Month: October 2013

The Washington Times reports that since “Libya and the nation’s allies have questioned the legality of the U.S. operation” that captured a suspected al-Qaeda member, Secretary of State Kerry was prompted “to do some public relations damage control.”

In his damage control to justify the operations, Kerry said, “I think it’s important for people in the world not to sympathize with alleged terrorists but to underscore the importance of the rule of law.”

Let’s unpack that. According to Kerry, anyone that questions the legality of U.S. actions is “sympathizing with alleged terrorists.” Even more strangely, anyone who underscores the importance of the rule of law vis-à-vis U.S. actions needs to be encouraged to “underscore the importance of the rule of law.” Kerry’s use of the latter phrase apparently means the exact opposite of what you’d expect given, you know, the English language.

Many commentators are welcoming the news that President Obama ordered special operations forces into Somalia and Libya to “capture” suspected terrorists because at least he didn’t drone bomb them instead.

Granted, capturing suspects with the intention of trying them in federal courts (at least eventually) is a welcome step back from what has been Obama’s predominant tactic for handling terror suspects abroad – to bomb them secretly with remote-controlled planes. But Obama’s newfound love for kill-capture missions has its own problems.

The JSOC mission in Somalia failed, as U.S. troops retreated without nabbing the target. But in Libya, U.S. troops grabbed Abu Anas al-Libi, accused of involvement in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and put him on a U.S. warship for interrogation.

The test case for this is Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali who was caught in the Gulf of Aden back in 2011 and held on the USS Boxer and interrogated for two months without a access to a lawyer or being informed of his rights.

Writing in The New Republic at the time, Joseph Margulies, a professor of law and author of Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, argued Warasme’s detention was “illegal.”

Not so long ago, just as we would have been shocked at the thought of indefinite detention or trial by military commission, we would have been scandalized at the idea that a defendant could be interrogated for nearly three months before being indicted and brought to court. The former avoids a real trial altogether, while the latter makes the trial a sham. Both are illegal, and it is not evident to me which is worse.

There is another reason this capture-him-and-put-him-on-a-boat tactic Obama is adopting should be troubling: in order to buy into its legitimacy, one must accept America’s self-righteous declaration of itself as the policeman of the world and to bestow rights and privileges on the United States that no other nation possesses.

Administration officials and others have claimed al-Libi’s capture and detention is legal under the 2001 AUMF. “Assuming [al-Libi] has not since abandoned his role in al Qaeda, then, he is almost certainly covered by the AUMF,” writes Marty Lederman, a former senior Justice Department official.

But the AUMF hardly grants the power to take police actions on any corner of the planet without regard to national sovereignty, especially when the target is wanted for crimes committed before 9/11 (thus inapplicable under the AUMF). As Margulies wrote, it’s “silly to suppose the AUMF and the laws of war are anything other than legal fig leaves in the current controversy.”

Robert Chesney over at Lawfare also argues that the AUMF covers the capture and detention of al-Libi. But that’s difficult coming from him given that it was only back in May that he argued while the AUMF is the most immediate official justification for the programs of indefinite detention and borderless drone strikes, the president has acquired so much unprecedented power since 9/11 that the AUMF isn’t even necessary anymore.

According to Chesney, “the current shadow war approach to counterterrorism doesn’t really require an armed-conflict predicate – or an AUMF, for that matter.” So, apparently the president holds inherent, unchecked power to roam the world with JSOC and drones.

For what it’s worth, former Bush lawyer Jack Goldsmith argues “it would be an unprecedented expansion of Article II authority if the scope and scale of current military and paramilitary operations outside Afghanistan today were justified under Article II,” instead of the notoriously broad AUMF.

And finally, Obama isn’t really one to talk about the powers granted by the AUMF. In a speech in May, he said he “look[s] forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate.”

“This war, like all wars,” he said, “must end.” Right…on someone else’s watch, I guess.

“The al-Liby operation also signals that the ‘battlefield’ of the war on terror, as the United States sees it, is broadening,” writes Shane Harris at Foreign Policy. A far cry from ending.

Beyond the legal justifications, I find it hard to believe the core argument for these kill-capture missions is anything more than “Because we’re America.” Libya called the mission a “kidnapping” and demanded clarification. If some other country used force on U.S. soil without Washington’s permission to capture a suspect, you can bet that would be the minimum of our reaction. This simple thought experiment renders the whole justification as a “might makes right” kind of thing – as opposed to a “legal” kind of thing.

The announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, set for October 11, is sure to make big news. The prize remains the most prestigious in the world. But the award has fallen into an evasive pattern, ignoring the USA’s continuous "war on terror" and even giving it tacit support.

In his 1895 will, the dynamite inventor and ammunition magnate Alfred Nobel specified that Norway’s parliament should elect a five-member committee for awarding the prize to "champions of peace." Yet the list of recent Nobel peace laureates is notably short on such champions. Instead, the erstwhile politicians on the Norwegian Nobel Committee have largely bypassed the original purpose of the prize.

Despite all its claims of independence, the Oslo-based Nobel Committee is enmeshed in Norwegian politics. The global prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize has obscured the reality that its selection committee is chosen by leaders of Norway’s main political parties – and, as a member of NATO, Norway is deeply entangled in the military alliance.

When the Nobel Peace Prize went to President Obama in 2009, he was in the midst of drastically escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, in tandem with the rest of NATO. The same prize went to the European Union in 2012, a year after many of its member states intervened with military force in Libya. On both occasions, in effect, the Nobel Committee bestowed a "good war-making seal of approval."

Since 2001, the Nobel Peace Prize has been on a prolonged detour around the US government’s far-flung warfare, declining to honor anyone who had challenged any of it anywhere in the world. But the Nobel Committee has done more than just ignore peace activism seeking to stop U.S.-led war efforts. By giving the Peace Prize to Obama and the E.U., the committee has implicitly endorsed those military efforts as part of a rhetorical process that conflates war-making with peace-making. Orwell’s 1984 specter of "War Is Peace" looms uncomfortably large.

Continue reading “Here Comes the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize, Dragging a Broken Moral Compass”

The New York Times is hosting a “Room for Debate” forum on the question of whether al Shabab poses a direct threat to the U.S.

Seth G. Jones of the RAND Corp is one of the commentators and employs some funny reasoning. Citing a University of Maryland database, Jones explained that, “Since 2007, 85 percent of Al Shabab’s attacks have taken place in Somalia, with another 12 percent in Kenya,” so “there is little evidence that Al Shabab is plotting attacks against the U.S. homeland.” But…they could or might…so we should still view them as a threat.

As I’ve written, the inflated threats experts continue to identify in Somalia are a real danger because they could serve to justify even more U.S. meddling in East Africa than has already been occurring. And that is one way to exponentially increase the prospects of al Shabab hitting the U.S.

Jones cites al Shabab’s formal alliance with al-Qaeda as one reason to fear it, but as Bronwyn Bruton, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, warned last month, “it was al-Qaeda’s goal in Somalia to attempt to draw the U.S. into yet another quagmire,” just as we saw in Afghanistan. And that could still be the goal.

Bruton is another commentator in the Times‘ “Room for Debate” and argues al Shabab is mainly a local problem. “The Somali clan factions in Al Shabab that are opposing the government in Mogadishu do not pose a threat to the U.S. homeland or to U.S. interests in East Africa.” She warns against conflating al-Qaeda and al Shabab factions.

Ken Menkhaus has an even firmer view, arguing that “the actual risk of a terrorist attack by Al Shabab on a soft target in the U.S. remains very low, and should not be a cause for alarm.”

Indeed. Harvard Professor Stephen Walt last week described the “breathless language” in the media that “exaggerates the actual danger” posed by al Shabab. Parodying what he saw in the press, he wrote, “For Americans to be 100 percent safe on American soil, the U.S. government has to get more deeply involved in the local politics and national security problems of this troubled East African region — using the FBI, CIA, special operations forces, drones, whatever — in order to root out bad guys wherever they might be.”

Even if al Shabab did pose a threat to the U.S., which it doesn’t, it seems pretty clear that getting more involved militarily wouldn’t be a way to resolve it. As Jeremy Scahill argues, “U.S. policy has strengthened the hand of the very groups it purports to oppose and inadvertently aided the rise of militant groups, including the Shabab.”

UPDATE: More grist: “law enforcement sources” now telling NBC News that Carey, “may have thought that President Barack Obama was stalking her.” Old boss tells NBC affiliate that she was fired from old job for being “too rough” with dental patients.

UPDATE 10/6: Little more is known about Carey or what happened on Thursday. Stories emerge that suggest she was taken in for a “mental health evaluation” last December. More troubling are reports that she was shot inside her car. Remember, initial news flashes said Carey had emerged from her vehicle after crashing it on the Capitol Grounds, suggesting she might have acted aggressively toward awaiting police. Thankfully, some Beltway writers are showing more skepticism toward the cops’ version of events today.

The New York Daily News should be ashamed, as well as any other news outfit that has jumped to conclusions in favor of the mentally-ill-woman-police-were-just-doing-their-jobs-and-by-the-way-they’re-heroes-we-live-in-a-scary-world storyline. But the New York City paper, known for dwarfing word space and actual copy with hyperbolic Citizen Kane headlines and even bigger paparazzi photography, takes the prize for reporting on yesterday’s shooting of an unarmed mother on Capitol Hill.

There was horror on the Hill when a crazed Connecticut woman who tried to ram her way into the White House was shot and killed Thursday after leading police on a high-speed chase through the heart of Washington.

Now we know someone is trying to earn their hard-boiled, wiseguy writing chops here, but step off Lee Tracy, this account is so far from reality that it goes beyond Big Apple embellishment. It’s just plain wrong. There is no evidence, yet, that 34-year-old Miriam Carey of Stamford, Connecticut, who has been identified as the dead woman, tried to “ram the gates of the White House,” which the Daily News and a host of irresponsible news reports charged willy-nilly on Thursday. As for being “crazed,” there is some thread of unknown origin that Carey had been suffering from “mental illness,” “mental issues,” “depression” and/or  “post-pardum depression” (the last two were from the Daily News gumshoes who stalked Carey’s family in New York Thursday night, snapping photos of their weary faces from across the street).

Simply put, from all the interviews I’ve scanned on the story — some of the most authoritative reporting I’ve seen so far has been from The Washington Post — the  best picture I can get is that Carey was a dutiful dental hygienist, who was generally liked, and for some unknown reason drove down to Washington with her one-year-old daughter in a luxury car, where she led police on a deadly high-speed chase.

Meanwhile, eye-witness accounts and raw video tell a different story about “crazed woman” in the Infiniti sedan. It looks like she might have made a wrong turn down a cordoned street (of which there are many) around the White House (though to be entirely fair, the DC police chief says it was no “accident,” but has offered no details to that end). She was yelled at, according to witnesses, by a plain-clothed guard and others who banged on the hood of her car. She freaked, hit the guard and a makeshift barricade that was put in her way, then tried to turn around and flee. Shots were fired at her car and the chase ensued. It ended in a hail of bullets when Carey emerged from the car (see UPDATE), outside the Hart Office Building on Capitol Hill (not far away), reportedly unarmed. From Time:

Meanwhile, beyond the garish headlines and the applause — yes, the police got a “standing ovation” from members of the House of Representatives afterwards, ostensibly for riddling a woman’s car and body with bullets  — we know nothing except a woman is dead and her child, motherless.

The police will no doubt be excused for engaging in a dangerous high speed chase through the streets of Washington, endangering pedestrians and the child inside (there are confusing reports about whether they saw the baby inside before she left the White House area or not) and then shooting Carey dead. This is a post-9/11 world, where she could have easily been careening toward the Capitol, armed with a trunk full of explosives, right? The truth is, more people are killed by cops each year than terrorists have attacked our cities. We need to get to the bottom of what happened to Miriam Carey, and keep the terror bugaboo out of it. And please, New York Daily News, stop acting like a law enforcement apparatchik, just do your job and report the facts. If they’re not readily available, don’t make them up.