Month: April 2013

The Boston Bombings left three dead and more than 100 injured and some have suggested circumventing the rule of law to prosecute the perpetrator. Yet, in Pakistan the unconstitutional drone war continues to kill innocents. On April 14, between 4 and 6 Pakistanis died in drone strike and numerous civilians were injured. Another strike three days later killed 5 more and injured several. Yet there are no protests in America to capture the responsible party, nor will there ever be justice. The people of Waziristan live in constant fear, and face bombings like that of Boston almost weekly.

The two April strikes both involved significant amounts of terror, with drones “hovering over the area” for long periods of time, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. These drone strikes, contrary to administration claims, rarely target “high-level” members of terrorist organizations, and often “militants” include young boys aged 10-16.

Only recently have we begun to learn of the shady covert drone war. Mark Mazzeti’s recent The Way of the Knife, details the beginning: the United States became the lapdog of the Pakistani government, performing a drone strike to kill Nek Muhammed in exchange for access to the airspace.

While the government acknowledges that trials would be preferable for the rule of law, this heavily redacted report gives the true reason for the targeted killing program: it’s cleaner, simpler and less embarrassing to just off the suspected terrorists. The government uses mafia logic – why waste time and energy risking the rule of law when you can just swoop in and launch a smart bomb?

Farea al-Muslimini testified this week to United State Senate about the “psychological fear and terror” that his village faces daily after a recent drone strike. He argues that while the strike may be cleaner for the United States government, on the ground it leaves significant psychological scarring. He said,“The drone strike [in my village] and its impact tore my heart, much as the tragic bombings in Boston last week tore your hearts and also mine.”

While we mourn the horrific events in Boston, we must remember that our government perpetrates a Boston bombing weekly in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan.

Sean McElwee has previously written for The Day and The Norwich Bulletin and on WashingtonMonthly.com and Reason.com. He is a writer for The Moderate Voice.

Senator Rand Paul has generated a firestorm over his apparent flip-flop on drones used by the US government to kill American citizens on US soil.

Last month, Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster on the Senate floor was the most sweeping denunciation of the Obama administration’s liberal use of drone warfare ever in Washington.

“I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court,” Rand declared.

That’s pretty unequivocal. But then, following the capture of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Paul had a different attitude:

Paul’s support from anti-drone libertarians on the left and right, which had soared after the filibuster, seemed to crash down upon him in the wake of these comments. People were angry. So Paul released a statement. Here it is in full:

My comments last night left the mistaken impression that my position on drones had changed.

Let me be clear: it has not. Armed drones should not be used in normal crime situations. They only may only be considered in extraordinary, lethal situations where there is an ongoing, imminent threat. I described that scenario previously during my Senate filibuster.

Additionally, surveillance drones should only be used with warrants and specific targets.

Fighting terrorism and capturing terrorists must be done while preserving our constitutional protections. This was demonstrated last week in Boston. As we all seek to prevent future tragedies, we must continue to bear this in mind.

This is not exactly an illuminating explanation. Saying, “Armed drones should not be used in normal crime situations,” one day after saying, “If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and fifty dollars in cash, I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him,” doesn’t make any sense. He didn’t repudiate his comments on Fox as a misstatement, he just argued the opposite of what he himself said mere hours before.

In the midst of the man-hunt for Tsarnaev, people became numb to the  showy, militarized response to the crime in Boston. In such times, people tend to more readily give up their liberties. They tend to be more willing to grant government powers it previously didn’t have. Maybe Paul was caught up in the moment of the national crisis, swayed by the mass fervor.

Or maybe Paul got lost in his own political strategy. For a long time now, his modus operandi has supposedly been to pick and choose his battles, pressing the Republican Party in a more libertarian direction when it makes sense, while placating the right on other issues they’re not ready to move on yet. Maybe Paul just forgot which buttons he was pressing.

There might be other explanations, but unless his comments on Fox the other night were simply a fluke, this controversy doesn’t look good for Paul’s “principled stance on drones.”

Update I: It’s worth mentioning too that this controversy happened in tandem with Rand’s sudden decision not to attend a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the legality of the drone war. He was supposed to attend, then his office said he had a scheduling conflict. I don’t doubt that that’s true, but given his 13-hour filibuster and its political aftermath, this hearing should have been a top priority for Rand. What could have been more important than following up his 13-hours of anti-drone rhetoric with an actual Senate hearing scrutinizing the President’s drone policies not just at home but abroad?

Update II: I’ve been informed that the drone hearing I mentioned in Update I was rescheduled three times, and that is the reason for Paul’s absence. Additionally, Paul’s office has posted a YouTube clip of his Senate filibuster in which he does indeed appear to be consistent with his Fox News comments on Monday.

Despite the apparent consistency, it is nevertheless confusing to hear him say that on the one hand “Armed drones should not be used in normal crime situations,” but that the liquor store hypothetical is acceptable for lethal drones. A man leaving a convenient store with money from the register and a gun is perhaps the quintessential “normal crime situation” one can conjure up.

At the very least, Rand needs to lay out precisely when lethal drones can be used domestically and when they cannot – and what a “normal crime situation” is and what it isn’t. Once he does, it may very well be a disappointment to those that loved him for his filibuster.

There have been a number of news accounts of Tamerlan’s “mentor,” a major influence on his path to jihad: the Uncle, Ruslan, has said his name is “Misha,” and that he is an Armenian convert to Islam living in the Boston area, balding, with reddish hair, middle-aged looking. So far, he hasn’t been turned up. But that may be coming to an end….

Laura Rozen, a crack reporter on the intelligence beat, recently tweeted a video off an Islamic web site about Armenian converts to Islam: here it is. The guy in the video, who is clearly instructing new recruits, fits the description: balding, with surviving follicles reddish, and older. She also tweeted this: a series of posts about the Islamic Society of Boston University, which she got by googling “Misha Islamic Society of Boston University” – but found they had been deleted. Hmmm… what to do?

Well, I tried googling “Islamic Society of Boston University” in quotes plus “Misha” all by itself– and came up with the deleted posts and this one from the Google group soc.culture.soviet: Misha’s email address is listed in the header of the last entry on the first page of the Google list. Click on the entry and you come up with an announcement of a lecture from the Islamic Society of Boston University and below that a post from someone named Mikhail whose Armenian-sounding last name I will not publish, and whose web address matches Misha’s (click on his profile, and the web address comes up): the post consists of a single link to an old column by Bill Safire attacking the Soviet advance in Chechnya’s war.

If you Google Mikhail’s full name you get this, a defense of Chechen “freedom-fighters” from someone comparing them to the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993:

“Was there a single explosion made by Chechen freedom fighters
(terrorists) in Moscow? Spare those organized by Chechen mafia…
By very modest estimates, Russia killed 30000 people in Chechnya,
AFAIK. How many have died in World Trade Center explosion? (rather
weak, but still…)

“Do not even bring this up, there is not a shadow of analogy.”

 Google Mikhail’s full name plus “Chechnya” and you get this:

“That was my attempt to explain why I am ‘on Chechens’ side’, even
after they’ve used such methods as taking hostages, and attacking
a peacefull town. I was also trying to place most of the responsi-
bility for the war to the invader — Russia. We may argue who pro-
voked it, but the fact is — Russia started, started with invasion.”

 Pretty dark stuff. A simple name search comes up with this, a post wherein the author argues that “it is impossible for anyone to have a peaceful, normal relationship” with Russia. And here he pops up in a discussion labeled “Orion Group,, Satanism, NWO, and ‘ruling elite.’” The header exhorts the reader: “Do not carry the poison of evil within yourself.” Here he makes the argument that ‘assassinations are not terrorism.”

There’s lots more, especially when it comes to Chechnya and the cause of Chechen independence, a subject “Misha” is virulent on.

I’m not drawing any conclusions here: I’m just asking questions. Is this the “Misha,” the nefarious influence on Tamerlan – who perhaps inspired him to go to Chechnya and take up the cause of jihad?

Judge faces off against Fox News people who think they can pick and choose when rights to due process apply and when they don’t:

You don’t need a PhD in international relations, or even an impressive IQ, to see that recent statements by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel stressing Israel’s right to attack Iran are just words.

The White House, intelligence community, and Defense Department see it quite differently, as was evidenced by the kerfuffle back in 2011 and 2012 between the Netanyahu and Obama administrations. Back then, Israel’s war rhetoric was at its most intense and the Obama administration responded defensively.

Obama expended a certain amount of political capital by marching out his minions from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey to reiterate the fact that Iran has not made the decision to pursue nuclear weapons.

Dempsey publicly explained that an Israeli strike would not only be counterproductive – in that it could prompt Iran to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program in earnest – but it would also be very dangerous in its potential to start a regional war.

Then the administration declassified a Pentagon war simulation that forecasted such a preemptive “strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States” and would immediately get at least 200 Americans killed in Iran’s retaliation, not to mention heavy Iranian and Israeli casualties.

Another incident occurred when Israeli press reports came out saying the Obama administration sent a surreptitious message to Iran promising not to back an Israeli strike, as long as Tehran refrains from attacking American interests in the Persian Gulf.

No doubt, Washington wants to get rid of the Iranian regime. But for now, the crafters of US foreign policy see it as in US interests to undermine the regime through sanctions like they did to Iraq in the 1990s. A preemptive (read: preventive) war on Iran at this time would be too costly and would get in the way of American hegemony in the Middle East.

So while Hagel’s statements backing Israel’s prerogative to attack Iran get antiwar activists riled, the US pursues a different policy behind the scenes. Here is Amos Harel in Haaretz on Hagel’s visit to Israel and the aid package he announced while there:

The military and diplomatic aid from the United States, which is slated to grow, will also require Jerusalem to coordinate fully with Washington in the most sensitive matter, the handling of the Iranian nuclear threat – in a manner that will limit Israel’s ability to act independently on this issue, despite the lip service paid by Hagel and U.S. President Barack Obama a month before him to Israel’s right to act independently to protect itself.

It’s an interesting way to get what you want: “Here’s a bunch of money and weapons…now quit this talk of unilateral war on Iran.” It shows how helplessly submissive the US is, politically, to Israel. It’s like bribing an unruly child to behave by promising to increase their weekly allowance.