to the--lower taxes and let people spend it on whatever they want, even doing that, you get 35 or so percent more jobs per dollar of expenditure than you would keeping the money with the military.

JAY: So just by actually lowering ordinary people's taxes a little bit and not spending it on military, even that creates more jobs.

POLLIN: Right, because one of the things we also compare in the paper is we just compare the ordinary consumer basket. And we just assume, let's say, put more money into people's hands, let them spend it, as opposed to having the money be with the military, and you're going to get about 14 jobs per $1 million, or 14,000 jobs per $1 billion, with increased consumer spending, as opposed to 11,000 per $1 billion with the military. So there really isn't any defense of the military budget on this basis in terms of job creation.

JAY: But adding money in terms of consumer--direct consumer spending is still--doesn't come close to what it would in health and education from what you found.

POLLIN: Right. Right. Spending the money on a consumer basket is not nearly as good as the areas that I talked about--green economy, health care, education--to a significant degree, because you have a higher proportion of those jobs from us consumers buying imports. And when we buy imports, of course, we're not adding to the demand for workers in this country; we're creating demand for workers in other countries.

JAY: Thanks for joining us, Bob.

POLLIN: Thank you very much.

JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.