Why confer an unmerited reward of citizenship on those who entered the country illegally? There is simply no benefit for rewarding an unlawful act.

Legalization, yes. Citizenship, no.

Ross K. Baker

6:18 p.m. EDT June 10, 2013

USA TODAY

Naturalization is a precious gift. So why grant it to those who didn't play by the rules?

There is something for almost everybody in the Senate's immigration bill, which was recently approved by the Judiciary Committee and is headed for the floor this week. At more than 1,000 pages, it lives up to its boast of being "comprehensive."

There is something for the high-tech industry in expanded H-1B visas that ease the way into this country for foreign techies.

There is a generous allowance of temporary workers for agribusiness. Big labor and big business sat down months ago and decided how many construction workers would be allowed in — not so many as to deluge unionized labor and not so few as to disappoint the American business community's thirst for cheap labor.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., even got a generous visa allowance for foreign ski instructors.

What about public interest?

The interest that was not served in this giant auction, however, was the public interest and the values that we purport to uphold.

There is a lofty term in common use among conservatives who oppose the kind of reform that is making its way through the Senate. The phrase is "rule of law." Translated into every day speech it means "playing by the rules," a principle deeply embedded in our culture. You don't jump the line. You don't shortchange. And if you do, you shouldn't expect to be rewarded for it. The reward, in the case of the comprehensive immigration bill, comes in the form of "a pathway to citizenship."

Citizenship is the most precious gift that America can confer. For many people outside our borders, it is equivalent to winning a megabucks lottery. So why are members of the Senate so determined to grant it to people who did not play by the rules?

Democrats want to reward a constituency that has proved itself both loyal and influential. Republicans see it as a form of damage control, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Hispanic voters whom they have systematically alienated. Each party sees a political dividend in creating millions of new voters who could be registered upon receiving citizenship.

But conservatives might have a good point. Why confer an unmerited reward of citizenship on those who entered the country illegally?

Proponents of a path to citizenship argue on their behalf that they are living "in the shadows." But bringing them out into the sun light can be accomplished by legalization and registration. Our security will be enhanced because we will then know who and where they are. They will be spared from deportation and able to lead normal lives. For most, legal resident alien status will be enough. It is unlikely that removing the path to citizenship will cause many to pull up stakes and return to their native country.

DREAMers are exception

Now, there are about 2 million people judged as illegal who are completely blameless and should be placed on an expedited path to citizenship: the people brought to this country as children by illegally entering parents. For them, called the DREAMers after the DREAM Act, the shadows need to be lifted. They are certainly worthy of citizenship, much like non-citizens who served in the U.S. military after 9/11.

While lawmakers are at it, they might want to reassert the validity of the birthright provision of the 14th Amendment, which states that those born in the USA are citizens. Enough of the disparaging term "anchor babies," used by those who quibble with the amendment's plain language. They are our babies because they were born on our soil.

A long road ahead

The immigration process still has a long way to go. It will be subject to amendment on the floor of the Senate and then be taken up by the House, where many Republicans consider the citizenship provision objectionable.

Rather the risk losing the bill in its entirety, senators should be prepared to abandon the path to citizenship portion when they sit down with their House colleagues.

To endow a pathway that began in a violation of the law with the gift of citizenship is to venture down a road of moral hazard and perverse incentives that invites the gaming of the system.

Ross K. Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

Syrian rebels (Our Would Be Allies, If John Kerry Had His Way) have attacked masked fighters shouting, “Here are the Mujahidin [Islamist fighters] celebrating entering the homes of the rejectionists, the Shias.” The fighter added that they “burned the homes” of the Shia residents of a village in the country’s east, killing dozens of Shias, mostly pro-government fighters, activists said. On Wednesday, a Syrian government official denounced the attack, saying Tuesday’s attack was a “massacre'' of civilians. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 60 people were killed in the village of Hatla in the oil-rich province that borders Iraq.

The US governmental threat to freedom: The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is. In a democratic constitutional state, security is not an end in itself, but serves to secure freedom.

US Prism Scandal: 'Security Is Not an End in Itself'

A Commentary by German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger

How much monitoring is too much and at what point does freedom become compromised? In a guest editorial for SPIEGEL ONLINE, German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger argues that the US has crossed the line with its Prism spy program.

Shortly before US President Barack Obama's visit to Berlin, Germans are troubled by questions regarding the extent to which the United States monitors Internet traffic worldwide. Is it true, as the media claim, that the United States can access and track virtually every form of communication on the Internet at the source? The Guardian and the Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) could gain direct access to and read user data with the so-called "Prism" program. An unnamed intelligence officer was quoted by the Washington Post as saying that the NSA could "quite literally … watch your ideas form as you type."

Internet giants like Facebook and Google were quick to issue denials, saying that they do not release any information without a court order. But doubts remain.
These reports are deeply disconcerting. When viewed in its entirety, this massive effort to acquire information, if it is true, would be dangerous.
On the weekend, President Obama reacted by saying that it is impossible to have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.
I don't share this view. The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is. In a democratic constitutional state, security is not an end in itself, but serves to secure freedom.

A Reasonable Balance

America has been a different country since the horrible terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The country's security architecture was drastically restructured. One goal was to link all institutions and create a broad flow of information among the different security agencies. The relationship between freedom and security has shifted, to the detriment of freedom, especially as a result of the Patriot Act, which was introduced only a few days after 9/11. The Patriot Act is essentially a number of legislative packages passed in rapid succession. They expanded the opportunities for surveillance, just as they created the possibility of imprisonment for the purpose of preventing acts of terror.

To summarize: As much as we want counterterrorism efforts to be effective, there has to be a reasonable balance between security and the freedom of citizens. The Patriot Act significantly limited the civil rights of Americans.

The development was repeatedly criticized internationally. President Obama, a lawyer specializing in US constitutional law, was also critical of this development in the past. But the restrictions on civil rights and liberties enacted in connection with President George W. Bush's "War on Terror" have not been reversed since Obama became president.

Alarming and Cannot Be Ignored

We should remember that the strength of the liberal constitutional state lies in the trust of its citizens. Constitutional guarantees protect this trust and pursue two objectives: to punish the guilty and to protect the innocent or those who are unjustly suspected of a crime against wrongful actions by the government. These are precisely the tenets Germany adopted in 1949 from the tradition of the American Constitution of 1776 -- namely that in a free and open democratic process, it is important to avoid the impression that the protection of basic rights is not being taken seriously enough.

The American politician and author Benjamin Franklin once wrote: "Those who give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The suspicion of excessive surveillance of communication is so alarming that it cannot be ignored. For that reason, openness and clarification by the US administration itself should be paramount at this point. All facts must be put on the table.
The global Internet has become indispensible for a competitive economy, the sharing of information and the strengthening of human rights in authoritarian countries. But our trust in these technologies threatens to be lost in the face of comprehensive surveillance activities.

Casual talk of arming Syrian rebel groups ignores the dark history of mayhem that has followed precisely on that tactic in the past.

JAMES CARROLL

No military intervention in Syria

By James Carroll |  GLOBE COLUMNIST     JUNE 10, 2013

IN A bold bid to force President Obama’s hand on Syria, Senator John McCain made a surprise trip to Syria early this month. He met with rebel leaders, assessed the situation as grim, and returned home with a reinvigorated call for military intervention by the United States — at least to the extent of creating a no-fly zone and safe zones for rebels and refugees. French and British leaders, meanwhile, seemed in sync with McCain, announcing intentions to begin supplying arms to some rebel groups. Calls for US intervention are gaining urgency, precisely because the tyrant Bashar Assad’s prospects have brightened recently.

The Syrian government was bolstered with support from Hezbollah fighters in from Lebanon and from crack units in from Iran. Then came news of significant increases in Russian military aid, especially antiaircraft missiles and warplanes. Secretary of State John Kerry sought to initiate peace talks between rebels and the Syrian government, but those hopes have fizzled. “Bashar Assad now has the upper hand, and it’s tragic,” McCain said, “while we sit by and watch.”

So the discussion winds back to what, actually, Obama can do. “Assad must go,” was his mantra until not so long ago. McCain does not want to let Obama forget that. He wants Obama to make it happen.

The hawkish McCain is taken to be a tough-minded realist. Those who oppose him, and his knee-jerk interventionism, are taken to lack the spine for hard action. But what is tough-minded about the refusal to learn from experience? McCain and others advocate exactly the policies that have led to a series of American catastrophes from Baghdad to Benghazi, without offering any suggestion as to why this intervention would be different. In fact, McCain is not motivated by a positive assessment that any conceivable military action taken by Washington could advance order, much less democracy. On the contrary, he swats aside informed warnings, including from the Pentagon, that US military involvement could make a terrible situation even worse. Horrible as Syria is, the present conflict pales beside the prospect of an entire Middle East inflamed in a Sunni-Shiite war, with even Israel and Palestine reduced to sideshow.

No, interventionist impulses like McCain’s derive not from cogent strategic analysis but from a truly weak-minded failure to grasp that, in the 21st century, barbarities like Assad’s cannot be whisked away by an immaculate American air power — or even, as we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, by full-bore American invasion and occupation. Arming select rebel groups is lovely in the abstract, but what if the group emerging as the central force in the anti-Assad opposition — Jabhat-al-Nusra — is tied to a sworn American enemy, Al Qaeda in Iraq? Casual talk of arming rebel groups ignores the dark history of mayhem — beginning with Al Qaeda itself — that has followed precisely on that tactic in the past.

McCain’s failure of realism is still more evident in his readiness to ignore what may already have happened on the ground. Syria’s doom as a fragmented former state may already be sealed, as three distinct political entities take shape: Assad’s fellow Alawites, a Shiite sect, in one enclave; a Kurdish domain; and jihadists dominated by forces friendly to Al Qaeda. There is simply no longer any question of restoring the political, economic, or social integrity of what was known as Syria. McCain does not explain how his intervention, whatever its scope, would redraw that geography. All it would do, in fact, is offer Americans some relief from the frustration of “just sitting by and watching.” That relief would be short-lived.

The effects of American power under 21st-century constraints are clearest, ironically, when that power fails. If the United States were to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war, the vast and divergent collection of parties, including US allies, would all be drawn into a swirl around the self-declared indispensable nation. The level of killing would massively escalate. Enemies would find common ground in demonizing Americans. Allies would shirk responsibility, leaving the superpower to take the weight.

But there’s the problem. In today’s thicket of real-world moral breakdown, no power is super. And by presuming to declare itself the solution, Washington puts itself, in that instant, at the heart of the problem.

The United States should continue providing humanitarian relief to Syrian civilians, and should do all it can diplomatically to broker Assad’s exit. But militarily, America must stand aside.

James Carroll writes regularly for the Globe.

Edward Snowden, NSA, Whistleblower , and we shall see what else

Hat Tip;  Quirk

Bush-Obama US dirty wars: technological hit squads, mercenaries, kill lists, militarization of intelligence and police and domestic spying.

08 JUNE 2013 - 20H14  FRANCE 24

New documentary warns against Obama's 'Dirty Wars'

AFP - A new documentary released Friday portrays US secret raids against terror suspects as a misguided assassination campaign that generates new enemies and tarnishes America's image.

In "Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield," journalist Jeremy Scahill condemns the "targeted killing" of purported Al-Qaeda linked militants in missile strikes and night raids by commandos as an ominous, permanent state of war that is "spinning out of control."

The film tries to shed light on operations conducted in the shadows since the September 11, 2001 attacks, focusing on civilians cut down in Afghanistan and Yemen.

The documentary recounts a botched raid by special operations forces in the Afghan village of Gardez that killed five people, including two pregnant women.

The documentary has poignant home videos taken by the Afghan family, showing a festive gathering with dancing and laughter only minutes before loved ones are gunned down.

One of the victims turns out to be an Afghan policeman, who was trained by the Americans.

Villagers vent their outrage afterward, vowing to fighting the bearded commandos they call the "American Taliban."

"If the Americans do this again, we are ready to shed our blood fighting them," one Afghan says.

Word leaks out about the raid and US forces initially insist their victims are Taliban insurgents, before apologizing later for a tragic error.

Scahill said in an interview with AFP that the secret operations are counter-productive and morally corrosive, sowing more anti-American hostility.

"I've come to the conclusion over the course of years of doing this work that we are creating more new enemies than killing actual terrorists," said Scahill, who wrote a book about the scandal-plagued Blackwater private security firm.

"The point of the film is not to tell people how to think about these things, but to present them with a different narrative than we generally hear on television."

In Yemen, the documentary features a tribal leader and former parliament member describing a Tomahawk cruise missile strike in 2009 on a Bedouin village, al-Majalah, that he says killed more than 40 innocent people, including children.

The Yemeni government claimed credit for the strike at the time and said it was targeting an Al-Qaeda training camp. Diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks later confirmed that it was a US cruise missile.

For a documentary, "Dirty Wars" adopts an unconventional approach, with Scahill's narration resembling a world-weary detective trying to uncover the truth.

"I returned to Sanaa but I wasn't sure why," Scahill says at one point.

The clipped, noir-style may win "Dirty Wars" a wider audience but it sometimes distracts from the serious questions raised by the film.

The most controversial segment focuses on the killing of the American-Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was taken out in a drone strike in September 2011.

It was not until last month that the Obama administration openly admitted killing Awlaki, a US citizen, and the White House insists he was hunted down not because of his anti-US propaganda but because he was directly involved in terrorist plots against America.

But Scahill has a different view, arguing Awlaki was targeted for his rhetoric and should have been prosecuted in a US court.

The documentary suggests Awlaki had turned from a moderate-minded spiritual leader based in the US state of Virginia to an angry extremist because of an anti-Islamic climate in the United States after 9/11.

"America had helped to create the very man it was trying to kill," Scahill says.

Days before the film opened, Obama delivered a speech in which he pledged to rein in the war on terror and impose stricter rules on drone strikes.

But Scahill said he remains deeply skeptical.

"I saw it as President Obama creating an infrastructure that will ensure that the drone program continues... in perpetuity."

Scahill, who writes for the left-leaning Nation magazine, argues Democrats have failed to hold Obama to account for expanding secret assassinations begun when George W. Bush was in the White House.

"(Former vice president Dick) Cheney must be sitting back somewhere with a deep sense of envy and a sense of awe and gratitude that Obama kind of kept it going for them," he said.

"Obama's better at their own game than they are."

June 8th, is the 46th anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty.

June 8th, is the 46th anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty. This dastardly and criminal attack has been largely written out from the pages of history. The survivors have been called liars and anti Semites by the usual gang. It is long since time for the few survivors still left to be honored by Congress and rest of us. A lot of the worst interventionists today are those who support the terrorist regime who attacked the Liberty. It is time to bring home our troops, to their families, to guard these borders and shores. The Middle East and the world will be a better place without us meddling in their affairs.








THIS IS THE SHIP THAT THE ISRAELIS AND THEIR APOLOGISTS AND PROPAGANDISTS CLAIM THAT THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE ATTACKING. IT IS A PREPOSTEROUS LIE:

Reversing civil liberty abuses with the stroke of a pen, Obama style: It is past time to abolish The Patriot Act. The very name of it is abhorrent.

President Obama’s Dragnet

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD NY TIMES

Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls.

A senior administration official quoted in The Times offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

That is a vital goal, but how is it served by collecting everyone’s call data? The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on “known or suspected terrorists” without logging every call made. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was expanded in 2008 for that very purpose. Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know who Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.

This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.

The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said today that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”

But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used?

The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”

That’s no longer good enough. Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions.

We are not questioning the legality under the Patriot Act of the court order disclosed by The Guardian. But we strongly object to using that power in this manner. It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the Bush administration’s surveillance policy “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”

Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, have raised warnings about the government’s overbroad interpretation of its surveillance powers. “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by issuing a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans. “As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”

This stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.

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