Month: November 2013

The big exclusive up at Foreign Policy reveals that Obama’s promises to shift the drone war from the shadows of the CIA over to the Defense Department are being broken. The obstacles to completing this promised shift are “practical” as well as bureaucratic, Gordon Lubold and Shane Harris report, and the DoD just doesn’t seem ready to handle it.

But here is the key passage, which I think describes the real hurdle:

Keeping the drones with the CIA also offers legal cover for drone strikes, former officials argued. By law, the military is not supposed to conduct hostile actions outside a declared war zone, although special forces do so on occasion acting at the CIA’s behest.

The CIA can break international law, while the DoD can’t. Almost a year ago, in a blog post titled “Why Is the Drone War Secret?” I explained it in a similar way:

Those parts of U.S. 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.  An ignorant public is absolutely essential to the functioning of Obama’s foreign policy.

The current debate about whether or not Obama’s drone war is legal and humane is resolved by simply recognizing that it is secret. It isn’t a covert war because Obama wants to “protect sources and methods.” Indeed, enough is known about the program that sources and methods aren’t really secret. What is kept secret, revealingly, is the administration’s legal case for the drone war, as well as a government accounting of who is being killed. If it were perfectly legal and humane, Obama would have little reason to keep it secret.

Bringing the drone war over to the DoD would automatically impose greater transparency and accountability to the law – two things the Obama administration is desperate to avoid.

Ever since the first big revelations about the National Security Agency five months ago, Dianne Feinstein has been in overdrive to defend the surveillance state. As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she generates an abundance of fog, weasel words, anti-whistleblower slander and bogus notions of reform – while methodically stabbing civil liberties in the back.

Feinstein’s powerful service to Big Brother, reaching new heights in recent months, is just getting started. She’s hard at work to muddy all the waters of public discourse she can – striving to protect the NSA from real legislative remedies while serving as a key political enabler for President Obama’s shameless abuse of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

Last Sunday, on CBS, when Feinstein told "Face the Nation" viewers that Edward Snowden has done "enormous disservice to our country," it was one of her more restrained smears. In June, when Snowden first went public as a whistleblower, Feinstein quickly declared that he had committed "an act of treason." Since then, she has refused to tone down the claim. "I stand by it," she told The Hill on Oct. 29.

Days ago, taking it from the top of the NSA’s main talking points, Feinstein led off a San Francisco Chronicleop-ed piece with 9/11 fear-mongering. "The Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States was highly organized and sophisticated and designed to strike at the heart of the American economy and government," she wrote, and quickly added: "We know that terrorists remain determined to kill Americans and our allies."

From there, Senator Feinstein praised the NSA’s "call-records program" and then insisted: "This is not a surveillance program." (Paging Mr. Orwell.)

Feinstein’s essay – touting her new bill, the "FISA Improvements Act," which she just pushed through the Senate Intelligence Committee – claimed that the legislation will "bridge the gap between preventing terrorism and protecting civil liberties." But as Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Trevor Timm writes, the bill actually "codifies some of the NSA’s worst practices, would be a huge setback for everyone’s privacy, and it would permanently entrench the NSA’s collection of every phone record held by U.S. telecoms."

Continue reading “Big Brother’s Loyal Sister: How Dianne Feinstein Is Betraying Civil Liberties”

The U.S.-led NATO war to topple the Libyan regime of Muammar Gadhafi helped create a nation of disparate rebel militias that to this day, two years later, refuse to give up their arms. This, along with the weakness of the central government in Libya, is making the fruits of our “democracy promotion” hard to recognize.

So, Washington’s plan is to further meddle in Libya’s internal problems and the Pentagon, through AFRICOM, is planning to weaponize and train a Libyan army. They call it “a general purpose force” and the aim is to give the new regime some teeth relative to the lingering rebel militias.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Frederic Wehrey details some of the problems with this plan:

But the force’s composition, the details of its training, the extent to which Libyan civilians will oversee it, and its ability to deal with the range of threats that the country faces are all unclear. And the stakes are enormous. There are signs that some militias within Libya are trying to bloody the new army’s nose before it even enters the fight: a campaign of shadowy assassinations against military officers, particularly in the east, is likely half vendetta against representatives of the old order and half attempt to deter the central government’s monopolization of military force.

The case of a separate and underreported U.S. effort to train a small Libyan counterterrorism unit inside Libya earlier this year is instructive. The unit, set up by U.S. special operations forces, was hardly representative of Libya’s regional makeup: recruitment appeared to be drawn overwhelmingly from westerners to the exclusion of the long-neglected east. In addition, the absence of clear lines of authority — nearly inevitable given Libya’s fragmented security sector — meant that the force’s capabilities could just have easily ended up being used against political enemies as against terrorists.

After the fall of Gadhafi, many Libyans fell back on their tribes and local territories for their identity and association. Unless the new U.S.-backed army is seen as representative of all those various societal components, it will likely spark new and intensify old tribal animosities along several cleavages. Needless to say, America’s previous attempts at nation building demonstrate rather conclusively that Washington doesn’t have the capacity, foresight, or local knowledge to be able to accomplish such a thing.

Continue reading “New US Plans For Nation-Building in Libya Riddled With Problems”

Shuaib Almosawa, a freelance journalist in Yemen, has a must-read report up at Foreign Policy investigating a U.S. drone strike in Marib, Yemen on August 8, 2013. It must be read in full, but Noah Shactman, an editor at Foreign Policy, sums up the piece quite appropriately on Twitter.

These teenagers were out holiday shopping. Then they were droned and decapitated. http://t.co/vhHeTshU5z

— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) November 5, 2013

It really is as simple as that. Almosawa fills us in on the gory details of how the older brother of the three victims, aged 24, 17, and 16, found their bodies ripped to shreds amidst the mangled car that was hit by the drone.

Most importantly, the report uncovers a familiar pattern that has been identified through the drone war in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Specifically, that pattern goes like this:

1. Without offering any evidence, government officials say those targeted and killed were al-Qaeda terrorists;
2. everybody blindly believes them;
3. they are later proved false.

In the aftermath of the strike, everybody said these three young boys were militants. Almosawa reports:

According to the Yemeni government, the August 8 drone strike was successful in “killing three brothers and members of al Qaeda.”

But locals, including the victims’ relatives, insisted that the three brothers had no affiliation with al Qaeda. They were only local boys returning from a holiday shopping trip in the city of Marib, the relatives insist.

While governorate officials claim to know little about the three brothers why they were targeted, Marib locals and family members deny they had been engaged in any forms of militancy.

Rafiq ur Rehman, a Pakistani school teacher, came to Capitol Hill last week and retold a similar story. He said the government and the media said several militants were killed in an October 2012 drone strike in northwest Pakistan. In reality, Rehman’s 67-year old mother was killed as she was picking vegetables with her grandchildren.

Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented several other cases that follow the pattern as well.

The pattern is so ubiquitous and recurring throughout Obama’s drone war, that one could spend a month cataloguing each case. The gullibility most Americans exhibit in accepting as fact government claims of killing militants and not civilians led me to some of my own tweets:

If you blindly believe it every time the gov't says their drones killed al-Qaeda militants, you are a sucker.

— John Glaser (@jwcglaser) November 5, 2013

Not only are you a gullible sucker, but you are willfully ignoring readily available disconfirming evidence. Double sucker.

— John Glaser (@jwcglaser) November 5, 2013

At each of the over 200 cities I’ve traveled to this past year with my book Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, I ask the audience an easy question: Have they ever seen or heard from drone strike victims in the mainstream US press? Not one hand has ever gone up. This is an obvious indication that the media has failed to do its job of humanizing the civilian casualties that accompany President Obama’s deadly drone program.

This has started to change, with new films, reports and media coverage finally giving the American public a taste of the personal tragedies involved.

On October 29, the Rehman family – a father with his two children – came all the way from the Pakistani tribal territory of North Waziristan to the US Capitol to tell the heart-wrenching story of the death of the children’s beloved 67-year-old grandmother. And while the briefing, organized by Congressman Alan Grayson, was only attended by four other congresspeople, it was packed with media.

Watching the beautiful 9-year-old Nabila relate how her grandmother was blown to bits while outside picking okra softened the hearts of even the most hardened DC politicos. From the Congressmen to the translator to the media, tears flowed. Even the satirical journalist Dana Milbank, who normally pokes fun at everything and everyone in his Washington Post column, covered the family’s tragedy with genuine sympathy.

The visit by the Rehman family was timed for the release of the groundbreaking new documentary Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Foundation. The emotion-packed film is filled with victims’ stories, including that of 16-year-old Tariq Aziz, a peace-loving, soccer-playing teenager obliterated three days after attending an anti-drone conference in Islamabad. Lawyers in the firm pose the critical question: If Tariq was a threat, why didn’t they capture him at the meeting and give him the right to a fair trial? Another just released documentary is Wounds of Waziristan, a well-crafted, 20-minute piece by Pakistani filmmaker Madiha Tahir that explains how drone attacks rip apart communities and terrorize entire populations.

Continue reading “The Victims of Drones Have Come Out of the Shadows”

Up until now, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who initiated unprecedented diplomacy with the U.S., has spoken very positively about the negotiations with Western powers. That has apparently changed, with French media reporting the reformist president saying he is “not optimistic.”

“The government is not optimistic about the Westerners and the current negotiations,” Rouhani was quoted as saying.

“But it does not mean that we should not have hope for removing the problems,” he said referring to international sanctions hurting Iran’s ailing economy.

The fact that the Israel lobby has continued to aggressively push for additional sanctions, and that Congress is just about ready to pull that trigger, might have something to do with Rouhani’s sagging confidence. Republican politicians and right-wing commentators are writing Op-Eds dismissing negotiations as a waste of time and urging the United States to continue with sanctions and even to just cut the bull and bomb Iran. These are not encouraging signals.

During the last round of negotiations, Iran was reported to have made considerable concessions in its proposed deal. These included “a freeze on production of 20% enriched uranium” and “a pledge to convert its stockpile to fuel rods,” in addition to “full monitoring of the underground enrichment plant at Fordow,” and “ratification of the Additional Protocol,” measures which have long been demanded by hardliners in Washington.

In response, the U.S.’s top Iranian negotiator Wendy Sherman went on Israeli television and explained that the expected U.S. response to this Iranian proposal was to “offer very limited, temporary, reversible sanctions relief, but keep in place the fundamental architecture of the oil and banking sanctions” to use as leverage for further Iranian capitulation down the road.

Again, it’s easy to see why Rouhani is turning pessimistic.

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett argue today in The Diplomat that an American refusal to recognize Iran’s nuclear rights under the NPT and to lift sanctions in return for Iranian concessions will result in the collapse of negotiations and a net-loss in terms of Washington’s geopolitical interests.

If Obama does not conclude a deal recognizing Iran’s nuclear rights, it will confirm suspicions already held by many Iranian elites—including Ayatollah Khamenei—and in Beijing and Moscow about America’s real agenda vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic.  It will become undeniably clear that U.S. opposition to indigenous Iranian enrichment is not motivated by proliferation concerns, but by determination to preserve American hegemony—and Israeli military dominance—in the Middle East.  If this is so, why should China, Russia, or rising Asian powers continue trying to help Washington—e.g., by accommodating U.S. demands to limit their own commercial interactions with Iran—obtain an outcome it does not actually want?

Emphasis added. That bolded excerpt is the most important feature of the whole Iran debate. As I’ve written, the U.S. has militarily encircled Iran, threatened military attack, and imposed harsh economic warfare all as punishment for a nuclear weapons program that America’s most informed intelligence agencies say doesn’t exist. Obviously then, the U.S.’s problem with Iran has little to do with nuclear proliferation, but rather with U.S. and Israeli dominance in the Middle East.

Unless that changes, Rouhani’s defeatism may be predictive.