8 Horrible Truths About Police Brutality and Racism in America Laid Bare by Ferguson

  Civil Liberties  

AlterNet / By Steven Rosenfeld

8 Horrible Truths About Police Brutality and Racism in America Laid Bare by Ferguson

African Americans and communities of color face many ugly obstacles.

November 26, 2014  |  

The hard truths about American racism exposed by Ferguson aren’t going away. That’s the case, even as the first African-American president, Barack Obama, responding to Monday’s renewed rioting, said, “Nothing of significance, nothing of benefit, results from destructive acts.” Racism is real, Obama said, and he urged Americans to “mobilize,” “organize,” find the “best policies,” and “vote.”

Yet on the ground in Ferguson, where the white policeman who shot an unarmed black man was exonerated by a local grand jury and went on national television and said he would do the same thing again, Obama’s words stung. There are specific and surprising reasons why the rage over Ferguson isn’t going away. In the St. Louis suburb and across America, blacks and other people of color still face embedded racism and second-class treatment. Political leaders have not brought change; they have failed to curb excessive policing and incarceration rates or create economic opportunities and hope people can believe in.

“The uprising in Ferguson was an inevitable reaction to the institutional racism coursing through the area for decades,” wrote HandsUpDontShoot.com, citing the example of police padding municipal budgets by going overboard with issuing traffic tickets to the poor, followed by even more punitive arrest warrants if people have not paid their fines.

Here are eight terrible facts and trends about abusive policing and institutional racism laid bare by the Ferguson uprising.

1. Darren Wilson was trained to kill and did. It was shocking that a local grand jury did not indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown. But no one predicted Wilson would go on TV and say he did as he was trained, and tell the nation he would do it again. Wilson told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he has a “clear conscience” and that he would have done the same thing if he had faced a white assailant.

His lack of remorse is not just maddening, but points to a problem that is much bigger than Ferguson: how local police have become paramilitary machines with officers trained, equipped and expected to shoot if they lose control of a situation. Across America, one result is that victims of police killings disproportionately look like Michael Brown and not like Darren Wilson.

2. More black Americans are killed by cops. Police shoot and kill blacks almost twice as frequently as any other racial group, MotherJones.org reported, after examining piles of federal crime data. “Black people were about four times as likely to die in custody or while being arrested than whites.” MoJo said the majority of local police departments do not report police killing figures to the FBI. “It’s also not clear that Brown’s death—the circumstances of which remain in dispute—would show up in the FBI’s data in the first place.”

3. Police are armed and trained to kill. The militarization of local police has been growing ever since the Pentagon and U.S. Department of Justice decided to give away surplus weaponry from Iraq and Afghanistan. The heaviest weaponry is often used by SWAT teams during drug raids, where as the ACLU has noted, communities of color are targeted for nighttime raids. They face few consequences for making mistakes, such as maiming or killing people and pets and ransacking homes and personal property. These same teams were deployed in Ferguson to confront protesters after Brown’s killing in August, exacerbating violence instead of quelling it.

As an ACLU report found, the rampant over-militarization is a national problem, not a few “bad apple” local departments. The ACLU called it a “war without public support,” filled with too many “unnecessary tragedies." Non-whites were primary targets of SWAT raids. Blacks were targeted in 39 percent of raids, Latinos in 11 percent, whites in 20 percent. There is little transparency about tactics, nor accountability for mistakes.

4. Life in black America isn’t getting better. The Ferguson protests are not in a vacuum, but come against a backdrop of ongoing societal hardship, especially in black communities. Obama has said that the U.S. is making progress on race issues, yet it’s hard, if not impossible, to separate issues of race and class.

RawStory.com cited a long list of disparities that factor into the simmering rage that boiled over in Ferguson and across the country. “The black-white disparity in infant mortality has grown since 1950. Whereas 72.9 percent of whites are homeowners, only 43.5 percent of blacks are. Blacks constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million people incarcerated. According to Pew, white median household wealth is $91,405; black median household wealth is $6,446—the gap has tripled over the past 25 years. Since 2007, the black median income has declined 15.8 percent. In contrast, Hispanics’ median income declined 11.8 percent, Asians’ 7.7 percent and whites’ 6.3 percent.”

5. White America really doesn’t get it. These race and class divides are not widely seen as serious enough for action by white Americans. When it comes to Ferguson, whites are quicker to accept the storyline laid out by authorities. “Well-meaning whites have, on the whole, failed to appreciate the origins of racial-ethnic disparities in health, wealth, education, and incarceration—or to see them as a problem,” RawStory’s Ted Silverman wrote. “Many believe in justice, but feel perfectly comfortable when and where racial-ethnic inequality is the norm.”

6. The system defends itself, not the public. The Brown family, protesters and civil rights advocates all wanted the criminal justice system to take a fair look at what unfolded in August, but kept getting signs that was not likely to happen. In August, police leaked video footage showing Brown robbing a convenience store, which was intended to smear his character and suggest that somehow Brown deserved what happened in the subsequent confrontation with Wilson.

The grand jury proceeding was strange, legal experts noted. The prosecutor said he was being fair by bringing all the evidence to the 12 jurors. But that tactic has been interpreted as a deliberate move to overwhelm jurors and create doubts that would not lead to recommending Wilson be charged. It is curiously parallel to what unfolded in the Trayvon Martin murder case, in which experts said Florida prosecutors didn’t really want to convict George Zimmerman.

7. Evidence suggests Wilson abused his license to kill. Besides Wilson’s interview on ABC-TV, his grand jury testimony has been released to the public. At the heart of his statements is the question of why he kept firing his gun at Brown. Wilson said he was threatened because it appeared that a stricken but enraged Brown was coming toward him. Others said it appeared that Brown turned around after trying to flee and was surrendering.

While that contradiction cannot be resolved, legal experts like the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson said that Wilson’s testimony suggested he shot to kill, and not to defend himself. “What stands out is that once the second shot had been fired and Brown had started to run, he no longer represented a deadly threat to the officer or to anybody else. He was a large, bleeding, unarmed man running down the street in an attempt to get away. Wilson, who chased after Brown, was the one with the deadly weapon.”

8. If Wilson was scared, the law takes his side.That’s the bottom line in Missouri law and jury instructions, which strongly defer to the use of deadly force by on-duty police officers. Brown’s attorneys had been hoping for a second-degree murder charge, when a person knowingly causes the death of another. But grand jury instructions in Missouri, which are read to the panel before it decides whether to press charges, allow police to use deadly force if the officer believes it is “immediately necessary.” That formulation almost always protects the police from prosecution for using deadly force because they can say they felt theatened.  

That’s the storyline Wilson told the grand jury and also told ABC-TV, and which underscores how the system is biased against admitting police errors even when people are unnecessarily killed. The story of Michael Brown and Darren Wilson is a prism reflecting many ugly truths about how American society operates and victimizes blacks and communities of color. That is why the nationwide protests will continue.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's retirement crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

The Racial Crisis in American Society: Ferguson: A Taste of Things to Come

September 22, 2014

Ferguson: A Taste of Things to Come

The Racial Crisis in American Society

by NAFEEZ AHMED

 

The shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, a district of St. Louis County in Missouri, and the spate of civil unrest that followed, could set a precedent for the future of American society according to a senior Iraq war veteran and Pentagon defence analyst. Terron Sims, an African American active in local Democratic politics who had previously served five years in the United States Army, told me during an interview last month that without a fundamental cultural and institutional change in American policing across the country, the US could see more Ferguson-type events in the near future.
In an interview in Washington DC where Sims is president of the North Virginia Black Democrats and on the Board of Principals at the Truman National Security Project, I asked him whether the Ferguson crisis offered a taste of things to come.

“This is a taste of the present, my friend. We’re already here. This is America, today,” said Sims. “And if we don’t deal with the root cause in terms of widespread racial discrimination against black people, this will be our tomorrow.”

The Ferguson crisis has sparked a national debate on the culture of policing in the US toward black communities, as well as the increasing militarization of the police due to a federal Pentagon programme providing military-grade equipment to local police forces at little or no cost.

Last Tuesday, Lt. Col. Jon Belmar, the top police officer in St. Louis County, justified the extensive deployment of military-grade equipment to respond to Ferguson unrest. “Had we not had the ability to protect officers with those vehicles, I am afraid that we would have to engage people with our own gun fire,” Belmar told USA Today. “I really think having the armor gave us the ability not to have pulled one trigger… I think the military uses armor to be able to provide an offensive force, and police departments use trucks like that so they don’t have to.”

The recent provision of three grenade launchers, 61 rifles and a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle to the Los Angeles School police department prompted civil rights and education groups to write to the US Defense Department demanding an end to the federal supply programme to the LA school system. One unidentified police official reportedly said that the weapons were needed “for the safety of staff, students, and personnel” and that the grenade launchers and armored vehicle would only be used in “very specific circumstances,” but did not elaborate on the nature of those circumstances.

In contrast, Terron Sims, a West Point Military Academy graduate and company commander during the 2003 Iraq war, said, “Police conduct in Ferguson is a travesty and wake-up call. There are simply no circumstances in the US where the use of military-grade equipment could ever be justified to police civilian communities.” During his Iraq service, Sims was principal civil military officer responsible for liaising with civilians and civilian authorities in Baghdad. He went on to become deputy chief of the US Army’s Joint Training Readiness Center at Fort Polk, finally serving as a senior Pentagon analyst before retiring into civilian life. “Our squadron had an exemplary record”, Sims said. “We had to deal with far worse than what the cops on the streets of Ferguson were facing. I’m talking about US troops faced with swarms of angry civilians who look at you as invaders. Riots? Protests? You name it. But we had to be disciplined. My squadron didn’t use force against a single civilian. In fact, part of my job was making sure that our squad worked with and alongside the civilians in Tisa Nissan district, in Baghdad, to ease the transition from a military-run institution to civilian-led government.”

During our interview, Terron Sims could barely conceal his disgust at the behaviour of police officers in Ferguson toward civilian protestors. “I can’t speak for the whole US army in Iraq, but if our squadron could do it, I don’t understand why American cops can’t.” The problem, he said, is that racism continues to be a major problem in American police forces: “This is about an entrenched culture of policing that doesn’t work with and alongside communities. Instead, we have police officers roaming around seeing the local community as outsiders, or even worse, as a homogenous enemy. The cops that are capable of shooting peaceful, black Americans don’t have relationships with the black community. They don’t have any outreach.”

I asked him how the police should have handled the situation. “The first thing I would’ve done if I was the police chief was reach out to black community leaders,” he said. “Get their take on things and work with them to restore justifiable confidence in the police’s ability to actually behave lawfully and accountably. But obviously in this case, the police clearly don’t have the first idea who the community leaders are. But to be honest, if I was the police chief, I’d be asking myself hard questions about how I’d allowed it get to this point in the first place.”

Sims is hardly an ‘anti-establishment’ activist. A believer in the political process, he is currently outreach director for the Arlington County Democratic Committee and chairman of the Veterans and Military Families Caucusfor the Democratic Party of Virginia. In that context, his verdict on what Ferguson means for the state of America today is damning. “The shooting of Michael Brown did not come out of the blue,” he told me. “Let’s not beat about the bush here. It came about through a deepening culture of unaccountable racism. And it’s not just about police racism. Obviously in Ferguson we’re looking at years of police repression targeted largely at black people, but it goes deeper than that.”

Police repression, Sims explained, must be understood as part of a wider racial crisis in American society. “You look at a place like Ferguson and you see rampant unemployment, poverty and illiteracy in the black community. These trends have persisted and worsened for years. And there’s no money to improve things,” said Sims. “Local government is not investing in education. It’s not investing in jobs, in infrastructure. But Ferguson is not an isolated case. Shootings of innocent black people in the US by cops is at epidemic levels. That follows on the back of massive inequalities between white and black people across America.”

It is now widely recognized that the racial divide in the United States has worsened in recent decades along economic lines. In 1970, 33.6 percent of blacks and 10 percent of whites were impoverished. In 2012, 35 percent of blacks lived in poverty, compared to 13 percent of whites. While 5% of white Americans are unemployed, more than double — 11% — are black. Nearly three quarters of whites own their own home, compared to just 43% of blacks. And in the last 25 years, the wealth gap between whites and blacks has nearly tripled. Median household wealth for whites is about $91,400, but a measly $6,400 for black people.

Economic inequalities are compounded by the acceleration in police repression of black and ethnic minority communities over the last two years. Official police records demonstrate that, notwithstanding deficiencies in the way information is catalogued, the victims of police shootings are overwhelmingly male, heavily young, and disproportionately black.

A startling independent report into “extrajudicial killings” of black people in the US by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) — an activist organization with chapters in Atlanta, Detroit, Fort Worth-Dallas, Jackson, New Orleans, New York City, Oakland, and Washington, DC — raises deeper questions. The report released in May 2013 — months before the outbreak of violence in Ferguson — found that an African American male is killed every 28 hours by US police or vigilantes, with little or no accountability. In 2012, a total of 313 black people were unlawfully killed in this way.

The report contextualizes this systematic violence against black communities by US police forces as part of a wider system of racist repression in which local police departments are entwined with a network of domestic security structures encompassing “the FBI, Homeland Security, CIA, Secret Service, prisons, and private security companies, along with mass surveillance and mass incarceration.” Together, this domestic national security apparatus “wages a grand strategy of ‘domestic pacification’” through endless “containment campaigns” against groups designated as problematic or dangerous to the system.

The MXGM analysis coheres disturbingly well with mounting evidence of Pentagon contingency planning for “domestic insurgencies” triggered by social, economic, or food shocks, or natural disasters. US federal government planning documents suggest that the Pentagon’s role in militarizing local police forces is linked to growing concerns about domestic civil unrest due to the state coming under increasing strain from elevated climate, energy and economic risks.

My in-depth investigation last month into the Pentagon’s controversial Minerva research initiative has, for instance, exposed how the US Defense Department is funding universities to develop complex new data-mining tools capable of automatically ranking the threat level from groups and individuals defined as politically “radical.” Such tools, which according to NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake could feed directly into the algorithms used to fine-tune the CIA’s drone kill lists abroad, are increasingly being used to assess threats from activist and civil society groups in the US homeland.

In a society where racial tensions are intensifying, this dynamic inevitably affects marginalised black and ethnic minority communities disproportionately. Police forces end up being brought into black communities “with the marching orders, equipment and the mentality of an occupying army that inevitably results in systematic extrajudicial killings of citizens without respect for their human rights,” the MXGM report found. “The adoption of military tactics, equipment, training, and weapons leads to law enforcement adopting a war-like mentality,” concurred journalist Adam Hudson on the MXGM report’s conclusions. “They come to view themselves as soldiers fighting against a foreign enemy rather than police protecting a community.”

Given the extent of America’s racial divide, does this suggest that the civil rights movement has failed? I put the question to Terron Sims. “It’s not that the movement has failed — it’s that it’s not over,” he told me. “In Ferguson, the conditions have been brewing for a while. Black people are being shot all across America, but the reason it hasn’t kicked off everywhere is because the demographics aren’t the same. Ferguson has a fairly sizeable and concentrated black population, unlike with the shooting of Trayvon Martin for instance in a district in Florida, where the black community is more dispersed and certainly more affluent than in St. Louis.”

Indeed, Ferguson represents a microcosm of these problems, with wealth inequalities markedly worse than the national average. For example, census figures for 2012 in St. Louis County show that nearly half of all African American men are unemployed, compared to just 16 percent for white men.
“At those levels of poverty and inequality, with no jobs available and nothing to do all day, that’s a serious level of despair and hopelessness,” said Sims. “You prod and proke a situation like that, and it’s going to start simmering. You shoot a kid in the street in a situation like that for no good reason, well then it’s going to explode.”

For Sims, the only solution is for black communities to mobilise socially and politically: “Part of the reason there’s no money going into these communities is because there are no black political representatives on the scene advocating for those communities. That needs to change. We need to compel change by engaging with these institutions.”

If nothing is done to address these bigger, deeper issues of racial discrimination and inequality, does Ferguson represent the future of the United States?
“Of course it could”, said Sims. “I’m not saying Fergusons could happen everywhere, but for sure, if things continue as they are, there’ll come a point where the combination of unaccountable, rampant and racist police repression will inflame community tensions in circumstances of growing levels of deprivation and hopelessness. And that’s where race riots could become far more of a norm than we might expect. So unless something changes, yes, Ferguson is our future.”

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author, investigative journalist and international security scholar.  He has contributed to two major terrorism investigations in the US and UK, the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest, and has advised the Royal Military Academy Sandhust, British Foreign Office and US State Department. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, CounterPunch, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others. His just released new novel, ZERO POINT, predicted a new war in Iraq to put down an al-Qaeda insurgency. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed and Facebook.

This article appears in the excellent Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.

Is Homeownership Really Falling Out of Favor?

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Is Homeownership Really Falling Out of Favor?

Posted by Rachel Silver on August 22, 2014

Homeownership seems to be falling out of favor.  Newspapers these days are peppered with articles that highlight the skepticism of younger Americans about whether buying a home is a good investment, and with so many people still suffering the effects of the housing crisis that started in 2008, who can blame them?  The MacArthur Foundation recently published the results of a nationwide survey of Americans' attitudes and perceptions about housing.  Based on this survey, many people feel that, given the changes over the past several decades in the way we live our lives, renting a home has become more appealing and owning less appealing.  Perhaps more surprisingly, a majority of adults believe that renters can be just as successful as owners at achieving the American Dream.  But is this really true, or, in the current backlash against homeownership, are we in danger of throwing out the baby along with the bath water?

Just what does it mean to achieve the American Dream, and why has it been so closely associated with homeownership?  The ideal of the American Dream is the opportunity to achieve a better life, unconstrained by class and caste distinctions that are prevalent in other parts of the world. The myth of America is that you can start from nothing and succeed by hard work and ability alone. But in practical terms, to really move up and out of poverty, American families need to build asset wealth, not just grow their incomes; historically, the best way to build asset wealth has been through homeownership .  Because of this, homeownership and the American Dream are deeply entwined in public perception, to the point that many people think homeownership is the American Dream.

It is also important to consider that historically, the opportunity to own a home and build asset wealth has not been equally available to all segments of the population.  Because of restrictive covenants, redlining, and other discriminatory practices, minority populations have not had the same access to homeownership as white populations, contributing to today’s disparity in both homeownership and poverty rates between white and minority households. What is especially troubling is that the gap between white and minority homeownership rates is widening, meaning that minorities continue to have less access to asset wealth building opportunities than their white peers.  While today’s young renters may be happy with their housing tenure, for lower-income families, access to homeownership can be a real and necessary step towards financial stability—provided, of course, that the homeownership opportunity is not unaffordable, speculative, and risky.

Because of homeownership’s traditional role in helping create strong, stable neighborhoods, communities across the United States have developed programs to promote affordable homeownership opportunities and assist first-time homebuyers.  Our work at Cornerstone Partnership has focused on building the scale and capacity of community homeownership programs that preserve long-term affordability.  We help these programs implement a series of best practices we call “stewardship,” which encompasses a range of activities, including pricing units affordably, educating and supporting buyers, preventing predatory lending, and preserving public subsidy for future generations of homebuyers. Over the last several years, we have helped hundreds of agencies strengthen their programs, gain knowledge from their peers, and collect data to support the impact of their work.  Not surprisingly, research conducted by the Urban Institute in 2010revealed that stewarded programs with long-term affordability have seen far lower foreclosure rates than the national average .

There is no doubt that the housing crisis hurt homeowners, especially those in the middle income ranges. Six years after the start of the crisis, we are still suffering its effects. As a nation, our faith in homeownership has taken a blow.  Certainly not everyone wants or is ready to own a home, and a range of decent and affordable housing options should be available in every community.  But homeownership done right provides unparalleled asset building opportunities with multi-generational benefits.  Tellingly, the MacArthur Foundation survey revealed that despite skepticism about the benefits of homeownership, 70 percent of respondents who are non-owners aspire to own a home someday. Wouldn’t it be great if there were more safe and affordable options available to make this dream come true?

(Photo by Alan Cleaver, CC BY.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR more »

Rachel Silver is director of Cornerstone Partnership, a peer network focused on helping nonprofits and public agencies strengthen homeownership and inclusionary housing programs that support long-term affordability and community stability.

3 Ways America Enables Slaughter in Gaza

  WORLD  

AlterNet / By Nicolas J.S. Davies

3 Ways America Enables Slaughter in Gaza

The U.S. government plays a central role in perpetuating the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The American and Israeli flags.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

August 20, 2014  |  

Opinion polling during a crisis tends to reflect the passions of the moment, but Americans have told pollsters for decades that we want our government to take an even-handed position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A Chicago Council Global Views survey in 2012 found that 65% of Americans want the U.S. to "not take either side", while only 30% want it to "take Israel's side". That majority rose to 74% vs 17% at the height of the U.S. war in Iraq in 2004.  American debate on the hundreds of civilian deaths in Gaza and the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict is polarized between feelings of sympathy with civilian victims on either side and mutual vilification of the Likud-led government of Israel and the Hamas-led government in Gaza.  But it may be more constructive for Americans to think about the role that the U.S. government plays in perpetuating this never-ending and heart-rending conflict.

But despite decades of presenting itself as an "honest broker" for Middle East peace, there are three ways that the U.S. unequivocally takes the Israeli side in the conflict and effectively supports the Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) with all it entails, from illegal settlement building to horrific violence:

1. Military aid. The U.S. has provided Israel with at least $73 billion in military aid and currently gives it $3.1 billion per year.  Under the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) and Arms Export Control Act (AECA), the U.S. is obliged to suspend or terminate military aid when U.S. weapons are used against civilians or in other ways that violate international humanitarian law, but these provisions have not been invoked or enforced in the case of Israel since 1982.  After resupplying the Israelis with ammunition during the Gaza crisis, the Obama administration has finally begun reviewing Israeli arms requests on a case-by-case basis and is witholding a new shipment of Hellfire missiles. Compliance with the FAA and AECA would require a suspension of military aid until recent alleged violations of U.S. law have been fully investigated, and stricter compliance could justify ending all military aid until a permanent peace settlement is reached and the occupation is ended.

2. Diplomatic cover. Since 1966, the U.S. has used its UN Security Council veto 83 times, more than the other four Permanent Members combined.  Forty-two of those vetoes have served to kill resolutions on Israel and Palestine, effectively shielding Israel from accountability under international law.  Israel has taken advantage of this effective immunity from the rule of law to violate the Geneva Conventions and other human rights laws, to continually expand its illegal settlements in the OPT and to ignore UN Security Council resolutions that require it to withdraw from the OPT.  The U.S. also uses its diplomatic, military and economic power in other ways to shield Israel from international accountability.  This extraordinary use of the U.S.veto and American power to shield a foreign state from the rule of law must end, before it further undermines a fragile system of international law that has already been badly damaged and weakened by the U.S.'s own illegal actions since 2001.

3. Moral support.  Israel is now a wealthy, developed country with an advanced weapons industry, so it could adapt to even a complete cut-off of U.S. military aid.  But U.S. diplomatic and Congressional support is critical to the Israeli government's ability to ignore otherwise universal condemnation of its illegal settlement building, human rights abuses and failure to end the occupation.  The UN General Assembly passed 21 resolutions on Israel-Palestine in 2013, mostly by at least 165-6, with the US and Israel in the minority. But U.S. support confers a false sense of legitimacy on Israeli policies.  Unconditional moral support encourages the Israeli government to press ahead with an illegal territorial expansion that the world will never recognize, leading only to endless conflict and growing international isolation for Israel itself.

These three elements of U.S. policy form a stable tripod, a three-legged stool upon which this otherwise unacceptable state of conflict grinds away without end and regularly flares up in horrific slaughter and mass destruction.  

Decades of UN resolutions require Israel to end its occupation of the OPT, to dismantle illegal settlements in the OPT and to treat Palestinians, both in Israel and in the OPT, according to the rights guaranteed to people everywhere by international humanitarian law.  The U.S. officially stands with the rest of the world on the fundamental questions, that the occupation must end, that Israel's international borders are the ones recognized by the UN in 1949, and on the protections guaranteed to civilians living under occupation by the 4th Geneva Convention.

President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry adopted a public posture of "getting tough" with the Netanyahu government over negotiations and settlement-building.  But the unwavering U.S. commitment to its three pillars of unconditional support for the Israeli occupation sent Netanyahu an unmistakable message that he could safely ignore Obama's and Kerry's "get tough" posture.  This left them looking impotent and more than a little naive, and it emboldened Netanyahu to launch the deadliest and most destructive assault yet on Gaza.  The Israelis seem to have achieved their goal of tightening the blockade by destroying the tunnels that were Gaza's only lifeline to the world, but this has only hardened the determination of Palestinians in Gaza to resist the even more restricted future the Israelis are seeking to impose on them.

Will Americans keep pretending that our government has been an "honest broker" in its efforts to end this horrific conflict?  Or will we finally demand real changes in the three aspects of U.S. policy that perpetuate war and occupation and deny peace to innocent civilians on both sides? 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of "Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq." Davies also wrote the chapter on "Obama At War" for the book, "Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader."

The Twilight Zone of American Political Life

The Twilight Zone of American Political Life

Where almost every word of news isn't what it seems

by John Chuckman / May 13th, 2014

I think a description of the political space in which we live as a kind of twilight reality is not an exaggeration. Not only is a great deal of the news about the world we read and hear manipulated and even manufactured, but a great deal of genuine news is simply missing. People often do not know what is happening in the world, although they generally believe they do know after reading their newspapers or listening to news broadcasts. People receive the lulling sounds or words of most of this kind of news almost unconsciously just as they do to the strains of piped-in “elevator music” in stores and offices.

There are several reasons why this is so. The consolidation of news media creates huge corporate industries whose interests are no different to those of other huge corporate industries. The ownership and control of these industries is not in the hands of people interested in finding out about things and helping others to understand: they are in the hands of people with political connections and goals. At the government level, those in power over the great agencies of the military and security also are not motivated by helping others to understand; indeed, they often are very much interested in hiding what they do.

With a large, complex, and powerful state like the United States these motivations become overwhelming in importance. The more the establishment’s national ambitions become interference in, and manipulation of, the world’s affairs – in effect, controlling the global environment in which it lives – the more it finds itself mired in acts and policies which cannot stand the light of day. Secrecy becomes a paramount goal of government, and all corporate news organizations – understanding their dependency upon government agencies for leaks and information to make them look good, for permissions and licences which allow them to survive and grow, and for advertising revenue from other great corporations involved with government – understand implicitly the permissible limits of investigation and news. And when they do forget, they are promptly reminded. Some of these giants – CNN and Fox News come to mind – make little pretence of genuine news or investigation, existing almost entirely as outlets for points of view, attitudes, and the odd tantalizing morsel of disinformation. They keep an audience because they offer what is best understood as either infotainment or soft propaganda which is expertly tuned to listeners’ and readers’ assumptions and preconceived ideas.

Size matters in all enterprises, economies of scale contributing to build powerful corporations with global influence. Size also matters to create what economists call “barriers to entry” in any industry, something which plays a major role in the evolution of many industries over time from fairly competitive ones to quasi-monopolistic ones. It is virtually impossible for a newcomer to enter an industry evolved to this latter state, including the news industry. It would be about as difficult to enter the American news industry as it would be to enter its soda pop, car manufacturing, household products, or hamburger restaurant industries. It is always possible to start a small niche, or boutique, operation, but it literally is not possible to compete with oligopolistic giants. So, necessarily, American news is under the control of a very few people, extremely wealthy people, who attend the same cocktail parties as senior people in government agencies and other great corporations.

The more powerful the great military-security-policing agencies in a society become, the more independent of public approval and scrutiny they grow. This is unavoidable without a sustained popular demand for public accountability and reasonable transparency, but such popular movements are difficult to start and even harder to maintain, and they are pretty much absent in America. Every once in a while we do get a movement in America popping up like spring dandelions on the lawn, almost always of the “back to basics” type, the Tea Party being the most recent manifestation, financed by some wealthy persons with their own goals and serving to titillate people for a short while that the dark monstrosity in Washington can be made to go away, but, as with the Tea Party, they always dry up and blow away.

The politicians who ostensibly oversee dark matters in special committees do not want public credit for what they approve. And I believe a point is reached, as it has been reached in the United States, where a great deal of the planning and decision-making in dirty affairs is left entirely in the hands of the great security agencies themselves, politicians not being in a position to interfere even if they wanted to do so. The sheer volume and complexity of such operations argues for this view, and the truth is most people and most politicians are comfortable with inertia.

If we go back about fifty years we have a complex and fascinating example of these forces and tendencies at work, and we can only be sure that matters have gone a great deal further since that time with the immense swelling of security budgets, open contempt for privacy and rights, and the dramatic advance of technological capabilities. On the matter of technology from the citizens’ point of view, the blithe pop notion of “social media,” so often talked up in the press as now working against concentrated power, ignores that “social media” too are just great corporations intimately linked to government. They not only send the security agencies a detailed flow of information about their subscribers, but they are all engineered to be switched off when government desires it. The Internet in general has provided an outlet for critical views, but the total exposure to the public is small in the scheme of things – a few channels, as it were, in a multi-trillion channel universe – and can mostly be ignored by authorities, and, in any event, the Internet is evolving quickly into something else far more dominated by commercial interests. The Golden Age of the Internet, so far as ideas are concerned, may well soon be over. To return to our example, if we go back to America’s many attempts to topple or assassinate the leader of Cuba in the early 1960s, we have perhaps our best understood example of elaborate dark operations, unaccountable officials, murder, mayhem, and an utterly compliant press – all freely continuing for years. Although histories of the Kennedy presidency contain more than one version of some details of America’s vast, long-lasting terrorist plot, still, much of it is understood, at least better than is the case for many such matters.

John Kennedy may not have been quite the idealist some sentimentally view him today, but he was more thoughtful, independent, and tough-minded than many American Presidents of the 20th century. He learned nearly immediately after becoming President that the previous Eisenhower government had established a vast operation to eliminate Castro and his government. It was a terror operation whose size and complexity and resources made the later mountain redoubt of Osama bin Laden resemble a Boy Scout camp. Despite its size, this was an operation unknown to the press and public at the time, although there is an anecdote that The New York Times tripped over the plot and, in traditional Times’ fashion, suppressed it at the CIA’s request. The plans took many routes, including, as we learned later from the Church Committee in 1975 (an examination of some intelligence practices in the wake of the Watergate scandal), CIA representatives going to the bizarre lengths of approaching senior Mafia figures to discuss commissioning them for Castro’s assassination.

Kennedy came under great pressure from the CIA to approve the project for invading Cuba, a difficult position in which to put a young, inexperienced President. He decided to support the plan with important provisos. The Bay of Pigs invasion, by a CIA-trained, supplied, and paid private army of Cuban refugees, was directed by CIA personnel and supported by a huge propaganda apparatus, including a radio station, in Florida. There were also CIA assassination teams prepared to enter Cuba and kill certain people once the refugees were established. Many elements of the plan and the people running it had been involved in 1954 with the successful overthrow of the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in Guatemala. But Cuba was not Guatemala, and their plans proved a colossal and embarrassing failure which served only to increase Castro’s heroic, legendary stature in Cuba, a classic result of poorly-conceived black operations called “blowback” in the security establishment, and the reverberations of these events continued for more than a decade, claiming many lives and careers.

Following the failed invasion, CIA leaders, much resembling some “old boys” at an expensive men’s club where outsiders are resented, blamed the President for his scepticism and failure to extend what they regarded as adequate support, especially in the form of disguised American air support for the invading forces. The new President himself was furious at having been pressured into the fiasco at the start of his term. The truth is that the CIA’s plan was almost laughable, including the key assumption that great numbers of ordinary Cubans would rise against Castro, an extremely popular leader, once the invasion force appeared. It was a delusional sand castle built on a foundation of blind hatred for anything to do with communism, especially for a man as charismatic as Castro. The blindness extended to the CIA’s having selected a poor geographical location for forces to land.

It was all a tremendous example of the arrogance of power, secret men with unlimited resources making secret plans that reflected little reality. Kennedy fired some top CIA officials, including Director Allen Dulles, and is said to have privately sworn to tear the CIA apart. We can only imagine the self-righteous fury of the CIA’s Cold Warrior Mujahedeen at the time, their words, when recorded here or there, resembling tent preachers speaking about casting out devils. Kennedy, however, did not tear the CIA apart. Realistically, that would have been impossible with the men at the CIA knowing better than anyone how to capitalize on an attempt – blackmail, threats, ugly frat-boy jokes, and criminal activity being everyday tools they used. To be labelled “soft on communism” in the early 1960s was the political Mark of Beast, Richard Nixon having built an entire political career on it, and Kennedy’s personal life was subject to then-unpalatable revelations of extensive marital infidelity. So Kennedy continued to work with the CIA on a series of sabotage operations against Cuba and attempts on Castro’s life. Indeed, it is said that Kennedy put his brother, Robert, a sufficiently tough and ruthless man by all accounts, in charge of the plans, making senior CIA personnel answerable to the young Attorney General, itself the kind of act which would not endear him to the CIA’s old boys.

The secret matters around Cuba dominated events for years, again almost without any hard public information, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis which President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev peacefully settled, a settlement importantly including an American pledge not to invade Cuba again. Ultimately this writer is convinced that it was events around Cuba that led directly to the assassination of John Kennedy, much evidence suggesting a false trail to Cuba being planted before the fateful day in Dallas, the very kind of trail that could be used by the Cold Warrior Mujahedeen to justify an invasion after all. With everything from a faked visit to Mexico City by someone posing as Lee Harvey Oswald (the poor man working in New Orleans as a paid FBI informer at the time – likely a low level part of a Kennedy-initiated FBI program to track and suppress the worst anti-Cuba excesses of the refugees and their handlers in keeping with the spirit of the Missile Crisis settlement – totally unaware he was being set up by those he fell in with), the one-man creation of a Fair Play to Cuba chapter in New Orleans, handing out Fair Play pamphlets (some of which were stamped with the address of an ex-senior FBI anti-communist fanatic, Guy Bannister, who ran a mysterious front operation in New Orleans with some very unsavory associates) at places including near a naval facility, the night visit to Sylvia Odio, daughter of a noted Cuban political figure, by a group of unidentified men who referred to a Leon Oswald, and many other such carefully placed little piles of breadcrumbs.

Kennedy offended his Pentagon Joint Chiefs by not letting them immediately bomb and invade Cuba when offensive missiles were discovered there by U-2 photography, and of course anything of that nature offending the Pentagon offended also the CIA and those dependent upon it. With his pledge not to invade Cuba again, Kennedy offended the violent Cuban refugee community, people who were armed to the teeth by the CIA and had killed and crippled opponents in Florida as well as in Cuba. And through the entire sequence of events from the Bay of Pigs to the Missile Crisis, Kennedy consistently offended the Cold Warrior Mujahedeen at the CIA. He added to that offence with acts like establishing secret backchannel communications with Khrushchev and preliminary efforts to establish the same communications with Castro. Such efforts were most unlikely to remain secret from the CIA when they involved such a high level and weighty matters. Remember, hatreds in the United States around Cuba remained so intense in the intelligence and refugee communities that as late as 1976, a CIA operative named Luis Posada Carriles planted two bombs on Cubana Airlines Flight 455, killing all 78 people aboard, and he was protected by the American government.

The effect on the general public of accurate knowledge about dark matters in the rare instances when they become known can be glimpsed here or there. One of the best examples is the disappearance from politics, including credible presidential ambitions, of a seemingly attractive Vietnam veteran holding the Medal of Honor, former-Senator Bob Kerrey. When the public learned of a secret operation called Project Phoenix and later learned that Kerrey earned his medal through such work, his political career simply dissolved. Project Phoenix was a dark operation in Vietnam in which American Special Forces crept out, night after night, to assassinate villagers the CIA identified as targets. It is estimated that twenty thousand innocent villagers had their throats slashed in the night by Americans creeping into their homes. It would be hard to conceive of a more cowardly and grisly form of war, but it went on for a long time in complete secrecy. The operation burst upon public awareness only after a titanic internal struggle at the CIA over the authenticity of a Soviet defector named Yuri Nosenko ended with the dismissal of James Angleton in 1974, the paranoid Chief of CIA Counterintelligence (a man, incidentally, who unquestionably had special knowledge of the Kennedy assassination) by new CIA Director William Colby. Colby also revealed the Phoenix program for reasons not well understood and stated he had run it. (A retired Colby later had a mysterious fatal boating accident near his home.)

People who want to discredit critics and sceptics of government today often use the term “conspiracy theorist,” almost as though there were ipso facto no such things as conspiracy or dishonesty in government. It is of course intended as a pejorative description. But the entire history of affairs around Cuba puts the lie to those using the term, and we know from many bits of information that Cuba is only one example of scores of genuine conspiracies.

Those with some history will know that secrecy and dishonesty have long served the interests of power. Why doesn’t the United States claim credit for overthrowing the democratic government of Guatemala, the democratic government of Iran which unleashed the filthy work of the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, afterward, or the democratic government of Chile and the fifteen thousand or so state murders that followed? Why doesn’t it claim credit for the State Department’s teletyping lists of desired victims to a new government of Indonesia, after the fall of Sukarno in 1965, as its savage followers conducted a genocidal slaughter of suspected communists which saw half a million people thrown into rivers with their throats slashed? Why did it hide acts like the machine-gunning of hundreds of fleeing Korean civilians, including women and children, at the early stages of the Korean War? Or the hideous murder by suffocation in sealed trucks of about three thousand Taliban prisoners in the early stages of the Afghanistan War undertaken by one of America’s key Afghan allies shortly after Donald Rumsfeld publicly said they should be killed or walled away forever? Why doesn’t Israel just tell people it terrorized Palestinians, killing and raping, in 1948 to make as many as possible flee their homes? Or that it machine-gunned masses of Egyptian prisoners of war in the Sinai in a war that it engineered only for conquering more of Palestine?

Could it be that there are acts of which governments are ashamed? That there is reason to be ashamed of acts which they nevertheless continue to repeat? It does seem that government values its reputation enough to avoid taking credit for its ugliest acts. The terrible dilemma is that in a supposedly democratic state, these horrible acts are committed without either the knowledge or consent of the people and despite the fact that the results affect the public’s welfare and often international reputation. Now at just what point could the consent of the people in a democratic state be more important than committing organized murder on their behalf? I cannot imagine any. Yet that is a point at which states like America feel free to act, covering up what they do with masses of secrecy and lies.

Why would anyone deny the existence of conspiracies by America’s government? Regrettably, the only reason that some government behavior becomes known is the existence of whistleblowers. But how does government treat whistleblowers? Just ask Mordechai Vanunu or Daniel Ellsberg or Private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning or Edward Snowden – truly brave and ethically-motivated individuals, treated like criminals by their governments.

Pervasive secrecy and truly democratic government are simply incompatible, and I think it fair to say that where we see monumental levels of secrecy, as we do in the United States with billions of classified documents and hundreds of past controversies dimly understood, it provides prima facie proof of a society tarted-up to resemble democracy but having few if any of the required internal organs functioning. A culture of secrecy and violence is the culture of a police state, full stop.

Right now we have partial information about some recent American, or American-sponsored, terrorist programs. One such is the induced “civil war” in Syria which receives arms and assistance via Turkey, the same route used to inject a rag-tag army of extremists into Syria and to allow them to retreat periodically in escaping Syria’s army. The extremists even used some of the deadly nerve gas, Sarin, to kill masses of civilians in hopes of pushing the United States openly into the conflict, making the rebels surely the kind of people no sane person wants running a country. And who supplied them with Sarin, a manufactured substance available from only a few sources? A related dark program occurred in Benghazi, Libya, where an American ambassador was killed in another instance of blowback: he had been running an operation to collect from Libya and export to Syria weapons and thugs when some the thugs turned and attacked him instead. Yet another dark operation has been the destabilization of Ukraine through a huge secret flow of money to right wing forces who shot hundreds of innocent people down on the streets of Kiev to instill general fear and terror to support a coup.

Now, you will not read one word from an American official acknowledging any of this grotesque behavior. Indeed, John Kerry has the unenviable job of publicly lying about it, puffing and pontificating and self-righteously proclaiming America’s revulsion over others behaving like that. And in all this storm of murder and dishonesty, you will only find American journalism, that noble guardian of the public’s right to know, keeping its readers and listeners in complete ignorance.

This is how it is possible in what is often regarded a free and democratic state, the national government commits itself to murder and mayhem, using its people’s resources without informing them and without their consent, all the while vigorously lying to them. Can you really have democracy that way? I don’t think so. The power and resources that are in the hands of America’s great secret agencies are greater than those enjoyed by many of the world’s dictators. And the distortions of the American press surely are in keeping with the practices of places where the press is never regarded as free. Many Americans know that at the local town or city level, they do have democratic institutions and attitudes, a fact which reassures them against criticisms of their national system, but then so does China today, and no one calls China a democracy.

John Chuckman lives in Canada and is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. Copyright © by John Chuckman. Read other articles by John, or visit John's website.

This article was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2014 at 8:31am and is filed under Blowback, CIA, Cuba, Democracy, History, Imperialism, Opinion,Propaganda, Tea Party movement, Terrorism (state and retail),Transparency/Secrecy, Whistleblowing.

Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know About Voter ID Laws

ProPublica

Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know About Voter ID Laws

A local resident casts her vote at a polling station in Sandy Springs, Ga., on March 6, 2012. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

by Suevon Lee ProPublica, Nov. 5, 2012, 5:50 p.m.

This post is being kept up-to-date. It was first published on July 23.

Voter IDs laws have become a political flashpoint in what's gearing up to be another close election year. Supporters say the laws 2014 which 30 states have now enacted in some form 2014 are needed to combat voter fraud, while critics see them as a tactic to disenfranchise voters.

We've taken a step back to look at the facts behind the laws and break down the issues at the heart of the debate.

So what are these laws?

They are measures intended to ensure that a registered voter is who he says he is and not an impersonator trying to cast a ballot in someone else's name. The laws, most of which have been passed in the last several years, require that registered voters show ID before they're allowed to vote. Exactly what they need to show varies. Some states require a government-issued photo, while in others a current utility bill or bank statement is sufficient.

As a registered voter, I thought I always had to supply some form of ID during an election.

Not quite. Per federal law, first-time voters who registered by mail must present a photo ID or copy of a current bill or bank statement. Some states generally advise voters bring some form of photo ID. But prior to the 2006 election, no state ever required a voter to produce a government-issued photo ID as a condition to voting. Indiana in 2006 became the first state to enact a strict photo ID law, a law that was upheld two years later by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Why are these voter ID laws so strongly opposed?

Voting law opponents contend these laws disproportionately affect elderly, minority and low-income groups that tend to vote Democratic. Obtaining photo ID can be costly and burdensome, with even free state ID requiring documents like a birth certificate that can cost up to $25 in some places. According to a study from NYU's Brennan Center, 11 percent of voting-age citizens lack necessary photo ID while many people in rural areas have trouble accessing ID offices. During closing arguments in a recent case over Texas's voter ID law, a lawyer for the state brushed aside these obstacles as the "reality to life of choosing to live in that part of Texas."

Attorney General Eric Holder and others have compared the laws to a poll tax, in which Southern states during the Jim Crow era imposed voting fees, which discouraged blacks, and even some poor whites -- until the passage of grandfather clauses -- from voting.

Given the sometimes costly steps required to obtain needed documents today, legal scholars argue that photo ID laws create a new "financial barrier to the ballot box."

Just how well-founded are fears of voter fraud?

There have been only a small number of fraud cases resulting in a conviction. A New York Times analysis from 2007 identified 120 cases filed by the Justice Department over five years. These cases, many of which stemmed from mistakenly filled registration forms or misunderstanding over voter eligibility, resulted in 86 convictions.

There are "very few documented cases," said UC-Irvine professor and election law specialist Rick Hasen. "When you do see election fraud, it invariably involves election officials taking steps to change election results or it involves absentee ballots which voter ID laws can't prevent," he said.

An analysis by News21, a national investigative reporting project, identified 10 voter impersonation cases out of 2,068 alleged election fraud cases since 2000 2013 or one out of every 15 million prospective voters.

One of the most vocal supporters of strict voter ID laws, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, told the Houston Chronicle earlier this month that his office has prosecuted about 50 cases of voter fraud in recent years. "I know for a fact that voter fraud is real, that it must be stopped, and that voter id is one way to prevent cheating at the ballot box and ensure integrity in the electoral system," he told the paper. Abbott's office did not immediately respond to ProPublica's request for comment.

How many voters might be turned away or dissuaded by the laws, and could they really affect the election?

It's not clear.

According to the Brennan Center, about 11 percent of U.S. citizens, or roughly 21 million citizens, don't have government-issued photo ID. This figure doesn't represent all voters likely to vote, just those eligible to vote.

In late September, an analysis by Reuters and research firm Ipsos of data culled from 20,000 voter interviews found that those lacking proper ID were less likely to vote anyway, "regardless of state law changes."

Among those who said they were "certain to vote," only 1 percent said they did not have proper ID while another 1 percent said they were uncertain whether they had the proper ID.
The analysis also found that those who lack valid photo ID tended to be young people, those without college educations, Hispanics and the poor.

State figures also can be hard to nail down. In Pennsylvania, nearly 760,000 registered voters, or 9.2 percent of the state's 8.2 million voter base, don't own state-issued ID cards, according to an analysis of state records by the Philadelphia Inquirer. State officials, on the other hand, place this number at between 80,000 and 90,000.

In Indiana and Georgia, states with the earliest versions of photo ID laws, about 1,300 provisional votes were discarded in the 2008 general election, later analysis has revealed.

As for the potential effect on the election, one analysis by Nate Silver at the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog estimates they could decrease voter turnout anywhere between 0.8 and 2.4 percent. It doesn't sound like a very wide margin, but it all depends on the electoral landscape.

"We don't know exactly how much these news laws will affect turnout or skew turnout in favor of Republicans," said Hasen, author of the recently released The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown. "But there's no question that in a very close election, they could be enough to make a difference in the outcome."

When did voter ID laws get passed 2014 and which states have the strictest ones?

The first such law was passed as early as 2003, but momentum has picked up in recent years. In 2011 alone, legislators in 34 states introduced bills requiring voters show photo ID 2014 14 of those states already had existing voter ID laws but lawmakers sought to toughen statutes, mainly to require proof of photo identification.

The National Conference of State Legislatures has a helpful breakdown of states' voter ID laws and how they vary.

Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Kansas and Pennsylvania have the toughest versions. These states won't allow voters to cast a regular ballot without first showing valid photo ID. Other states with photo ID laws offer some more flexibility by providing voters with several alternatives.

What happens if a voter can't show valid photo ID in these states?

These voters are entitled to a provisional ballot. To ensure their votes count, however, they must produce the mandatory ID within a certain time frame and affirm in person or writing they are the same individual who filled out a temporary ballot on Election Day. The time limits vary: They range anywhere from up to three days after the election (Georgia) to noon the Monday after the election (Indiana).

Ohio is now embroiled in a last-minute legal scuffle over provisional ballot procedures. Since 2006, if Ohio voters don't show some kind of ID at the polls, they fill out a provisional ballot and have 10 days to bring ID, in person, to the board of elections. The law states that an election official fills out the provisional ballot affirmation indicating what kind of ID, if any, a voter shows. On Friday, Nov. 2, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted issued a directive to election boards saying voters themselves 2014 and not election officials 2014 must record the ID information.

Voting rights advocates have asked a federal district judge for a clarification on the procedure. The judge says he'll issue one before the 10-day period after the election elapses. Husted's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Are there any exceptions to the photo ID requirement?

Yes. Indigency or religious objections to being photographed. But these exceptions don't automatically grant a voter the ability to cast a regular ballot: In Pennsylvania and Indiana, voters will be given a provisional ballot and must sign an affidavit for their exemption within the given time frame. For a more specific breakdown of all exceptions, see this state-by-state summary.

Why is the Justice Department getting involved in some cases?

Because of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that states with a history of discrimination receive preclearance before making changes to voting laws. Texas and South Carolina passed strict photo ID laws in 2011 but were refused preclearance by the DOJ, which argued that these laws could suppress turnout among minority voters. Texas went to court seeking judicial preclearance from a federal district court; in August, a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the law. South Carolina has presented arguments before the same court.

South Carolina also requested judicial preclearance. On Oct. 10, a separate three-judge panel cleared the law, stating that it satisfies Section 5 due largely to its "reasonable impediment provision," which permits voters with registration cards to cast a provisional ballot if they provide a reason for being unable to procure photo ID. However, the law cannot take effect until 2013, wrote Judge Brett Kavanaugh, since there's uncertainty as to whether it can be "properly implemented in time for the 2012 elections."

What about challenges to the laws?

On Aug. 15, a Pennsylvania judge shot down an attempt to attempt to block the state's voter ID law. The plaintiffs appealed. On Sept. 18, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, by a 4-2 vote, vacated the judge's order and returned the case for further review. The justices asked the trial judge to assess whether voters could obtain state-issued photo ID without difficulty in the short time remaining before the November general election. If the judge could not be convinced voters wouldn't be disenfranchised, the justices wrote, the law should be temporarily blocked.

In an Oct. 2 ruling, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson did just that. He wrote that he was "not still convinced" that voters yet to obtain photo ID wouldn't be disenfranchised as a result of the new law. He blocked it from taking effect, but only for the upcoming November 6 election. Additionally, the judge's ruling still permits Pennsylvania election officials to request photo ID from registered voters this election, just not prevent anyone from casting a regular ballot if they're unable to produce one.

As we've reported, other judges have also ruled in favor of other states' voter ID laws. Here's a rundown of the rulings.

The DOJ is also investigating many of the states' laws, including Pennsylvania's photo ID law. As first reported by Talking Points Memo, the DOJ's Civil Rights Division sent the state's chief election official a letter Monday afternoon requesting 16 separate items, including the state's complete voter registration list, any documents supporting the governor's prior assurance that "99 percent" of the state's eligible voters already have acceptable photo ID, any papers to prove the state is prepared to provide registered voters with ID cards free of charge upon oath or affirmation, and any studies that inform state officials of the "demographic characteristics" of residents who lack valid voter ID.

The DOJ letter states it needs these documents within 30 days to evaluate the state's compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.

Tennessee saw a fight over whether library cards with photos were an acceptable form ID under the state's new law. Just last week, the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed that voters can cast regular ballots using the free library cards.

Have any states attempted to enact strict voter ID laws but so far been unsuccessful?

Yes. In Wisconsin, two judges have blocked enforcement of the state's photo ID law. The state attorney general has asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to intervene and reinstate the law before the November election. Meantime, Democratic governors in Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire and North Carolina have vetoed strict photo ID bills passed by their Republican-led legislatures last year.

In New Hampshire, however, the state legislature overrode the governor's veto. In September, the Justice Department cleared the law, required since parts of the state are covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Voters in New Hampshire who cannot produce a valid photo ID in the upcoming November election will still be permitted to vote after signing a challenged voter affidavit. But that's not all: these voters will be sent verification letters from the Secretary of State to confirm they voted. If they don't respond in writing within 90 days, the state attorney general will pursue an investigation into voter fraud.

Are there other voter ID laws in effect that ask for but don't necessarily require photo ID?

Yes. In these so-called "non-strict photo ID states" 2014 Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Idaho, South Dakota and Hawaii 2014 individuals are requested to show photo ID but can still vote if they don't have one. Instead, they may be asked to sign affidavits affirming their identity or provide a signature that will be compared with those in registration records.

Why has there been such a recent surge in voter ID legislation around the country?

This report by NYU's Brennan Center for Justice cites primarily big Republican gains in the 2010 midterms which turned voter ID laws into a "major legislative priority." Aside from Rhode Island, all voter ID legislation has been introduced by Republican-majority legislatures.

News21 also has this report on the close affiliation between the bills' sponsors and the conservative nonprofit group, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Republican figures have championed such laws. For instance, Mike Turzai, majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, recently praised the state's legislative accomplishments at a Republican State Committee meeting last month. "Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done," he said.

A spokesman for Turzai, Steve Miskin, told ProPublica that Turzai was "mischaracterized" by the press. "For the first time in many years, you're going to have a relatively level playing field in the presidential elections" as the result of these new laws," Miskin said. "With all things equal, a Republican presidential nominee in Pennsylvania has a chance."

Correction August 20, 2012: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated "voting law advocates contend these laws disproportionately affect elderly, minority and low-income groups that tend to vote Democratic." It's voting law opponents who make that contention.

Correction July 24, 2012: An earlier version of this story said Texas went to federal court to challenge the DOJ's denial of preclearance. In fact, Texas filed a lawsuit seeking preclearance from the federal district court two months before the DOJ announced its decision. Also, some states require a government-issued photo that does not have to come from the federal government as first detailed.


Clarification Sept. 25, 2012: This post has been clarified to reflect details about who was discouraged from voting under a poll tax.


Correction Oct. 4, 2012: An earlier version of this story stated that New Hampshire was unsuccessful in enacting a voter ID law. In fact, its legislature overrode the governor's veto and the law is now in place in the state.
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