Month: April 2013

As tensions with North Korea continue to intensify, some have suggested the US press China to influence Pyongyang to calm down.

The first problem with this is that the US doesn’t have the best relationship with China right now because of a little thing called the Asia-Pivot, a hostile and confrontational foreign policy meant to militarily contain a rising China that poses no direct threat to the US. Washington has been using its military and economic might in Asia-Pacific to bolster China’s regional competitors. Beijing might not be in the mood to do Uncle Sam a favor.

The second reason such an approach is unlikely to bear fruit is because the US has insisted on maintaining a massive military presence and diplomatic base in South Korea ever since the unnecessary US intervention in the Korean War, for which Truman never sought formal approval from Congress. The remaining US stake in the Korean peninsula is perceived as a geo-political threat to neighboring China, which is wary of American dominance in the region already.

Matt Schiavenza at The Atlantic explains (via):

If China suddenly decided to cut ties to its mercurial neighbor, North Korea would almost certainly collapse.

That, precisely, is the point: China really, really doesn’t want North Korea to collapse. For one thing, the trickle of North Koreans currently crossing the border would turn into a flood, leaving China with a messy humanitarian situation on its hands. Secondly, a North Korean collapse would no doubt foster the creation of a unified, pro-U.S. Korea on China’s northeastern flank, depriving Beijing of a valuable buffer against American interest. For these reasons, China needs North Korea to stay alive — and North Korea knows it.

Like in Syria, where a political settlement assisted by world powers never materialized due to (justified) Russian and Chinese skepticism of letting Washington create another client state in the Middle East, the situation with North Korea is being perpetuated because everybody knows the US will stop at nothing to expand its empire.

As I’ve written, another option that would be very likely to mitigate the tensions with Pyongyang would of course be for the US to not constantly antagonize the North through provocative military activities with the South and, um, sending nuclear capable B-2 stealth bombers to drop munitions on a nearby island. That might work too.

Just-released declassified documents reveal new details about government surveillance of peaceful political activism in the name of fighting terrorism:

Government documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) through its FOIA records requests reveal that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an agency created after the September 11 attacks under the rubric of combating terrorism, conducts daily monitoring of peaceful, lawful protests as a matter of policy.

Functioning as a secret political police force against people participating in lawful, peaceful free speech activity, the heavily redacted documents show that the DHS “Threat Management Division” directed Regional Intelligence Analysts to provide a “Daily Intelligence Briefing” that includes a category of reporting on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations” along with “Domestic Terrorist Activity.” (p. 68)

The nationwide surveillance system has become the contemporary version of J. Edgar Hoover’s Gestapo-style FBI, watching, subverting, and harassing political dissenters in an extra-legal environment that disregards the First Amendment.

The DHS has used the inflated powers granted to it post-9/11 to expand the definition of “domestic terrorist” to anyone who disagrees with the government and acts on it. Senate investigations on what are called “fusion centers” – essentially DHS intelligence-sharing centers – concluded they did not act to disrupt terrorist plots and spent most of their time monitoring and trying to disrupt political dissidents, specifically “Ron Paul supporters, the ACLU, activists on both sides of the abortion debate, war protesters and advocates of gun rights.”

Muslim communities across the nation have been acutely spied on, intimidated, and persecuted by the FBI and DHS, as revealing Associated Press investigations have repeatedly demonstrated. More than that, as Trevor Aaronson’s new book The Terror Factory painstakingly documents, Muslims have also served as a scapegoat under an elaborate system of entrapment that targets vulnerable lowlifes with little capacity to do harm absent FBI enabling.

In the summer of 2011, The Washington Post reported on “a mysterious, ongoing nationwide terrorism investigation [by the FBI] with an unusual target: prominent peace activists and politically active labor organizers.”

The apparent targets, all vocal and visible critics of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South America, deny any ties to terrorism. They say the government, using its post-9/11 focus on terrorism as a pretext, is targeting them for their political views.

They are “public non-violent activists with long, distinguished careers in public service, including teachers, union organizers and antiwar and community leaders,” said Michael Deutsch, a Chicago lawyer and part of a legal team defending those who believe they are being targeted by the investigation.

Think of the resources – billions of dollars and massive human effort – wasted on abridging the free speech rights of America’s political dissidents. This is what happens when the government is given the power and a blank check to perform seemingly legitimate functions like protecting us from terrorists.

But since there is not enough of a terrorist threat to obstruct, the state has been busy countering the real threat they face: dissent.

Continue reading “Enemies of the Warfare State: Government Spying on Peaceful Political Dissidents”

The only message our children will take away from the war in Iraq is that if you repeat a boldfaced lie enough, it will someday become accepted truth. And as a corollary, saving face is much more important than admitting a mistake, no matter how destructive the outcome.

Unfortunately for our children, manipulating the truth became the norm for the Bush administration, which invaded Iraq on what we know now (and the administration almost certainly knew then) were utterly false pretenses. Thanks to these lies, Americans, including our soldiers and civilians serving in Iraq, were convinced Saddam Hussein was linked to the 9/11 attacks and had weapons of mass destruction, two of the ever-evolving reasons for getting into the war. Many still believe this. Engaging in mass deception in order to justify official policy both degrades and endangers democracy. But by far, it is ordinary Iraqis who have suffered the most.

We know now beyond any doubt that Iraq was not involved in 9/11 and had no weapons of mass destruction. But as Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst with the Iraqi portfolio, wrote on March 14, “Intelligence did not drive the decision to invade Iraq – not by a long shot, despite the aggressive use by the Bush administration of cherry-picked fragments of intelligence reporting in its public sales campaign for the war.” Indeed, this was a war in search of a justification from the very beginning, and any little lie would have worked.

It is very fortuitous for all those politicians, policy makers, and bureaucrats with Iraqi blood on their hands — Republicans and Democrats both — that the only courtroom they’ve been shuffled into is the court of public opinion, where most received light sentences.

Indeed, the Iraq war boosters are still a fixture on our television screens. Dan Senor, who served as a spokesman for the U.S occupation authorities and willfully misrepresented events on the ground during that time, is a regular commentator on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” a veritable roundtable of Washington establishment punditry. Kenneth Pollack, a longtime Brookings fellow and CIA analyst who wrote the 2002 book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (which is barely mentioned today on the Brookings website), is a familiar face on the commentary circuit and among think tank salons. Ex-Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, who each left their most recent posts in disgrace, are raking in thousands of dollars for speeches, lectures, and consulting work.

Continue reading “After Iraq, Climbing Out of the Moral Abyss”

Bertha Oliva is the General Coordinator of COFADEH, the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared and Detained in Honduras. Bertha’s husband was “disappeared” in 1981, a period when death squads were active in Honduras. She founded COFADEH together with other women who lost their loved ones, in order to seek justice and compensation for the families of the hundreds of dissidents that were “disappeared” between 1979 and 1989. Since then Bertha and COFADEH have taken on some of the country’s most emblematic human rights cases and were a strong voice in opposition to the 2009 coup d’Etat and the repression that followed.  We interviewed her in Washington, D.C. on March 15^th, shortly after she participated in a hearing on the human rights situation in Honduras at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).  During the hearing she said that death squads are targeting social leaders, lawyers, journalists and other groups and called on the IACHR to visit Honduras in the next six months to take stock of the human rights situation ahead of the November general elections (Bertha’s testimony [in Spanish] can be viewed here, beginning at 17:40).

Q:  On various occasions you’ve said that what you’re seeing today in Honduras is reminiscent of the difficult times you experienced in the ‘80s and I’d like you to elaborate on that.

In the ‘80s we had armed forces that were excessively empowered. Today Honduras is extremely similar, with military officers exercising control over many of the country’s institutions.  The military is now in the streets playing a security role – often substituting for the work of the police forces of the country.

In the ‘80s we also witnessed the practice of forced disappearances and assassinations. In that era it was clear that they were killing social leaders, political opponents, but they also assassinated people who had no ties to dissident groups in order to generate confusion in public opinion and try to disqualify our denunciations of the killings of family members who were political opponents.

Today they assassinate young people in a more atrocious fashion than in the ‘80s and we’re seeing a marked pattern of assassinations of women and youth.  And within this mass of people that are assassinated there are political opponents.  We refuse to dismiss these assassinations as simply a result of the extreme violence that we’re experiencing, as they try to tell the country.  We say that it is a product of impunity and Honduras’ historical debt for failing to resolve cases perpetrated by state agents…

In the ‘80s the presence of the U.S. in the country was extremely significant.  Today it’s the same.  New bases have opened as a result of an anti-drug cooperation agreement signed between Honduras and the U.S.

In the ‘80s it was clear that political opponents were being eliminated.  Today they’re also eliminating those who claim land rights, as exemplified in the Bajo Aguán.  More than 98 land rights activists have been assassinated.  The campesino sector in the Bajo Aguán has been psychologically and emotionally tortured on top of the physical torture that certain campesino leaders have been subjected to.

Q:  Today in the hearing on human rights in Honduras at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights you discussed death squads. Death squads were active in the ‘80s and now you believe that this sinister phenomenon is coming back.

It’s certain that death squads are a product of the impunity that we’ve seen in Honduras. The death squads of the past were never really dismantled.  What we’re witnessing is a reactivation of these death squads.  And we’re seeing it quite clearly.  We’ve seen videos of incidents in the street where masked men with military training and unmarked vehicles assassinate young people. There is the recent case of the journalist Julio Ernesto Alvarado who gave up his news program from 10pm to midnight on Radio Globo because members of a death squad came to kill him, and to save his own life he had to stop doing his program.

Continue reading “‘We’re Witnessing a Reactivation of the Death Squads of the ’80s’”

In July 2012, Senator John McCain argued the US’s unwillingness to intervene militarily in Syria to stop a humanitarian catastrophe was “shameful and disgraceful,” because it has allowed Bashar al-Assad “to massacre and slaughter people and stay in power.” Last month, he called on the US to “lead an international effort” to conduct “airstrikes on Assad’s forces.”

“The Assad regime has spilled too much blood to stay in power,” McCain insists.

McCain’s interventionist allies in Congress have been making similar pleas in Washington to initiate military action to stem the Assad regime’s violent crackdown on an armed rebellion. Hawks in the media, like Max Boot and Jackson Diehl, have just this week argued that 70,000 dead – according to a United Nations estimate – is too much not to intervene.

I’ve written ad nauseam and in detail about how disastrous direct US military intervention in Syria would be. Everything from directly arming the rebels to imposing a no-fly zone to sending boots on the ground to topple the Assad regime – all of it carries the predictable consequence of making the humanitarian situation unimaginably worse, which is ironic for war hawks who justify intervention on humanitarian grounds.

But we can expose the weak and even dishonest case for military action in Syria in a much simpler way: by analogy.

Last week, The Daily Beast covered the trial of Rios Montt, “the first former head of state ever to be tried in his own country for actions committed during his rule,” in Guatemala in the 1980s. Montt and his former military intelligence chief, reported Mac Margolis, “stand accused of genocide and ‘crimes against humanity.'”

Montt came to power in a military coup and “was a close ally of Washington who received training at the infamous ‘School of the Americas,'” writes Cyril Mychalejko. The Reagan administration “not only covered up, but aided and abetted war crimes and genocide in Guatemala.”

“Perhaps half of all those who died during the conflict, 100,000-150,000, died between 1981 and 1983,” according to Mike Allison, Associate Professor of Political Science at The University of Scranton.

So in a matter of two or three years, about 150,000 people were killed in a war that was being waged primarily by US-backed war criminals. Less than half that many have been killed in the same amount of time in Syria.

Why weren’t war hawks in Washington calling for the US to militarily intervene to unseat the Guatemalan regime in 1983? Better yet, why wasn’t anybody blaming the Reagan administration for paling around with blood-soaked dictators of exactly the type McCain, Boot, and Diehl now accuse Assad of being? Or better still, why isn’t anyone calling for accountability for the still-living Reagan administration policymakers, say Elliot Abrams, who insisted on maintaining US support for people like Rios Montt?

It’s hard to come to any other conclusion: interventionists in Washington who couch their arguments for military action in humanitarian terms are simply not using human suffering and death counts as a criteria for US intervention. Instead, they conveniently exploit instances of conflict and human suffering when it occurs in countries that they’ve long desired to intervene in anyways.

In 1994, something like 500,000 people were killed in Rwanda in a matter of 100 days. But McCain wasn’t going on television demanding President Clinton invade. Maybe 400,000 civilians died in the Darfur conflict, only petering out in very recent years. Few on the right called for a bombing campaign to eliminate the perpetrators.

Syria is strategically located in the Middle East, is geographically a close neighbor of Israel and a close ally of the recently-empowered-by-the-bungled-Iraq-War, Iran. President Bashar al-Assad is an ally of the Russians who value their last close ally in the region because it affords them geo-political influence and a chance to defy US imperialism. And this is why the conflict in Syria is being used to justify intervention. Not because of the death count.

When a forum as hawkish at The Washington Post‘s editorial page starts running pieces arguing the drone war is creating more enemies than it is eliminating, you know the dialogue is beginning to shift.

In an Op-Ed yesterday, Danya Greenfield, “deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East,” and David J. Kramer, “president of Freedom House,” insisted the high numbers of civilian casualties in the Obama administration’s drone war in Yemen is having the unintended consequence of expanding the support base of extremist militants, while also criticizing “the lack of transparency and accountability behind the drone policy.”

They write: “Thirty-one foreign policy experts and former diplomats — including us — sent a letter to President Obama last week that said the administration’s expansive use of unmanned drones in Yemen is proving counterproductive to U.S. security objectives: As faulty intelligence leads to collateral damage, extremist groups ultimately win more support.”

Despite considerable U.S. humanitarian aid and development support to their government, most Yemenis associate U.S. engagement with the ongoing drone campaign to destroy al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and they see it as having little regard for its effect on civilians. A number of former U.S. military and intelligence officials argue that the drone program’s costs might exceed its benefits. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal has articulated the hazards of overreliance on drones, and Gen. James E. Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cautioned last month against unintended consequences, arguing that no matter how precise drone strikes may be, they breed animosity among targeted communities and threaten U.S. efforts to curb extremism.

Of course, the Op-Ed was not nearly strong enough. The still-expanding drone war in Yemen, which often kills civilians, does in fact cause blowback and help al-Qaeda recruitment – as attested to by numerous Yemen experts, investigative reporting on the ground, polling, testimony from Yemen activists, and the actual fact that recent bungled terrorist attacks aimed at the US have cited such drone attacks as motivating factors.

After a September drone strike that killed 13 civilians, a local Yemeni activist told CNN, “I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined the lines of al Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake. This part of Yemen takes revenge very seriously.”

And of course there is more to the drone war outrage than the fact that it’s strategically counterproductive. Even if it killed less civilians and avoided considerable blowback, it would still be unacceptable for the President to draw up secret kill lists of mere suspects and conduct a secret, unaccountable war that dispenses with traditional legal boundaries of war and habeas corpus.

But the gradual push-back the Obama administration has been receiving from elite policy wonks (“foreign policy experts and former diplomats,” as well as a military general here and a CIA officer there) does represent a change from what the norm as has been for the entirety of Obama’s first term – namely, that almost exclusively alternative media and antiwar activists spoke out against the inhumane and counterproductive drone war.

This pressure hasn’t generated a change in policy yet: President Obama is still conducting the drone war at full speed and with all the ruthlessness and disregard of his first term. Last month, however, it was reported that a decision has been made to shift responsibility for the drone war from the CIA to the Defense Department. What appreciable change this will bring is not yet known, although there is reason to expect none.

Still, there are other pressures mounting. A federal appeals court ruled last month that the CIA cannot continue to “neither confirm nor deny” the existence of the drone war, in a court case prompted by a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union. For years, the modus operandi has been for the drone war to be the world’s worst kept secret so Obama gets the credit for being “tough on terror,” while reserving the right to disregard probing questions or inquiries.

In addition, a high level United Nations investigator last month said the drone war in Pakistan technically violates the law because it is conducted without the express consent of Islamabad, therefore a breach of Pakistani sovereignty. The UN envoy, Ben Emmerson, is leading an investigation into the drone war’s compliance with international law and international human rights law.

Add to this Rand Paul’s attention-grabbing (although far from perfect) anti-drone filibuster last month and you have a remarkable shift in the debate on drones compared to a mere six months ago.