Month: August 2012

Foreign Policy reports there are “many Yemenis who have come to suspect that their government is not fighting, but helping cultivate, jihadi activity in their country.”

According to sources in Yemen’s Interior Ministry and Defense Ministry, as well as independent Yemeni analysts and journalists with intimate knowledge of al Qaeda in Yemen, the Yemeni government is fully aware of a number of al Qaeda cells — and their existence is tolerated and their crimes covered up.

Indeed, this phenomenon is well known in Yemen. As Jeremy Scahill of Nation magazine wrote after visiting Yemen earlier this year: “Since the mujahedeen war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and continuing after 9/11, Saleh has famously milked the threat of Al Qaeda and other militants to leverage counterterrorism funding and weapons from the United States and Saudi Arabia, to bolster his power within the country and to neutralize opponents.”

Abdulghani al-Iryani, a Yemeni political analyst, has said has much about the Saleh regime and he told Foreign Policy that the collaboration between the new US-supported Yemeni regime and al-Qaeda militants continues. “At all levels of Yemen’s political elite you have collusion and cooperation with militants and terrorists,” he said.

The piece goes through a number of examples. Yemen’s Political Security Organization (PSO) – “the government’s most powerful internal security apparatus, is deeply connected to al Qaeda” and has provided safe houses for al-Qaeda leaders when needed. The PSO and Yemen’s top political and military leaders also help individual al-Qaeda militants get out of jail and of course have conspired to help pull off some of Yemen’s high profile prison breaks wherein hundreds of al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Sharia members run free.

All of this collusion is done in order to siphon off more taxpayer dollars, military training from Washington, and major weapons systems from America’s defense corporations:

As for why elements inside the Yemeni government would cooperate with or encourage al Qaeda’s activities, the benefit is clear. The United States backed Saleh’s regime with millions of dollars of assistance for his counterterrorism operations — and it now backs the Hadi government in the hope that it can eradicate the terrorist threat and stabilize Yemen. But elements in the government have an incentive to keep the pot boiling: The greater al Qaeda’s profile in Yemen, the more U.S. dollars flow to Yemeni government coffers. And with the country’s history of rampant corruption, it should shock no one if much of that foreign assistance finds its way into politicians’ pockets.

So not only is the Obama administration sending unprecedented amounts of aid and security assistance to the horrible Yemeni regime which systematically acts as al-Qaeda’s lifeline, but they are continuously bombing the “allied” country with drones, generating anti-American hatred and greater al-Qaeda recruitment. Can you imagine a policy more destructive of its stated ends?

The American Conservative’s Jordon Bloom ran into a befuddled John Bolton at the Republican National Convention yesterday and had a timely question for him:

He was on his way in to observe the speeches, and I knew he wouldn’t have much time to answer more than a question or two in passing. So I asked the most important one: given the definition laid out in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project,was he at all concerned that his advocacy on behalf of the Iranian dissident group the MEK could be defined as material support for terrorism under the PATRIOT Act?

Bolton, visibly flustered at the suggestion that he is a terrorist supporter, disputed the premise before cutting me off:

“I don’t know what you’re up to, but you’re flatly wrong, and I’m busy, so if you’ll excuse me.”

He is indeed a busy man, but if he ever cares to take some time out of his day to explain why I’m wrong, my email is jbloom[at]theamericanconservative.com. Or he could take it up with Glenn Greenwald or Larison.

Oh, how I’d love such an inquiry from Bolton. Perhaps Jordan could also ask why Bolton’s former employer, George W. Bush, included Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorists like MEK in his propaganda justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003. “Iraq shelters terrorist groups including the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization,” reads a document in the archives of the White House’s website, “which has used terrorist violence against Iran and in the 1970s was responsible for killing several U.S. military personnel and U.S. civilians.” Is Bolton proud of this point of commonality between him and Saddam?

The Economist has published interviews with ordinary Yemenis revealing what should be obvious – but clearly isn’t in our Orwellian political world – that continuously bombing another country that we are not at war with tends to generate hatred and create new enemies.

“PEOPLE are afraid to go to weddings because, whenever large groups of men gather, they are afraid a drone will hit them,” says a sheikh from Bayhan district in Shabwa, a haven for al-Qaeda to the south-east of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. He says he sees or hears about one drone a week flying over his home. After a big lunch, reclining on cushions as he and his friends chew the Yemenis’ beloved qat, a leaf that is a mild stimulant, they all grumble about drones. If these tribesmen are anything to go by, the Americans’ increasingly active deployment of drones is far from winning Yemeni hearts and minds in the battle against jihadism.

“Our people ask how these foreign planes have a right to come here and kill them, even if some of the people they kill are al-Qaeda,” says a friend of the sheikh, a smuggler. “The other thing is that they think the drones are taking photos of them and spying on them. Because of this, our people have finished with America. They see America as this,” he adds, making the letter X with his fingers. All the men on the cushions are convinced that drones photograph their wives, a vile insult in conservative Yemen.

The expanding drone war in Yemen, which often kills civilians, does in fact cause blowback and help al-Qaeda recruitment – as attested to by numerous Yemen experts, investigative reporting on the ground, polling, testimony from Yemen activists, and the actual fact that recent bungled terrorist attacks aimed at the US have cited such drone attacks as motivating factors.

To take just one recent example, a US drone strike launched last night reportedly killed 5 people, including at least two civilians. One of those civilians was an imam who was known for his mosque sermons condemning al-Qaeda, according to Haykal Bafana, a prominent Yemeni lawyer and activist. It’s hard to understand how someone could deny the potential for this kind of incident, which is becoming normalized in Yemen, to bolster the influence and recruitment of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

This policy of weekly bombings, mind you, remains technically classified, allowing the Obama administration to skirt any and all responsibility by citing national security concerns and shrouded it in secrecy. The President, personally, with top counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan are picking who they can kill, and what groups of people they can target, without providing any evidence against the suspects and without any checks or balances. As we know, this process holds even for American citizens with constitutional rights. So not only is the drone war in Yemen dangerous, murderous, and strategically counterproductive, but it also represents one of the most dramatic expansions of executive authority in modern American history.

The New York Times has a short documentary video (which they won’t allow people to embed, so you must follow the link) directed by Laura Poitras about William Binney, the former NSA analyst and mathematician-turned whistleblower.

Binney described details about Stellar Wind, the N.S.A.’s top-secret domestic spying program begun after 9/11, which was so controversial that it nearly caused top Justice Department officials to resign in protest, in 2004.

The video is well worth watching, as it vividly reiterates what Binney has been coming out and saying, that the Bush administration, in its post-9/11 surveillance activities, committed “a direct violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in the country,” and that the NSA is currently collecting information on “virtually every US citizen.” Binney has also condemned the Obama administration: “…the real problem I see is that the [Obama] DoJ is covering up for all the crimes that this administration and the previous administration has been committing against every one in the public.”

Poitras has her own experiences with intrusive surveillance practices of the US government.

The United States apparently placed me on a“watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.

The 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which oversees the N.S.A. activities, are up for renewal in December. Two members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats, are trying to revise the amendments to insure greater privacy protections. They have been warning about “secret interpretations” of laws and backdoor “loopholes” that allow the government to collect our private communications. Thirteen senators havesigned a letter expressing concern about a “loophole” in the law that permits the collection of United States data. The A.C.L.U. and other groups have also challenged the constitutionality of the law, and the Supreme Court will hear arguments in that case on Oct. 29.

Completely under the radar, Obama has sent 200 additional US Marines to Guatemala on another drug war adventure. Associated Press:

A team of 200 U.S. Marines began patrolling Guatemala’s western coast this week in an unprecedented operation to beat drug traffickers in the Central America region, a U.S. military spokesman said Wednesday.

The Marines are deployed as part of Operation Martillo, a broader effort started last Jan. 15 to stop drug trafficking along the Central American coast. Focused exclusively on drug dealers in airplanes or boats, the U.S.-led operation involves troops or law enforcement agents from Belize, Britain, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, France, Guatemala, Honduras, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Panama and Spain.

“This is the first Marine deployment that directly supports countering transnational crime in this area, and it’s certainly the largest footprint we’ve had in that area in quite some time,” said Marine Staff Sgt. Earnest Barnes at the U.S. Southern Command in Miami.

Talk about policing the world. The plan, according to military officials, is to intercept drug traffickers. A similar US mission is being carried out by commando-style DEA agents and hundreds of US soldiers in neighboring Honduras. In that case, it has brought about several incidents of killings of Hondurans by American forces and a massive uptick in support and training for a corrupt league of Honduran security forces with a long list of human rights abuses.

Washington’s prohibitionist policies in Central America have caused drug profits to skyrocket and its support for undemocratic police states in Latin America has pushed cartels to build well-armed militias that give state armies a run for their money.

The US has an ugly, bloody history in the region. In Guatemala, the Eisenhower administration imposed a military coup and then sent in the US military while fueling a violent civil war that left more than 200,000 people dead. The height of the bloodshed occurred under 1980s US ally and beneficiary Ríos Montt, during which the number of killings and disappearances reached more than 3,000 per month. Montt’s forces, with the help of his chief of staff Fuentes (recently brought to court for war crimes), slit the throats of women and children, beat innocent civilians and doused them in gasoline to be burned alive, tortured, and mutilated thousands of innocent indigenous peasants. The UN commission investigating the atrocities concluded it constituted acts of genocide. No inquiry into the culpability of US officials has been initiated.

Guatemala currently receives approximately $1oo million in aid annually from the U.S., despite a record of corruption and ties to the drug gangs. The former president, Alfonso Portillo, is in prison on charges of massive corruption. Scores of police chiefs, senior military commanders, and defense ministers have been indicted throughout an attempt to crack down on security forces with drug-trafficking ties.

The Kaibiles, the ruthless U.S.-trained Guatemalan state militia infamous for their role in killing civilians during Guatemala’s civil war, are being recruited in large numbers to violent Mexican drug gangs. Mexico’s Zetas drug cartel is paying large sums to a multitude of Kaibiles forces to pass on the training they received from the United States military.

This is the reality of the US drug war in Central America. And the Obama administration has just exacerbated the chaos by marching in 200 US Marines to Guatemala. Bravo.

Via, Mondoweiss, a new resolution passed by the California State Assembly attempts to limit criticism of Israeli policy on college campuses by equating it with anti-Semitic hate speech. The law urges “California colleges and universities to squelch nascent anti-Semitism” and “encourages university leaders to combat a wide array of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel actions,” according to the Associated Press.

The Assembly’s actions also drew criticism from free speech advocates. Carlos Villarreal, director of the San Francisco chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, called the resolution irresponsible and dangerous because it combines legitimate condemnations of acts of intimidation and hate with specific objections to tactics used to support the Palestinian people.

“In doing so, it can be seen as having no other purpose than to demonize all those who criticize the nation-state of Israel or support the rights of the Palestinian people,” he said.

Typically, those who want to suppress free speech criticisms of Israeli crimes are relegated to the tools of social ostracism or return criticism – you know, because of that First Amendment thing. The cry of anti-Semitism has been successful in this respect, unfortunately. This bill, by contrast, attempts to codify into law an obligation to “squelch” activism and speech objecting to Israeli government actions. Read the text of the resolution here. Fortunately, growing criticism of the bill has led the University of California to refuse to support it.