Month: January 2013

Politico reports:

Fifty-three percent of Americans believe the government is a threat, and 43 percent do not, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Three-in-ten Americans believe government constitutes a major threat. In a poll conducted October 2003, only 45 percent saw government as a threat to their freedoms. Fifty-four percent do not.

I’m not necessarily one to take public opinion as sacred (majorities of Americans support all kinds of horrible things), but it’s hard to blame the 53% of Americans who think the government is a threat to their liberties. The sectors of the economy in which the government is most involved are also the most dysfunctional (e.g., healthcare, banking, etc.). We live in an age where there is a bipartisan consensus that the government can secretly spy on Americans communications without a warrant from a traditional court; political activists are infiltrated with government agents; the President can wage secret wars with robots and can even kill US citizens without a shred of due process; American citizens may be subject to indefinite detention on the say-so of the Executive branch alone; and so on.

Granted, 70% of those who think the government jeopardizes liberties are Republicans, so many respondents are thinking about Obama taking away their gun rights and their Christianity. But 45% are not gun owners and 55% of independents are in the camp that believe the government is a threat to their liberties. And with the level of encroachment into people’s lives and liberties these days, it shouldn’t be surprising.

Micah Zenko is betting that the latest UN investigation into drone killings by the United States “is unlikely to compel increased transparency from the Obama administration.” Essentially, this is because similar investigations have been going on for about ten years and the Bush and Obama administrations have had the same response to them: “Screw off.”

After the first targeted assassination by drone killed six al-Qaeda suspects in November 2002 in Yemen, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, Asma Jahangir, demanded some answers and indicated this probably violated international law. Jahangir wrote:

The Special Rapporteur is extremely concerned that should the information received be accurate, an alarming precedent might have been set for extrajudicial execution by consent of Government. The Special Rapporteur acknowledges that Governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens against the excesses of non-State actors or other authorities, but these actions must be taken in accordance with international human rights and humanitarian law. In the opinion of the Special Rapporteur, the attack in Yemen constitutes a clear case of extrajudicial killing.

The Bush administration’s response, as Zenko documents, was to have “no comment” on the validity of the reports and to say that humanitarian laws wouldn’t apply to “enemy combatants.” This was of course characteristic of the post-9/11 view that the entire world was a limitless battlefield where the US was unrestrained in what it could do because it was all in self-defense against imminent terrorist attacks. Right.

And when UN special rapporteurs made similar inquiries into Obama’s drone attacks, they were similarly stiff armed. And the Obama administration made the same argument as Bush: these attacks were in self-defense of imminent terrorist attacks and it doesn’t matter that they occurred outside of an official battlefield because the world is our battlefield.

Two things are important to point out here. First of all, the notion that every one of Obama’s 400-plus drone strikes was in self-defense of an imminent terrorist attack is asinine. We know from reporting about the administration’s use of “signature strikes,” that bombs are dropped on people that the US cannot even identify, but who have supposedly demonstrated a “pattern of behavior” that suggests they might be a member of a terrorist organization. The very use of signature strikes appears to obliterate the argument that the drones are disrupting “imminent” attacks.

Obama has twisted the meaning of “imminence” in order to claim the drone war fits within international law. As Secrecy News explained while describing a legal memo scrutinizing the rationale in support of drone strikes:

For example, [Congressional Research Service] says the Administration appears to have redefined the meaning of “imminence,” one of the required elements for justifying the use of force in self-defense on the territory of another country.  The standard definition of imminence refers to an overwhelming threat that allows “no moment for deliberation.”  But the Administration uses imminence idiosyncratically “to refer to the window of opportunity for striking rather than the perceived immediacy of the threat of an armed attack.”  This novel usage “may pose some challenge to the international law regarding the use of force,” CRS said.

The use of force in the drone war is patently illegal without the the justification of self-defense from imminent attacks. Redefining the word is a sly way of being a criminal without admitting it.

The second thing that is important when considering the Obama administration’s defense of its drone war is the issue of secrecy. If the administration is so confident that the drone war is being carried out legally, why continue to “neither confirm nor deny” the existence of specific strikes? Why has Obama kept the official legal rationale for the drone war secret, not just from the American people or the UN, but from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to provide oversight of such policies?

If one thing has been clear throughout history and certainly in Obama’s first term as President, it’s that people in government keep things secret to protect themselves from public and legal scrutiny, not for their stated reasons of “protecting national security.”

So while the ramped up investigation at the UN is a good sign, all indications are that the Obama administration will, once again, thwart any attempt to impose legal scrutiny, transparency, and accountability to his drone war.

From The Independent:

Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.

According to Haaretz, “while the women were still in transit camps in Ethiopia they were sometimes intimidated or threatened into taking the injection.”

“They told us they are inoculations,” said one of the women interviewed. “They told us people who frequently give birth suffer. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.”

“We said we won’t have the shot,” recounted another woman. “They told us, if you don’t you won’t go to Israel.”

“The injections given to Ethiopian women are part and parcel of the overall Israeli attitude toward this wave of immigrants,” said one Haaretz Op-Ed writer.

See Justin Raimondo’s recent column on Israel’s treatment of black Jewish immigrants.

After 13 failed appeals, a Guatemalan court on Monday ordered 86-year-old former US-backed dictator Efrain Rios Montt to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

“Prosecutors allege Rios Montt, who ruled as commander-in-chief for 17 months, turned a blind eye as soldiers used rape, torture and arson against leftist insurgents and targeted indigenous people during a ‘scorched earth’ military offensive that killed at least 1,771 members of the Ixil tribe,” Reuters reports.

Rios Montt wasn’t the only one turning a “blind eye.” He came to power in a military coup and “was a close ally of Washington who received training at the infamous “School of the Americas,” writes Cyril Mychalejko. The Reagan administration…

not only covered up, but aided and abetted war crimes and genocide in Guatemala. For example, President Reagan traveled to Guatemala in December 1982 to declare that Rios Montt was getting a “bum rap”, while praising the dictator’s “progressive efforts” and dedication to democracy and social justice. Just a few days after Reagan’s presidential visit the Guatemalan military massacred 251 men, women and children in Las Dos Erres.

The United States was party to an extensive list of human rights violations and possible crimes against humanity going back to the Eisenhower administration, when in 1954 the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA.

The 1960-96 conflict in Guatemala, with consistent US intervention on the side of the government and paramilitary groups, saw some 200,000 people, predominantly indigenous Mayan, murdered or disappeared. The height of the bloodshed occurred under 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, 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 has already concluded it constituted acts of genocide.

Montt may finally face trial. No one has dared to suggest that those in Washington who supported, and were complicit in, his crimes ought to face similar justice.

Did Israeli government officials aggressively promote an unsubstantiated story about an explosion at an Iranian nuclear facility?

According to Ali Gharib at The Daily Beast, yes. He writes that it is “an object lesson that shows just how far some press—and even Israeli government officials—have gone down the rabbit hole on Iran issues by propagating a story reported on a conspiracy website.”

Reports have been circulating for days claiming there was such an explosion at the Iranian enrichment facility at Fordow. It might have just disappeared, but Israeli officials started pushing the story in the press, without citing any evidence, of course.

Gharib explains: