Month: May 2013

Israel’s bombing of Syria this week represented a very serious escalation in the civil war that carries a high risk of internationalizing the conflict. The supposed justification for the attacks was to eliminate a depot of Fateh-110 missiles, shipped from Iran and allegedly headed to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

That was the pretext. On it’s own terms, it is illegitimate. As was discussed by Glenn Greenwald and several others, it abides by a doctrine of preventive military attack that would never be considered valid or lawful for anyone other than the U.S. or Israel.

But even if we buy into the preventive war doctrine (despite the fact that it qualifies as a war crime under international law), Israel’s bombing was still not executed out of necessity. As Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman reports, Israel’s missile defense system is capable of obstructing Fateh-110 missiles even in the unlikely event Hezbollah decided to strike first against Israel.

…current and former Israeli missile defense officials insist that if Hezbollah militants ever got the Fateh-110 weapons, Israel could shoot the missiles out of the sky.

“We are now able to cope with all the missiles that are threatening Israel right now, including the longer-range missiles in Iran and in Syria,” Arieh Herzog, the former director of the Israel Missile Defense Organization, tells Danger Room.

Shachtman explains that if scores of the missiles were shot off at Israel simultaneously, it might not work. But this should do away with any arguments that Israel merely acted to neutralize an imminent threat of attack.

Robert Fisk spoke to Democracy Now this morning about Israel’s attack, and Syria more generally.

Bill Keller’s piece in The New York Times yesterday got a lot of attention, and for all the right reasons. The absurdity of the piece wasn’t lost on most people: Keller lays out how terribly wrong he was for supporting the Bush administration’s war of choice in Iraq, and is now asking readers not to collapse in laughter as he speaks with an air of authority on why we should invade, or at least bomb, Syria.

Keller explains that “at the outset of the Iraq invasion, I found myself a reluctant hawk. That turned out to be a humbling error of judgment, and it left me gun-shy.” How harrowing the experience must have been for you, Bill – using your position as an opinion-shaper at the most widely read newspaper in the country to cheerlead an illegal war that destroyed an entire country, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and cost trillions of dollars.

Still, Keller wants you to know he thinks we’ve over-learned the lessons of Iraq: “But in Syria, I fear prudence has become fatalism, and our caution has been the father of missed opportunities, diminished credibility and enlarged tragedy.”

He then takes us through all “the ways it is not Iraq,” and what follows is a dubious motley of pro-war arguments. Some of them are just flat out delusional, like his first one:

“First, we have a genuine, imperiled national interest, not just a fabricated one. A failed Syria creates another haven for terrorists, a danger to neighbors who are all American allies, and the threat of metastasizing Sunni-Shiite sectarian war across a volatile and vital region.”

Keller’s too blinded by his own warmongering to realize that it’s been our limited interventions that has made his scenario a reality, not the other way around. The rebels, many of them jihadists, received arms and support from dogmatic religious dictators in Riyadh and Doha (with CIA help) from very early on. The Sunni-Shiite sectarian war has already metastasized thanks to foreign meddling.

Despite all the wishful thinking from Keller, every option for intervention, from no-fly zones to invasion, carries terrible consequences for Syrians and Americans. But beyond that, what he and his establishment brethren can’t overcome is this idea that America has either the right or the responsibility to police the world and make civil wars our own wars. They are infused with the propagandistic notion that America is “the indispensable nation,” the moral actor on the international stage. And they are once again putting those delusions to use by rallying for another illegal, elective, protracted conflict in the Middle East that is bound to worsen the humanitarian situation and carry grave costs in blood and treasure.

On Friday, Israel attacked Syria. On Sunday, they launched multiple additional attacks, destroying several military targets in the Syrian capital city of Damascus and killing 42 people.

Today (Monday), Israel has filed an official complaint to the United Nations after a pair of Syrian mortar shells, being fired in the ongoing civil war, strayed across the line of control into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights (which the UN recognizes as part of Syria anyhow), doing no damage and causing no injuries.

Director Kathryn Bigelow’s cinematic valentine to dogged CIA sisters doin’ it and taking out Osama Bin Laden for themselves, Zero Dark Thirty, was controversial long before it was released last December. Initially there were rumors the film would be released two months before the 2012 election, ideally placed to give Obama a Bin Laden-killing bump. The movie ended up being released a month after Obama won his second term, but neither that nor half a dozen Oscar nominations, nor a collection of plum reviews could make everyone forget that the CIA had a hand in the movie. Newly released memos obtained by Gawker’s Adrian Chen confirm that, and further detail the level of the agency’s involvement in the production.

As Sean A. McElwee noted last month at Antiwar, U.S. Army involvement in Hollywood is nothing new. CIA is newer, but that still happened previous to Bigelow and writer Mark Boal’s production. Additionally, the difference between Army involvement in, say Pearl Harbor as opposed to Zero Dark Thirty is that the story of the former is much more widely known — there were thousands of witnesses to the Japanese attack — and has had sixty years to simmer. Plus, the incentive for filmmakers to work with military “minders’ is usually access to shiny Pentagon goods. Access in this case means access to the truth that rest of us are not permitted to know in its entirety.

We’re just a few days past the second anniversary of the killing of Bin Laden. And you don’t have to be Alex Jones to wonder  if there aren’t a few things we just don’t know about the events that transpired that day. We certainly aren’t to be trusted with photographic proof that Bin Laden was killed just as they said.

As Chen reports, these memos — obtained through Freedom of Information requests — describe how CIA public officials “corrected” Bigelow and Boal on certain portrayals, after the latter “verbally shared” what was to take place in their film.  Scenes changed after CIA input resulted in the main character (played by Jessica Chastain) shown not participating in the torture of a detainee, and the removal of a scene where a prisoner is threatened by a dog. As Chen points out:

The CIA might not have done it, but threatening detainees with dogs was a well-known feature of the War on Terror, even allowed in certain circumstances by U.S. Army interrogation manuals. The technique was pioneered in Guantanamo Bay and cruelly elaborated upon at Abu Ghraib. Some of the most disturbing photos from the Abu Ghraib scandal featured military dogs menacing naked prisoners.

Another scene changed had originally portrayed CIA officials getting drunk and being reckless with firearms, obviously something the CIA wouldn’t want on screen. And, most crucially, left unchanged — to Bigelow and Boal’s credit — were scenes of Chastain’s character putting together crucial intelligence by watching taped interrogations. The CIA PR person claimed that such things are not recorded, though supposedly didn’t ask for the scene’s removal. Chen reminds us:

(This is itself a lie of course—the CIA did record 92 tapes, totaling hundreds of hours, of the interrogation and torture of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. It subsequently destroyed them.)

Any of the changes that did take place could be true. Perhaps the still-covert agent “Maya” upon whom Chastain’s character was based never participated in torture. Not everyone in Intelligence is going to get their hands dirty in that way. And maybe the CIA didn’t use dogs. (Though why is that accusation worse than anything we know the CIA did?) The actual lie the CIA told was ignored by Boal and Bigelow.

What’s so wrong here? Just that the CIA has every reason in the world to guide the filmmakers into the best possible portrayal of their agency. Neither their suggestions — or “fact checks” if you prefer — nor the filmmakers’ end result can be trusted as a portrayal of reality.  The CIA wanted to look better, and the filmmakers wanted access the rest of us lacked.

The killing of Bin Laden is much too new, and the circumstances around it are much too hazy. Bigelow and Boal’s talents were wasted on a movie that looks good, and feels gritty and “real,” but is impossible to watch without a feeling of being misled.

Bolivian President Evo Morales recently announced he has expelled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), saying such “institutions” “continue to conspire.”

USAID, thanks to lots of propaganda, is thought to be a wonderful, almost charitable arm of the U.S. government that aims to promote democratic institutions and economic progress. Instead, it pushes through a staunch, pro-American agenda often at the expense of democratic institutions.

Jake Johnston at the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

The role of USAID in Bolivia has been a primary point of contention between the U.S. and Bolivia dating back to at least 2006. State Department spokesperson Patrick Ventrell characterized Morales’ statement as “baseless allegations.” While State Department spokespeople and many commentators will characterize USAID’s work with oppositional groups as appropriate, a look at the agency’s work over the past decade paints a very different picture.

Documents obtained by investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood show that as early as 2002, USAID funded a “Political Party Reform Project,” which sought to “serve as a counterweight to the radical MAS [Morales’ political party] or its successors.” Later USAID began a program “to provide support to fledgling regional governments,” some of which were pushing for regional autonomy and were involved in the September 2008 destabilization campaign that left some 20 indigenous Bolivians dead. Meanwhile, the U.S. has continually refused to disclose the recipients of aid funds. As a recent CEPR report on USAID activities in Haiti concluded, U.S. aid often goes into a “black box” where it becomes impossible to determine who the ultimate recipients actually are.

Undermining governments in Latin America that are not obedient enough is something of a national past-time in Washington. During the Cold War especially, we overthrew whatever democratically elected government rubbed us the wrong way. But old habits die hard.

In 2002, USAID was caught up in allegations that the Bush administration either encouraged or was complicit in the attempted military coup to overthrow Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. There indeed was direct involvement: State Department cables released by WikiLeaks documented an explicit policy of trying to undermine the Chavez government and noted USAID as being the primary administrator in that project. Bush administration officials later admitted having met with the coup plotters prior to the attacks, but insisted they asked for “constitutional” methods, not military.

There was another Latin American coup in Honduras in 2009, and while there is no evidence that the Obama administration participated in it, the marked increase in money and weapons flowing from Washington to the military regime in Honduras is notable. Washington’s own commando-style troops have been working closely with Honduran police in training and weapons procurement, even as reports of extra-judicial killings, disappearances and other human rights abuses have increased.

Recently, allegations that US-backed security forces are essentially running death squads have reached such a fever pitch that Washington was forced to respond. The State Department this week reassured the public that taxpayer money “only goes to specially vetted and trained units that don’t operate under the direct supervision of a police chief once accused of extrajudicial killings and ‘social cleansing,’” reports The Associated Press.

That police chief is one Juan Carlos Bonilla, who has been accused of, and in one case tried for, extra-judicial killings and disappearances of dozens of people. While US and Honduran officials promise US support doesn’t go to any forces under Bonilla’s command, evidence suggests otherwise.

“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.” Meanwhile, the USAID website claims their “strengthen the participation of marginalized groups in local and national governance.”

So is it surprising to anyone that Evo Morales has expelled USAID?