Month: March 2016

Yesterday’s surprise announcement that Russia was beginning a military withdrawal from Syria caught Washington off guard, as usual. With a political process beginning in Geneva and ISIS and Nusra severely degraded, Russian president Putin announced that Russian military goals have been for the most part achieved. Meanwhile, the US House passed a resolution yesterday accusing Syrian president Assad and Russia of deliberately targeting civilians and infrastructure. The quagmire that Obama promised was awaiting Russia in Syria did not transpire. Why did Washington get it so wrong? And can the US finally leave Syria alone already? Watch today’s Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Originally posted at TomDispatch.

General Lloyd Austin, the outgoing head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), recently testified before Congress, suggesting that Washington needed to up its troop levels in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, in his own congressional testimony, still-to-be-confirmed incoming CENTCOM chief General Joseph Votel, formerly head of U.S. Special Operations Command, seconded that recommendation and said he would reevaluate the American stance across the Greater Middle East with an eye, as the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman put it, to launching “a more aggressive fight against the Islamic State.” In this light, both generals called for reviving a dismally failed $500 million program to train “moderate” Syrian rebels to support the U.S. fight against the Islamic State (IS). They both swear, of course, that they’ll do it differently this time, and what could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, General David Rodriguez, head of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), pressed by Senator John McCain in congressional testimony, called on the U.S. to “do more” to deal with IS supporters in Libya. And lo and behold, the New York Timesreported that Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter had only recently presented an AFRICOM and Joint Special Operations Command plan to the president’s “top national security advisers.” They were evidently “surprised” to discover that it involved potentially wide-ranging air strikes against 30 to 40 IS targets across that country. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan – U.S. Special Operations units and regular troops having recently been rushedonce again into embattled Helmand Province in the heartland of that country’s opium poppy trade – General Austen and others are calling for a reconsideration of future American drawdowns and possibly the dispatch of more troops to that country.

Do you sense a trend here? In the war against the Islamic State, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have been engaged in the drip, drip, drip of what, in classic Vietnam terms, might be called “mission creep.” They have been upping American troop levels a few hundred at a time in Iraq and Syria, along with air power, and loosing Special Operations forces in combat-like operations in both countries. Now, it looks like top military commanders are calling for mission speed-up across the region. (In Libya, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, it already seems to have begun.)

And keep in mind, watching campaign 2016, that however militaristic the solutions of the Pentagon and our generals, they are regularly put in the shade by civilians, especially the Republican candidates for president, who can barely restrain their eagerness to let mission leap loose. As Donald Trump put it in the last Republican debate, calling for up to 30,000 U.S. boots on the ground in Syria and Iraq, “I would listen to the generals.” That might now be the refrain all American politicians are obliged to sing. Similarly, John Kasich called for a new “shock and awe” campaign in the Middle East to “wipe them out.” And that’s the way it’s been in debate season – including proposals to put boots on the ground big time from Libya and possibly even the Sinai peninsula to Afghanistan, bomb the region back to the stone age, and torture terror suspects in a fashion that would have embarrassed Stone Age peoples.

Put another way, almost 15 years after America’s global war on terror was launched, we face a deeply embedded (and remarkably unsuccessful) American version of militarism and, as Gregory Foster writes today, a massive crisis in civil-military relations that is seldom recognized, no less discussed or debated. TomDispatch hopes to rectify that with a monumental post from a man who knows something about the realities of both the U.S. military and changing civilian relations to it. Gregory Foster, who teaches at National Defense University and is a decorated Vietnam veteran, suggests that it’s time we finally ask: Whatever happened to old-fashioned civilian control over the U.S. military? Implicitly, he also asks a second question: These days, who controls the civilians? ~ Tom

Pentagon Excess Has Fueled a Civil-Military Crisis
By Gregory D. Foster

Read the article here

The FBI on Thursday threatened to raise the stakes in its legal battle with Apple, suggesting it could demand access to the iPhone’s source code and the electronic signature used to verify its software updates.

Battle Over Encryption

As part of the ongoing battle between the government and the tech industry over encryption in the United States, the FBI demanded Apple help it defeat the password security features on an iPhone 5C used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Specifically, the FBI wants Apple to create a modified version of the iPhone operating software that would allow the FBI to run an unlimited number of brute force attacks against a phone’s password to gain access.

Continue reading “FBI Threatens To Demand Apple’s iPhone Source Code, Digital Key”

At the March 9 Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton had this to say about competitor Bernie Sanders’s favorable comments on Castro’s Cuba and the Sandinista regime in the ’80s: “if the values are that you oppress people, you disappear people, imprison people or even kill people for expressing their opinions…, that is not the kind of revolution of values that I ever want to see anywhere.” This, coming from a former Secretary of State who backed a right-wing coup in Honduras and proudly name-drops Henry Kissinger – Henry Kissinger! – as a close friend and mentor, is the kind of thing the Onion can’t compete with.

If Kissinger was known for anything in his years as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, it was installing dictators who oppressed, disappeared and imprisoned people. He oversaw a wave of coups that swept South America in the late ’60s and ’70s, installing right-wing military regimes that tortured, murdered or disappeared dissidents by the thousands, and where a common fate for labor and peasant activists was to be found in a ditch with their faces hacked off. Under Kissinger the U.S. actively supported Operation Condor – the program by which these South American dictators used torture and murder to suppress opposition – with military aid and technical assistance. He gave the green light to Indonesia’s genocidal invasion of East Timor.

Continue reading “Hillary Clinton Breaks the Irony Meter”

I was on Twitter when the news broke on March 7, 2016. Initial reports stated that a drone strike had killed 150+ Al Shabaab terrorists in Somalia who were preparing for an “imminent” attack on US forces. My immediate reaction was: How could a single drone strike kill 150+ people? A few minutes later, emended news reports began to surface. In fact, the group of men – all allegedly operational terrorists involved in the allegedly “imminent” attack – were destroyed by a combination of drone strikes and manned bomber strikes. Okay, I thought, sonow we are at war with Somalia, too, on top of Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, and Syria?

The use of manned bombers along with drones in Somalia to kill a very large number of human beings claimed to have been on the verge of perpetrating evil against US forces represents yet another step along a continuum of ever-more lethal US foreign policy.

In the beginning, shortly after September 11, 2001, drone strikes were used against named, “high-value” targets believed to have already engaged in terrorist attacks culminating in the deaths of innocent people. Next, “medium-value” targets were hunted down and killed. Eventually, foot soldiers became the primary targets, and drone strikes began to be used against unnamed suspects, whose comportment corresponded to a “disposition matrix” of behaviors thought to be typical of known terrorists.

Continue reading “Lethal Creep in Action: The Slaughter of 150+ Somali ‘Terrorist Suspects’”

The FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies as potential future terrorists, warning that such “extremists” are in the same category as ISIS.

The FBI’s Preventing Violent Extremism in Schoolsguidelines try to avoid the appearance of specific discrimination against Muslim students by targeting every American teenager who is politically outspoken, as if that somehow makes all this better. The FBI’s goal is to enlist every teacher and every student as informants. The concept is not dissimilar to attempts by the FBI to require tech companies such as Apple to become extensions of the FBI’s power. FYI, the FBI also now has full access to data collected on Americans by the NSA.

Continue reading “FBI Has New Plan To Spy on High School Students”