Month: February 2012

There was a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee today on legislation proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein that would make clear that the U.S. government may not indefinitely detain American citizens without charge or trial, notwithstanding the language in NDAA establishing otherwise. Kevin Gosztola at FireDogLake has extended coverage of the hearings, which were sort of like having a congressional hearing reaffirming the fact that there are two chambers of Congress. It should be an accepted fact that the state does not have the legal or moral authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without charge or trial. That it isn’t indicates how truly perverse the zeitgeist in the country is.

Speaking of perversity, Steven G. Bradbury, former Assistant Attorney General and head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration, spoke to the committee on the matter. As Gosztola reminds us, Bradbury was “an author of one of the Bush torture memos” and “deserves to be tried in court for his role in the Bush Administration.” Who better to speak on constitutional law, right?

Bradbury said that because “the evident purpose of the legislation is to prevent the President from detaining…without criminal charge…any American citizen” even if they’re alleged to be a member of al-Qaeda, he strongly disagrees with it. He said that there are “extraordinary circumstances during an armed conflict when the President may determine it necessary to detain a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant consistent with the laws of war.” Plainly, the President does have the authority to disregard the Bill of Rights in “extraordinary circumstances” like war. Lucky for us, those “extraordinary circumstances” have become simply “ordinary circumstances” and the war – as Sen. Lindsey Graham has said – is “without end.”

To recap for people, Obama signed the NDAA into law, codifying the government’s right to detain individuals in the war on terror without charge or trial, even U.S. citizens. Obama signed it, but issued a signing statement in which he promised with a cherry on top he wouldn’t use it on U.S. citizens. Feinstein in the Senate, and others in the House, have decided that’s just not good enough and have pushed legislation establishing that, in the language of Rep. Chris Gibson’s bill, “the writ of habeas corpus shall remain available to any individual detained within the United States and no American citizen or lawful resident may be detained without all the rights of due process…”

It’s not clear to me at this point how much support these efforts will get in Congress, but the fact that people like Bradbury are giving testimony on it is troubling. Furthermore, even if these efforts are successful and are signed into law, it’s doubtful that would undo the damage done in December when NDAA was passed, for the same reason Obama’s after-the-fact signing statement didn’t cut it. Namely, these provisions are now on the books, and I assume future leaders could still draw on the language in NDAA to deprive U.S. citizens of the right to defend themselves in a court.

Most of those in Washington pushing for direct intervention into Syria by, at least, supporting the opposition fighters with weapons and intelligence are still harping on the whole “humanitarian intervention” narrative. Like most of the garbage that comes out of the mouths of politicians, this narrative is largely a lie, but I always find it interesting when politicians readily admit the truth, no matter how ugly.

A number of the Republican presidential candidates have openly admitted that a U.S. intervention is Syria would not be about a humanitarian mission based on the Responsibility to Protect Syrians. Rather, they explain, the terrible bloodletting in Syria should be exploited in order to weaken Iran. Ha’aretz:

On the possibility of intervention in Syria, Senator Rick Santorum said “Syria is a puppet state of Iran. They are a threat not just to Israel, but they have been a complete destabilizing force within Lebanon, which is another problem for Israel, and Hezbollah.”

Romney said that amid all the bad news coming from the Middle East, a troubled Syrian regime is one piece of good news. “The key ally of Iran, Syria, has a leader that’s in real trouble. And we ought to grab a hold of that like it’s the best thing we’ve ever seen,” said Romney, adding that the U.S. needs to work with the Alwaites, the ethnic group of Syrian President Bashar Assad, to show them they have a future without Assad. In addition, said Romney, the U.S. needs to work with Saudi Arabia and with Turkey to support the Syrian rebels with weaponry. “If we can turn Syria and Lebanon away from Iran, we finally have the capacity to get Iran to pull back. And we can, at that point, with crippling sanctions and a very clear statement that military action is an action that will be taken if they pursue nuclear weaponry. That can change the course of world history.”

Romney and Santorum aren’t the only ones. Rep. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said recently in a video message to his constituents that arming and aiding the Syrian opposition is “in our national security interest” because “Iran,” which he described as “the number one immediate threat facing the world and the United States,” has “no stronger ally in the world than Syria” and “the loss of the Assad regime in Syria is the single, most damaging thing that can happen to Iran’s regime.”

How quickly notions of humanitarian intervention begin to fade. This should make it clear to anyone still mulling the issue that humanitarian concern was not a part of the intervention in Libya. It should also raise questions about the dominant narrative on Iran: note that a consensus in the military and intelligence community that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons and has demonstrated no intention of doing so has not deterred a U.S. policy of military encirclement and crippling economic sanctions that are almost surely a prelude to war. Clearly, a nuclear weapons program has little to do with the supposed “threat” posed by Iran. Yes, the U.S. is laid prostrate in subservience to Israel on the Iran issue and that certainly explains part of it. But I wonder what it will take for this false narrative to fade away and for Washington to start readily admitting the grand strategy implications on Iran, as opposed to lies about an Iranian nuke, giving WMDs to terrorists, and annihilating Israel.

An article today by Charlie Savage in the New York Times looks at President Obama’s announcement of “waivers” related to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and its provisions related to the open-ended military detention of suspects. It is noteworthy in two respects:

a) It manages to get through all 16 paragraphs while never once actually naming the National Defense Authorization Act explicitly, but only making oblique references to it.

b) It describes the law thusly:

The rule, imposed by Congress, applies only to a narrow category of terrorism suspects: those who are not American citizens, who are deemed to be part of Al Qaeda or its allies and who are suspected of participating in a terrorist plot against the United States or its allies.

Which is untrue. The first draft of the act explicitly exempted US citizens from military detention, but Sen. Carl Levin (D – MI) removed that exemption at the behest of the White House.

In the end, the “waivers” are another attempt by the president to assert his own power over detainees rather than to limit the potential impact of the open-ended detentions. The waivers don’t rule out military detention for anybody (not even American citizens) but instead just gives the Attorney General the power to make the final decision on whether or not they get access to civilian courts.

George Little, Pentagon Press Secretary and Captain John Kirby, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Media Operations spoke to reporters yesterday about the ruckus unleashed in Afghanistan after the U.S. military burned Muslim holy books. Massive protests have taken place, even spreading over into Pakistan, against the foreign occupiers for “dishonoring the Koran…disrespecting our dead and killing our children.” The chaos led NATO to abruptly pull all its staff from the Afghanistan’s government ministries on Saturday after a vengeful Afghan shot a U.S. colonel and major inside the ministry, and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker pleaded not to pull out early just because of the unrest.

I just wanted to note two quick things about the Pentagon’s statement’s yesterday.

GEORGE LITTLE: Tragically, many in Afghanistan have been killed or wounded as a result of violence there.  Extremists have killed four Americans, including two officers within the confines of the Afghan Interior Ministry.  These are tough losses, and they demonstrate that we will experience challenges in the course of this campaign.

Many Afghans “have been killed or wounded as a result of the violence there.” More accurately, U.S.-supported Afghan security forces have killed and wounded dozens of Afghans who are protesting the abuses of foreign domination. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out:

Meanwhile, the protesters themselves continue to be shot, although mostAmerican media accounts favor sentences like these which whitewash who is doing the killing: “running clashes with the police that claimed the lives of another five Afghan protesters” and “in Nangarhar Province, two Afghans protesting the Koran burning were shot to death outside an American base in Khogyani District” and “protesters angry over the burning of Korans at the largest American base in Afghanistan this week took to the streets in demonstrations in a half-dozen provinces on Wednesday that left at least seven dead and many more injured.” Left at least seven dead: as As’ad AbuKhalil observed, “notice that there is no killer in the phrasing.”

Secondly, Little said the following:

But let me be clear.  First, Secretary Panetta and Chairman Dempsey are fully committed to our strategy in Afghanistan.  They believe we have achieved significant progress in reversing the Taliban’s momentum and in developing the Afghan security forces, and they believe that the fundamentals of our strategy remain sound.

…We’re making progress.  We have put the enemy on its heels in many parts of the country.  Doesn’t mean that there isn’t work to be done — there is — but let’s not let the events of the past week steer us away from the reality that we have made significant progress throughout the country.

I won’t run through the catalog of evidence plainly disproving these statements. I’ve done that sufficiently elsewhere. A short excerpt from Michael Hastings’s book The Operators gets the point across:

The United States regularly declares success in Afghanistan, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. A year doesn’t pass without public declarations of progress. In 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says, “It’s not a quagmire.” In 2003, the commanding general in Afghanistan says that U.S. forces should be down to 4,500 soldiers by the end of the following summer. After that summer, General John P. Abizaid says the Taliban “is increasingly ineffective.” In 2005, the Taliban is “collapsing,” says General Dave Barno. In 2007, we are “prevailing against the effects of prolonged war,” declares Major General Robert Durbin. In 2008, General Dan McNeill claims that “my successor will find an insurgency here, but it is not spreading.” That same year, Defese Secretary Robert Gates assures us we have a “very successful counterinsurgency,” and we won’t need a “larger western footprint” in the country.

This month, Lt. Col. Daniel Davis embarrassed the U.S. leadership in Afghanistan when he wrote a report arguing “Our current military leadership is so distorting the information it releases that the deterioration of the situation and the failing nature of our efforts is shielded from the American public (and Congress), and replaced instead with explicit statements that all is going according to plan.” I guess those criticisms didn’t stick.

At Mondoweiss, Allison Deger informs us of pending Israeli legislation that would allow Israeli settlers in the West Bank to construct unpaved roads without a permit. Essentially, “settlers would be given a quick and cheap holding tactic, to confiscate Palestinian land.”

Under the proposed legislation, Israeli-only roads in the West Bank will begin to take on a different function. This network of roadways currently exists to speed travel between the settlements and create physical barriers between Palestinian villages. The new law would treat roads as something similar to the caravans in illegal settler outposts – a means of pushing Palestinians off their land. The Civil Administration confirms the land grabbing function of the bill, stating: “the request did not deal with the paving of roads for vehicular traffic to preserve this land.”

Chiam Levinson explains in Haaretz, “as a practical matter it would significantly expand the amount of land around West Bank settlements that is off-limits to Palestinians.”

There has been considerable focus in recent weeks on the inordinate sway Israel has on U.S. foreign policy, especially towards Iran. Reckless Israeli policy and rhetoric on the Iran issue could get the U.S. into a war that Obama administration officials have repeatedly criticized as unnecessary. But almost no attention has been paid lately to how U.S. subservience to Israel works to continue the defunct peace process and how lavish U.S. support for Israel is actually support for illegal Israeli expansion and annexation of Palestinian land.

This piece of legislation is a perfect example of that. Israeli-only roads in the occupied West Bank have for a long time illustrated rather starkly the nature of the apartheid system there. But this legislation would build on that and expand the amount of land Palestinians are not allowed to trespass. It is a policy of expansion, clear as day.

There is another plan being pushed in the Israeli Knesset which proposed to annex “Area C” of the West Bank, which makes up over 60% of the total, and establish formal Israeli law there and “naturalize” some 50,000 Palestinians from the seized territory. At least 27 Likud party Knesset members have endorsed the idea.

Last week, Israel again approved the construction of 695 new housing units in and around the West Bank settlement of Shiloh, north-east of Ramallah. The United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Robert Serry, called the decision “deplorable and moves us further away from the goal of a two-state solution.” Settlements on Palestinian territory and the related destruction of Palestinian homes has been constantly recognized as illegal by the international community. The United Nations recently called on Israel to immediately halt the destruction of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, as it also violates international law. Israeli forces destroyed 622 Palestinian homes in the West Bank in 2011, forcibly displacing over 1,100 people, over half of them children. “The current policy and practice of demolitions cause extensive human suffering and should end,” said UN humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territories, Maxwell Gaylard.

When asked about this, Israeli officials like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sort of shrug and act as if this is just some naturally occurring phenomenon instead of a systematic policy. In a press conference with Obama in the summer of 2010, Netanyahu said two states based on the ’67 borders was impossible because of “certain demographic changes,” forgetting to mention that those changes were intended to prevent such a political settlement. Again, the policy is clearly expansion, if incremental. And it goes on because of U.S. support.

A recent report from the European Union warned that “if current trends are not stopped and reversed, the establishment of a viable Palestinian state within pre-1967 borders seem more remote than ever.” And that, indeed, seems to be the intention.

The EU report explained how “a combination of house and farm building demolitions; a prohibitive planning regime; relentless settlement expansion; the military’s separation barrier; obstacles to free movement; and denial of access to vital natural resources, including land and water, is eroding Palestinian tenure of the large tract of the West Bank on which hopes of a contiguous Palestinian state depend.”

Everyone is in on the debate about what to do vis-a-vis Israel and Iran. Even the elite media puts their two-cents of propaganda in there. But there is no prominent debate on Israeli occupation and American support of it, anywhere.

(Image via Mondoweiss)

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a very interesting exchange with Wyatt Andrews of CBS News yesterday. In it, Clinton suggested the opposition fighters in Syria are not a cohesive enough group to justify sending arms and that U.S. intervention on behalf of the opposition has the potential to indirectly aid al-Qaeda or Hamas. I’ve written about these issues here, here, and here. Here are some excerpts:

QUESTION: The Administration made a point this week of suggesting that if Assad does not step down, does not stop the violence, that the U.S. would consider additional measures. Talk to me. What are the additional measures?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I’m not going to go into that, Wyatt. I think we did signal that this kind of wanton violence is just unacceptable. There are countries that are much closer with a much greater stake in the neighborhood who are looking at what they might do. Obviously, we are talking with them to see whether they intend to take action and whether they need any kind of logistical or other support, but no decisions have been made.

This response leaves me pretty curious. It seems clear that, if the U.S. were to aid the Syrian opposition, the most likely route would be to do it through a third party, probably one of the Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. This would be done, I assume, for the sake of deniability and to further remove any sense of responsibility for the ensuing consequences. We know Saudi Arabia and Qatar have openly argued for arming the opposition and have actually become frustrated with the U.S. on account of their “inactivity.” Some such support is already taking place from over the borders of Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon, although it hasn’t amounted to much. Many credible voices have argued that so-called “logistical” or intelligence support has been given from the U.S., but that has probably amounted to even less. Clinton denies this third-party support is taking place at the moment, although we can’t be sure what’s happening behind the scenes.

QUESTION: You’re suggesting nonlethal support? Or are you suggesting that the United States may support the closet backchannel arming of the rebels that’s going on now?

SECRETARY CLINTON: We have made no decisions to do any of the above. We are in consultations with others who are watching this as we are watching it, and trying to determine what more can be done.

Clinton then speaks to the moral and practical aspects of this push to arm the opposition:

QUESTION: When I go back to the plight of the folks being shelled and who are very plaintive in their requests of the international community to be stronger, the question is: How long does the killing go on before the additional measures you’re talking about kick in?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I think, Wyatt, if you take just a moment to imagine all the terrible conflicts that go on in the world, we have seen in the last 15 years millions of people killed in the Eastern Congo in the most brutal, terrible, despicable ways. It wasn’t on TV. There were no Skype-ing from the jungles that were the killing fields. And I could point to many other places where governments oppress people, where governments are turning against their own people. And you have to be very clear-eyed about what is possible and what the consequences of anything you might wish to do could be.

I am incredibly sympathetic to the calls that somebody do something. But it is also important to stop and ask what that is and who’s going to do it and how capable anybody is of doing it. And I like to get to the second, third, and fourth order questions, and those are very difficult ones.

QUESTION: The U.S. has repeatedly said that it’s reluctant to support the direct arming of the dissidents. The U.S. has been reluctant to arm the dissidents. Why?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, first of all, we really don’t know who it is that would be armed. We have met some of the people from the Syrian National Council. They’re not inside Syria. This is not Libya, where you had a base of operations in Benghazi, where you had people who were representing the entire opposition to Libya, who were on the road meeting with me rather constantly, meeting with others. You could get your arms around what it is you were being asked to do and with whom. We don’t have any clarity on that. We —

QUESTION: But what’s the – Madam Secretary, what’s the fear?…of arming the rebels?

SECRETARY CLINTON: First of all, as I just said, what are we going to arm them with, and against what? You’re not going to bring tanks over the borders of Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. That’s not going to happen.

So maybe at the best, you can smuggle in automatic weapons, maybe some other weapons that you could get in. To whom, where do you go? You can’t get into Homs. Where do you go? And to whom are you delivering them? We know al-Qaida. Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria. Are we supporting al-Qaida in Syria? Hamas is now supporting the opposition. Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?

So I think, Wyatt, despite the great pleas that we hear from those people who are being ruthlessly assaulted by Assad, you don’t see uprisings across Syria the way you did in Libya. You don’t see militias forming in places where the Syrian military is not trying to get to Homs. You don’t see that, Wyatt. So if you’re a military planner or if you’re a Secretary of State and you’re trying to figure out, do you have the elements of an opposition that is actually viable, we don’t see that. We see immense human suffering that is heartbreaking and a stain on the honor of those security forces who are doing it.