May 14, 2013| News | Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, The Washington Post reports this week that in addition to the escalating sexual assault problem in the the military, there have been an uncomfortable number of sex crimes, convictions and what can only be called criminal behavior at the recruiter level, too.

Turns out, in all branches, a number of guys put in the position of shepherding young people into the military turn out to be classic predators, or in some cases, highly sexed (adult!) meat heads who don’t know it’s wrong to have sex on office desks or in parked cars and exchange nude pictures with the 17-year-old high school students they’re charged with recruiting into the service. In the worst cases, male recruiters have been charged with raping and sodomizing young women and according to WaPo’s report, not all have been charged by civilian authorities, resulting in a lighter sentence for their crimes.

“The extent of the problem is hard to ascertain because the Defense Department does not keep figures on recruiters accused of sex crimes,” the paper said Monday. That’s a shocker. We know from last week’s bad news that the DoD estimates that some 26,000 sexual assaults occurred throughout the military ranks in 2012. Of them, only 3,374 were even reported, mostly because of fear of reprisals.  Sadly, we’re getting a picture of how far these problems go back.

“There certainly is a power dynamic there that makes it a target-rich environment for a predator,” said Anu Bhagwati, the executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network, which has been on the forefront of the sexual assault issue.

According to the Air Force — also known as the most aggressively evangelical Christian of all the branches — it court-martialed an average of four recruiters a year for sexual misconduct or unprofessional relationships since 2008. The Air Force is currently under a massive investigation for the rape and assault of young trainees at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Also in Texas, a Air Force recruiter faces a military court next month on charges that he raped and sodomized and engaged in other crimes with 18 young women he tried to enlist over a three year period.

Of course, given the statistics — there are over 10,000 recruiters in the Army, 6,200 in the Navy, for example — the overall number of incidents may seem small. But tell that to the girls. At Fort Knox, Ky., there were 387 reported incidents  (327 “substantiated”) of sexual misconduct at the recruiting level.  That seems like a lot in five years.

A target-rich environment for predators. From recruitment up through the officer level, it never seems to stop. The question no one seems to want to ask is whether the military is screening for the kind of sociopathic types that go on to commit these crimes; whether the military is doing enough to combat the institutionalized misogyny that nurtures and protects this “environment” in the first place. Until it does, I suggest young women find another way to “be all they can be,” outside the military. Believe me, if the military wants to fight more wars, they will need the women — they made up some 12 percent of the ranks in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Forcing the military to change by opting out until that happens may be the only way.

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May 13, 2013| News | Lucy Steigerwald

Photo credit: Cherri Gregg/via CBS Philly

The 1993 Waco siege is often categorized as one of the more violent, militaristic, domestic actions by U.S. law enforcement in recent memory. And it should be. At the Branch Davidian’s “compound” a fatal combination of government arrogance, fear, impatience, and aggression lead to 76 bodies, including 20 children.

A less bloody confrontation took place in Philadelphia on May 13, 1985 — but the relatively low body count in the MOVE standoff (11 people, including 5 children) was no thanks to law enforcement. MOVE were a group of black activists who were anti-technology and government, pro-environmentalist, and who had a history of confrontations with law enforcement. Their neighbors had complained the group was loud and messy and aggressive. On May 13, attempts to evict MOVE and serve arrest warrants for four of the members led to an armed standoff. And when law enforcement grew too impatient to wait out the group, they simply dropped a C4/Tovex bomb on the house — ostensibly to dislodge a wooden structure on the roof — which turned into a fire that spread unchecked  and took out 60-some homes, the entire block.

Like Waco, this standoff with so-called radicals involved disputed who-fired-first exchanges of gunfire; it also involved members being jailed, while government and law enforcement officials got — at best — a stern talking-to. By 1999, when law enforcement finally admitted they had used incendiary devices at Waco, many people felt that the standoff had been a disaster. But nobody in the ATF, FBI, or Department of Justice was ever charged. And nine surviving Branch Davidians went to jail, one for 15 years.

There are more parallels with Waco: accusations that the MOVE members set a fire themselves, counter-accusations that police held firefighters back (this was definitely true at Waco and MOVE both).

Today CBS Philly has an interview with one of two survivors of the standoff, Ramona Africa:

“The whole house shook, but we didn’t know what it was,” says Africa, recalling the moment the city dropped explosives on the MOVE home on Osage Avenue. “We didn’t even know initially that there was a fire.”

Africa says she was in the basement when the bomb hit.

She and her family were holed up, in a standoff with police and other city officials.

Africa says the authorities employed water tactics and tear gas…then the explosives.

“We tried to get our children, our animals, ourselves out of that blazing inferno,” she says. “And as the cops saw us coming out, they opened fire.”

Accounts of the day vary. Philadelphia police have disputed Africa’s account. She escaped, with injuries, along with one child survivor, Birdie Africa, who was 13 at the time.

“We never saw Birdie again after that until my criminal trial,” she says. “He testified. His mother was killed in the bombing.”

Africa spent seven years in prison for her part in the standoff, but no one from the city was ever charged. She filed a civil lawsuit against the city and won after years of litigation.

The rest over here.

The point? Only that law enforcement began militarizing before there was a Department of Homeland Security to offer plush grants for cool new tech. And while Waco may have been a high-water mark in domestic brutality, MOVE also deserves to be remembered. Both incidents serve to underline the point that long before terrorism was the excuse for a “war at home,” that war was already happening for unsympathetic groups in the United States. And as in any war, if the casualties are not members of a favorite elite, their deaths are nothing more than unfortunate collateral damage.

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May 13, 2013| News | John Glaser

After a very lengthy legal process, “former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt was found guilty on Friday of genocide and crimes against humanity during the bloodiest phase of the country’s 36-year civil war,” Reuters reports.

Montt came to power in Guatemala in a 1982 military coup. Not surprisingly, the United States trained him at the infamous School of the Americas, where many a future Latin American mass murderer learned his trade. After coming to power amid instability, Montt proceeded to slaughter thousands of innocent people, mostly poor indigenous villagers. At the height of the bloodshed, the number of killings and disappearances reached more than 3,000 per month.

Throughout his mass atrocities, Montt continued to receive extensive support from the United States. President Reagan, America’s freedom-loving hero of the 80′s, described Montt as “a man of great personal integrity.” The Reagan administration actively covered up and aided Montt’s ruthless crimes against humanity –  you know, for the sake of democracy.

Montt will spend the rest of his life in jail and will be forever remembered in the history books as a genocidal murderer. No one has dared to suggest whether those in Washington who supported Montt’s crimes ought to face similar justice.

Update: Jim Lobe’s blog post following the Montt conviction on Friday is a must-read. In it, Lobe points out that Elliot Abrams, respected scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, probably bears considerable personal responsibility for his involvement in U.S. policy toward Guatemala as Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights. In another post, Lobe points out the irony of having Elliot Abrams, a veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal in which the Reagan administration secretly and illegally sold weapons to Iran in order to continue supporting the ruthless Contra rebels in Nicaragua in violation of explicit congressional action to stop said support, comment on the Benghazi “cover-up.” Read them both.

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May 13, 2013| News | John Glaser

Aryn Baker at TIME reports on a video out of Syria depicting the savagery of rebel commander Khalid al-Hamad:

The video starts out like so many of the dozens coming out of the war in Syria every day, with the camera hovering over the body of a dead Syrian soldier. But the next frame makes it clear why this video, smuggled out of the city of Homs and into Lebanon with a rebel fighter, and obtained by TIME in April, is particularly shocking. In the video a man who is believed to be a rebel commander named Khalid al-Hamad, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Sakkar, bends over the government soldier, knife in hand. With his right hand he moves what appears to be the dead man’s heart onto a flat piece of wood or metal lying across the body. With his left hand he pulls what appears to be a lung across the open cavity in the man’s chest. According to two of Abu Sakkar’s fellow rebels, who said they were present at the scene, Abu Sakkar had cut the organs out of the man’s body. The man believed to be Abu Sakkar then works his knife through the flesh of the dead man’s torso before he stands to face the camera, holding an organ in each hand. “I swear we will eat from your hearts and livers, you dogs of Bashar,” he says, referring to supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Off camera, a small crowd can be heard calling out “Allahu akbar” — God is great. Then the man raises one of the bloodied organs to his lips and starts to tear off a chunk with his teeth.

Obama has been helping his friends in Saudi Arabia and Qatar to provide weapons and other aid to Syrian rebels with little ability to control where they end up. Undoubtedly, people like al-Hamad have received such help.

Update: The Syrian National Coalition has publicly condemned what they saw in the gruesome video described above, insisting it doesn’t represent the opposition’s morals. Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch condemned the actions in the video as war crimes and said they’ve confirmed the individual performing them is in fact al-Hamad.

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May 13, 2013| News | John Glaser

When considering the likelihood of increased U.S. intervention in Syria, it’s useful to try to gauge the opinions of people in positions of policymaking and power. I’ve noted several times the Obama administration’s demonstrated reluctance to get further involved in the form of directly arming rebels, no-fly zones to topple the Assad regime, or even boots on the ground. I’ve also noted several establishment voices – people like Aaron David Miller and Zbigniew Brzezinski (among many others) - who don’t exactly have a history of dovishness but who firmly oppose further intervention in Syria.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates.Another such establishment voice from a long-time DC insider spoke out against increased interventionism in Syria this weekend. Robert Gates, Obama’s former Secretary of Defense who worked under at least six U.S. presidents, appeared on Face the Nation to say military action in Syria would be “a mistake.”

Gates: For us to think we can influence or determine the outcome of that, I think is a mistake. I thought it was a mistake in Libya. And I think it is a mistake in Syria. We overestimate our ability to determine outcomes, even if we had intervened more significantly in Syria a year ago or six months ago. I– think that caution, particularly in terms of arming these groups and in terms of U.S. military involvement, is in order.

Schieffer: Well what should we do?

Gates: Well, my question back to you is: Why should it be us? There are other powers in the region, Turkey and others, that have military capabilities. You have Europeans that are much closer and whose interests are much– are equally affected. I understand our broad interests in the Middle East. And I understand the risks to us of chaos in Syria and of an ethnic cleansing there– once the civil war comes to an end, no matter who wins it. But the question that you asked me is the question I think there– we don’t have a satisfactory answer to. What should we do? What can we do? I believe that if we’re to do anything, it is to pick and choose the opposition groups that we think have some– moderation and would, you know, espouse what we think is in the best interest of the region– provide them with intelligence, with basic military equipment, work through Turkey and other countries perhaps in providing some basic military equipment. But I think our direct involvement and particularly our direct military involvement would be a mistake. You know, I oversaw two wars that began with quick regime change. And we all know what happened after that. And as I said to the Congress when we went into Libya, when they were talking about a no-fly zone, “It begins with an act of war.” And haven’t we learned that when you go to war, the outcomes are unpredictable? And anybody who says, “It’s gonna be clean. It’s gonna be neat. You can establish the safe zones. And it’ll be– it’ll just be swell.” Well, most wars aren’t that way.

See the interview below (the Syria part begins at about 4:10):

Gates is no longer in government and his stated opposition certainly doesn’t mean there will be no escalation of U.S. intervention in Syria, but the fact that the bulk of such establishment voices have so publicly opposed it is an indication of just how extremely irresponsible and illegitimate it would be. I mean, for goodness sake, Gates goes on to give lukewarm praise for the Iraq war. If even someone like that opposes war in Syria…

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May 12, 2013| Iran, Syria | Angela Keaton

From Frank Brodhead’s Iran War Weekly:

While nuclear negotiators will meet Wednesday in Istanbul, little progress is expected in the diplomatic standoff about Iran’s nuclear program before Iran’s presidential election, which will take place on June 14th. With Iran’s reform movement still not recovered from its crushing defeat in 2009, until now the presidential election appeared to be a mere jockeying for power within conservative leadership circles, but it took on a more volatile character on Saturday, when both former president Rafsanjani and a protégé of current president Ahmadinejad registered their candidacies at the last minute. There are some very good articles about the election – both candidates and electoral procedures – linked below.

Whether Iran’s election will take place in greatly altered circumstances as a result of the escalation of the war in Syria is another question. The consequences of Israel’s two bombing attacks on Syria a week ago are still unfolding. The US- and Russian-sponsored “international conference” on Syria scheduled for sometime in late May or June appears to have been poorly thought out (or poorly reported). Among other questions, Who is invited? Iran? Israel? Lebanon (Hezbollah)? Or just the US/NATO plus Russia? And who among the warring parties? Armed Islamist groups, or just those included in the US-sponsored coalition? Already the US-supported Free Syrian Army has announced it will not negotiate with the Assad people, which of course is the point of the conference. Or is it? Is the conference merely a theatrical ploy, with its anticipated failure leading inexorably to military escalation and deeper US intervention?
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