President Barack Obama‘s administration has been delaying its planned $53 million arms sale to Bahrain due to human rights concerns and congressional opposition, but this week administration officials told several congressional offices that they will move forward with a new and different package of arms sales — without any formal notification to the public.
See here for some background U.S. support for the brutal Bahraini dictatorship.
Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, has a piece in the New York Times about the Obama administration’s avid support for the corrupt military regime in Honduras. She’s written previously about it, as have I on this blog. Excerpt:
It’s time to acknowledge the foreign policy disaster that American support for the Porfirio Lobo administration in Honduras has become. Ever since the June 28, 2009, coup that deposed Honduras’s democratically elected president, José Manuel Zelaya, the country has been descending deeper into a human rights and security abyss. That abyss is in good part the State Department’s making.
The headlines have been full of horror stories about Honduras. According to the United Nations, it now has the world’s highest murder rate, and San Pedro Sula, its second city, is more dangerous than Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a center for drug cartel violence.
Much of the press in the United States has attributed this violence solely to drug trafficking and gangs. But the coup was what threw open the doors to a huge increase in drug trafficking and violence, and it unleashed a continuing wave of state-sponsored repression.
The current government of President Lobo won power in a November 2009 election managed by the same figures who had initiated the coup. Most opposition candidates withdrew in protest, and all major international observers boycotted the election, except for the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which are financed by the United States.
U.S. aid to the essentially military regime in Honduras has increased every single year since the coup in 2009, with $68 million allocated for 2012. And, as Frank wrote previously Nation magazine, Obama has “allocated $45 million in new funds for military construction, including expansion and improvement of the jointly operated Soto Cano Air Force Base at Palmerola (supplied now with US drones) and has opened three new military bases.” The “Honduran police and military have launched successive waves of repression against entire campesino communities,” Frank explained, and funding “rose dramatically in June with $40 million more under the new $200 million Central American Regional Security Initiative, supposedly to combat drug trafficking in Central America,” even though the drug trade in Honduras has boomed since the coup.
In addition to that, the U.S. has a documented close relationship between corporate drug lords and private paramilitaries in Honduras. Wealthy landowners with ties to the cocaine trade, like Miguel Facussé, have been orchestrating illegal land grabs and murders of peasant farmers in the countryside. Facussé supported the 2009 military coup, has met with the State Department numerous times, and met with Obama in Washington DC in the first week of October. U.S.-supported private paramilitaries kill, steal, torture, and pillage. Frank continues:
Why has the State Department thrown itself behind the Lobo administration despite brutal evidence of the regime’s corruption? In part because it has caved in to the Cuban-American constituency of Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and her allies. They have been ferocious about Honduras as a first domino with which to push back against the line of center-left and leftist governments that have won elections in Latin America in the past 15 years. With its American air base, Honduras is also crucial to the United States’ military strategy in Latin America.
In last night’s GOP presidential debate, Rick Santorum seemed to be on the side of Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen warning against the ominous leftward direction of the governments in the region. But he is patently confused on the issue, accusing Obama of having a “consistent policy of siding with leftists, siding with Marxists, siding with those who don’t support democracy” in Latin America. Illustrating his even deeper ignorance, he said that Obama failed to help the Honduran people after the coup that ousted Zelaya. Who knows what the hell he’s talking about, but what’s clear is that Obama’s policy towards Honduras (and the region as a whole) is decidedly vicious and predictably on the side of tyranny.
In the news section today, Jason Ditz points to inter-militia fighting and rampant torture in Libya, America’s latest liberated country. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as we’ve pointed to the ugly humanitarian abuses of the so-called freedom fighters NATO helped oust Gadhafi since the beginning. As an illustration of how widespread the torture is, Reuters reports today:
Aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has halted its work in detention centers in a Libyan city because it said its medical staff were being asked to patch up detainees mid-way through torture sessions so they could go back for more abuse.
“Patients were brought to us in the middle of interrogation for medical care, in order to make them fit for more interrogation,” MSF General Director Christopher Stokes said in a statement.
“This is unacceptable. Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not to repeatedly treat the same patients between torture sessions.”
And again, it’s not just the nasty people we’ve put in charge. It’s also that they’re not even truly in charge, as tribal and factional disputes about who wields power are ongoing, indicating a brewing civil war. Ted Galen Carpenter writes that “the flare-up of violence in Libya could also be a symptom of profound divisions” and that “Libya is less a cohesive nation-state than an amalgam of competing tribes, with a marked division along a north-south line.” Carpenter explains that the ruling NTC has refused U.S. and NATO prodding to be more “inclusive” but that they “have ignored that advice, and there were already signs of growing discontent in western portions of the country.” More importantly, he writes:
The United States has nothing at stake in Libya that warrants involvement in that country’s internal disputes, and Washington erred by participating in NATO’s original intervention. If the current tensions escalate into a full-blown conflict between Libya’s eastern and western tribes, the Obama administration should not repeat that error.
Shamila N. Chaudhary at Foreign Policy notes how the Taliban are getting criticized for not having a consistent message on peace talks: they issued a Jan.3 statement about starting up a political office in Qatar and a willingness to negotiate, and then on Jan 12 they issued another statement clarifying that talks don’t mean “surrender from jihad and neither is it connected to an acceptance of the constitution of the stooge Kabul administration.”
So which is it? Well, apparently some factions of the Taliban want talks and political reconciliation, and others want plainly to win militarily. Chaudhary then kindly reminds us that this is precisely what the U.S. approach looks like regarding Afghanistan.
Likewise, the U.S. approach of “fight, talk, build,” does not mean that the administration speaks with one voice. The tensions among American defense, intelligence, and diplomatic communities on the Taliban’s willingness to negotiate are well documented. At face value, the military’s reluctance to characterize Taliban intentions reflects an unwillingness to acknowledge the failures of its military campaign in Afghanistan. The risk-averse nature of the intelligence community often lends itself to the most conservative estimate possible — rendering any possibility of negotiation impossible. Meanwhile, diplomats believe political talks are the only solution.
It might get a little confusing for Afghan civilians and Taliban fighters that the U.S. expresses its commitment to peace talks and then demonstrates a commitment to killing Afghans, paying murderous militias, and occupying the country for the foreseeable future.
Relatedly, this RAND study from 2008 provides quantitative analysis on “how terrorist groups end,” and concludes political deals are the way to go:
Following an examination of 648 terrorist groups that existed between 1968 and 2006, we found that a transition to the polit- ical process is the most common way in which terrorist groups ended (43 percent). The possibility of a political solution is inversely linked to the breadth of terrorist goals. Most terrorist groups that end because of politics seek narrow policy goals. The narrower the goals of a terrorist organization, the more likely it can achieve them without violent action—and the more likely the government and terrorist group may be able to reach a negotiated settlement.
Two points: (1) This language reminds me of when the U.S. demands the Taliban “abandon terrorism” as a prerequisite to negotiations. Will the U.S. do the same? (2) It’s good to hear political solutions are inversely linked to the goals of, in this case, the Taliban; it doesn’t get much narrower than “get the hell out of my country.”
Addendum: As Jon Stewart would say, here it is, your moment of Zen…NBC’s Brian Williams in Monday’s GOP debate asked, “Governor [Romney], how do you end the war in Afghanistan without talking to the Taliban?” Romney replied: “By beating them.”
Secrecy News has a post up on John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer being charged under the Espionage Act for contributing to the exposure of state crimes:
In the present case, Mr. Kiriakou is charged with providing the name of a “covert agent” in response to inquiries from a reporter, “Journalist A,” who then passed that information on to defense attorneys at Guantanamo. (The attorneys used the information in a classified pleading that they filed in 2009, which is what first brought the unauthorized disclosure to official attention.)
An FBI affidavit attached to the criminal complaint against Kiriakou states repeatedly that no laws were broken by the defense team that received the classified information. The FBI notably does not volunteer the same assurance concerning Journalist A (whose name is not yet on the public record), who actively solicited the proscribed information from Kiriakou and forwarded it to the defense attorneys.
…Mr. Kiriakou is the sixth individual to be charged in the Obama Administration’s unprecedented campaign against leaks of classified information to the media, following Shamai Leibowitz, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake, Bradley Manning and Stephen Kim. Among other things, the Administration’s aggressive pursuit of leaks represents a challenge to the practice of national security reporting, which depends on the availability of unauthorized sources if it is to produce something more than “authorized” news.
I think this is a clever way to get around the financial blockade the government and the banks have placed on WikiLeaks:
Starting in March, Mr. Assange will host a 10-part series of interview programs with “key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries” on Russia Today (RT), a state-funded English-language satellite news network which claims to reach more than 85 million viewers in the US alone.
According to a statement on his website, the new Assange series will explore the “upheavals and revolutions” that are shaking the Middle East and expose how “the deterioration of the rule of law has demonstrated the bankruptcy of once leading political institutions and ideologies” in the West.
Entitled “The World Tomorrow,” the show will be filmed by an RT satellite crew at Ellingham Hall, the remote manor house 130 miles north of London. It’s the same place Assange has been under house arrest since December 2010 awaiting a Supreme Court decision on his extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations.
