An American airman at the US military base in Okinawa, Japan has been suspended for one year after pleading guilty to breaking into a Japanese home, ransacking the place, and punching a teenage girl in the face while she was sleeping. He had been drinking heavily, according to reports.
US Marines training in Okinawa, Japan
The delinquency by US troops stationed in Japan is appalling. Between 1972 and 2009, there were 5,634 criminal offenses committed by US servicemen, including 25 murders, 385 burglaries, 25 arsons, 127 rapes, 306 assaults and 2,827 thefts. Last October, “two US servicemen were arrested on suspicion of gang-raping a Japanese woman in Okinawa.”
Tens of thousands of US troops have been stationed in Japan since WWII, and the local population has been firmly against the occupation with frequent protests urging their removal. Up to 85% of the Okinawan population wants US troops out. Not only do they not want to be occupied by a foreign military, but they’re fed up with the outrageous behavior of the American Marines.
Japanese leaders can’t submit to the will of the people on this issue for obvious reasons: the mafia don in Washington won’t allow it. “In 2010, Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama pledged to relocate the U.S. base, then backtracked under US pressure,” reports the Washington Post. “Outraged Okinawans staged public protests, demonstrations spread to Tokyo, Hatoyama’s approval rating plummeted to 25 percent and he resigned.”
Seemingly in order to placate the Japanese, Washington pledged last year to relocate about 9,000 US Marines from their bases in Okinawa, with about 5,000 transferred to Guam and the rest spread among other locations in the region. This coincided with Obama’s Asia-Pivot, an unconcealed policy of military containment of China that requires boosting US presence in the region. The deadline for the adjustment was 2014.
In the meantime, the Japanese people will continue to be ignored by Washington and terrorized by US soldiers for the sake of US power projection in China’s backyard.
US Air Force conducting military exercises in South Korea. Credit: Defense Dept.
This AP story says that North Korea may be gearing up for an attack on South Korea, if history is any guide. Apparently, past North Korean assaults have been preceded by explicit threats followed by a stretch of quiet.
…Pyongyang, angry over perceived slights, took its time before exacting revenge on rival South Korea. Vows of retaliation after naval clashes with South Korea in 1999 and 2009, for example, were followed by more bloodshed, including attacks blamed on North Korea that killed 50 South Koreans in 2010.
What’s wrong with the analysis is that North Korea is again portrayed as the sole offender, a rogue villain that is obsessed with aggression regardless of the context.
But let’s not forget what North Korea’s recent bluster is about. Kim Jong Un’s belligerent rhetoric is a reaction to two US-led policies – namely, harsh economic sanctions and provocative military exercises with the South.
The sanctions are useless. They accomplish nothing except to increase the deprivation of the North Korean people. Years of sanctions and diplomatic isolation have only pushed Pyongyang deeper into its own insular, authoritarian hawkishness.
And the military exercises Washington insists on performing with South Korea are equally egregious. The US says their purpose is to support our ally and promote stability, despite the fact that the drills have the predictable consequence of infuriating the North and increasing instability, as we’ve seen.
In reality, the military exercises – like other such operations the US performs around the world – are a wanton show of force meant to project power in a region Washington seeks to dominate militarily, economically, and politically. In some ways, this has never been clearer in the age of Obama’s Asia-Pivot.
As Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers wrote here at Antiwar.com last week, the US is far more deserving of being portrayed as the aggressor:
…North Korea has shown anger at these drills. In response to the announcement of the largest annual joint exercises for US and South Korean troops scheduled for March and April of this year, in a rare direct message to US Gen. James Thurman, North Korea warned the top American commander in South Korea on Feb. 23 of “miserable destruction” if the US military presses ahead with the joint drills with South Korea set to begin next month.
Like I said, the predictable consequences of US militarism are brushed aside. So if North Korea does engage in some sort of small scale attack soon, it will be in no small part because the US deliberately provoked it – choosing interventionism over stability.
In Senate testimony today, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and FBI Director Robert Mueller evaded questions from Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) on domestic surveillance of American citizens. Clapper seems visibly annoyed at the question. Neither he nor Mueller were willing to give specific answers, presumably because surveillance practices have gone far beyond constitutional and statutory constraints.
Update: Wyden got to question Clapper later on in the testimony, leading to a very awkward answer on domestic surveillance from Clapper:
Shedding a light on the devastating impact that widespread surveillance can have on a community, the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition released a report today detailing the effects of unconstitutional surveillance tactics of the New York Police Department on Muslim Americans following the September 11th attacks up to today. Here is an excerpt from the press release:
Since 2002, the NYPD embarked on a covert domestic surveillance program that monitored American Muslims throughout the Northeast, from spying on neighborhood cafes and places of worship to infiltrating student whitewater-rafting trips – a program that continued despite the NYPD’s own acknowledgment that, over the course of six years, these efforts had not generated a single lead. The report is an unprecedented collection of voices from affected community members reflecting how the NYPD spying and infiltration creates a pervasive climate of fear and suspicion that encroaches upon every aspect of their religious, political, and community lives.
…“This report is critically important reading for all Americans concerned with freedom, justice, and equality in 21st century America,” said Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan New York. “It is the authentic voice of real people impacted by unjust policies and procedures, for which Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly remain both defensive and un-apologetic.”
The Associated Press first broke the story in 2011, revealing the NYPD secretly gathered intelligence on more than 250 mosques, student groups, restaurant hangouts, etc. in the New York area in one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic spying programs. A secret squad known as the Demographics Unit sent teams of undercover officers to spy on the area’s Muslim communities. Lacking any fix on a specific individual or group, the surveillance targeted an entire religious community, often putting huge numbers of innocent people under scrutiny as they engaged in peaceful daily life.
So what has all this surveillance, this so-called “intelligence gathering,” gotten us? A terrorized local Muslim population, a police department that grossly exaggerates the terror plots it has disrupted and a crown jewel investigation of a troubled man named Ahmed Ferhani that was so problematic even the FBI – recently dubbed “the terror factory” by one author because of its role in manufacturing plots that its own agents then disrupt – wanted nothing to do with it. And as the report reminds us, Thomas Galati, the commanding officer of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, “admitted during sworn testimony that in the six years of his tenure, the unit tasked with monitoring American Muslim life had not yielded a single criminal lead.”
The rigorous AP reporting helped enlighten the public on just how deep the domestic surveillance of American citizens goes, but the depth of the reporting had a cost. The activities of the NYPD are just a single example of an issue that effects Americans across the country in the name of national security and the war on terror.
A Senate investigation last year found that an intelligence sharing program, called fusion centers, led by the Department of Homeland Security wasted billions of dollars and infringed on Americans’ civil liberties. The investigation, the AP also reported, was “a scathing evaluation of what the Department of Homeland Security has held up as a crown jewel of its security efforts.”
“The subcommittee investigation could identify no reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution such fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot,” the report said.
“When fusion centers did address terrorism, they sometimes did so in ways that infringed on civil liberties,” the AP reports. “The centers have made headlines for circulating information about Ron Paul supporters, the ACLU, activists on both sides of the abortion debate, war protesters and advocates of gun rights.”
Some of these intelligence centers even investigated Muslim-American community groups and their book recommendations. No evidence of criminal activity was ever found, but the government did store the information, which it is prohibited from doing for First Amendment activities.
Again, this is just another example. National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney has said that the US government is secretly gathering information “about virtually every US citizen in the country,” in “a very dangerous process” that violates Americans’ privacy.
Similarly, investigative journalist James Bamford wrote in Wired in March that “the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas.”
One anonymous official familiar with the NSA’s surveillance program told Bamford, “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
In an interview with Current TV in May, another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, made similar claims of the capability and intent of the NSA’s surveillance activities. “The vast capability of the NSA was increasingly being turned inside the US,” he said, “to surveil networks, emails, phone calls, etc.”
“The United States of America was turned into the equivalent of a foreign nation for the purposes of dragnet electronic surveillance,” Drake added.
Judging from what in depth investigative reporting and high-profile whistleblowers have revealed, the excessive domestic spying yields very little in the way of disrupting terrorist plots or anything of the sort. Yet, they continue – and even expand, making the whole enterprise seem much more like a domestic tool of subjugation than a heartfelt attempt at “keeping us safe.”
Via Glenn Greenwald, an illicit recording of Manning’s court statement last week.
Here is legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s reaction to the leaked recording:
Whoever made this recording, and I don’t know who the person is, has done the American public a great service. This marks the first time the American public can hear Bradley Manning, in his own voice explain what he did and how he did it.
After listening to this recording and reading his testimony, I believe Bradley Manning is the personification of the word whistleblower.
…For the third straight year, Manning has been nominated for the Noble Peace Prize by, among others, Tunisian parliamentarians. Given the role the WikiLeaks cables played in the Arab Spring, and their role in speeding up the end of the Iraq War, I can think of no one more deserving who is deserving of the peace prize.
He’s also deserving of the Congressional Medal of Honor. This medal, awarded by Congress–and not the executive branch–is given to military personnel, who during wartime, do what they should do for their country and their comrades, at the greatest risk to themselves.
On Sunday, March 3, four pickup trucks filled with Ansar al-Sharia militiamen pulled up at the European School in Benghazi. The men jumped out and stormed the school, saying that they were searching for teaching materials that they viewed as contradicting sharia law or the values of Libyan society. The incident at the school continued for about two hours and caused mixed reactions among Libyans as they followed the story.
Eljarh reminds us that Ansar al-Sharia is a radical, al-Qaeda-linked group – “linked to the attack on the United States consulate in Benghazi back in September of last year, which led to the death of four Americans” – that “advocates the implementation of strict sharia law across Libya.”
Aided by the West in NATO’s war of regime change, Ansar al-Sharia “fought with other Libyans to topple the Qaddafi regime in 2011.”
“Since the fall of Qaddafi,” Eljarh reports, “the heavily armed group has declared itself to be an independent paramilitary body that does not fall under the government’s direct command and control.”
During the US-NATO war in Libya, Antiwar.com took up the rather lonely task of warning against intervention. Among the many, many reasons to stay out was the fact that it was known that many of the Libyan rebels had ties to al-Qaeda linked groups or were otherwise unscrupulous Islamists, heavily armed from the outside.
And now, the shaky Libyan government is “cooperating” with Ansar al-Sharia, even though “they remain firmly opposed to the idea of democracy, which, they contend, contradicts sharia law.”
“The basis for Ansar’s reappearance seems to be an arrangement with the Libyan Ministry of Defense,” Eljarh reports. “At the time of the attack on the consulate, the government promised to do everything in its power to bring the perpetrators to justice — but now we see the Libyan authorities actually cooperating with the militia.”
The reason, according to the Foreign Policy report, is that the Libyan government is having a hard time achieving the central enterprise of a state: maintaining a monopoly on the legitimized use of force. Ansar al-Sharia has the guns. The Libyan government wants in on some of that.
And what better way to do that than to ally with thuggish armed militias that hold democracy in contempt?
Prophesies of blowback – and doom – that could be read at this site at the time of our heroic, humanitarian intervention in Libya were readily dismissed by most of official Washington and their obedient news media. Again and again, the predictions are being realized.
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