The last time anyone saw Nakoula Bassely Nakoula, he was wearing a scarf wrapped around his head as he was being escorted into a police car for a midnight visit to his probation officer. However, TMZ has uncovered a rare photo of the “producer” of “Innocence of Muslims,” the Youtube video that set the Middle East ablaze. Here he is on the set of “Innocence,” leering at one of the actresses.
The fact that the Syrian rebels have committed war crimes has been found and publicized repeatedly for anyone willing to hear it. In May, a United Nations investigation found that rebel militias were committing atrocities along with Syrian government forces. Again in August, the UN “identified both parties as guilty of war crimes.” Human rights organizations like Amnesty International, along with good, hard reporting have revealed a systematic practice among the rebel groups of murder, torture, and brutal massacres.
Now again, Human Rights Watch exposes practices of torture and executions by Syrian rebel forces and urges investigations and pressure for these crimes to stop:
Armed opposition groups have subjected detainees to ill-treatment and torture and committed extrajudicial or summary executions in Aleppo, Latakia, and Idlib, Human Rights Watch said today following a visit to Aleppo governorate. Torture and extrajudicial or summary executions of detainees in the context of an armed conflict are war crimes, and may constitute crimes against humanity if they are widespread and systematic.
Opposition leaders told Human Rights Watch that they will respect human rights and that they have taken measures to curb the abuses, but Human Rights Watch expressed serious concern about statements by some opposition leaders indicating that they tolerate, or even condone, extrajudicial and summary executions. When confronted with evidence of extrajudicial executions, three opposition leaders told Human Rights Watch that those who killed deserved to be killed, and that only the worst criminals were being executed.
Yet, US policy remains aiding and abetting the Syrian rebels. As Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch said, “Those assisting the Syrian opposition have a particular responsibility to condemn abuses.”
Actually, that has already occurred. In early August, White House spokesman Jay Carney was forced to condemn such acts when asked about them. “We strongly condemn summary executions by either side in Syria. We condemn actions like that,” he said, displaying no intention by the administration to try to put a stop to it or to pull support from such unscrupulous groups. Public condemnations are an easy public relations strategy of deflecting responsibilities for the crimes the US supports.
To reiterate, the US is working with allies in the Arab Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar to send the Syrian rebels weapons, intelligence, and other equipment. Our NATO ally Turkey is harboring and even training members of the Free Syrian Army, as our military and intelligence officials are stationed on the Turkish-Syrian border to aid the rebels. It is widely known and even officially acknowledged that the Syrian rebels have a large and growing contingent of al-Qaeda fighters in their ranks. Rather than deter US funding, this has merely prompted the Obama administration to claim, incredibly, that they’re going through a vetting process to ensure aid doesn’t reach the al-Qaeda-linked rebels. But the process is made up of untrustworthy, third-party sources and intelligence officials have recently told the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times that the truth is that the US doesn’t know who is getting the money and weapons.
And anyways, it would seem, from reports like this one from Human Rights Watch, that even rebels that don’t boast membership in al-Qaeda are committing serious crimes. US policy in this regard is both immoral and strategically bankrupt.
The Obama administration’s nation-building effort in Afghanistan is one of the most gratuitous failures of the whole post-9/11 era. The US has left a Taliban insurgency as strong as ever, built up degenerate criminal gangs in the Afghan Local Police, botched its mission to train obedient security forces, and laid the groundwork for future civil war. But aside from the actual war effort, Americans should be disgraced at the government they’ve helped set up and continue to support.
One example: 70 percent of all the Afghan women in jail are there for the offense of running away from their abusive homes:
Chief of the parliamentarian commission for human rights, civil society and women’s affairs Fawzia Koufi expressed concerns regarding the Afghan women detainees where majority of them have been arrested for escaping their homes.
Fawzia Koufi said more than 70% of the Afghan women have been jailed for escaping their homes despite this is not crime in Afghan law.
She said, “This is a major issue and women are jailed over adultery after escaping from their home.”
This is the kind of thing America is supporting when it sends billions of dollars in aid (about $16 billion since 2008) to Afghanistan every year. Reading this, I was reminded of when, last December, Afghan President Hamid Karzai agreed to pardon an imprisoned woman for the crime of being raped, on the one condition that she marry the man that raped her.
Jingoistic platitudes were all the rage at the recently-completed Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.
Foreign Policy Magazine’s Uri Friedman reported that Democratic Party apparatchiks used Osama Bin Laden’s name, in bragging about slaughtering him, some 21 times during the DNC. By way of contrast, according to Friedman’s count, there was only one mention of Bin Laden at the Republican National Convention, which took place the week before in Tampa.
One of the more memorable lines, in making the case for another four years in office for the 2009 Nobel Prize Peace Prize winning Laureate-in-Chief, came from U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA). He stated (emphasis mine),
And after more than — after more than 10 years without justice for thousands of Americans murdered on 9/11, after Mitt Romney said it would be naive to go into Pakistan to pursue the terrorists, it took President Obama, against the advice of many, to give that order and finally rid this earth of Osama bin Laden.
Ask Osama bin Laden is he is better off now than he was four years ago.
Vice President Joe Biden went so far to boast triumphantly, “Osama Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.”
This bellicose rhetoric on the part of Kerry, Biden and others moved investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill to compare the language to “jingoism that belonged in a sports bar” in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes.” Now billing itself as the “Lean Forward” network (a hilarious premise in of itself, given that it’s owned by General Electric, a weapons manufacturer), Scahill said MSNBC’s DNC coverage might as well have been an Obama for America salon.
“Many of the media discussions, including here on MSNBC, about foreign policy during the convention felt like we were watching an Obama for America meet-up, not an actual serious critique of this president’s most egregious aspects of his foreign policy, where you do see that of the Republicans,” he said on “Up With Chris Hayes.”
General Electric has given Democratic Party candidates at a federal level $510,400 so far in the 2012 election cycle, according to Open Secrets.
Antiwar.com readers won’t be surprised by any of this. What was surprising, though, was one of the more shameless displays by the Military-Industrial-Media Complex at the “Nightly Lounge” festive gatherings hosted by the Beltway media outlet, Politico.
One of the co-sponsors of the nightly ritual was none other than BAE Systems, another weapons manufacturer and war contractor, which has given $233,000 to Democrats so far in the run up to the 2012 elections, according to Open Secrets.
The nightly fiesta also included a delicious BAE Systems-sponsored specialty drink, the “BAE Systems Countermeasure,” which I ordered while having the pleasure to attend one of the soirees.
Why will November feature an election between Liberal Hawks and Neoconservatives? Just follow the money.
As Smedley Butler wrote long ago,
War is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
Whoever resides in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue after November 6, 2012, at least one major thing is already settled: the war racket has no end in sight.
Two US Marines were killed yesterday protecting a US-British base complex in Helmland Province of Afghanistan.
Prince Harry is currently assigned to the British portion of the base and serves as a helicopter pilot. His presence at the base was revealed last week.
Many believe that Prince Harry was the target of the attack.
The Taliban reportedly issued a statement proclaiming Harry as a “high-value target.”
Tory MP Colonel Bob Stewart, a former commander of British troops in Bosnia, said he did not think the Prince should be pulled out of Afghanistan because of the Taliban. “To hell with them,” he said. “Harry wants to go there and our soldiers want him there. He should stay.”
Did the two US Marines die to protect Prince Harry? If this was, in fact, one of the reasons for the attack, then the undeniable answer is yes.
It’s commendable that Maddow so meticulously illustrated the extent to which this attack on the US consulate building was the work of former US-backed Libyan rebels connected with al-Qaeda. But she should have gone even further. Reports now say that infiltrators within the US-backed Libyan government forces may have tipped off militants as to when and how to attack the consulate building and as to the location of the safe how to which Americans were sent to seek refuge from the attack.
The biggest problem in Libya now appears to be one of our own making. Al-Qaeda has gained an even stronger foothold in the country and now they’ve attacked a diplomatic building, killing an American ambassador, two US Marines, and one other American. The Independent reports that sensitive documents might have been taken by the militants: “Some of the missing papers from the consulate are said to list names of Libyans who are working with Americans, putting them potentially at risk from extremist groups, while some of the other documents are said to relate to oil contracts.”
The Libyan war has long been considered over and done with. But the consequences of NATO’s discretionary war are still reverberating across the country and the region.
Update: Harvard professor Stephen Walt offers some lessons of the incident in Benghazi and beyond:
There are reasons why anti-American extremists hate us (and it’s not just our “values”), and there are also reasons why they think that attacking Americans will win them greater support. Similarly, there are reasons why governments that pay attention to public opinion are often reluctant to embrace Uncle Sam too closely. In particular, numerous surveys of public opinion show that there is considerable anger at U.S. foreign policy among the broader publics in the Arab and Islamic world, fueled by what these peoples see as indifference to Muslim lives, one-sided support for Israel, our cozy relations with assorted Middle Eastern monarchies and dictators, and our hypocritical behavior regarding human rights and nuclear weapons. To acknowledge this broader context in no way justifies the events of this week, but ignoring this broader context is a surefire recipe for responding to it in the wrong way.
