Dissident Veteran For Peace

In the last couple of weeks I've discussed the death of Ahmaud Arbery with two people. Both of them had some familiarity with the matter and had seen William Bryan's video of the last few seconds of Arbery's life.

What was initially stunning to me is that their recall of the video was that the McMichaels were in motion in their vehicle and simply gunned Arbery down. I asked them if they had noticed that, in reality, the video clearly shows that at the time of the shooting the McMichaels were stopped with no one in the driver's seat. And that Arbery had run/jogged toward them and then alongside the passenger side of the McMichaels' truck before suddenly veering in front of it to attack Travis McMichaels, who was on the other side. They both denied noticing or recalling any of this.

The second person, I'll call her P., lives far south of the Mason-Dixon Line in a state where slavery was legal until 1865. P. is, arguably, herself of "redneck" stock. Nevertheless she reflexively denounced the McMichaels as vicious "rednecks". In all the years I've known she has never used that word, as she later acknowledged to me.

She also got angry that I characterized Arbery's final actions as "attacking a man armed with a shotgun". She objected to the word "attacking" even though, as I pointed out, that the word is neutral and if Arbery was engaged in actual self-defense, as she contended, he would have every legal right to attack the McMichaels.

Above I indicated I was initially stunned by the perspective of my friends. However, given the mainstream media's aggressively dishonest agenda-pushing it would be surprising if most people didn't accept the dominant narrative of the shooting. To be clear, my point is not that the McMichaels (and William Bryan) are innocent of any crime—although that seems to be the case based upon the evidence I've seen so far—but rather that the actual facts and the video alone paint a more complex picture of events than the simplistic characterizations of most mainstream and fringe Left/Right media outlets.

The McMichaels have both been arrested for aggravated assault and felony murder. The key charge the prosecution must prove is aggravated assault. If they are found guilty of that then perforce—because Ahmaud Arbery is dead—they must be guilty of felony murder (O.C.G.A. § 16-5-1). I was surprised that they were charged with aggravated assault (O.C.G.A. § 16-5-21) because, in my reading of the Georgia statute, I think the prosecution will have a more difficult time convincing a jury of that than of the charge of criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment (O.C.G.A. § 16-5-41), which is one of the charges against Bryan.

Going out on a limb here, I predict that, before they go to trial (assuming, as I do, that there will be a trial), the prosecutors will charge the McMichaels with criminal attempt to commit unlawful imprisonment in place of or in addition to aggravated assault. If they don't do that then I think the McMichaels will almost certainly be acquitted.

In any event, everyone interested in this case should critically scrutinize media and activist motives and narratives, consider the available evidence, and make up their own minds. Also ask yourself why some killings become national new stories with frequent updates and others get mostly ignored, nationally (see also here and here). Below is the best video (although the accuracy of the narration is spotty) of which I am aware of the events leading up to the shooting and some links to additional key case documents or sources.

• Glynn County Police Report of the Shooting
• Autopsy Report of Ahmaud Arbery
• DA George Barnhill's letter to Glynn County Police Department
• Ahmaud Arbery Murder Investigation | Georgia Bureau of Investigation

Labels: crime, critical thinking, guns, Justice, law, media, politics, race

The video below is from a 2012 presentation at the Christ at the Checkpoint conference in Bethlehem, Palestine by Gary Burge. It contains a fairly concise and direct Bible-based evangelical refutation of key theological errors of Christian Zionism. Burge is the current Dean of the Faculty and Visiting Professor of New Testament at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, MI.

Labels: Christianity, Israel Lobby, Palestine, religion, video, Zionism

Yesterday, the AP and NPR both reported that the US Justice Department "is dropping the criminal case" against Michael T. Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser. This is not quite correct.

The criminal case against Flynn was made when he pled guilty three times to the charge of lying to FBI agents although, more than two years later, he tried to withdraw his guilty plea. What actually happened yesterday was that the DOJ filed a motion in United States v. Flynn asking the trial judge "to dismiss the criminal information" against Flynn.

So, the ball is in the judge's court, not the DOJ's as has been implied in media coverage. And I wouldn't be completely surprised if Judge Emmet Sullivan declines to grant the DOJ's motion. In any case, the gist of the DOJ's motion is not so much that Flynn didn't lie to the FBI agents, though they do cast doubt upon that, but that Flynn never should have been questioned by the FBI in the first place.

As a long time Russiagate skeptic, I am sympathetic to this argument and I can see a case to be made in Flynn's favor on the grounds of procedural, but not substantive, justice. And make no mistake procedural justice is important.

However, there are a lot of aspects to this case that, barring additional evidence, temper any sympathy I have for Flynn or make me skeptical that dropping the case is really warranted in the name of procedural, let alone substantive, justice.

It's worth pointing out that Flynn wasn't some naive apprentice carpenter from Kalamazoo who fell in with the wrong crowd. Flynn was a long-time, loyal servant of the Empire operating at the highest levels of a corrupt system, including a stint under Obama as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Here's my list of, for lack of a better term, aggravating circumstances:

1. No one held a gun to Flynn's head to force him to: a) meet with FBI agents in his White House office, b) without his attorney present, and c) without recording the interview.

2. Flynn pled guilty, in open court, on two separate occasions to the charge of "making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001 and also signed a written plea agreement to that effect, not to mention his public mea culpa. Here it's worth considering key portions of the transcript of Flynn's abortive sentencing hearing (click on images to enlarge them):


Many of the claims that Flynn and the DOJ are now making in favor of letting Flynn off the hook were already addressed by Flynn himself at his sentencing hearing.

3. Flynn reportedly cooperated fully with the Mueller investigation when he thought it served his interests to advance the Russiagate farce. It's worth pointing out that the Mueller investigation began during the Trump administration and was opened by none other than Rod Rosenstein, a Trump appointee.

4. The Trump administration possesses but refuses to release the actual recordings or transcript of recordings, in redacted form or otherwise, of Flynn's conversations with Russian ambassador Kislyak. These recordings were reportedly made during the Obama administration under a FISA warrant. This is particularly irksome because of all the well-founded complaints about the Obama administration's abuses of power.

5. William Barr took over as Attorney General on February 14, 2019. The investigative phase of the Mueller probe ended on March 22, 2019, and the office was completely shut down on May 29, 2019. Yet, the Trump-Barr DOJ steadfastly prosecuted Flynn until yesterday and, although Mueller recommended no prison time for him, the Trump-Barr team reversed course and called for him to be locked up just last January.

6. Finally, like Trump and nearly all DC politicians, Flynn is a partisan and/or tool of the Israel Lobby. Flynn's first substantive post-election conversation with Kislyak was doing the bidding of Israel in trying to get a UN Security Council vote against Israel's illegal settlements blocked (see here and here). This aspect of the case was detailed in two pages (pp. 167-168) of the first volume of the Mueller Report, buried among the hundreds of other pages of text, and has been largely ignored in the mainstream US media (but not as much in the mainstream Israeli media).

Furthermore, it has even been covered up in some legal pleadings filed against Flynn. The criminal information that the DOJ now seeks to have dismissed says that: "the defendant falsely stated and represented to agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in Washington, D.C., that ... On or about December 22, 2016, FLYNN did not ask the Russian Ambassador to delay the vote on or defeat a pending United Nations Security Council resolution ..." No mention whatsoever is made in the information of which country was the subject of that resolution or why Flynn would reach out to the Russian ambassador to discuss it.

Similarly, most Americans have no idea that Israel was the country funneling arms to Iran as part of the illegal Iran-Contra affair. Likewise, the name of the country whose forces killed them fails to appear in the posthumous Navy Cross citations of Philip McCutcheon Armstrong and Francis Brown. Nor does it appear in the Medal of Honor citation of William Loren McGonagle. The marker for the five sailors and one Marine killed in the attack on the USS Liberty and buried in a mass grave at Arlington National Cemetery also gives no indication of who killed these men or the other 28 buried elsewhere who died with them on June 8, 1967.

In sum, I am by no means convinced that ending the case against Flynn satisfies any norms of procedural justice and the attempt seems to me to be primarily a political act of one group of crooks looking out for one of their own. Flynn appears to be clearly guilty of the substantive matter for which he was charged and repeatedly pled guilty.

On the other hand, I would definitely support investigating and prosecuting, as warranted, the allegations of FBI and prosecutorial misconduct in Russiagate (FWIW, I think the creation and release of the whole second volume of the Mueller Report was an abuse of power). Congressional action against law enforcement and prosecutorial abuse, not to mention mass surveillance, is long overdue. How about repealing the Logan Act and the Espionage Act, too? I won't hold my breath waiting for any of these things to happen.

Last revised: 13 May 2010

Labels: crime, Empire, Israel, Israel Lobby, Michael T. Flynn, Obama, Robert S. Mueller, Russia, Trump