Month: April 2013

It may sound melodramatic but one of the most tragic examples of blowback from our terror war in Pakistan is that the Taliban there are now trying to prevent Pakistani children from getting the polio vaccine, which has been available to Americans since the 1950’s and is all but gone from every corner of the earth, save for Pakistan and Nigeria where the remaining victims, and traces of the virus, linger.

On Wednesday, gunmen in northwestern Pakistan killed one security officer and wounded another as they guarded a team of polio vaccination workers. While no one has yet taken responsibility for the attack,  it was the latest in a string of violent attacks and threats against health workers that began when it was revealed that a Pakistani doctor had helped the CIA gather intelligence on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden’s family in 2011. He did this by setting up a phony vaccination drive with hopes of collecting DNA samples in Abbottabad, where the bin Laden family compound was located. U.S forces thought the ruse could give them a clue about bin Laden’s exact location. Navy Team Seal 6 eventually got their man, but the Pakistani government did not celebrate whatever role Dr. Shakil Afridi played in bin Laden’s demise — they threw the doctor in jail for a year, then tried him on what appears to be trumped up terrorism charges and sentenced him to jail for another 33 years. Reports say he is in solitary confinement in Central Prison, Peshawar.

But the repercussions of Afridi’s brief CIA experience continue. U.S lawmakers are “outraged” by Afridi’s jailing, even lining him up for a Congressional Medal of Honor and vowing to withhold aid if he is not released, but none have acknowledged that the CIA scheme may have grievously disrupted a global health plan that would see polio eradicated by 2018. They don’t acknowledge, that even before Afridi’s collusion with the CIA, Imams and other Islamist leaders in both Pakistan and Nigeria, had declared the polio vaccine off limits for Muslims, calling it, according to a New York Times story in July, “a Western plot to sterilize girls, that it is unclean under Islamic law, that it contains the AIDS virus.”

Then Afridi came along, apparently thinking he was doing the right thing in helping the U.S roust the terrorists from his neighborhood (reportedly he did not know  the bin Ladens were the target) and gave the Taliban all it needed to exploit that existing fear, paranoia and the ability to control and crack down on any whiff of western influence in northwest Pakistan. The government there acted swiftly, too, disqualifying the health workers who (unwittingly and unknowingly) went along with the fake vaccination drive from further service. Their terminations (over a year ago now) were just overturned by a court in Peshawar, according to The Dawn newspaper.

Some would say the number of actual polio cases — now down double digits — in Pakistan indicate the problem is well in hand anyway. But health officials fear these developments nonetheless, because there are still traces of the virus turning up in sewage samples, and there are a greater number of “carriers” that, without a full vaccination campaign, could spur an outbreak at any time. But as experts have pointed out, the Afridi affair has put ALL public initiatives, not just polio vaccinations, at risk.

According to a recent Associated Press report based on new UNICEF numbers, 240,000 Pakistani children missed out on the UN-backed polio vaccine because of the increased violence, and some 15 health workers have been killed (not counting the one on Wednesday).

Laurie Garrett, prize winning science writer, had this to say last May on the new realities in Pakistan:

“So last July (2011), when it was disclosed that the CIA had used Afridi and a false vaccination campaign to gain access to the Abbottabad complex, I co-authored a warning with Dr. Orin Levine that the CIA had ‘destroyed credibility that wasn’t its to erode.’ We wrote: ‘It was the very trust that communities worldwide have in immunization programs that made vaccinations an appealing ruse. But intelligence officials imprudently burned bridges that took years for health workers to build.’”

They weren’t thinking — or were just thinking of themselves and the prize of bin Laden at the other end of the scheme. A means to the end. Now we can just think about paralyzed children and iron lungs, and our hope that public health officials won’t stop trying to end polio there, even though they risk their lives every day to do it.

In case you’ve been asleep for the whole of Barack Obama’s first term, here’s one fundamental doctrine that has proven itself to guide his administration: if the President does it, it’s not illegal.

Mostly that has been true in the realm of secret war, indefinite detentions, spying and abridgments of Americans’ free speech rights. But this week he carried that torch in budgetary terms.

The President submitted his budget proposal on Wednesday. The military budget he is requesting – totaling out at $640.5 billion – “ignore[s] the budgetary cap set by law,” writes Ben Friedman at The Cato Institute, and marks “a substantial increase over the $493 billion that the Pentagon actually got from Congress this year, after sequestration.”

He’s referring to sequestration. Ya know, that legally binding piece of legislation passed by Congress and signed by the President? Yeah, Obama is ignoring that, despite the fact that it is law.

“The $552 billion requested in 2014 for non-war ‘national defense’ spending exceeds by $55 billion the spending cap set by the 2011 Budget Control Act, as amended by the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012,” Friedman writes.

Instead of acknowledging the statutory requirements, writes Gordan Adams at Foreign Policy, this “budget assumes that the Army and Marines will stay on the path to the 490,000 and 182,000 troops already projected and the large ‘back office’ can stay in place — the 560,000 active duty forces who do not deploy, but are the ‘overhead drag’ on defense efficiency.”

The big controversy in recent months over supposed “deep” cuts to the defense budget that would boost unemployment and harm national security was a lot of hot air, much of it fanned by the ever impartial military-industrial complex. In truth, the harshest sequestration cuts were merely reductions in the rate of growth of defense spending. And after an inordinate binge for a decade after 9/11, this was miniscule.

So why has the administration simply ignored the legally mandated cuts? Why have they so brazenly defied the rules?

Continue reading “Why Obama Won’t Cut Defense Spending”

For drone war advocates, the legitimacy of the targeted killing program rests on the notion that those targets pose a threat to America and US troops in neighboring Afghanistan. The AUMF and the principle of “imminence” supposedly form the legal basis of the drone war.

As the Obama administration has said, drone strikes are authorized only against “specific senior operational leaders of al-Qaeda and associated forces” involved in the Sept. 11, 2001. “It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,” Obama said on CNN. “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”

There are basically three categories of people who still believe drone strikes adhere to these standards: (1) right-wing hawks, (2) Obama/Democratic Party sycophants, and (3) the general public, which refuses to read the newspaper.

The rest of us – those paying attention – have known for years that the execution of the drone war has exceeded its already broad legal limits and that the vast majority of those killed in such bombings have not been “specific senior operational leaders in al-Qaeda.”

Joshua Landay’s report from McClatchy has documented, in the words of Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations, “proof that the United States has lied in the drone wars.”

According to classified documents that Landay obtained, the US has deliberately targeted for death by drone “groups other than al Qaida, including the Haqqani network, several Pakistani Taliban factions and the unidentified individuals described only as ‘foreign fighters’ and ‘other militants.'”

“At other times, the CIA killed people who only were suspected, associated with, or who probably belonged to militant groups.”

John Hudson at Foreign Policy estimates from the numbers in Landay’s reporting that less than 2 percent of those killed in drone strikes in Pakistan were described by the government’s own classified documents as senior members of al-Qaeda.

Consider also the New York Times piece by Mark Mazzetti, which confirmed that the very first drone strike in Pakistan, in 2004, targeted an individual that posed no threat to the US, but was instead a local rabble-rouser that the Pakistani government wanted gone. So the CIA did them a favor: The bombing killed the target “and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16.”

Add to this newest string of evidence the finding last year that the Obama administration “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

Landay’s findings are new and important, but by no means comprehensive. “The administration has declined to reveal other details of the program, such as the intelligence used to select targets and how much evidence is required for an individual to be placed on a CIA ‘kill list,'” he reports. “The administration also hasn’t even acknowledged the existence of so-called signature strikes, let alone discussed the legal and procedural foundations of the attacks.”

Much of the disagreement about the drone war arises from the fact that the program – and virtually all of its important details – is still technically secret. Indeed, one thing the Obama administration has explicitly kept secret is the identities (when they are known) of the victims of drone strikes. Now why in the world would that information be kept secret?

Those parts of US foreign policy that are of questionable legality or are particularly cold-blooded in their execution must be kept secret in order to avoid public and judicial scrutiny. If the ugly parts of the drone war – like the fact that its illegal, kills civilians, and represents a radical expansion of executive power – were out in the open, the administration might be predisposed to some accountability.  Keeping the public ignorant is absolutely essential to the proper  functioning of Obama’s foreign policy.

Thanks to selective leaks and good journalism, however, we know enough. And Landay’s reporting, as Zenko points out, is the latest piece of proof that the Obama administration has been lying through its teeth about the drone war.

From the Bill of Rights Defense Committee:

Today, April 11 come out in support for a Day of Action Against Guantanamo.

Detained men are on hunger strike, putting their lives on the line for the change that President Obama promised four years ago. We can’t let indefinite detention in our names drag on another minute. You can help! Join Amnesty, Witness Against Torture, the Center for Constitutional Rights, World Can’t Wait and other organizations:

1) Join us at the New Federal Building ay 4:30PM (at 7th and Mission Streets) in San Francisco

2) Tweet: Dear @BarackObama @WhiteHouse I support #HumanRights & closing #Guantanamo. Keep your promise!

3) Share Amnesty’s latest blog about the crisis at Guantanamo and the steps President Obama can take to fulfill his promise:

For any questions or requests, please contact Zeke Johnson, Director of Amnesty’s Security with Human Rights Campaign.

In a discussion at The New York Times, Kate Doyle, a senior analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America at the National Security Archive, delivers a strong critique of one of America’s greatest pastimes: arming and training foreign militias, often to bolster brutal authoritarian governments.

Her particular focus is Latin America. It is worth quoting at length:

During the cold war, the United States poured millions of dollars into arming and training militaries in Central America to serve U.S. strategic goals – in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua before the 1979 Sandinista revolution. Washington wanted to stop what it perceived to be the threat of communist domination in its own “backyard.” As a result, the United States supported the armed forces of brutal authoritarian governments that shared the same vehement anti-communist ideology.

But the policy ignored the regimes’ complicity in murdering tens of thousands of their own citizens.The most infamous among the training centers was the School of the Americas (created in Panama and moved in 1984 to Fort Benning, Ga.), which graduated hundreds of officers who went on to become documented human rights abusers. But visiting officers attended dozens of other institutions as well, including the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, N.C., and the intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

The courses they took were not directed toward protecting national borders but crushing an “internal enemy” that sought to compel political and economic change through armed revolution.

The concept of “internal enemy,” as defined in U.S. doctrine and training manuals from the era, included civilian political opponents as well as armed guerrilla forces. Politicians, indigenous farmers, labor leaders, lawyers, students and human rights activists were considered equally legitimate targets by U.S. military allies. The death tolls were staggering. In El Salvador, the army killed an estimated 75,000 unarmed civilians during its 12-year civil war. Guatemala’s security forces were responsible for 93 percent of more than 200,000 civilians murdered between 1960 and 1996, according to a United Nations truth commission.

Instead of helping secure just democratic institutions, U.S. aid left countries with a legacy of repression and violence that the region still struggles to overcome today.

So much for exporting democracy.

Washington has had a voracious appetite for fueling proxy wars and aiding state militias all over the world. Sadly, the region in which these policies have cropped up most often, Latin America, is also one in which the history has been virtually erased from Americans’ minds.

Also largely unknown to the public, is that these policies are continuing to a lesser extent today in virtually all the same countries. Most notably is Honduras, where the drug war is used to justify deploying commando-style DEA warriors and training “death squads” that are abusing the citizenry.

See some recent Antiwar.com coverage of US support for death squads in Honduras here, here, and here.

Washington hasn’t given up on repressing the Egyptian people:

A shipment of teargas canisters from the United States arrived at the Abadeya Port in Suez on Sunday, according to official documents obtained by Al-Masry Al-Youm.

Five containers carrying 140,000 teargas canisters were shipped to the Interior Ministry by Aramex International, a courier service based in Alexandria.

In case there is anyone out there thinking these canisters are for a deterrent effect, or some state-funded art project, the shipping documents explicitly stipulate that “the Egyptian government may use the canisters” but that “they are forbidden to re-export the shipment or sell it to third parties.” Hardly a difficult task for a despotic government dealing with rowdy citizens.

The decades-long US support for the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt has already been virtually erased from history if you take it from the mainstream commentary. But even since Mubarak’s overthrow, Washington has been sending Egyptian security forces anti-riot gear, crowd control equipment and weaponry.

In addition, Washington continues to send about $1.5 billion to Egypt every year, mostly in security assistance and F-16 fighter jets, and offering even more in debt relief, apparently as a bribe to keep “American interests” a priority.

As The New York Times reported last year, US aid to Egypt helps keep the pockets of defense corporations nice and full. But the broader strategy there is the same as its always been: to bribe the Egyptian tyranny towards conformity to US interests.

“[T]he U.S. strategy in the region is to prefer a managed transition to civilian rule and democratic governance as long as the American major strategic objectives are not challenged,” wrote Esam Al-Amin last year. Namely, to “keep the Americans in, the Chinese and Russians out, the Iranians down, and the Israelis safe.”

Because really, what’s a few more battered and pummeled Egyptian citizens compared to the selfish interests of Washington?