Month: May 2014

A year ago, on May 23, 2013, I was in the audience at the National Defense University when President Barack Obama gave his major foreign policy address. Having worked for years trying to close the Guantanamo prison and stop US drone attacks, I was crushed to realize that the president’s speech was ending and he had not announced any significant change of course on either policy. My heart was pounding with fear. It’s not an easy thing to interrupt a president, but I decided to speak up.

I tried to channel the anguish of Guantanamo prisoners like Moath al-Alwi, held without trial since 2002 and on his ninth month of a hunger strike. I cringe just thinking about Alwi’s daily force-feeding, where he is strapped to a chair with a tube shoved down his nose, leaving him violently vomiting and in excruciating pain. I thought of the tears of 13-year-old Awda Al-Shubati, a sweet young girl I met in Yemen who sobbed while clutching a worn picture of the father she has never seen because he has been held in Guantanamo – with no chance of a trial–since the time she was born.

I thought of innocent drone strike victims, like 68-year-old Pakistani grandmother Manama al-Bibi, blown to bits by a Hellfire missile while picking okra in her family’s field, or Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American obliterated while eating dinner with his teenage friends in a small Yemini village. My mind raced through the dozens of photos I have seen of children whose lives have been snuffed out, forever, with the press of a button from a remotely controlled Predator drone.

I stood, heart pounding even harder, and shouted “You are the Commander in Chief, you have the power to release the 86 prisoners who have already been cleared for release!” I continued to speak out about closing Guantanamo and ending the drone strikes as the Secret Service and FBI surrounded me, and grabbed at my arms. I told them in a low voice “I’m having a dialogue with the President. You really don’t want to pull me out, because that will be very, very bad for everybody” and that bought me a little more time.

Continue reading “Standing Up, One Year Later: President Obama’s Broken Foreign Policy Promises”

Gabriel Kolko died yesterday (May 19, 2014) peacefully at his home in Amsterdam. He was 82.

Kolko was an American historian who wrote about the close connection between the government and big business throughout the Progressive Era and the Cold War. He was considered a leading historian of the New Left, but broke new ground with his analysis of the corporate elite’s successful defeat of the free market by corporatism. Kolko’s thesis “that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government–business coalition” is one that is echoed by many observers today.

Murray Rothbard used Kolko’s writings extensively in his many analyses of the ruling class, most notably in his book Wall Street Banks and American Foreign Policy. In Rothbard’s 1965 essay, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty, he said of Kolko:

In his Triumph of Conservatism, Kolko traces the origins of political capitalism in the “reforms” of the Progressive Era. Orthodox historians have always treated the Progressive period (roughly 1900-1916) as a time when free-market capitalism was becoming increasingly “monopolistic”; in reaction to this reign of monopoly and big business, so the story runs, altruistic intellectuals and far-seeing politicians turned to intervention by the government to reform and regulate these evils. Kolko’s great work demonstrates that the reality was almost precisely the opposite of this myth. Despite the wave of mergers and trusts formed around the turn of the century, Kolko reveals, the forces of competition on the free market rapidly vitiated and dissolved these attempts at stabilizing and perpetuating the economic power of big business interests. It was precisely in reaction to their impending defeat at the hands of the competitive storms of the market that business turned, increasingly after the 1900’s, to the federal government for aid and protection. In short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market. Both Left and Right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and anti-business. Hence the mythology of the New-Fair Deal-as-Red that is endemic on the Right. Both the big businessmen, led by the Morgan interests, and Professor Kolko almost uniquely in the academic world, have realized that monopoly privilege can only be created by the State and not as a result of free market operations. The entire article is available on the Mises.org website.

Kolko continued to write until recently, often for Antiwar.com. He was a strong booster and financial supporter of Antiwar.com for many years. He emailed me several times a month with observations and recommendations for the site. I will miss him and remember his importance to the fight against the War Party.

Funeral services will be held on Friday, May 23 at 11:15am in the auditorium of Uitvaart-centrum Watergraafsmeer, Zaaiersweg 2, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

With an eye on the New Cold War, NATO officials have been examining existing defense plans and are finding, much to the delight of those advocating more spending, a stark reality: the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are not prepared to fight off a full-scale Russian invasion.

What we’re meant to take out of that analysis is that NATO is not doing its job with respect to those nations, and that the military alliance ought to follow US recommendations, dramatically increasing spending to send more ground troops from across Europe to the area to fend off the Russian attack.

From an historical perspective, that policy is unrealistic, and the reason why Latvia and Estonia have struggled to retain independence throughout history is that the tiny nations are all but undefendable from their much larger neighbors.

Active and reserve, Russia has about 2.8 million soldiers. Latvia has about 2 million people. The idea that NATO could realistically fortify the capital of Riga to the point that it could fend off a full-scale invasion from the Russian military is complete nonsense, and the costs of the alliance trying to make the Baltic frontier theoretically impregnable would be staggering.

If the criteria for NATO membership were complete military defensibility from Russia, it would be an inescapable conclusion that allowing any of the Baltic nations to join was complete folly. Cobbling together defensive strategies based on that assumption is also a waste of time, because it’s unnecessary, beyond being virtually impossible.

NATO’s Cold War strategies were never built around the idea that they could stop the entire Warsaw Pact instantly at the border in the case of total war. The whole point of NATO Article 5 is to oblige all members of the alliance to intervene militarily to reclaim any territory lost in an initial invasion.

The point of Latvia and Estonia joining NATO is not to get Europe and the US to throw impossible numbers of troops at them to build some sort of Sparta on the Baltic. The point is to bring them under the alliance umbrella, such that they can’t be attacked without de facto starting a war with the entire alliance.

NATO as a defensive alliance wouldn’t need to talk about a buildup on any frontier. Attacking a NATO member nation is all but unthinkable for anyone, and even if Russia had a reason to attack any of these nations to begin with (which they don’t), the NATO deterrent is the same with or without a buildup.

Rather, the whole reason this has become an issue is that NATO is not a defensive alliance anymore, and the false narrative of a Russian “threat” is being played as a justification for increased military spending, primarily for the benefit of major, well-connect US arms exporters.

The Greg Abbott campaign crafted this birthday card for their supporters to send to Wendy Davis, his Democratic opponent in the race for the U.S. Senate in Texas.  I’m not sure that they wish Wendy well.

The card could also be sent to Antiwar.com, which is now conducting a fundraising drive.  Antiwar.com was investigated by the FBI after 9/11 on the flimsiest of justifications.  As far as I know, no one connected with that website has been “vanished.”

On Twitter @jimbovard

If you think that as a United States citizen you’re entitled to a trial by jury before the government can decide to kill you – you’re wrong. During his stint as a lawyer at the Department of Justice, David Barron was able to manipulate constitutional law so as to legally justify killing American citizens with drone strikes. If you’re wondering what the justification for that is, that’s just too bad – the legal memos are classified. Sounds a little suspicious, doesn’t it? What’s even more suspicious is that now the Obama Administration wants to appoint the lawyer who wrote that legal memos to become a high-ranking judge for life.

Disturbingly, this is not the first time that the president has rewarded a high-level lawyer for paving the legal way for drone strike assassinations. Jeh Johnson, former lawyer at the Department of Defense, penned the memos that give the “okay” to target non-US citizen foreign combatants with drones. His reward? He’s now the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. These Obama nominations are eerily reminiscent of the Bush-era appointment of torture memo author Jay Bybee to a lifetime position of a federal judge.

Barron, a Harvard law professor and former legal counsel at the Department of Justice, was recently nominated by President Obama to the lifetime position of a judge on the First Circuit Court of Appeals – just one step below the Supreme Court. While at the Department of Justice, Barron wrote at least 2 secret legal memos justifying the use of lethal drones to kill Americans suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.

Should someone who has done such immense damage to the rule of law and our moral sensibilities be awarded with a judgeship on the First Circuit Court?

Continue reading “Drone Lawyer: Kill a 16-Year-Old, Get a Promotion”

Loyal Readers:

Wednesday was a hectic day. A major hack attack hit much of Antiwar.com, causing Google and other services to identify us as a “malware threat.”

Thanks to our administrator Michael Ewens and the awesome folks at Sucuri Services, the site is totally cleaned of malware and has been certified safe. Google and others have removed the warnings.

We have strengthened our defenses and are stronger for it.

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