And once again the US media remain mute, accepting the official story, which was of ISAF forces responding to an attack which in reality appears never to have happened.

Before I started to write this piece, which once again was broken by the intrepid Jerome Starkey, a reporter in Afghanistan who works for the Times of London, I thought maybe I should read the Sunday edition of the New York Times, to see whether America’s “paper of record” had reported on this latest atrocity. But the night before we had suffered a heavy storm that knocked down three large trees in my front yard, and there was currently a thunderstorm underway, with rain pouring down, so I decided, what the hell, I’ll just write it. There’s no way the Times would cover this story.

I was right, of course. When the rain let up, and I went out and got the paper, and scoured it for word of this latest obscene slaughter by US forces, I found nothing. The Times’ reporters in Afghanistan and the reporters in the paper’s Washington bureau who cover the Pentagon had ignored it. So, a Google search discloses, did the rest of the servile US media.

So what actually happened?

According to Starkey, US and Afghan Army forces on February 12 launched a pre-dawn assault on the home of a prominent and popular policeman’s home just outside of Gardez, the capital of Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan. The first person to die was reportedly the policeman himself, Commander Dawood, who had stood in his doorway protesting the innocence of his family. In the volley of fire directed against him by the brave US-led team, his pregnant wife, another pregnant woman and an 18-year-old girl were also slaughtered.

Commander Dawood had been hosting a party to celebrate the naming of a newborn baby boy, Starkey reported. As he writes:

Sitting together along the walls of a guest room, the men had taken turns dancing while musicians played. Mohammed Sediq Mahmoudi, 24, the singer, said that at some time after 3am one of the musicians, Dur Mohammed, went outside to go to the toilet. “Someone shone a light on his face and he ran back inside and said the Taliban were outside,” Mr Sediq said.

Also killed was Dawood’s brother, Saranwal Zahir, a local prosecutor, who had been shouting for soldiers not to shoot as women had run outside to tend to the wounded.

A younger brother of the two men, Mohammed Sabir, was arrested by the invading forces and brought to a US base, where he was held for several days and interrogated by “ an American in civilian clothes,” before being released. Sabir said he was shown photos of a man who had been at the party, a certain Shamsuddin. Sabir says he told the interrogatyor, “Yes, he was at the party. Why didn’t you arrest him?” The man in question, Shamsuddin, later turned himself in and was, after questioning, reportedly also released.

Raising the question, what was this raid, and all the pointless killing, about in the first place?

As Starkey writes, the US and the ISAF initially, following what appears to be standard operating procedure, concocted a lie about the incident In a release immediately afterward, under the headline, “Joint force operating in Gardez makes gruesome discovery,” the NATO release claimed that the US-led team had found the women’s bodies “tied up, gagged and killed” in a room. That statement went on to say: “Several insurgents engaged the joint force in a firefight and were killed.”

As Starkey, who charges NATO with a “coverup,” reports: “The family, however, insists that no one threw so much as a stone.”

He goes on:

Rear Admiral Greg Smith, NATO’s director of communications in Kabul, denied that there had been any attempt at a cover-up.

He said that both the men who were killed were armed and showing “hostile intent” but admitted “they were not the targets of this particular raid.”

“I don’t know if they fired any rounds,” he said. “If you have got an individual stepping out of a compound, and if your assault force is there, that is often the trigger to neutralise the individual. You don’t have to be fired upon to fire back.”

He admitted that the original statement had been “poorly worded” but said “to people who see a lot of dead bodies” the women had appeared at the time to have been dead for several hours.

Starkey reports that the Americans offered the distraught family $2000 per victim of the botched raid. But as the mother of the slain brothers, Bibi Sabsparie, told him bitterly, “There’s no value on human life. They killed our family, then they came and brought us money. Money won’t bring our family back.”

So once again, we have a massacre (in a night-time raid that occurred two weeks after the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal ordered an end to the practice because of the number of errors and civilian deaths, and the bad public relations such raids cause among Afghans), with no coverage by the US media.

Meanwhile, Starkey says that even in the UK, his stories have been ignored by the rest of the British media, and that his own efforts to get at the truth have begun causing problems with the US-led military command in Afghanistan.

As he told one reader who had written him to congratulate him on his work:

Word in Kabul is that NATO are turning their wrath on me, personally,

and about to release a rebuttal. All of a sudden it’s a daunting

prospect and more than ever I feel what it must be like to be churned

through the military machine. It’s good to know people appreciate it.

I’ve also had emails from the victims’ family, which is heartening.

It is not easy to be an honest reporter in wartime, where sycophancy and blind patriotism are what is demanded. Sadly, the US media are taking the easy way out, accepting the rules of being embedded, which require them to submit articles for censorship, to avoid being critical and to play the game, in return for getting easy human interest stories to send back to the readers and viewers back home.

That’s not journalism. It’s PR. It ought to be labeled as such.

Extra! Also ignored by the Times and most of the rest of the US corporate media was a historic decision by a federal judge in Chicago on March 4 to compel former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to respond to charges by to US torture victims that Rumsfeld authorized their torture by US forces at Camp Cropper in Iraq. The two men, David Vance and Nathan Ertel, were whistleblowers against the private security (mercenary) firm that had hired them, claiming it was secretly providing arms to insurgents. Instead of getting the firm investigated, they were arrested by US troops and held–and tortured, they claim–for three months, before being released without charge and sent home to the US.

Their attorney, Mike Kanovitz of Chicago’s Loevy & Loevy, correctly calls the quashing of Rumsfeld’s effort to have the suit against him thrown out, “pretty historic”–a former secretary of defense is being accused of authorizing the torture of American citizens and will have to answer the charge in a federal court–but you wouldn’t know it from the response of the US mainstream media, which has been…nothing.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

President Barack Obama is seen through the eyepiece of a video camera as he delivers remarks on health care reform at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa., March 8, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton)

President Barack Obama is out and abroad stumping like mad for his embattled health insurance “reform” plan, claiming now that his administration will “crack down” on $100 billion in annual “waste and fraud” in the Medicare and Medicaid systems.

This new tough rhetoric is meant to win over some of the conservative opposition that sees all government programs as inherently wasteful, inefficient and corrupt.

But the claim itself is bogus.

The figure comes from a study done annually by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and that study makes it clear that it is not looking at fraud, but at errors. And there are two things that can be said about those errors, most of which appear to involve problems like illegible signatures on doctors’ orders, or lost paperwork needed to document that a treatment being billed for actually happened.

The first point to make here is that such errors are equally prevalent in the private sector, only the chances are that in the private sector, the errors more often lead to shortchanging or denying care to the patient, while in the public sector, they as often lead to somebody or some institution getting paid more than they deserve for treating a patient.

Second, the errors in the Medicare program (there has been no systematic study, according to a spokesman at CMS, of error and fraud in the Medicaid program, much of which is funded and managed by the various states), cut both ways, with some errors leading to an overpayment or a payment for a service that wasn’t actually provided, and some errors leading to an underpayment for a service that was provided. Also not reported at all are errors that led to a person’s being improperly denied care altogether. (The same is true for the Veteran’s Administration, by the way, which is notorious among veterans for improperly denying claims of service-connected disabilities.)

According to the latest CMS report, the error rate for Medicaid parts A and B–the hospital and physician part of the program, was 7.9 percent or approximately $24 billion. Of this, $23 billion was said to involve overpayments, and $1.1 billion was said to involve underpayments. The underpayment figure looks suspicious, because in prior years, when the overpayment figure was roughly $9-$10 billion annually, the underpayments came in at about $1 billion also. It seems unlikely that overpayment errors in 2009 would more than double, while underpayment errors would stay the same.

Nearly all the underpayment errors–$800 million worth in 2009–were for inpatient care. This compared to $6 billion in overpayment errors. In otherwords roughly two out of every 15 errors involved the patient or the patient’s physician or hospital being shorted by Medicare.

CMS claims that the estimated error rate for Medicaid in 2009 was 8.7% for the federal government and 10.5% for the states and counties that administer the program locally. That would be $39 billion of the $98 billion in errors and fraud found in both programs combined for the year by CMS, and cited by President Obama in his “$100 billion in waste and fraud” claim.

But bear in mind that unlike Medicare, Medicaid is a welfare program, which means that the bias is towards denying benefits to applicants, as anyone who has had experience with Medicaid can tell you. Furthermore it is a program administered by both state and federal bureaucrats.

Back in 1977, when I was county government bureau chief for the Los Angeles Daily News, I got an urgent call from my editor, telling me to hop on a story based upon a release by the L.A. County Department of Social Services claiming to have discovered that 5.83 percent of welfare recipients were being overpaid because off errors and fraud, and that a campaign was being implemented to attack the problem, which was costing the county millions of dollars a year. Naturally, the editor saw this as a page one piece, perhaps a banner headline, for the next day’s edition.

I called the head of the Department of Social Services and asked a simple question: What is the error rate in the other direction? What percent of welfare applicants and recipients were being undercompensated because of errors? After a little investigation, she returned and informed me that the underpayment error rate was exactly the same: 5.83%! When I reported this back to the City Desk, there was an audible groan on the phone. The story had lost all importance to the editor. And yet, I thought, wasn’t an underpayment of welfare benefits to a poor family of far greater consequence than an overpayment is to the taxpayers? Getting shorted $100, or even $20, for a family living on, or below, the edge, would be catastrophic.

My guess is that a good study of underpayments and overpayments in the Medicaid program of the federal government and the states would more than likely give the same kind of result: an error rate in terms of underprovision of benefits that is equal to in percent and dollar amount the overpayment of benefits. And in fact, with welfare type programs like Medicare, there is also an unmeasured or unmeasurable problem, which is people who are wrongly denied benefits at all. They aren’t underpaid because they are simply turned away from public assistance for health care when they are actually eligible.

The point here is that if there is an error rate of about 9.5% in Medicaid (I’m averaging the federal and state error rate estimates for 2009), then either half of that $39 billion is probably underpayment errors, or, if they are only counting overpayment errors, there is almost certainly another $39 billion that should have been paid out for care of poor families that was not paid out.

Either way, the president’s incendiary claim that there is $100 billion in waste and fraud in the Medicare and Medicaid program is way off the mark.

If the president were serious about the problem, he would call for an honest investigation to make certain that everyone potentially eligible for medical coverage and assistance in both programs gets the full benefits to which they are entitled, to minimize inadvertent overpayments to providers, and to prosecute to the full extent of the law those who defraud either program.

That would be fine and appropriate. But at the same time, the president is also disingenuous in the extreme when he just attacks fraud and waste in Medicare and Medicaid, as though there is not massive fraud and waste in the private insurance industry and the rest of the medical industry. Indeed, much of the fraud in the Medicare program is in that part of it that is contracted out to the private insurance firms that offer the so-called MediGap insurance policies.

Nearly all the rest of the actual fraud is perpetrated by private physicians, private hospitals and by other medical industry firms and pharmaceutical companies, which submit false invoices and charge for services and goods not delivered. And as CBS’s “60-Minutes” program and other news organizations have reported, there has been little or no effort devoted to prosecution of such fraud, though it totals in the tens of billions of dollars per year.

That’s not a problem with “government-run health care”–a bogeyman that the president regularly pulls out to pillory–but with private healthcare.

The president knows this, but since his whole “reform” proposal is built around the private insurance sector, he’s not going to say that.

Then again, what political strategist guru in the White House came up with the idea that attacking alleged “waste and fraud” in “government health care” would be a good way to win support for Obamacare?

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

U.S. Army Sgt. Pedro Rodriguez-Ortiz provides security in Khowst province, Afghanistan, Feb. 27, 2010. Rodriguez-Ortiz is assigned to Charlie Troop, 1st Squadron, 33rd Cavalry Regiment. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Jeffrey Alexander

The stated goal of the US-led War in Afghanistan, according to the Obama Administration, is to defeat the Taliban and establish a stable democratic government over the entire country. Critical to that goal is establishing a professional Afghan army and police force that is not corrupt, and that has the respect of the Afghan people.

But reports out of Canada suggest that far from creating such a military and police force, the so-called International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) is turning a blind eye to the thuggish criminality of those organizations, both to avoid growing opposition in ISAF member countries, and to avoid offending those organizations in Afghanistan.

The issue in question is routine rape and sodomy of children by Afghan soldiers and police operating on Canadian-run bases in the Kandahar region.

As reported last fall in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, Canadian military chaplains and some soldiers have been complaining as far back as 2006 that Afghan security forces have been sodomizing young boys on their base. These military whistle-blowers charge that the military brass has been ignoring or burying their complaints, fearing the bad publicity they could generate.

The paper reports that Canadian military police have also complained, as reported by Brig.-Gen. J.C. Collin, commander of Land Force Central Area, that they were being told “not to interfere in incidents in which Afghan forces were having sex with children.”

According to the paper, the Canadian military command has argued that, even though sex with children is against the law in Afghanistan, the practice is culturally accepted and that the Canadian forces “should not get involved in what should be seen as a ‘cultural’ issue.”

Makes you wonder what other “cultural” issues involving Afghan security forces that the Western occupiers might not want to get involved in. Perhaps the oppression of women? That’s certainly part of the culture. How about bribery and extortion? Based on the evidence–that the police in Afghanistan are a wholly corrupt entity, and that the army is not much better–arguing that corruption is “culturally acceptable” would be easy to do. How about drug dealing? Again, that appears to be quite the culture in Afghanistan.

Kudos to the Canadian grunts, MPs and chaplins who found the sexual abuse of children more than they could stomach, and who brought their concerns to public attention at home in Canada when their own commanders sought to cover it up.

It makes me wonder, though, why here in the hyper-moralizing US, we haven’t heard a peep from our troops about similar behavior by Afghan forces on US-run bases.

It’s hard to believe that a practice so common on a Canadian base that it provoked such outrage among Canadian soldiers is not also occurring elsewhere.

This leaves us with two possibilities:

US soldiers and marines are just not as willing to go outside the chain of command and go public with their complaints, or

The US media are not interested in investigating this kind of story. It involves only Afghans, and who cares about Afghans? What American journalism covers is Americans. (Remember the big spate of stories about the sex escapades of guards at the US embassy in Kabul?)

I’d say it’s probably a combination of the two.

At any rate, the picture painted of Afghanistan’s army and police in the Ottawa Citizen article does not bode well for any plan that hinges on their taking over from US and ISAF troops any time soon…or for the fate of young children of Afghanistan, if and when they do.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Sơn Mỹ village, Sơn Tịnh district of South Vietnam, March 16, 1968. Photo/Wikicommons.

When Charlie Company’s Lt. William Calley ordered and encouraged his men to rape, maim and slaughter over 400 men, women and children in My Lai in Vietnam back in 1968, there were at least four heroes who tried to stop him or bring him and higher officers to justice.

One was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who evacuated some of the wounded victims, and who set his chopper down between a group of Vietnamese and Calley’s men, ordering his door gunner to open fire on the US soldiers if they shot any more people. One was Ron Ridenhour, a soldier who learned of the massacre, and began a private investigation, ultimately reporting the crime to the Pentagon and Congress. One was Michael Bernhardt, a soldier in Charlie Company who witnessed the whole thing, and reported it all to Ridenhour. And one was journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story in the US media.

Today’s war in Afghanistan also has its My Lai massacres. It has them almost weekly, as US warplanes bomb wedding parties, or homes “suspected” of housing terrorists that turn out to house nothing but civilians. But these My Lais are all conveniently labeled accidents. They get filed away and forgotten as the inevitable “collateral damage” of war. There was, however, a massacre recently that was not a mistake–a massacre which, while it only involved fewer than a dozen innocent people, bears the same stench as My Lai. It was the execution-style slaying of eight handcuffed students, aged 11-18, and a 12-year-old neighboring shepherd boy who had been visiting the others, in Kunar Province, on Dec. 26.

Sadly, no principled soldier with a conscience like pilot Hugh Thompson tried to save these children. No observer had the guts of a Michael Brernhardt to report what he had seen. No Ron Ridenhour among the other serving US troops in Afghanistan has investigated this atrocity or reported it to Congress. And no American reporter has investigated this war crime the way Seymour Hersh investigated My Lai.

There is a Seymour Hersh for the Kunar massacre, but he’s a Brit. While American reporters like the anonymous journalistic drones who wrote CNN’s Dec. 29 report on the incident, took the Pentagon’s initial cover story–that the dead were part of a secret bomb-squad–at face value, Jerome Starkey, a dogged reporter in Afghanistan working for the Times of London and the Scotsman, talked to other sources–the dead boys’ headmaster, other townspeople, and Afghan government officials–and found out the real truth about a gruesome war crime–the execution of handcuffed children.

And while a few news outlets in the US like the New York Times did mention that there were some claims that the dead were children, not bomb-makers, none, including CNN, which had bought and run the Pentagon’s lies unquestioningly, bothered to print the news update when, on Feb. 24, the US military admitted that in fact the dead were innocent students. Nor has any US corporate news organization mentioned that the dead had been handcuffed when they were shot.

Starkey reported the US government’s damning admission. Yet still the US media remain silent as the grave.

Under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to execute a captive. Yet in Kunar on December 26, US-led forces, or perhaps US soldiers or contract mercenaries, cold-bloodedly executed eight hand-cuffed prisoners. It is a war crime to kill children under the age of 15, yet in this incident a boy of 11 and a boy of 12 were handcuffed as captured combatants and executed. Two others of the dead were 12 and a third was 15.

I called the Secretary of Defense’s office to ask if any investigation was underway into this crime or if one was planned, and was told I had to send a written request, which I did. To date, I have heard nothing. The Pentagon PR machine pretended to me on the phone that they didn’t even know what incident I was talking about, but without their “help” I have learned that what the US military has done–no surprise–is to pass the buck by leaving any investigation to the International Security Assistance Force–a fancy name for the US-led NATO force fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

It’s a clever ruse. The ISAF is no more a genuine coalition entity than was George Bush’s Iraq War Coalition of the Willing, but this dodge makes legislative investigation of the event impossible, since Congress has no authority to compel testimony from NATO or the ISAF as it would the Pentagon. A source at the Senate Armed Services Committee confirms that the ISAF is investigating, and that the committee has asked for a “briefing”–that means nothing would be under oath–once that investigation is complete, but don’t hold your breath or expect anything dramatic.

I also contacted the press office of the House Armed Services Committee to see if any hearings into this crime have been planned. The answer is no, though the press officer asked me to send her details of the incident (Not a good sign that House members and staff are paying much attention–the killings led to country-wide student demonstrations in Afghanistan, to a formal protest by the office of President Hamid Karzai, and to an investigation by the Afghan government, which concluded that innocent students had been handcuffed and executed, and no doubt contributed to a call by the Afghan government for prosecution and execution of American soldiers who kill Afghan civilians.)

There is still time for real heroes to stand up in the midst of this imperial adventure that may now appropriately be called Obama’s War in Afghanistan. Plenty of men and women in uniform in Afghanistan know that nine innocent Afghan children were captured and murdered at America’s hands last December in Kunar. There are also probably people who were involved in the planning or carrying out of this criminal operation who are sickened by what happened.

But these people are so far holding their tongues, whether out of fear, or out of simply not knowing where to turn (Note: If you have information you may contact me). There are also plenty of reporters in Afghanistan and in Washington who could be investigating this story. They are not. Don’t ask me why. They certainly should not be able to call themselves journalists–at least with a straight face.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

I have been covering the Fourth Congress Against the Death Penalty sponsored by the United Nations and the international abolition movement, which brought together anti-death penalty groups from all over the world, and featured talks and workshops with a number of people, several from the US, who had spent years and even decades on death rows before being found innocent of the crimes that had put them there.

In view of their agonies and torments, my own little injury seems rather pathetic, but it did give me a chance, as the debate over how to deal with America’s health care crisis drags on in Washington, to see in person the workings of a non-socialist model of health care–but one that controls prices and also mandates (that word that strikes terror into every Republican heart) that everyone buy insurance.

The answer is, it works pretty damned well!

When I got up from my sprawled position on the sidewalk and stood, there were gasps of horror from my companions as they looked at my gaping wound. Blood began pouring from it and refused to be stanched. I was walked back the block or so to the International Center where someone got out an emergency medical kit and cleaned me up a bit. Then an ambulance was called.

The three EMT guys in the ambulance competently and professionally checked me our for signs of a concussion, found none, and let me climb in back and sit. On the way to the hospital we discussed their work. The big difference between them and drivers in cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Philadelphia, where I’ve lived, is that they said they had almost never had to transport a gunshot victim. “We have a lot of knifings in the summer for some reason–usually drug related,” said one EMT. “But no gunshot wounds.”

But the big difference came when we got to the big public University of Geneva teaching hospital that they chose for my treatment.  Exiting the ambulance, the men led me without stopping right past the intake and billing office, into the emergency room, where they brought me to the doctor in charge. She checked me out and, determining that I was not a serious case, dispatched me to the waiting room adjacent to the ER. It was equipped with free internet service, so I was able to contact my family back in the US while I waited.

Having been triaged into a low priority category, I sat for about an hour in what proved to be a clean, well-appointed ER operation. Unlike urban ERs I’ve visited over the years in the US, which tend to be controlled chaos, this place was calm and smooth-running. Maybe it’s because there weren’t police rushing in every so often delivering serious injured arrestees or victims. (Traffic here seems more orderly than what I’m used to too, plus there is a paucity of over-weight “muscle cars” and SUVs, so there may be fewer crash victims coming into the ER also.)

In any case my turn for treatment came soon enough. The doctor and a nurse did a careful job of sewing me up, pulling the wound together with two layers of stitches. Then they sent me on my way, with a letter of instructions to my American doctor about what they’d done, and when he should plan on pulling out the stitches.

On the way out, I passed through the billing room, where the nurse introduced me to a billing office clerk.  My bill for the ER visit: $200.

Now that is probably between 400 percent and 900 percent less than what the same injury would have cost in an American hospital ER–and in an American ER, I might not have even been stitched up by a doctor. (A friend in Philadelphia from Puerto Rico who went to Temple University’s public teaching hospital emergency room with a nasty case of the flu was given some aspirin and sent home a few years ago with a bill for $2000).  Clearly the highly regulated private insurance plans that every Swiss person (including any non-citizen resident staying longer than three months) is mandated to buy (low-income people and the unemployed get subsidized), are keeping the hospital and doctor charges low.

One big difference between what is being offered up as insurance “reform” by House, Senate and President Obama, and what the Swiss have, is that every Swiss person buys a basic health insurance plan on which the Swiss insurance companies are barred from making a penny of profit. The insurance firms can offer highly profitable supplemental plans that cover amenities like private rooms, but they must also offer the basic plans at competitive rates. There is no “managed care”–the euphemistic term for the common American insurance plans that actually manage no care for enrollees. Patients can choose their own doctors and hospitals and don’t go through medical gatekeepers to get authorized for treatment. They do have co-pays for treatment, but the total deductible outlay per person ranges from 300-2500 Swiss Franks per year (about $275-$2300) depending upon the plan chosen by the enrollee.

“Our insurance is not cheap, and it keeps getting more expensive,” Evelyne Giordani, the coordinator of Lifespark, a Swiss-based anti-death penalty organization, told me. “But it is still a lot better than what you have to pay in the US.”

Well,  of course, many Americans have some of their insurance premium paid for by their employer–an arrangement which American businesses actually like and have lobbied to keep, knowing that they are just paying for it with money that they aren’t paying in higher wages. (Workers only think they are not paying when the premiums are covered as a benefit, all or in part, by the employer.) American employers actually like being the health insurance provider because where the Swiss, like their fellow Europeans with more socialist-style or single-payer style health systems, aren’t tethered to their jobs by the serf-like bonds of health insurance, most Americans have to worry that if they quit, get fired, or go out on strike, they and their families are then left at the mercy of the health care industry. That in fact is a major reason American workers are so much more docile and cowed by management than are their European counterparts.

So all in all, the Swiss have it pretty good. They’ve got excellent health care, available to all. They aren’t being held for ransom by employers. They have complete freedom of choice of physician, hospital and course of treatment. The have reasonable costs for their care. And they are still only collectively spending just over 10 percent of GDP per year on health care. That’s more than the next most costly country, Canada, which devotes 9 percent of GDP to health care with its single-payer Medicare-for-all type system. But it’s still a far cry from the staggering 17.5 percent of GDP that gets pumped into the medical industrial complex in the US, where nonetheless 40 million Americans remain left out of the system, with no ready access to medical care at all.

The one place where Swiss health care and American health care have something in common is ambulance service. While my care in the hospital was incredibly cheap, my bill for the ambulance ride was $730, which is about what I expect it would have cost me in the US (maybe a little less).  One difference though–most of that bill would be covered in Switzerland. I’m less confident about getting reimbursed by my Blue Cross plan, though. They’ll probably figure out some way to weasel out of paying for it.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Marines from India Company, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment and soldiers from the Afghan National Army take part in a firefight while an explosion occurs outside of Marjah, Helmand Province, Afghanistan on February 13th, 2010. The Marines from 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment and ANA soldiers have been conducting Operation Moshtarak to eliminate Taliban presence and intimidation in the city of Marjah, Afghanistan. (USMC photo by Lance Cpl. Tommy Bellegarde)

The civilian death toll in the celebrated Battle of Marjah is now up to 19, a third of them children. But that’s only part of this ugly story. While the slaughter goes on in this pointless display of Marine power, civilians have been dying at American hands elsewhere in Afghanistan.

On Thursday a US airstrike allegedly targeting “insurgents” ended up hitting and killing seven Afghani policemen. And yesterday, another airstrike, this time on a “convoy” of three vehicles, killed an astonishing 33 civilians and injured 12 more–and given the vicious nature of American weaponry, it’s a fair bet that many of those who were injured will end up dying of their wounds too.

Nice work Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Your newly professed “concern” about protecting civilians is working out nicely.

True to form, Gen. McChrystal’s response to these murderous outrages has not been to call for investigations and courts martial of those responsible for the deaths, but rather to express his concern that “inadvertently killing or injuring civilians undermines their [the Afghan people’s] trust and confidence in our mission.”

Ah, the “mission.”

Oh yeah, this general who earned his rep running a huge death squad operation in Iraq, says he’s also “extremely saddened by the tragic loss of innocent lives.” What he didn’t say though, was that he is that he is extremely angry that American forces are continuing to shoot first and ask questions later, or that he plans to call some people on the carpet and strip some badges off them to ensure compliance with his orders to protect civilians.

Why would this be?

Because the professed “concern” about protecting civilians in this war is all talk and showmanship. It’s not about actually caring about and protecting civilians.

America is not in Afghanistan because of any real concern about the welfare of the people of Afghanistan. It is in Afghanistan because America wants to control Afghanistan. This is a war about geopolitics, not about liberation.

If America really cared about the ordinary people of Afghanistan, who have endured decades of war, it would forswear the use of antipersonnel weapons, which the UN has been trying to ban–over the opposition of the US and other benighted powers like China and Israel–weapons that leave unexploded bomblets littering the landscape to maim and kill innocent people, disproportionately small children. It would sign and obey the land mine ban. It would cease using pilotless drones, which have been killing far more innocent people than actual enemy fighters, and it would stop using airstrikes on “suspected” enemy targets when those targets are likely to have civilians in them.

In fact, if the US really cared about the people of Afghanistan, it wouldn’t be fighting there at all. It would be organizing a regional peace conference, under the auspices of the United Nations and involving all the surrounding nations–Iran, China, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan–and reaching an agreement among all the forces within the country, including the Taliban, to establish a government of national reconciliation. The US would be relying not on war but on the carrot of aid to get such a government to actually work for the peaceful reconstruction of the country. And it would withdraw all of its forces promptly.

But there is no talk of such an approach. Rather, in Washington all we hear is talk of “winning” and “completing the mission,” though nobody seems able to say just what “winning” or the “mission” in Afghanistan might be. That’s understandable since the government of Afghanistan is a corrupt narco-regime led by a family of gangsters, thugs and profiteers, and the military and police are a hopeless combination of inept and corrupt. According to a first-hand, on-the-scene report in the New York Times, which has been an editorial backer of this war, Afghan forces have played almost no role in the Marjah battle, which is supposed to be a test run of the new Obama war strategy. That might explain why only one Afghan soldier has died in the battle, compared to 12 US and other NATO soldiers.

Happily, there is a light at the end of this blood-drenched tunnel. That light is the people of the Netherlands, who have so soured on their nation’s support for this stupid, criminal war, that they have brought down their government. Technically what happened is that the Dutch Labor Party, which opposes Dutch military involvement in the Afghan War, has denounced the war and, this week, pulled out of the governing coalition, leaving the coalition with just 47 of 150 seats in the country’s parliament. It is likely that the 2000 Dutch troops serving in Afghanistan will soon be pulled out.

The war, never popular in Europe, Canada or Australia, has become increasingly less popular everywhere but in America. Now, like the famed story of the little boy who saved Holland by putting his finger in a leaking dike, only in reverse, this pulling out of a Dutch finger could lead to a flood of European nations ending their commitment of troops to the NATO participation in the War in Afghanistan, leaving just US and British forces alone there.

The challenge now is for the somnolent and co-opted peace movement in the US to throw off its narcophilic embrace of the Democratic Party and of President Obama, to take heart from the Dutch people, and to demand that the US too end its war making, not just in Afghanistan, but around the globe.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

City leaders and the downtown business community in Philadelphia are wringing their hands and calling for “tough action” against a horde of some 150 high school kids from eight of the city’s decrepit and failing high schools who rampaged late Tuesday afternoon through the Center City district’s shops, from the Gallery mall at 10th Street to Macy’s near City Hall, frightening tourists and suburban shoppers, and knocking over shopping displays.

By evening, police had reportedly locked up 15 kids who were charged with violent offenses, such as beating other kids or bystanders, or destroying property (Macy’s claimed damages to its flagship store totalling $700). Some of these kids were held overnight on lesser charges such as shoplifting or disturbing the peace.

I’m not going to diminish the seriousness of the incident. Nobody should be trashing stores or stealing things, and certainly nobody should be hurting other people.

At the same time, the official response, which has been to treat minor crimes like shoplifting or engaging in showball fights on the sidewalk or in the interior mall of City Hall like major criminal activity and to seek heavy penalties against these kids reeks of the growing police-state metality that is poisoning our society, locally and nationally.

Some of the kids who were arrested by police were under 16, and yet six hours after they were locked up, many, and perhaps all of them, had been prevented by Philadelphia Police from even contacting their parents. When a police officer at the 22nd Precinct, where some of the kids were being held, was asked by a caller why parents–who were understandably frantic by 11 when they still didn’t know where their sons and daughters were–hadn’t been allowed to call home, his response at first was a sneering, “Oh, you think they should have a right to a phone call?” Later, when pressed, he said, “They’ll get to call home when we’re done processing them.”

This was already some six hours after the kids had been picked up, and he gave no indication when the “processing” would be completed.

This is not, I suspect, how such things are handled by police in the suburbs, where parents of arrested minors, especially white minors, tend to get called immediately by police.

Now the city is seeking to have at least some of the kids who were arrested expelled from school, though the incident has absolutely nothing to do with their behavior in school. This is just punitive, law-and-order thinking that will do nothing to make these kids better behaved. In fact, it will just ensure that they are angrier and less able to make their way in society as adults. Do kids in the suburbs get expelled from school if they get convicted or shoplifting, or if they get busted for drunk driving on the weekend?

No. Of course not. They get expelled for violations that happen on school time on school property. Police are also calling for the Philadelphia School District to make free student transit passes invalid after 4 pm, instead of 7 pm–a truly stupid idea that if implemented would make it hard for all low-income students in the public schools to participate in after-school activities.

What really needs to be addressed, and what instead is being completely ignored by authorities and the public, is the question of why we’re seeing this kind of rampage in the first place.

Having talked with kids who frequent the Center City commercial area, I know that those with dark skin are regularly mistreated by store owners and store personnel in the Gallery, and in stores like Macy’s. My 16-year-old son reports that when he and friends have gone shopping in stores in the Gallery, for example, he has seen store personnel falsely charge his black friends with “planning to steal” items, when they were merely looking at things in the same way that other kids who were white, or asian like him, were doing.

In other words, African-American kids feel blatant prejudice downtown, which does much to explain the hostility that was apparent in the recent rampage. If Philadelphia politicians and business leaders want to make the Center City area more shopper- friendly, they might start by getting store owners (and police) to start treating all people in the area equally, including the kids who go there.

Meanwhile, the kids, who have demonstrated in this and earlier rampage incidents tremendous organizing skill at using social networking systems like MySpace, Facebook and cell-phones to pull together large groups of kids like the latest one along Market Street, should give some thought to taking their facility with the new technologies and using it more productively. Instead or organizing riots, they could organize protests that, instead of angering and frightening the majority of Philadelphians, would earn the support of at least some of them. Instead of calling kids together for a rampage against store-owners, they should organize peaceful protests against store operators who are demonstrably racist.

Imagine if kids used the new media to bring a thousand kids to the Gallery to march on the sidewalks with signs demanding an end to racism in the stores. Imagine if they used social media to organize mass boycotts of stores known to target black students for harassment. Imagine if they used social media to organize protests against police bias and police brutality.

There is enormous potential here, if kids would only grab hold of it and put it to good use.

They might even be able to teach some lessons to us adults about how to organize protests over things like the War in Afghanistan, or the failure of our congressional representatives to support real health care reform.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Marines from India Company, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment and soldiers from the Afghan National Army take part in a firefight while an explosion occurs outside of Marjah, Helmand Province, Afghanistan on February 13th, 2010. The Marines from 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment and ANA soldiers have been conducting Operation Moshtarak to eliminate Taliban presence and intimidation in the city of Marjah, Afghanistan. (USMC photo by Lance Cpl. Tommy Bellegarde)

The fighting is still underway in the town of Marjah, in what is being described as the first battle in Obama’s War in Afghanistan, or alternatively as the biggest battle of the US War in Afghanistan. But already, the US has lost that battle.

It lost it from day one, when troops fired missiles in to a Marjah house, killing 12 civilian occupants–half of them children. And it lost it further when another three more civilians were blown away by US-led forces. Finally, it lost the battle as much of the town has been simply destroyed by the fighting.

The supposed goal of the assault on Marjah was to demonstrate that the US would bring the wonders of good government and peace to the Pashtun tribal people who have endured a generation or more of war, and who have been living under the “cruel tyranny” of the Taliban in recent years. The new strategy of President Barack Obama and his hand-picked military leader in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was to show that the US military could fight the Taliban without causing civilian deaths and casualties. Protecting civilian lives would be a priority, they claimed.

The problem with such a strategy is that the whole reason American forces have been able to crush resistance, as they did in the lighting invasion of Iraq in 2003, or the overthrow of the Taliban government of Afghanistan in late 2001, has been their callous disregard for civilian lives, which have been coldly labelled “collateral damage.”

In the war in Iraq, and in Afghanistan until recently at least, the American war-fighting style has been for troops to go into an area, seeking to draw enemy fire, and then to call in long-range artillery or air support, and simply blow up the area with heavy explosives, devastating anti-personnel bombs that shower an area in flesh-shredding flechettes, burning white phosphorus projectiles, and a brutal rain of machine-gun fire from fixed-wing and helicopter gunships. Inevitably with such tactics, countless innocent men, women and children get killed and maimed.

In Iraq, US forces ended up killing far, far more civilians than actual enemy fighters thanks to this approach. While information about deaths in the Afghan War is harder to come by, it is likely that the same holds true there also. In addition to the well-known incidents, where air strikes have been called in which ended up butchering entire wedding parties in both Iraq and Afghanistan, or where farm families engaged in routine activties have been blown away thinking they were terrorists, US forces have for years thought nothing about assaulting compounds and killing the inhabitants, innocent civilians or not, children or adults, if it was thought that even one “terrorist” was in the building at the time.

Such tactics, reminiscent of what years ago used to be attributed to vicious military regimes like the German Nazis or the Imperial Japanese, have become the norm for US forces, as has the tactic of “spray and pray,” under which US forces, if they take fire or feel threatened, simply unload all their weapons in every direction, killing every living thing within range, including people who might be seeking shelter behind mud walls of their homes.

These tactics, while criminal in the extreme under the Geneva Conventions, which require that civilians in any conflict be protected, do work in the short term, which is why American forces have prevailed in their initial assaults. But long-term, they inevitably become self-defeating, since they only turn a population into bitter enemies, many with an understandable desire for vengeance.

Thus, the “new” strategy of trying to minimize civilian casualties.

But once US troops are denied their air support, and are barred by commanders from simply blowing away buildings from which they are taking enemy fire, because of fears that there may be civilians in those buildings, US forces lose any advantage they may have had over local enemy fighters. It becomes a battle of guns vs. guns and person vs. person, and becomes more of a case of who is more willing to die.

Clearly the Taliban then gains an edge. Its fighters, or at least many of them, believe they are fighting for Allah, or for their country’s survival and independence, or for both, and they are willing to die for those causes. What are American forces fighting for in Afghanistan? Hard to say. I suspect many, if asked, would say they have no idea. Some, I’m sure, would say they are “defending America” if asked thanks to their indoctrination, but I also suspect that as they survey the primitive society in which they are fighting, and see the poverty of the people, they will have a hard time perceiving Afghanistan as any kind of threat to their own country or families.

Some may say they’re avenging the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon “by Al Qaeda” in 2001, but then, even the US government admits that the foreign fighters of Al Qaeda have long ago left Afghanistan, and no Taliban were involved in the 9-11 attacks. So it’s hard to see American troops being willing to die for these trumped up “causes.” I suspect, again, that most US troops are understandably trying really hard mainly to make sure they don’t get hurt or killed.

And that’s why, in the end, the US is losing this war. It’s why those deadly Himars rockets were fired and why air assaults are being called in after all in Marjah, and why civilians are again being slaughtered by American forces in this battle.

It’s why, despite promises to the contrary from Gen. McChrystal and Commander in Chief Obama, the town is being wrecked.

And in the end, it will be all for naught, since the US is supporting a wholly corrupt and criminal regime in Kabul which will not follow up the ultimate “victory” in Marjah with some kind of honest and well-functioning government in the destroyed city.

We will no doubt see some photogenic reconstruction in Marjah when the fighting subsides. We’ll see some demonstration projects which will be dutifully praised by the journalistic shills flown in by Pentagon flaks. But the people of Marjah will remember the destruction of their town, and will remember their neighbors and relatives who were killed. And when the Taliban return to the town, as they inevitably will after the Americans withdraw or draw down, they will probably be welcomed, or at least tolerated.

The reality is that America cannot prevail in Afghanistan except by applying the massive, oppressive power of its military killing machine, with its robotic rocket-firing drone aircraft, its bombers and attack aircraft, its fixed-wing and helicopter gunships, its indiscriminate anti-personnel weapons, and its massive bombs. It cannot prevail, in other words, without terrorizing the population.

And even then, in the end, it cannot succeed.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

There was all kinds of high-minded talk about the protecting the dignity of the dead, and about how it was not appropriate to show such images without the permission of the deceased’s close relatives.

But then how to explain the spectacle of poor Notar Kumaritashvili, the 21-year-old luge rider from the Georgian Olympic team. Kumaritashvili had the misfortune of hitting the edge of the luge shute he was on during a training run in British Columbia, and, at a speed of 89 mph, he was thrown from his sled and over the safety wall into the air, where he hit a steel pole, which killed him.

NBC, which was taping the run, rushed to air the grisly death. No attempt was made to seek permission from Kumaritashvili’s family. Hey, this was good TV. Why risk ruining it by giving the family a veto over the tape?

Well, NBC, when criticized, claimed it was all in the interest of public safety. They had a legitimate need to show the public that riding a luge is dangerous, the network said. Never mind that almost nobody rides a luge, and that all of those who do are keenly aware that it is a life-risking sport.

The word for this kind of nonsense is hypocrisy. Another word is capitalism. Blood and gore sell, and this tape meant great ratings for NBC.

On the other hand, you’d think that showing what the war in Afghanistan, or the war in Iraq, look like would be good for ratings too. And shouldn’t there be a journalistic responsibility to show Americans what is going on in our name and with our tax dollars, in our country’s wars, not to mention that if it’s important for potential sledders to know how dangerous a luge shute is, shouldn’t potential military recruits be shown how dangerous wearing a uniform can be? Anyhow, we should be able to take the real ugliness and the blood: We Americans pay good money to see the fake gore of military slaughter–even of Americans–in movies like Avatar, or Saving Private Ryan, or Apocalypse Now.

But when it comes to war, politics intervenes. The military and its political handmaidens in Congress and the White House, don’t think that showing the authentic gore of American casualties that occur daily in the course of our bloody imperial adventures is a good idea. It might get Americans to thinking too hard about those wars, and about whether we ought to be fighting them. And so NBC, and most of the rest of the US media, politely keep those images safely abroad.

Seriously. They have the footage, and the photos. They just don’t let Americans see them. I was stunned, for example, when I lived in Taiwan in 2004 for five months, to see that CNN International, which is viewed all around the world, but not seen in the US, had plenty of film footage of dead American soldiers. They have to air that stuff if they want to compete commercially overseas with such other international news programs as the BBC and Al Jazeera. But those scenes get censored out in Atlanta, so we don’t see them here.

We get to see dead Haitians. We get to see dead Sri-Lankans. We get to see dead Taliban fighters. We get to see dead Olympians–especially if they’re foreigners like poor Kumaritashvili. They don’t get shown any “respect for their dignity.”

But we don’t get to see dead or dying American soldiers. That would be a shameful thing to do.

ave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

I guess I may as well get out front of things here. I’m about to fly to Switzerland to lead a panel on how to change pro-capital punishment attitudes in a country at the Fourth Congress Against the Death Penalty, being sponsored by the United Nations in Geneva. And judging from the stories I’ve been reading about the Transportation Security Administration, or at least its Philadelphia International Airport operation, and the Philadelphia Police who backstop the TSA here, I’m afraid I’m liable to be hauled away as a suspected terrorist before I can get on my flight.

Why? Because I will be carrying copies of one of my books, which has the title Killing Time (It’s an investigation into the death penalty case of Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, and was published in 2003 by Common Courage Press), and more importantly, because I just got a haircut.

Ask the TSA: Terrorist or just a diligent student?

A haircut, you may well ask? Well you see, we just learned that the TSA last fall handcuffed, arrested and held for five hours young Nick George, a 21-year-old Pomona College student on his way back to campus in California, because they found 200 Arab/English language flashcards on his person, and despite his protestation that he is a Middle Eastern Studies major, they decided that he must be a terrorist.

The reason they stopped him in the first place, though, according to Philadelphia Police, who were called in to take him into detention, is that the TSA and police were suspicious that George’s hair was shorter than it appeared in the photo on his Pennsylvania driver’s license. “That,” as Polict Lt. Louis Liberati told the Inquirer, is “an indication sometimes that someone may have gone through a radicalization.”

Damn. Just last week, I decided that my shaggy grey locks and Santa-like beard were becoming too unruly, so I got out the old electric hair-clipper and gave myself a very short buzzcut. It hasn’t changed my politics, but I sure look radically different–and I must say that my hair and beard are shorter than they appear on either my driver’s license or my passport.

Now, if the bright bulbs on the TSA at Philly’s airport security checkpoint decide that my haircut means I look “radicalized” and need closer inspection, and if they then decide to check through my carry-on luggage, they will inevitably stumble upon the copies of my second book, which I’m bring to Geneva to sell to interested participants at the Congress. As soon as they see the title, “Killing Time,” I figure they’ll freak. And if they read the subtitle, which says, “An investigation into the death row case of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” they will see that name and immediately flash “Arab! Arab! Arab!” although of course Mumia, aka Wesley Cook, is an African American native of Philadelphia.

That won’t help me, though, if the TSA cuffs me and turns me over to the tender mercies of Philly’s Finest, because Mumia Abu-Jamal is public enemy number one for the police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, whose members are dedicated to ensuring this man’s execution. They will not be kindly disposed to a writer whose book argues that Abu-Jamal’s trial was a kangaroo court sham rife with racism, prosecutorial misconduct and perjured testimony, that his appeals were subverted by blatant judicial prejudice, and that he may not even have been guilty at all of the crime of killing a white police officer.

Of course, it could get worse for me. Early last month, another local student flying home from the holidays to college, 22-year-old Rebecca Solomon, had a Philadelphia Airport TSA worker, “as a joke,” slip a plastic bag of some unidentified white powder into her carry-on bag, which he was inspecting after pulling her, allegedly at random, from the security line for a special inspection. “Where did you get it?” he asked her, causing the young woman to totally freak out. At that point, after letting her sweat and telling her things would be all right if she just answered “honestly,” the TSA goon reportedly smiled and said, “just kidding.”

Holy crap! Bad enough that someone in that kind of position of authority would think of that as a joke, but what if it hadn’t been? What if it had been coke, and he’d decided to claim he actually found something that he had really planted in the bag himself? How easy it would be in this mad, terror-crazed America, to get a jury to send someone like Solomon up for 10 years on a faked drug charge (the Philly Police were caught doing just this on a wide scale in a 1990s scandal prosecuted by the US Attorney’s Office)? Or, had the bag contained some explosive powder, how easy to send her packing to Guantanamo on a faked terrorism charge?

Luckily, the jerk who pulled that last stunt was fired by the TSA, but not, apparently, the guy who cuffed a young Middle Eastern Studies scholar and kept him from making his flight.

And then there’s Nadine Peligrino, a 57-year-old Baton-Rouge businesswoman and Philadelphia native, who was at the Philly airport preparing to fly home with her husband from a visit to family and friends. Back in July 2006, she was, for some unknown reason, selected for special attention by the alert agents of the TSA. As they started picking through her bag, the fastidious woman, who used to teach public speaking and semantics at Penn State and Trenton College, asked that the the TSA inspectors put on new surgical gloves.

The over-enthusiastic TSA inspectors were at the time pawing through her make-up, sniffing at her lipstick and fingering her undergarments (ahead of the game there apparently, they were already looking for explosive underpants!), and she didn’t want any unwanted germs. She claims the agents got irritated at her, especially when she asked them to put her things back in the bag the way they found them.

They didn’t–tossing everything together in a pile. When she stormed out of the private room where the screening had been conducted, the agents claim she hit them with her purse. She was charged with assault, was arrested by Philly police, and spent 17 hours in the can. Her case was recently tossed by a Philadelphia court because even though her attorneys had requested the security tapes of the incident from the TSA, the TSA destroyed them.

The judge, Municipal Judge Thomas Gehret, didn’t take kindly to the TSA lawyer’s explanation that they allowed the routine destruction of the recording after 30 days “because most of the incident took place outside of the camera’s view” and because the city of Philadelphia “couldn’t afford” the cost of storing such records. As the judge said, “With all the stuff that is happening, I would think you’d want to keep it – you could keep that forever.”

He scoffed at the TSA’s lame expense excuse, noting correctly that such digital records can fit on one DVD.

So there you have it. Cut your hair in Philadelphia and to the alert agents of the TSA and the equally alert Philadelphia Police you are a potentially radicalized terrorist. (Geez, and I already went through that garbage back in the ‘60s, when my long hair used to routinely get me harassed by police. So I guess it’s “long hair and beard = Commie” and “short hair and beard = Jihadi”). Carry language flash cards, or perhaps a book with an incindiary title, and you’re a potential terrorist. Get the wrong TSA agent, and you may even end up having some terribly incriminating substance planted in your bag. And try to prove misbehavior or worse by the TSA and they’ll casually destroy the evidence.

Ahead of this flight, I have memorized the number of the Philadelphia ACLU.

Wish me luck!

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net