On February 11, 2013, the New York Times reported about the funeral of retired Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle, portraying him as a "warrior and family man." The highly politicized and massive public funeral, held at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, points to the severe moral schizophrenia our nation has internalized. We see ourselves as the shining "city on a hill" and therefore a U.S. citizen who kills people in other lands becomes an unquestionably renowned hero. This must appear offensive and ridiculous to many people living beyond U.S. borders.

Mr. Kyle was a man who professed "no regret" for killing 160 people during his four tours in Iraq. A fellow soldier and former Marine, struggling with PTSD, murdered Kyle at point blank range while they were practice shooting for fun and "therapy" at a gun range in Texas. Despite the bizarrely karmic nature of his death and setting aside the much needed conversation on gun culture and pervasive violence which our nation is being forced to address, I am just as worried by our collective need to construct a fig leaf cover up over the legacy of Chris Kyle.

Glorifying Chris Kyle's story integrally connects to U.S. media and military efforts to affect public perception of ongoing warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as expanding war on terror policies which the Obama administration is aggressively attempting to institutionalize. Now, the U.S. not only retains the right to attack those whom it dubiously asserted were responsible for 9/11, it regards the entire world as a potential battlefield, dismissing any need for constituent and congressional approval nor any evidence of an attack being planned against the U.S. Though President Obama ran on an anti-war platform, he needs the legacy of Chris Kyle and others as much as any of the previous war criminals from the Bush years to sustain his current militarism.

© Zak Hussein/PA
Longtime peace activist and Nobel Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Tutu: 'Does the US really want to tell those of us in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours?'

In a letter to the In a letter to the New York Times published Wednesday, South African Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu challenged the hypocrisy of the US and its citizens for accepting a killer drone program when it pertains to foreign suspects while demanding judicial review when those targets are American citizens.

He writes:

Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours? That President Obama can sign off on a decision to kill us with less worry about judicial scrutiny than if the target is an American? Would your Supreme Court really want to tell humankind that we, like the slave Dred Scott in the 19th century, are not as human as you are? I cannot believe it.

I used to say of apartheid that it dehumanized its perpetrators as much as, if not more than, its victims. Your response as a society to Osama bin Laden and his followers threatens to undermine your moral standards and your humanity.

According to a report from the "Combatting Terrorism Center" at West Point, 'Anti-Federalists' who oppose a New World Order as well as members of several other far right wing activist groups are potential terrorist threats.

West Point is the U.S. Military Academy that trains, educates, and prepares Cadets for their service in the U.S. Army. The CTC (Combatting Terrorism Center) at West Point was established following the events on September 11, 2001 because of the belief that strong initiative was needed to prepare Cadets for the new environments they would be headed into upon graduating in the post-9/11 era. The CTC provides a unique terrorism-based education and since its creation, the program has received international recognition for its studies, reports, and teachings on terrorism and terrorist threats. A new report from the CTC, however, suggests that far right wing political activists, not radical Islamic groups, are the new terrorist threat in America and even goes so far as to say that those who oppose a 'New World Order' are potentially violent terrorists.

A senior official for the Guantanamo Bay prison said under questioning today that the government had placed a hidden microphone inside a meeting room but that he was assured it was not used to monitor the private conversations that prisoners have with their lawyers and the Red Cross.

Navy Capt. Thomas Welsh, the senior legal adviser to the commander of the Guantanamo Bay prison, conceded the microphone appeared to be intended to resemble a smoke detector in the ceiling of a meeting room for men labeled "high-value" detainees by the Pentagon and held in a special top security camp at the U.S. base in Cuba.

"I agree with your point that it was not recognisable, it was not readily identifiable," Welsh said under questioning by David Nevin, a lawyer for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has portrayed himself as the mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The admission came during a pretrial hearing. Lawyers for the five men charged with planning and aiding the attacks have asked the judge presiding over the military tribunal to immediately halt the proceedings in the long-stalled case over fears that authorities have been monitoring their private conversations in violation of attorney-client privilege.

Obama's State of the Union address didn't surprise. It reflected rogue leadership. It was beginning-to-end demagogic boilerplate.

Defending the indefensible took center stage. Rhetoric substituted for progressive policies. Bombast assured business as usual.

Priorities include waging war on humanity, force-fed austerity, ignoring public needs, institutionalizing a repressive police state apparatus, and cracking down hard on non-believers.

Doing so assures growing despotism, lawlessness, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, and deprivation.

Obama's address targeted Medicare. He called "medical care for the aged....the biggest cause of the nation's longterm debt."

He lied. Military spending, imperial wars, Wall Street bailouts, other corporate handouts, and tax cuts for the rich and business bear full responsibility.

Falsely blaming Medicare for Washington's malfeasance reveals bipartisan rogue leadership. It's indicative of what's to come.

If the president can order the killing of American citizens abroad should he decide they are involved with Al Qaeda, can he assassinate suspected Al Qaeda - connected US citizens in London or Berlin? What about a suspect's teenage son, a junior in a Canadian boarding school? If he can drop hellfire missiles on a house in northwestern Pakistan because he believes a terrorist cell is meeting inside, could he blow up a motel in Florida where supposed terrorists are staying and chalk up any dead vacationers as "collateral damage"?

Of course not. Pakistan is completely different. Anwar al-Awlaki may have been a US citizen, but he was in Yemen, which is different too. As for his 16-year-old son, killed in Yemen in a drone attack some weeks later along with several other people, former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs put it well, if ungrammatically: "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children." Unlike in the United States, in Yemen kids choose their parents.

Whatever happened to arresting people, extraditing them, giving them lawyers, putting them on trial - all that? Even in the hottest days of the Cold War, when millions believed communism threatened our very existence as a nation, Americans accused of spying for the Soviets had their day in court. No one suggested that President Eisenhower should skip the tiresome procedural stuff and just bomb the Rosenbergs' apartment.

The president and his choice to head the CIA, John Brennan, assure us that they are extremely careful, and the kill list is "legal, ethical and wise" (although they won't tell us anything more about it). Brennan asserted in 2011 that no civilians have been killed by drones. Maybe he even believes this, although the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented more than 500 civilian casualties in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, with a high estimate of many more.

When President Obama appointed Harold Koh legal adviser to the State Department in 2009, it looked like he was sending a message: the bad old days are over. Koh, who once referred to President Bush as the "torturer in chief," was an outspoken critic of that administration's legal rationales for torture, Guantánamo and "targeted killings." Fast-forward to today, and Koh provides legal rationales for those same "targeted killings" and gives critics the kind of snide brushoff the Bushites were famous for: justice for enemies "can be delivered through trials. Drones also deliver."

President Obama willingly admits he dispatched CIA agents to kill an American and his teenage son and the son's American friend while they were in a desert in Yemen in 2011. He says he did so because the adult had encouraged folks to wage war on the United States and the children were just "collateral damage." He says further that he'll do this again when he is convinced that killing Americans will keep America safe. He says he knows the adult encouraged evil, and his encouragement caused the deaths of innocents. The adult was never charged with a crime or indicted by a grand jury; he was just targeted for death by the president himself and executed by a CIA drone.

International law and the law of war, to both of which the U.S. is bound by treaty, as well as federal law and the Judeo-Christian values that underlie the Declaration of Independence (which guarantees the right to live) and the Constitution (which permits governmental interference with that right only after a congressional declaration of war or individual due process) all provide that the certainty of the identity of a human target, the sincerity of the wish for his death, the perception of his guilt and imminent danger are insufficient to justify the government's use of lethal force against him. The president may only lawfully kill after due process, in self-defense or under a declaration of war.

The reasons for the constitutional requirement of a congressional declaration of war are to provide a check on the president's lust for war by forcing him to obtain formal congressional approval, to isolate and identify the object of war so the president cannot kill whomever he pleases, to confine the warfare to the places where the object's military forces are located so the president cannot invade wherever he wishes, and to assure termination of the hostilities when the object of the war surrenders so the president cannot wage war without end.

But when war is waged, only belligerents may be targeted, and advocating violence against the U.S. is not an act of wartime violence and does not make one a belligerent. Were this not so, then nothing would lawfully prevent the U.S. from killing Americans who spoke out in favor of al-Qaida, and then killing Americans who spoke out against war and killing, and then killing Americans whose words became an obstacle to killing.

Latest successes further shrink portion of country governed by Assad, though regime does not appear on brink of collapse

Syrian rebels captured most of an eastern oil field and stormed a military base in the south, anti-regime activists said, further chipping away at President Bashar al-Assad's hold on the country's hinterlands.

Although Assad's regime does not appear on the brink of collapse, rebels have scored a string of strategic victories over the past week, also seizing a large dam and the defences around a major airport. These and other blows have shrunk the portion of the country that Assad governs and could deprive his regime of resources necessary for its survival.

If you can post bail on a non-felony charge, the likelihood is you will never go to jail. If you can't, you're in for months before trial

If you've ever been arrested for a misdemeanor offense, like jumping a turnstile, smoking a joint, or protesting a cause in a way the authorities would rather you didn't, then you'll know that your best chance of avoiding jail has less to do with what you've done than if you can make bail. It's no secret that the best-quality justice is generally reserved for those who can afford to pay for it, but the divergence is never more blatant than when it comes to America's complicated and discriminatory bail system.

In his recent state of the judiciary address, New York state's chief judge drew attention to the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. He pointed out that the system is stacked against people accused of misdemeanor offenses, who, unable to afford the bail terms, have to stay in jail before trial. On average, it takes at least three months (and more likely, six months to a year) for a misdemeanor case to reach trial in New York City, which is a long time to spend in a cell before you've been convicted of anything.

In 2010, Human Rights Watch issued a report titled "The Price of Freedom", which is awash with statistics and data on the bail system. The report makes a convincing case that an unintended consequences of our current system is that poverty, rather than the offense committed, dictates a defendant's fate. Here is one of the nuggets it contains:

"Among defendants arrested in 2008 on non-felony charges and given bail of $1,000 or less, only 13% of defendants were able to post bail at arraignment."

In other words, 87% of these defendants go to jail.