Month: July 2013

Robert Merry at The National Interest laments President Obama’s wishy-washy stance on the events in Egypt. Following the second overthrow of the government in as many years, “one might ask where Obama has stood on the momentous questions facing the Egyptian polity in recent days,” Merry writes. “The answer is that he has stood at various locations at various times—and hence nowhere at any time.”

Obama indeed seems to be walking a rhetorical line. It’s not a coup, but he’s unhappy about the affront to democracy; Morsi was duly elected, but wasn’t a good democrat; by law, the military’s actions negate U.S. aid, but we’re not going to discontinue it. Obama is wary of taking a strong stance either way because either way, he’s going to offend people that he is beholden to.

Undoubtedly, Washington has its own neck in the game in Egypt. No force in Egypt is as close to Washington as the Egyptian Army, reliant as it is on the flow of weapons, money, and military training. So the Obama administration is hesitant to take a hard line against military coups and for democratic processes because, heck, the military is the epitome of what America wants in an obedient, undemocratic client state.

That said, the Obama administration is visibly embarrassed by its own reluctance to show the world it supports democracy in Egypt. But there are other forces pulling at Washington to stick with the military.

As Paul Mutter at the popular Egypt blog The Arabist writes, “the US’ important security partners, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are gleeful at Morsi’s removal – the Saudi response arrived quickly from the King himself, to ‘strongly shake hands‘ with the military. The Emiratis pronounced themselves pleased, too, following ‘with satisfaction‘ the ouster of Morsi.” Similarly, Mutter continues, “Israel is not unhappy to see Morsi go, and will probably refrain from making loud noises about his departure…”

“So,” Mutter asks, “with Saudi Arabia and the UAE visibly pleased by the coup, and Israel unlikely to complain in private about developments, what is the US to do?”

Three of Washington’s foremost allies welcome the forcible ouster of the duly elected (and admittedly unsavory) Morsi/Muslim Brotherhood. So even if the Obama administration were to stand on democratic principle, in the vein of Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech that declared, “No system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by another,” and openly criticize the Egyptian military and cut off aid, it would still be hampered by its close relationship to Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Israel.

National myths about the purity and wisdom of the Founding Fathers are usually fallacious and the one about America’s early isolationist policies, avoiding entangling alliances with the Old World, is no exception. George Washington’s farewell address is nevertheless a pointed critique of America’s current diplomatic and military commitment to virtually the entire world. “Nothing is more essential,” Washington said, “than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.”

“The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave,” he added. “It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

If we weren’t so beholden to the interests of the aforementioned nations, we might be more apt to do the right thing in Egypt – namely, to stay the hell out of it.

“What’s the lesson for America?” asks Robert Merry. “It is that we should stay out of the internal politics of other nations because our involvement inevitably tosses us into inconsistent and even hypocritical postures and makes us look like a sanctimonious nation.”

Indeed it does, but Merry then goes on to say this means our policy should be to continue the $1.6 billion in aid regardless of what happens on the ground in Egypt (“that’s for Egyptians to decide,” he says). Merry’s advocacy of non-intervention should extend to the termination of all foreign aid, for it is all an attempt to peddle for influence and control. That inevitably draws us in to their internal affairs, and into hypocrisy, sanctimony, and wickedness.

Here’s a poster being held in Egypt’s Tahrir Square:

Source here.

According to documents acquired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in 2010 the Department of Homeland Security considered the possibility of arming their border drones with “expendables or non-lethal weapons.”

There are currently ten Border Patrol drones, the majority on the Mexican border. They are used only for surveillance-related actions, though a lot more often than previously admitted or expected before the release of flight logs and other documents to EFF. Some of the information gleaned by EFF about drone usage includes the fact that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have sent drones far into the Southwest and Northern corners of the U.S.. Also,  they’re also lending out their drones to the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshals, and various state agencies. In 2012, CBP flew drones for other agencies 250 times, a rapid increase from the last few years. (The question of FBI-specific drone usage has been raised recently as well, by Sen. Rand Paul and others.)

According to, EFF, CBP already use drones for

“specific drug-related investigations, searches for missing persons, border crossings and fishing violations to general “surveillance imagery” and “aerial reconnaissance” of a given location.”

They have also been used for environmental and geographic surveillance. Check out EFF’s report for some details, but mostly a lot of unanswered questions about privacy and accountability or lack thereof.

Customs and Border Patrol and DHS assure us that they have no current plan to arm drones. But how long will that last? We may be a long way away from a dystopia where Hellfire missiles rain down on American citizens (okay, Hellfire missiles that rain down on American citizens while they’re within the border of the United States) but a world where drones carry Tazers, sound cannons, rubber bullets, or mostly-not-deadly law enforcement favorites may be a lot closer. And throwing money at the border “problem” will no doubt make all of this worse.

Last week the Senate passed a long-awaited immigration bill that includes some good stuff for immigrant amnesty. It also unfortunately allows for nearly $47 million billion to be spent on border “security”, adds 300-odd miles of border fence, and, notes Arizona Central:

calls for the [Customs and Border Patrol] and its subagency, the Border Patrol, to operate drones 24 hours a day, seven days a week along the southern border. If some version of that bill passes the House, as many as 24 additional drones could be deployed.

Nathan Goodman writing at Counterpunch points out that it’s already bad on the border, and:

this money will be used to create what John McCain calls “the most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” staffed by at least 38,405 Border Patrol agents. That’s a larger force than George W. Bush had stationed in Afghanistan when he left office. No wonder it’s been called the “border surge.”

Those agents will be armed with billions of dollars worth of equipment from America’s leading war profiteers. According to the Washington Post, the bill demands “among other items, six Northrop Grumman airborne radar systems that cost $9.3 million each, 15 Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters that average more than $17 million apiece, and eight light enforcement helicopters made by American Eurocopter that sell for about $3 million each.” As usual, militarization means obscene corporate profits at taxpayer expense.

Moreover, increasing “border security” funding means expanding an agency whose members routinely violate civil liberties and have even committed murder. John Carlos Frey has documented 10 instances where Border Patrol agents have shot innocent Mexicans on Mexican soil. In one case, 16-year old José Antonio Rodríguez was shot eight times when he went to buy a hot dog in the border town of Nogales.  In another incident, Frey explains, “a husband and wife were celebrating the birthday of their two daughters. The husband got shot and killed, shot in the heart.” This is what Border Patrol agents do to peaceful people who haven’t even crossed the border.

The level of militarization within federal, state, and local law enforcement in America is staggering. Adding 20,000 more people whose job it is to stop nearly entirely peaceful immigrants from finding work is not a just, or free, or merciful solution to the supposed problem of their movement into the U.S.. Adding more drones, with or without non-lethal weapons, will make things worse. At the very least because of how much each step like this normalizes the warped state of policing in America.

The bill will most likely wither in the House because Republicans think it’s too soft on immigrants, and “amnesty” is unpopular in many districts. But honestly, if the plight of poor migrants doesn’t concern you, consider Ron Paul’s frequent warnings about what a border can mean to the people within that nation. East Germany and North Korea are the most obvious examples of a man-made border that kept their people from leaving. The people of America have a lot more exit options in this big old country, but the point and the principle still stands. You don’t want the people with all the power and the military tech serving as doormen in either direction.

Usually one needs a hypothetical to make a point this clearly and strongly.

Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Newspaper, the privately-owned newspaper of the nation’s former ruling party, has found itself completely out of luck today when they found out that the printing press, owned by the Egyptian government (now a military junta after yesterday’s coup) is no longer available for use.

Even a nominally free press cannot be one if the government owns the printing press. And while that may sound ridiculously low-tech to us these days, lets not forget the US government’s efforts to gain more and more official control over the Internet, nominally for national security reasons.

The Internet is increasingly ubiquitous in our lives, and it serves as a lot of things including, obviously, a printing press. Giving the US government, or indeed any government, serious control over the Internet means we no longer own the printing press, and our ideas never need to be officially censored at all, just kept quietly off the presses.