Month: October 2012

In a press briefing yesterday with State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, an unusual question was asked about the morality of the US-led sanctions regime on Iran, which is primarily hurting the population.

QUESTION: Do you have any concern about the effects – the ill effects that the severe depreciation in the currency may have on the Iranian people? When it’s trading – it’s I think something like 32,000 to 1, that inevitably is going to fuel inflation for anything that is imported. Does it bother you that this may hurt the Iranian people?

MS. NULAND: Well, any depreciation of currency is always going to affect the people who use the currency. The issue here are the choices that the Iranian Government is making, and this is the issue, that the Iranian Government needs to make different choices with regard to its nuclear program if it wants to get into a conversation with us about a step-by-step process, including on the sanctions side.

…QUESTION: Now, obviously, the Iranian Government, at least for the time being, is very stubborn; it will remain so. So at what point it becomes really a moral question that the people – 80 million-plus – should suffer so severely because of the stubbornness of their government?

MS. NULAND: Again, we want the Iranian people as well to understand that this is a direct response to the choices that their government has made in the context of the international community offering them a diplomatic way out, which they should take.

Find the full exchange here (I edited out most of Nuland’s evasions). As Antiwar.com’s own Justin Raimondo wrote in 1998 of the sanctions on Iraq: “This exterminationist policy is the logical consequence of a mindset that equates the people of a nation with its government, and therefore punishes the former for the crimes (both real and imagined) of the latter. In the calculus of power, individuals do not count: there are no Iraqis, only the nation of Iraq. The fundamental indifference to justice of the collectivist mentality is underscored by a policy that refuses to distinguish between Saddam and his victims.”

And so it goes for the Iranian regime. Here we have a US official coming face to face with the reality that the US-led economic warfare on Iran is cruelly strangling the population of sustenance, and she tries to claim its the ayatollahs’ fault, not ours. She tells the Iranian people they must suffer for what the regime’s policies are (this is the same regime that Washington continuously decries as undemocratic).

And what is it exactly that Tehran has done to bring on these sanctions? It can’t be punishment for an ongoing nuclear weapons program – US intelligence says it doesn’t exist. Economic sanctions are notoriously ineffective at changing policy in the desired direction anyhow, so why impose them?

Iran is a regional powerhouse that doesn’t happen to be a US client. That leverage, at a time when Washington is concerned about its own waning influence, is a threat. So sanctions are imposed, as the Washington Post reported in January, to destabilize the regime. Secondly, the Obama administration has been under heavy pressure from Israel and Congress to be hawkish on Iran. And since he’s up for election this year, he’d better be laying the groundwork for starvation and strife in Iran. How else to get reelected?

See here and here for more details on how the sanctions are directly contributing to a collapse of the Iranian economy, and even keeping much needed medicines from the sick and infirm.

President Obama’s personal involvement in selecting the targets of covert drone strikes means he risks effectively handing a ‘loaded gun’ to Mitt Romney come November, says the co-author of a new report aimed at US policymakers.

‘If Obama leaves, he’s leaving a loaded gun: he’s set up a program where the greatest constraint is his personal prerogative. There’s no legal oversight, no courtroom that can make [the drone program] stop. A President Romney could vastly accelerate it,’ said Naureen Shah, associate director of the Counterterrorism and Human Rights Project at the Columbia Law School.

The president ‘personally approves every military target’ in Yemen and Somalia and around a third of targets in Pakistan, the report says. The remainder of strikes in Pakistan are decided by the CIA, so are even further from formal decision-making processes and public scrutiny.

‘We are asking President Obama to put something in writing, to disclose more, because he needs to set up the limitations of the program before someone else takes control,’ Shah told the Bureau.

In The Civilian Impact of Drones: Unexamined Costs, Unanswered Questions, experts from Columbia Law School and the Center for Civilians in Conflict examine the impact of the US ‘war on terror’ on the lives of civilian Pakistanis, Yemenis and Somalis caught in the crossfire. The report’s publication marks the anniversary of the assassination of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki by a US drone in Yemen.

The report, which Shah said is ‘aimed squarely at policymakers’, calls on the Obama administration to justify its drone campaigns and their targets under international law. It also calls for a task force to examine what measures are in place to protect civilians.

‘The perception is that civilian casualties are not a problem. If you say otherwise, you’re accused of being naïve and being a pawn of al Qaeda… There’s an instinctual dismissal of reporting that shows there’s a casualty problem,’ said Shah.

Deep impact

The report examines how drone strikes have prompted retaliatory attacks from militants on those they believe are US spies, and stirred anti-US sentiment and violence among civilians in Pakistan and Yemen.

In the Waziristan region of Pakistan, the near-constant presence of drones exerts a terrible psychological toll on the civilian population, while the destruction of homes and other property is often catastrophic for Pakistani and Yemeni families.

In Somalia, many have been ‘forced to flee’ their homes in areas where al Qaeda-linked militants al Shabaab have their strongholds, to avoid drone and other air attacks.

And while the US claims only tiny numbers of civilians are killed by drones, establishing the truth of these claims is difficult. The report compares the Bureau’s estimates of drone deaths in Pakistan to similar projects by the Long War Journal, the New America Foundation and the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies, noting that they ‘consistently point to significantly higher civilian casualties than those suggested by the US government’s statements’.

But deciding who is a militant and who is a civilian is fraught with difficulty – the very terms ‘civilian’ and ‘militant’ are ‘ambiguous, controversial, and susceptible to manipulation,’ the report says.

The US’s criteria for who is a civilian are ‘deeply problematic’, it adds. In May, a New York Times investigation revealed that all ‘military-aged males’ are held to be militants.

Spy agency turned covert military force

The CIA decides on the targets of Pakistan strikes – but next to nothing is known about its procedures for monitoring whether strikes kill civilians. To this day, the CIA has never officially acknowledged its campaign.

‘We know the US military has set up procedures for tracking and responding to civilian deaths because there’s so much public scrutiny… The CIA has no institutional history of complying with international law or setting up procedures for civilian deaths,’ said Shah. ‘It was a covert spy agency; it wasn’t set up for this. We don’t know how prepared they are to monitor civilian deaths or how concerned they are.’

The CIA is supposed to be accountable to Congress – but lawmakers are failing to scrutinize the impact of the CIA’s drone campaign on civilians, Shah said. Its watchdog role is compromised by the fact that the CIA has been ‘really careful to get political buy-in’, having come under intense criticism from Congress over allegations of torture under President Bush.

‘The strange thing about Congress is they think they are very well informed through briefings from the CIA… The CIA has got them to buy into the drone program, so there’s no incentive for them to criticize it. If they were to admit there was a problem, Congress would be on the hook as well,’ she continued.

Lawmakers should look beyond government sources for information on the impact of drone strikes, and scrutinize whether the CIA’s processes for protecting civilians and investigating the aftermath of strikes are up to the task, the report says.

The Obama administration is so in thrall to drones’ technological potential that alternatives are barely considered, Shah said.

‘For policymakers there’s a false sense of limited options: [there’s] a drones-only approach in the situation room… drones are becoming the only game in town and the other tools are being taken off the table. And there’s no thought that a non-lethal approach might have less impact on the community,’ she explained.

‘The focus is so much on the extent to which drones protect American lives that the impact on Pakistani or Somali lives is displaced. There’s so much trust placed in the technology that policymakers especially are failing to consider whether drone strikes are wreaking havoc on these communities.’

Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute will publish an additional detailed study of reporting of drone strikes – including an evaluation of the Bureau’s drone data in comparison to similar studies – in the next few weeks.

This article was originally published at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

One of the biggest problems (and there are many) with the Obama administration’s drone program is that it targets unidentified individuals, the vast majority of whom have not been shown to present any real threat to Americans. According to the recent academic study, Living Under Drones, the number of “high-level” targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low — about 2 percent. Much of the rest were deemed worthy to be bombed because, according to the unaccountable drone war operatives, they demonstrated a certain “pattern of life,” which drone operators could tell from a remote-control camera up in the sky is worth dying for.

That’s what makes the administration’s new war plans for North Africa so troubling. The Washington Post:

The White House has held a series of secret meetings in recent months to examine the threat posed by al-Qaeda’s franchise in North Africa and consider for the first time whether to prepare for unilateral strikes, U.S. officials said.

The deliberations reflect concern that al-Qaeda’s African affiliate has become more dangerous since gaining control of large pockets of territory in Mali and acquiring weapons from post-revolution Libya. The discussions predate the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. compounds in Libya but gained urgency after the assaults there were linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM.

How much did we hear about the AQIM threat prior to the discretionary air war on Libya that started in March of last year? The instability and flood of Islamic extremists in Mali, apparently a focal point of the supposed AQIM threat, is itself a direct consequence of US interventionism in Libya. As the Post even explains, “the overthrow of dictator Moammar Gaddafi in Libya triggered a migration of African mercenaries and their weapons back to countries where al-Qaeda elements are based.”

Other “threats” in Africa, like the Nigerian Boko Haram or the al-Shabab network in Somalia are inflated threats that don’t seem to be able to make an impact in their own countries, never mind attack this one. The current policies are apt to come back to bite us, given the US-sponsored invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia in 2006 that helped give rise to the militant group al-Shabaab – now ironically justifying current interventions. Oddly, even the Obama administration has quietly acknowledged the fact that their military involvement in Somalia may create more problems than it solves, with one administration official telling the Washington Post in December there is a “concern that a broader campaign could turn al-Shabab from a regional menace into an adversary determined to carry out attacks on U.S. soil.”

So the Obama administration is currently debating whether to dramatically expand the drone war, or to use African proxy forces to do our fighting for us:

U.S. officials said the discussions have focused on ways to help regional militaries confront al-Qaeda but have also explored the possibility of direct U.S. intervention if the terrorist group continues unchecked…officials have begun to consider contingencies, including the question of “do we or don’t we” deploy drones.

Through the Pentagon’s Africa Command, the US is training and equipping militaries in countries including Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia in the name of preventing “terrorists from establishing sanctuaries.” The strategy appears irreconcilable with recent history, however, given the US-sponsored invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia in 2006 gave rise to the militant group al-Shabaab – now ironically justifying current interventions.

The strategy, which is beginning to span an entire continent, indicates a desire on the part of the national security establishment to avoid the high costs of thousands of occupation forces and lengthy nation building projects. Instead, military support to undemocratic regimes, dangerous proxy wars, drones, and covert military missions with a light footprint rule the day in America’s approach to Africa.

In other words, it is a strategy outside the jurisdiction of Congress and without the knowledge of the American people. Such strategies have led to tyranny, death, and blowback in the past. And there isn’t much indication it will be any different this time.

Friday brought another report of the civil war in Syria by Kelly McEvers of NPR’s Morning Edition.

The opening summary tells us that rebels “captured a third major border crossing between Syria and Turkey. The rebels are trying to restore services to a recently liberated town.” Let’s hold on right there. “Liberated town”? According to Merriam Webster’s online dictionary, the first definition of “liberate,” is to set at liberty: free.; specifically : to free (as a country) from domination by a foreign power.” (The phrase “domination by a foreign power” is more than a touch ironic, given the role of the U.S., Turkey, Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council in bankrolling and supplying the rebels. ) One need not even probe into the connotations of “liberate” which by its very denotation tells us that liberation is the work of the “good guys.” Right there in a subtle, or not so subtle, way, National Pentagon Radio is taking sides. And it is not too far into the reportage before journalist ace Kelly McEvers repeats the formulation: “Inside the building, we sit down with Abu Azzam, one of the rebel commanders who helped liberate the border crossing (with Turkey, Jw) and the town beyond.”

So what kind of “liberation” has come to this town of about 20,000 people called Tal Abyad? As we get deeper into the story, the “liberation” becomes ever stranger. McEvers reports: “Once inside the town, the only civilians we see are a handful of people in a pickup truck, and they’re on their way out. The bakeries have reopened, but apparently just to make bread for the fighters. One of two functioning stores clearly caters to the rebels, too. Otherwise, the town is almost completely empty….Our guide, Abu Yazen, shows us the blackened, pockmarked government buildings that were taken by the rebels. We ask Abu Yazen why the town is so empty. He says it’s because 80 percent of the people in town actually sided with the government, not with the rebels (emphasis, jw)….What happens when those 80 percent of the people come back and they want their houses back? What’s going to happen to them?”….The guide Yazen replies and McEvers offers the translation, “Those who have blood on their hands will be tried, he says. The others will come back and help us build a new country.” Hardly a reassuring invitation to those who have fled from the “liberation” of their town.

McEvers hastily concludes her piece: “Someone rushes in to tell us they’ve spotted a column of trucks with mounted machine guns that belong to the regime’s army. (Soundbite of truck motor) We have to hurry out of town before we know the end of the story.” The operative term this time is “regime.” The routine usage on NPR is that official enemies have “regimes,” so both Iran and Syria routinely have regimes but Israel, for example, has a “government.” Here we must look at the connotation of the word; and as Wikipedia informs us under “modern usage,”: “While the word regime originates as a synomym for any form of government, modern usage often gives the term a negative connotation…” (There was a time when the antiwar movement referred to the “Bush regime,” but that usage has gone missing with the ascension of Obama, the candidate of the “progressive” Democrats.)

This sort of vocabulary is not trivial as George Orwell long ago pointed out. It is usage which, repeated endlessly, reinforces the idea of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. Such propaganda molds opinions and is preparation for war and conflict.

This report by McEvers is just one droplet in the torrent of NPR’s shilling for the Pentagon and State Department.   We have all heard many other instances of the same thing.  If you have examples of such biased reports or discussions from NPR, please send them to me at John.Endwar@gmail.com . Besides Morning Edition and All Things Considered, Neal Conan’s Talk of the Nation, which reaches millions, appears to offer plenty of low hanging fruit. I am interested not only in bias based on word choice, but also outright falsification and coverage of only one side of an issue, often using two guests who in fact agree on basics which go unquestioned, a very effective form of propaganda. China bashing, Russia bashing, Iran bashing and Muslim bashing are especially worth being on the lookout for.

Let us see whether we can move NPR to change its ways.

(This piece was originally published on CounterPunch.com)

In a new piece at Foreign Policy, Ammar Abdulhamid meticulously describes how fundamentally disparate, disorganized, and divided are the Syrian rebels. He writes that although they all want the overthrow of Assad, there is no unified goal as to what ought to come after the regime and no demonstrated support for democratic reforms. Amazingly, his conclusion is still that the US not only needs to arm these rebels and promote certain elements of them, but that we may need to take military action as well.

Abdulhamid’s bio reveals that he is an an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the post-9/11 Washington think tank that focuses on policy ideas that work to overthrow Middle Eastern governments of a particular kind – the kind that are not propped up by the United States. The FDD is filled with neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, Joseph Lieberman, Newt Gingrich, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Ledeen, etc. They were in the forefront of advocating for the Iraq war and are manifestly supportive of a war on Iran. So, while Abdulhamid has traveled to the Turkish border to talk with members of the Syrian opposition, his policy advice should be viewed with the utmost skepticism.

Abdulhamid describes how there is no structured leadership in Syria’s rebel opposition, and that there is indeed often internal conflict among them. There are no secularists. There are Salafists, committed Islamists, and ordinary folk who’ve taken up arms. There are thousands of “foreign fighters”  – “mostly from Gulf states, Libya, Tunisia, Chechnya, Somalia, and Sudan.” One element conspicuously missing from his analysis is any emphasis on the growing al-Qaeda presence in Syria’s rebel fighters. Even other establishment analysts who support US intervention, like those from the RAND Corp., grant that “a rebel victory could result in Al Qaeda or its sympathizers coming to power in a post-Assad Syria.”

Nevertheless, Abdulhamid’s description of the opposition fighters tends to validate one of the central mainstream arguments against using them as a proxy force to overthrow Assad; they are disorganized. Yet, he still advocates providing certain elements of the opposition, which the know-it-alls in Washington will determine are better than the others, “with the tools needed to topple the Assad regime” and to help “build a new, inclusive political order.”

It’s an incredible conclusion to make after specifying how unreliable these rebel groups are and how few of them, if any, actually want an “inclusive political order.” First, the advice disregards (at least explicitly) what has been true throughout the history of US-funded proxy militias: the US is not interested in democracy in Syria. What is wanted is a new, exclusive client state that is approximately as democratic as the rest of the dictatorships the US props up around the region.

Furthermore, the same groups he advocates should receive more US funding are also being funded, armed, and influenced by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and other such countries. These are not exactly bastions of freedom and democracy. And consider the hubris of once again allying with Saudi Arabia to fund a far-off guerrilla group as the US once did in Afghanistan in the 1980s with the mujihadeen. That adventure didn’t turn out so well, did it?

Washington is already sending money and equipment to the rebels, despite the fact that the United Nations says they’ve committed war crimes and despite the growing presence of al-Qaeda. Additional US meddling would undoubtedly worsen conditions on the ground and deepen the civil war. As Prof. Eva Bellin and Prof. Peter Krause in the Middle East Brief from Brandeis University found in their study of the Syria situation: “The distillation of historical experience with civil war and insurgency, along with a sober reckoning of conditions on the ground in Syria, make clear that limited intervention of this sort will not serve the moral impulse that animates it. To the contrary, it is more likely to amplify the harm that it seeks to eliminate by prolonging a hurting stalemate.”

Abdulhamid also advocates some kind of US military action against the Assad regime: “Without creating military parity on the ground, including neutralizing Assad’s air power, a political solution will be impossible. And without a political process that involves both rebels and militias, any effort will fail. Military means alone will not be sufficient to help any side prevail.”

Half-measures like so-called safe zones are not a viable option. “Humanitarian corridors,” explained Marc Lynch of George Washington University in testimony before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, ”would be extremely difficult to protect, and could create a new refugee crisis if desperate civilians rush into designated safe zones or neighboring countries.”

Safe areas might also require airpower in some form, but Assad’s “anti-aircraft capabilities are located in or near urban areas, which means that significant civilian casualties could result from any attempt to eliminate them.” Lynch said. ”Creating and protecting a safe area in Syria would therefore require a significant and lengthy investment of troops and resources, and would not likely hasten Assad’s collapse.”

Finally, where in the world the United States gets the moral and legal authority to choose sides in Syria’s civil war is not mentioned by Abdulhamid. Beyond that, we’d be asking the same knuckleheads who can’t balance a budget to pull the strings and mastermind an end to a very complex conflict that may very well expand into a regional war with additional US meddling.