Republican Chairman Michael Steele’s Admission That the Party of Lincoln Betrayed African-Americans by ‘Focusing on the White Male Vote in the South’ for 40-Plus Years Predictably Draws Fire From White GOP Conservatives, But the Republicans Are Still Using Their ‘Southern Strategy’ — This Time Against Hispanic Americans

Demonstrators hold up a giant American flag during a mass demonstration in support of comprehensive immigration reform on the National Mall in Washington in March. In an extraordinary admission, Republican National Chairman Michael Steele acknowledged that his party — founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party — betrayed African-American voters in 1968 by openly appealing to conservative Southern whites opposed to the civil rights movement. But the party’s infamous “Southern Strategy” is far from dead. With GOP-dominated Arizona’s newly-enacted crackdown on illegal immigrants, combined with incendiary anti-Latino rhetoric by several prominent Republicans on the immigration issue, the GOP is now running a serious risk of permanently alienating Hispanic Americans — the nation’s fastest-growing voting bloc. (Photo: Ryan Roderick Beiler/Sojourners Magazine)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, April 27, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

An extraordinary thing happened in Chicago last Tuesday night.

In a speech at DePaul University, Michael Steele, the Republican Party’s first African-American national chairman, told some 200 students that black voters “really don’t have a reason” to vote for Republicans.

“We [Republicans] haven’t done a very good job of really giving you one,” he said.

In a remarkably candid assessment of his party’s standing with black voters, Steele told his audience that the GOP had lost sight of “the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans.”

Noting that the Republican Party was founded in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854 by anti-slavery activists, “This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass,” Steele said. “The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don’t walk away from parties, Their parties walk away from them.”

CONSERVATIVES BLAST STEELE — FOR TELLING THE TRUTH

Steele’s candor didn’t sit well with a number of conservatives. In an e-mail to Washington Post blogger David Weigel, conservative economist Bruce Bartlett slammed Steele’s remarks as “his biggest gaffe so far.”

Bartlett acknowledged that “The term ‘Southern strategy’ is such a loaded term, like ’states’ rights,’ that it’s hard to use it without conveying a certain racial stereotype. The fact that Steele used that term is, therefore, significant in and of itself.”

“Ironically,” Bartlett noted, “the Voting Rights Act is what made it possible for Republicans to compete in the South. Once blacks could no longer be kept from voting in primaries [where winning the Democratic nomination was tantamount to election], there was no longer any reason for whites to remain Democrats. Many found the Republican Party more attractive. Of course, the national party reached out to them, but the idea that they used racial code words like ‘law and order’ is nonsense. . .”

Bartlett said he thought that it was “too bad that Steele gave Democrats reason to believe that their distorted vision of how Republicans came to dominate the South is correct. It may be his biggest gaffe so far.”

Greg Alexander, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise institute think tank, was even more dismissive in his own e-mail to Weigel. “For four decades, national GOP strategists and candidates have certainly valued Southern white voters,” Alexander wrote. “At the margins, that’s meant accommodating them on some racial issues. But notice that Nixon did not repeal and instead enforced the ‘64 [Civil Rights] Act, did not ‘retreat’ on school desegregation nearly the way he has been indicted for doing, and launched affirmative action and minority business contracting as we now know them.”

BLACK REPUBLICANS DID HAVE A HAND IN FOUNDING THE NAACP

Steele was historically inaccurate about Frederick Douglass. He wasn’t a co-founder of the GOP, but he was a staunch supporter of the party until his death in 1895 and often conferred with President Abraham Lincoln — and even his Democratic successor, Andrew Johnson — on the treatment of black U.S. soldiers during and after the Civil War.

But Steele was right about Republicans having a hand in the founding of the NAACP. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization, was co-founded on February 12, 1909 — the centennial anniversary of Lincoln’s birth — by several prominent black Republicans, including W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells and Archibald Grimke.

The NAACP was founded six months after a deadly race riot in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois in 1908, in which angry white mobs attacked and burned the city’s black residential and business district to the ground, killing scores of the city’s black residents.

BLACKS REMAINED LOYAL TO THE GOP — UNTIL AFTER WORLD WAR II

For nearly a century after its founding, African-Americans were the Republican Party’s most loyal voting constituency. This was, after all, the party of the “Great Emancipator.” The fact that the Democratic Party was far from friendly to blacks — especially in the Deep South, where Democrats wrote, passed and strictly enforced the region’s blatantly racist “Jim Crow” segregation laws — didn’t leave African-American voters (That is, those outside the South who could vote) much of a choice.

Things began to change in 1947, when President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, issued an executive order to desegregate the Army and introduced civil-rights legislation to Congress the following year. This resulted in conservative southern white delegates walking out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention in protest. The southerners later formed the States’ Rights Party — which came to be known as the “Dixiecrats” — with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond as its presidential nominee.

By the 1960s, the Democratic Party was a house bitterly divided — pitting northern liberals against southern conservatives — over civil rights for African-Americans. It took the support of Republicans in Congress, mostly northern and midwestern liberals and moderates, to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

President Lyndon Johnson, a southerner from Texas, confided to his aide, Bill Moyers (now a prominent TV newsman and commentator) after signing these two landmark bills into law, that “We’ve lost the South for a generation.”

By “we,” Johnson meant his Democratic Party. But what Johnson didn’t anticipate was that the Republicans were about to lose Black America for a generation — and longer — when Barry Goldwater won the GOP nomination in 1964. Goldwater voted against both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act (which he publicly regretted years later).

The damage to the GOP’s standing with African-Americans had only just begun.

A TOTAL REVERSAL OF FORTUNE FOR BOTH MAJOR PARTIES

Enter Richard Nixon. In a bold and determined comeback bid eight years after losing his first run for the White House to John F. Kennedy in 1960, Nixon devised an electoral strategy for victory in 1968 that forever altered the character of the Republican Party — and turned the fortunes of both major parties completely upside-down.

It was a formula best described by Kevin Phillips, a top Nixon campaign strategist, in a 1970 interview with The New York Times: “From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the [African-American] vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

“The more [blacks] who register as Democrats in the South,” Phillips continued, “the sooner the [anti-black] whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”

NOW REPUBLICANS RISK LOSING LATINOS OVER IMMIGRATION

But after more than four decades — and despite the election of a black man as its national chairman — the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy” is still very much alive and now threatens to alienate another entire segment of the electorate: Hispanic Americans.

Unlike blacks, however, Latinos are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population — and of the electorate. A recently-released study of U.S. Census Bureau data by the University of New Hampshire predicts that non-white births will likely outpace white births sometime this year — and that the Latino birth rate already is outpacing the white birth rate in the Southwest, particularly California.

Republicans in California have been paying a devastatingly high political price ever since they pushed through Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative designed to prohibit illegal immigrants from using the state’s social services, health care, and public education.

The measure, introduced by Republican state Assemblyman Dick Mountjoy and strongly backed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson, passed with 59 percent of the vote — only to be struck down by the federal courts on the grounds that immigration is the exclusive domain of the federal government.

With the California Republican Party having so strongly backed Prop. 187, Hispanic voters — who now comprise 40 percent of the state’s electorate — have severely punished Republicans at the ballot box, handing control of both houses of the legislature and four of the five top statewide offices to the Democrats in every statewide election since Prop. 187 passed.

In that same period, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger — a moderate who is himself an immigrant from Austria — is the only Republican who’s escaped Latino voters’ wrath and win a statewide race in California.

IMMIGRATION ISSUE TRIGGERS A REVOLT INSIDE GOP THAT BURNS BUSH

The debate over illegal immigration proved too hot for Republican President George W. Bush to handle. For Bush — who has a sister-in-law and two nieces who are Latina — the issue became personal. He lobbied hard for Congress in 1997 to pass a comprehensive immigration-reform bill that would pave the way for many of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S. to become legal residents.

But an open revolt by conservatives in his own party sank the measure.

In one of his last interviews before leaving office, Bush warned his fellow Republicans not to turn the GOP into an “anti-immigrant party.” Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Bush said the GOP “should be open-minded about big issues like immigration reform, because if we’re viewed as anti-somebody — in other words, if the party is viewed as anti-immigrant — then another fellow may say, ‘Well, if they’re against the immigrant, they may be against me.’”

But Bush’s warning to his fellow Republicans has apparently fallen on deaf ears.

OUTRAGE OVER NEW ANTI-IMMIGRANT LAW IN ARIZONA

Last week, Arizona’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer, signed into law a measure passed by the GOP-controlled legislature which allows police to question and detain anyone in the state they believe may be an illegal immigrant.

Critics of the new law warn that it would lead to widespread discrimination against Latinos, including Mexican-Americans, who make up nearly a third of the state’s population, according to 2007 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Police in Phoenix reported Monday that vandals smeared refried beans into the shape of a Nazi swastika onto the glass doors of the state Capitol building. Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, a sharp critic of the new law, accused many supporters of the measure as being not just misguided but also racist.

“It’s just morally wrong,” Gordon, a Democrat, told CBS News Monday. “This country is not about having people wear arm bands with Jewish stars or in this case, Hispanic brown symbols.”

Gordon branded the law “clearly unconstitutional.”

GOP FACES HUGE LATINO BACKLASH AT THE BALLOT BOX

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) has vowed to challenge the measure in court. And — in a possible repeat of what happened in California — Latino community and political groups across the state have vowed an all-out campaign to oust Republican lawmakers who voted in favor of it.

Even a Fox News analyst openly warned that the new law will be “a disaster for Arizona” and trigger a huge backlash against Republicans by Latino voters.

Appearing Friday on “Your World with Neal Cavuto,” Napolitano, a former federal judge, bluntly warned that “Hispanics — who have a natural home in the Republican Party because they are socially conservative — will flee [the GOP] in droves.”

The new law is “gonna bankrupt the Republican Party and the state of Arizona,” Napolitano predicted. “Look at what happened to the Republicans in California with Proposition 187!”

Napolitano added that the measure “is so unconstitutional that I predict a federal judge will prevent Arizona from enforcing it as soon as they attempt to do so.”

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

New Demographic Survey Finds Tea Party Movement Is Essentially the GOP’s Voter Base: Affluent, Overwhelmingly White, Predominantly Male, Mostly Middle-Aged and Older, Fiercely Conservative — and, At Only 18 Percent of the Electorate, More Likely to Wreak Havoc in the Spring Republican Primaries Than in the November General Election

Tea Party protesters march through Washington, D.C. last September. Strong anecdotal evidence, based on attendance at its rallies across the country, that the Tea Party movement does not represent a broad demographic cross-section of the American electorate were confirmed last week by a new survey of the movement by The New York Times and CBS News that found that Tea Party supporters are overwhelmingly white, predominantly male, middle-aged and older, fiercely conservative and heavily Republican — essentially the GOP’s electoral base. The survey also found that the Tea Party movement, which comprises less than a fifth of the total nationwide electorate (18 percent), is economically more affluent than the general U.S. population. (Photo: Aaron Wiener/The Washington Independent)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, April 20, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Who’s afraid of the big, bad Tea Party movement?

If you guessed the Democrats, you’d be dead wrong. On the contrary, it’s the Republicans who need to be worried.

A new demographic survey of the Tea Party movement released last week by The New York Times and CBS News confirms what many observers of Tea Party rallies have said anecdotally about the movement: That it does not represent a broad cross-section of the American electorate, let alone a majority.

To the contrary, the movement more closely resembles the electoral base of today’s Republican Party: Overwhelmingly white (89 percent), predominantly male (59 percent), mostly middle-aged and older (75 percent) and fiercely conservative (73 percent).

And while a separate poll by the Pew Center for the People and the Press released Monday shows that 80 percent of Americans overall are highly critical of government, a clear partisan divide exists over whether the public considers the government to be a threat to them.

More Republicans (30 percent) than Democrats (nine percent) and independents (25 percent) are angry with government, the Pew survey found, with 43 percent of Republicans, 18 percent of Democrats and 33 percent of independents believe the government is a threat to them.

Significantly, the Pew study found, independents who lean Republican are far more hostile toward government (37 percent angry, 50 percent feeling threatened) than independents who lean Democratic (15 percent angry, 21 percent feeling threatened).

Tea Party supporters are by far the most angry and hostile toward government, with 43 percent of Tea Party supporters angry and a stunning 57 percent of them feeling threatened.

REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS FARING WORSE THAN DEMOCRATS — BUT NOT BY MUCH

Chief reasons for the ill feelings are economic fears wrought by the recession and high unemployment and frustration with the partisan gridlock in Washington — the latter of which has resulted in record-high negative ratings for Congress.

Only 40 percent of Democrats have faith in their elected representatives in Congress, the lowest positive rating by the majority party in the history of the Pew survey. But the GOP fares worse, with only 37 percent of Republicans expressing faith in their congressional representatives.

This is bad news for the GOP, for it means that the Tea Party movement, rather than pose a threat to Democrats in next fall’s midterm elections, is more likely to wreak havoc in the upcoming Republican primaries this spring — most of which are closed to independent voters.

The likely result is a Republican Party going into the November election saddled with hard-line right-wing nominees sure, particularly in Senate races, to turn off moderate voters — whose support is absolutely vital in order for the minority party to win back control of Congress.

Already, two GOP stalwarts — Florida Governor Charlie Crist and Arizona Senator John McCain — are in serious danger of suffering humiliating primary defeats at the hands of Tea Party-backed insurgents.

Crist has fallen behind conservative Florida House speaker Marco Rubio in the GOP primary and is reported to be seriously considering running as an independent in November. McCain — the 2008 GOP presidential nominee — is fighting for his political life against right-wing radio talk-show host J.D. Hayworth, with a new Rasmussen Poll showing McCain leading Hayworth by only five points, 47-42 percent, down from a 48-41 percent lead in March.

SCORES OF TEA PARTIERS MOUNTING STIFF PRIMARY CHALLENGES TO GOP REGULARS

Crist and McCain are far from alone. Scores of other GOP incumbents and party establishment-backed Republican candidates in open races are also confronting right-wing Tea Party-backed primary challengers.

In Kentucky, Tea Party-backed candidate Rand Paul, the 47-year-old son of Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), is favored to win the state’s May 18 GOP Senate primary against GOP establishment candidate Trey Grayson, the Kentucky secretary of state. “There’s a Tea Party tidal wave coming, and when it comes, it’s going to sweep a lot of people out,” Grayson told the McClatchy Newspapers.

In the Democratic primary, state Attorney General Jack Conway is battling Lieutenant Governor Daniel Mongiardo. Recent polls show Conway and Mongiardo running neck and neck, while Paul holds a commanding 15-point lead over Grayson.

State Republican leaders fear that a primary victory by Paul — who’s considerably to the right of Grayson — could lead to a loss of the Senate seat now held by the retiring Jim Bunning to the Democratic nominee in the fall election. Bunning has endorsed Paul. Grayson was endorsed by former Vice President Dick Cheney as “the real conservative” in the race.

Even Fox News — now embroiled in a conflict-of-interest scandal involving talk-show host Sean Hannity’s open promotion of a Tea Party event he planned to participate in, only to pull out at the last minute on the orders of Fox News executives — has, ironically, taken note of the growing Tea Party threat to the Republicans.

Appearing on Glenn Beck’s program in March, former Bush political guru Karl Rove said that “The Republican Party, like any party that doesn’t control the White House, will not have a single voice or a single leader until the 2012 presidential election, and frankly, I don’t want one person [in that position] now.”

Beck expressed his fear that the Tea Party movement could ultimately coalesce into a third major political party in its own right — at the GOP’s expense. Noting that independents now outnumber both Democrats and Republicans, “I think that having a third party — it could be a nightmare [for the Republicans],” he said. “There are so many conservatives who are saying ‘Please, Republicans, get your stuff together!’”

SURVEY FINDS NEAR-TOTAL LACK OF DIVERSITY IN TEA PARTY MOVEMENT

Only one percent of Tea Party members are African-American, Times/CBS News survey found — a figure much lower than the four percent of blacks who identify as Republicans. Ditto for Asian-Americans. The survey did not specifically identify Latinos in the movement, instead listing six percent of Tea Party members as “other.”

Given the incendiary anti-Latino and anti-immigrant rhetoric by former Representative Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) at the recent Tea Party convention in Nashville (Not to mention a fiercely personal attack by Tancredo on President Obama at a Tea Party rally in South Carolina that’s been roundly condemned as racist) — as well as extremely inflammatory rhetoric and signs at other Tea Party protests in recent months — it’s easy to see why blacks and Latinos are, for the most part, shunning the movement like the plague.

More than a third of Tea Party members hail from the Deep South — where support for the GOP and opposition to Obama is strongest. Not surprisingly, Tea Partiers are far more hostile toward the president than the electorate as a whole. Only seven percent of Tea Party supporters approve of the president’s job performance (compared to 50 percent of voters overall), while a whopping 88 percent of Tea Partiers disapprove (compared to 40 percent of voters overall).

SURVEY REVEALS SHARP CLASS DIVIDE BETWEEN TEA PARTIERS, VOTERS IN GENERAL

Significantly, the survey found that Tea Party members are more affluent economically than the nation as a whole, with more than half earning more than $50,000 a year and a fifth earning more than $100,000 a year. Twelve percent of Tea Party supporters earn more than $250,000 a year — precisely the income brackets whose taxes are going up, while everyone earning less than that are seeing their taxes go down.

In sharp contrast, the survey found, voters in general were considerably less affluent than Tea Party supporters. While 35 percent of Tea Partiers earned less than $50,000 a year, nearly half of voters in general (48 percent) fall into that category. Only 25 percent of voters in general earn more than $100,000 a year compared to the 32 percent of Tea Partiers in that category.

The Times/CBS News survey found several telltale signs of class bias: While 54 percent of voters in general said that raising taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year was a good idea, a whopping 80 percent of Tea Party supporters said it was a bad idea.

And while voters in general were evenly divided on whether the Obama administration favors the poor or treats all classes equally (27 percent each), Tea Party supporters were quite adamant (56 percent) in their belief that the administration favored the poor. Only nine percent of Tea Party supporters felt the administration was treating all classes equally.

OTHER SHARP DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TEA PARTIERS, GENERAL ELECTORATE

The figures stand in sharp contrast to voters in general in the Times/CBS News poll, 77 percent of whom identify as white, 12 percent black, three percent Asian and seven percent “other” (presumably Latino).

Fifty-one percent of voters in general are women, while 49 percent are men. In terms of age, the general electorate is evenly split, 50-50, between those under 45 and those over 45.

While 73 percent of Tea Party supporters identify as conservative, only 34 percent of voters in general do. Thirty-eight percent of voters in general identify themselves as moderate (compared to only 20 percent of Tea Party supporters) and 20 percent of voters in general identify as liberal (compared to only four percent of Tea Party supporters).

At Tea Party rallies across the country, activists have boldly asserted that their movement represents “the majority of the American people.” But the Times/CBS News survey shows that only 18 percent of Americans identify with the Tea Party movement.

And with Tea Party supporters coming largely from the ranks of Republicans — who themselves constitute only 23 percent of the electorate — it’s difficult to see how this movement can pose a threat to the Democrats in November, especially if, for the rest of this year, the economy picks up and joblessness goes down.

# # #

Volume V, Number 18
Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Little-Noticed Items in FY2011 Budget Call For, Among Other Things, Millions to be Spent on New Arms Sales, Programs to Beef Up Anti-Terror Efforts in Africa and to Professionalize Continent’s Military Officer Corps

Training: An unidentified U.S. soldier (left) directs Mali army troops during a training exercise. Mali is one of nine African nations whose armies are being trained to combat al-Qaida by U.S. forces. The training is part of an overall expansion of U.S. military assistance to Africa — including arms sales and training programs — in the 15 months since President Obama took office. (Photo: Luc Gnago/Reuters)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, April 13, 2010)

By DANIEL VOLMAN
Inter-Press Service

When President Obama took office 15 months ago, it was widely expected that he would dramatically change, or even reverse, the militarized and unilateral security policy that had been pursued by the Bush administration toward Africa, as well as toward other parts of the world.

After more than a year in office, however, it is clear that the Obama administration is following essentially the same policy that has guided U.S. military policy toward Africa for more than a decade. Indeed, the Obama administration is seeking to expand U.S. military activities on the continent even further.

In its fiscal year 2011 budget request for security-assistance programs for Africa, the Obama administration is asking for $38 million for the foreign military financing program to pay for U.S. arms sales to African countries.

The administration is also asking for $21 million for the international military education and training program to bring African military officers to the United States, and $24.4 million for anti-terrorism assistance programs in Africa.

U.S. HIKES SUPPLIES OF ARMS TO SOMALI ARMY TO FIGHT INSURGENTS

The Obama administration has also taken a number of other steps in the past year to expand U.S. military involvement in Africa.

Last June, administration officials revealed that Obama had approved a program to supply at least 40 tons of weaponry and provide training to the forces of the transitional government of Somalia through several intermediaries, including Uganda, Burundi, Djibouti, Kenya, and France.

In September, Obama authorized a U.S. Special Forces operation in Somalia that killed Saleh Ali Nabhan, an alleged al-Qaida operative who was accused of being involved in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, as well as other al-Qaida operations in east Africa.

In October, the Obama administration announced a major new security assistance package for Mali – valued at 4.5 to 5.0 million dollars – that included 37 Land Cruiser pickup trucks, communication equipment, replacement parts, clothing and other individual equipment and was intended to enhance Mali’s ability to transport and communicate with internal security forces throughout the country and control its borders.

Although ostensibly intended to help Mali deal with potential threats from al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), it is more likely to be used against Tuareg insurgent forces.

PENTAGON CONSIDERING NEW MARINE STRIKE FORCE FOR AFRICA, IF NEEDED

Last December, U.S. military officials confirmed that the Pentagon was considering the creation of a 1,000-strong Marine rapid deployment force for the new U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), based in Europe, which could be used to intervene in African hot spots.

Two months ago, in his testimony before a hearing by the Africa Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Johnnie Carson declared, “We seek to enhance Nigeria’s role as a U.S. partner on regional security, but we also seek to bolster its ability to combat violent extremism within its borders.”

Also in February, U.S. Special Forces troops began a 30-million-dollar, eight-month-long training programme for a 1,000-man infantry battalion of the army of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) at the U.S.-refurbished base in Kisangani.

Speaking before a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing in March 2010 about this training programme, General William Ward, the commander of AFRICOM, stated “should it prove successful, there’s potential that it could be expanded to other battalions as well.”

During the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Ward also discussed AFRICOM’s continuing participation in Ugandan military operations in the DRC against the Lord’s Resistance Army. Despite the failure of “Operation Lightning Thunder,” launched by Ugandan troops in December 2008 with help of AFRICOM (included planning assistance, equipment, and financial backing), Ward declared, “I think our support to those ongoing efforts is important support.”

And in March 2010, U.S. officials revealed that the Obama administration was considering using surveillance drones to provide intelligence to government troops in Somalia for their planned offensive against al-Shabaab. According to these officials, the Pentagon may also launch air strikes into Somalia and send U.S. Special Forces troops into the country, as it has done in the past.

NEW MOVES REFLECT U.S. EYEING AFRICA AS NEXT BATTLEGROUND AGAINST AL-QAIDA

This growing U.S. military involvement in Africa reflects the fact that counterinsurgency has once again become one of the main elements of U.S. security strategy.

This is clearly evident in the new Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) released by the Pentagon in February.

According to the QDR, “U.S. forces will work with the military forces of partner nations to strengthen their capacity for internal security, and will coordinate those activities with those of other U.S. government agencies as they work to strengthen civilian capacities, thus denying terrorists and insurgents safe havens. For reasons of political legitimacy as well as sheer economic necessity, there is no substitute for professional, motivated local security forces protecting populations threatened by insurgents and terrorists in their midst.”

As the QDR makes clear, this is intended to avoid the need for direct U.S. military intervention: “Efforts that use smaller numbers of U.S. forces and emphasise host-nation leadership are generally preferable to large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns. By emphasising host-nation leadership and employing modest numbers of U.S. forces, the United States can sometimes obviate the need for larger-scale counterinsurgency campaigns.”

Or, as a senior U.S. military officer assigned to AFRICOM was quoted as saying in a recent article in the U.S. Air University’s Strategic Studies Quarterly, “We don’t want to see our guys going in and getting whacked…We want Africans to go in.”

Thus, the QDR goes on to say, “U.S. forces are working in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Colombia, and elsewhere to provide training, equipment, and advice to their host-country counterparts on how to better seek out and dismantle terrorist and insurgent networks while providing security to populations that have been intimidated by violent elements in their midst.”

Furthermore, the United States will also continue to expand and improve the network of local military bases that are available to U.S. troops under base access agreements.

The resurgence of Vietnam War-era counterinsurgency doctrine as a principal tenet of U.S. security policy, therefore, has led to a major escalation of U.S. military involvement in Africa by the Obama administration that seems likely to continue in the years ahead.

# # #

Daniel Volman is the Director of the African Security Research Project in Washington. He is the author of numerous articles and reports and has been studying U.S. security policy toward Africa and African security issues for more than 30 years.

# # #

Special Report Copyright 2010, Inter-Press Service. Reposted by permission.

Federal Judge Appointed By Bush’s Father Declares NSA Program of Wiretapping Without Court Warrants Violates 1978 FISA Statute — But Ducks Broader Issue of Its Blatant Unconstitutionality Under the Fourth Amendment; Obama’s Refusal to End the Practice Is a Gross Dereliction of His Oath of Office to ‘Preserve, Protect and Defend the Constitution’

A federal judge in California has ruled that the Bush administration’s warrantless electronic surveillance program — which the Obama administration has continued — violates the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by not obtaining warrants from the special court established under the law. But Judge Vaughn Walker — ironically, an appointee of President George W. Bush’s father — did not rule on the broader issue of the program’s unconstitutionality under the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable government searches and seizures, which a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1972 includes electronic eavesdropping by the government without first obtaining court warrants. That President Obama has chosen to continue the warrantless surveillance, rather than comply with the Constitution he is bound by his oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend,” is a disgrace for which he must be held accountable. (Image courtesy textuality.com)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, April 6, 2010)

NOTE TO READERS: After being forced into hiatus for two weeks following the break-in of my Gmail account by hackers in China, The ‘Skeeter Bites Report returns to normal publication today (Tuesday), albeit a day later than its longtime Monday publication schedule. Effective today, The ‘Skeeter Bites Report is changing permanently to Tuesday publication. The reason for the change is one of practicality, made at the request of my wife and family: To eliminate the hassle of working under a weekend deadline — particularly during a long holiday weekend. Not to mention heeding the urging of my doctor to reduce my workload and free up my leisure time — a reduction which began 0n January 28 when I ceased publication of The ‘SBR’s Thursday edition. I thank you for your patience during these past two weeks, during which I, in conjunction with Google (which owns Blogger.com, The ‘SBR’s home site), have taken several measures to protect the privacy of my sources and subscribers and to prevent cyber attacks on The ‘SBR site itself.

By SKEETER SANDERS

It’s been 14 months since the administration of President George W. Bush passed out of power, an administration that turned out to be the most authoritarian government in modern American history, marked by a wholesale and repeated disregard for the Constitution that its officers, from Bush on down, were bound by their oaths of office to “preserve, protect and defend.”

Implicit in that oath is also a binding obligation to obey the Constitution and respect the freedoms that the Constitution guarantees to all Americans.

Among the provisions of the Constitution that every government official, from the president on down, is bound to obey is the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits the government from conducting “unreasonable searches and seizures” on U.S. citizens.

Of course, the nation’s founders could not have possibly forseen in the 18th century the rise of electronic communications — let alone the government eavesdropping on the private telephone and Internet communications of Americans without first obtaining a warrant from a court of law — and doing so without probable cause, as the Constitution requires.

To plug that loophole, Congress, acting within its authority to enforce the Fourth Amendment “with appropriate legislation,” passed two statutes to curb such government abuses: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA). Both statutes require the government to obtain court warrants to eavesdrop on the private electronic communications of U.S. citizens.

The ECPA was amended, and weakened to some extent, by some provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 that empowered the federal government to compel telecommunications companies to disclose records about their customers through so-called “national security letters” issued by the Justice Department.

A federal court in New York ruled those provisions of the PATRIOT Act unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment and it remains to be seen whether the fight over the warrantless surveillance will eventually end up in the Supreme Court.

But if you thought that the transfer of power from the Bush administration to the Obama administration meant the end of the warrantless surveillance, think again.

The surveillance is still continuing — and incredibly, the Obama administration is insisting in the courts on maintaining the practice, despite clear and overwhelming evidence that it’s unconstitutional and defies the explicit will of Congress when it acted to enforce the Fourth Amendment with appropriate legislation.

BUSH-APPOINTED FEDERAL JUDGE STRIKES DOWN WARRANTLESS PROGRAM

A federal judge ruled last Wednesday that the federal government’s nearly nine-year-old program of electronic surveillance without warrants violates the FISA statute, because the government — in this case, the super-secret National Security Agency — failed to seek required warrants for the surveillance from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees requests by the government for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents and/or terrorists inside the U.S.

In a 45-page ruling, Judge Vaughn Walker, chief judge of the San Francisco-based U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, rejected the Justice Department’s assertion that a now-defunct Muslim charity’s lawsuit be quashed because allowing it to go forward could result in the revelation of “state secrets.”

Judge Walker — ironically, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush — branded the government’s use of the state-secrets privilege an “unfettered executive-branch discretion” that had “obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.” Walker ruled that it was the expressed will of Congress when it passed the FISA statute in 1978 to “specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority.”

SUPREME COURT STRUCK DOWN NIXON PROGRAM IN ‘70S

Yet in issuing his decision, Judge Walker — like other federal courts that have similarly ruled against the warrantless wiretaps — failed to cite a unanimous 1972 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that declared a similar program aimed at domestic radicals by the Nixon administration unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.

Almost from its inception in December 2005 — just days after The New York Times revealed the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program’s existence — The ‘Skeeter Bites Report has pointed out again and again and again that the Bush program is every bit as unconstitutional as the Nixon program.

Nixon’s Justice Department, under then-Attorney General John Mitchell, had overheard telephone conversations of anti-Vietnam War activists and other domestic radicals “to gather intelligence information deemed necessary to protect the nation from attempts of domestic organizations to attack and subvert the existing structure of government.”

Mitchell argued that the surveillance was lawful, even though it was conducted without prior judicial approval, “as a reasonable exercise of [Nixon's] power, exercised through [Mitchell], to protect the national security.”

But the nine justices of the nation’s highest court ruled unanimously that the Nixon program violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” by the government.

Justice Lewis Powell, writing for the court, declared that “Civil liberties, as guaranteed by the Constitution, imply the existence of an organized society maintaining public order without which liberty itself would be lost in the excesses of unrestrained abuses…

“These Fourth Amendment freedoms cannot properly be guaranteed if domestic security surveillance may be conducted solely within the discretion of the Executive Branch,” Powell continued. “The Fourth Amendment does not contemplate the executive officers of government as neutral and disinterested magistrates. Their duty and responsibility are to enforce the laws, to investigate and to prosecute.

“But those charged with this investigative and prosecutorial duty should not be the sole judges of when to utilize constitutionally sensitive means in pursuing their tasks,” Powell wrote.”The historical judgement, which the Fourth Amendment accepts, is that unreviewed executive discretion may yield too readily to pressure to obtain incriminating evidence and overlook potential invasions of privacy and protected speech.”

APPEALS COURT EXPANDED RULING TO INCLUDE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE

The high court’s unanimous decision — which covered only domestic intelligence — was bolstered in 1975 by an equally unanimous ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the nation’s second-highest court, which declared the Fourth Amendment’s ban on warrantless domestic spying also applied to foreign intelligence gathering by the government on U.S. soil.

The seven-member appeals court ruled that even where foreign affairs and national security were involved, the government must obtain court warrants before it can eavesdrop on the communications of domestic organizations or individual U.S. citizens who were neither agents of or collaborators with foreign powers.

One judge on the appeals court disagreed in part with the ruling, in which six of its 11 judges wrote separate but concurring opinions. Nonetheless, based on the appeals court’s unanimity under the Fourth Amendment — which mirrored that of the Supreme Court’s decision three years earlier — the administration of then-President Gerald Ford chose not to appeal to the Supreme Court, apparently fearing that it would lose. Instead, Ford ordered the Justice Department to comply with the court’s decision.

Ford even indicated that he would support legislation in Congress to require court warrants for all electronic eavesdropping by the government — in part, paving the way for the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act a year after Ford left office in 1977.

IT’S TIME TO TELL OBAMA: ‘OBEY THE CONSTITUTION ON WIRETAPS’

Yet only the American Civil Liberties Union, The ‘Skeeter Bites Report — and a federal judge in Michigan — appear to have remembered the fact that the Bush (and now Obama) warrantless spying program is every bit as unconstitutional as the Nixon program of four decades ago.

The Obama administration has chosen to not only continue its predecessor’s unconstitutional warrantless spying program, but has shamefully chosen to defend its continuance in court. The time has come to hold this administration accountable for its refusal to obey the Constitution it is sworn by its oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend” — and force it to comply with the Fourth Amendment.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.