Month: August 2013

Even as they condemn the Syrian regime’s use of cluster munitions, the U.S. is selling Saudi Arabia $640 million worth of American-made cluster bombs. Cluster munitions have been banned in 83 countries on account of their indiscriminate nature and their record of killing children.

John Reed at Foreign Policy:

These weapons are loathed because in addition to killing enemy combatants, their fairly indiscriminate nature means they can kill plenty of civilians. And not just in the heat of battle. The little ball-shaped bomblets dispersed by cluster munitions don’t always detonate on first impact. Often, they will just sit there on the ground until someone, often a child, picks them up and causes them to explode.

So far, 112 countries have signed an international treaty banning cluster bombs, with 83 ratifying it.

The international ban began to take effect in June 2010, just after a U.S. cluster bomb killed 35 women and children in Yemen, with the Pentagon stubbornly refusing to admit to the wrongdoing despite damning evidence compiled by Amnesty International, which was later corroborated by classified diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

Cluster bombs were used in the initial phases of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and the Obama administration has firmly opposed their prohibition, as have countries like Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia. What’s that old saying about how you’re known by the company you keep?

It’s also worth pointing out how eager the U.S. is to keep giving Saudi Arabia, one of the most horrific, repressive, mysogynist theocracies in the world, all the weapons and money it asks for. Reed again:

The cluster bomb sale is just the latest in a string ongoing arms deals between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that include dozens of F-15SA Strike Eagle fighter jets, AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, H-60 Blackhawk helicopters and AH-6 Little Bird choppers as well as radars, anti-ship missiles, guided bombs, anti-radar missiles, surface to air missiles and even cyber defenses for those brand new Strike Eagles. It’s a relationship that’s worth tens of billions to American defense contractors. And even though the Saudi and the American governments have recently been at odds over a range of issues — Riyadh recently offered to replace any financial aid to Egypt’s military rulers that the U.S. withdrew —  those arms sales are all-but-certain to continue. If the Saudis want cluster bombs, the U.S. will provide — no matter what the world thinks.

On the one hand, the U.S. is desperate to maintain the geo-political dominance it has held over the Middle East at a time when it seems to be slipping through their fingers. And on the other, one of the strongest lobbies in Washington – the defense corporations – really want to proceeds of these nefarious weapons sales. And you gotta please them.

Matthew Schrier, a photojournalist covering the war in Syria, was captured by al-Qaeda-linked rebels and held for seven months. He finally escaped and has now told his story to various media outlets.

Once, when he was caught trying to escape, his captors tortured him as punishment.

They “forced a car tire over his knees” and “slid a wooden rod behind his legs,” proceeding to beat the bottom of his feet with a metal cable more than 100 times. At the end of it, he couldn’t walk.

The rebels dragged him back to his cell and their parting words, according to Schrier, were “Have you heard of Guantanamo Bay?”

John Reed at Foreign Policy describes “how the U.S. is encircling China with military bases.”

The U.S. military is encircling China with a chain of air bases and military ports. The latest link: a small airstrip on the tiny Pacific island of Saipan. The U.S. Air Force is planning to lease 33 acres of land on the island for the next 50 years to build a “divert airfield” on an old World War II airbase there. But the residents don’t want it. And the Chinese are in no mood to be surrounded by Americans.

…In addition to the site on Saipan, the Air Force plans to send aircraft on regular deployments to bases ranging from Australia to India as part of its bulked up force in the Pacific. These plans include regular deployments to Royal Australian Air Force bases at Darwin and Tindal, Changi East air base in Singapore, Korat air base in Thailand, Trivandrum in India, and possibly bases at Cubi Point and Puerto Princesa in the Philippines and airfields in Indonesia and Malaysia, a top U.S. Air Force general revealed last month.

As I’ve written in the past, these Pentagon plans are part of the Air-Sea Battle strategy. The idea is to have enough US bases and Air Force capabilities peppered throughout the region so that China would be too surrounded to safely attack in the event of a conflict.

“Stealthy American bombers and submarines would knock out China’s long-range surveillance radar and precision missile systems located deep inside the country,” reports the Washington Post.  ”The initial ‘blinding campaign’ would be followed by a larger air and naval assault.”

Not surprisingly, Beijing is none-too-pleased with the fact that Washington is planning contingencies to “battle” China, and militarily encircling China in the Pacific. Imagine the calls for war in Washington if China was backing various Latin American countries with money and weapons and building air and naval bases in the Caribbean with the explicit aim of bombing United States to smithereens.

“Some Asia analysts worry that conventional strikes aimed at China could spark a nuclear war,” according to the Washington Post. Other “critics see a dangerous tendency toward alarmism that is exaggerating the China threat to drive up defense spending.”

No, China has not threatened the U.S. with attack. It has not challenged core “U.S. interests.” The Obama administration simply objects to China’s growing economy and military. Such powers are reserved for America, goes the thinking. So, we’ll threaten anyone who challenges that with war.

As commander in chief, you’ve been responsible for the treatment of the most
high-profile whistleblower in the history of the U.S. armed forces. Under your
command, the United States military tried – and failed – to crush the spirit
of Bradley Manning.

Your failure became evident after the sentencing on Wednesday, when a statement
from Bradley Manning was read aloud to the world. The statement began: "The
decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and
the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has
been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on
any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods
of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life. I initially agreed with
these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country."

From the outset, your administration set out to destroy Bradley Manning. As
his biographer Chase Madar wrote
in The Nation, "Upon his arrest in May 2010, he was locked up in
punitive isolation for two months in Iraq and Kuwait, then nine more months
at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia. Prohibited from lying down during
the day or exercising, he was forced to respond every five of his waking minutes
to a guard’s question: ‘Are you OK?’ In his final weeks of isolation, Manning
was deprived of all clothing beyond a tear-proof smock and forced to stand at
attention every night in the nude."

More than nine months after Manning’s arrest, at a news conference you defended
this treatment – which the State Department’s chief spokesman, P.J. Crowley,
had just lambasted as "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid."
(Crowley swiftly lost his job.) Later, the UN special rapporteur on torture
issued a report on the treatment of Manning: "at a minimum cruel, inhuman
and degrading."

At a fundraiser on April 21, 2011, when asked about Manning, you flatly said:
"He broke the law." His trial would not begin for two more years.

Bradley Manning’s statement after sentencing on Wednesday said: "It
was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis
that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this
time I realized that (in) our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy,
we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life
both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the
enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians,
instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind
the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any
public accountability."

Public accountability is essential to democracy. We can’t have meaningful "consent
of the governed" without informed consent. We can’t have moral responsibility
without challenging official hypocrisies and atrocities.

Bradley Manning clearly understood that. He didn’t just follow orders or turn
his head at the sight of unconscionable policies of the U.S. government. Finding
himself in a situation where he could shatter the numbed complacency that is
the foundation of war, he cared – and he took action as a whistleblower.

After being sentenced to many years in prison, Manning conveyed to the American
public an acute understanding of our present historic moment: "In our
zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We
held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably
turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we
stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

"Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts
are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any
logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given
the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission."

Clearly, Mr. President, you have sought to make an example of Bradley Manning
with categorical condemnation and harsh punishment. You seem not to grasp that
he has indeed become an example – an inspiring example of stellar courage and
idealism, which millions of Americans now want to emulate.

From the White House, we continue to get puffed-up sugar-coated versions of
history, past and present. In sharp contrast, Bradley Manning offers profound
insights in his post-sentencing statement: "Our nation has had similar
dark moments for the virtues of democracy – the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott
decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps – to mention
a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed
in a similar light. As the late Howard Zinn once said, ‘There is not a flag
large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.’"

Imagine. After more than three years in prison, undergoing methodical abuse
and then the ordeal of a long military trial followed by the pronouncement of
a 35-year prison sentence, Bradley Manning has emerged with his solid humanistic
voice not only intact, but actually stronger than ever!

He acknowledged, "I understand that my actions violated the law; I
regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my
intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose
classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of
duty to others."

And then Bradley Manning concluded his statement
by addressing you directly as president of the United States: "If you
deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you
have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that
price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty
and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal."

You failed to break the spirit of Bradley Manning. And that spirit will continue
to inspire.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of
the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War
Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

In compliance with a Freedom of Information Act request, the Obama administration finally declassified a 2011 ruling by the FISA court which found the NSA broke the law and the constitution in its collection of Americans’ communications. The 86-page declassified document reveals that the NSA acted unlawfully in gathering up to 56,000 “wholly domestic” communications each year that the reportedly now-discontinued program was in effect. It also says that the NSA told the FISA court one thing, yet did another.

Here is the Washington Post write up:

The National Security Agency unlawfully gathered as many as tens of thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans as part of a now-discontinued collection program, according to a 2011 secret court opinion.

The 86-page opinion, which was declassified by U.S. intelligence officials Wednesday, explains why the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled the collection method unconstitutional. The judge, John D. Bates, found that the government had “advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe.”

Under the program, the NSA for three years diverted large volumes of international data passing through fiber-optic cables in the United States into a repository where the material could be stored temporarily for processing and for the selection of foreign communications, rather than domestic ones. But in practice, the NSA was unable to filter out the communications between Americans.

According to NSA estimates, the agency may have been collecting as many as 56,000 “wholly domestic” communications each year.

A month after the FISA court learned of the program in 2011 and ruled it unconstitutional, the NSA revised its collection procedures to segregate the transactions most likely to contain the communications of Americans. In 2012, the agency also purged the domestic communications that it had collected.

Keep in mind that this directly contradicts previous statements by President Obama. In a press conference earlier this month, Obama said, “what you’re not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and listening in on people’s phone calls or inappropriately reading people’s emails. What you’re hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused.”

Nay, Mr. President. We’re getting it straight from the secretive, rubber-stamping FISA court itself that the NSA’s collection of Americans’ communications was unconstitutional and it’s dealings with the FISA court were dishonest.

The Post reports that when the NSA received this FISA court ruling, they amended their programs to collect less domestic communications. This has led some people to argue that the NSA is trying to hold itself accountable and within the scope of the law. I have two important responses to that.

First, what this finding also said is that the NSA was responsible for “repeated inaccurate statements made in the government’s submissions,” and thus was trying to push through legal approval for things they obviously knew went beyond the law (or else, why mislead the court?). Secondly, even if you buy into the argument that the NSA is somewhat self-correcting, the powers of surveillance that the NSA possesses will be under the control of various people, some more scrupulous than others about abiding by the law. Without outside constraints, illegal NSA surveillance abuses will go on and on and on. Internal reviews just don’t cut it.

There’s only one question left to ask: How will the authorities be held accountable? I’m going to step out on a limb here and predict…they won’t.

As I wrote in a recent Huffington Post piece, the government has prerogative to break the law with impunity, as sharply contrasted with people who, say, steal a pack of cigarettes from the convenient store – they won’t escape the law. Or if you smoke a joint and do nobody any harm – surely you will be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Or, better yet, if you defy the government by informing the American people of vast and egregious criminal behavior that violate the Constitution. Your best bet is to spend the rest of your life in prison.

Not the government though. Not the NSA. When they break they law, they get away with it. Period.

JACOB APPELBAUM: [TOR developer & journalist] … it’s not merely a matter of whether or not we have something to hide, because it is not us that will decide whether we have something to hide. It is an analyst somewhere. It is a machine learning algorithm somewhere. … And this is the thing that is perhaps the most terrifying: Because people are flagged, then other people are dispatched. Each person plays their role, and more and more a machine plays that role, a machine that does not understand constitutional protections, does not understand the Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights, does not understand humanity. It’s a machine. And the humans, they behave like machines, too, which is a great fear, that humans will start to behave like machines.  —UK Media Crackdown: Greenwald’s Partner Detained, Guardian Forced to Destroy Snowden Files | Democracy Now!

The Singularity? UNCOMMON SENSE: The Singularity is here — and this guy is an under-achiever – – –