Month: August 2012

Steven Aftergood on the stubborn secrecy of Congress:

It is a simple fact that under the FISA Amendments Act “the government can and does intercept the communications of U.S. citizens, even in the absence of any particularized warrant or showing of probable cause,” stated the dissenting members of the Committee in the new report.

“The public has a right to know, at least in general terms, how often [this authority] is invoked, what kind of information the government collects using this authority, and how the government limits the impact of these programs on American citizens,” the minority members wrote.  But an amendment to require unclassified public reporting on these topics, offered by Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), was defeated 10-19.

Another amendment introduced by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) would have required publication of unclassified summaries of decisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that have interpreted the law in significant ways.  “This amendment aimed only to make the legal reasoning of the FISA Court available to the public.  It also sought to ensure that the United States should not have a secret body of law.”  It was rejected by a vote of 13-17.

A third amendment would have required the Inspectors General of the intelligence community and the Justice Department to produce a public estimate of how many Americans have already had their communications collected under this law.  The amendment, by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), failed by a vote of 11-20.

See also the recent waffling on harsh anti-leak, pro-secrecy legislation from the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Charles Davis noted on Sunday President Obama’s statement on the act of terrorism committed by a man shooting up a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The President “mourn[ed] this loss which took place at a house of worship” and killed six people. By contrast, Davis writes, Obama did not mourn a similar act of terrorism he committed in a drone strike which “hit a village mosque” in Pakistan and killed “at least ten people.” Davis sums up the moral of the story: “Whether or not massacring people in a house of worship as part of a self-styled ‘war on terror’ is morally right or wrong depends on geography.”

Today, Glenn Greenwald noted a savage suicide bombing in southern Yemen in which a member of Al Qaeda attacked “a funeral service attended by members of civilian militias,” killing up to 45 people. Those sadistic Islamo-fascists! Except that, as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has documented, “The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of  civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals.” And as the New York Times reported in June 2009, US airstrikes “killed at least 60 people at a funeral” and “as many as 45 were civilians, among them reportedly ten children.” Glenn sums up the moral of the story: “the same act that is the hallmark of repulsive savagery when done by Al Qaeda, Assad, and the Hutaree militia is transformed into a moral and noble act when done by the Government of the United States of America.”

Two principles are evident in almost all discussion of US foreign policy: (1) acts of violence by people is “terrorism,” while acts of violence by the state is “foreign policy;” (2) acts of violence by Washington are justified to keep us safe, while acts of violence by other governments we don’t like are crimes.

Anthony Gregory on the anniversary of America’s dropping of nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945:

The only way to regard the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so many other U.S. war campaigns, as anything other than state terrorism, is to define the concept in such an absurdly narrow way as to categorically exempt the U.S. from the definition out of pure convenience. If nuclear holocaust inflicted upon innocent civilians for the purpose of securing a diplomatic result is not terrorism, then there is no such thing.

Gregory also pushes back against the 67-year old propaganda line about how the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to end WWII. Incinerating hundreds of thousands of people indiscriminately “was unnecessary in every strategic sense,” he reminds us.

Yet Americans still applaud the act of mass slaughter. As George Orwell wrote in his Notes on Nationalism, “there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral color when it is committed by ‘our’ side.”

Columbia University Professor Gary Sick on the apparent “curtain of silence [that] has been drawn” over the aid being sent by the US and its allies to the Free Syrian Army:

…I look — mostly in vain — for any detailed disclosure of the sources and methods that are making the FSA such a formidable military force…

When opposition forces were battering the US in Iraq, we were treated to regular revelations in the media of Iranian supply of IEDs and other weapons, as well as training and direction. Some of those “exclusives” were based on very flimsy evidence, but that did not prevent them from becoming front page stories and lead items on the evening news, day after day. Even in Syria, we get a regular stream of speculative reports about Iranian support for Assad — money, oil, technical support, intelligence, even, some say, Revolutionary Guards fighting in Syria.

But now that the shoe is on the other foot, and governments friendly to the US are engaged in harassing Assad’s army, we are getting only the vaguest possible references to the description and sources of all that new weaponry, the training of FSA cadres, and how much it is costing to build a new army from scratch.

Last week it was revealed that Turkey has not only been giving shelter to the FSA, but that it has been providing extensive military training as well. US aid also continues to flow along with arms from the Gulf states, despite a growing list of accusations that the rebels have been committing crimes like torture and executions of Assad supporters.

In the Western media, this is called “humanitarian intervention” or “shaping the conflict,” whereas Russia is propping up a dictator and Iran is engaged in a proxy war. Just like how our occupation of Iraq was an exercise in “democracy promotion,” while alleged Iranian aid to Iraqi insurgents was criminal and nefarious proxy terrorism.

The most important and most frequently ignored distinction in the debate about Iran and its nuclear program is that Iran’s current postures are defensive in nature, not offensive. Right-wing pundits constantly harangue about Iran’s supposed intentions to annihilate Israel, wipe Israel off the map, and so on – and this, they claim, is why it’s so important to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. This assumes Iran would want a nuclear weapon for offensive purposes, which is incorrect.

Now, US and Israeli intelligence agencies agree that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. But there are aspects of the program, like increased enrichment in recent years, that is meant to place Iran in a technical range of capability, to produce a weapon on short notice if they decide to do so. As has been discussed at Antiwar.com for years, Iran is operating under constant threat from the US and Israel. The US has Iran militarily surrounded, has conducted covert attacks along with Israel, constantly threatens Iran with preemptive military strike, and is heaping harsh economic sanctions. In this environment, Iran has tried to abstain from developing nuclear weapons while having the know-how needed to get there; this essentially is an attempt to have a deterrent without actually having a deterrent. They don’t get in trouble for having a weapon, but they are able to ward off attack or invasion.

As renowned international relations theorist Kenneth N. Waltz recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Such a breakout capability might satisfy the domestic political needs of Iran’s rulers by assuring hard-liners that they can enjoy all the benefits of having a bomb (such as greater security) without the downsides (such as international isolation and condemnation).”

This distinction is almost always ignored by the pundits and the politicians, despite its supreme importance. But now, one of the most reckless hawks on Iran, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, has acknowledged this distinction out loud. Appearing on CNN (via Micah Zenko), Barak admitted that “[Israel and the US] both know that Khamenei did not yet ordered, actually, to give a weapon, but that he is determined to deceit and defy the whole world.” Wolf Blitzer asked, “What does that mean, that the ayatollah has not given the order to build a nuclear bomb?” Barak replied:

It’s something technical. He did not tell his people start and build it — a weapon on — an explodable device. We think that we understand why he does not give this order.

He believes that he is penetrated through our intelligence and he strongly feels that if he tries to order, we will know it, we and you and some other intelligence services will know about it and it might end up with a physical action against it.

So he prefers to, first of all, make sure that through redundancy, through an accumulation of more lowly enriched uranium, more medium level enriched uranium and more centrifuges and more sites, better protection, that he can reach a point, which I call the zone of immunity, beyond which Israel might not be technically capable of launching a surgical operation.

Here it is admitted that Iran is thinking rationally and defensively. The real concern, Barak says, is allowing Iran to enter a “zone of immunity” wherein it can deter attack or invasion. How dare the ayatollahs deprive Washington and Tel Aviv of the right to attack a weak and defensive Iran!

The whole story about how ‘we need to attack an aggressive Iran determined to get nuclear weapons’ falls apart under Barak’s admission above. First, if Iran has no nuclear weapons program (something admitted widely in US and Israeli officialdom), then there is no conceivable imminent threat and thus no attack is justified. If Iran is demonstrably intimidated by the threats from the US and Israel – that is, if it is acting defensively vis-a-vis its nuclear program – then current US/Israeli capabilities are proving sufficient to deter an Iranian attack whether it has a bomb or not (As Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate in February: Iran “is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict or launch a preemptive attack”), and thus an attack is not justified.

Finally, what the pro-war crowd can’t seem to grasp is that an attack on Iran would be most likely to push them towards reconstituting their nuclear weapons program. As Thomas Pickering, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and former U.S. Ambassador to the UN under George H.W. Bush, warned recently:

[A military strike] has a very high propensity, in my view, of driving Iran in the direction of openly declaring and deciding, which it has not yet done according to our intelligence, to make a nuclear weapon to seemingly defend itself under what might look to them and others to be an unprovoked attack.

Iran has great possibilities for asymmetrical reactions including against Israel through Hezbollah and Hamas who have accumulated a large number of missiles. […] It is a series of potential escalatory possibilities that puts us deep in the potential for another land war in Asia, something that I think we’ve spent the last number of years trying to get out of.

This has been virtually confirmed after a classified war simulation held a few months back forecasted that a “strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States” and kill many, many people. As Ha’aretz reports, this Congressional Research Service report estimates that Iran could completely recover from a strike on its nuclear program within six months.

So, seriously, what is driving the ‘bomb Iran’ crowd at this point?

Update: One commenter has pointed out that having nuclear capability, or ‘know-how’ as I call it, is not an indication of any military dimension to Iran’s program. Indeed, in the same Foreign Affairs piece I quoted above, Ken Waltz explains, “[One] possible outcome is that Iran stops short of testing a nuclear weapon but develops a breakout capability, the capacity to build and test one quite quickly. Iran would not be the first country to acquire a sophisticated nuclear program without building an actual bomb. Japan, for instance, maintains a vast civilian nuclear infrastructure. Experts believe that it could produce a nuclear weapon on short notice.”