Incredible. Required reading for everyone.

In a recent book Classified Woman, Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI, describes how the Pentagon, CIA and State Department maintained intimate ties to al-Qaeda militants as late as 2001. Her memoir, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, published last year, charged senior government officials with negligence, corruption and collaboration with al Qaeda in illegal arms smuggling and drugs trafficking in Central Asia.

In interviews with this author in early March, Edmonds claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, current head of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s deputy at the time, had innumerable, regular meetings at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, with U.S. military and intelligence officials between 1997 and 2001, as part of an operation known as ‘Gladio B’. Al-Zawahiri, she charged, as well as various members of the bin Laden family and other mujahideen, were transported on NATO planes to various parts of Central Asia and the Balkans to participate in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations.

According to two Sunday Times journalists speaking on condition of anonymity, this and related revelations had been confirmed by senior Pentagon and MI6 officials as part of a four-part investigative series that were supposed to run in 2008. The Sunday Times journalists described how the story was inexplicably dropped under the pressure of undisclosed “interest groups”, which, they suggest, were associated with the U.S. State Department. […]

Described by the American Civil Liberties Union as the “most gagged person in the history of the United States of America,” Edmonds studied criminal justice, psychology and public policy at  George Washington and George Mason universities. Two weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, her fluency in Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani earned her an FBI contract at the Washington DC field office. She was tasked with translating highly classified intelligence from operations against terrorism suspects in and outside the U.S..

In the course of her work, Edmonds became privy to evidence that U.S. military and intelligence agencies were collaborating with Islamist militants affiliated with al-Qaeda, the very forces blamed for the 9/11 attacks – and that officials in the FBI were covering up the evidence. When Edmonds complained to her superiors, her family was threatened by one of the subjects of her complaint, and she was fired. […]

When she attempted to go public with her story in 2002, and again in 2004, the U.S. government silenced Edmonds by invoking a legal precedent known as “state secrets privilege” – a near limitless power to quash a lawsuit based solely on the government’s claim that evidence or testimony could divulge information that might undermine “national security.” Under this doctrine, the government sought to retroactively classify basic information concerning Edmonds’s case already in the public record, including, according to the New York Times, “what languages Ms. Edmonds translated, what types of cases she handled, and what employees she worked with, officials said. Even routine and widely disseminated information — like where she worked — is now classified.” […]

Other intelligence experts agree that Edmonds had stumbled upon a criminal conspiracy at the heart of the American judicial system. In her memoirs, she recounts that FBI Special Agent Gilbert Graham, who also worked in the Washington field office on counter-intelligence operations, told her over a coffee how he “ran background checks on federal judges” in the “early nineties for the bureau… If we came up with shit – skeletons in their closets – the Justice Department kept it in their pantry to be used against them in the future or to get them to do what they want in certain cases – cases like yours.” A redacted version of Graham’s classified protected disclosure to the Justice Department regarding these allegations, released in 2007, refers to the FBI’s “abuse of authority” by conducting illegal wiretapping to obtain information on U.S. public officials. […]

While it is widely recognised that the CIA sponsored bin Laden’s networks in Afghanistan during the Cold War, U.S. government officials deny any such ties existed. Others claim these ties were real, but were severed after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989.

But according to Edmonds, this narrative is false. “Not just bin Laden, but several senior ‘bin Ladens’ were transported by U.S. intelligence back and forth to the region in the late 1990s through to 2001″, she told this author, “including Ayman al-Zawahiri” – Osama bin Laden’s right-hand-man who has taken over as al-Qaeda’s top leader.

“In the late 1990s, all the way up to 9/11, al-Zawahiri and other mujahideen operatives were meeting regularly with senior U.S. officials in the U.S. embassy in Baku to plan the Pentagon’s Balkan operations with the mujahideen,” said Edmonds. “We had support for these operations from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, but the U.S. oversaw and directed them. They were being run from a secret section of the Pentagon with its own office”. […]

Edmonds said that the Pentagon operations with Islamists were an “extension” of an original ‘Gladio’ programme uncovered in the 1970s in Italy, part of an EU-wide NATO covert operation that began as early as the 1940s. As Swiss historian Dr. Daniele Ganser records in his seminal book, NATO’s Secret Armies, an official Italian parliamentary inquiry confirmed that British MI6 and the CIA had established a network of secret “stay-behind” paramilitary armies, staffed by fascist and Nazi collaborators. The covert armies carried out terrorist attacks throughout Western Europe, officially blamed on Communists in what Italian military intelligence called the ‘strategy of tension’.

“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game” explained Gladio operative Vincenzo Vinciguerra during his  trial in 1984. “The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people… to turn to the State to ask for greater security.”

While the reality of Gladio’s existence in Europe is a matter of historical record, Edmonds contended the same strategy was adopted by the Pentagon in the 1990s in a new theatre of operations, namely, Asia. “Instead of using neo-Nazis, they used mujahideen working under various bin Ladens, as well as al-Zawahiri”, she said. […]

These new Pentagon-led operations were codenamed ‘Gladio B’ by FBI counterintelligence: “In 1997, NATO asked [Egyptian President] Hosni Mubarak to release from prison Islamist militants affiliated to Ayman al-Zawahiri [whose role in the assassination of Anwar Sadat led to Mubarak’s ascension]. They were flown under U.S. orders to Turkey for [training and use in] operations by the Pentagon”, she said.

Edmonds’ allegations find some independent corroboration in the public record. The Wall Street Journal refers to a nebulous agreement between Mubarak and “the operational wing of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was then headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri…  Many of that group’s fighters embraced a cease-fire with the government of former President Hosni Mubarak in 1997.”

Youssef Bodansky, former Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, cited U.S. intelligence sources in an article for Defense and Foreign Affairs: Strategic Policy, confirming “discussions between the Egyptian terrorist leader Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and an Arab-American known to have been both an emissary of the CIA and the U.S. Government.” He referred to an “offer” made to al-Zawahiri in November 1997 on behalf of U.S. intelligence, granting his Islamists a free hand in Egypt as long as they lent support to U.S. forces in the Balkans. In 1998, Al Zawahiri’s brother, Muhammed, led an elite unit of the Kosovo Liberation Army against Serbs during the Kosovo conflict – he reportedly had direct contact with NATO leadership.

“This is why”, Edmonds continued in her interview, “even though the FBI routinely monitored the communications of the diplomatic arms of all countries, only four countries were exempt from this protocol – the UK, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Belgium – the seat of NATO. No other country – not even allies like Israel or Saudi Arabia, were exempt. This is because these four countries were integral to the Pentagon’s so-called Gladio B operations.”

Edmonds did not speculate on the objectives of the Pentagon’s ‘Gladio B’ operations, but highlighted the following possibilities: projecting U.S. power in the former Soviet sphere of influence to access previously untapped strategic energy and mineral reserves for U.S. and European companies; pushing back Russian and Chinese power; and expanding the scope of lucrative criminal activities, particularly illegal arms and drugs trafficking.

Terrorism finance expert Loretta Napoleoni estimates the total value of this criminal economy to be about $1.5 trillion annually, the bulk of which “flows into Western economies, where it gets recycled in the U.S. and in Europe” as a “vital element of the cash flow of these economies.”

It is no coincidence then that the opium trade, Edmonds told this author, has grown rapidly under the tutelage of NATO in Afghanistan: “I know for a fact that NATO planes routinely shipped heroin to Belgium, where they then made their way into Europe and to the UK. They also shipped heroin to distribution centres in Chicago and New Jersey. FBI counterintelligence and DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) operations had acquired evidence of this drug trafficking in its surveillance of a wide range of targets, including senior officials in the Pentagon, CIA and State Department. As part of this surveillance, the role of the Dickersons – with the support of these senior U.S. officials – in facilitating drug-trafficking, came up. It was clear from this evidence that the whole funnel of drugs, money and terror in Central Asia was directed by these officials.”

The evidence for this funnel, according to Edmonds, remains classified in the form of FBI counterintelligence surveillance records she was asked to translate. Although this alleged evidence has never made it to court due to the U.S. government’s exertion of ‘state secret privilege’, she was able to testify in detail concerning her allegations, including naming names, in 2009.

Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ - that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for “soliciting” the disclosure of classified information - is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

That same “solicitation” theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the US government can “charge [Assange] as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.” When that theory was first disclosed, I wrote that it would enable the criminalization of investigative journalism generally:

“Very rarely do investigative journalists merely act as passive recipients of classified information; secret government programs aren’t typically reported because leaks just suddenly show up one day in the email box of a passive reporter. Journalists virtually always take affirmative steps to encourage its dissemination. They try to cajole leakers to turn over documents to verify their claims and consent to their publication. They call other sources to obtain confirmation and elaboration in the form of further leaks and documents. Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau described how they granted anonymity to ‘nearly a dozen current and former officials’ to induce them to reveal information about Bush’s NSA eavesdropping program. Dana Priest contacted numerous ‘U.S. and foreign officials’ to reveal the details of the CIA’s ‘black site’ program. Both stories won Pulitzer Prizes and entailed numerous, active steps to cajole sources to reveal classified information for publication.

“In sum, investigative journalists routinely — really, by definition — do exactly that which the DOJ’s new theory would seek to prove WikiLeaks did. To indict someone as a criminal ‘conspirator’ in a leak on the ground that they took steps to encourage the disclosures would be to criminalize investigative journalism every bit as much as charging Assange with ‘espionage’ for publishing classified information.”

That’s what always made the establishment media’s silence (or even support) in the face of the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks so remarkable: it was so obvious from the start that the theories used there could easily be exploited to criminalize the acts of mainstream journalists. That’s why James Goodale, the New York Times’ general counsel during the paper’s historic press freedom fights with the Nixon administration, has been warning that “the biggest challenge to the press today is the threatened prosecution of WikiLeaks, and it’s absolutely frightening.”

Indeed, as Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler noted recently in the New Republic, when the judge presiding over Manning’s prosecution asked military lawyers if they would “have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?”, the prosecutor answered simply: “Yes, ma’am”. It has long been clear that this WikiLeaks-as-criminals theory could and would be used to criminalize establishment media outlets which reported on that which the US government wanted concealed.

That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the “war on terror” will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week’s big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of “endless war”. Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war - justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism - that is the single greatest cause of that threat. […]

Just to convey a sense for how degraded is this Washington “debate”: Obama officials at yesterday’s Senate hearing repeatedly insisted that this “war” is already one without geographical limits and without any real conceptual constraints. The AUMF’s war power, they said, “stretches from Boston to the [tribal areas of Pakistan]” and can be used “anywhere around the world, including inside Syria, where the rebel Nusra Front recently allied itself with al-Qaida’s Iraq affiliate, or even what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called ‘boots on the ground in Congo’”. The acting general counsel of the Pentagon said it even ”authorized war against al-Qaida’s associated forces in Mali, Libya and Syria”. Newly elected independent Sen. Angus King of Maine said after listening to how the Obama administration interprets its war powers under the AUMF:

This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today.”

Former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, who testified at the hearing, summarized what was said after it was over: Obama officials argued that “they had domestic authority to use force in Mali, Syria, Libya, and Congo, against Islamist terrorist threats there”; that “they were actively considering emerging threats and stated that it was possible they would need to return to Congress for new authorities against those threats but did not at present need new authorities”; that “the conflict authorized by the AUMF was not nearly over”; and that “several members of the Committee were surprised by the breadth of DOD’s interpretation of the AUMF.” Conveying the dark irony of America’s war machine, seemingly lifted right out of the Cold War era film Dr. Strangelove, Goldsmith added:

Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made.”

Have been doing more theoretical reading on resistance lately and found this. Astute criticisms toward “post-Marxism’s” gaping holes that while effective don’t always broaden in positive terms. Very useful.

Of course, if one sweeps the nasty realities of the formation of the United Nations under the rug, it becomes that much easier to convince oneself that Empire might not be such a bad thing after all. Even after Hardt and Negri admit that globalizing tendencies involve a lot of “oppression and exploitation,” they still maintain that the process must continue. Why? “Despite recognizing all this [bad stuff], we insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that involves returning to the old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation-state against capital.” In other words, socialism defended by armed working people who would sacrifice their lives at places like the Bay of Pigs in order to build a better future for their children and grandchildren is a waste of time.

Leaving no doubt whatsoever about their intentions, they declare, “Today we should all clearly recognize that the time of such proletarian revolution is over.” With this declaration, they stand side-by-side with Roger Burbach who, as cited above, believes: “The left has to accept the fact that the Marxist project for revolution launched by the Communist Manifesto is dead.”

Unlike Burbach, Hardt and Negri have little interest in or sympathy for local struggles against the ravages of globalization:

“We are well aware that in affirming this thesis we are swimming against the current of our friends and comrades on the Left. In the long decades of the current crisis of the communist, socialist, and liberal Left that has followed the 1960s, a large portion of critical thought, both in the dominant countries of capitalist development and in the subordinated ones, has sought to recompose sites of resistance that are founded on the identities of social subjects or national and regional groups, often grounding political analysis on the *localization of struggles*.” (Empire, p. 44)

Hardt and Negri now regard such local struggles as they would tainted meat on a supermarket shelf because they “can easily devolve into a kind of primordialism that fixes and romanticizes social relations and identities.”

Although their prose, as is universally the case, hovers ethereally above real people and real events, it is not too hard to figure out what they are referring to. They obviously have in mind struggles involving the Mayan people of Chiapas or, before them, the Mayans of Guatemala who looked to Rigoberta Menchu for inspiration and guidance.

Don’t Hardt and Negri have a point? Isn’t it self-defeating to rally people around ‘primordial’ texts like the Popul Vuh, the Mayan sacred text that figures heavily in “I, Rigoberta Menchu.” Wouldn’t such people be better off assimilating themselves as rapidly as possible into a global network of political and social relations on the basis of what they have in common, rather than what distinguishes them?

In reality, local struggles have exactly that dynamic. A study of Menchu’s career would verify that. Starting out as a simple Mayan peasant with a desire to defend local communal lands against the onslaughts of agri-business and the Guatemalan army and death squads, she transformed herself into a global figure connected to indigenous movements everywhere as well as somebody committed to progressive social transformation.

Sadly, what Hardt and Negri miss entirely is how socialist consciousness is formed. It is not on the basis of abstract socialist propaganda but rather the dialectical interaction between experiences based on local struggles, either at the plant-gate or the rural farming village, and ideas transmitted to fighters by Marxist activists, the “vanguard” in Lenin’s terms. The construction of such a vanguard remains as urgent a task as it was in Lenin’s days, a period not unlike our own which faced thinkers not unlike Hardt and Negri. Part two of Hardt-Negri’s “Empire” is a rather lofty defense of an argument that has been around on the left for a long time. It states that all nationalism is reactionary, both that of oppressor and oppressed nations. While the argumentation is studded with references to obscure and not so obscure political theorists going back to the Roman Empire, there is a complete absence of the one criterion that distinguishes Marxism from competitive schools of thought, namely class. […]

Their arguments, although formulated in over-inflated jargon, boil down to the sentiments found in the Who song “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” They write:

“The perils of national liberation are even clear when viewed externally, in terms of the world economic system in which the ‘liberated’ nation finds itself. Indeed, the equation nationalism equals political and economic modernization, which has been heralded by leaders of numerous anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles from Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh to Nelson Mandela, really ends up being a perverse trick…The very concept of a liberatory national sovereignty is ambiguous if not completely contradictory. While this nationalism seeks to liberate the multitude from foreign domination, it erects domestic structures of domination that are equally severe.” (Empire, p. 132-133)

As is the case throughout “Empire,” there is a paucity of historical data to support their arguments. If you read the above paragraph, you would be left with the conclusion that the problem is mainly theoretical in nature. By embracing nation-state solutions rather than global solutions, national liberation movements have been suckered into accommodation to the status quo. Not only that, the new boss is just as bad as the old boss—won’t get fooled again.

Furthermore, if Marx’s main contribution was a dialectical approach to history and society, Hardt and Negri’s binary opposition between “foreign domination” and “domestic structures of domination” leads one to wonder whether they have read the Eighteenth Brumaire, which states that people make history but not of their own choosing. In the recent past, the failure of national liberation movements has less to do with thououououououououe bad faith of leaders, personal greed or theoretical error. It has much more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of low-intensity warfare, two key factors that are conspicuously absent from their discussion.

One particularly fascinating example is Foucault’s 1979 course, The Birth of Biopolitics, in which his analyses of the development of neoliberal economic thought in post-war West Germany and, to a lesser degree, the United States served indirectly to work through a political conflict that had erupted over a year earlier. In November 1977 the West German government demanded the extradition from Paris of Klaus Croissant, a lawyer representing the Red Army Faction (a.k.a. Baader-Meinhof Gang), charging him with overstepping attorney privileges and materially aiding his clients. Foucault mobilized to defend Croissant and the principle of the right to asylum, even to the point of having his ribs fractured by police in a clash outside La Santé prison where Croissant was held. He refused, however, to sign a petition supported by many prominent French intellectuals, most notably his long-time friend Gilles Deleuze, which not only defended Croissant but also claimed the West German state was becoming fascist. The petition incident was traumatic for Foucault, in particular because it broke his relationship with Deleuze, whom he did not see again before his death.

I interpret Foucault’s 1979 course as a defence and explanation of his position in the Croissant affair through its argument that the West German state is not fascist but neoliberal. This proposition, of course, continues Foucault’s earlier rejection of the notion of the state as the locus of power, which he derided as ‘state-phobia’. In contrast to fascism, he explains, neoliberalism operates through plural and decentralized governmental mechanisms defined by entrepreneurial logics and market rationality: a state supervised by the market, rather than a market controlled by the state. I think that Foucault’s motivation for contesting the claim of a ‘fascist state’ is also explained by the politics such a term implies, though he does not say this explicitly. Although many people use the term ‘fascist’ today simply as an extreme but relatively generic political insult—think of those who called the Bush government or the US Patriot Act fascist—in the late 1970s, particularly in groups like the Red Army Faction and the Italian Red Brigades, the claim carried specific political consequences: since the state was fascist, the only effective means to oppose it was armed struggle organized in highly disciplined, clandestine bands. Foucault’s analytical conclusion, then, that the West German state was not fascist, was directed also, and perhaps even primarily, against a specific form of action. As in his earlier studies of power, however, here too Foucault was much more successful in undermining mistaken political strategies than proposing alternatives. He provided no positive propositions regarding the appropriate modes of struggle against neoliberalism.

Numerous media reports convincingly speculated that the DOJ’s actions arise out of a 2012 AP article that contained leaked information about CIA activity in Yemen, and the DOJ is motivated, in part, by a desire to uncover the identity of AP’s sources. That 2012 AP story revealed that the CIA was able to “thwart” a planned bombing by the al-Qaida “affiliate” in that country of a US jetliner. AP had learned of the CIA actions a week earlier but “agreed to White House and CIA requests not to publish it immediately because the sensitive intelligence operation was still under way.” AP revealed little that the US government itself was not planning to reveal and that would not have been obvious once the plot was successfully thwarted, as it explained in its story: “once those concerns were allayed, the AP decided to disclose the plot Monday despite requests from the Obama administration to wait for an official announcement Tuesday.”

The legality of the DOJ’s actions is impossible to assess because it is not even known what legal authority it claims nor the legal process it invoked to obtain these records. Particularly in the post-9/11 era, the DOJ’s power to obtain phone records is, as I’ve detailed many times, dangerously broad. It often has the power to obtain those records without the person’s knowledge (as happened here) and for a wildly broad scope of time (as also happened here). There are numerous instruments that have been vested in the DOJ to obtain phone records, many of which do not require court approval, including administrative subpoenas and “national security letters” (issued without judicial review); indeed, the Obama DOJ has previously claimed it has the power to obtain journalists’ phone records without subpoeans using NSLs, and in its relentless pursuit to learn the identity of the source for one of New York Times’ James Risen’s stories, the Obama DOJ has actually claimed that journalists have no shield protections whatsoever in the national security context. It’s also quite possible that they obtained the records through a Grand Jury subpoena, as part of yet another criminal investigation to uncover and punish leakers.

None of those processes for obtaining these invasive records requires a demonstration of probable cause or anything close to it. Instead, the DOJ must simply assert that the records “relate to” a pending investigation: a standard so broad that virtually every DOJ desire will fulfill it. Even if a court were involved in the acquisition of these records - and that’s unlikely here - it typically does little more than act as rubber-stamping functionary, just as it does when secretly approving the DOJ’s requests for FISA warrants. This is what is reaped from continuously vesting the US government with greater and greater surveillance powers in the name of Terrorism and other fears.

There has long been concern about the DOJ’s snooping into the communications which journalists have with their sources precisely because the DOJ’s power to obtain phone data and other sensitive records in secret is now so sweeping. Attempts to enact legislation to protect journalists from this type of concealed investigative intrusion into their source communications have been defeated in part due to the DOJ’s insistence that it exercises this power responsibly and only in the most extreme cases.

One of the biggest drivers of Watergate was the seemingly unending war in Vietnam. As opposition increased to a foreign war that ultimately killed 58,000 Americans, for goals that were murky at best, so did government paranoia. At the core of Watergate was a team of shady operatives that were nicknamed “the White House Plumbers” — because they went after news leaks…get it? In May 1969, after news reports about U.S. bombing activities in Cambodia, Nixon and his then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger enlisted J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to wiretap journalists and national security aides.

Later, one of the worst governmental abuses occurred after whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked the massive Pentagon Papers that exposed governmental lies about the conduct of the war in Vietnam. Nixon’s “Plumbers” broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to dig up dirt to discredit him. Here is what one of Nixon’s former aides, Egil Krogh, wrote about it in 2007:

The premise of our action was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation’s security demanded it. As President Nixon himself said to David Frost during an interview six years later, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” To this day the implications of this statement are staggering.

No doubt. Luckily for America, not everyone agreed. Over the next couple of years, criminal charges against Ellsberg were tossed because of the government’s misconduct, and Nixon resigned facing certain impeachment over the activities of his Plumbers and the ensuing, elaborate cover-up. The nation mostly rejoiced. The system worked… for a while.

Flash forward to 2012. America had at that point been in an undefined “war on terror” for 11 years — the same amount of time from the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that greatly expanded the Vietnam War to the 1975 fall of Saigon. Just as during the 1960s and early 1970s, this terror war had provided government with an excuse to greatly expand its domestic spying on American citizens — some of that through a law called the Patriot Act and some of it even more dubious, constitutionally.

Then, on May 7, 2012, the Associated Press published an article about the Obama administration’s conduct of its war in a country that we’d never declared war on (it was Cambodia in 1969, but Yemen in 2012) and Obama’s Justice Department — for reasons not yet fully known — went crazy over the leak. This, then, is a reminder of why history matters so much.

Because if we’re not careful… it repeats:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

The AP’s CEO said tonight that “[t]here can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters” — and I could not agree with him more.

Amid twinkling fingers and Guy Fawkes masks, few were pining for central committees. Occupy’s emergence was welcomed. The movement galvanized radicals, bringing the language of class and economic justice into view. Yet many saw a certain arrogance underlining the protests. Occupy, in part a media event that mobilized relatively few, was quick to assert its novelty and earth-shattering significance.

“Our model worked” was the refrain, cutting short debate with representatives from the gloomy socialist left. A disconnect from the lineages of past movements — movements that energized and accomplished more — was for some a point of pride. The posture was all the more tragic, because Occupy’s potential went beyond the minuscule core that laid its foundation. It rested in the millions who saw in it their discontent with austerity regimes, wage cuts, unemployment, and financial abuse. OWS, the argument of many socialists went, now drifting towards irrelevance, lacked the experience and political strategy to rally these people to action.

Of course, no diverse movement emerges out of an apolitical era and latches immediately onto a unified and comprehensive critique. Politicization is a process.

In this context, the translation of Lucio Magri’s The Tailor of Ulm, a history of the rise and fall of the Italian Communist Party, once the most powerful and influential one in the West, is perfectly timed. With the Communist movement long dead and Italian politics vacillating between the dry and technocratic and the bombastic and corrupt, that’s an odd pronouncement. But the history of the PCI is the history of a vibrant and deeply political organization that in a few short decades embedded itself within the Italian working class, attempting to chart a new course between Stalinism and social democracy. Its premature disappearance left that class in disarray. And today, Italy’s anti-austerity movement is almost as weak and scattered as our own.

So Rome inspired no one at Zuccotti. Unlike, say, Athens. In Greece, the far left has come close to leading a governing coalition and a radical extra-parliamentary movement has been fighting for years to stave off the European austerity packages.

But it goes unnoticed that the Left’s rise in Greece is a result of a unique history. Almost alone in Europe, that country’s unapologetically Stalinist Communist Party and its Eurocommunist splinters clung to life after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This tradition of working class organization, even in its ossified “Party” form, has fueled eclectic protests that make Occupy look like a tea party. Or the Tea Party.

“Eclectic” and “ossified” seem as if they don’t belong together. Today, the Old Left is invoked as a convenient foil: humorless, militaristic, rigidly holding onto a stale ideology. It’s a critique that has roots in the New Left. But the revolution danced before Emma Goldman, much less Abbie Hoffman.

As Magri explains, the Italian Communist Party incubated a social movement and a real community:

In the evening you went to a meeting on your bicycle or moped, where you would discuss the newspaper articles or membership campaigns; then you came back late to eat a plate of tripe or have a drink or two at the cafe attached to the House of Labor.

The web of solidarity made it possible for the unemployed to get by with no income and to feel a sense of belonging and power, whatever their personal ability or status. It was similar to the way the early German Social Democratic Party earned the loyalty of workers by filling the holes in the Bismarckian welfare state. Late night dances and sporting events were just as important as propagandizing.

People are asking me three questions about the protests: Are they justified? Will they help or hurt the cause? And is Barber the best leader?

Yes, the protests are justified. The Republicans have unleashed a savage attack on the unemployed and the working poor, the latter by denying them Medicaid and cutting the Earned Income Tax Credit. They are attacking higher education, the K–12 public school system, pre-K programs for at-risk kids, women’s reproductive rights, gay rights, environmental protections—the list goes on. They’re privatizing public programs so shamelessly—putting businesses in charge while putting their hands out for campaign contributions—it would make Huey Long blush.

As destructive as the Republicans’ agenda is, their disdain for the basic requirements of democracy is even more appalling. They disdain evidence, treat public hearings as a joke, and when caught making up “facts” to support their positions, they couldn’t care less.

There isn’t a shred of evidence, for example, that people try to vote in North Carolina using another registered voter’s name. Still, the Republicans carry on about “voter fraud” and the need for photo IDs at the polls. The real reason for their outcry isn’t the integrity of ballots, it’s that requiring photo IDs will disqualify more Democratic than Republican voters.

Integrity? This week a Senate committee “approved” a bill dismantling renewable energy even though a majority of the members opposed it. Ignoring calls for a roll call, which would have given an exact count, the committee chair blithely ruled after a voice vote that the ayes had it. “North Carolina is not a banana republic,” said Sen. Josh Stein, D-Wake.

Maybe, but reasoning with the Republicans is futile. I’m sure there are some moderates who recoil at the sight of people—and by people, I mean black people—protesting and getting arrested. And Barber is black, as are many of his allies, though just as many are white, Latino and other ethnicities.

Don’t get too comfy at your desk. Your job might not be as secure as you think. Anecdotal reports from labor lawyers and a few polls show that most Americans believe their bosses must have a good reason to kick them to the curb. We labor under the illusion of what Harvard labor economist Richard Freeman calls, “there’s-got-to-be-a-law syndrome.” We don’t want to believe someone can be fired because her boss finds her sexually irresistible. In every other industrialized democracy, that couldn’t legally happen, but in 49 of the 50 states there is no law requiring a just or reasonable cause for employee termination.

Most Americans can be legally fired for almost any reason. Private sector workplace relationships tend to operate under the standard of employment-at-will, which means you can be fired for the color of your shirt, your political views, supporting your favorite sports team or for refusing to fetch your boss a cup of coffee. The Bill of Rights does not apply to your office.   

The protections in place are limited. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits“employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.” (But not sexual orientation: while 21 states have anti-discrimination laws on their books, it is legal under federal law to be fired for your sexual preferences or gender identity.) The National Labor Relations Act theoretically protects workers trying to form a union or engage in “other concerted activities for the purpose of…mutual aid or protection,” but the law is notoriously weak and its sanctions rarely deter employers. Any union contract worthy of the name will include a just-cause clause, protecting workers from arbitrary termination while leaving room for management to act in case of economic necessity or poor job performance. But 93.4 percent of private sector workers don’t have a union, and serve at the whim of their employers.

Unless they live in Montana.

In 1987 the legislature passed the Montana Wrongful Discharge Act, which states that (after a six-month probationary period) a worker can only be fired for a good reason, like “failure to satisfactorily perform job duties, disruption of the employer’s operation, or other legitimate business reason.” That’s awfully similar to the laws protecting the workers of almost every other industrially developed democratic nation on the planet (as this management-side presentation warns); protections enjoyed by nations like the Netherlands — where a McDonalds employee can win back pay after being fired for giving an off-duty co-worker an extra slice of cheese with her burger (the company was required to cover court costs, too).