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June 16 2007
As far as the world is concerned, the fact that on June 14 I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby lost his legal struggle to delay imprisonment for 30 months is a good thing.(1) That is just one less imperialist from the Cheney faction to contend with, and that faction of imperialists is most set on destabilizing global military adventures.
The way MIM looks at it, we are going to have to have some international help with our imperialists--probably from other imperialists. There is only one Republican Party candidate for president who is not in favor of attacking Iran--Ron Paul. He is also the only candidate running for the Republican nomination to take the nuclear option off the table.(2)
Amerikans did not convict Libby for being a nutty imperialist. They convicted him for obstruction of justice in connection to an imperialist agent, Valerie Plame.
The CIA agent Valerie Plame is thus a mixed blessing. Many will say that since Cheney retaliated against her for her husband's not fabricating evidence for the Iraq War, that her cause is just.
When all is said and done, however, the war is already underway and convicting Libby did not end it. The conviction of Libby did however, create procedural backing for a law repressive of the press. The "Intelligence Identities Protection Act" passed in 1982 makes it illegal to reveal an agent's identity.
One could argue against MIM that without 007 mystique, even fewer Amerikans would interest themselves in international politics at all. One could make a similar argument that repressing art is good for it, because it raises the stakes, the excitement. Then again one could argue that, but what really happens is that the united $tates claims to be a "free country" leading the "free world."
Within the united $tates, so far we have two bad results. One is we got the Iraq ground invasion. Two is we have reinforcement of a law attacking free speech. So we got both the war and the repression with the super-citizens at each other's throats in criminal court. That's the mark of an imperialist system, that no matter who won, Plame or Libby, the result was going to be no good.
In MIM's case, secret agents are also fouling up its efforts to organize as a party. It is not possible to organize an Internet discussion forum without having these secret agents pin various death threats and other foul play on MIM.
The third bad result yet to happen could be a Bush pardon for Libby. It is unlikely that Bush would pardon Libby because of any constitutional concerns about what the "Intelligence Identities Protection Act" does to politics. From the world point of view, a pardon of Libby would simply be a vindication of the Iraq War.
To top it all off, we are not done with this string of events. Now Valerie Plame is suing the CIA to publish her book, which the CIA is partially censoring under the terms of her contract.(3) She now argues that she has a First Amendment right to publish her book where there is no threat to national security, however that is defined. Ironically, Valerie Plame is only famous because of a law attempting to get around the First Amendment and now she asks for increased book sales in the name of the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech. The parts the CIA wants to censor are obviously the best-selling goodies.
Ordinary citizens lose their free speech and now Valerie Plame fights for the rights of super-citizens like herself, the same way we have other federal agents telling MIM that they have a right to "free speech" in connection to their spying on MIM. So what it is is that super-citizens can spy on other citizens, issue threats against citizens, complain when they are exposed and then time their own self- exposure to make the maximum 007-style publishing monies.
The struggle between Plame and Libby can have no final justice to it, because it is a contest between super-citizens. Libby had about a dozen noted super-citizen-celebrities write to the judge on his account.
Recently the House is considering a bill that protects journalists from being asked about their sources in court.(4) This might be helpful in countering some of the negative effects of the "Intelligence Identities Protection Act." The Senate version would protect only for-profit journalists,(4) a typical back-assward capitalist view of the Constitution, where free speech goes to guys leaving pizza coupons in a college dorm, but a MIM Notes distributor will find herself under arrest for leaving newspapers, not for profit.
William F. Buckley tries to diminish Libby's case by saying that Plame was headed for non-covert work anyway.(5) Again, even Buckley as a writer with a background in the CIA dodges the real issue.
Simultaneously in the news we have Iran detaining dual citizen U.$. academics.(6) Some elements of the mainstream media have noted that the united $tates brought this on itself by arresting Iranian diplomats and others in Iraq.(7) That is part of the story.
Here again there is an issue of the identity of the detainees. The united $tates would like to claim or at least plausibly project that Iran is holding non-spies.
The truth is that the u.$. media would not be allowed to say whether or not the detainees are spies or not, at least if the "Intelligence Identities Protection Act" trumps the First Amendment to the Constitution by some intepretation of monarchist judges. Hence, Iran cannot trust anything from the u.$. media, muzzled as it is and Iran has no choice but to decide that Amerikans are spies. From MIM's own research on the question, the numbers are there when it comes to academics in physics, energy and especially international issues--that "spy" is a good guess by Iran.
So here again, the super-citizen endangers the normal citizen. Ordinary academics cannot go abroad, in some cases cannot even obtain academic visas, because of the U.$. laws and a deserved spying reputation.
These wannabe 007s of the ivory tower could sit at a desk in any of the fine buildings in Maryland or Virginia but instead they jeopardize all U.$. academics travelling abroad. Even more importantly and not discussed by anyone except MIM, other countries are also cracking down on their internal atmosphere because of U.$. spies, with their budget literally greater than the GDP of Libya. The Washington Post gives its usual litany of reasons for war on Iran, including wimmin's liberation and then it says this:
"The recent detentions of Iranian American dual nationals are only a small part of a campaign that includes arrests, interrogations, intimidation and harassment of thousands of Iranians as well as purges of academics and new censorship codes for the media. Hundreds of Iranians have been detained and interrogated, including a top Iranian official, according to Iranian and international human rights groups.It's amazing how analytical the Washington Post can be without drawing the proper conclusions. What it all means is that U.$. academic spies are responsible for the loss of freedom in Iran. Had these wannabe 007s had a reputation of working in Maryland and Virginia buildings bordering Washington, DC where they belong, there would be no issue for Iran to weigh. To achieve this effect CIA and State Department recruiters should be arrested on campus, if "freedom" were really the u.$. concern numero uno in the world. Then other countries like China and Iran would know when they were talking to an academic, that that academic was not a government agent."The move has quashed or forced underground many independent civil society groups, silenced protests over issues including women's rights and pay rates, quelled academic debate, and sparked society-wide fear about several aspects of daily life, the sources said.
"Few feel safe, especially after the April arrest of Hossein Mousavian, a former top nuclear negotiator and ambassador to Germany, on charges of espionage and endangering national security.
"The widespread purges and arrests are expected to have an impact on parliamentary elections next year and the presidential contest in 2009, either discouraging or preventing reformers from running against the current crop of hard-liners who dominate all branches of government, Iranian and U.S. analysts say."(8)
Muzzling the press for their benefit is not the only super-citizen side-effect. The FBI is now on the hunt for "terrorist-spies" in Boston.(8) So to benefit these academics who should be in the Pentagon or State Department, ordinary academics without an international or military component to their work face snooping by the FBI as well. It's amazing that no one asks "what gives them the right to endanger and diminish the lives of non-spy academics?"
It's no surprise that these undercover agents are now hard at work trying to dismiss Ward Churchill. It is the influence of the super-citizens of repression. Free speech is for the super-citizen selling books about how they repressed and corrected non-super-citizens. It's about having the free speech to be an FBI or CIA agent and get Ward Churchill fired for his work criticizing the super-citizens.
Notes:
1. http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2007/jun/16/061610558.html
2. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2007/06/nuking_iran_the_republican_age_1.html
3. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40F11F83E540C728CDDAF0894DF404482
4. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR2007061301907.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
5. http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/WilliamFBuckley/2007/06/08/yes,_free_libby
6. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6704987.stm
7. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/05/18/MNGH6PTATE1.DTL&type=politics
8. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/15/AR2007061502333.html?hpid=topnews
9. http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/06/12/fbi_warns_colleges_of_terror_threat/