Iron fist of the US state comes down hard in Boston

The reaction to the Boston marathon attack reveals a dangerous degeneration at the very heart of the US state, from president Barack Obama downwards. In truth, if you want to know what martial law looks like in the 21st century, what happened in Boston says it all.

Immediately after the explosions, a gross state attack on rights and civil liberties began in the same city where the citizens took up a revolutionary struggle against British colonial rule in the late 18th century in the famous "Tea Party" revolt. 

Heavy armoured vehicles, soldiers, the FBI, local and state police turned the city into an armed fortress in the hunt for just two men. This was a blatant attempt by a nervous state machine to intimidate a whole city.

After some wavering, Obama pronounced the Boston marathon bombings as a “terror attack”. But the truth is, it is still not clear if the Chechen-American brothers involved were actually part of any wider network. The elder brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev was politically motivated, but any connections with al-Qaeda have yet to be shown.

Whatever the case, the reaction by the American state and its agencies demonstrates its abject failure to protect its citizens on almost every front. The reaction to the bombings showed disarray within the security forces combined with massive infringements of the rights of Bostonians. The facts include:

• The FBI received warnings from Russian intelligence about the brothers and interviewed the family in 2011. Nothing followed. This “security lapse” appears serious enough to fuel rumours that the FBI or the CIA may have been using one of the brothers as a double agent.
• An “unbelievable over-reaction” in the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, leading to a state of siege being imposed by the Boston police. One million people were ordered to stay home and lock their doors, even after the police knew that Dzhokhar was a 19-year-old on the run. The Boston public transport and Amtrak rail services to New York were closed down.
• Despite the huge deployment of every SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team and paramilitary vehicle from surrounding New England states descending on Boston, it was a home owner who found the second bomber. “There was no cause and effect relationship between the state show of power and the apprehension of the suspect,” rights campaigner Tom Mullen, writing in the Washington Times has noted.
• The refusal to read the remaining suspect his legal rights (known in the US as Miranda) on grounds that he represents a “public danger” – even though he is critically ill and handcuffed to his hospital bed is being widely criticised by the American Civil Liberties Union, Slate website and many others rights organisations. As they point out, the “public danger” exception from the right to the fifth amendment (to keep silent) does not remotely apply to this situation.
• Adding to the crimes and misdemeanours of the state were the actions of some amateur detectives on social media sites like Reddit and 4chan which led to some media accusing perfectly innocent bystanders.

Mullen asks: “How did we get here? 238 years to the day, the inhabitants of the very same city started a war and seceded from their union over a mere infantry brigade attempting to disarm them. Now they cheer those who violate their rights much worse than the British ever did.” 

Well, events in Boston deepen a process under way for some time. The American revolution of 1776 has come full circle. Representative democracy invented by the Founding Fathers has given way to a corporatocracy, where economic and financial power have fused with politics. This realignment is, naturally, enforced by vicious state power at home and abroad. Time to renew the American Revolution.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Obama's Disposition Matrix decides who lives or dies

Lest anyone thinks that when the US and Britain withdraw troops from Afghanistan, that will end their military involvement, think again. The United States has a new doctrine of permanent war, using hi-tech remote weaponry like the dreaded drone.

The Obama administration has institutionalised the use of targeted killing by armed drones. In fact, the drone is Obama’s weapon of choice. Under his presidency, drones are killing people at seven times the rate under the previous Bush administration.

In the Matrix films, humans struggled against the machine. In the Disposition Matrix, the US government deploys machines to assassinate people on a hit list that is added to daily. And, deciding who will live and die is the man in the Oval Office himself, president Obama.

Except for those on the hit list in Pakistan. Here, life-and-death decisions are taken by the Central Intelligence Agency, which has abandoned spying to become a subsidiary of Murder Inc, whose headquarters is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, Washington, DC 20500, tel (202) 456-2121.

The Disposition Matrix is a database that officials describe as a "next-generation capture/kill list". But it is more than that, creating a blueprint for tracking, capturing, rendering and especially killing terrorism suspects. Thus the use of the term “disposition”.

Paul R. Pillar, the former deputy director of the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre, has stated that "we are looking at something that is potentially indefinite". And certainly illegal, within the framework of both the US constitution and international law.

There is no “due process”, no opportunity to answer charges. The last thing a victim hears is the sound of a missile arriving, shortly after being fired by an unmanned drone. The trigger is pulled in a US military base somewhere else.

A computer game this is not, however. Some estimates suggest that more people have been killed by US drones than the 3,000 plus who perished when the Twin Towers were brought down in 2001. Many of the victims are bystanders, family members or just people at a gathering wrongly identified as would-be terrorists.

According to Daniel Klaidman in his book, Kill or Capture, “the inability to detain terror suspects was creating perverse incentives that favoured killing or releasing suspected terrorists over capturing them."  That is why Osama bin Laden was executed as he was.

At the heart of the Disposition Matrix is Obama adviser John Brennan, who came to the job from the CIA. He is, the New York Times reported, the "priest whose blessing has become indispensable" to Obama. Last April, he publicly defended the policy of targeted killing. 

Under George W.Bush, Brennan served as top aide to CIA director George Tenet, where he defended the administration's use of extraordinary rendition and “enhanced interrogation”, aka torture.

Brennan is said to wield enormous power in shaping decisions on “kill” lists and the allocation of armed drones. The review process also allows the killing of individuals whose identities are unknown. Americans may also be listed as targets Indeed, one of the victims was US citizen Anwar al-Aulaqi.  

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has condemned the Disposition Matrix database, stating that "anyone who thought US targeted killing outside of armed conflict was a narrow, emergency-based exception to the requirement of due process before a death sentence is being proven conclusively wrong.” It has launched a legal challenge, claiming that the policy is unconstitutional.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter terrorism, Ben Emmerson and Christof Heyns, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, have described some American drone attacks as "war crimes".

That they certainly are. Calling for an end to policy of permanent war, Washington Post columnist  Fareed Zakaria cited a warning from James Madison, father of the US constitution:

 “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Over two centuries years later, Madison’s words should come home to haunt Obama as he presides over the death of the very same US constitution. 

Paul Feldman

Communications editor 

Midnight of a surveillance society

In the week that new laws requiring phone companies to keep records of ALL calls and make them available to a range of agencies came into force in Britain, a report from the United States gives a chilling account of the destruction of civil liberties in that other great “democracy”.

In 2003 and 2003, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) described in separate reports how new technology was feeding a surveillance “monster” and how the government and private sector were increasingly “mining” data about individuals. In a further report, the ACLU says the situation has worsened dramatically and warns: “We are far too close to the midnight of a genuine surveillance society, and the second hand has not stopped sweeping around the dial.”

The state is engaged in a series of illegal activities. The National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency have departed from their supposedly exclusive focus on overseas spying, and have “turned their eyes and ears inward upon the American people” in violation of existing laws and the Constitution. The ACLU report shows that:

• the NSA has gained direct access to the telecommunications infrastructure through some of America’s largest companies. It is using broad data mining techniques to evaluate the communications of millions of people within the United States


• some of the major telecom companies have granted the NSA direct, wholesale access to their customers’ calling records – once again, outside the law – and that the NSA is compiling a giant database of those records


• the Treasury Department and the CIA is secretly sifting through the records of the global financial cooperative SWIFT, without Congressional authorisation or judicial oversight


• The NSA is sifting through the sea of communications using keyword searches, link analysis or other techniques such as voice pattern analysis


• A system for tracking cargo, also generated terrorist ratings on tens of millions of travellers, including American citizens


• the FBI’s “Investigative Data Warehouse” appears to be soaking up a broad array of data on innocent individuals


• a national ID system scheduled for 2008 will take state-issued documents such as a driver’s licence and turning them into nationally controlled, full-fledged national identity papers


• a radical shift in the use of CCTV, in which private cameras are actually tapped into by centralised government systems is under construction. New York City police plan to link together thousands of police and private video cameras combined with licence plate readers and a central police monitoring centre


• in August 2007 it was reported that the Department of Homeland Security was planning to deploy the nation’s spy satellites for domestic security purposes


• the government is claiming sweeping new powers to check the results of people’s Internet searches.

The ACLU report concludes: “In August 2007, the Bush Administration pressured Congress into enacting a misnamed Protect America Act. While the NSA can already engage in mass untargeted eavesdropping overseas, this legislation for the first time allows the government to engage in mass, untargeted collection of Americans’ communications (specifically, any conversations between people in the United States and overseas)… It cuts the courts out of the process, and permits the U.S. Attorney General to unilaterally issue a new legal order… in which entire programmes of electronic surveillance would be authorised in one sweep.”

Many of the practices described in the ACLU report take place in Britain too. New Labour has spent a decade building its own version of the surveillance society. The Brown government is constructing an authoritarian, one-party state and should it win the forthcoming election, it will press ahead with the destruction of what remains of our basic rights and civil liberties. One more reason to withhold your vote whenever the election is called.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor