Month: November 2012

Soldiers in Honduras that were “trained, vetted and equipped by the U.S. government” chased down and murdered a Honduran teenager, in the latest egregious example of US-fueled human rights abuses in that country. Associated Press:

Ebed Yanes, 15, was killed the night of May 26 after driving through a military checkpoint. His father, Wilfredo Yanes, a mild-mannered organic food supplier, tracked down the soldiers, eventually uncovering an allegedly high-level attempt to hide evidence. Further, his quest led to new information reported this week that the unit in question was supported by the U.S.

The Obama administration has slowly increased its interventionism in Honduras since the military coup took place in 2009. The US-backed regime’s record on human rights has worsened in that time as well.

“Since early 2010,” writes Dana Frank in a piece at Foreign Affairs, “there have been more than 10,000 complaints of human rights abuses by [US funded and trained] state security forces,” and “in many ways, Washington is responsible for this dismal turn.”

The situation brings back haunting memories of other U.S. involvements in Latin America. Washington has a dark track record of supporting military coups against democratic governments and then funneling money to repressive regimes. In 1964, the United States backed a military coup in Brazil; in 1973, it supported a military coup headed by Augusto Pinochet in Chile; and during the 1980s, it threw millions of dollars at the leaders in El Salvador. All of these U.S.–backed governments ruled with enormous brutality.

See here and here for more of the background on US policy towards Honduras lately.

Several hours ago, Israel assassinated Ahmed Jabari along with his son, a Hamas operative and at least three other civilians in an attack that launched a new war in Gaza.  Israelis have been receiving call-ups for reserve duty as happens whenever a war or ground operation is planned.  It appears likely this is Operation Cast Lead II.

It is, of course, no accident that Israeli elections will be held in two months.  Israeli prime ministers routinely use wars to bolster their popularity.   Menachem Begin attacked the Osirak reactor shortly before elections, which he subsequently won.  Bibi, being a master of political tactics (but not strategy, since he has none) wanted to leave no stone unturned in his march to victory in January.

As happened numerous times in the past, including after the Eilat terror attack, when Israel lied in ascribing blame for the attack on Gaza and murdered 30 in revenge strikes, terror in Gaza is not the issue.  Gaza is a useful tool or canvas on which Israeli generals and politicians embellish their careers.  It’s the utmost in cynicism, but alas all too common in the debased society Israel has become.

Further, Bibi did not yet have his own personal war to his credit.  Almost every Israeli PM has to have one.  It’s the mark by which they distinguish themselves.  Since he could not arrange a war with Iran due to U.S. intransigence, and the pig-headed obstinacy of the U.S.   electorate who refused to elect Mitt Romney, Gaza will have to do.

The first U.S. response was from the Pentagon saying they “stood shoulder to shoulder with the Israeli people in their response to terror.”  Which is ironic given that Israel engaged in an act of terror assassinating Jabari and the other Gaza civilians.

Pres. Obama must demand that the invasion stop and that Israel and Hamas observe a full ceasefire.  If Bibi refuses, Obama should convene a Security Council session to approve Palestine’s application for UN membership as a state.  He should also announce that he will abrogate all previous agreements to ostracize Hamas and that he will permit U.S. diplomats to begin discussions with the Islamist group.  It is the failure of U.S. policy in regard to Hamas and Gaza that’s gotten us into the mess we’re in now.  We share some measure of responsibility for this bloodbath.

In reality, Obama will do nothing, as happened in 2009, when he arrived at a grand bargain with Olmert to end Cast Lead the day before his Inauguration.  Until that date, the IDF had carte blanche to massacre Gazans, which they did with great aplomb.  The president has bigger fish to fry and is nothing if not a cold eyed pragmatist schooled in real politick.  He wants a budget deal and immigration reform far more than he wants to save Gazan lives.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has demanded that that country consider suspending its treaty agreements with Israel.  The question will be how far Pres. Morsi is willing to go.  Bibi has made a calculated gamble that the front line states will remain quiescent.  In the past, that would’ve held true.  But these are different times and Israel may find that the Arabs aren’t so willing to roll over and play dead.

Hasbarists, I put you on notice that you may argue till the cows come home about Jabari having  blood on his hands, but the plain truth in this case is that Jabari and Hamas were honoring the ceasefire (though Islamic Jihad wasn’t).  Even if you want to level the specious argument that Hamas was responsible for the renewed rocket fire, none of those rockets caused even an injury, let alone killed anyone.

I understand Judge Goldstone isn’t available to lead the next UN war crimes investigation. Ban Ki Moon might want to establish a short list of credible candidates to take this mandate As we will certainly have many choices of war crimes to investigate in the coming days and weeks.

This piece was cross-posted from richardsilverstein.com.

The flare up of violence between Israel and Gaza looks like its about to escalate, with an Israeli airstrike today killing a Hamas commander and Israeli military leadership talking openly about the possibility of an expanded war on Gaza, possibly including a ground invasion.

This escalation occurs just days after widespread reports about newly reelected Obama mulling a grand bargain with Iran over its disputed nuclear program. Barbara Slavin and Laura Rozen at Al-Monitor reported on Monday that US officials told them Washington was considering offering a “more for more” deal with Iran, based on the fuel swap deal from Obama’s first term.

So what does Israel’s impending war on defenseless Gaza have to do with Iran diplomacy? Here’s a tweet from the Tehran bureau chief for the New York Times, Thomas Erdbrink:

Forget ANY #Iran-US talks if conflict in Gaza escalates

— Thomas Erdbrink (@ThomasErdbrink) November 14, 2012

And here:

#Iran leaders can never be seen as talking to US, while its “eternal” ally Israel assassinates Iran’s ideological allies

— Thomas Erdbrink (@ThomasErdbrink) November 14, 2012

I suspect this point was not lost on the Israeli leadership, either. So, is Netanyahu knowingly escalating military tensions in order to avoid a successful diplomatic overture? I’m speculating, but it isn’t far fetched. We know from extensive reporting, mainly in Israeli media, that in 2010 – just as President Obama requested a freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank with the aim of resuming peace talks – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to provoke Iran into a war with Israel that would eventually drag in the United States.

It reminds me of what former CIA Middle East analyst Paul Pillar referred to this week as “Netanyahu’s tension-stoking brinksmanship: to divert attention from continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and inaction on the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” “[T]he Iran issue,” Pillar has previously written, provides a “distraction” from international “attention to the Palestinians’ lack of popular sovereignty.” Now the situation seems reversed: Israel is escalating war with Gaza to maintain deadlock with their favorite scapegoat, Iran.

Israel, lest we forget, instigated this resumption of missile exchanges last week when two Palestinian civilians were shot and killed and Israeli tanks intruded into Gaza, prompting Gaza militants to respond by targeting Israeli soldiers, which then gave Israel an excuse to unleash successive airstrikes. And Israel had numerous chances to pacify the situation, considering Hamas publicly offered to establish a total ceasefire and Egypt appeared about to broker a truce between the two. Israel has intentionally inched towards escalation from the beginning. Are we to believe this isn’t strategic?

Aside from the juicy details of the Petraeus sex scandal, the case raises some serious questions about the ease of government surveillance and individual privacy. Scott Shane at the New York Times:

The F.B.I. investigation that toppled the director of the C.I.A. and now threatens to tarnish the reputation of the top American commander in Afghanistan underscores a danger that civil libertarians have long warned about: that in policing the Web for crime, espionage and sabotage, government investigators will unavoidably invade the private lives of Americans.

On the Internet, and especially in e-mail, text messages, social network postings and online photos, the work lives and personal lives of Americans are inextricably mixed. Private, personal messages are stored for years on computer servers, available to be discovered by investigators who may be looking into completely unrelated matters.

According to the Associated Press, a major lesson from the Petraeus scandal is that “your inbox may not be that hard for authorities to access.”

Your emails are not nearly as private as you think.

The downfall of CIA Director David Petraeus demonstrates how easy it is for federal law enforcement agents to examine emails and computer records if they believe a crime was committed.

…Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, federal authorities need only a subpoena approved by a federal prosecutor — not a judge — to obtain electronic messages that are six months old or older.

…“Technology has evolved in a way that makes the content of more communications available to law enforcement without judicial authorization, and at a very low level of suspicion,” said Greg Nojeim, a senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology.

Chris Soghoian, Senior Policy Analyst at the ACLU put it succinctly: “When the CIA director cannot hide his activities online, what hope is there for the rest of us?”

In addition to how easy it is for the government to snoop on your electronic communication while following legal protocol, there is also the pressing issue of illegal, warrantless surveillance which the Obama administration has fought tooth and nail to preserve.

“Lets you, and me, and all your money that’s in all our banks talk.”
– a hypothetical French prospectus

With its economy struggling like many others in the European Union, France is in bad need of foreign investment. And it’d like it to be in cash. And it’s already got that cash.

In what even by diplomatic standards seems to be an incredibly cynical effort, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg have headed to Libya to announce that they are “ready” to start releasing some seized Libyan assets to the nation’s sovereign wealth fund, and that they think it’d be swell if that sovereign wealth fund invested those assets in French businesses.

“France is committed through me to immediately begin unfreezing the funds of the Libyan Investment Authority estimated at $1.865 billion,” Fabius told Libya’s parliament, while Montebourg pointed out France can get them a really good deal on a refinery in Normandy.

All told France seized $8-$9 billion in Libyan assets last year, and has only given Libya $1.8 billion so far. The addition $5 billion or so above and beyond what was given was not mentioned, likely because France didn’t have anything juicy to sell them for that part of the money yet.

Putting aside the implied shakedown going on here, it would seem like Libya, which was pounded with airstrikes by France and other NATO members just a year ago, would have a lot of other uses for that money other than buying Norman oil refineries. With Libya’s oil-rich economy looking to rebound and the French economy staggering along at an estimated 0.3 percent annual growth, it seems like the sovereign wealth fund would also find their own nation a better return on investment.

Those with a hand in crafting US foreign policy are always more explicit about their strategies than those in the servile political and pundit classes who have a bullhorn to the ear of the American public. The result of this is that the public are under grand delusions about what motivates US foreign policy. It’s far easier to listen to a speech from your district’s representative or to what Bill O’Reilly screams about than to actually attempt to understand policy from those who implement it.

Take, for example, a piece in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, the main establishment journal, by Andrew Krepinevich, a West Point graduate with a PhD. from Harvard who has served on the personal staff of three Defense Secretaries and now heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think-tank. Here is a key sentence:

The challenges that China and Iran pose for U.S. security lie not in the threat of traditional cross-border invasions but in efforts to establish spheres of influence in, and ultimately to control access to, critically important regions.

Now, if that is how most Americans understand the supposed top two greatest threats the country faces, I’ll eat my foot. What the public sees constantly streaming on television, across headlines, and rushing out of politicians mouths is that Iran and China are outlaw states that are threats to the security of Americans. And that’s why polling generally shows Americans are troubled by these two threats.

Krepinevich’s piece is subtitled “Why the Pentagon Should Focus on Assuring Access.” The last word there is important. US foreign policy centers around “access.” The threat to the US emanating from China and Iran is not that they will attack us – that is a virtual impossibility. Rather, it is that those states will “establish spheres of influence” and therefore deny US military “access.”

These are referred to in Pentagon parlance as “anti-access” or “area-denial” scenarios. A Department of Defense paper that was released last January focused on the potential increase of these scenarios going forward. It said, “the United States must maintain the credible capability to project military force into any region of the world in support of [its] interests.” Notice the technocratic description of empire. The notion that any state or non-state actor would dare deny America military access to their territory is patently unacceptable.

This is the mindset that informed the Carter Doctrine – literally the cornerstone of US foreign policy in the Middle East, which colored every policy and perspective on the region since its induction in Carter’s State of the Union address in January 1980. “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region,” Carter declared, “will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Suddenly America began to consider the Middle East part of its own territory. Any move by any state to gain influence in that region will be regarded as an “assault” on the United States worthy of military action in – they regard it – self-defense.

And thus the threat from Iran is not the status of their nuclear program per se, but rather its rising influence and how it might impact US control of Persian Gulf oil. A secret memo written in 1982 to the National Security Council regarding the threat from Iran put it succinctly, arguing that “whoever is in control of the Gulf’s” oil, “is in a position to have a very large political as well as economic influence in the world.”

You can see this strategy now playing out in the Asia-Pacific region as well, due to China’s rising influence. Not long before Obama announced his “Asia Pivot” strategy of surging US military presence throughout the region in order to contain China, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke at an International Institute for Strategic Studies meeting in Singapore and argued for “sustaining a robust [US] military presence in Asia.” He spoke of overcoming “anti-access and area denial scenarios” that the US military faces in Asia, which threatens America’s access to strategic markets and resources.

China represents a threat to the professional statists in Washington who benefit from having dominion over the world. Unless the Pentagon can span the entire globe at will with little or no resistance, it is a loss for them.

But Americans don’t understand it this way. They see Iran and China as a threat to their personal security. If only they could get beyond political soapboxes and Bill O’Reilly.