Author Archives: Bill Humphrey

Bill Humphrey

About Bill Humphrey

Bill Humphrey is the primary host of WVUD's Arsenal For Democracy talk radio show and a local elected official.

Chris Christie’s latest scandal involves EZ Passes

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Remember how Christie still believes he’s going to run for president and have a shot? New scandal discovered:

On Tuesday, the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey issued a subpoena to members of the state legislature seeking records related to Baroni’s testimony at a 2013 hearing on the Bridgegate scandal. At that hearing, Baroni disclosed that he possessed E-ZPass customer data showing the traffic histories of constituents of state lawmakers who were interrogating him. Experts tell IBTimes that the disclosure of E-ZPass records appears to have violated state law protecting the privacy of drivers and also raises serious questions about the degree to which government agencies can keep tabs on the comings and goings of citizens.

 
Do read the full thing. It’s another impressive insight into the constant abuses of power and intimidation that have been hallmarks of the full Christie administration.

chris-christie

The NYPD: America’s Secret Police

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Misconduct by the NYPD (with or without the apparently irrelevant backing of the law, based on their recent disrespect for their elected leader) extends from the individual level – stop-and-frisk encounters or the chokehold killing of Eric Garner – to the systemic and massive.

As a reminder: It took until April 2014 for the NYPD to shutter a terrifying surveillance program against Muslim communities, which was established after the 9/11 attacks.

That program not only sent undercover spies to Muslim neighborhoods in the city to track ordinary New Yorkers going about their daily lives, but it extended across the entire northeastern United States – well beyond the bounds of New York City.

The program was advised by the CIA (see previous link) but acted without the knowledge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In true Orwell fashion, it was named the “Demographics Unit.”

Such “secret police” behavior – down to the inscrutably euphemistic name – is like something out of Tsarist Russia.

Such programs — or indeed national security in general — are not supposed to be the role of a municipal police force. Activities by the NYPD in the past decade and a half suit the secret police forces of a 19th century reactionary monarch in Europe far more than a 21st century American liberal democracy.

Flag of the New York City Police Department

Flag of the New York City Police Department

2,000 “feared dead” in raids by Boko Haram in NE Nigeria

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Last weekend, I posted a story on Boko Haram’s rout of a multi-national force and capture of a Nigerian base in the country’s northeast:

Nigeria’s strategically significant military base at Baga, near the border of Chad, fell to Boko Haram in a clear rout for the multi-national force stationed there, who apparently put up no resistance.

 
Some residents, who escaped the fall of the town and fled across Lake Chad and the national border, had reported at the time that Boko Haram had set the town of Baga on fire and was killing people indiscriminately. (Baga was previously also the site of a massacre by government counter-insurgency forces in 2013.)

The reports filtering out since then, about what happened next, are even more grim:

Boko Haram razed at least 16 villages in northern Nigeria, leaving 2,000 people unaccounted for and feared dead since Monday, Nigerian officials said Thursday.

It’s possible some of the missing are in hiding or are outside the country and uncounted (about 2,500 refugees crossed the border this week), but things look bleak on that possibility:

Borno state lawmaker Ahmed Khalifa told NBC News that “towns are just gone” and that the the villages along Lake Chad are “covered in bodies.” The village attacks reportedly began after militants seized a key military base and chased residents out of the area. After clearing the villages, they returned to kill survivors and burn down town structures.

 
TIME magazine reports this alarming development:

Boko Haram […] controls an estimated 30-35,000 square kilometers, roughly the same amount of terrain as Syria and Iraq’s Islamic State.

 
It’s pretty telling about U.S. priorities, over-reactions, and under-reactions in different parts of the world that the response to ISIS last year was sharply different — which is to say, not even on the same scale of magnitude — from the response to Boko Haram, even as they now control the same land area by size.

Mass executions by ISIS in Syria and Iraq have so far reportedly topped out at 700 people in a two week killing spree (although the total figures across incidents over the past year are significantly higher). If the civilian body count estimates coming out of north Borno state in northeast Nigeria prove correct, Boko Haram will have already significantly exceeded the August 2014 massacres by ISIS.

Keep in mind, however, that public official/government reports on the insurgency in Nigeria have often proven greatly exaggerated or altogether false, and information coming out of the Baga area is likely to be very sketchy at best right now. At minimum, though, the intensity and frequency of Boko Haram’s attacks on military and civilian targets (especially near the border regions) appear to be picking up steam.

Added January 9 at 7:33 PM ET: — Report from Amnesty International via the AP:

Hundreds of bodies — too many to count — remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International suggested Friday is the “deadliest massacre” in the history of Boko Haram.
[…]
District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents.

“The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous,” Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defense group that fights Boko Haram, told The Associated Press.

He said the civilian [self-defense] fighters gave up on trying to count all the bodies. “No one could attend to the corpses and even the seriously injured ones who may have died by now,” Gava said.

 

Also: The BBC reports that nearby Niger’s troops will no longer be participating in the multi-national force in Borno state due to the deteriorating security situation (which seems a bit counter-intuitive since they’re supposed to be helping with that exact problem):

Soldiers from Niger had been there [at Baga base] but were not present when it was attacked.

Niger Foreign Minister Mohamed Bazoum told the BBC Hausa service: “We have 50 soldiers there and decided to withdraw them after Boko Haram captured Malamfatori town in October and continued to operate in the area with impunity.

“As you know, Baga is under [the control of] Boko Haram terrorists and unless the town is recaptured from them, we will not send back our troops.

 

Still image (via AFP) from a Boko Haram video communiqué received October 31, 2014.

Still image (via AFP) from a Boko Haram video communiqué received October 31, 2014.

Other police mutinies in U.S. history: Mississippi

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As the NYPD turns its back on its elected government and unilaterally refuses to enforce the law, let’s look back at another mutinous, anti-democratic police force that refused to uphold the law — Mississippi’s secret police.

For nearly two decades following the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling against school segregation, a secret state-level agency called the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission conducted surveillance on “subversive individuals and organizations that advocate civil disobedience” – i.e. civil rights activists.

Their primary mission was to resist the implementation of Federal government orders and laws on desegregation in Mississippi. This included aiding county governments in preventing African-Americans from registering to vote. Worse, their surveillance efforts have also been linked to the infamous lynching murders of three civil rights workers in 1964.

You can learn more about this secret police force from the Mississippi Department of Archives.

Flag of the State of Mississippi

Flag of the State of Mississippi

Things to think about as Sri Lanka votes

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Early presidential elections in Sri Lanka — between the incumbent (increasingly dictatorial) president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and his former Health Minister, Maithripala Sirisena — have unexpectedly become a nail-biter race.

Some of the Western coverage has focused on the frivolous and bizarre. (For example, the New York Times’s “As Vote Nears, Astrologer for Sri Lanka’s President Faces Ultimate Test of His Skills”.) Some has focused on the president’s troubling alliance with extremist Buddhist/Sinhalese nationalism.

But most importantly, there are reflections on President Rajapaksa’s appalling war crimes during his decisive but extremely violent conclusion to Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war:

By the first few months of 2009, with the [Tamil] Tigers in hopeless retreat, the government declared a series of what they called “no fire zones”, into which they encouraged as many as 400,000 Tamil civilians to gather “for their own safety”.

Government forces then relentlessly shelled these zones and, as a later UN report concluded, systematically denied them food and humanitarian supplies. The UN estimates that there were “as many as 40,000 civilian deaths in a matter of weeks, most as a result of government shelling. There was also a World Bank estimate that 100,000 civilians were missing after the war.

 
It takes a special kind of monster to urge civilians into safe zones and then direct military to shell those zones.

President and Mrs. Obama in an official photo with President and Mrs. Rajapaksa at the September 2013 UN General Assembly in New York. (White House Photo)

President and Mrs. Obama in an official photo with President and Mrs. Rajapaksa at the September 2013 UN General Assembly in New York. (White House Photo)

January 7, 2015 – Arsenal For Democracy 112

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AFD-logo-470

Topics: Rep. Steve Scalise, US policy on Cuba and North Korea, Islamophobia in Sweden and Germany. People: Bill, Nate. Produced: January 5th, 2015.

Discussion Points:

– Why House Majority Whip Steve Scalise is at least a White supremacist sympathizer, despite his sketchy denials — and what that means for the Republican Party now.
– What does the US policy change on Cuba mean for both countries? Should the US also adjust policies on North Korea?
– Why are Germany and Sweden witnessing a surge of anti-Muslim public actions?

Episode 112 (55 min)
AFD 112

Related links
Segment 1

– Cen Lamar: House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was reportedly an honored guest at 2002 international white supremacist convention
– Washington Post: House Majority Whip Scalise confirms he spoke to white nationalists in 2002
– NYT: Much of David Duke’s ’91 Campaign Is Now in Louisiana Mainstream

Segment 2

– NYT: Obama Announces U.S. and Cuba Will Resume Relations
– AFD: Hip-Hop Invasion! (and other stupid covert Cuba projects)

Segment 3

– The Globalist: Political Courage: Merkel Vs. Cameron
– BBC: Anti-Islam ‘Pegida’ rally in Dresden sees record turnout
– BBC: Three mosque fires in one week (Sweden)
– AFD: Sweden’s budget deal is American-style extortion

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De-Baathification: An ISIS misstep the US already made?

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ISIS appears to have made the same major error in Sunni Iraq as the United States did nearly 12 years ago, pursuing a de-Baathification policy and thereby alienating a key constituency that might otherwise have backed their occupation — Baathist military officers and pro-Baathist Sunni tribes.

These Baathists generally have the most military and administrative experience in the the Sunni regions of Iraq, due to their military and governmental service under Saddam Hussein. Additionally, most membership/follower estimates of both the new paramilitary wing (which aided the ISIS capture of Mosul) and the political party put them at significantly larger numerical strength than the ISIS brigades operating in Iraq, if not all across the so-called Islamic State.

All in all, this policy seems to be backfiring on ISIS much the same way it backfired on the United States, as demonstrated below in a comparison between recent articles and articles from various points in the U.S. war effort after March 2003.

Late Baathist-era flag of the Republic of Iraq, 1991-2004.

Late Baathist-era flag of the Republic of Iraq, 1991-2004.

The Atlantic, this week:

But once its initial gains were secured, ISIS quickly betrayed the very groups that had aided its advance. Most prominently, ISIS declared the reestablishment of the caliphate, with the group’s spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani claiming that “the legality of all emirates, groups, states, and organizations, becomes null by the expansion of the khilafah’s authority.” The statement clearly signaled that ISIS believed it had usurped the authority of its allies; indeed, in early July it rounded up ex-Baathist leaders in Mosul (doing so proved particularly problematic for ISIS because the ex-Baathists were also managing the actual governance and administration of the northern Iraqi city, and their arrest hastened the rapid disintegration of basic services).
[…]
And ISIS’s bureaucratic mismanagement has alienated local populations, leaving them with a lack of job opportunities and essential services.

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