Category: News

To some extent, my feeling has lately been that the information age of the internet, Wikileaks, etc. is kicking away the ladder of government secrecy. Reading through this recent ACLU report on secrecy laws has sort of deflated that feeling…

According to the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), the government made a record 76,795,945 classification decisions in 2010, an increase of more than 40% from 2009.

…Document reviews conducted by ISOO in 2009 discovered violations of classification rules in 65% of the documents examined, with several agencies posting error rates of more than 90%.Errors which put the appropriateness of the classification in doubt were seen in 35% of the documents ISOO reviewed in 2009, up from 25% in 2008.

Not to mention the cost that the public has to pay the government for hiding important information from them:

The cost of protecting these secrets has also skyrocketed over the last several years. ISOO estimated security classification activities cost the executive branch over $10.17 billion in 2010, a 15% increase from 2009, and cost industry an additional $1.25 billion, up 11% from the previous year.

Consider the enormity of the recent releases made by Wikileaks of secret government information: almost 800 classified Guantanamo prisoner dossiers; 250,000 diplomatic cables; many hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan war logs; et al. It has been a grand achievement and if one were to judge by the seething, belligerent response from the government, one would think it something of an upheaval. While I don’t doubt the far-ranging effects of the leaks, the above stats make me really cringe that it perhaps barely made a dent in all that our government doesn’t want us to know about.

Also listen in to Angela Keaton’s appearance on Alan Colmes’s radio show, talking about antiwar libertarians, what happened to the Obama-era antiwar movement, and what’s to come for the future.

The United States government has been hyping a supposed link between Iran and al Qaeda operatives, positing in particular that a “safe haven” in Iran exists as “six terrorist operatives form a network that funnels money and personnel from the Gulf to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan via Iran.” Leaving aside the limited evidence ever given for such accusations, has America any right to condemn others for engaging in exactly the behavior it engages in every day?

Coincidentally, Iran condemns the U.S. for supporting anti-Iranian terrorism all the time. Do the accusations have merit? Take, for example, recent moves by U.S. officials to remove Mujahedin-e Khalq from its terrorism registry, which would qualify it to receive U.S. funding, despite what Iran calls “a compelling record of terrorist activities.” Also note that U.S. officials during the Bush administration “suggested re-arming MEK and using it to destabilize Iran.” Is this not actively supporting and attempting to provide safe haven for terrorism? Or take instead the “cyber-terrorism, commercial sabotage, targeted assassinations, and proxy wars that have apparently been under way in Iran.” Do these qualify as acts of terrorism? No, because they are committed by America.

Let’s broaden the analysis. At this very moment the U.S. is actively supporting and fighting a war in Libya on behalf of a rebel group who has been committing acts of terrorism and reportedly has ties to al Qaeda. In Somalia, U.S. money and weapons are indirectly funding the U.S. designated terrorist group al Shabaab. In Afghanistan, U.S. money and weapons have also been funding insurgent groups deemed terrorists by the U.S. government. In Colombia, the U.S. is not only funding and arming paramilitary terrorist groups with atrocious human rights violations, but is also funding the corrupt government who commits horrible acts of state terror on the Colombian people.

If any of this qualifies as funding and cooperating with terrorists – and it quite obviously does – I’m not really sure where the U.S. gets off criticizing Iran for allegedly doing the same thing on a comparatively infinitesimal scale. It’s also important to note that my parallels have been kept mostly to non-state terror, but if we include the state terror America supports it begins to reveal America’s well earned place at #1 top supporter of terror on planet Earth. Even still this barely scratches the surface.

It should also be noted that this isn’t merely about hypocrisy and being principled and consistent. American policy is currently in violation of its own laws which prohibit providing material support or resources to terrorists. This means America should be in the process of prosecuting its own leadership, instead of, say, attempting to justify aggressive actions against Iran for behaving just like America.

 

Check out Antiwar.com’s Angela Keaton on Adam vs. The Man talking about Syria:

There have been plenty of reports that the incompetent Afghan war planners have allowed significant amounts of weapons and money to get into the hands of those we are ostensibly there to fight. This kind of thing is doubly counterproductive given that our entire set of policies towards the Middle East – including Israel-Palestine, support for dictatorships, military bases, aggressive wars and occupation – are the fuel for the engine of anti-American violence, never mind that we actually contribute guns and butter to our frontline foes.

But now there are reports that this inadvertent support is happening not just in Afghanistan but in Somalia with newfound boogiemen in al Shabaab:

Bad news in America’s five-year-old proxy war against al-Qaida-allied Somali insurgents. Half of the U.S.-supplied weaponry that enables cash-strapped Ugandan and Burundian troops to fight Somalia’s al-Shabab terror group is winding up in al-Shabab’s hands.

[…] The Pentagon has been striking at al-Shabab since at least early 2007, with special forces, armed drones and Tomahawk cruise missiles fired by Navy ships. But most of the fighting against the Islamic terror group, which has lured as many as 50 Somali-American kids to Mogadishu and even sent one on a suicide mission, is done by the roughly 9,000 Ugandan and Burundian soldiers belonging to the African Union’s peacekeeping force in Mogadishu, codenamed “AMISOM.”

In exchange, Washington pays the troops and sends them regular consignments of guns, rockets and ammo. Between 2007 and 2009, the bill for U.S. taxpayers came to around $200 million — and has probably doubled since then.

[…] So the Ugandans sell their excess weaponry to intermediaries who then sell it on to al-Shabab. And to keep up their racket, the peacekeepers make sure to shoot at every opportunity, burning through “an extraordinary amount of ordnance” to justify continued arms shipments from Washington.

How bad is it? “In April of 2011 the U.N. determined that 90 percent of all 12.7 x 108 millimeter ammunition [in Mogadishu] was from an AMISOM stock created in 2010,” Pelton revealed. “An RPG captured from al-Shabab was analyzed and determined to have been delivered by DynCorp to the Ministry of Defense in Uganda. The contract was to supply weapons and ammunition to the Ugandan forces in Mogadishu.”

Somehow defense planners never learn. The urge to fight wars and maintain dominance through proxies – whether client states or rough-and-tumble guerrillas – has historically led to backlash, betrayal, and blowback (as our first Afghan war sufficiently illustrates).