Kerry Chosen for U.S. Secretary of State, Hagel Still in Limbo
Taylor
Published: Sunday 23 December 2012
President Barack Obama has selected Senator John Kerry as his next Secretary of State.

U.S. President Barack Obama nominated Massachusetts Senator John Kerry on Friday to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, calling him “the perfect choice to guide American diplomacy in the years ahead”.

But Obama offered no hints as to whom he will pick for the rest of his national security team, including replacements for Pentagon chief Leon Panetta and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director General David Petraeus (retired), who resigned abruptly last month in the wake of reports of an affair.

The White House reportedly intended to announce its picks for all three posts Friday but backed off, primarily in response to an intense campaign led by prominent neo-conservatives and leaders of the Israel lobby against the possibility of former Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel as head of the Pentagon.

Hagel, who currently serves as co-chair of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and like Kerry is a decorated Vietnam War veteran, has come under heavy fire for his outspoken criticism of Israeli policies and the influence of the Israel lobby on Capitol Hill.

Reporter Matthieu Aikins on New Report: “The Doctor, the CIA, and the Blood of Bin Laden”
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 22 December 2012
“Pakistan continues to face the fallout from the raid that led to the capture and killing of bin Laden in May 2011.”

Today we look at the capture of Osama bin Laden — the focus of the controversial new movie, "Zero Dark Thirty," which was released this week. Billed as "the story of history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man," the film has come under harsh criticism from Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin for its depiction of torture. Meanwhile, Pakistan continues to face the fallout from the raid that led to the capture and killing of bin Laden in May 2011. Eight health workers have been killed this week during a nationwide anti-polio drive, as opposition to such immunization efforts in parts of country has increased after the fake CIA hepatitis vaccination campaign that helped locate bin Laden last year. Pakistan is one of only three countries in the world where polio remains endemic. Pakistani clerics said medical workers should not pay the price for those who collaborated with the CIA. For more, we’re joined by Matthieu Aikins, who just returned from two months in Pakistan researching what led to the capture and killing of bin Laden. His most recent article for GQ magazine is called "The Doctor, the  READ FULL POST 3 COMMENTS

An All-American Nightmare
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 18 December 2012
Why Zero Dark Thirty Won’t Settle the Torture Question or Purge Torture From the American System

 

If you look backward you see a nightmare. If you look forward you become the nightmare.

There’s one particular nightmare that Americans need to face: in the first decade of the twenty-first century we tortured people as national policy. One day, we’re going to have to confront the reality of what that meant, of what effect it had on its victims and on us, too, we who condoned, supported, or at least allowed it to happen, either passively or with guilty (or guiltless) gusto. If not, torture won’t go away. It can’t be disappeared like the body of a political prisoner, or conveniently deep-sixed simply by wishing it elsewhere or pretending it never happened or closing our bureaucratic eyes. After the fact, torture can only be dealt with by staring directly into the nightmare that changed us -- that, like it or not, helped make us who we now are.

The president, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has made it clear that no further investigations or inquiries will be made into America’s decade of torture. His Justice Department failed to prosecute a single torturer or any of those who helpedcover up evidence of the torture practices.  But it did deliver a jail sentence to one

To Hell With the Intelligence
Lawrence Davidson
Published: Tuesday 11 December 2012
“As intelligence agencies go, the CIA and its like are fairly good at collecting information, analyzing it, and rendering reasoned judgments as to its meaning.”

 

Part I - Magdulien Abaida and the Real Libya

 

 

On 3 December 2012, BBC News reported on the plight of Libyan activist Magdulien Abaida.  When the Libyan revolution broke out in Benghazi back in February 2011, she played an important part in developing a positive image of the revolt among European audiences and helped arrange material aid for the rebel forces.  She did this against the backdrop of Western governments describing the rebellion as one that sought “democratic rights” for the Libyan people.  Upon the collapse of the Qaddafi regime, the U.S. State Department issued a statement (2 November 2012) applauding the rebel victory as a “milestone” in the country’s “democratic transition."  This matched Ms Abaida’s expectations.  Unfortunately, her subsequent experience belied the optimism.

 

 

With the rebel victory in October 2011, Abaida  returned to Libya to help with the “democratic transition” and promote her particular cause of women’s rights.  However, what she found in her homeland was chaos.  The tribalism that underlies social organization in Libya had come to the fore.   According to Amnesty International, that tribalism is reflected in the activities of  “armed militias...acting completely out of control....There are hundreds of them across the country, arresting people without warrant, detaining them incommunicado, and torturing them....This is all happening while the government is unwilling or ...

To Hell With the Intelligence
Lawrence Davidson
Published: Tuesday 11 December 2012
“As intelligence agencies go, the CIA and its like are fairly good at collecting information, analyzing it, and rendering reasoned judgments as to its meaning.”

 

Part I - Magdulien Abaida and the Real Libya

 

 

On 3 December 2012, BBC News reported on the plight of Libyan activist Magdulien Abaida.  When the Libyan revolution broke out in Benghazi back in February 2011, she played an important part in developing a positive image of the revolt among European audiences and helped arrange material aid for the rebel forces.  She did this against the backdrop of Western governments describing the rebellion as one that sought “democratic rights” for the Libyan people.  Upon the collapse of the Qaddafi regime, the U.S. State Department issued a statement (2 November 2012) applauding the rebel victory as a “milestone” in the country’s “democratic transition."  This matched Ms Abaida’s expectations.  Unfortunately, her subsequent experience belied the optimism.

 

 

With the rebel victory in October 2011, Abaida  returned to Libya to help with the “democratic transition” and promote her particular cause of women’s rights.  However, what she found in her homeland was chaos.  The tribalism that underlies social organization in Libya had come to the fore.   According to Amnesty International, that tribalism is reflected in the activities of  “armed militias...acting completely out of control....There are hundreds of them across the country, arresting people without warrant, detaining them incommunicado, and torturing them....This is all happening while the government is unwilling or ...

The Barack Obama Story
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 4 December 2012
How a Community Organizer and Constitutional Law Professor Became a Robot President

President Barack Obama 

The White House 

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW 

Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear President Obama,

Nothing you don’t know, but let me just say it: the world’s a weird place. In my younger years, I might have said “crazy,” but that was back when I thought being crazy was a cool thing and only regretted I wasn’t.

I mean, do you ever think about how you ended up where you are? And I'm not actually talking about the Oval Office, though that’s undoubtedly a weird enough story in its own right.

READ FULL POST 6 COMMENTS

The Dangers of a Data-Driven World
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 30 November 2012
“For those employed in creative endeavors, it’s comforting to believe that technology's use in the information economy begins and ends with the kind of straightforward processes (data entry, dictation, etc.) that require little cognitive analysis and even less artistic thinking.”

 

If the recent political era has taught us anything, it has reiterated the enduring truth of George Santayana's aphorism about memory and duplication. Whether once again watching tax cuts fail to deliver a promised economic boost or witnessing more wars fail to deliver stability, we are reminded that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

But then, as much as those haunting words are meant as a warning, technology today is coding Santayana's principle into society's operating system, as if mimicking history is an admirable objective. Indeed, whether it's movie studios, record companies, government intelligence agencies or corporate human resources departments, algorithms that use the past to predict — and create — the future are making more and more decisions.

For those employed in creative endeavors, it's comforting to believe that technology's use in the information economy begins and ends with the kind of straightforward processes (data entry, dictation, etc.) that require little cognitive analysis and even less artistic thinking. Yet, as Christopher Steiner shows in his mind-blowing new book "Automate This," algorithms taking into account past commercial successes are being deployed by the film and music industries to choose which movie and album proposals will be produced. What's more, an increasing number of the algorithms' selections have proven profitable.

Steiner also documents the Central Intelligence Agency's seeming preparation for a real-life version of the WOPR from the 1980s flick ...

In Baseless Persecution of Rice, Republican Reputations Will Sink
Taylor
Published: Thursday 29 November 2012
The opposition to Rice is cobbled together from the remnants of a failed “October Surprise” election gambit.

 

With the Republican right persisting in baseless persecution of Susan Rice, the U.N. Ambassador who may replace departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, it has left President Obama little choice but to move ahead with her nomination. If he backs away from Rice, in the face of what he has called false accusations against her, that display of weakness would undermine his second term before it begins.

The opposition to Rice is cobbled together from the remnants of a failed "October Surprise" election gambit, which began when Mitt Romney sought to smear the president by using the tragic attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. In the election's aftermath, Senate Republicans have fixated on Rice, whom they accuse of misleading the public in television appearances several days after the Sept. 11 incident.

Rice's supposed offense was to downplay the likelihood that the attack had been perpetrated by al-Qaida terrorists or their local allies, while underlining the idea that it had been inspired by an anti-Muslim video on the Internet. On ABC News' "This Week," she repeated almost precisely the talking points provided to her by the CIA: Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous — not a premeditated — response to what had ...

Rice Twice? The Malicious “Controversy” Over Hillary Clinton’s Successor
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 18 November 2012
“The turmoil surrounding Ms. Rice is totally trumped up and the media, once again, is acting like a parade of willing propaganda puppets.”

 

Once again, the Republicans have raised a false alarm with the aim of embarrassing Obama and  obstructing the policy process.  This time, it's foreign policy and the object of Republican bile is UN Ambassador Susan Rice, rumored to be at the top of Obama's short list to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.  The turmoil surrounding Ms Rice is totally trumped up and the media, once again, is acting like a parade of willing propaganda puppets.

 

The "controversy" involves the tragic attack in Benghazi, Libya last September.  The incident resulted in the death of four US citizens, including US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.  When the attack occurred, Ms Rice was given the unenviable task of explaining what happened on morning talk shows.  Her account, based on talking points supplied by intelligence agencies, portrayed the Benghazi siege as a spontaneous protest exploited by extremists.  For whatever reason, she failed to say it was a premeditated terrorist attack.  "Within days," writes New York Times reporter Mark Landler, "Republicans in Congress were calling for her head."

 

Why?  A cover up, what else?  A conspiracy to bamboozle the American people into believing that President Obama, an African-American whose Kenyan father was raised in a Muslim family, was trying to hide his complicity in the attack.  And who else would he pick to be his accomplice but Susan Rice, another African-American?  NOW do you see the perfidy in this evil plot?  WELL, DO YOU?

 

A word about Susan Rice.  She's a Rhodes scholar, earned degrees ...

Did Petraeus Betray Us? And are We Better Off Without Him?
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 16 November 2012
“At that moment, apparently, all that was known was that there were harassing, anonymous emails to Kelley, referencing the Director of the CIA, whom she knew, and referencing information about the CIA director that was supposedly confidential.”

 

The David Petraeus clown car extravaganza that’s entertaining the country these days serves the useful purpose of distracting people from taking a hard look at the nature of the national security state we’ve become.  Comically hoist by his own petard, former General Petraeus is arguably just another of our war criminals who will never be held to account. 

 

Some say the FBI never should have been looking at his email in the first place.  Glenn Greenwald articulated this argument clearly as clearly as anyone on DemocracyNOW, where he complained that: 

 

…the FBI, based on really no evidence of any actual crime, engaged in this massive surveillance effort of, first, obtaining all kinds of intimate and private information about two women, one of whom complained, one of whom was the target of the complaint, Paula Broadwell and Jill Kelley; learned the locations and email accounts of Paula Broadwell, who was the subject of this fairly innocuous complaint; read through all of her emails; learned the identity of her anonymous lover, David Petraeus; likely read—certainly read through all of her emails, probably read through his; and then, in the process, as well, learned about an affair between the complainant, Jill Kelley—or not an affair, but inappropriate ...

GOP Rep Accuses FBI of Blackmailing Petraeus to Testify That Anti-Islam Video Sparked Libya Attack
Taylor
Published: Thursday 15 November 2012
The truth will soon be known, as Petraeus will now in fact be testifying under oath before the House Intelligence Committee’s closed-door hearings on Friday.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) thinks that the FBI may have been gathering information on former CIA Director David Petraeus to blackmail him so that he would testify favorably to the Obama administration’s position on the attack on Benghazi in September. “Hypothetically, of course,” as Gohmert put it.

 

Appearing on WMAL radio this morning, the outspoken Texas Congressman, known for his Tea Party-leanings, made clear that he wasn’t actually accusing the Obama White House of directing the FBI to investigate Petraeus for political reasons relating to his upcoming Benghazi testimony. Nor was he actually saying that the FBI was engaging in activities reminiscent of original FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to “blackmail” other government officials.

Instead, as Gohmert repeatedly made clear, he was only hypothetically spinning a story 

Top U.S. Commander Involved in David Petraeus Scandal
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 13 November 2012
The David Petraeus Scandal, Explained
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 13 November 2012
Beyond Bayonets and Battleships
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 10 November 2012
“Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed... the question is not a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships.”

It’s 2025 and an American “triple canopy” of advanced surveillance and armed drones fills the heavens from the lower- to the exo-atmosphere.  A wonder of the modern age, it can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed, knock out an enemy’s satellite communications system, or follow individuals biometrically for great distances.  Along with the country’s advanced cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated militarized information system ever created and an insurance policy for U.S. global dominion deep into the twenty-first century.  It’s the future as the Pentagon imagines it; it’s under development; and Americans know nothing about it.

They are still operating in another age.  “Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917,” complained Republican candidate Mitt Romney during the last presidential debate.

With words of withering mockery, President Obama shot back: “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed... the question is not a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships. It's what are our capabilities.”

Obama later offered just a hint of what those capabilities might be: “What I did was work with our joint chiefs of staff to think about, what are we going to need in the future to make sure that we are safe?... We need to be thinking about cyber security. We need to be talking about space.”

Amid all the post-debate media chatter, however, not a single commentator seemed to have a clue when it came to the profound strategic changes encoded in the president’s sparse words. Yet for the past four years, working in silence and secrecy, the Obama administration has ...

Drones Obliterate Shades of Gray Between Militants and Civilians
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 10 November 2012
“In September, as you may be aware, the Stanford International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic and the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law released a landmark report titled Living Under Drones.”

Killing someone because they looked like they were "up to no good" doesn't really pass legal muster.

Under the Obama administration, the CIA drone program uses what they call signature strikes, as you've no doubt heard. Usually, the term "signature" has a positive connotation, as in a characteristic that distinguishes one from others. But, to the CIA, it just means that any military-age males in an area it has decided is a strike zone are combatants. In other words, they look like they're "up to no good" and deserve to die.

In September, as you may be aware, the Stanford International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic and the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law released a landmark report titled Living Under Drones. In one section it reveals the sheer simple-mindedness of dividing individuals under surveillance into either civilians or militants. In fact, most of those labeled militants should be painted in shades of gray. (Emphasis added.)

Major media outlets in the US, Europe, and Pakistan that report on drone strikes tend to divide all those killed by drone strikes into just two categories: civilians or "militants." This reflects and reinforces a widespread assumption and misunderstanding that all "militants" are legitimate targets for the use of lethal force, and that any strike against a "militant" is lawful. This binary distinction. … distinction is extremely problematic, however, from a legal perspective.

[First] use of the word "militant" to describe individuals killed by drones often obscures whether those killed are in fact lawful targets under the international legal regime governing the US operations in Pakistan. It is not necessarily the case that any person who might be described as a ...

A Chat With Counterterrorism Chief John Brennan
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 6 November 2012
Medea Benjamin interviews John Brennan Counterterrorism Chief.

Having recently returned from Pakistan meeting with drone victims, on November 4 my partner Tighe Barry and I were having a leisurely Sunday morning breakfast. The discussion turned to John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism chief and the key person making decisions about drone strikes. We wondered if Brennan ever had a chance to meet innocent drone victims, as we did, and feel their pain.

 

“Maybe we should go to his house and talk to him,” quipped Tighe. We laughed at the absurdity of the idea but decided to do a little bit of research. Fifteen minutes later, we were out the door, driving to a Virginia suburb an hour south of Washington DC. I had no idea if it was really John’s address, but it was a lovely day for a drive—and Tighe was willing to indulge me.  

 

Exiting the freeway, we came to an area of rolling hills, green grass and private horse farms. As we approached what we thought might be John Brennan’s street, we were sure it was a mistake. How could this be? It was a nondescript upper middle class neighborhood, with children playing in the yards—no security, no government vehicles. The house was in a cul-de-sac sandwiched between two other houses, without so much as a fence surrounding it.

 

I decided to go knock on the door to make sure we were wrong.  A middle-aged, white-haired guy in a casual sweater and jeans opened the door, accompanied by someone who l assumed was his wife.

 

Could this really be John Brennan? The same man who championed "enhanced interrogation techniques” under President Bush? The same man who now decides, on "terror Tuesdays", who will be on the CIA kill list? The guy who developed the Orwellian "disposition matrix"—a blueprint for disposing of terrorist suspects for at least another decade?

 

I hesitated. He looked much younger and thinner than I ...

Twisting Benghazi Slowly, Slowly in the Wind
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 30 October 2012
If, as so many Republicans have claimed, the administration’s handling is a cover-up more significant than Watergate, then what is being covered up?

 

Two of the prime terrorist suspects in the Benghazi attack have been captured (one is dead), dozens more have been arrested in Libya, and the suspect group is dispersed and hunted, with its Benghazi headquarters dismantled -- but one wouldn’t know this listening to Republicans inside the Benghazi media bubble, whether partisans or reporters. 

 

“This issue of Benghazi is really bubbling up,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said on Fox News Oct. 28, echoing a talking point repeated on other networks and elsewhere by Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Reince Priebus, Carly 

The Alliance from Hell
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 19 October 2012
“At the heart of this acerbic relationship, however, is Pakistan’s arsenal of 110 nuclear bombs which, if the country were to disintegrate, could fall into the hands of Islamist militants, possibly from inside its own security establishment.”

 

 

The United States and Pakistan are by now a classic example of a dysfunctional nuclear family (with an emphasis on “nuclear”). While the two governments and their peoples become more suspicious and resentful of each other with every passing month, Washington and Islamabad are still locked in an awkward post-9/11 embrace that, at this juncture, neither can afford to let go of.

Washington is keeping Pakistan, with its collapsing economy and bloated military, afloat but also cripplingly dependent on its handouts and U.S.-sanctioned International Monetary Fund loans.  Meanwhile, CIA drones unilaterally strike its tribal borderlands.  Islamabad returns the favor. It holds Washington hostage over its Afghan War from which the Pentagon won’t be able to exit in an orderly fashion without its help. By blocking U.S. and NATO supply routes into Afghanistan (after a U.S. cross-border air strike had killed 24 Pakistani soldiers) from November 2011 until last July, Islamabad managed to ratchet up the cost of the war while underscoring its indispensability to the Obama administration.

At the heart of this acerbic relationship, however, is Pakistan’s arsenal of 110 nuclear bombs which, if the country were to disintegrate, could fall into the hands of Islamist militants, possibly from inside its own security establishment. As Barack Obama confided to his aides, this remains his worst foreign-policy nightmare, despite the decision of the U.S. Army to

The Week the World Stood Still
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 16 October 2012
The Cuban Missile Crisis and Ownership of the World

The world stood still 50 years ago during the last week of October, from the moment when it learned that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba until the crisis was officially ended -- though unknown to the public, only officially.

The image of the world standing still is the turn of phrase of Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, who published the authoritative version of the tapes of the ExComm meetings where Kennedy and a close circle of advisers debated how to respond to the crisis.  Those meetings were secretly recorded by the president, which might bear on the fact that his stand throughout the recorded sessions is relatively temperate compared to other participants, who were unaware that they were speaking to history. 

 

Stern has just published an accessible and accurate review of this critically important documentary record, finally declassified in the late 1990s.  I will keep to that here. “Never before or since,” he concludes, “has the survival of human civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations,” culminating in “the week the world stood still.”

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Americans Take Anti-Drone Stance Directly to Pakistan
Taylor
Published: Thursday 27 September 2012
We want to show Pakistanis that there are Americans calling for an end to the CIA’s killer drone strikes, and insisting that our government apologize and compensate the families of innocent victims.

 

“You’re not really going to Pakistan, are you?” “You’ve seen the State Department travel warning?” “Don’t they hate us over there?”

There are questions our friends and relatives are asking as we embark on a delegation to Pakistan to protest the drone attacks that have killed so many innocent Pakistanis over the past 8 years.

But the Pakistanis have been asking us very different questions. “Why do the American people support these barbaric and cowardly drone attacks?” “How would you like it if foreigners flew death machines into your airspace, murdering innocent men, women and children?” “Don’t you know that these attacks are counterproductive, driving locals into the hands of extremist groups out of a desire for revenge?”

When it comes to drones, Americans and Pakistanis see the world through different lenses. Americans are looking through the eyes of remote-control pilots safely ensconced in bases in the United States, while Pakistanis are at the receiving end of the bull’s eye. Polls show to the two peoples as polar opposites: 83% of Americans support the use of drones against “terrorist suspects overseas”; in Pakistan, among those who say they know something about drones, virtually all—97%—oppose them.

Many Pakistanis who raged against the “Innocence of Muslims” film were venting long-held resentments towards the United States stemming from drone attacks (along with other policies such as the US mishandling of the war in Afghanistan, the disastrous US invasion of Iraq, and the US pro-Israel ...

Documents on Drone Killings Remain Secret with Obama Administration
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 21 September 2012
Debunking Debunking
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 19 September 2012
“Conservatives’ hopes and plans for the future are exceedingly stingy.”

I was innocently chilling at home the other day when my TV brutally assaulted me with yet another show about how bad America is.  We’re number one in nothing, our schools suck, our health stinks, and our politics toxic as salmonella.  Then I endured a movie where our double-crossed hero spends two hours dodging bullets from corrupt CIA operatives.

 

I wasn’t surprised by the negative tone; we live in difficult times.  What got to me was the joy with which the bad news was delivered.  Everywhere I turned there was a talking head chortling with glee over the decline of our once-great nation.

 

Call it cynicism, call it disillusionment, call it the debunking of America. Just don’t call it liberalism.  Reciting the litany of woe has become a habit with liberals.  It’s hard to fault them for it, but that should never be an end in itself.  Liberalism is about hope and the future, even in the worst of times.  Especially in the worst of times.

 

When corrosive liberal debunking spreads despair in America, the American people despair and the liberals lose.  Nihilism is the mortal enemy of liberalism.  Because if you don’t have anything to look up to, you don’t have anything to live up to.

Conservatives’ hopes and plans for the future are exceedingly stingy.  Conservatives base their philosophy on the tragic nature of man.  They use that partial truth as an excuse to do as little as possible about human tragedy.

           

If you think that man is intrinsically evil and always on the verge of being worse, you fear the future.  The conservative thinks mankind is so fallen, so riddled with original sin, he can never live it down.  Though, God knows, some of them ...

The Bush Administration’s Oft-Repeated (and Now Challenged) Waterboarding Claims
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 18 September 2012
The CIA, President George W. Bush, and Donald Rumsfield have repeatedly said only 3 people have been waterboarded, but that is no longer true.

For many years, Bush administration officials have said that the CIA waterboarded only three terror suspects. Despite nearly endless revelations and investigations about the U.S.'s treatment of detainees, there has never been evidence contradicting those claims. But that changed earlier this month.

Human Rights Watch recently released a report detailing the accounts of 14 Libyan men who claim they were detained and, in some cases, subject to harsh interrogations by the U.S. before being transferred back to Libyan prisons, where they also faced abuse.

One man, Mohammed Al-Shoreoiya, provided a detailed account of being waterboarded “many times” while in U.S. custody in an Afghan prison between 2003 and 2004. Another man described a similar form of water torture, conducted without a board.

None of the men's accounts could be confirmed, but 

How the Gov’t Talks About a Drone Program it Won’t Acknowledge Exists
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 14 September 2012
“Administration officials regularly celebrate the drone war’s apparent successes— often avoiding details or staying anonymous, but claiming tacit credit for the U.S.”

 

Drones have become the go-to weapon of the U.S.’s counter-terrorism strategy, with strikes in Yemen in particular increasing steadily. U.S. drones reportedly killed twenty-nine people in Yemen recently, including perhaps ten civilians.

Administration officials regularly celebrate the drone war’s apparent successes— often avoiding details or staying anonymous, but claiming tacit credit for the U.S.  

In June, a day after Abu Yahya Al-Libi was killed in Pakistan, White House spokesman Jay Carney trumpeted the death of “Al Qaeda’s Number-Two.”  Unnamed officials confirmed the strike in at least ten media outlets. Similarly, the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki by a CIA drone last September was confirmed in many news outlets by anonymous officials. President Obama called Awlaki’s death “a tribute to our intelligence community."  

Just last week President Obama spoke about drone warfare on CNN, saying the decision to target individuals for killing rather than capture involves “an extensive process with a lot of checks.”  

But when it comes to details of that process, the administration clams up.

The government

Monopolizing War?
Taylor
Published: Thursday 13 September 2012
What America Knows How to Do Best

 

It’s pop-quiz time when it comes to the American way of war: three questions, torn from the latest news, just for you.  Here’s the first of them, and good luck!

Two weeks ago, 200 U.S. Marines began armed operations in…?:

a) Afghanistan

b) Pakistan

c) Iran

d) Somalia

e) Yemen

f) Central Africa

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Dumb and Dumber
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 7 September 2012
“His opponent in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton, tried to turn this hesitation to use hard power into a sign of a man too inexperienced to be entrusted with the presidency.”

 

Barack Obama is a smart guy. So why has he spent the last four years executing such a dumb foreign policy? True, his reliance on “smart power” -- a euphemism for giving the Pentagon a stake in all things global -- has been a smart move politically at home.  It has largely prevented the Republicans from playing the national security card in this election year. But “smart power” has been a disaster for the world at large and, ultimately, for the United States itself.

Power was not always Obama’s strong suit. When he ran for president in 2008, he appeared to friend and foe alike as Mr. Softy. He wanted out of the war in Iraq. He was no fan of nuclear weapons. He favored carrots over sticks when approaching America’s adversaries.

His opponent in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton, tried to turn this hesitation to use hard power into a sign of a man too inexperienced to be entrusted with the presidency. In 2007, when Obama offered to meet without preconditions with the leaders of Cuba, North Korea, and Iran, Clinton fired back that such a policy was “irresponsible and frankly naïve.” In February 2008, she went further with a TV ad that asked voters who should answer the White House phone at 3 a.m. Obama, she implied, lacked the requisite body parts -- muscle, backbone, cojones-- to make the hard presidential decisions in a crisis.

Obama didn’t take the bait. “When that call gets answered, shouldn’t the president be the one -- the only one -- who had judgment and courage to oppose the Iraq war from the start,” his response ad intoned. “Who understood the real threat to America was al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Who led the effort to secure loose nuclear weapons ...

Report Details U.S. Abuse of Gaddafi Opponents Under Bush
Taylor
Published: Thursday 6 September 2012
The investigation, which initially began with the examination of 101 prisoner cases, was reduced to that of only two already dead prisoners.

 

Startling new evidence of the torture, unlawful rendition, and other abuse of Libyan anti-Gaddafi rebels in U.S. detention facilities during the George W. Bush administration was revealed Wednesday by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The groundbreaking report, “Delivered into Enemy Hands: U.S.-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya”, was made public one week after Attorney General Eric Holder announced the Justice Department’s decision to cease investigations of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners.

The investigation, which initially began with the examination of 101 prisoner cases, was reduced to that of only two already dead prisoners. Additionally, the investigation only encompassed the abuses which were unauthorised by Bush.

READ FULL POST 4 COMMENTS

Obama’s Constitution
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 5 September 2012
Since most of the examination of our President comes from either the daily hypocrasies of Mitt and friends or the coddling progressive left, I thought I would examine “our guy” on a few issues with a bit more scrutiny and fairness.

 

I wrote this a while back after Romney got the nom, and, in light of the blizzard of bullshit that will be coming at us in the next few months, I thought I would put it out now.

Now that the Republican primary circus is over, I began to think about what a vote for Obama would mean.

Since most of the examination of our President comes from either the daily hypocrasies of Mitt and friends or the coddling progressive left, I thought I would examine “our guy” on a few issues with a bit more scrutiny and fairness.

The typical arguments in favor of another Obama presidency are centered around avoiding a fantical rightwing take over of the Oval Office. Obama is perceived as the last line of defense from the corporate barbarians--and, of course, the Supreme Court. There is a cynical logic behind this view, and I tend to agree with Garry Wills' description of the Republican primaries as  “a revolting combination of con men & fanatics, and agree proundly that “the current primary race has become a demonstration that the Republican party does not deserve serious consideration for public office.”

However, there are certain Rubicon lines, as constituational law professor Jon Turley calls them, that Obama has crossed that should not be ignored.

All political questions are not equal no matter how much you pivot. When people die or lose their physical freedom to feed certain economic sectors or ideologies, it becomes a zero sum game for me.

This is not an exercise in bemoaning regrettable policy choices or cheering favorable ones, but rather to ask a couple fundimental questions: Who are we? What are we voting for? And what does it mean?

Three markers — the Nobel prize acceptance speech, the escalation speech at West Point, and the recent speech by Eric Holder — crossed that Rubicon line for me.


During his 2008 campaign, ...

Rights Groups Denounce Dropping of CIA Torture Cases
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 3 September 2012
Now that Holder and Durham have concluded that prosecutions of the individuals involved are unlikely to result in convictions, it appears certain that no CIA officer will be prosecuted in a U.S. jurisdiction. Prosecutions of Bush officials responsible for authorizing the “enhanced interrogation” techniques have also been ruled out.

 

U.S. human rights groups have roundly condemned Thursday’s announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder that the Justice Department will not pursue prosecutions of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners in their custody.

The announcement appeared to mark the end of all efforts by the U.S. government to hold CIA interrogators accountable for torture and mistreating prisoners detained during the so-called “Global War on Terror” launched shortly after the Al Qaeda attacks on Sep. 11, 2001.

For rights activists and for supporters of President Barack Obama, it was the latest in a series of disappointing decisions, including the failure to close the detention facility at the U.S. base in Guantanamo, Cuba. They had hoped Obama would not only end the excesses of President George W. Bush’s prosecution of the war, but also conduct a full investigation of those excesses, if not prosecute those responsible.

“This is truly a disastrous development,” said Laura Pitter, counter-terrorism advisor at Human Rights Watch (HRW). “To now have no accountability whatsoever for any of the CIA abuses for which there are now mountains of evidence is just appalling.”

“It completely undermines the U.S.’s ability to have any credibility on any of these issues in other countries, even as it calls for other countries to account for abuses and prosecute cases of torture and mistreatment,” she told IPS.

“Continuing impunity threatens to undermine the universally recognized prohibition on torture and other abusive treatment and sends the dangerous signal to government officials that there will be no consequences for their use of torture and other cruelty,” noted Jameel Jaffar, deputy legal director of the

NYPD Admits Muslim Spy Program Generated No Leads or Terrorism Probes -- Only Controversy
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 27 August 2012
“In the years following the Sept. 11 attacks, the NYPD secretly infiltrated Muslim student groups, sent informants into mosques, eavesdropped on conversations and created databases showing where Muslims lived, worked and prayed.”

After years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, infiltrating groups and eavesdropping on conversations across the northeastern United States, the New York City Police Department has admitted its secret Demographics Unit failed to yield a single terrorism investigation or even a single lead. In the years following the Sept. 11 attacks, the NYPD secretly infiltrated Muslim student groups, sent informants into mosques, eavesdropped on conversations and created databases showing where Muslims lived, worked and prayed. We’re joined by Adam Goldman, who co-wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press series that revealed the spy program and, most recently, its failure.

 

Transcript

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The New York City Police Department has admitted its secret Demographics Unit that spied on Muslims in an elaborate CIA-backed effort over a more than six-year period failed to yield a single terrorism investigation or even a single lead. In the years following the September 11th attacks, the New York ...

U.S. Officials Unaware Of Navy SEAL’s Book Recounting Bin Laden Raid
Taylor
Published: Thursday 23 August 2012
The book’s publication could reignite the controversy surrounding national security leaks and the Washington Post notes that it’s unclear at this point “whether the CIA or Pentagon would take legal steps against the author or attempt to stop publication.”

 

The New York Times reported yesterday that a U.S. Navy SEAL who led the special operations team that raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan last year has written a book describing the events in detail. The existence of the book, which is titled “No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden,” has been a “closely held secret” within Penguin, the publishing house that is planning to release it next month on Sept. 11, and the SEAL is writing anonymously under the pseudonym Mark Owen.

But neither the author, nor Penguin, submitted the book to U.S. government officials for review, a normal process for publications divulging such highly classified ...

The War in the Shadows
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 21 August 2012
“The admission by Peter Torbiornsson that he unwittingly took the bomber with him to the press conference was a window into the sordid world of espionage, terrorism and assassination that was an intimate part of every conflict I covered.”

 

A Swedish documentary filmmaker released a film last year called“Last Chapter—Goodbye Nicaragua.” In it he admitted that he unknowingly facilitated a bombing, almost certainly orchestrated by the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which took the lives of three reporters I worked with in Central America. One of them, Linda Frazier, was the mother of a 10-year-old son. Her legs were torn apart by the blast, at La Penca, Nicaragua, along the border with Costa Rica, in May of 1984. She bled to death as she was being taken to the nearest hospital, in Ciudad Quesada, Costa Rica.

The admission by Peter Torbiornsson that he unwittingly took the bomber with him to the press conference was a window into the sordid world of espionage, terrorism and assassination that was an intimate part of every conflict I covered. It exposed the cynicism of undercover operatives on all sides, men and women who lie and deceive for a living, who betray relationships, including between each other, who steal and who carry out murder. One knows them immediately. Their ideological allegiances do not matter. They have the faraway eyes of the disconnected, along with nebulous histories and suspicious and vague associations. They tell incongruous personal stories and practice small deceits that are part of a pathological inability to tell the truth. They can be personable, even charming, but they are also invariably vain, dishonest and sinister. They cannot be trusted. It does not matter what side they are on. They were all the same. Gangsters.

READ FULL POST 9 COMMENTS

Impunity at Home, Rendition Abroad
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 14 August 2012
How Two Administrations and Both Parties Made Illegality the American Way of Life

After a decade of fiery public debate and bare-knuckle partisan brawling, the United States has stumbled toward an ad hoc bipartisan compromise over the issue of torture that rests on two unsustainable policies: impunity at home and rendition abroad.

President Obama has closed the CIA’s “black sites,” its secret prisons where American agents once dirtied their hands with waterboarding and wall slamming. But via rendition -- the sending of terrorist suspects to the prisons of countries that torture -- and related policies, his administration has outsourced human rights abuse to Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.  In this way, he has avoided the political stigma of torture, while tacitly tolerating such abuses and harvesting whatever intelligence can be gained from them.

This “resolution” of the torture issue may meet the needs of this country’s deeply divided politics. It cannot, however, long satisfy an international community determined to prosecute human rights abuses through universal jurisdiction. It also runs the long-term risk of another sordid torture scandal that will further damage U.S. standing with allies worldwide.

Perfecting a New Form of Torture

The modern American urge to use torture did not, of course, begin on September 12, 2001.  It has roots that reach back to the beginning of the Cold War and a human rights policy riven with contradictions. Publicly, Washington opposed torture and led the world in drafting the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the Geneva Conventions in 1949. Simultaneously and secretly, however, the Central Intelligence Agency began developing ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same international conventions.

From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of the mind with two findings foundational to a new ...

Drone on the Range
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 13 August 2012
It's the arrival and proliferation of "unmanned vehicle systems," soon to be buzzing around the airspace of your own town.

 

Get ready, America. Here comes "the next latest and greatest thing in aviation." Wow, what could it be? Maybe the airlines are going to drop all of their ridiculous rip-off fees. That'd be great!

No, no, not that kind of aviation. You probably won't find this breakthrough so great. It's the arrival and proliferation of "unmanned vehicle systems," soon to be buzzing around the airspace of your own town.

Yes, drones, right here at home. Those very same pilotless, remote-controlled, undetectable planes that the CIA has been secretly using to spy on and bomb people in Pakistan and elsewhere are headed to our local police departments, FBI offices, and...well, who knows who else will have these toys?

All we know is that Congress — under pressure from Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and other big drone peddlers — directed the Federal Aviation Agency earlier this year to open up civilian air space to thousands of them by 2015. And, in their wisdom, our loosey-goosey lawmakers provided no regulation of who can have drones, how many, or for what purposes.

So prepare to be pestered and monitored, for police agencies and corporate interests are said to be abuzz about getting their own. The first ones are expected to be used for high-altitude surveillance, which is worrisome enough. But consider this: A Texas sheriff's office that has already bought a "ShadowHawk" drone says it might outfit the little buzzer to fire tear gas and rubber bullets.

No worries, though. The drone industry's lobbying group has drafted a two-page code of conduct urging purchasers to "respect the privacy of individuals."

How nice. Only, it's a voluntary code — and totally unenforceable.

Mitt Romney, The One-Percent Supremacist
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 8 August 2012
“We’re witnessing what should be called the Two Cadillacs Fallacy: Romney’s rather authentic moments suggesting he doesn’t understand the lives of average people (such as his comment on his wife’s two Cadillacs) are dismissed as ‘gaffes,’ while Santorum’s views on social issues are denounced as ‘extreme.’”

Whether or not history will record Mitt Romney's misadventures in Britain and Israel last week as the Republicans' equivalent of Michael Dukakkis in a tank, remains to be seen. But whatever missteps Romney made abroad, he did not misspeak. Nor did anyone who spoke for the Romney Campaign.

That does not mean, of course, that I agree with what Romney said or what was reportedly said by his campaign adviser. I don't apparently and neither does Romney, who tried to rewrite his remarks about the "inferior" culture of the Palestinians even as right-wingers moved to embrace them. Meanwhile moderate Republicans tried, and tried, and tried to explain what Mitt Romney meant to say. Romney did not misspeak. He meant what he said, and he meant to say it. The proof is in the policies he'd like to inflict upon a whole lot of folks back home.

Mitt Romney's policies show that he's an extremist for the privileged. His words suggest the basis of his extremism, and reveal Romney as a one-percent supremacist.

When the conservative U.K. newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported that a Romney campaign adviser told the paper, "We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special," and that, "The White House didn't fully appreciate the shared history we have", the widely publicized remarks were denounced as racist. The Romney campaign 

A Law Enforcement Alternative to War in Syria
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 5 August 2012
The United States has not “declared war” against another country since Pearl Harbor; however, it has engaged in a series of losing wars ever since.

Once again the United States is engaging in a war it is destined to lose.  Add Syria to the long list of nations where the United States has unnecessarily used military force to its disadvantage since the end of World War II.

There is an alternative to waging war against other nations and their people, and the United States will continue losing such wars until it adopts a better strategy.

The United States has not "declared war" against another country since Pearl Harbor; however, it has engaged in a series of losing wars ever since.  Unlike World War II, which resulted in the complete defeat and unconditional surrender of enemy forces, these wars were not fought to defend the United States against military attack.  To the contrary, they were wars of convenience fought to advance the economic and political agenda of the United States government.

In the absence of clear-cut victories, the passage of time has demonstrated, repeatedly, that these wars have wasted trillions of dollars and millions of lives.  In every case, the war resulted in a loss of prestige and advantage for the U.S.  In other words, the United States lost these wars.

The only beneficiary of these wars has been the military industrial complex and those who profit from the excesses and violence of war.  Unfortunately, "they" have come to control the U.S. government and the means of communication.  Thus, they can easily start wars for profit and successfully peddle the wars to those who pay the price, in the lives of their children and their hard-earned taxes.

In every one of these wars, it is possible to identify an individual or small group of individuals who were engaging in conduct that may or may not have been dangerous to the safety and security of the United States, but which was always contrary to the best interests of their own people.

Washington’s War on Leaks, Explained
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 4 August 2012
“On Monday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence filed new anti-leak legislation.”

Accusations continue to fly from lawmakers and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney that the Obama administration has leaked national security information for political gain. Leaks, of course, are nothing new in Washington, but now the Senate has jumped into the fray, with a new proposal to tighten control over the flow of information between intelligence agencies and the press.

This summer the Justice Department opened two investigations into leaks about a foiled terror plot and U.S. cyber-attacks against Iran. But leak prosecutions haven’t always proved easy. As we’ve explained before, there’s no single law criminalizing the disclosure of classified information. National security leaks are sometimes prosecuted under the Espionage Act, which has been used a record six times under Obama, but there is perennial debate over whether to introduce more stringent laws against leaks.

On Monday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence filed new anti-leak legislation. The bill wouldn’t amend the Espionage Act, or make any blanket criminal penalty for leaks. But it does include several provisions that could stymie reporting on national security.

One ...

In Hiroshima’s Shadow
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 3 August 2012
This year’s Aug. 6 memorials have special significance. They take place shortly before the 50th anniversary of “the most dangerous moment in human history,” in the words of the historian and John F. Kennedy adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., referring to the Cuban missile crisis.

 

Aug. 6, the anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.

This year’s Aug. 6 memorials have special significance. They take place shortly before the 50th anniversary of “the most dangerous moment in human history,” in the words of the historian and John F. Kennedy adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., referring to the Cuban missile crisis.

Graham Allison writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs that Kennedy “ordered actions that he knew would increase the risk not only of conventional war but also nuclear war,” with a likelihood of perhaps 50 percent, he believed, an estimate that Allison regards as realistic.

Kennedy declared a high-level nuclear alert that authorized “NATO aircraft with Turkish pilots ... (or others) ... to take off, fly to Moscow, and drop a bomb.”

None were more shocked by the discovery of missiles in Cuba than the men in charge of the similar missiles that the U.S. had secretly deployed in Okinawa six months earlier, surely aimed at China, at a moment of elevated regional tensions.

Kennedy took Chairman Nikita Khrushchev “right to the brink of nuclear war and he looked over the edge and had no stomach for it,” according to Gen. David Burchinal, then a high-ranking official in the Pentagon planning staff. One can hardly count on such sanity forever.

Khrushchev accepted a formula that Kennedy devised, ending the crisis just short of war. The formula’s boldest element, Allison writes, was “a secret sweetener that promised the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey within six months after the crisis was ...

Before Deadly Bulgaria Bombing, Tracks of a Resurgent Iran-Hezbollah Threat
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 31 July 2012
“If the allegations are true, Iran and Hezbollah have crossed a dangerous line with their first strike in Europe in more than 15 years.”

 

After a decade in which al Qaeda dominated the world stage, the global terror threat from Iran has escalated sharply, generating a swarm of recent plots from Delhi to Mombasa to Washington and signaling an aggressive new strategy, counterterror officials say.

 
 

But there were meager results until this month. On July 18, a suspected suicide bomber killed six people and wounded 30 aboard an Israeli tourist bus in a coastal town in Bulgaria. Israel quickly accused Hezbollah ...

Misleading Ad Seeks to Scare Voters Away From Obama
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 29 July 2012
“Reminiscent of former National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice’s statement, ‘We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,’ the fear-mongering ad doesn’t mention Mitt Romney, Obama’s November opponent for president.”

“You know,” she says, closing her laptop and shaking her head, “It seems these days, not a single one of us steps on a train, boards an airplane, attends a concert or a sporting event that doesn’t have at least a fleeting concern that terror could strike.”

It sounds like this suburban woman is speaking in the days after 9/11. And in fact, footage of the planes hitting the twin towers does flash across the screen.

But the ad, from the nonprofit Secure America Now, was released just this week. “Are We Safer Now? ”blasts President Barack Obama for undermining American security in a litany of ways, including  wanting to close Guantanamo Bay (which he didn’t), ending “enhanced interrogation techniques” and closing the CIA’s “black sites,” secretive prisons overseas outside America’s legal jurisdiction.

The ad ends with footage of burning cars, burning buildings, and then — an explosion.

Reminiscent of former National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice’s statement, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” the fear-mongering ad doesn’t mention Mitt Romney, Obama’s November opponent for president. Instead, it calls on viewers to visit its “Are We Safer?” website so you can “learn the facts.”

The ad is rife with false and misleading statements. Among the most egregious:

  • Israel: Obama has not “all but abandoned Israel,” as the ad claims, though he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have had their differences.
  • Iran: Iran does not have a “nuclear bomb,” as the ...
That Makes No Sense!
Taylor
Published: Thursday 19 July 2012
Your Security’s a Joke (and You’re the Butt of It)

 

When my daughter was little and I read to her regularly, one illustrated book was a favorite of ours.  In a series of scenes, it described frustrating incidents in the life of a young girl, each ending with the line -- which my tiny daughter would boom out with remarkable force -- “that makes me mad!”  It was the book’s title and a repetitively cathartic moment in our reading lives.  And it came to mind recently as, in my daily reading, I stumbled across repetitively mind-boggling numbers from the everyday life of our National Security Complex.

For our present national security moment, however, I might amend the book’s punch line slightly to:That makes no sense!

Now, think of something you learned about the Complex that fried your brain, try the line yourself... and we’ll get started.

Are you, for instance, worried about the safety of America’s “secrets”?  Then you should ...

Obama’s Scramble for Africa
Taylor
Published: Thursday 12 July 2012
Secret Wars, Secret Bases, and the Pentagon’s “New Spice Route” in Africa.

They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks.  Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a fast-growing U.S. military presence in Africa. 

 

Few in the U.S. know about this superhighway, or about the dozens of training missions and joint military exercises being carried out in nations that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map.  Even fewer have any idea that military officials are invoking the names of Marco Polo and the Queen of Sheba as they build a bigger military footprint in Africa.  It’s all happening in the shadows of what in a previous imperial age was known as “the Dark Continent.”

In East African ports, huge metal shipping containers arrive with the everyday necessities for a military on the make.  They’re then loaded onto trucks that set off down rutted roads toward dusty bases and distant outposts.

On the highway from Djibouti to Ethiopia, for example, one can see the bare outlines of this shadow war at the truck stops where local drivers take a break from their long-haul routes.  The same is true in other African countries.  The nodes of the network tell part of the story: Manda Bay, Garissa, and Mombasa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe in Uganda; Bangui and Djema in the Central African Republic; Nzara in South Sudan; Dire ...

Rendered, Tortured & Discarded: Exposé Tells Innocent Man’s Ordeal in U.S. Prisons Abroad 1/2
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 7 July 2012
“A new exposé looks at secret U.S. operations in Africa and how the United States treated one innocent man from Tanzania.”

A new exposé by human rights investigator Clara Gutteridge for The Nation magazine looks at secret U.S. operations in Africa and how the United States rendered, tortured and discarded one innocent man from Tanzania. Suleiman Abdallah was captured in Mogadishu in 2003 by a Somali warlord and handed over to U.S. officials, who had him rendered to Afghanistan for five years of detention and torture. Imprisoned in three different U.S. facilities, Abdallah said he was subjected to severe beatings, prolonged solitary confinement, forced nakedness and humiliation. He said he was also sexually assaulted, locked naked in a coffin, and forced to lie on a wet mat, naked and handcuffed. Abdallah was finally released in July 2008 from Bagram Air Force Base — with a piece of paper confirming his innocence. However, he has received neither reparations nor apologies for his ordeal. "The worst of the torture, we’re not authorized to talk about, because it’s too painful for him," Gutteridge says. "What I can say is that he was subject to some of the worst torture that I have ever encountered in interviewing over a hundred U.S. torture victims."

Transcript: 

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to a shocking new story about U.S. secret operations in Africa. The Nation READ FULL POST 3 COMMENTS

The Military Solution
Taylor
Published: Thursday 5 July 2012
The Lessons Washington Can’t Draw From the Failure of the Military Option.

 

Americans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began.  Certainly, a smaller percentage of us -- less than 1% -- serves in the military in this all-volunteer era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington’s constant warring in distant lands seems barely to touch the lives of most Americans. 

And yet the militarization of the United States and the strengthening of the National Security Complex continues to accelerate.  The Pentagon is, by now, a world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a moment when no other power or combination of powers comes near to challenging this country’s might. 

In the post-9/11 era, the military-industrial  READ FULL POST 7 COMMENTS

Classified Confusion: What Leaks Are Being Investigated, and What’s the Law on Leaks?
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 3 July 2012
“Here’s what we know about leak investigations underway, the legality of leaks, and why leak prosecutions have been so rare.”

Recent scoops on national security have drawn the ire of Republican lawmakers, who have accused the Obama White House of leaking stories that burnish its image.

Obama responded that he has “zero tolerance” for leaks. He also said: “the writers of these articles have all stated unequivocally that they didn’t come from this White House. And that’s not how we operate.”

 
Republicans Swoon Over Holder’s ‘Partisan’ Leak Probers (and Forget Ken Starr)
Taylor
Published: Thursday 21 June 2012
“Angry Republicans (and their media enablers at Fox News, et al.) insist that the White House must have leaked information about the president's terrorist ‘kill list,’ the success of drone strikes and the killing of Osama bin Laden to improve the president’s martial image and re-election prospects.”

 

This week, Republicans on Capitol Hill opened yet another front in their continuous sniping against the Obama administration, the Justice Department and Attorney General Eric Holder. Having demanded a federal investigation of intelligence leaks, they now claim to be outraged because Holder has asked two United States attorneys to conduct that probe — and one of the two happens to be a Democrat.

Angry Republicans (and their media enablers at Fox News, et al.) insist that the White House must have leaked information about the president's terrorist "kill list," the success of drone strikes and the killing of Osama bin Laden to improve the president's martial image and re-election prospects. Never mind that they fawned over the Bush White House, regardless of its leaks and even its unlawful disclosure of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity. That was then, of course — and now the alleged leaks of national security material from a Democratic administration enrage them.

Whether those stories emanated from the Obama White House or not, someone must have tipped off The New York Times, which first reported the "kill list," among other things. So consistent with President Obama's evident obsession about stanching leaks, Holder appointed Ronald Machen, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and Rod Rosenstein, the U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland, to oversee an investigation and potential prosecution of the leakers.

CIA 9/11 Declassified Documents Released
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 20 June 2012
Obama Administration’s Drone Death Figures Don’t Add Up
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 19 June 2012
“A centerpiece of President Obama’s national security strategy, drones strikes in Pakistan are credited by the administration with crippling Al Qaeda but criticized by human rights groups and others for being conducted in secret and killing civilians.”

Last month, a “senior administration official” said the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under President Obama is in the “single digits.” But last year “U.S. officials” said drones in Pakistan killed about 30 civilians in just a yearlong stretch under Obama.

Both claims can’t be true.

A centerpiece of President Obama’s national security strategy, drones strikes in Pakistan are credited by the administration with crippling Al Qaeda but criticized by human rights groups and others for being conducted in secret and killing civilians. The underlying facts are often in dispute and claims about how many people died and who they were vary widely.

So we decided to narrow it down to just one issue: have the administration’s own claims been consistent?

We collected claims by the administration about deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan and compared each one not to local reports but rather to other administration claims. The numbers sometimes do not add up. (Check out 

White House Admits to Ops in Yemen and Somalia
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 16 June 2012
The New Obama Doctrine, A Six-Point Plan for Global War
Taylor
Published: Thursday 14 June 2012
“What looks today like a formula for easy power projection that will further U.S. imperial interests on the cheap could soon prove to be an unmitigated disaster -- one that likely won’t be apparent until it’s too late.”

It looked like a scene out of a Hollywood movie.  In the inky darkness, men in full combat gear, armed with automatic weapons and wearing night-vision goggles, grabbed hold of a thick, woven cable hanging from a MH-47 Chinook helicopter.  Then, in a flash, each “fast-roped” down onto a ship below.  Afterward, “Mike,” a Navy SEAL who would not give his last name, bragged to an Army public affairs sergeant that, when they were on their game, the SEALs could put 15 men on a ship this way in 30 seconds or less.

 

Once on the aft deck, the special ops troops broke into squads and methodically searched the ship as it bobbed in Jinhae Harbor, South Korea.  Below deck and on the bridge, the commandos located several men and trained their weapons on them, but nobody fired a shot.  It was, after all, a training exercise.

All of those ship-searchers were SEALs, but not all of them were American.  Some were from Naval Special Warfare Group 1 out of Coronado, California; others hailed from South Korea’s Naval Special Brigade.  The drill was part of Foal Eagle 2012, a multinational, joint-service exercise.  It was also a model for -- and one small part of -- a much publicized U.S. military “pivot” from the Greater Middle East to Asia, a move that includes sending an initial contingent of 250 Marines to Darwin, Australia, basing littoral combat ships in Singapore, strengthening military ties with Vietnam and India, ...

The NATO Afghanistan War and US-Russian Relations: Drugs, Oil, and War
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 10 June 2012
“A key example of such broken promises was the assurance that NATO would not take advantage of détente to expand into Eastern Europe.”

 

I delivered the following remarks at an anti-NATO conference held in Moscow on May 15, 2012. I was the only North American speaker at an all-day conference, having been invited in connection with the appearance into Russian of my book Drugs, Oil, and War. As a former diplomat worried about peace I was happy to attend: as far as I can tell there may be less serious dialogue today between Russian and American intellectuals than there was at the height of the Cold War. Yet the danger of war involving the two leading nuclear powers has hardly disappeared.

 

Unlike other speakers, my paper urged Russians -- despite the aggressive activities in Central Asia of the CIA, SOCOM (US Special Operations Command), and NATO -- to cooperate under multilateral auspices with like-minded Americans, towards dealing with the related crises of Afghan drug production and drug-financed Salafi jihadism.

Since the conference I have continued to reflect intensely on the battered state of US-Russian relations, and my own slightly utopian hopes for repairing them. Although the speakers at the conference represented many different viewpoints, they tended to share a deep anxiety about US intentions towards Russia and the other former states of the USSR. Their anxiety was based on shared knowledge of past American actions and broken promises, of which they (unlike most Americans) are only too aware.

A key example of such broken promises was the assurance that NATO would not take advantage of détente to expand into Eastern Europe. Today of course Poland and other former Warsaw Pact members are members of NATO, along with the former Baltic Soviet Socialist Republics. And there are still proposals on the table to expand NATO into the Ukraine – i.e. the very heart of the former Soviet Union. This push was matched by U.S. joint activities and operations – some of them under NATO auspices ...

CIA is Planning to Shrink Presence in Iraq, Although…
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 9 June 2012
Obama Resists Growing Pressure to Intervene in Syria
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 8 June 2012
“For now, however, the administration, concerned about the possibility of being drawn into yet another Middle East quagmire and worried that further militarizing the conflict risks destabilizing Syria's neighbors, is firmly resisting such advice.”

Citing the increased violence, neo-conservatives and other hawks have been pressing their case for Washington to arm opposition forces and aid Turkey and Jordan in creating and enforcing "safe zones" for civilians along their borders with Syria, at the very least. 

 


"In addition, the U.S. and our NATO allies could strengthen sanctions on Syria by mounting a naval blockade of the Syrian coastline," according to Max Boot, a prominent neo-conservative at the Council on Foreign Relations, this week. 


"This would make it more difficult for Syria's principal supporters, Russia and Iran, to provide arms to the regime," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times, noting that airstrikes to take out the regime's key military assets - as they did in Libya - should also be considered. 

For now, however, the administration, concerned about the possibility of being drawn into yet another Middle East quagmire and worried that further militarizing the conflict risks destabilizing Syria's neighbors, is firmly resisting such advice. 


While expressing growing skepticism about efforts by U.N.-Arab League Envoy Kofi Annan to implement a ceasefire and a transition plan that would eventually remove President Bashar al-Assad from power, the administration is standing by the former U.N. secretary-general, who will meet with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton here Friday. 

Citing reports of a massacre of 78 civilians in a village in central Hama province Wednesday, Clinton toughened her rhetoric in an appearance with her Turkish counterpart in Istanbul Thursday. Assad, she said, has "doubled down on his brutality and duplicity". 


"Syria will not, cannot, be peaceful, stable or certainly democratic until Assad goes," she declared, stressing that Washington intends to intensify economic and diplomatic sanctions against the ...

Dissecting Obama’s Standard on Drone Strike Deaths
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 6 June 2012
“But speaking on condition of anonymity, an administration official acknowledged that the administration does not always know the names or identities of everyone in a location marked for a drone strike.”

 

In a lengthy front-page story last week exploring President Obama's use of drone strikes in countries including Pakistan and Yemen, the New York Times reported that the president had "embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in."

Citing "several administration officials," the Times reported that this method "in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants ... unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent." The Times reported that this standard allowed counterterrorism adviser John Brennan to claim in June 2011 that for nearly a year "there hasn't been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we've been able to develop."

Human rights groups and others have expressed outrage at the reported counting method. And in the last few days alone, 27 "suspected militants" have been killed in three drone strikes in Pakistan, including the reported No. 2 of al Qaeda.

We wanted to lay out exactly what's known (not much) about the apparent policy, what's not (a lot), and what the White House is saying in response to the Times report.

Crucially, the White House has done nothing to knock the story down. I gave the White House a chance to respond, and it declined to comment on the record. But speaking on condition of anonymity, an administration official acknowledged that the administration does not always know the names or identities of everyone in a ...

As U.S. Escalates Pakistan Drone Strikes, Expansive “Kill List” Stirs Fears of Worse Civilian Toll
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 5 June 2012
“At least 27 people have been killed in three consecutive days of U.S. drone strikes inside Pakistan, part of a new wave of attacks over the past two weeks.”

At least 27 people have been killed in three consecutive days of U.S. drone strikes inside Pakistan, part of a new wave of attacks over the past two weeks. The surge in drone strikes comes just a week after the New York Times revealed that President Obama personally oversees a “secret kill list” containing the names and photos of individuals targeted for assassination in the U.S. drone war. We go to London to speak with Chris Woods, award-winning reporter with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, who heads the Bureau’s drones investigation team. Under the Obama administration’s rules, “any adult male killed in effectively a defined kill zone is a terrorist, unless posthumously proven otherwise,” Woods says. “We think this goes a long way to explaining the gulf between our reporting of civilian casualties in Pakistan and Yemen and the reporting of credible international news organizations, and the CIA’s repeated claims that it isn’t killing [civilians], or rather, is killing small numbers. ... If you keep assuring yourself that you’re not killing civilians, by a sleight of hand, effectively, by a redrafting of the term of 'civilian,' than that starts to influence the policy and to encourage you to carry out more drone strikes.” Woods adds that the latest attacks “indicate not just a significant rise in the number of CIA strikes in Pakistan, but an aggression for those strikes that we really haven’t seen for over a year.”

 

Praying at the Church of St. Drone
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 5 June 2012
“The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they -- and the vast national-security structure that continues to be built-up and institutionalized around the presidential self -- are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against.”

 

Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.  The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they -- and the vast national-security structure that continues to be built-up and institutionalized around the presidential self -- are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against.  They are one of the reasons those founders put significant war powers in the hands of Congress, which they knew would be a slow, recalcitrant, deliberative body.

Thanks to a long New York Times piece by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” we now know that the president has spent startling amounts of time overseeing the “nomination” of terrorist suspects for assassination via the remotely piloted drone program he inherited from President George W. Bush and which he has expanded 

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Drones
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 3 June 2012
This February, Congress cleared the way for far more widespread use of drones by businesses, scientists, police and still unknown others.

 

Everyone is talking about drones. Also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs, remote-piloted aircrafts have become a controversial centerpiece of the Obama administration's counter-terrorism strategy. Domestically, their surveillance power is being hyped for everything from fighting crime to monitoring hurricanes or spawning salmon. Meanwhile, concerns are cropping up about privacy, ethics and safety. We've rounded up some of the best coverage of drones to get you oriented. Did we miss anything? Let us know.

A Little History

The idea of unmanned flight had been around for decades, but it was in the 1990s, thanks to advances in GPS and computing, that the possibilities for drones really took off, as the New Yorker recently recounted. While hobbyists and researchers looked for uses for automated, airborne cameras, the military became the driving force behind drone developments. (This history from the Washington Post has more details) According to the Congressional Research Service, the military's cache of U.A.V.'s has grown from just a handful in 2001 to

Auctioning Off the Presidency From the Pentagon Battlements
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 2 June 2012
“In 2009, the Obama administration stunned two NATO allies — Poland and the Czech Republic — with a surprise withdrawal from an agreement to station missile defense sites on their territories, an agreement they signed in the face of Russian threats.”

 

Let me whisk you to 1980 on one of Obama's miracle drones.

In the right-center we had incumbent President Jimmy Carter, derided as a man of peace, el wimpo.

True, his top foreign policy man was an unreconstructed Polish Cold War warrior burning to bring the Soviet Union to its knees. True, the two had launched the largest covert operation in the CIA's history — $3.5 billion - against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

True, he was financing Argentinian torturers to impart their skills to the Nicaraguan contras.

True, his out-year military budgets actually outstripped those of his opponent.

On the far right was Ronald Reagan. His candidacy crowning almost a decade's worth of propaganda for the New Cold War from outfits such as Paul Nitze's Committee on the Present Danger. Nitze used to go on speaking tours with a rack of missiles. On one side were America's trim little intercontinental ballistic missiles. On the other, was their mighty, albeit technically somewhat backward, Soviet counterparts.

The Reaganites derided all treaties as traps, depicting Uncle Sam as, in military terms, down to his underwear, with a peashooter in his holster. Every Pentagon wish received a cordial welcome.

Here we are today. On our center-right, Obama, derided as a man of peace, el wimpo, though his relations with the Pentagon have been intimate and he himself ductile to their demands.

True, he's been waging war on ... how many fronts? Five, six, with probably more on a covert, semi-privatized basis. True, he has given the finger to all positive developments in Latin America and presided over a bloody coup in Central America.

True, he has been Israel's serf and hast humped the drum against China and Russia.

True, his secretary of state has been a fountain of bellicose bully-swaggering.

And on the far right here's Romney. The Pentagon auctioneers await the next bid. Up goes ...

Hope Burning
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 1 June 2012
“When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises—but his family is with him—it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.”

So now we have Rambo Obama, a steely warrior who, according to a lengthy leaked insider account in The New York Times, hurls death-dealing drones at anyone who threatens the good old USA. Including children. Those children are presumed guilty by virtue of proximity, and the Times plays along, not even modifying a targeted terrorist with the word “alleged,” as once had been the paper’s convention: “When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises—but his family is with him—it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.”

Obama as the cool triggerman is an image useful to White House operatives as they buff the president’s persona for the coming election. But what it reveals is the mindset of a political cynic whose seductive words cloak the moral indifference of a methodical executioner. Forget Harry Truman, who obliterated the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or Lyndon Johnson, who carpet-bombed millions in Vietnam. The Democrats have got themselves another killer, one whose techniques are as devastatingly effective, but brilliantly refined.

The story obviously was planted in The New York Times to benefit the Obama political campaign. Otherwise, why would the president’s former chief of staff, William Daley, and three dozen current and past intelligence insiders provide the newspaper with the most sensitive details of national security decision-making?

Pfc. Bradley Manning was held for many months in solitary confinement for allegedly disclosing information of far lower security classification. The difference is that the top secrets in the news article are ones the president wants leaked in the expectation they will burnish his “tough on terrorism” credentials. This is clearly not the Obama whom many voted for in the hope that he would stick by his word, including the pledge he made on his second day in office to ...

Obama and Drone Warfare: Will Americans Speak Out?
Taylor
Published: Thursday 31 May 2012
“Even the New York Times article acknowledges that Pakistan and Yemen are less stable and more hostile to the United States since Mr. Obama became president, that drones have become a provocative symbol of American power running roughshod over national sovereignty and killing innocents.”

On May 29, The New York Times published an extraordinarily in-depth look at the intimate role President Obama has played in authorizing US drone attacks overseas, particularly in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It is chilling to read the cold, macabre ease with which the President and his staff decide who will live or die. The fate of people living thousands of miles away is decided by a group of Americans, elected and unelected, who don’t speak their language, don’t know their culture, don’t understand their motives or values. While purporting to represent the world’s greatest democracy, US leaders are putting people on a hit list who are as young as 17, people who are given no chance to surrender, and certainly no chance to be tried in a court of law.

Who is furnishing the President and his aides with this list of terrorist suspects to choose from, like baseball cards? The kind of intelligence used to put people on drone hit lists is the same kind of intelligence that put people in Guantanamo. Remember how the American public was assured that the prisoners locked up in Guantanamo were the “worst of the worst,” only to find out that hundreds were innocent people who had been sold to the US military by bounty hunters?

Why should the public believe what the Obama administration says about the people being assassinated by drones? Especially since, as we learn in the New York Times, the administration came up with a semantic solution to keep the civilian death toll to a minimum: simply count all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants. The rationale, reminiscent of George Zimmerman’s justification for shooting Trayvon Martin, is that “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.” Talk about profiling! At least when George Bush threw suspected militants into Guantanamo their ...

Killings, Cancer, Corruption and Azerbaijan: Eurovision in the Islamic Republic of BP
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 28 May 2012
“Since BP has taken control of Azerbaijan’s oil, the nation has become fabulously wealthy – at least for those close to the Aliyev family and BP.”

Will “Beyond Petroleum” oil giant BP pick the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest today in Baku, Azerbaijan? If so, I wouldn’t be surprised.

When I was arrested by the military police of Azerbaijan during my investigation of BP for Channel 4′s Dispatches in 2010, one of the cops who surrounded our crew in the desert told us, with great pride:

“BP drives this country.”

Indeed it does.

Here’s a clip from my investigation:

In 1992, the newly independent former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan elected a kindly Muslim Professor, Abulfaz Elchibey, as President.

But the voters had made an error: Elchibey refused to give BP an exclusive contract to drill the nation’s massive Caspian Sea fields as the company wished. In 1993, with the assistance and, reportedly, guns provided by MI6, Elchibey was overthrown by the nation’s former Soviet KGB boss, Heydar Aliyev.

Within three months, Aliyev handed BP a sweetheart deal, called “The Contract of the Century”, to take Azerbaijan’s Caspian oil.

The way to the no-bid deal for BP was “greased”, to use the term applied by former BP operative Leslie Abrahams, with several million dollars in illicit payments and weekends with lap dancers in London for Azeri officials. I asked Abrahams, who was ordered by BP to provide military intelligence to MI6, whether he understood that he was paying “bribes on behalf of BP and the British government” – he replied, “absolutely, yes”.

When asked, BP would not directly deny paying bribes.

The company told us, ...

As New Jersey OKs NYPD Surveillance, Muslim Groups Continue Challenge to “Unconstitutional” Program
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 27 May 2012
“New York City Police Department did not violate state laws when they conducted extensive surveillance of Muslim communities with help from the CIA.”

A three-month review by New Jersey’s attorney general has concluded the New York City Police Department did not violate state laws when they conducted extensive surveillance of Muslim communities with help from the CIA. The review’s finding means Muslims will have no recourse to state law to prevent the NYPD from monitoring and cataloging their daily life. The decision has angered Muslim groups who were seeking an end to the intrastate police operations and surveillance throughout the Northeast. We get reaction from Gadeir Abbas, staff attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

 

Transcript

AARON MATÉ: A three-month ...

The Political Drones Get Louder
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 18 May 2012
“We believe Drone strikes are illegal according to international law because they kill innocent people,” Imran Khan told IPS from Islamabad.

The Tehreek Insaf party led by former Pakistani cricket captain Imran Khan first stepped up the political heat against the Drones. Civil society groups, including Pakistani lawyers, and now also groups from the U.S. and Britain have joined the campaign. 

 


"We believe Drone strikes are illegal according to international law because they kill innocent people," Imran Khan told IPS from Islamabad. "The U.S. or any other country has no right to violate frontiers of an independent state." 


The cricketer-turned-politician blames the Pakistani government for its "indifference" to the killing of innocent tribesmen in the Drone attacks. "They have sold out our sovereignty to our enemies." 


"A Drone attack killed the first ever head of outlawed Tehreek Taliban, Neik Mohammad Wazir in 2004," Prof Ziaullah at the Government College in Charsadda, one of 25 districts of the border state Khyber Pakhtunkhwa told IPS. "But lately attacks have assumed political dimensions largely due to Khan’s protests." 


Those began on Apr. 23 last year when Tehreek Insaf activists blocked the road to NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) vehicles in Hayatabad town for two days. U.S.-led NATO attacks on two checkpoints in Salala Mohmand Agency earlier this year which killed 28 soldiers sparked off mass protests, forcing the government to halt NATO supplies to Afghanistan through Pakistan. 


On Mar. 13, the National Assembly passed a resolution against Drone strikes in the border areas. Civil society activists are now pressuring the Pakistani government to do more to block such attacks. 


The Foundation for Fundamental Rights (FFR), a Pakistan based legal charity, filed two constitutional petitions last week before the Peshawar High Court against the Federation of Pakistan, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the ...

White House & Dems Back Banks Over Protests: Newly Discovered Homeland Security Files Show Feds Central to Occupy Crackdown
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 15 May 2012
“A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) exposes the massive hypocrisy of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party, which this election year have tried to co-opt and claim as their own the anti-fat-cat theme of the ‘We are the 99%’-chanting Occupiers.”

A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with 'anti-terrorism' funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.

The latest documents reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC). In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational ...

Welcome to the 2012 Hunger Games
Amir Gholi
Published: Tuesday 1 May 2012
“Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into the Arena”

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.

Some of them -- Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land -- were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now. Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones. Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Sacrificing the Young in the Arenas of Capital ...

As Obama Expands Drone War, Activists & Victims’ Advocates Join D.C. Summit on Civilian Toll
Amir Gholi
Published: Friday 27 April 2012
“Obama argues U.S. drone strikes are focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists and have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.”

Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who represents families of civilians killed in U.S. drone strikes, was finally granted a visa to enter the U.S. this week after a long effort by the State Department to block his visit. He has just arrived in Washington, D.C., to attend the “Drone Summit: Killing and Spying by Remote Control,” organized by human rights groups to call attention to the lethal rise in the number of drone strikes under the Obama administration. Obama argues U.S. drone strikes are focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists and have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. “Either President Obama is lying to the nation or he is too naive, to believe on the reports which the CIA is presenting to [him],” responds Akbar. The summit comes as the United States pursues a radical expansion of how it carries out drone strikes inside Yemen. The so-called "signature" strike policy went into effect earlier this month allowing the U.S. to strike without knowing identity of the targets.

We’re also joined by Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of CODE PINK and an organizer of this weekend’s summit. “So many people who spoke against George [W.] Bush’s extraordinary rendition and Guantánamo and indefinite detention have been very quiet when it comes to the Obama administration, who is not putting people in those same kind of conditions, instead is just taking them out and killing them,” Benjamin says. “So we need to make people speak up and say that when Obama says this [program] is on a tight leash, this is not true. This is a lie.”

U.S. Escalating Drone War in Yemen
Amir Gholi
Published: Thursday 26 April 2012
“There are raising concerns among some experts that Washington is slipping ever more deeply into a conflict – or a series of conflicts - it knows relatively little about.”

Washington is worried about recent advances by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), particularly in the southern part of the country.

 

Since the failed "Christmas Day" bombing by an AQAP-trained Nigerian national of a U.S. airliner over Detroit in December 2009, the group has been regarded here as a greater threat to the U.S. homeland than its Pakistan-based parent.

 

Quoting senior officials, the Wall Street Journal and other major U.S. publications reported Thursday that the administration has relaxed constraints on both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon in conducting drone strikes against suspected AQAP- affiliated militants in the Arab world's poorest nation.

 

Henceforth, the CIA and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which conduct parallel counterterrorist campaigns in Yemen, will be able to strike suspected militants whose precise identity may not be known but whose "behavior" suggests that they are either "high-value" operatives or engaged in plots to strike U.S. interests.

 

Such assessments will be based on intelligence acquired from such sources as informants on the ground, aerial surveillance, and phone intercepts, as well as circumstantial evidence regarding their associations, according to the reports.

 

The new guidelines are apparently a compromise between those in the administration who favored that the previous policy of authorizing strikes only against positively identified militants who appeared "kill list" and others, including CIA director Gen. David Petraeus (ret.), who wanted a further easing of the rules of engagement.

 

They are raising concerns among some experts that Washington is slipping ever more deeply into a conflict – or a series of conflicts - it knows relatively little about.

 

"There is a dangerous ...

The NSA is Watching You
Amir Gholi
Published: Thursday 26 April 2012
“Proponents of Internet freedom are fighting the bill, which they say will legalize what the NSA is secretly doing already.”

Three targeted Americans: A career government intelligence official, a filmmaker and a hacker. None of these U.S. citizens was charged with a crime, but they have been tracked, surveilled, detained—sometimes at gunpoint—and interrogated, with no access to a lawyer. Each remains resolute in standing up to the increasing government crackdown on dissent.

The intelligence official: William Binney worked for almost 40 years at the secretive National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. spy agency that dwarfs the CIA. As technical director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, Binney told me, he was tasked to “see how we could solve collection, analysis and reporting on military and geopolitical issues all around the world, every country in the world.” Throughout the 1990s, the NSA developed a massive eavesdropping system code-named ThinThread, which, Binney says, maintained crucial protections on the privacy of U.S. citizens demanded by the U.S. Constitution. He recalled, “After 9/11, all the wraps came off for NSA,” as massive domestic spying became the norm. He resigned on Oct. 31, 2001.

Along with several other NSA officials, Binney reported his concerns to Congress and to the Department of Defense. Then, in 2007, as then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was being questioned on Capitol Hill about the very domestic spying to which Binney objected, a dozen FBI agents charged into his house, guns drawn. They forced aside his son and found Binney, a diabetic amputee, in the shower. They pointed their guns at his head, then led him to his back porch and interrogated him.

Three others were raided that morning. Binney called the FBI raid “retribution and intimidation so we didn’t go to the Judiciary Committee in the Senate and tell them, ‘Well, ...

AP Wins Pulitzer for Exposing NYPD’s CIA-Linked Intel Program, Widespread Spying on Muslims
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 18 April 2012
“Matt Apuzzo, co-author of the Associated Press series that revealed the New York City Police Department has extensively spied on Muslim-Americans not only in the tri-city area, but throughout the eastern United States.”

We speak with Matt Apuzzo, co-author of the Associated Press series that revealed the New York City Police Department has extensively spied on Muslim Americans not only in the tri-city area, but throughout the eastern United States. The series won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Beginning last August, the AP detailed how the NYPD established a vast operation to monitor Muslim neighborhoods after the 9/11 attacks. Hundreds of mosques, businesses and Muslim student groups were investigated, monitored and, in many cases, infiltrated. Police observed and cataloged daily life in Muslim communities, from where people ate and shopped to where they worked and prayed. Police used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even without any evidence of wrongdoing. Also falling under NYPD’s scrutiny were imams, cab drivers and food cart vendors. According to the AP, many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans. In the process, theNYPD READ FULL POST 10 COMMENTS

Obama Administration Silencing Pakistani Drone-Strike Lawyer
Amir Gholi
Published: Tuesday 10 April 2012
“The U.S. government will not even acknowledge the existence of the covert drone program, much less account for those who are killed and maimed.”

When is the last time you heard from a civilian victim of the CIA’s secret drone strikes? Sure, most of them can’t speak because they’re deceased. But many leave behind bereaved and angry family members ready to proclaim their innocence and denounce the absence of due process, the lack of accountability, the utter impunity with which the U.S. government decides who will live and die.

 

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government has increasingly deployed unmanned drones in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. While drones were initially used for surveillance, these remotely controlled aerial vehicles are now routinely used to launch missiles against human targets in countries where the United States is not at war, including Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. As many as 3,000 people, including hundreds of civilians and even American citizens, have been killed in such covert missions.

 

The U.S. government will not even acknowledge the existence of the covert drone program, much less account for those who are killed and maimed. And you don’t hear their stories on FOX News, or even MSNBC. The U.S. media has little interest in airing the stories of dirt poor people in faraway lands who contradict the convenient narrative that drone strikes only kill “militants.”

 

But in Pakistan, where most strikes have occurred, the victims do have someone speaking out on their behalf. Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who co-founded the human rights organization Foundation for Fundamental Right, filed the first case in Pakistan on behalf of family members of civilian victims and has become a critical force in litigating and advocating for drone victims.

 

Akbar is by no means anti-American. He has traveled to the United States in the past, and has even worked for the U.S. government. He was a consultant with the U.S. Agency for International Development, and helped the ...

CIA Unlawfully Withholds Documents
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 8 April 2012
One of seven FOIA exemptions, the (b)(3) exemption allows an agency’s director to refuse disclosure of documents to protect “intelligence sources and methods.”

A federal lawsuit has charged the CIA with refusing to comply with requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), contending that the agency has repeatedly cited an exemption it does not have the authority to use.

Over the years, government watchdogs have requested records relating to the CIA’s treatment of detainees and policies related to the “war on terror,” but the CIA withheld many of these documents by invoking a (b)(3) exemption. One of seven FOIA exemptions, the (b)(3) exemption allows an agency’s director to refuse disclosure of documents to protect “intelligence sources and methods.”

When Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act back in 2004, the authority of protecting intelligence sources and methods shifted from the Director of the CIA to the newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). In other words, the ODNI (not the CIA) is in charge of invoking the (b)(3) exemption and has been for eight years. Interestingly, it appears that the CIA has only once received authorization from the ODNI to cite (b)(3), indicating that many uses of this exemption were purely illegitimate.

Such disregard for the law is not a first for the CIA. In spite of a well-established law that prohibits the agency from spying here in the US, the CIA trained the New York Police Department to carry out targeted surveillance of Muslims. An internal “review” later found no violation of law.

Kel McClanahan, executive director of the law firm filing the suit, suggests that the CIA’s actions follow a pattern of defiance:

As ...

Former NSA Employee Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack on Whistleblower Crackdown
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 26 March 2012
“I’m the first to acknowledge that there are secrets. But not when it comes to government wrongdoing and illegalities and when in fact they’re endangering the safety of our own country”

We continue our conversation with Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted by the Obama administration after challenging mismanagement, waste and possible constitutional violations at the National Security Administration. "I’m the first to acknowledge that there are secrets. But not when it comes to govt wrongdoing and illegalities and when in fact they’re endangering the safety of our own country,” Drake says. Former Justice Dept. spokesperson, Matthew Miller now says the case may have been an "ill-considered choice for prosecution. Drake faced 35 years in jail, and his case ended last year in a misdemeanor plea deal. We also speak with Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake’s lawyer and a whistleblower herself. She is currently the director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower organization. Radack has written a new book, called TRAITOR: The Whistleblower and the "American Taliban." We also discuss the case of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer who also has been charged under the espionage Act, allegedly, for providing details about the CIA’s covert spy war with Iran that formed a chapter in James Risen’s book, "State of War: The Secret History ...

More Bad News on the Afghan Front
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 13 March 2012
“A new Washington Post/ABC public opinion poll released Sunday found that 60 percent of respondents now believe the Afghan war was not worth fighting, close to an all-time high in the decade-long war.”

While U.S. officials insisted their counterinsurgency strategy is still working, Sunday's pre-dawn massacre by a U.S. staff sergeant of 16 people, including nine children, in their homes in Kandahar province has dealt yet another body blow to Washington's hopes to sustain a significant military presence in Afghanistan after 2014.
 

The massacre was perpetrated by one individual acting entirely on his own, the Pentagon said Monday. But it was the latest in a series of recent incidents, including the dissemination on the Internet of a video showing four U.S. soldiers urinating on the corpses of dead Afghans and the apparently inadvertent burning of copies of the Quran outside a U.S. military base, that have stoked popular outrage against U.S. and other foreign troops. 
 

It also took place amid indications that the U.S. electorate and Congress are increasingly disillusioned with what last year had already become the longest war in U.S. history. 
 

A new Washington Post/ABC public opinion poll released Sunday found that 60 percent of respondents now believe the Afghan war was not worth fighting, close to an all-time high in the decade-long war. 
 

Moreover, only 30 percent of respondents said they believed most Afghans support U.S. and NATO efforts in their country; 55 percent said they believed that most Afghans oppose the foreign presence. 
 

The massacre also took place just after Washington and the government of President Hamid Karzai had finally agreed on one of two key points of contention that have stood in the way of the signing of a strategic partnership agreement that would permit Washington to retain a substantial military advisory force and possibly access to several key bases after 2014, the deadline by which foreign combat troops are to have left Afghanistan. 
 

The two sides reached an agreement last week on transferring ...

Supreme Court Likely to Endorse Obama’s War on Whistle-Blowers
Amir Gholi
Published: Tuesday 13 March 2012
“The Supreme Court has yet to hear a case involving the Espionage Act. But one of these six cases will probably soon reach the court.”

Totalitarian systems disempower an unsuspecting population by gradually making legal what was once illegal. They incrementally corrupt and distort law to exclusively serve the goals of the inner sanctums of power and strip protection from the citizen. Law soon becomes the primary tool to advance the crimes of the elite and punish those who tell the truth. The state saturates the airwaves with official propaganda to replace news. Fear, and finally terror, creates an intellectual and moral void.

We have very little space left to maneuver. The iron doors of the corporate state are slamming shut. And a conviction of Bradley Manning, or any of the five others charged by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act of 1917 with passing government secrets to the press, would effectively terminate public knowledge of the internal workings of the corporate state. What we live under cannot be called democracy. What we will live under if the Supreme Court upholds the use of the Espionage Act to punish those who expose war crimes and state lies will be a species of corporate fascism. And this closed society is, perhaps, only a few weeks or months away.

Few other Americans are as acutely aware of our descent into corporate totalitarianism as Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to The New York Times and is one of Manning’s most ardent and vocal defenders. Ellsberg, who was charged under the Espionage Act, faced 12 felony counts and a possible sentence of 115 years. He says that if he provided the Pentagon Papers today to news organizations, he would most likely never see his case dismissed on grounds of government misconduct against him as it was in 1973. The government tactics employed to discredit Ellsberg, which included burglarizing his psychoanalyst’s office and illegal wiretaps, were subjects of the impeachment hearings against President ...

FBI in The Process of Creating a System for Monitoring all Conversations on Social Networking Sites
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 11 March 2012
“The bureau has placed a request from tech firms to develop a program that would enable agents to sift through waves of “publicly available” information, ostensibly to look for keywords related to terrorism, criminal activity and other threats to national security.”

If you're a regular reader of Natural news, you're already well aware of the fact that government, the courts, and private industry have all essentially disregarded the intent and meaning of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment privacy protections in the age of information technology. It seems that you give up your right to be "secure" in your "persons, houses, papers, and effects" if you dare to use a social media network or virtually any other information exchange system.


The latest onslaught comes from the FBI, which is only the most recent federal agency seeking to monitor all of your conversations on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The bureau has placed a request from tech firms to develop a program that would enable agents to sift through waves of "publicly available" information, ostensibly to look for keywords related to terrorism, criminal activity and other threats to national security.


'Early warning' system?


The goal, according to the bureau's request, is to develop a sort of early warning system that provides real-time intelligence to improve "the FBI's overall situational awareness." The proposed program must "have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats."

The FBI joins DARPA - the secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency- and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in searching for a program that can "monitor" ...

The More Violence, The Less Revolution
Amir Gholi
Published: Wednesday 7 March 2012
“Movements have sometimes produced regime change with no real democracy and the same 1 percent still in charge.”

In the discussion within the Occupy movement on whether violence is necessary for making change in the United States, the debate has so far conflated three of the movement’s possible goals. Are we talking about using violence to produce regime change? Or do we really mean “regime change with democratic institutions following the change”? Or is what we really mean “regime change followed by democracy in which the 1 percent lose their grip on power”?

Movements have sometimes produced regime change with no real democracy and the same 1 percent still in charge. The American Revolution did that: King George was booted out and the resulting government, to its credit highly innovative, was still not a democracy for women, the enslaved, and working class people. A couple of centuries later, the 1 percent are still running the United States. A number of other anti-colonial struggles had a similar result.

Many regimes are so oppressive that people will give their lives to change them, even without guarantees that the new regime will be a whole lot better. But as we consider what we want out of our sacrifices to the cause, we should ask: What’s the track record of movements that depend on violence to overthrow their regimes?

Political scientists (and Waging Nonviolence contributors) Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan analyzed 323 attempts at regime change between 1900 and 2006. They were curious about the comparative success of violent and nonviolent campaigns, among other things. They found that violent campaigns succeeded 26 percent of the time, and that nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53 percent ...

What Are Iran’s Intentions?
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 3 March 2012
“Iran has very limited capacity to deploy force, and its strategic doctrine is defensive, designed to deter invasion long enough for diplomacy to take effect.”

The January/February issue of Foreign Affairs featured the article “Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike Is the Least Bad Option,” by Matthew Kroenig, along with commentary about other ways to contain the Iranian threat.

The media resound with warnings about a likely Israeli attack on Iran while the U.S. hesitates, keeping open the option of aggression – thus again routinely violating the U.N. Charter, the foundation of international law.

As tensions escalate, eerie echoes of the run-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are in the air. Feverish U.S. ...

F Word: It’s not Just Koran-Burning, Also Drone Killings Riling People Up
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 1 March 2012
‘”There’s been real blowback from the burning of the Quran, but there has also been real blowback from the killings from continued drone strikes,’ says Ann Wright, a former State Department diplomat and retired Army colonel who stood trial this week for protesting US drone attacks.”

“Three major investigations were under way on Wednesday into the Koran burning at Bagram Air Base by the American military last week, the event that plunged Afghanistan into days of deadly protests…” So begins a New York Times report.     To read the New York Times you’d think the only American offense that truly riles people up after ten years of war is book burning. It’s certainly the only offense that’s so far merited “three major investigations.”     "There's been real blowback from the burning of the Quran, but there has also been real blowback from the killings from continued drone strikes,” says Ann Wright, a former State Department diplomat and retired Army colonel who stood trial this week for protesting US drone attacks.     Wright’s riled up. So is Pakistan’s High Commissioner to Britain, Wajid Shamsul Hasan. Just last week, Hasan warned Britain to stop the American “Drone Wars” that, he said, are slaughtering hundreds of its innocent civilians, or else the nuclear power “has the means” to retaliate. The British Sun quoted Hasan as saying that his country’s relations with America are at their lowest ebb.     A nuclear power threatening retaliation unless US robo-killings cease? “Three major investigations” into drone attacks might not be too much.     The CIA ...

WikiLeaks: Emails Leak Exposes Inner Workings of Private Intel Firm Stratfor, a “Shadow CIA”
Amanda Rae
Published: Wednesday 29 February 2012
“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the files implicate some of the world’s largest firms in corporate espionage.”

The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has begun publishing what it says are 5.5 million emails obtained from the servers of Stratfor, a private U.S.-based intelligence-gathering firm known to some as a "shadow CIA" for corporations and government agencies. The emails were reportedly obtained by the hackers group, Anonymous. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the files implicate some of the world’s largest firms in corporate espionage. Firms with ties to Stratfor include Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, Dow Chemical, and sectors of the U.S. government, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Coke asked Stratfor to keep tabs on the protest plans of the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. "We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the stories based on the material. They will come out in the next coming days and weeks," said Kristinn Hrafnsson, a WikiLeaks spokesperson who has been a key member of the project to release the Stratfor emails. "What we were doing yesterday was introducing the project, the nature of Stratfor and how they operate and their ties."

Transcript:

AMY 

Ron Paul Wants to Abolish the CIA; His Largest Donor Builds Toys for It
Anna Gilliam
Published: Friday 24 February 2012
“Can Paul really oppose such ‘fascism’ while his campaign is bankrolled by one of the chief protagonists and beneficiaries of the very system Ron Paul claims to oppose?”

If there’s one thing that distinguishes Ron Paul from the rest of the GOP field, it’s his principled stand against American empire and his ardent defense of individual liberties. Paul’s opposition to wars, bloated defense budgets and government espionage of US citizens has made him a hero among some young conservatives. His seemingly rock-solid principles and radicalism has even drawn some on the left; unlike even left-wing Democrats, Paul has said he wants to abolish both the CIA and the FBI to protect individual “liberty.”

So it should come as a shock and disappointment to his followers that Ron Paul’s single largest donor—his Sheldon Adelson, as it were—founded a controversial defense contractor, Palantir Technologies, that profits from government espionage work for the CIA, FBI and other agencies, and which last year was caught organizing an illegal spy ring targeting American political opponents of the US Chamber of Commerce, including journalists, progressive activists and union leaders. (Palantir takes its name from the mystic stones used by characters in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to spy one another.)

According to recently filed FEC disclosure documents, Ron Paul’s Super PAC has received nearly all of its money from a single source, billionaire Peter Thiel. So far, Thiel has contributed $2.6 million to Ron Paul’s Super PAC, Endorse Liberty, providing 76 percent of the Super PAC’s total intake. 

Thiel, a self-described libertarian and opponent of ...

“Losing” the World
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 14 February 2012
“American decline is real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the familiar ruling class perception that anything short of total control amounts to total disaster.”

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated -- Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.  Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead.  Right now, in fact.

At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops. 

The prime target was South Vietnam.  The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  In this, Henry Kissinger’s 

450 Bases and It’s Not Over Yet
Brian Walker
Published: Monday 13 February 2012
“The Pentagon’s Afghan Basing Plans for Prisons, Drones, and Black Ops.”

In late December, the lot was just a big blank: a few burgundy metal shipping containers sitting in an expanse of crushed eggshell-colored gravel inside a razor-wire-topped fence.  The American military in Afghanistan doesn’t want to talk about it, but one day soon, it will be a new hub for the American drone war in the Greater Middle East.

Next year, that empty lot will be a two-story concrete intelligence facility for America’s drone war, brightly lit and filled with powerful computers kept in climate-controlled comfort in a country where most of the population has no access to electricity.  It will boast almost 7,000 square feet of offices, briefing and conference rooms, and a large “processing, exploitation, and dissemination” operations center -- and, of course, it will be built with American tax dollars. 

Nor is it an anomaly.  Despite all the talk of drawdowns and withdrawals, there has been a years-long building boom in Afghanistan that shows little sign of abating.  In early 2010, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had nearly 400 bases in Afghanistan.  Today, Lieutenant ...

Silent State
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 9 February 2012
“The campaign against whistleblowers in Washington.”

 

On January 23rd, the Obama administration charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects. His is just the latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and leakers of every sort.

Kiriakou’s plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don’t go together. By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does. How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy.

 

Punish the Whistleblowers

The Obama administration has already charged more people -- six -- under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information than all past presidencies ...

Offshore Everywhere
Anna Gilliam
Published: Monday 6 February 2012
“For Washington, ‘offshore’ means the world’s boundary-less waters and skies, but also, more metaphorically, it means being repositioned off the coast of national sovereignty and all its knotty problems.”

Make no mistake: we’re entering a new world of military planning.  Admittedly, the latest proposed Pentagon budget manages to preserve just about every costly toy-cum-boondoggle from the good old days when MiGs still roamed the skies, including an uncut nuclear arsenal.  Eternally over-budget items like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, cherished by their services and well-lobbied congressional representatives, aren’t leaving the scene any time soon, though delays or cuts in purchase orders are planned.  All this should reassure us that, despite the talk of massive cuts, the U.S. military will continue to be the profligate, inefficient, and remarkably ineffective institution we’ve come to know and squander our treasure on.

Still, the cuts that matter are already in the works, the ones that will change the American way of war.  They may mean little in monetary terms -- the Pentagon budget is actually slated to increase through 2017 -- but in imperial terms they will make a difference.  A new way of preserving the embattled idea of an American planet is coming into focus and one thing ...

Pentagon Won’t Slow 9/11 Death Penalty Filings
Brian Walker
Published: Saturday 4 February 2012
[Pentagon official and retired Vice Adm. Bruce] MacDonald made clear in his rejection of the pleas for delay that the law does not require him to consider defense lawyers’ arguments against military execution as the ultimate penalty in a Guantánamo military commission case.

A senior Pentagon official on Friday refused to delay a pre-arraignment phase in the prosecution of five Guantánamo captives accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Defense lawyers had asked to delay at least until this summer the process of filing memorandum on why the 9/11 trial should not go forward as a capital case.

They cited an ongoing dispute over the prison camps handling of privileged attorney-client mail, now being addressed in several courts, as well as delays by some defense lawyers in meeting with their alleged terrorist clients.

But the Pentagon official, retired Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald, wrote 9/11 defense lawyers on Friday that Monday was still the deadline to argue in writing why life imprisonment — not military execution — should be the maximum possible penalty in the future tribunals of confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other alleged conspirators.

Under that timetable, the Sept. 11 accused could be brought before a judge for arraignment at Guantánamo’s Camp Justice as early as March.

In the case of Ramzi bin al Shibh, who allegedly put together the German hijackers’ cell, his military lawyer has ...

Unarmed Resistance Still Syria’s Best Hope
Brian Walker
Published: Wednesday 1 February 2012
“Syria has not had much experience in democracy. Its brief democratic period following independence was aborted by a CIA-supported coup in 1949.”

The Syrian pro-democracy struggle has been both an enormous tragedy and a powerful inspiration. Indeed, as someone who has studied mass nonviolent civil insurrections in dozens of countries in recent decades, I know of no people who have demonstrated such courage and tenacity in the face of such savage repression as have the people of Syria these past 10 months.

The resulting decline in the legitimacy of Bashar al-Assad's government gives hope that the opposition will eventually win. The question is how many more lives will be lost until then.

While the repressive nature of regime has never been in question, many observers believed it would be smarter and more ...

U.S. Defense Chief Confirms Pakistan Holds Doctor With Role in Bin Laden Raid
Brian Walker
Published: Monday 30 January 2012
The doctor has turned into a bargaining chip within the failing U.S-Pakistan alliance.

A senior American official has for the first time admitted that a Pakistani doctor played a key role in tracking Osama bin Laden to his hideout in northern Pakistan and called for his release.

The comments by U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta were the first public confirmation of a part of the bin Laden operation revealed by McClatchy Newspapers in July last year, about how the CIA used Shakil Afridi to try to establish whether the al Qaida leader was really living in a large house in Abbottabad, northern Pakistan.

Afridi has been in Pakistani custody since the country's own spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), discovered the secret task performed by the doctor, who set up a fake vaccination program in Abbottabad in a bid to gain DNA samples from those staying at the suspect compound.

The CIA was never certain that bin Laden was present in the house. Afridi worked for the American intelligence agency in the weeks leading up to the May 2 U.S. special forces raid, setting up an elaborate scheme that was supposedly going house to house to vaccinate residents in Abbottabad.

Panetta, speaking to CBS' "60 Minutes" in an interview to be broadcast Sunday night, also voiced his belief that elements within Pakistan must have known that bin Laden, or at least someone significant, was ...

Panetta Calls for Release of Pakstani Doctor in Bin Laden Case
Brian Walker
Published: Sunday 29 January 2012
The fate of the doctor has become another source of tension between Islamabad and Washington, with American officials pressing Pakistan to free him so he and his family can be resettled in the United States.

A senior American official has for the first time admitted that a Pakistani doctor played a key role in tracking Osama bin Laden to his hideout in northern Pakistan and called for his release.

The comments by U.S. Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, were the first public confirmation of a part of the bin Laden operation revealed by McClatchy Newspapers in July last year, about how the CIA used Dr Shakil Afridi to try to establish whether the al Qaida leader was really living in a large house in Abbottabad, northern Pakistan.

Afridi has been in Pakistani custody since the country’s own spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), discovered the secret task performed by the doctor, who set up a fake vaccination program in Abbottabad, in a bid to gain DNA samples from those staying at the suspect compound.

The CIA was never certain that bin Laden was present in the house. Afridi worked for the American intelligence agency in the weeks leading up to the 2 May U.S. special forces raid, setting up an elaborate scheme that was supposedly going house to house to vaccinate residents in Abbottabad.

Panetta, speaking to CBS show 60 Minutes, in an interview to be broadcast Sunday night, also voiced his belief that elements within Pakistan must have known that bin Laden, or at least someone significant, was ...

Growing Elite Opposition to Military Option Against Iran
Brian Walker
Published: Saturday 28 January 2012
“[W]hile the U.S. has the ability to mount a campaign, it could only serve as a short-term fix.”

Like the imminent prospect of one's hanging, to paraphrase the 18th century British essayist Dr. (Samuel) Johnson, the suddenly looming possibility of war can concentrate the mind wonderfully.

If that aphorism didn't apply in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq 10 years ago, it appears to be the case now for key sectors of the U.S. foreign-policy elite - notably, liberal hawks who supported the Iraq war - with regard to the sharp rise in tensions between Iran and both the U.S. and Israel earlier this month.

Amid a crescendo of threats by senior Israeli officials to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, the murder, presumably by Mossad, of a fifth Iranian nuclear scientist in the past several years, and a sharp escalation of Western economic sanctions designed to "cripple" Iran's economy, Tehran's threat to close the Strait of Hormuz brought the until-then hypothetical possibility of war - whether by design, provocation or accident - sharply into view.

The hawkish declarations by Republican presidential candidates eager to prove their love for Israel to Christian fundamentalists and Jewish voters and donors didn't help, nor did a renewed and intensified drumbeat for "regime change" by some of the same neo- conservatives from institutions like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) that led the drive to war in Iraq.

Adding to the sense that war was suddenly a very real possibility, these events more or less coincided with the publication by the influential Foreign Affairs journal of an article entitled "Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike is the Least Bad Option''. It advocated a limited and carefully calibrated U.S. aerial attack on Iran's air defenses and nuclear sites, and was authored by an academic, Matthew Kroenig, who had just completed a one-year stint as a strategic analyst in the office of the secretary of ...

French Judge Wants to Probe Guantanamo Torture Claims
Brian Walker
Published: Wednesday 18 January 2012
The three men are Nizar Sassi, now 31, Mourad Benchellali, now 30, and Khaled Ben Mustapha, now 40.

A French judge is seeking U.S. permission to visit the prison camps here to investigate claims by former French inmates that they were tortured, the Associated Press reported from Paris on Tuesday.

The AP reported that it saw a formal international request from investigating judge Sophie Clement to U.S. authorities to see the prison here that Tuesday held 171 captives, none of them French citizens. Clement also seeks copies of all documents relating to the arrest and transfer of three Frenchmen who were held there.

The three men are Nizar Sassi, now 31, Mourad Benchellali, now 30, and Khaled Ben Mustapha, now 40. They were arrested on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in late 2001 and transferred to Guantánamo. They were sent back to France in 2004 and 2005, held for a time for trial there, but then released.

The men told the judge during questioning in France that they were subject to violence including torture and rape during their detention.

At Guantánamo, a Pentagon spokesman, Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said it was not immediately known whether U.S. officials had received the request.

READ FULL POST 6 COMMENTS

Analysts: U.S., Pakistan Collaborating Again on Drone Strikes
Anna Gilliam
Published: Tuesday 17 January 2012
“Security analysts said the selective targeting suggested that Pakistani security authorities had sanctioned the strikes, despite a Foreign Ministry statement Thursday that drone intrusions into Pakistan’s airspace ‘cannot be condoned.’”

Two apparent U.S. drone attacks last week on militant targets in Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan very likely signal the resumption of joint counterintelligence operations by the CIA and Pakistan's military spy agency, security analysts here said Monday.

The reported strikes would be the first in Pakistan since U.S.-led NATO forces killed 25 Pakistani soldiers in a "friendly fire" incident on the border in November, which drove relations between Washington and Islamabad to a new low.

News reports over the weekend quoted anonymous Pakistani military officials as saying that radio chatter among militants suggested that the chief of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, was among four insurgents who were killed Thursday in the second of the drone strikes in the North Waziristan tribal area.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban denied Mahsud's death, however, saying he wasn't in the area at the time. Members of rival militant factions told McClatchy that they'd received no news of his death.

"The signs are that the U.S. has revisited intelligence cooperation with Pakistan, and the two sides have returned to the early stages, when drone attacks were initiated under a covert joint mandate," said Simbal Khan, the director of research at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad, a research center funded by Pakistan's Foreign Ministry.

In the first of the strikes, last Tuesday, four al Qaida fighters from the gas-rich central Asian republic of Turkmenistan were killed, analysts said.

However, the drones didn't target the Haqqani network, an Afghan Taliban faction that draws hundreds of fighters from Hafiz Gul Bahadur, the top militant commander in North Waziristan.

Security analysts said the selective targeting suggested that Pakistani security authorities had sanctioned the strikes, despite a Foreign Ministry statement Thursday that drone intrusions into ...

Israeli Intel Posed as CIA
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 14 January 2012
“The latest assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist comes as Iran and Western countries, through contacts via Turkey, are on the verge of restarting long-stalled talks on Iran’s nuclear program, which Iran says is for peaceful purposes but the West contends, with some supporting evidence, is aimed at weapons production.”

According to a report in Foreign Policy, agents with Israel’s Mossad spy agency posed as CIA operatives as they tried to recruit members of the Pakistan-based Sunni terrorist network Jundallah to launch attacks against Iran. The alleged revelations come at the tail end of a week where an apparent covert war against Iran’s nuclear program made headlines when a bombing in Tehran killed an Iranian nuclear scientist, the fourth such assassination in two years.

READ FULL POST 3 COMMENTS

Isolationism Redux Via Ron Paul
Brian Walker
Published: Saturday 7 January 2012
“America is weary of war, especially weary of those, in retrospect, that had no real purpose — the one in Iraq, above all.”

The blogger Andrew Sullivan, typing faster than he could think, endorsed Ron Paul for the Republican presidential nomination. (He took it back, but we’ll get to that later.) Sullivan is British-born, Oxford-taught and, like so many from that sceptered isle, gifted in print and speech. Still, he somehow did not realize that if someone like Paul had been president in the 1940s, his homeland might have succumbed to Nazi Germany while America, maddeningly isolationist, sat out the war. No doubt, curriculum changes would have been made at Oxford.

Paul opposes just about all international treaties and organizations. He would have the United States pull out of the United Nations and NATO. He would do away with foreign aid, abolish the CIA and essentially turn his back on the rest of the world. This is pretty much what used to be called isolationism, and it allowed Hitler to presume, quite correctly as it turned out, that America would not interfere with his plans to conquer Europe, Britain included. It took Germany’s declaration of war on the United States, not the other way round, to get Uncle Sam involved.

The isolationism of the 1930s and early ’40s has come roaring back — in the person of Paul, I am tempted to write, but that is not exactly the case. The old isolationism was deeply conservative, both ...

Pentagon Probing Possible Leak of Bin Laden Raid Details
Brian Walker
Published: Friday 6 January 2012
In addition to the Pentagon investigation, the CIA has decided to craft a written policy about how its public affairs division works with authors and filmmakers, the agency said in letter to King released Thursday.

Did the Obama administration release classified information to Hollywood notables for a film about the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, Sony Pictures movie slated for release in the heat of this fall's election campaign?

That's a question Rep. Peter T. King, R-N.Y., wants answered. And in response, the Pentagon's inspector general has launched an investigation, King disclosed Thursday.

"We plan to begin subject investigation immediately," Patricia A. Brannin, deputy inspector general for intelligence and special program assessments, wrote in a memo that King emailed to reporters.

At issue ...

Secret Guantanamo Cellblock Cost About $700,000
Brian Walker
Published: Wednesday 4 January 2012
Saudi-born Shaker Aamer, 45, a British resident, has been held there more than 100 days, said attorney Ramzi Kassem said Saturday, characterizing his client’s detention circumstances “reminiscent of Guantánamo circa 2003.”

A once-secret Guantánamo cellblock now used to punish captives was built in November 2007 for $690,000 from a crude, then 5-year-old temporary prison camp design.

Navy Cmdr. Tamsen Reese confirmed the existence of the block earlier in December, and released a photo of one steel-walled cell after detainee defenders called conditions inhumane. It’s called Camp Five-Echo, and “serves as a disciplinary block for those non-compliant detainees in Camps 5 and 6,” Reese said in an email Friday that for the first time revealed the cost of the 4-year-old prison camps construction project.

Fewer than 150 of Guantánamo’s 171 captives are kept in Camps 5 and 6, which are steel and cement penitentiary-style copies of U.S. prisons. Former CIA prisoners are held elsewhere at a secret site at the remote Navy base, Camp 7, a jail whose price tag the Pentagon won’t reveal.

As for Five-Echo, it’s a separate 24-unit boxcar-style cellblock on the grounds of Camp 5. Its design comes from the detention center’s earliest days, 2002, when contract laborers welded cellblocks from old shipping containers. But there’s a key difference: In the original design, the cells had a see-through metal mesh that allowed captives to communicate with and see others. For “the disciplinary block,” the military had workers weld in steel walls, sealing off each cell from the ...

North Korea is a Tough Target for U.S. Intelligence Agencies
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 27 December 2011
“U.S. officials downplay their interest in Egan, but they don’t deny that they are hungry for insight on a nuclear armed nation that is possibly the world’s toughest to spy on, a virtual black hole for most intelligence agencies.”

Robert Egan has a pretty good feel for how desperate the CIA is for scraps of information about North Korea.

Egan has served barbecue to North Korean diplomats at his restaurant in Hackensack, N.J., for 15 years, and he has visited Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, several times. He also has fed details about his customers to U.S. authorities, even plucking stray hairs off their suits so American officials could trace the DNA. Not surprisingly, he has found FBI surveillance equipment hidden in his office.

U.S. intelligence is "using a guy who flips burgers for a living" to understand North Korea, said Egan, a 53-year-old high school dropout whose odd role as a citizen ambassador has been optioned as an HBO movie.

U.S. officials downplay their interest in Egan, but they don't deny that they are hungry for insight on a nuclear armed nation that is possibly the world's toughest to spy on, a virtual black hole for most intelligence agencies.

The latest evidence: U.S. officials apparently were unaware for 51 hours that longtime leader Kim Jong Il had died Dec. 17, hearing the news only when it was announced on North Korean TV. They now are scrambling for the skinny on his youngest son and appointed successor, Kim Jong Un, a chubby 27-year-old known to enjoy playing video games.

More important, despite the near-constant gaze of spy satellites, U.S. intelligence agencies were stunned to learn from Israeli officials in 2007 that North Korean scientists had helped Syria build a secret nuclear reactor in the desert. Israeli warplanes bombed the site when President George W. Bush declined to do so.

Similarly, U.S. intelligence was caught off guard in November 2010 when North Korean officials took a visiting American scientist on a tour of a newly constructed uranium enrichment facility that is making low-level reactor fuel but could be converted to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

The ...

The Drone That Fell From the Sky
Anna Gilliam
Published: Wednesday 21 December 2011
What a busted robot airplane tells us about the American empire in 2012 and beyond

The drone had been in the air for close to five hours before its mission crew realized that something was wrong.  The oil temperature in the plane’s turbocharger, they noticed, had risen into the “cautionary” range. An hour later, it was worse, and it just kept rising as the minutes wore on.  While the crew desperately ran through its “engine overheat” checklist trying to figure out the problem, the engine oil temperature, too, began skyrocketing.

By now, they had a full-blown in-flight emergency on their hands.  “We still have control of the engine, but engine failure is imminent,” the pilot announced over the radio.

Almost two hours after the first signs of distress, the engine indeed failed.  Traveling at 712 feet per minute, the drone clipped a fence before crashing.

Land of the Lost Drones

The skies seem full of falling drones these days.  The most publicized of them made headlines when Iran announced that its military had taken possession of an advanced American remotely piloted spy aircraft, thought to be an RQ-170 Sentinel. 

Questions about how the Iranians came to possess one of the U.S. military’s most sophisticated pieces of equipment abound.  Iran first claimed that its forces shot the drone down after it "briefly violated" the country’s eastern airspace near the Afghan border.  Later, the Islamic Republic insisted that the unmanned aerial vehicle had penetrated 150 miles before being felled by a sophisticated cyber-attack.  And just days ago, an Iranian engineer ...

Pakistan Targets U.S. Troop Supplies, Drone Base After NATO Kills 24
Taylor
Published: Sunday 27 November 2011
Pakistan announces retaliation after NATO attack on Pakistani border outpost.

Pakistan on Saturday blocked supply routes for U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan and announced it would end American use of a Pakistani airbase by American forces in retaliation for a NATO attack on a Pakistani border outpost that officials said killed at least 24 soldiers and injured another 13.

American forces were given 15 days to vacate the remote Shamsi airbase, which was secretly turned over to them after the 9/11 attacks. The decision to order the Americans out followed an emergency meeting of Pakistan's top civilian and military leadership late Saturday to decide how to respond to the deaths of the soldiers.

Shamsi was used for launching the war in Afghanistan in late 2001, then later served as the base for the U.S. drone program targeting militants. Set in desert in sparsely populated Baluchistan province in Pakistan's west, the airbase became highly controversial within Pakistan for its association with drone strikes, which Pakistan officially condemns.

The decision to expel the Americans, made by the country's leadership meeting as the Defense Committee of the Cabinet, was an admission that Shamsi remains in American use.

The committee also announced that the government would "revisit and undertake a complete review of all program, activities and cooperative arrangements" with the United States and U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, "including diplomatic, political, military and intelligence".

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In Defense of Diplomacy
Taylor
Published: Thursday 24 November 2011
New legislation would make all diplomatic contact with Iran illegal.

Though most of our history books, as well as contemporary journalism, tend to focus on violence between peoples and nations, the vast majority of conflicts have been settled peacefully.  For centuries, it has been forbidden to “kill the messenger,” thereby enabling diplomacy between governments. Even in cases where countries have not had formal diplomatic relations, quiet negotiations – often initially clandestine and between low-level officials – have prevented cold conflicts from becoming hot ones.  Even war itself has generally not prevented ongoing diplomatic contact, which has often prevented escalation, limited civilian casualties, and made possible a speedier end to the conflict.

With the advent of air travel and instantaneous long-distance communication, the ease with which representatives of adversarial governments can meet has made diplomatic contact more timely and frequent. Meanwhile, advances in the study of negotiation and conflict resolution has made it more effective. Indeed, the improved quantity and quality of diplomatic contact has been a major factor in the dramatic reduction in inter-state wars over the past sixty years.

Unfortunately, Congress is taking up dangerous legislation which appears to be designed to make the risk of war more likely. The bill takes the unprecedented step of effectively preventing any kind of U.S. diplomatic contact with Iran. The Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011 (H.R. 1905), sponsored by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the right-wing chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, is a far-reaching sanctions bill which contains a provision (Section 601, subsection (c)) which would put into law a restriction whereby

"No person employed with the United States Government may contact in an official or unofficial capacity any person that. . . is an agent, ...

National Lawyers Guild Files FOIA Requests Seeking Evidence of Federal Role in Occupy Crackdown
Moderator
Published: Sunday 20 November 2011
“The National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee and the Partnership for Civil Justice today filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).”

With Congress no longer performing its sworn role of defending the US Constitution, the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee and the Partnership for Civil Justice today filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) asking the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA and the National Parks Service to release "all their information on the planning of the coordinated law enforcement crackdown on Occupy protest encampments in multiple cities over the course of recent days and weeks."

According to a statement by the NLG, each of the FOIA requests states, "This request specifically encompasses disclosure of any documents or information pertaining to federal coordination of, or advice or consultation regarding, the police response to the Occupy movement, protests or encampments."

National Lawyers Guild leaders, including Executive Director Heidi Beghosian and NLG Mass Defense Committee co-chair and PCJ Executive Director Mara Veheyden-Hilliard both told TCBH! earlier this week that the rapid-fire assaults on occupation encampments in cities from Oakland to New York and Portland, Seattle and Atlanta, all within days of each other, the similar approach taken by police, which included overwhelming force in night-time attacks, mass arrests, use of such weaponry as pepper spray, sound cannons, tear gas, clubs and in some cases "non-lethal" projectiles like bean bags and rubber bullets, the removal and even arrest of reporters and camera-persons, and ...

GOP Candidates Advocate Torture
Moderator
Published: Sunday 20 November 2011
“The United States has long considered waterboarding to be torture.”

At last week’s debate, Republican presidential candidates Herman Cain and Michelle Bachman defended waterboarding. Cain said, “I don't see it as torture. I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique,” which is what the Bush administration used to call its policy of torture and abuse. Bachman declared, “If I were president, I would be willing to use waterboarding. I think it was very effective. It gained information for our country.” And after the debate, Mitt Romney’s aides told CNN that he does not think waterboarding is torture.
 

President Obama correctly retorted, “Waterboarding is torture.” He added, “Anybody who has actually read about and understands the practice of waterboarding would say that is torture - and that’s not something we do, period.”
 

The United States has long considered waterboarding to be torture. Several federal court opinions refer to waterboarding as torture. Our government prosecuted, convicted and hung Japanese military leaders following World War II for waterboarding. The U.S. War Crimes Act defines torture as a war crime.
 

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and John Yoo have all admitted participating in decisions to waterboard detainees, knowing that interrogators would carry out their orders. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, commanders all the way up the chain of command to the commander-in-chief can be prosecuted for war crimes if they knew or should have known their subordinates would commit them and the commanders did nothing to stop or prevent it. Therefore, Bush, Cheney, and Yoo have admitted to the commission of war crimes.
 

But by refusing to investigate them for their admitted torture, the Obama administration has given the Bush officials a free pass.
 

Moreover, Bachman was wrong when she claimed torture is effective. Former high level FBI interrogators, ...

38 Protesters Face Charges for Disrupting US Military Base Used in Overseas Drone Attacks
Moderator
Published: Saturday 5 November 2011
“The defendants were protesting the MQ-9 Reaper drones, which the 174th Fighter Wing of the Guard has remotely flown over Afghanistan from Syracuse since late 2009.”

The Wall Street Journal is reporting the CIA has made a series of secret concessions in its drone campaign after military and diplomatic officials complained large strikes were damaging the fragile U.S. relationship with Pakistan. Meanwhile, a trial is underway in Syracuse, New York, of 38 protesters arrested in April at the New York Air National Guard base at Hancock Field. The defendants were protesting the MQ-9 Reaper drones, which the 174th Fighter Wing of the Guard has remotely flown over Afghanistan from Syracuse since late 2009. "Citizens have a responsibility to take action when they see crimes being committed," said retired Col. Ann Wright, one of the 38 on trial. "And this goes back to World War II, when German government officials knew what other parts of the German government were doing in executing six million Jews in Germany and other places, and that they took no action. And yet—and they were held responsible later, through the Nuremberg trials. And that is the theory on which we are acting, that we see that our government is committing crimes by the use of these drones, and that we, as citizens, have the responsibility to act."

Transcript: 

AMY GOODMAN: We’re on the road. It’s Syracuse, New York. I was speaking last night at Syracuse University. Well, the Wall Street Journal is reporting today that the Central Intelligence Agency has made a series of secret concessions in its drone campaign after military and diplomatic officials complained large strikes were damaging the fragile U.S. ...

As Gaddafi is Buried, a Look Back at the Complexities and Contradictions of the Libya Mission
Taylor
Published: Sunday 30 October 2011
“With Muammar Qaddafi now dead in Libya and NATO tentatively winding down its mission there by the end of the month, the Obama administration has claimed another foreign policy victory”

With Muammar Qaddafi now dead in Libya and NATO tentatively winding down its mission there by the end of the month, the Obama administration has claimed another foreign policy victory, touting the fact that “we achieved our objectives” without putting ground troops in Libya.

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Welcome to Our Banana Republic and Its Global Panopticon
Moderator
Published: Sunday 23 October 2011
“If presidential death warrants beyond the reach of scrutiny and review by courts or juries are the mark of a banana republic, then we were all waving the flag of just such an entity.”

The day I became a citizen of these United States, June 17, 2009, in the old Paramount Theater in downtown Oakland, I raised my right hand and swore that I “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

To my immediate left in that vast and splendid deco theater was a Moroccan; to my right, a Salvadoran; and around us 956 others from 98 countries, each holding a small specimen of the flag that was about to become our standard. All of us had sworn earlier that day that since our final, successful interviews with immigration officials, we had not become prostitutes or members of the Communist Party.

The sovereignty I was abjuring was the Republic of Ireland, itself not so far from shifting its allegiance from the Irish Constitution to the dictates of European bankers. Since questions about the Bill of Rights were likely to come up in those final interviews, many people in the theater had a pretty clear notion that along with allegiance came certain important protections, such as guarantees of due process and the right to a public trial by jury. There’s no doubt that for many, with vivid memories of summary seizure and arbitrary imprisonment in their biographies, these guarantees had great significance.

But as it turns out, it was all a fraud. The Uzbek down the row from me, who had fled Karimov’s regime, probably had no need to anticipate being boiled alive — a specialite de la maison in Tashkent. But being roasted alive by a Hellfire missile, doomed by the executive order of President Obama, without due process in any court of law, for reasons of state forever secret, could theoretically lie in his future. If presidential death warrants ...

America’s Secret Empire of Drone Bases
Moderator
Published: Monday 17 October 2011
Drones are now the bedrock of Washington’s future military planning and – with counterinsurgency out of favor – the preferred way of carrying out wars abroad.

They increasingly dot the planet.  There’s a facility outside Las Vegas where “pilots” work in climate-controlled trailers, another at a dusty camp in Africa formerly used by the French Foreign Legion, a third at a big air base in Afghanistan where Air Force personnel sit in front of multiple computer screens, and a fourth at an air base in the United Arab Emirates that almost no one talks about. 

And that leaves at least 56 more such facilities to mention in an expanding American empire of unmanned drone bases being set up worldwide.  Despite frequent news reports on the drone assassination campaign launched in support of America’s ever-widening undeclared wars and a spate of stories on drone bases in Africa and the Middle East, most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous -- until now.

Run by the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and their proxies, these bases -- some little more than desolate airstrips, others sophisticated command and control centers filled with computer screens and high-tech electronic equipment -- are the backbone of a new American robotic way of war.  They are also the latest development in a ...

Republican Frontrunner Touts Neo-Conservative Foreign Policy
Moderator
Published: Saturday 8 October 2011
“Speaking at The Citadel military academy in South Carolina, Romney promised to increase defense spending - and the size of the U.S. Navy.”

In his first major foreign policy address of the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney Friday presented a largely neo-conservative platform similar to that pursued by George W. Bush, although he never mentioned the former president by name.
 

Speaking at The Citadel military academy in South Carolina, Romney promised to increase defense spending - and the size of the U.S. Navy - as part of a strategy designed to ensure that the United States remain the world's dominant military power and that the 21st century be "an American century". 
 

"The United States should always retain military supremacy to deter would-be aggressors and to defend our allies and ourselves," he told the Citadel cadets. "And know this: If America is the undisputed leader of the world, it reduces our need to police a more chaotic world." 
 

"…If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your president," he said. "You have that president today," he said of Barack Obama whose policies of the last three years he characterized as "feckless". 
 

"Know this," Romney went on in an implicit assertion of the kind of unilateralism which Bush extolled but which alienated even some of Washington's closest allies. "While America should work with other nations, we always reserve the right to act alone to prevent our vital national interests." 
 

Critical to those interests, he made clear, was the greater Middle East. He suggested that Washington should align itself even more closely to Israel – whose existence as a "Jewish state" he characterized as a "vital national interest" – and pursue a more confrontational policy toward Iran, including the regular deployment in the region of two aircraft carrier task forces as a ...

Sex And The Single Drone
Moderator
Published: Thursday 29 September 2011
In 2007, CIA director Michael Hayden began lobbying the White House for “permission to carry out strikes against houses or cars merely on the basis of behavior that matched a ‘pattern of life’ associated with al-Qaeda or other groups.”

In the world of weaponry, they are the sexiest things around.  Others countries are desperate to have them.  Almost anyone who writes about them becomes a groupie.  Reporters exploring their onrushing future swoon at their potentially wondrous techno-talents.  They are, of course, the pilotless drones, our grimly named Predators and Reapers.

As CIA Director, Leon Panetta called them “the only game in town.”  As Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates pushed hard to up their numbers and increase their funding drastically.  The U.S. Air Force is 

Kucinich On The Ever-Expanding Use of Drones to Kill: “Unaccountable, Immoral And, by Definition, Inhuman”
Moderator
Published: Saturday 24 September 2011
The use of lethal force by the United States in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia – countries we are not at war with – constitutes an already troubling method of waging war in which we are accountable to no one.

According to reports, software is currently being developed that would enable a drone to fire a missile without any input from a human being despite the fact that the New America Foundation has found that 32% of those killed from drone strikes in Pakistan were civilians.

 

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is a proponent of peaceful resolution of conflict who has steadfastly opposed the expansion of war around the world and has consistently opposed the use of drones abroad. Kucinich released the following statement in response to the expansion of U.S. drone bases abroad and the development of technology that would allow robotic drones to hunt and kill human beings.

 

“This week, The Washington Post featured two articles documenting the troubling expansion of the United States’ drone program through the establishment of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) drone bases in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the development of technology that will allow for the automated use of lethal force by drones – drones ...

Expanding Network of Drone Bases to Hit Somalia, Yemen
Elizabeth
Published: Thursday 22 September 2011
The U.S. military has been flying armed drones over both countries from a base in Djibouti and is planning to build a second base in Ethiopia.

As Somalia undergoes its worst famine in six decades and Yemen slides into civil war, the administration of President Barack Obama is expanding its network of bases to carry out drone strikes against suspected terrorists in both countries, according to reports published in two major U.S. newspapers Thursday.

Based in part on newly disclosed U.S. diplomatic cables recently posted by Wikileaks, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. military has been flying armed drones over both countries from a base in Djibouti and is planning to build a second base in Ethiopia.

The Post and the Wall Street Journal also reported that a base in the Seychelles that the U.S. military has previously used to fly surveillance drones will now host armed drones capable of flying their lethal payloads the more than 1,500 kms that separate the Indian Ocean island chain from Somalia and the African mainland and back.

The "constellation" of drone bases will also include a secret new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) base that the administration announced earlier this year would be situated somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula.

That facility will be hosted by Saudi Arabia, according to an unnamed "senior U.S. military official" quoted in a FoxNews.com report also published Thursday.

"Operations in Saudi (Arabia) are (the) only new expansion to this plan," the official was quoted as saying. "The rest has been working for over a year when we long ago realised danger from AQAP (Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula)," a Yemen-based affiliate which, according to recent statements by U.S. intelligence officials, has been consolidating links with al Shabaab, the Somali group which Washington claims also has ties to Al-Qaeda.

IPS calls ...

President Obama’s Very Own ‘War on Terror,’ Continued
Moderator
Published: Thursday 22 September 2011
Despite the best intentions of the United States and ISAF, a new report says, Afghan civilians are still dying from these raids.

There’s a lot to report on President Obama’s very own “War on Terror.” He’s not calling it that, of course. But it’s spreading fast from Afghanistan to southern Arabia, the Horn of Africa and even to Nigeria and West Africa, if the testimony of the general who leads the US Africa Command is to be believed. Ten years after 9/11, maybe the “War on Terror” really and truly will never, ever end.

First, an important new report from the Open Society Foundations and the Liaisons Office tells us that the administration’s night raids in Afghanistan are deadlier than previously thought, creating swelling anger in that country (and, no doubt, more insurgents and “terrorists” than before). The report says, in part:

The number of night raids has skyrocketed: publicly available statistics suggest a fivefold increase between February 2009 and December 2010. International military conducted, on average, 19 night raids per night—a total of 1700 night raids—in the three-month period from roughly December 2010 to February 2011, according to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). ISAF has not released more up-to-date figures; however, interviews conducted for this report suggest a continuing trend of large numbers of night raids, possibly at even higher rates. In April 2011, a senior US military advisor told the Open Society Foundations that as many as 40 raids might take place on a given night across Afghanistan.

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Science Lags As Health Problems Emerge Near Gas Fields
Moderator
Published: Saturday 17 September 2011
Current law allows oil and gas companies not to report toxic emissions and hazardous waste released by all but their largest facilities, excluding hundreds of thousands of wells and small plants.

On a summer evening in June 2005, Susan Wallace-Babb went out into a neighbor's field near her ranch in Western Colorado to close an irrigation ditch. She parked down the rutted double-track, stepped out of her truck into the low-slung sun, took a deep breath, and collapsed, unconscious.

A natural gas well and a pair of fuel storage tanks sat less than a half-mile away. Later, after Wallace-Babb came to and sought answers, a sheriff's deputy told her that a tank full of gas condensate -- liquid hydrocarbons gathered from the production process -- had overflowed into another tank. The fumes must have drifted toward the field where she was working, he suggested.

READ FULL POST 9 COMMENTS

Edward Gibbon at America’s Grave
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 13 September 2011
What Will the Future Remember About America’s Decline and Fall?

1. Twin Towers

Two years from now the staffs of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker will move into the most haunted building in the world.  There, the elite of American celebrity photographers, gossip columnists, and magazine journalists may meet some macabre new muses.

Aloft in the upper stories of 1 World Trade Center (where Condé Nast publishing has signed the biggest lease), they will gaze out their windows at that ghostly void, just a few yards away, where 658 doomed employees of Cantor Fitzgerald were sitting at their desks at 8:46 AM, September 11, 2001.

Not to worry: The “Freedom Tower” -- the boosters reassure us -- will be an enduring consolation to the families of 9/11’s martyrs as well as an icon of civic and national renaissance.  Not to mention its dramatic resurrection of property values in the neighborhood.  (I confess that I find this conflation of real-estate speculation with sublime memorial unnerving: like proposing to build a yacht marina over the sunken Arizona or a Katrina theme park in the Lower Ninth Ward.)

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10 Years After 9/11, Suspected al Qaida Figure Still Eludes FBI
Elizabeth
Published: Sunday 11 September 2011
U.S. officials warned that Shukrijumah, 36, is especially dangerous to the nation because of the time he spent in America

Adnan el Shukrijumah left his family's Miramar, Fla., home in 2001 and traveled to Trinidad on business, presumably to buy sunglasses and children's clothes for resale in south Florida flea markets.

Ten years later, Shukrijumah is an elusive, globe-trotting fugitive — sometimes called "the Elvis of al Qaida" — wanted by the FBI as one of the terrorist group's alleged leading operatives and the subject of lingering questions about his possible association with 9/11 hijackers before the attacks.

He's also under indictment on charges of directing an alleged suicide-bomb plot in 2009 against the New York subway system. The reward for his capture: $5 million.

"We are still looking for him," said FBI special agent Michael Leverock, who's based in south Florida.

U.S. officials warned that Shukrijumah, 36, is especially dangerous to the nation because of the time he spent in America. The mystery surrounding his whereabouts — and whether he played a direct role in 9/11 — remains among the key unanswered questions a decade after the attacks.

"They are us. They know us intimately," said Michael Scheuer, a former top analyst in the CIA unit created after 9/11 to track down al Qaida founder Osama bin Laden, whom U.S. forces killed May 2 in a raid on his Pakistan hideout.

Shukrijumah is now a leading member and perhaps the head of al Qaida's foreign operations subcommittee, a post that makes decisions on plans and recruitments, said Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert and author of the book "Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror."

"He has moved up in the ranks because he's very clever and because he knows the main target, the United States," Gunaratna said.

Shukrijumah was born on Aug. 4, 1975, in Saudi Arabia. As the son of two foreigners, he wasn't eligible for Saudi citizenship but obtained citizenship of Guyana, ...

A Dark Decade for Civil Rights And Liberties
Moderator
Published: Saturday 10 September 2011
The U.S. has a long history of responding to national trauma by restricting rights and ladling out unchecked power to the executive during times of crisis - a pattern that is clearly marked out by the government’s clampdown on individual rights and liberties during the Civil War, the Cold War and World War II.

The tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center's Twin Towers and the Pentagon on Sep. 11, 2001 is marked by mourning.
 

With rallies planned across the country, largely concentrated at the sites of the twin tragedies in Washington D.C. and Lower Manhattan in New York City, victims' family members and politicians will gather on Sunday to share a solemn moment for those who were killed and maimed on that fateful day. 
 

But another group of mourners are making themselves heard this year, lamenting more than just civilian deaths. 
 

Led by civil rights and advocacy organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Brennan Center for Justice, this group is marking the demise of pre-9/11 democracy in the U.S., using the auspicious day to demand restoration of basic human and civil rights. 
 

"We are using this moment to take a step back and ask big, broad questions about how and why the U.S. continues to define itself in a state of perpetual emergency, how we seem to be moving towards a national security state, rather than returning to a proper balance between liberty and security," Ben Wizner, litigation director of the ACLU's National Security Project and co-author of the union's newly- minted report "A Call to Courage", told IPS. 
 

Wizner acknowledged that the U.S. has a long history of responding to national trauma by restricting rights and ladling out unchecked power to the executive during times of crisis - a pattern that is clearly marked out by the government's clampdown on individual rights and liberties during the Civil War, the Cold War and World War II, he said. 
 

"But part of ...

Bush Credits ‘The Work That Was Done’ During ‘My Presidency’ For Osama Bin Laden’s Death
Moderator
Published: Friday 9 September 2011
The reality, of course, is that Bush’s attempts to capture or kill bin Laden were huge failures

President Bush sat down with USA Today to discuss the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and his role in shaping U.S. policy in their aftermath. During the interview, Bush thought he’d take the opportunity to pat himself on the back for Osama bin Laden’s death:

Bush said the events that led to the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May began during his administration.

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Jihadists Take Over, As Warned
Moderator
Published: Friday 9 September 2011
On Mar. 8, François Gouyette told a select group of deputies at a closed session of the French parliamentary commission of foreign affairs that the rebellion, especially in the east of the country, comprised mostly ‘radical Muslims’.

The official euphoria with which the U.S. and European governments celebrated the fall of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya has given way to growing concern that many among the new Libyan leadership are radical Muslims with links to al-Qaeda. Revelations are surfacing also of a close collaboration of Western governments with the deposed dictator.
 

The overwhelming presence of radical Muslims among the rebel Libyan leadership has been known in Paris at least since early March. But the dangers from this are now beginning to be discussed openly in Western capitals. 
 

On Mar. 8, François Gouyette, ambassador to Tripoli until late February, told a select group of deputies at a closed session of the French parliamentary commission of foreign affairs that the rebellion, especially in the east of the country, comprised mostly "radical Muslims". 
 

"In the east of the country, especially in the city of Derna, which was taken very easily by the insurrection, there is without question a high concentration of radical Muslims," Gouyette told the deputies. "Hundreds of Libyan combatants taking part in the international jihad in Afghanistan and in Iraq originate from this region. 
 

"Many of these combatants are back in Libya," Gouyette warned. IPS has the minutes of the meeting. 
 

Gouyette recalled that some 800 members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) banned by the United Nations after the terror attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, and who were recently released after being incarcerated by the Gaddafi regime for many years, "have joined the liberated areas of the country. They can represent a problem in the future." 
 

Gouyette recalled that Gaddafi’s regime had "closely cooperated" with "all Western intelligence services in the fight against (Muslim) terrorism represented by ...

Ten Years Later, It’s Time to ‘Broaden The Context’
Moderator
Published: Friday 9 September 2011
We’ve learned, for instance, about the attack’s mechanics — we know which particular terrorists orchestrated it and how many lives those mass murderers tragically destroyed

Ten years ago this week, I, like many living in Washington at the time, was fleeing my office building. In those minutes of mayhem, I knew only what the police were screaming: Get out fast, because we're being attacked by terrorists.

In the years since 9/11, we've learned a lot about that awful day — and about ourselves.

We've learned, for instance, about the attack's mechanics — we know which particular terrorists orchestrated it and how many lives those mass murderers tragically destroyed. We also know about 9/11's long-term legacy — we have health care data showing that it created a kind of mass post-traumatic stress disorder, and we have evidence that it generated a significant rise in anti-Muslim bigotry. And, of course, we've learned that our government can turn catastrophes like 9/11 into political weapons that successfully coerce America into supporting wars and relinquishing civil liberties.

Yet, despite all of this new knowledge, we still don't know how to explain 9/11 to the next generation. As the magazine Education Week reports, "Fewer than half the states explicitly identify the 9/11 attacks in their high school standards for social studies" — and the relatively few schools that do discuss 9/11 often spend just a few minutes on it.

As a result, reports the magazine, "Many students today may have only vague notions of 9/11, since they were young or not even born when the attacks occurred." Worse, those "vague notions" are often defined by America's crude popular culture.

"Kids are no longer coming into the classroom as a blank slate — they have something they've been told [about 9/11] at home, at church, on Facebook, Twitter," says the University of Texas's Middle Eastern studies expert Christopher Rose, who adds that this leaves many children wrongly believing that "[Muslims] are all crazy — they ...

Under Obama Administration, Renditions and Secrecy Continue
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 7 September 2011
“Though an Obama administration task force recommended that greater accountability measures be imposed on countries that suspects are rendered to, the extent to which the recommendations have been implemented is unclear, and public statements by officials have been vague.”

New documents in recent days have surfaced several new details about the shadowy practice of snatching terrorism suspects from one country and rendering them into the custody of another. As we noted last week, several documents on rendition emerged as part of an obscure court case in the state of New York. Others were discovered by Human Rights Watch in Libya.

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The Long Life of Profiling, Ten Years After 9/11
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 6 September 2011
The NYPD dispatches “rakers” to monitor the daily lives of Muslim Americans in the places where ordinary living transpires, such as bookstores, cafés, bars, and nightclubs, without the hint of criminal wrongdoing.

The Associated Press has been doing some good investigative reporting lately. On August 24, the AP broke the news that the CIA and the NYPD are combining forces to spy on Muslims in New York City. Since the CIA is prohibited by law to collect intelligence on American citizens, this is more than newsworthy. It’s probably unconstitutional, which explains why the NYPD has, according to the report, kept these activities secret.

This is no ordinary program, nor does it seem to be merely about sharing expertise.

According to the report, the NYPD dispatches “rakers,” the NYPD term, into a “human mapping program” to monitor the daily lives of Muslim Americans in the places where ordinary living transpires, such as bookstores, cafés, bars, and nightclubs, without the hint of criminal wrongdoing. The police department also employs “mosque crawlers,” who scrutinize imams and their sermons, and have gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs commonly associated with Muslim workers. 

(There is of course a sordid history to all of this. Throughout the 1960s, about one million intelligence files were compiled on people and political groups by the NYPD through the use of “informants, wiretaps, agents provocateurs and undercover officers posing as activists, lawyers and journalists,” according to the New York Times. A federal lawsuit launched in 1971 eventually led to the Handshu Guidelines in 1985, which sought to preserve the First ...

CIA’s Push for Drone War Driven by Internal Needs
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 6 September 2011
“The CIA’s institutional interests in continuing the drone war may have become so commanding that no director could afford to override those interests on the basis of his own analysis of how the drone strikes affect U.S. interests.”

When David Petraeus walks into the Central Intelligence Agency Tuesday, he will be taking over an organization whose mission has changed in recent years from gathering and analyzing intelligence to waging military campaigns through drone strikes in Pakistan, as well as in Yemen and Somalia.

But the transformation of the CIA did not simply follow the expansion of the drone war in Pakistan to its present level. CIA Director Michael Hayden lobbied hard for that expansion at a time when drone strikes seemed like a failed experiment.

The reason Hayden pushed for a much bigger drone war, it now appears, is that it had already created a whole bureaucracy in the anticipation of such a war.

During 2010, the CIA "drone war" in Pakistan killed as many as 1,000 people a year, compared with the roughly 2,000 a year officially estimated to have been killed by the SOF "night raids" in Afghanistan, according to a report in the Sep. 1 Washington Post.

A CIA official was quoted by the Post as saying that the CIA had become "one hell of a killing machine", before quickly revising the phrase to "one hell of an operational tool".

The shift in the CIA mission's has been reflected in the spectacular growth of its Counter-terrorism Center (CTC) from 300 employees in September 2001 to about 2,000 people today – 10 percent of the agency's entire workforce, according to the Post report.

The agency's analytical branch, which had been previously devoted entirely to providing intelligence assessments for policymakers, has been profoundly affected.

More than one-third of the personnel in the agency's analytical branch are now engaged wholly or primarily in providing support to CIA operations, according to senior agency officials cited by the Post. And nearly two-thirds of those are analyzing data used by the CTC drone war staff to make decisions on targeting.

Some of that shift of ...

Possible CIA Role in Muslim 'Spying'
Moderator
Published: Thursday 25 August 2011
Shadow Warriors: Movin' On Up
Moderator
Published: Sunday 21 August 2011
“SOF forces have almost doubled in the past two decades, from some 37,000 to close to 60,000, and major increases are planned in the future.”

For decades the U.S. military has waged clandestine war on virtually every continent on the globe, but for the first time, high-ranking Special Operations Forces (SOF) officers are moving out of the shadows and into the command mainstream. Their emergence suggests the U.S. is embarking on a military sea change that will replace massive deployments, like Iraq and Afghanistan, with stealthy night raids, secret assassinations, and death-dealing drones. Its implications for civilian control of foreign policy promises to be profound.

Early this month, Vice Adm. Robert Harward—a former commander of the SEALs, the Navy’s elite SOF that recently killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden—was appointed deputy commander of Central Command, the military region that embraces the Middle East and Central Asia. Another SEAL commander, Vice Adm. Joseph Kernan, took over the number two spot in Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Obama administration has been particularly enamored of SOFs, and according to reporters Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post, is in the process of doubling the number of countries where such units are active from 60 to 120. U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Col. Tim ...

Why Pakistani Military Demands A Veto on Drone Strikes
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 17 August 2011
When ISI chief Shuja Pasha went to Washington in April, he took with him the first official Pakistani demand for an equal say in drone strike decisions.

Pakistani civilian and military leaders are insisting on an effective veto over which targets U.S. drone strikes hit, according to well-informed Pakistani military sources here.

The sources, who met with IPS on condition that they not be identified, said that such veto power over the conduct of the drone war is a central element in a new Pakistani demand for a formal government-to-government agreement on the terms under which the United States and Pakistan will cooperate against insurgents in Pakistan.

The basic government-to-government agreement now being demanded would be followed, the sources said, by more detailed agreements between U.S. and Pakistani military leaders and intelligence agencies.

The new Pakistani demand for equal say over drone strikes marks the culmination of a long evolution in the Pakistani military's attitude toward the drone war. Initially supportive of strikes that were targeting Al-Qaeda leaders, senior Pakistani military leaders soon came to realise that the drone war carried serious risks for Pakistan's war against the Pakistani Taliban.

A key turning point in the attitude of the military was the unilateral U.S. decision to focus the drone war on those Pakistani insurgents who had already decided to make peace with the Pakistani government and who opposed the war being waged by Al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban against the Pakistani military.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was allowed to run the drone war almost completely unilaterally for years, according to former Pakistani military leaders and diplomats, and the Pakistani military has only mustered the political will to challenge the U.S. power to carry out drone strikes unilaterally in recent months.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf allowed the drone strikes from 2004 to 2007 in order to ensure political support from the George W. Bush administration, something Musharraf had been denied during the Bill Clinton administration, Shamshad ...

Cuba in The Crosshairs
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 16 August 2011
“A prudent resort to terror should avoid risk to the perpetrator.”

Editor's note: The following excerpt from Noam Chomsky's book “Hegemony or Survival” was originally published on TomDispatch in October of 2003. As Tom Engelhardt says “In these dog days of summer 2011, a little reminder of the history of American-style terror might indeed be just what the doctor ordered.”

The Batista dictatorship was overthrown in January 1959 by Castro's guerrilla forces. In March, the National Security Council (NSC) considered means to institute regime change. In May, the CIA began to arm guerrillas inside Cuba. "During the Winter of 1959-1960, there was a significant increase in CIA-supervised bombing and incendiary raids piloted by exiled Cubans" based in the US. We need not tarry on what the US or its clients would do under such circumstances. Cuba, however, did not respond with violent actions within the United States for revenge or deterrence. Rather, it followed the procedure required by international law. In July 1960, Cuba called on the UN for help, providing the Security Council with records of some twenty bombings, including names of pilots, plane registration numbers, unexploded bombs, and other specific details, alleging considerable damage and casualties and calling for resolution of the conflict through diplomatic channels. US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge responded by giving his "assurance [that] the United States has no aggressive purpose against Cuba." Four months before, in March 1960, his government had made a formal decision in secret to overthrow the Castro government, and preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion were well advanced.

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Special Ops: The New Face of War
Moderator
Published: Monday 15 August 2011
Better to close one’s ears, draw a line in the sand and send in the assault teams.

How do you assure the security of a nation of human beings who consume a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources, habitually live beyond their means and are addicted to all forms of fantasy from Bible-based delusion, to patriotism-based arrogance, to movie special effects that make ordinary human drama seem boring?

What is the most powerful nation in the world with the largest, most expensive, most lethal military in the history of mankind to do when the good times turn bad, the money goes funny and class warfare breaks out on the homefront?

How does modern warfare in a nation-state system that evolved out of feudalism continue to evolve as new communication systems increase? What does modern warfare look like as that nation state system breaks down, to be replaced by a confusing, “globalized” world of power centers and power vacuums?

The answer for the United States seems to be a growing concentration on what is known as Special Operations, which includes Special Forces, Seals and a host of other lethal military forces that emphasize mobility, efficiency, secrecy and unaccountability. Navy Seal Team Six is the showcase unit of US Special Ops warfare; it’s the much-touted force that killed Osama bin Laden in May and on August 6th lost 17 men when their Chinook helicopter was shot down. A total of 38 men were killed in the shoot-down, including pilots, crew and eight Afghans -- plus a dog.

 

Collateral Damage in the War on Anonymity
Moderator
Published: Friday 12 August 2011
Online anonymity is primarily used by hate-mongers to turn constructive public discourse into epithet-filled diatribes.

From warrantless wiretapping to ever-present surveillance cameras, our world is right now in the midst of a long war on anonymity.

In the media and political arenas, we've seen paparazzi culture famously fetishize the outing of anonymous iconoclasts, from Watergate's Deep Throat (Mark Felt) to a top CIA agent working on weapons of mass destruction (Valerie Plame). Likewise, in our communities, we now know that we are almost always being monitored in highly trafficked parks, malls, airports and stadiums — and as Slate recently reported, we may soon have apps on all of our smartphones that let us identify random faces in a crowd.

Teeming with incognito bloggers and commenters, the Internet seemed to be the last bulwark against this trend — a rare public space that let us broadcast opinions from the shadows. But even cyberspace will likely be exposed to the white-hot spotlight of identity, as a new campaign for disclosure now starts in earnest.

Launched in response to cyber-bullying, this campaign made headlines last month when Facebook executive Randi Zuckerberg declared that "anonymity on the Internet has to go away." Her statement echoed that of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who'd previously called for "true transparency and no anonymity" on the Web.

As advertising corporations always seeking new information about their users, Facebook and Google have an obvious financial stake in these positions. Regardless of these firms' particular motives, though, they set standards for the entire Internet. So when their luminaries declare war on anonymity, it's presumably a fait accompli.

Thus, the key question: ...

U.S. Expands Involvement in Mexican Drug War
Moderator
Published: Sunday 7 August 2011
Uncovering the Military's Secret Military
Elizabeth
Published: Wednesday 3 August 2011
"Americans have yet to grapple with what it means to have a “special” force this large, this active, and this secret -- and they are unlikely to begin to do so until more information is available."

Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission.  Now, say that 70 times and you’re done... for the day.  Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries.  This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed, until now.

After a U.S. Navy SEAL put a bullet in Osama bin Laden’s chest and another in his head, one of the most secretive black-ops units in the American military suddenly found its mission in the public spotlight.  It was atypical.  While it’s well known that U.S. Special Operations forces are deployed in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it’s increasingly apparent that such units operate in murkier conflict zones like Yemen and Somalia, the full extent of their worldwide war has remained deeply in the shadows.

Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency.  By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120.  “We do a lot of traveling -- a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq,” he said ...

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